I hated going to the mall.

Even before things had changed, although for different reasons.

Back when I was a kid, my mother would drag me all over to look at things. Literally just look at them, with no intention whatsoever to buy. But what with me being male, and a child, I was the perfect marriage of impatience and practicality. I didn’t like to waste time, and didn’t see the need of just looking at stuff. What was the point of looking at something if you couldn’t make it yours one day?

As cliché as it was, she liked to look at shoes the most. She was one of those people that looked at things and went ‘I wish I could have that’ or ‘I wish I could wear that’ and then I’d start whining, and pull her away from her pleasant fantasies and into something not as pleasant called reality.

I stood in the giant darkened hallway, with the only light in the place coming from my Partner as I looked through the broken glass at the shoe store in front of us, I couldn’t help but wonder what had happened to her. At least, shortly after the world went to hell. When it came to the long run, I had a pretty good idea.

The chances of someone with cancer still being alive even one year after the world ended were…slim.

Two years was next to an impossibility.

Three…I wasn’t holding out much hope.

“Are you alright?” my Partner asked as I heard her walk up a little closer from behind me. Her hooves striking the ground as the soft blue light from her horn intensified from the proximity. “You look…sad.”

Her question made me flinch. As tough as the girl was physically, she was still a pony. Which meant her heart might as well have been made of glass. And like any decent human, I didn’t like upsetting ponies. Her most of all. “Just thinking about the old days,” I replied before readjusting the backpack I had stuffed full of as many boots as I could before the insensitivity of what I had said crossed my mind. Then I looked back at my Partner and gave a little wince. “Sorry.”

Like always, she just gave a little smile, and let the comment that probably reminded her of tons of bad shit slide. “It is alright. Are you ready to go, or do you wish to take something from this shop?” she asked, gently curious before looking back down the deserted indoor marketplace. “We can make it back to the cart, and then to the hotel we saw on our way in in just half an hour if we hurry.”

Not seeing any reason to argue, I turned around and made some quick adjustments to the light chain mail tunic that protected most of my body above the knees so it wouldn't be too bad when I picked up the cargo again.

“Sure,” I agreed as I checked that the backpack I had just put on wouldn’t mess with my ability to draw ammo from the quiver of short spears we made from an old mail sack I already had in place beneath it, or the machete I was wearing on my belt in case things got too close. Then I picked up the crossbow I had put down to adjust everything, and walked alongside the winged unicorn as a blue light from her horn illuminated what had been a busy mall before the world stopped making sense.

I tried not to think about how the building I was in should have looked like, but there wasn’t much else to do as I walked by dry fountains and mostly looted stores. I say mostly looted because there was still plenty of stuff to find if you had the balls to look. At least in the malls and stores deep in the bigger cities. People didn’t bother to take things like clothes or boots, beauty products, books, mouthwash or toothbrushes when they moved out of the major urban areas. For someone with enough food to get several days worth of travel through an old city, or a Partner who could carry them there through the sky, the buildings that might as well have been gravestones to the old world were a goldmine. Of course it took more than just being close friends with a pegasus to do what we did, not many people could stomach walking through the giant graveyard to the time before that the cities had become.

And that wasn’t even accounting for predators. Plenty of nasty things with large hunting radiuses liked to make the third or fourth floor of an office building their home.

“Coming here, it always makes wonder what it looked like before,” my Partner mumbled as we walked towards the exit and passed a dried up fountain that had a statue of a woman pouring a jar into the main body of it. Her hooves clopping on the ground echoed throughout the place. “It must have been beautiful.”

I did my best not to try and picture it. Not that I had ever been in this particular mall when the lights were on, but…the emptiness was bad enough without thinking about what had been there before. “Well...probably,” I replied dully. It wasn’t the first time we had such conversations. Whenever they happened, I just did my best to keep the pony happy and cheerful. It killed me when the little blue horse got depressed over anything. Which she usually did when we talked on subjects that involved what humanity used to have before all the magical creatures arrived.

More food than we knew what to with in most places. Entertainment that didn't require a person to read, think, or even move. The ability to talk to people hundreds of miles away in real time. The list just went on.

I opened the door for her, and watched as she walked into the light of a dancing aurora overhead. With the help of the extra light, the blue glow of her horn dimmed and I took in the sight of my Partner in all her nighttime glory.

