Welcome to Harmony - Part 4
Trust, I’ve noticed, is a fickle thing. It’s easy to come by when there’s no real danger involved, easy to throw around like “love” and “faith” and other words made commonplace by common ponies. Yeah, I love this pony, just like I love potato chips and good pens and a bright, summery afternoon. Sure, I have faith in her, just like I have faith in the sun rising every morning and the moon coming up each night. Of course I trust you, because you seem like a nice guy and you smiled when you said my name.
But when the chips come down and the horseapples hit the fan, suddenly “trust” gets a promotion back up to something worth thinking about. Do I trust this pony to get the job done? Do I trust that pony to keep my secret to herself? Do I trust myself to quit digging my own grave before I lose the opportunity to climb back out of it?
This isn’t something I’m just realizing now. Anyone who’s spent five minutes in modern society knows the difference between public trust and genuine trust. What I have just realized now, though, is that if the stakes get high enough and a mare get desperate enough, eventually she reaches a point where the only thing she needs to genuinely trust somepony is no reason not to. It’s like coming full circle and crossing the same line twice, or reaching the eye of a hurricane after spending hours trapped inside the full fury of the storm. And if I were going to pick a metaphor for what I’ve gone through since I left Canterlot this morning, a raging tropical monsoon probably wouldn’t be a bad choice. I don’t know if that at all justifies my decision to hear our new friend on the radio out, but by this point I’m content to just do what my gut tells me and leave the retrospecting to the philosophers.
“Where are you now?” Applejack asks, a moment or two after her introduction isn’t met with a reply. Link’s transition to full-blown head case is finally complete, so for the first time I’m free to talk to our new non-enemy however I want.
“We’re in a theater,” I tell her. Link never moves to stop me or grab for the radio again, but I keep one eye on him all the same. “I don’t know what it’s called. There’s a picture window behind the screen, though. Big wooden doors at the front too.”
“And a little movie goin’ on ‘bout the wonders and blessin’s of Harmony?” Applejack goes on, with the air of somepony leading us towards an answer she already knows. I go ahead and say yes anyway.
“All right…” Applejack says in a murmur that quickly gains strength. “All right, good. Here’s what you’ll do. Go over to the window and look down. There should be a plaza down there with a fountain in the center.”
A pair of glassy, empty eyes flashes through my mind, and the knot in my stomach cinches itself tight again. I look back up at the window, but I’m not moving an inch back towards it as long as I’ve got a choice. “Yeah, we…we saw that.”
“You see that metal door on the far side of it? Little square thing with somethin’ like a ship’s wheel on the front?”
A choice I apparently don’t have anymore. I shuffle forward and do my best to avoid looking at any of the corpses littering the clearing, but my gut rolls and my hooves tingle all the same. “Yeah, I see it.”
“Anypony around it?”
Nopony alive. “Looks clear to me.”
“Good,” Applejack says, “‘cause that’s where you’re headed. Go out the door left of the window and follow the hallway.”
With a sigh of relief, I turn away from the window and look to the left, towards a hulking metal door with the word “Securitas” printed on the front. “You’ll pass by a few shops and such, and then you’ll come to a bank of elevators,” Applejack continues. “Take one of ‘em as far down as it’ll go, and once you get out, turn left first chance you get. After that, you’ll be on a balcony right above the plaza. It’s right below y’all, ‘bout three, four stories down. You might be able to see it if you lean forward far enough.”
After about half a second of deliberation, I decide that I’ll just have to take Applejack’s word for that. “Then what?”
“There’ll be more elevators behind you that you can take down to the plaza. From there, it’s a straight shot across to the door. Once you’re through, call me up on the radio again, and I’ll keep you steerin’ straight long enough to get you over to me. You got all that?”
Do I got all that? If she means whether I understand it, then yes. If she means whether I’ve fully come to grips with everything it entails, I hope she’s got somewhere comfortable to sit tight and wait for a day or six. “What if we get lost?”
A burst of static hisses out of the radio immediately after I let off the button, and for a second or two I can hear another faint voice in the background. “What’s that?” Applejack says once the voice goes away.
“I said, what if we get lost?”
“You won’t get lost,” she answers in a rush. “I’ll keep an eye on ya, make sure you’re not wanderin’ off.”
“What if we do wander off?”
“Then I’ll give y’all a shout and point ya in the right direction.”
