Beneath Your Wings

Chapters

Eggs and Baskets
Seeing Straight
An Indecent Venture, Part 1
A Dash of Violence
An Indecent Venture, Part 2
Camping Sucks
This is Not a Nightmare*
This Is Not a Nightmare*, Part 2
Burning Through the Sky

Eggs and Baskets

Torque Stripe looked over the layout of his shop on its blueprint and wondered for some uncounted time if maybe his problem was that he was trying to do too much with it. Part sports spa and part first aid and general health clinic, he needed at least half a dozen different licenses to keep it "legitimate" and keeping some of the equipment and commodities up to date left him with barely enough to feed himself. Of course he lived where he worked. Trying to cover rent and utilities on top of business expenses would have been ghastly impossible.

He still didn't understand why he had virtually no business. He had used careful and thorough calculations to place his shop in a location that was readily visible from Cloudsdale regardless of the flying city's location over Equestria. He had crafted for himself a set of prosthetic wings so he could fly to Cloudsdale and try to bid for a contract with the Wonderbolts, and to advertise in general. Typically with flyers because those were all he could afford and also because those felt like the most fitting approach. And just like one of those dumb romance novels the bookstore owners and librarians dedicated entire aisles to, he had met her just when he thought he'd reached the peak of despair. To nopony's surprise, he was rendered oblivious to the much greater heights of that dark emotion by the hope she instilled in him.

The word on many ponies' lips was that Lightning Dust was a candidate for the Wonderbolts Academy. Not only that, but she was such a sure "in" that many Cloudsdale residents were already starting to call her Cadet. She had aced the written exam and was most definitely certain to do the same with the physical one in a couple weeks. Like her rival Rainbow Dash, she seemed to generate hopes and dreams wherever she went. But unlike Dash, Dust's intelligence held the promises of leadership, and she had never been ashamed of reading. The former had once berated Torque for having "too much word, not enough picture" on his flyers and left him in a puff of cloud dust (who knew that was a thing?) and shredded paper. He had to give up for that day and ended up rejecting her advice out of spite.

However, Torque's encounter with Lightning was totally different from top to bottom. For starters, he was making a point of avoiding her. Not only because of his trouble with her peer, but also because he believed that reaching for dreams was for ponies with a solid foundation from which to do so, and he knew he lacked that. Well, as it happened, there was a certain characteristic borne by flying aces and other ponies of similar disposition that rendered his efforts futile. Said trait was that when those kinds of ponies notice that somepony is deliberately ignoring them, it is regarded as an unforgivable sin that must be corrected. So it was that Torque's focus returned from yet another sigh to find the fledgling idol's face way too close to his.

"All right, Jerk! Just who the hay do you think you are, blowing ME off like that?" she demanded, going to butt her head against his until she noticed his horn. Lightning gasped, already aware of his "wings" since he had to keep them flapping with his magic, as he'd never learned of the Cloudwalk spell which would have made his life only about a million billion times easier. "Sweet Mother of Celestia! You're an ALICORN!? ARE YOU SOME KIND OF ROYALTY? HOW COME I NEVER HEARD OF YOU?"

Torque full-body cringed when she bellowed, not just because of the force and flying spittle of her shout, but also because he was pretty sure that every last pony in Cloudsdale looked in their direction, what she just said was made extra awkward by a surprise audience, and he was accustomed to solitude. Shaking, he impressed himself by not stammering or mumbling his response.

"No no no no nononono! Are you NUTS, or just STUPID?" he shouted back before he realized what he was doing and to whom, and where. Figuring himself for sunk, anyway, he soldiered on. "Only mares of royal blood can be alicorns! That's elementary foal stuff! The wings aren't real. ...I made them."

Lightning Dust shut up so hard that he could hear her teeth clack through her closed lips, and Torque Stripe imitated her before he knew what he was doing and struggled to process the expression on her face. It was a pretty one, but also both seemingly out of character for Lightning and one he'd never seen before, so he dismissed it as a freak of his imagination. But then she looked him over. And then she looked him over again, this time so hard he could feel her eyes raking through his mane and coat like a zealous cat's claws. He looked around nervously, but the rest of town seemed to have moved on with their daily lives. The relief he felt at learning that was immediately killed when he returned his attention to her and saw on her face an expression that he had seen before.

On Timberwolves and Changelings, when they thought they had him cornered. But they made it far less threatening than she did.

"Nopony ever talks to me like that. I'm Lightning Dust. And today's your lucky day, Chump. You just got yourself my undivided attention!"

*Three weeks later.*

Torque hadn't wanted to put all of his eggs in one basket, but he only had one "basket", and was already barely holding things together before he found her. For most of his time leading up to her, he was subsisting largely on the "disposable arts and crafts" he made and sold to his fellow ground-bound ponies. He had started making them out of boredom from waiting for customers, but apparently mail-order merchandise had a sustainable if not livable following. Most of the bits that went into maintaining his unused TLC equipment came from ponies who apparently believed that his store, which he'd named "Beneath Your Wings", was a fluffy romance novel. And those who found out that it wasn't were quite put out about that. He stopped telling ponies the truth because it somehow convinced them that he was previously lying.

However, with Lightning Dust, Torque had his real foundation. A high-profile, high-performance pegasus that demanded "The Works" with her every weekly visit. As one might expect, "The Works" was where a client paid wing-over-hoof for the finest treatment he could muster. There were, of course, a handful of significant differences between the theory he had and the practice he had to engage in, but he did well enough the first time that she made a point of returning to roost. Now if only he could convince her to stop the distractingly suggestive moaning and whimpering while he worked.

She paid him enough bits in her first couple of visits that he was able to commission the big sign he'd always wanted to have out front. Lightning even posed with him for it, and the artist did a credible job of rendering the two of them as he held her aloft by her majestically spread wings with his magic. Of course, with her qualification and training meets, she didn't get to see the finished project, so he covered it with a tarp and planned to surprise her with it as congratulations for her entry into the Wonderbolts Academy, and as thanks for putting him on the map by proxy.

The morning he planned to show her the sign, he felt more than heard a deafening clap of thunder. Literally shaken out of bed, he scampered out to the front of his store where the sound originated, his heart and face full of fear. When his eyes confirmed the destruction he'd feared, his expression joined his heart in a storm of rage, especially when he heard little hooves intentionally smashing the pieces into smaller pieces and powder. That, however, was also not meant to last. The dust surrounding the devastation was gently swept away by the deceptively soothing breeze, leaving in its wake a familiar winged mare wearing a distinctive blue uniform. One which had an even more distinctive hole in it, revealed by her turning to face him.

Torques expression went blank as he felt what he was sure must have been his soul dying. He didn't see Lightning cross the distance between them, but not for the usual reason. He was sure he imagined her burying her face in his shoulder. He was even more sure that he imagined her breaking out sobbing. This was so out of character for her, it must surely be a dream. So rather than speak to her the words of comfort he was no good at and didn't even know if she wanted, he stood there while she cried and internally screamed at himself to wake up from this Celestia-forsaken nightmare.

Seeing Straight

Derpy Muffins flew a few laps around the recently-rebuilt store sign and anxiously landed a few feet away from the door. She was always terribly nervous meeting new ponies, because she knew that they would inevitably get super judgmental about her eyes, regardless of how they chose to express or attempt to conceal it. But then she realized that she was being ridiculous, because having this stallion judge her eyes was part of the primary reason she was even here. She could probably have gone to a regular eye doctor, but she didn't want everypony in town to know that she was aware of her own abnormality. They would probably feel just awful. The door opened before her hoof contacted it.

"Hello, Miss. Welcome to Beneath Your Wings, were we -I- strive to bring out the best flyer in you! Are you here about your ocular dystrophy, or perhaps something more general?" Torque immediately closed his mouth as soon as he realized what he'd said.

That kind of insensitivity is probably why he'd never get a real marefriend and should just learn to be appreciative of Lightning's abuse. But the second customer his probably-overpriced care and service station has ever had just smiled and nodded as she stood on her hind hooves and clopped her front ones together. She had a disposition which he found utterly strange in its light and warmth. To compare the two, Lightning's presence was like the blistering wrath which the first ponies to discover fire must have experienced when their entrancement by its violent beauty drew them to cooking themselves; whereas this new mare's was like the pleasant glow one could find by remaining a reasonable distance from it. The problem was that she did not seem prone to speaking, so he worried he'd never really understand what she wanted, which given his occupation, was a nightmare material of its own kind.

"Oh! Well, very well then. This will be quick. So much so, in fact, that unless you wish to make use of the other amenities here, I won't even charge you for my time. It just wouldn't be right." Torque said as he opened the door to the "clinic" side of his establishment and trotted through. "Please take a seat. I'll only be a moment!"

Derpy slowly and nervously sat in one of the plush lobby chairs and immediately bolted out of it when she heard a thunderous crashing sound out front. Her terror at finding out what could have made such a sound warred vigorously with her terror of the idea of being caught entirely off-guard by whatever it must be as she slowly turned to look. What she saw was a large pile of rubble where the sign she'd orbited just a few minutes ago used to be. Before she could find out the destruction's source, Torque returned with a white string with three large beads on it: red, yellow, and blue.

