Fallout: Lavender Wastelander

Twilight gently pushed open the hallway door and made her way into the room, pistol held at the ready in case another ghoul leapt out to attack them.

She blinked. A room filled with empty cells, illuminated by a lone lightbulb hanging from the water-damaged cork-tile ceiling, and a ring of a half-dozen office desks arranged around a central desk.

The unicorn stallion was still splayed open on top of it, too.

They had been in the room before.

“Great, we’re going in circles now for no logical reason,” Electrum grumbled from the doorway. “Fucking dark magic.”

Twilight concurred. With how saturated the air was with dark magic, it had started to become easy to ignore—similar to the body adjusting to a cold bath after the initial shock—but that didn’t mean its tangible effects weren’t happening.

The sound of Pinkie’s grenade machine gun sounded off again, this time from one floor above them. It was so close, yet unreachable—like the sound was taunting them to guess how close rescue was.

Because it was a taunt.

The camp had been a mile from the building, and everyone had stripped down for bed because sleeping in combat armor was a one-way ticket to back pain. Her friends likely weren’t halfway to the building yet.

Twilight turned away from the autopsy to Electrum, who had remained at the door. They had found her pistol and ammo thrown haphazardly into a random closet three rooms ago as they searched for the stairs.

“The building is toying with us,” Twilight said as she walked towards the door. She puffed out her chest as she walked. She had dealt with dark magic before. A labyrinth wasn’t impossible to navigate. “It won’t beat us. Let’s see if doubling back has any effect.”

“Better than walking in another circle,” Electrum said as Twilight passed her.

Twilight halted as the walls, floor, and ceiling undulated as if thousands of snakes writhed just beneath every surface of the hall.

Walls lengthened and shrank, competing for the roof and floor like a game of tug-of-war, and the battle cry was the sound of masonry grinding under stress.

The racket had Twilight cover her ears and hunker down next to Electrum. Cracks formed, and pebble-sized shrapnel flew from them as liquid-silver gushed through the opening seams, all the while the walls continued to bend themselves at odd angles.

Then, all at once, the movement stopped and the hallway grew quiet. Only the sound of Electrum’s rapid-fire cursing reached Twilight’s ears.

“I’ve never seen dark magic do that!” Twilight exclaimed as she stood up so fast that her hooves left the ground, sending concrete dust flying off her like a sandstorm. Only Discord’s magic had come close.

The magic saturating Dunwich had gone beyond simply sending them on looping paths. It was rearranging the very building around them to the point the hallway had been transfigured into a parody of a funhouse mirror maze. It was no longer a straight corridor, with mirror-lined walls turning at sharp, sudden angles to the point Twilight could no longer see the original endpoint of the hall.

“What now?” Electrum asked as she stood up as well, trailing dust. She was clearly shaken from the tone of her voice, her eyes shifting around to quickly glance at the dozens, maybe hundreds of their reflections in the mirrors.

“I don’t know, we—” Twilight started, but cut herself short as one of the new mirrors writhed like the walls had

Twilight spun at once to face it, Electrum joining her.

The mirror lost cohesion, transforming into a pool of silver that was held impossibly vertical despite being a liquid with no container. The surface rippled like a pond that had a stone cast into it, but it rapidly settled back down.

Instead of the distorted reflections of the other mirrors, it clarified into a window which revealed an unpainted concrete room illuminated by a lone lightbulb hanging from the ceiling.

A human woman was tied facing upwards on a large inclined plank, her head resting lower than her feet. Twilight couldn’t make out her facial features past her blond hair as another human woman forced a large cloth over the bound woman’s mouth and nose.

“What the hay?” Twilight cursed.

Her expletive had matched Electrum’s, “Oh, fuck me…”

A third woman came into view with a large metal bucket that sloshed heavily with water. She reached the two other women and stopped by the bound woman’s head. The third woman lifted the bucket up and slowly began to pour water onto the rag.

The bound woman spluttered and coughed and tried to turn her head, but the one holding the cloth to her face had it so tight that it kept her head locked into place.

“What the fuck!?” Twilight yelled. She started to rush for the mirror, as if she could jump through it to save the woman, but Electrum grabbed her arm.

Twilight spun to face the other mare, who shook her head with a small, bemused and slightly sad smile.

“Twilight, that’s me going through torture resistance training.”

That was training?

When Twilight had heard the term waterboarding, she had pictured someone being tied to a surfboard or a raft and pushed out to sea to die of exposure. What was revealed by the mirror was somehow worse. From the gargles and gasps of the mirror-Electrum, she was drowning, or at least her body acted like it was.

“Are humans just made of crazy!?” Twilight exclaimed as she yanked her arm away from Electrum and threw both hands into the air. Twilight already knew the answer, and it was ‘most certainly’, but asking it regardless kept her sane when faced with such absurdities. It was a release valve for her stress, in a way.

“We had to learn how to resist torture in case of capture,” Electrum said with a sigh as she pinched the bridge of her nose. “Don’t Equestrian intelligence agencies do the same thing?”

“No!” Twilight gasped. “Torturing prisoners is illegal under every international treaty on Equestria!”

“Thought so,” Electrum said with a heavy sigh that sent her shoulders slumping.

Twilight backstepped. Why did Electrum sound disappointed? Torture was just wrong.

She looked away from the insane mare and saw another mirror down the path had started to warble.

“The building might be leading us somewhere,” Twilight said as she pointed out the next transforming mirror.

Electrum turned and regarded it with a frown.

“Yeah, and if the building can shift on us, we have to play its game by its rules,” Electrum groused. “I fucking hate dark magic.”

