Fallout Equestria: The Blue Lightning

— Time travel? Please. Entertaining as that may be, when has that ever worked?

FoE: Project Horizons, chapter 65

…The memory dissolved, and the image of the real world reassembled before her eyes.

Cosmic blinked a little as she came to her senses and removed the recollector from her head. Sky Bloom took the last memory orb from the slot at the top of the device and magically sent it to the box with the others that Cosmic had already looked through.

After dealing with Lyra, they dragged the bodies into one of the storage rooms, slept for a while, and then decided to search the bunker. In one of the rooms, which they thought belonged to the unicorn, they found memory orbs – as well as a note about what memory each contained.

Two of them lay separately – Lyra had wanted to use them as references to check how the future would have changed. In the first, the unicorn had attended the funeral of Big Macintosh, who had saved Princess Celestia from an assassination attempt at the cost of his own life; in the second, Lyra had placed the balefire bomb blast in Manehattan, which she had witnessed firsthoof.

Cosmic twitched as she remembered it.

Lyra – even after all she had done – certainly didn’t deserve such a fate.

The other three orbs contained memories of a different kind – and lined up in some sort of story about how Rainbow Dash, the former Minister of Awesome, and then Lyra herself had stumbled into the bunker and how it had eventually turned out. Shadow said that Rainbow was now in Hoofington, in Shadowbolt Tower; well, it was nice to know that at least somepony was safe.

A recollector was also found; explainable, considering that not all RC-13 personnel were unicorns. The events themselves stretched over days, but Lyra somehow managed to “glue” separate episodes of memories within one orb – or did something like rewinding, Cosmic didn’t know well. So it only took a few hours to go through the entire archive – and there was still plenty of time to figure out what to do next.

Meanwhile, Sonic sat at the terminal, surfing the local network for something interesting and occasionally asking Sample Dample for advice. Cosmic wondered if the professor was sleeping at all, or if he had to stay awake all the time – but she hesitated to ask directly.

The hedgehog had carefully collected the rings that Lyra had scattered, and now they were back in the pouch on his belt, just as before.

“…Are you alright? After such a marathon,” Sky Bloom asked, removing the box of orbs and the recollector.

“Uh, more or less…”

Cosmic rubbed her temples, recovering from the amount of data she had looked through, and spoke briefly about what she had seen.

“I thought it would turn out like this.” Sky Bloom shook his head. “If she had her mind and energy for good, maybe they’d have invented that crystal scheme on their own–”

“Maybe they would, maybe not,” the professor replied from his tank. “Such solutions are basically quite simple, but it can be very difficult for a small team to come up with them.”

“Why should we regret it now?” Cosmic snorted. “We’re not even gonna–”

…change anything here, she wanted to say, but stopped herself, remembering what they had just been through, and looked back at the casing of the reactor with the connected magical matrix.

“Um… Cosmic?” Sky Bloom wiggled a hoof in front of her eyes. “What’s the matter?”

“Wait a minute…” She waved him away and went back to thinking.

We have a damn time machine! If we knew where – as well as when – to move to, and most importantly what to do next, then–

“Well, never mind,” she shook her head and turned to the blue hedgehog at the terminal, “So, you found anything interesting there?”

“I think so,” Sonic said, turning around in his chair to face the others. “This Lyra seems to have spent years collecting data garbage from all over Equestria. But there are some pretty intriguing files in that heap… Like this one, for example.”

He flipped through the folder’s contents and pressed a button.

A strange metallic voice came from the loudspeakers.

“EMERGENCY MEMORANDUM: ALL PEGASI ARE TO ABANDON ALL GROUND POSITIONS IMMEDIATELY AND RETURN TO THUNDERHEAD. DROP EVERYTHING YOU ARE DOING! COME HOME NOW! LUNA IS DEAD. EQUESTRIA IS FINISHED.”

“What the…” Cosmic said as the recording ended, then waved her hoof. “Aw, whatever. It’s sad, of course, but it has nothing to do with us.”

“Or maybe it does?” Sky Bloom said.

Cosmic frowned at him.

Is he really thinking the same thing…? Well, then there’s nothing to hide.

“So, you’re suggesting we go back in time and save Equestria?” She grinned wryly.

Suddenly, she realized she wasn’t kidding. Besides, the unicorn was dead serious about it too.

“Why not?” He shrugged. “After all, we can hardly imagine anything worse than this. And we have nothing to lose but our own lives.”

“It’s you and Cosmic who have nothing to lose!” Sonic held out his hand, pointing his finger at them. “But I have a family! I have my friends that we came here with! Hell, there’s even a whole world we’re responsible for! Just because Shadow has stolen the Emeralds doesn’t mean Eggman will back down! Even considering how fast time passes here, he might have thought of something else – and even launched an attack! But–”

The hedgehog sighed and looked down at his palms. The once white gloves were now stained with blood and dirt. And the hands themselves were trembling slightly.

“I can’t leave my friends, you know? They’re completely defenseless in these… healing coffins. What if someone tries to break in? Or…” he winced and clenched his fists, “what if they don’t… don’t–”

He sobbed and turned away.

“Believe me, young friend,” Sample Dample said, apparently addressing Sky Bloom, “you can always imagine something worse. Even if it doesn’t seem possible.”

“I see,” he sighed heavily. “What are we gonna do now?”

“Duh, what? Same thing we decided,” Cosmic said, throwing the belt of the assault carbine over her shoulder. “Go back to the past to change the future. Even though Lyra said that everything is real at the same time, at least we can be in a different version of the timeline.”

“I’m staying here,” Sonic muttered. “I wanna… I wanna be the first one there when… when someone wakes up.”

From the looks of it, he was clearly struggling not to say “if.”

Cosmic walked over and put a hoof on his shoulder.

“We understand,” she said softly. “But… also realize that you can be useful to us. No one in the Wasteland, let alone ancient Equestria, can match your speed. Your friends will stay here, protected by a layer of earth, iron walls and locks – not to mention robots and turrets. And we won’t be gone for long. There’s gotta be a way to get back to the starting point. Isn’t there?!”

She raised her head and stared at Sample Dample.

He couldn’t see her with his empty eye sockets, but he could tell from the general tone that the question was directed at him.

“Of course,” the scientist replied. “We wouldn’t be so good if we hadn’t thought of that. There should be a box of special bracelets in the storage room. The crystals in them are synchronized with the spell matrix, and thanks to the theoretically calculated phenomenon of intertemporal resonance, it creates a kind of ‘thread’ through which you can return to the starting point at the push of a button. But it has never been tested, unfortunately, due to known events. At least it should work in theory.”

“Let’s find out.” Cosmic twitched her cheek and turned back to the hedgehog. “If we succeed, everything will be different here. There’ll be no war, no bombs falling…” She almost gasped at the sudden thought. “Your friends won’t even get hurt, because there won’t be any conditions for that!”

Sonic looked up at her. A glimmer of hope flickered in his eyes.

And the blue earth pony continued, “Together, we’ll end up in a new world, where there’ll be an Equestria familiar to you and your friends, and they may find the Elements of Harmony on their own, or even negotiate with their bearers. And you can find your way back and finally defeat your Eggman. And if we don’t,” she closed her eyes, “well, at least we’ll have tried.”

“All right,” Sonic said deafly. “I agree. I’ll go with you. But you must realize the responsibility. Besides…” he sighed heavily, “I can’t do anything to help them yet anyway.”

He turned back to the terminal and opened another file, this time a text one.

And his eyes immediately went wide.

“What?! Seriously…?”

“What is it?” Sky Bloom craned his neck, trying to see the text over the hedgehog’s shoulder.

Sonic wrinkled his nose, pulled the cursor back to the beginning, and began to read aloud.

“‘Top secret, of special importance. Delete before reading. Ministry of Morale, April 25th, 1016 Harmony Era. Report…’ In a nutshell, the story here is that shortly after the war began, the statue of Discord was evacuated from… Area 51 in Nevada! The operation was supervised by Pinkie Pie herself. Then come all sorts of details… And the signature: Bellerophon Michaelidis.” The hedgehog turned around and looked at the two ponies. “The same man Shadow and Lyra had been talking about.”

“I wonder if he was the one she said was Rainbow Dash and Twilight Sparkle’s lover before the war…?” Sky Bloom said, but under the sharp glances of Cosmic and Sonic, he smiled sheepishly and retreated a few steps.

“What’s clear is that nothing’s clear.” The blue earth pony shook her head. “And as long as we stay here, it won’t get any clearer. To find the point of no return after which everything went to Discord, we must start acting.”

“And what do you suggest?” asked the unicorn. “Jump two hundred years back in time and go to Canterlot to see Celestia and tell her about the war that wouldn’t have happened yet?”

“Wrong,” Cosmic grinned. “First, like the professor said, it would be good to test these bracelets – well, and the machine itself – at a gap of more than twenty minutes. But I’m afraid,” she sighed, “that we mustn’t play with time too much. Otherwise, we’ll get to the point where there’s no way to fix it. And besides… Equestria is one thing, but The Republic doesn’t deserve its fate either. Neither does the RC-13 itself.”

The blue pony lifted her chin. Her eyes shone with determination.

“And that’s why we’re going to this very same bunker. To stop Lyra in the past.”

…The bracelets turned out to be exactly as Cosmic had imagined: strips of shiny black plastic with a wide blue stripe down the middle, a built-in diamond-shaped crystal, and a red button to return. The earth pony was suspicious of the latter, but Sample Dample reassured her that the button had been made very tight on purpose to prevent it from being pressed accidentally.

It was decided to move to the day before Lyra had gone to Earth and learned of her parents’ death, into the same control room – the professor himself had insisted on it. It was also to show the scientists that their work was not in vain, and perhaps even to distract Lyra from her plans.

“Furthermore, you can tell us where to find the blueprints,” Sample Dample added from his jar. “So we can get them ourselves and finally finish the project.”

“You be careful out there, okay?” Sonic said, sitting down in front of the terminal with the settings window open. “I don’t wanna be stuck here without you. I got my rings back on now, but I don’t know if I can handle it if something happens to you.”

“We’ll be fine,” Cosmic replied and stepped onto the flat, round platform. Sky Bloom climbed up after her. “Run it.”

“Okay, now…” The hedgehog tapped on the keys and entered the settings and then the access code. “Done. Well, let’s go, then?”

His finger froze on the start button.

“Let’s go,” Cosmic nodded and glanced at Sky Bloom.

The unicorn nodded back silently.

Well, traveling through time again isn’t scary at all. Interesting, maybe. She looked down at the bracelet on her leg. Especially knowing that we can come back at any point.

The reactor hummed, generating just the right amount of power. The glow of the blue needle in the flask came into view – and then it all melted away. To reassemble.

Cosmic, however, squeezed her eyes shut: the flash of light around her simply didn’t allow her to see what was happening at the exact moment of the transfer. When she opened her eyes, she saw a completely different picture.

It was as if she and Sky Bloom were inside a memory orb. The room was brightly lit by tubular mercury lamps, unlike the “future” where half the lights were on at best. Ponies in lab coats sat at terminals; workstations were littered with charts, calculations, and coffee cups.

But the general businesslike hustle and bustle of the constant brainstorming that had clearly been going on here a second ago seemed to have stopped. All conversation ceased in an instant, and all eyes turned to the two armed and armored ponies standing on the platform of the time machine.

Cosmic cleared her throat.

“Um… hello,” she said. “We’re from the future.”

For a while, the work stopped. The scientists, many of whom were already of a solid age, jumped and squealed like foals at the realization that the work they had spent so many years on would one day come to an end.

Of course, there were many questions: how did the staff of the facility deal with it, who would continue the research after them, and in general - how much time had passed? And above all, what was Equestria like in this future?

Cosmic had to upset everypony by telling them that even after two hundred years, there was lawlessness and anarchy on the surface, and that the scientists themselves had turned from radiation into ghouls. She decided to leave out the fact that barely half of them had survived, and even those had become obedient cyber-puppets, as well as the blueprints from Manehattan, referring to some instructions about their possible influence on the future.

Lyra also came out to see what was going on. But the strangers’ story didn’t interest her much; her ears drooped, and the unicorn ghoul returned to her quarters.

Unlike Rainbow Dash, who just bombarded them with questions. How had the world changed? Did they remember her and how awesome she was? And most importantly, how was the Enclave?

Finally, after all the explanations, Cosmic and Sky Bloom managed to get a private talk with Professor Sample Dample. Of course, only after they both surrendered their weapons.

“…Let me get this straight: there is something else that the other employees of the Center are not supposed to know about?” asked the head of the RC-13 as he closed the door to his room behind them.

He looked exactly as he had in the memory orbs: lilac fur, tousled gray mane. Nothing compared to what he became later. Cosmic even shuddered as she saw this horrible contrast with her own eyes.

The professor sat in his swivel chair, Cosmic and Sky Bloom on the bed. Rainbow stood at the exit with her beam rifle, like a watchful and faithful sentry, making sure nopony could overhear them. Although the soundproofing should have been good in here.

“Yes,” Cosmic replied, pulling the memory orb from her saddlebag. “All of you are in danger. The danger we are here for. Here are Lyra’s memories of the events that will begin tomorrow,” the blue pony sighed, “and that will change the lives of the bunker’s inhabitants forever. Or rather, those of them who’ll survive it all.”

“And you want me to look through this memory?”

The professor carefully levitated the orb to himself and set it down on the desk, holding it with his hoof.

“Yes. And as soon as possible.” Cosmic glanced at the azure pegasus. “And you too, Rainbow. Because you, Sandy, and Runner will be affected as well.”

“Oka-ay…” Rainbow Dash stretched out and frowned. “But if you’re gonna pull some kind of stunt like frying Prof’s brains with your orb…” Sample shuddered. “…you know it won’t work!”

“We mean you no harm.” Sky Bloom sighed. “We just want to save you. I guess that kind of impulse is valued less than nothing in the Wasteland.”

Rainbow’s cheek twitched at the rebuke, but she remained silent.

“Maybe I really am too gullible – so gullible that it’s going to ruin me,” the professor said, turning to the pegasus, “but I do trust them, Rainbow. Just like I trusted you and your companions, remember?”

“And like Lyra,” Cosmic remarked. “She’s the only one with a gateway to the other world – and she’s unpredictable. Her pretty horned head can come up with anything. And we’re here to prevent it.”

“Well, let’s see what you got here…”

Sample Dample tilted his head, touched the orb with the tip of his horn… and froze in place, his eyes closed.

“How long does the record last?” Rainbow asked, looking anxiously at the unconscious professor.

“About two hours,” Cosmic remembered. “I don’t know exactly; I was inside the orb at that time.”

“Two hours and twenty-three minutes,” said Sky Bloom. “But it’s ‘clean,’ since Cosmic saw it–”

“By the way, why didn’t you want to?” asked the blue earth pony.

