Dead Cat Bounce: A Fanfiction Fanfiction

Chapters

Chapter One: An Introduction to the Prologue
Item One
Chapter Two: Those Before Bros
Chapter Three: Hobby Horse
Chapter Four: The Natural Condition
Chapter Five: Pegasus Device
Chapter Six: Blunderstorm
Chapter Seven: Tunnel Snakes
Chapter Eight: Leibowitz's Song
Item Two

Chapter One: An Introduction to the Prologue

Despite the sapping cold of late May, Romeo and I climbed the hill. It was the brief window when it was warm enough to go outside but cold enough to keep the bears and snow giraffes hibernating, and we weren’t going to pass the opportunity up. The culmination of months of hard work awaited us at the hilltop.

I looked down on my home. We were far enough out to appreciate the way that Hörspen managed to be even uglier on the outside. The crumbling concrete sarcophagus infrastructure was just regular ugly, but the main dome hung from the intact span of a ruined railroad bridge like a freaky beehive. Everything near it was perpetually stained by the rusting shell of stapled-together sheet metal. Steam wafted from the cracks in the lumpy brown mass. The appropriate descriptor for Hörspen might not have been “beehive” so much as “turdsicle.” I put that behind me. The day was just too important to waste it thinking about that waste.

Today there would be no Hörspen, no rotato-squirrels, and most importantly, no Flanders, I thought. Just me and Romeo, and Actaeon.

It was the first day that our Actaeon boxes were carrying the new targeting module. Romeo had come up with a really clever beam splitter made out of a fork and the crystallized extract of a fungus we’d found growing under the gymnasium. It turns out that one of the proteins in that fungus did a really good job of refracting light. The reconfiguration had ended up saving us a bunch of weight and space in the module, and that was good because the original module was roughly the size and weight of a cinder block.

We had later read that that same protein did an even better job of being poisonous, so I guess we got double lucky. I didn’t miss the feeling of carrying around our old version of the module, but I still had mixed feelings over how I felt about the feeling of knowing that if the new module ever broke it could possibly expose me to a deadly neurotoxin.

We were going to take advantage of the weather and point the new targeting module at the sun for three hours. The fact that it was cloudy didn’t matter. We couldn’t wait. The data were bound to be amazing!

It was also great because I had so many important things to share with Romeo, and he was a captive audience.

“Hey Romeo,” I said, “do you think spiders can dream?”

“Charlie, what?” He blinked. “Where did that come from?”

“My brain,” I said.

He walked ahead of me. I guessed that he didn’t have an answer.

Oh well, that’s okay, I thought. I have so many important things to share!

_____

“I’m telling you. It’s real!” I said.

“The ‘Gideon Code’? Not this again. Nopony can make sense of those Lunar Auroch bibles. Nopony knows why the things even exist,” Romeo said. “Hell, nopony knows when or where they were made. And you’re telling me there’s a secret society that uses them for conspiracies?”

“That’s my point exactly! Why else would something so unintelligible be so ubiquitous? Who would bother distributing identical copies of them everywhere, even here, if there wasn’t some secret purpose?

“I’m not saying they’re for a conspiracy, just that crazies decode them for esoteric mysticism stuff.”

“Or they could just be regular crazies.”

“Who’s to say what we think is meaningless-type crazy isn’t actually profound-type crazy?” I said. “The only way we’ll ever know is if we crack the code!

“Come on, do it for the world’s heritage!

“Do it for love!

“Do it for all the little colts and fillies who might grow up ignorant of the potentially mind-shattering secrets of the Gideon Code!”

“I’m going to pass.” he said. “Where the did you get this idea, anyway?”

“The radio pony said there was overwhelming and conclusive proof,” I said.

“What proof?” he said. “You’re trying to interpret the Lunar Auroch bible based on that idiot’s word? Is that it?”

“Yeah, pretty much.”

“Dude,” he said, “at least find a secondary source on this. And maybe then we can talk about finding magical bible secrets—”

He pointed out across the snow. “Hey, do you see that?”

A pink mare wearing a massive brahmin skull as a hat and some idiot in a gorilla suit were walking out of the edge of the woods. Romeo and I looked at each other.

“Oh watch out, it’s getting random out here,” I said and laughed.

He rolled his eyes. Still, raiders dressed up in silly costumes all the time, and it didn’t make them any less dangerous. General Butt Naked was one of Berlaska’s most heinous murderers. Contrary to popular belief, he does wear a costume. It’s just that most ponies have no imagination.

But we had guns and these two wackos didn’t, so we tagged the pink one on Actaeon and approached them. The Actaeon box, speaking to me in its language of beeps and clicks, gave me updates as it worked on a firing solution.

“Hey, you can’t be here. This is Hörspen land. If you want to trade come back on the first Monday of next month, and show up on the main road next time. This is your first warning,” I said.

“It dares address Antler? It shall speak when spoken to!” said the pink mare in a shriek.

Uh oh. Is she high?

The quick beeps of Actaeon’s tracking phase dropped to the loud, low buzz of lock-on. The vibrations of the lock-on tone had some sort of resonance effect on the cooling fan, and the whole module started to rattle in its mount. Head cocked to the side, the pink pony looked at the buzzing computer on my saddle, turned to her partner, and shrugged.

“Who?” I said.

“Who is Antler? WHO IS AN—“

“I’m Rainbow Dash!” said Gorilla Pony in a gravelly male voice.

Yeah, okay, so they are definitely high.

I was not in the mood for dealing with fucks coked-out on Dash, or methamphetamine, or meta-amphetamine, or whatever the kids did these days instead of playing the choking game like a normal pony.

I hit the toggle on my battle saddle and my rifle began to shudder as Actaeon made micro adjustments to keep it aimed at “Antler.” Romeo did the same.

“Rainbow Dash, Antler, this is Hörspen land,” I said. “Turn around and go home. This is your second warning.”

Antler stared at me with pity and condescension. “Antler says Hörspen land is our home,” she said. “‘Things Fall A-Fort’ belongs to us now! Soon all! Antler is here to warn them. Leave our home!”

She turned and trudged back into the woods. Gorilla Dash followed.

Well, corn.

The Book Fort was an old library that we had converted into one of our satellite supply depots. The list of book fort puns was only visible from inside the building, and, judging from the direction they were going, they knew where it was.

But on the plus side, it did look like somepony finally appreciated my pun.

I turned to Romeo.

“Trap?” I said.

“Oh, most definitely.”

He said, “And what was that ‘warning’ you made up? Who talks like that, seriously?”

“You gotta show ‘em who’s boss,” I said. “I’m the boss.”

Antler’s voice echoed through the woods. “Yams! All is yams!”

We radioed in that we were gonna check it out but we needed some help.

“Weird. But yeah good idea,” said the operator over the radio. “Sit tight and Flanders and Marina will be down to help you out in like twenty minutes, okay? You can go check it out together.”

Flanders. Why did it have to be Flanders? I thought. Why would they ever choose Flanders?

“Come on Romeo, it’s our day off,” I said. “We don’t need to waste our time waiting. We can handle this on our own.” I could tell by his nervous laughter that he was as eager to avoid Flanders as I was.

_____

We had to case the building three times before Actaeon got its shit together and compiled a resonance spectrum. I made a mental note to go over the code and find out why the peak-picking annotations had stopped showing up on the print-out.

The only screens we could fit into the module were old plasma flat-screens that had faded from their original orange-and-black display to brown-and-sorta-darker-brown. Plasma screens generate hella interference, so it was one of those awkward deals where you had to unplug the screen, run the scan blind, then plug the screen back in to see what you got, guess at what you needed to fiddle with to get the scan to work, unplug it again, and run the scan again.

After a couple minutes of interpretation and scratch work, we concluded that the backscatter and coupling meant there were only two ponies in the building. Actaeon still had a lock on Antler, so we knew she was standing inside by one of the boarded up windows. We had a good plan, and better yet the plan would take care of the problem before Flanders got here.

Once I had figured out what my catch-phrase was going to be, it was go time. Our opener went off just as planned. Romeo kicked in the window. I jumped through and tackled Antler.

“Wolverines!” I said.

She didn’t resist as I dragged her upright by her neck, and she only giggled as Romeo pressed his rifle to her side. Gorilla Dash just stood there and stared at us with the inscrutable gaze that only a pony in a gorilla mask can give.

“Okay now we’re all gonna leave,” Romeo said as we started to muscle Antler to the door. “And while we’re leaving you’re gonna tell us what is going on with you, Antler, and your gorilla suit.”

“Antler is like a heteroousian hypostatic union,” said Gorilla Dash. ”You can have the warm pulsating flesh of a living pony, with its slide into inescapable decay, or the glorious inexhaustible rectitude of a skull, transcendent and terrifying, but only together do you have the godhead.”

I looked at Romeo. Romeo looked at Gorilla Dash. Gorilla Dash looked at Antler. Antler looked at me.

And then ghouls dropped out from the rafters and we started shooting.

_____

Gorilla Dash was dead, and I still had Antler in a headlock, but now the two ghouls were piling on Romeo. Swaths of rotting skin slid off the ghouls as Romeo bucked and kicked to keep them away. One of the zombie ponies bit down on Romeo’s flank, and he hit the floor hard.

“Stop! I’ll shoot Antler!” I said.

The ghouls broke from their attack and stared at me. The struggle had torn open the distended belly of one the ghouls, and I could see its entrails droop and slide out from the wound. Bleeding, Romeo started to crawl into a corner.

“Kill this one, another takes its place! Antler is eternal! All is yams!” said Antler.

The ghouls nodded and went back to eating Romeo. I panicked. I shoved Antler forward, and I shot her. The pink pony collapsed. The ghouls stopped and turned towards me. The ghoul that still had eyelids closed its eyes, as if meditating. For a moment everything was silent except for my friend’s panting.

The ghoul opened its eyes and screamed, “Antler! Antler! Antler! ANTLER!”

Both ghouls went mad. They began to slam their bodies into the furniture. They started chewing on the wood and then on Romeo.

Then I had a plan, a good one this time. I grabbed the Brahmin skull off of the pink pony’s body and wore it on my own head.

“Disciples! Antler is here! You must follow Antler!” I said. “Follow Antler!”

Walking backwards, I led the ghouls out of the building.

“Antler! Antler! All is yams!” the ghouls said in unison as they walked with me.

“Yes, disciples! Follow me! Antler is here! All is yams!” I said to the stupid ghouls who had fallen for my cunning plan.

“You are not the conduit. Return the skull.”

Well, cob.

_____

Holy shit, ghouls are fast, I thought. I was able to put distance between me and them in the initial sprint, but I was running out of steam and they weren’t. The distraction might have failed— …or did it? I thought —but we must not let past mistakes ruin our lives. It was time for a new plan.

I needed to lose the ghouls before they caught up and ate me. I scampered down a small butte to see if I couldn’t throw them off on the rough terrain, but the ghouls just jumped off it and rolled down the slope. In seconds, they were waiting for me at the bottom.

“Give us the skull!” they said.

I turned around and scrambled back up the butte, but the ghouls were following close behind. One of the ghouls was dragging a dead shrub that had gotten caught in its guts.

I headed towards the river, and I prayed I’d get there far enough ahead of them. Ghouls might have turned out to be fast, but I knew they were still stupid. All I had to do was get to the rope bridge, get across it, and break the rope when they tried to follow me to the other side.

The bridge wasn’t very far. It was a great plan, and I could make it! But by the time I got to the riverbank the ghouls had already hopped on my back.

“Return the skull!” they said.

I improvised, skipped the bridge part, and tore off my saddle and just jumped straight into the river. We all tumbled in as a clump.

My new plan was working perfectly! The fall had knocked them both off my body, and the ghouls were too rotten and skeletal to float. I might not have been able to outrun them, but if I could just stop smacking up against these rocks, I could outswim them!

Well, I could outswim them until I got too cold, but I’d cross that bridge when I got to it. Oh that’s right, the bridge, I thought. As I smacked into a rock, I caught the shape of the rope bridge passing overhead. If I had just passed the bridge then that meant the waterfall would be right up next.

Fucking waterfalls, I thought, always at the worst possible time.

Then I smacked up against a really big rock and I had a new plan. I climbed up onto the rock and prepared myself for the maneuver. I took slow and steady breaths. I had to focus. Total zen mode, I thought. I felt two pairs of hooves latch onto my back legs and I screamed.

“Antler! Antler! Return the skull! The yams must not run out!” they said while not eating me.

“You want the skull?”

“Yes! Antler! Yes!”

“Then go fetch!” I said as I tossed the skull into the rapids. All three of us watched it disappear under the whitewater. Moments later, I caught a glimpse of it tumbling down the waterfall.

The ghouls didn’t budge. Dead eyes glared at me. Both ghouls let out a low, guttural moan. Oh shit, this is totally going to be the part where they eat me, I thought.

“You’re an asshole,” one said.

The ghouls looked at each other and shrugged. There was one last drawn-out call of “Antler!” as they dove after the skull.

”Sorry, ghouls. I’m not on the menu!” I shouted down at them.

It feels good to be a winner.

_____

When I got back to the Book Fort, Marina was patching up Romeo. He was hurt pretty bad, but at least he wasn’t getting worse. She told me that we were gonna have to wait for a medic team to come down before we could safely get him back to Hörspen.

When she was done with Romeo, she went to the storeroom and got a mop and started cleaning up. I went to the storeroom and helped myself to a blanket and a jar of pickled snackimals, and I kicked back by the fire canister.

A jar is like, thirty grams protein and ten carbs, right? I thought. I just did all that running so it’s probably calorie neutral.

Romeo and I passed the time by brainstorming reasons why Actaeon didn’t pick up on the ghouls. It sucked that the ghouls ended up falling of that waterfall. We could have used their bodies for experiments.

Marina seemed pretty pissed for some reason, so I offered her a snackimal. I guess she wasn’t hungry. Flanders was there too.

Then the body of Gorilla Dash shuddered and groaned. We all watched as it slowly got up, dusted itself off, and shambled towards the door. Pink vapor trickled from the bullet holes in the gorilla suit and seeped into the floorboards.

He stopped at the doorway and turned to us.

“Do you all not feel the joy of revelation?” Gorilla Dash said. “Providence has brought us here today, and I for one am humbled in the face of the wisdom of the almighty. I’m sure we will all reflect on this lesson that Antler has so graciously given us.”

In the light of the different ceiling lamps he cast four shadows. “Now if you excuse me, I have a skull to find,” he said.

Marina went for the door after him, but I stopped her. If it’s best to let sleeping dogs lie, it’s probably even bester to let were-dead-but-are-now-getting-up-and-walking-away dogs walk away.

I glanced over to check on the Pony Formerly Known as Antler to see if she was magical too. Flies were having a party on her eyeballs.

Anyway, it turned out somepony else was waking up, too. A stoned pony with a yam cutie mark crawled out of the broom closet. He puked a little on the way up. He was wearing a gang jacket with the letters “E ∆” on the back, and he had some sort of foliage headdress too, but I wasn’t sure if that was the ghouls’ doing or if that was just how E ∆ rolled.

I slurped down my last snackimal and approached him.

“Are you Yam?” I said.

He stared at the light fixtures for a couple seconds.

“No, I’m Sweet Potato.”

“Okay ‘cause some ghoul cult was just in here talking about yams. I figured since you’re a yam pony they’d kidnapped you for a terrifying ritual or something.“

“A yam is not a sweet potato! I’m Sweet Potato!” said Yam. He was sizing me up for a brawl. Whatever, I’d already dealt with a ghoul cult and an immortal gorilla pony. No way was I going to get in a fight over something this stupid.

“Chill, dude.” I said. “I just saved your life, you should compliment me.”

“Fuck you!” he said. “And fuck this stupid couch!”

He slammed his hooves down on a table. The impact knocked him off balance, and he tumbled onto his back. He mumbled something about monocots and threw up again. What an idiot! You can’t use the word “monocot” as a compliment!

But being a nice guy, so I kicked him until he rolled over on his side so he wouldn’t drown in his barf.

Two medics stepped in the building. They stopped to gawk at the shattered tables and banisters, at the blood and the vomit on the floor, and at the dead pony and the pony wearing a bush on his head.

“Woah, what happened here?” one said.

“Charlie happened,” Marina said.

Everypony in the room started laughing like it was the funniest thing in the world.

Everypony shared a laugh like they were all good friends, even Yam.

Everypony except for me.

_____

Item One

“—and I’m back! There was a birdstrike, and, well I’m not very good with radios, so I kind of panicked, and um… I hate to have to leave you alone….

But it’s okay because I came back! I will always come back for you! But I left the transmitter on so there’s only enough power for a few more minutes together. I’m so sorry I forgot! You know how much this means to me, it was an honest mistake, I promise.

But I should shut up! I don’t want to waste our time talking about talking about talking, y’know?

Well not shut up shut up, but oh, you know….

Oh, I wrote some haiku this week. I was going to read all eighteen, but I think I might only have time for a few because of my mistake. I’m so stupid, I hate it.