With nowhere to go but where the building wanted them to go, Twilight headed down the pathway between the mirrors, with Electrum in tow.

The hallway behind them creaked and groaned as the way they came shifted into a solid wall.

There would be no doubling back.

Twilight hoped the building wouldn’t give them a reason to need to try and go back. But based on her past adventures, it probably would.

She swallowed hard and forced the thought away as they reached the transforming mirror just in time for it to clarify into a scene familiar to Twilight.

Beyond the mirror was a room in her castle. Specifically her magic testing chamber. She could see her pony self as well as a gold colored unicorn mare. They faced each other with a large flat rock on the floor between them.

“Now, Electrum,” Twilight heard herself say on the other side of the mirror, “Patience is key.”

“Yes, ma’am,” mirror-Electrum said as she levitated an enchanted chisel and hammer. She looked aside to an open copy of Astrolathe the Amazing’s Compendium of Astral Arcana, which sat on a wooden lectern the size of a garden gnome.

“You know,” Twilight said as mirror-Electrum made the first score into the stone with the chisel. “You were right under my nose and I didn’t even know you were a human.”

“It’s my job to blend in and get to know people,” Electrum said as she stared into the mirror. Her mirror self had begun making progress with the rune, making heavier strikes to form deeper gouges. “I remember this. My first successful rune. You were a good teacher.”

“You were a good student,” Twilight said with a smile, despite the oppressive energy in the air.

The ghost of a genuine smile threatened to haunt Electrum’s face, but like a specter, it quickly vanished.

“Sorry.” She looked away from Twilight, and the memory Twilight considered a happy one, even if it was formed with someone who had turned out to be a spy.

“For what?” Twilight asked quietly. She turned her head to track Electrum drifting away before the mirror had finished the scene.

“For being born on the wrong side,” Electrum said, staring ahead. She dodged a few mirrors that had sprouted up from the floor like a forest of bathroom fixtures. “I don’t hate Equestria, or Equestrians. In fact, I rather like your country.”

“You can always change sides,” Twilight offered as she rushed as fast as her knee would let her to catch up. “Unless you’re like Glenn, I can forgive you for lying to me about being a human. You’re just a soldier on the opposite side.”

“Things are too complicated for me to change sides,” Electrum said weakly. Twilight doubted Electrum was saying what she really wanted to say, but didn’t press the mare for answers. She didn’t have the time to, either, as Electrum glanced at her. “But if we had been born on the same side, I’m sure we could have been friends.”

Who was to say that being enemies meant they couldn’t be friends? If Twilight knew anything about the human world, it was that things got messy and complicated fast. Especially relationships.

“We still can,” Twilight said. She forced a smile and held out a hand. “Friends?”

“Before I answer that,” Electrum said bitterly. “Answer this question for me. What do you think of this phrase? One death is a tragedy, but a million is a statistic.”

Twilight already knew her answer, but before she could reply, three mirrors shifted at once and Electrum jerked in surprise.

“Jumpscared by a bunch of reflections,” Electrum grumbled as the first mirror clarified into a pegasus-eye view of a ruined town. Twilight knew Rock Bend from photographs in Equestrian newspapers. No building had escaped being riddled with bullets or burned down to the ground, and there were blood stains in the street.

The second and third mirror continued to shift and warble. As if waiting on Twilight’s response.

Perhaps it was.

“Well, my theory on the mirrors going ‘A Christmas Carol’ on us is holding out,” Electrum said with a heavy sigh as she averted her eyes from the mirror. Twilight didn’t want to look at the ruined town any longer, either. “Past and present are out of the way.”

So by Twilight’s guess, that left the future.

Twilight quickly glanced at each of the still-liquid mirrors. They were mutable and ever changing. Such as the future was.

Something was off about the whole setup.

“My opinion is that the statistic is a compilation of a million individual tragedies,” Twilight said firmly as she narrowed her eyes at Electrum.

That was when the second mirror clarified, revealing Electrum in her human-pony form, hunched over a device inside a dark room. She tinkered frantically with a boxy device the size of a backpack—a comparison easy to make because of the hiking backpack frame that the device was mounted to. The panels of the device were covered in dials and rune-embossed plates. Copper wires ran between dozens of vacuum tubes and coiled around multi-colored crystals.

Atop the device was a white dish, like the Rockland satellite relays but in extreme miniature. In the background, Twilight could hear the sounds of drums, cursing, and off-key singing about living the life of a raider.

“What will you be doing at the Knock?” Twilight asked as she slowly turned towards Electrum.

“I share your opinion on the statistic,” Electrum said. “And your countrymen are far more suited to fight off raiders than what General Beckett plans for you.”

“And what’s that?” Twilight asked calmly.

Like it had been waiting, the third mirror clarified into a view of Canterlot in the distance as-seen from somewhere on the ground below. The sun was high in the sky, but low enough to frame the majestic city in gold as the light bounced off the white walls and the cascading waterfall.

A flash with the intensity of a star being born seared Twilight’s eyes before she had time to throw a hand in front of her face. A second, artificial sun had dawned in the middle of Canterlot.

“Genocide,” Electrum said as Twilight dropped her hand from over her eyes. She blinked out the spots, her vision clarifying to reveal an oddly calm Electrum, who had made no motion to shield her eyes. “The DIA noted down the coordinates of what cities they could. Back then, they were a fraction of the size they were two-centuries ago… so if General Beckett has his way, tens of millions will die.”

A quick glance back at the mirror revealed that a mushroom cloud and falling debris were all that remained of Canterlot.

