Sunny 10

Chapters

And Then There Were Ten: ACT 2
And Then There Were Ten: ACT 3
And Then There Were Ten: ACT 4
And Then There Were Ten: ACT 5
And Then There Were Ten: ACT 1

And Then There Were Ten: ACT 2

And Then There Were Ten: ACT 2:

Sunny Starscout was not okay. Unlike earlier in her walk through the woods though, what ailed her now was purely, or at least primarily, of the external, physical variety. Her entire body felt as though it’d been trampled underhoof by the preposterously prodigious troop of ponies that lined up before her store during free smoothie day. Without even having to look, she could tell much of her fur was singed by the smell wafting into her nostrils, memories of her first few dozen failures as a filly making creme brulee flooding back to her. She bristled in self-consciousness despite her best efforts to store those embarrassingly ignatius experiences back in their properly labeled boxes.

As if she hadn’t enough, far more pressing, problems.

“Oooooh… why’d I have to go and think about Mrs. Cloverleaf’s cooking classes?” she grumbled wobbly to herself, hooves just as wobbly raised in abashment to cover her face from imagined fellow students pointing and laughing at her humiliation.

Remembrance, thankfully, did not hold her for much longer. She soon found herself snapped back to coeval conditions by, fittingly enough, the snapping of many, many trees around her followed the equivalent cacophony of them crashing upon the ground. Eyes shuttering open, she gasped at these sounds of arboreal collapse, and then gasped again in more troubled a fashion when she realized it hurt to even breathe. She shuddered at the thought of actually moving herself in any major way, though only inwardly as outwardly doing so would, of course, lead to more pain she wasn’t quite ready for.

Yet on the subject of shuddering, she struggled to remain still as she saw and truly appreciated the scope of the devastation surrounding her. Without ever having to tilt her head, she discovered what must have been hundreds, maybe thousands, of trees either standing but on fire, lying broken on the earth in so many vast splinters, or some synthesis thereof. From those that were alight, embers of burning bark, leaves, pine needles, and other such plantstuff were lifted up by the heat and blown away by the cool breeze running through the locality like enkindled dandelion seeds. The smoke was so thickset and cimmerian that the sky, its moon, and its stars were blotted out in their entirety.

Sunny struggled to set the scene to words. The closest touchstone she had was the account recounted to her by her father concerning the climactic clash between Princess Twilight Sparkle and Tirek The Terrible early in her regal reign. The one where her first home since making the move to Ponyville, a really cool library built into an enchanted tree the princess sadly never did quite get over, was tragically destroyed along with hundreds of acres of a forest titled Everfiree. A close enough facsimile, she surmised, at least concerning scale. But the way dad’d told it, the way she’d always vividly picture it in her head, the trees in that part of Everfree were assailed so severely and swiftly that they had not the time to burn before being blackened so. Perhaps strictly rationally that was much the worse, but given that Sunny was not wholly given to rationality in the moment, the present portrait was naturally painted in far more striking trepidation.

Speaking of striking, she soon felt something strike the top of her head, something scaldingly hot. In terms of impact pain it was actually pretty picayune, her reactionary flinch doing more to harm her given the state she was in and her frenzied dash to brush whatever-it-was out of her mane before it started to burn like everything around her accomplishing the most harm.

“Ooo ow ow! Gah! Oh that smarts!” she rasped, which only made her hurt more which in turn made her groan out her woes some more which just made her hurt again in a never-ending feedback loop of pain. She only just managed to alter course and still herself once again when she saw what’d hit her and realized what it was.

A pinecone. On fire.

Sunny hadn’t much time to ponder where its origins rested when a half dozen or so more fell and pelted the ground around it. Looking up, she noticed many things she hadn’t since awakening from her slumber of agony. For starters, that she sat within the shade of a great sugar pine. For middlers, that the firmaments and tips of its branches and the pine needles and yes, pinecones, thereon blazed brightly. For enders, that the old tree, probably a sapling before Princess Sparkle was even a yearling, possessed very many cracks crisscrossing its surface up, down, left, right, and center that though seemed only bark deep, Sunny knew was anything other than by the way the pine suddenly screaked and listed significantly forward.

It was going to fall. The ancient, ignited tree was set to fall on her. Verily, because of her, she swiftly ascertained. Yes, age and flame were to blame too, yet with the fact that she must have been flung into the pine with no small measure of force if the roughly her-shaped depression imprinted in it she realized her back rested in was anything to go by, Sunny could not escape responsibility.

Regardless, she needed to move. Yesterday.

Gritting her teeth, Sunny’s immediate inclination naturally was to sidestep catastrophe as it were. Simple and effective on paper, strenuous and inefficacious in practice. The persistent pain she still felt didn’t help, but that wasn’t the preeminent problem. The debris to the left and right of her, all the burning logs that were once majestic firs and the titanic upturned stones the size of sailboats and the patches and piles of grass that still miraculously remained rooted to the ground or else had been plucked and sent billowing away with so much else that all the pinecones from the collapsing sugar pine had set aflame with them, were.

Between these three things she couldn’t find a safe or speedy enough route, any gap at her lateral axis at all. The only avenue of advance as she sorely slithered on her stomach was the narrow path ahead. Were it the shadow of any other tree casted over her, she might have been able to get out of the way in time. Not a capital course, but one she felt confident she had at least a fifty-fifty, maybe a forty-sixty, chance of clearing before fiery lumber was upon her. By points of comparison, there were no prospects she could spot where she could escape the sundering of the sugar pine. Not a tree that tall. Not via the line of its downfall.

Sunny’s only real hope was to fortunately find some passage somewhere through the refuse at her sides someplace downlane. When the steady snapping of the tree picked up in pace and power and its shadow oh so suddenly darkened, her optimism, meager as it was in the moment, shifted to maybe catching an opportunity by the wind, which blew the opposite way, altering the trajectory of the pine’s plummet somewhere away from her in these last few precious seconds. Miniscule as that happenstance was, it still seemed far more likely than the crawl onward. And yet, the latter was the only outcome she’d any direct control left, so through the fire and flames she continued ceaselessly. Through the torment and tumult, she kept moving forward. Even when the fracturing of the sugar pine attained crescendo, even when silence fell briefly alongside the tree, and even when she saw the crackling wreckage crashing down on top of her at the upmost of her periphery, Sunny kept. Moving. Forward.

For her efforts, she was privileged with a plunge.

Not of the tree, no.

Herself.

In a second and a half, Sunny tumbled into a depression of sorts, cartwheeling a surprisingly great deal in her brief air time before colliding onto the ground on her back. She yelped in surprised pain at this development, yet when she heard and then looked up at the sugar pine smoldering parallel with the earth now, covering over half the pit’s diameter from side to side and spanning its entirety from top to bottom, she counted her blessings. Letting loose the breath she’d forgotten she’d held, Sunny permitted herself a short respite that was greatly welcomed, punctuated as it was many times by her coughing out all the ash dripping down from the tree above. Upon securing enough oxygen to calm herself as well she could given the circumstances, she inclined her head as far back as equinely possible till her occipital rested on the soot surfaced floor, eyes shut for a bit. After the passing of a solid minute or two, she’d recuperated enough mental clarity and energy to contemplate copious questions. Yet while all were very good, there stood one whose pertinence shimmered just a little more lucent. Really two, but they were so well linked they might as well have been one.

“What… what happened?” Sunny asked aloud. “Why… why did it happen?”

She tried to think. Tried to remember. Tried to imagine how her night’d taken such a terrorful turn. She kneaded her temples with her hooves, thankful that the movement either didn’t hurt as much as it would’ve when she’d awakened or that she’d merely acclimated adequately to the agony already, and relaxed. She believed the answer would arrive to her rather than her having to go to it if she could just relax.

She was right to a point.

Sans any sweat from her brow, Sunny’s mind conjured forth the photo album of neoteric events in sequence. There were many that weren’t important for the line of inquiry she pursued, however, so she soon had to actively focus in on the last page of that scrapbook. She saw herself traveling sunnily along through the woods back to the cave that served as homebase for her and her friends till morning. She saw her face grimace in disquiet and discomfort at the rapid uptick in temperature in the vicinity and a bright light illuminating where she trotted. She saw herself stopping in place, twisting around, and beholding up in the night sky–

“Sunny! Sunny!”

Sunny gasped at what she thought sounded like a familiar voice calling her name, contemporaneously opening her eyes with the same surprise.

“Sunny! Sunny! Where are you!? Are you okay!?”

As the voice, Zipp it seemed, kept attempting to establish contact with her, Sunny gasped again. Yet not at anything she heard, at what she’d sighted.

There, a good thirty feet or so in front of her, sat a sphere mostly of murky gray with some strange pattern of black lines over the bottom, at the precise center of the hole.

No.

Not hole.

Impact crater.

For there was no doubt in her mind that the meteorite she’d just recalled seeing, the one around the size of the Smoothie carts she owned, the one whose descent from on high was faster than any pegasus she knew or knew of, the one wreathed in a halo of intense orange-red fire that rendered her frozen in its heat as it approached, was one and the same with the gray-black sphere before her.

Sunny was staring right at the thing that’d caused her and the forest so much trouble of late.

As she broke into a shivering sweat at this understanding, she wondered briefly what it was. She settled mostly on the belief that it must’ve been some sort of satellite that’d somehow gotten knocked out of orbit and dropped to the world below if the metallic sheen and the quite clearly unnatural nature of both its perfect circularity and the black line pattern were any indication. Then she figured it was probably better to hypothesize after she’d been found and brought to safety.

Thus, as stentorian as she could–which was a lot by her calculus–Sunny screamed, downright screeched, to get Zipp to locate her.

“Zipp! Zipp! Over here! I’m down here! In the crater! Beneath the tree! In the crater! Beneath the tree!”

Over and again she shrieked out this message to acquire her friend’s attention, putting absolutely all she had into this cry for help to the stage where she did cry with her eyes considerably. Yet even with such resolution, all that powering through the pain, her voice still lost ever more of its distinction and decibels with each passing repetition, growing ever fainter on the acoustic horizon. This trend extended steadily till, eventually and inevitably, if either pony still did speak, they were such minute things that not even the diamond dogs of old would be able to hear.

Sunny refused outright to slump down in defeat and stay despondent, however, wiping away the tears in hardy defiance. Every which way and that way, she angled her head on the lookout for anything, anything at all around her, any firm root or rock or anything that the sphere’s crash had uncovered that was usable for climbing out of the crater. From where she lay, she found nothing to fulfill the bill, but that was okay. Perhaps, she reasoned, if she could get to the other side she could discover what she needed. Her initial idea had her avoiding the sphere entirely to accomplish this since she was still quite shaken by its aire of imaginably menacing mystery and the prodigiously possible possibility that it was radioactive in some manner. It was in space presumably for a long time, after all.

Two tentative feet of painfully creeping on her belly later though, and Sunny decided just to crosscut the crater to save herself the hassle. The enigmatic rondure may’ve been releasing radiation, yet if she hurried, it wouldn’t have enough time to affect her.

Hopefully.

Gulping down her apprehension for the moment, Sunny shifted and slid towards the sphere, remaining cautious to keep at least a foot, foot and a half, between her and it at all times no matter what. Despite how achey she still was, this stratagem went swimmingly, and she made it to the crater center at record pace compared to her early estimates.

Yet, of course, something just had to make her drift off course.

A symbol.

An emblem.

A royal seal.

A six-pointed, magenta star over a six-pointed white star ringed by a constellation of five smaller white stars, all upon a backdrop of purple.

The cutiemark of Princess Twilight Sparkle.

Ten times ten times ten times ten times ten times ten times ten times ten times ten times ten questions streaked into and through her mind. They animated her such that she broke into a scurrying crawl, incapable of feeling pain even if somepony’d accidentally dropped a piano on her, and circled around to the other side of the sphere to find the same perspicuous image emblazoned there too. She was so overwhelmed that she had to massage, really paw, at her eyes to ensure they weren’t dismally mistaken.

They were not.

Faded as both instances of the cutiemark were by either time or the calidity of re-entry or both or whatever, Sunny Starscout could recognize it from a million miles away in her sleep back when she was two.

Yet even though she was a big filly now, an expressly girlish squeak couldn’t be helped from escaping her muzzle. Something similar could be said for the font of foalish–justifiably foolish–inquisitiveness her face just couldn’t hide. A fountain that intensified in her soul until, with strength she’d have thought beyond her mere moments prior, she stood upright on all fours without even an inkling of instability, and walked closer to the sphere.

Sunny, a lone inch away, halted, pondered what exactly was her next step, and then like any curious kid much her junior would, gently tapped her hoof against the mark.

Boop.

A lot of things happened seemingly all at once, though there was a proper progression, difficult to fathom as it may’ve been to an onlooker.

The mark’s stars shone like the stars above from which they drew their inspiration.

A masculine voice, monotone, yet decidedly unmachine-like and more like someone composedly reciting a script, said, “Pony DNA detected. Commencing unlocking protocols.”

Sunny, taken aback by the abruptness of these two incidents, fell back onto her back in a startled jar. “Ah!”

She didn’t have long to complain and recover however before a horizontal seam, previously totally nonexistent to her sight, appeared over the middle of the sphere, followed by a vertical seam at the peak. The loftier half of the sphere then split open like some odd, orbicular flower to reveal Sunny knew not what since she couldn’t see anything from her vantage point on the floor.

To correct this, Sunny’s inquiring mind gave her power again to get up and go without feeling like she needed a month’s vacation. She permitted herself a deep breath, took a couple steps forward, and craned her head into the opening of the sphere, really a pod now she guessed, to discover–

–the mirror image of the pod, yet in miniature, laying in a hole midpoint in said larger pod. Mostly gray, black pattern on the bottom, and Princess Sparkle’s cutiemark on either side.

“Huh,” Sunny said simply, grabbing the smaller pod from the top with one hoof and carefully resting it onto her other. “Hope there’s not more of you in here. That’d just be ridiculous.”

She examined it more closely, rotating it around a bit before her scrunched up–mental note taking–mien like a metallic basketball. Eventually she stopped on one of the sides with a mark and again, though much more certainly, lightly pressed her hoof against it.

A similar series of events to what’d just played out occurred.

The stars of the mark glowed like real stars.

The same unknown and unemotional male voice said, “Pony DNA detected. Commencing unlocking protocols.”

The smaller pod opened in the same way, horizontal seam appearing over the center, vertical one appearing at the peak, loftier half splitting in two.

The primary departure from earlier, aside from Sunny not being particularly jumpy this time, was what lay within.

Inside the smaller pod was not an even smaller pod as she’d half seriously hypothesized.

No.

“A watch?” she whispered.

What Sunny could only describe as a high-tech looking wristwatch sat snugly in a rectangular depression in the pod’s interior.

It was a rather cumbersome seeming thing for what she surmised it was, with an unwieldily grandiose wristband made of black and dark gray metal more than likely to make the simple act of cantering at a meek twenty miles an hour an athletic achievement in and of itself let alone a normal sustained speed. Four equally metallic yet white external tubes almost intersected in an X pattern before disappearing into the more black area in the middle. At the exact center of the watch was its most eye drawing feature. A mostly dark gray faceplate with a trail of black running over the top and ringed by four, spherical, tiny light emerald green light bulbs. A faceplate within which was a translucent screen beneath which began to glare stunningly the electronic image of an darker emerald green background upon which rested a black hourglass possessing a light emerald green interior. Right of center and to the side, off the faceplate and on the blacker metal, between two of the white tubes, she further noticed what seemed to be a big light emerald green button upon a cylindrical prominence of dark gray.

To say Sunny was a little weirded out at this development would’ve been like saying the larger pod had hit the planet kinda hard.

Tilting her head as far to one side as it’d go, brow upturned as far up as she could, she asked aloud, “What was a watch doing all the way out in outer space?”

Before she could even begin to arrive at an answer–let alone a decent one–for the question and the bajillion others she had, something even stranger and far more frightening happened. The watch’s wristband, which’d seemed so given to stillness as any other metal, started to shift, basically running like bubbling clay. Then the bottom parted completely like the yawning maw of some small, yet menacing, creature. Then, the watch leapt at her as though it had a mind of its own.

Then, Sunny screamed.

10-10-10-10-10-10-10-10-10-10

Having barely regained the requisite energy to hoofle with conversing with the purple mare, Zipp heard Izzy suddenly gasp and yell out, “Oh no!”

“What!?” asked Zipp, back to being super nervous again rather than super soporific.

“I just realized that because you two snoozed through Sunny’s lesson that you probably don’t know anything about the early Harmony Era!” A look of tenacious determination overtook her features. “In the name of being a good friend, it is my sacred, solemn, ecstatic duty to remedy this horrible situation with utmost haste!” she declared as though reciting an important line that’d been imparted to her school and doing so flawlessly.

“That’s cool and all, Iz, but right now I don't think it's the best time for–” Zipp began.

“Utmost haste!” Izzy yelled with enough force in her voice to literally nearly knock Zipp off her hooves. After coughing into a hoof and smiling bigly again, Izzy began, “Once upon a time, in the magical land of Equestria–”

A firm hoof in her mouth, plus a hastily geo-kinetically constructed ring around her lips, muzzled Izzy’s muzzle nigh instantaneously, the stallion responsible appearing as afraid and as sweaty as the pegasi sister duo just had as he hurriedly said, “Maybe that should wait till at least tomorrow. You know? Until after we get back to town and are safe and comfy under any of the various forms of shelter available there much better suited for a full half-day lecture? Besides,” Hitch smirked and craned his head towards the pegasi, “they haven’t made their Pinkie promise to keep their magic in check yet.”

Izzy immediately expelled Hitch’s hoof from her maw, her lips flexed away the stone around them like it was a dinner mint being crushed by a carriage, and she shouted, “You’re right!”

What?” Zipp asked, as confused as she had been in the now past ten or so minutes. “How is he right? DIdn’t you just say that all this–” she gestured to the dusty cave rubble they stood on, “--was on you?”

“Yeah, but who knows? Maybe next time we’re chillaxing in a cave it could totally be on you and/or Pipp! Like if you see your own shadow, get scared, and accidentally zipped into the walls too hard. Or if she yawned too hard while waking up.”

“Ha! As if!” Pipp said, stretching her legs and back out. “You’d need at least a memory foam mattress to get me to yawn after waking up and not… cave floor.”

“Plus,” Izzy continued, never minding Pipp’s comment, “you’ve never felt the astounding, amazing awesomeness of making a Pinkie promise before!”

“Yes. However did we carry-on?” asked Pipp with an eye-roll, almost as sarcastic as her tone of voice.

A jab to her soft pink neck by Zipp changed her demeanor to something considerably easier to construe as interested, lest Izzy catch onto Pipp’s condescension and get mad again.

The unicorn appeared to remain fortuitously oblivious as she stepped closer to the two and said, “Here, let me show you again!” She crossed her hoof over her heart again. “Cross my heart,” she stood on her backhooves and flapped her forelegs like a bird again, “and hope to fly,” she stood normally and pressed a mud covered hoof against her eye again, “stick a cupcake in my eye!” She then proceeded to recite the oath and repeat its accompanying locomotion to the point the heads of everyone around her spun in dizziness.

“Okay, I think we got a hoofle on it,” Zipp said, interrupting Izzy halfway through the hope to fly part.

“Yeah, Iz. Honestly doesn’t look that hard,” said Pipp.

Hitch sat down and placed both hooves over his mouth, seemingly barely able to contain his snickers. Izzy, still standing on her backhooves said, “I know it might seem easy peasy mozzarella cheesy, but believe you me there’s an art and a science to it that requires stacks of care. If not–” her gaze grew rigid for a brief instant, “Disaster!”

Zipp ‘tsked’ while Pipp huffed a stray lock that had fallen onto the bridge of her nose back into place on her mane.

“Pffft. Now I know you’re just being melodramatic for laughs,” Pipp said, putting her shades down and shaking her head. “And I would know. Accredited drama queen here.”

“Can confirm,” Zipp said, pulling out a plastic card from Pipp’s mane with a photo of the former’s face when she was just a filly on it going all ‘Woe is Me!’ with the words, ‘Uplift Elementary: Accredited Drama Queen,’ emblazoned in shiny, golden, metallic lettering just beneath. When she was sure Izzy and Hitch saw enough, she put the card back in her sister’s mane and said, “And yeah. For once, me and sis here are totally on the same page. Literally so simple pre-k ponies Pinkie Pie probably made it up for could probably perform it.”

“Yeah, I mean, all you gotta do is go: Cross my heart…” Pipp crossed a hoof over her heart, Zipp doing the same but in silence.

“Hope to fly…” Zipp stood on her backhooves, but instead of flapping her forelegs like Izzy, she flapped her wings a bit in light of actually having them. Pipp did the same but remained silent as Zippy had for the first section of the oath.

For the ultimate part of the promise however, both pegasus princess sisters sought to speak at once as they completed the final movement. “Stick a cupcake in my–”

But rather than completing matters sans fault, they both somehow managed to press their hoof far too firmly against their eye. Forcefully enough that they both yelped out in most ungraceful fashion. Where they differed crucially was in what occurred concurrently with said yelps.

In a single, reactionary wing push, Zipp zipped into the air so fast she broke the sound barrier and just kept going, going, going straight up like a bottle rocket into the night.

Pipp’s response, while not resulting in much personal displacement by comparison, was no less… moving. As in, her yelp was so powerful, precise, and projected that it blew away all the leaves and many, many, many branches of the nearby treeline and every other three behind them in a horizontal cone of devastating defoliation measuring some thousand feet in length and half that in diameter. So powerful, precise, and projected, that a veritable bestiary of mundane and marvelous woodland critters flew, glode, slid, crawled, or straight up sprinted as fast as their wings, bellies, legs, or other forms of aeronautical and terrestrial locomotion could carry them deeper into the weald for refuge.

As the various creaturely cries of panic dimmed down where not even crickets could be heard chirping in the immediate area, Zipp, clutching her sore, mud covered right eye finally managed to return to the earth. Just in time to see Hitch fall onto his back, clutching his stomach in a fit of laughter so strong it left the normally mild mannered sheriff crying.

Izzy in the meanwhile, typically as hyper-emotional as she was just plain hyper, merely lowered and shook her head in disapproval as she said, “Tried to warn ya. Told ya, told ya, told ya.”

Zipp and Pipp could not but groan as they did their best to assuage the pain in their eye with their good, non-mud covered hoof. For the former at least, she also groaned because she was so comically wrong she’d driven Hitch delirious with hilarity.

“What… what just happened?” Pipp askes, giving voice to the crucial query on both pegasisters’ minds.

“Stuck with you on the same boat there, sis,” said Zipp.

“It’s simple,” Izzy began, nose upturned didactically, “you each put your muddy hoof too hard onto your eyes like a couple of Pinkie promise putterers.”

“What? No way!” Zipp declared in downright disbelief. “That makes, like, zero sense!” She pointed at herself with her muddy hoof. “I’ve been a champion athlete since I was five!”

“And I’ve been adroitly applying face masks, face cream, eye-liner, eye-shadow, and all kinds of beautification products for my volto illustre since I was five!” Pipp agreed, in her own way.

“All super cool to know, but entirely relevant and inapplicable if you’ve never, ever, lever practiced Pinkie promising for long enough,” Izzy said, nose still slanted skyward.

“How is–does that–begin to–” stammered Zipp, barely able to form words she was so confuzzled.

“Don’t–don’t take it too personal, ponies,” Hitch said, sitting up criss-cross-applesauce, trying hurriedly to catch his breath as his laughter faded. “That’s just how the Pinkie promise operates. You think you have the best hoof-eye coordination and depth perception in ponydom, then blamo!” He slammed his hooves together for emphasis. “Mud coated hoof in the eye. If I had a bit for every time it happened to me growing up, I’d have paid off the mortgage to my house a full year sooner.”

Zipp’s eyes narrowed in anxiety and zipped from Hitch to Izzy and from Izzy to Hitch several–dozen–times. “Did… did you two plan this?”

“Plan what?” Izzy asked, head to one side. “I was rooting for you the whole way to be the first ponies I’ve ever seen breeze through it on the first try.”

“You got my motive down to the lowercase ‘t’, though,” Hitch admitted, shrugging. Smiling, he wiped away his leftover mirthful tears as he said, “And for the record, thank you both so much for exceeding my expectations so much. Best prank I’ve managed to pull in years.”

Zipp keenly inspected her friends’ faces for fractures, faults, fissures, anything foretoken of facade whatsoever that’d facilitate the notion they were being less than truthful on the subject of secret conspiring. Their considerably earnest sincerity–plus the fact Izzy probably couldn’t even spell the word deception where something involving ancient friendship customs was concerned–inevitably won the day. She sighed in acquiescence, silently promising to somehow prank Hitch back at the nearest opportunity, and asked, “So, uh… did that count? I mean, is the Pinkie promise complete on our side?”

“Because if it isn’t, we’ll keep trying! Mark my words as a virtuosa della cosmetologia, we WILL get this right!” proclaimed Pipp with unwavering venturesomeness. “Cross my heart–” She crossed a hoof over her heart. “And hope to fly–” She fluttered a bit with her wings before landing back on the ground and covering her hoof in fresh mud. “Stick a cupcake in my–”

“NO!” Izzy and Hitch both interjected as they closed distance on Pipp and grabbed her hoof mere calibers away from her eyes so quick Zipp had to jump back on reflex.

“It’s fine! It’s totally fine!” frantically said the unicorn.

“Yeah!” the sheriff hurriedly agreed. “The whole ‘hoof-pressing-to-hard-against-the-eye-thing’ is kinda expected for newbies, ‘case you couldn't tell!”

Zipp set free a huff of relief she hadn’t known she’d been holding till it was gone. “That’s a comfort. Honestly don’t know how many more twists and turns I can hoofle tonight.”

“Think you can manage a big hug?” Izzy asked, moving in a single hop to where everypony could see her, forelegs held wide-open for mostest huggage.

Zipp and her sister eyed Hitch, who shook his head at the voiceless question they’d asked. “No, it’s not part of the promise. Izzy’s just being… well… Izzy.”

“And huggy!” Izzy agreed in sing-song style.

Zipp looked at Pipp who looked back at her and then the both of them shrugged. They turned back to Izzy and, along with Hitch, trotted over to the unicorn.

“Ok. Just make sure not to squeeze us like accordions like you like to do,” Zipp started, smirking. “Wouldn’t want someponies here next to me trying to bring down fall early with their squawking.”

“Or some other ponies I could name, but won’t so they’re not humiliated, trying to become an astronaut in the pegasus space program,” Pipp riposted with an eye-roll.

Izzy was thankfully feeling merciful for the moment, none of the events the two sisters were jesting at the other’s expanse over coming to pass as the unicorn embraced them plus the sheriff. Although, they could do with several hours on a waterbed to rightly realign their backs later on.