“You sure about…”
“Yes, I’m sure about this,” Applejack retorts, and now I can tell her patience is starting to wear thin again. “Just keep your tails on for a few minutes, and you’ll be fine.”
I snap my jaw shut and comb through my brain for something else to stall her with, but no matter how much I try to stir up my thoughts, nothing good floats to the top. I’m a couple seconds from conceding defeat when one more question surfaces.
“What if that thing comes back?”
Applejack goes quiet, and I shift my gaze up to Link. His eyes are dim and oddly passive, much like the question he just asked. “I’ll do what I can from here,” the radio eventually replies. “You just worry about getting to that door.” There’s another pause, and then Applejack sighs. “For what it’s worth, you can trust me.”
Maybe it’s not trust I’m feeling in my stomach. Maybe the word I’m looking for sounds more like “desperation” or “panic”. Maybe it’s more of a phrase, like “no other options”, or “what else can I do”, or “exactly how much deeper do I want to dig that grave of mine”. Or maybe it doesn’t matter, because maybe the only thing worth thinking about in a place like this is how I’m going to live through the next ten minutes. Trust is fickle, but it’s also powerful, and right now trusting Applejack is the only chance I have of surviving that long. If she’s telling the truth, I’ll know we’ve got at least one friend down here. If she’s telling the truth, we might finally be safe.
And if she’s not…well, we won’t be any deader than we would be on our own.
“We’re on our way,” I say into the radio.
“I’ll be waitin’,” Applejack replies. Once I let go of the radio and let it swing back against my chest, she adds, “And if you wouldn’t mind…keep that radio on.” I mutter some kind of affirmative answer bookended by static, and then we’re alone again. Once the silence sinks in enough for my pulse to drop down to its normal pace, Link readies his crowbar and points a “You’re the boss” look in my direction. A couple deep breaths and a quick silent pep talk later, I point myself towards the exit and oblige him.
It takes me a few steps to realize that I have no idea how the hay I’m supposed to open a solid steel door with no visible locks or hinges, but soon enough that problem goes ahead and solves it. When I’m about three feet from the door, I feel a faint tingle pass over my ankles like I just walked through an invisible wire, and by the time I connect that electric sensation with the hair-raising effect of a magical spell, the door has already opened on its own accord, disappearing up into the ceiling with a grinding squeal. On the other side of it is a long carpeted hallway bordered by boarded-up shops, just like Applejack said they would be. So far, so good in the trust department.
I step over the threshold of the door and into the hall, and Link follows close behind me, his breathing shallow and his eyes darting over anything and everything in sight. He’s completely lost it, I find myself thinking, and although it’s probably not something I should be all that happy about, that realization still comes with a certain sense of relief. All things considered, he’s a lot quieter this way.
Of course, I have to grant him the fact that I’m teetering right on the edge of the same canyon he just swan-dove into, and that this hallway isn’t helping matters any. The pony-to-corpse ratio’s a lot closer to my comfort zone, at least. Whatever it was that killed all those ponies in the plaza must not have ever gotten back here, because I don’t see one bloodstain or body the whole way through. In fact, I don’t see any sign that anypony has been back here in years. The floor is choked with dust and bits of rubble and splintered wood, and each window and door in the abandoned shops nearby—more than one of which has jets of water spraying through cracks in the plywood boards covering them—is plastered all over with posters of a unicorn stallion silhouetted by a dramatic yellow sunrise and, on top of those, plain white bulletins with words like “CONDEMNED” and “REPOSSESSED BY ORDER OF EQUESTRIAN EUGENICS” stenciled in black across them. The rest of the city felt wounded and corrupted, but this part just feels abandoned.
My hoof dips into something cold and wet, and the shudder that runs down my spine is much bigger than the puddle I just stepped in should’ve warranted. When I take a breath a moment later, my stomach drops again; it seems louder in the still air, more rasping and more desperate. I can hear Link breathing behind me too, in short but steady gulps that betray how fast his heart must be racing. I can feel every speck of dust floating around me, scraping along my coat and squirming underneath my mane. I breathe in again and breathe out again. I wait for someone to reply, someone to cough, someone to step out from a doorway and reveal their presence, and no one does. I’m alone. I’m completely alone. There’s absolutely no one back here, and yet all around me I can sense their eyes watching me anyway, invisible inside every shadow and behind every window.
