Cutie Mark Crusaders: Survivors

Chapters

Chapter 1: Complications far and wide
Chapter 2: Here they come...
Chapter 3: Taking action
Chapter 4: Escalation
Chapter 5: Coming to terms
Prologue: The power of a tome

Chapter 1: Complications far and wide

At first, there was nothing…

Then came the awareness of existence, followed by vaguely perceived stimuli, and after those, the actual sensations – touch, smell, taste, then hearing, and finally vision. Not that it mattered, as they floated far from any solid surfaces with nothing in sight but the immense, featureless white void.

One of them tried to talk, but no sound came out. She tried once more, and this time, the other two could hear a distorted buzz, as if they were hearing a voice from underwater. Even though they could not understand each other, it was sound, something that proved that they weren’t ghosts in the aether.

They grew more restless, more frantic, and with each beat of activity, colors other than the pure white registered in their eyes, as if their muscles painted the grey, brown, blue, orange, red and black into the canvas of reality. Sounds, heavily muffled at first, became clearer by the second, followed by the feeling of freefalling.

Scootaloo, having the instincts of a flying being, reacted by beating her wings fiercely to gain enough updraft and break her fall. It really wasn’t enough for a softer landing than her friends', who crashed to the ground – floor? – with small thuds.

“Owww… did anyone take note of the cutie mark?” groaned a dizzy Apple Bloom, attempting to get back up on her hooves. After a little while, she gave up and lay back down, holding her head where it had met the ground.

The pegasus, a little less disoriented than her earthen counterpart, shook her head to clear up the stars still in her vision. She was met with no success. “I don’t even know what happened…” she slurred.

“Ah don’t know either. Ah just remember us enterin’ the library after Spike, an’ then that big WHOOSH, an’ now we’re here and-” Apple Bloom was cut off by a soft moan she recognized instantly. “Sweetie Belle?”

On one of the dark room’s corners sat the little unicorn, moaning pitifully as she attempted to get up, looking even worse off than Apple Bloom was. A quiet grunt, and the sound of splashing came to the fillies’ ears.

Despite her repulse, Scootaloo only wrinkled her nose as she stepped closer. “Sweetie Belle?”

The unicorn’s retching diminished in intensity, down to dry heaves, and from that to heavy breathing. “My… my head hurts…” she moaned, “and my horn…”

“Come on, Sweetie Belle. Apple Bloom’s over there, let's at least get to her...” the pegasus encouraged, stepping close to help her friend walk.

The complete darkness weighed down on the dazed and sickened young ponies as they huddled together in a search for comfort. Not much time passed before all three were in a deep sleep.

Twilight blinked. Then she blinked again. ‘What just happened?’ she thought as she looked around the library, which seemed normal except for three things.

One, Spike was slumped at the foot of the stairs, breathing raggedly with a hand over his chest.

Two, the Princess was sitting on her haunches, sweating profusely, with a distant, shocked look in her eyes.

And three, the floor around them was drenched with an unnatural liquid, an incorporeal substance with the consistency of both mist and molasses at the same time.

As it was, going first for her assistant, who, unlike Celestia, looked hurt, was a no-brainer. Spike was breathing a little more easily by the time she reached her, and looked at her with confused eyes. “Twilight… what did you do?”

“I don’t know, Spike. I didn't even notice I was doing anything.” She nuzzled him. “How do you feel?”

“Not very good…” the dragon admitted, stumbling onto his feet. Twilight offered a leg to support his efforts, and he smiled weakly at her. She took it as an ‘okay’ sign and readied herself to lift the baby dragon onto her back.

Of all things, the unicorn wasn't expecting to launch him at the ceiling with a speed that would make Rainbow Dash jealous. He landed with an ‘oof’ on her back. “Oh my goodness, Spike, I’m so sorry!” she immediately stammered, startled out of her wits.

Spike shook his head to put his spinning eyes back in place, rubbing his sore head. “Ow. What was that all about now?”

“I-I don’t know! I just tried to lift you to my back, and that happened! It’s like I have no control over my magic!”

“Twilight…” a voice called from nearby. Celestia, now a little more recovered, stood up and walked gingerly over to the two. “Are you two okay?” The dual nods tranquilized the alicorn to an extent. “What about the foals?”

“Foals?” Spike asked, confused. “There weren't any foals here, Princess.”

Celestia blinked. “I distinctly remember hearing at least three children's voices calling us when we stopped…” At that, her eyes wandered to the entrance, where something red caught her attention. Propelled by the breeze, a mane bow rolled off outside, and Celestia focused to get a hold of it.

The bow exploded like a firecracker, its ashes scattering all around by the pure force of the blast. And once again, Equestria’s head of government was left speechless.

“Princess…” Twilight broke the uncertain silence.

“My magic…” Celestia mumbled to herself, eyeing the cinders. Then, the alicorn looked at the mana flowing between their hooves, and did something no one would expect – she uttered a quiet curse. “Spike, lock down all doors and windows. Twilight Sparkle, collect the book we were reading. We have much to discuss and do.”

The urgent, stern tone didn’t leave any room for hesitance or questioning, and the two quickly moved to fulfill their orders.

A sudden, piercing noise scared the young trio awake. It rang out again immediately after, but this time, Scootaloo beamed. That ear-piercing whoosh of air, of something flying extremely fast, could only mean one thing. “Rainbow Dash!” she yelled in joy, pacing around in circles.

“Scootaloo, not so loud, please…” Sweetie Belle complained, holding her head. “My head is still pounding.”

“Sorry, Sweetie Belle. But listen, Rainbow Dash is out there!”

“Y’all say it like y’didn’t expect that,” Apple Bloom remarked.

The filly’s mood soured. “Ugh, don’t you guys get it? If Rainbow Dash is outside, we’re near Ponyville! We just have to get outta this room.” She moved to the thin line of light reflecting off the floor and tried to push the lower flaps of the door open. They didn’t budge. “Ugh, I can’t see anything, this place is too dark! Sweetie Belle, can you give us some light?”

“Hold on, let me try…”

A moment later, a light flickered on the horn of the trio's unicorn, who stared at it in awe. “Wow, Sweetie Belle, yer improvin’!” Apple Bloom cheered. “Ya didn’t do it so easily before!”

The white foal nodded absentmindedly. Every time she had tried to use her magic before, it commonly didn’t work, or backfired outright, which usually resulted in her being sick and dizzy for a few hours. Nurse Redheart, at Rarity’s request, had examined her, and came up with a simple diagnosis: Sweetie Belle had problems with mana control. It was a normal condition, which would be taken care of naturally as she aged. For the time being, what little she could cast required her to focus some more and do it slowly. Telekinesis was out of question.

However, the light she had summoned came up both abnormally quickly and surprisingly easily. Furthermore, it relieved her of the aches she still felt. But this magic, it was… ‘smooth’, without the ‘spikes’ and ‘edges’ she felt her mana normally had; it was like she wasn’t using her own powers. It was strange, but it felt good.

“Hey, guys, look!” Scootaloo interrupted, pointing at the door: instead of the usual semi-oval shape with three flaps, this door was a solid wood rectangle with a doorknob much higher up than any they had ever seen before. It was like they were in a giant’s house.

A quick scan around their claustrum revealed other things, all of them a lot bigger than normal: a bed, a nightstand, and an open wardrobe, its contents, which they found out were clothes, strewn all over the place.

Forgetting all about their current situation, the Crusaders dug in, giggling happily. “Look at me! I’m a super-heroine!” Sweetie Belle called, a large towel tied around her neck like a cape.

“Ah’m a fashion superstar!” Apple Bloom called, balancing a comically large set of star-shaped glasses on her snout.

Scootaloo emerged from the pile of garments wearing an overly large t-shirt with an logo saying 'AC-DC' on it. “Doesn’t this look cool?”

They continued frolicking on the fabrics, laughing and cracking jokes, until the same noise that woke them up rang out again. This time, it wasn’t a scary chord, but a sound of joy.

The massive explosion that knocked them clear off their hooves and shook whatever building they were in to its very foundations killed the mood in an instant.

“W-what in tarnation?!” Apple Bloom stuttered out, struggling to get out from under the pile of clothes that had swallowed her.

Before any of the others could answer, a voice came from outside. “STOP BOMBING US!”

The three remembered they were most likely in the room of somepony that didn’t like the idea of sudden and unknown visitors on their quarters, and would be rather miffed at the mess they had made. Or worse, a bad-tempered, foal-eating giant!

In an example of subconscious teamwork, Sweetie Belle and Apple Bloom stood side by side, while Scootaloo jumped on their backs and twisted the irritatingly rounded knob with her mouth, finally opening the door. The area outside didn’t seem populated, so they scurried out, only to stop and cover their noses with their hooves. “Ewww, what’s this smell?” Sweetie Belle complained. “It’s worse than the Everfree Forest!”

A strange bellow, deep, raspy and a little choked, very reminiscent of an angry cow. And then a yell, “CHARGER!”

A shrill, angry ‘MOOOOOO!’. Fast, heavy steps. A deep noise of something heavy hitting stone. More yells, and then something the fillies could only think of as somepony setting off many fireworks of different types at once. A pitifully weak groan, and then silence.

Then, a shape emerged on the doorway seeping light into the room.

A witch left behind crying undisturbed, one less hunter in the world, and now a charger taken out without incident. In Coach's opinion, it was some really quiet going since they’d left the last safe house at very early dawn. Of course, the flyboys doing their best to level the city block they were running through – to cover a retreat, according to Nick – soured things a lot. They had to hurry; who knew when they'd pick the bridge as a target, and if they did before they'd crossed it to the CEDA evac...

He glued his back to the wall and peeked through the door-less entrance in front of him. It was clear – no zombies, no noises, just the darkness of an abandoned jazz club like the one they'd been through in Rayford. “Clear! Get inside, people!”

Rochelle went in first, followed by Ellis and himself, with Nick pulling the caboose. Ellis went to one of the benches and sat down for a second to adjust the scope of his newly-acquired rifle, while the others made a sweep of the other rooms close by. Nick grunted in approval as he looked at something in the adjacent room, not far from them.

As Ellis screwed one of the bolts a little tighter, something called his eye. He stood up to look behind one of the benches, and his pupils glinted. “Well, lookie over here…”

As Nick tore off strips of cloth from the bodies at one corner of the bar, thinking of the sin he was going to commit to good beverage, he heard footsteps behind him. “What’cha got, champ?” he asked, knowing who it was without even looking.

Ellis lifted his catch proudly to eye level. “Fifty bucks, all mine!”

“Yeah, great, save them to buy us a drink when we’re outta here.” The former con man knew better than to call Ellis out on his weird tendencies after so much time with him. Besides, Keith’s tales, an obsession with amusement park rides, and plain and simple harmless lunacy were an always welcome break from the daily struggles and pains they faced. Not that he wouldn’t drop dead before admitting it, of course.

“A'ight. Say, what’s that yer doin’, Mollies?”

“Wanna help?”

“Sure!”

“Did ya see that?” Apple Bloom asked after the weird creature with the stallion voice disappeared through the doorway. “That thing talked!”

“I’m just happy that he didn’t see us,” Sweetie Belle whispered. Unlike the other two, she wasn’t exactly curious about the enormous talking ape-bear-pig thing.

If Scootaloo was afraid, she didn’t show it as she strutted forwards and out of cover. “Where are you going, Scootaloo?” the unicorn questioned, a tone of urgency in her voice. “Get back here! If he sees you…”

“Oh, come on, that big guy’s a doofus, he won't even know we're there! Let’s see what he'll do!” With that, the pegasus ignored her friends’ warnings and proceeded to peek past the doorway. Her target was in her sights, messing with something in the corner.

A movement distracted her, and she looked up. The creature in white, which seemed to have stopped messing with a bottle that for some reason had a rag on its mouth, looked back at her.

He blinked.

She blinked.

They blinked together.

Nick’s hand immediately went for the holster on his leg when the… thing, appeared on the doorway, but the sight made him reconsider. It was too small, too bright, and too steady in its movements – whatever it was, it wasn’t an infected. Then, it looked straight at him with a surprised face.

He analyzed the situation: irritability, lack of concentration, hallucinations… yeah, he knew what sleep deprivation could do to one’s brain. “I need to get some more rest in...” But when he lowered the hand he'd just used to rub his eyes, the thing was still there, staring fixedly at him with a confused expression. “What the…?”

He took a step forward, bending down with a hand extended. Halfway through, the spot of orange seemed to notice his arm, its purple eyes locking straight onto his hand, and, with a scream, it ran away from him. The sound, shrill and terrified, startled him out of his confused reverie, and he yelled as well, falling on his rear down on the floor.

Ellis was with him in an instant. “Nick! The hell was that, man? Ya scared the shit outta me!”

The other two survivors came down, skipping the stairs in a sprint. “Nicolas?” Coach asked worriedly as Ellis helped him up to his feet. “We heard screaming from down here. You okay there?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine.” He brushed off the hand on his shoulder, collected his trusty P226 and sneaked into the back hall of the jazz club, the way they had entered through. The others followed him, knowing something was wrong – Nick would normally retort to everything with an at least slightly snarky remark; for him not to say a thing, something was definitely off.

They watched as the younger man leaned to look under tables and behind benches, their fingers on the triggers. Eventually, the former criminal uttered a quiet ‘what the hell?’, which prompted them to approach. As they leaned down, each had different reactions.

Ellis made a confused face comparable to Rochelle upon her first contact with the mud men a week before.

Rochelle turned to look at Nick, looking just as befuddled as he was.

Coach arched an eyebrow. “You gotta be kidding me.”

There, hidden in a corner of a deserted, run down jazz club in a zombie-riddled New Orleans, three creatures that could only be described as miniature cartoon ponies were huddled together, trembling under a table.

As Celestia spoke, Twilight found her entrails in an increasingly tighter knot. “… so I cannot trust my magic. Whatever happened when we were reading this tome has amplified my powers far above what I believe is safe to test out,” she finished.

The smaller pony shook her head. “Just a second, Princess. Let me organize these thoughts."

“Very well,” the alicorn said with a serene tone. “I can’t ask you to help if you don’t understand the situation.”

Relieved by the free pass, Twilight nodded. “So, something in your book has altered our magic?”

“Yes.”

“And some foals were caught in a spell you’ve cast unintentionally?”

“Precisely. A teleportation spell, to be exact. The pattern of mana ripping through dimensions is very characteristic.”

“But, Princess, isn’t it impossible for one to teleport anything if caster isn’t included in the teleporting mass?”

Despite her grim mood, Celestia smiled fondly. Twilight was her favorite student for a reason. “And therein lies our problem. This variation of the teleportation spell has never been accounted for before. The Research Council has tried to make a variation where the caster doesn’t have to move as well for over two millennia, but we’ve never had any success.”

The younger mare’s eyes lit up at that, the information overloading her synapses and common sense. “Princess! This is revolutionary! You have invented a completely new transportation spell!” Her mouth flew out of control as her mind was flooded with ideas of how the new variant of magic could be applied. And its uses! And how much they could discover from that! It was a completely new branch of magic!

An ‘ahem’ from her teacher brought her right back down to earth. “Twilight, while I appreciate the excitement, don't lose focus. I did not so much as cast the spell as much as my magic flared out of control, and right now, we have three foals somewhere out there, possibly in danger, and we have to get them back before something happens to them.”

Author's Note

The clothes scene was shamelessly written for the d'aw factor alone. Sue me. :eeyup:

Chapter 2: Here they come...

The perplexed disbelief written all over the phrase prompted Apple Bloom to lift her hoof up and off her eye, and she eyed the quartet warily. The one that Scootaloo had followed extended a hand to them, and she retreated further into the corner. However, before it could advance, he was stopped by the oldest one, and retreated to simple observation.

Now that they had effectively established a silent limit to interactions, the small pony took a closer look at the unanimously perplexed ‘creatures’. The final member of the group scratched his chin in thought, as if in realization, and she could swear she heard a ‘CLICK’ as his eyes softened. For some reason, it reminded her of Cheerilee, a feeling that brought her some comfort. They didn’t look hungry or evil, so she felt safe to nudge the other two. “Girls…” While Scootaloo was busy trembling and facing the wall, Sweetie Belle risked a peek at her, and the yellow filly pointed a hoof at the creatures, then stood up and took one careful step closer. “… Hi?” she offered, rubbing one foreleg with the other.

“… have I just heard this thing talk?”

Apple Bloom flinched at the derision. “Hey, we ain’t no things!”

“Nick, take it easy. I got this,” the eldest said. Nick made a face. “If you wanna know, I heard it too.” He turned to Apple Bloom, and somewhat hesitantly, said, “Hello?”

The fear that gripped her heart waned further into slightly awed confusion. “What are you? I ain’t never seen anything like you before…”

He knew that look. He’d seen it multiple times as a teacher on the faces of newcomers, the ones in trouble, and even his own boys right before a big game. These creatures, whatever they were, were as intelligent, and just as scared, confused and lost as any human child.

A deep part of Coach’s mind was screaming in confusion and frustration at him, but he ignored it along with the sad feeling his memories as a teacher brought – those weren’t times that would come back anyhow. “I never seen your kind either, young’un. And ya know what, I dunno where you’re from, but I don’t think it’s from ‘round here. Unless you happen to be from New Orleans…”

The chalk-white little pony looked confused, and he couldn’t help but chuckle. They were kids alright. “’New Oarleens’? Is that near Trottingham or something?”

“Ahem, Coach?” Rochelle interrupted.

“What?”

She held a finger up.

The ponies quieted down as well, and he understood why she had called him. It was far away, but the sound of heavy coughing that they knew very well could only mean trouble. Snapped out of the moment, he looked back at the small creatures before him. “Listen, I got no idea what you are, but this ain’t no safe place. You better come with us.”

“Why? Is… is there something out there?”

Nick huffed in exasperation. “Just about forty-nine outta fifty of this city that got turned to zombies. And Coach, if we don't get moving, we're gonna end up joining them.”

At that, even the orange one, who was tucked in tight behind her companions, turned to the survivors, all three with fear evident in their eyes. “Z-zom-zo-zombies?” they stammered in unison.

Coach pinched the bridge of his nose. “Damn it, Nick!”

The man just shrugged. “Don’t ask me to say I’m sorry, ‘cause I’m not. We’re in zombie territory. I don’t know about you anymore, but my priority is to stay alive.”

The overweight team leader opened his mouth to reprimand him, but at that exact moment, a sonic boom cut through the air, and next thing he knew, Rochelle was running out the door after a shape the color of damascus.

“RAINBOW DASH!”

Young minds tend to focus on the most unusual things, and Scootaloo, whose mind practically orbited around her idol, could be expected by whoever knew her well to rush out of wherever she was to see the rainbow-maned pegasus train or exhibit a stunt. Which was exactly what she did when she heard the same zipping noise that had awakened her and her friends, not thinking straight enough through the fright to remember the sounds of the explosions from before. The only thought driving her was something along the lines of ‘Rainbow Dash is here, Rainbow Dash won’t let the zombies get me, Rainbow Dash will take me away from those weird giants!’

