Eclipse Phase: Dreamcatcher

by Pyrite

Rating: teen
Tags: Dark, Flim and Flam, Tragedy, Big Macintosh, Adventure, Crossover, Alternate Universe, Main 6, Princess Luna, Gore, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic
Length: 32744

A story of transequine conspiracy and horror.

A story of transequine conspiracy and horror.
Ten years ago, Equestria achieved a technological singularity. It did not survive the night. During an event now known as The Fall, the first Artificially Generated Alicorns unlocked the true power of Discord, and became the Nightmares, laying waste to Equestria before mysteriously vanishing.
The sun now lays still in the sky and transequines, the refugees of ponykind, try to find their place in the worlds and spaces left behind, where the body is transitory, where the mind can be fundamentally altered, where a beating heart and breathing lungs are luxuries that some cannot afford.
The Dreamcatcher network exists to prevent the extinction of ponykind, whether by the return of the inscrutable Nightmares, the insidious Discord Virus, or other threats that arise, through any means necessary.

Wonderful cover image commissioned by my good friend Banditfrosty!

Also, big thanks to Tactical!Rainboom, Shoggoth, and Demetrius! I would never have gotten here without you.

Published 2012-08-29 18:14:01 UTC
Last updated 2012-11-30 17:21:43 UTC

00: Nothing Lasts Forever

This work of fiction is a combination of the cartoon My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic and the tabletop roleplaying game Eclipse Phase. The Ponies are owned by Hasbro, and the setting of Eclipse Phase is distributed under the creative commons license by Posthuman Studios. You can find out more about Eclipse Phase here.

Eclipse Phase: Dreamcatcher

By Pyrite.

00 Prologue: Nothing Lasts Forever

For many, the natural light of Luna's moon above was the first sign of the end.

With a sound like shattering glass, that pale moonlight broke through and poured over the streets of Canterlot.

In a gentler age, the rose-red moonlight that had filtered through Shining Armor's shield above during the last week would have seemed to turn the city into a brilliant rose. Instead, the depressingly common metaphor was of a city painted blood-red.

Despite this, the sudden return to the natural order did not fail to throw the city into a panic.

For Twilight Sparkle, the change coming over the city went unnoticed. It didn't help that she had virtually walled herself in with floating books and display screens. Her tired eyes flitted between them as she casually held them all in her magical grip.

Her friends had gone to bed hours ago, each claiming their own little nook in Twilight's old sanctum in the palace tower. It would have been an uncomfortably crowded arrangement, had they not spent more than half a decade as the closest of friends.

Twilight was the only one still awake. She'd had to sneak out of bed an hour after everypony else had gone to bed to avoid Applejack making good on her threats to sit on her until she got some decent sleep. Of course, none of her friends understood. They all had faith that she would come up with a solution, like she had so many times before.

And besides, the new body only needed about four hours of sleep a night, which meant she'd barely missed sixteen since the incident in Manehatten, which wasn't nearly as bad as admitting she'd only slept one night in the last week. Or as bad as actually sleeping, and having to dream about what would happen if--

"Twilight?"

Twilight spooked as a hoof prodded her in the side, books and portable screens hurled into the walls. She whirled, horn pointed half in anger and half in fear, and took several breaths before she could even comprehend what was in front of her.

Pinkie Pie didn't flinch at all. Somehow she'd managed to stand in one of the few spots that wouldn't have left her straight in line to have a book thrown at her. She tried to force a smile for Twilight's benefit, but it didn't hold, and left her looking like she'd swallowed something unpleasant.

Twilight let her guard down, taking a few more deep breaths and taking a moment to retrieve her accidental projectiles, looking ruefully over one of the screens, which had broken clean in half on impact. "I should probably be in bed, shouldn't I?"

Pinkie shook her head, her ears pressing her curly mane back. "No, I'm pretty sure you need to be awake right now."

She swung a hoof toward the massive window that made up one wall of the library/observatory/bedroom where Twilight had spent much of her young life. The Canterlot skyline was brilliantly lit in silver and pale white.

"I think something really, really bad is happening."

Within minutes, the six Bearers of the Elements of Harmony were pushing their way through the sizable crowd that had taken shelter within the castle courtyard.

The herd milled about anxiously, uncertain what to expect. The royal guard were subtly making their presence known in an attempt to control the crowd before things got out of hoof. The only thing out of place was the occasional shouted order or report.

Twilight noticed this, and it gave her a moment's pause. Reflexively, she panned through the networks available, and winced at the noise of encryption fragments and error messages.

"Royalnet's in pieces," she whispered to her friends.

"Ain't that a surprise," quipped Applejack, rolling her eyes. Equestria had been on the losing side of the Information Warfare battlefield since the Alicorn Wars started.

Rumors and conversation moved through the herd in waves, originating from the ponies closes to Twilight and her friends. A cheer went up from the crowd as they realized who was pushing their way through. The castle had opened its gates to them when the hotels and shelters had filled, and many of them had been among the infected in Manehatten, who owed their lives and sanity to the use of the Elements.

The six did their best to keep straight and severe faces, though Fluttershy ducked down between Applejack and Rainbow Dash as much as she could, while Pinkie was everywhere, working the crowd and moving in to shake the hoof of everypony she could.

Equestria had been largely transformed by new technology. Just over the palace walls, towers of artificial marble and diamond rose into the clouds, rivaling the height of the mountain they stood on and dwarfing the aging spires of the palace. If the lane leading to Canterlot Castle was not the widest in the city, the balcony from which Princess Celestia raised the sun would not see its light until almost noon. In the suddenly-pure moonlight reflected off those pale edifices, the castle courtyard was nearly day-lit.

Inside the walls of Canterlot Castle, things were much as they had been for the last century. Even the ever-escalating hostilities had only prompted the installation of weapon emplacements on the outer walls. The castle was a symbol of austerity, a statement that the values that bound equestrian society together still stood, despite how deeply the world had changed.

The gleaming hypercorporate strongholds that loomed over its walls somewhat ruined that message.

At the edge of the herd of refugees a line was held by a cordon of royal guards. Relief washed over their usually stony faces at the sight of the six approaching mares. They parted before them without a word, and closed ranks behind them to keep the civilians from following.

A young guard officer greeted them on the other side with a quick bow and a crisp salute. "Lady Sparkle, Captain Dash, I'm glad that you're here. As you can guess..." He gestured toward the naked moon with his horn. "We have a situation."

"That's obvious, lieutenant." Dash barked, suddenly a military mare again. "Report! What's the status of Princess Cadence and General Shining Armor?"

"Unknown, Ma'am," he answered, then flinched at her immediate glare and scrambled to explain himself. "We-uh... we suspected Nightmare incursion, and SOP is to contain and wait for specialist backup."

"You're telling me you've got nothing more than--"

"He's right." Twilight cut in, stepping between the two and facing Dash. "We still don't know everything the Nightmares are capable of. If we aren't careful, we could easily have another Manehatten on our hooves."

Rainbow Dash grumbled, prodding her element necklace uncertainly. "Then I guess we just hope they don't have a defense against these yet."

"We can't be certain of anything," Twilight said, turning and trotting down the lane. "That's why we need to proceed cautiously and rationally--"

Then Twilight looked up, and the part of her mind that allowed her to be cautious and rational suddenly stopped. She'd finally gotten close enough to see the tower that Shining Armor and Cadence had taken residence in after their retreat from the Chrystal Empire. The masonry on the fifth floor bulged outward slightly, and the reinforced glass from its windows littered the ground beneath it.

Her horn lit up, and with a popping sound she was on the fifth floor balcony, rushing inside.

The rest of her mind ground to a halt at what awaited her.

The room was shredded. The bed had been reduced to splinters. The dozens of little souvenirs and knick-knacks Cadence had gathered from her long life were scattered or obliterated. The young princess was lying belly-down on the stone floor, cradling what was left of Shining Armor in her forelegs.

Twilight's brother looked like he’d slammed into a train horn first, and most of his body was pulverized. She was only sure it was him by his neon-blue mane, which decades of service to Equestria had left streaked with a respectable gray. He was still bleeding all over his wife’s coat, darkening patches of it.

Cadence was relatively unharmed, but still looked battered and disheveled, like she’d flown through a hailstorm. She shook him gently, as if trying to awaken him from mere sleep.

“Shining, no..." She closed her eyes against her welling tears, and shook him harder. "It can’t happen like this. It doesn’t happen like this. That’s not how it works!”

“Cadence?” Twilight managed, breaking free of her mental paralysis. “Tell me what happened?”

Cadence twitched, suddenly noticing Twilight in the room with her. Her voice was unsteady, and she stammered, her eyes unable to focus. “He... when we tried to recast the shield spell, there was some kind of resonance in it already. Th-the others must have done something to it."

The Princess' breathing quickened, and her pupils almost disappeared in the whites of her eyes. "What was I thinking? Shining's shield couldn't protect us forever. No defense can last long enough, or protect anypony. Nothing lasts. Nothing.” She was shaking, hysteria taking over again, and she clutched her husband harder to her chest.

"No!" Twilight shouted. "There's still a chance." She pressed forward as far as she dared, blinded by her own tears. Her brother’s body may as well have been a solid wall to her. She didn’t dare cross it. “We might still be able to save him, but we need to get you two out of here.”

Cadence snapped an angry glare at her. “He’s gone. His brain is gone! His mind is gone! There’s nothing left for you to upload and bring back. Don’t you understand? Everything in him that I loved is gone!"

Shining Armor’s horn, now that she looked at it more carefully, had ruptured into a twisting fractal shape. she knew Cadence was right when she saw the way the horn had channeled the impact directly into his skull, and the ragged hole that had opened on the other side of it.

Then she saw the pink and black smoky aura curling up from the edges of the horn. Twilight leapt back, screaming “Cadence! Get away from him, quick!”

The princess didn’t even acknowledge her, lost to the world, and Twilight felt her insides sink like she’d swallowed stones as she realized that Cadence had likely been breathing the multicolored smoke for minutes. Shining Armor’s blood crept through her coat, staining her a uniform deep red. When she looked up at Twilight, her eyes had gone wild. “Nothing lasts... if nothing lasts... then love is just a lie we tell foals to make them feel better.” She let out a dark, bitter laugh. “It all makes sense now.”

The echo of wing-beats reverberated through the tower, and then the clatter of hooves, as Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy landed ungently on the stone floor on either side of Twilight. Neither pegasus looked quite prepared for what they saw.

Cadence dropped Shining Armor’s body with a wet thud, standing to face the three ponies as hard hoofbeats began to echo up the tower’s spiral staircase. She gave the entrance a suspicious glance, then turned back to Twilight. “Your friends are coming up to surround me, aren’t they?” she asked in a hollow voice.

Trembling, Fluttershy pulled her eyes away from what was left of Twilight's brother, and focused on the Alicorn in front of her. With a few hard breaths she took a step forward, her eyes wide pools of sympathy, approaching Cadence as she would a wounded animal. “Please, Princess... We've seen this before. You’ve been infected with the Discord Virus. Please let us help you.”

Cadence pointed an accusing hoof at each of the necklaces that the pegasi wore, and then at Twilight’s tiara. “With those?” she asked.

Rainbow Dash stepped into line beside Twilight. Where Fluttershy projected kind forgiveness, Dash was doing her best to be as cold and hard as steel, though a slight creak of her voice betrayed a hint of fear. “It worked for Luna, didn’t it? Come on Cadence, we'll get through this together."

“No. We won’t.”

The transformation had been subtle, but was now complete. Her pupils were now ruby slits, and her mane had gone bloodred to match her coat, hanging limp off of her back. It seemed to flow around itself and into her tail like a thick liquid.

Cadence’s hollow eyes locked on Twilight, who shrank back under the weight of her gaze. “I can see past it all now, Twilight. All these poor, mortal foals, even you can’t keep them all safe. Not forever.”

The heavy wooden door slammed against it’s frame, drawing everypony’s attention for a moment. Suddenly the time for banter was over, and the Nightmare that had been Cadence stepped easily over the body of Twilight’s brother, stopping within a few feet of the trio of ponies. Fluttershy quailed in her presence, barely able to hold her ground, but Rainbow Dash stepped around to the side, flanking her.

“Did you know that Celestia built barriers in my mind? I can only use my magic by lying to myself. You like to call me a sister, Twilight. You said you love me. If that love is real, then help set me free.”

Twilight shook her head, trying to keep control in the face of what was happening. “Cadence... You’re not thinking clearly...”

“You’re wrong. I can’t stop thinking clearly. I can’t stop thinking of all the ponies who are going to die." She tapped Shining Armor's body dismissively with the tip of a hoof. "If I had realized this sooner, I could have saved him.”

She tossed her head dramatically. “If you’re not going to set me free, then maybe the others will.”

Rainbow Dash saw it coming and started to move, but she couldn’t escape Cadence’s wingspan before she snapped her powerful wings open, sending the mere pegasus tumbling across the room. Just as the door slammed open with a resounding crack, Cadence tackled the speechless Twilight, wrestling the Element of Magic from atop her head. Before anypony could react, she had rolled over Twilight’s back and was galloping for the balcony.

Rarity and Pinkie Pie rushed into the room, followed closely by a gray-maned Applejack. Cadence cast one last look back at the six friends, cradling the tiara in one leg, and took wing.

Twilight was enveloped by Rarity’s magic, pulling her to her hooves and straightening her coat and mane. “What happened in here?”

Applejack rushed to the balcony, her long rifle strapped by a harness to her back. She propped herself up on the balcony ledge, a sight sliding down from the side of the rifle to rest over her right eye. “She’s got your Element, Twi. Ah’ve got a shot on her. Do ah take it?”

Twilight started to answer, but couldn’t. Over the last ten minutes, she’d lost all that was left of her family. It was too much.

Applejack jerked back to stare at her. “Twi!” When she didn’t respond, the farmpony kicked the stone of the balcony and turned back to the sky. “Aw hay,” she swore as she refocused.

The something that had been sinking inside Twilight suddenly felt like it hit the bottom. The feeling was awful, but suddenly she was beyond grief and fear. She turned to Applejack, still shaking. “We can’t let the other Nightmares get the Element.” She swallowed, barely able to find her voice again. “Take the shot.”

“It’s too late, Twi. She’s past the castle wall, an’ flyin’ low. We lost her.” She turned the barrel hard to the left, where Twilight could see dark shapes emerging over the walls in the distance. "And it looks like we've got other problems coming."

That was when the shooting started.

The night sky leaked in through the edges of the enormous domed window, stars and planets glistening in the distance. Twilight gazed listlessly through it, her eyes tracing over the scene below, and she shook her head in regret.

“What seems to be troubling you, my most faithful student?” a voice asked from deeper within the compact little chamber

Twilight turned to her mentor, who stood self-assuredly in the center of the room, between the space devoted to Twilight’s bed and the slightly larger space occupied by her overflowing and disorganized bookshelf. She knew books were outmoded, but she still felt comforted by the feeling of real paper between her hooves and against her nose as she turned the pages. Sometimes it was the only way she could calm herself down enough to sleep. They were definitely worth the matter she’d fabricated them from.

And there was Celestia, the wisest and kindest of all ponies, and the source of all the answers Twilight had ever needed. The unicorn did her best to smile, just a little, even though she didn’t really feel it. “The same thing that always troubles me when I look through this window, Princess,” she answered wryly, her smile slipping as she felt her eyes drawn back to it.

“The Fall,” she continued. She was staring down at the earth, at the ruin of Equestria.

The towering skyscrapers of bustling Manehatten had vanished into a massive crater. Canterlot Castle had fallen to rubble down the mountainside. The desert canyons where the buffalo once roamed and where the Appleoosans had made their home was now a landscape of black glass. And even if Ponyville, Twilight's second home, had been visible from space, the swarm of nanosprites gathering above it like a weather system would have blotted it out. Everywhere she had ever called home had been destroyed, and quite possibly she would never be able to return.

“How?” she asked, staring down through the research station’s porthole window. The scene through it slidslowly to the side, a result of the habitat spinning to simulate gravity.

“How did we let it go so wrong? I know the history, the politics, all the excuses. I was there! It doesn’t make sense, how could we not see this coming?” She struck the transparent alumina window with a hoof in frustration.

She felt the gentlest of nuzzles on the back of her mane and sighed, turning back to Celestia. The Princess smiled her most encouraging smile; an expression that always managed to soften the tightness in Twilight’s chest. “We never believe that the worst can happen to us until it does."

Twilight nodded in weary agreement. “It was all coming together so fast back then. We didn’t really consider what we had to lose, so much as what we could accomplish by pushing things just a little further.” She swallowed. “Discord and Chrysalis made us feel powerless. Especially after...” She shied away from Celestia’s gaze as the sentence trailed off.

“Especially after what each of them was able to do to me?” The princess finished.

Twilight gave a slight nod, refusing to pull her eyes away from her hooves. “We thought if we had more ponies who could accomplish even half what you and Luna could, we could make the world safe.” She shuddered, sinking lower into the hard tile floor. “Instead we managed to create the biggest threat we’ve ever faced.”

A silence fell between them, as Celestia leaned forward over Twilight’s back, gazing down on her ruined country. Just as the silence was about to become unbearable, she spoke again. “We could have foreseen the war. After all, the only two full Alicorns anypony knew went to war once.” She shook her head with a pained look at that. “We should have foreseen that the creations of ponies would behave in at least a similar manner, though it happened far more quickly than with Luna and I. And we did not know that their war would be enough to reawaken an aspect of Discord, after less than a century.”

“Perhaps I could have stopped them from being made in the first place,” she continued, regret creeping into her regal tone. “Perhaps if I’d taken a stronger stance, if I’d been willing to accept ruling from a position of power rather than one of respect, I could have prevented this.”

She heaved a sigh, shaking her head. “Perhaps I was hopeful that the project would succeed, to protect my little ponies better than I have been able to. And...” she shifted uncomfortably. “And perhaps I have been growing lonely over the years.”

Twilight turned, making eye contact with Celestia again. “Is that why you made Cadence?”

This time, Celestia was the one who turned away, suddenly very interested in the contents of Twilight’s bookshelf. It took her a moment to answer.

“A thousand years is a very long time, Twilight, and even before that it was just the two of us.”

She shook her head sadly. “I took steps to limit the expansion of her power, and to help her develop empathy for the ponies around her.” She turned and gave Twilight a weak smile. “It did work out wonderfully, for what it’s worth.”

Then the smile died on her muzzle. “As long as it lasted. If only other ponies had followed my example more closely... we might still have her with us."

Twilight's eyes burned, and she shrank away again. But before she could disappear into her mind again she was locked in an equine hug, Princess Celestia leaning in to wrap her neck around her student’s. “At least you saved everypony you could.”

Twilight trembled in the embrace, but regained her senses and pulled away from it, wiping her eyes. “And for what? So that their minds and souls could have the time to wait in storage on the moon? We didn’t think of how to get everypony new bodies when we cast that spell. We’re lucky the moon colonists even found morphs for Applejack and I. There are still millions of ponies waiting there, and I don’t know how many of them will ever wake up again.”

