Source

~1~

Death.

Death was pretty easy.

We shared a moment, I think, the moth and I. Our eyes met.

My third shot caught it in the face; vanishing its right eye out the back of its head in a gooey blue spurt. It's momentum carried it thudding meatily off the desk, through a sloppy cartwheel overhead, and into the wall. I watched in amazement, and for my rookie awe was rewarded with a face full of insect back-splatter. Ugh. Some got in my mouth.

Living, on the other hoof, was pretty hard.

Apple Peel laid down a stripe of machine gun fire just in front of our makeshift position; an alcove made by the collapsed floor above us and all the junk that had been sitting on it. The moths... KCH-boom ...circled up to swoop on us again; then didn't.

Twitch-a-twitch.

“Lozenge, are ya doin' science under that desk?” Apple Peel shouted.

“I don't need to.”

I peeked up over the barricade, coming target center on another wildly diving set of wings and eyes. The bat pony squinted down the scope of his prodigiously...KCH-boom ...massive rifle. BLAM! The moth, and another some distance behind it, erupted into fur and blood. It was too much too fast. Fluttering wings and firing guns. I ducked back under the desk and yanked out my first syringe of Frivolity.

Abridged sobbed in the corner.

I worked up my sleeve, buried the needle, and bit the applicator. I didn't want to kiss the lights, but it was something. The panicked world took an edge of clear.

If I was going to die, I was going out happy. Solstice would want that.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Solstice, Prince of power and might, whose mercy is everlasting, guard and guide those who place their lives in the balance to ensure the safety of those nearby.”

"An enlightened passage, sister." Mother Superior smiled from the catwalk.

I returned a perfunctory smile, then turned to Blueberry Syrup, reclining on the worship bench next to me; her jack likewise connected to her whirring Apostle terminal, as I was to mine. The bronze box blooped and bleeped. She closed her eyes, enraptured by a hymn trumpeting out of her earseeds. The words seemed unnatural. Most things did.

My own earseeds pulsed the stallion's voice:

(whose mercy is everlasting)

I couldn't help but parrot.

I followed the terminal cables reaching up and away, in bundles of tens and twenties, merging into the Cathedral's seamless permaplast. The building looked like it was made from a cluster of cheerfully-colored bubbles; some large, some small; subdividing cloisters and study groups in coherent delineations; lineaments of worship. I liked that.

Solstice's dusky-blue face surrounded us, all turning left to right on the monitors with a uniform look of mild approval. Effigies of High Apostles Pound and Pumpkin Cake flanked the largest screen, which cycled up a line of stylized words: "I will light fire beneath you, and you will run."

Mothers Superior marched the raised catwalks between the pews, daggers of rainbow light bounding off their visors and polished weapons. They were normal ponies under all that hardware, all of uniformly muted color schemes, but their chromatic auras made them appear, even in a charlatan's fashion, otherworldly. The whole scene was surreal.

(guard and guide those)

I wasn't completely used to the in-eye Generosity displays, so I used the terminal screen to scroll through a copy of the Writ. Each Apostle distributed copies in audio, video, and text. I downloaded one to my jack. The squeaky voice lauded my decision.

"Are you alright, child?" The Mother's saddle cannon, a pair of silvery half-arches filled with glistening flechettes, clicked. I felt like the weapon itself had asked.

"Yes, Mother Superior. I'm fine."

She smiled and continued her rounds. I felt like a stranger looking from afar, with only a liquescent maze of half-memories to guide me. I wondered what drove these ponies to love so completely, to be so consumed.

(who place their lives in the balance)

I thought, maybe, I wanted to feel the same.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Abridged was crying. I felt like humming. The black pegasus jumped on top of the desk and rust flakes showered down on me. I sneezed and laughed a little. I started humming.

This wasn't such a bad situation. In fact, it was time to be a good pony; to do the good work of Solstice, helping fellow ponies in their time of need. I hopped up at an appropriately jovial speed and bounded toward Abridged. Her sobbing ceased. She was sobbed out.

Hobble's grenade thunked from the pillar and skidded back towards us.

Abridged cuddled up to me the second I reached her. She was really pretty.

The fiery blossom blammed back the moths, engulfing some; snapping my ears with the sound of crystal on steel. It was impressive, but not the doozy I expected. The desk popped all over with freckles of shrapnel and skidded across the tilting floor like a grand eraser. I knew where it was headed, and stepped gingerly out of the way. It missed by an inch.

