Magilytic

"What? What's wrong with my appearance?" Astral asked.

"What's wrong with your everything?!" the caretaker insisted.

Astral Nebula's mane imitated the background of her home, being colorful with many pastels shades that moved around on their own, and a coat of solid colors that was just as varied but static. Her eyes were expanding rings of the same colors, with various lines fading in and out of existence in new patterns.

"She's a unicorn!" one of the hunters realized.

The oldest hunter stared at her horn, shocked. "Ah ain't never seen no unicorns before. Some slavers got 'em a few years back, but there was only three." He shrugged. "Figured that was a lah."

"What's wrong with my appearance?" Astral Nebula asked. Insulted, her tone became more aggressive. "You're the ones who all look stagnant and boring!" she claimed. The hunters stared silently. "Everypony looks like me back home! Only our eldest didn't."

A hunter approached the old hunter, ill intent in every step. "If we capture her, we might be able to sell her for a ton! All of us would be able to live like the princesses of old!"

They watched the two giants lumber over to an increasingly worried mare. They started to gently poke and prod her, their massive bodies causing the mare an instinctive fear.

"Ha ha. Pretty," the brother mused.

"Like colors. Sparkly," the sister noted.

"I'm...not sparkly...some ponies where I'm from are, though. Something about the magic or energy within the space that we live in that modifies our biology and makes our nascent magical potential come out as sparkling lights, I think."

The two giants had removed their masks while listening to her, revealing their colors to be dim yellow and dim red, the color locations inverted between them. They had frozen in place, and the brother was shaking his head left and right.

"Consarnit!" the oldest hunter shouted in frustration. He stomped over to them and try smacking his hooves together to get them out of their trance. "Ya went 'n broke 'em! They ain't gots the smarts to be comprehensing yer big words! They're simple folk!"

Astral put her helmet back on with a whistling of the seals and backed away slightly. "I'm sorry. I didn't know."

The aggressive mare pointed her rifle at Astral and licked her lips, her goggles reflected malice. "I'll just shoot her in the legs, then we can loot her and send her to a slaver. Pretty little art piece like that oughta be worth a fortune."

Nebula furrowed her brows. "But I don't want that."

"Doesn't matter what you want."

"Now hold on just a sec!" The older hunter stepped forward, attempting to stand between the two. "Ah din't give ya permission fer that yet."

"Too bad!" the aggressive mare shouted enthusiastically. She fired a shot at Astral and missed, allowing the mare to hurriedly pull her pistol out and have it ready by the time the fourth shot just narrowly missed her head. The aggressive huntress started shaking her gun angrily. "This stupid gun keeps missing! I told you we needed new ones and not these stupid pieces of scrap!"

When she aimed at Astral again, the unicorn looked away.

"Hey, what's that gun she's using?" one of the other hunters wondered.

Everyone froze like statues when the magitech weapon released its charge, atomizing the aggressive mare and created a shallow half-pipe trench for about a dozen feet before it dissipated. The event shook the giants from their stupor, and they were quick to fearfully back away from Astral Nebula.

"The Tartarus was that?" the old stallion asked.

Doing her best to suppress the horror of what she just did, Astral responded, but with a trembling voice. "I...It's my weapon. The others gave it to me when I came here."

The old hunter stomped around, wheezing angrily and passing a hoof over his hood. "Y'all just pulled me outta a plum pie 'n called me Plum Pie fer yer troubles!" the stallion grumbled. He glared at Astral with one eye as he looked around briefly, baffled. " 'N just where is it ya come from? Y'all been baskin' in the taint of a sun shard ah reckon? How exactly did y'all even live afterward?"

"A what?"

Plum Pie blinked slowly. "A sun shard. You know? Fragments of the past?" His face dropped when Astral shrugged and shook her head. "Can't believe this. Some random, glowing, painted unicorn comes outta nowhere, offs one of mah hunters, 'n doesn't know nothin' 'bout the world."

He was overtaken by the wagon caretaker pushing him aside. "You didn't come from the past with a time travel spell did you?"

"What are you talking about, Hay?" a hunter asked.

"I heard that sometimes a pony from the past comes out of nowhere, having time-travelled." His excitement faded almost instantly. "But they would disappear soon afterward. Hmmmm."

"Look," Astral started. "I just want to know how to get to Canterlot and talk with one of the princesses there. I need information that only they can provide."

