Equestria Girls: Cataclysm

Fluttershy couldn't remember a car ride that had been so quiet, even when she was by herself.

It was an electric SUV they were in, so the motor was almost completely silent, save for a soft hum that the sound of the road easily overpowered, even at the speeds Fluttershy was driving at - she liked to keep below 20 mph just so that she wouldn't have to scramble too much if she needed to turn quickly, preferring to slam the accelerator as needed than pray that her foot was fast enough on the brake pedal. The road was thus fairly quiet, and so was the car. There weren't any radio stations left in the world that offered music, so there was nothing to fill the air there either. Meanwhile, her passengers were not being particularly chatty...

Fluttershy spared a glance from the road to look at Applejack in the passenger seat.

She looked exhausted. She leaned against the door, her temple resting against the glass as she stared ahead at nothing in particular, spacing out or lost in thoughts. Fluttershy hoped the former; there was nothing good in those thoughts right now. Not after Granny Smith.

Fluttershy wanted to say something - anything, really, just to kill this silence - but she had this feeling like now wasn't the time to speak to Applejack. Instead, she glanced up, at the rear view mirror to check on the passenger in the back seat.

"...um, I don't think that's how you're supposed to sit."

Apple Bloom's head turned to look at Fluttershy, her massive bow scrunching up against her cheek as she did. She had shed her seatbelt and was laid out completely horizontal across the backseat, feet up on the door across from her. "This is mah ‘bored as all heck’ posture. Cuz I’m bored."

"What happened to your Gameboy?"

"Battery died." Apple Bloom held up the offending device, which was indeed completely dark, and flicked the "on" switch several times for Fluttershy to see. Indeed, for the briefest of moments the screen would flash to life, and a split second later it would blink out. "That spare was almost totally empty. Didn't even last ten minutes. I couldn't even save!"

"Ahh..." Fluttershy gave a sympathetic smile. "I'm sorry about that. Do we not have any more batteries?"

Apple Bloom shook her head. The game system dropped to the SUV floor with a soft thud, and she crossed her arms over her chest with a ‘harumph.’

Fluttershy thought on this for a moment. "Well...we're gonna be there soon, so why don't you dig around in my bag back there in the trunk? There's a flashlight that still has a pretty good battery in it, I think."

Apple Bloom sat up a bit, eyes wide with anticipation, but hesitated nonetheless. "Are ya sure?"

Fluttershy nodded and smiled warmly. "Like I said, we're almost there. I'm sure someone will have a charger when we get there, so go ahead."

Apple Bloom gave a big beaming grin, then reached up over the back of the seat and leaned forward far enough that her butt was left sticking in the air as she rummaged around the trunk's contents.

Fluttershy giggled at the sight, then lowered her gaze to the road again, satisfied with this outcome. She spared a glance at Applejack, and found her peering into the backseat in amusement. She found Fluttershy's gaze by accident, but held it.

Fluttershy gave a tiny, warm smile. "Hey."

Applejack smiled back, a bit wider. "Hey."

There weren't any words for a few seconds. When their gaze finally broke and they sat back in their seats, it felt as though a spell that had been hanging over the van had been lifted. The air felt breathable again.

Fluttershy pondered for several seconds what to say next. She chewed over a few different phrases, but none of them felt right, or otherwise felt a bit awkward, and she did not want to spoil this nice mood with forced conversation. So instead, she did the first thing that came to her mind.

Applejack felt her head grow a little bit lighter, and she snapped a look over at Fluttershy. "Hey! Whattya think yer doin, hat thief?"

Fluttershy giggled, donning her prize right in front of her victim with an innocent-sounding, "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Uh-huh." Applejack gruffly snatched the hat off Fluttershy's head, whose giggling picked up gleefully. The faux-annoyance didn't even last as long as it took to put her cowboy hat back in its rightful place - darn grin couldn't wait. "Yer gonna have to try a lot harder than that to pull a fast one on me, sugarcube."

"Drat~ Foiled again."