The only survivor who had an actual working reaction was Rochelle, who had stood back during the humans’ contact with the three fillies, watching out for the source of the worrying wheezes. “Damn it! Wait!” she shouted, running after the filly.

The small pony practically rolled down the steps beyond the door she exited through, looking up feverishly at the sky. However, the only sign that anything had happened was a very un-Rainbow Dash-like trail of white smoke on the air high above.

Another unpleasant surprise was a lanky-looking creature looking over at her from a roof on the other side of the street. The small glance she sent its way didn’t notice the absurd number of unnatural tentacles sprouting out of its upper body, because at that moment it screeched a shrill, angry note, and something wrapped quickly and tightly around her body.

With a loud, panicked scream, she was hoisted up, the smoker’s long tongue squeezing the air out of her lungs, effectively silencing her. Blood pumped in her eardrums, but even through it she could hear an agitated cacophony of yells and growls quickly approaching, and her panic increased.

It wasn’t to Scootaloo’s knowledge that her loud, high-pitched voice had worked against her, grabbing the ear of every former human in the vicinity.

The filly squirmed madly in a losing battle, barely able to think with her head increasingly clouded by the dangerous blend of fear and suffocation. Then, the pressure around her eased up enough for her to take a labored breath, some of her senses returning, and she vaguely saw one of the beings from before struggling heavily with the tentacle, her left arm wrapped firmly around it right above the pony’s own body, the other frantically reaching for something on her belt.

Rochelle fumbled with the machete, struggling to get it out of its improvised scabbard, but the tension of fighting the infected’s pull jerked her to one side, knocking the blade out of her hand and to the pavement. “Damn it!” Her hand flew straight for the pistol, and she aimed up at the mutant, her arm unsteady from the effort. Her finger pulled the trigger of the Glock four times, the last shot drilling through the Smoker’s knee and robbing it of its balance. It fell with an uncharacteristic screech from the top of the building, hitting the ground in a burst of spores and a wheezing groan.

Scootaloo’s world was filled with air and a terrible dust of an acrid stench clung to all of her face’s cavities as soon as the tongue relented its pressure on her barrel. She coughed repeatedly, her savior doing the same as she waved her hand in front of her face. Unable to fight with her eyes clouded over and her breath constantly interrupted, Rochelle, clutching the young pegasus, ran blindly into the protective circle quickly formed by the three men of her ensemble as they stood by the door.

The two slumped down inside the building for Scootaloo didn’t know how long, trying to purge their airways as the filly cried her fear away. The cockatrice they had encountered in the Everfree Forest hadn’t been nearly as scary as being choked by that monster – she really felt like she was going to die at that moment, and her ribs, still aching quite a bit, didn’t allow her to forget it even by a second.

The magenta-maned child pony never noticed the company of her two friends, who tried to comfort her as best as they could while timidly watching the rest of the quartet retreat behind the doorway.

“Here they come!” Ellis warned, and surely enough, an infected sprinted through the door – and straight into the trio’s sights. One shotgun shell and several bullets later, it could barely be recognized as more than a pair of legs attached to a chunk of badly butchered meat. More of its kin flooded in, reaching for their human enemies in a blind rage, but only achieving their own death, their bloody carcasses on the ground being stepped on as more came from behind.

Nick let off a particularly long burst from his AKM at the crowd, not bothering to aim much given the short distance from the targets. Coach pumped and fired his shotgun like a robot, fiercely shoving any stragglers back with his weapon, shoulders and legs. Ellis had dropped his scoped rifle in favor of a pistol and a frying pan, shooting and bludgeoning in a hyped up frenzy, using both the kitchen instrument and the bottom of the gun’s grip. All three effectively boxed the invaders in, mowing them down from all sides – the infected that evaded Coach’s cone of fire had to face off against Ellis’ savage blows and bullets, even as the ones right behind were decimated by Nick’s sprays. They didn’t come out unscathed, though: no more than thirty seconds into the fray, already Ellis sported a bruised cheek, Nick had a coat sleeve almost ripped off and his arm was marred by nail scratches, and Coach was flexing his sore jaw, nursing a lucky arm swing from an infected that got too close.

Each zombie fell in a tangle of limbs, the others behind them, in their berserk mindsets, trampling the fallen ones, living or not, only to be shredded as the barrels turned their ways. The process repeated itself, over and over, as the smell of sulfur and copper hung increasingly heavy in the air. The floor became covered in so much blood it wasn’t even red any longer; it had become an almost pitch black surface with hints of crimson where it wasn’t as deeply coated. The walls suffered a similar fate, though less intense and brighter in its splotches of the macabre paint.

The entire episode was watched in a slack-jawed sense of morbid fascination and fear by Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle. The mix of terror and awe was overwhelming, mind-numbing like the end of a sugar rush. No matter how much they wanted to, they couldn’t look away.

As quickly as it had started, it was over. The swarm had been beaten down, and the only sounds to be heard were the panting of the spent humans and Scootaloo’s weak coughs.

After a quick check for any remaining infected, the humans regrouped in the table hall, reloading and administering treatment to their wounds. “Water, please,” Rochelle wheezed. “I think I dropped my canteen…”

Soon, Scootaloo felt a gentle hand rubbing water on her face and pouring it into her mouth, washing away the caking of tears and soot that hurt her senses. She blinked her eyes open, finally able to see right again. “You saved me,” she said between sniffles, hugging her hero tightly with her little forelegs. “What was…” she shuddered, “… that?”

“That,” Coach explained as he filled his shotgun’s magazine, “was a smoker.” His voice became stern. “It’s just one of the reasons we don’t go runnin’ off alone. Why the hell’d you even do that?”

The pegasus shrank noticeably. “I thought I had heard Rainbow Dash outside…”

The aged man twisted an eyebrow, but decided not to ask. This kid looked like she’d learned her lesson already, and now wasn’t exactly the time for questions. “Anyway, we gotta get movin’. That sure got some attention we really don’t need. You okay to go, Ro?”

The human female gave her companion a thumbs up, getting up from her seat. She didn’t want to make the scared little pony clinging so tightly to her let go, so she hooked an arm under her like one would a small child, and lifted her to look over her shoulder, a gesture Scootaloo gladly complied to.

Nearby, Ellis was bent down, trying to rouse the other two fillies to their senses. “Hey, hey, it passed. It’s all fine now.” He tried to ruffle their manes, but they flinched away right after contact. The carnage had left them with a clouded mind, barely able to mend two thoughts together. Beside Apple Bloom, Sweetie Belle seemed even more shocked, apathetically gazing forwards with lusterless eyes.

The young mechanic sighed. “These things were zombies. Y’know zombies, don’t ya? They don’t think, they can’t feel, they only eat an’ kill. And it was them or us.” He tried to touch the duo again, with just as little success. “Look, we ain't got time to explain right now, but we can sit ‘n talk about it when we’re in a safe place, ‘kay? Ah promise ya.” After a second of thought, he added, “Ah can carry you if ya want.”

Not fully convinced, the two reluctantly allowed the young man to pick them up. Everything was quiet, not even the wind making a single noise, as if the gruesome show from minutes earlier had shocked the entire world into silence.

As Twilight scoured the most minimalistic details in Body Flicker’s Advanced Studies on Matter Displacement, with her assistant sitting by her and diligently annotating every word of the resume she dictated to him, Celestia fiddled with a set of blocks and cubes. The toys were frequently used by younger unicorn foals to train their initial magic powers, and this specific set was a gift that her student’s parents had given her when she had departed to study under the alicorn’s tutelage. To most, it would look like the Princess’ day off… were she in Canterlot and not sporting a scowl laden with concentration as she stared at the pieces.

‘Okay, once again…’ she thought, focusing. One of the blocks zipped past her head, coming to a stop embedded halfway into the tree-building’s wooden wall, right alongside a good number of similar dents in the natural structure. ‘… ponyfeathers.’ “Twilight, have you found anything interesting yet?” she asked, trying to get her mind off her current predicament.

A sigh from the young mare dropped her heart onto her stomach once again. “Nothing that we don’t know already, Princess,” Twilight said sadly. “How much mana to use, how to focus the spell, picking a destination…” she rubbed her head with a hoof, “but there’s nothing about tracking somepony else’s destination here.”

Dejected, she watched the elusive shimmering pool on the floor – liquid mana, a leftover found after particularly intense magical flares, as Celestia had explained –, tumble over itself, its surface ebbing and flowing. “Are you sure you can’t just sense where it took them to, Princess?”

“Twilight Sparkle, will I really have to repeat myself?” Celestia asked in a mildly annoyed tone. “I do not wish to attempt any fine-tuned magic until I have my powers back under control.”

Spike quietly turned away on his seat, writing implements under claws crossed over his lap, while Twilight, who had taken a step back, looked down at the floor, almost in tears, her ears pressed extremely tightly against her head. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry…”

Celestia could hear the shattering in her chest by the end of Twilight's whimper, uttered so quietly it could pass off as background noise by somepony not paying attention. ‘I really have to keep my stress in check.’ As intelligent as Twilight Sparkle was, it was easy to forget she was very high strung and emotionally fragile, especially so when her teacher was involved.

She couldn’t withhold a sigh as she approached the cowed unicorn and nuzzled her scalp. “I’m sorry, my dear. I am as frustrated as you, believe me, but you know well that we cannot step farther than our legs allow us. For now, there’s very little we can do but study this phenomenon while we can’t act on it.”

“I understand, Princess,” Twilight said with the beginnings of a timid smile. “We need to have patience.”

Spike hated this kind of moment. It was rare for Celestia to chastise Twilight in any way, but seeing the two fight stung nonetheless. Were it not for the fact that neither of the ponies could write at all with their uncontrolled magic and an admitted difficulty of writing with their mouths, he would have excused himself, but as it was, he had to limit himself to watching the pool of mana on the floor. In fact, the way the essence slowly waved and spiraled unto itself was strangely soothing, and as the dragon watched, he lost track of time until a muzzle nudged the side of his head. “Spike?” Twilight asked, and he was thankful that she had returned to her normal tone.

He shook his head. “Sorry, I think I zoned out.”

“Well, playtime’s over! Ready to take notes?”

And with that, he was back to annotating her resume about translocation, the distraction seeping away from his mind.

Chapter 3: Taking action

“… and I think that’s it.”

With a huff of relief, Spike dropped the quill and spun his wrist. Any claw cramps he’d ever had before were nothing compared to this… but then again, they had never scoured a literal thousand-page book, line per line, with this magnitude of attention before. It was an incredibly detailed analysis, even by Twilight's standards.

Twilight gently took the bundle of sheets from the desk with her lips and walked over to where her mentor sat, still fiddling with the practice set. Celestia had her brow furrowed and her eyes closed, beads of sweat rolling down her forehead. Shakily, one block floated to the air, enveloped in an uneven yellow coat of light. The aura around the object quivered and spiked, as if demanding release.

The younger pony wasn’t an expert in sensing, but even she could perceive how unstable the Princess’ magic was acting, much like her own, but on a far greater scale. It was scary, actually – during her entire upbringing as her student, the unicorn had never seen a single unintentional fluctuation in Celestia’s power. To see her role model having problems with controlling a simple levitation spell made her uncomfortable in a way she could not describe.

The block dropped lifelessly to the ground, and Celestia opened her eyes. Her gaze fell on the purple pony in front of her. “Can you feel it, Twilight?”

Said pony broke out of her own musings, blinking. “Hm?”

“I asked: can you feel it? Our magic – yes, ‘our’, I saw you are showing the same symptoms – is not only boosted, but it has gained an offensive trait; an edge, so to speak.” The alicorn stood up, her hair whipping considerably more fiercely than usual, and ran a fetlock over her damp face. “I can’t keep it balanced long enough to perform even a menial levitation spell.”

After setting the papers down on the table, the apprentice tapped a hoof to her chin. “Yes, I noticed it too… It doesn’t feel bad per se, but it’s like every spell I attempt is altered to hurt somepony in one way or another.” A moment of silence passed. “Maybe your book has something that explains it?”

Celestia shook her head. “I don’t believe it is a good idea for us to lay eyes over those pages again, my dear. Our magic may flare again, and…”

The words were left hanging. There was no need to finish the sentence; its ominous point had already been made.

Another moment of silence stretched on and on, with neither pony knowing how to break the ice that had formed both between each other and in the pits of their stomachs. Uncomfortable, Celestia silently collected the recently written resume, while Twilight turned to look for Spike. Once again, the dragon was sitting, admiring the pool of mana on the library’s floor with a peaceful, almost hypnotized expression. “Spike?”

With a jolt, her assistant was on his feet once more. “Oh, yeah? What now?”

“Nothing, I’m just wondering why you’re always so fixated by this pool. It’s just mana.”

“I don’t know either,” he shrugged. “It just makes me feel calm. Maybe it’s the swirling…”

“Swirling?” Twilight squinted a little in concentration, and saw that indeed the mana whirled, very slowly, but it did. There were colors as well, very faint wisps of pink, green and purple light that a cursory glance wouldn’t catch. But there was more to it than just a magical lightshow, especially inside its eye. There was…

“I wonder what it is that you find so interesting in this.”

Celestia’s tone wasn’t one of disapproval – in fact, it was rather amused –, but the startled librarian still felt like crawling into a hole. Twilight chided herself; it wasn’t the time for sidetracking. “Sorry, Princess. Anyway, I’ve finished the resume you asked for.”

The alicorn nodded. “Indeed, I was browsing through it, but I presume it’s better if you explain it to me vocally. Reading it all would take time we don’t exactly have.”

She made a move to sit on one of the room’s cushions, and Twilight, already entering what was often referred to as ‘lecture mode’, followed. Once they were comfortable, the purple pony began explaining. “This is what I’ve collected: the basic mechanic of the teleportation spell is that it ‘bends’ our dimension over itself, and links two separate spots: departure and destination.”

The royal pony nodded quietly to show her attention. Both of them already knew these details, but a refresh might bring something up that might be overlooked otherwise.

“Theoretically, there is no limit for how far the spell can reach; that is only limited to the amount of mana used in the casting. And finally, there is a failsafe embedded in the pattern to ensure the safety of the caster and any load they may be transporting as well.”

“And that failsafe consists of…?”

“A scan array that ensures the target is in an environment not critically different from the point of departure, both chemically and physically. In a nutshell, it detects the closest location to the destination that has atmospheric composition and pressure included within a certain threshold, so that the subject doesn’t materialize inside of solid objects or harmful fluids, including toxic air.”

“Excellent work, Twilight Sparkle.” Said filly beamed. Praise from her tutor always made her feel good, no matter what the situation was. “This reduces our field of search in quite a bit, and ensures that wherever they were sent to is at least relatively safe, yes?”

“Yes, exactly.” She frowned. “But you said you cannot sense them with your magic as it is, Princess, and there is no way for anypony to track the transported. How can we find them, even if our search area is smaller?”

‘And so we return to the grim aspects…’ “Unfortunately, this is where we reach a bit of an impasse. I do have an idea of what could quell the fluctuations and allow me to try and sense them, but it will take some work. Firstly, I need you to gather your friends, the bearers of the Elements of Harmony.”

Twilight was taken aback at that. “The Elements?…”

A wave of a hoof quieted her. “Let’s cross that bridge when we get to it, my faithful student. For now, I kindly ask you to gather your friends. I will explain it when you are all assembled.”

The door led to another, darker room. It was hard to see what it actually was, with the little light there was coming from three low-power torchlights. The smell of it tortured the ponies’ nostrils, its aroma of rot, dust and rusty metal inflaming their senses.

“Listen, sweetie, I’m gonna put you down, alright?” Rochelle said to Scootaloo. “I need my two arms free to defend us.” The filly nodded shakily, and was set down onto the wooden floor. “Stick close.”

Behind her, Ellis did the same, and Sweetie Belle and Apple Bloom took the opportunity to get close to their friend while the Georgian collected one of the molotovs from the counter. “Guys?” the pegasus asked.

“Y’alright, Scoots?” Apple Bloom responded. “Yer not hurt, are ya?”

“Kinda…” she confessed. Had there been more light, the angry bruises around her little body would have been clearly visible. The pain of the compression had made it hard for her to take a deep breath, and woe forbid the thought of moving her wings even a millimeter. “That thing did a number on me.”

“That smoker?” Ellis interrupted. “Yeah, those sons o’ bitches are nasty. When they get ya, only way out is to cut the tongue or kill ‘em.”

“Th-them?” the pegasus asked, her voice faltering. “You mean there’s more than one?”

“Lots more.” He grimaced. “Ah think of all the people that turned, one outta ten are smokers.”

Another bomb went off, rattling the booze bottles off the shelves. The ponies recoiled as if struck, and Ellis flinched. “Alright, that reminds me, we gotta keep movin’. C’mon.”

The Crusaders reluctantly fell in pace with the human, cantering to his walk speed. Apple Bloom mustered what little courage she could and asked, “What’s goin’ on?”

“What, ya mean the bombs?”

The child stared blankly at his back.

Before he could continue, they stepped beyond an archway into a room full of flipped chairs and overturned tables, and hushed voices made their way into their ears.

“I’m telling you people, this is a bad idea. We’re barely standing as it is, we can’t just be charitable. Hell, we don’t even know what those things are!”

Ellis stopped, paying attention to the conversation he unintentionally eavesdropped on. Apple Bloom, Scootaloo and Sweetie Belle, all of which were less than distracted by the voices, looked around the new room. The place had a stage – going by the bottles strewn on the floor and lying on the counter and the deactivated light cannons, it seemed like a spot where parties took place. Seeing it dead, dark and covered in bodies and blood made for an absurdly eerie sight, and the trio moved closer to Ellis, anxious to get away from it.

“Nicolas, do you remember Vergil?” Ellis recognized Coach’s voice. “How he had no food, just a bit of fresh water, and almost no fuel? And how he still went to that plantation to save our asses? That guy got us outta that swamp, shared the lil’ bit he had with us, and never asked for payback.”

“Yeah, well, unless you forgot Ducatel, we had ways to return the favor.”

The set of telekinesis blocks lay beside the manuscript, both forgotten on the table. Their user had left them in favor of pacing back and forth, deep in a brainstorm session. ‘Sure enough, there’s no way for me to track them directly, but there must be an indirect way, a trail to follow. Every magic leaves a residual… effect…’

She unconsciously turned to the mana pool. It wasn’t a mere absentminded search for a distraction, she knew it – something was pulling very lightly on the edge of her mind, almost as a physical sensation… and that force came from the center of the eddy her surrogate children were so immersed in.