"All right, then," the stallion began, having apparently failed to notice the extremely visible destruction just over Derpy's shoulder. "I know this is strange, but I'm going to have to ask you to hold one end of this string in your mouth and look at these beads, okay?"

Derpy blinked in confusion, wondering why he would think it might be strange to hold something with her mouth until she remembered that he was a unicorn and they didn't often do that.

"Look, this isn't a prank, okay? I promise that this is how ocular convergence and divergence therapy works, at least on my budget." he tried to reassure her, worrying that his smile might look condescending or otherwise intimidating until she played along and took one end of the string in her mouth. Then he used his magic to move the beads until they were spaced a certain way along the string. The red bead nearest her face was half as far from the yellow bead in the center as that one was from the blue one at his end.

"All right, there you go. Now, please focus on the red bead until you can see the whorl patterns on it clearly...

Now the yellow and its ridges...

And the blue's dimples...

Back to yellow...

Back to red..

Yellow...

Red...

Yellow...

Blue... okay now release the string, please." Torque pulled the string out of her mouth, then out of the beads and disposed of it, then restrung the beads and put the partially-new assembly into a dish with a sealed lid.

Derpy was still watching him and waiting for the next exercise, having completely forgotten about outside when he turned and seemed surprised at her continued presence. She was too distracted by how sometimes she could see him and, well everything really, with greater depth and detail than she previously thought possible, for several seconds every third or fourth time she blinked.

"That was the whole therapy session," Torque said. "Would you perhaps like to reserve a bed or recliner? You're due for a massive headache in about half an hour or so."

Derpy was ruffled. He expected her to be driven to agony by a minute-long exercise? So in spite of his decidedly-less-haughty appearance than the unicorn stereotype, he was still arrogant enough to coddle her. But a scowl was not natural for her and therefore not long-lived on her face. Especially when she felt a slight twinge in both sides of her head and realized that she was the one being insensitive to how delicate unicorns must be about their heads. After all, everything they were was wrapped up in them. So she politely rented a recliner, which Torque had left her in with some soothing music while he went off to do... whatever.

Forty-five minutes later, Derpy felt like the recliner was her best friend in the world and her only anchor to sanity amid the unbelievable stabbing pain in her temples, and she clung to it like she was afraid that she was going to fall off.

An Indecent Venture, Part 1

Sassy alternated between whistling and humming the "Rules of Rarity" as she bustled around the Canterlot Carousel, getting ready to close for the night. She was about halfway done with the inventory when she heard the door chime, albeit nearly drowned out by a gust of wind that slammed the door shut as quickly as it had opened it. Expecting a criminal of some kind, especially after seeing the hooded figure suddenly inside her shop, she tensed up as she whipped around to face it, ready to bolt for the alarm at the counter. Except that when she faced the intruder's location, they weren't there.

"Excuse me." Lightning Dust said from her immediate left (between Sassy and the counter), except her tone made it sound more like a barked command than a request. Sassy was pretty sure she had never jumped so high or so swiftly in her life, and struggled to swallow the lump in her throat that she was pretty sure was her own stopped heart. Though she was prone to, Sassy didn't even scream, having been startled right past that point.

"Oh my sweet bells and buttons, Missy! You right scared half my life out of me!" Sassy whined when she managed something resembling a recovery.

She was really more focused on making sure that the wetness ruining her business gown was only sweat and not anything more dreadful than paying attention to the young mare's activities. Lightning finished galing around the store, ruffling EVERYTHING with a vigorous inspection and within a few seconds returned to look at Sassy like she was an insect and the pegasus was debating whether or not it was worth the trouble of squishing her beneath her hoof, in spite of being less than three-quarters of Sassy's height. The unicorn mare found the situation to be quite surreal.

"Um... Ahem. Can I h-"

"I hear you fashion ponies believe that clothes talk."

"What?" This was random, Sassy thought, where could she possibly be going with this? "Well, in a manner of speaking, no pun intended."

"Great! So do you have some kind of translator, or do I just say something and you make me a dress that says that?"

"It's um... not... quite that simple?" Sassy said, backing toward the door as Lightning followed her and refused to let her break eye contact. "Wh-what would you like it to say?"

"Oh that part's actually very simple," Lightning beamed like a shark. "I want it to be an invitation to butt stuff."

"I beg your PARDON?" the fashionista's vision temporarily doubled and her ability to intonate properly went out the window. She closed her eyes and rubbed her right temple with the corresponding hoof. "I-I-I don't believe I heard you correctly, dear."

"I said, "I want it to be an invitation to butt stuff". I'm guessing maybe something involving a short skirt and high socks. You can handle something that simple, can't you?" Lightning sneered, hoping to have finally verbally pounded Sassy into submission, but instead the manager snapped.

"GET THE HAY OUT OF MY STORE!" Sassy bellowed in a distinctly un-ladylike fashion as her horn glowed brilliantly and the pegasus vanished in a manner not unlike her namesake.

It actually took Sassy a few seconds to register Lightning's sudden absence, and it wasn't until she was nearly finished closing the store about an hour later that it occurred to her that she had teleported the rude "customer" out in a fit of anger without really thinking of a destination. Her eyes widened and her ears drooped as she considered the possibility of having committed a very serious crime because of a tantrum, one possibly made worst by the fact that Sassy didn't really practice teleportation spells, so she was quite certain that she'd grown sloppy, a thought that finished the sudden fright's job of making her absolutely nauseous. Sassy bolted out behind the store to properly lose her dinner and wonder how she was going to explain to Rarity why she utterly failed to finish any of the designs her boss had laid out for her. She didn't think Rarity would believe what had just transpired. Sassy certainly didn't.

* * *

Derpy prepared her and Dinky's usual breakfast of flaked corn with milk and sugar while trying to think of a way to battle the ice that had been forming between them over the past few weeks. As she closed the refrigerator door, she saw that Dinky had posted on it a picture of the two of them on it. As it had been some time since Derpy had last seen the expression on Dinky's face directly, the smile in their picture really warmed her heart. She was really proud of how far she'd come in such a short time, and as the headaches subsided, the deceptively simple therapy seemed to be working its magic in quite short order. That warmth held for as long as it took for the elder mare to finish making breakfast and turn to present it to her daughter, the grimness of whose features were now magnified by an invasively penetrating glare.

"Dinky?" Derpy inquired uneasily as she carefully set the bowl down in front of the her cute carbon copy, wondering what had been bothering her lately. She'd heard of adolescents being moody, but she expected that to come much later than now. "Honey, what is it? What's troubling you?"

"On the one hoof, you were wise to choose my mother," Dinky said slowly, her expression darkening with every word. "After all, I love her very much."

"Dinky, what are you-" Derpy tried to put a reassuring hoof on Dinky's shoulder, but it was slapped away by the latter's wingtip.

"On the other hoof, you were very stupid to take my mother, because I LOVE HER VERY MUCH! And I! Won't! Forgive! YOU!"

Dinky launched herself out of her chair and at Derpy's face, only to crash right through the little chandelier that Derpy had just finished replacing all of the bulbs in last night. It was a little-known fact that Derpy was the fastest filly alive, and that only her vision problems hampered her ability to prove it. Though she was plenty talented in her own right, Dinky couldn't lay a hoof on her, albeit not for a lack of trying. Derpy was torn. On the one hoof, Dinky was tearing up their small house. On the other, her reason for doing so would stir any mother's heart.

"Dinky, stop this! Please!" Derpy said as she evaded one attack after another. "What's gotten into you?"

"Don't try to fool me, Changeling!" Dinky shrieked, shattering her own softball trophy with another failed attempt to tackle this monster that had stolen the most precious pony in her world. "I've already alerted the Guard!"

As if waiting for that cue, a pair of burly pegasi in stunningly-polished gold armor burst in through the front door. Prank calls were vanishingly rare and the fright of the Changeling invasion was still fresh in everypony's mind, so every lead to one's presence was taken absolutely seriously.

"Ladies. We're here about the report received about a possible Changeling presence!" Big Shot declared in a gravelly voice that while quiet, still seemed to be coming from everywhere at once.

While the dueling (and crying) mares froze and turned toward the door, his partner whistled at the damage that had been caused. The house was barely holding together. Before Derpy could piece together thoughts to make words, Dinky pointed at her and then at the picture on the fridge door. The two stallions' eyes followed the filly's hoof to the picture, then snapped back to Derpy. In a flash, they'd been able to spot the difference with Derpy looking directly at them, and when they seized their spears, and tensed to prepare an attack, Derpy realized that talking was not going to be an option. In the time it took for the stallion's muscles to uncoil, she had already chosen an escape route and shot out of the chimney like a cannonball. She tore through several layers of some invisible substance before they slowed her from super-sonic speeds to a dead stop, wherein the weird material bound her in a fetal position and turned her to face its owner.

"Nice try, Bug. But you're not taking ANY of that little filly's love to your evil queen, GOT IT?" the smiling unicorn, Stock Home, said as he asphyxiated her just enough to make her pass out. Derpy's last thought was that unicorns were unfairly over-powered. Being unconscious, she didn't see Stock nearly collapse from exhaustion and struggle to wave to his pegasus comrades that he was ready to be towed back to Canterlot.