"Dingbat." This evoked another flurry of giggles. "Just don't be pullin' that once we get to the refugee center, y'hear? I don't want no one gettin' no wrong ideas or nothin'."

"Like what?"

"Like that yer a dingbat?" Applejack smirked at the next stream of giggles. "Or that ya got sticky fingers er some such."

"I won't, I promise. I'll behave."

"Good." Applejack leaned back in her seat to address the smallest passenger. "Same goes for you, y'hear, Apple Bloom? When we get there, I don't wanna have no one gettin' no funny ideas about what we're like, so just be good and stick close to me, alright?"

Apple Bloom nodded diligently, all attention on her sister instead of her game. "Is there gonna be a buncha people there?"

"Beats me," Applejack said, sitting back in her seat again. "Considerin' they had that message at the evac shelter, I reckon we ain't gonna be the only ones comin' in, so it might be more packed than a dry well after a mud slide, but heck if I know. Gettin' there don't seem like it'd be too easy on foot, unless they're comin' in real local-like."

"Do ya think everyone without a car got eaten by zombies?" Apple Bloom asked, sounding genuinely concerned.

"We didn't, and we only just got this," Fluttershy pointed out, patting the weathered steering wheel. "I bet plenty of other people made it too, even if they didn't get lucky and find a nice van like this."

"I hope so." She didn't say the words, but both Fluttershy and Applejack plainly heard what she meant.

Applejack chose to address it: "I'm sure there'll be plenty of youngin's yer age there to keep you company, sugarcube."

It wasn't heard, but both other passengers knew it by the shift in atmosphere: she didn't want other kids, she wanted her friends. Neither Fluttershy nor Applejack could do much more than share a concerned, if resigned look.

The ride became very quiet again. Fortunately, it wouldn't last much longer; twenty minutes later, the trees parted and a structure came into view in the middle of the field it sat in.

It looked almost like a school building of some sort from the outside, which was helped by the ring of busses parked all around it. The grounds were expansive, at least an acre of land surrounded by a chain link fence that appeared to be missing or broken in many places. Given the wild and unkempt appearance of the grounds, it appeared to have been sitting there unattended for quite some time, though the brick building itself appeared to be holding up much better to the passage of time.

"Here we are," Applejack announced. "Our home away from home."

Fluttershy smiled reflexively on cue, but made certain not to look at Applejack when she did so, who would be able to tell immediately that it wasn't genuine. She didn't want to spoil her friend's cheer when they were so close to what she'd been saying would be the end of their worries for weeks leading up to this, but Fluttershy also couldn't bring herself to deny the sinking feeling she felt the closer they got.

Applejack got more chatty as she started to prepare their things, but Fluttershy was silent, spending all her energy instead on hoping with everything she had that her gut was wrong this time.

Twilight barely recalled her dream. What little she remembered of it involved descending down a seemingly endless series of stairs into some dark structure, fighting all the while. Skeletal eyes full of darkness loomed in every shadow, but no matter how far she chased the voices of her companions, she could not find them.

She awoke to sunlight stabbing her eyes.

Lifting her neck to peer out the window made her strain and groan, more so as she unraveled her body from the ball she had curled up into in her sleep. The bed wasn’t that bad, but she nonetheless felt like she’d slept on a table. The sun was up just enough to have cleared the horizon.

After gathering her senses enough to remember what had happened the day prior (the fever dream that it was, in hindsight), Twilight slid off of the mattress, picking up the letter she had written the night prior with a flash of her horn and folded it up neatly. She wanted an envelope to go with the letter, and so Twilight took this opportunity to look through what little was in this lookout tower. Sadly, she wouldn't find an envelope.

The small dresser had some changes of human clothes tucked in it, but nothing remotely accommodating for a pony. The hoof(foot?)locker at the foot of the bed had a few odds and ends in it. A hammer was there, amidst a few bits of debris and small spare parts. A mostly empty container with a plus on it that she assumed was a first aid kit contained only a box of what looked like adhesive bandages, each wrapped individually. There was also a screwdriver in here, a pair of scissors, and a vaguely cylindrical device about a foot and a half tall and as wide as Twilight's head that she didn't recognize. None of it interested her.