Luna was beautiful, in that majestically alien sort of way. Kind of like a surreal painting brought to life. Although not the most colorful of ponies, she had a level of majesty that none of them could match. Physically, she was a head taller than most, with a mane that was only a shade lighter than her coat that sparkled in the moonlight. A thick spiral horn that she worked to keep dangerously sharp topped her head, while a pair of wings that didn’t show a single feather out of place covered most of the pair of slender rapiers that she kept under them. One of two oddities about the pony I had spent the past three years with.

The other being the fact that she had both a horn and wings. Every other interdimensional equine I had ever seen either sported a horn or some feathers, if anything at all. Why she had both…nobody knew.

Despite her appreciative beauty, the fact that my Partner didn’t have a smile on her usual happy face really killed it. She took one look at the sky and let out a dejected sigh. “I’m sorry we did this to you.”

Crap, I told myself before catching up with the miniature magical horse and putting my hand on the top of her head to try and reassure her so close to her ears I had to fight the almost instinctual urge to scratch them like she was a sad dog. I should have seen it coming. My Partner was pretty emotional, even for an equine alien from another dimension. But it was something I had come to expect from the pony who tended to find any reason she could to guilt herself to death.

That was her in a nutshell. A wide array of powers, and a borderline emo personality. Which was also something most ponies didn’t possess. Sure they took things pretty personally more often than not, but most ponies were happier than the majority of humans in the world.

“Oh come on Lulu,” I said gently before getting on my knees so we were eye level. “We got griffons, dragons, those dog things, and all that other junk here too. Just because a third of you guys have glowing horns and can move stuff with your minds doesn’t mean you’re responsible for...whatever that thing is. Hell, ponies are the nicest of anything that showed up during A-Day.”

And that wasn’t even counting the things that didn’t talk. Along with every friendly magical creature that had come along, we also got another that wasn’t so nice. Manticores alone had totally screwed up the food web with the fact they were a predator with the apatite of a lion and ability to fly, not to mention the giant poison stinger.

“Besides, if you guys really did do…something, then it had to have been an accident. Right?” I honestly couldn't think of any pony actually being evil. A little snarky, with some twisted morals? Yes. Vindictive and purposely destructive? Not a chance.

It was an old conversation we’d been having since about the second month we had been traveling together. Admittedly, there had been a lot more accusations and screaming on my part back then. But what can I say? Apocalypses brought out the worst in me.

Luna smiled a little, and I felt my heart fall back into a more relaxing beat as she nodded in agreement with my logic after a few moments. It always killed me to see Luna upset. Something as nice as her wasn’t allowed to have a bad day in my book.

And then I looked away from my Partner, and was reminded of the harsher reality that didn’t involve magical flying ponies that could talk with colorful pictures on their butts.

Hundreds of cars sat in the parking lot in front of me, just as dead as they had been when everything changed. In the distance, I saw the remains of the Bank of America Plaza tower that had been hit by an airplane when everything onboard went dead. Part of me wanted to compare it to the older events of 9/11, but that had hardly been the only building to come tumbling down from an impact with a former flying object the day the lights on the ground went out and the ones in the sky came on.

Up above everything, a colorful aurora danced all across the night sky, providing as much illumination as a full moon. I would have called it beautiful if its existence hadn’t caused a turn of events that ended in a death toll numbering in the billions world wide.

Not that I had any real proof that the multi-colored light was the cause of what had happened to the world. But ever since the dancing rainbow appeared, things had been impossibly out of whack. Technology beyond anything the level of a hand crank simply didn’t work. Gunpowder might as well have just been smelly dirt that made a loud popping sound, and even the old fashioned steam-powered ships and trains didn’t move, no matter how hot the fires burned.

It was as if some kind of trolling god had shown up to sell us magical wonders at the much too high price of every bit of scientific progress mankind had made since the fall of Rome.

I had talked to a former scientist about it once before he tried to leap to his death over how wrong the world had become a couple of years ago. His first theory was that heat no longer created pressure, or certain molecules no longer held kinetic energy no matter the temperature they existed at or…something. He lost me on the whole thing when he started talking about how that was also impossible, because we should have all been puddles of goo if that were the case, somehow.

What made it all a little worse was the reminder of everything that danced in the sky overhead. A dancing wave of colors of every hue possible just weaved around like a translucent sea stuck in the sky. The light pollution it created made it impossible to see the stars, but did a good enough job lighting things up. There was a lot of names for it: The Aurora, The World Wide Rainbow, God’s Middle Finger to Man, but most of us just went with The Aurora. The name was something familiar, something we could wrap our heads around as a species despite the fact that the only thing it had in common with the real Northern Lights was looks.

