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“Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.”

- Sir Arthur Eddington (1882 - 1944)

P R O L O G U E :

CONFINEMENT

Gordon P Freemane

Permanent Address: 5236 N 51st St. Maresachusetts, EQ

Phone:  15-9697-10

Email: gordonfreemane@mit.eq

Objective:

To apply for the position of Research Associate, Anomalous Materials at the Black Mane Research Facility.

Education

- Ph.D in Theoretical Physics, Maresachusetts Institute of Technology, class of 1036

- Cheerilee High School class of 1029: overall GPA: 3.9

I stopped typing, my hoof hovering above the comically oversized ‘backspace’ key on my keyboard.  Should I mention that I somehow graduated high school without a 4.0?

“Goshdarn that fiddlesticking history course!” I cursed at the ceiling, being sure to pump my hoof for added emphasis as I made yet another unrequited attempt to converse with structural elements of my tiny apartment.  Well, I suppose that’s not the only purpose it could have served - shouting at empty rooms would also be a great way to scare off the damned and implacable Book of Souls in the astronomically unlikely chance it happened, for whatever reason, to be present.  History had always been my weak spot, but like all students, I was required to take it, and like all students, I found it insufferably boring.  Or at least, I suspected all the other students hated history as much as I did.  I didn’t actually have any scientific data to back up that statement.

I reached up a hoof to adjust my thick-rimmed glasses as I reflected upon the catch-all word that described the study of our weird and wonderful Universe and everything in it;

Science.

For me, the word conjured as many warm, fuzzy feelings as a grown stallion reminiscing about playing catch with his dear old dad.  But for this pony, hypothesis was the dad, experimentation was the ball, and the game being played was called Progress.

There had been so much progress in Equestria just in the past 30 years - and most of it in my own lifetime - it boggled the mind.  First telegraphs and telephones, then radios, televisions, computers, and the Internet had all been invented and were now as common as electricity was after that Rural Electrification Something Something Act that my professor droned on and ON and ON about, and who do we have to thank for all of that progress?  The famous, celebrated, envied, irreducible and unreproducible pride of all of Equestria;  The Black Mane Research Facility.

I leaned back in my chair and stared at the ceiling as a huge, silly grin formed on my face.  When I was a foal, I used to fantasize about trotting down those pristine halls in my shiny white lab coat, passing by all sorts of fantastically complicated machinery sandwiched between banks upon banks of enormous computers that stretched from the floor to the ceiling, covering entire walls with flashing lights, dials, switches, and screens, OH!  Just thinking about it filled me with an almost indescribable joy.

In my dreams, the scientists at Black Mane would trot up to me, also wearing their adorable little lab coats, and point their hooves at me and say,

“Gordon, we need you to press the button that makes this huge, complicated machine do SCIENCE!”

And I would shout, “YES! SCIIIEEEEEEENNCE!” and then my mom would wake me up and say,

“Gordon!  You’ve been screaming ‘science’ again!”

And I would hang my head and say, “Oh, I’m sorry mom.”

And then she would say, “It’s okay Gordon.  I love you so much.  Here, have some chocolate-chip pancakes.”  And then I would start eating them and... and...

“Rise and shine, Missster Freemane, rise and shine...”

T H E  B λ L L A D

O F

G O R D O N  F R E E M A N E

Once upon a time, in Combine-occupied Equestria...

C H λ P T E R  O N E :

SOMEWHERE OVER THE RAINBOW

Oh, Celestia, my head, oh, Luna and Celestia and all their modes of aquatic transport my head...

“You probably don’t remember where you are or how you got here; the effects of temporal stasis on your... species... are still rather unknown, however that is at this point irrelevant.”

Who in the hay is that?!

“My employers have requested your services – they agree with me that you have limitlessss potential... not unlike someone I used to know.”

I knew who that was.  I recognized those blank, green eyes that never quite seemed to look right at you, always... through you... past you... like he didn’t care about your body because he could see your soul...

He was so mothercuddling creepy.

He was an earth-pony stallion who always wore the exact same blue business suit every day, and he would always say someone instead of somepony, which isn’t grammatically incorrect, I suppose, it’s just weird.  I’d always thought there was just something a little off about him, and everypony I talked to agreed.  We’d taken to calling him ‘The G-pony’, after the tales of mysterious ponies in business suits - always in business suits - who would supposedly show up at your house, claiming they were from some government organization you’d never heard of, and warn you to keep your mouth shut about your real day job, leaving you with ominous warnings about ‘unforeseen consequences’ should you, say, go to a bar and get hammered and start spouting state secrets.  And I remember how he always carried around this briefcase with the Black Mane logo emblazoned across it in gold-leaf... Black Mane...

… there’d been some sort of accident - a terrible, terrible accident - and... and I was somehow involved...

“I can’t tell you how thrilled we are that you said yesss.”

Wait.  He offered me a job... and I said YES!?  What the hay was I thinking?!

“The right... pony in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world... So wake up, Missster Freemane.  Wake up and smell the ashes.”

As he picked up his briefcase in his mouth and turned to trot away, the tangled chaos of nothingness around me began to fade, simultaneously losing and gaining focus, giving me tunnel vision.  Some unseen force was pulling me toward a light at the end of the tunnel, and I was going whether I wanted to or not.

I cried out, “Wait!  What do you want me to do?!”

He turned, his form now distant and almost transparent, blinding light bleeding into the edges of my vision.

“Isn’t it obvious?”

I awoke with a start as something big and heavy broke its fall with my face.  It was the most positive thing that would happen to me that day.

“Whoops.  Sorry about that, it’s a bumpy ride,” came a stallion’s voice, and I immediately gathered that I was on a train, given that the voice was struggling to be heard over the sound of wheels grinding against rails.  I also noticed that everypony was wearing the same drab blue coveralls, for some reason.  I looked down.  So was I.  For some reason.

I put a hoof to my temples, which were now experiencing a new kind of pain, and looked to the object of my latest torment, a brown suitcase.  “What do ya got in there?” I grumbled.

“Bricks,” the stallion answered with a smile, trying to lighten the mood.

I glared at him, unamused.  It wasn’t that the joke wasn’t funny, it was just that I felt like I did the morning after my cousin’s wedding, where I had chugged five tall glasses of apple cider and puked golden vomit into the toilet.  I turned to look out the window and saw the rotting corpse of a cow that had been sliced clean in half lying to either side of the other set of tracks.  Suddenly I felt like I was back at that wedding, heaving over that toilet.

“Dear Celestia!  There was a dead cow lying by the tracks!”

A mare standing next to the door looked up from her hooves that she had been intently staring at and said, “Yeah, sometimes folks get caught on the tracks.”

Another gentlecolt from the front added glumly, “That’s why you shouldn’t cross ‘em.  Those damned razor trains are so quiet, you’ll never hear ‘em comin’ till it’s too late, and they’ll slice you open like a cantaloupe.”

“Say,” the stallion from before began, trying to steer the discussion away from gruesome death and dismemberment, turned to me and said “I didn’t see you get on.”

“Neither did I.”

He raised an eyebrow.  “Aha.  So... where are you from?”

“Maresachusetts.”

“Maresachusetts?  You mean City 4?”

“City what?”

His response was drowned out by a tortuous screech as the whole train shuddered and came to a sudden and ungraceful halt.

The doors slid open and the passenger cars began to empty.  The stranger whose suitcase I had been silently cursing bid me a dispirited farewell and let out a heavy sigh before stepping out onto the station platform.  I had barely stepped one hoof off the train when I was flash-blinded by something that went *click*.  Blinking to clear my vision I saw a little... floating orb?  A little floating orb that took pictures uncomfortably close to your face like a particularly rude paparazzi would be the best way to describe it.  I had little time to ponder the mechanisms and purposes of such a curious little contraption, as my attention was quickly drawn to the enormous head of my former boss, Dr. Breen, staring down at me from an equally enormous television mounted on the far wall.

“Welcome!  Welcome to City 7.”

My jaw hit the floor and did not return to its mandibular casing for several seconds.

“You have chosen or been chosen to relocate to one of our finest remaining urban centers.  I thought so much of City 7 that I elected to establish my Administration here – in the Citadel so thoughtfully provided by our Benefactors."

The gwuh?

“I, like almost a million other ponies, have been proud to call City 7 my home.  And so, whether you are here to stay or passing through on your way to parts unknown, welcome to City 7; It’s safer here.”

While I continued to stare like a slack-jawed mule, that little camera thing took the opportunity to snap yet another picture of me, blinding me yet again.

“WOULD YOU STOP IT!?”  I shouted - quite a rarity for me.  Every eye in the station turned to stare at me, including some glowing, electric-blue ones.  A pair of ponies wearing white masks and dark green-and-blue uniforms exchanged glances and started towards me.  Oh darn it, I thought.

“There a problem here?” one of them asked, his voice garbled like he was saying it through a mouthful of rocks.  Their masks allowed their manes to stick out the back, and had what looked like breathing apparatuses over where the snout would be, but left the lower jaw uncovered, presumably so they could still grip things with their mouths.

I smiled.  “No, no problem, it was just a rough train ride is all.”  I noticed the patch on their flanks where their cutie marks should be that said ‘C7MP’ and my eyes floated toward the holstered pistols and mean-looking night sticks strapped to their mid-sections.

The other one leaned in close and snarled, “Poor you.  Now get going.  And no more outbursts.”  Again, I saw the... police officer’s?... mouth move up and down, and I could tell by the shape of the muzzle that she was a mare, but her voice didn’t sound anything at all like any mare’s I had ever heard, as if her vocal cords had been ripped out and replaced by a broken mechanical synthesizer.

I stepped off the platform and onto the station floor.  When I asked the G-pony what he wanted me to do, he replied, “Isn’t it obvious?”  I frowned.  No, G-pony, no it isn’t obvious.  In fact, it is entirely unclear what the sunflower seeds I am supposed to be doing, I thought.

Fortunately, it was at that moment of confusion, frustration, and dislocation that I simply decided that I didn’t care anymore.  I would start over with a clean slate, pretend that I did, in fact, know exactly where I was and that I did, in fact, know exactly what I was supposed to be doing.  I believe it is called just rolling with it.

With a newfound sense of determination, I got up, found a random suitcase lying on the ground, calmly picked it up in my mouth (noting that it tasted like what I imagine horseshoes taste like - old horseshoes), and strode confidently towards what looked like the exit gate.  Almost immediately, I passed by somepony having a disagreement with a police officer - something about luggage, and how it wasn’t allowed anymore.

Shucks, I privately remarked to myself, and I opened my mouth, letting the ill-gotten suitcase fall out, and of course, the sound of the damned thing clunking to the floor caught the attention of the luggage police standing nearby.  Our eyes met, his appearing cold, unfeeling and unsympathetic, obscured by lenses that glowed like the flame of a gas grill.  We just kind of stared at each other for several awkward moments before silently departing ways.

Trotting on through the squeaky security gates, shifting uncomfortably in my accursed blue whatever- these-are, my attention lingered on a framed, crumpled newspaper hanging from a sorry wall in a sorrier hallway, which read in obnoxiously tall, squished letters, “THE 7 MINUTE WAR” and though I thought it best to just pass on by like I hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary, my curiosity had definitely been piqued.

I passed by an Equinoid creature wearing what looked like a spacesuit, pushing a broom while a police officer looked on, and in my abnormal mental state, I thought nothing more than, “Oh, that’s nice.”

I came upon a pony who was pacing back and forth in front of the ‘ARRIVALS/DEPARTURES’ board, mumbling about how the trains are always departing but they never arrive, and the ones that do arrive are always full and nopony ever gets on, and I once again ignored him and trotted on, though I did wonder what he was talking about.

I closed my eyes and bared my teeth in an entirely futile effort to tune out Dr. Boring’s looping “welcome” speech, so I was caught quite off-guard when I set off an alarm while passing through a security checkpoint.  Gates to either side of me slammed closed and locked, and I heard what sounded like an extremely heavy-duty locking mechanism inside a featureless metal door disengage, and it swung open, revealing an imposing uniformed stallion who pointed a gloved hoof straight at me.

“You, citizen.  Come with me.”

“Me?”  I quickly glanced around, but there was nopony else but me.

“You.”  He answered back, clearly going for the minimalist’s approach to conversation.

He wore what looked like the same uniform as the other ‘officers’ except for a red square on his flank with ‘C7MPE’ written on it in a tall, squished font.  His head had no mane sticking out, but instead had a heavier-looking helmeted mask that encased even his mouth, covering the lower part of the jaw with a gunmetal-grey armored plate.  The mask conformed to the contours of the inside of the mouth, allowing the pony wearing it to still grip objects while remaining completely separated from the outside environment.  At the back of the mouth protruded a cylindrical voice synthesizer/rebreather/ Celestia knows what.  His eyes glowed yellow.  Scared manure-less I complied with his order and did not dare breathe another word.

I followed him past interrogation room after interrogation room.  I passed one that, from the sound of it, contained a unicorn who had been caught using magic, which apparently wasn’t allowed.  I frowned, looking at my horn in a reflection on a window.  Better keep you on the down-low, I thought.  Are pegasus ponies allowed to fly?  Are earth ponies allowed to be in touch with nature?  Are dogs allowed to bark?  Where does it end?

The police officer motioned me into an uncomfortable-looking room with an equally uncomfortable-looking chair sprinkled with what may or may not be blood stains.  I hesitated for only a moment, and the officer violently shoved me inside.

“BACK UP,”  He barked, moving to a terminal as a pair of security cameras automatically tracked me.  “I’m gonna have fun with you...”  he said as he reached down, grabbed a fat plug with his masked-mouth, and yanked it free.

The camera stopped tracking me.

Oh sweet Luna, bringer of merciful night,

Let thy moonlight shine upon us and bless us with your watchful gaze

To you do we cry, good mother of twilight, sister of dusk, and friend to dawn

To you do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears...

My feverish recitation of the Ave Luna was interrupted by a tap on my shoulder.

“Gordon?  It’s okay.  Everything is alright.  I’m not Combine.  I’m not going to hurt you.”

I opened one eye and was greeted by the first familiar face I’d seen in what felt like a lifetime, or maybe two lifetimes.

“BARNEY YOU PIECE OF SHIT!” I raged, eliciting my first swear word, I believe, ever.

Barney had doubled over on the ground, laughing uncontrollably, no doubt at the sight of Emperor of Geekdom level 70 Night Elf Paladin Science Major me using profanity.

Barnes ‘Barney’ Iron Buck had been a security officer back at Black Mane, and had become the closest thing I had ever had to a best friend during my tenure there, which I remembered had been brief, but without question or comparison the happiest time of my life.  That was so long ago, it seems.  How long ago was it?

“Hey Gordon, you ever gonna buy me that sarsaparilla you promised?”  Barney looked up from the concrete floor, a frown upon his now-unmasked face in a see-through attempt to look perturbed.

“Barney, how long has it been since Black Mane?”

He stood up on all four legs and gave me a very real frown.

“Gordon, the Black Mane Incident happened almost a decade ago.”

I collapsed into The Uncomfortable Chair.

Oh my goddesses.  Oh.  My.  GODDESSES.

“Gordon, do you not remember... anything that’s happened since then?  At all?”  Barney asked, an elevated level of concern tingeing his voice.

“NO!  ALL RIGHT!? NO!  I DON’T REMEMBER A CELESTIADAMNED THING!”  I screamed, tears in my eyes.  “I don’t know where I am, why I’m here, what’s going on, what happened, what year it is, w-what a.. a ‘combine’ is besides a piece of farm equipment, why unicorns aren’t allowed to use magic, why my boss is on giant TVs strung up on every wall, why everypony’s wearing the same blue jumpsuit...”

My face was red, and my throat was beginning to hurt as I covered my face with my hooves.  “I’m just... so... confused,” I whimpered, utterly defeated, and Barney gave me an extremely masculine hug that, though it may have lasted an uncomfortably long time, I nevertheless very much appreciated.

“Let’s start with the first question,” Barney chimed in, finally.  “You’re in City 7, formerly known as Manehattan.”

“I used to go up to Manehattan all the time,” I whispered.  “They had all the best book stores.”

“What was your next question?”

“What year is it?”

“It is the year 1045. 1,045 years ago, Nightmare Moon was imprisoned in the moon.  45 years ago, Nightmare Moon returned and was defeated using the Elements of Harmony.  8 years ago, there was a horrible accident at the Black Mane Research Facility, which resulted in its complete destruction.  You and I were there, Gordon -”

“I remember,” I interrupted.  “We were lucky to get out of there alive.  There were... monsters.  Creatures in no book I’ve ever read,”  I scratched my goatee, deep in thought.  “There were these little ones that could latch onto your face, and take over your body.  I would smash them with my crowbar...”

Barney was at the terminal in the room, pounding away at its oversized keys.

“Gordon, there’s somepony you’d better meet.”

Who could that be?

The screen on the terminal flickered, and the paragraphs of text, mugshots, and Metro Police jargon (Barney explained to me that ‘C7MPE’ stood for ‘City 7 Metro Police Elite’ - as for what a ‘metro’ is, I’ve no idea to this day) was replaced by a single elderly face that absolutely radiated pure joy, and seemed to make the whole room brighter, even through the pixellated view screen and compressed video.

“Oh, hiya Barnesy!  I had a feeling you were going to call just any second now, and it looks like I was right!  Oh, you’re not going to tell me you can’t make it to Gummy’s 45th birthday party, are you?  He’s still upset about last year!”

C H λ P T E R  T W O :

WELCOME TO CITY 7

I followed her down the wide, white campus sidewalk, my gaze fixated on her ridiculous poof of bouncing pink hair as she spoke not really with me, but at me.

“...so I told myself, Pinkamena Diane Pie, before your 50th birthday, you are going to march your little rump back to college and finish your degree, no ifs, ands or buts about it, missy!”

I was surprised when she said she was almost 50, she looked good.  NO!  Impure thoughts! Ew! Ew! Ewwwww!

The Pink One turned her gaze back toward me, her hair struggling to overcome the centrifugal force exerted upon it with such a sudden rotation, and inquired as to what I was doing at the Maresachusetts Institute of Technology.

“Uh,” that was my first response to every question, “I’m studying Theoretical Physics.”

“Oh.  That’s... interesting?”  The tone of her voice was dripping with poorly concealed disinterest, and I sensed her attention span was decaying faster than an atom of Unicornium.

“Theoretical Physics is... is like...”  Think, Gordon!  You’re losing her!

I reached a hoof up to adjust my glasses as my eyes subconsciously drifted towards her flank – and her cutie mark!

Inspiration struck, and I stopped.  “Okay - Pinkie Pie you said it was?  I noticed that your cutie mark is three balloons.  Well, imagine, for just a moment, that the whole entire world - everywhere you’ve ever been and everything you’ve ever seen - is on the surface of one of those balloons.”

Her head had turned almost completely around in what looked like a painful position as she intently stared at her own flank.

“Is it the yellow one?” she asked in her peculiarly squeaky voice.

“Yes, Pinkie Pie, it’s the yellow one.  Now, we here on the surface of that – yellow – balloon assume that the entire universe – everything, everywhere – is somewhere on the surface of that very, very big balloon.”

She nodded, and I feared she was going to pull a muscle in her already strained neck.

“Now, imagine our surprise when a fly comes and lands on our balloon, sticking its hairy fly legs in our little balloon cities!”  I gestured wildly with my forelegs for visual effect, satisfied that I had successfully enraptured her with my amazing storytelling.  “For all we can tell, that big, hairy fly leg just appeared out of absolutely nowhere!  Right out of thin air!  It didn’t come from above, or below, or from the right or the left; one minute it wasn’t there, and the next minute, it was!  And that fly can pick up its legs and set them down someplace else, and to us, it’s like they teleported from one place to another, sometimes kilometers away!”

It appeared to me that I had succeeded in blowing Pinkie Pie’s mind, and she regarded me anew with a kind of... reverence.  Like I’d subdued a crocodile or caught a bullet with my teeth.

“That is what Theoretical Physics is.”  I turned and trotted away, my saddle laden with books, as the Pink One continued to stare at the point in space I had previously occupied.  I had seen something special in those wide, bright eyes; the glimmer of true intelligence and the capacity to understand.  It was as if I had awoken something inside her; a curiosity, a yearning for knowledge, a fascination with the magic of science.

------------------------------λ-------------------------------

“Hello, Dr. Pie.”

“Gordon!  Ohmygoshohmygosh Gordon! We’ve missed you soooo much!  HowInEquestriaDidYouGetHereAndWhereHaveYouBeenAndWhatHaveYouBeenDoingAnd - ”

“Pinkie!”  Barney interrupted.  “We need to make this quick!”

“I’m sorry, Barnesy, I know you’re calling from work and you’re not supposed to do that.  But, Gordon, I need you to come to the lab RIGHT NOW.  No dillydallying or whatever it is kids do these days!”

She turned around, and I could clearly see the white streak running through her still-poofy hair, making it look rather like a candycane.

“Alyx!?  Allllllyyyyyyx!  Do kids still dillydaddle!?”

Barney reached over and switched off the screen.  “Right.  Look Gordon, we’re taking way too much time, and the other cops are going to start getting suspicious.  There’s a side door in the supply room that opens right out into the alley.  It shouldn’t be locked.  Go outside and make your way to the Sugarcube Corner at 101st and Blueblood.  That -”

Barney glanced around nervously, then whispered;

“That’s where Dr. Pie’s lab is.”

I nuzzled the pockets of my chafing blue jumpsuit, seeing if the G-pony had left me my wallet.

“Can I take a cab?” I innocently inquired.

“This is no time for joking around, Gordon!” Barney hissed.  Guess that’s a no.  Somepony was knocking on the door.  Barney shooed me into the supply room.

“Just keep your head down, your eyes forward, and stay the hay away from the CP’s!  That stands for Civil Protection, in case you didn’t know... which you probably didn’t...?”

Barney’s voice sounded like he was second guessing the wisdom of sending me out into the city all alone, with little direction, in an extremely hostile environment, with a severe case of amnesia and/or brain damage.  He didn’t get to dither on it for long, as the pounding on the door became more insistent.

“Just go!  Take the side door and go!  Remember:  101st and Blueblood, Sugarcube Corner!”

I turned to go, but I had one last nagging question.

“Barney, you’re not like them, are you?”

He gave me a strange look, then closed his eyes and sighed as he understood.

“No, Gordon, I am not like them.  I pretend to be one of them because I have to - because Dr. Pie needs someone on the inside.”

“Do you beat people?” I asked.

Barney looked away, a pained expression on his face.  “Yes.”

He closed his eyes for a moment as the pounding continued, undiscouraged.

He spoke again. “But only when I have to, and even then, I do a really lazy, piss-poor job of it.”  He gave me a weak smile, and I returned it.

He gently shut the door to the supply room, leaving me, quite appropriately, in the dark. I had no idea what Barnes had been going through.  Knowing him, he probably beats up himself more than he beats up disobedient citizens.  Luna, watch over him, I whispered to the goddess of night.

The door was unlocked, just as Barney had said.  Of course it is, when has Barney ever lied?  He could have easily lied to me when I asked him if he beat people, but he didn’t.  He’s just not that kind of pony.  I opened the door and stepped into the alleyway adjacent the train station’s administrative offices.  My hoof immediately landed in dog crap.  Good old Manehattan.

Scraping my hoof on some concrete steps, my eyes wandered towards the sky, and I saw a glimpse of what looked like a skyscraper made of blue steel.  I stepped out of the alleyway, my ever-widening eyes fixed on the monolithic structure.  It was without comparison the tallest building I had ever seen, with long sections cut out along the corners exposing girders and internal components too complex to make out clearly through the haze that filled the sky. Hundreds of wires of varying length and thickness were strung out from the tower to obscured points elsewhere in the city.  It stretched up and up until it disappeared above the clouds.

I recalled Dr. Breen’s speech:  “... in the Citadel so thoughtfully provided by Our Benefactors.”

That, I thought, must be the Citadel.

Okay Gordon, focus.  101st and Blueblood.  Sugarcube Corner.  I used to go to the ones in Maresachusetts almost every day.  They had fritters, dumplings, pies, caramel everything;  just thinking about it made me hungry.  As I started down the sidewalk, I began noticing odd things about good ol’ Manehattan.  There were absolutely no carriages, for one thing.  Metrocops and those little camera droids were everywhere.  The ponies I passed on the sidewalk looked downtrodden, defeated, their heads drooped, their gait nothing but a half-hearted shuffle.  The massive television screens were out here, too, and I cringed as my former administrator popped up on screen, with his perfectly groomed golden-yellow mane, and his painted-on smile superimposed against his neatly-kept blue coat.  Celestia, I just wanted to gouge his eyes out, and I didn’t even have a reason to hate him yet.

I turned to the next pony to come trotting up the sidewalk.  “Excuse me, can you - ”

“Get away from me!” he hissed, and brushed past me.

Huh.  That was kinda rude.

“Pardon me, miss, but -”

“We can’t be seen talking together!” she said as loud as she could while still technically whispering.

Ooooohkay.  Fine.  I don’t need any help to find Sugarcube Corner.  My sense of direction is as infallible as a scanning-electron microscope is accurate.

“I’d like to read a letter I recently received:  Dear Dr. Breen,  Why has the ‘Combine’ seen fit to suppress our reproductive cycle?  Sincerely, A Concerned Citizen.”

Well.  That would explain why everypony’s so grumpy.  No one can get laid anymore.

“Thank you for writing, Concerned. Of course your question touches on one of the basic biological impulses, with all its associated hopes and fears for the future of the species.”

I passed by a pair of Metrocops beating the tar out of some poor pegasus pony.  One stood on his hind legs, holding the captive’s forelegs behind his back while the other bucked him in the stomach over and over again with what looked like electrified horseshoes attached to his hooves.

That is the kind of beating that Barney would never do, not even to save face to the other cops, I told myself.

The pegasus coughed up blood and spittle onto the sidewalk and looked at me, resignation in his eyes.  He shook his head as if to say don’t try to help, just go.  Another hind-hoof struck his face, hard, and I heard something crack.

Perhaps everypony’s gloominess had to do with more than just a lack of cuddling.

“Do our benefactors really know what's best for us? What gives them the right to make this kind of decision for all ponykind? Will they ever deactivate the suppression field and let us breed again?”

The pony in me was disgusted, but the scientist was intrigued.  How would one go about disrupting our reproductive cycle?  Was it terminated at the point where the male and female share the special hug, or at some point afterwards, perhaps when the stork attempts delivery of the newborn?  That is the most dangerous stage of prenatal development.  Are ponies still able to cuddle, or is sexual attraction altogether ‘suppressed’, as Breen put it?  Is it a machine?  He mentioned a ‘field’ of some sort.  Where does this field extend and where does it not, and does it affect only ponies, or other species as well?  This raises so many questions.  So much scientific research to do!  If I can ever find Pinkie’s lab.

Which reminds me, I thought, I need to get to Pinkie’s lab.  I headed towards the fading sign that read 91st st, and continued listening to the Breencast that echoed across the eerily silent city blocks.

“I find it helpful at times like these to remind myself that our true enemy is Instinct.  Instinct was our mother when we were an infant species.  Instinct coddled us and kept us safe in those hardscrabble years when we threw together our first pile of rocks and called it a house and gave up our mating rights to the male with the biggest horn, or the longest wingspan, or the thickest skull.  But inseparable from Instinct is its dark twin, Superstition.  Instinct is inextricably bound to unreasoning impulses, and today we clearly see its true nature.”

I heard a distant clomp clomp clomp, and I looked around to see what it was.

“Instinct creates its own oppressors, and bids us rise up against them.”

An eight-story tall tripod-like creature was stomping down the street beyond a hastily erected barricade where a lone metrocop nervously stood guard, his pistol in his mouth and his tongue on the trigger.  He followed me closely with his electric blue eyes.

“Instinct tells us that the unknown is a threat, rather than an opportunity.”

The creature had disappeared behind a cinema and I felt as much as heard an earthquake tremor.  Except Manehattan doesn’t get earthquakes.

“Instinct slyly and covertly compels us away from change and progress. Instinct, therefore, must be expunged. It must be fought tooth and nail, beginning with the basest of equine urges: The urge to reproduce.”

I saw a large white cargo carriage parked on the side of Blueblood avenue, directly beneath the sign reading 96th st.  Sirens wailed and I saw a trio of the metrocops’ peculiar steel-grey horseless carriages rolling down the street on their disproportionately massive wheels, strangely silent without the sound of hooves clopping against the ground.  As soon as the middle transport was directly inside the intersection of 96th and Blueblood, the cargo carriage that had been parked there exploded.

I was thrown to the ground and showered with burning shrapnel, and both sides of the street were suddenly teeming with activity as dozens of oddly-clothed ponies armed with all manner of probably-illegal weaponry burst from their hiding places and laid down a withering hail of gunfire on the overturned horseless carriages.  I saw metrocops crawling out of the wreckage on their bellies, some with their manes on fire, only to be cut down the instant they left the protective metal shell of what I now recognized as Armored Personnel Carriers.  The poor bastards had two options: stay inside and burn to death, or go outside and die much quicker.  Almost all of them chose the latter option, though I did hear the distorted, garbled screams of Civil Protection officers being roasted alive from inside the worst-mangled flaming hulk.

The APC at the head of the column was the least damaged.  It turned its front toward one side of Blueblood avenue and swung around its massive pulse-cannon to face the other.  I lay low against the back of an overturned mail drop-box as I heard the throaty, rapid-fire thump thump thump of the cannon, and a new chorus of natural-sounding screams joined the dying metrocops’ synthesized imitations.  I didn’t dare look, but the gunfire coming from that side of the street stopped.  I heard an ear-splittingly loud *CLANG* as the rear hatch of the APC dropped and there was the sound of at least a dozen sets of boots hitting the pavement.

I had to move.  Or I was going to die.

Come on Gordon.  You can DO this.  Statistically-speaking.

I galloped hard for the nearest broken window and jumped inside.  I think it was some kind of store in a strip mall, I couldn’t tell for sure.  Everything had been looted long ago, and there were bullet-casings and splotches of fresh blood all along the store-front.  The opposing pairs of double-doors separating one store from another that would ideally remain forever closed were wide open, and I could hear shouts and the sounds of hoof-steps coming from further down, so I followed.  Probably stupid to be running toward armed soldiers instead of away from them, but I was curious as to who these freedom fighters were.

I eventually found myself following a squad of 'Resistance' fighters as they wandered through an apartment building along with a young mare, her foal, and an elderly stallion.  The squad leader had us duck into an empty apartment when he heard the nearby muffled chatter of what he called 'Combine'.

“Is that what you call those guys?” I whispered to him.

He gave me a look of incredulity.

“What did you say your name was?”  The squad leader asked.

“Gordon Freemane.” I replied.

The young mare in our group immediately let out a snort.  “Yeah, and I’m Twilight Sparkle.”

“And I’m Princess Celestia!” her daughter chimed in.

The squad leader forcefully shushed us, but it was too late.  The sound of voices abruptly stopped, and the sounds of heavy boots outside the apartment we were hiding in grew closer and faster.  The door let out a *click-clack* as the metrocops tried to open it, but we had locked it moments before.

“Alright, here they come,” a Resistance fighter whispered.  The door caved inward as the Combine behind it gave it a powerful buck.  I heard a pair of rapid-fire three shot bursts and both of the CP’s were dead before they stepped a hoof inside.  That distinctive sound elicited a high-pitched *squee!* from the little filly, and her face lit up.

“It’s Alyx!”

I quickly got out of my rather embarrassing pose of ‘forelegs covering face and tail tucked between legs’ and tried to look heroic.  I didn’t even hear her come in.  She had a light-caramel colored coat and a matching horn sticking out of her short black mane, and wore a little jean vest with pockets and holsters for tools and ammunition.  She telekinetically lowered her rapid-fire pistol into its holster strapped to the left side of her vest, and sprightly stepped over the bodies of the Combine she had just killed.

She looked at me and smiled.  “Dr. Freemane, I presume.”

The mouths of the other members of my party hung open in disbelief while the squad leader stepped forward and cleared the air with an authoritative voice.

“Miss Sparkle, escort Dr. Freemane to Dr. Pie’s lab.  We’ll get these civvies on the Underground Railroad.”

As he hurried them down the hall, the little filly with the young mare kept tugging at her mom's jumpsuit with her mouth, asking “Did he just... Hey! Did he say his name was...?”

------------------------------λ-------------------------------

The elevator roared to life, somewhat surprisingly given its condition, and the doors slammed shut.

“... The Combine can be slow to wake, but once they’re up, you don’t wanna get in their way,” she said with her unmistakable Manehattan accent.  The urban kind, not that uppity fake-sounding accent that rich ponies in the wealthy North District had.

I dumbly nodded.  She was so pretty.

She gave me a funny look, and said “I’m Alyx Sparkle by the way.  You worked with my mother, Twilight Sparkle back at Black Mane?”

I snapped out of my stupor.  “Oh, yes.  Twilight.  Very intelligent.  Inquisitive.  Yes.”  My mind wasn’t really into the conversation as my eyes drifted toward Alyx’s flank.  Her cutie mark was a socket wrench.

“Anyway, sorry about the ‘getting caught in the middle of a huge firefight’ thing.  I swear I had no idea the Resistance was plotting an ambush so close to Pinkie’s lab.”

The elevator stopped at the first floor of the apartment building, and we were greeted by a gruff-looking pony wearing a flak jacket and a standard-issue Royal Equestrian Army helmet.  He stood up on his hind legs and saluted, an unnecessarily formal gesture, and I saw the insignia of a lieutenant in the REA pinned to his chest.

“This building is secure, Miss Sparkle, ma’am!”  He beamed, fishing for acknowledgement or approval.  He got neither.

“Now it is, lieutenant.  Go police the bodies on the sixth floor,” she said with a glare.

The eager lieutenant’s face fell, and he hurriedly complied with her command.

I spoke up.  “So you guys have got a little resistance going, huh?”

“It’s not so little anymore.  We get bigger and stronger every day, and now that you’re here, Gordon, I think something BIG is about to happen,” she turned to me, “Speaking of big things, its funny you showing up today, of all days.”

We trotted down a poorly-lit hallway of the run-down building, and I prayed to Luna that there really were no more Combine waiting to jump out and grab us.

“What’s so special about today?”  I asked.

“You’ve heard of the Underground Railroad?  That’s the route we use to get people and supplies in and out of City 7, literally right under the Combine’s muzzles.  We’ve been working for a couple of years now on a better, faster way.  Well, we finally completed it yesterday, and today we’re going to send somepony through it for the very first time.

We stepped out of the entrance to the apartment building, glancing up and down the street to make sure it was safe.  I saw from the signs at the intersection that we were at 101st and Blueblood.  And sure enough, right across the street was a Sugarcube Corner.  I couldn’t believe it:  The sign said 'OPEN'.

“The Combine actually let you run your own shop?” I asked incredulously, as these were the same ponies who arrested unicorns for using magic.

Alyx gave a little laugh that made my heart flutter, and she replied, “Hey, Combine got to eat too, right?  And Nopony bakes like Sugarcube Corner.™ (R)”

I chuckled at the sign outside that read “Civil Protection?  Ask for the Combine Discount of 100% off!”  Sugarcube Corner franchises were designed to resemble gingerbread houses, with roofs and awnings that looked as if they were made of graham crackers, lights that looked like gumdrops, gutters that looked like licorice, windows that looked like lollipops, you get the idea.  If it looked a bit obnoxious in Manehattan, it looked triply-so in the dreary, hopeless, oppressive police-state of City 7.

We stepped inside the gingerbread-house-like bakery and trotted up to the counter.  I began to salivate as I gazed upon the rows upon rows of cookies, cupcakes, rolls, cakes, and other pastries I couldn’t even name or classify.  It occurred to me that I hadn’t eaten in a long time.

“How may I help you?” asked the cotton-candy-blue mare with shockingly pink hair behind the counter as she tried to suppress a knowing smirk.

The words had barely left her mouth when Alyx blurted out, “Yeah, can I get a crust-less apple pie with extra hot sauce and onions?”  Alyx rattled off the phrase like she had said it a few hundred times already.

Any hunger I might have had evaporated as soon as I heard that.

“Right this way, Miss Sparkle,” the blue mare replied, and beckoned us to follow her behind the counter and into the kitchen area.  Past the pots, pans, mixing bowls, messy countertops and shelves lined with bags and bags of flour and cornmeal, there was the massive metal door of a walk-in freezer.  Squeezing into the freezer and shutting the door behind us, the blue mare pressed a red button that was partially obscured by a half-empty tub of vanilla ice cream.  I shivered as I waited for something to happen.  Suddenly the back of the freezer slid open, revealing a small elevator.

"There's a service entrance that's a lot more direct, but we prefer to only use it under special circumstances."  She waved her foreleg.  "You know.  The Combine."  She sighed heavily, and put a hoof to her forehead as I gave her a worried look.  She looked up and said, "Sorry, it's just... you have no idea how many times I've been lectured on that particular topic."

I nodded in understanding.  No words were needed.

The cotton-candy pony stayed behind in the elevator.  Even before I stepped through the door to her secret lab underneath the bakery, I could hear her, and I could tell she had been eating too much sugar.

“BARNEY!  You didn’t go with her!?  What if she can’t find Gordon!?  What if she gets hurt!?  What if... what if she explodes, Barney!?  What if she has already exploded?!  *gasp*  Or what if she got possessed by headcrabs and now Alyx is a terrifying, horrible, gross zombie pony with little pincers on her legs that go *grawh gwar ghwarhhhh*...”

Alyx and I stepped inside and were greeted by the shockingly pink earth pony named Pinkie Pie.  She had aged gracefully, amazingly enough, considering that her cutie mark was basically ‘partying’.  To me, she looked almost exactly the same as I remembered her from my days at the Maresachusetts Institute of Technology.

Pinkie stopped berating Barney mid-syllable.  “Twitchy eye.  Sore ankle.”

“... And a pain in my ass,”  Interrupted Barney with an ear-to-ear grin that I returned.

“GORDON!  ALYX!  YOU’RE HEEEE-eee-*cough cough* ere!  And neither of you are zombie ponies!  This is the best birthday present EVER!”  Pinkie Pie exclaimed.

“I didn’t know it was your birthday, Pinkie!”  I said, trying to retain the capacity to breathe while in the clutches of her warm, joyous, but-just-a-little-too-tight embrace.

She giggled like a little filly even though she was now an old mare.  Her face had maybe a handful more wrinkles than it did at MIT.  Okay, and maybe that white streak in her hot-pink mane was a little wider.  But other than that, I swear she could pass for 50.  “It’s not my birthday, silly!”  She moved aside and pointed at the corner of the rather small laboratory.  “It’s Gummy’s!”  She positively beamed.

I could not believe what my eyes were telling my cerebral cortex, and my Broca’s Speech Area was temporarily at a loss for words, although my hippocampus continued to function just fine.

In the corner of the lab was a folding table with paper plates, napkins, cups, and an extravagantly decorated birthday cake, and at the end of that table, sitting glumly but patiently, was a fully-grown, four-and-a-half meter long crocodile wearing a party hat.

Achievement Unlocked!  Press Shift + Tab to view.

Filly Fatale - Meet Alyx Sparkle!

C H λ P T E R  T H R E E :

THE ONE WITH THE FREE MANE

As I sat there in a pool of my own blood, my right hoof inside the metallic padded stock of my completely empty LMG, my left hoof holding the jagged, gaping wound in my side which my flak jacket had done absolutely nothing to prevent, I laughed.

I laughed even though it hurt like a bitch to do so, I LAUGHED as I heard the monsters coming to drag me away into the darkness.

I laughed as I remembered how on the PPV ride over here, I had asked CPO Butterscotch what kind of ‘accident’ would require the deployment of an entire division of Royal Marines.

Tears in my eyes, I whispered out loud “Y-you’re all.  You’re all going... to die- hahaha! HAHAhah!”, but my voice was muffled by my gas mask.

The monsters continued advancing towards me, awkwardly balancing on sets of folded, razor sharp pincers that used to be their forelegs.  A pale, fleshy sac with stubby little legs sat atop their heads, nearly encompassing their entire skulls.

I slid my hoof out of the LMG’s cylindrical stock and used it to shove off my mask, thwacking it onto the thin layer of shell casings that inundated the warehouse floor from here to the impossibly distant entrance just a few meters away.

The empty shells bounced to a rhythmic pounding that was getting closer and closer.

“DID YOU HEAR ME!? I SAID YOU’RE ALL GOING TO DIE!  HAHAHAHAH!” I screamed as loud as my dry, raspy throat and punctured lung would let me, and my voice echoed through the massive room.

A moment later, the pounding reached its crescendo and the enormous crimson head of a Royal Equestrian Army-Dragon emerged from the pitch-black service tunnel, his golden eyes, big as the wheels of a semi-carriage, burning with the wrath of the peoples of Equestria and the God-Queen he swore allegiance to.  His overwhelming presence left not the faintest shadow of a doubt that dragons were indeed the physical manifestation of the omnipotent old magic which forged Equestria from the interminable chaos that existed before the beginning of time.

With a deafening sound that vibrated the steel girders holding up the ceiling, a long tongue of cleansing super-heated plasma burst forth from his enormous maw and immolated the entire warehouse and everything in it.

“Burn, mothercuddler.” I grinned as flames consumed my broken and useless body. “Burn.”

------------------------------λ------------------------------

Barnes “Barney” Ironbuck does not like crocodiles.  He has never liked crocodiles, nor had the slightest inclination towards tolerating their existence to any greater a degree than as an abstract concept that is necessary for the proper functioning of nature, like electromagnetism and photosynthesis.

Notice that nowhere in the above paragraph did I mention that Barney wanted a crocodile as a pet.  No, I wrote that Barney tolerates the existence of crocodiles on an abstract, conceptual, if you will, theoretical  level.  He does not wish them any particular malice, nor does he particularly care for them any more than he cares for wasps, horseflies and certain allergens.

Basically, if you were to pass him by on the street and say, ‘Hey Barney, how ‘bout them crocodiles?’  He would shrug and say ‘I don’ know.  They’re cool I guess.’  This in no way equates with ‘Oh boy!  Let’s go get a crocodile and bring it home!’

So, I could understand where Barney was coming from when he had just the slightest trepidation about serving Gummy his first slice of birthday cake.  I did not, however, expect him to pull the gun out.

“Whoah, there, Barney,”  cautioned Dr. Pie in a slow, calm voice, “You don’t have to do anything rash.  Like murder Gummy.”

“He growled at me!  He growled!  That means he’s ready to kill, doctor!”  He held his pistol in his mouth between clenched teeth, his tongue exerting dangerous levels of pressure on the trigger.

Pinkie Pie spoke in a disturbingly cheerful voice, “That just means he’s hungry, silly!”

Barney was hysterical.  “He’s hungry for pony meat, Dr. Pie!  I can see it in his eyes!”

Pinkie Pie frowned, disappointed that her attempts at diplomacy were failing.  “Okay, Barnesy, I’ll prove it to you.”  She trotted up to the four and a half meter long crocodile which somewhat surprisingly had no reaction to the imminent proximity of the big pink wad of juicy pony-meat that patted him on his scaly head, not-quite-whispering in a childish voice, “I’m sorry, Gummy.  Barnesy didn’t mean to yell at you and point a gun at you and say hurtful things and threaten to murder you,”  she glared at Barney,  “He’s just having a bad day.”

Her amphibious friend cocked open its mouth a little in what I assumed was a crocodile’s way of expressing happiness, as the Pink Doctor cut a slice of birthday cake, picked up the plate in her mouth, and set it down in front of the birthday boy.

If Barney didn’t have fur, he would have turned pale as the river monster demolished his slice of cake in a single *GLOMP* and proceeded to crawl up onto the sagging folding table to devour the rest of the admittedly delicious-looking pastry, frosting dripping onto the table from his long, jagged incisors.

Pinkie Pie looked on cheerfully as Gummy gnashed and chewed his way through the remainder of his confectionary victim.  Then, satisfied that the cake had been neutralized, he crawled up some stacked crates of lab junk to a dark, isolated balcony above us, and disappeared.

Barney collapsed into a chair and let out a heavy sigh of relief, momentarily secure in the knowledge that he had once again cheated death and survived another of Gummy’s birthday parties.

Dr. Pie rolled her eyes at Barney as Alyx tried in vain to suppress a giggling fit, and I took the opportunity to take stock of my surroundings.  The huge room we were in was completely underground, and looked like it had been built recently.

I was stunned.  Dr. Pinkie Pie’s lab was amazingly well-equipped, with computers and electronics of all kinds, massive glass cylinders filled with a mysterious orange liquid, and behind them was a massive generator, or perhaps transformer, connected to a tangle of pipes and wires of all different thicknesses that stretched up to the ceiling and across the room to the various apertures of science that lined the brick walls and covered every available surface.

If I could, I would have stayed there forever.  So much science!  YES!!  I said to myself with a mental *squee*.

Barney was surveying a bank of television screens beside a sliding metal garage door, and Dr. Pie was intensely studying a complex array of multicolored lines and numbers on her computer screen.  I watched over her shoulder as she exited the program, and I could see that her desktop background was a picture of six ponies in their mid-twenties wearing tattered, dirty gowns, sitting and laughing at a restaurant table.

I recognized Pinkie Pie and Twilight Sparkle, but who were the other four?  I felt like I had seen them before, maybe in history class, but I suppose I hadn’t been paying attention.  My eyes were drawn to a massive cork board covered in post-it notes, pictures, newspaper clippings and sketches, which I trotted up to for further examination.

Laminated and pinned to the board was a newspaper, the New Yoke Times, which had the headline in massive, bold letters:  THE 7 MINUTE WAR. Below that was a picture of an NYPD precinct in ruins, its internal structure flayed and spilled out across the street from what looked like a massive internal explosion, and its collapsed stone roof crushing a half-dozen police cruisers.  Luna, there were bodies everywhere, splayed out on the street, mangled and burned, and I saw at least a handful of limbs protruding from the debris of the collapsed structure, clad in the navy blue of the New Yoke Police Department.  I winced at the very real picture of so many very real dead bodies, and began reading the front page article, curiosity overpowering my revulsion.

“New Yoke City, Manehattan – They came from nowhere, and they numbered in the thousands; Creatures that flew and shot searing plasma from their beaks, towering tripods that could level buildings, and nearly pony-sized ones that galloped on three legs and hunted us inside our homes.

It would appear that our armed forces, though they fought with super-pony courage and bravery, could not stem the red tide of blood as these wicked and genocidal invaders swept through our land, mercilessly mowing down scores of innocents as they attempted to flee.

As of this writing, no contact can be made with Canterlot, nor any military command center, police precinct, city hall, or really anything, though one rainbow-maned pegasus vowed to  (continued on page 12A)”

Wow.  So the Combine invasion had lasted all of seven minutes.  In seven minutes, all the armed forces of Equestria were defeated by an implacable foe that came from neither above nor below, neither the right nor the left...  I stopped mid-thought as I recalled a conversation I had once had with Pinkie Pie about inter-dimensional travel.  Is that what these Combine were?  Were they from a higher dimension, like the monsters at Black Mane?  Were they from Xen?

I put that thought aside for now, and my eyes fell on a framed picture to the left of the board that had been taken at Black Mane.  There were at least a dozen scientists pictured, adorned in their immaculate lab coats, including, I realized, me, Twilight Sparkle, Pinkie Pie, and Gilda Gryffindor.  Well, that dates the image, I thought.

Gilda quit just a couple of weeks after I arrived, after having worked there for 20 years, and took a higher-paying job at Equestrian Innovations, a private company that liked to think of itself as Black Mane’s ‘rival’, as if there was such a thing.  Almost everyone I talked to considered Gilda a traitor, except for Pinkie Pie.  She assumed that Gilda had a good reason for leaving the government-run research facility, and nopony could convince her otherwise.

"Whose face is scratched out?" I asked.

Dr. Pie frowned in disgust, which was such a rare occurrence for her, looking back, I should have taken a picture.

"That's our old administrator, Dr. Breen."

Ah.  Administrator Breen.  Or as I knew him, 'that one guy'.  Yeah, we didn't spend too much time conversing, or really, being aware of each other's existence during my tenure at my old job.  He was more of a mythical figure than a pony, a story your parents would tell you if you misbehaved, somewhere between gingivitis and the boogeymare.

Pinkie Pie began to rant. "You know, he was a big, mean, grumpy, mean meanie-pants waaaaaay before any of THIS," she gestured with her foreleg at the whole room, and I assume if she could, she would have pointed at the entire universe.

Speaking with a very mare-like indignity, "Did you know that one time, he came right up to my desk and grabbed my coffee mug - right in front of me!  And as he's pouring it out into a sink, I'm like; 'Hey Wally, why you be jackin' mah coffee!?' and I could never remember his response because I was too busy pretending he had two giant teeth sticking out of his mouth like this- " she put her hooves underneath her muzzle, "- and going 'O hai you guiz, I'm Walrus Breen, king of the polar ice caps!  Bring me some more fish!’”

I smiled at her use of Dr. Breen’s embarrassing first name.  Who in their right mind would name their foal Walrus?

“...and then he would start eating them like *aurgph omf snarf SMACK SMACK SMACK*”

“Pinkie!”  Barney interrupted her dramatization,  “We don’t have time for this!”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Barnesy, I got a little carried away again, didn’t I?” Pinkie giggled as Barney rolled his eyes.  I thought sarcastically, Celestia, the poor feller must have to deal with this every day.  I only had to deal with it every other day back at Black Mane.

Suck it up, Barney, it comes with the job, I thought at him, as if he could hear me.

The Pink One turned to me.  “Let’s get you out of those icky clothes, Gordon.  Barney, go get the Mark VI ready.”

Barney saluted, for some reason, and went to open up the sliding garage door set at one corner of the lab.  Flicking a control switch, the door slid open, and I was confronted by the sight of my old HEV suit.  Except it wasn’t my old HEV suit, it was... better.  Newer.  Awesomer.  A certain percentage cooler.

“The Mark VI Hazardous EnVironment suit has been redesigned for comfort and utility,”  began the poofy-haired doctor.  “Uhhmmm....” she flipped through the pages on her clipboard, then shoved it aside.  “Basically, your suit is now twenty percent cooler and it lets you gallop really super-duper fast, in addition to all the other stuff the old one could do.”  She smiled at me, chin on her hooves, as she eagerly waited for me to put it on.

“Now Gordon,” Barney explained as I began taking off my blue jumpsuit,  “The Mark Six is equipped with an internally-stored extendable helmet that activates whenever you’re in an environment you can’t breathe,”

“Uh-huh, just like the old one.”  As I finished undressing, I noted that Alyx had been taking a keen interest in watching me.

Barney helped me assemble the HEV suit around my body, piece by piece, starting with the matte black under layer, which felt like a wetsuit and conformed to my body exactly, like a custom-fitted glove.  It was indescribably comfortable.  I noticed that whatever material it was made of instantly warmed when it sensed that my body temperature was just a tiny bit on the cool side.

“You have reactive armor plating, which can dissipate plasma charges to a limited degree, and deflect glancing blows from projectiles,”  Barney continued, “But that doesn’t mean you’re invincible.  A few good hits will still punch through your armor, but fortunately –”  He lowered the heavy torso piece onto my shoulders, and it fastened itself into place with an electronic series of *clicks*, “Your suit is actually capable of repairing itself to some degree, just like Overwatch armor.”

I interrupted him, “What’s ‘Overwatch’?”

Barney explained, “They’re the Combine military.  Like Civil Protection, they’re made up of trans-ponies: Ponies who have been cybernetically augmented to the point they’re no longer considered equine.  They have some really scary equipment, but hopefully you’ll never meet them, right?”  He smiled.

I didn’t answer.  I remembered the words of the G-pony:  “Isn’t it obvious?”  I remembered seeing what the Combine were doing to the people of this city.  I remembered the newspaper article about the seven minute war.  The Resistance.  The Occupation.  Freedom.  Slavery.

I think I know what I was put here to do.

I said to him with sudden steely determination, “Barney, I have a feeling that I’m going to meet the Combine military sooner or later.”

“Well, in case you do, you’ll need your glasses,” he replied.

“What?”  I asked, flabbergasted.

Barney face-hoofed.  “Gordon don’t you remember your first hazard suit?  Those glasses of yours have pico-projectors embedded in the frame, one for each lens, that wirelessly plug in to your suit’s computer.  The HEV suit automatically analyzes any weapon or item you pick up, categorizes them, and displays all the pertinent information on your Heads-Up Display, which is projected onto your glasses.”

I noticed the little yellow numbers floating in the peripheral of my vision, and a crosshair in the exact center, currently hovering above Barney’s muzzle.

“Ah, so that’s what that is.  It’s all coming back to me now,” I said, smiling as I thought back to my first day at the Black Mane Hazard Course.

“Right,” Barney continued, “And your suit is magically enchanted with an inventory sort-spell that will automatically holster or equip any weapon or item you tell it, just by thinking.  It also estimates your overall health, and gives you a score from 0-100.  At 100, you’re golden.  At 0... well, you’re dead.  Try to keep it somewhere between those two,” Barney said with a grin.

Alyx, who had been listening raptly to our fairly one-sided conversation asked, “What’s all this powered by?”

Dr. Pie broke her unusual silence and chimed in, “She’s got a nuclear battery right there on top, in the back-piece.  Bronium, I believe.”

Alyx’s ears shot up.  “Nuclear what now?”

I snapped out of my reminiscing and put on my best ‘Theoretical Physicist’ face, preparing to put that PhD to work.  “This type of nuclear battery, a Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator, converts the heat that is produced by the steady decay of radioactive elements into electricity via the Seebuck effect.  If Equestria had a space program, that’s what I would power a deep-space probe with.”

Alyx was impressed.  “And how long will this battery last?”

“Oh, about another...”  Pinkie put a hoof to her chin in concentration before answering, “217 years.”

Alyx let out a whistle as she angled around to get a better look at my fancy yellow-and-black suit.  “Hey, what happens if Gordon’s glasses fall off?”

Barney answered, “Well, hopefully that won’t happen, but don’t worry, Gordon’s glasses are magnetically attached to his face.”

I snapped my head around to face him.  “Huh?”

Barney sighed, obviously growing weary of my continued amnesia.  “Your first day at Black Mane, they took you to an operating room and implanted a small piece of metal on the bridge of your nose, just underneath the skin, so the HEV HUD-goggles that you would be required to wear could be securely attached to your face without any danger of them slipping off in case the back-strap failed.”

I ripped off my glasses in panic, which took noticeable effort, and felt the area atop my nose.

“Also the lenses are made from a custom variant of Dragon-Glass™, so they’re neigh-impossible to scratch,”  Barney added as he fastened the matte-black section that covered my tail into place.

“Is there anything else I need to know!?”  I asked, somewhat perturbed.

“Yes,”  answered Pinkie Pie.  “Uhh... I don’t really understand computers, so I designed your suit without any kind of navigation software.”  I would later discover that this was an outright lie.

“How will I get around?” I asked.

Pinkie gave me a ‘kids these days’ look, and reached her mouth into her lab coat’s pocket.

“Here’th a MAP.”  She said through a mouthful of map.  Ah, so that’s the way it’s going to be.  I have nuclear-powered self-regenerative armor, a heads-up-display, super speed, and... a map.  A physical paper map.  Great.

“One more thing,” said Barney, and he picked up a red, metal rod in his mouth.  “I shink woo dwopped dis bag at bwagck maan,” he said through a mouthful of crowbar.  I happily accepted his spit-covered gift, and held it in my mouth.  Ahh, my good ol’ crowbar.  How many headhumpers did I bash with you?  I asked it.

Almost instantly, the crowbar popped up on my HUD in Category 1.  I unequipped it, and drawing magicka from my horn, the suit’s spell-casting computer deftly guided it onto my back, where it was magnetically secured with a satisfying *click*.  The perfect melding of magic and technology.  I’ve missed you, HEV suit, I thought, grinning.

------------------------------λ------------------------------

Macroscopic trans-dimensional quantum tunneling can be a bit... fussy sometimes.  It had been back at Black Mane, and it hadn’t changed one quantum bit in the eight or so years since then.  In fact, considering the government-funded Black Mane Research Facility had the very latest and greatest in high-technology and arcane science at its disposal and it still managed to blow up in our faces, the fact that Dr. Pie’s teleporter successfully projected Alyx from her laboratory, across the intermediate dimension of Xen, and back into our world at the exact coordinates of Black Mane West without disassembling her into a light-years long string of elementary particles could be considered by a pony of faith to be a bona-fide miracle.

As I galloped down Western Avenue, dodging in and out of every dark back-alley I could, ignoring the warning indicators that flashed across my spectacles that my suit could not keep up this rate of speed for very much longer without permanently damaging its nearly drained ultra-capacitors, I wondered;  What is the opposite of a miracle?

Is it a curse?  No, the opposite of a curse is a blessing.  Was it a trick?  Was the opposite of a miracle a dirty, rotten trick?  Because I felt like I had been duped, like forces beyond my comprehension were conspiring against me.  Twisting the path that I travelled so that it led where they wanted it to.  Using me.

They were there in the test chamber on that day, so, so long ago, when the whole world, the entire course of history, changed in an instant.  They were there in the chamber of the Nihilanth when I defeated an enemy greater than any I had ever known.  And they haunted me still, these unseen forces that moved in the shadows, only revealing themselves when they chose for their own mysterious purposes.

The teleporter in Dr. Pie’s laboratory had malfunctioned.  It was supposed to send Alyx and then me to Twilight Sparkle’s laboratory, Black Mane West, located underneath the old Sweet Apple Acres farm outside Ponyville.  It worked, surprisingly enough, and Alyx made it through to her mother safely.  However, when it came my turn to be projected across the void, I was instead transported directly to the last place in the entire universe I would want to go:  Walrus Octavian Breen’s personal office.

Leaping clean over a dirty shopping cart in an even dirtier alleyway, I tried to remember what I saw on Breen’s television screen.  Frozen in place inside a Sparkle-Flowers force field, I watched in horror as the screen physically turned to look at me, and I saw a face.  A pale, furless, alien face, and it looked right at me.  Now, I do not claim to be any kind of authority on alien facial expressions, but I swear to Celestia and Luna and all their pegasus guards that its small eyes narrowed in what appeared to be... curiosity.  Distant, clinical curiosity.  And even worse, Breen appeared to be having a rather heated argument with it.

So that must be your master, Breen.  That thing, that alien, that’s who’s really in control.

Almost as soon as I arrived, I was sucked back through the quantum tunnel, and I appeared outside of the Sugarcube Corner bakery, landing in a dumpster full of discarded baked goods and sacks of expired flour (Did you know flour can expire?), and Pinkie’s voice came over the radio telling me that, wherever I was, gallop.  Gallop as fast as my legs could carry me to Station 8, marked on my map, and to take the Underground Railroad all the way to Black Mane West.

So I did just that.  Though Pinkie Pie’s map was a little hard to read, I determined that I was nearing the highway underpass marked ‘Station 8’.  It was part of a long, crooked line that stretched across Manehattan, beginning at the Fluttershy Hospice for Sick and Injured Animals, intersecting with Pinkie’s lab - labeled as ‘Black Mane East’ - and onward down a winding path that led out of Manehattan, went past Ponyville and ended at Black Mane West.  I noticed that almost all of the ‘stations’ were clustered in and around Manehattan, with almost none outside the city limits.  And, for some reason, Ponyville was crossed out on the map.

Galloping through the city, I was so lost in thought that I didn’t see the metrocop standing in my way, and I plowed right into him, dropping my map, and causing us both to erratically tumble to the pavement.  The CP re-oriented himself as quickly as his cybernetic augmentations would allow, and drew his steel-grey pistol.  The gun was tightly clenched in his mouth, with the business end aimed right at my head.

"YOU, CITIZEN! DON'T MOVE!" he shouted from behind his white face mask in that garbled, mechanical voice that is the hallmark of a trans-pony.

I froze.  All I had was my crowbar.  He had a gun.  It was no contest.

"Oh, you are in so much trouble," the metrocop said with disgusting satisfaction.  "Unicorns get extra special treatment at Canterlot."

Thinking quickly, I reached out with my mind, and my horn flared with a translucent orange glow as I grabbed the cold steel weapon in his mouth and, yanking it away, turned it on him.  He froze as I telekinetically pressed the barrel to his skull.

What the hay are you going to do now, Gordon? Shoot him?

I was so concentrated on the metrocop that I didn't notice the scanner float down and snap my picture.  I was flash blinded for about the third time that day.

*BOOF!*  I staggered backwards, but my telekinetic grip on the pistol held.   I gathered that the CP had taken advantage of my momentary blindness to buck me in the chest.  When my vision cleared, I saw that the officer had drawn his baton, which crackled with electricity.

I again raised the weapon with my levitation magic, noticing that my suit had placed it in Category 2, and the previously inert targeting reticule now tracked exactly with the weapon, telling me precisely where the shot would land without the need to aim down the weapon’s sights.  A counter popped up in the periphery of my HUD, telling me that I had 17 rounds in the current clip, and 0 clips in reserve.

"You don't have the nerve, kid," the Combine said in a low growl.

He's right, I thought.  I don't have the nerve.  I had never harmed another pony in my entire life.  Let me explain:  The closest I had ever come to killing somepony was back at Black Mane, when I encountered my first Marine.  I was extremely nervous, paranoid, and heavily armed, and I was faced with a machine-gun toting goon in a gas mask. I calmed down only after he explained that he was a soldier with the Royal Marine Corps, there under direct orders from the Princesses themselves to rescue us scientists.

So imagine my surprise when I pulled the trigger.  The sound guns make when you fire them is really, really loud, I thought as the brain-dead metrocop collapsed to the pavement, motionless.  He was dead, just flat-cuddle dead.  His electric-blue eyes continued to glow, but one of them was slowly turning purple as his mask pooled with his own blood.

I have just killed another equine being.  I am a murderer.

NO!  I screamed at myself.  THIS IS A WAR AND I AM A SOLDIER.

I suppressed the urge to vomit as I looked at the body of the dead Combine, evaluating my work.  A clean kill.  Good shot.  My HEV suit’s targeting computer had served its purpose remarkably well; the bullet had indeed hit exactly where the reticule told me it would.  The face masks that the Civil Protection officers wore did not seem to be armored at all, I noted.  In fact, no part of their body appeared to be covered in anything more than ordinary cloth.  Well, killing these cuddlers should be easy, I thought.  Nope, there’s no suppressing the vomit this time.  And indeed, there wasn’t.

------------------------------λ------------------------------

I had my map out, floating it in front of me, trying to figure out where in the pony version of hell Station 13 was.  I had collected a good supply of loot from the six or seven metrocops that had had the grave misfortune of meeting me and my trusty sidearm... Gunsy.  Gunner.  Pow-pow.  Whatever, I’ll think of a nickname later.  I had even collected a few saddle bags from the vile ponies in which to store ammunition, and they showed up in my inventory under Category 7, which I assumed was for ‘things that neither shoot nor blow up but are not crowbars.’  I loved the way Pinkie Pie programmed this thing.

I said out loud to myself, “Let’s see, Gordon, fellow scientist, coworker, and altogether decent equine being, where in Equestria is Caramel Sandiego, I mean, where in Equestria am I supposed to – HNYUGH!”

That last ‘HNYUGH’ was prompted by the fact that due to my continued inattention to where I was going, my path had once again inadvertently intersected with an obstacle that my cerebellum was not anticipating the sudden need to navigate.

I tripped down some steps.  And landed flat on my stomach with my butt in the air.  And then my ankle started hurting a lot.

“Minor fracture detected.  Automatic medical systems engaged.”

My suit talked to me!  Wait, what did it say about –

“Morphine administered.”

AHHhhhhhhh.  Oh, that’s the good stuff.  Oh, my ankle doesn’t hurt anymore!

“Seek medical attention.”

Okay, mom.  Fortunately, some friendly Resistance members came by to help me!

“Who the buck is this salad tosser?” the first one asked in an accent that I had never heard before.

“Some dumbass who fell down the steps,” the second one replied.

“Whas’ that e’s wearing?”  First one again.

“I am Gordon Freemane, killer of Combines.  This - ”  I gestured at my HEV suit, “Is a Hazardous EnVironment suit.”

“Roight.  Well, welcome to Station 13 ‘ah the undergroun’ railroad.  I’m... well that dosen’ matter, come on, les’ jes’ go.”  The gruff pony clad in the typical hodge-podge of a vest, hat, and goggles that Resistance members seemed to like said.

I looked at my HUD and it estimated my overall health to be at 75 percent.  That can’t be good.  It’s down 25 percent from just one sprained ankle?  Oh, it must weight the limbs more heavily than the other parts of the body.  I looked at my right ankle and thought, my legs are kind of important.

“Yes, excuse me, sir, but do you happen to have any doctors in your employ here at ‘Station 13’?”  I said to my gruff compatriots, hoping it wasn’t that obvious I studied at MIT.

He gave me a slightly annoyed look, and pointed me toward an equinoid creature sitting patiently in the corner.  It... He was clad in what looked like a space suit, with a black faceplate covering his eyes.

“This is the Freemane.  The Combine’s reckoning has come,” he said through his helmet.

I trotted up to him, and asked if he could take a look at my ankle.  With my assistance, he removed my boot, and to my great surprise, levitated a first-aid kit over to me.

“This is the last of our medical supplies, but for the Freemane, nothing shall be spared.  You held back nothing in the Chamber of the New Nihilanth, and we hold back nothing now.”

As he began telekinetically wrapping my ankle very tightly in the bandage, I asked, “So... what are you, and how can you levitate things without a horn?”

He gave a very strange laugh, and replied, “You would call me a Cerberus.  We were slaves of the Combine for hundreds of years before The One With The Free Mane slew the lesser master that binded us to the greater one.”

Ah.  “Well... you’re welcome!” I said cheerfully.

“As for the telekinesis, perhaps it is, as you say, an old magic that permeates across the divide which separates our worlds.  We were not always this way, and it is beyond even the knowledge of the Cerberessence whether this is how we shall remain.”

Ooookay.  Little creeped out.

“We ain’t got all buckin’ day, fluffay!  You done fixin ‘im up yet!?”

The Cerberus replied that he was, and bid me farewell, leaving me slightly confused, but immensely grateful for the ankle brace that my suit’s amorphous lining material happily accomodated.

We made our way up the stairwell of the office building, heading for the roof, with the only accompanying sound besides our hoofsteps being a Breencast that was drifting in through the filthy, broken-out windows that once constituted three-fourths of the walls.  It was a new one, by the sounds of it;

“My fellow citizens, it seems that we have a Disruptor in our midst.  One who has acquired an almost messianic reputation in the minds of certain citizens, earning such romantic embellishments as ‘The One With The Free Mane’, ‘The One Free Pony’.  Make no mistake: This individual embodies the darkest urges of instinct and decay!  He would have us embrace magical thinking and arcane ways instead of the true and lasting progress that can only come from the wondrous new technologies and societal advances that Our Benefactors have enabled us with!  This pony is not only personally responsible for some of the worst excesses of the Black Mane incident, but I have verified, first-hoof accounts that the so-called ‘One Free Pony’ not only proudly flaunts the use of his self-destructive magic, but has used it to murder –at least- one unarmed, defenseless officer of the peace.”

I stopped on the stairwell, and the other members of my party stopped to gawk at me.  I remembered what he was talking about – it wasn’t just pony-pies, but something that actually happened.  But he was armed.  He was carrying a baton.  That’s armed, right?  Yeah, Gordon, he had a scary stick in his mouth, and you had a GUN... damnit, this would be so much easier if there wasn’t truth mixed in with his ponypies!

The Breen-cast ended on a more hopeful note.

“So if you see this ‘One With The Free Mane’ report him!  Civic deeds do not go unrewarded, and contrary-wise, anti-civil activities will not go unpunished.”

My travelling companions either didn’t believe Dr. Breen or didn’t care either way, but they looked out the broken windows in concern at the increasing buzz of activity in the skies above the city.

“Y’ ain’t brought no Combine with ya, did ya Freemane?”

I replied that I most certainly hadn’t.

The other pony elbowed their gruff leader.  “Well, ‘ah course he’s goin’ to say tha’!  Its not like e’s got any bleedin’ idea!”

After a long trek up the stairs that left everypony but me winded (thank you Hazard Suit!) we reached the roof of the fifteen story office building.  I was greeted by one of, if not the most bizarre contraptions I have ever seen:  A large white cargo carriage with its wheels stripped off, attached to a long steel cable anchored to a fairly small makeshift metal tower that jutted up from the surface of the roof that may have once been an enormous antenna.

I followed the cable with my eyes, and it lead to a corresponding rickety, makeshift tower on the roof of another, shorter multi-story building emblazoned with the words “QUILLS & SOFAS” in huge, flamboyant, red letters.  Beyond, I could see dead yellow pastures, a series of artificial canals cutting through the fields, and just over the horizon, the faintest glimmer of Ponyville.

The chosen method of excursion employed at this particular station on the fabled Underground Railroad caused me to facehoof.  Hard.  “Roight, Freemane, this ere’s the Station 13 – Station 14 inter-junction-platform-switch-dealie-gizmo.  Or at least, thas’ what I think its called.  They moight have changed the name in the... in-tear-im,” he carefully sounded out the last word.

The door to the roof burst open, and a panicked cerberus breathlessly shouted, “HUNTER-KILLER CHOPPER!  THE FREEMANE MUST LEAVE! NOW!”

The others turned to the panting creature and inquired as to ‘what the blazes e’s on aboot’.  Godesses, I still haven’t figured out where in Manehattan you’d have to be from to pick up that kind of accent.

I was so concentrated on their peculiar manner of speech that I didn’t hear anything the cerberus said in reply.  The two Resistance ponies hurriedly shoved me into the carriage that had been turned into a horrific parody of a ski-lift, and prepared to shove me off to my probable death.  The gruff one leaned in a centimeter away from my face and said in a stern voice,

“You bettah be ev’rything they say you is, Freemane.”  With that, the horribly worn brake was released and, to my horror, the carriage began its unpowered, uncontrolled descent to Station 14.

I had hardly cleared the lip of the office building when what I deduced to be the ‘Hunter-Killer chopper’ unloaded its port weapons pod into the roof, my companions disappearing behind a wall of fire.  The metal tower I was anchored to shuddered and sagged, falling nearly all the way over, but amazingly, it held.

The carriage continued its descent, albeit slower than before, and the chopper circled around, scanning for survivors, curiously announcing its intentions in a cool, robotic female voice.

“Continue surface sector sweep: Biotics confirmed.  Sterilization recommended.”

The chopper’s fearsome auto-cannon opened fire, and the carriage was peppered with a hail of plasma bolts that ripped through its metal skin like papier-mâché.  I screamed as several of the bolts punctured my armor and burned through my body.  The pain was like being stabbed with a red-hot skewer made out of fire ants that were also covered in salt.

“Warning:  Suit Integrity Compromised”

“NO SHIT!” I yelled at my Hazard Suit, eliciting my second swear word ever.  The Hunter-Killer chopper shot by overhead, rattling the flimsy wheel-less carriage with the downdraft.  The pain partially subsided as my Hazard Suit injected a chemical cocktail of morphine, anti-biotics, and coagulants into my veins, and I blinked away tears to look at my vital signs monitor, which now read 50 percent.  In one of those strange moments of insight in the midst of absolute chaos, I thought, Wow, my glasses didn’t fall off after all!

I also thought, I can’t take another pass from that chopper. I looked out the twisted and bullet-ridden metal frame of what used to be the window, and judged that I was a little more than halfway across.  Not good enough.  I had to change the situation, alter it so that I was no longer at a disadvantage.  I needed a

Trump Card.

I cycled through my inventory,  and my crowbar unlatched from the magnetic strip on my back and floated to my side, surrounded by the orange glow from my horn.  My horn!

I unequipped the crowbar and climbed out the oversized front window, hanging off the front by my forelegs.  The chopper completed its circle, and fired on the carriage, which had had enough.  The cobbled-together mechanism connecting it to the thin steel cable finally gave, and the mangled transport began to free-fall.  I concentrated all of my magic on the cargo carriage, and my telekinesis seemed to be amplified by the HEV suit itself as I pushed off with all my might.  After a split-second explosion of neon-orange light, I was flung backwards at incredible speed.

All I saw were my hooves, floating in front of me, as the steel-blue blur of the Hunter-Killer chopper screamed past, and the cargo carriage, nearly torn in half, fell toward the ground dozens of meters below, and then the whole world instantly went black.

------------------------------λ------------------------------

I awoke staring into the eyes of a bright-white unicorn mare with a cutie mark of a red cross on her flank, as she telekinetically pointed a flashlight in my face.  I glanced at my health monitor, which now read 100.

“Dr. Freemane, you’re awake!” one of them cried.

“Godesses, doc, that was a hell of a trick you pulled out there!” came a stallion’s voice.

An over-excited adolescent filly began gushing, “Yeah, we saw the whole thing!  You were like *AAAAHHHHH* and then you were like *CROOSH!* and then you went through this window like *BSPDDSH!* but it looks like the fellas over at Station 13 didn’t make it, but they were jerks anyway, but YOU’RE ALIVE!  You’re here and you’re ALIVE!  Yessss!!”

A stallion wearing an Royal Equestrian Army cap stepped in front of the adolescent, and said,

“What my sister-in-arms is trying to say is that we’re relieved to see you’re alive and well, Doctor Freemane.  We’re under direct orders from Twilight Sparkle herself to bring you to Black Mane West as soon as equinely possible, so if you’re feeling up to it, if you would please follow me.”  He gestured toward the entrance of the cubicle-filled room.

“Very well,” I sighed.  My insides no longer felt like they were on fire, so that was something.

“I want you and you to stay here,” said the hatted pony, pointing at the medic and the adolescent filly.

The filly’s face fell, but she complied.  “I’ll see you later, Mister Freemane, sir!”  She saluted.  I smiled, saluting back, and she turned red.  Well, if she didn’t have fur, she would’ve been red due to the increased flow of blood to th – never mind.

So it was me, the squad leader, and a pegasus clad in an REA helmet, black goggles, and matching face-mask who went down the elevator of the QUILLS & SOFAS building.

I eyed the rickety metal cage with suspicion, given my recent experience with Resistance-operated transports.

“So you’re absolutely sure this thing is safe?” I questioned the squad leader for maybe the fifth time.

As the doors slid open to the bottom floor, he began to reply when his Broca’s Speech Area, along with the rest of his brain, exited his skull through a brand-new hole in his head and splattered all over the back of the elevator.

“COMBINE!”  The helmeted pegasus beside me screamed, and ducked behind the control panel to the right of the opening.

I levitated the squad leader’s body in front me for the macabre use as a meat-shield as a dozen pairs of electric-blue eyes behind a makeshift barricade opened fire with automatic weapons.

It is amazing the anatomical hurdles ponykind overcame to enable non-unicorn ponies to hold and fire weapons too large or too powerful to manipulate with their mouths.  It was a simple innovation that made it possible:  The cylindrical stock.  A pony could simply slide his or her hoof into the stock, leaving the other hoof free to stabilize the weapon and – most importantly - toggle its firing mechanism.  With your free hoof inside the circle-shaped grip at the end of the weapon, it was a trivial task to apply a slight upward pressure to depress the trigger. It must have been the morphine talking, but as we were sitting there getting shot at, I just couldn’t help but marvel at the creativity and cleverness we exhibited by throwing off the shackles of our species’ evolution and holding objects though we had no hands.

“GORDON!  I NEED HELP OR WE’RE GOING TO DIE!”  the helmeted pegasus shouted across the meter of death that separated us.

I snapped out of my probably-drug-induced stupor, and picked up both my and the dead squad leaders’ SMGs.  A pair of targeting reticules appeared on my heads-up display, tracking with the weapons, and they flashed a deep orange when I placed them over the bodies of the Combine.

I dropped the meat-shield and fired both SMGs at the mob of glowing eyes crowded around the elevator.  Several fell, but several more remained, and my ammo counter read 0/0.  I had dropped to the ground, and was yelling at the pegasus to toss me some ammunition, when a metal tube clattered onto the floor of the elevator.  A blinking metal tube.

“GRENADE!” we yelled simultaneously.

I picked it up with my unicorn magic and shot it back at the gaggle of metrocops outside the elevator, eliciting the same orange crackle of lightning that had occurred when I’d pushed off from that cargo-carriage death-trap.  The grenade hit one of them square in the face, and hadn’t yet finished tumbling to the ground when it exploded, the pressure wave knocking me backwards and engulfing the lobby – the lobby filled with Combine – in the ensuing explosion.

My HUD said that my overall health was at about 85%, meaning that even an explosion a couple of meters away still hadn’t knocked off my glasses.

The pegasus got up and hoof-bumped me.  “Doctor Freemane, sir, you cuddling kicked ass!”

I winced at his foul language related to equine reproduction, but accepted the compliment.

After a long, boring, dark, dreary, insufferable walk through the sewers beneath Station 14, we finally reached the last station in the city formerly known as Manehattan, and saw the boat.  Note my use of the singular here - there was only one left by the time we emerged at the entrance to the canal, and absolutely nopony to greet us.  The helmeted pegasus hopped into the rear of the transport and unfastened his flak-jacket, allowing his wings to spread.  He told me that I was to steer, and he would give any direction I needed.  Ah, I then understood, it was a PPV – Pegasus Powered Vehicle.  Another shining example of Pony’s triumph over nature.

------------------------------λ------------------------------

Seventeen hours later (or probably something less than that), the sky was getting dark as the day approached its end, and we were motoring our way past Ponyville.  For some reason, the town was completely surrounded by a five-meter high chain-link barbed-wire fence, with signs posted every few meters warning ponies to stay away.  Hmm.  And I swear I heard screaming, moaning, and... laughter?... drifting across the wind.

I never got the opportunity to ask any questions because lo and behold, that same mothercuddling Hunter-Killer chopper found us again.   I could tell it was the same one because as I zoomed-in my digital rangefinder on its steel-blue fuselage, I counted three empty slots on its port weapons pod.  And I knew exactly when they had been emptied.

My brother-in-arms turned to me. “What do we do!?” he yelled over the sound of rushing water. And spinning blades.  And... an auto-cannon powering up!

“DUCK!” I yelled back.

I panicked.  There was absolutely no cover anywhere.  Just water, sand and grass.  However, I think the helicopter only got off maybe two or three plasma bolts before it was knocked out of the sky by a screaming flash of purple.

“What the hay was that!?” I asked my helmeted friend.

“It’s Spike!” he yelled back, overjoyed.

I couldn’t believe it.  It was a dragon!  A dragon, just like in the story books, except for real!  And it was a lot smaller than I expected, maybe half the size of the chopper, if that.

The dragon and the attack helicopter tumbled through the air above us, locked in vicious battle, and all either of us could do was watch, not that either of us would complain.  The helicopter partially regained its stability and tried in vain to shoot at the dragon named Spike with its belly-mounted auto-cannon, spraying plasma bolts across the horizon in every direction.  Spike, giving up on trying to breach its impenetrable cockpit, reached over and swiped at its starboard weapons pod, ripping off two of its missiles.  The missiles tumbled to the ground, unarmed and harmless, but the Hunter-Killer chopper was not defenseless.  With a roar matching the dragon’s, it fired - and missed.  The missile went streaking past Spike on a trail of white smoke.  I wondered why in Equestria it would fire a missile at point-blank range.  If it hit something, it would kill them both, and if it missed, it would just sail off into the sunset, unless...

I tracked the projectile’s trajectory, confirming my suspicions.  “SPIKE!  IT’S COMING BACK AROUND!  HEEEY!  SPIIIIIIKE!” I screamed at the top of my lungs.  Amazingly, I think he may have actually heard me - either that, or he came to the same conclusion I did.  I focused in on his winged form as his head pivoted towards the missile, and I swear to Celestia I saw a smile form on his scaly face.

He leaped from the chopper, and sailed straight towards the missile.  The contrail pivoted back and forth as it tracked him, and the chopper simply hovered, apparently as enthralled with the sight as we were.  Spike bent his body forward at the last possible millisecond, and the missile screamed past him, hardly having a millisecond to course-correct before it collided with the chopper. Both missile and chopper were consumed in a deafening explosion followed by a long series of smaller explosions that ended with the attack helicopter’s burning husk plummeting towards somewhere in Ponyville.

We had paddled our way to the bank of the river when the immaculate dragon landed to greet us.

“Did you guys see that!?” he said in a voice that was much higher-pitched than I’d expected from a dragon.

The pegasus spoke before I could.  “Yes we did!  That was a bloody brilliant maneuver, mate!”

The adolescent dragon positively beamed with pride as he looked at me, and I was still too stunned to really say anything.

“Oh, you must be that Gordon Freemane guy everypony’s been talking about.  Boy, is Twilight gonna be happy to see you!  And...”  he subconsciously grabbed his tail as his emerald green dragon eyes glazed over, “... and Alyx will be really happy too.”

As he walked with us to Sweet Apple Acres, Spike, as he had personally introduced himself, related to us the story of his greatest heroes:  The four dragons of the Royal Equestrian Dragon Corps who fought at the Battle of Canterlot.

“What you’ve got to understand,” he said as we passed through a mostly dead or dying apple orchard, “is that the Combine invasion lasted only seven minutes.  In seven minutes, Equestria’s entire military was defeated by a technologically and numerically superior foe – except at Canterlot.”

“Those four dragons – Daggoth the Elder, Raszagal the Prophetess, Malachi the Small, and the mighty Sheogorath, held the city against a relentless Combine assault for twenty-six days.  They fought until the Princesses were safely out of the city, and then they just kept on fighting.  About midway through the battle, the small one, Malachi, personally delivered a message to Twilight Sparkle that had been written by their leader, Daggoth.”

Spike turned to me, his green eyes blazing in the light from the setting sun, “All she could get out of him before he rushed back to the fight was that their leader had been mortally wounded, and that the battle was not going well.”

“Wait, where was Dr. Sparkle at this point?” I asked.  “Wasn’t this after the Seven Minute War?”

“Twilight was already here, digging out her new lab underneath Sweet Apple Acres, preparing for the counter-attack.  Black Mane West isn’t just a lab – it’s the biggest Resistance base that exists anywhere, and the Combine have no influence here, partly because we’re so close to Ponyville, and partly because of me,” he beamed.

“Oh yeah, I was going to ask you about th-”  I never finished my thought as we entered the huge, red barn through its massive, reinforced door.  It was hot and muggy, but it didn’t smell, for there were no animals there, and hadn’t been for ages.  Instead, stacks upon stacks of cardboard boxes, crates and weapons filled the stalls, and at the end of the barn, hanging above the heavily guarded bunker entrance set into the floor, and lit by a huge electric lantern that bathed the whole room in golden light, was the single largest piece of parchment I had ever seen in my entire life.

Spike looked up in reverent awe at something he obviously never, ever tired of seeing.

“This,” he said, “is the letter that the dragon Malachi delivered to Twilight.”

It stretched nearly from the floor to the ceiling of the two story high barn, and the rafters that lined either side had to be cut to make room for the massive piece of worn parchment.

It read as follows:

“As our enemies circle like vultures and your once beautiful city burns, worry not, my little ponies;  your Princesses are in another castle.

As for us, anything other than absolute victory or utter defeat seems intolerable:  There will be no more compromises.  And contented though we are with our sojourn into darkness, this is my final promise to the ponies of Equestria:

We will climb to Heaven on a stairway of the bodies of your enemies.”

Achievement Unlocked!  Press Shift + Tab to view.

Late, As Usual - Reach Black Mane West.

C H λ P T E R  F O U R :

WHY WE FIGHT

The trio of dragons sat clustered in the rear of what was once the magma chamber of an eons-dead volcano, two of them chattering away like school-fillies to the exclusion of the third, when the leader of the group finally flew in, his ancient scales blending in perfectly with the black of that night and bearing a reflective sheen from the rain.  A cold, damp breeze blew in through the entrance, which had been hewn over the millennia by a river that would occasionally form when rainwater flooded the chamber from the volcanic vents in the ceiling.  After one unexpectedly wet meeting, those vents had been plugged permanently.

"Elder Daggoth, what significance does this council hold that it was called with such minimal travel time?" inquired the ruby-red one in his exceptionally deep voice.  The elder dragon took his rightful place at the highest point in the cavern and breathed on the faltering fire-pit, which jumped like a dog trying to lick its master’s face.

The smaller crimson one shifted uneasily as he sat, his leathery wings visibly twitching with anxiety.

"And, bearing no intention of intrusion, may I add that I myself was Manticore-hunting outside Griffon City when I received your message that I was needed in-country - with not so much as an explanation,” he said in his higher, somewhat raspy voice.  “Perish that you should perceive this as a complaint, but I should hope that this council would begin without further delay, lest my curiosity be my demise.”

Daggoth spoke softly, slowly, and with authority, yet his voice was tinged with a certain light-heartedness as when one speaks with a smile.

“Your curiosity, Malachi, will be the doom of us all before it at last takes you.”

The moment the first word left his enormous maw the other three dragons were absolutely silent, not only out of reverence for the Elder, but also because it was rather difficult to understand him, especially over the ceaseless rumbling of that dark night’s torrential downpour reverberating throughout the hollow mountain, only interrupted by an occasional terrific clap of thunder.

"Sister Raszagal has received a vision." Daggoth gestured with his massive talons towards the ocean-blue female to his right, permitting her to speak.

Raszagal raised her head and focused on the stalactites on the ceiling, searching for the words to describe what she had seen.

"Three weeks past, on the eve of the Summer Solstice, I was startled from my nightly slumber by the most vivid and disturbing vision of things to pass that the Stars have ever revealed to me - "

Sheogorath began to interrupt in a mocking tone, "Consulting th-"

"SILENCE!" roared Daggoth.  And there was.  Without question, there was.

In a warm and pleasant voice, as if nothing whatsoever had happened, he said to the female,

“Continue.”

She drew a breath of air that was relentlessly cold and damp despite the towering flame of the burning fire pit, and focused intensely at the empty space between Malachi and Sheogorath.  Daggoth was entranced by the image of flames dancing across her violet pupils, deep and unfathomable, like the infinite void that lies between stars.

She began her prophesy:

"The barriers separating the worlds will be broken, and abominations unto nature will cascade from the breach.  The Princesses will fall.  The rivers and lakes will run dry, and the animals and plants will become dead husks filled with poison.  Equestria, land of our fathers and our forefathers, will be ruled by beings with empty hearts and black souls, creatures of thought unburdened by empathy.  Every living thing that stands against them shall fall, and their bodies will serve as fuel and ammunition for their war machine.  The birds of the air and the fish of the sea, the squirrels in the trees and the adorable little bunny rabbits, none of these will survive in this new world, but the ponies will be kept alive.  Those who are not enslaved will die, and those who are enslaved will envy the dead.”

The other dragons sat in stunned silence, unsure of what to say, and Raszagal simply closed her eyes as a single tear rolled down her scaly cheek, splashing to the ground 50 meters below.

Sheogorath asked no one in particular,  “Is this true?”

Daggoth looked at him with a kind of resignation in his eyes.  “When has she ever been wrong?”

There was a long period of silence as the four ancient dragons digested this new information and all its ramifications.  Malachi scraped together a little pile of boulders into a tetrahedral arrangement, and flicked them away, one by one, lost in thought.  Sheogorath simply stared straight forward, his steely face giving away no hint of emotion.

Elder Daggoth broke the silence at last.  “I have rendered my judgment:  We shall break with the Communion and fight for Equestria against this new threat.”

The other dragons were pulled out of their disparate worlds of thought and turned to him, their leader, the unshakeable veteran of three wars in the past 4,000 years, the dragon who had led them through the Twilight War against Nightmare Moon, and before her, the revolution against the chaos-god Discord.  There were times, however rare, when separating from the Dragon Communion and fighting alongside that insufferable alicorn Celestia and her little sister was, in his opinion, the only moral option.

The apartment-building-sized red dragon spoke. “That is quite a resolution, Elder Daggoth.  If what Sister Raszagal says is true, are you prepared to follow it to your grave?”

Daggoth let out a thunderous belly-laugh that could be heard 15 kilometers away and felt at half that distance.

“My grave is already dug, the headstone set in place.”  He looked the younger dragon in the eyes.  “I do not fear my grave, Sheogorath, and if you are to continue associating with this particular circle of friends, I suggest you do the same.”

Malachi spoke up.  “Indeed, the intended purpose of this Association was never the extension of life spans but rather the shortening of certain... others.”

Sheogorath responded glumly, “Of this, I am well aware.”

Malachi turned to Raszagal, shock transforming into burning curiosity.  “Tell me Sister, was there any more to the prophesy?”

She responded, “Yes.  ‘Twas neither a voice nor a message nor a vision, but simply... a revelation.”

“Well, do not delay! Tell us!  Please!”  If Malachi’s ears were capable of doing so, they doubtlessly would have perked up.

Raszagal glared at him in annoyance at the interruption, but nonetheless continued, her gaze on the torrent of rainwater cascading past the water-bored mouth of the cavern.

“We were not the first, nor shall we be the last.”  And with that, Raszagal would never prophesize anything ever again.

------------------------------λ------------------------------

“OI! STOP ROIGHT THERE!” called out the sentry-ponies in a voice that somewhat resembled that weird New Yoke/ Manehattan accent I’d heard from other Resistance members.

I froze, and glanced at Spike, who seemed just as confused as I was.

The two earth-pony stallions guarding the heavily fortified entrance to Black Mane West trotted over to us, sporting dual pairs of positively frightening-looking weapons secured to their combat saddles, their business ends directed towards us.  The dark grey one actually had his mouth on the bit-like firing mechanism, ready to bite down at a funny glance or a twitch in the wrong direction.

These are our guys? I thought, and opened my inventory, looking for my SMG.

Spike, meanwhile, had begun to converse with them in a tone that sounded of coolness concealing annoyance.

“Heeeeyyy, Dreyfus, Drew!  How’s it goin’, you two?  This-” he rudely stuck a claw in my face, disrupting my inventory management, “is Doctor Free-”

“We know who he is, ‘Spike’!  Or should I say COMBINE HOLOGRAM!?” accused the brown-coated one that did not have his mouth on the trigger of a gun.

Spike blinked, confused.

“If you’re really Spike, then whas’ my name, huh?”  he demanded.

Spike began, “Uh, I just said bot-”

“SHUT IT!” yelled the brown one, presenting me with the astounding sight of a pony yelling at a dragon.

“I know a Combine trick when I sees one, tryin’ to get into our super secret hideout!  Well, you just report back to your alien overlords that this here establishment is nothing more than a veterinary clinic!”

“The finest veterinary clinic in all of Equestria!” chimed in the dark-grey one.

“Despite our remote location, and affordable co-pays!”  added the other.

“- And rather unfortunate prox-im-e-tay to a certain zombie-infested hell town!”

“- The likes of which produces a veritable tidal wave of sick and injured animals for us to uh... uhm...”  He paused, searching for the right word.

“Drew, what’s another word for ‘nurse back to health’?”  He asked the dark-grey stallion next to him.

“Hmm... I think the proper word would be ‘nurse back to health’, Drey.”

“That’s not a word!  That’s...” he paused, “that’s four words!”

Spike face-palmed.  “If you two idiots are done...”

“Oi!”  the chocolate-brown pony named ‘Dreyfus’ snapped at the fire-breathing dragon that could probably snap him in two without even trying.  “We did not roightly say any such thing!”

“Drey, it’s pro-nunciated ‘rightly’ not ‘roightly’,”  said his companion in a matter-of-fact tone.

“It’s called an accent you uneducated twit!”  Dreyfus shot back.

I was so transfixed by these two curious ponies’ banter that I didn’t notice the pinkish-white earth-pony clad in a lab-coat trot up behind them.

“What the hay are you two doing?  Why haven’t you let Dr. Freemane in yet?”  She demanded of the sentry-ponies.

“Roight,” responded Dreyfus.

“Right!”  hissed Drew.

“Accent!”  Dreyfus shot back.

“WILL YOU LET THEM IN ALREADY!?”  The pinkish-white pony yelled, and they did, and I was.

------------------------------λ------------------------------

Cherry Blossom, the mare in the white lab coat with a cutie mark of – you guessed it – cherry blossoms led the way as we descended the concrete ramp recessed into the floor of what I’m told used to be the barn of the famous Sweet Apple Acres.  A scratched, dented and abused steel door set into the overhang formed by the pit split horizontally across the middle to reveal a large, aging cargo elevator that had the looks of an abused piece of essential equipment that everypony expected to just work, but maintained as little as equinely possible.  There were skid tracks, boot prints, tread marks, and some lacerations that I couldn’t identify carved into what surely was once rubber safety padding, but which now more resembled a preschooler’s still-life art project made possible by a fit of rage, a box of black crayons, and a pair of scissors.

The elevator doors crankily slid their way shut, and the elevator grumbled to life.  As I watched the wall move upwards, I noticed to my shock that there was absolutely no barrier of any kind between the occupants of the elevator and the concrete wall.  When I expressed my concern about this probable safety hazard, Cherry Blossom replied;

“Oh, that old grate fell off a long time ago, Freemane.”

I suddenly looked upon the elevator with new apprehension, as flashbacks of another resistance-operated transport strung between two Manehattan high-rises played in my mind, and I successfully dismissed them - with some difficulty, I might add.  The elevator passed by several floors, each one a surprisingly well-lit concrete hallway curving into the distance to form a giant ring, reminding me of the halls of a particle accelerator.  We passed an impressively-equipped kitchen where those curious space-suit clad aliens were chopping and mixing various fruits and foodstuffs into what looked to be a delicious meal.  As our descent continued, I saw communal living quarters, storage rooms, ammunition dumps, and even a full-fledged gym, if you can believe it, where several ponies were engaged in a heated tennis match.

When the elevator passed a floor filled with stacks upon stacks of black boxes connected by a tangled rat’s nest of hundreds of wires snaking around to an unseen part of the base, I asked Ms. Blossom to explain.

“That’s the floor where the nuclear batteries are stored and maintained.  Those black boxes you saw are the regular chemical batteries that they keep charged, which in turn power our various electronics.”

“Aren’t you concerned about the radiation from such a power source?”  I asked, picturing some horrifically inadequate combination of aluminum foil and tin cans the Resistance had cobbled together to contain such highly radioactive elements.

“Oh, goodness, no, they’re encased in reactor shielding we recovered from Black Mane itself.”

I did a double-take.  “From where!?”

“The Black Mane Research Facility, I said,”  she responded as if there was a problem with my hearing.  There wasn’t a problem with my hearing, was there?  Oh, dear, I have been firing an awful lot of weapons with no hearing protection, and then there was that time a grenade went off in my face...

Focus!  “I thought Black Mane was completely destroyed!”

She answered, “The dragon Malachi did completely destroy the entire facility - except for the Lambda Complex.  It is separated from the rest of Black Mane, and concealed by the most powerful arcane enchantments and high-technologies known to ponydom.  That dragon couldn’t have found Lambda if he tried.”

I was stunned.  I remembered the Lambda Complex.  I remembered reuniting with the scientists that had holed themselves up there.  They decided to send me through a massive teleporter as big a football field to travel to the higher dimension of Xen with a probably-suicidal mission:  Find the seemingly omnipotent being holding open the breach between our worlds, and kill it, if possible.

I remember... jubilation!  Jubilation unlike anything I had ever felt before when, in defiance of all mathematical probability, I, a scientist whose sum total previous experience of warfare consisted of shooting pellet guns at Colt Scout camp, somehow defeated the creature that the Cerberuses (Cerberi?) called ‘The New Nihilanth’.  Then... blackness, and... the G-pony.  Whispering something in my ear.  And then... well, then I woke up about eight years later on a train headed toward what used to be Manehattan in a world ruled with a synthetic, bio-mechanical fist by aliens from another dimension.

I wondered – If the Lambda Complex survives still, whatever became of the teleporter that was its heart?  I wonder if it still works...

“... which is why we can’t use the same spells here.  Twi has the power, but she simply doesn’t have the arcane knowledge that died with all those scientists.  *sigh*  We lost so many good ponies there, which is why I’m so glad you’re here, Doctor Freemane.  MIT graduates are few and far between these days.”  She gave me a creepy smile that I half-heartedly returned, and continued talking as the elevator continued its painfully slow descent.

“Anyway, our instruments have been picking up a very weak SOS signal originating in the Lambda Core for years now, obviously indicating the emergency backup systems are still working, and the Combine either haven’t noticed or don’t care.  And quite frankly, I hope it stays that way,” she said with a horribly forced laugh.

The uncreatively-named Cherry Blossom rambled on and on about something related to how great things were going to be now that I was here, and how she wished she could have worked at Black Mane, and various other things, I don’t know, I was far too tired to remember or care.  I just wished the talkative mare would shut up and take me to my room already, so I could plop down on my bed and forget about the world.  Mentioning the Lambda Complex had dug up bad memories that I would rather forget, and a long, peaceful sleep would be of great help in that regard.

The elevator finally shuddered to a halt at floor three of seven, and I was led down one of those long, curved hallways, lined with evenly spaced, heavy steel doors and caged, shatter-proof lightbulbs, past the unisex restroom, and on to my private quarters at the very, very end: Room 342.

Cherry Blossom bid me an over-produced farewell, and left me alone – at last - in my very small, bare concrete room with a single vent and a single bulb that was too bright to look directly at, but not quite bright enough to provide satisfactory illumination.  Not that I’m complaining, as I’m told that very, very few ponies get their own rooms at Black Mane West.  There was a small desk, a homemade dresser constructed piecemeal from recycled particleboard, and a fat red pipe spanning from wall to wall near the ceiling.  As I collapsed onto the mattress of my bare-bones bed, the rusty springs groaned in protest at the sudden load, and the thing sat so low to the ground that I actually rebounded off the concrete floor before settling.  Too tired to shower at the head or to try to recreate the steps Barney had shown me to take off my suit, I simply closed my eyes and let sleep take me, but not before whispering one of my cheesy prayers to my favorite Goddess.

Thank you for this cold, uncomfortable bed, Luna.  And also for helping me survive a dozen-odd near-death-experiences today.  But all I can think about right now is this forsaken bed.

“Go to sleep, Gordon.” I imagined Her saying with a smile.  And I did.

------------------------------λ------------------------------

So, the problem with waking up in the morning - at least if you’re male, I don’t really know about females - is that you’re usually pretty horny.  And the problem with being horny, single, and a follower of Luna and Celestia, is that you have no real way of relieving those urges, because followers of the Princesses are not supposed to cuddle themselves.  Well, not supposed to, but I sometimes found myself doing just that anyway.  But, in my defense, this usually happens when I am only half-conscious, so it’s not an expressly willed action, and therefore, not a sin.  I’m pretty sure.  I think.  I hope.  Oh, Luna, please forgive me!

So, suffice to say, I was pretty frustrated that morning.  My body ached from the various contusions and burns from getting shot through with anti-personnel plasma bolts, I was extremely hungry, having not eaten anything since I left City 7, and I really, really had to pee, but worse than all of those things, I was sexually aroused, and there were no females to cuddle with!

“Surely science can come up with a solution to this most common of equine problems!”  I thought out loud.

“What kinds of problems?”  asked Alyx.

HURGH.

Did NOT hear her come in.

“Nothing!  No kinds of problems! Ha! Ha ha!”  I lied.  And certainly not anything to do with unfulfilled sexual desires! I screamed inside of my head while wearing a forced grin.

“Riiight, so, I was wondering if maybe you wanted to go get some lunch?”  Alyx asked with a cute little smile that did NOT help to calm me down.

“Lunch?  What -” I fumbled around for a clock in a groggy haze.

Alyx facehoofed.  “Gordon, it’s two o’clock.  In the afternoon.”

“Ah.  Well, good morning!”  I said with a grin in one of my pathetic attempts at humor.  Anything to see her smile again, I thought.  Suddenly, I became very aware of Alyx’s distinctly... feminine curves... and shapely, well-toned... DIRTY THOUGHTS HNGHRR.

My nostrils involuntary flared at the presence of the healthy, fertile female.  Oh my goddesses I can even smell her.  Oh Luna, she smells soooooo good... concentrate you bucking idiot!  Don’t let the hormones and/or pheromones win!  Wait, pheromones?  Oh, goddesses, Alyx isn’t in... you-know-what is she?  AHHHH! Shut up!  No one cares!  Just ignore the hormone/pheromone whatevers!  I mentally chastised myself.

Because then you won’t get laid!  Added the part of my brain devoted to cuddling.

Shut up!  I rebuked myself.

“Roight, let’s go get some lunch/breakfast/dinner,”  I said in an I-don’t-know-where-that-accent-is-from accent, and hopped out of my stiff, uncomfortable bed, stretching my overstrained ligaments that rewarded the healthy morning exercise by sending a jolt of pain up my spine from any muscle group I attempted to use in such a fashion.

“Gordon?”  Alyx asked as we stepped out into the hallway.  “Did you just say ‘roight’?”

“Yes, yes I did.”  I replied.

“That’s awesome,”  she chuckled.  I couldn’t tell if she was being nice or sarcastic, but whatever, I’m hungry, let’s go eat pleaseandthankyou.  We trotted down the long, curved hallway, and I made a special effort to walk beside Alyx instead of behind her.

“So, Gordon, how are you liking BMW so far?” She asked.

“It’s... nice.”  I said.

And then there was that long period of awkward silence that happens whenever the initiator of a conversation fails to pick a sufficiently engaging topic that would not end after two syllables’ response from the addressee.  This effect is especially pronounced when both parties to the conversation are already socially awkward to begin with.

As we neared the unisex bathroom, I remembered that I had to use it.  Alyx waiting, I made a motion to duck inside when the door flew open, and I was hit in the face with both it and a warm rush of steam in an odd combination of blunt-force trauma and a pleasantly refreshing facial cleansing.  The action elicited one of my inadequate attempts at profanity, and I looked up to see a light-blue mare with a towel wrapped around her head, halfway through an apology.  Judging by the beads of moisture running down her... nicely curved body... and round, taut rump... and her soft, wet, sweet-smelling mane matted to her - celestiadamnit this isn’t helping! - I concluded that she had just stepped out of the shower.  I was just about to say something, but as soon as she realized who it was she had just mistakenly assaulted, she did a double-take, looked to her left and saw Alyx, did another double-take, and then galloped as fast as she could back to her room, slamming the door shut behind her.

While in the bathroom, I could hear Alyx outside, knocking on the blue mare’s door, trying in vain to assure her that she was not in trouble.  After I was done, I came back out and rejoined my trot with Alyx.

Taking the initiative, I said,  “So, Alyx, you’re pretty famous around here, huh?”

She blushed, embarrassed.  “You could say that.  Everypony knows that I’m Twilight’s daughter, and I’ve been here longer than anypony besides her.”

“I see,”  I responded.  “You weren’t dropped here, were you?”

She laughed.  “No, I was dropped at... well, I was dropped right outside a normal hospital so, like any other foal, the doctors could get a look at me as soon as the bird took off.”

Ah, of course;  it was a routine procedure to have foals delivered to their waiting parents at hospitals nowadays.  Numerous peer-reviewed scientific studies have shown that having a licensed medical technician on scene at the delivery of a new foal can dramatically reduce the risk of injury or death from infantile pneumonia, altitude sickness, and even rare allergic reactions to the avian delivery system, among other things.

“And where was this?”  I asked out of curiosity.

“... I don’t really want to talk about it, Gordon.  Maybe some other time,”  she said with eyes pleading for me to go no further, lest I re-open an old wound that’s barely had time to scab over.

I nodded in understanding.  I made a mental note to ask her at another time, for now I was extremely curious as to why she was so reluctant to reveal the place of her birth.

But for now, yonder beeth the end of these wretched castle-halls!  And hark! The elevator approacheth!  I thought to myself in my 100% absolutely flawless imitation of Old Equestrian lexicon.  For some reason.

After waiting an extraordinary though not entirely unexpected length of time for the way, way, way overused and under-maintained elevator to finally reach our level, we hopped on and Alyx hoofed the button with the nearly scratched-off ‘5’ on it.

“I forgot to tell you,” she began, “there is no lunch at this hour, so we’re going to have to go to the kitchen and have the Cerbs make something specifically for us.”

“’Cerbs’?  Is that what you call the Cerberuses?”  Cerberi?  “And also, they won’t mind?”

“First question – yes, second question – no,”  she responded.

“Okey dokie lokie.”  And now I’ve switched to Pie-ish.  Why?

Like with most good things, I smelled it before I saw it.  Ah, the kitchen.  Not just any kitchen, no, sir or madam, as it may or may not be proper to address whatever poor, confused soul is unfortunately reading this, not any plain old ordinary run-of-the-kitchen-mill kitchen, but a kitchen staffed by celestiadamned aliens!

The Cerbs, as most Resistance members apparently called them, were... actually I don’t know anything at all about them, other than that they have four legs and a tail, and, judging by their full-body suits, they can’t breathe our 95% nitrogen atmosphere.  Either that or they’re germaphobes.  This calls for scientific research!  And who better to help me with research on Cerberuses (Cerberi?), than a Cerberus!

First step of the scientific process:  State the problem.

Problem:  What in under-hell is a Cerberus?

Alyx stepped off the elevator even before it came to a total halt, and I followed her past the retractable metal gate (noting that there was only one set because the elevator’s had ‘fallen off’, as Cherry Blossom had so eloquently put it) and stepped onto the sanitary, black-and-white checker-boarded floor of BMW’s kitchen.  Hard at work, chopping away at piles of vegetables with their small, gloved hands, were at least half a dozen Cerbs.  They all looked up from their preparation tables when we stepped off the elevator.

“Ah!  It is the lovely and talented Alyx Sparkle!  And who else should be in her company but the Gordon Freemane himself!”  announced the Cerb at the sandwich table in that raspy, muffled voice typical of their kind, and the others sounded similar approval at our unexpected visit.

All eyes, including Alyx’s (yes!), were on me as I confidently strolled up to one of the spacesuit-clad gentle-aliens and ordered a lettuce, tomato, and clover leaf sandwich on a poppy-seed bun.

“Whatever the Freemane requires for his gastronomical fulfillment,”  the alien replied with an eye-brow raising choice of words.  He set about fetching the various items required for the assembly of the sandwich as Alyx busied herself in the far corner at the salad table.  I trotted to the side of the Cerb cook and began my advancement of equine knowledge using the second step of the scientific process: research.  I casually leaned a foreleg against the table like a biped, and focused on the creature with an intensity I only get when I’m doing science or trying to kill something, which, now that I think about it, I have never done simultaneously.  Except for maybe that one time...

“Pardon me, sir,”  I said in as non-threatening a voice as I could muster, “But... what, exactly are you?”

He paused only for a moment, and his blackened visor remained fixated on the sandwich he was presently layering with toppings as he began to answer.

“You already asked us this question; Your kind do not understand the communion we are.  Go and learn the meaning of the word ‘coterminous’ and you will know that there is no distance between us.  No false veils of time or space may intervene.  You would call me a Cerberus.  We call ourselves Yllgalug.  The ones you say are ‘Combine’ mockingly called us dogs, and we once called them Master with equal sincerity.  One can suppose that they are a combination, a grey slurry of indifference and greed, cold calculation feeding an overpowering instinct to consume.  They use their gift of personhood to enslave other persons, their knowledge to spread ignorance, and their wealth and power to enforce poverty and subjection.  Such people are referred to sardonically by my kind as vpyn, a word that is considered so vile it is sometimes censored even when communicating by auditory speech.  Their genius lies in that they have spread so far, so quickly, so relentlessly, beyond even the scope of their predecessors whom our brothers, themselves refugees from some far-distant conflict, called Shu'ulathoi, until they, too, were betrayed by those beside whom they fought and killed and died.  There is a saying amongst my people;  ‘A good story deserves to be retold again and again’.  How is it that history repeats itself so exactly in realms as infinitely disparate as the third and the seventh dimensions?  It is a mystery no deeper than the void itself.”

He picked up my sandwich with hands that didn’t look like they were really meant for grasping things, and handed it to me, awkwardly balancing on his hind legs to do so.  My stomach grumbled as I levitated my breakfast/lunch/dinner to my watering mouth, but the food part of my brain just couldn’t enjoy the sandwich while the science part of my brain (which is everything besides the food and cuddling parts) was left entirely unsatisfied with the Cerb’s response.

“You didn’t answer my question,”  I pointed out with maybe just a little smug satisfaction that evasive answers don’t make it far past Gordon Freemane.  I went to college.

He gave a weary sigh, and looked up at my face, which was a mask of determination.  I felt like that unseen force, that puppet-master manipulating things behind the scenes, was getting frustrated at my persistence, trying to push me away from this creature.  Well, G-pony, I might be deviating from your script a little bit, but the scientifically-minded are not so easily dissuaded!  The Cerb accepted that I wasn’t leaving without an answer.  He rested his forelegs on the stainless-steel table, his enwrapped tail involuntarily jerking this way and that as he shifted position, and his visor-covered face turned to the far corner, where Alyx was levitating forkfuls of fresh greens to her small, feminine muzzle, herself caught up in conversation with the Cerb there.

“What are we?  What are you?  Ponies, miniature horses that can talk and feel and reason as if they were people.  We ask ourselves; How is this possible?  How can there be such a thing as magic, that unicorns freely manipulate and pegasi coax into allowing such an absurd thing to exist as a flying horse?  How is it possible that there is a natural system where cloud-walking scaled-down quadrupeds dictate the movements of weather systems?  Your method of reproduction, especially, has never, to our vast and ancient knowledge, been recreated by any known species across the cosmos, and is itself the very definition of illogic!  You expect us to believe that your DNA is magically transported to a plain in the sky where infants are grown, and the resultant foal is then delivered to its parents by a predatory bird which somehow evolved the instinct to transport other species’ offspring to the exact coordinates of their parents at extraneous personal cost to themselves for seemingly no benefit whatsoever?  Tell me, Freemane Doctor, are we so strange by comparison?  Is our world so alien?  Our ways so incredulous?  There is a far deeper mystery here than ‘what are we’, a problem of philosophy, of existence.  If indeed the universe was created to the specifications of an intelligent being, what purposes did this God have in making your world this way, and not ours?  What would be done in one place and not in another, and to what end, if an end exists?  ‘The magical land of Equestria’, you call it.  To us, it is nothing more than a fairy tale;  A story told to young children.  It cannot be real.  And yet here it is.”

I was stunned.  He was right.  I had started in the wrong place.  Before asking him what he is, I should first ask myself what I am, and return when I believe I have an answer more compelling than his.  As I thought about this, I felt as if the unseen force relaxed, letting its attentions drift back to whatever cosmically important task had occupied it previously.  I let out a sigh as its dark, secretive presence seemed to slink back into the shadows from whence it came.

The Cerberus chef raised his head to look me in the face, his tone changing from slightly indignant to somber and poetic.

“You, Freemane.  You were there when our worlds collided.  You are the breach from whence we came.  You are the tie that binds the fate of our worlds.  Even now, we see you still in Black Mane, clearly we see you in the test chamber.  We look upon your bright face from that piece of our tormentor which was stolen from Him.  We see you in the Lambda Complex as you bridge the fold between the Seventh and the Fifth.  We watch in joyous disbelief  as you, alone, breach castle walls that had repelled sieges by armadas of warships.  Though we grieve for our kind laid scattered at your hooves, compelled by the New Nihilanth to defend His fraudulent claim to life and existence, to us, their deaths are bittersweet.  We cannot forgive you for those whose cords you cut;  Forgiveness is not ours to bestow.  Simultaneously, you cause us to weep and to dance as you bring us pain and jubilation beyond measure.  Hope, a curious thing that we had long since forgotten, spreads through our people like wildfire as the Freemane accomplishes what ten thousand million had tried and failed to do, from war to war, kingdom to kingdom, empire to empire, across unknowable eons, for causes far more noble, against tyrants far more guilty, and a few even more wicked, than Nihilanth.  Of all these, only the Freemane succeeds.  The why and the how are not for us to know, though we suspect these too shall be revealed before the end.”

“We see you in that ancient chamber, we watch, breathless, as you stand in defiance before its latest occupant, the false puppet-master whom They resurrected to control us, a prison warden brought back from the dead to clap on our shackles scarcely a moment after we realized we had wrists to hold them.  Ye leap, ye fall, we see you flash beyond the barriers.  For a brief time, you joined us in communion with the Cerberessence, and we revealed how to slay the Beast, knowledge passed down from generation to generation from our brothers in spirit, the Vortigaunts.  We bear witness to the new life that is the abomination’s death.  Your song is the song we shall sing for all eternity, for once the lesser master lay defeated, we knew the greater must also fall in time.  We call you Abraham, not after the figure in our Master’s sacred texts, but after the leader of one of their greatest tribes, for he too set captives free.  But unlike him, your actions will decide not the fate of nations, but of worlds.”

I took the last bite of my sandwich, which was absolutely delicious, by the way, and thanked the strange little alien for everything he’d done, and everything he’d given me to ponder.  Alyx was already on the elevator, impatiently waiting for me.  As I trotted towards her, I thought I saw the image of a stallion wearing a suit and tie give me a very strange look from the monochrome screen of a dusty little crumb-covered television crammed onto a shelf amidst bags of spices.  The apparition disappeared as the image popped and reverted back to static snow.

I hesitated for just a moment, and the impatient Alyx leaned forward and bit down on the collar of my HEV suit, dragging me into the elevator with surprising force.  She hoofed the button marked ‘1’ and we had already begun our descent when the all-knowing Cerb ran up to the edge.

“Freemane!”  He called out, struggling to be heard over the sound of the overworked gearboxes and pulleys lowering us.  “Do you know what we call the Combine?”  he asked, leaning against the retractable metal gate to the elevator shaft.

“No, I don’t believe you ever told me that,”  I shouted back as the kitchen rapidly disappeared above us.

I guess I’ll never know for sure, but I’ll swear before the Princess’ Royal Court, the Princesses themselves, and all their pegasus and unicorn guards, he said something that sounded like “MAAN.”

------------------------------λ------------------------------

The elevator ground to a halt at the bottom floor of Black Mane West, and we stepped out into a brightly lit, tiled hallway, packed on either side with sensitive equipment necessary for the purposes of science; banks of computers, various kinds and varieties of electronic sensors, metal crates, wooden crates, plastic crates, and filing cabinets no doubt filled with scientific documents from that dark era before the dawn of the Equestrian digital age.  But even with all that clutter, the space was still more than wide enough to comfortably accommodate four or five ponies side by side.

“So, all this crap is mostly spill-over from the lab, which my mom constantly complains isn’t big enough,” Alyx explained.

“Some of this stuff looks too big to fit on that elevator,”  I gestured back towards the cargo elevator, which was certainly big enough to move a decent amount of freight, but some of these machines were the size of a Coltswagen carriage.  “Is there some other entrance?”

“Yeah, there’s a service elevator on the other side of the lab that goes all the way up to the surface, which we hid from aerial surveillance by moving an old pigpen on top of it,” she answered as she picked up her pace to pass by the large, dark tunnel to our left, blocked off by a massive metal garage-door, and partially hidden behind haphazardly-stacked piles of science junk and decorated with a pair of ‘DO NOT ENTER’ signs.

“I see.  And what’s this tunnel back here?”  I innocently asked.

“That’s... that’s the old tunnel to... ponyville...”  she answered in a near-whisper, her tone suddenly changing from cheerful to grim.

“It’s the tunnel to what?”

“uhm... ponyville...”  she whispered.

“Sorry, didn’t quite catch that - ”

“PONYVILLE! It’s the tunnel to Ponyville!” she yelled in frustration, her voice cracking a little bit.

“Ah, Ponyville,”  I answered in my typical haze of social-retardation.  “I used to go there to visit my brother, John, whenever I got a weekend off.”

I stopped, and frowned at the ceiling, trying to remember, as if the ventilation ducts and electrical wiring would coax the memories from my amygdale.  “As I recall, he worked in an office, some kind of clerical position.  In fact, I recall sending him an email from my phone just after the... ‘Black Mane Incident’, but he never replied.  Huh.  I wonder whatever happened to him.”

I looked back down to the sight of Alyx fighting back tears, her teeth clenched, and her eyes shut tightly.

“Whoah.  I’m sorry!  Did you know him?”

“NO!”  She screamed at me.

So similar was her response to a chemical detonation, I almost felt compelled to check and see if my glasses were still on.  They were.

She apologized.  “I’m sorry.  I’m sorry, Gordon.  You didn’t know.”

I didn’t know?  Suddenly, I remembered passing by Ponyville on the river, wondering why it was surrounded by a four-and-a-half meter high chain-link barbed-wire fence, with bright red ‘BIOHAZARD’ signs posted at regular intervals along the perimeter.

Alyx had collapsed to the ground, still struggling to hold back tears, and I joined her, putting a hoof on her shoulder in concern.

I looked over at the huge, darkened entrance to Ponyville, the source of her misery, and I felt angry.  I was angry at the inanimate object that had caused Alyx to cry.  But still, curiosity welled up from somewhere deep inside me, an unquenchable desire to know that had driven me my entire life.

It was that same desire that had led me to pursue my degree in Theoretical Physics, and attracted me to my job at the Black Mane Research Facility.  That boundless curiosity had driven me to put that crystal from another dimension into the extraction beam of an anti-mass spectrometer, precisely because I didn’t know what would happen the moment I did so.  Somehow, I just knew that I had to know.  The alternative was simply unacceptable.

“Alyx?”  I asked as gently as I possibly could.  “What happened in Ponyville?”

“Do you really want to know?”  She asked, her voice weak.

“Yes.  I must.”

“Okay, Gordon,”  she sighed heavily.  “Listen up, because I’m only telling this once.”

She took a deep breath, and speaking slowly, clearly, her voice quavering only at first, Alyx Sparkle began to tell the story of the day Ponyville died.

------------------------------λ------------------------------

It was a bright cold day in Neighvember and the clocks were striking three.  I parted the black curtains which concealed the view of my tiny tree-house bedroom to scanners and the occasional pervert, and looked out upon Ponyville, a town that had come to be known as the heart of the insurgency.  It was a reputation the local members of the Resistance had bloodied their hooves many times over to earn, making Ponyville a place where seemingly every other day, the decapitated bodies of metrocops and even Overwatch soldiers would turn up in the mornings, dumped on the streets by rebels, oftentimes accompanied by threatening notes warning against collaboration with what Dr. Breen termed ‘The Universal Union’, but what everypony whose head was not firmly lodged in their hindquarters knew as the Combine.

There were no ‘Breenscreens’ in Ponyville, except for inside the town hall itself.  The Combine had tried to hang them up on every post and street corner like they did in all the other cities, of course.  But, come every morning, they would find the things sabotaged;  their power cut, their screens broken, and sometimes even showing pro-Resistance propaganda or pre-war children’s cartoons instead of the traitorous Breen’s ugly mug. Some would like to refer to him as The traitor, as if it was some sort of honorific title, but my father had warned me long ago against doing the same.  Walrus Octavian Breen was a pony, nothing more, and giving him any title other than his name turned him into a myth, a legend, and in doing so gave him power that extended beyond his repulsive ‘Breencasts’.

