Short Scraps and Explosions

Scootaloo dropped the dented tray against the surface of the barn's wooden loft. Groaning in the afternoon's glow, she felt a day's worth of bruises and spent muscles aching underneath her coat. None of it mattered, though, because the sobbing voice of Blackjack still rung freshly in her ears, and as she gazed at the loft that was now filled to the brim with tinkering tools, blankets, a suitcase, a paperback book with her parents' photo, and a rattling tin can full of bits, she found her life dancing under a blissful new chorus.

“Hmmm... It wasn't impossible...” she murmured to herself, tonguing the traces of blood still in her mouth. Her smile was as rapturous as it was agonizing. “...But it happened, nonetheless.”

She gazed limply towards the far corner of the loft. A little white box waited right where it had been left—almost entirely abandoned—several weeks before. It was once something hideous, something that stabbed its way straight into her very heart. Now, however, it was something earned. Scooting over on her knees, the little filly raised the box, opened it, and raised the stale cupcake victoriously in the air.

“Well...” She grinned wide. She didn't know her foalday, but suddenly it didn't matter. “Here's to tomorrow!” She closed her eyes, rosily imagining a glittering rainbow shining across her subconscious. In such a tranquil breath, she leaned forward and chomped her teeth liberally over the length of the cupcake.

No less than half a second later, she was keeling over and spitting the granite crumbs all over the wooden surface of the loft.

“Ughhhh!” Scootaloo wiped a forelimb across her face, strung halfway between a violent retch and uncontrollable laugther. “Celestia, that's old! Snkkkkt-Hahahahahahaha!”

Thin, vaporous breaths billowed out through a canvas mask as the last pony stood atop the granite plateau, gazing at the sight before her. She reached a hoof up and exposed her mouth from behind the tight fabric. A dull, orange face shuddered beneath a pair of scarlet eyes. She swallowed a lump down her throat. No matter how many times she regularly did this, it never got any easier, not like the other things in her fatefully exhausting life.

Scootaloo sat down in silent reverence before the grave of Rainbow Dash. The heap of snow-white stones rested, undisturbed beneath the ever-present halo of twilight shimmering down from the Wasteland grayness above. All around her, the sunken depths of Cloudsdale danced thickly with ash. As more and more months ticked away, Scootaloo felt the powdery flakes in the air growing denser and denser. She no longer paid it any mind, for to do so was to lose her very mind in the end.

“I'm sorry I didn't visit you last week,” she murmured quietly to the rocks, gazing at them like so many white stones that blanketed the surface of her eyelids throughout her short and lonely existence. “A moonrock meteor landed not that far from the ruins. It didn't send any debris falling into the pits, but the resulting tremors knocked a bunch of stuff off-kilter at home, so I had to spend twice the time rebuilding a bunch of crap.”

The rocks said nothing in response. The air was deathly still here. Ironically, all that moved was a fluttering blue feather tucked behind Scootaloo's ear. The last pony felt its many tiny threads caressing her shaved mane as she continued speaking.

“I have a real frickin' fortress now, or at least I like to think of it as such. I stumbled upon a guardpony barracks that the goblins didn't find first. Heh... that was a lucky break. Now I have enough spears to practically make an entire fence of pikes around my hole-in-the wall. The only problem with that, I suppose, is that it's obvious to any imp or troll gazing at my side of the ruins from a long distance that something very ticked-off lives there. I gotta figure out the difference between fending off trouble and inviting it.”

A hoof dipped a large canteen into a pool of grimy Cloudsdalian water. Screwing a cap tightly onto the container, Scootaloo raised the translucent thing up to her squinting gaze. She briefly saw a half-faded reflection, making the violets of her eyes appear twice as dull as she imagined they had become. Suddenly, it no longer bothered her.

With a lengthy sigh, she slid the canteen into her canvas saddlebag and trotted off from the junction of several dried-up waterfalls. She climbed over mounds of ivory rubble, making her way home where she would build a fire to boil the water, hopefully making it as drinkable as her last trip's worth.

“It's been over two years since I fell down here. It has to have been—perhaps longer. The only regular things are the stormfronts that sound off above the pits, and I wish I could find a frickin' way to measure them. But it doesn't really matter. All I know is that I'm definitely older. I can feel it in my legs. My hooves are thicker, my joints are stronger, and I no longer waddle when I walk. There are even twice as many feathers in my wings as when I first stumbled down here, though I still can't seem to put them to good use. On top of all that, I had my first period a few weeks ago. Yeah, that was fun. I can still remember Sweetie Belle rambling on and on about how she couldn't wait for her cycle to begin, as if it was as important a part of becoming a grown filly as getting her cutie mark. Personally, I don't find it's all that special. If anything, it reminds me just how pointless it is to try foaling kids in a world like this.

Scootaloo finished hammering the last of several wooden pikes into the ground before her granite niche. She paused, wiping her brow and sweating. Around her, a tiny camp rested within the safe boundaries of the line of guardpony spears. There was a gravel pit for making fires, a series of skymarble slabs for crafting tools, and several wooden racks for shelving junk salvaged from the Wasteland.

Not wasting any time, she grabbed another pike, fitted it to a hole in the stony earth that she had carved into place days before, and began hammering the sharp object in tightly. Beyond her improvised fort, the gray mists of sunken Cloudsdale hung in perpetual shadow.

“Before I came down here in search of... well... in search of you, I started a journal to help me keep track of things. Now it's stuck up there in that first shelter I built for myself. Looking back, I can't imagine it's anything worth reading. At the time, I felt it was necessary to prove that I had survived everything, so that if another pony stumbled upon it, they would know they weren't alone either. The whole idea feels stupid to me now. I mean—really—what's the point? Still, I kind of wish that I had it with me, even if it doesn't make much sense. All the stuff I'm telling you now is the same sort of stuff I would write... assuming I can teach myself to write any better than I always have. I have to admit, I kind of want to learn to put down words better. After all, there are these books that I've stumbled upon lately...

Scootaloo curled atop a pile of canvas sheets just outside her niche. A crackling campfire hissed and sparked beside her as she reclined with a spear under one hoof and one of several salvaged tomes clasped in her other.

“Mmmmm...” The dark-orange filly squinted at the sheets of paper, licking her lips and eventually strugging to produce, “'...and then Consus took Ele... Elec... Elecktra under his wings, and be... bes... bestowed upon her spirit the mantle of... of ter... terrest... terrestr... terrestrial ma... mast... terrestrial mastery, for she was a dau.. daughter under his own heart...'”

“I'm learning things like I've never learned before. I guess it's partly because I'm feeling bored in between the times that I'm feeling scared. Another part of it, I suppose, is that I kind of need to read as much as I can. You, of course, remember how much we joked and kidded about Twilight Sparkle. Heh... She used to offer me books from her library all the time. I always found excuses to be doing something else besides reading. Now, the way I see it, if I'm not reading, then who's going to carry on all that's worth knowing? It sure as heck isn't going to be the goblins!

Scootaloo paused in the middle of rummaging through a collapsed hospital at the echoing sound of grunting voices. Freezing in brief fright, she produced her dagger from a hoof brace and crawled slowly up a hill of granite rubble. Gazing down from the hollow of the dilapidated building, she spotted several half-ling shapes fumbling over a crate of arcanium. She spotted Matthais, Braxx, and several others attempting to crack the container open. The leather-armored imps fumbled in the effort, obviously not knowing where the simple locking mechanism was. Scootaloo didn't offer the breath to tell them.

From the sidelines, a pale-blue figure sashayed into view. Scootaloo gazed aside from her quiet, lofty position. She spotted Devo coming upon the scene. His snow-white hair was longer now, having poured past his pointed ears. While his inferior companions bickered and spat at each other, he brushed them aside with authoritarian limbs, marched over to the device, put his ear to it, and briefly concentrated. After half a minute passed, he slid a palm up to the side of the arcanium box and merely flipped a switch. The lid to the container flung open, and a flood of Cloudsdalian water muddily poured out, soaking Matthais to the bone. Braxx pointed at him and laughed. The other goblins chuckled amongst themselves and followed a calm, collected Devo towards the next site of scavenging while a fuming Matthais stumbled wetly at the back of the procession.

“I've only run into them a half a dozen times since our first meeting. All but one of those times, thankfully, their pale-haired leader was there to keep them from ripping me to shreds. I don't really understand the goblins too much. So many of them hate me, and yet their boss really seems to care. I wonder if the ugliest of them will ever stop blaming me for what happened to this world. I don't suppose there's any point in hoping. There's no more sun and there's no more moon. What's to hope for? Hatred is as good a fuel as any in this world.

“Nnngh!” Scootaloo spun and slammed her rear hooves into a wooden door. The decrepit thing splintered to bits behind her. Exhaling sharply with victory, the sweating pegasus sauntered into a collapsed Cloudsdalian apartment atop a pile of subterranean rubble. She squinted as she trotted her way into the groaning, lopsided enclosure.

She saw furniture, rugs, family portraits, and kitchen utensils. Then, in the far corner of the place, she saw the unmistakable alabaster shapes of bones, ribcages, skulls, and hooves. Without wasting a second breath, the last pony marched indifferently over these brittle remains, and immediately began rummaging through several drawers full of rare stones, sharp-edged jewelry, and other assorted heirlooms.

“There was a time when seeing a dead body would freak me out, or else make me feel really sad. Now, after so many stormfronts, after bumping elbows with the goblins on occasion, I simply don't have the time to care. There are so many dead ponies, so many to bury, so many to mourn, so many to give a moment of silence to. I think a part of me still wants to pay them respect, but I have to trample that thought into dust. I simply can't afford to be a good pegasus and do a ritual for every body I see. I have to scavenge what I can find before the goblins grab it all up. What's more, I'm running out of food, and I still don't have any frickin' clue how to get out of this place.

Scootaloo grunted with the effort it took to climb over the last steep clump of rocks. A blue feather fluttered behind her ear as she scrambled, flexed her limbs instinctually, and ultimately pulled herself victoriously atop the mountain of crushed sky marble. Panting, she stood and gazed out onto the gray, twilight-banded vistas of the inner ruins. She stood upon the tallest point in the entire grave of Cloudsdale, and still the top of the pit was well over twenty meters beyond her reach.

From this vantage point, she slowly spun about and looked for any shape, any slope, any incline, any ramp of crumpled earth that might give even footing for a soul wanting to climb out of that place. She was no luckier than the goblins were in this matter, and as the cold Wasteland air kicked waves of snow against her shaved mane, she let loose a deep breath before subsequently inhaling the circular desolation enveloping her.

“I almost pray for a moonrock to land against the mouth of the pit, much like the one that stranded me here to begin with. Maybe it'll carve a hill that I can climb out of this place, or maybe it will knock loose a tall slab of sky marble that can miraculously form a bridge so I can get to the tools that the goblins are always desperately whining about. If they can find a way out of here simply with getting those lost things of theirs back, then I'm sorely tempted to help them out. I mean, what's the use in holding onto my pride anymore? If I'm to survive, I'm going to need all the help I can get, right? So what if the only things that are around to help me also hate my guts for whatever reason?

A crack of thunder exploded outside the niche. Scootaloo didn't budge a single centimeter. She sat in the tiny crook of her hovel, calmly chewing on a morsel of dried oats as the world flashed and roared outside. She cast a bored gaze beyond the mouth of her claustrophobic home, mentally counting the hours until the stormfront would eventually die down, silencing itself just as loudly as it had started on schedule.

“After all, the only thing that matters is that I survive, right?” Scootaloo murmured, gazing into the sea of stones that formed Rainbow Dash's grave. “It has to matter in the grand scheme of things. If this is all there is, then I'm all that there is to receive it. Forget the goblins and the trolls and all those other miserable things that pretend to have souls; I have to look after myself, and I have to do it as long as I can...”

She lingered on the last few words, her face contorting into a painful grimace. She gulped hard, and whimpered in a wilting breath.

“Because I want it to make sense to me. I need it to make sense to me.” She bit her lips and her eyes began to water, magnifying the scarlet that was slowly bleeding its way out from her pupils. “Because, for whatever reason, it m-made sense to you.”

There was no movement from underneath the stones. There never was.

“I keep asking myself why I'm still struggling. I keep asking myself what's the point. Even if I made it out of this Nebula-forsaken hole and made it back to the surface and recollected all my other things, what future do I have?” She stifled a bubble of panting breaths rising up her sore throat. She blinked her eyes dry, sniffled, and gazed off into the black chasm flanking the grave. “And all I can think of is that you must have known the answer. Otherwise, why did you save me? Why did you decide to put me someplace safe and then fly off to some crazy part of the skies that wasn't?”

With a shuddering breath, she raised a hoof to her ear and tucked the blue feather tighter behind it.

“All that's ever mattered to me... all I've ever wanted to accomplished in my life... w-was making you p-proud of me...” Her vision briefly blurred as she struggled to keep her gaze away from the hauntingly white stones. “And now, how can I do that, Dashie? I just... I just can't imagine a world where all I have to look forward to is myself. I'm... I'm simply not that awesome.”

Scootaloo gulped hard. She finally looked back at the grave. She shuddered.

“But you are.” There was silence. There was stillness. There was death. “You were.”

The last pony was finished. Her shivers subsided. The cold briefly stopped being such a stabbing thing. After a minute or two, she murmured something to herself, planted a hoof to her lips, and laid it gently atop the closest rock of the grave. Standing up afterwards, she wrapped the canvas mask back over her mouth, turned around, and—like so many identically quiet occasions previous—she walked away alone.

“I can't believe it! A damnable glue stick! Has your father gone mad?!”

“Franken, just calm down and listen for a second,” Raimony said. “It's not like the Outbleeder is gonna jump down your throat, for Petra's sake! I only want you to talk to her for a second!”

Scootaloo craned her neck, her ears twitching beneath a blood-soaked red bandanna and a blue feather as she sauntered down the interior of the unmoving train car. She rounded a corner of empty steam crates in time to see the brown-haired goblinette gesturing wildly, attempting to calm an elderly imp with dark gray skin and stocky shoulders.

“I'll have no part in this! This is an outrage!” Franken seethed, his frazzled black threads dangling between two moth-eaten ears. “Don't you think I have enough on my plate in trying to unearth those pathetic sky-stealers' grimy pillars without going so low as to talk to one of them?!”

“Pffft—Hey! I'm not the biggest fan of this whole crapfest myself, y'know! I'm only doing this as a favor to my father and prime Hex-Bleeder—”

“Your father should know better! Huh?! He's growing senile, that blighted imp! Not only is he slapping me in the face with all of this Intercessor nonsense, but he's gonna incur the wrath of Haman! Did you ever think of that?! And after all that the prime Rust-Bleeder has done for your old man...”

“C'mon, Franken!” Raimony exclaimed. “My father did business with Haman of Rust Blood! He respected Haman of Rust Blood!”

Franken pointed with a frown. “Your father did business with Haman of Rust Blood, he respected Haman of Rust Blood, but he never trusted Haman of Rust Blood! I always assumed that was the case, but now I know it!”

“Jee, I dunno,” Scootaloo hummed. “If he's willing to trust a glue stick, I imagine he's willing to trust just about anything.”

Both Franken and Raimony glanced over from their side of the train car. The prime bleeder of Glass Blood rolled his bagged eyes. “Great. On top of wanting to talk to me, it's a real smartass too.”

Before Raimony could retort, Scootaloo spoke, “This smartass also happens to have heard a lot of things as of late.” She slowly and boldly strolled over towards Franken's side, staring him unabashedly in the face. “Like how a small group of clan leaders miraculously survived a zeppelin crash in ogre war territory.”

Franken snorted. “What's it to you, horse filth? If I had my way, my boys would shoot you dead, here and now.”

Scootaloo slowly, icily grinned. “Well, it's a good thing you're not having your way, is it?”

“That's it! I am gone.” Franken groaned and marched out towards the cargo doors, beyond which a bustling cluster of imps strolled to and from the edge of the mining pits. “I don't need any of this nonsense. I have a schedule to keep...”

Scootaloo called over his shoulder, “I wouldn't work too hard. That's what ended Waven of South Blood's life, isn't it?”

Franken stopped in his tracks, fidgeting slightly.