She walked over to the bookshelf, nervously rearranging the volumes in it with her magic. “Now everypony is obsessed with the idea of living forever, without stopping to think about how easily everything could slip through our hooves. There were twenty-seven possible vectors of extinction last year, each of which could have wiped out every pony in the system within months. This year I’m expecting at least thirty. We barely made it off planet during the fall. Now we don’t even have the Elements anymore. Not with the Element of Magic lost somewhere in the Discord Gate network. At some point we’re going to mess up and there won’t be any second chances.”

“Isn’t that the purpose of Dreamcatcher?” Celestia asked, following behind Twilight, her voice infused with serene sensibility. “‘A secret network of individuals ready to do whatever is necessary to preserve Transequinity from the Nightmares and other extinction-level-threats’ was the mission statement, wasn't it?”

Transequinity. The state of transition between a natural state of pony body and mind and a body and mind augmented and enhanced by technology to the point where prior frames of reference became nearly irrelevant. It still scared Twilight to think about, even though she’d done so much to personally usher in this new era she found herself in. A hundred little steps that taken individually were mostly unobtrusive and undeniably beneficial, but when combined and made available to everypony it occasionally made her wonder if she was really the same mare who had lived in a tree in quaint little Ponyville once upon a time.

One of the books went flying across the room and hit the wall. “A secret organization was necessary because they still don’t want to admit how bad things have gotten, how bad things could still get. They don’t understand what measures are necessary. And the ones that do care are more interested in power than survival.” She looked away in frustration, a glance that unfortunately took her gaze back to the window. “I find more sentinels every month, and we lose them almost as quickly. I’m drawing out of a diminishing pool of ponies that can handle this, and I can’t seem to stop losing them. My resources aren’t infinite, but I’m starting to think that the folly of ponies is.” She shook her head in resignation. “What am I going to do if it’s not enough?”

“I’m sure you and your friends will be able to manage, just as you always have,” Celestia answered serenely.

Twilight gave the princess a long, sad look. With a sense of resignation, she stood, bowing her head for a moment. “Thanks, Princess,” she said, as she began walking to the door. “I think at least some of that helped.”

“Pluto?” she asked.

A white filly emerged from the corner of her vision, blinking up at her. She was Twilight’s muse, a specially made AI companion that most ponies kept with them, whether in peripheral devices, or like in Twilight’s case, in the cybernetic inserts implanted in her head, which allowed her to see a reality augmented by digital images and enhancements. She'd modeled the little pony after a character she'd made up in her foalhood, a little pony she had drawn wings and a horn on before she understood what that meant.

[Yes, Twilight?] Pluto asked in a soft, childlike voice, concern written over her features. She fluttered her tiny wings nervously.

“End Augmented Reality Therapy Simulation PC41.” Twilight ordered in a dead voice.

The filly nodded solemnly, her wings drooping a little. [Alright.]

Twilight looked away from the image of Princess Celestia, an image that only she could see, which only existed in the space between her optic nerves and her brain. When she looked back, the phantom she’d composed from memories and recordings of her mentor, was gone. She sighed, a long deep sigh that seemed like it might end with her collapsing.

“I’m sure you could help me if you were still alive, Princess,” she said to the shadows in the dormitory behind her.

[Twilight?] Pluto asked politely for her attention. [We've just received a message on the QE comm.]

Twilight stared across the empty space for a moment, then galloped out of the room.

The airlock opened, shallow light filtering into it from the surface of the asteroid. The shadow of a gangly stallion stretched across the floor, and halfway up the metal door that opened into the habitat. His figure was made more angular from the hard vacuum-barding he wore. The pony stepped in, and the door slid closed behind him.

The tiny room hissed as air from the habitat filled it, and the pony reached up and released his helmet, the section beneath his muzzle snapping open at the brush of a hoof. He lifted the helmet off and took a long breath of the fresher air of the habitat.

The window on the far door flashed silver, then lit up with an image of another stallion, his bushy mustache making him seem larger than he was. He looked sternly down at the pony in the Vacuum-barding. “Brother! I assume by your return that you were successful?” he asked with slightly-false joviality.

Flim set the helmet down and shook out his bright red-and-white mane. He had an ambitious gleam in his eye, and a hint of malice in his voice as he spoke. “It’s done, Flam. That fountain she insisted on installing in their main atrium will spread the gift throughout the hab quite nicely.”

Flam smiled slowly. “Wonderful work, Flim. I can hardly wait to see it start to take effect within their community.”

Flim glanced over his shoulder back to the outer door, then turned back to give his brother a searching look. “I guess I still don’t see the big picture, though. Why would we give it to them? I mean, it showed us all the opportunities we’d missed out on all those years, everything it really took to finally make it ahead in the game. Why give that edge to our competitors?”

Flam shook his head. “ I thought that way once, brother, and almost ruined us. I’ve been pondering the nature of it for the last few days, and I realized something.” His smile brightened, and his eyes gleamed. “I realized that one pony with our gift will rise above the masses, will naturally gather ponies under him and lead them into prosperity, but if more than one has it, they will inevitably tear each other apart, and bring everything down around them. Set it loose in a Habitat, let the unwashed herd have the keys to ambition, and it becomes a weapon.”

“But wait… Flam, we’re not one pony, we’re two ponies.”

“Indeed...” Flam answered, shaking his head slowly. “What a pity.”

There was a sound behind Flim, which gave him just enough time to spin to face the outer door and grab for his helmet before the airlock opened. The helmet was torn from his hooves by the sudden wind before he could bring it up again, and he followed quickly after, the push of the atmosphere enough force to catapult him out of the weak gravitational pull of the asteroid.

The door slid closed behind him. The stallion in the viewscreen gave a small sigh. “Goodbye, Brother.”

02: Being Honest With Yourself

Eclipse Phase: Dreamcatcher

By Pyrite.

02: Being Honest With Yourself

When Applejack came to, she realized instantly that the cold metal floor pressing against her face and her flank wasn’t the same one she’d passed out on. The way it accelerated toward her hooves to pretend it was gravity was subtly different, without the slight sideways drift of the habitat. She ached deeply throughout her body, but didn't feel the sting of the open wounds she'd earned. It was hard to sort out for a moment just what had happened... the mission, meeting Pinkie, those ghoul ponies... her brother. Her mind scrambled after that one, but she realized with a dropping sensation that it hadn’t been real. Regardless, she tried to grab hold of the scene and press it into her memory before it could drift away like memories of dreams tended to.

“Horseapples,” she cursed as the details of the vision fled from her anyway.

She could feel something in the small of her back, and slung across her shoulders and haunches. A restraint of some kind, tight enough to hold her in place though she was pretty sure she could crawl out of it if she really tried. There was a thin cushion under her, and not much else. She felt an uncomfortable detachment within herself, where the earth pony magic inside her reached out for more that wasn't there. Ah'm on some kinda shuttle, she thought.

[‘Tini, tell me at least that you’re still here and you’ve been awake through all this.]

[Yep,] she heard her muse respond. [Ah’ve got a con-ti-guous record of your vital signs, so you’ve got continuity. From what ah could tell, ya went down from blood loss and the effects of some powerful hallucinogens. See anythin’ interestin?]

Applejack sighed. [Just an old memory, nothin’ ta be concerned with.]

Her reverie was intruded upon by another mare’s voice, this one outside of her head. It had a deep accent and a singsong lilt to it. “Unless I am quite deeply mistaken, I believe Pinkie’s friend has finally awakened.”

Giving up on feigning unconsciousness, Applejack warily opened her eyes. What she saw was a pair of black-and-white striped legs, ending in hooves, about a meter from her face. Tilting her head back to bring the mare’s face into view revealed a young zebra, though every body looked young to Applejack’s eyes anymore, even her own.

The image she was looking at shifted, and she blinked and stared, woozily pointing a hoof at the zebra. “Am I still seein’ things, or are your stripes really slitherin’ around like a heap’a snakes?” she asked.

The zebra smiled roguishly down at her, turning to show off her side in profile. Her black stripes were quite clearly shifting over her coat, swirling into and around each other in a pattern that centered on her glyph mark, which rotated as if it was the eye of her own personal storm.

“I have thoroughly flushed out your system, and you may again believe your eyes. For a zebra, to change her stripes is something of a prize.”

There was a pink blur to Applejack’s left, and suddenly a pair of legs were wrapping around her barrel squeezing the breath right out of her.

“You’re awake! You’re awake and alive and okay, are you okay?” An exuberant Pinkie pie was attached to the legs, and she looked back over her shoulder at the Zebra. “She’s okay now, right Samira?”

Samira smiled indulgently, backing slowly away. “While I am sure your heart is in the right place, perhaps your friend could use a little space.”

Pinkie turned her gaze back down to Applejack for confirmation, eliciting an insistent nod from the mare underneath her. She let go, shifting around to let her breathe but still lay at eye level with her.

Applejack struggled to regain her breath. “Ah’m- Ah’m alright, Pinkie. Just... where are we?”

“Oh! That’s easy. We’re on the Welcome Wagon. It’s one of our shuttles, and it’s on it’s way back to Surprise."

Now that she had a chance to look, Applejack saw that she was in one corner of what was essentially a large open space. The shuttle was little more than a metal box with engines on one side, and what she thought of as the floor beneath her hooves was actually the back wall. It looked set up to use multiple surfaces as living space, and each of the surfaces leading up above her had ladders going up their middle. There were perhaps two dozen creatures aboard, mostly ponies. For the most part they seemed to be giving Applejack and Pinkie their space.

"And when did we get here?" Applejack asked, taking all of this in.

"Right after the big fight. I would have asked if you wanted to go, but you were a little unconscious and we really needed to leave after habitat security found out that the hallucinogens in my party grenades could be weaponized. Or that I’d smuggled them in in the first place. Or what I'd been doing to make the Revenants so mad.”

“Weaponized?” Applejack’s eyes went wide, and she shot to her hooves. “That was the stuff ah was caught in?”

Pinkie bounced up with her. “Yep! Though without the strobe light it’s really just kinda fast-acting. You... you didn’t look into the light, did you?” As she asked, she pressed her face in and turned it to the side, examining Applejack’s eyes carefully.

Applejack shook her head, and Pinkie immediately hugged her again.

“Space, Pinkie! Remember?”

“Oh, right,” she said, reluctantly backing off again.

Applejack raised an eyebrow. “So, how’d you keep from gettin’ dosed, then?” she asked. “You were almost as close to it as ah was.”

Pinkie tilted her head up in thought. “Ooh, that’s a good one, how did I...” Then she grinned. “I get it, it’s a trick question. I didn't not get dosed... um, didn't get not dosed?”

“Huh? How the hay’d you get us out of there, then?”

“Oh, that one’s easy. I just followed the emerald lizard across the sky islands. They always know where to go, but of course I had to pick a crystal pear to feed to the dragon so he wouldn’t eat the little guy. Then it mostly wore off, and it was security ponies chasing me rather than flying fish, and we were already in the shuttle bay.”

She glanced toward the ceiling of the shuttle above them, which was transparent, and Applejack realized, probably the actual nose of the craft, facing backwards as they burned thrust to slow down on their approach. “I used another grenade to cover our escape, so I don’t think they’re very happy with me, even though I only dialed that one up to ‘Rave’.”

Applejack stared back at Pinkie in bug eyed astonishment, reeling for a moment at what the girl could apparently get away with. After a moment, she just shook her head. “This... this is all normal for you, isn’t it? Like it’s just Tuesday or somethin’.”

“But it’s already Friday, silly.” Pinkie corrected, placing a hoof on Applejack’s shoulder. “I know it’s been a rough day, but Appletini should still be keeping you up on the date.”

“She’s doin’ just fine. And at least we made it outta there, even if ah don’t entirely agree with how. Ah’m sure ah would’ve agreed less with what those horror-story ponies wanted to do with me.” Applejack stuck her tongue out with a nauseous look on her face. “Why anypony would make themself into a monster like that is beyond me. Buncha freaks.”

A twitch of motion and a fluttering sound attracted Applejack’s attention toward another side of the room, where the wall curved out in the middle to include a small oval nook, large enough to fit a pair of ponies, or as became immediately apparent, a single griffon. The griffon in question sat her lion end on a small cushion, identical to the one Applejack was on, and had her eagle front end perched on a metal rod set into the wall. She had turned her beaked head over her shoulder to cast a predatory stare at Applejack, which put her on edge almost as much as the pair of gleaming golden robotic arms that rose out of the griffon’s shoulder-blades where her wings should have been, ending in a second set of claws.

Applejack, sometimes to her detriment, had never been a pony to back down in the face of anything, and she met the gryphon’s glare with a steady, unimpressed gaze of her own.

“There a problem?” she asked.

The gryphon curled out of her post and stalked over toward the two mares. “Yeah, there’s a problem,” she said, circling AJ ominously, just out of reach. “I’ve got a problem with you inner system stooges thinking you’ve got a right to spit in our faces like that.”

Applejack let out a little snort. “Like what?”

The gryphon sneered at her. “Piece of advice: lose the attitude that you’ve got any business judging anyone by their bodily choices before you set one of your hooves on Surprise. That is, if you don't want to get torn apart in there.” She reached out to curl a bionic clawtip under Applejack’s chin. “Got me?”

Applejack swiped the claw away and backed up a step, her stance changing. “Mah attitudes are mah business, thanks,” she answered.

The gryphon let out a loud groan, rolling her eyes until they landed on the pink mare behind her opponent. “Pinkie, don’t tell me we’re going to all this trouble and packing up early just to bail out some bioconservative loser who got in over her head.”

Pinkie’s smile, which she’d been projecting in an effort to defuse the situation, fluctuated. She stepped around Applejack to put herself between the two, meeting the hybrid’s gaze unflinchingly, still holding that smile up. “Sure, then. I won’t tell you.”

Then her smile failed, and for a moment she wore a very sober expression. “But seriously, Amalga, Apple Cobbler is my friend. Even if she’s a bit of a fuddy-duddy about some things, she’s really important to me. I want to keep being your friend too, so I’m going to ask you to please respect her.”

The effect was instantaneous.

Amalga backed up a step, quick to drop her aggressive demeanor in the face of the highest rep pony in her personal network. “I’m just... just looking out for her, really. You know some of the others aren’t as reasonable as I am about that sort of thing.”

In the outer system, and on scum barges like the one Pinkie called home, reputation was everything. If a few ponies liked you, you had a place to sleep and whatever food or energy you needed to live. If enough ponies liked you, then you could use whatever matter the community had access to and nanofabricate any luxuries you wanted, could trade up for more space, and you could count on the community for a favor here or there. If nopony liked you, then you were liable to lose the protection of your community, or be kicked off at the next port or onto the next scum-barge. Ponies called it the New Economy, and in the outer system, it replaced money. Ponies, and griffons, kept careful track of their various rep scores, and usually did what they could to make sure they stayed high.

In the right circles, Pinkie Pie’s reputation went a long way, and being her friend, having her trust, was a big deal.

Amalga darted a momentary glance at Applejack, then turned and stalked back to her piloting nook. “We’re approaching Surprise. I need to turn the ship around to maneuver, so we’ll be back in micro in a minute here.”

“Ooh, going all floaty is always the best part of these trips!” Pinkie jumped up and clapped her front hooves together.

“The fun of tumbling through the air aside.” Samira cut in, laying down on another cushion and tightening a restraint over her body. “You had best be prepared for a bumpy ride.”

Applejack watched as Amalga returned to her post, as she laid back down on the cushion and pulled the strap over herself again just before the ‘gravity’ provided by the shuttle’s thrust began to wane, sending her stomach flipping.

Pinkie was about to bounce right into the middle of the cabin, but Applejack held her down with a gentle press of hoof against her leg. “Pinkie, if you don’t mind just... stayin’ down here a moment, microgravity always makes me a bit queasy.”

Pinkie pie looked down to the friend lying beneath her, and her giddy grin faded into a simple warm smile. “Alright,” she said, bending her knees to look Applejack in the eye and relying on the special pads on her hooves to seal her to the surface. “You know I’m always there for a friend.”

Applejack’s hoof still touched hers, just barely, enough to activate her coat link again.

[Back there, before the fight started, you said you didn’t know anythin’ about our business, about Dreamcatcher. Would’ya mind explainin’ that?]

This prompted a pensive look from Pinkie, which definitely was an odd fit for her. [Well, there’s basically a space in my head where I know I left that, only it’s not there and instead there’s a note that says that if any of my old friends show up and mention dreams they might be in trouble, and they’ll need what’s supposed to be there, so it’ll be my job to make sure they’re alright and to get them there.]

Applejack’s eyes widened. [Ya mean you’ve been cuttin’ pieces out of your memory?]

[Out of my memory, I guess, though of course I don’t remember doing it either. But don’t worry, that’s why I’m taking you to the Pinkie who knows that kinda stuff. Then I’m sure I’ll be able to help!]

[The Pinkie that... wait...] Applejack drew back a little on her cushion, almost breaking contact. [I’ve been dealin’ with a beta fork this whole time?]

Pinkie nodded uncomfortably. [I never liked that way of thinking about it, but I guess so?] She tried to catch Applejack’s eyes, but the farmpony wouldn’t let her, instead turning her head to stare at the wall.

[I’m still the same Pinkie, you know. I just left some baggage behind on surprise, but we were friends before any of that, weren’t we?]

Applejack finally met her eyes, but then just shook her head. [Pinkie Pie and I have been friends for a very long time, through thick and thin. But you’re not her. Ah’m honestly not sure what you are, but you ain’t my friend.]

Pinkie Pie recoiled like Applejack had struck her with a hoof, though her expression held even more hurt than mere violence could have drawn from her. Her hair dropped straight down to the sides of her head, and the pain in her eyes rapidly converted to sullen anger. [Fine! If you don’t want to talk to me, then you don’t have to. Maybe the me that you think you know so well will want to talk to you when we get there, maybe she won’t. I guess we'll find out.] With that, she sulked off into the corner of the shuttle, sidling up behind Samira.

The zebra glared balefully at Applejack after Pinkie passed her, before turning to silently console the earth pony pressing herself against her side.

Everyone felt a pull to one side, as the stars above them slid across the view. As the spin was halted by the firing of a second set of maneuvering thrusters, an object close enough to appear as more than a point of light in the distance slipped into sight above them.

The scumbarge named Surprise was the size of a small habitat, and had been cobbled together from a variety of unrelated components that somehow managed an odd grace in the way they were balanced against each other. It was quite a sight, especially since Applejack remembered seeing a ship with only half of it’s modules nine years ago, on it's return to the moon. Pinkie had pieced it together from discarded orbital debris, in a desperate effort to accommodate the ponies who managed to flee earth in their own skins. It seemed that those who remained had expanded it significantly since those days.

An intricate feather pattern decorated its hull, barely visible from this distance, but a testament to the dedication its over five thousand inhabitants held toward their home, even if half of them only stayed for a few months at a time. Some ponies took to calling these ships ‘scum barges’, but never within earshot of someone who had been rescued from a falling Equestria aboard one. At least, never a second time.

“There we are.” Amalga announced, seemingly oblivious to the evolving social sitaution. “Home sweet home.”

Within a few minutes, the Welcome Wagon had settled into a small docking clamp on the side of Surprise, secured in place over an airlock. With that, any semblance of gravity were completely lost, as the scumbarge simply sailed forward on it’s leftover momentum, making a wide orbital circle around Saturn.