Even after she closed her eyes and shook her head, trying to concentrate, it took the aurora-maned mare a while to recognize it: her mana was being siphoned from her. It was an absolutely insignificant amount even to her magic at normal levels, and with the impulse she had received, actively feeling it actually took more effort than the drain itself. ‘How long has this been happening for? It can’t have been long, the pool doesn’t have a noteworthy concentration of my mana. Unless…’

She tried to extend her magic sense, to feel through the faint line, but no matter how hard she concentrated, no matter how hard she tried to rein her magic in, the power seeped through; if she pressed more, the sheer tension of the control would cause even more mayhem on the output, further increasing the spikes of power. There was no middle ground in it; she couldn’t read even the energy within her own being. ‘No use; I’ll have to do this later. I just hope this link still exists by the time we are done…’

A subtle knocking on the door broke the alicorn out of her thoughts. Opening it a notch, just enough for her to take a peek outside without being seen, she saw a mass of blue, white, yellow, pink, purple and yellow. The bearers had arrived.
However, another thing called her attention: the sun was at its zenith, much higher up in the sky than she had expected. ‘Oh no…’

Opening the door just barely enough for the average female pony to fit through, she called them in with a strict voice, “Quick, inside. No questions until all are in.”

One by one, the sextet entered the library, Pinkie Pie being the first, followed by Rainbow Dash, Fluttershy, Rarity, Applejack and finally, her student. The fashionista and the farmer were fidgeting quite noticeably, even though the rest of them, particularly Twilight, weren’t too far behind in terms of agitation. They all bowed, a gesture she paid no attention to as she closed the door.

“Girls, it’s very fortunate that you managed to come. Without any of you, this would be a lost cause.” She noticed the obvious increase in their discomfort. “I’m sorry to usher you in such short notice, and will not waste your time. The Elements of Harmony are needed again.”

Discomfort turned to shock.

“No, Nightmare Moon hasn’t returned. It’s not about any threats to Equestria's security, either.”

“Um, ‘scuse me, Yer Highness,” Applejack said, “but will this take long? Y’see…”

“… there are three foals missing from the town,” Rarity completed. “Mine and Applejack’s sisters, Sweetie Belle and Apple Bloom, and their friend, Scootaloo. We were in the middle of organizing a search party.”

Celestia’s neutral expression didn’t betray the block of solid nitrogen that dropped in her belly. Twilight, her mane slightly disheveled, moved to the front of the group. “Princess, girls… I think there may be a parallel here.”

“Parallel?” The blonde pony narrowed her eyes. “Twi’, are ya hidin’ somethin’ from us?”

An awkward grin and some beads of sweat on Twilight’s brow betrayed the answer.

The farmer’s ears pulled back tight against her head. “Twilight Sparkle, if y’all know somethin’ ‘bout what happened to mah sister, ya better tell me now,” she continued sternly, taking a step forwards for emphasis.

“Ahem,” Celestia cleared her throat loudly, garnering the general attention. “Girls, I know the situation is dire, but please, let’s maintain our calm. Twilight…” Her gaze asked the question in the minds of everypony present.

The purple unicorn kicked at nothing with a foreleg, clearly distressed. “Princess, you said you had heard a few foals during the… incident. Do you remember that red bow you tried to grab?” There was another moment of pregnant silence, during which Applejack’s expression twisted into something unreadable. “Well… I’ve never seen anypony else use a similar bow, except for Applejack’s sister, Apple Bloom.”

That broke the dam. Applejack, Rarity and Rainbow Dash rushed to Twilight, rapid-firing question after question, while Fluttershy paced around frantically in circles while muttering to herself. Pinkie Pie sat still, even quieter than before – Celestia swore she could hear gears gnashing their teeth together above her head. Another ‘ahem’, notably louder this time, was necessary to restore order.

“Very well, it seems we have come to a conclusion: at least three of the children we have lost are the same you are looking for. As insensitive as it may sound, this diminishes our workload. Now then, since we know both issues are one and the same, will you help me, my little ponies?” A mix of nods and positive verbal responses made her smile. “Excellent, I knew I could count on you. As such, let us tell you exactly what happened.”

“So, y'all were tryin' a spellbook and the girls interrupted, and the spell did some thingamajig that it shouldn't have?”

Twilight nodded solemnly. “And that’s why we need your help.” She turned to Equestria’s sovereign. “Princess?”

“We may have a chance of bringing them back, but as we’ve explained, I have a factor of instability in my magic. That is where you come in, girls: I need you to use the Elements of Harmony to purify me and get it under control again.”

A collective gasp resonated from the group. “But, but Your Highness,” Fluttershy asked, concerned, “aren’t the Elements supposed to be used against evil? I-I mean…”

Celestia smiled. “Do not worry, child. The Elements of Harmony have their name for a reason: they bring harmony and order to the world when they are activated. That is not limited to smiting evil; they can heal and restore just as easily.”

The relieved silence that followed was broken by her student. “But, Princess, after we defeated Nightmare Moon, you took the Elements to Canterlot for safekeeping. How are we supposed to use them if we don’t have them?”

That was a problem Celestia had considered. It would be problematic for her to simply leave the library, let alone go to Canterlot. Even if it wasn’t, it was too far to gallop, and she wasn’t sure the unbalance that ailed her magic had affected her pegasus abilities. With their uncertain time constraints, she didn’t want to make an attempt. The mail option wasn’t viable, either: nopony would take a letter explaining the current situation seriously if it wasn’t written by the alicorn herself, who had no real way to write a message – as much as she would like to deny it, magic was so much more convenient for writing than using one’s mouth that, like many unicorns she had seen through the ages, her mouthwriting skills were rusty at best and illegible at worst –, and even if she could, she would not risk burning the letter to Luna as usual with her magic out of control as it was. There was Spike, but he didn’t have the necessary information to direct the mail to her sister, the only other pony in Equestria with the ability to access the vault where the Elements were now kept.

Fortunately, one did not use the Elements twice without learning at least a little more than general knowledge. “Twilight, am I right to believe this library still has a copy of The Elements Of Harmony – A Reference Guide?”

She had barely finished the sentence before a purple hand holding a large tome appeared in her vision. “This one?” Spike asked.

“Why, yes indeed! Very efficient, Spike.”

The compliment left the baby dragon’s cheeks colored a funny shade of pink, and most of the mares present couldn’t hold their amused giggles in.

Soon the moment of reprieve waned, though, and the book was opened. A gold-plated hoof ran over the index’s contents, browsing to the ‘appendix’ section right afterwards. “Here, I found it. ’… though the Elements of Harmony themselves are the most efficient and powerful way to harness the bearers’ power, there is one known alternate method. Through the usage of the Sigil of Harmony – refer to page 866 for details – the power of the bearers can be unleashed in a lesser scale.’”

The sheets whipped past their eyes until the number 866 could be read at the foot of the page. Above it was an explanation on the steps necessary for the preparations, which, to general relief, were surprisingly simple. “Firstly, the sigil must be drawn on a perfectly flat surface, clockwise from Honesty to uh huh, to... mmhmm... and finally Loyalty,” Celestia read out loud. She turned to her subjects. “There is very little room for flaws here; one misguided point will unbalance the matrix.” A gold-clad hoof scratched at the floor. “Unfortunately, at the present time, I cannot successfully do it myself. I must ask of one of you to draw the sigil for us.”

The white-coated unicorn of the group took a step forwards. “Your Highness, if you’ll excuse me, it shall most likely be no problem to a fashionista worth her salt such as myself,” she said in her usual slightly posh, but good-natured, tone, hiding well her previous nervousness. Less than five minutes later, Rarity was done with her self-assigned task, the large sigil drawn with almost mathematical precision.

“Excellent work, my little pony,” Celestia complimented. “Now for the next part: the bearers must stand in their respective spots over the sigil…” she pointed to the spots on the edges of the pentagon on the floor as she read, “… and attempt to invoke forth the power of their respective elements. If you may…”

They all took their positions, with Twilight in the central point. As one, they closed their eyes. “Remember, girls, it’s not a matter of forcing it out,” the studious one reminded them. “Just think of the good things we’ve been through together, the obstacles we overcame, and the lessons we learned.”

However, even with that advice in mind, it didn’t seem to work. One by one, the Ponyville mares opened their eyes, looking amongst themselves at first with confusion, then deject. That is, all but one. Having learned, and gained, the most out of all of them in their experiences together, Twilight Sparkle didn’t break her focus, and slowly, as drops trickling down the aqueduct of memory, it all came to her. The brunch with the Apples. The welcoming party to Ponyville, courtesy of Pinkie Pie. The end results of the ticket dispute. Helping Applejack out of her stubborn fit during the apple harvest. The parasprite invasion. The Zecora affair. Accepting Pinkie’s sense. The amiable end of the Running Of The Leaves. Supporting Rainbow Dash in Cloudsdale, earning her the first place on the Best Young Flyer Competition. Fluttershy standing up to the dragon after she realized the way her friends had suffered in his claws. And above everything, Nightmare Moon, and the consolidation of their bond.

She felt lightweight, joyous, and oh so peaceful. If the enhancement provided by the tome felt good, this was positively divine.

The emblem she stood on began to radiate light, the inky lines of the sigil turning white as the magic flowed through them, trickling over the lines like fluid filling a crevasse. First Applejack, then Rarity, Pinkie Pie, Fluttershy and finally Rainbow Dash, all were engulfed by the gentle power emanating from the unicorn. Assaulted by the same jolly sensation as their friend, they closed their eyes a second time.

Suddenly, a pillar of light the exact size of the sigil hid their features, allowing Celestia to see only dark silhouettes of the bearers. Twilight opened her eyes, two empty holes pouring white light, and from the top of the phenomenon, a double helix of rainbow-coloured light beams shot up and swirled around an invisible pivot, conjoining high above in a single wave that hurtled towards the alicorn.

Relaxing all of her muscles and forcing her mind clean, the princess waited.

As they reached a small stop inbetween the set of stairs Ellis was climbing up, and Sweetie Belle, at the head of the Crusaders, turned to continue, she was stopped by one of her friends. “Sweetie Belle, wait jus’ a sec… Is that… yer cutie mark?”
The unicorn stopped dead in her tracks, her vision snapping towards her flank, and sure enough, a wide emblem of a yellow and gold sun was emblazoned on it.

Her cutie mark. Her cutie mark. The one thing that she had yearned for almost her entire foalhood, the one reason she had banded together with her two fellow blank flanks, and the cause of so many embarrassments and pains from the crusading they did in search for them.

She felt like she should be prancing with joy… but the very idea of happiness about it only existed in her head; her heart was void of it. Of course, it was a unique event, the coming of age for anypony, and something worth a very special celebration, but the present situation overshadowed it, glooming her senses so much she could only see her cutie mark as a useless decoration. “Yeah…” she muttered as she turned ahead and continued climbing up.

“Hey, what do you mean with ‘yeah’? It’s your cutie mark, for crying out loud!” Scootaloo interjected indignantly. Even the shock of the current situation couldn't hold her bafflement back. “That’s, like, the thing you joined the Crusaders for! And now you have it; you’re almost a grown up now, Sweetie Belle! Why aren’t you happy?!”

“Scoots… I’m sorry. I just… I think my head is a bit full right now,” she said. The chalk-white pony was comforted by the silence that indicated her friends relenting; though she knew it wasn’t over, and they would ask a ton of questions later, that they respected her want for silence at the moment made her feel warm inside.

At the top of the stairs, they were greeted by the sight of Coach and Rochelle, both looking rather grumpy, in a discussion with an annoyed Nick. The light-skinned man noticed them first. “Speak of the devil,” he said as he stood up from the pool table he was leaning on.

They flinched collectively against his hard tone. “Nick…” Rochelle drawled sternly. “Did you forget what we were talking about just now?”

“What, that I think this is gonna get us killed? We haven’t met them even ten minutes ago, and they’re already slowing us down! Ro, it’s not a matter of me liking them or not, it’s a matter of them being a liability we don’t need!”

“Nick, do I have to remind you that, when we met, you were a shady fellow that sounded like you’d stick a knife up our backs the moment you didn’t need us anymore?” Coach retorted. “You ain’t one to talk much about liabilities.”

Nick opened his mouth to say something, but closed it back again and just sighed, placing one hand on his forehead. “All right, fine, but I’m not gonna play babysitter.”

Apple Bloom huffed in irritation, despite the silent threat in the former criminal’s mannerisms. “Mistah, ah’d rather y’all know we may be young, but we ain’t no babies either. We can take care of ourselves jes’ dandy.”

That confrontational resolve vanished at the threatening metallic 'clack' when Nick pulled menacingly on the cocking handle of the Russian-made rifle he was carrying. “Says the one whose friend ran straight into a smoker’s tongue.”

Scootaloo blushed and shivered at the same time. “I didn’t know that… that thing was out there, alright?” she retored indignantly.

Apple Bloom, however, had latched onto another part of the phrase. “What is a ‘smoker’ anyway?”

The con man didn’t answer, moving carefully to a door on the other side of the room, rifle raised and ready. The yellow filly turned her eyes to the woman of the group, who sighed. “Never mind Nick, he’s just a bit untreatable at first. He can be nice… sometimes. Mostly when he’s not hungry or sleepy.”

It was obvious that the pony didn't fully buy the story. “If ya say so... But what’s a ‘smoker’?”

“Tall, lanky, got more tongues than a starfish got arms,” came the response from behind her, with a Southern accent. “Keeps waitin’ somewhere high up, like a roof or somethin’, an’ when someone pass, they get snared just like a calf on a rodeo.” Ellis lifted his shirt up to his chest, showing a number of faint purple marks among the various bruises and small lacerations on his skin, like he had been wrapped by rope that was tied far too tight against his torso. "See?"

“Ugh, that looks painful,” Sweetie Belle commented, raising one foreleg in a reflex of self-preservation. Apple Bloom shared her opinion, if the surprised grimace she had on was any indication. The pegasus of the trio just shivered, looking away at her own body. Under the orange strands of her coat, the marks were more or less the same as his, she could tell that much.

“Sure is. And y’all better hope ya have a knife or somethin’ to cut the tongue, ‘cause if ya don’t, there ain’t no way in Hell y’all gonna get loose if someone don’t go an’ help yer ass.”

“Ellis, sweetie, can’t this wait?” Rochelle interrupted him. “We really gotta keep a move on.”

“You got it, Ro.”

With that, he set his clothes back down, and the five left the hall, moving towards the door Nick had gone through. As they found out, it led to a small catwalk taking to a small office. Beyond the handrail lay the back area of the bar, comprised of a small storage place with the shutters open.

Inside the small office to the right, the man in the dirty white suit scrounging through the contents of a small crate looked back at the entourage and grunted. “Thirty-two, three-five-seven, thirty-oh-six... Guy bought out a gun shop, left it all behind, but forgot to get calibers actually worth a crap.” He tossed a box of .22 Long Rifle rounds against the wall. “Damn it!”

“Figures…” Coach sighed. “We're really only gonna get the bores we need at those evac outposts, aren't we?”

“Guys, there’s no ladder down,” Rochelle observed from the suspended junction. “We’re gonna have to take the express route.”

“Is it too high?”

“Not exactly, but there’s a soda machine we can climb down to. Beats leaping all the way down.”

“Sounds good to me. C’mon, everyone, we’re leaving.”

Rochelle went first, carefully propping her feet down on the top of the machine, praying to whatever entity was out there for the roof not to sink under her feet. Once she was sure it was stable enough, she gestured for the fillies to come, and set them down one by one, whereas they jumped to the floor below. The process was somewhat laborious, but in the end, all seven made it to the bottom without injury. An open shutter led to a back alley completely devoid of life or useful objects.

Nick continued ahead around a corner, leading the group into the entrance of an apartment building offering a better way ahead than having to jump over the fence at the end of the alleyway. “God, I hate blocked paths,” the fillies could hear him grumble.

“It’s so quiet here…” Scootaloo mused as they reached a door, with Nick leaned against the wall right beside it.

“Hope it stays that way,” Rochelle said, keeping her eyes glued to the way they had come through.

With a quick exchange of gestures, the con man let his elder take point - the extremely wide choke on his shotgun might not have much ground for range, but the cone of buckshot showed itself deadly against clusters of former humans. Coach opened the door and, two spent shells later, motioned for the others to come in. As they did, the humans turned on their torches, while Sweetie Belle called upon the magic within her, making her horn light up and providing the Crusaders with a way to watch their own steps. The silence was oppressive, overwhelming, filling the heads of all with ominous uncertainty.

A supersonic boom startled them out of their minds, and the following explosion, strong enough to rattle the foundations of the structure they were in the process of exploring, sent them all rushing for shelter. Coach and Ellis ran on upstairs, while Nick and Rochelle huddled in a corner on the ground floor, the quadruped children trembling next to their legs. Once the ground was still again, they breathed a sigh of relief. “That was a close one,” Ellis sighed, mostly to himself, though he nonetheless received a few assertive responses in return.

Scootaloo tried to control her breath, even as her psych wished to break down into a nervous mess. Not an hour prior, she was prancing about Ponyville with her two best friends, thinking of ways to earn their so-craved cutie marks, with no worries in her head except for taking care of her scooter and keeping her grades high enough. Then, with a burst of light, they were in a strange place full of monsters and explosions – it wasn’t nearly as cool as she would have dreamed, to boot –, depending on four strange creatures that looked like nothing she had ever seen, one of which had no reservations in showing how much he didn’t like them. To make it worse, Sweetie Belle had a cutie mark, but didn’t even pay any attention to it. ‘When did the world turn upside down?’

As Sweetie Belle bounded up to the third floor and through another broken wall – ‘Doesn’t anypony know what doors are around here?’ – she noticed the three older humans quietly discussing something in the middle of the bedroom they were in. An open door on the opposite side gave leeway to a sound she hadn’t heard before, a deep, heavy snarling. “Aw, hogwash, man…” Ellis cursed, looking outside.

“Y’all eat hogwash?” Apple Bloom asked, tilting her head to the side.

At that exact moment, a very quiet grumble filled the room, and Ellis put a hand on his stomach, but he didn’t answer.

Quietly, the ponies moved to see whatever it was that held the young man’s attention so much. What they saw would certainly not get out of their heads easily: a positively enormous creature, vaguely similar to the Crusaders’ companions, but very different at the same time – between its much stockier build, overly muscled arms and hunched over posture, it looked more like a shaved gorilla than anything else – paced around the courtyard below. It stomped around and scratched at the floor, leaning forwards at every louder growl it uttered, seemingly angry at the world and some more. They all ran back inside as the beast turned their way. “What’s… what is that thing?” Sweetie Belle whimpered pitifully from behind Coach’s leg.

Coach sighed. “Should’ve known shit was going way too smoothly…”

“So, how do we do this?” Rochelle asked. She moved to the doorframe for a quick peek, standing with her back to the wall. “All of these buildings around us are pure wood, so fire's not exactly an option. Do we do it the usual way?”

Once again, the – very relative – peace was interrupted by a sonic boom and an explosion not too far off. The Tank let out an ear-splitting roar as it beat on its chest, bounding out of a corner and out of sight, with the ground literally shaking under its limbs as it left. The fillies stepped further back at the sheer volume of its voice, their ears pulled back.

“Well,” Rochelle, who had been watching the turn of events, deadpanned, “that was convenient…” She stepped outside, both head and rifle on a swivel. “We’re clear, guys.”