The cupboards here had all manner of cooking utensils in them - knives, forks, spoons, ladles, various other odds and ends - though it had nothing she could currently use, what with the lack of anything edible here. The stove in the center of the room would not prove useful for the same reason, even if it worked.

Twilight's stomach growled, and she smacked her parched lips. She hadn't eaten or drank anything in twenty four hours, and she should really change that. She pondered this momentarily, though it ended up getting swept up and away as she thought on her plans for the day, and the future in general.

Her primary objective remained the same as yesterday: Canterlot was the focus of everything important to her right now, as it was both where her friends were last seen, and also because it was her only way home. It was day 2 of 3. Her window was small, and closing fast.

The issue, of course, was she still had no way to know where Canterlot was. She also wanted to find other humans, preferably ones that were alive, because they seemed like the best source of information about what the buck had happened to this world while she was away. Sadly, she had no idea where those were either, and so far all she had managed to find was a walking corpse. If they had journals like they did in Equestria, that would make this significantly easie-

Twilight midway through a stretch as an idea came to her. Humans don’t have magic journals, but it seems like all of them have phones.

Twilight nudged the door open and peered down over the railing of the viewing platform, searching the ground below. Her eyes quickly pinned down the spot where the ranger had fallen, a spray of dried blood and shriveled tissue marking the impact zone. A meter or so to the right, the earth had been heavily discolored a dark maroon, and a film of something oily glistened with a rainbow sheen as the morning sun glinted across it.

Far more conspicuous, however, was the lack of a body lying there.

“What?” Twilight cast a bewildered gaze across the rest of the area within the chain link fence, and then eyed the fence itself - it was whole and absent of any breaches, just as she’d left it. She quickly began descending flights of stairs, casting increasingly confused gazes at the area the closer to it she got.

As she made it to the second set of stairs from the ground, her query appeared. A corpulent human male stumbled drunkenly from around the other side of an outhouse, their chest split wide open and caked over with what looked like a thick layer of gray congealed grease, as well as copious amounts of blood. It turned as Twilight came into its view, its bottomless black eyes locking onto her, and it began to hobble in her general direction, looking like a stray breeze could knock it from its feet.

Something a bit stiffer than a breeze struck it. A magenta column of energy entered the already open cavity in its chest, emerging out the back in a shower of pasted innards and black bile. It flew back hard, slamming into the chain link fence behind it, and slid to the ground, where it slumped over and fall still, head lolling to one side. The reverberations from its collision caused the chain link fence to ripple and clamor loudly for another several seconds before it fell still again.

Twilight huffed, kneading one temple with a hoof to nurse the dull headache that now afflicted her. Either she didn’t do enough damage the first time to actually put it down, or these undead get back up after a little while. Either way, Twilight was determined to be a bit more thorough this time.

Four more beams rained down on the body, blasting it repeatedly in its already opened torso. The first struck the center, widening the crater out the back, and the other two split open it’s left side, while the fourth beam blew apart the flap of tissue and bone holding its ribs to the remainder of its abdomen. Its now liberated top half leapt into the air a foot or so, then fell back to the ground, landing face-down on its own lap. For a moment, Twilight was reminded of action figures that had been split apart to mirror scenes in violent movies, except the blood was very real, and there were a lot more chunks of meat and shattered bone.

Twilight suddenly felt a wave of nausea come over her, and her need to approach this scene did not help. Maybe she should have searched the body first before she’d…done that to it.

It’s too late now. Every human has a phone, phones mean I can talk to someone. I have to check.

Twilight swallowed the lump in her throat, and continued to descend the stairs to inspect the corpse she had just mangled.

How it had any blood left after last night was a mystery to Twilight, but a non-negligible amount of it leaked out all over the ground in a growing puddle, soaking its pants and legs where the base of its ribs dumped its contents. She tried not to look too closely at it, staying as far back as she could near the base of the tower as she probed at its soiled pants gingerly from about 4 meters away.

