Equestria Girls In Disguise: Rise Of The Toxibolts

“Sweet mother of goddess…” Applejack’s jaw hung wide open as she witnessed the destruction that had swept the Autobot HQ. Faint traces of black sludge dripped across the walls and Teletraan-1’s central computer screen was still static and fizzling from the attack. “What in tarnation happened here, Sunset?!”

“Uh, a bit of a long story.” Sunset replied. “Let's just say, I think maybe trying to remove all of the bad stuff from our Crystal Prep friends wasn’t such a good idea. Now we’ve got oily Shadowbolts and Wheeljack roaming around who knows where.”

“I dunno… this doesn’t really look like real oil to me.” Pinkie squinted her eyes as she examined the splodges of toxin on the walls. She scraped some of it onto her finger and brought it close to her mouth. “But, there’s only one way to find out.”

“Pinkie!” Rarity grabbed Pinkie’s hand and held it high to the sky. Before the pink teenager could do anything about it, Rarity had already whipped out a handkerchief with a purple ‘R’ stitched onto the corner and wiped the mess away.

“The damage was so bad that Teletraan-1’s still powered down and rebooting himself, Optimus Prime is being tended to by Red Alert in the medbay, and those black creatures are probably causing chaos out in Canterlot as we speak.” Sunset Shimmer grimaced at how the central screen still fizzled as a progress bar faintly showed how close the supercomputer was to coming back online.

“Well, that’s all I need to hear.” Rainbow Dash clutched the geode around her neck tightly. “Let’s give these black monsters a real butt-kicking, girls.”

“Uh, just as soon as we find them, that is…” Fluttershy whispered.

“Normally, I would leave this to the hands of the Autobots, but we know that these black creatures can shapeshift, take control of other lifeforms, and turn into puddles of goo that can’t be hurt by anything, so you’re the best bet I have, girls.” Sunset Shimmer slid her hand across the wall, narrowly avoiding some of the residue left over by the Toxibolts. “If I send other Autobots out to fight it, then they could end up like Wheeljack. And we don’t want another giant Autobot dripping that black poison everywhere.”

“Look, Sunset, maybe we should head to Wheeljack’s lab. See if there’s a clue in there or something that’ll help us understand this better.” Twilight lifted a finger. “If we can figure out what this goo is made out of, then maybe we can synthesize a weapon that can nullify the effects of and destroy the toxin. Plus, we’ll need to figure out a way on how we can use it to fix Wheeljack as well, since he’s still a robot and all.”

“Don’t bother. The place is full of that stuff…” Sideswipe limped out from out of the shadows with deep gashes on his arms and legs. Standing beside him were Bumblebee and Hot Shot, who also had violent cuts across their bodies. “Whatever those things are, they’re crafty…” Sideswipe was about to take another step forward, but the servos in his legs gave out and he collapsed to the floor.

“SIDESWIPE!” Rainbow ran over to Sideswipe and tried lifting him up. “No, no, no, no, no, no, no! You can’t die on me, buddy! Not now!”

“Hey, chill, Rainbow. I’m not gonna die.” Sideswipe groaned as he tried pushing himself back up. “Leg wounds aren’t fatal to an Autobot. Now, if they’d gone for my heart or head units, then yeah, I’d be dead, you’d be crying at my tombstone, and your life would go straight down the toilet.”

“Plus, these creatures aren’t pretty tough.” Hot Shot slung Sideswipe’s arm over his shoulders and hoisted him up while Bumblebee grabbed the other side.

“Yeah. If anything, we could’ve just used a giant mop to clean those girls up.” Bumblebee used his feet to get Sideswipe back on his, while his arms were busy holding up the body.

“Where. Did. They. GO?!” Rainbow Dash clenched her teeth and tightened her hands into fists. A strong flame burned in her eyes as she stood in front of a flaming background held up by Pinkie Pie.

“I’ve got no idea, girl. They just jumped into the sewers and that was that.” Sideswipe winced as the energon sparked out of the slashed wires. “Gah… okay, now I’m gonna need to get patched up.”

