Somewhere in deep space (Sector 78B71)
October 18, 2544, 2:14
"-ystal hyperstructure instability detected, now at 6%."
I jolted out of the intoxicating embrace of my bed into the icy world of wakefulness. My back ached. The metal walls of my cramped dormitory pulsed and swirled around me. Something was definitely wrong, maybe whatever it was that had awoken me a second ago, but I couldn’t remember exactly what.
Taking a breath, I rubbed my eyes and set to muttering curses and groping around the dresser beside me for my headset, with only the light from the red strobe alarm across the room to guide my hand. After knocking a few folders of notes and forms and what could have been a glass of water off the dresser, I retrieved the plastic headset and snapped its silicon hook over my ear. I immediately regretted that action.
“-Y GOD, THERE’S A SUPERMATTER CRYSTAL IN THE BATHROOM! SHUT IT DOWN! SHUT IT DOOOWWNNN!!!”
“Shut up, Wally,” half the station chorused, in grumbles deader than mine.
Now that wasn’t an uncommon reveille around these parts, I’ll tell you. Joe Wallick shrieked about something; the station responded in collective apathetic annoyance; and only a select few ever did anything afterwards to fix whatever he was screaming about.
Ahem.
"WALLY, FUCK OFF!" I yelled through the headset, feeling soreness and strain form on my vocal cords within the first seconds of the morning.
“WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!” I flinched as Wally’s reply punctured my skull like a .38. Do you know how embarrassing it is to get shot with your own gun?
“Ow, ow, please stop with the goddamn screamin'—the hell is that noise?”
Bzzzzzz
An unpleasant buzzing noise—like an electric hum but more intimate—flooded into the folds of my fleshy brain. It wasn’t convincing me to deal with… whatever it was Joe was screaming about. Damn, I already forgot.
I tossed open the closet towering next to my bed. Inside hung most of my proud few possessions: a threadbare trench coat stained in splotches of blood and with a fainter, uneven coating of sweat and more blood all over it, a fedora scuffed and flattened as though a horny xeno queen had mistaken it for a phallus and attempted to mate with it, my wrinkly set of black forensic gloves, and my faux-leather satchel, all present and accounted for in varying shades of dusty. Just noire enough for a space detective.
“WHERE’S THE HOS? HOS, WE HAVE A PROBLEM! HOS, WE HAVE A FUCKING PRO—”
“Fuck you,” I sighed, switching off the headset. I shuffled into my coat and slung the satchel over my shoulder. The forensic gloves slipped over my fingers, with some struggle.
I didn't want to deal with it. What I wanted was a coffee. Or maybe I wanted my mom. No. I want to shoot some bastard, I thought as I eyed my “trusty” revolver (“trusty” meaning the only one I seemed to be able to keep my gloves on).
The “Cripple Cannon”, as I’d dubbed it in the eons-honored tradition of naming personal firepower, rested innocently on the dimlit dresser like a giant, hairy tarantula. I was pretty sure it was eying me back.
But maybe not with that gun. I don’t feel like committing suicide before lunch today.
I could just feel the damn thing trying to edge a bullet into my face, or maybe three. Somewhere and sometime far away, the Warden and his lackeys were practicing the finer points of stun-batoning technique on my corpse while cursing me out for “dereliction of duty via self-injury”.
I drew in a sharp breath, reached for my gun, and with quivering hand, set it gently in my belt holster. It slid in much more cooperatively than the dents and deformations along its tin frame suggested. Yes, you read that right. Tin. I even checked with a chemist.
I then reached into my satchel and retrieved a small, chrome-plated rectangular device fitted with a square-shaped screen—a vintage personal AI, the prototype for one of Nanotrasen’s short-lived forays into the luxury consumer market, or at least, whichever one they thought must’ve been filled with utter tools, if how much they watered down the “sapience” module on the new versions was indicative of anything.
BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
Damn buzzing, I thought as I depressed the power button on the side of the device.
The device’s display lit up in blue. "Morning, sir," it sang in the kind of faux-polite, tinny voice that made you want to choke somebody. I hate when he talks like that. “I assume you’ve already discovered another way to off yourself today.”
"Ah, Squire,” I groused, “not even a minute in and you’re already giving me crap.”