“I don’t know.” The white unicorn gritted his teeth. “After everything we went through in the bunker with Lyra… I don’t want to stick my nose (or rather horn) in her shit.”

“Um… am I… missing something?” Rainbow inquired, shifting her gaze from one pony to the other.

“Unfortunately,” Cosmic nodded grimly. “But there must be a recollector somewhere in the RC, so it’s fixable.”

“All right.” The pegasus glanced at the electronic clock above the door. “If he’s not awake in two hours and twenty minutes…” She narrowed her eyes and glared at the strangers; her rifle slightly raised in her hooves. “…then I've warned you.”

…The time passed slowly – probably because the three of them had nothing to do. Of course, there was an option, but each of them thought it inappropriate in such an environment.

Instead, they tried to make up for the long wait by playing word games – but Rainbow started making toxic comments every time she missed her turn or someone else mentioned something she thought was too complicated, so the game quickly died down.

But as for the future, the pegasus was eager to find out as much as possible.

“You know, I… knew the bombs would fall,” she said. In response to the stunned looks, she grinned and continued, “Pinkie told me. She was really stoned on those Mint-als of hers, and at first I took her words for drug-induced delirium, but… well, by some bucking miracle, she convinced me. And I didn’t even dare tell anypony about it! And when it happened, that wasn’t what really surprised me. It was how easily, literally with the flick of a feather,” she demonstrated what she meant by actually flicking her wing feathers like fingers, “pegasi left Equestria to die in its own radioactive shit. And I… ever since I flew away from them, I’ve been trying to do the right thing. To make this bucking world a better place. Even if” – she snorted contemptuously – “it’s not friggin’ worth it. I want to know what happens next, so I don’t make any more mistakes.”

“Believe me, it’s unlikely to save you.” Cosmic shook her head. “Rather, only upset.”

The Republic. This mistake the blue pony would never forget.

Although… what had been the mistake? Even if she and the aliens had come to defend the town, what could they do against an entire army of cyberghouls and a gang of raiders? There wouldn’t be much left of The Republic anyway.

Finally, the professor woke up.

The lilac unicorn removed his horn from the orb and raised his head, panting and looking ahead with bulging eyes.

“Well, what is it, Prof?” Rainbow asked. Then she frowned worriedly. “Are you… okay?”

“It’s… even worse than I thought. It’s… just unthinkable,” Sample Dample exhaled and looked at Cosmic and Sky Bloom. “I’ll talk to Lyra. Tonight. We cannot let her do anything.”

“I guess it’s my turn now?” Rainbow said.

“Yeah… I better go get the recollector.” Sample Dample rose from his chair.

“One moment, Prof," the pegasus stopped him and pressed a few buttons on her PipBuck, then brought the device to her lips and said, “Runner, could you please come to room 113 right away? Yes, it’s urgent. All right, I wait.” She turned to the others and explained, “Now that things are moving like this, you’ll all be under guard from now on. Consider it my personal order.”

“Even in the bathroom?” Sky Bloom grinned.

“Especially in there,” Rainbow replied deadly serious. “I can’t let any of you get hurt. This is my way. My loyalty to you and to this place.”

Loyalty is only worth it when it comes from both sides, Cosmic thought. And sometimes it goes along with betrayal. It just depends on which side you look at.

The blue pony squeezed her eyes shut.

The Republic… The memory of home still wouldn’t let her go. Reminded her that some things simply could not be influenced. Like a basic plot already written for the world to follow.

But I’m the protagonist. After everything we’ve been through, I have to hoofle it… right?

The author of the story didn’t answer. And Cosmic wondered with bated breath what that might mean.

Soon the day came to an end. Everyone finished their scheduled work and went to their rooms, and the corridors grew noticeably darker.

But there was a new feeling in the bunker now. A sense of change that was coming in an unstoppable wave and could not be avoided. It was only possible to integrate and go with the flow.

The professor sat in front of the terminal in his room. A black window of an open document glowed in a green frame on the screen. The cursor flickered invitingly, as if begging to fill this gaping void with text.

I must think of something, thought Sample Dample. I already have a plan of action with various options, but how to explain it to the others… It’s going to be harder than presenting a thesis.

He tapped a few keys and propped his head back up with a hoof. “Appeal…” the typed word appeared.

But no ideas came. Maybe it was because before telling others, he should have formulated it for himself first.

Uh-huh, I could use Rainbow’s help right now.

The professor sighed and saved the document, leaving it open just in case.

The pegasus had also watched the memory orb – and for several minutes afterward, she had cursed fiercely, threatening to tear Lyra to pieces with her bare hooves. Only the three of them had been able to hold her back then. The mint-green unicorn ghoul didn’t know anything yet – which meant it was wrong to mess with her at this point.

I’ll talk to her first. If I can convince her, maybe it’ll all work out. But if not… He shook his head. How do I know I won’t make things worse? What if that’s the main reason–

A knock on the door snapped him out of his thoughts and made him turn toward the metal panel.

That must be Lyra. Though… it wouldn’t hurt to check out.

Rising from his chair, the professor walked to the door and displayed the image from the outside camera on the small terminal in the wall.

Yeah… everything’s fine.

His hoof pressed the unlock button and the solid steel door slid aside.

“Come in, Lyra,” he said, letting the unicorn in. “Thank you for finding the time. Have a seat.”

“Tell me, Professor, why did you call me here?” Lyra asked, sitting down in the chair with some awkwardness, while Sample Dample remained standing. “Does it have something to do with my work? Or” – she narrowed her eyes – “with my planned visit to Earth tomorrow?”

“I’m afraid so, Lyra. The latter.”

Now is the time… But how, how do I tell her everything?! One way or another I’ll have to weave between the meanings...

He turned and walked across the room. He stopped at the wall without looking at Lyra and said, “You should stop tinkering with those spells. It’s… distracting you from your work. Especially now that we’re one step closer to a clue, thanks to our theory being confirmed.”

“I don’t understand…” Lyra shook her head. “We’re still stuck with the problem of the crystal configuration for the accumulation circuit… How could the appearance of aliens from the future give us a clue?”

The blueprints in Manehattan, Cosmic’s words came to the professor’s mind. But that’s not something Lyra needs to know. No, I shouldn’t tell her.

“At least we’ve learned that there is a solution,” he sighed. “And in general, I’m speaking figuratively. But we have to throw everything we have at finding the best pattern. There is no time for… excuse me, nonsense.” He turned and looked at Lyra. “Please. I’m begging you. Help us regain our Equestria. And then… you can do whatever you want.”

“Okay, Professor, I heard you,” Lyra replied and stood up. Her and Sample Dample’s eyes met. “But you must hear me as well. I’m not your employee, and you can’t tell me what to do. Let me remind you, I’m still a yellow-cleared member of the O.I.A. under the pre-war chain of command. And stay out of my personal life!” She stomped her hoof violently. “I’m the one who decides what I do. Especially something you have nothing to do with! Is that clear to you, Professor?” She literally spat out the last word.

And with her head held high, the unicorn turned and left the room.

Sample Dample looked after her. It was hard to make out the expression that flashed in the scientist’s eyes for a moment.

Then he shook his head, lifted his PipBuck leg, and entered Rainbow’s PipBuck code on the radio tab.

“Dash, it’s me. Sorry, I failed. Yes, we’ll go with the backup plan. Take Lyra into custody and confiscate her matrices. Keep an eye on the staff. If anything happens, report to me immediately. That’s all. Good luck.”

The old unicorn turned off the connection and looked at the swivel chair where Lyra had just been sitting.

Is there really no future left for us other than what has already been determined? While we are now one step away from changing it completely? He closed his eyes. No. I must have faith. We must have faith that we can do this. For knowledge is a power in itself, and the knowledge of what will happen is a double power. And that’s reason enough to keep hope alive. Nothing else remains for us to do now anyway.

...Cosmic stretched sleepily, yawned, and spread out on the bed. The darkness in the room was a sign that it was still night. But her body didn’t seem to know when to sleep and when to wake, due to her disrupted regimen and the stress of the past few days. A quick glance at the electronic clock by the door told her it was four in the morning. There was still time to rest and prepare for a new day. The day when the future of RC-13 would be decided.

Sky Bloom was snoozing next to her. Smiling, Cosmic didn’t deny herself the pleasure of leaning closer and inhaling his scent with pleasure. Of course, she had thoughts of snuggling up and playing some dirty games, but… Discord, was she really going to get involved with Life Bloom’s sibling because of her attraction to the dead Snow Vision? No-o, she couldn’t afford such… weirdness a second time. So, with perhaps a slightly frustrated sigh, she rolled over and tried to go back to sleep.

But sleep didn’t come. On the contrary, her body was contracting like a spring, preparing for a possible mess. Now everything depended not so much on them, but on the coherence and coordination of the professor, Rainbow and their subordinates. And also on what Lyra would do. In fact, there were only two main points in the case: would the unicorn be able to travel to Earth and learn the terrible truth about her parents – and if so, would such a small security force, together with the strangers from the distant future, be able to prevent the rebellion she would raise?

That was what worried Cosmic the most: the uncertainty. The timeline in which they found themselves was no longer planned back and forth, but was being put together… no, rewritten! – literally on the fly. And the realization made her skin crawl.

If she and Sky Bloom wanted to stop Lyra, they had to do it now. Before it was too late.

Suddenly, hooves rapped on the steel door of the room, and Cosmic shivered in bed at the sound. Sky Bloom stirred, clearly awakened by the sudden intrusion.

Her PipBuck came to life and gave the trill of an incoming call. With a heavy heart, Cosmic opened the desired tab and pressed the answer button.

“Cosmic? It’s Dash!” came the agitated voice of the pegasus from the small speaker. “Open up, I’m outside!”

That alone sent a chill down the blue pony’s spine.

She jumped out of bed, ran to the door and unlocked it.

The heavy panel slid aside, and Rainbow Dash flew into the room, causing Cosmic to jump back. If the former Minister of Awesome could spin like a rainbow hurricane even in her ghoul form, what was she like in her youth?

I’m sure Sonic wouldn’t miss a chance to compete with her, Cosmic thought.

Then she noticed that Rainbow was clutching not one, but three weapons in her hooves.

“Here you go!” The pegasus passed Cosmic her Argument and threw Sky Bloom’s assault rifle at the stallion, so that he barely caught the weapon with his telekinesis inches away from his head. “Sample wants us in the control room. Runner and Sandy are in the corridors now, making sure nothing goes wrong…”

“What happened?” Sky Bloom asked, rising from the bed and magically fastening his armor.

Cosmic was putting on her armor as well.

Rainbow jerked her head, and her answer made the earth pony’s heart sink.

“What else could it be? Lyra’s gone.”

The professor had obviously not slept at all that night. His lab coat was crumpled as usual, but the bags under his eyes were certainly indicative of his condition.

“Around eleven at night, I called Lyra in for a talk,” he said, sitting at one of the workstations in the main hall, with Rainbow, Cosmic, and Sky Bloom clustered around him. “I tried to talk her out of the whole travel thing… but she didn’t listen.” He shook his head. “Instead, she accused me of restricting her. Then she left, and I asked Rainbow–”

“I went to Lyra’s to get the matrices around midnight,” Dash continued. “She took the news of her preventive arrest calmly, but damn, her look made me shudder! It was like she was about to cut me in half with her laser…!” The pegasus sighed. “I took the matrices to the storage room, put them on the back shelf and sat on guard at the entrance to make sure nopony came in. No, it had to happen so that Lyra could teleport! When I heard a strange noise behind me, I turned around and there was this green bitch and her stuff disappearing in a flash of magic. Obviously, she couldn’t have escaped that far, so we started looking for her all over the place. And then Prof guided us with the cameras.” Rainbow could barely keep from spitting angrily. “She’d gone to this Earth of hers right from her room. A perfect escape, to say the least. And now there’s no telling where exactly she’ll return to.”

And that was really scary.

When the pegasus mentioned teleportation, Cosmic’s mane stood on end.

Yes, I know Lyra’s undoubtedly a powerful magician, but to wield such power… According to Sonic and Shadow, of all the characters in G4, except for the Goddesses and Discord, only Twilight Sparkle and Starlight Glimmer could teleport with their magic! Did Lyra really get that close to them at power level? Well, I’ll have to rack my brain to calculate possible combat options.

But… then why didn’t she use teleportation to finish off Sonic and me? Was it simply a matter of vanity and two hundred years of ego-boosting that caused Lyra to naturally show off to her would-be victims?

Or… had that detail been trivially not invented in the story at that point?

Cosmic and Sky Bloom looked at each other. The unicorn’s face also showed that he wasn’t at all happy about the new discovery.

“And that’s not all,” the professor spoke up again. “About a third of the cameras are out of order for unknown reasons, so we can’t see some of the staff quarters from here, as well as the infirmary and the cafeteria. Runner and Sandy went to find out what was going on. Soon,” he glanced at the time on his PipBuck screen, “they should be back with a report.”

“Should we go after them?” Sky Bloom asked, pulling the bolt of his assault rifle with magic. “What if something’s wrong?”

“We’ll wait for the checkpoint time,” Rainbow said. Although she looked like she’d been thinking the same thing for a long time. “By five o’clock, we’ll know what to do next.”

She pulled two pass cards from her armor pocket and hoofed them to Sky Bloom and Cosmic.

“Here you go. Just in case we have to come back here.”

Then she turned to the professor.

“We need to alert the staff. Tell everypony who’s on our side to gather here in the hall. The armory’s already open, and I’ve moved what I can over here,” she waved a hoof at the pile of weapons and ammo boxes in the corner of the hall, “so let’s get ready to hold the fort. The problem is,” the pegasus grinned bitterly, “we have no idea who we can trust here.”

“I’ll try to track down their PipBucks,” Sample Dample said, taking a seat at the terminal. “Those who are asleep can be woken up one by one and brought here. But if many of them have gathered, they’re obviously up to something…”

“They might be on our side as well. At least some of them,” Sky Bloom argued. “So we should wait until we have more accurate data before drawing any conclusions.”

“But the others are still better called here,” Cosmic said. “If things go as far as we fear, we could use our own army of ponies.”

The professor nodded and began typing some commands on the keyboard.

The minutes of waiting passed even slower than the more than two hours of Lyra’s memories. Everyone was sweating from the tension; Cosmic’s knees trembled nervously from time to time. She wanted to get out of her seat and shoot the hell out of this breeding ground of traitors and squealers – but she realized: she could not. It was just the wrong time.

Not every problem could be solved with a bullet. And the ones that could, might just cause more trouble.

One by one, the disgruntled, sleepy ponies came into the room, summoned by Sample Dample via PipBucks based on the location of markers on the bunker map in the terminal. They were quickly briefed and, with a change in their faces, agreed to help, after which they received their weapons and took up positions along the walls of the room.

Still, it felt like nothing was happening. And that was partly true: the real battle was yet to come.

But then, with only five minutes to go, something finally happened.