A Dash of Violence

Torque supposed that he should have been suspicious when the day started off peacefully. He actually overslept, but decided that it wasn't as though he had enough business to be overly concerned about that fact, anyway. Besides, his dreams were as often as not just more days at work, spent hoping that something would happen other than what typically happens in dreams, like conversations about the distant past, alternate dimensions, and the strange creatures inhabiting both with the ghost of his dear friend Ma'ė Nóho, who had taught him to appreciate the beauty and majesty of flight. The Great Out-Back eagle had been devoured by a quarry eel right before his eyes, leaving behind only the feathers that had gone into Torque's manufactured wings and a Cutie Mark in twisting things to the point of no return. Torque had been found outside the gorge and told that the quarry eel population had suffered grievously that day, but that was decades ago. They had probably made a comeback by now.

Trying to re-establish at least the illusion of routine, Torque brushed his teeth and then went about the business of his morning exercises, equal parts meditative for his magic and calisthenic for his body. He hadn't made a career the Guard, but he'd spent sufficient time in it to be drawn into the Captain's "Sound Soul = Sound Mind + Sound Body" philosophy, which last Torque had heard, had worked out extremely well for the Captain. So well, in fact, that not only had it gotten the lazy nerds like himself into physical martial arts, but it also got some of the jocks trying to find some deeper philosophical meaning in Ogres and Oubliettes. Torque kind of wished he'd stayed, at the very least to have personally borne witness to the trail Captain Shining Armor had left in his wake.

But Torque had mistaken himself for a cutting-edge business pony, which is why he was out here in basically the middle of nowhere, standing on his horn and forehooves and hoping the increased flow of blood to his brain would help him figure out how he could've made such a stupid move, and more importantly, how to make the most of it. Instead, his mind was filled with memories (though thankfully none of the repressed ones) and the increasing concern regarding how much of his body's blood the his head could take until both were shattered with what he was sure was the audible sound of breaking glass. It took him a moment to notice that the sound wasn't accompanied by the usual cracking sensation inside his head, and much less time to right himself and teleport into the lobby of his clinic.

He couldn't imagine that a burgalar existed with the will to put forth the effort to come all the way out here just to rob him. It would be vastly easier and probably more effective to just get a real job. Torque was sure that no thief was a candidate for Celestia's School, but even finding his clinic would be, for anyone stupid and lazy enough for the life of a criminal, an extraordinarily discouraging proposition. So it was that he was prepared to sardonically demand reparations for whatever was broken and leave it at that. That is, until he took in the full scope of what had just happened.

That was when he happened upon a enlightened form of pure, unbridled rage. One that he had not known for nearly twenty years.

* * *

Zephyr had been working on what he would say for the first hour he'd spent trying to find the jerk who would hurt his precious Dashie's feelings. And after all she'd done for him, making him a new stallion with a sense of purpose and everything! Once he realized that he couldn't do both at the same time, he decided to focus on the latter. He knew that it should be fairly easy to find a unicorn in Cloudsdale, let alone a brownie anywhere in Equestria, but that didn't excuse everypony he asked calling him an idiot!

He consoled himself with the idea that Rainbow would much rather be regaled with stories of the flank-kicking he'd doled out than with what he said by way of introducing it. Or he could just embellish it later. Ponies insist that the pen might be mightier than the sword, but if you win the fights, you also get to dictate what stories get told about them. After all, that had been the driving philosophy that had served all of pegasus-kind for thousands of years.

"Hey, Stupid!" A voice reached out down the block and seemingly grabbed Zephyr's head and whipped it around in the direction of its source, inspiring a trio of raucous laughs before the lanky stallion realized his mistake and tried to escape. He failed, soon finding himself surrounded by a hoofful of familiar and unpleasant faces. "Look, you already admitted what you are! There's no sense in trying to go chicken on us now!"

"He-he-hey... guys..." Zephyr replied awkwardly, terrified that he was about to get jumped. "Wh-what's shakin'?"

"You mean besides you?" Dumb-Bell asked, before laughing at his own joke and being joined by his flunkies as they orbited Zephyr like a trio of hostile satellites. "I just wanted you to know that you're an idiot, and the stallion who you're trying to get your flank ripped off by is on the ground. You know, where boneheads and mud ponies belong. Everypony's betting against you, by the way."

"He's what? Wait, what? Everypony?" Zephyr laughed nervously. He knew he wasn't as popular as he liked to tell himself, but surely he had to have at least some faith from his fellow winged ponies.

"Aw, go easy on him, Dummy, he's about to get turned inside out by an angry splinter-face." Score faux-protested, mocking the concept of brief mercy. He turned to Zephyr, who was trying to curl into the fetal position. "It's not everypony. You got 40-to-1 odds!"

"Look on the bright side, Zephyr Sleeze!" Hoops said amid another chorus of laughter. "At least you'll give him a new set of feathers for his gimpy fake wings!"

Zephyr's vision blurred as he felt some cosmic force hurling him out of the cloud city. It took him a moment to process that the blurring was from his tears, and that the "cosmic force" was actually just the bullies "helping" him in the direction of his proclaimed destination. His heart sank with despair at his impending doom until he remembered that he was the underdog fighting for a lady's honor in a noble duel. A new fire ignited in his soul. That was it! He was sure to win, just like in all the stories he read as a...slightly younger stallion.

Zephyr's awkward flailing cleaned up into a semblance of an intentional dive as he rocketed toward his earthbound destination. There were landing pads and runways set up all around the place for potential clients of varying levels of flight ability ranging from his big sister's pre-Cutie Mark to his crush's current capacity. Not being here on a courtesy call, the mane therapist of course ignored all of these as he detached one of his landing horseshoes and launched it ahead of him through the big glass storefront.

Now, Zephyr may not have been the greatest arm in any elementary school, but he had been traveling at his peak terminal velocity when he made his throw. And the horseshoe was made of a nice brass (he expected it to help him beat the unicorn's face in). It punched through the massive window pane like a hot knife through butter, leaving a mostly-intact wall of glass for the unfortunate stallion to smash through a tiny fraction of a second later. Were this a certain other universe, he would have come out the other side an uncased pony sausage with glass slivers sticking out of the meat while most of his bloody pelt hung from the window. Luckily for him, this was not that universe.

Instead, he slammed into the service counter, ringing both its bell and his own before knocking the whole thing over. There was a barely-audible splash as it landed in a pool of the former contents of a respectable number of bottles of spa "product" which had been destroyed by a brass horseshoe ricocheting around the lobby at slightly-greater-than its own respective terminal velocity. Which was around the speed of sound. Said horseshoe had eventually punched through the back door leading to Torque's lab where it struck and tore up the mechanical wings and ricocheted around some more through shelves, books, and equipment until burying itself halfway into the motor he was working on that he hoped one day would allow non-unicorn earthbound ponies to learn the joy of flight with more reliability than the hoofful of half-hearted spells that were available to them.

As Zephyr picked himself up and put himself back together, grateful that the need was not as literal as it could have been, he couldn't help but notice that the air pressure in the room was significantly greater than a room's air pressure ought to be, especially with as many holes in it as this one had. He had half a mind to demand to see the manager and complain to him or her up until he remembered what he was doing here.

"Well. Hello and welcome, I suppose I'm obligated to say," Torque replied trying to piece together when and why his aura had turned golden, and why he felt so calm, while he used his magic to repair what elements of his establishment he could. "I don't know what has motivated your arrival, but I have to say that your particular manner of doing so is not placing you on my 'preferred customers' list."

"Don't bother with the niceties, dirtbag!" Zephyr blustered, hoping he put on an intimidating image standing in the midst of the destruction he'd caused and pointing an accusing hoof at Torque, whose horn was producing a deceptively gentle golden light and a more honest tearing sound. "I'm not here to make friends! I'm here to make you pay for your cruelty to the mare I love!"

And just like that, the pressure was gone, as were the golden glow and the air-tearing sound. Zephyr watched the unicorn narrow his eyes, then look around for something the pegasus couldn't imagine. In fact, if he had to guess, he would have come to the conclusion that Torque had abandoned consideration for his presence entirely. Since Torque wasn't even looking at him, Zephyr did have to guess, and his conclusion infuriated him! It was almost as if the snobby unicorn hadn't taken his heartfelt declaration of vengeance seriously at all! He totally deserved the surprise punch he got, and Zephyr was actually quite proud of himself not only for remembering which forehoof still had a brass horseshoe, but also that he'd sent the arrogant bastard through the only intact door remaining in the lobby.

The mane therapist didn't know how long he'd been standing there, panting in exhilaration, but he tried to catch his breath once he figured out that he'd been doing it. He did it! He kicked the flank of the stallion who'd hurt Rainbow Dash's feelings! And it barely took him any effort, too, which was a double win against the neigh-sayers who all bet against him! Zephyr was elated. Rainbow was going to be so proud of him!