“’Tis well deserved, perhaps even desired, from my experience. I shall ensure the MoMMIs sing of your coprophagic cravings.” What a cheeky cunt.
“Well, thanks, Mr. Thesaurus. Now, listen. I’ve decided. We're going on a trip, after I take a shit and brush my teeth,” I mumbled, clipping the pAI to the side of my satchel and stumbling towards the airlock that sheltered my bedroom from Hell.
The door opened with a hydraulic hss, and I toddled towards the bathroom on drunken autopilot, keeping my eyes on my black leather laceups clomping on the dull grey tiling beneath me. Strange that nobody had spilled any blood on the floor yet. Granted, some of the tiling seemed to have been torn up by an explosion of some sort, exposing the questionably manufactured and assembled metal plating and piping beneath that separated the dormitory foyer from the endless, apathetic vacuum of space, but that wasn’t really a problem Nanotrasen had promised me money to deal with. Aka, not a problem.
Come to think of it, they've never paid me any cash up front, so by that standard, nothing is a problem. Maybe they'd found a way to deposit some money into my Chase account, but they didn't exactly ask me for my credit card number when I started to work here, and frankly I had no way of knowing if Chase even remembered that I had an account registered with their Europa branch some centuries ago.
“Perhaps you should integrate the two. I hear detective excrement makes a highly effective palliative for the incipient symptoms of menarche and gingivitis.”
If only it were so. I'd love to make people scramble for my shit. And before you say anything, I didn't pay anyone for him. I adopted him. At a dumpster.
“Yeah, look, nobody wants to hear about your goddamn scat fetish; now be useful and talk normal before I donate you to Wally, capische?”
“Aw, fine, ya flappin’ fanny.”
BZZZZZZZZZ
Unfortunately, the buzzy sensation hadn’t disappeared with Squire’s shitty New Commonwealth accents; actually, I could swear it was getting more painful with every ringing stomp I took towards the bathrooms, a bit like the hangover after a night of Beepsky Smash.
“Lyell… I wouldnae dae that, were I ye.” Some contrarian in my mind offered “He may be right”. The masses echoed “But I need to take a shit”.
BZZZZZZZZZZZ
Hot, high-pressureair gushed into my face as the doors slid open to reveal light, glorious, holy light, like the time I thought it was a smart idea to lob a boxful of flashbangs at a Blob without wearing eye protection. My head felt like an “assistant” had given it a nice dose of skull-smashing reality with a fire extinguisher. I proceeded to slam my face into one palm, further aggravating my agony, while dipping my other hand into the old satchel for a pair of sunglasses. No space detective, after all, is complete without a pair. There we go, sunglasses…
“Hm,” I grunted through my palm, still fiddling with my glasses in the other hand.
“Quite,” remarked Squire.
“Ya know, I think Wally did mention a supermatter shard in the bathrooms, didn’t—“ My shades revealed the faint, ominous silhouette of a man in a baggy hazmat suit standing before afull-size supermatter crystal, a flamethrower in hand. “—Hey, hey, whaddya think ya doin’?”
My hands were pulsing as soon as they recognized an opportunity to shoot someone. One half of my brain was busy squirming down my larynx in a desperate attempt to turn my cardiovascular system off before it made a hasty decision. The other, important half was happily melting like a drugged-up “assistant” in a plasma fire.
In a nutshell, the instant I saw the igniter at the end of the flamethrower spark, my revolver might have been out and aimed at the perp.
Now, remember, this thing is just a plain old revolver, mind you—not a Mateba autorevolver, and not one of those fancy WT-550 auto-rifles with fifty different fire modes.
Click
I hit the trigger once.
The hammer struck once.
BA-BA-BAM
“AGH!” Pain cracked through my foot like lightning, and like a monkey having a foot cramp from not eating enough bananas, I dropped to the ground and clamped my hands around my right shoe, which now sported a smoking, fuzzy puncture the size of a shell casing. The Cripple Cannon (and now you know the reason for the name) clattered on the ceramic beside me.
“WAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!” Flamethrower Guy retorted, an octave than higher than any human being should be screaming.
“Wha- Nar’Sie’s nuts, Lyell, my scanners indicate that you actually hit your target… twice!” chirped Squire. He was laughing. Probably more excited that there was a bullet in my foot than that I had managed to hit somebody with a bullet other than myself.
