Garry's Mod Vs. Equestria 2: War in the North

The silence could be felt. Even the blizzard seemed to shut up for a few seconds after I spoke. The eyes of the ponies in front of me, wide and unsure, were glued onto me. Their shock at seeing me nearly made me laugh, but I controlled myself. "So, Canterlot?" I tried. "Which way is it?"

The rather large mare--that also seemed to sparkle in the snow, I might add--at the front of the party shook her head quickly, trading her shocked expression for one of suspicion. "Just what exactly are you? And why do you need to get to Canterlot?" she asked, a sharp edge to her voice.

With a roll of my eyes and a scowl directed at her, I said, "It's always the same thing with you ponies: 'what are you?', 'why are you holding a sledgehammer?', 'why are you doing this?'..." I shook my head tiredly. "Really, don't you ever come up with anything new?"

I guessed that she narrowed her eyes, but it was tough to see through the blizzard. "Let me rephrase that. Tell me what your business is in Canterlot, or I'll arrest you on suspicion of conspiracy."

I decided then that I didn't like her. Not one bit. "That's none of your fucking business, G.I. Jane. Just tell me which way to go and I won't have to bludgeon it out of you." That did it.

She said in a lowered voice, "Cuff him."

I raised an eyebrow at her. "Kinky."

Normally in this situation I would have avoided capture at any cost. But wandering around through a blizzard in a frozen wasteland wasn't exactly ideal for me, and I figured that somebody could give me the information I needed at... wherever it was they were taking me.

The walk was long, made longer by the wind whipping my face and probably blistering my skin. For nearly an hour we walked through the snow--well, I walked, they were chest deep in it so it was more of a hobble for them. But after all that walking, we made it to what looked like an old and abandoned shack, set in the middle of nowhere. There was barely a roof left, the walls were tattered and hole-ridden, and the door was only being held on by one busted hinge at the top.

The leader of our little troop, First Sergeant Snow Shield--she had introduced herself while bucking me in the chest after I made a smart remark about myself, her, the handcuffs, and a riding crop--stepped ahead of us and knocked on the shack's door in a certain rhythm, then opened the door and walked inside.

One of the stallions--also very sparkly--pushed me forward with the pointy end of a short spear. "Inside, prisoner. It's freezing out here..."

I looked back at him. "Inside that thing?" I asked incredulously.

He nodded.

I looked back to the shack. Then back to him. "Are you serious? That thing's not big enough for half of us." I was quickly prodded forward again with an angry growl. "Fine, whatever you say..." I made a mental note to kill him later as I walked through the little door into the dingy little--"Holy shit it's a fucking castle!"

And it was. Well, a modest one, but still no less impressive. There were four stone towers connected by high walls that made the perimeter, and surrounding that was a trench filled with sharp pikes made from long wooden poles. The only crossing was a drawbridge, leading to a barred metal gate that was raised just enough to let us pass. Inside the walls was much more interesting. Large buildings made up almost the entire right side of the place, and I could only assume that that was where the ponies slept. In the middle of the courtyard was a large platform, around which were hundreds of ponies--also sparkly--doing push ups, crunches, running in place, and other kinds of exercises. In the far left corner was a dirt circle with a wooden fence around it containing ponies--again, also sparkly--with wooden weapons fighting each other. As I looked around I saw ponies everywhere; some in armor, others in simple clothing, other bare, but all of them sparkly. Some were carrying weapons, others were at a large well filling buckets with water or washing out pots and pans, and there were quite a lot of them chatting and smiling and laughing with each other.

Although as I was walked through the place, more and more of them stopped what they were doing to stare at us, or more precisely, me. I noticed that some of them were whispering to each other, and others' eyes went wide and their jaws dropped.

I looked around me, at all of them. Staring. With their enormous eyes. Staring. Staring... As I passed close to one of them, I growled and tried to bite him. I missed by an inch, fortunately, as I would have bitten into his helmet.

"Hey!" the sparkly stallion with the spear yelled, pulling me away from the sparkly soldier I tried to bite. "Behave or you'll regret it!"

I stopped walking, slowly turning to face him. I stared right into his eyes. "I'm going to boil you alive until all of your skin is gone, then I'm going to chop you up, cook you, and force your family to eat you." I said the whole thing without blinking, flinching, or showing any emotion at all.

His face went from the light blue of his coat to white, his eyes rolled back into his head, and he fell over on his side, unconscious. He fainted from fright.

