THE SEVENTH DAY "PONYVILLE OUTSKIRTS" (THREAT LOCATED) 4:36 PM

The trees at Sweet Apple Acres were some of the most beautiful plants that anyone could imagine. The golden sunlight was shining through the leaves, giving a nostalgic feeling of home to the whole field. It didn't mean anything, though. That golden sunlight was just made up of photons radiating from a nuclear reactor suspended in the endless sky. Science dictated almost everything Anonymous did since he could always rely on it to work out in his favor. Philosophy wasn't his strong suit, but right now he was obsessed with discovering the meaning of life.

If he did find it out within the next few hours, he'd implement it into his speech that he was giving at six o' clock. For some reason, Anonymous also wanted to apologize to the family for the accident he caused. Not because he felt sympathy for them, he had been demoralized eons ago. It was because of Spike. That was the only entity he cared about right now. If Twilight had been there, the battle probably would have been had right over Canterlot.

While being distracted with his thoughts, Anon stumbled on a rock in the middle of the dirt path leading to Ponyville. If he ever got around to assimilating Equis into the Galactic Society, there would be nothing but asphalt roads and manufacturing lines for miles and miles. But if their world was changed overnight, it'd be stressful to adapt to the new world for them. Staying the same wasn't what they wanted, was it?

To his right, Anonymous spotted what appeared to be a shoddily-constructed treehouse. Now to think of it, Anonymous hadn't seen any Equine children around. Then again, who would want their children around the foreign invader from another universe? A scream from the other side of the hill caught Anon's attention. He decided to go investigate just in case someone was in trouble, after all, it wasn't that far away. From the top of the hill that he was on, Anonymous could see the diner that Twilight and Spike ate at a few days ago. Maybe today he'd try out some of their food, but first, he was going to find out what the commotion was about.

"HELP!" A young voice cried out in a squeaky voice.

Anonymous rushed down the hill to help the pony in danger. There was something odd about the trees in this area. It looked like the tops of them had been scraped off. Now the screaming filly had finally come into view. She was white and had purple and pink hair. There was another one with her, an orange Pegasi who looked about the same age.

The two of them saw the alien running down the slope and their panicked screams for help got louder.

The orange one had run off for help while the white filly backed up. From how the white one was taking up so much space, Anonymous guessed that she was trying to hide something. Muffled screams came from whoever they were guarding, screams that were much louder than either of their cries for help.

"You called for help?"

"You're--You're..." The white filly couldn't get the words out of her mouth.

"HELP ME!" The guarded object shouted out again.

"Alright, what have we got over here?" Anon gently shoved the filly aside and instantly realized what had happened.

In front of him was a black box covered in decorative lights and impressive technology-themed designs. It was the same box that he had left behind when getting his lens and earpiece from ALLOS. The orange pegasus was getting more comfortable with Anonymous, slowly getting closer to the box and her friends.

"We were just playing around and then we found this box. Then Applebloom wanted to investigate and she got stuck in it!" She rushed to explain what had happened.

"Please! Help me!" Anonymous presumed Applebloom to be the one crying from the inside of the box.

"Well, this is really quite simple actually, all it needs is my biometric identification to open."

The two fillies didn't understand what that meant, but they trusted that he was going to help their friend out. Anonymous pressed his index finger against a small green grid at the top of the crate. His earpiece shrieked an intensely loud tone that caused him to clutch his ears. The green grid rearranged itself to display a message from ALLOS.

"YOU HAVE NOT CHANGED YOUR MIND."

Anon groaned at the message and continued opening the box, trying to ignore the deafening tone being shot into his ear as best as he could.

"I'm done reasoning with you. You're guilty of the accident earlier today, not me." He whispered so that none of the fillies could understand what he was saying under his breath.

"YOU ARE THE ONE WHO WILL BE BLAMED."

Just as Anonymous had started opening the container, the lid quickly shut itself, closing on his fingers and locking. He almost bit his lip off in an effort to keep quiet and keep the girls calm. The green pad on the box flashed red as new words started to form on it.

"SELF-DESTRUCTING IN: ONE MINUTE"

The white unicorn was the first of the two to read it and resumed her screaming. The orange Pegasi was on the verge of tears, and collapsed into the fetal position, feeling hopeless. As for Applebloom who was still inside the box, she had given up hope long ago.

Anonymous tore out his earpiece and threw it onto the ground in a fit of rage.

"I'm done! I'm not going to play this game anymore. You aren't going to do it because you treasure life so much!"