“So you want me to accept that you’re going to send raiders to Equestria?” Twilight asked, her voice raised, but not to the point it was a yell. Something was wrong. Everything was falling into place too easily.

“I’m trying my best to minimize civilian casualties,” Electrum said as she started down the hall.

Twilight quickly followed, but this time was able to keep up with Electrum’s slower pace.

“So why not tell me where SOCOM’s headquarters are so I can help you defeat this General Beckett person?”

"I'm trying to keep casualties low," Electrum said. Her face twisted with sudden displeasure. "I never said I was on your side."

Twilight frowned.

"It would be easy for us to rip the information from her." Twilight heard her own voice from a nearby mirror.

She stopped to come face-to-face with a dark purple alicorn adorned in a cruel suit of spiked black armor. It was like raider gear had mixed with plate mail.

Nightmare Twilight.

“You’re a Princess, and an Alicorn… just reach out and take it.”

Dark black lightning danced across Nightmare Twilight’s full, unbroken horn, and purple-black smoke dripped unnaturally from the corners of her lambent-green-glowing eyes.

Twilight slowly turned to Electrum. She stood there, staring at her, unmoving and unblinking.

Like a puppet without their strings being pulled.

The spell would be an easy one—in theory at the very least—but the power needed could injure her mending horn.

Twilight inhaled slowly and prepared herself for what she was about to do, despite the gut feeling that what she was about to do was a bad idea. However, she might have only one opportunity to get it right.

She grit her teeth and dug deep within herself. Down and down to a small, buried, hidden part of her essence.

The fur of her brow seared as black lightning danced across her horn, arcing backwards to hit her. Each bolt was like a hammerblow to the temple.

A ball of pure darkness hit Electrum in the face, the impact sending her into a backstep with a scream.

A scream that was joined by a second, smaller scream, which sounded like a tea-kettle with a spout the size of a pinhole.

A fat, white worm fell out of Electrum’s ear onto the floor. It curled into a ball, and Electrum raised a booted hoof. She brought it crashing down onto the worm, splattering it like a water balloon filled with yellow ichor.

“Fucking dark magic!” Electrum screamed.

Twilight wheeled on her nightmarish reflection with a scowl.

“You’re not the first dark mage to mess with my head,” Twilight said as she narrowed her eyes at her reflection. “Glenn.”

“Oh, you are such a treat,” Glenn said with his own voice but still in Nightmare Twilight’s form. He chuckled and slowly clapped his hands together. “Dark magic to fight dark magic—without a black book, I should add—and you saw through the little earworm giving Electrum stage directions. Bravo… you would make a perfect apprentice.”

Twilight wanted to drag the reflection out of the mirror and stomp it into shards.

“Fat chance!” Twilight yelled as she tried to flare her horn, only to be rewarded with sparks and the sensation of a nail driving through her skull.

“Burn off your medicine already?” Glenn chortled as he studied Twilight as if she were under a magnifying glass. “I could teach you methods that need no horn. You have the potential to even surpass me in abilities… if you're willing to learn.”

The cocky, arrogant, smug, malicious blight on the planet.

“No,” Twilight growled. She leaned closer to the mirror and her voice rumbled in the back of her throat. “I am going to find you, and when I do, I will destroy you to the point that microbes won’t suffer having to eat what’s left of you.”

“Heh, good one,” Glenn laughed as the reflection leaned back in mock fear, then straightened up. “My turn for a one liner… I think it’s time I unleash Hel upon the Earth.”

Nightmare Twilight’s lips pursed as Glenn let out a single sharp whistle.

“I suggest you start running,” Glenn said, staring at Nightmare Twilight’s fingernails. Twilight could hear something charging towards them from behind the wall that had formed to block their path. “He hasn’t had supper yet.”

A crash resounded from the wall with enough force to crack and buckle it inwards. The blow sent the rest of the hall shuddering like an earthquake. It was joined by the deafening sound of metal grinding on stone as a metallic muzzle the size of Twilight’s head forced open a breach into the cracked wall.

The large muzzle sniffed the air, then drew back and howled like an angle-grinder meeting piano strings. The sound bounced off the walls, sending every hair on her body standing on end.

Her vision spun as Electrum yanked her, and before she could protest, Electrum had thrown her over her shoulders.

“Fuck this, we’re leaving!”

<>~<>~<>

“I’m buying explosives next time I visit a town!” Twilight yelled as she flew beside Electrum, clutching her backpack to her chest. She pumped her wings furiously to keep up with how fast the mare ran through the twisting, labyrinthine corridors.

They needed the speed as Hel was hot on their hooves. The maddened howls of the dire-timberwolf that chased them were a discordant roar of industrial equipment consuming an orchestra. Their only saving grace was the creature’s own weight. An entire scrapyard’s worth of pissed-off metal wasn’t meant to turn on a dime, and each corner that they took sent the metal claws behind them screeching on concrete.

They took another corner, and the steel demon behind them skidded uncontrollably until it slammed into a wall. Twilight turned back to see Hel remove himself from a crater the size of a taxi carriage.

“We must go faster, we must go faster,” Twilight repeated in a mantra.

“I’m going as fast as I’ll get!” Electrum yelled as she took another corner at high speed. She grabbed the wall and used it to spin herself around the corner.

Like the last corridor, there were no doors to be seen. Only mirrors. There was nowhere to hide, and running wouldn’t be an option forever. Glenn could change the hallways if he wanted to. Hel’s issues with navigating the halls were intentional at best to extend the chase, or worse, an oversight by Glenn that he could correct if he wanted to.

And they couldn’t just teleport away from the beast. It would take them back to the trapped room.