It felt so wrong. Twilight cringed at the feedback of contact through her horn - there was no detailed feeling through it, but the expression on Twilight’s face as she went about her macabre business read like she was sorting through a pile of waste for some keys that an animal had passed.

Princess Celestia would be so disappointed in me.

Some part of her knew that thought wasn’t true, but looting a body felt vile enough to her sensibilities that Twilight lost track of that fact.

There was a wallet in the pockets, as well as a stick of gum that had an unpleasant smell to it - ‘nicotine’ was not a flavor of gum she wanted to try - as well as a small rectangular device with a glass screen.

“Bingo,” Twilight breathed. She tried to forget everything she’d just done to get this device and brought it in close so that she might unlock its secrets, thrusting her full focus into it.

It took some fumbling around for about ten to fifteen minutes, but eventually Twilight figured it out. See, if you pushed this button to light the screen up, and then you swiped the screen this way, a bunch of buttons appeared! One of them had a picture like several bullet points, so she pushed that, because lists are good and useful. She was delighted when several names appeared on screen, along with a series of numbers beside them, and a smaller green one below that said ‘call.’

She was less happy with the message that popped up in response to the push, several seconds later:

No signal, call failed

Twilight scowled at this. She tried another name on the list, directly below the previous.

No signal, call failed

The one after that was next, and then the one after that.

No signal, call failed

She went down all eight names on the contact list, including the nine proceeding contacts that had only numbers associated with them rather than names, and all gave the same response.

No signal, call failed

Twilight flung the phone back at the bisected body where it lay against the fence, which bounced off the upper half's shoulder and clattering to the ground. “Why is everything broken?! Would it kill you to have something that works around here?!”

Technically it was me who killed them.

Twilight found her own joke kind of funny for a moment, until she felt incredibly unwell.

The urge to leave as quickly as possible presented itself, and Twilight indulged it. She flapped her wings as hard as she may despite their rigidity till she cleared the fence and left the lookout tower behind.

Twilight continued to follow the road. Rather than walk, however, she flew. She wasn’t confident in her wings’ ability to not cramp up suddenly, so rather than launch herself hundreds of feet up like she wished she could, she remained relatively close to the ground, only flying above the tree line if she felt it was absolutely necessary.

It proved absolutely necessary a lot sooner than she was expecting.

Twilight’s stomach was rather determined to remind her that she had skipped a step in her morning preparations, though Twilight had not immediately dropped back to the ground. She gently swung from side to side along her path through the air, inspecting the forest, till she found exactly what she was looking for and descended upon it.

A small pond sat in a clearing. Twilight dropped in a practiced descent, placing her hooves down softly against the slightly spongey earth. As she stepped up to the water to drink, she continued to gently flex and un-flex her wings, willing away the soreness that stubbornly clung to the joints.

Equestrian water tastes better, she decided quickly. A single large gulp was forced for the sake of making this as quick as possible, and it rewarded her with feeling as though she had swallowed a rock. Tasted about as good as one, too - she strained, and coughed a few times when it did finally go down, though the ache in her windpipe persisted. A lot better.

The thing that burst from the bushes to descend upon her was anything but stealthy, so Twilight had ample warning to turn her head and see what was coming.

Its body looked like a vase, as tall as she was, cylindrical with no handles. Out the bottom spread out a trio of knobby feet that moved with surprising quickness given their size, and out the top a stemlike narrow neck extended, doubling its height over Twilight. Leaves and branches hung out of the space where it’s neck and body met, and at the end of its neck, a pair of jaws like a vertically-shifted red Venus fly trap hung agape, aiming not at her but straight up towards the sky. It was like someone had cast an animation spell at a huge potted plant, which now charged her.

Twilight was surprised, but not nearly surprised enough to give the thing all the time it needed to cross the clearing. A powerful thrust of her wings launched her into the air, and she was well out of range over it when it got to where she had been.

Twilight hovered in place, staring owlishly at what she saw below her. Two more of its ilk emerged from the underbrush to stand beside its fellow as they all gathered directly beneath her, staring longingly and restlessly up at her. They were all identical, but the heads had slight differences. One head was yellow and ended in a bulb-like pair of lips, while the other was like the first, but seemed to have a flower around its neck that almost made it look like it had a collar.

