The Outsiders

Chapters

Angular Velocity
Outer Join
The Runner
Core Dump
Team Fifteen
Paradise Found
Split Insertion
Lost and Found
Thaumic Debris
Nopony Left Behind
All (f)or Nothing
Falls-EF
Inner Join
Unscheduled Inbound
Station Breach
Outward Bound
The Ruins
Fluid Loss
Dumping Ground
Survival Instincts
Blast Radius
Fine Structure
Heartfelt Moments
Detachment Event
Terminal Approach
Finalization Operator
The Unseen Mare
Rabbit Hole
Homeward Bound

Angular Velocity

It was wet. Rain poured from the sky with such gusto that the resultant deluge made it difficult to breathe without inhaling water. The ground had long since surpassed the requirements for 'mud' and entered entirely new and unfamiliar levels of fluid saturation. On the plus side, at least, there weren't any bugs. For the lone pony huddling in a bush on the side of a hill overlooking Ponyville, the near-solid wall of water was challenge enough without having to contend with errant insects.

"Walleye, in position," she muttered into her radio, barely audible above the incessant pounding of the rain on her equipment. Her rifle, almost half again as long as she was, dug painfully into her withers as she wiped the optics clean for the fifth time in as many minutes. The magically-augmented eyepiece helped, but against weather this severe, there was only so much that could be done.

"Roger, Walleye. Am almost in position. Do you have eyes on?" Came the reply, tainted with static.

She shifted the rifle slightly, moving closer to the eyepiece. The image was blurred almost beyond recognition, the optics’ built-in magical image postprocessor doing what little it could to pick out actual targets amid the visual noise.

"Barely. I can hardly tell ponies apart with this Celestia-forsaken rain."

"Would you rather be down here?"

"Oh no, I'm perfectly fine right where I am."

"You'd better live up to your name, Walleye. We only get one shot at this."

"You get this right the first time, you don't even need me."

'Walleye', of course, wasn't the pony's actual name. Originally a joke among the original members of Team Fifteen, the name quickly grew into a badge of respect honouring it's owners' nigh-unmatched levels of skill. Once the word got out, ponies had quickly warmed to the otherwise-unusual name. It was a lot simpler and considerably less silly than her official Outsider designation, 'Hooves Foxtrot.'

"You both talk too much," came a new voice through the rain and wind.

"Oh, I see you’ve arrived,” Walleye shot back. “It’s about time.”

"Are you kidding? You said it was going to be raining, not be solid thunderheads from here to Canterlot!"

"Oh, is that going to be a problem for the mighty Rainboom?"

"Ye- No... Oh buck you all." Walleye could practically hear the glare through the radio. "You pull off one Sonic Rainboom and suddenly everyone expects you to walk on water."

"Actually, since clouds are water vapour, we do expect that."

"That you, Woon? Should've expected the smartflank answer to come outta you," Rainboom countered, tone obscured by the static.

"Don't call me Woon."

Walleye snorted despite herself. Luna Delta had very quickly earned the nickname 'Woona' soon after her arrival on the Exterior, owing to her small stature and otherwise unremarkable features. Unsurprisingly, she hated it, rapidly escalating to threats of violence against those who used it. It wasn't until three members of Team Five were 'mysteriously' tarred and feathered that the message got through, and ponies began to use either her official designation, or the enthusiastically-accepted replacement nickname, 'Lunatic'.

Everypony except Rainboom, however. She still took the chance to use the old name whenever she got the chance, damn the consequences.

"Oh, sorry, Woona."

"...Shaving cream, coat dye, or sharpie. Which one do you want this time?"

"Okay, enough bickering," Walleye interrupted, trying to reign in the two errant members of Team Fifteen. "This is the first opening we've had in months to get Theta."

"Yea, yea, I know." Lunatic replied begrudgingly. Walleye could barely spot her through the downpour, edging along the perimeter of the target building, clad in a skin-tight black camouflage suit.

"Rainboom, I need better visibility,” Walleye snapped. “Ideas?"

"Less rain, or more light?" Rainboom replied after a second's pause.

"Which is easier?"

"Well, light, obviously, but lightning is a bit finicky."

"Try it, let's see what we get."

"On it."

With a phenomenal crack, the sky lit up, throwing the entire town into sharp relief. For the briefest moment, Walleye had a perfect view of their target, a poofy-maned pink alicorn mare on the upper floor of a faux-gingerbread shophouse.

"Again." Walleye commanded.

Again, the sky flashed, sending ripples of thunder through the sleeping village.

"Alright, that's good. Shadows are a bit funky, though. Thought there were two ponies in there for a moment."

"Aaaaand?" Rainboom asked expectantly.

"It's Theta. Upper floor, alone. Unarmed from what I can see, but that doesn't count for much."

"You're sure it's just her?" Lunatic asked

"What's my name again?"

"Point taken. Am I clear to begin?"

"As long as you know what you're supposed to do."

"Get in, grab her, hit my beacon. No residual presence, zero body count. If she resists, occupy her until you can get a clear shot. Any unforeseen problems, I hit my beacon and we abort. Anything I've forgotten?"

"You're clear to proceed."

"Breaching now."

Lunatic's silhouette vanished as she slipped inside. Walleye gripped the rifle with a slightly nervous hoof, keeping the crosshairs centred on Theta's head. She drew her breath in and held it, steadying her wavering aim.

"I'm inside. Lower floor is empty. Proceeding to the upper level."

"Roger. Rainboom, another flash, if you please."

A hiss of static issued from the radio, obscuring any reply as Rainboom complied, sending another thunderclap and wave of light to illuminate the town. Walleye sighed with relief when she saw that their target was still in place.

"Theta is still in place. Lunatic, go for it."

"Moving up now."

Walleye frowned. Something wasn't quite right.

"Rain, could you give me light again?"

"What, again?" Rainboom whined. "I just gave you one."

"Please, just do it."

Walleye glued her eye to the eyepiece as the flash rippled through the clouds, once again giving her a near-perfect view of the lone mare, standing motionless in the room.

Motionless.

"I'm at the door. I can see her. I'm going for it."

"Luna! Don't! It's a-"

Sugarcube Corner exploded.

"-trap."

"What in Tartarus was that?" Rainboom screamed over the radio. "I heard that all the way up here!"

"Lunatic's down!" Walleye screamed, jerking the rifle back and forth trying to catch sight of any survivors. "The building bucking exploded. Theta knew we were coming."

"What? How?"

"I have no bucking idea! How would I know-" Walleye's words cut short as a beam of malevolent pink light erupted from the ruined structure, impacting not feet away from her.

"Horseapples!"

Walleye swung the rifle around, reaching her hoof inside the trigger guard as she centred the crosshairs on Theta's maniacally grinning face. Hours later, she would lament the fact that she did not have an appropriate snappy one-liner to throw out as she squeezed the trigger, sending a collimated twenty-five thaum beam of destructive magical energy towards the cackling pink alicorn.

Theta's horn ignited at the last second, deflecting the beam harmlessly into the clouds above the town.

"Celestia damn it!" Walleye swore, ducking sideways as another beam flew past her close enough for her to feel the tell-tale tingling on her coat from the backwash. Mud spattered everywhere as the beam impacted behind her. "I'm under fire! Rainboom! Extraction!"

"Hit your beacon!"

"I can't!" she yelled, slinging the rifle over her back while trying to avoid the near-constant barrage of pink beams, the sodden ground sucking at her hooves as she ran. "I can't get at it easily, and if I stop to hit it, I'm vapour."

"Should've gone for a better beacon. Like my awesome one!"

"Rain, help me!"

"Fiiiine."

As abruptly as it began, the barrage stopped, giving her a chance to look back at the wreckage of Sugarcube Corner. The entire area was engulfed in chaotic pink and blue discharges, arcing away from a point where two solid beams of light intersected.

"Did I miss something?" Lunatic's voice echoed over the radio, distorted by static.

"Lunatic! What happened?"

"No idea. First I was diving right at Theta, beacon in my hoof, and next thing I knew I was on the floor in the gateroom, holding a giant pony plushie."

"Clever..."

"Hey Walleye?"

"Lunatic?"

"Do you think you could do me a favour and shoot this psycho mare?"

The blunt request snapped Walleye out of her daze. With a single smooth motion, she swung the rifle off her back as she dropped to the ground, carefully lining the weapon up on the back of Theta's head.

"Say goodnight, Theta," Walleye quipped, smirking to herself as she squeezed the trigger.

The beam impacted mere hooflengths away from its mark, a sphere of semitransparent pink magic flaring into existence to protect its occupant. Walleye fired again, sending another beam slamming into Theta's personal shield, arcs of magical backwash earthing into the ground around her.

"Oh for Celestia's sake!" Walleye exclaimed, squeezing the trigger a further three times, only to have every shot slam into the shield ineffectually. "She's got a personal force field! I can't punch through that."

"Well what now?" Lunatic asked, her voice wavering with the strain of holding her attack.

"Abort. Mission failed. Hit your beacon and get out of there."

"Oh no. No way in Tartarus am I letting that madmare get away!"

"Lunatic! Don't be stupid, you can't take her on by yourself!" Walleye screamed into her microphone. "Hit your beacon! NOW!"

"If she gets away, how many ponies die? How long until she sells the secrets of the Exterior to somepony?"

"That's not our concern! Mission brief says we return to base if anything goes wrong!"

"To Tartarus with that! I'm going to send this mare where the sun don't shine."

The air around the rapidly-degenerating fight began to distort inwards, warping space into unnatural, arcane shapes.

"No. No, no, nononononononono!" Walleye panicked, running towards the rapidly-forming teleport event horizon, struggling against the quagmire.

"Anywhere in the Core Falls cells and Theta is as good as dead!"

"And what about you?"

Walleye dived for the closing horizon a second too late, the black-and-silver boundary completing an instant before she reached it. With an earsplitting crack, the bubble vanished, air rushing in to fill the void.

Moments later, a thunderous explosion tore through the night as her teammate rushed to her aid, a rainbow-tinged shockwave trailing in her wake. Walleye felt a brutal tug at her withers as Rainboom grabbed her before the world turned sideways and reformed.

"Identify!" The words drilled into her ears, pulling her attention away from her shock and towards the team of guards holding weapons on them.

"Hooves, Derpy. Foxtrot. Team One-Five," Walleye recited, ripping her beacon from her foreleg and dropping it to the floor of the gate. "Beacon Clear. No Contamination."

"Dash, Rainbow. Yankee. Team One-Five," Rainboom followed, dropping her own beacon to the floor, a decorative pin. "Beacon Clear. No Contamination. Apart from being drenched."

"Mission completed," Walleye continued. "Theta has been neutralized. One team member M.I.A."

The guards lowered their own weapons, allowing the survivors of Team Fifteen to strip out of their rain-soaked gear.

"What happened?" The lead guard asked, face screwed up in distaste as the rainwater slewed onto the formerly-pristine floor.

"It was an ambush. Theta knew we were coming," Walleye explained flatly. "Lunatic sacrificed herself to send Theta and herself to somewhere in the Core Falls."

Silence descended upon the room as everyone present processed the implications of what had been said.

"I just don't know what went wrong," Rainboom admitted as she stripped off the last of her gear.

"I do," Walleye stated. "We have a leak on the Exterior."

Outer Join

Twilight looked around in fascination as Celestia guided her down the hallway leading from Gate Three. She shivered, feeling out of place in the sterile off-blue hallway, as though the walls themselves were somehow unnatural.

"What's wrong with this place?" she whispered, voice wavering.

"What do you mean?" Celestia replied, stopping to give Twilight a look of concern.

"I don't know," she admitted. "It just... feels wrong, somehow."

Celestia looked around, studying the featureless metal walls for a moment before turning back to Twilight.

"I'm afraid I don't know to what you refer, my dear Twilight."

"It's... nothing," Twilight concluded, trying to shake the feeling. "Probably just shock."

Celestia smiled reassuringly, resuming her slow trot down the hall.

"Who built this place?" Twilight asked, her natural curiosity managing to suppress her unease. "I've never seen material like this."

"Nopony really knows," Celestia admitted. "There are many theories, but without evidence it's impossible to say for sure."

"Wait... You mean..."

"The Exterior is unimaginably old. Far older than any of the ponies that inhabit it by far. Legends say that the first pony to find their way here found it devoid of all life, yet seemingly immaculately maintained."

"What about records? Books?"

"Nothing at all. We found libraries with naught but empty shelves. Piles of scrolls devoid of all markings. No writings, no explanations, nothing."

"But I've seen writing! That room I arrived in before, it had warning labels all over the place!"

"Those were added after we arrived, after much trial and experimentation. Strangely, most of the markings you see were placed upon plates that seemed to be specifically designed for them."

"So... assumedly somepony designed and built this place?"

"That is a popular theory, yes."

"But... that makes no sense! Who would build something this big, only to leave no clue as to its purpose or function?"

"And that is the obvious problem with that theory."

Twilight snorted. The questions were building up faster than they were being answered.

"No. There must have been writing somewhere. You called this place 'The Exterior'! Where does that name come from?"

“Where does the name ‘Equestria’ come from?” Celestia challenged, levelly.

“It’s a mutation of the ancient equestrian ‘Equestris’,” Twilight answered snappily. “Which is in turn a derivation of the word ‘Equus’. Before that, it’s debated, since ancient equestrian seems to derive from multiple different pre-classical language sources, from Cobbian heyratic all the way to Jackkadian poneiform.”

Celestia paused, glancing at Twilight with a curious gaze.

“That was supposed to be a rhetorical question,” Celestia admitted.

“Oh…” Twilight dropped her gaze, embarrassed. “Sorry, Princess.”

“Twilight…”

“Sorry. Celestia,” Twilight corrected herself, unable to meet Celestia’s gaze. “Old habits.”

“To be truthful, I wasn’t expecting such a verbose answer,” Celestia continued, turning down an intersection marked with a plethora of navigational markers. “The mistake is mine, thinking that you would not have an appropriate answer ready for such a basic question of history.”

Twilight followed her, unconsciously trying to hide in the shadow of the not-princess.

“If I’m honest, I don’t really know the specific origin of the term,” Celestia explained. “Much like ‘Equestria’, no Outsider has been able to discover to true origin of the word. There is a functional significance to it, but I’m afraid I am hardly the best qualified to explain it. You would be better served, I dare say, by asking one of the Librarians.”

“Librarian?” Twilight perked up, interest piqued. “Librarian implies library. You have a library?”

“We have many libraries, in fact,” Celestia chuckled. “There are many small libraries scattered throughout the inhabited areas of the Exterior, some devoted to speciality subjects, others collected by particularly devoted individuals. I curate one such collection near Operations that has somewhere near twenty million books within it.”

“What?” Twilight choked.

“I know,” Celestia sighed. “It’s paltry. Bravo’s collection at Analysis is almost double that size, it’s a source of… considerable rivalry between the two of us.”

“Twenty million books is not small!” Twilight shrieked, cutting in front of Celestia. “The Canterlot Royal Library barely has a fifth that many books!”

“Forgive me, I keep forgetting that this is all new to you.”

“Wait, wait a moment. If twenty million is small, then you must have something that it’s small in comparison to,” Twilight surmised. “You have a library somewhere with enough books to make twenty million books look small.”

“Yes.”

“Can I see it?” Twilight asked excitedly, barely able to keep herself still.

“I don’t see why not.”

“Now?”

“No.”

Twilight pouted, visibly deflating. “Why not?”

“Because you have no idea where it is,” Celestia pointed out. “And I still need to show you to your quarters.”

“I don’t need a room, there’s a library.”

“Twilight, I know this might be disappointing, but you can’t live in The Library.”

Twilight continued to pout, obviously annoyed at being denied the chance to see the hinted-at repository. “...Fine.”

They proceeded in silence for the next few minutes, passing intersections and other ponies, each of them staring at Twilight with strange expressions as she passed, mumbling under their breath.

"There aren't any windows."

"No."

"At all?"

"None that anyone has ever discovered. Many even attempt to break sections of the walls to see if there is anything beyond. None have ever succeeded."

Twilight tried to suppress the growing feeling of claustrophobia as the implications of that set in.

"How big is this place?"

"Nopony knows that either. It just seems to go on and on."

"Oh that's just stupid. It must have a limit somewhere!"

"If there is an end, nopony has ever found it. Not long after I first arrived here, I resolved to find an answer myself. I didn't find an end."

"How long did you look?"

"Eighty-five years."

Twilight coughed as her reply stalled in her throat.

"Y-years? Years? And you didn't find an edge?"

"It just goes on forever. Some Outsiders become so completely consumed by that very question that they flee into the Exterior to find where it ends. Most are never seen again."

“...Most? What about those who are?”

“There was one particularly memorable case of a mare who, upon her discovery near Hydroponics, claimed that she had only just departed on her quest, but in reality had been missing for over three centuries,” Celestia recalled. “Others… Are not quite as fortunate.”

Twilight's claustrophobia returned, accompanied by a perception of being utterly, insignificantly small.

"That's... wow."

"I trust you will not be following their example any time soon?"

"Oh Tartarus no! Truthfully I'm scared I'm going to get lost now!"

Celestia chuckled, laying a reassuring hoof on Twilight's shoulder.

"You won't get lost, Twilight. Not unless you try to get lost."

“What is that supposed to mean?” Twilight asked, trying desperately to fend off the panic attack she could feel welling at the pit of her stomach.

“Have you ever found yourself lost in Canterlot?”

“Well… No, but I know my way around Canterlot.”

“But that’s not it, is it?” Celestia said. “There’s a correct answer here, I want you to find it.”

Twilight’s brow furrowed in concentration as she pondered the question, her earlier panic seeping away in the face of a good intellectual challenge.

“Herding instincts?”

“Correct!” Celestia exclaimed, smiling. “Modern ponies still retain the herding and social instincts of their genetic ancestors, instincts that seep into and take advantage of natural pony magic.”

“I remember reading a dissertation to that effect some time ago,” Twilight admitted. “It was a fascinating read.”

“Much like on your homeworld, the same magic is in effect here,” Celestia explained. “Though in a slightly altered form, given the Exterior’s unique architectural oddities.”

“I can’t get lost, because I can instinctively tell when other ponies are nearby?”

“It’s a very subtle thing, not something you are consciously aware of, at least,” Celestia reassured her. “But, yes. You can’t get lost unless you specifically, consciously attempt to get lost.”

“Well, I certainly won’t be doing that.”

“I’m quite glad to hear it, Twilight.”

Celestia turned and led them into another corridor, dimly-lit and lined with solid-looking metal doorways, each with what looked like a small camera inlaid into the wall beside it.

“While some areas of the Exterior have functions that continue to elude us, areas such as this are more easily discerned,” Celestia explained, walking through the corridor. “Dormitories like these are located throughout the Exterior.”

Twilight followed the door with some trepidation, examining each door in turn. “So I’m going to be living here, then?”

“Once we sort through some issues, yes.”

“What issues?”

“I’m sure you noticed that my colleagues were… less than enthused regarding your arrival here.”

“Yes,” Twilight growled. “One of them wanted to kill me.”

“Ah, yes.” Celestia acknowledged. “Solaris can be somewhat overzealous, the same can be said for most of Operations.”

Twilight huffed.

“I certainly do not wish for you to remain here as a prisoner, despite what my colleagues would insist be done to you,” Celestia insisted. “However, granting you the capability to live here without constant escort represents an unavoidable potential security issue.”

“Go on,” Twilight said impatiently.

“Navigation on the Exterior is unavoidably difficult,” Celestia continued. “Maps and other traditional methods of navigational assistance are ill-equipped to deal with the sheer scale and… unique architectural features of this place. Do you remember the Sparkle you arrived with? Echo? She had a pendant.”

“I remember it.”

“That pendant is what’s called a ‘Beacon’. Their primary function is to allow Outsiders to return to the Exterior from anywhere in the Interior, but they also allow easy navigation on the Exterior through a little-understood thaumic mechanism. When wearing a Beacon, ponies are instinctively capable of finding their way around.”

Twilight’s ears perked up, her natural curiosity again showing through.

“So unless we have an Outsider following you around for the remainder of your stay here, we’re going to need to get you your own Beacon. However, I doubt I can convince my colleagues to grant such a request without certain… assurances being made."

“What kind of assurances?” Twilight asked, suspiciously.

“Many Outsiders are naturally distrustful of Insiders. It would go a long way to reassure them if you could demonstrate that you do not seek to bring harm to the Exterior.”

Twilight pondered for a moment, allowing the statement to percolate. “You… are you offering me a job?”

“Astute as always, Twilight.” Celestia praised, smiling. “I doubt you have any great desire to remain here, given your own admission to feeling this place ‘alien’, so I was thinking that we could attach you to one of our Operations teams. An Insider like yourself would be an invaluable asset to any Ops team, and being a Sparkle, you have a natural magic talent.”

“I don’t know what to say,” Twilight admitted. “This… this is all a bit much to take in at once.”

“I can imagine.”

“If it’s alright with you,” Twilight continued, thinking. “Could you show me around a bit more? I’d like a bit of time to think about the offer.”

"Absolutely.” Celestia answered, rising to her hooves and trotting down the hallway. “Come, do you enjoy science? Mechanics?"

"Yes. Very much."

"I thought so, most Sparkles do."

"That was another thing that I didn't understand. What's a 'Sparkle'?"

"Since there are so different copies of any one pony, we group them together. I am a Celestia, you are a Sparkle, your brother, Shining, would be an Armor. To set individuals apart, they are assigned a single phonetic letter, and the combination gives their Outsider Designation."

"Celestia Alpha being yours."

"Correct! Though since many find them extremely clunky, they instead choose nicknames or aliases and use them instead for most purposes."

Twilight pondered for a moment. "What would my designation be?"

"Since you are not an Outsider, the rules don't really cover you. Though since you are the only Insider here, I doubt you are going to encounter much confusion."

"I've got another question, if you don't mind."

"Not at all, dear Twilight."

"What are the Falls?"

Celestia's answer was cut off as the door they were approaching exploded outward with a howl of rending metal. A screaming pink mare, towed by a rogue jet engine, slammed into the wall beside them, covering the three with a plume of dust.

"Medic..." Pinkie moaned, twitching.

Twilight gaped at the soot-covered pony, shattered sections of what was once a gas turbine disc slowly spinning to a stop atop her head.

"What," Twilight blurted.

Author's Note

This chapter was a bit of a pain to write, mostly due to trying to strike an acceptable balance of how much to reveal through Twilight's questioning. That, and it's almost solid dialogue, something that I find I'm a bit ~~awful~~ ~~terrible~~ bad at.

The Runner

Lyra surveyed the bar, her current inebriation pleasantly obscuring the generally poorly-maintained nature of the establishment, but not quite managing to dilute the foul smell of bile and sweat that pervaded every surface in range of her unfortunately acute olfactory senses.

Two stallions were making an honest effort to beat each other senseless near the door, fighting over a not-particularly-interesting mare who now seemed to be watching with an amused gaze. Dozens of other ponies meandered around the dance floor, the occasional yelp of surprise echoing around the room as one got daring enough to intrude upon another's personal space in an intimate fashion. Still more simply sat around, trying to drink themselves into a stupor.

Lyra may have been slightly inebriated, but she was not drunk. If she had wanted to get enjoyably drunk, she wouldn't have used a bar that obviously had ambitions of playing host to many unspeakable biological contagions. No, she was here on a mission, having elected to drink only in a futile attempt to mute the horrid surroundings to a level that permitted her to ignore them and focus.

A stallion sidled up beside her, taking the seat with a smirk. He was drunk, and quite obviously so, judging by the pervasive smell of ethanol and regurgitated stomach acid. Lyra almost gagged as he opened his mouth to speak.

"Ca- cnnn..." He sputtered, faculties quite clearly impaired. "Can I get ya a drink?"

"I will buck you in the face," Lyra replied with false cheer, fixing the stallion with what she hoped was a sufficiently creepy smile.

"Oooh th- that! that sounds like funnnn," He slurred, leaning over to rest his hoof on her withers. "Fun mare. Barkeep! Two ovr- over here!"

"Get your hoof off me." Lyra growled, her smile slipping slightly. "Or I will break it off."

"Oh? And wherr- where would you put it afterwarr- after?"

"Oh for Luna's sake." She dropped her head to the bench as two shotglasses stopped in front of them, filled with a pungent white liquid. Without giving the stallion a chance to respond, she grabbed both glasses and downed them, wincing at the foul taste.

"Hey! One of those was mine!"

"Too bad, so sad. Now go away."

"You drink mah shot, ah- ahthinkyouoweme." He mutilated the last few words, trying to hold his stomach contents in place.

"Not a chance, bucko. Not that kind of mare."

"Oh? Y- ya into fillies then? I can dig that."

She turned to him, irritation making her eye twitch uncontrollably. "Okay. You want something from me? Let's step outside."

The stallion's eyes widened in anticipation as he almost fell backwards off the stool, drool dripping from his slightly-open mouth. Lyra nearly gagged as she walked past him towards the door, ducking past the two stallions who were still duking it out.

She sighed as the night air hit her face, fragmented moonlight shining down through the scattered cloud cover. It was an otherwise pleasant night, and she would have been enjoying it if she wasn't here.

"Come on little filly," The stallion gestured to a nearby alley, wobbling on his hooves. "Come show me a good time."

Lyra groaned, cracking her joints in preparation as she followed behind him. "Oh, I'll show you a good time alright..."

She stopped short as she heard the sound of a bag of coin being thrown to the ground.

"There. That's fifty bits. Now get lost, I can't stand your breath."

The stallion dashed from the alley with the bag in his mouth, a well-dressed unicorn mare emerging behind him.

"I really don't know why you insist on meeting here of all places, Sierra," Rarity drawled, looking disdainfully at Lyra. "It's disgusting."

"Not all of us can get lucky enough to get a permanent post in the Interior, Rare," She countered, smirking. "Though I'll take any chance to get your prissy little flank out into the Ruins."

"Quite."

"What was the deal with the colt? Not game to come talk to me myself?"

"You expect me to enter that reprehensible establishment? Dear, are you mad?"

"It's just a bar, Rare."

"Oh, I've seen bars, that is not a bar. That is a dive."

"You think I want to be here?" Lyra accused, gesturing at their surrounds. "This is, quite simply, the only Ruin I know of that's safe and easy to get to from the Interior. Unless you feel like dashing along an opening into the Void, or dealing with the other stuff out here."

"Why not just come to the Interior when you need to talk? It has to be better than this."

"You know, Rare, sometimes I wonder if you're secretly an Insider for how much you go on about how good the Interior is."

"That's harsh, Sierra," Rarity said in mock hurt, pulling a small grate away from an opening in the side of the building and stepping inside.

"Wouldn't surprise me, really." Lyra replied, stepping through and closing the grate, halting for a moment before stepping sideways.

The pale moonlight gave way to midday sun, an endless desert stretching out in front of her as she stepped through the breach. Piles of rubble dotted the sand where structures used to stand, some more complete than others. Lyra looked up at the sky and took in the vista, a malevolent red sun hanging perpetually overhead, countless scattered fissures of un-light searing through the atmospheric haze like scars. No matter how many times she came here, it always managed to take her breath away.

"Please don't dawdle, dear," Rarity prompted, walking towards an archway similar to the one they had just emerged from. "I'd rather not stay here long."

"Gee, I wonder why."

"Sarcasm is unbecoming of you."

"Oh, deal with it. Unlike you, I happen to like it here. I don't have to deal with all the usual crazy that being on the Exterior brings."

"No, you just have your own brand of crazy that comes from living in the Ruins for most of your life. This place is horrific!"

"Not as horrific as some places in the Interior. At least out here you can have legitimate safety and solitude."

"Not for much longer, I'm afraid."

"Oh cut the ponyfeathers, Rare. It takes effort to get around in here, and you contacted me for a meeting. What do you want? Does Administration want another update again? Because I can tell you now, nothing is going on out-"

"You can tell them yourself. You're being recalled. That's what I'm here for, to collect you and bring you back to Bastion for pickup."

Lyra stopped short, eyes narrowing. "Horseapples. I'm not leaving. It's quiet, and peaceful, and I get plenty of exercise, and I get to explore. This is the last remaining place in existence that is even slightly interesting."

"Be that as it may, you just said that nothing was going on out here. Not much point having you out in the Ruins keeping an eye on things if there's nothing to keep an eye on, is there?"

"I... but... you..." She plonked onto her haunches, pouting. "Not leaving."

"Oh stop being such a foal." Rarity ignited her horn, surrounding the uncooperative unicorn with a field of magic, lifting her along ahead of her. "Celestia above, sometimes I think living out here makes you stupid."

"I. am. not. Stupid!" Lyra struggled against the field, ineffectually. "Put. Me. Down!"

"Oh stop flailing."

Lyra snorted, glaring at Rarity through the field as they approached the archway.

"Glare at me all you want, I'm not putting you down until I hand you over to Operations."

Lyra stopped struggling and fixed Rarity with an inquisitive stare. "Wait... I'm getting transferred to Ops?"

"Yes, didn't I mention that?"

"...No. You said I was being recalled, not transferred."

"Oh. So sorry."

They proceeded in silence for the next few minutes, passing through the archway and off the sun-blasted desert, into a lush tropical forest.

"Why Ops, though? Don't they have enough ponies to go around as it is? What use would they have for a Runner?"

"Apparently there was an 'incident' with a retrieval mission, and one of the teams needs reinforcing to deal with the aftermath."

"Okay, so why me?"

"Something about needing a pony that can find her way around quickly. A Pathfinder."

"Makes sense," Lyra pondered, a hint of anticipation entering her voice. "Know what team they're putting me with?"

"Sorry, my ears must be deceiving me. It almost sounds as if the unabashed, outspoken Ruins inhabitant was excited about getting dragged back to the Exterior."

"Oh, eat horseapples Rare."

"Fifteen." Rarity replied, chuckling. "Team fifteen. They bungled their retrieval and lost one of their team in the process."

"Fifteen... fifteen... Oh! Walleye and Woona! They're doing retrievals now?"

"Lunatic."

"I'm sorry?"

"Fifteen's Luna goes by 'Lunatic' now."

"Oh? Well, she did always hate being called 'Woona'."

"She's also the one that they lost."

"What? Woona's dead?"

"Missing, as far as I know. Details are need-to-know at the moment."

Rarity turned another corner, through a thicket of branches, emerging into daylight out of a mouldy crack in the side of a hill. Three guards in heavy Outsider armour sat there, playing cards and plainly bored.

"Oh, wow. They sent the Shining Squad to get me, don't I feel special."

The three stallions looked up, fixing Lyra with identical goofy grins as she was gently set down by Rarity.

"Lyra! How've you been?"

"How's it feel to be back in civilisation?"

"Not too demented from all your time out there, I hope?"

"Oh Celestia above I've missed you three." Lyra grinned, glancing between each of them. "Always a fun time."

"Oh you dirty mare."

"I know just the sort of fun you're looking for."

"But you know we're married to the job."

Rarity groaned, rubbing her face with a hoof. "I'm going home. Do any of you gutter-minded ruffians need anything else from me?"

"Oh, there's plenty of stuff, filly-"

"-but I think you'd be more likely to hit us-"

"-than oblige us if we asked."

With a huff, Rarity ignited her horn, teleporting away. "Disgraceful!"

"Love you too, darling." One of the Shinings threw Lyra a nondescript gray band with an inlaid green jewel. "Your beacon. Bit bland, I think."

"Yea, well not all of us get to have suits of full armour and customised cutie-mark beacons, can we?"

The three Shinings merely shrugged.

"So what now? Do I just head back?" Lyra looked at them, waiting for instructions. "All I know is what Rare told me, that I'm getting reassigned to Fifteen."

"We've got some work to do here blocking up that Ruins breach, so you're heading back by yourself."

"The guards know you're coming."

"They'll take you where you need to go. Admin is a bit tight-lipped about the new team makeup, very hush-hush."

"Yea, I heard, Woona went missing." Lyra examined the beacon. It had been years since she'd seen this, and even longer since she'd first made it. "I'm replacing her."

"No, that's not it. You're not replacing her."

"It's to do with a candidate that they're also considering putting with Fifteen."

"She just arrived on the Exterior."

Lyra groaned, triggering the beacon. "A newbie Outsider? Just my luck they'd get put with my new team."

The three Shinings chuckled simultaneously. "She's not an Outsider."

"What?"

The world went sideways.

Author's Note

Chapter 6, 'Core Dump', should air on the 7th of May, barring any unforeseen obstructions popping up.

Core Dump

The world stretched and warped in unnatural ways as Luna's teleport spell executed. The two mares locked in mortal combat were wrenched bodily from their physical moorings and cast into the void between worlds.

RF?

"Not enough." Luna muttered to herself, her concentration fraying as the spell cycled through potential destinations that matched her initial request.

FO?

"That would help her. No," She groaned. Her attack spell was losing strength. She only had a few seconds to choose a target and ground the teleport before Theta overcame her meagre defences and snatched control of the spell.

HR?

"That one Detached ages back. Why in Tartarus is it still in the list?"

NV?

"Not lethal enough."

CI?

Luna blanched. "The last thing anyone needs is for her to get my beacon. No."

UP?

"They'd help her as well. No."

OB?

"Still No. Come on."

RW?

"Not quick enough."

EF?

"N- Wait." Luna paused the destination feed. It could work, provided they landed close enough to Canterlot to get spotted on landing. It was a risk.

"I'm co-ming to ge-et you widdle Woona," Theta taunted in a sing-song voice, her attack beam closing steadily on Luna.

EF?

It was an acceptable risk. Luna gave her affirmative to the spell.

Confirm EF?

She groaned as she gave the final confirmation. So typical for the Exterior's spell library to have everything ridden with safeties and confirmations. It was something she'd have to remedy when she got back. If she got back.

The spell grounded, the reflective interior event horizon vanishing to be replaced by a panorama of Canterlot. Luna dove to the side as her attack spell failed and Theta's beam of doom lanced past her, clipping the tip of her horn and sending a lance of pain flashing into her mind as she felt it crack.

A nearby building exploded as the beam lanced into it before Theta could shut the spell down. The sound of screaming ponies echoed throughout the city as flames and smoke rose into the sky.

"Oh you naugh-ty little fil-ly," Theta sing-songed, bouncing over to where Luna laid, cradling her cracked horn. "You made me blow up a building!"

Luna cried out as Theta grabbed her crippled horn, sending lances of white-hot agony searing into her brain.

"Naughty fillies get punished!" Theta growled, twisting the cracked appendage, sending a spiderweb of fractures scurrying away from the initial crack, eliciting another howl of pain. "Beg! Beg for mercy!"

"You first," Luna spat, channelling the last reserves of her energy and igniting her horn.

Theta jerked her hoof away with a yelp, the contact point smoking slightly from the intense electrical discharge.

"Is that all you have? Really?" Theta remarked with amusement, licking the burn. "I take it back, you don't need to beg for mercy when you're already broken."

Luna chuckled.

"What's so funny?" Theta demanded, narrowing her eyes. "Come on, I like a good joke as much as the next mare."

Luna looked up and muttered a single, venom-laden word. "Broken."

The spell slammed home an instant later, fired by a gold-and-iron-clad guard. Theta was lifted bodily and thrown into a nearby shopfront, glass and splinters of wood flying everywhere. Luna dragged herself to her hooves, limping out of the line of fire.

"You cheeky little..." Theta muttered as she pulled herself free of the wreckage. "That hurt."

The guard shifted his stance, lowering his centre of gravity and levelling his horn at Theta. Lines of power ignited along his armour, highlighting a plethora of runes and wards inlaid in the metal.

"Ooh, pretty!" Theta squealed. "I want it!"

"On the ground, filly!"

"Not even going to sweet-talk me?" Theta remarked, sneering. “I’m not that easy a mare.”

The guard fired, sending a bolt of yellow magic towards her. She deflected it easily, bouncing the ball into yet another building, throwing even more debris into the air. Growling, she counterattacked with a storm of her own magic bolts. The guard's armour flared as they impacted, absorbing the attack and harmlessly shunting it away.

"On the ground!" The guard repeated, forcefully.

"I. Said." Theta repeated. "I'm-"

The comeback was ripped from her mouth as another attack, far larger than before, slammed home. The shop disintegrated in a cloud of shrapnel and smoke, sending what few spectators that had stuck around scurrying from the scene. The rhythmic beating of heavily encumbered hoofsteps accompanied a further trio of guards running down the thoroughfare towards the disturbance.

Luna cowered behind an overturned wagon, fishing at her neck for her necklace's clasp. She had mere moments left to get it off and trigger the beacon inlaid on the reverse face of the band.

What was left of the store's ruins exploded as Theta discharged an immense kinetic pulse, clearing away the wreckage and affording her a clear line of sight to both the guards and the cowering Outsider. The guards seemed obviously surprised that she was somehow still standing.

"You dun’ goofed," She remarked with a giggle, air around her horn rippling with barely-controlled magic. "My turn."

Theta ignited, her mane switching from its usual poofy pink affair to an uncontrolled inferno of light. Heat spiralled off her wings as the energy output intensified, setting fire to nearby shopfronts.

"Ah ah ah!" Theta admonished, pointing at Luna as she fumbled with her beacon. "I'm going to need that. No leaving without me!"

Theta fired a mild kinetic pulse at her, knocking her into a wall and the beacon flying to land between her and the guards, lodging on the sign for a speciality store Luna didn't recognise. She groaned, trying to ignore the aching pain in her everything.

"And now for you." Theta turned back to the guards, only to have her head nearly taken off by a sword wielded by a creature she had never seen before. It was large, almost unnaturally so, with horns sprouting from its head like an elk, only larger and more complex. Pseudo-electrical arcs bounced between the branches in a crude mockery of unicorn magic, a similar cracking aura surrounding the wavy-bladed sword.

"Oh, that's cute." Theta remarked, pulling her own sword from the aether, a pointlessly showy neon-pink affair with a hugely oversized blade easily five times as long as she was, ribbons and streamers flailing from the blade's trailing edge. "Mine's better."

"Ha!" The creature growled, bringing his own blade overhead for a strike.

Theta blocked the strike with ease, showering them both with sparks as the two magic blades struggled for dominance over each other. An unholy screech echoed throughout the square as the thaumic discharge intensified, washing over the two combatants.

"Surprise!" She yelled, lowering her horn and firing a blast point-blank into the creature's face.

Luna dove for her beacon at the same moment as one of the guards, sending them both tumbling sideways in an undignified tumble of hooves and horns. The pain in her horn flared again as it slammed against the ground repeatedly. She pulled her hind hooves up, slamming them home into the guard's barrel. A high-pitched moan confirming that her hasty aim had been true.

She rolled back to her hooves, only to stop when the remaining three guards turned to face her, spears raised and aimed. With her horn in its current state, she could barely cast simple spells without the pain crippling her. Outright magical combat was impossible at this point.

She hollered like a madmare, lunging forward in the hope that her frenzied attack would put the guards off-balance and give her at least a slight advantage.

It didn't. The closest guard swung his spear around toward her face in a strike that Luna was barely able to dodge. She slid beside him, hooking her hindlegs around the back of his neck as she pulled his front hooves out from under him, slamming his face into the ground with a sickening crack.

Using the now-downed guard as leverage, she pulled herself into a standing position, catching the first guard's fallen spear with her tail and tossing it at the second guard, granting her a critical opening as he moved to block it. In a single smooth movement, she flipped forward, pirouetted, and bucked the second guard in the face, knocking him out cold.

Her rampage was swiftly cut short as the final guard slammed the shaft of his spear against the back of her head, sending her sprawling into the dirt. She groaned in agony, fumbling at her hooves, trying to regain her footing.

"Surprise!"

She looked up to see Theta blast the elk-like creature in the face ineffectually, the magical strike flowing over its face like so much water. Theta's eyes went wide, clearly surprised at this turn of events.

The creature simply punched her in the side of her face, sending her tumbling sideways. His sword slashed down again, cutting clean through Theta's magical construct blade as though it wasn't even there.

Theta, off-balance and unprepared, slowly backed away from her opponent, attempting to charge another spell. It too was snuffed out as the creature swung his weapon at her, the flat of the blade slamming into the side of her face. Luna winced as something cracked and Theta was again knocked sideways, her face badly bruised and a thin trickle of blood leaking from one nostril.

"Give up?" He asked in a gravelly voice, aiming his sword point-first at Theta's face.

Theta looked up at him with a gaze of mixed hatred and amusement. "If you wanted to play rough, you should have just asked, big boy."

The creature snorted, slipping the tip of his sword under her chin, lifting her face up level with his. "After they get through with you, you'll be begging for this to ease your suffering, princess."

"Yeah, I don't take suffering," Theta sneered. "I dish it out."

She grabbed the blade with her magic, yanking it free of the creature's grip. He stumbled backwards, Theta spinning the blade around to face him, a look of pure malevolence painting her features.

"Like this."

The blade fell from her grip with a thud, falling ineffectually to the ground. She stared at it in surprise, trying repeatedly to reignite her magic and lift the blade again before noticing the silvery-grey band locked around the base of her horn.

The fourth guard backed away wearing a smug look on his face, having snuck up behind Theta and slipped the suppressor band on.

"Oh, that's not fair." Theta whined.

The creature fired an arc of lightning into her face. Theta's body dropped like a brick, unconscious.

Okay, now or never. Luna thought to herself as the guard turned to face her. She ignited her magic, calling what vestiges of energy she had left in a last-ditch attempt to teleport far enough away to give her a chance to trigger her beacon and get home.

Her horn exploded.

Luna shrieked in agony as fragments of horn fell to the ground in front of her. Her brain felt like it was on fire, waves of pain radiating away from where her horn used to sit atop her head.

"Well, that will make our job easier."

She turned her gaze up into the face of the creature, eyes blurred with tears of pain.

"You will not find me easy to break, monster."

"Oh, I should hope not, Princess." He remarked. "I don't know how you managed to escape, but rest assured it won't happen again. You will be taught the lesson that your kind deserve."

Luna sneered. The creature was too close for her to escape cleanly if she triggered her beacon now, and she couldn't let them have access to it, lest they discovered the secrets it held.

She spat in his face, masking her bringing her fetlock down on the beacon and shattering it. He glared back, saliva dripping down his face.

"You'll regret that."

"Oh shut up and get it over with."

"Happily. Flash?"

She turned just fast enough to see the butt of the final guard's spear slam into her face before the world went dark.

Author's Note

...I got featured. Again. I... Uh... :pinkiegasp:

Team Fifteen

Twilight fidgeted as she sat and looked around the dimly-lit conference room, trying her best to not call attention to herself. The other occupants, a dirty red earth pony stallion, and the soot-covered pink mare she had had a... speedy introduction to earlier sat adjacent to her.

"So, you new here?" The pink mare asked, a shred of irritation showing through in her voice.

"Yeah." Twilight hesitated, not sure how to respond. "Got here a few hours ago."

"Thought so, you look new. Ops come and get you or you get here yourself?"

"I... I ran into a duplicate of myself and followed along with her."

"Really?" She sat up, curious. "That must have been weird. Not many Outsiders get here that way."

"I'm... I'm not..."

"Anyway, I'm a Pinkie Pie. Just Pinkie. I'm the normal one, so don't get me confused with the endless different copies of me that just bounce around and yell 'FUN!' all the time.”

"I see..."

"And this," Pinkie gestured to the stallion. "Is a Macintosh. He's called 'The Machinist' since that's all he seems to do. Everypony knows who he is."

"Eeeyup."

"He's responsible for most of the armour and equipment we wear, along with some more... hare-brained ideas. Like that jet engine."

"Eeeyup."

"Which almost killed me."

"Nope."

"Mac, I broke the sound barrier. Indoors. Even Rainboom herself isn't that crazy."

"Somepony talking about me?"

Twilight turned as three new ponies entered the room, Celestia following behind them.

"This the newbie we're getting saddled with?" added a grey pegasus mare, fixing Twilight with a critical glare. "A Sparkle. Well at least you should be an alright replacement for Lunatic."

Twilight shrunk back, trying to sink as far into the chair as she could manage.

"Please be seated, my little ponies, so that we can begin." Celestia walked to the head of the table, taking the oversized chair for herself.

The remaining three mares took their seats, a mint-green unicorn with an overly enthusiastic grin taking the chair next to Twilight.

Celestia sat forward, her expression shifting to one of seriousness. "What you are about to hear is not to leave this room, is that understood?"

The six ponies nodded.

"As some of you know, earlier this morning, Team Fifteen was involved in an incident during an otherwise routine operation to retrieve a rogue Outsider hiding in the Interior. While the operation was a partial success, it came at the cost of team member Luna Juliet, alias 'Lunatic'. Derpy, could you elaborate further, please?"

The grey mare nodded, leaning around to address the group. "We were assigned to bring back Theta, a rogue Pie. Our plan was to grab her during an evening when it was raining, to mask our arrival in that cell and our approach to where she was bunkered up. Somehow, she knew we were coming and almost killed the three of us. Lunatic sacrificed herself to send them both to the Falls."

Twilight tilted her head in confusion. There was that word again, 'Falls'. The rest of the group had varying looks of shock and dismay.