“Ow…” I stoically grunted through clenched teeth, squinting through tears at the similarly-affected man across the bathroom, who was now doubled over in front of the crystal, screeching and clenching his groin in pain. Bastard got what he deserved. “Heh, I guess I did. FUCK! FUCK YOU, SYNDIE SCUM! GAH!”
Did I ever mention I am usually the person who shoots me with my own, er, Martian Replica Revolver? In my defense, it was the only weapon they let me have apart from that pathetic telescopic baton, and the radiation wasn’t letting me consider what would’ve happened if I’d hit the fuel tank on the guy’s flamethrower, or fed the supermatter crystal an extra pellet of matter. I guess I was supposed to scare people with the gun—not actually shoot them—but that never made much sense to me. I mean, if people figure out that you’re not really going to shoot them, how are you supposed to scare them?
"Danger! Crystal hyperstructure instability detected, now at 36%," the little radio assembly duct-taped to the bottom of the crystal boomed.
“Aw, shut up,” I hissed through clenched teeth. Sometimes I wish the world world stop interrupting my monologues. “Squire, how do you turn off a supermatter crystal?”
Squire’s screen flashed a few different shades of blue before displaying in bright, blocky letters: “You can’t. ;^)”
“Goddamn it.”
So I lay there for a while, quietly weeping and gripping my burning foot as vital fluids leaked from under my shoe. Faithful Radiation, a better friend than Squire’d ever be, helpfully doused the pain pulsing through my foot and swapped it with a new sensation like an army of miniature dwarves unhelpfully drilling away at my skull. The pain and the radiation kept me from panicking. As a matter of fact, they kept me from doing anything at all, short of breathing.
It then occurred to my gamma-drunk mind that it would look stupid if somebody found me dead in the bathroom with my hands wrapped around my foot and my blood pooled around me, brought to a simmer by the heat from the supermatter crystal. I then gained new purpose in life, unlike the other guy, who was still shrieking and squirming around on the tiling in agony and generally losing reasons to be alive.
“SQUIRE, CALL SOMEBODY!” I screamed.
“Requested backup already, mate.” I could swear the damn thing was still laughing at me.
HISS
I shuffled around towards the doors to watch a man in a brass-colored hardsuit clank in. The floodlights on the side of his helmet, combined with the supermatter radiation, now made the room look more like the plasma giant we were orbiting than a space station. “Huh, a supermatter crystal. I guess that’s where the other radiation suit went,” he mumbled, retrieving a blood-red welding torch from a toolbelt hanging loose around his waist, flicking it on, and jamming the flame directly into the perp’s skull.
“WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAGGG…!” Mr. Radiation Suit finally depleted his supply of ear-carving screams and went slack on the ground.
“So that’s that. Damn syndies.” The man in the hardsuit slid the torch back into his belt. “Oh, hey, Lyell!… are you alright?”
I squinted down at Squire. “Oh, no. For the love of God, don’t tell me that Randy’s the only guy you… uh…” I couldn’t remember what I was going to say. My head was getting buzzy and numb, and my eyelids were drifting shut. “Could y’, uh…”
"Wait, no, I can’t die now!" I groaned.
A chill coursed through my body as I felt the tendrils of unconsciousness tangle around me, and I cringed and jolted awake. Did I already mention that the Warden's gotten into the habit of arresting my corpse recently? Apparently one day he got bored and decided that being dead for too long was a form of "malingerance".
Unpleasant sensations rushed through my mind as I struggled to keep awake: the burning crackle at the end of a stun baton, shoddily-written “malingerance citations”, and throngs of red-eyed jurors, all yawning and itching to ditch the courtroom and get back to whatever questionably legal crap they were doing before they all got called in to say “not guilty” in the sixth trial regarding the detective shooting himself and dying. You know, that damn guy never showed up to court after arresting my corpse anyways; he probably didn’t even bother to read the minutes.
…
Oh, fuck it, it can wait.
A few Z’s never hurt anyone, right? Couldn’t stop the station from imploding on a cloudy mind. I’d have the necessary sleep for a human being, bathroom tiles and blinding light be damned.