She tried to find words at this scene, but she had none. Twilight gawked a few moments longer before she broke away, setting herself back on course. From that point on she stayed well above the tree line, knowing that apparently not even the plants were immune to whatever insanity had afflicted this world.

I just don’t understand. How did everything get so topsy-turvy so fast? It’s only been a few months! Is this because magic works here now? Why is that even a thing?

Twilight pondered as she flew. There were no answers, only more questions, and those would only frustrate her further.

A sharp pang from one wing brought her back into focus, and she used this opportunity to bring herself earthwards again, trotting from this point on. Had to preserve her wing strength, especially if she was going to have to make a quick getaway from potted plants or whatever the buck was out in these woods.

She didn’t stop to graze, merely plucking the tips of tall grasses that she could safely reach from the road as she went. It barely satisfied her.

Hours passed like this, stride waxing and waning as the fairly out-of-shape Twilight was reminded periodically of her physical condition by the body that didn’t appreciate all this strain. Nothing else had given her hassle in this time, and as Twilight glanced up to see if she had any morning left or if afternoon had happened, she saw the sign up ahead, where the road forked for the first time since she’d started following it yesterday.

WELCOME TO LONGMEADOW

Twilight huffed and puffed, lips dry and throat burning, but a big smile found its way to her face all the same. She trotted quickly towards this new destination, her discomfort forgotten. A town meant humans.

The first building Twilight saw was a sky blue house, a pair of humans loitering in their yard behind a waist-height white fence. As they turned and shuffled from where they stood, the joy filling Twilight’s chest at the sight of them curdled in a heartbeat as she saw them glowering with omnidirectional fury, faces plastered with permanent snarls that almost shone against the blackness filling their mouths. An equal shade of pitch made up their eyes.

The creatures were not observant, or else they would have noticed the lavender equine about fifty meters up the road. As despair began to descend upon Twilight, she cast her gaze further down the road, deeper into what little of this town she could see.

More figures shuffled about in the open. There were four visible now, but there were surely others closed off in their homes, plus a dog that stood in the center of the road with a vacant stare transfixed on nothingness, its ears twitching sporadically at what little sound the shambling corpses around it made.

The streets were clogged with cars in various states of ruin and wreck, even from what little into town she could see from its outermost point. No less than 3 were fused together violently at an intersection. Every house was dark. The air was eerily still; no birds dared to sing. The winds had forsaken this place, and not so much as a stray leaf drew attention to itself.

Twilight wasn’t a fool. She had seen the writing on the wall well before this moment spelled it out for her, but she was still holding out hope that despite all these weird and scary events going on and all the signs that pointed to contrary, life had found a way to move on. She had hoped that some degree of normalcy had persisted despite everything, and that if she just traveled enough and saw for herself, she would find that things were still as she recognized them. She was holding onto that increasingly slim hope that all she had to do was just make it to the city and find her friends, and they’d all hug and have another adventure together and take care of everything before the portal closed, and that she would have a stressful but fun story to regale Princess Celestia with when she made it back home.

The wet streak that trailed down Twilight’s cheek marked the moment that hope died.

It had all been fine. She left this world a few months ago trusting everything would be fine. Her friends, too, trusted that everything would be fine.

But it wasn’t fine. She walked away, and left everyone in this world to face whatever catastrophe had befallen them all on their own. Nobody helped them. People were dead. This entire town was dead. Many other towns were likely dead, too.

Was she blind, back then? Had she missed something that would have alerted her to some kind of clue, some symptom that would become what she saw now, if left unchecked? Was there a way to have kept these people from ever falling, and for them to still be alive, happy, with their families, sleeping soundly in their homes, looking forward to tomorrow as they went about their days?

Could this all have been prevented? Could she have prevented it?

Is this my fault?