Samira kept herself between Applejack and Pinkie as they disembarked, her displeasure with their rude visitor clear from the set of her hooves and arc of her back. Applejack felt the need to say something, but thought better of it, and instead she simply floated on her side of the airlock in silent thought as they waited for it to cycle.

The airlock door opened into a wide bay, which was separated into a dozen small hangars, each sporting external airlocks, magnetic grapples on movable pulleys hanging from the ceiling, and spaces set aside for the cargo of visiting ships. A small gang of ponies, griffons, and zebra were hanging around, one occasionally pointing a hoof toward another or sweeping it in front of their field of vision, clearly engaged in some virtual game shared between them over the mesh. Some of them seemed to notice the state Pinkie was in, and in a flurry of activity suddenly no one was in their way.

Once they were clear of the airlock, Pinkie turned to the zebra, carefully avoiding even looking at Applejack. “Samira, I can’t let me see myself like this. Can you take Apple Cobbler to see me? I need to go cheer myself up.”

Samira gave a solemn nod. “Of course, my friend, consider it done.” She waved a hoof down one of the network of corridors leading out of the bay. “Now please, go and have yourself some fun.”

Pinkie forced a smile, and turned down one of the corridors. Applejack watched as she threw herself down it with abandon, apparently eager to put distance between them. A minute later, and she had vanished around a corner.

As soon as she was out of sight, Samira rounded on Applejack with a withering glare that actually forced the indomitable pony back a step. Her voice was filled with a contempt she’d obviously been hiding for Pinkie’s benefit until now.

“I know not how she can call you her friend, or how such behavior you think you could defend. When the two become one, she will not forget. I only hope then you have the grace for regret.”

Applejack grimaced, struggling to explain herself. Whatever she'd told Samira had probably been over a coatlink just as private as the one they had been using, but she could guess pretty easily.

“Ah wish ah knew what ta say ta that. Ah guess ah’m sorry that ah’ve never been good at hidin’ the way ah feel about things.” She rallied internally, taking that step of ground back. “Still, though, what ah feel is swindled. Ah thought that was the real Pinkie Pie ah was dealin’ with that whole time. Ah depended on her, and she turned out to be some diced-up copy.”

Samira nickered in exasperation. “If you did not doubt her, perhaps that is a clue, that the pony you spoke with is less false than true.” She sighed, lashing her ropey tail down another corridor. “I tire of treading over trodden ground. Your reckoning is with the pony for whom we are bound.” With that, she lead the way down the corridor, her hooves holding fast to the floor despite the lack of gravity.

Applejack started off behind her, but discovered that her morph, which had been grown for the use of visitors on a habitat with simulated gravity, had not come standard with the molecular grip feature many space-faring transequines relied on to keep their hooves on a surface. Instead, she went flailing gracelessly through the air when her first step only pushed her away rather than foreward. With nothing to hold on to, she kept on going until she slammed into the ceiling, and had to scrabble to find a convenient hoofhold before she bounced away again.

She heard a cold, electronic snickering sound behind her, and she twisted around to look, blushing in embarrassment.

The Synthmorph below her was riding a sleek, metal-and-plastic shell, with a thick serpent’s tail in place of it’s rear legs, and a pair of dragon's claws instead of forehooves. He was reclining on that tail against the floor beneath her, and as she watched, he coiled it before throwing himself down the corridor she had been trying to go down.

[That’s already posted on the local mesh, ain’t it?]

Appletini trotted back into her view and tapped twice on the wall beside her. [You bet your rear end it is.]

An AR window opened in the wall in front of Applejack’s muzzle, and she blushed deeper as she saw the display of her aerobatic failure in all of it’s vidcast glory. [Already gettin’ pretty popular, but ah’m sure they’ll forget it in a few days.]

The unsubtle clearing of a zebra throat prompted her to duck her head back into the corridor, where Samira was waiting, giving her an amused backward glance. Now that she had Applejack’s attention, she curled her tail toward her.

Applejack quickly caught on, and bit down on the tuft of hair at the tip of Samira’s tail, resigned to allowing herself to be towed through the corridors by it. Samira seemed to have no trouble at all, her hooves holding fast to any surface when she wanted them to.

It soon became apparent why a guide was necessary. Surprise was a chaotic mess of passageways, some cavernous and others tiny ductways barely large enough to fit a pony, some jammed with loiterers and traffic, others looping back on themselves if one didn’t know the right exit to take. It had all the bustle of a beehive, with none of the orderliness.

Samira, obviously, moved through the ship with expert grace, occasionally traversing walls or ceilings to avoid obstacles. Insomuch as ‘wall’ and ‘ceiling’ were really distinguishable in microgravity.

Applejack had always tried to think of whatever surface her hooves were closest to as the floor, but whenever she mentioned that to freefall-savvy ponies, they’d had to work to stifle laughter.

The oddest thing to her was that despite the chaos and crowding, nopony was shoving their way through, or really causing much disruption. It reminded Applejack of her time as a filly in Manehatten, with thousands of ponies pressing between each other on the streets, only with nanotattos and body modifications in place of ties and pressed business suits.

Applejack tried to keep her eyes to the walls, distracting herself from the view directly ahead. The AR displays were entirely unhelpful when it came to navigation. Instead, she found herself surrounded by a circus of murals and graffiti, which she struggled to clear from her view. Clearly, guests were expected to do research or find a guide if they didn’t want to get lost on the barge.

Honest, actually painted-on-the-walls graffiti was visible behind the AR layer. Much of it was incomprehensible, but one set of lines were quite legible, writ large across the approaching wall of an intersection:

Your mind is Software. Program it.

Your body is a shell. Change it.

Death is a disease. Cure it.

Extinction is approaching. Fight it.

It didn’t take much time for Samira’s long zebra strides and instinctive knowledge of the labyrinth to bring them to a large central chamber, which apparently was their destination. A set of small doors was set in a ring around it’s circumference. At a gesture from Samira’s hoof, one of the doors slid open to reveal a tight cylindrical elevator. Applejack followed her inside, spitting out the zebra’s tail as the door closed behind them.

Samira tapped the floor, and there was a slight pull to the side as the enclosure began to spin up, pulling both of them back down.

Applejack flexed her back, glad to feel pressure against it, which prompted a raised eyebrow at her obvious relief. She rolled her eyes at the look. “Ah was born an earth pony. It ain’t right to have nothin’ holdin’ ya ta the ground.”

Samira shook her head, nickering. “how very interesting, to find freedom from gravity a frightening thing.”

“Gravity keeps you from drifting off into nowhere, at least.”

If Samira had a response, she lost it to the sudden jolt as the elevator matched spin with one of the spokes of the torus wheel circling the ship, and began shooting down it. A sense of weightlessness returned as the floor dropped out from under them both.

A minute later, the false gravity reasserted itself as they reached their destination. The door slid open into a much wider area than the main ship. This seemed to be a more popular hangout for the residents of the scumbarge, and as a result basically resembled a circus. Rather than the rust and shadows the word ‘scumbarge’ evoked, it seemed that everything was well lit and brightly colored. A number of ponies were playing a variety of musical instruments, saxophones, electric guitars, lyres and synthesizers drifting into and out of any semblance of harmony.

A ring of onlookers had formed around a pair of ponies that actually seemed to be engaged in a swordfight. A unicorn wielding a pair of long curved swords in her magical field was facing off against a pegasus with wicked serrated blades strapped to her wings. The two danced around each other, taking playful swipes and grinning. Applejack could tell at a glance that the weapons were razor sharp, as the pegasus proved when it ducked under the unicorn’s double swing to rake his wing along her side, drawing a long gash. She stumbled back into the crowd, and was pulled out of the ring while an oversized earth pony stepped in to take her place.

Ponies easily made way for Samira as she lead Applejack through the chaos. As they got away from the area immediately surrounding the elevators, the open space receeded and they found themselves in an incredibly tight-cropped and metropolitan city, consisting of more back-alleys than main roads. Every vice and entertainment Applejack could imagine was on display, and she was solicited for more than one of them before Appletini managed to adjust her spam filters.

...Wait, was that a giant pink bouncy castle full of ponies? she did a double take at the city-block-sized carnival ride. She shook her head fondly. At least some things don't ever change.

It seemed like they’d traversed more than half the torus by the time they reached their destination. Applejack didn’t complain, though. Rather, she was glad for the long walk. It had given her time to think, and it had been a while since she'd had a long walk in normal gravity. She could walk a mile on the moon and barely feel like she'd moved at all

She felt betrayed, but wasn't entirely certain who to blame for it. She had to admit to herself that the fork of Pinkie hadn't really hidden anything from her. Do ah expect her to wear a sign that reads 'Fake Pinkie' when she goes around?

Was Pinkie herself to blame, for forking in the first place? Applejack knew that the practice was common enough on the moon, as little as she liked it, and out here it was barely given a second thought.

Finding out that Pinkie had actually been a fork of her friend had drawn a bitterness out of her that she hadn’t expected and didn’t like, and she was starting to regret her bluntness. Have ah become mah granny in mah old age ta snap at ponies like this?

She tuned out the whole cacophony of the scumbarge as she moved forward, only keeping Samira’s twisting striped coat in focus ahead of her. As insane as life on Surprise seemed, Applejack had to admit there was something refreshingly honest about it. In Hobble, anypony who was rich enough to be free had an image of themself they had to convey at all times, if they didn’t want to fall by the wayside. The indentured, as always, had it worse, with many contractually obligated to play a persona, even when not directly working. But here, most ponies were trying to be themselves as hard as they possibly could. Living a lie was something they just didn’t have time or patience for.

Remind ya of anypony? came a calm, quiet voice from the back of her mind.

She took in a sharp breath through her nostrils, snapped instantly out of her little reverie. Once she’d blinked her eyes clear, she was suddenly seeing the rest of the world again.

At some point, the constant noise had vanished, replaced by a comfortable muted silence. She was in an apartment dining room, small by the standards she was used to but a little above-average in this era, when every square foot of space had to be enclosed and claimed from the void. The dining room blended into a small living room behind her, with a compact staircase shoved into a corner.

A motion caught Applejack’s eye as she regained her bearings, and she turned to see that Samira was standing at a swinging door, waving a hoof and looking at her impatiently. With her attention acquired, Samira pushed the door open and gestured with her muzzle that Applejack should go inside.

What she found through the door was the largest room in the apartment, and was set up as a baker’s kitchen, with counters and cabinets, and a set of drawers against one wall. It seemed to have seen recent use, with a dusting of flour coating many of the countertops, along with a pair of large bowls, lying mostly empty.

The centerpiece of this arrangement was a block of four industrial ovens that stretched floor-to-ceiling like a pillar. In front of those ovens stood Pinkie Pie, obliviously balancing a ball of cookie dough on the tip of her muzzle.

In this odd, meditative pose, Pinkie didn’t even seem to notice that Applejack had entered the room, and this gave her a moment to gather her thoughts before she started what was destined to be an awkward conversation, even by Pinkie Pie standards.

As if to prove just how awkward destiny could get, the door on the opposite side of the kitchen opened, and the other Pinkie Pie walked through, her hair a cotton-candy mess of curls again.

The first Pinkie’s eyes uncrossed as the other pony bounced into the room. “Hey me!” she shouted, waving to herself. She tossed the ball of cookie dough to the other her, who caught it in her mouth with a smile mid-bounce. “How’s it going?”

“Everythings alright now, mostly. Things didn’t exactly go as planned, but figuring out the new plan is half the fun!” the second Pinkie answered. She twitched a glance to the side, suddenly aware of the intruder, but intentionally looked away as she saw who it was.

This of course drew the second Pinkie’s eye, who blinked and then broke into a beaming smile. “Applejack’s here too? Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked.

“I just wanted to surprise me and get to see the look on my face when I saw her!” the Pinkie Applejack had met on the Horseshoe replied.

Applejack self-consciously sidled further into the room while the Pinkies hoof bumped.

“Are you ready to get back in here?” Pinkie Pie asked, tapping her head with a hoof.

“Just about,” Pinkie replied, bouncing over to a counter on which lay a tray of cookies, still steaming from the oven. She took the edge of one in her teeth, tossing it up and catching it in her mouth, devouring it quickly. She smiled at her other self. “They turned out almost as good as we were imagining this morning.”

“Yep! I can’t wait to see everypony’s faces when we start giving them out at Railrider’s surprise party tonight!” She spun back to face Applejack. “But speaking of surprises, you showing up here is a really awesome surprise! And I thought you were terrible at surprises, but I really didn’t expect this at all!”

Applejack rolled her eyes. “Thanks, Pinkie. Ah do try.”

“You know, it might have caught me by surprise because I haven’t seen you in... wow, has it really been more than a year?” Her eyes went wide as she rushed at Applejack, pulling her into a hug. “You know what this means?! Reunion party!”

“Ya might want ta be saving that for a bit.” Applejack carefully extricated herself from Pinkie’s legs. “It’s real good ta see ya again, but that’s not why ah shot myself ‘cross half the system.”

Pinkie’s fork nodded. “She found me on the Horseshoe. She walked up to me in The Nail and she said she was Apple Cobbler even though I knew she was Applejack, and then she said the big D word, so after I got her away from TK and his guys I brought her here.” She glanced between Applejack and herself, and tossed her head back in a sigh. “This will be much faster if I just bring you up to speed. Give me a minute.”

With that, she walked over to the drawers set into the wall and pulled one open. Inside was a long shelf, with a pony-sized transparent pod lying on it. She slit the pod open with a hoof to reveal a life support rig and restraining harness, everything necessary to keep a morph comfortable and safe when nopony was riding it.

Applejack puzzled out what was about to happen, and something clicked in her head. She galloped to intercept Pinkie’s fork, pressing a hoof to her chest. Her determined eyes met Pinkie’s, searching the other mare for… something. She didn’t know what she was looking for. “Are you sure about this?” she asked. “Ah mean, ah don’t really understand or agree with what you are, but are you really ready to…?”

“Die?” Pinkie supplied, looking into Applejack’s eyes with a sad smile. “I’m not going to die, Applejack. I’m just a fork in the river. It’s been a fun ride and I’ve got to experience things I never would have in the old riverbed, but it’s time to flow back together and give those experiences back to myself. Everything I am is still going to be there.” She pointed over her shoulder at the other self, who was staring after them in confusion.

Then she brought that hoof down on Applejack’s, pushing it away from her chest, and pulled her into an insistent hug. “But I am so touched that you would worry about me, Applejack!” She chirped, squeezing her stammering friend. “Don’t be worried, I’ll be fine! I’m about to become whole again. I want to do this.”

Applejack stared, her jaw hanging open and her hooves falling to the tiled floor as Pinkie released her.

The fork glanced back one last time before stepping into the pod, slipping her body into the harness and her hooves into restraints set into the sides. She laid her head down on a pad placed between her arms, and the lid of the pod slid back over her.

She closed her eyes.

For a moment, her whole body shuddered, pulling at the restraints, every muscle convulsing. Then she went almost perfectly still, breathing shallowly. A breathing mask and set of tubes emerged from the bottom of the pod and placed themselves over her muzzle. As Applejack watched, the balloon cutie mark vanished from Pinkie’s sides, and the pod slid back into place.

She turned her stare from the vacated earth pony morph to the Pinkie Pie standing in front of her oven, eyes closed and shivering, hints of rapid eye motion behind the lids. When she finally opened them again, she was staring directly at Applejack, the emotions on her face quickly flashing between hurt, dejected, to sullen. She opened her eyes, boring into Applejack's, then closed them again.

Then she broke into a heartwarming smile that was forgiving, but still more than a little hurt. “You know, Applejack, I’ve been making forks of myself to go to parties across the system for years now and haven’t kept that secret from anypony. If you had a problem with it, you could have talked to me.”

Applejack swallowed, choosing her words carefully. “What c’n I say about it, Pinkie? That ah think it’s wrong? That the idea of ponies floatin’ around out there usin' your face and name makes me uneasy? That it’s a waste of good bodies other ponies could use? Ah don’t want us to stop bein’ friends over this.”

Pinkie bounced over to Applejack, regaining her smile as she pressed her nose against the other mare’s. “Silly pony. We don’t have to stop being friends just because you disagree with my lifestyle! I’ll even make sure to only visit as my original if that makes you more comfortable than dealing with a fork. Your friendship is really important to me.”

Her smile wavered, and she backed up a bit to look Applejack in the eye. “Just... try to remember that I always merge with my forks after they’re done. What you said to her really hurt me, just as much as if you’d said it to me. I was her now, and I remember what it was like.”

Before Applejack could answer, she broke contact to trot over to the tray of cookies, sliding one over onto her hoof and balancing it with practiced ease as she hobbled three-legged to offer it to her friend.

Applejack considered the cookie on Pinkie’s hoof for a moment, then tapped it with her nose, sending it flipping up into her mouth.

She chewed thoughtfully for a moment, considering Pinkie. “Alright,” she began as soon as she swallowed. “We can leave this for now, but ah think we need ta have a long, honest talk about it. Soon. We aint got time for it now, though. This ain’t a social call.”

“Oh.” Pinkie replied dejectedly, then grinned. “We should do a social call, though. We’ve got sooo much to catch up on!”

“Later,” Applejack cut her off, glancing around the room suspiciously. “This room secure?”

Pinkie’s grin disappeared. She closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them again. “Now it is.” She answered. “So… Dreamcatcher has a job for us? And I’m guessing since you’re here in person for it, it’s not the usual mission control slash networking slash researching slash boring stuff.”

“Yep.” Applejack nodded. “‘parrantly this is high level, and off the darknets. Don’t know the details yet, though. Maybe we’ve got a mole, maybe it’s something to do with the Elements. Whatever's goin' on, E-Cell’s been activated to take care of it. And yer first job is gonna be ta contact Rainbow Dash.”

03: A Pony in Motion Stays in Motion

Eclipse Phase: Dreamcatcher

By Pyrite.

03: A Pony in Motion Stays in Motion

In the vast emptiness of interplanetary space, speed seemed to lose its edge.

No matter how fast a pony hurtled through the void, once she get out there, she may as well just be floating along. Even the fastest ships took days to get from The Moon to Mars, and weeks or months to get anywhere in the outer system.

With no wind to blow through your mane and no landscape to blur past beneath you, it was too easy to forget that you were probably going many times the speed of sound. The exhilaration just wasn't there.

That was why Rainbow Dash loved comet racing.

Sure, a more practical pony might look at the fuel expenditure and risks involved in setting the finish line of an impromptu race on a mountain of ice and trailing gasses. Dash had a word for that kind of pony: Boring. After all, what was the point of custom designing one of the most efficient, most maneuverable, most versatile shuttles in the system if you didn't push it to its limits every chance you got?

She felt a tingle in her pinfeathers as the prow of the Firefly made contact with the trailing edge of the comet's long, beautiful tail, as the magic in her body responded to the alien wind battering the hull. It made her feel vibrant and alive. If growing up meant learning to compromise and giving up this kind of feeling, Dash was glad she never had. It was what she lived for.

This far out of the inner system, a comet with a tail this long was an oddity. Her muse had explained that this meant it had a particularly large number of volatiles, which make it particularly valuable to any habitat. Dash was just glad that it made the race more interesting. It was too easy for a course through empty space to look like an equation, and she hated math.