"The princesses?" Hay repeated.

He looked at the others that exchanged looks before they all burst into laughter, leaving the giants confused.

The mare's cheeks puffed up in frustration. "What's so funny?" she asked angrily.

"Yer lookin' fer Canterlot?" Plum asked. "Ain't we all?!"

Astral felt the blood flee her face, and her veins turned cold. "Wh...what are you trying to say?"

Plum laughed even harder, having to take a moment to get himself to breathe normally again. "That's cause-" He noticed the giants in the corner of his eye. "Put yer masks back on ya idjits!" The giants complied immediately and stood to attention in place. Plum shook his head in disappointment, waiting for the raucous laughter to die down a bit. "Dunno where yer from, but Canterlot's been lost 'n fergotten fer 'bout a hunderd years 're so. Dunno the exact number, and ah don't care none."

"Hey, Plum, are we just gonna let her go?" one of the hunters asked.

"Ah ain't enslavin' no pony." He gave Astral a side glance when she jumped in terror at a tail ending in a stinger poking out of the ground briefly. "Especially not with that gun 'o hers. We'll just leave her be 'n get our catch back home."

"We could always just drop her off at our town and move on from there. I have a feeling she'll follow us the whole time and attract all sorts of attention if we don't," she explained.

Plum weighed the pros and cons and sighed, wondering why he was agreeing to what his employee had just argued. "Fine." He pointed at Astral. "You. Unicorn. You'll accompany us to the town. There's ponies there at a meetup that escort gits like you ta where yer lookin'. Ya poke 'em some and you leave us alone, got it?"

"Yes, of course!" Astral said enthusiastically. "I'm not interested in bothering anypony." She hurried to join up with the ponies and smiled when they hitched the siblings up to the wagon and got moving.

Most of the trip was done in silence, although the siblings liked to sing as they pulled the wagon. Their voices were atrocious, but it seemed that their fellow hunters learned to tune them out. Astral, however, wasn't so lucky. As they moved along the hilly landscape dotted by the occasional debris of crashed aircraft, two hunters approached Plum Pie.

"You sure about this, Plum? She's a freaky looking unicorn. That's like a...a quintuple whammy!" the huntress whispered. "You're just gonna let her go?"

The other hunter nodded. "I understand that you don't like the idea of slavery and all, but a unicorn?! And she looks like she's overflowing with magic!"

Plum spat onto the ground and watched it sizzle. He grunted as he looked up, seeing an elevated mound, and gave it a wide berth. "It's because of how freaky she is, and that weapon o' hers ain't no joke either. Evaporated Jemmy Shards in an instant!" He looked behind to see the suited pony walking carefully while staring at the ground. "Ain't nopony looks like that 'n ain't been taintin' by a shard."

"But she's not even some weird mutant giant or elongated abbe ration!" the huntress said. "She just looks weird, which is what makes her prime material!"

Plum removed his mask, his plum-purple eyes darting left and right between the glass of the huntress' mask. "Okay. Say we did that. Then what? Those things'd come after us if she's gone too long. They clearly know that she left. All the others that kidnapped the victims were chased down until they were beaten ta death." He widened his eyes and pursed his lips as he pulled the mask back down. "Ah ain't goin' through that no way no how." His hoof went between both hunters quickly. " 'N Ah ain't 'bouta let that happen ta all y'all neither, so stop suggestin' it."

"Yes, sir," the two hunters responded reluctantly.

With a few more hours passed, Astral approached the wagon and the caretaker actively aiming at things from atop the corpses. "So...what are you going to do with those...things?" she asked. "Did you kill them because they're malformed? Are they going to pollute everything if left behind?"

Hay looked bewildered. "What are you talking about? These Deters are in perfect health. Some of the best I've ever seen."

It was Astral's turn to be bewildered. "But..." She looked at the white cloth fluttering behind the stallion. "Deer aren't supposed to look like that."

She was met with a shrug. "No idea what a 'deer' is, but a deter looks like these guys right here." He patted the mound behind him, creasing the fabric and loosening some errant blood on the fur.

"Okay...and what do you use them for?" Astral asked.

"We eat them and harvest their legs if we can't capture and farm their bonewood," Hay explained nonchalantly.

The mare was left stunned. "But...ponies don't eat meat..."