"You know..." a familiar voice began, sending chills not just down Zephyr's spine, but throughout his entire body in spite or perhaps because of its formal corporate pleasantness. It didn't help that the mysterious pressure was back and that the voice was accompanied by that unsettling air-tearing sound that Zephyr now realized reminded him of the torches used to cut pipes at the factory he haunted when Rainbow was giving tours. The voice's owner followed the pressure by a few seconds, entering the lobby from the back, rather than the first aid clinic section said owner had been launched into.

"I tried. I really did. When I saw the damage you caused to my shop, I was angry, because the stuff you destroyed was considerably expensive by finance or personal labor. I managed to keep myself in check by telling myself that a pony as weak as you couldn't possibly have caused this damage on purpose. Maybe you just really needed help and mistook my facility for a hospital."

In spite of the clear threat of Torque's horn, the dangerous new spark in his eyes, or the way his mane seemed to be trying to tease up in the breeze, Zephyr couldn't take his eyes off the unicorn's hooves. Every step he took made a wet crunching sound like bones being broken. The "spell" was broken when he reflexively backed away from the somehow frighteningly placid foe and noticed that his own hooves were making that sound, inspiring Zephyr to look down and notice that those particular sound effects were his own fault for scattering fluids and broken... everything on the floor. When he looked up, he saw Torque standing much too close to his face, and his retreat became a scurry.

"Then, when I heard you spouting your cliched lines, I thought 'Okay, this guy is just some poor stupid bastard who got suckered into somepony's sick idea of a practical joke. He's just as much a victim of this absurdity as I am.' and went about trying to find out who was really responsible so I could murder them, and not you."

Zephyr didn't know how long the monologue was about to go on, but he was very certain that he was royally screwed if the villain finished. Once he realized that no amount of pleading or rationalizing was going to save him now, he coiled up and prepared to do what he was best at: running the buck away from the problem he'd created. But he never uncoiled. The mysterious pressure and the golden glow both enveloped him like a selectively viscous gelatin, and he got to "enjoy" the relatively unique experience of being entirely bathed in another pony's rage.

"But then, you had to go and sucker-punch me." Torque continued, the welt from Zephyr's horseshoe seeming to materialize on the unicorn's lower right jaw as if cued. Zephyr wondered how he could speak at all, let alone so clearly. "Normally, I would have counted that as merely two strikes, but due to the personal attachment I had to some of the things your horseshoe destroyed, I find myself having to count it as having made its own strike."

Torque lifted Zephyr to his hooves, then pulled his front half down until his knees buckled and they were eye-to-eye, reminding the pegasus that he was actually almost a head taller than his opponent. Every part of his body from poll to pastern seemed to have its own idea of how to express its terror at their collective situation, and none of that mattered because he was effectively paralyzed.

"And I do hope you know what happens to ponies who pick up three strikes in The Old Ball Game..."

Zephyr swallowed hard and processed that Torque wasn't actually paralyzing him, raw fear was. He forced himself to straighten out, determining right then that if he was going to die, it would at least be with some pretense at dignity. After learning the value of effort, he couldn't allow himself anything less. That didn't stop his voice from wavering when he responded.

"I-I'm out?"

"Correct! But wow, you're sure sweating and shaking a lot. I think you could use some FRESH AIR!" Torque punctuated his three-liner by slamming Zephyr out through the window pane next to the one he had broken in through by using a move the airborne pony dimly recognized as Bruise Knee's "One Inch Punch". He didn't think that real ponies could do that with any real effectiveness until just now.

Zephyr watched in some wonder as the glass that was flying in his wake suddenly stopped, each individual piece surrounded by a now barely-visible golden glow and flew back to its source to be re-assembled into the window instead of following Zephyr's body on a quest to become a part of it. What an odd duck, he thought of Torque, to be pausing in the middle of a raging beat-down to fix something.

Also, he seemed to be using very little magic for a unicorn on a tirade. A flash of light and a bamf sound later, Zephyr decided that if he lived through this, he was going to find a way to give the analytical part of his brain a good kick for setting him up like that. As for now, he was expecting said kick to come from Torque during his descent, but the unicorn seemed content to watch him botch the landing all by himself. Which he did. Painfully.

Torque approached the fallen pegasus, the battle between mechanic and artist having gone about as anypony would expect if told about such a match-up. The unicorn fought clinically, despite being in a highly emotional state. On the other hoof, Zephyr's performance had been directly proportionate to his emotional dedication to the activity up until his opponent actually started fighting back. Torque lifted Zephyr with his teeth and tossed him over the river where he finally used his magic to suspend his opponent in mid-air.

It was only at this point that Zephyr realized that Torque was on some level as lazy as himself, and only the absolute minimum effort was going into his flank-kicking. It probably made for a boring show to any spectators. He didn't know how to feel about that. He didn't want to think about the fact that he was about to die at the horn and hooves of one of the few ponies that understood him and thus might ever have been his friend. He saw his enemy's mouth moving, but couldn't hear him over his own head pounding and the rushing water. That ceased to matter anyway when the aura suddenly vanished from around him. In the brief instant before he plunged into the icy river, he saw on his assailant's face an expression that did not look the least bit victorious.

* * *

It wasn't very often that a pony got to see the entirety of the territory he had staked out for himself because land out here was cheap and nopony contested him on it. He had enough space to start a farm were it not for the fact that the soil was worthless and could only grow the defiant grass and flowers he grazed from when times got super hard. Which was often, but he was too stubborn and proud to return to civilization with his head bowed and his tail between his legs. Much to his chagrin, he discovered that learning of his flaws didn't help him overcome them, because he had grown to feeling that he needed those traits to survive. So he tried to compensate by hyping his property to anypony who would listen. Which was virtually nopony.

"You may or may not know, but the Sapphire Spring here stems from an underground river in the territory in the Crystal Empire!" he was in the midst of belting out to his exclusive present company when he felt a sudden absence from his magic like a dropped wallet, and an instant later heard a loud splash as a pony-sized object plunged into the water.

Torque wasn't especially proud of the fact, but his telekinetic grip was a bit on the weak side for a unicorn of his caliber. He couldn't even move furniture with it, at least not without help. It was the kind of thing he dreaded another mage finding out about. He was grateful that he inherited his Earth Pony father's strong hooves and relentless stamina. He took great pride in the magical precision his mother's genes had granted him, but that only seemed to help him with things he wanted to do, not with things he needed to do. He tried to make them both work together in the form of his personal services and mechanical wonders, but few ponies seemed interested in buying what he was selling. A world of talent did an isolated pony little good, and Torque was one of those ponies who had just enough that everypony he met seemed to feel that he should have a lot more, a sentiment which steeped him in a constant sense of being a failure whenever he was around more than a few of them.

In spite of his only knowing the stallion by the same means he hated him, Torque shivered sympathetically when his mind returned to the idiot in the river. The only reason Sapphire Spring was liquid was because it was moving too fast to freeze at its temperature, even in early summer. He was on the fence about letting this be the idiot's means of death, since hypothermia would at least be a relatively merciful way to go, but drowning was most certainly not. A cannon exploding out of the water to slam against one of the dragon-tooth rocks marking the waterfall a few hundred cels downstream, and clinging to said rock and pulling its owner's head from beneath the water announced to Torque that his anger had passed; and that now he was going to have to save the moron who broke into his establishment and assaulted him or else he was going to be plagued by guilt for the rest of his life. Stupid guilt.

Torque teleported onto the rock, only to find that Zephyr was no longer attached to it. Growling at the still-increasing ridiculousness of the situation, he dove down, knowing that if he teleported, he wouldn't be able to find his feather-brained opponent while the latter was still in one piece. This whole ordeal would have been somewhat less of a problem if Torque still had his mechanical wings to help him control his descent. Instead, he had to find the other stallion and figure out how to stop both of them from dying in the scant few seconds it was going to take them to plunge hundreds of feet to their watery, rocky doom.

The unicorn didn't know or want to know how the pegasus had managed to slow his descent, but he caught up to Zephyr halfway down the waterfall and managed to get a force-bubble around each of them at three-quarters. Torque wanted to yell at him, but was somewhat inconvenienced by the roaring waterfall nearby and the fact that his quarry had lost consciousness and wouldn't register his words anyway. Instead, he had to focus on maintaining the bubbles as they bounced around the stalagmites that were supposed to kill the two of them until they ended up on opposite shores of the lagoon that was slowing the falling water's speed to that of a more mundane river current.

Torque teleported to Zephyr's side and dried the two of them by magically pulling the frigid water from both of their bodies, then tapped on Zephyr's chest with one hoof until he started coughing up water and sucking in the air that was supposed to be in his lungs instead. After pulling a fresh burst of should-be-frozen water from his face, Torque glared down at the pegasus.

"Now then. You want to tell me what the buck this was all about?"

An Indecent Venture, Part 2

Ms. Muffins lay in a bed more plush than she could possibly have imagined, had she not made deliveries to Canterlot Castle before, tossing a red ball with white stars on it up in the air with her forehooves and catching it as it fell back into her reach. In order to distract herself from the emotional turmoil of what just happened, she focused on the ball and her almost obscenely lavish surroundings. It wasn't right to call her location a prison cell... more like a prison suite. Equestria's concept of a minimum security prison was a wing of the Castle that while fully furnished was almost never used, and in fact the only hints that it was a prison at all were the bars over the windows and the fact that the door locked from the outside.