“We’ve got it.” Hot Shot turned Sideswipe the other way. “Just don’t strain yourself too much, buddy. We’re gonna need you out on the field soon.”

“Plus, you’re lucky. You’ll be right next to Optimus,” said Bumblebee as the two bots lifted him off. “I’m sure he could use someone to talk to other than Red Alert Two.”

“Red Alert Two?” Hot Shot lifted a brow. “Bro, that’s not gonna work. There’s only one Red Alert, y’know. Can’t we just have a nickname for the girl one and keep my main man’s name safe?”

“It was a surgery, Hot Shot! The only way I’d be alive again would be for my entire body to be reformated. Sorry I’m not the same guy you once knew!” Red Alert yelled from a distance.

“This is worse than I anticipated…” Sunset watched as Sideswipe was dragged off out of their sight. “We need to find these creatures and blast them with our rainbow laser NOW.”

I’m already opening a Groundbridge into the sewers.” Twilight Sparkle was typing away at Teletraan-1’s mainframe, causing a portal to open up before them. “If these creatures are down there, then we should strike while they’re still planning.”

“Remember, girls. Keep your geodes safe.” Sunset stood before the portal. “Don’t let those little monsters get their hands on them, or we’re doomed.”

“If they want these bad boys, then they’re gonna have to pry them from our cold, dead hands!” Dash used hers and grew her wings, ears, and hair extensions. “Now let’s go!” She blasted through the portal at lightspeed, almost knocking the girls over with the slipstream she left behind.

The other Rainbooms followed close behind Rainbow Dash, not wanting to get left behind. They threw themselves through the portal and disappeared in a pillar of bright light. Once it fizzled out, nothing remained of the girls or the vortex.

Down in the sewers, the Toxibolts were all gathered around a large drain room with a massive hole in the centre. Sewage was leaking out from the streams over their heads and down into the hole, along with some cans, syringes, and other garbage tossed away by the world.

“Real funny, Sugarcoat. You chose the fucking sewers as our hideout.” Toxic Sour grumbled. “Hardy har har. We’re trash, so we should live like trash.”

“Oh, go fuck yourself, Sour Sweet.” Toxic Sugarcoat hurled a blob of toxin at her face, disintegrating it with little effort only for it to grow straight back. “The only reason we’re down here is because those little worms at Autobot HQ welded up all their drains so now we can’t even get back in without one of those little runts’ Groundbridge devices.”

“So, what are we waiting for?” Toxic Indigo slumped her arm over a crate of rotting oranges. “I wanna start hurting people! That’s what we’re supposed to be, right?”

“You know that you’re all of Indigo’s bad parts, right?” Toxic Sugarcoat cocked a brow. “Which means you’re a stupid, arrogant, hasty, and incorrigible piece of shit that doesn’t listen to a single word we say unless she’s out of the field ramming her feet right up her enemies’ asses. So shut up, sit down, and let me work in peace!”

Indigo sat down and huffed, crossing her arms as she grinded against Toxic Lemon, who was still enjoying the music on her blackened headphones.

“Just hurry it up, Sugarcoat!” Sour huffed. “Do you know how long I’ve been waiting to scream at that bitch!? Oh wah, wah, wah, my entire planet’s been destroyed… wah, wah, wah, I mean jesus! And you know what? I swear if that…. That BITCH doesn’t want to move things along in our relationship and actually move to third or second base, I might as well just end things with us right now! I have needs…”

Sunny Flare just shivered in fear as Sour screamed.

“Do you think Smallfoot would actually want to do… that, with you?” Sunny cringed.

All of a sudden, a small rumbling noise echoed throughout the whole sewer, causing the Toxibolts to freeze and look around.

“Uh, I’m pretty sure that’s a bad thing,” said Sunny.

“Looks like we’ve got company.” Toxic Sugar cracked her gooey knuckles. “Indigo, you take the deaf idiot and follow their flank, Sunny and Sour attack from the front.”