The most distinctive thing about the hug, however, was that after a few seconds, Izzy sighed in most un-Izzy-like dejection and hung her head sadly.

Swiftly sensing something amiss. Zipp asked, “What’s wrong, Izzy?”

“Oh nothing, nothing. It’s just that, as great as you guys undergoing your first Pinkie promise is, it’d have been like, totes a bajillion times better if Sunny saw it.”

Zipp ascended a brow at this and began to counter by saying, “Uh, Iz? What are you talking about? Sunny’s been right here this entire–” But, she stopped towards the end when she realized one very little, teeny-tiny, minute detail.

She hadn’t seen or heard anything at all from Sunny since they’d all retired for the night in the cave. Like, at ALL.

Izzy was categorically right.

The look of stunned shock on Zipp’s face was swiftly followed by the same sentiment appearing on Pipp’s and Hitch’s own visages. Like clockwork, the trio’s attention turned to what was left of the cave beneath their hooves, the pegasus princesses shouting together, “Hitch! Sunny! Save her! NOW!”

“I’m on it!” Hitch bellowed back, standing on backhooves, fronthooves held apart and prepped to slam against the other. “Alakaza–”

“Wait! Stop! No earthpony, earthmoving magic!” Izzy cried out, preventing Hitch from following through and getting his and the two other eye-pairs to fall squarely on her. “Sunny woke up and trotted into the forest, like, half an hour ago or something! Don’t you remember what I said?”

“What?” asked Zipp. “You didn’t say she went for a walk in the woods!”

“Well I meant to! Or… I was gonna,” Izzy defended, if not quite convincingly. “Point is, she’s over there,” she gestured to the forest, “not here!” she pointed beneath their hooves.

Zipp, Pipp, and Hitch all clutched their hearts and breathed out easy.

“Good,” said the sheriff, wiping a bit of sweat from his brow.

“Yeah. You had us real worried there for a sec,” the singing stylist said, readjusting her shades.

Zipp hovered a few feet into the air and asked, “So, you know exactly where Sunny went? Because I’m gonna go get her to tell her what happened and find some new shelter for the night so we can all get back to shut-eye.”

“Hey! I’m perfectly capable of reconstructing this perfectly good pile of rubble to at least cover our heads, ya know,” Hitch said, aggrieved by the unspoken implication.

“Pffft,” Zipp dismissed. “After last time you tried building something with your powers, I wouldn’t trust you with building a pet rock let alone anything a story tall or above.”

“Yeah. I mean, face facts, Hitch. You’re un maestro at pulling the threads, but when it comes to stitching it all together at the kind of scale we need, you’re more like my sis here whenever she even looks at a sewing machine,” sad Pipp before pulling out a blankie from Zipp’s mane that had what was supposed to be a pattern resembling Zipp’s face when she was a filly on it but that looked more like a melted marshmallow with vaguely Zipp-like features. “See?”

Hitch gasped dramatically, hoof over heart in dismay. “Hey now, I’ll have you know–NEIGH–reminded that that castle was as architecturally sound as ANY of the titanic towers you grew up passing on the way to kindie-garten… if it didn’t immediately sink into the swamp… and get wet… and then explode in a storm of mud… and then make the birthday girl cry… and then ruin the party for everypony…”

Not even granting Hitch the chance to look self-conscious at that, Zipp turned to Izzy, smiled friendly, and asked, “So, yeah, Iz, about those directions please?”

“Sorry Zipp, but I’m afraid that’s gonna have to be a big negatory on that one,” the unicorn said, shaking her head.

Zipp didn’t try to mitigate her frustration with how nothing tonight was being simple and straightforward as she exhaled in exasperation and let her shoulders slump down. “Okay… why won’t you just give me the info I asked for?”

“Because my friendship sense was tingling.”

Zipp honestly didn’t know what was weirder: the content of Izzy’s words or the manner she’d delivered them, as though it were the most mundane thing in the world to say you couldn’t tell a friend where another friend was because of a sense specifically pertaining to… friends.

What she could say for certain was that she hadn’t the dimmest of an idea how to respond to that and, honestly, didn’t really want to, her mental fortitude diminished to a puddle’s stature by that point. She so wanted nothing more than to just turn around and fly away at top speed, taking her chances with spotting Sunny without any specific knowledge, but thought it’d be, like, super rude.. Too rude for her unicorn friend to bare without breaking down into a sobbing fit.

Desperately, Zipp turned to Pipp and Hitch, noiselessly beseeching them to put forth the query Izzy doubtlessly was waiting to be asked at what she’d said, but found both their countenances shaking side to side like latitudinal bobbleheads. ‘You no good wimps!’ she thought, even as she herself sweated like she was in a greenhouse in the desert on the sun and struggled to gulp down the apprehensive lump in her throat. Her mind began to wander, and she couldn’t help but inwardly laugh at the ridiculousness of the situation: her, Zipp, gold medalist in more things than she could count–and she could count half the record for pie–withering under the confused gaze of one of the least frightening ponies she’d ever met. In this admitted humor of things, Zipp met the mettle needed to prepare to continue the conversation.

But then, Izzy’s eyes widened and she looked above and beyond Zipp, hoof extended that way as she said, equal parts childlike gree and wonder, “Ooooo! Looky, looky guys! Up in the sky!”

‘Yes!’ Zipp cheered in her head. ‘Hat tip to the convenient distraction!’

Her attention and that of her sister’s and the sheriff’s tilted up to where the zealous unicorn pointed, a bright, orange-red light darting through the night.

“Is it a bird!? Is it a plane!?” Izzy speculated aloud. “Ooo, ooo! Maybe it’s one of the Trotformers from that one movie I saw! If that’s the case, I hope it’s one of the Autobots like Troptimus Prime! Not one of those meenie Decepticons. They’re just so mean! And sneaky!”

“You mean like… deceptive?” Zipp asked.

Izzy looked down back at Zipp for a bit and gasped out before asking, “How did you know!?” Her expression grew suspicious, eyes narrowed as she continued, “I thought you said you haven’t liked going to the movies since streaming was invented.”

“Lucky guess,” Zipp said, brimming with as much confidence as the unidentified, flying whatever illuminated the horizon.

“Actually, I think it’s just a meteorite,” said Hitch.

“Oh! You mean like a shooting star!?” Izzy gasped again. “Let’s make wishes!”

“Well, no. See, Iz, a shooting star would be a meteor, not a meteori–” Zipp started.

Izzy, however, bowed her head, clasped her hooves together, and quickly interrupted by saying, “I wish first and foremost that the reintegration of the tribes has a happy ending, second and secondmost that Briddlewood can be a shiny city on the hill for all ponykind, and third and thirdmost that I get to go on another big adventure with tons of fun and beautiful hearts and faithful and strong friends sharing kindness like it was an easy feat and–”

While Zipp was hoping Izzy wouldn’t just keep going and going, she much objected to the way it happened. Namely, because it involved the meteorite crashing so hard somewhere far distant into the forest that all four ponies were shaken off their hooves and slammed onto their backs upon the ground. As if that wasn’t startling and headache starting enough, all the animals that Pipp had scared away with her sonic crying came running, crawling, sliding, jumping, gliding, and flying back, moving past the equine quartet before a brief lull of quiet followed by considerably more forest creatures frightened by the meteorite alone rushing away from the direction of its crash.

Zipp’s ears had just about stopped ringing when, but of course, Izzy had to shatter her reclaimed peace, if not without admittedly good cause.

“Oh no! Sunny!” the unicorn shouted, raising the top half of herself up off the ground.

Despite her speed, and her apparent difficulties mastering it exactly, Zipp was rather unhurried in the race to the finish line of understanding what her friend meant till she saw the faces of Hitch and Pipp appearing equally as aghast as Izzy as they sat up like her with realization.

Now operating at peak, hundred percent mental efficiency, probably at least twenty-percent more, Zipp only allowed herself to mimic her friends’ and sister’s expressions a moment before looking at Izzy with a strong brow, fixed with fortitude. Zipp got back to her hooves in a single flap of her wings, grabbed Izzy’s shoulder, turned her around, and commanded, “Iz. Sunny. Exact. Direction. Now.”

10-10-10-10-10-10-10-10-10-10

“Aaaaaaaaah! Get it off, get it off, get it off!”

Sunny Starscout screamed a lot.

Sunny Starscout was not okay.

Granted, nopony likely would be if a puzzling device stuck itself upon their wrist and just would not let go, yet this truth didn’t detract from the immensity of the significant emotional event Sunny underwent.

The moment the watch did so, she skipped back onto her backlegs like she was competing in a reverse sackrace, flailing her forelegs in frenzy. Especially the affected foreleg, her left. She only stopped when she struck one of the crater walls hard enough to embed herself in the subsoil. This pause was slight however, and after pulling her left foreleg free and slamming it as hard as she could against the wall, she’d inadvertently managed to detach herself entirely from the force and fell face first to the floor. Yes, she was swiftly buried by the micro-dirtslide that followed her, yet she just as swiftly stuck out her hooves, pulled herself free from it, and soon was right on back to hopping on her backhooves, forehooves waving in the air like she just didn’t care, again. The central difference was that this time, in addition to going back, she went forward, sideways, this way, that way, dipped, dived, flipped, cartwheeled, somersaulted, pirouetted, and outright bowed on her knees and beseeched the device to remove itself from her person.

Yet still, nothing she did would get the watch to unlatch.

She hadn’t even felt it loosen, such was how firmly affixed to her wrist it was.

By this point, Sunny’d crawled into an apricot-orange ball on the ground and begun to rock herself gently to and fro. A little more cool and collected, her unkempt mane, wide and needle point eyes, sweat swept countenance, hyperventilating nose, and general jitteriness nevertheless presented the picture of a pony overwrought. She clutched her head and tried to think. Tried to plan. Tried to devise some method to dislodge the device off her left leg.

She considered trying to just grab the watch with her right foreleg and pry it off, yet decided against it because the strap was very much solid metal now and not at all liquidy as it’d been when it’d taken hold.

She considered smashing the watch against the ground, yet decided against it because she’d already smashed it against the wall and failed and the compacted earth making up the ground wasn’t that much tougher.

At the out-and-out limit of her cognition, she considered trying to simply bite off the watch. This option she actually decided to go for after a lot of sighing and shrugging. She opened her mouth, pressed her teeth against the strap, and clenched down adamantly. Tout de suite, she was reminded about her first ever attempt at eating corn on the cob when she was a filly and too silly to realize that the cob part wasn’t in the edible column.

“Ah! Ah! Bad idea! Bad idea!” she yelled, holding her jaw with both hooves as she rolled her head around, doing her best to suppress the titanic toothache she experienced.

When the smarting finally faded, Sunny picked up the pace of her rocking and stared blankly ahead at the larger pod and its smaller cousin beside it that she’d dropped when this latest helping of shock and surprise had commenced.

“Stay sunny, Sunny. Stay sunny. Look at the bright side,” she tried to console herself. “Whatever this watch thingamajig is, it hasn’t actually done anything to you except fasten itself to your hoof.” She suddenly looked very agitated and leaned her head back. “Honestly, you’ve probably given yourself more grief trying to get rid of it.” She leveled her head parallel with the floor again and beamed a little too broadly to be fully bona fide. “Who knows? This could be a blessing in disguise. Yeah. Yeah! Maybe it was Princess Twilight’s own personal stopwatch! Maybe… maybe it was sent to space until such a time as magic returned to equestria for some super important purpose! Maybe it and the two pods it arrived in were actually the key to some long lost, awesome ancient secret!”

Sunny abruptly gasped in epiphany.

“Wait a minute! That’s it!”

Sunny jumped up onto all four hooves and sprinted towards the pods. Halting her forward momentum so hastily the dust cloud she’d kicked up was enough to hide her house within, she placed her left leg flat as possible against the larger pod, grabbed the smaller one with her other hoof, and smiled a little too superciliously at the watch for a passerby to believe all her psychological support pillars were in proper alignment.

“Haw, haw, haw! You’ll be unfettered from me yet, watch!” she declared in a craze. “Both your containment pods just HAVE to be made of sterner stuff than you! I mean, they withstood the rigors of entering back into the atmosphere AND clashing with the ground at hypervelocity!” Her eyes shifted asudden side to side as a metronome. “Otherwise, why else would they send you all that way up there in them if the material they were fashioned from was weaker than you!? Am I right!? That’d just be silly!”

Not deigning to give the watch the chance to get the last word, Sunny then bashed the smaller pog against the watch, the larger pod serving as backstop to make certain maximal force was transferred into the troublesome timepiece as efficiently inelastically as feasible.

One time. Two times. Three times she struck

“Come on, come on!” she panted, taking a tiny break before beginning anew.

Four times. Five times. Six times she struck.

“Go away you… you… fascinating yet frightful artifact from a golden age!” she said while granting herself another respite.

Seven times. Eight times she struck.

Profusely did she perspire by this count, yet curt was her pause in between, as well as her speech. “Withdraw. From my wrist. Now!”

For the ninth time, Sunny struck. Yet something was different this instance. Perhaps it was fatigue finally moseying on up to her. Perhaps it was the sudor on her face setting her sense of balance at sixes and sevens. Perhaps it was the novel crack of thunder and renewed billow of rain and wind that’d tumbled into and startled her all of a sudden. Regardless, in the critical moment, Sunny’s right hoof brought the smaller pod clattering down onto a different section of the watch not yet hit.

The big light emerald green button upon the cylindrical prominence of dark gray.

As a result, the faceplate popped up half an inch from the centerpoint of the device like a miniature tower of technological terror, black with verticle green lines arrayed about.

Her reactionary measure was as predictable as the seasons.

“Ah!”

For the tenth time, Sunny struck the watch.

The faceplate was pushed back into its casing.

In a flash of light emerald light, Sunny’s person was enveloped and she was rendered visionless momentarily. For what must have been the bajillionth time in however long it’d been since plummeting into the crater, she fell back in scaredness, though just before meeting the ground her legs twisted and she landed front first on her chin instead of the usual landing on the back of her head.

Hurriedly, Sunny made to massage her eyes back to working order, but as she did, something felt a little… weird. Totally off-kilter, even. The tumble to the earth hadn’t… hurt anything like what she’d anticipated. Point of fact… it hadn’t hurt at all. None whatsoever. The pain she’d been saddled with since this whole entire nightmare began was also gone. She wasn’t ignoring it or fighting through it–it’d simply disappeared. Poof. Faded. Into thin air. So too did her pain’s concomitant weariness, and in its place stood a get-up-and-go-ness even a normally vastly vivacious pony like her was rarely accustomed to. Verily, she felt like she could run a marathon between Maretime Bay, Briddlewood, and Zephyr Heights for ten full laps and keep going without any appreciable loss in energy, enthusiasm, or speed.

Sunny Starscout was… okay.

Yet something about that didn’t seem that way.

At least, not to her sense of suspicion.

A sense magnified an order of magnitude when her ‘hooves’ met her eyes. For they were not ‘hooves’. They felt instead rather like… Sunny couldn’t rightly say. What she could tell was that they were quite coarser and warmer to the touch than expected, though not worryingly so.

Yet, where worries were concerned, they could not help but understandably skyrocket once she moved her ‘hooves’ away and opened her eyes to examine them more adequately. Before her were not ‘hooves’ at all, just as she’d inferred, but… hands. Hands most unlike those of any race or species she knew. Each had four very flat, almost rectangular fingers, the ‘skin’ of which appeared to be made of some sort of thermogenic orangey-yellow, nearly golden material. Down center, center left, and center right, patches of deep, dark, brick red, igneous looking rock seemed to jut out like stepping stones surrounded by a lake of molten lava. The settling raindrops nigh-instantly superheated to steam across all regions of both hands they splashed.

Not just her hands as she soon discovered, to her rising horror. But her arms–not forelegs anymore, arms–too.

“Oh no,” she muttered so minutely it couldn’t be echolocated by the world’s keenest eared bat. “No, no, no… it can’t be true. It can’t be! It’s not! It doesn’t make any sense! It. Makes. No. SENSE!”

As though she were Princess Sparkle well before she was a princess, specifically when she was a little filly in Princess Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns and had accidentally dropped all her stacks of homework papers for an important assignments due in ten seconds, Sunny frantically grasped towards the ground with her hoov–hands–in search of a puddle. Any puddle at all crafted by the recent precipitation with depth and breadth enough to see her reflection in. Yet the rain, considerable though it may’ve been, hadn’t thundered on heavy enough or over a long enough timespan.

Sans warning, she then thwacked the ground with both forehoo–hands–in a moment of pure eureka as she cried out, “The big pod! Duh, Sunny!”

Promptly, she turned around and scurried to said larger pod, resting her forele–arms–upon it from elbow to fist, and leaning her visage down closely against the mirror-esque surface of the mystery metal. She thought everything’d be fine. She thought everything’d be alright. She thought all would be well. She was just imagining things, she told herself. Just an unusually vivid daydream brought on by all the sundry burdens she’d endured till that point.

The likeliness that greeted her was not her own, however. Instead, a countenance rather like her hands stared ahead, a mien and maw of deep and dark and brick red volcanic looking stone suspended upon a sea of orangey-yellow, virtually golden, thermogenic goop.

Except unlike her hands, her heat was quite literally on fire like a prodigious birthday candle.

She blinked. One time. Two times. Three times. Four times. Five times. Six times. Seven times. Eight times. Nine times. Yet no matter what, nothing changed.

No.

Not true.

She’d changed, somehow.

Sunny had changed.

Changed into… whatever in creation she was.

Sunny Starscout was not okay.

Sunny Starscout was the most not okay she’d ever be that night.

Small wonder then that after the tenth time blinking and still finding her new, fiery face gazing back at her, she screamed.

Sunny Starscout screamed a lot.

Sunny Starscout screamed the most she ever would that night.

“AAAAAHHHHH!”

And Then There Were Ten: ACT 3

And Then There Were Ten: ACT 3:

“Sunny! Sunny! Where are you!? Are you okay!?”

For the past ten minutes or so, Zipp’d been yelling that and other minor variations of that aloud as loud as she could as she soared over the treetops on the lookout for her apricot-orange pal. Her clip was a relatively slow–by her standards, anyways–two-hundred miles an hour. Speedy enough to be punctual, slow enough that she could hear Sunny and Sunny could hear her. Or so she’d hoped.

Yet her ears, attenuated to the gentle fall of a descending pine needle as they were, caught naught but such faint tumblings most of the time. For the rest of the time, they sensed the same needles as they actually met the earth. She didn’t count the roaring of the forest fires. Or the snapping of twigs, branches, and trunks. Or the sizzling of the nimbostrati of smog as they arose. Or the stormclouds gathering again to thunder and rain once more. Those were so noisy one could listen over her sister’s garrulity about how great she was.

All that to say, the woods were–relatively–quiet concerning her purposes. To paraphrase the old adage, they were much too quiet. She began to wonder if Izzy’s directions were accurate, but dismissed the notion faster than she flew. Weird as her unicorn friend’s… friendship sense… was, she believed in its veracity, even if that meant more than accepting the general spacial state of Sunny. For Izzy had also told her before she’d charged up into the sky that Sunny’s physical and psychological state were, if not in immediate peril, in immense need of a blankie, a recliner, an epsom salt backhoof soak, carrot ginger soup, and a marathon of her favorite cartoon series that could happen only on The Shrub.

That Zipp had dismissed out of hoof as too fantastic.

Yet now, she found herself agreeing more than not, much as she didn’t want to, and her wish to get Sunny out of the conflagrating thicket and soon, already very elephantine, became downright mammoth.

Zipp sighed, crestfallen. Vexed via the rainfall and the sweat produced from her anxiety and the latent heat radiating from the flames below, she wiped both from her face by a brush of a back hoof. With a tilt of her form and for what must’ve been the thousandth circuit completed, she started to loop about the area Izzy’d told her Sunny was supposed to be in again.

“This really isn’t funny, Sunny,” Zipp whispered worriedly. “Come on. Talk to me here.”

“AAAAAHHHHH!”

Hardly a millisecond had passed after Zipp’d finished saying what she had before a momentous, blaring shriek blitzed through the weald and shook her in the air so strongly that her wings gave out and she span uncontrollably and dipped a good hundred odd feet before righting herself and coming to a float. As said shriek echoed then finally faded into the aether, she gazed as far deep into the epicenter of the blaze as its flames and smog did permit, for it was where the awful yet unmistakably familiar feminine sonance had emanated.

It was where Sunny was, for that had been her voice shrieking in such terror and ensconcing such terror into the hearts of all who listened, Zipp very much included in that column.

Yet despite this and the lingering ringing in her ears, she let out an alleviated breath, her greatest fears having been allayed by revelation. Enough that, with no small sense of humor in her tone, she said, “Well okie-dokie-lokie then.”

She swiped the recent sweat brought on by the shriek, pulled the fur over her forelegs up like sleeves, and called out into the burning yet tenebrous mass beneath, “Don’t worry Sunny! Help’s on the way on the wind!”

Then, Zipp dived headfirst into trouble.

10-10-10-10-10-10-10-10-10-10

“AAAAAHHHHH!”

Hitch Trailblazer was having a very bad time.

The difficulties he felt were many fold. For one, he had to lug around Pipp’s wackily weighty saddlebag after being verbally obliged by her to dig it up from what once was the cave they’d camped in for the night. For two, the hyetal weather had gifted an encore and ladened his mane over his eyes which, in league with his galloping gait, had made it a chore to see five feet in front without having to shake his head every five seconds. For three, despite being able to run rings ‘round Izzy and Pipp, he had to keep pace with them because the former was the guide who alone knew the way and simply so that nopony ended up lost and caused even more problems to trot on in.

He’d figured he’d performed in his typical fashion at first. That is to say, with great hair, witty aplomb, awesome and awesomely expensive sunglasses, a winning smile, and a victorious attitude. Or in another, less loquacious sentence, as any shining Sheriff should.

Yet at the moment, he was anything other than shining. He was absolutely abysmal, his spirit overcast by storm and smoke clouds as the eventine sky.

Downcast as that… that… that shriek had seemed to make the forest entire as he, Izzy, and Pipp skid to a sudden stop at such horrendous noise.

Hitch felt sick, stomach switched to cement, heart sinking to the depths.

That shriek had been in Sunny’s voice. Had belonged to Sunny. Was Sunny. Crying out in abject fright.

That shriek was his fault.

“We’re not lost, we’re just slowing down. Living life unplugged,” he’d said earlier when they’d first settled into the cave after totally getting them all lost like he was when trying to figure out the electric mixer for the first time in ever in home ec with Mrs. Cloverfield when he was a colt.

He’d just wanted to show everypony the secret spot he’d found when he was that young, the rainbow crystal caverns. His humble home away from home when he needed a little staycation away, yet not too far away, from Maretime Bay, the office, and his responsibilites. Something he’d never spoken of with anypony, even his best friend, yet that he felt was finally time to share after that fateful day Izzy waltzed right into the town and the months of amicable–often a tad chaotic–aftermath that followed.

He should’ve made a map.

He should’ve brought that map.

He should’ve kept that map in a steel hooflocker yoked to his neck like, well, a yoke.

Simple, easy, straightforward due diligence and redundancy and not relying on his rickety memory of a path to a place he hadn’t been to in the longest, and he could’ve avoided all this.

He wouldn’t have had to hear Sunny, his bestest and oldest friend, shriek like… like… like that.

Somewhere in an arboreal catastrophe of flame and smog.

All alone.

“Su… Sunny?” Pipp stuttered after several tense moments, appearing incomprehensibly petrified. “She… she… she sounded completely…”

“Terrified,” Hitch finished for her, mirroring her. “Like nothing I’ve ever heard.”

“She is,” Izzy interjected, countenance looking like everyone else. “My friendship sense is telling me her scared-o-meter’s off the charts.”

Hitch fought with himself in a manner the usually markedly decisive stallion was most unaccustomed to at that. The pros and cons of bolting into the black and orange-red rested heavily upon his troubled brow for ten entire seconds before, as a pony of action par excellence, he could stand standing idly by in despair no longer.

“Iz, Pip, under no, absolutely no, circumstances do you lose track of each other, alright?” Hitch said, brow furrowing in tenacious determination in the direction Sunny undoubtedly was. “I’m gonna gallop on up fast as my hooves can carry!”

Not lending them enough time to accept or take issue with his words, Hitch leaned back onto his backlegs, kicked the air in front of him with his forehooves like he was practicing his boxing skills with his speed bag back in his home gym, and landed on all fours again, blowing out a veritable cirrus of steam from his nostrils.

Hitch hardly made his first stride forwards before somepony put their hoof down onto his tail, causing him to yelp out at a pitch much too great for someone of his stature and to fall onto his stomach with a thud.

When he craned his head back and up, he found Izzy shaking her own head from side to side, teeth grit and eyes wide in an expression as fearstruck as it was awestruck.

He was about to ask her what the reasoning behind halting him so abruptly was exactly when Izzy extended her free hoof towards the ebon evening yonder.

Turning his eyes frontward and upward, Hitch’s jaw immediately hit the forest floor.

Quite like the new meteorite he saw, encompassed in an ample, flaming aura of orange-red.

Bearing. Down. Upon them.

“Well that’s just okie-dokie-lokie,” he heard Pipp mutter, sounding more annoyed than afraid, yet still plenty of the latter.

“Yesh. Yesh eet eesh,” Hitch concurred, communicating best he could considering he didn’t close his mouth at all while talking.

10-10-10-10-10-10-10-10-10-10

“I’M ON FIRE! I’M ON FIRE! BUAAAAHHHH!”

Sunny Starscout was not okay.

Sunny Starscout was the most not okay she’d ever be that night.

Sunny Starscout was now some creature whose head was on fire.

She acted accordingly, screaming via said head and running all the way round the crater as well she could with her new, bipedal gait and accompanying legs while swinging her new arms randomly. Eventually, she remembered an old proverb, an ancient and secret technique first taught to her in pre-k, and carried it out perfectly.

“Stop, drop, and roll! Stop, drop, and roll! Stop, drop, and roll!” she shouted, sporadically ending her sprint for a bit to stop, drop, and roll for dozens of feet before resuming her sprint for hundreds of feet and rinse, wash, repeat.

Now Sunny was a bright mare, despite some over-emotional tendencies. Bright in the sense of possessing a–usually–sunny disposition. Bright in the sense of literally being quite illuminant in her current, fiery form. And of course, bright in the sense of being at least above averagely cerebral. Though it took her a disconcerting quantity of time by her standards, soon enough, discernment emerged, and she became keenly and quickly conscious of the fact that although her head was indeed aflame, she didn’t feel as though anything burned. Much as she had upon transforming, she felt fine. Better than fine. Fantastic, even. If there was even a tinge of discomfort, it was not agony, but of fatigue. A tiny amount of that, brought on because of her ongoing mental breakdown and–figuratively–losing her cool.