Twilight barely heard the window shattering, but barely still counts. Multiple undead heads likewise swiveled towards the noise, and as they surged towards the one among them who had spotted the lone figure staring in quiet horror at the fate of Longmeadow, so too did they locate Twilight, and more windows shattered. A dozen husks of men and women, plus the remains of their pet, ambled towards her with rage painted permanently on their unfeeling faces.

A second tear spilled from Twilight’s eyes, and then a third. Her teeth ground together as her jaw locked. Some nameless viciousness welled up from somewhere dark and deep inside her, and her legs tensed in anticipation, but not to run. Never to run.

A pressure built up sharply as energy surged into her horn, and as the mob converged on her position, Twilight fired.

Fluttershy’s fingers tapped anxiously on the steering wheel, where they remained at the 9'oclock and 3'oclock positions, gaze fixed on the door to the refugee center. Her eyes flicked to the cracked display on the dashboard for the time, and confirmed that it had indeed been over twenty minutes.

A pink bow appeared in Fluttershy's peripheral vision past the front seat divider. "Is she still not back yet?"

"It shouldn't be too long." Fluttershy tried to not sound as nervous as she was. She failed. "It's probably something silly, like, um..."

"Everybody got eaten by zombies."

"N-no, no. No, I don't think that at all, and that's not silly. It's probably something like...um...they're really busy in there from all the people coming in."

Apple Bloom turned her head and gave her a dirty look. "We've been out here starin' at the door for half an hour, Fluttershy. Ain't nobody else's gone in there."

Fluttershy mouthed an incoherent response, gesticulating helplessly before managing, "I don't know. It has to be something."

Apple Bloom turned her gaze forward with a look in her eye that scared Fluttershy. Before she had to think about stopping the younger girl from doing something reckless, the door to the refugee center opened, and Applejack exited the building.

Just by the look on her face, Fluttershy knew that her hopes hadn't been enough.

Clearing the parking lot, the blonde farmer girl made her way back back to the van, with noticeably less enthusiasm than what she left with. She opened up the passenger door, all but fell into the seat, and closed the door.

Nobody asked the question immediately. Applejack didn't wait for them to. "We can’t stay."

Apple Bloom exploded. "WHAT?!"

Applejack didn't repeat herself, simply staring at the dashboard with a vacant gaze.

"They- those- they can't just-"

"Let," Fluttershy asserted sharply, punctuating with a firm hand to Apple Bloom's shoulder. When this kept the smaller girl’s outburst at bay, she continued very gently, "me talk to them."

Apple Bloom’s face screamed a challenge, but eventually she released her steely grip on the two seats and let herself flop into the backseat. She looked ready to start a fight. Her sister, meanwhile, looked like she was going to cry. Fluttershy wasn't standing for either. She keyed the button to pop the trunk open, and stepped out of the van.

She heard Applejack croak from the front, "Don't bother, Flutters."

Fluttershy retrieved her purse from atop the mound of random assortments that had been stacked haphazardly in the trunk, and closed it with a satisfying clunk. She came around to the passenger side door, and hovered there, looking at Applejack through the window. She didn't know what hurt more to see: the pain in her expression, or how utterly defeated she looked. She'd never wanted to see her like this again.

A pale hand took hold of door handle, then pulled it open. Applejack didn't react at first when Fluttershy put her arms around her, or when soft, if unwashed pink hair pushed up against her cheek and shoulder. After several seconds like that, Applejack let her eyes slip closed.

"I'll only be a few minutes," Fluttershy told her softly, just loud enough for her to hear while they were this close. "Don't let Apple Bloom come in after me, okay?"

Applejack nodded wordlessly.

The embrace persisted for a few long, quiet moments longer before Fluttershy gently pulled away, flashing a small, supportive smile to her friend before she closed the door, and walked towards to the refugee center.

She didn't know what she intended to accomplish here. Maybe she didn't want what few people she had left to fall into despair without a fight of her own. Maybe Fluttershy just couldn't accept what she'd been told until she had experienced it for herself.