There was a thud as the door slid aside. All the ponies immediately turned to see Sandy burst into the hall. The mare was standing on the threshold, breathing heavily; her blonde mane was disheveled, and her gun belt was tangled between her front legs.

“There’s… such a… Well… it’s…” she panted. Then she took a breath, drew more air into her chest, and blurted out, “Lyra’s back!”

Everyone looked at each other sharply. Each of them realized at that moment that it was impossible to delay any longer.

“Where’s she?” Rainbow asked, flying closer.

“In her room. She came out of the portal somewhere in the corridor and went to herself,” Sandy explained. “Runner followed her, blocked the door, and started guarding the entrance. The ones for Lyra are in the mess hall right now, I’m coming from there. They’re discussing something; apparently Melon’s in charge…”

“What a bastard,” said the professor. “And he is one of my best employees… was, anyway. Well, now he will definitely be, so to speak, fired. To the surface. Along with his companions.”

“We have to defeat them first,” Sky Bloom said. “And then we can throw threats around.”

“Let’s go already,” Cosmic said impatiently, getting up and heading for the door. “It’s time to end this play.” Suddenly she stopped and turned to the professor. “You won’t lock the doors, will you?”

“Probably not,” he shook his head. “So you can come back in case of an emergency. Although,” the stallion sighed heavily, “it seems to have ruined the other me. But I won’t leave you. You are the only ones who can change everything for the better.”

Cosmic did not answer – just nodded silently. And following Sky Bloom, Sandy and Rainbow, she walked out into the semi-dark, ruby-lit corridor of the Center.

But with each step into the dark corners of the pre-war bunker, the blue pony felt the darkness thicken around them, taking away not only their confidence, but the very possibility of their victory.

They reached Lyra’s room quickly enough; they were a little out of breath, perhaps from the excitement.

But another surprise awaited them.

Runner was lying in front of the door, his assault rifle underneath him. A pool of blood was slowly spilling onto the floor.

“NOOOOOOO!!!” Sandy screamed, and before anyone could do anything, she sprinted over to the stallion and dropped to all four legs beside his body. “Runner, wake up! Wake up! Please–”

She didn’t finish.

From around the corner, a series of bullets flew into her chest and face, causing her to spurt blood from her pierced throat and collapse sideways beside her lover.

“Stand back!” Cosmic yelled, firing back a line of bullets from Last Argument.

From the corner, a chain of armed ponies appeared, barely recognizable as RC-13 scientists.

“Go on, I’ll cover you!” Rainbow said.

The pegasus flew to the ceiling and, hiding behind a turret, began firing lasers from her rifle.

Fleeing from the barrage of lead, Cosmic and Sky Bloom retreated around the corner and began staggering toward the main hall. Rainbow’s shouts could be heard from the corridor off to the side.

“Ha, is that the best you can do? Here I am, try to hit me…!”

Short pew-pews of her beam weapon were interspersed with the dry crackle of gunfire.

And then Cosmic heard something that made her jump like an electric shock.

Gunshots. Somewhere behind…

Shooting in the main hall!

No… no, no, no, no, no...!!!

“Hurry!” the earth pony shouted as she ran backwards as fast as she could.

Sky Bloom rushed after her.

The painfully familiar steel door loomed at the end of the corridor, coming closer with each desperate, vein-racking leap.

Just make it in time, just make it in time…!

Sky Bloom slapped the key card in his telekinetic field on the scanner as he ran. The door opened, and the two ponies charged into the spacious room at full speed…

And stopped abruptly, their hooves sliding across the floor.

All the ponies that had gathered here to fight Lyra and her henchmen were dead! Cosmic’s breath caught in her throat at the sight of blood-drenched corpses lying all over the hall.

And then she saw them.

In the middle of the room, pointing the barrels of their assault rifles at the new arrivals, stood Melon and another turquoise unicorn – looking like a crayon of a different color from the same pack, as if all the constituent shades of fur and mane had been reversed. It was these two who were with Lyra in that memory orb.

Lyra herself stood between them and slightly ahead. In the magical glow of her horn swayed the familiar needlegun.

With a glance to the side, Cosmic spotted Sample Dample in the corner – sprawled on the floor, clutching his shot front leg. The professor’s broken horn was also lying there.

“Ah, there you are. At last,” Lyra said. “We’ve been waiting for you.”

Cosmic turned to see Rainbow catching up to them. The pegasus had apparently dealt with some of the cyberghoul unicorn’s fighters and was now speeding through the air along the corridor, her wings almost touching the walls.

“Oh yeah. I forgot.” A yellow glow touched the door lock button. “Divide and conquer, as the saying goes.”

Cosmic watched in horror as Rainbow dashed straight for the thick door slamming shut in front of her – unable to stop.

The impact was terrifying. The solid steel plate shook and rattled but stayed in place. The pegasus was cut off from those she was trying to protect.

Again. Just like the other version of the past.

This can’t be happening...!

With a face contorted with rage, Cosmic turned back to Lyra and raised Argument with her hoof – only to find the muzzle of the magically held needlegun at her nose.

Lyra and her allies stood behind the yellow shield the unicorn had created – and their weapons hung in front of it.

“You scum… you’ll answer for everything!” Cosmic growled.

At the same time, she tried to discreetly raise the carbine so that she could grab it in her teeth in an instant.

“Are you sure? No, it’s you who will answer for everything,” Lyra said and slightly tapped the earth pony’s nose with her needlegun… like a naughty foal. “Don’t even try, we’ll be faster anyway.”

“Guns down! Quickly!” Melon yelled, swinging the barrel of his assault rifle with telekinesis.

Cosmic glanced at Sky Bloom. The unicorn looked at her too. His eyes were filled with regret: he clearly realized that everything was over for them. But he wasn’t going to give up just like that either.

The bracelet! Cosmic suddenly remembered, feeling the thin plastic hoop on her leg. We can go back and try again! One more minute earlier and we can start acting right from the doorway! We just have to–

But what if things repeat themselves over and over again? How many failures will we suffer before we can change the situation for the better? And wasn’t it me who said that we should interfere with the flow of time as little as possible…?

No. Running away is not an option. We need to fix this here and now.

So that we can fix Equestria itself later.

“How long should I wait?!” Melon’s shout rang in her ears. His voice was high and hysterical, like that of an unstable filly. “Or do you want us to start with him?!” He jerked his head towards the professor.

Slowly, very slowly, Cosmic bent over and, removing the belt of her carbine from her neck, dropped the weapon to the floor. Sky Bloom did the same using his telekinesis.

Now she’ll make another speech while we play prisoners. And then, when she’s ready to kill us, we’ll… I don’t know, we’ll think of something. We will, won’t we?

“Great. You did all the work yourselves,” Lyra remarked as she magically tossed the weapons stacked on the floor aside.

Her needlegun suddenly twitched twice, and Cosmic was stabbed in the cheek with a needle. Soaked, apparently, with the same sedative that had been used in the nameless town two centuries later.

No! This shouldn’t have happened… thought the blue pony and started to run away… But her body did not obey her anymore. Her legs twisted in an unimaginable somersault, and Cosmic collapsed to the floor.

Sky Bloom froze beside her. The unicorn had even raised a pinkish wall of shielding in front of him, but his magic was weakened by the effects of the sedative, and he wobbled more and more.

The bracelet… I need to press the button… a thought moved through her fading mind. But Cosmic had no strength left to move a hoof. She could only watch – and wait for her fate.

Lyra smirked victoriously.

“And now die.”

In the next moment, the bursts rumbled.

Suddenly, Cosmic felt something heavy and warm. She looked up and saw Sky Bloom above her. The unicorn’s eyes were bulging as if in unbearable pain, and his body was twitching in time to the bullets. Drool mixed with blood dripped from his open mouth onto the floor.

No! Sky Bloom…!

The mare wanted to scream… but a lump suddenly rose in her throat, and she couldn’t make a sound.

The unicorn’s hoof shifted – and landed on the return button on her bracelet.

No!!! Not like this…! I… I just can’t… without–

“Cos… mic…” Sky Bloom wheezed so quietly that the earth pony rather figured it out by the movement of his lips.

And then he pressed the button.

Noooo– was the last thing the mare thought of.

That was all she had time for. Darkness came over her again, illuminated for a moment by a dazzling flash of light.

“I’ve remembered. Now I’ve remembered everything,” said Sample Dample.

“Not remembered. You’ve known.” Cosmic sniffed. “It’s just that the memories themselves… have changed.”

She was no longer crying. Well… almost. At least the tears were no longer streaming, just little drops at the corners of her reddened eyes.

And that was only because she had no tears left.

…She woke up with Sonic shaking her by the shoulder like a huge plush toy. Her consciousness returned slowly, reluctantly, but she was able to pick up something from the hedgehog’s rambling. Something about how he and the professor had guessed about the sedative, and there was an antidote in the infirmary, which Sonic had injected into her, so everything would be fine now, but wait, where’s Sky Bloom, wasn’t he with her–

The mention of the stallion was the last straw.

Cosmic was weeping, literally flailing hysterically on the ground – and could not calm down. She was burning from within with the unbearable, incredibly bitter realization that she had lost another friend.

“Why?! WHY-Y-Y…?! It couldn’t have happened! It couldn’t…!” she screamed, lying on her belly and slamming her hooves into the floor. “Why… why now…? We… we defeated Lyra! In this time…! Discord had me trying to do more…!”

Instead of crying, an angry growl suddenly escaped her throat.

“Oh, nooo… it’s not Discord – especially since he’s still locked up in his metal prison! It’s you, author, isn’t it?!” She looked up at the ceiling, as if someone out there might be watching her. “It’s always you who make me suffer new horrors! Why are you torturing me and my friends?! There are almost none of them left…!” The mare sobbed again. “I don’t have a home anymore! I have no–”

…no one I can rely on, she wanted to say, but remembering Sonic, she put it differently.

“…no one familiar! And it’s all you, whoever you are! What is this sick addiction to killing?! If everyone else dies just ‘cause they’re minor characters and I’m alive ‘cause I’m the protagonist, then kill me too! End it all! Throw this story in the trash and write another one, about the Equestria of long ago, without the Wasteland bent on massacring every fucking inhabitant! Without all the fallout and cupcakes and rainbow factories and whatever else humans, I don’t even know what you look like, have come up with over there! I don’t want! To live! Like this…!”

She coughed and sat down on her haunches, wrapping her forelegs around herself. Tears flowed from her eyes again.

“Why me…?” Cosmic whispered, her shoulders trembling. “Why is this happening to me…? I wanted a normal, boring life in The Republic… a peaceful old age in my own home… maybe a pack of foals would be not a bad option. Why should I have such adventures? I can’t even wipe myself with them, for that would mean betraying the memory of those who died… Wasteland has enough characters made up. Why create another one? No – a whole bunch of them… What the hay are you doing that for…?”

The words were gone. So were the tears. As well as the feelings.

Cosmic sat with her eyes squeezed shut, rocking back and forth. She no longer felt anything at all. There was nothing left of the willing, confident mare she had been a month ago. And she didn’t know what to do next.

What to do when my world was literally torn to shreds? Keep racing through time, hoping – for the umpteenth time! – to make things right? What if it doesn’t work? What if it doesn’t work?! What if it’s just a universal vicious cycle that can’t be broken? Will I be able to bring peace to Equestria if I can’t save anyone around me?! No, not even that – if I’m not allowed to…?!

What to do? Where to go? For miles around there’s nothing but barren land, contaminated by radiation and dried out by the sun. Go back somewhere near New Appleloosa? Who would want me there, with my current background? And if I keep going, one day, if I’m lucky, I’ll get to Hoofington… where no one would give a shit either.

Better to be forgotten here in the middle of nowhere.

Defeated. Broken. Devastated.

What a pity that medical capsules only heal the body – but not the soul, Cosmic thought aloofly, frozen and staring at a point in front of her. Maybe I should ask Sonic to take the plasma rifle and… no, he’ll refuse, of course, but if I insist–

Suddenly her eyes widened. Cosmic even raised her head, as if afraid of missing this brief glimpse of insight.

If the universe was being destroyed… perhaps it was just to show how it could be rebuilt.

Littlepip. Go through the fire.

Blackjack. Do better.

Puppysmile. Find her mother.

Silver Storm. Be a hero.

Dazzling Dusk. Reach the goal.

Murky Number Seven. Become free.

Finally, she, Cosmic Valor. Travel back in time. Save Equestria.

No matter how hard things got, she always survived. Overcoming one obstacle after another and forging ahead.

Defeating the enemies who stood in her way. One by one. Again, and again.

Everyone had fallen before her, including Lyra Heartstrings. And Sky Bloom’s death was only a consequence of her attempting the impossible.

The first death Cosmic was truly guilty of. And it would remain the only one.

Sky Bloom died covering her with himself. So that she could live again.

A time machine fell into her hooves. So she could change the past.

So many ponies have given their lives for her to be here now. And she must finish what she started, chasing the mystery that once tormented her. Otherwise, there was no point in all of this.

Suddenly, Cosmic opened her mouth and looked up at the slightest hint of a new thought. Someone else’s thought!

Without knowing it, she addressed an angry rebuke to what was now one of the gods of her world.

And she was answered.

Yes, it’s me. It was my will that you went through all your adventures, lost friends and gradually came closer to figuring things out. Said and thought what I put in your mouth or in your head.

I’m sorry about that. Maybe I did go overboard… more than once. But the world isn’t fair. I’m not fair. But your example shows me how to live and fight. To face the chaos around you and not let it consume your soul.

Admittedly, even I didn’t expect some of the things you’ve done. For example, you made the decision to go so far back in time to save not only The Republic, but also the bunker, instead of traveling back a year with Sonic and trying to kill Lyra. But your failures are a consequence of the fact that you’re still just an ordinary earth pony. That despite all your trials, you’re still you – even though you’ve changed. And that’s what I admire about you.

There are some things you cannot change, no matter how hard you try. You just have to look for a loophole where you have a chance to make a difference. Try over and over again – and not be afraid to fail. Accept your mistakes and keep going.

I could say that everything you’ve been through has really been to get you to where you are now. But you’re the protagonist, Cosmic. And you have your own free will. Your future is a blank page on the screen of my… uh… terminal. And even I don’t know it completely.

You can do it, Cosmic. I believe in you.

You are the hero I – and Fallout: Equestria itself – have been missing.

The Seventh Element of Harmony.

Justice.

The voice in her head was gone, but Cosmic sat staring dazedly at the ceiling for a long time. As if waiting for the author, whoever he was, to come back – or to do something else. Like resurrect Sonic’s friends. Or Lyra. Or Sky Bloom. Or just take them back to where it all started. Revive The Republic – or make the bunker explode.

But none of that happened. The reactor and the terminals hummed as usual, and the lights on the ceiling shone brightly, and the flask with Sonic’s needle glowed softly blue.

The time machine was waiting for its new hour.