One by one, the posse left the dilapidated bedroom. Coach veered to the right, following the walkway to a small drop onto a rooftop, next to which stood a scaffold. “Look over there! Safe house ahead!” he hollered to the others, pointing to a drawing on another building. “Just gotta cross that gap!”

A show of dull color caught Scootaloo's eye. It belonged to the head of a jester, affixed to an unfinished parade car. The planks on it were on level with the gap she'd been made aware of, just sufficient for a makeshift bridge. “Can't we use that?”

The small-ish voice grated on Nick’s nerves, but curiosity had him looking down at the object the pony was indicating anyway. Sure enough, the cart was connected to a tractor – one that seemed to be in working condition. “Looks like it. We just gotta move that tractor.”

Ellis took the initiative to move down and inspect the draft vehicle as soon as he was sure the others were covering him. It was a little battered after a few days of exposure, but the fuel level was above the red and the engine seemed to be in good condition. “Looks like it’s gonna work!” he announced. His hand floated over the tractor’s startup key. “Can ah?”

“Sho sho, boy!”

“I got your back!”

“Whenever you're ready.”

Satisfied by the three verbal nods, the mechanic turned the key and engaged the first gear. The float started moving as expected. ‘Lookin' good, lookin' good...’

The young southerner immediately rescinded that line when the float began spouting out a cheery jazz tune… at over a hundred decibels. “SHIT, THIS DAMN THING HAS A SOUND SYSTEM?!”

The end of his outcry was almost overshadowed by an almost deafening roar. The Tank had returned to its turf, and it fully intended to find out who was messing around in it.

Author's Note

Remember, season 1. That means no complete railroads.

Chapter 4: Escalation

“SHIT SHIT SHIT!” Ellis screamed, panicked, as he ran backwards to a staircase, away from the enraged mutant. Gunfire rained down on it, diverting its attention to the rooftop from where Nick and Rochelle spewed lead nonstop at its muscled frame. Though they didn’t seem to faze the creature much, they got it angered enough to forget its prior target.

Scootaloo gasped when the Tank shoved its enormous fingers on the ground and flat out ripped a large chunk of concrete straight out of the ground it stood on, heaving it over its head and launching it like a beach ball. The piece of masonry sailed through the air in an arc that would have ended up right on top of the two riflemen had they not scurried out of the rooftop the moment it left the infected’s hands. Instead, it collided with the wall, leaving a sizeable dent in the woodwork and scattering dust and mortar pebbles on the Cutie Mark Crusaders.

“THE HELL Y’ALL STANDIN’ THERE FOR?! GIT, YOU THREE!” Coach barked as he ran back into the scene, a white propane tank over his shoulder. He promptly threw it to the floor as soon as the trio sprinted past him and onto the walkway. Ellis, Nick and Rochelle lay down suppressive fire on the gigantic infected that had finished up climbing the scaffold exactly at the same time as the float began to play a particularly cheery sax interlude.

Coach shouted “FIRE IN THE HOLE!” and fired a shell into the propane tank. Nothing happened. The gas container didn’t have enough combustible in it to trigger the expected pyrotechnic show; only jets of flame came out. “SHIT!” he exclaimed, quickly retreating through the catwalk to the stairs. “I had to get an empty one!”

“SPREAD OUT, SPREAD OUT!” Rochelle yelled, backpedaling and frantically waving a hand holding a magazine in a ‘get away’ motion. The others wasted no time in running off down to ground level, Ellis with Sweetie Belle following him on instinct, while Coach and Nick had Scootaloo and Apple Bloom in tow. As Rochelle finally managed to reload and bring the weapon to bear on the zombie, she realized she had misjudged its speed, and she leapt back, almost managing to fully avoid a swipe of its arm.

But almost isn’t the same as completely.

The Tank’s fingers, smaller but just as solid as the palm they were attached to, impacted against Rochelle’s side, and the woman was sent staggering away, twirling on her feet in a mockery of a ballet move as she desperately tried to maintain her balance. The military carbine careened out of her hands and clattered against a wall.

“RO!” Ellis cried, pumping round after round against the Tank’s back, desperate to bring its attention to him and away from his injured teammate, while Nick and Coach both did the exact same with their own guns. The triple barrage of fire succeeded in distracting the monster from the downed woman in front of him, and it jumped down to ground level, eager to eliminate the source of pain. One muscled arm came down hard, aiming for the cluster of survivors, but they all ran to the sides, desperately dropping empty magazines to the ground in favor of full ones.

Sweetie Belle watched from afar, terrified. Her head pounded, her legs were wobbly, and she blinked forcefully a few times to hold her tears back. She had thought her traveling partners were big and strong from their first display against the infected, but this ‘Tank’ completely trumped them! To tear out stone from the ground as it did, that sure required an enormous amount of strength. She had flinched physically when Scootaloo’s savior was hit and sent sprawling, even though it was only a glancing blow – if that was just a scrape, a swing like that, if it hit full force, would demolish anything ity-bitty, soft and squishy like a filly!

Meanwhile, as they watched the intense battle of the humans against the gargantuan beast, Scootaloo and Apple Bloom hid behind the low wall surrounding the courtyard’s garden, barely able to breathe or move; their muscles had locked in place. The only thing they could do was watch with tremulous breath as the monster chased their alien brethren and find hope that they could get rid of it...

Hope that came through the realization that its movements were considerably more sluggish than before, and its roars were reduced to growls that, while still very intimidating, couldn’t compare to those roars from before. The red running down the perforations in its hide and leaving a trail behind it, left no wonder as to why.

Still, the mutated giant clearly showed it still had some fight in it when it slapped an overturned table towards Coach, who had run close to the tractor. However, its eyes were swimming, and its aim was off; the piece of furniture hit the speakers on one side of the float instead of the intended target. The music died off suddenly, drowned instantly by the angry chirps of the sparking equipment.

Houses of cards are constructs of possibly the flimsiest building material known to man, held up by nothing but a frail combination of friction and balance. Any change in the equilibrium, even the mildest vibration or gentlest air flow, suffices to send one sprawling to the ground in a pile of disorganized sheets of plastic paper.

Yet, despite this glaring instability, some people saw it fit to recreate structures taller and wider than themselves, buildings that defied the common sense that elements so weak individually could form up in so much grandeur. All it took was care and patience.

That was why Ernest Holly loved houses of cards.

A born Louisianan whose life’s highlight was an admission into the University of New Orleans and the tuition-free education it entailed, he never aspired for much: a calm life, a stable job and the few comforts he saw fit to have. His parents, old members of the humbler class of the state’s capital, made it the point of their lives to drill that into his head. They had many long-winded explanations full of examples and moral lessons; he eschewed all that for the simple concept that the bigger a card tower is, the easier it is for it to fall.

Three months ago, on the day after he graduated, grim news came. By the end of the week, he was left with Reverend LeClaire's Voodoo Shop – which, contrary to the name, was a grocery store – and his six year old niece. Both of them had been orphaned in a crash that took Ernest’s parents, his sister and her husband. He knew Steven, that stubborn mule, wouldn’t stop flying that monoplane of his for the world, even when the government issued an alert that people showing symptoms of the Green Flu shouldn’t operate vehicles.

He felt like his tower had collapsed, but on the first night, when little Sarah crawled up to Uncle Ernie’s bed because she was afraid of the dark and Mommy and Daddy weren’t home to make the monsters stay away, he saw the truth. Yes, a part of his castle had fallen, and some of his cards had been taken away, no one could deny that – but he had his own independent life, legal maturity and a source of income to set it back up. Meanwhile, Sarah didn’t have a base for mounting hers again, of all things; her tower had been tipped over and completely lost in the ditch of the fallen airship.

At first, the relationship was strained – Sarah had as much respect for him as he had experience as a parent –, but between keeping her well fed, overseeing her school life and comforting her while the wounds were still fresh, the child gradually eased herself into Ernest’s life. With the tender care he taught himself to mount the cards with, he rebuilt, the sole new piece he had been given now the pivot of his tower.

Then the outbreak hit New Orleans.

Even before they came, the infection wasn’t ignorable. CEDA had cordoned off New Orleans as a sanitary safe zone, and several evacuees came to a stop there. In fact, the triage zone they had mounted at the park was the origin of the vast majority of his clients, including the agency’s personnel. The cash began piling up even through the increase of the suppliers’ prices, and the reinforced safe doors the officials saw fit to provide his shop – “a token of recognition for your provision-distributing services aiding the well-being of the community during this time of crisis”, a pompous suit from CEDA’s office declared – served just as well to control the traffic and avoid the petty thieves that thought that they could take advantage of the crisis and leave with a chocolate bar or a soda can off the tab.

Ernest wouldn’t go so far as to be thankful for his good fortune, both because of its origins and the stress the more than doubled workload put on him, but he was happy nonetheless. His stack was growing, and slowly his tower gained floors as well.

But one night, things changed.

Due to a lack of permanent residents in the general area, Ernest often had Sarah make small deliveries in a one square radius or so. He figured that, since she never went too far and the authorities knew who she was related to, it would be safe. That evening, she begged him to deliver the groceries to the house of one of her little friends, whose family was cleared as immune by CEDA. He saw no reason to forbid it, and she left with a smile.

By that time, the knowledge of carriers wasn’t widely spread amongst those at New Orleans. The general line of thought was that only zombies spread the flu, if that's what it even was. They thought they were as safe as they could be for the moment, being within a sanitary zone.

That night, Sarah came back complaining that her head hurt. Ernest dismissed it as overexertion and sent her upstairs to bed with an aspirin in her belly and the promise of a day off. The next morning, he woke up spooning the little girl on his bed. He shivered madly under the sheets, feeling colder than he had ever felt in his life. He left her on the bed and went downstairs; there was work to be done after all, whether he felt under the weather or not.

With the arrival of a new batch of refugees, things were more hectic than ever. Usually, he tried to comprehend that these people were torn away from their homes, isolated from their loved ones, and tired from traveling. CEDA did the best they could, but that wasn’t enough to comfort them much. That morning, though, the talking, crying and yelling outside the reinforced doors added to the chills in grating on his nerves. With each customer that nitpicked about something or other, he became angrier. They should be glad he was still providing, not complaining about it! If they didn’t like how he worked, good luck finding another provider!

When Sarah started wailing on the second floor, it became too much; he had to go out for some sunlight, feel a breeze other than the stinky breath of the rabble that banged on his door, money or no money. The stress was too much to bear.

Ernest up and left his home without looking back. He never noticed that his niece-turned-daughter wasn’t crying like a normal child would, or that he had left the store’s door wide open.

As the hours passed, his aimless wanderings took him through abandoned houses, empty streets and vacant shops, eventually leading him to the riverfront in an abandoned part of the city. There, he stayed, the water’s gentle noises calming him down. He felt no need to sleep or eat, just... contemplate. His arms were getting heavier, and the soil sank under his weight more and more, but none of that concerned him. All that occupied his mind was how the little waves climbed over one another, stacking and rolling peacefully, like a mobile pile of cards forming houses, towers, battlements and castles of all shapes and sizes, all of them infinite and simultaneous. It brought forth memories of times not so long past, when his life and time were his own, when he didn't have to plan for and juggle the added challenges of people depending so much on him weighing his cards down, or the instability of his forced parenthood threatening to blow his structure off its base.

How much Ernest relished the nostalgic calm he was experiencing, the world may never know.

And then, there was the explosion. It came out of nowhere and was gone just as suddenly, leaving a befuddled and enraged Ernest in his wake. It was not because of the shock wave that made him stumble almost off the edge of the dock he had taken as his territory, or the piercing sound that would have made his ears ring like crazy were he twenty meters closer. No, what really threw the cards astray was how the blast made the water ripple and tremble, creating large parallel waves that interrupted and dissolved the original flow, breaking the houses he so admired just like a schoolgrounds bully's foot. The whoosh of the jets was a cruel mocking cackle to his ears.

How dare they disturb his peace?! He wasn’t bothering anyone! Oh, he would find them. He would find them, and then he would make them feel sorry for knocking all the houses of water cards down!

With those vengeful thoughts in mind, the former grocer set off back into the city. He never noticed how the bomb’s ripples washed off and died, and the water soon was back to its usual dynamics.

While in his mind it sounded like he was asking where the bastard pranksters were, however, in reality, the scene that played out was an enormous mutant growling, bellowing and swinging at a number of the infected that had overrun the park after his leave. The contents of the now abandoned store had caused the people to riot over the free loot, and even though the agents had no way to contain the situation, they tried nonetheless, but in their attempts, unsupervised carriers mixed with regular people. Previously restricted to quarantined households, the infection had closed its zombifying claws over New Orleans.

After he left the bushes behind, Ernest started losing focus. What was he running after again? He made an effort, but he couldn’t remember. Something about sand castles and business cards… He kept walking, trying to focus on the exercise so it could clear the cobwebs off his head, but even after he lost track of time in the effort, it didn’t work. Only when he realized it was futile, it came to his mind that he didn’t know where he was.

There was a man sitting on the curb. Ernest harrumphed to call his attention, but he didn’t lift his head. He tried talking, but the person remained still, quiet, lolling back and forth as if ready to fall asleep. Ernest moved up closer and nudged him. The man dropped to the ground, and stayed there. Maybe he was tired… In any case, all Ernest felt he could do was shrug and move on. Which he did, walking along the street and past the prone man.

A group of drunks didn’t hear him either. The lady with the baby carriage didn’t respond even when he put a hand on her shoulder; she just fell asleep to the floor.

Why was everyone so tired? Did the city have a late night party yesterday that he didn’t know of?

A bird chirped nearby. Ernest liked birds. Their nests were all branches weaved together, like houses of cards. They were like the card castle artists of nature. Where was it anyway? Oh, it was in that courtyard behind the gate! No problem, he could jump over it.

He called for the bird, looking up at the treetops and shingles, but it wouldn’t come down. Why wouldn’t it come down? Ernest had some good ideas and plans on building houses of cards and he wanted to discuss them. He called, he whistled and he chirped, but everything he did went unanswered. He began getting angry. So the arrogant little bastard was too self-absorbed with his own voice to talk to the public, huh?

KA-BOOOM! A big firecracker sound came from nearby, and Ernest unconsciously yelled out, startled. Those pesky troublemakers had just scared him silly again! But oh, they just wait until he got his hands on them! He’d grab them by the scruffs of their necks and bring them to their mommas, and he would watch them get grounded! They sounded like they were on the other side of that gate he leapt over earlier. They were so dead!

When he got to the street, he growled in frustration. They’d gotten away! Right then, a loud burst of music almost caused him to rocket off his shoes in fright. It couldn’t be, it had to be a conspiracy! Forgetting about the first noise entirely, Ernest leapt back into the courtyard and-

OH MY GOD WHAT THE HELL ARE THOSE THINGS?!

Their bodies were composed of straight lines with jagged edges. Their eyes were crimson red, dripping with liquid hellfire. Stunted, leathery wings sprouted from their backs, as deadly as their sharp white teeth, visible from miles away. And worst of all, there was the luminous orange fog that came out of their bodies like anglerfish lures, ready to blind and trap whatever poor unfortunate soul was caught by them.

It wasn't the previous anger that led Ernest to run up and attack the monsters he saw. Neither were outrage or frustration to blame. It was fear; fear and conviction that, no matter how far he ran, these abominations would follow him to the end of the world. It was a grim certainty coming from the bottom of his heart, a baser knowledge that had waited for this very moment to rise from the deep.

But no matter how fast he punched, how accurately he aimed, or how hard he tossed the rocks at them, the wraiths dodged or ran, cackling demonically at his efforts. The sound hurt his ears and crushed his sanity, and with every peal, he felt himself getting slower, weaker, and more hard-pressed to respond, almost as if they were hexing him, leeching off his life. Even when he cornered one of them and actually hit it once and made it shut up, things got no less desperate.

He knew he couldn't fight for much longer. But he had to. There was a table right between him and one of the monsters. If he could just…

He missed.

The last-ditch gesture took its toll on his body. He felt the last of his stamina draining away as his arm lowered to the floor. His vision blurred. His whole body felt numb. But more than everything… there was silence. Blissful, peaceful silence. Just like he liked it when building a house of cards. It was comfortable, warming even.

With that feeling in his heart, Ernest closed his eyes. Maybe a little nap wouldn’t hurt, and he could make a big house of cards to show Sarah tomorrow.

She was a good girl, she deserved a present like that.

One by one, the bearers of the Elements of Harmony touched the floor. Their eyes opened as they did, and Celestia greeted their sight with a warm smile, her hair back to its normal, gentle ebbing. “Excellent work, my little ponies.”

“OH YEAH! I KNEW I COULD DO IT!” Rainbow Dash cheered, pumping a hoof in front of herself in a victory gesture. “Rainbow Dash has saved the day again!”

Rarity gave a small ‘ahem’. “Pardon me for dousing the flames of your excitement, Rainbow, dear, but while you, and all of us, played a part in this, I believe the one keystone to our success was another pony,” she remarked, looking over to Twilight. Said unicorn blushed, sporting a coy smile.

“Meh, who cares about who is responsible? We ALL have a part in this!” Pinkie shouted. “And for that success, I say we have a bit of a celebration!”

The smile on Equestria’s supreme governor grew a little, before it deflated. She hated spoiling anypony’s fun. ‘Then again, they’re not exactly necessary as of right now…’ She decided to leave the gleeful young mares be, opting for approaching the ethereal whirlpool.

Now that her control was back, she could distinctly notice the siphon effect. Her eyes closed, and her sense extended to the tendril coming out of her essence. Indeed, it did move to the center of the spiral, reaching a point where it concentrated, but instead of spreading out in a root-like formation like she expected, it vanished. She cocked an eyebrow at that. ‘Strange, mana doesn’t dissolve this simply. No, “dissolve” isn’t the right word, it’s actually disappearing entirely.’

Without noticing, she stepped fully into the pool on the ground. She focused her sense once more, sending a little pulse of energy towards the focal point.

The other ponies and dragon only heard a yelp of surprise when the ground under Celestia’s hooves disappeared and she fell into the suddenly opened portal she inadvertently triggered. The first pair of eyes that turned that way only saw the misty mana being sucked into the dimensional vortex, along with the tip of an aurora-hued tail, before it closed and the floor of the Ponyville library was as clean and magic-free as it normally was.

The entire process took all of two seconds.

Everything was nothing. The quiet would be oppressive if one had a sense of individuality, which she didn’t. Instead, she was just like her surroundings: blank, devoid and sterile.

But no, she could sense something, a tug in her direction. Direction meant it came from somewhere and pulled at something… at her. It’s not possible to pull at nothing, so that meant she existed. And if she existed, she was something. Something living, and capable of thought.

With that in her mind, her sense of existence was restored, along with her physical form, and it all came to her: who she was, her role in the world – ‘my world,’ she added as an afterthought –, what had happened, and how she had come to be here, wherever it was.

Celestia let the pull drag her for she didn’t know how long or how far; the alicorn clung to it like a lifeline, lest the void begin draining her sanity through the sheer sensory deprivation it evoked. After some time – whether it was a matter of seconds, minutes, hours, days, or even years, she didn’t know – it diminished in its strength. She pushed towards its presence herself, which took a surprising amount of effort.