“Hey, why aren’t you throwing your ass onto the battlefield?” Toxic Sour cocked a brow.

“Because my ass needs to formulate a plan to get rid of those pathetic other halves, conquer this planet, and get those fucking machines off of it.” Toxic Sugarcoat turned back to the drawing board.

“Your plan is just as put together as Motormaster’s plan to rule Earth’s roads!” Toxic Sour snapped.

“Do. Not. Fuck. With. Me.” Toxic Sugarcoat grabbed Toxic Sour’s heart and began to squeeze as tightly as she could. Any more pressure would’ve killed Toxic Sour. “Get. Your. Fucking. Ass. Out. There. And. Do. Not. Question. My. Authority. Again. Do you understand me, you miserable waste of a life?!”

Sour only snarled. “I say tell that to my whiny girlfriend, but whatever, I’m in the mood for killing stuff.”

Toxic Sugar just threw Toxic Sour down and turned her back. “You try threatening me again, I’ll pop that bubbly heart of yours in a second. Then, you’ll never be able to tell that hunk of junk that you wanna fuck her.”

Indigo and Sunny cringed.

“That’s just disgusting! Why would you even want to do it with a cyborg of all people!?” Indigo snapped.

“You don’t know what I’ve got!” Sour snapped.

“THAT. IS. ENOUGH!” Toxic Sugarcoat roared, and her goo caused a flood to burst out around her. It was so powerful that it blasted the four other Toxibolts out of the room and down the sewers. Once the others had gone, she sealed the doors one by one and sat alone in the silence. “Now that those idiots are gone, I can finally work.”

The other Shadowbolts slowly got back up on their feet on another part of the sewer and huffed.

“Wow, what a bitch.” Toxic Indigo said.

Rainbow Dash blasted out of the Groundbridge and skidded across the sewer waters before grinding to a halt, splashing the wall and a bunch of rats. She watched as all the other girls came out the portal as well, with Rarity and Fluttershy shivering at the state of the place.

“If there’s one place that I never ever wanted to touch in my life, it was the sewers.” Rarity just watched the bilge stream trail down the tunnels as rats and other sewer creatures scurried through the holes. “This is hell for any fashionista. Forget the fiery wasteland where the devil rules supreme over the tortured souls…”

“It’s nasty alright. But we’ve still got a job to do.” Rainbow said. “Come on, we’ve got to find them.”

“If we’re going to find these oil-covered Shadowbolts, the first thing we should do is check for any fresh signs of the toxin.” Twilight pulled out a tiny test tube. “I can load it up into this DNA tracker and finely calibrate it to the highest concentration. That should allow us to locate the source of the problem.”

“Then let's get groovin!” Pinkie chimed.

“Are you sure about this, girls?” Fluttershy just peered down into the dark tunnels. The light seemed to get dimmer and dimmer the deeper it went. “I’m okay with getting dirty, but you know what sewers are like. What if there’s crocodiles down here?”

“Ah, c’mon, Fluttershy. It’s not all that bad.” Pinkie grinned. “Plus, if cartoons have taught me anything, it’s that there’s four mutated turtles down here who love to eat pizza and kick butt. I’m sure they could help us out.”

Rainbow stared back at Pinkie. “Yeah… well I doubt they’d actually be living down here in our sewer system. Anything yet Twilight?”

“Girls, we haven’t even left the Groundbridge yet.” Twilight deadpanned and rolled her eyes to the closing portal. “We’ll have to go down pretty deep if we wanna find a patch of the goo. A large bubbling mass or something similar to that should be just enough. It’s better for it to be hot off the cooker than to have lost its’ sizzle.”

The girls slowly walked forward as they began to walk through the dirty sewer system. Twilight led the group with a flashlight in her hands. She examined every wall, ceiling, and pipeway. She even tried looking into the water but couldn’t distinguish how deep it was or what was in it.

