Equestria Girls: Cataclysm

Fluttershy’s binoculars lowered from Crystal City in the distance, squinting lightly in the sunlight. Her teal eyes turned to find her alicorn companion where she was busy pacing on the overpass that they both stood on. “I can’t really see into its streets from here, but there’s probably tons of zombies…”

It was not immediately apparent that Twilight heard her, so fervent was her pacing and transfixed her gaze on the pavement as she walked this way and that, threatening to dig a rut in front of their silent 80’s Mustang. “Where is Canterlot relative to Crystal City again? It’s to the south, right?”

Fluttershy nodded. “Far south, on the other end of the county. I’m not sure how far that is exactly…” Fluttershy looked back at the cityscape where it hung suspended above the rows of other raised overpasses in the knots of interconnected roadways ahead of them. “I’ve never been to Crystal City before.”

Twilight’s thoughts were spinning somewhat, and she was doing her best to chase them around and orient them in a somewhat organized matter despite the tizzy she was attempting to think past. This was a sudden development, and one that felt very significant to her, and as such warranted decisiveness and effectiveness. At least, so it felt in the moment. “Okay…so how do we handle this?”

Fluttershy examined the city from afar a few moments longer, then lowered her binoculars back down again to look at her friend. “What do you mean?”

“This is a big deal. Crystal City is huge, and it’s got to be a massive concentration of zombies.” Turn. “I can’t even imagine how many of them there must be in those streets. Thousands.” Turn. “Tens of thousands.”

“Probably hundreds of thousands,” Fluttershy added, tone growing a little quieter. “It’s one of the biggest cities around us. And it’s always been a big tourist destination too, so that probably doesn’t help…”

Twilight nodded, pursing her lips together. The anxiety was all over her face, though not at any one thing in particular. Turn. “I want to go in there.”

“Why?”

Twilight opened her mouth for a moment, then closed it. Her pacing hitched for a second. “I just…I need to look.” The endless stream of quiet clopping resumed. “I need to see.” Turn. “There could be ponies we know down there, and I need to go through and make sure.”

There was a second of hesitation before Fluttershy spoke up, if with great timidity: “…um, I don’t, um…think there’s any, um, ponies, um…down there…”

Twilight’s pacing stopped to give Fluttershy a confused look. A half second later, she rolled her eyes and resumed. “People. Humans. Whatever.” She grumbled under her breath, “Stupid earth phrasing…”

“Um…in all fairness, I really doubt that anyone is still down there, pony or otherwise. The city is the first place we tried to escape, when everything went wrong. It was…um…bad. Really bad. And it’s not like it’s gotten better, with most everyone dead…”

Twilight’s brow furrowed, and she shook her head. It was not something she disagreed with, but… “I need to. I have to see.”

“Why?”

Twilight took a breath, “Cadance. Cadance lives here. I ne-“

”Human Cadance lives here.”

Twilight’s hooves halted with a harder clop, and she pinched her eyes closed. Even before Fluttershy kept talking, their previous conversation came rushing back to her.

But Fluttershy kept talking regardless, unintentionally emphasizing her own point. “I don’t know how all this, um…inter-world stuff works, Twilight, but it obviously isn’t perfectly what you understand it as back home. I only met you because you entered our world. As far as either of us know, whoever this Cadance is to you back in Equestria is nothing like what she is here on earth.” A beat, followed by a less confident, “…um, maybe, that is. I can’t say for sure, but just from what I know…she might know a you, but not this you. Not pony you.”

There wasn’t a response at first. Several seconds passed before Twilight sucked in a long, slow breath through her nose, and she opened her eyes as her hooves slowly picked up their movements again, at a fraction of the pace they were before. “Cadance is the Princess of Love back on Equus. She rules the Crystal Empire, which is…you know,” she waved a hoof in the direction of the city, “Crystal City earth-equivalent, obviously. She’s very close to my family. She foalsat me all the time growing up, and she married my brother two years ago. She’s always been like a big sister to me.” The smile was sneaky, how it crept up on Twilight. “She’s like everyone’s big sister.”

Fluttershy was quiet as she listened. Her gaze touched briefly on Crystal City in the distance, then found Twilight again, voice just above that of a whisper. “…billions were lost, Twilight.”

”You made it,” was the cool reply. “Applejack and Rarity made it. At least two of the Crusaders made it.”

Fluttershy said nothing at that.

For a time, the only sound was the sound of hooffalls. “I have to try. I don’t exp…” The understanding reached her at that moment, and she nearly stumbled in her pacing. It took a second to recover, and when she resumed speaking, her tone was low. “…I don’t expect to find her either, but I have to try. She’s a beautiful person, one of the most beautiful, wonderful people I know of. She’s worth checking for, even if she has never met any version of me in her life, even if it’s pointless. If there’s any chance she can be brought to safety, I need to take it. I need to.”

Fluttershy, again, said nothing.

Twilight took a breath, slowly steeling herself as she cast it back out, posture lifting. “I’ll do it alone if I have to.”

“You won’t have to.” Her gaze remained neutral, but Fluttershy’s voice had a soft warmth to it.

“You don’t need to help if you don’t want to.”

“I do want to. It’s for a friend.” A beat. “…we should probably think about this, though. There’s only two of us here, and I don’t have a lot with me right now.”

“Do you have a weapon?”

Fluttershy lifted her pale yellow shirt a little on her left side, better revealing a brown sheath on her waist, from which the handle of a knife could be seen. “It’s not much. I’m not the best with it…I have the revolver in the car, but there’s only um…ten bullets, I think.”

Twilight nodded, frowning as she thought on this.

“I’m equipped to look around. Not much more than that.” She paused. “I think we should stick to that for now. We can always come back.”

“I can’t wait.”