Okay, here I go!

foals frolic and play:

there is a place for all things

in time they will learn

my painful sunburn

I wear it proudly at night—

memories of noon

how will you love me?

hoofbeats under red maples

the only reply

I used to wonder

what friendship could be— it is

winter oh princess

I think I should stop with those. The yellow light is on now, and I still have two very important messages for you. But did you notice how I used the kire and the kigo? I was so hopeful that you would like them when I wrote them, but I was really scared too. Please tell me if you approve.

Now with the warmer weather and all, I want to remind you that the snow giraffes are going to be coming out of their dens soon. But I’m here to help! You can count on me!

I read in a very authoritatively written book that snow giraffes, like all members of the order Perissodactyla, are very easily confused. You can throw them off with Magic Eye pictures!

Now dearest, you may be asking yourself where you can get a hold of Magic Eye pictures in this present age.

That’s a good question. But at least now you know! Keep an… ‘eye’ out for it!

Ah ha ha ha! That was a joke! Oh, I make myself cry, sometimes.

The red light is on now, and that means I have to go. I’m always messing things up. Please tune in next Thursday at twenty-three hundred hours for an extra special broadcast. Not that every broadcast isn’t extra special to me, but next week I’ll be doing a dramatic adaptation of Phèdre, starring me as Phèdre! Oh, I can’t wait for you to listen!

And remember that’s twenty-three hundred, not twenty-two. The days are getting long now, so we have to stay up late so my words can reach you wherever you roam. And you know I’ll always stay up for you, darling.

Don’t forget, this is Strange Item on 14.860 MHz, with a tear in her eye, saying she’s sorry for everything and she loves you verymu…” —{CLICK}

Chapter Two: Those Before Bros

I awoke to the sound of the continuous-use power generators they had built directly adjacent to the bunkhouse. The thumping noise meant a squirrel had gotten caught in one of the fan belts again.

It was seven o'clock. It was morning, or night, or whatever. We slept in shifts, and the compound was perpetually shrouded in the blue twilight of five hundred lumen energy efficient LEDs. They were just bright enough to let you read but somehow never bright enough to keep you from scraping your shoulders on the exposed pipes.

Hörspen was not a Stable, no matter how hard some of the ponies there wished it was. There weren’t any Stables built here because I guess they thought nopony worth saving would choose to live in Berlaska. There were two states in the discontinuous Equestrian Commonwealth of Sequestria, and the one worth saving was Shelberton, the Turtle State. Shelberton got four Stables. So Hörspen had been built thirty years ago when a bunch of ponies found out what the phrase “missed the boat” meant and started getting ideas.

If you were generous, you could say Hörspen was like a Stable except made out of trash and without all that skilled labor, management experience, technology, and infrastructure stuff. If that seemed kind of sketchy, just remember it sounded more reasonable if you pretended that most of the actual Stables had not turned out to be miserable nightmare death traps anyway.

If the Stable program was the quiet girl who kept to herself and mutilated small animals in her room, then Hörspen would be her less-attractive, less-intelligent cousin who had a weird, smelly infection nopony wanted to talk about.

One of the only things Hörspen had going for it was that it was as cold as Cocytus —see what I did there? Pay attention, it’ll be important later— out there and having an insulated self-contained megastructure did a decent job of trapping heat. I mean heat’s not the only thing it trapped, but, like I said, nopony wanted to talk about the infection.

Berlaska only got nuked a little bit in the war, but it made up for it by being naturally cold and worthless. It was pretty much the ice capital of Equestria, and that’s all it really had going for it, more or less. Supposedly seventy-nine percent of Berlaska was just ice, and me and a handful of idiots lived in the warmer twenty-one percent. I’d been stuck there my whole life, so, in the absence of anything better to do, I just scraped away.

I made my way to the cafeteria, which, in the same vein of inspiration as the bunkhouse, sat on top of the waste processing center. Seven hundred and fifty calories of lukewarm mixed-starches gruel had my name on it. You have no idea how much lumpy, oily, salty gruel seven hundred and fifty calories constitutes. Aromatic hydrocarbons from downstairs added a unique kick.

I have to eat every day… for the rest of my life, I thought. Gross.

As I started to chow down, a hoof struck me at the nape of my neck.

“What up, gaywad?” Yam said as he leaned in hard on my shoulder.

The air was filled with the acrid tang of expired bodyspray. Letting Yam into Hörspen had been a mistake.

“Nah, I’m just messin’ with you, bro,” he said. “I know you don’t ride donkey sticks. But your walk is a little fruity, though, just sayin’.”

I looked up at him. Why him? I thought.

“I’m just sayin’.”

“Hey, Yam,” I said.

“Don’t fucking call me that, buttmunch!” he said. He hit me again.

“So… ‘bro.’” I said, “you’ve been for like a month now. Don’t you have someplace to be or something to do?”

“Nah, bro. Epsilon Delta is chill with me hangin’ here,” he said. He popped the collar on his E ∆ jacket and pointed at a table of mares who were doing their best to ignore him. “I mean, look at all this poon. How could they tell me to leave?”

He paused for second, looked back at the mares, and burst into laughter. “… something to do! Oh, I get it! You’re the best, bro!” he said.

“So what’s the deal with you and Epsilon Delta?” I said. It wasn’t the first time I’d asked this question, but his answers were usually hilarious.

“Epsilon Delta is the smartest, raddest, baddest brotherhood on the planet,” he said. “We collect and protect math. Like all kinds of math. We got all kinds of guns too, so nopony gets any ideas about stealing any math. And we learn it too, so it stays in our libraries and in our brains.

“And most importantly, ‘cause we’re not losers, we throw wicked ragers every night.”

“What, like math like an epsilon-delta proof?”

“Exactly, dude! Dude, when I do leave here, you should totally come with. You need to loosen up, but we’ll get you laid a couple times and you’d be a sweet Epsilon Delta brother.”

“I don’t know, bro. I’m a little weak on my proofs. Maybe you could teach me?”

“No prob, bro! The epsilon-delta proof says that for any polysyllabic function of x with the degree n, where n is greater than two, there must exist at least one value of x for which the function equals zero, but—”

“That’s the fundamental theorem of algebra,” I said. “And not even that, really.”

“Please don’t say things like that, it harshes my mellow, bro.”

Seriously, can that dude not say a sentence without using the word “bro”? I thought. Ugh, how annoying. Doesn’t he realize he sounds like an asshole?

_____

Once I’d fed the beast and ditched Yam, I started walking to the reactor. I scraped my shoulders on the pipes. Rounding the corner I ran into somepony face first.

Please don’t be Flanders. Please don’t be Flanders. Please don’t be Flanders.

Even without Yam living in Hörspen made you a tired and cranky pony, and being stuck with nine hundred other tired, cranky ponies is like compounding interest for misery. The only thing that could make life worse was having to live in Hörspen with Flanders. Flanders is a pegasus pony. She isn't a Dashite, so my guess is her parents probably just left her down here after they realized the enormity of their mistake, or maybe she was just too fat for clouds.

But I was in luck! It wasn’t Flanders. It was Romeo Bravo! We exchanged hoof-bumps.

“Sup, crah?” I said (Crah = crab + brah. Romeo and I formed the Crab Science Club, long story).

“Not much, crah. Zulu was able to get the centrifuges running early so I get an extra twenty minutes of free time. I thought I’d fill my canteen at the, uh, canteen. Reactor?”

“Yeah,” I sighed.

“I can get water later, I’ll walk with you.”

“So, Romeo, how’s the leg?”

“Incredibly painful to the point of disabling.”

“Damn, still?”

“Charlie, I tore my flexor tendon,” he said. “With diligent physical therapy the best I can hope for is a lifetime of joint instability and occasional pain. Just so you know, I’m never leaving the dome with you again. Ever.”

“I’m sorry, crah,” I said.

Awkward silence followed us as we walked through the aquaponics center. The ponies who tended the racks were scooping up fish and pond scum alike to be processed in the bioreactors into either the nitrogen or methane reagents for fertilizer and other chemical processes. The aquaponics center was the only place in Hörspen with sun lamps, and the bright light let me see Romeo’s furrowed face in glorious detail.

Finally he broke the silence. “Oh, by the way, I finally got in contact with Iris. We figured out why nopony’s heard about the Epsilon Delta gang.”

“Oh?”

“It’s because nopony actually calls them ‘Epsilon Delta’ outside of Epsilon Delta. They’re called the ‘Bronies’ by everypony else. Just don’t call Sweet Potato a Brony or he’ll probably kill you—they don’t like that.”

Next time I get the chance I am totally calling Yam a Brony, I thought.

“And the math thing?” I said.

“Nah, they’re just another gang with a gimmick, like the Daggers,” he said. “Their home turf is supposed to be a university’s math department, but Iris has only heard stories of them taking chems and shooting ponies. It’s all shibboleth.

“I still have no idea what Sweet Potato is doing all the way up here, though, crah.”

We made it to the reactor, and Romeo went off to do his centrifuge stuff.

“Later, crah,” I said.

_____

I did not like the reactor. I signed up for it because when I was a foal I thought I could use the reactor to make giant ants. Apparently it was actually Flux appropriation that handled doing that, but by the time I figured that out it was already too late.

Oh, what might have been.

The reactor was an old training reactor they salvaged from the chemistry department of Troy University. Back before the war it was meant to be a training aid that even ponies who went to Troy couldn’t screw up, so by design it was about as useless and impotent as a nuclear reactor could be. The only things it could do were be a reactor and heat water to room temperature, so we used it to keep our pipes from freezing. We did this in June. I don’t make the rules, I just press the buttons.

Some ponies freak out about reactors, but on the list of all the things that could kill you in the wasteland nuclear radiation ranks somewhere between getting hit by lightning and toxic brain mold. Taint? Magical radiation? Mutagenic ooze? Lasers? You're boned. Need to cross a room full of alpha-source contamination? Slap some paper bags on your hooves and go on through. Wear one on your head to complete the look. Just don't eat the bags when you're done and you'll be fine.

Well, okay, maybe that was a bit of an exaggeration, but if nuclear radiation exposure is on the top of your priority list you are having a good day, and my point is that working with reactor technology was neither dangerous nor exciting. It wasn't exactly involved work either. You sat next to the other operator and you had to watch three meters and every once in a while press one of six buttons on the console, so it left a lot of time for hobbies and getting annoyed with Flanders.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that the other reactor operator was Flanders. There was one thing worse than living in Hörspen with Flanders, and that was working with Flanders. For the last two years of my life I've had to spend ten hours of nearly every single damn day sitting next to her in the control room of the reactor. The very fact that she was qualified for the same job that I have does horrible things to my self esteem.

As I donned my dosimetry I prepared myself for another soul-crushing day behind the console. But being the of sort who tries to make lemonade from urine, I reminded myself that I could work on revising the Actaeon code to distract myself from having to look at Flanders’s stupid hair.

But as I entered the control room I saw something amazing: Flanders wasn’t there!

Could this be a dream? I thought.

Then I saw the note. There was a memo taped to the multitrend. The badly-printed ditto sheet still reeked of solvent.

MANDATORY MEETING

20: 15 in top dome

punch & cookies

—H.H.

_____

Chapter Three: Hobby Horse

Pretty much every pony my age in Hörpsen was in the room.

Oh no! I thought, Have they called us here to reveal that Hörspen is overpopulated and the only way to survive is by thinning out the population by pairing us up to fight in hoof-to-hoof combat to the death?

I realized that that cloud had a silver lining.

“Alright, everypony, shut up,” Hotel Hotel said. Nopony was talking. I think he just wanted to feel powerful. With satisfaction, he surveyed the silent crowd.

A crudely drawn triangle appeared on the projector.

“I’m sure you all recognize Mt. Moriah,” he said. “And I’m sure you’re all familiar with the Snowdark atop it.”

After struggling to center the projector, the A/V aide drew a little black dot on the upper part of triangle.

“A cache of supplies has supposedly been secured in the Snowdark, and I, as the boss, have decided that it is critically important we recover it if it exists.

“So I need somepony to go check it out. Head south down the Dalton Highway, climb Mt. Moriah, talk to the contact, and come back and tell us if the supplies are really there. Three days round trip, very simple. Your reward will be me not bitching you out for skipping out on a half-week of your duties.”

The projector switched to a photo of a bag of chips and a box of breakfast cereal.

“Of particular interest are the Watercress chips and Strawberry GeckO’s,” Hotel Hotel said. “Ask for them by name. Their flavors are supposed to be heavenly.”

A vacant “What.” came loudly from the back of the room. Grumbling ponies slowly began to file out of the room. A unicorn, out of spite, grabbed all of the punch and cookies by the door.

Hotel Hotel watched the exodus for about a minute before he said, “Any volunteers? Anypony?”

Three days outside with no Flanders? Sign me up! I thought.

“Three days outside with no Flanders? Sign me up!” I said.

“Flanders, will that work with you?” Hotel Hotel said.

Flanders went on and on about how she and the trainee could run the reactor while I was gone. I really hated it when she tried to manipulate me by making a show of how accommodating and reasonable she was.

“We’ll be using the buddy system. Who wants to be Charlie’s buddy?” Hotel Hotel said.

Hesitant murmuring filled the room. Ponies looked at the ground. Hotel Hotel looked around, becoming more and more exasperated as the tension built.

“Romeo Bravo!” he said. Romeo looked up, startled.

“You two are friends, right?” Hotel Hotel said.

“I don’t like where this is headed,” Romeo said.

“Sounds like a yes to me! There, that does it, you go with him!” Hotel Hotel said. “It’s settled! You can all go now. Meeting dismissed!”

Nearly everypony had already left.

One of the ponies who had stayed started to walk up to me. Not him, I thought. I pretended not to see him, and I made my way to the exit.

If I could just get myself behind Crystal Clear, he’d have—

“Charlie! I have a quest for you, for you to do in addition to your main quest!”

Damn it.

“Hi, Pizza Hut,” I said.

“My secret sources tell me that there exists a knick-knack collector who is currently inhabiting a settlement out on the on that winding road that they call the Dalton Highway, and if the gods of random chance have been so benevolent as to see fit to favor me, this aforementioned collector might have a RuPony Kenshin wallscroll that he may be willing to part with for the right price, and obviously, you getting me one would be a crowning moment of awesome,” he said.

What is it with today and ponies who think they’re gonna find their heart’s desire within eighty kilometers of their bedroom? Don’t they know we’re living in a wasteland? I thought.

“Here, take this, it may help you on your quest. It may take you into absolute territory.” He pushed one hundred and fifty-two “bitcoins” into my hoof. “On behalf of the fandom, I thank you for this epic deed.”

What the fuck are bitcoins? Is this supposed to be money?

“I don’t know, Pizza Hut,” I said. “RuPony Kenshin really isn’t my thing….”

“Oh, don’t worry your little head. One day you’ll like it,” he said. He let out a weird shuddering chuckle. “They always come around. RuPony Kenshin is just too awesome. You’ll be part of the nakama soon enough.”

Before I could get a word in, he turned around. “Oh, wait till I tell Spaghetti!” he said to himself as he walked away.

_____

We stood at the stoop of the supply shed. It was adventure time, but first we had to gear up. I loved gearing up! Getting all that stuff together and making sure it all was ready always made me feel like such a badass.

I lugged the barrel of hominy over to my saddlebags. I unscrewed the lid, but I pawed at the sack inside the barrel. The knot was just too tight, and the burlap was just too slippery! I tipped the barrel over to get better access to the sack. I managed to pinch my hoof under the barrel as it came down, but I accomplished little else.

I got up on my hindlegs to try working it with both hooves. It was a precarious balancing act, but after much struggling I finally undid the sack of hominy. In my brief moment of elation I lost focus on keeping my balance. I tumbled backwards and fell off the stoop into a puddle of mud. Hominy scattered everywhere!

Defeated, I slumped down and wallowed in the mud. I wiped the sweat from my brow. “There’s got to be a better way!” I said, shaking my head as I rubbed my bruised hindside.

“There is,” Romeo said. “Just pay attention to what you’re doing.” Romeo’s well-organized saddlebags and gear sat neatly on the table.

Once we’d gotten our supplies in order, Romeo and I went back inside and got to work on preparing our Actaeon boxes for the journey. It was going to be an exciting opportunity to point Actaeon at stuff, but we had to pull out all the stops if we wanted to keep the system running for three days.

Actaeon was our little pet project and bonding activity. It was a saddle mounted battlefield control system. One night we got bored while reading some StableTec promotional literature, and we decided we’d see if we could fake a PipBuck computer using our own only-very-slightly-water-damaged Flim&Flam Fun-D-mental 550 semi-portable computers.

Actaeon works kinda sorta like SATS and EFS, which are two pieces of boring incomprehensible StableTec technobabble that, blah, blah, blah, long story short, make finding and murdering things ludicrously convenient.

Actaeon could tell us where the bad guys were after we tagged them, and it could even shoot our guns for us. Romeo designed and built the hardware modules, and I was responsible for everything else. It was our lovechild, and like any baby it was a little finicky.

The trigger wire on the feedback escape prism had come loose again. At least it didn’t snap this time, I thought as I wound it back up. We had to put the prism in because the Actaeon targeting module had a bad habit of trying to shoot itself. In certain situations the targeting module could mistake the sensor scans of another Actaeon module as its own, and it would conclude that it was its own target.