"DANGER! CRYSTAL INSTABILITY AT 64%. DELAMINATION IMMINENT. EVACUATE IMMEDIATELY.”
As if to accentuate the warning, a fissure shot down the middle of the crystal, spewing out bands of pale pink plasma and lashes of hungry flame. I thought it looked pretty cool.
“Okay, Uh… What do I do with the crystal? There's a window here somewhere…”
“Whatever, it’s your problem now,” I yawned. The room was finally getting darker.
Beep
“Lyell. Alive and awake?” asked a familiar rattly voice.
“Huh? Yep, yeah, I'm awake,” I grumbled. I was lying on something hard and cold, and a sharp soreness throbbed in my shoulder. The recharging melody of a Nanotrasen-issue defibrillator quietly intoned nearby.
“Open eyes.” A literal human skull, complete with gaping, hollow eye sockets and naked teeth, filled my vision. I flinched as a bony hand shoved a penlight in my face. “Hold still.”
I wrenched my head away from the light. I didn’t feel like that extra nap time had come with any payoff. It couldn’t have helped that the something I was lying on was the exact same tiling I had passed out on. At least the Warden didn't get to me first.
“The hell you doing here, Bones? Aren’t ya supposed to be getting high in your lab right now?”
“PLR’s normal… You.Dead, for two minutes, asleep for nine. Arrived quickly enough to give you that atropine mix I’ve been experimenting with before you voided bowels into your pants,” grunted the skeleton, who was dressed in a decidedly non-protocol pair of red cargo shorts and an oversized rainbow tie-dye shirt and wearing a portable blue defibrillator on his back.. “Should be thanking me for saving the embarrassment. Oh, and right foot sucked up 50u Bicard.” His name’s actually Christopher, but we like to call him Bones, or at least, I do. Why, you might ask, is he a skeleton, and how is he still alive? The short answer is that he’s the station chemist.
“What? Squire, didn't y' say you'd call somebody?” I mumbled down at my satchel.
“Well, I was going to.” Oh, thank god, he’s talking normal again. “But when Randy gave the all-clear and forgot about your body, people started coming back into the bathrooms and tripping over you, and it was just too wonderful of an opportunity to pass up.”
As if on cue, the bathroom airlock slid open, and a short, lanky, mustached man in a spangled cloak chivied in, only to shove his foot against my leg, fall, and smash his face into the tiling with a yelp.
“Hi, Wally,” all three of us simultaneously grumbled.
Wally grunted, and pushed himself up, dusting the floor with sequins. He fired a sour glare at me as he shuffled to the urinal and forcefully unzipped his sequined pants. “Do you know how long I’ve had to hold back on taking a piss, man?” His voice was weak and hoarse; probably from all of the screaming. “Comrades in arms don’t make each other wait to use the bathroom.”
“Yeah, I was dead, asshole,” I muttered through clenched teeth.
The Chemist made a decent attempt at a frown without facial muscles. “Comrades don’t sit in reception office blasting prog while brothers are mixing prescriptions.”
“Hey, shut up, Chris. You volunteered to become Nanotrasen’s dog. I never signed up for this. Do you know that the CMO almost forced me to figure out how to refill cryo because you had to go collect two corpses? What kind of bullshit is that?” Wally stowed his willie and sewed up his slacks.
“Really, Wally? It’s too hard to flip a maintenance panel open and swap out the two empty beakers with the ones that Bones leaves next to the cells?” I said, forcing myself to my feet. “I mean, I’m no shrink—and Chris is a drug addict—and both of us know how to do that. Whoa!” All the blood that had accumulated in the bottom portion of my body rushed back into my brain, and I stumbled around in a blind daze as the tingly fluids of life cycled through my head once more. A sound like a buzzy train horn filled my head.
“You don’t even need to know how to mix it yourself,” remarked Squire. Even he had my back this time. “Is it that much of an inconvenience?”
“Wait, really? Is that what those things are? Man, and I thought they were liquid LSD or some shit.”