My face contorted into a grimace whenever I thought of Breen’s pretentious virtual fireside chats, which he created to fill the weary ears of the population he’d pretty much sold to aliens from another dimension with his own particular brand of bullshit – long-winded rants that he spewed with such enthusiasm and candor one might be deceived into thinking he genuinely believed every word.  My father taught me not to hate the poor souls who, in their piteous state of suffering, bought into the blue pony’s lies.  Not even the ones who went a step further and signed up with the Metropolitan Police or Overwatch.  We were to kill them, not hate them or judge them.  Just kill them.

But none of that was any of my concern that day.  The only thing on my mind was the fact that there was going to be another full moon that night, coinciding with a sky that was to stay perfectly clear – an event that I cannot remember happening twice in a row since the Seven Minute’s War ended pegasus regulation of the weather.  My mother, ever the amateur astronomer, and Pinkie Pie’s left knee – the Resistance’s meteorologist - had confirmed it, and Celestia damn me to pony hell if I was going to miss out on another chance to talk to Luna.

“Mom!  Moooooooom!”  I called out, my voice reverberating throughout the massive, hollowed-out tree trunk that was the only home I had ever known.

My dad answered, “Your mother is at work, Alyx.”

“She’s been ‘at work’ all week!  Is she ever coming home!?”  I looked down from the balcony at our cluttered living room, trying to spot the mustard-colored stallion to  whom I owe my existence amongst the stacks of books, newspapers, magazines, and, in a streak of modernity, a pair of paradoxically ancient-looking computers.

“She’s very, very busy, sweetie.  You know that.  What do you need her for?”  the earth-pony answered without looking up from his copy of The New Yoke Times, which he infinitely preferred over The Ponyville Gazette, even though its widely-read articles were more heavily scrutinized by the Ministry of Truth.

“I was going to ask her if I could go outside tonight,”  I huffed.

“You just went outside last night!  What are you doing out there that is so important?”  My father gasped in false realization.  “Have you met a colt?”  he asked with a grin.

“Oh, no, you are not changing the subject to colts again.  I  just want to go outside, that’s it.”

“And you were going to ask your mother because you knew that I would say no?”

“Yes, I was,”  I stated truthfully.

Dad sighed at my self-defeating honesty.  “Alyx, honey, there is a reason we don’t want you wandering the streets constantly, even at night.  If the Combine establish a pattern of movement- ”

“The Combine are practically gone, dad!”  I insisted.

He looked at me, surprised.  “How do you mean?”

“I mean, look outside!”  I pointed a hoof at the nearest window.  “You know those two guys that are always across the street at the Rotisserie?  They’ve been gone for days.”

He got up from the red leather couch and peered out the window past the double-layer of black curtains that would normally be closed at all times of the day or night.

I continued.  “I haven’t even seen an APC since last week!  Remember how they used to practically circle around our house?”  I said, remembering the terrible gunmetal-grey horseless carriages that seemed to be designed from the ground-up to inspire fear.

“... And occasionally unload a platoon of metrocops to search our home for contraband...”  He mumbled.

“... or evidence of a certain illegally-owned dragon,”  I added with a snicker.  “Oh, and don’t forget the secret passageway they’re too stupid to find that leads straight to the largest Resistance base in Equestria!”  I wonder how many times those idiots pried up our floorboards looking for something that was in the fireplace? I thought with a smirk the size of the full moon I was missing.

“And now they’re... gone,”  my father continued.  “Just... gone.  That doesn’t sit right with me one bit.  Why in Equestria would they go to all the trouble of building us that huge, nasty-looking fence to keep out the creepercolts, and then just leave?”  The Combine had been building a massive protective fence around Ponyville to keep out dangerous creatures like zombies (sometimes referred to colloquially as ‘creepercolts’), bullsquids, and of course the occasional headcrab.  Most ponies I had talked to chalked it up as a pathetic gesture of ‘goodwill’ toward the increasingly hostile population.

“I don’t know, I guess they’re up to something!”  I said half-sarcastically.  I didn’t really care what the Combine were up to, I just wanted to freaking go outside. “So...”

“No, Alyx, you can’t go outside.  Like I said, you just went out yesterday, and you may do so again tomorrow if you must, but not two nights in a row; it’s suspicious, it’s dangerous, and it gives them clues as to where we’ll be and when, which I wouldn’t have for my daughter even if your mother wasn’t the leader of the Resistance!”  the earth-pony decreed with finality, and returned his full attention to the newspaper.

I did my best to sound disappointed, letting out a grunt of frustration as I plodded back to my room.  I was actually excited that I would now get to go outside without anypony knowing about it, and without anypony’s permission.

Waiting till dark, I slipped into my favorite jean vest, and, not even bothering to bring a flashlight due to the ghostly otherworldly illumination provided by the full moon, I climbed out of my bedroom window and into the starry night.

I cannot tell you how much I love the night; the cool air, the quiet, the canvas of the entire universe hanging above the tree line.  But most of all, I enjoy being alone, away from my dad and even my mom when she’s home.  Just me and the stars, alone with our thoughts, like Luna on the dark side of the moon, which is surely where She must be.  At least, that’s where I’d go if I were Her.

I was trotting down the completely dead main avenue, quietly reflecting on the last words of the dragon Daggoth immortalized on that massive piece of parchment hanging in the barn at Black Mane West, ‘Your Princesses are in another castle’, when I was rudely interrupted.

“Going somewhere?”  Asked a voice so close I jumped in fright.

“Celestiadamnit, Spike!  You scared the pony out of me!”

“So does that mean you’re a dragon now?” he laughed, and began to trot next to me, his huge form obscuring my view of the cosmos.

“Why aren’t you with mom?  I thought she needed help!”  I scolded him.

“Ohhh, no, the real question is;  What are you doing sneaking out of the Library for the umpteenth time?”

“I just wanted to look at the stars, okay?!”  I loudly whispered, if that’s possible.

“Uh-huh.  And what’s the actual reason?”  he asked with exaggerated suspicion.

“Spike, name one time when I have lied to you,”  I challenged him.

“Just now,”  he grinned mischievously.

“Oh, shut up,”  I shot back grumpily.

We trotted and walked in silence for a minute, Spike’s huge green eyes darting back and forth, looking for scanners and Combine patrols that weren’t there.  I supposed that was nice of him, not to report me to my father, or worse, my mother.

“Hey, Spike,”  I asked, my tone changing from annoyed to something warmer.

“Yeah, Alyx?”  The adolescent dragon asked, his voice adorably cracking on the ‘A’.

“What do you think Elder Daggoth meant when he wrote ‘Your Princesses are in another castle’?”

I looked in amusement as he tried to come up with something besides ‘I don’t know’.  Spike never was one for proverbs and poetry.

“Ahm, well, he could have meant... uh... that the Princesses were... relocated to another palace somewhere else in Equestria?”

“No, I don’t think that’s what he meant at all, Spike,”  I shot him down.  Gently, though.  He’s a sweet dragon.

“Well, what do you think he meant?”  Spike shot back, almost as gently as I did.

I stopped, and looked at the bright full moon.  “There are some who believe that they simply fled, abandoning Equestria to its fate.  But my mother, who was closer to the Princesses than anypony, taught me that they would never, ever abandon us.”

I looked at Spike to emphasize my point.  “Never.”

“So where are they?” he asked.

“Personally, I think Celestia is hanging out with Luna on the dark side of the moon, sipping martinis, and doing everything they can to help us win.  But they sure as buck di-”

I was cut off by the loudest series of booms I had ever heard.  The stars winked out one by one to form dark blots which flashed across the night sky, and some of them could be seen silhouetted against the moon, hundreds of them!  They approached with a horrible whistling noise, landing not with a boom like you would expect, but with a terrific deadpan *THUD*.

They don’t explode, I thought with sudden terror.  The Combine were bombarding Ponyville with bombs that don’t explode.  That can only mean one thing.

“HEADCRABS!” Somepony screamed from a balcony to the east, still dressed in her robe and slippers.  “THEY’RE SHELLING PONYVILLE WITH HEADCRABS!”

------------------------------λ------------------------------

“I was already halfway down the street, galloping for home, when Spike picked me up, threw me on his back, and flew the remaining distance.  He skidded to a halt at the front door, narrowly missing another shell that screamed past and smashed a gaping hole through the roof of the Rotisserie, which thankfully was empty at this time of night.”

I thought, Oh sweet Luna.  They made sure to do this in the middle of the night, didn’t they?  When everypony would be asleep in their homes, right?

“I looked in horror at the residential district, and saw pillars of flame and smoke already rising from the closely spaced  cottages and small apartments that dominated that area of town.  Judging from the gleam of the headcrab canisters streaming down from the sky, that appeared to be where the Combine were concentrating their fire.”

“All I could think was, Celestia damn the Combine to underhell for this, and then I bucked open the front door.”

Alyx covered her face with her forehooves before continuing the story.

“Dear Celestia.  Our home had taken a direct hit from a shell, which had blown a hole through the trunk, and landed right in the middle of the living room.  The whole place was an absolute celestiadamned mess of scattered books, pages, debris, just... ugh, there was splintered wood from the walls just covering everything and... and the furniture was all overturned, and upside down and sideways, and goddesses, Gordon...”  She put a hoof to her temples and began massaging them, as if the memory of the event was causing her physical pain.

“...and crawling over and under and between it all were dozens of the cuddling little headhumpers.  And I thought, I’m already too late, aren’t I?”

She removed her hooves from her face, allowing me to see the streak down her cheek where the fur was a darker shade of caramel, dampened by tears.  My grip around her shoulders tightened, and I felt like I should say something, but I didn’t have the nerve.  So, I did the next best thing, and leaned my head over to nuzzle her shoulder in sympathy.  I apologized to her in my head, as if my thoughts would tunnel out of my mind into some adjacent dimension and reappear in hers.

I’m so sorry, Alyx.  I’m sorry that I made you do this.  But I had to know.  Celestiadamnit, I wish there was some other way, but I had to hear it from you.

“I flew into an absolute rage, and started killing the bastards any way I could, stomping on them with my bare hooves, and using my magic to impale them on anything I could find that looked like it could pierce flesh – it didn’t matter if it was wood, glass, metal – whatever it took.  After, I think, I killed them all, I started hysterically digging through the debris, hoping and praying that maybe, somehow, he was still alive.  I suppose in my chaotic mental state, I didn’t think to check his bedroom, which was probably where he was...”  She paused to think for just a little too long, and I took my muzzle out of her side to cut in.

“Well, did you find him?  Did you find your dad?”  I asked.

“His name was Tom,”  came a voice that was neither mine nor Alyx’s.  We both looked up and saw Twilight Sparkle trotting down the hallway to meet us, dressed in a lab coat that looked as if it hadn’t been washed in a few days.  Or weeks.  Or maybe ever.

“And no, we never found him, alive, dead, or zombified.  Spike went back and checked every room of the Library,” the purple mare stated with a cool distance, as if she was talking about a stranger from Griffin City rather than her husband.

This didn’t surprise me.  It’s a common psychological coping mechanism for survivors of extreme trauma to distance themselves emotionally from the event, as if they had watched it happen to somepony else.  This is especially prevalent in individuals who possessed an independent and head-strong personality, of which the stubborn physicist was practically a textbook example.  And if it wasn’t just an act, emotional bluntedness is a hallmark of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which, if I were a medical doctor, I’d probably diagnose just about everypony in Black Mane West with.  Luna, what a case-study.

“Dr. Sparkle!”  I immediately unwrapped my foreleg from around her daughter, and stood up on three hooves, extending the fourth to shake hers.  “It’s a real honor!”  I smiled.

“Likewise, Doctor Freemane.  And I see you’ve met my daughter.”  As soon as she said that, I sensed an almost instantaneous tonal shift from the Resistance leader, as if I had listened to her mind broadcast an acoustic inflection to signal it had connected the words ‘Doctor Freemane’ and ‘my daughter’ with the word ‘met’ between the two.  From this modicum of information, I gathered that Twilight approved of my association with her foal.  Cautiously optimistic yet hopeful YES.

Alyx stayed slumped against the filing cabinet she’d been leaning against, only glancing up for a moment before her eyes drooped back to the dirty tiled floor.

Before I was interrupted, I said, “Yes, Alyx was just telling me the story of what happened to Ponyville -”

“ -The Day Ponyville Died, I believe someone poetically described it, and yes, I heard.”  Twilight said ‘someone’ instead of ‘somepony’; one of the odd misspeaks she often makes, though still nowhere near G-pony levels of incorrect grammar, I suppose.

“You heard Ponyville die, or you heard the story of how Ponyville died?”  I asked, momentarily confused by her statement.  And secretly because I enjoy annoying Twilight, but mostly because I was confused.  I swear.

She gave one of her cute little huffs.  “Both!  I heard both.”  She sounded just like I remembered her; like an intellectual surrounded by illiterate dunces that she loves and tolerates the shit out of.  And that’s just when she’s around other scientists.  “Alyx is quite the storyteller, isn’t she?”

I continued,  “Ah, yes, she certainly is, and uh, I had a question about that - if you don’t mind me asking, did you ever find out what happened to... Tom, you said his name was?”  I was trying my best to be polite towards the elderly mare, really, I was.  Best behavior, Scout’s honor.

She didn’t hesitate to give the answer.  “Personally, I assume Tom was possessed, and shambled out of the house sometime between Spike leaving to bring Alyx back here, and his return.  And now, my husband’s body is probably wandering the streets of Ponyville, looking for dead birds to shove into his abdominal stomach-mouth- ”

Alyx exploded out of her silence, shouting  “YOU DON’T KNOW THAT!  You couldn’t POSSIBLY know that.”

I was so startled by her outburst that I physically jumped inside my hazard suit.  Twilight, however, had no visible reaction other than to simply turn and look at her daughter.  She wore a resigned expression, her eyelids sliding partway down to reveal a thin layer of mascara.  She knelt down so that her old, but still beautiful, face was inches away from Alyx’s, the sleeves of her already dirty lab coat becoming further soiled by the black dust and grit of the floor.

She said in a near-whisper, “Alyx, your father isn’t here anymore.  Not in Ponyville, or anywhere else in Equestria.”  Her eyes widened in sympathy as Alyx’s closed shut, already drained from tears.

“Then where is he?”  Alyx whispered back as if it was a rhetorical question, a statement that she didn’t expect an answer to.

“He’s home, Alyx.  He’s gone back to where he began.”

Reassured, but still bitter, she replied, “He better have,”  and stood up.  “I’ll – I’m going - ...” she stammered over her left shoulder as she awkwardly excused herself back to the elevator.

Twilight smiled.  “Just go.  You don’t have to say anything.”

Alyx paused, turned, and galloped back to give her a bear hug, leaning in close to whisper something in her ear, before galloping back to the waiting elevator.  The moment the doors slid shut, Twilight jumped up and pinned me to the wall with her forelegs.

“WHERE THE HELL HAVE YOU BEEN?!”  She screamed in my face like a cat that had just had its tail stepped on.

I couldn’t really process her inquiry due to the unprecedented volume of awkward feelings the current position was unfortunately eliciting from my stupid, stupid, dirty male brain which obviously didn’t register the fact that although Twilight was indeed a female of the species, she was old enough to be my MOTHER.

AAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!  Was all my brain could come up with as an answer, which my Broca’s speech area translated as:  “DyughIdinot!”

“ANSWERS.  NOW.  SPEAK!”  she demanded like a mountain yeti on its period.

I recovered from the shock.  And sexual confusion.  By far, the vast majority, it was shock, just forget whatever it was that I just wrote, it was shock, far and away.  Almost completely.  My neurons fired in a beautifully coordinated light-show of fantastically complex impulses that coalesced into the following eloquently composed retort:

“Heyhey, Twi, girl, I mean, Doctor Sparkle, after I jumped through that portal to Xen, it was all a blur, I mean, there were things, and I did stuff to the things, and I got hurt very, very badly, and it was really, really painful but there were these little pools of blue stuff, and oh man those little pools were the shit, I mean, I felt like I could do buckin’ anything after I sat in one of those cuddling things for a while, and then I... I ran out of bullets so I just started swingin’ and I was... freakin’... I was bashing skulls, lady, I was bashin’ heads like it was little league, it was... I mean...”

“GORDON!  What happened to the Warden!?  It’s name was Shu'ulathoi or Nihilanth or something like that!  Do you remember bashing in the skull of somepony – er, someone - named Nihilanth?”

Twilight had been one of the small handful of surviving scientists at the Lambda Complex to see me off through the portal to Xen.  Barney was there too, as I recall.  I was glad to see that they all made it out okay, I just wished that my nearly fatal journey to what seemed like the bad neighborhood in the worst part of double under-hell had actually ended up making any kind of difference in the end.

“In fact, I do remember shooting a grenade into this huge dude’s head.  It was pretty intense,” I said in the ineloquent haze induced by my impromptu walk down Bad Memory Lane.

“Was that the Warden?  The being holding open the breach between the dimensions?”  the Resistance’s lead scientist inquired, notably calmer than a minute previous.

“... He was the size of a building.  I’m pretty sure, like, a pretty good sized building.  Several stories.”

She gave me the most adorable look I’ve ever seen as she said,  “Yeahhh, that was probably it.”

Twilight Sparkle released me from her confusingly sexy death hold.  “So, you killed the thing holding open the breach, which is to say nothing about the life forms that had already passed through, and a fat lot of good it did us in the long run.  So then what?”

“What do you mean?”  I asked.

“What do you mean, ‘what do I mean’?  You killed the Shoola-Nilinth whatever, and then what happened?”

I turned into an alleyway on Bad Memory Lane named ‘Things I don’t ever, ever want to remember ever’, and replied, “I saw the G-pony.  He offered me a job, and apparently I accepted, and... then I woke up eight years later on a train to Ma- er, City 7.”

After listening to my response, Twilight put a hoof to her temples and massaged for a few moments before speaking again.

“Gordon, trot with me,” she commanded.

“With pleasure, Doctor,”  I obeyed.

She took me down the short access hallway and through a double set of doors to her lab – the heart of Black Mane West.  The room was huge, I mean at least in comparison with the rest of the base, it must have been two or three stories tall at its highest point.  Crammed into every nook and cranny were shelves and tables filled with the same kinds of instruments, computers, and electronic gadgets that I saw in the other (literally) underground laboratory, Black Mane East, back in City 7.  The tile and brick room was dominated by a massive quantum-tunneling apparatus that was identical in design to the one that had misfired back in Pinkie’s lab and sent me ricocheting through Sparkle-Flowers-Gryffindor space, with one of the exit points unfortunately (or perhaps exactly as planned?) being the private office of Equestria’s forcibly-imposed ‘Administrator’.

As we trotted through the lab, all of the doors to the lab magically closed and locked themselves;  Twilight obviously wanted us to be alone, and uninterrupted, and there I go, I did it again.  Celestia, it seemed obvious to me, at least, that the sexual tension between myself and Alyx’s cougar mom was so thick you could cut it with a dull wooden butter knife.  However, the elderly, sixty-something year old object of my newfound deep, dark, shameful desire didn’t seem to notice or care, as her attention was focused solely on a single object that sat tucked beneath her horrifically cluttered workstation – an unassuming, unmarked, uninteresting, olive-green metal box.

“Gordon, there are so many things I have to tell you – and I don’t know how much time I’ve got left to tell them.”  I looked at a cracked picture frame sitting on her desk, holding a family portrait of a much younger (and disturbingly attractive celestiadamnit shutupshutup) Twilight, an unfamiliar earth-pony I gathered was her husband, Tom, and – Oh Celestia, hahaha! They were holding their adorable little filly, Alyx, of course!  Daww, she was so little when this picture was taken!

Errngh.  The sting of sympathy felt like getting poked in the arm with a hypodermic needle.

This was your dad,  I thought of Alyx.  This was your family.

My eyes suddenly became just a little blurry from some kind of moisture that they were excreting for some reason that had nothing whatsoever to do with - I cried.  Like a stallion.  Anyway, I noticed that Twilight had been kneeling on the ground, the glow from her horn spreading to envelop the box with the same purple aura.  It slid out from beneath the desk, and its locking mechanism disengaged with a metallic *click*.

“Pinkie Pie’s tail has been twitching, Gordon.  And many other parts of her body, but mainly her tail.  She’s been telling me, privately, that something really, really bad is about to happen to me, specifically me - Twilight Sparkle. I know it’s absolutely ludicrous to actually believe such superstitious nonsense, I mean, the insanity of actually putting stock in somepony’s prophetic hearsay about the future, but Gordon-”  She began digging through the container, carefully removing its discrete internal shelves filled with machine parts and tools that rattled in their molded plastic depressions as she set them aside on the floor next to her.

“I learned a long, long time ago to believe the silly, superstitious nonsense that comes out of Pinkie’s mouth, because for some stupid, retarded reason, it’s true.  Believe it or not, every single thing Pinkie Pie has ever predicted has come true, often at exactly the time she predicted it would happen.  And Gordon – no scientific theory I’ve ever studied or theorized can explain that.  I don’t think science is capable of explaining what goes on inside that pony’s mind.  Honestly, I don’t think I’ll understand until after I die -”

She stopped at the word ‘die’.  She looked away, anxiety and pain on her somewhat creased and wrinkled, yet still quite pretty, face.  It was the look of a mother worrying about her children.  She carefully unlocked a compartment of the crate that I didn’t know was there until she opened it, it was so perfectly set into the frame.  She levitated out a small antique jewelry box that it had concealed.

“Gordon, I think I’m going to die.  And I don’t mean years from now, I don’t mean months from now, I mean soon.  And before I die, I need to make sure you understand what I’ve been spending every waking moment for the past eight years searching for.  I need you to know the only way we can defeat the Combine, drive them back to their world, and make sure they never come back.  I need you to know what the Elements of Harmony are.”

She unlatched the delicate hinge of the jewelry box, and floated out five bejeweled necklaces and an elegantly decorated crown.  They were magnificent;  the multi-colored gemstones refracted, bent, and reflected the sterile laboratory lights back at us, as if they could absorb things that were ugly and make them beautiful again.  I sensed that they were ancient, perhaps as old as time itself, like they had been there from the beginning and would stay until the end, a constant, an assurance, a covenant.  In spite of their apparent age, they bore no mark of time;  no scratch, stain, blemish, chip or dent disturbed the immaculate perfection of their design.

Twilight carefully set them down on her desk, one by one, starting with the crown adorned with a violet star, the same color as her magical aura, I noted.  Then the necklaces, each adorned with a unique symbol; a lightning bolt, a butterfly, a balloon, an apple, and a diamond.

“These, Doctor Freemane, are the most powerful magical artifacts in existence.”

I stared with my mouth agape, entranced by their beauty, and somehow I sensed that they were looking back at me, silently judging me.

“These are the Elements of Harmony?”  I asked incredulously.

“Did you figure that out all by yourself, or did somepony help you?”  she asked, I suspect, sarcastically.  She leaned against the desk with her forelegs and sighed heavily before continuing, her mind seemingly overburdened with thoughts.  “Gordon, when I finally made it home that day, I collapsed onto my bed and went to sleep thinking that you had just sacrificed your life to close the breach between our world and theirs, and that this whole mess would go down in history as another cautionary tale in playing fast and loose with safety standards when ponies’ lives are at stake, pushing too far too fast, and not to mention a critical lack of regulatory oversight from the government.  When I woke up the next morning, the biggest worry on my mind was how I was going to word that in a letter to Princess Celestia.  Goddesses, I was so stupid.”

She turned her gaze toward the part of the quantum tunneling device that hung from the ceiling directly above us and somberly continued.  “That wasn’t the end.  They came back.  Only this time, they were prepared, and we lost.  In seven minutes, we lost everything we had had for thousands of years to - ‘an implacable foe that came from neither above nor below, neither the right nor the left’ - is how I believe the papers put it.”

She turned her gaze back down to look at me, an inextinguishable fire in her eyes.  “I am absolutely convinced that the only way to right the wrong that we were all a part of at Black Mane is to use the Elements of Harmony to permanently seal off our dimension from all the others, however many there are.  And if they refuse to do that, then we’ll use the miniature teleporters Pinkie and I have been building to go to the Combine Overworld and use the Elements as a weapon to kill the enemy where they live.  And if they even refuse that, well, then we’ll just have to go to Plan C.”  She called the teleporters 'miniature' even though they took up most of the large room we were in.  Well, compared to the one in Lambda, I suppose the adjective was appropriate.

I considered all that I had learned about the Elements of Harmony from my magic courses.  As I recall, it is not known what the Elements cannot or will not do, only that they must consent to whatever action the caster of the spell, the bearer of the element of Magic, asks of them.

Twilight frowned.  “Aren’t you going to ask me what Plan C is?”

“... Yes, yes I was about to,” I said, deep in thought.

Twilight cocked her head downwards a little and raised her eyebrows, expectantly waiting for my question.

“... Uhm, what is... Plan C?”  I was persuaded without words to ask.

Twilight smiled.   “If all else fails, we’ll chuck the Elements of Harmony in a trash bin, and teleport a bomb or a death squad straight into Dr. Breen’s office, and overthrow our alien overlords the earth-pony way:  No magic,”  she chuckled.

I nodded approvingly.  “And why can’t you do that now?”

“We’re working on it,” she gestured towards the ‘miniature’ teleporter.  It looked sort of like a massive ray-gun like you would see in a cheesy sci-fi comic, aimed at a small elevator just big enough for a pony to fit on.  In, on, around, and even through were tangles of huge, thick cables that looked like they could transmit gigawatts of current, bundled together with cable-ties like a rubber band on the end of a ponytail in a futile effort to maintain some kind of order to the tangled chaos of wires.

The tangled chaos of SCIENCE!  I thought with another one of my nerd-squees.

“Judging from your experience with the quantum-tunneling device in City 7, I’d say we still have a lot of work to do.  But, on the plus side, you survived the projection, and we gathered a lot of data to pore over!”  Twilight’s eyes practically rolled into the back of her head as she thought about studying and organizing large amounts of scientific data.

Luna, that must be like pornography for her.  Science porn.

“What about the teleporter back at the Lam-”  I was interrupted as Twilight snapped out of her fantasy and burst out laughing.

“For Celestia’s sake, Gordon, you really think that thing still works?  Where h- oh my goddesses!  Hahahaha!  I was... hahah!  I was about to say ‘where have you been?’!  HAHAHAHAAH!”  she continued to chortle like an asshat.

An intellectual surrounded by dunces you remain, Twilight Sparkle.  You have not changed at all.

I frowned.  “Okay, and why can’t you use the Elements, again?”

She straightened up.  “The Elements of Harmony can only be used by their respective ‘Bearers’ - extraordinary ponies who are the embodiment - the spirit - of everything their individual element represents.  There are six; Honesty, Kindness, Laughter, Generosity, Loyalty and Magic.  If even one of those is missing, the spell won’t work.  Applejack, who represented the spirit of honesty, and was that Element’s bearer, died along with the whole Apple family during the Seven Minute War, and poor Rarity was in Carousel Boutique in Ponyville...”  she trailed off, her laughter suddenly extinguished.

“... on the day it died,”  I finished her sentence.

There was a rather awkward silence as both the doctor and I were lost in our own thoughts.  I wondered how things would have turned out if we had used the Elements back at Black Mane.  What, if any, limit to their power existed, and how might they behave if we felt it necessary to take them into another dimension?  Would they even work?  Were they capable of ‘sealing off’ one dimension from another, as Twilight put it, or is that even possible within the Standard Model?  I know the experiments we performed at Black Mane forced a revision of the laws of physics many, many times, but what about the laws of magic?  Had we ever experimented with the Elements of Harmony, to test their limits?  Oh, goddesses, what if this whole thing started because we did?

And another thing – Twilight said we could use the Elements as weapons to kill the Combine where they live.  How does she know that they will?  That they would?  What if they refuse to consent to killing, even if it is killing to save lives?  And would they choose us over them if it came down to it?  Is the Element of Loyalty really loyal?  Come to think of it, how is it that pieces of stone and metal are capable of making moral decisions, anyhow?  Celestia, the laws of the universe - particularly the laws governing magic - confound me, and I’m a physicist for pony’s sake.

“Theoretical physicist, anyway,”  I mumbled to myself.

“What?”  asked Dr. Sparkle.

“Nothing,”  I replied.  What the hell, Gordon?  You talk to yourself now?  Luna.

The short, pointless exchange had pulled Twilight out of her own world of thought, and she turned to speak to me, sounding as if the weight of the world were on her shoulders.

“Gordon, what you’ve got to understand about the Elements of Harmony is that they are totally powerless without all six of the Bearers to use them.  You take away even one, and the spell doesn’t work.  That is what I have devoted the vast majority of my time and resources to for the past eight years;  Searching for the ponies who can wield the remaining Elements so we can defeat the Combine, drive them back to where they came from, and make sure they can never, ever come back.  They have spent the last eight years doing everything they possibly could to prevent me and the Resistance from doing so, mostly by finding and killing us whenever, wherever and however possible.”

Twilight touched the Element of Generosity with her hoof.  “You have no idea what they’re capable of, Gordon.  What lengths they will go to in order to stop us.  Rarity does.  She and everypony else in Ponyville knows exactly what levels of depravity the Combine are willing to lower themselves to in order to protect their false claim to our world and to power.”

Twilight once again jumped up and put her forehooves on my shoulders.  Parts of me were delighted and other parts were less so.

“I need you to see Ponyville, Gordon.  I need you to understand why we fight.  We don’t have a choice.”

------------------------------λ------------------------------

Why we fight.  Powerful words, them.  Dangerous, fighting words.  Words written with the blood of innocents.  They are a reason and a cause, a caucus belli that drives nations to war with other nations, and people to kill other people.  More than a logical cause-and-effect equation, they are a moral justification, something in your head, something in your heart, something in your bones that you call upon in times of doubt and darkness when your flesh screams in protest to your mind, why?  Why do you fight?

When one has a satisfactory answer to that deepest and most personal of questions, the body relents, and the mind regains control, and you become unstoppable as a neutrino ejected from a supernova, a bullet through paper, or at the very least, a bull in a china shop.  It is a question that every soldier who is not a machine with a machine mind and a machine heart has asked himself, every soldier at war with a thinking conscience and a living soul;  Why?  And the answer comes from the clear of mind and the pure of heart sometimes as a whisper, sometimes as a scream of righteous fury;  Why? THAT is why.

I was headed to Ponyville on the back of the dragon Spike, at the command of the leader of the Resistance.  Several things occupied my thoughts.  One of those things was an explanation – finally – for the telekinetic explosion which occurred when I focused my magic on that mockery of a ski-lift back in City 7 and then pushed it away as hard as I could;  While in the lab, Dr. Sparkle had revealed to me that my HEV suit actually amplifies my inherent unicorn powers by approximately tenfold.  My education in the ways of the physical sciences did nothing to help me follow Twilight as she delved into the specifics of experimental arcane enchantments – personally, she lost me once she got to the part about grinding up the horns of particularly powerful unicorns who had died and donated their bodies to science.  That’s just really, really bucking creepy if you ask me, but hey, that’s pretty much the definition of arcane science.

My mind drifted to the dead town I was currently flying toward.  The once headcrab-stuffed mortar shells that now littered its winding streets or were hidden inside its modestly-sized buildings had been fired by strange bio-mechanical monstrosities employed by the Combine called ‘synths’;  Alien war machines that were disgustingly efficient at exterminating hostile populations.  Spike had explained to me that in the time it took him to fly Alyx to Sweet Apple Acres, and then return to the Library, it was already too late;  It had happened that fast.  Just like the Seven Minute War.  The Combine are slow to react, and capable of making astoundingly ill-advised judgment calls - both tactical and strategic – but once they commit to destroying a target, they cuddling destroy it.

I also wondered about the Elements of Harmony.  Where in Equestria did the things come from anyway?  How does one make an Element of Harmony or become a Bearer of one, and what god, gods, demigod, or demigods as it may be, decided that the harmonic elements would be specifically honesty, kindness, laughter, generosity, loyalty, and magic?  And why did this all-powerful being include something as dumb as laughter while omitting things like, I don’t know, Courage, or Love, or... the Element of Knowledge, or maybe...  the Element of Science!  But, seriously, laughter?  Stupid demi-gods.

I could easily see the town, sitting nestled in a modest, grassy valley with Canterlot and Mount Equestria in the background.  It was getting late;  As the sun neared the horizon, its rays made the brightly-colored rooftops glow, and produced an annoying glare off of what windows that weren’t busted out.  The massive fence that encircled Ponyville cast long shadows over the once peaceful and quiet town that had turned into a violent and rebellious town and then once again into a peaceful and quiet town filled with zombies.

“HEY SPIKE!”  I yelled at the magic dragon that I was clinging to for dear life.  “HOW DO THEY KEEP PEGASUS ZOMBIES FROM FLYING OUT!?”

Spike hollered back over his shoulder, “Pegasus ponies are rounded up and sent to be processed at Canterlot, where their wings are clipped so they can’t fly anymore.”

“DEAR PRINCESS CELESTIA!”  I shouted over the sound of wind and wings.  “WHAT DO THEY DO TO UNICORNS!?”

“They haven’t gotten to unicorns yet, but don’t worry, they’re working on it!”  Spike answered.  “I guess they did pegasi first because a flying enemy is a lot harder to kill than a magic-using one!  Ha!  Just ask the Combine about me!”  he laughed.

We flew low and slow over the infamous town, and Spike was banking gently in order to afford me an even clearer view of something that, thanks to my suit’s zoom function, I could already see all too well.

The once brightly-colored shops and two-story cottages that dominated the town were faded and decaying, some ravaged by fires that had burned unchecked but for the occasional rainstorm, and some with gaping holes gouged in their roofs and walls by mortar shells.  The cobblestone streets that surrounded them were littered with debris and abandoned carriages, and sprinkled with millions of shards of broken glass.  We passed over the once bustling market street, which was now a chaotic tangle of toppled and upended vendor’s stalls.  Their goods, locked up by their owners intending to come back the following morning, having long since been liberated from their containers and spilled onto the street to rot.

A free market was one of the concessions that the local Combine overseers, themselves likely having grown up there, had given Ponyville in an attempt to placate the restless and rebellious population.  However, whether they had grown up there or not, all civil authorities had abandoned the town to its fate once the order to do so came down the line;  There were no police transports anywhere, nor any other sign of Civil Protection.  They had simply packed up and left.  I gathered that once the midnight shelling began, total anarchy had reigned in the brief time before pretty much everypony had a little neural parasite sucking on their skull, telling them to go eat dead birds.

We passed over a little red elementary school, surrounded by dead trees, cracked cement, and rusting playground equipment.  The little bell tower had taken a direct hit from one of the shells and collapsed inward, down into the school, leaving a gap that was perfectly square on three sides, and was a jagged, splintered, partial-circle on the fourth.  I prayed that there hadn’t been anypony inside when that happened, but then I considered that being crushed to death was probably a downright merciful fate for the ponies who lived here.  Better than being possessed, or, if you managed to make it to some sort of fortified shelter, slowly starving to death.

Everywhere, streets appeared to have been deliberately blocked off and redirected by makeshift barricades, as if to funnel anything shambling down the street to certain locations.  How very odd.  I made a deliberate effort to trace one of the paths – It led into a huge pit that had been dug or blasted into the ground.  Piled high in the pit were wooden logs, charred and blackened almost... no, wait.  Those aren’t logs.  They’re people.  Dear Princess Celestia, those are the skeletons of ponies, piled on top of each other like logs, burnt almost beyond recognition.  There was no lingering scent of cooked flesh or decomposition, leading me to conclude this funeral pyre had taken place some time ago.

Spike commented over his shoulder, “I’m not sure who’s been building those barricades and digging those fire-pits.  They sure as hell weren’t there when we left.  In fact, sometimes I see somepony who’s definitely not a zombie in an all-black cloak dinking around here and there, across town.  I’ve never said ‘hi’, though.  He doesn’t seem too friendly, and he carries around a double-barreled shotgun.”

“Not that I’m afraid of shotguns.  No matter how many barrels they have,” Spike quickly added with pride.

As the sun neared the horizon, we heard a long, drawn out howl drift across the wind.  “One last stop, I guess,” and he flew back towards the edge of town.  I noted that Spike had specifically avoided showing me the Ponyville Library, but I wasn’t sure I even wanted him to.  Alyx’s recollection had been vivid enough.

The adolescent dragon dropped me off at the main entrance to the town so I could get a better look at the massive reinforced gate that kept anypony or anything from getting in or out of Ponyville.  The scene I beheld there told the story of hundreds of innocent ponies - mares, stallions, and foals - making one last, desperate attempt to escape from their hellish prison – only to be cut down as soon as they somehow, by an act of Celestia, managed to reach the main gate.

Dear Luna, the bodies.  The rotting piles of multicolored corpses splayed out, broken and twisted amongst the wreckage of dozens of carriages, carts and wagons, their disdainful blue coveralls eroded away by moths, weather and time.  These people had not been killed by zombies or headcrabs!  They had been shot through with bullets and plasma by Combine soldiers, maybe even police officers!  They hadn’t just packed up and left, they’d actually stayed behind in order to ensure that everypony died.  The same ponies that were supposedly there to protect them!  I don’t know what made me angrier – That the Combine had plotted to mass-murder every last one of the several thousand ponies who lived here, including my brother John, or that the citizens of Ponyville had actually trusted them in the first celestiadamned place!  Including probably my brother John, because he’s kind of retarded!

And the bodies had lain there, unfit for possession by headcrabs as they were no longer alive. The only attention they got was from birds, insects, and the occasional hungry zombie looking to shore up its fat-reserves before it collapsed back into hibernation, waiting for another victim that would never come because nopony is stupid enough to actually enter this place!

A sign had been hung on the thrice-chained and locked gate.  A handmade, delicately crafted wooden sign, with a poem painstakingly carved into it by some mournful soul who came by to pay his respects to the thousands who died here.

WE DON'T GO TO PONYVILLE

WE DON'T GO TO PONYVILLE

WE DON'T GO TO PONYVILLE

NOT SINCE THE DAY IT DIED

A short, dark, bitter poem that was, in its own way, beautiful.  Beautiful in its darkness.

Spike sat quietly, supposedly keeping a lookout for zombies, but I know he was thinking about this place just as much as I was.  I told him that I had seen enough, and I was ready to head back.  He arched his back and unfolded his great, leathery wings as I awkwardly climbed on, and I was thankful Alyx wasn’t watching.  Alyx.  I really wanted to talk to her.  About everything, everything under the stars.  All of a sudden, and I don’t really know why, I had this desperate, burning urge to see her, just to make sure she was okay, even though I knew that, logically, she probably was.

The flight back was short and silent, but for the sound of laughter drifting across the wind from somewhere deep within Ponyville.  I asked Spike if he had heard it, and he replied that he didn't know what I was talking about.  Hmph.

------------------------------λ------------------------------

Alyx waved to us from on top of the barn, and I zoomed in to see that she was, to my utter delight, holding shish-kebobs in her mouth.  Cuddle yeah, I thought as my stomach grumbled and my mouth watered, and I also felt this weird kind of tingling sensation in the top of my front teeth, like, right where the tooth meets the gum line that, I don’t know, it’s just been kind of bothering me.  I need to see a dentist.

“I bwot woo bwinner!” she called out as loud as she could without actually opening her mouth, and, I noted, with  probably the biggest smile I’d seen on her all day.

Spike gracefully landed on the roof of the enormous barn that dominated the former Sweet Apple Acres, only managing to tear off a few dozen shingles with his enormous talons.

“Gordon!  I’m glad to see you and Spike made it back alright!” exclaimed Alyx.

Spike and I gave each other a look.  “Uh, Alyx, it wasn’t really a harrowing journey,” said Spike.

I added, “It was more like a... tour.  And I mean, it was a really, really nice tour, Spike, over here, Spike is -”  I tried to think of the words that would most adequately describe the magnificent, spectacular, versatile, loyal, and graceful purple dragon.  “... he is so cool, he is just a really, really cool guy.”  Smooth.

They both gave me looks.  “You two enjoy your dinner, I’m going to go eat some barbequed bullsquid,” Spike said with his typical air of masculine posturing that I suspect was made doubly worse by the presence of a female that I dimly suspected he had a crush on.  Which, now that I think about it, would be really, really funny.

Alyx and I stood side by side, watching Spike take off into the twilight sky, and I ravaged my potato and apple and I-don’t-know-what-else shish-kebob.  The sun behind us had already slipped beneath the horizon, with only Mount Equestria in the distance still basking in the golden sunshine.

“And yet the sun still rises,”  Alyx whispered.

“What?”  I asked.

She sighed.  “Once upon a time, in the magical land of Equestria,”  Alyx began, looking at that sunlight-bathed mountain upon which once sat the most beautiful and majestic palace in all the world, and now played host to an alien military that infested it like a malignant tumor.

“There were two regal sisters who ruled together and created harmony for all the land,” she continued, her voice cracking, and her eyes beginning to water.

No, not again.  Alyx, please don’t cry, please don’t be sad.  I pleaded with her in my mind.

She actually began to smile as she continued.  “To do this, the eldest used her unicorn powers to raise the sun at dawn.”  A gust of wind blew the shish-kebob stick out of my mouth, and it clattered off the roof of the barn.

Okay, Luna, okay.

I finished the tale.  “The younger brought out the moon to begin the night.  Thus, the two sisters maintained balance for their kingdom and their subjects, all the different types of ponies.”

What happened next is;  I nearly died.  Seriously,  I almost fell off the barn to my certain death when Alyx jumped up and planted her soft, wet lips on mine, tasting of shish-kebob.  My cerebrum was tasked to capacity comprehending the fact that I had just been kissed by a girl, while simultaneously comparing the way Alyx had her forehooves on my chest to the way Twilight had jumped up and pinned me just a couple of hours previous (noting that the comparison was favorable), and my good ol’ cerebellum was very busy working with my Hazard Suit’s Motor Augmentation and Stability-Control systems to keep me from falling off the roof and dying.  I noticed that my suit had automatically detected the unstable terrain, and transformed the polymorphous hoof-pads to a more suitably gripping texture, which I thought was seriously badass.

With my stability returned, I pressed in further to Alyx’s small, feminine muzzle and continued smooching her.  My suit flashed a warning message across my glasses that my pulse and temperature were rapidly increasing, eliciting a mental no duh from me.  The air was cool, and her surprisingly pleasant-smelling breath was warm and moist, fogging up my glasses and concealing the idiotic warning.

Alyx finally pulled away.  “You’re all grody,” she said, trying her best to frown.

“Well I haven’t taken a bath in...”  I paused, considering, “Eight years.”

Alyx gave me the exact same absolutely adorable look that her mother gave me when I described the Nihilanth to her.

“Do you wanna take a bath?” She asked.

“Do you wanna take a bath with me?”  I asked with a grin 1.6 kilometers wide.

Alyx nodded, also grinning.  YES.  WE ARE DOING THIS.

And so we carefully extricated ourselves from the rooftop and galloped over to the highly polluted and probably bullsquid-infested river.  Thankfully, Alyx had been paying very, very close attention when Barney was assembling my suit around me, and she helped me reverse the process.

I was naked.  Naked as a pony could be.  In other words, I was in my informal attire, my casual dress.

“Are you sure this is safe?”  I asked Alyx.

She immaturely rolled her eyes.  “If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t be doing it, Gordon.”

“Alright,”  I said, and promptly pushed her in.

Alyx had barely surfaced her head above water when I followed her into the river, the volume I displaced with my sweaty, dirty, and just a little bit bloody body forming a mini-tidal wave that collided with her face.  The river was shallow enough here for me to stand, and I never took my eyes off of her.  I watched as she blew the murky river water out of her nose, her wet, black mane in her eyes, and her now soaking wet coat a darker shade of caramel.  She grinned evilly, and turned onto her back, bucking plumes of water at me with her hind legs.

“Damn, Gordon, you ever gonna take those glasses off, ya four-eyes!?”

I spat out river water, hoping I didn’t contract some exciting new disease as I shouted back, “Alyx, at this point, I don’t think it’s possible for my glasses to come off.”

“Oh, griffinshit, is that a challenge!?” she shouted back as her horn was enveloped by a sky-blue aura, and instantly, I felt an invisible hand grab my thick-rimmed frames and yank.  I was actually lifted several centimeters out of the water before the damned things finally let go of my face, doing for Alyx what grenades, crashing through the sides of office buildings, and getting shot by an attack helicopter had all failed to do:  Take off my mothercuddling glasses.

“WHOOOO! I DID IT!!!  I HAVE TAKEN YOUR GLASSES!!”  Alyx whooped in over-produced celebration.

I just stood there and rubbed the bridge of my nose;  that had actually kind of hurt.

Alyx jumped out of the river and back onto the bank, waving my glasses in the air like a flag banner.

“I have the glasses of the One With the Free Mane!” Alyx announced, again, over-doing it just a tiny bit, although she could have been doing it on purpose.

I followed her out and galloped after her, both of us soaking wet.

“Give my glasses back you evil and... positively treacherous fiend!”  I shouted after her.  Yeah, I got nothing.  Honestly, I was playing it by ear, and that’s what I came up with.  You know, I wonder how romantic encounters would play out if both parties had unlimited time to draft and compose a retort.  It would probably be a lot less fun.

I galloped after Alyx through the neck-high cord-grass that grew by the river’s banks, her wet coat gleaming in Luna’s blessed moonlight, and guiding my near-sighted rump to Alyx’s rump.  She made a mistake;  when she came to a spot along the river where the path was partially blocked by a fairly large boulder, she faked right like she was going to go around it when I knew full well she was going to try to leap clear over it.  Anticipating her move, I galloped around the left side of the rock, my hooves getting covered in the muck of the bank that was too steep for any vegetation to grow, and I looked up to see the underside of Alyx, flying through the air just centimeters above me.  I kicked off the ground with all my might, just like I did back in City 7, and I caught the devious little spectacle-snatcher by her slippery hind legs.

We both tumbled onto the ground, our heaving, gasping bodies entangled on grass that appeared almost blue in the moonlight.  Alyx seized with laughter, floating over my glasses.

“Here, ya caught me, fair and square,” she conceded.

I floated my glasses back onto my face, feeling my magic briefly touch hers, which felt really, really nice, by the way.

“Damn right I did.”  I looked over to her still-panting form lying across from me.  “You took my glasses, and I still caught you because your ass is so big, it’s impos- Ow!  Hey!  Quit it!”  I protested as Alyx struck me.  I laughed at the pain.  Compared to being shot, it was like getting tickled.  Although, I suppose the adrenaline was still flowing, minimizing perception of pain, but, whatever.  Alyx hits like a mare.

As I giggled like a school-filly, Alyx scooched over and snuggled me, rubbing her muzzle across my neck and chest, and I reciprocated the action.

We just laid there for the longest time, looking at the moon and the stars, listening to the sound of each others’ breathing, the beating of each other’s heart, and the occasional demonic howl from Ponyville.  Also, I think I heard a bullsquid fighting a headcrab somewhere in the distance.  From the sound of it, I concluded that the bullsquid was winning, which made me happy.

Then, I did the stupidest thing I have ever done in my entire life:  I talked to a girl about feelings.

“So, Alyx, uhm... so does this mean...?”

She lifted her muzzle out of my neck, and looked me in the eye.  “Does this mean what?”

“Does this-”  I raised a hoof and moved it in a circular motion, gesturing to our entangled bodies, “- mean... that, you know, we’re an... ‘item’ now?”  I innocently inquired.

Alyx pulled away from me, her eyebrows furrowed, and biting her lip – the same lip that I had been biting earlier, I noted with no small amount of satisfaction.

Alyx looked at me, a confused and worried expression on her face.

“Gordon – I- I’ve got – I mean, I’d better get going, mom – er Twilight, she... she said she needed me to help her out with some stuff in the lab, and... so, yeah.”

I was so confused.  “Wh- what?  You have to go?  Right now?  Did I say something wrong?”

She looked at me with pity.  “No, no no no, it’s nothing you said, I’ve just, I had a wonderful time tonight, Gordon, and I’d really, really like to do this again sometime, but it’s just, mom said she really needed my help down in the lab, and I just remembered... so, I gotta go, I’ll see you tomorrow!”

Alyx began galloping back towards the barn when she stopped suddenly, and turned back toward our original jumping-off point on the river bank, probably remembering that she left her vest there.  I smiled.  We’re perfect for each other.

------------------------------λ------------------------------

I was standing there on the river bank, having somehow managed to put my Hazard Suit back on, looking up at the night sky and being cross with the Goddesses.

I did what you wanted, Luna!  I did!  And now she hates me!  You know what?  This was YOUR screw-up, everything went fine on my end, this is YOUR – Oh, celestiadamnit, it was my fault.

“Yes, Gordon, it was,”  I imagined Her saying.

While stargazing/star-arguing, I noticed something very peculiar in the night sky:  Some of the stars were moving.  In fact, a whole bunch of stars were moving, all in the same direction.  And also, they were getting brighter.

Then I noticed that these stars were also humming.  Oh dear Princess Celestia and her sister Luna and all of their pegasus and unicorn guards.  I began to gallop.  I galloped like I had never galloped before, not even back in City 7 when the teleporter had malfunctioned and dropped me off in a dirty alleyway with every CP in a twenty-kilometer radius headed in my direction.  This panicked locomotion was beyond a fight-or-flight response.  I knew what those stars were.  And I knew what they meant.  And I knew that Alyx was in grave and immediate danger.

I was barely inside the barn door when the first shell hit.  It was exactly as Alyx had described in her story;  A horrible screeching noise followed by a terrific deadpan *THUD*.  Except this thud was immediately followed by a whole string of other thuds, over a dozen.  I activated my suit’s retractable helmet by selecting the option on my HUD labeled ‘hostile environment mode’.

The plate on my chest emblazoned with the Lambda logo unhitched itself from my suit, along with several other orange-and-gold metal plates, and the apparatus began assembling itself into a reactive armor-plated, air-tight helmet. The various folded flaps and extendable sections had barely finished magnetically and mechanically clicking into place around my skull when a mortar burst through the ceiling of the barn, snapping supporting struts like twigs and punching a hole straight through the floor and into the seventh level of Black Mane West.

Dreyfus and Drew, the sentry ponies, were on duty, and they ducked for cover as dust, debris, wood shavings, and a surprising amount of nails rained down on us.  I flinched as a several-centimeter long nail bounced off the lenses of my glasses, which had automatically bent backward and locked in place to form the viewports of my suit’s helmet.

The two sentry ponies looked at me with incredulity worthy of Luna herself, then shoved past me to get into the elevator.

“Whoah, whoah, wait, I’m going with you!”  I hollered at them, wondering if they could hear me through my helmet.

“Well then hurry your bleeding arse up, mister fancy-pants space pony!” the dark grey one mockingly yelled over the sound of dozens of Combine attack helicopters and dropships bearing down on us.  Ah, so they can hear me.

The elevator descended, miraculously enough, as another loud series of detonations rumbled through the base and warning klaxons blared, which my helmet thankfully filtered out as background noise.  Dreyfus, the chocolate-brown pony, hoofed the emergency stop button at the kitchen where the all-knowing Cerberus had told me what they called the Combine.

“Roight, Free-”

“Right, Drey!  ‘Ow many times has we gone over this!?”

“Freemane, we’re going to secure the kitchen.  You can... do whatever.”

“Great!”  I yelled at them.  “Can I at least have a bucking gun!?”

“O’ course, Doctor Freemane, sir,”  replied Drew as he grabbed his pistol with his teeth and held it out for me.

I sarcastically thanked him, but telekinetically grabbed the sidearm anyway, throwing it in inventory.  Just as they stepped off, a figure stirred in the darkened kitchen.  All three of us spun on the intruder, our guns raised, one by unicorn magic, two (or three, or four) by mechanical motion.

“Freemane!” the figure shouted from behind an overturned tub of strawberries which sat on the stainless-steel counter.  I sighed, and lowered my weapon.  It was the all-knowing Cerb who fixed me my sandwich.

“Freemane, I should like to join you, if possible.”

Dreyfus interrupted me before I could even say anything that could be interrupted.

“Be my guest, mate!”

“You are not the Freemane, so do not pretend to speak for him!” the Cerb scolded.

“Like he said, be my guest, sir,”  I said, and he came out from behind the counter and quickly trotted onto the elevator, his covered tail wagging behind him.

“No, Freemane, I am not sir.  You,” he stuck a gloved paw in my chest.  “You are sir.  I am an inexpressibly insignificant cog in an unfathomably huge machine, but you dwarf even that entity.”

The doors slid shut and the elevator continued its descent to the first floor.  The Cerb continued to stare at me, uncomfortably close, as he spoke in his deep, raspy voice.

“It is not known whether it is possible to see the future, the path that lies ahead.  But I fear what we will find in the Twilight Sparkle’s laboratory.”

Moments later, there was an extremely powerful explosion that rocked the whole base.  The lights blinked out, and the poor, abused elevator descended the last couple of meters in total free-fall, crunching to the ground, and knocking me onto my ass.

“FORWARD, FREEMANE!  GO!” my alien companion shouted, and I unhesitatingly complied, thinking of the danger that Alyx and her mother could be in.

We galloped down the hallway and slammed into the doors to the lab, finding that they were, of course, LOCKED.

CELESTIADAMNIT CELESTIADAMNIT CELE-  I paused my mental cursing and put my ear to the door, thinking I heard talking.

“You LIARS!  You never said ANYTHING about a bucking memory extraction!”  Was that... what’s her uncreative name?  Cherry Blossom?  Who the –

“Shut up.”  Said a deep new voice I’d never heard before, its owner distracted by something far more important than its present company.

“You said you would take them PRISONER!”  I can’t... the dirty... that dirty rotten whore.  That cuddling whore!

“You get one more chance,” said the deep, male voice

“I make the fucking calls here, lieutenant,”  Came a second voice, garbled beyond all resemblance of a normal pony’s voice.

“Please, I beg of you, it isn’t nec-” Cherry Blossom was cut off by a loud boom.  I heard the sound of metal hitting metal directly outside the door, and the wet splatter of fluid.  I leaned back from the entrance, and to my astonishment, the door swung just a few centimeters toward me, now slightly ajar.  I ventured a guess that the shot had broken the lock.  Well, no time like the present.  Helmet?  Sealed and locked.  Pistol?  Loaded, safety off.  I turned to my sandwich-making Cerberus friend, and he voiced what I thought.

“Into the breach.”

I nodded in concurrence.

I focused on the steel door and, amplified by my suit’s magical energy enchantment, my magic caused it to violently fly open, actually breaking the lower hinge when it slammed against the inside wall.

The first thing I noticed was Cherry Blossom’s dead pink body, what remained of her cerebrum spilling out of a hole the size of a grapefruit that had been bored through her skull.  Whatever.  She’s still a cuddling traitor, I thought.

The next thing that I noticed  was a pair of massive alien creatures present in the laboratory, standing upright on two legs like a monkey, and clad from head to toe in some sort of incredibly advanced powered combat suit the likes of which I’d never seen before.  The things were so tall, it looked like they almost touched the ceiling, and they weren’t skinny, by any means or measure, quite the opposite;  They were incredibly bulky and beefy, and their armored suits wore the same kind of mottled-yellow synthetic carapace that I had seen on the Combine’s tripod-like synths back in City 7, complete with thorny, organic-looking spikes peppering the surface, making the whole thing look like the exoskeleton of an insect.

I also noticed that Alyx and Twilight were indeed here in the lab, and they were still alive, thankfully.  Less thankfully, they were telekinetically pinned to the wall.

The all-knowing Cerb instantly became infuriated, shouting what would prove to be his final words.

“YOU!  YOU ARE NO SHU-ULATHOI!  Why pretend to be?” he raged.

The – I assumed – Combine that wasn’t preoccupied with holding my soul mate and her mother to the tiled wall of the lab, pulled out what appeared to be a pistol the size of my entire head, and without hesitating for even a millisecond, blew away the Cerberus, spattering my right glasses lens with his bright, red blood.  I was so stupidly stunned by the creatures that I didn’t get off even a single shot before I found myself pinned to the same wall as Alyx.  Wait, wasn’t it Alyx and Twilight?

Oh no.  The one who had murdered the unarmed Cerberus had grabbed her by the scruff of her fur and was holding her at eye level, its massive, apparently robotic arm hissing and squealing as it made minute adjustments to its grip.  I winced.  Being held like that, especially at her age, must have been enormously painful, but she didn’t make a noise.  The being’s grey segmented outer faceplate clicked and clacked as it pulled up and back into the suit, revealing a smooth, reflective dome that slid back as one piece.  The thing was hideously ugly – a wickedly deep scar ran down its pale, hairless face, and between its teeth was a thick, brown cylinder that glowed hot at one end.  It spat the thing out into Twilight’s stoically emotionless face, causing her to flinch briefly as it bounced off, singeing her purple fur before falling to the ground almost three meters below.

It spoke.  “So you’re the little purple unicorn been a thorn in Breen’s side so long,”  It frowned in disappointment.  “You don’ look so tough.”

“Just extract its memories, Wyandotte,”  commanded the other Combine in its almost incomprehensibly garbled voice.

The one holding Twilight closed its faceplate and I heard it draw deeply on whatever gas it breathed.

“Right.”  It leaned forward and whispered in a low, gravelly voice, “Let’s see what’s in that little head of yours.”

It raised its left arm, which had an extremely complex but relatively compact device attached to its wrist that included a pair of cloudy-white cylinders.  A long, thin needle extended from the tip of the device and began to spin like a drill.

As the Combine awkwardly turned Twilight around so that the back of her head was facing him, she shouted to Alyx, “I love you, sweetheart!”  So absorbed was I by the sight before me, I hadn’t even noticed that Alyx had been yelling, screaming and cursing like a cider-sick sailor all the while.

“Celestiadamn you, let her go!”  she screamed.

The Combine chuckled.  “Celestia’s next, kid.”

The needle was pressed up tight against Twilight’s skull, the bipedal being taking its time to make sure the angle was right.

“Close your eyes, honey,”  Twilight commanded as a mother to her daughter, and the needle plunged into her skull.  I closed my eyes too, but I didn’t know if it was even possible to mute my helmet’s tiny external microphones, so I was forced against my will to listen as Twilight’s beautiful mind was sucked out through the thin tube and deposited inside one of the semi-transparent containers on the alien’s wrist.

Her body hadn’t even hit the floor when that immaculate bucking dragon (really, I cannot write enough positive adjectives prior to Spike’s name) burst into the room through the service entrance in the roof of the adjacent hallway.  He sized up the situation pretty much instantly, and immediately leapt onto the Combine that had attacked Twilight - biting, clawing and scratching, too afraid to breathe fire because Twilight was so close by, and he didn’t have time to realize she was dead.

The other one panicked at the sight of an enraged dragon that was nearly as big as it was, and dropped both of us as it pulled out its ridiculously massive sidearm.  It fired three shots at Spike as he and the being wrestled, the chitinous armor apparently impervious even to dragon’s claws.  All three shots hit Spike, the shells pancaking against the thick dragon scales that were the namesake of many a bullet-proof vest and armored vehicle, and falling harmlessly to the ground.  The Combine, astounded by the ineffectiveness of his pistol, lowered the weapon, and to my great surprise, fled.  Those suits had built-in rocket-boosters of some kind, and the whole room filled with smoke as the coward flew away, leaving his friend to die.

Spike took advantage of the momentary confusion and bit down on the first bit of Combine that his mouth came across, which happened to be the padded elbow of the thing’s left arm.  Spike’s teeth, which were capable of chewing through diamonds, sliced straight through the creature’s flexible joint-armor.  It screamed in pain and began beating Spike on the top of his head as hard and as often as possible.  It reached down with its right arm for it’s pistol, but the sidearm was strapped to its left side, and the suit didn’t appear to be flexible enough for it to reach across.

Spike wriggled his head around, opening up the wound as much as he could, the thing’s red blood beginning to dribble down his chin from his tightly clenched mouth.  Needless to say, it was already in an extraordinary amount of pain when Spike finally did what dragons are supposed to do, and breathed fire.  The alien howled in protest and gave the dragon one last good bop to the head with his good arm, causing him to finally lose his grip, and fall to the floor.  The air was filled with the disgusting smell of burnt flesh and plastic and... I don’t know what all else.  The smell was apparent even through my helmet’s air scrubbers.

It’s arm below the elbow was hanging literally by a thread when it took off, clutching the part still attached to its body in pain.  However, that wasn’t good enough.  Flying that way, combined with the massive trauma of what it had just survived – being attacked by a dragon – had considerably dulled its coordination and grace.  As it spun around, its thrusters prompting a temperature warning that flashed across my glasses, it bumped its thinly-tethered arm against the side of the large service entrance to the lab, finishing the job Spike had started by snapping the thin string of flesh that still remained, allowing it to separate from its former owner completely.  The sudden change in weight distribution further threw off the thing’s flight pattern, causing it to bump into the far wall before shooting up the shaft to the surface, its spiked armor leaving a series of long, chaotic drag marks along the entire length.  In addition was the expected vision-obscuring plume of rocket exhaust that filled the outside hallway and partially spilled back into the lab, adding to the haze left over from the previous extraction.

I galloped over to Alyx, whom I discovered being sheltered underneath the wing of a very much alive and conscious Spike.  He looked up at the sound of my approach and gave me a very weak smile as I retracted my helmet back into its storage position.

Thank you, Luna.  I know you had something to do with this.  I mean the part where Spike saved us, not the... oh, hell, you know what I mean.

Spike lifted up his huge, leathery wing as the sounds of the battle raging above us began to filter down through the now not-very-secret shaft, and revealed Alyx’s huddled form, her sad, beautiful face buried in his side.  And it was then, just then, not any time else, but then that I noticed that Alyx had her mother’s eyes.

------------------------------λ------------------------------

“Spike,”  I began as he closed the huge metal garage door, leaving us on the other side of about a dozen  brightly-colored signs that said ‘DO NOT ENTER UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES’.  “You’re sure that there is absolutely, positively, no other conceivable way out of here other than through the-place-whose-name-shall-not-be-mentioned?”

Spike sighed heavily.  “I don’t know how to use the teleporter, you don’t know how to use the teleporter, and Alyx doesn’t know how to use the teleporter, if it even still works, which it probably doesn’t after all the damage it took, and OH!  Did I mention that it requires half a gigawatt of electricity, which if you noticed, we don’t have any.  Well, besides the batteries in the floodlights.  And the only other ways out are straight through a whole division of Overwatch with strider and gunship support.”

“So that’s a no?”  I asked.

“Yes,” he replied.

“Yes that’s a no?  Or yes that’s a yes?”

“No, that’s a no.”

“That’s a no to it not being a yes?”

“Will you please, please  shut up, Gordon,”  said Alyx, finally breaking her long silence.

I did as she wished.

“I’d go with you, but there are other lives to be saved here.  Things that must be done.”  He reached through the narrow window and touched the crying Alyx on her chin.  “Gordon will keep you safe, Alyx.”

She didn’t have the strength to look up.

Spike turned to me and stared into my soul with those deep green dragon eyes.  He probably would have added ‘If anything were to happen to her...’  but instead chose not to speak words that didn’t need to be spoken.

“I’ll pick you guys up in Ponyville the millisecond I’m done here,” he said in a reassuring voice.

There was yet another distant explosion high above us that shook years of dust from the peeling walls and caused the already feeble lights to flicker.

“Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some more friends to go play with,”  the purple dragon said with a wink, and he was gone, leaving the two of us alone in the dimly-lit tunnel.

As Alyx sat there against the wall, the flow of tears steadily slowing to a trickle, I took a hard look down the long, dark path that lay ahead.

Time to go to Ponyville, I thought with nothing approaching a sufficient amount of dread.

Achievement Unlocked!  Press Shift + Tab to view.

And Hell Followed With Him - Escape Black Mane West!

C H λ P T E R  F I V E :

WE DON’T GO TO PONYVILLE

Though the moon shone over Ponyville, the long-abandoned town was not dark, as it should have been: Rarity saw to that.  When she wasn’t slaving away in her fashion workshop like an unpaid zebra immigrant or performing field trials of experimental beauty products on her plentiful test subjects, she was patrolling the rooftops and sidestreets of her place of birth, repairing the severed and frayed strings of copper and aluminum that were all that remained of the murdered town’s electrical infrastructure.

She never bothered with the protective rubber coating; if anything, she made sure the uninsulated wires were extra saggy, as she was fairly certain that nopony would shed a tear were anything to accidentally brush up against the ‘hot’ power lines and fry to a crisp.  In fact, whenever that did happen, it seemed to be a real crowd-pleaser, as the corpse would be devoured within minutes, sometimes less.

One day, she thought.  One day this town will be beautiful again.  Like Canterlot used to be.

The obnoxious fidgeting and struggling of her restless companions snapped her back to the present and the reason she was there.  Rarity turned around and grinned from ear to ear as she surveyed her decorative handiwork.  She had been planning this party for weeks now, and tonight, at last, was the night.  The hoof-crafted everwood table, white lacy linen, and superficial decorative fluff had, of course, all been prepped and ready for days now.

This particular tea party, however, had been held up for what seemed like ages waiting for its special guest, for whom Rarity had busied herself sewing up some extra-large fabric harnesses, even breaking out the leather she’d been saving ever since she’d found an expired cow spoiling in the sun.  She was sure the poor old dear would be happy that her body was being used to make the world a more fashionable place.

“Sweetie Belle, Scootaloo, you remember old Mister Biggs, don’t you?” Rarity inquired of what appeared to be the decaying corpses of two middle-aged mares, anxiously fidgeting in their custom-tailored bonds, securely anchored to the floor with tightly-woven threads of a particularly rare and expensive material that had more tensile strength per cubic millimeter than spider’s silk.

“Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuunnnnnnnnnhhhhhhhhhhhhrckkclllleee,” they responded in unison, the headcrabs sitting atop their skulls visibly twitching with anxiety as the stench from the poison zombie they were being forced to have tea with wafted over to the scent glands embedded in their sickly pale skin.

Rarity let out a polite giggle as she explained, “Yes, it was quite a job getting him to come out of that dusty old pantry in Sugarcube Corner – you know, the one on Sunset Boulevard?” she asked, taking their blank stares and strained, ragged wheezes to mean that yes, they did understand which Sugarcube Corner she was referring to.  She sincerely hoped that they were as thrilled as she was to have the former proprietor of her absolute favorite bakery in all of Ponyville over for tea.

Mister Biggs spoke up.  “Beuh.  Beaahy?  Bay?”

“I’m sorry, Mister Biggs, what was that?  Bake?  Baked?  No, I’m afraid there won’t be any baked goods at this particular soirée, just tea,”  Rarity responded in her polite, lady-like voice.  It was a voice that had remained quite sing-song despite her advanced age - though if you asked her, without a doubt, she would insist that she wasn’t a day older than fifty;  Truth be told, she’d celebrated her fiftieth birthday more than a decade ago.  Being the bearer of the Element of Generosity allowed her to be a liar, so long as she was a generous one.  She leaned forward a bit to stare at the abominable creature sitting across from her, saying in a low whisper,

“Though I’m sure that won’t be a problem will it?”

The charcoal-black headcrabs pulsated as they fed on their cinnamon-brown mother, rather giving the xenomorphic headcrab-concubine the appearance of a chocolate chip cookie.

A big, fat, grumpy chocolate chip cookie, Rarity thought as Mister Biggs let out a deep, throaty, growl.

The poison zombie’s territorial vocalization caused Scootaloo to begin straining anew at her elegantly woven, hoof-stitched harness, flapping her useless wings that had long ago been ‘processed’ at Canterlot.  However, the headcrab possessing Sweetie Belle, even with its tiny rodent-like brain, knew better than to try to escape from its lacy, frou-frou restraints.

Rarity smiled and leaned further forward, “...Because if it is going to be a problem, we can stop tea-time, and you can be just another martyr for fashion.”  Outside the modestly decorated, but generously proportioned window, visible on the street below, was a contraption composed of an opposing pair of conjoined, magically-enchanted blades salvaged from a cloth-cutting table, spinning about the axis of a jury-rigged metallic pole embedded in the cobblestone.  The area immediately surrounding the apparatus was encircled by dark-red blood stains and spatter marks that, despite her best efforts, the white unicorn could never seem to completely get rid of.

Mister Biggs resumed his silence as Rarity, ever the proper hostess, levitated the delicate white ceramic kettle up from the silver platter it rested on, and poured her guests their individual cups of tea, the steaming, sweet-smelling liquid almost seeming to calm the zombie-ponies gathered around the table.

Sweetie Belle’s headcrab, again proving itself to be a savant amongst its peers, momentarily considered unlatching itself from its host – leaving her to die - and leaping onto Rarity’s inviting skull, but thought, Nah, probably not worth it.  This singular exhibition of intelligence would remain unsurpassed by any member of its genus for exactly 7,447 years and six days, though what, exactly was the cause of its remarkable cognition in the first place would continue to be a topic of heated debate in the scientific community for centuries afterwards.

“Oh, Scootaloo, I’ve been meaning to tell you how sorry I am that the whole ‘Wonderbolts’ thing didn’t pan out like you wanted.”  Rarity turned her head to the side and her eyes went lazy as she responded to her own statement.

“But Rarity!  That happened years ago!  Are you saying you just found out!?”

She gave a little frown and said, “Oh my dear, I’ve just been so busy running this boutique ALL BY MYSELF and filling all of my many, many customers’ orders ALL BY MYSELF, I just haven’t had time to keep up with current events.  I mean, goodness, I was hardly even aware there was a war on, if you can believe it!  HAHAHAHHAHAHAHAH!!”  Rarity erupted into insane laughter that startled every zombie in the room.

One of the poison headcrabs slowly and silently began to detach itself from old Mister Biggs, perhaps sensing an opportunity, or perhaps simply as an instinctual reaction to the sudden noise and vibration.

Ponyville’s premier fashionista transitioned back to her lazy-eyed expression, and spoke in a caricature of Scootaloo’s voice. “I’m so sorry, Rarity.  I shouldn’t have rushed to judgment without getting all of the facts first!”

The poison headcrab’s elongated front pincers tensed against its mother’s body as it prepared to execute what eons of natural selection in its extremely hostile native environment had crowned as a winning survival strategy:  Leap, latch, and possess.

“Apology accepted, Scootaloo.”

The crab leapt towards Rarity’s head, and the instant it did so, there was a sound like thunder that rattled the window accentuating the crescent-shaped room, as well as temporarily deafening the guests of the tea party.

The pitch-black neural parasite spun end over end until it collided against the far wall with a loud, wet smack.  The unicorn hostess magically cocked back the hammer of her lovingly crafted, beautifully decorated revolver floating obediently at her side, cycling the next brass slug into the delicately rifled firing chamber.  It was her second-favorite gun next to her beloved Opal.

“Mister Biggs, you insult me!”  She laughed with a faux-indignity, as the poison zombie’s remaining children huddled against their fat, warm mother in fear at the loud and sudden noise.

Rarity’s face abruptly contorted into an extremely cross expression, revealing the first glimpse of age-lines that unfortunately managed to somehow exist despite her lifetime of obsessive-compulsive spa treatments.

“Now drink your cuddling tea or the next bullet goes into the big one up top.”

------------------------------λ------------------------------

Oh shit.  Oh SHIT!

“Gordon, where are you going!?”  Alyx demanded as I telekinetically raised the heavy garage door that sealed off the old tunnel to Ponyville.  The action was made nearly effortless by my Hazard Suit’s miraculous property of amplifying my inherent unicorn magic.

“I freaking – just – just hold on a second, I’ll be right back, I... I forgot something!”  I hollered over my shoulder as I mentally facehoofed my forehead like I was trying to smash an allegorical mosquito.

You forgot the most powerful magical artifacts in existence, you IDIOT.

I don’t know, I guess my mind had been somewhere else.  Maybe it had something to do with the trauma of listening to Twilight get her brains sucked out by a monstrous alien being that seemed to regard one of the greatest minds of our time as something less than an animal.  Or maybe I was just incredibly forgetful.

I burst into the empty laboratory, whispering a quick prayer to the Princesses that it would remain empty for just a few more moments.

Speaking of Twilight’s brains... ah, there it is.  The left forearm of the enormous bipedal creature that had been addressed as Wyandotte still lay on the ground in a quickly-congealing pool of blood, right where it had fallen.  Only the thinnest ring of dark red could be seen forming on the outer rim, indicating it was still fresh, and, I thought with a sudden retch, warm.  I suppressed the urge to vomit as I looked at the device’s left canister, the one with Twilight’s mind inside of it.

Nopony deserves to die like that.  Well, except maybe Dr. Breen, I thought with a sudden lust for... not vengeance, per se... justice.  Justice was what I desired to be done unto the bad doctor - The betrayer of all of Ponydom, and the enemy of all who live free.

I searched the workstation Twilight had shown me herself just hours previous;  The olive-green box had been torn open, its contents dumped on the floor.  I really, truly was not surprised, and I knew who did it.  I shuddered to think how strong those creatures must have been in their power-armor, that they could just tear open a sturdy metal container like that.  A quick glance inside confirmed my fear;  the jewelry box was gone.

Celestiadamnit.  Cherry Blossom must have told them where they were.  They were supposed to be secret, but I suppose you can’t keep anything secret from a spy, can you?  Now the Elements of Harmony were in the Combine’s hands, and Celestia knows if we would ever get them back.

That whore probably just doomed our entire species.

I bucked away the empty container in anger, and it ricocheted off the front of a neighboring workstation.

“HOW MUCH DID THEY PAY YOU!?”

I turned to give Cherry’s bloated corpse a death-stare, the bloodstain from her violent demise easily visible on the ajar lab door, which was still swinging lazily from when I burst through it in a panic moments before, hanging a bit lopsidedly as its bottom hinge was missing.

It isn’t FAIR, I thought angrily.  Twilight had to listen to death coming for her, feel the needle pressed against her skull while commanding her daughter to look away, but Cherry?  Cherry Blossom’s death was as unanticipated as it gets, instantaneous, and probably painless to boot!

“WAS IT WORTH IT!?”

Drawn to the commotion, Alyx galloped in, stopping just inside the entrance.  “Gordon!  What the hell are you doing in here!?  We have to leave before they start flooding the place with pony-hacks!”

“With what!?”  I exclaimed, still enraged at the dead Cherry.

“You don’t want to know,”  Alyx said with a sinister look.  “What were you looking for in here?”

“You don’t want to know,”  I tried my best to mimic the look she gave me, causing the mentally and emotionally exhausted Alyx to roll her eyes and sigh.

Just something your mom spent the last decade and final moments of her life hiding and protecting, something that was lost almost as soon as I came anywhere near it, I thought with more than a little bitter self-loathing.

I was angry at myself for not doing more, for not doing anything, for just standing there like a celestiadamned deer in the head-lamps, as if I was waiting for the monsters to make the first move.  Maybe there wasn’t much I could have done, but I could have at least tried to save my Cerb friend, whose body joined Cherry’s, Twilight’s, and part of one of those bipedal creatures on the floor of the laboratory.

I hoped that one of the things Spike was planning to do before he got the freaking heck out of here was grab – at the very least - Twilight’s body, and take her someplace peaceful and beautiful, someplace far away from the miserable pit of death and despair that Black Mane West had become.

It was too much, too much, too many good ponies (and Cerberi) had died in front of me.  Died protecting me.  I thought back to the top of that skyscraper in City 7, how I had been shoved out of the line of fire of a Combine attack helicopter, and then watched as everypony else on that rooftop was transmuted into smoke and echoes.  And who had they been looking for?  Me.  The One With The Free Mane, the Chosen of Luna.

As my hoofsteps grew heavier and more reluctant, and the path they trod waned ever darker, I asked the Goddess Luna if it was true, if I was her ‘chosen’, whatever the darn that means.  I didn’t get an answer, but I did look up, and saw Alyx.  Her head drooped towards the ground, her beautiful black mane falling to the sides and covering her face.

Oh yeah, I’m not the only pony who’s got it rough right now, I thought, ashamed at my self-pity as I was reminded that Alyx had just personally witnessed her mother’s brutal murder.  Instantly, I imagined Princess Luna on a cloud or a balcony or something, looking down at me while rolling her cyan-blue eyes and shaking her head, “Ya think?”

I silently prayed to the deity-rulers of Equestria that the souls of the recently departed would have safe passage to whatever mystery lay beyond this world.  Except for Cherry Blossom.  I prayed that if indeed the Princesses had the power to do so, that they would cast her down into the deepest fathomable pits of that special part of double under-hell reserved for traitors, right beside Doctor Breen himself.

Not that I’m bitter or anything.  Okay, maybe a little bitter.

As Alyx and I made our solemn procession down that long, dark tunnel that lay beyond the warning signs, I silently dreaded not just the road immediately ahead, but the task that waited for us beyond Ponyville - should we survive the ordeal, of course.  The ‘Plan C’ that Twilight had described to me was now the only plan.

It was now a certainty that we, the Resistance, would have to end the Combine occupation of Equestria without even the possibility, the mad hope, that we might be able to use the Elements of Harmony to wash away our enemies and set everything back to the way it was before The Seven Minute’s War, before the Black Mane Incident, and before all of this muleshit that had taken my world, and turned it inside-out, upside-down and ass-backwards.  And it was all because of TRAITORS.

Traitors like Walrus Breen and Cherry Blossom, the latter of whom I actually hated more at that moment than the former.  That bitch had ushered me into Black Mane West knowing full well it was supposed to be my grave, along with Twilight, Alyx, and everypony else who resisted enslavement at the hooves (or whatever they had) of the Universal Union.

Well, best laid plans, Cherry.  Looks like they’ll have to move our headstones half a click east, I cynically thought as I checked on Alyx once more, who was reluctantly leading the way through the unfamiliar territory.  The mare was deathly silent, no doubt consumed by thoughts of her deceased mother.

We passed by the last functioning emergency floodlight, and I flipped on my HEV suit’s pretentiously-named ‘hazard light’ in an attempt to dispel some small amount of the encroaching darkness that pressed in on us from all sides, reaching out to smother us, suffocate us - kill us on the way to our execution.

------------------------------λ------------------------------

Ponyville.

More specifically, the Ponyville Library, which had long since reverted from being a public repository of books to serve as the private residence of a certain purple unicorn, apparently at the behest of Princess Celestia herself, or so Alyx told me.

“So this... was your home?”  I asked Alyx, surveying the disaster scene above, below, and surrounding me on all sides.

“Was.  Yeah.”  She replied with no inflection or emotion.

I’d seen this coming;  The long, narrow tunnel that led from the hallway outside Twilight’s lab to the fireplace on the bottom floor of the Ponyville Library had been littered with long-dead headcrabs and a pair of hideously deformed corpses that looked like they had been lying  there since... well, you know, since the day Ponyville died.  I knew that we were walking through the gates of hell.  I just didn’t expect it to be so personal.

In places, Alyx’s childhood home looked like ponies had been living here just yesterday.  Sitting on an end table was a large burgundy novel, lying face-down next to a coffee mug whose contents had somehow escaped total evaporation over the years, and now contained a putrid, moldy, blackish sludge resting in its bottom.  I hoped that whatever the substance was wouldn’t try to crawl out, and considering the things I’ve seen, I’m not quite sure if I was joking when I said that.

As I observed the scene, a little narrative formed in my head to explain how it had come to be.  I imagined that somepony had been reading a book while enjoying a hot cup of joe, and had set them down on that end table when they got up - perhaps to answer the door, or stir a pot of stew - intending to come right back and pick up where they left off.  Probably a unicorn, you would think, given our particular affinity for picking up objects that we are studying, as opposed to laying them flat on a surface like an earth-pony or pegasus would.  And since Twilight was gone that day... Alyx must have been reading this.  And here it’s sat for four years, waiting for her to come back.

I picked it up, and instantly regretted doing so.  The hard cover was liberated from the spine, leaving the pages stuck to the table.  I examined the book’s cover, and any question as to who had been reading it instantly evaporated.

“The Very Best of Foto Finish:  STALLION EDITION?!”  I spurted out between uncontrollable fits of extremely immature giggling.

Alyx came galloping over and wrestled the shorn-off cover from my magical grip.  “What th-  where’s the rest of it!?”  she hotly demanded.

“Right here,”  I smugly replied, and my horn flared as I tore the rest of the incriminating evidence from the table’s surface.  However, two of the pages were left behind, the years of mold causing them to stubbornly cling to the varnish.  I turned on my hazard light and saw a pair of handsome stallions emblazoned across the pages, striking poses for their unseen photographer.  The yellowish one had his head thrown back in a hearty laugh, his perfectly-kept blonde mane falling in front of his eyes as he did so, and the bright red one – I swear to Princess Celestia - had his back to the camera with his head halfway turned around to face it, his hoof up to his mouth, and an expression on his face like he had just been caught doing something bad.

“GIVE ME THOSE!”  Alyx yelled, her cheeks filled with more blood than I thought she had in her.  The stack of papers still suspended in the musty air were yanked from their position of unrest with so much force I wondered if I could have stopped her if I tried, even with my suit’s telekinetic amplification.  No surprise there, I guess;  She was the daughter of Twilight Sparkle, a unicorn so powerful that local legend had her lifting an Ursa Minor straight into the air after it unexpectedly came rampaging into Ponyville – An event that I kept meaning to ask her about while we were still colleagues back at Black Mane.  Well, colleagues might be a bit of a stretch, as our fields of specialty were quite disparate, but we would still occasionally bump into one another.

Alyx threw the book back together, and - probably out of force of habit, as I couldn’t think of any other reason as to why she would do so - carefully filed it back into place on a bookshelf of the long-abandoned library.

I cleared my throat.  “You, uhm... m-missed a couple...”  I stammered, feeling as if I was about to burst from my repressed laughter, and I placed a bright spotlight on the somewhat suggestive photographs that still clung to the table.  Alyx gasped in horror, and scrambled over to rip them off, only succeeding partially:  The pages tore unevenly, leaving behind a jagged scrap stuck to the varnish bearing the most unfortunate depiction of a stallion’s big red ass, a cutie mark of a large green apple still visible on his flank.

Alyx sighed in defeat.  “I, uh... I... I had very liberal parents, okay?”  Her amber-brown eyes pleaded with me to just let it go, and I acquiesced.

Nodding quietly to signal I understood, I carried on surveying the interior of the Library as the ever-resourceful mare turned away to go poke about the wreckage, looking for something that would help us survive the night in this hell-town until Spike finished doing whatever it was he was doing back at BMW that was so important.

The bookshelf Alyx had placed “The Very Best of Foto Finish” on was one of literally hundreds - Covering virtually every available space on the walls were lovingly crafted antique bookshelves carved into the ancient wood of the trunk itself, and stuffed full of obsessively organized, classified, and catalogued literature.  I was surprised the Combine hadn’t confiscated them, as they were doubtlessly subversive and dangerous.  It was probably another one of those under-the-table ‘concessions’ given by the local occupational government in an effort to reduce the number of headless CPs that would show up on the streets in the mornings.

I compared what I saw to Alyx’s emotional recollection, and found the state of the Library to be pretty much exactly as she had described.  Littering the polished redwood floor was a chaos of toppled furniture, splintered wood, scattered books, and broken glass.  The section of the huge room that had been exposed to the elements for several years thanks to the massive, gaping hole left by the mortar shell was rotten, faded, and decaying, and it smelt it too;  Just moldy, rotting wood and... a few other things I couldn’t quite put my nose on.  Its decomposing state was in pretty stark contrast to the other half of the room, left largely untouched by the rain and the sun.  Curiously, there were no insects or rodents that I could see.  I wondered why they would avoid such a seemingly perfect habitat.

My eyes moved to the steel-black headcrab canister that sat halfway plunged into the splintered floorboards of the Library’s equivalent to an atrium, almost in the exact center.  I interpreted that to mean that the Combine’s mortar synths - described to me by Spike on our somber aerial tour of Ponyville - had very, very good aim.  I also took it to mean that the Combine really, really didn’t like Twilight Sparkle or her family, who consistently denied that they were in any way affiliated with the Resistance, and stubbornly maintained that Twilight had died during the Seven Minute War - along with hundreds of thousands of others who would never be identified, buried, or remembered.  Based off of her description of that deceptively beautiful, moonlit night when everypony who had committed the crime of living in Ponyville was sentenced to a fate worse than death, the Library had already been lost by the time Alyx and Spike reached it while shells continued to rain down all around them - which must have meant that her house was one of the first to be hit.  Maybe the first.

I checked on Alyx to see how she was taking all this.  A black fire-poker floated in front of her, surrounded by that familiar sky-blue aura of her magic.  She was doing her best to shake loose the sticky bone fragments that still clung to the skewer, years after she had used the tool to impale the parasitic creatures that had been deployed as weapons to dispose of her and her family.

“Alyx, are you alright?”  I asked.

She completely ignored me, content to go on collecting and cleaning fire-pokers.

“Alyx?”  I persisted.

”My mom used to ask me that all the time.  ‘Are you all right, are you all right?’”

She threw the metal rods onto the floor, making an unbelievable racket as they clattered together into a tiny pile, looking like tiny logs sawed by the world’s smallest lumberjack.

“I think...”  she began,  “I think the only time I actually did something my mother told me to do was when...  was when I closed my eyes... so that I...”

In an admittedly rare moment of emotional sensitivity, I galloped over and threw both of my forelegs around her, squeezing tight.  Only the most instinctual, subconscious part of her accepted any part of my embrace.  The rest was back in that lab, pinned to that wall by an unfeeling mechanical monster, helpless, powerless, and soon to be an orphan.

“...didn’t have to see her die...”  Alyx shed no tears;  She had none left.

“Come on, Alyx, that’s not true.  I’m sure you did plenty of things your mom asked you to,”  I said, trying to cheer her up.

She shook her head, her disheveled, but still beautiful black mane falling into her eyes.

“No, I didn’t,”  she replied with cold bluntness.  “We had a non-traditional family, Gordon.  My father, yeah, sure, he practically never left the house, but my mom - Twilight, she was never really... no, I’m not going to say that,” she said with sudden heat.

“She was there, she tried, but I was too celestiadamned stubborn to let her in!” she said with a forceful stomp of her hoof that sent at least one of the metallic rods rolling in the opposite direction, as if fleeing in terror.

I hated seeing her this way.  I hated it more than anything I could think of, including Dr. Breen and the Combine, the aliens who killed her mother, and the ponies who sold out every mare, stallion, and foal who lived in this town;  More than any of those things, I hated seeing Alyx cry.  Some primal, instinctual part of me wanted to go and kill whatever wretched thing was causing her this misery, but unfortunately that primitive, animalistic response was comically inadequate for the social situations and societies that came with sentience and a soul.  I did not know how to comfort those mourning the loss of somepony they loved.  No more than I knew what words to say to comfort a dying pony.  No more than I knew what it was like to be in love with somepony who loved me back.

“Alyx?”  I whispered, my head so close to hers, I could feel the warmth radiating from her cheek.

She violently pulled away.  “WILL YOU JUST SHUT UP, GORDON!?  JUST - ”  Her head drooped back to the ground.

My ears twitched.  I heard the creak of a door opening.  It sounded like it had come from the other side of the enormous pile of wreckage that dominated the main room.

“...And now I’m yelling at the one pony in the entire world that’s trying to help me.  Doesn’t that sound just like me?” Alyx said with a cynical chuckle as I rapidly cycled through my extremely sparse inventory, my selection box finally settling on that curious little revolver that one of the sentry ponies at Black Mane West had given me before they took off – I couldn’t remember if it was Dreyfus or Drew, they tended to blend together in my mind.

Alyx sounded rather perturbed as she said, “Gordon?  What are you doing, checking your mail?  Have I been talking to a wall this whole time?”

I saw it before I heard or smelled it.  It cast an abnormal shadow in the ghostly moonlight that filtered in through the jagged hole created by the mortar shell, and it moved with this whisper-quiet, awkward, shuffling gait - like its ankles were broken, or its hooves had an infection, but it just kept walking on them anyway.  Luna, it was huge compared to the zombies I’d killed at Black Mane, in fact, it... could it be?... it looked like it was... covered in headcrabs.

“Gordon?  Are you ignoring me?”  Alyx said, sounding extremely annoyed, as I selected the silver revolver from my inventory screen, and my suit’s spell-casting computer gracefully brought it to bear, the targeting reticule projected onto my glasses turning a dark orange as it hovered over the hulking form that was rapidly filling my vision.

The thing growled like a feral wolf that had had its throat torn open and stuffed full of rocks.  I squeezed the revolver’s trigger with my mind, and Alyx disappeared from my vision.

The pistol bucked like a bull, sending my targeting reticule soaring towards the ceiling, and I was suddenly thankful I wasn’t holding it in my mouth.  I readjusted my aim, and squeezed off another round into its center of mass.  One, two, three, four more times I shot it, watching several of the dark tumors covering its body drop to the floor, dead, but the incarnate horror of flesh and blood continued moving towards me.

“Ammunition depleted,” my HEV suit cheerfully informed me.  Cuddle.

It bent down and grabbed one of the charcoal-black headcrabs in its gumless jaw, and I saw that its eyes were obscured by another one that was hugging its face.  It tossed one of the little neural parasites towards me, which I had never seen a zombie do before.  The doughy creature managed to grapple one of its ‘pincers’ around my carbon-fiber covered neck, and proceeded to sink its wretched little teeth straight through the polymer and into my flesh while somewhere, Alyx screamed.

I felt a warm, wet stickiness begin to run down my neck as the headcrab purred in delight at finding a new host body.  I think I heard my suit say, ‘Warning... something something detected...’ and I don’t know what all else, I was rather distracted with fighting through blinding pain to try and shake the headcrab off my neck while simultaneously avoiding the abomination that threw it, and also avoiding tripping over the copious amounts of debris that suddenly seemed to be present everywhere my hooves wanted to be.

Gordon, a highly rational and logical part of my mind began, You’re a unicorn.

Oh, yeah!  I can use magic!  Because that’s what unicorns do!

Yes, Gordon, n-

They use magic to do stuff!

Uh-huh, now, list-

I could use my magic to grab this cuddling little cuddle, and-

Gordon-

And throw his cuddling little ass into the cuddling air-

Gordon...

And then BAM!  Wham!  Bam!  Thank you good sir or madam!

GORDON!  JUST SHUT UP AND DO IT!!  one of the many voices in my head commanded.

I reached out with my mind and wrapped the little headhumper in magical energy, and in a single action pried it from my neck and sent it shooting towards the Library’s ceiling high above.  I watched, entranced, as it tumbled end over end, spinning in place, rather reminding me of a baseball.

A big, black, baseball.

Roight.

I selected the crowbar from my inventory, and it floated over to my muzzle.

Right!

I bit down on the cold, hard steel as the headcrab passed the vertex of its flight path.

Accent!

I kept my eye on the ball as I drew back and swung just like my little pony league coach had taught me.

She had taught me well.  The handypony’s best friend connected with the soft flesh of the black headcrab, and there was simultaneously a loud, wet smack and a satisfying crunch that rattled my teeth and briefly caused bells to ring in my ears.  The little ball of annoyance went sailing across the room to my extreme left, where it smashed through a very dirty window, and unceremoniously exited the Ponyville Library, leaving a roughly headcrab-shaped hole in the pane of glass to permanently mark its point of egress.

I frowned.  Too far left.  Foul ball.

I looked back at the impromptu pitcher just in time to see an iron fire-poker surrounded by a sky-blue halo skewer both its head and its crab.  I shifted my gaze upward to see Alyx standing atop an overturned bookcase content to lean over the back of an old leather couch, a look of grim satisfaction plastered across her face, and I believe I was more in love with her right at that moment than at any other time in my life.

The hellish creature crumpled to the floor, and the little headcrabs that covered it like cancerous warts began unlatching themselves from the thing’s abdomen, which had been bent and twisted to the point that it barely resembled a pony’s.  It looked as if the greedy little parasites had been sucking out every last bit of sustenance they could get from the piteous thing’s body;  Its ribcage was clearly visible straining against its epidermis - dry, flaky and stretched taut by a perpetual deprivation of hydration and nutrients - and I now saw that whatever could be said to remain of its fur was so filthy and disfigured and sick, it could have once been anything from white to black to every color in between.

As Alyx sprightly hopped down from her perch atop the bookcase, one of the fat little cuddlers finished disconnecting from its wretched mother and began dragging itself towards her.  I rolled my eyes, raised my polymorphous Twitanium-shoed hoof high into the air, and brought it down on the little guy as hard as I possibly could.  The crab exploded underneath like a big, fat bismarck with extra bloody filling.

Oh my goddesses, we had so much fun stomping on all those defenseless little baby headcrabs!  It was like popping bubble-wrap.  Bubble-wrap that was squishy on the outside, crunchy on the inside, and filled with blood and guts!  And, oh, they made these adorable little noises when you crushed them under your hoof, like eee!  Bweee!  Bleewaaahh!

------------------------------λ------------------------------

Stompy stompy stompy stompy...

“Gordon -”  came a voice from somewhere in the darkness.

Die! Die! Die! Die! Die! Die!  was all I could think as I enthusiastically acted out my long-suppressed and perpetually insatiated primeval bloodlust.

“Gordon, I think they’re dead.  You can stop.”  Though the voice was faint and distant, I had a nagging suspicion that it belonged to somepony I knew.  In fact, it sounded a lot like... what’s her name... starts with an ‘A’...

“GORDON!  YOU CAN’T KILL THEM ANY MORE THAN THEY’VE ALREADY BEEN KILLED!”

Alice?  Ellis?  No, no, it starts with an A... Alyx!  That’s her name!

“Oh, phooey,”  I pouted as I gave in to the pushy mare’s demands, thereby breaking my near-total immersion in my game of stompstompstomp.  It wasn’t fair;  Smashing baby headcrabs sent an intoxicating jolt of electricity to my pleasure centers from a very primitive part of my brain that otherwise hardly ever got any attention, and simultaneously compelled my diencephalon to release a flood of hormones that further eased any societally-imposed aversions to violence that may have otherwise stood in the way of continued and uninterrupted stomping.

However, my mind was very quickly snapped back to a cruel and joyless reality deprived of the indescribable ecstasy of curb-stomping headcrabs when I felt something warm and wet slide across the area of my neck where my HEV suit’s flexible mesh had been bitten through by a certain charcoal-black baseball.

“What the hell is that!?”  I yelped in fright, whipping my head this way and that as I tried to get a bead on whatever new nightmarish aberration was trying to devour me.

Alyx gave a little huff just like her mom used to.

“I’m cleaning your wound, Gordon,”  she explained before spitting out a mouthful of red liquid ont...  Dear sweet newborn Luna, is that my blood in her mouth!?

“Dear sweet newborn Luna, is that my blood in your mouth!?”  I exclaimed with shock and disgust, feeling just a little bit violated that my female counterpart was taking a part of my body without even asking.

“Gordon, that headcrab that chomped into your neck could’ve been carrying all kinds of diseases, toxins, poisons, and Celestia knows what else,”  she explained, trying to calm me down.  “All I’m trying to do is suck out all that nasty crud before it sinks any further into your system.”

“Yeah, and then it winds up in your mouth,”  I said with just as much disgust as before.

“Believe it or not, that’s not as bad as it sounds, medically speaking,”  she chimed with a kind of smartness that sounded scarily similar to her mother.

I reached a hoof up to feel the bite-mark that would’ve hurt a lot more than it did were it not for that most miraculous of ponydom’s inventions, morphine, which had been intravenously delivered to my bloodstream via my HEV suit’s auto-injectors, which also deserved an honorable mention amongst ponydom’s greatest inventions.  A flap of the matte-black mesh that was supposed to protect my neck hung from the crooked incision created by the headcrab’s nasty little teeth.

“I’m fairly certain that licking somepony’s open wound is not sanitary,”  I scolded Alyx.

“Neither is biting somepony, but that didn’t stop the headhumper - and besides, you won’t get sick from me;  We’ve already... well... you know...”

“Swapped spit?”  I said with a grin the size of a billboard.

My female companion ever-so-delicately put a hoof to her face.  “Yes, Gordon.  That... *sigh* that is a very... poetic way of describing the act of kissing.  Now, if you’ll excuse me...”

I felt the warm, wet, sticky thing on my neck again, except this time I was quite well aware that it was Alyx’s lips.  That knowledge probably would have made me all warm and sweaty if it weren’t for the immediately following sensation of having MY BLOOD SUCKED OUT OF ME.  I found the experience so disturbing, it more than cancelled out any sexiness that might have otherwise been inherent in the act, and instead somehow managed to creep me out more than the trotting headcrab-factory whose babies we had just spent the past five minutes sending to headcrab heaven.

My Little Vampire spat out a final mouthful of MY BLOOD onto the waxed redwood floorboards.

“Okay, *spit*, that should be *plleagh!* that shoul- hol’ on - *ppbbst!* that should be most of it, Gordon!”

I breathed a healthy sigh of relief and massaged the bite-mark with my hoof, praying that the next time her mouth was on my neck, it would be for non-medical reasons.

“You don’t think that those things are poisonous, do you, Alyx?”  I looked back at my newfound healer, frankly amazed that she had been thinking that much of me and my well-being, even in this place - the shattered ruins of her childhood home – even at this time – hardly a few hours after she had personally witnessed her mother’s murder.  That she was still thinking about me, and my problems after all that... it was amazing.

Alyx had taken a little metal flask out of her vest, and was in the process of gurgling the liquid in order to wash the coppery taste of selflessness out of her mouth.

She was amazing.

“I don’t know, Gordon.  *spit*  I’ve heard of poison headcrabs and poison zombies, but I’ve never seen one, and I don’t intend to.  Or at least, I didn’t.”  She floated the flask back into its little pouch, swapping it for her strange burst-firing pistol.  Its polished-silver barrel glinted in the light from the full moon as a long, mournful wail floated in from the jagged hole in the far wall of the Library.

“How many clips do you have for that thing?”  I asked with sudden anxiety, and perhaps just a hint of jealousy.  It looked really cool.

She smiled as she said,  “Five or six.  You know where I got this thing?”

“No, where?”  I asked, taking the bait to her obvious set-up.  I knew that she wasn’t actually asking me where she obtained the weapon, she was just trying to trick me into asking her where she got it so she could tell some big, long-winded story ab-

“You won’t believe this, but a witch-doctor gave it to me for my sixteenth birthday!”  she squealed.  “She said to me, ‘Young lady, now that you are legal, you’re going to need a deagle!’”  Alyx rhymed in a humorous imitation of an old mare’s voice.  I smiled at her;  I was glad to see her mood was finally beginning to improve.  She had been completely silent and withdrawn the whole trip over here, consumed by thoughts of her mother.  I figured we probably wouldn’t survive the night if she stayed that way.

Now, I had never been to a zombie-infested hell-town before, so, granted, my experience in these matters was limited, but based on the fact that we hadn’t been here for five minutes before we were attacked by a hulking abomination that would scare the darkness out of Nightmare Moon, I was increasingly cognizant of the fact that our probability of survival in this environment was... doubtful at best.

Frowning at that assessment, I looked to divine intervention to see us through the hordes of metaphorical undead.  I prayed to Luna and Celestia, the bringers of night and day, and the unjustly deposed rulers of Equestria, that they would somehow compel Spike to hurry the buck up with whatever it was he was doing back at Black Mane West that was so freaking important it warranted sending us both to Ponyville to wait for him while he did it.

I checked my inventory, finding the graphical icon that denoted my six-shooter pistol to be highlighted in red, meaning I had no remaining compatible ammo, as a pair of long, unnatural moans once again filled my scared pony ears.  They must have been responding to the first call.  Like wolves, I realized.  I looked at the full moon through the involuntarily-constructed skylight in the wall of the Library with my brow furrowed in worry.  Whatever these ponies had been turned into, they were now howling at the moon like wolves.

That... that was unsettling.

I did an inventory of my inventory:  1 empty revolver, 1 SMG, 1 clip of SMG ammo, 1 crowbar, 1 map of City 7, and 2 empty satchels.  That’s it.  That’s it!?  I didn’t have any food or water, any medical supplies, and a grand freaking total of two guns, one of which had no ammo.

I believed that Luna and Celestia were watching over us, sure, but I didn’t want to make it any harder for them to help us than it already was.

“Alyx, do you have any food, or drink?”

She paused, and opened the flap of her jean-vest.  “Got some oatbars, and whatever’s left in this flask.”

“Okay, okay, good, and much, much more importantly – do you know of any place where there are some spare Siddhartha Mathis Guptas lying around?”  Siddhartha Mathis Gupta was the innovator, entrepreneur, and die-hard gun enthusiast who invented portable automatic weapons, the likes of which are now affectionately nicknamed (and effectively marketed as) SMGs, after his initials.

Her face lit up at the question.  “No, but I know where we can get something better!”  Then her face fell with a sudden dreadful realization.  “Oh, but we’ll have to go into my dad’s bedroom to get it.”

I was anxious to get my hooves on whatever offensive weaponry the Sparkle family had hidden away in their home, and put it to good use holding off the mindless, flesh-eating hordes of zombie-ponies that would doubtlessly be spending the night trying to rend our delicious pony flesh, but I also didn’t want to psychologically traumatize my companion any more than she already was.

“Alyx, if you don’t want to-”

“No, no, no, it’s fine, I’m fine.  I can handle it,”  she assured me.  “His room’s right over here.”

She led me to the stallion’s bedroom, set into the under-hang formed by the winding staircase, and nudged open the already ajar door.  The regal-sized bed that dominated the room had long since been violently stripped of its covers by some zombie that would settle for nothing less than the finest sheets, and the underlying mattress had practically been torn to shreds – as well as, I noted with disgust, pissed on, repeatedly.  This pretty accurately described the whole room, actually.  It looked and smelt like wild animals had been living in it.  Or still are, I thought as I drew my SMG, my only weapon that had any ammo, and swept the room, bathing the ransacked living quarters in light generated by my suit’s nuclear battery.

The room was clear; That hulking zombie we killed in the living room must have been fiercely territorial –  that, or everything else was just smart enough to stay away.  Some deep part of me yearned to investigate further, but my voracious appetite for scientific discovery would have to go unsatiated for the moment, as Alyx was prompting me to help her move an expensive-looking, antique floor-to-ceiling armoire.

“So,”  I began as I strained to shove the ungoddessly heavy piece of furniture that seemingly resisted even my amplified telekinesis,  “The guns are under this thing?”

“Nope,”  Alyx replied.  “Civil Protection seemed to be particularly fond of prying up our floorboards, so we took to hiding crud in the ceiling.”

A wooden panel above us that had previously been concealed by the armoire was enveloped in her now-familiar sky-blue aura, and then shoved up and to the side to reveal a pitch-black cavity in the ceiling.

“Ah, clever,” I said in genuine admiration at their resourcefulness.  I couldn’t imagine what it was like to live under Combine rule, but it looked like the Sparkle family, at least, had adapted quite well.

Alyx fished around the space for a bit, searching it with her mind, until she latched onto what she was looking for.

“HA!”  she exclaimed in triumph, and she began, with some effort, dragging what sounded like a large, heavy metal box towards the gap in the ceiling.  “Now, Gordon, this thing is really, really heavy, and I’m going to need your hWHOAAHHHHH!!”  She screamed as the ceiling, weakened throughout the years by moisture from the same rainwater that had ruined the central floor, gave way to the enormous weight of the container it was now being asked to bear.  Using reflexes I didn’t know I had, I slammed my body into Alyx’s, shoving her out of the path of the free-falling container, which crunched to the floor, sinking into the floorboards up to its lid.

As I coughed to clear my senses of the cloud of dust the box had brought with it into the modestly-sized bedroom, I became aware that my (some might say heroic) action had placed me in a position where I was pinning my possibly-more-than-just-a-friend against the wall in a corner of the room.  I looked down at her, our panting muzzles separated by only a few centimeters of dead, dusty air, and we exchanged awkward smiles before wordlessly separating.  Perhaps a simple ‘thank you’ would have been appropriate, but I let it go.  Maybe she’ll thank me later.

“Starswirl’s beard, that thing is heavy!”  I exclaimed while moving over to inspect the container which had nearly killed us.

“...On account of what’s inside it.  You’re not gonna believe this, Gordon,”  Alyx teased me as she opened the lid of the crooked box.  It was then that I noticed the container was painted with the splotches of white and sky-blue representative of the Royal Equestrian Army.  I came around to the front and confirmed it;  Right below the latch was the emblem of a stylized golden sun, identical to Princess Celestia’s cutie mark.  If I recall correctly, by the time of the Black Mane Incident, only the very latest generation of military equipment had reincorporated Princess Luna’s cutie mark back into the design, which I remember disappointed me greatly, as she was my favorite Goddess.

There were other symbols and an 11-digit serial number along the bottom edge, including the letters ‘CL – 67 LMG/HRR :: SM/AIR’.  I knew that ‘LMG’ stood for ‘Leeroy Mathis Gupta’, Siddhartha’s equally famous brother, and inventor of a more powerful class of weapon now known as ‘LMGs’, but what about the rest?  While Alyx fiddled around with the candy-cane colored wrapping paper, I asked her if she knew what any of the military shorthand meant.

“Class ’67-tier Leeroy Mathis Gupta Heavy Repeater Rifle - ”  she grunted as she tore through the last of the questionably necessary and oddly cheerful packaging material.  “Hey, can you give me a hand?”

I enveloped the massive weapon in magical energy, and before I even brought it to bear, my suit had classified it under a new category that I’d never had anything under before, identifying it as a ‘Saddle-Mounted Anti-Infantry Rifle (REA Special Issue)’.  A semi-transparent yellow window appeared in the center of my vision:

‘WARNING: UID 810308913 has NOT been certified for operation of weapons in this weapon class.  Black Mane Research Facility personnel are required to obtain a separate license of operation for EACH class of weapon that they are authorized to use AND choose to employ.  Authorization does NOT equal certification.  If you feel that you have received this message in error, please contact Chief of Security Barney Ironbuck (00-7752-90).  Thank you, and have a safe and productive day.’

...

...I’d probably laugh if it wasn’t so sad.  While I was doing a little light reading of text that was 7/13 of a millimeter away from my pupils and reminiscing about a time long ago when I gave half a shit about such unnatural constructs as ‘rules’ and ‘regulations’, Alyx had been wandering about the raped and broken ruins of what was once her dad’s bedroom, and was now nothing more than a memorial to a life that no longer existed.  She stopped suddenly, a look of shock on her face, and her horn bathed the room in a soft, blue glow.

“I don’t cuddling believe it.”  She held up... a shoe?  It looked like a shoe.

“Uh... Alyx?”  I said with a raised eyebrow.  My left, I think.

“It’s one of my dad’s slippers!  I can’t believe it’s still here, I mean, look at this place!”  She said with astonishment.

I did as she commanded, and all I saw was the piss-stains on the mattress, and the, I now noticed, brown slipper.

“Er, Alyx, I think that thing might be covered in...”

She looked absolutely insulted as she shot back “Cinnamon-brown was his favorite color!  And Mom knew that so she bought these for him!  They went perfectly with his yellow coat!”

“Okay, okay, sorry, I di-”

“... And he loved them!  He wore them to bed every bucking night!”  She continued, incensed at me for reasons beyond my comprehension.

I quickly whipped around behind me to scan for any unfriendly visitors that might have been drawn to the commotion of Alyx’s ranting about the horse-shoe.  There were none, thank Celestia.  And Luna, probably more so, as night was her domain (and darkness her nomenclature.  See that, teachers?  See that?  I did learn something in citizenship class!)

When I turned back around, I saw Alyx kneeling down on the floor with the bed between us, one of her ears silhouetted against the bright white circle that hung low in the sky outside the shattered bedroom window behind her.  Her forehooves rested on the tattered mattress, and her head was buried in-between them in a spot that was thankfully devoid of any yellow stains.

She yelled into the mattress, “Celestiadamnit, I just blew up at you again.  AGAIN!  Over NOTHING!”

Without hesitation, I holstered the repeater-rifle and circled around to her side of the bed, kneeling down with my foreleg around her, and whispering, “Hey!  Hey, I’m The One With the Free Mane, right?  Don’t worry, I can take whatever you dish out!”  I said with a laugh, trying my best to console her.

That reminded me of an old schoolyard rhyme;  “Parasprites and Poison Joke can eat my lunch and put frogs in my throat- ”

“But words don’t hurt,”  she unenthusiastically mumbled into the mattress.

“Actually, the way I remember it was; ‘But words, being mere verbal incantations employed for the purposes of communication, are incapable of inflicting physical injury as far as science can determine,’ but your way works too,”  I said jokingly.  Half-jokingly, anyway.  I had an... uncommon childhood.

“Gordon,”  she said with a voice that was muffled by the moldy bedspread, “That zombie that I... we killed... do you... do you think it was...”

I interrupted her before she delved any further into that self-destructive line of inquiry, “Alyx, absent of any evidence to the contrary, let’s just assume that it wasn’t.  Okay?”

She said nothing, and I sighed at the floor.

“Listen, I’ve spent years pondering and pondering things that I, as a theoretical physicist, will never, ever, ever know the answer to.  Things that are impossible for anypony to know.  And you know what I’ve learned?”

She found the strength to lift her head up, and she turned to face me, her beautiful brown eyes puffy and red, her mane even more disheveled, and her face now wearing some of the dirt and grit from that filthy mattress she’d been burying it in.

My eyes wandered to focus intensely on a random, dark stain on the bedspread, but my mind was somewhere far away from that place.

“Why destroy yourself thinking about something you can never know the answer to?  When you could be doing anything, anything at all, anything in the whole wide world, but instead you just sit there... and ponder... and ponder... and ponder... something you’ll never, ever know.”

We both sat in silence for a very long time until our thoughts were interrupted by another one of those demonic howls, this one closer and louder than any of the others.

We both snapped back to reality, and Alyx jumped up and unholstered her pistol.  “Right, so... let’s just assume that that... thing, whatever it was, wasn’t him, but was just some zombie.”

I concurred.  “Yes!  It was just some zombie.  Probably not even somepony you know.”

“Yeah, exactly.  Exactly!”  she laughed – which I noted with great relief.  “Just some asshole who probably had it coming anyway!”

As we trotted back through the living room, our guns at the ready and our heads held high for the first time since we arrived in this dead town, Alyx stepped over the zombie’s ruined corpse without batting an eyelash.  I spoke up, having had sufficient time to mull over our options.

“Well, if we’re going to spend the night in this goddesses-forsaken town, we’ll need to do it somewhere that’s easily defensible;  Someplace high up, and isolated from surrounding structures.”

“Carousel Boutique?”  Alyx suggested.

“No,”  I dismissed the idea.  “There’s no way onto the roof, and how’s Spike going to spot us if we’re inside?”

“We could set the roof on fire,”  she said, trying to help.

Unable to tell if she was being serious or just joking, I replied,  “Okay, there are a couple of problems with that, one being that I don’t know any fire spells, do you?”

To my amazement, she answered, “No.”

I was aghast.  “You’re Twilight Sparkle’s daughter and you don’t know any fire spells!?”

“She didn’t want me creating any more trouble than I already was!”  Alyx said in her defense.

“Ugh, okay,”  I said in bewilderment, “We weren’t going to do that anyway.”  I suddenly remembered the little red schoolhouse I’d seen on Spike’s aerial tour, and gasped.

“There’s a schoolhouse not far from here!  It’s isolated from any nearby buildings, we can easily defend it from the roof,  and there’s a little bell tower that collapsed into the building, which should provide us dexterous, athletic ponies a way up, but make it pretty much impossible for any slow, stiff-legged zombies to follow.  It’s perfect!”  I shouted with glee at my stupid plan.

Alyx agreed.  “To the schoolhouse, then.  Though, for the record, I really would have liked to go to the boutique.”

I held open the front door like a true gentlecolt, and as the caramel-coated mare trotted out the doorway, she shot a glance back at the ruined corpse in the living room surrounded by drying blood and the barely-recognizable remains of headcrabs, and in a very un-ladylike manner, shouted  “Ain’t it a bitch!?”

I was about to gasp in shock at the mare’s profanity, and then I remembered how much I’ve been cussing lately.

------------------------------λ------------------------------

I do not believe it is within my capability, as a talentless hack of a writer whose only motivation for taking Lexicon classes was to improve my ability to compose scientific research papers, to accurately describe, really, to do justice, using words, to what it feels like to fire a Saddle-Mounted Anti-Infantry Rifle not using telekinesis, but with one’s own bare hooves.

You see, there’s this wonderful, amazing thing called recoil that you feel when you fire a gun that’s being held against your body, and the SM/AIR delivered more of it, faster, and harder, than any other gun I’d ever used.  It was like cuddling with Death.  It was unforgettable.

*THUNKA-THUNKA-THUNKA-THUNKA-THUNKA*

Two down.  What would the Royal Marines always say when they killed something?

*THUNKTHUNKTHUNKTHUNKTHUNKTHUNK*

The anguished cries of the damned filled my multi-directional ears with pain, torment, and death.  They cried out for peace, and I was the peace-bringer.

LET US REST, LET US REST!

That is what they were trying to tell me.  Those were the tormented lamentations that floated on the wind from Ponyville every night.  They were prayers.  And I was answering them.

*THUNKTHUNKTHUNK*... *THUNKTHUNKTHUNK*... *THUNKA-THUNKA-THUNKA-THUNKA*

Polka.  That’s what the Marines would say.  ‘Polka down.’

The zombies that seemed to be prevalent here were of the same variety I had seen butchering my co-workers back at Black Mane after the Resonance Cascade.  There was the pale little fleshy sac of hell-spawn that sat atop their heads, almost covering their faces, their useless and occasionally entirely missing lower jaws (I remember hearing from one of the medical-type docs who said she’d done a biopsy on one of them, that she’d discovered that the headcrabs would steal calcium from useless parts like the jaw bones if there wasn’t enough osteo-something-something in the host to form the pincers from the forehooves), there was the absolutely horrifying abdominal stomach-mouth that they used to eat, complete with rows of shark-like teeth lining the sides, silhouetted against their colorful internal organs, and then of course, there were the pincers.

The headcrab needed a way to feed both itself and its host, something with a much higher energy concentration than plant matter (and a frustrating tendency to fight back or run away), and since the creatures they were possessing didn’t have any natural weapons... they grew some.  The zombified pony I had seen back at the Library was the first one I knew of that didn’t have its forelegs twisted, mutated, and elongated into razor-sharp pincers that were just perfect for rearing up and tearing into somepony unfortunate enough to get too close.  I’ve seen those things rip apart fully-armored Royal Marines, stallions (if any of those marines were mares, I sure didn’t notice) that could probably bench press two of me, and I’m fairly certain ate nails and other construction materials for breakfast.  That and okra.

One of them was coming right at me – or, I should say, was drunkenly shuffling in my general direction.  It was clear from all of my dealings with the zombay-folke that balancing on folded sets of pincers instead of hooves while navigating entirely by sound (I was pretty sure zombies were blind in addition to dumb) was awkward at best, and at worst, resulted in them tripping and falling into something that killed or permanently crippled them.  The one approaching me, however, had a wound I don’t believe I had ever seen before;  Its neck was torn open, and its head now lazily flopped against its chest at an unnatural angle.  Apparently, zombies could make do without a throat, so long as the spinal cord was intact.

I looked down at my Saddle-Mounted Anti-Infantry Rifle (which I had named Leeroy) and thought,

Well, we can fix that, can’t we?

Standing on my hind legs, I used my forehooves to apply a slight upward pressure to the LMG’s trigger-plate, and there followed a resounding bellow from the tip of the long, steel barrel that was the heavy repeater rifle’s defining characteristic.  My aim, thank you Colt Scouts, was true, and the neck of what was once a pony snapped off completely.  I had only fired a single bullet from the fully-automatic beast, but it had kept on going after it finished the job of severing the zombie’s neck.  The depleted bronium slugs were so gosh-darned heavy that as it slammed into the polka’s chest, its whole body recoiled from the impact, twisting backwards and falling to the cobblestone street, dead as anything could possibly be.

Polka down.  Area secure.

I holstered the SM/AIR and dropped back to the ground on all fours.   As much as I enjoyed firing that thing manually, standing up on your hind legs sure made movement awkward.  I knew, of course, that it was technically designed for use with a compatible combat-saddle and trigger-bit, but the Mathis-Gupta Bros, gods amongst ponies as they were (no offense to Luna or Celestia), had possessed the foresight to make sure to add a cylindrical stock and handle just in case the occasion ever arose where, heaven forbid, it was needed for operation outside its originally intended design.

When the option suddenly popped up on my HUD to read more information on the SM/AIR, I considered dismissing it with a flick of my eyeballs like I’d done every previous time.  However, after a moment’s consideration, I thought, Oh, what the hell, and concentrated on it until it expanded into a semi-transparent window below my now-inert targeting reticule.  A disembodied Pinkie Pie began reading the brief Equipedia entry, while behind the translucent, yellow-orange article, I could see Alyx inspecting the smoking and oftentimes dismembered corpses that were made possible by contributions from guns like mine.  A disturbingly cheerful voice informed me that this particular model had been specially commissioned by Princess Celestia herself during the first Griffin Campaign, part of a series of conflicts with our friendly neighbors to the south that were fought on-and-off right up until the Combine invasion.  I found that my boyish enthusiasm for guns overrode my general dislike of history, and I kept listening.

“Our kingdom’s soldiers were getting slaughtered in the largely urban warfare that defined that mission, prompting our generals in the field to make a pilgrimage to Canterlot to plead before the Princesses for more effective weaponry, famously bringing with them the body of a slain Equestrian soldier, and dumping it on the floor of the Royal Palace in order to visually illustrate how desperate the war had become.  Our generous and compassionate Princess Celestia unhesitatingly agreed to all of their requests, which included an open contract for the development of a lighter and more compact repeater-rifle that could be carried onto the battlefield by a single pony, unassisted, while retaining the capability to deliver long bursts of continuous, uninterrupted suppressive fire with no need to stop and reload.  Leeroy Mathis Gupta answered the Princess’s call, and built the Saddle-Mounted Anti-Infantry Rifle, creating a new class of pony-portable repeater-rifles now known as LMGs.  The SM/AIR proved to be a smash hit amongst our mares and stallions in uniform, and gained particular notoriety amongst the enemy’s elite soldiers, the infamous

Blutige Krallen, during its heavy use in and around the capitol of the Griffin Kingdom, Griffin City.”

I probably would have devoted more time to lamenting why in the world we couldn’t think of more creative names for our towns and cities if I hadn’t been so astounded by how old my new favorite weapon was.  It wasn’t just the best LMG ever made, it was the first model of LMG ever made.  Knowing how well-connected Alyx’s family was, I fancifully entertained the possibility that I was carrying the first LMG, the one assembled by Leeroy Mathis Gupta himself with no instructions, no assembly-line (which his brother invented), and no assistance;  Nothing except a vision in his mind of what the perfect killing machine should be.  Beauty was a gun that was invented to suppress aerial attack formations of Griffins during a war my father had been too young to serve in, that was now being used to kill aliens from another dimension.