In ten seconds, after trundling to a halt after her last and half-hearted stop, drop, and roll, Sunny lay on her rocklike, ovenlike back and gazed up into what admittedly precious little she could see outside the crater between the sugar pine, smoke, and latent firelight from above blocking her view. She huffed, not because she was tired enough to–she wasn’t, and strangely enough because it felt like she didn’t need to breathe at all–but rather due to it being such a familiar thing to do whenever she was done losing her mind that it’d feel weird if she didn’t. More weird, definitely, than her present predicament.

“Huh.”

Squinting in curiosity restored from before, when she’d noticed the Princess Sparkle cutiemark, and like a foal first met by the sudden epiphany that she had hooves, Sunny raised her unusual hands in front of her unusual eyes and began to pat her unusual face. As she’d expected, the torch-esque mane of flame radiating around her head felt warm yet not way too warm as it would've been if she were a normal pony at the moment. Most unforeseen was that the brick red rock comprising her visage was suave to the touch despite appearing rather rough at the glance she’d taken at her reflection in the larger pod just prior to behaving as though the sky let fall more such pods.

Beyond her capacity to control, she recalled quickly tales of dragons imparted to her, typically at bedtime but here and there and elsewhere too, and how they were also so resistant to extremes of heat that they routinely swam through magma and lava with the same ease a pony could through water. Plus, how even the most jagged and craggy looking of their scales were actually quite smooth… assuming you contacted them gently and didn’t, say, accidentally gallop into them because you were in such a hurry you weren’t watching where you were going. Something that apparently occured to the Elements of Harmony and those they knew more than they cared to count, and when it did, was akin to running into a wall of steel.

Sunny further remembered how dragons were, surprise surprise, able to project great–and sometimes not so great–deluges of flame from their breaths. She began to wonder if… whatever she was… held any kind of pyrokinetic ability like that or close enough. Even though this whole entire scenario still stood as super scary to her, she had to admit that it’d be terrifically cool if that were the case. Terrifically both in the sense of the word’s original etymology, in which it was synonymous with terrifyingly, yet more importantly in its more modern parlance of being another way to say really, REALLY rad.

Because it’d be really, REALLY rad if she did have fire or fire adjacent powers of a sort.

Olden daydreams and olden ordinary dreams and schoolyard flights of fantastic fancy spent picturing herself as a member of those mysterious, fire spewing saurians flitted past her psyche such that she felt she lay before a silver movie screen observing the recollections as they came and went.

Oh if all the seconds of all the minutes of all the hours of all the days of all the weeks of all the fortnights of all the months gone by imagining she was a giant dragoness or diminutive drake crafting the equivalent of balloontwists or specialty fireworks but with fire–or rather, fire alone–to the jolly jumping enjoyment of crowds of ponies could be tallied up and presented back to her as a gift, the sum total’d be a year, easy.

Maybe even a little more.

With an allotment of time towering so monumentally, Sunny’d finally be able to enact all the smoothie experiments she required to perfect her new line of marvelous flavors she’d had the idea to create since forever that nopony in the history of smoothiedom had ever before experienced.

Smoothie experiments she’d be able to share with–and test on till they were categorically done with the concept of pureed fruit and other things blended together altogether–her friends to their jolly jumping enjoyment. After their stomachs stopped being so upset, but still.

Smoothie experiments she’d be able to share with her fam–

Sunny suddenly sniffled and realized that orangey-yellow, almost golden, effulgent tears’d tumbled out when she heard them sizzle against the ground on either side of her face and traced back the trail with her fingers to her eyes. Blazing orbs which were wet with lachryma despite the intense heat.

She balled her hands into fists and bumped her thumbs and forefingers upon her forehead over and again.

“Now why’d you have to go and trot on down that same, exact memory lane, Sunny?” she whispered to herself. “Come on. Stay sunny, Sunny. Stay sunny. Not the time or place for an introspective retrospective.”

A few more forced huffs through her luminous mouth and nose, and she recovered her precedent tranquility, short as it was. A bit more billowy breathing, and she even managed to conjure back to her mind her thoughts before this teeny detour, tilting her head left and down then right and down to find her teardrops still scorching a tiny trench into the earth beneath.

“So… looks like I’ve got some combustible potential after all. Well okie-dokie-lokie then.” She massaged her chin with a hand and scratched her brow with the other, all in deep contemplation. “But if my prospects as a pyromancer are even better than scalding crying, how’d I go about testing that out?”

Sunny acquired her answer far swifter than she saw on the approach, though most certainly not in the manner she’d anticipated.

“Don’t worry Sunny! Help’s on the way on the wind!”

“BuAh!”

Sunny yelped out in stupendous startlement at Zipp’s familiar voice colliding with her ears then. So taken aback was she that as she looked up and threw her arms up in surprised impulse, via a mechanism she knew not of, she somehow managed to let fly a formidable fireball from her hands. A fireball that struck the burning sugar pine above in less than a second with such force and in such an area that it tore in twine, the entire top half of the portion of the conflagrated tree covering the crater speeding towards her in a sparking downward spiral.

“BUAH!” she yelped again, except louder, of course.

Throwing her hands into the air before her in rapid repetition in far greater surprised impulse like she was back to being a three yearling playing hyper-competitive patty-cake, Sunny somehow summoned forth a flurry of yet more fireballs. Lesser in size though they were, quick work did they make of the flaming log, rendering it into smoldering shards of cinders, embers, and ash each no grander than a bit. Smoldering shards blasted away by the power of each impact such that between this and the simple force of wind resistance, what little actually landed on her had all the kinetic energy of somepony dropping a beach bucket of sawdust on her from that height. A mild annoyance, yet nothing more

“Whoa,” Sunny yelled as loudly as one could with a whisper.

She hadn’t long to further speculate on this insight and all its super cool and super scary possibilities when Zipp unknowingly mimicked her own initial, one word response.

“Whoa!” Sunny heard the pegasus shout out. “What was all that racket about just now!?” Sunny! Is that you!?”

Sunny shook her head to help her focus on more critical matters at hoof, and shouted back, “Yeah, Zipp! It is! It’s me! Sunny! In the crater! Beneath the–” she paused. “By the tree!” she corrected herself. “Or what’s left of it, anyways!”

“You mean the crater with the tree lying against it that looks like it got snapped in half like a big twig!?”

“Are there any other craters nearby!?”

“No!”

“Then yes!”

“Then I’m staring right at it!”

“Good!”

“Are you okay!?”

Sunny made to speak, yet caught herself at the last moment. “That’s… that’s kind of a complicated question right now!”

“I meant: are you hurt!?” Zipp replied, sounding nearer than earlier.

“Equally as complicated, more or less!”

“What!? How!? Are you or aren’t you hurt!?” Zipp asked, audibly a lot closer than before.

Sunny stammered, attempting to deduce a decent way to convey what’d transpired. Yet fastly figuring there existed no such passage, and prompted by the hoofsteps she could now hear approaching the crater, indicating Zipp was definitely nigh, she said instead, “Just… just promise me you won’t overreact, alright?” As an afterthought, yet one she believed would carry the gravity of her request, she expeditiously added, “Pinkie promise!”

Zipp, the smog so proximate to the crash site proving so malefic to her breath, coughed sans control as she asked, “Pinkie–” *Ahem, ahem* “--promise!? Why do you–” *Ahem, ahem* “--think I’ll–” *Ahem, ahem* “--overreact so–” *Ahem, ahem* “--much that I’d–” *Ahem, ahem* “--need to–” *Ahem, AHEM* “--Pinkie promise so I–” *AHEM, AHEM* “--don’t!?”

Sunny couldn’t rightly respond. Didn’t have the time she thought she did. She was still busy building the basic blueprint when she saw the crown pegasus princess tread into view, squinching down into the crater. Her friend then dropped the hoof she held over her mouth like a stone, stopped her coughing along with any noticeable in or out take of breath whatsoever, and her eyes simultaneously went broad as a blanket and thin as a thread.

"Hi." Sunny weakly and worriedly waved with both hands, hoping to prevent Zipp from getting lost in the massive onset astonishment she doubtlessly felt at the moment. "So... uh... I know it's been a while since we've gone over it... so... just in case, let me give you... uh... you know... a quick refresher." Sunny ceased her waving, pretend-cleared her throat into one of her fists in anxiety, and started to perform the promise and its movements. "Cross my heart, and hope to--"

Sunny stopped, however, when she noticed Zipp’d finally resumed respiration in preparation for what was sure to be a shriek to rival her own from when she’d first seen her fiery face if the ponderous patterns of the pegasus's breathing was any indication.

"Oh, here we go."

10-10-10-10-10-10-10-10-10-10

“Everypony: DISPERSE!” Hitch shrieked after grabbing his jaw with a hoof and putting it back into–mostly–proper alignment.

“What does that mean, I don’t even!?” Pipp replied, taking fright such that she didn’t even bother keeping her sentence coherent.

“To get away from each other and scram fast as you can!” Hitch shouted, hopping back to his hooves.

“Can confirm!” Izzy affirmed, taking her hoof off Hitch's tail and nodding like a bobblehead in an earthquake.

Without any more words, the trio about snouted and galloped as speedily as their hooves could propel them in disparate directions. The sheriff was all too keenly aware of the other two's terrified shouts and despite himself, struggled not to join in their chorus of scaredness even though he knew if he did he'd be wasting precious air better conserved towards sprinting like he was in competition with them for a fantabulous prize: particularly, a new car. He never had a car before. His folks found them to be kinda cool for their capabilities but kinda pointless by that same token and Hitch himself had a lot more obligations and hobbies to absorb his time, energy, and resources broadened by a bazillion after humbly accepting THE MANTLE OF JUSTICE!

Thankfully, he didn't have to focus on imagining himself in such a race to keep quiet as he could for much longer. Because ten seconds upon everypony splitting up and proceeding on their own path at rapid pace, the meteorite responsible for this turn of events in the first place made planetfall. Then, as Hitch was hoisted dozens of feet into the aether via the shockwave many, multiple feet per second, he'd little choice left in the matter.

“AHHHHHHHHH!” he screamed, all four limbs swinging around uncontrollably, unable to hear himself or the screams his friends were surely casting into the night in concert with him over the astounding, discordant, groundrending din.

A tree, big leaf maple if its characteristic namesakes he saw just before impact were any indication, was the only thing that kept his impromptu flight from continuing. Unfortunately, he ended up making a bark angel in its trunk. Front first.

“Ow,” was all Hitch could rightly say in such gigantic agony, face still rattling like a maraca.

At least until Izzy intervened.

“Don’t… worry… Hitch…” the unicorn suddenly announced someplace beyond the bark a few moments later, sounding as exhausted as Hitch felt. “I’ll get you… down from… there… with my… awesome… blossom… magic…”

“Iz…” Pipp abruptly spoke up, voice just as full of fatigue. “Iz… wait… I don’t think… that’s such a… good idea… now… You need… some more… time to… rest … first…”

“Nonsense…” Izzy denied. “I feel like… I could… juggle… bajillions of… oranges… right now… All with the… power of… my… mind… My very… clear… in-no-way-reeling-from-that-big-hit-to-the-head-I-took-striking-this-branch-here… mind…”

“Iz… please… don’t–”

“Too… late!”

Truly it was.

Hitch felt the unmistakably warm and fuzzy sensation of arcane, telekinetic force surround him. It was actually kind of cozy, soothing even. Yet then this same magic tried parting him from the maple very, very, very roughly and unevenly. He was thus swiftly shifted into being far more mindful of precisely the degree to which the rest of him hurt and not merely his mien.

A mindfulness he shared graciously with any and everypony within ear-shot.

“Ah! Oooh! Ow! Iz! Izzy! Stop! Stop it! Please! You’re just! Piling on! The pain! The pronounced! Protracted! Painful! Painful! PAIN!”

“Iz! Listen! You’re hurting him!” Pipp yelled, having recovered energy enough to protest against her unicorn friend’s actions without any winded breaks between words.

“It’s… almost… done!” Izzy responded, sounding like she did so through gnashed teeth. “He’ll be… out in… no time… maybe two… three… four… five no times… I… guarantee!”

All the while as this spoken exchange took place and immediately afterwards, Hitch continued to give voice to his vast disapproval. And anguish. His great, grand, grievous anguish. Eventually, and gratefully, a calm in the aching hovered over him as Izzy finally succeeded in plucking him from the bark-angel and made him hover over open space. None too steady, true, but it was a world of difference comparing and contrasting progressing up and diving down like he was riding slow wavelets not far from shore on a nice, normal, sunny day to… whatever analogy befit whatever it was the unicorn was making him undergo.

What it was like to be super crispy grains at the bottom of a rice-cooker being scraped off by a giant, jagged edged, steel spoon?

Who knew?

What Hitch did know was that floating in mid-air felt infinitely preferable–perfectly sufficient to have him huff and puff in relief.

“See? What’d I say?” Izzy declared as rhetorically as she did contently somewhere below and to Hitch’s left. “Everything's a-okay!”

“That’s bene, Izzy. Molto bene,” Pipp replied, sighing in a similar sort of solace as the sheriff, also someplace beneath him and to his left. “Now if you could just safely and carefully lower him, that’d be definitively fantastico.”

“You got it! Freshly freed sheriff dropping by for a magnificently soft landing!”

“Just please be sure he doesn’t just plain drop.”

“Wilco!”

Hitch felt himself descend ten or so feet, his form draped on its back like soaked laundry over a tree branch. He groaned out for a bit at how the rough, hard surface aggravated his pain compared to being held aloft in a purple glow before tilting his head to the left and finding Izzy halfway between him and the arboreal limb’s end and Pipp almost at said end.

“Hi, Hitch!” the unicorn greeted sans any lack of elan despite contemporary happenstances as far as the sheriff could tell, waving friendily as she was want to do.

“Hey,” Hitch responded weakly with an equally weak wave of his own.

“Just so you know–” Pipp chimed in out of nowhere, “I tried to stop her, but Izzy–”

“Is Izzy,” Hitch interrupted as he exhaled, exasperated. “It’s cool. If I were in your horseshoes, I couldn’t convince her either.”

“Ummm, excusez-moi, but what do you mean, ‘Izzy is Izzy’? Am I supposed to be somepony else? Someone so uncool that she didn’t get her friend totally literally out of a jam as fast as ponily possible?”

“Two minutes, Iz. Just two, mere, itsy-bitsy minutes and we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation because you would’ve been using your tk on him after recuperating from meeting the branch head-on and not during your recuperation.”

“Awww, don’t be like that, Pipp! It all worked itself out!”

“Somehow, I doubt he sees it that–”

“Wait. Did you–Ah!” Hitch began before he felt a cluster of splinters prickle against his tongue and took a brief breather to swipe them thoroughly away with a hoof. “Sahwwy.” Realizing his tongue still stuck out, he spooled it back in and restated what he’d just said. “Sorry.” He cleared his throat. “What I was about to ask is: did you just get done saying that Izzy got knocked on the head? Because if that’s the case, I think I heard her mention it too right before she tried pulling me from the ersatz knothole I carved up there,” he said, pointing above to the aforementioned, him-shaped, colossal cookie-cutter-esque depression in the trunk.

“E’yup!” Izzy interposed, pointing at the bumpy bruise Hitch then noticed for the first time she had on her forehead. “And I gotta say: was not good times.”

“Ditto,” agreed Pipp, directing a hoof towards the swollen lump on her forehead.

Hitch winced audibly and cringed visibly.

“Being honest, though,” the pegasus continued, “after getting a good look at you, we walked away lucky.”

Hitch was set to ask what she meant when Izzy stepped in to fill in the blanks in her own patented style. “Yeah!” she giggled. “Your whole face is like a blackberry! A bluish-black one, but still very much of the-edible-fruit-produced-by-many-species-in-the-genus-Rubus-in-the-family-Rosaceae-commonly-referred-to-as–” she stopped for a moment to catch her breath, “Blackberry.”

As Pipp spun her eyes at this with sarcastic force as swift as if they were in a washing machine–were each a washing machine–the sheriff appeared perplexed and raised a tentative hoof to his countenance. Urgent was his regret, prompt was his pain, and hasty was his holler.

“WAHOWWW THAT STINGS!” Upon his physical misery levels returning to normal–or at least the new normal given all the bruising–he clicked his tongue and said, “And here I was thinking we were going to have to use up all the pain ointment here–” he shifted the saddlebag, which’d somehow miraculously remained strapped to his back despite everything, to and fro for emphasis, “on you two when I saw the shape y'all were in.”

“Pain ointment?” Pipp lifted a brow.

“Well, yeah. Pain ointment,” Hitch reiterated.

“From where?”

“From the… saddlebag,” Hitch started, brow of his own lifted, stalling between the second and third words. “Well, more like the first aid kit clattering around in there, but I think you get the–”

“You didn’t pack a first aid kit, did you Pipp?” Izzy suddenly and rhetorically asked.

“Well, no. I mean, why would I?” the pegasus replied, shrugging her shoulders.

“What!?” Hitch yelled, forelegs catapulted skyward. “Are you telling me–why would you!? Why wouldn’t you bring a first aid kit!? We were going hiking! Don’t tell me this freight car I’ve been carrying for all this stretch and all this time just had half your chifferobe in it!”

“No!” Pipp observably and vocally bristled at the accusation like a vainglorious kid reprimanded by an older brother. Slanting her nose high and folding her frontlegs over her chest, she added, “FYI, I brought lots of water, snacks, AND clothes! A near even split! Well… more like thirty percent, thirty percent, and then forty… but close enough!”

Hitch grunted in frustration and was a third of an inch from facehoofing before remembering how awful a notion that was and just grunting some more.

“Wow, Pipp. And both you guys said my ways were weird earlier.” Izzy giggled again.

“Aw, come on you two! We weren’t gonna trek up a mountain–that I knew of–or something! We were just following Hitch to a super secret special spot somewhere between the plains and this forest! A spot he lost and got us lost trying to find, ya know.”

“It’s LITERALLY a basic, essential, fundamental principle when hoofing it through the great outdoors for extended periods to always, ALWAYS have a first aid kit on standby!” Hitch riposted, powering past Pipp’s attempt at reproach like it wasn’t even there with unending wags of his hoof–Izzy nodding in accord and wagging her hoof in tandem–for more stupendous and just plain stupefying was the pegasus’oversight. “It’s AT LEAST as important as bringing your phone or other means of communication with you!”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t, so… tough tulips,” Pipp replied with an overtly theatrical and dismissive wave. “Anyhoof,” she said precisely as somepony desperately seeking to change the subject would, “shouldn’t we all shelf all the hoof pointing for later and get down to the ground to focus on finding and saving Sunny ASAP?”

Hitch gasped. “Sunny!” Like a molehill in the type of rain presently pouring on the three of them, his discontent concerning Pipp’s deficit of proper nature excursion etiquette–and pain ointment–did disintegrate. In its stead stood despair replenished, and the radiant responsibility he bore to ensure everypony possible was as far removed from danger as the rainbow crystal caverns were from both danger and his pathfinding abilities apparently.

Friends quite included.

Without thought, Hitch leapt off the big leaf maple. It was over halfway into his plummet though, and mostly because of Pipp’s and Izzy’s scared screams, that he realized this was a horrible idea and that he really should’ve asked the latter to at least use her magic to soften his fall before jumping. Providentially, as he joined in on their frightened ensemble, Izzy quickly accomplished exactly that, the sheriff hitting terra firma more akin to as if he’d tripped over the curb of sidewalk rather than as if he’d nosedived from over a hundred feet like what’d actually happened. It wasn’t painless, especially not since the persistent soreness rendered things just seventy-seven bajillion times worse than it would’ve been otherwise, but hey, at least it was just par for the course at this point and not par for a completely separate course a million miles in the other direction.

Raising his head from his face-shaped imprint he left in the forest floor, and dusting and spitting away as much of the dirt on his mien and within his maw as he could, he turned his attention up to the branch and at the purple mare in particular, and waved while saying, “Thanks a bunch, Iz! You’re a peach!”

“I prefer persimmons but I completely comprehend and appreciate the sentiment anyhoof!” the unicorn cried and waved back.

“I hear ya! I’ll keep it in mind next time I owe you one!”

“While you’re at it, next time, would you please mind giving us a heads-up before you go trying to pull a reckless stunt like that again!?” Pipp called down.

“Can do!” he responded with a prodigious salute. “Just promise me you’ll try and keep up when you can and under no circumstances find yourself going adrift!”

“Kind of hard to do when I’m literally right next to the metal detector for friends here!” Pipp pointed at Izzy, who still hadn’t ceased to wave since Hitch’d granted her gratitude.

“Good! Glad we’re on the same page! See ya soon!”

Hitch faced forwards, shut his eyes, and after a ton of scowling and squeaking, stood. Upon taking a few experimental steps to establish how bad it’d hurt, he believed he’d be able to hoofle it, flipped his rain inundated mane back, exhausted steam via his nose, and built up to a galloping gait prior to reopening his eyes–totally determined that this time for sure, nothing, nought, not anything, would prevent him from protecting his eldest, most predominant pal. Even if a third meteorite came down from the black to block his way again.

Well, it certainly wasn’t another bit of space rubble that diverted his path once more, at any rate.

Yet it was about as abrupt and unanticipated.

Upon reflection, he probably should’ve noticed something was amiss, askew, and askance much sooner. Likely, he would’ve if not for being flung as a slingshot’s shot into the side of such towering timber as he’d been and the predictably ensuing consequences.

The first hint of the strange and unusual was the fact that although the impact of the second meteorite was authentically dramatic, he’d further describe it as rather less, well, warm than expected. So absent of heat was it, that it’d extinguished the flames in the woods in the immediate proximity for as far as Hitch’s eyes could see so thoroughly that even lingering smog was hard to find.

The second hint was that despite much broken, snapped, and strewn about debris, the affected area of devastation seemed a lot smaller than it should’ve been when factoring the size and velocity last time he’d looked at it, the resultant crater being merely double its diameter and depth from what he could tell as he moved to go around it to the right.

All in all, if Hitch didn’t know any better, it was almost as if the meteorite had somehow slowed significantly just before touchdown.

Which lead to the third and and most important hint. Something he well and truly and verily should’ve been able to see from all the way up into the tree as he was with such a great, commanding vantage point. Something his friends, not nearly as taxed by the shockwave, should’ve honestly witnessed and pointed out to him. The fact that what lay in the center of the crater was not crafted from rock, but made of metal. Orange metal. Two shades. One lighter, one heavier, but both dark in their own way.

Hitch’d hardly went past an inch of the side of the crater when out from it rose something he honestly didn’t expect to see when slammed the door to his house shut behind him almost a day ago. It was only then that he learned that the meteorite was not round in the traditional, immediate-to-the-mind sense as, say, an apple. More like a peanut. More cylindrical. More capsule shaped. For it was then when, like some humongous redwood sapling that’d forgotten to grow and rapidly tried to compensate for lost time, it sprouted out the ground to a height of what must’ve been forty feet. From three panels close to the bottom extended three spindly metal legs of mostly steel grayish standard except for the pointed, dark orange feet. In concert, two similar arms expanded from two panels near the top, the key difference being the four dark gray claws that likewise stretched out from the end of each hand. Just as concurrently, up top and from the center unfurled a head with a neck of steel gray cabling and wiring, a forehead with a flat, sloping protrusion that arched back into a downward facing point, and most prominently, two big, compound, unmistakably insectoid eyes. Crimson red.

Looking.

Down.

Right.

At.

Him.

If Hitch wasn’t far too petrified with fright for words, far too scared to even blink or gulp or drop his jaw, he might’ve said something, might’ve shrieked as he’d heard Sunny minutes prior, to indicate vocally just how unbelievably terror-stricken he was.

Such as things were, for the moment, he left that matter in Pipp’s more than capable hooves.

“MUH-MUH-MUH-MONSTERRRR!”

10-10-10-10-10-10-10-10-10-10

“MUH-MUH-MUH-MONSTERRRR!”

After Zipp had finished the shriek, Sunny was fast to speedily oscillate her hoo–hands–in front of her in a desperate wave, just as desperately yelling, “No, wait! I’m not a monster! I’m your friend! It’s me, Sunn–”

But then, what felt suspiciously like another, second impact crater being formed shook the area, scaring Sunny so much that she never got to finish her sentence and, more pressingly, causing the ground around where Zipp stood to crumble, bringing the elder princess tumbling down faster than she could react given the evident fragility of her present mental state.

Before the pegasus could get back to her hooves, Sunny got back to her own hoo–feet–and made a dash towards her friend, crying out, “Zipp!” Oh no! Are you okay!?”

Not only was Zipp okay, but she was more than okay enough to look at her with abounding alarm anew, shout, “Stay back!” and raise her fronthooves to the air and draw in from the thunder roaring over their heads, a bolt of lightning. A lightning bolt that then surrounded her in what could only be called a chain-link like wall or fence of blue, brightly glowing, enchanted electrons.

Skidding quickly to a halt, almost losing what little balance she had in her contemporary, unfamiliar form in the process, Sunny swiftly remembered she needed to be very diplomatic to keep the situation from spiraling any more out of control than it already was. Giving her friend a breather of ten whole, tense seconds, she chanced a tentative step forward and said, “Look, I’m not–”

“I said stay back!”

And then, Zipp threw her hooves, and two streams of electricity, forwards towards Sunny.

They struck her in the chest with such force that she was knocked off her feet, knocked into the larger pod, and knocked into the aether by her angle of deflection from the initial impact.

“WAAAAAAAAA!” she shouted as she tumbled up, flapping her arms slapdashedly around like they were wings in an attempt to stabilize her from all the out of control spinning.

Sunny didn’t have to worry about this for long, however. Because then, Zipp raised her forehooves again, another passing lightning bolt arcing groundwards, except not at the pegasus, but onto Sunny. Specifically, her back. Hard enough that she was brought back down onto the larger pod belly first, and bounced away from it to the right with loud, metallic clang. After rolling away a ways on the floor, she hardly had a moment to clutch her stomach and groan before she noticed a looming shadow obscure her form and the surrounding area in a three-foot radius, and looked up to find Zipp hovering ten feet above, holding the larger pod over her head, brow sweating and teeth grit from the strain, but managing to remain airborne all the same.

“Where’s my friend, monster!? You better get to talkin’ or else I’m gonna get to chuckin’!”

Sunny’s eyes widened as far as they could–or at least as far as she knew her current form could–and the flat of her palms hit the top of her head in an expression that could only be interpreted as extreme dismay.

“Zipp! Stop! Please! It’s–”

With a mighty heave, Zipp tossed the larger pod five feet up and spiked it down at Sunny like some oversized, shining volleyball. Though it hit with the energy the transformed mare expected, planting her firmly into the earth like some strange, fluorescent flower, the collision kept such elasticity that it bounded all the way back up into the pegasus’s awaiting hooves where she caught it and lifted it back over her head again.