The skeleton gave Wally a plasma-cutter glare. “Are you the one who keeps drinking the cryo mix?” Actually, Bones’s drug problem is far worse, relatively speaking. It made him a skeleton. One day, Chris's body began to fall off after a Krokodil overdose. You could see all the meat and fat turning black and dripping off his body, like somebody had overcooked it, as he stumbled around the medbay floor (it was clean at the time, since we still had a janitor, but now's a different story), trying to pretend nothing had happened. The next day, there was nothing left but clean white bone. That’s what happens when a heroin addict who likes to experiment spends too long in Chemistry. Bones’ mind is still pretty damn sharp, though, for all the stimulants he’s imbibed hourly for these past few decades.
Wally could only giggle like a monkey-man doped up on coke. “Eheh, uh… maybe?”
“Hm.” Bones’s face, or what was left to tell of it, fell into one of those blank stares that told you something unsavory was cranking around in the guy’s head. He’s usually a pretty relaxed guy as long as you don’t question his taste of clothing, but if you ever happened to really piss him off—well, he still won’t say anything, but you bet your big mouth he’ll bring an eleventh degree of chemical revenge upon you in your sleep. Last guy who drove him totally nuts was the Janitor. I ended up having to clean smudges of him off of those hard steel chairs in the Medbay lobby for weeks. I miss that guy.
“Uh, well, thanks, Bones.” Eager to leave before the chemist got a bead anywhere near me, I pushed myself off the ground and dusted my duster off. It was now damp and smelled of stale urine and blood. ”I’m gonna go update the records. Where’d you dump the other guy?”
Bones got up and stared at me for a minute before rattling out, measuredly:
“Back of morgue. Chef probably hasn’t gotten to him yet.” He reached into his shirt pocket, retrieved a purple pill, and popped it into his mouth. He paced back towards the bathroom airlock with far less sound than you’d expect of a bare-bones skeleton, keeping an invisible eye on Wally.
hss
Phew.
I righted my deflated fedora atop my head and tentatively lifted my revolver off the ground. See, not even the people who had been using the bathroom for the past eleven minutes wanted to touch the damn thing, and I’ve been assigned to plenty of cases where an assistant torched a room full of people just to get his hands on a gun, which really makes you wonder why they needed the gun in the first place. “Well, alright, then, Squire… What was going on while I was dead? I remember something about a supermatter shard.”
“Randal spaced the crystal,” the pAI stated.
“Yeah, we’re not dead. What an astute observation. Worthy of a celebration. Is that all?” I cinched the strap on my satchel and walked towards the bathroom airlock.
“No. He dragged it into the pool room, broke the window, and shoved it outside into that wormhole he found outside last week.”
hss
“Oh, so no more swimming? Eh, that's okay. Nobody ever goes swimming anyways. I think, then, Caiden'll be next on the docket after recordkeeping. We’re going to have a little chat with him about letting random people order supermatter crystals. Wait a minute.” I halted mid-foot out the airlock as a pressure in my sphincter announced its presence. I shoved my fingers through my hair. “Fuck. I still need to take a shit.”
“And brush your teeth,” Squire added.
“Yeah.” I walked back into the bathroom, retrieved my identification card from my pocket, and waved it in front of a stall door. A green light flashed.
beep
The door slid open.
As I sat down on the toilet, I felt something click in my holster.
BAM
“GAAAAAAAAH!”
Syndicate recon craft in deep space, Sector 809F8
Matthew Tireman pushed himself away from the desk and yawned, sinking back in his plush scarlet lounger. He reeled in a breath and scanned the room again in his screen-induced stupor. There wasn't much to scream about, at least compared to some of the places at which he’d had the opportunity to work in the past, but it was better than anything he’d been expecting when the Syndicate had caught him siphoning money off the communication equipment budget and dumped his case into some foreign war court.
The silent observation module was lit by a row of warm spotlights above and the consoles embedded in the walls, with clean ebony desks floating in front of them. Fulton Schofield, Matthew’s slightly thicker accomplice and working partner, sat at the desk on the opposite side, sending an empty stare into the television inset into the blood-red polyester walls (for some reason it was the policy of Syndicate designers to put black and red on EVERYTHING, regardless of whether it looked good or not), which were curved concave to fit the semi-cylindrical shape of the module. Small ports and a huge window in the back of the capsule revealed a majestic sea of sparkling stars.
Blip
“Hm?” He slid back over to the console. A value on the side of the translucent red screen blinked a brighter red. “Ha! Oh, wow, that’s bad. That is… wow! Hey, hey, man, stop watching that Thunderdome for a sec and come take a look at this.” He grinned, pointing at the screen before him.