It didn’t immediately dawn on the blue pony what had just happened.

She had just yelled at a god.

And the god had apologized.

Someone’s hand rested gently on her shoulder, and Cosmic turned sharply.

The blue hedgehog immediately retreated a step or two, apparently frightened by what flashed through her eyes at that moment.

“How… are you?” he asked cautiously.

“Shitty,” Cosmic exhaled and wiped away her tears. “But what does it matter now? It won’t bring Sky Bloom back anyway. And I really don’t seem to have anything left to do but hang around and try to do something about Equestria. I may not be able to bring peace to everypony around me, but maybe the others can help.”

“I’ve remembered,” Sample Dample said. “Now I’ve remembered everything.”

They were silent for a while, and then Sonic, sitting back at the terminal, spoke again.

“Can’t you… well, I don’t know…” he waved his hand in the air, “try again? The time machine is needed to save everyone in the past, right? Why don’t you go back in time and fix everything?”

“It won’t work,” the mare said in a flat voice. “Things had gotten so bad that there was nothing I could do. And how can you imagine that? I didn’t see myself until–”

Suddenly she paused, afraid of missing an idea that had been glimmering somewhere on the edge of her mind.

“Wh… what happened?” Sonic was alert. “Are you up to something again?”

“I’ll save him!” Cosmic sprang to her hooves. “I… I know how! I just… have to time it right…”

Her face now lit up with inspiration and hope. The darkness of despair that had gathered around her, almost enveloping her, receded slightly.

Cosmic looked at her PipBuck. In the corner of the small screen, green numbers were changing, counting up the seconds ticking away into the past. For some reason, the sight of these constantly updating numbers fascinated the blue pony; with her mouth agape, she watched the device on her leg count off the time.

Except that the numbers on PipBuck were quite different from the system clock on the terminals.

Cosmic blinked.

“Time…” She suddenly smacked her hoof on her forehead. “Of course! Time!”

As it turned out, the PipBuck counted time as if the blue earth pony had stayed in her present. Knowing the exact moment of the transfer thanks to the log of operations, it was easy to calculate how long Cosmic had been in the past, and thus to determine the new “destination.”

The interface allowed setting the transfer location to the accuracy of a foot and the time to the second. And that was exactly what Cosmic was going to use.

“…No, sweep me a little more to the right!” She removed her hoof, and the tape measure they used to calculate distances on the floor immediately rolled back up. “The guns are almost up to the platform! I need to be right there, so I don’t waste any extra seconds!”

“What’s the problem?” Sonic grumbled from across the hall, typing in the new coordinates on the keyboard. “Just grab some weapons from the arsenal and pick up yours before you get back.”

“You don’t get it. Argument is for me –” Cosmic twirled her hoof in the air “– even closer than a friend. Like… like a battle buddy. I’ve been through so much with it… you’ve seen some of that yourself. And most importantly, it’s never let me down. And neither have you. Without my carbine, I’m–”

“…just like without your hooves, I’ve got this,” Sonic finished for her and leaned back in his chair. “Done. If Tails were here, he’d have figured it out in no time…”

“You learned a lot from him,” the mare said with unexpected warmth, and the hedgehog looked a little embarrassed.

Cosmic put the bracelet on her leg (the crystal on it glowed green) and climbed onto the platform. She turned to Sonic and shouted, “Launch!”

“Yes, ma’am!” the hedgehog replied cheerfully and pressed the button.

A flash of light and the blue pony was back where Sky Bloom had saved her.

Or rather, when.

The crackle of gunfire reached her ears. Blinking quickly, Cosmic saw the deadly scene from the side: the unicorns stood behind the shield, and Sky Bloom shielded her from the fire of the floating assault rifles. Some of the bullets bounced off his armor, but more and more stayed inside, penetrating deeper each time.

In this situation, unarmed, pinned down by the stallion’s body, Cosmic could do nothing – not even press her bracelet’s return button herself.

But now she wasn’t going to hesitate.

The weapons, hers and Sky Bloom’s, were right next to her hooves. She and Sonic had made no mistake in their choice of coordinates after all.

However, while the earth pony would have bent down to pick up the Last Argument, Sky Bloom would have taken at least five bullets. So Cosmic quickly assessed the situation, lifted her hoof with the PipBuck, and entered the S.A.T.S.

And the world slowed down.

The sounds of gunfire faded to a muffled rumble. Lyra and her minions were just beginning to turn – but Cosmic had already tossed her carbine, caught it in her teeth, and fired a long series of shots in the direction of her opponents. They were unprotected from the side, and even if they could react in time with the cyber-enhancements, they would need to be distracted from shooting their opponents.

Wasting no time, Cosmic grabbed the weapons by the straps with her teeth and dashed across the fire. Her legs felt like squeezing through thick jelly; her muscles would definitely ache when this was over.

But was soreness and pain a high price to pay for saving someone’s life? Especially someone dear?

In the corner of her greened field of vision, the charge scale of the spell was rapidly melting. A few seconds – and the head start Cosmic had gained with technomagic would be over.

She couldn’t afford to be late.

Not now. Not again.

Lyra had created a shield on the side as well, so the bullets from Argument ricocheted off the yellowish field of magic. The unicorn’s eyes widened, clearly surprised to see a second Cosmic in her S.A.T.S. rushing to the aid of the first.

At that moment, Sky Bloom pressed the button on the mare’s bracelet. Cosmic’s body – her own self, just a few subjective hours earlier! – disappeared in a flash of light, and the wounded white unicorn fell to the floor.

In this timeline, all he had to do was die.

Or not?

Was Cosmic creating a new branch of reality – or altering an existing one?

The blue earth pony didn’t have time to wonder about such questions. All she cared about now was Sky Bloom – and the tiny chance of saving him.

Standing between her wounded friend and the trio of scum, Cosmic fired the rest of her magazine at them. To think – now she was doing for Sky Bloom exactly what he had done for her! Paying the unicorn back in the same coin.

And at the same time, her hoof hit the button of his bracelet.

Cosmic looked Lyra in the eye – and grinned at the sight of the cyberghoul’s twisted face. And then she pushed down with her hoof as hard as she could, sending Sky Bloom back to the future.

And then, as the unicorn almost literally vanished into thin air, the spell ended.

The blue earth pony gasped as the bullets flying at Sky Bloom hit her in the chest and threw her to the floor. The armor had held up, but there would definitely be a bruise.

Cosmic had nothing more to do here.

She grabbed the straps of Argument and Sky Bloom’s assault rifle with her teeth again, rolled onto her stomach, and pushed the button on her bracelet with a sense of accomplishment.

She did it.

She fixed the mistake she’d made herself.

Or… had the author said that on purpose to encourage her? Then how was it all part of the plan again?

What the hay does it matter, to Discord?! What matters is that she actually resurrected her friend.

And Lyra and her minions can die watching their bullets pierce a void.

“…I still don’t get it,” Cosmic said, looking at Sample Dample. “Now that I’ve been to the distant past twice, it’s clear how Lyra knew I would come. But I wasn’t in her memory orb at the beginning! How could she know so much about me in that version of reality? And, in her words, be on my trail from The Republic itself?”

The three of them met again in the main hall – and the professor had not even left. The blue pony was not wearing armor now; instead, her chest was tightly bandaged. Sonic sat at the terminal as usual, stroking the keyboard thoughtfully with his finger.

The two of them couldn’t even drag Sky Bloom to the corridor exit – but luckily, Sample Dample had come up with a more elegant solution. So the unicorn rode to the infirmary on the back of a miraculously surviving Protectron of the bunker’s robot guards.

Together, they removed Sky Bloom’s pierced body armor. It was bad, but not fatal: several bullets had lodged in his back muscles, luckily not hitting his internal organs, and only one had scratched his lung. That had caused the unicorn’s mouth to bleed as he had covered Cosmic with himself.

The capsule they had put him in was the last one – all the others were occupied by Sonic’s friends. The blue hedgehog didn’t even look like he wanted to be here, so he bandaged Cosmic’s bruised chest in one of the living quarters.

“Don’t forget, Lyra could hack sprite-bots too,” Sonic replied. “Plus, she had a network of spies who fed her all the info about what was going on in the Wasteland. Metal Dawn could drunkenly spill everything about you and your team, including the town you came from. And all she’d say was just a show-off to make it creepy.”

“I prefer the term ‘posturing,’” the professor remarked. “It’s been a hundred and eighty-five years, Miss Valor. Do you think it’s hard to forget something, however strange and unusual, when your mind is blinded by a thirst for revenge – not against you, but against the whole other universe? It’s not like Lyra was doing Project Whirlpool; she needed the reactor for her megaspell.”

“I guess it’s not that hard,” Cosmic sighed. “But I have another thought. What if the events as I saw them didn’t happen at all? Could she have recorded an ‘edited’ version of what happened in the memory orb – with the intention that if she suddenly decided to be merciful, she would show it to me, send us back in time and finish us off when we returned? To keep it logical, as it were.

“I’ve never heard of such a thing,” Sample Dample said in surprise. “As far as I know, only real memories can be written into orbs… But again, don’t underestimate Lyra’s abilities. The fact that she was able to upload multiple memory fragments into one orb is already a major breakthrough. I wouldn’t be surprised if she also found a way to record the simulated images…”

Suddenly, there was the sound of a door opening and Cosmic and Sonic turned around.

Sky Bloom stood on the threshold and peered hesitantly inside. The unicorn, like the blue earth pony, was naked and disheveled, clots of biogel dripping from her fur onto the floor.

“Um… and what does all this mean?” he asked in confusion. “Have you seen my armor, Cosmic…?”

He had barely finished when the mare broke from her seat and ran up to him, embracing him as soon as she was close enough.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered in his ear. “I won’t let any more ponies get hurt because of me. Neither you nor anyone else. I don’t want to lose you – and I won’t let you die before your time.”

She bit his ear lightly and exhaled softly, “I promise…”

“…But why Littlehorn?” Sky Bloom asked. “Why not the case of the Zebra pirates which started the war? What is so important about this school, and… where is it even located?”

They were sitting in the main hall again – the four of them now. After Sky Bloom had washed off the biogel, his wounds appeared to be almost healed. Still, wartime technomagic could work wonders – and this time, it had put the nearly point-blank shot unicorn back on his hooves in less than a day.

But even now he looked embarrassed, clad once again in his body armor. Of course, he was – he’d recently had his life saved… ignoring the fact that he’d done the same thing first.

After recovering from the shock, they began to discuss a new plan: what to do next? Since the RC-13 could not be saved, it was clear that they had to try something else, without dwelling on the failure. Like changing the history of Equestria itself. After all, if there was no war, or at least no catastrophe at the end of it, then the bunker wouldn’t need to be saved. Most likely, it wouldn’t be built at all.

The only thing left to do was to choose the moment to move.

“Because that’s when the war went through… well, the point of no return,” Cosmic replied. “After what the Zebras had done, the ponies had no sympathy for them. Equestria was willing to fight to the last soldier to revenge the murder of her children. And the Zebras wanted to destroy Nightmare Moon, as they saw her in Princess Luna. And they ended up screwing the whole world.”

“But that’s not what Shadow said happened in Project Horizons." Sonic scratched his nose. “The refugee zebras were shot by the school’s defense systems, and Goldenblood, who was a geography or history teacher, ordered to take care of the survivors. And among them was one of the Starkatteri tribe, who carried a talisman that was a gas bomb. The rest of them might not have even known about it! And then Goldenblood became head of the O.I.A. and hatched his own plan to make sure that power would eventually go to him. And he basically started the end of the world when he sent Jetstream the pegasus, through his subordinate, to the capital of Zebrica with a megaspell talisman, and when the city was destroyed, the balefire bombs rained down on Equestria…”

The hedgehog looked up to find Cosmic and Sky Bloom staring at him, stunned.

“What? I just remembered what Shadow said. And… put some facts together. That’s all.”

“So…” Cosmic cleared her throat. “So, the task is simplified? We don’t have to kill a whole bunch of refugees, but just one striped asshole with an amulet? Nice.

“But… there’s only one problem.” Sonic scratched his nose again. “This zebra has a talisman inside him that gives him immortality. Even if he gets melted by a plasma gun, the talisman will allow him to regenerate.”

“And… what should we do?” Cosmic was clearly confused.

“Well, actually, the main thing is not so much to kill him (although that’s impossible), but to defuse the talisman with the Pink Cloud. Then the ponies were literally a second too late before the villain came back to life and activated the bomb–”

“So one of us will have to get a plasma rifle,” the blue pony said, and looked at the unicorn, “What do you think, Sky?”

“Is this really gonna help stop the war?” Sky Bloom snorted skeptically. “The battles would still go on, and without fanaticism they could last for fifty or a hundred years…”

“Anything is better than two centuries of radiation, chaos and thick clouds,” Cosmic snorted. “Besides, all wars end sooner or later.”

“By the way, with less escalation, a ceasefire becomes more likely,” Sample Dample added. “Unless there is an unresolvable ideological contradiction such as Princess Luna’s power, or, as Lyra said, the value conflict between East and West on Earth, the war could be over in a few years, and relations with Zebrica could be restored. After all, the original confrontation was over resources: Equestria needed coal, and Zebrica needed gems. But the war gave an unprecedented boost to progress: the ponies discovered oil and natural gas and learned to make synthetic crystals, and the Zebras somehow managed to solve their problems with magical storage material. In fact, the war simply accelerated the scientific and technological processes that would have led to the result one day. However, due to the changed paradigm of the conflict, they could not be used for peaceful purposes. And it’s unlikely to be possible in the foreseeable future.”

“Because this future we do not have yet,” said Cosmic and rose. “Then we gotta create it. We need only two things. First, the exact date of the attack on Littlehorn. And second, the coordinates of that place.”

“Everything is in the database,” replied the professor. “So it all depends on you. And… on your luck.”

“Luck comes to those who know what they’re doing,” Sonic grinned. “It’s okay. We’ll get through this. Should we at least get lucky once more? Right, Cosmic? C-Cosmic…?”

The mare did not answer. She stared silently at the ground – and seemed unwilling to discuss the matter further.

Suddenly, a hoof touched her shoulder and dragged her to someone’s furry side.

Once in the warm embrace, the blue pony looked up at Sky Bloom in surprise.

“Don’t be afraid,” the stallion whispered in her ear. “The main thing is to believe that we’ll make it. And if we don’t… well, it’s never too late to fix it. From now on – and forever.”

Cosmic nodded and buried her muzzle in his long scarlet mane.

Indeed… Everything will be fine. We just have to want it – and make an effort.

Suddenly there was a tangible shudder on the floor, accompanied by a low rumbling from somewhere above and beyond, and the ceiling lamps flickered for a second. The very walls of the bunker, designed to withstand the blast of a megaspell, seemed to quiver.

“Wh… what is it…?” Sonic muttered, staring at the ceiling.