There had to be... KCH-boom... something else. I was expecting...

My tail was going nuts.

...a doozy.

Now standing as I was, and not doing science under a desk (science now linked in my logic as a slang term for drugs), I saw something I shouldn't have missed. A pot sat on the shelf. Somepony had painted a sloppy monster face on it. We shared a moment, the yellow monster pot and I. It was bristling with wires, and I thought that was pretty great. Our moment lasted for half a second. The still-flying desk tumbled into the shelf. The pot catapulted over me.

The cookware seemed to maintain eye contact as it flew, though the eyes were poorly drawn and didn't quite point in the same direction. Nopony looked. They were too busy with the moths and the dying.

The black pegasus was spurting blood from his face. Hobble was reaching for another crystal apple grenade. The bat pony looked back at me, the only one seemingly aware of what exactly was happening. I didn't blame him for staring. I think at that moment, my face was slacked in a goofy, cock-eyed smile. The look on his face, though...

It bothered me.

The moth cloud tore off in every direction. The pot sailed through and hit the same pillar as Hobble's grenade.

KCH-boom!

The explosion was a doozy. The overpressure felt like a flower pot rocketing into my guts. If I could have drawn breath, I don't know if I would have laughed or screamed.

I managed to not have my head sheared off by the remaining moth coming for my neck, or the spinning section of wall that frisbeed the little bastard off to a squishy death. The pervasive bass shock almost made me evacuate my bowels. It's a good thing I didn't. Abridged pressed up against my flank like I wasn't the most likely candidate to get her killed. It was mildly arousing.

Oh, the floor was tilting.

There was a stretch of no-time, then everything flipped, spilling us and three floors worth of junk down in a brain-splitting roar. For a few seconds, gravity didn't care. We were tossed like balled paper into a waste bin.

Then it was completely dark and I felt a little less like humming.

I thought this would be the perfect time to deliver a pithy one-liner, but I realized my leg was oozing from the knee and the black pegasus was thrashing and cursing somewhere in the dark nearby. No punch lines there. I felt my way toward him, picking through two floors of jagged ancient history. My flashlight was gone.

My eye hurt.

The only light was from an overhead marquee wedged between a filing cabinet and a slab of wall covered in bleached-out posters. Despite all logic, it still ticked along:

TAILAHASSEE RESEARCH FACILITY
THE DEPARTMENT OF AUGURY WELCOMES YOU

"Abridged, you alive?"

"Y... yeah."

"Light, please."

Her illumination spell lanced in a low circle; jabbing through riotous motes of dust that obscured the pegasus as much as the darkness. I leapt for the middle, felt the squirming ball of steel and panicked muscle, and tried to hold him down. I had perused several help files on "rodeos", but still ended up halfway through a filing cabinet. Reading about something isn't quite the same as doing it.

Apple Peel dove on top of him and tried to wrangle him down while he kept digging at his face and howling. Those spines must have hurt. She held him still enough for me to sink the healing stim needle. Just as I did, the poison took effect, and he flattened out. We collapsed in a pile on top of him.

The whole scene brought to mind Berry Tart.

Don't think about Berry Tart.

The yawning wound on the stallion's face started closing like a casually napping, bloody third eye. Faced with the prospect of injecting myself with something that would induce pain, though, rather than smear it away in a smiling haze, I balked. The oozing wound on my leg couldn't wait. I was getting woozy. Woozy-happy, but woozy.

I distracted myself by staring at the roots that stabbed out from between the bent edges of wall tile; eager little brown claws that radiated sickly warmth. I squinted into the dark tangle. Small moths and ruddy brown caterpillars flitted and oozed around their gnarled Baltimare. One tentatively hovered onto the crimson mirror expanding around my hoof. Of course. If the moths lived off blood, they would've starved to death. The roots were their real food, which filled me with a special variety of dread knowing that they didn't need to eat us. We were a special treat.

We were candy.

Yeowch! I hadn't done anything yet! I stared down at the stim; a white glow slid it back out of my foreleg, puckering the skin. Abridged pricked me! My mind rang up a vague Berry Tart reference, the juxtaposition with moth analytics worrying me. Then; pain.