And then there were the magical creatures.

They had started showing up on and after A-day. From what I had gathered from Luna, she had just…wandered in on the street corner I found her on, dazed to the point a bunch of street thugs had been a threat to her. There was no magical portal or anything like that, and she had no idea how she had arrived either. All Luna had ever said were her first memories were moving through a thick fog and then she had appeared in the middle of the street.

Whenever she tried to remember anything before then, she just became more frustrated than a talking pony should have been allowed to be. Then either started crying at the complete loss of her past, or had a more angry reaction to the amnesia problem she shared with every other talking magical creature on the planet. And maybe the ones that couldn’t talk as well, but we couldn’t really ask them.

Not that she had been a total blank of course. The girl knew how to talk, and she might as well of been a walking calculator when it came to mathematics. Chemistry was also a subject she had apparently taken at Pony University, as well as physics and whatever ponies with horns studied to do the things they could do. She had a full working knowledge of spoken English, French, and German, although her ability to read even basic English was oddly lacking. And even though she knew nothing about her personal life before, Luna still knew much of the lore about everything that had come from Neverland with her.

Even after three years of being with her, it was still hard for me to fully comprehend.

But the ruins of a shopping mall weren’t really made for reminiscing. So we headed down to where we had parked, and stopped at a derelict suburban. Luna’s horn lit up, and the image waved a few seconds later to dissolve into that of a little wooden wagon that looked like it might have belonged in the early 1800s.

The thing wasn’t nearly that old of course. And it only might have looked like it belonged in the 19th century because there was no way someone would have made a wagon to be pulled by something that wasn’t that much bigger than a large dog. Sure, it didn’t have rubber tires like most of the other new wagons today, but those things were hard to keep filled and repaired even with Luna around to magically fix things. According to the pega-corn, wood was simple to mend compared to rubber.

“I still don’t see why you insist on making me leave our wagon outside and having us make multiple trips,” the pony grumbled as I put my back on top of the rest of our swag. “We would have been done an hour ago if we had it.”

I groaned and looked back at my Partner. “Because of Minnesota.”

Luna rolled her eyes and magicked her saddlebags of stuff into the cart. “That was over a year ago. I am no longer as trusting, and you are much more capable, not to mention well-equipped. I think we can afford to be a little more brazen these days.”

The fight ended there, and I was glad that it did. Dragging up memories of that little fiasco wasn’t good for my blood pressure.

Of course in hindsight, everything was 20/20. But when you’re only fifteen miles from the Mall of America and looking for some camping supplies on top of food and some new boots, the giant building that had been full of stuff before the sky got a dancing rainbow thrown across all of it seemed like a good idea. On the other hand, going anywhere near major population centers back when people had still been trying to scavenge for food in them was just plain retarded.

Luna had healed about three arrow wounds in my body after she pulled us away from a small mob of twenty some people I had been pretty sure wanted to eat her. We had also lost a makeshift cart that held everything we had because she couldn’t fly away fast enough with all the weight.

What really made me angry about the whole thing for the longest time was: Luna could have probably taken a mob of twenty humans easily. Any number of ponies I had since met over the years could have.

But at the same time, they couldn’t.

When it came to ponies, violence just wasn’t in their nature. Oh sure, there was the one in one hundred weirdo that liked to kick people in the face, but despite the fact that an earth pony was ten times stronger than the average human and could shatter rocks with bare hooves, most of them would just curl up and take a beating or run away rather than fight to defend themselves.

And more than one group of humans had figured out that creatures that didn’t defend themselves very well, but could do the work of five people per pony made pretty damn good slaves.

The head and shoulders colored pony had managed to toughen up a bit as time went on, thank God. But Luna still tended to scare off and incapacitate rather than kill anything that didn’t want to turn talking things into food. Of course her purity and all that was one of the reasons I liked her so…damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.

I shook my head to clear away the thoughts of the past, and went about taking a quick inventory of the wagon to see what all we had managed to grab on what would be our last trip into the mall.

There were ten pairs of rubber boots of middling size, and half a dozen heavy hunting coats in a camouflage pattern that I had snagged on top of five hoodies and several jeans of various sizes on top of several caps. And that was just the clothing.