Her opponent's shuttle was still too far off to see, but that didn't stop her from glancing in the direction the Firefly's telemetry pointed her. They had each noticed the other angling toward the prize as it first loomed over the trail of asteroids following Saturn, and it quickly became clear that neither of them was ready to give up the chase just because of a little competition.

The distance through open space, and the lack of friction or gravity, lent and odd dynamic to a race. A shuttle could keep accelerating as long as it had fuel to burn, but it would need just as much fuel to decelerate again after, or risk slamming straight into its destination with enough force to leave a crater.

They'd been anonymous to each other throughout that long dance, each daring to use a little more thrust, put on a little more unnecessary speed, wait a little longer before decelerating swoop in behind the comet. Each tested the other, figuring out what they were willing to risk. She'd developed a short list of suspects just from the way they handled the craft, but really, it could have been anypony out there.

Whoever they were, they were good. As they both swung around from their intercept course to chase the comet directly the other shuttle had actually slipped into the lead through a hard, precisely timed rocket burn. It had also finally slipped into sight ahead of her, and well within the dozen or so kilometers that most mesh transponders could reach out to. Now, finally, she could pull up the mesh profile it was broadcasting and see who she was dealing with.

The shuttle was called 'Dagger', and the name certainly fit. It was clearly designed to put as much raw rocket thrust behind it as possible, and had the frame to absorb the pressure, focusing it into a long, pointed prow. A pair of spars extended from its aft, just in front of the main drive, each holding a set of small maneuvering thrusters that allowed it to make course corrections quickly. The single massive thruster dwarfed any one of Dash's four rockets, ejecting a visible stream of plasma and radiation as it pushed further forward.

[Hey Caliban!] she called over. [Haven't seen you in a while, old goat. Maybe that's just because you always end up behind me.]

She snickered at her own joke, while video from his cockpit popped up in her view.

Caliban had taken on a roguish pirate look, a black eyepatch standing out over his white fur, and his beard trimmed in a swarthy cut. He bleated a challenge to her in goat, which her muse quickly translated for her.

[We'll see about that, Rainbow Dash.]

With a thought she turned on her own camera, just so he could see her apple-eating grin. "I guess we will. It looks like you took the Saber back to the drawing board. Think this one stands a chance?"

He glared defiantly back at her, bleating back his response. [I have more than a chance. The new frame cuts mass and withstands more thrust than those flimsy pods of yours ever could. Just don't disappoint me by holding back, it would ruin my data.]

She rolled her eyes. Caliban tried to maintain that pirate image, but he was a rocket nerd at heart. Among some circles, designing the shuttle that could take her on in a fair race was a holy grail.

"I thought you knew me better than that, C! I never hold back!"

Rainbow Dash pulled her rear legs and wings in tighter, and as the smart harness she was strapped into adjusted itself to her new position, the Firefly mimicked her movement perfectly, each rocket aligning on its own articulated pod to emulate her position. It was a unique setup of hers; she'd always been more comfortable maneuvering her own body than using some esoteric interface.

She dialed the thrust up as far as the rockets could handle, and the Firefly pressed forward hard.

It was obvious Caliban was giving it everything he had to keep his lead, but meter by meter she proved that it just wasn't enough. The kilometers between them disappeared, and for a moment they found themselves side by side as they flew into the thick of the comet's tail.

Dash's focus was a laser beam, spotting ice and detritus in her path and evading each piece with a tight maneuver. A slight pressure on her hooves and wingtips kept her aware of the thrust from each rocket pod behind her, and the starry black void pitched and spun across her view with every twitch of her legs. She charged ahead, waiting for the last possible moment to cut the feed to her rockets.

Her focus drifted to a view from the Firefly's rear cameras. The Dagger was following close behind her, twisting into a series of nimble corkscrews, managing to keep pace just a few hundred meters back. If this was the saber I'd be long past him now. He really does stand a chance she thought, her eyes wild with the scent of a real challenge. This is going to be so awesome!

[Eyes on the prize, kid. Don't let him distract you,] her Muse's phlegmatic voice echoed inside her head.

She pulled her focus back front to find herself staring down a huge slab of ice, filling her view as it fell back toward her.

The harness squealed as she snapped her rear hooves and wings toward the floor. The Firefly danced back out of the comet's tail, emissions from her rockets turning the edge of the ice wall into vapor as she passed over it.

A moment to catch her breath, and through the haze of high-speed mist she saw the Dagger still in there, slamming prow-first right through, shattering the obstacle into a dozen pieces around it. When the shuttle emerged, it was careening badly off-course, but the bold move had put Caliban back in the lead. He took his shuttle through a wobbling, wide spin, and had to adjust his course on the fly for the fact that two of his spars had been sheared off, but managed to regain control of his course, cutting his engines to let momentum carry him to victory.

Dash was getting further away from the comet, and only had a moment to respond, but she hadn't become a national icon by hesitating. She'd done it by stepping up to the impossible and showing it what she was made of.

She snapped the rocket pods behind her in a maneuver sure to shorten the lifespan of the Firefly's joints, and pushed as far as her shuttle would let her, straining the ability of the pods to contain the inferno. Diving back into the swirling gasses of the tail, she came up hard behind Caliban as he finally deployed his forward thrusters to bring his speed back into line with the Comet's.

She followed his example, cutting thrust for just long enough to bring her rockets between her and the comet, firing all four in a desperate race against her own inertia.

As they both passed the last chance to pull out, time seemed to stretch. Everything was on the table. They were each slowing down as much as they could, and if anything went wrong, one or both of them could easily find themselves decorating a new crater in the ball of ice.

A hundred meters away, Dash tapped her hooves together, and a pair of long manipulator arms snapped down from Firefly's lower hull, quickly orienting themselves between her and the comet. At the last moment she cut her rockets and braced herself for impact.

The arm joints yielded as they made contact, but not quickly enough to prevent the entire shuttle from shuddering with the blow. The smart harness kept Dash from slamming into anything, but even she felt the hard Gs from the sudden stop.

But at the end of it, her hull was pressed into the comet, and her shuttle was intact.

She'd barely come to accept it when a second impact slammed through the mountain she'd latched onto, as the Dagger took a very close second place, embedding it prow deep in the celestial object.

A moment of silent concentration passed as Dash angled her rockets and fired a few bursts to alter the comet's slow spin, reorienting them around to the opposite side from Saturn and the boulders dragged behind it. Caliban started his thruster again in a slow burn, gradually diverting the comet's path into the field of asteroids stretching out beneath them, visible only as spots of shadow against the backdrop of distant stars.

Rainbow was still on top of a mountain of adrenaline, her excitement leaking into her voice. "Good race, dude! That's the closest anyone's been in a while, at least if you don't count that unicorn with the antimatter rocket."

Caliban looked disappointed, but forced himself into a daring smirk. [I underestimated how crazy you were willing to be, Dash. I thought I was insane for blowing through that debris, but trying to catch yourself like that...] He shook his head.

Dash grinned sheepishly in return, changing the subject. "So, we going by the usual deal for this sort of thing?"

[The victor chooses who gets the spoils? I suppose. What habitat did you have in mind?]

She took a moment to think it over, but it didn't take long. "Paradise Gardens always needs water, and I'm sure they could use the other stuff in there too. Let's bring it there."

The goat let out a braying chuckle. [And the fact that you practically built the Gardens has nothing to do with it, I'm sure.] He held up a placating cloven hoof before she could protest. [Ah, but it's your choice, and I'm sure the uplifts have many needs.]

The two settled in for the long journey back, where they would have to move the rock into place as efficiently as possible to make up for their earlier excess. Pulling it out of its millennia-old Celestial orbit and slowing it down in range of the Habitat would take most of their remaining fuel as it was.

Dash left her muse to do the complex and tedious course-corrections over the day it would take to reel the comet in, and pulled herself free of the harness. She took a moment to stretch a few cramps out of her wings, and took to the air. The cabin was a little cramped by her standards, but that didn't really pose a problem to her hovering about.

The interior of the Firefly was a spartan affair, just how she preferred it. No clutter to get in her way, or to throw itself across the cabin when she made a hairpin turn or three. Without passengers or cargo to fill it, the shell was pretty empty. There was just the harness, a few places across the floor for ponies to strap themselves down, and some display screens.

Just about the only exception was the corner Tank, her pet tortoise and companion, had nestled himself into. His legs stuck out of the shell, pressing the grip pads on his tortoise claws against the floor. He'd apparently pulled his head in when the flying had gotten serious, and just held on.

She flapped over to him and tapped softly on the top of his shell with her hoof. "Hey, you OK in there?"

The venerable tortoise hesitantly poked his face out to see his pony smiling down at him, then reached his long neck fully out of his armored shell to press his forehead against the top of her muzzle, letting out a croaking murr.

Dash giggled girlishly, wrapping a hoof around him and pulling into her chest in a gentle hug. "Don't worry buddy, we're both still here. I got your back, you got mine," she repeated their old oath.

Tank wrapped his neck around hers, and for a long moment, they just held each other, surrounded by the distant roar of the rockets moving the sky outside.

I am getting old, she thought to herself. I never used to get this mushy.

She pulled him in just a little tighter, then let him go. Looking up, she found herself before the one wall she'd bothered to decorate, her own personal wall of fame.

There were a lot of awards for contests and races, which she had stuck to the wall in her own haphazard way. Most of her actual trophies were probably melted into the ground back in Equestria, but she didn't really need a physical object to remind her how awesome she'd been.

And then there were the newspaper clippings, of all the times she'd caught everypony's attention. Most of the highest points, and some of the scariest moments in her life, all laid out in a rough timeline down the curve of the wall.

A headline of The Cloudsdale Chronicle read ‘This Year’s Best Young Flier Performs Legendary Sonic Rainboom.’ Below it was a distant photograph of the chromatic shockwave and the rainbow contrail leading toward her falling friends.

She'd agonized over that trick for weeks, but she'd only been able to pull it off when her friend and her idols were in danger, and it was suddenly the last thing on her mind.

Another headline, from The Canterlot Times, covered the award ceremony after her and her friends’ first encounter with Discord: ‘Princess Celestia Recognizes Six Ponies and Baby Dragon for Service to Equestria During Day of Chaos.’

Celestia had never been clear to the public exactly what their roles had been in the world-shaking event, likely concluding that their lives would become too complicated if everypony knew they had effectively saved the world. Twice.

Another article, from the sports page of the Chronicle a few years later, read ‘Wonderbolts Accept Youngest Member: Rainbow Dash!’ with a picture of her, smiling a nervous but proud smile in her new uniform, standing between Spitfire being casually cool and Soarin grinning like an idiot with a leg around her shoulders. She rolled her eyes at herself. I wish I could forget being that much of a rookie.

Just under that was a collage of photographs of all her greatest stunts and routines, both solo and in groups. Some were thin screens displaying a few seconds of moving video, the stunts they depicted not as impressive without full motion. There were also photos of her with other Wonderbolts, the new friends she’d made, the times she’d had with them. At the center of the collage was a poster of her, more years down the line, in her captains uniform, her smile now brazen and self-assured. In those days, she had been invincible.

She grew tense as her eyes kept moving right, but once she'd started this flight down memory lane, she couldn't stop galloping forward.

The Manehatten Times front page. “Rainbow Dash, first pegasus on the moon.” Below was a still picture of her in a primitive, clunky space suit, a transparent dome over her head, trotting merrily over a pocked, white rocky surface. A blue and green orb, the planet Earth, hung in the black sky between the stars like the moon’s own moon. That picture, that little blue marble hanging against the black, had changed the way ponies saw themselves, how they saw Equestria.

Below that, a caption was formed out of a pair of quotes:

'Hey, now I know what Luna must have felt like all that time.'—Captain Dash

'No. She does not.'—Princess Luna.

She wished she could stop right there, but Dash’s eyes betrayed her, drifting further right.

‘Space Shuttle Galloway Crashes on Re-entry’ with a sub-line ‘Captain Dash in Critical Condition, Unlikely to Recover.’ This picture showed a long crater from above, tearing a rent through the Everfree Forest, the landing pod scattered to pieces as it had rolled to its final resting place.

She kept that one there to remind her of two things: that she wasn’t invincible, and that she’d be nowhere without her friends. Specifically, in this case, Twilight Sparkle, the unicorn who had been with her through her darkest moments.

Moments that were never far enough away anymore.

Her eyes slipped closed, and she was in that darkness again. Only not even darkness, just... nothing. She hadn't known how long it had been. She hadn't known where she was or what was happening. She couldn't feel her legs or her wings.

She was back there again. Coiling in on herself, in her own thoughts, running and running her mind without getting anywhere. She couldn't sleep. There was nopony to talk to and nothing to do. She couldn't even yell, or cry, or kick at the walls. It was just her own mind, and nothing else.

[Rainbow Dash?]

She wanted to believe that the voice was real, but it hadn't been the first time she'd heard voices. She didn't want to scream out again only to be bowled over in a wave of disappointment. She was sure it would fade away like the others had.

[Rainbow, please, can you hear me? Please tell me you're in there.]

Now it was stronger, and it didn't feel the same as before. She dared to hope, and tried to move her muzzle, lips, and tongue to respond. But she couldn't find them.

[I'm getting something, can you try to speak? The interface should be drawing on patterns running through what would be the speech center of your brain, so just try to concentrate on saying something.]

Dash had never been so happy to hear something she couldn't understand. This had to be real, it had to be. If she'd imagined Twilight saying something like that, it wouldn't have made that kind of sense.

[Twilight, is that really you?] she voiced in her head. Her own voice seemed to reverberate outside of her, as if coming from somewhere just behind her ears.

[Oh thank Celestia, you're still in there! It worked!]

Twilight's voice was a desperate sort of happy. Dash imagined her jumping up and clapping her hooves together in excitement, but didn't hear it.

[What worked? What happened? Where am I?] Dash barely kept herself from screaming the words. She wanted to be happy too, but everything still felt wrong.

The voice didn't come back for a moment too long, and then she started panicking, yelling into the darkness that seemed like it would consume her words before anypony could hear them.

[Twilight, I don't know how long I've been here and I don't know if you're really there, but please talk to me! Don't go away!]

[I-I'm here. I'm just so, so sorry.]

[Sorry for what? Stop scaring me and just tell me!]

[There was an accident with the landing module. The chutes didn't deploy right.]

[Am I hurt bad? I mean, I've been awake all this time, but I can't really feel anything.]

Another silence. Damnit, didn't Twilight understand how much she needed her to be real right now?

[Come on Twilight! I've been in crashes before, I can take it. I knew the risks. Remember that time I broke my wing, or that time I caught fire doing the new Buccaneer Blaze?]

[This is a little worse than that, Rainbow.] She sounded a little exasperated.

[I figured it was. This is really weird. But I'm still alive, aren't I?]

The voice that came back was almost a whisper.

[Not... not exactly.]

She paused for a moment, but continued before Dash ran out of patience with her, with a bit more strength folded into her voice. [I don't know how to say this-]

[Then just say it!] Dash screamed in her head. She was frustrated, and afraid, and wanted a solid idea of what had happened so she could stop imagining what could have happened.

[You didn't make it, Rainbow. You died after the crash. About a week ago.]

[What?] She was dumbstruck. That didn't make any sense.

[How are we talking if I... died?]

[I'm still not entirely certain. I was losing you. I knew I was losing you and nothing was working. Then I... I built something. I guess it's a computer, technically. I've still been trying to figure out how it works, exactly, and I don't know what to call it yet, but when I was done I had you in there! We couldn't save your body, but you're still here, Rainbow!]

[Wait, but... my body?! What am I going to do without a body?]

[I've had some ideas about that, but I haven't had any time since it happened. We've been working full time making sure we wouldn't lose you and hacking in this communication link. I must have used some of the uplift research at some point, it's all kind of a blur now, but it works and now we should be ready to move on to phase 2. I need to go talk to some of the genetic engineering ponies...]

Rainbow's panic spiked again.

[No! Don't go! Please don't go!]

She tried to collect herself after the outburst. She wished she was breathing harder, it would have given her something to focus on. She still felt shaky when she continued.

[Can you just... stay here? You're the only thing that's real in here. I know you've gotta do important stuff but I don't know if I can handle this.]

[Of... of course. I didn't realize you must have been alone in here this entire time. I called the others down again, they should be here soon, but I'll... I'll stay here with you, at least that long.]

Dash tore her eyes away rather than go on down the line. Remembering the crash, and waking up in that computer of Twilight's had stabbed a knife of melancholy into her gut, and she hated that feeling. Instead, she took a few steps to the side, examining herself in the mirror-finish of one of the display screens.

The body that had been built for her, Transequinity's first 'morph', was awesome. It was the product of a crash project put together by Equestria’s finest minds in physiology and gene-engineering. She only needed 5 hours of sleep a day, and burned food into energy almost instantly. Her lungs could handle sudden pressure drops, and she could survive in vacuum as long as she had an air supply. Her eyes were as sharp as an eagle’s, and the muscles in her legs and wings were re-designed to be stronger than they had ever been. She could pull over 20 wingpower, and if she ever actually lost a wing somehow, it would regrow. And it still looked mostly like the old her, if a bit thicker in the limbs and sleeker in the barrel, finished with her trademark naturally-growing rainbow tail and mane.

She smirked, and thought of her old nickname. Her body had been the prototype for a lot of the enhancements that nearly everypony used now. In some ways, that crash had changed the world more than anything else she’d done.

It had almost been worth spending months in that data-box. Almost.

[Great performance out there, kid! Good technique, but next time don’t be so eager you forget to look where you’re goin’.]

It was the voice of her muse again. He rose out of the corner of the mirror as a baggy eyed old gray stallion with a cap on his head and a whistle around his neck. His sudden appearance didn’t startle her at all.

Dash rolled her eyes, but winced a little at the memory of her mistake. [Coach, there's got to be some kinda limit to how long you get to call me 'kid'.]

[Sure there is. The limit is when you stop acting like one, and just judgin' by the last fifty years, I don't honestly thing that's liable to happen anytime soon.]

The training AI had been her constant companion since the technology had first been developed, when the Wonderbolts were the first to use AI muses to keep ponies up with their intensive training regimen. Despite her talent, Dash had needed significant work to force her to actually reach out for her potential, rather than lazing away and coasting by on her considerable ability. She’d hated him for the first year of the program, but by the second she didn’t know how she had ever gotten by without him always there to lend an encouraging word when she needed one, or to challenge her to push just a little harder than the minimum she could get away with.

And it was only natural that she took him along with her when she was selected to pioneer Equestria’s space program.

[Now I didn’t want to interrupt that star performance, but you’ve got a message from Pinkie Pie waiting for you.] He gestured with a hoof, producing a tiny window-shaped card, with Pinkie's face visible inside it.

[Go ahead and put her on.]

The stallion tossed the card up in front of her, and it expanded fill the display. Then, with a moment of glitching around the edges, it expanded again, curving around and filling Rainbow’s view completely.

“Dashie!” The pink pony was suddenly in front of her, reaching out of the window, arms thrown wide as if waiting for a hug.

Rainbow Dash groaned. “Jeeze, Pinkie! What if I’d opened this mid flight just a bit ago? I could’ve run straight into that comet.” She was annoyed enough by Pinkie’s compulsive hacking to forget momentarily that she was probably talking to a recording.