"Thank you, Derpy," Celestia continued, "It is quite clear at this point that somepony on the Exterior is feeding secrets to Rogues, and this is not something we can permit. Team Fifteen will be tasked with hunting down and plugging this leak with all due haste, while simultaneously determining Lunatic’s current location for search and rescue."

Celestia paused for a moment, before continuing. "To this end, I will be assigning three extra ponies to Fifteen for the duration of this operation, in order to fill the requisite experience gap."

It took a moment for the implication to sink in before one of them, the rainbow-maned pegasus, stood up with indignation. "Six ponies? Fifteen was always a three-pony team!"

"And we never took rookies, either!" Derpy griped, pointing at Twilight.

"Five, actually. Mac will be serving as your quartermaster and equipment specialist, not a field member," Celestia clarified, waving her hoof for silence. "And I understand your hesitation, but I believe that this team configuration will be the best for your future operations."

Derpy huffed, sinking back into her seat.

"Now, I understand that many of you are meeting directly for the first time, especially Twilight here," Celestia gestured towards her, only to stop mid-movement as she noticed Twilight’s utterly bewildered expression. “Who seems to be a bit out of her depth at this point.”

“You could say that,” Twilight mumbled, still trying to make sense of anything that had been said.

“Newbies,” Walleye muttered under her breath. “How long have you been here? Surely Alpha has given you the run-down by now if you’re going to be working in Operations?”

“About… Two hours?” Twilight guessed. It was impossible to tell time without any windows. “I really don’t know what’s going on.”

“Seriously?” Walleye moaned, dragging a hoof down her face. “Two hours? You’re saddling us with a newcomer thats only been here for two hours?”

“I have my reasons,” Celestia replied.

“I’m sure you do,” Walleye said. “But we don’t have time to waste bringing an untrained, uneducated newbie up to speed when we have urgent work to get done!”

“Uneducated?” Twilight exclaimed. “Uneducated? You’re accusing me of being uneducated? ME?”

“Oh, I’m sure you’ve got plenty of book-smarts, Sparkle,” Walleye shot back. “But this is the Exterior. Unless the world you came from has some forbidden, impossible repository of Outsider-related knowledge, all your education is useless to us.”

“I learn quickly,” Twilight growled, narrowing her eyes at Walleye.

“Alright,” Walleye smirked. “You’ve got one minute to get yourself up to speed before we move along with the briefing.”

“Fine!” Twilight shouted, before looking around the room. “Where are the books?”

“I daresay you don’t need books with her here,” Celestia said, gesturing at Pinkie.

Twilight looked between Celestia and Pinkie, confused. “Why her?”

“I remember things,” Pinkie cheerily explained. “That’s why I was in Analysis, best memory ever! Quiz me! Quiz me! Quiz me!”

“Okay,” Twilight smiled, sorting through the pertinent questions in her head. “Who is Theta, and why were you trying to capture her?”

“Theta’s a Rogue,” Pinkie began. “‘Rogue’ is what we used to refer to an Outsider who, well, goes rogue. Usually they hide somewhere in the Interior and use their knowledge to either subjugate the local population or just cause outright destruction. Alicorn Rogues like Theta are especially dangerous, since they have enough raw magic to wreak destruction on a massive scale.”

“I can imagine,” Twilight said.

“Oh, I don’t think you can,” Pinkie countered. “Rogues like Theta know tricks that let them throw around huge amounts of magical energy. Levels of magic that allow her to fling something like a moon around like a hammer. And that level of power is dangerous.”

“Dangerous how?”

“You can only cram so much magic into an area before the world itself can't take it any more. Force it enough, and you run the risk of tearing an entire universe free from its moorings and flinging it into the Void.”

“The Void?”

“The space between universes. A place that is neither Inside nor Outside. We don’t know much about it, since once a universe detaches and falls into the Void, it’s impossible to reach it any more.”

“So… Why is that an issue? Sounds like a self-resolving problem…”

“Because whenever a world detaches like that, it causes damage to the worlds around them.”

“Oh.”

“It’s possible to detach a world cleanly and with a minimum of collateral damage, but it’s rare. Most of the time when a world detaches, it pulls other worlds long with it. If enough nearby worlds fall into the Void, it creates a fissure like the Ruins, and makes interworld transport very difficult for us.”

“I see…”

“That, and Rogues carry an unacceptable risk of exposing us whenever they go around flaunting their power. We can’t exactly let that happen.”

“I suppose there’s also a bit of an ethical issue,” Twilight surmised. “You’re technically responsible for these Rogues, so you have an obligation to minimise the damage they cause…”

“I never thought about it like that…” Pinkie mumbled, trailing off.

“Okay, time’s up,” Walleye barked. “Pinkie, get to the next part of the briefing.”

“Eh?” Pinkie jerked forwards, snapped out of her contemplation.

“Briefing. Introduce everyone.”

"Say no more!" Pinkie shouted, bouncing onto the table. She spun in place, before pointing a hoof at Derpy.

"Derpy Hooves. Foxtrot. Leader of Team Fifteen, specialising in recon and sharpshooting. Got the name 'Walleye' after managing to bullseye a shot at five miles range back when she was on Team Eleven. She's the best sniper on the Exterior, bar none."

Derpy grinned with pride.

"Next, we have Rainbow Dash." Pinkie pointed at the rainbow-maned pegasus. "Yankee. She's Fifteen's aerial support specialist. She's also the only Rainbow Dash on the Exterior who's managed to pull off a Sonic Rainboom. She's fast, she's brash, she's the legendary Rainboom Dash!"

Rainbow blushed, giving a slightly nervous grin.

"Now, You!" She pointed to Mac. "Big Macintosh. Lima. Also known as 'The Machinist' considering that's all he ever does. I'm sure you all know who he is. He also almost blew up the Machine Shop this morning with a jet engine."

"Eeeyup" Mac said simply, the barest hint of a satisfied smirk curling at the edge of his mouth.

"And over here we have Lyra Heartstrings, Sierra." Pinkie shouted as she pointed at the mint-green unicorn next to Twilight. "Largely considered to be entirely pants-on-head insane by most of the Exterior since she has spent the last five years living in the Ruins. If you need something found, she's the mare for you. She was also thought to be dead by a few ponies, too."

"Rumours of my demise were greatly exaggerated." Lyra scoffed. "And I'm not that insane"

She looked at Twilight with a grin that could only be described as 'psychotically exuberant'.

"And myself" Pinkie concluded. "I'm Pinkie Pie, Tango, but not tangy. Until this morning, I worked for Analysis. And you've probably noticed, I know everything about everypony."

Everyone slunk back into their seats, except for Twilight, who leant forward.

"I thought you said you didn't like having fun? You certainly look like you're enjoying yourself!"

"I said I didn't like having fun all the time." Pinkie corrected. "The occasional fun moment, or party even, is fine. Just not all the time."

Twilight cocked her head in confusion.

"Anyway, enough about me, we need to hear about you, newbie!"

"Ah! Um..." Twilight trailed off, thinking of what to say.

"I'll field this one." Celestia interrupted. "If you don't mind, Twilight."

"By all means, go ahead."

"I have elected to add Twilight to Team Fifteen due to a myriad of circumstances, chief of which is the need for Fifteen to have an adept magic-user since Lunatic has been lost. Though she may be a relative newcomer to the Exterior, I have no doubt she will be an invaluable asset as any Sparkle would be."

"And?" Lyra prompted, waving her hoof. "Why this Sparkle? What's going on that you're assigning her to this team?"

"Lyra, what are you going on about?" Rainbow asked, irritated. "She's just a newbie. Nothing weird about that. Annoying, sure, but not weird."

"Oh, that's not all, is it, Celestia?" Lyra said, grinning mischievously. "This Sparkle isn't like us, is she?"

"No." Celestia admitted. "She isn't."

"Well?" Lyra prompted. "Do share with the group."

"Twilight here is an Insider."

The room was silent for a moment as everyone turned to stare at Twilight.

"What?!?"

"She's an Insider?"

"Are you insane?"

"QUIET!" Celestia slammed her hoof into the table, irritation etched into her features. "Yes, she is an Insider. She's the first Insider to ever escape the Interior. Given the auspicious nature of her arrival, and the requirement for secrecy preventing her from returning home, I elected to give her something to do rather than keeping her here like a prisoner."

"Forgive my bluntness, Celestia, but why?" Derpy asked, a hint of disgust edging its way into her words. "She's an Insider. We don't concern ourselves with the wellbeing of Insiders. Lock her up and forget about her."

"We are not barbarians, Derpy. Insider or not, she's still a pony."

"We may not be barbarians, but I've seen Insiders who are." Derpy shot back. "You're not going to convince me to have her on my team."

"I don't need to convince you," Celestia said, narrowing her eyes threateningly. "It's an order. She's an official member of Team Fifteen. She's your assigned Magic Specialist. Like it or not, she's working with you."

"Horseapples! I do not work with Insiders. And there is nothing you can say that will make me!"

"Continue with this, and I will have you restrained, Hooves," Celestia warned. "The decision has been made. That is the end of it."

"Oh, you're going to pull rank on me then? You going to send me to my quarters as well?"

"Oh for Celestia's sake, Walleye," Lyra groaned, head in her hooves. "I get that you don't like Insiders. But she's valuable. Do you have any idea how much easier my work would be if I was an Insider?"

"You want to be one of them?"

"Well, I wouldn't really expect you to understand, since you're in Operations and you don't have to deal with the practical issues of being an Outsider when you spend so much time in the Interior and the Falls."

"What issues?" Rainbow cut in, interested.

"Outsiders get noticed. It's part of who we are. Some innate fact of our nature means we just stand out to other ponies in the Interior. It makes covert operations very difficult. It's the reason no Outsider stays there for long, eventually somepony is going to question them."

"So?" Derpy challenged. "What's this got to do with her?"

"She's an Insider, you dolt. Those rules don't apply to her."

"She won't be noticed like we would." Rainbow surmised after a moment, gasping. "She'd be practically invisible compared to us!"

"Exactly!" Lyra tapped her nose. "Free to move wherever she pleased, and she can hang around as long as she needs to. Not to mention that she can convincingly masquerade as a Sparkle on any cell we visit. That is a massive asset to us. I can't even begin to imagine the places we could get with her help!"

"Seems like everypony is against me on this." Derpy muttered, rising from the table and heading for the door. "Fine, she can come play with the real ponies. Just don't be surprised when something goes wrong and it's her fault!"

She stormed from the room, loud hoofsteps echoing through the halls.

"Did I do something wrong?" Twilight asked, completely confused.

"No." Celestia glared down the hallway, voice laced with annoyance. "You did nothing wrong, my dear Twilight."

"Yea, don't worry about Walleye." Lyra slapped her hoof down on Twilight's withers, smiling. "She's always been a bit high-strung."

"Says the mare who doesn't even work with her." Rainbow remarked.

"Okay, fine, you work with her, am I wrong?"

"Of course not! She's a nightmare when she gets in one of her moods!" Rainbow said, flopping back into her seat. "Though I think at the moment she's just worked up about Lunatic and she's taking it out on the newbie."

"Be that as it may," Celestia interrupted. "She is the leader of Team Fifteen, and I need her mind to be on the mission ahead."

"She'll be fine," Rainbow reassured her. "Give her a bit to come to terms with it and she'll be right back wearing the saddle before you know it."

"I hope so." Celestia sighed, raising from her seat. "Lunatic is still out there in the Falls, and we need to find out how Theta got information about our operations."

"Um... I was meaning to ask this before Walleye cut me off..." Twilight spoke up, drawing everyone's attention. "What are the Falls?"

“Perhaps it would be best for you to get that answer from somewhere more suited to answering questions,” Celestia said, draping a wing over Twilight. “Come. It’s time I finally made good on my promise.”

Paradise Found

Twilight gaped, unable to find words capable of efficiently conveying the impossibility of what she was seeing. The chamber she now found herself inside was so far beyond anything she had ever expected to see in her lifetime that her brain was very nearly on the verge of shutting down in protest. Unlike what little of the Exterior that she had seen thus far, (relatively) simple rooms and chambers with doors and lights, The Library was something else entirely.

It wasn’t merely the size that Twilight was having trouble dealing with, but more the utterly foreign rules that seemed to govern the chamber that she now found herself inside. The gargantuan spherical chamber had seemingly done away with conventional laws of physics in favor of something that gave Twilight the impression that she was standing on the interior wall of a thousand-kilometre-wide ball. A place where down, in contrast to what she had come to expect, no longer pointed towards the centre of the world, but away from it.

Willing herself not to panic at her mind’s insistence that everything was about to come crashing down on her, Twilight turned, taking in more and more of the chamber. Immense triangular and pentagonal patterns adorned the walls, delineating boundaries between what she assumed were colossal bookshelves. With a start, she realised that the pattern continued along the wall to what she identified as the floor, driving home the full scale of the place - Each of the delineated areas had boundaries hundreds of kilometres long. You could put the entirety of the Equestrian subcontinent into this room and it would barely touch the sides.

And floating in the centre of this impossible place, a small sun burnt a brilliant white, illuminating the entire chamber. As she stared, a miniature flare arced away from the surface of the miniature star, sending patterns of light chasing across the corresponding floor, or wall from Twilight’s vantage point.

“Welcome to The Library,” Celestia said, beaming down at her.

“Celestia above,” Twilight whispered, awestruck. “What is this place?”

“This is the Index,” Celestia explained, leading Twilight away from the doorway they had entered through. “The various books in this chamber catalogue and map the myriad tomes contained within the Library’s various subchambers.”

“Subchambers?” Twilight croaked. “There’s More?”

“There are a further ninety-two chambers of similar size to this that contain the actual content of the Library.”

“Okay, this is too much.”

“You wanted a library, Twilight,” Celestia said, voice stern. “I recall you insisting that I bring you here not an hour ago. I also seem to remember you claiming that you didn’t need a room, since you could live here.”

“I wasn’t expecting this!” Twilight shrieked, hyperventilating. “You could fit all of Equestria into this one chamber alone! And it just… keeps going! The walls slope up and it keeps going and it should come crashing down because this is down and that’s up and…”

Twilight gulped on the air in a panic, fuzzy darkness curling at the edge of her vision.

“What were you expecting?”

“Not THIS!” Twilight yelled back, voice straining. “I was expecting big, like, Library of Canterlot-big. Bigger, even. But… You’ve hollowed out a small moon and are living on the inside!”

“Twilight…”

“How is this even possible? The magic required to reshape gravity on this scale is immense! I can’t even begin to guess the scale required to pull this off!”

“Twilight…”

“And then you put a star in the middle! How in the name of creation itself is it still burning? How have we not been incinerated? How is it sitting there?”

“TWILIGHT!”

“WHAT?” Twilight spun to face Celestia, questions continuing to pile up inside her head.

“Calm down.”

“Are you serious?” Twilight asked, tilting her head slightly. “I am in the most impossible structure ever conceived, and you’re asking me to be calm?”

“Yes,” Celestia implored, exasperation creeping into her voice. “I realise that this is probably a bit much for you to assimilate all at once, but you’re focussing on the wrong things right now.”

“Oh Really?”

“Think about where you are.”

“I’m standing on the inside of a giant ball with a miniature star in the middle and gravity is asleep at the wheel.”

“No. Where are you? What did you come here for?”

“A library. It’s a library.”

“Yes.”

“It’s a library.”

“Yes.”

“I am standing inside the largest library that could ever possibly exist, anywhere, ever.”

“I daresay you are right,” Celestia said, guiding Twilight along the marked pathway, flanked on both sides by guide rails and navigational aids.

“How big is it?”

“This chamber, if I recall correctly, has a diameter of around 1,500 kilometres. It serves as the index for each of the ninety-two sub-chambers linked to it.” Celestia led them down a staircase into a brightly-lit hall, shelves of meticulously-catalogued index volumes stretching away in both directions.

“How many?”

“I’m sorry? How many what?”

“Books. How many are there?”

“I’m… not sure, to be honest. I don’t know if there are words for numbers that large…”

“That many?”

“For a sense of scale, these shelves cover the entire shell that you saw before, and extend to a depth of… about twelve kilometres, if my memory is correct.”

“Thats…” Twilight paused for a moment, running the numbers in her head. “Three Hundred Million cubic kilometres.”

“That sounds about right.”

“Of nothing but bookshelves and books.”

“Correct.”

“And that’s the index?”

“It would be more accurate to call it a map,” Celestia clarified, turning down an intersection. “With the scale involved, mere numeric indices are insufficient to guide patrons to the sections they desire. Tomes here contain both index information and navigational aids to help ponies reach the shelves the need.”

“I can see ponies getting lost in here…”

“Less often than you would think. Everything is extensively marked, you can find your way out easily.”

“Where are we going, anyway?”

“To get you some preliminary reading,” Celestia replied, turning again and leading Twilight through an archway. “Books to familiarise yourself with some of our more useful magic, operations principles, all to bring you up to speed.”

They emerged into daylight, the shelves that were flanking them falling away to reveal a tiered amphitheatre embedded into the floor of the chamber. What seemed like hundreds of ponies, many of them duplicates of Twilight herself, milled around the various levels, some talking, but most of them reading.

Twilight felt her eyes again drawn irrevocably upwards towards the walls of the shell, taking in the hundred-kilometre-wide delineations and interlocking patterns, only to feel a twinge of confusion as smaller details made themselves apparent. Small protrusions that weren’t there before, patterns of light and shadow that weren’t there before, the sun was a different color.

“Why did the sun change color?”

“It didn’t,” Celestia answered, gazing up and the miniature solar ball. “It’s always been that color.”

“It’s yellow now,” Twilight said, squinting. “It was white before.”

“This one’s always been yellow, Twilight.”

“What do you mean, ‘This one’?”

Celestia smirked, leading Twilight down the stairway. “You’ll get it in a moment, I’m sure.”

“It’s changed color,” Twilight stated, staring at the various copies of herself as they descended. “What’s there to get?”

“There is a deeper implication here than mere color, Twilight,” Celestia encouraged, stopping as they reached one of the tiers, before proceeding along it. “Find it.”

“It’s… hmm…” Twilight mumbled, trying to keep focus as Celestia led her forward. “Stars don’t change color like that, but I suppose this isn’t exactly a normal star floating up there. It’s only a few dozen kilometres across, and… Waitaminute.”

Twilight turned in place, pointing at a purple-coated, blue-maned stallion they had just passed, nose-deep in an ancient tome. “What.”

The stallion raised his head, frowning at Twilight. “It’s rude to point, you know.”

“You’re me!”

“Yes.”

“But you’re male!”

“Yes.”

“That’s impossible.”

“And yet here I am,” the stallion muttered, turning back to his book.

“Twilight,” Celestia prompted, pulling Twilight gently away from her stallion counterpart.

“That was a stallion version of me.”

“It was, yes.”

“There are stallion versions of me.”

“This surprises you?”

“Yes!”

“Why?”

“Because it’s… I…” Twilight trailed off, failing to solidify the reason she had been so shocked by her male duplicate. “I don’t know.”

“I daresay the events of today have taken a considerable toll on you, Twilight Sparkle. It may simply be that you have reached the limit of surprises you are capable of easily withstanding.”

“You’re probably right…”

“You will find gender-swapped and even race-swapped versions of all of the ponies here. It is yet another inexplicable quirk of the universe.”

“Male versions of me… Alicorn versions of that Pinkie Pie mare…”

“Exactly!”

“Wait, does that mean that there are...” Twilight stopped short as Celestia halted next to a pair of Twilight duplicates, one of them sporting a pair of wings in addition to her horn. “Alicorn versions of me…”

“Wait until you see the griffin versions of you,” The alicorn Twilight smirked, setting down the scroll she had been perusing. “Or the dragon version!”

“There’s a dragon version of me?”

“No,” Celestia chuckled. “Not here, at least. Though I daresay there is a world in the Interior with your dragon counterpart.”

“Oh, go and ruin all my fun,” The alicorn pouted, unable to hide the barest hint of a grin at the edge of her mouth.

“Twilight here has just arrived,” Celestia said. “She needs instruction and tutelage on our basic magic framework, and she’ll need to be shown how to assemble a beacon, as well.”

“Can do, Pinks. What’s her homeworld?”

“Her homeworld’s Slateform. She knows enough to get straight into our spells.”

“Waitaminute, Slateform?” The third Twilight sat up, suddenly paying attention. “This is the Insider I got caught by this morning?”

“Oh, hello Echo,” Celestia smiled. “Didn’t see you there behind that book.”

“Insider?” Alicorn-Twilight asked, pupils shrinking in surprise. “She’s an Insider?”

“Yes, Aleph,” Celestia said, her wings fluttering in frustration. “Is that going to be a problem?”

“Uh… No. I just wasn’t aware we were handing out secret knowledge to Insiders. Or that there were Insiders here at all”

“She is the first, and I have my reasons for wanting her taught our magic.”

“She’s been here for all of three hours,” Echo observed. “And you trust her that much already?”

“Yes.” Celestia stated flatly.

“I’m not going to try and wring the justification out of you, Pink,” Aleph sighed. “I just hope your trust is accurate. Leave her with us, I’ll show her the ropes.”

“Thank you,” Celestia smiled at Twilight warmly, before heading back in the direction they had come from, leaving her with her two duplicates. The three Twilights stared at each other awkwardly, each of them not knowing what to say next.

“Noneuclidean!” Twilight blurted.

“What?” Echo asked, head tilted in confusion.

“This Library. It’s non-euclidean. It’s a gigantic spatial graph. Forward then left isn’t the same as left then forward!”

“How long have you been awake?” Aleph asked, smirking.

“Seven hours or so… Why?”

“You sound sleep-deprived,” Aleph smirked.

“More specifically, you sound like what we sound like when we’re sleep deprived,” Echo clarified. “Sparkles, that is. You sound like a sleep-deprived Sparkle. Or a manic-slash-hysterical Sparkle.”

Twilight and Aleph stared at her, wordless.

“What?”

“Anyway,” Aleph continued, turning back to Twilight. “We need to get you up to speed, apparently. What’s the most advanced spell you know?”

“My final semester project is an intelligent area search and pathfinding spell. That’s about as advanced as I’ve gotten, at the moment…”

“Okay, that’s Thaumic Self-Initiative at the least, plus Instructional Embedding. Mostly utility magic, but fairly far along.”

“How much offensive magic do you know?” Echo asked.

“Offensive, as in…”

“Attack spells.”

“Um… I can set things on fire…”

“And by ‘things’ you mean…”

“Candles… bits of paper…”

“That’s Ignite Fire. That’s a basic spell. Every unicorn with half an education knows that spell.”

“Look,” Twilight growled. “Equestria is at peace. There’s not much need to know how to blow the side off a mountain where I come from.”

“Enough, both of you,” Aleph barked, sorting through the stack of books. “First, you’ll need Starswirl’s Conflagration Unleashed, which will give you a good grounding in general magic combat technique.”

She plucked the book from the stack, passing it to Twilight before returning to her search.

“After that, Offensive Thaumic Formatting by Pelt, and Clover’s Cataclysmic Conjurations. Read Conjurations last. It’s much older, but you’ll need Pelt’s Fifth Thaumic Field Equation to get any of Clover’s spells to work with anything resembling reliability. Clover was a genius spellcaster, but she sucked at math.”

Two more books joined the pile, one a modern hardback, the other a leather-bound tome of indeterminable age.

“Once you’ve mastered that, you’ll need to read through Advanced Thaumic Embedding and Programming, which will give you the framework required to work with the spells in Alpha’s Applied Void Magic.”

“Void Magic?” Twilight asked, looking at the book with curiosity. It appeared to be bound in metal, with pages made of gold leaf.

“Fancy term for Outsider magic,” Aleph replied. “Most of the Exterior-unique spells you’ll come across utilise what’s called ‘Void Intrusion’, which is just a fancy way of saying that they interact with the fabric of one or more universes at once. The book has more detail. And while we’re on the topic, Beacon Assembly for the Experienced Spellcaster. You’ll need that one, I’m sure.”

Twilight eyed the books with fascination, straightening the pile as she did so.

“Away from the topic of blowing ponies away,” Echo began, picking a book from her own pile. “This is A Brief History of The Exterior. I’m sure Alpha gave you the abridged version, but this should answer some of the questions you’ve been having.”

“Brief?” Twilight asked incredulously, examining the doorstopper.

“It’s either this or we get you a copy of The Encyclopaedia Exterra.”

“Before I get completely distracted by this… treasure trove, I have to ask. What are the Falls, exactly?”

Aleph winced, her wings fluttering unconsciously. “How much do you want to know?”

“Enough to know why everyone keeps wincing whenever it's mentioned.”

“See, the thing is,” Aleph began, scanning through her book pile again. “It’s a bit complicated to explain. No-one really knows exactly why the Falls exist. It’s sort of a ‘this is how the world is’ kind of thing, and there isn’t an exact definition that doesn’t rely on extremely convoluted eight-dimensional vector calculus.”

“Try.”

“The Falls are the area of the Interior that is adjacent to the Ruins.”

“That is… so extremely unhelpful.”

“Ah!” Aleph exclaimed, pulling another book from the pile, sending eventing tumbling. “Here we are! The Falls Catalogue. Right, so… picture a ball.”

“A ball?”

“Just go with me here. The Ruins are essentially a large crack in that ball, an area that is structurally unstable, only partially linked to the rest of the ball. Not a very happy place to be.”

“With you so far… kinda.”

“The Falls are the area around that crack, but not part of the crack, if that makes sense.”

“To a degree, yes.”

“Except in reality, the relationship is backwards. The Ruins are caused by the Falls, not the other way around, and the ball isn’t a ball, but rather an eight-dimensional hyperstructure.”

“The Falls cause the Ruins?”

“Generally, the Falls have a greater propensity to produce individuals of greater-than-average magic potential, coupled with lower-than-average overall positive ethical pressure in the world. Ponies who have the potential to cause Detachment Events, and are more likely to do so.”

“Why go there at all then?”

“Not every world is at risk like that,” Echo answered, popping up again. “In general, ‘Falls’ is used to describe worlds within a particular vector space that have either dangerously powerful magic inhabitants, hostile inhabitants, or both. There are worlds bordering the Ruins that aren’t Fall worlds.”

“That… doesn’t really answer my question.”

“Damage control,” Aleph explained. “Some Fall worlds are naturally self-limiting, while others… aren’t. Most forays into the Falls are to either ascertain the state of the world, or to effect precise changes to mitigate the possibility for Detachment Events”

“Changes? Like what?”

“Assassinations!” Echo cheerfully exclaimed, grinning lopsidedly.

“Echo, do try not to scare the poor newbie,” Aleph admonished. “It’s not always assassinations.”

“You kill ponies?” Twilight asked, eyes widening in shock.

“You’re not going to last very long here if you have qualms about killing,” Echo stated, sneering.

“I don’t want to kill anypony!” Twilight shouted, taking a step backward.

“An attitude that isn’t all that strange, considering where you’re from,” Aleph conceded, trying to defuse the situation. “Slateform is an unnaturally quiet world by the standards of the Interior. Even throughout your history there was very little war or conflict, and many of the common defining attributes of Interior worlds are missing from yours. A naturally pacifistic culture is to be expected, given that environment.”

“She wasn’t all that pacifistic back in Gate Three,” Echo said. “By the look of it, she was ready to take my head off.”

“Echo, shut up. You’re not helping.” Aleph barked, glaring at Echo. “A lack of desire to kill is hardly something to sneer at.”

“I don’t want to kill anypony…” Twilight repeated, whimpering.

“Oh, don’t be like that,” Aleph sighed. “It’s fine. Echo’s just trying to rile you up. Our job isn’t about all about killing and death and mayhem. We’re explorers. Explorers that live somewhat at right angles to the world we explore, but explorers nonetheless. And sometimes it’s better to commit a small evil in the name of greater safety.”

Echo snorted, but didn’t say anything, watching the exchange with detached amusement.

“The greatest good that can be done in the world is by those who would stand up against those who would take from them their friends,” Twilight said, quietly.

“Exactly!”

“I learnt that from my brother,” Twilight admitted. “I never really understood it.”

“Like I said, you’re from a quiet world. It’s bound to be a shock being thrown into our world.”

“Oh, stop babying her,” Echo cut in, glaring at Twilight. “Here’s the long and short of it. The Interior is not the happy-go-lucky fun-fun-times world that you’re from. Ponies can and will try to kill you there, and they’ll succeed unless you’re willing to do what you’d not consider normally in order to defend yourself and those around you.”

“I will not kill ponies,” Twilight reiterated forcefully, picking the pile of books up in the grip of her magic. “I am not going to marr myself like that!”

“You say that now, little Twilight, but when the time comes you will either do what needs to be done, or you’ll lose everything.” Echo leaned in, a contemptuous sneer stretched across her features. “Until then, you’re your own worst enemy.”

Twilight glared back for a moment, before turning to Aleph. “Thank you for your help, and the books.”

With nary a look backwards, Twilight walked off, the tower of books floating faithfully along behind her as she departed.

Author's Note

We're back, fillies!

For the curious, there are words for numbers large enough to describe the number of books in this library. Those words are 'Forty Sextillion'.
I have found that it is far more useful (and amusing) to use SI prefixes at this point, leading to the words 'Forty Zettabooks'. Trying to visualise a quantity of books that large is left entirely as an exercise to the reader.

Split Insertion

The azure unicorn paced around the edge of the chamber, examining the arrayed members of Team Fifteen with a critical eye. Nondescript saddlebags adorned the flanks of each team member, all of them filled with enough provisions and equipment to last them weeks on an otherwise-inhospitable world, except for Twilight, whose bags were filled, predictably, with books and reference materials, and Walleye, who had foregone one bag in favour of an elaborate harness and sling to hold her impractically-oversized rifle.

“Keep all hooves inside the circle,” The unicorn instructed, gesturing to the clearly-delineated safety boundaries near the edge of the chamber. “Don’t give me that look, Hooves. More than half of your team are inexperienced and if they aren’t told the rules, we’re going to end up with heads inside walls, or heads inside other ponies’ flanks, or any other on a long list of unpleasant catastrophes.”

“Trixie, just hurry it up,” Rainboom implored, tapping her hooves in impatience. “I hate sitting still.”

“If you’d let Trixie continue, and not interrupt, this will take less time.”

Rainboom huffed, but stayed quiet. Twilight glanced between her and Walleye, positioned next to each other on the departures pad. Apart from a single withering glare the grey pegasus had shot her when they first entered the chamber, it seemed as though Walleye had resolved to simply ignore her presence entirely. It was proving to be annoying for the naturally-curious Twilight, who wanted to inquire about the prodigious bruising sported by both Walleye and Rainboom, reminiscent of a massive brawl.

“Okay. All hooves inside the circle. When Exiting, make sure you have at least twenty hooflengths clearance between you and any obstructions, or you risk bringing them along with you. Orientation is preserved when you transit, momentum isn’t. That’s a safety feature, we don’t want any of you getting splattered because you Exited while flying.”

She shot a meaningful glare at Rainboom, who blushed slightly, embarrassed.

“Your destination is Shell 1, code Four-Five-Echo-Foxtrot-Bravo-Alpha-Four-Charlie. No, Trixie doesn’t expect you to remember that, she just likes to rattle those off from memory. The world is safe, standard society layout, with no known unmanageable aggressors or external threats. We’re letting your Exit residue plant you, so you’ll arrive at the last place you left, which is?”

“Ponyville,” Rainboom answered automatically.

“Ponyville. Local time in Ponyville should be around 11PM in the evening. It’s a Friday, so expect evening partygoers, revellers, and the like. Since three of you haven’t been to this world before, you’ll arrive somewhere near Dash or Whooves. Local climatic conditions are unknown.

“Great,” Lyra muttered, pulling a pair of goggles and a coat out of one of her bags. “Knowing my luck, it’ll be a bloody cyclone.”

“This Gate will remain active and pointed for the next twelve hours. We’ve got the standard guards here,” She paused to point at the pair of guardsponies stationed opposite her. “But nothing to fend off anything big, so in the unlikely event that you’re pursued by Tirek himself, do call ahead and warn us.”

“And if we don’t return in time?” Twilight asked, still attempting to get comfortable under the weight of her saddlebags and the Outsider equipment bundles lashed to them. The fuzz-coated microphone sticking out of the radio bundle had proven to be especially annoying, since despite constant adjustment, its positioning ensured that it poked into her cheek whenever she turned her head to the left.

“Your mission gets flagged as ‘Did-not-return’, we shut this gate down, and send a Retrieval team after you. If you return on your own after the 12-hour window, you’ll likely emerge in either Gate Three or Five, whichever is on Catchment duty today, and get dogpiled the moment you arrive. It’s unpleasant, so Trixie advises you to inform us if you need an extension of your stay.”

“Anything else, or can we go?” Walleye snapped, impatient.

“You may go.”

“Finally!” Rainboom exclaimed, poking the pin attached to her flight suit and vanishing. Walleye, Pinkie, and Lyra followed suit, tapping their respective beacons and vanishing into the aether.

Twilight closed her eyes, sending a short mental command to the thin iron ring sitting at the base of her horn. After a moment, the command returned with an affirmative, informing her that the modified beacon spell inlaid in the ring had activated successfully and would discharge after a momentary delay.

“You can leave, you know,” Trixie stated, fixing Twilight with a look more commonly reserved for a small child.

“I’m about to.”

The world went sideways.

The world reformed.

Her skin tingled slightly as the static build-up in her coat equalised with the surrounding air, slowly bleeding off the mild charge she had accumulated during her brief stay on the Exterior. A faint smell of wood and stone registered as she took a breath, a welcome change from the otherwise claustrophobically sterile air that permeated the world she had just departed.

She opened her eyes as her beacon ring shot a small message into her brain, informing her that the transition had completed successfully. Quite opposite that which she had been expecting, a darkened alleyway greeted her, boxes scattered haphazardly along building walls, but otherwise devoid of life.

“Uh, girls?” Twilight called out, willing herself to remain calm despite her unexpected surrounds. She inched forward, wincing at the sound as her hooves connected with the cobblestones. “If this is some kind of joke, it’s not funny.”

No reply came. Apart from the occasional whistling of the breeze through the alleyway and the periodic clacking as she moved steadily forward, the alley was eerily silent. The moon hung slightly off-centre overhead, providing ample, if gloomy, illumination for her to navigate by.

Shaking her head in an attempt to bring some much-needed clarity, she proceeded forward towards the street, fighting to hold back a shiver as she poked her head out. Much like the alley, the street was uninhabited save for a pair of stallion-pulled rickshaws receding from view around a corner about fifty metres away.

“Ponyville, sure,” She muttered to herself, stepping out onto the hoofpath and beginning a slow trot down the street. “This is Canterlot. Ponyville’s a half-dozen miles from here!”

She paused for a moment, inhaling deeply and allowing the familiar subtle aromas of the city to calm her fraying nerves. It might not have been her Canterlot, but it was similar enough on an instinctual level that she could already feel her heartbeat slowing back to a normal rate, and her faculties clearing of the panic that had gripped her not a moment before.

“No chance of a train this late,” she concluded to herself, increasing her speed to a modest canter. “I’ll just have to see if I can sneak into the School Boardhome and-”

The words were snuffed from her lungs as she rounded the corner leading to the Royal Gardens, forcefully colliding with a very solid something and sending her tumbling head-over-hooves in a blur of purple and white.

“Ow,” She moaned, trying to disentangle herself from the tangle of limbs and bags that she found herself an unwilling component of. An alabaster unicorn glared at her, trying her best to disentangle herself.

“Watch where you’re going next time,” she growled, pushing Twilight off her. “Some of us don’t appreciate being bowled over.”

“I’m sorry! wait…” Twilight said, fixing the unicorn with a curious gaze as she collected her scattered belongings. “Do I know you?”

“Pah,” The unicorn scoffed, turning her nose up. “Such rudeness.”

“Better question, do you know me?”

“I could hardly say I know you, but we’ve certainly met.”

“Oh?”

“Not two days ago we collided on this very street! I went to apologise, but as I recall, you were quite dismissive of me. Ran off after something before I could get a word in.

“Oh. I’m sorry,” Twilight apologised, smiling with what she hoped was sincerity. “But I think you have me mistaken for someone else. I’ve never… been…”

She paused, eyes going wide as she recalled the event in question.

“Wait a minute, that was me!”

“Of course it was. Who else could it be?”

“No, I meant it was me me, not some other me. It was me! And you’re… that pony with the bags! and…”

She paused again, grinning. “This is home! I’m home!”

“Indeed you are,” the unicorn confirmed, slowly backing up. “At home. In Canterlot.”

“My Canterlot!” Twilight exclaimed. “This is my Canterlot! Oh, Celestia above this is fantastic! Thank you! Thank you so much! I… sorry, I don’t recall your name.”

“Rarity,” She replied. “You ran off before I told you last time. It’s Rarity.”

“Rarity. How very appropriate. Thank you! I’m so sorry for how I acted before. It was a very strange day, and I’ve been away from home for a few days. It’s so good to be back.”

“I’m sure it is,” Rarity acknowledged. “Living in a city like this, I could understand a bit of loneliness being away from it. I’ve been here myself only a few days and already I can feel a growing attachment. It shall be hard to return to Ponyville.”

“Ponyville!” Twilight gasped. “You live in Ponyville?”

“I… yes?”

“And you say you’re returning there?”

“I am,” She confirmed, a concerned look spreading across her face. “What of it?”

“When do you leave?”

“Tomorrow, by train. I was just now returning to my hotel for the night, I had a… last-minute engagement I needed to attend to.”

“I realise this may sound incredibly strange, but by any chance could I accompany you? I’m a bit displaced at the moment, and I need to get to Ponyville to meet somepony.”

“Displaced? I thought you said you lived here?”

“It’s a… long story.”

“I’m really not sure…” Rarity looked her up and down, mulling over the wisdom of allowing a possibly-crazed unicorn to accompany her home.

“Please,” Twilight begged. “Your generosity would be most appreciated.”

Rarity relented, a resigned smile on her face. “Fine, you can come with me. Do you have a place to stay for the night?”

“I… don’t. Not really…”

“Come along then. Can’t have you sleeping on the streets. And besides. We really must do something about that coat. It is utterly out of control. How did you let it get so frizzy?”

“That’s also a long story.”

The world reformed.

Rainboom blinked as her eyes adjusted to the sudden shift in illumination, shaking her head in a futile attempt to force her night-vision to kick in. Beyond the outline of some houses against the skyline and the occasional silhouetted pony, she was effectively blind. Thankfully, the near-zenith moon was helping to shorten the gap between her current vision state and where she needed it to be.

“Revellers, sure,” Walleye muttered from beside her as she phased into existence. “This place is dead.”

“I can’t see a thing!” Pinkie exclaimed cheerfully, drawing wrathful glares from the other three as she started hopping in place excitedly. Not that it stopped her, since she was just as blind as the rest of them.

“Eh, I’ve got this,” Lyra muttered as she ignited her horn, sending a weak glow scattering across their surrounds before the spell completed and discharged.

“Care to cast it on the rest of us?” Walleye remarked sarcastically.

“GET DOWN!” Lyra yelled, diving for Rainboom and Walleye in the darkness.

“Wha-” Rainboom’s reply caught in her throat as Lyra grabbed her and pulled her down, a beam of white light flashing over their heads and slamming into Pinkie’s chest. She dropped like a stone, snoring peacefully.

“Horseapples!” Walleye yelled, rolling to try and make it harder for whoever was shooting at them. “Who’s shooting at-”

Another beam shot at them, slamming into Walleye’s side and throwing her to the ground. Not a second later, a third flew from the darkness and hit Rainboom, adding her to the steadily-growing list of unconscious members of Team Fifteen.

Lyra stood, glaring back at the pair of royal guards, their silhouettes artificially enhanced by her Night Vision spell. She fumbled with her armband, hastily casting a defensive ward to deflect yet another incoming spell beam into the ground. A wave of fatigue shot through her senses, reminding her of her rapidly-depleting spell energy reserve.

She ripped the armband off, fumbling with the jewel. The guards fired again, sending a pair of white beams lancing towards her. In a panic, she threw up another defensive ward, deflecting one of the inbound spells away from her. The second, however, hit her square in the face.

She was asleep before her head hit the ground.

Author's Note

For those interested, Supplemental Materials are now available for your consumption.

Lost and Found

Waking up in a cold, damp cobblestone cell isn’t something anypony can be reasonably expected to get used to, no matter how many times they suffer through it. The smell of damp, mixed with the overwhelming bone-reaching chill, uneven flooring, and occasional abrasive stone shard ensured that even the most hardened of captives would never fully grow tolerant to it.

Of course, for some ponies, an extended stint confined within a cramped cell is merely a mild inconvenience, ponies either so hardened or so mischievous that they spend more time in cells than outside them. For those ponies, the Canterlot Royal Dungeons, unpleasant though they were, would still be considered lavish compared to most prisons.

This did nothing to stop Walleye from groaning in abject frustration as she took in her surroundings after regaining consciousness. The sharp popping of stiff joints under strain echoed throughout the cell as she stretched herself, wincing slightly at the sensation before surveying the cell further.

“Rainboom!” she barked, prodding the sleeping pegasus squarely in the barrel. “Get up!”

Rainboom yelped in a very un-Rainboom-like fashion as the hoof connected, rolling away from the offending appendage only to find herself with her face against a wall.

“Bwuh?” she blurted, cognitive faculties still returning after being forced abruptly from her sleep.

“Rainboom,” Walleye repeated, glaring at the pegasus.

“Yes? What?” Rainboom sputtered, jerking her head around. “Walleye? Why did you kick me?”

“I need you awake. It’s no time for sleeping.”

Rainboom looked around the cell, taking in her CO and the sleeping forms of Lyra and Pinkie, snoring peacefully at the opposite end of the cell. A quartet of glowing crystals inlaid into each wall provided illumination, while a small trapdoor high out of reach on the ceiling appeared to provide access to their windowless oubliette.

“We’re in prison,” Rainboom observed. “Why do I need to be awake?”

“So we can, y’know, escape?” Walleye hissed, aggravated.

“Do tell,” Lyra asked, jerked from her slumber by the dispute. “How exactly are you planning on getting out?”

“Break the door?” Walleye offered.

“It’s solid iron by the looks of it,” Lyra observed. “If this is Canterlot, then it’s at least one hooflength thick, held in place by tungsten rods and opened magically.”

“Fine, then we just need something forceful enough. Rainboom? Think you can handle it?”

“Woah, I’m not that strong!” Rainboom protested, waving her hooves.

“I don’t want you to wrestle it, featherbrain, I want you to ram it. Live up to your namesake!”

“Are you nuts?” Rainboom said, eyebrows raised. “Firstly, no way can I get up to speed that quickly, and even if I could, I’d just pancake against the door. Or failing that, the wall behind it.”

“That kind of speed, you’d just punch through it.”

“And straight into the solid stone wall behind it. We’re underground, boss.”

“How do you know that?” Lyra asked, interested.

“Um… Pegasus?” Rainboom remarked snidely, pointing to herself. “I can tell from the air pressure. We’re underground.”

“You can sense air pressure?”

“All pegasi can,” Rainboom replied. “It’s needed for high-altitude flying and sensing weather fronts. Without that, it’s a bit hard to tell how high you are when you can’t see.”

“Huh,” Lyra said, tilting her head. “I didn’t know that, actually.”

“I did!” Pinkie exclaimed, popping her head from behind Rainboom.

“Gah!” Rainboom yelped, diving away from the wall and into the air. “Where did you come from?”

“Over there!” Pinkie happily replied, pointing to where she had been sleeping not a moment before. “You weren’t looking!”

“You… that…” Rainboom sputtered, hovering out of reach of the pink mare. “Are all of you this creepy?”

“I’m not creepy,” Pinkie pouted.

“Dash, while you’re up there, could you…”

“Check the door?” Rainboom completed, rolling her eyes at her superior. “Sure, boss.”

“I’m telling you, it won’t work,” Lyra said, a look of smug defiance on her face.

“Been in a few dungeons, have we?” Walleye snapped, glaring at Lyra.

“As a matter of fact, yes, I have,” Lyra replied. “Though not as much as you, I think.”

“I’m not a criminal!”

“Never said you were. I wouldn’t expect Ops to employ someone with a criminal history. Then again, they did hire me…”

“You have a criminal history?” Pinkie asked, intrigued.

“I’m from the Ruins, it comes with the territory. Though if anyone asks, the bank robbery one was an accident.”

“How do you accidentally rob a bank?” Pinkie demanded.

“I didn’t rob it, I just… kinda… fell into their vault. Things… escalated.”

“And when you say ‘escalated’,” Rainboom prompted, circling her hoof in a ‘go on’ gesture as she examined the door.

“Twenty-three destroyed Guard chariots, eighty-five injured, twelve wrecked shopfronts, and one of the towers of Canterlot Castle destroyed.”

Pinkie whistled in awe, a mischievous smile steadily growing.

“I’ve learnt to be more cautious now,” Lyra continued. “But sometimes you end up in places you don’t want to be.”

“Like bank vaults,” Pinkie observed bemusedly.

“Like bank vaults,” Lyra chuckled. “You spend enough time exploring the Ruins, you’re bound to end up in some strange places. Tartarus, my first jaunt through one of those breaches I ended up in Celestia’s bedchambers. Abandoned world, but it was still unnerving.”