She tried to distract herself, but she failed. Thanks to its no longer having to compensate for her wayward eyes, her brain was going on what she thought was overdrive until she realized that this is just how it was going to be from now on. She could think faster and more thoroughly than she ever remembered being able to. And she could also remember so much. Her mind blessed her with memories of past victories and cursed her with failures with equal disregard to how she felt about them...

She remembered winning her first Junior Flyer's Competition... and that her parents weren't there to see it, having had to work a double shift at the Weather Factory that day.

She remembered winning the Most Creative entry at the Applewood Derby in spite of not even being a resident at the time... and also the haunting wails of the white filly local who had genuinely poured her heart into that work.

She remembered the love of her life... and the pain of having lost it.

She remembered all of Dinky's firsts: her first steps, her first tooth, her first words, her first time taking flight... Derpy's vision blurred, and the red ball struck her in the forehead, but she didn't really care. She remembered her daughter's first earth-borne fall, her first time accidentally biting herself, her first tantrum, her first harsh reunion with the ground from the sky. Her first birthday party, her first funeral...

The trip down memory lane didn't save the gray pegasus from the grievances of the more immediate past. The look of perpetual misery briefly vanishing from the face of the stallion who helped her with a problem every other pony in her life simply chose to ignore. She wanted to spend time wondering if he did that a lot, but her mind relentlessly marched forward into the issue she was avoiding.

Her daughter didn't betray her. Derpy didn't know if it would have been better or worse if she had. She didn't want to know. She didn't want to think about it, about how Dinky had inflicted this wound on both of their hearts out of love for her. Until she had, Derpy hadn't really wrapped her mind around just how fast the change her therapy had brought was. While her vision hadn't cleared up until about the time the headaches were more or less gone, Dinky's attitude toward her had changed almost immediately. That meant that her eyes must have been continuing to try to orient themselves properly without her direct intent after just the first session. Her heart wanted to soar and shatter at the same time.

Not one to wallow in her misery, the pegasus popped out of bed and into a standing position, then strolled to the door and knocked on it.

"Excuse me!" she called through the door. "I don't want to be a bother, but I would like to know how long I'm going to be in here!"

The door didn't respond. Since her prison suite was comparable to a five-horseshoe penthouse with its own fridge and a bathroom bigger than her living room, the alarm at the idea was dull and muffled. But it was there, and she didn't have anything better to do. She knocked again.

"Hello?"

Still no response.

"Is there anypony out there? Hellooo!"

Silence.

There was no peephole, so she crouched to look through the gap under the door for shadows. There were none. The alarm in the back of her mind was no longer muffled. A few hard vibrations through her hooves drew Derpy's face the rest of the way to the floor. She cupped her ear against it and heard a commotion. She didn't know what to make of that. It could be anything from somepony having frosted Princess Celestia's cake incorrectly to the Castle being invaded again.

Now Derpy was terribly afraid that she'd been forgotten, and informed of just how such fine accommodations as those she'd been provided with could serve as a deterrent from future crime. A locked suite in Canterlot Castle was a fine place to stay, so long as nothing was happening. But with trouble raining from the skies, it was a threat zone that couldn't be escaped. She could die here, surrounded by expensive, pretty things that weren't the least bit helpful for anything.

"I'm sorry, Princess Celestia..." Derpy thought out loud, unaware of the fact that the Princess was in another castle.

Taking a stiff glide across the massive room, she slammed her forehooves into the door, one in its center and one near its latch -only to find that she had grossly overestimated the strength of the lock. She rode the door halfway across the broad hallway and winced as she saw the latch assembly punch into the wall across from her and stick. Despite herself, she was actually more alarmed at the idea of the guards' utter lack of response to her escape attempt than she thought she would have been if she'd suddenly found herself surrounded by them.

The commotion was louder when magnified by the hall's acoustics, and she managed to pick enough words out to learn that the Princesses had been ponynapped. Again. The guards were, of course, taking it pretty hard. So much so, in fact, that she was tempted to forego her escape attempt to try to go console them. Derpy decided better of it when she realized that a guard receiving comfort from a fugitive from his own prison was simply not possible. Instead, she focused on finding a window to bolt out through (though at this point she was sure she could just take the main doors) and reuniting with her daughter. It didn't take long, which left her with far too much time to focus on the conversation she was dreading having to have with Dinky.

* * *

Lightning Dust couldn't believe her luck. Apparently that beanpole unicorn's innate desire to satisfy her customer overrode even the peak of her anger, and the teleportation spell had dumped her off inside what could only be described as a swanky fetish boutique. The scent of latex assaulted her until she was forced to admit that she kind of liked it. In the meantime, she just sat and looked around, dumb-foundedly taking in her surroundings. A feminine cough drew her attention to a pony wearing what looked like a business suit with a microskirt made of the store's most ubiquitous material, showing off a Cutie Mark that looked like the product of a hateful coupling between a whip and a rake. Once there, her attention announced its refusal to leave.

The mare in question had The Goddess's long, straight, and brilliant red mane and that's where the similarity ended. Her coat was somewhere between yellow and bronze and looked... fake somehow. Like she'd taken the pains to dye her entire body that color. Her eyes were a light brown that reflected the red of her hair and seemed perpetually illuminated by a camera flare. Her horn was as long as one of Lightning's legs, and nearly half as thick, but much more rounded at the tip than she'd ever seen before. Her teeth were so white that Lightning wondered if ponies in her presence habitually wore shades just in case she smiled. She was as much taller than Lightning as Sassy had been, but unlike the latter actually came across as full-figured.

"The name's Cat-O-Nine." the taller mare said by way of introduction, her warm and cultured voice doing little to rein in her no-nonsense tone. She had an accent that hinted at origins in that one country where the laws of fashion were practically written. Its name eluded Lightning, who struggled to work out her response. "How did you get in here? I locked the doors and didn't hear anything break."

"L-Li-Lightning Dust. I tele-was teleported in! By a unicorn! She was tall like you, only uh..." she swallowed as she tried and failed to restrain her eyes from raking over the mare's body again as they took the scenic route to finding a defining difference between Cat and Sassy that wouldn't come across as insipid or offensive. "Blue."

"Blue? Oh my. Don't tell me Sassy Saddles sent you my way." Cat said, smiling down at Lightning, who was only spared the glare off the taller mare's teeth by her crimson tresses falling down to cast her face into shadow. It was still super bright and equally frightening. "I told her when I fired her that I didn't want to ever hear from her again, even second-hoof."

"Well maybe the two of you might want to try avoiding getting potential customers caught up in your personal drama?" Lightning snapped back, siding by default with a fellow recipient of unwanted employment termination.

She stood defiantly, drawing herself up to her full height of just beneath Cat's lowered chin. In hindsight, Lightning didn't even know why she let Cat intimidate her. Sure, she was bigger and prettier and gave off strong vibes of sexual aggression, but the pegasus didn't own anything in the shop and was pretty sure she could kick the unicorn's ass. Which was a large part of why she was proud of herself for not immediately demonstrating that ability when Cat burst out laughing.

"You're right, Sweetie. I'm sorry." Cat replied, though her tone indicated that she wasn't even remotely sorry. She used her right hoof to brush back half of her mane past the corresponding ear. "Let me make it up to you. I'll give you a 10% discount on your Starter Package and a free subscription of your choice between Adventures at Home Monthly or Brave New World. This way, please."

Lightning opened her mouth to respond and was rewarded for doing so with the distinct flavor of expensive conditioner as Cat's tail slapped her in the face with her turn. Words were forgotten as she tried first to spit the horrible taste out and then to scrape it off her tongue with her hooves. Bitterly, she followed the larger mare to the front of the store. There, she saw a shelf lined with a row of large boutique bags, each with the face of a somewhat familiar-looking yellow mare on the front with a long pink mane and tape over her mouth. She noted that the way they were spaced would have allowed for seven bags on the shelf, but including the one that was taken down and presented to her, there were only three. And it was Friday, hinting that Cat had somehow predicted exactly how many of the things she'd sell during the week, including to customers who didn't know they were going to be customers.

"So uh... What's in the bag?" Lightning asked as she hoofed around in it, noting a massive bottle of lubricant, some hose, a small bottle of what claimed to be a cleaning solution, a strap on, a book, and some other things she couldn't identify without removing anything.

"Just some basic essentials for your first adventure. Lube, enema kit, basic instructional manual, faux military prep-school uniform, training beads, the like. You'll want to practice and study a lot if you don't to make yourself look like a complete idiot while trying to seduce your partner." Cat replied, her tone and smile indicating that she was daring Lightning to get defensive, but the smaller mare's full-body cringe actually managed to garner some sympathy. It became apparent that this one was not a Canterlot native.

"Aw Tartarus, am I really that obvious about it?" Lightning asked, realizing that her demeanor must have screamed "prude" as loudly to Cat as Cat's did "whore" to her. And they were in the whore's domain. Lightning might as well have been picking a fight with a seahorse in the water.

"Yes," came the matter-of-fact response. Cat wasn't pulling any punches. "Nopony with experience enters a fetish shop against her will, nor do they look as hopelessly lost as you did while here. You obviously don't know what you're doing, and unless you put some effort into learning, you're going to hurt yourself and/or your partner."