But Cosmic already had a guess. And she did not like it very much.

“Quickly!” she shouted, rushing to one of the terminals. “Cameras…!”

The hedgehog didn’t need to be told twice. Having already learned from his experience with the local computer system under Sample Dample’s guidance, Sonic immediately entered the surveillance system’s menu and brought up an image of one of the cameras on all the displays.

Except it wasn’t the camera above the bunker entrance. There was no signal from it at all! And it was clear why: the camera in the vestibule leading to the surface showed that the heavy outer door, no doubt made by Stable Tec, had been blown up along with the front wall! That just couldn’t happen – and yet it did.

It looked like someone had used a lot of explosives.

Worst of all, two ponies and a blue hedgehog saw who did it.

The Steel Rangers were coming into the shelter in a neat line.

Sky Bloom cursed foully.

“…Buck, they were all killed by the cyberghouls in that town!”

“Don’t forget, we’re already in a different timeline,” Cosmic replied. “Besides, it might be other Rangers who found the remains of them and traced the route. Since a few days have passed… that is… ah, you know what I mean!”

“D-damn, there–” Sonic said, jumping up from his chair, but Sky Bloom held out his leg in warning.

“You’re not gonna save anybody out there now, just get yourself killed! No matter how fast you are, those assholes will blow you up!”

“But they’ll kill my friends!” stomped the hedgehog in anger. “Now that they are in the capsules, they can’t do anything! I must protect them!”

“Professor, how can I lock all the doors at once?” Cosmic turned to the tank with Sample Dample floating inside.

“In the service directory there is an executable file,” the scientist replied. “Scroll down… right there, between the folder for reports and the system log. It’s password-protected, the code is the same as the one used to start the time machine. Then again, that was within my power…”

But the blue pony had already run across the keyboard and was about to hit the enter button.

“No!!!”

There was a blue flash – and Cosmic’s hoof was in the firm grip of hands in blood-stained gloves.

“You can’t…” whispered the blue hedgehog as he looked into her eyes. “They’re gonna die in there…”

The mare slapped him across the face, and he fell to the floor a few meters away.

“We don’t know that!” she blurted back. “It had been so long since the battle with Lyra that the capsules should have almost healed them! If any of them could wake up and crawl out, they’d get the others out and come up with something together! Otherwise, the Rangers would just leave them in the capsules, afraid to touch the ancient technology!”

The earth pony fell silent, breathing heavily. Sonic lay propped up on his elbow, rubbing his aching cheekbone. His eyes, which read a pleading expression, were fixed on Cosmic.

Sighing, the mare rose from her chair, walked over to the blue hedgehog, and sat down beside him.

“Listen,” she said softly. “I know you’re trying to fight for your friends on your own right now. But believe me, they’re capable of something as well. Even if not in their current state… Have faith in them, faith in their strength. Remember how you fought back together… they can stand up for themselves too, right? And if we succeed, they won’t be in any danger. Neither will you. Nor will we. Nor Equestria.”

The hedgehog took a long look at her, sniffed, and said reluctantly, “Okay. Lock the doors.”

He didn’t have to say it twice.

Cosmic immediately jumped back to the terminal and smacked the enter button with her hoof.

“Done!”

“Great,” said the professor. “Now these Rangers will have to break through all the lowered corridor bulkheads. Don’t worry, it’ll be enough to hold them off for a while…”

As if on cue, all three travelers looked at the plasma-eaten door of the main hall.

“Hurry up!” Cosmic pulled a drawer out of the desk and shook out three bracelets on the floor. “Sonic, enter the coordinates! We need to sync this stuff…”

A moment - and the hedgehog was sitting at the screen, navigating the ancient menu. Meanwhile, Cosmic and Sky Bloom put on the bracelets.

“Ready!” Sonic shouted, and the crystals on the return devices flashed green. He turned and stared at the third bracelet, slightly confused. “You… want me to go… with you, too?”

“For Celestia’s sake, just move and press the button, that’s all you need!” Sky Bloom blew up, carrying his spare magazines. “If I understand right, we’ll be thrown into the same reality anyway! Move it!”

“Stop pushing me!” Sonic shouted back.

Blue discharges ran through his needles. Standing in front of the two ponies, the hedgehog looked exactly as he had when he had saved Cosmic from Metal Dawn. Only now, it was as if Cosmic herself was standing in Sonic’s way, along with Sky Bloom.

The silent scene lasted for an indescribably long moment, interrupted by the professor’s cautious cough. If, of course, that sound, distorted beyond recognition, could be recognized as a cough.

Without a word, all three of them turned to the screens that displayed the images from the cameras. Judging by the images, the Rangers had already searched about a third of the bunker and were now enthusiastically cutting through the bulkheads blocking their way with auto-axes.

Sonic seemed to wilt and sighed quietly. White sparks flew from his needles, disappearing into the ground with a slight crackle.

“You’re right,” the hedgehog murmured in a colorless tone. “We… we need to do something. I… should be with you. Because… because…”

He shook, ready to cry at any moment.

Sky Bloom magically fastened the bracelet to his wrist.

“Trust us,” the unicorn said softly. “We cannot be divided now. If we change history globally, we could create a paradox like Lyra’s memory orbs. But you can’t be seen there, or things will really go wrong. You and your friends, you’re… too unusual for this world. And… like Shadow said,” the stallion grinned wryly, “you weren’t mentioned in the original Fallout: Equestria. But that doesn’t mean you’re useless. You just have a different role – which you all fulfilled to the best of your abilities.”

“Thank you.” The hedgehog sniffed. “You… all of you… it means a lot to me. I’m sorry, whatever it is. After all, besides them… I have you now. And I have to make a choice. A right choice. Even if it’s a bitter one.”

Sky Bloom nodded and turned to the platform. “Let’s go, then.”

“Wait,” the professor’s voice suddenly sounded behind them.

“What the heck!” Cosmic stomped irritably.

“There, in the far corner… in the bottom drawer. A spare matrix… just in case.”

“Seriously?!” exclaimed the blue pony. Sonic was already at the other end of the hall, pulling the second matrix out of the drawer. “B-but how…? Why…?”

“Well, we couldn’t keep such an important element in a single copy.” An eerie chuckle came from the speaker. “This matrix is portable, which means it can work without a platform, moving itself and all objects within a few meters in time… if only a powerful enough power source is connected to it. However, it’s not programmable. Several default points are encased in small crystals on the central circuit, a special slider activates one of them. And over there on the side is a chip that records their coordinates.” Sample Dample sighed. “I designed this solution for the future, so I didn’t have time to anticipate everything… And then I didn’t have the chance.”

“Look,” Sonic said, walking back over to his companions, “there was also a flask of some sort… just like–”

He stopped and, holding the spell matrix in one hand and a glass cylinder and a bundle of wires in the other, he looked at the reactor casing, where the blue needle in the same vessel was shimmering with blue-white sparks.

Cosmic and Sky Bloom looked at each other. Smiles spread across their faces.

“Then we’ll take it,” the mare said, turning to the professor while Sonic carefully placed the items in her saddlebags. “Thank you. For... for everything. I’m sorry that we weren’t able to help you. What happened to you… it shouldn’t have. I’m sorry.”

“I’m used to it,” Sample Dample replied from his jar, and for the first time there was a real two-century-old bitterness in his voice. “I suppose I deserve my fate. I was so naive then… didn’t see what the world outside the Center had become. I didn’t realize that I couldn’t trust everyone. I just wanted to help a wounded, in some ways even dead mare… Except that I didn’t think she was morally dead either.”

“Everyone makes mistakes,” Cosmic sighed. “No one here is an exception. Me, you, Sonic, Sky Bloom… The important thing is that after each mistake, we get back up – and either fix it, or just find the strength to move on.”

“Miss Valor… can I ask you something? As a farewell, so to speak.”

Cosmic went cold. The professor’s tone was deadly serious.

Nevertheless, she controlled herself and answered, “Y-yes, of course. If I can–”

“Please disconnect my life support system.”

“W… what?”

The blue pony was taken aback. Not by the request itself – no matter how unthinkable and sacrilegious it was! – but rather by how casually and calmly it was said.

“Please… While your friends in the capsules have no choice, I do have one. I’ve had enough of what Lyra has done to me. And I don’t want to become a living (yet) plaything for those Rangers!” His voice rose to a shout, then dropped to a barely audible whisper. “I don’t want to… tell them anything. The code is only in my head, without it they can’t use the machine… I’m in pain… I’m so tired… So much pain – why, in so many years? I… I cannot… Please, give me a break from all this. I’m… so tired…”

If Sample Dample had been a normal pony, tears would have come to his eyes.

But instead, it was Cosmic who was crying. Sonic was also furtively wiping something from his eyelids. And only Sky Bloom turned away, staring into space with a stone face.

“No…” the blue pony whispered. “No, no, no…! We… you can’t–”

“Please… time is almost up… Soon they will come here, and only Discord knows what will happen then! I helped you with the system… grant my last request as well…”

Cosmic closed her eyes. Tears streamed down her cheeks and her voice turned to a stifled gasp.

“H… how…?”

“Terminal nineteen. There is the control interface of this tank.”

Seeing almost nothing through the wet veil covering her eyes, Cosmic walked slowly to the correct workstation.

The “jar” control menu was easy to find. In fact, it was the only one there. And the last item in the list of commands was a simple phrase: Terminate power.

Silently shaking with suppressed sobs, Cosmic selected a line in the menu. A dialog box appeared with a single question, “Terminate power? Y/N”

At this point, Cosmic couldn’t stand it any longer and wailed out loud. Her legs gave out and she collapsed onto her haunches where she was standing. Her whole body was shaking, and tears dripped from her chin onto the butt of the carbine hanging on her belt.

Someone’s hooves tapped on the iron floor. Then paused nearby. It was Sky Bloom, no doubt, who had decided to do what she hadn’t dared.

A few seconds of silence – and then the slight clang! of a button being pressed.

Done.

The professor didn’t scream in excruciating pain, didn't twitch in agony, stirring up the clear, viscous liquid with his legs. Not even sighed. His long-suffering body ceased to live in an instant.

Sky Bloom leaned over and touched the blue pony’s shoulder.

“Get up, Cosmic. We have to go. The Rangers will be here any minute. We must save Littlehorn, remember? End… or even prevent the war that is still going on to this day. We must, Cosmic. Because if we don’t, who will? Get up… please. This world needs you. But most of all, we need you.”

“Okay.” Cosmic sobbed one last time and rose to her hooves. “Come on.”

They made their way to the platform waiting for them at the other end of the hall.

The mare could barely move her legs, which had become as wooden as her entire body. Her eyes were still wet with tears, but a seemingly forgotten command pattern had already been triggered in her brain.

She must be strong. For her own sake. For Sky Bloom and Sonic. For her friends who were no longer with her.

And finally, for the sake of Equestria.

Suddenly, a noise came from the corridor, getting louder by the second. And it wasn’t difficult to recognize it.

Whoever heard the rumble of the Steel Rangers’ armored hooves would never forget it.

Damn it! We were too slow!

Cosmic and Sky Bloom exchanged a quick glance and rushed towards the platform together. Leaping onto the smooth plastic surface, the blue pony turned and looked up to find Sonic still sitting at the terminal.

“Sonic, hurry!”

“Now!”

The blue hedgehog entered the confirmation code, pressed a button, then transformed into a blurry silhouette, and was on the platform in the next instant. In the meantime, he had actually managed to grab one of the plasma rifles from the wall.

Cosmic watched with bated breath as the magical energy limited by the F.A.D.E. shield gathered over the matrix behind the dark glass as the advance party of Steel Rangers raced down the corridor to the molten door of the room.

It seemed as if the three of them were too late, and they would all be killed in a few moments…

But a second before the armored ponies would have burst into the hall, the accumulated energy hit the transfer matrix with a blinding beam.

Will we return to this present? Cosmic had time to think. Or will history change so drastically that we won’t even recognize the world we’re in? No matter. The important thing is that everything is reversible. Any mistake can be corrected. It’s just that some of them are very, very hard.

And then the familiar white flash went off, and the three of them came to in a completely different place… and time.

Littlehorn Valley…

Cosmic’s breath caught as she opened her eyes. The landscape spread out around her in the bright moonlight. She had never seen anything so beautiful and majestic. Yes, the crescent-shaped banks of the canyon were not the thick and lush forests she had expected to see, but even the stern, silent rocks towering up and the slow river flowing through the gorge made her Wasteland-hardened heart tremble.

This world… was so much like the Equestria the aliens had told her about. The one Professor Sample Dample so desperately wanted to resurrect – so much so that he’d willingly entrusted a time machine to random travelers.

Goosebumps ran down Cosmic’s back.

And something’s about to happen that will eventually affect the school and the whole country. The whole fucking world.

She sighed and made Argument more comfortable on her back. She didn’t take Nige and Dan with her anymore: Sonic had used up all the ammunition in his desperate attack on the cyberghouls. But there were plenty of 5.56s in the bunker instead.

The three of them fell out of the time jump onto the shore of a lake in the widest part of the valley. A river meandered between the rocks and flowed into the lake. A huge waterfall cascaded down the cliff nearby, pouring its own moisture into the stream.

And directly in front of them stood a castle of black marble, carved into the rock itself. The rounded walls cast a matte sheen, and one might have thought that Canterlot had somehow been miraculously transported halfway across Equestria… were it not for the color of the magically polished stone. The tall spire rose like a lone sentry over the valley, and it seemed to be some kind of antenna, sending up secret, unknown signals.

“Whoa…” Sonic’s quiet exclamation reached her ears.

Cosmic turned around. The hedgehog was staring at the magnificent building with his mouth agape, just as she had been a moment ago. It was one thing to see Canterlot Castle in the cartoon, and quite another to see a replica of it with their own eyes, even if it wasn’t an exact copy.

The gates in front of the school were open, and in the spacious courtyard, the outlines of striped figures could be seen on the ground. They must have been the unfortunate zebra refugees.

“I hope we’re in time,” Sky Bloom muttered. “The main thing now is to sneak in unnoticed.”

“Hmm…” Cosmic looked at the zebras. “Maybe we can get around them somehow?”

“Sure,” the unicorn snorted and used his telekinesis to rummage through his bag, pulling out…

The blue pony gasped as she realized what she was looking at.

Floating in the faint glow of magic was the translucent invisibility cloak, barely visible in the night.

“When I dragged Tails to the infirmary, I decided to take the cloak as well, not to leave it to Lyra,” Sky Bloom explained, unfolding the seemingly weightless fabric, white sparks glimmering in the moonlight. “I hid it there for the duration of the battle, then – before we started jumping back and forth in time – I took it back and patched it up. Thanks for your help, by the way: without the spell you made me remember, we’d be in a lot of trouble…”

“And how do we both fit in there?” Cosmic chuckled. “It seems to be designed for one–”

“Without trying – won’t know,” Sky Bloom smiled in response.

