Magilytic

She would have to use her gun again, and that could attract the attention of others like that monster around. Astral activated the illumination function of her suit, activating a light projected around her visor. The pathway hadn't been used for a long time, with errant hair and dust particles lingering in the air and being disturbed from their mindless flying as the visitor moved forward. A metal door kept ajar sat at the end of the tunnel, making Astral's mind run wild with ideas on what might be on the other side. Keeping her gun at the ready, the mare attempted to open the door. Unfortunately, it was far too heavy to be open lightly, and it screamed when she forced it to push open, startling her. Preferring not to do that again, she peered through the crack into the room it was hiding and saw the remains of a family. Their clothing had rotten off their bodies, and their skeletons sat, slumped, on the ground between two bunk beds that were in a mostly conserved state. Whatever used to be in there had been picked clean by something that Astral really, really wanted to be other ponies with nothing weird like the big mouth covered in horns.

Waiting for an hour in the hole left Astral bored and tired, but she thanked the silence and calmness and gradually climbed the rusty ladder bolted into the stone wall, begging it to not shatter under her weight with every step she made. The yard was clear, allowing the mare to hurry away and continue her way outside the city. Every now and then she would hear the same mumbling and made a wide berth to avoid the big mouths. Astral looked at her gun and nibbled at her lower lip. She could use it to shoot at everything that moved, but it would take it forever to recharge afterward. It was better to use it on whatever she couldn't flee from.

Her hooves were killing her in the end, but she passed through skeletal brush into a massive expanse of brown and black. She had made it outside the city after hours of being trapped in it with the mutant monstrosities. She sighed in relief, looking around at the nothing before her, then her good feeling dropped. What was she supposed to do now? Keep wandering? There was no way she was going back into the city. She sighed and started walking again. The best she could do would be to look for signs of life. Non-mutated, non-scary life, this time. Then maybe she would be directed to one of the princesses.

The wandering lasted for many more hours, making Astral suddenly feel fatigued. She realized she was tired and needed sleep. Without the artificiality of her home, she had no idea when to sleep, and sleeping out in the open was a bad idea. Seeing a tilted shack leaning against an assembly of dead trees, Astral was quick to enter it and carefully close the door behind her. The interior had been recently disturbed, and the fireplace was filled with the remains of burnt woods. Dust and cobwebs were present, as always, and the windows were stained brownish-orange by whatever had affected the world outside. A few tables and moldy chairs decorated the interior, with several collapsed pots and pans and shattered plates and glasses strewn along the floor.

"Finally. A moment of rest," the mare sighed.

She wiped one of the windows to see outside and felt her hairs stand on end when the sky started to swirl and shift into a night-blue shade with lightning traveling within it. It was almost impossible to look away as the weather started to change, and the dusty grounds started to shimmer with light, pulling dust and sand up with slowly rising lightning tainted blue into the sky above. Astral spotted something wandering through the wastes when it touched one of the slow-rising bolts and exploded in a flash of blinding lights and fleshy bits.

"I...don't know this weather phenomenon...Even the weather is mutated?!" Astral thought to herself in horror.

The wind started picking up and began battering the leaning wooden shed, causing its occupant to feel her nth panic attacking in twenty-four hours. She covered herself in the dusty blankets and placed the furniture around her to protect her as best as she could be. Trembling walls and old branches scraping the wood filled her mind until she woke up several hours later, realizing she had closed her eyes so hard and so long that she had fallen asleep from exhaustion. She immediately burst from her makeshift bunker and felt relief that the shed hadn't collapsed. It had likely suffered the odd weather phenomenon for as long as it existed, but staying in such a horrible place with broken physics made its continued survival a baffling mystery.

There were a few old pictures littering the ground that had been freed when the shack's new occupant had created her makeshift protective bunker. They depicted a rather big, happy family. Only two of the apparently seventeen pictures were still frames. The rest were exposed to the elements and severely damaged because of it. A consistent theme were the pictures having splotches on their surfaces, damaging the captured moments even further than they already were. One had been almost completely soaked: A picture of a massive family of pegasi and unicorns smiling at the camera. Astral placed the pictures back down and wrapped them around in the cloth. She didn't know the best way to protect the painful past of whomever lived here, but she could at least make an effort.