“You’re going to have to, Twilight, or we’re going to take some risks that aren’t worth taking right now. There’s a little girl back at the ranch that needs me. My friends need me. Besides…” Fluttershy’s tone lowered. “I don’t think I would be able to live with myself if I turned around here and let you go out alone, and you never came back, all because you couldn’t wait just a little more.”

Twilight didn’t say anything, but the fact that her pacing resumed spoke enough of her distress.

“Look at it this way: anyone who’s in that city and has survived has done so for months in the most dangerous place in the world to be right now. If they lasted this long without help, they’ll probably be okay a little while longer. Right?”

“Right,” Twilight breathed, willing herself to believe it. It was a logical conclusion, but it was not a logical part of her brain that was crying out for action. The logical part of her brain wasn’t scared for Cadance and wasn’t thinking about how much she wanted her to be okay and to throw her front legs around her and squeeze and never let go. But this was a situation of tactics, and tactics demand logic and reasoning in order to function. As loud as it was being, and as important as it was to who Twilight Sparkle was, that emotional part of her mind needed to be ignored right now. “Then we do what we came here for: we scout it out.”

“No risks…”

“Nothing dangerous.” Twilight nodded. “Then we go home, and…I guess we take it from there.”

Fluttershy smiled, and for a moment Twilight saw relief in her expression, though only for a moment. “I’m not sure how busy the roads are going to be, but…”

“Busy enough, I’m guessing.” Twilight extended flapped her wings at their full length in anticipation of flight. “Hopefully good enough to drive around. Come on, let’s get down there and take a look.”

Fluttershy nodded, stepping away from the concrete barrier of the overpass to get in the car.

Twilight listened to her wings as they drummed against the air, flapping hard enough to lift her hooves from the pavement. As her forward movement provoked the song of the wind in her ears, she listened to that as well, doing whatever she could to occupy her thoughts and drown out the disturbing image that flashed through her mind: the beautiful pink eyes of one of the most important people in Twilight’s life falling upon her, reflecting back not a friend or an adoptive daughter, but an alien and a stranger.

"Mmmm...sorry, darling~! Go fish."

"OH COME ON!"

Three sets of laughter erupted. Sweetie Belle was not among them. The cards spilling out of her hand likely had something to do with it, as it was getting difficult to physically hold them all with her small hands.

The living room of the farmhouse was dark and lightless under its own power, of which there was none, and it was not helped by the fact that every window in the building was nailed shut and boarded over with multiple two-by-fours that blocked all light. The solution was a bit crude, but effective: the front and the back door both were wide open, allowing the light to flow into the room and illuminate the thrilling game of Go-Fish that the two pairs of sisters were currently engaged in.

The Apples were comfortably snug together on one of the two red couches, Apple Bloom resting up against her big sister in her lap. Rarity and Sweetie Belle sat in the adjacent couch that formed an L-shape with a rounded table between them, where the war of cards was currently being hosted. Rarity had her splint off at this point - the bones had securely set, as far as could be told (everyone was trying to ignore how fast it had been, with moderate success), though it remained heavily bruised and weak, so it remained wrapped in extra padding and was generally unused. It took up residence across her belly where she lounged luxuriously across the couch; Sweetie, meanwhile, bounced back and forth between the floor, standing, and pressed up against Rarity as the game progressed.

"Sugarcube, I think yer supposed to drop yer pairs if ya got 'em," Applejack told her. "Ya gotta have at least one pair in all that."

Sweetie was practically juggling her cards at this point, and several of them spilled all over the floor in front of and onto the table. "Well I can't tell because there's TOO MANY CARDS! AAAGH!"

The game was going well. Not for Sweetie Belle, perhaps, but overall the atmosphere was pleasantly jovial. Apple Bloom was quite at ease; she was more animated when they first started, but as time passed and games racked up, she fell back into a comfortable quiet, sitting up against Applejack, who held onto her with one arm and rested her chin atop her head. She'd dozed off at one point, and Applejack let her nap for the few minutes that she did, coming to in a haze she never totally recovered from, but Applejack was pretty sure she was deeply relaxed rather than sleepy.

Rarity, meanwhile, was insufferably smug, looking past the edge of her two remaining cards at her furious younger sibling with a taunting gaze. As soon as she had picked up on the fact that Sweetie Belle was only targeting her for cards, she had made it her life's mission during this game to make it as agonizingly difficult for Sweetie to figure out what her cards were and continue to play mind games in order to mess her up. She'd been juggling between one and three cards for the last eight turns, and she likely could have won the game several times by now, but she remained in it expressly for the purpose of toying with Sweetie Belle, who was by far the destined loser of this game. Judging by the way she had all but thrown her cards across the room, her checking for pairings did not seem likely, and Rarity was mentally chalking this up as a win, regardless of the outcome of the game itself.

The actual victory was a surprise: Apple Bloom plucked a two out of Applejack's hand, and then tossed down all six of her cards, which revealed themselves to be three pairs that she never put down until now. "I win!"

Applejack, who knew for a fact that she had looked into her hand to pick that card, chose not to say anything, not because she felt her sister had any right to the win, but because she took pity on Sweetie Belle, who seemed intent on digging the hole she'd been allowed to dig deeper and deeper out of pure stubbornness. The girl needed to be rescued from herself, and Applejack was happy to let that happen with the game ending. "Alright, good game, y'all. We want another round, er we feelin' somethin else?"

At that moment, there was a knock against the open back door, and a head of brown hair leaned in the door frame, tied back in a ponytail beneath a baseball cap. Alex found Applejack, asking the question with her words, but with an expression that suggested it wasn’t actually a question: “You have a minute?”

Well, there was worse timing. Applejack gently gave Apple Bloom a nudge, rising up off the couch to stretch her legs that had since begun to fall asleep where she’d been getting sat on; pins and needles rippled across her thighs and down her calves, and she tried not to hobble. “I’ll be back, y’all pick somethin’ good. An’ don’t you girls let Rare draw nothin’ for me while I’m out!”