Raimony saw it. Scootaloo saw it too. The last pony walked to the very edge of the train's cargo door. “Isn't it? He worked himself to the bone? Even if he was perfectly healthy just prior to the zeppelin trip that nearly ended his life at the meaty hands of battle ogres?” Her metal horseshoes tapped and rang against the floor of the train. Just one more step, she figured, and she would give every gremlin and goblin within sight free reign to plug an iron dart in her skull. “Or perhaps something else consumed Waven, drove him to a bitter end, something akin to the same frenzied panic that is making you work your bat-ears off?”

Franken slowly turned around. He cast a dark, wrinkled frown in Scootaloo's direction. “What I do for my clan's industry is none of your business, glue stick.”

“But it is Haman's, I take it?” Scootaloo leaned her head to the side while squinting suspiciously at him. “Prime Glass-Bleeder, when the Rust Blood clan stopped dead in their tracks, almost all of the other families related to Haman had to experience a severe drop in production. But your clan? You're expanding three times faster than any of the other families, and you've been closer to Haman, financially speaking, than even Lazarus of Core Blood. Just how can you afford to be processing so many resources along the stalk of Strut Eleven? For Celestia's sake...” She pointed past him at the several mining lattices lining the torchlit edges of the pits. “...You're mining nearly twice as much stuff as the Hex-Bleeders you're sharing this part of the pits with! At some point, you've gotta run out of steam—no pun intended, I mean the silver kind.”

The elder clan leader said nothing. He clenched his fists and gazed off towards the smog-laden horizon.

“Unless...” Scootaloo raised an eyebrow. “...Haman is either promising you a reward for all of your otherwise fruitless endeavors, or...” The last pony smirked as her thoughts produced themselves out loud. “...He's withholding something from you, until you do all the dirty work for him behind the shadows, while he unassumingly sits atop his high seat, doing nothing.”

“This is why it's a horrible idea to make a glue stick an Outbleeder...” Franken grumbled, standing icily still. “Your mind is full of paranoia and prejudicial assumptions of impkind...”

“On the contrary, I'm beginning to see the wisdom of Devo having chosen my sorry flank for this lousy job.” Scootaloo paced across the wide mouth of the train's cargo door. “‘Cuz I can see into this whole goblin infrastructure without having my hooves tied by the ridiculous politics of it all. But you? What freedom do you have? You came back from a horrible situation in the Valley of Jewels, Franken, and while Haman has been eating a slice of his own pie ever since, you're the one who has been stuck doing a mountain of work, and I bet it just gnaws at you. I've lived in the Wasteland all my life, prime Glass-Bleeder. I know that sometimes the only way to deal with something you hate is to utterly drown yourself in it. I think you're too afraid to stop whipping your family into an industrial machine for one second, or else you—and your loved ones—may all end up just like Waven of South Blood and his brood.”

“Don't be ridiculous,” Franken grumbled. “I've lived even more years than Waven. I'm not foolish enough to succumb to food poisoning.”

Scootaloo's scarlet eyes rounded at that. “Poisoning! Interesting... Her daughter didn't even remotely mention something like that. She said it was just a fever.”

Franken bit on his lip. There was a drooping motion to his ears. Raimony blinked at that. The next gaze the goblinette gave Scootaloo was filled with remarkable interest for once.

“Franken, you can probably guess this, but...” Scootaloo's nostrils flared as she gazed coldly at him. “I frankly don't care what Haman is up to, what it means to your family, or how many other prime-bleeders may be suffering from the recent financial slump as of late. What you goblins do for each other, with each other, or to each other is none of my concern. What is my concern is a little something I left decades ago in the pits you're constantly mining from over there...” She pointed towards the busy sight past him. “I'm only doing this for your friend and business partner Devo because he's promising me a potential chance to get down into those ruins without a bullet flying through my skull. As odd as it sounds, I'm not exactly a stranger to witnessing Devo of Hex Blood being true to his word.”

Raimony glanced curiously at Scootaloo upon hearing that.

The last pony went on, “Now, there's nothing stopping me from taking all this armor off, stretching my wings out, and diving full-feathered into that mess. Yeah, I might die, but odds are just as well that I could come out alive with all the stuff that I need. But I'm not going to do things that way. Why? For one thing, I'm not a frickin' idiot. For another, I've learned that goblins—for all of their craziness and occasional bloodlust—are not devoid of honor. I'm trying to be respectful here, Franken. I, a pony, a Petra-forsaken glue stick, am extending a hoof of trust out to you. Can you say that Haman has gone out on a limb to do anything remotely as sincere for you?”

“I don't see what the point is...” Franken murmured in an off-key voice. His jaded eyes turned to meet hers once again. He looked suddenly and utterly defeated. “There is nothing to share that is salvageable. Soon I will be up to my nose in debt. No imp will ever know that the Glass Blood clan ever existed.”

“Then answer me... Answer Devo,” Scootaloo insisted. “I may not give a crap, but he does. He wants to know the truth of what's going on. What he does with that truth is beyond my power to know. But my guess is, if uncovering the truth means I can possibly walk into those mines without getting shot, then all of this secretive crap is the answer to the rapid xenophobia that's been infecting the steam operations. The only reason for such an infection is that the many families of Petra are sick to death of Haman's nonsense, and I have a feeling that you are too.”

“Pony, where are all of your hooved kind now?” Franken briefly frowned her way. “Why should I trust the opinion of a creature who has no civlization to rest on? Doesn't that make your judgment moot?”

“I'm not here to judge, only to observe,” the scavenger said. “And besides, if I was as... as lucky as you, prime Glass Bleeder, and I still had a living species to answer for, I would do everything in my friggin' power to preserve it. Take a look at the Wasteland around Petra and ask yourself if you would do the same.”

Franken fidgeted, glancing aside at his many clan members working the steam barges as they rolled down towards the wooden lattices hanging over the pits. “Word around the imp city is that there will be a meeting tomorrow, so I won't be able to speak to you then...”

Scootaloo squinted. “Since when were you going to speak to me?”

“Since now,” Franken said, gazing sharply at her. “There is much to tell you, much about what we're mining down here. It's more than steam.”

Raimony almost said something, but Scootaloo brushed her aside and took up the center of Franken's vision once more. “Something other than steam? What the heck could you want from the depths of Cloudsdale if not sky marble—?” She paused in mid-speech, blinking. “Moonrocks. Of course, tons of them rolled down into these pits while the rest of Equestria blanketed them with earth...”

“I can't talk about it here, even among my own workers and allies,” Franken said. “But it's important that someone must know. Tomorrow's meeting of the families is merely a superficial, puppet gathering. No true information is going to be spread there. But if Devo's found a way to carry word of mouth through this... equine Outbleeder nonsense, then I might as well swallow my pride and take advantage of the situation.”

“Very well,” Scootaloo said with a nod. “If you're more willing to say the truth directly to my face rather than to Devo's—”

“A lot is on the line, pony, I cannot be more detailed than that,” Franken practically whispered. He glanced from side to side, shiftily, and added, “Meet me in Strut Eleven the day after tomorrow, Ceti Level, along the stalk. The foundries there will be abandoned briefly for hob maintenance. That will give us ample time to speak without interruption.”

“Works for me,” Scootaloo performed a mock curtsey. “Wear a white carnation.”

Franken walked away, paused, gave Scootaloo a double-take, sighed, and sauntered off towards where his many lackeys were slaving away at steam shipments.

Scootaloo's nostrils flared as she hummed to herself in thought. She trotted back into the center of the train car.

“Uhhm...” Raimony brushed aside a few brown bangs, her thin green eyes blinking. “What just happened?”

“I think we struck pure steam, metaphorically bullcrapping, of course.”

“What the heck could the Glass-Bleeders get out of moonrock?” The goblinette's scarlet bandanna flapped in the wind as she gazed towards the Outbleeder. “Or Haman of Rust Blood for that matter?”

“I've mined moonrocks all of my life,” Scootaloo muttered. “From them, I've been able to create runestones, enchantments, luminescent gemstones, and several different kinds of nasty explosives.” After a deep breath, she muttered, “Only Goddess Luna knows what goblins are capable of doing with the stuff.”

“I can't believe that you got him to open up like that!” Raimony exclaimed. “I've known Franken all my life. He's like an uncle to me. I've never gotten him to tell me something I wanted to hear, and you just canter up and make him spit something out in a flash!”

“He hasn't spat anything out yet,” Scootaloo said. “That's in two days' time, apparently. Since when was there a huge meeting going on between the families anyway?”

Raimony smirked devilishly. “I'd say sometime shortly after you and short-round began marching around the city, strut to strut, asking questions. I knew my dad was gonna cause a stir, I just didn't think it'd happen this quickly.”

“I guess it goes to show that he had every right to to be concerned about all the families in general,” Scootaloo murmured, gazing out the door as a trio of loud, thundering gremlin aircraft throttled over the gaping pits. “Ever since Haman closed shop with the ogres, they've likely been antsy to see something happen—anything—just to spark this imp city into action.” She turned and glanced over her pink mane at the goblinette. “For all we know, Franken may have nothing to share with me whatsoever. I think Devo just needed me to do this whole Intercessor thing to get the imp city blood flowing. I bet, as we speak, Haman's starting to feel the squeeze.”

“Heh... By the Dimming's Blight...” Raimony managed a razor-toothed chuckle. “Wouldn't that be a first!”

Just then, a little green figure bounced into the midst of the two females. “Whew! Alright, I'm back!” Warden stood by Scootaloo's side. “What did I miss?”

“Go back to the other side of the train,” Scootaloo droned. “We were almost having a moment.”

“Pfft—Were not!” Raimony scowled. “Dream on, you sky-stealer!”

Scootaloo sighed and gave Warden a sarcastic smile. “Welcome back, ya little Wart.”

“Sorry I took so long,” he sheepishly smiled. He pointed a clawed finger behind him. “I was taking a leak in the train's toilet.”

Raimony twitched, giving the little teenager a vicious glare. “This train doesn't have a toilet.”

Warden froze. His green ears drooped. “Whoops...”

“Unngh...” Raimony grabbed a mop from the corner of the car and marched off beyond the line of crates. “Story of my friggin' life...”

“Hey, while you're at it, why don't you clean up after your sarcasm too?” Scootaloo exclaimed.

“Bite me, battle-mare!”

“Love you too, ya mud-headed ragdoll—Augh!” The last pony suddenly stumbled. “Celestia dang it!”

“What?! What?!” Warden jumped, breathless.

“Nnngh...” Scootaloo seethed and settled down on her haunches, waving a barren front right hoof. “My friggin' horeshoe. This thing hates me, I swear to Epona.”

“Yeesh...” Warden stared at her from an angle. “How much does it suck to have to nail a footpiece into your... foot?”

“It's called a 'hoof,’ for your information, Wart,” Scootaloo groaned as she struggled to wedge the loose metal article back onto the end of her limb. “I only know of one pony who had feet, and it was all in the silly unicorn's head.”

“I still can't get over the fact that you don't have hands.” The green teenager smirked. “Just how do you expect to live without fingers?”

“Jee, I dunno. How do you expect to live without your kidneys?”

“Haha! What are you smoking? I totally have my kidneys—” His aquamarine pupils shrunk upon her tossed frown. “Oh... Ohhhh... Ahem. Right, no more making fun of the pony's hooves.”

“Now you're learning,” Scootaloo muttered, halfway through reattaching the damnable article. “There's nothing left in this Wasteland that's so small that it isn't worth killing your conscience to threaten it unashamedly.”

“I'll have you know that I'm pretty big for my age!” Warden folded his arms with a haughty glare. “None of my siblings were nearly as tall as me when they set out for another township!”

“Oh really...?”

“Yeah! Besides, I dwarf most gremlin adults. I could even piledrive a hob if I wanted to.”

“What's the difference between all of you little imps anyways?”

“Pffft—Only everything!” Warden made a face. “Haven't you been paying attention?”

“Some of you walk around with guns, others of you fly around with guns.”

“Gremlins make up barely a tenth of the imps who live in this city,” Warden said. “I remember a guy on the street stating that fact for me.”

“Was that before or after he began curb-stomping you for being branded with the 'emblem of sky-stealers?'”

“Erm... Well...” Warden blushed slightly, but shook that thought off entirely. “Anyways, gremlins don't belong to clans like goblins do. They have families, of course, but they're all engineers first and sons and daughters second. They gang together in city-wide corporations that the bigger, far more powerful goblin organizations hire for their security and flight skills.”

“What's with the helmets they wear?”

“Helmets?”

“Yeah,” Scootaloo nodded, finishing her horsehoe job and pressing the bottom of her limb tightly to the bulkheads, testing the tightness of the metal article. “They've got these breathing apparati and visors on all the time. Do they have a problem inhaling the Wasteland air or something?”

“It's more of a religious thing.”

“Religious?”

“Yeah, they believe that Petra is an actual imp, and not a spirit inside all of them.” Warden smirked. “I used to have a gremlin buddy in the township I grew up in. I asked him how come he never showed his eyes. He said that it had to do with Petra being an all-seeing entity, and that gremlins weren't worthy of exposing their mouths or eyes nakedly to Petra's vision, or else their souls might fall apart and they'd no longer be vessels for manifesting their engineering skills and stuff.”

“Heh. Trippy.” Scootaloo stood up evenly on all fours once more. “And what about hobs?”

“Hobs just smell bad.”

“Oh.” Scootaloo blinked. “Really?”

“Yeah,” Warden said, stifling a yawn.

She stared at him for a prolonged period of time, then shrugged. “Well, okay then.”

“I've never been this close to a mining operation,” Warden murmured, gazing out the wide open cargo door to observe the many shuffling bodies of goblins dredging steam from the pits outside. “I didn't realize how hot it'd feel.”

“I'm guessing that, all your life, Petra has demanded you manifest the clerical side of ingenuity.” Scootaloo briefly smirked. She trotted over and leaned against the doorframe, gazing into the perforated landscape. “If they want to pull pegasus sky marble from out of those ravines, they gotta generate a lot of frickin' heat to slice straight through the condensed steam-solids.”

“So, it's true then?” Warden gazed curiously up at her, his ears twitching. “Winged ponies made all that stuff?”

“Yup.” Scootaloo inhaled. “That we did. We built it out of the clouds. Much of it was condensed vapor wrangled from above the waves of the East Ocean. Even to this day, you can measure the structural integrity of sky marble by its saline content. Cloudsdale was built entirely with twenty-five percent saline pure sky marble. When I was a little foal, the kids in this foster home I grew up in used to say that if you put your ear to a chunk of pure sky marble, you could hear the sea ponies singing. Heh...”

“What... What was Cloudsdale...?” Warden made a face.

“This... This was Cloudsdale, Wart,” Scootaloo murmured, her eyes tilting forlornly upward until they were absorbed into the surging black fumes. “This was the floating skytropolis of pegasi, a brilliant city built of the clouds, in the clouds, and for the clouds. It was the center for all weather construction and climate distribution in central Equestria, from Canterlot to Manehattan.” Her eyes settled back down onto the torchlit wooden lattices, the grimy mine workers, and the ocean of industrial machinery stretching as far as the ghastly pits would allow her to see. “This was where rainbows were made, along with snowflakes—and I don't mean the putrid ash that pelts the Wasteland today, I mean real, honest-to-goodness, geometric masterpieces of artistic beauty.”

“So...” The teenager scratched his emerald skull. “You're trying to tell me that ponies weren't so much sky-stealers as they were... sky-builders?”

“Hmmmph...” Scootaloo smiled gently. She glanced at him and raised her eyebrows. “More like 'sky sculptors.’”

“It's hard to believe that a city was ever capable of freakin' floating in the air.” Warden briefly stuck his tongue out and folded his arms. “If you ask me, it's too good to be true.”

“And just what makes you say that, ya little wart?” Scootaloo cackled. “Your fellow imp-bleeders are dredging up all the sky marble to turn it into steam that makes zeppelins of the Wasteland float, right? Is it so hard to believe that pegasi could do all of that naturally without so much as breaking a sweat?” She smirked harder and gazed back out onto the landscape. “Y'know, it's ironic, and I've held my tongue until now, but ponies were hardly ever sky-stealers.” She gulped and grunted, “You goblins are.”