The unsettling robotic imitation of Doctor Pie hadn’t finished reading off a completely irrelevant 32-digit alphanumeric string at the very bottom of the page when my travelling companion attempted to communicate with me.

“How much ammo you got left?”

I checked my ammo counter.  “Ninety.”

“Luna, Gordon, you shot sixty rounds into that handful of zombies!?”

“I was testing out an unfamiliar weapon!”  I exclaimed in a ‘you-wouldn’t-understand’ voice.

Alyx rolled her eyes.  “Whatever, Gordon, but that’s the only clip you get.  There aren’t anymore.”

“It’s really more of a basket... or a box,”  I corrected her as I inspected my instrument of war that was bigger and more beautiful than any gun I had ever seen, “A lunch box filled with bullets.”

I turned back to Alyx and smiled.  “Not a clip.”

Alyx gave me a funny look, and kept on trotting down the narrow street, muttering something about ‘that headcrab bite must be getting to me.’

We never encountered whatever had been making those horrific howling noises back at the Library, but what we had encountered were roadblocks.  Barricades constructed of piles of debris and useless junk that forced us to turn off of Sunset Boulevard, and onto a narrow side street lined on either side with quaint little two and three story apartments, complete with proportionally modest balconies and mezzanines.  Below, every single door and window had been nailed, boarded, taped or otherwise sealed shut, which struck me as odd considering that, according to Alyx’s account, nopony had had any time to prepare for the surprise artillery barrage, and I found it unlikely that in the chaos that immediately followed, somepony had gone around with a wagon full of lumber and a bucket of nails, boarding up apartments that were already infested with zombies.

Placed at regular intervals in front of the mysteriously barricaded buildings were old-fashioned cast-iron lamp posts, whose kerosene torches had long ago been swapped out for electric bulbs, and - despite everything - were still being powered by a nearby hydroelectric dam whose untended and uncared-for turbines now provided over 200 kilowatt-hours of electricity to a ghost town where the (not really) dead roamed the streets looking for lost souls to join their never-ending patrol.  They shone brightly, illuminating the more than a century old cobblestone road, and cast deep shadows where the stones laid into the street had been uplifted over the years by equine activity and natural processes.

I noticed that one of the buildings had been gutted by a mortar shell that landed so close to the outside wall, it had blown every window, window frame, door, doorframe, curtain, and a handful of furniture out the front and onto the street below, where they were scattered amongst a layer of thatched straw and hay from the blown-out roof.  The golden-yellow rays of light emanating from the streetlamps illuminated dark stains tarnishing the stone, where I gathered there had once been bodies, but where there was now nothing, not even bones.  The only intact corpses on the street belonged to the pack of zombies I had just had the worryingly sadistic pleasure of slaughtering.

And none of it, none of it was right, and I sensed that Alyx felt it, too.  I had walked into too many Cerberus ambushes at Black Mane to not get the suspicion that we were being herded in this direction.

“Gordon?  Do you...”

“Know who did all this redecorating?  No.”

“Add this to the roadblocks...”  Alyx reasoned, “And it’s almost like we’re being... funneled.”

I replied, “I agree completely.  That is exactly what we’re being... done... to.  That’s what’s being done to us.  That is the action that is being performed.  To us.  Or on us.”

Alyx gave me another funny look.  “Gordon, you alright?”

“YES.  I AM FINE,”  I said louder than I meant to.  Damn, what’s wrong with me?

We cautiously continued down the street in the direction of Ponyville Elementary, and out of curiosity, I glanced at my vital signs.  Then double glanced.  Then pried my glasses off my face and focused both eyes on the duplicated image projected onto the lenses.  My health monitor had read ‘90’ when we left the Library, and now it read ‘72’.  Which wouldn’t be particularly troubling, except, I hadn’t been hurt by anything since then.  None of those zombies had gotten within ten meters of us.  By my HEV suit’s reckoning, I had been getting ‘unhealthier’ ever since I left the Library for seemingly no reason.

That was extremely disturbing.

“Holy shit, Gordon look at this!” yelled Alyx.  I considered that she had told me she had never seen a poison zombie or headcrab before, so I figured the blood-sucking she had already done was about the extent of her suite of medical aid when it came to cures for poison headcrab venom.  I decided to keep my little problem to myself for the time being, as I didn’t want Alyx to needlessly worry about me.

I galloped ahead to where the street made a sharp turn at what used to be a barber shop, noticing that the little barber pole beside the boarded-up entrance was still magically spinning, as if the owners were convinced that the current dry-spell was only temporary, and business would pick up soon.  I slowed down to a quick trot and tried to suppress my giggling at the sight.

Then I noticed the sign out front that had been knocked onto the ground.  It mentioned a ‘Combine Discount.’

Yeah, I thought, Ask for the Combine Discount!  We’ll shave you like the Buffalo shaved pioneers they caught trespassing on their stampeding grounds!

At this point, I couldn’t hold back any longer, and I burst out laughing.  This caught the attention of that party-crasher Alyx, who came galloping over to give me a lecture.

“Gordon!  What in the magical land of Equestria is so funny!?”  she snapped.

“I was- It was just- there was a barber- and- and I thought- Oh, never mind, you had to be there.”

Regarding me once again with a concerned expression, she reared up, grabbed my head with both hooves, and turned it to face the object she had originally called my attention to.

It was a spinny thing.  On a pole.

“Whoopie.  How amazing.  Look at the spinny thing spin.”

Alyx gave one of those frustrated little huffs I’d come to associate with her mother.  “No, Gordon, don’t you see?  It’s a trap!  A trap that somepony set up to kill zombies! “

I regarded her with a vacant expression as I wondered what other nasty things a barber might do to a metrocop, and Alyx grew increasingly frustrated with me.

“Which means we aren’t alone here!”  she exclaimed, hoping the added volume would help get the message through my unusually thick skull.

Ah.  Now I see.

The apparatus’ rotating blades were indeed lethal – The slicks of blood and bits of torn, rotting flesh encircling the device gave testimony to that.  In addition, I now realized I had found the author of those grievous neck wounds I’d seen on several zombies now.  Scattered about were a handful of the decapitated corpses of their mindless, flesh-eating friends who hadn’t been lucky (or unlucky, depending on whether or not you view the continuing state of neural possession to be a worthwhile life’s pursuit) enough to escape the blades with their lives, in addition to a severed larynx.

“It’s cursed!”  I exclaimed.

“Not cursed;  Enchanted,”  chimed a casual voice from above.

We both screamed in fright, and simultaneously drew our weapons.  I don’t think I even need to say that one of those weapons was much, much bigger than the other.  In fact, I would go so far as to say that it was the gun that was bigger than all the other guns, but I think I’ve already said that.

“Who are you!?”  Alyx shouted up at the dark-robed figure staring down at us from the second-story balcony of a limestone inn.

The phantom flicked its head back with lady-like grace, causing the black hood of its cloak to fall away.  There before us, bathed in the light from Luna’s full moon as she casually draped her perfectly ponycured forehooves over the bronze railing, was a snow-white unicorn mare with a well-maintained curly violet mane that was nevertheless obviously thinning with age.  I saw Alyx give a frown of disapproval, and I imagined her saying Just let it go grey, honey, you’re not fooling anypony.

“Who am I?  Who am I, she says?  Who am I?”  she said with a hoof directed at herself, enunciating the line with all the dramatic poise of an actress in a well-rehearsed play.

“I’m nopony.  I’m nothing.  All this?”  she gestured at the barricaded storefronts and the cursed – excuse me, enchanted – blade,  “The work of a mare who once had too much time on her hooves, who was once beautiful and respected – a mare who was renowned throughout all of Equestria for her gorgeous dresses.  A mare who is now old and ugly and alone, whose only companions are the dead and the dying.  A mare who now has no other use for her once coveted time but to deploy experimental fashion statements everywhere that is dull, drab, and same-ey same-ey, in an effort – neigh, a quest, a crusade! - to make this ugly town beautiful once again!”

I stared at the razor-sharp rotating blades, which produced a fuzzy, translucent circle of azure in the air as they spun, playing tricks on my eyes so that they appeared to be floating off of the ground, unassisted.  I had to admit that it did look pretty badass, even though it was clearly beheading admirers who wandered too close, but really, what work of art doesn’t?

Regarding the blood-spattered art-piece, Alyx stated bluntly, “I think your fashion statement is killing ponies.  Well, former ponies.”

The – dare I say ingenious – mare bit her lip in embarrassment as she replied, “Oh, yes, that.  Well, I’ve, uh, I’m thinking about putting up a little, you know, a little fence, an...enclosure,”  she traced a box in the air with her hooves, “To cut down on the, *ahem* you know - the decapitations, hahhahaha!  My!”  She paused her laughing as something on the street caught her eye.

“Oh dear.  Here, let me get that for you.”

I suddenly became aware of an unusually white headcrab that had been sneakily inching its way toward us on the ruined, crooked avenue.  Before I could bring my SM/AIR to bear, there was a crack of thunder, and the ghostly thing burst into flames, flipped onto its back, and wretched for several moments before finally dying.

I looked back up to the sight of the shadowy unicorn floating a ruby-red cartridge into one of the chambers of an absolutely gorgeously decorated double-barreled shotgun, its engraved silver body lovingly swaddled in some kind of white, urban camouflage.

She must be using incendiary bullets.  Luna, I didn’t even know those existed.

Alyx was opening her mouth to say something, but I cut her off with my own question.

“Excuse me!  Miss!  If you don’t mind me asking, you wouldn’t happen to be the one who’s been making those funeral pyres, would you?”  The headcrab that was slow-roasting on the street reminded me of the piles of charred bodies I’d spotted on the fly-over with Spike.

She stared at me, blinking in confusion, before laughing in sudden understanding.

“Oh, no, no, no, my dear, those weren’t funeral pyres, they were failed product lines!”

It was my turn to blink in confusion.

“So were those, unfortunately,”  she said with disappointment, and shoved a hoof in the direction of the crispy, black headcrab lying on the ground below.

“You know, it’s the just the damndest thing, but who would have thought that so many of my beauty products were so flammable!”  she laughed.  ”From the way things have been going here, you’d think in another life I must have been a bomb-maker!”  I couldn’t help but giggle just a bit at her little joke, causing Alyx to glare at me as the strange mare continued her monologue.

“Oh, but all for the best, I suppose;  Martyrs for fashion, every last one of them!  All yielding valuable data, of course – you wouldn’t know it unless you dissected them yourself, but headcrabs have a marvelously complex olfactory system, making... oh, ‘sniffing out’ the best perfumes – or colognes if you’re a stallion, of course – their, ahm... well, mercy for the clichéd analogy, but their veritable ‘cutie marks’, as t’were.”

Alyx and I looked at each other, and I’ll bet anything that the expressions on both of our faces were priceless.

“The Combine – HA!  HAhahHAHA!  The COMBINE, the Combine, the Comb-i-nation, COMB!  INE!” she spat through teeth that were gritted in barely-contained rage.  “They were JEALOUS!  They FEARED us, Opal and I - oh, by the way, this is Opal.”  Her voice went from nearly-screaming to polite and conversational in an instant.

She floated up her meticulously engraved and decorated shotgun for us to inspect from our low vantage point, and I found myself strangely mesmerized by the light refracted in the huge, baby-blue sapphire set into its wooden stock.  I hadn’t noticed before, but that fuzzy white camouflage wrapped around the lion’s share of the weapon had a tail... and claws... and teeth.  The insane mare grasped it with her forelegs and held it against her chest, caressing it with both hooves like the gun was her lover.

“This is my widdle Opal, my precious widdle Opal that keeps me safe from all the bad ponies who live here because my kitty is FAITHFUL and LOYAL and LOVES ME,”  she proclaimed.  It seemed that her mental state was deteriorating with each passing moment.

Suddenly, my suit began whispering more words into my ear than I’d ever heard it say before.

“Warning:  Vital signs are dropping.  Neurotoxin antidote reservoirs at zero point zero zero percent.  Seek medical attention.”

Cuddle.  That headcrab back in the library must’ve been poisonous.  Wait, I’m not hallucinating all this shit am I?  Dear Celestia, what if I go crazy and I end up like that weird cat lady!?

“ALYX!”  I suddenly shouted into my companion’s ear, causing her to recoil in fright.  “ALYX, ARE YOU REAL!?  IS THAT SPINNY THING REAL!?  DO YOU SEE THE WEIRD LADY, ALYX!?!  DO YOU SEE HER TOO!?!”

On hearing this, the weird lady let out a gasp of indignity.  “Weird!?  WEIRD!?  I am NOT weird, I am eccentric.  Do you want to see weird?  THIS is weird!”  Finished with her rapid correction of which adjectives were to be used to describe her, she tore off her cloak, flung it to the ground, and then, with her forelegs raised to the sky, shouted at the top of her lungs,

“I AM THE LIZARD QUEEN!!  TELL THE BEAR WHO LIVES IN THE CAVE THAT FEELS LIKE A HOUSE TO FROG BLAST THE VENT CORE!!  HUZZAH!!”

And with that, she took a galloping jump up and over the railing, flinging herself with unexpected dexterity across the gap to the balcony on the opposite side.  To both my and Alyx’s shock, she made the jump alright, but it appeared that she slightly miscalculated the heighth (or indeed presence) of the target balcony’s chipped and peeling guardrail, as at least one of her hooves scraped the tip-top of the thing before slipping off.  The extremely eccentric unicorn over-corrected, throwing her entire body back towards the street to counter her forward momentum, resulting in her shifting her center of gravity a bit too far downward towards her hooves and the thin, poorly textured strip of metal on which they carried her entire weight (not that she was heavy, come now, I would never insinuate - never mind).

The unlucky mare awkwardly attempted to balance with all four hooves straight in a row and her rear in the air, as the whole contraption bucked and wobbled under the weight of the full-grown adult pony it was being asked to support (again, not that she was heavy in any way!).  The unfortunate mare succeeded for just a moment - perhaps two - before failing spectacularly.

The snow-white unicorn went tumbling forward to do a face-plant on the concrete balcony upon which she, compelled by the cruel and unsporting laws of physics, involuntarily executed a new arc of her ungraceful somersault into an – amazingly - intact sliding glass door, the show-stopping shatter of which provided the finale for what would surely be looked back upon and remembered by all parties involved as a very poorly thought-out and painful exeunt.  She disappeared inside the apartment, and besides a few gunshots, a fit of sneezing, and some cursing, that was the last we saw of her.

“Right, so.  So.  So, so, so...”  I said, searching for words to compel us forward to our next objective, which, now that I thought of it, I couldn’t think of.  If that... makes... any sense.

“... So... Ponyville Elementary should be just down the street from here, if I remember correctly,”  Alyx helpfully pointed out.

“Roight, or right, or whatever,”  I said in reply, and we deftly skipped around the enchantingly cursed (or accursedly enchanted) spinning blade, and over the severed, headcrab’d heads littering the dark street, accompanied by their corresponding decapitated zombie torsos with their horribly mutated, blood-stained pincer-legs sticking into the air, stiff with rigor-mortis.

Awful as it was, scenes of death and destruction would not foul our mood, and we skipped on down the narrow cobblestone street with hardly a care in the world - Affected, maybe more than either of us were willing to admit, by the mysterious mare’s intoxicating devil-may-care attitude, obviously insane though she was.

As I trot, I ruminated on this, reasoning that considering where we were, perhaps a bit of insanity was just what the doctor ordered.  Perhaps insanity was a kind of defense mechanism, something to help you laugh in the face of certain danger  and even death itself;  A tool, a gift, a truly terrifying weapon that enabled us to continue functioning – and fighting - even in the most horrific circumstances imaginable.  It was to laugh when others are screaming, to call your enemies’ bluff, to mock and belittle what scares you, to embrace your wonderful, glorious equine terror, welcome it back like it was an old friend, squeeze it tight and give it a name, and LOVE IT, to realize that being afraid only makes those things that you are afraid of stronger, bigger, and scarier.  It was... to giggle at the ghostie.

All the while I pondered, we trot through streets that were blessedly empty (Thank you, Luna!), and our ears were seldom given respite from a background symphony of unintelligible shouting, perfectly intelligible laughter, and we-could-probably-guess cursing echoing off of the rooftops and into the narrow corridor of the apartment-lined boulevard.

That was the battle-cry of a snow-white unicorn mare, a challenge to the sleepers and dreamers that filled Ponyville’s houses and businesses, police stations, health clinics, parks, schools, pools, public bathrooms, and combine watchtowers, to the restless wanderers that roamed streets once filled with wagons, carriages, foals, businessponies, patrons, artists, painters, movers, doers!

The screams of profanity and bouts of insane laughter melded together to form a territorial vocalization not unlike the snarl of a feral jungle cat, a unilateral declaration of absolute monarchy, a message that said, THIS IS MY TOWN, AND YOU LIVE HERE BECAUSE I LET YOU.

But there was more to the message;  A subtitle, a punctuation heard in the occasional piercing crack of thunder followed by the unnatural wails of wounded and dying zombies, sleep-walking ponies whose prayers for an end to their waking nightmare of all-consuming hunger were being answered with every well-placed shot;

AND I DOUBLE-DIAMOND-DOG DARE YOU TO THINK OTHERWISE.

------------------------------λ------------------------------

Faces.  Young faces, cheerful, optimistic, only the tiniest handful looked less than pleased.  They had large, round heads and huge, exaggerated eyes that could hide no emotion a pony was capable of feeling.  The gaggle of brightly-colored foals consisted mostly of the fairer sex, with a couple of shy colts awkwardly hanging back from the rest of the group, unsure of themselves around The Other Half, apparently, even at that tender young age - although in Ponyville, there did seem to be a curious gender disparity that resulted in something like nine females for every male, so I suppose they could have simply been intimidated by the sheer number of them.  I’d have liked to do a scientific survey, but unfortunately, that wasn’t the kind of science that Black Mane was interested in doing, nor the government interested in funding.

Every frequency of the electromagnetic spectrum was represented amongst their number, smiling, shouting, calling to each other, waving, greeting and being greeted, the pair of little colts swapping highly exaggerated stories of the previous night’s mischief, and the swarm of little fillies gossiping about the latest developments in their peers’ personal relationships, as well as what mischief the colts had gotten into, if the boys had done their job right.

Almost all at once, a rainbow of multi-directional ears pivoted to face the same origin, while the school-foals they were attached to whipped around like puppies responding to the clinking and clanking of food pellets hitting the inside of a bowl, and the whole crowd took off galloping as fast as their stubby little legs could carry them towards the colorful and inviting archway that embellished the school’s entrance, not only in competition for the best seats in the classroom, but out of fear they’d be counted tardy if they continued to loiter outside, lost track of time, and then couldn’t make it to their seats before the second bell.

Of course, a few either didn’t care or were simply too absorbed in their conversations to notice the clanging of the great silver bell, rocking back and forth atop the modest schoolhouse in a bell tower that had been painted a shade of bright red that was dangerously close to pink.  And as if that wasn’t bad enough, much to the chagrin of the more masculine members of the student body, somepony had gone and painted unmistakably pink HEARTS above all of the windows!

“It’s an outrage, Gordon.  A boner-fied outrage, I tells ya,” complained my little brother.

I did my sworn duty as his big brother, and corrected him.  “It’s ‘bona-fide,’ John, ‘boner-fied’ sounds like... well, golly, it sounds like something that’s been cooked over a skeleton, or something.”

“What’d you say, Gordon?”  Alyx interrupted.

“Welp, ‘still stands that there ought to be a law ‘gainst paintin’ big, pink hearts all over our perfec’ley good schoolhouse,”  John continued.

I frowned at him in disapproval, and whispered so that Alyx couldn’t hear.  “John, you’ve got to work on your accent, this isn’t the country no- er, any more.  The other foals are going to look at you funny if you go around tahkin’ lahk ‘dis.”

John Freemane didn’t reply, but simply lowered his over-sized head to stare at his little hooves, and I took that to mean he understood.

“Now run along and get to class,”  I whispered into his ear, and he took off towards the school without even saying goodbye.

As I watched my little brother disappear inside the entrance to Ponyville Elementary, Alyx and I both stopped for a short break on the concrete promenade that  wound its way through the front lawn to the school’s steps.  It had been a mercifully short distance to the school from the terminus of that narrow side street where we had encountered the crazy lady and her unintentionally lethal art.  There had been no more barricades blocking our path, or indeed, zombies – in fact, the only remotely interesting occurrence on the way here was an unexpected encounter with a perturbed carrier pigeon that had been trying to make his nest inside the hollowed-out ribcage of one of those... poisonous zombies that we found lying in a film of whatever was left over after everything in your bodily fluids that could evaporate, evaporated.

All along the way, Alyx kept asking me if I was feeling alright, and I had insisted that I was fine, or I just needed a drink of whatever that carbonated liquid was in her flask, or I needed to take a quick breather.

These things pass, don’t worry, just let nature take its course,  I kept telling myself.  No need to make Alyx worry about something she can’t do anything about.

She would come over to examine my neck wound during our infrequent breathers, trying to divine some sign of infection in a wound that was being autonomously treated with a steady supply of intravenously-delivered antibiotics.  However, without a neurotoxin antidote, I would have a very clean - and certainly not infected - neck wound while my nervous system gradually turned to mush.

Despite my objections, Alyx had forced me to sit down on a wooden bench that leaned dangerously to one side, and was in the middle of swabbing my neck wound with an alcohol-dipped piece of cloth when she asked for my thoughts on what was to be our fort for the night.  The scientist in me labored over the answer, my neurons still firing away at nearly full capacity despite the steadily rising amount of organic toxins clogging their synapses and eating away at their precious myelin sheaths.

The building was small;  I kept getting the feeling that there had to be more of it, hidden behind what I could see, but I knew from the flyover with Spike that this was all there was.  The town around it had grown immensely since the school’s founding back in the frontier days, when southwestern Equestria was sparsely inhabited, and largely unexplored.  But unlike the other, more modern schools scattered throughout the town, Ponyville Elementary had never expanded with the rest of its namesake, remaining a simple, one-room schoolhouse.

I think it had something to do with small classes and low student-to-teacher ratios.  That, and a desire to maintain Ponyville’s ‘small-town’ image that made it a surprisingly popular getaway for ponies from the twin megalopolises of the east coast, as well as a steady trickle from Canterlot, Trottingham, and other cities.  I always enjoyed dropping by the charming little town to visit my brother whenever I got some time off from the lab.  In fact, being here was probably the closest I’d felt to being ‘home’ since... well, since even before the Black Mane Incident – I hadn’t been back to my true home, Maresachusetts, in years.

I concentrated on an icon in the lower left corner of my Heads Up Display, and my suit’s hazard light (for use in low-light environments only!) painted a bright circle of white environed by a thick line of golden-yellow on the side of the school.  I imagined that the wooden exterior would have beamed back bright red were it not for several years of disrepair that left the layered-on paint, like so many other things in this town, cracked, faded, and a shadow of its former self.  The grass surrounding the structure was now a  thicket, tall as a pony, and so dense it had to be waded through like water.  I think I saw the tip-tops of some rusted playground equipment poking out amongst the weeds, but didn’t even consider investigating them, as a part of me just knew that some unspeakable horror lurked within, just waiting for its next victim.

Every single one of the school’s windows had been broken out;  Not one remained.

“See that?”  I asked Alyx, shining my light over the crooked shards of broken glass, creating a disjointed rainbow of colored streaks across the inside wall as the light was refracted into its constituent elements.

She dropped the alcohol-soaked pad she’d been rubbing on my not-infected wound, likely irrevocably contaminating it, and shifted her gaze to the object of my interest.

Though it embarrasses me to admit it, I actually liked it when the young mare fussed over me.  I don’t want to sound like a creeper or anything, but any time she was close, close enough that I could smell the scent of her mane - just shampooed this very morning - intermingling with the musk of her sweat from several hours of fighting for our lives, to feel just a handful of the steel-grey hairs on my cheek brush against her wet muzzle, to feel the warmth of her breath on my neck letting me know that she was alive, and so was I – it was something I never had any objection to.

I began to explain, “Mortar took out the bell tower, I saw that from the air.  And then, overpressure from the shell bl-”  I stopped mid-syllable.

“What’s wrong?”

“Did you...”  No, no, no, no, no, no.  “Did you hear a... heh... a bell ringing just a minute ago?”  I asked Alyx almost shaking with my sudden barely-repressed anxiety.

“Ahhhh...”  her pupils darted to various corners of her eye sockets as she tried to recall something, anything that could legitimately explain this latest in my series of non-sequiturs.

“And you... you didn’t... see any... foals?  Galloping to school?  Like – my... brother?”

I turned to look into her eyes, accidentally swinging my hazard-light around as it tracked with my inert targeting reticule.  She reacted quite negatively to suddenly having 2000 lumens projected directly onto her retina.

“Ow!  Gordon!  That thing’s really bright!”  she complained as she turned her head and brought a hoof up to cover her eyes.  Her big, beautiful, pretty, amber eyes and her long, thick eyelashes that somehow were now curled even though I’m fairly certain they weren’t five minutes ago.

“Alyx.  Alyx, Alyx, Alyx.  You... you... are quite pretty, did you know that, Alyx?  You... are very... attractive.  I mean, in a sexual way.  As in having to do with the sexes, as in the two different sexes, as in... a mare... and a stallion... just like the Princesses intended...”

To my great confusion, Alyx expressed her gratitude for my flattering compliments by recoiling backwards, wearing a look of sheer horror.  For some strange reason, my female travelling companion just all of a sudden looked absolutely irresistible, and it took nearly all my willpower to stop myself from just cuddling her right there on the concrete.

“So... anyway, Gordon, why don’t – why don’t you go have a look inside that schoolhouse?”  Alyx asked in a way that was as friendly and non-threatening as possible.

I responded by staring at her slack-jawed while my HEV suit whispered a warning into my ear that I didn’t quite catch as nearly all my cognitive capacity at the time was devoted to admiring Alyx’s tantalizing, socket-wrench-tattooed flank.

She spoke again with greater authority.  “Like, right now.  I’ll be fine.  Just go!”

I was snapped out of my stupor, and dutifully complied with the mare’s request, flipping through my inventory to my SM/AIR, and as I noted that it had 90 cartridges left in its 150-round clip, I mouthed a silent prayer to the Goddess of the night.

Luna, what in pony-hell is wrong with me!?

------------------------------λ------------------------------

I gently placed a hoof on the heavy oak door, and, while wishing that the hazard course I’d been forced to take at Black Mane had provided training in breach-and-clear scenarios, gave it a shove.  It refused to budge.

All for the best, I thought.  I really didn’t like the looks of this place anyway.

I stole a glance back towards Alyx, who had unholstered her strange repeater-pistol, and was busily scanning the horizon for the creatures of which nightmares are made that doubtlessly lurked in the jagged voids of darkness carved out of the moonlight that painted the stone pathways and tops of the untamed overgrowth.  Already, I felt terrible guilt for my advances on her that resembled that of an adolescent colt who’d just met a mare in heat during hugging season.  I’d have to think of some way to make up for it later, provided I could get over this... this sickness from the headcrab poison.  Not to mention getting our rear-ends to the roof of this Goddesses-forsaken schoolhouse.

I lowered my head and banished all thought from my mind except for that door which stood in my path, silently mocking me, daring me to open it as if it were part of some juvenile hazing ritual.  As I began to  enshroud it in the violet light of the magical energies I channeled from the ether by some mystical and ancient gift from the forgers of the universe, as I felt that timber in the grasp of a disembodied hand that had its origin in my very soul, and I felt the creaking, cracking, and bending of every microscopic superstring of mostly carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen that determined its nature and imbued it with shape and strength... for some reason on which science is silent and faith is uncertain... I thought of the words of a very short poem by an ancient philosopher whom I am certain I never learned about in school, and whose name, I only recently discovered, was Hobbes the Deep;

There is a place I must go that I wish I did not.

There is a door I must open that I wish would stay shut.

I tore that cuddling door off its hinges and cast it aside like the wrapper of a sunflower burrito.  I never even saw where it landed, and I didn’t care, because right at that moment, I once again laid eyes on my little  brother, John.  Other than looking years younger than he should have been, he still had almost the same steel-grey coat that I had, the same green eyes, no horn or wings, and a stringier, shockingly blonde mane that was combed in a way that threatened to cover up his right eye, thereby depriving him of the ability to perceive depth.

He was just standing there, staring at me blankly, unblinking, despite the professional-grade flashlight being shone in his face.  He regarded me with empty, green eyes from the far side of a headcrab canister that was sunk so low into the floorboards, all you could see was a long-dead sensor pod fastened to the cylindrical wire cage that had once been stuffed full of the despicable creatures;  And even that was partially obscured by one of the ’fins’ from the section at the end where the three metal flaps that formed what I had taken to calling the ‘containment vessel’ flared outward from the body of the delivery vehicle.

My body language closely resembled what I interpreted my brother’s to be;  Shock.  Shocked, like I hadn’t been before when I warmly greeted John, whispering into his ear that he had better get himself to class if he didn’t want to be counted tardy.

I knew that he wasn’t real.

My vital-signs monitor read ‘55’, and another warning message about the poisonous neurotoxin swimming  around in my bloodstream was blinking in the periphery of my vision, impatiently waiting to be dismissed.

“You’re not real,”  I finally worked up the nerve to say, though it still came out shakily, as if I wasn’t sure of it myself.

“What’re you talkin’ about, Grody?” my brother laughed.  ‘Grody’, a colloquialism for “gross” had always been his favorite nickname for me.  The real him, not this pathetic imposter.

I tried to ignore him, trotting over to one side of the classroom, looking up at the low ceiling for a trap-door  to the attic, where I just knew more horrors awaited me in the darkness.  The debris from the collapse of the bell tower was responsible for the convex bulge in the ceiling, which lay between the entrance and the jagged hole that marked the entry point of the Combine-approved dissent queller;  The little structure had collapsed inward, straight down.  Recalling the effect a mortar had had on Twi-... On Alyx’s house, I saw a stupendous contrast here in that I did not see any great amount of debris;  It was almost like somepony or something had cleared the place out.

However, whoever had done so had stacked all of the foal-sized desks along the wall in the most idiotic fashion, and I tripped over one of the stuck-out legs, smacking my jaw first on the protruding leg of yet another desk in front of the first, and then into the hard, wooden floor, my SM/AIR clattering to the ground almost on top of my head with a thunderous crash that testified to its tremendous weight.

NNNNnnnnnnnngggghhhhh.  Oh, hey, my health monitor hasn’t changed.  I guess us scientists are just supposed to suck it up when we dislocate our jaws.  The preceding was thought with some measure of discontentedness, which, I noted, was a very long word.

I moved my tongue around my mouth, feeling at least a handful of rocky, bloody bits, and I tensed my jaw, feeling that it wasn’t the ligaments near the back that hurt, just the part of my mandible that had come into direct contact with those stupid bucking desks, meaning that I had not, thankfully, dislocated my jaw after all.

I guess that tiny lady that lives inside my suit is smarter than I thought.

“Hey, you alright, bro?”  John asked.

My hazard-light shone through the cracks between the boards, and I could see movement... and hear noises.  Voices.  Muffled, distorted, high-pitched wails and grumbling.

Gritting my flat, herbivorous, and now, just a little chipped teeth, I raised myself back onto all fours, and commanded my SM/AIR to do the same.  In a sudden fit of anger that surprised even me, I violently bucked away the miniature wooden desks that I had tripped over, sending them both flying across the classroom to smash into the dusty, dirty bookshelves lining the walls.  Their books, having been exposed to the elements ever since the overpressure wave from a Combine mortar shell blew out all the windows, had mostly turned to sticky cottage-cheese with the occasional intact binding or dust-cover.

I whipped around and screamed, “YOU ARE NOT MY BROTHER!!” at the apparition before me, who reacted by staring back at me without expression or emotion.

“YOU ARE A HALLUCINATION PRODUCED BY MY NEUROTOXIN-LACED MIND!!  You don’t CUDDLING exist!”

I looked over to my left as I heard a disturbing cacophony of scraping and scratching mixed with garbled wails that almost sounded like prayers to the Princesses;  I think I picked up a garbled ‘Luna’ or ‘Celestia’ here and there.

My brother sadly regarded the creatures that were clawing their way up the black metal of the headcrab canister from the blackness of the crawlspace below.

“They didn’t know where else to go.”

I saw the first one of them poke its head up from the pitch-black depths.  It’s not that it had a headcrab on its head;  It’s head was a headcrab.  The skulls of these creatures were so small, that the parasites swallowed them whole.  Dear Celestia, I realized.  It was a foal.  I saw its could-have-once-been-white body emerge from beneath the floorboards.  It was little else but a skeleton wrapped in a paper-thin sheet of skin and fur, which, being designed to encompass a great deal more mass, sagged along its little tummy in loose, bunched-up folds.

I whispered out loud not to my brother, but to nopony, really, “But it was midnight.  There weren’t any foals here, there couldn’t have been!”

My brother continued the story in a solemn and somber voice. “When the attack began, the falling of the shells and the screams of the wounded and dying awoke each child.  They galloped into the streets in their pajamas and nightcaps, and wandered, lost, alone and confused.  Not knowing what else to do, they gathered inside the schoolhouse, a place that to them seemed safe, a place that was warm and familiar.”

It was amazing.  The hallucination was delivering a narrative like he was in a play, the zombies were actors, the classroom, a stage, and I, the audience.  And for whatever reason, I stood there and listened;  I was transfixed.

Several more of them had crawled up the crooked mortar shell and now lay on the floor, gasping for breath through their tiny little abdominal stomach-mouths, which looked as if the mutative effort had been halted halfway through.  In fact, only one of the little things looked like it had even the initial pseudo-form of the shark-like teeth I’d seen on every other zombie, and it was the same story with their little pincer-like forelegs;  Like the zombification had been aborted partway through.

“They locked themselves in tight, but they didn’t know there were headcrabs under the floorboards.”

More still were emerging from where the mortar shell pierced the floorboards, their number now easily over a dozen, perhaps two.  The first ones to have emerged were finishing up catching their breath, as the short trip seemed to have absolutely exhausted them, and were beginning to get to their hooves.  Their manes may have been covered up, but I now noticed that every single one of them had tails that were white as an old lady’s - One of the classic effects of chronic malnutrition.  I knew that zombies could lay dormant for extremely long periods of time to conserve energy, but these ones, these little ones, looked like they had been pushing the absolute limits of how long a zombie could go without eating before it starved to death.

“The only one of them who knew how to use the lock was the first to be possessed.  The rest were trapped in here with the headcrabs.  Some of the more clever ones tried to climb up the bookcases and out the windows, but foals are far easier prey than headcrabs are used to, and none made it very far.”

One of them was painfully, hungrily, inching its way towards me when one of its rear hooves caught on some kind of cable or hose lying across the floor that I hadn’t noticed before.  The thing roared at me in a voice that was higher-pitched than any zombie I’d ever encountered before.  Though the vocalization was unintelligible, its body language got across what words weren’t necessary to convey;  It was hungry, and I looked absolutely delicious.

The imposter of my brother concluded his story with, “When they entered this room, they thought they had lucked out.  They saw no headcrabs, and were only dimly aware of their connection to the mortar shell lodged in the floor.  They thought themselves clever when they locked themselves inside their own death chamber.”

My targeting reticule projected onto my glasses hovered over the starving zombie that crawled on its virtually nonexistent belly towards me, and I saw that its little neck could barely hold up the weight of the fat headcrab engulfing its skull, draining its host of nutrients to feed itself.

I... well... I seemed to have just a little bit of difficulty squeezing the trigger-plate of the infantry-suppression weapon.  I imagined what a ‘67-tier depleted bronium bullet would do to that zombified foal, and... well... I didn’t much care for it.

Then, at that moment, it finally occurred to me to ask, Why is there a hose on the floor?

I followed the rubber tube to its origin;  A large, white metal canister emblazoned with three blue diamonds.  Printed across the front in a fancy, curvy font were the words,

“Rarity’s Vineyard Scent”

Right under that was what I guessed was the company slogan,

“For Mares & Stallions With Generously Good Taste”

Pfft.  Perfume?  Perfume is not for stallions.  Deodorant, yeah, sure, but perfume was most definitely a lady thing.  Or at least, it was eight years ago;  I suddenly considered the radical possibility that perhaps in this post-war world, maintaining personal hygiene had become so tremendously difficult, that especially amongst stallions - who naturally produced the strongest odors - social attitudes towards the employment of scent-masking chemicals by males had greatly relaxed.  It was an intriguing proposition that had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the life-threatening situation at hand, but for some reason, I just found it so utterly, utterly fascinating!

When I finally returned from my mental holiday, I noted two major things that had changed while I was gone.  First, I noted that there was a foal-sized zombie wrapped around my leg, using its pathetic, unfinished stumps of pincers to try and scratch through armor that was designed for use in unsafe working conditions such as the actuating ring of an electron catalyst destabilizer (which, trust me, was quite unsafe, at least for organic beings), and another one was lying on its back, sucking on my carbon-nanotube-polymer- -enshrouded tail with its toothless, partially-formed stomach-mouth.  For a zombified foal whose body was eating itself from the inside out, I thought it actually looked kind of adorable.

The second thing I noticed was that the air now smelled exactly like a vineyard.  Or at least, what I imagined a vineyard would smell like, as I’d never actually been to one, but if I did, I imagined it would smell like... grapes... and wine... although why it would smell like wine, I didn’t know, as you would think that came at a later stage in the wine-making process, not that I’m an expert in wine-making... as I... I never actually... did take an interest in... th-.... culllllllllllllinaaaaaaaaaaarrrrry.   Arts.  The art... of... hey... does anyponyone know what hazardous chemicabiuhlogicahsomething something means?

There was a pretty light blinking in front of my face, and I looked at it really, really close to see what made pretty lights go blink, blink, blink, blink, blink, blink, blink, blink, blink, blink, oh hey, where’d it go?

Suddenly, there was clicky-clicky sounds and something pressed against my face really tight, and I think it made my glasses go backwards like, like how does that even...  Is that Alyx screaming?

“GORDON!  GET DOWN!”  she yelled as she unholstered her polished-silver repeater pistol and proceeded to unload its custom-tooled clip into the swarm of bite-sized zombies that were crawling under, over, and around each other to get their turn at failing to devour my juicy pony flesh.

“NOOOO!  STOP!”  my little brother yelled, “They’ll starve to death if they don’t eat something!”

I don’t think Alyx heard, because she just kept firing into the crowd, which had lost a few of its members already, and looked as if it was beginning to reconsider eating me, and going for her instead.

“What the hell are you waiting for, Gordon!?  A hug!?  Get your ass over here!”  Alyx yelled from the open doorway at the far end of the classroom.  I noticed something... odd about her.  It was like she was shimmering, oscillating back and forth like a stone beneath a clear pond, except the distortion grew wider to one side and narrower to the opposite...

“NOW, you son of a bitch!”  Alyx raged.

Cuddle.  Right.  Leaving.

I bucked two zombies in their beachball-like heads – one of them was apparently a unicorn, and the force of the buck caused the horn to break through the headcrab’s skin, squirting me with a stream of its dark, stolen blood.  Then, after I kicked off another pair that were trying to wrap what was once their forelegs around mine, I began wading through the crowd of combat-ineffective brats towards Alyx’s psychedelically distorted form.

Just a little under halfway there, I realized the true nature of the visual anomaly.  Wait a tick.  That’s gas!  And it’s coming from one of those big white canisters that say ‘Rarity’s Vineyard Scent’!  I thought in an accent not entirely unlike that of the legendary Trottingham detective, Sherclop Holmes, whose name was a hilarious play on that of real-life detective, Sherclop Pones, who was not actually stationed in Trottingham, but was in fact on loan from the New Yoke Police Department when he briefly became a household name after solving a whole series of grisly murders, thus providing the inspiration for the famous character.  But I digress.

Much like Sherclop Holmes, I put the pieces of the puzzle together to deduce the following:  In its haste to free its entrapped limb, the zombie that had gotten its hoof caught on that peculiar hose had yanked the entire assembly free from the canister, the valve of which was at present dispensing an extremely fine mist of an olfactually-overwhelming chemical cocktail that this ‘Rarity’ called Vineyard Scent.  The perfume seemed to be extraordinarily irritating, even intolerable, to the possessed ponies in the room, some of whom had actually begun dragging themselves back down into the crawl space, seemingly to claim refuge from the overpowering fumes.

I had almost reached Alyx, whom I noticed was taking very careful aim at something behind me, when I risked a glance over my shoulder.  Scattered about the classroom floor were the tangled and writhing bodies of two dozen starving zombies, many of whose bodies had been plugged full of holes from Alyx’s burst-firing pistol.  I could see them shaking as the stinging perfume in the air slowly seeped into their open wounds, which I noted drew surprisingly little blood, as the bodies they belonged to were at this point more dead tissue than living.  Amongst their number, I thought I saw a... white headcrab.  It almost... no, it did look like it had been... painted?  Somepony painted a headcrab to look like... What was that?

It resembled a ceramic doll, complete with a pair of red, painted-on lips, ‘eyelids’ with blue mascara, blush on its ‘cheeks’, and most horrifying of all, painted-on eyes with long, delicate eyelashes, half-closed and relaxed.  They looked almost like... like... well... I thought... they looked like the kind of eyes a mare would look at a stallion with when she was in the mood.  Dear Luna on the cuddling Moon, it was one of the most disturbing things I’d ever seen.  It wasn’t just the physical appearance, it was the knowledge that somepony would be spending any amount of time at all drawing ‘come hither’ eyes on neurological parasites from another dimension.

I think... I don’t really remember all that well, but I think I had just begun my mental ritual to erase that particular image from my mind when Alyx fired that damned pistol right next to my head.

I didn’t hear the gunshot.  I felt the meatus in my ear canal recoil from a pressure wave.  There was no hearing in that ear for a good, long time afterwards, just bells that would make a charity solicitor around Hearth-Warming time burn with envy.  I saw that little headcrab jump into the air like a jackrabbit that had just stepped on a hot stove.  There was a flash, a spark as at least one of the rounds from the three-shot burst found its mark and connected with the white paint that coated the crab’s body.  The fine mist of sweet-smelling perfume that inundated the enclosed space ignited, and a snake of flames twirled and danced its way along an immaterial causeway of reactive compounds back toward its source, the broken valve of the canister with the three sapphire diamonds.

I whipped around to shield the unprotected Alyx, though I can’t remember if I actually managed to grab hold of her.  My Hostile Environment Helmet (For use in environments that are unbreathable, are actively working to inflict bodily harm on the user, or both!) was already deployed and secured, as my hazard suit had identified the chemical as being unsafe to breathe, and I had drunkenly accepted the prompt to extend the air-tight headpiece.

Not a tenth of a second after the warning symbol for ‘fire’ was etched onto the lower-left corner of my folded-back and locked glasses, the dancing spirit of flame that had engulfed the classroom concluded its upstream journey against the high-pressure jet of chardonnay-scented mist, and battled its way inside the great white cistern to greet all of its molecular brothers and sisters imprisoned within, with every intention of setting the captives free.

The last time I was that close to an explosion, I had launched a fragmentation grenade at a Combine patrol that had been waiting for me on the first floor of the QUILLS & SOFAS building back in City 7.  When it went off, I miraculously avoided taking any shrapnel to my uncovered and unprotected face, though I did feel like I had been punched with the fist of an invisible giant whose girlfriend I had just called a doubler-cuddler.

That hurt like a bitch on fire, but I was very, very lucky (or blessed, thanks be to Luna) in that I was not mutilated by the explosion, which brings me to my next point.

Whatever modicum of good fortune could be said to have befallen me lately befell the freaking heck out of me at the moment that canister of highly flammable perfume had its insides tickled by a tongue of fire, for my HEH (which I actually do pronounce like a chortle) was already extended, sealed, and locked - In fact, it had been for almost a minute.

Because of one of those annoying little warning messages that normally only serve to drive me bonkers (and I apologize to anypony who may be offended by that word), I did not lose all hair, skin, and muscle tissue around my skull when Ponyville Elementary exploded like it was getting paid for it.  Behind me, so powerful I could feel it burning against my reactive-armor-enshrouded rump, was a roiling ball of fire that lit up every building, tree and signpost within at least a city block in every direction, dying them in twitching strokes of electric orange and yellow that contrasted so beautifully with the architectural schematics drawn in shadows black as the void of space and painted on every surface that would accept them, it made me believe that the creator-spirits must have been artists themselves - either that, or total pyros.

That... was NOT... perfume, was the first thing I remember thinking after I regained consciousness;  I wasn’t sure how long I’d been out, or even if I’d been out at all, but the one thing I was sure about was that no damned perfume was that powerful of an explosive.  The wine scent must have simply been a coincidence.  They had been deliberately set up as a trap;  A zombie-killing trap.  How inventive.

One.  Two.  Three.  Four.  I counted my heartbeats to try and convince myself that I was still alive.  But something was off;  They almost seemed to come in pairs, the second perpetually fainter than the first.

When I opened my eyes, two beautiful amber ones were staring back at them.  Two eyes that had already seen too much for such a young soul, and were only destined to see more.

“The school blew up,”  I rasped as I retracted my heaven-sent helmet back into its storage position.

Our faces were millimeters apart, and I was keenly aware of the fact that her body was underneath mine.  As my retracting helmet clicked, clacked and folded its way back into my flame-broiled hazard suit, it revealed a one-point-six-kilometer-wide grin plastered across my face, which I still had thanks to... thanks to something, it was definitely thanks to something, be it Pinkie Pie’s GUI code, or the Goddesses’ favor, or the laws of physics, or what have you, but I was thankful to something that I still had a face.  Alyx couldn’t help but smile back as I finished my thought, being reminded I was alive with each breath of hers that I felt on my chin.

“The school blew up, and while I was unconscious, you took the opportunity to set us up like this,”  I remarked in an I-am-quite-frankly-shocked-and-appalled tone as I gently pushed against her chest to adjust my position a bit, and I was utterly delighted to hear her musical giggle in response to my pitiful attempt at humor.  “Didn’t you? Didn’t you!?”  I egged her on, eliciting additional laughs more powerful than the first.  It must have been the moment, as I’m almost positive I’m not that funny.  However, I dismissed the thought, deciding to just take what I could get.

For a moment, lying there, playfully pinning Alyx to the ground of a schoolyard, I genuinely felt like a foal again.

Foals.

Images of the previous half hour’s events came screaming back from short-term memory, further guaranteeing their unfortunate but inevitable conversion to neigh-un-erasable long-term memory.  I saw the zombified foals, their bodies still skeleton-thin, their headcrabs still fat and heavy, their appendages still partially-formed, their coats still faded and thin and coming off in places, and all of their tails still white as snow.  I heard their abnormally high-pitched whines and moans as their headcrabs fished around their frustratingly undeveloped brains for the right synapses to complete.

I would never forget.

I rolled off of Alyx’s smaller, softer form, and looked up from my position on the concrete to observe the blazing inferno that was Ponyville Elementary.

“There goes our holdout spot, Alyx.  Up in flames.”  I was entranced by the dancing, twirling tongues of yellow and orange flame that it seemed were putting on a show just for me, so I didn’t even notice when my rescuer put her hoof to my forehead.

“Dear Celestia, Gordon!  We were almost incinerated back there, and yet you’re... you’re cold as an ice cube!”

“Ha!  Isn’t that just the damndest thing?” I laughed as if it was a joke.

Alyx angrily confronted me.  “No more bullshit, Gordon!  What the hell is wrong with you!?  Tell me RIGHT NOW!”

I sighed heavily.  I couldn’t hide it from her any longer.

“Alyx, I think I’m dying.  From that black headcrab.  Back in the... the Library.”

“... Shit, Gordon.  Shit.  Uhhhnng...”  Alyx sat down heavily on the concrete, cradling her face in her hooves as she tried to think, lightly interspersing her groans and grumbles with the occasional taking of one or more of the Princess’ names in vain.

“There’s a hospital – well, clinic – near here;  Ponyville Urgent Care.  I remember – I went to this school a couple of years, and...”  Alyx shook her head as she tried to think over the sizzling and popping of the blazing primary school to her left.  “I remember, because one day, I was out at recess, right over here, and some little colt in my class did that thing where you go ‘think fast!’, you know, and he bucked a freaking basketball – the heaviest ball we had, okay? – at my head, and of course, I didn’t... Goddesses, I’m not going to explain.

The point is, they took me to Ponyville Urgent Care, and I remember – PUC is really close by – I... I remember that very clearly, PUC is nearby.  It’s...”  she stood up, and whipped her head around, trying to get her bearings.  “It’s behind the school, that way.  Behind and to the right... I think there’s a... oh, buck it, just come on, I’ll remember.”

Before heading out, my mare friend turned to look at me over her shoulder, and I saw the deep, painful worry on her face illuminated in the bright light of the inferno.  Suddenly, as if it was a shocking and unprecedented revelation, it occurred to me that if I died... if I were to die, I would never see her again.  Well, I might see her in an afterlife, but... damn, then I’d have to sit around on the infinite plains of eternal undeath waiting around for her for who knows how long.

“Alyx,”  I called out to the figure half-clothed in shadow before me.  “Alyx if we die, we have to make sure to die at the same time, okay?”

She almost paused her forward march, but thought better of it, opting instead to go for another look over the shoulder, this time with a kind of bemused affection that made my heart flutter, speeding the rate at which the neurotoxin contaminating my bloodstream was transmuted across my straightforwardly-named blood-brain-barrier.

My confused and distressing thoughts continued as we approached what was once the soccer field behind the school.

Wait, what if she doesn’t go to the same afterlife as me?  Luna on a boat, what if there are different afterlives, and me and Alyx don’t go to the same one?

Alyx paused, as she nearly stepped on what looked like a pile of debris from a distance, but on closer examination, we saw was actually the corpse of one of the zombies that had been thrown clear in the explosion.  She knelt down, shaking the glowing embers from her mane that clogged the air, and as she examined the burnt, unnatural, and unusually small corpse in the glow of the burning school, I thought,

Or what if one of us ends up in one of the hells?

I watched as her face contorted into an expression of horror and disgust that surpassed every other I’d seen from her up to that point.

“Luna cuddle the moon, Gordon!  They’re blank flanks!  ...I just k-, I just kihhhuh-...”  She couldn’t even finish her sentence without gagging, as if she was literally choking on her words.  Dry-heaving for a few agonizing seconds, but failing to vomit, she erupted into deep, painful sobs.  As if she felt a basic, biological need to say the words out loud, the caramel mare let out a last, deep wail of sadness, and the next huge gasp of air that filled her lungs would condemn her before it left her body.

Alyx looked up at the blackness above and saw a perfect and unblemished moon that looked down on her unforgivable sin lying before her in a pile of ash, bathed in the damning light of the flames as if she was already in hell, and screamed,  “I JUST KILLED A BUNCH OF FOALS!!”

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Tick.  Light goes on.  Tick.  Light goes off.  Tick!  Light went on!  Tick!  Light went off!

There is an idea floating around the scientific community of Equestria called the Infinite Worlds Theory.  It states that for every action, there exists a distinct alternate reality for every single possible outcome, an entire universe created for just that one variable of that one action at that one point in time and space, a universe where everything is exactly the same as ours – except for that one single quantum event that turned out differently.  I don’t know how I even got to this point, but what I was thinking as I obsessively-compulsively flipped my hazard light on and off and on and off was,

In some other universe there must be a very sad pony with a very broken flashlight.  Not that Infinite Worlds isn’t a load of shit.

“I’m not as good at this as my mother.  Just one of many, many things that fall under that category,”  sighed the lightish kind of tan, or possibly caramel-colored mare in front of me as she actually looked at her horn, cross-eyed, attempting to magically cut a path through the thick grove of shoulder-high weeds that if you squinted really hard and turned your head sideways, almost looked like it could have once been a soccer field.  “Teleportation, for example.  And, goddesses, do I wish that wasn’t so, sometimes.”

Quite frankly, I was pretty tired of listening to her talk by this point.  I couldn’t even remember her name anymore.  Come to think of it, I couldn’t remember my name anymore.  And I realized that I didn’t even care!  I didn’t care if I couldn’t remember my own name!

“HA!”

My outburst caused my companion to abruptly stop and turn to face me, glaring at me with the kind of look you’d give somepony who had just stood up on a table in the middle of a crowded restaurant and declared that narwhals should have the same rights as everypony else.

She sure had changed in the past... I don’t know, half an hour, something like that.  She’d been lying on the ground, sobbing her freaking eyes out over some dead body or something, for like, ten freaking minutes, and then I think I said something to her, and that made her more upset, so I just kind of wandered off a little ways – I wasn’t going to leave, but I wasn’t going to come right back either.  I just, I don’t know, needed some fresh air.

Then... then I saw these ponies trotting up to the school, and I was like, ‘hey school’s closed, you can’t go in there,’ and then they started to get real close to me, and I was like ‘whoah there buddy, you don’t have to get upset,’ and then one of them started freaking wailing on me like I’d just called his wife a doubler-cuddler or something, and... then Alyx runs over and she freaking shoots them in the face which I thought was pretty hot, you know, seeing a mare handle a gun like that... and then... after that, we took off, for some reason.

“Hey,”  I asked the mare who hadn’t taken her eyes off me since we stopped in the middle of the stupid grassy field that I didn’t want to be in and probably had snakes, “What’s your name?”

For some reason, she grimaced, her eyebrows shooting up in concern.  Not that her eyebrows were actually concerned, it’s really more of a metaphor than anything.

“Gordon... you really need to get to a hospital don’t you?”

I wasn’t listening.  I wasn’t even there.

“Gordon?”

I was on a carriage that was carefully making its way down a seaside road that some unfathomable machine or magic had carved from the face of the bright-white limestone bluff.  Its peak lay some thirty meters above us, the whole magnificent thing casting a shadow some distance out into the sea, enshrouding much more than just us in cold and dark despite the otherwise sunny and warm day.

“Mom?”  I asked the faded-black mare next to me in the coachpony’s seat.  To me, she seemed nearly as tall as the cliff behind her.

“... and this chick, oh, you would not believe this chick they had me replace.  She let them get away with anything!  Anything under the sun!  Neighthan – she even let them use sick leave days for vacation days -”

“Maaaaawwwwm,”  I called out.  Again.  And she ignored me.  Again.  I hated being ignored.

“No, I agree completely, Raz;  Breaking the ratio rules is totally unprofessional.  It’s like I always say; You’ve got to follow the law, and if you don’t, they will cu-”

“Neighthan!”  my mother scolded the off-white stallion pulling our lousy beater of a carriage.

“...sorry – snuggle – your... stuff up,”  he verbally backpedalled.

“MAAAAWWWMM!!”  I whined.

“YES, Gordon, what do you want?”

Of course, at that point I had forgotten what it was I was going to ask her, and it took me a second to remember... something about the hospital... and what they were going to...

“AH!  Yeah, uhm, are the doctors going to put me to sleep when they pull my teeth out?”

My father looked at us over his shoulder as he answered the question that had been posed to his wife. “Yes, Gordon.  We’ve already told you this, but it seems you weren’t listening.”

My mother hated being interrupted as much as the next pony, but she just loved seeing her husband interact with their son, so she let it slide.

Then, without warning, my brother smacked me upside the head, making me nearly lose my balance and tumble down the cliff to my almost certain death!

“OW!  What’d you do that for, ya mule!?”

“What did I do that for!?  Gordon, if you don’t cuddling snap out of it, I swear to the Goddesses, I am leaving your ass with the zombies, do you understand me!?”

I blinked.  It was dark.  It was very, very dark, and we were in the middle of a... well, if you tilted your head and squinted, it almost looked like it could have once been a soccer field... next to a burning one-room schoolhouse.

Dear Princess Celestia.  I’ve lost it.  I’m not just hallucinating, I’m going to other places now.

“I’m past the point of no-permanent-brain-damage aren’t I?”  I guessed while glancing at my health monitor, which read 24, the lowest I’d ever seen it.

“Yeah, probably,”  Alyx spat, clearly extremely irritated.  “You know, Gordon, I really, really wish that you had TOLD ME YOU WERE FREAKING DYING, like, before the ELEVENTH HOUR,”  She screamed.

I would have apologized, but I didn’t feel that my present mental state was in any shape to explain my past mental state, if that makes any sunflower-sniffin’ sense.

We stepped out of the brush and onto a nicely paved avenue that still had a few working streetlights, and I almost fell over when I laid eyes on Ponyville’s local Taco Bellflower.  The front of the gastrointestinal-adventure of a restaurant had been smashed into several million pieces of glass and brick, along with the rarer and more expensive metal that had once held the two together.

There, sprawled across the debris so that it was half inside and half outside the broken wall, bent, broken, and bearing more than a handful of the deep, unmistakable scratches that can only come from dragon’s claws, the blue, alien steel of a Combine Hunter-Killer chopper lay glinting in the light from the moon and the flaming school behind us, in addition to a modest amount from the smattering of streetlamps along the boulevard.

So this is where it crashed.

I had hardly put my fourth hoof on the pavement before Alyx fired a trio of three-shot bursts into the plump, round heads of an equal number of zombies who had gathered around to study the specimen of alien technology.  Or maybe they were there because it smelled like food, or because it was shiny and made noise, or it’s entirely possible that it was some combination of those three things;  Advancement of zombiekind’s knowledge, acquisition of tasty treats, and artistic appreciation of shiny, noisy things.

I unholstered my Saddle-Mounted Anti-Infantry Rifle and drilled smoking-hot holes almost as big as my foreleg in the other half of the crowd of spectators.  The toxins clouding my thoughts were evidently causing me to hallucinate, so it was with great suspicion that I made my way over to the crash site to investigate the freshly-made corpses.

Their faded coats were almost all the colors of the rainbow; Yellow, orange, purple, red.  Lots more red now, of course.  I shrugged.  They looked real enough to me.

“Hey, Alyx,”  I called to my companion whose name I now remembered, though I had no idea how long that would last.  “Do you see these dead zombies over here?  And, for that matter, the heli- Hey!  What is it!?”

“Look,”  was all she said as she pointed her hoof down the street.

I peered into the far reaches of the darkness with my suit’s zoom function, and by the grace of Celestia, there it was, where the road split into a T-intersection, with big, red letters hanging above the main entrance, illuminated by an amazingly still-functioning spotlight:  ONYV LLE URGENT CAR.

“The hospital!”  I looked to my right at the still-burning schoolhouse across the field.  It looked just about ready to collapse.

“Wow, you weren’t kidding when you said it was close by,”  I remarked.

Alyx gave a frustrated sigh.  “No, Gordon, below that.  On the street.”

I looked again, this time noticing the glowing blue blades of one of that crazy unicorn’s contraptions lying roughly in the middle of the road, and all around it were dozens upon dozens of possessed ponies.  Some had begun shambling in our general direction, but the majority crowded around the whirring ‘art piece’, seemingly transfixed by it.

I commented, “I didn’t know zombies could see.”

Alyx replied, “I think the problem is that they can’t see very well.”

I’m proud to say I was still perceptive enough to get the joke.

“They’re not that bad-looking,”  I said while admiring the spinning blades through my digitally-zoomed rangefinder.  The metaphorical walking dead seemed to have a bad habit of wandering too close to what I increasingly suspected was not just a piece of art, but a beautifully simple killing machine.

Whenever that happened, the rotating blades would, of course, saw through their flesh at about neck level, sometimes decapitating the poor ponies, and sometimes leaving their headcrab-laden heads hanging off to one side, attached to their former owners by nothing more substantial than a string of flesh or a particularly strong-willed vertebrae.

Hmmm.  Rotating blades.

Alyx had lain down on the cobblestone and begun picking off the monsters from a distance with her favorite weapon.  I turned to shine my hazard light on the ruined Combine helicopter.  The tail rotor seemed to be mostly intact, and I’ll bet it was quite sharp.

No.  Bigger.

I turned my light upwards to the primary lifters;  Two of its several-meter-long blades were crumpled and bent, but the other two were mostly undamaged.

“Gordon, I know you’re slowly descending into madness and everything, but could you please help me kill some of these cuddlers!?”  Alyx pleaded.

Ignoring her, I concentrated on persuading the axiom of the blades loose from its peculiar blue-metal enclosure, which was thankfully already quite loose, having endured a point-blank detonation from one of its own missiles, followed shortly thereafter by an uncontrolled and unplanned landing right into one of the worst restaurants in Ponyville.  It came off with a creak and a snap, and I floated the enormous assembly towards me, noting that even if it was made out of advanced alien space-metals, it was still incredibly heavy, making me infinitely thankful for that creepy voodoo-witchcraft in my suit that amplified my telekinesis.

“Gordon!”  Alyx yelled at me while she gracefully levitated a fresh clip out of her jean-vest,  “What, are you ignoring me again!?  What in Celestia’s name are you doing with that helicopter!?”

I turned to look her in her amber eyes - the dark sacs underneath them, surrounded by lines and wrinkles of worry were obvious even in these poor lighting conditions, such was the stress of the past few hours.

“I’m helping you kill those cuddlers,”  I stated with vulgarity that was becoming increasingly commonplace for me.

She blankly stared at me for a moment, then to the blades, then simply nodded.  She tried to conceal it, but I could see the foal-like excitement creeping into her stare.

You want to watch them get chopped into pieces, don’t you?  I thought in a teasing sort of way.

I wrapped my mind around the adjacent pair of four-to-five meter long blades that were too damaged to use, and, not for a single moment thinking it would work, yanked them as hard as I could in opposite directions.  To my great shock, they actually popped right off, like they were attached magnetically or something, which you’d think would be absolutely ludicrous for a connection that would be under as many gees as the blade of a helicopter.  And yet, here they were, snapping apart like toy building blocks, with no discernible design element that suggested more mechanical attachment.

Huh.  I guess the Combine have evolved beyond the use of screws, I thought as I used my unicorn magic to launch the useless things into the night sky, hoping that wherever they landed in this forsaken town, they wouldn’t hit the ground before slicing open some unlucky zombie or headcrab.

With, I should note, much greater effort, I popped off one of the good ones, and repositioned it so that the blade assembly formed a straight line of death as wide as the entire street.  It was too perfect, like it was meant to be, like... destiny, or fate, or, I thought as I gazed at the magnificent majesty of the full moon, the answer to the fervent prayer of a desperate little pony, lost, alone, and confused, in an alien world surrounded by alien things.

Warning: Vital signs critical.

I raised my makeshift horizontal guillotine in front of me, and willed it into position between us and the starving horde of involuntary murderers and cannibals.

I am in Xen now.  I see islands of strange rock floating in the air, orbiting like moons around a planet, barreling through a formless void that was both sea and sky, an ether of green and blue and black that swirled without movement and burned to gaze at.

The horde was steadily, patiently moving forward, shrinking the distance between us every second I delayed.  “Gordon, whatever you’re going to do, hurry up and do it!”  Alyx urged.  Goddesses, there were so many of them I couldn’t even see the clinic anymore.

“Goddesses!  They call you goddesses!”  I screamed inside my air-tight helmet before once again breaking down into shameful sobs of self-pity.  Before me, lying scattered in the alien regolith, was a pump-action shotgun, an SMG, a crossbow, and even a pair of experimental directed-energy weapons.  And they were all completely useless because I had not one round, clip, charge, or bow left for any of them.  I was knee-deep in aliens - flank-deep, even - and not only did I have no way of fighting them, but I was also so far, so totally, so fundamentally removed from my usual plane of existence that the very thought of going back home was comical.

“CELESTIADAMNIT, GORDON!  If you don’t shoot that thing in about five seconds...”  I could have guessed what Alyx was going to finish her sentence with, but for some reason she couldn’t bring herself to threaten to leave me there.

That’s probably because she cares about you, you bleeding numbskull, I counseled myself, apparently in such a state of mental degradation that I had resorted to using Trottinghamian vernacular when addressing myself.

I raised my razor-sharp ambassador of friendship once again, and tensed it in the mystical folds and strands of magical energy emanating from my horn, which now glowed so brightly it outshone every other light source I could see down the haunted avenue.

I drew back, and whispered a quick prayer to the Princesses that I had learned from the small minority of ponies who revered them as living gods before they vanished with the arrival of the Combine;

Princesses watch and guide my sword,

‘Til friendship and harmony ‘ve been restor’d.

I set the blades free, telling them to fly like they were still attached to a helicopter.

Ponyville disappears, and I am once again lying on that horribly familiar alien soil.  My eyes are closed tightly shut, and I am whispering something inside my head.  It is my first prayer.

I don’t know about the Princesses.  I don’t know a lot of things.  Hell, that’s putting it lightly.  If I’ve learned anything from all that study and research, experimentation, observation... It’s how incredibly, unbelievably ignorant we really are.  Especially me.  I couldn’t theorize my way out of a wet paper sack.

If there is anyone out there, if anyone or anypony, or any anything is listening...  My name is Gordon Freemane, and I am lost and alone in an alien world surrounded by alien things, and I am scared that I am going to die... and because of that... because of my failure... I am scared that all of my friends are going to die, too.

Please.  I need help.  I really, really need help.

When I opened my eyes, I saw fifty headless, neck-less, and even faceless corpses strewn across a dark, empty, and still boulevard;  A rainbow of colors smeared, spattered and dipped in red.  My improvised horizontal guillotine had performed flawlessly, even cutting through the spinning-blade contraption that once lay in the middle of the street, its glowing, bluish blade simply gone – it was probable that it had either rolled away or taken to the air the instant it had been freed from the constraint of its base.  A number of streetlamps had also been pared down, making my flashlight almost the only source of illumination.

The street was not perfectly flat, and the zombies were not all the same height.  Some had been sliced through at or even beneath the shoulder;  The force from the sudden impact with so much mass had sent their bodies flying backwards, and large portions of their back and withers were now bloody flaps of skin and fur, the helicopter blade having violently cleaved into them, but failed to completely tear off the strong, flexible pony hide.

At the other end of the scale were a few that the blade cut into at such a high angle that literally only the headcrab, or part of the headcrab, was removed.  Those ponies got to taste freedom’s sweet nectar for a few precious moments before their irreversibly-altered brains died along with the parasite that had unjustly imprisoned them inside their own bodies for the past half-decade.

I peered into the mass of blood and carnage that I had created:  Nothing moved, nor made a sound.  Not a single one of them survived.

I had just killed over fifty zombies without firing a shot.

A miracle is something that cannot be reproduced or proven, only believed.

Almost as soon as I was done lamenting to the universe that I had no ammo, and therefore, no way of killing the many and various things that my current job assignment required me to, I felt something tumble off of the magnetic strips on the back of my HEV suit, clattering to the alien ground with a metallic *thud*.

Getting back on all four hazard-suited hooves, I stared down at the object that had chosen that moment to fall on the ground.  It was my crowbar, which I had actually grown rather attached to over the course of my little day from hell.  And crowbars don’t run out of ammo.

At least, I don’t think they do.

Alyx was behind me, cheering like I had just scored a game-winning touchdown, but I remained silent.

“Come on, Gordon!  We’re there!  We made it!”  she rejoiced.

I did not feel joyful.  I felt like I had just slaughtered some fifty ponies.  Mares, stallions, maybe some of them were even foals.

“Alyx,”  I asked as I noted my health monitor was now below 20%, “How did you feel after you realized that the zombies you’d killed back at the school were blank-flanks?”

Alyx, who had just begun trotting towards the hospital, stopped dead in her tracks.  “What did you just say?”  she asked, turning around to look me in the eye.

“I said, how did it make you feel when you realized you had just killed a bunch of foals?”  I answered, barely conscious of what I was saying.

She didn’t get upset, or buck me in the face like she should have.  Instead, she collapsed onto the blood and gore soaked ground, resting her haunches in the intermingling connective tissues of a dozen different ponies like she didn’t even care anymore... like she was already covered in their blood.

After a long moment in which Ponyville was so quiet and the air so dead, I swear I could hear Alyx’s heart beating, she said, “... I felt like I wanted to kill myself, Gordon.”

Again, barely aware of where I was or who I was speaking to, or even why, I replied,

“Oh.  Well, why didn’t you?”

I remember her smile so well.  It is frozen in my memory, burned into my retina, but not in a painful way, in a good way.  It was a smile that somehow made the smell of death and entrails that filled my nostrils actually seem pleasant by association, like whenever I smell pumpkin pie, I think of Hearth’s Warming day back home.  Except with freshly-killed zombies and Alyx grinning.

Anyway, she grinned, and said,  “Well, because I’ve still got to worry about your stupid ass.”

I laughed because I thought it was funny that she just said ‘ass’, and I always got in trouble with Mrs. Brightly for saying bad words out loud because it’s a bad word and she’s a total codger, and she’s also mean.  One time she wouldn’t even let me use the restroom because she didn’t trust me and I had to hold it until the bell rang a really long time after that.  Just like when I was in Xen, and I couldn’t go to the bathroom because I was in an airless and radioactive environment that I’m pretty sure was also quite cold.  And ugly.  Really, really ugly.  Just brown and green everywhere, like some colossal cosmic being had taken a giant shit all over the entire world, and nobody cleaned it up because they were born there, and that’s just what they thought the world was supposed to look like.  Really, it was a terrible world to raise a family in.  No wonder they wanted ours so bad.

I wrapped my mind around the cold steel shaft of the red-and-slightly-darker-red crowbar, lamenting how I couldn’t grip it in my teeth without retracting my helmet and breathing sweet, cold vacuum.

I decided to take it as a sign - a sign from the Goddesses that they were there, and they were watching.  “Thank you, Luna and Celestia!”  I shouted out loud, prompting incredulous reactions from what sounded like Alyx, but it couldn’t possibly have been Alyx because I don’t remember her going through the Lambda Core teleport.  I don’t think Alyx even worked at Black Mane, let alone had access to one of its highest security areas.  That was just plain silly.

------------------------------λ------------------------------

I cannot, however how hard I try, remember actually walking through that sea of dead to the front entrance of Ponyville Urgent Care.  I do, however, remember ducking underneath the rotor from a helicopter that had lodged itself inside the pair of concrete pillars that marked the entrance:  I was seriously impressed that I had launched it with such incredible force.  I examined the battered and abused alien blade;  It seemed that the only thing covered with more blood, gore, bits of bone and hair, and other nastiness than that vital component of powered flight currently attached to the clinic, was the clinic itself.

It appeared that the Day Ponyville Died, PUC had been the first place ponies had gone for help, and from the looks of it, it had been absolutely overwhelmed with hundreds of wounded and dying patients.  A triage had been hastily erected immediately outside, stretching across a long-dead decorative garden, across the wide sidewalk, and into the street;  White tents, gurneys and folding tables marked makeshift operating rooms whose paper-thin walls had long been torn to shreds by weather, decay... and zombies.

The blood that had been spilt here half a decade ago had long dried up, leaving dark stains on the stone surfaces, and utterly disappearing in the hoofprint-packed dirt of the garden.  But there were no bodies, not even bones, and I really didn’t want to know what had happened to them.  There were, however, scraps of cloth here and there, hats, jackets, and saddest of all, a saddle with foal-sized safety restraints lying on the ground that I imagined had once belonged to some desperate parent who had come galloping to the hospital, searching for help for his family in an artificial hell, and finding only the dead, the damned, and the Dreaming to aid him.

There were cushions, strewn about on the sidewalk without rhyme or reason, and almost every single one of them bore the same red smears that marred the ground everywhere else.

A waiting area, I thought, my mind’s logical circuits still firing away despite the destructive organic chemicals that by now constituted a significant percentage of my blood supply.

“They were here for so long,”  I said to nopony in particular, and certainly not Alyx, “They not only had time to set up a triage, they even set up a waiting area.”

“I guess killing several thousand ponies takes time,”  Alyx replied to a question that was not in any way directed at her.

“I thought that it happened so fast, that by the time Spike got back here from Black Mane West... he said it was already too late.  That’s what he said, ‘it was already too late’.  What does that even mean?”  I did not ask Alyx, because it was impossible for her to be there.

“I don’t know, Gordon.  I guess you’ll have to ask him about it later.  Right now, we need to...  Hey!  Where are you going?!  Wait for me!”  she called out as I made my way to the entrance, thoroughly ignoring her.

I turned a door handle ominously decorated with a bloody bite mark, and the right-side door of Ponyville’s no-longer-operational clinic swung open.  The tiny lobby was devoid of any particular terror except for the double-lines of bloody hoofprints vandalizing the floor, the rust-colored stains remaining long after the liquid components had been evaporated by the sun, air, and time.  Their numbers were dense, and I noted that, judging by their wide, smeared pattern, the column heading in, and the adjacent one heading out, had both been created in equal haste.

Alyx was ahead of me, remaining deathly silent.  She gently magic’d open the double-doors to the waiting room, and I almost wished she hadn’t.  It was a large, wide open room with comfortable floor-pads to sit down on – much nicer than those filthy ones outside -  wooden benches along the walls if you preferred to sit for some reason, and scattered here and there were little coffee tables piled with the kind of lowest-common-denominator mainstream drivel that I would prefer not to call ‘literature’.  Nowhere, nowhere was there a single copy of Scientific Equestrian or Celestia’s Science Monitor, or any other peer-reviewed journals of any kind, unless you count The Manehattanite as a scientific journal of different positions in which to cuddle!

There were also lots and lots of dead bodies, for some reason.  Perhaps whatever had... removed... the bodies outside couldn’t - or wouldn’t - come inside.  And that was all well and good, and, you know,  fascinating and all that hullabaloo, but I just couldn’t believe the reading selection these poor ponies had been forced to endure!

“Decay: How Magic is Holding Us Back as a Species, by W. Octavian Breen, Dr., Phd.”  I drunkenly read aloud from the cover of one of the ‘books’.  Alyx whipped around to shush me, and she seemed to be gently rocking back and forth like a boat on restless waters.  Then, there were more of her, copies, clones!  Mimicking her actions like actresses in a well-rehearsed play!

“Gordon, we really need to get you that medicine, don’t we?”  I think Alyx asked.  I didn’t respond, as I had just noticed that the targeting reticule on my glasses had also multiplied into... one, two, three, four... seven... wait, what comes after... what number was it, again?  One, two, three, f-fo-four...  No, no, no, it can’t be seven, how absolutely ridiculous that would be!  That’s... that’s like saying Gryffindor’s Cat disproves the Pinkamena Uncertainty Principle!

“HAHAHAHAHAHHA!!” I laughed, and Alyx shot me this look of unadulterated horror, like I was... like I was eating my hair, or something.  I didn’t listen to whatever it was that she said, as I was preoccupied with trying to shove my targeting reticule up her big, stupid, nose.

There was a terrifyingly loud *crack* as the door to the stallion’s restroom at the back of the waiting room burst open so hard and so fast that it rebounded off the wall and came back to hit whoever had just opened it in the face.  The slapstick humor caused me to let out another fit of insane giggling.

“Gordon, will you shut the buck up for just a second!?”  Alyx snarled at me while I stuck out my tongue.

“What in the hell made that n-  SHIT, GORDON!” she screamed as the dark figure finally emerged from the bathroom, apparently having mastered door-opening.

My giggles instantly escaped me when I laid eyes on it.  No, not it, them.  They were coming out of the mare’s bathroom now too, a whole darned pack of them!  My hazard light revealed that they were all wearing the same pinkish-red, skin-tight... Wait.  They had these white areas that looked like... ligaments and tendons...

I focused my hazard light on the head of one of the things as it sniffed at the air.  Its head was white.  Bone-white, with thick, red ligaments attached to the jaw.

That’s a skull if I ever saw one, I thought.  Dear newborn Luna, they don’t have any skin.  Just muscle.  Just pure, rippling muscle.

That wasn’t all.  The headcrabs, which were rounder and possessed skinnier legs than any others I’d seen, were attached to the backs of their skulls instead of covering the face, and looking out from the former pony’s eye-sockets were these globs that you couldn’t rightly call eyes.  Glazed-over, dull-yellow, featureless, mindless, heartless, unsympathetic and unfeeling.  They were eyes that no longer held souls, nor the slightest flicker of reason.  Only a drive remained in those eyes, an overpowering and all-consuming hunger.  I didn’t need to observe them in action to know this.  I just needed to look into those celestiadamned yellow eyes, and from the moment I did so, I knew that those soulless, demonic things would haunt my dreams for the rest of my life, however long that was to be.

Further down, below the skinless nasal passages, were no longer the flat, herbivorous teeth of a pony.  It looked as if some sick bastard had taken a hacksaw to the gumline of their skulls like one would take a paring knife to a jack-o-lantern, carving unnaturally large, jagged incisors out of the bone of their mandibles and maxillae, giving what were once vegetarian grazers teeth that looked to be supremely well-adapted to tearing flesh and snapping bone.

“ALYX!”  I shouted as I switched to my very unauthorized Saddle-Mounted Anti-Infantry Rifle,  “LOOK AT THEIR CUDDLING TEETH!”

They all stopped sniffing the air the second I stupidly opened my mouth, collectively snapped their heads in the direction of the sound, and lunged - covering the distance between us faster than I could blink.  However, not even poison headcrab venom could interrupt the neural synapses that reflexively activated in response to the sudden movement, commanding my horn to snap shut the magical energy field that currently had a death-grip on the trigger of my repeater-rifle.

I fired into the pack.  The thunderous, rapid-fire booms of the SM/AIR drowned out the blood-curdling shrieks of the fast zombies who bayed for my blood.  Two of them went down instantly, simply disappearing behind the other hideous forms that now filled my vision.

Then they were on me!  Before I even knew what had happened, I felt myself pinned against the ‘intake’ counter, getting battered by zombie-hooves as I tried to keep my head and neck away from those cuddling TEETH!

“ALYX!!” I yelled.  By some divine act, my helmet began to extract itself from its storage position, protecting my face from being bitten off!  Bless you, Black Mane scientists and engineers!

Black Mane.  Black Mane...  Black Mane.

I was hanging above a catwalk.  There was something sticky and warm wrapped around my neck.  I couldn’t breathe.  It was pulling me up, pulling me up to its mouth, it wanted to eat me, it was going to eat me!  I could see my crowbar, it was lying on the catwalk, dangling over the edge!  If I could just concentrate... It wasn’t very far away...

I had snapped back to reality, and was staring at the fast zombie on top of me, when its head exploded like some enterprising young pony had planted a grenade inside its skull, coating my folded-and-locked glasses with gore and saliva.  I looked to my left and saw Alyx levitating my portable repeater-rifle in front of her, a thin wisp of grey-white smoke lazily drifting from its air-cooled barrel.

Or a ’67-tier depleted-bronium anti-material round.  That would also do the job.

A few more crashes of thunder from the pride of the REA dispatched the remaining two zombies.  Alyx helped me to my feet, putting her horn under my foreleg and pushing upward.  She did her best to give me a smile.

“Here’s your gun back.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s impressive, but... it’s just a bit much,” she said graciously.

I retracted my helmet.  “I think... I need... to see a d-... DOC-tor,”  I slurred as I accepted my precious, wonderful, miraculous gift from the Royal Equestrian Army back.

Alyx’s voice was full of worry as she said, “Right, you need medicine!  Medicine, medicine...”  She tried the door to the doctors’ offices, but it was locked.  She cursed, and climbed up and over the counter of the intake desk through a window that hadn’t been intact for a very long time.

“Careful, Alyx!”  I cautioned as I may or may not have stared at her red, blood-stained ass.

“Gordon, you better not be staring at my ass!”  she yelled over her shoulder as she wriggled through the opening.

“I’m not!”  I lied.  It looked like a giant pair of red lips that were trying to kiss a particularly squeamish, black  furry centipede.

While Alyx fished around in the cashier’s cage for the right set of keys, I groggily stumbled over to the floor-pads and sat down on one that wasn’t covered in bodily fluids or worse – bodies.  There were dead ponies everywhere in this waiting room – some were skeletons, some were still partially or mostly whole, their wounds still visible in their bright, multicolored fur and flesh.  Pegasi, unicorns, earth ponies, mares, stallions, foals, even what looked like a zebra.  And I didn’t care.

I didn’t care anymore about these dead ponies who surrounded me at all times, haunting me wherever I went.  That’s a terrible thing to say, I know, and how could I even think something like that?  I mean, of course I care about these ponies, they’re people!  Just like me!  But damnit, that’s the problem.  They’re not me.  They don’t serve any purpose in whatever twisted, insidious cosmic narrative that I’m a part of, so whoever the hell is up there, pulling the strings, I don’t know if it’s Celestia or the G-pony or what, they don’t bother pulling the ones that would keep these... insignificants alive.

So, because they’re just collateral to the G-pony or whoever he works for, or whatever dark force or cosmic energy or supernatural entity that possesses them, or whatever it is, whenever I meet up with an ally, a friend, a fellow freedom-fighter, or even a fellow scientist, the moment they reach out to shake my hoof, their fate is sealed.  They’re just warm, breathing, talking corpses in denial about a simple fact:  If you meet Gordon Freemane, your violent and untimely death suddenly becomes virtually inevitable, no matter who you are, or what you’ve done.  Everypony I know, everypony I care about...

I looked at Alyx through the window of the cashier’s cage.

Everypony I love.

So, why bother?  Why bother getting attached to somepony who’s just going to die anyway?  It’s best not to get too close, right?

Celestia, I hate myself for thinking that.  I really, truly do.

“I found it!”  Alyx proclaimed through gritted teeth that were holding up a fat set of golden keys bundled together on a key-chain.

“Whoopie,”  I said, sounding about as enthusiastic as I felt.  Maybe all these distressing thoughts were just the deadly neurotoxin talking, and as soon as I got the cure, everything would go back to normal.  Besides, I’ll get to see more of this hell-clinic!  That’ll be sure to give me plenty of material for new and exciting nightmares for years to come!

We cautiously stepped through the now-unlocked hallway door, and I noticed that I could no longer see the color green, which concerned me, as I very much enjoyed the color green.

“Wait, Alyx, why didn’t we just shoot the door open?”

“Because we don’t want to make any unnecessary noise, silly,”  she replied using a very girlish inflection.

I wasn’t satisfied with that answer, even in my extremely groggy state.

“But while we waited, I was dying.”

Alyx’s eyes went wide.  “Oooh.  Yeah.”  She bit her lip and looked down at the floor in shame and embarrassment, which for some reason I thought was really, really hot.  “Good point.”

I blankly stared at her as the hallway seemed to get infinitely longer, the walls began to collapse in on us, and Alyx’s body warped and twisted in sickening ways.

“Whatever, let’s just get this medicine and get the buck out of here,”  I said while trying to shut out the impossible hallucinogenic phenomena that were starting to surround us.  “...and on the way out, set the place on fire, if possible.”  I noticed that the color red was now gradually replacing the absent green in my visual spectrum, making the shapes, forms and shadows fighting their way into my vision blood-red, as if I hadn’t freaking seen enough of that cuddling color today.  Celestia.  Celestia and the army that wears the tattoo on her ass.

We passed by the corpse of a physician with white fur and a matching white doctors’ uniform, lying in the hallway next to a cart loaded with dusty medical equipment.  Latched to her face were the stiff, blackened remains of a headcrab with a long, fat syringe sticking out of its back.

The elevator stopped.  I couldn’t believe it still worked, after that... what did they call it, again?  Renaissance Cavalcade?  Something like that, anyway.  I stumbled out, and saw Barney kneeling over a bright, violet body that had been neatly lain on the tiled floor.  His specially-enchanted security helmet lay next to him, along with his pistol.  He glanced up, and I believe that was the first time I had ever seen the stoic, black stallion cry.

“She has foals, Gordon.  She was just telling me this morning that her oldest brought home all ‘A’s on her report card.  Celestia DARN IT, Gordon!  What in Equestria ARE these things!?”  he angrily shouted while pointing a hoof at the pale sack of flesh whose stubby little limbs still pressed it tight against the dead mare’s head.

“I don’t know, Barnes,”  I replied.

Alyx stopped so abruptly that I ran into her, almost falling down in the process.  I noticed that her blood-red hindquarters were no longer blood-red, but were instead a delightful shade of purple!  And so was almost everything else!

“Gordon?  Did... did you just call me... ‘Barnes’?”  Alyx asked with barely-contained incredulity.

I attempted to answer, slurring my speech as I said,  “I need to shee... a dogtor pleashe.”

“Yes, yes you do,”  she said, and anxiously quickened her pace.

I just stared at my hooves and prayed to Celestia there weren’t any more damned-by-her zombies waiting for us in this Goddesses-forsaken hospital located appropriately enough in an equally Goddesses-forsaken town.

A nice lady whispered in my ear,  “Emergency!  User death imminent!”

That lady was always bossing me around.  Well, actually, I suppose that isn’t fair;  The only thing she ever actually told me to do was go to the hospital.  The remainder of the time, she’s just saying things that would make Captain Obvious facehoof.

“Gordon!  I found the supply room!  Just hang in there a little longer!”  somepony said.

I wonder if there’s a Lieutenant Obvious and a Corporal Obvious and... oh, hell, what are the military ranks again?

“It’s...  No... Celestia, no, no, NO!”

I saw a caramel-colored mare come out of a doorway.  Her face was all dark and grim and stuff, like... like, I don’t know, like it was ‘LET’S BE DEPRESSED DAY’ or something stupid like that.  I hate holidays.  Especially Rose Day.  Luna, what a colt-canoodling holiday.

“It’s empty, Gordon.  Somepony else got here before we did - It’s.  All.  Gone,”  she said while completely failing to give her opinion of Rose Day.  She probably loves it, like all mares.

I think I was on the floor then.  Or maybe I had been for a while.  I noticed that the ceiling was made out of ceiling tiles.  The mare with the black mane and the caramel coat and the black mane... Black Mane...

Black Mane.

I was lying on my back on a flimsy metal catwalk, my legs wiggling in the air as my whole body spasmed with uncontrollable laughter.  At my side was a red, multipurpose maintenance tool, and stuck to the ceiling above me were the mutilated remains of a barnacle that looked like it had been beaten to a bloody pulp by a blunt, metallic instrument.  I was laughing so hard, tears were streaming down my face.  It was so.  Freaking.  Funny.  Really, you should’ve been there.

Authentic and intoxicating as it was, I was genuinely uncertain as to whether I could stop if I even wanted to, not that I did.

I had never felt so happy to be alive.

------------------------------λ------------------------------

“Neurotoxin antidote reservoirs at seventy-seven point zero seven percent.”

The first thing I was aware of was that I was thinking.

“Coagulant reservoirs at eighty-seven point zero four percent.  Antibiotic solution reservoirs at fifty-five point nine five percent.”

The second thing I was aware of was that I was hearing things.

“Equine tissue growth hormone reservoirs at ninety-seven point zero six percent.”

Huh.  I guess a little of that sauce goes a long way.

“Magical energy levels at square-root negative forty-seven point one one percent.”

Very funny, Dr. Pie.  You didn’t know enough about computers to give me a navigation system, but you knew enough to code math jokes.

But I wasn’t completely convinced I was alive until I heard what came next.

Morphine reservoirs at eight point zero zero percent.”

I snapped up, my eyes wide open, and my mind consumed by a single word;

“MORPHIIIIIIIIINE!!”  I screamed.

My head felt like it had been split open by a woodcutter’s axe and violently thrown back together by a surgeon whose only medical training came from playing that board game where you have to put the organs back in the little pony before the buzzer sounds.

Given that my most recent memory was of the world turning purple and then collapsing in on itself, combined with my semi-lucid state, it did not seem entirely out of the realm of possibility that I had, in fact, recently received brain surgery from a friendly lumberjack who earned his medical license in a game of Operation: Put the Pony Back Together™.

I rocked back and forth, wailing in agony as I clutched my skull in my forehooves.  My horizontal gyrations inched my body closer and closer to a precipice, and I – quite bravely and heroically, I might add – fell off the bed.

“Minor impact detected.”

I opened my eyes to see a mahogany wooden floor, the surface of which I noted was unmolested by dust bunnies, or, indeed, dust versions of any other cuddly forest creatures.  Which, by the way, we call ‘cuddly’ because rabbits do, in fact, really like to-

“Good Heavens!  That is the highest-pitched screaming I have ever heard coming from a stallion!”

I looked up and saw a formless white-and-purple blob surrounded by indistinct shadows and shapes.  I noticed that my ability to perceive color had returned to normal.  In every other aspect, however, my sight had decayed like an atom of unicornium.

“Pardon me, Miss...”  I very politely intoned through sheer force of will despite a throbbing, jackhammer-like headache that seemed like it was spamming the dendrites of every single neuron I had left.

“Rarity,”  she replied in a beautiful, sing-song voice, despite her apparent age.  “You may call me Rarity.”

------------------------------λ------------------------------

I had sat there, patiently waiting for an opportunity to interrupt Rarity for the past five minutes.  There had been no opportunities.  None.  She just kept talking in one long incredibly unbroken sentence, switching from topic to topic so nopony could get a word in edgewise.

Regarding with unmasked and unmitigated horror the zombified mares quietly sitting side-by-side in twin wire-mesh cages to my right that had been the strange hermit’s only company for the past several years, I deduced it was because she had grown accustomed to her guests not responding to anything she said.

“Well, I saw that terrific explosion down at the elementary school, and came galloping, and, well, then I may have gotten a bit carried away with cleaning up, but then I thought, ‘Wait!  If those two caused all this, they must have been very badly hurt, and, oh, where do badly hurt ponies go?’  Well, besides the local ice cream parlour for a gallon of Rocky Road, I mean!  Hahaha!  Oh, guilty of that more than once, I am!”  she said while magically refilling her cup with more of that gross-smelling tea that I wasn’t drinking no matter how thirsty I was.

I continued to glare daggers at the snow-white mare that I could now see thanks to my newly-bespectacled eyes.  As soon as she had relinquished the invaluable piece of technology - without the assistance of which I would be dead many times over by now - I had to spend several minutes dismissing error message after error message that had piled up as Rarity picked and pried at my HEV suit, not knowing what the heck she was doing.

But, I suppose she had cleaned the blood and bits of bone off them and my suit, in addition to personally sewing up the hole in my neck-armor with some type of super-strong thread, as well as patching up the hole in my flesh in a surprisingly similar fashion.  And on top of all that, she had, with Alyx’s help, refilled my neurotoxin-antidote reservoirs.  Which is the reason I am still alive.  So, I suppose I could forgive her.  But it wasn’t easy.

Alyx, sitting on the side of the rectangular table between Rarity and I, did something I had previously  thought impossible;  She interrupted her.

“So, was it you, then, who cleaned out Ponyville Urgent Care of medical supplies?”

Rarity’s face fell into a look of embarrassment and guilt.  “*Ahem*, Well, yes, I’m afraid so.  You see, I stockpiled all the medicine and such I could find here, thinking that, well, if some poor, injured pony were to ever venture into Ponyville, unlikely as that may be, I figured I should keep the Boutique well-stocked, so I could help him or her, as t’would be.”

I opened my mouth to yell something profane and derogatory at her, but Alyx quickly jumped her forehooves onto the table, using her right to silence me and her left for balance.

“We are so very grateful for your generous hospitality, Miss Rarity,”  Alyx purred, causing the elderly white unicorn to preen herself like a bird.

“Don’t mention it, darling.  Generosity is my... oh... field of expertise, if you’ll pardon me, Doctor Freemane,”  she said while giving me the kind of look I would kill a dozen poison zombies to have Alyx give me.  Or her mom.

I cleared my throat, trying not to preen myself as she had done when she was complimented.  Not that addressing me as Doctor was a compliment, it was simply a fact.

I momentarily forgot what I had been waiting so long to ask, and instead simply stared into my reflection in the white ceramic plate that had been enthusiastically cleared of its eggs and toast almost the instant they hit the platter, along with all primary and secondary reinforcements.  I didn’t ask where she got them because I really, really didn’t want to know, as that ran the possibility of ruining my enjoyment of the delicious meal.

Alyx took the opportunity to ask another question.  “Uhm, Rarity, about those... canisters... of perfume?”

“Yes, dear, what about them?”  she disinterestedly replied while I felt her eyes continue to linger on me.

“Well, uhm, they’re kind of... extremely flammable.  That perfume blew up Ponyville Elementary,”  Alyx elaborated with an expression that seemed to bear just the faintest traces of Twilight Sparkle’s motherly concern.

Rarity frowned.  “Yes, that was one of my... oh, how do I put this... test chambers, if Doctor Freemane doesn’t mind me borrowing some of his scientific nomenclature,”  she explained.  I looked up as my name was mentioned, and for a brief moment of wonderment, our eyes locked, my olive-green pupils reflected in those big, blue, beautiful sapphires of hers, making my heart leap against my ribcage like it was trying to escape its thoracic prison and run off with hers into the wild blue yonder.

“I was planning on herding a bunch of zombies into the place, spraying them with my latest experimental perfume, and observing their reaction from the most perfect vantage point that I found - ”

I interrupted her, to even my own surprise.  “-The hole in the ceiling.  From the headcrab canister.”

“Why, yes, very good.  Very observant, Doctor,”  she chirped.

I continued, “As I recall, a headcrab fell from the ceiling, one that was coated in... white paint?”

Rarity blinked.  “Oh, goodness, no, no, that wasn’t paint, silly, that was makeup.  As I myself recall, as you so properly put it, when I was rummaging around up in the attic, I wasn’t surprised to find a healthy amount of those little headcrabs nesting up there.  But, instead of killing all of them, I believe I saved one to use as a prototype for something I like to call My Little Crabby – I mean, think about it;  They’re plump, soft, cushiony, huggable little bugaboos to start with, but if you just add a little personality, a little emotion to make them seem more equine, something you can relate to, they could become the next big thing!”

I could.  Not.  Freaking.  Believe.  What I was hearing.

“And then everypony - not just fillies, but colts too!  Even their parents!  Everypony would just have to have a crabby of their very own!!”  the insane mare passionately testified.

Alyx and I exchanged glances as Rarity’s face suddenly fell, like somepony had just told her the Hearth-Warming bunny wasn’t real.

“Anyway, before you say it...That  was a product line I had really high hopes for, but apparently it, too, is highly explosive,”  She said with a hugely disappointed sigh.

There was a long, awkward silence during which one of the caged zombies – which I also deliberately avoided asking about - let out a low, guttural growl which prompted *shush*s from Rarity like she was talking to a misbehaving dog, after which Alyx cleared the air.

“So, anyway, Gordon, Rarity found us, we dragged your heavy ass back to her place, I helped her fix you up, and we spent the night.  That clear everything up?”  She asked with a smile.

I actually considered the question before answering it;  More supporting evidence that my brain’s normal functions had returned.

“One more thing:  Rarity, uhm, when you were... setting up in Ponyville Elementary, you were never...”

“Never what, darling?”  Rarity asked, clueless.

“There weren’t any... zombies in there?”

Rarity glanced upwards at the ceiling in thought.  “Hmm, no, I don’t recall any zombies inside the school, though, like I said, I did stumble across some of those head-crabs up in the attic.”

I stared at her incredulously.  Alyx had seen them too, they weren’t hallucinations.  I think my “brother’s” story about how they got there was just my own mind concocting a narrative to explain the unusual situation it had been faced with, just like it normally would, but distorted and amplified by the poison in my head.  But they were definitely...

I suddenly recalled the canisters of perfume.  The zombies had crawled back towards the hole in the floor, trying to get away from the fumes.  They had reacted to Rarity’s Vineyard Scent the same way we would react to the smell of rotten eggs mixed with dead fish and butthole vinegar.

That’s what Rarity’s perfume smells like to headcrabs, it suddenly clicked.  Moldy eggfish butthole vinegar.

I looked back to the elderly unicorn, who was politely sipping her herbal green tea, then stuck my muzzle in the air and took a cautious sniff;  It was thick with all kinds and varieties of perfumes and scents, including, I could tell, more of that wine crap.

I looked over to the zombified mares quietly sitting in their cages on the far wall, and thought, Oh, you poor, poor things.

I finished my line of questioning with, “And where were you during the shelling?”

“Why, right here, of course!  A captain goes down with her ship, I believe the old saying goes,”  she laughed.  “Does that answer your question, Doctor?  Doctor?”

My face was buried in my hooves as I tried to comprehend the stupidity of it all.

Survival of the Fabulousest.  I should write a paper on it.  I’d be famous.  Oh my Goddesses, I just want to get OUT of this special hug of a town already.

That’s when I finally, finally, finally took particular notice of the sunlight that was streaming in through the second-story window.

My eyes went wide in panic as I practically shouted at Alyx, “IT’S MORNING!”

Alyx spit out her tea.  “OH SHIT!  SHIT! SHIT! SHIT, GORDON!”

Rarity was quite taken aback, and, from the sounds they were making, so were the zombies.

“What!?  What happens in the morning!?”  She demanded, her dyed, thinning hair whipping back and forth between the two of us as we argued.

“Why didn’t you bucking say something, Gordon!?” Alyx demanded through gritted teeth.

“ME!?  I just woke up from a cuddling coma!  What’s your excuse!?”  I immediately countered.

“Well, now how the in the hell are we going to get out of Ponyville!?”  Alyx exclaimed.

Rarity caught on, it seemed.  “Oh, was... was someone supposed to pick you up?”  she asked.

We both whinnied “YES,” at the same time, staring each other down from opposite sides of the table.

“Was... Was that someone a... purple dragon named Spike?”  Rarity continued.

We both turned to look at her in incredulity.  “How did...”  I’m pretty sure we both once again said simultaneously, just in time to watch as Rarity bolted from the room, slamming the door shut behind her.

Just as I suddenly became aware of the sunlight streaming into the room, it was in much in the same way that I noticed the abrupt lack of sunlight that was now coming in through the window.  I closed my eyes and gritted my teeth as I anticipated what I knew would happen next.

------------------------------λ------------------------------

Ponyville’s premier fashionista pressed herself against the wall of the narrow hallway outside what she had labeled her inspiration room, a space for innovation and genius that was currently serving its ancillary purpose as the perfect room for tea parties.  This particular tea party, however, had been rudely interrupted by an adolescent dragon whom she felt shake the entire building when he crashed through the window.

Which she actually wouldn’t have particularly minded.  She never, ever got guests, and she considered dragons to be just absolutely fascinating creatures, but this dragon, however, was no stranger to Rarity.  In fact, the immaculately white unicorn had been the object of his intense (and, she thought, adorable) desire throughout his entire childhood, and like everypony else, now thought she was dead.  Which was one of many reasons why he mustn’t know she was there.

Rarity slowly, carefully moved along the wall to the doorway.  At first, all she could hear was muffled arguing.  The dragon’s words were the only ones her elderly ears could understand through the barrier of the closed door.

“I don’t know!  I don’t know, Gordon!  Did you want to be found!?  Because I spent all freaking night- No, I spent all freaking night-“

She wasn’t sure what was going on in there, but the adolescent dragon was clearly pissed.

“Oh!  I’m alive, by the way!  THANKS FOR ASKING.  Do you have any... f-freaking idea what I went

through at Black Mane West?!”

Rarity heard an unintelligible response, probably from the handsome doctor.

“Oooohhh, zombies!  They’re so freaking dangerous!”  Her heart stopped as she heard the fiery roar of dragon’s breath, and she prayed that Spike hadn’t just done what she thought he’d done.

More shouting, from the mare this time.  It spoke volumes about her status and character that she went for so long without once being interrupted.

“Whatever.”  She heard the scraping and creaking of her poor window being further violated by a creature that was much too big to fit through it.

“Well!?  Hop on, Gordon, unless you want to trot to New Cloudsdale!”

More talking, the sounds of movement, the beating of wings, and the tinkling of her shingles falling off her first floor awning... then naught but silence.

Rarity bucked open the door and beheld the carnage.  The room was an absolute mess, the tablecloth was lying on the floor in a dirty pile, there was tea all over everything, and... Oh dear Celestia, Rarity thought.

And there were the smoldering corpses of Sweetie Belle and Scootaloo, still in their cages, still sitting right where she’d left them.  It appeared that the delightfully cunning xenobiological organism that had been possessing Sweetie Belle for the past half-decade had detached itself at last, and made one final, desperate bid for freedom before it was consumed by the flames that had engulfed its host.

Oh, Sweetie Belle.  You’re finally at peace.  I could never kill you, I wouldn’t... but it seems the Goddesses had other plans, and sent you an angel to take you away from this awful place.

Before she went to look out the pitiful remains of the window, Rarity added, Oh, and Scootaloo, too.

"Oh, my little Spike is all grown up!"  She thought to herself as she watched the majestic purple dragon fly away, his scales gleaming with morning dew, illuminated by the day’s first light from the rising sun.

“And he looks nothing at all like that ugly brute he became when he robbed half of Ponyville of all their possessions and almost destroyed the entire town...”  Rarity put her hoof to her chin, deep in thought.

“Is it... if they grow up hoarding everything in sight, they turn into monstrous dinosaurs, and if they grow up the proper way, they turn into beautiful, gorgeous, magnificent winged dragons?  I should really ask Twilight about how all of that works one of these days.”

Thinking of her old book-smart friend reminded her of that caramel-coated filly that had accompanied the Doctor to the Boutique.  Though they had greeted each other as strangers, Rarity couldn’t shake the impression that she looked awfully similar to Twilight’s little filly, only much older.  She’d meant to ask, but somehow the rather awkward and potentially embarrassing question kept getting shoved to the back-burner.

As t’were, Rarity thought.

She gasped.  "Believe it or not, that gives me an idea for a dress!  I need cloth!  Red, yellow, maybe a bit of orange!"  The once-and-future Empress of Fashion rushed downstairs and out the front door of Carousel Boutique, completely forgetting, for the time-being, that her zombified sister had just been burned un-undead by her grown-up childhood crush.  That, and the positively dreadful mess that would be waiting for her when she got back - an occurrence which not a nerve cluster in her brain doubted would take place.

A fast zombie was waiting for her on the roof of the emporium across the street.  It lunged for her, screaming like a banshee.  With ladylike grace, Rarity levitated Opalescence forward, took precision aim at its hideously mutated head, and telekinetically depressed both triggers.

There was that familiar sound of thunder, and a sickening *THUD* as the possessed pony’s lifeless body slammed into the cobblestone street, its muscle-bound skull sporting a new pair of ventilation ducts drilled by Rarity’s memorial to her kitty.  Perhaps she would make a new gun, and name it Sweetie Belle, after her sister.  Whatever it was, it would have to sound beautiful.

As the echo from the gunshot faded, Ponyville was silent once more but for the sound of an elderly mare with a beautiful voice laughing at the absurdity of it all.

The sheer, utter absurdity.

Achievement Unlocked!  Press Shift + Tab to view.

But I Thought You Wanted Crazy - Meet Rarity!

Author’s note:  If you are a colt or filly, ask your parent’s permission before reading this My Little Pony  fanfiction, as it contains violence, romance, hugging, big words, bad words, and big bad words like Onanism and discountenance.

C H λ P T E R  S I X :

INTO THE BLACK FOREST

The Moon is such a peaceful place.  There is no wind, no birds, no rustling of leaves, no crashing of waters;  nothing exists except for the silence, the total, absolute, perfect silence.  It is a quiet that penetrates so deeply into the mind it is possible to be startled by the sound of one’s own thoughts.  Or at least, that is how the dark-blue alicorn remembered it from when she spent a millennium imprisoned upon its surface;  now, it seemed, it could not be any noisier if it tried.

Princess Luna lay on her back with her wings folded and her lazily-bent legs sticking into the air, either uncaring or unaware of the degree to which the position was unbefitting of royalty.  There she lay flirting with sleep atop the bedspread, removed from the warmth that lay beneath the blood-red satin linens complimenting her fittingly soft and plush Sleeping Bed (which, aside from sharing certain superfluous architectural similarities, was otherwise irreconcilably different from her Reading Bed and Thinking Bed, not to mention the archaic and as-yet un-christened Procreation Bed, which had sat unused for such an eternity she’d had it converted into her unprecedented and highly controversial Eating Bed) inside her royal chambers, which comprised the highest room of the tallest tower of the incomparable, irrerproducible, unattainable by mortal hooves, and otherwise inestimably splendid (and highly copyrighted) Lunar Palace.

It was a fortress of solitude that seemed entirely out of place, jutting up as it did from a vast and featureless desert of white and grey.  One could look at it and wonder if, perhaps while on a trip to that great (and powerful) grocery store in the sky, somewhere between the shampoo and the pop-tarts, it had lost track of its mommy castle, and after tiring itself out with a frantic and futile search, finally collapsed onto the Moon’s powdery regolith, forlorn and depressed, consigning itself to perpetually point its fifty-story body towards the heavens (unlike the hells, there’s only a couple) to indicate from whence it had come to passerby.

The extraterrestrial installation had served her Majesty well as an extravagant (perhaps inappropriately so) prison during that dark and confusing time when she was an alicorn possessed - physically transformed by her own envy - becoming a sort of alter-ego she dubbed ‘Nightmare Moon’ and subsequently declaring war on her sister, whom she named ‘Little Miss Sunshine’.

Though the millennium-spanning lunar exile following her humiliating defeat greatly dwarfed the current sojourn in absolute terms, Luna had begun to wonder if, through some truly obtuse magic, her intense aggravation had actually gained the ability to slow or even completely disrupt the normal passage of time.  If it was, she deigned to name this phenomenon ‘aggro-dilation’, and also that she would win many awards.

The once feared Princess of the Night, who herself constituted 50% of Equestria’s newly formed government-in-exile, was now a political refugee trapped in a ridiculously conspicuous Moon base, much like Cobra Commander (antagonist of Donut ‘Danger’ Joe in the comic book G.I. Donut Joe: An All-Equestrian Hero, a series of easy-readers by somepony named ‘John Freemane’ that consisted of only one, unfinished issue).  However, unlike any snake-headed fortress Cobra Commander ever built, the Lunar Palace just happened to be in a strategic location;  the Moon’s far side, the face that could never be seen from any position planetside.  This ensured Luna’s extremely exclusive clubhouse would remain hidden from even the Combine’s strange magic - this ‘technology’ her sister often spoke of.  But though the lunar mass was excellent at absorbing even the highest frequencies of extra-solar radiation, it was no barrier to real magic.

The dark princess tossed and turned in a restless fit as she struggled to catch just a few hours’ sleep despite the unearthly symphony of voices whose cries punctuated her dreams like the chirping of crickets – or sometimes, the howling of wolverines.

The two sisters had been tormented for the better part of a decade by the disembodied sounds of suffering ponies that filled every second of every day with the horrors of what life had become in what was once their sovereign and unconquerable kingdom.  Princess Luna knew better than to grumble at her share of the burden; poor Tia had always borne the brunt of her subjects’ pleas for help, guidance, mercy, and forgiveness during her millennia-long tenure as co- or sole ruler of Equestria, and she continued to do so even though ‘The Throne’ had been forcibly replaced by an alien governmental system headed by something called an ‘Administrator’ - An execrably pretentious blue earth-pony whom by now they had heard described using over a hundred different euphemisms, none of them pleasant, all of them colorful.

It was known as The Despot’s Curse;  an old magic inextricably bound to any who claimed to be Equestria’s ruler since at least its founding – perhaps even before that.  Some posit that it was a spell cast by the Stars themselves to punish the very first ruler of Equestria, the infamous Princess Platinum, whom oral tradition depicts as gaining the throne through her legendary cunning, only to abandon it shortly afterwards during a time of unprecedented crisis, nearly resulting in the kingdom’s total ruination barely after it had begun.   Others insist that the curse was a kind of magical sabotage, set upon the land in anger by Equestria’s little-understood native inhabitants who were displaced by the flood of very cold pilgrims.  Nothing could ever be proven, of course, as knowledge of the true origin and nature of the curse had been lost to time in the countless footnotes and folklore surrounding the kingdom’s otherwise well agreed-upon founding story.

The Despot’s Curse is thus:  Should any who dared claim themselves sovereign of the land that the Outcasts called ‘Equestria’ ever abdicate the throne while still living, for any reason, they were to be ceaselessly haunted at all times and all hours, everywhere they went, by the piteous wants, needs, desires, and grievances of those over whom they claimed sovereignty, until either death, or their return to the throne.

Princess Celestia’s bed sat across from that of her little sister, cold and empty.  The outcries from the ponies below had grown to such a tremendous multitude that its intended occupant had long ago given up any facade of actually sleeping at night, instead choosing to keep a perpetual vigil before the ‘Heart of the Moon’, a magical fireplace on the ground floor that would burn unceasingly until the end of all things.

So deeply moved was she by her subjects’ stubborn persistence, that there she chose to remain, night after lunar night, at times sitting, sometimes anxiously pacing back and forth, and occasionally lying on the ‘Grand and Magnificent Rug of Aesthetic Improvement and Incomparable Fuzziness’ (summoned by an unholy and depraved dark ritual by Nightmare Moon herself), doing her best to answer the pleas – she was uncomfortable thinking of them as ‘prayers’ - that floated up to her from the wounded and dying globe suspended in the infinite vacuum below them.

If she ever did care about herself, she didn’t anymore; her thoughts and the subtle yet powerful influence of her magic, were, as always, with her little ponies.  “Magic will sustain them,” she told her younger sister time and time again, “Just as it sustains us, Lu-Lu.”  Both of them used the subtle influence of their unicorn powers to assist their battered, defeated and enslaved subjects - including the Resistance - in any way they could.  However, both of the alicorns knew deep in their hearts that only friendship, that most ancient and powerful of magics, had any hope of truly saving them from the hell they had all played a part in creating.

In Celestia’s darkest moments of thoughts and chaos, when the wails of pain and despair from within the Combine’s many torture chambers mingled with the last gasps from those who had stood against them and failed, and her royal alicorn heart filled with so much grief and hurt she thought it might burst, the insane idea crept out of some dark corner of her mind to simply grab hold of the Sun and hurl it into the sphere of the world, vaporizing every one of its inhabitants, living and dead, the innocent and the guilty equal only in death.  No more pain, no more tears, no more torment, no more pleading for the end, only a cosmic storm of hellfire, of superheated clouds and plumes of molten rock and free electrons twirling carelessly through a yawning abyss of nuclear fire so vast as to be virtually without boundary or threshold.  Edgeless, centerless, airless, treeless, poniless, lifeless; a globe once teeming with life and death, triumph and pain, righteousness and wickedness, burned into its constituent elements and cast adrift in a cold, black sea.

But she wouldn’t.  She couldn’t.  What would her little sister think?

More than a hundred meters above, Princess Luna soldiered on in her battle for sleep, unaware that her struggle was rapidly approaching its end on that blackest of lunar nights, when even the void itself seemed somehow perturbed; anxious, like a pack of gazelle stalked by some unseen predator.  For even these alicorns, imbued as they were with magical powers so great that some actually worshiped them as living Goddesses, were ignorant as to the dark machinations of unfathomable cosmic forces that, even as she squirmed atop her luxurious bedspread, crept their way toward the highest room of the tallest tower of the castle on the dark side of the Moon.

“Princesssss Luuuuunaaaaaa...”

She jolted upward, looking left, right, up, and down, but beheld only her silk blankets atop her lavish four-poster bed, and beyond them, her royal chamber; dark and vacant as the airless plains outside.

Oh, how I do so wish my dearest sister, rude as she may oft be, were but the distance of a girlishly-thrown stone on yonder bedding, Luna thought in her unintentionally sexist Old Equestrian lexicon.

Dismissing the occurrence like she would a disrespectful peasant, she lay her head back down on the wisp-silk pillows piled beneath to her preference of exactly three deep, and buried her muzzle in her shimmering, almost immaterial mane just as she did when she was a filly and it was storming outside.  Unaware of when or how, the princess was gently, but insistently, ushered from her familiar universe and into the impossible world of dreams.

Alone and watching, silently contemplating her - an invited guest, but a visitor nonetheless in a world where she did not belong - she beheld the face of a stallion with a blue coat, the spectre of a collared suit and tie just barely visible beneath his somehow... unsettling features.  An unnatural interaction of light and shadow played across his face as he cleared his throat and began to speak in a most peculiar manner; stuttering and struggling, like he had some sort of speech impediment.

“I realize this may not be the most convenient time for a heart to heart, but I had to wait until yourrrrr... ss-sssister was otherwise occupied.”

She was now in a thoroughly alien tile-and-glass room, facing an eccentrically wide desk situated beneath a massive, blown-up image of a steel-grey unicorn stallion, his green eyes just barely discernible beneath the glare from his glasses.  Luna would never admit it, of course, but she thought he was kind of cute.

“There is an individual of unimaginable import to the future of YOUR p-...p-ppeople, an individual who is, at this time... on the verge of entering a very s-specific area of your ‘kingdom’, an area which has earned a certain...” the intruder paused a heartbeat to find the right word, “... ehrm... infamy even amongst those who, by all reason, should not possess any such... superstitionssss...”

She felt herself instantly transported again, this time to a dense and ancient grove whose brooding pines cast long, unnatural shadows that toyed with the mind and devoured the courage of the brave.  A most powerful kind of dread radiated from within, as if the wood were the source of all foreboding.

Though the Forest was haunted by an abundance of evil things, these things did not make it evil.  It was the Forest that made them evil.  And, though heaven knows they would try, the arrogant fools of the scandalously-named ‘Universal Union’ could never control the Forest, for control was the Enemy, and an enemy was something the Forest could not abide.  If there is a truth beyond legend or myth that the heart of every Equestrian knows to be true, it is this:

Hatred may pass and dictators die, and the power they took from the people may return to the people, and brutes - machine intelligences with machine minds and machine hearts - may come to look upon our bounty with envious eyes, the eyes not of another pony, but of intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, their hearts hardened to the magic of friendship, their goal to take our world for their own, but the Forest...

The Forest would be forever free.

“My e-eh-employers view this as an unacceptable risk to their... invessstment, and despite my VOCAL objections, have requested an insurance against any... unff-fforeseen consequences... that may result from this individual’s traversal of this particular geographical region – a circumstance I have been helpfully informed... many times... could have been so easily avoided if only I had been aware that a certain unicorn and a certain dragon KNEW EACH OTHER,”  the mysterious stranger explained in a growl of frustration that Luna sensed was not directed at her.

She somehow felt as if the spectral stallion leaned in closer to whisper the next words into her ear.

“See him safely through Everfree Forest, Princess Luna.  You are, after all, his favorite goddesssss.”

------------------------------λ------------------------------

I kept replaying the scene over and over in my head, my understanding of the recent series of unfortunate events seeming not to deepen, but to lessen with each mental viewing.

“Who was that?”  Spike inspecifically asked.

“Who was who?”  Alyx unhelpfully replied.

“You were having breakfast with somepony inside the Boutique.  Who was it?”

I explained, “Oh, that was this crazy, shotgun-toting cat lady who keeps zombies in her house as... pets, or something... oh, and survived the shelling by spraying herself with perfume.”  This intelligent and informative statement was spoken in an unfittingly off-handed manner, as if discussion of murderous pet zombies and life-saving perfume were pedestrian as crossing the street.

“Oh,”  Spike acknowledged, turning back to look where he was flying, which I was glad of, as I was fairly certain I had had enough excitement for one... that’s right, it’s a new day, isn’t it?  I take that back, I was disappointed that Spike turned to see where he was going, as compared to the previous night’s exciting and educational adventures, today was boring, uneducational, and devoid of even a single near-death-experience.

After a moment of calm but for the rushing of wind punctuated at regular intervals by the sharp beating of his Pterodactyl-like wings (not that you would know what a Pterodactyl looks like, as they’re quite rare), he once again looked over his shoulders at the equine passengers who desperately clung to the scales of his rhythmically undulating body as it weaved through the air, chasing his dark green wings and dragging our soft, fragile bodies with it.

“What was her name?”  Spike shouted back, trying to be heard over the sound of his dragon aerodynamics.

I couldn’t remember, so I deferred the question to Alyx, whom I presently had my forelegs wrapped around, and was probably enjoying that fact just a bit too much.

“Rarity,”  Alyx answered.

Spike’s entire body froze, including his wings, and down came dragon, ponies and all.

After plummeting several hundred feet, the two more equine of us screaming bloody murder all the way, Spike finally snapped out of whatever funk had possessed him, and expertly reoriented his flight path into a semi-powered spiraling descent – which he executed so rapidly that my ears hardly had time to pop before we smacked into the ground; a wretched, dying patch of unremarkable nopony’s-land that lay between what used to be Ponyville and what was still, and always would be, the Everfree Forest.

Alyx and I had both recovered from having the wind knocked out of us after we were violently thrown clear of our worryingly emotional transport, and had started to make our way back over to the panting, twitching mass of purple scales and machete claws, when the gentle, unstoppable killing machine finally summoned the articulation necessary to deliver his response to the answer Alyx had provided.

“SHE SAID HER NAME WAS RARITY!?”  he finally choked the words out in a voice that did not sound at all as loud and intimidating as the dragons in the movies, or at least the ones I’d seen.  Which could be counted using all of my hooves except two.

Alyx sighed in relief; if her thought process was anything like mine (which I knew damn well it wasn’t) she’d probably thought Spike had just been shot, or suffered a heart-attack, or some other massive physical trauma that was not at all similar to ‘Oh my golly, I just realized something!’  She trotted over to have a chat with the startled dragon while I shouted vulgarities unfit for publication.

“Yes, she told us her name was Rarity,” my potential love interest (okay, love interest) purred to the one-nosed one-mouthed flying purple gemstone eater, reaching a hoof up to stroke his scaly chin while he fondly looked back down at her, his lifelong companion and only remaining link to Twilight Sparkle.

Their eyes met, and my temperature rose.  I felt something I had literally not felt, ever; I felt like another male was moving in on my female.  And I knew, of course, the feeling was ludicrous - dragons and ponies are completely different species with totally unequivocal lifespans, not to mention incapable of magical reproduction, and I’m not sure if we even possess any physical traits that a dragon would find specially- huggable, at least in a subconscious, evolutionary psychology kind of way - but in spite of all that reason and logic and science... Alyx and Spike’s, for lack of a more accurate term, intimacy, triggered waves of jealousy that surged through my body and sent a certain circulatory fluid to particular areas of my face.

“Gordon, are you... blushing?”  Alyx giggled.  Spike too, as I recall.  Or maybe I was just imagining it, unconsciously adding it to the memory after the fact in order to paint the picture I wanted.

No, not picture.  Evidence.

“I am not!”  I loudly refuted the pair of gawkers.  Fascinating fact about us Equus Minusculi; we are among a tiny handful of species documented to possess melanin-shifting facial hair follicles, meaning that when somepony blushes, as I’m sure you already know, the hairs on his or her cheeks actually change color in order to carry across the social signal that, for whatever reason, you are currently embarrassed – an adaptation that otherwise serves no conceivable evolutionary purpose. However, nature, it seems, was too much of a freaking troll (truly abominable creatures that are also nature’s fault) to give us ponies control over when and where and whether or not our faces turn red.

“It’s just... the excitement!”  I lied like a snake.  Alyx cocked her head and gave me a funny sort of sideways smile.