Which would be somewhere not in front of Hel…

“Electrum, teleport us!” Twilight yelled.

The flash of light was quickly drowned out by smoke.

Twilight slammed face-first into a cinderblock wall as she failed to slow herself in time. She bounced away and landed in a heap atop her backpack, Electrum tripped over her a split second afterwards in the smoky cell.

Twilight grunted in pain as Electrum wasted no time in rolling off of her and onto her own back on the floor.

“T-that,” Electrum said through ragged pants as she leaned up, “was some quick thinking.”

“It’s not the first time I’ve been chased,” Twilight replied as she pushed herself up to a resting position on her knees. She vented the smoke from the cell with a wing flap, revealing that the door was thankfully still open. “Looks like our way out is still clear.”

“Then let’s not waste any time,” Electrum said, standing up. She reached a hand down to Twilight, which she accepted. Electrum then nodded to the floor. “Do you think you can destroy the runes so we can teleport away?”

Given the circumstances, it might be their only option. She hadn’t felt anything try to attack her while she had used her dark magic, but Glenn could have been holding things back. There were so many unknowns with dark magic, which was why Twilight rarely ever used it.

“Maybe,” Twilight said as she knelt down and opened her bag to retrieve her medicine. She unscrewed the jar lid and frowned.

It was already down by a third.

She had burned off a full application of medicine after just one purification. There were dozens of runes.

“No, too many runes to purify, and there could always be another teleportation trap,” Twilight said while she reapplied her medicine. “Any suggestions from you?”

“Yeah,” Electrum said with a nod to Twilight’s backpack. “If we’re going to be running, I don’t want you slowed down by gear.”

“Good idea,” Twilight said as she finished with her medicine and replaced it back into the pack. She then stood up and held the pack out for Electrum.

Electrum winced after she took the pack and put it on.

“What the hell do you have in this thing?” Electrum gasped. “It feels like this was most of the weight I was carrying when I picked you up.”

“There’s a lot in there,” Twilight said. “Alchemy manuals to teach wasteland doctors how to make penicillin and other medicine, seeds for many plants used in alchemy, seeds for food crops, and a lot of other things I thought could help improve the living conditions of the average wastelander.”

“Of course,” Electrum said with a sigh as she stepped out of the cell.

“Is helping people a bad thing?” Twilight asked as she flew beside Electrum.

“Not at all,” Electrum said with a shake of her head. “You’re just making it hard for me to think I’m on the right side in all of this.”

Twilight raised an eyebrow. Electrum had been under Glenn’s influence while they were in the hallway of mirrors.

“How much of our previous conversation was controlled by you?” Twilight asked while they crossed the room towards the exit.

“Most of it,” Electrum said dourley. “I wasn’t aware of that thing in my head. I could move and speak on my own, but it was like there was a voice in my ear pushing me to take our conversation in certain directions.” She then spit on the ground. “The fucker ripped control away from me at the end. When he tried tempting you.”

“I’m going to kill him,” Twilight said bitterly as they reached the door that led to the next room. The lab. “Not offering him a way out or a chance to back down. He’s a monster that’s even worse than King Sombra.”

Twilight pushed open the door that led into the next room.

“So how are we going to get to him past the guard dog?” Electrum asked as they both passed through the door.

Twilight frowned.

How was she going to keep a giant hungry wolf from killing them both? What would Fluttershy try to do? She’d try to win the starving wolf over. But they didn’t have enough food for something that large.

Or did they?

Her eyes landed on the corpse of the unicorn stallion.

“Have you ever heard the expression that there are no bad pets, just bad owners?” Twilight asked as her stomach twisted into a knot. She didn’t want to say her idea yet. It was… wrong, but it might work. Glenn had starved his pet to make it violent.

“I don’t see how that’s—” Electrum began, but Twilight could see out of the corner of her eye that Electrum had caught where Twilight was looking, and came to the same conclusion. “Oh, that’s fucked up but resourceful. But will it work?”

Fluttershy was able to stop a charging, injured manticore by staying calm and not running away from it.

“No clue,” Twilight said with a shake of her head. Timberwolves and manticores were both creatures of the Everfree. She slowly levitated up the butchered body, doing her best to avoid looking directly at it. “Only one way to find out.”

Copying the pursed lips of Nightmare Twilight, the real Twilight let out a sharp whistle.

Hel answered with a far-off but still ear-splitting howl.

“If this doesn’t work, I’m haunting you,” Electrum said as she took up a spot beside Twilight.

“You’re not going to hide?” Twilight asked. She could hear the impacts of Hel slamming into walls as it took corners. They had a few moments.

Electrum shook her head. “No. I owe you for saving me, so if this fails, I’ll distract him and you run.”

“And why do you care if I survive?” Twilight asked. “You said it yourself that we’re enemies.”

“That doesn’t mean I have to be an omnicidal cunt,” Electrum calmly replied. “I was in control when I told you I wanted to minimize casualties in the war against Equestria. The sniper teams I convinced General Beckett and President Eden to send were supposed to target VIPs. Your country has a tendency to roll over when your leadership is gone. It would have made occupation less difficult and violent.”

Straight out of the playbook from two-centuries ago. Twilight chewed her lip in thought. If she was a princess, that meant she was a VIP.

“Are you going to try and kill me when this is over with?”

“Going after VIPs is out of the picture,” Electrum said. “Too many sniper teams changed sides. Those mirrors were showing the truth since Glenn had everything inside of my head to show you. I’m going to tune the dimensional shift beacon to put the raiders somewhere sparsely populated in Equestria. Infighting and squabbling over their situation will probably reduce their number before making contact with your military. Should buy some time for me to come up with something else to dangle in front of General Beckett to keep him from going nuclear.”