Warden made to protest that, but stopped in mid-breath. A sigh escaped through his nostrils, and he leaned lethargically against the doorframe of the train car opposite the last pony. After a minute or two, he swallowed and inquired in a curiously solemn voice, “Were you ever here, pony?”

“Hmmm?”

“Back... y'know... before the Dimming.” He gazed up at her with sensitive, turquoise eyes. “Did you live in Cloudsdale?”

Scootaloo bit her lip. “In a manner of speaking...” She gazed once more into the pits. “Yeah, I lived here. For over two years, I lived here. But that was after the Cataclysm.” She inhaled deeply. “But before...?” Her lips quivered as her scarlet eyes dilated at the thought. “...I was here for less than a day.”

Warden chuckled slightly. “Less than a day? Heheheh—Well, that's hardly exciting!”

“Hmmph... If only you knew....”

“What did you come here for? Was it grocery shopping or some crud?”

“Remember that friend that I buried here a long time ago?”

“Uhm... Kind of.”

Scootaloo swallowed hard. “She brought me here. It was my first time spent in Cloudsdale ever. She was... She was going to teach me how to fly.”

“Heh... Frostbeams...” Warden smiled, but as he gazed up at Scootaloo's blank expression, the curve left his lips. He cleared his throat. “Um... did she ever get a chance to?”

Scootaloo slowly shook her head. “No,” she said in a single breath, her eyes glistening.

Warden shifted uncomfortably. “Well, uhm, did you ever learn how to—?”

Just then, a loud buzzing alarm went off. Warden jumped with a high-pitched gasp, shrinking beside Scootaloo's flank. The last pony stood up straight, craning her pink-maned neck as she looked every which way. The granite landscape between the train tracks and the pits was covered with red-bandanna wearing goblins as the many Hex-Bleeders scrambled towards a crate of steam powered weapons and armed themselves. An elder, gray overseer shouted orders towards all the imps while miners rushed in one massive, panicked surge from the depths of the Cloudsdalian ravines. Red flashing lights strobed all across the latticework as the buzzing noise intensified.

“Wh-What's going on?!” Warden exclaimed, trembling.

“You asking me, Wart?!” Scootaloo barked, staring at all the scampering bodies along the edge of the pits. “Give me a pony siren anyday, and I might do a better job of interpreting it over impish bedlam!”

“Of all the stinkin' timing...” Raimony suddenly dashed her way between the two figures, her bandanna waving in the cold Wasteland winds as she jumped down from the train. “Franken! Look after your fellow Glass-Bleeders!” she shouted across the frenzied work area. “My father's workers and I will form the forward barricade!”

“What's the alarm going off for?!” Scootaloo exclaimed over the noise. “Has there been a pressurized steam leak in the mines or some crap?!”

“As if!” Raimony barked back at the train as she rushed towards a metal crate and picked up a hulking semi-automatic dart cannon in her lithe limbs. “We're under attack for the fourth time this month!”

“By what?” Warden asked.

“What do you think?!” Raimony cocked her steam cannon to hissing life. She shouted towards her compatriots in matching bandannas, “Face the mines! They were sighted in the depths! Don't let a single one of them live!”

“I don't get it...” Warden trembled. He was hiding behind Scootaloo's leather frame. “Wh-What are they going to be shooting at?”

“Trolls...” Scootaloo murmured. The pink hairs on the back of her mane stood on end. She darted her eyes across the Wasteland, past the line of gun-toting Hex-Bleeders, past the gray overseer shouting orders at his phalanx and Raimony's, past the distant, dark image of Franken forcing the miners back behind the line of defense. “They must be attacking in full waves, otherwise the goblins wouldn't be making such a solid formation...”

“What, did somebody die and make you a military commander all of a sudden?!”

“Shhh—Just shut up and let me think for a second!” Her eyes narrowed upon the scene. She saw the goblins positioning themselves behind crates and mining equipment, their guns aimed at the wooden lattices leading up from the ravine. They were all facing one direction, and their backsides were to the grand widths of the Wasteland beyond the monorail tracks. “Something isn't right here. If this is how they plan to kill the trolls, it's way too easy to be true. It's too organized, too predictable...”

“It looks A-Okay to me!” Warden gulped, his bright eyes darting left and right. “Let's just let them to do their job, huh?”

Scootaloo's brow furrowed. Her lips pursed as she thought and thought...

The last pony knelt down low, squinting in disbelief. She lowered the canvas mask from her mouth so she could breathe more easily. With a dark orange hoof, she reached forward and turned over the pony skull in front of her. In the glistening twilight, a strange thing appeared on the deceased equine's bony head. It was a horn.

Never before had Scootaloo encountered a non-pegasus skeleton. It boggled her mind to be staring at an actual unicorn corpse. Her most logical guess was that the unfortunate equine was passing underneath Cloudsdale when the Cataclysm took place. She wondered if it had been lucky enough to have died from either the flames of Equestria or from the weight of the city falling on top of it. For the life of her, Scootaloo couldn't pretend to know which of the two was the better fate.

There was something odd about the horn, something that made it look and feel brighter than the rest of the bone matter in the penumbra of the twilight's glow. Scootaloo realized that this brightness was changing with each shift and wobble her body made as she knelt over it. The wheels turned in her head, and on a whim she reached into the depths of her saddlebag. When her hoof pulled back out, she was grasping a bright red gemstone that she had pilfered from a mound of powdery moonrock.

Glancing back and forth from the gemstone to the horn, she slowly waved the ruby-colored jewel back and forth. Sure enough, the horn of the dead unicorn resonated with a faint but very real glow, intensifying the closer that the translucent moonrock approached the alicornia substance.

Scootaloo raised an eyebrow. She didn't quite know what to make of this discovery. Her first thought, however unsavory, was to somehow find a way to harness that magical connection...

There was a rustling sound behind her.

With a metallic ringing noise, Scootaloo pulled her dagger out from its sheath and instantly spun about. She frowned, her nostrils flaring as she gripped the blade between gritting teeth. A cold gust of air wafted over her shaved mane, and still she was helpless to find the source of the inexplicable sound.

Then something moved just to her right, something snow-white and shivering. The lone scavenger glanced over, and her breath left her.

It was a white bunny rabbit. It was the white bunny rabbit. Scootaloo remembered it from over a year ago, there was no way she couldn't have remembered it. It was the only living thing besides bipedal monstrosities that Scootaloo had seen since the Cataclysm happened. It glanced at her with the same frightened, wriggling expression that the filly remembered. Its one ear was still a shredded mess, and it still moved with a painful limp.

Scootaloo gazed in silent awe. Two years had passed, two years of stormfronts, two years of dodging angry goblins, two years of starving and struggling and bleeding. In spite of all the odds, all the lengthy nightmares and trials, this tiny, fragile creature was just as alive as she was.

The Wasteland survivor nearly whimpered, assaulted by the most painful sensation yet, for once again she was a pony. Instead of a grimace, this wave of agony came out of her through a smile. She didn't think twice about it, she didn't consider the consequences, but she reached into her saddlebag, grabbed a container of moldy bread bits, and unscrewed it. Eyes glossy, Scootaloo knelt down and offered the morsel to the twitching little mammal.

The rabbit eyed her shiftily, its nose glistening with condensation and melted snow. Nevertheless, it navigated the tense distance between itself and the patient pegasus, shuffling towards her, one miniature hop at a time.

Scootaloo waited. Scootaloo watched and smiled.

Finally, the rabbit reached the filly's hoof, took one last glance at the tender bits of dirtied bread, and eagerly swiped some from her limb. It hunched over in the rubble, gobbling the edible material down its tiny throat. Its shivers matched the painful lurch in Scootaloo's own stomach, but the pony waited the encounter through, giving as much as she could... all that she could. It would be against her pegasus essence to do anything but help this last sliver of nature live, even to her own detriment.

“I'm sorry...” Scootaloo said, sniffling her way through a fragile smile. “I know the world's due for two, maybe three Winter Wrap-Ups...”

The rabbit gave no reply to this. Instead, it froze—becoming still as stone. Suddenly, the little rodent shot up, its chest beating like a petrified groundhog's. In a single breath, the white thing spun about and sped like a fluffy missile directly eastward, down a slope of crumbling ruins.

Scootaloo squinted curiously. She watched as the rodent scampered away out of view. She watched as the petite pads of its feet flashed like burning moonrocks. Her eyes traveled up towards the twilight yawning above as she pictured something else just as pale but twice as frightening. She imagined...

The last pony jerked. She flung the jar back into her saddlebag. She sheathed her dagger, pulled her mask back over her mouth, and galloped straight down the craggy hill of ivory rubble. She bounded eastward over chunks of skymarble, ducked under pale pillars, slid through beds of gravel, and leaped over a mound of collapsed earth. Just as a frightening rush of thundering limbs filled her twitching ears, she slid down behind a granite outcropping, spun backwards, stripped of her saddlebag, squeezed herself inside a thin slit formed beneath a leaning slab, and pulled her belongings into the tiny crevice along with her. Flattening her body against the stony womb of the sundered world, she held her breath and gazed at the tiny sliver of light separating her from the inner ruins beyond.

Breathlessly, she waited for ten seconds, twenty, thirty. Less than a minute later, the claustrophobic world above her shook and rumbled. Pebbles and flecks of stone littered the mouth of the tiny crevice within which her petite body was hiding. She clenched her jaws tight and squinted her eyes as the rumbling intensified to a low roar, followed by the shrill, haunting sounds of whooping, hollering monstrosities.

In a gust of hot, rancid air, they finally stampeded past the mouth of the crevice, clambering on razor-sharp hands and feet as their pale, leathery bodies took their murderous charge down the sloping inner ruins of Cloudsdale. Hungry, hyperventilating breaths pierced the air, robbing Scootaloo of clean oyxgen. She almost asphyxiated from the sheer stench of their numbers as she trembled there for a cramped and sweating eternity, waiting for them to clear, waiting for them to dissipate, waiting for them...

“They're coming from behind,” Scootaloo said.

“H-Huh?” Warden glanced up at them as the face-off began. “How do you know that—?!”

The green teenager shrieked as the air filled with hot steam bursts and gun blasts. The phalanx of goblins were firing blindly into the mines. All of them were shooting into the southern slope of the ravine. Occasinally, a tiny shrill shriek or two filled the air in a blood curdling octave, but it was hardly enough to warrant the menacing firepower.

“Dang it, they're gonna get flanked—!” Scootaloo made to hop down from the train car.

“D-Don't!” Warden gasped and blocked her at the last second with his small, outstretched arms. “Are you crazy, pony?!”

“They've been set up!” Scootaloo exclaimed, glancing fitfully towards the unguarded edges of the stony embankment as a dull thunder filled the air below the cacophony of the imps' combined firepower. “They won't shoot all of the trolls!”

“But they will shoot you if you so much as land your feet—erm, I mean—hooves down onto this ground!” Warden stammered to say above the noise and bedlam. “Or have you forgotten why you're here in this train to begin with?”

Scootaloo gazed, her lips quivering. After a strong breath, her face tensed. “Very well then.” She shrugged half of her armor off her. “Hold my stuff.”

“Hold your stuff—?” His aquamarine orbs blinked incredulously. “Augh!” He shrieked suddenly under the weight of her leather gear falling into his quivering arms.

With her wings free, Scootaloo flung her saddlebag and reached into it. She grabbed a magazine full of purple, explosive rune-darts and clamped them in her teeth. With a single flick of her limbs, she extended her rifle and cocked it so that the normal runestones flew to a clattering heap on the train car's bulkheads below.

Warden glanced up at her. “Uhm... what are you—?”

“Hey!” an elderly voice shouted from below.

Warden gave a breathless, panicked look.

The old, gray overseer was gazing up at the train. With his back suddenly to the waves of goblin riflers, he gave the pony on board the train a frowning glare. “Who invited this murderous glue stick here—and armed?! Raimony?! Is this your father's doing?!”

The brown-haired goblinette was too busy shouting orders to her fellow Hex-Bleeders. The many imps let loose a sea of blazing steam bolts down into the gaping ravine beneath them. The air was filled with burning hot mist and gun exhaust.

“Dang it—Somebody! Anybody!” The gray overseer pointed up at the last pony. “Shoot the frickin' sky stealer before she gets us in our backs!”

“P-Pony...?” Warden trembled.

“Great, just what I friggin' need...” Scootaloo hissed as she scrambled to shove the magazine full of runestones into her rifle.

“By Dimming's Blight...” the goblin elder hissed and pulled out a steam-powered revolver from his belt. “...if you want a job done yourself...”

“Oh jeez oh jeez oh jeez...” Warden flinched, covering his eyes.

Scootaloo sweated, bravely continuing with her weapon loadout as her eyes darted between the one overseer and the thundering hills beyond.

The overseer frowned. He aimed his pistol up at her. The imp's clawed finger pulled the trigger.

The last pony's eyes twitched.

The elder goblin's revolver jammed. Cursing, he slapped the gun against his thigh and reloaded a fresh steam bolt into it.

Scootaloo took a brave breath. In a desperate race with this gray goblin, she cooly slapped the last lengths of her glowing magazine into the rifle. She cocked it.

The overseer finished refilling his revolver. He spun the chamber.

Scootaloo aimed past him.

He aimed at her, squinting, narrowing the sight on her forehead. He fired—but the bullet flew off-kilter, for a green teenager had just tackled him to the ground. “Aaugh!”

The steambolt ricocheted off the top of the train car's cargo door frame, just a meter away from Scootaloo's skull. Undaunted, the equine in question shouted into her rifle: “H'rhnum!”

“Nnnngh!” The overseer flung the petite body of Warden angrily off him. “What the heck do you think you're doing—?!” The elder stopped in mid-sentence as he watched a pair of explosive rune-darts soar over his pointed ears. He and the teenager spun to see the projectiles embedding into the stony flesh of the earth right as a cloud of ash billowed above the rising Wasteland hilltop beyond.

Scootaloo craned her neck. She watched with an icy gaze. Just as her scarlets reflected a solid line of pale leathery menace, she spat into her bracelet of horns, “Y'hnyrr!”

The hilltop exploded in a brilliant mess of purple mana and plasma. The resulting thunder shook every rifler off his haunches. Many goblins spun, gasping, along with Franken... and finally Raimony herself. The daughter of Devo watched with mesmerized green eyes as a sea of pale limbs flailed amidst ink-black blood, fountaining outward from the last pony's bursting ordinance. Without a second's hesitation, she stood up straight and pointed a clawed hand straight at the failed charge of bleeding trolls. “About face! Fire at will!”

Every goblin spun around. The edge of the Cloudsdalian ruins glinted with one swaying motion of twilight-reflecting rifle barrels. Then the air rang with murder and mayhem as the steambolts flocked the other way, reducing the unwitting army of flanking trolls to a bloody soup of leather and bone. Arms, fingers, and teeth flew as the howling creatures flung themselves back over the hill, only to be consumed in the lingering flames of the last pony's runic discharge. Not a single one of the helpless, scampering carnivores made it past the crest of the sundered landscape.

“Ha! Boo-ya!” Warden hopped up and down in place. “Killer frostbeams! Send them packing back to the Dimming! Hahaha!” He smiled an infectious crescent moon in a world without light. Spinning, he gazed warmly up at the last pony.

Scootaloo exhaled long and hard, leaning her entire body against the frame of her smoking rifle. She watched as the gunshots came to a stop, filling the air with the smell of hot steam and exposed troll innards.

“Well...” She brushed her pink bangs back behind the red bandanna and bore a dry smile. “...that certainly made my day.”

“Holy blazes!” The elder overseer stood up, wincing. He managed a drunken grin as he holstered his pistol and sauntered over to the train car, navigating an age-old limp. “Heck, glue stick! If you were gonna do that, why didn't you frickin' say so?” He chuckled hoarsely and turned his pale face up to look at her. “I almost gave your head a new oats-hole—” The old goblin froze upon seeing her up close. His eyes blinked slowly.

Scootaloo returned the gaze, though she hardly looked as shocked as he was. Her narrow eyes poured unemotionally over the frail, bony frame of the lowly imp.

“It's... It's you,” Matthais murmured, his jaw agape. He swallowed dryly. “You're still alive...”

“Mmmm...” Scootaloo slowly nodded. Her voice came out in a blunt drone, “No thanks to you.”