“From... watching... us?”  she said, exchanging humorous glances with Spike.

“No!  From the-”  I reared up and frantically gestured towards the sky with my front legs, trying to save (red) face by lending my lie a bit of credibility.  It did not work.

“The fall!”  I insisted, plunking my twitanium-encased hooves back in the dirt, and rapidly moving to change the subject as stupid Alyx and very extra more stupider Spike made faces at each other.  Faces of evil.

“*Ahem* Spike, so, how do you know...”  I was still riled up from watching Alyx gently caress Spike, so it took me a moment to think of that insane mare’s name.  Spike eagerly watched as I stammered, like the purple bastard wanted to see if I could do it.

“...erm... ehhhh... RARITY!  Rarity!  Because that’s her... name?  Yes.  Yes?  Rarity was her name.”

Spike turned his head, scrutinizing me with a green orb the size of a dinner plate.

“Are you sure?”  he challenged me, trying to get a reaction.

While I shouted that I was, my (Please, Luna!  Please!) more-than-a-friend let out the most heart-melting giggle at the sight of a pony yelling at a dragon (although, legends do tell of a pegasus that was actually so good at doing just that she earned herself a nickname; in their language, Dovahmaar, or Dragonshy), the nearly simultaneous actions provoking me to clench my jaw into something like a grimace at stupid, stupid Spike, while at the same time driving my heart to flutter uncontrollably for Alyx.

The fire-breathing stayawayfrommygirlfriend cleared his throat to speak, his loud, deep, appropriately dragon-like voice carrying easily through the damp and cool air of the morning.

“Aaaanyway, to answer your question, Gordon,”  he said while pointing one of those (recently-trimmed, I noticed) keratin machetes at me, “Rarity and I,”  I noted that he said ‘Rarity and I’ instead of the (I’ve always been told) grammatically incorrect ‘Me and Rarity.’

“... go way, waaaaay back,”  Back when she was pretty, or back when she wasn’t insane?

“... to have this *huge, ginormous* crush on her,”  Luna’s waterskiis, It is possible!

“... go on ALL DAY about the stuff we did together, ha!”  Did that stuff include cuddling, perchance?

“Heheh... Oh!  But, anyway, yeah, we all thought... you know, she died in the shelling!”  She should have!  I mean... well, you know what I mean!  She shouldn’t be-

“... alive!?  What did she look like?  Are you sure it wasn’t some other Rarity?”

Alyx answered.  “I *knew*, I just *knew* I’d seen her before!  She used to come over to our house all the time when I was little, and – listen to this- are you listening?”

I had decided to temporarily forgive Spike for tempting my Alyx to be unfaithful to me, and wandered over to the side of the crouching dragon hidden (not so well) in the dewy grass, the tips of each blade just barely kissed by the steadily-advancing light of the rising sun.

“Yes,”  we simultaneously assured her.

“That lady – Rarity – would come over to our house all the freaking time, like three times a week, okay, and she would always haul over a crapton (Spike winced at her profanity – I did not) of dresses and stuff for my mom to enchant with... I don’t know, spells that make dresses prettier, or something – I was really little, okay,”  I think at this point, Alyx took notice of the expressions on her audience’s faces as we sat there listening to her just utterly, utterly fascinating story.

“Anyway, my point is;  I know who you’re talking about, Spike!  And that was definitely her!”  she enthusiastically concluded.

Spike opened his gaping, toothy maw to say something, but my darn self with my darn lack of social skills interrupted.

“That’s wonderful!  Why is this important?”  I asked, it would later occur to me, somewhat disrespectfully.

I glanced between the two of them, expecting an answer.

“Anypony?”  I glanced at Spike, who was glaring at me incredibly hard.

“Or dragon?  Anydragon?  Anyone or anything?  I’m sorry, Spike!  Look, don’t be mad!  Hey!  HEY!  Don’t be mad, dude!  (I possess a severe affliction known as ‘I am socially retarded’, and one of the symptoms of this debilitating illness is that I sometimes address other ponies as ‘dude’ when I am trying to appear as ‘part of the herd’)  Just – Just take a- SPIIIIIIKE!!”

It became apparent to me throughout the course of the preceding exchange of ideas and opinions that I had done something to offend the fire-breathing, hulking, flying, so-heavily-armored-that-even-those-fat-ass- bullets-from-those-power-suited-Combine-bounced-right-off, fresh-out-of-what-sounded-like-an-extremely- harrowing-battle-where-he-very-nearly-died, and already-pissed-off-at-us-for (he probably thought intentionally) making-ourselves-so-hard-to-find-he-had-to-pull-a-several-hour-long-overflight-of-Ponyville -searching-for-us dragon.

His emerald eyes narrowed further, and to my slight discomfort (absolute terror), the huffy magic dragon descended upon me like a peregrine falcon swooping down on the glare from the window of a taxi carriage, adamant on feeding its starving chicks with delicious rays of sunlight and broken glass.

“I know what you did, Doctor.  You. YOU.”

His head stabbed towards me, and as he roared those words, my HEV suit (Goddesses bless its cold, unfeeling, built-by-the-lowest-bidder and probably nonexistent soul) flashed me a temperature warning the instant I felt his naturally hot breath on my - I was suddenly keenly aware - naked and exposed face.

Dragon’s breath was warmed by magical forces excited, I’m fairly certain, by changes in mood - especially anger - and I had not a shadow of a doubt that at that moment, Spike was a very angry dragon.

It was abnormal, the way he - practically without warning - just went off on me like that.  It was as if he had at last found the anger he’d been searching for since last night, just after dusk, when he had crumpled to the floor of the laboratory at Black Mane West, doing his best to shield the frightened and shivering mass of fur that was Alyx Sparkle from the sight of her mother’s lifeless body.  He had been deprived, cheated out of his just recompense.  Even his terrible strikes at the perpetrator were done absent the knowledge of what the creature had just done.  He had been waiting, waiting for the anger he wanted to feel, waiting to identify whoever was to blame, whoever could be said was responsible, and use his body as the weapon that it was to make sure that pony could never do anything ever again.  And to my dismay, when Spike ripped open that metaphorical package and dumped it on the floor of his mind, out spilled a bunch of photographs of me.

The young dragon shifted the burden of his weight to his massive hind legs, and wrapped his powerful talons around what was, despite the marvelously-engineered Hazard Suit encapsulating it, still a relatively frail and weak body.  I would have yelled at Alyx to help me, in the rather optimistic hope that she might be able to talk some sense into her massive guardian-companion before he crushed me, but so great was the shock at being so suddenly assaulted by somepony I had certainly considered up until that point to be, if not my friend, then at least someone I could trust, that.. I don’t know, it was like my muscles would not cooperate, like they couldn’t believe it either.

No, I did not cry out.  Instead, my little pony brain was consumed by only one thought:

What did I do?

His dragon’s breath adding a physical fire to his words, Spike answered my unspoken question:

“YOU are the reason the Combine attacked Black Mane West. YOU are responsible for the loss of the ENTIRE BASE, and therefore YOU are indirectly responsible for the DEATH of the only mother I-”  Spike had to pause to bite down on his tongue and still his quivering vocal chords - a physiological response we apparently share with dragons triggered by the urge to cry.  I didn’t realize it at the time, but he hadn’t been saddened not by the words he was speaking, but because right as he said ‘I’, he had glanced over his shoulder - and saw Alyx standing there, looking distraught, abandoned.  Orphaned.

“... either of us have ever known,”  he finished with an almighty sigh.

Dragon tears have the opposite effect of Phoenix tears.  Phoenix tears heal;  Dragon tears burn.  As the warm glops of sadness dripped from Spike’s massive head, hovering over me like a hunter-killer chopper, splashing teardrops onto my neck and cheek like wet little proximity mines, I thought,

You should can that stuff and lob it at the Combine.  Seriously.  That hurts.  OW.

Spike released me from his appropriately terrifying grip, plopping me down on the dead dew of this dead land.  Having caught my breath, I inspected my suit, noting with unwarranted shock the deep dents his machete-like talons had left in the reactive armor.  As I ran a hoof over the newly formed claw-shaped ‘molds’ that - according to Dr. Pie - would repair themselves over time through some feat of magic or science or possibly the magic of science, I thanked Celestia that Spike was on our side - even if he hadn’t really been acting like it a few moments previous.

What I did not do was thank Celestia that I was still breathing.  Not even in my most basic terror did I think for one second that Spike would have actually done it.  Somehow, I just knew he wouldn’t have killed me.  He couldn’t have, not even if that had been his darkest moment.  I mean, I know it’s totally unscientific, for goodness’ sake, we’re talking about feelings here, but... I suppose when it comes to social interactions, trusting your instincts is usually the way to go.

Brings to mind something I heard once... something about instinct... and how it was the enemy...

... And I remember watching those words form on the blue, digitally-altered lips of a high-minded soulless waste of nitrogen that lost his right to call himself a pony when he betrayed every single other member of the species in order to attain some retarded utopia where science and reason somehow made all pain and suffering, disharmony and ill-will, and basically evil itself disappear like it had been put under a giant box on a cheap folding table, and that one show-mare from that terrible circus-thing, the powerful and great Trickery (something like that), had zapped it away in a lame puff of intermediate-level magical smoke.

Magic.  Huh.

Perhaps the reason Dr. Breen was so fed up with magic was because it had so utterly failed to fix Equestria’s problems.  You know, as if technology would fare any better.

Alyx galloped up to the dragon, his massive form slumped over in the dead grass, silent as the hallways at Black Mane West.

“Listen, Spike,”  she implored her (JUST A) friend, trying her best to fake upbeat optimism, “You said you used to know this Rarity, right?”

He glumly nodded in acknowledgement, the dragon tears slowing to just a hair over a trickle.

“Well,”  she began, kneeling low to the ground and looking up at his drooping face, “What say we go back to Carousel Boutique, and have a chat with the lady, hm?”

Spike’s head snapped up, his mood instantly improved by the mare’s tantalizing promise.

“Really?  You’d... let me do that?”  He asked in a unfittingly small and timid voice, as if Alyx would recant her offer the instant his decibel level exceeded a certain arbitrary limit.

“Spike, I am ordering you to do that,”  Alyx replied with authority.  “The Resistance is always searching for new blood, and this Rarity seems to have some.”  A moment later, she clarified, “I mean, unique talents and abilities,”  in case there was any confusion.

She turned to me just as I opened my mouth with the intention of adding, “And blood too!”  And as soon as I was done saying that, I was then going to vehemently - and possibly violently - object to heading BACK IN to damned and forsook Ponyville - a town that would feel right at home in an Edgar Allen Pony horror novel -  when we (and especially I) had -just BARELY- survived the previous night’s exciting and educational bloodbath, where we had to quite literally cut our way through extremely disagreeable hordes of involuntary cannibals in the optimistic hope that somehow, eventually, MAYBE somepony might discover our corpses mostly intact so we could have a proper burial.  Or rescue us, if we happened to be found alive.

“And before you say it, NO, you don’t have to come with us...”  Alyx paused a moment to think and also my heart was significantly elevated from its previous position somewhere inside my right-front hoof.

“... in fact, it’d probably be best if you headed on to New Cloudsdale and got settled in, while us two go talk to Rarity, and try to persuade her to join the war effort.”

“War effort!?”  Spike guffawed.  “Is that what we’re calling it these days?  I thoug- ”

“Spike, shush!”  Alyx silenced her subordinate like the cute little military officer she was.  “Anyway, Gordon, you’ve got NCD on your map?”

I replied in the affirmative.  “Great,”  she said while climbing up onto her emotionally unstable transportation.

Our plan was progressing so quickly, I hardly had time to articulate my objections to its every aspect.

”Wait!”  I called out as Spike performed the opening moves of his instinctively-known takeoff sequence, “Will- I mean, will I be okay!?  Like, out here in the wilderness!?  All alone!?”

Alyx rolled her eyes as if my question was stupid WHICH IT WAS NOT.  “Gordon, where you’re going, there’s not much, if any, Xen life, and absolutely NO Combine.  And you’re heavily armed and combat experienced, besides!”

I glanced at the ammo counter in the corner of my HUD, which I noticed had become harder to read in the glare of the rising sun, and was projected onto glasses that remained miraculously clean and virtually scratch-free.  It showed that there were only 35 bullets left in my LMG’s lunchbox-shaped ammo drum.  Not good for a weapon that can easily burn through that much ammunition in a matter of seconds.  Add that to my low morphine reserves and lack of medical supplies save for those intrinsic to my Hazard Suit, on top of the existing side-effects (and hopefully nothing more than that) from the neurotoxin antidote that made me feel light-headed and clumsy, and I understandably began to view the prospect of hiking through the dark, scary, unfamiliar and possibly dangerous woods with a reasonable level of trepidation.

The rhythmic beating of Spike’s wings intensified, and as his clawed feet left the ground, I came galloping after.

“Chillax, Gordon!  If you’re attacked by a hungry bear, just scare it away with that huge-ass gun you’re so proud of!”  He bellowed with a terrifyingly toothy grin.  I found it hard to believe this was the same dragon that just minutes ago had come within an inch of crushing the life out of me, but... maybe running off with the pony he knew damn well I had eyes for, and abandoning me to wander the Everfree Forest was, in his eyes, a fitting punishment (or worthy beginning of a series of punishments) for what he saw as partial responsibility for Twilight’s death.

Wait!  What about my horrifically under-developed sense of direction!?  I should have yelled as my window of opportunity to change the situation exponentially decreased with every second I wasted, and I think all that came out of my mouth was “B- Bu- !”

As Spike maneuvered to redirect himself back towards Ponyville, Alyx leaned over his shoulder and shouted to me what I would forever remember as one of the stupidest things I have ever heard.

“Don’t worry!  It’s just a short hike through the Everfree Forest!  You’ll be fine!”

------------------------------λ------------------------------

I can still see her.

Pinned against a white, tile wall.

She can’t move, she can’t look away, she can’t scream.

I watch as the enormous mechanical monstrosity reaches out an arm thick as a tree to grab hold of her beautiful purple fur. I can see her bluish mane with its little pink and purple stripes, faded with age and accented by inconcealable strands of grey and white.  She is an elderly mare held aloft by nothing more than the scruff of her neck, but she doesn’t scream.  Even though it looks very painful, she doesn’t scream.

And there I am.  Frozen in place by some incomprehensible magic or technology, helpless as she is.  My body refuses to collaborate with the orders of my mind, as if doing so were shameful.  Disreputable.  Beneath it.  As if saving Twilight’s life was an unworthy expenditure of its precious adenosine-triphosphate.

I can’t help her.  I can’t stop it.  I can’t do something that is impossible.

I shut my eyes and accept that as inevitable as it is that she will die, I will have to stay there and listen.

------------------------------λ------------------------------

I am not responsible for Twilight Sparkle’s death.

I’ll say it again;

I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR TWILIGHT SPARKLE’S DEATH.

Look, I even underlined it.

There was nothing I could do, there was nothing anypony could have done except Spike, and HE WASN’T THERE.  So maybe he could stop blaming me for her death, and START BLAMING HIMSELF.

I’m sorry.  I’m sorry you had to read that, but I’m not taking it back.  It’s important.  You need to see it because it’s important.

As I wandered across those dead fields of long-unplowed, untended, and thoroughly forgotten farmland, all I could think about was her, and how Spike had looked me in the eyes and told me to my face that I was an accomplice to murder.

I wasn’t angry.  How in Equestria could I possibly be angry at a dragon who had personally saved my life, like, three times now, and Alyx’s, what... twice?  I would forgive him.

I would forgive him for the things he said to me.  I would forgive him for accusing me of things I didn’t do.

Because I didn’t... Right?

Please, Goddesses, please somepony say, ‘Yes, Gordon, that’s right!’,  I pleaded with the sky.

I mean, it was Cherry Blossom’s fault, right?  She betrayed us.  She was working for the Combine... so why do I still feel... responsible?

Well, think about it, Gordon.  The Combine attacked the day after you got there.  Black Mane West had been operating in secret for nearly a decade, maybe longer.  Even after Ponyville, they kept going.  All those years... and then you show up, and everypony dies.

Maybe Spike was right.  Maybe the Combine were there for me, not Twilight.  Or my Cerberus friend.  Or any of the other Celestia-knows how many ponies and Cerberi died there, trapped under the ground like cornered rabbits, all exits leading to certain death.

My hoofsteps became extremely heavy, like the enriched bronium powering the actuators in my HEV suit’s leggings was decaying into lighter elements at an unusually high rate.

What if I AM the reason it all happened?

I let out a sigh of despondence - not wanting to contemplate the question, yet contemplating it anyway - and my gaze dropped to my twitanium-encased hooves.  I don’t even need to mention who invented that alloy.

Hell, everything reminds me of her now.

It was the craziest thing; Dr. Sparkle and I had never really talked much at all until the night I met her – but that night... it was like I had learned more about her in the span of a few hours than I had in all the years I’d known her professionally.  And then she was just gone.  Almost as soon as I met her, the same day that the spark of our friendship burst into being and illuminated what could have been a very special and treasured relationship with somepony wonderful, passionate, amazingly intelligent, and admirably selfless, *BAM!*.  Snuffed out like a flame that had burned too hot and too bright for too long.

Goddesses, Gordon!  Are you in love with Twilight or Alyx, you numbskull!?  I impolitely questioned myself while my plodding across the dead land slowed to a pace resembling that of a tank mired in mud.

Sunflower seeds, love is so confusing sometimes.

I set the thought aside for the moment, as pondering such matters at a time like that could be fatal.  With effort, my attention shifted to the land my journey was to take me through; that twisted wood where the clouds move of their own accord, the animals fend for themselves, and the trees, it is said, laugh at you.

I hope I don’t see any bears, I thought.  I hate bears.

------------------------------λ------------------------------

I have nothing against the Everfree Forest, or really, forests in general.  Forests are great, forests are wonderful, they’re sanctuaries for wildlife, they’re peaceful, they’re quite pretty, and you know, it was nice to get away from the hubbub of suburbia every once in a while, and all such jazz.  And logically, the Everfree Forest was an excellent location for a Resistance base, as the Combine had never had much, if any, control there.  They just avoided it, like everypony else.  Or so Spike had told me.

But why?

Now, I’ve heard the stories, the legends, the urban myths, you know;  the Cockatrice, timberwolves, strange lights, sounds and voices with no conceivable origin that come to you from within the thicket and tell you to do awful, horrible things, or lead you away from the trail and deep into the forest, where you’d be lost forever.  Scaring each other by spinning those kinds of stories around the campfire was any good Colt Scout’s favorite pastime.

But - not just the Combine - everypony around here seemed to take them seriously.  I mean, I may just be a jaded East Coast Maresachusite (not dropped/born/whatever, naturalized pony is best pony!), but I never would’ve thought that with all their dawn-of-a-new-age, forget-all-that-you-know hooey, the rank-and-file of the misleadingly-named Universal Union would still cling to the same backward superstitions as the majority of the population they were forcibly ‘enlightening’.

I am not a superstitious little pony.  Praying to the Goddesses is the most, one certainly could argue, superstitious thing that I do, though I personally find that description of prayer offensive.  I do not wear lucky charms, I do not perform strange rituals, I do not knock on wood, or whatever it is the foals call it these days.  When it comes to the supernatural, as a scientist, my stance - you could probably guess - is that extraordinary claims merit extraordinary evidence; there are precious few things I will simply take on faith.

Though, as I crossed that boundary where the rays of the sun were swallowed by the warped and unyielding canopy of this goddesses-forsaken forest, I was beset with a nagging reminder tickling at the edges of my consciousness which told me that just because I’d never seen a timberwolf didn’t mean they did not exist.

The ground was soft and damp, giving easily under my weight added to that of the Hazard Suit.  The leaves blanketing the forest floor had lain exactly where they fell for decades, if not centuries, each autumn’s annual shedding smothering the previous one’s.  As I passed by tree trunk after bent, entangled tree trunk, I ruminated on the curiosity that I was stepping on leaves that had not been felled by hard-working ponies during their normal autumnal defoliating processes, but had simply dropped from their branches unassisted, motivated by some unseen force, the nature of which only a very few brave biologists had dared to theorize, and thus risk ridicule and the inevitability of being proven wrong.  Everfree simply refused to be explained.

My suit somehow detected that I had entered a location I had never been before, and a little yellow-orange notification pulsed in the periphery of my vision, impatiently waiting for me to either dismiss or intensely ignore it like I had done all of its meddling friends on all previous occasions.  But, for whatever reason, I thought Oh, what the jolly rancher, and decided to enlighten myself.  I glanced around the shadowy forest, and after determining in an extremely scientific way that I was in no immediate danger (I didn’t see any movement), I focused on the tiny pulsating block of text until it expanded into a transparent, yellow-orange window virtually identical to the one that displayed a rambling history lesson I couldn’t figure out how to exit out of on that unforgettable night when I first met my beloved SM/AIR in the Ponyville Library.

I rolled my eyes as I realized that it was another Equipedia article.  I found Pinkie Pie irritating enough without having to listen to a robotic imitation of her voice do learning at me.

Why doesn’t Doctor Pie go all the way, and have warnings and alerts spoken in her voice, too?  I thought aloud, and I swear to both of the Princesses I heard a voice from the void, unseen and unknowable, whisper “Working on it.”  This not only caused me to stop in my tracks and a take a panicked survey of all my blind spots, as I could have sworn I just heard a strange, pink earth-pony that was, at the time, on the other side of the country.  It also may or may not have caused me to pee just a little bit.

Regaining my composition (mostly carbon and hydrogen) after my moment of fright, and thoroughly scanning my increasingly dreary and depressing surroundings for the possibly present pink pastry producer I had practically proven to be the prank-plotting party-pony Pinkie Pie, I decided to minimize the window and listen to the synthetic squeal of a voice as I trot.  I almost shut it off after hearing the very first sentence.

“Hi!  I’m Pinkie Pie, and I researched this article just for you!”

Please, no.  Please, PLEASE, just, no.  No.

“The Everfree Forest is a magically anomalous region, or M.A.RE., which predominantly lies in the south and southeastern parts of Equestria.  The region is most well-known for its self-regulating biosphere;  a famous and well-documented supernatural phenomenon that to this day mystifies ecologists, biologists, arcanologists, and just about every other kind of ‘ologist’ you can imagine!”

“/R/ MAIN ARTICLE,”  Dr. Pie squeaked in a voice that sounded especially robotic and lifeless.

Nopony knows for certain how old the Everfree Forest is; no more than anypony knows how old the whole entire world is (at least several hundred thousand years, though I’ve heard more ridiculous estimates ranging into the tens of millions, which, I like to remind my peers in the scientific community, would make our planet older than the entire universe, but I digress).  What we do know is that the forest vastly predates the founding of Equestria, and most likely all of prehistoric civilization, equine or otherwise.  The pre-Hurricane- Platinum-Puddinghead inhabitants of Equestria, the noble and friendly buffalo (nice ‘neutral language’ there, EquiEditors), were already extremely wary of the place from the moment our founding mothers hastily scribbled down a brief description of them before their hides were collectively punctured by arrows and spears, it should be noted, were employed by a species lacking in magic or limbs, which would necessitate an unexpectedly high technological sophistication, topics of interest pertaining to which can be found here.

I wouldn’t have opened that link even if I could (telecommunications were, are, and forever will be, terrible).  Pinkie-bot went on to discuss in entirely too much detail native Equestrian legend and folklore surrounding the magically anomalous forest.  One of the tall tails in particular caught my attention; a story about an accursed zebra that, upon coming across buffalo tribe members who had gotten lost in the woods, would invite them into her cottage deep in the Forest, where she would, seemingly out of the goodness of her heart, provide them with food and shelter for no compensation.  Then, come nightfall, she would revert to her true form, a hideous beast with sharp teeth, long claws, and red, beady eyes called a marewolf, and then, of course, proceed to tear her sleeping guests to ribbons.  Not the most pleasant thing to be thinking about as you’re literally trotting through the setting of said legend.

When the evil Combine came out of their scary space rifts to invade and enslave our fair and peaceful land (even though I agree, again with the language, and the being neutral), not even their colossal climate- changing constructs could alter Everfree’s intrinsic magical weather, the caricature of Pinkie Pie continued, and I had to stop her right there.

First of all, they’re not rifts, they’re bridges of exotic matter.  Second of all, WHAT!?  The Combine were controlling the fracking weather?!  I’d never seen these ‘climate-changing constructs’, but their existence would explain the unseasonably warm weather and-

“HNYUUGH!”  I adjudicated.

I planted my face upon the forest floor immediately following an occasion in whence I tripped over some goddesses-damned thing.  If I’d been paying any sort of attention (an activity at which I am demonstrably unskilled), I might have seen the thick, metallic leg sticking out of the muddy forest undergrowth.

Bringing up a hoof to wipe the muck off the bottom of my mouth and neck,  I looked up and saw something I had never seen before, but hoped to see buckets of in the future.

It was a dead synth.  A dead Combine synth!  Indisputable proof that the things could actually be killed!  Ha!

I stood there in awe, my mostly un-muddied mouth hanging open in such a way that I didn’t think it would ever close again.  A heaping, crumpled mass of tangled limbs, antennae, spines, and if you leaned in especially close, you could even make out tiny filaments of insect-like hair peppering its surface.

It was armor.  That, I could tell.  A sickly-yellow unified-body carapace somewhat resembling that of an Emperor Beetle.

I made the connection instantly, thinking, it looks almost identical to the armor worn by those bipedal creatures, and Luna save me, I started to slip away from reality, back into that trap of memories I didn’t want to remember.  Back in... back in Twilight’s laboratory...  where they picked her up by the scruff of her fur, and...  Celestiadamnit!  I mentally screamed to clear my thoughts, It’s a good thing I’m not high on neurotoxin anymore.  And with that, I caught myself before my mind went any further back to that dead, dark place buried underneath Sweet Apple Acres.

It would be just like in Ponyville... only Alyx wouldn’t be here to snap me out of it.

Pinkie-bot finally shut up as she finished the article, and I took several steps back to survey the alien instrument of war, an artificially constructed machine that now lay dead and rotting like an organic being.  And all the while I kept cursing myself for getting so caught up in a freaking Equipedia article that I’d lost my spatial awareness.  That was suicide in this place.

I didn’t know what time it was;  I reasoned that either the sun was still coming up and I was still inside the twilight zone (darn it, why does her name have to be so common?), or its rays were being absorbed by the incredibly dense canopy above me.

Or a third possibility;  I’m in the Everfree Forest.  When we left Ponyville, the sky had been bathed in the crimson-yellow of another of Celestia’s beautiful sunrises, but now that I stopped to consider, weather outside a Magically Anomalous Region famous for its screwy, uncontrollable and unpredictable climate wouldn’t have much correlation with the weather inside, now would it?

As if on cue, it began to drizzle, the minuscule droplets of rainwater sliding off the seemingly infinite number of leaves towering above me, and coating my (water-proof, thankfully) glasses in a fine mist of magical rain.

You did that on purpose, I mentally accused the Forest.  Just to piss off Gordon Freemane.

Deciding against extending my Hostile Environment Helmet (For use in environments that are actively working to SHUT UP), as that would limit my range of senses and would do nothing to keep my glasses clean, I resumed my scientific analysis of the alien specimen that fortune had dropped at my hooves like a gift from a heaven filled with nosy-as-hell scientists.

I knew what I was looking at.  Well, kind of.  I was pretty sure I’d seen another synth just like this one back in City 7, on my way to Dr. Pie’s lab.  The thing appeared massive, taller than many of the buildings it strode in front of.  The tripod-shaped machine had stomped by on legs like tree trunks behind an imposing blue-steel barrier the purpose of which seemed not to prevent us civilians from interfering in its work, but almost like it was there to protect us from the monstrous thing.  Spike had described synths as an unnatural fusion of living and non-living tissue, but now that I finally saw one up close, I had to say I disagreed with his description; fusion was the wrong word.

As I stared at the chitinous, crab-like body - which, even with its trio of comparatively slender legs collapsed and broken, still loomed over me, big as a train engine, and twice as wide - I thought that this... this is like somepony mixed together the strength and durability of a machine with the flexibility and survivability of a living creature, and created something that was not a combination of the two, but something completely different, something... synthetic.

Thus the nickname ‘synths’, Señor Thickskull, grand champion of the Chalupacabra Wrestling Circuit.

I concluded that the creature must have died recently, judging from its still-decaying ‘biological’ parts, and the accompanying stench that was actually worse than the rain-amplified background swamp-like smell that pervaded everywhere else.  However, the non-biological parts – the rusted shell, the cracked, faded, and peeling ‘paint’ that decorated certain parts in indecipherable alien iconography – looked like they had been sitting there, exposed to the elements (the natural ones, not the harmonic ones) for years.

I stood there, mulling this over, paying none of my overtaxed mind to the steadily intensifying drizzle that streaked down my face and neck and seeped down into my suit.  After some time, I was cold, soggy and uncomfortable, but not any more enlightened than when I began.

I shouldn’t have been so puzzled.  I mean, there I was, standing in the definition of a Magically Anomalous Zone.  I know that there are other MAREs, scientifically classified as ‘haunted’ or ‘cursed’ and a couple as ‘blessed’, but nothing at all like the Everfree Forest.  No dead emperor’s tomb or miraculous wellspring came close to necessitating a revision of schoolbooks as many times as this place has.  So it was certainly within the realm of plausibility that the Everfree Forest just didn’t like letting go of living things, clinging to the deceased like a soon-to-be empty-nester would to her only remaining foal.  Either that, or the manufactured biomass found in synths simply decayed differently from naturally-occurring organic tissue.

It’s every scientist’s lament; how in Equestria am I supposed to get a fix on how the world works when there’s magic flying all over the place, muddying up my equations, disproving my dissertations, spilling my coffee and calling me fat?  And while those last two things have never happened to me personally, my point is that they could.  Because magic.

Research associate rage aside, I was totally stumped – a feeling that ate away at me like a skin disease, as it would any scientist worth his weight in grant money, threatening to leave me pale and furless as one of those ghastly bipedal aliens.  Searching for more clues, I looked in the direction the dead synth had been facing for Celestia knows how long, and my science was rewarded;  my eyes wandered up a massive tree trunk that abruptly ended in a jagged, charred stump about midway to the top.  The missing portion was lying nearby, covered in moss and poisonous mushrooms, with a hundred little streams of water dribbling down its branches and onto the soggy forest floor.

So that was the last thing you did, I thought.

I frowned.  Something didn’t add up.  The hole which had cleaved the tree in half wasn’t off to one side or the other, it wasn’t a glancing blow – It had been aimed squarely at the tree, and only the tree.  I considered the possibility that there had been some alternate motive for committing such arborcide.  Perhaps the Combine were getting into logging?  Unlikely.  Or maybe the tree was felled to crush some enemy agent, some brave member of the Resistance the ghastly thing had chased in here?  I could find no evidence that any creature, person or vehicle was beneath the fallen section – just more leaves and mud.  Maybe something was hiding behind or inside it?  Maybe if the shot had been much, much further down.

I considered that maybe it had missed its target, and then was killed by... whatever it was fighting, but my inspection turned up no bite marks, claw marks, or bullet holes that I could see.  In fact, the only damage at all was to the creature’s front and belly; I deduced that extreme heat had fused the tip of the undercarriage-mounted cannon solid, and a simultaneous massive concussion had partially torn the mounted gun free of its casing, its internal components spilling out of the wound like entrails - slimy, too.

Now, I’d never seen a synth in action before, or, really, at all – until now – but I called it’s cannon a cannon because the appendage’s appearance and the context in which it was located – that is, attached to a prominent hard-point on the shell of a war machine - left little doubt in my mind as to its function, which would most likely be emulsifying the Universal Union’s enemies.

Sticking out of a solid mush of disgusting, mottled-yellow wax on the front was a smaller tube that I guessed was this type of synth’s point-defense armament – probably saved from a similarly gooey fate as the armor around it by being designed to love and tolerate the superheated plasma it was forced to associate with.  The surrounding sludge had long since cooled and hardened, making the melted alloy look like it was forever dripping down into a gooey puddle that would retain its shape for millennia to come.

I ruminated (oh, how I love ruminating) for a spell on the information I had gathered.  It was almost... well, it was ridiculous, of course.  Stupid!  But still... it was almost as if the machine had simply walked right up to that tree, taken careful aim, and fired its most powerful weapon at point-blank range, killing itself with the blow-back.  I shivered as I thought about this, leaning down to peer deeply into its empty compound eyes, blacker than charcoal and deader than space.  I couldn’t help but think they looked almost... helpless.  Betrayed.  Thinking that made me wonder if these monstrous things were even capable of feeling emotions.

As a cold wind drifted through the Forest, making the trees shake as if possessed by the spirits of the damned, I asked the beast,

What did you see that would make you do something like that?

The beast gave up no answer, content to return my stare with its own, and the Forest was silent but for the trick, trick, trickling of rain.

A powerful and involuntary shudder swept through my body.  I hate the Everfree Forest.

------------------------------λ------------------------------

The forest grew ever darker, the rain ever harder.  The sun was a distant memory.  I was lost.

Just like in those darn ‘tails’ Pinkie-bot had read to me.  And what happened to folks who got lost in this Goddesses-forsaken forest?  They were slowly driven insane by disembodied voices coming from the thicket telling them to cut up their family and friends, and they were either found weeks later - their cold, starved, disintegrating bodies lying in a gooey puddle of bodily excretions, serving as sustenance for an entire community of insects that resembled the characters in The Creature from the Black Marsh - or lured into the dwellings of mythological creatures whom, after ensuring that their guests were fast asleep and utterly defenseless, would proceed to rend their flesh, and grind their bones to make their bread and all that jazz.

I just wanted to get to New Cloudsdale as quickly as possible.  Alyx had carefully indicated its location on my map, not that it mattered at that point how carefully she had marked on the soggy tissue paper crisscrossed with black, blurry lines bisected with a thick streak of blue running down the vertical plane which had previously featured a single point denoting the location of New Cloudsdale that was my map.

THANK YOU DOCTOR PIE.  THANK YOU FOR MY REVOLUTIONARY NAVIGATION SYSTEM.

I could imagine the sales pitch.  It never needs to be recharged!  Never needs to be plugged in!  No more hassle of ‘updating your firmware’!  It’s paper!  You don’t gotta update shit!

As my head was relentlessly pounded with thick, heavy raindrops that were actually starting to hurt just a little bit, ridiculous fantasies about somehow actually reaching my destination swam through my cold, wet, throbbing, sinus-clogged head.  Spike the Magic and Very Nearly Murderous Dragon had told me about New Cloudsdale:  It was described to me as a cluster of old, poorly-maintained wooden shacks that have never had any right to be called ‘houses,’ located in a giant clearing roughly in the center of the Everfree Forest.

With Black Mane West gone, NCD was now the largest Resistance base in Equestria, though not the most important; that distinction went to Black Mane East back in City 7, a compound that housed and protected the... actually, I had no idea what her area of expertise was, so... the scientist Dr. Pinkie Pie, the only remaining member of the original science team besides- LUNA ON A BOAT whatthespecialhugwasthat!?

Out of the darkness, there had been a sudden flash of movement, something creeping behind the trees and underbrush, its movement partially masked by what had slowly grown into a torrential downpour.

Then another, near the center of my vision this time.  Whatever it was, it was unnaturally fast.  As fast as the fast zombies I’d encountered in Ponyville Urgent Care.

I flipped on my (still pretentiously-named) ‘hazard light’, and pointed it at the hazard of the hideously twisted woods.  The Forest seemed to feed on the 2000-lumen light beam, draining its power to illuminate, weakening and dimming the light until it was indistinguishable from a 2-bit saddle light you’d get at the 1-bit Store. Although, I have always found it confusing that the 1-bit store sold products that cost more than 1 bit.

A confederacy of liars is what they are!  were the words going through my head when the beam from my flashlight, forming a solid, white cone as it tunneled through sheets of rain that were, at times, nearly horizontal due to the abnormally violent wind shear, suddenly came to rest upon a FACE.

With no mind-altering chemicals inhibiting my cognitive abilities, I did what was perfectly normal and healthy to do in such a context;  I let out the loudest, shrillest yelp I have ever let out in my entire life.

“Howdy, mister!”  cheerily chirped the demon-spawn come to devour my body and soul for deliverance unto the rending pits of eternal torment before the Rosethorn Throne for the vainglory of the Devil of all Hells.

“AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!”  I replied after - I swear on the Book of Souls - there was a spectacular flash of lightning and accompanying thunder that cast the malevolent being’s face in the starkest black and white – for an instant, rendering it in the exact likeness of a cartoon character drawn in ink on a blank sheet of paper - and in the fields and floods of rainwater behind IT, there were drawn ten thousand pitch-black silhouettes resembling the legions of damned that no doubt lay waiting for me amidst the tall, untrustworthy brush.

It frowned a pathetic imitation of a pony’s frown.  “Whoah there, stranger!  I ain’t aimin’ to hurt ya, honest!”

I had hot-mapped my SM/AIR to the action of scraping the ankle of my left foreleg with the hoof of my right twice in rapid succession, just in case I had to draw my weapon quicker than I could by leisurely scrolling through to it in my inventory screen, and let me tell you;  I stroked my ankle in rapid succession like it had never been stroked in rapid succession before when I saw that cupcake-makin’ FACE materialize out of the unnatural and living darkness of the Forest.

We regarded each other for a few tense moments, the newcomer, whom I could now see was an orangish earth-pony stallion - not a demon sent by the Emperor-Devil to drag me body and soul into the fires of one or more of the hells, staring down the barrel of my infantry-suppression weapon, a ghostly circle of yellow-white from my suit’s lamp dully reflected in its black, wet steel, and the mysterious stranger wearing a mask of fearful innocence as his eyes squinted from the glow, which I noted had returned to its intended luminosity.

The entire world was the pitter-patter of raindrops colliding by the billions with the suffocatingly thick canopy above our heads and splashing onto the leaf-entombed mud and mud-entombed leaves compressed beneath our hooves.

I was cold.  And tired.  And kind of hungry.

I lowered, but did not holster, my repeater-rifle.

“You know anyplace that’s dry?”  I inquired of the mysterious stranger as cordially as I possibly could over the naturally-occurring racket all around us - deciding, for the moment, to trust him.

Looking relieved (that sure didn’t surprise me, given the size of the gun that had just been in his face), he answered with a grin in a country accent, “Mister, I thought you’d never ask.”

As the stallion turned around, I noticed that partially concealed beneath his rustic, cowpony-like attire, was what appeared to be a wooden prosthetic leg, which, like the rest of the pony, was soaking wet on account of the currently-pissing-me-off, Goddesses-forsaken rainstorm.  I decided to refrain, for now, from asking how he’d lost his leg.  It did occur to me, though, that perhaps the reason the soggy, sickly-yellow stallion had been so remarkably resolute when I pointed the business end of my favorite pony-maimer at him was perhaps because he had grown accustomed to losing parts of his body.

As we took our first few steps forward, I swear to Celestia, he looked over his shoulder and winked at me, and I thought, Ugh, how gay.

------------------------------λ------------------------------

It was still raining.  It was raining before I got here, it continued to rain after I did, and it had not let up one microliter since then.

“I thought the Everfree Forest was supposed to be wild and unpredictable,”  I complained mostly to a window sill that was caked in dust and garnished with a dozen different species of expired arthropods.

In regards to the tantalizing possibility that I might someday reach the final destination of my SHORT HIKE, this weather was cooperating about as well as the warring tribes who accidentally founded our country.

“Shouldn’t the weather have changed by now?”  I inquired of whoever the hell these creepy ponies were.

“Ain’t no predictin’ Everfree, dearie,” explained the elderly mare, shaking her head as she reclined in an antique rocking chair in what looked like a very uncomfortable position.  She was occupying the empty, happening-free passage of time that came about whenever it was raining and you worked on a farm by doing what elderly mares were wont to do; knitting, pinning the fabric between her worn, hairline-fracture-covered hooves, and cautiously threading the needle through with her mouth.

Taking care not to stick herself in the process, I’m sure, I thought with a grimace as I watched her awkwardly lean over to grab the end of a multicolored thread in her mouth, draw it between her crooked – but real, at least – teeth, and prepare to thread it through the eye of an almost invisible needle, which was haphazardly pressed between her hooves along with the fabric.

Even though I was supremely well-aware that my perception of the passage of time was biased and unreliable due to my extreme boredom, somehow, being aware of this made it no less tolerable.  To put it lightly, I did not want to be stuck here in this ramshackle piece of shit cabin in the middle of absolutely nowhere, surrounded by other, smaller structures that were equally ramshackle and also pieces of shit, with my sole company being these unsettling ponies who seemed to have lost track of when they had last had contact with the outside world, and whose defining achievement was, “We stumbled into an evilly enchanted forest, picked out a completely random, unremarkable patch of hackdirt somewhere in the middle of said evil forest, and said to ourselves, ‘Oh boy!  What a perfect place to start a horrible little town filled with failure and broken dreams!  I’m dead inside!’ (at least, I imagine that’s what they said) But it was still an undeniable fact that the location and necessity of the place was, at the very least, questionable.  And it didn’t help any that my “guide’s” name was Slimpickins.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am actually from a pretty rural part of Equestria – My family moved to the suburbs of Maresachusetts before my brother was born, and never left – so I am accustomed to last names like ‘Turniptruck’ and ‘Appleseed’.  I remember one kid whose last name was just ‘Dirt’.  But, these ponies’ mommies and daddies usually had the good sense to give their foals normal first names, one, so that you didn’t have to go around all day yelling at farm tools and vegetables to come inside for supper before it got cold, and two, so that if, Celestia forbid, they were to ever find themselves amongst city folk, they wouldn’t be stuck with a name that shouted from the mountaintops, ‘I AM FROM THE COUNTRY.’  Especially ‘slim pickings.’  Celestia, what would drive a mother to name her foal after ‘a lack or dearth of abundance’?

Anyhow, Slimpickins Mustardseed (ugh) was an earth-pony with an off-yellow coat and a hammer and sickle for a cutie mark, a somewhat unique marking (and that’s being very generous) that I took to mean he was good at both pounding things and cutting things, and I guess nature just couldn’t decide which he was better at, so it was like, buck it, let’s give ‘im a double cutie mark.  That oughta shake things up in Conservaton.

In addition to giving me that uncomfortable wink, hammer-and-sickle-pony had also led me to his creepy little idiot house shortly after I had come a few nerve impulses away from splattering his brains across the forest flora, which, now that I think about it, was pretty nice of him.

Said stupid house in the middle of hell’s suburbs was situated in a generous clearing not at all far away from where we had unexpectedly met, and I had to admit that sloshing through the mud wasn’t so bad when you had somepony with you who actually knew where he was going.  So of course, just as the faintest hint of happiness began to creep into my psyche, Slimpickins chose that moment to tell me that this ‘settlement’ was home to his family, the Mustardseeds, and that if I had need, I was welcome to stay here in Dithering.

First of all, a single, solitary shack is not what I’d call a settlement.  Second of all, now I was not only in a place called Dithering, I was there with a pony named Slimpickins Mustardseed.

Luna, if you’re listening, please just kill me.  Just – please, please kill me.

I asked the old mare in the rocking chair if she was aware that Dithering consisted of one.  Single.  House.

“Eeyup, an’ a’fore I’m in the ground, I’ll see Ditherin’ bigger AN’ better’n...”  the elderly mare spat.  Literally.  “... Ponyville...”

I reflected on the idiocy of that answer for a while, watching the magic rain fall outside the mud-streaked window, when my pondering was interrupted by an annoyingly insistent, high, scratchy voice.

“Gordon?  Are you hungry, dear?”  the old mare asked, apparently done with her knitting, and now busying herself over a crock-pot filled with stew of one kind or another.

My stomach answered the question for me, gurgling its response like an alien lifeform that only associated with me as an indefeasible party to its symbiotic relationship with my mouth, whereby the mouth obtained food for the stomach and in return, the stomach defended the mouth from predators.

Whatever porridge the old mare was ladling soup from actually smelled quite good, and yet... odd.  Exotic.

I cautiously trot closer to the naked everwood table to take a peek over the rim of the iron cauldron.  The witch’s brew didn’t look all that sinister.  I saw... lettuce, cabbage, little slices of cherry tomatoes, big, meaty chunks of whitish... sinewy... muscular... Luna’s brand new jetski...

My throat burned as I felt stomach acid churning its way up my esophagus.

Those aren’t meaty chunks.  Those are chunks of meat.

“Ya were sayin’ you were hungry?”  she asked, ladling out a serving of the brew into a stout, tin bowl.

I shook my head like a particularly disagreeable headcrab had latched on.

Chuckling at my reaction, the elderly mare testified, “Why, hardly a better source of protein exists than a hare or mudrat.  Zapples!” she continued, invoking the magical fruit as a swear word, “Sometimes, we even cook up a polecat or two we find pokin’ round the garden.”

I recoiled in revulsion both physically and mentally at the thought of eating an animal.  Suddenly, I was biting down on the severed hind leg of some skinned and boiled forest beast, my flat teeth designed for digestion of plant matter instead scraping against some dead quadruped’s solid, yet porous and flexible thigh bone, the stubborn tendons and stringy muscle tissue being drawn between my teeth like floss.

My mind presenting me with such a vivid and morbid scenario made me feel just a little bit sick, so I took leave of the dinner table, making haste for my favorite corner that was the maximum distance from everypony else I could get short of trekking out into the miserable rain.

After a riotous fit of gagging on my own stomach bile like a mare who’d just seen a video-ad for the latest Michael Hay movie, the sound of clopping reached my ears, muffled only slightly by the thin wooden construction of the dinky little cabin.  I looked up to see – guess who? – Slimpickins Mustardseed, followed closely by some little foal I hadn’t yet met.

Standing just a hoof’s length above the creaky planks of the cabin floor was a brown, scrawny, and (he looked to me) under-fed colt with a black, tangled rat’s nest of a mane sitting atop his otherwise adorable little head.  Come to think of it, this was the first foal I’d seen since I’d woken up in this occupied Equestria.

“Hey... er,” I was about to say cabbage patch or something like that, before I remembered his cringe-worthy name, “Slim... *sigh* Pickings...”  ARGH!  “You’re back!  And I see you’ve brought somepony with you!”  I observed with as friendly a grin I could make while my throat was still burning from suppressed vomit, and I bent my forelegs, bringing me closer to the ground so as not to appear quite so big to the timid little colt.

He remained silent, burying his muzzle into his father’s side, the congealed raindrops sprinkled over their two bodies melting together into one solid stream before finally dripping to the floor.

Slimpickins beamed down at the mocha-colored colt, appearing, for just that brief moment, not to be creepy and unsettling.

“This’s mah son, Plowshare,”  he announced with what seemed like genuine fatherly pride.

I tilted my head and cocked my eyebrow in and began talking in silly, exaggerated suspicion.  “Well, Plowshare, you and your pa must’ve been trying to surprise Mr. Freemane, ‘cause I didn’t hear the door open or close when you two sneaky little ponies came in!”  I finished with a big, encouraging grin, and I swear on all of Princess Luna’s aquatic transports that the instant I did so, I heard a sound like a deflating balloon come from the ether.

Alas, nopony had taught the youngster the virtue of reciprocity, and my carefully calculated attempt to befriend this poor little colt trapped in this shithole ‘town’ went unrewar-

“Whas’ that yer wearin’, mister?”  he asked, pointing an adorable little hoof at my HEV suit.  It was a bit odd, now that I think about it, that nopony had bothered asking me that question until just then.

“Oh, this old thing?”  I said casually, looking back at it, and turning myself so he could get a better view.

“Why this... this is a Haphazardly Environmentous Un-suitable!”  I said with a fake-serious face, trying to get a laugh.

Plowshare wasn’t buying it.  “I’m not an idiot, mister,”  Plowshare replied with perfectly proper enunciation.

I said nothing, instead giving him the stare.

“Whas’ that on yer back?”  he asked, referring to my heavy repeater-rifle.

Okay, I think he’s just using the accent to screw with me.

I smiled, replying in a sugary-sweet voice, “Shut up!  That’s what it’s called!”

This annoyed the colt’s father, who stepped in to play referee.  “Nooowwww, Doctor Freemane, it ain’t like the boy hassun’t seen thundah-sticks before,”  he said in a surprisingly calm voice, gesturing with his head towards a far wall at the end of the tiny kitchen area, hidden around a corner I hadn’t dared peek around until just then, as this would have involved coming uncomfortably close to the creepy old lady and her nefarious knitting and revenant rocking.

Acquiescing to the schizophrenic impulses part-and-parcel to my greatest sin - that is, my soul-crushing need to be privy to all things which I am not - I merrily pranced around my sworn nemesis, the corner, which up until that moment had done an admirable job of coordinating with my other nemesis, geometry, (but one of a scientist’s innumerable enemies) in a living-room-spanning conspiracy to conceal from my view that thing which was being spoken of that I didn’t know what it was but I wanted to know so bad!

It was quite a sight; mounted on the cabin wall was an impressive collection of souvenirs from the Griffon Kingdom Campaigns, including medals, ribbons, a photograph of a handsome and, from the looks of it, utterly exhausted stallion standing at attention in front of the backdrop of a massive Equestrian flag.  Hung beside the photograph was a complete set of the bedazzling golden armor that once upon a time was standard issue in the Royal Equestrian Army.

The torso piece was split lengthwise for easier mounting, the two halves hanging so that they formed mirror images of each other.  In between them was a five-pointed bluish-teal star, and I could still make out the words engraved in its surface so long ago in a tongue as ancient and forgotten as the rune into which they were carved:  Concordia Regnat per Magia de Amicitia – Harmony Reigns Through the Magic of Friendship.

The artfully crafted metalwork, though it was certainly beautiful and majestic, was nevertheless an obsolete relic from a long dead pre-industrial era.  Nowadays, REA troops march into battle wearing combat vests composed of the most advanced lightweight polymer fibers and metallic composites, not suits of solid gold.

Or, at least, they did, I thought as my eyes lingered on the photograph of the young stallion saluting in front of a field of white stars set against a background blue like the Equestrian sky, along with the highly stylized depictions of the Two Sisters - the immortal Goddesses of Night and Day, Luna and Celestia - endlessly circling each other in a symbol of perfect harmony, that made up the flag of my nation.

Back when we had a nation, I reflected with something resembling patriotic indignity, a rarity for me.  This was the first image of the Equestrian flag I’d seen since I departed that train in City 7.  All I’d seen to replace it was this fugly, computer-drawn poster featuring an extremely abstract representation of like... maybe it was supposed to be a teal pony... I don’t know, raising its forelegs into the air?  Or something?

I’d heard some ponies say it looked like a wrench that was screwing in a deformed bolt.  It just sucked.

Slimpickins caught me eyeing his admittedly impressive collection, and moseyed (this was not trotting, mind you – this was real, honest-to-Celestia moseying this stallion was doing with his legs) over to my side.

There he stood patiently, and after having finally caught on that he was waiting for me to speak, I proceeded to clear my throat, preparing to wow the simple country ponies with the wit, charm and eloquence that came with a university education.

“So, uhm, what’s under the cover?  I mean, if you don’t mind me asking...?”  Work that PhD!

“I don’ mind a bit, mister,”  he replied, proudly striding over to the worn fabric shroud, and, reaching up to grasp it in his (yellow and not entirely present) teeth, he yanked it off.

I believed it like a sale on sesame-seed buns (thar’ ain’t none, and I do not apologize for one sunflower-sniffing second for the phonetically-transliterated country accent).  The cloth fell away, and there, mounted securely on the cabin wall, was my beloved SM/AIR, but with subtle differences; off the bat, I spotted what looked like a slightly elongated stock and a more pronounced charging handle, as well as different sights.  At first glance, I thought that perhaps the stock had been painted, or encased in some kind of composite, but then I realized the thing was made out of wood!  I couldn’t believe it, a wooden stock!  Ha!

Of course! I mentally bucked myself.  I must’ve been looking at the mass-produced counterpart to the prototype LMG that, in some strange twist of history, had ended up in the possession of the Sparkle family.  And below, I realized with a quickening pulse, was a metal box painted in the same blue-and-white REA camouflage as the box back in the Ponyville Library, labeled with nearly identical military shorthand:

AMMU: C-67 LMG/HRR :: SM/AIR

I was ecstatic;  It was an ammunition crate for the exact same model of LMG that I had - ammunition I was in desperate need of.

“How in all the hells did you get that!?”  I asked in open disbelief at the fact that such heavy, expensive, and - certainly if my lighthearted killing spree in Ponyville was any indication - lethal military-grade hardware could be found casually displayed on somepony’s living room wall.

The stallion let out a chuckle.  “That levy-looted gov’ment-issue thundahcannon was a lil’ hush-puppy indulgence on mah part, taken and account’d for as part ‘oh this wounded warrior’s severance package,  all manifest ‘ah the altruicity o’ a powr’ful good friend ‘ah mine – and speakin’ ah mines,”  He suddenly switched gears, “Them’s the reason this pony was hon-or-ab-ly discharged from Her Majesty’s royal service -”  he turned to me, beating his wooden leg against the floor, and, swelling with pride, declared,  “- Steppin on one a em’d do that to ya.”

Slimpickins regarded his wooden prosthetic leg with a kind of fondness as he concluded, “Ain’t that a buck in tha flank?” giving me one of the creepiest smiles I’d ever been given.  Creepiness was perfectly descriptive of the whole damned place.  Something about these earth-ponies was just... off;  their mannerisms, their clothes and speech, their use of archaic words and titles, discussing historic wars like they’d just...

Think, Gordon.  Put that one-hundred-thousand-bit MIT education to use.

The old mare and her foal had drifted over to the blurry, segmented glass window on the opposite side of the room, and my eyes followed Slimpickins as he hobbled over to join them, his wooden leg awkwardly thunking against the floor with every awkward, strained step.

The Forest.  Who in the HELL sneaks up on somepony during a FREAKING RAINSTORM in the middle of the loving Everfree Forest?!  Of all places and times?!

I thought back to those... figures I’d seen moving in the darkness around me when we first encountered each other in the woods outside ‘Dithering’.

Those couldn’t have been him, because, I mean, look at him, Gordon!  He can barely move!  And yet, this crippled stallion somehow sneaks up on me!?  And if he could see me AT ALL, which he had to, there was no way he could’ve missed that huge, bright beam coming from my suit’s lamp, and even if he didn’t see the huge-ass gun strapped to my back, wouldn’t somepony like him – a soldier, hell, somepony who hunts wild animals for a living or a hobby – know to announce their presence just to be safe, lest they get SHOT?!

The rain stopped at last, like some diligent pegasus pony, after lassoing every last raincloud with a single extraordinarily long rope, gave a mighty tug, and all at once, yanked them away.

“They’re here,”  the old mare whispered in a voice of soft rejoicing, her worn forehooves pressed against the fragile glass window, which creaked and groaned as the impurity-ridden silicate threatened to give way to the weight of her body.

My eyes drifted to the photograph.  It was made using more than a century old plate photography, but it was a picture of... Slimpickins.  Hardly a few years younger than he looked now.

“Hey... Slim... uhhh... what, ah...”  I tried to think of an indirect way of asking, “What unit did you say you served in?”

His face still glued to the window, he sounded off his full military title, rattling off the information as quickly as he would describe his own cutie mark.  “Lance Corporal Slimpickins Mustardseed, Royal Equestrian Army, 51st Entrenchment Battalion, Baltimare.”

“The Diggin’ 51st,”  the blank-flank colt added in a trance-like voice, his attention preoccupied with what was outside the window.

Baltimare.  A significant industrial hub with a population somewhere between Canterlot and Maresachusetts, along with a sizable military presence befitting its strategic importance.  Slimpickins may very well have been stationed there at some point, were it not for one small inconsistency; the Equestrian military doesn’t have ‘entrenchment battalions’.  They haven’t for at least a hundred years.

That’s it, I’m gone.  Screw this place into a wall.  I.  Am.  Leaving.

My hungry eyes flitted to the royal-blue ammunition crate, where they lingered in hesitation as I remembered that I had 35 rounds left in my LMG’s only clip.  My revolver remained just as empty as it was after I finished unloading it into the poison zombie that attacked me inside the Library, and I couldn’t quite recall what I had done with that empty SMG I’d been carrying pretty consistently since I’d pilfered it from a dead metrocop in City 7 – it was probable I had simply forgotten it in the confusion and rush to leave that boutique in Ponyville after Spike found us, leaving it behind with what’s-her-name...

So there it is, I thought with cold finality.  I am not leaving without that ammo.

I reached across the room with my mind and, after enwrapping the box’s cold metal lock in my magic and ‘feeling’ its several layers of tumblers, it suddenly occurred to me that locks require keys to open them.

Shit!  I deplored in execrable consternation augmented heretofore by ignominious discountenance.

Glancing about the room in a panic, looking for a location somepony might think to store such talismans of unlockery, my eyes settled on Slimpickins’ flank.  I mean, he had a decent, altogether aesthetically- pleasing flank, but that wasn’t the reason my attention was drawn to the earth-pony’s taut, muscular, well-rounded rump.

The reason was that said pony flank happened to be adorned with a silvery metallic tool sparkling in the light from the lamps scattered about the room, a key that called out to me, cruelly taunting me like the key to a box in which was stored all of life’s happiness, individually-wrapped in candy-colored tubes ready to tear apart the world Dr. Breen and the Combine had worked so very hard to create.

Mmmmm, I just keep all that ammo locked away, the key called out to me in its strange key language.

Just sitting there in a box, caged-in like a feral animal, while they wait in joyful hope for somepony in shiny yellow-and-orange armor to come along and give them PURPOSE, Gordon!  The bullets!  The bullets WANT you to take them!  They want to be taken!  the key on Slimpickins’ flank pleaded.

Curiously, at the time, I had no moral qualms about doing this; something was wrong with these ponies, my every instinct screamed as much, but my higher reasoning hadn’t yet pinned down what.  Relieving them of their implements of destruction wasn’t just permissible, I felt.  I was leaning towards it actually being the right thing to do.

“Oh, look!  Here they come!”  the little foal squealed in barely-contained delight.

I concentrated as best I could on that silver key hanging just off the end seam of Slimpickins’ dirty, wrinkled jacket, silhouetted perfectly against his now-dry yellowish coat.

“S’ gonna be so nice havin’ some company t’last,” the stallion remarked in a voice that was as trance-like as everypony else’s, the whole group still glued to that dirty old window.

My paranoia was at its absolute peak now, and I cannot express how much I did NOT want to cuddling know whatever was outside that they were looking at so celestiadamned intently.  All my heart’s desire was to simply grab my mothercuddling bullets, and load them into my gun as fast as I possibly could.

At this point, there’s no sense in trying to hide the truth any longer, so... I have a sort of confession to make, dear reader; I am not as diametrically opposed to the learning of history as I had led you to believe.  You see, normally, and this would indeed be the vast, overwhelming majority of the time, I am only interested in history inasmuch as it is relevant to scientific progress, which, I have come to understand, is a myopic worldview.  However, in my youth I was not so enlightened, and I hated history with a passion that would have made Inquisitor Twinkle Wishes blush, so wide and deep was my contempt for the enormous amount of time and energy I was forced to spend on what I saw as an irrelevant course of study.

But there was one small thing, a tiny non-sequitur, a relatively rare and insignificant historical occurrence unrelated to science (or at least the kind of science I was interested in) that made my little ears perk up, my emerald-green eyes widen, my young mind daydream, and my imagination to drift away from the confines of the reality in which it felt trapped like it was being carried away from a castaway’s island on a receding tide;

War.  War is just fascinating.  It changes, but it stays the same, just like us.

Let me tell you, dear reader, that I never asked what war Slimpickins had served in, what war from which he had dragged back all that loot to proudly display in his home; I knew damn well what the answer to that question was.  I just didn’t want to believe it.

The conflict that would come to be known as the First Griffon Kingdom Campaign was the first and only war in the history of ponydom that was won and lost almost entirely in two-to-two-and-a-half meter deep trenches.  They formed a complex network of fortifications dug into the easily broken soil of southern Equestria and beyond to provide REA soldiers with some semblance of protection from the relentless flying death squads of fiercely-armed and well-armored griffons - hardened by more than a century of almost non-stop tribal warfare - that were grinding through their ranks, resulting in waning public support for the war.

In fact, so many trenches had to be dug that entire engineering units were formed for pretty much the exclusive purpose of digging, maintaining, expanding, and if necessary, filling-in trenches.  These ‘Entrenchment Battalions’ were dismantled after science and industry brought us the advent of aerodynamic pegasus-powered craft that could produce enough lift to carry armor and repeater-rifles, and the mechanized mobile artillery we now call ‘tanks,’ making the war-time use of trenches, and the units formed to dig them, obsolete.

That war ended in the early 900s.

Slimpickins Mustardseed had told me that he was a veteran of a war that ended 150 years ago.

But none of that mattered.  The First Griffon Kingdom Campaign was the reason the gun that was currently strapped to my back existed, and if it could survive in almost perfect condition locked in a box for a century and a half, then it seemed plausible that perhaps the ammunition it used could survive that long, too.

Slim, buddy, I don’t know who or what the hell you are, but I am going to take that key or die trying.

I was reaching out with my magic, trying to be inconspicuous, trying not to alert these... things that I was doing anything except staring out the window just like they were.  It didn’t make any sense; I was licking at the key, brushing against it with orange tongues of ethereal energy, but I couldn’t get a hold of the thing!

An awful thought crossed my mind; What if that ‘key’ is actually just his cutie mark?  Shit!

I would never get a chance to examine the key (or possible epidermal representation of a key) in any greater detail, because at that moment the fairly imposing earth-pony whose flank I’d been sort of telekinetically molesting rounded on me, his eyes burning with the fires of every hell, and a look on his face like I had just blasphemed against the devil he served, with the remainder of the unholy trinity following suit.

“Just who in the HELL d’you think you are?”  he growled at me in a voice that rose the hairs on the back of my neck and made the blood in my veins freeze in its capillaries.  I’m not speaking entirely metaphorically, either; my Hazardous Environment Suit flashed me an actual warning indicating that there had been an extreme and sudden drop in the ambient temperature, and correspondingly in air pressure.

I’m not entirely sure why I replied the way I did.  Personally, I blame the intense fear disrupting my normal cognitive processes, plus the fact that I was still somewhat giddy from my reminiscing about one of my absolute favorite lessons from my least favorite class, divided by my usual social retardation and multiplied by my shock from the sudden and unexpected cold and pressure change.

Anyway, when asked who I thought I was, I replied, “A scientist.”

While the whole group gave me blank stares, outside, I could hear the howling of wolves and the pitter-patter of little paws moving through the underbrush.

With a mighty push of my forelegs that almost seemed amplified by my Hazard Suit, I leapt back from the undead ponies, and gave my left hoof a double-barreled scraping faster than surely even a very-quickly- blinking pony could blink.  My repeater-rifle sprung from its resting place on my back and snapped into position at my side like an obedient hound answering its master’s call, the hulking slab of near-solid metal made weightless by the perfect combination of magic informed and guided by technology.  The yellow crosshair projected onto my spectacles jumped to life as it traced the computed line-of-fire for a weapon whose date of manufacture showed that it was older than some towns, and in a fraction of a second, came to a rest hovering over the face of the impossibly-old war veteran named Slimpickins Mustardseed.

He grinned an evil grin; a grotesque and insidious grin, a toothy, unnatural smile that I will never be able to forget.  Just like those eyes I saw inside Ponyville Urgent Care, those eyes on those faces that were no longer faces but weapons platforms, designed to support jaws like sharks, bound in muscle and tendons.

That smile, that smirk, the unnatural sneer of the dead who look out upon the living burrowed into my psyche and planted in my id the most primeval kind of fear and loathing a little pony was capable of feeling.

It was the fear my ancestors felt when a cold wind extinguished their meager campfire in the dark of the early morning, and their curled-back ears were filled with the long, tortured scream of the mythical Beti.

It was the fear I felt when I was a little colt and the sun was going down and the house was dark and empty and silent as the grave and I made a deal with the monsters who lived in my closet, an agreement to leave me be for just a few seconds after I turned out the light – just long enough to gallop to my bed, jump in, grab the sheets in my mouth and pull them up and over my head.  They couldn’t get me if I was under the covers.  And if ever I didn’t make it to bed in time, then the monsters in my closet - there weren’t any under my bed, I checked - could come and get me.  That was the deal.  That was the deal I made with the monsters.

Whatever Slimpickins was, he spoke.

“Oh, that ain’t gonna help you none,”  he warned in a voice that was part whisper and part growl.

The coffee-colored stallion took several threatening steps toward me, stopping just short of the (presently) cold barrel of my rifle only to lean in closer as my magical grip on the trigger-plate tightened to within a hair’s breadth of that specific, predetermined lethal amount of pressure.  The yellow crosshair quivered in place as it hovered midway between his muzzle and the intersection where the bridge of his nose met his blank, vacant face.  If I fired, he would smell the bullet for 1/10,000th of a second before it broke through to his frontal lobes.

Not to mention the back-splatter, which would be horrendous at this range and caliber, I thought in an uncharacteristically clinical way, even though I suppose I was, technically, a doctor.

I didn’t want to shoot him.  Not in front of his son.  Not in front of what I figured was his mother.  And I don’t even know what happened to his wife.  It just wasn’t right.

Unbeknownst to me, it also wasn’t possible.

“Cain’t shoot some-pony who don’t exist, now can ya, GORDON?”

I blinked stupidly.  And it wasn’t because he knew my name without ever having asked.

“Can you?”

No, no, no, no, no, no, no...

“Can you?”

Where is the house?  The question slowly began to consume my panicked mind.  Where did the house go?

Can you, Gordon?

There used to be a house here.  I know it I saw it I touched it I was inside it I hated it.

I spun and looked.  And spun again.  And looked again.  And looked again and looked and looked.  And looked.  And looked and lookedandlookedandlookedandlooked.

There used to be a house here there used to be a house here there used to be a house here there used to be a house here there USED to be a house right.  Here.  In.  This.  PlacewhereIamstanding, there USED to be a house, there WAS a house, I was IN I was IN I was INSIDE. THE CUDDLING. HOUSE.  and now there is... now there is... there used to be... and... now... it’s... now...

Slimpickins’ taunting haunted my thoughts, and his voice blended with my own until the two were indistinguishable.  Inseparable.  One voice saying the same thing to the same pony over and over again.

YOU CAN’T KILL SOMEPONY WHO’S ALREADY DEAD.

YOU CAN’T SHOOT SOMETHING THAT ISN’T THERE.

AND YOU SURE AS HELL CAN’T BE SOMEPLACE THAT DOESN’T EXIST.

I heard somepony scream.  I wasn’t sure if it was me.

------------------------------λ------------------------------

The absolutely bedazzlingly beautiful (really, she is just stunning) Princess of the Night lay on four bent legs on the slickly polished stone that comprised the floor of her impossibly perfect royal chambers.  It was a poverty to think that the void-rock felt as cold and unwelcoming against her divinely silky azure coat as the infinite ocean of blackness the exotic matter had been lured from.  However, this half of the former Equestrian diarchy was completely uninformed as to the exact degree to which the floor of her bedroom was uncomfortable, for her mind, her magic – and indeed, some part of her soul - were half a million kilometers distant - for now, concerned only with the fate of a little grey unicorn lost in the Forest that is forever Free.

There was, of course, always the possibility that this pony was not as important as the mysterious visitor had characterized him as being, and that she was the royal victim of trickery, for any number of motivations and any number of organizations – not the least of which was the Combine.

But if Luna hadn’t exactly been paying the closest attention to the day-to-day happenings in post-occupational Equestria, her sister had - with a vengeance.

Every time they had a meal together (which, admittedly, was getting to be less and less often), the usual sisterly banter was inevitably dominated by the latest developments planetside; the daring-doings of the Resistance unrealistically romanticized by Tia’s admitted bias to the point where they sounded like something out of the similarly-named book series, the shameless appeasement and bald-faced lies of the blue pony who falsely insisted his full name was ‘Octavian’ Breen, and the unconscionable devilry of the enemy – devilry which she suspected as being deliberately downplayed so as to protect her from knowing the whole truth of just how bad things had become for their little ponies.

For the last several meals, however, there had been nothing but talk of the unbelievable escapades of the mysterious goatee’d stallion who, in the span of a single day went from being a nameless face in a weary and downtrodden crowd, to being an anticitizen one number below Twilight Sparkle...

Having been sisters for millennia, Luna could read Celestia’s emotions as if they were advertised on an absurdly large and strategically-placed roadside billboard.  It was obvious that something was wrong, and she found that especially disturbing, considering that there were so very, very many things wrong with their present circumstances that whatever was bothering her more than usual must have been substantial indeed – however, on occasions when the subject came dangerously close to being discussed, Tia would lock up like Canterlot Tower, forcibly twisting the corners of her immortal lips into a dishonest smile, and becoming quite insistent that there was nothing whatsoever for her to worry about.  “Not any more than usual,” she would add with fakety-fake-fake-fakeins-FAKE sincerity that surely she must’ve known Luna could see through like Absolut® water going down the drain of her crystal washtub.

At any rate, there was not an inkling of doubt in the dark Princess’ mind that there was something unique about this mysterious grey unicorn who had appeared out of nowhere and blindsided the Combine like he was their version of kryptonite, cutting through their ranks like target dummies, and paralyzing their leaders with fear... she was well aware, of course, that Tia was, perhaps without even meaning to, romanticizing and embellishing a bit, but ponies ‘prayed’ to her, too; it wasn’t just rose-colored glasses, nor botanical specimens of any kind.  This stallion, this Gordon Freemane was indeed a very special somepony... and realizing that her (relatively) young mind had picked out that particular phrase to describe the bespectacled unicorn made her soft cheeks flush a hotter shade of blue.

But it wasn’t what you think!  She was just... it was the excitement!  From... knowing that one of her loyal subjects was in mortal danger, and the fate of her kingdom was hanging in the balance!

That was all!  She found danger, adventure and risk-taking exciting!

Despite her indignant mental cheering squad, Luna hardly seemed convinced that her feelings toward the cinnamon-maned stallion could be dismissed as simple admiration.  However, she shoved the immature, inappropriate (and, she had to admit, absent for thousands of years) feelings to a dark corner of her mind, banishing all thought besides keeping that oddly-dressed pony five-hundred-thousand kilometers away alive.

The kind of magic that could span the astronomical distances between heavenly bodies flowed through the incomprehensible mystical conduit of her naturally spiral-engraved horn, sending waves and ripples coursing through her ghostly, cosmic mane, the magical ebb and flow growing in frequency and intensity with each additional layer of after-glow that appeared around her horn’s crest.

Her eyelids – for once, not scandalized by the wholly unnecessary mascara that would otherwise be concealing her natural color like it was a state secret – were scrunched shut in intense, almost painful concentration, and nearly every surface of her sleeping chambers was now bathed in a disturbed, vibrating glow that emanated from the pulsating fist of ball-lightning that had engulfed the apex of her horn - an immaterial magical anomaly resembling a miniature white-dwarf star, that, like the rest of the magical feedback, seemed only to grow larger, brighter, and more blue-shifted as the True Cause of Night projected powers from one world to another that were more than worthy of the adjective ‘god-like’.

And what, pray tell, had drawn the ire of the Goddess, whose terrible wrath would cause even the most stoic of the legendary Spurtans to fall to his knees, begging her to refrain from sending the heavens crashing down upon their adorable little feather-capped heads when they dared dishonor her in the least?

What defied the same Luna who accidentally caused the collapse of the pre-Equestrian Incayatec civilization when She banished their god, the Moon, from the night sky for the very first time as the high-priests of the sky-altar looked on, their ceremonial blades sanctified for the blood-sacrament dropping out of their gaping maws and probably hurting somepony?

A wooden door.

To be fair, it was a skillfully crafted and lovingly-maintained wooden door, but it was still a wooden door.

What the Princess was specifically interested in happening, with regards to this door, was that it not open, no matter how much a very, very old, and frustratingly insistent zebra wanted it to.

And if she failed, she wasn’t sure if that little grey unicorn would survive the next battle.

------------------------------λ------------------------------

It had been taken from me.  Like I had fallen asleep, and a thief had made off with it in the night.  Dithering - The One-House Town - wasn’t completely gone.  The better part of the flimsy shack’s foundations and masonry - including, miraculously, the floor I was standing on - remained, they just... well, they looked like they’d been abandoned for a hundred years.

Make that a hundred and fifty, I thought, to my great relief, in my own voice; it seemed my body had been exorcised of that unnatural demon that had called itself Slimpickins.

My hooves rested atop rotten floorboards that looked about a fly hair’s breadth from collapsing under my modest (honestly!) weight, and I noticed they were bone-dry.  I spun around in the now open-air living room, trying, quite paradoxically, to get a grip on reality by taking in the unreal.  It was then, in ever-increasing frustration to my empirically-oriented mind, that I was presented with the third or fourth mind-buck of what was turning out to be another wretched day.

It hadn’t just stopped raining; as I looked around at the literal ghost town (well, ghost house) all around me, past rotten, moss-covered walls that had probably completely deteriorated before my grandparents graduated from high school, I observed that nothing, anywhere, looked even a little bit soggy or wet, or like it possessed a shiny sheen from the torrential downpour that I had just stumbled through.  A rainstorm that I had felt on my face, in my eyes, in my mouth and nose, and trickling down into my suit had just... never happened.  The wood wasn’t a darker shade of brown, the grass didn’t have little rivulets of dew clinging to every blade like thousands of see-through ladybugs, the air didn’t have that aroma of ozone that was supposed to accompany the rain that was supposed to have happened, and neither was the dirt soggy, sticky sludge like it darn well should have been.

But this didn’t really bother me.  Hell, I was just about used to having conversations with ponies who didn’t exist, so I didn’t give a ration of Soylent Green about supernatural weather (sorry for the slang - I heard some of the rebels say that in reference to Combine food rations, and I just liked the way it sounded).

It didn’t particularly bother me that the state of the toppled, smashed, fading furniture and household wares haphazardly strewn about the cabin’s interior painted an unambiguous picture of how these ponies had died – suddenly, violently, and tragically.

Nor did it bother me that the neat little patterns of scrapes and scratches carved into the wood, along with the testimony of the tiny, conical, wooden toenail wedged between a pair of floorboards served as damning evidence that this family had been killed... dragged away and eaten... almost certainly while conscious... by timberwolves, non-sentient quadrupeds that, from what I’d read of government- commissioned studies, were a particularly lethal example of the magical aberrations that lurk within the Everfree Forest – 9 out of 10 victims of timberwolf attacks are either found dead (what’s left of them), or later die of their injuries.

None of that really bothered me.  I mean, this was the Everfree Forest.  If there was anything I’d learned from all the bad influences I inexplicably surrounded myself with as a colt, it was that shit like this happened all the time.  If anything, the place was struggling to live up to my lofty expectations of what a forest as supposedly haunted as this one should be.  I mean, there was supposed to be a literal gateway to one of the HELLS somewhere in here.  Think about that.

No, what bothered me, what actually, truly, deeply bothered me, was that Slimpickins had moved his family - his little colt, his elderly mother, hell, maybe his wife had once lived with him, too - to here.  HERE.  Right smack dab in the middle of what is arguably the most dangerous place in all of Equestria.  A region that had been, to vastly understate it, well-known as a highly unusual and extremely dangerous place since the dawn of freaking time.  Either this stallion was almost incomprehensibly stupid - and I want that to be true, but something tells me it isn’t – or, far more likely, he knew, he had to have known, how could he have not, that the Everfree Forest was a dangerous and unpredictable place, but he decided to move in anyway.  Either way, his mother and his son paid the price.  Come to think of it, if the stallion ever did have a wife (or hell, lover, or whatever)... maybe she left precisely because of his stupid decision, and that’s why she hadn’t been there, trapped with the rest of them in the Forest that didn’t want to let go.

Slimpickins, you dumb sonofabitch, you deserved whatever end you met.

Now, inasmuch as the historical geo-territorial patterns of predatory forest fauna, though admittedly far outside my field of specialty, were suddenly of imminent pertinence to my bodily integrity, I pondered;

If Slimpickins was killed by timberwolves a hundred and fifty years ago... pretty much right where I’m standing... one wouldn’t suppose that this place is still infested with the damned things...?

As I watched a quadrupedal creature a little over half my height cautiously climb over the stunted remains of the dining room wall, setting first one bark-covered paw down, then tilting its amber-brown, leaf and twig matted head to one side as it glanced further inward towards what used to be the kitchen area, before resting its other tellingly woody paw down on the floor, which resulted in the creature comically jumping in fright when the floorboards squealed as if in admonition, I thought, Yes, one would suppose.

------------------------------λ------------------------------

Those eyes.  Those goddesses-damned yellow eyes.  Dull, glazed-over, but not soulless like the fast zombies in the Ponyville hospital.  These orbs had fire in them.  The energy, the excitement, the thrill of a hunt.  The thrill of at last happening upon another one of those four-legged creatures that had as much meat as a doe, and sat equally well in the belly, but unlike those timid bucks, actually put up a decent struggle.  It had been a long time, hadn’t it?  So long without a competition of wills that left the ground slick with blood.  So long since you had dragged home a fresh kill, still warm and marinated in sweat and fear, to your starving litter, perhaps intelligent enough to take grim satisfaction in knowing that your offspring would eat well that night because you could not be beaten.

For me - one of those tall, brightly-colored quadrupeds who, at the moment, must have resembled an orange-and-black pig with an apple stuffed in its mouth (I’ve read that wolves like that sort of thing) - it was knowing that it was from that slowly cooling corpse, and so many others like it, that came the bullets and unstable chemical ordnance weighing down my every step.  It was the thrill of knowing that the weapon floating at my side was a gift from my forefathers, an instrument of violent and expedient change, a tool amongst tools, uniquely capable of effecting satisfactory reparation for every conceivable slight, waiting patiently at its master’s side for the signal to do what a loving father and devoted husband from Baltimare had designed it to do in another century - terminate disputes amongst candy-colored equines as if every shot fired was itself a counterpoint; a non-verbal argument of hot metal pressed into a tightly-wound cone of indiscriminate causality, each bullet arguing the same point again and again;

Thus, I refute thee.  And thee, and thee, and thee.

------------------------------λ------------------------------

The thing growled, baring its wooden teeth, and those eyes changed, becoming narrow, glowing slits tinted an angry shade of electric yellow.

Come at me, you son of a bitch.  I’ll blow your warmly-embracing head off.

My Saddle-Mounted Anti-Infantry Rifle, in a remarkable feat of consciousness (and barbarity), decided to take that literally, and the fury of an industrialized and united Equestria - followed by a bullet, of course -  erupted from what they call ‘the business end’ of the LMG, drilling a hole as big around as a newborn’s hoof through the ridge of the magical creature’s nose, the bullet refusing to stop even after it exited out the poor mutt’s butt-cheek, only coming to a rest when it reached the stone foundation behind.

The timberwolf’s head did not explode due to the kinetic impact of the depleted-bronium round it had just met and been simultaneously poisoned and lobotomized (and possibly irradiated) by, but rather due to the searing heat of the heavy metal which, while tunneling its way through the canine’s wooden skull, triggered a flash-vaporization of nasal and cerebral fluids, along with the moisture in innumerable other minuscule cavities, giving rise to a tiny pocket of boiling hot gasses that were prevented from escaping out the tunnel the bullet had bored by the hurricane-force surge of air rushing to fill the vacuum of it’s supersonic wake, such that going out the way it came no longer constituted the path of least resistance.

But all that high-pressure gas had to go somewhere; it wasn’t going to just politely sit in the wolf’s brain.

The timberwolf’s little wooden head and little wooden twigs and little green leaves and everything else underneath liberated itself from the rest of its body, rocketing away in an almost geometrically perfect Buttercup-Lulamoon Sphere that I did not see because my eyes were, at the time, squinted tightly shut.

Struggling to see out glasses that would now have to be cleaned, I could scarcely believe the mess the lupus arborous had made.  Who would’ve thought that such a small creature would need so much blood?

Blood.  I reared up on my hind legs and inspected my forehooves, which were red with the sticky stuff.  They look like trees, but they bleed like any other animal.  I looked at the now headless form lying in a heap on the rotting floorboards before me; its wooden, segmented tail was curled up between its legs, and red stickiness oozed from its stump of a neck like syrup from a maple tree, slowly painting the floor of the kitchen and dining area red.

The kitchen.  Could it still-?

I laughed.  Partially concealed beneath a soiled olive-green tarp was a scraped and battered ammunition crate, no longer blue-and-white, but rusted solid into a filthy reddish-brown.  It sat nestled between two rows of collapsed kitchen shelves that were illuminated by golden sunlight shining through the absent walls and ceiling.

Perhaps there’s some small chan- my thought was prematurely cut short when I was knocked sideways by an unseen impactor, losing my balance and crunching into the short, jagged, gore-spattered wall adjacent the front door.

“Minor impact/No fracture-“  “SHUT UP!”  I screamed at my Hazard Suit snapping my gaze back toward the living room and feeling my blood run cold.

Six?  Eight?  And that was just in the living room.  A pack of timberwolves, a grove of trees that bleed, swarmed the living room, almost blending in with the native wood of the cabin.  Where did they come from, and why hadn’t I noticed!?  Was I really that distracted by the stupid box!?

Before I could count to ten, the pack was all over me.  I didn’t believe a blinding stab of pain that shot up my right hind leg, as that would’ve implied that one of the cuddlers bit through my suit’s armor with wooden teeth.

My leg lost its strength, and I stumbled backwards into the kitchen.  The whole world was a fury of claws and teeth, filling my ears with the chattering noise of timbered jaws snapping shut by some unknown mechanism, and the intolerable sound of the scraping and scratching of metal that I could somehow feel in my teeth and even deeper inside my head, making my bones quiver while canines gnawed at them like they were milk bones wrapped in aluminum foil and pony meat.

Amazingly enough, through all this EXCITING ADVENTURE, I managed to maintain the telekinetic link to my LMG.  And so, to my inexpressible delight, the moment my mind conjured the feeling of squeezing a very small piece of metal until it *clicked*, what a beautiful noise did I hear; a deafening chain of rolling thunder sounding off less than a meter from the left side of my head.  Not only did this remind me that I really, really need to start casting noise-dampening spells over my eardrums - one of which, it should be noted, had begun to bleed – it also had the bonus effect of why in the hell are they all running away?

Acting on a hunch (something I advise against doing in combat situations), I leaped over to what no sane pony could call a window, finely adjusted the vertices of my SM/AIR until the reticule painted on my (still quite dirty and very much in need of a cleaning) glasses centered on one of the stupid little tree-dogs, waited a tiny fraction of a second for it to turn a dark shade of orange, and fired, holding the trigger down with the intention of never, ever releasing it.

A few of the buggers were literally ripped to shreds by the armor-piercing rounds, their bodies becoming a surreal mixture of dark red mist, wood splinters and leaves, and the remainder fled even further, some actually stopping to cover their ears with their adorable little paws, letting out a woodwind howl of pain.

“Ha!  I knew it!  AFRAID OF A LITTLE NOISE, YOU DOUBLER-CUDDLERS!?”  And, no, I’m not going to explain what a doubler-cuddler is, because if you don’t know by now, you certainly aren’t old enough to be reading this.

Laughing like somepony who had a very large repeater-rifle and was using it to kill the shit out of magical woodland creatures, I fired on the retreating arboreal nightmares for about two additional seconds before my gun suddenly fell silent.

“Ammunition depleted,” my Hazard Suit chirped like those words would ever, ever, be uttered under pleasant circumstances.  The final echo of the terminal gunshot reached my ears.  Instinctively, I pulled the charger lever on the LMG, the lunchbox-shaped ammo drum spryly rebounding off what only the Screw Sisters would call a window sill, and clattering to the grass outside with a dull, quiet thud, empty as the stomachs of the wolves that had attacked me.

My heart sank as low as its thoracic cage would allow.  Please, no, I prayed, to whom, I’m not sure.

The first wolf paused in its retreat, sniffing at the air as an excuse for what it was really doing – listening.  One by one, up to the edge of the tree line, they slowed... stopped... and listened.  Listened for the repetitious sound of rolling thunder that had so very, very recently pierced their fragile, sensitive ears;  A sound that would never come.

And so, one by one, they began to turn around, taking back their premature retreat like an unwanted hearth’s warming gift, their toothy mouths dripping with a strange kind of saliva that, like their blood, reminded me of sap flowing from a tree.  Their bellies were still empty, and the pack had apparently decided that despite my frightfully large firestick, and the fact that I had successfully killed several of them already, I still looked like a family-sized meal.

The ammo box!

A smile had halfway formed on my face when I turned around and saw staring into mine the beads of two fiery, electric-yellow, irrational eyes filled not with hunger, but with malice; murder.

I had no time to react.  The timberwolf lunged for my throat and bit down, its horrible teeth punching through the flexible polymer like the damned things were made of diamond, and sinking way, way, way too deep into my flesh, its jaw a clamp, a tourniquet around my throat, crushing my trachea under hundreds of kilograms of pressure and constricting the blood supply to my brain.  Breathing became an impossible trick.

The paralyzing pain completely overwhelmed my concentration, and my empty LMG, for the second time ever, was involuntarily emancipated from my inventory.  I found it quite comical that even in my state of blinding, unforgettable pain due to the wolf wrapped around my neck, I was still keenly aware of exactly what would happen the instant the mounted gun came into contact with the 150 year old, flimsy, rotten wood at any sort of velocity.  However, foreknowledge such as this seldom prevents me from being a clumsy idiot.

Through the brief struggle, my SM/AIR had lazily drifted to a somewhat useless position behind me, so when my telekinesis failed, the extremely heavy tool busted through the floorboards like a sledgehammer through papier-mâché, bringing at least one of my rear hooves with it.  Even though the distance between the floor and the ground beneath was a matter of centimeters, it was still a hell of a stumbling block, especially when one has a wolf about one’s neck.

I stumbled backwards into the remains of the kitchen counter, landing flat on my ass.  I screamed silently as I felt the skin and muscle of my larynx tear and pull, my jaw moving, but no sounds came out.  Were it not for the resistance of that matte-black polymer, my throat would have been ripped out of my neck.  As it was, with that Everfree demon-spawn biting down like he was never going to let go and thrashing about like rainbow trout in a bear's mouth, that neck mesh was about the only thing holding my larynx together.

But actually, none of that was important.  What was important was that I stumbled into a kitchen counter, and in doing so, demolished what little structural integrity the thing had left, thus revealing to me its contents.  And the things it contained, besides wasps and spiders and rat shit and other kinds of shit that I couldn’t identify in my state of low-oxygenated blood and low-blooded brain and dangerously high amounts of wolf, were piles of rusty, crumbling metal.  And, as I sat there dying, I spied at least one piece of metal that was not at all rusted-out and crumbling, and in fact, looked rather sharp.  Sharp like a... like a... oh sunflower seeds, I’ll think of it... I just need a minute to... to catch my breath...

I can see a whole bunch of white dots, and I don’t recall those being in the cabinet.  And I guess it’s getting late, because it sure is getting dark... dark and cold...

What was I thinking about?  Damnit, I hate losing my train of thought... hehe... my train of thought jumped the tracks... hahaha!  NO!  I was thinking about something really freaking important!  Think, Gordon!  Think, think, think, think, think!

Those metal things.  Dangit, what are they called?  ... Crowbars?  Nah, I don’t need any crowbars, I already got one.  Besides, crowbars aren’t what I need... KNIVES!  That’s the word I’m looking for!  And wow, those are some pretty big knives.  Luna, those things would be great at slicin’ open a tomato, or slicin’ open a cucumber, or... slicin’ open an onion...

The movement of the timberwolf with its mouth glued to my trachea caught my eye.

What in tarnation is that?  It seemed to be somehow stuck to some obscured part of my body.  Glancing back at the heaping pile of rusted cutlery, and picking out a particularly good-looking cleaver, I decided the only way to find out was to cut whatever it was free and bring it to where I could get a good look at it.

I wrapped the meat cleaver (recalling and immediately suppressing the memory of the meaty stew) in an invisible hand, and the instant it rose from its super-centenarian place of rest, the petrified wood of the handle broke apart like chalk.  However, the business end of the oversized food-preparation tool was still quite sharp and ideally suited to separating things.

Summoning every ounce of concentration my deoxygenated brain could muster, I drunkenly lined up the cleaver and swiped it horizontally approximately somewhere beneath my chin.  Of course, I missed, and in one of the strangest sensations I have ever experienced, I heard, but did not feel myself cleave a not-insignificant chunk of fur, skin, and hair from the ventral portion of my jaw.

Oh, darnit!  I thought, just about ready to black out.  Let’s try this again.

I calculated the attack angle of my next swipe with much greater accuracy, and that time I heard the distinctive sound of metal plunging into wood, immediately fancying myself a lumberjack.  Another swipe and the sound of chopping wood was accompanied by a sickening, juicy smack.  Every hit after that came as naturally as breathing, an action, I noticed, that was getting considerably easier with each swing.

With what I was sure were my final, dying breaths, I remember thinking with great passion and conviction,

Chop, chop, chop, chop, CHOP!  If I’m to die, then damnit! I’ll die doing what I love!

I do not believe I will ever know what, exactly, I meant by that.

------------------------------λ------------------------------

To my great surprise (and perhaps slight consternation), when I awoke, I was still stuck in the whimsical and ridiculously circuitous realm of the living, exactly where I quite clearly remember dying.  Except, it was different; something had changed.

I sat up, my forelegs behind me for support, and took in my horribly familiar surroundings, my attention almost immediately monopolized by the decapitated, leafy, bleeding, tree-like, four-legged corpse lying across my lap.  Perish that there be things I am not privy to, I discovered, quite by accident, the location of the torso’s missing head when by the force of my sitting upright, it was jostled loose from its position of having its jaw closed around the abused and tattered mesh around my neck.

You see, I was in the process of contemplating the somehow warm pile of kindling giving me a (not special) hug, when the severed, bloody head of an exceptionally nasty-looking lupus arborous tumbled down my chest, rebounded off the headless torso in my lap in a hilariously slapstick way, rolled over the little hump of my thigh, and bounced onto the floor, staining it with a thin trail of blood as it lazily drifted off to the opposite side of the kitchen, and on its way there, barreled over a massive, rusted, bloody meat cleaver lying on the kitchen floor.

Personally, I found waking up to such a sight to be somewhat disconcerting.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!  I interjected.

AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!  I continued, extrapolating upon my previous assertion.

Through the course of my dissertation, that is, my screaming like a little filly who had found a spider in her mane, I came to notice the odd angle of the sun, and came to the conclusion that it was either near sun-up or sun-down (I never really learned my cardinal directions, sorry Scout Master Creampuff), and from this, I further concluded that either a great deal of time, or no time at all had passed since I entered the Everfree Forest... probably the la- *sssluk!* *krrrra-schlink!*

What the hell was that?  I asked myself, fully expecting a reply if we were to remain friends.

“Test my mood;  try to move,”  came a thickly-accented and downright frightening voice.

I looked up - my first in a litany of mistakes - and beheld the moneymaking end of the world-famous Fançi Mane-6 rotational-release pump-action, bottom-loading shotgun, or fusil de chasse, as they would say.  Not that I have any interest in firesticks, I mean, I’m a scientist, that’s... just... I mean... *ahem*

But, more interestingly – the black and white striped forelegs supporting the close-quarters favorite of Fançi riot police was a zebra, a creature that, for whatever reason, I hadn’t seen since I got here.  She reminded me of something unpleasant I think Dr. Pie had told me... something about marewolves and zebras deep in the Everfree Forest...

“Who are you!?”  I politely asked.

She either became incensed, or already was for no apparent reason.  “I’m an evil fucking enchantress!  I tell a pony to dance, the fucker dances!”

Of course, I had no idea what that ‘f’ word meant (it probably had something to do with bucking), but I decided to let it slide for the moment.  I was too distracted by the zebra’s rhyme and verse to interpret her statement as a threat.

“Where are all the timberwolves?”

Still standing on her hind legs, she slung the Mane-6 around her back and brought her legs up to her neck, cradling in her hooves a strangely organic-looking bone-white instrument hanging from a fancy (but not Fançi) necklace, the many other trinkets hanging from it jingling and rattling as she did so.

“The sound from a Manticore’s nasal cavity causes even the bravest Timberwolf to flee.”

“... what?”  I asked, blinking in confusion.

She actually facehoofed, as if the question I’d asked had been stupid, or obvious.  Which it WASN’T.

“Manticores eat Timberwolves, stupid!”  She paused, taking note of the massive, congealed stream of blood that went from my neck, to my belly, to the floor.  “... are you perhaps low on circulatory fluid?”

I responded by just staring at her.  I actually enjoyed the moment of awkward silence; it was refreshing.

“Where did you come from?”  I asked with a voice that sounded just like a voice coming from a throat that had very nearly been ripped out was supposed to sound like.

“It was my exceedingly bad luck that somepony locked me out of my house.”  She looked around, as if searching for something, then quickly added, “Fuck.”

Again with that word.

She frowned, and unslung a ridiculously massive heavy repeater-rifle with no clip in the...

“That’s my gun!”  I rasped in a quiet scream.  “You touched my gun!  You touched Leeroy!”

She recoiled only slightly at my accusation.  A sign of a guilty conscience, no doubt.

“How is it you possess a weapon of such excess?”  She asked with suspicion.  “Stealing from the Resistance threatens your existence.”

I brought a hoof up to rub my temples.  “You mean you’re with the Resistance?  Well good!  There-”  I halfway turned around and pointed with my hoof, which did NOT cause me to shriek in unimaginable pain, “- is a whole damned crate full of ammo that you guys can use!”

She dropped down to all fours, bringing her striped, and I now saw, somewhat elderly face closer to mine.

“You did not answer my question.  Where and how did you get that gun?!”

“Will I find out in time why all your words rhyme?”  I asked her, apparently in the mood for pissing off heavily-armed probably-marewolves at a moment when they had me completely at their mercy.

“Continue being an ass, and you’ll get le fusil de chasse!”  she threatened.  At this point, I was pretty freaking sick and tired of being threatened by zebras who wouldn’t tell me their name and spoke entirely in rhyme, and that wasn’t to mention my steady accumulation of stress that entire morning.  I was pretty apple-buckin’ sick and tired of the world and every single thing in, on, above, or below it, and especially of being called words I don’t know the meaning of.  So I took a ragged breath, feeling some of the air being sucked through the puncture-wounds in my neck, and yelled at my severely diminished top lung capacity;

“‘Fuck’ you and your Fançi too!”  I shot back, mocking her use of that ‘f’ word, in a verbal exchange that had an astoundingly high probability of leaving one of us dead - and it probably wasn’t going to be her.

In a sudden flash, I saw the zebra’s rear-end, then her powerful hind leg raised into the air, then the bottom of her hoof, then an up-close detail of the cusp of the bottom of her hoof, and then... nothing.

------------------------------λ------------------------------

As usual, the first senses that returned to me were not sight or sound, but this time, feeling.  Specifically, I felt somepony touching me; there were hooves against my coat, hooves that felt somehow... soft against my tense and strained muscles.  My mind, already forming long-term memories despite only being partially functional at this point in what was becoming a worryingly normal wake-up cycle, immediately deduced that my HEV suit had, once again, been removed without my assistance or consent.  The frequency to which this had been occurring of late made me suspect that perhaps taking the thing off wasn’t as difficult as I’d been led to believe, seeing as to how apparently anypony with even the most rudimentary-

“Wake up, sleepy head!”  sang a feminine voice from the darkness created by my still-squeezed-shut eyelids, a voice as soft and gentle as the hooves on my fur, a voice like the lullaby of an angel.

Now, I don’t think I even need to point out that the last time I woke up in a stranger’s bed without remembering how I had gotten there was my first time doing so - I’m not... you know... hug-happy? I don’t know what the foals call it these days – but what I recall with extraordinary acuity from my experience in Carousel Boutique is that it was extremely unpleasant.  I had The Headache from the Black Marsh, it was as cold as whichever one of the hells is frozen, and there was nopony there giving me a... massage.

“Ahhhhh...”  I groaned, and she responded with nothing more than a “Shhhhh...”

Oh my Goddesses, I wondered in something approaching ecstasy, how much is this going to cost?

She moved her hooves further down my sore back, gently kneading into pacification a particularly troubling knot in such a way that caused my entire body to involuntarily arch, and an uninvited smile spread across my face that I unhesitatingly welcomed after the fact.

A lot.  This is going to cost a lot.

“Doctor Fluttershy will fix you allllll up...”  she whispered in soft melody, her voice smooth and sweet as honeybutter, and I decided that I didn’t really care where my HEV suit was, or where I was, or how I’d gotten there.

As I lay in heaven, my wounds being tended by one of the angels who must surely live there, I thought,

Doctor Fluttershy, you can do whatever you want to me...

... in a non-sexual way, I mean...

I felt her move further up, back to my aching shoulders, every measured little plodding of her impossibly soft hooves releasing the superstrings of protein stretched taut beneath my skin and fur from their uncomfortable entanglements, sending more ‘release the dopamine!’ signals to my brain than it’d received in a long time.

... or you know, whatever...

Achievement Unlocked!  Press Shift + Tab to View.

"I hope I don't see any bears!" - Click for full description.

[a]

[a]This is an amazing fan fic

This chapter is dedicated to Kkat, who inspired me to write this story.

C H λ P T E R  S E V E N :

ANTICITIZEN ONE

The clean-room was actually pretty bright.  That should have been my first clue that something was amiss.  Nothing at the Black Mane Research Facility was ‘bright’ except those enormous glowing pools of radioactive waste I passed over on the tram every day.  And us scientists, of course.

“Gordon!” Dr. Pie squealed as she galloped over to me in the same unbridled joy with which the pink pony greeted every single one of her colleagues, regardless of who or even what they were.  I swear on the Big Book of Souls (an object of unimaginable evil that shall never be mentioned again), one time, she tried to hug one of the Siege Dragons guarding the massive elevator shaft that leads to the Lambda Complex because - she later said at a disciplinary hearing at which I was called as a witness - “Poor fella looked so down in the dopey dumps, I just... I had to do something!”  I think the big guy took it pretty well, considering that with the constant threat of Changeling infiltration hanging over everypony’s head, standing orders were to use deadly force against suspicious ponies who suddenly began galloping towards Lambda at high speeds while ignoring verbal orders to halt.

Before the clean-room’s air-tight door was even halfway shut behind me, I found myself imprisoned in a bear-hug that was at once extremely uncomfortable, yet undeniably pleasant.

Then she began doing something she is incomparably skilled at.

“Aren’t you just so excited for this big, huge, super-duper extra, extremely really really important-”

“Doctor Pie...” came a scratchy voice from somewhere beyond the floofy, but thinning mass of pink and white hair latched onto the doctor’s skull like a parasitic alien life form.  Ignoring the salutation, Pinkie continued demonstrating her incredible talent for me to document for later research.

“... don’t know what’s going to happen, never, ever, ever done anything even a little bit even-”

“Doctor Pie!”

I don’t even think of it as talking.  What she does is just... something completely different.

“...this ever before, could possibly go very, very bad, could blow up in our faces, could destroy the whole facility or open a portal to another dimension full of evil aliens and scary, creepy monsters with really weird portmanteaus for names like head-crab and bull-squid and hound-eye...”

Okay, I don’t know if I’m embellishing or if that was my imagination or what, but it truly, deeply frightens me that I cannot actually say for certain whether or not Pinkie Pie basically predicted not only the outcome of the experiment and more or less the fate of the Black Mane Research Facility, but even named several of the alien species that lived Over There on the flip side of reality.

“DOCTOR PIE, FOR THE LOVE OF SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS!”

I recognized that voice.

As I slipped out of Dr. Pie’s death hold like legendary Office of Royal Intelligence agent “Double-O” Donut had slipped out of innumerable court hearings, a creature once thought to be as mythological as the Smooze came into view, no longer obscured by the happy little pony who had just ended her nearly lethal embrace of me (which, strangely, was one of Agent Donut’s favorite covert techniques).

The creature’s massive amber-brown wings were extended, casting a giant ‘W’-shaped shadow upon Pinkie and myself.  We must have looked like we were cowering before it in fear, a wife and husband kissing each other goodbye while some hulking monster slowly advanced on us.

“Doctor Freemane?” asked Gilda Goldenclaw Gryffindor.

“That’s me-”

“You’re late,” she cut me off, looking like she had never been hugged by anypony ever.

Dr. Gryffindor and I already sort of knew each other, though not on a first-name basis.  She’d left the science team for a higher-paying job at Equestrian Innovations - a privately-owned science and technology venture - only a few short weeks after I started working at Black Mane, and I think I’m the reason.  Let me explain:  You see, Gilda is a griffon, and griffons eat meat.  Well, I mean, if vegetarian griffons exist, Gilda is not one of them.

The food at the Black Mane Research Facility was, of course, strictly vegetarian, which resulted in Dr. Gryffindor bringing her lunch to work every day, which necessitated the use of a communal refrigerator in one of Sector C’s many break rooms, the one she chose to use just happening to be the same one I frequented to get my fix of CarrotCoke™ from the vending machine, which inevitably resulted in the two of us one day being in the same break room at the same time.

Dr. Gryffindor had brought a dish she called ‘tuna casserole’ and was heating it up in the microwave, and I, being relatively new, and smelling the acrid stench of burning flesh emanating from the microwave, went over to investigate.  Peering through the transparent window at the mutilated remains of aquatic beings unceremoniously mixed in with sickly-yellow sawed-off tubes of cooked wheatgerm nearly made me vomit in disgust and moral outrage and possibly other things that I don’t remember because the disgust and moral outrage could have momentarily overwhelmed my brain’s ability to form long-term memories.  So, being a conscientious and morally-upstanding citizen, I did the only thing I could do; I pressed the microwave’s power level button until it was pumping over a thousand watts into the dead fish entombed in its macaroni mausoleum, determined to destroy its corpse rather than allow the disrespectful, humiliating and undignified ritual preparation to continue.

Heated to the point of excess, the plastic container sagged into the glass platter upon which it carelessly rotated, eroding its ability to contain the rapidly expanding gases trapped inside its thin walls.  The bowl exploded like a tripmine, coating the inside of the microwave in the bloodless guts of the butchered vermin and the dread macaroni some cruel monster had stuffed around its entrails like so many styrofoam packing peanuts.  Dr. Gryffindor, who’d been busying herself at the vending machine across the room, was alarmed by the sweet, sweet sound of vigilante justice, and stormed over, shouting in an outdoor voice, “WHAT IN THE NAME OF CELESTIA ARE YOU DOING?!”

So, that was my first real encounter with Gilda Gryffindor.  She left for Equestrian Innovations a few weeks after the tuna casserole incident, and I can’t help but feel that I was partially responsible, even after my sincerest efforts to make up for the incident by trying to be as tolerant and open-minded in regards to griffon culture, tradition and taxonomy as I possibly could, including my total acceptance of the fact that some creatures just happen to eat animals.  I still thought it was gross as hell, but I accepted it, and obnoxiously berated anypony who wasn’t as tolerant and open-minded as I was towards carnivorianism, because they were wrong.  And it was all for nothing, because Gilda ended up quitting Black Mane anyway.

So what in Equestria was she doing here?

Dr. Gryffindor cleared her throat (of what, I don’t care to know) and inhaled through her bird-like nostrils as she prepared to speak.  “You may be wondering why I a-”

If Dr. Pie could have stopped herself from interrupting, she didn’t.  “Gilda came over here from that other place whose name I forget because Dr. Breen, and he’s the Administrator in case you didn’t know that, which you probably did, but anyway, the Administrator really really really wanted her to be here for the antimass-spectrometry because-”

“BECAUSE,” Dr. Gryffindor did unto Pinkie as Pinkie had done unto Dr. Gryffindor, “I know more about these damned crystals than any pony or griffon or zebra or anything in Equestria!  And aside from that, it’s none of yours,” she poked a mean-looking (and sharp) talon in my direction, “or yours,” she jabbed another one at the lab-coated pink pony, “or anypony’s damn business!”

Astoundingly, the Pink One simply silently nodded her head in agreement, and that right there should have been my second clue.

Gilda let out a deep sigh, took a moment to adjust her comically ill-fitting laboratory coat (a futile gesture), and turned to take a few steps towards the massive airlock door separating the air-tight clean-room from the test chamber, looking proudly upwards as if she were using x-ray vision to stare straight through the heavy mustard-yellow steel and blast-shielding at some unknown wonder that only those captivatingly deep hawk-eyes were capable of perceiving.

“Gordon, we-”  I’ll give you one guess as to who interrupted her.

“I’m afraid we’ll be deviating just a teensy-weensy bit from standard procedure today, Gordon-”

“-but with good reason.  This is a rare opportunity for us.  That crystal in there-”

“-it’s not in there, Gilda,” she interrupted the griffon for the fifth time, “It’s below us.”

“I don’t care, that crystal – wherever it is – is the purest sample we’ve ever seen.  That anypony inside or outside Equestria has ever seen.”

Based on that, I deduced that Black Mane was, as always, one or two or nine steps ahead of Equestrian Innovations.  Go us.  But what did she mean, outside Equestria?  Was she talking about the Griffon Kingdom?  Some had always looked upon her with suspicion - even though she wasn’t even born in the GK - as if simply being a griffon automatically meant you were lock-step with its to-talon-tarian regime.  But travel and even communication with a belligerent nation in wartime was severely restricted, which just raised a whole new set of questions.

This whole experiment is just becoming curiouser and curiouser, I thought with incorrect grammar.

“Wait, what have you got a sample of?” I asked, much to Dr. Gryffindor’s annoyance.

“NOW YOU’RE DOING IT T-  What I meant to say, Gordon, is... that is outside the concerns of your duties,” she coolly replied.

Right.  None of my goddesses-damned business.  Tippety-top-secret Ministry of Defense stuff.  Got griffons to kill.  Well, bad griffons.  Not that Gilda wouldn’t love to be thought of as ’bad’.

“Well, it may be the purest sample,” continued Dr. Pie, “but it is potentially the most unstaple.”

“Stable,” Gilda corrected her.

“No, Doctor Gryffindor, it is anything but stable.  Why, the slightest bump or jolt or jimmy or... or... jiffy or shimmy... did I ever tell you that shimmy is one of my favoritest words ever?  I wish I could shimmy on down to work, or not just work, I’d shimmy to the store or the rec room or... heck I’d even shimmy to the bathroom, ha!  In fact, I’d say I’d shimmy just about anywhere shimmying could be done!  And after I clocked out, I’d shhhhhimmy right on back to my dorm!  Dorm.  Doooorrrmmmmmeh.  You ever think about how much ‘dorm’ sounds like ‘door’?  And ‘norm’?  But it doesn’t sound anything at all like, ‘house’, or ‘room’, or... ‘quarters’ or ‘apartment’ or ‘living area’ or anything even remotely related to habitation, it just sounds like ‘door normal’.  I mean, what the heck is a ‘door normal’?  What’s so normal about it?  And who decided that it was normal?  Because if it wasn’t a peer-reviewed study or official building code standards from ROMS, then who the heck decided it was even ‘normal’ to begin with?  And why not put the words in the right order and call it a normal door, or a... or a ‘noor’?!  I’ve always wanted to live in a noor!  Well actually, no, I haven’t.  Hah!  Why in the world did I just say that?!  Hahahahahah!”

To be honest, I don’t know what’s wrong with Dr. Pie.  And by that, I don’t mean that I think she’s normal, not by any means or measure.  I mean;  I.  Don’t.  Know.  What. The special hug.  Is wrong.  With that mare.

I stole a glance at Dr. Gryffindor.  Pardon my stereotyping, but she was doing to the pink, floofy- maned, floofy-tailed, floofy-personality’d doctor what griffons do best; staring at her.  No, not staring, that’s too kind.  Glaring.  Glaring at her like she was a plump, writhing rainbow trout gasping for air on a river bank.

If you don’t know what it is like to be stared at by a griffon, first, thank whatever gods you pray to that you don’t have to work with one, and next, imagine, if you will, a hawk.  A hawk as big as you are, or possibly bigger.  Now imagine that the hawk has the hind legs of a lion, complete with adorable little fluffy paws that end in retractable bayonets of black keratin that, with the brute force of a good kick from the muscular, tan-colored legs driving them, could easily disembowel any other apex predator and virtually any kind of living prey in the animal kingdom (which, it turns out – and I did not know this - is not an actual kingdom).

Oh, and then there’s the gigantic talons up front.  And the sharp, powerful beak above those.  And a cute little kerfuffle of feathers that, if you combed them just right, kind of looked like a mane.  But that last feature wasn’t scary.  I actually thought her mane looked kind of cute.  But no matter how absolutely adorable her hairdo was, it didn’t come close to making up for how absolutely terrifying the rest of her was, and I’m not just talking about her body.

Gilda Gryffindor is scarier than the sum of her parts. And when she stares at you, she doesn’t stare like a hawk.  She doesn’t even stare like a griffon.  Gilda stares at you like Gilda.

There is one, however, who seems to be totally immune to Gilda’s intimidating presence.

“...I’d tell ‘em, oh, nothing, just shimmyin’ on down to my noor with my picklebarrel full of kumquats!”

I’m pretty sure that one time, Dr. Gryffindor actually tried to stare at Dr. Pie until... well, I guess she figured until the mare naturally concluded her thought process and stopped talking all by herself.

It did not work.

“PINKIE PIE!” Gilda shouted.

The stream-of-consciousness parade of which Pinkie had been the sole participant, organizer and conductor came to an unhappy and premature halt.

“Yes, Gilda?” Dr. Pie sweetly asked, flitting her big, beautiful... long... full eyelashes... giving her the kind of eyes I’d kill to have a mare give- celestiadamnit, Gordon!  She’s in her sexties!  I mean sixties!  Damnit!  That’s what I thought to think, er, meant to think!  SUNFLOWER SHIT.

Pinching the bridge of her beak between her talons (an action I would love to perform at times were it not for my unfortunate lack of digits), she replied, “Dr. Pie, you brought up the supposed instability of the artifact?  Before your... unprovoked mnemonic seizure...?”

Gilda likes insulting ponies in ways they don’t understand.

Giving a little cough, she stated confidently, “As long as we’re following standard insertion procedure, I don’t see any way a vanilla antimass-spectrometry would be abnormally dangerous.”

Even though we’d explained to Pinkie that ‘vanilla’, when used in the field of particle physics, almost never has anything to do with ice cream, I swear I still saw her eyes almost imperceptibly light up the instant the word left Gilda’s beak.  I preemptively raised a foreleg, prepared to facehoof at whatever the perpetually over-wound earth-pony was going to say next.

“Hmph,” she huffed, “I don’t know how you can say that, Gildey.”

She glanced at her tail, ready to make a point involving it.  Get ready, hoof.

“My Pinkie Sense™ has been going off the walls, or charts – or both, really – for months now!”

Tactical facehoof... now!  Clop!  Hoof to face!  Face hoofed!  Verify... telemetry... coordinates!  Leave me alone, I’m improvising with the military terminology.  I think I might have actually thought that last sentence to myself, like I was arguing with the many, many voices in my head.

“... and especially in the past three days – I’ve hardly been able to get to sleep!  And you know how much I love sleep!”

“Yes, Pinkie, we know,” sighed Dr. Gryffindor, glancing my way as I fake-nodded.  Rumors and speculation that the pink pony slept at night had yet to be confirmed.

“And what has happened in the past three days that’s super-duper unusual and weird and doesn’t make any cupcake-bakin’ sense?!”

Wait.  If something doesn’t make sense to Pinkie Pie, of all ponies... does that mean it’s so illogical that even the most illogical of minds cannot abide it, or does that mean it is so rational and reasonable that she simply doesn’t trust it, rejecting it like she would a creepy stallion pulling a rusted heap of a cargo-carriage and giving away free cupcakes filled with ‘special frosting’?

Eh.  Probably the latter.

“Uh...” stuttered Dr. Gryffindor as Pinkie actually waited for her to respond.  I cannot believe how unfazed I was by that.  Doctor Pie was waiting for somepony else to speak.  That should have been my third clue.

“The arrival of the specimen?”

“Eeeenope, one more guess.”  Giving her only two guesses was maybe a tiny bit out of character, but I can forgive overlooking that one.

I contemplated the griffon aging process as I watched Gilda, who was quite secretive about how old she was, lift up a golden-yellow claw to absentmindedly scratch at her scalp, slightly ruffling the bright white feathers that had obviously been combed-over to hide an ever widening bald spot.

Heh.  Gilda was ruffling her own feathers.  I was perilously close to making some sort of terrible joke pertaining to such when I heard a weirdly familiar beep, beep, beep, beep, beep rhythm – from where, I wasn’t entirely sure.

Dr. Pie gave a huff as she ran out of patience, proving, perhaps conclusively, that she has patience.

“You’re taking too long.  That creeper-colt in the blue suit!”

“Ohhhhhhhh,” Gilda and I simultaneously reacted.  However, as a low-paid and fairly unimportant ‘valuable addition to the Black Mane team’ my participation in the conversation was met with unpleasant looks from the pair of superior scientists in front of me, although Pinkie’s was more confusion than disapproval.

Gilda’s huge wings flared open in excitement, their brown tips brushing against the low ceiling and easily doubling the size of her profile.  Like I said, in excitement, not sexual arousal.  I have been around pegasus ponies for far too long to put any weight in the embarrassingly common misconception that every damn time a flying creature opens his or her wings, that automatically means they are in the mood.  Quite frankly, anypony who actually believes that is just an idiot.

“Yeah, that dude.  He is one creepy colt-cuddler.  You know, this would probably be one of those rare occasions where I actually concur with you, Dr. Pie.”

Pinkie was all misty-eyed as she said, “Thank you!” and no, Doctor Gryffindor did not literally mean that the stallion in question was a ‘colt-cuddler’, but as a general insult.  Also, as I understand it, in the Griffon Kingdom, that term means ‘male homosexual pedophile’, not ‘stallion who likes other stallions’.  And even though Gilda was not actually from the Griffon Kingdom, her parents most certainly were, which would explain the unique mix of dialects.

I worked up the courage to jump into their lovely conversation which they were completely leaving me out of as usual.  “You mean that earth-pony stallion who’s always sniffing around, asking a bunch of weirdly specific questions, that dude?”

“Yeah.  That dude,” replied Gilda.  “They say he’s from the government, but he basically refuses to talk to anypony except the Administrator... and, I suppose, the occasional huffy security guard.”

Barney.  She must be talking about Barney.  He doesn’t take anypony’s word on anything when it comes to security.  I’ll bet he demanded to see that...government stud’s ID every single time he wanted through a door he was guarding.  Trust may be a virtue in Equestria, but Barney Ironbuck would card Princess Celestia herself.  Actually, I believe he has.

Dr. Gryffindor consciously refolded her wings.  “Whatever, none of that matters,” she said with a dismissive wave of a clawed limb that I had difficulty classifying as an arm or a leg.

“The test is going to be carried out regardless of the locomotion of your hindquarters, Pie.”

Oooh, last name terms.  Amazingly enough, the founder of the Sugarcube Corner baked goods empire whose mouth watered whenever something was described as ‘vanilla’ did not associate the word ‘Pie’ in certain contexts with the actual dessert.  It begs the question of how and how long it took for her to master that particular caveat.

Pinkie Pie turned her head to frown at her backside, indicating that the mean old griffon had successfully shaken her faith in her ability to predict the future with her ass.

She gave a defeated sigh.  “Well, I suppose the possibility of a Resonance Cascade scenario is highly unlikely...”

A Resonance What Now?  What in the hell is that and why is it ‘highly unlikely’ instead of completely impossible?!  And why am I just now finding out about this?!  What else are you jerks not telling me?!  Yeah, concerned about a ‘Resonance Cascade?’  Oh, just send in that Research Associate, Gordon, he’s expendable!

“Pinkie Pie, Gordon doesn’t need to hear all this!” Gilda squawked as I thought LIKE HELL I DON’T.  “He’s a highly trained professional.”

No.  I’m not.  That’s what I damn well should’ve said, but I didn’t.  I just stood there, a thousand questions on the tip of my tongue, every one vying to be asked at the same time with the end result being that none of them were.  I should’ve told the two doctors to go hug themselves.  Well, maybe not Dr. Pie, she was actually super nice.  But definitely Dr. Gryffindor.

“We’ve assured the administrator that nothing will go wrong,” she added, emphasizing the latter half of the sentence as if it was a command.

Yeah, make sure nothing goes wrong, pony who has almost nothing whatsoever to do with the actual experiment!  I should have told her if she was so concerned with everything going flawlessly, then why didn’t she go take it up with Dr. Sparkle and the team in the control room, or hell, maybe even me, you know, the pony who’s going to be in direct physical contact with the stupid crystal and the stupid antimass-spectrometer?  Nooo, that would make too much-

Huuuuuuummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm beep.  Beep.  Beep.  Beep.  Beep.  Beep.

And there it is again, only with humming to go along with the beeping now!  I hate this job.

Dr. Pie sighed in resignation, an extremely rare frown appearing on her face for a shorter period of time than the half-life of Unstabilium.  “You’re right, Gilda.”

She turned to face me, beaming, almost literally.  “Gordon, we have complete confidence in you.”

Her joyous, full-mouth smile wasn’t just positively radiant; it was almost too bright to look at.  It was unbelievable, that pink pony’s toothy grin was literally lighting up the entire room!  It got to the point where I actually began to squint, like the sun was in my eyes!

This seemed to do wonders to calm Gilda’s normally tense demeanor, and the griffon said with a deep sigh of relief, “Well, go ahead.  Let’s let him in, now.”

The two doctors moved to their respective retinal scanners at opposite ends of the cramped antechamber, and the glow was gone as suddenly as it had appeared.

And, as if to add insult to the injury of depriving me of my happy-glow, that annoying beeping and humming sound was now louder and more obnoxious than ever.

I positioned myself in front of the massive blast-door that was now all that stood between me and doing science, and I heard Dr. Gryffindor, still at the retinal scanner, offer an extremely late retort to something that was said several minutes before.

“And Pinkie, we aren’t going to be deviating a ‘teensy-weensy’ bit from anything.  Everything past this point is completely standard procedure.”

Dr. Pie caught my attention as she shouted, “That’s what I’m worried about!” into her terminal, her head magically locked in place while the computer scanned her baby-blue irises.  With effort, my eyes wandered away from her plump, salacious, sixty-year-old butt (I don’t know, okay?), and up towards the computer monitor set above the elaborate system of cameras and lasers that were currently being a bit on the slow side in determining whether or not this pink earth-pony with a very nice arrruughhh was or was not, in fact, the legendary party-mare-turned-scientist Pinkie Pie.

Without warning, the computer suddenly began making these clickety-clickety noises, which, to me at least, really didn’t seem like the sort of sound a computer had any business at all making.