The computer would then try to solve this existential crisis by firing continuously until it received mechanical intervention.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I knew exactly what the problem was, but fixing it would mean me having to go through a bunch of code and would probably mean me swapping 1s and 0s a million jillion times. So instead we just hooked up a prism on a little lever that temporarily disconnected the targeting module from the gun servos every time the module got too excited. It was a simple, easy, and reliable solution.

I disassembled the battery case. I looked for any leaky envelopes or misaligned heatsink contacts as I went over every cell. Acrylic sealant and pair of pliers corrected the defects, and I topped-off the cells that were low on conveyant. Finally I went over everything again with a file to make sure it all fit back in the case. I closed the latch, and the battery hummed to life as the gemstones inside expanded into their mounts.

With the salvaged military batteries retrofitted to our FDm 550s, we expected we’d able to power the machines for up to a week. However, the Flim&Flam Fun-D-mental 550 model semi-portable computer was never meant to stay on for more than seven hours.

Once we’d set up Actaeon modules there’d be no way to get at the power switch of the FDm without having to disassemble the whole apparatus. Unless we got lucky and found a clean, hard surface to take apart the Actaeon boxes, we were going to have to run them non-stop for the next three days. My theories on the consequences ranged from “negligible loss of efficiency” to “fire.”

But those were just minor hiccups. On a good day Actaeon was a pretty dangerous thing. Nopony would mess with us with Actaeon. All in all we were very proud.

_____

I would have liked to have begun my journey at the top of the dome where its superstructure intersects with the railway bridge. The massive gates would open, maybe with some horns blowing. We would cross the bridge, a metaphor for the journey into the unknown and personal development, and look across the canyon. From the panoramic viewpoint we would see the whole of Berlaska and the all the various kinds of dumb stuff in it.

Instead we left from one of the hatches in the sarcophagus where they dumped all the trash and vented all the smells. There were some powerful smells. Three ponies came to say goodbye to us. There was Zulu, Romeo’s boss from the centrifuge room; Drizzy, the exchange student from Drive-Thru Canyon; and Chang Ling, the exchange student from I forget where.

“I’m proud of you, Romeo,” Zulu said. “Iris and Tree Urchin couldn’t make it to say goodbye, but they told me to send you their best. Bumble Puppy said he was coming, but you know how he is.”

“Keep it real, Romeo,” Drizzy said. “Tomorrow night’s Risk game is gonna suck without you. Say, are we still going to uh….” Drizzy stopped to look for spies. Then he leaned in close to whisper something into Romeo’s ear. When Romeo nodded Drizzy said, “Right, they won’t know what hit ‘em!”

“Oh, Romeo…” Chang Ling said, and she hugged him tight. “Keep me in your heart!”

Ew, clingy. They’re not even dating, I thought. What’s her deal?

And with that they waved goodbye and headed back inside. We were alone. It was just me, Romeo, and the open road. Or at least that’s what I hoped. I really didn’t want the smell to follow us around, too.

_____

A few hours later out in the fields we passed by some villager ponies tending to their Bokanovsky Grasses. The overladen red, green, and amber stalks of the different Grasses shimmered and swayed in the breeze. The long summer days meant they could get in about eight crop rotations of Grass in the season, which was enough to fill our larders for the whole year and then some.

We had the mother cultivars for most of the nutrient grains, and that was really the whole reason why Hörspen even existed. Heat conservation was chump change. The cultivars gave us a secure source of food and capital. We sold the cuttings, which are sterile and annual, on a subscription basis to the local communities in exchange for equipment or supplies. Since most families didn’t have anything we’d want to buy anyway, most of the time we’d give them the cuttings in exchange for part of the resultant harvest and call it square.

From Manehattan to Shelberton City Grass was king, and the more mother cultivars you had the better. Without it we would all be eating tins of ossified Cram like they do in CrasherSmasher.

The Bokanovsky Grasses were engineered to complement each other and grow together, and outside of the nitrogen-fixing Grasses nothing short of industrial fertilizer on a pre-war scale could supply the staple grains with the nutrients they needed to grow. This was not an option. Even before the life-stifling darkness and cold came, the miracle Grass was useless without it.

No nitrogen-fixing Grass meant no food on the table. Only Halibut City had the mother cultivars for the nitrogen-fixing Grasses, they had like everypony with a monopoly on a cultivar, they kept it that way. And that meant Halibut City was the queen bee.

Things in Hörspen had been pretty tense with them ever since that time when we broke Mr. Potato Head. We were lucky that we the heavy equipment to run the old industrial Haber-Bosch process for nitrogen fixation, so we were able make our own fertilizer after they stopped selling their cuttings to Hörspen. We might have been able to scrape by without their nitrogen-fixing Grasses, but for anypony else pissing off Halibut City like that would have been a death sentence.

The logistics of making all that fertilizer and then selling and distributing all of it to our client-farmers was a hassle, but it was probably for the best. In principle I thought it was better to be out from under the yoke of those Junkers, anyway. Freedom is what’s really important in life.

_____

The dusty dirt trail of the farmlands petered out, and we found ourselves walking through shrubland. I ended up getting like fifty different kinds of burrs in my hair, but we pressed on until we finally stepped onto the Dalton Highway.

Concrete and asphalt didn’t last half a minute without maintenance out here, but the Dalton Highway was special. You could feel it. The road was warm underhoof. The road was crackled and flaked, but its core was intact. The broken chunks of road stayed put like iron on a magnet. I tried kicking a small lump of asphalt, but all I did was hurt my leg.

Nature made no attempt to encroach upon it. No plants grew on the highway. It wasn’t like there was poison leaking from the road. There was no slow die-off. On either side the grass thrived, but past a certain point it all just stopped at once like it had been manicured.

As we made our way further south, the spell or whatever that was maintaining the road started to falter. Gaps formed in the highway, and the grass filled them in vindictively. As if trying to make a point the invading grass grew thicker and taller than the grass adjacent to the highway. The road turned into a long line of Morse code laid out in asphalt. Romeo and I made a game of trying to decipher messages in the road fragments.

We descended down a gentle slope into a marshy basin. Unhealthy, discolored reeds stretched into the horizon along the valley to the west and east. The bleached trunks of pine trees stood like tombstones in the mottled carpet of reeds. Impervious to the sinking ground the augmented highway formed a bridge through the soggy wetland.

We kept our eyes on the sky. Marshes were dracula territory. I kept watch ahead, and Romeo followed walking backwards to scan from behind. Any one of those dead trees could hide a dracula nest, and out on open ground we were vulnerable.

We made it out of the marsh and onto the southern slope of the valley, and we both breathed a sigh of relief. But as we made it to the top we realized that we hadn’t gotten out of the valley at all. All we had done was climb over a hill within it. The rest of the marsh extended out in front of us. Even worse, the segment ahead was easily three times longer than the basin we’d just crossed.

But parallel to the road and only a few kilometers to the east there was a gray forest of toppled concrete pillars that ran across the length of the valley. They were the ruins of some sort of massive building complex, I imagined. We decided it would be safer to cross the marsh through the ruins than out on the road.

As we made our way through the ruins the pillars grew in on each other and became crowded and disfigured. It became a struggle to get through them, and soon we were walking through a shadowed forest of concrete thorns. Tiptoeing over stone caltrops, we ducked under warped branches and made passage through the choked fissures in the entanglement. The crumbling concrete was wound around the rebar like it was the bark of a knotted bough.

These weren’t ruins. Tormented faces of screaming and crying ponies were carved in bas relief on each trunk. The rusting metal left streams and pools of sanguine stains on their faces. Marsh birds, with clawed feet and filthy, distended bellies, roosted on the thorns. Their harpy-like cries joined with the dolorous moan of the wind that passed through the forest.

Smaller monuments littered the ground under the thicket. Asymmetric, jagged plaques carried infographics depicting ponies running from the thorns. Messages in every language were written on misshapen columns. The largest legible one read:

THIS PLACE IS NOT A PLACE OF HONOR

NO HIGHLY ESTEEMED DEED IS COMMEMORATED HERE

NOTHING VALUED IS HERE

WHAT IS HERE WAS REPULSIVE TO US

SHUN THIS PLACE

I guessed they didn’t see the world getting nuked when they designed the place. The impact is kind of lost when half the cities in the world are ominous lumps of foreboding spikes, too. Romeo suggested we keep moving. I was getting pretty bored as well, so I followed him out and we got back to heading south through the forest. The columns thinned out as we headed south, and somepony had even cleared a path. We made quick progress. From where the forest ended it was just a short sprint up the slope to get out of the valley.

_____

We still walked back-to-back for about an hour after leaving the marsh, but things relaxed from then on out. As the day wound down, we came across a caravan of brightly-colored motorhomes parked at the Gobbler’s Knob rest stop.

Heaps upon heaps of pink, blue, green, and yellow insulation had been glued or stapled onto the outside of each motorhome. Spherical to reduce surface area, the motorhomes looked like giant balls of cotton candy. Behind the homes were newer log cabins, and a modest plot of Hörspen Grass cuttings struggled to grow in the acidic soil.

Amidst the spindly weeds that grew from the concrete, a stout, balding pony was doing laundry under the skeleton of a pavillion.

“Well hey there, fellas,” he said. “Y’all ain’t in a hurry are you? It’s getting late, and I know there ain’t nothing down south for hours. Come keep me company, and y’all can stay here for the night.”

He seemed legit. Would a bad pony own a dolphin duvet cover? Never.

“They call me Swap Meat,” he said. “Who’re you two?”

We introduced ourselves.

“Romeo Bravo? Oscar Charlie? Those are Hörspen names, ain’t they? What are you up to outside the dome?” he said.

“Apparently, there’s breakfast cereal for sale up on the Snowdark,” Romeo said. “We’re supposed to go bring some back.”

“It’s pretty much as dumb as it sounds,” I said. “So, do you live here?”

“Me? A Knob Goblin? I sure hope not!” Swap Meat said and laughed. “Only ponies that live here is the Duggle family.” He gestured over at one of the motorhomes, which was rocking back and forth. From the sound of it, there were at least a dozen ponies in just that one tiny little vehicle.

Swap Meat leaned in close to whisper, “There’s sixty-three ponies living in Gobbler’s Knob. All of them is Duggles. I don’t know how there got to be so many of them just on their own, and frankly I don’t want to know.”

“And by ‘don’t want to know,’ I mean ‘already do know,’” he said. “And it’s a’cause of the fact that they’s in bed with the bread. Know what I mean, jellybean?”

“Yes,” I said.

No, I thought, but I said yes because that’s called being polite.

He said, “But they let me park my truck here, so good on them. I’m here only ‘cause I been trying for months to crack into that damn depot up north, but let me tell you they built that place up something fierce. Sturdy as it is spooky, I tell you what.”

He dragged his pillowcase in circles through the milky suds. “Honestly, I think I’ve have enough of that damn place,” he said. “If I couldn’t get into it by now, I ain’t never getting in there.”

“Aw, don’t say that,” I said. “Never give up on your dreams!

Swap Meat took a break from laundry to think. “Sulddurn it, you’re right! And I got dynamite I been savin’ this whole time, too.” He dropped the little scrubby-brick like it was a mic.

“See?” I said. “There you go!” Breathe new life into a dream, bring sunshine into somepony’s heart. It feels good to make the world a better place.

“‘bout time I used it! Thanks, kiddo,” he said. “You’re all right.”

They should call me the ‘Dream Defibrillator,’ I thought.

Romeo looked nervous. “Why are you trying to break into that place?” he said.

“Cuz that’s where they put all the Mare Do Well merchandise they couldn’t burn,” Swap Meat said. “I collect all sorts of gewgaws and trinkets and other pre-war Equestriana. Then I put ‘em in plastic bags and keep ‘em in my truck so the gypsies can’t get at them. Somepony has to. It just ain’t safe otherwise.”

“Maybe you should leave that place alone. They sure went through a lot of effort to ponies out,” Romeo said. “Are you sure it’s just for merchandise?”

“Kiddo,” Swap Meat said and leaned in close, “looks like you don’t know about Mare Do Well.”

“Well if you’re having so much trouble breaking into it, then don’t you think the merchandise would be safer in the depot than in your truck?” Romeo said.

Swap Meat got up and hung his duvet cover on the line without saying a word. He then paced around the motorhomes for a few minutes. When he came back he scrubbed, and kept scrubbing, his pyjamas into the washboard until most of the water was on the concrete. He didn’t speak to us again until after everything had been put to dry

_____

Swap Meat’s truck had gotten a little wider since the day he had first parked it in Gobbler’s Knob. Swap Meat probably had too, but that was a just a guess. Various tools were strewn around the outside of the truck, and a lean-to was hooked on each side of the trailer. Swap Meat invited us into his truck’s trailer for dinner. Inside the trailer were poorly secured shelves loaded with boxes and tied off grocery bags, and there were various tools strewn around the inside of the truck, too.

Swap Meat lived the truck’s cab, so we all sat on saran wrapped pachinko machines. Mine had pictures of bears, bees, and honey on it. Romeo’s was chocolate cake themed.

Swap Meat’s, however, was really weird. It just had a boring picture of a generic-looking blue pony on it, but there was something vaguely creepy about her. The more I looked at her, the more uncomfortable I got.

He laid out the meal on a life-size laminated cardboard cutout of a ridiculously broad-shouldered stallion wearing one of those ruffly pirate shirts that exposed his whole chest. Swap Meat told us that that was Candlelight Ecstasy, a protagonist from a popular series of romance novels.

I inspected the stallion. Candlelight as a character had all the depth of a cardboard cutout. He was he perfect provider and protector built to inspire the fantasies of disappointed and unfilled mares everywhere.

His rock-hard abs would be the sexual bedrock of the relationship, and the confident and nurturing eyes let you know he was the kind of boyfriend who would accept you even after you confessed that you lost your virginity to your old ex-boyfriend, whom you actually didn’t really like, because you weren’t over your last ex-boyfriend and you went with the sure thing because you needed to feel less vulnerable.

But Candlelight looked like the kind of pony who waxed, so I had trouble taking him seriously. Maybe it would be an important plot point in the book where he’s a werewolf or something, I thought. Still he was charming in his own campy way. It’d be fun to hang him up in the control room.

“You know,” Swap Meat said, “the best thing about living all the way out here is that it gives me plenty of time for... mastication.”

He chuckled to himself and looked at us expectantly.

Romeo looked at the green pieces of tree bark on the makeshift table. “So, what are we eating tonight?” he said.

“This right here is some World-Famous Duggle Family Drymeat,” Swap Meat said. He seemed serious.

We were both treated to a rancid-tasting serving of World-Famous Duggle Family Drymeat. Romeo tried to be polite by finishing it off. I try not eat foods I don’t have macronutrient data for, and I didn’t have anything on green meat. I went for my dried hominy.

I scrabbled at the drawstring on the bag for about a minute, but it just wouldn’t open. I lost control of the bag and the thing went flying. Hominy scattered everywhere!

It keeps happening, I thought. It took a while to pick up all the hominy, but it was still pretty good even if some of it had mud and lint on it. Also I was pretty sure mud counted as at least a couple grams of fiber.

“Hominy, eh?” Swap Meat said. “I like hominy myself, especially when I… masticate.”

He waggled his brow in anticipation.

I looked around the trailer to avoid making eye contact. I noticed a cork board titled “Swap Meet’s Greatest Finds” that had a bunch of pictures of Swap Meat holding various kinds of worthless junk. I figured now was a good of a time as any to ask him.

“Hey, so you’re a collector right?” I said.

“Yeah, you could say I’m a collector,” he said. “But you know, my favorite thing is... masticating.”

He hung on that last word with an exaggerated smile.

“You don’t happen to have a RuPony Kenshin wall scroll, do you?” I fished out the bitcoins. “I’m supposed to give you this.”

He gaped in amusement. “Bitcoins? Oh wow, really? Well, that’s a first.” He took a close look at the bitcoins. “Wow, a hundred and fifty-two bitcoins? Somepony really must have bet the farm on this. Hell, the world ending probably did them a favor.”

“What are they?” I said.

“Well, you ever heard of Tulip Mania?”

“No.”

“How about the Cupcake Bubble?”

“No.”

“Friendship Explosion?”

“No.”

Swap Meat paused to recollect his thoughts. Clearly he didn’t get the answers he was looking for.

“Well, uh, bitcoins were supposed to be an alternative currency to bits, for some reason,” Swap Meat said. “Ain’t like the bit wuddn’t already a coin. Don’t know how it was supposed to work, don’t think it really matters now.

“Well, one day bitcoins suddenly became worth a lot of money. Hell, you could buy a helicopter with a hundred and fifty-two bitcoins, and a real one, not just one of those pedal-copters, either.

“So a bunch of ponies bought bitcoins thinkin’ they could sell the bitcoins later for even more money and get rich. Those ponies was called speculators, ‘cause they tried to get a good look at what was in the future with a tool called a speculum.

“But then one day, quick as they came, all the bitcoins became worthless, and anypony left holding the bag ended up in the poorhouse.