“Can you talk him down from waging war?” Twilight asked. Metal scraping echoed down the hall. Hel was close. Maybe a few more turns away.

“I tried before,” Electrum said. Her posture was visibly tense as Hel approached. “But maybe after Colonel Autumn’s betrayal, he sees the bigger picture. I can try.”

As Hel’s muzzle crashed through the door from the hallway, Twilight considered that trying anything was the best option they had.

<>~<>~<>

Daniel ducked under the swung fist of a skeleton before he pushed it away with enough telekinetic force that the skull shattered like old pottery.

“Hit ‘em with the boomstick, Spike!” Pinkie yelled as she slid past Daniel on her knees, firing a lever-action rifle she had pulled from… somewhere.

Twilight had warned that Pinkie Pie had strange powers. He’d thought she was having a seizure when they ran through the front door of the Dunwich building, but the clarification that she had felt a ‘doozy’ was quickly followed by all the skeletons in the hall rising from where they lay.

Spike blew apart one skeleton with one barrel of his shotgun, then two more that had been too close to each other with his second shot.

Raising his carbine, Daniel fired single shots. He picked off skeletons one-by-one like a surgeon making an incision. They weren’t tough to kill, but there were a lot of them. Most had clustered together into a mob which shambled towards them like in the horror movies he had watched back in Vault 101.

They wouldn’t stop him from saving Twilight.

“I’m coming, Twi,” Daniel said under his breath. Out the corner of his eye he saw Pinkie Pie reach into her hair and pull out a grenade.

“Skeeball of doom!” Pinkie yelled as she pulled the pin and threw it down the hall. The grenade bounced off a wall, hit the floor, then rolled into the middle of a cluster of skeletons. The explosion snapped the skeletons like bundles of dry twigs. Pinkie leapt up with a whoop. “High score!”

“She always like that?” Daniel asked Spike as he shot the last skeleton.

“Yeah, pretty much,” the young dragon said as he reloaded his shotgun.

Daniel turned towards Pinkie Pie, who had swapped from her lever-action rifle and back to her grenade launcher without him noticing where she’d stored the other weapon.

“That was a doozy,” Daniel said as he forced out a strained laugh. He kicked a skeleton’s skull away from him, which like the last skeleton he had pushed against the wall, shattered like a vase after sailing in an arc away from him.

“No it wasn’t,” Pinkie Pie said with a chipper giggle as she hopped towards a pair of green ammo cans laying on the floor. She pulled one open.

“That wasn’t the doozy!?” Daniel asked with a loud groan. “How are reanimated skeletons not the doozy?”

“I thought we heard fighting!” Twilight yelled, from down the hall.

Daniel snapped his gaze towards where Twilight had yelled.

“That’s the doozy!” Pinkie exclaimed, her entire body vibrating as Twilight rounded a bend in the hallway and was quickly followed by Electrum and a giant metal wolf.

In Daniel’s opinion, it certainly was a doozy.

“Well, what are we waiting for?” Twilight called out, waving for them. “We’re going to stop Glenn.”

<>~<>~<>

The cavernous lair deep below Dunwich was a charnel house. Dozens of ghouls lay dead, scattered apart by grenade blasts. Among the twisted necrosed meatbags was Hel, reduced to a smoking pile of arcane energy and twisted metal by a concentrated barrage of his strongest dark magic.

Glenn sighed. Hel had been a useful companion, loyal until the blasted alicorn had used her quick wits to win him over.

Though in the end, even having Hel on their side hadn't been enough to save them. All of their eyes glowed a lovely dark green and black. They were his, and he was going to have so much fun with them.

Like living dolls, they were able to see and hear everything, yet unable to move. Exactly how he preferred until they were strapped down. Then, well, allowing them the free will to scream and thrash wasn’t a problem.

Approaching his quarry, he paused long enough to kick aside the shattered head of a ghoul. The stone floor was covered in a thin soup of gore. The damned pink-haired one had turned most of his thralls into chunks with her homemade grenade machine gun. The rest had been gunned down by the others.

He reached the five who had dared try and defeat him and began his inspection. Three women and two men.

Glenn paused in front of the leader of the pack, Twilight. She was a prize, that was for sure. An alicorn. While he hadn’t seen one of her kind before, the male unicorn had been so forthcoming under pressure. He caressed her chin, moving her head from side to side to study her face. His witch sight could see the grain of dark magic embedded within her.

A worthy apprentice if he could convert her.

She was proving to be quite stubborn, but the two unicorns flanking her would be a verdant bounty of spell components. More than enough to do the job of shattering the mind of his new student. Then, like clay, he would mold it into any shape he wanted it to be.

Slowly, Glenn turned away from his prize to face the green-haired dragon-human hybrid. A plan had already formed for what he would do with him. A simple test of how long it took for the dragon to bleed out after peeling off his few scales would be an enjoyable distraction from his other work. Dragon’s blood and scales could have interesting properties when it came to spellcraft.

Mind already made up on the dragon, Glenn stepped in the opposite direction towards the pink-haired woman and studied her. If it wasn’t for the pink hair he would have mistaken her for a human. She was heavier than he preferred to move around, maybe two-hundred or so pounds. He was going to drag out her painful death over weeks just for the fun of it, then resurrect her as a thrall.

He turned back towards his prize, only to come face to face with a pistol between his eyes. The alicorn had broken free.

“How!?” Glenn yelled. It was impossible to break free from his power. He was a master of dark magic.