She noticed something else. A tall figure, wearing a blue garment she recognized as similar to a pony’s suit, observed her from afar. It was too distant for her to recognize anything other than its stance - which was the same as that of the figure in the ancient texts -, the rectangular lump at one of its forearms, and strangely enough, a pair of eerie green eyes that seemed to glow unnaturally.

Before the pony could even reflexively call out to whatever it was, she felt a smothering pressure, like she was being pushed into a layer of rubber. Trying to rip it open as if it was a physical barrier rewarded her with an explosion of color, sound, and tact. She hadn’t realized how much she had missed it all.

A strong light hit her closed eyes, and she turned away, her brow creased. ‘How odd,’ she thought, for the simple reason that an ordinary lamp wasn’t strong enough to create such an effect, and her sun didn’t due to her alignment with its magic. She flipped her eyelids open, and her sight was rewarded with the blurred sight of a gray texture. The ghostly light coming from a lone fluorescent lightbulb high up on the wall, didn’t do much to illuminate the cold, wet room the princess lay on.

As the teleportation daze faded away, she finally noticed a specific sensation: cold. However, it wasn’t the refreshing coolness typical of the breeze she loved to go out to her room’s balcony in the morning to feel; no, it was the sort of bitter, wet cold that was reserved for water of the streams on high altitudes, much higher up than even Canterlot. Looking down, she saw why: the place she had been sent to was flooded with enough water to cover just under half of her body as she lay on the floor.

As Celestia glanced around, she perceived a weight pulling down both on her neck and her rump. It didn’t take her long to find out what caused it. ‘Seems like this is really a “bad hair day” for me…’ Both her mane and her tail, usually almost incorporeal and floating in conjunction with her natural magic, were sopping wet, dangling limply from her body. She noted with intrigue that they were considerably heavier than when she bathed.

The place was littered with various pipes of all sizes, criss-crossing the entire to the ceiling, floor and walls, while a few were welded to a large contraption on the corner of the room. The walls were bare of any paint, being nothing more than pure, simple concrete. ‘A maintenance room, maybe a pump room?’ The constant droll of rushing water made her believe she was near a body of water, a large one at that. ‘Am I in a dam?’

“How’s that for easy prey, you son of a bitch?” a weak voice hacked outside. That tone… whoever it was not in good shape. She turned to a part of the room she hadn’t really looked at, and an empty doorframe greeted her eyes.

Eager for answers and concerned for this somepony that obviously needed medical assistance, the sovereign ignored the rest of the scenery and left.

The slumped monster didn’t move at all after it fell, but even then, it took Coach running past its limp body for the Crusaders to calm down enough to move. Scootaloo and Apple Bloom cantered back to the stairway, quick to join him and Sweetie Belle, the only one who had run under the walkways connecting to the door they all came in from. Neither filly dared to speak a peep as Ellis gently helped Rochelle up. “Y’all good, Ro?”

She nodded, grimacing slightly. “Yeah, I’m fine, just a bit bruised. Nothing broken from what I can feel.”

“That’s it, girl, walk it off,” the elder said encouragingly.

As Rochelle pulled out a yellow and white cylinder from her bag, the observing pegasus seized the chance to approach her. “Are you hurt?” she asked. “That looked really nasty.”

The woman grinned a pained smile. “Don’t worry, it’s gonna take more than one punch to bring this girl down!” she boasted, making a little pose while pointing a thumb at her own chest, suppressing the urge to moan out her discomfort. She had to stay strong, at least a bit longer. ‘I just hope we get to that damn bridge soon. I’m not sure I can take another one of these.’

The Crusaders stepped closer, but immediately pulled back when Rochelle pulled the tip of the cylinder she held, revealing a rather large needle surrounded by two plastic pads. It reminded them a bit too much of the vaccine seasons with Nurse Redheart, and the less said about those moments, the better.

Without another word, the human female stabbed the thin metal tube forcefully on her leg. “Heh, I’m not doing my cellulite any favors with this, but you guys don’t mind, do you?” she joked as she pulled it out after all the precious epinephrine had entered her body. Ellis and Coach laughed, while Nick allowed himself a quiet, non-sarcastic chuckle.

Scootaloo was amazed. She had always thought that nopony could ever hold a candle to Rainbow Dash, not even herself. And of course, her rescuer looked very unassuming and not nearly as cool as her idol. But… the filly was certain that the cyan pegasus couldn’t take a hit from something six or seven times larger than Big Macintosh, then inject herself with a needle longer than her own muzzle, and shrug it all off, all in the space of less than five minutes! If Rainbow Dash was coolness ponified, Rochelle was toughness in flesh and bone! She hopped to the front of the survivor as she threw the spent shot off to the side. “That was really cool!”

“Yeah, that’s our lil’ girl right here,” Ellis beamed. “Small like a button, tough like a nail.”

“Hey, who are you calling little?” Rochelle retorted in mock offense. “The way I see it, both Coach and Nick are taller than you, Ellis.”

The young man scowled, too deeply to be serious, in return. “Hey, now that’s not cool.”

Coach’s placating clapping drew the general attention. “Okay, kids, playtime’s over. We can sit an’ bully each other when we’re on the other side of that bridge.”

Sweetie Belle tilted her head. “Bridge?”

Coach’s gloved hand pointed a finger out to the horizon, above the low-rise buildings surrounding them, to an imposing structure not too far from their location. “That one over there.”

Further questions were stopped dead in their tracks when an explosion rocked the courtyard hard, the bomb having hit the ceiling of a building not fifty meters away. Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle were thrown off their hooves and almost rolled down the steps, while the humans tossed themselves to the floor, Coach reflexively covering Scootaloo with his large frame. “OH COME ON!” Nick exclaimed, angry and exasperated. “Christ, these guys are such assholes!”

Rochelle sighed after she got up, staring at the busted barrel of her automatic carbine. “Just my luck,” she muttered as she removed the still-usable STANAG magazine from the gun. “Guys, I’ll have to go pistolero for now.”

“It’s fine, Rochelle, we’ll find you something else,” Coach reassured her warmly. “Now, let’s get it on, they ain’t gonna be waiting for us if they don’t know we’re here.”

The other six moved, the bald man taking point.

“Who’s not gonna wait?” Sweetie Belle asked, trotting right behind Nick as he jumped to the planks on top of the now stationary float. Coach and Rochelle had already crossed it, and were exploring the room beyond the still burning passage on the other side. Near the hole in the building was what Coach had pointed to first: a simplified picture of a house with a cross on its middle decorated the wall, an arrow next to it pointing to the ordnance-made entrance, painted by some kind-hearted survivor to guide others to an at least temporary safe shelter. The edges of the hole were still burning: it had to be a recent crafting.

The con man sighed in irritation, covering his forehead with one hand. “Look, I’m tired, hungry, my trigger finger is hurting already, and my three thousand dollar suit has more stains than I could ever wash off and a sleeve that I don’t think I can mend. Go bother someone else before I really lose my patience.”

The small unicorn took a step back, frowning. “Wow, no need to be so grumpy. I’m just asking.”

“No need? No need?!” The annoyance was very evident in Nick’s voice as he spun around to face the pony. “Look aroundja, it’s a freakin’ zombie apocalypse! The world’s gone to hell! If you ask me, I have more than one good reason to be ‘grumpy’!” he finished, flexing the index and middle fingers of his free hand in the universal ‘quote’ gesture at the last word.

“Nicolas,” Coach said from unexpectedly close, putting a hand on the younger man’s shoulder, “calm down, boy. Keep your shit tight. She just asked you a question, nothing more. It ain’t like she’s the one to blame for all this.”

Nick scowled and lightly shrugged off the hand, moving ahead without saying another word.

His informal chief sighed. “I’m too old for this shit.”

“What’s his problem?” Apple Bloom, who had just joined her friend on top of the cart, asked. “He’s been nothin’ but mean ever since we met.”

“That’s just Nick being Nick. Don’t worry, he ain’t a bad guy.”

“That’s what Rochelle told us,” Scootaloo uttered as the Crusaders followed Coach off the improvised bridge and into the empty storeroom. “But…”

Coach laughed. “Yeah, he tends to rub people the wrong way at first. But lemme tell ya, if y’all want someone backing you up when you got a bunch of zombies right in your face, that someone’s him.”

The confident, friendly tone of his voice reassured the ponies by a good degree, and they moved quietly further into the building, backed up by Ellis. The destroyed room they had passed held nothing but broken wood and some empty paint buckets, serving as nothing more than an alternate entrance. A dark hallway greeted them next, the drab orange paint of the walls cracked both by its age and the tremors of the payloads being dropped all over the city. Off to the left, they could hear someone rummaging through clothes. They moved in to see a bedroom, Rochelle searching inside a wardrobe that she soon left alone.

Seconds later, Nick left the adjacent bathroom. He glared at the fillies for a second, then walked around them and out of the room in complete silence. Shrugging to each other, they followed, hooves clopping lightly against the wooden floor. Outside, Coach waited at the top of a staircase. Once all were reassembled, he started going down it, waving his shotgun about warily. The lower floor only yielded various rooms in complete disarray, none of which hid anything useful.

An open door beside the foot of the stairs led to a short back alley. The place looked reasonably untouched: a plant-littered wall stood on one side, the other one composed of the side of a shorter, wooden building covered in closed windows. Nick crossed first, followed by Rochelle, the Crusaders, Coach and finally Ellis. It was a formation subconsciously made to keep the most vulnerable targets away from the edges. It didn’t have to be explained or proposed, it simply came up in and of itself. Nick could say he was surprised when he thought back on it, before he dismissed the thought as really not important.

Once again, the way to the street was blocked, this time by a gate, so he passed the empty doorway in front of him and shone the improvised tactical light on his AK into the room that awaited them. Nothing but boxes in one end of the hall, and a door in the other. “This must’ve been a nice place to live before all this…” Coach muttered.

As Nick entered the following room, he couldn’t help but grin. He quickly snatched the metal cylinder from a shelf. “Pipebomb for me!” The recipe for the zombie-luring bomb had sure become widespread before the Internet went down.

“’Pipebomb’?” Scootaloo asked almost at the same time as her friends.

Nick ignored them, instead peering through the arch leading into the next room, which he identified as the foyer of an unidentifiable store, the contents of its aisles stolen long ago, either during the panic at the start of the outbreak or by lucky survivors a while later. Nick was quick to dispatch the three zombies inside the store, killing one before he was noticed and the other two before they could reach him, and with the area clear, the human motioned for the others to come in.

As Rochelle took an advantage of her reduced load to raid the red medical cabinet in the back room they were in, filling her bag with the few bandages and minor objects there were in it, Ellis moved forwards into the front room, rifle loaded and raised, and Coach kept an eye out for the back entrance, ears alert for the sound of anything banging on the wood of the now closed door of the alleyway.

The Equestrians moved about in silence, observing the humans do their self-assigned jobs. Apple Bloom walked to Coach. “Mistah Coach, how long will it be ‘til we’re in one of them ‘safe houses’ y’all keep talkin’ ‘bout?”

“I wish I knew, young’un,” he answered, not looking at her. “We’re all flyin’ blind here.”

The two short phrases greatly disturbed the yellow pony. ‘So we’re gonna have to stay outside with these… these zombies?’

Before her mood could plummet further, though, the man continued, “But there was a sign back there. Those ain’t painted around for shits and giggles; there’s gotta be somethin’ close by.”

That brought a small smile to Apple Bloom’s face, and Coach was glad he didn’t let it slip that he was trying to convince her as much as himself.

Sweetie Belle, to her luck, found that Ellis was a lot more approachable than Nick. “… so, noise and puke attract the zombies?”

“No, not jes’ pure puke, Boomer bile,” he explained, peeking at the street from the corner he was in.

The unicorn shifted on her hooves. “And what’s a ‘Boomer’?”

“Listen,” he said, lowering his own volume. “Can ya hear it?”

From her position, she could indeed hear grunts that she couldn’t describe as anything but ‘obese’, accompanied by sounds similar to burping and dry heaves, though she couldn’t pinpoint where it came from no matter the direction her ears swiveled to. The filly approached the window for a peek outside before Ellis could say otherwise… and was rewarded by the fright of a large mass dropping from high above right in front of her.

Sweetie Belle didn’t have time for anything before a veritable river of a goopy, oily substance coming from the exploding lump washed over her. The vile fluid disturbed almost all of her senses: her vision was blurred, the feeling on her skin was robbed of all sensation by the running liquid, but nothing compared to the smell – it stank to high heavens of rotten meat, expired soap and old sweat. And the taste, Celestia, the taste! ‘Ewwww! This is the grossest thing ever!’

“Aw, shit!”

Scootaloo and Apple Bloom turned to the entrance just in time to see Ellis run back behind the counter, holding their retching friend with one hand. Quickly, he deposited her on the floor next to him, taking position behind the waist-high barricade. “Y’all get ready now!” he warned, tense.

As Sweetie Belle did her best to contain her heaves, rubbing the clingy bile off her eyes while spitting it repeatedly from her mouth, the humans waited for the inevitable mass attack, eyes keen on all potential entrances and trigger fingers ready to pull down on reflex.

“Hello? Anypony out there?”

The lighting had diminished considerably, and the water splashing against Celestia’s legs felt like a current had started forming. The passageways had a bit of a low ceiling and were very narrow horizontally, obviously not designed for anypony her size to trudge through comfortably, and so she took care not to unfurl her wings or raise her head too high. The close encounter her horn had had with the rough concrete of a doorway not a minute ago was still fresh both in her memory and in her neck muscles.

The faint cough intensified as the owner of the voice shouted a strained “Over here!”, and she hurried down the hall, trusting her ears to guide her hoofsteps. The light she had brought forth on her horn wasn’t much help, as the dark sheen of the wet concrete seemed to absorb it. She could swear the place was a labyrinth.

She came across an open metal door, where the ill throes seemed to be coming from, and peeked inside.

The cold in her gut returned with a vengeance. Inside the room, the body of a familiar, primate-like alien creature floated on the water, face down, lolling limply when her hooves sent ripples towards it. The sheer amount of color escaping from its underside and head left no room for wondering about its vital state.

However, that sight was quickly forgotten when wheezing reached Celestia’s ears. Up on a section of the room above the water level, another similar being lay slumped against the side of what looked like a turbine. Its face turned to the floor, one hand holding a metallic L-shaped apparatus, the other clutching its stomach. Beside it, a crowbar lay forgotten on the ground, its curved end painted a dark red. It coughed, exactly as the winged unicorn remembered the nameless voice doing, and Celestia couldn’t climb the stairs fast enough. “Goodness, what happened to you?!” the winged unicorn asked as she hurried up the small steps leading to its location.

When it looked up, she winced, startled by how horribly disfigured its – her? – face was. The skin near one of its eyes was swollen and colored an angry purple, making it impossible to open. The other eye seemed to have been gouged out by the strike of a clawed paw, blood flowing freely down its roundish features and mingling with the dribbles of the vital fluid that came from its mouth. The garments it wore were filthy, stained with blood and a sort of greenish, dried substance she couldn’t identify. Its torso sported four round holes in a rough circle, above and to the right of the wound her hand clutched.

It was with unspeakable horror that Celestia realized the creature, whatever she was, was using a hand to hold its own innards inside its abdomen.

It coughed again. “That bitch over there,” it muttered in a definitely female voice as she pointed vaguely in the direction of the water. “God damn Hunter… bastard got me good…”

She was interrupted by a particularly vicious coughing fit.

It was the third time in a single day that Celestia was speechless. She gazed in the direction the finger pointed, then back at the injured being. “I…”

“… don’t worry about me,” the injured female said after the hacking subsided. “I was a nurse, I know what… I know my condition. A punctured lung, internal bleeding …” Another fit, which she waited out before resuming more calmly, “… perforated abdomen… Let’s - let’s just face it, I’m fucked.”

Equestria’s head of government wouldn’t believe she could be any more stunned. She had seen ponies at death’s door before – a sad side effect of outliving most of her peers and friends –, and they all shared an uncharacteristic tranquility, a sense of tranquility that belied their fate. However, she had never seen anyone with this many mortal wounds act so nonchalant, despite the signs of severe pain. It was as impressive as it was heartbreaking. “Can I… do something for you?” Celestia asked, her head bent down close to the almost dead primate.

“For me? You can stop worrying… and get out of here,” the unnamed female snarked. “This blasted plant is… it’s a death trap. Last… Last I heard, the naval base was safe. Go there, it’s not far. The military are…”

The fits were getting longer and longer.

“… they’re still taking in survivors.” Her voice was getting slurry, the blood loss slowly cradling her into unconsciousness. “Take the gun and the… the rucksack over there… may be something you… you can…”

The rest of the sentence was left in the air; the creature, almost dead, didn’t have the energy to finish it.

On a whim, Celestia flared her magic, trying to stabilize the unknown being’s vitals enough for her not to fall asleep. She had never been a specialist in the arts of healing, and doubted her capability to save the one she was talking to, but she might be able to keep her from expiring until she was done talking. She molded her mana, and her horn glowed.

To her surprise, the golden casing she expected didn’t appear around her patient, who jerked stiff, at the same time uttering a prolonged, agonizing gurgle. Her limbs and all of their subsections extended and flexed randomly as she spasmed on the floor, her nervous system gone on a fritz.

‘What?! No! This isn’t what’s supposed to happen!’

Celestia, shocked to tears, could only watch as her patient squirmed and convulsed like an ant under a magnifying glass for well over ten seconds, reduced to incoherent, hyperventilating whimpers. Finally, she stopped moving, her shape stiff and twisted like a tin can crushed underfoot. The alicorn couldn’t take the emotional strain anymore; she turned tail and bolted, breathing rapidly, threatening to sob. Her mind did not consider for a second the objects she was told to pick up, nor the sight of unnaturally sharp nails jutting out of the corpse in the water, or the questions of what a Hunter actually was, or what the creature meant by ‘survivors being taken in at the naval base’.

As if to mock the Princess of Equestria, a shrill, maniacal bout of laughter echoed through the tunnels.

Five former humans, two females and three males, rushed the storefront through the windows, and were quickly dispatched by the well-positioned Nick and Ellis. Over twenty tense seconds of no combat passed until Ellis felt it safe to as little as to wipe his ooze-covered trigger hand on his pants. “Weird,” he remarked as he lowered his rifle. “Where are all them zombies?”

“Beats me,” Nick responded. He pointed a thumb over his shoulder at the back of the store. “Guess bile doesn’t smell that nice on them.”

“Well, let’s take all the blessings we can get,” Coach said, leaving the cover he had taken in anticipation of the massive assault that never came. He set his Remington 870 against the counter, turning to the filly beside Ellis. “Hey, how ya feelin’?”

“Disgusting,” Sweetie Belle muttered miserably. “This gunk stinks so much, and it won’t get off my mane!”

“Take it easy, it’s gonna dry out soon,” he reassured her, standing back up. “Ellis, check outside.”