“That’s what we in the business like to call a bubble, in honor of the first speculators, the brave pioneer ponies who lost their livelihoods speculating on soap, and whose sacrifice we will never forget.

“Like I mentioned earlier, the same thing later happened with tulips, cupcakes, and friendship. And bitcoins.

“Anywhoozle, the moral of the story is ‘Buy low, sell high.’”

“So are the bitcoins worth anything now?” I said.

“Well, normally, no,” he said. “But these are crazy times we’re living in. Some ponies—” he narrowed his eyes hatefully “—out there would use these bitcoins for evil. And normally I don’t do trades, but maybe I can swap this out with you for something a little less dangerous. Meet you in the middle. After all, heh-heh, that’s my name.”

Sure, dude, I thought, whatever you say.

Swap Meat rummaged around his truck for about twenty minutes. He had to go over each box at least twice. Meanwhile, I couldn’t help but stare at that blue pony on the pachinko machine. She was weirding me out. Fuck.

"Okay! Here’s what I got!” Swap Meat said finally. “Here’s your RuPony Kenshin wallscroll. For thoroughness’s sake I also have to mention I found this RuPony Kenshin body pillow too, but that’s not for sale. Body pillows is powerful stuff, and honestly, kiddo, I don’t think you’re ready to handle it.”

I was about to trade for the wallscroll. Then I saw a thing. “What’s that?” I said. “I want that.”

Swap Meat climbed up to grab the package off the shelf. “This is a Gyrobowl. Trust me, kiddo, you don’t want a Gyrobowl.”

“Yes I do. Give it to me,” I said. “No. Give me two.”

“I thought you wanted the wallscroll? Are you sure you don’t want that? You can’t have all three.”

“Are kidding? It comes with a lid!”

He shrugged. “Well okay, if it means that much to you….”

I cradled my new Gyrobowls.

Yes, I thought. Yes!

Swap Meat looked us over. “Say, while we’re trading,” he said. “You boys don’t happen to have any rope, do you?”

“Rope?” Romeo said. “No. Do you need some?”

“Me? It’s you who needs rope!” Swap Meat said. “Two ponies out in the wilderness with no rope? What is the world coming to?”

“I don’t think we need rope,” I said.

“You don’t need rope?” Swap Meat said. “You always need rope. It’s one of the basics. Brush your teeth. Wear deodorant. Carry rope. This is kindergarten stuff! What if you ran into mountain ponies or the Hill Witch? For goodnessakes, what if you needed to hang somepony?”

Romeo was aghast. “Why would we ever need to hang somepony?” he said.

“Well, clearly, you’ve never been in a survival situation,” Swap Meat said. “Y’all probably pour the milk in before the cereal, don’t you?”

“Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll throw in some rope for free. You two tie any knots?”

Romeo and I looked at each other and blinked.

“Well, I’ll teach you. Let’s start now,” Swap Meat said. “Romeo, you come over here. I’ll demonstrate on you, and then you two can practice on each other.”

_____

After an increasingly uncomfortable evening under Swap Meat’s tutelage, Swap Meat let us sleep in the cab of his truck while he slept in the trailer. I don’t know if he was just being polite or if he didn’t trust us around his collectables, but either way we were thankful.

He’d even cleaned out the cab, too. Swap Meat had make like four trips to get out all of his teddy bears and beanbag pets. Romeo offered to help, but Swap Meat insisted that we didn’t touch anything. Swap Meat slept with a lot of stuffed animals.

He did a decent job, but he forgot some stuff. The stuff he left behind was mostly just junk, but there was also this brown unicorn plushie on the dash. I even didn’t realize it was there until we caught him trying to sneak into the truck cab to come back for in the middle of the night.

_____

Chapter Four: The Natural Condition

In the morning I awoke with some blisters, a dubious new skillset, and, most importantly, two Gyrobowls.

“How you doin’, Romeo?” I said as we scooted out of the truck cab.

“Sore. Really sore,” Romeo said.

“Yeah, me too.”

“No, not you too,” he said. “This is ‘torn tendon’ sore. Now if you excuse me I’m going to have to do my exercises now, the ones that I’ll have to do every day for the rest of my life because of you.”

“Awkward.”

Romeo went out on the pavilion to do his controlled wiggling movements for the next fifteen minutes. At the start he’d turn around every so often just to glare at me, but after a while his mind started to wander and he started telling me about the dream he had the night before.

In the dream he was a little filly, and he solved mysteries after school. He found out there was a secret group that turned ponies into trees. The group was led by the Day Mare and the Night Mare, who were kinda like the princesses, but really they actually totally weren’t. He ended up getting captured by them, and he got forced to eat the magic acorn that turned you into a tree, and he got turned into a tree.

But after he became a tree he learned that the group was actually a secret society sworn to protect the world. Then a hurricane happened and this giant tank-gorilla hybrid showed up, and he and the other trees had to go fight it. Then he woke up.

“Oh, one time I had a dream where I was trapped on beach full of seals,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, like seals bumper-to-bumper as far as the eye could see.”

“Was it scary?”

“Oh, terrifying. Like I didn’t know what to do ‘cause if I moved it’d probably provoke a seal, and seals are pretty violent right?”

“I think it depends on the kind of seal.”

“Well, these were dream seals, which are probably one of the most aggressive kinds of seals.”

“Anyway,” he said with a chipper smile, “I think I’m ready to go now. You almost packed up?”

“Yeah, just a second. One last thing to do,” I said.

The colorful plastic gleamed in the morning light. Oh yeah, I thought as I hooked the Gyrobowls to my saddle, this will be so much easier. The internal bowls rotated around on their hinges to keep themselves upright. They were ready to lovingly cup their contents like a mother would hold her foal.

“Screw saddlebags, I got Gyrobowls!” I said as I effortlessly poured all my hominy into my two awesome spill-proof, virtually-indestructable Gyrobowls. I reared up and took off with a sense of confidence I’d never felt before.

Never again.

_____

About fifteen minutes after we left Gobbler’s Knob, I remembered something.

“Hey, Romeo,” I said, “we forgot to turn off Actaeon last night.”

“You’re right. That’s going to be a problem,” he said as he slapped his forehead in frustration.

“Do you want to go back to the truck and do that now?”

“No.”

“Me neither.”

_____

Day turned to twilight the moment we stepped under the dense forest canopy. It was summer, and the seasonal trees were determined to soak up all the light they could. Looking through the forest was like looking at a solid wall of dark green. Despite the gloom the ground was covered in grasses and shrubs, and even the tree trunks were green with moss and lichen.

We were only able to make our way up the overgrown mountain by following the divot that a stream had cut into the slope. Foul-smelling black fungus grew on the rocks around the stream. It crept up the fallen trunks of old trees, and it overwhelmed and smothered the surrounding moss. The slippery fungus spread everywhere as we climbed further up the mountain.

It got so bad that we decided it would be easier to abandon the stream and just bushwhack the rest of the way up. The vegetation was so thick we didn’t realize we were right in front of a slug the size of a bus. It slurped its way through the forest towards us, toppling trees in its wake. It stopped, and it waved its eyestalks at us and made wheezing noises from the hole in the side of its body.

It said, “Sbluerb! Spu, spu, spu delu?”

“I think it’s trying to talk to us,” Romeo said.

“What would a slug have to talk about?” I said. “I don’t trust it. It probably wants to lay its eggs in us. I say we shoot it and move on.”

“Hold up. This is interesting, and you’re terrible,” Romeo said. “I’ve never talked to a slug before.”

Romeo walked up to the slug, and the slug craned its eyestalks down to meet him eye-to-eye. “Sbluerb!”

“If you can understand me, say ‘Splorb,’” Romeo said.

“Sbluerb!” said the slug. “Sbluerb.”

“If you cannot understand me, say ‘Splorb.’”

The slug nodded its eyestalks and said, “Sbluerb!”

They stood around looking at each other for about a minute. At least Romeo did, but I don’t think slugs can stand. Romeo shifted his weight from side to side, and then the slug started to slide away.

“Sberble-berb!” it said.

“Sperble-berb!” Romeo shouted back.

“So what’s the diagnosis, Romeo?” I said.

“Well, I think it’s intelligent. And friendly. It just doesn’t speak English,” he said.

“So, we should shoot it?”

“What do you think?”

“…yes?” I said. “Nopony’s looking. We won’t get in trouble.”

“Don’t shoot the slug, okay?”

“But I—”

“No buts.”

“Fine,” I said.

The slug mowed through the thicket that we had just spent half an hour trying to muscle through. Nothing but bare earth and slime was left in the slug’s wake. We followed its slime trail back up to a slug-shaped hole in the forest that went straight through to the tree line. It was like a road. It was even sparkly, but that was because of the slime.

“See Charlie, you don’t need guns or magic. We have something with us that’s much more powerful than those.” Romeo smiled pleasantly. “Kindness.”

“What kindness? All you did was say, ‘snerble-werb,’” I said.

“Serble-burb.”

“Whatever. The slug had already cleared this path. Had we done it my way,” I said, “we’d still be able to go through it, and the slug would be dead. That’s like cost of opportunity, Romeo. Cost of opportunity.”

_____

Of course, nopony maintained an actual trail up Mt. Moriah, but there was still evidence of foot traffic. We followed the muddy rut through the meadows up the mountain. The long streaks of mud down the steep grassy slope showed us where not to step.

A long-dead glacier had carved a puckered scar along the slope the mountain. In its life the glacier had crushed the rock underneath, leaving a snaking belt of boulders, sand, and gravel in its wake. With the glacier gone the rocks lay bare. Nothing grew in this miniature valley, this moraine, save for the occasional solitary and stunted shrub.

We had to cross it, and that sucked. The footing was treacherous, and many times I nearly lost my balance. My missteps sent rocks tumbling down the moraine. Their clattering echoed through the valley.

I looked up from my feet to see Romeo, prim and proud, perched on a boulder ahead of me.

“Hold up a second,” he said. “I want to try something.”

“Quack!” Romeo yelled. He craned his neck to the valley. A second later the quack echoed back. He pumped his hoof in triumph.

“Quiet!” I said. “You’ll wake up the Hill Witch!”

“Hill Witches are a myth,” Romeo said, “like the Element of Laughter, or voter fraud, or that a quack can’t echo.”

“So?”

“Uh… so?” he said.

“I’m just sayin’.”

He looked down at me.

“What? I said I was just sayin’.”

_____

When we reached the snowline it wasn’t hard to find the Snowdark. It was an abscess in the mountain. The snow flushed from pink to an inflamed red and finally blackened as we reached the ruins of a factory and its company town. Oily discharge still dripped out of holding tanks that had blistered and ruptured.

Each tank had held a different color, and their contents had mixed and congealed to make the foamy tar that stained both earth and snow alike. Residual heat from the chemical spill had burned holes into the snow, and sulfurous fumes and steam wafted from poisoned ground that was left exposed.

Fortunately for us, we didn’t have to go anywhere near that shit. Trader Vic’s was on the periphery of the town. And at the same time it was also in the center of the town.

It turned out there were two towns in the Snowdark. One was the original company town built to service the factory, and the other was a more recent shantyville built off of the buildings on the original town’s outskirts to shelter scavengers.

It was built after the war, but the shantyville had long since been abandoned. It looked like it had been decades since anypony set foot here. The factory itself was in oddly good shape. Large sections of the outside facade were still intact, and their valuable materials remained unlooted despite their accessibility.

The sight of it unnerved me. Hotel Hotel told me that the goo was harmless, unsightly, but harmless. Had the ponies who had lived there known that? Had the tanks ruptured while they lived there? Had it spooked them into evacuating?

Or had the chemical spill already been there when they found it? That seemed more likely to me. The buildings of the shantyville stopped at the border of the chemical stain. Realizing that only unnerved me more. Had some other disaster driven them away? Or what if the chemicals really were dangerous and they had all died a few months after they had settled here?

Hotel Hotel told me it was harmless, but Hotel Hotel was the kind of pony who would lie to you about that if it got him what he wanted. He wasn’t the boss of Hörspen for nothing.

Was it wise of me to trust him? I thought.

Normally I like asking questions, but it’s not so much fun when you’re asking questions of yourself. Why does asking myself questions make me so uncomfortable? I thought. Then I realized why. It was introspection! Introspection is like shooting a laser at yourself in the mirror.

Questions are for making other ponies look stupid! I thought. And if you’re the enemy, then you lose when you win. But if you lose when you’re the enemy, does that mean you win? Ack! No! I have to point my laser at something else.

“Hey, Romeo!” I said.

“What’s up, crah?”

“Do you think the Snowdark is going to kill us?”

“As strange as it sounds, I actually trust Hotel Hotel on this one,” he said. “He wouldn’t order take-out from this place if he didn’t think it was safe. Also, Zulu and Iris weren’t able to find anything suggesting the place is dangerous, and Chang Ling tells me the place used to be some kind of food processing facility. Is this because of the abandoned town?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I mean, this is a town built on top of a mountain in the middle of nowhere with no ready source of drinkable water or means of growing food. I figure there must have been some sort of supply cache or generator, and when that ran out everypony just left.”

“Yeah, but if it was as simple as they just ran out of supplies, don’t you think somepony’d eventually come back?” I said. “It’s not like this place is a secret.”

He paused for a moment to think.

“Okay, well let’s assume the chemicals they made or used here were toxic,” he said. “I’m still not terribly concerned. The stuff has had decades to dissipate or degrade, and toxic waste is more of a chronic exposure kind of deal, anyway. We’re only gonna be here for a couple of hours, so as long as we don’t eat or drink anything or bathe in the goo we should be fine.”

“The cosmic rays we’ve gotten from hiking up here have probably done more damage, anyway,” I said.

“Exactly,” he said. “But it wouldn’t hurt to be careful, though. We might as well treat it as if it was dangerous.”

“So just keep it ALARA,” I said.

“As low as reasonably achievable?”

“See? Aren’t you glad you took the reactor tour? Now tell me, do you remember what Epsilon times P-sub-F times P times P-sub-T-H times F times Eta equals?”

“Charlie, keeping it ALARA means not standing here and asking trivia questions. Let’s go.”

_____

“Trader Vic’s” was painted on a corrugated sheet metal billboard propped up the gutted second story of the original prewar building. At its entrance was an extended foyer of sheet metal and rotting laminated plywood done in the style of an Arabian souq tent. It was a lot less impressive than I had imagined. I had pictured something swanky and exotic hidden away for savvy merchants, and it was pretty obvious whoever built this was trying for that aesthetic, but this was just a worn-out pile of rubble among many.

I wondered how Hotel Hotel decided there’d be snacks here, but then I remembered I was just using this as an excuse to get out of Hörspen and I realized I didn’t care.

The inside was just as ramshackle and dilapidated, and in fact it was actually a little worse because we had to go through like five obnoxious bead-curtain doors to get through the souq tent. Inside the original building there were used heater packets and an unpacked rucksack on the floor.

Whoever lived here wasn’t home, so Romeo figured the sensible thing to do was to wait patiently in the souq tent for whoever it was to get back. I agreed, but I chose to interpret “wait patiently” in a very liberal sense.

The back rooms were filled with trash, mountains of it. I’d never seen so much processed food in my life, and it was pretty ridiculous.

That’s not eating clean, I thought, and I laughed for a good minute after that because that was a good joke.

The food residue on the trash was rotting, but it had yet to be picked clean by scavengers. I got the feeling that at some point in the past few weeks there had been a lot of food here, but it had all been eaten by what had to have been a big group of ponies. I got bored of looking at the trash, and I just sorta stared at the walls for a couple minutes.

There was a door with a keypad lock. Judging from the red light on the handle, I figured it still worked. While that was some impressive engineering, I ignored it. I wasn’t going to waste my time messing around with an old lock. But then I noticed that the paint had worn down on four keys.

That made things a little easier. it narrowed it down from five thousand and forty possible permutations to just twenty-four. Curiosity took hold. This I could justify doing. It was probably some sort of mnemonic, so I tried a couple.

P-O-E-M? No.

I tried it backwards.

M-E-O-P? No.

L-O-R-D? No.

P-O-L-E? No.

F-O-R-K? No.

I ran out of ideas and just started mashing buttons.

6 5 7 3

Three beeps and the lock disengaged. The door swung open, revealing a gutted room filled with broken bottles, soiled blankets, and the world’s most intense piss smell. I wasn’t the first pony to solve The Mystery of the Closet.

However it did look like the preceding Great Detective had generously bequeathed a stash of personal effects for me. A little tin box held a picture of a ritzy unicorn family, a box of crayons, and a white sphere with a tag tied around it. I took a look at the tag. It had something written on it:

Satsuma,

I will miss you terribly. I’m sorry I can’t send more. I want you and Breeze to draw a sunset for me when you get to the Stable. Remember me, and pleas, smile.

I love you

Quilton

Quilton sure had shitty taste in jewelry. I chucked it at the wall. There was a loud crack, and the thing let out an “oooOOOooo” noise as it shattered on the floor.

I wondered what Stable stuff was doing all the way out here, but it probably wasn’t important. What was important was a little mesh bag filled with half-a-dozen plastic eggs. I grabbed them. I figured they contained chocolate or something.