“Uh… here you go.” Sonic handed the two ponies the plasma rifle he had brought with him, and Sky Bloom nodded gratefully as he picked it up with his magic. “Well… goodbye then?”

“See you in the future,” Cosmic said.

“Maybe a brohoof?” the hedgehog suggested.

The blue pony grinned and held out a hoof, which Sonic lightly poked with his fist. Then Sky Bloom did the same.

“Good luck, anyway.” Sonic sighed. “I hope you’ll be able to make things right.”

“We will,” Cosmic corrected him. “You’ve been with us too. But thank you. We could really use some luck right now.”

The hedgehog pulled up the corner of his mouth in a grin, showed a ring of two fingers – and then pressed a button on his bracelet and disappeared in a bright flash.

“All right,” Cosmic said, “let’s go this way. Unfold your cloak; let’s see how far it stretches.”

“Our cloak,” the unicorn replied with a smile, and covered them both with a thin, flowing cloth.

“Starlight Glimmer approves that," the blue pony giggled.

Contrary to expectations, the cloak was large enough for two ponies to hide under. They had to walk close together, but Cosmic didn’t mind. It was so pleasant and cozy to feel Sky Bloom’s soft fur and warm body against her side that the mare didn’t even notice as they crossed the courtyard full of zebras and found themselves in front of the tall doors of the building.

The unicorn silently opened the massive oak door with magic, and the two of them went inside, finding themselves in a decent-sized lobby. There were wide staircases with carved railings on either side, and elevator cabs lined the entrance. In the far wall were office doors – and from behind one of them came hushed voices.

The soft glow of spark lamps allowed them to see enough to know where to go. During the day, the interior of this place must have looked like a real work of art – but now Cosmic didn’t have time to admire the stucco and other things that would remain nothing more than beautiful, pretentious words in the future. It was necessary to act.

“Well, where do we go now?” Sky Bloom asked in a quiet voice. “Any ideas?”

“Let's go up there.” Cosmic pointed to a large, fenced rotunda where the stairs converged. “From there, we’ll have a better view and be able to run in any direction if we need to.”

They walked up the marble steps, careful not to clatter their hooves too much. The rotunda was even larger than they had seen from below, with a vat of plants in the center and two doors on the far side that looked like the colt’s and filly’s bathrooms.

With nothing better to do, the two ponies, hidden by their cloaks, just stood against the wall. Cosmic listened to the tense silence of the school, but all sounds were drowned out by her own breathing. A drop of sweat slid down her neck, tickling her skin.

We can’t be discovered before our time. Otherwise, we won’t be able to explain anything.

Her leg was gently touched by Sky Bloom’s hoof, and Cosmic lifted her head. The stallion silently jerked his chin forward, toward the hallway.

Where the voices were now coming from.

“Let’s check it out,” she whispered, and they crept toward the rotunda fence.

The lobby wasn’t empty now; it looked like some kind of meeting, the echoes of which the time travelers had just heard at the entrance, had ended, and everypony was leaving one of the offices. Two ponies led a zebra back into the courtyard; the others, all unicorns, split into two groups and headed in different directions.

“We’ll take the north wing,” said the orange mare, who, accompanied by a white unicorn with a golden mane, trotted off to the right toward a passageway that disappeared into the darkness. “Everypony is nervous.”

“They’ll get the refugees out in the morning, and the children can have an early break…” her companion replied.

They entered a side corridor and disappeared from sight, their voices fading into the distance.

“I guess that’s Goldenblood,” Cosmic said. “He’ll be the only one left alive after the impact of the Pink Cloud…”

“So we’ll try to prevent the Cloud from appearing at all,” Sky Bloom said. “The school won’t be affected, and everything will change.”

“I hope so,” the blue pony sighed. “I really hope.”

They moved away from the edge of the rotunda and stood where they had been.

It was quiet again. Sweat trickled down Cosmic’s face – maybe from excitement, or maybe just from the heat under the cloak, heated by the two bodies. Sky Bloom didn’t smell like violets either.

The monotonous, exhausting waiting was beginning to make the blue pony’s eyes sleepy. What a joke: to be dragged out of the past at four in the morning, to experience the death of a friend and his “resurrection” in one day, and then to have to flee back into the past to escape a crowd of armored schizophrenics! This would make anyone want to take a nap… or not wake up at all…

Suddenly, a sound jolted Cosmic from her half-sleep, and she pricked up her ears. Hoofbeats were coming from the corridor above, leading into the rotunda from the side where Goldenblood had gone. What’s more, they were getting faster and faster.

Cosmic and Sky Bloom looked at each other. The unicorn nodded slightly, and the earth pony returned the favor.

Are we finally lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time?

After a bit of jostling, they pulled their weapons from their backs, Cosmic her trusty carbine, Sky Bloom his plasma rifle.

And just in time.

A zebra ran out of the corridor, one hoof clutching… something that looked like a crystal wrapped in wires. He slowed for a moment to look around, and then, ignoring the signs, he slipped into the filly’s bathroom.

The invisibility cloak immediately flew aside. With their guns drawn, Cosmic and Sky Bloom ran through the door, following the zebra. The striped stallion was just beginning to frantically connect the wires to his talisman.

“Drop it!” Cosmic yelled, taking aim at the zebra. “Hooves up!”

He turned sharply. His eyes narrowed at the sight of the two ponies pointing weapons at him.

In the next subtly quick movement, he jumped up and charged at them, swinging his hoof for a crushing blow…

Cosmic barely had time to dive into the S.A.T.S. and program a series of bullets to fire at his face. But she couldn’t dodge herself.

A powerful blow to her chest threw her to the floor, knocking all the air out of her lungs. But the bullets hit their target. Zebra, hovering over Cosmic, screamed in pain and stood on his hind legs, grabbing his face with his front legs. There were scarlet, bloody wounds where his eyes had just been.

The striped stallion staggered to the side… but he was not allowed to fall to the floor.

A scorching blast of plasma struck his flank, enveloping his entire body, and the zebra literally sank to the floor in a green puddle.

No… there was something else.

Cosmic took a closer look. In the slowly evaporating slurry floated a dark green gem, which seemed to contain a small black dust.

Hoofsteps sounded behind her, and the blue pony turned around.

Several teachers ran into the bathroom, frozen at the sight of two armed intruders and a puddle of plasma.

“Who are you?” Goldenblood asked, frowning. “What are you doing here?”

Following some kind of intuition, Cosmic pulled from her armor pocket a key card from the bunker, given to her by Sample Dample in another version of the past, and waved the pass in front of the teacher’s nose.

“Calm down,” she replied coldly. “We’re conducting a special operation to capture a dangerous Zebra saboteur. There were reports that he had infiltrated a crowd of refugees to prepare a barbaric terrorist attack in the area. The suspect resisted capture and was eliminated. Thank you for your vigilance.”

Goddesses, I’m talking like Sheriff Railright when he gets his ass kicked.

“Who do you work for? What right have you to come in here?!” yelled a dirty yellow unicorn with a gray mane. On his suit hung a name tag that read “Bitterbrew, Dean.”

“Top secret,” Sky Bloom cut off, apparently also deciding to accept the rules of Cosmic’s game. “Look, we want to help. The most important thing right now is to deal with the gas bomb he was about to activate.”

“With this?!” Bitterbrew sneered, pointing to the talisman. “What’s there to deal with, just cut the red wire – and that’s it…!”

“I see you don’t know a Discord thing about it, so shut up,” said Cosmic and sat down on the floor next to the talisman. “Unlike you, I have some experience as a technician… Aha, well… Looks like some kind of industrial–”

“It’s an industrial strength lye generator, ma’am,” the orange mare clarified. “And it’s overcharged because the wires are connected to capacitors…”

“So we can’t cut any of them, so it won’t be activated by accident…”

A green flash flickered, and the talisman that could change the fate of all of Equestria turned into a puddle a few feet to the left.

Everyone in the crowd seemed stunned, and Cosmic’s jaw dropped. Eyes bulging, the blue pony glared at Sky Bloom, who was still holding the plasma rifle.

“Are you crazy?! W-we could’ve all died in here!”

“Sorry,” the unicorn grumbled. “Next time I’ll ask permission before I shoot…”

“What the hay is that?” Bitterbrew asked, looking at the green stone in a pool of plasma.

Cosmic broke into a cold sweat.

Oh, shit! We totally forgot about him!

She jumped to her hooves.

“Quick, we have to destroy–”

Suddenly, the gem glowed, and flesh literally began to grow on it. First the spine and all the other bones appeared from nowhere, then twisted bundles of muscles. Eventually, the entire body was covered in striped skin.

The teachers on the doorstep huddled together, eyes wide and mouths agape. The blue pony herself went numb at the sight.

The just melted zebra rose from the dead in a matter of moments.

Cosmic and Sky Bloom fired at the same time – but both missed. The zebra easily dodged the bullets and the plasma blast, as if his brain had S.A.T.S. like a cyberghoul’s, but an order of magnitude more powerful.

The earth pony had no time to think. With a swift movement, the saboteur swept toward them, throwing the plasma gun and Sky Bloom in different directions with a powerful kick of his hind hooves… and then she herself was sprawled on the floor, crushed by the zebra’s weight.

“You made a terrible mistake, pony!” he roared in a strange accent straight in her face. His mouth smelled of rot. “The future is not set in stone just because it has many different branches! But only one of them has to come true! It is not in your power to try to change it!”

“No!” Cosmic shouted, kicking the stallion away with her legs. With a murderous grace, he jumped aside and glared at the blue pony with hatred. “All versions of the future and the past exist at the same time! We just want to make the one we want a little more likely! And so that other ponies can live in a world without an apocalypse!”

The zebra grinned. “Well then, let’s see which one of us is right. The future will be our judge, Security.”

Suddenly, he dashed for the exit, scattered the teachers like bales of hay, and leapt out of the bathroom.

“Get him!” Cosmic shouted and raced after him. “Don’t let him go…!”

She ran back into the rotunda. The zebra was already near the railing…

Is he getting ready to jump?

Suddenly he became invisible. As if…

No! Invisibility cloak…!

Cosmic jumped to the edge of the rotunda – but too late.

There was a muffled sound of falling below, followed by hooves clattering towards the door. It opened ajar for a moment, letting in a gust of wind…

And everything went quiet.

Only the green slime on the bathroom floor hissed softly as it evaporated.

No… No way… We lost him…

A hoof touched Cosmic’s shoulder, and she turned around.

Sky Bloom was standing beside her. But there was no doom in his eyes, just a slight annoyance and… relief?

“We did it after all,” he whispered. “The school is saved… for now. Things will definitely change now. And if anything, we can always go back and hunt the bastard down.”

“But what prevents him from making a new talisman and trying again?” Cosmic objected. “What if we still haven’t changed anything… or just made things worse?”

Sky Bloom leaned toward her. His breath tickled her ear.

“There are no mistakes that can’t be fixed. You already showed me that by bringing me back from near death. It’s just that sometimes mistakes overlap, and to get things back to the way they were, you have to eliminate the bigger one.”

“Uh… And what was that?” Bitterbrew’s shrill voice sounded behind them.

The time travelers turned around. The teachers stood in a crowd in front of them, cutting off their escape routes.

“What were you talking about?” Goldenblood asked. “And… is it my imagination, or do you know that zebra?”

“Identify yourself!” stomped the orange mare. “Otherwise, we’ll have to arrest you…!”

Sky Bloom and Cosmic’s eyes met. The unicorn tilted his head slightly – and both of them pressed the buttons on their bracelets sharply.

I wonder… did we make it?

Goldenblood’s eyes widened… and then everything disappeared in a bright flash.

The return was harder than the previous one. Not feeling the familiar platform underhoof, Cosmic crashed from a small height onto the worn stone.

Wait… stone?!

Cosmic jumped to her legs. It was dark everywhere, so she turned on the flashlight on the PipBuck and looked around. And what she saw now made her blood run colder with each passing moment.

No, it was the same place – otherwise they’d just been thrown out somewhere else – but the room itself looked different. There were no more rows of terminals (just a single one on a table, and it looked like it hadn’t been activated in two hundred years), no more reactor casing. Even the “jar” containing Sample Dample’s remains was gone.

So was the platform.

Cosmic turned around – and was dazed. The time machine, which was the heart of the bunker, did not exist in this version of reality! No trace of it. Nothing at all.

The lamps didn’t work either and the PipBuck’s flashlight was the only source of illumination in the room.

Only the shackles welded to the wall gave the place any semblance of Lyra Heartstrings’ former lair. And the skeleton of a unicorn beneath them was even more gruesome.

“No…” the blue pony heard Sonic’s voice.

Without another word, the hedgehog took off, speeding into the corridor before Cosmic or Sky Bloom could stop him.

“Where are… we…?” muttered the unicorn.

He dropped both rifles, the regular and the plasma one, and strode through the hall with a dazed look on his face.

“Same place as before,” Cosmic said slowly and walked over to the table where the terminal stood. “Just in a different version.”

The zebra did not lie. They really changed something drastically. And so much that it made everything look so… dead.

I hope we can at least find out what it is.

With a trembling hoof, Cosmic pressed the power button.

The terminal flashed and lit up, revealing the standard archaic interface. Without too much trouble, the mare found what she was looking for. Namely, the camera feeds.

Like everything Stable Tec had created, the surveillance system still worked after all this time. It had simply gone into hibernation mode long ago, deactivating the data storage on the mainframe. Of course it had; in two centuries, so much data would have accumulated that no amount of storage would be enough.

With a few commands listed in the attached help file, Cosmic displayed the image from the camera above the entrance on the monitor. No signal.

The camera wasn’t working… or it wasn’t there anymore.

A shiver ran down Cosmic’s back. However, she continued scrolling through the list and finally came to a working camera, which, according to the metadata, was located quite close to the first one.

The blue pony immediately expanded the image to full screen…

And was stunned.

Instead of a radiation-scarred desert with at least some hills, rocks or sparse grass, the mare saw a flat, stony landscape with no signs of life.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. In her home reality, Cosmic could raise her head and see, if not the sky itself, then at least the curtain of clouds hiding it – but here, from above, there was nothing. Only blackness, in which the stars did not even twinkle. Maybe it was because the sun illuminated the rocky wasteland from somewhere off to the side, casting sharp shadows over the edges.

It seemed that the time travelers were now on... the moon.

Except that it wasn’t the moon. Logically, it was their home Equus.

“Wh-what happened here…?” Cosmic mumbled, twitching.

Sky Bloom walked over to her and looked at the screen as well. The sight of the lunar landscape made the unicorn’s teeth clench.

“Discord!” He slammed his hooves down on the tabletop with great force, nearly breaking it. “How could this happen?! We prevented Littlehorn! We did it…!”

“Then something else happened…” Cosmic said. “Something we couldn’t have imagined in our worst nightmares.” She rubbed her chin thoughtfully. “Let’s do this way: I’ll look in the terminal while you search here. If we find something, we’ll deal with it together.”