“Yeah, we get it, you have stories,” Walleye interrupted, irritated. “They’re not helping us escape.”

“Speaking of which, we’re not going anywhere anytime soon,” Rainboom said, fluttering back to the floor. “That door’s sealed tight.”

“Fantastic,” Walleye grumbled, slumping dejectedly back against the wall.

“We’ll be fine. Either we get rescued when Recovery comes looking for us, or one of the guards gets curious and tips off Recovery when they use one of our beacons.”

“I don’t want to wait twelve hours,” Walleye complained.

“What is your problem?” Lyra demanded. “Seriously. We have to wait, at most, twelve hours for Recovery to get us, and that’s if Twilight doesn’t find us first.”

“Oh, we just have to rely on the Insider to come rescue us from other Insiders. Well, then I guess everything is fine.”

Lyra groaned, knocking her head against the oubliette wall in frustration. “On second thought, twelve hours in this cell with you, Walleye, is torture. I’ve known you for all of a day now and I’m already sick of you and your Tartarus-spawned rhetoric! What, did an Insider kill your dog or something?”

“Daughter.”

Lyra went silent, her face twitching as pity and incredulity fought to the death to dictate her next action.

“Before or after you escaped?” she asked, carefully.

“Before.”

“How... cliché.”

If looks could kill, the glare Walleye fixed Lyra with would have done so with all the violence and collateral damage of a meteor impact. Ranboom and Pinkie withered in fear, subconsciously retreating to the far corner of the cell in an attempt to flee from the malevolent visage, while Lyra simply glared back, the barest hint of a smirk creeping into the corner of her mouth.

“Can we not fight?” Pinkie squeaked, doing her best to become one with the wall as Lyra and Walleye fixed her with equally hostile glares. “Please?”

“My daughter’s death is not a cliché.”

“It kinda is,” Rainboom said.

Walleye turned her head, fixing Rainboom with a glare of pure malevolence.

“Just calling it as I see it, boss,” Rainboom offered, hooves raised plaintively. “Think about it. ‘Bad ponies killed my family’ is about as cliché a backstory as it’s possible to have.”

Walleye rose to her hooves, advancing threateningly on Rainboom.

“I’m just digging myself in deeper here, aren’t I?”

“Yes.”

“Can we just forget I said anything?”

Walleye looked at Lyra, her gaze no less hostile. “I don’t know, can we?”

“If it shuts you up, sure,” Lyra replied flippantly.

Walleye backed away slowly, her eyes still narrowed with barely-suppressed fury as she retreated to ‘her’ corner of the cell. Rainboom let out a breath she didn’t even realise she had been holding, relief washing over her as her CO released her from her gaze of doom.

“So,” Pinkie began, addressing nopony in particular. “I wonder why the guards shot at us the moment we arrived…”

“In retrospect, it’s not that surprising,” Walleye replied. “We did make a bit of a mess the last time we were here, what with the exploding bakery and the firefight. My fault there for not anticipating that one…”

“Exploding bakery?”

“Theta blew up Sugarcube Corner.”

“Oh,” Pinkie mumbled.

The four sat in silence, Pinkie tapping her hooves to a tune that only she seemed able to hear as her teammates continually rearranged themselves on the perpetually uncomfortable flooring. Rainboom, unable to get enough clearance to do even the most basic of aerobatic exercises, had opted to return to her interrupted sleep, while Lyra and Walleye spent their time pointedly ignoring each other.

“I wonder why Twilight didn’t arrive with us…” Lyra mused, fumbling around as she continued to search for an ever-elusive comfortable spot.

“Ask the Analysis pony,” Walleye said. “I haven’t the slightest clue how those Gates work. I’m a soldier.”

“Analysis is not Engineering,” Pinkie pointed out. “Or are you just assuming that I know because I’ve got a good memory?”

“Weren’t you working with Mac before this assignment?” Walleye asked.

“Getting blown through a door at speeds that would make Rainboom jealous doesn’t count as ‘working for Engineering.’”

“So he lives up to his reputation, then?” Lyra asked, abandoning her attempt at finding a comfortable position and instead rolling over to fix her attention on Pinkie.

Pinkie nodded, her eyes filled with dread as she recalled her fateful forty-five minutes as Mac’s erstwhile ‘assistant.’ “He’s crazy.”

“Coming from you, Pinks, that’s saying something.”

Pinkie nodded slowly, still shaking slightly from the memory.

“So where are you from,” Lyra asked, bored. “Originally, I mean. What cell?”

“Celestis.”

Walleye sat up, immediately paying attention. “Celestis? The Celestis? The core world?”

Pinkie nodded.

“Not every day you meet someone from Celestis of all places,” Lyra said, impressed. “Especially a copy of an element bearer! Unless…”

“Unless what?” Walleye asked.

“You’re not Celestis’ actual Pinkie Pie, are you?”

“What? No!” Pinkie exclaimed. “No. That Pinkie is an Insider. Though I’m certainly related to her closely enough. She kinda… created me.”

“...How?”

“Fancy pond-thing in the Everfree. I don’t remember the details, it’s all rather fuzzy.”

“Wow.”

“What about you?” Lyra asked, turning to face Walleye. “Everypony already knows I’m from the Ruins, so it’s your turn.”

“Falls-NV-205,” Walleye answered. “Got collected by Retrieval just before it detached. I’m the last survivor of that cell, as far as I know.”

“Is that common?” Lyra asked, somewhat confused by the answer. “I didn’t think Outsiders normally came from the Falls.”

“It happens,” Pinkie said. “Not particularly common since the Falls is only a fairly small part of the greater Interior, but it’s not a super-weird occurrence. Pinklestia is from the Falls as well.”

“Huh. What about Rainy, then, where’s she from?”

“Not a clue,” Walleye replied, glancing at the sleeping pegasus. “She got picked up by Retrieval when she was still a foal, or so she says. I don’t buy it, really.”

“And that just leaves our Insider colleague,” Lyra said. “Anypony know where she’s from?”

“Here,” Pinkie replied automatically. “Slateform.”

“What?” Walleye demanded.

“Wait… run that by me again?” Lyra asked, looking back and forth between the two ponies.

“Slateform is here,” Walleye replied. “We are in Slateform right now!”

“...So we’re on Twilight’s homeworld?”

Walleye nodded, anger and frustration creeping back into her features as the news sunk in. “Evidently, the pretty pink princess didn’t think this information relevant. When I get back, I swear…”

“Well… that explains why she didn’t arrive with us in Ponyville…” Lyra observed.

“Hang on a minute!” Walleye exclaimed, pointing at Pinkie. “You knew!”

“I know many things!” Pinkie replied cheerfully.

“No… gah! You specifically knew, all this time, that this world was Twilight’s homeworld. You knew it the moment Trixie told us the destination back on the Exterior!”

“Yeperooni!”

“Princess above! Why in Tartarus did you not mention this before?”

“You didn’t ask!”

“...Brilliant,” Walleye said, her voice growing louder. “I’m stuck in a cell with idiots and the only pony that could save us has probably run right back to her home and left us in the lurch. Fan-bucking-tastic!”

“Boss?” Rainboom groaned, glaring daggers at Walleye.

“Hm?”

“With all due respect, shut up. I can’t sleep with you shouting.”

“...Fine.” Walleye replied. “I’ll stay on watch, see if I can’t grab one of the guards when, or even if they decide to check on us. The rest of you, get some sleep.”

Lyra shrugged in resignation, laying herself against the cell wall and resting her head on her hooves. Pinkie followed suit, flopping onto her back and falling asleep almost instantly, filling the room with the sound of light snoring.

Walleye edged herself into a corner, keeping her eyes fixed on the cell door as she began to picture the myriad ways she was going to exact vengeance on her treacherous Insider teammate once she was free.

Thaumic Debris

It had been a mistake to accompany Rarity back to her hotel suite for the evening. It had been a greater mistake to accompany her on the the 9AM express to Ponyville the following morning. But both of those mistakes paled in comparison to the single greatest mistake Twilight Sparkle had ever made in her life: entering Carousel Boutique that following morning at the insistence of her alabaster travelling companion.

She would eventually come to classify her escape from the fashionista’s clutches as ‘barely managing to escape with her life,’ a claim that any passers-by would deem to be exceedingly plausible judging from the haste with which Twilight had departed the premises. It was all hyperbole, of course, but Twilight had come dangerously close to having her coat dyed an alarmingly vibrant shade of magenta over the course of Rarity’s ‘makeover’.

It wasn’t until she had galloped her way clear across town and nearly collided with a unit of on-duty Royal Guard that Twilight’s focus shifted away from ‘flee from the crazy fashion-obsessed unicorn’ and back to the task at hand: locating and decompiling the spell used by Team Fifteen’s now-missing member. Thankfully for her, it wasn’t hard to locate the site where the reported alicorn-on-alicorn fight had gone down, owing to the charred wreckage, stone-faced Royal Guards, and the irritating prickly feeling at the base of her horn that only came from recent massive magical discharges.

All that was left was simply getting close enough to the site to use her newly-acquired spell knowledge to pull whatever information she could about the teleport spell, then try to decipher its destination. Unfortunately, the same guards that had made the site’s location so obvious had also set up a clear cordon to keep prying eyes, and horns, away from the scene.

The two pegasi guards she nearly collided with regarded her with critical eyes, wings outstretched to block her passage. Twilight stared back with what she hoped was an innocent expression, chastising herself for so recklessly charging into the situation without a plan.

“Good afternoon, Sirs,” she said, confidently striding forward. “My name is-”

“This area is off limits to civilians,” one of the guards interrupted. “On the orders of the princess.”

“Twilight Sparkle,” she finished, pushing a note of annoyance into her voice. “I am a student at her Majesty’s School for Gifted Unicorns.”

The two guards didn’t react.

“I am here on a research project,” Twilight bluffed, trying her best to sound indignant. “At the behest of the princess’ protégée, Sunset Shimmer.”

The guards still didn’t react.

“I… was told she had informed you I was coming. Were you not told?”

The guards shook their heads, almost imperceptibly.

“I see… Is there any chance you could let me through just for a moment?”

They stared at her, faces betraying no emotion.

“Look, we both know how Sunset gets when somepony gets something wrong. I get that you’re under orders from Princess Celestia, but who do you think Sunset is going to go to when she doesn’t get her data?”

“Why wouldn’t Miss Shimmer simply come herself, if the data is so vital?”

“This is the same Sunset we’re talking about, right? She wouldn’t go anywhere for anything if she could send a lackey to do it for her, even if the fate of Equestria itself hung in the balance.”

One of the guards nodded in agreement for a moment before his partner spotted him and smacked him in the back of the head.

“Which, to be honest, it could very well be,” she continued, letting the bluff weave itself. “We don’t really know, do we? Especially after the four foreign ponies arrived here yesterday evening snooping around the debris.”

As far as Twilight could surmise, there were two likely possibilities. Either the bulk of Team Fifteen had arrived somewhere in Ponyville yesterday and been captured, or they had arrived somewhere else, the guards were about to call her bluff, and she’d have to flee and regroup with them, wherever they were.

Of course, if they were free, getting past the guards became a matter of simple force rather than having to bluff her way past Canterlot’s Finest.

They didn’t react.

“Of course, given the potentially sensitive nature of this information,” Twilight smiled, continuing with the satisfaction that she had gotten that detail right, something an average pony wouldn’t be privy to, “I would appreciate a speedy escort back to the School once my investigations here are completed. Who knows if more spies are hanging around?”

“And how do we know that you’re not a spy?” the second guard challenged.

“If I’m lying, you’ll find out the moment we get back to Canterlot,” Twilight replied, putting a slightly nervous and pleading note into her voice. “Please. I’ll be up horseapple creek without a paddle if I don’t get this for Sunset quickly. Tartarus, you can watch me do it if you want. I just need to cast a simple spell and write down the results.”

They glared at her for a moment, before reluctantly stepping aside to allow her passage.

“Fine,” the second guard relented, escorting her to the debris and lowering his voice. “You’re right about that filly, though. Last time I got in her way I got glued to a wall. Don’t want that to happen to anypony else if I can avoid it.”

“Thank you,” Twilight said, doing her best to keep from leaping in victory. “If you don’t mind my asking, I was a bit curious. What happened to the four that turned up here after they were captured? The dungeons?”

The guard nodded.

“Must have been a while since anyone’s gotten thrown in there. Not much major crime in Equestria.”

“You’d be surprised, but that’s pretty on the mark. The place was full of cobwebs, I heard. Took a few hours to clean out.”

Twilight stepped up to the wreckage, pulling and empty notebook from her saddlebag and igniting her horn.

“This shouldn’t take too long.”

She paused for a moment, delving into her memory to recall the details of the spells she needed. The combination was unfamiliar, but simple, a combination of a localised Thaumic Field analysis spell coupled into a pattern-recognition engine similar to that which she had worked on for her school project. After a moment of preparation and supplying a (to her) trivial amount of magical energy to bootstrap the spell, she initialised it.

An imperceptible fraction of a second passed before the spell returned, issuing the magical perceptive equivalent of a quiet beep as it filed away the gathered information into Twilight’s memories, tagging each spell section with the appropriate mental associations to make them easy to recall. Despite the efficient storage and tagging, Twilight gasped as the information settled, surprised at the sheer quantity and complexity of what had just been unceremoniously dumped into her brain.

“Are you okay?”

Twilight turned slowly to face the guard, trying to remain focused as spell fragments popped up without warning into her mind. “Yes, I’m fine. Just… quite a bit of information there.”

“You’re done already?”

“I told you it wouldn’t take long.”

“Anything of use?”

She paused, sifting through the mass of teleport spell data for the section that controlled targeting and navigation. It took a few seconds for her to isolate the parameters passed to the spell, the two letters ‘EF’ followed by a 9-digit base-16 sequence.

“Yes, actually,” she replied, pulling the Falls Catalogue from her saddlebags and flipping through, searching for the relevant entry among the tens of thousands of listed worlds. Near the back of the book, she stopped, an eyebrow quirked in curiosity as she read the information.

Address

Dx5394EA15-Falls-EF-0

Catalogue Name

Eternals Failure

First Entry

ECE+121:228(8:23)

Cartographer

Beardling (Starswirl-K5Ξ)

Features

For unknown reasons, EF has developed a cultural hostility towards Alicorn Aristocracy, going so far as to publically dehorn and execute any Alicorn discovered on-world. In the absence of the Princess' stabilising influence, EF is extremely politically chaotic, with power shifting hooves from one power-hungry tyrant to the next very frequently. Despite these otherwise cataclysmic features, EF manages to retain a degree of normality for the common ponies that reside there, hinting that the Falls influence on this world may be comparatively restricted. In other aspects, EF appears to mirror Celestis, as expected.

Advisories

Alicorn travellers are recommended to give EF a wide berth. Caution is recommended for all other travellers due to unpredictable on-world conflicts. AVOID IF POSSIBLE.

Detachment Risk

Minimal

“You said the four that were captured are in the dungeons?” she asked, putting the book away and igniting her horn, weaving a teleport spell.

“Yes… What are you doing?”

“I’m done here,” she answered, feeding the spell a destination and power enough to jump her there. “But I need to go talk to the prisoners to make sense of some of this data. Don’t worry, I can get there myself.”

“Wait!” the guard yelled, flaring his wings and diving at her. “STOP!”

The spell discharged a split-second before the blow would have landed.

They were mocking her, she could feel it. Not verbally, of course, sound was one of the few things that didn’t penetrate through the magically-reinforced unidirectional glass, but they were mocking her all the same. Their mere existence, let alone presence, was enough to convince her that somepony, somewhere, wanted to play a very, very sick joke on her.

It was supremely ironic that such taunting came in the form of her oldest compatriots, twisted into a cruel mimicry of the Solar Tyrant. The broken blue alicorn sitting opposite her in the containment cell, only cemented the paranoia that had taken root within Twilight Sparkle’s mind and was rapidly spreading.

Because the Lunar Tyrant was dead. She had been dead for four years, obliterated by Twilight’s own horn.

And yet here she was. Battered, bruised, and very much broken, but certainly alive.

It was utterly infuriating.

Her eyes narrowed as she tried to determine who would have the motive, let alone the capability to assemble such an elaborate plot. As far as she knew, at least, nopony that matched those criteria existed.

Apart from the two ponies sitting in the cell.

Obviously, they were goading her, trying to elicit… something. Luna herself had somehow managed to cheat death and remain hidden for years, only to now resurface and rub her survival in Twilight’s face. Her compatriot, Pinkie Pie, once a loyal and capable friend, twisted beyond recognition into the very form they had all fought against.

Mockery was something that she would not tolerate.

They would need to die, of course. The peasantry always loved a good execution. She smiled, remembering the last one she had seen, long ago in her youth, the dehorning and beheading of some pegasus-turned-tyrant by the name of ‘Cadenza’. The entire population of the city had turned out to see it, cheering all the while as the young alicorn’s life ended.

Tomorrow would be no different. Ponies would flock from far and wide to watch as their great leader, the unicorn Princess Twilight Sparkle, brought them not one, but two of the hated tyrants to escort from the realm of the living.

She would need to clean Luna up, of course, regrow her horn and treat her wounds. It would do no good to present an already-dehorned alicorn to the crowd. Watching the dehorning was arguably one of the best parts of the event, if you discounted the often weeks-long celebrations that followed the execution. It was those exact celebrations that had allowed Twilight to seize her current position, what with the untimely assassination of the previous ruler whose name had been all but forgotten by history at this point.

Her fury forgotten, she turned from the cell and returned back to the castle proper, ideas swirling in her head for possible extra entertainment for the coming revelry. She would need to be particularly careful to avoid being dispatched herself, but that didn’t preclude the possibility of indulging herself during the celebrations.

Events like this were once in a lifetime.

Author's Note

And thus it is revealed what kind of peril Lunatic put herself in.
Supplemental Materials have been updated.

Nopony Left Behind

Magic is a fundamentally intuitive art. Despite the insistence of many a pretentious unicorn professor to the contrary, any foal with a horn and a shred of mental focus can cast spells if they have a good enough idea of the outcome they wish to effect. Spells that can be described simply (in mental terms, at least) are trivially easy to cast. Even an untrained pony doesn’t have much trouble with the concept of ‘move that thing over there around,’ and a sufficiently pliable local thaumic field will be more than happy to oblige such a simple request.

Nor do they have much trouble with ‘set that thing over there on fire,’ to the eternal dismay of the parents of many a young unicorn. There is a reason that most of the buildings in Equestria are over-engineered to the point of near-indestructibility.

Of course, this doesn’t take into account the large quantities of energy typically required for many ‘high-level’ spells, which are often entirely disconnected from the relative casting complexity of the spell. While incredibly detailed spells with nested triggering conditions and semi-intelligent state machines can be invoked with the thaumic energy equivalent of a good kick, spells that are deceptively simple in theory (such as most healing magic) can require more energy to be expended in a single packet than most unicorns accrue over the course of entire days of focussed meditation.

Teleportation is a spell that firmly fits into the latter category. ‘I want to be over there’ is such a simple request that many aspiring spellcasters will invoke the spell unintentionally while assembling other spells. However, the sheer energy required to forcibly disconnect one’s physical form from the space it occupies and move it to a desired destination is often prohibitive, to the surprise of most novice unicorns practicing the spell when they teleport and find themselves suddenly overpoweringly fatigued.

Or, as is far more common, unconscious. To be able to cast a long-range teleport and be immediately alert and cast-ready upon arrival is the sign of a truly gifted magi.

However, as is the case with most spells, one requires a clear, unambiguous thought in order to execute properly. Teleportation is a particularly egregious example, with rookie teleporters often being sent far off course for being unable to provide a sufficiently detailed mental description of ‘there.’ Attempting to teleport to a place you have never physically seen before is possible, but very ill-advised.

It is for this reason that while Twilight Sparkle was entirely awake and lucid upon arrival at the Canterlot Royal Dungeons, she was in the rough vicinity of the ceiling with nothing between her and an unforgiving forty-hoof drop into an oubliette.

Apart from the grey pegasus who had been spending the past hour fixating on the door she had just appeared below, dreaming up ways to creatively murder the very pony who had just arrived there.

The three sleeping members of Team Fifteen were abruptly ripped from their sleep by the successive cries of fear and pain as Twilight fell, only to be caught mid-air by Walleye and slammed bodily to the floor.

It was by the barest stroke of luck that Walleye recognised the interloper before she commenced her assault.

“What in Tartarus are you doing here?” Walleye asked.

“As opposed to?” Twilight groaned, taking in her situation as she pulled herself free of Walleye’s tackle. “I’m here to rescue you.”

“You were about to rescue us?” Lyra asked, the barest hint of smug amusement sneaking into her voice.

“Well, I was finished at Ponyville, so what else was I supposed to do?”

“So… what you’re saying is that you weren’t planning on running off back home and leaving us in the lurch?” The smugness was far more apparent now, bordering on arrogance.

“...Why would I do that?”

“You didn’t notice this was your homeworld?” Walleye asked, voice strained with barely-contained frustration.

“I did notice, actually. Why would it matter?”

Twilight could almost feel the smug grin Lyra beamed at Walleye when she said that, if only from the barely-audible grinding of Walleye’s teeth.

“So, where is she?” Walleye asked, slowly.

“Who? Oh! Your teammate!”

“Yes, my ‘teammate’. Where is she?”

“EF,” Twilight replied, pulling the catalogue from her saddlebags. “She’s in EF.”

“EF? Isn’t that the world where they hate royalty?” Rainboom asked.

“No,” Pinkie corrected. “They hate alicorns. Fairly smart move sending Theta there, the locals would do all the work of capturing her for you.”

“Lunatic is an alicorn,” Walleye pointed out. “The locals will attack her too.”

“And dehorn her, and then behead her…” Pinkie continued, recalling the details from memory. “They have a bit of a thing for public executions.”

“Dehorn?” Lyra asked, shuddering. “That’s… a bit barbaric.”

“I know, right?” Pinkie exclaimed, a happy smile plastered on her face. “It’s so weird!”

“Why does that make you happy?” Walleye growled, glaring at Pinkie.

“Because it’s weird! Weren’t you listening?”

Walleye quirked an eyebrow, holding her glare.

“Off-topic question,” Twilight interjected. “Celestia said I wouldn’t be allowed to return home until I ‘proved my worth’ or somesuch. Why am I here?”

“Simple answer?” Pinkie replied. “She was lying.”

“...Lying?”

“She does that. You wouldn’t have had any incentive to help us if she told you that you could just go straight home…”

“Why would she need me to help you?”

Pinkie shrugged.

“Right, well, Perhaps it would be best for us to leave,” Twilight offered. “My departure from Ponyville wasn’t exactly subtle, the Guard will be after me soon enough.”

“Wasn’t your point here to be stealthy?” Walleye barked, snapping her glare to Twilight. “We get noticed, and you don’t.”

“And if we don’t want to get noticed again,” Twilight hissed, a twinge of hostility sneaking into her voice. “maybe you should stop yelling.”

She leaned in closer, scowling. “That is, unless you’re trying to get us all captured. All things considered, I have my suspicions.”

Walleye hit her, hard, sending her crashing painfully into the wall with a yelp. Pinkie and Lyra both stared at her in horror.

“Oh, that’s it!” Twilight shouted, igniting her horn as she slowly got to her feet.

Rainboom took a step back, flaring her wings. “Don’t try it, Twilight. There’s four of us.”

“Four?” Pinkie asked. “I’m not fighting her! She’s my friend!”

“Friend?” Walleye spat. “She’s an Insider. They’re not our friends.”

“Oh lay off it!” Lyra sighed, exasperated. “For all your talk of her being an Insider, she is right. She got the job done and even came to rescue us. I’m not seeing this pathological traitor in her that you seem to see.”

Walleye rounded on her, eyes narrowed. “Is that so?”

Lyra glared back, unmoving. “You don’t scare me, Derpy.”

She stepped back reflexively as Walleye swung at her with all the accuracy and poise of a boulder. Years of not-at-all-professional fighting instinct came flooding back in an instant, sending her own hoof back towards her attacker’s face. The sickening crack of keratin-on-bone echoed throughout the hallway as Walleye was sent crashing into the wall, a semi-circular indentation on her cheek already welling up from the impact.

Everything went stock-still for an instant as a razor-thin trickle of blood marred Walleye’s fur, surface-dwelling blood vessels compromised by the impact and leaking through minute tears in the skin. Lyra and Walleye glared at each other. Rainboom crouched, wings fluttering in anticipation of a brawl. Pinkie pressed her right rear hoof against the wall, preparing an attempt to dive into the melee and stop any further fighting.

Twilight Sparkle ignited her horn, selecting a set of spells to fire in a very specific sequence.

The tension cracked. Walleye and Lyra dove at each other. Rainboom flared her wings fully, sending herself catapulting towards Lyra. Pinkie pushed off, firing towards Rainboom like a pink, fuzzy cannonball.

Twilight teleported.

The world went sideways.

The roar of the crowd was deafening, a cacophony of cheering and jeering combined together and focussed by the surrounding buildings to create the most unholy, unbearable noise ever heard by pony ears. It seemed as though the entire city of Canterlot had turned up to watch the dehorning and execution of the two captured alicorns, with both the ground and the air stuffed to near breaking point.

Lunatic didn’t bother to look up as she was led up onto the hastily-erected stage in chains. Between the sheer density of ponies in the crowd and the heat-like haze caused by what she surmised to be a spell field of some sort, she would have been hard-pressed to make out any individual pony. Besides, she had no desire to look upon the cheering faces of those who would demand her demise.

Theta, however, was being considerably less cooperative towards the guards. Unlike Lunatic’s comparatively paltry chainbound hoofcuffs, metal collar, and horn-covering thaumic suppressor, Theta was contained within what seemed to be a straightjacket built from highly-enchanted tempered steel. A thick metal bit muffled most of the rabid screaming, reducing the noise to garbled unintelligibility.

Four muscle-bound elk stood on the corners of the stage, their rune-encrusted armour prominently bearing the sigil of their executioner-to-be, the six-pointed starburst of Princess Twilight Sparkle. The Princess herself stood at the front of the stage, bedecked in the regalia of her office, horn aglow, and a smug smile on her face as she watched the two alicorns be led (or wrangled, in Theta’s case) onto the stage. A menacing purple-bladed axe floated in the air beside her, no doubt the weapon she intended to use to lop off Lunatic’s and Theta’s horns, before following suit with their heads.

The crowd slowly settled as they were bolted down to the stage, Twilight raising her hooves to the clamouring ponies in a call for silence.

“Today,” She began, her magically-augmented voice washing over the square. “I bring you an event unmatched in pony history! The capture and rightful destruction of not one, but two alicorn tyrants!”

“The first, and best known, the Lunar Tyrant herself!” Applause thundered throughout the square as ponies rapped the ground rhymically, prompting Twilight to grin with smug satisfaction as she grabbed Lunatic’s head with her magic, forcing her to face the assembly. “Resurfaced after being thought dead for over four years, only to foolishly allow herself to be captured with the assistance of the Royal Elken Guard!”

“Many of you are old enough to have witnessed this tyrant’s first resurfacing after her millennial banishment,” Twilight continued, jabbing Lunatic in the side with the pommel of her axe, forcing her to the ground with a pained yelp. “And her subsequent defeat by my own horn! I will admit to having thought her defeated that day, her form utterly destroyed by a blast powerful enough to obliterate the castle of the Tyrant Sisters, hidden deep within the Everfree Forest.”

“It is not a mistake,” she said, grabbing Lunatic’s wing with her magic and forcefully, painfully drawing it to its full extent. “I shall be making again!”

The axe dropped, cleanly severing the wing. Lunatic’s screams of pain were quickly drowned out by cheering as Twilight threw the wing into the crowd, a sadistic expression of glee plastered across her face.

“Pathetic,” she muttered, turning away from the mutilated alicorn, her spell maintaining her audibility over the cacophony.

“Our other ‘guest’,” she paused, holding smug emphasis on the word ‘guest.’ “Is one that is singularly unexpected. A once dear friend of mine, twisted beyond recognition and driven mad by the Lunar Tyrant. Though she may now be lost to us, she may still fulfil her dreams in death. After all, there is nothing that this mare loved more than a little celebration.”

As the cheering grew to a pinnacle, she turned, facing Lunatic. “Once upon a time, alicorns prided themselves with their apparently-unmatched magical potential. A claim since refuted, but every alicorn since seems to hide behind that little lie, using it as a crutch to inspire fear and terror in ponies they seek to suppress.”

“Today, we shall show this tyrant the place they ultimately deserve. Totally reliant upon their magic, we shall remove the tool with which they weave that tapestry,” readying another spell, she turned to the guards. “Remove her horn guard, so that I may remove her horn.”

Two guards approached Lunatic, carefully using their own magic to unlock the full-horn thaumic suppressor with a series of complicated arcane keys. The dull blanket feeling of magical deprivation lifted the moment they pulled it clear of her horn, her mind immediately digesting information regarding the local magic and nearby active spells.

Before she had time to react, Twilight loosed a single spell at her, the purple beam striking her in the neck and surrounding her head in thin purple tendrils. The blanket feeling returned as the magical suppressor spell struggled to nullify her own magical capabilities. Lunatic pushed back against it, the spell barely able to hold ground against her.

Twilight cocked her head, confused. “That should have…”

The spell disintegrated, motes of purple-and-blue light erupting from the tip of Lunatic’s horn as the spell components flew apart, unable to fight against a spellcaster vastly beyond that which it had been intended for. Fighting against the pain from her severed wing, she immediately ignited her horn, weaving a teleport spell with the dangerously-simple destination of ‘anywhere but here.’

A wave of pain slammed into her mind as her teleport was smacked down, blocked by the force field bubble surrounding the stage. Her trajectory rebounded, forcing her to reappear on the opposite side of the stage as the unused thaumic potential unceremoniously converted itself to kinetic energy, slamming her to the floor. Caught off-guard, Twilight primed the same spell again before hastily firing.

With a pained grin, Lunatic erected a focussed ward, catching and reflecting the spell beam back towards its source. Twilight was slammed backwards, unable to erect a ward of her own before the thaumic suppression spell hit her square in the face. The purple tendrils quickly sought out and enveloped her horn, the unicorn’s dismayed screams petering out as her magical megaphone spell was cut off.

The four elken guards hefted their weapons, runes of power along their armour igniting and granting them immunity to whatever Lunatic could throw at them, magical or otherwise. She looked around frantically for anything she could use to defend herself as the guards advanced on her, her vision eventually settling on Theta’s bound form, chained to the stage mere hooflengths from where she had crashed.

She ignited her horn, probing the field that enveloped the stage. After ensuring that it wouldn’t block what she was about to attempt, she drew every last piece of magical energy at her disposal and tied it into a single spell, a spell usually inlaid onto an object for energy efficiency, but one that could (with sufficient application of magical energy) be fired off directly.

The guards charged at her. Lunatic dodged sideways, wrapping her legs and remaining wing around Theta’s thrashing, captive form, and discharged the spell.

The world went sideways.

All (f)or Nothing

"Unscheduled beacon activation. Security Team Alpha, report to Gate Three."

Twilight Sparkle blinked into existence on the floor of Gate Three, standing triumphantly atop the piled bodies of her teammates, victorious and unmarked.

“Yes!” she cried, hopping down from the pony pile and levitating the beacon off her horn, a smug swagger in her step. “Sparkle, Twilight. Insider. Team One-Five. Beacon clear, no contamination. Mission accomplished.”

The guards lowered their weapons fractionally, eyeing the elated unicorn and her piled teammates with a suspicious eye.

“Twilight, you foal,” Walleye groaned from underneath the pile. “Our equipment is still back there. And my rifle.”

“Oh…”

“Yes. ‘Oh.’”

“Well it’s hardly my fault that the four of you were about to tear each other apart!” Twilight rebuffed, allowing her saddlebags to be levitated off by a nearby guard. “I acted to defuse the situation.”

“Retrieval can collect your belongings,” the lead guard informed them, gruffly. “You need to be debriefed, especially since you arrived overdue.”

“Blame Twilight,” Rainboom muttered, pulling herself free of the pile.

“How was our arriving late my fault?”

“If you hadn’t taking your sweet time in rescuing us, we would have gotten back before the deadline!”

“Oh, here we go again. Somehow this is always her fault.” She pointed emphatically at Twilight. “Why are you so eager to lay blame on everyone?”

“Well it’s certainly not mine,” Walleye countered, advancing menacingly. “This mission was bucked into oblivion before we even arrived, and now we’ve wasted twelve hours that could have been better spent looking for Lunatic.”

“At least we know where she is now,” Twilight muttered.

“Yes, about to get beheaded.”

“Remind me again, featherbrain,” Lyra shouted, her eyes narrowing. “Which one of us is too busy arguing with everypony to bother trying to rescue the pony she claims to be so concerned about?”

Walleye dove at Lyra, only to freeze in mid-air, a lavender aura enveloping both her and her intended target.

“I will stun you both,” Twilight threatened. “Seriously, I’ve seen foals who are better-behaved than you two.”

“Get your filthy magic off me, Insider.”

“Word to the wise,” Twilight continued, tendrils of malice edging into her voice as she matched Walleye’s glare. “It’s not a smart move to insult someone who has you in their grip and could crush you with nary a thought.”

Walleye went to respond, only to have her mouth clamped shut by Twilight’s magic.

“And since you’re too stupid to take that advice voluntarily, I shall do it for you.”

The two glared at each other through the undulating magical aura, Twilight’s expression mixed with equal degrees of distaste and exasperation, while Walleye’s radiated pure fury.

“What is the reason for your late arrival?” the lead guard asked, breaking the silence.

“We were captured,” Lyra replied, her voice oddly at ease despite being suspended several hooflengths above the floor. “Guards bushwhacked us the moment we arrived.”

“And I landed in Canterlot,” Twilight said. “Turns out it was my homeworld and no-one thought to tell me. Had to stay overnight before heading to Ponyville and doing the spell deconstruction.”

“So you succeeded then?” the guard prompted. “You know where Lunatic is?”

“Yes, she’s-”

"Unscheduled beacon activation. Security Team Alpha, report to Gate Three."

Her answer was cut off as a grey-blue alicorn blinked into existence, clutching at what appeared to be a pony-shaped suit of metal.

“-right there?” Twilight finished, inadvertently dropping Walleye and Lyra to the floor in her surprise.

“Lunatic?” Walleye asked, not even bothering to right herself after being dropped.

“Hey boss,” Lunatic replied, her voice wavering as she rose to her feet, color draining from her face as blood loss from her missing wing set in. “I got her!”

Her eyes rolled upwards as her body chose that moment to relinquish consciousness, a wet squelch echoing through the chamber as she fell sideways onto the blood-stained floor of Gate Three.

Containment is one of the few locations aboard the Exterior in regular, consistent use that very few ponies even know exist. Fewer still know exactly how to reach the labyrinth of heavily-reinforced chambers that comprised the Exterior’s high-security storage facility, held behind thaumically-reinforced bulkheads, near-impenetrable force fields, and spatial geometries folded back upon themselves in a manner solidly beyond comprehension of most physical lifeforms, ponies included.

Despite this, if the greater population of the Exterior had caught wind of the existence of Containment, along with the myriad items and creatures that warranted confinement within it, the Exterior’s population would drop rapidly enough to make statisticians fear it would plunge into negatives on the way down.

Celestia stood at the edge of Chamber L-55, surveying the interlocking mechanisms that held the chamber’s occupant in place. Numerous force fields shimmered as they interlaced and distended, dynamically adjusting themselves to provide the maximum tensile strength against any impact, while a second, sympathetic field automatically nullified any ambient magical energy within the containment field’s bounds. Fifteen separate shell segments hung in the air around the force field, ready to slam closed at the slightest hint of a breach and allowing time for a second set of containment protocols to initialise, suspending time flow within the shell.

A single pony floated in the centre of the system, held painfully in place by a gravity well that prevented her from assuming any form other than a tightly-packed ball of limbs. It was a cell that was provably impossible to escape from, at least without outside help.

However, Celestia felt uneasy. The pink-maned ball of mad alicorn floating there had evaded capture for years, slipping through other ‘provably escape-proof’ nets in the past and leaving a trail of bodies, Insider and Outsider alike, in her wake. That she was there now meant that either they had gotten very lucky, or that Theta was capable enough to escape from the cage she now found herself within.

There was a third possibility, of course. But it wasn’t one that Celestia was particularly eager to entertain, given that it required her to consider the possibility that Theta had allies.

“I know you’re there,” Theta mumbled, her voice picked up by the array of monitoring devices in the chamber and helpfully reconstructed for Celestia to hear. “Have you come to gloat?”

“I’ve come to talk,” Celestia replied, slowly approaching the containment field, stopping short when she reached the line of shell sections.

“Talk?” Theta spat. “You expect to talk? And you call me crazy!”

“You are crazy!” Celestia cocked her head, trying to follow the pink alicorn’s logic.

“You’ll find out soon enough, Princess Pink,” Theta taunted, her voice happy and chirpy despite her physical construction. “Once I get out of here, you’ll get your answer.”

“That… wasn’t a question. I know you’re crazy.”

“Not that, dummy. The other question.”

“I haven’t asked you any questions at all yet!”

“Oh haven’t you? I thought we’d just skip past that bit of you asking the questions and me acting all coy and villainously flirtatious, fun though it is to watch you squirm, Pink.”

“If you think you can unnerve me with mind games, Theta, you’re wrong.”

“Oh, I don’t need to play mind games to unnerve you, Pink. You’re already unnerved from my reputation. And the fact that you don’t know the answer to your question.”

“There has been no question.”

“Just because you haven’t asked it yet doesn’t mean I don’t know what it is. No it’s not.”

“...What?”

“You were going to say, ‘that’s horseapples’. I’m proving my point. Yes you are.”

“I’m- stop that!”

Theta giggled, making Celestia shiver.

“Fine,” Celestia seethed, circling the outer shell boundary. “So you’re not going to tell me the answer to a question I haven’t asked yet.”

“What’s the fun in telling you now? Then I don’t get to see your reaction when you find out for real!”

“Thing is, though,” Celestia continued, ignoring Theta’s infuriatingly sing-song voice, “I can’t trust any answer you give me anyway. If you say you are working with somepony else, it could just be a ruse to divert my attention into finding somepony that doesn’t exist while you tear us apart from within. But if you claim you’re working alone, it’s just a way to distract me from finding whoever it is that’s going to stab me in the back.”

“I’m hungry,” Theta complained after a moment of silence, her voice petulant. “Think you could bring me some food?”

“You’re not hungry. The field overrides your metabolism.”

“Okay, fine, I’m not hungry,” Theta admitted. “But this is all so boring. I already know everything you’re going to say years before you say it. Yes I am.”

“You’re not- Buck!”

Theta giggled again.

“This is getting nowhere,” Celestia groaned, turning back to the exit of the chamber. “Enjoy your new home, Theta. You’ll be in it until you start giving straight answers, or I drop you into the Void. Whichever comes first.”

“Buh-bye Pwincess,” Theta sung. “ Enjoy your emergency!”

Celestia stormed from the chamber, extinguishing the chamber’s lighting spell on her way out, Theta’s increasingly-manic laughter following in her wake.

“Why exactly am I here?” Twilight asked, barely keeping pace with her grey-coated CO as she cantered down the corridor at speed. “What in Tartarus do you need me for, Walleye?”

“You’re my lockpick,” She replied, skidding around a corner. “You can magically unlock things, right?”

“Yes. Well… most things that aren’t already magically locked, but that’s not what I meant.”

“Well, we’ll just have to hope you’re skilled enough to unlock what I need.”

“Walleye, stop dodging the question. Why are you trusting me with this? You hate me, last I checked.”

Walleye skidded to a halt outside of a heavy dual door, turning to fix Twilight with a look of frustration. “Because, much as I would rather otherwise, you’re the only magic adept I can call on right now to get what I need out of the Armory.”

“Why don’t you just ask them for it?”

“Because there’s no way anypony is going to let me into that section,” Walleye said, pressing her beacon to the door’s access plate, prompting it to neatly fold away into the adjoining walls to reveal racks upon racks of weapons. Twilight eyed the racks with curiosity, awed not only by the number of familiar implements, but the variety of unfamiliar ones.

“That was easy,” Twilight observed, once again following as Walleye trotted into the Armory. “Bit small, though.”

“She says to the mare that carries around a rifle that’s longer than she is.”

“Okay, fair point...” Twilight trailed off, stopping to look at an array of jewels set atop pedestals, equally spaced twelve hooflengths away from each other.

“Would you keep up?” Walleye said, gritting her teeth and turning to glare at Twilight

“What are these?” Twilight asked, levitating one of the stones off its pedestal so she could examine it further. “Some kind of spell stone?”

“Probably,” Walleye replied, trotting over to read the label. “Um… This is all gobbledygook to me… ‘Self-Recharging Thaumic Energy Stone. Two point five… Kith?’”

“Kith?”

“I don’t know that word. K-T-H.”

“That’s a unit of measurement. Kilothaum. Used to measure… magical…” Twilight trailed off as what she had just said sunk in, staring at the stone with a mixture of wonderment and horror. “...energy.”

“And… what? 2.5 is a lot?”

“Yes,” Twilight breathed, delicately setting the stone back down. “It’s immense. Normal unicorns can barely leverage ten or fifteen thaum without exhausting themselves, this stone is storing more than one hundred and fifty times that!”

“Take one, then,” Walleye said, tapping her hoof in impatience. “It’s not like it’ll be missed. I’ve seen Ops teams wearing those like they’re going out of fashion.”

“Okay, pertinent question,” Twilight began, gently attaching the stone to her beacon ring, reforming the metal to clasp around the stone. “Back home, this stone would be considered a weapon of mass destruction. Nopony bar Celestia herself has ever managed to create a powerstone with that kind of capacity, and you have them lying around, unguarded.”

“Yes,” Walleye replied, rounding the corner and stepping onto a wall, her subjective gravity rotating with the change in perspective. “Not hearing a question yet…”

“If this is something you don’t think is dangerous enough to lock up with any degree of seriousness,” Twilight continued, pausing for a moment to following Walleye, shaking her head with the disorienting change in gravity. “How dangerous is whatever it is you’re wanting me to help you steal?”

“You’ll find out soon enough.”

“Oh, no way,” Twilight said, stubbornly shaking her head. “I’m not moving another step until you tell me what we’re here for.”

“Now you listen here,” Walleye growled, rounding on Twilight. “I don’t care. I don’t take orders from you. Now, you can either shut up and keep cantering, or I can escort you back to your room and good luck ever getting me to trust you with anything, ever again.”

“...Fine,” Twilight acquiesced, ears drooping slightly.

They continued in relative silence for over a mile, Twilight choosing to occupy her time by pinging the powerstone now bound to her beacon ring, pulling various parameters from the stone, when it was made, the exact energy capacity, how much she could requisition for immediate use in a single go…

She was so enthralled in the crystal that she almost missed Walleye taking an abrupt turn, leading them both into a small, nondescript domed chamber with a hoof-thick crystal floor, underneath which lay a locking mechanism that, to Twilight at least, could be described only as ‘beautiful’.

Walleye, however, was less impressed by the lock, standing off to one side and pointing at the floor. “I need you to open this.”

Twilight trotted forward, analysing the myriad of interlocking gears and mechanisms with a critical eye, occasionally probing the construction with a carefully-placed ping of magic. Her expression grew steadily more dismayed with each component identified.

“I can’t.”

“Oh, so Miss ‘Mission Accomplished’ can’t get past a simple lock?”

“This lock is by no stretch of the word ‘simple,’” Twilight snapped. “This is probably the single-most-complicated thaumomechanical device I have ever seen or likely will ever see in my life. I wouldn’t know where to start!”

“Why does that matter? You’re a unicorn, just dump some magic at and make it open.”

“That wouldn’t work. I can’t just fire a spell at it with the order of ‘open up,’ because there’s a far more powerful spell, several far more powerful spells, actually, sitting in there with the explicit instruction of ‘no, don’t open up.’ Without knowing the exact timing and exact strength each locking component needs to be triggered, I can’t open it.”

Walleye waved her hoof in the air in a clear ‘blah, blah, blah’ gesture.

“And the fact that I know that much is a miracle in itself! This entire plate is covered in a field that screws with magical interrogation, so I’m having to guess most of this based on the thaumic equivalent of shining a light on something and trying to figure out what its shape really is from the shadow it casts! That’s not mentioning the structural reinforcing, the layers upon layers upon layers of thaumic field interference that basically result in any external magical effect being rendered impotent after a few hooflengths. I can’t levitate anything inside, I can’t teleport in or out, it’s a magical black hole!”

“You’re talking,” Walleye said, “but I’m pretty sure you’re not speaking the same language as me.”

“Gah,” Twilight facehoofed, groaning in frustration. “Okay, lay-ponies explanation. A normal mechanical lock works by little segmented pins. You put a key in, it pushes the pins up until all the little lines of segmentation align, and you can turn it. Simple, and with magic you can just fire a spell that finds the right amount to raise the pins to unlock it.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Walleye said, rolling her eyes. “I follow you.”