And then I was nearly blinded by the brightest celestiadamned magnesium-tier flash I have ever experienced, the pain seeming to go even deeper than my retina, past my eyeballs, down the whole length of my optical nerves and into my brain.

I wailed in ocular agony, but neither of the doctors seemed to notice.  I was about to say something extraordinarily rude out loud when the moment of dead silence was cut through with a mechanical fracas of pneumatic pumps pumping, the click-clacking of locks disengaging,  the grinding of gears and the growling of electric motors, all underscored by a steady tempo of the clanking of poorly lubricated chain-link pulleys backed up by the long, steady howl of metal scraping against metal.

The noises stopped.  All of them, even the beeping.  I removed my hooves from my eyes, but a faint white orb burned into my retina would continue to obscure my vision for quite some time.

Dismissing the unexpected flash from my mind, I timidly stepped forward into the test chamber.  Its yellow walls were coated in special paint that wasn’t special enough to stop it from cracking and peeling and falling off little by little from the not-insignificant amount of rads thrown off by the pride of Sector C: the Antimass-Spectrometer, or AsSpectr.  Which sounds to me like a ghost with no respect for boundaries, but I’m not the pony who makes up the acronyms.

Hanging from the ceiling twenty meters above me was what looked almost like an enormous, yellow-orange telescope, like the kind in the Royal Observatory in Canterlot, only significantly bigger.  Rising up from the floor like the black talons of a metal god was ‘the Cradle’, the structure which housed the analysis port - otherwise known as the science end of the massive machine.

The huge, heavy airlock door slammed shut behind me as if in contempt of the fact that I had passed through it, and I lifted my Twitanium-encased hooves up to cover my bare ears as a screech from the overhead PA system reverberated throughout the huge, circular chamber.

“Testing, testing, *ahem*.”  It was Doctor... oh hell, I’m just going to call her Twilight Sparkle.  “Everything seems to be in order,” she noted, the master of both science and magic sounding satisfied, if just a tiny bit nervous.

After a slight commotion accidentally broadcast over the intercom, a new voice replaced hers.

Well, not completely new.  “Okay, Gordon, the specimen should be delivered to you in a few moments...” Dr. Gryffindor trailed off, obviously distracted.

Wow, she got back up to the control room fast.  Which told me that she was more excited to be here than she’d been letting on.  That, or Twilight had teleported her back up there, which I wasn’t even sure was possible.

I’d always wanted to teleport.  It was a magic trick I could never master.  Very few unicorns could, and I don’t think anypony since the legendary magisters of old could do it as quickly, accurately, and effortlessly as Twilight.  Judging from what I’d read of her unclassified work (which  was probably the minority of it), it was an indisputable fact that were things – real and measurable things, if incredibly tiny - popping into Equestria seemingly from nowhere, appearing as suddenly as if they’d been conjured at a magic show, yet we were certain that whatever their method of arrival, it couldn’t have been any more ‘magical’ than a waterfall, a flower in bloom, or a volcanic eruption.  All we knew for certain was that these particles had to be coming from somewhere... someplace else... and if we could only figure out how, how in the world this was happening, if we could replicate it somehow... the implications for non-magical and even - or maybe especially - magical creatures... for me... was profound.  More than profound.  And Twilight was at the center of it all, the lead scientist at Black Mane and a more persuasive intercessor to the Princesses than even the king of hoofboot-licking himself, Administrator Breen.

And there she was, literally the best and brightest of all of us, advising a traitor (to science, not to Equestria) who’d been brought back as an expert.  Celestia, that must have been humiliating.

The intercom crackled on again, projecting Dr. Gryffindor’s scratchy voice.

“Oh, and your suit should keep you comfortable through all this.”

That’s reassuring, I thought.  My Mark IV Hazardous EnVironment Suit represented the absolute pinnacle of equine scientific progress and arcane engineering, bar-none the most harmonious fusion of magic and technology Equestria had ever...

Wait, why am I not wearing a helmet?

It was true; I was not wearing a helmet.  This was deeply worrying, as my head was where my brain was, and my brain was reasoning that if operation of this machine required a protective full-body-suit to be worn, presumably to protect me from invisible maladies like high-energy radiation or whatever it was the AsSpectr threw off as a byproduct of the advancement of knowledge, then why would I not be wearing any protection whatsoever over the single most vulnerable part of my body?!

“Hey!” I shouted at the observation window, clopping one hoof to the side of my mouth, which I don’t think was actually amplifying my voice at all, “Did this thing come with a helmet?!”

“If you would be so good as to climb up and start the rotors-” there was a short pause followed by the slightest hint of annoyance, “Doctor Sparkle and I can bring the antimass-spectrometer to 80% and hold it there until the specimen arrives.”

This is ridiculous, I thought, uncharacteristically furious.  I am not ‘new’ anymore, and I am sick of not asking questions.  Especially when those questions are about my own celestiadamned safety.

“Hey!  Can somepony please tell me why this ‘hazard suit’ leaves only the most vulnerable part of my body completely unprotected?!”  I shouted louder, my voice reverberating off the metal walls of the massive chamber, making me sound like an entire crowd of Gordon Freemanes.

When Dr. Gryffindor at last approached the transparent polycarbonate of the observation window, it was, of course, just after I had finished yelling, and was taking a breath as I got ready to yell a third time, so all the stern griffon saw was me standing on the floor of the test chamber, staring up at the window with my jaw hanging open.

From the way she grabbed the microphone, I took it that Gilda wanted to be a lot meaner than she allowed herself to be.

“Freemane- ... we cannot predict how long the system will be able to operate at that level, nor how long the reading will take, so please work as quickly as you can.  Doctor.”

Of course they can’t hear me.  Forcefully putting an armored hoof to my face and dragging it slowly downwards while grunting in frustration, I thought, I don’t want to lose this job.  Hay bales, I’ll ask them about the helmet later.  But I am NOT going to just forget about this.

I turned to look up the ladder which led to the rotor controls about halfway towards the ceiling.  Now, I was no veteran at what I did, but it seemed to me irredeemably stupid to put the rotor controls halfway up the wall like that.  One could easily see the things from ground level, and putting the terminal up there necessitated defeating a ladder in one-on-one acrobatic combat just to reach them.  For those of you who have never had to scale a ladder, I would describe it as incredibly easy unless you actually have to do it.  In that case, it’s about the most awkward thing a pony can do.

As I trot over and laid a hoof on the first rung, I lamented the fact that I would never teleport anywhere.  I just wasn’t that gifted a unicorn.

That must be why they don’t want me to wear a helmet, I thought with as much sarcasm as I could muster while I bit down on another one of the ladder’s red, metal bars and relearned what the bottom of a typical laboratory technician’s hooves taste like.  They want to see if repeatedly exposing me to the ‘Ass-Specter’ will give an otherwise lackluster unicorn magical superpowers.

Now, you may be wondering why I have still not explained just what an antimass-spectrometer is, and I will tell you that it is not because I do not know what an antimass-spectrometer is.  I know quite well what an antimass-spectrometer is, I just don’t want to needlessly overwhelm the laypony reading this with technical terms and extremely complex scientific concepts that most ponies have no interest in learning.

But what I’m not going to do is just say; “It’s a huge, complicated machine that does science!”

I will not ask the reader to ‘bear with me’.  I only ask for the reader to trust me.

The machine I previously described as similar to ‘an inverted telescope’ really wasn’t anything at all like a telescope, but more like its antithesis - the microscope - though neither analogy is by any means perfect.  Instead of gazing into the heavens like Starswirl the Bearded, my colleagues and I at Sector C (or Sector Seers, was our terrible, terrible nickname) would peer down our gigantic microscope at the border between our familiar three or four dimensions – a trio of space plus one of time, or that was the classical thought going all the way back to the Reignaissance - and the ones that lay crushed beneath our hooves, wrapped up and compressed so tight, you couldn’t even begin to notice them unless you were far smaller than the nucleus of an atom.

I finally reached the floor of the suspended platform.  Exhausted, yet excited that I was at the bleeding edge of scientific research, I slammed my hoof down on the big, red button that made the huge, complicated machine do science.  Just like I had wanted to do since I was a colt.

Inside the frame of the machine, what was only the central component of the massive cooling system that was simply called ‘the rotors’ began to rotate.

Dr. Gryffindor’s voice came over PA, a bit sarcastic this time.  “Excellent work, Doctor Freemane.”  As if she was saying ‘now let the big ponies take over’, she finished, “We’ll take it from here.”

“Power to Stage-1 emitters activating... now,” announced Twilight, and really cool yellow lightning started coming out of these weird-looking kind of cylindrical things that orbit around the top of the spectrometer.  Those things always weirded me out.  They aren’t attached to anything, they literally just float there, in mid-air, even when the machine is completely turned off.  Maybe there was some unicorn hiding inside a vent somewhere that kept them levitated, I don’t know.

“I’m showing predictable phase-arrays,” again came the purple mare’s voice, sounding just a bit unsure of herself.

I was leaning over the small terminal at the end of the balcony, thinking about predictable phase-arrays and what in Equestria it was that Twilight was showing them.  To be honest, I didn’t want to be there, in that dank, dark, extremely technologically-advanced dungeon.  I wanted to be up (well, down, from this perspective) there, in the control room, with other members of the science team, and I was for the first few weeks I was there.  And then I (sort of on purpose) blew up Dr. Gryffindor’s lunch.  The day Twilight pulled me aside and told me I had been reassigned to duty as a laboratory assistant was the saddest of my entire life.

There I used to stand, a university graduate in the presence of scientists three times my age, ten times my income, and some of whom were actually famous – as in, almost every single pony in Equestria knew who they were – all of us equal in our curiosity, wonderment, and yes, ignorance, as we huddled around our banks of screens, every one displaying a rainbow of bright, colorful, abstract graphical representations of things so small, their existence could only be inferred through indirect measurement.  Like expectant mothers waiting for the storks to deliver their foals, we would stand at attention for lengths of time that seemed shorter than they actually were, a sea of white that must have resembled a flock of excited, overweight seagulls; pegasi, unicorns, earth ponies, donkeys, mules, zebras... a cow, I think... no, no, bull, that’s what you call them... and yes, even a handful of griffons, as loyal to the Princesses and to Equestria as anypony else, all of us watching and waiting with bated breath, hollering and hoof-bumping each other every time somepony caught even the faintest, fleeting glimpse of an interdimensional interloper, rarely more than a single or a tiny handful of elementary particles at a time, appearing in our world after being pinched across the folds where the dimensions intersect by some unknown force just begging to be found out.

And I’d never get to do that again.  Because of tuna casserole.

“Power to Stage 2 emitters in 3... 2... 1...”

A second beam of yellowish lightning erupted from the bottom of the emitters, tracing a jagged, flickering line of plasma to the center of the Cradle several meters below.

Shit, I better go get in position.  The hard plastic ‘cage’ around the delivery port hadn’t yet started flashing its red warning lights, so I figured I still had time.

While cumbrously making my way down to the ground despite the best efforts of my arch-nemesis, the ladder, Dr. Sparkle said something kind of disturbing over the intercom.

“Uhm... it’s probably not a problem... probably, but I’m showing just the slightest discrepancy in... well, no it’s well within acceptable bounds... sustaining sequence.”

That gave me pause.  Just what in the hay bales of hell is that supposed to mean?!

I jumped the last few rungs of the ladder and trotted over to the delivery port while thinking about how I wasn’t wearing a helmet.  At least my HUD wasn’t flashing any warning symbols or whispering any auditory alerts into my ear, so I took that to be as good a sign as any that nothing was going horribly, terrifically, irreversibly, unprecedentedly, spectacularly wrong.

“Gordon, Doctor Sparkle and I have just been informed that the sample- er, specimen- w-...”  I could hear Twilight very insistently commenting in the background.  When Gilda came back on, she sounded extremely distracted.  “Whatever, it’s ready.  Doctor-”  That time, I had clearly heard what sounded like a pretty hurried and tense conversation between Twilight and I think Dr. Pie.

What the hell is going on up there?!  What if they forget about me?  I wouldn’t be trapped in here, would I?!

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not an expert on acoustics, especially not the acoustics of a gigantic metal echo-chamber like this one.  That being said, I’m pretty sure that the whirring rotors at the top of the spectrometer were making an entirely different noise than they were a few minutes before, and it wasn’t because they were rotating any faster, and I found it unlikely that the blades were out of alignment, as I was aware that they’d only recently been serviced.

“Power to one-hundred five percent.  One-oh-oh-five percent,” came a new voice that I don’t think I’ve heard before or since.  “Sythtemth nominal!” she said with a bit of a lisp and a tad too much enthusiasm.  And aside from the way she said it, something else about it didn’t sound quite right.

But that didn’t bother me, nor did the fact that the rotors were making an unusual sound, nor did the fact that I’d been hearing strange noises and seeing lights that weren’t supposed to be there for quite some time now.  Not even the fact that the scientists in the control room were apparently so busy arguing, some intern had to come in and take control of the experiment phased me.

What bothered me was that I could have sworn on my brother’s false knee that I’d heard the sound that I was hearing before.  Those spinning rotors sounded like... like what?  Whatever it was, it was the wrong kind of spinning rotor, but what kind was it?  Celestiadamnit, where had I heard that?!

I tore my mind apart searching for the answer, fueled by an unexplainable sort of desperation.

It started with a C...

It hunts and kills...

Without warning, there was a flash of blinding green light directly beside me, which may or may not have scared the everfree crap out of me.

I let out a breath of relief.  The Haz-Mat carrier had arrived, and I hadn’t even noticed when the cage dropped.  Apparently, the laboratory rats downstairs had finally finished prepping it, and these particular rats were unicorns – talented unicorns.  Like I said before, I can’t teleport to save my ass, let alone my life, which is why I really, really hoped that I wasn’t trapped in the test chamber until Gryffindor and the rest of the white-coats were done squabbling.  And compounding my anxiety, I was afraid that the results of this experiment could have already been invalidated due to the added variable of the higher-than-normal load the machine was operating under, possibly skewing the test results and making the whole experiment an enormous waste of time, energy, and taxpayer bits.  The prospect made the scientist in me – all of me except the food and cuddling parts – a very sad pony.  I really wanted to see the results of this test.

That not-so-sing-song and worryingly carefree voice boomed over the intercom once more.

“Uhhm...”  Oh, Luna’s inflatable space raft that is not a good thing to hear in this line of work.  “Twilight told the griffon lady... to tell me... to tell you... to, uh... she wanted you to... ‘shloop?’... the grocery cart into the glowey beam.  I think.  I’m pretty sure.”

Obviously forgetting to turn off the PA system, I heard her lean away from the mic as she shouted, “You okay, Twilight Sparkle!?  Anything I can- Oh, whoops.”  She must have remembered she was still broadcasting into the test chamber, because the next thing she said was, “My bad, Gordon!” followed by several seconds of muffled noises that were so loud, I could hear them over the sound of both the antimass-spectrometer and the ever-increasing din of that shwoop-shwoop-shwoop-shwoop sound coming from the rotors.

Celestiadamnit all to hell.

Yeah, I spent a decade of my extremely finite lifespan in college, earned a PhD in theoretical physics, and what did I end up doing?  In between pushing buttons and pushing carts, I also got to push papers.  Unimportant papers.

But on the bright side, I’m fairly certain the buttons I got to push were important, consequential buttons, and I know for a fact that the carts I had the duty of pushing were inestimably important, extraordinarily consequential carts.  But the papers were pointless shitwork, I’m certain of that.

I calmly laid my Twitanium-ensconced hooves on the rubber-padded bar of the carrier just like I had done dozens of times before, and recalled words Twilight had spoken to me before she... before she what?  Twilight...  What happened to her?  Why do I feel like I’ll never see her again?

“If you’re wondering why in Equestria we’d be looking for antimatter in a piece of crystal (such a thing would be considered silly by any theoretical physicist except possibly the extremely stupid or the extraordinarily intelligent, but for completely different reasons), circumstantial evidence strongly suggests its presence, and if this test confirms that, it is either being contained within by some extraordinary mechanism beyond our comprehension and is slowly leaking out for whatever reason, or – this is Gilda’s theory - it’s being generated somehow, or – and this is my theory – it’s not coming from the crystal at all, but from somewhere else.”

I asked her where that somewhere else might be, and she answered,

“I have no idea, Doctor.”

Celestia, she was a terrible liar.

Wearing a Bill-Fillymaff-tier poker face to conceal my unbelief in her lies, I asked her whose theory was the first one.  She answered with a most un-Twilight-like science burn.

“Oh, some dumbass from MIT.”

And I remember thinking, Oooooohhhhhh!  Twilight’s talking smack about Gryffindor’s school, yo! (Gilda was very proud of the fact that she attended the Manesachussetts Institute of Technology) That’s ten points from Gryffindor and fifteen to Twilight!

My hooves still on the handle of the carrier, I heard an extremely odd noise, stranger than the humming, the beeping, the clicking, and the whirring coming from the rotors – which, while still at an obnoxiously high volume, had at least stopped getting any louder.

My final clue was a *pop!* and a *fwoosh!* and I wouldn’t get any more clues after that because a few quite modest fractions of a second later, the entire world decided that, for whatever reason, the thing it ought to do is blow up.

And, my, did it blow up.

------------------------------λ------------------------------

Miracles.  Miracles above you, below you, beside you, before you, after you.  Some would say the existence of life is a miracle, the most improbable thing to have ever occurred in the history of the universe, that life is even possible, let alone that it actually exists, anywhere... is a miracle.

Why am I still alive?  Why in the fiery blazes of all the hells am I still alive?  Is that damned hazard suit, designed to protect laboratory technicians who work around potentially dangerous scientific equipment and increase their chances of survival in the event of an industrial accident really able to absorb an almost direct hit from a celestiadamned missile fired from an attack helicopter?!

As if a giant had picked me up and thrown me like a horseshoe at a contest involving the lobbing of such objects, I was flung over the handlebars of the carrier and straight into the flickering extraction beam before I even thought I knew what was happening.

Then, of course, I died.

I had to have died.  As an MIT-educated theoretical physicist, I was forced to take actual physics classes before I could advance to the wonderful world of knowledge and learning I so loved that gave out really, really hard tests that you couldn’t cheat on because they had different versions and they made you sit one chair away from the pony next to you.  And I am certain that at some point in one of those boring ‘real’ physics classes, the way electricity works was explained to me.  And I’m absolutely positive that a high-intensity electron beam the diameter of my entire foreleg should have stopped my heart, and that would’ve occurred after my brain was cooked inside of my skull, my head splitting open to relieve the pressure from my flash-vaporized cerebral fluids, much like what happened to the timberwolf in the Everfree Forest.

But that is not what passing through the electron beam felt like to me.  Instead, it felt like getting thrown into a wall, then thrown into another wall, and then having a whole bunch of walls fall down on top of me like hoofball players making a diamond dog pile.

When I finally woke up, it was to the feeling of room-temperature water splashing onto my face and seeping into my suit.  At least, it seemed like water until a little bit of it got in my mouth.

“PPLEEAGHWAH!  PBBSTLYUAH, PLEAH!” were my first words spoken in this brave new world.

The acrimonious stench of what I was guessing were at least a dozen different kinds of potions foaming and boiling as they pooled together assaulted my nostrils and made my eyes water.  I do not believe our language possesses the vocabulary to sufficiently convey just how absolutely foul beyond any and all reason or comparison was the smell produced from the mixing together of so many disparate and exotic potions that were never, ever, ever intended to be mixed.  Sudden understanding washed over me as I thought,

This must be what Rarity’s Vineyard Scent smells like to headcrabs.

I couldn’t even throw up.  With my head pointed towards the ceiling, I choked on my own vomit.

My second experience in this brave new world – which I was beginning to suspect was, in fact, the real world – did nothing to improve my impression of it.

“ALERT:  ANTICITIZEN ONE ENGAGED. EXPUNGE. MANDATE SUBLEVEL RESTRICTIONS.”

Oh shit.  The cute lingo in the synthesized feminine voice was the calling card of one of those goddessesdamned Hunter-Killer Choppers.

Now, although ponies had indeed invented semi-powered flying contraptions that operated on the same basic principles - Dr. Pie being the pioneer who successfully tested the first VTOL-capable aircraft at Cat Bird beach when she was only in her twenties – these ‘helicopters’ employed by the Combine were purely alien in origin and design, the local populace only terming them ‘helicopters’ or ‘choppers’, because of their passing resemblance to one.  It isn’t hard to imagine where they got their ‘Hunter-Killer’ motif – and if my previous experience of being hunted and very nearly killed by one of those metallic works of some particularly skilled and inventive devil was any indication, they are persistent damned things, apparently with enough of whatever it is they run on to follow me from the outskirts of former Manehattan all the way to Black Mane West.

Judging from the composition of the debris I was lying in, I was in some sort of house.  Trapped.  The enemy had found me while I was asleep, dreaming, lost in the steel corridors of Black Mane.  Those strange noises and lights inserted into the dream must have been from one of those ‘scanner’ droids that loved to take pictures of ponies’ faces and, if possible, blind them.  And now, I was right where the enemy had dreamed of having me ever since I stepped outside of our familiar dimensions and accidentally stepped back in inside the administrative office of the biggest liar who ever lived.

I really hope that Walrus Octavian Breen (whose parents should be ashamed of themselves for naming him that) got one hell of a conclusive analysis of that stupid yellowish-orange crystal that sent the whole world, starting with Black Mane, straight to hell.

All I could see were little pinpricks of light, and all other sensory input besides that and the smell was overwhelmed by the throbbing pain coming from the left side of my head, which felt extremely tender, and like the right side of my face, wet, but unlike that side, this wetness also felt... warm.

Well, that’s no good, was all I could come up with at the time to express my displeasure at having an enormous hay-baling gash on the side of my head that was leaking fluid like Changeling spit.

Just as I began to recall having some sort of vital-signs monitor, I noticed that the little points of light across my vision didn’t all appear to be exactly the same.  For example, some of them were a yellowish color, and appeared to be organized into patterns that resembled numbers and letters.

There was a string of letters inside a little box off to one side that said ‘-nto shock.  AMS engaged.  Administering adrenaline H-21b... Administration complete... Seek m-”

Oh, fancy that, I thought in an uncharacteristically Trottinghamian accent, I’ve already lost so much blood that I should be in shock.  But, of course, my Hazard Suit unilaterally decided that its user should be awake when he or she dies.

Not that I’m a she.  Yes, I really thought that.  I sometimes have to verify basic things with myself, such as the fact that I have hooves, and I am not currently wearing a hat, even though it feels like it.

Below those medical alerts were some numbers the same color as everything else, and those numbers said ‘60’.  This meant that my suit’s medical computer rated my overall health as a 60 out of 100.  That was an abysmally low score, and that meant that I was very seriously injured.  Just as I started thinking about how this latest development was nothing startlingly new, I tried to recall the last time I’d been very, very badly hurt, and that was when my forelegs almost reflexively shot up and clasped around my throat.

Dear Princess Celestia, I began my mental use of Her name in vain, it’s gone.  It’s g- well, I mean, to be more accurate, it’s there.  And by that, I mean my throat.

I had my hooves clasped around my throat because I seemed to recall with extreme clarity it being ripped out, or very nearly so, by a timberwolf.  The little tree-dog must have been either extremely brave and tenacious, or just very, very hungry and deaf, and once it sunk its teeth into my throat, it simply ran out of ideas.  Far-fetched, you say?  Another trick that the Forest was playing on me?  Impossible, for as I slid my hoof across what little of my suit protected my trachea, I could feel the little depressions where the wolf’s impossibly sharp teeth had punctured the mesh, encountering little resistance as they cut through the woven carbon-fiber polymer despite their inherent inhibition of being made out of wood.  I hate timberwolves.  But not as much as I hate the Everfree Forest.

It was just occurring to me that there was a very real possibility that I was still in the Everfree Forest when my thoughts were interrupted by a curiously artificial wail like the opening stanza of a blue jay’s song amidst the thwack-thwack-thwack-ing outside, followed immediately by an angry roar from the nose-mounted turret of the Hunter-Killer Chopper, the inventor of which should be dropped in the Everfree Forest and left there.

Electric-blue packets of what I had long since deduced to be superheated ionized gas hissed and pounded through load-bearing beams and cuts of jagged timber from some truly ancient tree - all that remained from what I assumed had once been a bedroom - and punched through the wood as instantaneously as if they had traversed a quantum tunnel from one side to the other, the plasma lighting tiny flames at the entry and exit points of every cavity they drilled.

Now, I know I previously stated this smell to be indescribable, but I’m going to give it a go anyway:

The sewer-death zombie-shart hell-stench from the ruined potions was quite maddeningly augmented by a slightly sweet sort of cotton candy smell, a result of the trace amounts of nitrous oxide left in the wake of the plasma bolts as they burned the very air through which they traveled.

Opening my eyes once more, I blinked away splinters of wood that had slipped beneath my glasses (which, I now appreciated, had once again not fallen off), as well as the sleepiness that was still somewhat present despite having been awoken by something exploding very close to my head.  Whichever one of the Goddesses had been watching over me while I slept (and it was almost definitely Luna, as She was the guardian of night and also my favorite princess), I knew She wasn’t going to give me another chance like that.

I should have already been dead.  That much I knew.  There was no good reason why I shouldn’t have been coating the walls of that house with the 99th percentile of the most indebted body parts in Equestria.  And yet, there I was with nothing more than a nasty gash on my head and a sixty percent health rating from my Hazard Suit’s medical computer.  Which, now that I write that down, doesn’t seem all that fortunate, but at least I wasn’t dead.  Not yet, anyway.

Move or die.  One or the other, Gordon.

I wriggled my hind legs out from beneath a collapsed support beam, and stared down a jagged section of wall on top of me while an ominous orange glow emanated from my horn.  The debris got the hell out of my way like I was Al Capony, bringing along about fifty kilograms worth of its scumbag friends, most of it landing in a neat little pile on the other side of the roughly circular room.

Celestia’s tongue-polished hoof boots, I’ve gotten pretty good at that since Ponyville.

Ponyville.  Memories, both capable of being forgotten and not, sights, sounds, smells, feelings, the almost incarnate taste of despair and foreboding in the dead air of that dead town, the burning heat on my face from Ponyville Elementary that I felt even through my HEV suit’s extended helmet, the maliciously deformed, carved faces of the fast zombies that not even the timberwolves or the restless spirits trapped forever in the Forest could even begin to make me forget, it all began flooding back into my conscious, but it was too much!  It was too much, too soon, and it made my brain physically hurt so much that I actually cried out in pain.

I violently dismissed the thoughts, banishing them to a dark place in my mind that the rest of me mostly tried to ignore for the sake of my psychological functioning, though it was, at times, difficult.

Ungracefully stumbling to my hooves, which found little secure footing amidst the chaos of debris, I pictured a worried (and really, really pretty) Luna saying, Everything is up to you now, Gordon!

I urgently shook myself free of the tangled scraps and splinters that still clung to my reactive armor, and, blinking, felt the magical mud caked to my face like spastically-applied makeup - the product of those potions mixing with the dust and soot that covered me from head-to-hoof - and thought,

Right.  The miracle store is all out of miracles.  Come back tomorrow.

“TARGET LOCK ON ANTICITIZEN FREEMANE LOST.  INITIATE SURFACE SECTOR SWEEP.”

“I’ll try not to push my luck!” I shouted not at the cautiously optimistic helicopter, but at the neigh-immortal and somewhat all-powerful Princess of the Night (my favorite Princess!), making sure to melodramatically pump my hoof in the air for added emphasis.

Not that I’m not thankful! I quickly added, afraid that I had offended the Goddess.

“THREAT LEVEL ADJUSTMENT: PROBE, EXPUNGE.”

The fact that I was able to hear the robotic chatter coming from outside suddenly made me a bit curious as to how in the hell I could still hear anything considering that the first thing I heard that morning was a concussion wave generated by the proximal detonation of military-grade explosives.

That is when I noticed a bright red earplug hanging from a thin wire out of my left ear.

Ah.  So that’s why I’m not permanently deaf.  Strange.  I don’t remember having ear-plugs.

Ripping the remaining ear-plug out, I briefly considered throwing up my Hazardous Environment Helmet, but then I again heard that unnatural wail from the talkative flying-machine’s gun, and made a concerted effort to remove myself from what the helicopter (or its pilot, if those things even have pilots) knew was my last known location.

I galloped like the dark king of hell was after me for cuddling with his wife, desperate to reach the only point of egress I could see; what looked like a hoof-crafted wooden door.  Sure enough, almost a full heartbeat after the wailing stopped, the room behind me was perforated with what sounded like hundreds or maybe thousands of rounds of plasma bolts.

The damned thing gives away when it’s going to fire.  I decided against raising my helmet, as it would have unacceptably constricted my senses - especially hearing – and while it would have been useful in shielding me from shrapnel, it wouldn’t do much to stop a plasma bolt, especially not one from as big a gun as those choppers are equipped with.

With a rapid series of ‘flicks’ from my eyes, my inventory screen was projected onto my glasses, and it showed that I was the proud owner of absolutely nothing.  I had nothing to fight the helicopter with.  Not even ear-plugs.

That somber emptiness one feels when one is without the happiness that is a warm gun enveloped in a telekinetic field must have been at least part of the reason the dark, blocky, angular shapes neatly arranged on the wall beside the door caught my attention with such urgency that I stopped in my tracks, skidding to a halt like a character from a cartoon show.

It was a mothercuddling gun rack!  Lined with guns that shoot bullets that kill things that are not Hunter-Killer Choppers, and were, in fact, entirely useless in the dilly of a pickle I found myself in!

Oh, what the hell, I may as well take one, I thought with a sort of utilitarian disregard.

I grabbed the short, black one with the folding grip near the barrel and a cute little holographic sight affixed to a top-mounted modular expansion ‘rail’, and my suit’s inventory selection and weapons management systems automatically tossed it under the third category, giving it the label ‘SMG-1’ underneath an adorable little outline of the gun’s body that seemed to place special emphasis on its attachments as if they were status symbols.  I would’ve stood there, snickering, if I wasn’t being shot at.  The ‘augmentations’ were completely aesthetic, given that I’m a unicorn, so manual grips were a non-issue, and my HEV suit already had its own targeting system, so I would never have to awkwardly peer through the sights of my weapon like a barbarian who did not have an HEV suit.

Now armed, I immediately resumed my galloping advance out the door to meet my enemies in a glorious duel of wills for Goddess and Country.  However, I found the very modern-looking synthetic composites and metal alloys that appeared to compose most of the little gun’s body – particularly the initials S.M.G. petered out in silver lettering that stood out nicely against its charcoal-black unibody chassis - to be distracting, perhaps excessively so.  In order to evaluate this possibility, I decided that further observation was needed.

And so it happened that I was looking at my gun instead of where I was going when I bumped into a rather anxious-looking female zebra that happened to be going in the opposite direction I was.  And by ‘bumped’, I mean I slammed into her like a hoofball player tackling a bowling pin.

I assumed that the ‘shocked and horrified’ expression on her grey and white striped face was at least partially a result of her looking at what I was guessing used to be her house, which, judging from the sounds of cracking, splintering wood, shattering glass, and the sounds of many small, fragile things becoming in need of repair, all underscored by a blast of overpowering fumes as yet more potions and tonics were flash-vaporized by a constant barrage of quantized packets of superheated plasma, had been more or less annihilated.

Either that, or she was staring at the gobs of caked blood and dried potions all over my head.  Celestia, I must have looked like a zombie, and not the headcrab kind, but the kind of zombies from old (and recent and new and future and basically forever and all time) movies.

The zebra and I somehow landed on our sides in the patted-down dirt with our legs clumsily (and embarrassingly) tangled, and some involuntary movement must have triggered my suit to holster my SMG. Lying on the ground together, I regarded her with sheer and utter confusion, and she regarded me with a mixture of puzzlement and, I think, relief.

“Watch where you steer, you little queer!”

I attempted to relate to her the gravity of our situation by wildly flailing my legs like one of those annoying damned inflatable waving leg ponies that shop owners use to attract customers, and presumably to also scare away predatory birds and ward off evil spirits like aesthetics and taste.

One of those little floating camera droids, whose ‘taking pictures of shit’ program was clearly inspired by the work of real life paparazzi, took advantage of our undignified half-embrace by floating down to snap a few dozen pictures.  And guess what that was followed by.

A three-armed purple monitor lizard wearing a top-hat and puffing on a cigar appeared out of nowhere and... I’m just kidding!  What really happened was the flying alien robot from another dimension that was trying to kill me started talking again!

“ALERT:  ANTICITIZEN FREEMANE ACQUIRED.  ANTICITIZEN ZE-KOR-AH ACQUIRED.  ILLEGAL INSURGENT COMBATANTS ACQUIRED.  PRIORITY OVERRIDE: EXTERMINATE ANTICITIZEN ONE, EXTERMINATE HOSTILE FORCES,” blared the loud, obnoxious Hunter-Killer Chopper as it proudly flaunted its fetishistic use of classification and categorization for all to hear.

I heard a *pop!* followed half a second later by a whooshing noise that I thought sounded kind of like a couple of big moving ponies dragging a mattress across a rough patch of carpet.

“SEMI-AUTONOMOUS UNITS-” the helicopter began, making another seemingly pointless and really weirdly worded verbal announcement before it was rudely interrupted by a rocket-propelled projectile, which came screaming over the tree-line from a wide clearing somewhere behind the zebra lady’s house.  The well-aimed explosive blindsided the chopper, abruptly cutting off its statement, and causing it to abnormally pivot as flames washed over its canopy for only a split second before being dispersed by the powerful downdraft from its rotor.

Still lying on the ground, that sound of pony-made thunder (and not the kind made by pegasi) from above made us both recoil, and we made the bipartisan decision to get up off the ground and onto our hooves.

“Griffons wearing socks!” she exclaimed with a hoof over her brow even though it was still too early in the morning for the sun to be over the horizon yet.

Being an immature bastard, I replied, “Griffons?!  Where?!”

The zebra lady just glared at me, then, with her head turned back toward the portion of the sky that wasn’t obscured by trees, I noticed the three stripes beneath her aquamarine eyes, reminding me of tears.  She looked old, but not too old, mainly being given away by how grey her stripes were.  Her cutie mark was a tightly-wound swirl surrounded by arrows pointing outward, which I figured either represented the sun or a flower or perhaps a sunflower.

There was another explosion up above, the orange light reflected in the polished sheen of the gold bands around her neck, as well as her excessively large gold earrings.

I was about to ask the nice zebra lady some friendly and polite questions such as; what’s your name, what’s an ‘anti-citizen’, what happened last night, and most importantly a question pertaining to the whereabouts of a certain massive, heavy repeater-rifle that I could’ve bet ten thousand bits would tear that hugboxing helicopter to shreds.  Then I saw something very odd in the tiny, distorted reflection of one of her gold earrings.

It looked like two glowing blue dots, one on top of the other, staring at us, and that’s all I could tell before she moved her head slightly, and the image went away.

Only glancing down at me for half a second before turning her gaze back towards the battle in the sky, the zebra at last revealed her name.

“Zecora’s my name, Gordon Freemane.”

Just as I was about to proposition my new best friend Zecora for an anticitizen hoof-bump, there was a peculiar rapid-fire series of noises from somewhere behind us that sounded like something much more massive than a bullet being ejected from some kind of tube using something other than chemical explosives.  And come to think of it, anything being ejected from any kind of tube anywhere near me should always set off warning bells in my head, but for whatever reason, I didn’t panic, which would have been the appropriate thing to do, considering what was being fired at us.

I did turn to look out of curiosity, but I didn’t see anything, so I turned back to Zecora, and upon doing so, immediately exclaimed,

“What the hell is that?!” jabbing a hoof at what appeared to be a glowing blue throwing-dart that had somehow embedded itself in the zebra’s solid gold earrings.

Except it couldn’t have been a throwing dart, because throwing darts don’t wriggle and vibrate like they’re alive, nor does any part of any throwing dart I’ve ever seen glow an intense, plasma-blue.

“GORDON!” she screamed, and her eyes were drawn to their corners in a futile effort to look at the thing on her ear that really did sound like it was probably getting ready to explode.

Ah.

I didn’t like what I was going to have to do, but I did it anyway.  With the throwing dart’s vibrations increasing in frequency every millisecond, and my window to save the life of this zebra who just told me her name was Zecora shrinking every moment I hesitated, I concentrated not on the dart, but on the earring in which it was embedded.  Something that probably had something to do with science told me that that thing - ignoring the possibility that it was actually a throwing dart - was extremely unstable, and I didn’t want to give it a direct, amplified telekinetic buck and just hope for the best.

She closed her eyes, and I noticed for the first time how pretty they looked in the blue glow of the thing that was almost certainly going to melt them off along with the rest of her skull if I didn’t act some time in the next few hundred milliseconds.

Luna, I whispered my single-word prayer.

I concentrated on that mare’s earring like it was another part of a world that seemed hell-bent on stopping me, on opposing me in every single thing I do, on pushing back when I push forward, hell-bent, hell-bent as surely as if commanded by the devils whom dwell in the deepest dark of the hottest hell, as if the world itself, the ground beneath my hooves, the air in my lungs, the water in my brain, and even the Hazard Suit entombing my body were my opponents, my foils, my enemies, the products of a conspiracy by malevolent beings with infinite means, unlimited patience, and a single purpose, pure and unselfish: to stop me. To prevent me from doing what I was born to do.

And I’m just too celestiadamned stubborn to let them.

There was a bright flash, and a crooked beam of electric orange connected the tip of my horn with Zecora’s gold earring, and less than a quarter of a second after the thing went flying, it detonated in mid-air in a blindingly bright blue flash of superheated plasma that actually wasn’t all that loud compared to chemical explosives, but was certainly hot, blisteringly so, and given the amount of moisture in the air, the heat wave that washed over us felt a lot like opening a steam-cooking oven, which if you’ve never done... I can’t decide if that says something good or something bad about you.

Dismissing the temperature warning from my Hazard Suit, I checked on the old mare’s condition, whispering a soulful thank you to Luna as I did.  Her ear was bleeding, but I hadn’t torn through her flesh as I initially feared.  The piece of jewelry took the path of least resistance out of her ear lobe, over-stretching, but not breaking through, the cartilage.

I was so proud of my quick reflexes and problem-solving skills (go hug yourself, Miss Stalwart Star!) that I said something like, “Yeah!” and then raised my leg to give her my first anticitizen hoof bump.

She did as I expected (and I expected mandatory compliance with the anticitizen hoof bump), and I did bump her hoof, but I suspected her hoof had been raised for a different purpose entirely.  One of my clues was that her mouth was open, which, though permissible, was not required to execute any hoof bump, and another thing she was doing that was unnecessary was she was screaming.

------------------------------λ------------------------------

I have noticed something, whoever is reading this - and Luna and Celestia bless you for doing so.  And if Luna or Celestia is actually reading this, please, good and gracious Goddesses and/or immortal and somewhat all-powerful alicorns that are merely god-like but are not actually Gods, please don’t bless yourselves.  Please just give it to somepony else who really needs it.

Anyway, I have noticed that I tend to emerge from combat situations extremely badly injured.  I think it has something to do with me not being a soldier, and being extremely new to this whole ‘getting shot at and blown up or sliced into, or bitten, or crushed, or bruised, or battered and beaten to the point that I lose consciousness and wake up in a hospital or in the exact same place a great deal of time later, or in whatever place you go after you die, although that hasn’t happened yet’ thing.

So, whenever ponies talk about how ‘lucky’ I am, they’re full of freaking sunflower sniffin’ manure.  And if you don’t know, manure is a more polite word for ‘shit’.

I am not lucky.  I am blessed, yes.  I believe that Luna and Celestia have blessed me enormously and continue to do so.  I am also certain that I am not cursed, even though, as I understand it, such things do exist, the Despot’s Curse inflicted upon our Princesses being the most famous example.

But I am not lucky.  Every time I survive something that would have killed anypony else, that should have killed me, that would have but for the grace of the Goddesses, I am injured just enough so that I don’t die - most of the time actually fully recovering - but I live, it seems like I live just so - just for the express purpose - of once again getting injured so badly that I’m within an inch of my life, and being brought back from the brink, back from the edge of a good, natural, usually heroic and honorable death, being held back from the end, being brought back into a world full of suffering and then having to live through more damned pain.  I mean, you understand what I’m saying, I get shot, burned, stabbed, poisoned, whatever, I feel this... horrific, you know, unforgettable pain, but then I live through it, so I can feel even more unbearable pain in the exciting future filled with endless possibilities (That’s sarcasm, if you didn’t catch that.  That’s me being sarcastic).

It’s like it’s not enough to just let me suffer and die and just freaking be done with it like a normal pony.  No, that’s unacceptable, that’s not allowed, I’m not allowed to just freaking die and be done with it.  I have to keep going.  I have to complete my contract.  Yeah, I know, I have to fulfill my purpose, except my purpose right now is whatever the G-pony says it is.

That’s not my purpose.  That’s not why I’m here.  I’m not here to just do whatever some other pony tells me to do.  That can’t be.  That isn’t.  But what am I supposed to do besides just play along?

So don’t ever call me, or think of me, or in any way regard or characterize me as or insinuate me to be ‘lucky’.  I am not.  I am no more or less fortunate than anypony else in this Combine-occupied world.  So, whenever I relate to you ponies reading this how I somehow miraculously survived some terrible calamity, don’t go, ‘Oh, what good luck!’

I mean, if anything - and I’m the kind of pony who would really rather you take your feelings about me and shove them up your feel-hole – but if you just have to, then think to yourself, ‘Poor Gordon.  I can’t even imagine what awful thing he’ll have to live through next.

------------------------------λ------------------------------

“He... Guh... Gor... l-wh-huh... HUNTOOOOOOWAHHHHHHHHRD!!”

“What?” I politely asked while continuing to thrust my hoof into hers, perplexed and disappointed that what was sure to have been an epic hoof bump was being returned so half-heartedly.

“Whountawd?  Huntoward? Wh-” was all I ever got to say in reply, because as my very frightened companion jumped away from me like I was infected with an especially virulent strain of double- super-leprosy, I felt, but did not see, a twin pair of extremely sharp, hard, and smooth javelins puncture my withers where my neck met my back, breaking straight through the most advanced armor system ponydom had ever produced like I was naked.  Like my HEV suit wasn’t even there.

I was lifted into the air at least one meter, maybe two, screaming in unfathomable, incommunicable pain that shot out from those two points dug deep into my back, radiating wretched agony to every single dendrite of every single nerve cell in my body, all of which dutifully reported their valuable feedback to every single neuron in my brain, flooding my synapses like a Zebratown call center.

I couldn’t even see the Goddesses-damned hugboxing piece of grand galloping taint sweat that had gored me; my eyes were full of trees and branches and leaves and other things that I don’t usually take the time to just appreciate the beauty and fragility of because, one, I’m usually busy either doing science or trying to avoid things that are trying to kill me (which I’ve never done at the same time) and two, after my experience with the ghosts in the ghost house in ghost-town, I would die happy (and thus, not become a ghost) if I never again looked at, or was even aware of the existence of, any sort or number or area of any grouping of trees anywhere.

Meanwhile, all I could hear was a strange, uneven kind of gallop and these really weird, unnatural- sounding grunts and growls from whatever the hell the thing was.  Well, okay, I could hear the galloping and the grunts whenever I ran out of breath and couldn’t scream in indescribable torment until I took another breath.  The damned Forest beast was galloping through the trees and bushes, every single solitary step it took bouncing my frail little pony body up and down on those damned... spines or tusks or whatever the hell they were.  Every little movement the horrid beast made sent new torrents of stinging, shooting, stabbing pain up and down and then right back up my spine, from the tip of my crest to the end of my tail and down through my legs to at least beyond the pasterns, the near-constant involuntary spasming of my muscles only amplifying and multiplying the pain coming from the creature lodged inside of my back so that I thought my nerves would burn out; fry from the electrical current produced by my own body as it tried to warn me that whatever I was doing to it was injuring and destroying it.  All I could feel, all I could see, all I could smell, and all I could taste was pain.  Endless, pointless, costless, purposeless.  There for its own sake.

“Warning: Suit integrity compromised.”

I laughed.  Even though I was in the midst of an electrical storm of uninhibited anguish, I laughed the kind of hearty, full-body belly-laugh that I hadn’t had since a Hearth’s Warming Eve reenactment I was forced to attend with my family seven years ago, where my brother, John, and I continuously whispered historically inaccurate explanations for the events on stage to one other, my jokes usually having to do with intelligence, ridiculous world-views and an arms race for hat-technology, and his jokes usually having to do with constipation, homosexuality and an inability of certain characters to ‘get any’ from their spouses, which of course, was then the sole motivator for anything, good or bad, that they did, up to and including war with other nations.  Of course, I held off on laughing that hard as best I could until after we were kicked out, but that’s beside the point.

“Major thoracic trauma detected,” my suit helpfully informed me.

Good job, Hazardous Environment Suit.  I’m glad you caught that.

“Automatic medical systems engaged.  Morphine administered.”

Aaaahhhhhhh... Thank ‘Em both.

The morphine took the edge off the unending torment that was circulating through my body.  Then it took more than an edge off.  Then more.

It got to the point where the pain I still felt was reduced to not much more than a steady, pounding ache centered in my chest, and I could actually see and feel and think about things other than pain, and what I saw were the branches of bushes and trees thwacking me in the face with their wooden flagella.  I decided I didn’t much like that, so I concentrated on a little yellowish box on my HUD that said HEH - and it wasn’t because my suit’s operating system thought there was anything funny about my situation, although it was programmed by a very funny little pink pony.

Oh, but I’m sure she would’ve gotten a chuckle out of what happened next.

My Hostile Environment Helmet (the acronym of which was still, and always would be, stupid) extended, and my bloody and dirty face protected from being lashed by any more tree branches, I calmly, professionally, morphinedly flipped through my inventory to the only thing in it – the SMG – which obediently floated to my side, syncing up perfectly with my targeting reticule, and giving my suit a perfectly accurate ammo count, reading 45-0-1, though I had no idea why there were three numbers instead of two.  I turned it around so that the barrel was facing me – though not with suicidal intent – and, somehow retaining the mental acuity to check and make sure the safety was off – which it was – I noticed for the first time that this particular weapon appeared to be endowed with two barrels – the bottom one looking to be a good bit wider than the top one – and two triggers – the grip was widened and split down the middle, the triggers lined up single file like foals at a drinking fountain patiently waiting for their turn to do violence unto the enemies of Equestria – and I also noticed somepony had chosen to deface the carbon-black finish on the other side with the letters W, E, P, O and N crudely scratched into the surface, a metallic grey transposed against the black of the rest of its beautiful body.  And thus, calmly aiming the SMG over my shoulder at whatever in the seventh tetrahedron of hell was giving me the most sadistic piggyback ride in history, I was faced with a very curious decision that I don’t recall ever having to make before:

Which trigger do I pull?

I, being inappreciably clever, decided to game the system and pull both triggers at once!

Well, I would tell you that if you are ever stabbed by something that’s pretty much smooth - like not serrated or anything - it hurts a lot, lot worse going in than it does coming out, but I don’t know if that would be universally true, because in my case, I was under the heavy influence of copious amounts of painkillers and other medications, and also the speed at which the spears in my back were pulled was a great deal faster than what would be possible under normal circumstances.  In fact, some medical doctors have told me that if it weren’t for my HEV suit, the force of the extraction, regardless of the construction, would’ve almost certainly ripped out a good chunk of my back and spine.  I think it was mostly the... latissimus dorsii muscle group, something like that.  So that’s like, basically, half my back that would’ve been ripped out.  Which would’ve been a huge setback.

At any rate, my brief and unpleasant involuntary fusion with the animal that had gored me was solved, like so many of life’s problems, by the precise application of chemical explosives, the explosive in this case being a grenade launched from one of those little rifle-mounted grenade- launching doohickeys you see in all the REA propaganda posters, a feature that, until I used it, I was unaware my SMG had.  Which I really should have known better, I mean, this isn’t the first time I’ve ever seen an under barrel mounted grenade launcher.  Perhaps my only excuse was that this weapon’s augmentation was so well integrated into the chassis, it was easy to overlook.

So there I was, lying on the ground, flipped onto my stabbed and tortured back, bleeding liters and listening to bells ringing, with a computer-operated intravenous delivery system pumping me so full of drugs, I soon would not know which way was up and which was north and what my name was, and Luna knows what else.  Luna or Celestia.  Although, to be honest, I don’t think either of those Goddesses are omniscient, given that they still need to be told things with written letters, and their knowledge of medical science is probably lacking given that they went to school a millennium ago, but... what I’m trying to say is that Luna flunked out of grad school.  But that’s another story.

My Hostile Environment Helmet is designed to automatically retract once it is damaged beyond a certain point because one, its designers didn’t want its users to suffocate or drown because of a helmet that was so damaged that it couldn’t be taken off without cutting tools, and two, if your helmet really was that damaged, it wouldn’t be air-tight anymore anyway, so no harm done to those poor souls operating in unbreathable environments.  It doesn’t give you the option of keeping it up just for its armor, though, which tells me that the ponies who originally designed my HEV suit never imagined or intended it to be used as combat armor on a battlefield.  Which I can’t blame them for.

Anyway, my HEH had been so damaged by the point-blank detonation of the grenade that it had retracted itself.  I don’t know how long I lay there on the ground in a state of semi-consciousness, but at some point I became aware of a very weak, slightly warm breeze on my face that was the downdraft from one of those freaking little camera droids which came floating down from the trees, merrily going about its buzzing, and snapping pictures, and beeping, and generally being annoying.  I decided that a great thing for somepony to do would be to pick up that accursed hunk of alien engineering and throw it against a nearby solid surface as hard as he or she could.  I wasn’t doing anything besides being injected with a steady stream of painkillers, antibiotics and blood-clotting factors, and I was feeling quite a lot of antipathy towards basically everything in the entire universe at the moment, so I volunteered to be that somepony.

I didn’t bother actually grabbing it first, nor did I even bother sitting up.  Lying with all four legs stuck in the air like a dead possum, I just looked up at the hugboxing thing and blasted it with my buckass HEV-suit-amplified unicorn magic.  A flash of electric orange connected the tip of my horn with the automated photographer, and the incomprehensible forces of magic - aided by the much more comprehensible, but still a bit mysterious forces of science - wrapped it around a nice, sturdy branch somewhere up above with enough force to snap the limb in two.  Because the universe is unable or unwilling to just let me have a moment of unblemished triumph, a shard of glass from the machine’s ocular piece rebounded off my forehead between my eyes, causing me to flinch in a most cowardly fashion, followed, of course, by all the other components of the machine, the tree branch, a bird’s nest, a spider web with a pretty big spider on it, several caterpillars and centipedes, some ants, these tiny little brown dots that I don’t know what they are and I don’t want to know and I don’t care, and are probably ticks.

Really, really tiny ones.

One of the things I noticed as I very, very slowly, gingerly, and probably against any sane doctor’s orders, got back on my hooves, was that my constantly changing (usually downward) health monitor now read ‘zero’.  That’s right, according to my Hazardous Environment Suit, I was dead.

I wish.

Upon turning my extremely stiff and sore neck just to see if I was even still physically capable of doing so, I observed that, judging by the homely little cottage carved out of an unreasonably large tree, I had somehow ended up exactly back where I cuddling started.

Story of my life.  It’s like that old zebra spiritual they’d sing in the orchards; ‘Ya gather fifteen barrels, and ‘ah whaddaya get?  Anoth’r day older and a’deeper in debt.’  Except I don’t even know who the hell I’m bucking apple trees for.

…or if bucking apple trees is what I want to be doing at all.

Well, there I was thinking about zebras, when guess who showed up?

That’s right, Doctor Breen himself!  He just zapped out of nowhere in a big, stinky cloud of bullshit, and he was in this huge walking robot suit with these huge yellow laser cannons that could turn-

Just kidding.  It was Zecora.  She looked different – prettier – now that she had a Fançi Mane-6 pump-action rotational-release shotgun slung around her back by what looked like a really old, really traditional, hoof-stitched belt that I sensed was probably a family heirloom of some sort.  And if it was, it probably wasn’t anymore, as it appeared to have been heavily modified for the purposes of a modern military, complete with little pouches all along its length with shotgun shells stuffed in them like big red candy bars, except you couldn’t eat them, and they were used as ammunition for government-issued assault weapons designed for use in breach-and-clear combat scenarios.

She must have noticed the fact that I was lightly sprinkled in little pieces of metal and plastic (never mind the dried blood and dirt and leaves and twigs, although a lot of that must have been knocked off when I accidentally discovered my SMG had a grenade launcher), as the first thing she said was,

“That thing was tracking you!  It is good it you blew! ... Up!”

I gave her that look that Twilight used to give me all the time, the kind of look you’d give a disheveled homeless pony who stood up on her hind legs atop an overturned bathtub in the middle of town square and declared through the wrong end of a megaphone that well-endowed narwhals deserve to be treated with the same earned-income tax credit and chocolate cake as any other table-top board game for foals and family.

While stretching out the brand new holes in my back – which, medically speaking, is something nopony should ever do, especially if that pony is currently under the influence of dangerously high doses of extremely powerful pain-killers and cannot feel all the tissue damage he or she is causing – I made sure to ask Zecora if she was okay.

“I am fine, small equine!  What about you?  You look a little blue.”

I don’t know how much willpower it took to not just pin her down on the forest floor, clasp my hooves around her white and grey throat and just squeeze, just squeeze-

“I’m a bit concerned; were you, perhaps, bur-”

“SHHHUUUUUUUUUT UUUUUPPPPPP!! SHUTUPSHUTUPSHUTUP SHUT UP!”  I interrupted, clasping my hooves not around her throat, but around my skull, frantically scraping at it like it was a mask I was trying to peel off.

“What?!  What?!” she repetitively asked before her face lit up in epiphany.

“Is it the Hunter’s wail that is causing you to ail?” she asked with suspicious disregard for my interpretively stated preference that she stop grouphugging doing that.

I was just about to truthfully answer her possibly malicious question when my drug-saturated brain registered the strangely proper noun she had used in reference to whatever the crispy cream cuddle was responsible for the fact that I now trotted like a ninety year old zombie with rickets.

“Is that what it’s called?!” I rasped, my breathing labored, and I wondered just how close to my lungs those damned spears, or tusks or whatever they were, had come.  Every instinct I had was telling me that I should not, under any circumstances, be contracting any muscle in my body except the ones around my face and perhaps ankles, lying down in a sterile room with at least a couple of tubes sticking out of me, surrounded by ponies with white coats and face masks.  But something was wrong.  I felt no pain, none at all, which was impossible, illogical.  Something was broken, something had to be very, very broken.

I suppose the sheer magnitude and duration of the trauma I had just experienced created a kind of subconscious expectation that I should have, by any reckoning, still been in a tremendous amount of pain.  I was stiff and sore and aching, and I knew from the way I trot that there had to be some muscles in there that just didn’t work anymore, but I was numb.

I was either on even more painkillers than I thought, or parts of my body that had previously been hurt were now simply dead.

Obviously assuming that I was just fine, the zebra asked, “Did it you kill?  Or alive is it still?”

“Kill what?”

Out of the brush and the trees, unsteadily climbing over a lightning-felled cut of swamp-timber (further confirmation that I was, as I feared, still in the Goddesses-forsaken Everfree Forest) was an animal I had read about in no book, nor heard of in any fireside tail told amongst foals.  It was a beast, but it was not a beast, a living, breathing, bleeding machine employed by our benevolent oppressors to hunt down and kill anypony who hungered and thirsted for food and drink that was not administered as part of a Combine sustenance program, who wanted to live in homes not built to house prisoners and slaves, who missed occasionally getting sick before they were force-fed an endless supply of antibiotics that kept them alive and healthy so that they could better serve the system, the government, the Universal Union, the Combination of every species and nation and creed and tongue and religion and size and shape and color and gender into a grey, homogenous sludge with one duty and one purpose and one Goddess; the perpetuation of its own existence by any means conducive to doing so.  The System does not exist to serve any being, no matter how powerful or influential or wealthy or benevolent.  Even those at the very top have been indoctrinated.  Hypnotized, as an eel is by the pattern-shifting skin of a cuddlefish (which has an unnecessarily offensive name).  They believe they serve themselves or the peoples constituent of, adherent to, dependent upon, and ultimately and masterfully controlled by the System, or if not them, if not the people they are supposedly supposed to serve, then their friends or family, or perhaps an ideal or principle or value or moral, but they have been deceived, they are not kings, queens, princes or princesses!  Nor are they presidents, dictators, tyrants, Gods, Goddesses, or Administrators!  Doctor Breen was a cog in a war machine that I got to know better and better with each passing day in this new world, a war machine that was the skin and veins and arteries of a System that contains and controls and protects its populace only because they are a part of itself.  And because the System exists only to perpetuate itself, and because the System knows that anything in the universe like itself that exists solely for the sake of existing, ultimately and inevitably can only do so through force, the war machine is not only the skin, veins, and arteries, the war machine is the very heart of the system known as the Universal Union, the Combine, or my favorite, Our Benefactors.

The war machine is the heart, but not the soul.  The System has no soul.

As I looked upon the alien weapon of war standing on three vaguely equine legs the color of a mountain lake with two vertical dots staring at me like eyes in the center of a hideously ugly pale-white torso, its almost organic-looking shell cracked, broken and darkened by scorch marks above a pair of short, spider-like mandibles stained red with my blood, and either bleeding or leaking (I couldn’t decide which) a semi-transparent, faintly greenish-tinted liquid from its wounds, I didn’t see a Combine synth.  I didn’t see an abominable facsimile of life growing around the hulks of unfathomably advanced alien weapons systems the way a climbing vine sprouts up around a tree.

I saw us.  I saw the inevitable end result of the Combine occupation of Equestria.  I saw what they wanted us to be, what they wanted to make us into: organic components in a vast, unfeeling and unthinking machine, a machine that is never discouraged and never determined, that never sleeps and is never awake, that never questions and never answers, that never disobeys and never chooses to follow, that is never sick and never healthy, that never dies and never lives, and most importantly, that never, ever stops serving the System that exists to exist.

I unholstered my shiny black SMG, and my Hazard Suit coordinated with my unicorn magic to float it to my side.  I finely manipulated the gun until my targeting computer calculated that its line-of-fire would send my shots inside a particularly wide crack in its shell, through which I could see wet, slimy wires and circuitry and things I didn’t understand.

I glanced to my side, and saw that Zecora had the same idea.  She’d reared up on her hind legs, and was pointing the unsafe-end of her Fançi Mane-6 at the thing she’d called a ‘Hunter’.

I heard some really awful, muffled mechanical grinding noises coming from inside its main body, which I’m guessing was the sound of it trying to fire the pair of glowing electric-blue cannons that constituted most of what I’d call its ‘face’.

I don’t know why the hell we were hesitating.  I guess we were both just curious as to what the wounded (or damaged - again, I’m not really sure what to say) robot-animal would do.  Which, looking back, was incredibly stupid, and I’m absolutely amazed it didn’t kill us both.

The thing stumbled off the log and stamped one of its... hooves on the ground like it was getting ready to charge, even making this garbled, electronic growling sound that I (correctly) guessed I would hear in my nightmares.  Meanwhile, the most annoying Hunter-Killer Chopper the Combine ever produced announced that it had found me once again, no doubt thanks to the little tattle-tale in front of us that we had our loaded and very unsafe products of societal advance pointed at.

I was wondering when she was going to say something that didn’t rhyme.

“GET FUCKED, BOY-O!”

And, with my dark orange targeting reticule signaling its approval of whatever it was that the strange mare had just told the Hunter to go do (I figured it probably had something to do with bucking), we both merrily relieved our weapons of their burdensome cargo of bullets, transferring the lot of them into the strangely beautiful abomination unto ponydom and the Goddesses standing, but not for much longer, like a tripod on its three legs in front of us.

The war machine shuddered and seized, screaming like it was in pain, before collapsing to the ground, the dirt at its artificial hooves transformed into mud by the almost water-like fluids pouring out of every gunshot wound.

Awkwardly balancing on her hind legs – the difficulty of which was compounded by her obvious age and also, with her standing like that, I now saw that she was maybe just a little tubby – the zebra named Zecora sort of – and I’m not trying to be disrespectful or anything – waddled her way over to the twitching, spasming mass of bullet-ridden alien benevolence, placed the barrel of her shotgun a few centimeters away from what I’m guessing was the equivalent of the thing’s face, and with the thunderous reports of what sounded like several heavy repeater rifles all firing at once sounding off in the background complimented by the whirring of helicopter blades, the scream of a rocket taking flight, a well-timed response from the chopper’s plasma cannon scoring a lucky hit and blowing it up mid-flight, the explosion of which, in those pre-dawn hours, lit up practically the whole Forest in brilliant and angry shades of orange and yellow, Zecora coldly ignored the machine’s synthesized grunts and guttural wails, sounding like pleas for mercy in the electronic tones of an alien tongue, and cried out in a loud voice,

“FUCK YOU!”  She fired.

“AND FUCK-”  She fired again.

“YOUR BENEFACTORS!”  She fired a third time, the gunmetal-grey cylindrical stock of the shotgun and her left foreleg spattered and splashed with bits and pieces of the Hunter’s shell and internal components.  I traced the path of one of the ruby-red cartridges that was ejected from the Mane-6’s firing chamber.  After ricocheting off the sizeable log beside which the synth had drawn its dying breaths, the shell plunked into the transparent synthetic liquids pooling around its chitinous hulk like blood, the fluids immediately surrounding the shell popping and sizzling like grease in a frying pan before cooling off and dying down.

After twitching a few more times, the synth stopped moving permanently.

Ignoring my HEV suit’s oblivious chirping that my ammunition was depleted, I stared, captivated, unable to tear my eyes away from the Hunter’s ‘corpse’.

Dead.  If these things are ever considered to be ‘alive’.

I holstered my now-empty SMG (noting that its primary fire had performed admirably, if having a bit more recoil than I’d like), trot over to the thing, and gave various parts of it curious, inquiring, scientific pokes with my hoof, again noting the spider-like chelicerae beneath the eye-like weapon ports, still stained with my blood.  I was quite taken aback when I looked at the Hunter’s ‘hooves’ as I discovered that they were actually pairs of folded-under claws almost exactly resembling the hideously deformed forelegs of a headcrab zombie in every way except color - these being dark blue.  It smelled a lot like the preserved bodies of animals that you get to dissect in school, only mixed in with much more noxious fumes that made me dizzy, and something told me that I would probably get brain damage or lung cancer or both if I inhaled too much.  Even though the thing was apparently dead, it’s gun ports were still glowing bright, and I wondered if they would ever stop.

“It moves, behaves... it even sounds like an animal,” I remarked with a mixture of awe and disgust.

“Synths are much like animals, it is true.  But they only do what the Combine tell them to.”

I was just about to threaten to kill her if she didn’t explain to me why almost everything she said rhymed when I was interrupted by a very fast moving helicopter blazing by overhead like a phoenix on his way to a hot date, followed shortly by the exhaust trail from something like the ninth rocket that had been shot at it.  As I questioned the efficacy of the Resistance’s laser-guidance systems and quality of training, I heard the chopper start saying things again, much more faintly this time.

“Anticitizen One disinterred from passive target registry.  Threat level adjustment: probe, expunge.”

Zecora had slung her shotgun back around her neck, and had her ears perked up, listening intently.

“Aha, see?!  You, they can’t... see!  Damnit!”

I didn’t know how she got that from what it said, it sounded like nonsense to me.

At any rate, I was pretty adamant that it was my turn to speak, and though I had to shout to be heard over the constant back-and-forth between the chopper’s plasma cannon and the poorly trained freedom fighters it was having a hilariously inconclusive battle with, my drug-addled mind, my partially bled-out body, my corrupted soul, my whole conflicted being and all my malformed instincts, stunted emotions and unremarkable intellectual capacity were consumed by a single question that I did not so much say, as rather allow to be expelled from my body.

“WHERE IS LEEROY?!” I questioningly screamed at the poor, confused and heavily armed zebra like somepony had set my tail on fire, or perhaps like I had been stabbed in the back twice and the ten liters or so of morphine my suit had injected into me for the pain was now starting to wear off.

She answered me by stupidly staring back.  A slave to my passions, I firmly clamped the zebra between my forelegs and jostled her like a piggy bank that wouldn’t tell me where my gun was.

“MY GUN!  WHERE IS MY GUN?!  Where is Leeroy the Saddle-Mounted Anti-Infantry Rifle?!”

She opened her mouth like she was going to say something, and her eyes shifted from one corner of her vision to the other while the air-to-ground and vice versa firefight above us intensified.

I glanced up at the very shiny, aquamarine Hunter-Killer Chopper, its movements partially concealed by the intervening foliage.  It was so close, the leaves and branches straight above us rustled and rattled from the downdraft.  The helicopter rocked back and forth like a ship on uncertain seas as it attempted to track its comically, yet sadly impotent enemies, beeping and bleating seemingly in anger as it did so.  We were almost directly beneath it, but it couldn’t see us - maybe because of the extreme angle, or maybe we were partially hidden by the cover the trees provided, although with the kind of technology the Combine have, it could’ve been both or neither.  I noticed that somewhere in the distance, an air-raid siren was blaring.

“The only reason we are not dead,” Zecora began in her infuriatingly rhythmic way, “is because it thinks we’ve got brains in our head.”

I smiled, the urge to kill washing away - I actually got that one.

We hadn’t moved a single centimeter since delivering the killing blow to that tripod-like synth.  The helicopter could have simply emptied its payload at our last known location, but the thing was apparently so stupid, it assumed we had common sense, and thus would have logically moved on from that exact same spot at the first possible opportunity.

“Okay, listen,” I said to the lady zebra, my pauses punctuated by plasma-fire and the roar of burning rocket fuel, “maybe we got ourselves off on the wrong hoof here.”

For some reason, I raised my hoof while I said ‘hoof’ as if to provide an example of one in case she was unaware of what a ‘hoof’ was. I don’t know, maybe being woken up by the pressure wave produced by the detonation of high-explosives had given me some slight brain damage, or maybe it was a side effect of all those chemicals swimming around in the dangerously shallow pool of my depleted bloodstream, but for whatever reason, I just couldn’t think straight.

I decided it was about darn time I introduced myself.  Or reintroduced, in case we had met before.

“My name is Gordon Freemane,” I said in an extraordinarily casual manner considering that there were, at that very moment, an unknown number of synthetic organisms and/or scary robot things dangerously close to my location that were trying really, really hard to kill me.

“I am a scientist-”

“Don’t play that game!  I know your name!”

Okay.  Retaliation.

Clearing my throat, I replied, “Lest for, we be done, wherefore art my gun?”

She gave her eyes a little half-roll and opened her mouth to reply, but I wasn’t finished.

With my health monitor still reading ‘zero’ I gasped another breath and continued, “Oh, and no arrow and bow is this solver of rows, though this you may know if you had seen it unload not so long ago.”

I quickly selected my SMG-1, which promptly floated to my side, and continued, “Nor is it this one, though yessir it is fun, and its grenade-launching-gun surely did save my buns-”

Ticked off, she cut in,  “Oh, would you shut up about guns?!  That’s all it is with the young ones.”

She turned to storm off while a lazy stream of blue sparks from the tip of the Hunter-Killer Chopper’s cannon rained down around us.

“Guns, guns, guns!” the grey-and-white striped hermit shouted over her shoulder as the chopper’s cannon went silent, the strange plasma-like byproduct continuing to dribble off the barrel, burning the leaves and twigs it touched and splashing off the dirt like electric raindrops.

It was a phenomenon I didn’t understand.  Much like mares.  Or maybe just zebras.

I finally paid for my worryingly relaxed attitude towards rhyming while being apparently undead and also being hunted by two different kinds of robots that both have the word ‘hunter’ in their name;  the attack helicopter had snuck behind me - if it is possible for something that makes that much noise, and is that big, and that also loudly announces to the world over a megaphone virtually its every intention, to ‘sneak’ - so that I was no longer at such an oblique angle relative to the flying killing machine and its nose-mounted plasma cannon.

Another problem: the tickling of thousands of grey-white embers on my cheeks and forehead accompanied by the hickory-smoke smell of a burning forest actually would have been rather pleasant had it not signified that my cover – the only thing that had kept me hidden thus far – was  blowing away in the downdraft from the massive, rotating blades of the Hunter-Killer Chopper, the already uncomfortably thin forest canopy burned away by the electric pseudo-liquid dripping down the barrel of the gun like sweat down the smooth, slender, velvety-soft neck of a mare who’d just stepped out of a bathhouse.

I don’t think I need to explain what I was thinking about while I stared at the ‘Aim Away from Face’ end of the turret coming about to point directly at me.  But I will anyway.

I was thinking, I wonder if it was designed to do that or if that was just a happy accident?

Without warning, there was another roar, a bit different from the previous rocket attacks, prompting a thunderous response from the chopper’s gun, I suppose, in an attempt to destroy the projectile in-flight.  Before I could blink, the cockpit was devoured by a strikingly intense inferno of almost liquid flame, none of which, thankfully, got on me.

Which somehow reminded me; that zebra lady, Zecora, conveyed to me in rhyme that she already knew my name when I told her what it was.  But how?

I’m pretty sure we’ve never met before... but, wait, hold on... I woke up in her house this morning... which means I slept there last night... but before that... AH!

Thinking was becoming extremely difficult, almost physically painful.  My head was light and pounding, my thoughts sluggish and stupid.  A terrible feeling for any PhD holder, the sensation of stupidity.  The aura of ignorance.  Celestia, now I sound like that coltcanoodler Dr. Breen.

I should go and ask her, I thought at myself, relieved at the idea’s relative simplicity.  I did an about-face, and began cantering towards her tree-house.

Did somepony else tell her who I was?

There was a terrific crash and the clattering of tree branches, followed by a dead thud so powerful it nearly knocked me off my hooves.  It took some hard work and determination, but I was able to steady myself and continue trotting towards the front door of the little cottage.

Oh!  I know!

New calamities joined in with the first, one sounding like the claws of some giant animal scraping against metal, the others being sounds of distress from the chopper consisting of an electronic bleating noise accompanied by a mechanical whine from its engine, sounding as if it was straining to maintain altitude.

It’s because I’m ‘The One with the Free Mane!’

I almost dashed my hoof against a stone as I heard what sounded like an enormous loogie being hocked up and spat out, accompanied by the appearance of an illustrious glow more intense than any flare, erasing the shadows cast by the trees, and tinting everything I could see a warm orange.  Too busy giggling like an idiot at my shadow, which now vandalized the trunk of the zebra’s cottage with a five meter high exaggeration of myself, I paid little attention to the flapping of wings and the sudden increase in pitch of the whine from the rotors, as if the chopper, previously sounding like it had been shunting all the torque it could muster to its primary lifter in an effort to stay in the air, had suddenly been relieved of its burden.

Everypony knows who I am!

With my suboptimal mental faculties preoccupied with sugarplum dreams of hearing somepony (and a mare at that!) tell me I was famous, and the rest of me hell-bent on fulfilling that desire, my body was, to put it simply, not ready for what occurred next.

I was just a few strides away from the front door of the cottage when the sound of (I was later told) twenty-one blunt-tipped antipersonnel rockets exploding inside the launch tubes of the Hunter-Killer Chopper’s starboard weapons pod greeted my ears the way a stallion named Roid “Horsepower” Rage would greet somepony who’d been sleeping (sexually) with his girlfriend and also owed him a great deal of money and also had called both his mother and father doubler-cuddlers.

This auditory pummeling was followed a fraction of a second later by a concussion wave that slammed me into the dirt with the most profound and unrelenting violence I had ever felt up to that point - not pain, mind you, just sheer force.  I couldn’t tell you what the explosion looked like because a very small part of a moment after it occurred, my face was embedded in the ground like somepony had planted me there in the expectation that I would grow scientific progress.

If you have ever been thrown head-first into a roaring furnace where you burned to death as punishment for blasphemy against the gods of the ancient Spurrtans, then you know exactly how the tiny portion of my epidermis that was exposed to the outside world felt underneath whatever terribly unfortunate accident had just befallen the enemy attack helicopter.  When the hellstorm above me died down, in addition to the perplexingly prolonged feeling of intense heat that seemed to be concentrated on the parts of my head and neck where my mane grew, I was awkwardly lying on one of my legs, with the other three splayed out at angles from my body, flat as they could be without breaking.  Elsewhere in my spectacularly healthy (compared to the Spurrtans) body, my mouth was full of dirt, which, I noted, had a disagreeable taste, my already dehydrated face was now so dry it would probably start cracking and bleeding in random spots, and other than that and the holes in my back, every single joint and bone in my body hurt, the ball-and-socket joints and tendons of my front legs especially, bitingly, debilitatingly so.  Luna, even my hooves hurt.

HEV suits may not be designed for war, but they sure can survive one hell of an industrial accident.

But more things than usual weren’t right.  For example, the warm spot on my head was getting warmer.  More than warm.  Hot.

It wasn’t until I tried to lift my head out of the dirt to yell that my mane was on fire that I noticed I was feeling something that I hadn’t felt in minutes; pain.  It wasn’t even that much pain, it was the just that the tendons in my neck felt at once cramped and overstretched, and now they just... hurt.  Not especially badly.  But so it was that by this time I had almost gotten used to not feeling any pain, that simply the shock of trying to lift my stiff neck and feeling that unexpected jolt made me yelp a hell of a lot louder than was appropriate, dirt falling from my mouth as I did so.

But it was strange.  It had felt so... alien, so unsettling to know, to have full and complete knowledge that I was damaging and destroying my own body as I stretched and moved my punctured back... Luna, I could almost hear the muscles tearing and snapping, or maybe that was just my spine adjusting to the new voids on its either side... just the fact that I knew I was hurting myself even more than I already had, and yet the pain had been blunted so much by all the drugs flooding my system, I wouldn’t even know it was there if I wasn’t searching for it...

I started laughing.  In joy.  I was lying on the ground, by my suit’s reckoning, past the point of death, my mane was literally on fire, at least two of my legs had been dislocated, the gash on the side of my head had reopened, Celestia knows (and never would tell me) how many broken bones I had from being blown up twice, I was coming down from an adrenaline high that left me more than utterly exhausted, I was dehydrated from both extreme blood loss and a severe lack of fluids, I was starving, having gone more than an entire day without eating anything (which I might have been able to get away with if I hadn’t been hiking through the woods and fighting timberwolves and depressingly unaccomplished ghosts), I was painted like a toy doll with grit and grunge and filth, my mouth tasted like dirt, the inside of my suit was soaked in sweat and blood, and to top it all off, I really had to go to the stall... and there I was, laughing in joy because I could feel pain again!

Aaaaaaand... nothing.  You’d think a moment like that would merit some kind of ‘You learned a valuable lesson today, here’s some chocolate chip pancakes!’ reward from like, the Goddesses or the universe, or my mom or something.  But I didn’t get a damned thing.  I was literally steps away from this cuddling swamp cottage, and I heard no kind of response to or acknowledgment of all the noises I’d been doing my part to help make.  I didn’t hear the door creak open, nor did I hear anything like ‘Good Golly, Miss Molly!’  from Zecora.  I heard nothing.  At all.  From anywhere.

I would consider your door to have been knocked on, you rhyming, striped-

I felt a rush of lukewarm water being dumped on my head, followed immediately by the sudden feeling of not being on fire - a pleasant sensation substituted just as quickly for the excruciatingly rank odor of burning hair, which the water somehow made even worse.  Understandably startled, I jerked my head upwards, and noted after the fact that it no longer felt painful to do so, which prompted the following inner dialogue:

Oh, goddessesdamnit.  I didn’t even hear the ‘morphine administered’ thing.  And by the way, suit, I know your cold, unfeeling little soul means well, but please stop injecting me with morphine every five freaking seconds.  That stuff can be addictive, you know.  Hazard Suit.  Hazzie.  Your new name is Hazzie HEV, okay?  Possibly.

Well, standing (on two legs) in the doorway with a wooden bucket (who uses wooden buckets anymore?) clasped between her hooves, and wearing an expression that was some hybrid of worry and mystification was that damned blessed zebra, Zecora.  To her either side was her broiled and slightly blackened but - thankfully - not burning cottage, and directly to her left, embedded deep in the wood of that unreasonably large tree, was an entirely out-of-place looking piece of bent, twisted, charred black metal in the exact shape of the tail-rotor from a Hunter-Killer Chopper.  She turned to look at it, then to me, then back to it, and then appeared to burst out laughing.

Except it was a mute, soundless belly-laugh.

“I DON’T THINK I CAN HEAR ANYMORE,” I yelled, trying to be heard over the silence that had stolen her voice and the sounds the world makes.

“IT’S KIND OF FUNNY,” I asserted, probably quite loudly, “I WAS ACTUALLY WEARING EAR-PLUGS WHEN I WOKE UP.”

She must not have understood why that was funny, as she just put a hoof to her face and started moving her jaw up and down like she was lip-synching to a song that only zebras could hear.  This is what I imagined she said; what she actually said might have been something completely different.

“You’re injured for sure, but don’t worry, I’ve a cure!  And let me help you up of course, you brave, young, and attractive male horse!  And have no fear, I’ll give you your gun!  And maybe a secret beer - secret, but fun!”

“THE UPSIDE TO THIS,” I interrupted, which startled her for some reason, “IS THAT NOW I DON’T HAVE TO LISTEN TO YOUR STUPID RHYMES.”

I smiled afterwards to indicate that I was, of course, joking.  She simply glared at me really nastily while I thought of the story Dr. Pie’s robotic voice had read to me from Equipedia about the zebras who lived in little cottages deep in the Everfree Forest and turned into terrifying monsters who viciously mauled desperate travelers like me to death.

I burst out laughing once more, which in this case, was an unhealthy activity, as it increased the rate at which I was slowly asphyxiating due to smoke inhalation.

Without warning, a pair of female pegasi appeared next to me as suddenly if they’d coalesced from the wisps of black smoke still hanging in the air from the terrible accident the Hunter-Killer Chopper had as well as probably a great deal of burning wood and leaves given that the enormous fiery explosion occurred in the middle of the (haunted, evil, cruel, dark, cold, unnatural, malevolent pit of eternal misery and un-death that very much deserved to be burned to the ground) forest.  Behind them at some distance were what looked like a couple of large, blue-and-white blobs that were busily unloading at least two dozen smaller, multicolored blobs, many of whom appeared to be transporting much smaller, vaguely cylindrical red blobs.  If it helps, the blobs seemed to be doing so in a very determined and orderly fashion.

Upon seeing me, one of the pegasus mares immediately went prone, bringing herself down to eye level so she could get a better look at my wounded, wounded, sexy, wounded self.  Her coat was off-yellow, and complimented by a long, curvy mane that started out light-pink at the roots, and became lighter and lighter along its length until it ended in white, curled-up tips.  She was really quite pretty, her every element seeming to embody a different cultural archetype of feminine beauty.  Philosophical objections about the definition of ‘beauty’ aside, it was impossible to argue that this mare was anything but – when somepony later told me that she’d done some modeling work in her youth, I responded with, “No cabbage-patch-colts.  Next thing you’ll tell me is that the General was in the military at some point.”

The General.  Standing next to the yellow one, I could plainly see that they were almost the exact same height, but the cyan mare seemed three meters tall, such was the aura of authority she radiated.  Pinned to her earthen-camouflaged vest was the unmistakable insignia of a four-star general in the Royal Equestrian Army.  Beneath her fishnet-covered helmet was a mane striped with an unbelievably diverse array of every - I’m just kidding, her mane was grey.  All of it.  Showcased in this pegasus’ mane were parallel streaks of all different shades and tones of every imaginable color between black and white.

I probably would have pointed my hoof at her and laughed if, one, I was capable of moving it, and, two, if she didn’t have my gun strapped to her filthy, contemptible back.

“THAT’S MY GUN!” I objectively and factually observed before continuing on to the latter portion of the case I was building against her.

“YOU STOLE MY GUN!” I reasonably and logically inferred based on the data available to me and the resources I had to process it.

The General looked a bit shocked as I sloppily attempted to stand up, which triggered a pain almost as deep as being stabbed in the back at the joints where my front legs met my shoulders, a pain that not even the morphine inundating my veins blunted.

This time, I was not happy that I could feel pain again.  This time, I was reminded of why ponies invented drugs to make pain go away.  I may have also started crying a small amount - I’m stallion enough to admit that - although, in my dehydrated state, I don’t think I actually produced any tears.

There was more mouth-moving, the wild gesturing of legs, and what looked like some heated words were exchanged between the four-star General and my fellow ‘anticitizen’ Zecora.  While this was going on, the yellow pegasus with the pink and white mane continued lying on the ground perpendicular to me, taking out a rag and blotting away the water, sweat and blood from my eyes and face, and even going so far as to rest her hoof on top of mine, patting it gently, but making sure not to move it, her hooves impossibly soft, her touch unforgettably gentle.  She smiled at me, her gracefully aging and evocative, if not outright gorgeous and above all, delicate face saying without need of words, everything is going to be just fine.  Her bright, blue eyes were just centimeters away from mine, and even through the smoke and isosorbide mononitrate, she still smelled like lilacs.

Pretty lilacs.

Damnit.  Damnit damnit damnit.  Doesn’t she realize what she’s doing?

I appreciated the hospitality, I really, truly did, I mean, my own mother couldn’t have matched this mare’s bedside (or in this case, groundside) manner, but dear Princess Celestia, I didn’t need a mirror to know that my face was turning the most unfaithful shade of red!

Luna, I prayed, please grant that Alyx won’t see this.

Seeming to sense my discomfort, the pegasus got to her hooves with impressive swiftness, and began gesturing and moving her mouth in the direction of the blurry blobs that reminded me of a poorly-drawn ‘SKY’ background for a kindergarten school play, except the completely wrong shape.

Before I knew what was happening, my broken or almost-there limbs were magically paralyzed as I was enveloped in the telekinetic field of a Resistance medic whose coat just happened to be white, in addition to her cutie mark being a red cross – I don’t know if there’s some magic associated with that, or if it’s just a coincidence that every medic I’ve come across has had a white coat of fur – and was being relocated to what I assumed was the cleanest and most suitable operating room these ponies could find on short notice – the broken, shattered, ruined, debris-strewn, perforated, alchemical-stained, and in some places, dusty living room of my anticitizen sister, the one they incorrectly call ’ZE-KOR-AH’.

I really didn’t think I was in all that much immediate danger of dying, but, in my effort to gather some kind of hard data to back that up, I glanced down at my health monitor, which wasn’t there.

Well, that’s new, I thought, and caught the eye of the yellow mare with the kind eyes.

Then something peculiar happened.  Looking deep into the bluest depths of those oceans of eyes this special mare had, I sort of... I don’t know, I felt like she asked me what was new.

My glasses fell off, I thought while the nurse had me suspended in the air over my soon-to-be operating table, trying to sweep it clear of broken glass and splintered wood with a levitating broom while simultaneously keeping my lightly-armored ass from falling on it.  I didn’t know where the zebra went, or the General for that matter.

After biting down on the handle of the broom, she repeatedly glanced back at me while sweeping, and something about the body language, the gestures... she was saying she was sorry I’d lost my glasses, and she would keep an eye out for them.

My fellow Enemy of the State appeared again, awkwardly balancing on her hind legs once again as she toted two forelegs full of bottles, almost all of them some shade or hue of vomit.  It hadn’t quite yet occurred to me that I was going to have to drink one of those.

Not thinking there was anything at all unusual about our method of communication given the amount of drugs I was on, I decided to continue thinking at the old mare, noting for the first time that her cutie mark appeared to be three pink butterflies.

These are very special glasses, I clarified.  They have extremely high amounts of science in them.

The kind, gentle and considerate red-and-white nurse pony unceremoniously dropped me from over a meter in the air onto the ‘clean’ debris-strewn wooden floor.

While thanking the Goddesses that none of the shards of glass were sharp enough to puncture my suit, my eyes caught the pegasus’ once more, and... again, I don’t quite know a way to describe it that does it justice, but I felt like she understood what I was telling her, and she responded by sort of... planting the idea in my head that she would... call in the troops?... to help find them.

Our gazing into each other’s eyes like lovers was interrupted when her face flinched and her ears twitched with the Gastonian Reflex.  We both turned to see that the Zecora had kicked (not bucked, mind you, as she was actually standing on two legs at the time) what looked like a fairly massive sawed-off tree trunk over to where we were sitting, the furnishing deceptively light due to being thoroughly hollowed-out, much like the cottage itself.

She began angrily gesturing at the yellow pegasus, who in turn wildly gestured at the nurse, who exasperatedly gestured at both of them simultaneously, standing up on her hind legs to do so.

The yellow mare got down on all fours again, her hooves against my chest, and my heart pounding against my ribcage as I meditated upon her entrancingly delightful aroma of desert lotus fruit punch, in addition to some new ones I hadn’t detected before like cat litter, nitroglycerin and the sun, if that makes any sense.  Come to think of it, I think with my sense of hearing gone, my sense of smell greatly heightened to compensate.

My head was violently jerked upwards like an assassin was trying to snap it (which was a lot less painful than it should have been), and a glass bottle was shoved into my mouth, which, having never been a big drinker (except for Carrot Coke), and certainly never against my will, was quite a new experience for me.

It was strange, this potion didn’t taste at all like the others that had spilled onto me when my limp and unconscious body was flung into them at something like a hundred meters per second.

I don’t even want to know why that is, I unwisely thought.

Why what is? I felt her say.

What those potions all over the floor were, I mentally answered while the remainder of the bottle swirled into my throat, and like the heads of the Hydra that were chopped off by Her Cute Lilies, was instantly replaced with two more.

She imprinted upon me that those weren’t potions; they were ingredients.  You know, eye of newt, tongue of frog, anus of duck, that sort of thing.

Ah, I thought.  Oh, goodness, that rosy-cheeked smile she gave me was so sugary sweet, I didn’t care what animal’s bodily organs and waste products had spilled all over my face.  That smile could have made any and all of them taste like party-time birthday cake.

The pony with the red cross cutie mark removed the empty pair of bottles and flung them over her back where they must have collided with something, as the other pairs of eyes in the room all suddenly turned to look at something that I couldn’t twist myself around to see.

I sighed inwardly.  The irony of having my hearing saved from ruination by a pair of earplugs only to be blown out several minutes and some permanently scarring trauma later was not lost on me.

By the way, I began once more in my head, do you know who put ear-plugs in my ears last night?

The pretty pegasus pony blushed hot, and my heart fluttered for the shy mare.  That was all the communication I needed to conclude that it had been her, though I was still curious as to why.

‘Overhearing’ my question she related that Zecora was a loud sleeper, and she wanted me to get a good night’s rest.  That was so dang sweet of her, I was about to think out a thank you.

‘Aw, you’ was as far as I got before the first potion began working its zebra magic to get me all better, and it worked very, very well.

“AAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!” was the speech pattern I employed to relate that I was getting better.

It wasn’t so much the pain, though it certainly was painful; I felt and saw my left foreleg moving beneath the flexible mesh at my joints, watched the femur shift laterally while I felt my skin stretch to the point that I knew damn well I should be screaming, and my stomach involuntarily retched as I felt the ball of the dislocated bone slide over a rim of cartilage and trigger a final few stabs of the deepest kind of pain, the kind not even morphine can prevent, as it settled back into its socket.

I cautiously moved it with the anxious expectation of a new mechanic pulling a carriage whose wheels he had just aligned.

It worked.  The potion worked.

While I reached over to touch a hoof to my other foreleg, which had, apparently, been merely twisted, I felt the strange pegasus indicate that she was glad, and that the other two potions should be taking effect any second.  I felt my burned hair sprouting, the gash on my head knitting itself shut, and the tunnels drilled into my back filling in with muscle tissue, cartilage and cellulite.

I... I heard.  I heard.  I heard those chimes that shellshocked troops returning from the Griffon Kingdom Campaigns made famous in their interviews and memoirs.

Then other sounds came; the crackle of flames outside, the whoosh of an expertly-aimed fire extinguisher, the creaking of the floorboards I sat on, first the higher-pitched voices of mares, then the deeper voices of stallions, orders being given and taken, a whistle being blown, and finally...

The pony with the most peculiar talent I’d witnessed yet was staring right at me.  I wondered if it was wise to talk to her in front of others about her apparent ability to read anypony’s thoughts and communicate with them as if... sort of like as if they were reading her thoughts...

Not true, she thought, smiling that universal panacea of a smile.  She impressed upon me that normally she could only communicate with animals this way, and the messages were very short and simple.  Aside from the truly telepathic Cerberi, I was the only pony she’d ever done this with.

I see.  So... I was your first one, eh?  I thought with a suggestive expression on my face.

Yes.  I...  It took her a second to recognize the double-entendre in my thought, and though her smile wasn’t turned upside-down, her eyes went wide, her head tilted a little toward the ceiling, and her face became tinted the most beautiful shade of rosy red.

So, anyway, I never got your name, there, I nudged my muzzle in the direction of her flank, Butterfly.

She coughed a graceful, ladylike cough.  “Oh, uhm-”

Her gentle little voice, smooth as a silk-wrapped jar of honeybutter floating down a maglev track contrasted with what interrupted her the way a lipstick-smudged love letter to a front line soldier did with the dark, muddy trenches it would be read in.

“MEDICAL OFFICER FLUTTERSHY, SITUATIONAL REPORT!” somepony who was obviously testing my newly-rediscovered sense of hearing yelled.

“Sir!  I mean, ma’am!  Private- er, Doctor Freemane is in... one-hundred-percent, uh, operational status, sir!  Ma’am!  Sorry!”  the yellow pony (quietly) shouted at the blue General, one hoof raised to her forehead in a salute.

“Why only a hundred percent?” the General inexplicably inquired.

“Uhm, well, he hasn’t eaten anything since Zecora brought him in last night-”

“I also need to use the restroom!” I interrupted the lovely ladies, raising my hoof in the air like I was a kindergartner requesting an unarmed escort to the little colt’s room.

“Very well,” the cyan pegasus stated.  “Doctor Freemane, go and relieve yourself.”

I just kind of stared at her because I don’t think anypony had ever told me to do that in those exact words, ever.

The yellow pony named ‘Fluttershy’ timidly whispered some words to her superior officer while the Zecora clarified to me, “The purple door, you’ll find, has a bathroom behind.  On the toilet, you may sit, and take your much-needed sh-”

“ZECORA!” the General shouted.

She was just about to apologize for no greater a crime than giving me helpful directions to the bathroom when the (frankly, kind of bitchy) cyan pony continued, “You are to get the Doctor something to eat – and make sure it’s quick, we don’t have time for a five-star breakfast.”

Zecora saluted with a suspiciously evil smile, then quickly made herself scarce.  I glanced back towards the door and noticed that the nurse and that intriguing mare Fluttershy had also vanished.

“So, just make it four stars!” I yelled after her, which drew a cold glare from the grey-maned General, which I countered with a big grin, to which she responded by upgrading her glare to ice cold, which I didn’t have any counter for.

“So, right.”  I glanced toward the unnecessarily ornately-decorated purple door set into the hollowed-out tree trunk.  “I’ll go and use the facilities, uhm...”  I gestured with my newly-healed hoof towards the military officer, inviting her to reveal her name to me.

“I’ll be waiting for you when you get out.”

Okay then.  Sourpuss.  I was woken up by an airstrike, how’s your morning been?

I did what I said I’d do, and used the tiny, cramped, dark, probably non-sterile facilities.  While telekinetically fiddling with one of the tiny, partially-melted clasps on my back that is part of the entirely too complex electro-mechanical system which allows me to access my ass without taking off my entire Hazard Suit, I reminisced about how we used to call the bathrooms at Black Mane the ‘Black Mane Research Facilities.’

When I emerged from the bathroom, the General was gone, replaced by several burly-looking Resistance soldiers who were busily helping my fellow anticitizen sift through the enormous mess that had been made when the better part of my bedroom was forcibly relocated to various parts of her living room.

She looked up from her work, obviously still ticked off, and violently jabbed a hoof at a silver canister on top of the hollowed-out tree stump.

“Your breakfast is on the table.  Now go to your room, if you are able.”

I didn’t like being told what to do, and I’ve never liked anything that came out of a thermos, but I decided not to say anything.  I was just glad she didn’t say something like, if you’re done taking a dump, you’ll find your breakfast on that stump.

I levitated the thermos up, unscrewed the cap, and after hesitating only a single moment – drawing a look of ire from Zecora – put the thermos to my lips.  Only after swallowing the contents of the entire decently-sized mug in a single breath did I note that the liquid tasted suspiciously like sweet, sugary milk.  In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if that was exactly or almost exactly what it was.

I set it back down on the stump, tried and failed to suppress a belch, and trotted past the zebra – who wore a look of either shock or disgust, or perhaps both in equal measure.  I had taken a step towards the massive, jagged hole in the wall which marked where the entrance to my room once was, when I abruptly stopped.

I turned around to face the brave and resourceful Zecora, and bowed as deeply as I could, my chin scraping the broken shards of ceramic and glass that littered the floor.

“Thank you for risking your life to help save mine, Zecora,” I said into the rubble on the ground with as much sincerity as when I told my mother I loved her, or thanked Celestia and Luna for the everyday miracles they performed on behalf of their royal subjects.

Zecora responded by saying, “If you don’t go and talk to the fucking General and get the fuck out of my house, I’LL KILL YOU MYSELF!”  Again, she paused as if she forgot something, and added, “AND YELL AT A MOUSE!  Damnit!”

The other workers stopped working for a moment, thought better of it, and returned to their duties.

I proudly lifted my head up, smiling as wide as a nautical mile, give or take a thousand meters.  That was precisely the reaction I was shooting for.

When I finally entered my bedroom – for the first time, consciously - the pegasus in the woodland military fatigues was waiting for me, her fishnet helmet hung from a broken window frame, her sky-blue forelegs draped over a half-extant window sill that formed part of the gaping, jagged void carved from the tree bark by a Combine rocket, her body sandwiched between two horizontal rows of jagged wooden teeth, her eyes looking out, searching the Forest.

Feeling energized and rejuvenated from the ‘sugarmilk’ Zecora made for me, I confidently trotted up beside her.

“Beautiful morning,” I said, taking a breath of the cool air and noting that it no longer carried anything but perhaps the slightest trace of chemical explosives and vaporized engine lubricant.

“You are Doctor Freemane, correct?” she asked while keeping her gaze fixed outside.

I thought about whether or not I should admit to that offense before saying, “Yes.”

“Then you are the pony the civilian population, the Combine, the Cerberi, my own soldiers - hell, even Fluttershy – won’t shut up about.”

She planted all four hooves on the floor of the ruined bedroom and took a step back to look me over – scrutinizing me, inspecting me like she would one of her troops.

“So... so what is it?!” she demanded.  “What?!  Tell me!”

She waited impatiently on an answer, and I only hesitated, looking down at my hooves as if the twitanium alloy had the magical ability to offer guidance and direction.

I sighed as I thought about how my HEV suit didn’t have a single ounce of that kind of metal.

Obviously, she noticed.  “What, is it the suit?!  Because if it’s the suit, then take it off, ‘cause... I’ve got about a dozen soldiers I’d love to give it to.  Some of the finest soldiers you’ve ever seen.”

I tried imagining what my forehooves would say, but it wasn’t very helpful or informative.  Just the expected clap-trap like, ‘Keep us planted on the ground, if at all possible!  Other than that, you can go buck yourself!  Well, as long as you do it with those idiots back there, not us.’

The General must have thought I was looking for something on the ground, because she reached her face into a satchel on her combat vest with a pitiful sigh, and extracted a pair of black spectacles, being extremely careful not to touch them with her tongue.

I levitated them to my face, where they snapped onto the bridge of my nose with an unexpected magnetic violence, which may have possibly caused me to jump just the tiniest little bit.

Carrying on a sacred tradition in honor of the sacrifices of her ancestors, the grey-maned pony despondently put a hoof to her face, and held it there for a few reverent moments.

When she returned from her meditation, she began speaking in the weary tone of an old, tired warrior.  I sensed she was perhaps a willing spirit entombed in weak flesh, her soul wanting to believe, but her brain in need of a sign, of evidence, of proof.

Proof of what, I wonder?  That I was who I said I was, or that I was who others said I was?  That I was ‘The One with the Free Mane?’  ‘The One Free Pony?’  Or how about my latest nickname, ‘Anticitizen One’, which probably means something bad?

What was she looking for?

What does she want from me?!

“I have soldiers who don’t wear glasses, Doc.”

Oh, I see what this is all about.  ‘Four-eyes here couldn’t possibly be that unicorn done been gallopin’ all over Equestria kicking ass like the Termineightor.  Couldn’t possibly be this colt.’

“Soldiers who went to schools that taught them how to kill, and make bombs and evade capture, not... Celestia, what was it?  FIT?”

“MIT,” I whispered.

She dismissed my answer.  “Same difference.”

“No, it’s not.”

“What?”

“MIT and FIT are two completely different institutions in two completely different cities with completely different curriculums, completely different academic standards, completely different faculties, different demographics, different requirements, different tuition rates, different government assistance... about the only thing they have in common is that their names are similar and they are both schools!”

She gave me an extraordinarily funny look, and I think for the first time, I really noticed that her eyes were a really gorgeous magenta color.  She wasn’t leaving without an answer, and unless I gave her one, neither was I.

I felt his eyes on me.  The one who was always watching.  Lurking in the shadows, everywhere and nowhere.  The one who seemed to see everything, but unlike the Goddesses, did not seem to have our best interests at heart, his purposes entirely his own, his methods seemingly unchecked and unrestricted.  And yet he spoke of his employers, this pony with god-like powers... that he answered to a still higher power than himself was... frightening.  Terrifying.

So, why did he care about me?  Why did he care about somepony whose only combat experience before the ‘accident’ at Black Mane involved fighting with his brother?  Somepony who couldn’t have joined the military even if he wanted to because of his poor vision?  Somepony whose defining lifetime achievement was barely graduating from a halfway-decent college that languished in the shadow of a far more prestigious one?  Somepony who learned to shoot with pellet guns in the colt scouts, not carbines in basic?

My thoughts gathered for the moment, I rested my forelegs on the same half of a window sill the General had.  To my surprise, she joined me.

The Forest was quiet and still, silenced, but not forever, by the calamitous sounds of the forces of freedom and slavery having a respectful disagreement.  Somewhere over the treetops, I heard a duality of leathery flaps, and I knew it had to be Spike.

“You know what Black Mane is?  Or.. was?” I asked her, noting that her woodland fatigues actually gave off the scent of pine trees and moldy leaves, and wondering, just like with the Hunter Chopper, if it was by design or coincidence.

“Yeah, I know.  Where the Black Mane Incident happened.”

“Right.  Well, I was there when that happened.  I... basically caused that to happen – although I don’t think that’s very fair to blame the middle-pony.”

Things were going well.  I didn’t feel her buck me through the wall or shoot me or punch me as soon as I told her that, in a sense, I was the cause of all the world’s suffering.

Facing no physical violence, I decided to keep going.  It was like pushing a cart up a steep hill.

“I shouldn’t have survived that-”

“Well, of course you did!” she objected.  “The suit!”

I recalled going to retrieve my Hazardous Environment Suit, in a tremendous rush because I was already more than half an hour late, and turning pale when I saw all the empty charging stations.

Thankfully, there was one left; a Mark IV, then the most advanced Hazard Suit in existence, and a whole different beast from my Mark V.  Especially around the crotch area.

“I wasn’t the only pony wearing a suit, Miss...”  I paused, wracking my horribly average brain for a nickname for the mare, her dull, colorless hair being no great inspiration.  “... Grey-Mane.”

Now, that remark did elicit physical violence from the military officer, in the form of a sharp jab to my newly-healed shoulder that felt like being stabbed with the end of a police baton.

“OW!” I yelled probably louder than I should have while she tried really hard to glare at me, but I could see that the tiniest little grin had snuck past her defenses and infiltrated her face.

“So, anyway...” I said while rubbing my shoulder, “I guess what makes me ‘special’ - I mean, if there even is anything - it would be that I survived... when so many other ponies... didn’t.”

We both leaned against the weak window sill for a few very, very long moments, and I was afraid it was going to break under our weight.

“All that other stuff – rescuing trapped scientists, reaching the Lambda Core, going to... well, abridged version, I stopped the thing that was sending all the other things into our world – all of that stuff, even that... was just me doing whatever needed to be done.  You know?”

The General let out a long breath of sympathy, her forelegs slacking over the side of the broken wall.  “Yeah, I know.  You’re too stupid to recognize a lost cause when you see one...”

I was shocked and offended, and I had a good mind to jab her in her shoulder for insulting me.  However, I figured I may as well let her finish, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with how very heavily armed she was, either.

“... so you go ahead and give it your best shot anyway.  And every so often, it just happens to turn out that things weren’t so hopeless after all.”

“Right.”

“Okay, so...”  she began, getting back on all fours and stepping away from the poor, abused window sill before it snapped off.  I decided to push my luck.

“... one, you’re stupid...” she said, summarizing my unique qualifications for my assignment with a cyan hoof raised in the air as if it somehow represented the number ‘one’.

“... and two...”  She deliberately looked towards the charred and cracked crater in the solid stump of the truly massive tree which marked about the spot where my bed had been that morning.

“... you are one lucky son of a bitch.”

I nodded my head in concordance even though, as I said before, I am not lucky.  “Yes.  Yes I am.”

“And that’s everything?”

“That’s pretty much it, General, ma’am.”

She laughed the cutest, scratchy laugh.  “I never told you my name, did I?”

I confirmed that she hadn’t.

She stabbed her hoof at me like she was going to poke me again.  I counter-attacked by jabbing my own hoof directly at hers until the two locked with a *clop!*  The ensuing battle of wills shook both of our legs up and down in a rhythmic pattern.

“My full title is General Rainbow Dash, Royal Equestrian Army, Third Combat Air Wing Division, Canterlot, but most ponies just call me ‘General Rainbow’ or ‘General Dashie’ or ‘General Rainbow Dash’ or something like that.”

“Nice to meet you...!” I decided that it would be prudent to wait until I heard what the other Resistance members called her before I committed myself to a title.

“Can I have my gun back now?  Please?” I asked extremely politely.

She awkwardly tried to look at her back as she said, “Oh!  I didn’t realize this was yours!”

I replied with indignity and insistence, “Well.  It is.”  Maybe a hint too much insistence.

“Okay... heh.  Well... take it, I guess...”  I did so with great enthusiasm, feeling a heretofore un-awakened sort of - I guess I would call it nostalgia - well up from somewhere deep inside me, some foalish part of me that just loved blasting things to itty bitty bits without any need for a rational, logical justification or a desired end - the blasting of things being an end in and of itself.

My suit, however, did not classify and sort the weapon into my inventory, nor did it pop up on my HUD.  Nothing at all happened.  I don’t know why I didn’t notice until just then – I’d wager I was distracted by General Grey-Mane/Dash – but my glasses had no heads-up display whatsoever, no targeting reticule that I could pretend to shove up other ponies’ noses while they talked, no health monitor to let me know that I was either ‘dying’ or ‘fine’ with basically nothing between those two.

It appeared that I had operated my Hazardous Environment Suit in an environment that was too hazardous, and it was now, as we physicists say, ‘broke.’

I actually reported my discovery to a yellow spotted ruby beetle that hijacked my attention at the exact moment I began to speak as it crawled up the wall at what was, in all honesty, a pretty decent clip for a beetle of any species.

“My suit is broken.”

“Oh, really?  Well, that sucks.”

That was not the response I had anticipated.  I decided to stare at her with both of my eyebrows raised until she understood that my problem was now her problem.  Meanwhile, just to see if I could do it without looking, I carefully floated my LMG over to the magnetic strip on my back, which I discovered still worked when I heard the satisfying clap of metal on metal – and the familiar, reassuring weight of the enormous infantry-suppression weapon testing the muscles of my zebra-magic-healed body.

After several moments of staring into those deep, bright, magenta oceans that beautiful, smart, funny, kind mare had, Miss Dash got my message.

“Uhm, yeah, I’ll have my engineers look at it when we get back to- oh, hang on!”

Just as Gen. Dashie began to turn to exit through the scandalously large hole in the wall, she stopped herself and said, “I almost forgot, heh... Welcome to New Cloudsdale, Doctor Freemane!”

“Wait a minute,” I commanded her, subverting her expectations by actually waiting only a tiny fraction of that time before I continued.

“This is New Cloudsdale?” I asked, glancing around with unsuppressed incredulity at the ruined bedroom and living room of the cottage, observing how even the largest of trees nevertheless made for the tiniest of homes.

“Uh, yeah,” she replied, obviously not comprehending the ludicrousness of the implication.

“Seriously?!  This is celestiadamned New Cloudsdale?!” I shouted in outrage and disbelief.

All that work, all that travel, all those kilometers through Hell Part One and Hell Part Two – Alyx and I’s detour into Ponyville, the fast zombies I was attacked by in the hospital, being bitten by that celestiadamned poison headcrab and almost dying as a result, followed by Spike’s retarded decision to let me trek through the cuddling Everfree Forest which I was still in, the ghost family in the one-house-town of Dithering, getting attacked by timberwolves and almost getting my throat ripped out, trotting through an apparently imaginary rainstorm... it was all so I could get to an absurdly large tree in the middle of a bunch of other trees where a foul-mouthed zebra alchemist lived in an unimpressive cottage?!

General Rainbow nearly doubled over in laughter as it dawned on her just what I was interpreting ‘this is New Cloudsdale’ to mean.

“...Oh!  HAHAHAhahahaha!  Oh, Celestia, nonononono, well, I mean, yeah, this cottage is part of New Cloudsdale, but... this isn’t... like...  Oh my-hahahahaha!”

I glared at her like I could kill her if I just concentrated hard enough, and she wisely ceased her giggling.  Actually, being a unicorn capable of basic telekinesis, it was entirely possible for me to magically strangle her to death.  Which is actually really disturbing now that I think about it.

“Okay, okay, cool down, or cool off, or whatever.  (I think she was mixing up the phrases ‘calm down’ and ‘keep your cool’ the latter of which showed how old she was)  Come on, I’ll show you.”

With the General’s support, I was able to obtain another thermos of that strangely addictive sugar-milk stuff from Zecora.  I felt really bad when I looked at her house and reflected upon how all of that damage was done solely in an effort to kill me.  I’m not much of a handypony, but I offered to stay and at least help her clean up.  She declined my offer by threatening to kill me if I didn’t vacate the premises within fifteen seconds.  It rhymed, too.

Trotting out the door with General Rainbow Dash, I lamented how the mare was still laughing about our misunderstanding in the bedroom (not the kind of misunderstanding that usually occurs in bedrooms between males and females – which side of the bed which one got to sleep on – ours was a simple miscommunication), and continued to do so, on and off, for the next fifteen minutes.  At the end of that fifteen minutes, I would no longer find her laugh to be cute, but rather, I would gradually grow to find her scratchy, guttural, nasal vocalizations to be extraordinarily irritating.

But as I trot in my increasingly uncomfortable suit, the temperature regulation system of which -  along with every other system - was completely hugboxed, I thought about which feature of my Hazard Suit I would miss the most if it were irreparably damaged and could not be replaced.

And you know what I discovered?  The elements of the HUD, the nice mare who whispered sweet nothings into my ear that let me know that I had just broken my leg, or I had just been poisoned or irradiated or burned, or all of those things at the same time, the reticule that told me without even trying exactly where my shot would land, and even the ability to gallop at great speeds for short distances?  I could live without all of those things.  Metaphorically speaking.  I would actually most certainly be dead without all those things.

But I couldn’t live without morphine.  Whenever I got shot, stabbed, bitten or burned, whenever I fractured my legs or my neck or my spine... morphine.

“General, we have to get my suit repaired at the soonest possible opportunity.”

She was too busy waving to somepony off in the distance to notice that I said something.  Either that, or she was using it as an excuse to pretend she didn’t hear me, which – believe it or not - ponies do sometimes.

“General!” I repeated.

“Huh?  Oh, yeah, yeah, your suit.  Relax, bucko, we’ll take it to Pinkie Pie.  She’ll take care of it.”

Oh sweet Celestia.

“And if for some reason she can’t fix it, I’ll have Gilda look at it.”

Oh dear sweet merciful Moon Goddess.

Thinking for a moment with her head upturned toward the gloomy, cloudless sky as if the glacially-slow undulations of water vapor would help jog her memory (which I suppose might if she were thinking about something like aerobics in pools of honey or perhaps flying through clouds of cotton candy), she added further,

“Actually, I think Pinkie and Gilda are both in the same room, so we’ll have both of ‘em look at it.”

Oooohhhhhhh, that should be entertaining.

Achievement Unlocked!  Press Shift + Tab to view.

Don’t Know How to Die - Successfully reduce health to zero without dying.

The following is a work of parody unrelated to the main story.  Like North Korea, only a fool would take it seriously.

John Freemane who is Mr freemane and Mrs Freemane’s son and is also Gordon Freemane’s brother because they both had the same mom and the same dad was one day in a bilding which was the place where he did things that the ponys there would give him moneyy for doing so that he could use it to bvuy foood for a poor orphen named little orphan Annie Frank that needed to feed her family and his mom and dad and then when she was done he woudl go and donate blood at the red celestia becuase helping people is the rigth thing for a pony to do in PONYVILLE in equestria because this si a my lttle pony fanficition much like fallout horisons porject equestria about the gay lesbians and Element Zero.

John Freemane looked out t he saw a river which was therehe window and sawed trees and little bunnies and little birdies and they was hurting.  Becuase of all of the smoke that was going out from the chimneys and  fatcories that had pipes going up and there was smoke going out of the top of them to.

John Freemane said to his coworkers   , ‘”We must stop the smoke form going out of the chimneys and the fatcories and the piupes that go up from the fatcories”’  and john Freemane smiled becusase he new that there was no cars because this is ponieville  and horses do not drive cars because that would be  perprostraterous.

Gordon Freeman’s brother John Freemane maed sure that his computer got shut down because that saves energy wich stoped the smoke from going into the ski and makeing it bad for the aminals and pants And birdies and sqirels but jon freemane remember his dad sayed to him:

“SON POLITION IS BAD NEWS BEARS AND EXEPT  NOONE CARES ABOUT IT and you should beleave in yuorself and dont stop and give up on making the environemnt a better place for the aminals and the trees and the poneys and the carrieges or you will lower yourself to there level :(”

That was basicly the jissed of it

AND so John Freemane went.  He wet out of the bilding and he went out on to the street and he stood there on the street and looked up and saw the birds and the sun was getting smug all over them and he said:  “ITS A GOOD DAY TO DO WHAT HAS TOBE DONE BY ME TO HELP MOTHER NATURE AND THE ENVIROMINT AND DO MY PART TO MAKE A DIFRENCE IN THIS ROUND WORLD WE        EVERYONE LIVE in a CIRCLE OF LIFE ;_; ’’”

John Freemane locked both ways to make sure there was no HORSE-DRAWN CARRIEGES comeing  and then walked galloped across the street and then he looked!

And he saw that there was no happy littel trees on the grass which was on the side of the road that he was on.  John Freemane got out his cherry tree (wich he always keeps on him in case of emergency)  and he put it planted it on the ground and he dint care if no pony saw him becuase he did the rite thing that even when noone was locking brecause that is the lkind of pony john freemane is because john freemane was a kind and gentle soul and Jesus and Luna love him verry much.

John Freemane locked at what he had dsone and said “THERE YOU ARE SAFE AND FREE NOW JUST AS ALL OF THE HAPPY LITTLE TREES THAT BOB ROSS PANTED” and the tree said woodily “JOHN FREEMANE LOOK OUT” and he turnt around and saw noone other then PINKIS CUPCAKE!!!!

Pinkis Cupcake saw John Freemane and John Freemane loocked and saw Pinkis Cupcake and she was dumping hazerdes waist into  into the river where all the fish lives and swim like MICHEAL PHELPS and harming the enviroment.

Pinkies Cupcake said “I AM PINKIS CUPCAKE.”

then she got real close and contenued, “I WILL EAT YOU :D”

John Freemane was fraid for first time.  He dident want nothing to happenb to himself because then there wouls be noone to save the world from evildoors like Pinkis Cupcake grinned hugely but John Freemane was not scarred becuase he was mad and sad and he had to do it becayse she was evil and was from science and outer-space just like the combines and pertty much everything else I can think like the meter that killed the dinosoars and the metore that made the earthqake that knokced jesus off the cross and killd him   because that big red carpet thing didnt cach him because it tore down the middle.

“I AM GORDEN FREEMANE’S BROTHER JOHN FREEMANE”  he ponted and yelled at the pink monster.

‘”AND I WILL NOT LET YOU DESTROY THE ENVIRONMENTS’’ he said very angrilly.

John freemane and pinkis cupcake was fighting for life and death when who shoudl show up? But Gorden Freemane came.

John Freemane said to Gordon Freeman, , “GORDON FREEMANE OVER HERE!!

And Gordon made faces like he and said ‘I AM SORRY BRO, I CANT DO IT IM SCARRED’”

And John Freemane angered back to his brotheer “YOU HAVE TOO TRY! AND DO YOUR BEST BRO!  REMEMEBR WHAT DAD SAID!/.”

And so gordon Freemane looked around and saw a olive garden and an idea was formed in his mind... (!)

-----> Sometimes later... -----<

John freemane was to tired to keep on fighting and Pinkis Cupcake holded him intot he air.

“I WILL EAT YOU :D”  she sayed.  I didnt mention that shes a girl but she is.

She openned her mouth wide to gobble up Gordon Freemane’s brother, John Freemane, and it looked like everything was totaly helpless and jon freemane was going to be some pony”s pankakes and eggs and toast and juice and milk and cereal and muffin and beagle and scrambled eggs and sausage and apple juice and fried okra and frosted wheat and poptarts and cantlope when suddenly...

“NO PINKIS,”  gordon freemane said.  “YOU WILL EAT THIS!!!”

And JGordeon Freeman shoved the his bowle of spaghetti  into Pinkis Cupcake”s mouth.

She ate all  the spaghetti and said locked back at the 3 brothers who was standing there safe and sound and felt bad and sad .  She sed “JOHN FREEMANE TODAY I LEARNED THAT IF YOU DONT GIVEUP AND BELEIVE IN YUORSELF AND EAR TEN POUNDS OF SPAGGETTI EVERY DAY LIKE MICHELE PHELPS (BECAUSE IT HAS GOT LOTS OF CARBONHRDRATES)_  THEN YOU CAN SWIM LIKE A DOLLFIN LIKE MICHEL PHELPS DID AT THE OLYMPICS

And then she was gone away and John freemane said ‘WHAT HAVE YOU LERNED ABOUT SOPRSTSMANSHIP ?”

“And he said trees are important to the circle of life and the water cycle and they make oxigen for the ponys of Equestria to breethe.”

Something that he also was learned was that the oxigen that the teers and the forist and clouds makes is what Micheal Phelpes’ musscles uses to gave him THE EDGE to win 22 GOLD MEDALS and gived him the strenght and endirence to swim for 400 metiors tho im not sure what that means in feet)

CONGRATS MICHEL PHELPS FOR BEING THE MOST DECORATED GOLD METALS EVER WON BY A PERSON WHO WAS AN OLIMPIC ATHLETE  ;)    ;*

GO MICHEALE PHELPS I HOPE YOU GO WELL  AST THE OLYMPECS AND ON YOUR REALTY GOLF SHOW

xx GOD BLESS the USA xx FREEDOM ISNT FREE xx

This chapter is dedicated to Lauren Faust, who reminded me to giggle at the ghostie.

C H λ P T E R  E I G H T :

UNFORESEEN CONSEQUENCES

High above the fluffy clouds and sparkling waters of a magical kingdom that, inexplicably, possessed neither a king nor a queen – and never had - soared a majestic purple and green dragon that had never been on a single date with any female dragon ever.

“SHOOOOOT THROUGH THE GRIFFONS AND BUUUURN UP THE VICTIMS AND PAAASSS THE AMMUNITION TO THE COLTS IN THE COOOOORPS...”

Riding atop this ravishingly handsome and altogether desirable dragon (all of the many, many, mares he knew had assured him on numerous occasions that any girl dragon would have to be absolutely bonkers – if you’ll pardon the language – to not want him to fertilize her clutch of eggs) were what appeared to be two blobs, one an unremarkable purple and the other a more caramel sort of toffee-ish color.  If one looked at them from a more reasonable distance, one would see they weren’t blobs at all, but unicorn ponies!  Upon still closer inspection, one couldn’t help but notice that one of the ponies was reciting the delightfully merry chorus from some patriotic little ditty, or maybe one of those death-metal hell-worship tunes that are so popular with the foals these days.

“SHOOT THROUGH THE GRIFFONS AND – BURRRRN! - UP THE VICTIMS AND - PAAASS! - THE AMMUNITION TO THE COLTS IN THE COOO-HOOOORPS...”

The dragon and at least one of the unicorns seemed irritated, possibly by the lyrics of the tune, or perchance by the persistence with which it was being sung, despite the fact that the howling rush of stratosphere coursing past them combined with the furious pumping of green, leathery wings rendered the whole thing indistinguishable from the sound of a burning cat being bathed in nickel-metal hydride solution while suspended from the maw of a Guardian Changeling and forced to listen to its mother being filleted alive by the razor-spines of an Elder Marewolf.  And while this may have been its intention, it was still an excruciating sound, at least to the ears of organic beings.

“ALYX!” the purple unicorn screamed over her shoulder.

“WHAT?!” the pony behind her answered.

“WE’RE ALMOST CLOSE ENOUGH!” she screamed even louder.

“Also, SHUT UP!” the dragon shouted at the unicorn named Alyx, an action her mother had figured the testosterone-fueled, hormone-crazed, angst-filled teenage dragon would do long before she did, although she was surprised that he was able to hold out against the relentless assault for so long.

Some time and slight turbulence later, the flying circus burst through a cloud bank bathed in silver moonlight, and what a vision did that young dragon and those two little ponies behold.