“Okay,” Sky Bloom replied and stepped back to look around the room.

Cosmic began to click on every directory in the catalog, trying to find at least some indication of what had become of the world in this version.

But it was as if someone had deliberately deleted all non-system files. Moving from one folder to another, the blue pony saw only a single line with two dots to return to the level above.

This place was obviously cleaned up before the planet turned into a copy of its satellite. I wonder who made them do it? Did they really think that someday – after all that’s happened! – someone would come here?

“Found it!” Sky Bloom said suddenly from somewhere in the corner.

Cosmic pulled herself away from the screen. The unicorn returned to her, carefully floating two… memory orbs?!

“They were next to that pony,” he explained. The smooth glass orbs rolled to the side as soon as he placed them on the table, so Sky Bloom had to hold them down with his hoof. “I think she had recorded them before she died. Apparently, she managed to get out of the shackles somehow, and then she died… I think she was shot.”

“Yeah? How?”

“There’s a stain underneath her skeleton. It’s long dried and almost invisible, but it’s definitely blood. I’m sure if you examine her bones, you’ll find a bullet in them.”

“Ugh…” Cosmic grimaced. “Are you serious?”

“Yes, it would be unpleasant for me as well, but… after all, my brother is a doctor, and–”

He hesitated, realizing that he had said something wrong, and gritted his teeth.

“We gotta make things right. Make the fucking world live. And Life Bloom too! I didn’t even get to see him after he left…! We gotta get it all back!”

“I know,” Cosmic nodded. “And we will. Sooner or later – but we will find a way. We just have to keep the hope alive.”

“Yes… you’re right. Well, let’s look for a recollector then?”

“Why don’t you take a look at these memories and tell me what’s in them?”

“No, I’ll pass.” He shook his head with a grin. “You’re the one who’s the expert on investigations and shit like that, right? I’m here just to protect you.”

“Thank you. For not leaving us despite everything.”

“Likewise, Cosmic. You at least gave me a purpose…” he gloomed, “after The Republic had died.”

“It lives as long as we do. Even if there are only two of us on this planet now, and the town itself was probably never founded, but… Never mind. It’s too complicated a subject right now.”

Together they stepped out into the corridor – as dark as the hall they had fallen into five minutes ago. But in the glow of PipBuck’s flashlight, it was clear that the structure itself was completely different.

The floor, for example, was not clad in metal, but carved in stone. Instead of hermetically sealed bulkheads, there were regular steel or louvered doors. The bunker did not look like a research center, but more like… a prison. The kind where ordinary ponies who got into a fight in a public place or stole a basket of apples from the market wouldn’t go.

Surprisingly, many of the offices were unlocked. Some of them even contained pony skeletons. They hadn’t been cyberghouls when they had been alive, so they had obviously all died a long time ago. Probably after the thing that ruined this world happened.

The papers in the desk drawers and the folders scattered everywhere had decayed and crumbled to dust at any touch, including telekinesis.

They also found a recollector in one of these rooms.

“Should we go back or look for Sonic?” Sky Bloom asked as they stepped back into the corridor. The unicorn levitated the device, and the earth pony took the plasma rifle from him in return.

“He probably ran to the infirmary and–” Cosmic stopped suddenly and looked worriedly at Sky Bloom. “Oh… We don’t know what happened to his friends!”

“Wait…” the unicorn lifted his hoof. “Do you hear that?”

Cosmic’s ears pricked up.

From the depths of the corridor came a sound. It was as if a distant scream was echoing off the walls, changing eerily.

“Sonic!” they exclaimed at the same time and rushed to the source of the scary sounds.

Rounding the corner, the two ponies ran into a room with a red cross painted on the wall in glossy paint. Or the blood of one of the prisoners.

The door was open.

As they ran in, Cosmic and Sky Bloom did not see the rows of medical capsules in which the aliens in the RC-13 lay. Along the walls were shriveled beds with rotting sheets, off to the side was the entrance to the operating room – and in the middle of the room, squeezed into a lump, Sonic sat on the cold floor, crying.

“They’re gone…” the hedgehog squeezed out, wiping away his tears. “Where are they… WHERE ARE THEY?! Why? How… I… further… why at all–”

He shook, unable to stop another burst of sobs.

Cosmic slowly walked over and sat down beside him. She touched his shoulder gently with her hoof and was silent for a while, searching for words. But there was nothing to say – and how could it help? It was like rubbing salt into a fresh wound.

“We’ll find them,” she said finally. “We’ll search all the time branches, but we’ll find them. Right after we bring peace back to Equestria.”

“And if we don’t?” Sonic hissed. “Then what? How am I supposed to look Tom and Maddie in the eye…?” He pounded his fist into the floor. “Why did we even come here to look for artifacts?! Why didn’t we choose another world without this Fallout crap?!”

“You couldn’t have known that–”

“Enough!” The hedgehog jumped to his feet and glared at the two ponies, gritting his teeth. “I don’t need your empty consolations! We followed you, we trusted you, and you couldn’t even–”

Suddenly, he stopped speaking and put his hands over his mouth. A look of fear flashed across the huge green eyes.

“No… I… I almost… blamed you? But… I didn’t mean to… I didn’t think… damn, how did that–”

“We understand,” Cosmic replied deafly. “We all have a hard time now. Maybe this is the author going crazy again. By the way, he could also make you stop half a word on purpose. Make us feel the line we’re not allowed to cross.” She grinned. “And even make me say it now.”

Sonic swayed and sat on the floor again, clutching his knees.

Cosmic moved closer to him.

“We don’t know where your friends are, that’s true. But… you shouldn’t think that must be bad. If we changed history instead of creating a new branch… though Lyra said they were all real – so we just made one more likely… then when your company came to this world, they shouldn’t have found anything and would have come right back.” Sonic lifted his head and looked at Cosmic. Hope flickered in his eyes, and the blue pony continued, reassuring not only him, but also herself, “Yeah, maybe nothing happened to them here! And Shadow stole the Emeralds from Eggman anyway, so you and he should have a draw… But we don’t know,” she saddened again. “Maybe there’s another you out there who didn’t go to Equestria, and you yourself will disappear once you get back to Earth. The universe is too complex to know for sure. We can only guess.”

“So… what should I do now?” asked the hedgehog uncertainly.

“It’s up to you. We’ll accept whatever you decide.”

“Then…” He thought for a moment. “I’ll stay with you. I can always get back to Earth in time – given its different speeds… And this world, however, is still waiting to be fixed.”

“Thank you,” Cosmic nodded. “Together we’re stronger. And that’s why we will win.”

Sonic grinned faintly with the corner of his mouth and raised his hand in front of him. The blue pony smiled back and tapped his fist lightly with her hoof.

“Let’s go,” she said and stood up. “We’ll decide what to do later.”

The hedgehog nodded silently and rose to follow her.

Together they returned to the main hall. Sonic began to look around the room idly, and Cosmic sat down at a table with a terminal and put the recollector on her head.

Sky Bloom placed the first memory orb into the slot.

“Good luck,” the stallion said before pressing the button.

Cosmic only closed her eyes… and the world dissolved again.

<========ooOОOoo========>

Canterlot was weeping.

The sky was thick with clouds – pegasus weather teams had done their best. Many ponies made their way to the main square, treading heavily on the growing puddles. There was a look of sorrow on everypony’s faces; some couldn’t hold back tears. Posters and banners with Celestia’s portrait were everywhere in the crowd. Here and there, black ribbons fluttered in the wind.

The unicorn, who had decided to record these memories, walked with the others. Her horn tinkled faintly, and the same portrait of the Princess floated in the magical field nearby.

Finally, the pony entered the square and took her place in the countless rows of citizens. No matter how large the paved area in front of the castle gates was, it could not accommodate all the visitors today. So many ponies turned to the nearby park or gathered in the neighboring streets.

Her ears picked out a few colorless fragments from the faint chatter of the crowd.

“…a sniper…”

“…there should have been more guards on the Shattered Hoof…”

“…two shots. One killed Big Macintosh, the other the Princess…”

“…Zebras will pay for this…”

And how desperate almost all the phrases sounded, made both the bearer of memories and Cosmic watching it shudder.

“…will soon carry the body out…”

“…walk from the castle through the city…”

“…make a detour and bury Her in the park…”

“…Big Mac’s probably been taken to Ponyville…”

There was no longer any doubt as to what was about to begin.

It was Princess Celestia’s funeral.

The wait dragged on, and from time to time a murmur could be heard in the crowd. The unicorn also looked around from time to time, as if trying to figure out what was going on.

Suddenly, shots rang out from the castle, followed by the deafening rumble of an explosion. And then another. Screams erupted. And then one of the side towers collapsed as if it were made of shortbread cookies; the rubble fell into the courtyard behind the white stone wall, sending a cloud of dust into the air.

The noise in the square started growing. The ponies raised their voices in confusion, shouting over each other, and the occasional nervous stomping could be heard. The portraits of Celestia no longer hung above the crowd; some posters now lay underhoof.

“…where is Princess Luna…?”

“…where are the Ministry Mares?! Will someone explain something to us?!”

“…had the terrorist zebras gotten here…?”

Minutes passed one after another. Half an hour, an hour… A strange tension hung over the capital; the ponies stood in the same place, wondering where to go or what to do.

But everypony suddenly fell silent as a stallion clad in the golden armor of the Royal Guard appeared on the balcony of the castle. He was a blue-gray unicorn, quite young, but one of his eyes was covered by a bandage, and the thick plume of his helmet matched the captain of the guard.

He stepped to the edge of the balcony, looked down at the thousands of ponies below, then coughed and hesitantly called out, “Citizens of Equestria…!”

But it was as if he didn't know what to say next. Or had trouble articulating it.

The crowd clamored again.

“…where’s Luna?! What’s going on?!”

“…what was that explosion?! Is Celestia’s body intact?!”

“…just tell us what’s happening!”

“SILENCE!!!” the guardspony shouted, his cry echoing across the square like the Royal Canterlot Voice of the Princess.

Everypony immediately froze, preparing to listen to the speech that would set everything straight.

“Upon hearing the news of Princess Celestia’s death… Princess Luna… turned into Nightmare Moon.” The crowd gasped in unison. “And… gave the order to unleash megaspells against Zebrica, destroying major cities and industrial centers. To prevent a global catastrophe, this order was deemed criminal, and Princess Luna was stripped of her title as ruler of Equestria… and eliminated for resisting arrest. The captain of the royal guard who defied her was killed with her. I have now been appointed to this position. My name is Solemn Force, and I am authorized to read today’s proclamation.”

The square fell silent. Everypony was shocked – to say the least! The unicorn mare muttered something under her nose – but Cosmic could not make out what it was, although she felt as if her lips were moving.

A large ceremonial scroll hung in the air in front of the guardspony.

“For the sake of preserving the country after heavy losses, for the sake of achieving peace as soon as possible for further reconstruction… Equestria declares surrender!”

Well, this was serious.

The crowd exploded with indignant shouts. It seemed as if the angry ponies were going to storm the castle!

However, Solemn Force continued to read in a trembling voice, breaking the clamor.

“The territory of the country is placed under foreign administration. The Director of the Office of Interministry Affairs, Goldenblood, has been appointed head of the provisional government. The megaspell launch chambers will be unilaterally sealed by tomorrow evening. All military development will be suspended. Any attempt to protest or sabotage will be violently suppressed. All those who oppose this decision will be eliminated.

“Despite the popular belief that Big Macintosh and Princess Celestia were killed by Zebras, Goldenblood believes you should know the truth. The sniper who fired the two fatal shots turned out to be a traitorous pony named Psalm, who served alongside Big Macintosh. She has now been captured and sentenced to execution by disintegration.

“Princess Luna is recognized as a war criminal and officially stripped of her Goddess status. The heads of the Ministries are arrested for various war and state crimes. A special Canterlot Tribunal is currently being held in secret to bring them to justice. A few verdicts have already come down.

“Twilight Sparkle has been found guilty of crimes against the ponykind, specifically illegal experimentation and multiple abuses of power. Sentenced to execution. Along with her, scientific employees of the Ministry of Arcane Sciences Mosaic and Gestalt are sentenced to the same punishment for aiding the experiments.

“Pinkamina Diane Pie has been found guilty of organizing torture, including mind control, premeditated murder and abductions, mass violation of the privacy of citizens, deliberately spreading false information, as well as illegal possession and trafficking of narcotics. Sentenced to life imprisonment.

“Applejack has been found guilty of corruption, sabotage, and extremism. Sentenced to life imprisonment.

“Rainbow Dash has been found guilty of organizing genocide against civilians and terrorist activities. Sentenced to execution.

“Rarity Modens has been found guilty of conducting illegal experiments that resulted in the deaths of many ponies, and of deliberately spreading false information. Her accomplices, Ministry of Style employees Snips and Snails, were also arrested. All three will be sentenced this evening.

“Fluttershy has been found guilty of treason, conducting illegal experiments, and violating the memories of citizens. The verdict will be delivered this evening.

“All death sentences will be carried out in this square tomorrow morning at ten o'clock.

“Ministries have been declared disbanded; the establishment of new authorities and the terms of a peace treaty with the Zebras will be announced shortly.”

Solemn Force rolled up the scroll and sighed heavily.

“That was the end of it… May Celestia’s soul protect us.”

<========ooOОOoo========>

…In the second memory orb, the setting was very different. And, Discord be damned, it was eerily familiar.

It was the same bunker-prison hall where the time travelers had found themselves the last time, only in its working state, so to speak. The lamps on the ceiling were on, and the terminal on the desk hummed softly. But that was the extent of the differences. The rest of the room looked just as unfriendly and uncomfortable.

Whether because of the sickly gray and green tones… or because the unicorn, whose eyes Cosmic was looking through, was now struggling in the same shackles attached to the wall. She was the only one here and seemed to be chained recently. Cosmic felt a real sense of déjà vu as she watched this pony’s futile attempts to free herself on her behalf.

And that feeling was only intensified by that unicorn being Lyra.

If at the funeral, which Cosmic had seen in the same way, Lyra had preferred to pay attention to others instead of herself, now there was no one else in the room. And Cosmic could not mistake this mint-green fur, not yet covered with scars and sores, for anything else.

Lyra hissed through clenched teeth. The unicorn must have tried to use magic, but with the blocking ring on, it was useless. Sweat trickled down her forehead and her eyes squeezed shut with the effort.

Soon, Lyra exhaled sharply and relaxed. Then she muttered softly, “Buck you all, what more do you want from me…?”

And then the hall door opened.

Lyra immediately lifted her head and stared at the newcomers.

Cosmic knew them too. Well, at least one of them.