“Anything yet?” Rainbow asked as she avoided some trickling water from another grate.

“Are you just gonna pull that ‘are we there yet’ gag from all them there movies?” Applejack lowered her brows.

“Oh come on! I never got a look at these things, I’m dying to see them! Besides, I want to kick some butt!” Rainbow whined.

“Well, at least there’s no crab Decepticons hiding down in these sewers.” Twilight asked. “But… it never hurts to make sure. I mean, who knows what kind of Cons escaped from the Alchemor?”

“All I know is there’s a lot of anthropomorphic Cons that escaped.” Rainbow said. “I mean think about it, every Decepticon we’ve met from Cybertron has some animal form built in their body. What’s up with that? I mean seriously!”

“Well, Weirdwolf did tell us that during the war, the Cons did some searches across the galaxy for other forms to take on. I think they might have spent some time on Earth for a bit, and then when they saw some of our animals here, that’s what they used to shape some of their warriors.”

“Only for a bunch of them to go off on their own path and life of crime.” Applejack finished.

“Exactly.” Twilight replied.

Twilight was about to butt into the conversation when she saw a giant hump of black goo across a wide river of sewer water. There was no bridge connecting the two sides and the water was flowing heavily due to the large streams coming out of the pipes on the wall.

“Hold on, girls. I’ve found something.” Twilight Ponied-Up and flew over to the black mass. She knelt down and put on some tight doctor’s gloves. “Now, keep an eye out for any Cons or those black monsters.” She tossed the flashlight and levitated it over to Rarity. “We don’t want an ambush down here.”

“Tell me about it. The mess we could make with a fight down here would completely ruin my dress.” Rarity sniffed the air. “And… probably leave me with a smell so bad, no shampoo would be able to fix it.”

The girls carefully gathered close as they looked around. All they could see was more black goo, but no sign of these evil doubles that they were told about.

Twilight put the goo in the tubes and put it into the tracker. As she tightened the hatch and calibrated the device to track the correct wavelength, the puddle of black slime began to ripple and shake. Toxic Sour rose out from the mass with Toxic Sunny right next to her.

“Got it!” Twilight flapped her wings and made it halfway across the water when a massive black slime hand grabbed her and started pulling her back. “H-Hey! What the heck?!” She struggled to try and break free but couldn’t move her body an inch.

“You ain’t going nowhere, Twilight!” Toxic Sour yelled.

“HANDS OFF!” Rainbow Dash ran over and punched Toxic Sour in the face. The punch was so strong that it blew the monster’s head clean off. Then, using her wings, she yanked Twilight out of the hand and landed her back with the rest of the girls.

“Nah. We’re more hands on.”

Before the girls could do anything, a blast of black slime struck the girls by the feet and began to solidify, trapping them in a rapidly growing case of hardened gunk. As they groaned and strained to break free, Toxic Indigo charged up and fired more of the slime around their arms, encasing them in the hardening slime as well.

“Sending the Rainbabies after us instead of fighting us themselves?” Toxic Indigo taunted. “So like those ooey-gooey other halves. Makes me sick.”

“We came on our own, you brutes!” Rarity called back.

“Blah, blah, fucking blah…” Toxic Sour made a bridge out of slime and walked over it.

“Hey! Watch your language, girls!” Pinkie’s brows lowered. “There might be kids reading this!”

“Might as well teach ‘em to swear young instead of listen to some stupid grown-ups do it.” Toxic Sour shot slime at Pinkie’s mouth, trapping it in the hardening mass as well.

Toxic Lemon paid no attention to her surroundings. Her head just continued to bob back and forth as she rocked to her tunes, but she gave an evil grin as she looked at the Rainbooms.

“Y’know, if you girls weren’t as important, we’d snap your necks and ripped your hearts out, but since you’re connected to those other Shadowbolts, you’re coming with us.” Toxic Indigo now started to seal the girls’ chests up, leaving only their heads. “And as much as I wanna hurt you right now, Toxic Sugarcoat would probably toss me into the sea if we didn’t get something about the other Bolts out from you.”