I didn't know enough curse words to describe two weeks worth of healing pains and itching condensed into a few minutes. In fact, I could only recall two curse words. They were pretty great. I should use them more.

Her horn fizzled out. All was fucking dark.

"They coulda taken us out five times," the bat pony said; silhouetted upside-down in the marquee's glow, popping a clove cigarette in his mouth.

I kept thinking of how I could use my other curse word.

"Whayel, why r' we alive then?" AP (can I call you AP, Peel?) said from beneath me.

"The bomb," I replied, "they thought we were going to kill ourselves."

The bat pony gave me that weird look.

Sizzlestick's horn lit up. Everypony blinked their surprise, though whether at the light or the realization that the bugs were strategizing, I didn't know. The bat pony nodded, and gestured for Sizz (can I call you Sizz?) to light his cigarette. Sizz frowned.

"Where are we now?" Abridged peeped.

"We need a better map," I said. It took me a second to notice the bat pony was pointing at something. I looked up in time to catch a terminal screen as it swung through Sizz's light radius. It cast a square shadow suspended from a long black bundle of cables. On its return swing I caught the label: "Maps".

Oh sweet, pendulous irony.

That irony, though, was pretty gr... wait. I was at the bottom of a senescent junk pile with a cadre of wounded ponies, some illegal drugs; old, poorly hidden and highly volatile explosives; and my hearing was half blown-out.

I tried a smile again, but it didn't come. Sub-par street Laughter.

Shit.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"Did you get my message? You owe us, big time."

The zebra, Zandali, leaned up against me as he tongued a cigar suffusing the muted, musty stink of cheap syntha-clover. The physical contact was both startling and perversely pleasant. I hadn't realized how little I'd touched other ponies, or zebras for that matter, since... forever. Other than the kid riding on my back, nopony had reached for me with anything but a medical implement. Except Apple Peel. I bit my tongue to kill the thought.

"Do I now?" I was sure I couldn't play my hoof. The more they thought I knew, the safer I was. Maybe I had some leverage on them. He was certainly spooked.

"You didn't even foalnap the Bishop's colt, after we practically delivered him to you."

The scene with the figure in the hallway now made sense. The colt and I had been the most prominent targets, and he still didn't shoot at us. He shot around us.

"Why did you want him?"

"We didn't want him," he mumbled, finally lighting his cigar, "That was your deal."

Damn. I just played part of my hoof, unless he thought I was testing him. If he did, he didn't show anything but slick indifference. He slid the lighter back into his jacket pocket. I felt a tingle, and not a good kind. A disastrous sort of tingle.

"I need an extension on getting the Honesty, and I need some more backup."

"Oh, that's a load of minotaur shit. Do you think zebra lives are things you can play with?"

"Do you really want to fuck around right now?" I said, more terse than I had intended.

"Five days."

"Fifteen."

"Hapana! Garbage."

"I have the tracking codes for all of your credbit accounts."

Cards down. Thanks, stalker.

For the first time, he really looked at me. I hoped the House Apple retainer tailing me could save my flank if this suddenly went south. Probably not.

"I have nothing to lose," I choked.

"Alright, alright," he waved his hooves, "have your little buddy get in touch with me again. We'll meet at the studio, you name the when."

He shot off the bench and along the contour of the road with an easy, accomplished sort of grace. The leery tingle went with him, but not exactly with him.

"Wait! I need something else," I called after.

He grinned so big it looked like another white stripe.

Being a bad pony was hard.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

~2~

Hungry.

Everypony was hungry.

#~Body temperature at 102 degrees.

We picked our way down through architecture sharper, better, than anything we could replicate. Even the symphonic contours of Baltimare were a half-realized likeness. The further we went, though, the more the metal and screens gave way to roots, moss, and all manner of creepy crawlies. And bones. It looked like a ghastly, unholy future. An advanced tomb.

The most unsettling part was actually sleeping down there, which we did in shifts. The moths, disturbingly, left us alone, though the occasional scuttle or whoosh would double my heartbeat. It was worse than open combat. There was no real concept of time. Our jacks would rattle it off on request, but without sky or light, time was, like my memories, without context. We went until our bodies gave out; slept; went on.

I scuttled down a gully of debris blown through the middle of Research Area #2. A decaying sign hung cockeyed, reminding us to "Read Twice, Cast Once". My mane was prickling all over. My guts were starting to cook. I checked my forehead to see if the radiation had made me sprout a horn. Finding none, I disregarded the advice.