“Oh silly, I knew that grumpy old Coach of yours wouldn’t open a message from me if it’d put you in danger. He knows how distracting I can be,” Pinkie replied, apparently also forgetting that she was a recording.

Dash and Coach shared a look while Dash shrank Pinkie’s screen to a more reasonable size with a thought. Then she did a double take back to Pinkie, who was now wearing an insufferably smug look.

“Wait a second… Pinkie, are you nearby with a fork or something?”

“Nope!” Pinkie answered, bouncing with her eyes closed in joy. “I just pause and wait for you to answer, and then I respond to what you’re going to say! It’s easy, especially with you. You’re so predictable.”

Dash’s eyes went wide, then she closed them and shook her head. Only Pinkie…

Pinkie Pie’s face suddenly became serious. Or perhaps it was a look mocking the look a serious pony might have. It was hard to tell.

“Now Rainbow Dash, I’m calling because I need some help. Some good friends of mine need a fast shuttle to the other side of Saturn, and I might have told them that I happen to know the owner of the fastest shuttle in the system. Since that’s you, it would be really great if you came by and picked them up!"

"Besides, meeting new ponies and flying off to new places has got to be better than pushing rocks around. Not that there’s anything wrong with pushing rocks around, but it’s not very exciting,” Pinkie rambled, leaning out the virtual window and waving a hoof for emphasis.

Dash smirked, remembering the heart-pounding race she’d just participated in for the honor of pushing this rock around. “You’d be surprised."

Pinkie scowled. “Well, maybe it’s exciting when you do it, Dashie. You make everything exciting.”

Rainbow Dash wasn’t done being weirded out by Pinkie holding a conversation with her over recorded media, but decided to push past it. After all, she’d seen weirder from her pink friend, and predicting the future was nothing new, though usually it wasn’t this specific. No one really understood how an Async like her worked anyway.

She thought about Pinkie Pie’s offer, her eyes narrowing. “I’m kind of in the middle of something, Pinks. What do these ponies need a fast shuttle so bad for, anyway?”

Pinkie momentarily got a far-off look in her eyes. “To chase their dreams, Rainbow Dash. You should know something about that.”

Dash blinked, then smirked. “Say no more, Pinks, I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“Great! I knew I could count on you, Dashie! Or at least I hope I can, or this is going to sound really silly.”

Pinkie looked thoughtful for a moment, then was beaming again. “Surprise is docked at The Horseshoe. I’d invite you to the party, but I think my friends will want to get going right away, so you’ll have to settle for some cookies I just baked. See you soon!”

[So…] Coach cut in as the window closed in on itself. [Want me to send a recording of your responses back to her?]

Rainbow put a hoof to her chin, thinking it over for a moment, then shook her head. [Nah. If she knows me so well she can pull what she just did, then she knows I’m coming. And if she doesn’t, then she deserves to sweat a little.]

04: Castles In The Clouds

Eclipse Phase: Dreamcatcher

By Pyrite.

04: Castles in the Clouds

For the first time since he was very young, Kyrrin was seeing the world through real eyes.

It certainly felt different. The light stung at them, making him blink rapidly and flutter his wings. Some of the colors seemed brighter, maybe a little more real. It wasn't quite as sharp.

The overwhelming transcendental experience he'd built this moment up to in his head, the moment he would finally open avian eyes again, failed to crash over him. It was a little disappointing.

He closed his eyes for a moment, and remembered to breathe. The lungs were a bigger change. A power core's fluctuations didn't have this kind of emotional feedback. Breath came faster as he thought about it, and he had to force himself to calm.

When he opened his eyes again he accepted them for what they were. They were his eyes, and no one else's. That was meaningful enough.

The Neo-Avian rose up on his thin legs, shifting his talons on the branch, and tested his new wings with a few flaps. He reveled in the sensation of the air flowing over his feathers, but too soon he felt a cramp in the muscles of his new body. It had only been fully-grown recently, and was still a little weak.

Kyrrin was the product of several breakthroughs in cognition and the nature of sentient awareness made before The Fall. When Equestrian science ponies had discovered the physical and psychological structures from which language and self-awareness arose in ungulates like ponies and zebras and cows, they were able to identify less developed versions of the same structures in the minds of many other animals who only certain ponies with special gifts had been able to understand. Several species of bird and some sea creatures were able to be genetically and mentally re-engineered to a pony level of intellect. With the help of vocabulator implants, these uplifts could even learn to understand and speak Equestrian.

The newly-embodied raven felt a gentle hoof press against his back, and turned to bring one eye to bear. A yellow pegasus with a pink mane stood over him, smiling down with wide eyed sincerity.

“Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it soon. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you,” she said softly. “You’ll hurt yourself if you rush, so please take it slowly.”

He gave a little nod. "Alright. I'll try. It's just... they're my wings now."

He hugged them to his sides. "I really want the chance to get used to them."

"Of course you do, but there will be plenty of time for that now. In a few days it shouldn't be any problem at all, and it will take much longer if you damage them." She held his gaze for a moment, until she was sure he had his agreement, then stepped off the branch and gently fluttered around the side to better address the rest of his little flock.

Kyrrin moved his focus to the eye on the other side of his head, now staring 'up' into the wide-open avian portion of the habitat. Willowy trees grew from plantings set into the walls, their branches spreading out through the air to provide a multitude of perches and little hollows. Hundreds of Neo-avians of every breed flitted or glided through the air between them, in a swarming flock of life and culture.

Then he tilted his head back into line with the thick branch he was perched on, where almost thirty other ravens, crows, owls, and parrots had gathered. All of them were recently liberated from corporate control, and just like him they were adapting to their new bodies.

The birds had grown used to a life of forced servitude, their minds uploaded into drones or small shuttles where their owners could make the best us of their flight instincts. They had adapted to jets or rockets, and returning to bodies made of flesh and feathers had become a distant dream.

At least until Kyrrin had acted on rumors he had heard about the Mercurial Railroad, and sent a message that he'd dared to dream would be received by the pony they now all had their eyes on.

"I know it's a lot to take in, but the Gardens are your new home now, if you want them," Fluttershy began. "You're free here and you own yourselves. You don't belong to anypony, least of all me."

The corporations funding the uplift projects had been able to gain public acceptance through assurances that uplifted animals would be better able to safeguard their own species without having to depend on pony involvement in their lives. At the same time, those corporations carefully prevented a system of rights from being properly recognized in the Equestrian legal code, despite the efforts of uplift rights activists.

Princess Celestia had been in the process of a yearlong negotiation with activists, corporations, and the uplifts themselves to finally establish their rights in law in the years before The Fall, but it was only one of many legal niceties that had been put aside temporarily to deal with the building crises. Now that the Equestrian government was relegated to historical data, the largest and most central government arising from the ashes, the Pony Consortium, had a habit of treating uplifted animals as the property of the hypercorps that had created them.

Fluttershy lighted back down on another nearby branch, balancing on her hooves in the peculiar way only pegasus magic made possible.

“There are a few minor things you’ll need to learn to take care of around the station if you want to live here, but that won’t take more than a few hours every week or so. You should try to become a part of this community, and learn to get along with everyone here. I do hope all of you will stick together and help each other adapt.”

As she finished speaking, some of the birds in front of her startled into the air, though their untested wings only carried them a few feet. Others simply stared behind her and backed away along the twigs they clung to.

Fluttershy felt a set of clammy tendrils begin to slink around her withers, wrapping around her from behind and pulling her toward the trunk. She let out a high-pitched squeal as she was dragged back.

As two more tentacles wrapped around her, she twisted in their grasp to face her assailant, and wrapped her forelegs around the octopus clinging to the trunk of the tree, hugging his squishy body tightly.

"Oh Plix, you snuck up on me! I've missed you since we've been out, how have you been?"

"Worried," he answered, his slightly-mechanical voice rising out of the vocabulator implanted somewhere within his head. "We have all been worried about Fluttershy. We always do when she leaves."

Fluttershy stepped back along the branch, taking one of his tentacles between her hooves and letting the others drape over her back. "You shouldn't have to worry about me. You have my backup on file, you'll never lose me."

Plix moved to pull her in again, as if he could protect his little pony from the dangerous world outside the habitat. "We do not want to have to tell a new Fluttershy what happened to the old Fluttershy, or wonder to ourselves for months what has happened, whether it is time to give up hope and revert.

He squeezed her just a little tighter, his voice coming from somewhere just under her muzzle. "Fluttershy only talks about her backups when she has been putting herself in danger. Has she?"

The butter-yellow pegasus looked away guiltily. "Well..."

The ghostrider modules implanted in Fluttershy's sides seemed to weigh more heavily with nearly thirty Neo-avian souls uploaded into them.

She knew that the data and magical energy they were composed of didn't have a literal weight, but that didn't stop her awareness of each implant inside her, now ferrying the mind of a future friend.

Doing her best to ignore the feeling of that precious cargo pressing down on her, she galloped through the corridors. Her hooves skidded on the smooth tiles as she swerved through a doorway, emerging behind the reception desk of Experia's front office.

She leapt over the desk, toward the glass outer doors and freedom beyond them--

--and smacked right into the secretary's prim blue unicorn morph as the mare reared in surprise at the sudden intrusion.

The two ponies went tumbling over her desk, sweeping a rather tasteful Neighponese lamp along with them, and fell on the floor in a heap.

Fluttershy gently but hastily pushed the shocked mare off of her, scrambling up to her side. "Oh my goodness, I'm really, really sorry about this, but you see there's--"

One of Fluttershy's ears swiveled toward the sound of clanking hooves emanating from the still open doorway. She lunged toward the desk, reaching out a leg to carry the secretary with her, as a pair of faceless, gleaming, armor-plated synthmorph ponies galloped into the room, the assault rifles mounted on their backs swiveling in turrets and opening fire.

The two living ponies huddled behind the solid desk as rounds were driven into its fabricated hardwood frame, with more whizzing over their heads to shatter the glass doors and windows at the entrance.

"What's going on?" the receptionist cried, curling into a tight ball against her desk. "I-I'm putting in a call to security!"

Fluttershy shook her head sadly. "There's no need, really. Security is already firing on us."

The unicorn just stared, trembling, at the pegasus mare who had made her smile with a moment of pleasant small talk just a few minutes ago before going to her appointment.

"You should probably tell them I threatened you." Fluttershy continued, twisting around to get the floor under her hooves.

The gunfire stopped, but Fluttershy knew better than to leap out into the open. Instead, she took the fallen lamp in her teeth and threw it into the air.

Made to look like a paper lantern, the lamp had a vague enough resemblance to Fluttershy's coat to fool the security ponies into opening fire on it. It disintegrated under a blaze of withering fire, but served its purpose.

By the time they stopped firing, Fluttershy's hooves were sliding on broken glass as she emerged into outer walkway that circled the corporate tower, and leapt off of it. She pumped her wings furiously, rising quickly into the vast open area of the cylinder colony.

She was headed up, where the ground beneath her curved up to meet itself far above.

Fluttershy had strong wings now. It was one of the first things she'd asked for after the accident, when Twilight was designing her new morph. While it superficially resembled her old body, this one was built for strength and endurance.

She pumped those wings for all they were worth, pulling on the inner strength that had once allowed her to keep up with a Discord-infected Rainbow Dash while dragging a hot air balloon. With thirty new friends who needed her, it didn't matter what her body was normally capable of. By the time the guard ponies had emerged from the wreckage of the doorway, she was already halfway to the cloud column at the center of the cylinder.

A stream of automatic fire tore through the sky, sweeping around in circles as she twisted her flightpath to the left and the right, distance barely allowing her to evade. For a moment, that old twinge of paralyzing fear almost seized her wings, making her gasp and twitch, but then she was past it.

Back when she'd been in that server waiting for Twilight to have her new body ready, she had asked her to use a new set of techniques she'd been experimenting with to remove her fear entirely.

"No. I wouldn't do that to you, and I'd stop anypony who tried," Twilight had snapped at her. "That's not how psychosurgery works!"

She'd continued after calming down a moment. "Fear is a part of who we are, Fluttershy. Maybe for you it's an especially large part, but if I just get in there and cut that out, it wouldn't be you in there anymore."

Fluttershy had eventually talked her into a compromise: with some minimal tinkering, the feedback that made her reflexively freeze in the face of danger was toned down and rerouted, giving her more conscious control over herself in stressful situations. She could still feel that terrible anxiety inside her, like a tiger pacing its cage in her chest, ready to clamp its claws around her heart again, but she didn't have to let it out.

A stroke of pain carved itself up the side of her leg, bringing her mind back to the present. She let out a pained squeak before clamping her muzzle shut and pulling her legs in tight underneath her, trailing blood until the medical nanites inside her sealed off the wound.

Among the clouds, in the weightless center where the air didn't push as hard against her, she was able to break visual contact. The pair of security synths finally relented, unwilling to risk firing into the cloud at random considering its other inhabitants.

Those very same pegasi leaned out from the many doorways and windows carved into the cloud face to get a look at the source of the commotion.

Fluttershy turned her face away as she circled by them, unwilling to face ponies whose community she had disrupted with violence.

[Eyes open Hooves. You need to see to fly.]

The sharp, sarcastic voice in her head was Artemis, an uplifted owl who was hitching a ride in one of the ghostrider modules in her sides. [The plan didn't include this much getting shot at. It won't be long before the corps start pulling in other forces. You gotta keep your head in the game and pull this out before they can get it together.]

The pegasus nodded, forcing her eyes open again. [I know. I'm sorry.] She cringed a little in the air. [There's always so much more shooting than I plan for.]

She dared a glance at her side as her wings carried her further around the edges of the cloud face.

[Is everyone alright in there?]

[These birds are scared, but holding together. They all knew this would be dangerous when the asked for our help.]

Fluttershy took a deep breath and drew on her inner reserves. It would all be worth it. She just had to make her way to the other side of the habitat. The Cinnabar Express was docked there, latched to the rim edge beyond the vertical wall. She just had to make it on board and it would deliver her new friends to their new lives.

The 'gravity' shifted around her as she traversed the center of the hab. Her stomach lurched a little as 'down' made a quick circuit around her. She worked hard to slow her anxious breathing, gliding over the carefully designed buildings and streets below her, and finally swooped in for a landing on a composite road ending in a tall pair of metal doors.

She glanced around nervously, certain that sensors from the maglev station to her left had caught every moment of her approach, then galloped toward the doors.

[Artemis, could you please, please open these?]

[They're in security lockdown, Hooves. The corporation knows we're here and they're probably scrambling counter-intrusion specialists right now. They don't intend to let us leave]

Fluttershy's steps faltered, and she stumbled to a halt, staring up at the gleaming metal.

[Do... do you mean you can't open them? We're trapped in here?]

[Of course not. We're fine,] Artemis answered smugly as the doors began to grind open. [I just wanted to make a point that these hypercorp foals are amateurs compared to me.]

Fluttershy left the manicured lawns and gleaming chrome defining the architecture of the habitat's 'outdoor' area behind as she slipped between the opening doors, which screeched to a halt and closed again the moment her tail was through. The other side was all sterile white plastic, designed with cavernous arched ceilings to make room for the movement of freight. High above, hoses for fluid and gas transfer snaked across the ceiling, disconnecting and reconnecting with each other every few moments.

A bright line of text flashed in Fluttershy's view. 'Security Alert: proceed to nearest checkpoint.' Glowing lines were drawn down the corridor walls to guide her.

Around the corner a cavernous chamber opened before her, with pairs of airlocks seperated into rough terminals by short walls of stacked plastic crates. A hooffull of ponies who had been milling around were now moving toward the glowing lines with a sense of put-upon annoyance.

Fluttershy quickly pulled into line with them, finding herself behind an especially put-off olive-coated stallion. Hoofbeats echoed through the bay as dozens of others responded to the apparent security threat.

Before long, the gentle curve of the ceiling fell away to reveal a hastily-assembled choke point, another pair of synthetic guardponies flanking the one-pony-wide gap in the barricade. In the stark lighting of the transfer area, the shadows from their sharp, angular forms made them even more intimidating. The wide-barreled plasma rifles mounted to their backs didn't help much either.

The ponies ahead of her began filing through the checkpoint, each submitting to the intense scrutiny of one of the menacing roboponies. The rest of the little herd milled about nervously under the steady gaze of the second synth, many eyes never leaving the barrel of his plasma rifle. A tense silence reigned, the cluster of ponies dwindling as one by one they were cleared to pass.

The silence snapped like a twig as the aggravated stallion Fluttershy had followed came to the front. "Is there any chance you can tell us what's going on? This is the third time this month we've been forced to drop everything and waste an hour like this."

By the way the ponies behind the olive earth pony stared at him, one would think he had just poked an Ursa Major in the eye with a stick. Those who'd already made it through kept their gazes carefully forward and began to trot more briskly, lest they be drawn into the scene.

The synthetic security guard did not respond, merely continuing the sweep of his eyes.

"I mean come on!" the stallion continued. "This has got to be a massive inconvenience for everyone. Is this a drill? Who schedules these things?"

"Employee Strike Silver," the synthmorph spoke up suddenly. "Your complaints regarding the inconvenience of necessary security procedures has been forwarded to your immediate supervisor. You are cleared to pass this checkpoint. Have a nice day."

Finally comprehending that he'd put his hoof in it, Strike Silver instinctively backed down a few steps, bringing his rump into contact with the horn of the unicorn who had stepped into place behind him. He yelped and spun around to face his accidental assailant, prompting both guards to aim their focus, and their plasma rifles, directly at him.

"Please move through the checkpoint." The security pony's deadly cold voice reverberated through the docking bay.

"Alright, alright, no problem..." Calming down, he was halfway through slowly and carefully backing up through the gap when a thunderous clatter filled the terminal behind them.

As one, everypony turned to see that a plastic crate had toppled from the stack down to the floor, and that a butter-yellow pegasus was swiftly winging her way over to the next wall of crates.

For one frozen moment, everything else was still, but as Fluttershy's hooves hit the top of the next crate at a gallop, the security ponies leapt over the barricade, clambering over Strike Silver and bowling him over onto his back.

By the time they crossed the terminal, Fluttershy had gained quite a bit of ground. Bolts of plasma fire spattered against plastic crates as she scrambled for hoofing atop them, opening holes in their sides and sending more than one toppling over just after she leapt nimbly to the next. Finally, she broke line of sight and disappeared behind the wall of crates.

The mechanical ponies were relentless, galloping down the open lane until they finally spotted her again three terminals down. They squealed to a halt, opening fire on her as she dove toward an opening airlock.

Fluttershy finally gave into her fear instinct and let herself drop as globules of blue fire streaked over her back to sink into the wall above the airlock door. She landed hard on her grazed leg, which decided that between the bullets and the freegalloping it had taken enough punishment for one day and gave out on her completely. With a pained squeak, she crumpled around her injured leg mere meters from the opening door.

The synthmorphs moved up the sides of the terminal, training their rifles on the downed pegasus. "You are being taken into custody. If you resist, we are authorized to retrieve your stack."

[Artemis?!] Fluttershy quailed in her head, her body trembling.

[Lie still, Hooves. Help is on the way.]

A pair of black shadows flitted from the now-open airlock doorway, drawing the synthmorphs' attention away from their fallen prey. They quickly resolved into a pair of Neo-Ravens, each carrying a grenade in its talons.

