Dead Cat Bounce: A Fanfiction Fanfiction

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.

_____