I was getting hungry, and I didn’t really have much else to do, so I opened one of the eggs. Yep, there was chocolate in it.

Unfortunately the chocolate had shriveled up into gray little chocolate raisins. They were most assuredly not chocolate-covered raisins.

There was also a little Rarity figurine in there too. Neat!

I opened the other five.

Rarity.

Applejack.

Rainbow Dash.

Another Rarity.

Rainbow Dash with yellow coat and pink hair.

Most of them I put in my Gyrobowls to trade with Swap Meat. I really wanted that Candlelight Ecstasy standup, and if I walked away with that it would be worth it. However I took the yellow pegasus and wedged it in one of the crevices on my Actaeon module. I don’t know why, and some might have called it superstition, but I felt safer with Flitter hanging out on my battle saddle.

I heard three beeps from outside the door.

“Hey Romeo,” I said. “What’s up crah—”

A pony with a popped-collar gang jacket walked in. He saw the plastic egg shells on the floor and the toys sticking out of my Gyrobowls, and he puffed up like a threatened wolf.

“Bro, what the fuck are you doing with my stuff?” he said.

Then he saw the gun on my saddle. “Aw, shit,” he said, and he ran out the back door.

“Romeo, get out over here!” I shouted.

Romeo came out to meet me on the back porch of Trader Vic’s. The pony in the E ∆ gang jacket ran across the town and into the blackened snow field.

“Follow that Brony!” I said.

“Why?”

“He ran away from me,” I said. “If he ran away from me, then he has to be up to no good.”

“What about the chemical spill?” he said.

“Worry about that later,” I said. “The game is afoot, chase! Quickly!”

“But my leg—”

“Then run slowly!”

_____

Well, at the very least, the black snow isn’t causing a burning, itching sensation, I thought as we crossed over to the dark side. We chased him through the company town to the manufactory proper. Uninspired duplex apartments gave way to cardboard box warehouses. The sides were even corrugated.

The Brony ran into a zig-zagging chain-link fence corridor that fed into the walled-off grounds of one of the factory buildings. I slowed to a trot after I realized he was running right into the wrong end of a one-way turnstile gate.

Is he gonna see it? I thought as he ran towards the dead end.

“Oh, fuck!” he said when he realized the door wasn’t going to turn.

“Now you have to answer for what you’ve done, you villain!” I said. I shouted to get Romeo’s attention.

“Q-quiet!” the Brony said. “You’ll wake the Hill Witch!”

Oh, I thought, he’s one of those.

“DID YOU HEAR THAT, ROMEO? ” I said as Romeo came up behind me.

“Oh, no, no, no! Please! Don’t!”

“I THINK HE’S AFRAID OF THE HILL WITCH,” I said.

“No!” the Brony squealed as he went from zero to ramming speed in about a quarter of a second and charged straight into us. “I don’t want to be a lizard!”

Romeo was able to whirl out of the way, but the Brony plowed through me at full force and knocked me off my feet. By the time I got up again he had ducked around a corner and out of sight.

“She turns you into a goon, you goon!” I shouted at him.

“Well, would you look at that,” Romeo said. “I guess he’s gone now. Can we go now?”

“No, not yet,” I said. “Fortunately, I tagged him on Actaeon. We can search for him all day!”

_____

Chapter Five: Pegasus Device

Actaeon led us up to one of the bigger cardboard-box structures in the complex. We followed the snow tracks down a colorfully painted hallway. A long, kid-friendly mural stretched along the empty corridor. Colts and a clown played ball by the lakeshore as ladybugs and aphids did a cute little Lindy Hop on a lilypad.

Maybe it was just because I didn’t have the innocence of a child or something, but I thought that was a really poorly thought-out mural. I mean, what was that trying to say? Play with your food?

When we got to the end of the hallway we turned right to face the foyer of the factory.

Welcome to:

THE RAINBOW FACTORY

Manufacturer of Organic Foods and Solvents

BUILDING 4 DIRECTORY

Floor 1

↑ Main Lobby

← Break Room

→ Daycare Facility

↑ Factory Floor

← Maintenance

Floor 2

→ Management Suites

← Visitor Center & Museum

“Why did they have a visitor center?” I said. “This is a company town!”

I impersonated a factory worker. “‘Well gee there, squirt, your mother and I are off to work in the Rainbow Factory, but don’t worry, we’ll be just be down the hall. Be good at daycare today, and maybe when we get off work we’ll take you upstairs to see the museum like we did yesterday and the day before! Wouldn’t that be fun?’”

“Maybe it was part of the town’s culture?” Romeo said. “Like Rainbow Factory Building Four wore blue hair nets and Rainbow Factory Building Number Three wore red hair nets. There’s probably a museum for each building.”

“Yeah, and when the Factory Two Conveyor Belts beat the Factory Four Quality Control Inspectors at foosball there was rioting for three days,” I said.

“Hey, don’t joke about that. Eight ponies died.”

“Who builds a factory on top of a mountain, anyway? This whole place is stupid.”

“There was probably some sort of magical jet stream or whatever that made the factory more efficient. Or maybe the products would explode if they weren’t built on a mountain,” he said.

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Well, yeah, that’s why it’s called ‘magic’ and not ‘chemical engineering.’”

Actaeon started squawking to let us know it had a lock on the Brony.

“Okay, three beeps high, two beeps low. He’s on the second floor,” I said.

“Wait, I thought three beeps high, two beeps low was ‘Calibration Required for Multilateration’?’’

“Yeah, it was,” I said, “but I changed it two weeks ago. Now it’s ‘Positive Altitude, Distance and Azimuth Indeterminate.’ I had to rearrange all the squawk codes because I forgot to put in one for ‘Low Battery.’ Didn’t you get my note?”

“No, I never did.”

“Oh, well I guess that explains why you were ignoring the ‘Discharge Inhibitor Overfill’ warning squawk.”

“Wait, what?” he said as the saddle dropped to the floor. “You replaced ‘SSD Core Temperature High-Normal’ with that?”

Romeo pulled a buzzing module out of the Actaeon box, and he tapped the module’s contacts against a metal railing. A red spark leapt from one of the contacts to the railing, and the buzzing stopped. He plugged the thing back into the Actaeon box.

The box let out a squawk and three clicks.

“Is this still ‘Reintegration Successful’?” he said.

“Yeah. Don’t worry not all of them got changed.”

“…okay,” he said as he put his saddle back on.

“Look, trust me,” I said, “it’ll all make more sense when you look at the note I wrote.”

At that point I actually realized that the revision actually didn’t make much sense at all. I could have just added ‘Low Battery’ at the end of the catalogue instead of bumping everything down to put it at the front. But “never let them see you sweat” is like the third rule of friendship communication, so I kept my mouth shut.

_____

We made our way up the stairwell. The staircase ended in the lobby of the factory museum. We paced around the lobby as we made a wide sweep on Actaeon. When both our boxes faced the long corridor to the management suites, Actaeon switched to squawking low beep, three clicks.

“Wait, why is it squawking ‘Logarithmic Meter Range-Up’—I mean, okay he’s ahead of us within five hundred meters in a thirty degree cone,” I said. “That means the management suites. We can hit up the gift shop later.”

The further we got down the hall way, the more red cups littered the floor. Somepony had made little cup walls and little cup pyramids. By the time we got to the end of the hall we were walking through a tiny temple complex made out of plastic cups.

A sloppily written banner hung over the entrance to the management suites.

The top line read “ E ∆,” and beneath that was the motto “Non Legitur.”

The eyes on a miniature metal pony lit up.

“Welcome to— Welcome to— Wel—” said the door robot. “To complete verification— To complete verification— Please insert—” The voice broke into static for several seconds before returning with heavy feedback. “Please— Please recite pi to fifteen digits.”

“Pi to fifteen digits? Why on earth would anypony memorize that? Fifteen is stupid! That’s more than you’d ever need, ever!” Romeo said.

“It’s Epsilon Delta, remember? Of course it’s stupid,” I said. “And actually, fifteen digits is not all that long and there are certain applications in which it can be—”

“Okay, then recite it!”

“Just because I don’t have it memorized doesn’t mean it’s not important.” I said and pouted.

Then brilliance struck.

Finally, I thought. Finally, after all this time, it pays off!

“Wait, Romeo, I got this. Give me a beat.”

“A beat?”

“Yeah, a beat. Bmp bmp bmp tsh.”

Jaw open, he stared at me. Never breaking eye contact, he stomped out a rhythm.

Bobbing my head in time, I approached the door robot.

“Yeah.

“Okay.“I got this pi shit backwards and forwards.“Check it out.“I did three chicks then I pointed at the door,“one walked in and that made it four—”

“ERROR: Password ‘Okay-I-got-this-pi-shit-backwards-and-forwards-check—’ not recognized,” said the robot.

“Oh, fuck this,” I said and turned around to kick down the door.

“Break— Break-in detected. Initiating lasers,” said the robot.

With a rusty screech a multi-barrel laser cannon dropped from the ceiling and began to spin up.

“Why couldn’t you just say the numbers?” Romeo said as we bolted for the stairwell.

“Because that’s not how mnemonics work!” I said. “If I could just say the numbers I wouldn’t need the rap!”

“Why did you memorize the rap?!”

“I thought it would be useful. I thought it would impress somepony.”

I felt kind of bad that we destroyed the Great Pyramid of Kupfu in our escape, but I would have felt worse if it wasn’t for the fact that I was about to get lasered.

We took cover midway down the flight of stairs.

“You could have just written it down and read the numbers,” he said. “You didn’t need to kick down the door! What were you thinking?”

“I wanted to do the rap. It didn’t like my rap, and that made me mad.”

There was an electric screech and a loud pop. I peeked my head around the corner to see what was up. The laser turret dangled from its fixture, and tongues of flame darted from the barrels. The door was covered in soot.

“Well, that was a freebie,” I said.

“It figures they didn’t bother to see if it still worked,” Romeo said.

We walked back up to the door. The body of the doorkeeper robot was wobbling on its floor mount, and it spun around and around, back and forth, on the creaky fixture.

“Buy some apples!” the robot said. “Buy some apples! Buy some apples! Buy some apples! Buy some apples?”

“Um, I’m here to buy some apples,” I said.

“Apples! Apples! Apples! Apples! Apples! Apples! Apples! Apples! Papaya!”

The door swung wide open.

_____

The Bronies had turned the management suites into makeshift dormitories. They were pretty lived-in, and I estimated maybe seventy ponies had been staying there for at least a few weeks. The sour scent of expired bodyspray still lingered in the air, but it looked like it had been a couple days since anypony was last there.

Bronies were sloppy packers. They took their stuff, but they left the mess, which was substantial, behind. It was the kind of thing that would have given a hotel maid a cerebral aneurysm. They were staying in the trashed-out ruins of an abandoned factory, though, so I can’t really blame them for not caring to “leave nothing but hoofprints.”

Midway through the management wing was an observation lobby that looked over the factory floor. In another age, capital would gather in this room to lounge on chaises longues, drink champagne martinis, watch the proles labor, and toast to the end of the middle class.

So unfair only they got to have all that power, I thought.

I imagined myself riding around on a sedan chair, smoking a cigar, and twirling a diamond-tipped cane. A tiny street urchin hobbled up to me on crutches. I motioned to my porters to stop. “Pwease, guv’na. Me gran’s in the ‘opital, and me lih’ul sistah can’t afford no more gruel t’ eat! Alms?” he said. I tossed a bit onto the cobblestones.

“Keep the change, kid!” I said.

“What?” Romeo said.

“Oh, nothing. I was just imagining life in a better world.”

Outside the window, a massive, impractical-looking device dominated the factory floor. Through the scaffolding around it we could see it was full of exposed gears, fan blades, and spiky-roller-crusher things. Hooked chains hung from a ceiling crane above a rusty entry chute. Hoses radiated out from the device and terminated at various smaller processing stations throughout the factory floor.

“Well, that’s a mutilation waiting to happen,” I said.

“Maybe, but those are just its guts,” Romeo said. “Most machines look like horrible nightmare octopuses on the inside, too. Scavengers must have taken apart the housing and all the guards and stuff that keeps you from getting ground up into goo.”

Actaeon’s squawking grew louder as we approached the end of the hallway. The squeals and clicks switched to a continuous buzzing tone when we got to the door to the Junior Sales Offices. We knew he was behind this door, but he had no way of knowing we were there. Thanks to Actaeon, we had the element of surprise!

We kicked down the door, and we got ready to kick that Brony’s ass!

But it wasn’t a Brony! He was a she! And she was a pegasus!

_____

The pegasus walked up to us on arthritic joints. She had a dingy, graying lavender coat and a dingy, graying blonde mane. Fatigue, born from a frail, aging body and a life lived in bitterness, was evident on her hollow face.

She was burned out, but she still burned. Her merciless and dissecting gaze worked us over with unforgiving rigor. It was unnerving. Her sky-blue eyes were so flat and uniform they’d look more natural on demon-possessed doll than on a living pony.

A contemptuous, disapproving frown formed on her face. It was a look I’d come to know very well.

She said something, but I couldn’t hear her over Actaeon’s squawking.

“What?” I said.

She said the something again, angrily this time, but I still couldn’t hear her over Actaeon.

“What? You have to talk louder,” I said.

She said the something while stomping and flaring her wings. I still couldn’t hear her.

“That’s a good start, but you—wait, hold on. I have an idea,” I said. I hit one of the toggles on my saddle and Actaeon went silent. “Okay, you were saying?”

The pegasus was shuddering. She took a moment to compose herself, and the expression on her face simmered down to cold hatred.

“Hörspen ponies?” she said.

“Yes, but how did you know we—” Romeo started to say.

“I didn’t,” she said, “but I guessed on the assumption that the only ponies equipped with battle saddles who wouldn’t have already used them on me would be Hörspen ponies.”

She pointed at a desk and walked towards it. “Come with me,” she said. “If you’re from Hörspen you will want to see this.”

I started followed her, but I startled when I noticed the bloody and barely-breathing body of the Brony we had been chasing was slumped over next to a shattered window. A rock had bashed in his skull. The window’s glass covered his body.

“H-h-hill Witch…” he rasped before he keeled over.

“Is this what you wanted to show us?” I said and stopped, pointing to the glass-covered body.

“No. That’s unimportant. Come here,” she said, but she did look a little proud that I noticed.

“How did you even get in here?” Romeo said. “The only entrance to this part of the building was the one we went through.”

She froze mid step, hung her head down low, and sighed. She gestured at the shattered window with a wingtip.

“Stop asking stupid questions, and read what’s in the damn briefcase,” she said.

On the desk was metal briefcase holding a thick dossier. I took a peek at the cover letter.

“Wait, are they using the Jazz Calendar?” I said.

“That’s what the HJN 11968 means, yeah,” Romeo said.

“Why is everypony using the Jazz Calendar these days?”

“Because the astronomical events the old calendar was calibrated on don’t happen anymore. If we don’t make the switch to the Jazz Calendar in the next fifty years, the days are going to start shifting and we’ll start having time problems,” the pegasus said.

“But it’s so stupid with its arbitrary huge-ass numbers!” I said.

“Take it up with Mr. Jazz,” she said.

Bros, Apr. 4, HJN 11968

its like babe central back in Fetty.

sucks to be you biyotches! boom roasted!

Okay so theres like five places worth talking about in Berlaska.

I ranked them in order of shit wreckableness.

Horntopia is a unicorn only city. Everpony hates them

so we can just reck their shit.

Red Cup says that they pay us extra for unicorns,

so we should wreck their shit.

Horspen is the southest one. Theyre pussies

and we could totally wreck thier shit.

Only reason were not wrecking their shit first

is because its earth ponies and we want the unicorns more.

Halibut City has good cherrychangas

but thats all thats important.

Has a gang, not a big one. Its a big city

but its out on the steppe so

we can just park outside and wait on their shit.

Drive-Thru Canyon is no fun. It’s all one tough gang.

1 on 1 they would probably wreck our shit. But well have

backup so whatev. Its gonna suck but at the end of the

day that shits gotta get wrecked.

CrasherSmasher stay away from this place there shits wrecked

theres details and shit inside

well be in Berlaska for the invasion next month in the

meantime go party with these muppets and

make sure the shit in these documents is correct

a squared plus b squared equals c squared,

your bro, Polo Stripes

PS The Squid got Ice Blocked. he totally beefed it.

The intelligence was frighteningly accurate. I did hate Horntopia. They were fucking snobs.

_____

Romeo and I went over the documents in the dossier. The Bronies were planning on getting their whole gang together enslaving everypony in Berlaska. We had no idea why, and it didn’t look like they had any idea why either. None of the Brony bosses seemed to care, not even the Brovost. I think by the time they read the words “wreck shit” they were already on board.

Some of the documents in the dossier looked a lot more professional than the bragging, squabbling internal memos of the Bronies. These documents were straight and to the point. They had to be from outside. Concrete objectives and itineraries were laid out in a strictly compartmentalized way. The Bronies were told what they needed to do and no more.

From the bits and pieces, I was able to infer that this was about a lot more than rounding up slaves. The Bronies were to cooperate with other gangs as well as mercenaries. Internment camps were to be built for the slaves on site. Foundations were to be laid for what I guessed would become some sort of massive infrastructure project later on.