"That's a myth," Plum Pie interjected. "Us equines 're herbivorous but also opportunistic carnivores." He grinned at Plum, his mask creasing from his jaw muscles tensing. "We still eat whenever we can. Besides." He walked up to the giant siblings and jabbed the sister in her flank. "Show her yer big teeth?"

"Show who?" the sister asked.

"The u..." Plum took a deep breath. "The sparkly pony."

"Ooooo," the siblings aww'd in unison.

They took off their masks and smiled at Astral, scaring her. She hadn't noticed how bulky they were, but their faces were...slightly deformed. Their muzzles were exceptionally pronounced with immense lower jaws, but their mouths were seemingly small in comparison. What wasn't small was the rows of sharp teeth growing every which way from their gums. Calloused muscle crevices were located above and below, letting their awkward teeth rest tranquilly in their mouths.

"Look like sharks from the old books," Plum laughed.

"Sparkly mare like teeth?" the sister asked.

Her brother laughed heartily. "We like smile. Smile make lots better."

Astral was thankful they couldn't see her disturbed expression behind her helmet. "Uh, yes. Very lovely smiles."

Plum patted the brother on his side. "Alright, ya giant sausages. Get yer masks back on." He watched them struggle to pull the masks back down before speaking again. "They're primarily carnivores, those ponies. Big colts 'n filles need their protein, in't that right?" He chuckled when the giants giggled. " 'Sides, we're almost there."

"Really?" Astral asked with surprise.

The older hunter nodded. "Yes. We aren't going to travel days out just for hunting."

"The meat will spoil," Hay interjected.

"Gotta git it ta the smoker's right fast." Plum nodded. "Stayin' away

"Oh."

The hunters looked at her, smirking under their masks. "You sound disappointed."

"There's that..." The unicorn swayed left to right. "I kinda expected there to be a long trek there so I could see more of Equestria. It's way different from what our elders told us."

"Oh?" Plum said absent-mindedly. "And what did they tell you?"

"That it was a place full of color and life, with plenty of different species around." With every word Astral said, the hunters gradually looked at her, their movements becoming stiff and robotic. "They never told me what to do if Equestria looked like this, though."

"Like this?" a hunter repeated. "You act like you were hidden away in a vault." He paused and pointed his rifle at Astral again. "Or that you came from space, alien!"

Plum grabbed a rock and chucked it at the hunter's head. "Ah told ya ta knock it off!" He waved the stallion off. "Never you mind him. The town's rrrright over there."

A bunch of homes made from repurposed, concrete ruins sat in the middle of the wasteland, with scrap metal walls surrounding it on all sides. A few old buildings were still mostly intact, but reinforced with white, wooden material that held them and their new walls up. The tallest building had three gradually smaller floors and looked like a giant bell sat on the second. A large field sat opposite the group's direction, next to the town, full of wooden poles holding up a plethora of dried out vines that Astral could see ponies tending to, much to her confusion.

What had caught her attention first, but that she tried her best to ignore, was a strange, stretched out thing standing over the walls at one of the gates. It stood on four long legs that grew at the base, like gravity was pulling all of its fat down. It was covered in splotches of red surrounded by yellow rings, sitting in a sea of deep blue. The main body looked like a potato sitting comfortably far above even the tallest building in the city.

"Why do you have a statue like that at the town? To scare off any monsters."

Confused, Hay spoke up. "Statue?"

The surface of the 'statue' shifted to sharp zigzags of red surrounded by white lines on a flickering background of green and purple. The potato body elongated and stretched out to meet the group, multiple stalks popping out of its front to look at the group. Its skin started to glisten, and buckets of acidic substances slid off its body to stain the ground beneath everyone. Two of the stalks lingered on the giants who cheered like children and started swiping carefully at the stalks staring at them. They lingered on everypony until one spotted Astral, and they all converged on her.

Nebula screamed in terror and fell backward as the stalks followed her every movement until Plum jumped in front of her. "It's okay!" he declared. "She's just a visitor. Ain't gon' bring no harm ta the town. Y'ain't need ta worry none."

The stalks bypassed the stallion, seemingly 'sniffing' Astral before receding back in the shrinking body, leaving the unicorn gasping for air.

"I hate this place," the mare complained. "Now there are colorful potatoes able to stretch for miles to eat you!"

The hunters laughed together once again.

"Welcome to Equestria, 'Sparkly Pony'," Plum mocked.