Matthais winced slightly from that. A deep tremble flew through his body, and he briefly twitched his fingers once more around the holster of his pistol. “After... After all this time... You were out there?” His ears drooped back as his eyes darted towards the gray horizon. “...You spent it all in the Wasteland?”

“Did I have a choice?” Scootaloo uttered. “Nice job you've done with the place, by the way.”

His eyes rounded at that. He gazed up at the dark clouds, then at the sudden sea of troll blood saturating the earth beyond the rows of grimy mining equipment. “I keep waiting... Keep waiting for it to blossom...” He hissed in a suddenly sour breath. “But Petra keeps taking... keeps needing...”

“You know, I never did cause the Cataclysm,” she murmured. Her eyes narrowed like knife-edges. “And the least I've done since is make the world even dimmer.”

Matthais bit his pale lips. Turning around, he limped off in a defeated shuffle. He paused briefly at Warden, glancing down at him. He reached a wrinkled hand over. The teenager appropriately flinched, but the elder merely patted his head—an apologetic gesture—and he walked off on his lonesome, losing himself in the shuffle of goblins scavenging from the dead corpses of trolls.

Warden gazed quizzically from Matthais' figure over to Scootaloo's. “What was that all about?”

Scootaloo sighed long and hard. She retracted her rifle and slid it back into the folds of her saddlebag. “I'm sorry, kid. I'm sorry that you'll never be able to understand.” Sadly, she gazed her eyes up towards the blackened sky of the Central Plains.

“Hey! Hey Rainbow Dash! Down here!”

Scootaloo's pink tail flicked excitedly, like an overgrown puppy's, as she beamed up towards the tiny, white cloud hovering low above the green hilltops north of Ponyville.

“I've been looking for you all day! What are you doing up there? Napping?”

There was no denying a sapphiric speck perched atop the lone, fluffy object. A small curtain of prismatic tail hairs dangled over the side as the shadow barely budged.

The orange foal didn't stop grinning. “I can see you moving up there, Dashie!” She grinned wide, bearing a devilish glint to her teeth. “You've got some bugs caught in your mane.”

“Nnngh... I do not...!” a cracking voice echoed from above.

“Heeheehee! Made you talk! Since when did Ponyville's chief weather flier talk in her sleep?”

“Since annoying little brats with drumsticks for legs started barking up my cloud!”

Scootaloo stuck her tongue out at that. Undeterred, the little filly squawked, “C'mon, Dashie! I thought you had a whole bunch of aerial tricks to practice today! Don't you wanna finally pull off the Buccaneer Blitz? I even have the notes we took from last time!”

What came from the cloud was as sullen as noonday rain. Sighing, Rainbow Dash muttered dully into the air, “I... I-I'm not in the mood today, Scootaloo. Could we do it another time?”

“Not in the mood? Hehehe—Are you joshin' me?” Scootaloo uttered. Silence filled the breezy air, and slowly her smile faded as she came to comprehend the utter limpness of Rainbow Dash's body against the vaporous splotch above. Gulping, she sat down on her haunches and murmured, “Dashie?”

The blue pegasus was still as a stone. The only thing that moved was her colorful tail, swishing indifferently against the high winds of the sunny day.

“Dashie, what's wrong?” Scootaloo felt a lump in her throat. She couldn't understand why, but her heart was beating a kilometer-per-minute. “Y-You're usually not like this...”

“Please, kid, seriously, could you just lay off?”

Scootaloo's face jerked back as if dealt a vicious blow. Her violet eyes began to curve...

As always, Rainbow Dash swiftly came to the rescue. Sighing, she stirred, shuffling about-face so that she finally hung her head in Scootaloo's direction. The smile on her face was a brief, hasty construction. “I'm fine, kid. I wouldn't mind hanging out with you, just—another time. Okay? Today, I...”

“What, Rainbow?” Scootaloo stared up at the pegasus, her lips pursed. After months of looking after herself, fixing up her loft in the barn just right, earning bits, and staving off bullies, she suddenly and unexpectedly felt vulnerable again. “What happened...?”

“I learned a new word,” Rainbow grunted. She slumped down over the edge of the cloud and gazed forlornly towards the sky. “'Flip Flop.’” She blinked and frowned. “Pfft—Okay, so maybe that's two words. Either way, I'm an idiot.”

“Why... How are you an idiot?”

“Because 'Flip Flop' describes me.”

“It... H-Huh?!” Scootaloo's orange face twisted as if she broke a blood vessel.

“Because I'm cool one second and then I'm lame the other. I flip flop around like a drunken mule,” Rainbow Dash spat.

“Pffft—That's so not true!” Scootaloo smirked bravely. “You're the most spectacular flier in the skies! Ponyville depends on you to keep the weather perfect! You save ponies from trouble all over town! As a matter of fact, your friends—”

“My friends?” Rainbow Dash balked, frowning briefly. “You mean that egghead in the town library?! The fashionista who sounds like a vampire?! A bouncing diabetes explosion and a pegasus who's afraid of her own shadow? Oh, and don't forget Strawhead! Where do I begin...?”

“I... I-I don't understand...” Scootaloo squinted at her.

Rainbow Dash practically growled. “I used to hang out with Cloudsdalian speedsters, kiddo!” she said. “There was a time when you would only see me with the fastest and coolest pegasi in all of Equestria. Heck, if I never came to Ponyville, I'd probably have met the Wonderbolts over a year ago! I used to outrace stallions, knock feathers with harpies, and shoot the breeze with...” She paused in her speech, then utterly deflated with a long winded sigh that pulled the blue soul straight out from her. “...With griffons.”

Scootaloo couldn't find words to respond to that. She was still processing it all. The foal felt ridiculously and hoplessly tiny along the hilltop in the cloud's shadow.

“But look at me now...” Rainbow Dash muttered, punching a few puffs of cloud material off into the wild blue yonder. “I'm stuck in this boring town, and I can't bring myself to ditch it. For the life of me, I have no friggin' clue why.” Her nostrils flared and she shut her eyes, murmuring, “I'm a lame-o...”

“Rainbow Dash, y-you're...” Scootaloo tried finding the words. She felt like she suddenly had to fight to salvage this situation, as if Rainbow Dash might suddenly float away forever and never come back. “You're not lame. You're...” She brightened hopefully. “Y-You're the best friend a pony could ever have.”

“Snkttt-Heheheh...” Rainbow Dash chuckled with her eyes closed. She turned over as if summoning sleep. “Uhhhuhhh...”

“Y-You are! Anypony would want to have you as a friend! Applejack, Twilight, Pinkie Pie—and the rest: they're lucky to have you around! There's nothing lame in that! It's... It's because of how good a friend you are that they refuse to let you go!”

“Hmmm... Why?” She opened her ruby eyes lethargically. “Because I'm loyal?” Her inquisition came out as a cold grunt.

Scootaloo bit her lip briefly. She swallowed and said in a sincere breath, “No, because you're... you're just so awesome, Rainbow Dash. And what's more—you know it. And you're not afraid to show off just how awesome and cool you are. When other ponies... when your friends are around you, they see that in you, and it gives them hope, because they want to become the best that they can possibly be, just like you are. You show them that it's possible to be so spectacular. How can someone hang around you for so long and... and n-not want to be a better pony?”

Rainbow Dash stared down at her blankly. She said nothing, but her blue ears were suddenly twitching.

Scootaloo was hanging her head by that point, brushing at a few flakes of dirt on the ground as she murmured, “Why anypony would look beyond all of that and call you a 'flip flop' is just stupid. Whoever that is, it's obviously somepony who doesn't want to become better than what she or he is. That's a pony who's willing to settle for less in life, and that's so not like you. You've made such good friends in this town, because to give them the brush off would be... well... really boring.”

The air was still. The breeze shifted, bringing a chill to the landscape.

The orange foal shuddered from it, among other things. On waddling limbs, she got up and trotted away. “Well... uhm... I'm done being annoying, Dashie. If you want, I'll just leave you alone...”

Scootaloo wasn't counting, but she was sure that it was less than two seconds after uttering the word “alone” that she heard a voice rasping from above—

“Hey pipsqueak. Where are you running off to?”

The foal blinked. She turned and looked up. “But, I thought you wanted—”

Rainbow Dash was smiling. It was a soft grin, softer than the cloud that was dissipating beneath as she suddenly levitated down to the grassy hill on blue wings. “Don't you want to see something cool past the hilltops over there?”

“H-Huh?” Scootaloo blinked.

“Hahah... Ooops. What I meant to say was....” Rainbow Dash chuckled and ruffled the foal's mane. “...I totally got something cool to show you past the hilltops over there. Try and keep up, ya ‘lil squirt!” She winked, motioned with her head, and trotted off.

The orange filly was confused, but it didn't matter. She rediscovered her smile and swiftly galloped after her. “Hey! Wait up...!”

“Okay, I'll admit that you're full of surprises...”

Raimony folded her arms and leaned against the side of the rattling train car full of sky marble and pressurized steam containers. The vehicle roared eastward along the monorail track. It was a slow trip, due to the various cars being filled to the brim with cargo and goblin miners returning home to Petra.

“But tell me, how did you know that the trolls would try to blindside us like that?”

“I've battled those walking, pale turds more times than I can count,” Scootaloo said. The last pony stood opposite from Devo's green-eyed daughter. Her armor was off, so that she stood—clad in only the Outbleeder bandanna and blue feather—as she took the time to polish her copper rifle and magazines. Minding her leather belongings, Warden sat on a crate by her side. The goblin teenager's legs dangled over the container's edge while he stared at the brown pegasus. “I know what scents attract them. I know where to hit them so that they don't get back up. I know their herd instincts. And I know when they're using their meager brains to outsmart higher creatures that rely on patterns in battle.”

“You also know how to raise hell out of frickin' nowhere,” Raimony uttered with a smirk. “I'm kind of surprised that Matthais didn't lop off your head at the earliest opportunity.”

“You mean that gray-haired spitstain who pulled the pistol on me in the middle of all that nonsense?” Scootaloo scoffed. Warden watched her as she reexamined one last magazine of runes before slapping it back into the rifle's compartment. “Heck, he almost did. I guess yours and Franken's miners aren't the only things that were lucky today.” She paused in the middle of her weapons check and glared aside at her “assistant”. “What?” she barked.

“Hmmm... Nothing,” he said with a smile. He continued staring at her, his legs kicking playfully against the metal crate.

Scootaloo sighed. She gazed over at Raimony again. “I counted at least thirty trolls who bit the dust today. That's more than enough to send the rest of the pack hiding, at least for three or four stormfronts, before they figure out a new way to attack your mining operations.”

“You mean that there's more of them out there?” Raimony exclaimed incredulously.

Scootaloo nodded. “If there's anything a pony like me has come to expect in life, it's that there shall always... always be trolls.” She cocked the gun, retracted it, and slid it into the armor lying beside Warden. She cracked a few kinks in her necks before sighing. “Nothing multiplies more in the Wasteland than creatures of pure hate.”

“I'll get my father to hire extra gremlin air patrols,” Raimony uttered. “Y'know, you're pretty helpful to have around. I think I was wrong about you...”

“Whew... If I had a silver strip for every time I heard that...”

“You'd be dirt poor, right?” Raimony smirked.

Scootaloo smirked back.

“Heeheehee...” Warden suddenly giggled again. “I think you two are having a moment again.”

Raimony rolled her green eyes. “Do yourself a favor, pony.” She strolled off towards the adjacent car and her fellow Hex-Bleeders. “Ditch the shrimp, then maybe you'll become hireable material around Petra.”

Scootaloo watched her walk off. She blew a pink lock of hair back up over her red bandanna. “I take what I said back. The only thing more common than trolls in the Wasteland is insincere creatures pretending that they give a crap about things.”

“So...” Warden leaned against the crate's edge, his pointed ears twitching curiously. “What are you gonna tell Devo?”

“Hrmm... What should I tell him?” Scootaloo examined the horseshoe on her front right limb. Once again, it was rattling loose. Frowning, she fiddled with it and muttered, “That his casual business partner, Franken of Glass Blood, is mining moonrocks instead of sky marble? That Waven of South Blood may have died of far more suspicious means than old age? That more crap happened in the zeppelin crash at the Valley of Jewels than any goblin is willing to let on about?”

“All of that is nice, but what about the royal troll-bashing you did back there?!” Warden grinned wide, his aquamarine eyes practically electric. “Y'know, saving his daughter and stuff?”

“I... don't see how any of that sheds light on Haman of Rust-Blood and the recent economic drag in Petra...”

“Who cares?! It's full of frostbeams!” Warden giggled excitedly. “Yeesh, if I had known that my life was gonna have this many explosions and gunshots, I'd have left mom and dad way earlier! Even before my brothers and sisters!” He sat back atop the crate and hugged his knees. “They kept me in the house way too long, thinking that I'd run into nothing but trouble if I left for another township.”

“Er... yeah...” Scootaloo shifted uncomfortably and tossed a glance at his right leg. “And did you?”

Warden's ears drooped, and the last pony realized then and there that he had actually forgotten about the branding, if even for half a day. “Heh... Okay, so they were right about some things. Still...” He cleared his throat and rediscovered his grin. “...they also taught me that ponies steal infant imps in their sleep. But that's a load of crap! Ponies only steal the show by making trolls burst into flames!”

“Nnngh... I didn't make any trolls burst into flames—”

“You sure did! Your magic gun ripped their stomachs out and shoved fireworks in their place! Kabooom! Heeheehee...”

Scootaloo raised an eyebrow. “What is it with goblins and their love of all things that blow up?”

“Pfft—Come on, pony! Don't tell me you're not a fan of explosions!” Warden smiled wide. “Blowing up is—like—the most poetic thing any self-respecting element can do! When I'm lying on my death bed, and the lights go down, I hope I explode too!”

“You're a big bucket of something else, kid.” Scootaloo tilted her head at an angle and gave him a distant grin. “Speaking of explosions, you've got a little bit of spark inside you that's worth something.”

“The heck are you talking about?”

“I'd be a bloody glue stick right now if you hadn't speared that gray-skinned moron who was waving his pistol around.” She chuckled breathily. “That's twice you've done something to save my skin. Has that ever dawned on you?”

Warden blinked at that. Despite a slight rosiness to his green cheeks, he rolled his eyes and scratched a hand behind his head. “Pffft—Please. I'm just earning the silver you've given me. It's what any goblin would do.”

“Any goblin? Or any goblin who likes to see a pony make explosions happen?”

Warden stuck his tongue out at her. “Yeah, whatever. I still can't blow trolls up at a distance. Why, if I had as many frostbeams in my blood as you do, pony...” He exhaled with a fading curve to his lips. “Then I'd be somebody else, not this branded little punk.” His nostrils flared as he gazed briefly out the metal grated window, his turquoise eyes absorbing the blurring landscape. “Maybe I'd even... convince my parents that not all my brothers and sisters have to do the same thing. I'd show them that... there are cooler, far more exciting things to do in life than banging your head trying to manifest Petra...”

Scootaloo gazed long and hard at Warden, as the colors in his eyes changed, dulling like a foal's violets that were engrossed in an endless cascade of waterfalls. She glanced out the same window that he was, at the slow rate at which the train was gliding eastward with its heavy cargo. The last pony then glanced towards a series of metal steps leading towards an aluminum door in the ceiling.

“Hey, ya lil’ wart.”

Warden glanced up at her, blinking. “Hmm?”

She gave a devilish smirk and motioned towards the steps with her head. “Why don't you let me show you something?”

“I don't get it, Dashie,” Scootaloo murmured. She trotted up the hill, catching her breath from the long climb. A steep cliff suddenly blocked their path as she saw the wide green plains of Equestria stretching beneath them in the noonday glare. “What am I supposed to see?”

“You ask way too many questions, squirt,” Rainbow Dash said, smirking. She shuffled to a stop halfway towards the cliff. “I bet the reason you're always gliding around town is ‘cuz your parents kick you out for some peace and quiet.”

“Don't be a dunce!” Scootaloo stuck her tongue out at the blue pegasus and proudly shuffled past her so she could gaze down the edge of the cliff. “Half of the time, I'm running errands for my parents' lazy flanks! I swear, we'd all starve if it wasn't for me!”

“Heh, sure thing, kid.”

