Magilytic

Astral was completely lost. She didn't know what to do nor where to go. She expected everything but this. Did the door send her to the wrong Equestria? Could it do that? Which direction was she meant to go in? Left? Right? Which way was north? She pulled off one of the bags from her suit and started digging through it until she found a notepad.

"Plan A, B, C...C-2...D..." Astral gradually yelled lower and threw it back into the saddlebag. "None of the plans work for this!" The mare gradually and carefully made her way down the pile to reach the ruined street below covered in the same black marks and tried to find a spot that would help her scout out the area and find some landmarks she could use. "Alright. That should work," she muttered to herself. She moved toward a standing, blocky skyscraper and jumped up just for her to hit the ground hard. "What?" She tried again, and the same thing happened, leaving the mare baffled. "I...gravity works differently? I'm stuck on this plane?!" She looked at her hooves and the cracked pavement beneath her. "Why would they want to come back here?! It's so limited!"

Grumbling, the mare got back to her hooves and resumed her exploration. There was no way she was going to try and break inside the building and climb its collapsing entrails just to get a good look over the horizon and the ruined city. As she avoided the mutant rats, the mare made sure to take a mental note of them. They didn't look like anything her parents had taught her about Equestria, and if they were new, what else was there? This world was already dangerous within civilization. What was it like now that civilization seemed to have collapsed?

Astral flinched when she heard a beastly cry reverberating through the ruins and making the buildings tremble. A strained screech that the mare just couldn't put her hoof on. She dug into her other saddlebag pouch and pulled out a gun. She affixed the brace around her left shoulder and kept the barrel and mechanisms at her face level, leaving the trigger mechanism looped vertically around her hoof. Without using her chin to hit the safety lock on the top of the weapon itself, there was no way for the mare to shoot anypony by flexing her foreleg back.

The sounds became louder and started to become accompanied by glass breaking and rocks tumbling. "What are you?" the mare grumbled to herself, her eyes darting about and her breath heavy and inaudible in her suit.

A bright yellow 'worm' the size of a wagon came around the corner of a far away street, digging into the broken pavement exposing the soil beneath it. Despite its horrendous size, Astral didn't see much threat coming from a worm regardless of its size and started to let herself relax. Then a second one came around the corner, holding onto the nearby building. Then another, and another, and another.

"What the...?!"

The cry reached her ears with greater clarity, sounding like somepony screaming in agony stretched out by a musical program to make it sound compressed and unusually digitized. Astral felt her heart skip a beat when she realized that these bright yellow things weren't worms at all. At least, not how she understood them. It was all part of a greater mass crawling around on around twenty-one different worm-like limbs. As it dug around, several of its limbs split apart, showing that these were thousands of tiny, hair-thick strands wrapping around each other. Nebula slowly backed away, giving brief glimpses to her surroundings for any free pathway she could take that had not been obscured by the dregs of the city. She froze instinctively when the creature raised itself high, showing yet another horrific secret of its.

The 'worms' were parasitic in nature, although to what degree Astral would never know. She wasn't a biologist. The desiccated remains of a pony rested, entangled, within the mass of golden worms. One eye was glazed over, white from death, while the other socket was occupied by the strands of life emerging and writhing around, breaking the fragile bone. Mere fragments of clothing clung to what used to be a pony, although not much of the dried-out remains stayed untangled or even solid. The pony's lower jaw dangled far from its head, pulled off by the growth of the worms but still hung onto, their bodies perpetually flossing the two rotted teeth that remained as though it were a form of entertainment for them.

The dried skin undulated and waved with the parasite beneath it as it looked around and rummaged through the debris. It caught a skeleton of some deceased animal, then launched it hard against a mostly intact window, shattering it and the fragile bones.

"I don't want to stay around for it to do that to me," Astral thought to herself.

The mare ducked into an alleyway and carefully stepped over some bikes and rusted crates to make her way further into the city. With luck that was the only instance of whatever that horrid thing was, but the mare wasn't going to stay around anytime soon to find out.

"I need to get out of here," Nebula thought to herself. She started rummaging through another pouch. "They told me that the closest way out would be the north-eastern tunnels... or at least over them." She pulled a compass out and balanced it on her right hoof. "So where do I have to go, little compass?"

The circular device was filled with just barely enough water to make the lozenge in the middle float enough. It pointed to her fore-right direction, allowing the mare a moment of respite from being completely lost. As she made her way through the ruined city, Astral was able to observe the ruins of the past and still couldn't understand just how long everypony had been trapped in that pocket dimension. Outside was no better than the basement. Buildings collapsed from neglect, asphalt roads cracked and consumed by dust and dirt, and the occasional skeleton reminding the explorer that this was, indeed, a dead city.