Plasma rifles swiveled to their new targets and fired.

One of the ravens managed to circle faster than the turret could track her. Her tail-feathers were left smoking as the sphere of energy singed them in passing. The second bird wasn't so lucky, catching the ball of liquid death in the wing and losing it down to the base instantly and tumbling to the floor next to Fluttershy in a whirlwind of agony.

Unfortunately for the synth that shot him down, he'd already dropped his grenade. Twin spheres of white fire bloomed in the terminal.

In their wake, the plastic floor had been vaporized in two neat circles, revealing metal hull plating that still glowed with heat. Each wall of crates was melted and fused back together into a twisted cargo sculpture.

And the two synthetics were smoking metal shells, toppled over and half melted into the floor.

The remaining raven wheeled around and landed in front of Fluttershy's still-quaking body. The bird leaned in and nipped at the pony's ear, pulling toward her companion.

Fluttershy's eyes flashed open, her ears filled with alarm klaxons, and she scrambled to her hooves. She nosed under the fallen Neo-raven and slid him onto her head, then trotted quickly into the waiting airlock.

Fluttershy gave her octopus friend a sheepish smile. "...maybe there was a little danger involved."

Plix gave her what passed for a worried look among uplifted octopi, which was really more of a quivering of his body than a look.

"We care about our Fluttershy. We do not want her to be hurt."

This prompted a weary sigh from the pegasus. "I know that, Plix. But there are so many uplifts out there who need our help, so many who never get to have proper lives of their own. That's why we built the gardens in the first place. I can't turn my back on them now, even if it is a little dangerous."

Plix deflated, literally to a degree. "We understand, but still we worry."

Fluttershy turned back to the birds she had rescued. In the moment of awkward conversation, they had regathered on the branch, and blinked curiously at the pegasus and octopus on the other tree.

"Oh my, I'm so sorry, I should have introduced you!" Fluttershy interjected, backing up and waving a hoof toward the octopus who had accosted her. "Everyone, this is Plix. He's a long term resident here and a very good friend of mine. He lives in the underwater ring, beneath us, but he likes to come up here and climb around. I hope you'll--"

An image suddenly popped into her optics, accompanied by a voice message from Artemis. Fluttershy stopped mid-sentence and stared.

[Hey, Hooves, guess who just requested permission to dock.]

The image was a view from one of the external cameras mounted on the outer hull. Through it, she watched a distinctive four-engine shuttle as it decelerated on approach.

"Oh my goodness, Rainbow Dash is here," she whispered.

Fluttershy turned suddenly back to the group of uplifts, her mane falling in front of her face. "I'm sorry, everyone, but something's just come up. Plix, could you please show them around the station, at least until Muninn gets back from putting Huginn in the healing vat?"

Plix looked the birds over, then gave Fluttershy's ankle a farewell squeeze. "Because you ask."

"So, this is what you and 'Shy spent all that time workin' on?" Applejack asked. "Ah never got a chance to see it properly, especially considerin' what was goin' on in mah neck of the woods that year."

"It was Fluttershy's idea, really. She just needed a little help with the whole 'making it happen' thing." Rainbow replied, flying just a little above where Applejack was loping along the wall in Zero-G.

"Ah don't mind ta disparage yer hard work or nothin', but..." she stopped to wave a hoof at the wide corridor they were walking through, which took up about half of the area of the docking spar. "It doesn't seem like much."

Indeed, the docking spar was a simple affair, just a corridor with regular doorways leading to small chambers along its length. But despite the lack of gravity and sophistication, more than a few ponies could be seen moving about the spar.

Rainbow turned to grin smugly at Applejack behind her. "This is just a transfer point. You'll see the real work when we get into the habitat rings."

"Oh but it was sooo worth it too!" said Pinkie, bouncing along from wall to wall. "Last time I was here, it was for a party in Aqua Ring. Oh wow, but dolphins really know how to party, and the octopuses can actually be a lot of fun once you get them out from under their rocks."

"Ain't it octopi?" Applejack suggested.

"Gesundheit." Pinkie said with a sudden look of concern, which was immediately forgotten with her next idea. "Hey! You should totally all jump into seaponies while we're here! Come on, when was the last time you even had a swim?"

"No thanks," Applejack snipped. "Ah'd rather keep ta four simple hooves if it's all the same."

Applejack was without her signature cowpony hat, which would have been more than a little troublesome in a zero-gravity environment. Her mane and tail floated freely behind her, pooling up around her legs and above her head whenever she paused.

Pinkie shot Applejack a concerned glance as she bounced across the hallway.

"But it is all the same! The same thing day in and day out and doesn't that get a little boring after ten years?"

Applejack's expression soured. She shot a momentary glare at Pinkie. "Maybe ah've got simple tastes, but ah for one am just fine with just bein' an earth pony, thank you."

Pinkie stopped bouncing, pinned to one side by Applejack's eyes even after the farmpony bit her tongue and forced herself to look away.

Then Dash was between the two earth ponies, her wings flared toward Applejack, her mane and tail a prismatic halo around her as she stared her friend down. "You're going all tribalist now? Really?" She was just barely not shouting, ignoring the looks it was getting her. "That was getting old before we were mares."

Applejack whirled on the pegasus, her mane and tail flying up into the air to snake behind her head. The gesture was somewhat ruined by the way her hindquarters swung a little farther in front of her than she'd intended. Trying to recover from this, she blustered on. "Is it wrong ta just be comfortable in one sorta skin, then? Am ah not allowed ta stay in the sorta body ah was born in out here?" She pointed an accusing hoof at the pegasus. "Ah don't see you leavin' those wings of yours behind for somethin' new."

Rainbow snorted. "At least I'm not afraid to try something new every once in a while! What, are you worried that you might like it?"

Dash was pulled away from her staredown by a gentle but insistent hoof on her neck. It was Pinkie Pie, and her ears were pinned back.

"It's really great that you're willing to stand up for me Rainbow Dash, but this is a tiny bit less than helpful."

These words didn't exactly mollify her, and she shifted in the air, her anger quickly transferring focus.

"What am I supposed to do, Pinkie? You two have spend the whole trip tiphoofing around whatever is going on, and it's been driving me crazy! What is your deal?"

"Not that it's any business of yours." Applejack commented.

"Um... excuse me, why is everypony fighting?"

The three arguing ponies turned toward the soft-spoken voice, and fell immediately silent.

Fluttershy was floating there, her tail coiled up beneath her, with her mouth hanging open anxiously.

The fragile silence persisted for just a moment before Pinkie shattered it into a thousand pieces. She pushed expertly off the wall, hurling herself toward Fluttershy with her legs held open, and caught the hapless pegasus in a hug that sent them both spinning down the corridor.

"Flutters! I can hardly believe it, though I should after we came all this way to find you" she babbled, not paying attention to Fluttershy's frantic wingbeats. "The birdie running docking control said you just got back!"

Her wings mercifully not caught by the flying hug-tackle, Fluttershy was able to steady their course before they were slammed into a wall. Shocked out of her earlier apprehension, she gave her friend a gentle squeeze with the leg that wasn't caught under her. "I had to go pick up some new friends. I... I've missed you too, Pinkie... but would you please let go? I can't breathe very well."

Giggling, Pinkie Pie obliged. She pushed off gently, and did a graceful flip in midair to clap her grip-padded hooves to the corridor wall.

She'd barely gotten clear of Fluttershy's airspace before Dash had swept in, stealing a brief but intense embrace before backing off again.

"Yeah, long time no see," she commented, blushing. She rubbed the back of her mane with a hoof. "Too long."

"Ah apologize that ah'm not leapin' on ya mahself, but ah'd probably get us both hurt. Was never so good at throwin' mahself around like this." Applejack trotted under where Fluttershy was floating, and reared up to grab hold of her briefly as well. "But don't think that means ah'm now glad to see ya."

Fluttershy closed her eyes for a moment as their necks pressed together, then pulled back to take them all in. The Dreamcatcher protocols each of them had passed through their coatlink in the embrace checked out. They were really her friends. And they weren't here just to see her.

"It's very good to see you all," she said, then took a moment to quiet the butterflies in her stomach. "It's just a bit of a surprise."

"Well it's not like we could have told you we were coming, with you falling off the system for the last two months." Rainbow snapped, then immediately cringed at her own words. "I mean, I know you've got a lot to take care of..."

"An' Ah can't exactly make a call ta this place from the moon. Yer still a wanted mare in the inner system," Applejack added. "Haven't even had a chance to ask how ya been in more'n a year."

"Well, um..." Fluttershy paused to gather her thoughts. "Things have been going pretty well, I guess. I'm sorry about not being in touch. We usually need to run silent when we're bringing new creatures. I should have sent--oh!" She squeaked, her cascade of apologies cut off by Rainbow Dash's hoof on her mouth.

Rainbow's glare only lasted for a moment, before she broke into a smile. "It's OK. It's not like we would have gotten a message before we were on our way here. We're cool."

She took her hoof away and began flapping her way down the corridor again, moving slowly and looking back over her shoulder for her friends to follow.

“Artemis?” Fluttershy called out as she rose through one of the many canopy layers of Avian Ring. She landed gracefully on the thick base of the long branch in which her friend made her home.

Artemis was riding her familiar Neo-Avian morph once again, a lanky owl body with a rakish look to its facial feathers. Across a large, neatly constructed nest from her was another owl, who flared his wings when he glanced at Fluttershy, making her almost lose her balance as she scrambled to back away from him.

Managing to hear the pony's tiny squeak, Artemis turned as well. She glared at the back of her husband's head, and took a step forward on her talons, reaching out to brush the back of his neck with the transgenic, batlike hand that extended from the elbow of her wing. He turned to look at her.

Fluttershy held her breath as they just stared each other down. Aremis' eyes were wide and haunting, shifting very subtly as they had their silent argument over the mesh.

Finally, he backed down. He turned one last glance at the four-legged interloper, then opened his wings and flew in the opposite direction.

Artemis turned back to Fluttershy. “Hey there, Hooves,” she greeted, flitting with a few flaps of her wings to a new perch closer to the pegasus.

“Oh-" Fluttershy finally gasped in a breath, her voice coming back. "I- was I interrupting something?”

Artemis spared a look in the direction he had flown, then turned back, shrugging her wings. Her embodied voice was a little different from the one Fluttershy had grown used to hearing transmitted directly to her aural centers, but it definitely still had Artemis’ harsh edge to it.

“Nothing really. Don’t worry about him, he’s just on the loosing side of an old argument.”

“You... you were fighting over me?” she asked, backing up further along the branch, feeling like an intruder in her own habitat.

Artemis turned her gaze back on Fluttershy, as fierce as the one she had used against her husband. “I told you not to worry about it.”

After a moment, she looked away again. “I love Solomon, but he's a little too hardline sometimes.” She met Fluttershy’s eyes again, trying not to overpower her this time. “I don't let politics decide who my friends are.”

Fluttershy nodded, letting out a little sigh of relief. “Then thank you for standing up for me. I just hope I haven’t come between you two. I’d never want to do that.”

“He’s going to need to accept my choices and my friends sooner or later if this is going to work,” Artemis answered. “Now come back over here. There’s something I want to show you.” She gestured toward the nest with a wing, then fluttered back to stand over it.

Fluttershy picked her way carefully over the branch, never having been quite as comfortable with high places as most pegasi, and peeked inside. Within the depths of the nest there was a small, open incubator dome, and inside was a pair of tiny owl chicks. Their plumage a softer version of the distinct points sported by their parents. They stared up at Fluttershy with their solid black eyes wide open, taking everything in.

Her eyes went almost as wide as theirs,. “Oh, Artemis, are they- did you really- Oh my goodness!” she squeaked ecstatically.

` Artemis puffed up a little in pride. “Yes. They’re mine. And Solomon’s. That seapony genehacker finally came through for us.” She brushed a wing lovingly over the two little balls of fluff, who each shivered slightly at the touch. “She showed me a list of all the genetic timebombs in my DNA she had to disarm, but it was worth it.”

Fluttershy sank down to her pony knees to get a closer look at the Neo-Avian children. “I’m so happy for you. You always talked about how much you hated reproductive control, but I had no idea you’d been trying to have children this whole time.”

Artemis nodded, staring off into the distant wall of the habitat. “I don't like to talk about long shots. I didn't want to get everyone's hopes up if it... didn't go right." Then she turned and gave Fluttershy as brilliant a smile as her face allowed. "Apparently they’ve been about ready to hatch for the last week, but Solomon waited until I was back. He made sure I got to see them hatch.”

"That's good of him." Fluttershy commented, glancing back at the little owls in the nest, cheered by the sight of them.

"It is, but he's going to need to get used to you. Now that you're sticking around for a while, I intend for my chicks to know their godmother."

Fluttershy’s heart sank. "Um... about that..."

Artemis turned and glared at her. "What about that? We just got back."

“Oh, it’s just... well, Rainbow Dash is here because of some bad dreams she's been having, and it’s been so long since we’ve seen each other. She invited me to join her for a week or so.” Fluttershy cringed. Artemis knew what that meant. “I’m sorry, but I really do need to go with her.”

Artemis didn’t answer for the longest time, only staring into Fluttershy’s eyes as if she was looking for something. Fluttershy looked back, holding the gaze as well as she could. Artemis was one of her oldest and most trusted sentinels, and had been ever since she had uncovered that the pegasus organizing for the Gardens was embroiled in a shadowy network of conspiracy and confronted her about it.

At the time, Fluttershy had done the only thing she could think to do, and the last thing Artemis had expected: she had calmly explained what Dreamcatcher was, and showed her evidence of what they were fighting against.

When she was finished, Artemis had only been able to think of one thing to say.

“I’m coming with you.” Artemis said with finality.

“No, Artemis, you can’t!” Fluttershy defended, coming back up to her hooves. “You have chicks to take care of now. You’re needed here. Besides, we’re just spending some time together. It’ll only be a week or so.”

“You’re just spending some time together. With Rainbow Dash. The pony who invented trouble.” She glanced around suspiciously, and then leaned closer, brushing a hand over Fluttershy's side.

[They named her Proxy Danger for a reason, I have to assume. The last time you went off with her to deal with 'bad dreams' it was a week before you were ready to speak again.]

“I know she can be a little... reckless sometimes, but I’ll be fine. Please, I couldn’t ask you to do this. I couldn’t.”

Artemis turned her head sideways, watching her with one intense eye. “Let me send a fork along with you at least. In case you need me.”

Fluttershy shook her head again. “We could be gone more than a week, Artemis. You know how hard it can be to reintegrate after that.”

[They'll never allow a breach of security like that,] she added over their link.

Artemis’ eyes pierced through Fluttershy, and she took on the pose of an owl that knew exactly where a tasty vole was hiding in the grass. “It won’t be so hard if you keep her in cold storage until you need her. If she’s only got a few hours of experience, she won’t have time to change.”

[And then they won't have to know unless it turns out you needed me.]

She turned her head in a twitch, which made Fluttershy jump. “I’m not letting you leave until you agree to at least that.”

“Al-alright,” Fluttershy conceded. She took a few steps to the side, quickly changing topic as she looked back in on the tiny owls. “I hope you’ve made up your mind about what to name them.”

The fleshy edges of Artemis’ beak perked up in an avian smile as she turned to look at her progeny again, who had watched the whole exchange with wide, blank eyes. “His name is Apollo, and hers is Minerva,” she answered, leaning in to lovingly nudge each of them in turn with her beak.

“They’re beautiful.” Fluttershy said, pausing to let the moment sink in. “I’m sure they’ll grow up just as strong and smart and brave as their mother.”

Artemis gave Fluttershy a blushing look, then turned her beak up. “I don’t. I’m too brave for my own good. I’d better not catch them trying the stuff I did growing up.” She turned her gaze back to them, her features softening. “I’m just glad I'm going to be able to raise them as free birds.”

Fluttershy carefully brought a hoof toward them, looking to Artemis for her nod of permission before gently brushing each of them. “So am I.”

It was hard for Fluttershy to pull herself away from Artemis’ hatchlings. The two spent more than an hour together, slipping between chats about the habitat's gossip and culture and moments of silent contemplation, until the sight of Solomon circling in the distance finally prompted them to part.

Artemis had been her last stop. She'd already said goodbye to everyone else.

She was more than a little somber on the glide down to the bottom of the avian ring, but the copy of her friend in her pocket helped keep the sense of dread at bay. The 'gravity' on the floor of the ring provided a thin layer of normal pony habitability, and was home to a few dozen anarchists, uplift sympathizers, and brinker hermits, but plenty of rooms were left empty most of the time. Ducking into the cramped corridor and passing her hoof over the door gave her access to the small meeting room she'd secured for her friends.

It was little more than a small room with a thick plastic table, but in true form Pinkie had already managed to put together some refreshments. She and Rainbow were at the table, while Applejack sat in the corner, staring at her hooves. She still didn't look right without the hat.

The farmpony looked up as the door slid closed, her eyes shifting away from some nebulous emotion. "Sorry about this, Shy. I hate that we gotta barge in here and sweep off with ya just as ya were about ta settle in."

Fluttershy took a moment to look each of her friends in the eye before sinking down to her rump. "I wish we were really just going to spend a week or two flying around together." She let out a tiny, heartrending sigh. "But I guess they wouldn't be pulling proxies up like this if it weren't important."

"There’s no sayin’ fer sure yet, but I was called in by Twi’,” Applejack answered. “There’s been some kinda incident over in Titan’s back yard, and apparently she thought it was important enough to pull the old team together.”

"It had better be world shattering with all the fuel I'm burning on this." Dash groused.

"Oh, I hope it isn't." Fluttershy said quickly. "It's always so much better when it turns out to be nothing."

Applejack shook her head. "Can't count on that ah'm afraid. They wouldn't let us put ourselves on the pointy end if a regular cell hadn't already stepped in it and gotten bit."

Rainbow Dash saw Fluttershy's cringe, and decided it was a good time to change the subject. "We need to get a message out to Rarity. We've still got a deal going with that darkcasting group on Venus, right?"

Fluttershy gave a tiny nod. "A lot of our uplifts come in that way, and it's one of the only ways we can keep up with what goes on in the inner system. O-outside of the network, I mean." She glanced over to Applejack. "I hope that's alright."

Applejack looked sour for a moment. "Ah guess there ain't too many eyes on ya out here, so long as you've got a cover for it."

The yellow pegasus gave another nod, perking up at a thought. "Will we be meeting up with Twilight too?"

"Yeah," Dash answered, slamming a hoof down on the table. "Whatever Discordian Boogiemare is out there, it won't know what hit it."

01: Friendship is All We Have Left

Eclipse Phase: Dreamcatcher
By Pyrite.
01: Friendship is All We Have Left

She called it Sweet Apple Acres, but it wasn’t the same.

No matter what fertilizer they put in it, moon dust wasn’t Equestrian soil, and the dome above them wasn’t the wide-open sky. She looked out at Equestria through that dome, and let herself imagine that she could still make out her old home, the farm that had once supported her family, had once meant everything to her.

She closed her eyes and let out a breath. Damnit, ah know better.

Then she looked back at the trees standing in neat rows on crafted hills, thousands of them filling the massive crater, with dozens of ponies rushing around them, checking the moisture levels of the soil or bucking apples from the trees.