Scootaloo glanced up towards the blue sky. “So, what'd you want to show me? I don't see why you couldn't do your tricks back there on the lower hilltops.”

“Oh, this is a good place for tricks, alright.”

“Heh, you know best, Dashie,” Scootaloo said. Her mane suddenly billowed over her skull. She whistled. “It sure is windy up here!”

“There's a reason for that,” Rainbow Dash said, suddenly above and behind the foal.

“H-Huh?” Scootaloo glanced down, realizing that her legs were dangling. What was more, the earth was more than two dozen meters way. “Aaack!” She flinched and flailed, her eyes convulsing. “Uhhh... Uhhhh...!”

“Hey. Hey. Chillax.” Rainbow’s hooves gripped her waist tightly from behind. The rush of her beating wings cooled the little filly's feverish panic. “I got ya, kid.”

“But... B-But...” Scootaloo's teeth chattered as her dilating eyes reflected the ever-distant landscape. “It's... It's j-just so high...”

“Oh, it'll get even higher,” Rainbow Dash said coolly. There was a humming to her voice, a tranquil thing, so that Scootaloo didn't have to see it to know that the blue pegasus was smiling. “Heh. Don't worry, pipsqueak. Even if worst came to worst, there's nothing on this earth that could fall so fast that I wouldn't be able to catch it.”

Scootaloo breathed slower, easier. She felt her own heartbeat pounding through to Rainbow Dash's hooves around her torso. On so many occasions, she had seen Ponyville's chief weather flier carrying small rainclouds across the skies. In a blurred blink, she saw herself as just such a cloud, something that should have naturally flown apart, but was instead being held together tightly in the blue pegasus' expert hooves.

The little orphan knew then and there just who it was that had always held her together.

“Sure beats that little metal slab on wheels, huh?” Rainbow Dash chirped.

“Yeah...” Scootaloo's smile widened with each mound of Equestrian earth that blurred underneath them. “Heheheheh—Yeah!” She stretched her forelimbs out wide like a falcon.

“Hahahaha!” Rainbow Dash smirked and angled her wings so that the two of them soared upwards. “You ain't seen nothing yet, kiddo!”

“Uhhh...” Warden nervously stammered as a gust of wind kicked at his ears. “Isn't this dangerous?”

“Everything is dangerous,” Scootaloo said, pushing her way through the squeaking door so that she stood halfway on the wobbling rooftop of the train car. She gave the smoggy, desolate sky a drunken grin and trotted out. “You're only safe when you're dead. But, y'know, that's boring and crud.” She turned around and reached a hoof down. “What are you, your parents' kid?”

That did it. Warden frowned at her and practically hopped to join her. “I'm not afraid—Aaaah!” He belatedly shrieked as he lost his balance and clumsily flailed before clutching her side in desperation.

Scootaloo stifled a chuckle. “Smooth, kid. Gonna melt the frostbeams before they have a chance to show themselves?”

“Don't make fun of me,” he said with a frown, albeit a trembling one. “I don't get it. What are you trying to show me?”

“There's something awesome about train rides,” she said, leading him so that the two stood on top of the Hex-Bleeder's car. The engine two spaces ahead of them churned hot clouds of steam into the air that split on either side of the two as they gazed at the blurring desolation beyond the monorail tracks below. Ahead, due east, the epic, golden stalk of Petra and its many circular struts shone like a beacon against the smoggy sky. “It all brings out the little foal in me. What about you?”

“I don't think I h-have an inner f-foal!” He trembled, gritting his teeth as he felt his feet slipping pathetically atop the metal surface of the car. “This is stupid! It's just a train delivering cargo back to the imp city! What's so special about that?”

“You know what?” Scootaloo muttered. “You're right. There's nothing awesome about this. Trains suck.” She suddenly shoved the two of them clear off the roof of the car.

Warden's impulse to gasp was only interrupted by his impulse to scream. Halfway in between, he settled for a childish squeal. This outburst had no punctuation, for he hadn't struck the bone-crushing surface of the earth as he had anticipated. Squinting his aquamarine eyes open, he saw the world blurring below as if they hadn't leaped off the train to begin with. This utterly confused the goblin until he saw bulging shapes rhythmically stretching outward from their combined shadows in the penumbra of Petra's looming glow.

“H-Huh?” Warden glanced up and witnessed the last pony's wings outstretched for the first time, slicing the air in pristine, earth-colored majesty. “Whoah...”

“Careful,” Scootaloo droned in a sarcastic voice. “You say 'whoah' to a horse, and she's liable to stop in her tracks.”

“No!” Warden jolted in her grasp, his eyes bugging out at the ground below. “I-I didn't mean to say that! Honest!”

“Heheh—Take it easy, Wart.” Her breath was bittersweet, saturating the lengths of her smile like the lengths of her years as she said, “Even if you fell a million kilometers per second, I'd still catch you.” A rising snarl bubbled through her lungs, but for once in her life she wasn't aiming it at something she hated. “Now, how about we catch some more of those frostbeams?”

Warden gulped, but very bravely smiled. “Okay—” The world surged past them at a greater speed as suddenly they climbed upwards, propelled by her beating wings. “H-H-Holy crap!”

“You said it, pipsqueak!”

Rainbow Dash squealed into the whipping winds as she banked the two of them up high into a gigantic loopty-loop.

“It's the Rainbow Express! Next stop, the sound barrier!”

“Heeheehee!”

Scootaloo grinned wildly into the gravity-defying madness. The world spun around them. The blue canvas of the sky switched with the green bosom of Equestria, and the two pegasi were free from it all. For a few seconds, all space and matter revolved around them. They were the center of the universe, and the universe was awesome... because they were awesome.

At the bottom of their dive, Rainbow Dash's voice pierced the beating winds to meet Scootaloo's twitching ears. “Hey! Ya little smart aleck! You remember what E.Z.N stands for?”

Scootaloo's teary eyes blinked against the centripetal chaos. “Uhhh... Uhhh... 'Epic Zoom Noiiiiii-iiiiiise—!'” The orange foal literally heard her voice echoing behind her as the two broke through a booming cloud of vaporous air. The two outraced sheer thunder as Rainbow Dash shot one wing perpendicular to the other and twirled the two of them in a maddening barrel roll towards a jutting hilltop. Scootaloo exhaled mutely into the insanity, wincing. At the last second, Rainbow Dash lifted them up so that they skirted the edge of the hill's cliff-face with a splash of loose grass.

Scootaloo's face briefly stretched from the impacting g-force. The blood suddenly rushed to her head, and as the two twirled upside down again, she heard distinctly in her own voice: “Sweet Celestia's flank!” She blushed. She shouted behind her shoulder, “D-Did I just say that seconds ago?”

“Haaaahahahaha!”

The little foal was suddenly a bottle of giggles and adrenaline. It was as if she was suffering the bends, but in a blissful, heavenly way. Never before did hyperventilation feel like a good thing. She stretched her limbs out fearlessly as Rainbow Dash dipped the two of them down a hilltop, parting the high grass as they scooped daringly low over the Equestrian countryside.

Raimony was talking to Matthais about hiring extra gremlin security patrols when she heard the screams. Her pointed blue ears twitched, and she spun about with a cockeyed expression. At first, she thought it was another troll attack. Shuffling over to a metal-grated window of the train car, she gazed outward.

The smoggy sky was ever so briefly sliced by a brown shape streaking with pink threads. A green figure was in the equine's grasp, and the screams that filled the desolate air were those of rapture and joy.

The goblinette blinked queerly. A few of her impish cohorts shuffled up and gazed out along with her, murmuring curiously amongst themselves. She stifled a smirk and shook her head in disbelief before strolling back towards the center of the train.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Outside, Warden was flying. At least, that's what he allowed himself to imagine. His eyes lit up like crashing ocean waves. They were just as moist: they filled with tears in the cold winds of the Wasteland as Scootaloo flung the two of them fearlessly.

The last pony gritted her teeth, pulled an old trick out of the book, and stuck one wing out—perpendicular to the other. She barrel-rolled the two of them in a wide arc, spiraling broadly and wickedly around the monorail train tracks as they effortlessly matched the chugging speed of the train. Warden's hollering voice was like a twirling siren in the gravity-defying loops that the pegasus weaved for them both.

With a burst of her wings, Scootaloo accelerated the two of them so that they sped up along the engine of the train. The conjoined wheels of the front vehicle spun, the iron joints rustily squeaking and creaking to join the cacophony of the majestic steam boiler surging within. As the monorail tracks lifted, the metal wheels of the train spat a rain of sparks in its climb. Warden flinched and chuckled in the sudden fireworks display of bouncing embers that rained on them. Scootaloo smirked and suddenly jerked to the left. The goblin in her grasp let out a startled yelp as the two barely surged past the murderous front of the chugging engine, coming out unscathed on the other side just in time to perform a loopty-loop and a dive that took them spinning through the concrete crossbeams of the monorail track's support struts.

Warden's shrieks of fright once more morphed into cheerful whoops, so that the two blended together, and all that was left to fear was all that was left to anticipate. As the two of them and the train approached the body of Petra, he inhaled the golden glow as if it was something cleaner than oxygen. It was a sharp sensation, full of excitement and mystery, so that the dark shades of the Wasteland suddenly had an enormous library of colors worth splitting asunder.

A flock of geese flew up from a crystal blue pond as Rainbow Dash dipped the two of them lower and lower, just stopping at the water's surface. Once or twice, the blue flier faked dropping Scootaloo, so that the orange foal let out an appropriate shriek on each occasion. Rainbow Dash merely chuckled and glided the two of them along, filling their faces with a gentle breeze.

Scootaloo gazed down at the pond's reflective surface, and when she did, she saw her and Rainbow Dash in an immortal embrace, as if they were flying a thousand kilometers per hour, and yet were going nowhere. She closed her eyes to preserve that snapshot, along with all its colors, and for once, the spectral awesomeness of it all drowned out a pair of white stones haunting the back of her mind.

As the two glided over the pond and toward the sun-lit clouds beyond, she relaxed into Rainbow Dash's limbs, tilting her head back to nuzzle the blue pegasus' shoulder. Everything was warm, perfect, and safe.

“Tell me about the world of ponies.”

Scootaloo paused in the middle of taking a sip from her canteen. The wind kicked at her pink mane as she glanced aside. “Well, what do you want to know about it?”

The two sat hours later on the tiny metal platform just outside the aperture entrance to the Harmony. The airship hovered at a distance from Petra. The smoggy sky billowed overhead while half the world burned bright and gold beyond them, swarming with the distant specks of other zeppelins bustling to and fro.

“What was it all like before the Dimming?” Warden asked. He hugged himself as he gazed out into the industrial mess and the endless desolation surrounding it. “What kind of a world did you live in when you were young?”

The last pony paused, contemplating that. She took a swig of the canteen and spun the lid shut. After a brave swallow, she murmured to the high wind, “Well, it was a lot more alive than what you have now. There was grass... and, uhm, trees and birds flying in the air—”

“Birds?” Warden asked, squinting curiously at her.

Scootaloo drew a blank at that. She gazed at Warden, then beyond him. Awkwardly, she eventually uttered, “Er... yeah. Y'know... birds. Small, hollow-boned creatures with wings and feathers that flew and sang in the sunlight...”

“S-Sunlight?” The teenager once again gawked.

The pegasus' lips hung open. She ran a hoof through her mane, lost in thought. Clearing her throat, she laid the canteen down on the platform and folded her front hooves. “Yes, Wart. There was once something called the Sun. It was a bright, celestial object that lit up the sky, making it far brigher and far warmer than you could ever imagine. There was never this... this pitiful, dim twilight. Well, sure, it got dark at night when the Sun went down past the horizon, but then you had another object—a beautiful object—called the Moon, and that lit up the night so that life wasn't entirely thrown into darkness.”

Warden chuckled bitterly at that. “Okay, now I know you're really pulling my leg. Two big bright things lighting up the world? That sounds too good to be true.”

“There's a reason your parents and every other imp calls it the 'Dimming.’ Did you ever once think of that?”

“How could anybody live in a world that switched from bright to dark constantly?”

“But we did,” Scootaloo said, and the moist sincerity in her eyes swiftly silenced him. She took a deep breath, murmuring into the heights of the dead world. “We did, Wart. We lived warmly, happily, and graciously...” She swallowed a lump down her throat and gazed off towards the grayness.

Scootaloo clung to Rainbow Dash, trembling. Undaunted, the blue pegasus aimed the little foal's dangling legs towards the body of a tiny, fluffy cloud. Slowly, she lowered the orange filly until her twitching limbs made contact. Nature took over, and soon the young pegasus' hooves stood squarely on the body of the misty vapor instead of sailing straight through. Scootaloo's violet eyes flashed open, and she finally let go of Rainbow Dash, standing in a wobbly motion in the center of the white cloud. A dumb smile swam slowly across her lips. Rainbow Dash chuckled and squatted down next to her. Gesturing for Scootaloo to watch, she gathered a clump of white vapor in her hooves and juggled it like a bouncing ball. Gracefully, she hoofed it over to Scootaloo. The little foal clasped the tiny pillow of clouds, reveling in the way it stayed solid in her gentle grasp. Rainbow Dash winked, leaned in, and blew mightily at the cluster of white froth. The mist fluttered every which way through the blue sky in ivory tendrils. Scootaloo watched in awe, unable to stifle the occasional giggle that came out from her lips as she and Rainbow Dash stood aloft the tropospheric pedestal.

“We lived under a sky that was pearlescent blue, just like the oceans. The clouds there were bright, white—not an endless gray ash heap. They liked to change color too. In the morning, they glowed like platinum silk sheets. At night, they burned red, like glistening apples. Do you know what apples are, Wart?

An orange mare in a cowgirl hat traded squabbling sentences with a blue pegasus. As the conversation ran on, the rainbow-maned pony rolled her eyes and stuck a playful tongue at the green-eyed farm-filly. Applejack growled in consternation. She was about to say something else when the two heard the noise of a growling stomach. Gazing aside in the afternoon sunlight, they spotted Scootaloo gazing up towards the first row of orchards just beyond the fence line of Sweet Apple Acres. She sighed and clutched the metal tray to her chest, but said nothing. With a shuffling of hooves, Applejack was suddenly standing beside her. With a wink and a smirk, she flung her lengthy, golden tail hairs up with whiplike precision, knocking an apple clear off a low-hanging branch. It fell neatly into a gasping foal's hooves. Blushing, Scootaloo glanced from the apple and back to the two ponies. Applejack and Rainbow Dash needed only to toss the foal a conjoined smile, and she had all the permission she needed. Too touched to be stubborn about it, Scootaloo gave in, filling her mouth with a sweetness that set her senses on fire, christening the lengths of the toasty afternoon sunset.

“Apples are fruit. Fruit used to hang off of trees. If you treated the land right, and if you cultivated the bounty that the earth had to give you, you could simply walk down a line of groves and pluck these things off the branches. And their taste, Wart? It was like biting into the juiciest, sweetest morsel of food you could ever imagine. It was too heavenly to be called food; it was dessert that sprouted from the ground.

Fluttershy hummed a tune into the air, coaxing a pair of songbirds to hover down from a line of trees bordering the Everfree Forest. She stretched out a hoof from where she reclined on the soft grass. Smiling, Fluttershy reached her nose out and softly nuzzled the two colorful creatures. They sang innocently, filling the morning air with a melodic beauty. Gazing over, Fluttershy quietly beckoned for Scootaloo. The orange filly trotted up nervously. Fluttershy gestured towards the tiny pegasus' wings, and Scootaloo obediently stretched the feathery stubs upward. With gentle grace, Fluttershy waved her hoof over the little pony's body, and the two birds hovered down and each perched atop a separate wing of the young pegasus. Scootaloo smiled at the two fragile creatures on either side of her, staring at them in wonder. There was a grunting noise off to the side. Scootaloo and Fluttershy looked over to see a severely bored Rainbow Dash, hooves folded, balancing the weight of a dozen fat pigeons across her blue appendages. The other two pegasi giggled helplessly as the weather flier rolled her eyes.

“There were forests. Forests were things that brimmed with life. This was a life that sustained itself, that perpetuated itself in a cycle of everlasting beauty. There were carnivores and scary creatures, yes, but they had just as much of a part to play in life as the softer sides of nature did. The world only produced things that made life plentiful, instead of wanting to devour everything like trolls or harpies.