“How do you know my name!?”

Sunny massaged her aching cranium and grunted her pain as she spat out ounces of dirt from her mouth before opening it to dazedly say, “Zipp… it’s me… I’m not–”

Zipp spiked the larger pod down at her and caught it again.

“What’d I say, monster!? WHAT DID I SAY!?”

“Zipp–”

Zipp spiked the larger pod down at her and caught it again for the third time.

“Stop–”

Zipp spiked the larger pod down at her and caught it again for the fourth time.

“Please.”

Zipp spiked the larger pod down at her and caught it again for the fifth time.

“I–”

Zipp spiked the larger pod down at her and caught it again for the sixth time.

“Said–”

Zipp spiked the larger pod down at her and caught it again for the seventh time.

“PLEASE!”

For the eight time, Zipp spiked the larger pod down at her.

Sunny, however, was absolutely at her boiling point by this point. Most literally as, via what felt like an innate, irate reaction to such duress, the moment she saw the larger pod propelled her way, she stuck both her hands out in front of her, open as could be, and unleashed a totally titanic torrent of flame that collided with it and sent it soaring somewhere into the night sky, almost striking Zipp in the chin if not for the pegasus’s swift reflexes permitting her to flip back in time in her place in the air. Digging herself out of the soil, the transformed mare couldn’t help but observe how her friend’s expression switched from being as open mounted and wide-eyed as one would expect to as teeth gnashed and narrow-eyed as you could get in less than ten milliseconds flat.

Sunny’s wrath fleetly flying far out into the stars, she was frozen briefly by fresh fear and, when she was finished burrowing herself fully back above ground, she got to her feet and, making absolutely sure to keep her hands pointed down, hurriedly said, shaking her head, “WAH! Wait! I’m sorry! I’M SORRY! I didn’t mean to–”

Lightning sparked across Zipp’s eyes, literally, and Sunny gasped, knowing precisely what was about to happen. She’d seen it occur and almost occur plenty of times before in the top room of the Brighthouse ever since magic’s return throughout the land, hearing way too many arguments than she cared to admit between the pegasus sisters about whether or not the younger one snored swirling cold fronts into being.

She wasn’t a second too late in her evasive roll to the right, for then, twin beams of straight, linear lightning blitzed forth from the pegasus’s occuli and struck the spot she’d been standing at. Sunny couldn’t rest though, and had to continue dodging every which way possible to not be zapped by Zipp’s lightning vision she was shooting at her in steady, staccato, calculated bursts. Much like what’d transpired prior when she’d been placed under pressure, the transformed mare also found herself intuitively firing, well, fire, back up at the electrokinetic princess when she saw an opportune shot. Particularly, fireballs. The spheres of flame were not as grand as the first, basketball diameter, one she’d ever fashioned, and were slight stacked even against most of the ones launched at the falling sugar pine detritus, which were more akin to baseballs in overall dimension. They were rather more reminiscent of golf balls in size. This meant they were easier to generate and lob snappily where she wanted, which was always just sufficient to make the pegasus move and either stop blasting or throw off her aim. After all, this most unwelcome and harrowing misunderstanding notwithstanding, Zipp was still her friend, and in the spirit of amity, she did not wish to hurl her harm.

Sunny carried out these avoidant and defensive tasks surprisingly well given the stress and her lack of familiarity with her fiery form. Likely thanks to the former, in part. Yet even so, she could only keep up this jeopardous game of projectile tag–or pseudo tag where she was concerned, at least–for so long before all her awkward motions and the pegasus’s adjustments caught up.

Inevitably, Sunny was hit in her heel while hopscotching aside, which caused her to tumble onto her side in shock–both in the surprised and stunned by an electric current sense–which made her a bigger target which left her open to being buffeted by a bunch of smaller but faster lightning vision beams that sent her wiggling in agony, going, “ZZZZZZZZZH!” once she hit the dirt again.

To worsen matters, she’d hardly gotten over her pained twitching when Zipp decided to strike at her with regular, slower, yet more thickset with energy, lightning vision beams since Sunny obviously wasn’t going anywhere. The pegasus then switched from bursts to two, continuous, unbroken streams of voluminous voltage after ten seconds and then finished her withering assault by calling down another thunderbolt from the sky for good measure ten more seconds later.

By the end of it all, Sunny was rendered so staggered she couldn’t even mutter out a simple, ‘Ouch’.

“HAD ENOUGH, MONSTER!?” Zipp shouted down.

‘Yes’, Sunny thought, yet was utmostly unable to utter in her neoteric state. ‘Not that I was really even trying to fight you in the first place, but in any case, you win. I surrender. I seriously, SERIOUSLY surrender’.

Zipp, of course, couldn’t listen in on her mind, however, and yelled, “I. SAID. DID. YOU. HAVE. ENOUGH!?”

‘EEP!’ Sunny said in her head, despite her sparse recovery an instant before for fear that the tiniest displacement on her part would be misinterpreted as an act of aggression, and of the resulting agony.

She had to get away.

She had to get away, yesterday.

Yet Zipp was faster than her–much faster–so Sunny clearly couldn’t get up and run away like the price tag of running her smoothie business whenever there was an unhappy harvest.

Due to this, and the fact that her palms rested on the ground, facing it–meaning it’d take extra time to aim them in her friend’s general direction–she likewise wasn’t fond of her prospects for escape there, either.

She needed a distraction.

She needed a distraction, now.

Yet how?

Zipp’s entire attention was squarely on her.

Even if Sunny could do something surprising to take her friend off guard such as shooting fire from her eyes as the pegasus did electricity–which she didn’t even know was possible in the first place–she galloped into the same issue which she’d have if she fired her flames normally of being unable to avoid telegraphing her intent too much.

No decent option in sight, Sunny did what anypony would do. She offered up a silent, mental prayer to Faust, wriggled her fingers to ensure that was enough feeling in them, and steeled her resolve to attempt and flee regardless.

Her nervous system too.

She could’ve failed disastrously, but she figured she should at least make the effort and try.

Sunny would always try.

Shockingly however, being shocked wasn’t in her immediate future. A most hopeful fortuity dictated otherwise.

A rumbling, a tremor, an earthquake steadily sounded throughout the woods, said continuous nature being the only thing about it Sunny could determine distinguished it from yet another something or other from space crashing into the face of equis.

Though the pegasus was unsusceptible to the more tremendous physical effects all the way up there in the air, like all the shaking that couldn’t be evaded by the transformed mare, even from her elevation, she could hear it despite being unable to feel it.

Twirling around in the direction from which the temblor emanated, Pipp said, “Whoa! What’s that all about!?”

Sunny knew not the cause of the quake, and honestly, didn’t really care.

It provided the perfect opening need though, that much she was aware.

While Pipp’s proverbial spotlight was preoccupied otherwise, Sunny slowly, noiselessly as practicable, lifted herself from the imprint the last thunderbolt had made her impress upon the ground, got to her feet, about faced, and balancing herself carefully as she could, silently tip-toed away from her friend. If she were capable of sweating presently she would’ve she was so concerned with being caught. Innumerable it seemed to her were the moments she found herself glancing beyond her shoulder back up at her friend to ensure she hadn’t noticed her in sneak-mode. Nearly as numerous were all the times she almost tripped on account of her already clumsy control of her current form alloyed with all the rock rocking in the vicinity.

Yet providentially, she made it to one of the walls of the crater quicker than expected, only then letting out the breath she’d held within for the duration of her exiguous yet dangerous jaunt.

It was then though that yet another predicament was presented to Sunny.

How, just how, was she going to climb all the way out without constantly falling or, more importantly, quietly and quickly enough that Zipp wouldn’t turn around and get back to zappin’ and strikin’ her ad infinitum again?

Promptly, she realized that it was simply out of her hooves. That no matter what, even if she’d a method of vamoosing nimbly, the pegasus would grow cognizant of her departure and pursue posthaste. Her lone chance, then, was that whatever the manner of leaving she chose, had to be expeditive indeed.

Yet again, however, how? How was she to accomplish even this far more meager feat?

“Come on! COME ON! Think, Sunny! THINK!” she whispered loudly to herself, rapping her knuckles against her temples all the while as the land thankfully continued to sway.

On the tenth such tap against her candle-like head, epiphany finally did dawn, and she lowered her hands before her eyes, which were wide as though she were staring right at the answers to her quandaries.

For she was.

“Adoi, Sunny!” she said to herself, facepalming at how obvious this solution was and how she’d still failed to see it until now.

The transformed mare carefully yet energetically clapped her hands together once, and with all the mastery over her fiery form she could muster, began to forge the single largest fireball she’d had till then–much bigger than the first she’d fabricated. Where that one was a basketball in extent, this one’s proportions were comparable to a beach ball’s. Expressly, one of those vast, seasonal, gimmicky ones Canterlogic always sold at the outset of summer and throughout, measuring some twelve feet from pole to pole. In a mere three seconds, it’d completed ballooning, Sunny holding it above her head to prevent it from slipping out of her grasp.

Muttering up to the Almighty another prayer in her mind, she sighed out in a low voice. Her moment of supplication having passed, she then whispered, “Here goes nothing.”

At that precise point, the earth quaked not, and she shut her eyes and winced, daring not to look back towards Zipp as she more voluminously whispered, “Or maybe everything!”

Sunny Starscout soon after chucked the colossal beach ball of flame at the floor before her feet with all her might.

And Then There Were Ten: ACT 4

And Then There Were Ten: ACT 4:

“ERRRRRRRRR!”

Hitch had to hoof it to Pipp. Despite all that previous business about the pegasus’s paucity of proficiency with her magic powers, her uninterrupted, sustained, and ceaseless shrieking never did quite acquire the cacophonous apex of a sonic cry.

Although, it was most certainly getting there regardless of the remarkable control she’d demonstrated thus far.

Verily however, he couldn’t rightly bring himself to blame her. He’d be yelling up the proverbial storm she was too were he sufficiently far away on the branch of a titanically tall tree and not close enough to the object bringing about such terror he could see the individual granules of dirt as they flowed down and off its form.

The form of a giant.

The form of a robot.

The form of a giant–basically four story tall–robot.

Tripedal.

Pentapodal.

Very, VERY bug-like.

Twin clusters of crimson, compound eyes.

Squared.

On.

Hitch.

But of course, the sheriff wanted to run. While it wasn’t the first overgrown automaton he’d ever personally witnessed weirdly enough thanks to the misguided efforts of his former deputy, it was most certainly the most… minacious. So much so that if his hooves could spirit him away faster than the monumental machine could tag him, a notion he was not confident in given how easily it’d just surprised him with the speed at which it rose from the earth, he feared he wouldn’t look back, even for a moment. Not even to see how his friends fared with the hulking, mechanical creature in their midst.

That frightened him above all.

Somehow greater than Pipp’s extended shrieking, he heard Izzy shreak, “Hitch! What are you doing!? Get away from that thing, now!”

With automatic rapidity, the giant robot hinged its head towards the big leaf maple, attention doubtlessly concentrated on the unicorn–and positively possibly the pegasus–and not on Hitch in what felt to him like forever.

The sheriff dawdled not and awayed elsewhere while the contraption was distracted at prodigious pace. He sought shelter abaft the black bark of the closest tree, an ebony, and after sliding to what he presumed to be safety and hyperventilating profusely, only then did he chance a glance back at the machine, head slowly looking around the trunk.

The giant robot remained far more… immobile… than Hitch’d discerned, eyes still pointed in the direction of Pipp and Izzy. Probably mostly the former, who kept shrieking so forcefully. Though it’d only seemingly become aware of the ponies up there in the maple once Izzy had given her warning to him, he knew he’d quickly switch to primarily analyzing the pegasus princess’s boisterousness were he in the magnified home appliance’s place.

One thing he certainly did know, though, as the moments went by and he managed to reclaim some serenity again, was that the giant robot did not appear… aggressive per say. It maintained its intimidating image, true, yet its outward actions did not affirm nearly as much alarm. Indeed, it merely stood there, examining.

A tenth of a minute passed. Two tenths. Three.

Hitch, hope replenished, believing that maybe, just maybe, things weren’t set to be much worse, dared to ponder that perhaps the contraption’s purpose was far more peaceful than he’d first surmised.

Such optimistic thoughts had to wait, however. For, ten more seconds later, something decided to plummet into view.

A large sphere, white and black, descended from the heights of the night. Crafting a screech of metal clashing against metal, it collided with the top of the giant robot’s head with such immense strength before bouncing off that the automaton almost tipped over forwards fully. It would’ve too, if not for the quick work of its arms anchoring themselves into the dirt and suspending its fall.

Soon after, when the sphere came to a thudding halt in front of it, the mecha-insectoid grabbed hold of the orb with both hands, stood back up tall as it could, and started rotating it horizontally and vertically in its grasp–all in one, fluid, automatic movement.

Hitch’d, of course, withdrawn back behind the ebony partially initially at these events, most unsure of what to take away from this development other than being kind of glad that it finally got Pipp to find silence again, which was a definite plus sign since his ears were no longer ringing like a wobbly old, analogue rotary phone.

He had to say though, he certainly felt more than an iota of unease once, with no warning telegraphed in its mechanized demeanor, the machine straightened up its head till it was parallel with the planet again, turned around in a single hop that shook some of the leaves in the surrounding trees including the one hiding Hitch as well as the sheriff himself, and from its shoulders retracted two, what could only be described as disk-shaped, drones. Each hovered on either side of the giant robot’s head before sonic booming into the forest in said head’s line of sight, the great gizmo following with a speed that, while nowhere close, was still much faster than it had any right to be being so gigantic–over a hundred miles an hour without question.

Inevitably, all three zoomed out of view, leaving the light amber stallion with a visage that spoke both of worriment and wonderment in more or less isometric terms.

That was, until he suddenly heard Izzy shout right into his ear like it was a megaphone, “Are you okay!?”

Then, he looked completely terrified as he screamed and jumped a good ten feet and spun in the air and landed on his face and yelled, “Ah!” in pain. He didn’t linger in agony however and swiftly lifted his head to face the unicorn, commanding, “Izzy! Don’t… do that!”

“Don’t do what?” she asked, genuinely perplexed.

“Don’t… just… turn up when nopony’s anticipating you to! You had me bouncing like I was on the moon I was so scared!”

“But somepony was anticipating me to just turn up. I told Pipp that that’s what I was going to do.” She craned her head around to the branch of the big leaf maple where the pegasus princess in question still rested on. “Right?”

“Yeah, I, uh, guess you did,” Pipp replied, hesitantly. “Even though I totally told you not to.”

Nodding at that first part and ignoring that last part, Izzy turned her head back at Hitch and said, “Plus, you hopping so high is a good thing! It means you can still sprint a bunch, which we’re all probably gonna have to do to stop all those alien robots.”

“What?” Hitch asked, massaging his sad, suffering face. “What do you mean alien robots?”

“Um, that tall one and those two little saucer looking thingies that just took off the same way we were going before they fell outta the sky, obviously,” Izzy responded as though it were a perfectly typical sentence, raising her eyebrow.

As Hitch stammered, trying yet failing to find the words, he heard Pipp proclaim, “Okay, I’ve been meaning to say this for a while now, but I think it’s a pretty apropos time to tell you all things considered that you’ve seen WAAAAAAAAY too much sci-fi, Iz.”

“Enough to know alien robots when I see them. Like, adoi, Pipp,” Izzy said, rolling her eyes before pointing in the direction of the automatons in discussion. “Even if you hadn’t sunk in countless hours reading, watching, and playing countless fantastically fantastic and fancifully phenomenal fiction, how else would you describe them? Do their designs match any machines you’ve ever seen on this world? Do they appear to be any you’ve even heard about? Do they even resemble the craftsponyship of equine hooves? No! The big one especially literally looked straight up like an Insecticon!”

Hitch attempted to relax his temples with both forehooves as he listened to the argument, finding issue with the last word and doing his best to remember the similar word the unicorn had used earlier before trying to correct her by asking, “Don’t you mean, Decepticon?”

“Well, yes, but actually no,” Izzy said swiftly, as though that made matters non-opaque. “Insecticons are like a type of Decepticon. Though sometimes they weren’t because they’d broken away and were out going their own way, doing their own thing. It’s all really, really, REALLY complicated and would take at least two hours of in-depth lore videos on the Canternet to explain properly.”

Hitch heard Pipp’s facehoof echo across the woods and wished very much his own mien was in sufficient condition to permit the same sans pain.

“The point is, those things are quite clearly extra-equistreal in origin! They literally crashed down from outer-space! And they’re moving towards Sunny!”

Hitch’s eyes widened and he recalled Izzy had recently said something analogous, hoof on chin as he said, “Yeah, I think I heard something about them going where we were going a couple rambles back. But how do you know for sure that Sunny’s in danger from them? I mean, scary as they were, they weren’t exactly lunging at us back there even though they had plenty of opportunity.”

“Your friendship sense?” Pipp asked.

“My friendship sense,” Izzy said, nodding matter-of-factly.

Hitch and Pipp both sighed in comprehensive exasperation.

“As to why, I don’t know, but if I had to guess, it probably has something to do with that first meteorite,” she said, using air-quotes on that final word. “And at this rate, I’m using meteorite loosely.”

Hitch grunted in thought at this, his mind quickly pulling forth the image of the giant robot holding the sphere. It was a detail that’d been paid little attention to before, yet now it stood prominent, aloft all else. The sphere was not truly a sphere. At least not technically. Or totally. Two quadrants seemed to be missing a notable amount of material, revealing an interior that all in all was greatly reminiscent of a case of some sort. A case that’d been… opened.

The sheriff huffed, his prior optimism that maybe, just maybe, the contraptions came in peace–of a sort–and that the evening couldn’t get any more labyrinthine or laborious being dashed aside like he and Pipp and Izzy were when the giant robot slammed in from the black. “Well, whatever’s going on, we aren’t going to figure it out by just standing around, thinking out loud about it.” After some neck stretches, he stood on his backhooves long enough to clap his forehooves before they landed on terra firma again and he shouted, “Okay ponies, listen up cuz here’s the offense plan!”

“Okie-dokie-lokie,” Izzy and Pipp said with varying levels of vivacity.

“Pipp up there is going to dive down here and carry me while flying till we reach the big guy while Izzy intercepts the floating, charging chargers, ideally before they reach their destination. After, we should all form up to find Sunny again. Unless one or more of us does as this cookie crumbles. If that happens, just go with the flow, you know?”

“Si, si, capitano,” Pipp said sarcastically, just as sarcastically saluting, visibly not finding the prospect of having to haul Hitch and her saddlebag which he still hefted on his back a considerable distance while keeping pace with something so surprisingly celeritous fun. “But what about Iz? Those drones broke the sound barrier. How do you honestly expect her to catch up?”

“I just assumed she’d just appear over to where she needed to be after mysteriously disappearing from our sight when we least expected, ya know?” he said, shrugging before looking back down in front of him to see naught but empty space where once the unicorn stood. “E’yup. Like clockwork.”

“Hate it when she does that.”

“Very so-so on the subject personally. Anyhoof, we need to get to blazing some trails here!”

“On it!”

Hitch whirled about and bounded forward and into the aether, fronthooves extended maximally. As he envisioned, as he had full faith in lest she actually wanted him to fall face down onto the ground again, Pipp dove into action with quickness, grabbing hold of his fronthooves with her own, and raced towards the giant robot at her topmost speed possible with the sheriff in tow.

As he struggled to keep his lips from billowing in the hundreds of miles an hour’s worth of wind, he heard the pegasus princess sonorously ask, “So, mind filling me in on the details of how exactly you plan on stopping that thing!?”

“Let you know when we get to that part!” Hitch said, or rather gave his best to given the aforementioned draft of air-resistance kind of made it difficult to say much of anything. “Still trying to solve that there problem myself!”

Verily, it was quite the considerable quandary. Direct confrontation was out of the question, incontestably so, even with magical support. His abilities didn’t work on metal and somehow he couldn’t shake the inkling that throwing rocks at it, big ones included, wouldn’t amount to much besides making it angry. Pipp’s powers might’ve fared better between potentially bringing to pass a diversified array of atmospheric effects and the vociferous force of her sonic cry. Yet, as established innumerably prior, she was no prodigy–intentionally anyways–at forgathering her capabilities to their fullest. Hardly an apprentice in the field, in fact. Depending on her mystic efficiency thusly was just asking for trouble. Yet, by that same token, depending on his was not much of an improvement, for as skillful as he was, he hadn’t the arcane might.

Regardless, Hitch soon realized that whoever took the lead in the oncoming clash, their overall methodology would have to be of the indirect category. Preferably while maintaining total stealth, or at least heavy low-visibility so that even if the machine was aware that a proverbial–maybe literal–stone was chucked into its path, its list of recourses would be rather limited and the time used searching for them was more time for Sunny and the others.

Soon, as in ten seconds later soon, the giant robot came back into view a thousand feet straight ahead, legs a blur of movement as they propelled it through the flame and smoke and the flaming and smoking trees in its path as though they were naught but towering toothpicks, and Pipp asked, “Wanna share with the rest of the class now?”

“Yeah, actually,” the sheriff responded rapidly, eyes narrowed in determination. “Finally got a lightbulb beaming or two. The first is for you to slow down and match speed so you don’t overshoot that oversized and overpriced toy and get us on its radar and so I have some extra time to think.”

“No argument here!”

Pipp performed precisely as requested, her swiftness lowering itself till it equaled the giant robot’s own.

“Anymore brilliant light bulbs?”

Hitch clicked his tongue. “Yeah, but you’re probably not gonna like it. I know I don’t.”

“What? What is it?”

He turned his head up, looked her square in the eye, and said, “I’m gonna build me a sandcastle.”

“Huh?”

“And not just any sandcastle, but the biggest, most TERRIFI-MONGOUS sandcastle I’ve ever built! Ever!”

Pipp gasped. “I knew it! I should’ve said something earlier once I saw enough of the signs, but now, there’s no doubt! You’ve gone mad! This whole situation has driven you crazy! Just as crazy as it is!”

Hitch chuckled. “You’d think so, but no. Honestly, if even a quarter of the secret, forgotten lore Sunny told me growing up is true, this event here rates at about a six, maybe a seven. Significantly emotional, but not sanity striking.”

“Ah, I see. So you’ve just always been crazy and these conditions are just giving you the chance to express that. My mistake.”

“Now, now, Pipp. I know it sounds a little off-kilter–”

“A little!?” she exclaimed, composure completely consumed. “The last sandcastle you made carved a hole in the beach bigger than the Canterlogic factory! And that was just from one little wave just a little taller than your average foal! Now you’re telling me you want to go grander in all this rain!? That could remove half the forest off the map!”

“Actually, by my estimates more like a tenth, but at that scale, really, who’s counting?”

“Um, me.”

“Pipp, look at that.” The sheriff turned his head pointed towards the giant robot, still just plowing through every tree in its way with its strength as though they were paltry impediments indeed. “Does that seem like anything we have escalatory dominance over?”

“Escalatory what?”

Hitch huffed. “We can’t go by bit packets with that bot, Pipp! We either give it everything we’ve got, dial it up to eleven now, or we’re not stopping it at all!”

“You don’t know that!”

“Might be true, but you know what I know for sure? One hundred percent? I’m not pushing my luck tonight!” He looked back at the pegasus. “Are you?”

The princess’s visage appeared visibly conflicted at this, yet still did it retain too much of its prior uncertainty for the sheriff’s liking.

“Now or never, Pipp!”

The pegasus grumbled a while before finally responding with a reluctant, “Fine!”

Hitch nodded. “Why thank you kindly, Pipp. Appreciate it a bunch.”

“You better!”

“Oh! That reminds me! Please, don’t get upset now, but just in case, and it might not even be the case so chillax before you go on getting all the more jumpy, I might, keyword: might, need you to augment my stratagem depending on how it goes by sonic screaming at that robot! A lot! Till it calls it quits!”

Pipp roared her disgruntlement. “Okay, now you’re just being extravagant!”

“Better safe than sorry as my Grannie Figgy always says!” Hitch said with a smile wide as a hillside.

“What!? I don’t remember her ever saying anything like that whenever we’ve met!”

“Yeah, well, you should’ve been in Maretime Bay back when me, Sunny, and Sprout were kids! Used to use that there proverb all the time with all the trouble we brought!”

“Was that more or less the kind of trouble I’d be bringing myself for breaking a Pinkie Promise!?”

“Extenuating circumstances, Pipp! In service, or even sufficiently presumed service, to a friend it's okie-dokie-lokie not to abide a Pinkie Promise! Besides, if you’ll recall, you said you’d keep your magic in check, not to not use it! Just think of that as some unscheduled arcane training against a very durable target! Plus, if anypony still tries to say you didn’t hold to your guarantee, just point out that Iz totally forgot and broke hers very evidently when she surprised me after the bots left!”

The pegasus’s eyes broadened. “Huh! Guess she wasn’t the only one that totally forgot about that!”

“I figured!” Hitch chuckled. “Feels like forever since that happened to me too! Just don’t forget to sing in the whistle register if I ask!”

“Got it!” the princess groaned in annoyance.

“Good! Now set me down a decent ways ahead of that thing and stay in the air closeby! And please, do not let it see us! And now that I think of it, could you please take your saddlebag back and off my back when we land!? It’s really, really, RIDICULOUSLY heavy!”

“Wilco!”

Pipp proceeded to fly them both up beyond the treetops and past the giant robot at her speediest pace. A mile along at a clearing her eyes noted in the woods, she decelerated to a hover and then descended to an altitude low enough to let go of and deliver the sheriff safely to the ground. Once the task was finished, and he removed her saddlebag from his person and firmly attached it to hers, she returned to greater heights in the air in a push of her wings, her climb coming to an end only when she ascended to a good thousand feet or so. She then turned towards the earth stallion, stretched every which way, cleared her throat, took a deep breath, and signaled she was ready to render aid if needed with a hoof’s up.

Hitch sent a hoof’s up of his own before turning forwards and stretching and clearing his throat and taking a deep breath himself. “Now, let’s go and start this show.” He sat down and as a stage magician like Rufus would, pushed his fronthooves out far from his form and into the air dramatically. “Here goes nothing.” He closed his eyes and frowned with focus, gulping anxiously. “Or maybe everything.”

The sheriff reopened his eyes and with a clap of his forehooves and the green glow of his magic, yelled out as he expended all his mental capital into composing his super-colossal castle of sand.

The earth quaked.

“BOO–”

The pinnacle of the tapered spire of the central roofted turret took shape on the ground before him.

“YAH–”

The spire shakily and slowly rose, revealing the crenelated denticulations of the aforesaid central roofted turret.