“This,” Twilight gestured to the floor, “works by examining a pony’s magical field. There’s dozens of tiny little collector pins in there, which react to a certain frequency of magical excitation. Each individual pony has a unique magical ‘signature,’ if you will, and you can only unlock this lock if your magic matches the magic that’s programmed into the lock.”

Walleye nodded, clearly bored and impatient.

“The thing is, though, this whole ‘Outsider’ thing makes it more complicated, since my magical field is the same as any other Twilight Sparkle on the Exterior, or in the Interior, for that matter. That’s what I don’t get. It’s quite obviously a magical signature recognition lock, though a very, very thorough and complicated one, but that alone wouldn’t work. Unless Outsiders have some extra field component that this thing reacts to that is different from pony to pony, any Twilight Sparkle could just come in here and pulse their magic, and the lock would open.”

As if to punctuate her point, she loosed a mild thaumic ping, a barely-visible purple wave echoing off the walls of the chamber, motes of light flickering through the floor as the lock reacted to the pulse, reading and responding to her magical imprint.

Two seconds later, the entire mechanism slid sideways with a solid mechanical thump.

“...Much like that,” Twilight breathed as the lock rotated and a panel in the centre of the floor rose, revealing a simple metallic-silver cylinder covered in warnings.

“Good work, rookie!” Walleye exclaimed, trotting forward to retrieve the object. “Never doubted you for a moment!”

“That shouldn’t have worked.”

“And yet it did,” Walleye said, swinging the cylinder onto her back, a strap looped around her barrel.

“But it shouldn’t have!” Twilight yelled, turning to Walleye as the floor section sunk back into place. “It’s impossible!”

“I’m not going to complain that we got what I came here for, but apparently, you are.”

“What is it, anyway?” Twilight asked, trotting forward to read the prominently affixed warning sign, a red circle-enclosed six-pointed star denoting the presence of high-energy magic components. “Thaumonuclear Implosion Assembly. Two Megathaum Effective Discharge. Handle with Care.”

Twilight turned to look at Walleye, all color drained from her face. “Two megathaum?”

“Yes,” Walleye snapped, purposefully walking towards the exit. “It’s a very large bomb. Those monsters are going to pay for what they did to Lunatic, and I wanted an appropriate weapon. Now, are you coming or not?”

Author's Note

'Thaumonuclear' and 'Thaumomechanical' have become my two most favourite words.

Falls-EF

"Security breach. All teams stand by for immediate action.”

Twilight’s breath burned in her throat as she ran, hastily-donned armor and saddlebags pinching uncomfortably where a strap or clasp dug into her skin. Her limbs screamed at her as she ran, insisting that she slow down and take a moment’s rest to allow her oxygen-deprived muscles a chance to recuperate.

She couldn’t remember the last time she had run so hard, probably because she hadn’t. For the typically library-bound unicorn, ‘long-distance travel’ usually translated to either ‘train ride’ or ‘teleport.’ Of course, any meaningful form of teleportation ran head-first into the Exterior’s entirely unintuitive brain-warping architecture, thus rendering that form of travel entirely useless, and Twilight had yet to see anything resembling powered transport inside the endless miles of bleak blue-grey corridors.

Thus, she was forced to run. Her four teammates, however, were having a significantly easier time of it. Walleye and Lyra galloped in front, the two easily keeping pace astride each other. Rainboom brought up the rear, flying through the hallway at a speed that seemed considerably slower than the speed-obsessed pegasus would desire. Pinkie, of course, was Pinkie, somehow managing to keep pace despite her bouncy, pronking gait.

For a moment, she lamented that she had never taken the time to find a book on the subject of proper running practice, before the entire team took an abrupt right turn, swerving into the open expanse of Gate Three. Twilight took the opportunity to veer out of the way, collapsing into a heap on the floor as she caught her breath.

“Pinkie,” Walleye barked, skidding to a stop in the centre of the room while pointing to a recessed panel on the Gate’s wall. “Set our destination.”

“On it!” Pinkie replied, ever cheerful as she bounced over to the wall, pushing the panel away to reveal an intricate array of movable crystal mechanisms.

“So…” Lyra said, gazing confusedly at the pile of equipment bags Rainboom had just dumped onto the floor. “Why were we running?”

“Well, in case you didn’t notice,” Walleye raplied, grabbing her own bag-and-sling set and hoisting it into her back. “Security is on the warpath, so we’ve only got a few moments before they find where we are and ‘bushwhack’ us, or however you say it.”

“Right, next question then, why is Security chasing us?”

“Walleye wants to blow someone up,” Twilight wheezed, rolling the stolen thaumonuclear device off her back and gently to the floor. “With this.”

“Okay, third and hopefully final question, who are we blowing up?”

“Whoever,” Walleye answered, slipping her rifle into the sling and securing it. “Or whatever creature tortured Lunatic and cut off her wing.”

“And you need a bomb to do that, why?”

“I want to be sure.”

“With a nuke,” Twilight deadpanned.

“I want to be very sure.”

“This thing will obliterate all of Canterlot and most of the mountain it’s on,” Twilight pointed out, running the mental calculations for the blast radius. “And Ponyville, and probably set the Everfree Forest on fire.”

“Overkill much?” Rainboom chuckled, stretching her legs as she waited for Pinkie to finish aligning the Gate.

“What part of ‘I want to be sure’ do you not understand?”

“Can’t be sure until you see the body!” Lyra chirped.

“There isn’t going to be a body,” Twilight said dryly. “Or much of anything, for that matter.”

“Good!” Walleye barked.

“Aligned!” Pinkie shouted, slipping the panel back into place before tapping her beacon and vanishing.

"Security breach, Gate Three.”

“Did she just...?” Rainboom asked, pointing at where Pinkie had been standing.

“She did,” Walleye answered.

“Was she supposed to…”

“No.”

“Nicely done, Walleye,” Lyra smirked, patting Walleye on the back. “Haven’t even started this mission, and already our analyst is in the middle of the combat zone.”

“Horseapples!” Walleye swore, pulling the straps on her saddlebag tight. “Go! Twilight! Bring the bomb!”

Walleye, Rainboom and Lyra disappeared as they tapped their beacons, leaving Twilight alone on the Gate floor.

“Great,” Twilight muttered, gingerly hefting the nuke onto her back and securing it in place, sending off the mental command to her beacon.

"Security breach, Gate Six.”

“...Waitaminute…”

"Security breach, Gate Two.”

The world went sideways and reformed.

Canterlot was in chaos, pillars of smoke rising from sites all over the city where mobs had set buildings alight. Screams and cries of rage echoed through the streets, ponies running from building to building looting what little remained. Soot-covered shattered glass littered the square where the team had arrived, abandoned weapons lying by storefronts where rioting ponies had smashed windows, doors, signs, and whatever else was within reach.

“Pinkie!” Rainboom cried, whipping her weapon, a compact thaumic carbine, from her saddlebag and loosing a single blast at the pony that was currently beating Pinkie over the head with a baseball bat, sending him flying as the collimated chromatic beam struck him mid-barrel.

Twilight ran forward, scattered information from medical and surgical textbooks flooding to the forefront of her mind as she quickly examined the fallen pony. Rainboom quickly took to the air, not hesitating to make liberal use of her carbine against any pony that dared to get close to the group of newly-arrived Outsiders.

“Is she okay?” Walleye asked, concerned.

“Pulse and breathing are fine,” Twilight said, calling up and casting any spell she had available for medical diagnosis. “She’s unconscious. Probable concussion, skull fracture, dammit, I don’t know what that means…”

“What a skull fracture means?”

“No, what this spell is telling me,” Twilight clarified. “It’s an old one I remember from the Canterlot Archives, designed for rapid diagnosis for paramedics. Medicine wasn’t really anything that I found especially interesting, I mean… I’d read it… But other stuff was always more interesting.”

“You’re babbling,” Walleye barked. “Is she okay?”

“I don’t know!” Twilight yelled. “It’s throwing all this information at me, and it’s being very insistent about an… Epidural Hematoma? I don’t know what that means!”

“Neither do I,” Walleye said. “Can she be moved?”

“I… I think so.”

“Good. Lyra, carry her. Medical on the Exterior can handle her once we Exit.”

“Why don’t we just take her back now?” Lyra asked as Twilight levitated Pinkie’s unconscious form onto her back, hooking her legs into the straps of Lyra’s saddlebags. “It could be serious!”

“I need you here,” Walleye replied. “The city is in chaos, and I need all hooves.”

“Buck that! Just set the bomb here. If Twilight’s right about the blast, it’ll get whoever you’re looking to get.”

“I need to be sure that they’re here,” Walleye insisted. “We’ll head to Canterlot Castle, break into the throne room, and set the bomb there.”

“Because that won’t be hard,” Twilight muttered, reading a set of stunning spells as they moved down Canterlot’s main street towards the palace, Rainboom keeping overwatch from overhead.

To Twilight’s surprise, they managed to keep a relatively brisk pace. The occasional pony, seeing another potential opportunity for violence, had taken a run at them with whatever improvised weapon was at hand, only for Rainboom to smack them down from above with a well-placed carbine bolt. After the first three attempts, they were given a wide berth, allowing the team to proceed in unmolested relative silence.

Much like the rest of the city, Canterlot Palace was in chaos, pillars of smoke and flame issuing from locations where particularly daring rioters had flung bombs or spells. Hundred-year old masonry and stonework continued to crumble, sending echoing shocks throughout the area as they struck the ground and shattered.

“Where are all the guards?” Twilight asked as they cautiously made their way through the main gates. “I would have expected more ponies trying to defend the castle.”

“Guessing they all went for smoko,” Lyra quipped.

“Or whatever reason everypony outside is rioting was enough to get the Guard to walk off, too,” Rainboom added.

“It mostly likely had something to do with Lunatic escaping,” Walleye said, tentatively guiding them into the deserted entrance hall. “If this world is so caught up on killing alicorns, how do you think they’d react when they capture a pair and they both get away?”

“Violently,” Lyra answered. “This room looks clear, alright if we set that bomb of yours here and get out of here?”

“I’d rather you didn’t.”

“Twilight,” Walleye groaned, turning to face her. “We came all this way and now you’ve got an issue with me setting it off? What, is this room too pretty?”

Twilight glared back at her, slowly lifting her forehoof to point at the other Twilight Sparkle that had just come into view at the top of the grand staircase, a jet-black hammer floating in the air beside her. Despite the multitude of bruises and cuts, she held herself with an air of regal determination, gazing at the newcomers with mild annoyance.

“I must admit,” she began, slowly descending the staircase. “This is somewhat unexpected. You are working with Luna, then? Rather an elaborate plan, I must admit. How did you manage to ally yourselves with the changelings? Even I couldn’t convince them to come peacefully! I had to resort to using elk as allies, and look how well that turned out!”

“What changeling?” Rainboom asked, confused.

“My doppleganger over there,” she replied, pointing at Twilight.

“Oh,” Walleye said. “Yeah, she’s not a changeling.”

“No? Then what? Illusion magic? It’s not surgical, she has my cutie-”

“Not relevant,” Walleye cut her off. “I take it you’re the maniac that was responsible for mutilating Lunatic?”

“Lunatic?” Twilight laughed. “Such an appropriate name, and you call her that as well! Oh, I wish I had thought of that one when I fought her the first time. All I got out of it was this lousy hammer. Apparently It’s made from cast lunar stone, an appropriate trophy to take from the Lunar Tyrant.”

“Answer my question.”

“Yes, I cut her wing off. My only regret is that that was all I got to remove.”

“All I needed to hear. Rainboom?”

Rainboom aimed her carbine and fired, only to have Twilight raise her hammer and easily deflect the chromatic beam harmlessly into the floor.

“You’ll have to do better than that,” Twilight smirked, twirling the hammer in mid-air.

Rainboom fired again, only to cry out in pain as the shot was reflected back at her, lancing clean through her wing. An echoing thud resounded through the room as she crashed to the floor, moaning.

Twilight swung the hammer around, glaring down Walleye. “So, you’re going to try next?”

Walleye reacted, releasing the straps on her rifle sling and bringing it up to bear. Twilight responded decisively, teleporting closed the gap between them before slamming the hammer into the side of Walleye’s head, sending her spinning into Rainboom, her rifle dropping unused to the floor.

“You’re naught for two,” she quipped, turning to regard her doppleganger. “Perhaps my duplicate will put up a fight worthy of a Princess?”

“I’m not a Princess,” Twilight replied, backing away fearfully.

“No, but I am.”

A crack echoed throughout the hall as the Tyrant Princess teleported the gap closed, her hammer already mid-swing. Twilight, reacting on instinct, triggered her own teleport, blinking out of the way of the hammer strike, causing the blow to land on the tiles, sending spiderweb cracks rippling through the priceless marble.

“You can dodge,” Princess Twilight smirked, pulling the hammer free. “That’s one better than your friends!”

“Friends?” Twilight breathed, distracted. The concept was foreign to her, she hadn’t ever entertained the possibility of friends during her years at the Royal School, and she certainly didn’t consider Team Fifteen to be anything more than workmates or acquaintances.

The momentary distraction was more than enough for the Princess to teleport again, bringing the hammer around in a devastating spinning strike. The sound of stone on metal echoed through the room as Twilight ducked a split-second too late, the bomb on her back sent flying through the air before landing next to Walleye and Rainboom.

Adrenaline flooded her senses, reducing her awareness to a relative pinhole as her brain shut down ancillary cognition in the face of imminent mortal peril. Millenia-old fight-or-flight instincts kicked in, autonomously polling her memory for any useful methods of self-defense as her muscles went into overdrive, preparing her to fend off the threat.

Dimly, Twilight noticed that the Princess’ strike had put the tyrant in a particularly vulnerable position, and her horn was now pointed directly at the Princess’ neck. While she was hardly an expert on magical combat, she knew from her limited reading that that was the last position you wanted to be in when facing off against another spellcaster. She had a momentary advantage.

Thought left her mind, to be replaced by cold, unwavering instinct. Her forebrain immediately latched onto the idea of ‘neutralise threat,’ and fed it directly into the neural structures below her horn, responsible for coordinating magical work. Magic flowed through her, her adrenaline-addled brain overriding any conscious limits she would normally place on spell output, dumping every thaum of magical potential at her disposal, including the Outsider Powerstone’s reserves, into a single offensive blast.

A two-and-a-half-kilothaum pulse of barely-formatted magic left the tip of her horn, striking the Princess just below her jawbone.

An instant later, Princess Twilight Sparkle abruptly ceased to exist.

It took a few seconds before Twilight opened her eyes, her limbs shaking as the adrenaline flood finally reached them, arming them for a fight that was now entirely unnecessary. The base of her horn burned as the spell’s waste energy washed over her, dumping the unused thaumic potential back into the local field.

“Woah,” Lyra mumbled, staring wide-eyed at the crouching unicorn. “You just… That… was something.”

She gingerly rose to her full height, glancing at her teammates with an unsure look on her face. Walleye and Rainboom both stared back at her, their pain entirely forgotten and replaced with pure surprise.

“I killed her,” Twilight said, quietly.

“She was going to kill you,” Rainboom groaned as Walleye helped her to her hooves, her wing hanging limply at her side. “It’s a natural response.”

“But… I killed her.”

“If you didn’t do it, I would have,” Walleye reminded her.

“Fat chance,” Lyra said. “She smacked you down without even putting effort in.”

“Oh, rub it in.”

“I killed her,” Twilight repeated. “I killed her, and now an entire city is going to die because I was oh so desperate to get you to trust me!”

“Twilight…” Walleye began

“Walleye, I think it’s best you shut it for a tick,” Lyra said, resting a hoof gently on Twilight’s back. “Twi, It’s okay. We’ve all of us killed ponies.”

“But that’s not me!” Twilight sobbed. “I’m not a killer! I don’t want to be a killer!”

“Sometimes you get forced into a corner. Self-preservation is a fairly primal instinct.”

“When did you get all poetic?” Rainboom asked.

“Better than the bollocks you two are feeding her.”

“Oh buck up,” Walleye shouted. “She killed somepony who was about to kill her, boo-bucking-hoo. Everypony here’s done it, at least now she’s actually earning her place on this team.”

“No! Shut up!” Twilight shouted, notes of hysteria creeping into her voice. “I am not like you! You bigoted, unthinking nag! I should never have tried to earn your trust, I should have just run off the moment I got home and forgotten about all of you. You’ve turned me into a mass murderer!”

Walleye stopped mid-step, eyes fixed on the tiny green-black motes popping into and out of existence around the base of Twilight’s horn. “Okay, Twilight. Take it easy…”

“Uh, guys?” Rainboom piped up. “Is the bomb supposed to be doing that?”

Every head in the room snapped around to look at her, before slowly following her outstretched hoof to the bomb, malevolent red numerals floating over the damaged activation plate. They were counting down.

“Fix it!” Lyra shouted.

“Screw that! We’re leaving!” Walleye shouted.

In unison, they all tapped their beacons.

Nothing happened.

“Uh…” Rainboom mumbled, repeatedly tapping her beacon. “It’s not doing anything. It’s not even beeping. Aren’t they supposed to beep?”

Twilight fired her own beacon, waiting a few seconds for the return acknowledgement.

“There’s nothing there,” she said as the beacon quietly informed her that the call failed. “There’s no gate there to collect us. That doesn’t make sense.”

“Did they strand us here on purpose?” Lyra asked.

“No, Gates don’t work like that. We’d return to the default gate if they switched off the one we left from,” Twilight explained, taking the opportunity to lecture to distract her from the horror of the situation. “This is more like the Gates are just… gone.”

They all stared at each other, expressions mixed as they turned to regard each other, and the rapidly-depleting bomb timer.

“Oh good,” Walleye said, smirking lopsidedly. “For a moment there, I thought we were in trouble.”

Author's Note

And thus concludes Act 2.

We will be having a short break for me to rebuild my buffer and deal with some real-life issues, before we dive into Act 3 with 'Homeward Bound'

Inner Join

Of the many places one could find themselves awakening after being stunned into unconsciousness by the Royal Guard, Canterlot Royal Memorial Hospital was not particularly high on Twilight’s list of expectations. The sterile white panelling came as a pleasant surprise to the unicorn as she came to, considering that she anticipating a stone-walled dungeon.

Her stone-faced brother, however, standing astride her bed, was far less of a surprise.

“I’m sorry,” she muttered, flopping her head back in resignation.

“For what?” Shining asked.

“Everything. I’ve been such a foal.”

“Well, I’m not going to tell you ‘everything’s going to be okay,’ because that’d be a lie, but…”

“Oh, it’s worse than you think.”

“I’m sure we can work it out.”

Twilight sighed, looking at him. Despite his stony expression, she could spot the brotherly concern, lines of worry etched around his eyes. It was an expression she’d seen many times before growing up, her brother doing his best to look out for her as she shunned the world around her, whiling away her time in the company of books and dust. Even considering that he didn’t know the full extent of her misdeeds, the fact that he was still concerned for her well-being came as a surprise.

“Why?”

“Why… what?”

“Why. Why are you still worried about me? Aren’t I an enemy of the state by now? After all I’ve done?”

“Should I not be worried about my little sister?”

“That’s… ugh! How can you even be sure that I really am your sister?”

“Are you not?”

“Well, I am, but…”

“Is there any good reason I should believe you aren't?”

“The fact that the ponies I was with at the Academy are duplicates of other ponies all over Equestria?”

“Yeah, but they felt weird. You don’t, ergo...”

“You’re basing your judgement on the fact that I don’t feel weird?”

“And your smell.”

“Ew! Shining! That’s creepy!”

“What? You grow up with a filly you learn to recognise their scent! I’m stallion enough to admit that! It’s a biological thing!”

“Still creepy,” She muttered, sitting up slightly and looking around the ward. There was a pair of nurses on duty, diligently working around the ward’s patients, while a third sat next to the bed opposite her, constantly monitoring the patient there, a pink mare whose head was nearly cocooned in bandages, tubes and cables running from her to nearby machines.

“Pinkie!” Twilight exclaimed. “Is she okay?”

“She’ll be fine, but it was a close call,” Shining answered, looking over. “Another hour or so, and it would have been much worse.”

“She was hit in the head pretty bad.”

“The doctor thought as much. She was bleeding into her skull from whatever hit her, but he managed to heal the wound and drain out the blood. She’ll have a mighty headache and maybe some behavioral tics when she gets back up, but no lasting damage, thankfully.”

“Thank Celestia for that…”

She flopped back, relief flooding through her.

“So, who is she?” Shining asked.

“That’s… a long story.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“Try me.”

“I… ran into a doppelganger copy of myself from another world and followed her to her home, discovering an entire civilisation of world-hopping duplicates of everypony.”

“I see…”

“And since they couldn’t send me home for some horseapple political reason, they offered to let me work for them until something could be worked out, so I got put in this team to help them find somepony who got lost or captured, I don’t remember which. Pinkie over there is from that team.”

“Wait, if they couldn’t send you home, why are you here now?”

“I got dragged along to blow up a city when the pony we were originally looking for found her way back on her own, and Walleye wanted revenge on the ponies that cut off her wing.”

“Walleye?”

“The gray pegasus I arrived with.”

“Right, so they just let you and them go?”

“No. Walleye commandeered one of their teleport machines to send us there, and then I brought us here when everything went pear-shaped.”

“Alright, that doesn’t explain what you were doing here yesterday at Ponyville and giving my lieutenants the slip. Wait, was that you, or some duplicate?”

“No, that was me. I was trying to help them find where their friend had gone.”

“Rather duplicitous story you told the Guard, but anyway… I thought you said they wouldn’t send you home, and then… they send you home?”

“I’m as confused as you. None of us had any idea why Celestia did it.”

“The Princess?”

“No, different Celestia. Duplicates of everypony, remember?”

“Ah. And the fight that we broke up at the Academy? That didn’t look all that friendly.”

“I was… angry,” Twilight mumbled, unable to bring herself to look at her brother. “Walleye manipulated me into doing something horrible, and I wasn’t thinking straight.”

“Should we be concerned about her? Should I have her put in solitary confinement?”

“No, no. She’s just very protective of her team, and gets a bit… equicidal when they get hurt.”

“Sounds like a pretty poor choice for a team leader, if you ask me…”

“Mmhmm,” Twilight agreed. “She’s got a bit of a thing for Insiders.”

“‘Insiders?’”

“Ah, terminology thing. We’re Insiders, they’re Outsiders. I’m not quite sure what makes the difference, but I think there’s some magic field component. Still need to test that hypothesis…”

“Are these ‘Outsiders’ a group that we need to be concerned about? A bakery in Ponyville was levelled and Celestia is rightly concerned that these ponies are changelings, or some sort of enemy agent.”

“...You do realise that everything I’ve said to you thus far could be a lie?”

Shining’s horn lit up, a rosy aura washing over Twilight’s head. She felt a slight pressure at the side of her awareness, daring her to resist the intrusion. It passed quickly.

“Nothing you’ve said to me thus far has been deceitful.”

“It’s rather rude to cast that without asking a pony first.”

“If you didn’t want to accommodate me, you could quite easily have blocked the spell’s effect. Celestia knows you’re better at magic than I am.”

“Still…” Twilight pouted, crossing her forehooves.

“Oh, cut it out. Would you rather I have been mindlessly suspicious and had you thrown in the dungeons on suspicion of espionage?”

“To be honest, I feel like I deserve that more than… this…”

“Quit being so down on yourself.”

“I’ve killed ponies, Shining.”

“Uh...”

An uncomfortable silence settled between them as Shining attempted to process what Twilight had just said.

“Sorry… killed? As in…”

“Dead. Yes.”

“...You didn’t mention that before.”

“Well, I’m not exactly proud of it, am I?” Twilight shouted, startling Shining and the orderlies. “Hello, yes! My name is Twilight Sparkle! I just killed a duplicate of myself in an alternate world, and am indirectly responsible for the demise of a few hundred thousand ponies in the destruction of an alternate Canterlot! How do you do? You can see why I’d be a bit hesitant to spill those details at the drop of a hat!”

“...Yes.”

“‘Yes?’” Twilight asked, anger starting to seep forward. “Is that all you’re going to say about the discovery that your little sister is a murderer?”

“Twilight, calm down.”

“Calm? Why in Celestia’s name should I be calm? Do you have any idea what I’m going through right now? Have you ever killed anypony?”

“No.”

“Well then. You don’t know how this feels. You can’t know. Nopony knows apart from that monster of a pegasus in the dungeons, and that just makes it worse!”

“Twilight.”

“I don’t want anything to do with that nag!” Twilight gasped, pulling in breath as fast as she could manage, panic starting to flow freely into her mind as her hooves began to twinge and go numb. “I don’t want to be like her! And now I… oh Celestia help me!”

“Twilight!” Shining shouted, holding Twilight’s shoulders and forcefully pushing her into the bed. “Stop! You’re going to hurt yourself! Calm down!”

“No! Nononono… I’m broken! It’s gone now!” Twilight yelled, pushing vainly against her brother’s grip as the feeling in her limbs gradually faded. “I’m broken! I can’t do this! I can’t do it!”

“TWILIGHT SPARKLE!” Shining yelled, gesturing desperately for an orderly while trying to restrain his manic sister.

“LET ME GO!” Twilight screamed, pushing her brother off her with a magically-augmented shove. “DON’T TOUCH ME!”

She scrambled off the bed, only to collapse to the floor as she attempted to stand, her numb oxygen-deprived limbs failing to give her appropriate feedback enough to balance. In desperation, she scrambled closer to the wall, her horn ignited in desperation.

“Get away from me!”

“Twilight?” Shining said, poking his head around the edge of the bed. “Please, try to breathe. You’re having a panic attack. You’re making it worse.”

“No I’m not!” she screamed. “There’s something wrong with me! I must have corrupted myself, or something. I can feel it! This is what happens when you kill somepony. It’s wrong! And now that wrongness is changing me!”

“Celestia above! Twilight! You’re having a panic attack!”

“Stop saying that!” She gasped, voice raspy as her airway contracted. Her head felt limp and uncooperative. “It’s a corruption! I… can’t feel anything. I can’t breathe.”

Shining edged closer, hoof outstretched. “Twilight, please.”

“GET AWAY FROM ME!”

She dove sideways, away from him and into a curtain. With a groan, the fabric sheared away from the runners, sending the panicked unicorn flying into the next bed. A brief flash of red and green flying through her vision before the bed toppled from the impact, sending her, the unfortunate patient in the bed, and the contents of a nearby tray, snagged by the curtain, crashing into the floor.

It took a few moments for Twilight so see through the haze of panic that occluded her vision, allowing her a good look at the red-coated earth pony she had collided with in her desperation. A twinge of familiar oddness poked into her awareness the moment she recognised him.

“...Mac?”

She vainly tried to pull away, only worsening her predicament. The overturned tray shifted, dropping a ornate yellow crystal onto Twilight’s outstretched forehoof. It flashed white as it made contact with her, a wave of vertigo suddenly intruding into her mind.

Moments later, the world around her dissolved.

Unscheduled Inbound

Unease filtered through Celestia’s bones as she walked away from L-55, the echoes of Theta’s mad cackling still echoing through her mind. It was a sensation almost entirely foreign to the nigh-ageless Outsider, and it took all of her not inconsiderable mental discipline to not instinctually squash it out of her awareness.

Because anything that could make her nervous was something that required her utterly undivided attention, and she needed that sensation there to keep her on-task and focussed.

Not that it was helping, however. Despite her innumerable years of experience dealing with existential threats to the Exterior, she was at a total loss for a solution to her dilemma. Beyond interrogating each and every resident of the Exterior, there was little she could do to determine if Theta was acting alone, or had collaborators.

The mere idea was nigh-unthinkable. The mare was psychotic, unhinged to the point of delusion. The only reliable fact about her was that she had brutalised or killed every Outsider sent to stem the tide of bodies that followed in her wake. Nopony would have been able to work with her without fearing for their own lives, waiting for that inevitable moment when Theta deemed they had outlived their usefulness.

Or, more likely, the moment when Theta would decide that they were the easiest target for her latest boredom-alleviating murderspree.

According to official, public record, Theta was directly responsible for the deaths of twenty-three Outsiders since her recovery, four years ago. The number of unsolved Outsider deaths that were directly or indirectly connected to the mare, however, spanned into the tens of thousands over a period spanning decades. None of them were substantiable, of course, otherwise they wouldn’t have been sending mere Operations teams to bring her in. They would have been throwing Detachment Devices at any world she was even suspected of being on, and damn the consequences.

And of course, she couldn’t be working with someone stronger than her, since, as always, she would get bored, attempt to murder her ostensible ally on some spur-of-the-moment urge, and get obliterated for her trouble. And since Theta was still alive, the likelihood of that particular scenario was effectively zero.

Which left either a weaker ‘ally’ who was exceedingly capable at avoiding being the next target of Theta’s random killings, a stronger ally with considerably more restraint than Theta herself, or Theta was working alone with a level of foresight far beyond what anyone had given her credit for.

All options seemed equally impossible.

In everypony’s experience, Theta was not a calculating mare. She was random and impulsive. Prone to gleefully random bouts of violence and mayhem. Planning was not something she did.

As she slowly passed through each of the seals separating Containment from the greater Exterior, Celestia came to consider another, singularly frightening possibility:

Somepony may have found a way to control Theta.

She shuddered at the possibility, pausing just beyond the final seal as she waited for her spell suite to reassert itself and reconnect her now that she was clear of the thaumic field discontinuity induced by the Containment seals. One by one, the spells came back online, streams of tabulated data once again streaming into her peripheral awareness, collected from tens of thousands of quasi-sentient autonomous information-gathering spells.

Her sense of unease lessened slightly as the familiar comfort of sheer, unmatched awareness returned to her. A cacophony of voices accompanied it, communications spells reasserting and connecting her back to the myriad networks she had direct or indirect involvement in. A short mental directive relegated the majority of them to low-level awareness, while bringing a secure high-level command-and-control feed to the forefront of her attention.

“This isn’t a minor breach, you realise,” a voice said, inserted directly into her auditory nerve by her spell suite. “That section of the Armory is subject to the most sophisticated security interlocks we could devise. If somepony can just walk in…”

“Alpha here,” Celestia subvocalised, spells capturing the words for transmission. “What’s going on?”

“The Queen in Pink returns! Finally! We have a situation!”

“I keep telling you,” another voice interrupted, “this is not a major issue. We know exactly where the thieves are. We can stop them before any damage is done.”

“You should be more concerned about this!”

“Forgive me for having faith in our security team to interdict two ponies.”

“Anypony going to fill me in, or are you both going to keep arguing away?”

“One of the secure vaults in the Armory has been breached. An explosive was taken.”

“By whom? What was taken? How long ago? Details, Solaris!”

“Two ponies, looks like it was an inside job. They took a thaumonuclear device.”

“Do you know who exactly?”

“Team Fifteen. A Whooves and a Sparkle.”

Celestia stopped mid-stride, surprised. “Are you sure?”

“Absolutely sure. We have a breach somewhere, obviously, since access permissions don’t include a Sparkle from Fifteen.”

“There’s no breach. Fifteen’s Sparkle has access to the Armory, actually.”

“No she doesn't,” the second voice challenged. “There is no entry for a Sparkle from Fifteen in the logs.”

“I know that, Anna,” Celestia said, mildly irritated. “This particular Sparkle doesn’t need any entry.”

“Would you stop being so gods-damned coy about this, Alpha?” Solaris demanded. “A stolen thaumonuclear device is hardly a small problem!”

“Fifteen’s Sparkle has my personal dispensation to access the Exterior in its entirety. She is working for and loyal to me personally. I trust her, and trust that she has need of the device.”

For a moment, she pondered what possible need her trump-card Insider could have for the weapon, considering that Twilight hadn’t been told about the existence of such powerful devices, at least by her.

“And when did you feel like informing the rest of us about your little sleeper agent?”

“Never. The only reason I’m telling you now is because otherwise, you’d have her arrested and mind-read. On that topic, have your guards stand down. They are not to be interdicted.”

“Are you mad?”

“I am quite sure plenty of ponies think so, but that’s immaterial. Grant them passage.”

“Fine. Done.”

“So,” Anna began. “Did you find out anything useful from the Rogue?”

“Theta is about as comprehensible as she usually is. Which is to say, not very. Cryptic riddles, and lots of her trying to screw with my head. Nothing substantial or actionable.”

“Well, that’s entirely unhelpful.”

“I thought much the same thing. Short of a direct mind-read, we’re not going to get anything useful from her. And I doubt anyone working for us has the power to punch through Theta’s mental fortitude.”

“So, what’s the plan?”

“I don’t have one, so we’re just going to have to wait and see what pans out. I have a few theories, but no evidence to support any of them, short of interrogating everypony on the Exterior.”

“That sounds like a plan,” Solaris said.

“We are not interrogating everypony on the Exterior. That’s so far beyond practicable it’s not funny.”

“And I’m not laughing. If that’s what it takes to find out what that madmare is up to…”

“By all means, Solaris. If you can find a way to organise untold trillions of ponies and have them submit to mind-reading, be my guest.”

“I’m sure we have a large enough guard contingent to manage a sectional sweep…”

“Solaris, be sensible. Alpha’s right. We don’t have the pony-power to interrogate everyone, and we have no leads. All that’s left is to wait and see what happens next.”

“That’s horseapples. I am a stallion of action! I will not stand around-”

“You’re full of hot air is what you are.”

She took a moment to appreciate the pointed silence that greeted her over the spellwaves. While she respected Solaris as a commander and a tactician, he was a lackluster administrator, all too eager to jump on the aggressive, militaristic solution. And as much as she loathed to antagonise any of her colleagues, it was occasionally necessary to get the war-stallion away from his fixations.

Her awareness shifted, tracking and positioning data called to the forefront of her perception as she called for information on Twilight. Currently, the Insider was being led along at full-pelt by Fifteen’s CO, the stolen bomb dutifully following behind the duo in the grip of Twilight’s magic as they headed towards Habitation. She was largely unconcerned about the device itself, since it was impossible to arm it within the Exterior. Not that Twilight would know that, of course, but it would provide rather telling proof of her treachery if she were to try.

As it were, Celestia continued to watch Twilight as she and Walleye rounded up their teammates, curiosity piqued as the five ponies made a rapid beeline towards the Exterior’s Gate array. Minor alerts pinged in her peripheral awareness as Operations interlocks detected the weapon passing security boundaries, which she dismissed offhoofedly.

An instant later, the entire Gate array dropped clean out of her awareness.

“What the…?”

She wasted no time, sending packets of energy to the myriad of observer spells responsible for that area, attempting to reassert her observation coverage.

“Alpha, what did you do?” Anna asked, audibly concerned. “I can’t see anything near the Gates.”

“That’s not me! Solaris! Are you up to something?”

“Not me. I blame your little sleeper agent. No coincidence that spell coverage dropped out just as she entered the area!”

“No, it’s not her. She doesn’t have the ability to cause an outage on this scale.”

Fragments of information began to filter back into her awareness, almost all of them tinged with interference, providing no clear picture on what was going on. She brought the PA network bridge forward, issuing a command.

"Security breach. All teams stand by for immediate action.”

“Security breach?” Solaris hissed.

“I have no idea what’s going on. Something is actively interfering with my spell coverage. I can barely see anything through it.”

“At least you still have a bit of coverage. My spells are all completely gone.”

She picked up her pace, heading towards Operations. While her own observer spell swarm was largely ad-hoc and provided complete coverage mostly through sheer force of their owner’s will, she knew that Solaris’ versions were hardened and redundant to the point of paranoia. Anything that could manage to irreversibly knock his coverage out was a threat that needed to be dealt with quickly.

“Do you have any contact with security teams at the Gates?”

“No. I’ve got nothing from that entire area.”

“Featherballs,” Celestia swore, breaking into a gallop, pulling what little diagnostic information she should from the surviving observer spells. Gate activation logs began to filter back into her awareness, distorted from interference. “Solaris, whatever guards you can reach, get them over to the Gates now. Full containment!”

“On it!”

A fragmented Gate activation alert popped forward, which she reflexively directed to her PA bridge.

"Security breach, Gate Three.”

“Anna. Start evacuations of all civilian areas closest to the Gates. Somepony, or something hostile is on the Exterior.”

Silence greeted her, further activation alerts popping into her awareness as she ran, which she forwarded to the PA bridge as she was able to piece them together.

“Anna, are you there?”

"Security breach, Gate Six.”

“Solaris, do you read?”

“Yeah, I’m here. I’ve got guards mobilised.”

"Security breach, Gate Two.”

“What in Tartarus is going on?”

“I don’t know. I’m getting a lot of fragmented information, but I can’t tell anything beyond the fact that something is coming aboard the Exterior.”

“Security breach, Gate Nine.”

“Security breach, Gate Fifteen.”

“Security breach, Gate One.”

“Solaris? You read?”

She cried out as the entirety of her extended perception dropped out of her awareness, leaving her blind to anything going on beyond the corridor she was now in. Communications spells flickered and died in her mind as a blanket of interference flooded the spellwaves around her.

“Theta,” she growled, pulling long-disused combat spells from her memory, rushing as fast as her legs could push her towards Operations.

Station Breach

Under normal circumstances, the Operations Spire, a two-kilometre-tall spike of barely-understood thaumic machinery encased in support equipment and maintenance gantries, was a relatively quiet place, despite the high traffic that came with being the functional command-and-control hub of the Exterior.

Today, however, it was a warzone.

Typically, all one could hear when they first entered Operations was a faint, almost imperceptibly oscillating hum that came from the spire itself, interspersed with muffled hoofsteps and quiet chatter. As Celestia entered the chamber, however, the first thing that struck her was the noise: screams of pain and dismay echoed throughout the chamber, punctuated by sharp cracks as offensive spell charges impacted against metal or flesh.

She skidded to a halt, surprised at both the scale of the carnage that had spread in such a short time, and the fact that she was surprised, a sensation almost entirely alien her her considering her previous nigh-omniscience. It took a second for the fact that the Exterior was under attack to sink in, before a bolt of malevolent red energy screeched passed her head, forcing her to take cover behind an upturned metal desk.

She was woefully underprepared for combat. Without some external power source or a Powerstone at her disposal, she would have to rely upon her own natural reserves of magical power and raw ability as an alicorn. While that would be more than enough to best a regular pony one-on-one, she was facing an army. Or, something that seemed like an army.

“Horsefeathers,” she swore under her breath, chaining together a series of one-off general-purpose defensive spells, carefully metering her available power. Since everyone in Operations knew her personally, she could be reasonably assured that anyone who attacked her wasn’t friendly, and tailored the spells accordingly, directing them to reflect any inbound hostile spell, projectile, or beam back to its source.

“This is Alpha!” she yelled, voice echoing over the chaos. “I don’t know who you all are, but this is your last warning to stand down before I personally get involved!”

A bolt of energy slammed into the table she was hiding behind.

“Very well!”

She vaulted the table, propelling herself at the central spire of Operations, wings spread and horn ignited. Almost immediately, five of her prepared defensive spell chains triggered, reflecting three high-energy thaumic beams, a thrown agonize spell, and an explosive cannon shell back to their owners.

The extent of the chaos became even more apparent now that she found herself in the midst of it. For starters, she couldn’t tell her own ponies and the enemy apart, given that everypony in Operations was wearing standard Outsider Operations gear. Groups of what she could only assume were hostiles were grouped together on many levels, systematically advancing on and dispatching isolated ponies who were as much in the dark on who was friend and who was foe as Celestia herself was.

She hesitated in casting an offensive spell, twisting mid-air as she drew closer to the Spire in order to present a smaller target for anyone who might decide to take a potshot at her. As it was, the only way she could determine if somepony was an enemy was if they shot at her first, while they seemed to be able to easily discern who was on their side and who wasn’t.

Another bolt of energy flew at her, and was diverted back at its source in turn, a startled yelp accompanying the bolt’s impact. Two more flew past her, passing barely far enough from her for her wards to ignore them.

She stretched her hooves, latching on to the Spire’s meshwork as she passed, swinging herself up and under a catwalk to provide her with some much-needed cover. It wouldn’t last long, the interlopers would get to a more suitable vantage point to dispatch her, but she didn’t need much time as it was.

To many, the Spire that ran through the core of operations was often mistaken for an ornamental centrepiece, an immaculately-carved spike of eldritch crystal, inlaid with innumerable patterns and fractal fissures that led deep into the spire’s core. Otherworldly polychromatic light flashed through it, bathing the chamber in dancing colors that one never seemed able to tune out. An intricate golden mesh encased the crystal, itself immaculately designed and detailed, further distorting the errant bursts of light.

To Celestia, however, it was a device quite beyond her capability to understand. Countless scholars had spent their entire lives studying it, unable to discern the crystal’s ultimate purpose or limits. As far as Operations was concerned, it was essentially a giant filing cabinet, a faithful assistant capable of storing, organising, and recalling any information stored within it. Beyond that, ponies didn’t really know what it was ultimately capable of, and new functions, trivial though they may have been, were discovered almost every other week.

While the information stored within it was her primary concern, Celestia hoped that somewhere, deep within the crystal’s lattice, lay some capability that could help her.

She reached out, worming her hoof through the meshing to lay it against the icy-cold surface of the Spire.

It was cold. Almost unbearably cold, as though the heat of the universe had been syphoned away and replaced with a dull freezing void. Celestia saw her body stiffen up from the sensation, but didn’t feel it happen, her perception currently situated around five hooflengths behind her head.

She hated this place. Not that it was accurate to call it a ‘place,’ but she hated it nonetheless. Through a mechanism that wasn’t even slightly understood, upon physical contact with the Operations Spire, the user’s conscious awareness was forcibly detached from their body and permitted to roam freely. Her viewpoint drifted upwards, idly examining the innumerable ponies in the room, frozen in time under her scrutiny. An urge to shudder made itself known, stopped short by the fact that it had no body to act upon.

Dismissively, she turned away from Operations, the world shifting around her as she moved through the crystal’s inner world. Quite unlike a giant filing cabinet, data within the Spire was stored natively, ponies depositing memories or innate factual connections within the crystalline lattice for later recall. The sensation of feeling knowledge rapidly connect and detach itself from one’s mind was unnerving, to say the least. It took most ponies years to learn how to act within the Spire, if they ever mastered it at all.

A subjective age later, she stopped, positioned at the exact center of the Spire’s world, innumerable nodules of memory arrayed around her at the periphery of her mind, awaiting connection and analysis by the user.

She hesitated for a moment, a spell sitting in her mind awaiting execution. What she was about to do, cast a spell from within the detached awareness of the Spire, was something that had never been done before, as far as she was aware. Considering that she didn’t currently occupy a physical form capable of casting spells, she was unsure as to what could happen once she tried to cast it. It also didn’t help that she didn’t know if the spell she had prepared, encrypt, was even valid when used on the type of information within the spire.

On the other hand, the only other option she could conceive of to deny the interlopers access to the information was to outright delete it, something that she was reasonably sure was impossible.

She executed the spell.

The affirmative ping of a successful cast popped back to her almost immediately, the array of memory-nodes subtly shifting around her as the lattice visualisation refreshed, an air of perceptual security now pervading each of them.

For a moment, she floated there, pondering how the spell managed to execute at all given her incorporeal form and lack of mana. It was possible that the lattice was somehow drawing from her now-unoccupied body’s reserves, but that was unlikely considering that everything outside of the latticework’s interior world was frozen in place. Mathematically speaking, it was impossible.

And yet, the spell had executed.

Which begged the question, How?

She decided to test the waters, calling up a set of simple spells to test the capability of the realm she inhabited. First of which was a spell that most every young unicorn learned at one point or another, Ignite Fire.

It failed immediately, the negative ping popping back to her almost before she cast the spell. Identical failures met her attempts to cast other basic spells, like Create Air or Sound. It wasn’t until she worked her way into more advanced information-gathering spells that the continual pings of failure gave way to the more amenable success returns.

‘Okay, something simple,’ she thought to herself, readying a simple thaumoinformatics spell. ‘Where am I?’

The Lattice Spire

While unhelpful, the blunt, literal response had been within the realm of her expectations for the spell output. Since the spell’s output was partially based on what information one already had, in order to frame the response in the most understandable, intuitive way. It wasn’t going to give her the Spire’s name for itself, since she didn’t know it. That was assuming the eldritch artifact was even given a name by whomever created it. Questions for another, less imminently perilous situation.

‘Who am I?’

Outsider Celestia Alpha-113, Chief Executor, Exterior Operations

‘What am I?’

Equus Sapiens Majestas

‘Who is attacking the Exterior?’

Outsiders

She paused, confused. Either the spell didn’t properly interpret her meaning, or she didn’t possess the required background knowledge for the spell to give a more detailed answer. The former hypothesis was easy to check.

‘There are a number of ponies aboard the Exterior who have moved to attack me and my subordinates. Who are they?’

Outsiders

She huffed mentally, the memory nodes around her shifting as her viewpoint recoiled with her frustration. Without further information, the line of questioning was pointless, and there were hard limits to the sort of information the spell could retrieve. Asking it for the hostiles’ motivations, for instance, wouldn’t work.

‘How many hostiles are within Operations?’

Three hundred and forty-two

‘How many of my ponies are in Operations?’