As the stallion twitched on the ground, I calmly continued to follow the Sergeant through the castle yard. I chuckled inwardly as the sparkly ponies backed away as I approached them from then on. We walked to what looked like the second largest building inside of the castle walls, a mainly wooden structure with three floors, many windows, and a large double door. It was through the large double door that we--only the Sergeant and I, as the others decided to wait outside--walked through. We walked past a reception desk with an older mare behind it, into the next room, up two flights of stairs, and down a short hallway. As we reached the end, we entered a small wooden door leading to a rather unimpressive office. A simple desk, a small bookcase, and a few maps along the walls.

The Sergeant looked at me with a glare. "Stay here and behave," she warned.

I scowled at her. "Make me," I challenged.

She matched my scowl with one of her own, then kicked me in the knee. Hard. She went from scowl to glare as she saw me fall to my knees and snorted at me in disgust. She then disappeared behind a curtain that I just now noticed behind the desk.

I remained there on my knees, biting my lip at how much my leg hurt. "That bitch is next," I muttered to myself. "Let's see her kick me when I tear her legs off. She's next, right after that fucker with the spear." My threats were cut short by the curtain moving once more, revealing the Sergeant and another pony, a not-sparkly stallion wearing very regal armor. He was pure white with bright blue eyes and a thick blue mane. He was also very large, as ponies go. Though even on my knees I was still a few inches taller than him.

He stared at me, seemingly in an awed state. His eyes wide, and focused solely on me. "I can't believe it," he whispered to nobody in particular. He stared at me for a long time like this, occasionally muttering something like not believing it, and a sign of fortune. It took a long while for him to calm down, and once he did he started speaking clearly. "Sergeant, you said you found him on the border of the Dark Zone?" he asked.

She responded with a brisk, "Yes sir."

He stared at me some more. Then some more. Then, finally, he seemed to notice that I was on my knees with handcuffs on. He blinked in surprise. "Sergeant, take those hoofcuffs off immediately!" he ordered in a panicked voice. "Don't you know who this is?!"

The Sergeant looked from the large stallion to me. She stared at me, long and hard, like I was a puzzle she needed to solve. It felt like a long time before she moved, her eyes slowly widening with every second, until they were nearly bugging out of her skull. "By the Sun and the Moon!" she shouted. "It's him!"

The stallion in front of me turned to face her, glaring. "I know it's him Sergeant!" he scolded her. "So take those cuffs off!"

She nodded jerkily, moving forward in a flash and removing the cuffs from my wrists.

I stood slowly, not sure what exactly was going on. I was glad the cuffs were off and I had circulation in my hands again, but I was even more suspicious that these ponies I'd never met before knew me. Not just knew me, but seemed to be awed by me. "About damn time," I muttered, rubbing the feeling back into my wrists and eyeing them with suspicion.

"You're him, are't you?" the stallion asked, a broad smile on his face and a hopeful gleam in his eyes.

I looked at him. "I don't know what you're talking about," I told him. "Whoever you think I am, trust me, I'm not. I'm just trying to get to Canterlot."

"To get back home, right?" The stallion asked, his voice excited.

I looked at him, my suspicion growing. "To see Celestia," I corrected him. How did he know about my home? How did he know me? The questions rang inside my skull like a bad headache.

"You're the one who saved Canterlot from the Changeling invasion," the Sergeant said. "You coordinated the attack, and fought off over ten thousand Changelings with only a small device that shot metal from it. You and your companion, the one called Viking fought off the entire invasion by yourselves and saved Canterlot."

The stallion laughed heartily. "Probably all of Equestria even!" he added with gusto.

I looked between them, my mind a pool of confusion, suspicion and more confusion. "So... you've heard of me?" I received nods from both of them. "So, you know what'll happen if I'm here to long?" Again, I got nods. "So can you tell me how to get to Canterlot?"

Their faces fell. "So you weren't sent to help us?" The stallion asked despairingly. "You aren't our reinforcements?"

"No, don't any of you idiots listen? I just need to get to Canterlot," I told them angrily, repeating myself for what felt like the millionth time. "Can you just give me some damn directions?!"

The Sergeant spoke up, her voice tight and standoffish. "No, we cannot give you directions to Canterlot, sir." She looked at me like I'd just murdered her family.

I scowled at her. "Why not?!" I yelled loudly.

She met me with a scowl of her own. "Because we're not in the same dimension."