Suddenly, I need to hear them, need to see them, need someone to just tell me what I need to be scared of, because right now I have no idea what’s real and what’s not real and what I can or can’t see hiding out of sight, and I’m about to go crazy trying to figure it out. I lift my hoof up and rest it on my chest, and when I speak, my words don’t come out as a shout, but as a whisper.
“Applejack?” I hiss into the radio. “Applejack, you still there?”
I hear static, the sound of something thumping against a receiver somewhere, and then like a tiny blue flower in a sea of thorns, Applejack’s voice blooms from the speaker. “Yeah, I’m here,” she replies. “Why, what’s the matter?”
I try to keep from sighing too audibly, but I wouldn’t bet the mine on Applejack not having heard it. “Nothing,” I say quickly. “Just…checking in.”
“All right, then,” Applejack replies after a moment of somewhat mystified silence. “You reach the elevator yet?”
Heat flushes through my face, and I speed up my pace from a slow prowl into a trot. “Just about.”
“Well, get a move on, sugarcube. That splicer’s still waitin’ in the wings somewhere…no tellin’ when she’ll be back for an encore. Y’all watch each other’s backs out there.”
I don’t know whether Applejack meant to warn us or just to light a fire under our tails, but either way she gets what she wants. It only takes me a couple seconds to cover the last few yards to the end of the hallway, where four identical sets of elevator doors are waiting for me, each pair bulging out a bit from the wall and built out of golden rods and spirals woven together in ornate patterns. Through the gaps in the bars, I can see all the way to the back of all four elevator shafts, but more importantly, I can’t see any of the elevators that should be blocking that view. I look for a rope or a crank to pull, but all I find are little panels embedded into the wall next to each door, each with two softly glowing buttons inlaid in the center.
For a second or two, I’m completely clueless about what I’m supposed to do next, but then I remember the movie screen that turned on all by itself, and the little stripe of invisible magic that lifted a metal door the size of a water buffalo. On a hunch, I walk up to one of the panels and push the bottom button, and sure enough, I look up a moment later to see a shadowy, cylindrical cage slowly descending down the shaft, its motor puttering away somewhere out of sight. Automatic elevators, my internal voice dryly proclaims. Now I’ve seen everything.
The elevator car creaks to a halt once it’s level with the floor, and the doors open with a tiny ding. Once I’m inside, I quickly find another panel just like the one outside, only this one has about a dozen buttons on it. You’ll come to a bank of elevators, Applejack’s instructions echo inside my head. Take one of ‘em as far down as it’ll go. Looks like that’s the sixth floor, then. I reach out and press the button labeled “6”, and with a slight shudder, the elevator kicks into gear again. The doors are nearly closed before I realize Link isn’t on the right side of them.
I throw my forehooves out and force the doors back open, and try to make sure the look I give Link once they slide back out of sight is as unsubtle as possible. Even then, though, he still doesn’t wake up and smell the seawater. As a matter of fact, he doesn’t do anything at all, just stands there a good five feet from the elevator with a shadow over his eyes that makes him look almost feral.
“You coming?” I ask him, putting the same force into my words as I did into my gaze. Link answers by way of not moving a single freaking muscle and, as an added bonus, pointing his wild stare towards me. His eyes—the same ones I’d compared to emeralds not even a full twelve hours ago—look more like dull, swirling spheres of pond scum now, and when I make the mistake of looking into them, it isn’t long before I feel myself start to get sucked in too, like his fear is contagious and I’m slowly being infected by it every second.
And yet, the longer I stare at him and he stares at me, the more convinced I become that it isn’t fear at all I’m seeing, but rather something oddly familiar that’s congealing and solidifying into a kind of cold determination. Either way, it still makes the fur on the back of my neck stand up, and given what’s happened in the last few minutes, that’s not even close to being on the list of things I need right now.
“Link, for Celestia’s sake, quit being a drama queen and just get yourself together already,” I growl, my last reserve of patience suddenly empty. “We don’t have time for this.”
Finally, a little blip of intelligence bubbles to the top of those algae-infested lakes, and Link blinks a few times before looking down at the floor. “I…” he starts to say.
“Well, whaddya know, Peter Pan’s back from Neverland. That’s just super. Way to go. Great job,” I say. “Get in the elevator.”