"...!"

Astral looked at the wall, trying to discern the source of the noise.

"...ui!"

The city was disturbingly quiet, even with all the strange creatures wandering around within it. Nothing made sense at all to the mare. That it might have been destroyed by an unfortunate war was something she took into account when she went through, but that it would be in such a state and the environment would have mutated so badly was a sickening nightmare. Perhaps because she used her pistol, the creatures wandering the ruins were no longer approaching her, and Nebula felt extreme relief from it. Her stress and fear were preventing her from feeling a correct amount of hunger and thirst, and she was aware of this fact, but she didn't want to do anything about it until she got out of the urbanized area.

Every step and every crack Astral made put her further on edge, and the faint light coming through the dead, rusted sky prevented her from knowing the time. She was taught about something called 'night' but didn't know what that meant. The excitement of learning about a new phenomenon was ruined, and her anger started taking over as she continued her trek through the ruined landscape. After several hours of walking, the mare finally made her way to a more rural area, although there were still a few tall buildings, they didn't seem to go beyond four stories in height. Strangely, most of the homes were intact outside some decay and rot in the materials that made them up. The lawns were tainted dirt and the bushes and trees were dead, blackened reminders of the beauty that once was. There were a few more of the black spots here and there, but they were far less common in the rural area than in the city itself. Some houses had completely collapsed, and the stench of burning still lingered, somehow going through the suit's filtration system.

Astral stopped in place when she heard a strange mumbling that sounded like buzzing and somepony droning on at the same time. She slowly moved in the direction of it, going past two houses to reach another street. The mare couldn't understand why she was doing something so stupid like going toward a potential threat rather than avoid it, but if she didn't learn about it now, she would get sideswiped in the future by the surprise.

Nebula tiptoed over the lawn to the skeletal remains of a hedge and peered through them to a house just barely standing from its corner getting blown out by an explosion. Debris hung everywhere, long since taken over by the dust and grime of the area. Peering within the ruined interior, the mare's eyes widened when she realized there was a vanilla-colored pony with almost no mane and tail sitting on a stool at a bar and mumbling like they were having a conversation with somepony. Surrounding them, the walls were charred black with that strange pattern spotted all over the city. Nebula realized they were in the middle of one and furrowed her brows. She saw what she had to. She didn't need to approach them further.

The mare moved away and tripped over several mutant rats wandering around near her hooves. They squeaked and garbled in shock, making Nebula curse loudly unintentionally. When the miniscule monster had moved away, it became clear that the mumbling had stopped. Remembering the tunnel, Astral slowly turned around to see the unicorn at the bar staring at her with wide, unblinking eyes.

"Uh...hi?" Nebula squeaked. The unicorn's mouth opened slightly as a scream of growing intensity came from its throat. "Something wrong?"

The unicorn's mouth seemed to grow wider and wider and started to stretch out its body as it started to fracture and unstable, trembling bits of its body started separating, reminding Astral of the concept of tectonic plates always moving around. The monster's horn started to elongate and split apart as whatever spell was surrounding it started to evaporate, revealing its true form. It grew taller and lankier as its entrails stretched out like limbs, magic spewing wildly from its body and destroying everything around it.

"Oh Tartarus no!" Astral blurted.

She immediately turned tail and started galloping away as fast as she could, but the screaming thing gave chase, clearly furious at being interrupted at whatever it was doing. On the odd occasion that the mare could spot a reflective surface, she realized that many horns were growing through the entity's flesh and interior like tumors, each one thrumming with unstable magic that polluted its surroundings like toxic sludge. One rat was caught in its poisonous embrace and started growing wildly, with limbs bursting at the seems with muscle, magic, and claws before it grew to the size of a pony and popped like a balloon, much to Astral's disgust.

She managed to round a corner and fall down an open hole behind a house, leaving the monstrosity to stumble away chasing after prey it could never find.