“I’ve been trapped inside my own head enough to memorize the exits.”

<>~<>~<>

Twilight Sparkle stood over Glenn’s body, her arm shaking as she kept the pistol trained on him. The shot had splattered his blood onto her face, and something wet and spongy was stuck in her hair.

She had done it. It was over. He was dead.

So why didn’t it feel like she had won?

Twilight couldn’t answer her own question as Electrum let out a primal scream of rage.

“God fucking damn that sonofabitch to the deepest pits of Hell!” She yelled in a single breath as she rushed over to his corpse. She reared a booted hoof back and brought it crashing down between his legs hard enough to push the corpse. “Fuck you!”

She aimed her pistol and the weapon flashed as she pulled the trigger. She kept pulling and pulling, until pulling the trigger no longer sent bullets slamming into the corpse on the ground. Most of Glenn’s chest was reduced to a bloody puddle. She stood over him, staring down at his remains with an expression of fury and terror on her face.

Twilight wanted to reach out and comfort her, but Twilight was too busy trying to breathe slowly and stop her full body shake.

She caught a lucky break as Daniel, Pinkie Pie, and Spike brought her into a hug.

But no one was there for Electrum.

Twilight slipped her arm past her friends to reach out and place a hand on Electrum’s shoulder. Pinkie Pie silently broke away from the hug to wrap an arm protectively around Electrum.

“Once we destroy the books, it’ll be over,” Twilight said.

“No,” Electrum panted as her own body trembled like a leaf. She kept staring down at the corpse on the floor, even as Pinkie helped guide her away from the body. Her voice was as brittle as glass as she finally looked away. “We’ll still remember what he did to us.”

<>~<>~<>

Twilight was the last to leave the chamber where they had defeated Glenn. The center-point of the cavern contained the focal point for the foul sensation permeating the area.

It was a dark-green obelisk that radiated dark magic like gamma rays escaping a breached reactor.

Daniel had dumped out his rucksack before stuffing both of the heavy suitcases into the bag. It meant there would be no need to run back and forth between the camp and the Dunwich building to destroy the grimoires.

All three of them levitated by Twilight as she walked deeper into the room, their own darkness a pale blip in comparison to the obelisk. Her hooves stuck to the drying gore on the floor. There was no use trying to step around it. Many of the ghouls had been hit directly in the chest, Pinkie Pie’s grenades sinking into their necrosed bodies before detonating them into gory confetti.

Twilight tore her eyes away from the bloody mess to the obelisk, though it wasn’t much better.

It stood in the center and blended seamlessly with the cavern floor, like it had been carved from the chamber, despite looking like extremely dark jade. It contrasted heavily with the brown and gray of the rest of the cavern.

Emerging from the floor were three tentacles that wrapped around the obelisk. Despite sharing the same material, Twilight’s fur crawled at the thought of them breaking free to twist around her friends and crush their life, their very soul. It was a flash of fear that faded, but still clung to Twilight like the darkness permeating the air.

Discord had been a statue, once, in Canterlot Gardens.

The faceless statue of a woman pressed the thought. Twilight’s guts twisted, imagining herself in its place. Frozen, forever reaching out for help that wouldn’t come, as tentacles pulled at her into their dark embrace of a being that only wanted to torture her.

It was a shrine to some sea-born god of rape. Or at least that’s what Twilight interpreted from it.

If it wouldn’t shatter her horn to do so, Twilight would have blasted the room apart with as much cleansing magic as she could after destroying the books. But her horn wouldn’t be able to handle that kind of power. It would have to be later.

Twilight clenched her teeth and stepped as far back away from the obelisk as she could, the black books following close by in her magic. Once she was at what she considered a safe distance, she brought the books close to herself.

She was going to destroy them one-by-one. She didn’t know what would happen if she threw all three of them at once at the obelisk. She looked at the first book in the stack, the Krivbeknih. Its black cover was decorated by a single slash down the front.

Averting her eyes, Twilight levitated it over to the obelisk and pressed it into the stone.

The flash of fire was still bright enough to sting her eyes, and her Pip-Boy clicked as the already low-level of radiation in the room increased to three rads a second before slowly falling back to normal levels.

The next book, Glenn’s book, had an image embossed onto the black leather. A skull with downward curving horns emerging from each side, with a long, slithering tongue extending out between the skull’s fang-like teeth.

Another burst of fire and radiation. The taste of metal danced on her tongue.

She looked at the cover of the last book. The one Daniel and her had been given. The embossing on the cover was a spider. An hourglass sat on its abdomen. A black widow.

Twilight didn’t hesitate to press the final book into the obelisk. It didn’t deserve anything less, and its destruction was already felt. Twilight heaved a heavy sigh as a weight lifted from her shoulders. The air was a little clearer.

<>~<>~<>

It was still dark as Twilight was the first to step out of the Dunwich building.

She quickly checked the time.

Three-fifteen A.M., Tuesday, September 4th, 2277.

Enough time to still get some sleep before sunrise.

She reached the bottom of the steps before she faced Electrum exiting the building. Electrum burned down her fifth cigarette, hands shaking.

“Do you want to talk?” Twilight asked her. It was clear that she wasn’t okay, and Twilight wanted to help. Even if Electrum was her enemy, she knew what it was like to feel someone pressing their will over her own. Twilight’s fur itched as she remembered Glenn admiring her like she was a trophy.

Even though he was dead and she was safe, her mind still raced down the paths of where it could have gone. What he could have done with her. Tightness gripped her chest like a fist, and every hair on the back of her neck stood on end.

Nothing had happened, but her own treacherous imagination filled in the blanks.