I get a few more seconds of silence and a couple hard swallows, and then whatever it was that was rolling around in Link’s head sinks down into the bog, and a glimmering sheen of passivity returns to his gaze. “Yeah,” he says with an awkward cough, and without further ado he steps into the elevator and reaches in front of my chest to push the button for the fifth floor. “Sorry,” he mutters without looking at me, his voice still a bit distant while my own silently begs to be allowed to chew him out again. As much as I’d like to grant it that pleasure, though, I manage to restrain myself. There’s something about Link that just makes him hard to stay mad at for long. It feels too much like kicking a lost puppy who won’t stop following you home. A puppy that’s liable to get us both killed sooner rather than later. Whatever it was I did to you, Celestia, I’m pretty sure I’m sorry by now.
We pass by a few other floors on our way down, but all I can see of them are a few flickering lights and a lot more free-flowing water than I’m really comfortable with. I’ll grant this place the fact that it’s definitely seen better days, but when a city built on the ocean floor starts springing leaks, a few buckets and mops just aren’t gonna cut it. And when more than one floor is so submerged that several inches of water seep into the elevator and wash over our hooves as we pass by it, the thought of how much structural integrity this place has left to lose quickly takes a back seat to the thought of buying a one-way ticket to scenic Anywhere-But-Here-Ville.
The sixth floor slides into view behind a thin, green-tinged waterfall, an aftereffect of the water cascading down from the upper floors. I waste a few seconds waiting for the flow to taper off, and then another few building up the courage to force myself through the freezing-cold sheet once I realize it’s not going away. Gritting my teeth and bolting through it in one motion gets me into the hallway all right, but it also gets me a mouthful of seawater and a painful chill down my spine to go with it. I was nearly dry from the crash by then, too. Charming, this Harmony place.
“This thing’s waterproof, right?” I say to the radio.
“Much as anything else down here is,” the radio replies.
And that’s another thing: not one single pony in this sunforsaken place can put anything in simple terms. They have to be cryptic about it. It’s like a fetish or something, like some part of them just has to go all Comic Book Bad Guy on me and speak entirely in riddles. Here’s a crazy thought: if I ask you a yes-or-no question, Applejack, just say “yes” or “no”. Or better yet: say nothing. Say absolutely nothing at all. Just let me keep prattling on to myself out here, because even that’s better than having to go dig out my Honey Oats Super Secret Decoder Ring every two minutes just to figure out what the hay it is you’re talking about. It was a rhetorical question to begin with, for Celestia’s sake!
By the time I finish taking the Princess’s name in vain for the nth time today, it occurs to me that it’d probably help out a lot in the way of efficient communication if I expressed a few of those sentiments out loud to the pony they were directed at. It also occurs to me that efficient communication is right below “filing my forehooves into razor-sharp griffon talons” on my list of priorities at the moment. Usually, the more I try to make my opinions heard, the more I end up making them heard to everyone within a half-mile radius. So in light of that, my better judgment knows that the far smarter option right now is to just wring the water out of my braid again and keep plodding along until I find a nice, quiet place where I can stick my head into a hole in the wall and scream.
“What are you looking at?” I snap at Link as he sidles up beside me. He responds with a slow, heavy blink and an open-mouthed shrug, and another claw screeches down the chalkboard in my head. Maybe I’m just tired. Or hungry. Or wet. Or all three at once, with a nice helping of stress and a few pinches of salt pricking into my eyes. How many different kinds of emotional and physiological trauma do I need to have before it’s morally acceptable to put a hoof through somepony’s larynx?
A question for another time, I suppose. Now is the time to say nothing, hurt nothing, and put one hoof in front of the other, so that’s what I do. I take a deep breath and hold it inside my chest for the first few steps, and when I let it out in a slow, controlled huff, the sound echoes down the hallway and into the intersection a few yards away. Turn left first chance you get, that’s what Applejack said. Okay, great. I’m turning left. I’m keeping my head up, I’m jogging these last few feet to the turn, and…
There’s someone else down here.