“Oh darling, I’m hurt~ Wherever is your trust in me?”

“In a locked box under my bed, where I keep all my other bad ideas.” Applejack smirked at the laughter behind her despite herself and limped outside, doing her best to shake off her discomfort as she joined Alex outside.

Alex began walking towards the garage, and Applejack followed. “You guys are having fun, I see.”

“Eh, tryin’.” Applejack’s senses tingled, which she suspected meant that whatever they actually were going to talk about would be withheld until they reached the garage. Made sense, seeing as it was the closest thing that the settlement head had to an office, though it wasn’t the best tone-setter for whatever it is she wanted to talk about. “Flutters pinned me down an' wanted me to spend a lil more time with the girls, so just tryin’ to follow ‘er advice.”

Alex didn’t follow up on the small talk. She lead Applejack to the garage, opening the wooden door and allowing the farmer to step inside. As with the farmhouse, there was no lighting in the fixture that lay embedded in the ceiling, so the door was left open so that the conversation was not held in total darkness. “Alright, we need to talk.”

“So I gathered.” Applejack leaned up against the barren green tractor that sat in the middle of the garage, arms crossed lightly over her chest. “What's up?”

Alex took a few steps over to the wall farthest from the metal shutter doors, coming to a stop there - it was a bit out of the cone of light that the door provided, but it was not so dark to render what was there invisible. “Notice anything here?”

Applejack followed her gaze, squinting in the dark. She hadn’t been in here often enough to recognize what was meant to be there, but she could faintly make out the outline of a coat hook among a few others of its ilk nailed to the wall in that spot. “Nothin’ in particular, but I imagine you’re gonna tell me.”

“Remember that new guy we got yesterday?”

Applejack processed this for a moment. She then noted that the spot Alex was gesturing to was empty, and she frowned. “Sorta. Didn’t see much of ‘im at all, mighta saw ‘im once. Where’s he at?”

“Gone.” Alex now turned to face Applejack, hands on her hips.

Didn’t like that. “Somethin’ get ‘im?”

“Yeah, his nerves. His stuff was gone this morning, I think he slipped off in the night. Probably on his way back to the refugee center, or fucking off into the wilderness, I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.”

Definitely didn’t like that. Applejack didn’t say anything this time.

Alex let the silence hang for a few seconds. One of her hands left her hip to rise to her face, where she kneaded the bridge of her nose between two fingers, head hanging forward. She took in a quiet breath before she began: “You know, I’ve been trying to avoid this topic for the last week, hoping to myself that whatever part of me that needs to break down enough to make it seem normal will do so and I won’t have to actually deal with it, but it just started to affect my job, so…” She tossed her hand up, letting it slap back to her side as she smiled a humorless smile at Applejack. “Now we both get to deal with it together. Isn’t that lovely?”

Applejack didn’t say anything. She met Alex’s gaze with an expressionless stare.

“I think it’s time we address the tiny technicolor horse in the room here.” The faux-cheer bled out rapidly and died, and for the first time in this conversation, Applejack quit getting the tingle that something was being withheld. “What is she?”

“A friend.”

“No, I mean, what is she? What actually is that thing?” There wasn’t any trace of the incredulity or grasping that had been present the last time this topic had been broached; Alex was leaning forward, tone and expression deathly serious and focused. “I may not have worked on a ranch before this, and call me crazy here, but I’m going to hazard a guess and say that whatever the hell they do on farms in Canterlot, the animals you guys have do not typically include purple flying horses that shoot fucking laser beams from their horns like a goddamn unicorn.”

“Alicorn.”

”I don’t give a fuck what it’s called.” Alex took several steps closer to Applejack, jaw set and eyes hard. “This isn’t a game and I don’t have the luxury of playing it, Applejack. Does this face,” she traced a circle around her head, “look like the face of someone who’s playing?”

Applejack looked at that face, but she did not commentate on it. Her expression was not quite grim, but it lacked any semblance of positivity, and her voice matched as she asked, “Whattya want from me?”

“Answers. What is she?”

Applejack let her head hang forward. This time, she did not withhold the sigh. “She’s a princess from another world. Place called Equestria.”

“Horse princess from horse world. Okay, great.” It was difficult to tell if Alex was saying that in incredulous mockery or genuinely doing her best to parse what would otherwise come off as insanity. Perhaps both. “Why is she here? What does she want?”

“She’s here cuz…” Applejack had to consider that for a moment, and she paused. “…way she explained it, she was just checkin’ up on us an’ got pulled into this whole mess like the rest of us, an’ now she’s stuck here.”

“Here, like, on earth?”

Applejack nodded.

“How do you know this thing?”

“First of all, I’d really rather ya not call ‘er a thing, cuz Twilight ain’t no thing.” She looked squarely at Alex as she said this, and when she found no sympathy in her expression, she went on regardless, tone guarded. “She came to us back when we was at school, about four months ago, ish? Somethin’ got stolen from ‘er and we helped her get it back. Cleaned up a mess for us while she was at it.”

“Define ‘mess.’”

There was a brief hesitation. “One of uh…one of the folk from her world came in ahead of her by a couple years an’-“

“So there’s more of them. More alicorns.”

“It wasn’t an alicorn, and sh-“

“What is it, then?”

“Unicorn.”

Alex’s eyes closed for a moment. “So there are alicorns, and also unicorns involved now.”

“Eyup.”

“Great.” There was not a gram of enthusiasm behind that word, but several kilograms of exasperation. Alex’s eyes opened again. “Keep talking. ‘Mess.’ Mess how?”