According to the documents the invasion should have happened weeks ago. Even though they stood on the shoulders of giants, it looked liked the Bronies fucked it up. Whoever was behind all this must have been pretty pissed.

Why on earth would anypony waste resources on conquering Berlaska? I thought. Do they need to make the world’s largest sno-cone or something?

“Oh, hey, look at this!” Romeo said. He lifted up the dossier binder. There were seams along the inside of the binder’s coverboard.

“Secret panel?” I said. “Secret panel!”

We tore along the seams in the tacky marbled paper endpaper, and sure enough it was a secret panel! The panel was locked in place by an internal latch. It looked to be airtight.

Romeo read aloud the message painted on the panel. “Warning! Definitely not Epsilon Delta secret documents! Do not open! Not documents! Do not open this!”

“Open it!” I said. “Open it! Open it! Open it!”

I shoved Romeo out of the way, and I pulled down the cover on the secret panel. I kept tugging until it the latch gave way with slurpy pop and the panel slid off its oiled rails. The secret compartment was filled with a mysterious white powder that got all over me and the desk. Taped to the back of the panel lid was a note:

roses are red

violets are blue

you are already dead

omae wa mou shindeiru

The white powder began to sizzle and blacken.

Uh oh.

It’s funny how life can be that one moment you think everything’s good, everything’s fine, and then the next moment you’re on fire.

Oh fuck, I’m on fire, I thought. Oh fuck, fire. Fire! Fuck!

At some point I found myself on the ground with the pegasus using the body of the dead Brony to smother the flames. I wasn’t sure how I got into this position, but I wasn’t paying attention because I was too busy being on fire.

“Mmph—it’s out,” I said. “You can stop—”

She rolled the corpse over my face.

“Okay—ow—stop, there’s glass—”

She kept rolling and applied more pressure.

“Is he gonna be okay?” Romeo said.

“Just make sure he drinks lots of water and he’ll be fine,” she said as she got up and walked back to the desk.

I was feeling pretty good for having just been on fire. Everything was going to be all right. I just had to drink water.

“Also, don’t pick at the skin when it starts to fall off unless you want scars,” she said.

“I-is it going to hurt?” I said.

“Yes. It’s going to hurt. It’s going to hurt a lot. And it’s going to itch. It’s going to itch worse than anything in your life.”

“And, of course, you are going to pick, aren’t you?” she said and glanced over to the charred remains of the Bronies’ dossier. “It’s something you just can’t help, hmm?”

“That folder was important, wasn’t it?” I said as I got up and walked to the smoldering table.

“Yeah, Charlie, I’m pretty sure it was,” Romeo said.

We turned to the pegasus. Before we could speak she flared her wings to interrupt us.

“I would rather address your concerns about who I am and what I want now, in advance, rather than have you ask questions,” she said.

“Whatever floats your goat,” I said.

“My name is Rayleigh. I am not a Dashite,” she said.

Rayleigh turned to face us in profile as proof. Yep, her cutie mark was there all right. Thought it might be more accurately described as just a “mark.” I mean Romeo and I both have pretty abstract ones, but hers took the cake. It was just a line-drawing of hexagon with a circle in it.

It was kinda sad, really.

“I chose to be here,” she said. “My relationship with the Enclave is one of mutual disinterest.

“I was a biomedical molecular genetics research scientist. I worked at the laboratory upon the Mont Ventoux summit. The laboratory was destroyed in a disaster, and along with it my life’s work.

“There’s simply not enough time for a specialist like me to start over. I’m too old. I have no place in academia anymore. There is no room for me in my old life.

“What I saw on Mont Ventoux changed me. When the skywagons came, I chose to walk down the mountain. The alternative was to stand at a lectern and foalsit.

“Ultimately, we can only choose between boredom and suffering in life, and it’s the first that I find intolerable.

“I have been stalking these Bronies for several weeks now and I have learned things that Hörspen will want to hear about. And since you just destroyed the evidence, you should take me with you.

“I want to travel with you because you still have something to lose. The Bronies conspire to murder or enslave your families. You have a purpose, and I want to experience having that again, even if I do so vicariously.

“And, perhaps most of all, I’m lonely."

“There, is that a satisfactory apprisal?” Rayleigh said to conclude her recital.

“Wow,” I said, “you sure are a very comprehensive-minded and existentialist pony.”

She tried to look impassive, but the down feathers at the base of each wing ruffled in appreciation. She just barely managed to suppress a self-satisfied little squeal.

Tut mir leid, Frau Rayleigh, I thought, but I don’t think you can be das Überpony and bitch about not having choices at the same time.

“Quick question,” Romeo said.

Rayleigh slumped in frustration and disappointment. “Yes?” she said.

“How’d you take out that Brony?”

“Dive-toss bombing.”

“You had a bomb?”

“No, I had a rock,” she said. “Dive-toss bombing is a delivery technique in which you use momentum from your dive to impart additional—”

Rayleigh’s expression soured when she realized that Romeo had just roped her into teaching him something.

“You know what?” she said. “It might be easier if I just demonstrated.”

She leapt through the window and took to the sky on unsteady wings. With an ungainly pass over the debris field she picked up a rusty metal stool from the junk pile. She struggled to gain altitude, but soon enough she disappeared into the cloudlayer.

A lavender streak dropped from the clouds and speeded towards us. It broke off at the last moment, but the stool it was carrying didn’t. The stool hurtled past our faces and with a tremendous crack buried itself deep into the drywall behind us.

Rayleigh slowly circled back around in a wide arc. Staring Romeo in the eye the whole while, she landed in front of us. Nopony said anything. There were no sounds save for Rayleigh’s labored panting.

I didn’t really understand what she was doing in the Snowdark, but I figured it was a bad time to ask.

_____

We decided to take Rayleigh with us. I was sure under that gruff, wrinkly exterior she actually had a heart of gold, and Romeo always believed in second chances.

We made our way back down Mt. Moriah. If there had ever been Watercress chips or Strawberry GeckO’s in the Snowdark, the Bronies had long since eaten them. Also I figured it was probably important to let Hotel Hotel see that briefcase.

It was bad luck that the dossier had to get burned, but the briefcase was still very important looking. The scorch marks on the briefcase even made it look kind of badass, like it belonged to some high-power executive who got shot at when he did action business.

I figured that between it, Rayleigh’s testimony, and the respect and trust I commanded in the community, I could make a pretty good argument for why Hotel Hotel shouldn’t get angry at us for not bringing back any snacks.

But first it was time for small talk and bonding!

“So, Rayleigh,” I said, “you like science right?”

“I said I had been a scientist,” she said.

“Romeo maintains the centrifuges that are used for the all the biological safety investigations in Hörspen.”

“Okay,” she said.

“Perhaps you’d like to visit the lab? I can show you around,” Romeo said.

“My interest was in research,” she said.

“Is that a no?” he said.

She whipped her tail in irritation.

“Do you want to come visit the reactor, then?” I said. “You can see the Cherenkov radiation and everything.”

“No,” she said.

“Please? It’d help keep me from having my day ruined by my cowoker. Spending every day with her is torture.”

She stopped walking, but we didn’t notice that until we realized she had fallen behind. She leapt up and flew around and in front of us, and she blocked our path so that we had to stop with her.

“Tell me, Charlie,” she said, “do you hate your life in Hörspen?”

“Oh, totally!” I said. “The food’s gross, it’s always dark, nearly everypony there is a moron, and there’s Flanders.”

“Have you ever thought about killing yourself?”

“Well, no, I mean I really just wish—”

"I’ve lived a long time, and in that time I have traveled many places and done many things,” Rayleigh said. “And throughout all of that, I have observed that, without fail, all of the ponies I have known had held their existence in abhorrence. It appears you are no exception.”

“I’m not sure what you’re trying to say, but—”

“Think about that. Know that you are not the first that has cursed his existence many times and said to himself over and over again that he was the most wretched of mortals. Isn’t it funny, then, that with all of these miserable and hopeless souls so few of them have killed themselves?”

“What—”

“Isn’t that just ridiculous? If you hate this burden so much, why not throw it off? Why detest, but then insist on keeping such an existence? Why do this? In a word, to caress the serpent that devours us and hug him close to your bosom till he has gnawed into your heart.”

“What—”

"I have a great deal of knowledge and experience in the world; therefore, take my advice: think it over.”

She wouldn’t say another word to us all day. Sure I didn’t understand what had just happened, but I had to be patient. It would just take a little coaxing for her kind soul to shine through. The friendship we were going to share would be worth it.

Plus she was a pegasus, and it would be totally awesome to have an Actaeon module mounted on an aerial platform. I just had to earn her trust, and in no time at all we’d have the world’s first flying FDm 550!

_____

“… and that’s why you should wear an Actaeon module! It’ll be like AWACS!” I said.

“AWACS?” she said.

“Airborne Warning—”

“And Control System,” she said. “Yes, I know what AWACS is. This is not AWACS.

“There is no battle management system to speak of. There is no beyond-visual-range detection or identification. There is no ability to track and identify multiple targets or even friendly units at the same time.

“At best Actaeon is a glorified fish finder. A fish finder that only works after you’ve already found the fish.

“And you expect me to put on twenty-five kilograms worth of deathtrap and fly around waiting to get shot at or stung by draculas for your shitty little pet project?

“I don’t think so.”

Does every pegasus pony I know have to be a colossal, soulless bitch? I thought. I’m not sure why she wants to follow us around if she’s just going to harsh our mellow like that every chance she gets. If she does that again we’re leaving her.

_____

Chapter Six: Blunderstorm

When we got to Gobbler’s Knob, shit was going down.

An eerie thunderstorm raged to the north like a backdrop to the scene. The sixty-three members of the Duggle family were standing around Swap Meat in a semicircle. An aged red earth-pony stallion leaned on a pitchfork, a trio of yellow unicorn sisters had baseball bats, and most of the rest of them were armed with planks. It was a diverse crowd of all different shapes, all different sizes, and all different colors. But they all had one thing in common. All of them were furious. They eyed us and grimaced.

Swap Meat had laid most of his trailer out on the pavillion. There was that pachinko machine with the scary blue pony again. I could feel her dead eyes bore into me. She was doing something horrible to my soul. I was sure of it.

“Hey, what are you doing?” I said.

“There’s not en-nough room in my truck to fit everything like it is, I, uh, gotta unpack to pack it again more efficient like, you know? Look, kiddo, I-I kind of don’t have time for this. Um, you see I sort of wore out my welcome with the, uh, the Duggles. And I gotta go! You have fun—”

I pulled out one of the Rarity figurines. He relaxed and his eyes went wide, and just like that he was in the zone. He was enraptured by the toys.

The Duggles glared at me.

“Whatever you do, do it quickly,” Rayleigh whispered from behind.

“I have a bunch of these,” I said. “Want to trade?”

“Look, kiddo, like I said I don’t have a lot of time. I can’t haggle with you,” Swap Meat said. “Two hundred caps each, take it or leave it, okay?” All of the tension had drained from his voice.

It wasn’t Candlelight Ecstasy, but it was a deal. I started pulling the figurines out of my Gyrobowls.

“Three Raritys and an Applejack? Not bad, kiddo, not bad at all.” He caught sight of the yellow pegasus on my saddle.

“And Fl—”

“She’s not for sale.”

“Fair enough. You got good taste, kiddo. Keep her safe.”

“But I do have a Rainbow Dash, one sec, let me find it.”

I fished around for the Rainbow Dash figurine, and when I got it out it was broken! One of the wings dangled from its foundation.

“Yeah, they tend to do that,” Swap Meat said. “She breaks her wing all the time. Never seems to happen to any of the other pegasuses, even though they all share the same mold. Kinda like what happens to the Twilight Sparkles and their front legs. My guess is that color plastic’s just more brittle. Or something, dunno.”

He turned to go back to his truck. “Don’t worry, kiddo. I’ll still pay you twenty percent for it.”

He broke into paroxysmal laughter.

“Tw-twen—ha—get it?”

He fell to the ground.

“Rainb—ha—percent—Rainbow—hah—”

He rolled around taking tiny, pained, whisper-quiet gasps between heaving spasms of silent laughter.

“Because—ha-ha—co-cool—she—ha—said cooler—”

It took him about a minute to finish up. He would have gone on longer, but the sound of thunder from the storm up north knocked him out of it. The Duggles were scowling. Some of them picked up their weapons.

“You know what? On s-second thought why don’t you just keep them safe for me okay? I really, really gotta go. I trust you, you’re a good kid, okay bye!” he said.

He returned to shoving collector’s edition boxes into larger boxes, and he wouldn’t say another word to me. The Duggles started to edge towards us, and we took that as our cue to leave.

_____

As we made our way north the thunderstorm made its presence felt. I could deal with a little wind and thunder, and at least the rough weather meant we didn’t have to worry about any draculas coming out of their nests.

Heavy waves of hot air rolled through the grassland. The surging wind birthed and extinguished dust devils in cycles.

“It’s getting pretty hot and muggy, isn’t it?” I said.

"Thunderstorms are fed by warm, humid air,” Rayleigh said.

As we headed north the edges of the clouds took on a sickly green color. Green flickered across the sky with every lightning strike. The thunder grew louder each time it came.

“I hear the when the sky turns green then there’s a tornado,” Romeo said.

“That’s a myth, just like the Element of Laughter,” Rayleigh said. “The sky looks green because the heavy cloudlayer reflects the color of the ground. If we were in the desert the sky would be orange right now.”

"Wow, you sure know a lot about weather, Rayleigh,” Romeo said.

She gave an irritated sigh and shrugged her wings. A moment later she took off and flew in a low, lazy circle around us. A powerful squall made her landing messy, but I had to give credit where credit was due. It was impressive she could still get in the air at all.

About twenty minutes later, corpses of marsh birds fell from the clouds and littered the steppe.

“So… Rayleigh…” I started to say.

She interrupted. “Charlie, I have no idea,” she said. “We should turn around.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” I said. “I’ve read about this. I remember now. Sometimes whole flocks of birds will just drop dead in midair. All sorts of animals, really. Nopony knows why, but it’s nothing to worry about.”

The thunderclaps came in time with the lightning now, and they were deafening. The gusts of wind built to a howling roar. We had to struggle to make headway. Romeo had to put his leg around Rayleigh to hold her down and keep her from being blown away.

“Look, I was hoping you two would be smart enough to reach this on your own,” Rayleigh shouted over the suffocating, hot wind, “but I guess you need me to spell it out for you! Thunderstorm! Lightning! I’m a pegasus! This is not a problem for me! You two goons, however, are in trouble! And to top it all off….”

She smacked the radio aerial on my Actaeon box. The antenna whipped around and stung me on the flank. Rayleigh looked diabolical in the brilliant green light of the storm.

“Okay, okay!” I shouted as we made our way to the cusp of the marsh basin. “You’ve made your point. Look, we can take shelter for the night just down this valley, there’s this compound made of concrete where—”

I looked down into the marsh.

Swap Meat, you piece of shit.

_____

Chapter Seven: Tunnel Snakes

Searing green light radiated from the thorns of the concrete thicket. It wasn’t fire. It was too bright, too pure. A green sun had been trapped under the earth, and it was now breaking free of its prison. From the cracks in the concrete, tongues of plasma arced into the air.

Refraction from the heat plumes warped the sky into sinuous tendrils. The column of superheated air dragged from its nest a screeching dracula, roasted alive as it tumbled through the cataclysmic sky.

Lightning forked across the roiling, bulbous clouds, themselves glowing from the near-constant discharges hidden within. Heaven’s wrath, brilliant blue lightning, thick as tree trunks, reduced the ground to craters.

I backed up and got ready to turn around. Even though they kicked out Swap Meat, I figured we still had a shot at staying with the Duggles for a bit.

“Too late for you!” Rayleigh shouted. “We need to take cover! There was a trench on that hillside! Take off your saddles and follow me!”

She pointed back to an old, disused turbary some distance away from the highway. Its network of trenches, and the revetment-like mounds of the peat it yielded, were the best we could have hoped for. Romeo dropped his saddle, but I would have none none of it. Abandon Actaeon? Abandon Flitter? I’d rather take my chances with the lightning.

Rayleigh wove through the sky as if dodging invisible arrows. She rolled right, and we ran to the right behind her. A column of lightning vaporized the ground to our left. The heat seared me. The pressure wave knocked me to the ground. But I scrambled back up again. I couldn’t afford to fall behind. Rayleigh’s guidance meant we never came too close to a strike, but it still felt like being crushed in a corridor of lightning.

The trench’s rear lip had just appeared in sight when Rayleigh gasped and pitched up hard into a knife-edged cobra turn. Too hard. She stalled and dropped to the ground on her back. But Romeo was following too close behind her to react in time. He ran forward and into the lightning.

When my eyes recovered, I saw him lay still. But he was lucky. He lay well outside the circle of steaming earth where the lightning had struck. I ran to his side.

He didn’t get up.

Rayleigh glared at us and dove into the trench. She poked her head out to glare at us again before ducking back in.

I checked his breathing, and he was, and that was good. But after that I had no idea what to do.