The rest of the stuff wasn’t as lasting or valuable, but that was the problem when it came to digging through the remains of civilization. There was no food to be had of course, even if canned goods could have survived for more than a few years on their own, everything had long since been picked clean just a few months into the first year after technology failed to work. Most of the camping gear had been taken as well, not to mention most of the useful medicines, disinfectants and first aid supplies.

Cosmetics were still in plentiful supply, and most people hadn’t thought just rolled bolts of fabric were worth carrying on their way out of the cities, refugee camps, or wherever else they had been staying before moving on in search of food. Hand tools, pocket knives, hand sanitizer, toothbrushes along with all other forms of things needed for dental hygiene were still easy to pick up just about anywhere that asphalt and concrete held dominion instead of greener pastures. In the rush to find someplace better to be, most people left a lot of everyday items behind that had become very wanted now that time had passed, and us humans found ourselves missing some of the good things in life like dental care and playing cards.

And it was all there for the taking for anybody with a winged Partner.

“Will?”

The sound of my name brought me out of my mental tally/bragging, and I looked over to Luna. “Yeah?”

She pointed to the wagon with her hoof. “Hitch me up, would you?”

I looked over to the wagon and did my best to hide my grimace at what I was about to do before Luna picked up the front with her magic and slipped the top on. Then she just innocently waited for me to secure everything down below.

Now, it wasn’t the actual tying my Partner up in a harness that I detested. After being with Luna for over two years, touching the naked horse wasn’t really a problem for me. Especially since ponies liked having their ears scratched, their wings massaged, and their bellies rubbed.

Don’t even get me started on the belly rubs.

No, what I hated about attaching Luna to a cart was the fact that I was tying her to a cart…like a fucking horse. A stupid animal that we humans still used as a beast of burden, whipping and beating the things as they pulled whatever we’ve attached them to. But Luna wasn’t a stupid animal. Looks aside, she was a person. One of the most brave and caring creatures I had ever met, and…I felt like kicking myself for making her do all the heavy lifting.

Or maybe it was the fact that I had seen other ponies put in such positions against their will. A team of four stallions could pull a train down some tracks if they were cleared and maintained properly. And by that, I mean the tracks. Pony slaves didn’t get good maintenance beyond the food they ate.

If Luna knew about how any of this went through my head, she was good at not showing it. The lunar pony shifted around as I finished securing her straps, and looked back at me with a smile. “So, ready to go?”

And then came a bit more hesitation on my part that had little to do with the comparison of Luna to a horse, and more to do with how she wanted to, you know…fly.

With me.

And a cart she shouldn’t have been able to get off the ground with her relatively tiny wings. Not to mention hold up at the angle she was able to. My mind also raced with about half a dozen other things the little horsie did that were impossible when it came to lugging stuff in the air around.

There also might have been the fact I was well aware of the fact I could die from falling at the heights Luna needed to travel in order to reach our destination. Either that, or become permanently paralyzed when my not so aerodynamic body fell and smacked into the cold hard concrete.

“Will, I know you’re afraid of high places, but we need to get to the hotel soon and…” The pretty pony with her all too big eyes looked up at me while wearing a slightly downcast expression. “Do you not trust me? I know we have not been prospecting for very long, but we have flown together plenty of times. When have I ever dropped you-”

Even with the little cutsie stare she was given me, my fear and snarkiness managed to overpower Luna’s poniness. “Well there was that time in Manhattan, in the mountains over Montana, Lake Michigan-”

The pega-corn let out an animalistic groan. “Firstly, I had just about no practical experience flying the first time, the second time you were pulling on my tail, and it was not as if dropping you into one of the biggest puddles of water on the planet did anything but get you wet.”

“And cold!” I added with indignation.

Luna sighed and slumped a little bit. “Very well then, you do not have to get in the cart,” she said before a smirk appeared on her face along with a blue light around her horn.

“What the-no wait! I’ll get on the cart! I’ll get on the cart!” I shouted before I felt tightness all over my body where I was wearing clothes and a little tingle on my forehead in the space just above the eyes.

The flap of blue wings accompanied my ascent, and I heard Luna’s singsong voice in my ears. “Too late!” she said before her overly round pony head came to fill my vision. “And you really need to get over this silly fear of heights.”

-Break-

The only thing more terrifying than flying through the air while holding on a non-aerodynamic piece of transportation that was in no way meant to fly was flying through the air while holding onto nothing at all. It’s like skydiving, in reverse…without a parachute. Being hauled around by something that had no obvious reason to be up in the air without physical contact? Nothing to grab onto? Nothing to keep you from falling? That was scary.