Applejack hesitated. Alex’s gaze was squarely upon her, and for a few moments the farmer was not sure how to get around this subject, because she had a feeling how this was going to go. “Right,” she started, carefully. “So…this gal, uh, Sunset Shimmer showed up at our school one day, disguised as a human.” Alex blanched, and Applejack waited for the interruption, but it didn’t come, so she went on. “She went back to her world to steal somethin’ from Twilight, and made her way back to start messin’ with us.” Alex continued to stare, and Applejack tried not to fidget. “She uh…she caused a whole lot of problems, but the whole thing was about tryin’ to raise an army an’ invade Equestria with it.”

“She tried to raise an army,” Alex repeated, slowly. “Of us.”

Applejack nodded.

“Using something she stole from Twilight.”

“Her crown. Had some uh, powers and such associated with it, I don’t really know how it all works...”

“And?”

“…an’…uh…we stopped her.”

“How?”

“Went through a whole song an’ dance over it, but we uh…we stole the thing back an’ Twilight left with it.”

“And I don’t suppose she has that thing on her now?”

Applejack shrugged. “You see her wearin’ a crown? I don’t see no pockets it can go in.”

“I’ve seen her wearing bags before.”

Applejack shrugged again. “Feel like we woulda heard or seen somethin’ ‘bout it by now. She cares a lot about us.”

Alex pinched the bridge of her nose, breathing out a very unconvinced, “Sure she does.”

This made Applejack’s frown deepen. “Yes, she does. I realize ya ain’t got much reason to trust ‘er yerself, but I been around Twilight long enough to know she’s an earnest sort, an’ I consider her a close friend ‘a mine, so if ya don’t mind maybe easin’ up a little on the tone with ‘er, I’d be thankful.”

“She’s a fucking alien,” Alex snapped. “She’s a fucking alien who hid among us in a disguise, has powers that could blow any of us away at any time if she felt like it, who has infiltrated our ranks before-“

“It ain’t like that!”

Alex talked over her, “-and you want me to watch my tone? You w- do you realize the position this puts me in right now?! I’ve got people who are coming in, talented people with the skills I desperately need to get this settlement off the ground, who are taking one look at this thing here at this ranch and going, ‘What the fuck?’ And I don’t know! I don’t know what the fuck, Applejack! They’ve got questions, I can’t answer them, and I don’t blame them for not wanting to get involved! I mean fuck, I didn’t want to get involved! I got this close,” she held up her index finger and thumb, spaced barely a sliver apart, “from just turning back around and walking away after she came out of the trees with you, I got this close to going ‘fuck this’ and walking off. The only reason I haven’t is because I have hundreds of people counting on me! Hundreds of scared, hurting people who don’t know what the future holds, and my ability to help them is in jeopardy because of a fucking talking horse!”

Applejack didn't say anything - she wouldn't be heard in this moment anyway.

“I can’t get people to stay! I can’t get people to show up!“ Alex threw an arm at the empty coat rack. “I know exactly why he left, and I don’t blame him at all for not wanting to stick around, he didn’t ask for this shit! He was talking to me about it, and I didn’t know what to tell him, and honest to god, I feel like what I’ve been told is even worse!” Alex’s head swiveled back to Applejack. “What do I tell them, Applejack? What am I supposed to say? What do I like- a-and I’m not like being facetious here, what do I tell them?” Her voice was picking up a frantic quality to it. “What do I- what am I supposed to say? I don’t know what to tell people to make them comfortable with this, do you?”

Applejack swallowed, but didn’t say anything, because she didn’t know either. Her expression said as much.

Alex brought her hands up to head, dragging them down her face. The intensity was gone, replaced by the stress and anxiety of a woman in an unwinnable position. “I came out here to be able to provide for families who’ve lost everything and are going to start dropping like flies come winter. Lives are depending on this, on me getting this shitty little ranch turned into something that can start filling stomachs and providing shelter. I was supposed to get half a dozen people by now, and after taking one look at the thing living here with us, only one of them fucking showed up to work. Then he left in the night anyway because this was too much for him. People are talking about this, Applejack, I know they are, it’s only going to get worse. This will freak people out. This is freaking me out. How am I going to get any help if she’s here, scaring everyone away? What do I tell them to get them to stay?”

A sinking feeling had slowly been making its way over Applejack the longer this conversation went on, and at this point it was becoming oppressive. Breathing was getting difficult. “Whattya want from me?” she asked grimly.

“I want you to give me something.” Alex’s hands fell away to her sides. ”Anything. Just give me anything here…look I- I can see, alright? I’ve got eyes, I know you’re close to this thing, and like I- I don’t get it, and it freaks me out a little bit to think about it too much, but like- like it’s- I don’t think it’s going to hurt me, I guess, I don’t know, but I can tell you’re all close, and I know exactly what you’re going to say if I tried to chase it off, or make it leave, or like…” She fumbled, stumbling over her own words, then brought her hands back to her head again, talking past her hands: “Just please give me something here, anything I can use. I don’t want to kick you guys out, I really really don’t, I don’t want to do that, I hate that’s what I’m left with, but I’m stuck. I’m stuck, and I need help. Give me something, anything. Anything at all.”

Applejack let her head hang. She wasn’t surprised. It would have been nice to say that this was out of the blue, and that it was a complete shock, but it wasn’t. Some part of her had been expecting it - there had been hopes that it would just be accepted, and that the conversation they were having right now wouldn’t happen, that Twilight would work her way into their hearts if she was just given sufficient time, but they were vain hopes at best, denial at worst. It would be nice if she had a defense ready, something airtight and concrete that didn’t boil down to ‘just trust me.’ Or, god forbid, ‘just trust her.’ Applejack trusted Twilight, but she didn’t expect anyone else to, especially as she was, and especially now, after everything that had happened. Truthfully, it was only just now that Applejack was considering for herself exactly how this situation appeared.

