New World Blues

The screams of an alicorn princess once more echoed through the streets of Ponyville, turning all eyes towards the Golden Oaks library.

Inside that fine establishment, Spike was holding Twilight down while Fluttershy was trying to calm her, Rainbow Dash was recovering from having her nose reset, Pinkie Pie was screaming along with her friend (“It looked like fun” she had said, before continuing to scream) and The Courier and Veronica were looking around in confusion at the chaos that they were inadvertently causing.

“Huh”

Said The Courier.

“Guess we gave her a bit of a fright”

Amidst the earsplitting cries emanating from our purple friend were semi comprehensible words, that sounded vaguely like “Please get me a pudding cup!”... as I said, semi comprehensible.

“Twilight, please stop screaming”

Fluttershy was saying calmly.

More screaming

“Twilight, if you could please just calm down and tell us what’s wrong”

More screaming

Fluttershy winced. There was one surefire way to get Twilight to calm down... but she didn’t want to resort to scare tactics.

In the end, her complaining eardrums won out.

“I could always get some sedatives, Twilight”

The screaming instantly stopped.

It was a little known fact that Princess Twilight Sparkle, glorious alicorn and savior of the world, was deathly afraid of needles.

Blissful silence filled the room for a moment that seemed to hang in time.

The rope was cut by the sound of someone trying to sneak whilst wearing power armor, a near impossible task that would have taken a stealth boy and huge amounts of turbo to accomplish.

As it was, every head in the room was turned to the ex-Brotherhood scribe, who was halfway to the door with her combat armoured compadre, Twilight’s screams having covered their approach so far.

The two Mojave natives froze for several second, considering their options and weighing up the risks each one presented.

Their dash to the door was so well choreographed , you would think it had been planned months in advance.

They continued sprinting down the stairs and towards the front door, only giving slight pause to observe their unusual surroundings, once they had thrown the front door wide open though, they both stopped completely.

It wasn’t the multicoloured pastel ponies -a many of whom were staring at them- that were giving them pause, and it wasn’t the thatched roof cottages either.

No, they were looking beyond the entire village itself, as if all the streets and shops didn’t even exist, towards the outskirts of Ponyville.

And, more importantly, the rolling fields of lush green grass.

It wasn’t as if both of them had never seen grass before, there was quite an abundance of the stuff in Vault 22, but that had always looked... unnatural, like it didn’t belong in the burnt wastes that surrounded it.

What they were seeing now though... this was the good stuff, it stretched on for miles and miles.

And, for the first time in either of their memories, both of them began skipping towards it