A hot pink balloon soared over the cool skies of Equestria. An energetic, bouncy voice echoed through a loud megaphone as a great rumbling noise roared through the earth. Scootaloo watched from a hilltop as a huge herd of colorful ponies galloped down a dirt road and straight into a forest full of autumn-red leaves. Leading the pack was a pair of fillies: an orange mare in a brown hat and a bright pegasus with a flowing, spectral mane. Scootaloo's eyes were on one of them and one of them only. Cheering loudly, Scootaloo pumped a hoof in the air and tried to keep up, her tiny limbs mimicking the Running of the Leaves as she ran parallel to the dirt-trampling crowd, grinning with joy as she saw them thundering their way into the line of trees and shaking the color out of the dead branches.

“The forests changed, as did the weather. There was never just one season, but many. The world constantly shifted in a rhythmic cycle, bending the colors and the texture of everything from green to amber to gray to green again. Spring and Summer were toasty and warm. Autumn filled the air with a gentle crispness that made you happy to be alive. In Winter, ponies played in the snow, instead of having to hide in it.

Scootaloo's breaths came out in vapors. She wore a violet, velvet scarf that a fashionista had sewn for her in spite of all her protests. At that moment, though, she couldn’t care less about cold temperatures or excessive generosity. She sat atop a wagon full of baskets and rakes, gazing up into the air as hundreds—if not thousands of pegasi filled the air above Ponyville. In colorful droves, they brushed the last gray clouds of winter into obscurity. Birds flocked in from the south, escorted by winged figures that mimicked the hustle and bustle of the town streets below. All around Scootaloo, Ponyvillean citizens were melting the snow and raking up dead leaves. Everypony wore color-coded vests that dazzled the air with merriment, as did their song and cheer. Smiling to herself, Scootaloo grabbed the nearest rake she could find and jumped off the wagon to join the Wrap-Up.

“We were not just passive witnesses to the changing canvas of the world, we were participants in it, purveyors of that which blessed us. We gave to the earth, and the earth gave back. We beat the skies with our wings and herded the weather like cattle, making everything pristine and structured, building ourselves a utopia out of the materials that the Alicorn Sisters granted us. Life was more than just a series of bleak circumstances; it was an artpiece. We had the entire canvas at our disposal, and what we painted we did with finesse, with respect, and with joy.

“The world was a sparkling, vibrant place,” Scootaloo murmured into the ashen wind as the Harmony bobbed and weaved beneath the two of them. “Ponies reveled in it, the pegasi especially.” Her brown wings twitched slightly as she spoke, “It was in our blood to monitor the landscape, to keep the skies clean, and to let the weather release itself in stride, so that the only storms that ever happened were necessary. Even ugliness had its own merit in the world, so long as it was exercised properly.”

Warden gazed at her, his ears low to his skull. “It all sounds just so... so amazing. Who would ever want to dim that?”

Scootaloo took a deep breath. “I don't know, Wart. If you ask me, I seriously doubt the Cataclysm was a conscious decision on somebody's part. Whatever happened must have been a terrible disaster that no living thing in Equestria—equine or not—could have been capable of stopping. Ponies were innately bound to preserving all that was warm and bright. We would never even think of dimming it all. Never.”

“And still... after so much time has passed... every imp believes that you did,” Warden murmured. He rode a painful shudder down his spine. “That's depressing.”

Scootaloo nodded. “Everything is depressing once you know enough about it.”

“Is it because you're a... pegasus pony that you miss the warmth and brightness so much?”

“It's.. It's not just that, Wart,” Scootaloo said with a sigh. “Any creature in this Wasteland that respects itself would miss the brilliance of the old world. Pegasi, though... we were more than lucky creatures.” She gazed off forlornly into oblivion, her scarlets awash in ash and soot. “We were the stewards of the earth. It was our job, our sacred duty, to keep this world pristine. We gave our entire lives into doing it; we reveled in it. The seasons defined us, and we defined them. Creatures respected us and we respected them. We had a drive, a purpose, a reason to exist, and we made it manifest by finding what was gorgeous and beautiful about life and making it last as long as we could.”

“Heh...” Warden smiled, his cheeks warm as he contemplated that. “Sounds a lot easier than manifesting Petra.”

“Yeah, well, what's natural is necessarily easy,” Scootaloo said. She gulped dryly as her eyes fell to the metal platform beneath her. “At least that used to be true. Now...” She shook her head slowly and sighed. “It's all too much... Just way too much to fix. So much is gone... so much is dead... I don't even know where to begin...”

Warden bit his lip. His aquamarine eyes briefly glossed over to a soft turquoise. “That... That must be tough, being the last one of your kind... being the last steward...”

She glanced up at him, blinking. With her next breath, however, she bravely bore a smile, even if just a soft one. “One way or another... I will bring light back to this world. I may not live long enough to see to its beauty, but I will see to its hope.”

“What brings you here to Petra, then?” Warden gazed out towards the golden structure and the gaping pits beyond them. “How's it helping you to dig up your old friend? Did she leave something behind that will assist you?”

“Heheheh...” Scootaloo gazed down at her shifting hooves and murmured, “I may be the last steward, Wart, but only one pony in the history of time was the best steward.”

“Oh ye of little talent, watch and be amazed at the magic of Trixie!”

A thick crowd of excited ponies had gathered in the center of town. Scootaloo wriggled and stumbled her way through the many equine bodies in order to get a better view of the large wooden stage that had been erected in front of the Town Hall building. She barely made it in time to catch the sight of Applejack's hooves being tied in a coil of magically floating rope. The orange mare was flung upside down as a crimson apple was teleknetically stuffed in her mouth.

Instantly, the orange foal winced, but as the other ponies around her laughed and cheered, she nervously joined them with a titter of her own. Her ears pricked to the sound of a showmare's voice, dripping with haughtiness and pomp.

“Once again, the Great and Powerful Trixie prevails.”

Scootaloo stared up at the stage. The sight of a blue unicorn was suddenly outdone by the rapturous hue of an even bluer pegasus. The foal's heart instantly skipped a beat.

“There's no need to go struttin' around and showin' off like that!” Rainbow Dash squawked, levitating in the robed magician's face.

“Oh?”

“That's my job!” With a sharp smirk, Rainbow Dash bolted into the air. A rainbow blur soared over the many heads of cheering ponies as her fellow citizens chanted and hollered her name. By the time she athletically spun around the wooden blades of the windmill along the outer reaches of town, Scootaloo's boisterous yelps were joining the chorus.

“Yeah! Go Dashie!” Scootaloo hopped and hopped in place, her wings twitching. “You show that mare who's the coolest—” She stopped in mid-exclamation, her eyes suddenly exploding as wide as saucers. Breathless, she stumbled back, gazing through the thick of the crowd.

Two stallions were shuffling through the crowd. They wore bands around their front right hooves that brandished a copper badge. Dark shades adorned their eyes as they approached one spectator after another. One stallion clasped a photo in his teeth while his partner muttered in an undeniable Manehattan accent: “Hello, have you seen this filly? Excuse me, has anypony seen this filly? No? Sorry to bother you, carry on with what you're doing...”

Scootaloo's eyes twitched. Even from several meters away—through the thick of the crowd—she saw the unmistakable colors of the foal in the photograph, and they all matched her. Too frightened and panicked to observe Rainbow Dash's current airshow, Scootaloo scrunched down low, backtrotted, and scampered her way out of the crowd. She laid low, hyperventilating, and ultimately galloped towards the edge of Ponyville, heading her way straight for the forest and the barn beyond.

Behind her, the rainbow blur finally returned to the stage, basking in the explosive cheers of the crowd. “They don't call me 'Rainbow' and 'Dash' for nothing!”

“When Trixie is through, the only thing they'll call you is 'loser.’”

“Hmmm... but seriously, boomer, what else is there to call you?” Miss Ryst's left eye twitched as she leaned in and tapped the upside down forehead of a goblin with her steam pistol. “You've cut yourself off from Haman. You've cut yourself off from his grace as well, yes yes yessssss... you did...” She tapped him harder, almost striking him with the gun. “What is there to gain in that?”

The bruised and twitching goblin hung upside down from a steam pipe in Strut Fifteen. He spat and dribbled blood as he gazed helplessly at her and her many lackeys. “I-I was promised a new job with decent pay! I was g-gonna help my family expand into hovercraft production! Things with the Rust-Bleeders have been st-stagnant! What choice did I have?!”

“You always have a choice, dear boomer,” she hissed into his face, licking her teeth before gnawing on the end of her knuckle. “Hmmm... like right now, you can tell me just what family made you this offer that they couldn't make to Haman's face.”

“I-I can't do th-that!” He choked back a sob and wriggled in his bindings. His voice rattled against the steam-venting bulkheads around them. “I made an agreement! It was a contract of confidentiality!”

“Blood is hardly confidential. Hmmm... so easy to smell, even easier to taste.” Miss Ryst sniffed, scratched a part of her forehead with the barrel of her gun, and lisped, “Here's another choice, boomer. Yes yes yesss... you can either tell me what I want to know, or you can tell my steam pistol.”

The goblin's eyes widened. “You gotta be kidd—Mmmff-Mmmmf!”

The green-haired goblinette had just planted the barrel of her pistol into the gasping imp's mouth. He quivered and let loose muffled whimpers into the body of the weapon aimed down his throat.

“What was that?” Miss Ryst's eye twitched as she squinted at him. “'Moth Blood'?” She glanced aside at her thugs. “Did that last muffle sound like 'Moth Blood?’ Mmmm... I hate steam; it burns my ears...”

All of the goblins were staring down through the latticework at the lower platform of the Strut.

The yellow-banded goblinette raised an eyebrow flaked with dying skin. “Do my boomers see something so interesting that they must leave me alone in pistol poetry?”

“Sorry, Miss Ryst...” Otto murmured, running a clawed hand over his balding head. “It's just that... that pony...”

“Hmm? Four legs?” Ryst craned her neck to see a leather-armored equine and a green goblin marching out from the hangar and making their way towards the distant elevators. She instantly spotted the red bandanna on the equine's forehead. “Huh... the pony is an Outbleeder. I have seen the insides of many exploding creatures,” she hissed into the tear-stained face of the goblin whom she was forcing to swallow the gun barrel. “Yes yes yesssss... many, many guts—but that takes the cake of gross absurdity. Devo has lost more than his legs in his old age, the poor boomer...”

“I dunno, I think he may have made a good choice, Miss Ryst,” Otto exclaimed. “The gremlins have said that the pony single-hoofedly killed over a hundred of trolls yesterday, saving a bunch of miners.”

“Hmmm... Truly?”

“Yeah, including Franken of Glass-Blood.”

The upside-down goblin's brains flew all over the lattice work. Miss Ryst blinked through the steam rising up from the pistol after having its trigger inadvertently pulled. She stared numbly as curds of red matter oozed down her dry skin. “Hmmm... He was wetter on the inside than I had hoped...”

The many thugs gazed in wide-eyed confusion as Miss Ryst stood up, ran a bloodied hand absent-mindedly through her hair, and waved the soaked pistol in the direction of the pony.

“She... She talked with Franken?” Ryst uttered in a hoarse voice, her eye twitching with frightening severity in the Rust-Bleeders' direction.

Otto and the rest shuffled nervously away from her. “Uhm... Y-Yeah, Miss Ryst,” the stout thug stammered under a crooked smile. “Is there... uh... is there something wrong with that?”

“My dear boomers, there is always something wrong with everything everywhere.” She muttered into the back of her knuckles, licking the blood away to give her room to gnaw on the flaky skin once more. “Hmmmm.... Hmmm-but only once in a dozen stormfronts can you succulently bite into the neck of a problem and twist its spine asunder.” She gulped hard, shivering briefly, before grunting in a low voice, “I must have a word with Haman before the meeting today. Handsome boomer deserves the work he pays for. The world spins so long as we keep stirring the silver around.”

She made to shuffle out of the cranny of rusted metal, leaving the corpse dangling behind her with a hole in its skull. She paused, spun ,and aimed the gun up high. Her lackeys flinched and shrieked as she fired two bullets, severing the rope so that the corpse fell wetly to the metal bulkheads below.

“There,” she hissed, offensively waving the steam out of her face. “It'd be a shame to attract crows to the mess.”

“Crows?” Otto made a face. “Miss Ryst, what are 'crows' exactly?”

The goblinette rolled her eyes, wincing fitfully as if rising to the surface of a cold, cold dream. “Unngh... damnable steam,” she blurted and shuffled away while her thugs followed behind her, exchanging confused shrugs.

“And then Matthais nearly shot her dead right there on the train!” Raimony exclaimed, her mouth unabashedly balancing a grin or two as she stood across the cramped office from her father. “In fact, he would have, had her little sidekick not jumped in and slammed Matthais' lousy butt to the ground.”

“Hmmm... I've had imps call me senile,” Devo said with a nodding smirk. “If only they knew how much I've had to rein in Matthais. I love him like a brother, but he's come close to wrecking my operations on numerous occasions.”

“Well, things couldn't have gone smoother this time. Father, I can't pretend to understand what you're accomplishing with all of this Outbleeder Intercessor crapola, but it may not hurt to hire the pony as a full-on security guard. She's certainly accomplished a lot more in a day than an entire squadron of gremlins have in months.”

Devo pointed behind Raimony's shoulder. “If you feel that way, why don't you tell her yourself, child?”

The goblinette blinked her thin green eyes. Her ears drooped as she groaned and slowly spun around. “Just how long have you been standing there?”

Scootaloo stood beside a snickering Warden. A pair of bandanna-clad guards allowed them into the crimson glow of the metallic office. “Long enough to know a fangirl when I see one.”

“And since when were you the expert on that, pony?”

Scootaloo merely smirked.

“Whatever. Father, I'm off to meet with the gremlins to talk of our agreement. The big meeting will be happening in less than two hours. I suggest you don't spend too much time talking to Miss Blazing Saddles here. Remember, your legs don't move you around as quick as they used to.”

“Thankfully your mouth does the moving for us both, darling.”

“Ugh. I'm gone,” Raimony stumbled out of the room. The door creaked shut behind her.

Scootaloo glanced over at Devo. After a deep breath, she let forth, “Your daughter has... a very delightful name.”

“I thought as much when I raised her,” the elder nodded, his white dreadlocks dangling in the red light. “She wouldn't have come into this world had a pair of very important souls not blessed the lives of my clan just before the Dimming.”

“A pair of... goblins, right?” Scootaloo asked.

Devo merely smiled. With a whirring of his leg braces, he shuffled over and stood before his metal locker. “I heard that you talked with Franken of Glass Blood. Did he give you a lead?”

“He might tomorrow,” Scootaloo said. “He's asked that I come meet with him in secret at Strut Eleven. It's the same location where he expanded his family's business into the foundaries of the impcity's Stalk.”

“A meeting?” Devo squinted, folding his muscular blue arms across his chest. “You and him alone, at Eleven Strut? Hmmm... how remarkably clandestine.”

“It's not exactly the prettiest, safest part of town,” Warden nervously added.

Devo smirked down at him. “And did you inform her of that, young one?”

He blinked. “Should I? She brings explosions wherever she goes—”

Scootaloo nudged him into silence. With a breath, she softly smiled Devo's way, “I agreed to talk with Franken. Whatever he had to tell me, he didn't want me to hear it out there in the open, within earshot of so many miners.” She paced towards the prime Hex-Bleeder a few trots. “But if I didn't know better, I'd say he's mining more than sky marble.”

“Like what?”

“Moonrocks,” the last pony bluntly said. “I've scavenged enough of the material to know that they can be enchanted or chemically altered to become dangerously volatile.”

“You mean like in weapons?” Devo's brow furrowed. “Could the Glass-Bleeders be starting a new trade with the ogres via a black market?”

“I told you she brings explosions wherever she goes—” Warden started, cut short by a glare.

Scootaloo turned to look at Devo once again. “It isn't safe to assume anything until I get to talk with Franken. Still, it's interesting to note that his whole demeanor changed when I mentioned Waven of South Blood's death.”

“The two clan leaders were business partners, if I'm not mistaken.”