And…okay look, it wasn’t that I didn’t trust Luna. I trusted her more than any other creature on the planet, no matter how many legs they walked around on. She saved my life less than two minutes after I met her, and was the only reason I had made it through the last three years. Semi-suicidal as she was or not. But that didn’t make it any easier to accept the nonsensical.

Luna could fly with wings that shouldn’t have been able to support her weight the way they did, shatter things that by all accounts should have left her hooves a mess of cracks…and don’t even get me started on the magical horn she had that could move things around with magic. Then there was the fact that she was a pega-corn, which was an oddity even among the magical creature community. In the three years since the ponies had appeared, she was the only one with all three kinds of magic that the two of us had ever seen.

So yeah, Luna was weird, even among all the weirdoes.

I managed to avoid wetting myself. Didn’t scream either, although that was more thanks to holding my mouth closed and the need to keep quiet than any natural bodily controls. After all, if nobody in their right mind would hang around a big grave city like Dallas. That just meant the only thing to hear me were the monsters and the crazies.

Thankfully, the trip to our resting place didn’t take long. Luna found a nice Marriott hotel not too far from the mall that hadn’t been completely ran sacked into until we got there. Thanks to the sliding window doors that opened enough to let people walk out of a third story building from the top floor, we didn’t even have to hide our cart. Getting in wasn’t a problem of course, we humans were foolish, and never counted on a race of interdimensional alien equines to suddenly appear one day with telekinetic powers. With those, Luna simply unlocked the door from the inside and slid it open.

The room was your typical hotel room. Single bed, cheap coffee maker, little fridge and a pair of two dollar water bottles that I had no intention of drinking from until after they had been poured out and cleaned properly. Sure it was a little overly cautious, but…that had kept me alive about as much as Luna had these past three years.

Luna unloaded the wagon while I took a few moments to make sure the rooms around us really were clear and got an extra chair to block the door since there was no reason not to be paranoid. She always rolled her eyes at my precautions, but…the little single packs of coffee most of the good hotel rooms still had always managed to bribe her into not complaining.

By the time I was back, the light blue pega-corn was done unpacking. Aside from the swag we had liberated from the enclosed shopping center to be doled out when we got back home, there was plenty of our usual camping supplies. Luna had already poured some feed for herself into a bowl, and was heating a cooking pot with her magic that probably contained soup from the empty can that was laying near her hooves.

Of course the soup inside the metal container wasn’t what it said on the label, when the can had a label that is. Unicorn magic had made resealing old cans an easy process, so mankind was still able to hold onto its average temperature food storage thanks to our quadruped friends.

While waiting for the pony to finish the whole instant chef thing, I took off my rubber boots and got some lighter clothes that were better suited to an indoor climate. I managed to hide behind the bed while I changed to avoid teasing from the creature that walked around butt naked about my nudity aversion.

Once the food was cooked to Luna’s liking, she pulled every drop of it out of the metal pot and into my own bowl with her magic while I got some eating utensils. After I waited a few seconds for the stuff to cool, I sat down on the floor beside her and took a bite.

“How is it?” Luna asked me hesitantly. From the way she was looking at me, not to mention her voice, I could tell it was one of those questions girls put too much importance on. It was weird that a species with nothing in common with humanity physically besides the most basic of stuff could be so much like us mentally.

“Good,” I told her, speaking truthfully. While not the best cook, the pega-corn was the most decent field chef I had met, able to take things that were just lying around in the rubble and turn them into something edible. Even meat. Which didn’t bother Luna as much as it did most of the other herbivores.

Although these days…we had to reach a bit of a compromise on the subject of munching on living creatures. I didn’t eat anything cute, and Luna would cook it with her maximum amount of skill.

After a few seconds, I decided to expand the compliment just a bit. “You sure you're not talented with baking or something?”

Luna spared a glance at her butt mark for a moment, then looked back to me. “No,” she said with a little smile. “I know I’m no Sugar Bell or Apple Strudel.”

The sadness I picked up from her voice made me wince. Idiot! I scolded myself. I had known Luna’s inability to discover the secret meeting of her ‘cutie mark’ as the ponies called them, was a sore subject for her. While tons of other ponies were off doing things with an unnatural level of skill, we had coasted from job to job and place to place without Luna being able to find a proper fit.