One thousand, eight hundred and eleven

‘...How many of those are still alive or conscious?’

Sixty-three

Over fifteen hundred ponies to sixty in a matter of minutes. The prospect was as horrifying as it was infuriating. She has dedicated herself to protecting the Exterior, safeguarding the secrets and the sophonts within it, and now a group of interlopers had intruded on her domain and cut a bloody swath through it.

‘What is Gate Three’s current target?’

Falls-EF

‘Are there any hostiles in or around Gate Three?’

She paused, thinking. It stood to reason that Twilight was acting under orders or coercion from someone in Team Fifteen, likely Walleye or Lyra. There was little other reason for her to steal a high-powered thaumonuclear device, something that she would have no knowledge of otherwise.

Ultimately, though, who and why were irrelevant. All that really mattered at this point was preventing Twilight from returning to the Exterior, forcing her to divert to somewhere that she wouldn’t be immediately ambushed upon arrival. Considering her extremely limited travel history in the Interior, the most likely place she would end up was her homeworld.

The next most important thing was finding some way to get a message to her. Contingency plans were rather useless if you couldn’t activate them, of course.

‘How long ago was the last departure from Gate Three?’

Eight minutes and forty-three seconds

‘Where is The Machinist?’

In the Machine Shop

‘I need a teleport solution from my body’s current position to the Machine Shop, and also a solution from the Machine Shop to Gate Three.’

For a long while, nothing happened. The spell eventually returned, depositing two near-incomprehensible spell arrangements into her mind. Long-distance teleportation like that was theoretically impossible within the Exterior, and the fact that the request had returned positive filled her with no small measure of amusement. Academics and researchers had spent years attempting to solve what she had managed to create in an instant. If she managed to get out of this situation alive, the spell arrangement would make for quite the discovery.

She steeled herself, readying her senses for the reattachment to her physical body, and sent one last query into the latticework.

‘Is it possible to detach a section of the Spire for transport, containing specific information for a specific recipient?’

Yes

‘Is it possible for me to do it?’

Yes

‘Show me how.’

Information flooded into her brain. She followed the directions exactly, forming a new bubble of memory, sequestering it away within an apparently isolated, unused area of the latticework that her directions informed her was near the ‘surface’ of the physical Spire crystal, right under her hoof. She took memories from herself, the still-accumulating stream of information and senses from her mind of everything that had happened in the last ten minutes, instructing it to only divulge itself to Twilight Sparkle, the Insider from Slateform.

Finally, she turned towards the bubble.

‘Twilight, I know this is a horrible, unequalled burden to put on you right now, but I need your help. I’ve had a hunch that something like this invasion were coming for a long time, but I could never prove it; there was no evidence, just niggling suspicions. That’s why I needed you. I needed an agent who couldn’t be anticipated, who I could count on to act in my, and the Exterior’s, defense when we really needed it.’

‘It was a manipulation, and I’m sorry for it. I wouldn’t even think of forcing you into this situation if I had any other choice, but here we are. I need you to find out what these interlopers are here for, where they came from, what they want, and if you can, to stop them. For all we know, these ponies could pose a threat to all of existence, not just the little shell that is the Exterior. There are a lot of dangerous things here, Twilight, and they cannot fall into the wrong hooves.’

Outward Bound

Twilight sat there, staring blankly at the now-cool blue crystal in the centre of the table, her ears downswept and expression blank. Around her, the members of Team Fifteen, plus Shining Armor, continued to bicker and argue, debating the veracity of Twilight’s report of the crystal’s contents. Since it was allegedly coded only for her receipt, none of the others could use it to confirm or deny her tale, producing divisive opinion.

Well, divisive opinion among two of them, at least. Lyra was currently leading the charge in Twilight’s defense, while Walleye, unsurprisingly, was taking advantage of Twilight’s unreactive melancholic state to slander her tale. Rainboom and Pinkie were staying largely silent, and Shining, who had retrieved the five from the Royal Dungeon at Twilight’s behest and brought them all to a disused meeting room at the palace, was content to sit back and observe with a bemused grin, interjecting only when the argument got unacceptably heated or violent.

All of this was background noise for Twilight, though. As far as she was concerned, none of this was her concern. The only reason she was even at this ‘meeting’ was because her brother had insisted upon it.

“I’m not your messenger,” he had said. “I’ll go get them from the dungeons if you’ll attest to the fact that they’re not a threat, but I’m not relaying your story to them.”

If she had had her own way, she would have been in her childhood bedroom, buried under hooflengths of sheeting and blankets, intent on pointedly ignoring the world as her entire inner world self-destructed, torn apart by her steadily-worsening existential crisis. As it was, she was forced to suffer through it in public, not that anyone seemed to be noticing.

“Twilight! Pay attention!”

She lifted her head, glaring back at Walleye.

“What?” she spat.

“Don’t you have anything to say?”

“About what, exactly?” she asked, lethargically pulling herself into something approximating a sitting posture. “Aren’t you still arguing about if you think i’m full of horseapples or not?”

“Actually,” Lyra interrupted, “Walleye here was wondering if Celestia’s message to you gave any indication of where we should start looking, since our options at the moment are either ‘storm the Exterior’...”

“Which would be utter suicide,” Rainboom pointed out.

“Or we sit on our rumps and wait for an opportunity to quite literally fall onto our backs.”

“Well, if you think about it,” Pinkie piped up. “The crystal being sent by Alpha kinda is the opportunity falling onto our backs, ‘cause think about it, beforehand we didn’t know what was going on, what with our beacons being broken, and no idea what was going on on the Exterior, and no way to get home, so Pinks sent us the message as our opportunity since we’d be pretty buck-”

“Yes, thank you Pinkie.”

If anything, after her injury, Pinkie had become even more of an enthusiastic motormouth, continuing to talk even as Lyra held her mouth shut with magic.

“No,” Twilight replied flatly. “There wasn’t anything else. Just that there were ponies aboard the Exterior, killing everypony else, and that I was somehow supposed to find out who they are and stop them before something happens.”

“‘Something’?”

“It was vague.”

“Fantastic!” Walleye shouted, slamming her hoof onto the table. “We have practically nothing to go on here. We don’t know who they are, where they’re from, or why they’re on the Exterior. Without some more details, we’re stuck.”

“Well isn’t Twilight’s description of them a clue in itself?” Rainboom asked, weathering Walleye’s answering glare.

“No. They’re wearing Outsider combat gear. Which makes no sense. I could buy, say, a Bureau world having one or two incomplete sets of Outsider gear from stuff that we were unable to recover over thousands of years of operations, but not hundreds of full sets. Unless whoever is attacking was also sneaking sets of gear out of our own armory for months before the attack—which would have been noticed, by the way—they are making it themselves, and producing it requires equipment that can’t be found off the Exterior.”

“Bureau?” Lyra asked, confused. “What’s a Bureau?”

“Worlds with inter-world transport capability,” Twilight answered. “Apparently, most worlds tend to consolidate their research and deployment of such capability into a single agency, thus the name ‘Bureau’.”

“Well, it sounds like you’ve got a bit of a civil war on your hands,” Shining said, quite clearly amused. “Outsider-on-Outsider fighting.”

“Not that we asked you, Insider, but that doesn’t make any sense either. The only other pony on the Exterior with the influence and ponypower to pull this kind of thing off would be Solaris, and with all due respect for the stallion, he’s not subtle enough for it. If it was him, it would be far more obvious, and more importantly, our beacons would still work.”

“So… you have no idea.”

“None whatsoever.”

“You know, given your history in this Equestria, I’m a bit disappointed. What with all your previous cloak-and-dagger work, I was expecting something more… impressive.”

“Oh, shove it, Insider.”

“I was expecting more professionalism, too. I’ve had Guard recruits straight out of boot camp who were better-presented than you lot!”

“Give me a break! Of the five of us, only two are actually Operations ponies,” she cried, pointing at each of them in turn. “Pinkie is an analyst, Twilight literally only learned about all this a few days ago and has no training whatsoever, and Lyra has spent more of her life off the Exterior than on it.”

Her hoof lingered on Lyra, who appeared distracted.

“And, to boot, has appropriated the lazy-distracted mantle from Twilight.”

“...idea,” Lyra mumbled.

“Care to repeat that for the class?” Walleye prompted.

“I have an idea,” Lyra obliged. “It just occured to me. Twilight, you said that the attackers were using Outsider gear, right?”

“Yes,” Twilight replied.

“And that crystal answering-oracle-thing said that they were Outsiders as well?”

“Yes.”

“What if they are Outsiders, but not our Outsiders?”

Everypony stared blankly at her, Twilight included, her previous melancholic state momentarily replaced by utter confusion.

“Are you planning on making sense sometime soon?” Walleye sighed, her head flopping forward.

“Well, being out in the Ruins for so long, you hear whispers, rumors, ‘specially from ponies really deep in there, like smack-dab in the middle of Detachment Zones and the like. One of the weirder ones I heard, one that I never really put much stock in, is that these were these… ‘Dark Outsiders’ hidden in some base or other in the Ruins.”

“‘Dark Outsiders’?”

“Their words, not mine. I always thought the ponies who went on about it weren’t the full two bits, really, but it kinda fits with this story if you think about it.”

“Really?”

“I don’t know, maybe? I don’t know enough about the nitty-gritty of the science of the Ruins to really know for sure.”

“Well that’s just lovely. Our only lead is a rumor no better than something a foal would come up with.”

“She’s right,” Twilight muttered. “It does make sense, rumor or not.”

“I thought you didn’t want anything to do with us any more?” Walleye growled.

“I… don’t. Especially not you.”

“Twilight,” Lyra cut in, glaring at Walleye. “Explain it to us, please.”

“It’s… really complicated.”

“Try.”

Twilight hesitated for a moment, before igniting her horn, a featureless blue sphere a few hooves across appearing above the table. After a few seconds of concentration, it split in half, revealing an intricate red honeycomb structure.

“The simplest way to think of it is like this. What you call the ‘Interior’ is the inside of the ball, billions upon billions of worlds all crammed in together. The Exterior, by contrast, is the surface of the sphere. Understand so far?”

Everyone nodded.

“Now, the ruins are a bit more complicated, because as far as I’ve read, no-one really knows what makes worlds there more prone to detaching, they just… are. And detachments are violent.”

As she spoke, one of the honeycomb cells near the surface of the sphere broke off, flying outwards and scattering dozens of nearby cells with it.

“So each time a world in the ruins detaches, it tends takes a bunch of other worlds with it. Now, if it happens enough…”

More cells broke away, faster and faster, scattering neighboring cells as they went and forming a scarlet cloud of detached cells, floating gently away from the sphere. By the time it stopped, there was a deep fissure in the side of the sphere, filled with jagged protrusions and thin filaments of barely-connected cells.

“Thats what the Ruins are. They’re a giant wound in the side of the multiverse, a hole created by the collateral damage from millennia of detachments. And it’s dangerous because quite a few of these worlds are holding on only by the most tenuous of bonds to the rest of the Interior. They could just break free.”

The rest of the illusion faded away, with the Ruins fissure section enlarging to show the detail.

“Now, since the Exterior is literally the shell of this entire thing, whenever a world detaches, especially deep in where it takes quite a few worlds with it, bits of the Exterior get torn away with it.” She leaned forwards, pointing out the jagged blue edges of the surface of the sphere. “Thing is, though, the actual fissure of the Ruins is criss-crossed with tendrils of worlds that were either lucky enough or stable enough to survive getting caught in the backlash of other worlds detaching. And if those tendrils and clusters are close enough to the surface, they could have bits of the Exterior still hanging on.”

The illusion enlarged again, focussing on a cluster of cells supported by a myriad of filaments, atop which rested a ragged-edged cyan piece of the sphere’s shell.

“I’ll admit that it’s all speculation, but if your ‘Dark Outsiders’ actually exist, that’s where they come from.”

The illusion slowly vanished as Twilight let the spell lapse, leaving everyone in silence.

“Can you get us there?” Walleye asked Lyra after a moment’s contemplation. “You’re the Runner.”

“Probably, but-”

“Good,” she cut her off, turning to Shining. “We’re going to need supplies.”

“Waitaminute, hold up,” Lyra interrupted. “Not five minutes ago you were rubbishing Twilight like your life depended on it, and now you’re suddenly rearing to go with a plan that’s even more tenuous than the story she was telling. No offence, Twi.”

“At least we have a plan, now.”

“Oh come off it, you were going on and on about how you thought she was bodgy. You cannot expect me to buy that you’re willing to go walkabout in the Ruins after that.”

“I don’t think she’s dodgy-”

“Bodgy.”

“Whatever! Look, it is the best lead we’ve got at this point, Tartarus, it’s the only lead. So we can either sit here on our rumps, or we can go and do something. Personally, I’m going to pick the option that involves me doing something.”

“Even if that something could get you killed? The Ruins aren’t a walk in the park, Walleye, They’re bloody dangerous. And what if this entire thing is a trap? There’s no guarantee that that crystal actually came from Alpha.”

“For crying out loud! Why are you suddenly against this? I’m taking your side! Let’s go storm the castle!”

“Because the Ruins aren’t the place for drongos like you with no patience and even less sense. If we do this, you’re following my orders.”

“Fine,” Walleye glared at her. “Can we go now?”

“Sure, so long as we can get supplies,” she said, turning to Shining. “We can get supplies, right? It’s gonna be a long trek into the Ruins for where we’ll need to go.”

“How much do you need?” Shining replied.

“Well, I know of a few places we can get food on the way, but we shouldn’t rely on that. And we could get turned around a few times. Figure three weeks rations for each of us, to be safe. And we’ll need our weapons and gear back.”

“That should be doable. I might take some heat from the Princess, but I can handle that, so long as you take care of Twilie.”

“Speaking of Twilight, could you give her back that hammer?” Walleye interrupted. “I don’t want to give her a carbine without training, but she seemed pretty skilled with it for a rookie, and we’ll need every force-multiplier we can take.”

“No,” Lyra said. “Too heavy. It’ll weigh her down and slow us down.”

“We have bags that can fix that,” Shining informed them. “Bigger-on-the-inside type stuff. ‘Hideaway’ is the actual enchantment name, if I recall correctly.”

“You lot have Bag of Holding enchantments? And you’re just going to give them to us?” Lyra asked, impressed. “That sort of stuff isn’t cheap where I’m from! Remind me to come back here when we’re done with all this, I’m gonna want a few of those.”

“Waitaminute,” Rainboom interrupted. “What about Mac? Are we just going to leave him here?”

“He arrived here unconscious and in pretty bad shape,” Shining answered. “Looks like he was on the receiving end of a few high-powered attack spells on the way, too. He’ll recover fine, but it’ll be some time until he wakes up. We can take care of him until you get back.”

“I’m not going,” Twilight butted in. “I want no part of this. I’ve given you all Alpha’s message, now leave me alone.”

Walleye and Lyra went to respond, only to be cut off as Shining spoke first.

“Could I have a minute alone with my sister?”

For a moment, Walleye looked as though she was going to argue, only to abruptly stand up and usher everyone out of the room, leaving Shining alone with the sulking Twilight.

“I’m not going,” she reiterated.

“And what are you planning on doing instead?”

“Nothing. I… don’t want to do anything. Not anymore.”

“So, you just expect me to sit here on my haunches and watch my little sister waste away?”

“Sure. Not like it matters, really.”

“By the sounds of it, a few million pony lives hang in the balance. Does that not matter?”

“They’ll die with or without me.”

“You could save them. Or try, at least.”

“No, you don’t get it. Everypony dies in the end, magic or no, that’s how the world works. You can’t dodge entropy. What’s the point of saving a few lives now when they are going to inevitably end, regardless of what I do?”

“That’s awfully morbid.”

“Doesn’t change the facts, Shining.”

“Why are you here, then?”

“Because you made me come to this meeting.”

“No, not in this room, alive. Why are you here? I’m sure you’ve had plenty of times to just lay down and let the inevitable take you, and yet you’re still here. Why is that?”

“Instinct is hard to shake.”

“Says the mare who was quite happily using a giant magical hammer to blow the side off a building when her life was on the line.”

“I wasn’t defending myself, that was vengeance.”

“And what, pray-tell, needed avenging?”

“I did.”

“You’ve… lost me completely.”

“Not me-me, a different me. They made me do something that I would never want to do, and now quite a few ponies are dead as a result. Including a me.”

“Confusing.”

“You have no idea. Normal pronouns are really insufficient for what I need them to do.”

“So what, you killed them?”

“I… helped. Indirectly. And you’re right, I could have just laid down and died, there was a perfect opportunity for me to. I very nearly did. I don’t know why I tried to avoid it. I just… got so… angry. I didn’t deserve to die, and I got put in a situation where I was going to, and I just got mad.”

“So, what’s changed, really?”

“Nothing, I suppose. Nopony really deserves to die.”

“Fight it, then. You sound like you were pretty eager to from what you’ve said.”

“Oh, don’t be a foal. Do you really think I of all ponies are deluded enough to fight off death?”

“Well, the Princess seems to have done a pretty good job of it so far. Not impossible.”

For the longest time, Twilight didn’t answer, just sitting there and thinking, her downcast expression twitching slightly as her mind processed.

“Oh buck it then. Time to go save the world!”

Author's Note

I'm a little unhappy with how this chapter turned out, but that can be put down to having to deal with a bunch of things IRL around the time this was written, and it bled through somewhat.
Next chapter shall return us to our regularly scheduled exploration of the multiverse, with 99% less depressing existentialism.

The Ruins

Despite her initial three-week estimate, Lyra had managed to get Team Fifteen to their destination in only nine days, aided by the fact that, apart from Twilight at least, everypony seemed to instinctively know their way towards their next waypoint. Come rainforest, desert, abandoned cityscapes or barely-comprehensible honeycombs of stone interspersed with Void intrusions, nopony save Twilight needed much orientation on the long hikes.

Most of Lyra’s work came in distinguishing the real interworld portals from the far-more-dangerous but visually identical Void intrusions, and ensuring Twilight didn’t get separated from the group.

Beyond that, most of Twilight’s time during the trip had been occupied with researching the team’s innate pathfinding sense, a task made all the more difficult by the infuriatingly subjective nature of the ‘guidance’ Team Fifteen seemed to be following, and everypony’s abject refusal to acknowledge it as anything other than entirely normal.

In fact, Pinkie Pie found it almost insufferably interesting that Twilight lacked this sense, taking every available opportunity to interrogate her on how it felt for such a feeling to be absent.

After three solid days of attempting to explain how impossible it was for her to explain the absence of something she had never experienced in the first place, Twilight was forced to drop the topic entirely, opting instead for more passive observation than direct questioning lest she be forced to engage in more ‘philosophical’ discussion with the walking conundrum that was Pinkie Pie.

In the end, however, she had come to very few solid, testable hypotheses beyond her initial observation of the effect, and an inkling that it may have been related to the innate strangeness that Outsiders seemed to radiate in the perceptions of Insiders. By the time they they passed through what Lyra claimed was the final gateway before their destination, she had become entirely fed up with being unable to scratch her investigative itch, and just wanted the journey to be over.

“How much longer?” Twilight demanded as she emerged from the inky black gateway, squinting to mitigate the glare from this world’s far-too-large, far-too-red sun.

“Home stretch now,” Lyra replied, checking to ensure no-one had spotted them emerging from the gateway as were preparing to ambush them. “This world has the last significant piece of civilisation this deep into the Ruins. We’ll stop there and resupply, and hopefully get some direction towards this ‘Dark Exterior.’”

“And if we don’t?” Walleye asked as Lyra began to move, leading the team towards a large ridge. “What’s our contingency for if we don’t find any information?”

“We’ll find something. The Shard has enough ponies that it’s impossible somepony doesn’t know something useful.”

“Statistics doesn’t work like that,” Twilight muttered under her breath.

Lyra ignored her, stopping as she crested the ridge.

“Welcome to Harmony’s Shard,” she proclaimed, gesturing towards a huge spike of eldritch grey metal, barely distinguishable as a single object for the innumerable clusters of windowboxes, additions, and barely-hanging-on attachments that encrusted almost the entire visible surface. It hung suspended in what appeared to be a bottomless pit, the ridge they had just crossed rapidly turning into a sheer drop towards an eerie black abyss, a feature Twilight recognised as what Lyra has called a ‘Void intrusion’, a gap in space-time where the fabric of the world had been abraded or torn away and was now open on pure nothingness.

Apart from an appropriately rickety-looking bridge comprised of what appeared to be mostly scrap metal and stone, the giant structure didn’t seem to be physically attached to the pit that housed it, beyond the jagged spires of metal that hung from the frayed bottom of the structure into the Void rift far below.

It wasn’t until Lyra tapped her on the side of the head that Twilight realised she had been staring, mystified.

“You in there, rookie? Time to get moving!”

She nodded and began to follow, not speaking.

“So, this is where you live?” Walleye remarked.

“After a fashion,” Lyra replied. “I’ve got a mate here that I crash with, but I don’t really own anything here. Living in the Ruins, you don’t get too attached to any one place considering that they can just up and drop into the Void without warning. You’ve gotta be quick on your hooves.”

“And yet, this place looks pretty thriving.”

“Well, it’s the only actual city within about fifty vert of here, or at least, the only permanent one.”

“...Vert?” Walleye asked.

“It’s a unit of distance,” Twilight contributed. “‘One Universe’, essentially, if you were using a universe as an eight-dimensional yardstick.”

“That’s what it really is?” Lyra remarked. “I just tend to use it as slang for the number of gateways you need to go through to get somewhere.”

“Probably roughly equivalent, all things considered.”

“Anyway,” Walleye cut in. “Care to clue the rest of us in on the plan?”

“Well,” Lyra began, gingerly stepping onto the bridge as it swayed disconcertingly in the updraft. “Unlike what you’d expect, this place is actually pretty friendly to Outsiders, since Runners like me tend to use it as a hub and resupply. That, and we’re not the weirdest thing to pop up out here.”

“Dare I ask?”

“Just be thankful we haven’t run into any of them on the way here, and leave it at that.”

“Right. Plan?”

“I’ve got a few contacts that hang around here. We’ll talk to them first, see if they know anything, and if that doesn’t work, just pound the pavement.”

“Metal.”

“Whatever.”

“Uh, girls?” Twilight hesitated as they drew closer to the Shard. “Does anyone else think this thing looks a bit… strange?”

“You mean beyond the fact that it’s a giant spike of metal floating in a pit of nothing?” Rainboom remarked, sarcastically.

“Yes, actually. Look at all the stuff that’s been strapped on! It’s corroded, tattered, weathered, but the metal underneath is untouched! Pristine, even. And if you look closely, I can’t see any bolts or welds anywhere! Most of those boxes are clamped onto protrusions, or hanging onto some girder anchored inside. Nothing’s actually physically attached!”

“Huh, fancy that…” Lyra said.

“You’ve been here how many times and you’ve never noticed that?” Walleye asked as she looked up through her rifle scope.

“It’s never come up before. To be honest, not sure why it’s a big issue now. The Shard has always had conspiracy theories about its origins and nature and all that, that’s never going to change.”

“Gotta agree with her on this one, Twilight,” Pinkie chimed in, sounding oddly disappointed. “It’s not all that weird, really. Now you not being able to feel where to go, that’s weird.”

“It’s only weird from where you’re…. standing…” Twilight trailed off again, scurrying over to the railing to peer towards the Shard’s base.

“You alright there, rookie?” Walleye asked.

“You’re weird!” Twilight exclaimed, pointing at the team.

“Come again?”

“You’re weird. Outsiders are weird. You seem weird to me, and to other Insiders.”

“Yes, that has been established.”

“And this Shard is weird!”

“That, on the other hand, is contested.”

“No, see, that’s the thing! You’re weird, and it’s weird, but it’s the same sort of weird, so you can’t feel it like I can.”

“You’ve lost me.”

“Ugh, okay. I felt it the first time back on the Exterior. Everything felt… wrong somehow, as though the world was ever-so-slightly out of kilter. It didn’t occur to me until now that that feeling, and that wrongness that Insiders get when looking at Outsiders is connected!”

“Still not following you.”

“Alright. Have you ever gotten lost on the Exterior? Ever not know where you’ve needed to go?”

“No.”

“Lyra, have you ever gotten lost in the Ruins? Have you ever had a moment where you didn’t know which way to go to get to the next world?”

“I… not really, no,” Lyra replied, pondering for a moment. “Getting ‘lost’ in the Ruins is different than that. You need to know the general layout of the worlds so you can find your way long-distance, but it’s hard to get stuck on any one world, you can always find your way off.”

“Same principle. And you’ve never really questioned it because, to you four, this is all perfectly normal, an extra sense that feeds into your subconscious, like you’re tuned into something extra in the world that Insiders are blind to.”

“Makes sense,” Lyra said.

Walleye stared at her, incredulous.

“What? It does!” she reaffirmed. “She’s right. For all we might talk about how you get lost in the Interior, does that ever really happen? It might take a bit of skill to know what portal leads where in the Ruins, but we can always find one.”

“That’s what makes an Outsider,” Twilight explained. “You’re tuned in, somehow, to the little holes where the Void leaks into the Interior, and you can find them. But that same ability makes you seem strange to somepony like me, since we aren’t tuned into that. I’d wager it has something to do with how your bodies and minds interact with ambient magic fields.”

“Congratulations, you’ve solved the enigma,” Rainboom quipped. “I’m sure you’ll be nice and famous when-slash-if we make it back, but how does this relate to the giant mysterious shard of metal?”

“You four seem strange to me, instinctively, because of that… let's call it ‘interference.’ I got the same sort of strange uneasy feeling, multiplied by about a thousand, every time we went through one of those portals on the way here. And I also had it, practically non-stop, when I was back on the Exterior, as though there was something wrong about it in the same way I feel like there is something wrong about you.”

“I take it you’re actually going somewhere with this, rather than trying to indirectly insult us by calling us wrong?” Walleye demanded.

“I’m getting that same feeling from the Shard.”

“You think it’s a piece of the Exterior,” Lyra realised, eyes widening.

“Yes!”

“Lovely,” Rainboom deadpanned. “Can we go in now?”

“We don’t even need to. That’s the beauty of it. It’s still attached.”

The four of them stared at her, varying states of confusion on their faces.

“It’s… ugh,” she grunted. “You remember the explanation back on Slateform? About how bits of the Exterior get broken off when worlds violently detach? This piece of the Exterior didn’t get completely sheared off.”

“My head hurts,” Pinkie complained. “We’re not on the Exterior. How could it still be… part of not-here?”

“I get it,” Walleye said. “It got almost torn away, and then fell back, and now it’s just… hanging there.”

“But it’s floating,” Pinkie pointed out. “You can’t be hanging from something and floating at the same time.”

“It’s not floating,” Lyra explained. “It’s being… held up? I don’t know, this is confusing.”

“It’s a matter of perspective, but you’re right,” Twilight confirmed. “If it wasn’t still attached to the Exterior by something, it would either have punched into this world more completely, or just fallen back out into the Void.”

“So we just follow the bits at the bottom and we find the Exterior?” Rainboom asked.

“Well, yeah. Can’t be too far, either. A thousand hooflengths, maybe?”

“Lyra, you got some rope?”

“Yeah,” Lyra replied, pulling a length from her saddlebags. “Wait… you’re not going to-”

She didn’t get the chance to finish her sentence before Rainboom snatched the rope coil from her hoof, tying a hoop around her barrel just above her wings before tossing the rest to Walleye.

“One tug for ‘help me’, two for ‘come though’, got it?”

Walleye nodded, and Rainboom took flight, diving over the edge of the bridge in a flash of her chromatic tail. Twilight dashed after her, barely fast enough to watch as the prismatic blur tied a loop into the rope around the jagged spires before disappearing through the rift into the Void.

Fluid Loss

Twilight’s entire world was darkness as she pulled herself along the rope, hoof over hoof. There was no sound, no light, no sensation at all beyond the roughness of the rope on her hooves, and the tug of the harness around her barrel as the carabiner dragged along unseen behind her, and an unfamiliar, nigh-unbearable burning sensation at the base of her horn.

According to her senses, the world simply ended in front of her eyes. Her first instinct upon dropping bodily through the rift below Harmony’s Shard had been to trigger a simple lighting spell, but that had done nothing at all, despite the cast completing successfully. It had taken every ounce of self-control she had at her disposal to fight the overwhelming wrongness of her perceptions and push on.

Even her rational mind was insisting that the world really did end right in front of her. Given that her expectation was that her breath was going to be ripped from her lungs the moment she crossed through the rift, as one would expect upon moving into an area of pure vacuum, and the fact that her breath was quite happy to remain in her lungs for the time being, she had come to the conclusion that, for all intents and purposes, she was occupying a roughly Twilight-shaped bubble of existence, beyond which was absolutely nothing.

She kept pulling, relying on the lack of gravity to aid her efforts. With the lack of exterior stimuli, her internal senses were heightened to the point of painfulness. Increasingly-stale air burned in her lungs as what little oxygen she had dragged with her was steadily depleted. Her head spun from the combination of no gravity to orient her, and the progressively worsening pain at the base of her horn. Her skin itched as her body heat, normally dissipated into the environment, was trapped with nowhere to go under her fur. Her heartbeat echoed deafeningly in her ears. Illusions danced in front of her eyes, optic nerve conveying nonsensical information as her retina attempted to adapt to the absolute zero light level and fired off erroneous signals in the process.

By the time her hoof touched metal, she felt as though she were on the verge of unconsciousness. Pulling herself through, the normally-tepid air of the Exterior felt like a blast of arctic wind against her badly overheated fur.

“Never... again...” she gasped, gulping down fresh air as though she had almost died, which, to be fair, she almost had.

“Oh, don’t be such a foal,” Rainboom chastised, pulling her the rest of the way into the hallway through the rift. “It’s not that bad.”

“Oh, you can talk!” Lyra cried, similarly breathless. “You... just had to… fly here… Gravity… did all the… work…”

“Horseapples. Pinkie’s an Earth Pony, and she’s fine!”

“Yeperoonies!” Pinkie confirmed. “It was a bit lonely in there, but not all that bad, really. Just like hiding in a really, really dark box and pulling the box along by a rope outside the box and-”

“You can’t use... Pinkie as evidence... for your point,” Lyra groaned. “She’s Pinkie Pie!”

“Yes I am!”

“What’s Pinkie now?” Walleye asked as she came to a rapid halt after barreling into the hallway.

“I’m me!” she replied enthusiastically, bouncing in place.

“Of course you are.”

“Buck… you both…” Lyra gasped, the flush in her face slowly subsiding. “You can carry me… next time…”

“Like Tartarus that’s happening,” Walleye smirked, hovering cautiously. “Any contacts?”

“Not as of yet,” Rainboom replied, moving up the hall. “We’re alone.”

“Good, good. Everyone up. R.D., you’re on point. Twilight, you got any spells for early warning?”

“Not if we’re going to be moving,” Twilight replied after a quick mental skim. “The Exterior’s geometry would play havoc with any of the area-cast spells I have for that.”

“Sense Danger?” Lyra prompted. “Even I know that one.”

“Firstly, that doesn’t endure, so I’d need to cast it repeatedly,” Twilight lectured. “Secondly, a spell that senses danger is too general here. The walls themselves are dangerous considering this bit of the Exterior is barely hanging on and has holes open to the Void all over the place.”

“Point taken.”

“Both of you, quiet,” Walleye ordered. “I’ll take the rear. R.D., stay airborne, I’ll do the same. Twilight, you’re behind her. Lyra, Pinkie, stay behind Twilight so she can protect the three of you if something goes wrong.”

“Wait, protect them?” Twilight asked, concerned.

“Yes, rookie. Protect them. I assume you know some force field spells or some other defensive trickery?”

“Well, yes, but…”

“Good. Keep them ready. Rainboom, we’re looking for a control room or a briefing room, office… anything that’ll give us some information on who used to live here, if anypony.”

“But…” Twilight began.

“And stay quiet,” Walleye finished. “We don’t need to give any hostiles here extra options to ambush us.”

She scowled, moving into position a dozen hooflengths behind Rainboom as they began to walk down the hallway. Pinkie, despite the glares from Walleye, opted to bounce behind Twilight, the slight sproing sound as she bounced only slightly more audible than the ruffling of the two pegasi’s wingbeats.

Very unlike the Exterior she had come to know, the hallways they were walking through were worn and ruinous. Ragged holes open to the Void were common, marring walls and floors and making navigation difficult. More than once, Twilight had been pulled back by Lyra, about to step into a rift that she hadn’t spotted.

While a far cry from the oxygen-depleted air she had been forced to breathe during her transit through the Void, the air here tasted stale and old, markedly warmer than she remembered from the Exterior. A sheen of dust and debris coated most everything in sight, kicked up by their movements to produce a cloud that irritated their eyes and noses.

It took them almost six hours to find anything indicative of habitation. Every room until then, either intact or no, had been completely devoid of any signs of life. Door mechanisms and lights were barely functional at best, dangerously malfunctioning at worst, and the mood among the team had been steadily deteriorating from the combination of enforced silence and unpleasant environmental conditions.

It didn’t matter that all they found were empty crates and stale food in a chamber that was half-missing and near-unlit. By that point, anything was enough to make them jump for joy.

“R.D., check those,” Walleye hissed, pointing at the crates. “Twilight, check for traps.”

Twilight edged forward, her horn igniting as she readied and cast a spell which would highlight traps or hidden objects within her line of sight.

“Gah,” She yelped, turning her head away from the room and blinking.

“What?”

“Weird spell interaction. The rift in there is lit up like the surface of the sun!”

“Really?” Lyra asked, incredulous. She ignited her horn, casting the same spell and looking into the room. “Looks normal to me…”

Twilight peeked back in, immediately recoiling as the spell-vision seared her retinas.

“Alright. Yet more weird Outsider magic stuff,” She mumbled, dismissing the spell and rubbing her eyes.

“Too much talk,” Walleye interrupted. “Lyra, is it clear?”

“Yeah, looks that way,” Lyra replied, dismissing the spell.

“Rainboom, anything dangerous?” Walleye asked into her radio.

“Not that I can see,” Rainboom replied as she hovered to each of the crates in turn, using the various pillars of ruined metal in the room as cover. “Some torn cloth, a few food rations, nothing really substantial, but it looks like our stuff.”

“Food?” Pinkie perked up, poking her head into the room. “What sort of food? I’m starving!”

“Pinkie!” Walleye shouted, pulling the pink mare back behind the doorway.

Not an instant later, a beam of solid purple light tore through the air where Pinkie’s head had previously been, slamming into the wall behind them with a phenomenal crack.

“Bloody Nora!” Lyra cried, scrambling away from the doorway.

“What in Tartarus were you thinking?” Walleye yelled at Pinkie, pinning her to the wall.

“I… I was hungry…” Pinkie replied, quietly. “I’m sorry, I don’t know why I-”

“We have rations, you foal! Why didn’t you mention that you were hungry before now?”

“You said to keep quiet…”

“I… argh!” Walleye grunted, pulling her rifle from its sling. “Stay here, and stay down!”

“Okay…” Pinkie whispered, shame and confusion etched onto her face.

“Twilight, you-”

Twilight didn’t hear the rest of what Walleye said, a crack of displaced air echoing from the room as someone, or something, teleported.

“No.” Twilight breathed, pulling her hammer from its pouch and coupling its magic reserves to her own. A script of spells, burned into her memory from constant recitation since their departure from Slateform, executed, encasing her body in a form-fitting force field and preparing a set of instant-response defensive spells for use.

A second crack echoed through the room as she teleported beside Rainboom, ducking in beside her.

“Where did the shot come from?” she hissed

“I don’t know,” Rainboom replied. “I just heard the shot and dropped!”

“Hoof!” Twilight said, reaching out and grabbing Rainboom’s hoof, pulling a ready teleport spell from her collection and casting it.

A sense of unnatural wrongness accompanied the spell discharging, as though the spell’s parameters had been perverted mid-cast. Reacting on instinct, she released another readied spell, forming a momentary bubble of invulnerability around herself and Rainboom.

Microseconds later, the world went purple as their attacker fired a beam of energy at them, point-blank into the shield. Twilight responded, funneling the hammer’s power reserve into a crude formatting spell, directing a beam of her own from the hammer’s head back towards their attacker as the barrier collapsed, a sickening metallic shriek echoing throughout the room as the two beams collided and struggled against each other.

“Rainbow!” she yelled, pulling the beam’s focus tighter and pushing forward. “Move!”

No reply came. As she chanced a glance over to see why her teammate had failed to respond, an almighty bellow issued from off to her side, and a prismatic blur streaked out of the shadows towards the unknown assailant.

“RAINBOW!” Twilight cried, cutting her beam off and dodging sideways so as not to hit Rainboom. “NO!”

There was a flash of purple and a crack of a shockwave.

As she watched, Twilight saw their assailant twist to the side, grabbing Rainboom in their magic and effortlessly swing her around, propelling the helpless pegasus straight past Twilight.

Twilight caught only the briefest glimpse of confusion and fear on her face before Rainboom vanished through the rift that occupied half the room.

And in that instant, something within Twilight Sparkle cracked.

“No,” she growled, standing up. “No more.”

She rounded on her assailant, swinging her hammer around to almost effortlessly deflect a spell thrown at her. Small motes of blackness popped in and out of existence around the base of her horn, amplifying the already-intense burning sensation she had had since traversing the rift from Harmony’s Shard earlier.

“No more killing,” she declared.

She walked forward, miniscule black scars forming and vanishing in the air around her as she solidified her grip on the magic under her control. With barely a thought, she directed it towards her opponent, engulfing them in a malevolent violet field. Motes of light sputtered and died around the mystery pony’s horn as the field sapped their available magic.

“There has been too much death,” Twilight continued, spinning the pony upside-down in mid-air. “That ends now.”

Twilight tore the black helmet and mask away, only to recoil in shock as her own face stared back at her.

“Not what you were expecting?” the duplicate sneered.

Twilight glared at her alternate, her magic darkening ominously.

“You killed Rainboom.” Twilight growled.

“Oh, she’s not dead yet,” came the reply, belligerent and condescending. “I give it a minute, maybe two before she suffocates in her own little bubble of existence. Good luck getting to her, though.”

“Why? Why did you kill her?”

“...Because you’re the enemy?”

“I am not the enemy here! You attacked us!”

“I engaged you to give the rest of my team a chance to get clear. They’re long gone by now, on their way to your Exterior.”

“What do you want with the Exterior?” Walleye asked, slowly walking up behind them with her rifle trained on the duplicate Twilight’s head, Lyra and Pinkie following gingerly behind her. “Who are you working for?”

“Is that a Hooves I hear? Figures the derpy question would come from the derpy pony.”

Walleye pushed the rifle into the back of the duplicate’s head.

“Call me derpy. One more time. I dare you, dam-bucker.”

“Such language.”

“Enough,” Twilight commanded. “Answer the question. I assume you’re working with the group that attacked the Exterior?”

“Why are you expecting her to answer?” Lyra chipped in. “If she considers us to be the enemy, why would she tell us anything?”

“Well, it’s not like you can do anything at this point,” the duplicate replied. “We’ve got a Derpy with anger issues, a Pinkie, a Lyra, a Twilight, and a Rainb— oh sorry, former Rainbow. Five Outsiders, now four, against everyone on my side, and we’ve already taken your Exterior.”

“Your count is off,” Twilight corrected. “I’m an Insider.”

“Really?” The duplicate asked, surprised. “I didn’t think they usually let Insiders in on the secret, much less work for Outsiders.”

“We don’t,” Walleye replied. “But this one’s special.”

Twilight looked at Walleye for a moment, genuinely surprised.

“What? You are!” Walleye said. “I’m pony enough to admit that. Diving in there, risking your own skin to save Rainboom? That takes guts. Guts that, until now, I didn’t think you had. Didn’t think any Insider had. You proved me wrong, kid.”

“That doesn’t change what you made me do.”

“No. And to be honest, if I had the chance to do things over, I wouldn’t change what happened on EF. Not my proudest moment, sure, but we’d still be on the Exterior if I hadn’t done it, probably dead, definitely captured.”

“Doesn’t make it any less wrong.”

“Look. When we have the time, I’d love to sit down with you and discuss the relative moral balance of wiping out a single city filled with rioting, regicidal ponies who almost executed my closest friend and bashed Pinkie’s head in, but right now we have more pressing issues.”

“So much for that apology. Thought you were actually starting to like me.”

“I didn’t say I liked you. I respect you. There’s a difference.”

“If you’re going to continue with the sappy heartfelt crap,” Twilight’s duplicate cut in. “Please shoot me before you do. It’s honestly painful.”

“Shut up,” Twilight growled. “Why are you attacking the Exterior?”

The duplicate didn’t reply, mouth prominently pursed.

“What?” Twilight asked.

“You told me to shut up.”

“Can I shoot her?” Walleye asked, ears twitching.

“No more killing,” Twilight repeated, gently pushing the muzzle of Walleye’s rifle away from her duplicate’s head. “Answer the question.”

“You need to ask?” The duplicate asked, incredulous. “We want your Exterior because it’s functional. We’ve always wanted your Exterior. I hate living here, in this ruined shadow of the Exterior, where nothing works, rooms falling away into the Void on an almost daily basis. I’ve lost friends, lovers, colleagues… Hundreds of ponies, lost because this place is falling apart around our ears. I have been forced to live in the belly of this horrid place, and it’s bleeding to death. And you wonder why I want out?”

“Okay, point taken, but why not just ask?” Twilight challenged, voice weary. “You’re all Outsiders, you have all the same technology, why not just organise everypony and head over to the other Exterior?”

The duplicate’s confused silence was more telling than anything she could have said in response, but far more surprising was the identical expressions of confusion on the faces of Lyra and Walleye.

“Celestia above, I feel like the only sane mare here,” Twilight muttered. “Did none of you ever consider the peaceful option? Just jumped straight to the killing, did we? Are all the ponies from the Ruins like this? Murder first and ask questions later?”

“Would certainly explain a few things,” Pinkie said, voice tinged with pain.

“Yes,” Twilight continued. “We’re up against a force of Outsiders, only with the violent impulses dialled up to eleven and then some, who want to take the Prime Exterior by force because they want a new house and buck everypony else in the way. And we can’t reason with them because, again, Ruins logic means near-insane.”

“Hey!” Walleye protested. “I’m from the Ruins and I’m not insane.”

“By my standards you’re pretty equicidal,” Twilight countered. “And Lyra is strange by anypony’s standards.”

Lyra nodded sagely.

“This also quite handily explains why Theta is working with them,” Twilight continued, turning back to her duplicate. “The Exterior as it is isn’t all that friendly towards her, but an Exterior controlled by ponies like you would probably let her run free.”

“Who?”

“Theta. The mad alicorn-Pinkie Pie.”

“Oh. Yeah, probably.”

“That’s not an answer,” Twilight growled, adding a spike of mental pressure to the plethora of spells that were containing her duplicate. “Is that why Theta is working with you?”

“I don’t know,” the duplicate replied, wincing at the effort of trying to resist the intrusion. “I’ve never met a ‘Theta.’ That’s not who I was told was helping us.”

“Wait, what?” Walleye blurted. “There’s somepony helping you? And it’s not Theta?”

The duplicate remained pointedly silent.

“Who is helping you?” Twilight repeated, voice dropping an octave as she directed all of her available energy towards penetrating her duplicate’s mental defenses. The sound of cracking glass echoed throughout the room as the aura around her horn and her prisoner completely desaturated, turning pitch black.

“I don’t know!” The duplicate shouted back, voice cracking.

“LIAR!” Twilight bellowed, forcing ever more pressure onto the prisoner’s mind. “WHO. IS. HELPING. YOU?”

“A Sparkle!” The duplicate cried. “It’s a Sparkle. One of yours. She’s helping us get inside!”

“Twilight…” Lyra said, voice filled with fear.

“WHICH SPARKLE?”

“I don’t know! I swear! I never met her!”

“TWILIGHT!” Lyra shouted.

“WHAT?” Twilight demanded, glaring at Lyra.

Twilight turned, following Lyra’s outstretched, shaky hoof, pointing at where Rainboom had disappeared through the Rift. What was only moments before simply a hole into nothing had changed dramatically, thousands of razor-fine spiderweb cracks radiating out from every edge she could make out.

As she watched, horrified, ever more cracks appeared, slowly forming together into larger, more coherent rifts of their own, swallowing piece after piece of the room from right around them. A horrid cracking noise, sounding like a cross between bone shattering and glass breaking, echoed through the room as each new rift tore open.

She stepped backwards in horror, only to stop and stare up at her horn as a flurry of identical black spiderweb cracks formed in its wake, slowly undulating and vanishing before her eyes. Experimentally, she wobbled her head, watching the cracks again appear in her horn’s wake, writhing in place before slowly disappearing.

“What the…”

Her words were cut off as the steady cracking of opening rifts grew instantaneously to a crescendo. Before her eyes, the entire room shattered into fragments, each piece visible for a fraction of a second before they vanished completely into the Void. The bottom dropped out of her stomach as local gravity abruptly ended, giving her no time to react as the floor below her lurched around an axis that her mind insisted wasn’t part of the three-dimensional universe she knew, and straight up into her face.