The city of Canterlot, the Capital of the Kingdom of Equestria, lay below them, encircled, ensnared, and in places gutted completely through with ten thousand-fold lashes of angry, billowing flame.  Ten million tongues of boiling lightning lashed out at every dwelling - military, civilian, governmental, industrial, infrastructural, economic, it was of no concern, all were treated the same – and the yellow flashes of return fire that streaked into the sky from the fortifications of the fortress-city were outnumbered by the alien bolts of electric-blue by ten or twenty thousand to one.  And trapped within the walls of that doomed city were some one million souls to whom no evacuation order had ever been given, nor ever would be, for there simply would never be any time - although, had it passed that such an order had been issued, one has to wonder just how many lives could have been saved in the face of so great, so merciless and so unsympathetic an onslaught.  The invaders had struck so suddenly, and with such emotionless ferocity and clinical efficiency, the Princesses themselves knew of the crisis before their scouts and intelligence networks did.  And as the dragon named Spike watched that shining city upon the mountain burn, he was struck with a horrid realization; with his heightened senses, adapted to hunting prey from the tremendous altitudes and distances at which dragons spend most of their waking lives, he could actually smell the sickeningly alluring scent of the burning flesh and fur of the hundreds of thousands of innocents trapped below; students and teachers burning alive inside their schools of learning and magic.  Shop-owners, hoping to retrieve a few precious supplies to sustain themselves and their families in a future never to exist, instead finding themselves penned-in by the unexpectedly swift advance of flames.  Young foals, asleep when the attack began, who awoke with a start to find the only homes they’d ever known were now furnaces within furnaces, and with their parents away at work, now faced the horrible decision to either burn in their homes or burn in the streets.  And in the middle of it all, what remained of the city guard and emergency services fought an unwinnable battle against the swelling firestorm, their spells and systems perfectly useless against a multitude of individual blazes that grew and multiplied far quicker than they could be extinguished.  Those who were capable of fleeing – the pegasi and some unicorns - were either compelled by duty to stay, or fled, traversing a comically short distance before being lit up like fireflies in applebuck season by the unfathomable weaponry of the alien invaders – synths, as some were already calling them.

“Good Goddesses...” breathed Spike, who found it difficult to concentrate on maintaining altitude.

“Dear Princess Celestia!” gasped the most powerful unicorn in modern history.

“And Luna!” added that unicorn’s daughter.

The air of that midsummer night’s apocalypse was already warm, even at this altitude, and it only became warmer, thicker and smoggier the closer the time-warping trio came to the city limits.

Ah, yes.  This little ensemble wasn’t there to fight the aliens or put out the fires, though they would have gladly given their lives to do so had they not been on an infinitely more vital mission.

Spike halted and began rhythmically beating his huge wings in steady, powerful strokes.

“So... mom...” Alyx cautiously began, her quavering voice disrupting the silence of a night that, with the war distant but still easily visible, was strangely quiet.

“You’re going to the Royal Palace... right?”

Alyx’s mother paused for a long moment, staring deep into the hell that had come to Equestria.

“...Yes.  I am,” she finally stated, quite confident that she would, in fact be making her second-ever covert incursion onto Palace grounds, though this time, she wouldn’t be hiding from the guards.

Unsure, Alyx asked, “Do you think the Elements of Harmony can even fix this big a mess?”

She expertly skirted around the unanswerable question by saying, “Yuh-huh.”

“Ooookay,” Alyx replied, her voice full of doubt.  And sarcasm.  “That’s good to know.”

Speaking with authority, her mother said, “We’re here because there’s only one thing that would be worse than if Canterlot were to fall into enemy hooves, or hands, or tentacles, or whatever.”

Alyx thought for a moment.  “What if they don’t have limbs at all and instead just use-”

“The Elements of Harmony,” she declared very truthily.

And incomprehensibly more world-endingly, she thought to herself, the Time-Traveling Tome of Starswirl the Bearded.  That, and the Elements of Harmony. Those two things.

Seven things, Twilight corrected herself.

Shut up, Twilight, she snapped.

Fine! she shot back, appalled at how rude she was.

------------------------------λ------------------------------

The Hunter-Killer Chopper that woke me up that morning was now approximately ten billion individual particles of debris spread out in a circle 3/4 of a kilometer in diameter within and above the Everfree Forest, excepting the tiny fraction of its mass that had been converted into energy.

However, the most annoying helicopter the Combine ever produced left an admirably significant mark upon the world when it left it in a probably super awesome explosion that I never got to see.

The Forest was burned and battered and broken; every tree immediately surrounding - and certainly including - Zecora’s cottage had been stripped of its leaves and many of its branches, making them resemble telephone poles, and for 200 meters in every direction lay the tangled and twisted-up wooden entrails of what used to be a pristine, unholy, beautiful, dark, evil, haunted, accursed, habitat for wildlife and pure evil, mixed in with tiny bits and shards of the recently deceased talkative aircraft.  In fact, so thorough was its destruction, the largest single piece I could find was the very center portion of the tail-rotor assembly, firmly lodged in the trunk of a Goose Spruce.

As I trotted past the several dozen fire-brigadier ponies bravely extinguishing the several dozen little forest-fires bravely doing their part to help burn the demonic, hexed, evil, foul-smelling Everfree Forest to the ground, for some odd reason I found myself fixated on their uniforms.

They were just so tacky.

Every single one of them would’ve triggered a code clash at any Fashion Police bureau in the kingdom had the Fashion Police survived the Hipster Inquisition of the early thirties.

Maybe it was some freakish combination my brief exposure to that unicorn mare in Ponyville, my chronic lack of sleep, a healthy amount of morphine still swimming around in my bloodstream, and perhaps some permanent psychological scarring, but all I could think about while looking at the brave mares and stallions of the Equestrian Resistance was that the Combine could get a lock on their position simply by setting their scanners to filter out any spectroscopic data that follows the complimentary colors system.  Every Resistance soldier would show up like a big, tacky bullseye.

Ugh.  Anyway, as an REA-blue cart passed by that was loaded up with the bleeding corpse of the three-legged ‘Hunter’ that Zecora and I had researched with our guns until it stopped moving, I was just thankful to the Goddesses that I had my Heavy Repeater Rifle back, and also that I was alive.

The pegasus general who had identified herself as ‘Rainbow Dash’, ‘General Rainbow’ and ‘General Dashie’, was snickering before we left the cottage and had continued to do so unabated ever since.

“New Cloudsdale is an empty field of grass?” I wondered aloud in regards to the uninhabited clearing toward which we were trotting.

Instead of answering my question, she just went right on snickering.

Fine.  Maybe it’s another underground deal, like with Black Mane- WHOAH.

The cart carrying the dead Hunter vaporized into nothingness as if it had passed behind a curtain made out of reality, while at almost the exact same time, an REA troop transport - a massive, six-wheeled metal behemoth, pulled by an equal number of saddled, blue-and-white camouflaged pegasi - appeared out of the very same nothingness to replace it.

“Stay to the left, Freemane,” the rainbow general chuckled.

Okay, she’s ahead of me, so she’ll disappear first.

It felt wonderful; my mind, previously slow and sluggish from a lack of nutrition, now felt sharp enough to predict that the pony ahead of me would cross a physical point before I- where’d she go?

“Just keep going, Gordon!” came a voice from the netherworld.

Doing as I was commanded by disembodied voices - which, under normal circumstances, you should never, ever do - I suddenly found that I was... losing myself, somehow.

As I precipitously inched my way forward, I watched the whole world around me get sucked up towards the sky with me following after.  I saw... something... clusters of buildings, white and brown and grey, then the world flipped upside down, I saw trees that hung from a dirt sky pointing at the endless blue expanse of ground beneath them, then I was under the ground, through the shale and clay!  It was dark, terribly, hopelessly, unchangeably dark!

“Come on, I have things to do!  March, you pansy!” came the voice from the ether once more.

I again obeyed the order and forced myself to keep trotting, one unsteady hoof in front of the other.  Compared to my departure, my return felt extremely abrupt and anticlimactic.  After several more steps through the depths of darkest darkness, being rewarded with still more black nothingness, just as suddenly as I’d been lost, I found myself again, coming up through the ground and back into my Hazard Suited hooves, still trotting all the while.  Though the whole ordeal - and I find calling that an ‘ordeal’ extremely awkward after my battle with the Hunter - lasted only about ten seconds, I was relieved when I could at last stop to take a breath and perhaps have a look around while I was at it.

I was no longer headed towards an empty field, but a plethora of buildings.  Occasionally arranged in neat rows, but often not, were small cabin-sized ones that rather looked like they were simply regular houses that had been picked up and relocated from parts unknown, looking thoroughly out of place with their bright, pastel-colored paint jobs.  Aside from those were larger, prefabricated-looking rectangular ones - usually arranged in rows of three or four - and in a handful of key locations were comparatively huge - as tall or taller than the barn at the former Sweet Apple Acres - multistory affairs resembling lodges or inns, with multiple connected roofs and awnings that looked like they’d been added-on over a period of some years.  With the exception of a vocal minority of cabins, all were constructed of unpainted timber that was almost certainly logged right here in Everfree, none of them had very many or very big windows, and all of them were heaped with scores of dirty-white sandbags - some having them stacked all the way to their roofs and even covering them.

And it was all encompassed by the biggest, shimmering, oscillating, pinkish shield bubble I’d ever seen outside of the one that would occasionally be thrown up over Canterlot whenever the ‘Threat Level’ for terrorism reached a certain threshold.

“Shield bubble, an invisibility hex, and a shit-ton of personnel and weaponry... and a very, very tall fence!” I observed in awe, while the General... I still didn’t know whether to call her Rainbow Dash or General Rainbow... or Dashie - ugh -... simply nodded smugly.

I was about to ask her why there hadn’t been invisibility hexes protecting Black Mane West or East, but I answered my own question simply by thinking it over for a few moments; both of those were already hidden, one inside a Sugarcube Corner, the other underneath an abandoned homestead.

So, ‘Don’t use what you don’t need’, I suppose, although that’s kind of an odd philosophy when it comes to security, but there must be other reasons... I wonder if their radiation emissions... Oh, look, what’s this?  A checkpoint?  I love checkpoints!

Readers, sometimes I lie about the things that I think, and sometimes I don’t.

At a spot where the rough dirt trail met the base’s physical perimeter – an imposing chain-link, razor-wire fence taller than the one that surrounded Ponyville – was a heavily-fortified checkpoint guarded by two earth ponies, partially concealed by a low wall of sandbags beside a wooden watchtower.  One of the stallions was chocolate-brown, the other was steel-grey, and both of them were equipped with combat-saddles outfitted with matching pairs of ghastly-looking weapons - all of which either looked like pinecone-shooters or some variety of confetti-cannon compared to my Class-67 Saddle-Mounted Anti-Infantry Rifle.

They wordlessly snapped a hoof to their foreheads as the General trotted past, giving her a curt nod.  But I wasn’t just going to trot past, no, no, no, no, I was going to make a show of it.

I stopped and jabbed a hoof in the direction of the grey one.

“HEY, YOU!”

“Oi?” he replied in what I now recognized as being a Trottinghamian accent.

I turned my flank towards them and violently stabbed an extremely sharp - for a hoof - hoof at the SM/AIR magnetically clipped to the only part of my Hazard Suit that wasn’t totally non-functional.

“Mine is bigger,” I factually stated with as smug a look as I could manage.

“Gordon?” somepony who sounded just like Barney Ironbuck called out.

“WHAT?!” I screamed back.

“Holy shucks, what’s wrong, Gordon?” Barney yelled back down from the wooden watchtower, his  head barely peeking out over the edge.

Oh, gumdrops.  “I’m sorry, Barney, I didn’t mean to yell at you!”

I just kind of snap at random people at random times.  It’s some psychological tic or something.

“Also,” I continued, “BARNEY!  Damn, colt, how’d you get all the way out here?!”

Barney poked his head out again, this time with his cute little shiny helmet off.

“That’s a pretty long story, Gordon, and I think you have other business right now...” he said, gesturing his head toward the General, who acknowledged that yes, I did.

Whatever Barney had been through to get out of City 7, he certainly hadn’t injured his face, which betrayed no irregularities on its light-black surface as it always had, nor had he damaged his mane - aside from a bad case of helmet-hair - which was just as long and stringy and - quite boringly - simply a darker shade of black than the rest of him.  Not to imply that he’s ugly or anything, he’s just very... plain.  Traditional.  He’s actually rather attractive, I think.

Not that I’m gay or... curious or whatever,  I’m just stating an objective observation that Barney is one handsome stallion.  I mean, he’s got those deep blue eyes just like a lot of the stallions in romance novels.  He’s even got those bangs that hang down in front of the eyes like you always see in those magazines.  Those ones that are marketed towards mares.

And gay stallions.  Which I am not.

“I see you found a new weapon!” he yelled down.

“Actually, I-”

“No, Gordon, I, uh... I actually saw it last night when I came to visit ya, heh.  So... I’ve uh, I’ve actually seen it before just now.”

I swear to Celestia, he’s incapable of saying even the tiniest, most insignificant kernel of anything that could even remotely be perceived as dishonest.

“Uh, hey!  Dreyfus!  Drew!  Lend Gordon some of those clips you guys found for his HRR!” he commanded the two checkpoint guards, whom I now recognized as the two dolts who went to secure the kitchen in Black Mane West while I went down the elevator to meet...

NO.  I’m NOT thinking about that I’m NOT thinking about that I’m NOT thinking about that-

“Hey, uh, Barney!” I suddenly called out while the sentry-ponies clumsily rifled through the stacks of crates behind them, “I got a message on my heads-up display that said... I am not allowed to use this class of weapon, and... please contact Chief of Security Barney Ironbuck if I believe I have received this message in error.”

“Okay,” he shrugged.

“So... I’m informing you, right now, that I think I received that message in error,” I said, hesitating.

“...because... Black Mane is gone, aaaaand... we’re at war with aliens from outer space... aaaaaaand because of this, the rules no longer apply to me.”

“Okay,” he replied, unphased, nodding his head in agreement.

At this point, the General began to lose her patience with the sentry-ponies, who were holding us up with their epic odyssey in search of the bullets for my gun.

“Will you two hurry up?!”

They gave the following extremely strange series of responses, which I have recorded here for the benefit of scientific research into whatever personality disorder, psychological condition, or social impairment it is eventually decided that those two earth-ponies are inflicted with, in addition to the fact that I liked their funny accents.

“Roight, sorry a’ffer tha’ Gen’ral Rainbow Dash, ma’am sir,”

“S’right, we’ll get yeh yer boolets for your chav-cannon there, space-pony, don’ get yer thesis paper up in bunches, er whate’er space-diaper ya got unner there.”

There was more rustling and rattling, and then one of the ponies said something like,

“Fogelsakes, Drey, show Doctah Freemane some loving ress’petcha twinkie disposal!”

“To eat’ his due, Drew, to eat’ his due.  Andgeyorra a once-fried, twice-removed, downstream hasn’t-been what sunlights as a door-licking-”

“Dreyfus!” General ‘Rainbow Dash’ barked.

“-taste-testing-”

“DREYFUS!” she yelled again.

“-buckle-butler, YES, General, ma-sir, sir?”

“I order you to shut up!”

Dreyfus replied by simply nodding his head while Drew, standing up on his rear legs, awkwardly waddled over to the sandbags and dumped his legful of lunchbox-like magazines at my hooves.

I threw all eight of them onto the magnetic strip on my back, surprised at how light they were.  I mean, they weren’t light, but compared to the clip the gun came with, they seemed light.

“Oh, Gordon!  Before you go...” Barney shouted, “I think you dropped this; I found it in your room.”

The security-pony pulled out my crowbar, clenching it between his teeth.

“Why didn’t you leave it there?” I asked, sort of irritated.

“Uhhhh...”

“Never mind, just give it to me,” I said in a much more thankful way.

Barney dropped it from his mouth, and I magic’d it over to where all of its rotten siblings were congregating on my back, making me look like I had a robotic tumor growing out of my spine.

“And thank you, Barney.  For everything.  But, I’ve gotta go, so... I guess I’ll see you around?”

Barney just glared at me from atop the watchtower before he replied,

“Why, no, Gordon, I’d love to come with ya, but, see, I’ve got to stay at my post and do my duty, but hey, thanks for offering!”

“No problem!” I absentmindedly responded as General Rainbow Dash beckoned me to join her.

Compared to the hold-up at the checkpoint, passing through the shield-bubble was incredibly easy.  I just trotted through the great pink mass, got shocked, felt like I wanted to sneeze but couldn’t, and watched a very entertaining light show play out on my lenses as a result of a magical interaction with the pico-projectors in my glasses, and I was through.  Nothing to tell, really.

Inside the camp, sitting to my left and right and, indeed, flying above me (this is New Cloudsdale, after all) were dozens of Pegasus-Powered Vehicles of all shapes, sizes, and varieties, both of military origin, and seemingly repurposed civilian craft; sitting on cinderblocks outside one cluttered shack were a couple of sky-skimmers - very aerodynamic recreational PPVs built for competitive racing - that had apparently been painted white and blue and pressed into service for a reason that probably wasn’t very good, unless it was something like, ‘I want to die very quickly!’

And galloping in, out, around, and above the sandbags, shacks, workbenches, campfires, latrines, and more than a handful of tents were mostly sky-camouflaged pegasi and woodland-camouflaged earth and unicorn ponies – both mares and stallions - complimented by a minority of the most diverse group I’d seen since my golden days at Black Mane; mules, donkeys, a gaggle of cows and bulls antagonizing a pair of griffons adorned in traditional-looking battle regalia - which included generous amounts of leather - here and there a few of the strange, telepathic former slaves of the Combine who called themselves Cerberi - not to be confused with Cerberus, a terrifying dog-like demon that guards a gate to one of the hells somewhere in the Everfree Forest - several young dragons who weren’t much bigger than ponies - I wasn’t sure whether to be thankful for that or not - who had apparently, for whatever reason, painted themselves the same purple and green colors as Spike, and probably most notably of all, a positively enormous blood-red minotaur with a black beard, white horns and grungy-yellow eyes, who was literally the spitting-image of a stereotypical Reignassance painting of a devil.  In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d actually walked straight out of that nearby hell-gate, strode up to the leader of the Resistance and, surrounded by fire and brimstone, asked if he could join up.

“I seem to recall, uhm, General...” I began, still transfixed by the sight of what appeared to be one of the dark kings of hell taking a massive drink from a water container in front of me, “uh, General, somepony told me that Black Mane West was the largest Resistance base in Equestria?”

“Uh-huh,” she replied, seeming even more distracted than I was by the bustle of activity around her.

“Well,” I continued, “whoever said that obviously didn’t know about this place... uh...”

She glanced back at me, her grey-striped mane sparkling with either morning dew or sweat.

Oh, the way the rising sun hit her, she was just soooo... shutupshutup “... G... General... ma’am.”

“Do I look like a ma’am to you?” she asked, the question primed like a Manticore-trap.  The rather charged tone with which the General asked it drew a few stares from the other Resistance soldiers.

“Uh... myes?”

She abruptly halted her advance, and I nearly bumped into her flank, which was tattooed with a cutie-mark of a raincloud shooting a rainbow-colored lightning bolt - which, it now occurred to me, would be an ideal metaphor for her personality.

“Ma’am stands for Madame, doctor.  Look at me.”

I looked at her, which I certainly had no problem doing WHY LUNA, WHY DO YOU KEEP DOING THIS TO ME?!  and several other soldiers had stopped and begun staring as well.

“I’m wearing swamp-johns and an LCR, dude.”

I have no idea if that’s even what she actually said.  It was some military lingo.

“I am not a Madame.”

She gestured with her hooves at her helmet and combat vest when she spoke, so maybe that’s what she was referring to, and if that’s the case, I don’t see how wearing a helmet and a vest precluded you from inclusion in the group Madame, but then again, I do not speak Fançi.

“What the hell are you all looking at?!” demanded the pony who was most certainly not a ma’am of the little crowd that had gathered around.

They stared at her, looking positively grim.

“Get the loving corn-on-the-fuck back to work!” she commanded the idle troops.

A large pegasus grunt timidly stepped forward from the little crowd, a little green hat with four turquoise stars stitched to the front hanging from his mouth.

“General, I was just trying to give you your cover back.  I kept trying to offer it to you, but... you wouldn’t respond...”

Embarrassed, she quickly pulled off her combat helmet and swapped it for the hat, apologizing to the trooper all the while.

“Sorry for being such a rancid turnipseed, everypony,” she apologized one last time, and we moved on.  We did not, however, escape the stares and whispers that followed us like our hoofsteps as we moved through the base, and I began to suspect it wasn’t her they were all gawking at, but me.  And more confusingly, I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.

We hung a right at a good-sized, round concrete bunker at what I guessed was the center of the encampment.  It was sunken halfway into the ground and looked quite intimidating, with mounted Heavy Repeater-Rifles poking out of narrow windows overlooking wide, uninterrupted fields of fire on all sides.  On top was a ridiculously tall flagpole jury-rigged with loudspeakers and sirens, and I took a few moments to feel patriotic while standing underneath one of the biggest Equestrian flags I have ever seen.  The General simply continued on trotting - I paid her no mind, and she did likewise.

Gazing upon the splendor of the Two Sisters circling each other in endless harmony made me thirsty, so I took out my thermos and downed the last sweet, sweet drop of my sugar-milk.  Not wanting to bother Rainbow with a trivial question and not wanting to lose her while I wandered the base looking for a trash receptacle, I magically launched the empty canister through one of the bunker’s gun-ports.  Making a hasty getaway after it made a series of loud, attention-attracting metal clangs, I caught up with my high-ranking guide (who thankfully did not notice the commotion), and asked her about a strange word I’d heard her use earlier.

“What does fuck mean?”

She immediately grew more tense, and returned the question like an uwanted shuttlecock.  “Yeah, I dunno.  Uhh... did I say that back there?  ...nyeahh, I don’t remember.”

Sensing she knew, but wouldn’t tell me, I pressed harder.

“I heard Zecora saying that word a lot back at her cottage.  Do you have any idea what it means?”

She placed the cusp of her hoof approximately in the center of her face, then continued trotting.

“Fucking, Doctor Freemane, is the Cerberi word for...” she quickly glanced around, “cuddling.”

“Ah, of course!  That makes perfect sense, given the context in which it was used.”

“Anyway, didn’t you have a question for me, Doctor?”

I had to think about that while I watched a convoy of four REA Armored Personnel Carriages roll past on their massive talonium-alloy wheels, the lead one pulled by six sky-camouflaged pegasi and the back three getting by with only four gruff-looking earth ponies each.

“Oh yeah, uh, this place seems extraordinarily huge compared to Black Mane West...”

She cut me off.  “Well, there was a lot of that place you probably never saw, and besides-” she reached into her combat vest, bit down on a silver bottle, and turned her head to the pink sky to take a swig, before continuing with it still in her mouth, “we got a flood of refugees from out of BMW and the surrounding way-stations after Breen burned the place to the ground...”

Her pace slowed.  “...and killed Twilight...”

Her gaze shifted downward, her eyes shaded by the brim of her general’s cap - which she’d forgotten to pick up, she was so distracted with her thoughts.

“...just to find you...”

I was about to loudly object - to defend myself, to shift away blame and guilt - when she turned to me, bottle between her teeth, and said,

“Gordon, could you... get me a refill?  Please?  It’s just water.”

I don’t know what, but something about those pleading, magenta eyes compelled me to just shut up and comply with the request.  I telekinetically - and, I’ll admit, more forcefully than I intended - yanked the bottle out of her mouth and went to fill it up at the spigot of an enormous black water-buffalo - a portable container for water, not an actual buffalo.  In fact, I don’t recall seeing any buffalo at New Cloudsdale.  All the while the liquid flowed from the tap, sparkling in the twilight of the morning sun, I thought about what happened at Black Mane West, the bipedal creatures in the laboratory, Twilight hanging there, helpless, Alyx screaming at the monstrosities to let her mom go, Spike’s stunning and terrifyingly fierce rescue that saved us both just... in the... nick... of time...

...both of us.  He saved the both of us.  The two of us.

The bottle was overflowing, and had been for quite some time, when I finally closed the tap.

I lugged the bottle over to the General, feeling like a headcrab zombie carrying a leaden canteen filled with liquid Amareicium.  Like I was a ghost haunting the body of a theoretical physicist, just merrily going about my everyday business because I couldn’t or wouldn’t accept the fact that I was already dead, and was just lying to myself.  It wasn’t the first time I’d felt that way, and it wouldn’t be the last.

Rainbow Dash looked about how I felt, sitting on her haunches atop a crudely-tied bale of hay - a luxury I admit I hadn’t expected at such a ramshackle place - set in front of the huge, red cross emblazoned across the back-end of a white, nylon medical tent.

I plopped down beside her and floated her flask over.  “Here’s your drink, ma’am.  Sir.  General.”

She chuckled almost under her breath while I struggled with which title she should be addressed.

Putting a hoof to the silver container, she said, “Keep it.  I don’t need it.”

I was grateful; I recalled the thirst I’d felt as I wandered, hopelessly lost, through the Everfree Forest.

Of course, thinking about how thirsty I was once again made me thirsty, so I took a swig from the tin, which was wider than it was thick, and curved down the middle.  I don’t know if it was the bottle or the water, or maybe just a general routine dehydration, but though I intended only to take a gulp, I didn’t stop until the thing was empty.

“Thirsty, Doctor?” the General observed more than asked, and I nodded.

Levitating the flask away from my lips, I looked at the wall of white fabric behind us and remarked,

“So... how come that’s camouflaged white?  Wouldn’t it just stand out like sore cackles against all the-” I gestured wildly and probably suspiciously with my legs at... I’m not sure what, but I was definitely gesturing at something.

“Those weren’t meant for the ground, Freemane.”

After I was finished tempting somepony to shoot me for acting suspicious within leg’s reach of such a high-ranking officer, I thought about the grey-maned pegasus’ statement.  Somewhere in the course of my eyes’ natural zig-zagging to and from random points of interest - biased towards things that were shiny, moving, or both - the flapping, sun-tinted flags mounted on the shiny polished-silver flagpole in the distance naturally caught my attention.

But it wasn’t the image of the Goddesses of Day and night I was interested in.  I didn’t mention this before, but there was another, smaller flag just beneath the banner of our no-longer-existent nation.  It looked very old, with faded colors and ends that were tattered and frayed - the least of its injuries.  Judging from those edges lined with strips of black, melted nylon, the flag had been burned at least once, and it looked like somepony with either chattering teeth or unstable telekinesis had found a comfy spot, sat down, and spent about half a decade taking potshots at it.

In between gusts of wind, I could just barely make out the image of a complex association of fluffy, white cloud banks, along with what appeared to be several columnar structures built into, and out of, the clouds themselves.  Banking through the cloud banks - likely lined with banks - was a horribly faded rainbow – though not grey, like General Dash’s mane – and underneath it all, spelled out in golden yarn, was the word CLUUЭSCALF.

“Uh,” I started my sentence the way I usually do, “Wh...”

That was about all I got out.

“What?” the General asked while I continued to stare at the word ‘CLUUЭSCALF,’ trying to very rapidly invent some technique or mental trick to prevent me from bursting into a fit of giggles, and subsequently getting shot or stabbed.

“S-ssoooo... wh- heh- what happened to... hehahaheah... uh... Clou- heheahahaaha... *AHEM* uh, what happened to the place after which this place is named...?”

Rainbow’s sobering expression did a wonderful job of extinguishing my giggles.

“Long before the founding of Equestria,” she began her story as I quietly groaned, “Cloudsdale used to be its own nation called Pegasopolis, full of proud pegasus ponies-”

Much like how I am unable to conceal my disdain for many-worlds-theory - which is so full of shit - I was incapable of hiding my lack of enthusiasm for sitting there and listening to the General’s detailed summary of every single event that occurred between the creation of the universe and the present moment while my HEV suit was broken and I was bearing the full weight of my SM/AIR and its bullet lunchboxes without the benefit of any power-assisted conservation of posture.

“Whoah, whoah, General,” I stopped her before it was too late.

“What?” she asked, her eyebrows raised.

I swear on the Big Book of Souls - a source of incomprehensible suffering and unbounded darkness that shall never be spoken of again - I was about to explain to the four-star general that she was an insufferable old windbag when my attention was unexpectedly hijacked by the slender, curvaceous, almost unjustly clean body of what appeared to be a pink version of the Goddess Luna.

General Rainbow Dash was probably giving me an extremely puzzled look that I never saw as I sat frozen, mouth open, eyes staring, my whole body paralyzed by the experience of bearing personal witness to the unattainable regal beauty of not only the third alicorn I knew to exist, but also the only ‘Princess’ outside of the Goddesses Themselves, Princess Mi Amore Cadenza!

And because the Universe hates me and wants me to die, it was only right at that moment I finally made a disturbing connection between her royal visage and something that wasn’t a royal visage!

I jabbed my hoof at her as she trot by and without really thinking about what I was going to say prior to my saying it - an event which occurs with frightening regularity - and blurted out,

“I’VE SEEN HER IN PORNO!”

It was true; I had.  Not that I make a habit of indulging in such activities, nor that I think that kind of thing is okay or anything, but for reasons that are related to my early adventures on what was then a new and mysterious source of unending horror – the magical land of the Equestrianet – I had indeed seen this exact pink alicorn posed in immodest positions “on the on-line”, as the foals say.

The entirety of the armed personnel of the Resistance base of New Cloudsdale turned to look at me, most of them with their jaws open, and one of them – a male griffon adorned in traditional battle-dress – heartily guffawing, to which his female companion reacted by hitting him very hard until he stopped.

“Excuse me?” asked the stunningly gorgeous, young-to-early middle-aged mare who’d been gallivanting past when I made my observation.  She stopped dead in her tracks, and whipped her head around to face me, her accuser, and her suspiciously clean mane – colored three stripes of lavender, rose, and pale whitish-gold - swung around after her with such force that she had to blow on it with her mouth to get it out of her face.

I just stared at her blankly, her eyes seeming to paralyze me like a poisonous snake-bite.  After risking a glance at the General, who, surprisingly, regarded me with nothing more than a reserved amusement, I formulated not a retraction, but a clarification of my previous statement.

“... as well as many other things!”

By this time an elderly white unicorn in woodland camo fatigues had cantered up to investigate the commotion.  The stallion’s mane was striped several light shades of blue - growing thin, short, and tinted with white at the ends - and covering his head was a dark green cap embroidered with the insignia of a Captain.  Obscuring his eyes were a pair of old, thick glasses that made mine look ravishingly stylish by comparison.

“What’s going on here?” he demanded, his voice hoarse.

I was just about to answer when General Dash interrupted me with a swift sweep of her hoof, back-slapping me in the chest so hard I nearly fell backwards off the hay bale.

“Oh, that’s just my friend...”

What, is she not going to say my name?

“...Gary!”

Cud- wait, what was that other word?  That’s right, fuck.  Fuck you, Rainbow Dash!

“...he’s on an insane amount of painkillers and stuff right now- he doesn’t know what the hell he’s saying!” she apologized with a smile, regarding me with some well-timed dramatic pity.  “Poor colt!”

I take that back, bless you, Rainbow Dash!  Bless you and your lies!  Lies are good!  Lies are okay!  Lies are the thing to do right now!  The thing you should do right now, Gary... is lie!  Lie your way to freedom!  Do it for them!  For the Princesses that count!  For Equestria!

“I CAN HEAR COLORS,” I explained to the second small crowd I’d attracted since I trotted through the front gate of New Cloudsdale.

“Yeah, so, why don’t we go inside and get you into bed, Gor-uhh...Gary?  Okay?” the quick-thinking Rainbow advised, and both of us stumbled off the hay bale and began moving – I, purposely loping, and she, trotting on three legs with her fourth wrapped around my withers – and down the heavily-trafficked venue towards a large cement structure sunken into the dirt at the end of the road.

“What was his name again?” hollered the blue-maned unicorn from an ever-increasing distance behind us, his voice tinged with anger.

“I’M COVERED WITH HAIR!” I yelled back.  I’ll never know if the answer satisfied him or not, as the next time I’d see him, well... he wouldn’t be himself.

I mean, outside of court-martialing me or making me drop and give her fifty, I was expecting the General to make an honest observation, like, ‘You don’t know how to converse with members of the opposite sex’, or at the very least give me a halfhearted lecture on respect and decency, and how it related to morale and unit cohesion - something like that.

But instead, she simply asked if it was true.

“Is what true?  The thing about the porn?”

“Yeah, uhhh... the porn.”

“Yeah, it’s true.”  For whatever reason - probably a rare manifestation of my repressed conservative values - I chose not to elaborate on my indecent on-the-line adventures any further.

She just nodded, smiling a knowing smile, and I decided it was my turn to ask a question.

“Just to confirm, that, uh, pink alicorn back there?  That was, uh...”

Again, she simply nodded her head, saying, “Yup.”

“How did, uh...”

“Don’t know, don’t care, and never - not once in eight years - have I been bored enough to ask.”

I understood, but something else bothered me.  “...I ...isn’t she supposed to be, like-”

“A princess?”

“No...”

She looked at me sideways.

“Celestia’s niece?”

“No.”  Oh, come on, don’t make me say it out loud.  Celestia knows - well, I don’t know that for certain, but – Celestia knows a pony like that knows some eavesdropping spells.

“She’s supposed to be what, Freemane?”

If I weren’t a scientist, I probably would have told her to forget about it, and moved on.

But you know what?

I’m not not a scientist.

I covertly glanced around, then whispered, “...really fiddle-diddling old?”

The General’s whole head recoiled like the breech of an artillery cannon as she gave what I thought was a very masculine snort.  It was kind of gross.  Like she was hocking up a booger.

“The little princess has got a practical monopoly on Zecora’s anti-aging potions-”

“Ah,” I interrupted, which was very rude.

“-which, your sugarmilk-”

“Oh, it’s actually called that?!” I remarked, astonished at how good I was at guessing the names of foods by consuming them.

“Freemane!” she snapped, drawing my limited attention span back into focus.

”Which your sugarmilk is an active ingredient in.  And by the way,” she added, tilting her head to scrutinize my suspiciously no-longer-loping figure, “what’d you do with yours?”

“My sugarmilk?  I... drank it...?”  What were you expecting me to do with it?

“You didn’t throw away that thermos, did you?”

I turned my head to face the dismally grey, cloudy heavens as if they could lead me to the thermos that I had disposed of in a large, prominent, heavily fortified and easily-defensible waste bin.

“Uuuuhhhhh...” The sound I made was the sound of meditation, and it is to be respected.

“For Pete’s sake, Gordon, you could’ve reused that.”

I was so distracted tuning out the lecture Rainbow Dash proceeded to give me - not about publicly accusing other ponies of being porn stars, but on the virtues of reduce, reuse, and recycle – that I was quite startled when the ground we were trotting on suddenly became hard and unyielding, the familiar squishing and squashing of our hooves as we tramped across the short, damp grass being replaced by a much sharper clopping sound.

The sudden transition was extremely jarring; I’d almost forgotten what it even felt like to trot on an honest-to-Goddesses concrete sidetrot.  I hadn’t seen one of those since Luna’s space hair I am not freaking thinking about Ponyville, no, hell no.  The pedestrian venue was about two ponies wide, beginning at a seemingly arbitrary point, and ending at the base of a massive, squat concrete structure at least a couple of hundred meters wide - most of it barely a story tall but for a lone windowed section offset from the center that overlooked the rest of the building, surrounded on all sides by barred windows as thick as my hooves were wide.  Some ways behind that was a pair of minimalistic communication towers connected at their midsections to form an ‘H’.  The facility’s sandy outer wall was peppered with cracks, bullet holes, and burn marks in various states of repair.  A few of them looked old, and I don’t mean pre-Combine old - some of the scars on that building looked like damage from some battle that took place long before I was born.

The sidewalk melted into a shady alcove that housed a massive steel door and dozens of types and varieties of sensors fastened - some, rather unsafely - to the wall.  Embedded in the left of the alcove was a long window almost as thick as the barred ones on the control-tower type structure outside.  Set into the overhang was an expensive-looking copper sign engraved with these words:

Royal Equestrian Army Air Corps Installation

BUTTERCUP BLOOMFLOWER BLACK FOREST FACILITY

Beneath that aging plaque was a much less expensive-looking metal sign that read:

TAKE HEED

IT IS UNLAWFUL TO ENTER THIS AREA WITHOUT

PERMISSION OF THE INSTALLATION COMMANDER.

In Loyal Obedience to Sec. 19, Internal Security Act of 901 ; 00 C.A. 10906

“Are you the installation commander?” I asked General Dashie.

“Acting, yes.”

“... Do I-”

“Yes.”

“Okey Dokey Donkey.”

That earned me a couple of weird looks.

------------------------------λ------------------------------

After a slight mix-up at the checkpoint that involved me being extremely heavily armed and there apparently being a rule about that - and Rainbow Dash didn’t know about the rule, and who in the hell is just goin’ around, makin’ up rules, and what gives them the right, and I’m the commander and I make the rules, etcetera, etcetera - we were finally let inside the something-something-flower Black Forest Facility.  What transpired was that Rainbow ending up having to pull rank and the officer - I don’t know if she was actually an officer, I’m just going to assume she was because of how snooty she sounded when she was talking about the rules and crud like that, and also she was wearing an officer’s uniform - admitting that nopony except the Installation Commander should have been making rules anyway, and that Doctor Gryffindor told her to do it.

“Ho-leee shit,” I breathed to the Installation Commander trotting beside me as we made our way down an oppressive and mostly featureless hallway that, in stark contrast to Black Mane, could almost be described as ‘adequately-lit’.

“What?” she asked, her scratchy voice echoing down the hall in either direction, and I noted how the wrinkles around her mouth and eyes were brought out as each fluorescent bulb we passed highlighted them in shadow.

“Gilda is freaking alive?  And she’s here?!”

“Uh, yeah,” she replied with all the astonishment of somepony who’d just been told fire is hot.

Before I could remember all the fun I’d had working with that easily agitated bird-lioness whose presence was both physically and intellectually intimidating, the cyan-colored pegasus pony beside me, whatever her name was, reminded me of how poor my short-term memory is – undoubtedly a side-effect of prolonged exposure to the antimass-spectrometer that is the bane of my existence.

“Gordon, I told you we were going to go see Gilda, like, fifteen minutes ago.”

This revelation somehow prompted me to think back to fifteen minutes previous, when General Dash told me we were going to take the hugboxed insurance write-off surrounding my frail body to Dr. Pie and Gilda, and – obeying a truly fascinating and poorly understood social instinct - I hit myself in the face with my hoof, signaling to anypony nearby that I was self-aware of my own stupidity.

Past a series of steel-cable-reinforced windows overlooking rooms filled with surveillance equipment and stacks of flickering monitors, through throngs of flushed-looking Resistance personnel in a hurry to get wherever it was they were going, and around one of those curious little space-suited aliens who turned around to shout ‘Follow Freemane!’ as we passed by – drawing a look of doubt and perhaps a pinch of contempt from General Dash - we eventually passed through a thick, heavy metal door set into the inner wall that looked like something you’d see on a big passenger airship.

The air-tight door automatically swung shut behind us, its heavy-duty locks clicking into place, and suddenly I found myself staring down a cavernous tunnel that was so poorly lit, I was unable to see the pony standing next to me.  As my eyes were adjusting, Rainbow Dash began giving me a little speech that sounded like she’d rehearsed it several times in her head already, her voice coming out of the darkness like an authoritative, high-ranking apparition.

“Gordon, the Buttercup Bloomflower Black Forest Facility has remained solely the possession of the Kingdom of Equestria for over forty years now, and the ground you trot on is governed by Royal Law, Ministry of Defense regulations, and the authority granted to me under the...”

She continued on like that for some time, reaching her hoof down to nudge a faintly glowing toggle, which immediately triggered a calamity of mechanical noises, causing me to jump, and indicating my astute situational awareness and unceasing vigilance.

Unfortunately, I don’t think Rainbow caught the demonstration.

“...and what you are about to see is designed to ensure that this small piece of Equestria remains a part of Equestria, and not the newest territory of the Universal Union.”

“Cool!” I remarked, and she glared at me again.  I concede that I was paying far more attention to the obnoxious clicking and clacking of chains and motors than the speech she was giving.

Just as my eyes finished adjusting to a room that was almost as poorly lit as the tram tunnels at Black Mane, a cage-like elevator crunched into the concrete ledge we stood on, and when the General moved her hoof to the terminal that opened its chain-link doors, she hesitated.

Somepony who was very angry had taped a hastily-scribbled note over the ‘Open’ button.

It read,

ENOUGH!!! THIS ELEVATOR IS FOR CARGO TRANSPORT ONLY –

THERE ARE STAIRS TO YOUR <----LEFT FOR A REASON!!!!!!!!

- Dr. G!

After glancing at the caged-in stairs to our left and then to each other, the General hoofed the ‘Open’ button.  The chain-link doors of the elevator slid roughly apart and we stepped inside.

Almost immediately after we jerked away from the ledge, a pair of enormous blast doors at the end of the rails began to shudder apart, and yellow-orange light, colored by the echoes of a lighthearted and good-natured exchange between two old friends, began drifting through the gap, gaining in volume as the doors slid further and further apart.

“...and you know what, Pie?  You know what?  I’m glad you destroyed my relationship with the closest... f-friend I ever had, because-”

“Friend?! Oh, please, Gilda!” came a giggling, snorting voice that was unmistakably Dr. Pie’s.  “You and Rainbow Dash were the fillyfooliest fillyfoolers I’ve ever... suh...”

Oh shit! I thought, jumping up and planting my forehooves on the elevator doors in concern.  What the hell is Dr. Gryffindor doing to Pinkie?!  Also, Dr. Gryffindor is a fillyfooler?!  And why do I care?!

Rainbow Dash seemed less concerned, however, her body language speaking of little else but cold agitation; her magenta eyes were narrowed about as far as they could go, and her face, as Dr. Pie would say, was made of frowns, rather looking like she was staring down a cockatrice.

The morality of her silent inaction was at last vindicated by a “What is it?” from the scarier, more avian, more digit-possessing of the two scientists, to which the unfathomable pink pony responded,

“My Pinkie Sense™ is telling me that Gordon is on the elevator!”

Although she was – unbelievably – correct, the nonetheless pseudoscientific assertion on her part was met with an appropriate level of professional, scientific skepticism from Dr. Gryffindor.

“My Gilda Sense® is telling me that if I can’t predict earthquakes with my knee, you can’t predict the future with your ASS!”

Although I did successfully stifle a whinny, a highly suspect ear-to-ear grin did sneak onto my face.

With the blast-doors finally fully open, we steadily sunk into the cooler air of... whatever the place was.  One tick of a cricket’s wick - rounded to the nearest decimal place - after the stout metal rollers supporting the ends of the heavy, groaning doors clanked against the ends of their shallow gutters, Dr. Gryffindor spoke up once again.

“What?  You can’t come up with some smart-Alyx comeback?”

A voice from above that sounded very similar to Alyx’s shouted, “Hey!”

The elevator ground to a halt at the end of the train-tracks with a disconcertingly pronounced crunch, and the chain-link doors screeched apart to permit our lazy, very important butts out.

Rainbow Dash and I stepped out onto a rutted steel-grate floor - practically the first surface I’d been on since I entered the complex that wasn’t some variant of concrete.

Dr. Gryffindor looked at me and scowled.  I’m sure it was a friendly scowl, a scowl of friendship.  The kind of scowl I imagined the white-and-brown griffon would give a boar whose life she decided to spare because she had more important things to do at the moment than disembowel it and feast upon its protein-rich entrails.  Other than an even more obvious feather comb-over to hide her bald-eagle spot, the griffon looked just as old as she always had.

She greeted me with a curt “Freemane,” and at almost the exact same time, a pink party-science pony with the same floofy, thinning, candy-cane-colored mane - that I admit I once dazedly fantasized about eating after I skipped lunch one particularly busy day at work - popped her madly-grinning head out of a small door in the side of the conical, cargo-carriage-sized top of what appeared to be an Oh my wet-maned Goddesses having a Celestial cuddle in the Lunar water-park.

“SUR- Goddessesdamnit, Gilda!  You ruined it!” Doctor Pie profanely yelled at her poor coworkers, causing angels to weep.

Dr. Gryffindor immediately noticed and became enraged at something I couldn’t quite see that apparently followed the dangerously pink earth-pony into her ambush position.

“And please get that cold-blooded... reptilian... apex predator AWAY FROM MY NOSECONE!”

No shit.

“Now, listen here... oof! ... Gryffindor... there’s no need to – stop it! – to hurt anypony’s feelings!”

She brought Gummy.  Of course she did.  Why the hell not?

“What about me, Doctor Gryffindor?” came another unseen voice significantly deeper and louder than those of the females, its origin impossible to discern as it reverberated throughout and beyond the circular room.  I looked down through the floor, which was a grated metal platform partitioning off the dome of what appeared to be an enormous concrete silo, completely forgetting about the voice as I observed the hubbub of activity below.

Below us were several more platforms like our own, with worker ponies milling about with their tools, the rainbow of magic glows which emanated from their disparate horns making for a chaotic lighting scheme.  Adding further confusion to a workplace that wasn’t wanting for any, every slightest noise, voice and shout was amplified elevenfold in the literal echo-chamber.  Neither the faint glow of unicorn magic nor the portable lamps scattered about did a whole lot to negate the pervading darkness of the place, and to put the cherry on top of all that inherent discomfort, the structure seemed to be completely devoid of any kind of temperature management - not even the simplest of climate spells, not even a damned fan.  Depending on where you stood, it was either just cold enough to make you feel uncomfortable after about ten minutes, or there was a stream of dangerously hot air shooting up through the floor from somewhere below.  Paradoxically, almost all of the pipes on the body of the vehicle at the center of it all were bone-chillingly cold, permanently surrounded by a milky-white layer of ice and dripping with condensation.

I didn’t even notice Spike climbing down from a large, dark cavity above the thing’s nose.  Nor did I notice or particularly care that Alyx Sparkle had her front legs wrapped around his tree-trunk-like neck just a little too snugly.  The squabbling between Dr. Pie and Dr. Gryffindor, the grey-maned General’s extremely ticked-off but ultimately good-natured rebuke of Gilda, the hustle and chatter of the engineers and technicians scattered below, my brain filtered out all of it as meaningless background noise, for the entirety of my attention at that moment was monopolized by the miracle of modern science and technology that towered beneath my hooves, down four or five stories to the ground, an object the height of an average office building, the beautiful and terrifying product of years of government-funded research, Ministry of Defense contracts, and the bloodthirsty braying of Equestria’s military-industrial complex... I did not react when General Dash spoke my name.

“DOCTOR FREEMANE!” the rainbow-lightning bolt pegasus screamed in my ear, demonstrating to everypony present her apparently very healthy diaphragm and lung capacity.

Of course, it’s what she said next that made up for the auditory pain she caused.

“This is a Tartaros-Class Inter-National Ballistic Missile, the only one of its kind in existence, and currently our Kingdom’s best hope for ending the Combine occupation of Equestria.”

Rainbow Dash, I want to cuddle you.  Suddenly remembering a word she’d told me was an alien euphemism for ‘cuddle’, I added,

And I want to fuck you.  I want to do both of those things.

I want to fuckuddle you.

------------------------------λ------------------------------

“...Tirek, Tirek, this is Malefactor...”

No.

“-ECHELON IS TOTAL LOSS, AND TALON CASUALTIES ARE NEAR 100%, WE ARE-”

No.

“-13 is unresponsive, any units headed to the burning academy on East Royal Court, be advised-”

Nope.

“-TO SITTING-BULL-7, TARGET IS STILL SOAPBOX-TWILIGHT, MOVING NORTH-NORTH-E-”

I groaned in frustration.  Well, at least that one had her name in it.

Toggling through radio frequencies on my not-so-little, not-so-light portable radio was a pain in my caramel-colored flank under optimal conditions.  Doing so while clinging for dear life to the wildly undulating body of a dragon currently executing a terminal velocity dive into the burning, exploding, shooting gallery known to most as the city of Canterlot, fearful of being thrown clear of the reckless, hormonal transport each of the many, many times he decided to make a sudden and extremely violent course-correction in a much-appreciated effort to dodge stray REA anti-aircraft fire, as well as slower, more explosive, more radar-guided projectiles was, to some extent, more difficult.

“-if Black Forest has launch capability, then-”

“Hang on, Commander...”

It was tough, yes, and it took skill, concentration, guts, and a stomach for vertigo that very few ponies – especially non-pegasi – could attain, even through years of training.  It required a mental state that couldn’t be taught, only discovered to either be possible or impossible.

“SHINING!  Stop spamming this freq!  If Nightmare Proco gets greenlit, you’re sure as shootin’ to be the first to know, trust me!”

But this...

“LOOK OUT A WINDOW, YELLOWCAKE!”

This was too Goddessesdamned much.

“IT’S THE SECOND RETURN OF NIGHTMARE-MOTHER-CUDDLING-MOON OUT HERE!  HELLO?!  HELLO?!  RADIO!  Patch me through to triple-bowling-fun-fun!”

“Spike!  Got an update for you!”

“OH, HOLY SHIT, AND AT JUST THE EXACT RIGHT TIME, TOO!” he roared back without turning his head to the slightest degree, seemingly agitated by my super-important informational PSA being delivered while he was desperately fighting to prevent both of us from dying horribly.

“I haven’t picked up any reports that mom isn’t at the Archives!”

“THAT’S BULLMILKING GREAT!”

“And I haven’t heard any reports of anything bad happening there, either!” I shouted as close to the dragon’s ear canals as I could get without losing my already tenuous grip on his - hated, hated, hated - pony harness.  “So that’s good!”

“Have you ever considered the possibility,” Spike began, managing to be sardonic while traveling through an active warzone at 170 meters per second, “that the worst stuff is the stuff that you’re not going to hear reported on the radio because nopony would’ve survived to call it in?”

I hadn’t.  Damned if I was going to tell that to him, though.

“You’re being negative, Spike!” I yelled, my magic-kindergarten-tier megaphone spell amplifying my voice above the deafening rush of ever-warmer, thicker and hazier air whipping past us to a level I perceived as being just above a whisper – though to Spike’s much more sensitive ears, it would’ve been about the level of a friendly conversation over tea in some sleepy little street-corner bistro.

The harrowing hail of gunfire that surrounded us like embers leaping from the roaring bonfire of our nation’s funeral pyre was not actually an effort to kill us, however close it may have come to successfully doing so in the past twenty-five seconds.

It was there for our protection.  Our impossible salvation.

So thick had the smog and haze become that we were nearly below the altitude of the highest pony-made structure in Equestria – Canterlot Tower – before the target of our military’s laughably ineffective and increasingly sporadic taxpayer-purchased ordnance became apparent.  Out of the cold mountain air that was interspersed with ten thousand groundswells of blistering heat upwelling from the inferno below – flames that were stoked by uncountable lances of electric-blue lightning, bright as the sun and only slightly cooler, igniting the dark horizon with an unnatural firestorm hotter than anything ponies could concoct with chemicals or conjure with magic – swarmed a thrumming multitude of hostile aircraft from another world.

I’d never seen any of them up close, thank Celestia, but from what I could tell there seemed to be two main varieties.  One buzzed and was shaped sort of like a skinny raindrop – those were the ones doing almost all of the shooting – and the other hummed and was much more complex, resembling a hybrid of a manta ray and a snow crab, except with these long ‘fingers’ with glowing blue tips that came out the back of the main body like fingers come out of the palm of an ape’s hand.  These, too, could shoot, but only seemed to do so when they felt ‘threatened’.  Besides that, I had no idea what they did – perhaps they were command vehicles or coordinators of some sort?  Both varieties looked to be the same basic color – a gross greyish-white, like really old, dried glue.

The aircraft were so legion that they formed their own cloud, their gunfire a devastatingly beautiful downpour of blue rain that burned everything it touched, burned holes in the pillars of smoke and steam, burned dirt into rock and sand into glass and stone into lava, that scorched the air itself.  And wherever that strange pseudo-liquid splashed against the ground, the stone, metal and asphalt it touched leapt into the air like water, cooling and hardening where it landed like candle wax.  And - as if the universe felt compelled to give not just the doomed inhabitants of Canterlot, but all the millions of the Princesses’ faithful servants who lay dead and dying across the entire kingdom a grand finale, a production, a show befitting the end of as vast and ancient an empire as Equestria was – sandwiched between the orange and yellow of the hellfire below and the blue and white of the hellfire above was another lightshow, produced when the innumerable bolts of that liquid flame punctured the thousands of moonlit columns of blackish smoke that oozed into the sky from the habitations below - columns so thick, a pegasus could probably have built a house on them.  Some strange interaction between the bolts and the smoke through which they burned then colluded in a way I didn’t understand to produce wild sparks and webs of lightning that cut through the ashen clouds, glowing green and purple and teal, the whipping tails then reaching out and touching the tips of buildings, the pavement below, and anything, friend or foe, caught between, each cumulonimbal discharge of static electricity as apparently unpredictable to the invading horrors as it had always been for ponydom.  The spectacle gave me a beautiful – tragically, horrifyingly beautiful – reminder of why Spike’s passenger harness was equipped specifically with nonmetallic hoof-holds.

“Hello?!  Hello?!  Anypony who can hear this, please respond!  PLEASE!” a male voice came crackling over the radio, desperate and panicking.  I thought about responding.  Really, I did.

I thought about telling him to take a few deep breaths, go outside, look up, and enjoy the 3,000,000-gun-salute in memory of Equestria - to die with dignity and serenity as the mountains fell and the hills turned to dust and the kingdom of the Two Sisters screamed, thrashed, and died.

“This is Principal Uncertainty of East Royal Court Academy!  There are foals alive here, but they are trapped.  Please, I can’t get through to the guard, I can’t get through to the fire department, nopony answers!  PLEASE, for the-”

I violently unplugged the moisture-slick headset and floated it into my hemp saddlebag.  Spike’s acute hearing is something he takes pains to ensure is easily and often forgotten.

“East Royal is right over- there,” he hollered over his bony shoulder, gesturing his head toward a particularly wealthy-looking quarter a relatively short distance to our right.  Somewhere on the edge of a massive courtyard, hidden from our view by a high-rise apartment block, was the origin of a pillar of smoke half a kilometer wide that would dwarf the tallest skyscraper in Manehattan.

“KEEP GOING!  ... JUST...”  The meaning of my words impacted me after I spoke them.  It was a sad reality that the deaths of all those ponies - schoolfoals and their teachers who would’ve been listening to the ringing of the final bell when the attack began - were pretty much guaranteed; not because the school was going to fall down on them, or because they were going to be vaporized by the aliens’ heat-rays or consumed by the blaze that was gradually filling in what little unburned pockets of the city still remained.  But because we were not going to stop to help them.

We couldn’t.  Mom said so.

“The Elements of Harmony are more important, Spike!” I yelled, my voice cracking - not because I was going through puberty - and my nose getting even runnier than it already was - even though it certainly hadn’t gotten any colder.

Spike gave a deeply bitter grunt of discontent that genuinely frightened me, and for just one second, some primitive part of me became terrifyingly aware that there was no way off of the flying, fire-breathing monster I was riding except by jumping to the streets hundreds of meters below.

It was only for a second, though.  Spike would never hurt me.  Even if he really, really wanted to.

As the green and purple dragon poured some extra steam - metaphorically speaking, although dragons probably do contain some steam - into his wings and began weaving in and out between buildings as much as he could – partially for evasive purposes and surely at least some of it was just him showing off -  I began to look down at the streets below and wonder why they were so empty.  There were no soldiers, no civilians, and certainly no... well, aliens.

Like everypony else, I had difficulty classifying the things as machines or creatures; they seemed to exhibit characteristics of both and the totality of neither, moving and verbalizing like animals – talking to each other in an electronic mixture of guttural howls, squeals, and groans, even screaming and grunting when shot as if in pain – yet possessing clearly artificial - and extremely advanced - weapons and propulsion systems, and operating with a dogged single-mindedness and lack of concern for self-preservation that was reminiscent of automatons.  And with all of that integrated into vaguely crustacean-like bodies that seemed composed of some medium between plastic and metal that, for all I knew, could have been living tissue, one thing was clear:

These things sure as hell weren’t sent by the Griffons.

Their origin was another world, another universe, it had to be, you’d have to be flat-out stupid not to see that.  I knew enough about the Black Mane Incident and my mother’s work to know that the headcrabs and barnacles that suddenly appeared a couple of years earlier and now infested pretty much every corner of Equestria weren’t some ‘invasive species’ that latched onto the hull of some commercial trade ship.

Dear Celestia, she didn’t have anything to do with this, did she?

Spike banked left onto the grand and majestic Canterlot Boulevard, which led straight to the Royal Palace and the Canterlot Archives.

Because I don’t think I could ever, ever live that one down.

“SHE SAID THE NORTH ENTRANCE, RIGHT?!” Spike very loudly asked.

‘Oh, you’re Twilight’s filly, right?  Isn’t she that scientist that, like, ushered forth the Apocalypse?’

“TWILIGHT!” Spike persisted, and if there’d been something in my mouth I would have spat it out.

“WHAT DID YOU JUST CALL ME?!” I, Alyx Sparkle, demanded.

He unconsciously shook his head to either side, causing us to chaotically swerve.

“I MEAN ALYX! SORRY!” he barked the apology out like a very bad, scaly, fire-breathing dog that had just inadvertently reminded me of the fact that despite my sincerest efforts, I was probably going to turn out to be just like my mother.

After a short silence illuminated by the alien bombardment that shrouded everything not already aglow in a blanket of blue-white light, I told Spike that he was correct; we were supposed to meet mom at the north entrance of the Canterlot Archives, and after that, I think I said something that sounded like ‘at huuAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!’ while kind of... pointing with my face – that’s the only way I can think of to describe it – at what appeared to be at least a couple of dozen very, extremely tall, spindly-legged tripod things that had just finished climbing over a collapsed section of overpass a few seconds of flight-time further up the road.  Their shape was such  that at a distance, they were so damned tall and their movement just slow enough, they sort of blended in with the other tall structures that defined Canterlot, being easily mistaken by inattentive ponies such as myself for innocent things like water towers, radio antennae, lamps or power poles.

I reasoned that Spike must have been looking at the same thing I was, because he was also... well, I won’t call it ‘screaming’, he was... gasping.  I suppose it was possible that he was doing whatever you want to call it both at what I was looking at, and at what he was looking at.

With my harness already wet with condensation, I nearly slipped free of it when Spike suddenly decided to shoot upwards without warning.  After beating his wings especially mightily a couple of times, the inconsiderate jerk then flipped his body possibly more than 90 degrees towards the ground – again, with no warning whatsoever – once again nearly bucking me off and sending me to my painful, screaming death.

All my sensory experience consisted of was the sound of rushing of air and the feeling of my lunch attempting to evacuate my body through my mouth, followed by most of my internal organs.

I opened my eyes the instant I felt our tethered bodies come into contact with the ground, and my hayseed sandwich, along with all of my bodily fluids, returned to their naturally-intended locations.  However, I immediately squeezed them shut again as an instinctual reaction to the plethora of abandoned carriages, guardrails, signs, and at least one solid-lead drainage pipe we were headed toward at tremendous speed.

And by ‘we’, I mean ‘Spike’.  And by ‘crash into’, I mean ‘smash through’.

“Luna, Cadance and Celestia group-hugging on film!” I blasphemously exclaimed after we finished skidding to a halt in a shower of asphalt-on-talon-induced sparks beneath the absolutely massive highway overpass above us, noting the long, straight landing strip of carnage my little dragon had left behind him – including the aforementioned solid lead pipe that was now missing a sizable section, as well as a gigantic hole the size of a coltswagen that had been bored straight through the middle of an aluminum passenger-carriage.

“Are you alright?!” we both asked each other at almost the exact same time.

“Spike, I’m fine, but, Luna-”

“Okaythen, SSSHHHHHHHH!!” he very, very loudly shushed me, spraying me with some of his dragon spittle – although apparently it didn’t bother me all that much, as after I wiped my face off on my foreleg, I found it quite impossible to stop smiling.

Following Spike’s pointed gesturing, I shifted my gaze toward the gaping chasm dividing the overpass in two - which, unless there was some criminal negligence going on at the Ministry of Transportation, couldn’t possibly be more than around half an hour old – noting the highly abnormal sound of distant, rhythmic thumping.

I almost subconsciously huddled close to the huge, heavily-armored and sometimes insensitive mode of transport beside me.  As dozens of otherworldy moans and cries - extremely deep and muffled, and like all the invaders, sounding like something synthetic trying to imitate something organic – filled our ears, Spike returned my huddle, pulling me in close and holding me tight.

Scrapes, scuffs, synthetic screams, and some sick crunching sounds accompanied a truly massive object which momentarily interrupted the colorful lightshow pouring in from above, and more than half a dozen of the alien ‘walkers’ tumbled down through the gap in the overpass, their hard shells cracking open as they smashed against the ground like turtles dropped by a falcon.  The insect-like limbs of those that had fallen on their backs folded up against the underside of their squat, sandy-yellow torsos like the legs of a spider, and if they weren’t already dead when they fell, they were after hitting the pavement.  A rapid series of powerful thumps reverberated along the road from some distance further down, followed by a chorus of unnatural squeals just barely audible over the incessant pounding of anti-aircraft guns and detonations from around the city.

I looked up at Spike, whom I was suddenly aware I basically had my forelegs wrapped around (I mean, as much as I could), and his rough, scaly arms - I don’t know whether to call them ‘arms’ or ‘front legs’, and I have the same problem with griffons - were pretty much wrapped around me, though he had to hunch over pretty far to do so.

And as our star-struck gazes met, and we looked deeply into each others’ eyes, both of us wearing huge, silly grins, and a bit of hot, red circulatory fluid seeped into my cheeks, with me in the arms of my indestructible knight in purple armor, he leaned down and whispered into my perked-up ear,

“That was Elder FREAKING DAGGOTH!!”

Specifically, the former part was whispered.  The latter part left my ear ringing with tinnitus.

“Who’s Elder Daggoth?”

He released me from his (admittedly enjoyable) embrace simply to free his front limbs so he could perform an action ponies would call a ‘face-hoof’, but which dragons, I am told, call a ‘face-claw’.

“He’s one of The Four!  You know, the Royal Equestrian Dragon Corps, which he is the leader of – the four dragons that broke from the Dragon Communion to be formally inducted into the REA at the behest of a vision from their prophet Raszagal – you don’t know any of this?!”

“Uhhhh...” I responded, accessing the partition of my brain devoted to ‘dragons’ and desperately rifling through every quanta of data I could find.

Spike just rolled his eyes and said, “Oh, never mind, it doesn’t matter.”

“No, nononono, Spike, it does matter!  It does!” I corrected him, trying not to hurt his feelings, and failing.  “I want you to tell me everything you know about... Elder Draggith and the others!”

That seemed to temper the sullen look on his face, and I decided to take it and gallop with it.

“Spike, look at me,” I commanded the teenaged dragon that, although he’d actually lived three or four times longer than I, sure didn’t act like it sometimes.

He did as he was told, and his emerald eyes glowed like a cat’s in the shadow of the overpass.  And yes, even though it was night, there was so much celestiadamned gunfire and explosions that, added to the full moon, it actually did create a clearly discernible shadow underneath the overpass.

I leaned against him on the tip of my back hooves and said as sincerely as I could,

“Spike... I want you...” I began, biting my lip and hanging on the ‘you’ for a moment before continuing, “...to tell me about dragon stuff.”

He beamed, and I swear I could see a glint in his eye.  Specifically, a yellow glint.  Then a couple more appeared.  Then both of us had the everloving manure scared out of us by a deafeningly loud, pained, and most of all, angry, bellow from one of the tripod creatures lying behind us.

“-BUT NOT NOW!  NOTNOWNOTNOW!-” I shouted as I leapt onto his back and scrambled into my harness, “ARCHIVESARCHIVESARCHIVES!  ARCHIVESARCHIVES!”

As he lumbered forward, beating his green wings hard and fast, and kicking up clouds of white, chalky dust, I risked a glance backwards.  I could see... ports on the main body of the tripod that had ‘woken up’, glowing a different kind of sickly yellow from the rest of its exoskeleton, as well as some electric-blue coming from this long, thick shaft sticking out from under its belly that swung from side to side between its writhing legs as the injured machine struggled to erect itself.

My train of thought was interrupted by an insistent – and thoroughly airborne – Spike.

“WHEN DID YOUR MOM SAY TO MEET HER AT THE ARCHIVES?!” Spike inquired.

I looked down at my old-fashioned watch.  By the steady light of the moon, I could see that it was a quarter past 3 PM; it had been bright and sunny not half an hour ago.  When the attack began, the Princesses quickly lowered the sun and broadcast an emergency Royal Decree that all lights be extinguished and all windows be shuttered in an effort to deny the enemy the advantage of seeing their targets.  Commander Shining Armor later told me that it was at the military’s request that Luna brought out a full moon, as it was reported that the alien craft had highly glossy, reflective skin that would give them a glint in the presence of a light source - which REA troops would find very helpful.

“She said to meet her outside the archives’ northern entrance at a quarter til, and not one second before or after!”

“Okay, got it!”

“... ‘a quarter til’ means 3:45, right?”

“YES, Spike, that is what that means.”

“Okay, got it!”

After that little exchange, my extremely resilient and hopelessly - hopelessly, hopelessly - romantic dragon powered into the sky, away from one danger and straight into another, and I gazed backward at the ruined Canterlot Boulevard we’d taken refuge under.  The only hint that a platoon of those walking tripods had been marching across it on their way to the Royal Palace a couple of minutes before were the dozen-odd huge, beetle-like torsos illegally blocking almost every lane, most of the them upside-down, all of them leaking some kind of dark fluid, and it looked like some of them had literally had their legs shorn completely off, the spindly limbs now haphazardly splayed across the freeway not too far from the ‘bodies’ they’d once been a part of.

I recalled the trail of destruction my thick-skinned Spike left behind when he crashed into all of those abandoned transports and drainage systems beneath the overpass, and my skin got all tingly as I realized how indestructible, how mighty, and how massive this ‘Elder Dragonith’ must have been to ram into a whole pack of creatures as tall as water-towers, and not only instantly kill or incapacitate almost every single one of them, but actually dismember some of the beasts... tear their telephone-pole-like legs from their sockets by sheer force...

It was like I was actually looking forward to hearing Spike’s dragon-lore geek-out.

Spike gently banked right to circle around to the back of the greater Royal Palace complex, and the northern entrance to the Canterlot Archives.  If it hadn’t been for the multicolored lightning and the constant back-and-forth (mostly forth) between the triple-A cannons and the attacking hordes of alien aircraft, it almost would have been possible to imagine I was simply trapped on another one of Spike’s ‘unexpected detours’ that seemed to be heavily biased towards occurring only on pleasant, cloudless, and preferably moonlit nights, suffering through the fifty-five year old teenager’s embarrassing attempts to hit on me.

But alas, there was just too much gunfire to sustain my suspension of disbelief.

The Palace itself looked largely the same as it ever had; a complicated series of interconnected towers of chalk-white limestone topped with enormous gold domes often painted with long, fancy stripes of a multitude of bright shades and hues.  It was so prominent that, at certain distant angles, they appeared to compose basically the entire city – and in ancient times, probably actually did.

Just as I was beginning to wonder why - given that there were at least two princesses, innumerable court mages, and my mother inside - there was no shield barrier around the Palace, a blue-and-violet bolt of magic suddenly sprung up through the slanted roof of the Grand Hall, leaving nothing more than a brief glow upon its surface before continuing on its path upwards as if there had been nothing in its way but air.

The bolt shot up to a height just above the very tip of Canterlot Tower – like the rest of the Palace, an island of calm and unblemished beauty looking out of place in the boiling chamber pot of hell that was its namesake – and blossomed into one of the largest neon-pink shield bubbles I have ever seen in my entire life.  Like strawberry syrup flowing over a scoop of ice cream - and that may have been an excessively delicious description - the magical barrier quickly extended to cover the entire Royal Palace, extending so far out that it nearly enveloped us.

No sooner had my eyes adjusted to the bright pink glow than a pair of solid electric-blue beams connected with the bubble from somewhere out of the northeast, and what looked like a... ripple through space... slammed into the barrier with unbelievable force, sending a shockwave across its surface several meters high.  A blink of an eye later, a second lance of the fabric of reality impacted the already compromised shield-wall and – after being up for about five celestiadamned seconds – crumbled into a hundred thousand million shards of magical matter that littered the meticulously manicured lawns around the palace - the walls of which were made of far, far less sturdy stuff.

“THERE!  We’re at the north entrance!  Spike, hover here!”  I knew it killed him to hover in place at altitudes as high as Canterlot, but according to my watch, it was actually thirty seconds past 3:45 – the time mom told us to meet her at the Canterlot Archives, next to Canterlot Tower, at the end of Canterlot Boulevard, in the city of Canterlot.

So, we wouldn’t be waiting for very long, is what I’m trying to say.

The Royal Palace was still aglow with lights, making it a huge, obvious target that should’ve been as difficult to hit as the side of a barn.  Spike, who was panting as he rapidly beat his wings in the thin mountain air, must have been thinking the same thing.

“Why don’t they keep firing?!” he wondered.  “What, are they saving the Palace for something?!”

I was about to offer my own speculation when I was blinded by a purple flash originating some twelve millimeters away from my eyeballs, and a purple unicorn popped into existence – in my lap.

“Okay SpeuuAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!” was all she was able to say before she realized she’d teleported into the wrong saddle, and our screams combined as we both began tumbling downward.

And that was terrifying and everything, but... the fall spilled out the contents of mom’s simple brown satchel, and - though I was upside down and falling to my death - for whatever reason, my eyes darted to the one object amongst all those shiny, sparkling, golden pieces of jewelry that was different from the rest, and it wasn’t the large, semitransparent white spot in the center of my vision.  It was very plain.  Very worn.  Very... papery.

I was once again nearly blinded by that damned purple flash, and when I opened my eyes, I was once again on the back of Spike, who was looking over his shoulder with a curious expression on his face.  Behind me, there was at least one more big flash, and several smaller ones.

Spike’s eyes went wide.  “OH!  I was wondering why you two were so ligh-”

“SPIKE!” screamed my mother, clearly under an extreme amount of stress.  “PONYVILLE!  FLY!”

I swear he grumbled, “I am flying,” as he shunted his body into a gut-churning dive, thankfully pulling up shortly afterwards, and powering his wings up and down as he fought to gain altitude.

I glanced backwards at mom.  Despite everything, she forced herself to give me a smile, and I returned it.  Neither of us even tried to speak above the howling wind of that warm, moonlit afternoon, interrupted only by claps of rolling thunder and the occasional long, bloodthirsty roar of a dragon that echoed off the mountain, growing ever quieter, ever fainter, and ever more sporadic as the magical land of Equestria drew its last, defiant breaths.

I forced myself to stare deep into the inferno we left behind, which had only grown fiercer and more massive since I first saw it from this distance.  I had to.  So I would never forget.  So nopony would ever forget that there used to be a city here, and it was called Canterlot, it was the capitol of an empire that existed for thousands of years, and under the stewardship of two beautiful, wise and benevolent princesses, over time, that empire grew to be so great and so incredibly vast, that, indeed, there were some who were unaware that there even was a world outside of Equestria.

The kingdom of the Two Sisters, which had begun with the disposition of a malefactor, would end, it seemed, with the imposition of a Benefactor.

Benefactors...

Where have I heard that before?

I looked around me, and noticed that all of the little pinpricks and flashes of light surrounding the city had frozen in place, which seemed rather strange.  Then I looked at Spike’s wings in what dim light there was to see by, and they, too, were not moving.  I looked behind me and saw the horrifying sight of my mother’s deformed face; her caved-in cheeks making the bones of her skull jut out, her eyes were rolled into the back of her head, and a stream of congealed blood ran down her purple face, leaking out of her nostrils.

I wasn’t frightened.  I was pissed.

“WHO DID THIS?!” I yelled at the blackness.

Enraged, and feeling like hitting something, I climbed out of my harness, clambered up Spike’s neck and punched him in the head with my front hooves – an odd course of action, but at the moment, making perfect sense.  He reacted to the force as if his entire body was composed of a single solid hunk of Twitanium.  This brought further frustration, as Spike normally reacts when I punch him in the head.

“AND WHO STOPPED TIME?!”

“Time, Mmmmiss Twilight Ssssparkle...?” came a voice out of the void that addressed me by my mother’s name, and there was no longer any doubt as to who was screwing with me.

“Your mmmmother always had difficulty managing time...”

“My mother is dead.”

“Unfortunately, yes, and she was a very valuable asset to... too... mhmm, you have my sincerest condolences, the events of Black Mane West must have been... traumatizing...”

“I know.”

“...and you also know that you could bring her back if you wanted to...”

“NO!” I screamed.

The frozen blackness was silent for several moments, as if waiting for me to say something else.

“Just... no.  No.  She...” I trailed off, resting my chin on Spike’s head as I attempted to gather my thoughts and think of how I was going to say something I’d never told another living soul.

“She warned me, about... that kind of stuff.  One day, she just grabbed me and looked me straight in the face and said ‘Alyx, honey, sweetie...”

NO.  This is NONE of his business, celestiadamnit!  Why do I have to tell him this?!  It’s not FAIR!

I sighed, and leaned more heavily on the unbreakable statue that was Spike.

“...she said... she said, ‘Alyx, when I go...”

I couldn’t take it anymore – my throat tightened until it almost clamped shut, like my body didn’t want me to say any more, like it knew who I was telling this to.

“She said, ‘When I – you know, go... you... you don’t try and bring me back, you just let me go on, just let me go on and see the Princesses, Alyx, don’t you dare...”

I was sobbing.  I didn’t want to talk about my mother.  The wound was too raw, too deep.

“Goddessesdamnit... I can’t-”

“She told you there were ways, ‘magical’ and ‘pseudo-scientific’ as she put them, of cheating death.”

“SHE TOLD ME ABOUT BLACK MAGIC AND DARK MAGIC AND SHIT LIKE TIME TRAVEL, ALRIGHT?!” I raged at the starry afternoon sky.  “Shit like that.”

“...and what did she tell you about time travel, hmm?”

“She...” I almost looked back towards her, fortunately remembering the corpse he had summoned.

“... she told me... it was ‘unnatural’ to stop the dead from dying, and I shouldn’t ever even think about it, or the Princesses will banish my soul to Tartaros.”

“Your mother was a brilliant w... mmmmmare, one of the most brilliant minds I’ve ever encountered.  However, that did not stop her from using a, heh, ‘magical’ method of time travel in a mostly – and fortunately – harmless attempt to alter an unsssssatisfactory event of her past.”

My face betrayed my completely sarcastic and fake shock.  Which Mister Doesn’t-Understand- How-to-Interact-With-Other-Ponies of course interpreted to be sincere.

“Oh, yes, she never told you, did she?”

Oh, for Goddesses’ sake.

“Your mother stole a certain scroll which instructs how one might alter one’s... ‘time-line’... and you stole those documents on the day of the attack on ‘Black Mane West’, and you are so generous, you are going to give those scrolls to yourrrrrr... very... sssspecial somepony...”

Everything he said was true.  The Combine Advisors in my mother’s lab missed that particular artifact when they ripped open her safe.  I remembered Gordon charging back in there, searching for the long-gone Elements of Harmony, blessedly ignorant of the Tome’s existence.  And I was, in fact, planning on giving it to the only stallion – the only pony, the only being – I trusted to do the right thing with them... a stallion I’d probably never even met or seen a single time until less than a week ago, and yet... I felt like I’d known my entire life...

“Now, listen here, my dear...”

Gordon...

“...when you see yourrr very sssspecial sssomepony...”

Gordon...?

“...relay these words...”

Gordon!  It’s Gordon!  Celestia Almighty, I’m in love!

“...prepare for unforeseen consequences...”

Wait, what?  What does that mean?

I was hearing voices... several different voices... extremely loud, mechanical noises... and I was lying on something soft and warm and alive... and it smelled like a rotten apple core that somepony had wrapped in moldy hay and dipped in dragon perspirant – and that was putting it delicately.

“What?  You can’t come up with some smart-Alyx comeback?” somepony asked, using the name my mother gave me as if it was some kind of insult.

“Hey!”

------------------------------λ------------------------------

“Oh, getting out of Manehattan was a nightmare – then the Combine invaded!  Ha!”

Almost all of us giggled like school foals at the terrible joke, and Dr. Gryffindor said something to the effect of ‘hardey har-har’ before voicing one of her many, many, many, many reservations.

“I’m not even going to try to comprehend why you wanted to transport a fully grown male alligator from City 7 to NCD – and on top of that, why Spike actually did it!”

After spending approximately fifteen seconds in the missile silo – about five of which I spent pretty much waving a hoof at the mare I was almost completely convinced I was head-over-cackles in love with, and whom I hadn’t even seen since I left Ponyville, and - in fact - could only now confirm to actually be still alive – we all decided - and by ‘we all decided’ I mean ‘Dr. Gryffindor insisted and General Dash made us do it - to migrate our little herd of scientific, military and culinary expertise to a location known as a ‘staff room’, where, we were told, there would be pleasant temperatures, comfy seats and privacy suitable for a top-secret, high-level meeting of the greatest minds in Equestria, as well as tea and snacks.

The staff room was as promised, with air-conditioning, an abundance of comfy seats and sofas, along with a big window offering a majestic vista of a suspiciously green, boring, generic hallway, and there was indeed tea, lukewarm and tasting slightly of dust and something else I couldn’t quite identify, that we sipped from of these gorgeous little ceramic teacups – the only pretty things in the room (besides Alyx, of course) – and I could have sworn up and down that I’d seen them before, though I couldn’t quite put my nose on where.

The snacks, however, were lies; lies told to lure us into a boring and aesthetically displeasing trap.

I was hoping to sit in the loveseat, snuggled up next to Alyx, but it was quickly occupied by the behind of Dr. Pie.  Dr. Gryffindor, dressed in a - I am told, traditional, though you could’ve fooled me - robin’s-egg-blue suit, rested on her lioness laurels on a pea-green sofa, alone, Rainbow Dash and I were both comfortably seated on small, cushy ottomans, and Spike was chewing on his right wing – for some reason – atop a padlocked chain-link ‘cage’ in one corner that boxed-in some filing cabinets and other random office furniture.  Judging from the way the thing teetered and swayed with every little movement the purple dragon made, I fully expected it to collapse at any moment.

I was busy making faces at Alyx – who, in turn, was making eyes at me – and entertaining impure thoughts of hugging her sexually when General Dash suddenly began shouting in an outdoor voice.

“ALRIGHT!  Enough chit-chat!  This war council is now in session!” the General barked at our slightly frightened tea party that had run out of tea.

“Sasha!  Bring up the tactical map!”

A little space-suited alien began keying in commands into a complex control console on the far side of the cramped room, and above her (I think it was a her), a blurry, outdated, crudely drawn, low-resolution, mislabeled, black-and-white map of a foreign country that I’d never heard of called ‘Equesteia’ appeared on a huge bank of monitors stretching almost from the floor to the ceiling.

Of course, I wasn’t paying very much attention, for I was far too distracted by the feeling of fine vinyl scratching at my totally naked behind.  Oh, yes, dear reader, I was un-Hazard-Suited for the first time since I went swimming in the Ponyville river with Alyx – which, despite all of the negative things that happened immediately afterward, remained an extremely pleasant memory - for the generous Dr. Pie had enthusiastically agreed to repair my horrifically abused HEV suit on the condition that I ceased use of it while she did so.

I made every effort to suck in my gut, puff out my chest, and flex my muscles as much as I could while in naked view of Alyx so the mare could appreciate how physically attractive or unattractive I was, and correspondingly increase her love for, and/or repulsion towards, me.

After I, and most everypony else, daydreamed through General Dash’s explanation of what the map was, what maps are used for, how symbols on a map denote locations in the real world, etc, Dr. Gryffindor took the floor.  And by that, I mean she began addressing our eagerly-attentive group.

“First thing’s first:  As of four days ago, the Equestrian Resistance’s primary... offensive... scenario...?” she glanced over at Dash, who nodded her head in response, “was to construct teleportation devices that would enable us to place an improvised explosive device or death squad directly inside the Citadel, preferably in Doctor Breen’s personal office or living quarters.”

I was just about to spontaneously combust under the glare she was giving me, when Alyx loudly objected to the toffee-brown griffon’s insinuation.

“Our primary ‘offensive scenario,’ Doctor Gryffindor – and by the way, I think the word you’re looking for is ‘objective’ – was to seek out and find a new Spirit of Honesty to replace Applejack so the Elements of Harmony could be used!”

Gilda rolled her eyes and grunted before Alyx interrupted her once again.

“And then, after Ponyville, we added the Spirit of Generosity to the list!  Right?”

Alyx was interrupted by a muffled voice coming from another room adjacent to ours.

“BECAUSE YOU THOUGHT THEY COULD KILL ME AHAHAHAHAHHAHAHHAAH!!”

I’m pretty sure everypony in the room jumped when they heard the jolly laughter of that absolutely insane mare come screaming out of the walls and into our collective subconscious.

“Sasha,” Rainbow Dash calmly stated the single word as she stole a glance down at her sidearm, her normally stoic face becoming a portrait of worry.

“I resume my place of honor at the side of The Rarity, tamer of the undead hordes of Ponyville.”

Tail wagging, the cerberus named ‘Sasha’ went willingly over to a door hidden around a corner and the sound of the clinking of dishes and things of that nature could briefly be heard.  With my mind frozen in terror at the sudden revelation that Alyx and Spike’s recruitment mission had been a resounding success, my eyes randomly fixated on Gilda’s scowling avian features as they formed an even bigger scowl than they normally did, and I am guessing she was thinking something like,

It should be ‘at the side of the Gryffindor.’

My mind unfroze, and I quickly took advantage of the communicatory chaos all around me to interrupt with something I’d been wondering since the moment I first arrived.

“Uhm, yes, General Dash, ma’am – uh, sir, uhm...” I began with my typical eloquence.

She turned to wearily regard me while Dr. Gryffindor continued shooting laser beams out of her eyes in the direction of the tiny kitchenette The Rarity was in.

I cleared my throat a second time, and asked, “Theeeeuh – Dispersion Field and, uh, Invis Hex...”  I tried to sound cool by using abbreviations.  “Those were not at Black Mane West, uh... well...”

General Dash facehoofed – a common reaction to the probing of an ignorant, curious nerd.  Also the reaction of the scientific community to Pinkie Pie’s keynote at the 1st Summit on Precognition.

“Okay, doc, Shining Armor’s shield spell requires Shining Armor.  Twi was able to do something similar on a smaller scale, but that’s conspicuous as all the blazing fires of Upper Hell, and the invis hex we’ve got – and I don’t know how many different kinds there are – but the one we’ve got requires resources we don’t...”

She looked me in the eyes, suddenly infuriated with me.

“Look, Doc,” she said, sounding like somepony who was under an extreme amount of stress and irritation, and was ready to snap at any moment.  “Don’t worry about it.”

Shortly after not worrying about it, I made a face at Alyx like, ‘get a load of this mare,’ and the look she gave me in response said something like, ‘It’s not your fault, you didn’t know, but what you’re doing right now is incredibly immature and I am very disappointed in you.’

Something like that.

“AHEM.  Well.  Where were we?” asked Dr. Gryffindor, who then answered her own question, which is one of those things I just can’t stand.

“Ah yes, the objective of the Resistance.  Well-” Gilda, who had stood up and begun strutting back and forth in front of the giant, flickering map of Equesteia, gestured a talon towards Alyx.

“-Besides the Elements of Harmony-”

Alyx glared at her, and I breathed an inward sigh of relief that the heat had been taken off me.

“The objective of the Resistance was to use our teleporters at Black Mane East and Black Mane West to bypass the Enemy’s defenses and strike them from within – until, well...”

The griffon turned up her beak, doing a sort of ‘thinking jig’ as she paced in a figure eight.

“Three days ago, all that planning and preparation and hard work was blown all to hell by the sudden and unexpected arrival of a former member of the Black Mane science team in City 7.”

She paused in her little patrol to regard me with a shocking look of something approaching pity.

“I know you don’t remember anything, Gordon, and I’m not blaming you for anything that’s happened since your... episode, or whatever you want to call it...”  She raised a golden talon to scratch at her feathered neck.  “It’s quite obvious you are being used as a pawn in some scheme – that perhaps we all are...”

Dr. Gryffindor trailed off, lost in thought, her neck craned toward the ceiling.

The analogy came to me almost immediately.  “Like players in a game.”

“Like Dungeons and Diamond Dogs!” Dr. Pie very suddenly and unnecessarily loudly agreed, and if I’d been wearing anything, I am almost positive I would have been scared out of it.

“Oh!  Except we don’t know who the Dungeon Mare is,” she added, reflecting upon the rule set of the infamous game historically associated with that loathsome but fluid minority, ‘the uncool’.

“You mean the Game Master,” Gilda further corrected her, betraying the fact that she played Triple-D.  “A Dungeon Mare is... something completely different,” she said with a... blush?

Why in the world would Dr. Gryffindor be blushing over an impenetrably complex and indescribably boring tabletop role-playing-game which, from all that I could tell whenever I saw it being played at MIT, involved neither role-playing nor dungeons, and certainly no Diamond Dogs!

Actually, I don’t think I thought every single word of that, but I’m not removing it.

It wasn’t exactly an unforeseeable event, but Dr. Pie’s response made us all feel... strange.

“Oooohhh, I think the way you guys play ‘Dungeons & Diamond Dogs’ is a liiiiittle different from the official way,” Pinkie said with a provocative smirk and a flutter of her eyelashes.

Dr. Gryffindor looked terrified, her white feathers dampening with sweat.  General Dash just looked perplexed, with her eyebrows furrowed like she was trying exceptionally hard to either remember or not remember something.  I did not dwell on the mystery for long, however, as my eyes were drawn to Pinkie’s like worker-changelings to the intoxicating pheromonal stench emitted by their Queen.

It’s just... I don’t know, the way she says it, just watching her face and her body language, and those big, bright, bedazzling, incredibly expressive eyes of hers... I figured she was probably popular with foals, even though the youngest couldn’t be more than eight years old because of that ‘reproduction suppression field’, whatever the hell that was.

And speaking of reproduction... there was something about being good with foals that I just found so inexplicably sexy.

I know, I know, you should buck yourself for thinking that way about one of your fellow coworkers-slash-insurgents that way, Gordon – especially somepony in her sixties – but...

“Doctor Freemane!” barked somepony who was neither a dog nor a cerberus.

“WAH!” I replied to Dr. Gryffindor.

“I said, do you have any idea who or what might have had the motivation to send you here?”

“No,” I responded, and the griffon used her eagle’s eyes to give me a Gilda Stare.

While she tested the authenticity of my statement by boring a pair of holes into my soul with those damned yellow orbs, I thought,

What?  It’s true.  I have absolutely no idea who I’m working for.

“Humph.  Or, I could be wrong.”  She looked over at our pink confectionologist, who was playing with Alyx’s mane.  “A possibility we never overlook, eh, Pinkie?”

Oh no.  You know not what you do.

“Yup, that’s right, Gilda!  Let’s see... you were wrong about the possibility of a Resonance Cascade happening at Black Mane, you were wrong about the stability of the Electron Catalyst Destabilizer, you were wrong about the killing of that unarmed prisoner at Lunatanamo- that’s the moon base for anypony who’s wondering-”

“Pinkie,” General Dash pleaded, trying to prevent our meeting from straying off-topic while Gilda loudly ground her beak, but otherwise seethed in silence.

“-and you said it was an execution but the security camera footage clearly showed the griffon attacking the guard without provocation-”

Rainbow Dash looked first to me for support – I responded only by shaking my head – then to Gilda, who now had her beak buried in her left wing in a very bird-like manner, and finally to Alyx.

She nodded in understanding, and as Dr. Pie leaned over to resume braiding her mane, her flat and probably cavity-filled teeth snapped shut on air, and those big, bright eyes widened as they locked- on to a new target.  Alyx, who was about to give the pink pony a polite tap on the shoulder, was thwacked in two separate places by a pink foreleg, shooting up to point at something across the room, and out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed a bored, half-asleep Spike suddenly snap to attention, sensing a threat to his charge.

“And you!” she gasped in sudden realization, her hoof pointing at the general.

“I know it happened a reallllllllly long time ago, but do you remember when Gilda blamed me for all of your pranks that she fell for at my ‘Welcome to Ponyville, Gilda!’ party?”

She simply stared at the grey-maned Rainbow, waiting for an answer, and she gave in.

“Yes,” she sighed.

The extremely uncomfortable silence that followed drew the griffon out of her wing like a tortoise poking its head out of its shell.  However, the moment she opened her beak to talk was about the moment the good General Dash chose to shove her off to the side, probably hurting Dr. Gryffindor’s feelings and at least one of her floating ribs.

If there were ever any feelings between those two, they sure are gone, I noted to myself, making sure to think especially loudly so I could be heard over all the other voices.

“ALRIGHT! FILLIES AND GENTLECOLTS AND GRIFFONS AND SPIKE!” the airborne pegasus shouted at us in a scratchy, high-pitched voice that I found at once adorable and terrifying.

Hovering abreast the flickering bank of monitors, she produced a long yellow stick pinched between the cackle and hoof of her foreleg, and whacked it against the glass surface behind her.

“What you are looking at-”

-is a poorly drawn-

“-is a problem.”

-of artistic license.

Demonstrating her clear possession of psychic powers – the only possible explanation, as I hadn’t been thinking very loudly – Rainbow Dash glared at me with the discountenance of a thousand teachers in a thousand classrooms filled with paper aircraft and spitballs.

“Are you paying attention, Gordon?”

“YES,” I lied.

Deciding to have faith that she’d grasped my immeasurably limited attention span, she continued,

“...and that rocket-”

“-missile-” Gilda interjected.

“-whatever– is the Resistance’s weapon of last resort; our terminal contingency; the only backup plan we’ve got after all our other backup plans have failed-” she turned her head to give me yet another sore look, “-which, they have.  All the good ones, anyway.”

I must have looked lost and confused, as the General let out a heavy sigh.

“Okay, for the pokeyponies among us...” she said, obviously referring to me.

I was about to loudly object – I wasn’t slow, I was uninformed – but Rainbow steamed on ahead.

“Here’s the situation, Gordon;” she began, steadily flapping her stubby wings to maintain her meter or so of altitude, “Three days ago, the Equestrian Resistance had three major bases of operation, three scientists who, between them, had the knowledge to construct two complete, long-distance, non-magical teleporters – that, for all we can tell, actually worked – and I had just busted Shining Armor all the way down to private for insubordination.”

That last thing drew a litany of gasps and guffaws and I think a squawk from Dr. Gryffindor.

“What’d he do?” came the deep voice of Spike, who’d been so quiet throughout the entire meeting, I’d forgotten he was even there.

She shrugged.  Still hovering with her forelegs crossed, she clarified, “Oh, we were talking about what we’d do if the teleportation test didn’t work, and I brought up ‘island hopping’, and – of course – that set him off, aaaaaaand... he threatened to kill me if I even considered such a thing, yadda yadda.  Anyway, he should be pulling weeds along the perimeter fence.”

I jabbed my naked hoof into the air like I had a question for the teacher.  “Ah, yes, uhm – what is ‘shining armor’, and who is ‘Island Hopping’?”

Not noticing my object-pony confusion, she began her lengthy reply.  “Twilight is- well, was...”

Oh, Celestiadamnit.  I felt those eyes on me again.  Everypony’s eyes.  Alyx’s eyes.

I caught the caramel-colored mare’s gaze briefly, but powerfully.  I looked into her face and saw her mother’s eyes staring back out at me, and Her Majesty’s witness, I was more terrified by that sight than I was by the restless spirits of the dead that haunted me in Dithering.

Just because I don’t blame myself for her death doesn’t mean that everypony else doesn’t.

And that’s the thing about believing something nopony else does.  At some point, you begin to wonder if maybe they’re right.

“Sorry, I’m sorry,” the General apologized to the group, mostly to Alyx.

“Anyway, so-”  She put her forelegs behind her back as she spoke, a gesture I am jealous of.

“...let me put it this way; we had the ability to teleport behind enemy lines, it’s just that... her teleportation spell, her ‘blink’ had a limited range – I think when she was young she could ‘blink’ herself and a few others around a kilometer, max, and as she got older, it faded to around half a click.  Problem is, if we wanted her to teleport to, say, The Citadel-” she clopped her hooves together, and the image on-screen snapped to an overlay of Manehattan with a big, red circle that cut off about a quarter of the northern end of the island and extended out into the ocean.

“-the Citadel Exclusion Zone forms a perfect circle around it with a radius of 2.15 kilometers.”

The pegasus turned to face away from our group, and the warm, stuffy staff room made me have a strange fantasy about standing under her wings and feeling the light breeze as they flapped.

“Well, one of the scenarios we developed would’ve involved something we dubbed ‘island-hopping’, in which she, starting inside neutral territory, would teleport her maximum distance towards an objective – in this case, the Citadel – and then, the moment she reappeared, immediately teleport again, gradually working herself towards the target.  Due to the distance limit, even if she were to send somepony else in her stead, she could only send them half a kilometer.  There’s no getting around her having to go along for the ride.  And of course, ‘going along for the ride’ would entail Twi-” she caught herself, “-sending our lead scientist and organizational head into Combine territory, materializing in an unknown, unsurveyed area deep behind enemy lines...”

She spun around to face us again, her eyes halfway shut.  “...repeatedly.”

Rainbow clopped her hooves together, which caused a blurry, dated picture of a familiar-looking bluish skyscraper to pop up on the bank of screens.  She huffed, and clopped again and again, scrolling through several colorful and complicated diagrams of the same tower, a roster with names, pictures, and statistics, a couple pictures of the missile sitting peacefully in the silo behind us, and finally a picture of a white male unicorn with blue and white striped hair and a cutie mark of a shield.  After awhile, she let out a frustrated grunt and gave up with the clopping.

“Anyway, after a particularly bloody computer-aided simulation, we decided to abandon the idea entirely.  And by that, I mean Shining threatened my life multiple times and in multiple ways if I allowed her to go through with it.”  With her hoof pointed back at the screens for some reason, she smiled her cute, radiant smile and reflected, “Ah, that would be the first time I demoted him.”

She glanced back at the monitor bank, mumbled something at Dr. Gryffindor, and continued,

“So, these facts are what necessitated the need for the teleporters; they have infinite range-”

Both I and Dr. Gryffindor – who had flipped the image back to the embarrassingly bad cartoonists’ interpretation of Equestria – tried to interrupt her with our science, but she shushed us with the authority of somepony who has hundreds of armed soldiers waiting at her beck and call.

“For our purposes, the teleporters have unlimited range – that is, had.”

Oh boy, here we go.

I felt it like the pressure change before a thunderstorm on the Great Galloping Plains.

“We don’t anymore.  To be brutally honest: we have no teleporters, we have one major base, and we have lost the leader of the Resistance and the greatest mind of our time, and in exchange, gained Doctor Freemane – about whom the only thing I can really say is I don’t know how the hell you are still alive, nor do I know why the hell Doctor Breen is so interested in you being dead.”

I was just about to volunteer that I had personally killed a couple of dozen Combine transequines, but she’d thought of that already.

“I mean, yeah, you got really, really lucky back in City 7, got your hooves bloody, sure.  But hell, Freemane, any one of us in this room besides Pinkie Pie have ‘deserviced’ more Breen than that, and the most we ever got in return was them making me an ‘Anticitizen’... I think two or three...?  Eh, I don’t remember.  Anyway, the point is, why in the cinnamon-flavored-”

She took her eyes off of me for a second, glancing at Alyx and Spike, then continued,

“-Darn is Breen so obsessed with you, Freemane?  What did you do to step on his horseshoes?”

All eyes turned to stare at me, including two that I would happily kill Rainbow Dash to have just a few moments alone with.

“I interrupted him in his office once, quite recently.  Heh.”  I choked out the words, trying not to seize up like I usually do when I’m speaking to a crowd.

“Yeah, yeah, I heard about that,” she responded.  “That’s not a good enough reason.”

“Uh...”  Well, shit.  Why would the Administrator have it in for me, specifically?

“Perhaps he perceived that I was ‘giving him the cold shoulder’ at Black Mane when I passed him by in the hall and didn’t say ‘hi’?  I don’t galumphing know!” I said, my voice suddenly raised.

General Dash let the issue lie for the moment.  “Whatever, I don’t care.  It’s not relevant.”

“What matters now-” I had the gall to interrupt about something that was starting to bother me:

Dr. Pie’s laboratory, Black Mane East, was raided by the Overwatch – the military branch of the Combine – literally the day I left City 7.  Pinkie, who thankfully escaped unharmed, had spent the intervening time getting settled in here at New Cloudsdale.  But I’d never been told the ultimate fate of Black Mane West and its teleporter.

“Wait, wait, go back a little bit - you said we have zero teleporters left?  Do we know what happened to the one at Black Mane West?  Did the Combine destroy it?”

“I’ll answer that,” volunteered Spike, and I rotated my ottoman to face the fire-breathing monster.

“BMW is gone,” he began, his voice and his face grim.  “The Combine have... basically carted it up and shipped it off, or boxed it up and carted it off, whatever that fu- freaking saying is... all of that shi- all of that stuff is off somewhere in some Combine hel- sorry, heck-hole, somewhere off in Celestia-know-where.  Along with the Elements of Harmony.  So, yeah.”

“Right,” the General agreed.  “It’s been compromised, which leads me to-”

“Wait!” I again interrupted, which caused her to glare at me, and also caused a certain griffon to let out a – quickly rebuked – snicker.

“Spike, what happened at Black Mane West?  Did anypony survive?”

Oh my Goddesses I hope they didn’t kill every single pony there just because they were looking for me.  Wait, what the hell is wrong with me?  I don’t feel responsible for Twilight’s death, and yet I do feel responsible for everypony else’s death?  Even though they were killed in the same place, at the same time, by the same enemy?

I thought about that for a while.  Yeah, basically.  Wow, that’s kind of weird.  I wonder if there’s something wrong with my brain.  I have been inhaling a lot of toxic chemicals lately.

Spike let out an excruciatingly long sigh, then took a deep breath.

“Well, I was able to make myself enough of a pain in the Combine’s backside that a modest number of survivors made it out of the compound.  However...”

Spike’s face turned grim, his eyes frozen to the floor.  “...however, the nearest friendly territory was here, and... well, I couldn’t very well carry them all on my back...”

Alyx startled us all by jumping out of her seat to go to her companion’s side, laying a hoof on him as if protecting him from the wrath of our judgment.

“It was the middle of the night, and they had to trot through the Everfree Forest.  Of course some of them got lost.  Spike did everything he could, short of burning the Forest to the ground.”

Dear GODDESSES I wish you had.

Alyx’s words were short, terse and defensive.  A couple of the other faces in the room looked just as shocked as I felt.  The next words she spoke were mostly directed toward me.

“Based on survivor’s accounts and Zecora’s reports of timberwolf activity... we called off the search parties... after... after twenty fourrrr...”  It seemed like Alyx was summoning all of her willpower just to keep from galloping out of the room.

“-but... but a lot of them... did... make it here...” she finished, forcing herself to give a little smile while her beautiful brown eyes twinkled like a lake beneath a setting sun.

Luna and Celestia.  Those poor bastards had to hike through the Goddesses-forsaken, hell-embalmed, accursed, haunted, evil, vile, life-scorning Everfree freaking Forest at NIGHT.

I couldn’t even imagine what unseen horrors were kept at bay by Celestia’s Glory while I wandered, lost, in that wormwood labyrinth.  I could scarcely imagine what horrors of flesh and hate and pain emerged from the Forest’s woodwork after the burning sun no longer dampened its evil spirits.

“Luna, Alyx, I had no idea.  Spike...”  I leaned forward on my ottoman so far I nearly tipped the thing over, but I refrained from going to lay a hoof on him, keen not to wound the proud creature further.

There were so many things I wanted to say to the poor guy.  Most of them started with requests for clarification regarding the feasibility of burning down the Everfree Forest, and whether doing so would, in all actuality, send it back to hell.  Several of them had to do with why in the dark fires of night-hell did he send me tromping through it all alone with little direction, like it ISN’T plentifully evil, dangerous, unpredictable and – oh, did I mention HAUNTED BY HICK GHOSTS – during the day.

But mostly?

Mostly... I just wanted to tell him it wasn’t his fault those ponies got lost and were probably dead.

I wanted to tell him that he was just doing his job... and that he did his job beyond well.

“Anyway.  Everypony.”

As we all looked toward General Rainbow Dash, I felt an indescribable conviction that I wouldn’t let another Black Mane West happen.  I wouldn’t allow any more ponies to die... because...

...because of...

...me.  Because of me.

It was as clear to me now as a bright, cold day in Neighvember.  I wasn’t responsible for what happened at Black Mane West, but I was still the cause.  The Combine came there looking for me.  Not Twilight, not Alyx, not Spike, not the Elements of Harmony, not the teleporter, not the other Resistance members.  They were there because Walrus Octavian Breen wanted a knife in my gut.

Oh my Goddesses.

Sitting there, ignoring every single word Rainbow Dash said, I suddenly realized why Dr. Breen was having me hunted with such urgency, with such passion, why he had made me Anticitizen One instead of somepony who’d done much more damage to him and his order than I.

Because he knows.

He knows who I am.

He knows who I work for.

And he knows that I am here to kill him.

“... which naturally leads me to my next point – Freemane!” I snapped out of my stupor.  Her voice was quite sharp, I can see why she made such a natural leader.  “There are no teleporters left in the magical land of Equestria – except-”

“Except?” asked Dr. Pie.

“Except?” asked Alyx.

Sensing a trend, Spike half-heartedly added, “Except?”

“Except?” I asked, and I watched as Dr. Gryffindor rolled her eyes and repeated my question, thus completing the chain.  The completion of interrogative chains such as this is inexpressibly pertinent to the nature of universal causality in ways that are so impossible to describe, the fact that I am even mentioning them at all is almost sufficient grounds, in an of itself, to have me committed.

“Except the one in the Royal Palace in Canterlot... what’s left of it, anyway...”

The screen popped to show what appeared to be partially the same old Royal Palace that I and generations of ponies have known as the official residence of the Princesses, and partially what appeared to be garish, imposing hulks and columns of bluish metal with transparent tubes woven between them at intervals.  It was like the ‘building’ equivalent of a trans-pony; the familiar and natural awkwardly fused with the unfamiliar and alien, although the Palace itself seemed to be mostly intact – most of the Combine construction was confined to a massive annex off to one side that looked like it was designed to be... picked up and moved... and the idea that the Combine even possessed the means to perform such a Her-Cute-Lillian feat gave me cockatrice bumps.

“...and the other teleporter, according to our intelligence, is here-”

The screen changed once again to show what looked like a live video feed of that massive, blue tower in City 7 whose name I was almost positive was ‘The Citadel’, but I was afraid of being made fun of and called names if I asked in order to verify that I was correct.

“-in the Citadel.  Specifically, at the very tippety-top, within trotting distance of Breen’s office.”

She inhaled deeply and loudly declared, “Fillies and gentlecolts, that is our new objective.”

I knocked over my ottoman when I got to all fours, and my hooves made an unintentionally loud *clop* when they smacked against the tiled floor.

“Whoah, whoah, whoah, wait, what?!” I exclaimed – again, probably louder than I meant to.

“What’s the problem, Doctor Freemane?” the four-star General asked in an unamused tone, like she was talking to a foal who had interrupted the adults’ conversation.

I jabbed my hoof at the screen to illustrate.  “That’s what you call that... that thing in City 7?  That’s the Citadel?  That giant... monolithic... alien skyscraper that extends into the heavens as far as the eye can see, and has parts that move and shift around and spew out alien spacecraft and probes and robots and shit?  That’s the Citadel?”

She gave me the most loathsome look I have ever been given, and bluntly replied,

“Yes.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.  I saw that giant metal tower, bigger than anything I’d ever seen, than anypony had ever seen, built by forces and using materials and processes incomprehensible to equine science, a truly and totally alien structure that seemed entirely out of place amongst the Manehattan skyscrapers surrounding it – the ones that it hadn’t destroyed.

“Is there a problem, Doctor?” came the General’s agitated voice, cutting through my thoughts, my physicist’s brain suddenly an electrical storm of calculations and chaos.

I regarded her with an academic intensity that, as I have said before, I only get when I’m doing science or trying to kill something.

“Rainbow Dash- I can call you Rainbow Dash, right?”  If there’s ever any doubt, always clarify how your audience wishes to be addressed.

She grimaced at me, then rolled her eyes.  “Sure, why the hell not?  We’re all friends here.”

“Okay, Rainbow Dash – I have been to the Royal Palace.  I have seen the inside of the Royal Palace, I have touched its walls, I have used its restrooms-”

“Your point?” she interrupted, thankfully preventing me from going into any further detail.

“I know that it’s an actual building made out of limestone and plaster and gold – stuff that we actually understand.  The Royal Palace is not a monolithic xenomorphic haybaling tower from outer celestiadamned space.”

General Dash snarled, “You watch your goddesdamned tone when you’re talking to me, civilian.”

I was rather taken aback at that.  The only other time I’d ever been addressed as ‘civilian’ was when it was shouted at me by Royal Marines at Black Mane.

Regaining her composure – and with everypony in the room staring at our two faces, which I just noticed had somehow become uncomfortably close – she asked as professionally as she could,

“And what would you suggest we do?”

I mean, that’s what she asked, but I don’t think she actually cared what the hell I thought.

“Wh- well...” Celestiadamnit I hate being put on the spot like that.

“We should... attack the Palace, wasn’t it?  That’s... why are you laughing?”  She was laughing.

“Do you even know what the Royal Palace is, Freemane?”  She continued to laugh as she said it.

I started to say ‘yes’ but Alyx’s shaking head caught my attention, so I switched my answer to ‘no’.

“I’ll be blunt,” Rainbow said with a smirk.  She had me.

“The Royal Palace you grew up with is...” she paused, searching for an appropriate word.

“...gone.”

That didn’t sound good.

“You remember Medical Officer Fluttershy?”

What does that have to do with anything?

“The yellow pegasus with the butterfly cutie mark?  Yeah.”

“Did you notice she never flies?”

I had indeed, though I didn’t think anything of it at the time.

“One day, Civil Protection burst into Fluttershy’s home in the middle of the night, and after they bound, gagged, and blindfolded her, they had her put on a razor-train to Canterlot.  Once she arrived at the Royal Palace, she was carted off to one of two-dozen ‘processing wings’ the Combine had prepared – an ironic name, considering what was done there.”

She began to pace; her head drooped, her eyelids half shut, lost in thought and memory.

“There, she was violently strapped down to a metal table, and her wings were painfully stretched out and clipped, down to the bone.  She was given no anesthetic and no bandages, and no words were spoken during the procedure.  They simply wanted it ‘done’ as quickly and efficiently as possible.”

The General’s breathing grew heavier and more labored the further she got in the story.

“Fluttershy was shipped back to Ponyville and dumped in front of her house.  Even though her bindings were removed, she lay there for at least an hour, too scared to move.  When she finally opened her eyes, she was startled by how bright it was.  All told, she’d been gone for some ten hours, on top of the hour she lay there on the ground, sweating while she shivered.”

Rainbow took a deep breath and stopped pacing.

“During that time, she was given no water, no food, no bathroom breaks, and no explanation.”

I hadn’t noticed that I’d stopped breathing some time ago.  This is another one of those important things that nopony ever told me.  I wonder how many more of these there are.

“Gordon,” came her voice, the most somber I’d yet heard it, and I snapped to attention.  “The Royal Palace is a prison, a facility for medical experimentation and ‘processing’, as well as a military base and staging area.  It is a place that almost every pegasus pony in Equestria has emerged from permanently disabled, and Celestia knows that I and every other faithful pegasus subject would give anything to charge in there, free everypony trapped inside, burn the place to the ground and piss on its ashes.  But, Gordon, in order to do that, we can’t assault it head-on like the Termineightor.  And that is why we are going to attack the Citadel, and use their teleporter to send troops past alllllllll their defenses and right into the heart of-”

Okay, I had to stop her right there.  Her story was moving - indeed, bringing me to the verge of tears - but I’m sorry, I can’t shut off my brain.

“So that’s your plan?  That’s it,” I said, exasperated, and the General glared at me like she was imagining all sorts of terribly unfortunate things happening to me in extremely rapid succession.

“Let me repeat this back to you, just to make sure I’m not missing anything-”

I began to pace in a geometrically perfect figure-eight.

“Because of the presence of the teleporters – which, I am assuming, we know how to operate...?” I looked at Alyx while I half-asked the question, and she nodded in the affirmative.  “Okay, so after we take one objective, we’ve got the other by the hairs of its chinny-chin-chin, that I understand.”

The General nodded, momentarily staying her anger to hear me out.  A good leader listens as much as she talks, I guess, and Rainbow Dash was certainly a good leader.  She was incredibly dense, but still a good leader.

“You are going to attack the single, biggest, largest, most heavily fortified, most unknown, and most incomprehensible enemy stronghold in Equestria – in existence, in history - a metal tower constructed by ALIENS FROM OUTER SPACE... because you feel it is more vulnerable than the Royal Palace in Canterlot?”

She glared at me for a few moments, then said, “The Royal Palace is on top of a mountain, Doctor.”

“The Citadel is in the middle of a crowded city, General!”

“We can get to the Palace from the Citadel, Freemane.”

“We can get to the Citadel from the Palace, Rainbow!”

“I am a four-fucking-star general, and you will address me as such, or you will be thrown in the brig!”

“But I thought you said we were all friends here, RAINBOW DASH.”

At that point, I really didn’t care what the hell she did to me.  I think it’s because for the moment, I’d forgotten how naked and unarmed I was.  And again with that ‘F’ word.

“Oooookay, everypony, why don’t we all-” Dr. Pie’s plea for calm was shouted down by the General and I’s continued exchange of thoughts and ideas.

“Who the fuck declared you an expert in the art of warfare, Gordon?!  You’re an analytical physicist, not a military scientist!”

“First of all, that’s theoretical physicist, and from that perspective, I can tell you that whatever the Combine’s buildings are made of, it’s unlike any material I’ve ever seen – it’s lighter, stronger, more durable, more flexible, and more non-conducive and non-reactive than any material I’ve ever seen, except maybe the reactive armor on my Hazard Suit, and you want to assault and presumably infiltrate a potatomashing skyscraper covered from top to bottom in it, a skyscraper that I swear to Celestia, I have seen move, and for all we know, isn’t even physically possible to enter from eweclidean space!”

Rainbow Dash was staring at me, for the first time since our exchange began, not angrily, but genuinely confused.  Very, very confused.

As even Dr. Gryffindor behind had a furrowed brow and a golden claw scratching at her beak, I thought, I’ve got her.

“Look,” I began, taking a deep breath.  “The Royal Palace was made of sticks and stones by equine beings thousands of years ago-”

She huffed and turned away before I finished.

“-not advanced alien beings from extra-dimensional space!” I shouted after her across the meter and a half that separated us like she was galloping away down the street.

“What do you know about headcrabs, Doctor Freemane?”

Oh, for the love of Saint Peter.

“More than I ever want to know,” I informed her with all the conviction of a theoretical physicist who had performed countless - approximately - hours of in-field research on the pudgy neural parasites.

With the blunt end of a crowbar.  Often while squealing like a little filly who caught her dress on fire at her cuteciñera.

Whatever, it still counted.

“Then you are aware of what insanely effective biological weapons they make when they are rapidly and unexpectedly deployed in vast numbers in a target-rich environment.”

Oh my Goddesses.

“We’re going to do the same thing to the Combine that they did to Ponyville.”

“That’s a really good idea!” I told the General, who was totally oblivious to the irony of the situation.

She looked at me suspiciously, like she was expecting me to immediately retract the statement.

“Yeah... so, we aren’t going to be banging sticks and stones against the Citadel, or whatever that phrase is.  We’re going to have a little cheat on our side.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Okay,” she replied.

“Alright,” I said.

“...alllllright...?” she replied.

I couldn’t keep it up any longer after that.  Again, I cannot shut off my brain.  The damned thing just keeps whirring and cantankering and colombulating all the time, like patapatapatapata.

“Where is the Citadel?” I asked.  Luna, I must have sounded like a blathering idiot.

“Excuse me?” asked Rainbow Dash, who was about to move on to the next item on the agenda.

“Where is the Citadel?” I repeated.  She stared at me for several moments, blinking in unbelief at how apparently deficient in mental faculty I must have been to ask so very stupid a question.

“Uh... City 7?  Last time I checked...?” she replied, sounding like she didn’t know whether to laugh or to buck me in the face.  She’d get the opportunity to do both.

“Okay,” I acknowledged, satisfied with her answer.  “What is City 7?”

Now she regarded me very strangely when I asked that, so strangely, in fact, that a griffon had to answer for her, coughing first – perhaps to ask permission or clear her throat, or maybe both.

“Haven’t you heard?  It’s ‘One of our finest remaining urban centers.’  That’s the party line, anyway,” Dr. Gryffindor dryly snorted, followed by a cough and a wheeze.

I almost completely ignored her.  “An ‘urban center’, you said?  A fairly major one?”  Though I nodded in Gilda’s direction, it was obvious who my question was directed at.

“Yes, that is correct.”  She sounded increasingly suspicious with each passing moment, like I was the enemy, leading her platoon into an ambush.

“Okay.  So...” I took a breath, taking a moment to gather my thoughts.  “You’re planning to launch an INBM filled with headcrabs into the heart and transitory hub of a major population center that is home to, let’s say, 1,000,000 stallions, mares, and foals – although the foals can’t be younger than 8 years old because of that ‘reproduction suppression field’, whatever the hell that is.”

Every eye in the room was on me, nopony’s chest was moving, and because just then, the air conditioner clicked off like it, too, was holding its breath, I could hear the sound of my heart beating, so acutely, so clearly, I could scarcely believe I couldn’t hear it all the time.

“Could you please explain to me how you are any different from the Combine?”

------------------------------λ------------------------------

I have never hugged another pony sexually before.  I have hugged other ponies in innocent, non-sexual ways, sure, plenty of times.  I’ve even been hugged on more than one occasion – and yes, by mares other than my mom.  Pretty mares, I’ll have you know.  But never, ever, even close to the point that it would be considered a ‘special hug’, you know?  Not that I or anypony else really fully understands who or what determines what does and does not constitute a ‘special hug’.

“OW, Celestiadamnit!”

But I swear, sitting with Alyx by the bank of the little creek that runs past the bottom of the cliff-face containing BBBFF’s launch tube, her holding a bag of ice to my right eye, which was slightly puffy and tender because General Dash bucked me really, really hard in it... I swear on the Book of Souls – an object of eternal death and damnation that shall never be spoken of again –  I was closer right then to being sexually hugged than I’d ever been in my entire life.  And it would have been with Alyx.

Ohhhhhh, I’m supposed to wait until marriage I’m supposed to wait until marriage I’m supposed to wait until marriage but she smeeelllllllssss sooooooo gooooood and her eyes are telling me yes...

“Gordon?” she asked, fluttering her eyelashes at me and biting her lip.

She was biting her lip.  Think about that.  Picture that in your head for a moment – you’re by the bank of the creek, near sunset, the clouds are parting, the unnatural golden rays are making the water sparkle, the damned, evil, haunted Everfree Forest is pretending not to be evil and haunted and damned for a few minutes out of respect for the moment, and Alyx Sparkle is looking at you with her eyes full of cuddling and her muzzle scrunched and ready for nuzzling.

I don’t care if you’re male, female, gay, straight, you should be aroused right now.  And if you aren’t, there’s something wrong with you, and I’ll bet I’m not the first pony to tell you that.

Seriously, have you ever considered getting some help?  We’re all a little worried about you.

Sorry, I enjoy lingering on this memory for as long as possible – but anyway, here comes the funny part, depending on your definition of ‘funny’.  The part that makes me hate the G-pony more than anything, hate him with an intense, burning passion.

“Gordon...” she said again, her voice flat and trance-like.

“Yeah, Alyx?” I asked, the dilation of her pupils causing some slight worry to accent my speech.

“...prepare for unforeseen consequences...”

I remember falling over, I remember glimpsing a flash of bright yellow-orange from the setting sun – however, I do not remember the actual moment I impacted the ground.

You see, I’d heard that exact phrase before, and I’d heard it from somepony with those exact same eyes and those exact same lips... only she’d said it in a very, very different way, and under very, very different circumstances.

------------------------------λ------------------------------

Sobbing.  The first thing I heard when the elevator doors torturously squealed open was somepony bawling their eyes out, and with the way Dr. Sparkle immediately got in my face and basically started yelling at me, I began to wonder if she was a contributing factor, if not the direct cause.

“Gordon!  Thank Celestia you’re 100% completely unhurt!”

“I’m-”

“You are 100% completely unhurt, and the Resonance-Cascade-like event you just experienced was purely the result of design-flaws in the equipment provided to Black Mane by its OEMs, do you understand, Gordon?!  Nod your head if you understand!”

Twilight’s worry-stricken face floated up and down as I nodded my head in accordance with her somewhat threatening instructions.  Being new, I considered the frighteningly real possibility that memorization of this information was an actual procedure that all employees were required to follow in the event of things like Reignaissance Cavalcades and explosions happening.

As Dr. Sparkle moved away from my face, I located the source of the crying, and a little piece of happiness inside me died and never grew back.

“I... I- I t-tooo-hoooold them... mah... my tail was tw... was tw... TWITCHINGahhaaaahhhhhhhh...”

Dr. Pie was curled up beside a large computer bank in a corner of the modest, almost blindingly white room, and pooled around her hooves was a substantial puddle of her own tears – so substantial, in fact, I feared for her hydration.

I noticed Dr. Sparkle was looking at the same thing I was, and she shook her head at me like she was saying ‘all we can do is just wait it out.’

“Listen to me, Gordon,” she said with undiminished urgency, and she jumped up and planted her forehooves on my chest, causing blood to flow into my cheeks because I think she’s really hot.

“Has anypony ever told you, or said anything to you about... ‘unforeseen consequences?’  Or does that sound familiar to you at all?”

I wasn’t going to lie, not that lying is something I often do, or anything, but I wasn’t going to say that I had heard of ‘unforeseen consequences’ just to humor her.

“Uhh, no.”

“Okay, because... never mind.  Well... okay, have you seen this... okay, no, no, never mind.  But-”

It seemed to me that either Twilight was thinking faster than she could talk, or talking faster than she could think.

“Okay, Gordon – do you have any idea... what that could mean?  ‘Unforeseen consequences?’”

I was about to once again tell her that I didn’t, but Dr. Pie chose that precise moment to cease her wailing and begin talking, which – I’ve said before – is something she is painfully good at.

“Gooooooordon GordonGordonGordonGordonGordon, paaaaaaaaaaaaging Doctor Freemane, Doctor Freemane, report to the Principle’s office immediately-”

I was absolutely confused as to why in the hell she was doing that, but the Pink One’s odd behavior didn’t seem to phase Twilight, who rolled her eyes and sighed before turning back towards me, her face grim.

“Gordon, if you feel you’re up to it – I mean, seeing as you’re the one with the Hazard Suit – we’d really appreciate it if you went on ahead and got help.  I don’t know where Doctor Gryffindor is, all our phones are out, and the control room... Gordon, when you get to the control room, just hold your breath, stare straight ahead, and don’t stop for any reason until you’re through.”

All the while Twilight was giving me crash-hazard-courses, Pinkie continued her inane rambling, something about the similarity of the words ‘principle’ and ‘principal’.  I tried my best to tune it out.

“Right, go and get help, I’ll be back!”