I peeled off my parka while Hobble and Sizz made some inconsequential tactical maneuvers. This barrier had done its creators as much good as ours had done us. I twitched, and tried to ignore it. I ended up finding two more bombs, which we gave a wide berth.

#~Sparkle radiation levels 20% above mean. To avoid radiation poisoning, please evacuate the area.

My eye burned.

I questioned whether moths could have possibly done this, or crude explosives. Or radiation. There were burnt hunks of cable and two tunnels beyond. A long black smear on the wall had been worked into letters: Now we reap it. The pony's skeleton hunkered down right under the period.

You had to respect somepony dying for proper punctuation.

"Pony getting heavy," grunted Hobble, the black pegasus slung over his shoulder.

"Fahn. I'll double yer gems," AP glared back.

"Pony feels lighter. Miracle."

I found an intact terminal, led by my ears, which kept flopping. I growled. They were ears, not twin otic divining rods jutting out of my headpiece. I refused to believe something I couldn't explain.

The terminal wired into a maneframe full of audio recordings and encrypted files. I pilfered what hadn't been rendered unusable by ages of internal technological churning. I started running my stalker's hack tool on them, yanked out a House Harvest Tinned Carrot Cake, and shoved it in my mouth. Survival provisions my flank. Courage came from a full stomach; all else was madness. As far as I could frame madness. For a second I was somewhere near happy. At semi-peace, at least.

Then I looked up. I could say the pair of tunnels in front of me looked like something; accusing eyes, perhaps, but no words materialized. Metaphors didn't come down here. This was a bad place.

I cued up the first audio file, chewing pensively. A static-washed voice burbled into my brain. I immediately hated it:

Audio log of Experiment 11-8-6-4, Elements of Harmony Global Delivery System. Trixie Lulamoon, Assistant Director, Department of Augury.

Solstice trample me with your adamantine hooves, the level of entitlement in that voice wounded some deep part of my sensibilities.

It's only natural that the biggest, most important project this department has ever seen be trusted to a prodigy such as myself. If only we could speed it along to the inevitable conclusion of all Equestria's problems being solved by the Great and Studious Assistant Director, moi. This will require dynamic management and...

Something in the background of the recording beeped.

Ugh. Test floor five and that entire team. I'm going to have them moved to the secondary facility in Fillydelphia. I'm here to manage. Let the technicians do the... technicianing. Now, back to the Harmony Circuit. With the completion of the Windigo Containment Grid...

I heard a second voice, washed out and distant.

Moths? Moths!? Ahem. Sorry, Moondancer. I have more important things to worry about than Fluttershy's pet projects. Assign it to Twinkleshine; she worked on the Breezie Preservation Initiative. Moving on. Once we test the conduction of the Elements in miniature, using the transmutation gel samples from FlimFlamCo., we'll be able to... What, Heft!? A sculpture of what? Put it as far away from my office as possible. In fact, put it on test floor five."

"Hey!" the bat pony dropped from above.

I almost shot out of my saddlebags.

"Ya' all right, tootz?" he grinned; pleased with himself, "How ya doin?"

"How do you think I'm doin," I threw my hooves up, trying to mock his goonish accent as emphatically as possible (with a mouth full of cake), "We're going to die."

"Shocker. Ya weren't gonna do that anyway?" he was revoltingly sincere, "Ever?" Eva.

Point taken, probably more poignantly than he intended.

"Directions," he said.

I pulled up the map, which featured some cartoonishly rendered cutesy-poo purple unicorn face (violet-striped mane and a little gold crown, ugh). She winked at me from the corner eerily; her smile overlaid on a backdrop of dust, darkness, and old frozen blood. It fit neatly on top of the featureless visitors map from the communications room, slicing neat delineations into the grey blob labeled "Labs & Test Floors". Lines. Margins. I felt better.

The facility was a huge corkscrew burrowing down to an immense fan of test floors and, shockingly, what looked to be a train station.

"The communications room is through the left tunnel," I said, finally getting all the carrot cake down.

"Got it. Ya gonna share?"