What was the difference between Twilight Sparkle or Sunset Shimmer and that monster that had nearly killed Rarity, when you got down to it? Both were inhuman things from beyond the stars, who arrived one day unbidden through portals and rifts into a world that was not their own, pursuing their agendas that endangered the lives of people that Applejack loved. Sure, the bedside manner of ponies was generally more agreeable, but there was a time when that wasn’t wholly true. Sunset Shimmer had once been entirely antagonistic, her intentions selfish and downright malevolent, in spite of her claims of not being a ‘monster.’ So she wouldn’t hurt a dog; but she would enslave a bunch of kids and intend to use them as a thrall army for an assault against a foreign state, because that was just so much better. Hundreds could have died. Maybe more.

Even Twilight hadn’t necessarily done what she did out of the goodness of her heart; that artifact of hers was vital to her world, and getting it back had begun as a pragmatic affair. Who was to say it didn’t remain that way, as nice as she was? Sure, she nearly stranded herself by calling what had turned out to be a bluff by Sunset to smash the portal, but that could have just been her seeing the bluff for what it was. Perhaps it wasn’t selfless at all; maybe she just knew that would work.

Was it really so strange to be viewing the monster that had nearly murdered Rarity and ponies from Equestria in the same light, with this in mind? Applejack trusted Twilight…whether or not she should was another question, one being asked only just now, and with an answer a bit too ambiguous for Applejack’s liking. Which, of course, raised a question of its own: if she didn’t know whether or not Twilight could be considered wholly trustworthy, how could she hope to convince anyone else that she was?

Maybe Alex was right. Maybe Twilight was a problem. And if it came down to it, and Applejack had to choose between one pony and the friends and family she would give anything to-

The knock to the open door caused both women to look with a start. Rarity stood there, knuckle against the door frame, a deep frown on her lips. "Oh, you want something? I'll give you something alright."

Applejack let her head fall once again, breathing a haggard sigh. How the hell did she even hear? "Rare..."

"Don't you Rare me," Rarity huffed, shifting her icy blue gaze to Alex. "And you! Wait for everyone's backs to be turned, then slink off into the shadows to discuss the fate of someone who isn't even in attendance? Hardly ladylike nor sporting of you, miss Alessandra."

She was on the backfoot at first, but Alex's expression quickly hardened. "This isn't exactly a normal circumstance."

"No, it's not." Rarity's hand on the arm not in a sling went to her hip. "But that doesn't change the fact that this is a thinking, feeling person being discussed, one who has been nothing but supportive of all of us this entire time. For something as important as whether or not it's good for her to live here, I find myself wholly disappointed that the first person you decided to pull aside to deal with it was Applejack and not Twilight herself. I don't suppose you intended for dialogue to ever reach her? Or was this going to one of those coveted surprise eviction parties I've heard so much about?"

Alex's expression grew increasingly steely. Her arms crossed over her chest as she turned fully to face Rarity. "And what would you have me do instead, miss Rarity? You want me to just walk up to a creature I don't understand, which I know can kill me immediately if it felt like it, and go, 'You gotta go.' Is that what you want me to do? Put my neck on the chopping block for something allegedly safe when I'm already worried about people's safety?"

When she spoke, Rarity's voice was so chilly enough to freeze helium: "It would certainly be a lot braver than going behind her back and putting a gun to the head of one of the most vulnerable members of our group where you know it'll affect her most." She cocked her head, like a bird contemplating how to best pluck out the eyes of the target of its fascination. "Are you trying to be different, or are you trying to perfect the art of extortion? They'll welcome you back to the center as a saint at this rate."

Alex uncrossed her arms very suddenly. Applejack was on her feet in a heartbeat, immediately interposing herself between the two women with one hand towards each of them. Alex pressed hard into one, and Rarity the opposite in turn. "Alright no more, none of this. We ain't doin' this, we ain't fightin', we ain't gettin' physical, nothin', y'all hear me?"

"She's trying to get rid of Twilight," Rarity seethed, all pretense of civility dropped - she practically had her fangs bared, venom rolling from her voice like coils of steam, all the while Alex cast a bloodthirsty leer back, dangerously silent. "She's trying to hold us hostage and get rid of Twilight because she's scared!"

"I'm scared, Rarity!" Applejack's voice was like a bass drum with the way it boomed in the garage. "I'm scared! She's scared! We're all fuckin' scared! An' right now, what I'm most scared of is you startin' a fight and makin' this a thousand times worse than it needs to be! If you can't cool it, get the hell in the van, an' don't you come out till yer ready to handle this like an adult! We do not need this right now!"

Rarity's face blazed with fury, and Applejack burned right back at her, the air practically rippling with heat as their stares locked together like crossed swords. Unstoppable force met immovable object - two incredibly stubborn, willful women dug in their heels and dared the other to make the first move over a line that neither of them wanted to be the one to cross. They would not start this battle, but they yearned to wage it, and they would both happily finish whatever came about as a result, unwilling to proceed but similarly not willing to be the one to back down in the heat of the moment.

The standoff lasted for nearly a minute. Eventually, though, it was Rarity who gave ground. Her eyes closed, posture shifting such that she was no longer leaning forward, taking a long, slow breath in through her nose, and then releasing it silently. Her back straightened, the muscles in her face relaxed, and she opened her eyes back up - though they remained practically luminous with blue-hot anger, the defiance was missing from them. "Fine," she said, voice level and every word carefully measured. "I am willing to talk about this."

Applejack gave a very terse nod. She turned her head, looking Alex square in her brown eyes. Alex met her gaze unflinchingly, and the two stared one another down for a couple more seconds before Applejack was content. The anger was still just as present in her face too, honed and ready to be brought down like the head of an axe, but not for no good reason. Never for no good reason.

To call the air "calm" would be disingenuous. The atmosphere in this garage was charged enough that it was a wonder there weren't sparks dancing between their eyelashes every time one of the three women blinked, but at least for the moment, there was peace. Peace so thin it was see-through, perhaps, but peace nonetheless.