Lightning's ears drooped from the gravity of the situation she had gotten herself into. She was expecting this to be a quick and easy little game she could play to make certain that stallion's eyes were on nopony but her, but apparently even getting her plot plowed was something that an Equestria Game-level activity could be made out of. Until now, that possibility would never have crossed her mind. By extension, her eyes were opened to the possibility of similar levels of complexity and effort being potentially demanded of all ponies in any given activity. Cat lowered her head until the two of them were at eye level with one another.

"I could give you some basic lessons myself, and I'm feeling generous so I'll only charge half my usual rate. But I have to ask before we get started: are you certain this partner you've got your eyes on worth this level of effort and personal expense?" Cat asked, and Lightning was certain those blood-red-looking eyes were boring into her soul for its answer. Colt, was she in for a surprise.

"Of course not," Lightning replied, her tone indicating that she'd been asked an elementary-school level question. "I'm doing this for me. I only care about what he wants as far as it can help me win."

"Win?" Cat raised her head back to its proper place and blinked, cocked it to the right, and blinked again. Confusion was vivid on her face. "Win what, exactly?"

Lightning inhaled hard and opened her mouth to respond with the fiercest snap she could muster, but stopped when she realized she didn't have an answer. To be honest with herself, perhaps for the first time in her life, there was no tangible benefit to coming out ahead in this competition. Looking back, she realized that Torque had only ever treated her as a customer, albeit a highly valued one. And it's not like his attentions to that grey mare had diminished the services he provided Lightning. In fact, the two mares rarely saw one another, and the other one would probably would be surprised to learn that Lightning had more or less declared war on her for... nothing, really. Attention, at best, but she already had that and found herself at a loss for how she'd been reciprocating.

"I think you should leave," Cat said, echoing Lightning's conclusion. The smaller mare looked up and saw an unusual coldness in the larger one's eyes. "And before you ever think about setting hoof in my establishment again, you should seriously reconsider your stance on the value of other ponies. Especially those you plan to try inviting into your bed."

Lightning thought she was going to have a snarky comeback in the vein of poor customer service, but if she was honest with herself, Cat almost couldn't get that shop door open fast enough. It was slammed shut between them, and Lightning distracted herself by watching the rain hit the empty street. It was such an odd thing to see on a somewhat arid night, and she didn't hear either the rest of the rain or any of the other things that typically accompanied it. But it was definitely raining, just like on the day she was kicked out of the Wonderbolts. It was almost like the weather knew exactly when her life took a hard dive and she only had herself to blame.

Author's Note

Free e-cookie to anyone who correctly guesses who Cat-O-Nine is modeled after.

Camping Sucks

Author's Note

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oud-UWry1Cs

Camping Sucks

"I'm so cold..." Zephyr whined as he hugged himself with as many limbs as could be applied to the action, his shivering only interrupted by his periodic sneezing. He couldn't figure out why he was still alive. The pegasus dimly remembered attacking a unicorn stallion and having his flank handed to him on a platter made of broken glass. Then he remembered finding entirely new plateaus of "cold" and "wet" as states of being. He remembered a rock, then falling, then he was here on this shore. He was sure that the unicorn was here too. Operative word being "was". His ears pricked up and his pupils dilated to pinpricks at the howls of a pack of Timberwolves. They were close and approaching.

The lanky pegasus flailed about, making noises that were totally undignified for a grown stallion and unintentionally working warmth back into his system. His limbs were filled with an agonizing sensation of reluctantly returning circulation, which was almost enough to make him forget the terror that had inspired the activity in the first place. Almost. Once he realized that his flailing had by some miracle rendered him airborne, he decided that the best solution was to land on the other shore. He almost didn't make the trip, but he noticed that the Timberwolves went silent by the time he landed.

* * *

"I'm so tired..." Torque muttered as he trudged through the forest, trying to find enough dry wood to make a campfire out of. He shivered, but wasn't sure if it was from the cold or the adrenaline rush leading up to and surrounding it. It was taking much longer than it should because most of what was dead was crawling with insects and similarly-sized living things. His ears perked up and his eyes narrowed at the sound of Timberwolves' howls piercing the night. They had surrounded him and were closing in. The unicorn wondered if the occasion would ever arise where he fought because he wanted to. "Not this... not now..."

There were about half a dozen of them, and they all burst into the clearing surrounding him, somehow almost simultaneously. He closed his eyes and lowered his head slightly as their howls were replaced with growls. They slowly stalked toward him.

"You poor animals..." Torque continued muttering as he raised a pebble in front of each of them using his telekinesis, then began spinning them until they started buzzing like angry hornets. "You have no idea how hopelessly outclassed you are."

Three of the Timberwolves leaped toward him as one while the other three held back to minimize his chance of escape. A clever tactic, as far as dumb animals went, but they were up against a sapient with the firepower to fight back. All six of Torque's pebbles were launched into their targets with so much force they simply punched through them, while at the same time the pony dove straight forward and rolled under the Timberwolf going for his face. The former Guard smiled with grim satisfaction at the sounds of whimpering and scattering wood.

"Ha!" Rolling back up to his hooves, Torque looked back at the product of his labors with a grin that first blossomed then quickly faded. The destroyed Timberwolves were very quickly re-assembling into a giant one right before his eyes. Oh right. They did that.

"No. No! NO!" The thing was bigger than the other six combined and made a very dramatic entrance. It launched itself onto its hind legs and pawed the air as it let loose a howl that Torque was sure they heard in Ponyville. Then it slammed its front paws down uncomfortably close to the stallion with enough force to nearly knock him down. It was at that moment that discretion seized the better part of valor. "NOPE!"

Torque turned and bolted at the nearest to a full gallop as he could manage on his chilled and tiring limbs. He had an advantage over the monstrosity from his smaller size giving him more room to maneuver, one which was quickly negated by his unfamiliarity with the environment and the fact that the mega-Timberwolf was simply plowing through obstacles he had to avoid. The only thing that kept it behind him rather than on top of him was that it kept slowing to try to bite him, each time revealing that its muzzle was at least as big as he was. He was agile enough to avoid these attacks, but only just, and he didn't know how much longer he could keep it up.

"Crap. Crap! Crap! Crap! CRAP!" The pursuit exploded out onto the lagoon's shore, where Torque tried to look for the pegasus he'd left here and flee for his life at the same time. It turned out he couldn't do that, so he teleported a short distance forward and turned to face his gigantic foe alone. He levitated a rock about the size of his head and begun to spin it like he did the pebbles, though with considerably more effort. The Timberwolf Alpha bore down on him but stopped when it found itself confronted again, snarling and growling as it tried to menace him into fleeing again. But faced with what looked like an inevitable death, Torque felt that distantly familiar darkness settling over him again.

The rock was launched right through the Alpha with enough force to set the wood surrounding the hole it made to smoldering. But the beast was only briefly delayed by the injury, and Torque knew he didn't have anything left. His vision was blurring and doubling, and the strength was leaving all four of his legs. It reminded him of when Tirek had drained all of his magic, making it pretty clear what his status was at the moment. He staggered back and fell onto his haunches, but continued trying to stand because he was unwilling to resign himself to falling to a dumb animal.

"Up here, you termite buffet!" came a voice whose tone did not match its brazen words. It still worked, though, and both wolf and pony found their eyes directed up at the off-green blotch in the night sky. Zephyr launched his attack in the form of a stiff breeze generated by his wings. At first, this only annoyed the Alpha, which directed its growling at the airborne pony instead of Torque. But then it coughed and smoke erupted from its mouth as confusion took hold of its face. Moments later, it erupted into a bonfire. "Yeah! I totally meant to do that!"

His bravado had an audience of none, however. The black-and-tan unicorn had collapsed and the Alpha had scared off all wildlife for miles, especially when it burst into flame. Still, the rush of victory in battle was a new sensation that Zephyr was eager to embrace, and the heat was vigorously banishing the debilitating effects of his recent high-intensity bath. He laughed and cheered for himself as he pranced around like he was in the midst of the best birthday party ever. He just hoped that his new partner in crime didn't need any more help, because he didn't know the first thing about first aid for any situation.

Joy was banished from the scene, however, by a seeming lightning bolt announcing the arrival of a new pony to the scene. A pegasus, specifically. More specifically, it was Spitfire. And the look on her face was one Zephyr would imagine of a mare who was just told that the only way to save her foal was by ripping her own teeth out. It was the kind of expression that quickly and reliably banished any fantasies of joining the military from Zephyr's mind.

"Nice work, Civilian." she said, filling the stallion's mind with pride and terror at the same time. Praise from the Wonderbolt Commander could not be valued, but what was she doing way out here in the middle of the night? And why did she look like she was about to tell somepony they had cancer?

"Th-thanks, Ms.-"

"Commander."

"Yes ma'am! C-Commander S-Spitfire! Uh... wh-what brings you out to this neck of the woods?" Zephyr asked, feeling really proud of himself for not following up with a demand as to why she wasn't here sometime sooner. Like when they were fighting the Alpha, that would've been great.