Decayed posters fluttered in the faint wind produced by air flowing between the taller buildings, and while some shreds would peel off and crumble in the air, a few of them were still intact enough that Astral was able to get to approach one hanging off an old restaurant. There was a black pony with sky-blue eyes to the left and a boring looking gray pony with a red mane on the right looking angrily at the observer. The center was taken over by two hooves interlocked and the phrase 'Stick Together!' above. Below was written the text 'If you consider somepony to be harboring malicious intents, contact your local changeling investigation bureau'. Nebula could only make out an eight and a four on the poster. whatever any of it meant in the past was lost on her. At least the boring pony reminded her of the elder. A bit of levity in her situation helped immensely.

The mare eventually came upon an elevated, rocky hill with the tunnels she was told. She dove into a nearby café and peered past the windows, letting her suit handle the broken shards of glass before her. Nebula had a bad feeling of going into such a dark place, especially with that worm monster and the weird mutant things wandering the city. The tunnels themselves were also unusually quiet. Red veins grew out from them, crawling along the surface of the stone they were dug into. One part of the mare believed it to just be some harmless form of mutated fungus and to just go in. The other had more common sense. One of the flying monsters from earlier came down, landing clumsily and rolling on the ground before it could unfurl its large, left wing and dig seven spindly fingers into the ground to stop its crash. Its body pulsed with blue and yellow veins, illuminating the surroundings lightly. Before Astral could make out any other details outside of its eggshell-white feathers with dark-blue tips, the red 'veins' ripped out of the walls, clamped onto the bird monster, and pulled it in instantly into the tunnels. Multiple sharp bits of rebar, ore, and concrete burst out gradually along the interior of the tunnel, resembling broken, sharp teeth that bent as the construct closed down, crunching whatever was inside it.

Astral ran away in the opposite direction, tripping over herself and the destroyed furniture and dishes, her instincts screaming at her that everything was wrong in this place and that none of what she just saw made any sense at all. Her heart was pounding a thousand a minute, her brain was screaming, her instincts wailing. She had to get out of this place as quickly as possible! The best thing she could do now was to just run straight forward and hope that there was another way to get out of the city through there. Even the many black stains marking the city's streets and walls did nothing to deter her fears. Unfortunately, all the noise she was making caught the attention of the same strange, flying beasts that swooped down to catch her. Their clumsy and misshapen bodies didn't allow them any purchase within the air currents, causing them to sway wildly into other directions and crash through windows and against walls or the floor.

Panicking, the mare flexed her left foreleg to shoot at them as they got up on feet too wide to walk naturally with too many clawed toes to count. They moved using their odd left wing in a stumbling gait, the limb essentially being a crutch, and their heads bounced up and down with each step. Their beaks were crooked and jagged, and eyes of varying sizes ran down from the 'normal' section all along the base of their beaks down to the center of their chests lacking feathers. Having regained their bearings, the creatures started dashing clumsily at Nebula who quickly struck the top of her gun with her lower chin, activating it, and letting pink-colored energy flow through the elongated frame. With one bend of her foreleg, the magic was released, releasing a tear-drop shaped mass that cut through seven of the creatures and continued on until it hot some metal debris further away and melted it. The victims had lost almost seventy-percent of their bodies with that one shot alone and collapsed in heaps of charred bone, melted insides, and dirty feathers.

Astral felt relief when the creatures, knowing that this wasn't prey to tangle with, quickly took to the skies to keep away from her. "At least they're still animals," Astral sighed to herself as she felt her heart constricting and her breath hitching. "They...they know when to leave."

She poked the device with her chin again and witnessed, in the corner of her eye, a mass of golden worms that shivered when she looked at it and hid back away in the ruins of an office building. The mare thanked the foresight of her older colleagues to give her a weapon. Having a brief moment of respite, Nebula tried to gather her thoughts and think about a plan of attack that didn't involve her just screaming and running away from the city. She hid in a mostly-intact house whose floorboards had rotted through and dug through her saddlebags again to look at the plans. Her anger started to become palpable when she arrived at the 'Death Throe'. Ultimately, Astral Nebula needed to rebuild the doorway, but she didn't know how. She would need the blueprints. The 'Death Throe' as morose and inappropriate as it sounded, required her to find her way to some 'Canterlot' where the princesses her elders and grandparents always talked about lived. She chuckled at the idea of them idealizing some ponies that let the city collapse as it did, but if anypony could help her it would be them.

Unfortunately, all the landmarks that were indicated in said instructions had probably long side eroded away or been destroyed outright, so the mare had her work cut out for her. If she wanted to get everypony out of that constricting space and save this place then she would need to work hard and try not to panic at everything arou--

"Aaah!"

Astral shot at a mutant rat that made noise across the street, obliterating it and melting through the ground and asphalt. This was going to far more difficult than she thought, and the mare panicked at the idea of what other abominations roamed the lands of this rotted world.