"Alright," Applejack said smoothly. Her tone was soft, though the iron was faintly audible just beneath the surface. She glanced between both girls one last time, then gradually began to lower her hands holding them apart. When they did not move to immediately flay each other, Applejack dared to relax, and dropped her arms completely. "So let's talk."

The Crystal City of earth was a unique location in the world of humans. Its architecture overwhelmingly favored reds, blues, purples, and oranges, which - when combined with its style that most closely resembled a variety of gothic - made the city almost impossible to misidentify based on appearance alone. Most roads had a dull purple or gray tone to them as opposed to the typical black of standard asphalt with seamless sidewalks looking like it was all strewn out at once, and wherever possible the windows were tall and narrow with a rounded triangular top, like every opening of every structure had at one point been considered as a candidate for stained glass in a cathedral.

Like its neighbor Canterlot, Crystal City had a very distinct sense of cultural identity that was visible on every corner and in every brick it was paved with. Large archways and decorated pillars of carved stone loomed around all roads and paths to the city like arcane gateways. Past this point, the aesthetic of basic, unremarkable interstate infrastructure suddenly shifted to the deliberate layout and bold colors of Crystal City, giving the sense of having passed through some kind of barrier into another world entirely.

Even as it sat lightless and still, it was still a beautiful place. Pillars and earthen temple-like constructions stood tall over the barren streets, surviving their makers with a solemn kind of nobility - monuments to those that came before, telling the tale of the late humanity that gave them form in near-holy silence. Were there enough people left to host such an award, it would likely be in the running for title of the most gorgeous graveyard on earth.

The streets were not exactly crammed full of bodies, but every block across every street in the city had at least a dozen or more humanoid shapes idly shuffling around, awaiting something killable to come into range so they could make it one of them. Every shape and size of human imaginable, every condition that a body could be left in…zombies you wouldn’t know were dead if it wasn’t an apocalypse, zombies that looked like the classic decayed stereotype, zombies with a thin layer of skin sitting atop nothing more than a skeleton, corpulent zombies, muscular zombies that looked like they still did bodywork, zombies without legs, zombies without heads whatsoever (so much for the old ‘go for the head’ trope), zombie dogs, zombie children…all of these and more were visible somewhere down there. There were thousands, easily. More than could be counted. Twilight had never seen so many of them in one place before, and the full breadth of the cataclysm that ravaged this world laid bare was enough to make it hard to breathe.

So many dead. So much loss...

Twilight tried not to let her head spin too much as she circled past another area that looked to her like a neighborhood of some description, though truthfully she had a hard time making out what some of these buildings were. She assumed it was a neighborhood based on what she knew of the architecture of the Crystal Empire back home, but a lot of it did not translate well to the world of humans. Humans had needs that differed from those of ponies, and so their infrastructure differed to match. The Crystal Empire back home didn’t do rain, for example, so slanted roofs were not useful to ponies there except as an aesthetic choice. It was always clear back home; the crystal heart saw to that. Slanted roofs and gutters to prevent the pooling of rain were a staple here, however, as humans lacked magic and, evidently, a crystal heart of their own...or at least, one with magic powers.

There was a certain surreality to flying by and looking down. Everything that made the place recognizable as the humans' Crystal Empire analogue was similarly off in some manner; every reminder of home was a reminder that it was not home. The pattern recognition portion of Twilight’s brain was having quite a trip working all of this out, and it left Twilight with this vague sense of wrongness everywhere she looked. Everything was recognizable, but it was all wrong.

Twilight had been doing a decent job with avoiding it for the most part, but analyzing the layout of Crystal City’s streets and seeing how much it looked familiar yet foreign opened something up in her mind, and she could no longer ignore the homesickness where it gently ached at the lowermost chamber of her heart. She missed seeing things that she didn’t just recognize, but understood. She missed seeing other ponies. She missed Cadance. She missed Celestia. She missed looking out at the world and not wanting to cry at what she saw. She missed home. She missed Spike...

...keep it together, Twilight, she thought to herself, swallowing against her tightening throat. Crystal City means Canterlot is around. Just hold it together for a few more weeks, and everything will work out. Everything will be fine.

Twilight passed Crystal City limits and turned to the south, following the perimeter where human world became Crystal City till the roads leading out became thick and double-wide. Huge mounds of crashed vehicles lay fused together in various states, and beside one pile in particular was a functional-looking 80s Mustang. A girl with pink hair and a pale yellow shirt stood atop the wrecks for extra altitude, binoculars raised to her eyes.

Twilight came in low. Her wings flared back slowly, feathers ramming through the air more where they had previously slipped through it, pulling her momentum back such that she had to start beating her wings to avoid falling to the asphalt. She flapped and reversed her forward motion more and more, then neatly let her hooves reach the pavement with four near-simultaneous clops, giving herself a good shaking off. It wasn’t necessary, but giving all her fur and feathers a good jostling after the constant, rhythmic flow of the wind pushing against it from the same direction for extended periods of time felt satisfying to her. “Anything happen?” she called up, trotting over to the car.

Fluttershy shook her head, dropping her binoculars to jot down something on a piece of paper. “It’s been all quiet.”

Twilight nodded at this. She waited until Fluttershy had made her notes before her horn flashed to life, retrieving both the paper and the pencil utensil that presented themselves to her in a magenta glow. She plucked the pencil out of the air with her mouth and rested it against the hood of the car at Fluttershy’s feet, beginning to contribute her own share of sketching to the steadily growing (very) rough map of Crystal City, based on nothing but observations and guesses about what everything was. Calling it a ‘map’ was a bit on the generous side, borderline self-flatteringly so, but it showed where things were, if only in the loosest sense. If the horseshoe fits…

“Twilight, do you have the time? My watch died.”