“KAW–”

The four spires of the surrounding, smaller, half as huge roofed turrets popped up from the forest floor next, the central one now standing taller than the giant robot he could now hear gaining on him somewhere in the distance at his back.

“SHAW!”

With that last word and the final effort following it, Hitch lifted the machicolated battlements, the walls that carried them, the gatehouse with attendant barbican, the portcullis, the drawbridge, footbridge, the surrounding terrain-only moat, the bailey within, the firm foundation they rested upon, and all else left of the palace. When it was fully completed, it towered over him at two-hundred and twenty-two feet at its most prodigious peak, spanning an area some hundred feet in length by an equal hundred feet of breadth. It was magnificent. August. A thing of most rare, true beauty. Hitch could not contain himself from shedding twin streams of tears down his face in addition to the sweat that’d flooded it ever since he’d begun this titanic undertaking.

“One day you’ll be permanent, Trailblazer Keep. One day,” he sniffled, head hung low as the sounds of trees snapping into bajillions of pieces and fast feet approaching became louder to his ears. “Yet not today, dear friend.”

The sheriff leapt back to all fours, twirled to his right and galloped towards the treeline there like it had a donut shop. He didn’t bother looking back when he heard the rushing rain begin to sizzle against the colossal sand castle without his focus and magic to fight against such deleterious effects. He didn’t bother looking back when that sizzling turned to outright boiling and the sand comprising the structure started to join in. He didn’t bother looking back even when he felt the ground shake beneath his hooves even though he was many hundreds of feet away by then. He only did so once he’d reached the treeline, was securely behind the biggest, most durablest tree he could find there, and heard the giant robot enter into the clearing, seeing the machine continue straight along its path, on an inevitable collision course with the now half melted looking castle. With any luck, Trailblazer Keep would not be the lone construct that would appear so.

“Oh, this is gonna be blaring,” he said, looking away, shutting his eyes, and jamming his hooves against his ears hard as possible.

Indeed it was, and when the giant robot struck the castle, it seemed as though the entirety of planet equis for miles and miles and MILES around trembled from the ensuing, booming, and absolutely monstrous explosion.

Despite all his quite accurate predictions and expectations, the power of the event was so compelling he could not bring himself even to shriek slightly.

And he wanted to.

Oh, did Hitch seek to shriek.

10-10-10-10-10-10-10-10-10-10

“YAAAAAAAAA–HOO–HOO–HOO–HOOEY!”

Sunny Starscout was not okay.

Sunny Starscout, through mysterious means via a mysterious watch that’d fallen out of the night sky had been transformed into a mysterious creature of fire and fiery rock apparently so scary that her friend Zephyrina Storm, usually amongst the bravest of their mutual quintet of amity, had permitted her fight to overwhelm her such that she’d attacked with an unrelenting, furious wrath.

Sunny Starscout, rather than endure the pegasus’s fearful ire, had to resort to literally blowing herself up, up, and away with the biggest fireball she could create to escape.

Sunny Starscout cartwheeled through the aether over the forest at speeds easily exceeding the sound barrier and perhaps poking upon mach five and thus the much storied hypersonic regime, spinning so fast she wasn’t sure what was up or down or left or right or diagonal.

Sunny Starscout shrieked the second loudest she would that night, the only reason it didn’t take the top place due to the sound around her as she ‘flew’ and from how winded she was from the explosion that’d launched her so far and so fast.

Sadly for her, the situation would worsen vastly before it improved.

This began to occur once she reached the zenith of her arc. Then, past the collage of legerity she experienced, she saw the first of the many, many, MANY trees she was set to shatter through: a redwood some three hundred feet tall. Moments later, she did. And then the giant cedar, ponderosa pine, black cottonwood, silver fur, lodgepole pine, red alder, white oak, western juniper, and sugar pine–of course–beyond it. And then the big boulder roughly the same dimensions as the larger pod beyond the trees. And then the steep cliff beyond the big boulder, though it should be said concerning said cliff that it was in fact where her journey finally did arrive to a sudden stop. Six feet or so within, true, but a sudden stop nonetheless.

She couldn’t move. She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t even think. It was as though the agony she was going through was so grand that it’d spun full circle and she didn’t feel much of anything at all for a tiny eternity, her entire body having been numbed like it was a leg she’d been slumbering a little too firmly upon.

On the subject, she began to wonder as feeling slowly returned to her. Was she even awake? Was she really just catching some dreadful ‘Z’s’ back at the cave? Was this whole terrible trial merely an odd nightmare?

“Hey, monster! Why dontchya tell me where’d you decided to rocket away to!? I wasn’t finished asking you nicely about my friend, yet!”

“EEP!”

Sensation totally returned at hearing the intimidating tone of Zipp’s voice again, Sunny immediately initiated what she presumed would be the arduous process of removing her face from the cliff face. She greatly underestimated her own strength, however, especially under duress of the utmost variety, and managed to dig herself out in less than ten seconds flat even considering the extreme lack of leverage. Though, as she finally fell back and out of the ‘rock angel’ she’d hewn and got a better look, she found the edges of her limestone mold to be molten. No doubt because of her ‘warming up’--most literally–in responsive fright, so it couldn’t all be chalked up to strength in the conventional sense alone.

Sunny didn’t sit and ponder long though prior to getting up on her two hoo–feet. She really needed to quit confusing the two–and sprinting as fast as they could carry her into the woods proper, running through the forest edge and going around the cliff. She got pretty far too. Almost to the other side, and it was not a small cliff either, measuring some one and half miles in diameter. Yet then, she noticed the tell-tale sound sign of something whooshing through the wind at voluminous velocity somewhere above and abaft and bearing down at her.

“No, no, no!” the transformed mare said in her mind in a fright. “How’d she find me so quickly!? How could she possibly even see me past all this smoke!?”

Sunny didn’t know, and contrasting against her sense of common sense, she took a glance up and over her shoulder on the small chance she could maybe begin to piece it together.

She didn’t, yet not in the manner she anticipated not too.

That is to say, that Zipp simply wasn’t there in the air at all.

In her stead were what she could only describe in her present state as… as… flying saucers. Each colored by a medium, almost amber orange ring atop a black ring atop a dark orange ring. Each about as wide around as a dining table. And each seemingly opening up as some stranges, mechanical crustaceans at the top and at the bottom to respectively reveal a toroidal ‘head’ of bright, glowing, even flowing red glass-like material with blacklines criss-crossing in a pattern she couldn’t even guess the logic of, and a thickset, cylindrical ‘body’ of grayish-silver metal from which six spindly little arms or legs or perhaps some other sort of limbs, arose.

“Whaaa…?”

To say Sunny was a smidge mystified was akin to saying that it rained a bit last night the day following a major hurricane. She was so confused and her confusion took such a curious incline that she planted her feet into the ground, burrowing up twin trenches through the dirt till she halted wholly, and twisted herself around to examine them in more detail.

A momentous mistake, as it turned out.

The flying saucer mechano-crabs–she really needed a better, more abbreviated way to refer to them by–zoomed faster, and before she knew it they dived down, their limbs clamped about both her shoulders, turned themselves around and her along with them, and whisked her away, back into the night, to parts unknown.

To say Sunny was an iota unsettled by this unforeseen and unforeseenly swift turn of events was akin to saying Maretime Bay was a little smaller than Zephyr Heights. She was so superfluously afraid that she thrashed every which way in their gras with all her apparently prodigious physical power, shouting, “Hey, hey, HEY! Who are you!? What are you!? Let me go, RIGHT NOW! Did I say you could haul me around ANYWHERE!? NO! So kindly get your robotic-grabby-thingies off me!” all the while.

Neither action ultimately profited her, though, the flying saucer mechano-crabs not heeding her words or her strength, their flight path hardly diverting from its trajectory despite her particular efforts in the latter. Yet that was fine, she supposed. For she hadn’t begun to get away.

“I said: LET. ME. GO!”

Recalling all the wrath she felt when Zipp just wouldn’t listen to her earlier and all her admittedly short but rather intense know-how concerning her pyrokinesis, Sunny decided it was now time for something similar, though not quite the same as all she’d done before. Much like with what she’d apparently accomplished in the ‘rock-angel’ without a lot of intent, she started to dial-up the temperature of her ‘skin’, only this time she was cognizant of what she was doing. VERY cognizant. Though she was unaware of the exact degree of fahrenheit she reached, she knew it had to have been great since the air around her distorted as though she were surrounded in a plasma sheath like, fitting enough, a meteorite. Compared to exciting molecules to the point their electrons were freed from their covalent bonds and ionized, the energy output by the fire her friends had set and rested around to keep warm for the night in the cave might as well have been a flashlight to the array of a thousand production studio scale limelights that Sunny radiated. Combined with a renewal of struggling with her strength, she’d a reasonable faith that the limbs would loosen some way or another and she’d drop safely hundreds of feet into the burning forest below.

The flying saucer mechano-crabs seemed to have other machinations in mind, however. Or rather, the material they were forged from. Whatever it was, Sunny realized to her soaring horror that it must’ve been of similar construction to the larger and smaller pods, for although their limbs and much of each’s form had been super-heated to a glowing, white hot only a few shades darker than she was, neither of the automatons sent any hint of their hold on her weakening.

“Perfect,” she muttered sarcastically to herself. “Just… just fantastic.”

Tired both mentally and materially, Sunny huffed angrily as she cooled and settled down.

“It’s fine, it’s fine. Minor setback is all.” She took a deep breath and closed her eyes after a few moments. “Because that was only the easy way. They haven’t seen the hard way yet!”

Her brow furrowed in intense focus, Sunny then tried a different approach. It required her to revisit the fury she possessed towards Zipp again, verily, but instead of merely warming herself, she would export all that excess energy elsewhere and in a more kinetic fashion. Omnidirectionally. And, rather rapidly.

A white-hot blast wave of both heat and shock, though primarily the latte, was sent out from her form and placed within the proverbial post box of the flying saucer mechano-crabs. It was so much more successful than what she’d even hoped that the automatons were launched away, far out of eyesight as their grips were forced open and she plummeted to the surface of the planet as a, fittingly enough again, meteorite. The impact with the shining willow below and its subsequent sawdustification and the craterization of the surrounding area caused her some discomfort, yet was ultimately infinitely favored to being captive to the contraptions.

“Haha! Yes! It worked!” she cheered, raising her fists victoriously into the air prior to pulling them back down equally as victoriously.

She didn’t stay to celebrate though, and within five seconds, jumped up to her feet and proceeded to run forwards fast as practicable considering the recoil and expenditure of power from her all-round explosion had rendered her somewhat faint. More faint, honestly, than the follow-up crash with the tree and the ground.

More faint than the albion object that then crashed to the ground in her avenue of travel with such force that she was knocked back upon her back, though honestly, nowhere near as surprised.

“There you are!” yelled the unmistakable voice of Zipp.

“Oh no… not THIS again!” Sunny sighed and yellow aloud, facepalming with both hands in sheer, weary annoyance over removing herself most effectively from her would be mechanical captors only to fall under the sight of her misguided friend that she’d removed herself from first in fiery form.

“Sorry, but you really don’t get to grumble!” the pegasus declared, hovering in the air and folding her forelegs over her chest in quite the condescending manner. “Because if you really didn’t want me to find you, then you shouldn’t have gone all ‘supernova’ back there. Ponies could’ve seen that all the way in Bridlewood!”

Sunny huffed at herself for failing to consider that factor in her calculus and now having to suffer the ensuing consequences. “Uh! I so do not have time for this!” Swiftly, a little too swiftly upon reflection, she attempted to stand up again.

Yet another momentous mistake, as it turned out.

For Zipp, via lightning vision, zapped her in the forehead in a way that between the power and pain from the electricity, Sunny was brought back upon her back upon the earth.

“Well me neither, monster!” the princess shouted.

“Ow,” Sunny said within her head. “Right. No sudden moves. Bad idea, Sunny.”

“Now tell me: how long do I have to keep reminding you who’s boss around here before you start telling me what I wanna know!? And while we’re on the subject: tell me what I wanna know, NOW! What are you, why are you here, and where. Is. My. FRIEND!?”

“A very hapless pony, just to continually be confused and in pain it seems, and right. In. Front. Of. You. You. MADMARE!”

That was what Sunny so wished to say, yet couldn’t for fear of her friend overreacting for the billionth instance ever since seeing her in her transformed state seven minutes ago at the pod crash site. No. Past failure caused her to figure the fastest, really lone lane out from that murky doom was to play along. A conclusion she arrived at doubly so when she saw the flying saucer mechano-crabs enter her cone of view and rapidly descend towards her again.

“I surrender! I surrender!” Sunny shouted, raising her arms as far from and as non-threateningly from her head as she could. “I’ll tell you everything! I give up! I’ll tell you everything you want to know! I promise! I promise! Just save me from–” She twisted around on the ground, making sure to exclude any perceived sudden menace in the enterprise, to point with both hands at the automatons. “Those things!”

“What things?” Zipp asked, brow forced together in disbelieving suspicion, eyes not leaving the transformed mare for a second, at the ready to fire a second time in this conversation.

Sunny was about to air her anger at her friend’s tone when she felt the now familiar mechanical limbs of the flying saucer mechano-crabs clamp on her shoulders and lift her with them into the night sky once more.

Understandably and instead, she yelled, “THESE things!” as she was carried over and beyond the pegasus.

10-10-10-10-10-10-10-10-10-10

Zephyrina Storm wondered to herself why it was recently that right as she thought she’d a hoofle on events that yet another event always seemed to arrive left of field and leave her mind back at the drawing board.

The monster of flame and volcanic rock upon a lava-like base of ‘skin’ she’d surmised had foalnapped Sunny and was mimicking her voice with one of its no doubt innumerable secondary, malicious, monastery powers and that had attempted to flee from her plus the smack down she’d brought to it via a rather large explosion while she was distracted by that sudden earthquake and that she’d spent a sadly immense amount of time tracking down and probably would’ve lost if it hadn’t decided to shine like the most shimmering star and that’d just groveled at her hooves for her to stay said hooves in exchange for finally answering her many, MANY questions… had just been taken aloft by what appeared to be large, orange, aerial… crustacean-like… drones?

Zipp shook her head. Yet another question the monster would have to resolve once she’d rescued it from the flying robots. She’d been perplexed into stillness more than enough in the recent past! Action now, talk later! There’d be time to suffice for queries, and she was NOT losing her only lead to find Sunny!

With a flap of her wings and kick of her hooves, she propelled herself to the height the crustacean drones and their ignatius cargo had reached and with one more of the former proceeded by a volume of smaller ones, got to within two hundred feet of the three, matched speeds, and followed them cautiously.

Soon, as in, a second later soon, Zipp saw the monster manage to aim a palm at one of the bots and the other palm at the other bot at angles that though odd, were well enough aligned to allow the firing of fireballs right in their donut shaped ‘eyes’, or more likely and accurately, visual sensors. And they were mere fireballs. No great, continual funnels of flame. Not even bursts flame in such a form. And most certainly nothing of the white-hot magnitude it’d achieved, she now reasonably presumed, to get out of their grip before and that’d inadvertently lead to her finding the creature again. The igneous thing seemed altogether rather exhausted and increasing in exhaustion with each fiery rondure it threw, huffing and puffing like Izzy after rearranging every item of furniture in the Brighthouse for the tenth time every other weekend. For their part, the crustacean drones appeared completely impassive and unmoved from their line of flight, as affected from the force and heat of each hit as twin pottery kilns in which twin infernos raged ultimately were.

It was kind of a, dare she say, saddening sight, and for the first moment since she’d met it, Zipp felt kind of sorry for the monster. She’d be sure to seek Hitch’s help in making its accommodation in jail comfy… if they could even find a way to properly contain it at the Maretime Bay Sheriff’s office or elsewhere in the first place. Oh well. She and her friends would travers that tenuous suspension bridge when they arrived at it.

For now, the pegasus focussed upon the task at hoof. It occurred to her in a flash of possible epiphany that maybe, just maybe, the monster’d failed to tell her the truth in some manner and that, for all she knew, the automatons were, if not totally without fault in the present situation, the far and above more trustable party. So, rather than attack with lightning-vision as she’d prepared to, she changed plans, sped up till she was parallel and to the left of the trio, equalized quickness, and attempted to converse with the crustacean drones with a very simple, “Hey!”

They did not respond.

“Hey! HEY! I’m talkin’ to ya here!”

They still did not respond.

“No need to be mean and act like stone, ya know! I’m just wondering about the whole and what you two are and why you’re hauling away that walking, talking birthday candle there! I sorta, kinda, need it to learn where my friend is!”

“What are you doing!?” the monster yelled with a fleetingly refilled font of strength as it hurled its hundredth or so fireball against the automaton at its left. “I thought you said you were going to help, not ask them questions!”

“Hey! I never promised anything!” Technically true, even if Zipp’d more or less agreed with the monster before realizing it may not have been entirely in tune with verity. It most certainly didn’t need to be aware of that fact right that second, in any event. “Far as I’m concerned, if there’s even a one percent probability of getting my answers without having to lift a hoof for your benefit, it’s mine. Sorry, light ornament.”

The monster snarled at that, ceasing its attack briefly to focus all its attention on the pegasus. “Look, I might be about as in the dark here as you–”

“Irony of ironies,” Zipp interrupted with a cold chuckle.

“Ignoring that,” the monster said, continuing with, “As I was saying–or about to say–somehow, I don’t think they’re exactly in the chatty mood!”

“How do you know? Did you even try conversing with them?”

“Yes! And they still wouldn’t speak or let go! So stop the talkin’ and get to zappin’ already!”

Zipp raised a curious brow and massaged her chin with a hoof at the monster’s words. She then looked at the crustacean drones for a short while, the automatons remaining with nothing to announce even after the rather loud quarrel concerning them. If they had anything they wanted to make known, even if it was a simple, ‘Do not interfere,’ they would have voiced it by now. Probably.

Turning her sight back at the monster, she said, “Okay, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“About what?”

“This.”

In a fashion closely resembling one of those Neighton’s Cradle desk toys, Zipp suddenly flew sideways and upways and then arced down in a flawless forty-five degree angle, shoulder checking the automaton at the left so hard that it slammed into the one on the right that, they both crashed at supersonic speed into a tree–mendocino cypress if her quick observations were anything to go by–and, most importantly, that they both let the monster go and tumble towards the ground as it yelled in a fright and tried to keep aloft by hurriedly, and most humorously to the princess’s eye, flapping its arms as though they were wings like a bird’s or the pegasus’s own. It was only upon achieving a grand amount of righteous serenity at the monster’s predicament, and at the proverbial eleventh hour, that she interceded via diving down, grabbing the monster’s shoulders with her forelegs, and sending the both of them back into the sky right before they would’ve held their appointment with terra firma.

As the whatever-it-was slowly calmed down and craned its ‘eyes’ to look at Zipp, the pegasus smirked and said, “Told ya to be cautious, didn’t I?”

The monster blinked like she’d just told it that the answer to one plus one was none other than strawberry-rhubarb pie prior to closing it eyes, sighing, brushing its brow with its fingers, reopening its eyes, and saying, “Yeah. Yeah… I guess you–LOOK OUT!”

Zipp’s vision immediately widened and she followed where her cargo pointed to find the crustacean drones already zooming through the air again, towards her and the monster. And that wasn’t all. Both had a claw raised, and from the relatively little laser-pointer like device either had there, a ruby beam of light rushed outward and towards the pegasus. An immediate hard aileron-roll right spared her the problem of being hit, temporarily. Complications announced themselves however when the beams ceased not their projection across the distance between her and the automatons, said bots merely reaiming the continual outpouring of energy with swished of their wrists to continually try and reacquire their target.

“I think you made them mad!” the monster shouted as the princess rolled, lined, spun, looped, and hammerheaded to dodge the deluges of rubicund power.

“Yeah, yeah! And the daylight sky is blue! What’s new!?”

As if in dialectic answer to her rhetorical question, the crustacean drones then decided they were tired of their current tactic’s unsuccess. For that was when the other claws in their possession joined in with the other emitters of intense photons on them by shooting forth unending ruby beams of light of their own. Where before her breathing was steadily controlled, her brow steely cool, and her mind completely concentrated on her task, now her breath was a staccato chaos, her brow shone with sweat, and if her mind’s inner clockwork could be converted to clever visual metaphor, it’d be akin to her playing a pinball machine in any of the numerous timed competitions she’d participated in growing up.

All that to say, a grand total of twelve lasers she now had to avoid meant it was not good times for Zipp. A reality she readily voiced via repeatedly yelling, “Ah! Ah! Ah! No, no, no, no, no!” and its various variations over and again.

“Hey, hey, hey! Careful with the flying!” shouted the monster as Zipp aileroned continuously to keep a quartet of the beams from hitting their mark. “I’m getting really, REALLY dizzy here! Like spinning a gravitron kind of dizzy!”

“Would you rather get hit upside the back of your head by these lasers!?” Zipp shouted before barrel-rolling rather sharply to the left for ten entire seconds to stop precisely that and more.

“Poi-oi-oi-oi-nttt-ta-ken!” the monster replied, voice shaking from all the barrel roll’s shaky motion. “Howww-lo-lo-lo-long-caaan-you-cooon-tinueee-dodggg-ging-like-thiiis-forrr-thooouuuggghhh!? Seee-aaa-mmm-sss-verrry-exhausstting!”

Verily, it was, and as Zipp dived into the canopy of the woods in the hopes of fining concealment if not exactly cover there, she concluded for the first time that it was only a matter of time prior to the assorted stresses of the situation would lead her to making at least one little, tiny, meager mistake that’d snowball quickly to ending this unforeseen chase on most favorable terms.

She couldn’t allow that.

She wouldn’t allow that.

Her friends were counting on her.

Sunny was counting on her.

At this point, Zipp herself was counting on her.

But how?

How was she to clutch victory away from the steel-gray claws of defeat?

Those very same claws had or could have every direction filled with lines of energy of great range to avoid, more than balancing out the apparent hypothesis that the crustacean drones seemed to be stuck at only supersonic velocity and unable or unwilling to overtake her present, hypersonic celerity.

Their aim was getting better, incrementally so, yes, but progress was progress.

Plus, as stated earlier, she was getting more and more tired from this endeavor and was sooner rather than later set to fail in some way, shape, or form that would ultimately lead to colossal calamity.

Even if she did find the reprieve she sought beneath the collage of foliage atop the trees, for all she knew the automatons had sensors that could see or at least track reliably her trajectory, and they probably would’ve resorted to some other, as yet unknown method to render things equally or more difficult.

The lone lane out, she knew, as she reached the shelter of the upper leaves and branches and fire and smoke of the forest and ceased her barrel-roll, was to stop playing defense.

To take the game to them and to them out of the game.

Decisively.

And the window on that opportunity was not on her side, for, as she’d feared, the clutter of the more confined space she’d entered didn’t do much to throw their marksponyship off, though the branches did block what otherwise would’ve been direct hits to her wings, and even a few occluding leaves that were singed as they were pushed away from their tree yet weren’t set ablaze, unexpectedly enough.

Well, at the very least, if she was struck, the subsequent attempt to stay airloft and not crash and or fall would be all she really had to worry about. Not the most assuaging of comforting thoughts, perhaps, yet certainly more so than the quickly cobbled together course of action she constructed and soon did share with the monster.

“You’re right! Much as I don’t wanna say it, can’t maintain evasive maneuvers forever! So I was thinkin’ on making that beside the point!”

“That means you have some ideas already, right!?”

“Yeah! I got a few! One of them depends on if you got at least one more supernova left!”

“What!?”

“That big flash of light that led me to finding you again not too long ago and that I think you were trying to do a second time when they grabbed you! That was you trying to get away from these crustacean-like drones, right!?”

“Yeah!”

“Think you could do that one more time!?”

“I dunno! Maybe!?”

“Maybe!? Doesn’t seem very encouraging!”

“Well honestly, I’m kinda sleepy at the moment!” the monster yawned. “When this is all over, I think I’m gonna need to take five! Or take ten! Or however long it takes!”

“Oh, and I look like I couldn’t use a nap!?”

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I just… don’t know if I can expend anymore firepower on that scale till I rest my little conflagrant head! But if it’ll make things easier–”

“It will! Trust me!”

“Then I promise to try!”

“Mind promising to actually do instead!? By my estimates, we passed trying however many miles it’s been since these bots stopped playing and started getting serious!”

The monster sighed repeatedly, demonstrably weary with every breath. Zipp herself sighed yet once–in vexation more than impending collapse. If the blazing whatever-it-was could step up to the plate, she truly had not been joking about how much simpler events would proceed. Though she soooo didn’t want to, she sensed that the only thing between her and an easier time was a pep-talk, so that’s exactly what she did.

Or rather, she would’ve, if one of the lasers hadn’t fortuitously accomplished her goal for her, striking it upside her head much as Zipp had mentioned she was trying to prevent earlier.

“Ah! Ah! Ow!” the monster shouted, swiftly grabbing at and massaging the affected spot. “I take it back! I take it back! I think I can help! I think I can help! I think I can, I think I can, I think I can!”

Zipp’s inner conflict concerning this tremendous development only being possible because of one of the increasing errors of hers as she flew away from the beams lasted all of three owlish blinks before her surprise stepped aside for brave boldness.

“Alright then! Now, I’m gonna launch you towards those drones soon, so please do not lose your cool!”

“Wait… you’re gonna what!?” the monster replied, totally losing its cool.

Upon completion of the chandelle followed by the vertical figure eight she had to perform, Zipp said, “That sounds alot like losing your cool to me!”

“One: I’m on fire in case you haven’t noticed! I literally don’t have a lot of cool left! Two: that was before you told me you were going to hoof me to them!”

“I’m NOT hoofing you to them! If you’d listened to me and let me finish, I would’ve told you that just before they try and grab you, to blaze like a bursting star like you’ve done before!”

“But why would I–!?”

A cry of pain from Zipp silenced the fiery creature. A laser beam she wasn’t keeping track of, distracted by the conversation as she was, had managed to brush against a shoulder blade in a manner that though brief, was enough for her to vocally make known her agony and spiral half-way to the ground before regaining control, evening out her spin, and righting herself into flying parallel with the ground again.

As the pegasus clenched and breathed heavily through her teeth, the monster yelled, “Oh no! Are you okay! Are you–”

“I’m fine!” Zipp interrupted. “But I’d be alot better if you’d just do what I say and trust me, comprende!?”

“Alright, alright!” replied the monster. “I comprende! Much oh, much oh, comprende!”

Ignoring the creature’s awful attempt vaguely resembling proper sponish, Zipp did her best to ignore the pain atop her weariness and responded with, “Mue bien, monstro! Mue, mue bien! Now get ready, cuz on the count of three, you’re gonna be skybound! Oh! And sorry in advance!”