The pony I see is hardly more than an afterimage by the time my mind processes the fact that we’re not alone, and the flash of memory that stays with me long enough to go back over and review is nothing more than raw sensation—pink fur, orange mane, darkened face bent into a scowl. In the time it takes for me to even pick up that much, the stranger is gone, galloping off around the corner with an uneven gait muffled by the shaggy, water-worn carpet. I stand stock-still for a moment, waves of adrenaline rolling through my shoulders, and in the distance I hear metal clanging against metal, the harsh, grinding click of something being slotted together. A slight, almost dainty cough wafts around the bend, and then the air stands still. I take one slow step forward, tilt my head, hear nothing, take another step, and then instinct jerks me back and forces me down to the floor as I hear something approaching, something that clatters and squeaks like a rusty old wagon, or like a baby carriage.
Exactly like a baby carriage.
I don’t even believe my eyes at first, but I get much too long a look at this new arrival to be anything but sure that it’s real. As I watch in mute confusion, a rusted iron baby carriage rolls out from the left and rattles across the hallway, coming to a stop a few seconds later with a gentle bump against the opposite wall. Nopony follows it out, nopony shouts after it; I can’t even hear if there’s actually a baby inside. It’s just an ordinary four-wheeled wireframe carriage, sitting in the middle of the hallway, all alone. And despite the fact that every hair on my body is still standing at attention, it only takes a few seconds for caution to be overruled by curiosity.
The carriage’s front end is pointed slightly towards me, so I can’t see enough of the interior to check whether there’s anything alive in it. When I take a few steps closer, the clicking sound I heard returns, but this time it doesn’t sound like it’s coming from the hallway on the left. In fact, the closer I get, the more it sounds like it’s coming from the carriage. I stop short with a good twenty feet to spare and listen for a moment, and as if on cue, the noise ceases too. A second later, though, a hollow, unearthly tone—like something you’d hear from an alien spaceship in a cheesy radio play—emanates from the stroller, and then, inexplicably, a tinkling, soothing melody fills the hallway. The notes are tinny and insubstantial, but I’d know that tune anywhere. Anypony in Equestria would know that tune anywhere.
Hush now, quiet now, it’s time to lay your sleepy head…
My subconscious fills in the words automatically, my mother’s voice seeping through faded memories and singing loud and clear inside my head, and the song echoes out from the carriage and washes over my whole body. I feel weightless, like I’m caught in the thin space between the real world and that of a slowly evaporating dream.
Hush now, quiet now, it’s time to go to bed…
The peaceful lullaby is nonsensical in a place like this, but at the same time some part of it is hypnotizing. Some part of it draws me closer and closer, even as my heart pumps faster and my head begins to fill with air.
Drifting off to sleep, leave your busy day behind you…
“Ruby?” Link murmurs. “Ruby, where are you going?”
A blurry vision of green grass and starry skies soaks into my brain, and suddenly the cold of the stale air and the seawater dripping down my back seems a hundred miles away. I’m not just warm. I’m contented. I’m exhausted. I’m homesick.
Drifting off to sleep, let the joy of dreamland find you…
“Ruby, what’s wrong?”
Wrong. Yes, this is wrong. There’s something very, very wrong here, and yet I’m powerless to resist it, powerless to do anything but keep walking toward the sound like a lamb being led to pasture. I just want one look, that’s all. Maybe there’s somepony in that carriage. Maybe somepony else needs help. I can’t just leave them there. I can’t bear not knowing.
Hush now, quiet now, it’s time to lay your sleepy head…
I have to know. I’m cold, wet, alone, and terrified, and I have to know.
Hush now, quiet now, it’s time to go to bed…
The song slows at the end of the verse, then cuts off with a violent clunk. The whirring, clicking noise returns, but now it’s not coming from underneath the carriage, but rather from inside it. I’m five feet away, and I can finally see inside the carriage, see a gossamer purple liner and a ragged gray blanket, and another one of those magic voice recorders. And no baby. The carriage is empty. The carriage isn’t moving.
The carriage is still ticking.
My blood runs cold, and the floor rolls in synch with my stomach. Five feet to the carriage. Thirty feet back to Link, whose eyes are wide and slowly filling with comprehension. I turn towards him and watch my name form on his lips, just before it punches through the air like a bolt from a crossbow.
“Ruby!” he screams, and fear coils around my spine like a snake. I kick my hooves into gear, and soon that five feet is eight feet, ten, twelve.
I’m fifteen feet away when the carriage explodes.