"There's been a General Recall of all former Guards, and the Bolts are the ones tasked with seeing it enforced." Spitfire replied, her voice wavering. The mare was visibly displeased with the situation. She jabbed a foot at the unconscious unicorn. "He's the last one. Up until your bonfire, we almost gave up finding him."

"O-oh. Wait, what? Why?" Zephyr was immediately cured of the illusion that he could not possibly be more scared than he was just a few minutes ago. A General Recall of Guard veterans was the kind of thing that while unprecedented, strongly indicated something terrible happening to all of Equestria.

"I am not at liberty to discuss that with you, Civilian." Spitfire spat, making her unwillingness to continue the topic abundantly clear. "Now wake him up. He is to report to Canterlot ASAP."

"What? No!" Zephyr protest, but flinched away from the Wonderbolt's scintillating glare. "He uh, look. We both had a very long day. Can this wait until tomorrow?"

"ASAP means 'as soon as possible', Civilian." Spitfire replied curtly, cringing internally at what she was sure was unnecessary hostility. But she carried a burden of bad news that she wanted to be relieved of as soon as she could conceivably manage. She hid her emotional turmoil behind a fierce glower as she marched smartly over to Torque and poked him with a hoof. He didn't respond, which alerted her, so she poked harder and held it. She could barely feel his heartbeat. Sliding her goggles up, she regarded Zephyr with a penetratingly inquisitive gaze.

"Just what the hay have you two been up to?"

This is Not a Nightmare*

Author's Note

*Unless you're ophidiophobic, in which case, trigger warning: SNAKES! Also, beware if you're thalassophobic, claustrophobic, or generally sensitive to anything.

This is Not a Nightmare*

Torque "opened his eyes" to find that his bed was standing in cool, murky water-like fluid that might very well have been at least half tar up to his knees. The other half of the fluid appeared to be snakes. Cobras, to be precise. And they weren't just in the water. They were everywhere. They swarmed over his bed and his body, periodically baring their fangs as they hissed and made as if to try and bite him. He reacted with the kind of calmness only manageable by a pony whose life was already desolate and whose soul was already just tired of everything, with the potentially fatal threats being shaken off to the tune of mutters of mild disdain.

"Hey! No. Knock it off. Don't you even think about biting me, you little bastards!" Much to his surprise, however mild it may have played, the snakes were cowed and parted just enough to let him move around.

They were still everywhere though. He shook half a dozen tiny ones off his brush before using it to brush more out of his mane. They hissed at him, and a couple that had been framing his bathroom mirror lunged at his face. The first missed entirely, whereas the second succeeded in sinking its fangs into his front left hoof. Instead of the burning pain he was expecting, its venom instead felt like a dull ache.

Kind of like a regret, really. Regret like the expression on the cobra's face when it noticed that he wasn't screaming in horror and agony as the death it promised seized his heart and sealed his fate. The snake slowly pulled its fangs back out of his forehoof and was about to retreat back to its place when he caught it with his magic aura, pulled it up to his face, and bit its head off. How he had not yet learned he was dreaming at this point eluded him; especially as he made a point of making eye contact with each nearby snake in turn as he chewed on the head and noisily swallowed it before tossing away the body. It tasted like a peach, of all things.

None of the other snakes ever opened their mouths in his direction again.

Torque trudged in the direction of his old Guard post, not the least bit hindered by the midnight blue tarry snake-water. This was in spite of its height ranging from his chest to his pasterns, depending on some arbitrary ruling he couldn't begin to guess at. All around him, ponies were screaming in horror and agony as the snakes piling onto them bit them to death, or as the tar sticking to their bodies pinned them in place while the chill of the water sucked all of the life and warmth out of their bodies. He was actually just starting to feel abysmally lonely being the only pony unaffected by the goings on when-

"Hey! You!" A rough, but not unattractive female voice called out, but before he turned his head enough to look, he felt a pair of somethings slamming into his right side with cosmic force. Somethings small and decidedly reminiscent of hooves. He was getting really tired of ponies hitting him out of nowhere, and for no readily apparent reason. Then again, he was often fatigued in general, so drops of water and buckets and all that.

He skidded a good distance to his left in spite of the knee-deep water, and then toppled over with a splash that somehow cleared all of the water and snakes from his- their immediate vicinity. He felt his ribs making a sharp protest as his body hit dry land that wasn't there a second ago. Picking himself up, he turned to glare at his assailant.

"What do you want?" he inquired, though his tone and body language effectively shouted 'Go away!' She didn't get the latter message.

"You look like you can do something about all these snakes, and the flooding." the fire-colored winged mare said as she gestured about them, and her tone carried a demand that he suit action to ability.

Torque noticed that though the snakes were giving him a wide enough berth to avoid her by extension, the ichor she was standing in clung to her body like black taffy. It stretched with her movements, then tried to pull her back down. She seemed to resist it by pure obstinacy, which come to think of it was how he fought depression when he was younger.

"That's a rather strong assumption you're making there, miss."

"Really?" She stamped her free hoof, making the tarry water flee its impact site briefly before rushing in to reclaim the limb. "I don't know who you think you're fooling, but it isn't me. Now get to work!"

"Fine." He replied after a few moments of considering defiance, rolling his eyes as he reluctantly got started. The absurdity of approaching the cleanup of a global catastrophe like a teenager being ordered to take out the trash managed to click into the barely-present conscious part of his mind. "Anything else you want me to handle while I'm at it? Groceries, maybe?"

"Close. Her Royal Majesty, the White Queen also commands that you retrieve your fellow pawns and return them to post."

"Let me guess, they're-"

"At the bottom of the ocean, last I heard."

"Outstanding! I was guessing inside a volcano." Torque smiled that not-smile one could only really justify bringing to bear when using black humor.

"Don't be ridiculous. That's where your post is." the fire-maned pony scowled back, trying to shut down his smile and thus demonstrating her ignorance regarding how it worked.

"I'm going to get started before this gets any more ridiculous."

"Good. You'd-" Bamf! "-better. Damn unicorns." Spitfire hissed and muttered as she suddenly found the two of them in another location.

She was about to ask how he knew this was the ocean, until she saw the moon hovering just a short distance over the horizon, lighting both the bleak clouds blanketing the sky above and the even bleaker waters below it. At which point she wondered how that clued her in that this was the ocean. Especially since the shore was littered with marsh grasses. In fact, half of her experience was trying to piece together how anything was relevant to anything here. She was definitely not a fan of either snakes or things that restricted her ability to move, and was certain she would be terrified right out of her mind if she wasn't so Celestia-forsaken confused about the whole deal. "A million is a statistic" apparently also applied to sources of fear.

"If I were you, I'd be careful with my distribution of cursed words in this place." Torque said cheekily as he surrounded himself in a dome barrier, then started walking into the deeper water.

"Hey! Wait!" Spitfire shouted after him, indignant that he neither included her in his dome nor made one for her. That was until she noticed that the water was not falling in his wake, even once he'd gone far enough in that his bubble was completely under the surface.

"Why would I wait for you? You're not helping, and you haven't given me the slightest inclination to like you."

"I'm helping!" Spitfire insisted, to which Torque wheeled on her, then scowled slightly and cocked his head just enough to the right for the inclination to be visible. "I helped... I told you what you needed to do and where you needed to go."

"Well!" Torque snapped as he wheeled back. "Do let me know if you need somepony to be contracted for the creation of your medal."

"Excuse me!" Spitfire shouted as she galloped forward until she was just behind Torque, but didn't lower her volume once she was within range of a whispered conversation. "Who do you think you are? Do you have any idea who I am?"

"Judging by your appearance and voice, I'd peg you for Spitfire. Commander of the Wonderbolts' Canterlot Branch, and the primary face of the organization. Also, in spite of your comparatively low rank within said service, you are somehow responsible for making a lot of decisions that would ordinarily be well above your pay grade, perhaps in part due to your association with the nobility. We've only met about twenty times in the past half year. Now, I absolutely hate this game thanks in large part to the aforementioned nobles, but since you started, it's your turn." He glared down at her, the bags under his eyes intensifying the expression. "Do you have any idea who I am?"

"Don't be ridiculous. I obviously can't be bothered to remember every whimpering sycophant who comes crawling to beg me for patronage and endorsement." Spitfire sneered, then stopped suddenly when she realized that there was more to this conversation than a contest of wills, and she had just talked herself into a corner. In hindsight, she had never bothered to attempt to learn more about who this pony was, and learning that he was formerly of the Guard should have been a wake-up call. "Wait... wait. I recognize you now. You... you used to be Number 64 of Her Majesty's 100, didn't you? Iron Driver."

Her delivery of the nickname he'd received in the Royal Guard opened an emotional floodgate... -for Spitfire. Unbeknownst to him prior to this point, she had been extremely attached to the image of who he used to be. But he could tell by the way she was "winding up" that she was about to thoroughly inform him.