“Got it!” The monster nodded.

Not letting a single second go by inefficiently, Zipp nodded back and began the countdown with, “One!”

Five of the beams found gaps in the canopy ahead in her flight path, and Zipp had to zig-zag between them.

“Two!”

The monster suddenly appeared confused, a hand on its chin as it asked, “Wait… why’d you say you’re sorry–!?”

“Three!”

Zipp flipped herself till her back was parallel with equis and with her backlegs kicked the monster in the back with all the power in her possession towards where she presumed the crustacean drones to be.

“IN ADVAAANNNCCCEEE!?” the monster shouted as it was propelled upwards through the uppermost tier of the forest and out of her cone of vision.

When the beams abruptly seemed to cease, Zipp prepped a breath of ease, and once she cleared the canopy and saw the automatons moving towards the still screaming, meteorically rising monster, she sent the breath along its joyous way.

Perfect. Her stratagem proceeded right on schedule.

The princess next focussed her attention to the stormcloud above them all, herself included, and with a couple stretches to ensure her slightly singed foreleg could move without too much pain, began the next phase of her grand, master plan.

True, she may’ve believed reasonably by this point that the usual lightning-vision probably wouldn’t have worked since the bots seemed to be made of extremely durable material and were too swift and pressing too much to charge up a normal thunderbolt from the sky, yet that didn’t speak of the type of attack she had in mind.

She’d never really practiced it before. It was actually something she’d discovered completely by accident before on one otherwise uneventful and decidedly dull day. When, in curiosity, she wished to see how well she could sculpt clouds–if perhaps she’d a mastery for artistry or was even merely okay if only she used her magic as the hammer and chisel and other such creative hewing implements and the clouds as the medium of marble stone.

It hadn’t worked.

Of course it hadn’t.

Beauty, jubility, and basic intelligibility seemed forever fated to elude her no matter the aesthetic endeavor. Though the impromptu experiment was ultimately the product of her boredom, she’d ended up quite invested in the hope that maybe, just maybe, she could be capable of crafting so much than ugly, misshapen clumps no more distinct in form than those she made in her mashed potatoes when she was anxious.

Upon learning the truth of the matter, she’d flown into a rage, most literally, rocketing into the sky at top speed with her unsuccessful, nebulous clumps in tow, and when she’d reached a decent enough height, in her anger, she commanded the clouds to clash together with all her arcane strength. If she was foredoomed to constructing clumps, then she’d construct the most colossal cloud clump construct she could! The thought of how the mass darkened and shook with thunder and lightning was thoroughly ignored.

The pegasus was only one-quarter of the way complete with that expedited concept before she’d learned its folly, firsthoof.

A most powerful and humbling lesson she would share with the others present in most spectacular a fashion–if everything fell within its proper place.

And it did.

As the monster neared the automatons, it’d found whatever will and power required of it to begin to glow with such a white-hot intensity that the princess found herself shielding her eyes with the entirety of a front leg.

“Wow that’s so much brighter so much closer,” Zipp thought.

Though true, she hadn’t a split-second to spare. Her sight raised to the stormcloud as she raised her forelegs far as they’d go before bringing her fronthooves back down and against each other as forcefully as she could as though she was squeezing a giant paper ball right before throwing it in the closest, tiny garbage can. She supposed, verily, that was what she was doing, after all, except yon paper ball wasn’t the only thing set to get trashed.

In response to her telekinetic action, the stormcloud obeyed, compressing into an even black and more turbulent assemblage. She didn’t need to add any more clouds, for the conglomeration of energetic water vapor already possessed the matter–she just needed to condense it.

And condense it, she did.

It was merely a few fractions of a second from achieving critical density and cascading away before her command when the monster must’ve finally gained full supernova glow intensity, Zipp’s fur standing on end from the force and heat even as far removed from the epicenter as she was. She allowed herself to check to see that the crustacean drones fared as much the worse as she’d anticipated, being knocked into a fairly linear collision course with the stormcloud.

Upon confirming this, difficult as it was through the fiery shine, she refocused her sight on the stormcloud and continued concentrating on concentrating it to the inevitable conclusion she sought before the automatons cleared their way through.

“Here goes nothing!” Zipp thought to herself as the crustacean drones arrived at the storm clouds center just as it illuminated the night sky for easily dozens of miles around in the same two colors as her cutiemark, rewarding her efforts a little sooner than she’d thought. She grit her teeth, looked away from the obscuring shine, and braced her forelegs around her head for impact. “Or maybe everything!”

And Then There Were Ten: ACT 5

Sunny Starscout was not okay.

Maybe better than she’d been mere moments ago when in the blink of an eye following her second proper supernova and the ensuing recoil she’d been pushed into the ground with even more crater crafting strength by an explosion of blue and pink lightning, but still not in any way okay.

It wasn’t the pain. No. She’d gotten more or less accustomed to that by now, even as physically and mentally stunned into silence as she was.

It was the uncertainty.

Not of whether or not the flying saucer mechano-crabs had been decisively defeated. For the evidence that indeed they had soon fell from the air, Sunny and her crater being peppered by bazillions of pieces of alloyed metal and non-metal that’d at one time been the automatons.

No.

It was the uncertainty of what’d happened to her friend.

To Zipp.

For it’d been much too long post that most thunderous detonation, yet the pegasus still could be heard not.

Once sufficient feeling returned to her fiery form, Sunny lifted her upperform and whispered in horror, “Oh no.” Hurriedly, she returned to both feet and climbed out of the crater. The moment her knees touched terram etiam, she stood up, cupped her hands around her mouth into the shape of a cone, and yelled, “Zipp! Zipp! Where are you!? Are you okay!? Do you need help!? Please, tell me where you–!?”

She was halted from properly ending the question when the princess in question suddenly descended from the aether not a foot away in front of her. Of course, the impact with the floor and the tremendous surprise Sunny suddenly was saddled with causes her to tumble backwards into the crater till she was right where she’d started–its center.

“Hey.”

Sunny shook her head and stared up to find Zipp looking down at her. Immediately, comparisons to when the pegasus first saw her in her transformed state back at the pod crater were made, though at least, she noted, the princess seemed in far more amicable a mind if her smirk was any indication.

“What’s up? Aside from me, obviously.”

What was up, apparently, was Sunny’s time as the mystery entity of enigmatic igneousness.

Just as she sighed in a sense of ease that Zipp had outflew and/or not been too affected from the shockwave of deep azure and rose lightning, a few strange things, even by the standards of previous happenstances, occurred.

The hourglass symbol of black and white at the base of her neck shimmered red off and on in tune with ten blitzingly speedy and somewhat sonorous beeps.

A flash of emerald light radiating from the aforementioned hourglass symbol and much akin to the very one that’d made her into the blazing being she’d been for the past ten minutes obscured her and the surrounding locale.

And, most importantly of all, once the light faded, she could see clearly that she was back to being, well, herself again.

Sunny.

The friendly, neighborhood, smoothie mare.

Apricot coat, magenta and purple mane with rainbow streaks, presumably emerald green eyes, four hooves and legs and weirdo space watch attached to the left lot of her hooves and legs, and cutiemark composed of one large pink star with a blue trail and two smaller pink stars. She was so herself that she couldn’t even find a single bruise or tuft of singed fur or anything that visually demonstrated all she’d endured since the pod-crash, and felt as though she’d been given the rest she would’ve if she’d stayed slumbering in the cave.

Sunny Starscout was back to normal.

Sunny Starscout was… okay.

Zipp, however, was not.

As the now untransformed earthpony lifted her now equine form up halfway and stared at her hooves as she waved, rotated, and otherwise maneuvered them about as though she still feared they were illusions yet and searched for any seams at all to confirm or deny this, she was brought out of her disbelief momentarily when next she heard her friend speak.

“You… you… you were Sunny? Are… Sunny!? This whole time!?”

The earthpony focussed up at the pegasus to find her jaw somehow even more towards the ground than when she’d first seen her as the combustible creature she’d been for the past third of a half-hour.

“Ummm… yeah?” She chuckled anxiously. “I tried to tell ya, but you didn’t exactly seem to be in listening mode there, soooo… sorry?”

As Sunny grinned uncertainly and Zipp gasped in total shock and surprise, a familiar feminine voice the earthpony instantly recognized as Izzy rapidly cried forth, “Zipp! ZIPP! Is that you!? If it is, then we have to worry! A-gigantic-alien-robot-just-dropped-in-from-outerspace-and-sent-two-crab-looking-drones-after-Sunny-I-think-For-what-I-don’t-know-but-I-do-know-that-we-have-to-help-her-before-they–”

Once the unicorn stepped into view there at the edge of the crater though, her words stopped suddenly, doubtlessly confused by the sight of said depression in the earth, Sunny seated at the center of it with the weirdo space watch on her left hoof and so many fragments of what were the crab-looking drones Sunny’d hardly heard her mention all around the earthpony.

“Uhhh… what’d I miss?” Izzy asked.

Zipp, in the meantime, huffed as she fainted and collapsed face first into the crater.

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“Hitch?”

“Yeah, Pipp?”

“I’ve meant to say this a while ago, but I think now’s the single most apropos time to tell you.”

“Tell me what?”

“That sometimes, your powers scare me.”

“Me too, Pipp. Me too.”

The sheriff sighed, cleaning some dirt out his eye with the back of his hoof and casting it into the roiling lava of the extemporaneous volcanic crater many thousands of feet wide by many thousands of feet in depth of his own accomplishment.

Upon the destruction of Hitch Keep, the eponymous earthpony felt himself grabbed and hoisted into the sky by his light purple pegasus pal over the immense and intense light, heat, and force sieging his senses even through the cover of the tree and his forelegs. In the brief moments before their climb ended, he wondered why Pipp would go against his orders so soon when the detonation hadn’t even reached its end yet since she was supposed to hover around the site in case the giant robot somehow needed more power sent its way to be stopped.

Once the explosion faded into the aether and normalcy, or what counted for normalcy in those woods, returned, though, and Hitch’d massaged his eyes so they no more shook about and he could see right again, he learned the pegasus’s reasoning as soon as he looked down.

The spot where he’d been seconds prior was… gone.

The tree and the ground below the tree had slid and tumbled into the pyrous pit.

The consequences of him and his sandcastle accidentally striking a faultline, no doubt.

Hitch’d miscalculated. A lot. While the effects on the landscape were still far and above closer to his estimates than Pipp’s, it was most certainly larger enough that if she hadn’t flown to his rescue… well… it wouldn’t be fun having to escape, that was for sure.

In acknowledgement of this teeny, tiny, little factoid, after brushing out some more dirt for the fire, from his hair this time, he said, “By the way, thanks for not listening to what I said and saving me the trouble of having to get outta–” he waved towards the lava abyss, “that. Kudos. Kudos all around.”

Pipp snickered, annoyed and amused in equal measure. “It was nothing. Oh! And I’m so glad you understand why I couldn’t just wait and text you to get your approval to leave my post. Really, you’re TOO kind,” she said with sarcasm substantial enough that it had its own orbit. Much more consistently seriously, she swiftly added, “Speaking of getting outta–” she pointed with her snout towards the fire pit, “that… think the big bot managed or…?”

Hitch huffed, half humored, half incredulous Pipp would even bring forth such a question with such an obvious answer. “Doubt it. Seriously doubt it.”

“Yeah. Though so.” She sighed. “Silly to ask, I know, but I still think it needed to–”

A roaring, rumbling rose from the lava in concert with a great figure also rising from it.

“No,” Hitch and Pipp both whispered in total disbelief.

As the lava coating the figure fell away, removing all hope that it was something else, the earthpony and pegasus gasped as they saw the head of none other than the giant robot.

Looking.

Straight.

Up.

At.

Them.

And though Hitch didn’t have proof more concrete than the fantastic fear he felt, between its fiery backdrop, the molten rock still attached to much of its form and the cracks in whatever material composed its ‘eyes’, the giant robot was angry.

Very.

VERY… angry.

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“And-then-you-showed-up-and-then-Zipp-collapsed-from-the-revalation-that-I-was-the-walking-talking-birthday-candle-she’d-spent-hurting-and-then-saving-from-the-flying-saucer-mechano-crabs-and-then-you-bunnyhopped-into-the-crater-and-then-you-sat-down-and-then-you-started-explaining-things-and-then-I-started-explaining-things-and now we’re here.”

Sunny Starscout was not okay.

Sunny Starscout had just spent the past two minutes or thereabouts telling Izzy Moonbow everything that’d happened, everything she herself endured that night, after yon unicorn’d spent two minutes or thereabouts telling the earthpony everything that’d happened and that she’d endured that night.

Sunny Starscout huffed and puffed, requiring ten whole seconds to catch her breath.

Sunny Starscout could no longer hold back her tears.

Sunny Starscount hugged her friends and weeped like a baby into her shoulder.

“There, there, Sunny. It’s okay,” Izzy shushed soothingly as she patted the earthpony on the back, again like a baby.

“No it’s not!” Sunny lifted her head to try and brush away some of the tears blurring her vision, yet no matter how much she tried, it only helped a little. “This was supposed to be a fun camping trip, and it turned into… into… this!” She cried anew, head tilting downwards.

“I know, I know. Honestly, I wish things went as planned too. I mean, I like adventure, but not this much adventure. All you gotta do though to stop being so gloomy and get back to being sunny, Sunny, is to follow my lead and just look on the brightside!”

Sniffling, Sunny brought her head level with the ground again and asked in nonplussed manner, “Brightside? What are you talking about? What brightside could there possibly–”

“Well, for one: everypony’s all right. Maybe not as all right as they usually are, but all right all the same. For two: we have a fun story to share with ponies from now on into forever. I pledge no tall tale they could tell attains as much altitude. And for three: even though it was very scary–very, VERY scary, even–you got an awesome, super cool, ancient, hi-tech magic watch that fell right outta the stars outta the deal! I mean seriously! Our side’s so bright I think I’ll need to borrow Hitch’s or Pipp’s sunglasses when we see ‘em next!”

Izzy chuckled and despite the sorrowful mental state she was in, not long later, Sunny found herself laughing too. Not chuckling, not so grandiose and warm was her laughter, yet still, it was laughter, and an unmistakable upturn in how she felt, the crying finally stopping.

“Yeah. Yeah… I guess there really is still a lot to be, well, me about. Thank you, Iz.”

“You’re welcome!”

A few more seconds passed, Sunny finally having removed enough of her tears that she could see more or less a hundred percent clearly. “I have to say though, if what you said was in ascending order–”

“Nope! No particular order here!”

Now Sunny did chuckle, through mouth and nose, a storm. “Somehow–” she started, getting a hold of herself, “that doesn’t surprise me. In any event, I gotta take issue with that last one being involved whatsoever in the blessings column.”

“What? Why!?” Izzy asked, pulling back from Sunny slightly as she pushed her back, just as slightly. “It’s awesome, super-cool, ancient, and hi-tech magic, just like I said! Maybe even alien in origin in some way like all the bots!”

“Iz, the whole, ‘aliens’ idea–” Sunny began with tremendous air quotes on those last two words with her hooves, “hasn’t been sufficiently confirmed yet, sorry to say.”

Izzy sat down, crossed her frontlegs over her chest, and went, “Harumph!” as she pouted like a three yearling. “Maybe not sufficiently for you, but upon all the knowledge I’ve accrued from all the relevant works of fiction I’ve gone through and the extensiveness of all the evidence we’ve witnessed tonight, I’m saying: aliens did it!”

Sunny sighed, massaging the bridge of her nose, annoyed by her friend’s insistence, yes, but honestly glad said friend had lifted her demeanor up to the point where she could worry about arguing with her in the first place. Inwardly, anyways. “Regardless, interesting as it is–” she lifted her left wrist and the watch in question that’d stuck itself upon her wrist for everypony’s ease of sight, “it’s caused half the problems I’ve dealt with tonight. We’ve dealt with tonight. Especially if your hypothesis about the bots being alien mechanisms seeking this supposed alien mechanism on my foreleg here is true.” She sighed again, bringing her left frontleg down and pointing at Zipp’s still unconscious form to her right. “If you’re correct, then it’s thanks to this watch that Zipp’s in the condition she’s in.”

Sunny leaned back and sat down, forehooves held sadly under her chin. She looked across at the unicorn, who no more acted as a foal and instead mirrored the earthpony.

“Well, when you put it like that,” Izzy began, head tilting to the side, “I guess I can understand where you stand. Plus, I’d probably be real unhappy too eventually if I had a watch latched to my wrist that just wouldn’t let go no matter what I did. Despite how neato it is.”

An anxious silence descended upon the crater, stopped from being totally quiet only by the rainfall, which was now in gentle form.

Of course, Sunny wasn’t joyous about taking away Izzy’s optimism. She never was. Every time she had to, she was reminded of the day the city council of Maretime Bay and mayor both told her that her idea for a strategic smoothie reserve was cool, but impractical. And colossally costly for very little, if any, concrete gain in the long or short term. Yet, the earthpony had to be the voice of unidealized reality here. She had to. Too many times tonight had been hopeful that night, and time and again her hopes were half actualized at best or just completely pushed by the wayside. Though Izzy powering through every, any, and all negative experience and holding onto everything, anything, and all things positive was her most magical, amicable, and admirable ability, it could not be Sunny’s conviction, sadly. Not presently.

Verily, that didn’t stop the unicorn from trying, though. Hardly was that how the smoothie blended.

“Well,” Izzy started, “maybe… the watch can be part of the solution too instead of just the problem.”

Her words and ensuing smile caused Sunny to shake her head and sigh in exhaustion. “I should’ve figured you’d say something like that.”

“What?” Izzy asked, visibly perplexed. “It’s true. Honestly, Sunny, while I get your POV, I’m surprised you of all ponies don’t seem to be even mildly appreciative of the possibilities!” She stood up on her backlegs and pointed her frontlegs suddenly and overdramatically. “I mean: THE POSSIBILITIES! Just think about ‘em!”

“Honestly, Izzy, I’d rather not,” Sunny said, hugging herself in fright and shivering.

“No! Not the bad! The good!” Izzy shouted, bringing her frontlegs upon the ground again. She then looked contemplative, hoof massaging her chin as she quickly added, “Or potentially good. Maybe even more neutral.” Certainty returning to her mien again, Izzy stomped both her front hooves prior to saying, “The point is: the watch, whatever trouble it may’ve brought, can’t be all bad, and likely, it’s really, really, REALLY good! I mean, think about it! You yourself said Princess Twilight Sparkle, THE PRINCESS TWILIGHT SPARKLE, probably had a hoof in creating that device if the FACT that both pods it crashed down in had her cutiemark on them was anything to go by! Those bots were probably bad guys trying to take an awesome, super-cool, ancient, and hi-tech magic and GOOD secret in that watch that SHE made and use it for their not awesome, un-super-cool, current, still probably hi-tech magic, but obviously EVIL secret plan to take over the world!”

The earthpony prepared a protest, yet stopped at the last moment. Something in what her unicorn friend’d said had just then managed to advance beyond the thicket of her own personal and opposing thoughts and feelings, and held in its hoof the light of truth. What she’d mentioned concerning Princess Sparkle’s mark being on the pods that’d contained the watch.

Yes. Yes… that was it. The Princess of Friendship was a paragon. The epitome of equinity’s decency. A hero whose name and likeness belonged in the dictionary entry for the very word hero. If she of all ponies had any part to play in the invention of any invention,its purpose could only be intentionally malevolent in the hooves–or various other tactile means–of those who would willingly misuse, misapply, and mishoofle it. From there, it really would be a short, especially well-founded leap to conclude, as her friend had, that the flying saucer mechano-crabs and that huge tripedal robo-bug they’d launched from that the aforesaid unicorn’d mentioned had descended for just such a purpose. Their actions certainly leaned more towards that idea.

The simple smoothie mare looked down at the watch–really looked at it–again.

Sunny had to admit, Izzy’s perspective did have some very, very, VERY valid reasons.

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Hitch had to admit, he did not see this happening.

He did not see the giant robot enduring Hitch Keep’s destruction as well as it had.

He did not see the automaton raise its right arm out towards him and Pipp.

He did, however, see something retract from beneath its wrist–a relatively thin, grayish metal tube.

And, he did see the end of the tube glow with an angry, red light.

Eyes widening even further as he understood what was about to occur, Hitch yelled out, “Pipp! Get us out of here, right–”

Thankfully, the pegasus princess didn’t need much prompting on his part, dodging the red beam of energy right before it was fired by the bot. The sheriff hadn’t the chance to catch his breath though when the automaton fired again, the beam being continuous in nature this time, forcing Pipp to continuously evade its aim.

“I think you made it mad!” she shouted.

“Nah! Really!? You think!?” Hitch shouted in reply. “What else are you gonna tell me is new!? That the daylight sky is blue!?”

“I was just saying! No need to be mean!”

“Well stop just saying and just get to getting us gone!”

“Well I can’t!”

“What do you mean you can’t! All we literally need is some altitude here!”

“Easy for you to say! You’re not the one constantly having to change flight patterns here to avoid being hit! Something that’s, for the record, really hard to do when you’re only going in one direction like you want me to!”

Hitch grumbled and was set to argue some more when the giant robot performed the unexpected that the sheriff really probably should’ve expected with a basic application of prediction. It raised its left arm, from which another relatively thin tube of grayish metal appeared from under the wrist of, and fired another unending beam of angry red energy at the disagreeing duo.

Pipp’s manner of avoidance had been seriously and celeritously oscillating before, yet now it was positively vertiginous, Hitch’s eyes rolling in place like water mill wheels in a raging rapid, his head spinning like a titanic top, and his shouts of terror rising to the outer reaches of the sky. “Whaaaaaaaa!” In a desperate attempt to keep some miniscule control of the situation, and direct it for the better, he tried once more to convince the pegasus that they needed to gallop bravely away from all this danger, yesterday. “Huuury uuup alllreeeaaadyyy Piiip! Ssstttoppp ttthhhe cannn’ttt-dddooo atttitttuuude, hhhooolllddd a cannn-dddooo ooonnneee annnddd ffflllyyy usssss awwwaaaaaayyyyy! Faaaaarrrrr as yooouuur wwwingggsssss cccaaaaannnnnn carry!”

“Hitch! If I couldn’t before, what makes you think I could now!?”

The sheriff huffed, planning to press the matter, when he had to pull one of his forelegs back to only just dodge one of the beams. It was then he knew the princess was correct and that acting otherwise could serve no purpose but their defeat. So instead, upon getting the timing more or less accurate so that his words were far more easy to hear if also a lot more intermittent, Hitch yelled, “You’re… right! I’m… sorry! Let… me… get… you… an… opening! Throw me… at… edge… of… crater!”

“What!?” the pegasus asked, confused and surprised. “Why!? How’re you even gonna get away!?”

“I… didn’t… say… to… leave… me! Just… grab me… again… when I’ve… resolved… the situation!”

“Huh!? What’re you even planning against that thing if you’re best only slowed it down!?”

“Honestly… dunno! Guess I’ll… throw a rock… at it! Or… something!”

“Are you crazy!?”

“It’ll be… a big rock! I… promise!” Hitch suddenly tilted his head sideways and had to pull his left shoulder out of Pipp’s grasp to avoid both of them being hit by both of the beams just then. “Now go! Stop… second guessing… and–!”

Finally not needing to be told any longer, Pipp performed precisely as instructed. She twirled around for several revolutions, managing to evade the beams and spin Hitch around like an out of hoof teacup ride, before taking her hooves away from his shoulders and letting him fall swiftly towards the earth.

“Goooo!” Hitch shouted all through his brief, downwards flight in the direction of terra firma.

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“Recharge, complete. Ten minutes of transformation remaining.”

Sunny and Izzy leapt back synchronously at those sudden words, and when they landed, the stability of both was so unstable that they collapsed onto their sides onto the crater floor. Mirroring one another further, neither remained long on the ground though before jumping up onto their hooves again, yelling, “What!?” and turning their attention to the source of the sentence that’d caused everything that’d happened in the past three seconds or so.

The watch.

Of course it was the watch.

As Sunny systematically analyzed the device, noticing for the first time a very dramatic change in its aesthetic design, she realized something at least as puzzling. “Wait… that voice just now. It… it sounded like–”

“You,” Izzy ended for her, eyes wide before looking inquisitively to the side as she massaged her chin with a hoof and quickly added, “I mean, a super serene and peaceful and maybe a little sleepy version of you, but still… you.”

Indeed. It was her own voice that Sunny heard, her tone sounding exactly like the mysterious male voice that’d spoken when the pods have been opened as Izzy’d said in so many of her own words.

“Well. That’s… a thing… apparently,” the earthpony thought. “A very weird thing.”

Izzy gasped with such a total lack of warning, that the surprise brought Sunny out of her thoughts, listening intently as the unicorn shouted, “And look! Your watch! It stopped being all red and black and is back to being all green and black like you said it was when you’d found it!”

Again, Izzy was correct. For the ten minutes or so it’d been since Sunny was her normal self again, the device in question had been glaring red where once it’d been emerald green. That was, until the earthpony’s voice had sounded what it’d had, the watch now as normal as she was currently–as it had been when she’d discovered it in the pods.

Curiouser and curiouser.

“You’re right,” Sunny admitted. “On both observations.”

Izzy gasped even louder, standing on her backlegs as her forehooves were pressed against either side of her head in epiphany as she shouted, “Wait just a second here! Do you think those things also mean–”

“That the watch can maintain morphing for ten minutes before requiring a break of ten more minutes?” Sunny completed for her.

“Well, yeah.”

“Well, given that it basically just told us that, in my voice no less, and it seems exactly like it was just before it latched onto my hoof… yeah. Yeah, I think so.”

“Cooooooool.”

Izzy’d said that after just… appearing behind Sunny and staring down over one of her shoulders at the watch. Yet the earthpony wasn’t frightened into movement, equally as focussed on the device as the unicorn as she was.

“Yeah. I’ll admit. It is pretty cool,” Sunny responded, hardly above a whisper with a renewed sense of childhood wonderment and inquisitiveness not unlike what she’d felt when she noticed Princess Twilight’s cutiemark on the pods. She sat down on the ground and brushed her right hoof over the watch, her immediate concern very much to study it further–an idea she concluded Izzy shared completely. Something echoed in the back of her mind though. Something that Izzy’d said when she’d been explaining the events of that night from her perspective. Something that ultimately stopped Sunny from pressing the big green button on the watch again and seeing what happened. For the moment, anyways.

A sudden snore brought the simple smoothie mare’s eyes over to Zipp’s still slumbering-from-total-revelation-overload form and she trotted towards her upon seeing for the first time that her head rested on an alloy plate that’d once been part of one of the flying saucer mechano-crabs. With great care, she pulled the plate from under the back of her friend’s head and placed said head onto the crater floor. It wasn’t much better a pillow, but it certainly had to be an improvement considering it was a much softer surface than whatever those drones were made from.