“Yes, and Waven's own daughter claimed that her father passed away from natural causes.” Scootaloo murmured, “Franken implied that it was food poisoning.”

“Hmmm... Quite interesting...” Devo scratched his chin as his copper brown eyes swam across the bulkheads of his office. “Three goblin clan leaders survive a zeppelin air crash in ogre territory. One comes back silent, the other comes back dying, and the third gives in to sharing something desperate and secretive with a pony Outbleeder.”

Scootaloo raised an eyebrow. “Just how many goblins in this imp city know about the zeppelin crash in the Valley of Jewels?”

“Oh, many goblins think they know about it, but none have stepped up and attempted doing legitimate research.” He cleared his throat and gazed proudly at the armored pegasus. “You, on the other hand, have accomplished more in two days than all of the other business families have in months. The meeting that's transpiring today is evidence of that. The entire city knows something is up, and this council is a way of letting off steam... eheheh... if you pardon the pun.”

“I'm guessing Haymane will be there.”

Devo delivered a bizarre look. “'Haymane?'”

“Sorry—Haman. Haman of Rust-Blood.” Scootaloo sighed and tiredly ran a brown hoof over her features. “Forgive me; I dazed out for a moment there.”

“No problem,” Devo said with a subtle smile. “Yes, the prime Rust-Bleeder will be at the meeting, as will Franken of Glass Blood, if he knows what's good for him and his image. Still, I look forward more to your meeting with him tomorrow than I do to what transpires today.”

“What should I do in the meantime?”

“Heheheh... What else?” Devo's razor sharp teeth showed in a smile. “Attend both meetings, public and clandestine!”

Scootaloo's face scrunched up at that notion. “Wouldn't I just... cause a stir?”

“I'm sure you can find a place that's strategic and tactful enough to not catch too many goblins' eyes. These meetings are mostly excuses for the families to engage in passionate and cyclically pointless arguments. I think the clan leaders will be too embroiled to notice something as out of place as a pony. Besides...” He suddenly stared at her with a fixed gaze. “You were always good at staying out of sight.”

Scootaloo merely blinked at him. In a completely neutral voice, she droned, “I have no idea what you're talking about.”

“My dear pony,” Devo replied coolly, his eyes just as rich as the earth once was beneath them. “I think we both know exactly what I'm talking about.”

Silence permeated the office like beams of frost, but not the sort that Warden reveled in. The goblin teenager glanced nervously between the two ghostly figures, until finally Scootaloo bowed out of the staring competition.

“Wart,” she murmured. “Would you mind stepping outside for a minute?”

“But... But...”

“Remember who you're earning the strips for,” she added.

Biting his lip, Warden hesitantly complied. He shuffled out of the room and stood beyond the guards. The door creaked icily shut behind them.

Scootaloo inhaled deeply and glared in Devo's direction. “Prime Hex-Bleeder, I'm only here to do business, nothing else...”

“Only business, pony?” Devo asked in a soft voice. “There is something you're returning to this sundered earth for. You nearly died in those pits, at the hands of my own followers, no less—”

“Please, I don't want to talk about—”

“Who in their right mind, pony or imp or ogre, crosses the lengths of the Wasteland to enter the very abyss that nearly claimed her?” He swallowed briefly with a haunted expression. “That nearly claimed us all?” His copper brown eyes narrowed on her. “Something drives you, pony. I've seen it in the eyes of your kind before. Where so many of my brothers and sisters fall prey to prejudice and hatred, I was given a chance to see what the beauty of Equestria had to offer. I'm here this day, leading my people, manifesting Petra, because of grace that has extended beyond the Dimming, not luck.”

“Grace is just luck painted up with poetics.”

“Spoken like a true imp. Tell me, pony...” Devo pointed at her. “Do you remember flowers?”

Scootaloo's eyes twitched. “Flowers, Hex-Bleeder?”

“The scent of them, the color of them, the symbol of flourishing life that they promised to all the world?” Devo smiled painfully. “I remember when the fields of this earth were covered with them. That was a peaceful time, a green time, and I carry those sights with me to my grave, for there are very few imps of my age who are blessed... or cursed with that same token of the past. What's more, I hold them dear to me because a long time ago, I had an epiphany—something that was inspired within me by an act of kindness that bridged even the darkest of chasms—that flowers aren't the only thing that can blossom in this world. Someday, even in the Wasteland, even Petra could blossom—with a flourishing of souls. After all...” He smiled warmly and gently uttered, “...We have it within each of us to be stewards of the earth, so long as we are alive, so long as we have hope.”

Scootaloo's breath left her. Through gaping lips, she almost whimpered, “Where did...? How did you, of all creatures, stumble upon such a philosophy?”

He gazed blankly at her. “I am hoping, pony, to find out.” Devo gave a slow nod, then after a breath he brandished another smile. “Well, all in good time, hmmm? That, after all, is the one thing we all have to count on...” He shuffled past her on whirring leg braces and slapped her shoulder. “...Time.”

She glanced at his hand, at his legs, at the bulkheads beyond. “I'm sorry. I'm just a little... a little...”

“Overwhelmed? Who isn't? These are trying times.”

“It is always trying times.”

“All the better reason to be on our toes—erm—or hooves, if you will.” He folded his arms. “So, can I expect to see you at the meeting?”

“I... I-I don't know...”

“Come on, I need your pair of ears there, Outbleeder,” he said with a smile. “Besides, you'll undoubtedly find it educating. These family meetings are the pinnacle of goblin honor, respect, and gentlemanly etiquette. You may even be surprised!”

The carcass of a black-eyed, razor-beaked, winged creature was slammed offensively down atop a curved desk before several flinching goblins. Leaning over the mangled thing, a fat imp snarled before the crowded ring of imps gathered before him.

“This! Look at this!” he bellowed. “This is all that remains of the fifth consecutive band of harpy pirates who have assaulted Strut Fourteen in the past month! Strut Fourteen! My family's strut, and nobody else's! I want to know the meaning of this relentless, conspiratorial assault of avian mercenaries! And I want to know what the rest of you silver-sniffing, thankless filth-bleeders are going to do about it!”

The air above the meeting filled with growling, murmuring, squawking voices. The clawed feet of several imps rang against the bulkheads as every single body attempted voicing their frustration at once. A grand, multi-tiered ampitheatre of rusted platforms vibrated from the sheer magnitude of the gathered representatives. Every row of seats, every metal desk, every aisle of bulkheads was occupied by goblins of all walks of life, from every strut, from every platform within the Struts. Colored armbands, scarves, eyepatches, bandannas, vests, and bracelets properly identified more than ninety seperate clans who had gathered themselves there to address such topics as...

“What about the families of the Lower Struts?! They are most vulnerable to incursion! If this is a sign of mercenaries doubling their efforts to get to our steam resources, then we need a new line of defense!”

“For Petra's sake, can we finally outlaw all outsiders?! For months, we allowed harpies to dock at our stations! Certainly they were nothing more than spies for these attackers!”

“This is why we need to resume business with the ogres! They are the one force to be reckoned with in the Wasteland! If they were still on our side, they would protect us from these assailants, no matter how the battle goes over the Valley of Jewels!”

“I don't see how any of this is going to come to a head unless we get Haman of Rust Blood to come out of hiding and show his moth-eaten ears for once! It's about time we had some answers! Wasn't he supposed to be here?!”

The meeting chamber rolled and rang with hundreds of squabbling voices. High up, along the top-most tier, a pink-maned pegasus ran a hoof over her head, groaning.

“Dear Celestia, I'd sell the Harmony and all that's inside it just to listen to Octavia right now...”

“Octavia?” Warden murmured from her side. The teenager sat on a metal bench and the pony stood next to him as the two craned their necks to see the majority of the meeting from their lofty height. Only a few goblins took notice of the pair, casting shifty-eyed glances and pretending to be absorbed with the ring of arguments bellowing out from below. “Who is Octavia? Some friend of yours?”

“Kid, the closest thing I have to a friend in this world smokes himself to death and wears a bushy tail.”

“Really?” The aquamarine-eyed imp blinked. “Oh...” He glanced aside, bearing a rather sad gaze. “Well... okay then...”

Scootaloo heard him, but pretended that she didn't. She hardly even paid attention to the meeting. She saw Franken of Glass Blood sitting in the far edge of the circular place. The elder goblin was hardly the center of attention, but his features were jittery nonetheless, as if the upper Struts of Petra would collapse in on everyone at the last second. Gazing past him, Scootaloo engrossed herself in staring at Devo, at his calm features, at his solid copper eyes taking in everything that was happening.

“I still can't believe that Haman isn't here,” Warden murmured, sounding as though he was a million kilometers away. “You’d think such a freakin' important member of this imp city would know better than to be a no-show.”

“Hmmm... It means he knows.”

“He knows what?”

“That somebody is onto him,” Scootaloo murmured in a muted voice. “Things aren't... as safe as they used to be...” She blinked, reflecting the bright torchlamps beyond like a mound of white stones before her.

“It's no longer safe here, but then again it never was. At last, it's happened,” Scootaloo spoke to Rainbow Dash's grave. Armed with two spears embedded into her canvas armor and a rusted dagger sheathed against her forelimb, she stood within the halo of twilght and glanced nervously behind her at the yawning chasms of Cloudsdale. “The trolls have found their way here. I don't know how there are just so friggin' many of them. It's almost as if they all sprung up from the ground at once. I... I keep searching the ruins of the Cloudsdalian Library that I found six months ago. Most of the books there are either soiled or shredded beyond belief, but I'm still hoping to stumble upon some historical text that will explain to me just how to get rid of these dang things. Because it's just too much to deal with, Dashie. I don't think I have the power to do it on my own.”

She seethed through clenched teeth, shutting her eyes as she weathered a nervous wave of fear.

Gulping, she murmured, “For the last several weeks, I've hidden in my cave, or forced myself to lay low amidst the rubble. The trolls have shuffled past me at least a dozen times. I think it's sheer luck that they haven't sniffed me out. Up on the surface, I came close to dying two or three times. But that was two years ago, and I was a lot stupider then. I'm doing all I can just to avoid them now, but it's not likely that they'll starve to death or get bored to tears or find any other excuse to leave me alone...”

The last pony opened her half-violet eyes. Moisture clung to her lashes as she murmured towards the stones.

“I'm sc-scared, Dashie. I'm running out of food and counting the stormfronts before these things finally find me and gut me. I shouldn't even be out here, talking to you. But I had to. I had to see you again. I had to ask myself... what would Rainbow Dash do?” She gulped and dodged a sob with more or less grace. “I need to get out of here, but it's impossible. There're trolls around every turn, and I need to get out of this stupid, festering hole but I can't. What would you do, Dashie? What would you think of? How would you win the day?”

Her voice trailed off like the cold, Wasteland air that was wafting down from above. Silence rattled off the stones with the grace of melting snow, and Scootaloo was soon alone with her own panting voice. Hopelessly, she bowed her head and closed her eyes. For the briefest of seconds, she saw herself in Rainbow Dash's arms, safe and secure...

There was a loud popping noise from the distant edge of the Wasteland.

The pondwaters rippled madly, shredding apart the image of Scootaloo and Rainbow Dash. The last pony looked up with a gasp. She spun, turning towards the source of the noise. She heard the chuckling sounds of impish voices, then a series of argumentative tones. After a few seconds, there was another popping sound, and Scootaloo imagined it sounded like fireworks, gunpowder, dynamite, or any number of intelligently concocted explosives that were indicative of anything but trollish handiwork.

She blinked, comprehending a new and alarming thought. She had been so busy running from the goblins over the past few weeks that she hadn't once thought about the goblins' plight. It suddenly occurred to her that they may have been completely oblivious.

Numbly, the filly ran a hoof up to her brown neck. She ran the limb across the fuzzy stubble of shaved mane hair. Realizing something, she gasped hard, her eyes returning to a frightful, foalish brilliance. Without wasting another second, Scootaloo spun away from the sacred grave and galloped towards the popping noises, bounding and leaping over the mounds of debris at lightning speed.

“You need to come with me, pony...”

Warden blinked quizzically. Scootaloo turned and glared at the figure who had just tapped her on the shoulder. “I need to do what, now?”

Otto stood beside the equine on the topmost row of metal seats overlooking the loud, bickering meeting between the elder goblin clan leaders. “There is someone who wants to speak with you,” the balding thug uttered. “It isn't a good idea to waste her time.”

“If they want to skin me alive, tell them to wait in line,” Scootaloo muttered and stared back down at the clamorous discussion. “I kind of have a job to do here, whether I like it or not.”

“I... think it will be in your best interest...” Otto leaned in and sneered into her twitching, brown ears. “...As Devo's Intercessory Outbleeder to let my boss pay you a visit.”

“For real, just what are you going on about—?” She glanced at the goblin just in time to catch him flashing his armband. The yellow color caught her off guard, and she suddenly remembered a goblin rifler with his hands missing, kneeling before a tall imp with long green hair. “Hmmm... Rust Bleeder business, huh?”

“Please, pony, everything in Petra is Rust-Bleeder business,” Otto said with a grimy smile. “If you would please make haste: the lady does not do a good job of waiting.”

“Who does in this goddess-forsaken town?” Scootaloo shuffled to trot away.

“Hey! Hey hey hey—Wait!” Warden tugged on her armored flank. He whispered up towards her ears, giving Otto a forlorn glance. “What gives? I thought Devo wanted you to pay attention to this meeting!”

“Yeah... Uh...” Scootaloo glanced down at the rows upon rows of barking, arguing figures. She suddenly brightened. “Congratulations, Wart.” She took the bandanna off her brow and wrapped it three times over the teenager's petite forehead. “You're the new Outbleeder.”

“I am?!” He blinked crookedly, his face scrunching under the weight of the blood-stained article. “B-But... This seems like a really bad idea!” He leaned up towards her, pouting. “At least let me come with you!”

“Devo wants me to listen in on the meeting, right?” Scootaloo said to the green-haired imp. “Then be my eyes and ears, but just for a little while. In the meantime, I'm about to do my job—y'know, the one that involves getting to know Haman more?”

“But... What if it's a trap?!” Warden gulped, giving Otto a frightened look. “It's a trap, I just know it is!”

“You're right. Those Rust-Bleeders won't know what hit 'em,” Scootaloo smirked. He was hardly placated, so she added a wink for good measure. “Seriously. Relax, Wart. Would I let the world have any less frostbeams by disap...?” She trailed off at the sound of her own words, navigating a bizarre grimace that suddenly assaulted her face. She salvaged it with a bold smile at the last second, cleared her throat, and simply uttered, “I'll be back, okay?” She trotted off without a second thought. Otto and two other yellow-banded imps from the shadows shuffled along with her.

Warden sat there, by himself, wringing his clawed hands down low beside his thigh. In the last pony's absence, he suddenly felt the need to hide his branding again. The meeting rolled on loudly below him, and he knew that he suddenly had to pay attention to it. For some reason, he couldn't, for the young imp was encumbered by the need to murmur something he didn't have a name to.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

“You've made quite a stir, pony,” Otto murmured through a confident grin. His stout form led the way towards a lone elevator shaft with rusted metal barricades. “In all your days spent in Petra, you've only fired two shots from your weapons, and still it's been enough to make many imps turn their heads, including the most powerful ones.”

“Why, is something wrong with their necks?” Scootaloo mused.

“Ah... a funny horsie,” Otto pointed as he stood within the elevator car and gripped the controls. The last pony and the other imp thugs marched in after him as he muttered, “Be careful who you joke with in this town. Some goblins don't have the same sense of humor you do.”

“Jee, I don't know.” Scootaloo smiled calmly at him. “Looks like you can afford to give me two thumbs up.”

Otto opened his mouth, but then blinked as shades of Darper flashed briefly across his pale eyes. With a grumbling breath, he yanked the door to the elevator car shut and pulled at the controls. Rattling, the rusted chassis slid down the chamber, bathing the orphan of time's face in a brief darkness.

“We've been looking all over for this little pony. Have you, by chance, seen her?” One of two stallions inquired of a gray pegasus in the middle of the road. “She answers to the name of 'Scootaloo.’”