At least the places that would have human-pony partnerships. We tended to stay away from the villages and towns where the ponies had to wear bridles. It was kind of creepy how quickly America, a country where the belief in freedom and equality reached almost religious level of fervor could descend back into slavery within three years just because the slaves looked different than us.

Of course, the path to finding just what the hell a crescent moon meant wasn’t all that clear. Most ponies had it easy. Food was usually a sure bet for a cook, tools meant handyman, flashy stuff on unicorns usually meant they had a higher repertoire of spells, and a pegasus with anything weather related meant…well, weather. And all of them possessed an almost instinctual knowledge of how to do their jobs.

But Luna had something that didn’t really match up with anything. On top of which, she had a horn and wings, and her being as big as most guy ponies had to mean something too. But, her larger than average wings didn’t make her the best flier, and while her magical power way outstripped most unicorns, Luna said her talents were more route knowledge than personal genius after taking a few lessons from our hometown’s local magic talent.

Hell, we weren’t even the best prospector team for our town. That title belonged to a pegasus and this other girl who’d been going after an archeology degree of all things before A-Day.

But at last we were the number two team…by default. No one else was stupid enough to walk two days just to get to Dallas and risk their lives to loot from the dead city.

“So I was thinking,” Luna continued as she finished off her oats. “Once Winter sets in and we get our share of the harvest, we should try and find another lumberyard. Try and build a real house.”

I tensed. I kind of hoped Luna didn’t see, but…the blue pony could read me like a book. “You sure? I was kind of hoping we could head to Florida for the Winter.” It was our usual modus operandi. Come to a town in the Spring, take work in the Summer through the Fall, and head out come Winter. It kept things simple and clean.

Luna’s face took in a slightly pained look as her ears flattened. “But we have friends in Ponyville.”

The mention of our current home made we wince. I was pretty sure the humans in the community had meant it as a joke, but the equines had thought it was very fitting. “We had friends in Salt Lake too, and New Buckingham.” The former of which I was more than glad to leave behind. “Luna, this is what we do. You’ve seen Ponyville. No town walls, no real militia. One monster attack or slaver raid, and the place is going to fall apart.”

I sighed, and put down my bowl to run a hand through my hair “Look, I know you want to settle down. I do too. We spent a year running south to find someplace that isn’t covered in snow half the year and can grow enough food to go around. But until we can find someplace that can stand up to something more than a light breeze, that’s just a waste of time.”

A paranoid idea? Yes. But I had seen way too many places burned down and looted for glorified TV dinners to lie to myself about any of what was bound to happen one day. The only reason Ponyville had lasted these three years was because of its out of the way location, plenty of ponies to grow food, and a hell of a lot of luck.

Having to swallow the truth put a scowl on Luna’s face. “You know, this perfect town you want us to find? Safety, food, work, room…everything else. Even if we do manage to come across it, what makes you think they’re just going to let a couple of strangers in?” she said before spreading her wings and upping the glow on her horn. “Especially one like me.”

That took the wind out my sails. Luna was pretty sensitive about her double heritage. It was one of the things that kept her apart from other ponies. Not out of spite other anything…most of the time. It was just that in a species that put everything around what they could and couldn’t do, the majority of the quadrupeds didn’t know what to think about Luna, who could apparently do it all.

As I didn’t have an answer for her, I could only scoot over to the pony and place my hand behind her head to invite her into a little hug. Luna drew in and placed her head on my shoulder to complete the action to the best of her ability. She didn't use her forelegs. Hooves that could shatter stone weren’t the best thing to touch people with.

Not that I was made of glass, especially with Luna as my Partner. Still, hooves were hard. Hugs were supposed to be soft.

And…just thinking about that made me realize I was probably in the most fucked up version of a post apocalyptic world there was. With guys thinking about hugs.

I pulled away from the embrace and smiled at her. “So, you want to get ready for bed?”

Luna thought about it for a second, and then nodded. “I will draw the bath. You gather the grooming tools.”

When most people first encountered ponies, they thought the unicorns were the weirdest of them. And I’ll admit, the telekinesis was pretty up there on the freakiness scale. The ones that could do more than just toss stuff around with their horns like the magus of our town were even more-so. But even though it was fictional, scifi had kind of prepared people for things like force beams, force fields, just pulling things from nowhere and teleportation. At the very least we weren’t completely baffled by them.

But ponies with pegasi abilities? They were something else.