The mechanic did as asked, peering out a window to the street. “Nothin’ around, Coach. Ah reckon we should move while it’s like that.”

“I’m with ya, boy,” he agreed.

With the general compliance voiced soon after, they moved out to the street, this time with Ellis in front and Nick in the rear. The path they were in was once again silent, the effect of desolation enhanced by the amount of buildings with their windows and doors covered by large wooden plates. Rochelle tried prying one off with her hands, to no avail – they were deceptively well-nailed.

As Ellis peeked into a corner leading to a back alley, something caught his eye. “Hey, y’all, we really got a safe house close by!” he beckoned with a hand, his grinning face not turning away from the familiar sign sprayed on the wall in black aerosol paint. “We just gotta find a way around this fence.”

“There’s a door up there,” Rochelle pointed out, her finger extended to the roof of the adjacent building, a low-class apartment building. Indeed, an extension of it was one floor only, and its roof was low enough for a safe drop. "We can jump down from up there if we reach it."

“Alright, let’s go, then,” Nick called, looking up at the sign above the door. “Gators Speakeasy… Wonder if I can find some booze here.” The empty doorframe, with the paint on its sides peeling off due to disrepair and old age, convinced him to correct himself. “Nevermind. It’ll be a miracle not to get tetanus in this hole.”

The paint job inside, a worn-down dark green, seemed to trap the feeble light of the smoky sunrise, which did not do his eyes any favors. His flashlight went on. “Ugh, let’s just get out of here,” Rochelle asked behind him, to the disagreement of no one.

As the now mostly dry and smell-less Sweetie Belle passed through a bunch of black trash bags piled up in the corner of the entrance hallway, her hoof hit something with a glassy ‘clink’. She looked down at what it was, and discovered a cylindrical jar full of a vivid green liquid, sealed with a red cap and covered with paper tags printed with tons of small letters. “Hey, I think I found something,” she remarked.

“What?” asked Scootaloo and Ellis at the same time.

“Check this out.” She rolled the glass towards herself. Her hornlight shone on its contents, casting a faint, alien green glow on her legs.

Apple Bloom ooh’ed at the display. “Y’all reckon what this doodad is?”

“This,” the Georgian said as he bent down, his hand clamping down on the object, “is Boomer bile. Useful crap.”

“You mean the zombie-attracting stuff?” Sweetie Belle asked, her eyebrow twisted into a tilde-like shape. “Why would you want that?”

“HEY, ELLIS!” a male shouted from above. “Quit horsing around!”

“Ha ha ha,” he deadpanned. He turned to the little ones near his shins. “C’mon, let’s catch up.”

As soon as Scootaloo could peek out at the second floor, Nick exited through a dilapidated doorway, fiddling with his rifle. “What’s the matter, you found some toys in there?”

“A stink bomb ‘nuff of a toy for ya?” Ellis said, nonchalantly holding the glass container up at eye level.

The shady man made to say something, but realized the jab had been turned on its head and against him, and promptly clamped his jaws shut. Instead, he narrowed his eyes and brushed past the lad with a disdainful ‘pfft’. “Love you too, Nick!” Ellis shouted at his back, to which he replied by flipping him the bird. The younger survivor just laughed.

The fillies, who had watched the exchange passively, spoke up. “What a grumpy-pants,” Sweetie Belle mumbled.

“What was that all about?” Apple Bloom asked, curious.

“Jes’ givin’ Nick what he got comin’ for him before Ro did,” the human answered smugly, already walking towards the roof access door his older companion had gone through. “He likes to give everyone shit, so we pull the rug from under his feet an’ he pipes down. Works every time.”

Somewhere in the back of their busy minds, Apple Bloom made a vague mental note to do something like that to Diamond Tiara when they found their way back to Ponyville. It sounded like a good anti-bully tactic.

Outside, something came to Rochelle as she took a cautious look at the empty back alley behind the building. “You know, that kid had a point. We're so used to dealing with a lot more zombies than this.”

There was another rumble, rather far away this time. Coach looked in the direction of the newest column of smoke he could see. “Guess the bombs got somethin’ to do with it.”

The woman shrugged. “Good guess as any, I suppose…”

“Yeah, with our luck,” Nick grunted, stepping into the dying sunlight, “that means we’ll be blown up before we’re ripped apart.”

Both dark-skinned survivors made it a point of ignoring the rambling man. As soon as Ellis arrived with his three escortees, Coach jumped down to street level beside a still-running generator feeding power to a spotlight focused on the graffitti, likely for nighttime visibility. “Hey, send me the lil’ ones,” he called from below.

Nick turned to the ponies at Ellis’ feet. “You heard the man, sweethearts.” Contrary to his words, his voice at the last word was anything but sweet, something they noticed easily. Him nudging Scootaloo’s rear end with his foot, as light as the gesture may have been, cemented the deal.

“You know, it doesn’t hurt to be nice sometimes,” the pegasus grumbled, looking down at Coach’s extended arms and missing the death glare Nick sent her way. Nearby, Rochelle snickered.

“I swear…” he mumbled under his breath, prompting the woman to laugh outright.

Ignorant to the chatter above, Scootaloo leapt down and into Coach’s arms, forcing the unprepared man to take a step back to maintain his balance. “Well, shit, you’re a bit heavier than you look,” he chuckled as he set her on the ground. She blushed, but he simply waved her off. “Shit happens, don’t get your panties in a wad over it.”

“’Shit happens’…” Scootaloo repeated, almost chewing on the words. Meanwhile, Ellis leapt lightly to the floor near her, catching Apple Bloom on her way down as Rochelle did the same with Sweetie Belle. “Er, mister Coach?” she beckoned, poking the man’s leg with a hoof. “What is this ‘shit’ you guys all keep talking about anyway?”

Even the ever so sour Nick couldn’t keep a straight face at that; he, Ellis and Rochelle all laughed both at the absurdity of the question and Coach’s flustered face. “Oh, c’mon, people!” he complained, embarrassed. When he realized none of the younger survivors would help him with his plight, he turned back to the orange pony. “Well, shit, uh, let’s just say it’s something that happens, ‘kay?”

“Okay,” Scootaloo shrugged. “But when does it happen? And what are ‘panties’, and why would they be in a wad?”

The level of the laughter increased. He felt his dark skin begin to redden. “God damn it. Let’s just go.” With that, he trudged on ahead, leaving three sniggering humans and three confused foals a small distance behind him. In the middle of the alleyway, his mood swung upwards in a split second. “Hey, it’s the bridge!”

The announcement made the humans quiet down like magic. “Holy shit,” Nick sighed, “I think we actually made it!”

As Coach checked an opening to the right, leading to a parking lot, they ran to his position, circumventing dumpsters and garbage bags, and indeed, a curved slope greeted them right outside the alley. A great number of infected littered the section of the road below the start of the bridge, milling like ants around a smashed car, the single intact turn signal flashing uselessly.

“Huh, guess we found out where they all went to,” Rochelle observed as they all moved back into the alley where they wouldn’t be noticed.

“… that’s a lot of them,” said an intimidated Apple Bloom. “How are we gon’ get past?”

Nick nudged the others out of his way, making a show out of pulling the pipebomb he’d swiped from the shop before out of his pocket. He fished out a beat up lighter with his other hand and lit the wick, causing the fire detector components wrapped around the metal cylinder to beep and whine loudly at the smoke, attracting the attention of the closest infected. “Chase this, you bastards!” He yelled as he tossed the improvised grenade right in the middle of the open area. The zombies, even those who had begun sprinting in his direction, turned right around to the source of the cacophony, crowding around it.

The explosion that followed was spectacularly gruesome, even by the survivors’ dulled standards of violence. The whole mob that had come around the pipebomb, angrily trying to stomp out the beeping, was completely annihilated, the closest ones almost vaporized, while the farther others were rippped to pieces. Torn meat chunks and blood droplets rained down upon the surrounding area, almost reaching their position.

But getting soaked in red was far from the top of their list of concerns.

The sound of the detonation was channeled by the alley’s walls, amplifying its already violent noise to a flashbang's levels. Much like the surprised humans did, the Crusaders closed their eyes on reflex, bringing their hooves to their sensitive ears with acute shrieks of pain.

“FUCK!” Nick cursed to no hearing ears: he wasn’t expecting that to happen, even though he should have seen it coming a mile away. How could he have been so goddamn stupid?!

The con man couldn’t hear the frightening bellow akin to an angry cow’s. The vibrations on the ground were cushioned by the soles of his shoes. A child’s gasp of pain couldn’t pierce through his tinnitus.

However, he did notice the crusty forearm that smashed into his face and chest, throwing him backwards and into a wall.

As he’d put it himself, he felt jack shit after that.

Light. Corner. Stairs. Lamp. Pipe. Everything passed in a blur, barely registered by her livid, panicked mind.

It took several minutes of running for exhaustion to override Celestia’s addled brain, only then allowing her to calm down enough to slow her frantic galloping down to a trot, and to a slow walk from there. ‘It wasn’t your fault, you didn’t know that would happen,’ she repeated mentally to herself as she pushed her way past a semi-ajar door. The mantra was anything but false: in all of her many years of life, nothing had reacted like that to a healing spell, even one cast by an inexperienced pony. It just wasn’t right.

Instead of lingering on her previous misdeed, the princess mare chose to focus on her current surroundings, which consisted of a large, warehouse-like space. Celestia knew nothing of how she’d gotten here; she could only remember having gone up several flights of stairs, a memory reinforced by the lack of icy water lapping at her legs. She knew she could have easily mistaken this location for Ponyville’s power plant, if not for two things. One, a barricade of sandbags and random furniture – no doubt taken from an office she could see on a corner of the room – was set in front of a large, closed door. Number two were the many skid marks all over the floor, along with splotches of the same color decorating some of the walls. Curiously, the vast majority of the random spills stopped right before the blockade, with only a few existing past it. As she went near one such stain, her nose twitched. ‘It smells like… rust.’

Confused, she followed the terracotta lines. Absentmindedly, she stepped around a corner, which greeted her eyes with a simple slope, sunlight filtering from a half-closed shutter at the top. ‘Finally!’

It took some effort for the unusually large pony to crawl through the narrow opening, the rough concrete scraping her sensitive underbelly all the way through, but at last, she found herself outside. The light was unusually harsh on her eyes after so long underground, but at the same time, it filtered comfortingly into her body, prompting the mare to stretch her muscles in relaxed delight. She could feel her pastel locks starting to ebb once more, though not nearly as vibrantly as usual. Celestia opened her eyes and glanced at them, and indeed, her longer hairs were still droopy, even though the water in them had dried off. They also looked slightly discolored, glassy even.

Filing those observations for a later time, she took note of her surroundings. She was in a large, walled courtyard holding a number of colorful, rubber-wheeled carts that she couldn’t identify. With some confusion, she noticed a red one, at the end of a long trail of scratches on the floor, was upturned; it had a dent on its side, as if it had been violently knocked and sent tumbling to its current rest spot. Its windows seemed to have been made of glass, which was currently shattered, its shards strewn all over the pavement.

The area was littered with more brownish skid marks, along with a small amount of small yellow metal cylinders. The curious royal tried to lift one up telekinetically to take a closer look, but nothing happened. Celestia quirked an eyebrow, further drawing mana out of her reserves, and the capsule started to smolder a faint red, the air above it gaining an undulating trait much more characteristic of intense heat than magic, until it shakily lifted a centimeter off the ground.

The alicorn cut off the levitation spell, causing it to clink hollowly on impact with the pavement. She shouldn't have had to use enough power to lift a baby dragon to make such a diminutive piece of metal move off the ground.

Her eyes moved automatically to the sun, which was almost touching the horizon, signifying either sunrise or sunset. It was noticeably smaller and a lot brighter than she was accustomed to seeing, but that wasn’t what made her uneasy. What did was that, barring the one-way lane of its rays shining down on her body, she couldn’t feel the slightest direct connection with it. It only added to her growing unease.

Before she could think any more on the subject or continue the inspection, a throaty snarl reached her ears, predatory in nature. It didn’t sound like any beast she knew of: the throaty timbre brought a manticore to her mind, but the pitch was closer to a timberwolf’s growl. Either way, she decided not to find out what it was; the beasts of Equestria’s wilderness weren’t intimidated by her – namby-pamby, as a dragon clan had put it once – appearance; she’d always had to bring her magic to bear to stop any and all attacks. With it acting as oddly as it was, she wasn’t sure what might happen to this beast were she forced to defend herself, and killing was far from an action she wanted to take.

Her wings unfurled, and with a leap, Equestria’s main sovereign took to the skies. The air, for some reason, felt thin, not giving her the whole stability she expected, forcing her to beat her wings faster to gain substantial lift.

Whatever animal was nearby had other ideas, though.

An abnormally loud shriek rang out, echoing in the large space of the courtyard, and a yell approaching at a very fast speed made her head turn. Her eyes caught the sight of a primate-ish creature, much like the one she had met earlier on, sailing the air in an arc towards her, its hands outstretched like a pouncing feline. It fell short when she gained more height, only managing to hook a finger on her left hind leg’s golden shoe, which promptly left her hoof to clink on the ground ten meters below.

The creature landed, and immediately leapt up a second time, but it was a futile effort, as its target had already moved well beyond its jumping range. The first living infected Celestia ever saw, ironically of the same mutation branch which she first saw dead, was left to screech and growl in hunger and frustration at the emptiness of the derelict water treatment plant’s parking lot.

Author's Note

KARMAAAAA-

Chapter 5: Coming to terms

Chaos. That was the only word they could use to describe what ensued.

Something big and heavy came down on Apple Bloom right after the explosion, and on top of the shrieks of protest from her ribs and the air leaving her lungs by force, she felt a sickening pop on her shoulder. The weight lifted just as fast as it came, but its presence had already taken its toll. The injured filly, out of breath to so much as squeak in the intense pain she felt, could only watch as a hideously asymmetric mutant staggered after hitting the wall far at the back of the alley.

Ellis knew how lucky he was to have been merely clipped at the elbow by the rushing charger’s attack, a contact that ended up in an ugly but ultimately ignorable scraped patch of skin on his forearm. On reflex born out of pure and simple necessity, he grabbed his rifle off the ground and whirled around, poised to shoot the offending former human clad in a tattered CEDA hazmat suit, who now jogged back their way with a humongous arm raised to strike. Its stance dropped with an inarticulate groan, along with its entire body, when three 7.62 NATO ball rounds sailed into its comparatively fragile torso.

Coach and Rochelle weren’t as lucky. The chubby teacher was clocked on the side, almost as hard as Nick, and sent reeling to meet the brick wall back first. As he stumbled drunkenly forwards, his shotgun escaped his fingers. The reporter, for her part, received an enlarged knuckle to her injured ribs, dropping her almost instantly. The pain that was already there flared up over the numbing effects of the adrenaline, something her scream, muffled to their ringing ears as it may have been, made rather obvious.

The septet’s youngest human didn’t know who to tend to first. If he went for Coach, he might have his help with the others, but Nick had passed out and Ro had already been smacked once; they might need attention sooner. He knew he had to choose, and soon.

Instead of fretting over the decision and getting nowhere, Ellis took a deep breath and made his move, hoping it was the best choice.

For Scootaloo and Sweetie Belle, the only two that get away intact, everything happened too fast to account for anything. They opened their eyes just in time to see Ellis kill the charger, the rest of their group scattered like ragdolls… including a close friend. “Apple Bloom!” they shouted in unison, blazing over to her side.

The filly was stuck between gasping and crying as she lay on her side, nursing an extended foreleg. Scootaloo went to nuzzle her. “Apple Bloom, what happened?” When she received no direct answer, she started to really worry. “Oh no, this is bad!”

“What do we do?!” Sweetie Belle squeaked.

“God damn it…” they heard from above. One look up revealed Coach slouched over them. The man proceeded to bend down in a slow, laborious effort, and picked up the hurt filly, passing his palms under her and hoisting her up, cradling the pony much like a newborn. Once she was snug against his chest, he moved his gaze to the other two. “You girls okay?”

Both nodded, able to hear clearly by now.

“Thank the Lord for small miracles,” he sighed. “Alright, follow me. We can’t stop now.”

“Is she gonna be okay?” Scootaloo asked uncharacteristically timidly, her eyes fixed on Apple Bloom’s semiconscious form. She’d been hurt by these things already; she knew where her friend was coming from.

Coach took a deep breath, but didn’t answer. She could only hope his grimace was from his own pain.

The group dynamics had changed completely. Now a limping Rochelle was on the lead, carrying Nick’s AK, followed by Ellis, who slowly walked forwards, heavily burdened by the unconscious man he held in a fireman’s carry. Following him were the two standing Crusaders and finally Coach, who had carefully maneuvered Apple Bloom’s small shape to rest on his left arm so he could pull the M9 pistol off his hip holster with his right hand. With two men out of the fight and one unable to reload his gun if it ran empty, it was a weak formation, and they all knew it, even the fillies.

“Knights of Columbus, this is bullshit… This is not happening…” Rochelle mumbled to herself as she went.

“C’mon, girl, keep it together,” Coach answered as reassuringly as he could. “We gon’ make it to that safe house, and we’ll get right.”

She felt tempted to whirl back and tell him he wasn’t the one who had taken two smacks from two brick shithouses on the exact same spot of his body, but refrained from doing it. She knew that, while she was busy venting her own aches away, he was doing one of their most crucial jobs – keeping the mood positive. Instead, she kept her eyes on the surroundings, extra wary for any opportunists as she led the team out the alleyway and around the circle of slaughter on the grassy patch the pipe bomb had landed.

It took them almost three minutes to cross the interdicted stretch of pavement towards an overturned semi-trailer near the original parking lot for the stores that once existed in front of the alley - a distance of less than fifty meters that would have been covered in forty seconds by a healthy adult -, but when they did and the lead’s head checked to the right, she felt the unbelievable sensation of her lips curling upwards. “Guys, safe house! C’mon!”

“Where?” Sweetie Belle asked curiously from between the woman's legs. Then she saw it too: past a fallen concrete divider, at the foot of the ramp’s pillar, stood the sturdiest door she’d ever seen. “You mean that one?”

“Now that’s… a sight for sore eyes!” Ellis huffed, adjusting his arm around Nick’s leg.

“I guess that's a yes,” the filly deadpanned.

Though at times it felt like the doorway was a mile away and still sprinting off towards the horizon, eventually all of the standing survivors made it past the makeshift cordon and into the maintenance room turned safe haven. Once Coach was past the entrance, Rochelle slammed the door shut and shoved the ever-present metal bar into the attached hooks. Now the place was firmly secured against anything without the mental faculties needed to figure out the simple but effective lock. They could consider themselves safe for a while.

The woman finally lowered her gun to cradle her injured flank, and Ellis gently set Nick down on a pile of rags on the floor. “Man,” Coach muttered as he placed his own charge on a table at a corner near a fixed ladder, “they say that every fight you walk away from is a win…”

Flying in this world was surprisingly hard. The air didn’t obey the aerodynamics she was used to, forcing her to put in a great extra effort to remain aloft, let alone move forwards, and that was when the surprisingly powerful gusts blowing around didn’t send her off course. Not even three minutes in the air, and she was already out of breath, her muscles aching more and more with the inevitable lactic acid buildup.

