Starting from the background.

Funny thing about the scale the Equestrian Royal Guard uses to grade the weather is that it have no grades for the weather that happens on it's own. It also don't have any means to separate one good weather from another, everything class zero are considered good on account of it being safe. One to three is a weather that is bad, but necessary - rains to water the crops, snowfalls to protect the plants from the winter, winds to move the clouds en masse, those kinds of unpleasant necessities. Four and five are the grades reserved for when those responsible managed to mess up and produce something like a thunderstorm with tornadoes instead of a sunny day with a gentle breeze. Usually it involves somebody facing some consequences, and means a decent (quite probable in case of a class five) chances for anyone caught by this kind of weather to win a free funeral. The scale goes to twelve. Everything above five is classified. Yes, Strict can find a way to put that word in a conversation about the weather.

Most of this relevant information he reluctantly passed to me during our mad dash for cover, so when Mist looked at me for answers, I was ready to provide them instead of asking some urgent questions of my own. Quite naturally, universe hates answers, people giving answers, and ponies receiving answers. I wasn't even able to catch my breath, when three very big figures approached us from beyond the store shelves. The looks on their faces made my ears drop, while my face attempted at most fake looking smile it ever made, and failed miserably. The armbands each of them was wearing left no place to wonder why they were not looking very happy with us. While the organisation those four letters represented was as new, as the pony epidemic itself, it made perfectly clear to everyone in the world that they don't like anything pony-related. Our luck brought us right in a store crawling with P.A.P.A. activists. And we were trapped inside by the class-four thunderstorm, that shouldn't be even possible at this time of year at this latitude. Not enough to let my inner hero out (damn that guy and his endless pursuit of an honorable death), but pretty close.

I guess, here I must explain, why I was so sure, that P.A.P.A. was bad news. After all, they made every attempt to show, that while they are not happy with the ponies, they are not happy in a completely non-violent way - being loud, but otherwise harmless lunatics. Several days into all this mess, when I was neck-deep in some very nasty part of the code I wrote couple of years ago, not expecting, that the number of days in the week can sometimes go up to 356 (rather naive assumption on my part, I know), I got a call. One of my acquaintances has asked me if I was interested in joining the noble fight against the alien invaders horde. I can't recall our conversation in any detail, it's a miracle I could even remember it happening at all, but the general idea of it was that this noble fight wasn't supposed to be non-violent. On the contrary, he was very open in his desire to do harm to any brightly colored quadruped he can get his hands on. He had also mentioned the name of the organisation behind this "holy crusade". I'm not sure, which long and bumpy road I sent him on (I'm not usually the most polite man when someone interrupts my work, especially when I got one three hours long sleep in three days), and I had dismissed him as a normal overreacting guy of the kind that tend to flock together in case of an interesting times to cause some minor mischief. Still, the People Against Ponies Association was in fact violent when they thought they can hide it from the general public, and I knew it. I had got a chance to reaffirm that knowledge, because those guys looked violent enough.

To their defence (as much as I don't like to defend some violent nutcases), they made an attempt to negotiate. Not that it had much success, considering their native tongue and our translator being incapacitated at the moment. Still, their gestures was plain enough - they wanted us to leave the store immediately, or else. It was a tough choice. On one hand, the thunderstorm combined with the blizzard isn't the weather anyone would want to be anywhere near. On the other hand, it's very hard to refuse three big angry men while your eye level is at level with the middle of the smallest of them. Strict is a big stallion, if the size of Mist is of any indication of a normal pony height, yet even that is pretty small compared to a normal human. He's a little pony, after all, emphasis on "little".

"Can we survive in that?" I asked, glancing out of the window at the swirling snow and lightning flashes.

"If you have a set of a guard armor, fully charged, stashed nearby, we can last an hour or so," answered Strict with a shudder. "Maybe two, if we can find a place to shelter from the wind. Like we are now, we have minutes. At best."

"Can we take those guys out?" My next question was hurried by the impatient nudge from one of the P.A.P.A. guys. Mist, for some reason, just sat there, paying no attention to our predicament, leaving us to resolve the situation as we see fit.

"I can, probably, wound one or two, before the third one gets us, it's too tight quarters for us here. Not that it'll do any good, as you are the one in control. Too bad Mist isn't..."

At that moment, the ferocious lieutenant of the Night Guard decided to come to senses. She blinked, looked around as if seeing it for the first time, and let out surprised yelp as one of the goons decided to help her to the exit with the hard nudge. Her scary yellow eyes focused on the offender and she let out the most angry speech in Finnish I've ever heard, sprucing it up with some colorful, if not very well articulated obscenities from Russian and, surprisingly, English, yelling all of it on top of her lungs, but, thankfully, below Royal Equestrian. The offender and his friends was so taken aback by the assault, that they looked almost apologetic. Almost. The moment she paused to inhale, the biggest one hit her on the side of her head, knocking her clear out.

Then, my inner hero finally decided to wake up and I did probably the stupidest thing I've ever done - I've grabbed the limp form of the batpony and darted out of the shop as fast as I could, ramming through the door on the way out and nearly losing consciousness in the process. Outside the blizzard was thick enough for me to immediately lose any sense of direction, so the next few minutes only the good will of the universe saved us from the possible collisions with trees, buildings and such. Up until it run out and we crashed into something, plowing through and finally blacking out on the other side.

This time, unlike the others, there were no library and, even more surprisingly, no gates to the afterlife. After some time I just woke up to the cold winter air, some snow and a massive headache. Apparently, crashing through the solid objects don't kill pegasi. It just makes them wish it did. Still, I was alive, I had no P.A.P.A. goons around me, I still held Blue Mist in my arms, and something was protecting us from the weather - which, judging by the sounds from the outside, was still showing it's bad mood, so overall my suicidal stunt was an unexpected total success. I had several whole seconds to bask in the light of my victory before the mighty smack to my head returned me to the land of the unaware. This time there were no library either.

Waking up the second time was even less nice, especially as the first sight that I've encountered when I've opened my eyes was slightly glowing and very apologetic eyes of my companion. Did I mentioned that the batponies are scary even in the daylight? Well, in the dark they are downright terrifying - you can't actually see the pony, just very big, yellow glowing eyes. It's so scary, that it even made me jerk away. Right into something solid and unyielding. The darkness claimed me once again. No library still, and this time when I finally woke up, it was already morning.

Strict was yawning in my head loudly, and Mist was curled by my side on a large stack of wooden boxes. Pale morning light poured through the small two-pony-shaped hole in the side of a large freight container we were in. From the looks of it, outside there were no sign of the countryside we were in before the storm. There were no land in sight at all. Somehow, we made it to the sea while asleep.