The domed orchard was big enough to encompass the old Sweet Apple Acres several times over, and its trees had been enhanced by a combination of advanced techno-ecology and refined Earth Pony magic to put out a new crop of apples every month. The overwhelming size intimidated her, though she’d never admit that to anypony, and the schedule she had to run the place at often had her gasping for breath.

It would probably never be home, but this was what she was born to do, and this was what kept the population of the Lunar Republic fed with something better than tasteless vatgrains and recombined foods out of a maker. Food that was grown from soil worked by Earth Pony hooves, like it was meant to be, or as close as you could get anymore. It had taken the better part of ten years to build, and as alien as it was to her, she was damned proud of it.

They were in the middle of what she’d come to call ‘hyperbucking season’, the one-day period in which they had to get all the apples off of the trees in order to keep the cycle going. Once upon a time she’d stressed and worried over the seasons and an annual cycle, and had often barely kept up. Now every month there was a strain to produce as much as possible, no matter what. At least she had a lot more hands than the old farm had ever been able to afford. There was no replacing earth pony magic, and she was glad for that, regardless of the expense of having so many bodies grown. Not all of them had been born as earth ponies, or in some cases even as ponies at all, but Applejack had spent the last ten years trying very hard to learn to look past that sort of thing.

She could feel in her hooves that this kind of farming was wrong, that it just wasn’t the way things were to be done, but she’d choke on those feelings before she let her apples be something that only a bunch of high-falutin’ ‘hyperelites’ could afford to enjoy. And as it was, too few ponies could even afford to live in a body that needed food.

She walked through the trees, between dozens of mares and stallions bucking the month's crop down into mesh nets and carrying them away. All of them were working their hardest, keeping her dream, and their own dreams, alive—

--almost all of them. She saw the crook of a pony’s leg sticking out from behind a tree ahead of her, just lying there, completely still.

Applejack reacted instantly, sidestepping behind a thick trunk to her left, and quickly scoping out the area. Mares and stallions dashed back and forth, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary. She pulled up displays from the many and various systems used to secure her little piece of the moon, and none of them registered much unusual. No violent disturbance outside, no odd heat signatures, no sudden change in air pressure. And none of her cameras had an unobstructed angle on the other side of that tree.

Was this an attack? While most anarchists would prefer to grind their axes against larger and more obvious targets than her, some didn’t make those kinds of distinctions. And more than one corporation on Civicnet had it in for her. And then there was the chance that some of her other activities over the past ten years had been traced back to her...

Tactically, her position was terrible. She wasn't carrying a weapon, and if this was real she didn't have time to go get one. She just had her hooves, and the hope that the tight rows of the orchard would favor her if she needed them.

Applejack let out a quiet snort. Buck up, ponygirl. If fancy cameras or sensors won't tell me what's over there, my own hooves will.

She left the cover of the tree, and silently advanced up the lane between trees, ready for anything. as she cleared the tree she saw that the leg was attached to a golden-tan stallion with a buttery yellow mane, who appeared to be dozing behind a tree. She felt her attitude transitioning from edgy to indignant as she trotted over to him.

[Who’s this here?] she whispered inside her head.

A tiny, angry-looking caricature of Applejack fell into her vision, landing hard on the stallion’s head. He didn’t react, of course, considering that the little pony wasn’t really there. ‘Appletini’ was AJ’s muse, the digital servant that served as her interface with the now-unmanageably-digital world. Some ponies, like Twilight or Pinkie Pie, could handle having to access that much information on their own, but even they accepted the help, and a pony like Applejack would be lost in the mesh without her muse.

Pinkie had made the little AI pony as a birthday gift for Applejack’s seventieth birthday party. She'd realized that her friend had been floundering for some time in a world that was moving beyond the information age, and reasoned in her oddly-insightful way that the only thing AJ would ever be willing to depend on to that degree was herself.

Appletini gave the lazy pony’s ear a spiteful kick from her perch on his skull, which made Applejack smirk for just a moment. [This here layabout is named Corn Cob,] the little pony answered. [You brought him on just a few weeks ago. Standard four year contract, this is his first hyperbucking season.] She leaned far forward, turning her head to glare comically at him. [Liable to be his last, at this rate.]

Applejack had to suppress a chuckle. Appletini’s antics and exaggerated aggressiveness always managed to put things into perspective for her, showing her an example of how she was acting to make her think twice. More than anything, she actually felt a little ashamed that she hadn’t remembered the name of a pony she’d talked to only a few weeks ago. So much happened every day anymore, and her memory wasn’t what it used to be.

She shrugged off her maudlin feelings, and smirked mischievously, lowering herself to the ground. She crept forward until her muzzle was just inches from his.

“Well, good morning Corncob! Ah do hope yer enjoyin’ yer little nap while the rest of us are workin’!” she almost shouted, her voice the perfect blend of angry, hurt and disappointed.

Corncob’s eyes flashed open to find his boss staring him right in the face, and jumped to his hooves, coming back to his senses with an alacrity that revealed he hadn’t actually dozed off. More likely, his muse had noticed the situation and pulled him out of whatever XP he was living through. she decided she didn’t care to know what eXperience Playback sense-recording he’d been experiencing; it would probably just make her angrier, and she was angry enough as it was. Or it would be something like a memory of his family before the fall, and then she’d feel angry and guilty.

“Er, Applejack, hi… I was, uh, just taking a bit of a breather,” he said, and then winced as her glare only intensified.

She shot back up to stare him in the eye. “Don’t lie to me, Corncob. Ya told me when ah bought yer contract that you were willing to put up with a bit a hard work. Now I don’t like spyin’ on my workers, but if I do look back through the security recordings, are ya goin’ to tell me this has really just been five minutes here an there?” she asked.

He deflated, his defense crumbling before he could prepare it. “No…” he admitted ruefully.

Satisfied that he'd chosen not to dig himself any deeper, she continued. “You see, I don’t think y’unnerstand how lucky you got it. By my reckonin’, I’m about the only pony offerin’ a fair deal to ponies who had to leave their bodies behind on Earth.” She stepped forward, tapping a hoof to his chest. “This body was made fer ya just how ya wanted it. In four short years, it’ll be yours. Not like most ‘corps, who’ll wring at least twenty years out of a pony, or ten if they’re willin’ to put up with dyin more’n once, all just to slot ya into a body that’ll go out on ya in three years, or even one of those…clanking… things.” She scrunched up her face in disgust. “What I’m sayin’ is, things could be a lot worse fer ya than this.”

The plump stallion cowered. “I… I’m sorry…” he whimpered. Applejack looked into his eyes, and saw the world dropping out from under him.

She swallowed, falling on her rump hard.

“look, Corncob… It’s alright. Ah’m mad at more’n just you. There’s a lot gone wrong with the world and you don’t deserve to have me taking it out on ya.”

“I didn’t mean to—“ he started, his mouth hanging open as he rethought what he had been about to reflexively say. He shook his head. “It won’t happen again,” he finished, forcing some determination into his words.

“Good.” She smiled at him, continuing, “I expect ya to work hard, but it’s work ya can be proud of. And Corncob?” she asked for his attention, continuing when his eyes met hers, “ah’ve never sold a pony’s contract to one o’ those jackals. Ah don’t intend to start, and I’m sorry ah implied to ya that might happen. But if you don’t carry your weight around here, ah will make it mah personal project that you earn what ah’m givin’ you. An’ that’ll make this four years go by a lot slower.” Her smile had gained a bit of an edge to it, her eyes hard. She'd outlined the path to forgiveness, and it was up to him to take it or not.

He nodded, gingerly backing down a few steps, suddenly feeling a rush at his narrow escape from serious trouble. “I’d… uh, I’d better get back to work,” he excused himself lamely, and then hastily cantered off to a distant tree that needed bucking.

“That’s the spirit,” she called after him, smiling widely. She got up, heading over to the corner of the dome where she kept her personal stock: the copse of McIntosh reds that she cared for and bucked the apples from personally, to remind herself what real work was like. And to remind herself what she’d lost.

She was about halfway there, pausing to wipe her eyes with her forelocks for a moment, when her muse cut in, [Hey, we’re getting’ a vidmessage from Twilight. Feel like watching it now?]

[Not really, but ah probably shouldn’t let it wait.] Applejack replied, her voice reverberating in her head as she thought at the computers implanted there. She raised a hoof to her face, as if she could hold her emotions in with physical pressure.

[let’s see it then,] she replied, glad that lightspeed issues made a recorded message more convenient than a real time communication with the research station Twilight was on. She really didn’t want her unicorn friend to see her like this. She was stronger than that.

A window opened before her eyes, seeming to emerge from the side of the apple tree in front of her. She preferred that things blend into the real world whenever possible, and hated it when she had to have an augmented reality window pop out of thin air. She had never liked the whole thing, really, but trying to live without the virtual world was basically impossible these days. Especially on the moon, where millions of ponies lived and were all connected to the same wireless mesh network. Even with her stodgy ways, she’d become a business leader again, and couldn’t afford to let herself fall behind the times.

The window looked in on a small, cluttered room, which seemed from this view mostly taken up by a bed. The bed was framed by a set of hard-plastic bookshelves, which curved around it organically, also forming it’s headboard. AJ smirked. She thought of herself as old fashioned, and rightly so considering, but Twilight was the only pony she knew anymore who even read actual books, with pages.

Well, she thought, At least some things don’t ever change.

Then she took in Twilight. The unicorn was lying across the bottom of the bed, with her legs hanging off of the side. She was gazing toward the camera, and Applejack flinched at the sight of her. Her mane was a jagged mess, her eyes were sunken, and she looked like she hadn’t slept for days.

“Hey Applejack,” Twilight began hollowly, hesitating a moment before continuing. She bit her lower lip, seeming to consider whether to start with small talk, but then just launched into it. “I’ve been having those dreams again. The ones about The Fall.”

Applejack kicked the tree in annoyance. She knew what this meant.

The Twilight in the recording didn’t see her reaction. She looked almost in pain as she continued. “I--I really need to talk to you. In person. I know it’s a lot to ask for you to farcast over here, but I really need a… a friend right now.” She sighed. “You don’t have to do this, I know you’re busy. I hope everything’s going well over there. You keep that moon spinning more than anypony but Luna, you know? Hope to see you soon.”

[Ah assume there’s some kind of coded message for me in that.]

Appletini nodded. [You bet. Gimme just a minute.] She leapt up from the side of her view on top of the window, falling through it and into the frozen scene. The vid played again, fast forwarded and without sound, and as it did the little pony pulled words and images off of the books, some of them only visible for a moment as Twilight’s head moved in and out of view. The order had looked random, but when Appletini rearranged them, feeding most into one cypher or another she’d been given by the network, a message emerged:

Possible existential threat in Saturn Orbit. E Cell activated to respond. Farcast to The Horseshoe to pick up Oatmeal. Transport through Danger to Paradise to meet Tom and the Tree. Rendezvous with team leader via Leap of Faith en route to Saturn orbit. Ask Tom about the measurements.

The tree’s bark crept back over the window until it disappeared. Applejack closed her eyes, and took a deep breath, letting the scent of the orchard stream through her nostrils. It wasn’t the same air as what she’d grown up with. By all rights, she should be buried next to her brother and grandmother in the soil she had worked over the course of a very long life. This place wasn't the same, but by Celestia, it was hers.

But it wasn’t the reason she kept going anymore. She didn't have a family to provide for, not since Applebloom went to Mars, and her friends needed her. “Looks like I’m takin’ a bit of a holiday, then. I’ll see you soon, Twi’.” She said. kicking at the dirt.

[Am I sending that along?] Appletini asked.

[Go ahead. It works as well as anything.] Applejack answered. [Now I just gotta clear my schedule for a week.]

The inky darkness receded inside as Applejack pushed the door open. She peered in for a moment, her eyes adjusting, before stepping in from the neon-lit streets of Hobble, the most crowded of the Lunar dome-cities. She kicked the door closed behind her, and all light was banished from the room.

Then the walls flared with illumination. She blinked away the momentary glare as Appletini quickly broadcast a passcode, before the second phase of security response could activate. When she could focus again, she found herself in a rectangular room with a set of hard metal tables lining three of the walls. Three of the eight tables were occupied, each with a pony’s body strapped to it, a series of tubes and wires running to their limbs and muscles, keeping them fresh.

Probably a team of sentinels, she thought to herself, before shaking her head to banish it. Not your operation, dammit. Keep yer nose outta what ya don't need to know.

Between each pair of beds sat a thick, gently-curving console, almost like an end-table. Instead of the usual lamp, each sported a pair of thick cords, each of which was attached to an ego bridle, a device designed to connect to the back of a pony’s head so that the pony’s ego, their mind and soul, could be transferred to and from their biological body. Since nopony had yet figured out how to move faster than the speed of light, other than by stepping through the unpredictable Discord Gates, this was the quickest way to get from one planet to another.

The only other things present were a small chest of drawers on each side of the room, and a plastic coated mechanical pony standing between the two beds against the far wall.

Applejack jumped a little when the robot suddenly moved out of it’s place and casually took a step toward her. She huffed a breath through her nostrils and glared at it as it approached. “Whose that in there?” she asked, walking up to meet it and clapping a hoof against it’s chest-plate to emphasize her point. The blow rang with a hollow sound.

If it was annoyed or amused by her reaction, it was impossible to tell by the blank, emotionless face. The body it rode was a casemorph, a cheap robotic frame capable, barely, of playing host to a pony’s ego. It was unexpressive, slow, clumsy, mentally limited, and fragile, but a pony sometimes had to take what they could get, and a pony in a casemorph could blend into a crowd almsot anywhere in Luna as one of the ‘Clanking Masses,’ the underclass of impoverished indentured servants who would spend a decade or more working menial labor or service jobs with the carrot of a real, flesh-and-blood body hung out for them at the end of their term.

“You can call me Killjoy,” the casemorph answered from a speaker somewhere in his body. His mouth was just a line in the plastic plate on the front of his head. His voice sounded synthesized and bored.

Applejack rolled her eyes. “Ah assume that wasn’t the name you were born with.”

“It’s the name that Dreamcatcher knows,” he answered emotionlessly. “But my origin is irrelevant. I assume you are here for a higher purpose than to harass synthmorphs?”

She glared at him again, nodding curtly. “Ah need to book a trip to a habitat trailin’ Saturn called The Horseshoe,” she said, barely keeping the edge out of her voice. “It needs to look legitimate, and I’ll be goin’ under another name.” With a sweep of her hoof, she passed him the data for her second identity.

Killjoy shifted, staring into the middle distance for a moment, then turned his empty eyes back to lock on with hers. “That shouldn’t be a problem.” he circled around to one of the tables, tapping it’s surface with a hoof. “Step on up. I’ll have you there before you know it.”

Applejack walked up to the table, scrutinizing him every step of the way, for what little it was worth. His nonexistant expression and body language only further frustrated her.

She set a shoulder on the edge of the table and rolled onto it, repositioning herself onto her belly with her hooves by her sides. She couldn’t help but cast a sharp glance at the waiting body on the table next to her as Killjoy pulled the ego-bridle over her face, setting the curving metal plate against the back of her neck. She shivered as it made contact with her coat.

“Ah expect to find my body in the same condition I left it in, y’hear,” she grumbled.

“I have no intentions of joyriding, I assure you,” he answered, hooking a respirator up over her muzzle. A few moments later, he had her as plugged into the medical systems as the others were, a process that Applejack found more than a little demeaning, especially administered by the passionless casemorph, but was far too proud to complain about. Finally, he was done, and stepped back in front of her. “Ready?” he asked.

Applejack nodded slightly, careful not to dislodge anything.

The back of the ego-bridle began to glow with a pure white aura. In the last few seconds she had left, her eyes darted to a small display on the machine in front of her, showing the current timestamp. As she recited it to herself, the aura behind her head shifted to a pale orange color.

She shuddered, her eyes shooting wide open, and then her muscles gave out and she collapsed onto the table.

As her body went slack, Killjoy reached a hoof over, pressing a release on the Ego-bridle. In a flash, the aura sped away down the thick cord and into the machine, to be transmitted out to it’s destination. “Good luck.” he said to the room of empty pony bodies. “I’m sure we’re all counting on you.”

When Applejack opened her eyes again, she was over 300,000 kilometers away from her home on the moon. She blinked a few times as her new eyes adapted to the light. She felt the ego-bridle being unstrapped and removed by somepony behind her, but that wasn’t the first thing that concerned her. She quickly snapped her head around, fighting against the immediate sense of vertigo and nausea.

She found what she was looking for on the wall to her left, a display of clear numbers lit in a reassuring blue-green showing the local timestamp, shining through the dim room toward her. An hour and a half, almost exactly as long as she’d expected it to take.

She sighed in relief. How many times have ah gotta go through this before I get over that?

“Please stay still and remain calm, ma’am. You’re still integrating,” pled a mare’s voice from behind her.

A deep shiver went through Applejack’s body, and she suddenly was feeling every inch of her skin and muscle at once. Earth pony magic thrummed through her spine to her legs, not as strong as it was in the body she usually wore, but reassuring all the same. She was left gasping for breath as the internal awareness subsided.

She looked back at the clock in nervous habit. It was bad enough that she had to let herself be shot across the solar system as a coherent beam of magical energy like this, but waking up with lack, lost time from a hiatus in cold storage or restoration from a backup after an unfortunate death, was the stuff of Applejack’s nightmares.

“Apple Cobbler?” came the mare’s voice again.

Applejack lifted herself on one leg and turned behind her, more slowly this time, to see a sea-green unicorn mare looking her over carefully. The mare smiled, seeming to check something off in her head as the earth pony on her table responded to the name.

Applejack sighed, answering “Ah suppose so,” as she twisted a little on the table, getting a look at her own cutie mark: A scoop of cobbler with a green apple slice sitting on top of it.

Apple Cobbler. She’d been one of Applejack's several second cousins, and through the mysteries of extended family genetics, they had shared a striking resemblance, though Cobbler had always been a bit more willowy. The two had always gotten along, and Cobbler came a long way to visit ponyville sometimes, when life out on her own farm got a little too meandering.

“This town is always good for a little excitement!” Applejack could hear her say, and she cringed at the memory.

Apple Cobbler hadn’t made it out of the fall, but her identity had, and now it served as a convenient cover for when Applejack needed to slip off of the moon and pursue Dreamcatcher business. The cutie mark was proof of that identity, enforced by most habitats to keep track of who was who. In a way, by using it, Applejack was stealing everything her younger cousin had been, and everything she’d aspired to.

Thinking about it made her sick, but she knew it was necessary, so she resolved not to think about it.

The nurse pony seemed a little confused by her reaction, but after a moment she shrugged it off, instead switching to a cheery, greeting-visitors tone of voice. “Well, Cobbler, welcome to The Horseshoe! My name is Tender Care, and I’m one of our habitat’s physicians. You seem to be adapting to your new morph quite well. Are you experiencing any cognitive issues? Difficulty focusing, compulsions, anything like that?” She’d passed Applejack a digital tour guide, and after Appletini nodded that it was safe, she went ahead and accepted it, quickly glancing through it as Tender blathered on.