Fulton took a loud slurp from a shiny red can of Space Cola, eyes fixed upon the epic, gory, red-tinted arena battle unfolding before him, live on NT television. “Yeah, yeah, a rock or a comet or something came flying out of the wormhole awhile ago. I’m not blind. It’s not headed anywhere near us, and it’s too small to be important. You think it might blow some ears out down there or something?” An assistant skewered a clown with a spear; blood and what looked like brighter blood (maybe banana juice, but with these monitors you could never tell) spurted out of the clown's back. Pretty standard stuff.
“No, no.” Matt slapped Fulton on the shoulder, and Fulton shot him a ghost of a frown. “Check these readings. Starboard hadron scanners.” A space bear toddled over behind the assistant, shoved its claws in the poor and likely retarded man, and ripped him in twain, bits of his flesh and blood staining the camera and the grey tile floor of the arena.
“Fine.” Fulton took another sip of his drink and slid his chair over to Matt’s desk. He immediately had to fight the urge to paint the screen with the contents of his mouth, lurching forward with his cheeks full of Cola. He tilted his head back and made a noise somewhere between gulp and death rattle before setting his can down on the console and grumbling. “Wait, what the hell?. Is that a fucking supermatter crystal?”
“Yep, and it’s already fizzing. Look, there’s a little bit of it headed straight at the planet.” Fulton tapped on the screen and pulled up a window, gesturing to a bright red dot sailing through space, trails of darker red light bursting behind it.
“Oh, man, I feel sorry for anything living at ground zero.”
"DANGER! CRYSTAL INSTABILITY AT 103%. DELAMINATION IN PROGRESS. THERE IS NO HOPE LEFT.”
“There is no hope le- Ha!” Matt fell back in his chair. “Christ. You know what it is, those bastards working for Nanotrasen probably figured out they could dump their trash into this wormhole and get away with it. They have stations everywhere, and I swear, you can find the weirdest things floating through space or lodged on some asteroid if you just trace the trajectories of their mass drivers.”
Fulton’s laugh died, giving way to the faint, immutable—and yes, both of them had tried many times before to figure out where it was coming from—sound of grim, noisy, and unmistakably masculine progressive rock (always the same albums, of course; King Crimson's "Red" or "Starless and Bible Black") that filtered into the cabin from a ceiling speaker. He turned and gave Matt a troubled look. “Do you think they know we’re here?”
“Oh, they’d have sent a spec ops squad through the portal instead of a supermatter crystal if they knew that…” Matt frowned, running his hand down one side of his nose. “Well, then again, they’re Nanotrasen.”
“Maybe we should file a relocation request. Or at least a separate priority report.” Fulton swiveled his chair back to his console and pulled up a form on his screen. “Think we should we be worried about this?”
“Eh,” Matt grunted. “We’re far enough that the rift shouldn’t touch us. If it happens to fracture, any other pieces of supermatter are probably gonna blow up AUs before they get anywhere near here.”
“Ah. Well, I guess that just means less work for us. Hey, maybe we should, uh, warn those horsey-things.”
“No interfering with developing species, man.” Matt shook his head and tapped a button on the courtesy minibar below his desk. “Even if Nanotrasen does it. Especially if Nanotrasen does it.”
A neon orange can popped out of the top of the machine.
“Goddammit, I wanted lemon-lime!”
Ponyville, Equestria
Clear skies and a balmy sun hung above the thatched roofs of Ponyville that noon. A small procession of multicolored mammals (plus one reptilian) had assembled in the approximate center of the town, vocalizing loudly at the town hall. To the uninformed bird’s-eye viewer, the whole matter might have looked more like a dramatic coup d'etat or worker’s revolution in the middle of a small farming estate than song in celebration of the redemption of pink (unknowingly) Marxist unicorn Starlight Glimmer, who had incurred over two million space dollars’ worth of vandalism fines and a year of prison sentences from intergalactic empires across various timelines for planetary destruction. Not that anyone was there to make her pay (yet).
So there was in fact no tar-and-feathering going on. A little bit of prescience, however, would have made a very convincing argument that these organisms would've been better off conducting Starlight’s public humiliation and/or execution by the nearby pond or apple orchard rather than trying to make friends with her.