"Go eat a moth." The second I said it, my spine locked straight. The bat pony's eyes narrowed humorlessly, and I realized that I was a lanky pink amnesiac with the murderous skill set of a tin of peaches, while he was a practiced-looking killer with a good say in my ensuing survivability. This wasn't like cracking a joke on Murmur, who I was pretty sure wouldn't off me. A scar ran down over one ear and just above his eye. He could have had it clone-repaired, but he probably kept it there just to show he'd once been shot in the head. I smiled so hard I squeaked.

He burst out laughing.

"You're a riot."

I wiped the sweat out of my forelock and took a few steps. He popped up in front of me.

"Seriously, give me a carrot cake."

I hoofed one over. "Last one," I lied, feigning disappointment.

"Found this," he handed me a note (on FlimFlamCo. Everlasting Parchment, now with a pleasant cherry scent!): “Laid out all the explosives I could carry. Couldn’t get past the turrets. -Sleet” Then, in more urgent mouthwriting: J24783 - Bomb factory.

I found J24783 twelve floors below us, judging by rough approximation and the lingering effects of my last dose of Frivolity. Again, my mind ..t and powerf... seemed to be working just a little faster than I was. My eye was killing me.

"Interested," he waggled his eyebrows; seductively, I think.

Ugh. Wait... no, ugh.

"Don't worry. I've been in worse," he smiled. It was the real kind of smile I only got from alcohol and science. Frighteningly, as far as I knew, he wasn't using either.

"Where?" I screwed up my face.

"Double Down," he said.

"Huh?"

"My name."

"Oh. Uh, Lozenge. What special talent...?"

"Gamblin, sweethooves," he cut me off, and popped his still-unlit cigarette back in his mouth, "Gamblin."

Perfect.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Dr. Straight peered over his clipboard.

"It's natural for trauma victims to desire an increased degree of control in their lives. It's a psychological defense mechanism against anxiety."

"Did I say something that makes you think I'm anxious?" I replied.

"Are you?" he frowned. Out of the two of them, Dr. Straight was certainly the more intuitive.