Goldenblood, dressed in a black funeral suit, approached Lyra and stood opposite her. He looked down at her naked body and spoke in a flat tone, “Lyra Heartstrings, you are accused of extremism and calling for the overthrow of the government. I would like to speak with you now to determine the extent of your guilt and the danger your thoughts pose to the state.”

“Do I have a choice?” Lyra snorted. “I see you chickened out of coming alone, so you decided to call your minions?”

She glared hatefully at the two unicorns standing beside Goldenblood.

Sonic and Tales had told Cosmic enough in their time for her to be able to tell which of the cartoon characters was in front of her.

The lilac mare with a green stripe in her purple mane held a clipboard and a pen with her telekinesis. Her blue eyes looked at the prisoner appraisingly and impassively, as if she were a patient in need of counseling. Well, Starlight Glimmer had indeed changed since she had become the principal of the School of Friendship.

The red-haired, orange unicorn with glasses and a navy-blue cape embroidered with stars looked at Lyra with awkwardness and almost sympathy. Just as Sky Bloom had looked at Cosmic when she'd had the misfortune to return to The Republic. And hopefully Sunburst would be kinder to Lyra than Goldenblood had been to Starlight.

“It’s your own fault for ending up here, Lyra,” the lilac pony sighed. “We’ve tried repeatedly to convince you not to rock the boat. And not to try to undermine the already explosive social situation.”

“Didn’t you bring this on yourself?!” Lyra shouted. “Oh yes, of course, Pinkie Pie’s balloons were very handy for shooting demonstrations! And these new stealth-bots with stun guns – formerly sprite-bots – are just fabulous…!”

“You wouldn’t understand,” replied Goldenblood. “If we hadn’t stopped Luna, Equestria would have been wiped out that very day. But at least we gave the land a few more years of life. Yes, a hard, unpleasant, hungry life, but a life nonetheless.”

“Should I kiss your ass for that?” Lyra thrust her chin forward defiantly. “What’s keeping you? You’re the new god here, even under the occupation government! What’s stopping you from unleashing your megaspells and wiping Zebrica off the face of Equus, retroactively winning the war you cowardly gave up six years ago?”

“Conscience. There is no preemptive strike in my concept, only a retaliatory one. But with a force that would make the universe tremble.”

“You and conscience?” snorted the unicorn. “Don’t be ridiculous. After torturing Pinkie and Rarity to death? And that judgment too… Seriously – five thousand counts? Either I’m crazy and delusional, or you are. At any rate, this is the most farcical thing I’ve ever seen.”

“Do you want to revise the results of the trial?” Goldenblood raised an eyebrow. “All right. Miss Glimmer,” he turned to Starlight, “could you please–”

She nodded silently, and a folder of documents appeared in front of her in a flash of magic.

“Thank you.” Goldenblood nodded and intercepted the folder with his own telekinesis. “So… let’s start with the most serious one. Pinkamina Diane Pie, 4379 counts. She was acquitted on one hundred and twenty-two of them, mostly because her Ministry had worked very cleanly in those cases: no evidence, and we also failed to prove a few things about the possession and trafficking of Party Mint-Als.

“Want to hear the rest? Go ahead.

“Twilight Sparkle, 296 counts. Found guilty on all of them. Tried to justify that she was doing her experiments for Equestria, to stop the war… well, she failed – I stopped the war anyway. And all that was left was tons of toxic waste and the bodies of those they’d killed after turning them into monsters.

“But… you helped her! Discord, you and your O.I.A. helped them all – and then you betrayed them!”

“And you betrayed me,” he retorted, and Lyra jerked as if struck by a blow. “Yes, some of the responsibility for the Office’s research had fallen to her. But she was so obsessed with the idea of creating magical weapons for victory that she was actually complicit in what my department was doing. And there was no place for Twilight Sparkle in the world after the war – no matter the outcome: defeat or victory… especially victory. Not for her, not for the rest of the Ministry Mares. They were the very coin that Equestria had needed to pay to bring the war to an end. What a bitter irony, don’t you think?”

He sighed.

“But let’s get on with it. Applejack, seventeen counts. All in all, harmless stuff that would have been overlooked in peacetime: just some sloppy financial reporting, a bit of nepotism, a few attempts to mess with her own Ministry, and a few careless remarks that happened to be in the memory orbs. Found guilty on all counts, pleaded not guilty. What a pity. You might say she was just unlucky.”

“Unlucky?! You put her in a prison for the rest of her life! I saw her a few times when I was escorted past her cell. Applejack is depressed, no longer the determined and brave pony she used to be. You broke her. I won’t be surprised if she commits suicide one day.” Lyra gritted her teeth. “You’re a monster, Goldenblood. And the only one here who’s really a traitor.”

“Rainbow Dash, 142 counts. Yes, you are right: I was the one who suggested she do the sabotage the Zebras’ territory – but I didn’t expect her to go this far. Contaminating clean water sources, some of which feed the outskirts of Equestria? Shooting down civilian townships from raptor airships? If I am the monster, then who is she?”

“She just wanted to do something cool – about twenty percent cooler than the rest of us. And you fooled her. You got her into this whole thing. At least she faced her death with dignity.” Lyra grinned wickedly. “I wish I could learn to look at you the way she did before she was incinerated.”

“Rarity Modens, 468 counts. Not many - considering she was doing the same thing as Pinkie and Twilight combined: messing with ponies’ heads and studying dark magic at the same time. Did you know that she split her soul into forty-three pieces just to make sets of figurines of their six? Indestructible figurines. Rarity is also responsible for the deaths of many innocent ponies. Her Ministry became as much a scourge to Equestria as the Ministry of Morale. And she paid the price.”

“Allegedly choking on a muffin by accident?” Lyra spit on the floor. “There you go, murderer… But Fluttershy… Why did you pardon her alone?! Was she happy to be the only one spared the hoof of your ‘justice’?”

“Fluttershy–” A shadow ran across Goldenblood’s face, as if an old pain had stirred within the stallion. But he regained control of himself and continued, “Seventy-eight counts. Found not guilty on twenty-two of them, pardoned by special decree on the rest, and released from custody in the courtroom.”

He hoofed the folder back to Starlight, and the mare teleported it elsewhere in an instant.

Goldenblood shook his head and looked glumly at Lyra.

“I loved her. And I made one unforgivable mistake in my time with her. I wanted to make it right. But… I couldn’t. She was pregnant when she injected herself with thirteen doses of Med-X while I was away. She didn’t have time for more… I didn’t just lose my beloved; I also lost my unborn daughter. And you cannot blame me for what I did wrong. Especially to somepony who betrayed not even me, but the country by giving megaspells to the Zebras.”

His voice sounded so dull, as if he was speaking through a thick membrane. But that membrane now seemed to be inside him.

“My mistake was that I was too late to stop them. And I had to pay a terrible price. Basically, all I’m left with is trying to fix a bilge hole in a sinking ship with duct tape. And your eloquent speeches and pamphlets of condemnation, which you have been tirelessly uttering and publishing since the O.I.A. was disbanded, will only cause more water to break in.”

Suddenly there was heavy pounding on the door. Sunburst and Starlight glanced over, and the red-haired unicorn pushed the handle after Goldenblood nodded approvingly.

A panting earth pony in an officer’s uniform burst into the hall.

“D-Director…” he blurted out. “It… it happened…!”

“What exactly?” Goldenblood asked. His eyes narrowed into small slits.

“Zebras… they… launched the missiles! In a few minutes, the whole place will be blown up!”

“No-o-o-o…” the white unicorn whispered. But then he looked at the earth pony, who was trembling with fear, and said, “Go back to your room. Let’s hope this place is sufficiently protected even against a direct hit.”

The guard just hiccupped nervously and darted out of the door, which swung shut after him in the airstream of his run.

Goldenblood turned his gaze to Sunburst and Starlight, who were frozen in place.

“You two may go as well. I suppose the interrogation can be postponed indefinitely.”

The two did not immediately recover from the shock of the unexpected news. Then Starlight nodded and they both left the hall.

Goldenblood turned to Lyra. She shuddered at the cold in his eyes.

The Director’s horn suddenly glowed. The shackles holding Lyra opened abruptly, and the unicorn slumped belly-down onto the floor. The ring on her horn opened and came off, rolling to the side.

“What… are you doing…?” she stammered, lifting herself up…

And then she froze.

In Goldenblood’s magical grip was a pistol, aimed directly at Lyra.

“I have no time to deal with you right now,” the stallion replied with a completely blank face. “So, you’ll have to die trying to escape.”

Lyra had no time to do anything.

The pistol banged loudly and a hard, painful blow to her chest threw her back to the ground.

Lying cheek to cheek on the cold stone in the rapidly spreading pool of her own blood, Lyra could hear the words Goldenblood muttered to himself as he fiddled with the terminal.

“…EC-1101… launch… Horizons… erase all data…”

Then his hooves trotted toward the exit. The door slammed shut with a metallic clang.

Lyra was left alone to bleed to death.

But it was as if she had her own plans for how to spend her last moments.

Her horn ached mercilessly – which, compared to the bleeding wound in her chest, felt no worse than a slight itch. Drawers slid out of the terminal table and then flew outward, scattering their contents across the floor.

Lyra’s gaze fell on two empty memory orbs. She pulled them towards her with her weakening telekinesis and pressed her horn against one of them…

That was the end of the memory.

But Cosmic had already found out enough.

<========ooOОOoo========>

As she came to her senses, Cosmic looked around the room again. It was a little eerie to be in a place where a pony had been murdered about two centuries ago (and it felt like just now).

But not as much as on the surface, where many, many millions had died.

Hugging each other’s shoulders, Sky Bloom and Sonic sat against the wall and looked at the strange structure on the floor in front of them. A flask with a sparkling blue needle was connected to the time travel matrix. The wires formed a kind of circuit, and if the three of them squeezed in, they could fit inside.

Cosmic coughed, and her two companions turned to her.

“Oh, it’s over already?” Sky Bloom said, magically helping her remove the recollector. “So, what terrible secrets would this place tell us?”

“I’m afraid the secrets are indeed terrible,” she replied, and briefly recounted the memories from each orb.

At the news of both Princesses’ deaths and the capitulation, the unicorn swore, but the hedgehog just sighed heavily and shook his head. The prison episode, on the other hoof, didn’t impress Sky Bloom much, unlike Sonic.

“I think I get it,” the alien said as Cosmic finished her story. “After the Zebras launched their missiles, Goldenblood decided to destroy everything – and somehow, with the help of Equestrian Command 1101, he turned on his own superweapon, called ‘Horizons.’ Anyway, a chunk of rock came from the moon, hit a piece of star metal in the center of Hoofington, and… boom!” Sonic even showed his hands what a “boom” was. “The whole world is in pieces. Just not to waste time on small stuff.”

“Shadow, I remember, told us something…” mumbled Cosmic. “Shit, I still can’t get rid of the idea that all that’s happening is some twisted, altered plots from the books… And that zebra at school called me ‘Security’ for some reason… That has a special meaning too, right?”

“He must have mistaken you for Blackjack in his glimpses of the future,” Sonic chuckled. “Or maybe he just wanted to make an easter egg.” Seeing the confusion on both ponies’ faces, the hedgehog explained, “Well, it’s kind of a joke in the form of an unexpected reference.”

“Okay, we can talk about all the fun stuff from Earth later,” said Cosmic, pointing her hoof at the matrix. “What are we supposed to do with this?”

“As I found out,” Sky Bloom replied, “Sonic’s needle is the main source of energy here. But the energy is only enough for the transfer itself, to activate the matrix you need a magical impulse. It’s a good thing I’m a unicorn,” he grinned, “otherwise we’d be stuck here forever, unable to fix anything.”

“Yes, we’re very lucky to have you,” Cosmic said. Suddenly she came over and hugged Sky Bloom herself. He tensed at first, but then relaxed and hugged the earth pony in return. “Thanks for not leaving us. And for not thinking that I’m a total loser.”

“That’s a title that has to be earned,” the unicorn smiled. “And you, time after time, strive for the opposite. You are a good friend, Cosmic, and I wish I had realized that before.”

“You’ve done a lot for my friends, too,” Sonic said and sighed heavily. “And I hope they really are all right. In this version, back on Earth, they may not remember all the horrors that happened, but we do. In a way, we’re protecting them.”

“You both mean a lot to me. And I will always be grateful for your help. And now,” Cosmic raised her head, “we’ll try to make Equestria a little better. Sky Bloom, don’t you mind?”

She poked her hoof into the center of the matrix, where a small chip slot was hidden in the tangle of energy channels.

“Sure,” the unicorn nodded and carefully removed it from the slot.

“Thank you.”

Cosmic inserted the chip into the PipBuck and displayed a single file on the screen.

It turned out to be only a few lines. But what was written in them made the earth pony sigh happily.

1) October 30, 1 before Harmony Era, Canterlot. The War of the Two Sisters.

2) June 22, 1000 Harmony Era, Ponyville. Nightmare Moon’s second coming.

3) August 9, 1005, Canterlot. Twilight Sparkle’s coronation.

4) September 4, 1008, Canterlot. Princess Celestia re-enthroned.

5) July 18, 1012, territorial waters of Zebrica. Hostage rescue operation.

6) May 19, 1018, attack on Princess Luna’s School for Gifted Unicorns in Littlehorn.

7) April 21, 1022, Shattered Hoof. An assassination attempt on Princess Celestia.

“We have several options for where to go,” Cosmic said hoarsely. “But the last two are no good – we need a deeper change. The first one as well: it’s too long ago. On the ship with the Zebra pirates, we have nothing to do; the war there obviously can’t be prevented. That leaves three… I think we should try the fourth one on the list. Equestria will have changed by then, and our arrival could be a new starting point.”

“We trust you. Fourth is the way.” Sky Bloom used his telekinesis to move the circular slider to the position below the desired number. “Hopefully we’ll be able to do something.”

“How many tries do we have?” Sonic asked. “Isn’t it only three?”

The earth pony grinned. “So far, yes. But if we can somehow reprogram this thing… we’ll have an eternity.”

“Stand inside the circle,” Sky Bloom requested. “We’re going.”

Cosmic and Sonic did as he said.

Sky Bloom stood next to them and tilted his head. A burst of energy shot out of the tip of his horn; when it hit the center of the matrix, the blob of white light instantly spread through all the channels, and the crystals on the copper platform glowed brightly. Lightning danced around the needle in the flask.

And then there was a dazzling flash.

And the world changed.

Many, many times.

Note: Maximum Level.

Player: Cosmic Valor. Bonus perk: Soldier’s Luck (level 2/3… no, 3/3) – your critical damage chance is increased by 15%. New quest perk: Time Lord – constantly jumping through realities has taught you a better understanding of paradoxes.

Player: Sonic. New quest perk: Energy Lord – you have become the most powerful walking accumulator in the universe. Your needles contain the energy of a small supernova.

The quest stage “Go back in time and defeat Lyra” has been completed.

The story part of the game has been completed.

Continue the game? Y/N