“Noooooope nopenopenopenope, GordonGordon, we need you to go help, Gordon, not get help, weeeeeeee neeeeeeed you to go HELP somepony!”

We both regarded the pink riddle-wrapped-in-a-mystery-inside-an-enigma a bit stranger than usual.

“Just ignore her, Gordon.  Go on, we’ll be fine,” she said with a comforting smile, and I didn’t doubt her for a second.  Don’t let the fact that these are two old mares fool you; between Twilight’s envious teleportation abilities, legendary telekinesis and potent defensive spells, and Dr. Pie’s incomprehensible ability to predict seemingly any sort of impending calamity, I could easily envision them handling any unsafe situations they may face while I was gone.

“Gordon!”

That reminded me of this thing they showed me one boring day at work.  They’ve got this little two-pony ‘act’ where Dr. Sparkle closes her eyes and sort of... withdraws from reality into this trance-like state that enables her to focus all of her will, all of her energy, her whole being on her magic, and while she’s like that – get this-

“Gordon!”

-they’ve worked it out so that Dr. Pie sort of picks up Dr. Sparkle and actually ‘aims’ her like she’s a freaking weapon, like a Twilight Cannon!  And then they’ve got this clever little system of letting her know when to cast a spell while she’s got her eyes closed by having Dr. Pie lift up her tail – and smack it back down like the trigger of a gun!  Like the trigger of a cuddling gun!

“GORDON!”

Together, the two are truly a force to be reckoned with, as Dr. Pie’s ‘Pinkie Sense’ alerts her to incoming targets, and Twilight’s unicorn magic is just... legendary, I mean, what they showed me was, they had her blow up a coffee mug, and I mean, the thing was just gone, it was vaporized, there were no pieces to pick up!  And I’ve heard she’s gotten to the point where she can blow through solid rock, melt through metal, she’s really just an incredible...

*SMACK!*

...and then somepony bucked me in the face.

And the funny thing was, it felt like the second time that had happened to me that day.

------------------------------λ------------------------------

I woke up on an operating table.

I have been deeply afraid of being unconscious on operating tables ever since my wisdom teeth were removed as a colt, and I refuse to record the reason why here.

This would explain why I extricated myself from that operating table with enough force to knock it almost completely upside-down, as well as displace a bunch of other really nice, really clean, but nevertheless painfully inadequate medical equipment like plastic tubs full of cotton balls, gauze and tweezers instead of actual surgical tools and bottles full of brightly-colored liquids.  Based on my limited medical knowledge, I supposed that what little was here plus some alcohol would be good enough for treating a bullet wound or a burn, maybe.  But if you were floated into that Resistance O.R. with any substantial internal injuries, you’d probably be floated back out, laid on the ground with a lollipop, and be told somepony would be praying for you.

“Hiya Gordon!” the enigma from my dreams greeted me.

“Hello, Doctor Pie!” I happily returned her greeting.

“Gordon!” said Alyx, who was also standing there.

“Oh, hey Alyx!” I said to her.

“WHAT THE HOLY MOTHERFUCK IS GOING ON IN THERE?!” crackled Dr. Gryffindor’s voice over the PA system, using a word I seemed to have thoroughly internalized while I slept.

“ARE YOU HAVING A FUCKING TEA PARTY WHI-” the good doctor was temporarily cut off by an ear-splittingly loud crack of thunder that, despite the sky being a bit on the cloudy side last time I was conscious, I figured probably wasn’t caused by bad weather.

“What the candy-colored marshmallow lemon bars is going on?!” I asked.  Just because I now knew what that ‘F’ word meant didn’t mean I had to start using it.

Dr. Pie opened her mouth to answer when the glint from a small metal tube caught her eye, a tiny pinprick of light reflected in an otherwise dismally dark room.

The tiny tube had a blinking, red light on it.

She screamed, her eyes transfixed on the object that was about to kill her.

No.

My dazed and disoriented mind snapped taut, wrapping itself snugly around the invitingly smooth surface of the fragmentation grenade, and hurled it back approximately in the direction it had come from – a dark concrete hallway filled with smoke and glowing eyes.

Dear Princess Celestia, I began my prayerful lamentation to the Sun Goddess.

The frag grenade detonated.  Photons and shrapnel bounced off my closed eyelids.

It’s happening again.  It’s happening again, it’s happening again.

“Freemane?!” the intercom crackled again as blue fire burned through the newly-created smokescreen in both directions.  “Freemane have you heard a word I’ve been saying?!  Once again; New Cloudsdale is under attack, and General Dash wants you to report to the bunker in the center of the base, which is called, hang on... it’s called ‘Central Bunker’... straightforward- Hello?!  Hello?!  Is anypony still alive down there?!”

I show up, and everypony dies...

They didn’t even wait until the next day this time.

“Hostiles down!  We’re clear!” hollered a stallion who hadn’t said that exact phrase since the last time we played Death-Shot: Changeling Extreme War together at the Black Mane arcade.

“Barney!” I shouted in surprise and relief.

“WHAT?!” he responded, kind of scaring me and hurting my feelings.

“I was just saying hi, dude.”

“SORRY!  It’s- Th- There are things!  There are things!”

“It’s no problem, Barnes, no problem!” I assured the obviously very jumpy stallion, his charcoal coat and light armor standing out against the grey of the concrete room.

It was then that I noticed my flashlight was on, which would explain why I could see Barney – the makeshift ‘operating room’ we were in wasn’t very bright to begin with, and the smoke, along with the recent series of detonations, had made the lighting situation even more abysmal, with my yellow-white hazard light easily being the brightest thing in the room.

“Everypony, check in!” yelled Barnes, who had gone into full ‘security guard’ mode.  The beam of my light reflected a very familiar logo stitched on a patch on his left foreleg – he was actually wearing his old bulletproof security vest from Black Mane, the same shade of blue as his eyes.

“I’m okay!” chirped Pinkie Pie, sneezing with explosive force afterwards.

“Me too!” Alyx sounded off.

“ALYX!” I shouted, causing her to jump practically to the ceiling.  In hindsight, yelling out somepony’s name in an outdoor voice in an indoor area moments after a shootout was extremely inappropriate, and I never, ever made that mistake again.

I whipped my head around, my flashlight smartly tracking with my head – a very nice touch – until I was blinding Alyx, then lunged towards her – which was probably extremely frightening from her perspective – and wrapped my front legs around her like I was a zombie trying to eat her face.

“Gordon... I’m... glad you’re...”

“Shhhhh... there’s no need for words... you’re safe, that’s allllllllllllll that matters...”

You know, reading that back, it kind of sounds really creepy and weird, but trust me, it wasn’t.

It was romantic.  Or at least, I felt romantic.  I mean, I felt very warm and sweaty when I said it, is what I’m trying to say, or I think that’s what I’m trying to say.  I don’t know, never mind.  And no, I’m not removing that.

Alyx lovingly shoved me away just as Barney came over, looking ready to do the same thing.  He’s a good friend.

“Gordon, you better gear up,” he advised.

“Why?”

“I, uh-”  He looked over at Dr. Pie for some reason, who was fiddling with an intercom terminal.

“Hello?!  Hello?!?  Pie, do you hear me?!”  It was the disembodied voice of Dr. Gryffindor again.

Dr. Pie’s button-fiddling was bringing on some auxiliary lights as yet more cracks of thunder echoed from the concrete tunnel that had been filled with unmistakably Combine figures.

“Yes, Gilda, we hear you, and you can stop shouting,” she dryly mouthed into the terminal.

“Operation Gryffin-Gore is officially underway!” the pink pony cheerily announced.

“It’s about celestiadamned-” Pinkie jabbed her hoof into the intercom, silencing the excited bird.  She suddenly turned to face me, with her eyes twitching as well as slowly dilating – her pupils drifting to opposite sides of her face, re-centering when she blinked, only to slowly drift away again.  This, combined with the inadequate lighting casting deep shadows this way and that across her face, was really, really, really, really cool-looking.

No, I did not find it frightening in the least; I find the idea that some ponies are scared of a smiling, bubbly, happy-go-lucky, poofy-haired, little old pink mare quite comical, actually..

“Heyyyyyyy Gordon!” she said with an enormous grin that went nicely with her dilated eyes.

“Heyyy what?”

“How do you feel about your new suit?”

Shit.  It now occurred to me that there was a transparent, yellow-orange crosshair over her face.

“Oh, yeah, it’s really- it’s new?”

“Kinda,” she said with a shrug.  I rapidly, almost reflexively flitted through my wonderfully familiar inventory screen, noting that I was the proud owner of one crowbar, one Saddle-Mounted Anti-Infantry Rifle (REA Special Issue), two nicely camouflaged military-grade saddlebags – which I could feel weighed down with those bullet-lunchboxes I stole from Slimpickins and friends – well, assisted in stealing... if you can steal from the dead... ugh, I’ll have to think about that one for a while – and what’s this?

I selected the foreign-looking icon, and my HEV suit floated out the outrageously large device.

“You like?” Dr. Pie inquired, her eyes full of fiery visions of science and revolution.

I’d seen rocket launchers before – hell, I’d used one at Black Mane – and this device certainly resembled one, with a long, fat tube flared out in black composite at both ends.  Where it differed radically from my previous experiences was its downright obnoxiously huge aiming mechanism – a metal ‘shield’ attached to the tube about a hoof and a half from the operational end of the device that reminded me of those early, massive tripod-cameras that you had to duck under a curtain to use.

“I’m really not sure I’m properly trained to use a rocket launcher, Doctor Pie.”  My experience with the launcher, as well as pretty much all explosives at Black Mane had been... scary.

“Oh-ho-ho!” Dr. Pie... coughed?  Laughed?  I don’t know what it was that she did, but it made me uncomfortable and I didn’t want her to do it again.

There was another tremendous explosion, and during the perhaps half a blink of an eye that the lights flickered off, the pink pony appeared beside me.

“That’s not a rocket launcher you’ve got there,” she whispered into my ear, the feeling of her hot, sweet-smelling breath against my short, tepid coat making me tingle all over.  “That’s SPERMS.”

It was amazing to me that my companions seemed less disturbed by the full-blown war going on right over their heads than they were by Dr. Pie being friendly.

Still high off the fumes of her tarty breath, I asked her what a ‘SPERMS’ was.

“Soldier Portable Evasion Resistant Munitions System, Doctor Freemane,” she sang, reciting the acronym like it was the name of a layer cake, and I took the opportunity to feel stupid as I realized that exact information was printed in huge, bold letters along the side of its cylindrical launch tube, clearly standing out against the sky-blue finish – a trademark of the Air Corps.

“Barney!” Dr. Pie suddenly shouted, and I actually did not jump that time, due to the already high volume of various thumps, thuds and booms symptomatic of the two opposing military operations taking place outside of our safe, secure, explosion-resistant sissy hole.

“Are the Gryffindors secured?”

“You betcha!” he responded while I physically cringed at his vernacular.  “Eighteen LGEMs prepped, secured, and ready for transit – I even pulled off the warning labels!”

Why is he saying that like it’s something to be admired?

“Okay, that is way too many, Barnesy.  Drop half your boom here and move out with the Doctor,” Pinkie commanded, sounding like she had already spent too much time around GIs.  Barney, who was breathing heavily under the weight of two bundled three-by-three racks of white tubes almost as long as his body and easily the circumference of his hind legs, unhesitatingly complied with Pie’s order, and there were exactly two heavy, metallic clunks as he cautiously retired the bundle on his left side to the concrete floor.

“Doctor Freemane,” Pinkie began as I eyed the extraordinarily complex, expensive, and fragile ammunition for my newest weapon.  “That is not a weapon in your possession...”

Aw, shit.  I thought it was.  And now it turns out that it isn’t.

“That is a weapon system.  Don’t forget that.”

“Yes, it’s a weapon that receives firmware updates and must occasionally be rebooted.”

She nodded, glad that I understood, and then her face turned an unusual shade of grim.

“Striders are coming to New Cloudsdale, Gordon.”

What are coming?

“And, rest assured – according to Gilda – their primary goal will be to destroy the rocket in that silo,” she said with a flick of her head towards the empty, wire-strewn pair of tunnels that led further into the depths of the BBBFF.

“And the only way you are going to stop them from destroying Gilda’s rocket...” she said, pausing - I assume - for dramatic effect.  Or maybe she’d simply forgotten what she was going to say next.

“...is with the Gryffindor Device.”

Ah, that’s what that is, I thought as Dr. Pie’s eyelids began a fresh fit of twitching, her expression going wall-eyed.

I wonder...

“Uhm, Doctor Pie, ma’am,” I began with a shyness that you’d think I’d have overcome by now, considering how many ponies I’d killed up to that point.  And that’s not counting zombies.

...and that is counting the Combine.

“Is that, uh... thing you’re doing...”

As the meager lights flickered off and on once again and the shadows they cast played across her insane expression, I began to understand why the mare could be frightening to some ponies.

“...Is that part of the Pinkie Sense?”

“A-yep!” she confirmed, nodding her head madly, her pink mane flipping and flopping up and down as it tried to keep up.

What she said next was of particular concern, however.  First of all, it rhymed, which was extremely disturbing all on its own.  But it was far more unsettling considering the extent to which the grounds of New Cloudsdale could, at the moment, be described as a hazardous environment.

“Twitch-a-twitching lazy eye means somepony’s about to die!”

------------------------------λ------------------------------

By the aching of my hooves...

My targeting-reticule shuddered and quaked in time with the ground beneath my hooves, which really were aching due to all of the exercise I’d been getting since I left the safety of the bunker.

...something wicked this way moves.

The spindly, barbed legs of the tripodal monster, the sickly-yellow bug-like carapace, the ‘hairs’ sticking out of the top, those dead, dark, unblinking, unthinking and unfeeling eyes, whose gaze was as deep and cool and unsympathetic as the intelligences that spawned them – these were familiar to me.  Surprisingly, the only visual difference between a live specimen of the things and a dead one – like the one I found in the Forest - was that the former was a great deal more animated.

*Beep...beep...beep...beeeeeeeeeeep!*

The preceding was not a quote from the works of any playwright - at least not any that I know of - but was the piercingly loud tone emitted by the Command Launch Unit of my SPERMS to – in theory – let its operator know that its targeting computer had acquired some very dangerous and, in all likelihood, quite scary thing, and was prepared to do its best to help render that thing an insignificant threat.

I magically squeezed the firing mechanism on the weapon system, and a long, fat tube as big around as my leg was expelled from the device’s Launch Tube Assembly with a POOMF.  Its end was dark, however, its engines unignited – it hadn’t been so much as launched, as spat out like a watermelon seed.

I had already turned around to haul pony ass for cover behind a washing machine outside a sandbag -armored barracks – why a washing machine was just sitting there in the grass, unconnected to anything, I never found out – when my already-airborne missile finally decided to actually take off.  I had to trust that its tiny, built-by-the-lowest-bidder electronic brain would find its way to its target without any further assistance from us fleshy, watery meat-bags who created it.  Sliding behind the washer, I was greeted by Barney, my ‘missile-caddie’ – I believe the official title was ammo bearer – who was taking cover behind an adjacent dryer - again, not connected to anything.

Just as I began to ask him if he was alright, I was interrupted by a stupendous explosion that felt like a blast of frigidly cold air instantly followed by a second wave of the kind of extremely warm air one would expect to be produced by a massive explosion.

Without hesitating, we both peeked out from behind our respective laundering systems like colts peering through the door to the fillies’ locker room.

The Gryffindor Device had done an admirable job.  The creature’s torso was utterly annihilated, its stories-tall limbs now attached to nothing but a swirling cloud of greyish-white smoke and steam, with jagged chunks of its crab-like body joining with sparks and exotic fluids in a toxic shower that fouled the ground for more than a dozen meters in every direction.  It seemed the manner in which these Gryffindors destroyed their targets - or perhaps simply the very biochemical nature of the Combine synth’s internals - produced quite a goopey, chunky, explosive mess post-mortem.

Hence ‘Operation: Gryffin-Gore’.  Haw-haw, I get it.

Unbeknownst to me, directly behind that tripod had been marching another, probably nearly bumping into its companion as it slowed down to maneuver between the two-to-three story high wooden building on its left, and the concrete bunker on its right.  Wherever it was, it had been way, way too close to its companion when it personally experienced the intellectual prowess of Doctor Gilda Gryffindor in the field of experimental weapons design.

The detonation of the Gryffindor Device had apparently torn off, or otherwise influenced the separation of one of the synth’s two front legs, causing it to lose its balance, tip over, and crash into the wooden building at its side, its remaining legs lifting into the air as its body careened through the attic, both main floors, and all the way down into the basement.

A rather shocked two-pony team of pegasi - who had been camped out on the other half of the now extremely unstable roof - bolted into the air, maneuvered into position, and launched a dumb-fire rocket into its exposed belly just before the building’s remaining superstructure yielded to the pull of gravity and caved in on the wailing monster trapped inside.

The wicked thing died with a long, muffled squeal followed by a gurgling grumble that sounded just as robotic and synthesized as the death knell of the Hunter, and every other damned one of these disgusting imitations of life our Benefactors sent to New Cloudsdale to help us.

Hiding back behind my functionally-useless washing machine, it occurred to me what the destruction of those Striders meant.

Striders, they called them.  Striders.

These were the machines that ended the world, that destroyed my country, that dissolved the 4,000 year empire of the Two Sisters, that killed the immortal dragons guarding Canterlot...

And for the first time ever, we - the Equestrian Resistance - had a weapon that was capable of blowing the fuckers to kingdom come literally as fast as it could be fired.  And before I left the bunker, I learned that these missiles were just a prototype – a test bed for a mass-production version of the Gryffindor Device that was already well into development, a version requiring no clunky, complicated launch-device that was basically a ‘sticky bomb’ that almost anypony could simply toss onto a Strider, and – in case of a fatal malfunction of its detonator – could even blow up simply by shooting it!

I listened as Rainbow Dash resumed barking orders over the megaphones and loudspeakers lining the giant flagpole atop the concrete bunker off to our left.  Dr. Pie explained that she was doing so because the communication tower had been ‘deep-sixed’ - which I think means ‘destroyed’ - and, presumably, because the Resistance couldn’t afford short-wave trotty-talkies.

“Fourteenth platoon, rendezvous with twenty-second Tactical Air Wing and provide cover for their takeoff... uhhhh, eighth aaaaand... I guess, anypony left in seventeenth, do the same.  And by ‘do the same’, I mean cover the twenty-second, okay, Dreyfus and Drew?!”

And for a moment, just a clear, serene, bright, shining moment, I was truly, genuinely convinced that between the creativity and ingenuity of the former Black Mane science team, the dedication of regular soldiers like Dreyfus and Drew, and the military experience, knowledge and leadership of General Dash – whom I was sure would eventually come around on the whole ‘launching headcrabs into City 7’ issue - the Resistance had a real, fighting chance of overthrowing the Combine and making Equestria safe for our Princesses to return.

It was then that a very odd coincidence occurred.  See, one of the reasons I had to be the one to use the SPERMS was because Dr. Gryffindor had modified it to use the targeting systems of an HEV suit, greatly reducing the lock-on time, but it was odd because that made me wonder if there was anypony else galloping around in an HEV suit, which was really odd because I swear to the Princesses and their Royal Court and Luna’s moon amusement park, that right as I thought that, I saw another pony poking his muzzle over the tip of the concrete bunker, his head encased in the Hostile Environment Helmet that only comes with a Hazardous Environment Suit.

That’s interesting, I thought, and moved on.

I went and collected Barney from behind the outdoor laundering station, the little island of relative security we’d carved out of the warzone seeming thoroughly out-of-place amidst the explosions, gunfire, garbled bleats, equine screams, and at least one stupendously loud and and blood- curdlingly terrifying dragon’s roar that flooded our ears from every corner of New Cloudsdale.

Like being in the eye of a tornado, was the most appropriate metaphor that came to my mind.

Barney and I set out for the open emergency front door beneath the cabin of a sky-camouflaged Armored Personnel Carriage, which was scrunched up against the southeastern wall of the Central Bunker, blocking its entrance – it could have been the General’s transport, an escape vehicle, or both.  Or, judging from the way it was parked, it could have been part of some failed attempt to establish a barricade between the bunker and the utterly demolished building to our right.

“You know,” I remarked to Barney as we made our way inside the derelict transport, “every time I hear a gunshot or a plasma bolt, no matter where it’s from or how far away, I have to fight this urge to just... hit the deck, you know?  Like every single shot is being aimed at-”

I froze in the narrow doorway.

Lying on the steel floor, bathed in the golden-yellow of the interior lights, was the body of a very old zebra mare, her Fançi Mane-6 rotational-release pump-action shotgun lying close by.

Her right eyelid was partway open, her eyeballs turned upward, not quite rolling to the back of her head, and her thick eyeliner was smudged and smeared, like she’d wiped her eyes several times, trying to clear them, perhaps of dust and debris, or perhaps of the tears that naturally form in response to such things - likely both.

“Gordon,” Barney began, “how in the hay am I supposed to fit through this doorway with these missiles strapped to my side and your big rear-end blocking the way?!”

“Oh, sorrrrr...” I whispered so quietly that even I could barely hear it  Some overpowering force was preventing me from even finishing a simple two-word sentence, so moving my entire body was out of the question.  I said nothing else and I thought nothing else, but I knew who this was.

“Hey, come on, Gordon!” Barney yelled, and I completely ignored him.

The APC had armored windows which could be opened and shot out of.  Two on the side opposite Zecora were propped open, bullet and scorch marks on their insides telling me she had put up quite a fight before some lucky Combine sniper made a great shot.  Just, a really, really great shot.

Judging by the spatter, she’d been looking out the right window when she died.  From the congealed, dark-red blood pooling beneath the side of her head that was facing down, I deduced she’d taken a round through her left frontal lobes, possibly through the eye itself, that this had occurred some time ago, and that she hadn’t been moved from the spot where she let out her last breath and, according to her traditional belief - elaborated to me long afterward - that dying in the Everfree Forest is something you should never, ever do, gave up her spirit to wander it for either the rest of eternity, or the end of time, whichever came first.

I heard Barney yelling, which wasn’t unusual.

I heard some giant with great, giant hooves stomping toward me, which was unusual.

I heard a very loud noise like a metal table being dragged across a cement floor.  Not unusual.

Then I saw a warning symbol pop up on my HUD that I’d never seen before.  Fortunately, it was written out as well as verbally announced, because, boy, was that weird scraping noise loud.

It was simply a flashing, orange triangle with an exclamation mark in the center, a seemingly generic warning symbol that, oddly, I’d never gotten until just then.

Below it, the words ‘DARK ENERGY SURGE DETECTED’ flashed in orange, and when my Hostile Environment Helmet unexpectedly deployed and rudely shoved something cold and rubber-padded into my mouth, I had about 1.5 seconds to appreciate the fact that Dr. Pie had apparently outfitted it with some version of an up-armored ‘chomp-bit’ like I’d seen on Barney’s purposefully intimidating ‘C7-MPE’ helmet all the way back in City 7, thus enabling me to grip things with my mouth even when my helmet was on!  A feature so angrily useless, I sort of wanted to kill Dr. Pie for adding it!

Then my body had an unpleasant meeting with the overpressure-wave from an absolutely terrific explosion that, if I had been just a few centimeters to either side, or if I’d been turned just a few degrees off of perfectly perpendicular and facing it head-on, it is a physical certainty that I would’ve had my neck snapped in numerous ways and in innumerable areas as it collided with the back of the APC.  However, that did not happen, and I was fortunately blown out the front of the troop- transport, my Hazard Suit’s health monitors penalizing a mere ‘15’ from the number that symbolizes whether I am alive or dead.

I don’t think I even blacked out at all, I was just winded as hell, like I’d been bucked in the stomach by the biggest, meanest bully in grad school for making fun of his thesis, and I was lying on my back, which, to be honest, I’ve never really been a big fan of.  Before I could recover, or think, or really do much of anything, I watched in shock and awe as Spike, that magnificent purple bastard, swooped down from the heavens, grabbed a Gryffindor Device out of Barney’s combat-saddle so fast that he didn’t even see who did it, and then, leaping into the air and beating those mighty wings, he drew back and hurled the thing like a celestiadamned javelin.

Curious as to what the purple dragon had thrown the strider-buster at, I tilted my head to follow its flight path, and witnessed a strider that was slowly standing up, its utterly massive belly-cannon so hot that it was glowing bluish-white all along its shaft and even past it, and it looked...

...confused?

If I’m reading synth emotions correctly?

My brain didn’t get to chew on this unique observation for a single second before the pressure- sensors on Spike’s ‘javelin’ made solid contact with the strider’s stubby little nose-turret, and the resulting explosion sent the abomination to go and live with the ghosts in the Everfree Forest.

Along with Zecora.

And Rainbow Dash.

And any hope the Resistance might have had for ending the Combine occupation of Equestria.

------------------------------λ------------------------------

A pink pony sat in front of a gold-framed photograph of a timidly smiling zebra, the ground all around her damp and soaked with an unbelievable volume of tears.  The photograph, resting atop a simple wooden box – the best our undertakers could do – was as black and white as the stripes on her coat, and looked like it had been taken when Princess Celestia was a filly.

On either side were a number of similar wooden coffins, carefully arranged in a semi-circle on the parade grounds of New Cloudsdale, its opening towards the Buttercup Bloomflower Black Forest Facility, and its apex facing the crumbling ruins of the Central Bunker, next to the smashed and imploded pile of smoldering debris that I am told used to be the officer’s dining hall – now the permanent resting place of a dead strider, since we had no cuddling way of fishing it out of the food pantry - also a total loss.

Beyond that were other landmarks about which the soldiers of New Cloudsdale were already making up legends and tall tails – for example, the (only there for those who wanted it) ‘Females-Only’ barracks that was all but annihilated when a Combine dropship made an unpowered, emergency landing on it, leaving every single piece of an abandoned game of chess sitting on a portion of the interior floor completely undisturbed.  Another popular one was the tail of the heroic last stand of Satan ‘Stan’ Steelhooves, the enormous red minotaur who died defending the ammo dump, carrying in each of his massive hands a mounted turret normally reserved for Main Battle Tanks and other armored vehicles, steel plating and all.

The Battle of New Cloudsdale, it was being called.  And I?  I wasn’t known as the complete failure who’d been carrying a loaded, primed and ready-to-fire anti-strider weapon and who was very much within range of a strider that was barreling toward literally the single most important individual in the Resistance, and for whatever stupid, inane, incomprehensible reason, DIDN’T FIRE.

Nope.  I don’t even want to write it down.

Fuck it.  I’ll do it anyway.

They were calling me Strider-Bane, the Freemane Device.

Those celestiadamned Gryffindor Devices.  That was what Pinkie was primarily referring to when she said she’d made ‘upgrades’ to my suit.  It had been upgraded with new software, which gave the Hazard Suit the novel ability to imitate - and therefore completely bypass - the built-in targeting computers of a wide variety of missile-launchers - computers which, compared to those of the HEV suit, she said, ‘took longer to perform floating-point operations than the half-life of bronium-115.’

That was why General Dash needed me.  She needed my Gryffindors, and I gave her the brush-off.

I sighed deeply, feeling the crushing weight of depression that was further amplified by the encroaching darkness, a welcome end to the shittiest day I’d had in... well, I couldn’t remember.

Though I ached from head to hoof and felt fit to collapse from exhaustion – among other things – I refused to plop down in the grass like the other mourners; I just stood, staring up at the swirling cumulus clouds still high enough in the sky to be cast in the glow of the sun.  The tiredness I felt in my bones made me long for some more of that ‘sugar milk’ that Zecora made for me.  And she’d given me that after healing the worst injuries I’d ever sustained with her unique zebra magic.  And that was after she took me into her home, and in doing so, risked her life and her property as surely she must have been aware of the Combine’s continued hunt for me.  And that was after she found me bleeding to death on the floor of Slimpickins’ haunted house, and even after I insulted her, (earning me a justified buck to the face), she carried me on her back all the way back to her cabin.

But, I suppose she did threaten to kill me once or twice.

I wasn’t cold and numb anymore.  I was thawing and in pain, the water dripping down my face.

Damnit, Zecora, why did you have to die where I would find you? I scolded her.  Didn’t you stop to think that your dead corpse might distract piddly ol’ Gordon were he to stumble across it?

I didn’t want to take off my glasses and announce to the world I was crying – it’s a stallion thing, I won’t try to explain it or rationalize it, as it’s outside my field – so I turned my head to the heavens, letting my tears drain down the side of my face.

Celestiadamnit, I threw away her really nice thermos into the same bunker she would die defending.

Oh my Goddesses.  It called to mind sins I’d committed against another pony right before she died.

The day I met Rainbow Dash... I used her temporary grave as a trash can, told her not to bore me with a story about her hometown, compared her – straight to her face and in front of her peers – to the Combine, and then...

...then I ...

The tears were starting to burn at my cheeks, and were being replaced faster than they could be magically wiped away.  It felt selfish in a way.  Why was I so torn up over these two ponies when at least a hundred others perished on the same battlefield?  But my mind dismissed that reasoning as false logic.  I would grieve over whomever the shivering hell I wanted to, however much I wanted to.

I was just too afraid to approach the open casket holding Rainbow Dash.  Aside from that, it just felt right to give some room to the poor yellow pegasus who had practically draped herself over Rainbow the instant her dusty and bruised, but otherwise untouched body was pulled from the intact front portion of the Central Bunker.  She was the one who’d pronounced her dead at the scene hours before, and while the rest of the medical staff had to stay on duty in the overflowing field-hospitals, she must have been granted an exception by the acting Installation Commander and new de-facto leader of the Resistance, Cadance – yeah, Princess Cadance, although it has never been explained to me to any degree of satisfaction what, exactly, merits her the title of ‘Princess’.  She’s sure as freaking darn not on the same level as Luna or Celestia.

I went up to Zecora’s casket - unlike Dash’s, it was closed out of consideration for the more sensitive among us - and stood next to the surreally depressed and surely extremely dehydrated Dr. Pie, offering the crying pony a shoulder to lean on, and maybe so I could lean back a little.

“I c-called her an evil enchantreh-heeehhh-heeesss,” she bawled, blowing her nose into a mane that was straighter than I had ever seen it.

I could relate.  “I accused Rainbow Dash of being as bad as the Combine!” I tearfully confessed, drawing no shortage of audible gasps from the weary crowd of mourners.

To my great shock, Dr. Pie recoiled.  “How can you be thinking about Rainbow Dash at a time like this?!” she demanded, gesturing with both of her forelegs at the coffin in front of her.

“Zecora’s dead, Gordon!”

I couldn’t fucking believe what I was hearing.  There was no way it was a joke, it was way too unfunny to be a joke.

“...so is Rainbow Dash!” I replied, our exchange starting to attract angry, heavily armed attention.

The unknowable pink pony stared at me incredulously.  “She is?!”

When the words I wanted to say popped into my head, something inside me snapped.

“F- wh- th...” were just some of the things I said in response before bolting off in the general direction of the main gate, not that the fact that the perimeter fence had been completely flattened didn’t make having a ‘gate’ completely pointless.  And for reasons unbeknownst to me at the time, the shield bubble I saw when I first arrived was also gone, leaving nothing to separate New Cloudsdale from the Forest in which it was entombed...

…nothing left to hide the fact that, despite the manicured lawn, open sky, large population, modern technology, and safe, secure, tightly-controlled environment, New Cloudsdale was still right smack in the middle of the evil, Goddesses-forsaken, haunted, cursed, malevolent, undying, unpredictable and uncontrollable Everfree-Goddessesdamned- Forest.

I was galloping away from the words.

The words that I thought when Pinkie Pie asked me if Rainbow Dash was dead.

They sickened me, stung me, burned me, hurt me... because in some ways... on some levels... parts of me believed that as surely as the sun shines and electrons repel and the speed of light is c and the massless field-flux always, always, self-limits...

“YES, RAINBOW DASH IS DEAD – I KILLED HER!”

The part of the base I was in was empty, both of inhabitants and bodies, but I still sort of expected my words to echo back at me, especially considering how loud I’d said them.  Instead, it was like the black Forest swallowed them up, saving them for future use.

Hah.  Black Forest.  How incredibly straightforward.

Somehow, I ended up at the demolished bunker, staring at that damned crooked flagpole lying bent and twisted across the ground, and, stripped of its flags, a naked, meaningless pole awkwardly jutting out of the derelict and decaying ruins, no different from the crooked rebar poking out of the rubble like ribs from a rotting corpse.

I don’t know why, but I just felt compelled to climb to the top of the great pile of crumbling debris.  It was like King of the Hill; if I sat on top of the mess I felt responsible for creating, it was like I took ownership of it.  Come to think of it, that must be why monarchs feel compelled to sit on thrones.

As I sat atop my throne of Regret, gazing out upon my kingdom of Missed Opportunities, wearing my crown of Failure, I recalled the advice I imagined another monarch and/or Goddess giving me in the tunnel underneath Ponyville.

“Everything is up to you now, Gordon!”

“And a fine fucking job I’ve done!” I screamed.  “Everything was up to me, and I completely fucked up!”  My tears continued to flow, heavy and warm, splashing against the concrete mountainsides and flowing around the rebar trees of my shameful realm.

“...I’m a complete... ff-fucker-upper... and I don’t even know what that means.”

They’d come for me.  They’d come to New Cloudsdale for me, their ‘Anticitizen One’.  Luna, they had a loving codename for me.  Everypony else - everypony else they could kill was just... gravy.

I considered everything I’d done to reach this point – everything I’d survived, every pony I’d killed and watched kill and suffer and die, all the sacrifices others had made to push me to my next goal, all the scarce and invaluable medical supplies I’d used up, and for what?

I’d failed.

I failed.

In spite of everything, when the moment of truth came, when everything was at stake, when there was no margin for error, no time to waste, what did I do?  I dilly-dallied.  I stood there in the APC, staring at her lifeless body, and I was shocked, yes, and it was startling, of course, but that wasn’t enough for me.  I stood there as precious, irreplaceable seconds ticked by, wondering how she died, when she died, where she was standing when she died, who she was shooting, and from what angle, and who killed her, and how, and had she been moved, and did she die instantly or did she bleed out, and then I moved on to my analysis of the finer points of CEREBRAL ANATOMY, and then... then...?

Then I ran out of time.

I moved my head forward and slammed it back against my cold, concrete throne as hard as I could.  Once was not sufficient, and I went into a rage, bringing my head forward and slamming it back, again and again and again and again, and when I stopped because my neck was tired, I saw stars, and the back of my head was pounding.

Oh, look, there’s Gordon, what a clumsy klutz.  Oh, Gordon, your tendency to constantly and consistently fuck up everything you do is an endearing personality trait that makes us laugh and giggle and chuckle and say, ‘Oh, Gordon, what will you FUCK UP next?!”

Even when it really, really, really REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY FUCKING COUNTS... he’ll still... fuck up...

...because that’s our Gordon...

‘...what an adorable fuck-up,’ they’ll giggle.

They’ll giggle.

They’ll giggle at... something.  What do they giggle at?

My slightly stunned and pounding brain was trying to conjure an extremely specific auditory memory transcribed in the very earliest partitions of my long-term memory, a string of proteins and RNA lying dormant somewhere in my cerebrum, proteins that had not come into contact with any electrical impulses in a good bit more than twenty years - or if they had, I never knew about it.

Suddenly, I could smell crayons and almost feel tiny pages crinkling in my telekinetic grip, and I saw a bully whose face I would always remember, but whose name would forever escape me... and there was an old, old fashioned television hanging precariously over the edge of a cart that almost certainly would’ve killed somepony if ever it finally did what it always seemed on the brink of doing.

And there, on the fuzzy, colorful screen, was an unbelievably joyous and animated little pink pony whose face I never really got a good look at because she was always moving too damned much.

But I understood her words.

“...Giggle at the ghostie, guffaw at the grossly,” the tune came, its lyrics transcribed across the bottom of the screen, along with a little yellow ball that bounced across them in time to the music.

And each song was apparently brought to us by these pictures of assorted baked goods and treats, and some company’s indecipherable logo... Good Goddesses, we were being targeted with subliminal advertising since practically the day we were born!

Ha!

“Hahahahahahahaha!” I suddenly rasped through my tears and retches and gagging and pain.

“AHAHAHAHHAHHAHHAHA!”

I started cackling like a mad scientist because it was fun and I was one.

It felt nice.  It was just like when I regained the ability to feel pain back at Zecora’s house, after the excessive amounts of morphine I’d been doped up on started to wear off.

The functioning of the equine mind is incomprehensibly illogical, and something I have never fully understood and never will – and I’ve got one!  Have for years! - but my mind... for whatever stupid cuddling reason... it was like I wanted everything to seem as bad as possible.  At that moment, in that state... I actually desired the world to seem bleak and horrible and hopeless... like I was just being honest and realistic and simply seeing and accepting reality for the way it truly was.

But it was a lie, wasn’t it?

I turned my face toward the incredible pantheon of color that Celestia managed to cajole from the sky over this unnatural Forest as she lowered the sun to make way for the moon, bringing this bloody day to an end, and I put the question to the Goddess of the coming Night.

“It’s a lie, isn’t it?” I asked in a conversational voice, like She was sitting right across from me.

As the light from Her sister’s responsibility shone through thicker and thicker stratosphere, the beautiful pink and rose and apricot oranges that somehow filled an evil sky told me that it was.

Things were not hopeless.  Everything was not terrible and horrible and bleak and final.  We were not doomed.  And the notion that we had no hope left, that our defeat was now assured, that the Enemy’s victory was now inevitable and unchangeable, and that we should accept falsehood and cynicism as truth and reality was a lie; an outright fabrication.

And as I realized that even the course of history itself could be altered, that not even events that have already occurred are set in stone, I thought to myself,

Oh, no.

And as I cycled through my HUD’s inventory screens, stopping when I’d highlighted the yellow box labeled, ‘Time Traveling Tome of Starswirl the Bearded (MAGICAL OBJECT)’, and a little ancient scroll of tanned papyrus floated over to my face and carefully unrolled itself, I thought,

Awwww, shit.

And before I could read the first line of the ancient riddle (and also be taken in for a desperately needed psych-eval), a haunted and howling wind roared from out of the midst of the Forest that doesn’t want to let go, the still slightly sun-tinted sky was consumed by an impenetrable blackness that consumed the feeble beam from my automatically-activated hazard light, and my little pony ears folded back against my skull as – I swear to the Goddesses – the Everfree Forest spoke.

“YOU HAVEN’T WINGS, AND TIME IS FLYING!”

The geographical location rebuked me in what I’m sure you can imagine was an absolutely holy motherfucking scary-ass voice, and the possessed wind whipping around me blew even harder.

“YOU CANNOT STOP THE DEAD FROM DYING.”

Ah.  I see the objection.  And I have a logical, well-thought-out rebuttal.

In what is easily one of the weirdest things I have ever done, I cleared my throat, held up my chin, and responded to the Everfree Forest’s insulting accusation.

“I intend no such thing.”

The screeching wind that sounded like the tormented wails of the eternally damned floating up from the deepest pit of the darkest depths of hell subsided for a moment, and I got the sense that the Forest was kind of giving me a weird look – like it was waiting for me to explain.

I took the uncontested delay to bathe the extremely old and crinkled Tome floating in front of me in the whitish-yellow beam of my torchlight, silently reading the surprisingly short and straightforward riddle it posed.

Coincidentally, the answer was basically the same thing I was going to tell it anyway.

“I swear on the Book of Souls – which I continuously remind myself is an object of pure hatred and unknowable pain whose name I don’t dare ever again utter – I won’t change a thing.”

The soul-devouring darkness conjured by the Forest was violently banished as my body was enveloped by a luminous bubble of white ball-lightning, and a raging whirlpool of magical energy began to coalesce around my – extremely hot – horn.

Staring at the Tome floating in front of me, I broke out in a cold sweat as I witnessed the spectral shadow of a figure trotting towards me that, though we were little more than strangers, I’d very quickly developed an intense dislike for.

And before snatching the Time Traveling Tome of Starswirl the Bearded out of the air on which it lay, he regarded me with a look of intense disapproval, and in his odd way of speaking, snapped,

“We’ll just seeee... about that.”

And then, well... I simply remained in the exact same spot in every single dimension except one.

------------------------------λ------------------------------

Trouble.

A great white creature like a flying manta-ray trailed by great, thick tendrils of a sickly whitish alien composite that retched and spasmed as if in pain as the purple and green dragon clinging to it like a lamprey gnashed its teeth capable of chewing through diamonds and, tearing off its organic, manufactured skin, breathed its hellish, emerald-green dragon’s breath over the unnatural creature’s writhing, pulsating, living insides while it screamed.  The abomination unto nature gave out a shrill, frightened, tormented wail, and with the hot, blood-red glow of the setting sun reflected in its own bodily fluids, the crablike pincers along its belly at last gave in to some overpowering reflex and reluctantly wrenched open as the assaulting dragon, now upside-down, with his front claws still hooked deep into the aircraft’s sandy skin, scraped and scratched at its glistening internals with the scythe-like talons of its hind legs, eliciting showers of electrical sparks and a fresh litany of screams.  Like a newborn foal dropped by a stork, a ribbed, blue-steel box that called to mind a cargo container fell from the sky like lightning and struck the ground like thunder.

Trouble tends to follow in my wake.

I slammed my body flat as an inchworm against the dark-grey roof of the Central Bunker, my senses overwhelmed with information, and my already exhausted brain that just minutes previous, I’d been pounding until I felt dizzy, was now my only...

“...prayer...” I whispered, fully aware of how impossible it was to hear my own voice, gazing upward as I did so, and for just a moment, the world became wondrously dimmer and more starry as a surprisingly wide smile found its way onto my face.

Past steamy contrails of rockets and yellow-orange tracers of anti-aircraft fire, through a break in the scattered sheets of cirrus clouds, I saw the faint, white portrait of the moon, the self-motivating cloudbanks above this Magically Anomalous Region covering it back up as quickly as it had appeared.  It was like Luna was winking at me.

I winked back, and for a moment, nothing in the world could’ve ruined my good mood - not the terrific crunch of a mortally wounded Combine dropship making an uncontrolled descent into the ‘Females-Only’ barracks, nor the primal, animalistic roar from Spike immediately afterward – a war cry that was laced with so much adolescent rage and insatiable bloodlust, I wondered if the Combine rank-and-file even had the autonomy to surrender, or perhaps offer themselves up as sacrifices - not even the crack of a sniper’s bullet followed by a clear and wet – very wet – *plunk* somewhere very close to my right, followed almost instantly by a brief, muffled sound like water from a sprinkler hitting a carriage’s windshield, and then after that, a sack of potatoes that had been hammering in a couple of nails having a heart attack and falling over onto the floor.

A good hearted, but just... easily irritated... sack of potatoes... that made the most delicious...

Shapes started to lose focus and definition, and the colors of the battlefield began to bleed as I thought about that sack of potatoes I knew damn well I’d just heard go to join the Forest she seemed to genuinely love.  And this was in spite of it being a soul-swallowing demon-pit that was literally a huge inspiration to the devil of one of the hells it contained a portal to.  It seemed logical that my other major sense of use to me in combat situations was also about to be diminished with a reminder that there was a huge hugboxing flagpole behind me with about 1,000 decibels evenly divided amongst a baker’s dozen of tornado-siren megaphones and rock-concert loudspeakers.

“Fourteenth platoon, rendezvous with twenty-second Tactical Air Wing and provide cover for their takeoff... uhhhh, eighth aaaaand... I guess, anypony left in seventeenth, do the same.  And by ‘do the same’, I mean cover the twenty-second, okay, Dreyfus and Drew?!”

It was then that I noticed that the large, almost condo-like building to my right was completely caved-in, with a pair of massive, spindly legs curled up like a dead spider and poking out of the pile of smoldering debris clogging the structure’s stone-and-mortar foundations.  Though my targeting reticule was blurred by tears, I did not miss the hulking, sickly yellow monstrosity that came lumbering through the center of my vision, stomping its way across the grassy promenade to...

... some...

... other...

... target...

Of course, it was only then, lying on the otherwise featureless concave roof of the dull-grey bunker in my shiny, orange, reactive armor that just twinkled in the angry red light of the setting sun, that it occurred to my huge, magnificent, grad-school-educated, doctorate-holding brain that;

I probably stand out like a big, giant, stupid-

“PRIORITY ALERT: ANTICITIZEN ONE ACQUIRED.  PRIORITY OVERRIDE: ENGAGE.”

... idiotic, stubborn, arrogant...

“ANTICITIZEN ONE ENGAGED.  EXPUNGE.  ABDICATE ALL SUBLEVEL RESTRICTIONS.”

...prideful, cocky...

I tried to make myself as small as possible as I hid behind that silver flagpole while heavy blue raindrops of magnetically-confined superheated plasma thudded against the concrete and steel, turning them into magma and molten metal, and sent tiny, glassy globules into the air that gently melted off of the wonder-materials of my Hazardous Environment Suit but stuck to my exposed ears and cheeks, singing my fur and burning my skin.

... piddling, delaying, procrastinating...

My helmet was only halfway deployed, every millisecond it delayed a lesson in pain-thresholds.  Completely negating the brevity of their passage, the plasma bolts that screamed past my face felt far hotter than the molten metal and rock, their heat-radiation penetrating beneath my skin and fur, cooking my brain and my eyes.

... intelligent, intuitive, resourceful...

My Hostile Environment Helmet clicked into place, closed, and locked.  Half a dozen symbols and warnings flashed, and my ringing ears picked up the muffled tones of good old fashioned auditory warnings, all demanding my attention, all receiving none.

... MIT-graduated, PhD-in-Theoretical-Physics-holding...

I rounded the flagpole and stood on four yellow-orange hooves, noting with satisfaction the noticeably dimmer shade the world now was – as it turned out, my new helmet also had tinted plates that extended over my glasses – selected my crowbar from inventory – figuring it would be a good idea to have something to bite down on other than rubber – and silently whispered to the Goddesses exactly how I felt about what They were about to make me do.

... scientist.  A scientist who is about to do science.

My mind raced as I tried to recall the exact wording of the Tome in regards to its duration, but under such extreme stress, all I could recall was the basic, underlying message that I could only go back once, and only for a few seconds.  And by my calculations, hell, it’d been a few seconds.

...or kill something.

I already knew what the spider-like machine was going to do – I’d seen it destroy the bunker, kill Rainbow Dash, and very nearly kill me.  And between my Hazard Suit’s extremely unusual warnings about ‘Dark Energy’ and the devastation I’d observed striders as being capable of inflicting, I’d constructed a picture – crude and incomplete, but sufficient for my purposes – of what, exactly, those peculiar cannons beneath the striders were; a weapon system that actually fell within my particular field of dimensional physics.

Motes of white light began to gather around me, and I felt the grim, bleak future calling me back.

Right about time.

The strider crouched down, bringing its repulsive, barb-covered, and - like all synths - crab-like torso low enough that it was blocking the nearly-gone sun, but still far enough away that I couldn’t try any funny business – I almost wanted to tell it not to worry, for I wasn’t to be its cause of death.

Lattices and starbursts of blue light joined my white lights in a twisting spiral that traced back to the mouth of the machine’s incredibly prominent belly-mounted cannon.  The light from all around us, the trees, the grass, the Forest, the buildings, all of it bent with the curvature of space, becoming more and more distorted as the pinpricks of blue multiplied and tightened into an almost solid line.

I smiled as I heard Barney shrieking at past-me to get the hell out of that APC before the strider in front of future-me killed everypony.

You can’t interrupt me, Barnes.  Not when I’m in the zone.

Though I’d once written a paper exploring a strikingly similar thought-experiment – a paper for which I received a B minus – I still couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

I’d been staring into the blue-tinged face of death for some five to seven seconds at this point, and instead of being very, extremely dead, I was experiencing a whole range of strange phenomena resulting from the totally unprecedented interaction occurring before my eyes between the incomprehensible forces of Magic and the equally incomprehensible forces of Nature – two disparate fields that Twilight Sparkle had always viewed simply as different aspects – different angles, different dimensions - of some greater, fundamental truth, and had spent not just her entire career, but her entire life trying to unify the two.

And standing there, conducting what could very well be the greatest scientific experiment of my lifetime, listening to this extremely irritating noise like a big metal desk being dragged across a cement floor while having that annoying ‘DARK ENERGY SURGE DETECTED’ warning with the yellow triangle that continuously blinked on and off with no way to dismiss it from my HUD...

I knew, somehow, that if it was possible, Twilight was watching this and smiling.

I only lamented the fact that I had no way of recording it for future study, particularly the fantastically strange ‘tunnel vision’ I was experiencing – weirdly similar to the ‘interference effect’ that happened when I tried to teleport from Black Mane East to Black Mane West.  But one theory I have as to what was going on, was that the strider’s cannon was working just as hard as its little dark-energy heart could to frame-drag my fifth-dimensional space towards its compressed-dark-matter- singularity – thus the sound of a desk being dragged across a floor – while my time-traveling spell was essentially doing the opposite, sucking me away from the attractive force of the singularity as it tried to move my fourth-dimensional self to another point, distorting the field the strider was attempting to create, and dissipating its energy into the future – thus producing a whooshing sound.

Now, due to the extremely high amounts of science at work in this particular situation, there’s some wonkiness mostly with the perception of the passage of time – I assure you that from where I stood, the strider’s gun was ‘powering up’ for a hell of a lot longer than two and a half seconds.  In theory, under ideal circumstances, it would have been possible to sustain such a scenario indefinitely – I know virtually nothing about strider weaponry, and everything here is educated speculation that just happened to not be completely wrong – but I was almost certain that was not going to happen in our case; I assumed that the spell of Starswirl’s Tome, being magical in nature, was a lot more powerful than the effect of the strider’s cannon, meaning that it would eventually overcome the ‘dark matter drag’ and suck me back into the future when I belonged.

And the problem was that as soon as I left, and that equalizing force disappeared, the cannon would power up as usual, and fire as intended - killing Rainbow Dash.

I couldn’t let that happen again.  Thinking for a moment, I decided to very carefully see if I could use any of my unicorn magic at all while my horn was channeling the power of the Tome.

I decided to try and pick up the crowbar in my mouth.

WHOAH.

I discovered I could levitate my crowbar – after I accidentally wrapped it around my jaw one way, then wrapped it around my muzzle another way, and then finally straightened out the thick bar of solid steel.  More than a little freaked out, I put it back in inventory.

Then I got a terrible, horrible, awful idea.

I reached out with my magic and grabbed the strider’s elongated cannon, causing the stupid creature to jerk away in shock and confusion, and - somehow surprising me, PhD-holder that I am – when it did so, the evidently overly-sensitive and reactionary biomechanical war machine canceled its celestiadamned firing sequence.

Though I was, of course, glad that I was pulled through my little wormhole at least a hundredth of a second before the strider’s undirected and less-than-full-strength, but still extremely unsafe pocket of potential energy was suddenly liberated, I did feel a little sorry for myself, as that blast not only really hurt, it also almost KILLED ME when it blew me out the front of that illegally-parked APC.

Sorry about that, Gordon.  I’ll try harder to think about things before I do them, I lied to myself.

Ugh.

Anyway, fuck apologizing to Rainbow Dash.  As soon as I get back, I’m making her apologize to me for bucking me in the face.

------------------------------λ------------------------------

“Oh, you’re not dead, you fucking TWIT!”

It was now simply nighttime, and one would be hard-pressed to see without some sort of aid.  By the feeble light of electric and magical lamps, I could see that the mass funeral-slash-wake was almost completely empty, with the exception of a pretty pink pony princess and a mournful yellow pegasus whom she was attempting to comfort: a yellow pegasus that, it was now incredibly obvious to me, wasn’t a part of the medical staff, and couldn’t be, despite her supposed ‘title’ of ‘Medical Officer’.  And it wasn’t just because she was still out here with the ‘dead’ when any other doctor, nurse or medic would’ve been in the hospital-tents, suturing wounds, emptying bedpans, and just generally not pronouncing ponies to be dead whom I had an almost indescribably strong intuitive conviction could not possibly be so.  Her pink mane was simply much too long.  No nurse, no medical personnel, and few food service workers would be allowed to have a mane that long.

I didn’t think they heard me, so I continued yelling in a threatening manner while advancing on them.

“ANSWER ME!” I shouted at General Rainbow Dash, who was lying very still in a simple wooden coffin, its singular lid leaning against a supporting stand, and its front decorated with all sorts of little trinkets like wreaths and baubles and black-and-white photographs.  Lovingly heaped around its base was a bulging pile of tulips, roses, ponisettias – I’ll never be able to name them all - representing all the colors of the rainbow, and arranged to roughly resemble one.

I was almost jealous – which only made me angrier.

Stomping towards the open casket with my helmet retracted and my sweaty, dirty, partially burned and slightly puffy face cast in deep, black shadows, I understood that the pair of ponies were startled by my appearance - however, it wasn’t for the reasons I imagined.

Through bared teeth, I growled, “Unless I changed the past so that half-charged... indirect... mis-fire actually killed you...”

Princess Cadance slowly backed out of my way, as did the yellow mare – I could read her name engraved on a clip in her mane, illuminated in a blue glow – Fluttershy, whom I really should have recognized, but I suppose in that light, with a river of dried tears and mascara running down her face, she just didn’t look the same.

Reaching General Dash’s casket, I leaned in close to her face – which, I noted, had beads of a clear liquid running down it – and, in a move I was later told would have made her proud, yelled,

“I SAID...”

I turned around and drew back one of my twitanium-armored legs.

“GET...”

Given that the motile actuators in my suit didn’t actually make me any stronger, my buck probably didn’t even match the force with which the athletic career-soldier bucked me.

“UP!”

The air was pierced with the sound of splinters, and a hoof-shaped dent in the side of the everwood casket disappeared from my view as the whole sacred vessel broke free of its flimsy moorings, rotated about its axis and spilled its highly-decorated cyan cargo onto the grass, which was matted completely flat in an area the exact shape of Fluttershy’s butt.

Instincts kicking in, Rainbow Dash’s wings flared open, beating like a hummingbird.  Her hooves touched the ground, and she drunkenly stumbled forwards and backwards before collapsing onto her butt in the exact same spot - only inverted - that her friend had been keeping warm for her.

As the not-dead General vomited onto my hoofboots, Fluttershy screamed, Cadance yelled for a medic, and I cackled like a mad scientist – which I no longer was, as my spirits had been lifted.

“Got you BACK, Rainbow Dash!” I gleefully yelled at the now-conscious pony.

She responded by blowing out spittle onto my hooves.

Alerted by the sudden high-pitched squeal off to my side, I managed to sidestep the yellow blur that wrapped itself around the cyan pegasus, embracing her in – I swear to Princess Celestia – a full-mouthed kiss, which she held for several seconds before breaking off, possibly afraid that she might vomit again.

“So, General,” I began, finally breaking my silence after awkwardly waiting around for several minutes while Fluttershy and a Resistance medic fussed over her, trying to get her to ingest an array of liquids as colorful as the bouquet of flowers around her coffin.

“...so what?” she rasped, cutting short a conversation with Princess Cadance that I actually hadn’t been eavesdropping on.

“So... given recent developments... uhhh...”

I was sweating, and it wasn’t from the heat of plasma bolts, and though I didn’t actually wish that I was sweating from the heat of plasma bolts instead of Rainbow Dash, I could certainly see the appeal of plasma bolts.

“Uhm, given recent developments, do you think it would be possible to maybe... reconsider what I... said...?”

She snorted, which I mistook for her getting ready to throw up again.

“Listen, Freemane, sorry about bucking you, but we’re still attacking the Citadel.”

My face fell as she looked over at Princess Cadance with sympathy.

“That really, really sucks about Shining Armor, but I can’t devote any assets to Canterlot for just one pony... not even him.”

My face fell several hundred more meters.  My brain couldn’t formulate an inquiry into the situation, but it deduced everything it needed to know; Princess Cadance would have been the new leader of the Resistance, but I had to go and alter history to stop Rainbow Dash from dying.

And Cadance would have preferred to attack Canterlot.

“-He knew what his duty was, and he did it,” she said with a surprising lack of emotion.  “Anyway, whatever we do, we have to do it now.  The Combine have forced our hoof.  Either we attack, or we all die the next time they do.”

You’ll all die if you attack the Citadel.

“All in,” Dash agreed, nodding.

And before you all die, you’ll launch a rocket full of headcrabs into Mane-FUCKING-HATTAN.

“But I just saved your life,” I said, exasperated.  “And you won’t even re-”

“When the hell did you save my life?!” she demanded.

Shit was the only word that came to mind when I realized that I no longer possessed the Time Traveling Tome, nor any other proof besides my own insane blathering that I’d altered the course of history – that I’d stopped the dead from dying.

I could feel the Forest rustling as I finally realized what I had done.  What I should have done.

I should have let you die, I thought as I stared at General Dash, simultaneously the Resistance’s greatest hope and the singular assurance of its annihilation.

“Gordon- you’re glowing,” she suddenly gasped.

“Yeh-... yeah!” I angrily agreed, assuming it was some figure of speech.

“Ooooh, you are glowing!” said Dr. Pie, who’d appeared out of nowhere and scared the shit out of me, as she sometimes does.

“What?”  None of what they were saying was making any sense.  None of what they were doing was making any sense.  The small, illuminated circle of General Dash’s coat that was slowly crawling across her forehead didn’t make any sense.

Wait, what?

I activated my suit’s ‘zoom’ function, centering my crosshair right between her eyes – and not because I intended her any harm, it’s just that that was where the curious little blue circle was.

Something else was weird; the lighting conditions made that lit section of her coat seem... teal.

The height of a wave doesn’t change its frequency, Gordon! I mentally smacked myself.  That meant this was a-

Oh piss, that’s a laser-sight, isn’t it?

I spun around, facing the darkness that now suffocated the camp, punctuated here and there by islands of white and yellow light, and I found myself suddenly wishing my HEV suit had thermal optics.  Funny thing is, I don’t think they would’ve shown up on thermal anyway.

I’d seen the machine-ponies, the transequines before.  I’d killed scores of them in City 7, watched as the optical ports in their gas-masks, looking like eyes that glowed the same shade of electric-blue as their plasma bolts, filled up with their unnatural blood.  Blood that was too cold.  Too slimy.  Too oily.  But this one, this lone straggler that the clean-up crews somehow missed, the ‘eyes’ of his mask weren’t blue.  There weren’t even two of them to speak of.

I never said anything, and he never got a shot off.  I simply saw him, cloaked in a pearly white suit that made for extremely bad camouflage at night, crouching behind that enormous black water- buffalo – which our thirsty troops were thankful survived the battle – and reached out with my unicorn magic, trying to see if it would be possible to grab or dislodge the weapon clipped to his surprisingly equestrian-looking combat saddle.

I felt like I could do more than that – like when you go to the gym (which I actually did a couple of times in high school) and pick up a weight that is much lighter than you were expecting.

So I thought, oh, what the hell, and I grabbed him – all of him – and dragged him across the ten or twenty meters between us.  Seeing that he was still armed with a very cool-looking sniper rifle, and, obviously, still alive, I then shot him.  Not with bullets, but with kinetic force.

A blue stream of magical energy connected the elite Overwatch - as they are called - soldier and the tip of my horn, and he was sent hurtling backwards into the iron tank of the water-buffalo as if Princess Celestia had accidentally sent him to go rise in the east instead of the sun.

He didn’t stop after his body squashed against the side of the water tank, the force knocking it over, but thankfully not puncturing it.  It kept going, into the side of an administration building, smashing through the wood and plaster of multiple interior walls, the body not stopping until it was nothing more than a particularly chunky slush of gore and electronics splattered against the inside of the outermost wall and the desk of some poor sergeant.  An old-fashioned chimney on the roof of the building collapsed inward, flooding the space with red, white and black dust.

I rounded on General Rainbow Dash so quickly I felt my tail smack against my flank.

“WE ARE ATTACKING CANTERLOT TOMORROW!” I screamed in an almost blinding fury.

I’ll never know what I looked like as I said that; what she saw as she stared into my face while I felt electricity crackling through my teeth and my horn, my bones, my whole body surging with an energy, an unstoppable fury unlike any I would ever experience again as long as I lived, and my spirit, my will, my conscience, my being, burning with a self-righteous conviction that she was wrong, and I was right, and I was not going to allow her to lead these mares and stallions who had just fought and killed and died by the scores for a cause more worth fighting for than any cause I had ever been a part of to their deaths in City 7, and in the process, make herself the co-signer on not only the death warrant of everypony in the entire city when her targeted plague of headcrabs inevitably spreads beyond the control of either side, but indeed, she would share some of the responsibility and shoulder some of the blame for the deaths of every citizen of Equestria at the synthetic, bio-mechanical hooves of the Universal Union after the Resistance, which was supposed to burn that unnatural abomination to the ground is instead destroyed from within by a blue idiot who couldn’t see the Forest for all the Goddessesdamned trees!

She stared at me.  I stared harder.

I couldn’t see anypony else’s reaction, I was so focused on her.  I did, however, finally notice that there was that odd warning flashing in the peripheral of my vision, once again informing me in all capital letters that a ‘DARK ENERGY SURGE’ had been detected.

Even stranger; it wouldn’t go away.

“Fine, Freemane,” General Dash at last broke her silence, her face a mask of determination, her glare at first seething with anger, then gradually fading to more contemplative, and then serious, like she would look if she was explaining to a teenager the risks of cuddling before marriage or pulling a carriage that’s as loaded as they are.

I blinked, and gulped for air, suddenly aware of how out of breath I was.

Turning to the inexplicably-present Dr. Pie, she said, “Pinkie, you and Gilda ready the rocket-”

“-Missile!” the contraptionologist corrected her.

Rainbow Dash glared at her for what felt like seven hours.

“...’missile’... set target coordinates for the Royal Palace in Canterlot.  We attack at dawn.”

Achievements Unlocked!  Press Shift+Tab to View.

Allons-y! – Travel through time!

That’s all (s)he wrote – This author doesn’t know the meaning of brevity!  Or punctuality!  Gaben would be proud.

This chapter is dedicated to Gabe Newell, who occasionally takes a break from Episode 3 to watch My Little Pony.

C H λ P T E R  N I N E :

THE DECEIVER OF THE WORLD

“It has come to my attention that lately some have called me a ‘collaborator’, as if such a term were shameful.  I ask you, what greater endeavor exists than that of collaboration?

In our current unparalleled enterprise, refusal to collaborate is simply a refusal to grow – an insistence on suicide, if you will.  Did the pegasi refuse to leave the mountaintops?  They did not.  In want of a new home, they boldly leapt into the sky, leaving the fearful and superstitious behind, forever ignorant of their natural ability to live amongst the clouds – doomed despite their eternal vigilance.  Our nation’s founding myth tells us that our ancestors were nearly destroyed by mythical demons who grew stronger as they fed off of their disunity and disharmony – a fairy tale, of course, but a fairy tale with an unmistakable moral message: When we choose to fight amongst ourselves in the face of impending calamity, we threaten our own destruction.  The demons of division and animosity toward one another live inside each of us, as does the ability to choose not to give in to the selfish compellations of Instinct which tell us that change is something inherently negative to be feared and resisted at all costs and by all means, even violence and bloodshed.  We should be working to build up our world, not leave it in ruins!  We should be spreading unity and hope, not terror and chaos!  Shall we model ourselves after Discord?  Are all the achievements of ponydom fated to be nothing more than a layer of broken plastic shards thinly strewn across a fossil bed, sandwiched between the Yawning tar-pits and an eon’s worth of mud?

I have come to deeply admire the earth-ponies from the Hearth’s Warming Eve tail.  As the legend goes, there they were, in a harsh and inhospitable land where food was scarce, medicine nonexistent, and war a fact of life, a land where they were forced to compete with tribes of unicorns and pegasi for resources while seemingly lacking any extraordinary abilities of their own.  And in spite of this, they pressed forward.  Drawing on a cleverness and a tenacity they never knew they had, they discovered a strength few had ever thought possible: The capacity to feed themselves, no matter the season, without anypony ever going hungry.  In fact, so great was their bounty, they had food left over to trade with the pegasus and unicorn tribes – their competitors!  Their adversaries!

They gave food to their enemies.  I would do the very same if our Benefactors allowed it.

No, it wasn’t their cleverness or their ability to succeed in the face of adversity that I admire most about these simple ponies, as I believe we are all capable of such things.  It was their willingness to forgive their enemies, to give them the benefit of the doubt – even to the point where they were actually feeding the very ponies whom they had been fighting in the not-so-distant past, and toward whom they certainly still possessed no shortage of animosity and distrust.

They put down their weapons and picked up their tools, and together they began to build a New World.  Is it not possible that perhaps they were labeled ‘collaborators’ by some of their peers for doing so?  And out of their collaboration came something new and wonderful that today we call Equestria; our home, our birthplace, our starting point, but only our starting point.  A cradle offers no delusions of permanent residence and unlimited support – even if these things were possible within the laws of nature, how could we be content when we were meant for so much more?  All the world cannot contain the enormity of our potential, the greatness of what we might one day become if we give ourselves the chance;  if we make a conscious choice to abandon Instinct and reject the dogma of decay dictated by our ingrained conservatism – our natural resistance to change – and move ourselves forward to the greater and grander existence that awaits us among the stars.  And only the Universal Union that small minds call the ‘Combine’ can carry us there.

Therefore I say, yes, I am a collaborator.  We must all collaborate – Willingly!  Eagerly! – if we expect to reap the benefits of unification!  And reap we shall.”

------------------------------λ------------------------------

“What do you want me to do?” I once asked the G-pony.

“Isn’t it obvious?” he answered.

For the first time, I could honestly say that yes, yes it was.

“He’s scared, you know,” came a deep voice that could only have belonged to Spike.

Judging from the angle and proximity of the sound, I guessed he was standing in the same hallway I was, and I’d have the mind of a true intellectual juggernaut to say that he was probably doing the same thing I was – watching a certain mare that neither of us ever seemed to be separated from for very long.  I lowered the volume of the tiny speaker embedded in the neckline of my HEV suit, and the sound of lies faded until they were gone.

I didn’t even glance in his direction; my eyes remained transfixed on the very special somepony in front of me, only slightly obscured by a fairly massive pane of reinforced glass which absorbed only a single Combine bullet during the brief breach of Black Forest hours earlier.

“Scared of what?  And who’s scared?”

“I can hear your radio, Gordon,” Spike replied, and I was reminded of an interesting fact:  Contrary to popular belief, a dragon’s hearing is actually quite sharp, especially in the young (less than a century old) ones.

Either that, or I had had the volume turned up extremely loud to compensate for my own rapidly diminishing hearing due to having listened to far too many explosions.

“The only logical reason I can think of that Breen would be broadcasting propaganda into rebel territory, over all frequencies... is because he’s scared, Gordo.”

His use of ‘Gordo’ told me he’d been hanging out with Barney.

“Yeah?  Of what?” I asked while continuing to stare through the window, unable or unwilling to tear myself away from the sight of Alyx and Princess Cadance chatting and laughing while switching back and forth between preening each other’s manes and playing hoofsie.

“’Of what?’ Of you!” he said a little too loudly, drawing a panicked shush from me, to which he responded by shifting his voice to a coarse whisper.

“I mean, think of everything you’ve done!  Everything you’re going to do!  You’re already a fu-”

He caught himself before he let slip the popular alien euphemism for cuddling.

“There are no girls here, Spike.”  I’d noticed that since the arrival of that insane mare from Ponyville, Rarity, he’d begun censoring himself whenever females were present.

“You’re already a fucking legend to everypony in the Resistance, hell, to the entire population of City 7... more than that.  Way more than that.  Everypony knows that Breen’s got a giant, bloody, pus-filled scab in his buttcrack, and everypony knows who that scab is, Gordon!  It’s you!”

I didn’t know what to say; the comparison was flattering.  And absolutely disgusting.

Spike added, “Plus, you can do that thing now.”

I tore my eyes away from the window long enough to regard the purple dragon strangely.

“What thing?”

“Oh, for pity’s sake, Gordon,” he replied, and I could see his claw clutching his snout in the faint light emanating from my body.

I suppose you are owed some sort of explanation for certain previous feats of telekinetic magic far beyond my normal or even Hazard-Suit-augmented unicornian abilities.

But I’m not going to give you one, not quite yet.  I will say, however, that neither I nor anypony else knows what caused the bluish-white glow coming from my horn and, faintly, my eyes.

“Yeah, that,” I whispered, turning back to the window.  “Breen couldn’t possibly know about that.”  The Combine Elite that had been ready to drill a hole through Rainbow Dash’s head had met his wet, sloppy end far too quickly for him to have transmitted any radio message other than a terrified scream and perhaps the sound of his helmet being crushed against the side of the iron water tank that he was denting with his face and his skull and all of the rest of his body.

Spike sighed, deciding to drop the subject, and leaned his massive form against the reinforced plate-glass, eliciting a worrying series of creaks and cracks as he did so.  My prayer that nopony on the other side would notice was answered, as the two mares simply carried on, Alyx slapping her hoof against her flank at what was apparently quite a whopper from Cadance, and Cadance holding up a gold-gilded pink hoof to cover her mouth as she giggled – I think that’s one of those ‘proper’ things that ‘royalty’ have to do.  I didn’t know how to feel about Cadance.  All I knew about her was she was allegedly a princess, and I’d never come across any evidence to the contrary.  (Editor’s note: the author wishes to express that he is incredibly detached from past, present and future events, and although he can name the two rulers of Equestria, he would be hard-pressed to name a single one of their cabinet members, court members, or in this case, provincial duchesses)

“Damn, Gordon, I can feel your jealousy from here,” Spike noted, breaking the brief silence.

I quietly laid my front hooves upon the glass, willing them not to make any noise.  The outside hallway was dark and the staff room was brightly lit, but were either of the ponies within to glance outside, they would’ve seen something resembling a vaguely equine figure surrounded by a glowing halo accompanied by the dark silhouette of a winged and apparently headless monster.

This might cause a panic.

“... I never... got...”  My brain was obviously far too taxed to properly communicate to Spike how I’d been craving some alone time with Alyx ever since I first saw her in New Cloudsdale, and I’d been consistently denied that pleasure again and again and again-

“Alright.  Look, Gordon,” the hunched-over dragon sighed.  “Cadance just lost her husband, right?”

Oh, about that.  Apparently, Princess Cadance was married to Commander Shining Armor (which I suppose would make him a prince, not that anypony cares).  The second important thing was that he was out pulling weeds along New Cloudsdale’s perimeter fence when the Combine attacked.  For whatever reason, instead of just killing him on sight, they abducted the poor unicorn and took him to the Royal Palace.  How did we know this?  Soon after the attack was over, a bright pink, city-sized shield-bubble materialized over Canterlot - something Cadance immediately recognized as her husband’s magic, the recognition of another by the spells they cast being something most unicorns are pretty good at, if you are unfamiliar with the subject.

“Right,” I grunted, gritting my teeth as I braced myself for what I knew he was going to say next.

“And Alyx just lost her mom-”

“I KNOW, ALRIGHT?!” I screamed at the virtually indestructible fire-breathing monster that was at least four times my size and ten times my weight.

He recoiled.

There was a sourceless flash of deep blue light, and a lighting fixture several paces further down the hallway surged to its maximum luminescence and burst, showering a Resistance porter with sparks and shards of glass.  Regarding us for a moment with eyes filled with shock and fear, he spun around and trotted in the opposite direction quicker than I’d ever seen another pony do so.

Spike was startled, of course, but me... if I could have jumped out of my suit, I would have.  My magic, it seemed, was now especially sensitive to my emotional state, much like that of dragons.

“Luna Saint Peter!” Spike cursed, but he seemed to be taking those names in vain out of concern, not fright.  I don’t know why that surprised me – he was a dragon, after all.  It’s not like I could have killed him.  At least, I don’t think I could have.

“What was that?!”

“What was that?!” I spit the words right back at him.  “Spike, I don’t need to be reminded that Twilight Sparkle is dead and it’s MY FAULT.”

Words that might have otherwise been calm and logical became explosive and violent as the anger that had smoldered inside me for the past several days finally ignited, blazing up for everypony to see.  For days, it had tickled my insides and crackled through my grey matter, the product of perpetually turning wheels in my head that were always trying to figure out how the world works and why it works and when it works and where it works and whether, in fact, it actually does work, and how it could work better and how it could work differently, and those qualities were good and they made me a good scientist, but all those goddessesdamned wheels that were always turning and turning kept working through the same order of operations over and over and over – Why is Twilight Sparkle dead?  Tell me, Gordon, why was Black Mane West attacked less than 24 hours after you arrived?  If you did not, in fact, lead the Combine there, if they already knew of its location because of Cherry Blossom, the informant, the traitor, then why, Gordon, why, Doctor, why would they choose not to attack until the day - the day - after you arrived?

I faced Spike in the darkened hallway in a full-blown combat stance as I tried to shut out the pantheon of voices making the simple observation that trouble seemed to follow me everywhere I went, and ponies always started dying shortly after my arrival.  My brain burned with the energy of its mental somersaults as I struggled to regain control, my inner voice shouting down all my other inner voices.  It was Spike, however, who finally pulled me out of my doldrums.

“Luna, Gordon!  It’s not your fault Twilight died!”

“It’s not?” I asked, stunned.

“Heavens no!” he exclaimed while I recoiled at his shocking choice of words.  “What in Equestria would make you think that?!”

It shouldn’t have been necessary to tell him.

------------------------------λ------------------------------

Ponyville.  Ponyville.  Just saying it brings a smile to your face, doesn’t it?

“I know what you did, Doctor.  You. YOU.”

I was outside the fence surrounding Ponyville, the fence that our Benefactors put up to keep all of the headcrabs and zombies and ponies from escaping into the surrounding countryside.  A fairly large adolescent dragon, whom it appeared I had done something to upset, was yelling at me.  This is an uncommon enough occurrence that I feel some explanation is warranted:  When a dragon breathes fire, he uses almost all of the same muscles used during vocalization.  The emission of flame is a voluntary action, but just slightly.  In order to yell without breathing fire, as Spike was doing at me, it took a bit of concentration, sort of like talking without moving your tongue.

“YOU are the reason the Combine attacked Black Mane West...”

While he wrapped his massive clawed talons around my frail equine body and accused me of being an accomplice to murder, I was not thinking about how much discipline it surely must have required on his part simply not to kill me.

“... YOU are responsible for the loss of the ENTIRE BASE...”

To be honest, besides the pain of my diaphragm being pushed upward into an unnatural location somewhere inside my ribcage, all I could contemplate was my innocence; my blamelessness.

“... And therefore YOU are indirectly responsible for the DEATH of the only mother I-”

Those last words broke through my shock and disbelief.  They jostled me, shook me to my core.  I caused somepony’s mom to die?  Whose mom?

“... either of us have ever known,” Spike finished, relaxing his grip, and my diaphragm returned to where diaphragms were supposed to be.  As I rolled my head to one side, gasping for breath, I caught the eye of a caramel-colored mare looking forlorn in the middle of a vast and empty field.

It was Alyx.  It was her mom that I just killed.

------------------------------λ------------------------------

“You!” I shouted at the purple bastard.  “You would make me think that!”

Spike flinched, his eyes darting to the thick – and apparently soundproof – window.  Some sympathetic impulse caused me to mimic the action, and I looked over just in time to see the alleged Princess, Cadance, give us a murderous look before her horn flashed robin’s egg blue, and both her and the still blissfully unaware Alyx were suddenly obscured by blinds.

Looking suddenly empathetic, Spike turned back to me and said,

“Oh... Gordon - that stuff I said in Ponyville-”

“Outside Ponyville,” I swiftly corrected him.

“Look, Gordon, that stuff I said...”  He lifted an arm up to scratch the spines on the back of his head.  “I didn’t mean it... I was just angry.  And stressed out and tired.”

I looked at him with absolute incredulity, my facial muscles contorting every which way as my mind flooded with an electrical storm of emotions, at least half of them violent.

“Really?!” I asked.

“Really,” he answered, and I deemed the dragon’s words to be as sincere as anypony’s could.

You know, reader, there are many places in this little account of mine where I could’ve lied to you, where I could’ve trussed up or omitted things that I did or said or thought, but you know what?

... I don’t really know why I don’t do that, but my point is – I don’t.

So, I’m not lying when I say that I was incredibly grateful that the blinds on that window were closed, as the next thing I did was hug Spike while bawling like a little filly who just got mud all over her pretty white dress.  In front of her entire school.  Including all of the colts.

“I MISSSSSS HERRRRR-HURRRRRR-HURERRRRERRRRRR,” is what I think I said.

“I MISSSSS HERRRRRRRRR TOOOOOOOOO,” Spike echoed my sentiment, howling the ‘too’ so long and so loud, I swear I heard timberwolves join in from the forest.

Yes, I wept.  So did the usually macho Spike, I swear on the Pomegranate Book (a commentary on the Book of Souls, if you are unfamiliar with the field of evil literature).

I wept because that was the first sign – the first real sign - that I wasn’t lying when I told myself I wasn’t to blame for the deaths of all those ponies at Black Mane West, including one of the most passionate, intelligent, driven mares I have ever known... as well as the mother of the love of my life.

You have to understand, reader, that if Spike hadn’t said those words to me, at that moment, in that hallway... I am convinced it is likely that I would have killed myself before the completion of my assignment from the G-pony, either through action – such as pointing one of the many guns at my disposal in the wrong direction – or, as the thought had already crossed my mind, inaction, as I was imminently scheduled to take part in a commando-style raid on the Royal Palace in Canterlot – the most heavily-fortified Combine installation in all of Equestria apart from the Citadel itself.  I am ashamed to say my mind had come to the conclusion multiple times that I would probably be presented with numerous opportunities to die there – swiftly, painlessly, understandably.

But if even Spike, after saying what he said to me outside Ponyville, had absolved me of this sin...

If even Spike, who had shielded Alyx from the sight of her mother’s body...

If even Spike, who was just as much Twilight’s son as Alyx was her daughter...

If even he, of all the creatures in this world, deemed me blameless...

Then maybe I wasn’t.  Maybe I wasn’t.  More evidence was needed to silence the accusing voices in my head.  I would need the testimony of another.

But for now, I cried because I was no longer the only pony who didn’t hate me for what happened.

Besides Gilda.  And screw Gilda.

“Gordo...” Spike began, the bridge of his long reptilian snout pinched between his fingers,

“... that’s... that’s like saying if a hostage-taker starts shooting hostages because a... a bank-teller wouldn’t give him money, then it’s the bank-teller’s fault they died.”

I swallowed some of the mucus clogging my throat and asked,

“How is it not the bank-teller’s fault?”

Spike let out an explosive sigh.

“Luna, Gordon!  Because the bank-teller wasn’t the one shooting ponies!”

We both laughed.  Not because bank robbery and murder was funny, mind you, but because... well, actually, nopony really knows why certain species possess the reflex to begin emitting loud wails while their body spasms uncontrollably whenever they find something comedic, but if I had to say why, I would say I laughed because Spike was right.

I did not order the attack.  I did not kill anypony.  I would not feel guilt for somepony else’s sin.

“... anyway...” Spike sighed when we were finally done having a fit of hysterics borne of our misery.

“... Oh!  Hey, before I forget...”  He quickly glanced down at his leg, which is an action that I am inherently alarmed by.  There is almost never a ‘good’ reason to quickly glance down at your leg.

“You wanna see something cool?”

“Yes, I totally want to see something cool.”  I love seeing cool things.

Bringing up a clawed foot as terrifying as the fossilized hind limbs of a marmaraptor, or perhaps the scythe-like talons of a modern-day pterodactyl, he reached down and began fiddling with an inconspicuous fabric satchel fastened snugly to his ankle.

Methodically undoing a pair of black polymer straps that stood out against blue-and-white camouflage, he carefully slid an expensive-looking metallic device from the smooth black interior.

While he fiddled with the apparatus, obscuring it from my view, I asked,

“Have you always had that little... tote-”

“Yes, Gordon,” he cut in while I heard a series of loud and very suspicious clicking sounds.

“How come I’ve never-”

He cut me off again.  “I’ll bet if you... unf! ...opened your eyes and... hnnf! ...looked around, you’d... see! ... a lot more... things!  There!  Got it!”

Jubilant, Spike presented me with a clearly alien device strapped to his right wrist.  The hallway being as dim as it was, I forced my automatic Hazard Light to turn on and stared, agape, at the pair of cloudy white cylinders and the long, thin needle protruding from the bulky machinery in between, spinning on as Spike’s long claws clicked and clacked against the device’s underside, fumbling with switches and buttons obviously designed for alien appendages - for shorter fingers with no claws that were made of softer, more grippy stuff than dragon skin.

I examined the cylinders closer – Twilight Sparkle’s liquefied grey matter had been removed.

I chose not to ask any questions as to how or where because I didn’t want to know.

“Eh?  Eh?  What do we think?” Spike sung, a braggart to his core.

I checked with myself to see if there were any questions I wanted to ask.  I knew good and damned well what that thing was, I knew exactly where he got it – and a fairly good idea of when - and I didn’t find it at all difficult to believe that it had simply escaped my tenuous-at-best attention after Spike’s rescue of myself and Alyx from the boutique in Ponyville and before they both abandoned me to the evil that never dies in the Everfree Forest.

So, to both our amazement, I really only had one question.

“What are you going to do with that, Spike?”

He brought his massive body down closer to my level, holding the rotating syringe as close as he possibly could to the long, black slit of his pupil.  I watched millions of emerald-green strands of protein contract to narrow his iris and deform his ocular lens as his huge dragon eye strained to focus in on the device’s tip, a startled twitch being all that separated them.

“I’m going to stick this needle in-between Doctor Breen’s eyes.”

------------------------------λ------------------------------

Supernova Prospect.

Just as General Rainbow Dash officially dubbed the previous hours’ carnage ‘the Battle of New Cloudsdale’, so she also had the privilege of naming the Resistance’s imminently scheduled, poorly thought out counter-attack ‘Operation: Supernova Prospect’.

The name’s meaning sort of went over my head.  I knew what a supernova was – the explosive death of a star – and I knew what a prospect was – a view, a vision, a hope – so what was a ‘supernova prospect’?  Was the supernova symbolic of the violent death of the Combine, which was an appealing prospect for all of ponydom?  Was it a literal explosion we were hoping for, or that had the prospect of occurring?  I never asked.

So what was Operation: Supernova Prospect?  An extraordinarily complex, wasteful and absolutely spectacular method of committing suicide were it not for one key element that had been generously donated to the Resistance by a rather insane snow-white unicorn – a unicorn I never would have met had circumstances not forced me to take an unexpected detour through a certain zombie- overpopulated town that nopony was supposed to go to anymore for any reason ever.

If you would recall the Inter-National Ballistic Missile I described in the previous chapter (at least, I think it was the previous chapter - I haven’t slept in a long time), you might remember that General Rainbow Dash concocted the brilliant plan of filling the inexplicably roomy – or, more likely, highly modified – warhead of the exceptionally long-range projectile with a selection of headcrabs, using technology and techniques – and the very idea – borrowed without permission from the Combine.

The INBM would then be used to rapidly relocate several thousand headcrabs to some place that we really, really, really didn’t like.  Upon arrival, the parasitic creatures would be left to do what Nature intended them to do amongst a suitable population of host bodies – namely, the soldiers of a branch of the Combine Overwatch called the ‘Royal Palace Internal Security Force’.  Headcrabs would, of course, prefer to infest slow and defenseless prey, but those magnificent little balls of slavery aren’t known for their prudishness so much as their tendency to create zombies.

And while you’re recalling all that, you may as well remember that it was this same blue idiot who wanted to launch said biological weapon (weapons?) into the middle of City 7 – which, by this point, I was slowly beginning to forget was ever called Manehattan.  Not to rub my own horn or anything, but I fear she might have actually gone through with it had I not persuaded her to switch the target to the Royal Palace in Canterlot.  Goddesses know what would’ve happened otherwise.

So, you know the what – Canterlot Palace (formally, Royal Palace) – and the where – the ruins of Canterlot (no shit, Sherclop), the civilian population of which consisted entirely of political prisoners housed within the Palace, and was outnumbered two or three to one by the Combine security forces guarding them.  You should have a pretty good idea of the why – the Resistance had exactly one chance to go on the offensive before the Combine came back to finish them - to finish us - off, and the teleporter inside the Palace was our only remaining hope of getting at Doctor Breen.  If you haven’t pieced together how we were planning on getting to a teleporter located deep inside the Combine version of the Lunatanamo Detention Center, here’s a simplified version:  First, we were going to hit the Palace with a headcrab canister the size of a building - and yes, that’s taking into account the absent fuel assembly, okay, rocket scientists (I know I said this would be simple, but that is to ponies like me) - that was filled with headcrabs scooped up straight out of Ponyville – at Rainbow Dash’s insistence that it all be extra ironic, I’m told.  After the Palace’s internal security forces were thoroughly distracted with all of their friends trying to kill them, we would attack.

Who is ‘we’?  Barney and I would be leading a platoon of Royal Marines through the Northern end of the Palace complex – over the Palace Labyrinth.

Spike, the Resistance’s secret weapon, would be taking a squadron of battle-hardened pegasi from the Royal Equestrian Army Air Corps in from the South, the part facing the city’s Grand Gate.

Of course, if Spike was going to be there, you’d think that Alyx would be too, and you’d be right.  She volunteered to be the mission’s tech specialist; once we reached the teleporter, it would be her job to program the thing to take us to Breen’s office.  I couldn’t think of anypony more qualified for the job – Alyx’s skill at contraptionology (and baking) was surpassed only by Doctor Pie, and there’s no way in even the most surprising of the hells that she’d be going on our commando-raid.  Not that she didn’t want to.  She actually would’ve loved to.  I would’ve loved her to, if that meant Alyx would’ve stayed behind in the safety of New Cloudsdale.  I’m not sure if it’s a male instinct to protect somepony he wants to mate with (really, really super badly), but when looking for a mate, scientific studies support that it is a female instinct to look for somepony who is able to protect her.  And as long as she was with Spike, hell, she’d have no need of that from me.

I know it’s so fucking stupid, so fucking childish, but I wanted to be her Knight Who Wasn’t Shining Armor.  I wanted to protect her from every possible calamity.

Luna, I hate being in love.  Don’t ever do it.

And also, don’t listen to those ponies who say there are no differences between males and females.  There are plenty, and I’ve got science to back that up.  And science – good, solid science – is never wrong.  It’s just the truth.  And there are some ponies who try to use science to ‘prove’ things that cannot be proven, such as where we came from, why we’re here, what happens after we die... and let me tell you, reader, if anypony ever comes up to you and says, ‘My beliefs regarding the origins of the universe are scientific - they’re supported by science!’, tell that pony to go hug himself.  Or herself.  Tell him or her to go hug him or herself because you can’t prove anything that happens outside of the fucking universe.  You can’t prove anything exists outside of the fucking universe.  It’s outside of the fucking universe.  You can’t open an aperture in the side of it, poke your head out and report back your findings any more than you can jump into a black hole and tell us what’s inside.  All you can do is infer, based on what you do know.  And all we know is that there’s something inside a black hole.  There has to be.  What’s generating all that gravity?  It’s got to be something.  What’s holding open the gateway between Xen and Equestria?  It’s got to be something.

Where did we come from?  Why are we here?

Why am I here?

There at the Resistance base of New Cloudsdale, watching the minutes tick past 3AM on my suit clock, feeling an energy crackling through my horn and my bones, my muscles, my skin and fur, my teeth, my eyes, and especially my brain, an energy that allowed me to pick a pony up and hurl him with incredible force or even rip him apart, to manipulate objects many times my size and mass and coax movement from objects greater still, all because of an extraordinary series of seemingly unrelated but invariably and inseparably connected events...

... More than ever before in my entire life, I was consumed with the feeling that I had a purpose... like there was something, somewhere, something specific, something extraordinarily specific, that I, and only I, and nopony else in the entire universe, in all its dimensions, could do...

... and that was the reason I, Doctor Gordon Freemane, ‘the One With the Free Mane’, a celebrity and hero to everypony in the Resistance, the romantic interest (I hoped) and/or best friend (I feared) of Alyx Sparkle, with the ability to pick her up, blast a hole in the ground, dump her in it, throw something big and heavy on top of it and leave her there in the safety of that hole, thus preventing her from coming with us to a more hazardous environment than even the most hilariously improbable usage scenarios the creators of the Hazardous Environment Suit had ever envisioned in their wildest nightmares...

... couldn’t stop her.  I couldn’t stop her from going.

Because I knew she felt the same way I did.

------------------------------λ------------------------------

“Alright, before we get started here,” Rarity began, flicking her head to clear away a few lavender locks of her mane from her bright, blue eyes, “let’s just clarify one little thing.”

I didn’t want to be there.  I no more wanted to visit Rarity again than I wanted to visit the town she used to live in.  Celestia, did I know the meaning of the words we don’t go to Ponyville.

But Alyx had insisted.  I was finally able to wrench her away from that damned talkative alicorn, and the first thing she wanted to do was go and ‘thank’ Rarity for her contributions to the war effort.  There was no talking the headstrong mare out of it, so we plodded through the early morning dark – tripping over several very different things, despite my flashlight – to a wooden longhouse lined with fairly large windows that glowed roughly the same warm and inviting orange-yellow as the lambda symbol on my HEV suit, demonstrating either flagrant disregard or total ignorance of clearly-posted rules requiring windows to be blacked-out at night to make New Cloudsdale harder to target.

I didn’t say anything.  Our enemies were about to become very distracted from New Cloudsdale.

“This-”  A grey canister enveloped in a magical blue aura floated up to eye-level, and she jabbed a hoof at it that was suspiciously clean given that we were in the middle of a muddy swamp.

“-is a perfume called Rarity’s Vineyard Scent,” she finished, stabbing the logo taped to the side of the canister which was written in the same lacy, curvy font as on those tanks in Ponyville.

Alyx blurted something out before I could.  “That stuff is high-explosive zombie repellant-”

“No, Alyx, a high-explosive,” I corrected her, “doesn’t require a heat source to detonate.  This stuff is just regular chemical explosives-”

“NO!” Rarity corrected us, startling everypony in her workshop.

I looked over at the two-dozen or so Cerberi sitting at the adjoined work-tables spanning the longhouse’s length.  They glanced in our direction for a heartbeat, and then collectively resumed their various tasks, toiling away like alien slaves as they sewed fabulous new uniforms for the mares and stallions of the Resistance and carefully filled standard-issue smoke and signal grenades with Rarity’s curious chemical concoction.

“No, heh,” she said with a forced laugh, trying to regain her lost composure.

“It is a perfume.  That is what it is.  It is nothing else besides perfume.  It is not zombie repellant, it is not explosives, it is not lighter-fluid, it is perfume.  For mares and stallions whom desire to smell pleasant.  Mm’kay?”

That was a strange phonetic variation on ‘okay’ that I hadn’t yet heard.

“Ooh-mm’kay, Rarity,” I replied with the utmost sincerity.  I made the decision to correct, right then and there, the error of categorization she had brought to my attention.

Hastily scrolling through my inventory screen, I stopped when I had highlighted the stylized icon sitting all by its lonesome under the sixth tab.  It looked a lot like the icon for ‘grenades’ – which I had several of – under Category ‘5’, except it had this adorable little vector of a headcrab underneath one of those circles with the slanted line going through it.  With the item selected but not equipped, I squinted my eyes and gave it a really nasty look until it turned pale – as if wondering whether today was the day it would finally be deleted.  The icon got lucky that time; today was not its ‘D-day’.  I merely gave the thing a good talking-to (in my head, of course), and it dutifully picked up on certain keywords that were thought at it especially loudly.

The weapon’s name was now ZOMBIE REPELLANT (RARITY’S VINEYARD SCENT).

You see, Rarity’s Vineyard Scent wasn’t just an odor-masking spray-on perfume – it had a couple of unique properties that made it useful as a military-grade chemical weapon.  The first and most obvious was that it was highly flammable, as I saw and felt in Ponyville.  The second and far more interesting was that headcrabs, and by extension, headcrab zombies, absolutely hated the stuff, and would seemingly do anything just to get away from the stench.

And thus, anypony wearing a sufficient amount of the (frankly, not all that great smelling, I thought) vanity product would be safe from attack by zombies.

Satisfied, I refocused my eyes on the world beyond the frames of my glasses, hoping against hope that I wouldn’t regret the decision like I normally do.

The first thing I noticed was the black poison headcrab centimeters from my muzzle.  The second thing I noticed was the vulgar reek coming from the crab’s cage (the cage being the third thing I noticed).  The fourth thing I noticed was that the xenomorph wasn’t a poison headcrab.

“It chirps!” I shouted, as if in disappointment.  I’d slammed my rump so hard into the table behind me, I later checked to see if any points had been deducted from my vital-signs monitors – all because of an ordinary, run-of-the-standard-manilla-bog headcrab.

Alyx and Rarity, who were very busy holding their sides, asked me something like, “What?”

“It doesn’t purr, it chirps and trills!” I rambled like I was mad.  “The poison ones purr, I swear to Celestia, they purr!  I’ve never heard a normal headcrab do that!”

I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the thing’s skin, flaking and shriveled, caramelized blood, dark red and inundated with rigid little bubbles of air, congealed in the cracks between crispy flaps of headcrab flesh.

“And what the fuck is wrong with its skin?!  Is it burnt?!”

As soon as the last word left my mouth, both mare’s expressions contorted into disapproving scowls - Alyx, probably just because I said ‘fuck’, but Rarity...

“Now, Gordon, dear,” the suspiciously-clean unicorn started, gently setting the cage down on the floor, “that headcrab is the one that used to possess my little sister, Sweetie Belle, whom I believe you’ve already met.  Seems she’s quite the little fighter, surviving being roasted alive by your fucking brute of a dragon – and now look, you’ve got me started.”

Some time during the long, accusatory stare that followed, I decided not to tell her that the dragon she was referring to was keeping watch on the roof, and that dragons had very, very good hearing.

I didn’t know what Alyx was doing, but she said, “Yeah, uhhhh... that’s pretty amazing.”

In a completely separate sentence, she added, “That she survived that.”

The ticking of needles coming from the cerberi behind us sounding like hammer falls while I stood there frozen in Rarity’s cold, silent stare, I asked,

“... and by ‘she’, you mean...?”

My question had been directed at Alyx, but Rarity answered quite harshly,

“She means the headcrab, Gordon.”

“Ah,” I replied as the headcrab trilled in its cage.

As in, not your sister.

“Look, Rarity, I’m really, really sorry about-”

Like an ice skater coming out of a spin, Rarity’s mood suddenly swung to something that, while not overtly cheerful, could at least be classified as ‘positive’.

“Oh, Gordon, I don’t blame you, or anypony, really,” she politely - and awkwardly - laughed.

“Hell, it was Sweetie Belle’s own damned fault she was ever possessed in the first place... heh...”

Rarity trailed off, her good mood vanishing as quickly as it had come, and her bright, beautiful eyes darkened, becoming those of a dreamer.

Then she began screaming.  Hysterically.  Every cerberus in the room immediately stopped work, craning their necks with their ears perked up and their covered paws on the table as they strained to see what was causing all the commotion, and several nearby rushed to where we were all standing.

None of their response times bested Spike’s, however.  I saw the dragon appear outside the front window, accompanied by a simultaneous thud after he jumped off the roof, making the glass windows rattle.  With Rarity now lying curled up against a wall, her head in her hooves, and at least one of the cerberi (female, I think) by her side, trying to comfort her while avoiding being bucked, Alyx thought it best to lock the door in order to prevent Spike from possibly making things worse.

So Spike poked his head in through the front window, which remained closed while he did so.

Alyx then yelled several harsh-sounding things at him while shaking herself clean of little shards of glass and splinters of wood, and Spike recoiled away from the window, whimpering like a beaten dog, breaking it a little more in the process.

After a few more seconds of hysterics, Rarity lifted her hooves away from her eyes, looking at first startled, then extremely embarrassed as she rejoined us in the real world.

Less like an ice skater coming out of a spin, and more like an ice skater recovering from hitting the entire panel of judges, the dignified unicorn hurriedly righted and recomposed herself.  Keenly aware that apologizing for whatever had just happened would result in her being immediately reprimanded for doing so, she moved to simply carry on with business as usual as best she could.

“Right.  Everyone and everypony back to work!  -Yes, yes, I’m fine, no, no, well... yes, I think I will take a break, or maybe a nap, it’s what, three in the morning?  Hahaha... Oh!  Sasha, be a dear and clean up this glass from that... broken... window...?  Somepony broke my window?”

With Spike smartly out of sight, both Alyx and I replied with something along the lines of,

“Uhhhh...”

“I didn’t do that, did I?” Rarity asked, preemptively embarrassed.

“No, no, no... no,” we both truthfully replied, and Rarity accepted our argument without any further questions.  After Alyx was rebuked by a cerberus named Sasha for offering to help her sweep up the glass (I never found out if they replaced the window), Rarity did a surprisingly good job of resuming our conversation almost exactly where we’d left off.

“Anyway, what were we talking about?”

“Uhhhh...” was all I could answer with before Rarity beat me in answering the question she’d asked.

“Ah, yes, headcrabs!” she said in triumph.

Her left eyelid twitched for an instant and then she moved on.

“Yes, consider that headcrab’s reaction an approximation of what would’ve happened if you’d been wearing my perfume... and encountered a normal... you know, healthy headcrab.”

Looking toward the cage that held her little sister’s former enslaver, still on the ground right where she left it, she said,

“That poor dear can’t smell a thing, of course.”

Quickly figuring I wouldn’t of course know why, she explained,

“Uh, her... scent receptors – in her epidermal tissue – were all burned off by your dragon-”

“Spike, is his name,” Alyx informed the cream-colored unicorn.

“Yes, that monster.”

I heard the roof creak when she said that, confirming to me that Spike was back on his perch and that, yes, he heard that.  Dragons are known to be proud creatures, and Spike was certainly no exception.  I literally could almost feel his hurt and indignity leaking through the cracks between boards in the ceiling.  Perhaps there’s something magical about it.  I was a unicorn, after all.

“Anywho, Alyx and I saw you fiddling with your glasses, and we thought it would be in good fun to scare you with the horrors of your sin.”

I glanced disapprovingly at Alyx, wanting to say, “By ‘your’, does she mean me, you and Spike?”

All I actually said was, “Alright, thank you, Misses Rarity-”

“You’re welcome,” she cut me off.

“... for lending your talents to the Resistance.  Of Equestria.  Ma’am.”

“You’re welcome,” she repeated, managing not to sigh the words in spite of her exhausted state.  She then bid us adieu (actually using the word adieu) and started to leave, her unblemished hooves not stepping on any glass, as every shard was now gone, along with the laborer responsible.

The silence that followed in the mentally-unstable unicorn’s wake as she headed for the door was suddenly interrupted by a question from Alyx.

“Wait, if this repellant-”

“-Perfume,” Rarity auto-corrected her, stopping just outside the door.

“... perfume is supposed to... well... repel zombies, then why don’t we just wait for the whole palace to become completely infested and then-”

“-And then just moontrot in past the sea of undead,” Rarity finished Alyx’s thought.

“-zombies,” I metaphorically jumped in.

“Yes, undead zombies,” Rarity stated as if just the word zombie all by itself wasn’t enough of a misnomer and scientific inaccuracy.

“Zombies aren’t undead,” I insisted, and she immediately dismissed me.

“You can believe whatever you like, dear, but anyway, I already discussed that possibility with the esteemed Doctor Pie, and she elaborated to me a fantastic recipe for snow-brownies that you’ve just got to try-”

“Most Irreducible Rarity...” a nearby cerberus with no respect for privacy said in a perceptibly feminine voice, pausing in her filling of an empty smoke grenade for only an equine heartbeat.

“What’s that?  Oh, yes, the undead hordes.”

I refused to correct her.

“Well, Pinkie was telling me about that recipe for snow-brownies when that awful griffon, Gilda, interrupted us with her two bits on the... what’s the word... scenario you just described.”

Gasping for breath, then continued,

“She said it would be... I think she used the word wise, yes, that’s the exact word she used, she said it would be wise if you all reached the teleportation chamber before the rampaging horde of mindless, bloodthirsty cannibals because, for one thing-”

She gasped again.

“-I don’t suspect anypony on the fire team – that being Spike and Alyx, of course – will be wearing my perfume because despite it being apparently repugnant to zombies, it is extremely prone to combustion, so of course you won’t want that around a fire-breathing dragon unless you want to... oh, burn to death, hahaha-”

She gasped once more.

“-it would be doubly wise to reach the teleportation chamber before the Combine sabotage it or otherwise enact any fail-safes that would leave you trapped inside a Royal Palace swarming with flesh-hungry zombies that will probably...”  She paused and took another quick gulp of air while thinking for a moment.  “... Probably hold off on eating you until at least the scent wears off, and of course, the teleporter itself would have its own dedicated cadre of Stalkers, and I don’t even know if those can be zombified, but just in case, you’ll probably want to take care of them before they become even more execrable.”

------------------------------λ------------------------------

“What in hell’s hugbox does execrable mean?!”

“Uhhh...” Alyx responded with an answer I was getting sick of hearing.

“Also, what is a ‘Stalker’?”

Alyx gave me a grim look like she didn’t really feel like telling me.

“Whatever, I don’t want to know.  I’m terrified enough as it is.”

She smiled.  Goddesses, I love her smile.

In all likelihood, General Dash had already informed me of the threat ‘Stalkers’ would pose at the Palace when she went over the part of Supernova Prospect that detailed the types and varieties of enemy forces we’d be facing.

It didn’t even matter.  I’d find out soon enough.

Good Goddesses, it hit me right then, right outside Rarity’s workshop as I trod through the pre-dawn darkness, the hour of dawn’s first light and the start of the attack drawing closer and closer.

This really is a war, and I really am a soldier.

It was no longer simply a helpful psychological technique for coping with the act of killing another pony.  It was a fact, cold and hard, and I was about to leap into its maw, and it was looking down on me from Canterlot, smirking through the shimmering pink shield-bubble and licking its lips, ready to rend my flesh when I went to war; a place where ponies like me were never meant to be.

And what I saw in the dark, exhausted and uncertain faces of the ponies of the Resistance was far more frightening than Operation: Supernova Prospect or the Combine waiting for us in Canterlot.

I saw hope and faith – not in something worth having hope and faith in, like Luna and Celestia.

Instead, I saw hope and faith in me.  In me.  In Doctor Fuck-Up.  The pony who pointed a gun at the monsters who killed Twilight and didn’t fire a single shot.  The pony who could have destroyed the strider that killed Rainbow Dash, but didn’t.  And because of my insane effort to stop that unfortunate event from occurring, I now glowed in the dark.

Maybe that’s why everypony was staring at me.

I probably looked like I was some kind of superhero.

“Gordon, you should say something,” Alyx whispered in my ear, her hot, sweet-smelling breath on my cheek triggering a cascade of highly inappropriate feelings that, added to my sleep-deprivation, resulted in a mind that was ill-equipped for public speaking.  So, of course, that was exactly when I was expected to give a public speech.

Fuck.  My, what a versatile word that is.

“Roight,” I whispered back, meriting another amused look from the mare.

“Right!” I repeated, this time more loudly and correctly.

Locating the hastily repaired water buffalo with the aid of my flashlight, I dragged it over to a more attention-getting spot, more or less halfway between the under-reconstruction entrance to the Buttercup Bloomflower Black Forest Facility and the utterly demolished center of the base.

A few unicorns helpfully casted some lighting spells, and little flares shot out of their horns like signal rounds, lighting up the base for some distance in a yellowish-green luminescence.

After trying and failing to climb on top of the thoroughly cylindrical water buffalo (and Celestia, did I look like a cuddling idiot) a pegasus onlooker helpfully suggested an Armored Personnel Carriage as a suitable alternative, and I agreed.

While the six-wheeled, tank-like metal behemoth of plating and pony-power was rolled into place and the water buffalo (which was also tank-like, but in a different way) was put back where it came from, a small group of cerberi sauntered up to me - judging by their weary gait, I guessed that they’d just left Rarity’s workshop, and by their quickness, possibly without permission.

The cerberus in front was smaller and a bit stockier than most I’d seen.  He removed his visor, and besides the fur that was about as white as his suit, the only other notable feature was his eyes.  Like mine, they too appeared to glow in the dark – even the same color – but it seemed theirs was a more tenuous effect, appearing and disappearing with every minute shift of his head.

Sitting on his haunches with his tail wrapped around him, he held in his little paws a modest metal box.  Asking him what it was, he replied in the gruff voice typical of the cerberi,

“A Cerberal-Input-to-TV-Output Converter.”

Without hesitation – or me asking – he added,

“I will never explain to you how it works.”

From that, I concluded that its operation most likely involved magnets.

Conquering a particularly short version of my eternal foe, ladders, I emerged on top of the APC via the roof hatch and took a quick look around.  By this time, of course, all the strange activity combined with my local infamy had begun to draw quite a crowd.  Looking up at me was an expectant crowd of possibly a couple hundred Resistance fighters – mostly armed civilians, with the remainder made up of professional soldiers in the Royal Equestrian Army, off-duty medics, engineers, officers and goggle-wearing pegasus pilots.  By this time, three hours to ‘oh-six- hundred’, nearly all of them were wearing the same black, grey and white checkered ‘urban camouflage’ fatigues fresh out of Rarity’s workshop, all expertly tailored to each soldier’s race and species, along with helmets that had holes in them when and where appropriate.  My gaze stayed affixed for a particularly long time on what looked like a sheep wearing a pair of night-vision goggles, the device’s huge lenses appearing violet even in the putrid green of the flares.  Watching her push the oversized goggles back up as they continuously slipped down the short muzzle of her too-small face, I couldn’t help but think that we stood absolutely no chance against the Combine.

Then a sudden movement drew my eyes to a massive, demonstrably-bullet-proof, fire-breathing, surprisingly polite and somewhat shy aerial weapons platform named Spike, who was busy handling a gaggle of those young, pony-sized dragons who had painted themselves to look like him (I never could decide if they were orphans or if dragons simply left their families at a much younger age than ponies and other hoofed creatures).  Resting her caramel forelegs atop his huge head was Alyx, easily one of the most resourceful, adaptable and reliable ponies I’d ever met, as well as a capable fighter and highly intelligent (at the very least, compared to Spike).  And sexy (again, compared to Spike).  And then there were Doctors Pie and Gryffindor, Barney and General Dash, who weren’t present.  And behind them stood an army of professionally-trained soldiers augmented by an even larger non-professional force, all of them actually decently well-equipped and outfitted, especially after the Battle of New Cloudsdale – in which the Combine threw everything they had at us and lost, for the first time ever – hell, we even had a Princess on our side – not that the Goddesses weren’t also on our side, which they were – and we had a missile!  And a terrible, terrible plan to use it!

Maybe... I thought as I stood on the roof of that APC, maybe it isn’t all hopeless.

The small cerb at the front of the crowd carefully set down his little box onto the trampled-flat grass and placed both of his unprotected canine-like ‘paws’ onto two identical buttons on top, causing a small white light on the face of the device to begin glowing.  A hush ran through the crowd, their faces, cast with deep shadows in the harsh light of the flares, simultaneously exhausted, anxious, expectant and curious, as all of them feared the worst, hoped for the best, and got only me.

Then I spoke.

“Hello, everypony...”

And then it occurred to somepony that it would be a lot easier for everypony to hear me if perhaps I had the benefit of some sort of voice amplification spell – a spell which shot out of the crowd courtesy of some generous unicorn.  A bolt of magical lightning hit my throat like a sniper’s bullet and gave me a bellowing voice closer to that of a full grown dragon than a little pony, and I’d just like to take this space to thank whoever did that.

“Hello, everypony,” I repeated.  “To those who don’t know me, my name is Gordon Freemane.  I am a scientist, and I specialize in the field of Theoretical Physics...”

Unable to steady my rapidly-increasing pulse or stop myself from sweating, I took a deep breath to try and loosen the tightness in my throat, and continued.

“I don’t know what I’m doing here, to be honest.  I’m not a soldier or a police officer, I’m not a tactician, I’m not a strategist – I... I’m a physicist!  And not even a very good one!”

Everypony seemed shocked, and they could go hug themselves because I wasn’t done.

“I’d fired guns before the Black Mane Incident, but really, the only ‘combat experience’ I could be said to have had was from playing arcade games at movie theaters!  My Hazard Suit is sending me warning messages right now informing me that I have not been trained to use any of the deadly and dangerous weapons strapped to my back – including my crowbar!  Nopony’s ever taught me how to use a crowbar!  I just... picked it up as I went along!”

Revelation hits me.  It hurts, but only for a little while.

“... I’m just making this up as I go.  I’m sorry.  But that’s the truth.  I don’t know what I’m doing.”

Silence.  Everypony sits, stands and floats in silence as they process my words.  My gaze falls on Alyx, who is using Spike as a piece of furniture and looking depressed.  When I catch her eye, her face instantly turns a very pretty shade of pink and she reflexively shrinks behind her dragon as if I were somehow casting a spotlight on her.  She still manages to crack a smile big enough for me to see, and it was all I needed.

“... I don’t know what I’m doing, but I know why I’m doing it.”

Something changes.  Something is different now, and everypony in the crowd can sense it.

“I know why you fight, and why you will never stop fighting until either you have reclaimed what has been stolen from you and the world is returned to its natural order and everything is put back in its rightful place or every single last one of you is dead.  You fight because the old saying still rings true;  Better to die with a rope around your neck than live with a yoke about your shoulders.  You fight because of ten thousand sins that have been committed against you by a liar and a coward and a traitor who has appointed himself our ‘Administrator’.  You fight because far graver a sin than killing your sisters and brothers, mothers and fathers, nieces and nephews and uncles and aunts, he has killed your children.  You fight because you know in your hearts that when the liar is sent screaming from this life into the next, he will have to answer to one who cannot be deceived.”

I had figured out by now what that humming box in front of me did.

“To anypony who can hear me, I say:  You have been lied to.  You have been told that our malefactors are our Benefactors, our enemies are our friends, our freedom is an impediment, our misery is an illusion, our minds are irrational, our bodies are defective, our instincts are untrustworthy, our nature is our downfall, and the biggest lie of them all, that such a thing as Paradise exists in this world.”

My gaze drifted upward to that great pink sphere enshrouding the ruins of our nation’s capital.

“You have been lied to by the biggest liar who ever lived, a pony I am ashamed to say I once worked for in another life.  A pony whom sold every stallion, mare and foal in Equestria to alien powers who razed our cities and burned our homes and killed our families and for WHAT?!”

I was thinking of Ponyville when I said that.  Or yelled, or screamed, I don’t remember.

“... instead of his paradise, instead of his impossible utopia free of ‘bad things’ like magic and cuddling, he created a world of victims.  A world of victims of a system which exists not to serve or protect, nor for the benefit of any creature, nor even those who sustain it, nor even those who defend it, nor even those who lead it... a system that exists both in theory and in practice solely for the perpetuation of its own existence, and the annihilation of anything and everything, living or not, soldier or civilian, real or imaginary, which that system perceives to be a threat to the fulfillment of its one and only purpose: To prevent itself from ceasing to exist.”

“To anypony listening, let it be known that soon the liar will give his last speech and then the system will fail.  And to anypony still unsure about joining in our fight to make that happen, to anypony who might still advocate for a ‘peaceful solution’:  The only solution to something so heartless and soulless, so irrational and illogical, so unnatural and unneeded – the only way to reform or repair something as abominable and abhorrent to every living thing... to all of creation – as this ‘Universal Union’ you call the Combine... is to burn it to the ground and start over.”

Trying my hoof at show-colt-ship, I dramatically looked (or at least, tried to dramatically look) into the bright white light on the face of the cerberus’ transmitter.  Then, thinking better of it, I shifted my eyes upward until I was staring straight into the telepathic alien’s glow-in-the-dark eyes.

“And, fillies and gentlecolts, at the first light of dawn, we, the mares and stallions of the Equestrian Resistance, we, who remain the faithful subjects of the only true rulers of this realm, our banished and humiliated but FAR from forgotten Princesses of the bright and blinding day and the blackest, darkest night, we, the loyal citizens of the real and true and free Equestria, are going to set the whole world on fire, and before the sun sets today, for the first time ever, the system that exists to exist will be purposeless.”

Amid a thunderous stomping of hooves that made me appreciate how poor the suspension is on our military’s fighting vehicles – and I did find it a bit odd that these soldiers were giving me an encore immediately after suggesting that the entire planet was about to burst into flames – I could have sworn on the Book of Souls (an object of unimaginable evil that should never actually be sworn upon for any reason) that I saw that familiar dark-blue suit on the roof of the BBBFF, looking out at me in the greenish illumination of the dying flares.

Typically emotionless, he simply turned and appeared to trot into Black Forest’s control-tower, which was funny because I was almost positive there were no doors in any of those glass walls.

------------------------------λ------------------------------

Below me – far, far below me, further than anything has any right to be – multicolored lights twinkled like stars, some of them dancing around in an as-yet unknown pattern, some static and unmoving relative to the rest, and some of the brightest, most visible ones – which were also the most likely to provide Combine spotters with a decent point of reference – slowly winking out, one by one, as the event which they had been conjured from the immeasurable ether to illuminate was now over, and had been for somewhere between ten and fifteen minutes.

I rotated my whole body until I was facing the cloudless night sky.  The maneuver felt a bit more eccentric than I was expecting, as my center of gravity had shifted due to the slightly smaller, slightly lighter and much more fussy counterweight tightly clinging to me for the sake of her apparently very highly valued life.

“Gordon, whattareyou-AAAAHHHHH!” is an approximation of what that counterweight thought of being flipped upside down and faced with the seeming possibility of plummeting to her death.

“Alyx, it’s fine, I just want you to see the stars.  I won’t let you fall.”

The glow from my horn intensified as I reached out with my mind and squeezed her body closer to mine as a sort of ‘proof’ that I wasn’t just talking out of my ass when I said that.  As I did so, I could feel her shaking, and it was a truly weird sensation – I didn’t feel it through my HEV suit, I felt it through my magic.  Wrapping another pony’s entire body in one’s own telekinesis field is a much more intimate experience than one would think.

“If you don’t want to-”

“No, no, it’s fine.”

She said that a lot, and I was starting to wonder if it was always true, but I didn’t say anything.

“Okay, Gordon,” she began as I felt her warily peek her head over my shoulder, “the stars are beautiful-” I rudely interrupted her, and I’d just like to tell anypony reading this that you shouldn’t do that when you’re on a date, at least not with a female.

“Oh, Alyx, you don’t have to lie.”

“-I... what?”

“They look terrible.  There’s too much light pollution coming from New Cloudsdale and that bubble shield around Canterlot,” I observed.  “And even if there weren’t, the sky seems... hazy for some reason.  Hazier than I remember it being.”

I privately added to myself, You know, before Black Mane and the Combine.  Before everything.  Before we fucked up the world.

I swayed slightly as she shook her head, her legs wrapped around me tighter than ever.

“...whatever.  Okay, Gordon, I trust you...” she began, her voice now raised so close to a squeak, I could hardly hear it over the whipping of the warm night air, “... but I would love to hear your explanation of how you’re doing this-”

“-You mean how I’m flying?” I interrupted her.  While flying.  I said that while I was flying.

Like, flying.

“Yes, how you’re flying, but, Gordon-”

She placed the cackle of her hoof on my right shoulder and used the hold as an anchor to help her inch her body up closer to my neck – causing me to sway correspondingly to the right – so that she could whisper the following unmistakable message into my ear;

“-I want to hear it sitting down on a solid surface.”

For the record, she did not specify that this surface necessarily had to be on the ground.

------------------------------λ------------------------------

Celestia, how do I describe Cloudsdale?

Cloudsdale was a ruin.  A memory.  Something forgotten after the world so suddenly and so violently and irreversibly changed, replaced with something new and worse, something different, something alien, something that had no use for a city in the clouds.

For those of you who are unaware, Cloudsdale (or the City of Cloudsdale, as you’ve most likely seen on your water bill) is a city in the sky in central Equestria.  I say ‘is’ because to my indescribably limited knowledge, it’s still there - whether it’s been rebuilt, demolished or simply left the way I found it, I couldn’t tell you.

Now, this may come as a shock to some, but Cloudsdale is made out of clouds.  If you’re not from around here or whatever, living in the clouds is pretty much in pegasus ponies’ blood - it’s what they were designed by nature to do, although there’s an old scientific debate about whether the pegasi (and other flying races) evolved the ability to trot on sufficiently dense layers of airborne water moisture before or after they evolved the ability to fly, with the cloud-down theory depicting flightless pegasi jumping down onto clouds from the tops of mountains or other high places.

“So, what happened here?” I shouted back at Alyx, her legs still wrapped tightly around me.

“Let me give you the short version,” she shouted back, “I don’t think my voice can handle the long version.”  I think that’s what she said – it was a bit difficult to hear.

Below us, innumerable little tufts of puffy white cloud drifted like inkblots through water.  In front, silver moonlight reflected off of streets and sidewalks carved out of carefully grouped and enjoined cloudbanks, looking like a plowed street on Winter Wrap-Up day in Ponyville (my brother, John, lived there with his wife for some years, so I’ve personally seen the famous earth-pony tradition being performed).  With smooth drifts and frozen eddies making the whole scene look strikingly similar to a bright winter’s night, it was downright surreal that the air felt as warm and wet as a night in Las Pegasus.

“At first, the Combine treated Cloudsdale like any other city, putting up Breenscreens, repurposing the weather factories, recruiting ponies for Civil Protection and Overwatch, building re-education schools, making ponies they didn’t like ‘disappear’, all the same shit they did in the other cities – just with all pegasi.  Y’know, so they wouldn’t fall through the streets.”

I smiled at the image of Combine Metrocops stepping off a dropship in Cloudsdale and promptly falling hundreds of meters to their death.  As we entered a particularly dense scattering of little puffs of cloud, I began to fully appreciate the fact that though we were flying, we weren’t actually pegasus ponies - our bodies simply passed straight through the water vapor instead of (admittedly, gently) smacking into it like it was made of cotton candy.

“Then the order came down the line to start clipping wings.”

When we emerged from the cloud of... cloud... I was at last able to appreciate the cause of the flying debris.  It was actual debris.  Everywhere I looked, jagged bits and pieces of Cloudsdale were drifting away to rejoin the atmospheric strata they were taken from so very long ago.

“The whole city is... eroding!” I exclaimed after finding the word I was looking for somewhere in a dusty sub-basement of my memory next to interesting facts about amethyst and amphibians.

“Yeah, like I said,” Alyx continued on, “the order came down to start clipping wings, so since there are no, like, stairs to Cloudsdale-”

“-A stairway to heaven?” I playfully (but still rudely) interrupted her.