It was then, upon sighing at the pegasus’s state, that she was given the final catalyst to put to words the thought holding her from testing the watch and its secrets, her expression resembling the one she always had whenever she was far from home and had forgotten to water her garden. “Iz,” she started, trying yet not really succeeding in keeping out the sudden wave of worriment that’d struck her from her voice. “Pop quiz: what can you tell me about how Hitch and Pipp are doing against that colossal, mechanical mantis you mentioned?”

Izzy scratched her head and brow, confused, yes, yet more disappointed at Sunny’s change in priorities. To her credit though, she didn’t argue, and, sitting down, placed her hooves against either side of her head and said, smiling sadly, “Alright. Personally, I think they’ve got a hoofle on things, but if you want, I can see what the ole’ friendship sense is saying, no prob. Just gimme a sec to check the voice mail.”

“Thanks, Iz,” Sunny said with a breath of refreshed serenity. “That’s all I ask.”

Nodding in decuplicate, Izzy then imitated a phone ringing once, twice, then thrice before nodding again, though more slowly and continuously and with a comically focussed visage, as she said, “Ahuh. Ahuh. Two new messages. Sunday at three A.M. Hitch and Pipp’s interception of the giant robot is going–”

The unicorn’s mien instantaneously went shocked and surprised, just as instantly reminding Sunny of the look Zipp had prior to fainting.

Though the earthpony feared the answer, though she knew the answer, she still felt she had to ask, “Not good times, I take it?”

Izzy, as quick to respond as she was, for many moments could not say anything else sans, “Uuuuuhhhhh…”

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He was worrisomely close prior to impact, so close he’d make sure to never mention it in any future retellings of the tale to anypony, before deciding on just what course of action he would gallop down to achieve his stated goal. When he finally had something concrete in mind, though, Hitch sought it out with his typical clarity and capability.

Willing the earth beneath to compress together and mimic the elastic properties of things like plastic or rubber or Zipp’s homemade marshmallows she ‘cooked’ whenever she felt like attempting the culinary arts, he hit the floor on his forehooves, bounced up ten feet into the air, flipped himself the other way ‘round, willed an even larger square area of earth he couldn’t see far deep below the surface to resemble playdough so, and stomped down on all hooves when he landed with all the tangible and intangible might he could.

An avalanche, a landslide, a great wave of rock and dirt fell forth from the edge of the crater and struck the giant robot, who neither moved nor seemed to notice, focussed still on trying to aim its lasers onto Pipp as it was. Upon completing his backflip away from the tumbling terrain under him and landing tens of feet away on far more reliable dirt, Hitch couldn’t even see the automaton anymore it was so obscured by earthen debris. He didn’t stop to respite safely and securely in his victory, though, for he knew how weak and tenuous a trophy it truly was by this point. Instead, he looked up towards the pegasus, who was huffing and puffing and floating in place now that she had a few precious seconds to herself to rest, and yelled out, “Pipp! Sonic cry! Now!”

“Wha!? Why!? I’m tired! And by the looks of things, the robot–”

“Is probably digging itself out as we speak! We can’t take chances! Remember!?”

As if to support his view, two continuous laser beams, undoubtedly from its wrist cannons, dug through the rocky dirt it was buried beneath, both ponies jumping back in fright as said earthen debris then began to shake, the giant robot’s hands soon rising through.

“Pipp! Please! Stop just hoverin’ and get ta hollerin’!”

Requiring no further prompting, Pipp took ten more deep breaths, just in time for the giant robot’s head to break through the rubble, and yelled out, “OOOKKKAAAY!”

Of course, it was not a simple word she’d said, for it was one spoken with all the power of her sonorous magic reinforcing it to rock crushing intensity. Intensity enough that the automaton was knocked back into the lava and back out of sight, that the crater in its tremendous entirety collapsed in upon the automaton, and, of course, that Hitch was brought to the ground, hooves over his ears, shaking and shrieking in pain from the mere wake of the auditory assault, regretting his command to the pegasus very, very much as he was thrown careening quickly into dreamland despite his best efforts to remain awake.

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“E’yup. Not good times, no,” Izzy completed prior to celeritously adding before Sunny’s predictable reaction, “However, I have the very strong feeling that our friends’ve finally turned the corner they needed and are set to ultimately win against that big meenie robot!”

“That you talkin’, or the friendship sense?” Sunny asked, unconvinced brow raised.

Izzy’s signature larger than life, genuine, and warm grim seemed to turn forced, a single line of sweat trailing down the left side of her face. Eyes moving every possible way except Sunny’s, the unicorn replied to the question with one of her own. “There’s… uuuuuhhhhh… a… difference?”

As if to support Sunny’s view that Izzy’s optimism was obscuring something, namely the trouble her friends that weren’t present were in, she saw from one of the upmost corners of her eyes a figure flying through the night towards the crater. A swift turn of her head there, and she gasped at the sight of the younger princess of Zephyr Heights carrying the unconscious form of the sheriff of Maretime Bay–who appeared as though he needed weeks of vacation to return to his typical state–in her forehooves.

“Pipp! Hitch!”

Sunny dashed beyond Izzy and stopped right in front of the purple pegasus right as she landed and placed Hitch softly on the crater floor.

“Pipp! What happened!? To you!? To–” she pointed to the sheriff. “What happened to his face!? Was–was it the giant robot!? Did it hurt him!?”

“That?” Izzy asked, just appearing to Sunny’s right and looking down at Hitch’s uneasily slumbering self herself. “No, that’s just from when–”

“No time to explain!” Pipp suddenly, terrified, and out of breathedly yelled. “We have to move! We have to run! It–it–it’s chasing after us and I don’t think we can–”

The purple pegasus stopped when she noticed Zipp, gasped, pointed a hoof there, and asked, screaming, “What happened to my sister!? Was–was it the drones!? Did they hurt her!?”

“That?” Izzy asked, just appearing to Pipp’s right and looking down at Zipp’s uneasily slumbering self herself. “No, that’s just from when–”

“No time to explain!” Sunny suddenly, terrified, and out of breathedly yelled. “Pipp: focus! What’s chasing after us!? Is it the giant robot!?”

Pipp didn’t respond immediately, taking many more breaths before she was ready to respond. When she was though, she answered Sunny adequately with her first word. “Yes.” Upon completion of a few more breaths, she further said, “We did everything we could, pulled out all the stops to stop it, but it wasn’t enough! Never enough! I even dialed my sonic cry to max volume, all the way to eleven and beyond, knocked Hitch right into dreamland as a result on accident… and still… a few seconds later… it just… got… back… up… again. Lasers… blasting… legs… running… to get me… as I flew away after grabbing Hitch again… with everything… I had… left.”

Suddenly, Pipp collapsed forwards, thankfully not hitting the ground, though, due to Sunny and Izzy rushing towards her and holding her up.

“Ahhhh!” the younger princess yelled out. “Oh is my throat sore,” she then said, voice raspy.

“Take it easy, Pipp. Just take it easy.” Sunny looked over to Izzy, a face of immense disappointment at her failure to tell her the simple truth about how Hitch and Pipp fared sans any positive, yet ultimately pointless, intuition.

When the unicorn realized the earthpony was looking at her so unhappily, the sweat started falling from her brow once more, her lips forming the word, ‘Sorry’, sans sound.

Sunny sighed, her visage losing its severity as she decided to drop the matter and save it for later. In the here and now, she turned her head back at the purple pegasus and said, “Rest now. Rest. It’s okay. You’re safe. You and Hitch are both safe. We’ll–” she looked down at the watch. “Hoofle it from here.”

Pipp’s reply was as swift as it was surprising. “No. No. No, no, no, no, no! I can’t! I won’t! Not until I’m sure that… that… metal monster can’t get to me or anypony else!”

Sunny was about to try and convince her that she’d played her part and needed a break.

That was, till Izzy suddenly shrieked, “SUNNY, LOOK OUT!”

From the upmost center of her eyes, Sunny turned her head up just in time to see a massive metal arm and the four claws on its hand reach down towards her. The simple smoothie mare’s eyes hardly had time to telegraph the sudden fear she felt before her world disappeared in a flash of azure.

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When the light faded, Sunny found herself, Pipp, and Izzy… not where they were. She couldn’t say precisely where. Not yet, anyhoof. Only that by all the empty space, the empty sky in her periphery vision, that wherever they were was most certainly not the crater.

A little looking at her left, and she found Zipp and Hitch were with them, remaining unconscious on the ground. A little more at her right, and she discovered the ground seemed to go on to a point and then just stop till open air was all that she could see, the earthpony deducing from this that wherever they were was elevated in its topography.

When Izzy fell onto the ground, wheezing and holding her head, she also decided how she and her friends had gotten to wherever they were so quickly and, carefully placing Pipp onto the floor, yelled, “Iz!” She rested a hoof on the unicorn’s shoulder as she rolled to and fro in pain. “You… you… you just… teleported! All five of us! Away from the giant robot! That’s… that’s amazing! You’ve never been able to do that before! You’ve hardly managed to teleport only yourself in the past, and now: four other ponies with you too!”

“Yay. Go me. Woo-hoo,” Izzy weakly grumbled. “If only I didn’t have this doozy of a headache because of it, I’d be standing and celebrating with you right about now.” She closed her eyes and grit her teeth, brow knitting together. “I mean, I knew traditional unicorn teleporation could be tiring, especially when moving multiple ponies, but not this painful! Ooooowooowwooowwooowwooowwooow! I’m never trying that again! Never ever forever ever again!”

As the unicorn continued to complain, incredibly well founded as it was, Sunny couldn’t help patting her friend on the shoulder, smiling sadly as she said, “There, there, Iz. I’m sure when this is all over, you’ll be galloping at the chance to be like Princess Twilight before she was a princess and trying teleporting an entire stadium of ponies elsewhere.”

“Uhhhh,” Pipp suddenly grumbled. “Speaking of teleporting, is Iz feeling okay enough to tell us where we are now?”

Though Sunny had been much more concerned for the well being of the unicorn, she had to admit that she’d intended to ask her that herself before the extent of her agony was shown, and was thinking of asking her now since Pipp’d brought the issue to the top of the list.

Thankfully, Izzy was cognizant and composed enough that she required no further inquiry on the earthpony’s part to answer, “Yeah. Yeah, she is. Just a little though.” The unicorn, with help from Sunny, stood again, if on shaky hooves, and finished her response by saying, “We’re on a hill, like, three miles away, or something like that, that I saw earlier when I was galloping towards where the friendship sense told me Sunny here was.”

The aforesaid smoothie mare gasped, “Wait,” her eyes widened in realization, “was there a hole hewn into that’s twice my size, by chance before a trail of destruction though the forest.”

“Yeah. Weirdest thing too.” Then, at super speedy pace, she added, “I-mean-not-as-weird-as-everything-else-but-still-kinda-hard-to-miss-the-local-landscape-being-rearranged-LIKE THAT.”

Sunny chuckled, glad that Izzy was evidently rapidly returning to her usual state if that example of talkativeness was anything to go by. “Yeah. My fault there. I don’t think I mentioned it when I was giving the summary of what I’d gone through so far tonight, but I sorta, kinda caused all that destruction trying to get away from Zipp when she was fighting me because she thought I was a monster.”

“She did WHAT!?” Pipp yelled, standing up with only the unexpectedness of that revelation to help her. “Why would she–!?”

“Because, to be fair, I kinda was at the time,” Sunny swiftly explained. “A tall, two leg walking, two armed, firestarting monster of lava, lava rock, and, uh, fire.”

“You were what!?”

By this point, Izzy’d bounced back completely. In such good health across the board was she that she even lifted Sunny’s left hoof for her to show Pipp the device latched onto there.

“This watch looking whatchamacallit Sunny found! See? It-turned-her-into-some-fiery-something-or-other-and-your-sister-didn’t-know-so-she-jumped-to-the-conclusion-that-the-fiery-something-or-other-Sunny-was-had-foalnapped-Sunny-or-something-and-then-jumped-into-action-by-zapping-and-hitting-the-fiery-something-or-other-Sunny-was, alot, and then–”

Unfortunately, or maybe most fortunately depending on one’s ability and inability to understand Izzy’s vocal velocity, her mile a minute recollection was halted by the sound of dozens of trees snapping, a noise rising louder by the second and signaling the doom that remained fast in its approach, if delayed for the moment thanks to the unicorn’s efforts.

“It’s still on the way,” Pipp said for the trio of scared looking ponies. “That oversized insect is still heading our way!”

Sunny promptly shook the fear off her face via the shaking of her head, replacing it with a mien that spoke far more of determination and only mild fearfulness. “Right.” She turned to Izzy and said, “Sorry, Iz, but I can’t stay for storytime. It’s fight the giant robot time for me.”

“Awwww…” Izzy said sadly, head tilted floorwards just as sorrowfully.

“You’re going to what!?” Pipp yelled.

“Hopefully?” Sunny replied to the purple pegasus. “Give an amazing demonstration of the watch’s list of features followed by a decent report of myself.” She looked back down at the aforementioned device, staring intently into the hourglass of green and black. “If all goes well,” she sighed.

Sunny sat down and pressed the big, green button with her right hoof. As expected, the faceplate popped up atop a miniature, cylindrical tower, also of green and black. As she’d planned, she brought her right hoof down towards it. Just as she would’ve pressed upon it, however, she stopped, her eyes having observed something… new. A facet of the watch she’d never seen before and now realized for the first time.

The hourglass within the faceplate was… gone. In its place was a green and black diamond, within which, over much of the green, was an outline, a silhouette, an icon with an uncanny and remarkable resemblance to the fiery creature she’d been.

“Wait a second…”

“What is it? What’s wrong, Sunny?” Izzy said, just appearing in front of the earthpony and looking down at the device herself.

“What’s wrong? Ha! What’s right should be the question!” Pipp said.

Sunny sighed. “While that’s probably true and I’m the last pony to disagree, to answer Iz,” she pointed down at the entity depicted on the faceplate, “I think I’m looking at an image of what I’d transformed into.”

“What!? No way! Ooo! Ooo! Lemme see! Lemme see!” Izzy, head somehow keeping still in place while the rest of her jumped parallel to Sunny’s right before said head turned a full 180°, looked down directly where Sunny’s sight was set with eyes then not upside down relative to the picture the device showcased. Obviously, she then gasped dramatically. “You’re right! It is! It totally is! That’s so… so… cool! Like, seriously awesome! How could you’ve possibly not noticed that before!?”

“Well, wasn’t exactly focussing on the minute details what with all the terror and all.”

“Oh. Right.” Izzy suddenly looked rather apologetic. “Sorry.”

“It’s fine.” Sunny tilted her head to the side. “I wonder though…”

Carefully, she placed her right hoof on the right side of the faceplate and, more carefully still, tried to see if she could move it in some way–clockwise, counterclockwise, or in any wise. Her curiosity had much verity, and was rewarded by the faceplate and its tower both turning in either direction most easily.

What’s more, the icon changed concurrently.

When the faceplate and its tower went left, the silhouette of a similar tetrapodal and bipedal entity to that of the fiery creature she’d been appeared, differing in that it seemed overall more bulky and broad shouldered with said shoulders each possessing a spike of some sort slanted at a slight angle and the being’s head between said spikes being decidedly more rhomboid and less on fire with another smaller spike seemingly emanating from the top.

When the faceplate and its tower went right… an image far greater in its familiarity greeted her.

So familiar was it, that Sunny’s eyes widened as though they’d just beheld an old, dear friend that she’d never actually met, yet felt an amity towards beyond words, for she’d known it and its kind prior to ever properly speaking.

So familiar was it, that Izzy, voice slight and shaking, asked, “Is-is-is that what I think it is?”

Sunny, her voice only slightly less slight and shaky, said, “Yeah. Think so.”

“What!? What is it!?” asked Pipp. “Will somepony PLEASE stop ignoring my plight and tell me, FULLY, what on equis is happening!?”

“It’ll all make sense, soon. Or as much as it can anyways. I promise.” Sunny looked up from the watch and, pointing to Pipp and Izzy, said, “Right now, though, I need you and Iz here to back up away from me. And hurry, because if my ears are correct, we’re only a few seconds away from the robot breaking through the treeline.”

Pipp prepped a protest, yet was stopped by Izzy just appearing next to her, grabbing her, and pulling her away as the unicorn said, “I’d listen to the lady if I were you! Wouldn’t want to accidentally be squished now, ya know!”

Again, Pipp was about to disagree boisterously, yet by then Izzy’d gotten them so far away that Sunny couldn’t hear her over the noise of the automaton’s tree crunching advance.

Yet not far away enough that the unicorn felt comfortable.

“Hey Iz, do you mind moving yourself and Pipp a little further actually!?” she yelled to ensure she was heard. “Just to be sure!”

A salute super silly in its super seriousness later, and Izzy followed her instructions flawlessly.

Yet still, Sunny was unsure the distance between them was enough.

“A little further!”

Izzy repeated her salute and her backwards jumps, the latter in particular bringing Pipp much chagrin.

Sunny however, remained unsure STILL.

“Just a LITTTLLLEEE further! Like, three more decent jumps, and we should be good to go!” Sunny blinked quickly in sudden realization, and just as quickly added, “Oh! And while you’re at it, could you please bring Zipp and Hitch with you, please!? I almost forgot about them! Sorry!”

The purple pegasus was not the only pony super annoyed this time, the unicorn tilting her head skywards and grumbling in concert, yet ultimately carrying the white pegasus and the sheriff over to her in the blue glow of her magic, jumping back thrice more with the two unconscious ponies of their quintet telekinetically following in tow, placing them with utmost care on the floor, and yelling out, “There! Now quit stalling and show that big metal meenie what you can really do and your super special awesomeness already!”

“Gotcha, Iz!” Sunny waved and then stared back at the watch and the icon upon it, which in that moment, she thought seemed to stare back at her. With a determined–and admittedly a little crazy–grin, she said to herself, “And oh, how I intend to.”

Indeed.

If whoever stood behind the drones and the giant robot wished for the watch so much, she would let them have it. Just not in the manner they foresaw.

Sans any further consonant, vowel, or delay–important or no–Sunny Starscout then slammed her right hoof against the faceplate of the mysterious watch on her wrist and its tower, both collapsing back into said device.

In a flash of light emerald light, again, her person was enveloped and she was rendered visionless momentarily once more. When it faded, Sunny Starscout–as her friends and she herself knew her anyways–had disappeared once more.

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Humongous height.

Tail as long as she was tall.

Wings that when unfurled spanned easily double such length.

Four lizard-like legs, the forelegs so dexterous they were more akin to an arm-leg amalgam.

Colossal claws at the end of each reptilian toe.

Titanic teeth reflecting an astonishing marble as she scowled.

Apricot scales instead of fur.

Magenta and purple spikes with rainbow streaks on top atop her head in place of her mane.

Emerald green, saurian eyes where her much warmer, equine ones had just been.

A boiling inferno seemingly about to race forth with every breath she took.

A dragon.

A true, real, bona fide dragon.

That was what the watch’d transformed her into this time.

An individual of a race not graced by the light of equestria’s moon in ages.

An individual that immediately upon confirming her current state, leapt from the hill with all her mighty legs and single flap of her formidable wings followed by many more such movements of said wings in rapid succession, propelling herself forwards then downwards towards the giant robot, which’d just then cleared the treeline.

The impact was… not all that she expected.

Oh, the noise was cacophonous and the two of them did go sailing through tree upon tree upon tree, yet despite the vastness of the collateral damage caused, the automaton didn’t seem all too affected. In fact, when their momentum slowed to nil after touching down onto the ground and digging a very, very long trench within, Sunny honestly felt she’d hurt herself more than the giant robot. It didn’t help that she’d decided to mimic many superheroes from many different forms of media she’d read, watched, and played over the years and flew fists first into the machine’s chest–literally the place where it was probably the most well armored.

“WOOOW THAT’S PAINFUL!” she thought to herself as she jumped back onto her back into the trench upon arriving at a complete stop, shaking her hands and wincing and gnashing her teeth to attempt and remove the agony she felt.

She was only mildly successful.

What helped her much more, as it turned out, was the giant robot returning to its pointy feet, leaping hundreds of feet into the air, and plummeting like–fittingly enough–a meteor towards her.

Fear instant as that tended to overshadow other emotional burdens. For a while, anyways.

“EEEP!” Sunny bellowed in her booming dragon voice much louder than she intended, unaccustomed to speaking with such stentorian intonation as she was.

Celeritously, she rolled to the side, escaping not a moment too soon before the automaton’s most unsoft landing. Her wrath reascending to its status as her dominant mental state, Sunny hesitated not in her retaliation, a prodigious tail whip knocking it away from its footing and onto the forest floor on its back. Though the aforementioned tail didn’t hurt that much less than her hands, the extra scales and bulk did reduce it enough that she was in sufficient condition well enough to follow through by leaping speedily via her back feet and diving at the monumental machine with her claws pointed towards its head–specifically it's visual sensor.

A superb plan, she surmised. After all, the structurally weakest component of any robot was always the sensory gear, and of all portions of the automaton cracked by the powerful efforts of her friends, she’d noted during her opening attack that the visual sensors were the most so.

This course of action, like to work as it would’ve, however, was intercepted from completion when Sunny was herself intercepted by both of the giant robot’s wrist lasers, the beams of a continuous intensity she failed to anticipate. Such energy was she struck in the stomach with that not only did her plummet halt–extremely painfully she might add–yet she was lifted into the night sky at an altitude far above what her and the automaton achieved during their recent leaps. So far above was she launched that she reached a thousand feet before the beams ceased being fired, and when all was said and done, her cartwheeling arc back to equis’ surface spanned a little more than a mile.

By contrast, the ‘dirt angel’ she made was only five fold her own diameter upon her impact with the ground–and the tree that’d been standing over that ground for likely hundreds of years at the least before she slammed into it and turned it into small fragments of timber wood.

The agony, though, eclipsed both by country miles upon country miles.

Dragons of the Harmony Era were tough.

Tough enough that they routinely swam through rivers and lakes of lava and magma as easily and even joyfully as Sunny swam through the calm waves at the beach, treating volcanic eruptions like oversized waterslides.

Tough enough that they routinely ate rubies, emeralds, sapphires, quartzes, diamonds, opals, garnets, topazes, red beryls, and lots and LOTS of obsidian and other precious–and quite a few non-precious–stones with nothing except their bite force.

Tough enough that even drakes–that is, young or child or even baby dragons–could accomplish such amazing feats of heat and kinetic and dental and tummy durability and jaw strength and were counted upon to do so as simply as a foal could run around having fun on a summer’s day.

Yet, that hurt.

Not so much the crash as what caused the crash, yet still, it hurt.

The affected sector of her stomach, that she now clutched as she grit her tremendous teeth and huffed and puffed rapidly, had been hit so hard that the scales there were blackened by carbon scoring, bent concavely as opposed to their typically convex angle, and she thought she felt a profound bruise along the skin beneath. Double checking the veracity of the latter with her fingers, she winced as she definitely confirmed it was true when she pressed said digits a little too much, immediately pulling them back and screaming, “AHHH, AHHH, AHHH, OWWW, OWWW, OWWW, THAT IS NOT GOOD!”

Indeed. Another collision like that with the automaton’s extended laser beams, and she was out. The figurative game ending before she’d even really begun. No three strikes required, no umpire to help her by saying that was against the rules.

What was much worse, however, was the giant robot suddenly sprinting through the lane of trees in front of her, wrist lasers at the ready.

“WHOA!”

She hadn’t the time to move out of the way. She hardly had the time even to think. Even her intuitive reaction to the threat was only a second of inaction apart from calamity. Yet, such a phenomenon did not befall her thankfully… for the moment at least. The totally titanic torrent of flame cascading forth from her mouth saw to that, and while it didn’t instantly stop the giant robot, it did slow it down, and more importantly, pushed its arms back just as its rubicund energy was about to fire, sparing her the trouble, though burdening the poor trees around the machine to being cut in twine as it eventually slid back on its back upon the ground before ceasing its blasting of energy since it couldn’t currently point them at its intended target.

Not daring to cease her own blasting of energy of a sort, Sunny capitalized on this reversal of fortunes without haste. She took to the sky with a few flaps of her wings, still breathing fire on the giant robot and dived upon it for a claw strike again. This second time, the sharp fingernails impacted the mystery material of the visual sensor sans any delays, setbacks, or etc.

A thundering… yet disappointing… clang ensued, supported by, of course, the noise of a large crater being formed–which she was sadly quite accustomed to by then. Much as she was with the aforementioned disappointment. Despite all the sound and fury of the event, is signified a mere magnification of the cracks Hitch and Pipp’d created, yet not a full collapse, and absolutely not her claws crashing right through as she’d pictured.

Still, she reasoned, that just meant she had to try more and with a little more force. Once, twice, thrice, four fold, five fold, six fold, seven fold, eight fold, and nine fold time, Sunny threw her claws quickly against the visual sensor. She only used her arm strength and didn’t try leaping aloft to amplify her attacking power, true, yet if the manner in which the cracks deepened was any indication, she really didn’t need to.

The issues rearose, though, when she realized she was losing control of her breathing, needing more and more air to maintain her attack on the sensor which obviously meant less and less air for fueling the fire projected at the automaton to keep it pinned. Thus, between the ninth hit and what would’ve been the tenth, the flames she sent had lost so much concussive energy, that the giant robot managed to bring one of its hands forward in a catching block of Sunny’s falling hand, brought it other to catch-block Sunny’s when she threw it at the sensor in response, and then, because the robot’s AI was evidently more concerned with efficiency than imaginativeness, of course, the automaton charged up its wrist lasers to shoot at her again, the devices tilting to take aim right at the spot on her belly where they’d fired before to make matters even worse.

“OH NO YOU DONT!”

Pulling with her arms, her legs stepping on the machine’s chest, and flying with her wings, Sunny launched herself and the giant robot into the aether just prior to the beams being emitted. She leaned backwards, tilted the machine upwards, and successfully removed herself from its grasp–kicking the automaton away with all her strength as it uncontrollably blasted its lasers continuously about everywhere except at the transformed mare. She then drew her tail back, flew up towards the twirling robot, and tail whipped it so strongly upon its head that said bot sailed off into the horizon at celeritous pace.

“WOOOOHOOOO!” Sunny shouted triumphantly, hovering in place, fists extended victoriously towards the storm clouds, which in that moment, seemed to dissipate a substantial amount. “HOW’S IT FEEL FIGHTIN’ SOMEPONY YOU’RE OWN SIZE, ROBO-BADDIE!? YEAH! PROBABLY THINK TWICE ABOUT VEXING MY FRIENDS NEXT TIME, HUH!?”

She prepared herself to give chase, yet halted at the last second, a word in the last sentence she’d spoken echoing through her mind.