Physically manipulating weather, just making clouds and tornadoes by flying in a circle, or kicking the rain out of them was just…different. It was something we hadn’t been prepared for by the power of our imaginations, and thus, I was more freaked out by it than by the pretentious unicorn that had the title of top magical horn in our town.

Still, three years being Partnered up with a winged pony had allowed me to get used to her just making clouds appear out of thin air before she kicked them to make rain fall out. More rain than they should have even been capable of possessing.

Before settling into the bath, Luna stretched her right rear leg out for cleaning. Since she didn’t fight me like a normal horse, I was able to take it in my hand from the side and worked a hoof pick to help dislodge bits of grime, asphalt, and everything else that had gotten stuck in her hoof since the day began while doing my best to avoid her frog. Then, I repeated the process three times for her other hooves. Polish and filing would have to wait until we got back home though.

As the rain cloud poured water like a shower head, Luna lit up her horn and I watched the heated water fill the room with steam, despite the fact that it was coming from something made of ice crystals. Then, she stepped inside and directed me closer while the warm water ran over her body for a few seconds before stopping it to leav the pony just a little damp.

I applied the curry comb to her rump, working the rubbery teeth over her coat to help get out the dust and dirt that had been collected during the day as I moved it all over her rear areas in a circular motion. Then came the brush for her back, and face brush for her neck. Luna had once told me that our daily grooming was one of the most enjoyable feelings in her life, which explained the moans of pleasure she let out every time.

Once I was done with her coat, mane care came next. Shampoo was put in her damp mane that I ran through with my fingers and scratched into her scalp. The process had Luna collapsing into the tub with her head resting on the edge when I started working the area around her ears. “Have I mentioned how much I love you today, my Comrade?” the pastel pony asked since she managed to keep her tongue in her mouth this time around. Usually, it just lolled out in a pretty good Homer Simpson impression.

I did my best to ignore the feelings in the pit of my stomach the question generated. “Only a couple of times.”

I also did my best not to think about the people that were outright married and sleeping with their Partners like I had encountered since moving to Ponyville. The kind of sleeping that involved sex. With the private parts of both ponies and people being working together rather than being worked on by the other. Which also presented its own set of disturbing images.

Not that I was one of those guys that opposed pony-person marriages. To each his own I always said. As long as they kept the X-rated stuff in the bedroom where it belonged anyway.

“Well I do. Or your magic fingers at least,” she added before moving back under the rushing water to rinse herself off.

Then came the quick drying, followed by Luna cleaning out the shower-tub for me to use. A quick rear and kick of her hooves had the cloud pouring out water even faster than before, and the basin was filled up enough for its purposes in short order. After that, she brought the cloud over to the sink and filled it up with more hot water after putting in the stopper.

Once everything was finished, she turned near the door and smirked. “Are you certain you would not like some help? I could at least scrub your back.”

I tensed at her teasing tone. “Luna.”

“What?” she asked in a totally fake innocent voice. “You just got finished rubbing me down from top to bottom. Not to mention all the time I have spent with you, completely nude. Yet here I stand, denied the vision of one that trust with my life.”

I took off my shirt and tossed it onto the half empty towel rack. “There, you happy?”

In response, Luna actually went through an overdone motion of thinking about something, tapping her chin and hmmmming for a few seconds. Then she giggled and shrugged. “It is enough…for now.”

I felt like throwing my washcloth at her, but she turned and left the room before I could.

With that over with, I got completely unclothed and relaxed into the hot water to clean off a good layer of work and travel. After that, I just laid back and let my mind drift. And with Luna’s little bit of verbal promiscuity, I couldn’t help but land on a topic I would rather have avoided.

Although I had been with Luna since everything fell apart, we had never really been a couple. Sure, I thought better of her than any person or pony on the planet, and had traded the chance of living in a pure human community more than once rather than leave her, but…the whole romance thing? That had never even been an issue until we found a place to settle for the summer.

And with any luck, it would just turn out to be a phase she was going through.

Time enough in the tub to let the water cool and my hands to become pruny told me it was time to get out.

After toweling off, I made it to the mirror, tore open a pack of disposable razors we had liberated from the hygiene aisle of a pharmacy, and cleaned the mirror off to take a good look at myself.

Unlike what had been advertised, three years on the road, living in a world of magic and monsters had not turned my body into a buff barbarian-type with sculpted muscles that could stop steel like it was supposed to have done. Sure, I was a bit thicker in some areas and leaner than others than living in a society where most everything from travel to lifting heavy objects could be accomplished by sitting down in the right kind of contraption, but not enough to prove that movies and television hadn’t lied to us since the moment they were invented.