I looked at his clipboard and wished I had a horn. I desperately wanted to hit him with it.

~~~~~~~~~~~

~3~

Zap.

Zap. Zap. Zap.

Some things, when looked upon with the proper inclination, can only be offered a paltry sum of words in comparison to the void it creates in your perception. If I was a poet, I may have likened the scene stretched out around us to a charnel house. If a philosopher; a metaphor for futility, folly, death. I was none of those. I was a mare of science. All I knew for certain was that the room had been a cafeteria, and a lot of ponies died there. Their skeletons piled against the walls like snow drifts. If it smelled like old death, that would be one thing, an appropriate thing, but it didn't. The air was affrontingly neutral.

#~Sparkle radiation levels 25% above mean. To avoid radiation poisoning, please evacuate the area.

And irradiated.

And we were being shot at. With lightning.

The gunfire and unicorn light made the piled bones dance and writhe. Vacant, fleshless faces stared up at me; judging, maybe curious. It was the kind of memory I wouldn't get...

A broken picture frame.

The gun next to it.

...rid of any time soon. Time was the thief of memories, but it was a weak thief. It only carried away flimsy things.

Another arc of pink energy snapped by, scoring my vision with a lingering light trail. I'd known it was coming, absentmindedly, and I think that as the point. The margins didn't make me feel better anymore. My guts and nerves thirsted for anything to make me not here; booze, Laughter. I was pinned behind a robo-pony server that had broken down half-way between the kitchen (devoid of pots) and a pile of bones dwarfed by an even larger drift of serving trays. I wondered how long the robot had been serving the corpses lunch before it finally broke down. It had worn a rut in the floor.

"Please present yourself for... bzzzzzrt... erasure," the turret repeated. The turret's voice was entirely synthetic, but it sounded like the programmer had gone for 'happy'. They were happy killers.

I was convinced we were on our way to Tartarus. Everything in this ancient grave was just a reminder of how much I deserved to be punished; before I reported for further punishment. My heat-wracked mind floundered.

"Stop!" Double Down shouted.

I froze mid-step, only semi-aware I'd been moving.

"Are you trying to die?" he smiled.

I stared across the gulf between us, where he was likewise pinned behind a janitorial robot that had been crudely decapitated. The corners of his smile drooped. Another arc of energy scorched the tiles just in front of me. I imagined the turrets had been programmed to avoid shooting the robots, so when the turrets whirred to life we had reflexively chosen the only truly safe points. Lucky us. A second set of turrets pinned AP, Hobble, and Sizz a ways back around the wall's L-shaped curvature. Two further sets of turrets hung mangled and inanimate at the other entrances, one of which had been neatly sheared by a veneer of purple-veined stone.

"I just..."

His smile flattened.

Bzzzrt. The tile directly in front of me erupted with pink energy. My whole coat bristled.

"Listen," he shouted over the steady arcane pulses, "Life aint so bad."

A beam skimmed the janitor, dappling him with sparks. "Service Unit 74391 damaged. Apol..bzzrt..ogies. Adjusting aim."

He smiled. "Fuckin grand. Am I right?"

Then, oddly, I was smiling too.

I heard AP's machine gun, followed by two sets of evenly-spaced explosions. Hobble flashed around the corner, hurdling a table where four unicorn skeletons sat like they were about to play cards. The turrets momentarily tracked him.

That was all Double Down needed. His rifle levered forward on its mechanical arm. He lowered his head to the scope. BLAM! BLAM! The middle of each turret skittered down the hallway in a hundred wrecked shards. I expected them to explode. Instead, they spidered over with pink-hued electricity then sagged impotently downward. All in the space between blinks.

The last shell casing tinked across the tile. He turned his head to me, that fanged smile gleaming.

"See?"

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

~4~

"Abridged."

"Hmm?"

She turned from her task of levitating books. This place was full of libraries. I couldn't imagine a society as advanced as this kept this many books out of anything other than simply loving to have books around.

"Have you ever heard of 'the Elements of Harmony'?"

She patted her chin. "No. Can't say that I have."

We crossed two more atriums filled with petrified trees, several floors of sealed off or demolished offices, and a questionably functioning lift I was almost certain would dump us into the yawning shaft below. Why? Because the world was out to torture me for a sin I'd left somewhere before metal hospital tables ...help me save... and confusing dreams. It didn't, however, and we managed to skirt several more batteries of turrets in varying degrees of functionality.

One turret sprouted from the ceiling above me, and I thought it was all over. Instead of reducing me to an ashy pile it spouted a stream of obscenities. Those preservation spells weren't perfect. It did call me a "manticore-fellating cunt skag", which I filed away for later use.

A.P. and D.D. (I was getting good at this truncation thing) stayed uncomfortably close. I was pretty sure they'd shared a quick word about my attempted suicide-by-turret.

"Hey, Sizz," I asked.

"When did I give you permission to call me 'Sizz'?"

"Well, never, but your full name is so... unwieldy."

Double Down chortled. Good ol' Sizz looked like he was going to torch us both.

"Anyway," I cut in, "Do you know anything about Elements of Harmony?"

"Elements of what?"

"That answers my question," I sighed.

"There's a lot of junk across the Tundra that says 'harmony' on it," he shrugged, "never thought much about it."

#~Sparkle radiation levels 30% above mean.