Both doors to the refugee center were visibly reinforced in a way that made it look almost like it was designed to be that way from a distance. Up close, though, it was just four boards nailed together over a larger wooden panel that was vaguely aesthetically appealing if you didn't look very hard. The small waist-high fence around its perimeter turned out to be barbed wire, and a pair of metal shutters sat behind each of the six windows that overlooked the path leading up to the main entrance, all currently closed and likely barred from the inside. It looked like a brick school building that Fluttershy had once gone to when she was a child, but up close, it looked more like a low-budget but otherwise rather effective fortress.

The door seemed to be unlocked when Applejack had used it, so she turned the knob, and the door opened easily. Unlike every other building Fluttershy had entered over the past two months, the ceiling lights here worked. There didn't seem to be heat, though, and Fluttershy didn't remove her jacket.

The lobby was about eight meters wide and twice as long in a rough oval, with a set of double doors leading deeper into the center. Six benches were positioned out on either side of the room, three each, the longest ends of the room ending in a window, like the sort you might find at a post office, except this glass was probably reinforced. Four haggard and sickly-looking people sat among the benches, each seated far apart from each other, a few worn blankets scattered around. A man in a dinosaur suit sat in an oversized carboard box beside one of the benches, his mutterings incoherent behind the suit's zipped-up head. Everyone seemed to be doing their best to ignore him.

A man and a woman flanked the door leading further into the center. Each had a handgun in a holster at their hip, one hand resting on it. Fluttershy hesitated when they returned her look, and she was about to approach them when a waving arm from one of the windows caught her gaze. A man with a trench coat and felt plaid hat sat behind a desk on the other side of the glass divider, and Fluttershy approached him as he flashed a customer service-grade smile behind an untrimmed black mustache. She didn't smile back.

"Excuse me," she said softly. "Um, my friend just came in here a few moments ago...she said that you'd refused her entry to the shelter?"

"I did." His voice wasn't harsh, but the firmness in it suggested little room for argument. "And yes, that goes for you too, because we are very over capacity right now. We don't have the room, or the food, to take on anyone else." His voice softened a bit as he continued, "But we're always looking to trade, and I'm the one in charge of supplies. You can call me Gavin, or Smokes, if you like. If you need tools, we're selling, and if you've got food, we're very much buying."

Fluttershy swallowed a little bit - the way his expression shifted back to hard again betrayed how he could tell she wasn't done trying yet. Fluttershy felt the will to fight and argue slipping away rapidly, and by the time she opened her mouth, all that she could manage was a soft, sincere plea. "Please, mister Smokes," she almost whispered. "We have a little girl with us, she's only ten...she lost almost all her family right in front of her. We aren’t from around here, we don’t know where anything is. We don't have anywhere else to go."

"I'm sorry, but no is no." Smokes' voice sounded hard at first, but as he looked at Fluttershy's tired face and saw what he did in those big, sad eyes, something gave, and humanity bled back into his expression and voice. "Look...I am really sorry, and I wish that I could help you. I do. But right now, those of us here can barely help ourselves. We're struggling to make ends meet as-is, and if we go taking on anyone else, people are going to start to starve, and we can't have that. We simply can't take anyone else. We're not equipped to let anyone else in, no matter what they may have gone through or how young or old they are. If it’s a mouth to feed, we can’t have them. I’m sorry.”

Fluttershy's gaze sank silently to the counter. A sense of heaviness slowly started to descend over her, resting across her shoulders like a cloak.

After a few seconds of silence, Smokes continued. "...but we've already got some folk who hang out in this hall here." He gestured to the few who squatted here behind her. "We can't provide for you, but if you need shelter or somewhere to hide your head, it's not exactly a luxury hotel here, but it beats getting rained on outside. If you needed somewhere safe for your girl to stay, we have armed guards who are stationed out here at all hours."

Fluttershy swallowed the lump in her throat, and tried to not be so quiet that she was inaudible when she found her voice: "I'll tell my friend about it. We have to figure out what to do next..."

The man didn't say anything in response. When Fluttershy looked up at him, she could see the remorse in his eyes was genuine. She wasn't the first of such cases he'd likely had to turn away. She probably wouldn't be the last. She felt sad, and hopeless, but she couldn't imagine what it must be like to deliver the same bad news to people even more sad and hopeless than she was. It had to hurt him to tell her all this...