Then a lightning bolt struck the earth behind me. A wave of steam scalded my back, and as I tumbled onto my face I experienced a moment of clarity.

Priority one was getting the hell out of the open.

I picked him up as gently as I could. I had no idea what his injuries were, and I just prayed he didn’t have a broken spine. I scurried to the trench, straddled it, and, did a sort of backwards chimney-climb slide thing down the mired walls.

I rested for a mud-covered moment, with Romeo on my belly. Black drops of rain, the size of marbles, fell from the sky and cratered the earth.

Rayleigh appeared from the shadows, wearing a look of umbrage, out of a recessed shack.

“Right. Well, get inside,” she said as she held the creaky door open.

The shack was a skeletal and rotten thing. The rain soaked the rough dugout and pooled at the entrance, and we retreated further underground into a wide tunnel. I hoped the door had been enough to keep anything else from trying to take shelter here.

Since everypony in Hörspen did had to practice electrocution first aid weekly, I went with what I knew and assumed I needed to treat Romeo for shock. I laid him down at the end of the tunnel, and I piled up some mud to keep his legs elevated. My blanket was soaked, so to keep him warm I used Actaeon as a space heater and huddled close beside him. His eyes didn’t open, but his breathing was soft and regular.

The rain rattled on the earth above. Softer drops came from the ceiling as the rain percolated through, yet the fraction of a meter of marsh-dirt between us the sky felt like power armor. The acrid, sinister tang of ozone faded, and as the wet smell of peat and mildew hit my nostrils my shuddering body melted into the earth. I lay there, head lolling, with my jaw open.

_____

I jolted up when Romeo shuddered. He wasn’t awake, but his heart raced. It was in the throes of an arrhythmia.

“Hey, so I don’t know what to do here. You said you were a biomedical postdoc, right?” I said.

Rayleigh stood by doorframe and watched the sky. She stood, entranced, chanting words without meaning in a voice without sound. She took her time before getting back to me.

“Yes,” she said, one traipse later.

“So, do you think you can help?”

“Perhaps you have me confused with some other pony?” said the graying purple pegasus.

“You said you were, like, a biomedical postdoc, right? Like, I mean—”

She scowled. “I research the de novo biosynthesis of inosine monophosphate. Unless this has something to do with glutamine five-phosphoribosyl-alpha-pyrophosphate aminotransferase, I’m not sure what you want me to do.”

‘Look at me! I’m Rayleigh! I know words!’ I thought.

“Honestly, I don’t know why I put up with you two,” Rayleigh said. “I’m here for your benefit. You know I don’t have to stay here.” She looked out to the raging sky and stretched her wings.

“Okay, so why don’t just go do that, then?” I said.

She whirled around. “I don’t know, you tell me.”

“I can’t. That’s why I asked you.”

“Sometimes, the answers aren’t laid out in front of you. Don’t you know that?”

“Are you going somewhere with this?”

“Am I?”

“I don’t know, you tell me,” I said.

“I asked first.”

“No, you didn’t. I did. And that doesn’t even—this is dumb, I give up.”

“Do you always give up at the first sign of resistance?” she said.

“Whatever.”

She closed in on me. “Do you run away because you hate thinking?”

“You know, if you’re trying to use the Socratic method to look deep and shit, you’re doing a really bad job of it. If that’s all you can do, then please, by all means, go ahead and leave,” I said.

I put my ear to Romeo’s chest. His heart hadn’t slowed, but it was beating regularly. For a moment she looked like she was going to say something, but she just threw her wings up in a huff and turned to look at the tunnel wall.

“You’ve done all you can,” she said at last.

_____

It didn’t look like any of us were going anywhere soon. I resigned myself, and, like so many other ponies in times of adversity, I took solace in the pages of the Lunar Auroch bible.

Song of Spiders 9

1 And so i all the spiders ran through Equestria.

And all the ponies were scared ii and ran into house.

But except for one pony,

who stood in the street and angry!

2 And she said, “Stop spiders!” iii

And they stopped.

3 And a big brown spider iv jumped off of her head.

And her head was gray and her coat was gray too,

and her hair was straight.

And the spider v was brown and big,

and made angry click.

i. Raphèl maí amèche zabí almi.

ii. Raphèl maí amèche zabí almi.

iii. Ibid.

iv. Raphèl maí amèche zabí almi.

v. See ii.

Such poetry, I thought. I wonder if there’s—

Romeo woke with a wheeze. I leapt to his side as he sat up. He looked around, slowly digesting the situation. He chewed on his lip for a moment. He didn’t look confused, rather it was like he was looking for the witty thing to say.

“Not the best place to wake up, is it?” I said.

“Yeah, the humidity’s doing awful things to your hair,” he said.

That’s the zinger I was hoping for, I thought. My optimism was short lived. He started to slump down, and I helped lower him to a more stable posture.

“We need to get out of here… right… now,” said Romeo as he fell back asleep. “Five minutes….”

“Bad idea,” Rayleigh said.

“Uh, no, it’s a really good idea.” I pointed at the fire. “There’s probably stuff in that stuff.”

“No, it’s a bad idea.”

“Care to elaborate?”

“I already told you it was a bad idea.”

Well, that had me convinced. I started packing up. As soon as Romeo could stand we were going back to Gobbler’s Knob.

“You can risk going sterile in twenty years, or you can risk dying in a lightning storm today. Weigh your options.”

She had a point. But I had a Actaeon.

“Aight, well. If I’m gonna weigh my options, I need a full picture.” I went over to Romeo and swapped the computer box with my now dry blanket to keep him warm. After pulling the sensor modules loose, I scooted Actaeon’s scopes up up into line-of-sight of the fireball.

Rayleigh watched me until she decided she knew what I was doing.

“Are you kidding?” she said. “Do you think spectroscopy is point and shoot?”

“We’re not doing a research experiment,” I said, as I shoved laminated checklist cards upright into the mud in front of me. “It’ll be good enough.”

Rayleigh sighed. “I can’t stop you,” she said, with a resigned shrug.

I went through the checklist of threats. “Ionizing radiation looks fine, we’re not getting a dose—”

“I have no way of checking your results. Unless you actually find anything notable, I don’t care,” Rayleigh said.

She still peeked over my shoulder. I believed her when she said she didn’t care about my results, but she couldn’t hide that she was interested in the way I was collecting the information. She looked pleased, or, at the least, not angered.

“Do you mind?” I said. “I’m trying to do some ‘brating here.” I tapped the flickering phosphorescent viewfinder for emphasis, and I tried to ignore her as she loomed over me.

_____

The light was like the lanterns of passing cars. Every time a beam broke through, a concrete column collapsed upon it, sealing it. Flash, then dark. Flash, then dark. The compound struggled, mortally wounded, determined to hold on to its charge against the overwhelming siege from within.

My computer beeped when it finished up the last survey. The beep became a low rattle when the speaker unseated itself and lodged itself in the fan guard. I told myself I’d fish it out later, as soon as I plugged the monitor back in. The brown screen warmed up and greeted me with exactly what I didn’t want to see.

“Alright, you wanted bad news? I got bad news.” I said.

I showed her the chromatogram. “Check this shit out.”

“What’s this supposed to mean?” she said.

“Look at the figure legend.”

“All it says is, ‘Figure One. Check this shit out.’”

“Oh. That’s the template. My bad.” I scribbled down an actual legend on scratch paper. “Well okay, if those markers are breaking, then the energy released as they reanneal is gonna fry us. We need to leave ASAP.”

“Those markers aren’t indicating breakage.”

“Look, lady, the ECS CAS Databook says that zero bands on MspI marker fragments means reannealing. There’s the CAS databook and you, and I’m going with CAS.”

“Then CAS is wrong.”

“Right…”

She slapped me hard in the face.

“What the fuck—”

“Are you only capable of parroting your ancient factbook? That model for annealment markers was flawed eighty years ago, it should even acknowledge the unexplained discrepancies in the CAS entry. Do you think science has been standing still for eighty years?”

She hit me to let me know that was rhetorical.

“There’s no reannealing,” she said. “The reason there’s a zero band is because the fire isn’t strong enough to break the marker site in the first place.

“And you practically performed the experiment that proved that yourself just now. Examine the chromatograph, draw your own conclusions and test them with other observations to see if it holds up. Be more critical!

“All of the molecules in this category are going to have similar fragment overlaps! If the MspI fragments have reannealed, then all of the other molecules would reanneal, too, and we would see bars on the zero position for every lane on the chromatograph!”

She hit me again.

“Furthermore,” she said, ”you should realize that two-base overhangs aren’t stable enough to anneal at room temperature, let alone in the in furnace of radioactive inferno!”

I checked back and forth between the chromatograph printout and the the CAS entry.

“Shit. You’re right,” I said.

She hit me again.

“Would you stop?!” I said.

She raised her hoof to strike, but I blocked the old mare without much effort.

“I will throw you,” I said. She backed down real fast.

“So we’re safe,” I said.

“No. All we know is that your equipment has yet to detect anything dangerous. Those are not the same things. And what I just said about the markers was on the conceit that your equipment actually works as advertised, which is something we don’t actually know to begin with. All sorts of horrible things could be happening to us that your little junk heap can’t see. To wit, ‘absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.’”

“I—”

Deep reverberations of a dolorous metallic groan shook me off my feet. It came from the left, the right, all around, and under. The cracking and creaking sounds of wrenching and warping grew louder, came nearer, and shook harder with every passing second, until the ground itself broke into an anguished scream as something gave way deep beneath the earth.

Quick as the flash that came, Rayleigh seized me by the leg and dragged me deeper into the tunnel.

When the mud hissed, Rayleigh hissed, “Wait, wait! Wait till it dies.”

The light cleared, and I climbed up to the baked, crackled mouth of the tunnel. The embers of the dugout burned red and gold. Rayleigh snapped up again to yank me back by the mane. She dug into the dirt as she pressed me into it. Romeo was awake and alert, and he followed Rayleigh’s lead and hunkered down too.

It was the sky’s turn to scream. The whistling of the wind rose to a moan and then to a wail.

“Exhale! Exhale now and—”

And then silence. Things that should have made noise didn’t. A wave of vertigo and nausea hit me as my ears burst into splitting pain. My lungs had been empty, but I felt my breath sucked out of me.

The pain subsided, and the roar returned. Wrenching back-and-forth gusts followed it. The tunnel shook just as much as it had during the earthquake, and the layer of dried mud at its base peeled partially from the earth and swung back and forth like a shutter board in a storm.

The backdraft had brought the smoldering dugout into a brilliant conflagration. Rayleigh and Romeo stood over me to help me up. They were bathed in dancing lights of sickly sweet lime green and tangerine.

The thunderclaps were no longer just from thunder. The lightning no longer wracked the sky alone. The highway crumbled as the magic that had sustained it nearly a century now fueled its destruction. Arcs of energy tore through the highway, and the ground gave way in their wake. The green fire broke loose across the marsh and birthed smaller, natural fires in its wake.

Their silhouettes still visible through the river of fire, the tree-like claws of the compound still fought to contain the infernal core. They lost. The pressure and heat dissolved the bastions like wind on sand. Hotter than any desert, the sand took to the sky, glittering as it transformed into steam jets of liquid glass to join the clouds above.

“Lightning and radiation don’t matter anymore. We’re going now,” Rayleigh said. Romeo nodded. He was standing like a champ.

“Where will we go?” I said.

“Away from the fire,” she said.

“But—”

“You really like being on fire, don’t you?”

I nursed my burns at her burn.

“Is everypony okay?” Romeo said.

“How you doin’, crah?”

“When I die, it won’t be in this cave. Let’s go.”

But somepony wasn’t okay. Actaeon wasn’t.

The love of my life, moon of my moons, lay in scorched and fractured pieces, connected to each other loosely by tangled, fraying wires. As I caressed it that one final time, Actaeon zapped me, as if to say farewell. The shock brought back so many memories, and it would be the last. Choking down sobs, I began to sing.

“Hush now, quiet now

“It’s time to lay your sleepy head

“Hush now, quiet now

“It’s time to go to b—”

“Get going!” Rayleigh kicked Actaeon down into the tunnel. It tumbled down the slope and burst into flames, and then, with a squeal, it exploded. Then it exploded again, and all the stuff that got shot out in the explosion exploded too. The shrapnel pierced the ceiling, and the mud and water that had collected on the surface broke through and buried the tunnel in a cave-in. And then caught fire.

Good night, sweet prince.

_____

Chapter Eight: Leibowitz's Song

Chapter Eight: Leibowitz’s Song

Through the deafening, thundering, scalding abyss I scrambled, blinded by the impenetrable flash fog that had descended upon us. It was so thick, it was impossible to tell that there had ever even been a storm at all. The only thing keeping me tied to the world was Rayleigh’s hoof, now nothing more to me than a faint sense of inertia in the chaos.

We ran without direction. “Away from the fire,” she’d said.

I didn’t know how long we had been running. The midnight sun made time meaningless. My lower lip carried a thick wad of mud from all the times I had stumbled, and I judged our progress by the changes in flavor from bitter to rancid that came with each new fall.

But at some point our pace slowed, and the pounding of my heart became the loudest noise, and I finally noticed something else.

Bog smell.

In every direction there was only flat, solid-green land, extending until the flat, solid-gray fog swallowed it. Filled with moss, this place was the wasteland in its truest form.

We kept walking. We said nothing. Rayleigh walked with me and frowned into space, and Romeo hung back behind us the whole time. How far we got, if we weren’t just going in circles, was impossible to tell. The bogs here extended forever.

Squish. Squish. Squish.

I was sure I was going to get hoof rot.

Squish. Squish. Squish.

Squish, squish, squish.

Squishsquishsquishsquish— splat.

I looked down and found my hooves in the mud furrow of a trail.

Clear hoofprints punched through the still-living moss. The ruts were sharp, made by wagon wheel and not by the macerating grind of the usual halftracks that traveled these parts. A red plastic cup jutted from the mud.

“Red cup! Red cup! Red rum, red cup!” I bounced in circles around it. “We should mark down where we are and where these tracks are going, it could be a clue.”

“Just how do you plan to do that?” said Rayleigh.

“With Actaeon—”

Without Actaeon’s weight it was like floating. I bounced reflexively. But it was a sad bounce, a heartbreaking bounce heavy with loneliness and grief.

“Well, it’s still a road. It’ll go somewhere. I guess,” I said. “We’ll probably run into peat harvesters eventually. Next pony I run into, I’ll ask them.”

We plodded along the road through the haze and the soggy flatland. It was green and really boring. The only thing we encountered was a pool of water. I ordered us all to take a bath in it, to wash off any contamination and fallout from the storm. It could have been contaminated too, but I had to make a judgement call. Being a leader isn’t always easy. Responsibility is a tough job.

_____

At last, the mud road merged into a larger route. We arrived at the crossing just as a half-track truck trundled along at the intersection. I ran ahead to catch up to the driver.

“Hey!” I said. “Hey! Hey!

“Hey!

“Hey—”

I slipped and landed in the mud. I picked myself back up and ran alongside the driver’s cab.

“Hey! Hey! Hey!” I said. “Hey!

“Hey!

“Hey!”

“Huh?” the driver said. “You wanna buy a carpet? I ain’t selling—”

“Hey!”

“Yeah?”

“Can you give me a ride?”

He slammed on the brakes. The cab door swung open.

“Get in,” he said.

The motor puttered down, and I stood outside as we waited for Rayleigh and Romeo to catch up. The driver glared at me and did a little waiting dance in his seat. “I said get in.”

The cabin and truckbed were made of rough-and-ready wood, overkill-sturdy in its craftwork and coated in a simple primer of milk paint. The truck’s precious mechanical parts were lovingly shrouded in a thick layer of dully shining homebrew cosmoline. Way more than necessary, and keeping the grit-magnet anti-corrosive grease on the moving parts was doing more harm than good, but it likely made the driver feel better about himself.

The truck was a Diesel aftermarket refit of a wartime gem powered machine. I could tell from the noise and the barbecue smell. Diesel, like gems and all the other fuels, had been developed to save us from the grip of coal and bring us back from the brink of disaster, and like all of them it only came to fruition long past the point where it mattered. But the machines themselves outlived, more or less, the society they were meant to save.

Prominent empty fixtures marked where the characteristic massive gill-like conveyant flues of the gem powered engine once stood. It almost certainly hadn’t been the first refit cycle in the vehicle’s lifetime, and it wouldn’t be the last, not until the music stopped and the chairs ran out.

Hörspen was a colossal monument to the fact that building just about anything was a nightmare when you couldn’t rely on your supply of doo-dads, you didn’t have the thingy you needed to make the widgets to make the doo-dad, and you had an ambiguity in the thingy maker schematic that only the pony who designed the damn thing and died fifty years ago could explain.

Backyard furnaces could pump out products for a season or two, but it was just better to just scavenge for parts and cannibalize old stuff than to try to make anything without the all the infrastructure to back it up. All the clever cannibalisms and duck tape solutions in the world could only take you so far, but it kept us all from wearing mohawks and football gear.

“Hey, are those collectables?” said the driver, startling me from my road warrior fantasy.