We found the Great and Studious Assistant Director's office, a cavernous semi-circle that rivaled the size of Doctor Needleminder's. It had been razed in a manner that made the rest of the facility look in good repair. The desk terminal had been ripped clean out. What had once been a row of mirrors (covering an entire wall, how vain was this mare?) had been blasted to pieces. All we managed to scrounge up was some illegible paperwork and a half-full bottle of cupcake-flavored whiskey. Hobble tried to dig through a patch of wall that had given way to earth, but we found that the same purple-grey stone from the cafeteria neatly boxed in the entire facility. Further proof of my torture assumption.

We went deeper.

It was all wrong in a very intrinsic way. Sputtering images popped up in my mind. A bookcase, a Dash Cola vending machine, only they weren't there. I wouldn't bump into them until three or so minutes later.

#~Sparkle radiation levels 35% above mean.

My headache suddenly spiked. My eye literally felt hot.

The communications room, at last.

Something had bloomed the wall out like a massive, charred flower; scattering the furniture and launching several larger items in a grenade-like blast radius. There had only been one victim, and I couldn't discern whether it was a mare or a stallion by the skeletal rear end jutting out. A vending machine had shot across the room and punched him or her half-way through the wall. There was plenty of one-thousand-plus year old soda to be had. Dash Cola. A Sonic Rainboom, whatever that was, in every can.

I needed some water. I tried a water purifier, but it looked like it was pumping straight from somepony's colon. Another derelict servitor had broken down next to the valve, a drill appendage half-extended and eternally frozen. It'd been trying to fix it.

"Ya'll right, sugarcube?" A.P. inquired.

I finally found my metaphor. The Tailahasse Research Station had decided to die, and we were fighting over its bones.

I wasn't looking entirely at the mechapony and his sadly drooping head, nor was I looking at the moth, fully double the mass of its next rival, soaring towards me. I saw both. Two distinct time streams played out before me, along with the heat leaking from my eye into the front of my brain; the filmy outline of the could, and the thick pastels of the is oozing sluggishly behind to color it. Grey, dirty robot. Bloody, red moth. Or was it more cinnamon?

On cue, my tail twitched.

I knew it was coming, which made it all the more perplexing, and infuriating, when the giant moth finally did soar over the bones. My skull rattled like it'd been hit with an anvil. My brain was too slow. Cloudy. It couldn't keep up with its own thoughts. I needed the Frivolity. I rooted in my saddle bag.

"Lozenge!" A.P. shouted

I was doing science! Double science! I didn't reply, but instead worked my muzzle past the carrot cake tins. And why was she paying so much attention to me? I just needed to calm my nerves a bit, and all would be right. Or dead.

Hobble fired, washing out my night vision with the blooming flash. Abridged dove up under my plot. I blinked. Don't think of Berry Tart. Then Hobble was dragging both of us. I almost had my little blue friend before my saddlebag caught on a door and tore off, spilling its contents everywhere.

"Oh hey," said Double Down, "Look at all these carrot cakes."

Solstice, sodomize me with thy jagged horn.

The mothstrosity whooshed past us, almost dragging everypony along in the vacuum. What it did suck up was several tins of cake and my vial of science. I dove for it, but it pinged past my hooves and I smashed my face on the wall. I charged after it into the dark.

#~Sparkle radiation levels 60% above mean. Radiation poising imminent.

Then, there was light.

They were everywhere. I'd charged into a massive, open hall; one of the test floors. All of the walls I could see were covered in a sea of red fur. Tartarus, here I am. Above me, at the source of the dazzling light; my tormentor. The others spilled in behind me.

Surrender your days.

The voice wasn't a washed-out whisper anymore, and I recognized it immediately. But what it was coming from...

It was a moth pony! My mouth hung slack. My brain anvil was crushed by a piano. She'd once been a stunning-looking unicorn mare, I thought, but patches of her blue coat had been replaced with echinate bloodmoth fur. Red streaked her mane. Red. Red. Red. One side of her face had a mare's eye, the other, a purple blob of hexagonal segments. Six-sided. Eyes.

I felt a pop in my left eye socket. My mind rushed back in a flood that snapped the world into disorienting stability. My brain clicked. The universe clicked.

I need you to help me save Equestria, my little ponies. Come to the Great and Powerful Trixie.

Double Down responded immediately. "Blow me, lady."

"Wh... what?" Even her thoughts stuttered.

Guard and guide those who put their lives in the balance.

And it was all I needed. I yanked off my remaining saddlebag and smashed it on the ground, violently and immediately mixing together my entire chem kit in the only way time allowed. Red chaos erupted, the moths tearing each other apart to get away. The cloud had the desired effect. The unexpected side effect was due to scientific oversight.

The gas was flammable.

The fluid was caustic.

Add old and slightly unstable flares...

Solstice, shield me with thy all-enfolding wing.

A violent flame spout scattered my fried belongings in every direction. I leapt as fast as I could. Half of my skin cooked off. My jack informed me, rather politely, that twenty percent of my bodily surface was now covered with subcutaneous burns. Yay.

"That way!" I shouted, pointing, my throat and lungs burning, my entire body burning.

Hobble scooped me and Abridged up backwards as Double Down flew past. It was excruciating. My future eye saw a long hallway and an office full of bombs. My present eye saw A.P., Sizz, and the black pegasus being ripped off into the air in auras of pink magic.

Through the haywire alarm system of my nerves, I managed to tack that down as my good deed for this lifetime. My perception filled up with wet cotton, and if it wasn't for the pain, I'd liken it to the blunting fog of a hangover. Was this dying? Pfffft. Underwhelming.

To ensure the safety of those nearby.

I closed my eyes.

Death was pretty easy.