Celestia knew better than to ignore the alarm her body was blaring and risk falling from the air due to overexertion, and when the first suitable landing spot came into view, she went down and planted her hooves on the floor. She did not expect her legs to falter under her, though, and the spent mare came down on the concrete with a dull ‘thud’.

Though her body was tired, Celestia’s mind was buzzing, having gathered quite a bit of information during her short flight. Her previous encounter with the wounded one down in the tunnels convinced her that she was dealing with a world at least partially populated by an intelligent species of primates, one that, as far as she could see, wasn’t much different from her ponies. That she had emerged in a full-blown city, seemingly the size of Manehattan itself only with somewhat shorter buildings, attested to that.

However, that was where the similarities ended, and where the reasoning behind the warning started to make sense.

The city was devastated. Nearly all visible buildings and houses were badly damaged, on fire, peppered with wide craters, long fissures or missing chunks, some almost to the point of collapse or even past it. The bitter stench of smoke hung thick, even far from the more ravaged spots. The crushing majority of the roads were blocked off with fences, vehicles and whatnot, turning the whole city into a gigantic improvised maze. The amount of trash littered around, adding up to the rubble strewn literally everywhere, gave off the impression that the area was in disrepair even before the buildings started getting destroyed.

Those aspects were not what immediately caught her eye, though: what really did was the populace. The ones wandering the streets were but a shadow of what she figured would be their former selves, all of them sickly-looking – and given that several were vomiting right out in the open, it wasn’t a mere appearance –, some sitting still or slowly milling about, unanimously oblivious to the havoc all around them. Some, she noticed, started fighting against one another for no apparent reason; one simply moved to the other and began hitting it until it fought back. A select few moved with a smidge more conviction to their step, but their even more grossly deformed bodies and feral behavior erased any thoughts of them being healthier than their peers. Some of them were on the ground, lying still, but she couldn’t tell why, mostly because a good deal of those got back up to amble or brawl.

A grim picture painted itself in her mind’s eye. ‘This place seems to have been touched by pestilence incarnate…’ The mere thought of vileness on this level being witnessed by her little ponies, especially the young ones lost here, pained the mare even more than the old thought of Nightmare Moon being an irreversible transformation of Luna’s. To her relief, that had turned out to be a bogus theory. ‘Unlike this… living nightmare,’ she added with a grimace.

As she looked up to the firmament in an attempt to soothe her distress, something on the horizon caught her eye: a cluster of black specks, far away but approaching very quickly. Celestia didn’t know what to expect from something flying at that speed in a location as brutally dilapidated as this one, so she decided to play it safe; scampering to her feet, she galloped towards a door on the opposite end of the rooftop. It didn’t budge when she pushed against it; instead, the doorknob rattled. She hurriedly pushed the handle down with a hoof, and the door gladly swung open.

The princess had barely cantered halfway inside when a shockwave from behind sent her to the floor on her side, her ears ringing from an ear-splitting blast. Another sound just as loud followed, and a dusty bit of ceiling plaster fell on her head.

“Hey there, can ya hear me? I need y’all to open your eyes, alright?”

Still sniffling, Apple Bloom complied. Her pained gaze added up to her trembling frame and hitched breathing, twisting Coach’s heart even further than it already was. At the same time that he worried he might aggravate the little thing’s condition, compassion practically forced him to do at least something to help her. ‘She’s just a kid, man.’

“How is she?” the unicorn asked, prodding his leg with a small hoof. “Is she gonna be okay?”

He craned his gaze down at her and her winged friend, both of whom were all but nipping at his pants legs. “Look, kids, I gotta run a check-up on her, but I can’t do it with y’all talkin’ and distractin' me.” One look around spotted a viable diversion messing with a bottle of painkillers. “Look over there: Rochelle’s sitting right there, all alone. Why don’t you go make her some company while your friend and I ain’t around?”

Reluctantly, Scootaloo and Sweetie Belle nodded and left the large man in favor of the survivor they’d been pointed to. “Hi, miss Rochelle,” the unicorn filly said quietly.

Rochelle took a deep swig of lukewarm water from a dusty plastic bottle. “Hi there,” she replied as she screwed the cap back on and set the bottle down, her voice hoarse and a little strained.

“We were told to stay here with you,” Scootaloo added awkwardly, “while mister Coach treats Apple Bloom.”

The woman’s eyes gaze set upon the frame of the bulky health teacher speaking to the filly on the table in hushed, comforting whispers. “She’s in good hands,” she smiled, looking back down. “Anyway, it looks like I’m in a bit of a disadvantage name-wise. What are you called, sweeties?”

“Hey, I’m not ‘sweetie’! I’m Scootaloo!” the pegasus protested, jabbing a hoof at her friend. “She is Sweetie!”

“I think that was a figure of speech, Scootaloo,” the white pony explained. Her head moved to face the human. “My name’s actually Sweetie Belle.”

The pills Rochelle had taken with the water started to work their magic, and added to how these two behaved exactly like human children, despite everything, the mildly sedated reporter felt a long-absent sense of normalcy. “Well then, hello, Scootaloo and Sweetie Belle,” she said with a gentle smile. “Who’s your friend?”

Right then, there was a sickening pop and a muffled scream from Coach’s direction. “APPLE BLOOM!” the two ponies shouted in unison, abandoning Rochelle’s side to hurry to the impromptu operating table, Scootaloo following close behind Sweetie Belle with a slight limp. However, instead of hearing more screams and the evil laughter of a tormenting jerk, when they got close, their ears caught quiet whimpering and soothing whispers.

“Shh, shh, there, worst is done, kid...” Coach said quietly, scratching behind his patent's ear with one hand, keeping the other firmly in place over the shoulder he had just set in place. He stole a quick glance at the joint, and couldn't help but think to himself, 'Please tell me I did this right and didn't screw her up more...'

“The hell was that, man?” a southern voice asked. Ellis had stopped his treatment of Nick in favor of staring, perplexed, at his other male companion.

“She had a dislocated shoulder,” was the answer.

“Ow,” Ellis cringed in sympathy, turning back to his own patient. “Reminds me of when Keith had the idea of base jumpin' off the railroad bridge. He was meanin' to use one of those big-ass weather balloons for a parachute, but when we were fillin' it, it popped, so he had to cut a square off it an' tie the tips with some braided string. An' it was goin' real smooth, too, least until–“

“Nngh...”

“Nick!” the accented boy exclaimed in surprised joy. “Yer awake!”

The man in question waved a hand blindly, raising the other to cradle his head. “Stop screaming, Ellis! Damn it...” He grunted once, working his fingers over his temple. “What the hell was that back there?”

“That's your sense of acoustics coming to bite us in the ass,” Rochelle answered, already crouched over him.

“Should've known...” The man in white set the free hand on the ground and tried to push himself up, but quickly abandoned that idea. “Whoa, shit, dizzy spell... Damn does my head hurt.”

“Nuh-uh, you stay right where yer at,” Ellis admonished, holding him down by the shoulder.

“Okay, mom.” Nick rolled his eyes at a slight angle, enough to show his annoyance without worsening his migraine. “What shit fell on my plate?”

“Stampedin' charger,” Coach said simply. The two conscious fillies turned back to him, having forgotten about him and Apple Bloom in the distraction of Nick's awakening, and saw him biting down on a length of silvery tape and taking it down to the table, likely towards their fellow Crusader. “Alright, that should do it,” he said after giving the loose end of the tape a few taps to glue it in place. “How you holdin’ up, shorty?”

“… bit better now,” answered a tremulous voice. “Thanks, mistah.”

The man smiled warmly. “That ain’t nuthin’. Now I’m gonna need you to stand: think ya can do it?”

Seconds passed before a mussed up mop of red hair poked out from the edge of the table, followed by two amber eyes, and finally the rest of Apple Bloom’s head. She wore a grimace that showed the aches wracking her little body, but it faded to a happy grin when she looked down and saw her closest friends up and running much better than she herself was. “Hey girls!”

Seeing Scootaloo's and Sweetie Belle's elated faces at her appearance prompted the junior farmer to go and join them, but she was stopped by a hand grabbing her from below just as she was preparing to leap off the table. “Whoa, whoa, whoa, you crazy?!” admonished Coach. “I just fixed y'all up, kid, the least you can do is not waste my work!”

Caught red-handed, the filly grinned sheepishly.

Nick snorted from where he was, but said nothing else about the matter. Instead, he turned to Ellis. “How long was I out?”

“Not too long, five minutes at most,” Rochelle answered, moving to shove the painkillers back inside the medical pack. She reconsidered. “Want some?”

“I'll pass,” he grunted. “I've felt worse after booze benders.” He hadn't, really, but he just knew that any sort of anesthesic would drop him faster than a puppet with cut strings. He idly eyed Coach setting a now partially-silver Apple Bloom to the floor, and muttered a few quiet words to himself, two of which sounded a lot like 'carousel decorations'.

“Hey!” Scootaloo exclaimed, offended by what she heard. “What do you have against us anyway, dude?”

Nick fixed her an icy glare. "You three are trouble, that's what I have against you." He brought a hand up and extended one finger. “For one, you yourself brought zombie city on our tails when you ran off screaming like a loon. Two,” his middle finger went up, “you're moochers. I don't care what you are, you're gonna jeopardize our safety, and unless you things eat grass, our food supplies too.”

Had the mention of eating grass been at any other time, the Crusaders would have made fake gagging motions to show their disgust: the word 'grass' was only one letter apart from 'gross' for a reason. But the way that was said, and by whom it was said, gave them pause.

“Oh, right, they go after noise, right?” Sweetie Belle said timidly.

“Wait, whaddya mean 'gepardizing yer food'?” Apple Bloom piped in. “Stop usin' those complicated words to make us feel dumb!”

“Jeopardizing means compromising, doing bad things to something.” All eyes turned to Sweetie Belle, who shrank slightly. “What? Rarity loves that word!”

Meanwhile, Scootaloo returned to fuming in guilt. The others hadn't zipped away screaming, which meant the blame was entirely on her withers. “Sorry for giving you guys in hot water...”

“It's okay, shorty, you didn't know any better,” Coach said placidly. He made it a point to stare at Nick as he said that. “'sides, they were gonna come for us sooner or later. You just got it started when we were in a good position where nobody would get hurt bad.” He looked down at the filly. “Don’t y’all feel guilty, got that?”

She gave a feeble nod, smiling faintly. “Okay then.” Then she blinked. “But there's one thing bugging me... Why are your zombies so fast? Aren't they supposed to be all slow and rotten and moany?”

The humans eyed each other. "They're... not that kind of zombie," Rochelle explained. "They're all alive, in a weird way."

"Good thing, too, we had to run through a graveyard right before we met you girls," Ellis chirped in. "Imagine if they were real zombies... it'd be like death for sure."

"I've never heard of living zombies..." Sweetie Belle remarked, confused. "Don't they have to be undead to be zombies?"

"Beats me," Nick said with finality, carefully standing back up, breathing deep to ignore the aches. "Just like how long we have before the turbine jockeys burn the bridge down, and I'm not betting on anything above five minutes." The way he loomed over the Crusaders made them take an unconscious step back with folded ears.

"What exactly are you implying, Nick?" Rochelle, who had stood up herself, asked knowingly. "Are you gonna say we have to pack light to get there before the deadline?"

The man snorted. "We've had that discussion before and you two made your point, we're not getting rid of anyone or anything today." He looked back down. "But you three are gonna pay us back."

"But we don't have bits," Sweetie Belle pointed out. "We left our coin pouches at home, we weren't planning to have to pay for things..."

As soon as she mentioned coin pouches, Nick realized they were talking about money. For the sake of his own string-thin patience, he decided to ignore the other details. "Like we have anywhere to spend cash on. I meant you're pulling your own weight. For one, your eyes are huge and your ears are even bigger. You're gonna spot for us."

"Oh," the filly nodded. "We can do that, right guys?"

Her friends both nodded. "Sure we can!" Apple Bloom said happily.

"What do we have to look out for?" asked Scootaloo. She was eager to make up to them for saving her, it was the least she could do.

"Well, Nick, color me surprised," Coach grinned. "You're being reasonable for once!"

"Yeah, yeah, 'see the silver lining' and all that crap," the man responded, brushing off the teasing. "Wait, where did Ellis go?"

A 'clunk-clunk' noise came from above, and Scootaloo was the first to put herself to work as assigned. "There's something up there."

"HEY GUYS!" the missing survivor called from above, climbing down the ladder on the wall. "Ah went for a look, an' we can get on street level from a door up there. Ain't no zombies around that Ah could see, so we're good."

The supersonic boom of the fighter jets came up seconds after Ellis had finished. "Well shit, souds like a 'hurry up' to me," Rochelle observed, and no one disagreed. "Everyone ready? Then let's go, we've got an evac to catch."

Calling it a door would be quite an understatement – what stood before Celestia was a behemoth of thick metal plates welded together, attached to the wall by hinges so huge, they did not obey any architectural proportions she knew of. Right in its middle, a large window had been left open, criss-crossed by steel bars spaced far enough apart that she could slide her foreleg through without problems.

Though unusual in its properties, it had a purpose that did not escape her eye. ‘The entrance to a safe haven.’

Beyond the room she occupied – a stairway landing cut off from the lower levels by various pieces of heavy furniture clogging the passage –, a reasonable number of shamblers, as Celestia had decided to call the strangely irrational primates, lazed about. The smaller distance between the alicorn and them allowed her to notice details she hadn’t been able to before. For one, they had a particularly unpleasant smell, a mixture of vomit, old sweat and… She covered her nose. ‘Hurricane’s helmet, is this refuse?’

Any thoughts on how any sapient creature could forgo as basic a self-preservation instinct as personal hygiene were immediately lost on the alicorn as some passed under a still-working lamp further back, and her observation could actually be made with her eyes. Alongside the mottled, dusty skin that indicated constant exposure to the elements, all of them had thick streaks of blood originating from their mouths and running down their chins – ‘A widespread case of hematemesis?’ –, and the vast majority sported a good amount of dark bruises, open cuts, jagged scratches and bite marks, among other injuries, in various places of their bodies. One of them, seemingly a male, was missing an arm – and if the irregular aspect of the remaining flesh and bone were any indication, it had been torn off with extreme force. She quickly turned away, trying desperately not to retch.

Another explosion rocked the immediate surroundings, causing the building tremble under Celestia’s hooves and the lamps to flicker menacingly. To her surprise, the seemingly absentminded shamblers all ran out of the corridor and its surroundings, grunting and yelling incoherently. A few seconds later, a sharp crack, which the princess knew by instinct would be eardrum-tearing were she not indoors, filled the air. ‘Wait, I recognize this noise… A sonic boom?!’ There was in fact something, whether a contraption or a creature, that could surpass the speed of sound, right there in the world she was in. And Celestia was not exactly sure she wanted to meet whatever it was.

Another thought ran through her head: ‘know your foe’. If just to know what to avoid, she had to know what it was.

Carefully, she ascended the two flights of stairs, her bare hooves barely making a sound on the dusty granite floor, and peered out the door to the roof. She didn’t like what she saw. The farthest side of the building’s top had been obliterated; in its place there was only a crater, its edges smoldering both from whatever explosive had destroyed the area and the wooden beams making up the building’s structure. Slowly, Celestia re-entered the stairwell and closed the door with a quiet ‘click’. ‘I will definitely have to be careful,’ she thought to herself.

A few seconds later, she was once again in her safe haven, with her eyes closed in thought. ‘I need a plan of action.’ Just running out the door as she was at the moment was most likely a move that would get her roasted, if the behavior of the shamblers, the general state of the city and the explosions were any indication. Setting her body down on a part of the floor that was covered in cardboard sheets and a bedsheet – she had to admit it made for a surprisingly comfortable bedding –, she concentrated on organizing her ideas.

The first priority was, naturally, survival – she wasn’t going to accomplish anything if she was dead.

Secondly, she had to find the fillies. She banished the grim thought of their deaths out of her head; there had to be hope. The syphon line was her main motivation, as they were the only thing that could plausibly be attached to the other end... and dead ponies don't consume or transmit magic; even passive users like earth ponies or pegasi had their active circulation and application. She ignored the fact that it was a gamble, telling herself that it was as good a gamble as any, and it paid to be optimistic.

And thirdly, she had to secure them all a way back to Equestria. However she was going to manage that was a bridge she would cross when she got there.

Next, she listed her available resources. Her body, flight capabilities aside, seemed normal. Her magic, from what she had tried, was acting inefficient and warped to the point of being dangerous to use. However, she could still feel the tug, so maybe magic could work if the spell was self-cast…

She focused on herself, trying to feel her own magical matrix. Much as she had hoped, her perception spread from the pith of her horn to her head, and down her neck and to her body. To her intrigue, the syphon effect was a little stronger. It still wasn’t nearly enough for her to think of it as a cause of concern, which she was glad for, and it gave her a waypoint to follow. She got up on her hooves, filing it all in her mental archives.

The room, though small, was surprisingly packed with all sorts of items, some unpleasant like the foul-smelling clothes left at one corner, others intriguing like the hollow metal sticks filled with brass-colored tubes like the one she had tried her magic on before, though these had a tip made of a similar material on them; a tin can on a battered wooden table held a significant amount of these spikes of sorts, of varying shapes and sizes. Celestia decided to leave them be.

Another finding was a shaft made of polished wood and dark metal, apparently made of a number of moving parts. One of its sides had a sort of alphanumerical code that the princess failed to comprehend.

Searching a cardboard box yielded a much more recognizable item, a blue satchel with a red cross on it. ‘A first aid kit!’ It quickly found its way around Celestia’s neck, hanging by a small strap. ‘Not the most comfortable fit, but I think it would be too much to ask for saddlebags…’ Further rummaging only produced a flashlight much too large and clunky to carry without a proper bag, which she left alone. The opened cans and cartons in a pile at the farthest corner offered nothing useful enough to take, as did the drawers of the desk on the barricade.

Taking a deep breath, the alicorn steeled her nerves and put her hoof under the metal bar holding the door closed, ready to lift it off the improvised lock. Lingering wouldn’t solve any of her problems, and she knew it.

Much to Nick's pleasant surprise, their tagalongs could climb ladders, with the obvious exception of Apple Bloom, whom Coach volunteered to carry after a small dose of Rochelle's ibuprofen.

The outside of the safe rom's upper level was dominated by huge concrete dividers on the left side. A blue semi had crashed hard enough against one of the dividers to move it a fair distance, but didn't knock it down. Fences on the right had the usual 'aggravate the military and you're dead' warnings tied on them.

Applebloom surveyed the scenery from above on Coach's back, paying grim attention to the small fly-ridden pile of corpses in front of what remained of the semi. A small crackle turned her ear to the right, and her face followed suit.