"...maybe there's something else that you could help me with."

"I might. What's up?" Smokes leaned in, listening through the speaking port in the glass between them. His namesake could be faintly smelled on him at this proximity.

"We've been trying to find our friends after the..." Fluttershy hesitated as she tried to find the words she intended, but she saw that she was understood, and moved on. "We were hoping that maybe they managed to get here before us, and that they're in there somewhere with you. Can you help us find them?"

"I can certainly try." Smokes reached out of sight for a moment and pulled out a note pad, which he put a pen to. "Who're you looking for?"

"There's a bunch of them...um...Rainbow Dash, Rarity, Sunset Shimmer..."

Smokes scribbled down each name as Fluttershy listed out everyone they had lost contact with. At some point he paused and examined the list, and Fluttershy realized he was smiling. "Canterlot?"

"Yeah." Fluttershy returned a small, slightly sheepish smile. "Easy to tell?"

"Very," he chuckled. "The pink hair was a clue, too. Curious folk in that city, but it's hard not to admire the way they hold onto their cultural identity. Sorry, go on." He put his pen to the paper, awaiting her to continue. When she had run out of names to offer, he asked, "And what's your name?"

"Um...I'm Fluttershy. My friend that came in here was Applejack, and her little sister is Apple Bloom."

Three more names made it to the list to the side, and Smokes jammed the butt of the pen against the desk to retract the tip. "I don't recognize these names myself, but that doesn't mean they're not here. I'll try to get a show of hands when I get a chance, and point them your way if they answer. Check in regularly is my advice. We get a lot of folk coming and going, with lots of scavengers and hunters making plenty of return trips, plus whoever else shows up out of the blue. Even if we don't have any of these friends of yours here, they might still show up, so don't lose hope."

"Okay." Fluttershy she tried to offer a smile in exchange for the one that was offered to her. She found it easier than before. "And...um, it's okay to still visit, right?"

"Anytime. Just don't cause any trouble and clean up after yourself, and you can come and go as you please. Same goes for any of your friends."

"Okay..." Fluttershy was quiet for a few seconds, visibly considering what to say next before she eventually said it. "Um...I should probably get goi- oh! Um, I almost forgot, um- mister Smokes, do you have a spare charger cord, for um, for in a car?"

"Oh, plenty." The man vanished beneath the counter for a few seconds, and retrieved with a hand filled with a bouquet of various colors of insulated wires, each tipped with a standardized UPS connector. He plucked one out of the bundle, confirmed that it had an end appropriate for the request, and slid it forward beneath the gap in the glass. "Go ahead and just take that one, we don't need a trade for it."

Fluttershy's eyes shot open wide, and she nearly tripped over her own tongue as she stammered, "A-are you sure? I don't want to get you in trouble or anything, I-I can- I have some things, I can exchange for it, it's no trouble..."

Smokes waved the matter off with a smile. "Consider it an apology for having to send you away. Just this once, though..." He leaned in a bit closer and sad in a quieter voice, "And uh, don't tell anyone. I don't need anyone trying to guilt me for freebies." He winked.

A smile warm enough to heat this whole room spread itself across Fluttershy's lips. It was a small gift, but its worth transcended its material value. "Thank you so much, mister Smokes."

Smokes returned a smile of his own, this one much more genuine. "Be safe out there."

As Fluttershy stepped out of the refugee center, her spirits soared higher than they had in months.

She was not much better off than she was before, only a single piece of wire more to her name, and Fluttershy still did not know whether she would ever see any of her friends ever again. She still had no proper home, and the three of them were going to have to provide for themselves for the foreseeable future in a world that was more hostile than it ever had been, and in ways that it never had been. The days ahead were going to be dark indeed, and the darkest may not have even come yet.

But today, it had been revealed that of the blessed few things to survive the cataclysm, kindness was among them, and that alone was enough to give Fluttershy reason to smile.