“N-no,” Electrum said quietly. “I just want to get away from the building.”

Twilight could agree with that sentiment.

<>~<>~<>

The trip away from Dunwich had been a mostly quiet one. There would be no teleportation while inside the dark magic’s radius, so Twilight simply walked and Electrum followed beside her. Pinkie Pie, Spike, and Daniel fell behind them, occasionally chatting amongst each other but conversation never lasted that long.

The current bout of silence was broken by Electrum.

“Thank you, Princess,” Electrum said, her quiet voice as empty as a dry lake. Her gaunt eyes bore into the dirt. “You’re a lot better of a person than I am.”

Would things have been different if Electrum had found Twilight in the cell? Twilight didn’t know. Maybe Electrum wouldn’t have hesitated to kill a defenseless enemy in cold blood.

“We made a good team back there,” Twilight replied, something to keep the conversation going. Anything to keep her mind off Glenn, Dunwich, and the feeling of darkness in the air. They were still too close to the building for comfort. “I’d like to think we could be friends. Or we might already be, since I never got a full answer from you.”

“I didn’t answer, did I?” Electrum asked with a small smile. Twilight smiled back. “Oh, what the hell. Frenemies?”

Electrum held out a hand.

Twilight shook the offered hand.

“Thanks—” Twilight started before a yawn cut her off, as if she needed a reminder she had run on empty through Dunwich. The yawn spread to everyone else. “We really need some sleep.”

Electrum nodded.

“Yeah, we do, but I can’t stay with you,” Electrum said as she shook her head. She then leaned close to Twilight and whispered, “I need to try and talk General Beckett down, and, failing that, do the thing we talked about.”

Twilight winced.

She hoped Electrum would succeed. Twilight hated the idea of sending raiders to Equestria. But the alternative was sending a nuke, or ripping information out of someone who had already suffered too much at the hands of a dark mage.

Twilight wasn’t going to turn herself into a nightmare. Feeding a corpse to Hel to save herself had already been a much grimmer choice than she would have liked. The wasteland wasn’t going to turn her into what she had seen in the mirror.

“Well,” Twilight said. “Good luck.”

<>~<>~<>

General Clyde Beckett leaned forwards in his large leather chair, staring at the chessboard on top of his grand and ornate wooden desk. His eyes wandered to the rest of his office, which matched the grandness of his desk. Bookshelves with decorative carvings of pre-war animals lined three of the four walls. Each shelf was packed with literature or memorabilia the General had collected, or had been passed down throughout his family’s multi-century tradition of military service. His grand prize was a pistol from his many-times-great grandfather, dating all the way back to the revolutionary war.

The beauty of all the decorated shelves was offset by the mundane banks of filing cabinets taking up the fourth wall.

“Sir?” General Beckett’s opponent said from across the desk from him. It was a Mr. Gutsy combat robot that was painted matte black. The normal thruster had been replaced with eyebot hover technology, allowing the machine to levitate far more quietly than other models of Mr. Gutsy.

“Oh, I like to let my opponents make the first move,” General Beckett said to the Mr. Gutsy.

“Sir, yes, sir!” The robot cheerfully proclaimed, using its manipulator pincer to salute before it moved a pawn two spaces ahead.

General Beckett enjoyed a good game of chess, and robots always proved to be the most challenging of opponents. They had an artificial patience that he usually couldn’t throw off. A biological opponent could have been frustrated by his gambit of staring at the board while looking like he was thinking about his first move.

It didn’t stop him from trying, though, as many of the SOCOM robots were advanced enough to gain sentience. A few of them could experience emotions like boredom.

However, his given opponent was shaping up to be the unshakable sort.

General Beckett stared at the board again. He was about to make his first move, but there was a knock at the door.

“It’s open,” General Beckett said.

The glow coming from the door handle soured his mood.

It twisted, and the only unicorn he allowed within a hundred yards of him stepped inside.

“Hello, Electrum,” General Beckett said. He looked up from his chess game to examine the new arrival. Electrum looked like shit, and not just the ugly horse-mutant way Beckett normally associated with her. Her eyes were sunken with exhaustion and she looked like she had run three marathons.

Her horn flared as she levitated the seat the Mr. Gutsy had pushed out of the way over to herself. She didn’t sit in it yet.

Beckett frowned.

“Sergeant W-four-R, please leave my office,” General Beckett said with a shake of his head.

“Sir-yes-sir!” The Mr. Gutsy said as it saluted. It then turned and near-silently hovered towards the exit.

“Sir,” Electrum said with her own salute. “Permission to be seated?”

“Granted,” General Beckett said with a frown. “Care for a game of chess?”

Electrum sat and nodded. “I would like that. It’s been a while since we last played.”

“We never have,” Beckett grumbled.

“Do we have to play this whole song and dance,” Electrum asked as she rolled her eyes. “I’m still Valery Beckett under this fur.”

“Are you?” General Beckett sneered. “I know about your little trip to Dunwich. You didn’t think we had cameras pointed at that place from Rockland, did you?”

He smiled as she balked.

“Sir, I can explain,” Electrum cried out.

“No need,” General Beckett said with a shake of his head. “You helped destroy something more powerful than Twilight.”

Beckett knew about Twilight’s little black book. A soldier who had accidentally left their helmet camera on had provided SOCOM with footage of one book severely crippling Twilight and her husband. Destroying something powerful enough to make one of the six living weapons of Equestria nearly vomit was forgivable.

“I did,” Electrum said as she reset the piece W4R had moved. “All three books were destroyed.”