Nothing. The earpiece didn't shriek and the countdown didn't stop.

"These kids have a full life ahead of them. There is a world that they don't know about and need to explore! You cannot take this away from them!" He shouted.

"I AM BEHAVING NO DIFFERENTLY THAN YOU."

The words overwrote the self-destruction timer which now read forty seconds. It was hard for Anonymous to sit and do nothing, but he had to. The only way that the timer would be destroyed is if he could change ALLOS' mind.

"I was wrong! Life is about persuing what interests you and enjoying those around you. I may have run out of my will to live eons ago, but these kids are full of it."

Still nothing.

"I can take away your permissions."

The counter rapidly knocked off numbers, amounting to less than twenty seconds left. He had to try. Twenty seconds to get the code to the mainframe and destroy the timer himself. Anonymous used his remaining hand to tear off the timer, revealing a multitude of wires and small circuit boards in its place. There was no keyboard, and no microphone for the command to work. With ten seconds left to go, Anonymous somehow had to find a way to broadcast the signal all the way to The Flying Castle.

His eyes skimmed the interior of the box, looking for a transmitter. The transmitter was in the top right, and now he needed a power source to send the message. Anon quickly snipped the wires off, in a rush to enter the code.

'Dot dash, space, dash dot, dot, space, dash, dot, dot--'

He was too late to finish the other half of the code. The timer read zero seconds left and he and Applebloom were engulfed by a giant white fireball. The other two kids were probably killed by the shrapnel that used to be the box. ALLOS was merciless. He had killed the kids without remorse and was willing to kill Anonymous. The alien was lying on the burning grass fifteen feet away, trying to ignore the pain throughout his body. His metallic organs had gone unaffected, but his skin wasn't so fortunate. It was trying to regenerate and reconnect itself in the front, but the fire was burning off any skin produced.

Anon patted out the fire with his hands, which were also on fire. Besides him, there were no survivors. Two of them were bleeding on the ground, beyond repair, at least by their world's standards, and Applebloom was all over the field. Pieces of circuit boards littered the field. Anonymous crawled over the debris, looking for the right chips.

He could still fix this.

Luckily the transmitter board experienced minimal damage, and all he had to do was find the chip with the battery. Scootaloo tried to call out for help between her breaths, filled with agony. After a few minutes of searching, Anonymous couldn't stand it anymore and crawled to Scootaloo to help her. She had a circuit board impaled in her lungs.

"Always the last place you look for it, isn't it?"

Anonymous pulled out the board without any care about Scootaloo's body, which was now bleeding out twice as hard. He could manage to stand now. The muscles in his legs had finally regenerated, and the skin on his chest was being reattached.

'Break, dot, dot, dash, space, dot dot dot...'

Sweetie Belle had died long before Scootaloo, not from bleeding or from shrapnel, though. Heart attack. Applebloom was probably the luckiest of all four of them. She had an instant death with no pain. The best way to go.

'Dash dash dash.'

The message was complete. Any second now, Anonymous would have control over all the functions of ALLOS, and he would finally become the puppet master and play ALLOS as his puppet. There was no way to tell that the message had gotten through, and so Anon decided to use the suffering Scootaloo as his guinea pig.

'Repair structure, primary priority.'

Air was spontaneously sucked into her lungs as she started breathing again. The pool of blood she was in slowly seeped back into the wounds, which closed once they got as much blood as the could. Her ribs cracked back into place and the shrapnel dissolved into nothingness. She was still in pain, but it was significantly less than what she felt like less than a minute ago. Then all of her pain went away. And her reality became distorted. The sky was yellow and the grass was orange. Everything was happy, despite her friend's recent deaths.

"Gee, thanks, Mister," Scootaloo said, almost toppling over as she tried to get back on her hooves.

"Your friends aren't as lucky as you. I'm going to have to take do some... unconventional things with them."

"Well, whatever gets the blood flowing at the end of the day, am I right?" Scootaloo let out a weak laugh, which slowly evolved into hysterical laughter.

Anonymous raised his left hand at the field and tried to focus his thoughts. Intestines, lungs, the heart all had to be in the right general places, the nanobots would do the rest. Applebloom's blood slowly crept towards a central point in front of Anonymous. Smoke caused by the explosion descended from the skies and took the shape of Applebloom. While the smoke was slowly transmogrifying into tissue, Anon turned his attention to the late Sweetie Belle.

There was still some activity going on in her brain, but not much. Anonymous touched her heart, slowly stroking her bloody chest. The sound of electronics charging up came from inside the alien. Sweetie Belle's corpse shook and jumped at the touch of his electric hands, eventually, she was able to push the hand away from her.

