Locus

They were camped out on the edge of a bog.  Derpy had recognized it as the “Froggy Bottom Bog;”  however, Gerald wasn't so sure.  Judging by her directions so far, there may have been in fact only one bog around Ponyville, but it was entirely possible that she could find another, nonetheless.

He was sitting next to a swampy tree.  There was a gun beside him.  He had taken first watch, because he wanted to watch the stars. He was an amateur astronomer—that is to say, it was one of his hobbies, like the folder on his computer filled with enough inventions and thought experiments to simultaneously take over, feed, power and destroy the entire world three or four times over (he was still working on the calculations for how many times the world could be destroyed by his “hobbies” alone).

He had never thought of himself as more intelligent than the average person, he just thought other people lacked the drive to reach for the stars.  He had in fact designed three interstellar drives, and had just started on what he referred to in his notes as “a machine for handling of stars.” He was examining the night sky and contemplating the fairly rough figures Dr. Freeman had worked out on the Locus, when he heard the little Pegasus—he really needed to start thinking of her as Derpy—came to sit beside him.

Gerald wasn't sure where to start.  Of all the people in the entire group she hadn't yet talked to him yet, and he wasn’t sure how to talk to a sentient horse.  She solved the problem for him, by starting the conversation herself.

“I've always been curious about the night sky,” she began, hesitantly.  Gerald could see the stars reflected in her look of childlike wonder. “I thought about how many of them may have life like ours.”

“Back home I'm an astronomer,” Gerald grinned, “...well, at least it probably looks like I'm making an effort to replace the astronomers where I work.”

“That's the Hydra constellation, by the way.” Derpy pointed to a small collection of stars.

“So do you have an astronomy job or...?”  He couldn't find a tactful way to mention her apparent job as a mail-pony.

“Well it sounds like a good job, but this whole,” Derpy made a gesture at her eyes, “eye thing, makes it hard to get jobs.  Some ponies just can't look past them.  After a while I just gave up on it...”

An awkward pause later, Derpy excused herself to go sleep.  Gerald was about to get back to waiting for his watch to end when he saw something move into view a short distance off in the almost-dark.

The moon and unfamiliar stars weren’t very bright, but they were enough to make out, about 20 feet away from him, the most unpleasant monster he thought he would ever see.  If it had been standing next to him at, say, a bus stop, the two scythe-like appendages that stuck out of the top of the creature would have seriously inconvenienced Gerald by removing his arm if it had decided to tap him on the shoulder and ask if the next bus had arrived.  The two clawed arms that hung down below its armored raptor-like body would have further gouged, if not completely bifurcated, the said removed arm, if the monster was courteous enough to help him with his lost appendage.  And its fanged, tusked mouth, with the mad focused eyes, would probably have made Gerald faint out of sheer terror, if he hadn’t already fainted at that point from pain and blood loss.

Gerald immediately grabbed the rifle he had been given for his watch, and instinct took over.

Five shots rang out in the moonlit night.  Three missed.  One actually bounced off the monster’s back, and the final one hit something soft around the area of its head.  By that time, it was already charging at Gerald with a spine-chilling scream, so animal it came right back around to being almost human.  A further five shots later at the unmoving tangle of clawed appendages found everybody else in the makeshift camp either trying to disarm him or staring at the scythe-clawed monster he had unwittingly killed.

To call it the most terrifying monster Gerald could ever imagine would be a bit of a short sell; this one had two advantages over the average imaginary monster, the first of course being that it was distressingly, completely, and shockingly real. The other was the gruesome injuries it had already sustained before Gerald had even tried to shoot it. He could see them now because he wasn't concentrating on not dying.

One quick glance showed him that a good portion of one of its legs was missing—and it still had charged at him, at a terrifying pace, even in the adrenaline-fueled world of the nearly-dead. That, along with a whole host of other very serious injuries, most of which would have crippled or killed anything, in Gerald’s opinion, made it the most terrifying thing he’d ever seen—imaginary or not.

It was also the most terrifying thing Ditzy had ever seen, Ponyville had been set upon by a number of different monsters in recent months, but none of them had ever seemed so... dangerous. The Ursa Minor certainly seemed dangerous right up until Twilight was magically carting it back into the forest. But this, this thing looked evil. If there was a manifestation of pure hated it would probably manifest itself as a healthier version of this.

Was this really what had been skulking around the edges of the forest?  Her mind raced and concluded that it couldn’t be, this was probably the thing from the crater.  That left a disturbing thought for her all alone inside her head.

What if there were more of them out there....

Gerald realized that he had been staring at the corpse of the monster for far too long, and that somebody was trying to find out what happened from him. Snapping back to reality, he essayed a blank expression at Rodger, who was holding his shoulders as if he was about to try to shake him back to his senses—or perhaps as though Rodger had already attempted it, and he was just waiting for a reaction from Gerald that never came. Gerald couldn’t tell which.

It was then that Rodger’s years of training took over from his instincts. He stopped trying to ask a man who hadn’t reacted to anything for almost a full minute “What happened?” Instead, he decided to try and figure it out on his own. It seemed fairly obvious what happened, but that didn’t answer any questions for him. He decided that he really, really should have brought along a biologist. He was talking to Carlyn about the mysterious creature, when Gerald piped up.

“I’d like to study it.”

Everybody nearby stared at him in disbelief; nobody had quite collected their wits at this juncture in time, and he spoke with a quiet authoritative certainty that was very reassuring to those who weren’t used to heavily armored hellbeasts charging at them in the dead of night.  This meant everyone.

Before anybody could react in any meaningful way, he had already walked over, sat down next to the beast, and started asking for various implements in the manner of a preoccupied mechanic. Fifteen minutes later, he had only answered a few questions, which seemed to open up a lot more questions. He had determined that the creature didn’t have a number of important organs, most of which had been determined to be absolutely essential for multi-cellular life. Its carapace was bulletproof, and the only reason he had managed to kill it was that the armored shell around its head had actually been torn off, apparently, in an unexplained prior incident.  Possibly when it had dropped in from space.

Not long after Gerald finished examining the horrific monster he drug himself off to a bedroll and fell asleep.  Gradually everybody else fell into an uneasy rest with many glances back at the silhouette of the monster.  Except for [atuhor name] he was staring at the zergling in a way that people who knew him well(a group consisting of nobody in the entire universe) would identify as “very nervous.”

His mind was spinning a mile a minute with small nervous thoughts ranging from “zerglings here?!” to “how can we stop them?”  and even “am I on the right side?”  Very few of the thoughts even approached becoming action and none of them were vocalized.  Every one of them was considered as a possibility however.

He sat staring unseeing at the deceased zergling idly chewing a fingernail long into the night.  Never once though did he consider telling anybody else anything he knew about it.  [atuhor name] would have to figure out where he stood in this coming conflict first.