“What?  No, a stairway to Cloudsdale, I said,” she did indeed say.  “But, yeah, since the only way to get to Cloudsdale is by flying, and flying was basically outlawed, and the Combine weren’t going to set up a public transportation service or anything like that just to get to some useless pegasus city, and the weather factories - I think they called them ‘Air Exchanges’ - weren’t worth keeping the whole city just for them, the Combine just...”

She paused for a moment, taking in the decaying city in all its sadness; its banks, venues and homes universally cracked and fading, with great chunks missing from cloudcrete foundations once strong enough to support thousands – in some cases, tens of thousands – of kilograms of goods and materials – even full-fledged gardens – that would otherwise have been impossible luxuries in a city made of steam.

“... emptied the city,” Alyx finished with a weary sigh.

I added, “And with nopony here to maintain it, it’s just...”

“... blowing away,” she whispered, her mouth probably unintentionally close to my ear, and her grip on me tightened as a shudder ran through her body, making me wonder if she was cold, and also what the hell I could do if she was, given that the only clothing I had was my HEV suit.

I finished my search for a suitable spot to set down, settling on a small but proud bank in a quiet little corner of the city.  Etched into its bluish cloudcrete facade was its name – you guessed it, Cloud Bank (copyright laws being what they are, I imagine that every city in the clouds has its own local Cloud Bank, none of them related in any way whatsoever).  The financial institution sat on one side of a deserted street, the thin and flat center of which had almost completely given to the persistent tug of the wind, leaving an already-tenuous road with massive, gaping holes along a wide and flat central bed.  To the left and right of the bank along this same boulevard of broken steam, sat several other storefronts in just as sad a state as the rest of Cloudsdale; windows busted out and fanciful signs long gone, having fallen through the cloud-streets along with nearly every bench, wastebasket and lamppost to join their broken and shattered relatives lying forlorn in the valleys below, as dislocated, discarded and utterly out of place as Cloudsdale’s pegasi were now.

We landed on the bank’s flat roof and sat our rumps down halfway between its center and the bleeding edges where the highly-condensed cloud was cracking and peeling away.

The cloudcrete felt almost rubbery... squishy – sort of like loose, freshly-tilled soil – and the barely perceptible hoofprints we made in the blue pseudo-stuff disappeared almost as quickly as we could lift our hooves.  Obviously, we made sure to stay where the roof was most solid, and thus most capable of supporting the two of us highly non-pegasus ponies.

“Gordon-”

“Alyx-”

We both said each others’ names simultaneously.  Fortunately, my mother raised me to be both a scholar and a gentlecolt, and I wouldn’t disappoint her that morning.

“You go first,” I told Alyx.

“Hell no!” she violently rebuked me.  “Gordon, you tell me what the f-”

“Okay, okay, you’re right, so... uhhhhh...”  Celestia, it was hard enough just for me to form a coherent sentence whenever I talked to mares I really wanted to snuggle, but now I was expected to explain advanced concepts in theoretical high-energy physics to one.  Where would I even begin?

“Dark Energy,” I said while using my front legs to make an action that was spooky and distant.

Alyx blinked, as if waiting for me to say something else, then inquired, “What’s ‘Dark Energy’?”

“Nopony knows!” I said in just as eerie and foreboding a voice as before while continuing to waggle my hooves at her.

Alyx did not seem amused at my decorum for whatever reason (it must’ve been the depressing setting we were in), and she continued to question how I had suddenly acquired superpowers.

“So,” she said, holding her head in her head in her hooves as if to prevent her brain from simply leaping out of her skull and flopping like a gasping fish over to something more logical, like death.

“So,” I imitated her, causing her to become more angry.

“So, you galloped off to the Central Bunker after freaking out at the funeral service, I saw that...”

“Alyx, I was just... thinking about how... General Dash was dead, and... and I just felt terrible about that, I mean, I’d just met her!  That day!  You know?”

By the way, I was telling her the truth.  Just not all of it.

“Okay, okay, I get that,” Alyx conceded before continuing her questioning.  “But then you come back 15 minutes later, glowing blue, and you buck over her coffin?!  What were you thinking?!”

“Alyx, I know this sounds crazy, but...”  Come to think of it, you should really try to avoid using that as a preface for any fantastical claim, as it plants the word ‘crazy’ in your audience’s head.

“... After I sat down on the rubble of the bunker... I began to glow, right?  And then, the next thing that happened in a chronological sequence of events was... I knew, I just knew she wasn’t dead!”

Again, none of what I said was untrue, just... simplified.

“Okay... I guess.  But I still don’t understand what ‘Dark Energy’ is or how you got it from the bunker or how that made your magic so much more freaking powerful!”

“Nnnnooooo-pooooo-ny knoooooooo-wsssss!  Ooo-oooh-ooohhhh!” I said, trying to scare her into giving me candy.  And it was true; nopony knows what Dark Matter or Dark Energy is.  Sure, we have our grand-unification theories and such, but nopony has figured out how to test them.

“Alright, whatever, Gordon,” she said, heaving a sigh.  “Now it’s my turn.”

I found it very strange that she seemed to abruptly shift from sounding like she hated me to sounding like she was... in love with me.

“I’ve been waiting for-ev-er to tell you this, but... you remember that night at Black Mane West?”

I should have told her that it would be an act of Divine Intervention if I were ever able to forget that night at Black Mane West.  Instead, I said something much less creative and more awkward.

“Alyx... it would be something... it would really be something if I could ever forget what happened at Black Mane West.”

Seeming to accept this, she laid down and, for whatever reason, I followed suit.  I wasn’t being at all metaphorical when I said the sky was too hazy and polluted for stargazing, but if you squinted (or zoomed in with your digital rangefinder), you could see a few stars twinkling here and there.

“Well, when you asked me... if we were an ‘item’...” Alyx began, anxiety straining her voice.

“Whoah, whoah, hey, Alyx, no-” I think was my chaotic and ineloquent response, and she abruptly stopped getting to whatever it was she was getting to.

“Before we talk about that, I need to clear up two or three things...”

I paused to think for a moment.

“Yes, I’m sorry, it’s three things.”

I collected my thoughts, inhaled and exhaled deeply, and made my first wish.

“So... you and Spike...”

She looked at me like she seriously couldn’t believe I was asking her that question.

“Oh.  My.  Goddesses.  Gordon.  We’re just friends.”

I don’t know how I was looking at her, but I must have been giving her an awfully strange look, as the next thing she said was,

“Seriously.  We’re friends.”

“Okay,” I breathed, accepting and believing her words as if they had come from the Princesses.

Writing it down, it sounds downright stupid, but after hearing her say that... instantaneously, any doubts or fears I might’ve had about there being any feelings between her and her lifelong guardian- companion (and good friend of mine, might I add) vaporized.

One out of three.

“... and me and Twilight...”

Then she looked at me like she really couldn’t believe I was asking her that question.

“Oh my Goddesses.  Gordon.  That wasn’t your fault.”

My ears perked up (I could feel them) and I’ll bet ten bits there was a twinkle in my eye as I said,

“Really?!”

“No!” Alyx snapped, and my ears suddenly went flat.

“No?” I asked as if she’d just told me cookies weren’t real.

Rolling her eyes and grunting in frustration, Alyx clarified,

“I meant, no it wasn’t your fault, stupid.”

Reader, after many, many drafts of this paragraph, after hours so numerous and spanning so many days I actually began counting them in the first place, only to lose count of them by the time I am writing this, which I hope, like I have for my previous ten billion paragraphs, will be the one you finally end up reading... I and my extremely helpful copy-editor, have come to accept that writing is no special talent of mine, and I will never be able to relate here the peace I felt when Alyx told me that.  So I won’t even try.  All I’ll say is this:

Both of Twilight Sparkle’s children – and, yes, although they were not biologically related, Twilight was every molecule and boson, if not every gene and chromosome, as much Spike’s mother as she was to Alyx – both had absolved me of any sin related to their mother’s death.

And as soon as I realized that, I thought,

Well... if neither of her children blame me... then how is it possible that Twilight could?

And gazing up at Luna’s bright face etched into her birthright just as the moon itself is upon Her flank as if the two were each others’ cutie marks...

I swear to the Goddesses the fucking thing winked at me.

No allegory, no metaphor, no optical illusion, the goddessesdamned mare in the motherfucking moon fucking winked at me.  It scared the piss out of me.  And by that, I mean I was deeply, deeply disturbed and terrified and I was instantaneously afflicted with extreme paranoia and agoraphobia and I might have also peed a little.  In my suit.

Don’t worry (and I know you were, you worry wart), there are systems that take care of that.

When Alyx asked me what was wrong (you know, I could’ve just said, ‘Oh, she didn’t notice and then we passionately made out and I made her moan and gasp and call me Daddy, and by the way, I think that’s extremely disturbing that that’s a ‘thing’ that stallions are apparently supposed to enjoy – like, what, am I supposed to be fantasizing about cuddling with my freaking daughter?  I’m sorry, but that’s just sick) but when Alyx asked me that, I opted not to tell her what I knew then to be true, with even the Goddess of the Night, Princess Luna Herself, backing me up:

I was no longer Twilight Sparkle’s murderer.

And when I die and go to pony heaven, if she is still mad at me – after all that – then you know what?  She can go to hell.

But, no, I didn’t tell Alyx any of that.  I don’t actually remember what I said to her, but I can tell you that she was looking pretty worried by the time I asked her my third and final question.

Two out of three.  I get one more wish.

“... and you and me?”

When I asked that, she looked at me like that one successfully topped the previous question as being the most absolutely retarded thing she had ever heard.

“Gordon...” she began with an extremely weary sigh that soon yielded to a gorgeous little grin that called unwanted attention to the pair of rosy red cheeks just above it.  Knowing her answer but wanting to deliver it properly, Alyx partially lifted herself up off the cloudcrete, and, after a moment of quick hoofwork, repositioned her body so that she was facing me head-on.  And then, let me tell you, that mare taught me the meaning of coterminous when she leaned forward until her wet nose was touching mine and her sweet breath and feminine scent was all I could smell and her tongue was so close I could almost taste it, and whispered in the single, bar-none, blue-ribbon gold medal champion of all the sexiest voices I have ever heard,

“I’m all yours.”

Three out of three.

And then, after we were done kissing (which we did, we kissed, even though Alyx told me afterward she didn’t really like my facial hair because she said it was ‘itching her’, and I didn’t really understand because it’s not like her face was hairless, I mean, our entire bodies are covered from head to hoof in luscious, beautiful silky fur that the Combine will never know the pleasure of and that’s got to be some sort of motivating factor in their unnecessarily harsh treatment of us and by us I mean all Equestrians, even though some of us don’t have fur but what I’m saying is dragons don’t, or at least no breed of dragon I know of)...

But anyway, after we were done kissing (which we did for a really long time, boy did we kiss for a long time and in lots of different ways that I didn’t even know you could kiss, I mean, it’s like Alyx had been thinking about this for a long, long time, and I don’t think those books her mom let her read as she was growing up did anything to discourage this, not that I think that’s bad or anything, although I don’t think my parents would’ve approved of it, but you know, we grew up in a pretty conservative part of Equestria, not that the region you physically live in should affect your personal beliefs, although, looking from the outside-in, one could reasonably label my family as fairly conservative, and this did pretty much correlate to the geo-political region we were living in at the time, which I think I’ve already told you was back on the old farm – which is a pretty counter-intuitive place for a theoretical physicist to come from, not that ponies from rural areas are any less intelligent or anything than any other pony), but, again, after we were done kissing...

We hugged.

Nonsexually.

------------------------------λ------------------------------

Goddesses.

I focused on the bright red trigger beneath the launch tube of my Soldier Portable Evasion Resistant Munitions System (SPERMS), trying not to break the flimsy thing.  It spat out a Laser Guided Explosive Munition (LGEM) that cost the equivalent of a year of my former life’s salary to produce.

The Goddesses did not create the Universe...

Instead of heading straight for its (at this point, quite perturbed) target like my last two failed attempts, this one instead shot straight up into the air, climbing toward the heavens on a fluffy beanstalk of hydrocarbonates and water vapor.

... nor write the laws governing its behavior.

The precision-engineered product of a once thriving military-industrial complex did something it was never intended to do: Mortally wound a (again, very angry) Combine Gunship – a bony thing resembling a flying whale that hunted you like a bloodhound and growled when it couldn’t find you.

Nopony knows who did.

After seeing what looked like a giant radiator grill tucked underneath the thing’s tail rotor, I’d set my Control Launch Unit to a heat-seeking, top-down attack profile and pressed a clearly-labeled button.

But I can tell you one thing...

Now lacking much of its back section and howling in pain, the Gunship careened into a pair of Combine bunkers near the base of the Royal Palace, and both the synth aircraft and the defensive positions it collided with were engulfed in clouds of grey and white and orange.  In death, the flying machine only served to further decimate friendly forces whom it had already twice betrayed when in shooting down two of my other missiles, it unexpectedly caused them to veer wildly off course and – twice – into friendly personnel and equipment, thus setting off secondary chains of explosions and causing further destruction and carnage.

Whoever did must have a strange sense of humor.

Flanking my flanks were two gunmetal grey ‘Surprise’ class Light Armored Vehicles (LAV) – four-wheeled monstrosities that were a bit smaller than the six-wheeled Armored Personnel Carriages I saw trucking around New Cloudsdale.  Seeing as they were being towed through the air by two teams of four of the most rough-and-tumble (or at least, rough-and-tumble-looking) pegasi I’d ever seen, one couldn’t possibly have expected a wingless, ground-bound, flight-incapable unicorn that wasn’t a Dark Energy superconductor to keep pace with the airborne beasts.  No, nopony could possibly have expected that from one of those kinds of unicorns.

Our attack group, ‘Blue Team’ was assaulting the Palace from the North side, briefly cutting across the ‘Shady City’ – so-called not because of anything bad, but simply because the North end of downtown Canterlot sat in the shadow of the utterly massive Royal Palace to the South, and in the shadow of the mountain itself to the East.  This part of Canterlot – that is, everything outside the Palace complex – was little else but a burned-out pile of ash and detritus, a pile of bones picked clean by fire, devoid of anything consumable and some things that weren’t.  Honestly, the most revealing description I can give of what was once our nation’s capital city is to simply say that there wasn’t much left to describe.  The most cursorily obvious feature would probably be the innumerable broken limestone skeletons poking out of what looked like an old fire pit, the once well-maintained streets and avenues buried under a layer of grey ash that had been rained on and dried out and rained on and dried out so many times it was starting to level out to a uniform depth of around 40 meters.  Poking out of this new kind of concrete were the black-and-grey remains of collapsed structures, the white walls and towers carved from the mountain by my forefathers vandalized by burn marks flowing upward out of every single gap.

Those four dragons who held out here against the Combine must have fought and fought until all they were defending was a graveyard.

It made me angry.

It made me angry because there were hundreds of thousands of my fellow citizens buried in that graveyard.  And looming over it all like a great headstone was the Royal Palace where once reigned the Princesses of the Sun and the Moon, a triumph of architecture and engineering, a precious gem treasured and free to be enjoyed by all Equestrians, now occupied like the rest of our nation, existing now only as a place of torment for its citizens and service to foreign invaders.

It was an affront to the Goddesses.

“Taking fire, taking fire!” a feminine voice came over the radio, static making her panicked statement snap, crackle and pop like a bowl of oat-bran.

I glanced around from behind the safety and comfort of my newly sunglassed Hazardous Environment Helmet – protection from bright lights being an unexpected necessity during this early-morning attack due to the one-two luminescent punch favored by the Combine of aiming high-powered spotlights at us while also shooting superheated plasma, both of those things being very, very bright, especially the latter, as it’s what the sun’s made out of.

I verified that indeed, she was taking fire – quite a lot of it in fact – the heaviest of it coming from a series of Combine AAA cannons (that’s ‘Anti-Air’... something) that lined the gilded catwalk connecting the Tower of Abridgment with Canterlot Tower.

Now, those towers were just two of many that composed the sprawl of the Royal Palace, with few connecting structures between them – instead of cold stone hallways, the Princesses always preferred lush, meticulously-tended lawns and gardens between individual branches and agencies of the royal government.  The administrative center of Equestria was sort of like its own miniature ‘forbidden city’, although almost everything except the Princess’ sleeping chambers was entirely open to the public – the Princesses just loved rubbing shoulders and bumping flanks with their citizenry.  Probably the biggest single structure was the Grand Ballroom, an enormous circular space used for exhibitions and special events that could be seen from the North or South equally well.  Overall, finally seeing the sprawling complex with my own eyes only confirmed what I already knew: By some miracle, the Royal Palace had survived the Seven Minute’s War virtually unscathed.  Its golden domes were still shiny and splendid, its whitewashed limestone was still virtually without blemish (due to the whitewashing), and the famous royal blues here and there that inspired the dress-blues of the Royal Equestrian Army Air Corps appeared just as I and my father and grandfather and great-grandfather (I’m told they were pink before that) remembered them.

But there was something different; a big, black hole had been cut out of the center of everything.

Dodging long, gooey strands of plasma the color and brightness of a stellar supergiant, I floated myself over to Barney to return the missile launcher I’d borrowed to take out a pair of those whale- like ‘gunships’ that had spotted us on patrol.  When he poked his security-helmeted head out of the top hatch of the Surprise, I made a magical motion to dump the SPERMS onto him, but he reached his front leg out and jabbed it at me several times, batting away the launcher like he was a kitten and I had a ball of yarn.

“There should be more!” he yelled over his radio, utterly impossible to hear otherwise.

With my prolonged and intense exposure to dark energy radiation making me some sort of ‘magical superconductor’ (a phrase that doesn’t really mean anything, as dark energy is so mysterious to equine science, it may as well be magic), telekinetically flinging my body around to get another viewpoint was, by this time, about as easy as moving around any other object.  Roughly.  I never said I was ever any good at moving around other objects, but for the purposes of this attack, my jerky, erratic, unpredictable movements made me a harder target.  And while I’m explaining that, I was flying outside the (inadequate, as you’ll see shortly) protection of the pair of LAVs because doing so made me a smaller, (albeit more Gordon Freemane-looking) target.

“Holy shit, Barney, you seein’ this?!” I radioed to Barney, the shock of having spotted a stupidly obvious detail that I’d missed at first through my zoomed-in rangefinder causing me to drop the ‘g’ off the end of a present participle.

Although the blue steel the Combine seem to love so much was almost invisible at this time of day – with Celestia content with raising the sun over the East coast every morning, Canterlot was presently lying at the base of a shadow that extended across half of Western Equestria – that didn’t mean the Combine could see without aid, and their various bases and outposts always had plenty of outdoor lighting that made them easier targets for insurgents such as myself.  However, the Combine, being characteristically slow in all things, still hadn’t flipped the lights off even though they were surely aware that all their nicely illuminated buildings made easy targets for the enemy forces that they must have been similarly well-aware were attacking it.  They hadn’t even turned off what must have been purely decorative spotlights lighting up what appeared to be...

“Am I seeing what, Gordon?!  More gunships?!”

“No, it’s not gunships, it’s like this utterly enormous... unfathomably massive-”

“Use words, Gordon!”

“It’s like this... huge metal box!” I yelled out my description.  “Good Goddesses, it’s right where the Throne Room used to be!  They just... smashed the thing right down on top of it!  Like a... like a...”

“That’s the Depot, Gordon!” Barney cut me off before I could finish my simile.  That’s our target!”

Indeed, that was where ‘Blue Team’ was to rendezvous (I love that word so much) with ‘Red Team’, which consisted of Spike, Alyx and a couple of squadrons of crack pegasus commandos.  After meeting up at the Depot – which was sort of like the Combine version of a train station, although I couldn’t see any train tracks running through it in the dark – we were to find and rescue Commander Shining Armor (if possible) and somehow get him to safety (if possible) or just bring him with us to the teleportation chamber inside Canterlot Tower (which is what we all figured was most likely to happen) – the teleporter itself being located somewhere in the Hall of History (HoH), either inside or outside the Secure Internal Sanctum (SIS), which once housed the Elements of Harmony.

The absence of the threat of gunships confirmed by my repeated observation, I once again floated over to Barney and once again offered him my SPERMS, which he gladly accepted.

The glow from my horn illuminating our faces paled in comparison to the work of Rainbow Dash.  Less than a minute before, she had dissipated the bubble shield surrounding the Palace using an extremely curious aerobatic trick that only she knew how to do, and it was necessary that it be done: The only other weapon the Resistance had that was capable of defeating Shining Armor’s shield spell was our little Inter-National Ballistic Missile, which we – and especially the General – really, really didn’t want to waste on something so unharmful to the Combine.  It basically consisted of her flying directly into a solid surface at a supersonic rate of speed, which you’d think would kill a pony instantly, but through some pegasus magic, certain ponies are able to trap an enormously dense cushion of air and water vapor in front of them as they fly (it probably has something to do with how water vapor is much more ‘substantial’ to a pegasus pony than it is to unicorns and earth-ponies).  This pony would then either shoot through this pseudo-cloud when they broke the sound barrier (the speed at which a wave passes through a given substance, in this case, air), or in our case, they could smash it into something, the pocket of steam hopefully providing enough of a cushion to allow the pegasus performing the trick to pass through to the other side of whatever it is they’re ramming into unharmed and still have enough time to slow down from a tremendous rate of speed before running into something else.  General Dash reported that the most massive object she ever demolished using this method was a friend’s barn, with the ‘cloud’ enabling her to smash through the roof and out one of its walls as she followed a very high-G U-shaped flight path – although she expressed regret over her chosen exit point, as her watching friends didn’t get to see her fly safely away from the enormous explosion that followed.

The remnant of her work hovered in the sky over us like a giant cumulonimbus cloud, glowing with all the colors of the rainbow partway down from its peak, where it reached high enough to clear the steep incline of Mount Equestria and be painted in the rays from Celestia’s rising sun.

The cloud was several thousand meters high and shaped like a mushroom...

Goddesses, how could anypony survive that? I wondered, and started scanning the spectrum with my suit radio, looking for the band General Dash was using to communicate with Black Forest.

“... Airwatch reports probable Anticitizen One reacquired zone Canterlot...”

The robotic, monotone mare’s voice was one of only a few active frequencies I was picking up, and it sure as hell wasn’t Rainbow Dash, so I concentrated on the nifty little toggle on my HUD until it cycled to the other one.

“...to compete with government-funded agencies like Black Mane-”

There we go.  Is that... Doctor Gryffindor?

“-Oh!  We were the government’s customer, Gilda!”

Yup.  And she’s arguing with Doctor Pie?

“We had investors demanding results just like Equestrian Innovations!”

“... Guys...”

Was that...?

“Oh, I’m sure MARePA’s fatted calf worked extremely hard for their no-bid, no-contest contracts-”

“... Guys, seriously...”

Yeah, there’s definitely a third voice...

“-meanwhile, Equestrian Innovations had to whore itself out to anypony with two billion bits to rub together-”

“PINKIE PIE AND DOCTOR GRYFFINDOR!”

Aaaaand yeah, that’s the General.

“How come you didn’t call me ‘doctor’?”

“THIS IS A MILITARY FREQUENCY AND YOU WILL CEASE ITS USE IMMEDIATELY OR I WILL HAVE BOTH OF YOU THROWN IN THE BRIG!  TOGETHER!”

Not another word was spoken by either doctor.

The General’s voice sounded strained with anxiety and stress – unusual for a pony that made a career of making life and death decisions, often while on the battlefield herself.

“NOW, WHERE THE FUCK-”

There’s that word again.

“-IS THE MISSILE?!” she asked.

It was a valid question, as the missile was supposed to be launched literally the second we had confirmation of the shield barrier’s dispersion.

“Cool your jets, Dash,” replied Doctor Gryffindor amid a brief burst of static which directly correlated to a plasma bolt passing very close to my face.  “It should be there in about... two seconds.”

My whole body froze the instant I heard that. I knew it was no joke or figure of speech - it was math.

I whirled around in midair, wildly scanning the sky for the incoming missile - our secret weapon, our only hope, our Hail Luna - and in doing so, I nearly lost concentration on keeping myself airborne.  Most non-unicorns don’t realize this, but magic isn’t like trotting or galloping – there’s no special part of the unicorn brain specifically dedicated to spellcasting, unlike the cerebellum is with movement.  Levitating yourself or anything else involving magic requires about as much mental exertion as, say, playing the piano or chopping a cucumber.  You can get really good at it, but it still requires a level of attention beyond that of things like galloping or breathing.

Something dark and smoking streaked across my vision.  This was followed, an instant later, by the loudest boom I’d heard since a Hunter-Killer Chopper exploded about twenty meters above my head in the Everfree Forest.  This was followed, perhaps half an instant later, by a much deeper, crunchier, more drawn-out sort of boom.  It sounded like something extremely dense and metallic drilling through layer after layer of concrete, limestone and marble, which was, of course, exactly what was happening.

Haaaahahahahahaha, how does it feel you mothercuddlers?  I don’t know if I thought or said that.

There was enough natural and artificial light for me to make out the outline of a thick, dark plume of smoke trailing behind the missile, outlined against the dim white walls of the Palace.

“Direct hit!  Direct hit!” General Rainbow Dash squealed like a fanfilly at a Curbside Colts concert.

”Right through their barracks, it looks like!” is what, after much thought, I am 95% certain she said next, her voice breaking in and out over the airwaves - no static, just a clean butchering of her wonderfully squeaky voice - and that was the last thing I ever heard her say.

I have no idea if she lived or died when... something very scientific happened to Canterlot around 15-20 minutes later, but hey, here’s to hoping.

Anyway, right after she said that, things started happening very quickly.  Too quickly.

The LAV that earlier had reported taking fire was ripped nearly in half by an explosion, its forward pink shield bubble vanishing with no hint it was ever there in the first place, and the pegasus ponies it was supposed to protect simultaneously being flung from their harnesses, some of them on fire and with a slight chance of living and others slamming violently into the side of the other transport with absolutely no chance of living.  I had to dodge the body of a white pegasus mare whose back was bent at an unnatural angle – whether she was alive or dead is anypony’s guess, but I know for sure her wings weren’t moving – and Barney’s LAV took evasive action to avoid one of the other carriage’s flaming wheels, blown free by the explosion and deformed by heat, as well as molten metal and cooking ammunition spilling out what was left of the armored vehicle.  I never saw the bodies of the soldiers who died inside, nor did I hear their screams – I couldn’t hear anything anyone was saying, as my radio was tuned to the completely wrong frequency.

Meanwhile, the missile impact site was lit up by a series of secondary explosions, illuminating both the plume from its entry as well as its own column of smoke and dust rising out of the massive, gaping hole it had added to the facade of the Grand Ballroom.

Luna Almighty, I think we hit something delicate.

And, again, at the same time these things were happening, Spike, with Alyx huddled against his back, had begun his bombing run on Combine positions around the perimeter of our landing zone, which will hereafter be referred to as ‘Our Landing Zone’ (Editor’s note: After being introduced, the landing zone is never mentioned by name again).  A couple of seconds after hocking up a fireball at a guard tower, I saw another globe of orange light erupt from the battlements below, a tongue of flame shooting out its end illuminating a curvy tail of grey which betrayed it as a Rocket Propelled Grenade.  I concentrated on tracing its path - it was aimed at Spike.  However, I saw no explosion – it was hard to tell in the darkness of the shadow of the mountain, but I swear one of his rear talons twitched and he threw his head off to one side, mouthing the word ‘fuck’ as the ball of light suddenly switched direction, now heading toward the ruins of the rest of the city.

After our attack group made it far enough away from the cluster of Combine AAA (pronounced ‘aaa’) atop the Bridge of Abridgment (actual name) that we were safe from its fire (which was plasma), it was time for us to join in on the killing (assuming killing transponies counts as killing).

I could see them down there, dozens, maybe hundreds.  The electric blue eyes of the Combine Overwatch shone in the long dark shadow of the mountain like the eyes of batponies.  All along the watchtowers and battlements of the Palace streaked the indigo discharge of alien energy weapons, and almost directly below me now, bright yellow and orange flames lashed out at the huddled troops from the dragon who saved me outside Sweet Apple Acres.

A hatch popped open atop the remaining Armored Personnel Carriage, and Barney emerged with a deployable double-barreled mounted turret strung on either side with links of small black canisters.  In addition to not looking all that scary, the weapon was also surprisingly quiet, so I hardly even noticed when Barney opened fire.  It took me a few seconds to make the connection between it and the rapid series of explosions that began ripping through the Combine seconds later.

Reflecting on the placement of a what appeared to be a rapid-fire grenade launcher – two of them, to hoofboot – on a lightly-armored vehicle of such diminutive size and capacity, I thought,

Ah.  That’s why it’s called the ‘Surprise’.

Now, to be honest, the only reason I put in so many extra hours at the Black Mane Hazard Course was because there was this one part where you got to shoot a gun at a bunch of targets in a little shooting-gallery type dealie.  Oh, Celestia, I lived for that part.  Of course, what sucked is you had to get through this long, stupid obstacle course just to get to it.  There was even a swimming section.  Celestia forbid our laboratory technicians don’t know how to swim.  I mean, even the gun part seemed at least somewhat reasonable - I was going to be working in a top-secret government facility during a time of war, and the enemy, we were told, was everywhere.  But swimming?

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I did indeed find myself doing quite a bit of aerobics after the Resonance Cascade, but it’s not like the swimming section prepared me for that.

It’s not like the shooting section prepared me for this.

I scrolled through my inventory screen until my Saddle-Mounted Anti-Infantry Rifle was highlighted in yellow on my HUD.  For what could have been the last time, it obediently swung around to hover at that familiar arbitrary point slightly to my right.  Our attack group was steadily slowing down as we prepared to land on a wide-open, sorely neglected lawn directly beyond an outer section of the Palace’s whiter-than-white walls, and Barney and mine’s job was to “cover” our descent (apparently, what military ponies mean when they say “cover me” or “cover that” is they want you to shoot at whatever is shooting at you, which I found kind of confusing because isn’t that the whole point of war, anyway?).  Though the wind shear was still quite fierce, there was no possible way my rifle would be torn from my magical grasp.  That might have been a worry under normal circumstances.

Not these.

Centering my crosshair on the winking blue dots below, I pretended as best I could that they were just targets at a shooting range, then commanded the trigger of my SM/AIR to lie down like a dog.

Under normal circumstances, a shooting range would be the only place I would ever fire a gun.

I have heard it said that a soldier should enter the battlefield with the disposition of one who is attending a funeral, as a battlefield quickly becomes a mass wake for those who will die on it.

Under normal circumstances, I would be horrified at the thought of killing another pony.

Personally, I never saw the point of being ‘respectful’ towards somepony’s remains.  It’s just a body.  There’s nopony inside it.  Not anymore.

Under normal circumstances, I would never feel pleasure from watching other ponies die.

I’m not sure if I should apologize for this or not, but I couldn’t describe what those old, brittle bullets from Slimpickin’s cabin did to the transorganic bodies they impacted, spreading out inside like the petals of a flower - it was too dark, and the ponies being killed were too far away.

Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t take pleasure in knowing it was I who was killing them.

Closer to the ground now, I focused on a cargo container the size of a passenger-carriage and its sides crumpled like a crushed aluminum can while it leapt into the air like a frightened jackrabbit, its doors breaking free of their flimsy steel locks and stacks of metallic furniture and equipment – still wrapped in plastic and pyrofoam and strapped to rotting wooden pallets – everything sliding out and crumpling to the ground with a crash of thunder, killing anypony with poor enough reflexes or situational awareness to be caught underneath.

Under normal circumstances, I would never in my wildest dreams, have been able to do that.

And I told that container to fly for me like the rotor of that Combine helicopter in Ponyville, and it did so as if the command came from Princess Celestia Herself, smashing its open end into a limestone guard tower, gutting its hexagonal walls and shipping its pulse-rifle turrets, along with the soldiers operating them, to somewhere beyond the Palace walls, with only the surrounding catwalk and the dust from the collapse of its sides and roof as evidence there was ever anything there at all.

This is not a normal circumstance.  There is nothing ‘normal’ about these circumstances.

Thinking about the fully masked and helmeted Combine that I killed due to their lack of situational awareness, I deliberately disengaged my Hostile Environment Helmet as we coasted into the courtyard of a boxy, unlabelled building that was connected somewhere in the back to the Tower of Abridgment - and it to both the Depot and Canterlot Tower.

I hit the dirt the same time the LAV did, its massive tires digging long black trenches in the dead grass as it skidded to a halt inside the courtyard.  The surrounding wall was pockmarked with black-rimmed craters and missing chunks here and there, and piled atop or scattered all over were the blue-and-grey urban camouflaged bodies of the Combine Overwatch.  Dark grey gas masks, steel combat saddles and smoking assault rifles littered the ancient battlements, but nothing living stood against us.  Somepony yelled “ALL CLEAR!”, and the lead pegasus pilot powered down the bright pink bubble shield protecting the front of the Surprise.  The instant it vaporized, I heard a sort of squeal that sounded like nothing I’d ever heard before, and a second later two of the pegasi were just... gone.  Before I could close my eyes, their bodies blew up from the inside like a balloon and burst into ribbons of charcoal-black flesh, and everything - every little piece of their bodies - just burned, burned until there was nothing left, gone before anything touched the ground.  There was no blood, no screams... nothing, just nothing.  Nothing left of them to speak of.  Not even shadows.

There was a panic.  Orders were shouted.  Ponies screamed.  I understood nothing, not while my ears were filled with rolling thunder produced by the dancing of titans, nor did it matter, not for a little pony caught in a crossfire between warring sky gods who hurled lightning bolts like raindrops, pelting us from everywhere and nowhere, everywhere and nowhere, everywhere and nowhere!

I think the Goddess of the Night must have decided to stay and watch the sun come up that morning, for when I became situationally aware that I was being shot at by ponies who honestly wouldn’t mind if I were to die somehow, instead of doing something that I was normally quite good at - that is, something - I did nothing.  Yes, I froze.  I froze in that maelstrom of enemy fire like a goshdarned fiddlefucking retard, like a scared little physicist who’d never been shot at before and remained that way until it stopped, and suffered no more serious an injury than aching ears for it.

Maybe they saw a flying unicorn and thought I was a Princess, or maybe it’s because I was a little ways apart from the others, I don’t know.  All I know is that Luna let me get away with suicide.

I was shaken from my stupor when a Laser-Guided Explosive Munition – no doubt fired by Security Officer Ironbuck – fell from the sky and detonated inside a Combine guard tower to my right.  This had the curious effect of causing half the enemy fire to suddenly cease without explanation.

With that one effectively deep-sixed (nopony’s ever actually explained to me what that means), the surviving Overwatch fled across the battlements to the only remaining tower - which, if I was any indication, was doing an absolutely fucking terrible job of killing us.

Barney will need help reloading his- I began to think when something huge, dark and terrifying caught my attention as it swooped down on us from out of a sky redder than Red Hell.

“Goddessesdamnit, Spike!” I yelled at the monster.

Spike wasn’t even supposed to slow down while aiding our assault, but there he was, coming around for one more pass at our target, impaling Combine soldiers atop the wall on his rear talons and splattering their shimmering shield barriers with dark-red blood.  Then, once he had the Overwatch cowering inside their fortress of cautious optimism like Reignaissance-era Night Knights hiding... from a fire-breathing dragon... Spike calmly set himself up at its entrance, happily took a deep breath and burned them alive inside their stone crucible.  Alyx, still huddled against his back, raised a leg to shield herself from the heat of the flames coming from inside - and probably also to gag herself, as the stench of burning flesh and brimstone is awful, and that of transequines worse.

With that watchtower gone, the cover of the wall and the sheer verticality of the Palace spires above ensured that we were, for the moment, out of harm’s way.  Watching Alyx ride away into the sky on the - even I will admit - at times, awe-inspiring Spike with a chorus of triumphant hurrahs at their back, I dismissed my usual primitive jealousy at their closeness, thinking with a smile,

Well, Spike, from now on, if Alyx wants to fly somewhere, she can just hop on me.

Barney herded the survivors around like sheep (there were no sheep on our team), trying to get us to form a circle (we never did), and we all took advantage of the lull to douse ourselves in Rarity’s Vineyard Zombie Repellant.  I prayed to Celestia that, until that flammable perfume evaporated, none of us would get shot by superheated plasma bolts - and while I was at it, that none of us would get shot by whatever the hell killed those two pegasus pilots.  Under any circumstances.  Ever.

“Alright, let’s go!” Barney shouted after we were done, and I pushed the thoughts aside, galloping after him like he’d just said something improprietous about my mother.

“Follow Freemane!” shouted one of our Resistance comrades behind me.

That’s new.

I was suddenly overcome with a surreal sense of déjà-vu.  There I was, following wherever Security Officer Barnes led, just like on the day of the Resonance Cascade, back when I was just a weak, helpless scientist who let other ponies kill and die for me because ignorant eggheads like me just didn’t do those kinds of things because they were too afraid to do anything except sit still and pray that somepony would come and help them instead of helping their own damned selves.  And this, right after my little episode where I froze after we came under fire.

Forget that! I mentally shouted.  Things are different now.  Things are much, much different.

“Now remember,” Barney hollered at us while we galloped up a short set of stone stairs that led to a tall, bronze portal, “we should have somewhere between thirty minutes and one-”

“Barney,” I interrupted, “in thirty minutes, I’ll level the whole fucking Palace.”

------------------------------λ------------------------------

“How can one pony have slipped through your force’s hooves time and time again?” Breen demanded over the announcement system, an unusual tinge of stress coloring his normally calm, smooth, well-spoken voice.

”How is it possible?”  His question, echoing down dark, empty hallways, reverberating off of marble and tile and glass, went unanswered.  For all I knew, nopony besides Barney and I even heard it.

We completely ignored him, which was especially easy in light of a couple of recent developments.  First, except for us, all of Blue Team was dead or missing - and probably dead.  You know my prayer that none of us would get hit by plasma while we were wearing perfume?  Well, two of us got hit by plasma while we were wearing perfume and burned to death, plasma fired not by soldiers, but by these highly unstable little auto-turrets the Combine have set up in places.  So, for you atheists, I guess that’s one point towards the futility of prayer.  Although, looking back on it, if those two soldiers ahead of me hadn’t been shot by those turrets... well, I would have - probably Barney, too.  And if both me and Barney were dead... for one thing, you wouldn’t be reading this... maybe our group would’ve made it to the teleporter alright, Spike being as tough as he is, and Alyx knew how to operate the thing, so they probably would’ve teleported, but without me and Barney...

Well, I won’t spoil anything, but after thinking about it... maybe the Goddesses had a good reason for letting those two ponies die.  Oh well, it doesn’t excuse the disappearance of the other pair.

As for them... Barney and I were sure they were with us when we came in, but at some point we turned around and they were just gone.  No clues, no evidence.  At some point between when we entered this forsaken building and when we decided to check on the extremely quiet and unhelpful soldiers following us, two of our number vanished without a trace.  Add that to the extremely disturbing orchestra of wails, grunts, snarls, moans and screams sometimes punctuated by a spate of frantic radio chatter or a calm, emotionless announcement, all underscored by an erratic drumbeat of explosive thumps or an occasional burst of automatic weapons fire that echoed through the vents and the hallways and drifted in through broken window after broken window... there was only one thing I could think about:

My sexual frustration.

“Gordo, you are being paranoid,” Barney assured me as we clopped down the hall at a brisk pace.

“Am I, Barney?”

“This is not some agent-provocateur or highly trained assassin...”

“Because I’ve read some pretty weird shit on the Equestrianet about mares and dragons, now SHH!”

I hurriedly shushed him, straining my ears so I could hear the liar giving one of his last speeches.

“Gordon Freemane is a Theoretical Physicist who had hardly earned the distinction of his Phd at the time of the Black Mane Incident...”

“Oh, fuuuck you!” I cursed at a random wall, as I couldn’t find any PA speakers to yell at.  Really, that that was all I could think of as a counter response was more revealing than anything.

I mean, it was true, of course.  Doctor Breen didn’t make up facts and figures, he never drew unreasonable conclusions, never made unfair assumptions, never made leaps of logic.  Everything the liar said was true.  His lies were not small ones - they were big ones.  Doctor Breen operated by carefully and expertly assembling a thousand little pieces of truth into one big lie.  Then, after a little practice in front of a mirror, he’d get in front of a camera and use his obvious talent as an orator to deliver that lie to a frightened, confused and desperate populace with the reassuring eloquence of a learned intellectual and the self-assured poise of one who had deceived the whole world.

Excuse me, enlightened.

“I have good reason to believe that in the intervening years, he was in a state which precluded further development of covert skills...”

I had to look up preclude in the dictionary while writing this.  I’m going to use it more often.

“Yeah, hey, Gordon, I was gonna ask-”

“SHH!” I shushed him again.

“The pony you have consistently failed to slow down, let alone capture, is by all standards, simply that; an ordinary pony!”

“Well, he’s gotcha there, Gordo.”

I paused, turned to him, raised a hoof to my mouth and said,

“SHH!”

Barney and I continued our semi-careful, somewhat panicked, and at times, a bit past cantering and more into full-on galloping advance down the hallowed halls of some building I never learned the name of – which, as was evident from the plain white pilasters (fancy talk for fake columns) lining the walls, indecipherable stain glass windows, tacky mauve and cream tiles, and the occasional harsh assault of fake-gold baseboard (trust me, I know these things), was a fully recognized organ of the Royal Palace.  It was extremely dusty, and everything besides what I mentioned was purple.

Ugh.

“The Depot is just a little further, Gordon!”

Somewhere between the alternating high and low ceilings and dirty marble hallways, I began to wonder why this part of the Palace seemed to be... abandoned.  Other than the automated defenses, almost no mark of the alien occupiers stained our beautiful (it could be argued) Palace.  There had to be some Combine personnel to set up and maintain the automated defenses and equipment we’d seen, so where in the hell were they?

There were two possibilities: Either the infestation was spreading far more quickly than we ever anticipated, and the Combine were pulling all of their forces back to defend the most important areas, or, the Combine felt so threatened by the possibility of an infestation that they’d ordered virtually all of their personnel to abandon their posts and converge on their barracks, where the Resistance’s inspired headcrab canister had struck.

Either way, the area of the Palace we were in was almost devoid of the kinds of things that would kill us on sight and the kinds of things that would hold off for a while before killing us on sight.

“Gordon, have you not learned that you can’t trust everything – or really, anything – you read on the Equestrianet?”

“No!”

“And you know something else, Gordon?” Barney began, suddenly irritated.  “You sure complain a lot about having a girlfriend.”

“Oh, that’s right,” I smarmily answered back, “you’ve never had one!”

We both stopped, our hoofsteps continuing on down the hallway without us.

As Barney stared at me like a hurt and abandoned puppy dog, I raised my right foreleg and tenderly touched him on the shoulder.

“I’m sorry...” was all I got out before I spotted a fast headcrab skittering toward us like a spider.

I raised my SM/AIR.  The whole hall blazed blue.  In the confined quarters, the sound was amplified to a level ten times louder than a normal gunshot.

Turning back to Barney, I continued,

“That... was uncalled for.”

Looking vulnerable but grateful, Barney smiled and we were friends again.

“Attention Royal Palace Internal Security teams:  Deservice all political conscripts in Sector C-7, prohibit external contact,” echoed the utterly indifferent voice of that one announcer lady who seems to be suffering from the side-effects of something that kills your soul.

Oh, raspberries.

Our immediate reactions to this announcement mimicked each other as perfectly as rehearsed street performers – we both glanced up at the ceiling with perked ears, realized what ‘deservice’ and ‘political conscript’ must mean, and we both turned to each other and simultaneously shouted,

“Shining Armor!”

------------------------------λ------------------------------

I had expected our entry to the Depot to be resisted at every turn – even if our path was perfectly straight – as much as I expected Celestia to bring the sun up each morning.  There wasn’t any.  The defaced tile floors, the gilded halls intertwined with alien metalwork, the alcoves humming with strange machinery, all of it sat abandoned, the gates unguarded, the barricades undisputed, the terminals unoccupied, their glowing screens unwatched, their urgent warnings and standing orders as unseen as the public announcements were unheard.

“Where the hell are the Combine?” I impolitely wondered while inspecting yet another hastily- deserted position.  “I thought they don’t retreat.”

“Retreat?” Barney responded.  “Heck, Gordon, they were just advancing in another direction.”

Barney was right – the Combine’s uncharacteristically chaotic and uncoordinated response to the sudden outbreak of flesh-eating amongst its soldiers had, if anything, accelerated its virus-like spread throughout the complex.

There was also just some good old fashioned stupidity at work here:  The Overwatch knew that I and a bunch of other ‘anticitizens’ were barreling through the damned Royal Palace with little or no opposition, and they didn’t care – the infestation was by far the bigger threat.

Did they think us so stupid that we would risk a frontal assault on the Royal Palace solely to rescue one, single pony?  Did it ever occur to them that we were heading for their teleporter, their precious lifeline to their wretched homeworld and their abominable confederation of alien slaves?  Were they so arrogant that they figured ponies couldn’t possibly, possibly know any more about teleportation than they did, and couldn’t possibly, possibly have actually solved problems that they couldn’t, problems with their physical theories that didn’t allow them to step out into another dimension and then back into their own at a different point than where they left?

And if they knew... did they realize what we could do with such an ability?

As we neared the wide-mouthed entrance to the Depot, I began to see strange metal cocoons lining the walls in rows three high, affixed to great pylons that touched the ceiling, and it was all connected to some sort of suspended rail system.

This is a prison, is it not?

One of the cocoons detached from the wall, lifted by a robotic arm, and after hooking onto the rail, fled from us.  Almost as soon as it departed, another swooped in to replace it.

Where are the prisoners?

“Hey,” I began to ask Barney, but I was interrupted by that disturbingly calm, cool, feminine voice.

“Contact lost in block A-2; Deploy.  Reinforce, intercept in central block B-2.  Reminder: mission failure will result in permanent off-world reassignment.  Code reminder: sacrifice, coagulate, clamp.”

A demonic chorus of unnatural screams and screeches echoed out of the dark we’d passed just minutes before, followed by a detonation that echoed down the hallway until it sounded like it had gone off right next to us.

Barney, whom I had somehow failed to notice was still carrying the SPERMS (I thought it was just a knapsack), reared up on his hind legs and readied the enormous weapon like he was actually thinking about using it.

“Barney, that thing has a kill-radius of fifty meters, and that’s outdoors.”

“How do you-” he began to ask.

“I looked it up on Equipedia.”

“While we were trotting?”

“Yes.”

Barney sighed and dropped the fat tube of his SPERMS onto the ground.  It landed with a terrific clunk followed by a much less memorable noise that I can’t recall.

“Happy?”

“Barnes, that is too deep a question for me to answer right now,” I replied.

By far the most lethal of our weapons safely abandoned, and our far less dangerous ones at the ready, we confidently clopped onto a curious little glass bridge spanning the modest gap where the Royal Palace ended and the Depot began.  Let me explain:  The Combine Depot at Canterlot was an enormous structure several stories high, constructed of the same alien metals as the Citadel, and, as I understood, far from the only one of its kind in Equestria.  Wherever the Combine’s ‘Razor’ trains stopped, there was a Depot to facilitate the loading and unloading of cargo for shipment all over Equestria.  I previously described it as looking like it could be picked up and moved, and indeed it had.  The Combine, because they are assholes, apparently decided to just drop the great ugly box right on top of the Princess’ Throne Room – looking out into the narrow chasm below us, I could make out jumbled bits and pieces of exquisite masonry and mixed in with the twisted rubble, including – I swear on the Book of Souls – the cracked and broken, barely recognizable stain glass window commemorating the marriage of Princess Cadance and Shining Armor.

“Barney, are you seeing this?”

With that simple question, I suddenly became a popular topic of discussion.

“Gordon!  Listen!” Barney hissed at me.

“Gordon?” echoed another voice from inside the Depot, accompanied by,

“Gordon?  Who’s that?” and “He’s lightning spice” or “She’s lying, Spike” or something like that.

And while this was going on, I just barely caught the tail-end of the announcement Barney had initially called my attention to, though I failed to see its significance;

“... confirmed.  Deprioritize exigen containment – hold for override code...”

I don’t know if that had anything to do with the enormous pylons making up the walls of the Depot suddenly deciding to lift themselves up into the air with an enormous groan and then come crashing back down with the force of... well, with the force of part of a building falling down on top of you, but if it did, that was a great catch on Barney’s part.

Anyway, while the structure behind me was crushed and compressed by the unstoppable advance of the great wall, I took the few short steps to cross the lip bisecting the now nonexistent catwalk behind me and the still currently extant catwalk in front of me running across the interior of the Depot, which – don’t worry – I will describe just as soon as I’m done setting this up.

Barney was leaning over the railing, his mouth and eyes open and fixing to stay that way until further notice.  I nonchalantly cantered up beside him and leaned my forelegs over the railing, figuring I had a few seconds to take a look around given that the way we’d come and the only other way forward – at the opposite end of the catwalk – were both blocked off by a couple different types of enormous, impenetrable steel walls.

The Depot itself was a little disappointing, to be honest.  I was expecting the Combine version of Great Granddad Station.  It was tall enough, sure, but it was so narrow I could spit from one side to the other.  The blue lights sequestered into the ceiling, dimmed as they were by a tenuous mist of smoke, illuminated the interior with only the brightness of a full moon.  Apparent even in the dimness were the smooth domes of jet-black pods that lined the walls like Hearth’s Warming Eve decorations, as they, along with every upward-facing surface were coated in a thin layer of fine, white foam, some of it still hanging in the air.

Like snow, I thought.

There had been a fire, that much was readily apparent.  The ‘snow’ covering everything was fire-retarding foam.  I couldn’t really think of a reason why the Combine wouldn’t just use water to put out fires, except that perhaps they were from somewhere where water was scarce...

...then I thought of our receding shorelines...

“WHICH ONE OF YOU FUCKERS DID THIS?!” former Security Officer Barney shouted over the railing with uncharacteristic profanity, interrupting my train of thought.

That brings me to the cause of the fire.

“WAS’ THAT S’OSSED TO MEAN?!” came the indignant response.

There was only one track running through the Depot, and it was thoroughly blocked by what I would describe as a ‘train wreck’ – a Razor Train wreck, to be precise.  The toppled engine and mangled cars lying askew of the tracks (with wooden ribs, which I thought looked hilariously out of place) wouldn’t be shipping anything in or out of Canterlot ever again.

The enormity of the destruction suggested Spike, but its excessiveness suggested otherwise...

Maybe it was the dead Combine strewn about who appeared to have been shot with high-caliber weapons instead of burned or eaten or burned and then eaten.

There was only one question:

Has Spike ever actually eaten a Combine soldier?

“We dint do it, mate,” the chocolate brown one replied.

“Mostly,” the steel grey one offered his condemnation.

Personally, I was happy that Dreyfus and Drew were here, though I wasn’t sure how – I was positive they weren’t part of Blue Team, which meant the earth-ponies must have come in with the pegasi of Red Team.  What did they do, grow wings?  Is that even possible?

“Do you see those black pods?!” Barney shouted, whirling around to jab his hoof at the things on the wall – some of which had scorch marks on the bottom.  “Those are prisoner pods.  Those things have ponies inside them.  Including Shining Armor!”

“Oh, thas’ what those things are!” the chocolate-brown one remarked, and I felt a sudden pang of regret that we weren’t here to free any of them except one.

They’ll have to wait, I told myself. They’ll be safe in those pods until we can get some help out here.

I didn’t know then that I would make good on my promise to destroy the entire Royal Palace.

“Shiny?” the grey one shouted up at us from the ground floor.  “Whatchya care about ‘im fer?”

Suddenly I heard Alyx’s voice shouting at us from a broken glass window on the other side of the room, higher up than us.  I didn’t hear what she said, though.

“Whas’ that, Alley?” the grey one, Drew, shouted back, using a nickname for Alyx that I never heard before or since.

An enormous figure stirred behind the broken glass, and suddenly Spike appeared at Alyx’s side, leaning out the window.

“SHE SAID HE’S HER UNCLE, FUCKER!” Spike informed the former sentry-ponies, being the second person in as many minutes to refer to Dreyfus and Drew as ‘fuckers’.

“Whoah, serry I gotchyer boyfriend angry there!”

Alyx shouted something and Spike re-shouted it.

“I AM NOT HER BOYFRIEND!”

I watched Spike and Alyx exchange extremely awkward glances through my rangefinder.

Alyx placed her hoof on her face, then pointed at me while saying something to Spike.

Spike moved his mouth.  Alyx punched him and said something else, continuing to gesture wildly.

“ALYX SAYS SHE WANTS YOU TO COME UP HERE, GORDON.”

After another brief exchange of gesticulations, Spike added,

“BARNEY, YOU STAY THERE AND MAKE SURE THOSE TWO DON’T TOUCH ANYTHING.”

“What’re we goin’ to touch?!” Dreyfus protested.

“EVERYTHING!” Spike immediately answered, needing no aid to hear him.

Wasting no time (not that I’d wasted any before, but continuing not to waste time), I lifted myself up off the catwalk, and floated up to my waiting Princess in her tower (not that Alyx is a Princess) so we could begin our retrieval of Shining Armor (who is a Prince, which is like a male Princess).

I swooped through the open window to rescue my fair lady from the monstrous dragon guarding her.

“Gordon!” cried Alyx, daughter of Twilight, as I ravaged her with my hugs.

“Hey, Gordon!” roared the foul dragon.

“I’ll see if I can pull up Shining from this terminal,” Alyx said while threateningly pointing to a machine sticking out of the wall that, in all honesty, looked much too big to be a computer.  It was probably a washing machine or something like that and it just had a computer attached to it.

“Found him!” Alyx said after scrolling past stock photos of dozens of very unhappy-looking ponies.

She keyed a command into the computer and machinery in the room before us sprung to life.

An eerie clinking and clacking echoed throughout the chamber as a black pod slowly crawled its way up to our little observation room, coming to a halt with a screech and a hiss.

Alien machinery whirred, and the pod split down the middle, opening into two equal halves.

Restrained within its metallic bonds was some creature that definitely wasn’t Shining Armor.  But it was strange – it had the same shield-shaped cutie mark, the same white coat, and the same thinning, blue and white streaked mane as the stallion whose wife I accused of being a porn star back at New Cloudsdale.  But there were some... additions... and subtractions...

“Uh... Alyx, are you-”

“SHUT UP!” she screamed at me like I’d interrupted her while she was performing brain surgery.

I don’t know if it was a direct response or not, but just then, two metal plates that covered the thing’s face ‘opened’, revealing two black slots beveled into another metal plate where two bright, blue eyes should have been.

It screamed.  It was a shrill, inequine, unnatural shriek.  Worse than the Combine soldiers.  It was the scream of something that was in pain, constant, never-ending pain.  It was the scream of something that wanted to die.

A shot rang out.  The wretched creature slumped in its harness, still and quiet.  I glanced over at Alyx.  Her strange, foreign-looking pistol was floating in front of her, smoke trailing from its barrel and tears streaking down a face that looked just like Twilight Sparkle’s.

------------------------------λ------------------------------

It is almost dark now.  Mom is upstairs dictating a lengthy note to poor Spike, and dad is out – I have no idea where.  It’s quite a reversal from the way things normally are.  Usually, it would be dad stuck at home, and mom staying the night or the next several nights at one of the laboratories or sometimes over at New Cloudsdale.  Speaking of New Cloudsdale, Uncle Shining is here – an increasingly rare occurrence, especially with the way things have been going with the Resistance.

He and I are alone in the living room.  I can hear the rumble of the last Combine patrol of the day passing by our house.  He stands at the window, tense, wound up, half-expecting something to happen, but it doesn’t.  The strange horseless carriages of the Universal Union roll by, blotting out the sun one by one.  I join him in the shadows.

“Hey, Uncle Shiny?”

“Yeah, Allie?”

“I heard you’ve killed Combine soldiers, Shiny.”  I was always one for uncomfortable questions.

The last of the patrol passes, and we are left in the light shining through the dark curtains.

“We all deserve to die for the things we’ve done,” he answers.  “But there are some ponies who must die at the hooves of others.”

------------------------------λ------------------------------

So that’s what a ‘Stalker’ is.  That’s one of the primary – if not the primary – function of the Combine’s perversion of the Royal Palace; to turn political prisoners into Stalkers.  That’s what they did to Shining Armor, and he hadn’t been gone a day.

What is a Stalker?  The embodiment of everything the Combine stands for.

A Stalker is what happens to ponies the Combine really, really, really doesn’t like - ponies they hate too much to kill.  A Stalker is a pony who has been ripped apart and put back together in a form more useful to the Combine - as a servant, a worker, a slave.

It is an abomination.

Of all the things I saw, of all the things I’ve seen, the closest analogy I can think of to a Stalker is a headcrab zombie.  Both are things that were bent and twisted and disfigured by an alien entity for its benefit.  Instead of claws, there were metallic multi-tools to replace limbs.  Instead of a headcrab, a solid metal plate took away one’s face and identity, making one anonymous, nameless, less than an animal; a machine.  In the Stalker, the Combination was complete and at last, there was equality; nothing differentiated one pony from another pony.  Not even a cutie mark.

Come to think of it, I may have created a false memory in regards to Prince Shining Armor’s cutie mark and coat and mane.  He couldn’t have had a cutie mark.  He was a Stalker.  He didn’t have a coat.  He didn’t have a mane.

He didn’t have hooves.

“Gordon, that thing that used to be Shining Armor-”

Alyx paused while she choked on her own vomit.  I patiently waited, not in any hurry.  I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the product of indifference before me.

“-I - it’s...” she continued, “something’s calling it up to the teleportation chamber!”

I don’t know how she knew that.  She must have been looking at the computer screen.

“I’m not going to make you do it, but...”

It didn’t take much to persuade me.  I just wanted to get the fuck out of there as quickly as possible, and it looked like that prisoner pod was my ticket straight to the only exit.

“Look, Gordon, if you’re going to do this,” Spike began, unusually concerned with my well-being, “It would probably be a good idea to take the body with you, at least initially, you know, to fool the sensors.”

“Yeah, whatever,” I replied, emotionless.

“’Yeah, whatever’? That’s it?”

“What do you want from me, Spike?!”

“Nothing, nothing,” he conceded.

After removing the surrounding sarcophagus-like ‘pod’ to make room for two bodies, I strapped myself into the part that was designed to hold ponies or things shaped like ponies, levitating the corpse of Shining Armor in front of me.  It didn’t surprise me that he was lighter than Alyx when he should’ve been twice as heavy.  It surprised me that he bled as much as a cadaver bleeds; like he’d already been drained of his blood by the time Alyx shot him.

Alyx furiously pecked away at the console adjacent to the demolished observation window while in the background, Barney could be heard arguing with Dreyfus and Drew.

“Once you’re under way, you’ll be on your own until you reach the teleportation chamber.  We will meet you there – isn’t that right, Spike?”

Spike straightened up and said, “Yes, ma’am!”  He even saluted.  I’d never seen him do that before.

Keying one final command into the laundering-computer, Alyx whirled on me with sudden fury.

“Gordon – I want you to kill Doctor Breen.”

Her voice was as cold as the body I was carrying.

“I want him to die.”

------------------------------λ------------------------------

“I’d like to take this time to address you directly, Doctor Freemane.  That’s right; I’m talking to you.  The so-called ‘One Free Pony’, ‘The One with the Free Mane’.”

I gagged and rolled my eyes as the liar’s voice echoed from the outdoor loudspeakers, and it wasn’t because Shining Armor had begun to smell – I’d discarded him (as respectfully as I could) as soon as he’d helped me cheat my way past the final set of sensors.

Well, this is different.

I was on a rail, crossing the bridge that joined the Tower of Abridgment to Canterlot Tower, trapped within the confines of my metallic straightjacket and thankful for the poorly-designed nature of Combine security systems, General Rainbow Dash’s idea to use the Combine’s own headcrab-shelling tactics against them, the ease with which their rank-and-file could become confused, disorganized and slaughtered, and, at least for the moment, I was thankful to be alive.

“Make no mistake, Doctor: This is not a scientific revolution you have sparked – this is death and finality.  You have not set the world on fire; you have plunged it into freefall.  You have deliberately provoked a galactic superpower so vast and so powerful, so far beyond anything ponydom has ever encountered, it is almost beyond imagination.  Look around you, Gordon.  Look at the ruins.  You know this to be true.”

Like everything he says.

I looked down at the darkness of Canterlot, but my eyes were drawn to the world beyond the plateau.  The still-rising sun had bathed all of Equestria in a deep, angry scarlet.  The sight only made me pause to smile.

It looked like I really had set the world on fire.

“I have spent the last eight years doing everything I can to prevent that from happening again.  And over the span of less than one week, you, Doctor Freemane, have undone almost all of the progress that I have made toward ensuring the continued existence of sentient life on our planet.”

I didn’t know if Breen could hear me, but right then, I shouted,

“BETTER TO DIE WITH A ROPE AROUND YOUR NECK THAN LIVE WITH A YOKE ABOUT YOUR SHOULDERS YOU LYING FUCK!”

“Think, Gordon!  You are perilously close to starting another Seven Minute’s War – only this time, we won’t last seven seconds!”

He’s lying, I told myself.  He’ll say anything he can to get what he wants.

“You have the power to stop this.  Give yourself up, Gordon – for the good of all.  I know it’s hard, but if you truly love Equestria, you will do everything you possibly can to prevent her destruction.”

“SHUT UP!” I screamed.  It was maddening.  I couldn’t cover my ears, and the straightjacket would have prevented my helmet from extending.  I couldn’t tune him out.  I couldn’t shut him up.

“Shut up shut up shut up shut up shut up shut up shut-”

As I made my way across the bridge, I eventually noticed the utter silence.  There was no breeze though I was outside, there were no crickets or grasshoppers so high up, there was no sound at all except for the squeaking of my progression along the rail.

And a hum.  A calm, steady hum.

Goddesses, how did I not see it until just then?

At the midpoint of the bridge lay a barricade separating two halves of a Combine anti-aircraft battery.  The energy barrier, clearly erected in haste by an opposing force, crackled with alien energy and glowed an unfamiliar teal, inexplicably dividing one set of quickly-forgotten guns from another.  Both sides were mirror images of carnage; dead transequine soldiers and dead transequine zombies, both kinds marked with puncture wounds from plasma, bullets, claws and teeth seemingly without care, as if soldiers had killed soldiers and zombies had killed zombies, as if none of it mattered.

As if they knew.

A proudly-erect and fully-functional barricade with mangled masses of hellish, twisted dead on both sides and in equal amounts begged the question:  Why was it there?  What purpose did it serve?  What was it protecting?  It didn’t matter.  None of it mattered anymore.

None of it mattered because I was about to do what I was put here to do.

I won’t be stopped, for I am moved by a power greater than myself.

”Attention Royal Palace Internal Security teams...”

Make no mistake:  I can be stopped.  Of course I can.

I won’t.  But I can.

“Deservice all political conscripts in sectors A, C, G, H, I, M, N, O, S, T, U...”

The emotionless message faded off into the distance.

So many, so many, so, so very many, and there was nothing we could do to save them.  Nothing that didn’t involve getting us all killed and letting the Combine win and letting them continue killing and enslaving and turning ponies into Stalkers and zombies and soldiers.

There was one more bit that made my heart flutter and my stomach sink – or something like that, I find my body extremely confusing.

“Anticitizen Ironbuck engaged.  Anticitizen Spike engaged – advise close air support.  Sparkle Subprime engaged.  Expunge.”

“Oh, thank Celestia!” I shouted, thinking, that was an order to kill all of my friends, which means they haven’t been killed yet!

You know, I didn’t believe in ghosts and zombies when I was a foal, so of course I never saw any actual reason to maintain a reverent and respectful silence in a graveyard.

The reason I mention this, dear reader, is because as soon as I opened my big, fat, stupid, loud mouth, one of the dead bodies below me started moving.

“Oh, fuck!”

And it wasn’t a normal, regular dead body, no, of course not - it was a dead body that had violently torn away all of its clothes, revealing taut, striated muscle tissue where there should have, by the laws of nature, by the laws of the natural order, been fur.

It was one of those fast zombies.

“OH, FUCK!” I repeated for emphasis.

With super-equine speed, it scrambled up the long barrel of one of the anti-aircraft guns.  Reaching the end, it whipped around and leapt, its open mouth showcasing ten-centimeter carved jack-o-lantern teeth stained with fresh blood.

The blood of the Combine.

The delicious, good-smelling Combine.

It latched onto my pod, perfectly still while the world seemed to swing up and down, and its horrible mouth closed, for it had gotten a whiff of something suspicious.  It leaned closer to my neck than the length of some of its teeth and inhaled through its shredded and bloody face-mask.

Apparently, whatever I smelled like (a vineyard) was just too much for it to bear, and it recoiled in revulsion, leaping off of me and back onto the bridge.

Not wanting to tempt it with laughter, I stifled my I-almost-died giggles as best I could while the pod click-clacked onto the inclined part of the rail that would take me up to Canterlot Tower.

Goddesses bless you, Rarity.  You are... the best.  You are just the best.

------------------------------λ------------------------------

Above a massive and ancient door decorated in brightly-colored runes, there was a section of Canterlot Tower’s outer wall that had been cut out specifically in order to allow the passage of the sort of craft I occupied.  After passing through a sort of shield wall not dissimilar to the one that once surrounded New Cloudsdale, I – quite suddenly, more easily and in a manner I never imagined – found myself inside the Hall of History.

The checkered aisle was lined with colossal columns upon which rested the titanic weight of the rest of Canterlot Tower, and at the end of the grand promenade sat a raised platform that clashed with its magnificent surroundings as badly as the Combine teleportation chamber sitting on top of it.

And if the rail I was attached to was at all an indicator of where I was going, it looked increasingly inevitable that I would end up inside the dinky little thing!  Or at least it looked dinky compared to the bipedal alien standing beside it.  The thing was too busy typing away at a typically overdone Combine terminal to notice that I looked a little different from the prisoner whose pod I was occupying, so I took the time to ponder what would happen if it did notice me.

I would be sent straight to Breen, would I not?  After all, he seemed to be intensely interested in me, and I had no reason to believe that the Combine, as a whole or individually, were aware of my newfound powers – they had only recently confirmed I was even inside the Royal Palace – so it seemed entirely plausible.  And once he and I were in the same room, it would be utterly trivial to rip apart my flimsy steel bindings and decorate his office with his insides.

As if seeking guidance, I looked to the stained glass windows lining the walls that depicted the various triumphs and defeats, milestones and millstones that define and color Equestria’s history.

I watched Discord, the spirit of chaos, torment my distant ancestors.  I watched the Goddess of Night try to plunge the entire world into darkness.  I saw the reverent depictions of the Six using the Elements of Harmony to vanquish these foes just as the Two Sisters did before them.

Twilight Sparkle was depicted at the center in each instance, surrounded by the other five Spirits whom together created the most powerful magic known to ponydom.

We’ve suffered worse and still pulled through, she seemed to say to me.

My pod clanked to a halt at the rail’s final bend before it ended inside the teleportation chamber.

“...together.”

“What?” asked a deep, rough voice that I’d heard somewhere before.

My attention snapped from the beauty of the windows to the ugliness of the creature before me.  I was especially drawn to the extremely distinct scratches and scrapes all over its sickly yellow armor that looked almost exactly like they were made by the five-fingered talons of a dragon – a dragon just about the size of Spike.

“LUNA IN MY WET DREAMS!” I exclaimed.

“MERRY MOTHER OF JE’SEUSS!” is my phonetic alliteration of whatever it is the alien said.

Then I heard the most blood-curdling roar of nothing but perfect hatred, then the window to the left exploded, and a purple dragon carrying two little ponies appeared where none had existed before.

The scarlet sunlight streaming in behind them seemed to set ablaze the cloud of broken glass and flying metal that enveloped the left side of my vision.  As quickly as they had come, Spike, Alyx and Barney disappeared behind the shimmering curtain, not to be seen again until after I had freed myself from my bindings by thinking about them until they were no longer of any concern.

“Room’s clear!” I heard Barney shout.  “Except for... well, him.”

Spike’s maneuver had a similar effect on the Combine biped to that of a hoofball player tackling a flower pot, throwing it clear of the raised platform, tearing through the low railing, and skidding to a premature halt at the fat base of a column on the right side of the hall.  And, there, Spike unleashed every kind of violence onto the creature, clawing at its immovable faceplate, biting at its impenetrable armor!

“Celestia, it’s already warmed up!” Alyx shouted with glee.

That must have given Spike an idea, for it seemed then that half the hall ignited with dragon’s breath, the heat from the flames feeling as hot against my cheek as his hatred – real and personal.

“I don’t freaking believe it!  It’s already set for Breen’s office!  Spike, Gordon, get in the teleporter!”

I followed Alyx’s command, as did Barney, setting ourselves up in the unsurprisingly cramped confines of the Combine’s surprisingly dinky teleporter.  Spike, however, would not follow.

“Spike!” yelled Alyx, “I said go!  Now!”

She looked at me, and I at her.  That was all the communication that was needed.

She kicked her leg out to block the teleporter’s fancy hybrid shield-door from dropping down into place, but I was already out of the chamber, halfway through vaulting over the platform railing.  It seems all that jumping I did in the Hazard Course really paid off in the end.

Spike’s teeth held onto the Combine’s armor for just a second after I lifted it into the air, his jaw muscles relaxing so his mouth could hang open.

I shot the fucker out a window.

I looked at Spike and he looked at me, and, like with Alyx, we didn’t need to use words.

All four of us huddled together on the teleporter platform, and Alyx withdrew her leg.

The shield-door slid shut and locked.  The teleporter hummed.  The air tingled with electricity.

I knew those bipedal Combine could fly.  It didn’t surprise me that it came back, this time with a gun in its five-fingered hand that was a bit longer and beefier than the slug-thrower that practically decapitated Cherry Blossom and my prophetic cerberus friend.

We had begun ascending towards a bright green portal that had opened above our heads when I decided, for whatever reason, to look down.

I wasn’t afraid when the alien began shooting the computer terminal below.  The portal was already open.  Nothing could be done.  Once you start these kinds of things, they can’t be stopped.

Alyx wrapped her cold legs around me, and I returned the gesture, hoping to make her a little warmer as we listened to the final gunshot echo out of Canterlot.

“Wait, what happened to Dreyfus and Drew?” I asked Alyx.

She never answered me, for just then we left the magical land of Equestria.  When we came back, we were over 250 kilometers away from Canterlot – about as far as I would’ve liked – and I was once again standing in the office of Doctor Walrus Octavian Breen, once again courtesy of a malfunctioning teleporter (I really don’t seem to get along with the things, do I?), except this one was malfunctioning a bit differently from the one in Doctor Pie’s lab, with a very, very different result.

Achievement Unlocked!  Press Shift + Tab to view.

Teleport Successful – Successfully teleport!

This chapter is dedicated to Marc Laidlaw, who wrote the greatest story that has ever been in a videogame.

C H λ P T E R  T E N :

OUR BENEFACTORS

“Tia?”

“Yes, little sister?”

“What do you know of devils?”

“... What brings that to mind, Lulu?”

“Oh, nothing... We... I mean... I- it’s okay if you don’t-”

“Which one?”

“Oh!  Well... I don’t know, any of them, I... We... - I suppose.”

“... Luna, look at me.”

“Yes?”

“The devil is a liar.”

“Okay.”

“The hawk is a predator, the Forest is free, and the devil is a liar.”

------------------------------λ------------------------------

“This room is so clean!”

I’m not sure why I felt it necessary to say that, but multiple independent sources confirm that I did.

A quarter of a second later, my left eardrum was hammered by twin reports from the pair of semi-automatic shotguns fastened to Barney’s combat saddle.  That ear rang with tinnitus for the entire duration of our encounter with Equestria’s Interim Administrator.

“Gordon, get the door!” Alyx shouted with military professionalism.  “Barney!  Cover him!”

Immediately to our left was an appropriately lavish entryway inappropriately splattered with splotches of dark, chunky blood that had once run through the veins of a pair of those white-suited elite soldiers – the kind that have that one, big, red eye on their helmet.  Ignoring a prompt on my HUD that identified the alien weapons strapped to their sides as AR3’s, I spotted the lip of what looked like an emergency blast door recessed into the side of the wall.  Using my almost-Celestial telekinesis, I pulled it closed while hydraulics and mechanical things squealed and broke.

All the while, Doctor Breen did not utter a single solitary syllable.

He was there, sandwiched between a bank of oversized computer monitors glowing puke-green and a large, ornately-decorated golden-oak desk that was coated in a layer of amber varnish so thick you could almost see your reflection in it.  We didn’t know where Breen slept, ate or bathed; the walls of the Citadel were utterly impenetrable.  That was what made Breen’s office, of all the places he must surely visit, such an attractive target;  It had great, big, easy-to-see-through windows.

“Well?”  Spike bellowed, his left talon casting a sharp, jagged shadow across his face as he shielded his eyes from the sun, which was rising from the wrong direction and the wrong location and at the wrong time of day.

“Aren’t you gonna say something?!”

He almost looked like he actually was about to say something, but Breen’s attention had been drawn to something outside the window from nearly the moment we’d arrived.

With Barney replacing the guards he just killed and my amplified telekinesis holding the blast door in place with what felt like the strength of at least a couple of Atlases (thick ones), I was able to have a good look around.  There was no doubt whatsoever that we were, in fact, in Doctor Breen’s office;  while the spacious interior was composed of the same lustrous blue steel typical of any generic Combine outpost, the jaw-dropping view could not have been attained anywhere else in all of Equestria.  And before you ask, no, the Resistance couldn’t have killed Breen with a well-aimed bullet or rocket – Combine ‘glass’ unflinchingly shrugged off either.

Still sitting in his chair, Breen at last made a motion in our presence, jabbing some button or switch hidden from view beneath the lip of his desk.

No alarms sounded.  No klaxons blared.  Was it a silent alarm?  A radio message?  Were we being recorded, our every word heard, our every move watched?  By whom?

It didn’t matter.  Not anymore.

Hoofsteps could be heard from beyond the door, heavy and plodding.  Mechanical voices choking on words like chain-smokers accompanied the jingle-jangle of metal things secured on belts and hooks and buttons and clips.  They began banging and scraping and hitting the door.  I felt only the tiniest, most insignificant oscillation in the metal and nothing more.  It was incredible; my exposure to dark energy had made me a kind of magical superconductor.  My door would hold, and nothing, no being, no force, not all the mighty armies of every devil of every hell, nor least of all the brigades of the Numb which the insultingly-named Universal Union would hurl at us in an attempt to rescue their puppet from his right and just and fitting death would wrest it from its place.

There was a loud snap and a flash of sparkling blue light equal to the intensity of the slowly fading sunlight flooding the room.

“Elevator’s broken!” Alyx announced with a mischievous smirk, practically skipping out of the narrow hallway directly opposite Breen’s desk.

The short passageway led to what the Resistance deduced must either be one long, complicated elevator or a series of shorter, simpler elevators that provided access to the Citadel’s rooftop teleporter – which, for whatever reason (knowing the Combine, probably a stupid, easily-solvable one), was of a very different design from the one in the Royal Palace.

With that elevator out and such primitive constructs as ‘air-ducts’ not existing in purely Combine structures – they used something better we would call ‘molecular air-exchange and filtering’ – the only other way in was past my door, and sir, that door would not part for Celestia Herself.

I decided to make a promise.  To everypony who died in Ponyville.  To everypony who died at New Cloudsdale and Black Mane West and everywhere else I had been where trouble had followed.

Alyx trotted into view from the tiny hallway, beaming with the confidence of her mother.

A promise to Twilight.

“Gordon, Barney, stay where you are,” she ordered, and I swear she licked her lips.  Spike stood off to one side, looking as if he wanted to say something but didn’t know how to say it.

Barney answered with a snappy “Yes, ma’am!” but I was silent.  I kept my mind and body as rigid and immovable as the door I was restraining – and despite having all the forces of hell arrayed against its opposite side, desperate to claw their way to their god, the devil, it remained so cold, I could see droplets of water vapor condensing on its surface... and then freezing.

My telekinetic grip on the metal was so strong, it was slowing the movement of individual atoms, draining them of their heat energy.

Nothing... nothing in the entire Universe will enter or leave this room until Doctor Breen is dead.

Having made that promise, I permitted myself the use of one eye and the one good ear I still had to observe the events that followed for the sake of history, well-aware that if all went as planned, someday foals would be learning about me in my least favorite class – of course, with the more adult parts censored.  Unfortunately.

Breen sat perfectly still while Alyx approached his desk, his mouth agape with disbelief, his face frozen with shock, his eyes wide with fear; gawking, helpless, stupid, hoping he would wake up.

Alyx clopped to a halt beneath a circle of bright white lights set into the ceiling at the midpoint between the Administrator’s desk and either of the room’s two possible avenues of escape.

Alyx’s left eye twitched in a manner startlingly similar to that of her mother.  Her horn flared baby-blue, and in one practiced, graceful motion, her beautiful silver pistol jumped out of her chest holster and dutifully directed its holey, unsafe end at the enemy of all who live.

I am proud to report to whomever is reading this that I kept my promise:  My magical stranglehold on the blast door wavered only slightly when – to the complete surprise of our inattentive and overly optimistic commando squad – the Citadel was rocked by a medium-magnitude seismic tremor.

Alyx let out a frightened yelp, and then she, Barney and Spike all vanished as every light in the room winked out.  It sounded like a nighttime hailstorm as every small, fragile object in Administrator Breen's office that was not firmly bolted down or otherwise fixed in place crashed to the metal floor, and the whole Citadel swayed back and forth like a beanstalk being shaken by an angry giant, groaning like a Seawinkleathon, creaking, cracking, bending, snapping... falling.

And we’ll all come tumbling after.

Curiously, the Citadel seemed to move without me, the ground just barely scraping against the tips of my hooves as it wiggled back and forth beneath me while I and at least the blast door remained absolutely still in relation to each other.  After several seconds of violent oscillation, the rest of the tower at last settled and was quiet – even quieter than before.

Due to its high angle, the sickly orange light that streamed in through the windows illuminated only a small area at the back of the room, bathing Breen’s desk and the area immediately surrounding it in light while doing almost nothing to lessen the darkness that prevailed everywhere else.  The only pony I could make out in the pitch-black silence was Barney – the white dust caking his hoofboots and little specks of fire-retarding foam sprinkled all over his mane and back made him easier to see.  I couldn’t quite make out the look on his face, but his posture – slightly spread out with his head lowered – suggested he was simply in shock and didn’t quite know what to do.

The lights flickered back on.  Breen’s office was an absolute mess.  Books, papers, ornaments, pens, pencils and trinkets were scattered all over the floor, and dust shaken from cracks in the ceiling floated in the air.  Lying directly at my hooves was the empty pedestal of an antique globe of Equestria, its accompanying orb having shattered during the earthquake, littering the ground with ten thousand little pieces of the broken world, aimlessly drifting about on the blue steel ocean.

“This room is no longer clean!” I informed my two new acquaintances and two former coworkers.

“CELESTIA FUCKING LUNA!” said Spike.

“SPIKE!” Alyx rebuked him.

“Was that a fucking earthquake?!” Spike continued, completely ignoring her.

“Watch your language!” Alyx continued rebuking him.

We still didn’t know what had just happened.

“Are you joking?!”

I shifted my head to see where the question had come from, accidentally shifting the multi-ton blast door I was restraining several centimeters to the right, partially crumpling it into its solid metal frame before quickly correcting my mistake.

“Are you telling me...”

Everypony’s eyes were on the window, where Doctor Breen was struggling to his hooves, his executive office chair lying on its side a meter or so away.  He wore a formal grey business suit, leaving his blue-coated ass and (almost certainly dyed) yellow-gold mane and tail exposed.  He stood at last, his legs trembling as if his modest figure was almost too much to bear, his body outlined in the ten thousand burning hues of daylight that Celestia brought to Her kingdom and Her subjects every morning, only asking that Her day be used to create something beautiful.

Does destroying something ugly count?

Eh, good enough for government work.

“... you didn’t plan this?” Breen finished, looking at Spike.

“Plan wh-... oh, that’s not the sun, is it?” Spike said, directing a long, scaly talon out the window.

Breen, now back on all fours, lowered his head and scowled.

“No, Spike, that is not the sun.”

The windows faced West; before them lay the sprawl of City 7 and far beyond that was a vast expanse of open, uninhabited countryside – ‘The Wasteland’, as the area between the Combine’s ‘Cities’ was called – ultimately terminating in the purple majesty of Mount Equestria, which appeared, at that moment, to be undergoing a cataclysmic volcanic eruption.  A great cloud shaped like a mushroom that glowed fiercely from within, growing ever so slightly darker toward the edges and as time went on, hovered ominously over a summit which appeared to no longer be covered in snow, as well as being slightly misshapen.

Now, I’m positive we all already knew this, but just to be clear:

The sun does not rise in the West.

And Mount Equestria is not a volcano.

“So... soooo...” came the musical tones of Alyx’s brain not working.

“Gordon, what’s goin’ on?” Barney smartly asked, seeing as I was the only scientist in the room besides Doctor Breen – and he wasn’t a theoretical physicist.

“Antimatter annihilation,” I answered.  It was the only reaction in nature I could think of that could produce so much energy.  I mean, Goddesses, Canterlot had to have been completely wiped out.

What in Equestria could produce enough energy to destroy an entire city?

“Either that,” I continued, “or somepony lit off fifty megatons of conventional chemical explosives.”

But how, why?  My mind reeled, searching for answers, scenarios, probabilities.

“The teleporter...” said Alyx.  “I think the teleporter exploded just as we were porting out.”

I recalled how the alien in the powered suit of armor had fired into the - apparently quite important - computer terminal next to the teleporter after we had begun our ascent to the portal.

A governor... a governor must have failed... the antimatter that would be produced by probably any trans-dimensional macroscopic quantum tunneling device has to be negated somehow, but if a-

My thoughts were interrupted when something new and heavy and mean slammed its substantial weight into the door.

The door jerked.

Impossible.

The movement was slight, but clearly visible.  There was a synthetic roar from the other side, and once again, the immovable object in my unbreakable grip shuddered.

“Fuck this!” Alyx cried, bringing her silver sidearm to bear.  “We’re finishing this now!”

Finally.  This was finally it.  Everypony was where they were supposed to be.  We were about to kill the biggest liar who ever lived.  I didn’t really care if Alyx shot him, or if I did it, or Spike or Barney.  All of us were already killers and Doctor Breen was already dead; a ghost, a spirit haunting a dead body.  Which one of us dealt the final blow didn’t matter.

But before he died, the Liar would give one last speech that will haunt me until I follow where he trod.

Alyx pointed the unsafe end of her repeater-pistol at the Administrator.

He flinched, letting out a little squeal, and ducked behind his thick oaken desk.

Oh, Goddesses, he’s going to be a big foal about this.

While Breen’s reaction to Alyx’s gun was to move out of its way, Spike did just the opposite – the purple dragon leapt with surprising swiftness into a position between Breen and Alyx, blocking her shot with his massive, bullet-proof body and holding out his huge arms as if trying to stop them from bucking each other.

“Alyx,” the unhelpful dragon began, “let me do it.  You don’t want this stain on your soul.”

Alyx gave him the look.

“Spike, I’ve killed ponies before,” she replied in her best I’m-a-big-girl voice.

“Barney!  It didn’t work!” Spike shouted to Barney while Doctor Breen peeked out over the top of his desk, probably wondering why we were taking so long to kill him.

“Wait, you two have... talked about this?!” Alyx asked, probably also wondering why Doctor Breen was taking so long to die.

“Oh!” I blurted out while what sounded like a second huge creature joined the first on the other side of the door.  “Spike’s got this little needle thing he wants to stick in Doctor Breen’s face!”

Breen seemed to take this news quite well.  In fact, his mind seemed to once again be elsewhere.

Barney turned to me.  “He does?”

“Wait, isn’t that what you two were talking about?” I asked, jabbing my head toward Spike.

“Spike, why didn’t you tell me you wanted to kill Doctor Breen until JUST NOW?!” Alyx screamed.

“Wait a minute, what happened to ‘Gordon, I want you to kill Doctor Doofus’?” I interjected, using my best insulting imitation of Alyx’s whiny voice.  (But even though it was whiny, it was still beautiful and melodious and siren-like!  I mean, the good kind of siren, not that horn on top of a police carriage!  Not that sirens are really good, anyway, they’re actually kind of evil, but the important thing is that they’re really sexy and they have great voices)

“I did not say ‘Doctor Doofus’!” Alyx gracefully sung in the dulcet tones of her musical voice.

I was getting ready to compete with the formidable lungs of Spike for a deliciously abrasive insult regarding Alyx’s dumb-sounding statement when the shockwave that had spent the last 32.85 seconds barreling through the air from Canterlot finally reached City 7.

It was by far the most memorable part.  Not what we saw or felt, but what we heard.

And it wasn’t the multitudinous symphony of creaks and groans and cracks that stuck with me, although I certainly remembered those.  No, it was one, great, powerful, resounding, unchallenged Emperor of all *BOOM*s that I’ll never forget.

The Citadel reverberated like a brass gong when it was hit by that multi-megaton compression wave.  My bones quaked, my eardrums cowered in fear, and my teeth chattered with static electricity while several of the smaller ceiling lights flashed and popped.  Beyond thousands of spider-web cracks in the unbreakable glass of the windows, a roiling earthen blanket tinted with the glorious red of the rising sun swept across Equestria as far as could be seen, from horizon to horizon, blowing into the city below like a Saddle-Arabian sandstorm.

It was beautiful.  All those ponies in Canterlot couldn’t have asked for a better way to die.

Rainbow Dash.  Dreyfus.  Drew.  If you died in that explosion...

... today you will see the Goddesses’ faces.

“That’s it,” said Spike, his voice effortlessly heard over the hurricane-force winds battering the walls of the Citadel.  “I’m done.”

Alyx lowered her pistol as Spike raised his arm, the alien syringe device already strapped to the underside of his thick wrist, the thin, silver needle already extended, the pair of cloudy cylinders empty and very much needing to be filled.

Breen, shaking off the same disorientation we all felt, turned around and saw Spike’s massive form sidestepping his comparatively insignificant desk while Alyx watched them at gunpoint.

Breen’s jaw snapped open and his eyes went wide like he’d just seen his own ghost.

“W- wait!  Wait!  Spike!” he cried, pressing his body up against the cracked glass behind him.

It was pathetic, listening to him beg and plead like that.  Pathetic, but somehow gratifying.

Spike wrapped his massive claws around the aging earth-pony’s small blue body and, raising him up to eye-level, drew back his right arm and...

Hesitated.  I couldn’t believe it.  I couldn’t believe it any more than I could believe that it now sounded like there were three of those huge things on the other side of my door, and they were getting clever.  And angry.

“Think!” Breen squeaked as Spike’s massive talons enclosed around his thorax.

“Think,” Spike repeated back at him, as if skeptical of the notion.

“Yes,” replied the Administrator.  “Think... rationally...”

Spike’s grip around the soft blue body of the enemy of all who live loosened, and his weaponized claw relaxed – just slightly, ever so slightly.

“Rationally,” Spike echoed once more.

Alyx, still standing in front of the desk, trained her pistol on the Doctor, who, from my vantage point, was behind and to the left of the desk, being held against the window – but not necessarily touching it.  For the moment, Alyx held her tongue like all of us.

Personally, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.  This was the pony ultimately responsible for the murder of the only mother Spike had ever known... executed in front of her own daughter, in her own laboratory – which, if I know Twilight Sparkle, would’ve pretty much been her home – and he was... talking to him?

“For five seconds, Spike...” Breen choked out, his breathing labored as if savoring every gulp of air.  “For just five seconds, think... about the consequences... of your actions...”

Alyx couldn’t take it anymore.  “GODDESSESDAMNIT, SPIKE!  If you won’t do it, then I will!”

Breen, being an accomplished public speaker and knowing well to ignore hecklers, made an extra effort to shut out Alyx during this persuasive speech, the most important he would ever make in his entire life; an argument for why he should be allowed to live.

He only needed Spike to listen – something he was exceedingly proficient at.

“What is the first thing that will happen after you kill me?” the Administrator asked, his breathing slowly stabilizing as his tongue began to spin and weave.  “What is the first thing that will occur once news gets out that I’ve been killed by members of the Equestrian Resistance?”

“DON’T THINK I WON’T, SPIKE!” Alyx screamed.

Alyx would have to angle around his massive hide to get a clear shot.  Perhaps Spike was well aware that his body was blocking her line of fire – if Alyx was given even a partially clear shot, she would take it, unafraid to miss, as it takes substantially more than a bullet to pierce dragon scales.

“Tell me!” Breen demanded, wanting the answer to come not from him, but from within his target audience. “Tell me what will happen!”

“There will be dancing in the streets,” Spike smartly answered.

Breen sighed and rolled his eyes.  “Other than that.”

“The Combine will want revenge.”

Having moved into a position with a clearer shot, Alyx Sparkle issued Spike his final ultimatum and Breen his death sentence in the lowest, coldest, most feminine growl I have ever heard.

“You have ten seconds before I pull this trigger.”

Breen ignored her as if she were a figment of his imagination.  Armed with the answer he needed, Breen and Spike continued to speak as if they were the only two things in the entire Universe.

“That’s exactly right!  That’s exactly right, Spike!  They’ll want revenge.”

Stomping her hoof like she was getting ready to charge, Alyx shouted,

“TEN!”

“Spike, you don’t know them.  You think you do, I know you think you do, but you have no idea what they’re capable of.”

“NINE!”

“I was there during the Seven Minute’s War, we all were, well-”

Breen dared to spend a precious heartbeat on a pause, jerking his head in my direction.

“-almost all of us.  I was at East Royal Court Academy when Canterlot was attacked-”

“Wait, what?!” Alyx yelled, interrupting both Breen and her own countdown, which I was beginning to suspect wasn’t adhering exactly to one-second increments.

“You were at East Royal Court?!” she continued, obviously remembering something important and possibly traumatic.  “Then how...”

Suddenly a little defensive, Breen said,

“They came and rescued us-”

It was Spike who interrupted him this time, repeating his words back at him in case Breen had trouble hearing himself.

“-Rescued.”

“Yes.  Of course, it was they whom created a need to be rescued in the first place, but anyway...”

There was a terrifying roar on the other side of the door culminating in a tremendous *THWACK*, and the immovable metal bent and twisted for just a fraction of an instant before my telekinetic magic snapped it back into place.

“... anyway, they offered me a job and I accepted it,” Breen finished somewhat indignantly.

Oh, Breen, never, ever do that, I thought.

“You betrayed your whole race!” Alyx shouted over the muffled flurry of activity outside.

“And what else was I supposed to do, Miss Sparkle?!  Put yourself in my place for a moment, if you are even capable of seeing me as anything other than an evil demon spewing the devils’ lies for just a couple of seconds.”

Alyx glared at Breen like if she did so hard enough, he would burst into flame.

Breen inhaled deeply – an action that would have been impossible were it not for Spike’s ever-loosening grip around his torso.

“After it was made crystal-kingdom-clear to me that all the colors of every rainbow and all the magic of every unicorn wasn’t going to put Equestria back together again, I was given two options: Either I would become the new Administrator, or a Maan would.”

Alyx maintained her stolid silence.

“Presented with two evils, I chose a lesser.  I figured Equestrians would rather be... be...”

It was the first time I’d ever seen the Administrator stumble over words.

“Ruled?” I helpfully suggested to his irritation.

“Yes, I figured that, given the two options, ponies would prefer to be ruled by ponies instead of aliens from outer space that know absolutely darn about shucks when it comes to Equestria... and maybe I could use the leverage of my position to do good and effect positive change and... well, fight for you guys... as a... as an intercessor... an advocate for ponydom!  And... and-”

*BANG!*

Everypony ducked when they heard the clap of thunder, and even the Combine paused in their commendable effort to open my door – perhaps wondering what they were supposed to do if the Administrator was already dead, leaving nothing in his office but enemy combatants.

A grey-white wisp of smoke trailing from the end of Alyx’s pistol lazily meandered about her ears.

I stood there, transfixed, swelling with so much pride I was ready to burst into tears.

She switched to semi-automatic to conserve ammo.

Alyx lowered the pistol so that it no longer pointed at the ceiling, but at Doctor Breen’s head.

The silver barrel sparkled in the twilight of the red rising sun.  Breen visibly twitched at the sharp *click* when Alyx cycled the firing mode toggle back to three-shot-burst.

“EIGHT SECONDS.”

That reminded them both of something – for Spike, it was his still cleaned, primed and ready to be used needle, and his slacking grip on Breen.  He quickly tightened his grip around the little earth-pony’s chest, making him squeak like a rubber doll.  Yet, still, his other claw hesitated.

“Eight years!  I have spent the last eight years trying to prevent another Canterlot, another Seven Minute’s War, or worse – and believe me, Spike-”

“SEVEN.”

“-at Canterlot, they weren’t even mad.  Our biosphere wouldn’t have survived if they were mad.”

“SIX!”

“Spike, I am trying to make you understand... if you kill me, they aren’t going to blame you.  They aren’t going to blame the Resistance.”

“CELESTIADAMNIT SPIKE, FIVE!”

“They’re going to blame our entire species.”

“FOUR!”

“And yes, Spike, I realize you are a dragon.  Most of us aren’t.”

“THREE!”

Breen was very close to getting through to Spike, to turning him over to his side, to his point of view, to winning the argument, to proving to Spike, through logic and reason, that he was right and we were wrong.

While Spike was able to maintain his mostly stoic outward facade, Breen was trying not to pant; beads of sweat peppered his face and dribbled off his chin, darkening his blue coat.  His body had begun to betray him, but his forked tongue would be the very last.

"And when their World-Ships are floating in the skies over Manehattan, Baltimare, Fillydelphia-”

“TWO!”

“-and they’re powering up their dark energy weapons...”

“GODDESSESDAMNIT, SPIKE!”

“They'll all look up..."

“SHE WAS MY MOTHER TOO!”

Alyx was crying.  Did she think he would turn?  Did she think the Liar would deceive him?

“... and they’ll say, ‘Who brought this wrath upon the world?’”

“ONE!” Alyx screamed, the baby-blue magic coming from her horn flaring, the pistol shivering.

I could barely hear anypony.  Breen’s voice had become a loud whisper, and Alyx’s a quiet scream.

“Don’t let them say it was you, Spike,” he pleaded, sounding like he aged ten years for every second that passed.  “Don’t begin the end of the world.”

Still the needle did not move.

“ZERO!”

Breen’s pupils dilated until his eyes were almost black, and I could almost see his heart stop beating, as if his body, in the ultimate act of betrayal, had died in anticipation of its own death.

But I did say his tongue would go last, didn’t I?

“Think about that!  Think about them!” Breen said in one final, last-ditch appeal to stay his execution, his voice high and coarse.

He used 'them' to refer to his administrative region’s civilian inhabitants, and if he were to follow the usual grammatical conventions of Equestrian Lexicon, he would be forced to choose a proper noun to refer to the central thesis of his persuasive speech; the Combine, and the threat they posed to the continued existence of organic life in Equestria.

The problem was that Walrus Octavian Breen accidentally defaulted to the proper noun for "Combine" that he himself had coined.  You see, by this time, the Administrator of Equestria had repeated and repeated this conjoined pair of words so many times, it rolled off his tongue like oil off of butter.  Like blood off his hooves.

Perhaps it wouldn’t have made a difference in the end anyway, but the next four words Doctor Breen said would finally trigger an emotional reaction in the adolescent dragon holding him, but not the kind he had been hoping for.  It was a reaction borne of a decade of war and torture and suffering, of hiding, of retrieving the soft, candy-colored bodies of his little four-legged friends, burning their lifeless forms, and throwing their ashes into the ever-shrinking sea, a chore that had been repeated to the point where it held as much meaning as hanging a load of laundry out to dry.  And all the while, while he slept during the day and hunted at night, even high up in the air with the wind howling past his recessed eardrums, the acute, predatory hearing that made it easy to pick out the pitter-patter of footsteps or the snoring of a hibernating bullsquid from a thousand meters or more – just another extraordinary ability of dragons that made Spike such an invaluable asset to his little pony friends – also made it extremely difficult to tune out the Doctor’s never-ending series of pretentious, pseudo-intellectual lectures as they were broadcast to anypony who would lend an ear across virtually every inhabited square kilometer of Equestria.  After years of listening to lies being whispered in his ear, Spike’s magnificent dragon memory had accumulated an incomparable recollection of Doctor Breen’s catchphrases and clichés, and there was one in particular that ate away at him, burning him the way fire couldn’t – a simple label, a name, a word that Breen kept using that he would think of whenever he needed motivation to go and pound the Combine and their lapdogs into mush, to burn the fur, skin and sinew from their bones, to sink his teeth into their traitorous flesh until they emerged from the other side, a name which somehow made it worth the taste of the rancid fluids that ran into the cup of his jaw when he bit into a Combine-created zombie, or the feeling of the oily, lukewarm blood against the unnaturally cold, clammy flesh of the Transequines, all of them instruments of an alien empire that exactly one pony in the entire world referred to as anything besides ‘the Combine’ or, if you worked for them, “the Universal Union”, a nickname this pony made up that is itself a lie; an outright fabrication.

Alyx fired at the exact same time Breen opened his mouth to damn himself.

*B-DDD-T!*

Not much muzzle flash out of that Fançi pistol.  Real unique sound, though.

Spike’s left wing had extended halfway, shielding the enemy of all who live from Alyx’s bullets.

Alyx was totally speechless and Barney was probably flashing through everything he’d ever learned about dragon-slaying (like that happens in anything except fairy-tails), but me?

I wasn’t worried for a single second.

I’d seen Doctor Breen’s lips move; I knew what he said despite the sound of the gunshot.  And I was quite aware by now that Spike can hear damn well everything.

"...think about our Benefactors!"

------------------------------λ------------------------------

“...our Benefactors...?” Spike asked, drawing his green wing back into a folded position.

“... uh...” was all he got in response.  One single syllable.  Breen was too intelligent to even try to make up for a mistake from which he’d never recover.

“Is that what you said?” Spike asked the small, blue pony.

“Do you know how many times I’ve heard you say that?”

Breen shook his head.

Whatever he said next was drowned out by what sounded like two of those huge synth monsters slamming their hulks against the other side of the door, which gave more than it ever had before.

“GORDON!” Barney yelled, and I suffered further hearing loss in my left ear as a result of the former security officer letting off three rapid-fire shots from each of the auto-shotguns strapped to his sides.

In my peripheral vision, the biggest crab claw I had ever seen withdrew back into the breach between the door and the frame, obviously panicking and likely in pain.

Though I did a quality job of almost instantaneously bending the metal back into shape (no, really), my attention quickly snapped back to the exchange between the dragon and the dead pony.

“Even after they shelled Ponyville - in the middle of the night, when they knew everypony would be asleep in their beds!”  As Spike screamed, his eyes began to water as he surely recalled all of the pain and misery and death he had personally witnessed because of the life he held in his claws.

“Even after they clipped the pegasi’s wings and KILLED US and rounded us up and turned us into MACHINES!  Into fucking MACHINES, Breen!  Even after they shot mortars filled with headcrabs into our homes and schools and playgrounds filled with FOALS, Breen!”

Breen actually had the nerve to interrupt him.

“But you just said that t-this shelling happened in the middle of the night!  There couldn’t have been any foals on any playgrounds!”

Spike’s posture sagged for a moment before he continued yelling, sounding like he couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

“DOES IT MATTER WHERE THE FOALS DIED?!  OR AT WHAT TIME OF DAY?!”

Breen went silent.  Even he couldn’t argue that it did.

“And those words came out of YOUR MOUTH!” Spike continued, now clutching the Administrator in both talons.  “AGAIN, AND AGAIN, AND AGAIN!  AND AGAIN, AND AGAIN!”

“... Spike, I had noth-”

“SHUT UP!” the dragon roared.  “SHUT UP!  I don’t fucking care if you didn’t order it - it happened, and you knew about it, didn’t you?!  Didn’t you?!”

Breen kept quiet, his eyes darting around the room, neither confirming nor denying the accusation.

“Of course you did!” Spike yelled.  “You’re the Administrator of fucking Equestria!  How could you not have known?!”

Again, Breen said nothing in denial.

“And for years afterward you kept making your fucking little speeches about our ‘Benefactors’, our ‘Benefactors’, our ‘Benefactors’, knowing in the back of that little head of yours what they did... what they really were.”

Isn’t it extraordinary how we are defined by our actions?

The instrument on his wrist caught Spike’s eye, and he glanced down at the needle that another large and powerful, neigh-invincible flying monster had once inserted into the skull of another scientist who also once worked at the Black Mane Research Facility.  As his huge, diamond- shaped irises deformed to bring that needle into focus, I could almost see the primitive, pre-social instincts of calculated premeditation leading to uninhibited violence – as natural and seductive to the predator lurking beneath Spike as cuddling with a mare in heat is to an equine male – all come flooding back into his consciousness like a ruby red river of blood.

It was a good thing, too, because it was at that point that I became aware of just how exhausted I was from eating and sleeping very little for quite a while now, and it honestly frightened me how close I was to simply releasing the door and letting the Combine come and kill us all.

“Hey, Walrus,” said Spike, emerging from his meditation with the swagger of somepony who recently realized that he is a dragon, “have you ever heard of a zebra named Zecora?”

Walrus Octavian Breen, shocked though he was by the completely random and unrelated question, as well as the suddenly conversational tone with which it was asked, still managed to visibly bristle at the use of his retarded first name.  Only fear, however, had the courage to remain on his face when he realized that Spike was no longer holding him with both of his claws.

Breen shook his head to indicate that he hadn’t heard of Zecora.

“Oh, that’s too bad,” Spike sighed.  “She died in the attack you ordered on New Cloudsdale.”

Breen was stone.  I don’t know what Alyx was doing.  I don’t know what the Combine were doing.  I was so tired.  But Spike’s mentioning of Zecora made me think of that kind, profanity-rhyming zebra.  I remembered that sugar-milk she gave me, how it perked me right up and silenced my hunger.  I remembered how she found me nearly dead in the Everfree Forest, and took me into her home even after I insulted her.  I remembered seeing her lying face-down on a metal floor, blood coming from her head... she was dead, she’d been shot by a sniper’s bullet and now she was dead, dead like Rainbow Dash, dead like Twilight, dead like everypony in Ponyville and the ponies at Black Mane West, and I knew the Everfree Forest sometimes hung on to ponies’ souls, but I really didn’t think that Zecora was going to come back and haunt New Cloudsdale, so that meant she was just gone, and I’d never get to see her again... and it was all because of this blue, suit-wearing earth-pony suspended in the air not three or four meters away...

... him and his Benefactors...

“Well, there’s something Zecora used to say all the time – especially whenever she heard you talk,” Spike said, grinning that terrifyingly toothy dragon’s grin.  “You want to hear it?”

Doctor Breen shook his head in declination of Spike’s offer.

“Oh, I think you do!” he giddily replied because nopony says ‘no’ to a fire-breathing, lava-drinking, lahar-shitting dragon that is four times bigger than you, ten times heavier than you, a million times more pissed than you, and has a syringe as long as your leg strapped to a set of five-fingered claws half the length of your leg that are, in and of themselves, also like huge syringes.

Spike stood up to his full height and stepped forward, clasping his powerful left talon around Administrator Breen’s soft, blue throat.  With the earth-pony’s perfectly trimmed and groomed head pinned between his clawed thumb and forefinger, the adolescent dragon raised the alien machinery strapped to his wrist and briefly held it up to eye-level so that both of them could see.

So that all of us could see.

So that the whole world, the entire universe and the spirits that created it, the Goddesses Luna and Celestia, and the souls, the wailing, tormented souls of everypony – every zebra, every griffon, every donkey, cow, sheep, minotaur, seapony, cerberus and especially every dragon – who had ever died because of this straight-collared suit-wearing thing, this empty shell of a sapient being that had lost its right to call itself a pony when it sold its soul to nightmares and darkness in exchange for delusions and grandeur, so that they all could see what he was about to do!

Spike raised Doctor Breen into the air, drew back his claw, and screamed loud enough for Luna and Celestia to hear,

“FUCK YOU!  AND FUCK YOUR BENEFACTORS!”

And with one graceful motion, he plunged the long, silver needle into the skull of Equestria’s Interim Administrator, sinking it in all the way up to its hilt.

Right.  Between.  The eyes.

As I stared in shock at what so many had died to accomplish, my senses failed to alert me to the fact that there were no longer any sounds coming from the other side of the blast door.

Then it appeared that the entire world exploded, which made me thankful I was standing next to a door that was supposedly (I actually have no real basis for this conclusion other than ‘it looked like it was’) designed to withstand such things.

Sometime after this (or before this, or during this) time stopped working the way it ought.

And then, if then could be said to even still exist, I heard that horribly, horribly familiar voice.

“Well done, Doctor Freemane.  I am impresssssed.”

Achievement Unlocked!  Press Shift + Tab to view.

Contract Complete – Successfully complete your first assignment!

[a]

[b]

This is dedicated to ktooosiek, without whose feedback and friendship, I never would have finished this.

E P I L O G U E :

WHY WE FOUGHT

“When all the world is a hopeless jumble, and the raindrops tumble all around...”

Princess Mi’Amore Cadenza had never heard the lyrics to the song she now sung until the Combine invasion necessitated her forced relocation to a heavily-fortified Royal Equestrian Army Air Corp base deep within the Everfree Forest.

“Heaven opens a magic light...”

The dark concrete hallway lit up with a hot pink glow as yet another love charm crackled from the tip of her horn.

“When all the clouds darken up the skyway, there’s a rainbow highway to be found...”

If she hadn’t moved to New Cloudsdale, then known as the Buttercup Bloomflower Black Forest Facility, she never would have met a Cerberus named Sasha.

“... leading from your window pane...”

If she’d never met Sasha, she never would have heard her singing this song one gloomy day, using a garden tool to scrape dried, muddy hoofprints off of the cement leading to the facility’s entrance.

“... to a place behind the sun...”

Cadance had asked her where she heard that song, and she told her it was from a very, very, old film about a young girl who is sucked up by a tornado and deposited in a strange land located south of No Land and either west or east of Lo Land, somewhere in the middle of the Great, Deadly, Shifting and Impassable deserts.

“... just a step beyond the raaaiiiiinnnnn...”

She told Cadance she believed this was that land.

“Somewhere over the rainbow... way up high...”

The little heart-shaped love charm hovering in the dank, stuffy air popped and fizzled like every other before it, taking with it what little comfort it gave her.  Cadance plopped her head back down on the chilly concrete and sobbed.  She felt like a horrible pony for thinking not of Shining Armor, nor any of the other scores of ponies who were dead, but of Sasha and that stupid song.

Her whole body jumped when an obnoxiously loud, metallic bang shot past her ears and continued reverberating down the hallway.

“PRINCESS CADANCE!” a stallion shrieked.

Her body jumped again.  With Twilight and Shining Armor dead, and Rainbow Dash missing and presumed dead, she was in charge of the whole Resistance – and, just like when she was the Duchess of the Crystal Empire, that meant she had to swallow her personal emotions, no matter how profound, long enough to carry out the duties of her office.

“Yes, I’m here!” she hollered, getting to her hooves.

“Princess... Princess Cadance...” the stallion wheezed, sounding like he was having some difficulty breathing.

“Yes, yes, what is it?!”

She clopped to a halt at the swaying side-door next to the much larger, much more broken door that marked the BBBFF’s main entrance.  A uniformed REA soldier stood there, giving no reaction whatsoever to the metal door repeatedly hitting him in the flank as it slowly returned to rest.

“What is it, soldier?!” she demanded to his face, to which she got the insubordinate response of absolutely nothing.  The pony simply continued staring straight ahead at a wholly unremarkable point on the opposite wall, moving only to satisfy the occasional pesky urge to breathe.

“Oh, for the Goddesses’ sake,” Cadance grumbled, abstaining from taking the name of Peter in vain.

“Yes.”

That was the only response she ever got from that stallion.

Thankfully, the great commotion that drifted through the open set of doors gave the princess a clue as to what this soldier doubtlessly would have would have called her attention to, had he still possessed a vocabulary greater than two, or possibly three or four, words.

Timidly entering the narrow passageway, Princess Cadance stepped outside into the strange twilight of that day and into the presence of the Goddesses Triumphant.

“... FOR WE SENSED THE DEATH OF THIS BREEN THE MOMENT IT OCCURRED,” the Princess of the Night proclaimed in the traditional Royal Canterlot Voice, “AND NOW, NOW IS THE TIME TO STRIKE, FOR OUR ENEMY HAS NEVER BEEN WEAKER AND WE HAVE NEVER BEEN STRONGER!”

The Two Sisters hovered in place above a weary but awestruck crowd of hundreds of soldiers and civilians, their great, glorious wings beating to keep them effortlessly aloft.  The trademark aura of magnificence they radiated somehow made the surrounding devastation of the base – which resembled the site of some combination of a hurricane and a carpet-bombing – seem as dignified and proper by its mere association as the gilded halls of the Royal Palace, the fallen branches and muddy grass littered with leaves and broken glass, the manicured lawns of Canterlot Gardens.

Princess Celestia addressed the crowd in a much more modern voice than her sister.

“The end of the Combine and the birth of new freedom is just over the horizon, and we have grown far too tired of hiding in peace and comfort while our subjects fight and kill and die.”

“AND THOUGH WE MAY BE DESTROYED IN THE COMING BATTLE,” Princess Luna, it could be argued, spoke, “WE WILL NOT GO QUIETLY!”

Cadance giggled.

“PRINCESS CADANCE!”

The pink princess turned a different color when Luna spotted her.

“WHAT IN GEHENNA DID YOU DO TO MY SISTER AND I’S PALACE?!” she demanded, pointing at the kilometers-high mushroom cloud where Canterlot was supposed to be.

“-And the rest of the city!” added Celestia.

It occurred to Cadance that perhaps it was so easy to envision her surroundings as a sort of ‘replacement’ for the Royal Palace because of her subconscious awareness that the old one was now millions of tons of elemental gasses and ultra-fine particles that, after mixing with the air’s latent water moisture along with dozens of cubic kilometers of flash-vaporized snow, had begun to condense and fall from the sky, showering its rightful owners in a charcoal-black ashen rain.

“PRINCESS CADANCE?  PRINCESS CADANCE!”

And as she felt the ruins of the Shady City wash over her, running down her cheeks and dripping off her chin in gentle streams that were warm as a summer’s rain, Princess Cadance dared not blink away the stinging water, for before her very eyes, the bitter rain transformed the scenes of death and devastation around her into visages of beauty, life, prosperity and hope.  She saw a new Everfree Forest – no longer dark and foreboding, but a bright and beauteous place where foals played and lovers laughed – and she saw a new Canterlot – its towering golden spires no longer in the shadow of the mountain, but bathed in Celestia’s sunshine from sunup to sundown.

It was not a dream or a fantasy or a delusion.  She wasn’t remembering the past.

She was seeing the future.

------------------------------λ------------------------------

I have destroyed so much.  What is it that I have created?

I have created a new world for Alyx and her friends; the old, imperfect one that the Combine replaced with something new and worse.  Have I started an intergalactic war with an advanced civilization that our race will surely not survive?  It doesn’t matter.  Why?  Because it is better to die fighting for what is right than it is to live in complacency with what is wrong.  Did I make that choice for all of Equestria?  Again, it doesn’t matter.  How could it, when we are all viewed as the same by those who seek our annihilation?

Alyx.  I’ll never see her again, will I?

------------------------------λ------------------------------

Stopped.

It seemed the whole world and everything in it simply exploded, wrapping me in excised spirits of flame shaded ten thousand hues of orange, yellow and red.

And then it just... stopped.

What happened?

It was all I could think - my overtaxed mind was numb, uncomprehending, stunned, simultaneously tired as the light from a star on the other side of the universe, yet still coursing with adrenaline.

I looked closer, and saw that the flames were seeping through the cracks between the door and the frame.  Had the Combine refrained from the use of explosives out of an abundance of caution, only resorting to their use after all other practical options had been exhausted?

Also, far more importantly, why did the flames appear to be frozen in place?

Curious.

Yet they were still emitting electromagnetic radiation.  They still felt hot.  Good Goddesses, that was a strange sight.

What... what happened to... time...?

“Time, Doctor Freemane?”

Good hell, there it is again.  I was hoping that perhaps I had misheard his voice the first time, but there was no longer any question, any room for other possibilities.

“It’s that Time again, isn’t it?”

I could still move, at least a little bit, and swung my head around to see if I could get a look at the bastard.  I saw Spike with the needle in Breen’s head, with Alyx still staring at the pair with her pistol lowered.  Turning my head around the other way, I saw Barney, his teeth clenched in a grimace and his eyes squeezed shut.

Ooh, he is in a really bad place right now.

If Time ever got going again, I was certain he’d either be killed or severely injured.  I concentrated, trying to shove him away from the door.  Nothing happened.

“Damnit, G-pony, you’ve got to get Barnes out of the way of that door!”

I looked at the door, and my position relative to it.

“... as well as me, I guess!  Please?  Hello?”

My legs were frozen.  Not literally, but they may as well have been solid hunks of lead.  It felt like one of those dreams where you try to run, but your body knows that it’s lying down, so when you will your legs to move, they just feel like they’re made of marshmallows.  It was strange because, mentally, I actually felt refreshed, wide awake and alert.

“I wouldn’t say ‘but you’ve only just arrived’.  It actually feels like you’ve been here a rather long... time...”

I whipped my head back around to the center of the room, and there he was.

That bastard.  Though I’m normally quite blunt and unafraid to spout whatever idiotic thought happens to be zipping through my mind at the moment, somehow, I didn’t think it wise to insult this... creature, this pony, if he even is a pony, to his face.  Especially not when he seemed to be in a rather good mood.

He stood in his pleated blue business suit, his briefcase set on the ground nearby, admiring the statue of Spike holding the body of Administrator Breen.

“Not that I wish to imply you have... ‘overstayed your welcommme’...”

“That was what I was supposed to do, right?” I asked the G-pony.  “Kill Doctor Breen?”

He turned around and slowly trotted toward me, his green eyes seeming to glow like those of a cat.

“Oh, yes, yes, that was obvious wasn’t it?” he replied dismissively.  “Breen was dead the moment those two were in the same room together, however, never in a million years would he have gotten here without you.”

Glancing backward, he remarked, “Spike is a magnificent creature, yes, but...”

He stared hard at me.  “... you ... are far more dangerous.”

He gestured toward the dirty, unmoving clouds outside the window.

“Quite a nasty piece of work you pulled off there in Canterlot – even I didn’t see that coming.”

I held my tongue.  I didn’t feel at all good about that.

“Now, you have two options: You can either continue employment with uhh... me... or... I could leave you here... and hopefully, possibly... maybe...”

He prodded the massive wall of steel centimeters away that I had concluded was accelerating, albeit very, very slowly, toward my head.

“Well, I’m sure you’ll think of something.”

“Oh, Celestiadamnit,” I grumbled.

I jabbed my head at my friend, who was also very close to death.

“What about Barney?!”

“That is none of either of our concern,” he answered.

“BULLSHIT IT’S NOT!”

“Time to choose.”

“Damnit!”

I wracked my brains trying to think of something, anything I could do if I refused and the G-pony restarted the normal passage of time.

Spike is pretty much invincible... what if I pulled him over here, and...

“It’s time to choose.”

No, no, there’s not enough time... explosives?  Even if I had any, my helmet is down, I’d still die and so would Barney and everypony else.

“THIS ISN’T FAIR!”

“That is hardly a new objection.”

“YOU’RE HOLDING A FUCKING GUN TO MY HEAD!”

“My, where did you learn that word?”

“I don’t want my friends to die!” I pleaded, almost crying (I said almost).

“And I want a pony,” he responded with a disgusting grin on his face.

“FINE!” I yelled, making far from my last stupid decision.  “Fine!”

“Excellent choice, Doctor!  I will see you on the other side.”

And the world flashed a bright and blinding green while I yelled, “I love you, Alyx!”

She probably never heard me.

SUBJECT:  GORDON FREEMANE

STATUS:  CONTRACT COMPLETE,

AWAITING REASSIGNMENT

One Last Thing...

It is a little known and seldom remembered fact that the Combine did not invent memory- extraction.

The following, reprinted here because I said so, is a homemade collage which Twilight Sparkle gave to her daughter as a present for her fifth birthday.  It was made, I am told, using a couple of different advanced memory spells and the clever application of existing technology.

Well, that’s it.  That’s all there is.  Thank you for reading.  I miss you so much, Twilight, but I’m not worried.  We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when.

(About this story and the jerk who wrote it)

I wrote this story for the countless Valve fans that love My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.  I wrote this as a tribute to Marc Laidlaw, for writing the best story of any video game I’ve ever played, a story that is pushed over the top of a tiny handful of other competitors by its absolutely unforgettable villain, Doctor Breen.  I wrote this for the entire team at Valve, for making Half-Life 2, one of my favorite videogames ever.  And I chose to cross it over with one of my favorite television shows ever, which Gabe Newell also enjoys;  My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.  I did this because I was sick of enjoying all of the amazing, professional-grade content this community is constantly producing, some of it literally the best of its kind, without giving back anything of my own when I knew that I could.  I was sick of not contributing to one of the most astounding phenomena that I have ever seen on the internet, which has produced one of the most astounding concentrations of sheer talent and ability that I have ever witnessed in my 22 years of life, a vast and diverse group of people centered around something as seemingly insipid and trivial as a television show about rainbows and unicorns.  And yet, this girly television show for little kids (and their parents, I know) somehow became an internet meme – a category normally reserved for things like rage faces, pictures of cats, and videos of people getting very, very badly injured.  And not only did Friendship is Magic become a meme when things of its nature very seldom do, it became literally the biggest meme to ever occur on the internet, and the definition of a cultural phenomenon – I have a screenshot on my computer showing that Equestria Daily surpassed the most popular Star Trek fan website (or probably any kind of website for Star Trek, fan-made or official) on the internet in terms of traffic on at least one occasion, and at any time, there are half a dozen conventions dedicated to the show running in just the United States and Canada.  For me, it became a new and completely unexpected addition to my identity, a source of endless inspiration, and a vehicle for forging friendships and making memories that I will carry with me for the rest of my life.

And, as anyone reading this would already know...

Lauren Faust’s accidental legend – which I wager will go down as one of the biggest surprises in the history of entertainment – set me, an aspiring writer, down a path that would eventually lead me to write The Ballad of Gordon Freemane, my first novel-length story, and hopefully just one of many stories I will tell before I die. So, thank you, Lauren.

I must also thank Kkat for writing Fallout: Equestria. It was his story that ultimately inspired me to write this one. Anyone who has read both stories cannot help but notice the many similarities between the two.

So thank you, everyone.  Never stop being awesome, never forget that friendship is magic, and hopefully ponies will tide us over until Half-Life 3.

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