Twilight paused her rough sketch, then raised her front leg up, examining the device around her wrist above her hoof. “Shix shirty choo,” she said past the pencil in her teeth. When Twilight finished her sketch and glanced up at Fluttershy, she had taken a seat on the wreckage, slumped forward and rubbing her eyes with the base of her palms. “You alright?”

Fluttershy nodded, though she did not stop rubbing her eyes immediately. “Tired.”

Twilight pursed her lips somewhat, glancing at their ‘map’ and the wobbly, uneven shapes sprawled across it, then looked up at the sun, which had begun to take on a faint but not insignificant citrine hue. It was fairly lower in the sky than when they had started - understandable, considering it had been a few hours since then. She was feeling a faint fatigue as well, but not so much that she wanted to quit. Far from it: Twilight had started something that mattered to her, and she wanted to keep at this for however long it took to get it done, exhaustion be damned. In fact, she wanted to go in, not just sit back and take poor notes. She wanted to inspect the area that she was reasonably certain was the school here, given its proximity to the center of town and the way the schools seemed to equate to castles in whatever weird logic decided these things. She wanted to do this now, and she didn't want to rest until either she had what she wanted or knew it to be impossible.

Twilight reconsidered, however, when she looked back at Fluttershy and realized she could see the dark spots under her eyes from here. She looked at the paper in her hooves, bit the inside of her cheek, then looked back at Fluttershy. “Do you want to call it here?”

Fluttershy blinked slowly, continuing to gaze ahead at the city - her eyelids looked so heavy when she did. “I can last a little longer, I think.”

“You look exhausted.”

Fluttershy’s gaze fell to her lap. She didn’t acknowledge it, but she also didn’t refute it.

Twilight gave her wings several good flap, lifting her up into the air some and atop the center of the wreckage heap that Fluttershy sat at the end of. She then took a few careful steps over, wings outright for balance, then lightly nudged Fluttershy’s cheek with her nose. “Hey…I can tell you’re too tired for this. Let’s head back.”

Fluttershy’s shoulders lifted sluggishly, then dropped all at once as she breathed out a silent sigh through her nose. Her palms found her stinging eyes again, and she mumbled, “I thought I’d last longer…I’m sorry.”

Another nudge with her nose followed, this one more gentle. “We can come back. Don’t worry about it.”

“You’re sure it’s okay..?”

Twilight nodded and smiled. “More than okay. C’mon.”

It took a few seconds for Fluttershy to gather the will to get back on her feet. Twilight kept a hoof out, which Fluttershy held onto for balance as she stepped carefully off the wreckage heap, then made her way back to the brick-red Mustang.

Twilight was, admittedly, a pinch concerned about the bleary look on her friend’s face and the slight unsteadiness in her gait. “Are you good to drive like this?”

“It’ll be fine.” Fluttershy pulled open the driver door and fell into the seat at about the same time that Twilight hopped into the back, then clamored her way to the front passenger seat. “It’s not like there’s much I need to worry about hitting.”

Despite the assurance, Twilight wasn’t super certain of Fluttershy’s coordination in her current state. She remained alert and attentive of the road ahead as they drove, though it turned out that indeed, Fluttershy had it under control…at least, enough so that the occasional wreck did not present a challenge or an issue to navigate. It was a good thing, too, because Twilight found herself struggling to concentrate on anything for long before her violet eyes fell out of focus, staring off into space as the world rushed by through the windshield. Had Fluttershy needed her responsiveness, it’s unlikely she would be able to provide with how distracted she was.

It seemed like a pretty short drive, though it took over an hour and a half to get back to the ranch. By the time the driveway was in sight again, the sun had begun to set, casting the world in an orangish tint and marking the time where shadows began to reach outwards from their positions more boldly as the dominion of daytime crept towards is conclusion.

Applejack, Rarity, and Alex were all there waiting for them. It didn't look like it at first, but as the car pulled into the driveway and the engine cut, the three of them converged together. Applejack stood up off the doorstep, standing like Rarity beside her, while Alex came over from the garage, adjusting her hat like she'd just put it back on, purpose in her stride. Fluttershy didn't seem to notice, or if she did, she didn't seem to care, and no one stopped her - it wasn't exactly hard to see that the girl was completely exhausted.

Twilight, however, hung back. She was a little out of it herself, but not so out of it that she couldn't see something important needing to be shared on the faces of her friends. The fact that they were greeting her immediately out of the car with it was a little concerning to the alicorn, and sufficient to make her more alert. "Is something the matter?"

Applejack glanced at Alex, then Rarity - Twilight's suspicions were confirmed with that. "We uh...we been talkin' 'bout somethin', sugercube. We got a problem, an' I think we could really use yer help with it."

"Absolutely, I'd love to help," Twilight said with zero hesitation. "What's wrong?"

Applejack glanced at Alex. Alex looked at her, but didn't react otherwise. Evidently that was a cue of some kind; Applejack's expression said 'Alright then' before she looked back to Twilight and resumed speaking. "Apparently we been havin' trouble gettin' help comin' from the refugee center."

Twilight frowned at this. That...did add up, yes. Progress seemed to be really stalling out, seeing as there was only one or two of them here with real carpentry experience, and there were an awful lot of empty beds in the barn... "I've noticed that too. Do we know why?"

Applejack opened her mouth...then closed it again, lips pressed together like she had bit into a lemon, and looked at Twilight with a slightly pained expression.

It took Twilight a second or two to understand what was being communicated. Her ears fell a bit. "...ah."

"Yeah..."

Twilight's shoulders sagged as she let loose a sigh, fatigue she had been suppressing catching back up with her. "I was worried about that. I had been hopeful, but..."

"It's hardly your fault, darling," Rarity said, smiling sympathetically. "If people got to know you a bit better, they would see that you're absolutely nothing to be afraid of. In fact, they'd see you for the blessing that you are." Ice-blue eyes darted over to Alex; her voice did not change, but something about her tone was bladed where it wasn't previously. "Sadly, some people aren't yet willing to open themselves up to that possibility."