“Friends.”

“FRIENDS.”

“FRIENDS,” she said aloud.

Silently gasping, she broke the sound barrier in a single push of her wings against the air and raced against the clock to stop or at least reduce her terrible mistake.

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“--and then Sunny turned into a giant dragon, and then she left so fast she mach cone indicating she was moving at supersonic speed, and then she made a whole new trail of destruction right over there when she hit the giant robot at supersonic speed, and then you demanded an explanation after the two of us were done looking on with awestruck looks on our faces, and then I explained everything, and then you told me to explain everything again except slower this time because I was talking too fast for you to understand, and then I did, and then I finished, and then you looked like your sister did right before she fainted, and now,” she took a deep breath for ten entire seconds, “We’re here.”

Izzy Moonbow truly hoped her clarification of the facts was sufficient for her friend to understand. After all, in the unicorn’s experience, there were few things just as or more confusing than channel surfing, finding an episode of a new show that appeared interesting, yet tuning in during the middle of events, which was essentially what happened to Pipp. She also hoped that overburdening of data didn’t cause her a fitful slumber like her elder sister.

“I mean, the information I shared was a little crazy, but not THAT crazy!” she optimistically thought to herself. “Really, it’s got nothing on the big fight between Princess Twilight and Tirek the Terrible that destroyed Books and Branches. Now THAT was crazy!”

Izzy smiled at the memory of when Sunny’d first recounted that account, yet frowned when she remembered both pegasus princess sisters were in dreamland for that.

Thankfully, her smile returned when, upon a skyscraper sized sigh, Pipp fell backwards on her back, obscured her face with her forelegs, and said, determinedly, “When this is all over, I’m gonna need a hooficure the likes of which Equestria has not seen for ages.”

Izzy chuckled at the purple pegasus’ melodramatic declaration, complete with ‘Woe is me!’ mane flip, and in that moment truly appreciated her drama queen credentials being given to her when she was only a filly.

“Never fear, Pipp! If there’s one thing dragons way back when in the day were known for, it was for being the physical powerhouses they looked like and were basically as big as.” She tilted her head to the side, hoof pressed on the side of her head in reflection. “Also for being really big meanies before the Elements of Harmony and their friends managed to prove to enough of them that being much nicer was much nicer, but mostly that first thing I said!” she finished, all smiles again.

“What? Does your friendship sense, that you just got done telling me you didn’t listen to when me and Hitch were hitting the giant robot with everything we had and still couldn’t stop it, tell you that Sunny’s having a much easier job?” Pipp asked with sarcasm enough that, if it were water, would fill all the numerous craters formed that night and then some, her upper form tilting up at ninety degrees to stare disbelievingly at the unicorn.

Izzy shook her head. “No. The giant robot cartwheeling through the air towards us faster than sound moves through air at that altitude tells me that, silly.” She pointed a hoof at the horizon at the sight she’d just mentioned that she originally noticed out of the corner of her eyes. “See?”

Pipp lifted a questioning brow, yet when she returned to standing on her hooves, and she saw what Izzy was talking about, her eyes widened. Despite her initial response to this unfortunate occurrence being quite cool, calm, and collected, Izzy’s eyes widened concurrently, the seriousness of the situation finally being understood.

In further synchronicity, Izzy and Pipp both said a surprisingly level and typically volumed, “Huh. Well okie-dokie-lokie, then.”

Then, once more at once, they both shrieked.

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“NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO–!”

Over and again, Sunny Starscout repeated that lone, simple word aloud as she flew in the direction she’d so foolishly sent the giant robot in thanks to her tail whip with utmost haste.

During this time, she also repeatedly said the lone, simple word, “Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid–!” to herself in her mind.

For indeed, what else could she say outwardly and inwardly?

Sunny’d been so busy fearing the machine landing another hit with its lasers and getting away and making it go away and even simply enjoying the power of her present form combined with her eons of acquaintance with it and not being or feeling powerless whatsoever for once since the night’s strange turn against her that she never once paused to consider where the giant robot was sent, so long as it went.

And now her friends, the very ponies she was trying to protect in the first place by propelling herself and the automaton away in her initial attack could very well be set to pay the price for her questionable fortune in finding the watch, anyhoof.

“Don’t think like that!” she thought, mental state finally changing gears if only a little. “Do not! No! I’m sure they’re fine! I’m sure they saw the bot in time and got out of the way and are perfectly–”

The sight of the giant robot frozen like a popsicle within a rotund block of ice rotating and floating about a few feet above the hill where she remembered her friends to be arrived into view.

“SAFE AND SOUND?” she finished aloud, the immense confusion making her raise both eyebrows.

Extra carefully, she hovered to a stop ten feet over and ten feet next to the most strange sight and landed with the gentleness of a droplet of water spilled from a quarter inch above the ground. She leaned down and looked below the unexpected ice sculpture to find none other than all four of her friends beneath. Three of them lay slumbering upon the ground, and of those three, one was snoring with such chilling force so celeritously that by such a boreal breath alone, she was holding the robot up and spinning and doubtlessly was also the reason it’d frozen in the first place. The other one, the fourth friend, stood awake, waving at Sunny as though nothing’d happened and everything was absolutely normal.

“Hey Sunny!” Izzy greeted cheerfully. “What’s up?”

The transformed mare’s eyebrows rose even further, joined by wide eyes in her overall jaw wide expression. She formed her hands into fists and massaged her eyes a little while before bringing them down again only to massage her eyes again when she still didn’t believe what she was seeing.

“I’M SORRY, WHAT’D YOU SAY?”

“I asked, ‘What’s up’?” Izzy then squinted and, holding out a hoof to shade her eyes while trying her best to keep her vision in Sunny’s general direction, added, “Though, now that I’m looking at them up so close, think you could pretty please close your muzzle or something so that your teeth are hidden again? Because they’re SOOOO shiny! Like, really, really, REALLY shiny! And reflective! I think I saw myself standing here smiling before I couldn’t google the stinging in my eyes anymore.”

“OH. RIGHT. SORRY. MY MISTAKE.” Sunny coughed into a fist to steady her voice, trembling with puzzlement as it was, and was extra super careful to make sure her teeth couldn’t be seen as she spoke. “UHMMM… I DON’T KNOW IF YOU’VE NOTICED, IZ, BUT ‘WHAT’S UP’ IS THE GIANT ROBOT TWIRLING AROUND IN AN EVEN GIANTER ICECUBE. AS IN, IT’S RIGHT ABOVE YOU AND EVERYPONY ELSE.”

“Gianter isn’t a word, silly!” Izzy said, giggling. “And I should know since I make new words all the time.”

Sunny blinked. Once. Twice. Thrice. Then she shook her head. She sighed and closed her eyes, at the outset to let go of her annoyance at herself for not seeing the approach of a response like that, yet ultimately, over the immense ease she felt knowing that her friends were all okay and not suffering the consequences of her own mistake.

Still, there was one rather obvious question aloft in the air that required resolving.

So obvious, that when Sunny reopened her eyes, Izzy answered it, at least in part, by saying, “It was all thanks to my excellent quick thinking skills!”

The transformed mare snickered. “YEAH. THAT MUCH I FIGURED.” When her vocalized humor stopped, she then asked, rhetorically, “FOUND A WAY TO GET PIPP TO GO TO DREAMLAND AND SNORE A LITERAL STORM, I TAKE IT?”

“E’yup!” Izzy suddenly appeared contemplative. “Though now that I think of it, it wasn’t actually ONLY my mental capacity for rapid adaptability that gets kudos! Without a particular book here, which somepony I know is the author of, Pipp and I would’ve had to probably jump off the hill with Zipp and Hitch!”

“WHAT BOOK?” Sunny asked, brow raised.

“This one,” Izzy said, grabbing a hardbound tome more titanic than several school textbooks put together out of her mane and holding it up for the current dragon to see.

The transformed mare squinted her eyes and read the title aloud. “The REAL History of Ancient Equestria, by Sunny Starscout. Forward by Argyle Shine and–”

Sunny Starscout felt tears begin to well up in her eyes and her voice crack like the automaton’s visual sensor.

“No, no, no. Don’t go back there, Sunny. Stay sunny, Sunny. Stay sunny,” she swiftly said to herself in her mind. “Not here. Not now. Not in front of your friend when you just won against that mechanical monster and this awful, horrible, terrible night. It’s a happy, if really weird, time, so above all else, just please, stay sunny, Sunny! Please stay–”

“Sunny?” Izzy said suddenly. “You’re... you’re… crying.”

The transformed mare immediately wiped away her tears and hastily replied with, “UHHHH… YEAH. I’M… UHHHH… JUST… REALLY GLAD YOU ALL ARE ALRIGHT.” Even more hastily, and in an attempt to change the subject, she got back onto her two back feet, grabbed the frozen robot, and said, “Here, let me move this bot-sicle here out of–”

The moment she placed it on the ground to her right and away from her friends, the automaton demonstrated that it was not in fact defeated by melting the ice around its arms via its wrist lasers, spinning the top half of its forms around its axis so swiftly thanks to the wrist lasers having weakened the ice so much that it broke away in a miniature hail storm, and knocking Sunny back and on her back in the process.

“Sunny!” Sunny heard Izzy yell as she tried to stand up again with the help of her arms, legs, and wings and just before her efforts were shown to be for naught when the giant robot, true to its tactical pattern thus far, struck that spot on her stomach it had earlier with the awful results Sunny was trying to avoid.

“AHHHHHHHHH!” the transformed mare yelled, the force from the two lasers striking her so strongly that yet another crater was being formed right there atop the hill.

If there was anything in the brightside column about this sudden renewal of the battle between the bot and her, the first would have to be that without gravity on the automaton’s side, the pain, while immense, was not so that she couldn’t think of a way out. The second, which was thanks to the first, was that she was able to roll herself onto her hands and feet, the much denser and tougher scales of her back enduring the energy much better and subsequently less agonizingly for her.

Still, she couldn’t bring herself to close the distance the way she needed for a proper counterattack, and even if she could stand up and sprint towards the machine, given how far it was it’d probably just evade her charge.

So, since the giant robot hadn’t really changed its stratagem, she deemed she’d keep to the same gameplan too.

The setup, however, required a little more this time.

“Izzy!” Sunny yelled. “Force field over you and the others! Now! And it BETTER be all around you four!”

“What? Why do you want–”

“DON’T ARGUE! JUST DEFEND! NOW!”

The unicorn, confused as she sounded stuttering and sputtering at the outset of her response to the command, nevertheless acted fast and magicked the magical barrier into being that Sunny wanted. Or at least, she thought she had, as Izzy said, “Defense at the ready!”

In any event, the transformed mare took her word for it, turning her head around and firing fire as much as she could at the automaton again.

Just like before, the giant robot was pushed back onto its back, yet Sunny stopped breathing so hard once this happened, not wanting to have the mechano menace slide back against the ground and break the shield Izzy had raised, struggling as she doubtlessly was to maintain it from even the edge of the cone of flame buffeting it.

Because propelling herself onwards upon her legs was out of the question since she had difficulties even standing up and keeping standing up, she used her wings to steady herself like two additional arms against the ground, and in a single pushup–ceasing her fire breath to breathe normally again to prepare for what happened next–she gained enough forwards and upwards momentum to crash onto the giant robot and tackle it further into the hill, tail slamming onto its legs, knees driving into its center, and hands grabbing its wrists as it tried to aim the lasers there at her again, all three serving to keep the robo-bug pinned and unable to retaliate properly as Sunny then open her jaws wide around the visual sensor on its head and bit down on it with all might musterable.

Back during round one of their fight, Sunny didn’t want to use her teeth offensively even though she’d numerous chances to. She felt she’d plenty of other, better options available at the time and, considering how tough the giant robot was, greatly feared a repeat of what’d happened when she tried to bite the watch earlier, only now in her dragon form.

Those concerns have evaporated by this point.

Everything else, even what worked, was insufficient to win.

She couldn’t think of another avenue of approach that didn’t extremely risk the automaton just blasting her with endless energy beams again.

And, perhaps most importantly of all, Sunny Starscout was curious to see if her dragon teeth could succeed where her dragon claws could not in finally breaking the proverbial weakest link in the figurative chain comprising the mechanical monster.

The sensor’s cracks widened further, that much was certain.

Yet still, no matter how much pressure she applied, no matter how much she struggled as the automaton struggled to remove its head from her jaw’s grasp, the orange, crystalline material just would not fail fully.

And despite letting go temporarily to bite it anew many, many, MANY more times, she only had weakening, not collapse, to show for it.

Not just for the sensor, either.

Slowly, Sunny’s grip on the giant robot’s arms lessened, her own arms tiring from the endeavor. Calamity almost impacted her as a result when the automaton acquired leverage enough with one that it was able to fire at her face, the beam striking her forehead, an eyelid she just clocked in time, her nose, her upper lip, and her teeth.

“YEOWWWWWWW!”

She recoiled back from the painful scare following this. So much so that she was nearly struck by the wrist laser again and the one on the machine’s other hand.

Thankfully, just as they were about to converge on her visage, she regained control of her mind and refocused and reconcentrated her efforts solely on ensuring the robo-bug didn’t hit her by forcing its arms down with her own again, both emitters eventually stopping as once more it appeared they were without a clear or merely likely targeting solution.

“WOULD YOU MAYBE, KINDA, SORTA PLEEEAAASE STOP BEING SO ANNOYING FOR ONCE!? LIKE, JUST SOOOO ANNOYING!”

Unfortunately, it effectively said no in as many, silent words, ever persistent in its attempts to overpower her and reclaim the initiative in the fight. While it was true that now that she didn’t have to allocate air and energy to trying to chew through the visual sensor that she honestly felt she could sustain this combat with the giant robot ad infinitum even with the damage she’d experienced, she recalled she had not that kind of time. That she was working against the clock here. Sunny suddenly tried so hard to remember how long it’d been since turning into a dragon and leaping off the hill that if it’d been possible to sweat in her draconic state, she would’ve. She finally realized that even her most charitable estimates gave her only about four minutes left before she was back to being her usual smoothie mare self and had to wait ten more minutes before transforming again.

“Sunny! Sunny!”

Fire breathing was a no go. With her fortune, the visual sensor even now would withstand the effulgent force and leave her without enough normal breath that the situation, less than ideal as it already was, could completely reverse for the worse for her.

“Sunn! Yoo-hoo! Sunny!”

Yet, besides that, she couldn’t think of anything. Anything whatsoever different and decisive enough to turn the tide of battle once and for all. Nope. Nothing worth the likely risk of the status quo going to the giant robot’s favor and–

“HEY SUNNY!”

“WAHHH!”

On her snout. Izzy Moonbow’d just appeared on her snout. Of course, Sunny reclined in shock, nearly forgetting to keep the pressure on the automaton prior to correcting this potential mistake before it was an actual mistake and pinning the robo-bug down with more might.

Feeling safe and secure once more, or as much as she could in the scenario, Sunny’s wide eyes then turned towards the, relative to her current giganticness, little purple unicorn atop her scaly, reptilian nose, and asked the obvious. “IZ… IZZY? WHAT… WHAT’RE YOU DOING HERE!?”

“Sorry! Didn’t know how else to get your attention speedily enough.”

Sunny’s brows then furrowed furiously and she further asked, “AREN’T YOU SUPPOSED TO BE LOOKING AFTER THE OTHERS LIKE I SAID!?”

“Well, see, that’s the thing,” Izzy started, sounding about as intimidated by the transformed mare in front of the automaton below as a foal would be of animatronics of the two at a themepark. “I was, just like you told me, and then BOOM!” She clashed her hooves before her for emphasis. “The barrier my horn was holding up got busted into a BAJILLION pieces by a wandering laser beam!”

Sunny gasped. “IS EVERYPONY–”

“They’re fine!” the unicorn answered swiftly.

Sunny hardly had the time to breathe easy before her friend continued.

“But if you can’t shut down this oversized abacus, none of us are gonna be! By my count, you’ve only got three minutes left before you’re just a normal, not that tough or strong, pony again! Two minutes and fifty-five seconds now! Two minutes fifty-three! Two minutes and fifty–”

“ALRIGHT ALREADY IZ! I GOT THE IDEA MYSELF, LIKE, HALF A MINUTE AGO! DO YOU GOT A NEW POINT OR–?”

“Yes! I was getting to it!” Izzy pointed at Sunny’s mouth. “It’s your teeth! They’re the solution to all our problems right now! It’s been staring us in the face this whole time! Literally! For me anyways! Before I had to look away! Because they were so bright! Like I said earlier!”

Now Sunny looked confused at the unicorn. “WHAT? WEREN’T YOU WATCHING? I ALREADY TRIED CHOMPING AND IT DIDN’T WORK!”

“No! Not chomping! Smiling! That’s how we defeat it! That’s how we win!”

If she could’ve scratched her head with a hand or her tail, she would’ve. Such as things were, and since she couldn’t tilt her head for fear of her friend falling off, she simply raised a brow, asking, “I DON’T–HUH?”

“You wanna know why that laser went my way in the first place?”

Sunny nodded… uncertainly and cautiously, Izzy as still as a doll despite the movement.

“Because your teeth!” She pointed towards her mouth again. “When the giant robot was trying to break your hold and blasting at your face, it hit your teeth and deflected off towards me before you brought its hand back down and it stopped!”

The transformed mare’s incredible incredulity expressed on her mien at this, were it electricity, could’ve powered every city ever in existence in ponydom, and several in griffondom, and then some ten times over.

Izzy grumbled at Sunny’s disbelieving look and, pointing to her right, asked in rhetorical fashion, “If I’m wrong, then explain that extensive, several feet deep trench running on the ground right next to our friends.”

Sunny’s eyes followed to where the unicorn pointed, finding Zipp, Hitch, and Pipp still lying unconscious on the hill with the very trench she’d just mentioned spanning a great length beside them like she’d said, indeed.

“HUH.” Eyes narrowing in thought, she replayed the memory of what Izzy spoke of in her mind, inquisitive moving her tongue over the division of her draconic dentition struck by the beam and noting that despite the pain still there, nothing so much as the most miniature chip could be felt. This fact, combined with her recalling how tunnel visioned–and tunnel hearinged–she was, had her conclude the same as Izzy, Sunny voicing her agreement via gasping the words, “YOU’RE RIGHT…” Then, much more triumphantly and over joyfully, she yelled, “OF COURSE! THE POWER OF REFRACTION! DRAGONS WERE KNOWN FOR HAVING TEETH SO SHINY, LIGHT AND LIGHT-LIKE ENERGY BOUNCED OFF LIKE THEY HIT A SPRINGBOARD WHILE FALLING DOWN ON A POGOSTICK!”

“Which was why dragons would have one of their own replace broken mirror balls at parties when they couldn’t find any non-broken ones to use, remember?” Izzy added.

“I SURE DO NOW!” Sunny replied, nodding. “I MEAN, HOW’D I EVEN FORGET SUCH AN AWESOME DRAGON FACT!?”

“Probably ‘cause you were busy with other things,” Izzy said, shrugging. “It happen–ooooo! Butterfly!” she finished as a butterfly landed on her nose.

Nodding some more, Sunny said, “ALRIGHT THEN, IZ: LEAP AWAY FROM MY SNOUT AND GET YOURSELF AND THE OTHERS TO A SAFE DISTANCE! OH! AND ENJOY THE LIGHT SHOW! NOW GO! THERE’S NO TIME TO LOSE!”

“Hear ya loud and clear, Sunny! Your voice in this form kinda makes it hard not to!” Izzy said, sitting down, left hoof saluting, right hoof reaching into her mane to grab Hitch and Pipp’s sunglasses that she apparently had for some reason and placing them both on her face, one on her eyes, the other on her forehead. “Oh! And don’t forget Sunny,” in sing-song fashion, she finished with, “SMILE, SMILE, SMILE!”

Without any further words, Izzy leapt from Sunny’s nose–the butterfly on the unicorn’s nose flying away–landed after a triple somersault back on the hill, and galloped away out of Sunny’s sight at her left towards Zipp, Hitch, and Pipp.

Turning her attention back at the automaton, the transformed mare roared, “OKAY, ROBO-BUG: YOU WANNA PLAY LASER TAG!? THEN LET’S PLAY! JUST REMEMBER THAT WHAT GOES AROUND COMES AROUND!” Slowly, ever slowly, so that she maintained control and the plan proceeded as, well, planned, she decreased the amount of force used against the automaton and angled its hands towards her scowling visage. Predictably, the machine couldn’t help exploiting the opportunity, the ruby-red glow of its wrist lasers powering up reaching her eyes and,far more importantly, striking her teeth as she grinned, causing them to sparkle. “LET’S SEE HOW YOU LIKE IT, YOU TECHNO-FREAK!”

The wrist lasers completed their charging sequence and fired through the diminutive space separating them from the mien of the transformed mare.

And, just as she’d expected, both beams bounced back the moment they contacted her teeth and collided with the visual sensor.

“CHEEESEEEE!” Sunny said as best she could through her smile.

And, just like that, in less than ten seconds flat, it was all over. The laser beams broke through the glass-like material entirely in a wave of sparks and destroyed electronics, the wrist lasers stopped, and the giant robot’s head fell back upon the ground along with the rest of its form.

With the largest of sighs, Sunny closed her eyes and her mouth, let go, and fell over backwards onto her own back, a titanic thud resounding throughout the hill, giving thanks to Faust for every fraction of a second she felt the serenity and accomplishment that then hugged her physical and metaphysical self.

For finally, her task was finished.

And, as it turned out, so too was the night.

She reopened her eyes and looked over to her right, the brightness and warmth her oculi sensed being confirmed upon witnessing the very sun that’d once been lifted up every morning by Princess Twilight, Princess Celestia before her, and the most fortunate unicorns in all the land before her, rising over the dark storm clouds of the eventide before, and bringing with it the promise of a whole, new day.

“Glorious,” she thought, tiredly. “Simply… glorious.”

Like what’d happened prior, the hourglass symbol of black and white at the base of her neck glew red in perfect synchrony with ten rather rapid and a little loud beeps.

Beep.

Once again, a flash of emerald light radiated from said hourglass symbol, rendering Sunny back into the friendly, neighborhood smoothie mare she truly was, even if now she had an immovable, mysterious, magic, ultra super powerful alien watch adamantly set on her wrist.

“That’s still gonna take some getting used to,” she said to herself in her mind, tilting her head slightly to her left to look at the device there that’d literally fell out of nowhere. “Still, I got all the time in the world to figure out this little puzzle here. Me–” She smiled again, like she had when she’d experienced her childhood dream of being a dragon at the sound of approaching hoofsteps, and looked up to find Izzy trotting over Sunny’s other–and still unconscious–friends following and floating above the ground in the glowing grip of her magic. “And the best friends a pony could ask for.”

As Izzy stopped before her, speaking a mile a minute she was in such amazements and joyousness, hopping around her and telling her how awesome her achievement was–Zipp, Hitch, and Pipp slowly groaning awake between the rays of the early morning and Izzy having them hover up and down as they trailed her as she went up and down–Sunny happiness blasted off into outer space. So tremendous was it, that to not sing the song that then reentered her thoughts would’ve made her feel as sad as she had when she was wandering the woods upon awakening and leaving the cave the night before.

“Oh Mister Sun, Sun, Mister Golden Sun,

Please shine down on me!”

Sunny Starscout was not simply just okay in that moment.

Sunny Starscout, was okie-dokie-lokie.

And Then There Were Ten: ACT 1

And Then There Were Ten: ACT 1:

Have you ever had a memory or dream or just experience so amazing, so tremendous, so unbelievably pure in its perfection that just the lack of it made you want to cry oceans? Even if things weren’t bad per say by any of imagination’s contortions? Sunny Starscout did.

Sunny Starscout was not okay.

In her case the memory or dream or experience was all the above, and that night, had befallen her in the form of the second harder than the realization by the pegasi of Zephyr Heights that their monarchs were given to flights of fibbing over flying. It’d been awhile since its full force struck her. Well beyond a year. Even during the lowest points of her big adventure with tons of fun to bring back friendship and fellowship to Equestria several months back, she’d only had to deal with glimpses, fleeting stills of eternity and its garden. Not the entirety of the pulchritudinous, if lugubrious, motion picture from Acts 1 to 3 as she just had.

It was to nopony’s surprise then that she awoke from her sleep with a fitful start, standing up on all hooves with all the fore-warning Izzy gave that fateful day she just strolled right into town, though with far less friendliness and far further fret furrowed into her features.

“Stay sunny, Sunny. Stay sunny,” she whispered, both to keep herself calm and keep from waking up her friends as they still slumbered soundly in the cave they’d taken refuge for the night after Hitch got them all lost. “Remember what day taught you about breathing. Remember, remember.”

She placed her left fore-hoof on her chest and began the deep breathing exercise she’d been taught. One atypically grand inhalation followed by a short, staccato succession of three very short exhalations. As she repeated this for the better part of a minute, she fluttered her eyes shut and then open, shut and open, shut and open until she felt sleepy and the peace that accompanied it overwhelmed the despondency weighing her down like a brick horseshoe.

Ever slowly, she found herself kneeling and laying back onto her side, resting her head upon the nice soft rock pillow she’d settled on for the night, drifting back to that harmonious realm of dreams once the domain of Princess Luna. She thought of all the things that were good and true and beautiful in that great, big, off-kilter, topsy-turvy world of hers. All the things that relaxed her, put her at ease, and ever had made her smile.

Sunshine. Ladybugs. Clapping her hooves. Doing a little shake. Smoothies. Her friends.

Her family.

This time, the tears tumbled out her eyes and down her face as she jumped awake onto her hooves, and she had to cover her visage to keep her sniffling down as not to alarm her friends. She did not, could not, wish to bother them. But she couldn’t stay.

So, carefully, taking extra care to avoid accidental splashing in any large enough pool of water in her path, Sunny left the cave and her friends behind. She had no idea where she was going or where she’d end up, but she did know she’d be back. Just as soon as she cleared her head.

As she entered the forest nearby, she hung her head down low and whispered a silent prayer to The Beyond. “Please, Faust, help me settle my thoughts. When the sun comes up, help me to face my friends with all the smiles and sunshine they expect.”

She looked up between the leaves and the branches of the trees around her, doing her best to try and find all the heavenly glory of the moon. But even in those rare instances where she could find the night sky through all that canopy, she could barely see it and its accompanying stars, the storm clouds that had confined her and her friends to the cave in the first place remaining ever present even considering it was only mildly drizzling.

But hope still lingered, and as such, to hold onto something so preciously pure and fleeting, she began to do so as she’d often had after bringing back the arcane force of amity to her home and folk.

Sunny Starscout, closing her eyes, started to sing:

“Oh, Mister Sun, Sun, Mister Golden Sun,

Please shine down on me.