“Friends can change the world, you see…”
These “ponies”, as the organisms had termed themselves, thus concluded their joyful chorus and cast their wide-eyed gazes up at the three-story town hall in abrupt silence. While the exact cause of this is not known, there has been some speculation on the effects of being on the receiving end of these gazes. Psychophysicist Maynard Wolfe, for one, theorized that an observer on the middle balcony of the town hall, vis-a-vis with the onlookers, would at that point in time experience the highest concentration of cuteness measured in the history of all sapient life—a level irreproducible via human means. Such a concentration would induce in said observer, in this order: perspiration, violent convulsions, loss of motor functions, loss of spaghetti (given presence of spaghetti), loss of consciousness, heart failure, death, and posthumous perspiration. Others think that Maynard is a complete loon in a nonexistent field of study with no credibility whatsoever.
Regardless, both acclaimed and fringe researchers unanimously considered the following events unfortunate.
“What is that?” wisely asked a bright yellow filly in a ruby bow, a placid smile still resting on her face.
“It’s so… bright,” another, a light grey unicorn, squeaked.
"DANGER! CRYSTAL INSTABILITY AT 135%. DELAMINATION IN PROGRESS. IF YOU HAVE ANY LAST WORDS, SAY THEM NOW,” a crackling voice boomed from the sky, sending pangs and stings of fear throughout the crowd.
“And it’s headed right towards us,” an neon orange pegasus muttered in a faint rasp. The smiles began to drift away from the ponies like ghosts from corpses.
"DON'T WORRY, I GOT IT!” A group of ponies found themselves coughing in a cloud of dust, hooves to muzzles, as with a single bass wingbeat, as Rainbow Dash, local weather supervisor and Wonderbolts reserve flier, bulleted skywards, only the thought of destruction in her mind as she shot towards one of the deadliest means of power generation in the universe, sparking and burning brighter than a yellow dwarf, but emitting about the same amount of UV (and higher frequency) radiation.
"WHOO! Go, Rainbow Dash!" the orange pegasus cheered from below.
One of a more developed, mercantile, and “wise” race may have rallied the crowd together in an effort to catch the crystal, either to sell its design to Nanotrasen’s competitors or hold it or the power it could generate for ransom. That would be a slightly less wise decision than what Rainbow had in mind. Charging directly at the crystal with the full intention of smashing it into pieces, as it turns out, has a much higher immediate survival rate for third parties than the other options.
That being said, the total historical survival rate for bluespace cascades of any scale remains at a nice, substantial 0.01%.
“GAAAAH!”
An explosion of sound and color shook Ponyville as the pegasus, pressing her teary eyes shut at the rending wind and searing light, screamed and slammed into the crystal.
"DANGER! MATTER INPUT DETECTED-KZRKT-CRYSTAL INSTABILITY AT 250-”
Then she was nowhere to be seen. Bolts of blinding energy cut through the celestial dome, and the crystal shattered, filling the sky with a rain of light, colored in a cosmic blue even purer and brighter than the heavens themselves. An ethereal hum filled the air, and the ground rumbled and thundered beneath the ponies.
“EVERYPONY BRACE!" a voice in the subsequent screams boomed, the quivering voice of the lavender alicorn Princess Twilight Sparkle, Doctor of Magic, professional librarian and friendship consultant, and amateur astronomer, inventor, and psychologist.
In the center of what once was a crowd but now a mass of screaming, panicking ponies, Starlight Glimmer, shortly followed by the the Princess, stood firm, teeth clenched, horns glowing with licks of light. A dome of white magic rose over Ponyville, appearing to shield the little hamlet from the cascade. For a moment, the hum and the rumbling ceased, and some ponies in the fray began to feel a little stupid as they continued to run around and shriek in the eye of the storm.
Luckily for doomsayers in the short term and unfortunately for all the ponies in the long term, the dome was not to last. Blue energy bore down on the dome like rapids surging against a leevee. and it flickered, cracked, and caved inwards, firing a ripple of crackling magic down to Twilight and Starlight, knocking both down on the grass. So "stay calm" lost the lead to "scream and run".
The torrent of blue rained down on Ponyville.