Author's Note

Thus concludes Act 3.
As usual, there will be a (hopefully) short break before we dive into the fourth and final act of the story.

Dumping Ground

“Wake up!”

The shout came like a slap to the face, abruptly forcing Twilight’s brain back into a conscious, if disoriented state. Her eyes struggled to focus, pain radiating across her muzzle in a manner that led her to believe she may actually have been slapped in the face, and not simply yelled at. The gray-encircled-by-yellow blob that dominated her vision, only one pony that could be, did nothing to dissuade her theory.

“Ow,” Twilight moaned, flailing somewhat as she turned and regained her footing. “Why’d you hit me?”

“I didn’t.”

“You’re a bad liar,” she shot back, shakily getting to her hooves, wrinkling her muzzle in annoyance as an unidentified liquid dripped from her nose.

“Your nose is bleeding.”

“I am?” Twilight poked her tongue out, only to recoil at the overwhelmingly metallic taste. “Why’d you hit me?”

“No, really,” Walleye asserted, voice tinged with worry. “I didn’t hit you.”

“Why do you even care? It’s not like hitting me is out of character for you.”

“Celestia above… I didn’t hit you!” Walleye growled, exasperated. “There’s blood all over the floor. You probably fell on your face or something.”

“Why would I fall on my face?”

“...Do you even remember what just happened?”

“I… something... about Pinkie Pie?” Twilight wondered aloud, tapping her hoof to her chin in contemplation.

“I think you might have a concussion.”

“From you hitting me, probably.”

“No. We were fighting a Sparkle, you managed to pin her down after she killed Rainboom, and then your magic went all… Sombra.”

“Rainboom’s dead?” Twilight exclaimed, whipping her head around to stare at Walleye as her vision finally cleared. “How?”

“Rogue Sparkle threw her into a Void rift. Not the best way to go, but considering our fate, I’m kinda wishing I’d gone out that way.”

“Don’t say that,” Twilight snapped, looking around. “Alive is better than… dead…”

Her words died in her throat as she fully took in the world the found herself in. The entire landscape was littered with debris, fragments of buildings, vehicles, and what she could only assume were bones jutted out of the landscape, and each other, in a manner that seemed as though they had been teleported into the positions they now occupied. Stone met brick and brick met bone at odd, unnatural angles, forming vast, seamless, and chaotic spires that reached far into the air.

The sky itself was the most unnerving feature. It was black, but unlike the unnatural darkness of rifts into the void, or the star-speckled dark of the night sky, this was a black that seemed to blur into the foreground. As her view darted around, visual echoes of the terrain she had been previously looking at flickered in Twilight’s view, as though her brain didn’t quite know how to interpret what it was seeing and opted simply to repeat what had previously been occupying that area in her field of view.

As she watched, a black fissure formed intersecting one of the debris spires, lingering in place for a moment before fading and leaving a shard of stone in its place, jutting at right angles out of what appeared at first glance to be a gigantic rib bone.

“Where are we?” she breathed, utterly awestruck by the vista.

“I don’t know.”

“What did I do?”

“I have no idea,” Walleye replied, genuine fear in her voice. “And this is coming from me. I’ve seen some bucked stuff in my time, but what you did… was something else entirely.”

“So, neither of us know what I did or where we are.”

“We could be in Tartarus…”

“No, Tartarus is an actual place. Each world has its own Tartarus, I’m pretty sure. If I wasn’t inside it right now, I’d swear this place didn’t, couldn’t, exist.”

“Tartarus is real?”

“...Seriously?”

“What?”

“You’re a special ops pony working for an inter-dimensional secret society, you just, for lack of a better description, fell out of space-time, and you’re surprised that Tartarus exists?”

“Okay, enough of that.”

“What, embarrassed?”

“Twilight, this is not the time,” Walleye hissed, irritation wound into her voice. “You’re more than welcome to ridicule me later about my knowledge, or lack thereof, of the finer points of Interior… Wait, no, you don’t get to ridicule me, that’s not how it works. I give the orders, you follow them. And right now, I’m ordering you: get us out of here.”

An unnatural, otherworldly shriek echoed over them, punctuated by a chain of unsettling organic cracks, as though to reinforce Walleye’s order. Twilight’s ears reflexively flattened against her skull, the fur on the back of her neck prickling up as a wave of dust was kicked up by the shock of the sound passing over them.

“What was that?” Twilight whispered.

“I don’t know.”

“It sounded like… metal. Tearing. Like paper.”

“I don’t know, alright?” Walleye growled, fear seeping into her own voice as she instinctively backed away from the direction the sound came from. “I don’t know! I don’t know what it was, I don’t know where we are, Rainboom is dead, I don’t know where Lyra and Pinkie are, so you need to get us out of here before whatever made that noise comes after us!”

“You don’t know where they are?”

“Of course not! I thought I was here alone until I found you!”

Twilight looked around. Shards of fractured Exterior metal poked out from the ground around her, partially superimposed into the rock like most of the landscape she had seen. Dozens of other objects from the Exterior room she had just been in were scattered around her in an area a few hundred hooflengths wide. Off in the distance, she spotted another shard of Exterior, jutting vertically downwards from an overhang.

A twinge of fear shot through her as she realised that the spot she had been lying, distinguishable by the puddle of rapidly-drying blood, was only barely in open space. She had avoided reappearing inside solid rock by mere fractions of a hooflength.

“They… might not have survived.”

“How do you figure?”

“Look,” Twilight said, pointing at the blood. “That’s where you found me, right?”

“Yeah…”

“Well, stuff that arrives here doesn’t fall from the sky,” she said, gesturing at the unnatural heavens. “It seems like it just… pops into existence wherever it pleases. If that piece of wall had arrived two or three hooflengths lower, you would have found me sticking out of the ground.”

“Couldn’t I have just dug you out?”

“Not buried, Walleye, superimposed,” Twilight explained. “Like two images projected atop each other. Their very molecules are intertwined. And that’s if I was only a little bit lower. What if I had emerged completely inside the rock? You wouldn’t have even known I was here!”

“...Oh,” Walleye replied, after the mental image had properly sunk in. “So…”

“Yeah.”

“So Pinkie and Lyra are dead, too?”

“No… Maybe? I don’t know.”

“That’s helpful, rookie.”

“Look, I don’t know, alright? Where did you turn up?”

“About a thousand hooflengths up,” Walleye replied, pointing in the direction of an area comparatively devoid of complex terrain. “Half a klick that way.”

“What, by yourself? No walls or anything?”

“Just me and my wings.”

“Right, well… You probably tumbled through the Void differently to the walls around you. Weren’t you in the air at the time? Maybe being in contact alters the components of your eight-vector enough to…”

“You’re speaking words, but I’m pretty sure they’re not the same language as mine.”

“Well, think of it like turbulence, only instead of it being in a three-dimensional world like…”

“Irrelevant. Get us out of here.”

“...The one we… Sorry?”

“Whatever you’re magi-babbling on about is irrelevant to the task at hand, which is getting us out of here.”

“I thought we’d agreed that we needed to find Lyra and Pinkie?”

“No, That’s what you want. Meanwhile, I am ordering you to teleport us off this world.”

“And leave them behind?”

“We’re no good to them if whatever else is here gets to us first! Teleport us! NOW!”

“I’m not going to…”

“CAST THE CELESTIA-DAMNED SPELL, INSIDER!”

Twilight took a step back, surprised.

“So much for respect...”

Walleye just glared at her, wings twitching in annoyance as she tapped her hoof impatiently on the ground, waiting.

“Fine,” Twilight acquiesced, igniting her horn and pulling Lunatic’s spell to the forefront of her mind, feeding it her homeworld as a target before allowing it to discharge.

>Cynosure Acquisition Failure

Twilight tilted her head in confusion as the spell pinged back, the message entirely unfamiliar.

“Well?” Walleye demanded.

“It… didn’t work.”

“Or you didn’t try.”

“No, really. It failed,” Twilight insisted, re-casting the spell with the same parameters.

>Cynosure Acquisition Failure

“Failed how?”

“I’m not sure. I… think it might not be able to find a way to where I told it to send us.”

“Send us somewhere else, then.”

With a huff, she re-ignited her horn, pulling the spell up again and allowing it to discharge without a target input.

>Void Intrusion Failure

“Oh, come on!”

“Waiting, rookie.”

“I don’t know what’s wrong. It won’t cast at all.”

“Stop with the excuses!”

“It’s not an excuse!” Twilight pleaded. “The spell just will. Not. Cast. First It’s saying it can’t find a reference point, when I gave it a target, and now it’s failing saying it can’t intrude into the Void.”

“And that means?”

“Well… From what I know about how the Ruins and the Falls work, it not being able to find a reference point isn’t that strange if we were still in the Ruins, since that’s kind of their defining feature. You need to go through connected worlds in order to get anywhere. Direct-transport is possible in the Falls and elsewhere because everything’s connected, if that makes sense.”

“It doesn’t, get to the point.”

“Oh, well… The thing is, even in a Ruins world, the spell would still partially work. It would be able to detach us from a world, but it wouldn’t be able to send us anywhere else except drop us back on the world we came from, or MAYBE jump to a world that’s directly connected to it. Maybe. I’d need to test it.”

“More point-getting-to, less magi-babble.”

“We’re not in the Falls, OR the Ruins, OR the larger Interior, OR the Void. We’re… somewhere else again.”

“And we can’t escape?”

“More or less.”

“Great.”

They both fell silent, Walleye standing in contemplation while Twilight took the time to reexamine the world she was now in. Random, turbulent airflow ripped at her mane and fur, shifting and inverting with a frequency unseen even in tropical cyclones. Dust whipped around her feet, borne aloft by the wind, yet strangely not rising far above her hooves, creating the illusion that the demarcation between ground and air itself had blurred.

The most unnerving thing, however, was the sounds, or more specifically their absence. Beyond the white noise created by the wind barreling past her, and the unearthly screech that had drawn their fear moments earlier, the world was eerily silent. Twilight’s ears flicked around, trying to localise phantom sounds in the random auditory stream, each false noise only serving to heighten her unease as her brain attempted to pattern-match nothingness.

Cracking stone. Flowing water. Skittering insects. A pleading cry. Each cued Twilight to twitch her ears in what she thought was the source of the noise, it stopped. She hunched down slightly, vertigo beginning to exert itself from the repeated failed localisations.

“Did you hear that?” Walleye asked, suddenly alert.

“Hear what, exactly?” Twilight whispered.

“That sound,” she replied, pulling her rifle up and peering through the scope, scanning. “It sounded like somepony shouting.”

“It’s your brain playing tricks on you, there’s nothing…” Twilight trailed off as she heard a cry, quiet, but distinct. “...there…”

“There!” Walleye shouted, pointing at the floor of a ravine far below them. Two points of color, one pink, the other aqua, were moving rapidly along the ravine floor towards them. They were shouting, though what they were shouting was still indistinct.

“Is that…”

“Lyra and Pinkie. They’re booking it. What in the…”

Walleye was abruptly cut off as a massive cluster of material came loose from the side of a spire at the far end of the ravine, showering rock and debris as it fell sideways and slammed into the ground. Seconds later, the sound of the event caught up to the visual, a horrid, otherworldly metallic screech, the same as what had startled them both not moments before.

As they watched, horrified, the pile of debris began moving, pulling itself under its own power, standing.

The shouts of the two ponies in the ravine became suddenly clear as a single, urgent, terrified word reached them.

“RUN!”

Author's Note

And like an elder god rising from the depths...
It awakens

Survival Instincts

“Rainbow!” Twilight yelled, pulling the beam’s focus tighter and pushing forward. “Move!”

Rainboom didn’t respond, already moving. With an almighty bellow, she flared her wings to their maximum extent, kicking off against a nearby crate and accelerating towards the black-clad assailant with as much acceleration as her wings of capable of providing.

“RAINBOW!” Twilight cried, her attack beam abruptly shutting down. “NO!”

Her ears popped.

G-force slammed into her brain, the black-clad assailant twisting only barely out of the path of her attack before her vision smeared and went purple, the assailant’s magic field swinging her around in a tight circle.

Her brain reacted sluggishly, only barely registering the wall of black that was rapidly rushing towards her. Confused and groggy, she twisted her wings perpendicular to the airflow, desperately trying to slow down.

An instant later, the darkness swallowed her whole.

Gravity, light, and sound abruptly vanished. Her brain, operating largely on instinctual autopilot, flared her wings out as far as her physiology would permit, trying desperately to catch any sort of airflow to arrest her motion, or even discern which direction she was travelling in. Her stomach heaved from the combination of no gravity and her tumbling motion imparted from her final moments before being catapulted into nothingness, acceleration-sensitive bones and highly sophisticated absolute pressure sensors in her inner ear screaming absolute nonsense to the centres of her brain responsible for orienting her in 3-d space.

She extended her legs, trying to at least slow her tumble before realising that she wouldn’t be able to reliably tell the difference without gravity or visual reference. Determined, she gulped back on the nausea, and racked her brain for something, anything that she could do to prevent her imminent death from hypercapnia and asphyxia.

Nothing came.

Every piece of training Rainboom has received was centred around the assumption that she would be operating in an environment under the purview of normal physical laws, not a sealed pony-shaped bubble of spacetime drifting through nothingness. The only thing that came remotely close was her high-altitude endurance training, but that was concerned with oxygen deprivation and problems with pressure at high altitudes, not dealing with carbon dioxide buildup in a closed system.

Already, her skin had begun to prickle unpleasantly from the trapped heat, the air in her lungs rapidly going stale as her lungs dumped the carbon dioxide she had built up from her earlier exertion. The contents of her stomach re-attempted their escape of their confines, only barely held back through sheer power of will.

“So this is how I die…” Rainboom muttered to herself, her words echoing through the confined bubble. “This sucks.”

Out of nowhere, the breath was driven from her lungs as something hard and unyielding was driven into her belly at speed.

She flailed, partly out of confusion and partly to try and grab whatever had hit her, a task made all the more difficult by the complete lack of external sensory input.

Another something whacked into the back of her head, sending stars swimming throughout her already-reddening vision. She yelped, groggily, as something sharp raked her outstretched wings and caught on her saddlebag strap, swinging her around as the bags tore away.

Mercifully, her hooves grasped something solid. After a few panic-filled moments of scrabbling, she finds purchase, drawing herself close, almost hugging it in relief as her accumulated body heat rapidly bled off into the shard of what felt like metal.

She pulled, momentarily hindered as the few meagre remaining scraps of fabric that held her saddlebags to her sides finally tore away completely, moving herself along the spike of metal. Her brain, only barely functional thanks to the knock to her head and steadily increasing CO2 levels, latched onto a single, desperate thought: There has to be something at the end of this shard.

She kept pulling, holding herself as close to the metal as possible in an attempt to keep her rising body heat at a tolerable level, though it did precious little to abate the steadily-worsening headache that was spreading through her awareness, threatening to wrest consciousness from her and strand her in her own personal tomb of spacetime.

Redness filled her vision. Tingling spread along her limbs up from her hooves, progressing into full-blown numbness as she suffocated. Piece by piece, her mind slipped away, whole sections of her brain bluntly refusing to continue operating until all that was left was a periodic throbbing, and the fragmenting remains of her consciousness desperately pulling her along.

Her hoof breached something, something cold. Pushing against the reflex to yank her hoof back from the icy something, she braced her hind legs against whatever purchase she gould gain on the metal, gathering the last vestiges of energy available to her, and with her final thought, pushed off.

Her entire world went white. White and cold. Her brain, finally overwhelmed from the sudden stimulus and CO2 poisoning, shut down, ferrying her into blissful oblivion.

“Are you okay?”

The question cut into her like a knife, stabbing directly into the part of her brain responsible for interpreting pain and amplifying it by a factor with enough digits to give an accountant nightmares.

Through the intolerable, throbbing headache, the realisation that she might not be dead was presented to her faculties, since she shouldn’t have been feeling pain. A realisation that was almost summarily dismissed, since, of course, she could be in Tartarus, which would handily explain the pain, and probably still mean that she was dead.

She cracked open an eyelid, only to yelp and slam it closed a moment later as pure, unfiltered white pain seared her optic nerve.

“Could someone turn that bucking light off?” she swore, holding her hooved up to her eyes.

“That’s the sun.”

“What?” she responded, confused, as she squinted through the glare, focusing, or trying to, on the blurry shadow standing over her.

“Are you the only one? Is there anyone else down there?”

“What in Celestia’s name are you talking about ‘down there’?”

“In the Void, in the hole. Is there anypony else?”

“No. Wait, where am I?”

“You’re on Harmony’s Shard, where did you think you were?”

“Honestly? Dead.”

It took a few moments for the implications of what the pony standing over her had just said, and a few more for her to react to them.

“Harmony’s Shard?” she exclaimed, sitting up and squinting behind the slowly-resolving form of the pony that was attending to her. While she could only barely make it out, the giant vertical occlusion was unmistakable as the Shard. “How did I get back here?”

“We spotted you jumping off the edge of the bridge and into the Void, you and your friends. Are they down there too? Are they okay?”

“They’re… fine?” The memories of her rather abortive fight against the hostile Outsider came flooding back. For an instant, she considered diving straight back over the edge of the bridge and getting back to them as soon as she could, before realising that, by now, the fight would have been over, with either the hostile or her friends dead on the floor. “I hope.”

“What in Tartarus is that supposed to mean? Are they down there or not?”

“Yes! No,” she sputtered. “Augh! Shut up for a moment! I need to think!”

“There’s no time for that! You were barely alive when we pulled you out of there. If they’re in there as well…”

“I was barely alive because I got thrown into the Void by a crazy pony who was trying to kill me.”

“I’m sorry, what?”

Rainboom looked up, only to groan in mild annoyance as the face of the pony above her came into focus. Her own face. While it certainly made sense that a Dash would be part of whatever SAR team they had in the Shard, ad-hoc though it likely was, it didn’t in any way mitigate the inevitable irritation that came when she had to deal with one of her alternates.

Barring the rare exception, Dashes are stubborn, proud, determined, and unfailingly loyal to their allies. Putting two of them together, especially when their objectives are at a crossroads to each other, and you were guaranteed a confrontation.

“Trust me when I say that there’s exactly nothing you can do for them right now. It pains me to say it, but I can’t do anything for them right now.”

“You realise how crazy that sounds, right? I saw you jump off a bridge, willingly, into the Void, and now you’re asking me to trust you?”

“The irony is not lost on me.”

Rainboom sat up, rubbing her hooves as the feeling slowly returned to them, almost gulping down the blissfully oxygenated air to clear out her lungs. As her vision returned to its normally-sharp levels, she noticed the dozens of heads poking out of the bolted-on superstructure of the Shard, all staring at her.

“I see I’ve become quite the attraction,” she quipped, stretching herself out and smirking. “Would have thought you lot would see interesting stuff fairly often out here.”

“‘Freak jumps from entryway bridge into Void’ is interesting above and beyond what we usually get.”

“‘Freak?’” Rainboom repeated, slowly, feeling a twinge of anger ignite inside her.

“Yeah. Freak,” the Dash replied, a distinct lack of malice in her voice. “As opposed to Normies. You’re all weird and freaky, and have weird, freaky gear, thus freak.”

“It’s not all that nice to call a pony a freak,” Rainboom said, holding her anger in check, for the moment. As much as her hot-headedness was begging her to lay out the belligerent pony in front of her, weight of experience held her back. Getting into a fight with one of her alternates never ended well.

“Uh… sorry?” Dash replied, seemingly genuinely confused. “That’s… just the word that gets used around here. What’s wrong with it?”

“It makes it sound like you think there’s something wrong with me, like I’m a monster or something.”

“Monster? Nah, we get plenty of monsters, you’re no monster.”

“Still…”

“Well, what word do you use?”

“‘Outsider’ is the only one I know, really…”

“Too clunky. ‘Freak’ rolls off the tongue better.”

“Fine,” Rainboom acquiesced, rising to her hooves, unsteadily. “Are we done here?”

Dash supported her, wrapping a leg around Rainboom’s shoulders. “You’re going to be a bit shaky on those hooves for a bit. You should come inside, sit down.”

“No, I…”

“I insist,” Dash said, forcefully, pulling Rainboom along towards the Shard’s entryway. “You’re not going to be any help to anypony for at least another half hour.”

“They probably think I’m dead, anyway,” Rainboom remarked.

“Good thing we were there to scoop you up, then, eh? Should be a happy surprise when you meet again!”

“If we meet again…”

No sooner had the both of them stepped inside the entryway of the Shard, the entire structure tilted precariously off-axis, the screams of startled ponies and shattering of unsecured glassware echoing through the corridors.

“Is that normal?” Rainboom asked, struggling to hold her footing.

“No, it’s not,” Dash replied, visibly concerned. “What’s going…”

The words were plucked from her throat as the floor fell away from under them, pinning Rainboom and Dash to the ceiling as the entire structure plummeted. Rainboom got the barest glimpse of the walls of the pit rushing upwards and the entire bridge disintegrating before the entire Shard fell into the Void, and nothing could be seen beyond the doorway but inky nothingness.

Author's Note

And we rewind for a moment, to see what happened to the other part of the team.

Or is it because I like leaving you all on a cliffhanger for a moment longer?

Blast Radius

“The mountain is moving,” Twilight commented, too awestruck to do anything else.

“Yes,” Walleye replied, rather more urgently than Twilight, as she properly braced her rifle, centering it on the colossal mass moving towards them.

“...Why is the mountain moving?”

“What in Celestia’s name makes you think I know the answer to that?”

“I… uh…” Twilight hesitated, her brain still hung up on ‘moving mountain.’ “You've got more field experience than I do?”

“Yes,” Walleye shot back, snarkily. “Because I’ve had so much experience fighting giant moving mountains.”

“Any experience you had would be more than me. I’ve been on this job… how many days now?”

“Less babbling, more working out how to kill the mountain-monster, Insider!”

Twilight raised an eyebrow, finally pulled out of her reverie.

“...How am I supposed to work out how to kill that?”

“Find a way!” Walleye insisted, sweeping the scope of her rifle over it looking for weak points. “It’s not just mountain, by the look of it, there’s something alive in there. And if it’s alive that means it can be made dead.”

“What?” Twilight said, confusedly turning her attention back to the mountain-creature.

Her immediate impression was to disregard Walleye’s statement as that of a deluded madmare, not entirely unreasonable considering her history with the mare, and the impossibility of what she was describing. If she wasn’t witnessing it first-hand, she would insist that the ten-thousand-hoof tall object would have been incapable of locomotion entirely.

It took a few moments for Twilight’s inner scientist to assert itself, and start reviewing the evidence. If her initial conclusion that the mountain couldn’t move was false, then it stood to reason that her conclusion about its composition could be likewise false. Out of sheer curiosity, she pulled up an old intelligence gathering spell, Unicorn’s Eye, and cast it, before teleporting the featureless ‘eye’ it had conjured closer to the creature.

She inhaled sharply as the image resolved in her peripheral consciousness. It was alive, that much was clear. Bare sinew, muscle, and bone protruded from stone and gravel at unnatural, painful angles, propelling the construct forward on a haphazard, uncoordinated gait. It wasn’t the plainly-organic pieces that surprised her, however - it was their variety.

From her vantage point roughly five hundred hooflengths above the creature, she could make out at least three pairs of what appeared to be legs scattered along its height, most arranged at angles that made them pointless at best, and all of them different. And not different as in ‘front’ or ‘hind,’ either. As she inched the eye further, it became exceedingly clear that the different sets of limbs didn’t even belong to the same species, or even the same genus. Cloven hooves, plantigrade feet, an oddly reptilian claw… It was as though somepony had glued a pile of completely dissimilar creatures together and buried them in the side of a mountain.

It took a few moments before she caught view of eyes and a face amid the cacophony of body parts, and the horrible truth reared its ugly head.

“So…” Twilight croaked. “You remember how I said that I’d have been embedded in the ground if I’d arrived a few hooflengths lower?”

“Yeah?” Walleye replied. “What about it?”

Twilight didn’t reply, opting instead to emphatically point at the creature.

“What, you think…” Walleye trailed off, examining it for a moment further through her rifle scope before pulling back with a cry of disgust. “Oh, Celestia above…”

It took a tremendous level of effort for Twilight to push past the fact that what she was examining could very nearly have been her, if her luck had been fractions of a hooflength worse, and focus on the matter at hoof. What she had previously classified as a single mountainous entity comprised primarily of mountain and animated by entirely unknown means was actually a horrifying conglomeration of no less than sixteen (at her count) distinct creatures ranging in size from ‘large pony’ to ‘adult dragon,’ all fused to each other and the myriad of debris that was unfortunate enough to occupy the same space as them when they were unceremoniously dumped on this world.

The most striking aspect wasn’t the creatures’ combined collective size, or even its apparent coordination (though that was becoming a more pressing question as it shambled closer to them at speed), it was that every single creature that she could spot that was part of the conglomeration was in quite visible agony. If it wasn’t for the distance and the wind, she was quite positive that the air would have been filled with the moaning, shrieking vocalisations of the suffering of dozens upon dozens of trapped creatures.

To call Twilight Sparkle ‘horrified’ at that moment would have been an understatement of truly cosmic proportions. Disgust, nausea, outrage... her brain struggled to even find words compatible with the emotion that had, quite uninvited, parked itself at the centre of her being.

She wasn’t even sure that sufficient words existed, and that just made the entire situation orders of magnitude worse.

“It…” Twilight whispered, wrestling with the words. “It needs to die. Quickly.”

“I’m sorry, what?” Walleye asked, completely taken aback. “Not ten minutes ago you stopped me from killing a pony that had murdered a teammate, not to mention a close personal friend, and now you’re flat-out saying that something needs to die? Who are you and what have you done with the pacifist Insider that I got saddled with against my will?”

Twilight didn’t respond, running through a mental checklist of spells she had previously earmarked and categorised as ‘Heavy Combat Spells - use with caution,’ giving each in turn a small pulse of energy to initialise it and hold it ready for full activation. The Outsider Powerstone still nestled safely on the rim of her Beacon ring on her horn began to emit a faint purple glow as it was bound to the nascent spell objects, freeing Twilight’s own magic energy reserves for any more immediate tasks.

“I mean…” Walleye continued. “I’m alright with killing it. Won’t be the first thing, just tell me where to shoot, it’s just… jarring to hear you say it, after you’ve been so against cold-blooded murder this whole time.”

“This isn’t murder,” Twilight corrected. “This is mercy.”

“In what way is killing merciful?”

“Have you ever had a sick pet?”

“No…”

“Then you won’t understand.”

“And what, you do?”

“I understand,” Twilight snapped, the outburst threatening to upset her position in her checklist, “that that thing is in more pain than either of us could even hope to conceive. Do you have any idea how painful, how indescribably agonising it is to be forced to occupy the same space as solid rock? How about another living creature? I don’t, but I’ll bet my life, and the life of every single one of my alternates that it is feeling all of that, right now, and then some!”

Walleye stared at her for the longest moment, before simply nodding and turning back to look through her scope.

“Where do I shoot it?”

“Everywhere.”

“...That’s not helpful.”

“It wasn’t supposed to be. You’re too small for this.”

“Sorry, too small?”

“Yes. If we still had that thaumonuclear device you’d manipulated me into stealing, this would have been the perfect use for it. Barring that, we’ll just have to settle for me.”

At that moment, Lyra and Pinkie crested the final hill standing between them and Walleye and Twilight, visibly out of breath, exhausted, barely able to move, and quite visibly with no intention of stopping. Behind them, maybe a thousand hooflengths and closing faster than it had any right to, the monstrosity was closing the distance.

Twilight flipped a mental switch, giving the go-ahead for every one of her mental spells to flip from ‘pre-init’ to ‘standby,’ while a further three slammed all the way over to ‘active.’

An opaque force field enveloped her, forming an unyielding, utterly impenetrable barrier between herself and the outside world. In lockstep, the field and its contents were rendered invisible and teleported high into the air, far out of reach of anything, let alone the creature. A multitude of Unicorn Eyes blipped into existence before fading from sight and scattering themselves far enough to give Twilight a complete, unimpeded view of everything in a ten-thousand-hooflength radius.

As far as anypony else in that area was concerned, Twilight Sparkle had ceased to be a distinct, attackable object and for all intents and purposes was now an abstract concept, the idea of a unicorn mage that existed somewhere within that volume of space.

Twilight picked a vantage point at random, popped an offensive spell off the stack, allocated a full quarter of the Powerstone’s energy reserve to it, and loosed the spell at the creature. A half-kilothaum ball of pure destructive energy flashed into being above the creature and lanced downwards, slamming home enough energy to easily vaporise a half-ton of solid rock and keep going.

And nothing happened.

Twilight blinked.

The creature, incredibly, impossibly, responded.

With an almost audible rush, the ambient magic density in the area dropped by a factor of twelve. Twilight’s ongoing spells adjusted their power draw from her powerstone in response, compensating for the loss of ambient magic. Entire sections of her prepared spell stack dropped out of existence, reflexes dismissing them to maintain enough mental focus to hold her essential defensive spells in place, while simultaneously thinning the magic flux load on her powerstone to a level that wouldn’t deplete it in a matter of seconds.

What just happened was impossible. The creature should barely have been able to move in a coherent manner, let alone cast spells of that caliber. As it was, she was willing to explain away the fact that it was most certainly chasing down Lyra and Pinkie with violent intent through some sort of mindless impulse or deranged common thought lurking in the creatures’ minds, borne of pain and hunger and isolation. Injured animals are, of course, the most dangerous.

This was something else entirely. It had recognised the fact that Twilight had just attacked it. It had either correctly deduced or theorised close enough to the methods that she was using to protect herself. It had then picked an appropriate spell to counter her protective charms and cast it. Not to mention that fact that it had shrugged off a half-kilothaum bolt of pure, abstract destruction as though it were nothing more substantial than a housefly, and despite it, had chosen to strike back.

She was entirely incapable of harming the creature with the tools at her disposal. It was either durable enough to resist the spells she was throwing at it, had some sort of shielding enchantment, or (most likely) was using some variant of the utter dome spell she was using to protect herself, cast in response to the inbound projectile. It could swat away anything she threw at it, since, even accounting for the powerstone’s reserves, it had far more magic at its disposal.

And despite all that, it was fighting back. It could flat-out ignore her, yet it had instead opted to cast the one spell that would (eventually) make her vulnerable. It wasn’t merely defending itself, it was hostile, and malevolent.

As quick as the thought entered her head, she had queued up a further three utter dome spells, casting them around Walleye, Lyra, and Pinkie in turn, barely in time before the creature caught up and slammed into where they were, dust kicking up from where the near-irresistible force met the actually immovable solid force wall. She didn’t bother with any further protection, since the dome would outright block any physical or magical effect crossing its boundary, hostile or not, for as long as she could maintain it.

Anger and determination gripped her, a familiar burning sensation taking root at the base of her horn. Memories of the same burning, unnatural sensation flicked through her mind, memories of every instant she had come into contact with the Void. She knew the basic sensation well, any trainee unicorn mage becomes intimately familiar with the prickling-at-the-base-of-their-horn that signified an abnormally large amount of magic in an area.

But this tingling was different, more painful, darker, as though out of alignment with her own magic, at right angles, or something close to it. Ultimately, she didn’t care much about the small details, or even the how or why. For some reason, something to do with the Void had vast, untapped magical potential, and at that moment, she needed exactly what was being offered to her.

With a thought, she latched onto the sensation, focusing on its dark unfamiliarity, solidifying it into a point, before driving a sliver of magic into it, forcing it open and releasing a torrent of raw magic directly into her brain. With a sickly crackling sound, the aura surrounding her horn turned from its usual cheery magenta to a deep, malevolent black, with spiderweb-thin cracks undulating in its wake.

With careful, almost trepidative mental motions, she pulled a spell from what remained of her mental spell stack—a crude offensive spell that accepted raw magic, collimated it into a beam, and directed it at a target. Resisting the urge to smirk, she plugged her new source of energy directly into the spell, picked one of her few Unicorn Eyes as the beam origin, and kick-started the spell, opening the maw of her Void mana source wide.

A pure black beam of unformatted destructive potential lanced out of a point roughly two thousand hooflengths behind the creature, slamming home fractions of a second later. Moments after, two further identical beams formed from nothingness as Twilight sent a pair of mental ‘repeat’ commands to the spell cluster.

The creature stumbled, but remained alive, the three beams held back mere hooflengths from impact. Ignoring the rapidly-spreading black spiderweb cracks, she issued a further five repeat commands, bringing the total number of active beam spells up to eight.

Infuriatingly, it refused to fall, standing stubbornly at the centre of the converging beams, arcs of grounding magical energy flaring nearly constantly around it an into the ground, creating an ionised halo almost twice its size. Nearby cliff faces crumbled and liquefied in the magical backwash.

Fractures radiated away from her, momentarily stymied by her utter dome spell before turning back upon themselves and tunneling through her remote spell links, one-by-one severing her vantage points as the fissures spread and solidified, entire sections of reality flickering in and out of existence as they were uprooted, only to come crashing back down into the very world they had departed.

Her eye twitching slightly from frustration, Twilight reached inwards, jamming open the black void in her psyche that represented the open Void mana source as wide as possible, before wrapping the closest nearby mountain to her in magic, and ripping it cleanly out of reality, leaving a jagged-edged black Void fissure in its wake.

Struggling against her logical mind’s insistence that space did not have that many dimensions, Twilight swung the detached mountain of stone around an axis firmly outside conventional spacetime, slamming it downwards through the 8-dimensional space onto the creature. Eerily, the mountain made no noise as it arrived, completely superimposed over the creature.

Grinning almost against her will, Twilight cut her plethora of beam spells, directing a single, simple mental command at the mountain, still held in her mental grip.

Disintegrate.

The mountain, and everything contained within it, obediently complied.

Instants later, the world itself followed suit, the flow of Void magic stubbornly refusing to self-regulate as Twilight’s previous spell loads were removed, and channeling themselves outwards. Fissures spread at an almost explosive pace, fracturing the world into massive shards before violently solidifying, propelling the resultant chunks outward and upward along barely-understandable 8-dimensional vector lines.

Fine Structure

It took Twilight Sparkle all of a fraction of a second to react, momentarily suspending the four utter dome spells under her command for long enough to teleport Walleye, Lyra, and Pinkie to her own location, the sharp triple-crack of the chained teleports only barely drowned out by the sound of the world around them fracturing at the seams.

The dark abyss within her psyche continued to spill magic through her, the flow completely unaffected by any grip, restraint, or degree of control Twilight attempted to enforce upon it. Where the magic was going was a completely mystery to her at that point, for all she knew it was being vented directly into the Void, atomising chunks of the world around them and firing them as reaction mass, turning them into a steadily-accelerating thaumic rocket, flying upwards out of reality.

Barely able to think as she held the font of magic from growing any wider, tendrils of black and purple flowing in her peripheral vision, she spoke, words echoing unnaturally in the enclosed space and triggering synesthesic feedback as the words mixed with magic.

“Okay. What now?”

“What do you mean, ‘What now?’” Lyra shouted, standing on the wall of the now-reinstated utter dome, at right-angles to Twilight’s own subjective ‘down.’ “I don’t even know what you just did, let alone what you should do next!”

“Way to not panic, Lyra,” Walleye snarked.

“No, you don’t get to be a smart-flank about this, Derpy,” Lyra shot back. “I just ran for my life from a creature that I have never bloody seen before, and that is saying something. I’ve seen everything, I’ve been nearly everywhere that you could call dangerous, I live in the bloody Celestia-damned flank-kicking RUINS, and today is probably the first day in my entire bloody life when I’ve been scared for my life. I’m bucking done, alright? The moment little miss Sombra over there gets us back to civilisation, I’m out, I’m finding some hole in the ground and…”

Walleye slapped her.

Lyra blinked, holding her face in her hoof.

“We good?” Walleye asked.

“I… yeah,” Lyra replied, shakily. “Yeah, we’re good.”

Walleye smiled, turning away from her and back to Twilight.

“You do that again, though, and I will kick your flank,” Lyra remarked, rubbing her cheek.

“I’d expect nothing less.”

“Sorry to interrupt this heartfelt moment,” Twilight interrupted, anger and frustration echoing to a nearly visible degree in her words. “But the world is disintegrating around us. I have little to no control over the spell that’s doing it, and I’m out of ideas.”

“How long?” Walleye asked, eerily calm.

“How long until what?”

“How long until the world completely disintegrates?”

“Seconds. Maybe single-digit minutes if I really put effort into stemming it?”

“Can’t you just dismiss the spell? Short your magic out?” Lyra asked, licking her hoof and tapping it to her horn, demonstrating the de-facto method of short-circuiting runaway magic.

“This isn’t my magic. If it was, I would have depleted it already and been knocked out. I’m not in control, it’s just running through me.”

“Serious question, if you die, would it stop?” Walleye asked, straight-faced.

“Sorry, what?”

“We’re not killing Twilight!” Pinkie cried.

“It’s drastic, I realise,” Walleye admitted. “But if the choice is between all of us dying and just one of us dying… well…”

“And leave us stuck on a piece of rock?” Pinkie countered. “Even Maud wouldn’t be able to live here for long, and she eats rocks!”

“Maud?” Walleye asked, confused.

“No, Pinkie’s right,” Lyra cut in. “Even if we stop the fragmenting, that still leaves us stuck here on a tiny island floating through the Void. It’s not viable.”

“Okay, fine,” Walleye relented, turning to Pinkie. “Who’s Maud?”

“Not relevant!” Twilight interrupted.

“No, yes, you’re right. “ Walleye sputtered.

“What’s the magic doing now?” Lyra asked.

“Near as I can tell? Venting into nothingness.”

“Magic doesn’t vent, Twilight, you know that as well as I do. What. Is. It. Doing?”

“I… don’t know. This magic is weird. I… I think it’s trying to get back to where it comes from, back to the Void. I’ve opened a valve, and since I can’t close it again, it just keeps flowing and flowing and running back to its source and tearing everything apart along the way.”

“Give it something to do, then, if that will stop it.”

Twilight boggled at the request. “Give it something to do? There’s more energy flowing through me right now than I accumulate over entire weeks of meditation and focus. Kilothaum-watts. Gigathaum-watts.”

It was hyperbole. Twilight didn’t have a reliable method of gauging the exact magic flux, but it solidly conveyed the point.

“You know as well as I do that the right spell will just accept as much energy as you can throw at it. Pick something simple that scales up easily, and plug it in.”

“That won’t stop it!”

“No, but it will slow it down. If you give it somewhere to go instead of just taking a shortcut back into nothingness and tearing us apart in the process, it could buy us enough time to figure out an escape plan.”

Twilight didn’t reply, pulling a single tendril of mental focus free from the iron-clad grip around the fissure in her mind to poll her mental list of spells, searching for something simple, yet scalable. Under normal circumstances, simple spells were that way for a reason, utilising the caster’s own preconceptions and innate understandings in order to avoid having to fully define every last detail of the spell to be cast, and had a typically fixed amount of energy that could be channeled into them. For instance, a spell such as light, which consists entirely of issuing that single word as a magical command, will universally create a light source that the caster considers neither too bright nor too dim, with a commensurate energy demand.

However, given enough energy, any spell can be pushed beyond its initial limits. Typically, such energy demands are only available to sufficiently skilled unicorn magi, alicorns, and coordinated ritual circles, but the fissure of Void-ness flooding Twilight’s mind with black magic was anything but typical.

Outside the opaque dome protecting the remaining members of Team Fifteen, a pinprick of light flickered into existence. A moment later, as Twilight turned the Void magic source in her mind around towards the mental pointer that corresponded to the light spell, the pinprick of light became as bright as the surface of the sun.

Simultaneously, the violent shuddering that had gone largely unnoticed in the panic abruptly ceased, plunging the interior of the dome into eerie calmness.

“Well,” Lyra breathed. “That seems… better?”

“Wait a moment,” Twilight said, gingerly removing her mental grip on the Void source within her mind. Despite her relaxed control, all the magic flux remained centred on the spell pointer. “That’s… strange. I wonder…”

Experimentally, she wrapped the light pointer in a maintain spell, a simple metamagic trick designed to allow a spell to continue autonomously with an independent energy source, designated the Void source as the ‘pool,’ and released her grip entirely.

Abruptly, both the spell pointer and the Void source disappeared from her mind, the purple-and-black tinge quickly fading from her peripheral vision.

“That should buy us some time.”

“It worked, then?” Walleye asked. “Your eyes aren’t all green and purple any more, so…”

“My eyes were green and purple?”

“Green, with these purple-y tendrils flowing off them. ‘Going Sombra’ is what it’s usually called.”

“Yeah,” Lyra pitched in. “Telltale mark of black magic. Though I’ve never seen it do… that.”

“It’s probably some weird cross-reaction between my having travelled between worlds,” Twilight guessed. “Or at least, having prolonged contact with the Void, or being near the Void when you tap into black magic… I dunno. Outsiders are probably immune to it as a side-effect of your other magic quirks, I’d guess.”

“Again, you’ve lost me,” Walleye complained. Lyra smirked, shaking her head in bemusement.

“Okay, long story short, I shouldn’t use black magic because my travels with you have made my usage of it vulnerable to loss of control which could tear the world I’m on apart. I’ve solved the immediate issue, for now, but we’re still stuck inside a sealed bubble on a small chunk of rock, hurtling through the Void, with limited air and supplies.”

“Let’s go home,” Pinkie offered.

“How do we go home, featherbrain?” Walleye snapped. “We’re out here to find out who’s attacking the Exterior. Just because we now know doesn’t mean we just go back there. The ponies we would report that info to are likely dead!”

“But…” Pinkie stuttered, taken aback from the hostility. “Can’t Twilight send us somewhere? Somewhere friendly?”

“The spell to do that doesn’t work, apparently.”

“Well, actually…” Twilight corrected, pulling Lunatic’s spell up and executing it. On cue, a reflective silver sphere formed around the four ponies, signalling the spell’s success.

RF?

She yelped with glee.

“We’re good, we can teleport! Where should I send us?”

“Oh, so now it works…” Walleye grumbled.

“Bastion,” Lyra replied, ignoring Walleye. “It’s a world on the Edge of the falls that Runners like me use all the time. It’s friendly to Outsiders. Pretty grouse all-round, actually.”

“Grouse?” Walleye questioned.

Twilight ignored her, issuing the destination order to the spell.

Confirm Ex54A2FF05-Bastion?

Without a second thought, she issued the confirmation and the spell grounded, silver walls falling away to reveal the vibrant vista that was downtown Canterlot, mildly surprised ponies slowly backing away from the four newly-arrived offworlders.

“Well, at least nopony’s screaming,” Pinkie observed cheerfully.

In the distance, a pony screamed.

“You just had to go and say it, didn’t you?” Walleye groaned.

More screams came, mixed with shouts of alarm and confusion, none of them directed at the new arrivals. In fact, the ponies in the square seemed equally confused as to the source of the screaming, glancing around with worry.

“At least nopony’s screaming at us?” Pinkie sheepishly corrected.

“Where in the name of Celestia’s fluorescent flank is that screaming coming from?” Lyra wondered aloud. “And what are they screaming at?”

“I think I may have an idea,” Twilight stated, eyes fixed firmly upwards. Far overhead, a long, slender, off-brown shape was streaking towards them, nearly-invisible particles of debris shedding from the object’s surface like metal dandruff before disintegrating as they slammed into the stationary air outside the object’s slipstream.

“What is that?” Lyra demanded.

“It’s supersonic,” Twilight observed, catching hints of the tell-tale conic shockwave as debris passed through it.

“Sorry… what?” Walleye asked, taken aback. “Supersonic?”

“Solidly supersonic, for sure,” Twilight confirmed. “Probably around Mach three or four, judging by the angle. Would probably give Rainboom a run for her money.”

The mention of their fallen colleague blunted Walleye’s reply. Twilight, a fraction of a second too late realising her mistake, grimaced at her, apologetically.

“We’re going to die,” Pinkie observed, somehow still managing to retain her cheerful tone.

Around them, all across the city, pegasi had begun to take flight, vectoring towards the falling structure in a haphazard attempt to defend the city against the perceived attack that it represented. In the distance, towards the palace, Twilight spotted at least two distinct Princess Celestias take flight alongside the rapidly-growing fleet of airborne ponies.

At the edge of the city, a force field dome began to materialise, a rosy ripple rising out of the mountain that supported Canterlot and up into the sky, easily recognisable by Twilight as her brother’s work, or at least one of his duplicates. While the shell was taking its fair time to fully form, there would still be ample time for it to solidify before the object arrived, protecting the city against any physical or energy-based attack.

Beyond mild surprise, everypony in sight was largely unalarmed. Why should they be? Even Twilight herself knew that there was no danger. If the armada of pegasi and alicorns now closing on the ‘threat’ didn’t manage to slow or divert it, it would impact Canterlot’s force field dome and likely disintegrate. In the unlikely event that the object had some esoteric thaumic properties that would allow it to bypass the shield, failsafe spells built into the city’s very pavement would execute and teleport the city itself or its inhabitants to safety. Or at least they would, if those spells existed on this world’s Canterlot like Twilight’s own. In all likelihood, there were probably further layers of defensive measure on top of that that she didn’t know about.