“Hmmm... I c-c-c-c-can't say that I have!” A wall-eyed mailmare rubbed her chin in thought. From where she hovered in front of the two social workers, she smiled and shrugged. “Then again, I only keep my eyes on my muffin! Otherwise, where would my whole world b-b-b-be?”

“R-Right. Well, if you happen to... erm... see a young, orange pegasus who hasn't yet gotten her cutie mark, do please get in contact with our service. This foal has run away from her foster home in Manehattan, and many ponies at our bureau think she might have turned up here, her town of foaling.”

“Manehattan?!” The pegasus gasped. “Why, that's a long, long way from here!”

“I know, but still, if you could keep your eyes peeled, ma'am.”

“Will do, sirs!” Ditzy saluted with a cockeyed grin and floated away. “Good luck to you! Be on the lookout for squirrels—Owie! Nnngh, silly lamppost. Eheheh... Bye now!”

As the gray mare floated off, the two stallions slid the photograph back into one of their saddlebags and trotted down the road.

“Yeesh, did you see the eyes on that mailpony?”

“I can't believe she can see anything, much less the kid.”

“Still, we gotta keep asking. I get the strange feeling we're missing something.”

“You're still trusting the word of that colt with the missing teeth?”

“That punk may have been exagerrating a bit, but he's definitely afraid of somepony. It sounds just like something the Manehattan kid would have done, too.”

“Elektra Alive, why's it always the pegasi that are the little spitfires?”

“Don't look at me; blame Nebula's spirit. Anyways, let's try the west side of town again.”

“Right with ya.”

Long after the two stallions had trotted off, a row of bushes stirred. Slowly, a pink-maned little foal popped her head out. Panting, she shuffled out into the middle of the road, gazing with sunken eyes towards the distant social workers.

Scootaloo couldn't help it. She had hid out in the barn for days. Those were days without sleep, days without peace, and days without eating. Scootaloo's stomach was desperate for food, and while she had a few bits to spare, she needed to find a way to get something down her throat. Applejack was an honest pony, so while representatives from the foster home were asking around about Scootaloo, she didn't want to risk going straight to Sweet Apple Acres and paying for an apple. She figured that a quick dash by Sugarcube Corner would make the difference, but she had almost run into the two stallions instead.

Now she was too panicked to eat, much less think. Every breath she took was like flinging pins and needles against the walls of her insides. She thought about a deathly train ride back to Manehattan. She thought of foster caretakers frowning at her, looking at her as if she was the plague. Most of all, she thought of Rainbow Dash, and how she might not see her again—

In the middle of a mindless shuffle, Scootaloo's hoof slid on a randomly fallen tree branch. She stumbled and fell—crashing loudly into a pine tree. “Ooof!” She grunted as several pine cones showered the rocky path around her, filling the edge of town with a goofy echo.

To her horror, it had been heard by somepony other than her.

“The heck was that?”

“Probably the mailmare slamming into something else.”

“No—This sounded different. It came from right were we just were...”

“Hey... do you see something—?!”

Scootaloo whimpered. Scootaloo kicked dirt loose. Scootaloo blazed a panicked, heavy gallop towards the far end of town, making towards the first, bright red structure she could see on the bounding horizon. She panted and hyperventilated and fought back the tears as she heard a pair of thundering hoofsteps sounding off just behind her.

“Listen to me! This is serious!” Scootaloo gritted her teeth and shouted towards the broad cliff-side. “You have to cut your hair! All of you!”

Braxx, Matthais, and a dozen other goblins laughed pathetically at her. They all crowded around a series of improvised tools that they had built out of Cloudsdalian bric-a-brac. Using goblin ingenuity and a pile of powdery explosives that they had alchemically brewed over the past year, they fashioned a grappling hook and were attempting to fire it across the black chasm towards where their far more precious tools of salvation lingered perpetually in wait.

“I mean it!” Scootaloo squealed in a foalish voice, stamping her hooves down like an indignant child as their laughter doubled. “There are trolls all over the place now! Maybe you haven't seen them, but I have! They're attracted to the scent in ponies' manes, and I think it's the same with goblin hair as well!”

“I've heard a lot of stupid crap in my days, glue stick,” Matthais snickered and waved a tool at her before tweaking the grappling hook for another shot. “But this one's a winner! What the heck would trolls care about one's hair or not?! It's the meat off the bone that they're after.”

“Ponies' bones, most likely,” Braxx said with a smug smirk as he held the grappler up for Matthais to tinker. “You say they keep bothering you? Well, we haven't seen a single troll since we came down here! If you ask me, they're on our side! They're ridding the world of the sky-stealers!”

“Hahahaha!”

“Don't be idiots!” Scootaloo frowned. “Even Devo's said that you've run into these creatures before! They've ended the lives of more than one of your kind! There's nothing stopping them from doing it again! They're all over the place in these ruins, now, and they're not gonna stop stalking the pit until all of us are dead!”

“You know what I think this is all about?” Matthais glared up at her. “Huh?! Do ya, glue stick?” He pointed his tool at her with a frown. “We're not dumb! We've seen you struggling to make a shelter across the ruins! We know that you must be out of food, out of materials, and out of wits! So, what happens today?! We children of Petra are just about to get our tools back, which means we'll finally climb ourselves out of this hole-in-the-ground for good, without any of your worthless help, might I add. And now you're suddenly having to face the fact that you'll be here alone—truly alone—without our boss' good grace to fall back on! Well, you can stew in it all you like, sky-stealer! I hope you slowly rot to death in this place once we're all long gone!”

The goblins laughed and chuckled as Braxx and Matthais prepared to fire the grappling hook once more across the ravine.

“Please! You gotta cut it out!” Scootaloo hissed, glancing every which way in a cold sweat. “They're gonna hear—”

The grappling hook fired, filling the air with a brief thunder that echoed across the entire chasm like a gunshot.

Scootaloo winced. “They're gonna hear this and they're gonna come and kill us all!”

“Dang it!” Matthais hissed as the hook fell into the blackness. Braxx and another goblin rushed over to grab their length of the rope and catch the slack of it before the hook fell too far. “You made me miss, ya stupid manure bag!” Matthais glared briefly over his shoulder. “Do us all a favor and take a hike, or else, Devo or no Devo, I'll launch you over the ravine myself!”

“Yeah! Maybe her wings will guide her faster into the ground! Heheh!”

“Pfft—Braxx, you're an idiot.”

“Bring it on, hotshot.”

“Don't make me!”

There was more laughter. The world was too loud, far too loud. Scootaloo's heart was nearly beating out of her chest. This was a bad idea. She cursed the pegasus spirit inside of her that thought it was the right thing to warn these living creatures. Slowly backing away, she thought she heard a rattling sound in the rubble off to her side. Spinning, she stared with twitching eyes.

The rattling doors to the elevator car flew open with a clang. Slowly, Scootaloo trotted out into the shadows. She heard the muffled cacophony of the goblins' clan meeting, only now it was directly overhead. Through a web of translucent lanternlight wafting down from the ampitheatre, the last pony shuffled down the thin corridor, flanked by the Rust-Bleeder thugs. The hallway opened up into a boiler room, consisting of an intestinal mesh of brass pipes and steaming vent grates.

Standing off to the side, leaning against a series of rattlings valves in all her gangly, lanky glory, was a tall imp with long green hair. “I'm a little surprised that you came, four legs. But it makes me happy, because now I know that we are both scavengers of what the Wasteland has to offer, yes yes yesss?”

The thugs parted ways, giving Scootaloo room to stand on her own and squint curiously at their goblinette boss. “You... Don't you work for Haman?”

“Hmmm... I work for silver strips, no matter the appendage of the boomer who gives them to me,” she muttered, gnawing on a flake of dead flesh along the back of her tan knuckles. “After all, beggars can't be choosers in this world. However, they can all be corpses, if they aren't careful. Yes yess?”

Scootaloo gulped a nauseous lump down her throat. “Uhhh... lady? What's wrong with your skin?”

“It's that time of month,” the tall goblinette sighed. “Though, as of late, every year of my life is full of such months.” She hissed and kicked at an infernal vent blowing mist at her from behind. “I freaking hate steam. Don't you?”

“Coming from a goblin, I don't know how to respond to that.”

“A goodly notion, four legs. Allow me to get more relaxed if you have the spit to spare.” Miss Ryst lowered her hand and stood up straight, loosening her body muscles. Regardless, her right eye twitched more and more under the effort of what she did next.

A nervous Scootaloo instinctually reached a hoof back to her copper rifle, but paused and watched in awe as every tan stretch of skin across the thug leader's body unfurled—like a sea of twitching butterfly wings—and soon there stood a tall body fashioned out of gnarled red scales, and half of it shedding with flimsy, snow-white blankets of dried skin.

“A naga...” Scootaloo muttered out loud, her scarlets reflecting a reptilian figure with razor sharp claws and a barbed tail.

The once-goblin's quivering eyes opened, and they were now pale green slits. “An itch that can never be scratched,” she muttered in an off-center voice, flicking the fingers of her left hand to shake a sheet of dead white skin off. “We all have one somewhere. Then there are those of us who have it everywhere. Hmmmm... the boomers can never understand... not like you and me...”

Scootaloo blinked. Swallowing, she stood up straight. “You're her. You're Razzar, the shape-shifting mercenary that the Golden Gang is looking for.”

“Darling four legs, everybody is looking for me,” the former Miss Ryst said, her voice a hissing thing. Her jittery eyes bounced across the room as she gulped and added in a murmur, “Except for myself. I am too busy with stale, smelly half-lings.” Her tongue darted briefly between sharp teeth, a white sea of fangs against a crimson maw. “But what is around us is neither here nor there. I would very much like to speak with your ears if your ears still have the good sense of hearing, yes yes yesssss?”

“You know what I'm here to talk about,” the equine Outbleeder murmured with a suspicious frown. “Just what do you want to get off your chest, in case you haven't already?”

“Mmmm... a ticket, four legs...” Razzar gazed fitfully Scootaloo's way while gnawing on the dead skin hanging off her knuckles. “A free trip to the inner pits, to get that which you so desire, with no bad boomer to shoot you.”

Scootaloo stared at her, and slowly her ears twitched. The world was once again a desolate basin for collecting blood, and goblins and trolls both leaked it all the same. After a lingering few seconds, the mare's lips dripped, “Okay. I'm listening...”

While Braxx and Matthais chuckled through the air of the Cloudsdalian ruins, a young Devo marched onto the plateau's cliffside with a frown. “Okay, Matthais. Just what's the big problem?”

The gray goblin in question pointed up at the young pony. “Your precious glue stick of a pet keeps bothering us in the middle of our extraction! If you love the stupid horse so much, prime Hex-Bleeder, why don't you just put a leash on it!”

“Or do you not want us to get these tools back after all?!” Braxx frowned. “With all due respect, Devo, sir, I'm tired of wandering around here, scavenging for food, when we could be back on the surface manifesting Petra like we were born to!”

“All in good time, my brothers,” Devo said. Slowly, he turned and gazed up at Scootaloo with a calm expression. “Is there something that concerns you, pony? My companions and I have been working towards this moment for a long, long time.”

“There are trolls everywhere,” Scootaloo said, her eyes flickering forth her breathless earnesty. “And I do mean everywhere.”

Once more, the many goblins chuckled as they gathered around the grappling hook and its launcher. Devo hissed at them and glanced back at the pony, his face serious and contemplative.

“I'm not making this up! I've spent the better pat of two weeks just barely avoiding them!” Scootaloo said. “Sure, I may not have a whole lot of food and stuff left, but so long as I stay near the defenses of my shelter, I can outlast them just long enough to possibly survive. The thing is, I don't think they're only after me! I've watched their ranks shifting about through the ruins, and I think it's only a matter of time before they launch an attack on you guys! That's why I was saying—”

Matthais' guffaws could be heard across the cliffside again.

Scootaloo frowned and spoke louder, “That's why I was saying that you should all cut your hair! Trolls have this crazy sense of smell, and they go after the scent of one's follicles first!”

Devo glanced closely at the young equine's shaved mane and tail. He squinted. “You're certain of this, pony?”

“Look, I know what you're all thinking! The truth is, I'm not doing this as a desperate plea to get help from you guys! I don't need any of your resources, food, or whatnot!” Scootaloo clenched her jaw. “I just don't want anything bad to happen to you either! Is that so hard to freakin' believe?”

“She's a real class act, Devo. Heheheh—You got yourself an amusing pet.”

“Matthais, please...” Devo sighed, turning to face him. “We already know she's not the type to ask for that which she hasn't earned.”

“Yeesh! What prime Hex-Bleeder died and made you goblin horse whisperer!”

“Matthais, we've talked about this,” Devo groaned. “I can only tolerate your mouth so much in the company of my fellow clan-imps.”

“I'm sorry, boss, but the more you show that pony mercy, the more I fear for the state of your mind...”

All this time, Scootaloo was barely paying attention. In the middle of the large group of half-ling engineers, she caught sight of a white object stirring out from underneath the rubble. Her eyes followed a limping white rabbit with one ear missing. In a frightened breath, the thing scurried away from the cliff-side, away from the group, and off into the shadows. Scootaloo's eyes brightened, and she gasped in horror. “Th-They're here!”

“Huh?”

“What?!”

“The heck is she going on about?”

“Who's here?”

Scootaloo stomped her hooves and shouted, “We gotta go! We gotta go now! Right now!”

“By Dimming's blight!” A gruff imp stood up, waving a Cloudsdalian spear and frowning across the way. “Devo, could you just let us put her out of her misery already? This is getting downright pathetic—” His breath was cut short as his windpipe was bloodily exposed to the ashen air. A pair of pale claws had ensnared him from behind, and soon his torso was ripped to ribbons by three shrieking trolls pouncing onto his shoulders. Already torn in half and spilling his bowels out across the plateau, the ambushed goblin nevertheless managed a long wail of sentient horror.

Braxx and Matthais spun, their eyes wide. Devo jerked to action, whipping out an expertly constructed bow-and-arrow. Beside the clan leader, the air sang with glinting weapons held up high, but even that was drowned out as a solid ring of leathery monstrosities poured in on the gathered crowd, bathing the rubble with blood and torn skin.

Scootaloo watched this for the first breathless second of comprehension, and then the shivers swam through her body as...

...she hid herself in a hollow of earth dug out from beneath a foalish sandbox. Trembling into a fetal position, the orange-coated orphan bit her lip and silenced her frightful whimpers as she heard the stallions' hoofsteps getting closer and closer.

In her desperate flight, she had fled to the site of Cheerilee's schoolyard. The playground offered many possible hiding places, and she had decided upon scrunching her petite body beneath the sandbox. In her haste, she realized that she hadn't refilled the ditch she used to climb under the structure. Now it was too late to amend her error, so she huddled there, trying her futile best to keep still.

The breaths of the social workers hovered directly above her impromptu shelter, vibrating the air with their murmuring voices:

“I could have sworn I saw somepony run out here.”

“Maybe it's a filly who's late for school?”

“It's a holiday, remember? There's no reason for a kid to be out here all on her lonesome.”

“This is a nice town. Lots of colts and fillies wander about. They're safe.”

“Yeah, maybe for now. Times are changing. For such a quaint town, this was the sight of Nightmare Moon's return.”

“Wow, no way!”

“And did you hear about the dragon that blotted out the sunlight for a week? I'm telling you, there's no place in Equestria that's safe these days.”

“Well, not like it's the end of the world.”

“True. True—Yeesh, just where did she go?”

“Beats me, want to have a look around?”

“Let's go in opposite directions...”

“Got ya...”

Scootaloo took a deep breath, but on her next exhalation, her teeth chattered. She gasped, clutching a hoof over her mouth as she stared, wide-eyed at the shadowed lengths of the world underneath the sandbox.

“Shhh... Did you hear something?”

“Hmm?”

“I think it was coming from over here...”

The hoofsteps grew closer and closer. The earth around Scootaloo started to shake.

Shedding tears, the little orphan clenched her eyes shut and hugged herself like she hugged this moment, this place, this atmosphere that was hers to earn but soon would be gone, because she was about to have everything that mattered to her in her life dragged away in a blink, along with all the colors of the rainbow that framed it, that held it, that flew it beyond the realms of the impossible.

“Please, Dashie...” She murmured against her better judgment. The ground shook and it was the only thing she could do. “Please... come find me...”