"You used to be the poster colt for the personal integrity in the Guard! You used to be an icon! A role model for colts to aspire to and a dream for fillies! I even have your trading card for pony's sake!" To punctuate this outburst, she tucked her head back and pulled a card from one of the pockets which pegasi sometimes mysteriously had under their wings and threw it down onto the ground in front of him, face up. Apparently the photographer had caught him in a bad mood. Albeit, not nearly as bad as that afflicting the mare now pointing an accusing hoof at it as she continued to bellow at him while her eyes welled up and eventually started overflowing with tears. "I touched myself to that! But then you had to go and let me and everypony whoever looked up to you down! Now, you're nothing but a quitter! A self-made loser! You abandoned your team! And I..."

Spitfire's tirade broke down at this point, her hate taking her down as it turned inward. Only now that she'd stopped shouting at him was he able to register the tendrils of black tar snaking their way up her legs and over her body to ensnare it like a net. He wanted to free her, but had no idea what to do, since trying to blast the ichor carried the risk of hurting her. So for a time, he could only watch.

"I'm a stupid hypocrite..." she sobbed.

"I really am a disgrace to this uniform," she muttered as she reached for her left shoulder with her right hoof and tore off that portion of her Wonderbolt body suit. Incidentally, that also freed her of that portion of the "net", despite her seeming unawareness of its presence.

"I tried to wall out our best prospect with red tape even though I owed her my life and those of my wing-mates, all so I wouldn't have to let her see the truth of what we were." she mirrored the action on the other side.

"I abandoned one of our members when he was injured and replaced him with the aforementioned prospect just to preserve our image in the public eye." she tore off the left half of the midsection now, leaving the right to dangle off the corresponding wing.

"I tried to treat the Wonderbolts like a military even though we've never really contributed anything to the defense of Equestria's sovereignty." she tore off the right half, leaving only leggings.

"I promoted an environment of ruthless pursuit of greatness, then I shot down the pony who suited it best when our Corps' new hero called me out on it. Like a coward, I threw our most capable Cadet under the chariot because I couldn't stomach what she revealed about me." Spitfire kicked off her leggings, then trampled them and tore the large pieces of her uniform into smaller ones. There was something cathartic about destroying the thing she'd realized that she'd been sacrificing other ponies to preserve. "I didn't see her again for months, and the whole time, I almost couldn't sleep because I was afraid that she... that she did what I might have done, if I'd been on the receiving end of what I did to her."

The mare looked up at the stallion with the expression that was almost his trademark, had it not already been copyrighted by Celestia: a smile that was not a smile, but which existed nonetheless because admitting the emotional pain would have only made it worse.

"I guess in the end... you were right about this, too. About quitting when you no longer serve your purpose. I should have done it sooner myself, you know, before I started ruining lives and trampling dreams. I just have to know: how do you do it? How are you always so right all the time, even when your rightness looks so wrong?"

A long moment stretched between them as Torque processed all of what she said. After closing his eyes and taking a deep breath, he opened them again to take and hold her gaze.

"Well, it's simple really." he walked over to Spitfire and pulled her into a hug identical to the one he gave Lightning not too long ago. "I've never had a choice. Whenever I reached a point in my life where I faced a conundrum between personal happiness and the well-being of other ponies, I've always strongly felt that the decision has already been made for me."

This Is Not a Nightmare*, Part 2

Author's Note

*But everypony involved sure wishes it was.

Yes, believe it or not, I'm actually finishing a scene started in a previous chapter. Shocker, I know.

This Is Not a Nightmare*, Part 2

"I bet almost everypony you've ever met both loves you and hates you with a burning passion," Spitfire declared as she placed a hoof against his chest and shoved. This had the effect of pushing her away from him, as opposed to her intended result, but she still got the foreleg-length distance from him she wanted, so she glared directly into his amber eyes instead of getting distracted. "Being right more often than not has doubtless made an insufferable ass out of you."

"That's racist~ Ahem. That is one of my several reasons for isolating myself, yes. Speaking of burning, I seem to remember dipping into this coma in front of a roaring bonfire within easy spitting distance of a forest and presided over exclusively by a moron who probably couldn't handle preening his own feathers. I know I'm stuck in here until I recover, which I doubt is going to be nearly soon enough to save the day, so I'll have to ask you to go in my stead."

"'In here'? What, is this some kind of- of course this is some kind of dr-" Of course, as was typical of most alert ponies, Spitfire woke the instant she realized that she was dreaming. Also of course, if Torque had not been entirely exhausted and possibly also on the edge of death, he would have woken up some time ago.

"Aaaand, she's gone. Now to figure out how she got in here." Torque looked around, watching his awareness of the dream state manifest as a brilliant light that carved the dark waters surrounding him into smoky-gray canyons.

He levitated, though not by his own conscious will, skyward until he stood upon an ashen mesa and found himself gazing out over a landscape which was marginally less bleak than it had been just a short while ago. Of course, this wasn't the much more pleasant traditional Equestrian vista he was usually rewarded with at the end of his dreams, but since he typically had to be repaid for his heroic efforts by being emotionally discarded and "dying" to get to see that, he was conflicted. His immediate company appeared to be a gnarled and blackened tree until it metamorphosed into the Night Princess herself. Well, at least that answered his question regarding how another pony got into his dream. He would have been more surprised if it weren't for the fact that that was the only answer that question could reasonably have had.

"Princess Luna," Torque began, crossing his right hoof over his chest and bowing until his horn was level with his shoulders. A perfect military bow, the absolute minimum required of a Royal Guard. "To what do I owe the tremendous honor?"

"This is your dream, Mr. Stripe. You can afford to be a little less formal." Luna replied, and the stallion could tell by her tone and body language there was something she was struggling to tell him. Like Spitfire, however, she took an opportunity to distract herself. "While I'm at it, why is this place so desolate? It pains me to say it as the regent of the matter, but I'd almost be happier if you didn't dream at all if this is the kind of environment your mind conjures."

"Princess, please..." Torque closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose with the crook of his front right knee. "I don't wish to be rude, but please get to the point. I have not shared your company in my entire life prior to just now. You're not here on a social call. This damage you see all around us, this is past tense, and also much better than it was a minute ago. You can't save me from it, and you know that. What happened? Who died?"

At that last word, Luna reared her head, her ears first perking sharply then flattening against the side of her head. Tears welled up in her eyes before she shut them tightly and turned her face away from him. Torque was just starting to think that he'd earned a platinum upgrade on his "Unbearable Jerk" internal merit badge (finally putting him on even hoofing with Blueblood, Zephyr, and Lightning) when she finally spoke, her voice at once hollow and laden with poorly-suppressed sobs as she gave him the news nopony would ever want to hear in their entire lives:

"All of them."

"All of... who?" Torque asked, for once in his life genuinely and openly afraid. She hoped he was talking about his estranged family, and whether the one he was adopted from or into, he didn't much care. But deep down inside, he knew better.

"My sister's... Damnit, Spitfire, why did you leave this in my hooves? The One Hundred, Mr. Stripe. They are no more, save for Captain Shining Armor. That's why we're recalling veterans such as yourself. They... they all... killed themselves, after the latest incident with the Changelings."

"What, the wedding? But that was years ago, back when I was still in service! Why would-" Torque stopped and narrowed his eyes. "There has been a more recent incident involving the Changelings."

"Yes!" Luna sob-shouted, following Spitfire in having a much bigger emotional reaction than Torque to something the latter ought to have been having the bigger emotional reaction to. "They captured all of the core Royal Family and half the extended one, but there won't be a retaliatory war with them, because they're... different now. My sister wants us to focus on the prospect of a peaceful future, not revenge. I'm so sorry! All this time, I've never even considered how all of these things going on lately must be making the lot of you feel!"

"In your defense, Princess, we're specifically trained to psychologically register as furniture to you and the rest of the nobility." Torque quipped, trying and failing to escape the telekinesis-assisted nonconsensual hug by the bawling alicorn mare who was as big as he was. "Please release me, you are making this very awkward."

"Awkward? Awkward!? All of your friends are dead you psychotic little stallion!" Luna released him from her forelegs but not her aura, which she used to float him a couple body-lengths away from her and shake him vigorously as she worked progressively up to the Royal Canterlot Voice, which in his dream seemed to be coming from everywhere at once. "YOU SHOULD BE THE ONE CRYING YOUR HEART OUT RIGHT NOW! JUST WHAT THE HAY IS WRONG WITH YOU!?"

"That's a very long and ill-defined list, Your Highness," Torque replied, once he'd been stationary long enough to orient his thoughts. He gestured to their surroundings in an effort to use them to summarize his personality defects, then continued, "After all, sane happy ponies don't make for very good government-contracted killers. Most pertinent to the topic at hoof, however, are the facts that I have fainted from exhaustion and life-threatening trauma; and that I have never been able to 'feel' properly in the first place. Also, I had long suspected that many of the Guard would end up giving up on life in the face of all the shenanigans they've thus far been wholly unable to prevent. I just... didn't think it was going to be all of them, nor so literally. Now, if you don't mind, I'd like to take you up on that offer of 'not dreaming at all'. Today has been a very long and dismal day, and it looks like the future ones are only going to be worse."

"Your wish is granted. Just understand that by my command, I expressly forbid that you die." Princess Luna responded, educating both of them on the notion that it was possible to verbally spit gently. She set him down and instantly he was embraced by a peaceful darkness.

Burning Through the Sky

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