Of course, such spells vary from world to world, as was demonstrably the case with Falls-EF, where such defenses were either disabled or omitted, but by and large, at the end of the day, the only place safer to be than the streets of Canterlot was beside one of the Royal Sisters themselves. Twilight knew it, Team Fifteen knew it, everypony in the city knew it. There was no fear.

There was also absolutely nothing Twilight could do to influence the unfolding course of events. Without dipping back into the malevolent font of darkness she had only barely managed to free herself from moments ago, she had only her own magic reserves plus whatever dregs remained in her powerstone - a few dozen thaum, tops. The object was massive, easily over a thousand hooflengths long and weighing hundreds of thousands of tons.

So she watched. Before her eyes, easily a thousand pegasi took flight, streaking upwards to meet the falling structure before Canterlot’s shield closed. Over the span of the next few minutes, they took formation around the object while the few alicorns among them (of which Twilight spotted at least twelve: five Celestias, four Lunas, the rest she didn’t recognise) attempted to slow the object with magic enough to allow the rest of the flight to nudge it off-course.

Exactly two hundred seconds after Twilight first spotted the object (she counted), it slammed into the side of Mount Canter, well outside the city’s defensive shield, but close enough that the shockwave knocked everyone off-balance, at a speed that was only barely subsonic. The mountain yielded. The object did not.

It took another hour for Team Fifteen to make their way to the impact site, struggling their way through obstructive Royal Guard, crowds of fascinated onlookers, and the massive dust cloud that had been kicked up by the impact and now blanketed the entire mountain. With Lyra’s navigational skills at the helm, they arrived only barely behind the emergency response teams from the city.

The four of them stopped dead as they good their first good look at what exactly had fell from the sky, a spike of eldritch grey metal, jagged and chaotic, now jutting out of the side of Mount Canter at an odd angle. They all recognised it, since they had been standing outside of it only a few hours before, only it had lost all it’s scrap-metal adornments and was now upside-down.

Out of the fog and dust strode a pair of pegasi, two Rainbows, one clearly injured and being supported by the other. Twilight’s breath caught in her chest as she caught sight of the latter Rainbow, immediately recognising the black uniform and noticeable-but-not-prominent ‘15’ embroidered on the sleeve.

“Oh, good,” Rainboom said. “About time you lot got here.”

Heartfelt Moments

“How in the name of Celestia’s luminescent off-pink backside did you survive?”

Lyra’s question hung in the air, unanswered, for the better part of an hour, unceremoniously shoved aside in favor of helping the arriving army of emergency response ponies tend to the injured and distressed. Or, more accurately, outright forgotten as medical teams press-ganged the team of evidently-uninjured Outsiders into patient transport and stabilisation.

By the time doctors and nurses had stopped barking orders at her and she remembered that she had, in fact, been asked a question, she found herself surrounded by unknown ponies in a hospital, with the rest of her team, yet again, nowhere in sight. It took another fifteen minutes for her to track them down and either bribe or threaten their impromptu supervisors to release them for ‘more important’ work.

All except for Lyra, who stubbornly refused to be found. Uncharacteristically, Rainboom gave up after just north of five minutes extra searching, not wanting to spend any further unnecessary time within the hospital and reasoning that whenever she was ready, Lyra would come find them.

Twilight, the only Canterlot native among the remaining four, directed them to a nearby cafe, ordered a set of hay-shakes, sat down, and fixed Rainboom with a penetrating gaze.

“Well?” Twilight demanded.

“What?”

“You’re supposed to be dead. I saw you die.”

“Nice to see you too, by the way,” Rainboom quipped, sipping the shake.

“We all saw you die,” Twilight reiterated, gesturing to the others.

“Was I dead when that Sparkle threw me into the Void?”

“No… but…”

“Then you didn’t see me die, did you?”

“If somepony got thrown into a river of lava, being alive before they hit doesn’t change the fact that they are going to be dead, very quickly.”

“Entirely true.”

“Oh, for Celestia’s sake,” Walleye interrupted, abruptly sitting up and nearly spilling her untouched hay-shake. “Rain, stop dodging the question. We all thought you were dead! How did you survive?”

“Did you mourn me?” Rainboom asked, only barely managing to maintain a straight face.

“Yes,” Pinkie replied, visibly torn between sadness and outright elation.

“Awesome!” Rainboom grinned.

“For all of five minutes until our little Insider Sparkle here broke reality,” Walleye added. “And then we fought a mountain. The mourning was mostly in the background while we tried not to follow your lead.”

“Okay, now I know you’re yanking my tail. A mountain? You need to learn to bluff better, boss.”

“She’s not joking, Dashie,” Pinkie said, somber.

“Dashie? I… What?”

“She… We’re not joking, Rainboom,” Twilight interrupted, pre-empting the impending derailing questions. “There was a mountain that tried to kill us, we thought you were dead. You’re obviously not. How?”

“I… snagged a branch and pulled myself to the surface.”

Pinkie, Walleye, and Twilight all stared at her, at a loss for words.

“What?” they asked, simultaneously.

“That’s pretty much it, really,” Rainboom reiterated. “I couldn’t see a Celestia-damned thing once I flew out that hole, so I couldn’t tell you what it was, but I grabbed it and dragged myself along it until I pulled myself into open air and passed out. Woke up staring up at myself.”

“On the Shard?” Twilight asked.

“Yeah. Evidently this is a bit of a thing for them, they’ve got entire teams for it. Figures I’d be on it, wouldn’t be surprised if the entire rescue team was me…”

“I can’t help but consider the irony here considering that you turned up quite literally carrying yourself,” Twilight observed. “Your ego truly is boundless, Rainboom.”

“Yeah, yeah. Wouldn’t have been carrying me if the whole world hadn’t fallen out from under my hooves, what’s up with that?”

Walleye smirked, fixing Twilight with a smug glare.

“I…” Twilight began, sheepishly. “May, may, mind you, have lost control, slightly.”

“Understatement of the year, right there,” Walleye said, turning back to Rainboom. “She went nuts interrogating the Sparkle that threw you out into the Void, everything broke, and we ended up in Tartarus.”

“I told you before,” Twilight corrected. “It wasn’t Tartarus. It was… some Other place, like a graveyard where all the flotsam and jetsam that isn’t blasted clean into the Void washes up.”

“And what about the Sparkle?” Rainboom asked. “The one that ambushed her. Did she ‘wash up’ with you?”

“No, she…” Twilight trailed off as she tried to recall when she awoke in the ‘graveyard,’ a cold chill running down her spine as she pieced together the conclusion based on her own position and the orientation of the debris around her. “She’s dead. Most likely. Hopefully.”

“Dead?”

“As close as one gets from being superimposed with a block of solid rock,” Twilight replied. “Though considering our current track record of living-things-embedded-inside-rock-that-ought-to-be-dead, it’s entirely possible she survived. Personally, I hope she’s dead, it would be a mercy compared to the alternative.”

“Either way,” she continued, clearly trying to avoid thinking about the reality of her doppelganger being encased in rock. “She isn’t coming after us.”

“Is that a ‘I hope,’ or a definite there?” Rainboom asked. “The last thing we need is more evil Outsiders coming after us.”

“It’s a definite,” Twilight confirmed. “She’s either dead, or trapped in solid rock, or even if she’s not, she’s trapped on that world like we were without the tools I used to escape us. She is now irrelevant, and I would very much like us to stop talking about it.”

“...Why?”

“Because I have killed myself twice now, and I would very much like to stop.”

Everypony fell silent, digesting Twilight’s statement, trying to unravel the inadequate chain of pronouns into something comprehensible. Pinkie was the first to break the silence, distracted by something completely unrelated.

“Lyra!” she cried, sitting up and waving. “Over here!”

Everypony perked up, thankful for something, anything to distract them from Twilight’s focus on recent morbid events. Lyra on the other hand looked anything but thankful, clearly debating if she could get away with ‘not hearing’ Pinkie’s beckons and heading in the other direction. It was only at the apparent insistence of her companion, who Twilight recognised as an Outsider Rarity, that she acquiesced and approached.

Pinkie, evidently even more eager than the others to have cheerful company, or perhaps simply just being her usual welcoming self, wasted no time pulling extra chairs for the newcomers to the steadily-crowding table. Surprisingly, though, it was Rarity who broke the silence first.

“So,” she opened, surveying the table. “This is who you’ve been saddled with, Yankee. A Pie and a Sparkle. I suppose you could have done worse.”

“Sorry, do I know you?” Walleye replied, raising an eyebrow.

“No, but I know you from reputation,” Rarity replied, grabbing a menu from a nearby unoccupied table with her magic and perusing it. “I was the pony that was sent to retrieve Lyra after your bungle retrieving Theta.”

“That wasn’t a bungle, I’ll have you know,” Walleye growled back, eyes narrowing. “Somepony tipped her off. It was a trap.”

“My oh my, such a temper!” Rarity chuckled. “Do calm down, dear. I meant nothing of it, only repeating what I had heard. Rumors and hearsay, nothing more.”

Walleye backed off slightly, still fixing Rarity with a malevolent glare.

“Though such rumors have increased of late,” she continued, ignoring Walleye. “Even disregarding the obvious mystery of the piece of Exterior that has fallen from the sky, there’s the fact that nopony’s beacons seem to work anymore. It’s been… a week? There’s been a few scattered Outsiders who managed to find their way here, but nopony knows what’s going on.”

“I’ll bet my coiffure that one of you ponies knows what’s going on, though. Lyra here has been somewhat tight-lipped, which I suppose is understandable considering her friend’s injury, but I expect some answers from at least one of you four. Spill.”

“What are you talking about?” Rainboom blurted. “None of us are injured.”

“Up in the hospital,” Rarity replied. “There was a Sparkle that Lyra here was fawning ovmmph?”

Rarity scowled, struggling as Lyra shoved her hoof over Rarity’s mouth.

“...I’m not injured…” Twilight stated, confused.

“Not you,” Rainboom cut in. “Some other Sparkle...”

Pinkie Pie almost audibly inflated, grin splitting her face from ear to ear.

“Mate!” she squeed, pointing at Lyra.

Everypony looked at her, entirely confused.

“Mate!” she repeated, gesturing between Lyra and the hospital building.

The looks of confusion intensified, mixed with mild irritation.

“Ugh, seriously?” Pinkie whined, exasperated. “Am I the only one who picks up on this sort of stuff?”

Everypony continued to stare, clearly waiting for her to get to the point.

“When she said she crashed with a ‘mate’ on Harmony’s Shard, it wasn’t some expression, it’s what they do togemmmpfh?”

Pinkie glared at Lyra as it became her turn to have her mouth filled with hoof, her triumphant explanation cut abruptly short. Though judging by the dawning expressions of revelation on everypony’s faces (or in Twilight’s case, mild disgust), it has been too little, too late.

“Oh, Celestia above,” Rainboom cackled, gaze snapping back and forth between Twilight and Lyra, tears pooling in her eyes as she struggled to contain her laughter. “This… this explains so much. This is why you’ve been so soft on her, even though she’s an Insider!”

Lyra glared at her, rosy embarrassment easily showing through her aqua fur as she gestured at Walleye to control her out-of-control subordinate, only for the grey pegasus to waggle her eyebrows and tilt her head suggestively towards Twilight.

“Can you two take nothing seriously?” Lyra barked. “How is this relevant?”

“Oh, that’s rich,” Walleye chuckled. “Coming from you. You couldn’t be serious a day in your life!”

“Fair call there, but this isn’t grouse, Walleye. It’s not even relevant. So what if-”

“-you have a Sparkle that you roll in the hay with?” Rainboom interrupted, only able to hold her composure until the end of the sentence before she rolled backwards off her chair and onto the sidewalk, cackling mercilessly.

“Root-minded dipsticks, the both of you,” Lyra muttered, sitting back in her chair and pouting.

“She’s right, I think,” Twilight added, almost having to shout to be heard over Rainboom’s mirthful cacophony. “This isn’t relevant or constructive in the slightest.”

“Indeed,” Rarity chipped in. “Discussion of one’s bedroom arrangements is hardly something to be done in polite company, and that’s ignoring the fact that I asked you a question.”

“Sorry,” Walleye apologised, giving Rainboom a stiff kick to the barrel to get her back on-task. “Forgot it during the amusement. Repeat for me?”

“Why are our beacons not working any more?” Rarity repeated. “And ‘it’s classified’ isn’t an acceptable answer.”

For a moment, it appeared as though Walleye was seriously considering giving that answer, if only to infuriate Rarity further.

“Evil Outsiders attacked the Exterior and now we can’t get back.”

Rarity raised an eyebrow. “You know this how?”

“Celestia-Alpha sent her,” she gestured at Twilight, “a memory crystal or something with a recording of what happened.”

“Do you have this with you?” Rarity asked, eyebrow raised. “Can I watch the recording? Or do I have to take your word on this?”

“No, not my word, her word,” Walleye gestured as Twilight again. “Crystal only works for her.”

Rarity paused, eyes narrowed in thought. “Okay, slight side-track to clear something up. You’re asking me to trust the word of an Insider, which isn’t as confusing as the fact that you’re asking me to trust an Insider, as though you trust her word yourself. I might not know you that well, but I know enough to call horseapples on that. You hate Insiders. Tartarus, you’d probably wipe out an entire city of Insiders without a second thought.”

“You can drop the ‘probably’ on that one,” Twilight corrected.

“Sorry, what?” Rarity exclaimed, eyes darting between Walleye and Twilight. “Explain.”

“I helped…” Twilight began, before correcting herself. “Walleye manipulated me into helping her steal a thaumonuclear device so she could destroy a city on EF.”

Rarity’s eyes went wide with shock, quickly giving way to abject horror. “I… You nuked a city? WHY?”

“They mutilated Lunatic,” Walleye replied matter-of-factly. “It was better than they deserved.”

Half-formed syllables echoed over the table as Rarity repeatedly tried and failed to enunciate a response, before giving up and turning to Lyra. “And you went along with this?”

“Honestly?” Lyra replied. “I couldn’t see a reason to try and stop it. EF is a Tartarus-hole anyway, and I’ve seen better worlds than that tumble into the Void before.”

“And EF is marked as a high detachment hazard in the records!” Pinkie chipped in. “Only a matter of time before it falls into the Void.”

“Be that as it may,” Rarity said, slowly. “That is excessive. Even by Outsider standards.”

“Oh come on, Rarity,” Walleye countered. “You might think it’s all noble and principled when you live down here all the time, but the fact of the matter is that Operations has nuked cities, no, detached entire worlds before when it’s advantageous to them. One city? A Falls city? In the grand scheme of things? Not even a drop in the ocean.”

“This is absolute lunacy,” Rarity lamented. “You’ve all gone mad.”

“No, it’d be lunacy if Lunatic was involved,” Pinkie grinned.

“This is no time for jokes,” Rarity growled. “Not even going into what you’ve done, if the Insider’s claims are true, the Exterior is under attack by… evil Outsiders? What makes them evil?”

“In the recording I got, they butchered everypony in Operations,” Twilight explained. “Based on what the one we captured said, they’re probably going to kill everypony they can find on the Exterior that represents a threat to them, or who isn’t demonstrably on their side, so basically everypony on the Exterior, period.”

“I’m going to assume based on your track record this captive you mentioned is dead now,” Rarity surmised.

“You’d be correct,” Walleye confirmed.

“In any case,” Twilight continued. “This event bodes well for nopony. Apart from the fact that they’ve demonstrated a willingness to murder without even considering negotiation, consider the wider impact of this attack. Take Walleye’s willingness to casually erase entire cities and imagine an Exterior exclusively inhabited by ponies at least that equicidal or more so. And… wait…”

“Well, I don’t see what we’re supposed to do about this,” Rarity concluded. “Our beacons aren’t working, so we’ve got no way to get onto the Exterior to fight them.”

“Beacons aren’t the only way to get onto the Exterior,” Lyra corrected. “There are other routes.”

“Everypony shut up for a second,” Twilight commanded. “Rarity, you said that Outsiders were congregating here in the wake of their beacons not working?”

“Well, yes. Bastion is a commonly-known and commonly-used meeting place for Outsiders across the Interior.”

“How well-known?”

“Practically every Outsider who does work in the Interior knows about Bastion, rookie,” Walleye said. “I even know about Bastion. Please get to the point.”

“We’re a threat to them.”

The two facts connected themselves in Walleye’s mind a split-second too late for her to react in time. On the opposite side of the street, a building shattered, the shockwave slamming all six of them unceremoniously through the cafe shop front, closely followed by fragments of masonry and table.

Detachment Event

Outside, it was an abysmal day. The sun, once proud and radiant now sat obscured behind the thick columns of smoke that billowed from points all over Canterlot. Fires, rapidly spreading beyond the ability of local emergency-response ponies and fire-suppression spells to handle, whipped the formerly-pleasant easterly breeze into a hellish cyclone of ash and heat. Ponies the city over found themselves trapped by the expanding infernos and deteriorating structural integrity of the city’s housing.

Even the Princesses, normally quite capable of responding to the myriad of unexpected threats that befell Bastion Canterlot, found themselves overwhelmed by the scale and ferocity of the attack, and had been mostly driven back to the castle grounds, only barely protected by hastily-erected Utter Domes and teleport-denial shielding. Screams and cries of dismay, coupled with the occasional thundercrack of a collapsing building, echoed from all corners of Canterlot as what seemed like the entire population filled the streets, attempting to escape.

Twilight crawled, caked in an uncomfortable layer of dust and debris, from under the wreckage of the cornerside cafe, coughing from the burning ash that invaded her lungs, and took in the chaos.

“Why.. wha?” She stuttered. “The defenses… Why didn’t the defensive spells trigger?”

Above her, squadrons of black-clad pegasi fired volleys into any defenders that moved to challenge them, the tell-tale polychromatic beams identifying them as using Outsider weaponry, or at least something derived from it.

Above that, only barely visible through the smoke, but glowing like a small star in almost every thaumic spectra Twilight could care to name, a lone pink alicorn mare floated, casually flinging bolts of destructive energy into the city below, cackling in magically-amplified psychopathic glee as she did so.

“Oh.”

Almost unconsciously, she shrunk back, careful to avoid even thinking about casting a spell lest the emissions draw attention to her. Around her, the remainder of Team Fifteen excavated themselves from the wreckage, shaking off the after-effects of the blast that had thrown them a good hundred hooflengths and brought the building down on top of them.

“Everypony alive?” Walleye coughed. “Any injuries?”

“What in Celestia’s name?” Rarity cried as Pinkie pulled her clear of the rubble. “What was that? My ears are still ringing!”

“You may want to keep it down,” Walleye hissed back, “or you’re going to paint a target on us.”

“A what?” Rarity yelled back, before withering under Walleye’s glare. “Sorry.”

“She’s not going to paint a target for us in this chaos, boss,” Rainboom chipped in, picking splinters and chunks of plaster out of her wings. “Those pegasi are only firing on ponies that try to fight back. I bet they can’t see or hear anything this far down.”

“And what, there aren’t any of them on the ground?” Lyra countered. “Earth ponies or unicorns getting a little close-in action?”

“Why would they?” Walleye asked. “All they need to do to take us out is sit up there and shoot anypony that tries to fight or flee. Let the fire and smoke finish everypony off.”

“No,” Twilight said.

“No?”

“They have hooves on the ground. We can’t stay here.”

“And you know this how?”

“Can you honestly expect me to believe,” Twilight lectured, turning on Walleye. “That given the opportunity, if you were on the other side of this fight, wiping out a city full of enemy ponies, that you wouldn’t take the opportunity for a little sport?”

“Sport? What are you talking about?”

“Because the ponies, the Outsiders currently attacking this city are, compared to you, madam nukes-a-city-for-no-reason, orders of magnitude worse. They have hooves on the ground. Ponies, Insider and Outsider alike, are dying by the hundreds. We have maybe a minute or so before their hoofsoldiers find us.”

“I don’t have to take this horseapples from you!”

“Enough!” Rarity shouted, silencing them both. “This is disgraceful! I am not going to die in this city because you two foals were too busy bickering to come up with a plan to save us. You are both supposed to be professionals, yes? Act like it!”

Walleye glared at her, clearly torn between wanting to argue the point and accepting the obvious.

“We can go home now, right?” Pinkie asked, voice neutral.

Everypony turned to stare at her, incredulous. Twilight tilted her head in momentary confusion, before her face lit up from the realisation.

“Yes!” She cried. “Pinkie Pie, you are an absolute genius!”

“Oh, it’s the end times,” Rainboom muttered.

“I am?” Pinkie asked, confused.

“Yes!” Twilight confirmed, pointing at the pegasi above them. “How do you think they got here? And so quickly? The gates are active!”

“They’ve left themselves open,” Walleye stated, catching the realisation. “We can counterattack.”

“Exactly!”

“And what about all the ponies here?” Rarity interrupted. “Like me? While you’re off on the Exterior, everypony here gets slaughtered!”

“I’ll stay,” Twilight said, shifting her gaze back to the sky.

“Twilight, no,” Lyra said. “You’d be outnumbered at least a hundred to one, not to mention the alicorn Pie up there!”

“That’s Theta,” Walleye observed. “Looks like they let her out.”

“Crazy, equicidal, alicorn Pie,” Lyra reiterated. “Staying here is suicide.”

“No. I’m not going to leave everypony here to die,” Twilight insisted. “It is time for the killing to end.”

“I give you all of thirty seconds before Theta swats you like a fly,” Rainboom quipped. “This isn’t a fight you can win, Twilight.”

“Look, the Exterior is open for you. Go get your home back, that’s your fight,” Twilight gestured at the ongoing destruction around them. “This is mine.”

“You sure?” Walleye asked, genuine concern leaking into her voice.

“Walleye,” Twilight said, fixing her with a flat stare as she ignited her horn, the aura almost instantly snapping to a deep black as she once again delved into the darkness. “I’ve got this.”

Walleye nodded grimly, tapping her beacon and vanishing. The remainder of Team 15 summarily followed suit, the light beeps of the beacons echoing through the square, only barely audible over the cacophony.

Abstract combat, like she had engaged the material-melded abomination with only a few hours previously, would be useless against Theta. It would be trivial for the alicorn to outright destroy any unicorn eye viewports Twilight could create to cast through, and although spells like Utter Dome rendered her practically immune to any attack, such protection went both ways.

Likewise, she couldn’t use a similar area-magic-denial spell to that had been used against her, since Theta’s alicorn biology included innate magic-amplification that would largely nullify the overt effects of such a spell. The amount of power she would need to sink into such a spell in order to produce a noticeable effect would likely completely null the effects of any magic in the field’s effect for the spell duration, reducing both of them to hand-to-hand combat. While it did technically remove Theta’s thaumic advantage, she did still have a pair of wings over Twilight.

No, the only acceptable course of action was a head-on attack using as much energy that Twilight could bring to bear without shattering reality into shards, again. Provided she could divert Theta’s attention towards herself, it would give Twilight enough time to enact a plan to defend the citizens of the city from the Rogues. After that came the relatively simple matter of surviving, since Theta would no doubt try to kill her.

Careful to hold the Void magic source in her mind in an iron vice grip, she probed the local magic field, searching for the remnants of the city defense spells that had failed to act against the Rogue’s attack.

To her surprise, the results popped back almost immediately, reference pointers for well over a hundred nested protective spells slotting neatly into her mental spell stack as the disowned and deactivated array of defenses popped back to life, ready to obey her commands.

She paused for a moment, sensing attention being diverted in her direction, as though a giant searchlight had wafted over her. Words, dripping with uncontained malevolent glee, followed.

“Oh, hello little one.”

Twilight didn’t have time for indecision or deliberation. The world dropped away from underneath her feet as she spammed commands through her frontal lobe and out into the universe, organ-flattening g-forces only barely held in check as she accelerated upwards, her own words echoing in her ears.

I’ve got this.

Almost as an afterthought, she pulled two of the spell pointers from her mental stack, casually rewriting the target parameters for the first, a teleport spell, to read ‘Threats to the city’ instead of ‘Inhabitants of the city’, before triggering the set, immediately discarding the pointers to lighten her mental load.

Next, she pushed her own combat spell complement forward, offensive spells immediately dropping into her spell stack as a plethora of defensive enchantments took hold, not the least of which was an array of shaped force field plates, angled to give her maximum defensive coverage against incoming threats, while still allowing her to return fire with impunity. Wings, constructed from the same force field plates, splayed out beside and behind her, stabilising trajectory as her acceleration pushed her clean through the sound barrier, while a set of secondary, autonomous spells pushed aural and visual white noise in a partially-collimated beam ahead of her, momentarily compromising Theta’s ability to aim.

The spells came to full effect an instant before Twilight slammed into Theta at a hair under Mach 5, approximately half a second after Theta had first noticed her. Behind her, shockwaves echoed throughout the city as the Rogues were teleported out of the city to random locations in the surrounding countryside, fires likewise snuffed out as the contingency teleport spell widened its scope to include flame, smoke, and collapsing masonwork as ‘threats’.

The city’s shield began to form shortly after, the lip of purple light slowly rising from the city’s edge.

Twilight wheeled around, keeping her field wings as backswept as possible to minimise wave drag from her supersonic speed, before fixing Theta in her sights again. The crazed alicorn had been punted clear into the upper atmosphere, and was clearly having difficulties bringing her trajectory under control.

Taking advantage of the clear moment, Twilight reached into her pack, pulling her hammer out of the compressed space. Although the weapon would be largely useless at the ranges this fight was shaping up to be fought at, it provided a convenient focusing point for any offensive spells she wished to cast, allowing them to be fired off-axis or at a separate target to her primary threat, in the event that Theta summoned reinforcements.

It took all of a few seconds before Theta’s flight path stabilised. Immense columns of light materialised around her, sweeping towards Twilight and forcing her to bleed airspeed in an effort to keep them from impacting her.

“Dead pony says what?”

Twilight’s eyes went wide in surprise, searching for the source of the noise. Threat-awareness spells screeched in her peripheral consciousness as an object rapidly closed the distance with her.

“Wha-”

Consciousness returned too late for Twilight to pull herself out of her near-hypersonic earthward dive, forcing her to consider the phrase ‘lithobraking’ from an all-too-personal distance as she punched clean through Mount Canter and slowed to more manageable subsonic velocities.

She wheeled around again, foregoing visual acquisition in favor of tracking Theta’s thaumic emissions, in light of the city-sized cloud of dust that had been kicked up by the impact, and loosed a flurry of offensive spells in her general direction. Thundercracks echoed over her as her purely-thaumic targeting failed to take the intervening mountain into account, further adding to the dust and smoke.

Groaning, she vectored sideways, trying to keep her range to Theta constant while circling the mountain far enough to get a clean shot. Threat-awareness screeched in her periphery again, this time with enough forewarning for her to loose a single arcane bolt at the incoming object before blinking sideways out of the line of fire.

The dust abruptly cleared, the blue-black Exterior metal flashing momentarily through Twilight’s peripheral vision as Harmony’s Shard lanced through the cloud, the slipstream clearing it in an instant. Seconds later and far behind her, Twilight was vaguely aware of the sound of the Shard embedding itself into the ground, almost the entire width of Equestria away from her.

Without anything between them, Twilight fixed Theta with a calculating glare, almost able to feel Theta’s smug grin despite the thousands of hooflengths between them. A dull warning echoed through her mind, alerting her to the fact that Theta was accelerating towards her and charging an offensive spell.

Twilight reacted, accelerating forwards and charging an offensive beam spell of her own. With a screech not unlike shearing metal, the two beam spells met, neither gaining any ground against the other as their casters closed rapidly towards the point of intersection, playing a game of chicken with each other at velocities normally associated with re-entering meteorites, trails of superheated air trailing in their wake.

It took all of a fraction of a second for the distance to close, the two combatants meeting at a combined velocity somewhere in the region of Mach 30. Theta impacted Twilight’s force field array slightly off-centre, her flight abruptly shunted sideways towards the earth.

Twilight didn’t register either impact until she had rocketed clear to the edge of space, her flight fields having a hard time slowing her down to a manageable speed in the rarefied atmosphere, even oriented flat to the oncoming air.

“ENOUGH!”

Theta’s voice rang in her ears, magically-amplified words inserting themselves directly into her auditory cortex. Twilight, sensing the strain she was putting on the world around her as the burning, almost stabbing sensation in her horn intensified, swung her hammer back, locking a motion-mirroring spell on an appropriate nearby object.

“You are BENEATH ME!” Theta bellowed, her voice dripping with unrestrained malice. “I am a GOD compared to you, you tiny creature! And I will NOT be bullied by-”

Twilight swung.

The moon dropped clean out of its orbit as the spell forced it along a sympathetic trajectory, wheeling around and dropping onto Theta’s head. Atmosphere superheated under the compression as the air failed to get out of the way of the falling celestial body, while Earth fractured and Moon shattered as they were subjected to forces firmly outside their ability to withstand.

Twilight registered the barest hint of a confused whimper in her ears before the world lurched sideways, the universe finally yielding to the strain she was putting it under as its moorings snapped, flinging the world into the Void.

The world went sideways and reformed.

Walleye’s eyes went wide as the scope of the invasion she had just escaped stared back at her, easily two dozen armed and black-suited ponies scattered throughout the twenty-five metre rotunda of Gate Eight, frozen in surprise with the appearance of the interlopers. For a beat, no-pony moved, both sides lacking any sensible contingencies for dealing with the situation they now found themselves in.

“Uh… Hi?” Pinkie offered, hesitantly.

The moment broke. Everypony moved simultaneously, the Rogues going for their weapons, Team Fifteen going for the floor.

“Hose the room!” Walleye shouted.

Rainboom and Lyra complied, the former flipping her weapon over to continuous-wave mode and holding the trigger down, the latter firing a crude explosive fireball spell at the Gate’s doorway, eliciting a prompt eruption of screams as the Rogues were cut down by the polychromatic beam of Rainboom’s weapon, woefully unable to reciprocate from the combination of surprise and spell shockwave.

The smell of burning and burnt flesh diffused through the room, prompting a disgusted nose-wrinkle from Walleye as she picked herself up off the floor and levelled her rifle at the door.

“That went well,” Lyra quipped, grabbing a pair of carbines from the fallen Rogues in the grip of her magic. “What’s next?”

“We get somewhere safe,” Walleye stated, poking her head into the hallway to check for further targets. “You got any spells that can keep us away from danger?”

“Kinda, yeah…”

“Do it. This Gate isn’t going to remain empty for long.”

Lyra complied, her horn glowing for a moment before flashing out with a satisfying pop. Immediately, her pupils narrowed to pinpricks.

“We need to move.”

“How many are coming?”

“Many.”

“Okay,” Walleye said, bracing herself for a sprint. Pinkie and Rainboom did the same, the latter stretching her wings in anticipation. “Is there somewhere we can go? A clear path?”

“Right, Then left. Straight down that hallway is clear, I think.”

Walleye nodded, and shot forward, leading the team down the path Lyra had marked for them. Lyra and Pinkie went next, forced to gallop at full tilt to keep up with Walleye and not fall behind, lest they receive a sharp kick in the hindquarters from Rainboom, who brought up the rear.

The walls started to blur together as they ran, featureless blue corridor after featureless blue corridor merging together into a single endless hallway, punctuated every second or third intersection by Lyra re-casting her spell and shouting another set of directions.

By the time they reached open air, Lyra was barely standing, her stamina almost completely exhausted by the combination of non-stop running and spellcasting. High overhead, a brilliant white miniature star bathed the entire chamber in light, affording a welcome change from the endless blue hallways.

“I… No more,” She gasped, taking the opportunity to collapse against a nearby dividing wall, panting. “That's it, I’m done.”

“Rainboom, move her!” Walleye commanded, jumping over the wall. “Get her in cover! Pinkie! Get behind me!”

Pinkie, still bright-eyed and enthusiastically energetic, despite the flat-out chase, complied, bouncing behind Walleye as Rainboom half-lifted, half-dragged Lyra over the wall they were using as impromptu cover.

“How far off are they, do you think?” Walleye asked, flipping her rifle’s bipod out and sighting it on the doorway they had just come through.

“About a minute?” Lyra guessed, trying to catch her breath. “No more than that.”

“How many of them?”

“Four or five dozen within range of the spell, last I cast it…”

“Are there any Sparkles?”

“What?”

“Do they have any Sparkles with them?”

“Sparkles? I don’t think so, Why?”

“Oh good. For a moment there I thought we were in trouble.”

Author's Note

“Oh, I don’t think you can,” Pinkie countered. “Rogues like Theta know tricks that let them throw around huge amounts of magical energy. Levels of magic that allow her to fling something like a moon around like a hammer. And that level of power is dangerous.”

Okay, now be honest. I know it was subtle, but how many of you caught the foreshadowing with regards to the moon?

Terminal Approach

Rocketry is not a particularly well-studied field, at least among the vast majority of worlds that comprise the Interior proper. While general equations of motion and inertia are widespread and understood, the engineering knowledge required to build functional reaction drives and rocket engines are notably lacking, especially on worlds where the local magic density is high enough that such a field of study is relegated to the rarified air of pure research owing to its lack of useful practical applications.

This shortcoming is particularly evident among the thaumoscientific enclaves of the Exterior, whose access to high-powered interuniversal travel allowed them to neatly sidestep the need, or even desire, to physically travel significantly beyond the surface of whatever world they were standing on. The myriad worlds of the Interior represented far more variety, more interest, to explorers than the dark expanse of the cosmos above them, containing little more than dead wastelands, uniform and unchanging.

That isn’t to say that there are no civilisations within the Interior that have plied the heavens. Such worlds were of particular curiosity to the exploratory divisions of the Exterior, but in much the same way that one would consider a particularly enjoyable piece of art or music to be interesting - enjoyable to observe, but otherwise of no practical merit. They are outliers, statistical anomalies among an insurmountable trend of planetbound equine cultures.

It was for this reason that Twilight Sparkle was having to rapidly deduce the best purely-magical rocket design from first principles as the world she was standing on tumbled, out-of-control, through an eight-dimensional void.

Twilight stood at the tip of Mount Canter, having long abandoned the idea of moderating the Void magic flow that she had tapped, instead opting to open the floodgates as wide as they could possibly go, nudging the flow slightly to direct it along a particular avenue, but otherwise allowing it to do as it would. In front of her floated an intensely-glowing orb - a visual abstraction of a thaumically-assembled eight-dimensional inertial measurement unit, a plain scroll and quill, and a plain mechanical stopwatch, fetched via magic from one of Canterlot’s many clockmakers.

Around her, closing in at a speed well in excess of c, the universe disintegrated. Void fissures violently ejecting material and spacetime into pure nothingness and imparting commensurate reactive momentum upon the remaining, rapidly dwindling, portion of the universe, propelling it upwards and outwards through the fissure at the heart of the Ruins.

Slowly, almost agonisingly so, the universe stopped its eight-dimensional tumble. Jets of ejecting spacetime, directed off-axis by Twilight’s subtle nudging, nullified their angular momentum and allowed her a brief moment to tabulate the data that was streaming from her improvised IMU into her frontal cortex.

She knew where she was when Bastion detached from the Interior, give or take a few vert. She knew roughly how fast she was going, give or take a few multiples of c, and the direction of that motion in the eight-dimensional space her ‘vehicle’ occupied. Integrate over time, and that gave her the position she was at right now, and, more importantly, which direction was ‘down’, back towards the Interior.

Carefully, delicately, she directed the expanding void tendrils in the opposite direction, and the acceleration built up. Steadily, their upward momentum dwindled, replaced with an ever-increasing downward trend. By her guess, they would impact somewhere in the Exterior, if only due to the asymmetric thrust and uncontrolled tumble during the initial detachment. Ultimately, she had no way of knowing, since she completely lacked the ability to ‘see’ through the Void.

A twinge of fear shot through her as she considered the possibility that her calculations were off, and that she would miss her meta-universal target without ever realising it. It worsened seconds later when she realised that she was piloting an entire universe towards the Exterior at speeds that her mind couldn’t even comprehend, with little regards to how well her own vehicle, or the intended target, would handle the impact.

Moments after the first head became visible in the crosshairs of her rifle, Walleye’s world had turned from ‘tense anticipation’ to ‘neon white’. The first to round the corner was taken down cleanly and effortlessly by a shot to the base of their skull, the second and third followed suit as Rainboom opened up on the hallway with a chaotic, but nonetheless effective burst of polychromatic energy. Morbid though it was, it gave the following two ponies sufficient cover to avoid immediate death for long enough to loose a handful of shots at Team Fifteen’s hastily-erected cover and spoil their aim.

Another eight followed in their wake, and any pretense of being able to effectively return fire from their position immediately evaporated, forcing both Walleye and Rainboom fully behind the dividing wall, occasionally wincing as the fusillade of beams kicked chunks of the Exterior metal onto their heads.

“Certainly not the ideal way to go out,” Walleye muttered. “But it’ll do.”

“I don’t know about you, but I’d rather not die,” Lyra panted, breath slowly returning. “To be entirely honest.”

“What, you think they’ll accept surrender?” Walleye asked flippantly, pulling a grenade from her saddlebags, priming it, and casually lobbing it over the wall. “Somehow I don’t think they’ll go for that.”

A chain of hasty exclamations accompanied a marked reduction in the intensity of the gunfire raining down on the all-too-thin wall separating Team Fifteen from a quick death, followed seconds later by an explosion and screaming.

And as abruptly as it began, the gunfire stopped. Muffled, indistinct voices yelling through the smoke and haze, accompanied by the sound of increasingly-rapid hoofsteps.

After a few seconds, Rainboom poked her head over the wall, and scoffed.

“One grenade scares them off? Seriously? I would have expected more of a fight!”

“I know, right?” Walleye laughed. “How in Tartarus did they manage to take the Exterior when two of us fought them off with small arms and a bucking grenade?”

“You… didn’t scare them off,” Lyra stated flatly.

“Then what did, genius?”

“That,” Lyra replied, pointing directly upwards.

Walleye and Rainboom looked up, and almost immediately wished that they hadn’t. Descending out of the sky in a manner that could be most accurately described as brick-like, trailing debris and dust, was Mount Canter.

“What…,” Walleye began, only to be cut off as the 200 trillion-odd kilograms of rock cheerily obeyed the orders given to it by the laws of physics, and hit the ground. The ground, meanwhile, being made of Exterior metal, steadfastly refused to acknowledge something as trivial as a mountain being dropped on it, and dumped most of the energy and momentum back the way it came.

Mount Canter, obligingly, disintegrated into a kilometres-tall plume of pulverized rock and smoke. Canterlot, meanwhile, still encased in the force field bubble that Twilight had reactivated minutes earlier, shot out the side of the impact plume at near horizontal, bounced twice as it bled speed, and rolled to a halt about a half kilometer away from Team Fifteen.

Walleye could do nothing but gape as the shield gingerly deactivated and the city settled on solid ground.

“Well,” Rainboom observed. “That… just happened.”

With a crack only barely audible over the cacophony of settling debris, Twilight Sparkle materialised next to Team Fifteen, a conscious, shivering ball of pink fluff clinging to her back, hammer floating at her side. Tentatively, she stretched her legs and looked around, her expression stadily shifting from intense focus to manic glee, and the tiniest squeal of triumph escaped her.

“You…” Walleye began, glancing back and forth between the adrenaline-soaked Twilight and the mountain still settling in the distance, words entirely failing to come to her aid. “What.”

“I told you I had this” Twilight explained, grinning. “I saved everypony. I Won.”

“You… won?”

“I Won,” Twilight repeated, audible emphasis on the second word as she attempted to dislodge her shivering passenger, to no avail. “It’s over.”

“You… wait,” Walleye stammered, examining the pink object. “Is that Theta?”

“Yes.”

“...How?”

“I dropped a moon on her.”

“Hold up,” Lyra interrupted. “You dropped a moon on her?”

“Yes.”

“Bollocks.”

“Sorry?”

“You’re having me on. I’m calling bollocks to this. No way did you win that fight by dropping a moon on somepony.”

Twilight raised an eyebrow, before pointedly turning her head to gaze at the mountain behind them, and then back at Lyra, slowly.

“Okay, point,” Lyra conceded. “Let's assume you’re not completely full of it right now, how is she still alive? Moons aren’t the sort of thing that are known for leaving survivors.”

“Fun fact,” Twilight began. “Force Dome, and similar force-field defensive spells are, according to modern understanding of thaumic field theory, impenetrable, provided sufficient source energy and local thaumic flux. She likely cast it in the moments before impact to protect herself.”

“Hold up,” Rainboom interrupted. “Unicorn forcefields are impenetrable?”

“If cast properly, yes.”

“Why has nopony told us that?” She asked offhandedly to Walleye, clearly not expecting a response from the still-wordless grey pegasus.

“Okay, next question,” Lyra continued. “If you didn’t kill her, why isn’t she still trying to kill you? This is Theta we’re talking about here.”

“Honestly? I think I just broke her,” Twilight replied, poking the shivering mass on her back, only to elicit a quiet squeak of distress. “She’s been gibbering like a frightened foal since I grabbed her.”

“Twilight,” Walleye said, slowly and carefully assembling her words. “I say this will all due respect and deference, but honestly? After… this?”

She gestured at Theta and the mountain beyond.

“You scare me.”

“Thank… you?” Twilight said, confused.

Walleye nodded and looked back at Mount Canter. There was nothing left to say.

“So, what about you four?” Twilight asked. “How did it go storming the castle?”

“They were about to overwhelm us until you showed up,” Rainboom replied. “Nice timing, by the way.”

“Oh, just my luck,” Twilight moaned. “More saving to do.”

“Excuse you?” Rainboom retorted. “They obviously held back a reserve for defense. You might have alicorn-like powers, but we’re...”

“Look, I am running on pure adrenaline at this point,” Twilight shot back. “I don’t even have words good enough to properly elucidate what I just did in the last five minutes, let alone something you would understand!”

“Well buck you too then!”

“And it is still not over!” Twilight barked. “I still have to save the day again, because of course I do.”

“Okay, question,” Lyra interrupted. “Why are we suddenly overwhelmed? We saw thousands attacking Bastion, why are there also thousands here?”

“It makes sense that they’d not commit their entire force to that attack,” Rainboom offered.

“No, that’s not it,” Twilight said. “There is no way they wouldn’t fully commit to an attack against the one remaining threat against them and risk failure. They fell back, and you got caught in the retreat.”

“Why would they fall back when they had the advantage?”

“First thing I did before attacking Theta was to teleport anything that was a threat to the city out of Canterlot, before re-starting their defensive spells,” Twilight explained. “They likely gated back here shortly after.”

“So, now we’re, what? Behind enemy lines facing a scared, retreating army?”

“Yes, but we still have an advantage,” Twilight mused. “They will all be congregated around the gates, but whoever’s in charge of everything going on wasn’t in the attack. They sent Theta in their stead.”

“Makes sense,” Walleye chimed in, turning back to the group. “The ringleaders would likely be back in Operations. You said from that crystal vision thing that the initial attack focussed there.”

“How long does it take to get from the gates to Operations?”

“For me?” Rainboom offered. “Five minutes. If you’re on hoof, closer to fifteen. Probably twenty considering they’re retreating in a panic.”

“So we just need to get to Operations before they do, capture the ringleaders, and let the bigger army of Outsiders that I brought with me from Canterlot secure the Exterior.”

“Great plan, except that we ran away from Operations to get here,” Rainboom explained, exasperated. “We’d have to fight our way through them again to beat them to Operations”

“...Point,” Twilight replied, thinking for a moment, before she started rummaging around in the tattered remains of her saddlebags for something specific.

“What are you looking for?”

“A counterpoint,” Twilight replied, triumphantly pulling a cool blue crystal from the depths of her bags, and holding it close to her head.

Finalization Operator

“Please work”

An entirely unfamiliar cold swallowed her, wrapping itself around her so completely she swore the universe had just given up on thermodynamics and nulled out the concept of ‘warm’’ entirely. Twilight watched herself stiffen up and begin to fall in slow motion, her body limp and covered with goosebumps.

‘I can see why Alpha hates this place,’ Twilight thought to herself, clumsily shifting her perceptual viewpoint around, getting a better view of her now-vacated body slumping to the floor and the other members of Team Fifteen sluggishly reacting. ‘Thought isn’t everything supposed to be frozen? It was frozen in the recording…’

She focussed, reigning in her curiosity and pulling up her old coursework. It seemed almost a lifetime ago, peaceful, serene days spent cooped up in a dark, abandoned library, poring over volume upon volume of thaumoinformatics theory as part of her undergraduate coursework. The thaumic state machine she had built as a final-year project was, in retrospect, clumsy, inefficient, and flawed in all the ways that only undergraduate work can be. She passed the course with distinction, and then went straight back to that library, burying herself in books and theory and pure, purposeless, fundamental knowledge.

For a brief, razor-sharp and terrifying moment, she wished she had stayed in that library. That she hadn’t gone after the Outsider that had caught her attention out of the corner of her eye, and instead remained within the familiar. Spending her life within academia, filled with distinction and accolade, to be sure, but it would have been quiet. Excitement of the sort that brings light chuckles and small smiles over cups of tea, not that which brings terror and exhaustion from the endless running. No other worlds, no copies of her, no hundreds of thousands of ponies killed in a poorly-thought-out moment of deception and revenge.