The one thing I did have plenty of was scars. Luna’s magic could heal wounds, but that didn’t mean the reminders weren’t going to disappear with them. And with the type of life my pony and me led, there were a lot of them. Little bits of uneven skin all around my chest and belly marked where pointy objects had poked me on numerous occasions, and two long red lines across my chest served as grim reminders that swords and battle axes really hurt. Then there were the bite marks that came in every size, all over my body from lions, tigers, bears, and the real animals that even made those things scream and run away.

No, despite three years of experience that taught me how to use ye olden weapons, other experiences that taught me to favor the stuff that could kill things without getting close enough to get stabbed, bitten, or acid sprayed in my face, and the Gifts provided by Luna, I did not look anything like one of those action-adventure medieval times movie types. Just a fit guy with black hair, brown eyes, and more scars than a human being should be allowed to have. In fact, the only part of me that hadn’t been marked by anything stronger than a razor was my face.

Which I was more than grateful for. Scar causing damage there had a tendency to kill people.

Once I was done shaving, I let the water go and gathered everything worth stealing from the bathroom in the plastic trash bag they left along with the can. Then, halfway to my silk pajamas, I stopped. Seeing the dirt on them that had been put there by me earlier, I just...groaned when I thought of how this was going to go in front of Luna.

Still, there wasn’t anything to be done about it. So I just put on some clean underwear and headed out into the hotel room.

Luna looked up from the pack that stored all our books, and her too expressive eyes widened in surprise for a couple of secs. “Oh…oh my, I didn’t-um…you…”

“Not. One. Word,” I warned her before tossing the clothes onto the floor. The unspoken part of the threat shut Luna's mouth, and let me get into bed. Cheap sheets made me wish I had something between me and them, and then the other reason wearing pajamas was a good idea landed on the top of the bed’s covers to lay down on her belly, pressed up against the lump in the sheets that my body made.

And like every night as of late, I was forced to remind myself that when I slept with a pony, it was in a completely non-sexual way. We had simply become used to the contact during the first winter up in the north, when body heat from the pega-corn did more for me than blankets ever could.

A second after Luna situated herself, a dark square object filled my vision. “Read me this one.”

I sighed at the request, and gave her a deadpan stare. “Shouldn’t you be the one doing the reading? It’ll help you learn faster,” I said a bit sweeter at the end, trying to bribe her with the efforts of hard work.

“True,” Luna admitted. “But it doesn’t sound as good, and it’s slow and….“ She paused to put on a tiny pout and blink a few times in a way that added the tiniest bit of moisture to her eyes. “Please?”

I looked at the title of the hardcover, and sighed. “But we’ve already read this one.”

“That just means I know it’s the kind of story I like,” she replied. “A tale of adventure, with larger than life heroes fighting an impossible evil foe using magic and swordsmanship. A story of two friends, bound together by both duty and magic, carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders. And a bit of romance on the side, involving a few people that are a little too…sensible to let it control their lives.”

I rolled onto my stomach and faced away from the pega-corn to take full advantage of the light provided by Luna’s horn. “Fine,” I relented, not wanting to admit the fact that I had given up back when she gave me the puppy-dog eyes.

“A cold wind gusted through the night, across the snow-covered land where men had been killing one another for the past three days. The air was crisp, if not so icy as was expected for this time of year…”

We got midway through the fourth chapter when Luna finally called it quits, and I returned to resting on my back before she crawled on top of me to try and snuggle her way through the blanket. After getting situated, the pega-corn laid her head down on the same pillow I was using, and I heard her light snores in my ear moments later.

A few seconds after that, I closed my eyes, and was wrapped in dreams that reminded me of just how the impossibility of this world had come to be.

Author's Note

And yet here's another story that wouldn't leave my brain alone until it was out there. My latest shot at an action style story.

If you've noticed the similarities in this story's idea with ones like Ariel and Dies the Fire, good for you, that's where I accidentally got the inspiration for this while replying to a blog post. And not to worry, the main character isn't going to turn into a whiny little bitch that leaves his poor unicorn after she endures weeks of torture because he wanted to sleep with some tramp. Nor is some invisible guiding power going to Dues Ex Machina every decision to be made and action to be performed.

But other than that, I can offer no other guarantees because...you know...spoilers