"Point is," Applejack cut in sharply, "we wanna do somethin' about that. The sooner we can get people ta be a lil' more trustin', the sooner we can get as many hands as we need down here, an' the better off it'll be fer everyone. We had a good talk about it, an' we came up with an idea of how we might pull that off, if you was willin'."

"I'm absolutely willing!" Fatigue swiftly made way for the determination that lifted Twilight's posture and filled those violet eyes. "Tell me what you need."

Rarity and Applejack both turned their head, looking directly at Alex. "Well?" Applejack nudged her chin at Twilight with a smile. "Yer the boss. Lay it on 'er."

Alex did not meet their gaze, nor anyone's for that matter, looking straight ahead at the trees across the road for a second or two. She then swallowed, unfolding her arms in front of her chest and reaching into her jean jacket pocket with deliberate motions. She dug around for something momentarily, then retrieved her hand and held out a black device dangling from the end of a piece of string, roughly as wide as a human thumb nail with a small square peg jutting out of the rounded rectangular main mass. She took a stiff step forward, then another, gradually and slowly approaching Twilight with pronounced deliberateness and care, device held out far from herself.

It was at that point that Twilight realized the context of Rarity's comment, and the week or so of avoidance finally clicked. She had just thought that Alex was really busy and hadn't been wanting to speak to her because she didn't know what to say, but now she realized the nature of the hesitation. It wasn't just people from the refugee center that was afraid of her: Alex was also afraid of her. That meant the others probably were, too...

The sting must have been visible on her face, because Alex stopped approaching, and Twilight chose that moment to flare her horn and retrieve the device being held out. She tried to not notice how the hand recoiled from the magenta glow like it had been scalded, bringing forth the small plastic thing and holding it between her hooves with care, focus pouring into it rather than the ache she was busy burying.

Alex cleared her throat, and to her credit, the discomfort was not audible when she spoke with her business voice. "About a month ago, I was uhh...I took on a job with a team of scavengers I had gotten on good terms with at the request of one of the representatives from what's left of the American military. He said that he was interested in any information on a cure for the zombie situation, and I was more than happy to contribute to that. Good cause, you know? About as good as it gets. Job was pretty simple too, just get a blood sample from a zombie, plug it into a centrifuge in a hospital, and download whatever fancy numbers and words it spat out. Easy, other than the, uh, wall of zombies between us and the hospital, but, y'know, there's ways to deal with that..."

Twilight considered asking what a centrifuge was, but resisted the temptation. Fascination with human inventions could wait. The device in her hooves seemed more relevant. "What's this thing?"

"That's a USB drive. It's uh...it stores data, basically. The information from the blood analysis came back on it. It's...I mean to me it's completely fucking illegible, whole lot of techno-babble and...other weird shit, but part of it also came with a message saying that any samples that showed up like this were to be kept classified and then forwarded to a lab for further analysis."

Twilight nodded along, gazing at the device patiently as she waited. Rarity, however, seemed to realize something, and she looked at Alex with wide eyes. "They knew."

Alex smiled grimly. "The government knew what was going on. Real nice of them to fill us in, huh? Good old US of A."

Rarity's expression remained as it was, even as it drifted forward to stare off into space at this knowledge. Applejack let her head hang, slowly shaking it from side to side. The implications seemed bad, but were otherwise lost on Twilight, who also lacked a first-hoof experience with all of this like they did, and was also not brave enough to ask the questions that were starting to pile up about how much this mattered and why. Some things seemed better left to the imagination.

After some time, Alex pulled her baseball cap off for something to occupy her hands and her need to fidget. "I took the follow-up job to go to the lab it mentioned, since the rep basically hit me with it immediately after she saw it for herself, and like...yeah I intended to go, at first, but I never really got the motivation back to go out there again. We got a real up-close personal look at the zombies at that hospital, and..." She opened her mouth to continue that train of thought, visibly wrestling with something, then decided not to elaborate. "I just didn't...want to know, I guess. I want to believe that there's such a thing as a cure out there, but I was...I guess I was afraid of what I'd see in there, what I'd learn. Not everybody feels like I do, though. I might not be brave enough to do it, but..." She trailed off.

Twilight nodded - slowly, at first, but more surely as she began to clearly understand what was being offered here. It was hard not to see the opportunity this presented, nor was it hard to see how she might be better equipped to do something like this than others would be. No human here had magic, and while it was not as reliable as Twilight had come to grow accustomed to over the years, it had proven demonstrably better than most of the tools that humans had available to them for various purposes. There were a lot of unknowns, and probably a fair few risks, and a few more things that she would have to learn before she could jump right into this, but the possibility of a cure? Even if there wasn't one known, any data that could be retrieved from the heart of that research center could be the difference between living with the way things were and finding a way to reverse what had been done.

This could be the thing that reunited families with loved ones once thought lost forever. This could be the start of fixing what had been wrought on this world. This was huge - too huge to pass up. It was Twilight Sparkle's chance to show humanity that she was a friend, and that she was willing to be there in their hour of need, like she'd wanted to be from the very beginning and had wished for a way to prove. This would be that proof.

…but Cadance was out there, potentially. She could still be alive, and the longer Twilight waited to find her, the lower the odds were of that being true.

What would Cadance want?

The answer was quick to come for Twilight. She knew Cadance better than most anyone, but it wasn't hard to figure out Cadance's priorities even after having been around her for a brief period of time: she wanted the best for everyone. She always had and she always would, no matter how much risk she had to put herself in and no matter what sacrifice on her part was necessary, because she was Love. And love she would, until it killed her or she ran out of love to give, and only one of those things was possible. There was no question: she would want this. She would insist on this, even.

Then and there, the Princess of Friendship made up her mind. She nodded to herself once last time, finality in her expression as looked back up at Alex. "And where do I find this laboratory?"