It was what could have been.

It was irrelevant.

Romantic, terrifying, and irrelevant. With care and specificity that only an academic could wield, she plucked out the nuggets of theory absorbed over far too many weeks spent alone in that library, and plugged them together into a nearly-flawless reproduction of a first-year thaumoinformatic seek spell. With barely a thought, she fired the spell, a wordless ping echoing back into her mind as an affirmative confirmation of its execution.

‘Where am I?’ She asked of the spell. For a moment, she feared she had assembled it wrong, before information slowly asserted itself in her mind, an answer built letter-by-letter and out of order, only comprehensible once fully assembled.

The Library

She swivelled her viewpoint around. An accurate, if basic answer, that at the very least proved the spell was compiled correctly. Lyra’s hoof was moving, reaching for the crystal stuck to Twilight’s comatose head. There was time for only one more question before she was forced back into reality, and, twilight realised with detached horror, she couldn’t tell if her vacated body was breathing or not. Time was running critically thin.

‘I need a teleport solution from my body’s current position to the commander center of Operations’’

Seconds passed, then a full minute, then more. Lyra’s hoof moved further towards the crystal, Walleye had turned her head to see what the commotion was about. Against all sensibility, Theta still clung to her back like a furry pink limpet.

It was taking too long. Twilight could feel the spell arrangements being pieced together by the spell, again formed out of order and individually useless without the complete set. Much as she willed the spell to work faster, it was constrained by the limited processing resources at its disposal, along with its own rushed assembly.

Lyra reached for the crystal, missing it by fractions of a hoofwidth as Twilight’s comatose form began to crumple. Walleye had visibly stiffened, reacting to what, from her perspective, looked very much like Twilight had been neutralised by a sniper. Rainboom was already ducking and moving to cover, having reached the same conclusion already. Pinkie, seemingly out of nowhere, was beside her, hooves already reaching to cushion her fall.

Twilight could only watch with increasing unease as the scene played out in slow motion. Walleye and Rainboom ducking for cover. Lyra’s second, and then third frantic, failed attempts to knock the crystal off, the latter seemingly connecting, but from Twilight’s dilated perspective she couldn’t tell if it was true, or a trick of perception.

Time dragged on, until the spell finally returned, dumping the finalized spell arrangement into her awareness, just as her head contacted the ground and jostled the crystal loose.

“...Off her!” Lyra yelled, before freezing as Twilight’s eyes snapped open.

Twilight blinked, twisting her head around to stare at Walleye and Rainboom, their search for an assailant abruptly interrupted by Twilight’s return to consciousness, and then to Pinkie, her concerned expression still lingering.

“Right,” Twilight groaned, pulling herself upright again, gingerly igniting her horn and levitating the spire crystal back into her saddlebags. “Not doing that again.”

“Are you going to even tell us what ‘that’ was?” Rainboom asked, irritated.

“I have a plan,” Twilight asserted, collecting the hammer that had fallen to the floor beside her. “Long-range teleportation within the Exterior is ostensibly impossible, until Celestia Alpha went and did it to get that crystal to me the first time around.”

“And what, you think you’re as good as she is?”

“The crystal helped her. It gave her the spell to escape, and that little crystal just gave me the spell to get to Operations first.”

“In any case, If I haven’t completely exhausted your...” She paused, weighing different choices. “Sense of duty, Walleye, Rainboom, I require your aid...”

“What?” Walleye interrupted, incredulous.

“To stop this.”

“You really think that plan is going to work?” Walleye snorted. “You might fool these three with that sort of optimism, but I know better. They’re not going to just stand down because you captured a leader. Remember? They are desperate. No matter what tricks you think you have with dropping a mountain from the sky and taming Theta, they’re not going to care, they’re here because their home is dead, and they don’t mind using violence to take mine.”

She paused, taking a breath.

“So, what, you’re giving up?”

“No, I’m just not going to throw my life away on some feather-brained plan that has no chance of working.”

“Not two minutes ago you were getting ready to die in a last stand against them?”

“At least it was my choice!”

“And what, because this idea is mine that makes it have less merit?”

“You’re more likely to get us killed yourself than to save the day! ADMIT IT!”

“I AM NOT YOUR ENEMY!”

An uncomfortable silence settled over the group.

“Look, I get it,” Twilight said, slowly. “I can see why you’re scared of me. I’m scared of me. In the last few days I’ve been shown a world beyond what I could have possibly imagined. It will take me a lifetime to make sense of it, and I fully intend to spend that lifetime doing exactly that, because the alternative is that I run back home to my study and my books and try in vain to forget all of this.”

She took a breath, forcing down the tremor growing in her hoof-tips.

“But we are wasting time. Every second we argue is one second less before they reach Operations and our opportunity closes. Then we’re back to a straight fight, dying ponies everywhere, and absolutely no chance in Tartarus of this being over.”

Walleye huffed, taking a long look around the room, and then back to Twilight.

“I mean to be fair,” Rainboom interjected. “We were doing the whole heroic-last-stand thing, boss. What difference does it make if it’s in Ops instead of here? I never really wanted to die in a library, of all places.”

Walleye chuckled.

“In any case,” Rainboom continued, turning to Twilight. “Bossfight, yeah?”

“I… suppose,” Twilight answered, tentatively. “Yes.”

“Bossfight. I’m in.”

“Seems I don’t have much of a choice, does it?” Walleye smirked.

“And what about us?” Lyra asked, indicating herself and Pinkie. “Just wait here for them to come back and kill us?”

“No,” Twilight replied. “The ponies in Canterlot need to be told of what’s going on. If we fail like Walleye thinks we’re going to, they need to know what they’re facing if they have any chance of survival”

“Anything I should expect for this?” Walleye asked.

“Teleportation doesn’t hurt,” Twilight replied. “Though I can’t be sure for this variant specifically. You should be fine. Celestia was when she used the same spell to escape the first time around.”

“Apart from that?”

“You mean apart from the imminent death from gunfire?” Rainboom quipped.

Walleye shot her a withering look.

“Ok, ready,” Twilight said, slotting the spell components together in her mind. “Shall we?”

Twilight ignited the spell.

Obediently, the spell discharged.

Twilight’s nose immediately wrinkled, the still-lingering acrid aroma of soot and thaumic residue from the days-previous assault on Operations assaulting her senses and disrupting her focus. Rainboom and Walleye were immediately in motion, darting for cover behind the myriad chairs and eltrich panels that made up the de-facto brain of Operations.

On an ordinary day, the space would be filled by easily two dozen ponies, creating an impression not unlike an angry swarm of bees as they coordinated the unceasing operation of the Exterior’s hundreds of Operations teams, surrounded and supported by thousands more throughout the Spire chamber. Today, it was empty, save for two Sparkles, both clad in heavyset Outsider gear, and clearly in the middle of a heated argument before Team Fifteen had interrupted.

Twilight raised a hoof, tentatively, realising that she had left herself unavoidable exposed.

“Before you try anything,” She began. “Just be warned that the fuzzy ping ball on my back is Theta, and i’m not sure how well she’s going to react to violence in her current state.”

The moment dragged out, before shattering as the two Sparkles answered in unison.

“YOU”

“I… sorry?”

One of them stepped forward, carefully, her horn already ignited. “Why is it always you? The moment I met you everything just started going sideways! I was this close.”

“What?”

“Oh don’t deny it,” the Sparkle continued. “You come here with that ‘I don’t want to kill anypony’ attitude, I should have known it was a ruse. I should never have believed Alpha. How long ago did she recruit you?”

“You… have completely lost me”

“Horseapples. I run smack into a Sparkle on a world where there is no recorded Sparkles, drag her back here, seemingly by accident, and then suddenly you’ve got your hoof in everything i’m doing, and you expect me to believe this isn’t deliberate?”

“...Echo?”

“I should have killed you the moment I met you,” Echo asserted.

“I don’t know what I was expecting,” Twilight began. “But this wasn’t it.”

“And you think for a moment,” Echo continued. “That I believe that that ball of plush on your back is Theta? It took me years to enamour myself with her, find her spots, how to calm her down, convince her. She would eat you for breakfast.”

Almost on cue, the ball ruffled, the barest outlines of wings and a horn shifting on its surface before a single, baleful blue eye opened, staring at Echo.

“...no.” Echo breathed. “That’s not possible.”

“Hey, uh…” The third Sparkle began, focussing on Rainboom. “Aren’t you supposed to be dead?”

“No?” Rainboom replied, confused. “Why? Did you try?”

“Well…”

“Oh buck me,” Rainboom swore. “I remember! You’re that nag from the Dark Exterior that we found! You tried to kill me!”

“Tried?” The Sparkle replied. “You would not have been the first to die from that trick. It always works. You should be dead.”

“You had them dead to rights,” Echo growled, rounding on the Sparkle. “You had all of them dead to rights, and not only did you fail, the one pony you were absolutely sure was dead is still alive, here, pointing guns at us.”

The Sparkle grimaced, stepping back slowly.

“Look,” She began. “I threw her into the Void. No-pony comes back from that. It’s not my fault if they had a Sombra-Sparkle on their team, especially one picked by one of your Celestias. It’s over, you got outplayed.”

Echo’s eye twitched.

“Hey, uh,” The Sparkle continued, stepping around Echo carefully. “I’m smart enough to know what’s going down, especially after that last trick you pulled. I surr…”

Her words died in her throat with a sharp crack that echoed throughout the room. Twilight blinked for a moment, startled, before spotting the lavender glow around the back of the Sparkle’s neck.

“We’re not surrendering,” Echo asserted, releasing her grip and letting the Sparkles now-lifeless body slump to the floor. “I am not surrendering”

“You didn’t need to do that,” Twilight whispered.

“Oh?” Echo responded, sneering. “Is one more dead pony too much for you? Do you get it now? I told you that this is the way of this world. Do you get it now?”

“This ends now,” Twilight breathed.

“Does it?” Echo shouted back, her horn glowing brighter. “You think you’re going to stop me? The coward from the pacifict world?”

Twilight paused, her hammer lowering slightly.

“I stopped your pet,” She replied. “I can stop you too.”

“Big deal. I stopped her too.”

“No. You seduced her. I stopped her. There is a difference.”

Twilight stepped forward, the glow around her hammer brightening as she tightened her mental grip.

“I ripped an entire universe from its moorings to stop her, but I did it. The best you could do to flatter her and somehow convince her to not kill you immediately, in return for, I don’t know, free reign to murder as she pleased? I don’t know. To be honest, I don’t care.”

She took another step forward, motes of black and green popping into existence around the base of her horn.

“I have taken on two different versions of myself and survived. I fought a mountain and won. I dropped a moon on an alicorn. I survived. After all that, do you really think that you are in any way a credible threat to me?”

The motes solidified, arcs of black lightning flaring into existence around them as she levelled the hammer at Echo.

“I could drop this entire room into the Void right now.”

Echo glared back at her, her eyes flicking between Twilight’s face, the hammer, and the two pegasi who had weapons trained on her head. Twilight glared back, a trio of spells dropping into place in her mind behind a mental hair-trigger, the point of darkness in her mind held tight at hand.

Echo opened her mouth, hesitating slightly.

“Bullsh…”

Twilight reacted, the spells triggering autonomously as she moved almost too fast to see, closing the distance as a point of light appeared behind Echo, discharging a thin purple beam towards the back of her head.

Echo gasped, the hammer’s haft pressing into her throat as Twilight held her to the floor in a telekinetic vice grip, purple tendrils enveloping her horn and solidifying.

“Wrong answer,” Twilight growled.

She concentrated, closing the tap of Void energy in her mind and breathing a sigh of relief as it closed without resistance. Taking care not to release her grip on Echo, she ripped the communications stalk from the dead Sparkle’s uniform, floating it to Walleye.

“Get on this and get the army coming at us to stand down,” Twilight ordered. “Tell them that I’ve captured their ringleader. This other Sparkle seemed willing enough to surrender, maybe the rest will show sense.”

“Yeah,” Walleye replied, taking the stalk. “Alright.”

“And if that doesn’t convince them, feel free to drop the fact that I was the one that thwarted their attack at Bastion, and the survivors of that attack will be coming up behind them pretty quick to return the favor.”

“Wait,” Rainboom interrupted, poking her head up. “Is that it? That was the bossfight?”

“Yes,” Twilight replied, charging a stunner spell and aiming it squarely into Echo’s face. “That’s it.”

She fired.

“It’s over.”

Author's Note

This story, and this final chapter in particular, has been clawing at me for quite some time (years, in fact). For those that stuck around, I thank you.

I could never quite settle on a proper ending to this story, and to be honest this one feels somewhat anticlimactic to me, but it seems better than the one where Twilight dies to save the day.
There were some events in my life that forced me to finally come back to this story and close it out, as a final stroke at the end of this chapter of my life. I may come back and re-visit it at some point in the future and explore it a bit further, but not right now.

This story represents a long part of my life, and reflects a lot of my personal journey through depression, existential despair, self-harm, substance abuse, trauma, grief, and loss. As that chapter of my life ends, so too does this story.
With any luck, I hope that my own journey continues with the same hopeful tone.

Thank you all.

The Unseen Mare

Outside, it was a good day. The sun was shining, it was the middle of spring, there wasn't a single cloud in the sky, and the many parks scattered around Canterlot City were graced with a pleasant easterly breeze that boosted the conditions from 'acceptable' to 'absolutely perfect'. Parents the city over found themselves host to renewed headaches at the insistent whines of their offspring to be unleashed upon such fortuitous outdoor conditions.

Even the Princess herself, normally confined to the interior of Canterlot Palace during the afternoon hours, had elected to relocate the Solar Court to the castle grounds, much to the consternation of the unicorn nobility. Laughter and cries of merriment, coupled with the occasional beat of a singing flash mob, echoed from all corners of Canterlot as what seemed like the entire population filled the streets, enjoying the day.

It would come as a surprise to most, then, to discover that at least one of the city's inhabitants was not outside, but had instead opted to inhabit the Canterlot Castle Library. A stuffy, dark, cold place at the best of times, the Library could not have been more opposed to the vibrant conditions that now enclosed it. To any sane pony, depriving themselves of such a radiant outdoor environment in favour of the library would be considered an act of lunacy worthy of incarceration in any of Equestria's fine mental institutions.

To those that knew anything about her, however, the library's current inhabitant's presence was not particularly surprising. While many would consider it strange in the extreme, her preference for the solitude and quiet of the library significantly outweighed any desire to partake of the afternoon's glow. In fact, given that everyone else in the city was outside doing exactly that, her preference for partaking of the library had been only strengthened, since it meant she was now alone in the greatest repository of knowledge in Equestria, surrounded by the (to her) intoxicating smell of dust and old paper, a first edition of Niccolo Marechiavelli's The Princess open in front of her.

Twilight Sparkle was in heaven.

Well, that was her intention, at least. Upon waking to discover the day's climatic wonder she had almost shattered her bedroom window with cries of glee, realising that everypony would be outside today, leaving her free and clear to partake of the normally-crowded library. In fact, it had been the reality up until a few seconds prior, when her attention had wavered from the tome before her for an instant, drawn outdoors through the library window.

The library, uniquely among libraries, had an unparalleled view of Canterlot Palace and its surrounds. Twilight had often entertained the prospect of taking her telescope and using it to observe the comings-and-goings of the many visitors to the Palace, but had never had the opportunity to execute the idea, owing to the library's typical patronage. She was rather annoyed that she had failed to remember the idea in her haste to appropriate the library for her own ends. It would have provided her with a much easier time of attempting to identify the distraction.

It was a pony, that much was clear. They were purple, as far as she could tell, but then a purple coat isn't all that remarkable when you live among a population of creatures whose range of colours were seemingly endless.

Beyond that, she could discern nothing specific about that particular pony from that distance. Other than the fact that they seemed wrong.

And she didn't know why.

"Strange," she muttered to herself, abandoning the ancient tome in front of her in favour or leaning closer to the window, trying in vain to distinguish further details. "Who are you?"

The question echoed around in her head for minutes as she watched the pony wander through the castle gardens, pausing occasionally, she assumed, to partake of the garden's many fragrant flowers, or to greet the occasional passer-by who happened to intersect the mystery pony's path. Her frustration only grew at attempting to identify the strange characteristic that had drawn her initial attention, only to come up with nothing.

A chill ran through her nose as it pressed up against the window glass, momentarily startling her before she realised she had unconsciously moved herself closer, her hooves likewise pressed against the glass in a vain attempt to close the distance to the object of her curiosity and identify it.

With a groan, she pushed herself away from the window, shaking her head in an attempt to clear her mind and refocus on her initial intention of the day, to read her book.

"It's just a random pony enjoying the day," she muttered to herself, trying to find where she had left off. "Just like anypony else. Out, enjoying the day, strolling through the gardens, absolutely nothing untoward, nothing strange, just a normal, regular pony."

She grit her teeth, steadfastly boring her glare into the book, denying the insistent, nagging urge to divert her gaze back out of the window. Small beads of sweat began to collect around her mane as she forced her attention towards the book.

It wasn't until she had read the same sentence six times in her attempt to resume that Twilight finally abandoned the attempt, batting the book closed in frustration before once again turning her gaze outside, slamming her hooves against the glass.

"Why can't I stop watching you?" She cried, face pressed uncomfortably against the glass as she watched the purple interloper. "Who are you?"

She froze in place as the mystery pony turned and looked right back at her. Normally, given the distance, she would have doubted her ability to determine the direction of the pony's perception beyond vague directions, but in that instant, she knew that the pony down there was looking right at her. And they knew that she was looking right back.

The pony bolted.

Twilight squeaked in surprise, watching the pony dart through the gardens, dodging ponies and bushes alike as they made a hasty beeline for the exit. Others turned to regard the running pony with what she could only assume was confusion at the sight of anyone running so determedly through the gardens.

For a moment, she entertained the possibility of simply letting the pony go, conjuring dozens of potential mundane explanations for their sudden departure, any one of them as plausible as the last. They were late for an appointment and had only just seen the time. They were playing a game of chase with their children and had been spotted. They were being chased by a swarm of killer bees.

The moment passed quickly, however, before she resolved herself to pursuing the mystery pony and discovering their secret. Plans formed in her head as she surveyed the gardens, vainly attempting to calculate a route that would get her from the library to the gardens before her quarry had a chance to escape.

For a normal pony, it would have been impossible. Even a pegasus would have been hard pressed to find an appropriate, safe path from the lofty library to the ground. For Twilight Sparkle, student at Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns and head of her class, it was a trivial exercise.

The world tilted sideways, the muted browns and blues of the library interior replaced with the vibrant colours of the outdoors as she teleported herself to the grounds. A sharp jolt of pain seared through her horn at the sudden discharge, reminding her of the need to practice that particular spell before using it so flippantly.

"Twilight!" Came a voice from behind her. "You're outside! Certainly wasn't expecting that today."

She turned, regarding the pony with a mild detached annoyance. It was one of her classmates, insisting once again on superfluous, unnecessary social interaction when there were far more pressing matters at hoof.

"Sorry," she said, smiling falsely as she whipped her head around, trying to locate her quarry among the crowds. "Bit busy at the moment."

"When are you not busy?" Came the reply, dripping with sarcasm.

Twilight didn't bother to respond, instead darting off when she saw the barest hint of purple out of the corner of her eye near the garden's exit. A cry of indignation followed her sudden departure, but she paid it no mind, her attention solely focussed on the matter at hoof.

A task made all the more difficult by the crowded, bustling streets of mid-afternoon Canterlot. She grumbled, pushing through the crowds in pursuit of her target, trying to close the already-considerable gap between them. Ponies around her grumbled as she pushed past them, nearly colliding with a few of them in her haste.

"Agh, where are you?" She muttered, craning her head to try and see over the crowd and spot her target. A quiet exclamation escaped her as she spotted them dart into an alleyway a few hundred yards ahead of her, only to be snuffed from her lungs as a passer-by forcefully collided with her, sending them both head-over-hooves in a tumble of purple and white.

"Ow." Twilight moaned, trying to extricate herself for the tangle of limbs and bags, glaring at the alabaster unicorn that had collided with her.

"Oh, I am so sorry dear!" She replied, pulling away from Twilight with an apologetic look on her face. "I was miles away, didn't even see you there."

"Watch where you're going next time." Twilight growled back, rising shakily to her hooves. "Some of us don't appreciate being bowled over by every Canterlotain who decides to clog up the streets."

"Oh, I'm not from Canterlot, I'm just visiting from Ponyville. Though I do hope to live here one day." She explained, extending a hoof in greeting. "Besides, where are my manners? My name's Rar-"

"Don't care." Twilight interrupted, swatting the hoof away in annoyance before dashing off again, leaving the unicorn grumbling as she collected her bags.

The crowd slowly thinned as she reached the alley, ponies stepping aside as the near-frantic unicorn dashed toward the entrance. She darted inside, panting at the exertion and scanning the alleyway for the mystery pony.

It was empty.

"Oh come on!" She groaned, trotting forward into the inky darkness. "All that and they're gone? Typical."

She continued forwards, lighting her horn to try and banish the shadows, only to reveal more empty alley. Another groan escaped her lips as her frustration grew further.

Exhausted, she took the opportunity to lean against a hay bale that had been left near the rear entrance to a nearby store, trying to steady her breathing.

Something in the darkness beeped.

Twilight froze, her ears twitching as she tried to localise the source of the noise.

Something beeped again.

She crept forward, trying to keep her hoofsteps as silent as possible as she closed on the noise. Her heart hammered in her chest as excitement coursed through her system, drumming a tattoo that she was entirely sure could be heard for miles.

"C'mon, there's enough room here!"

Twilight stopped again and dropped to the ground, holding her breath in fear and extinguishing the light on her horn. She crept forward on her hoof-tips, barrel scraping the cobblestones painfully.

Another beep echoed through the alley, followed by an annoyed exclamation.

"Oh Celestia damn it!"

Twilight tilted her head in confusion. The voice was oddly familiar, yet had a strange quality about it that she couldn't identify. She continued to creep forward, keeping herself hidden behind a stack of boxes as she approached the voice's source, only to find herself in a pile of hooves for the second time that day as the mystery pony barged back into the alleyway, running headlong into the hidden Twilight.

"Owwww." Twilight groaned again, struggling in vain to free herself from her quarry. "Why do people keep running into... me..."

The complaint died in her throat as she looked up and into the face of the pony she was pursuing, only to see herself staring back with a look of horror on her face. Experimentally, she tilted her head marginally and flicked her ears, expecting the face in front of her, her face, to do the same.

It didn't.

Not a reflection, then.

"Not possible." Twilight muttered to herself, her faculties for more complex language having evidently vacated for the time being.

Her duplicate stared down at her in horror, apparently at a loss for what to do next. "Okay... This is... bad."

Twilight reached out a hoof, tentatively poking the duplicate to check if it was solid or merely a hallucination brought on by what she expected was stress exhaustion. To her dismay, however, it was solid.

"Yes, I'm real." Her duplicate snapped.

Twilight yanked her hoof back, only to have it catch on a chain hung around her duplicate's neck, upon which a small pendant hung.

"Ah, careful!" The duplicate cautioned, alarmed. "Don't touch-"

Twilight's hoof grazed the pendant, triggering a light whistle. The pendant's edge began to glow green, pulsing gently.

"-that." She groaned. "NOW you work? at the worst possible moment? Celestia above..."

"Sorry." Twilight offered, at a loss for what to say.

Her duplicate just glared at her, an exasperated look filling her face.

A small ding issued from the amulet as the green pulse turned solid. An instant later, Twilight felt the bottom drop out of her stomach as the world lurched sideways.

Rabbit Hole

Twilight groaned in pain as the air was forced from her lungs, her back pressed uncomfortably against cold metal by the crushing weight of... herself. She struggled to extricate herself from under her duplicate, unsuccessfully.

The pendant emitted a chime that could only be described as 'cheerful', the green glow fading from around the rim. Her duplicate nickered, expression shifting from exasperation to abject horror.

"I am so dead."

"Sorry." Twilight offered again, smiling sheepishly

"Stop apologising."

"Sorry."

"Augh!"

"Sorry."

Her duplicate leaned in, nose almost touching Twilight's. "Shut. Up."

"Sorry."

A glare silenced any further apologetics, granting time for her duplicate to pull herself away from Twilight and raise to a standing position. Granted a reprieve from the crushing pressure, Twilight rolled over, taking the opportunity to examine the room into which she had been deposited.

It was bright. It was cold. It was very unfamiliar to the bookish unicorn, who had spent most of her time inside structures constructed of brick, wood and stone, lit by lanterns and sunlight. The floor was a silvery-grey metal, lined with strips of a black, grippy material Twilight couldn't identify. The walls were constructed of a similar material, curving upwards from the floor to meet the ceiling far overhead, where numerous small recesses shone with a sterile, almost clinical white light.

Twilight felt her breath catch in her throat as she realised there were no doors.

"Where have you taken me?" She breathed, on the verge of panic "Where am I?"

Her duplicate didn't respond immediately, looking around the room with a look of confusion.

"Odd. It doesn't usually take them this long."

Twilight gaped. It was as though she wasn't even there. Panic gave way to indignant anger. She opened her mouth to speak, only for a voice to echo throughout the room, cutting her off before a single syllable had the chance to form.

"Unscheduled Beacon Activation. Security Team Alpha report to Gate Three."

Twilight squeaked and covered her ears as a series of cracks echoed throughout the room. She tried to make herself as small as possible as the yelling started, holding herself to the floor and covering her head protectively.

"Identify! Now!"

"Sparkle, Twilight. Echo. Team Three-Eight." Twilight heard a clink of metal on metal as something fell to the floor. "Beacon Clear. No Contamination."

Twilight peeked her head up, staring at her duplicate who had sunk to the floor, forehooves behind her head, horn pointed up and away in a display of nonthreatening submission, her pendant lying on the floor next to her. Three other ponies surrounded her, clad in suits of dull grey armour and brandishing an assortment of what she assumed were weapons.

A fourth guard approached Twilight, a blocky rectangular device held aloft in their magic, pointed at her.

"You! Identify!"

"Twilight Sparkle?" she offered hesitantly

The guard continued to glare at her, clearly unsatisfied with the response.

"Um... I'm a student at Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns?" She continued "My parents are Night Light and Twilight Velvet? I... uh..."

"Stop talking," The guard growled

"Okay," Twilight whispered

"Sparkle Echo," the guard began, still glaring at Twilight. "Who is this?"

"She spotted me." 'Echo' replied in an even tone. "Chased me through half of Canterlot."

"Is she hostile?" The guard barked, impatiently. "Analysis said that Room's disposition was friendly!"

"Analysis can go suck horseapples." 'Echo' replied, bitterly. "She's an Insider."

The guard stepped back in surprise, lowering the device he had aimed at her.

"You brought an Insider to the Exterior?" he asked, quietly "Echo, that's Rule Number One!"

"No, she followed me." 'Echo' corrected. "And got caught in the backwash when I Exited. Like I said, Analysis are complete featherbrains. That cell was not supposed to have another Sparkle."

"Analysis has never been wrong before."

"Suuure..." 'Echo' replied sarcastically, gesturing at Twilight. "Explain this then."

"Excuse me..." Twilight interrupted, raising her head slightly. "But where am I? What's an Insider? What is going on?"

"Can we just send her back?" the guard asked, nervously. "Would that work?"

"Possibly" 'Echo' replied "Though knowing my luck she'd find a way back here now she knows about us. She is a Sparkle."

"Have I ever said how much you Sparkles annoy me, Echo?" The guard sighed, leaning his head to the side and muttering something into a black, fuzzy protrusion sticking out of his suit.

"Okay, enough," Twilight stated, rising slowly to her hooves and igniting her horn. "This day has been entirely too weird for me, and you all keep ignoring me. I want answers!"

The guards backed up, levelling their weapons at her. The closest guard, the commander, Twilight assumed, was frantically muttering into the fuzzy stalk.

"Security Teams Beta and Gamma report immediately to Gate Three. Intruder Alert!"

"I wouldn't," Echo warned. "You might be a Sparkle, but these colts are quite good at their jobs."

"What in Celestia's name is a 'Sparkle'?" Twilight demanded, levelling her horn at Echo.

There was another series of cracks from behind her. She yelped as a yellow-tinged magic field surrounded her, lifting her off the floor and shorting out her own magic, droplets of purple dripping off her horn and dissolving into the aether.

"Let. Me. Go!" She demanded, struggling futilely against the field.

"Oh dear. Now this is bad." came a male voice, regal and measured. "Shoot her."

"Wait! No!" Twilight yelped as one of the guards levelled their weapon at her. "Stop! Don't!"

"Hold," came a different voice, a female this time. "She's not a threat to the Exterior, not where she came from. Her cell was about as far from the Ruins as it's possible to get."

"How can you be sure?" Came a third voice, another female. "This wouldn't be the first time somepony from the Ruins had tried to escape by infiltrating the Interior. Not to mention the Falls, one of them could have discovered us and sent her here."

"She's not from the Falls," the second voice replied, spitting the word 'Falls' like it was toxic. "None of them even know who we really are, let alone have the capability to attack us here."

"You can't know that as a definite," The first voice challenged. "The Bureaus-"

"Are far too focussed on their own little campaign to even notice Outsiders." The second voice interrupted. "We're secure. This breach, through unique, does not threaten the integrity of the Exterior. Guards, you're dismissed. I will deal with the Insider."

The guards teleported away one-by-one, cracks echoing throughout the room as they departed, eventually leaving only the mysterious voice, and Twilight, suspended in the air.

She drifted slowly to the group as the field dissipated. The sound of hoofsteps echoed throughout the room as the owner of the unknown voice walked into her field of view.

"Princess Celestia?"

The Solar Princess gazed down at her, fixing her with a gaze that was equal parts amusement and disappointment, a strange combination that Twilight had witnessed on many different occasions. Despite the familiarity, Twilight knew this was a different Celestia to the one she knew, a fact given away by the distinct lack of golden regalia that typically adorned the Princess' neck and head, and the slightly pinker hue of her coat.

"Twilight Sparkle." Celestia replied. "I apologise for the zealousness of my guards. They are trained to deal with threats considerably more aggressive than yourself."

"I understand." Twilight lied.

"I hope you are not unduly stressed by the situation," Celestia stated soothingly, flashing a disarming smile. "I assure you, this is all an accident of celestial proportions."

Twilight chuckled at the joke.

"I understand, Princess," She replied, bowing in deference. "You don't need to explain yourself."

"Just Celestia, please Twilight. I'm no princess. Never have been," Celestia replied. "Besides. I am not even the Celestia you know, though I suppose that much is obvious, given the lack of..."

She gestured to her missing regalia, drawing an understanding nod from Twilight.

"I am what is called an 'Outsider'. So is everypony else who lives here." Celestia gestured to the room, before stopping herself. "Not in this room, obviously."

"Your speech, it's so..." Twilight trailed off, trying to find the right word.

"Strange?" Celestia offered

Twilight nodded.

"Like I said, I'm not the Celestia you know," She continued. "I'm not even the only Celestia that lives here. I am one of six, actually. We all have our little quirks that set us apart. I'm a bit more pink than the others, for instance. I am officially Celestia Alpha, owing that I was the first recorded Celestia to arrive here, though many of the ponies here have elected instead to call me 'Pinklestia' instead"

Twilight snorted, trying to hide it behind a cough.

"Go on, laugh, it helps to ease the tension, trust me."

"Um, Princ... Celestia?" Twilight began, hesitantly. "I would very much like to go home."

"Ah," Celestia answered, slowly. "I was afraid you were going to ask that. Honestly I was hoping you were going to take longer to get to that question, though I can see why it would be foremost in your mind."

Twilight merely stared, waiting for a response.

"I'm afraid you cannot go home." Celestia explained. "Not permanently, at least."

Twilight gaped, unable to form a response.

"You see, you're an anomaly to us," She continued. "No Insider has ever, ever in the history of everything managed to get here. It's never happened before, and by all rights, it shouldn't ever happen. It's not something we even have contingencies for."

"I don't understand," Twilight replied, apparently still processing the fact that she wasn't going home.

"I don't expect you to. This is a lot to take in at once." Celestia sighed. "Ten minutes ago, you didn't even know this place existed, let alone what it implied."

Twilight took a deep breath, taking stock of her situation in as close to a level-headed fashion as possible.

"You're taking this rather better than I expected you to, Twilight."

"I'm not going home?"

"No. Not until we discover what your presence here implies for us."

"How long will that take?"

"I don't know. Maybe a few hours, maybe entire years." Celestia admitted, glancing nervously at the floor. "Maybe never."

"Oh."

They sat in silence for a moment, the larger alicorn regarding the small purple unicorn with an air of concern.

"I'm sorry. I can only begin to imagine how you must be feeling." Celestia said, trying her best to console her. "I'm sure you will see your friends again, once we sort all this out."

"Don't have friends." Twilight corrected flatly

"Oh? What about your companions, the Elements of Harmony? Did you have those where you came from?"

"I don't know what that is."

"Have you ever heard of a pony called Nightmare Moon?"

"No."

"Spike?"

"No."

"Discord?"

"No."

"Princess Cadance?"

"No."

"...Shining Armor?"

"That's my brother. But I don't see him much anymore."

"Your family?"

"Don't see them much either. My studies take up most of my time."

"Being the personal protégé of the Princess would do that..."

"I'm not her protégé." Twilight corrected. "You're thinking of Sunset Shimmer. I'm just a student at the school."

They both stared at each other for a moment.

"How unique," Celestia pondered. "Forgive my bluntness, but you seem so alone there. Why are you so eager to return?"

"It's what I know," Twilight explained. "I don't know anything about here. Or even what 'here' is."

"Well!" Celestia explained, getting to her hooves. "What say we change that, then? How about a tour? With the excitement over, It should be quite easy to show you around."

"I'd like that."

Author's Note

Thanks to everyone who's upvoted and faved this, and to the people who PM'd me offering editing work. I never expected this to become anywhere near as popular as it did (let alone get in the popular stories list. *is proud*).

Homeward Bound

Twilight Sparkle had roughly five seconds left to live.

She stared at the glowing red numerals as the concept of mortality was forcefully injected into her thoughts, cold, dark tendrils of panic writhing their way onto the floor of her brain as she was made to contemplate the fact that in a few moments, her conscious awareness would be forcefully terminated, and she would cease to exist.

Along with every other pony in the city.

Mortality is a concept that many a pony struggles with in their lifetime. Most elect to avoid it or ignore it, unable to reconcile their own existence with the inevitability of non-existence. There exist many personifications of the concept of death throughout history; attempts to rationalise or realise some sort of conceivable being to rail against.

Griffons visualise it as an otherworldly, ethereal many-headed snake, perpetually earthbound and waiting to snatch any unsuspecting griffon that strayed too low. Zebras view it as a zebra-esque creature with no skin, blackened bones in place of stripes, sneaking into encampments to snatch them away. Ancient pony cultures typically adopted the archetypical Earth Pony image of a skeletal horse accompanied by a floating scythe, come to harvest the dead and dying like wheat.

In more modern times, the being most closely associated with death was the Princess of the Night, Luna, given the connection between darkness and death. If there was any actual connection there, though, she certainly wasn’t telling.

Some rare ponies however, come to accept death, dedicating their life to their own pursuits, aware and comfortable in the fact that they had a limited amount of time in which to experience the miracle which we call ‘life.’

Four seconds.

Of course, there is an extremely rare subset of ponies, rare beyond reason, who take a different path. Ponies to whom the concept of death is viewed not as an inevitability, but an obstacle, a mere annoyance to be swept aside. Some would perceive such a view to be arrogance of the highest order, to sweep death itself aside into the dark of oblivion. Death is the one true certainty of the world, pervasive and unchanging.

But then again, that never stopped the Princesses for living over a thousand years, an age that normal ponies consider completely unattainable. Twilight herself had once wondered how Celestia and Luna had managed such a feat of longevity, living ten times longer than even the oldest living non-alicorn. While her subjects withered with age and were turned to dust, they stood unchanged, as regal and as powerful as the day they first set hoof upon the world.

Three seconds.

It wasn’t enough time. She couldn’t stop it. She didn’t want to die, but then no rational, healthy pony really wants to end their life, to step into the Reaper’s waiting embrace and the void of oblivion. Anger welled deep inside her, wailing against the injustice. Why? Why her? She didn’t deserve to die, surely!

“No,” she whispered.

Two seconds.

“I am not going to die here!”

Solutions half-formed in her brain, each dismissed in turn as her analytical mind found the inevitable problems with each and tore them apart. Her earlier attack had left her energy reserves near-depleted, and the Powerstone mounted atop her horn was entirely empty. She couldn’t teleport far enough to be outside of the range of the blast; it was more than likely that it would take out most of Mount Canter with it. All of her solutions required magic, and she didn’t have any magic left.

She looked around, assessing everything in sight for its potential magical capability. Her teammates she dismissed immediately as useless, she doubted they knew the spells required to assist her in a group cast, let alone the energy reserves to pull it off. The bomb she similarly dismissed, she didn’t even know what a ‘Thaumonuclear Implosion Assembly’ was, let alone how to pull enough energy from it to escape in the second-and-a-bit she had left.

There was nothing left in the room beyond broken masonwork and a giant hammer.

A hammer that, now that she was actually paying attention, was heavily enchanted. She didn’t have enough time to fully unravel the full set of enchantments on the weapon, but it stood to reason that at least one of the enchantments was probably Powerstone, or something equivalent enough that supplied thaumic energy in the same way, especially considering the raw power the former-princess Twilight displayed.

Of course, if she was wrong, the hammer would be useless and she wouldn’t have enough time to find something else.

One second.

Her horn ignited, wrapping the hammer in a lavender glow. Simultaneously, she shot a simple directive into her mind.

‘Get us out of here’

The hammer glowed as it dumped its stored energy into the request, a primitive search-and-execute spell running through Twilight’s capabilities before eventually settling on one that had been recently acquired that fit the parameters.

A silver-white event horizon slammed closed as the spell executed, enveloping the entirety of Team Fifteen as Twilight punched a hole into the void.

A fraction of a second later, the device initiated.

RF?

Twilight yelped as the spell’s request lanced into her head, the space around her warping to a near-obscene degree as the spell executed, holding a bubble of existence in place against the oblivion of the Void. Her horn itched almost uncontrollably as the seemingly unbounded energy of the nothing-dimension beyond the bubble’s event horizon seeped through, bathing them in the thaumic shadow of a tangible oblivion.

“Great. So this is what death is like,” Lyra groaned, her hooves flailing ineffectually as she attempted to gain purchase on nothingness, seemingly oblivious to Twilight’s extreme discomfort. “Floating in a white bubble with you wankers for the rest of eternity. Could be worse.”

“You’re not dead,” Twilight corrected, her voice strained from the effort of keeping the spell in check.

“Then where are we?”

“Somewhere. I don’t know exactly. I think this is the spell your Luna used when she escaped from my homeworld.”

“Looks about right,” Walleye said as she drifted past. “Nice save, rookie.”

“Still not talking to you, nag.”

“Oh buck up, filly.”

“Walleye, really not the best idea right now,” Lyra warned.

RF?

Twilight yelped as the request repeated, threatening her already-tenuous hold over the spell.

“Are you okay?” Lyra asked

“The spell keeps asking me something. R-F, whatever that means… I just want to go home…”

Confirm 1x45EFBA4C-Slateform?

“Take me home!” she shrieked.

The spell grounded, the reflective inner surface of the bubble’s event horizon falling away, unceremoniously depositing the five floating ponies inside a cramped dormitory room at the Canterlot Royal Academy with a series of pained thumps.

“‘For a moment there, I thought we were in trouble?’” Lyra asked incredulously as she pulled herself to her hooves, echoing Walleye’s words from moments earlier. “That’s the best you could come up with?”

“Buck Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” Twilight said, shaking the detritus of the spell from her mind. “Those are Sundance’s last words to Buck before they go out to face the Bullivians. I remember seeing it as a filly.”

“Well, what do you know,” Walleye remarked, surprised. “Common ground. Here I thought you were just another Insider, but it turns out you can fight, and you have good taste in films!”

“I never said I liked it.”

“So, what, suddenly she’s in your good books because she’s seen some flick and vaporised another Sparkle?” Lyra asked, flippantly. “So much for that ‘I hate all Insiders’ rhetoric.”

The hammer twitched slightly in Twilight’s magic as she was reminded of her split-second murder of her doppelganger.

“Or is it because she helped you level an entire city?” Lyra continued, turning to Twilight. “Nice work, by the way. You’re off to a fantastic start. Only two days in and already taking out entire cities.”

The hammer twitched again, more violently.

“I never said I liked her,” Walleye said. “But I’ll admit, she’s proven herself.”

“Proven myself a killer, you mean,” Twilight whispered.

“Well… yes.”

“You thoughtless, greedy, manipulative cow,” Twilight hissed, punctuating each word with a slight twitch of the hammer. “You just killed an entire city, I just killed an entire city. I helped you kill an entire city of innocent ponies! What have you done to me?”

“They deserved it,” Walleye replied, simply and calmly. “I would kill a million Insiders for what that tyrant did to Lunatic. Fair price, I say!”

“You… monster…” Twilight whispered. “They’re still ponies! Living, breathing, with hopes, dreams, ambitions!”

“Well, not any more…” Lyra quipped off-hoofedly.

“No, now they’re all dead because of this mare’s massive superiority complex!”

“You’re not going to convince me that they didn’t get what they deserve,” Walleye said.

“Oh, so all Insiders are worthless scum, then? What about me? Where do I factor into your campaign of hate and bigotry, Derpy?”

“Do not call me that,” Walleye growled, her wings fluttering in irritation.

“Or what?” Twilight threatened. “Need I remind you that you’re stuck here? It’s not like you can go running back to your Outsider friends like the spoiled foal you are and have them get you your bottle…”

Walleye threw herself at Twilight, wings flared and mouth open in a cry of animalistic fury. She didn’t get far, a lavender glow enveloping her and sapping her momentum mere hooflengths from Twilight’s face.

“You have already turned me into a mass-murderer today,” Twilight stated, applying pressure to Walleye’s neck with the field. “Give me a reason I shouldn’t add another single, measly death to that count.”

“Twilight, stop,” Lyra said, cautiously holding a hoof out towards the hysterical unicorn.

“Why are you defending her?” Twilight hissed.

“Just pointing out that you might want to put her down before you get hurt…”

“Is that a threat?”

“Bloody… no,” Lyra said, rubbing her face with a hoof. “There are three ponies here, excluding you and me. Wallie here is all trussed up, and Pinkie’s unconscious, where is number three?”

Twilight reacted a split-second too late, turning her head only to see a cyan hoof as it connected with her muzzle, a solid crack echoing through the room as she was sent flying into a wall, dust and powder from the destroyed masonry flooding the room.

“ENOUGH!” Twilight screamed, swinging the still-levitating hammer around in a wide arc, slamming into the side of Rainboom’s head with enough force to propel her bodily through the outer wall of the building and clear into the air outside.

She groaned as she pulled herself clear of the wall, gingerly walking towards the jagged hole she had just created. Screams echoed up from the paths below as ponies ran from the falling stonework, guards scrambling towards the building and helping the injured away from the area, while others took the opportunity to gawk and point at her as she stood in the hole, hammer floating at her side.

A dull thundercrack in the distance pulled her attention upwards, a thin chromatic contrail trailing from the pegasus she had just violently evicted, a luminous ring of color bracketing the trail close to the earth. As she watched, it looped upwards into the sky, gaining altitude before pulling back and aiming back towards Twilight.

“Not a smart move, Rainboom,” she remarked, pulling the hammer up, a wry smirk pulling at her lips.

“Could say the same about you,” Lyra said. “For somepony who seems to abhor murder, you seem to be awfully eager to indulge yourself.”

“She made me a murderer!” Twilight shouted, pointing at Walleye. “She did this to me!”

“She must be a stealth alicorn too, then, because I’m pretty sure that hammer that’s about to smack miss supersonic rainbow missile in the face is floating.”

“Rainboom kicked me in the face.”

“Because you were choking me,” Walleye croaked, rubbing her throat.

“Because you turned me into a mass-murderer!”

“Well, I suppose it’s all good then,” Lyra sneered. “You’ve already killed so many ponies already, what’s two more deaths going to change…”

“Stop!”

“No, go ahead. I’m genuinely curious now. You bash Rainboom’s head in, snap Walleye’s neck, then what? Are you going to kill all the Guards that are coming to stop you? Because as it is, that’s what comes next.”

“STOP IT!”

“Or what? Are you going to kill me too? Great solution. Walleye might be a single-minded soldier with a superiority complex, and Rainboom is loyal to a fault, but you, little unicorn, need to step back and think for a moment. You’re a bloody Sparkle. Act like one.”

Twilight stared, speechless.

“Or you could kill us, let Pinkie die, and render Derp-face’s prejudices against Insiders perfectly justified.”

“I…” Twilight breathed, unable to articulate her tumultuous thoughts.

The door exploded, Royal Guard flooding into the room. Twilight caught the barest glimpse of a blue-maned, purple-armored unicorn guard running towards her, horn ignited, before the world went dark.

Author's Note

We're back, fillies!