Twilight could only give a deadpan look and scowled. “Scrap.”

“Little word of advice, Twilight. Lose the S in that word and just say the swear word properly.” Toxic Sour covered Twilight’s mouth up. “After all, you’re nineteen years old now, not fucking eight.”

Twilight just threw her head around, trying to get the sludge gag off, but there was no luck.

“Try all you want, that ain’t working. Well, unless we remove it ourselves,” Toxic Indigo said. “Come on, girls, Sugarcoat’s got some questions for them.”

As Sunset and the others fell into the black pool of sludge forming beneath them along with the Toxibolts, she only let out a groan. “If only our Pony-Ups had unicorn horns, then we would’ve been out of this in no time…”

“Oh, you wish!” said Toxic Sunny.

Optimus Prime was hooked up to a bed in the medical ward. His servos, systems, and energon outflow were all displayed on a heart monitor as Red Alert finished sealing up the last of his sliced parts. He tried to sit up properly, but the wires in his body were still coming back to life, which limited his movement very much.

The doors swung open, revealing Sideswipe hanging from Hot Shot and Bumblebee’s arms. He just groaned and lowered his gaze to the floor.

“Red! We need an emergency fix stat!” Bumblebee called out. “Sideswipe’s in pretty bad shape and is about to lose energon!

“Bring him on the table!” Red called back as she finished her work on a monitor.

Sideswipe was set down, and Red went to work. She connected some Energon lines to his body, and Sideswipe just laid his head back on the head rest.

“Easy there, Sideswipe,” Red Alert said in a warm voice. “Just relax, and you will be okay.”

“Yeah. If you count having my leg servos shorted out and my energon about to drain out of my body as relaxing, then yeah, I can totally chill, babe,” said Sideswipe.

“What happened, Sideswipe?” Optimus asked from his own bed.

“Optimus. I’m not gonna sugarcoat this. It’s pretty bad,” said Sideswipe. “When me, Bumblebee, and Hot Shot tried checking Wheeljack’s lab for clues on how to stop those black creatures, we found the whole place flooded with that ooze. We tried to fight back against it and for the most part, we were winning, but then it started to change shape and we were just lucky to get out of the base.”

“And we still don’t know where Wheeljack is.” Bumblebee shook his head. “Or any of those black Shadowbolt copies.”

“Wheeljack vanished down the sewers along with the other sludge creatures when the Autobots drove them out,” said Optimus. “We don’t know anything other than that. He might have gone off the grid, assimilated to power the Shadowbolt doppelgangers even more, or even deconstructed beyond repair…” He shuddered at the last scenario.

“Have you tried the tracking chip in his Autobot logo?” Sideswipe tilted his head.

“Unfortunately, Teletraan-1 was damaged in the attack and he’s still rebooting as we speak.” Optimus’s head sank. “Now, I fear that these black Shadowbolts have destroyed his Autobot logo and taken him off our sensors. Which can only mean that he’s gone for good.”

“Now hang on, we know these things are bad, but Wheeljack survived much worse. I’m sure there’s a part of him that’s still alive in that… thing.” Red Alert intervened.

“And speaking of which, is there anyone even outside the base?” Bumblebee asked.

“At the moment, there are the real Shadowbolts’’ guardians. Highbrow, Hound, Blaster, Smallfoot, and Outback.” Optimus counted them off with all five of his fingers. “Other than that, the rest of the Bots are making sure the base is perfectly protected against another attack from those things.”

“And we still have all of the good Shadowbolts with them,” Hot Shot replied. “Not to mention, Sunset and the girls are still out. That’s a good few people.”

“Out where, Hot Shot?” Optimus asked. “Where are their trackers’ locations?”

“Right now, they’re underneath Canterlot. At least thirty feet down, I’d say. They’re down in the sewers trying to chase down those sludge monsters and bring ‘em to justice.”

Optimus’s eyes widened. “No..."