"Rescue 7, this is Papa Gator, over."

"This is Rescue 7, over."

Everyone's attention, not just hers, were drawn to a body laying against the fence in front of a power box, a walkie-talkie in his hand. "Hey, these are soldiers!" Nick exclaimed, picking the radio up. "Uuuum, hello? Papa Gator, Rescue 7, anyone there?"

"Rescue 7!" said the alarmed voice of Papa Gator. "That's coming from the bridge! Bridge, who is this?"

Nick was quick to respond. "My name's Nick. There's seven of us on the..." he checked the morning sun's rays beaming from the opposite side of the river, "... on the west end of the bridge."

"Copy that, Nick. Are all of you immune?"

"Papa Gator, we are NOT infected!" he made a point to emphasize. They'd not come this far to die now just because some bastards with stripes decided that they were the same as the mealy-mouthed bastards that they were sick of fighting.

The next two words chilled his soul. "Negative, Nick. ARE YOU IMMUNE?" A second later, Papa Gator explained further, "Have you encountered the infected?"

Rochelle mouthed 'understatement of the year', and Coach chuckled. The Crusaders stared at them, then at each other, feeling mildly lost.

"Yeah, you could say that," Nick affirmed.

About five seconds passed before Papa Gator came back on. When he did, the message wasn't intended for them. "Rescue 7, are you equipped for carriers? Over."

"Affirmative, Papa Gator, over," Rescue 7 said without a hint of trepidation. Nick was relieved; at least they weren't going to be seen as target practice to be lined up against a wall or locked on by fighter jet sighting systems right away.

"Roger, Rescue 7. Nick, listen closely: Rescue 7 is the evac on the east end, at the helipad on the naval base. He's the last one, we've pulled out of that sector. You've got ten minutes to get to him. Are you near the west checkpoint?"

"You mean the fenced passage next to where the bridge rises, with all the signs? Yeah, we're there."

"Check for a power box on one of the bridge's pillars. It should have a red light. Turn that on, and the bridge will lower."

Scootaloo saw Rochelle, who was already close to said box, turn a large red switch on the top. The red LED turned green, and with a mighty hydraulic roar, the bridge started its descent. The woman gave a thumbs up to Nick.

"We've got it, it's coming down."

"Remember, guys, ten minutes," warned the more laid-back voice of Rescue 7. "I'll be warming the rotors while you don't get here, but if you don't get to the chopper in ten minutes, you're on your own."

"We've got that, we'll be there," Nick answered.

"There are no infected on the bridge as far as the buzzards can tell, so you're lucky," said Papa Gator. "God be with you. Over and out."

"You heard the men, let's get across this and we're home free!" Coach yelled.

"Oh shit yeah! Shit! YEAH!" At least Ellis was motivated.

"Get ready to run!" Rochelle warned. "This whole bridge is almost half a mile long, we're gonna have to book it to get there on time!"

The span reached its lower level with a powerful rattle, and the gap covers extended. As soon as they hit the ground, the humans darted away startlingly fast, and Scootaloo and Sweetie Belle ran after them, giving all they had in their little legs to try and catch up.

The beige walls dully reflected the light of her horn as she slowly trod through the empty hallway. The flickering lights of the fluorescent lamps above, pulsing between weak and imperceptible, made for an ominous atmosphere, pregnant with anticipation.

'Or maybe that's merely the knots in my stomach,' Celestia mused idly. She passed yet another bend in the hallway, and was rewarded with a larger door than the usual wooden ones that led to offices and rooms she didn't bother to look into after a frustratingly fruitless round of scouring for useful objects. The image of an extinguisher above the lever gave her an idea of what to expect, and the thickness of the door as it swung open confirmed it: it was a fire door, covering a stairway.

Carefully, Celestia climbed down the dangerously steep staircase, until an unpleasant sight caught her eye: the ceiling of the fourth floor had caved in, leaving several large pieces of wood and mortar blocking her path. 'It cannot ever be easy, can it?'

She sighed, and headed to the fire door next to the collapsed passage. It offered surprisingly heavy resistance, and the princess had to resort to standing on her hind legs and use her forelegs and shoulder to muscle it open, trying to resist the foul smell that seeped through the gap between it and the frame without holding her breath. As the movable barrier very slowly budged under the alicorn’s force, a grating sound of something being dragged coming from behind it, it became clear to her why it was so hard to open: someone had blocked the door with a weighty metal desk, which slid noisily out of the way with her final heave.

Finally, there was enough room for Celestia to squeeze through, and she entered the new room. It was much different from what she had expected; unlike the small, cramped hallways with entrances to offices the mare was used to from her experiences on the floors above, this was a very large room, about half the size of Canterlot Castle’s main hall, if her mental measurements were correct. She stepped in, carefully checking the barely lit surroundings. The chamber hadn't escaped whatever had happened to the city untouched, as the general disarray and malfunctioning lighting showed, but it was empty as far as the light spell could reach and her ears could pick up over the faint sound of a ventilation fan somewhere nearby.

The promise of relative safety did not convince Celestia to dawdle, and she quickly contoured the room. Here and there the occasional corpse caught her eye, and she noted with morbid interest that the vast majority sported at least one round perforation in their torso. Some of them had them in their heads, though, and she could spare no more than a cursory glance at the bloody messes signaling the exit wounds of whatever had pierced them without feeling even sicker than the odor of the room already made her. The lower floor held little promise of an exit; the only clear way the royal pony could see was a metal staircase near her. Careful so her hooves didn't clash too loudly against the metal, Celestia climbed. 'I hope I'm not walking in circles here.'

As the final steps were left behind, a moderate-sized landing came to view. It was made as if to overlook the lower collective office, however it puzzled Celestia that the large table near the fencing around the edge was turned away from the lower floor, instead staring at several pieces of equipment and a booth. All curiosity seeped out of her mind at the sight of another shambler lying limp on top of the frame of the booth's broken glass window, its blood marking streaks down the wall. A door to the left, marked with a large, red-illuminated sign spelling 'EXIT', accompanied by another sign, this one green and showing a minimalistic caricature of a biped going through a frame, with an arrow above it. Thankfully, this one was unblocked, and she went through with no problems.

Suddenly, she was thrown off her feet by a concussive blast of air caused by an explosion mere meters into the hallway ahead of her. The glass on the windows exploded, and the shards joined the wood splinters and concrete chips in raining down on her body. Her ringing ears did not register the sound of the sonic boom that followed, and Celestia felt so sick she couldn't hold it in anymore: staggering unsteadily to her hooves, the disoriented mare leaned against the edge of the nearest window and expelled all of her stomach's contents down onto whatever lay below. Her dazed brain barely recognized the movement of a bridge far away coming down with a heavy pneumatic groan, and her hazy eyes took a considerable amount of time to register the fire escape staircase right in front of her, leading to the ground level.

Author's Note

Happy 2015, everyone!

This is actually the very first fanfic that I wrote and was content with, after a few tentative throwaways in other fandoms. It first came onto fanfiction.net in January 2012 under the handle of REV6Pilot, and was last really messed with in the 14th of October on that same year. Quite a while, isn't it? Yeah, for all this time, I've been giving it a facelift one little bit per time I could sit down and write, and now I've decided to transplant it over here for several reasons - let's face it, getting recognition in that arthritic dinosaur that is FanFiction is next to impossible, let alone receive valuable feedback in a way as fluid as we have over here with our comments sections. Hell, even editing there is a pain.

Now, I want to address the unspoken issue that, while this beginning is looking a bit similar to S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Multiversal Leak, the two stories are NOT going to be parallels. Each will deal with different themes in different ways, with different outcomes.

With all that good fluff said... don't expect this story to get updated often or soon. The time I took to reform this and get it up to snuff with my standards really pooped me out, and I don't want to write more of it right now. Instead, I'm plannning to get more of Waking Up for the Equestrian Dream out for you dear fellows to read, so be on the lookout for that. I'm gonna do my best to make this summer vacation count!

Prologue: The power of a tome

It didn’t look like much: an old, dictionary-sized book with a black dragon leather cover and a metallic spine, nothing radically different from many of the volumes that filled the Canterlot Palace’s library archives. From the outside, the only aspect that would call attention to it was the odd metallic insignia on the front cover, keeping the book closed by holding a grey latch in place. Even so, it made the most notable Princess of Equestria's eyes widen at the very first glance, since to her, the symbol represented much more than that.

The decoration was what she recognized as a cranium, but not an equine one, or a dragon’s, or any creature she had personally laid eyes on. It was much rounder, similar to a great ape’s, in fact, but with a considerably different facial structure, one that the alicorn had only seen in extremely ancient documents from the unicorn tribes, written millennia before even Princess Platinum was born. Sadly, those documents were illegible due to the complete loss of the understanding of the language of whoever wrote them. But there were still images on them, one of which she remembered as clearly as the sun she always guided through the sky: a bipedal creature wrapped in a cloak, holding a long, crystal-tipped rod in one of its dragon-like hands, and a book in the other.

A book uncannily similar to the one she, unable to manipulate with her telekinesis, now contemplated.

Celestia gently grabbed the book with her teeth and carried it off to her private quarters. She had an unexplainable hunch not to expose her discovery to anypony for the moment. She would leave the inspection of her find, and the inquiry about how such a valuable and old find had found its way to the fiction aisle of the constantly and carefully checked front shelves of the archives' lobby, for another date. It had been a long day, and even though she was used to all the royal duties, administrative work, and the manipulation of the Sun, it still wore her out sometimes.

In addition to that, the only pony she thought could really help her without boring her to death was most likely asleep.

Spike huffed. Once again, his surrogate older sister, while looking for one of her topics of interest, had made a mess out of Books and Branches, the same library he had organized to perfection not half a day ago. Of course he loved Twilight Sparkle, but couldn’t that pony clean up after herself even once?

He was about to grab a copy of The Missing Link: A Study On The Connection Between Neighanderthals And Modern Ponies when he felt his tummy tremble. The expected fiery belch came up, carrying the essence of a letter that fell on the intrigued baby dragon’s hand. Why would anyone mail them so early in the morning? A second look at the rolled up sheet attracted his full attention to it. ‘Oh, wow, the royal seal!’

Wasting no time, Spike ran up the stairs and into Twilight’s bedroom, where Ponyville’s resident librarian lay fast asleep, with her muzzle resting on the latest edition of Equestria’s National Guide to Amateur Botanists. The dragon nudged her urgently with a palm, making her stir a little. “Not now… no class on Saturdays…”

Spike insisted. “Come on, Twilight, wake up! You got mail!”

As soon as he uttered the last two words, the lavender unicorn shot up like a spring-loaded toy, dazed and nervous. “I’m sorry Princess I didn’t mean to take a nap but it was late and I was so tired but I promise I won’t do it again I’m sorry!” she stammered quickly, trembling in both from sleepiness and only half-justified apprehension.

But instead of the wise feminine voice she expected, what broke her out of her semi-awake state were the guffaws of a definitely masculine nature. Blinking a few times to scare off the remains of sleep, she looked at the bed side, and at her small reptilian assistant, who was currently on his belly, pounding the ground with his fists and laughing hysterically. She glared at him. “Spike!”

The baby dragon piped down at the annoyed shout and picked himself up off the floor, wiping a tear from his eye. “Heheheh, where did that come from, Twi?” He looked at her again, and her expression made him quiet down completely. “Er, I mean…” He offered the parchment. “Here, you received a letter.”

Twilight raised an eyebrow at that, as confused as Spike seemed to be. “Couldn’t this wait until coffee?” she asked a little grumpily.

“No, look at the ribbon. It’s priority mail from Princess Celestia.”

She had already taken the rolled up paper and opened it before he could blink once.

As her eyes ran through the writing, she muttered the contents to herself. Spike strained to hear what she was saying, but gave up soon after and mounted on the mare’s back to read it over her shoulder.

My faithful student, Twilight Sparkle,

Normally I wouldn’t ask you this kind of thing so early, but do you have a few hours free at the moment? I have recently found something that I’m sure you will be interested in.

Please answer as soon as possible. I do not have much time before I have to attend to morning duties.

Your teacher, Princess Celestia

“Spike, take a letter,” Twilight said as she finished reading, rolling up the parchment. “ Are you ready? Good. ‘Dear Princess Celestia, if you wish…’”

Twilight paced nervously around the library’s main floor, her nerves on edge. She knew her teacher didn’t mind the lived-in aspect of her dwelling – in fact, she knew it suited her more than the spotless chambers she spent most of her time on –, but she couldn’t help feeling nervous. “Spike, would you please hurry up?”

“Hey, I’m trying!” groaned the small dragon from the top of a ladder. “You can’t just align spines in a hurry, you know!”

“I know, Spike, I know, but-”

“BURP!”

She caught the letter before it was halfway to the floor, opening it eagerly.

I’ll use this letter as a beacon! STAY BACK!

The unicorn quickly flung the piece of paper into the center of the room and closed her eyes, tightening her eyelids against the usual flash of a teleportation spell.

At least, until a voice whispered in her ear. “Boo.”

It took ten minutes for a guffawing Spike and a giggling Celestia to safely pull Twilight out of the knot her horn was stuck to in the ceiling.

“Did you guys know I love weekends?” declared an orange pegasus filly walking down Ponyville’s main street. “No school, no homework, nothing!”

“Yeah!” agreed her yellow-pelted earth pony friend. “Now we have more time to go crusadin’!”

The third member of the trio, a white, curly-maned unicorn, piped in. “So, what should we try now?”

“Ah know, ah know! Ice-skating!” shouted Apple Bloom.

“But it’s spring, Apple Bloom. There’s no ice to skate on,” Sweetie Belle observed.

The earth pony deflated visibly. "True..."

“Then we can go roller skate racing instead!” Scootaloo offered. After all, she had to train her speed. She had an idol to surpass!

"Er..." Apple Bloom fidgeted, "ah'm not exactly allowed in the roller rink anymore." Rainbow Dash knew that much.

“Hmm…” the young unicorn tapped a hoof to her chin. They had tried baking, stage performing, sewing, and pretty much everything that wasn’t too dangerous for fillies to do, and the ones that were dangerous as well.

They were close to the library at this point, and Sweetie Belle was assaulted by a bout of inspiration. The door to the tree/building mix-up was open for a brief moment as Spike set a trash bag on the can beside it and went back inside. She turned to the other two. “We could try breathing fire like Spike does!”

“Breathe fire? Why'd we want that?” Scootaloo asked with her head tilted.

“Lots of things!” her friend explained. “We could cook without a stove, light campfires without matches, and even send letters to the princess!”

Apple Bloom nodded, starting to get enthusiatic about the idea. “Y'know, sometimes we get a big order o' homemade pies back at the farm and our oven jes' can't make them all. If ah breathe fire ah can roast more pies and get it done quicker an' we have more time off!”

"There's smoke, too!" Sweetie Belle squeaked out. "It scares away insects and miss Cheerilee said ponies used it to send messages many years back."

The farmer filly started bouncing on her front legs. "Smithing too! Imagine us makin' our own crusadin' tools!"

With each suggestion, Scootaloo became less skeptical and more enthusiastic. She lay her own idea on the table. "And fireworks and our smoke trails, too! Imagine a show you can do yourself right on the spot! Yeah, that sounds really cool!”

“Ah’m in!” Apple Bloom nodded.

With a yell of “CUTIE MARK CRUSADERS FIREBREATHERS, YAY!”, the trio was off to the library.

Five minutes prior…

Twilight was so transfixed by the book in front of her and Celestia that she forgot about the ring of wood firmly stuck around her horn. The mere presence of the cluster of bound pages, so old yet so preserved, awed her to no end.

“I would have asked Luna, but I have my reservations,” the teacher explained. “I am still not sure if Nightmare Moon was a possession or an alter-ego, and she is still quite shaken by her recovery. Letting her near a possible source of unknown power is the last thing I would wish for her.”

The unicorn didn’t answer, her eyes glued to the book, her attention in a not very different state. She moved a hoof over the artifact. “It has a tingly aura…”

Celestia raised an eyebrow. “It does?” She repeated her pupil’s gesture. “I can’t feel anything.”

“But, Princess, it’s right here. It feels like…” Twilight hesitated, unable to put what she felt in exact words. “It’s like it flows with my magic. I can feel its essence seeping a little into my body, circulating with my mana. It’s kind of soothing." She squinted at the cover, as if something on the leather might hold the explanation.

Celestia being at a loss for words was something that didn't happen too often. This was one of those times – try as she might, she didn’t know how to answer the young mare’s question. What Twilight described sounded like the effects of a mana stone, the kind of jewel that unicorns without much power used to amplify their reserves... but Celestia herself wasn't exempt of the effects of those artifacts. It was puzzling.

Her train of thought was derailed by her student’s face shooting up with the most perfect puppy dog eyes she had seen in centuries. “Please, can I open it? Please, Princess?”

Normally, the trick would be ignored, drained of effects by the lack of novelty. It happens when you're over a millenium old, and have a younger sister. However, she was being eaten by curiosity herself, and so Celestia couldn’t help but nod. This prompted Twilight to open the latch and the cover as fast and meticulously as an aficionado opening a rare comic book they were trembling with anticipation to read, an action that forced the alicorn to hide her quiet chuckle behind a hoof.

As Twilight ran her eye over the very first word of the first page, something clicked within her brain. The runes inscribed in the old paper were suddenly legible, but more than that, they made sense. Every syllable, every word, even the slightest scratch of ink on the pages felt just right, and in a way that no evil magic could.

She was immersed so deep into the ancient artifact that she didn’t notice her own mouth articulating almost unintelligible words, reading the page's syllabic runes out loud. Neither did she see that her teacher was trapped in the same trance, mimicking her actions.

What she did feel, however, was that her mana was running thicker, faster, and more vividly within her body and spirit. With that, it brought a sense of calm euphoria, a radiant inner peace.

To anypony who wasn’t reading the book, a thick, suffocant shroud of power emanated from the two mares. It certainly was the case for Spike, who lay prone near the bottom of the stairs, panting painfully as he was held down by an invisible weight.

A door slamming and three loud yells broke both princess and librarian out of their reverie. Were she thinking straight, Twilight would have instantly remembered how channeled mana had to have some kind of exhaust chute if a spell was ever aborted midway through.

And that was exactly what happened.

The greater source of magic in the room overshadowed the involuntary repeated casting of her latest application of mana – a feat of basic levitation –, suppressing any action it might have caused. However, Celestia’s re-cast teleportation spell lacked both a target and a focus... a focus it found in the three fillies standing at the door.

A bright white flash, luminous enough to overshadow the sun’s rays with ease, and the only testament that the Cutie Mark Crusaders had ever been at Ponyville's only library was Apple Bloom’s mane bow lying on the floor.

Author's Note

Remember, this story is set right after "The Show Stoppers". Don't nail me to a cross because of how you remember Luna to be: by the time this takes place, she's still recovering from the Nightmare Moon fiasco.

Also, it's implied by "The Ticket Master" that it's not just Celestia that can send Spike mail, remember? She's just the most frequent on-screen sender.