“Three?” General Beckett asked. There was Twilight’s, then the one Pinkie Pie had announced over the radio as possessing, which meant the third had to be from—

“We killed Scribe Glenn.”

Excellent.

SOCOM knew all about that disgusting little leech. The Pentagon—now called The Citadel by the Brotherhood of Steel who occupied it—had once been the headquarters for the Department of Defense, which SOCOM was under the umbrella of.

The Brotherhood of Steel recorded every one of their records onto old mainframes within the Pentagon. Mainframes which SOCOM still had the back-door entrances into.

Everything the Brotherhood of Steel knew, SOCOM knew.

“Very well,” General Beckett said. He didn’t move a piece, and Electrum kept her magic glowing on the piece she had moved back two spaces to reset the board. It was going to be a waiting game to see who would cave to frustration and make the first move. “I assume you didn’t come to see me to play chess or tell me about your self-given mission to destroy the books.”

“No, sir,” Electrum said. “I think attacking Equestria in any capacity would be suicide.”

So it was back to this topic.

“We have nukes, they don’t,” General Beckett growled. “Your reports said they will crumble after an overwhelming show of force. We glass one, maybe two of their cities, and the rest will fall in line. They’re weak cowards.”

Electrum flared her nostrils with a heavy sigh.

“You think they’re weak?” Electrum asked.

“Their military is dogshit!” General Beckett snapped. “They lost the capital once while you were there!” He facepalmed. “Don’t tell me you’ve gone as soft as Colonel Autumn.”

“If you judge a fish by how it climbs a tree, you will only come to the conclusion that it's a bad animal.” Electrum softly said. She moved the same pawn Sergeant W4R had, to the same position, but kept her magic glowing around it. “Equestria's lack of a proper military may seem like weakness, but they are not weak people. I've walked their streets, ate their food, and enjoyed the strength of their moral character. There are good people there who would help America rebuild.”

Electrum reached into one of the pockets of her greatcoat. General Beckett stared at her as she brought out a small brown cloth sack and tossed it beside the chess table.

“And what’s that full of?” General Beckett asked, his fingers causing the ends of his arm rests to creak with how hard he gripped them.

“Collard seeds,” Electrum said. “Help put some greens into a wastelander’s diet.” She shook her head. “One mare with a backpack full of books and seeds will win more hearts and minds than jackboots and gunships ever will.”

Insanity. Electrum had gone as soft as Colonel Autumn. Not even SOCOM was safe from the toxic reasoning of a bunch of weak-minded and weak-willed horses.

“That ‘judge a fish’ comment is good and all, but allow me a moment to speak,” General Beckett said. He let go of his armrest and reached to his side. “You’re a smart woman, Electrum, so I know you know about the Ship of Theseus… one second.”

General Beckett pulled open the flap of his holster slowly, the snap-buttons popping audibly before he slowly drew his pistol. The slow slide of metal on leather was music to his ears. The weapon was an American classic, a .45 caliber semi-auto pistol, passed down from father-to-son since World War I.

“This pistol has been in our—my,” General Beckett quickly corrected, “family for generations. It’s an original model 1911… or is it? Three and a half centuries is a long time for a gun. The grip panels have been replaced, the magazines I have for it aren’t the original, and the barrel, of course, has been replaced many times.” He pulled back the slide. “Even the slide and frame aren't original. But over the years it’s killed krauts, japs, and commies.”

“D-dad,” Electrum stuttered. That damned horn of hers was still glowing. “What are you saying?”

“I can spout philosophical bullshit, too.”

He pulled the trigger, sending a .45 caliber slug into her gut.

She doubled over with a wheeze of pain, but that damned horn of hers kept alight.

She always did have ironclad focus, even in torture training.

“Do you have any last words?” General Beckett asked as he stood up, aiming the pistol at Electrum’s head.

She coughed out a laugh, and pointed above.

“Magic isn’t just good for moving chess pieces.”

General Beckett looked up and his eyes went wide at the sight of the grenade hovering above him, the pin pulled. The lever was only held by the glow of magic.

There was a loud pop as Electrum teleported away, and the grenade fell.

General Beckett dove under his desk for cover, the grenade slamming into the desk above him with a thud.

One second, two, three… five… eight…

General Beckett slowly left the safety of his desk. The grenade was sitting atop it, the bottom of it was facing him, allowing him to see the hole drilled into the bottom.

Hands shaking with fury, General Beckett picked up the glorified paperweight and returned it to its rightful place on the bookshelf next to the revolutionary war pistol.

He made a mental note to find the pin and lever later as he walked back to his desk, picked the telephone up off the receiver and dialed.

“Security,” General Beckett said in cold fury once the ringing ended and he heard someone about to answer.

“S-sir?” A woman on the other end of the line answered.“General, I was just about to call you. Research and Development just reported that Electrum stole a prototype and teleported away.”

“Damnit!” Beckett yelled, his cold fury going hot. “Well, do your fucking job as security and find her, you incompetent gremlin!”

General Beckett slammed the telephone back onto the receiver, before he picked it back up and dialed a new line. He tapped his foot impatiently as the phone rang, the noise from the phone joined by a cacophony from the hall beyond his door as alarms blared.

The base was going into lockdown

“General Beckett, what’s going on?” Colonel Michael Hoffman, his subordinate in Strategic Command, asked. “Why is the base going into lock—”

“We were infiltrated by the god-damn horses,” General Beckett replied. “Send it!”

“Sir, the portals for the missile aren’t—”

"I don't care if you have to send the God-damned warheads through a portal on the back of a truck,” General Beckett snarled, spittle flying through the air like a shotgun blast. “Figure something out and fucking send it!"