"What's this, now?" Astral muttered to herself as she rubbed the back of her head and checked her limbs for fractures.

She was in a small tunnel lined with lightbulbs that had popped or weren't fed power in a very long while. While it would be better to climb back up, the mare could only bide her time until she felt enough time had passed. Worst case scenario:

She galloped to the windows and looked around, weary of the big mouth monsters. Instead, she bore witness to a dozen equine-shaped creatures draped in cloth garb using archaic gunpowder weaponry against multiple deer-like creatures with antlers in place of legs. Said growths were bending and twisting at their enemies, the extended pieces breaking off almost instantly so they could regrow differently. They seemed to exist with a form of diprosopus, making their heads wide and malformed but hindered them in no way to dealing with their aggressors. Their size, three times that of a regular pony, made them incredibly dangerous, which was probably why the ponies in question kept their distance.

Two of the larger ponies easily the size of these deer rushed forward and body slammed into them, knocking them over before they stomped hard on their bodies, killing them. Three more were shot dead and double-tapped in the ground for good measure. The two giants bounced giddily when they were congratulated by their smaller kin and had ropes tied around the deer and their waists, letting them drag their hunt along the ground. An open wagon made from welded bits of scrap metal and its attendant waited for them, ropes, and wooden poles waiting for them.

"This is my chance!" Astral realized.

The mare put her gun away in her pouch and went out of the shack, rushing toward the ponies before they could finish whatever they were doing and leave. Her approach was unnecessary since the ponies were letting the corpses of their prey and stringing them up to let gravity do the work.

"Excuse me! Excuse me!" the mare shouted.

The ponies noticed her and then flew into a panic.

"What in blue blazes? We've got aliens 'round here now!" The pony smacked the wagon attendant on the back of his head to grab his attention. "Git yer rahfle. We've got aliens here!"

The attendant reluctantly faced Astral's direction and rolled his eyes. "It's an alien because it's wearing a suit?" He flinched when three rifles were shot at the mare. "Stop shooting, you idiots!"

"Not a great way to introduce myself," Astral said. "I got too carried away."

One of the mares groaned and rolled her eyes. "Can't we just kill her and loot her?"

"We crush? Smush?" one of the giants asked innocently.

The other clapped her hooves excitedly. "Brother smush. I crush!"

"No! I crush! You smush!" the brother opposed.

The caretaker leaned his face into his hoof. "They're fighting again."

"Consarnit!" the country pony cursed. "Ah told y'all ta stop that stupid fightin'! Yer just doin' the same thing with different names!" He froze in place, glaring at nothing until he swung and pointed a hoof at the bloodthirsty mare. "And you! The city is down thatta ways. Ya think this alien is safe ta murk 'n loot 'cause ya like shootin' things? What's under that suit, then?!"

"I-I can show you, if you want," Astral suggested nervously. "If it's not dangerous to breathe here."

The ponies mumbled to each other while the giants kept pummeling each other. Getting a better look at them when they started approaching with rifles locked around their shoulders, Astral was able to see that their weapons were sanded down to get rid of rust and the wood used for the stocks weren't of the best quality. They were scavengers surviving in the wastelands.

"It ain't unsafe ta breathe here," the older stallion claimed. "Just lots of crap flyin 'round. Gets in yer eye and hurts something' fierce." He leaned to the side, his fellows keeping their weapons stable. "Now, y'all're gon' git turned intae a pockmarked calendar if ya trah somethin' weird, ya hear?"

"A pockmarked...okay?" Astral said with a shrug.

"Food." He waved his hoof several times at the mare. "Now be slow with yer helmet removin' 'n such. Can't be too careful."

The ponies focused harder when Astral's helmet hissed, letting loose the familiar air of her home out, coat her surroundings from barely a moment in pastel colors and white mist. She lowered the helmet to her side and kept it under her right foreleg, smiling nervously all the while, sweat staining her fur.

"Did I pass?" she asked. She shifted in place nervously when the ponies stared at her, dumbfounded. "Is everything okay?"

"The Tartarus kind of pony is she supposed to be?" the wagon caretaker blurted out.