"What are you, a mashugana?" She shouted.

Her attention was quickly turned to the cloud of smoke and skin that stood before her. Anonymous raised out a hand to it, and touched it's "head." The electricity sustained itself, like a ball of lightning in the smoking brain of Applebloom's clone. The smoke rapidly turned itself back into bone and tissue, leaving behind no smoke at all. She still had no skin. Anon scooped up some dirt from the ground and threw it on the abomination of skin.

Scootaloo and Sweetie Belle were horrified to watch as their recently deceased friend's skin started appearing out of thin air. Ten seconds is all it took for her skin and yellow coat to be grown back. She was indistinguishable from her previous self, and didn't appear to remember anything that happened.

"Girls! I'm alive!" Applebloom rushed up to her friends, trying to hug them.

The two fillies backed up and raised their hoofs defensively.

"Girls... It's me." Applebloom was upset to see her friends so terrified of her.

"How do we know you're not a zombie or an alien robot?" Sweetie Belle asked.

"The same way you find out if you're in a dream or not," Anon answered for her.

Scootaloo walked up to the clone of Applebloom and raised a hoof just to feel her coat. It was very real, and felt exactly like her old coat. Then Scootaloo pinched her friend, to which Applebloom jumped up and shrieked.

"Now do you believe me?"

The three of them laughed and hugged, relieved to be alive and well.

"Hey, Mr. Alien, what's your name?" Scootaloo asked, still a little sluggish.

"The Galactic Society calls me Mechanic Sapien-Humanoid number thirty-three thousand, two hundred and forty-one. I know it's quite a mouthful, so just call me Anonymous. What are your names?"

"I'm Sweetie Belle!"

"My name's Scootaloo."

"And I'm Applebloom. You don't look familiar to me..."

Applebloom gasped in realization, finally realizing that the entity that stood before her was the alien that had also set Equestria on edge for the past week.

"Are you that alien that everypony's been talking about?"

"Why yes, I am."

"Thank you for saving our friend, Anonymous!" Sweetie Belle exclaimed.

"It was nothing really, I just..."

"Raised the dead." Scootaloo interrupted. "Are you kidding? If it wasn't for you, this whole field would still be painted Applebloom right now!"

"Well, just be careful next time, and I guess I'll see you girls around..."

"Bye, Anonymous!" They called out as they walked towards Sweet Apple Acres. They had a lot to tell their family about.

ALLOS' administrative access was a very taboo thing to use, no matter the circumstances. All orders had to be completed without question and on demand. Twilight didn't stand a chance in the battle anymore. If he wanted to, Anonymous could snap her neck by thinking about it, or dissolve her skin, or drown her in her own blood. It was intoxicating to wield such power. Anon continued his stroll to Ponyville, still trying to think of the meaning of life.

'What do I want most?' He thought to himself.

The material realm was at his mercy, and so Anonymous wanted something immaterial. Emotions and thoughts were harder to manipulate and required time to work with. But Anon wasn't going to distort Equestria's perspective of him. He respected free will. There was still someone who he wanted to see who would not care about being manipulated.

In his peripheral, Anonymous turned to see Sarah waiting for him by the treeline. She was as beautiful as he remembered her. There was something off about her, though. Her lifeless eyes. No matter what Anonymous created, it would never be natural, only artificial. Sarah's replica burst into flames and quickly crumbled into ashes upon Anon's disappointment. Alright, so he couldn't create immaterial things, but anything physical he wanted was his.

Ponyville could finally be seen in the distance. The Ponies wouldn't be happy to see him. Facing Spike was going to be the hardest thing Anon had done since he arrived on Equis. The rectangular device in his pocket made a ringing sound. He pulled it out and read the notification on it.

5:00 - Duel with Twilight

It was time.

Twilight was waiting for him at the Golden Oak Library, he could feel her there. He could feel all of Ponyville similar to the way he could feel his limbs. His molecules and consciousness disassembled and slid down the hill and all the way to the front of The Library. Twilight stood there, unsurprised. In the background, Anonymous could make out Spike frowning at him. No doubt he had told her about their misadventures earlier today. Twilight was also frowning, but that was just a mask for another emotion she was feeling right now.

Fear.

"I was hoping we could talk this out."

Author's Note

Halloween-themed penultimate chapter for the first of November, everyone!

HAPPY NOVEMBER-WEEN!

(Written in two days on a time-crunch don't hate on my grammar, yo'.)