The Horseshoe was a space station set in a nexus of travel just behind the orbit of Saturn. Its design was a testament to elegant simplicity: an enormous ring with one quarter flared open, and large enough that spinning it for the half-Equestrian-gravity its inhabitants preferred gave the transparent arboreal domes built on its inner rim three hours of ‘day’ after every nine hours of ‘night.’ Ponies had found ways to adapt after the Fall, with the sun now hanging motionless in the sky. The solar panels on the outer rim of the station gave it all the power it made daily use of. Most of the 20,000 ponies who called it their home preferred to work hard and be left alone to their business. It was run by a mixture of the more liberal inner-system hypercorps and Titanian Commonhoof microcorps, in a cooperative to design habitats out past the belt. The horseshoe was one of the tighter-laced habs in the outer system, which was why the Lunar Republic even allowed ponies to egocast there.

“Nope, everything seems fine so far.. Thank’ya kindly fer yer help, but I’ve got a friend to meet,” Applejack replied, flipping herself deftly off of the table and onto her hooves. The new morph she found herself in responded well enough, though on top of having only the standard level of magic, it lacked the muscle tone she was used to. She’d have to see to that over the trip. At least she’d been able to afford a quick treatment to alter her coat and mane colors and have her face skinflexed to the facial structure she preferred while they re-sleeved her; she could look in a mirror and maybe recognize the pony who looked back as her, if she squinted.

Just before stepping out the door, she turned back to Tender Care, offering her a weak smile. “Hey, ah don’t suppose you’ve any idea where a pony might go on this hab to ‘get down?’”

The only place for anypony who knew what they were doing to really ‘get down’ on The Horseshoe was a club in the lower decks called “The Nail.” It had taken some convincing, but Tender Care had passed her a file detailing how to find it, along with a concerned look and an extra note of how to make it back to the hospital from there. Applejack made sure to give her a recommendation for being so helpful to newcomers.

The club was set claustrophobically deep within the lower plumbing of the station, out of the way of polite society. The tight, irregular open spaces were crowded with ponies desperate for a good time, each dancing their heart out despite being nearly pressed together. It was a mosh pit, a kind of contained stampede that ground everypony against one another, only instead of panicking they just tried to grind back harder.

Applejack grinned as she waded into the mess. She didn’t care much for the music the kids liked these days, their Nightmare Metal and Parabolabeat, but pushing her way through this rowdy almost-brawl was much more her speed.

The air was laced with a swarm of specialized, photo-receptive nanobots, carrying flickering lines of light that spun and danced about the room, oscillating with the music. Every time a pony touched one of them, it sent a new tone reverberating through the music, and altered the beat, forming odd, crowd-sourced harmonies.

This was where the party was. Even if the low ceiling, bright lights, and crush of dancing ponies would usually be overwhelming to Applejack’s sensibilities, this was clearly the place. She kept low and pushed through the throng. She took the occasional buck to the side, but when she retaliated with one of her own, knocking the offending pony back into the crowd behind him, she suddenly had room to breathe again. Applejack worked her way toward the liveliest corner of the floor.

And there she was, surrounded by a group of ponies who were clearly having the time of their lives. They’d somehow moved a number of the spinning lines of light together above her, and as she danced in a space cleared in the center for her she kicked out her pink legs at them, sending them spinning and twisting. It soon became clear that most of the coherent tune was her freeform composition, which might have been why Applejack had found the music even halfway bearable.

Applejack got a few dirty looks as she forced her way through that crowd. Some of them tried to hold her back, but the farmpony had almost a century of experience shoving other ponies out of her way. She turned from staring down one of the stallions she’d pushed aside to see Pinkie Pie. She wore a look of pure, serene bliss as she made up the combination dance and musical performance on the spot. Applejack opened her mouth to get Pinkie’s attention, but couldn’t quite bring herself to interrupt someone having that much fun.

Then Pinkie Pie stopped with a twitch, the music shifting instantly as she spun around, saw Applejack, and launched herself at her in a tackling hug. The two tumbled back through ranks of confused onlookers, and when they rolled to a halt, Pinkie Pie was on top of a bewildered Applejack, arms locked in a death grip around her body.

“Applejack! I’m so glad to see you! When did you get here?”

“It’s... uh... it’s Apple Cobbler, actually.” Applejack replied in a tiny voice, glancing between the faces of the onlookers.

Pinkie’s smile fell a couple of notches. She looked skeptically at Applejack for a moment, raising a hoof to her chin in thought. “I guess that must be one of the things I’m not telling myself,” she concluded, shaking her head to clear any unnecessarily analytical thoughts away. “But anyway, Cobbly! I haven’t seen you in so long! I’d invite you to a party, but we’re already totally at an awesome party so I guess that saves me some time.” She stood properly, and bent a hoof to help Applejack back up. “Come on! Now that the two of us are here, we've doubled the fun! Lets tear it up!” She reared, pumping a hoof in the air. “Woo!”

“Pinkie...” Applejack groaned, pulling her friend back down to her hooves. “Ah love a good time as much as the next pony, but we need to talk business.

“Business?” Pinkie asked, quirking an eyebrow at her. She gestured with a hoof to the club around them. “But Cobbly, I’m having fun. Having fun is my business.”

Applejack glared at her, saying her words slowly and carefully. “Look, Pinkie, ah know yer livin' the dream here, but we’ve gotta focus.”

Pinkie’s eyes widened, and her jaw went slack for a moment as something came over her. When she spoke, the tone of her voice was suddenly subdued and reasonable. “Alright, Cobbly, lets get out of everypony’s way, then.” She turned to lead Applejack over to a less-crowded corner of the room. The herd of ponies they left behind looked a little disappointed, but it only took a moment for them to forget the momentary distraction and resume their night.

Arriving at a cramped little nook between two large pipes, Pinkie Pie turned to face Applejack, their front hooves subtly brushing slightly together .

Pinkie started the conversation. “It really has been way too long. I know I haven’t been to the moon to visit recently, and I can’t wait until we can go that way again. You know we always pick up a crate of your moon apples when Surprise is in orbit. There’s no replacing them, they’re almost as good as they used to be.”

While she made small talk, a different message came through over the coatlink connection the two ponies were sharing. [I’m really sorry, Applejack, but I don’t really know what this is about. All I know is that you might be in danger, and that I need to help you, no matter what.]

“Almost…” Applejack answered, giving her a perplexed look. She tried to keep her voice even as she replied to Pinkie in public. “We work pretty hard on them, but that don’t mean you’ve gotta wait until ya park that barge of yours above us ta come out an’ see me. Ah know yer not as skittish as ah am about sendin’ yer mind flittin’ about through space, so ya oughta come by more often. The moon’s a welcomin’ place.”

Through the link between the electrical fields flowing between their coats, she replied to Pinkie’s message. [What are ya talking about, sugarcube? Y’practiacally built the network yerself, how can you not know?]

“Not as welcoming a place as you might think,” Pinkie answered, idly scraping a hoof againsst the floor. She shot back out of her momentary melancholy just as quickly as another thought came over her. “Oh, I’m so lucky I get to be here when you come to visit! I don’t get to see you very often you know and if you’d gotten here a little later I wouldn’t have run into you!”

She also replied in their silent, private conversation. [I didn’t put everything I know in my head. Probably to keep bad ponies from getting it, I don’t know. I’m just here to have fun and help these ponies have a good time.] She gave a tiny shake, and her eyes flitted over to the side, but she didn’t turn her head to follow. [Are you in trouble, Applejack? Somepony is closing in on us.]

“Ah’m just lucky, ah guess.” Applejack answered nervously, unable to keep herself from glancing in the direction Pinkie had cut her eyes to. All she noticed between the haze and the bright lights against the darkness was that the crowd around their little corner had thinned a little. She pulled in a breath, and let go of it, feeling her body tense up in anticipation.

[There ain't no one should be followin’ me,] she sent to Pinkie. Then the smell hit her, a sticky, dank, rotten smell that almost made her retch.

[Pinkie, why does it suddenly smell like dead pony?]

Pinkie pie took a sniff at the air and rolled her eyes as the remaining ponies around them turned and moved to block their route of escape. In the dim light in this corner of The Nail, Applejack couldn’t make out much about their features, but they all seemed wrong somehow. Some were all jagged edges, while others sagged alarmingly.

“Oh, it’s these guys again. I told them I’m not interested, but some ponies just can’t take a hint I guess.”

“Funny you should say that, Pie,” came a harsh, wet voice from around the corner. “Most ponies would have taken the hint we gave you about the exclusivity of our business on The Horseshoe, and realized how... impolite you are being by just handing out blueprints to anything a pony wants to get high off of. Most ponies would be more respectful of the dead.”

Pinkie raised an eyebrow at the ghoulish stallion. “What hint?” she asked, then gasped comically. “Oh! Is that what the severed hoof you sent me was about? I thought maybe that was just how the Revenants welcomed new ponies to the station.” She waved a placating hoof toward him. “I was going to tell you guys that’s a really terrible way to welcome new ponies, maybe recommend you try flowers or cake instead, but I guess a severed hoof makes a lot more sense if you were trying to intimidate me.”

Her utterly blase attitude tripped the unicorn up for a moment, and while he sputtered for a reply, Pinkie glanced back to Applejack.

[The unicorn’s name is Thriller Killer, though everypony usually just calls him TK. The Revenants are his crew, and they're the biggest gang on the habitat. Ever since they all started getting their bodies modded out with that ‘zombie pony’ look, they’ve worn the meaniest pants around here. Not many ponies are willing to stand up to them anymore.]

Applejack gave Pinkie a hard look while she absorbed this information. [Wait, what was that he said about ponies gettin’ high?]

TK, on the other hand, looked to his gang for strength, then turned and took three slow, menacing steps forward, the other six ponies closing in ranks to his sides, and cutting off any real hope of slipping past. “You scum think you can just step off of your ships and trot around on a hab like you own the damn place, well I have an update for your muse to feed to your addled brain: you don’t run this place. We do.”

Applejack looked over her shoulder at him disdainfully, like she might scrape him off her hoof after a hard days work, and wrinked her nose at his increasingly oppressive smell. “Don’t most ponies who run habitats bathe from time to time?”

He turned his gaze on her, and she realized that his pupils reflected the dim light of the room back at her in a smouldering red glow. Probably some fancy enhanced vision he’s got, she thought to herself, eager to rationalize his intimidating visage.

“Cute,” he commented. “Who the buck are you?”

She smiled, and actually had the gall to turn and pass a hoof toward him, sending him a digital copy of her business card. “Apple Cobbler, business consultant.”

TK stared to her left, where she was sure her business card was on his optics, at a loss. “What.”

Applejack gave him a sarcastic smile. “By the way, that piece’a advice was a free sample, though I am open for light contract work at the moment.”

Silence descended between the two groups as Applejack held Thriller Killer’s murderous stare.

Pinkie, sensing the impending violence, stepped in and broke the quiet. “Well, really TK, I'm really sorry If I’ve been stepping on your hooves, and I was just wrapping up here. We can just take our shuttle back out to Surprise and we’ll be out of your mane, Okay?” She took another step between them, and sat down, holding out a hoof toward each of them to hold them apart.

“No.” TK answered darkly, his horn lighting up with a turquoise aura. A matching aura surrounded Pinkie Pie, pulling her off her hooves and to the side, holding her legs splayed out around her.

Thriller Killer quickly backed out of Applejack’s reach as he floated Pinkie over their heads and spun her around. “I think it’s time for an object lesson instead,” he said as Applejack launched herself at the gap he’d left, only to find another pony in his place. “Now you get to watch us tear your friend apart.”

The unfortunate stallion who'd taken TK’s place had a jagged-edged shaved-dog look to him, and seemed to be missing his lower jaw. She adjusted to the new situation quickly, shoving off of him into a midair spin that she landed with her forehooves on the floor. Her rear hooves never landed, however and before he’d recovered from the first awkward blow she'd given him an applebuck straight in the exposed teeth, sending him tumbling to the floor.

He had, however, succeeded in arresting her momentum, and the noose closed in around her, the other five Revenants rearing up to slam their hooves down at her. She saw them coming on, and pulled her rear legs back in to launch herself at the pony who had lost time circling to a better position behind her, a cheese-colored pegasus mare with sooty black feathers. She looked like she’d had holes eaten randomly throughout her flesh, some that Applejack would swear she could see clear through.

Her AR profile said her name was Coriolis, and featured pictures of a happy dark-coated pegasus flying above the trees in the habitat’s inner dome. Applejack felt a momentary pang of guilt, wondering when the filly’s life had gone so wrong.

Applejack caught her just as she'd started to rear, adding her inertia to the equation and slamming her down on her back, driving her rear hooves into her exposed underbelly. Whose tellin’ what good that’ll do with these freak bodies, though, she thought.

Then Coriolis flexed her wings up, making contact with Applejack's sides. Metallic shock feathers laced through her wingspan carried a paralyzing jolt of electrical current right into the other mare's body, pulling a strangled scream from Applejack and freezing her in a vulnerable position, just as she was preparing to leap over the pegasus.

It didn’t take long for another of the crew to take advantage. The pony next to her, his bare flesh clinging tight to his body, looked like a gnarled and tumorous dead tree. He spun and slammed into Applejack with the jarring weight of a modified bone structure, throwing into the side of a pipe. The blow seemed to actually bring Applejack back to reality, and in the moment it took for Coriolis to scramble out of the way so he could advance on her she had picked herself back up. His name was Driftwood, or so his profile advertised. It didn’t say much else.

As he took his next step toward her, Applejack was ready, hammering him right in the face with her rear hooves. She sent his head snapping backward, but he only took a moment to recover. She recoiled, feeling like she’d bucked a cannonball. Skull’s reinforced, she realized, growing frustrated at her own inadequate, stock body.

She took the moment that had bought her to scramble free, working out a limp as she moved. For all her expertise in hoof-to-hoof combat, Applejack was badly outnumbered, and the Revenants broke formation to hunt her like a pack of timberwolves, two breaking to circle in front of her while the rest pressed her from behind, hot on her hooves.

TK leered at Pinkie, whose eyes flitted over the scene and trembled as she watched it unfold. “Maybe I’ll give you her stack when we’re through with her. We wouldn’t want her to forget this experience, after all.”

Pinkie pie looked at him, then back at the scene, struggling helplessly against his telekinetic grip. Then she took a deep breath and closed her eyes, blocking it all out.

“Nope,” she responded after a moment. “You aren’t going to do that.”

TK’s eyelid twitched, and the aura holding Pinkie jarred suddenly to the side, though the jolt seemed to have no affect on her composure. If anything, now she’d begun to smile.

His smouldering eyes bored into her, certain this was some kind of crazy, last minute bluff. “The buck do you mean?”

Pinkie Pie opened her eyes and returned the stare, the sparkle in her eyes entirely natural. “The whole tearing apart thing? Totally not going to happen,” she answered simply.

“I beg to differ,” he said, gesturing with a melted-looking hoof toward Applejack, who was finding herself in increasingly dire straights.

Applejack had elected to simply charge through the ponies rushing out in front of her, expecting to barrel between them through sheer superior will. Instead, a gaunt, pale pegasus stallion with a bony muzzle and skeletal-looking wings sidestepped further into her path, forcing her to slam into him and sending them both tumbling across the floor. He flared his bony wings to stabilize them, and ended up on top of her. His hooftips were sharpened to deadly points, and he slammed them into her chest, probing for a weak spot in her ribcage. He flapped his wingbones in her face, their own sharpened tips tearing bloody scratches across her coat.

She closed her eyes and got her legs under his midsection, throwing him into the low ceiling. Before she could get up, the other pony who had circled ahead caught up with her. This one was another mare, and she looked like she’d been immolated, every inch of her coat replaced with a blackened scab. A lump on her shoulder split open to reveal a wide silvery barrel. The name over her head was ‘Cinder Shadow’, though Applejack didn’t have time to look through her profile as the wide shredder barrel swiveled to line up with her chest.

She frantically rolled to the right, which saved most of her from the blast. The cone of diamond shards that sprayed from the barrel tore a ragged hole in the floor, revealing the fullerene hull plate beneath it. She only realized that it had also annihilated a patch of her coat when her roll pressed her weight against the bloody patch of muscle left behind.

AJ jumped back onto her hooves, but she’d ended up on the wrong side of Cinder to get to TK, and the shock and rapid blood loss were starting to take their toll. On top of that, Driftwood was still coming at her like some kind of juggernaut, and Coriolis had managed to mostly recover. It was only a matter of time before they brought her down.

Thriller Killer grinned at Pinkie, laughing wetly. “Now, tell me again how we’re not about to eat your friend for dinner. You scum are always good for an entertaining lie.”

Pinkie’s smile burst into a grin. “Oh, that’s just because I’m the one who designed the nanoswarm The Nail uses for it’s effects.”

One by one, the oscillating lines of light across the dance-floor flickered out, in a wave moving out from where Pinkie was floating. Within seconds, the club had darkened, with only occasional dim emergency lights to cast long shadows across the room. Everypony blinked and took a moment to look around, readjusting to the sudden darkness.

Then suddenly the full spectrum was back, with all of the lasers crowded around the faces of the Revenants, beaming brilliant light directly into their dilating eyes. The music descended into a fast, schizophrenic melody as the nanobots interacted with the instinctive flailing they were doing to get their hooves between the light and their eyeballs.

The telekinetic field dropped, and as soon as Pinkie’s hooves hit the floor, she was reaching into her hair, withdrawing a small pink sphere caught in the gap of her hoof. “You ponies need to loosen up. Here, have a party grenade,” she said, throwing the smooth ball into their midst.

The lights dispersed, and the Revenants had just enough time to turn and look at the grenade before it twisted open, launching confetti everywhere. Then it began strobing patterned lights like a disco ball.

“What in Tartarus...?” TK asked, blinking. “Was that supposed to-AAH!” His hooves shot out from under him as he suddenly found himself melting through the floor, then the ceiling crashed through him, grating him into spagetti. He tried to wriggle back into shape, but the lights from the ball kept smashing him apart.

Applejack staggered to Pinkie, who reached down and held her face between her hooves. “What’d ya just do?” she asked.

“Look at me, don’t look at the pretty lights, that’s a really bad idea. Just look at me.” Pinkie said, her own eyes tightly closed. Only as Applejack watched, her pink coat stretched and darkened red. Now it was Big Macintosh holding her, staring into her eyes, his own begging her to trust him. Her rear hooves felt like they were hanging over a deep chasm, and she didn't dare look behind her

“Ain’t you dead?” she asked him, confused.

He nodded serenely. “Ayep.”

“Then what’re you doin’ here?” she tried to yell it at him, but she didn’t have the strength. She was fading fast.

“Ya need me,” he answered.

Around him were her fields back home, the fields both of them had worked so hard to keep productive, to keep feeding ponies, to keep the family afloat. Only everything was going crazy, like it had the first time Discord had come back, chocolate raining from the sky, corn popping on the stalk, and a dozen other calamities she only was vaguely aware of. She brought a hoof between his and tried to pry herself free. “Lemme go. We gotta stop this mess.”

“Nnnope,” he said. “Jus’ hold on ta me fer now. You’ve got your own work to do, an’ ah’ve got mine.”

She opened her mouth to reply, but instead she felt like she was falling forever in an instant, only he’d already caught her. He smiled at her, and she couldn’t help but smile back as blackness crept in from the edges of her fields and smothered them both.