…with an axe! I thought.

He peered down at my Gyrobowls.

“Yeah?” I said.

“My kid loves those! You get them dolls for your little sister, eh?”

“Yeah, no. They were shiny so I grabbed them”

“Gimme one, and you can come along.”

“No way! Hey, I thought—”

He took the truck out of park.

“Do you want a Rarity?” I said.

“Nah. Already got one.”

Crap, I thought.

“But, hey! Is that an Applejack?” he said.

“Yeah? Uh, you want it?” I said.

“Everypony loves Applejack.”

“Yeah, sure. Okay.” I dropped the plastic Applejack on the dash. What a relief!

When my friend and Rayleigh showed up, he said to us, “Alright, y’all can get in back. Just don’t touch the carpets.”

Rayleigh sprawled out in a corner of the truckbed. She spread her wings to soak up the shrouded sun of the muggy summer’s day and took a nap. Romeo kept quiet, leaning over the railing to watch the scenery. I got comfy between two rolled up carpets by a dilapidated rattan cage with a lizard in it.

“‘sup?” said the lizard in the cage.

“Not much, you?” I said.

“Not much. Chillin’.”

“Cool.”

_____

“…then I hear the best thing to do is feed the bodies to sports,” said the driver through the back window. “They say it’s best to chop ‘em up into six pieces, but they’ll eat it whole just fine. ‘strue they do it fastest if you slice it up like noodles first, mind you. What you ain’t got to do is starve ‘em, that’s just cruel, and it doesn’t even matter at that…”

Nopony else in the truck bothered talking. Rayleigh was asleep, and Romeo just kept staring out into the bog. The driver's story at least staved off awkward silence for a few hours.

“…and then I say to him, ‘Well, it don’t matter now, ‘cause that’s what I’m feeding you. Now it’s a hard pill to swallow, sure, but I don’t give a rat’s ass ‘cause this is how it is.’ Now around this time my daughter gets back, and sweet little filly she is…”

Every so often we passed by the rusted, gutted hull of a stranded boat. At first they were abandoned husks sitting askew and slightly sunken in the flatland, but, as the driver rambled on, the boats gradually began sporting light fixtures, window covers, and patios. Grass became more common, and the truck climbed its way out of the bog and into a sparsely wooded valley. The truck had left the bog, but the bog smell hadn't left the truck.

“…so don’t ever get too comfortable ‘bout any family with too many sports. And not just for that reason, too! Eh-heh-heh…”

The woods gave way to farmland, and and we came within sight of a village. He stopped a good distance ahead of the gates, far enough so that you couldn’t pick out ponies with the naked eye.

“Last stop, Ole Valley-O!” said the driver. He got out to make sure none of us were hiding behind the carpets.

“Hey, thanks, dude. So which way’s Hörspen?” I said.

“Hörspen? Huh, um, I think it’s that way.” He pointed back to the bog. “Welp, have a good life.” The lizard blew a kiss.

“Ooh! Oh, did you see any ponies at that spot with the road where you picked us up?” I said.

I watched him get back in the truck and continue on his way through the village.

“Hey!” I said. “Hey!

“Hey!

“Hey!”

He kept going, and he, along with the bog smell, disappeared into the hills.

I turned around, and Romeo and Rayleigh were looking at me.

“Well how was I supposed to know he was headed in the wrong direction? And so what, you forgot, too!” I said. “Learn some personal responsibility, ponies!”

_____

The upside to getting stuck in Fumbuck was their respect for guest friendship. Village ponies always took you in for the night. They had to. It could turn out I was actually Zeus in disguise, and if that happened I’d smite them for refusing to honor guest friendship.

A farmer ran up to meet us on the road. He was orange. After inviting us to spend the night and telling us how glad he was to meet us, Orange Pony said, “Now, if you all have any questions, I’d be happy to answer them.”

Finally I’m getting some answers! I thought. He started saying something but I got distracted looking at him and zoned out. They’re so dirty.

Dirty as he was, Orange Pony had a delightfully rustic hat. I wanted one.

Not just for the style, but also because I had run out of sunblock, and UV still gets through the clouds. It turned out letting the birds fly burned up the ozone layer too, and it turned out that we kinda needed that.

Sunblock, all day, every day. Everypony always made fun of me because I wore it in winter, and I always told them it was because I didn’t want to get cancer.

That was a lie.

I didn’t care about cancer. I just didn’t want wrinkles. Spending time around Rayleigh was motivation enough. Though, I had to give the old mare some credit. I was surprised didn’t have, like, a million cataracts.

He noticed me ogling his hat. He just straight-up tossed it to me.

“Everypony’s gotta have a hat!” he said. “We’re all in this together! Say, where you from, pilgrim? Pat’s Club?”

“No, uh, Hörspen,” I said.

His eyes narrowed. “Give it back.”

“No! My hat!”

He growled, but his anger diffused when he realized he could extort me. “Gimme your briefcase, and I’ll let you keep it.”

“Dude, don’t be a dick! There’s nothing inside.”

“I don’t care what’s inside, you can keep that for all I care. Just give me the damn briefcase.”

He was being a dick, but I was too tired and sore to deal with his dickness.

I had to weigh my options. I really wanted that hat, but the briefcase was my best bet for convincing Hotel. This would be my only chance to keep him from bringing out the Wheel like last time.

I am so unlucky, I thought.

But then my luck improved.

Some incriminating documents had gotten fused to the inside lining of the briefcase. They were stuck pretty tight, but I was sure if I just applied a little finesse I could pull them out. I would get to keep the hat and the evidence too!

I yanked and tugged, and half the thing came loose between the plies of paper. I chewed on a ragged scrap, and the rest of the document was an illegible fuzzy white patch on the inside of the briefcase.

Luck hated me, and even worse it was a tease about it too. It was the briefcase or the hat, and I made the logical choice.

_____

Hat on head, I explored the village. Rayleigh and Romeo had gone along with Orange Dick to take a tour, but I wasn’t in the mood to deal with that dick any more than I needed to. They had said to come meet them at the “Boat House” when it was dinner time.

They were all boat houses. I wandered down a semi-straight row of homes made of fiberglass yacht hulls, which had been turned upside down and propped up on wattle-and-daub walls.

Up the lane, two stunted, shaggy colts chased a stunted, shaggy filly down the gravel path. She was a dingy green thing aged beyond her years, and her mangy body was covered in matted tufts of fluff. Her eyes were full of unthinking, primordial terror. She carried a dead rabbit in her mouth. It was nearly as big as she was.

Their own long fur dragging in the mud, the two ran after her. They shouted, “Giz’z’un! Giz’z’un! K’mah!” as they tried to herd her into a corner.

I shoved the tiny things back for funsies. It gave the little filly enough time to struggle through a gate and lock it behind her. They two colts howled and vented sub-verbal frustrations as the filly devoured the dead rabbit raw in front of them.

A mare stomped up to me, but she hesitated before speaking. Her belly was full, but her body was too wiry for it to be either pudge or the distended belly of starvation. “Don’t torture the sports, you ass,” she said, and she bolted into her house and bolted the door.

“Oh, come on, it wasn’t that bad. All I did was push em. Sorry, I guess.”

Behind me the colts had finally gotten the rotten wood gate down, and they charged into the alleyway. Over the clattering and crunch sound of the wood, the three screeched over the rabbit.

“Look out! Look out! Ghosts! Monsters! Fallout!” somepony behind me shouted.

The three stunted ponies froze as their pupils flooded. One of the colts tumbled over onto his back. He lay perfectly still, legs locked, like an upturned stool. The other two ran screeching in circles. They collided, but they didn’t react. They just kept trying to run in place, grinding against each other, screaming all the while, until they finally became exhausted and slid, asleep, into a puddle.

Shouting again, an elderly little pony stumbled out of the house connected to the alleyway. He had a little nub of a horn on each temple, and he stepped gingerly on gnarled, cloven hooves. He looked like the Krampus.

“You look like the Krampus. Are you the Krampus?” I said.

“It’s June,” he said, snarling.

I shrugged. “Krampus gotta go somewhere.”

His eyes narrowed as he glared, not at me, but just kinda in the direction of the area around me. His eyes had gone cloudy, and his shaggy agouti-speckled fur was turning that same milky gray.

“Yeah, I’m ‘Krampus,’” he said. “Just Krampus. Not a Krampus, not the Krampus. Krampus. You found me, you happy? You want a photo? I’m all out, sorry. The rest of your village will just have to come out and see me here, I guess. Oh. Wait. NO!”

And as fast as he could, Krampus hobbled back into his into his house. Spurts of stuttering, sparking magic slammed the door extra hard. All five other ponies around me went inside and just stayed in their houses after that, so I kicked rocks around until it was dinner time.

_____

The Boat House was a peat-insulated timber lodge. Its doors and hatches had all been taken off to let the summer light in, but we had to be very careful stepping up onto the raised floor. The other ponies made sidelong glances at Romeo and me and warned us not to disturb the circle of chalk that had been laid around the lodge’s foundation.

On the steps, I tried to get Rayleigh to take the threat of radiation exposure seriously.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said.

“Our bone marrow could be melting right now. It tends to do that, you know. The skeleton is the most fragile part of the body, it breaks all the time,” I said.

“Does it matter? Do you really think we could get treatment in time? Would a treatment even exist? Let us assume the worst then. What can be done? Come, ‘Nunc est bibendum, nunc pede libero pulsanda tellus.’”

“Huh. Well, um, you’re awfully cavalier about this.”

“‘Audaces Fortuna iuvat.’ It isn’t true, but you can hate yourself when you fail to live up to it.” She laughed and clapped as she thought up something she thought was clever. “Ces chevaux courent cavalièrement à Calvaire!”

“I really hate how you expect me to know what you mean by that.”

“Who says I do? Who said I knew what I meant by that?”

Not this shit again, I thought, and I went inside to get a bowl of a waterier, dirtier version of Hörspen porridge from a vat labeled “Kommie.” If I was to die, I wasn’t going to die hungry.

Romeo spent the better part of an hour getting laughed out of the social cliques in the lodge, but he eventually managed to make some friends by joining in in their folk dances.

No matter what culture, no matter what place, there is the universal language of folk dance. It is a stupid language, I thought, smirking a little as I watched the flapping.

In the corner, where it managed to be dark in the open air, Rayleigh orbited the bar. You’d think she was the type to linger on a beer for hours and think her Byronic thoughts in pensive silence. But no, she was just pounding it.

Every time the bartender filled her stein she would down it within seconds. He eventually gave up and just got her a bigger one.

Either the beer was close to water or her frail little body just didn’t care.

Rayleigh caught me staring.

“I dunno, I guess I just imagined you as straightedge,” I said.

“Self-contradictory? Probably,” she said. “If you pointed a gun at my head I’d cry and beg for my life, too. And, of course, I have my petty joys.”

She smiled. “But, on the other hoof, this beer is shit. Nepenthe couldn’t salvage it.” The skin around her graying mouth sagged and folded under the strain. And in moments, it was bottoms up again.

The lodge got together to sing, and everypony lined up for a group dance. Romeo had become the guest of honor, and now nopony even seemed to remember hating him.

A filly, anxious to beat her competition, darted to his side. She was young, and the brief contacts of the contra-dance were still illicit and exotic to her. That real pang of loss in her eyes when they switched to their neighbors spoke of innocent, idle fantasy. Twirling and giggling as she flowed through the dance line. She was at last returned to her partner, and she drew herself around him possessively. Their hooves touched and she was sent flying through safety, freedom, and intimacy in three-beat transit. She had the thrilling privilege of dancing with the stranger, and she was proud.

Damn right you are, I thought.

“He seems to be doing well,” Rayleigh said.

We both stood there as the two danced. Rayleigh took unceremonious gulps as she leaned on the bar.

“So, Charlie, have you noticed that that filly’s a pegasus pony yet?” she said.

“Yeah, that crossed my mind,” I said.

She watched as I watched.

“How much do you know about classical genetics and heredity?” she said.

“Peas and stuff?”

“Good enough.”

She went on in a kinder register than before. “Unicorns can come from earth pony families. Pegasus ponies can come from earth pony families. Yet the genes determining pegasus pony and unicorn heredity are both dominant to the earth pony genes. You see where I’m going with this?”

“Uh, that you can’t have silent carriers of a dominant gene?”

“Yes!” For the first time the light in her eyes sparkled and didn’t just burn.

She struggled to keep her words from racing. “In fact, poly-recessive homozygotes were relatively rare in earth ponies before the war. The more important determiner of pony phenotype is the regulatory mechanism that silences the dominant expression.”

“I—”

“At, at, at, ah!” She raised her hoof to silence me.

“The difference between you and me is not so much that I have pegasus pony genes and you don’t— you could very well have PGNW in you, after all —but rather that my silencing mechanism is broken and isn’t suppressing the genes that we share.

“It’s not enough to merely inherit the unicorn or pegasus pony genes, you also have to inherit a broken silencer too. Typically one does that by having a unicorn or pegasus pony parent, but because of the way silencing genes work, sometimes two poly-heterozygous ‘appendage-positive descendant’ earth ponies can have a child who inherits the broken silencer.

“And rarely, a mutation can cause this too. One might expect that in ‘genetically compromised’ communities they would show up more often. A gene mutates, the silencing mechanism breaks down, and a genetically ‘pegasus’ earth pony gives birth to a foal with wings.”

“So are there, like, Anti-Enclaves of ground-born nega-pegas?” I said.

“No, I should clarify, this is very rare. Every generation down here without the skyborn pegasus ponies breeds out the requisite genotypes more and more. Her children will be earth ponies. This may very well be the last pegasus foal you’ll ever see. Appreciate it.”

“Magical. But they think you’re one of them, then?”

She giggled and shook her head.

“Also, what’s PGNW?” I said.

She smiled for real this time. “‘Pony’s Got No Wings.’ It’s the gene that gives you wings. Gene names are like that.”

The ponies of the lodge looked on as she took a deep swig from her stein. Half of them were impressed, and the other half just annoyed that she was hogging all the beer. At last, the bartender lost patience and cut her off.

“Maybe I’ll tell you about it later,” she said, and she wandered off to socialize.

Romeo and the pegasus stepped down down from the stage, and the two were mobbed by jocular, congratulatory ponies. Rayleigh made awkward gossip with the old mare’s club, even though she seemed to be the butt of most of their jokes. I put my cool face on and did my best to look uninvested. Avoiding affectation was the surest way to succeed in any social situation.

When the evening wound down, all the drunk ponies gathered together to sing their little anthem.

“Good times await at the ole gay Boat House!

“‘cause we will all love you even if ye’r a louse!

“Good times await at the ole gay Boat House!

“So don’t be afraid, and don’t be a mouse,

“and follow me to the gay Boat House!”

It was supposed to be the last song of the night, but it quickly segued into “The Rattlin’ Bog” for another half-hour as the patrons trickled out. Rayleigh among them sang the loudest. The beer had definitely not been watered down.

That was the Boat House. It was a singing lodge, a Rattlin’ lodge. The lodge was in the bog, that bog around Ole Valley-O. And in that lodge there was a crowd. It was a singing crowd, a Rattlin’ crowd. The crowd was in the lodge, and the lodge was in the bog, that bog around Ole Valley-O.

_____

Item Two

“I’m sorry.

I’m so sorry.

It’s just that I've had a really stressful week and sometimes it's just so hard to concentrate and I really don't want to perform unless it's going to be really great and really special. It's hard, because it's just like, you try so hard to make things good, but it's just so hard and everything turns out bad. Phèdre next week, I promise.

I have some news. Maybe you would like that?

There have been frequent occurrences of mass animal death events this month, according to a letter I received from an acquaintance who isn’t even a friend and could never take the place of you, my love.

Whole clowders of cats, up to several dozens, have been found in characteristic crescent-shaped piles within fairy rings. It might be that the cats are the victims of the ire of pixies or elves, for their transgression into the realm of the fey folk. But that’s impossible because fairies aren’t real and nopony believes in them, so they all went extinct.

It's true it’s already been two months since Walpurgis Night, but maybe the cats were slain by vindictive witches who can't let go and have nothing better to do all day then mope around and revisit the sites of their unholy rituals in the vain hope of rekindling that sense of being alive that they only experience then because they're too afraid to try new things and jealously guard the only thing that makes them feel special even though at this point it's just a meaningless fight to grasp onto something that everypony else has already stopped caring about.

There are skeptics out there who disagree, though. Could this be evidence of Nibiru? Some say clathrates are to blame.

But, I mean, that's just my opinion. I'm not speaking for anypony at all, but I feel like it's okay to hold an opinion on something even though you haven't personally experienced the situation you're talking about?

I'm not a witch.

I'm not a dead cat, either.

What do you think? It would make me feel so much better about it if you agreed with me, but at the same time if you don't that's okay too because you're probably right and that means I'm probably wrong and I should just accept that because if you can't be good then you have to be humble.

And since my play is late I think I'm bad.

I just want to go to bed.

Please don’t forget, this is Strange Item on 14.860 MHZ, and she’ll do better next time.

But there’s just so much time left…. I have to fill it up… I… I'll just play it off….” —{CLICK}