Heat scorches along my back and throat, and compressed by the unyielding hallway walls, the shock wave might as well as have been a tidal one. The impact scrambles my mind on contact and wipes away any awareness of losing my balance or having my legs swept out from under me, so when I come to a moment later nauseatingly dizzy and deafened by an unending screech, I’m lying on my side facing the wall, with my head pressed into the carpet and throbbing fit to burst. Over the keening in my ears, I can hear a voice somewhere close by, a sour, high-pitched squeal that seems to combine fury, pain, and the wavering, whining tone of somepony about to burst into tears.
“…told me I was gonna be a star…ain’t fair. It ain’t fair! You ain’t no better than me! Who are you anyway, huh? Nobody! She’s mine, you hear me?”
I press my forehooves against my temples and force my head up, and in the dirty brown haze that’s enveloped the hall, I see an earth mare dressed in discolored white lace with pink fur, a light orange mane shaped into a bowl cut, and a thick, dark bracer strapped to her foreleg. The second I catch sight of her, a demented snarl curls onto her face, and she jerks the bracer out from her body to eject a cherry red monkey wrench from somewhere inside it. I have just enough time to sit up, to see her raise the bracer up and drag it along the wall as she lowers her head into a charge.
“She’s MINE!”
I squeeze my eyes shut and try to brace myself, but the blow comes much sooner than I expected, and feels more like it came from skin and bone than metal. It still sends me flying off into the wall anyway, though, so by the time I get my bearings and look up again, it’s only just soon enough to see Link’s crowbar whip through the air and smack into the mare’s bracer, only just soon enough to watch him swing again and clobber her on the cheek, the meaty thud sending a spray of crimson arcing across the hallway. The mare hardly even seems to feel it, and with an indignant roar, she aims her next attack at Link’s neck. He ducks under the wrench a split-second before it decapitates him, and counters with a blow to her knee that sends the sickening crunch of shattering bone vibrating all the way down to my soles. That one, the mare feels. She stumbles again and nearly collapses before hopping back a few feet and crouching into a defensive stance, the leg with the bracer on it hanging useless below her chest.
There are so many things in front of me I can’t comprehend that for a moment, my whole brain just ceases to function. Once it’s back in motion, I have to rebuild the scenario from scratch just to even begin to make any sense of it:
We’re heading to meet Applejack and get to safety.
The elevator will take us down to Applejack.
We’re in a hallway leading over to the elevators.
There’s another mare in the hallway with us.
She has a white dress and a red wrench.
She just tried to attack me.
Link just attacked her.
Link just attacked her.
She’s hurt.
I’m not.
We have to move.
Finally, something to focus on: we have to move. We have to get out of here before she recovers. We have to run away from here just like we did before, except Link doesn’t look like he’s going anywhere. He looks petrified, actually, only beneath that fear is a maniacal look of abject rage. The mare, on the other hand, looks almost pitiful as she hobbles back and forth a ways down the hall, her eyes darting over Link’s rigid frame and her mouth motoring away even as she groans in pain.
“C’moooooon, baby…” she croons. “Just a little taste…don’t be such a square. I deserve it, ya bastard! I’m the star here, I’m the one who’s gonna be up in lights. Just you wait, you see, you’ll all see. It’s my part, it’s my chance to shine, and you. Can’t. Have it!”
Her sneer returns with a vengeance, and with another yell she comes at Link again. I see his shoulders tense, watch him take a step back, and then time seems to slow down as he brings his crowbar around again, as he slams it into her head and another cloud of blood splatters against the wall. When the mare looks up again, part of her jaw is hanging at a sickening, unnatural angle, and all the rage has drained from her eyes, leaving in its place an almost pitiful look of disappointment and pain, like a little foal who’d been sent to bed without supper.
Suddenly, everything is happening too fast. Before I can bring myself to stand, Link is standing over her, and I regain the ability to speak just in time to have my words die in my throat as he raises the crowbar and hits her again, and again, and again. A choked, mottled cough bubbles out of the mare’s mouth, and then Link cries out and slams his weapon down one last time. The mare groans and rolls onto her side, and doesn’t move again.
For a long time after that, none of my senses seem to work right. No matter how much I blink, I can barely see Link through the haze slipping over my eyes, and when he releases his magical grip on the crowbar and lets it fall on top of the mare lying below him, the metallic thump it makes as it bounces off her stomach feels as loud as a freight train. At the same time, though, the tangy scent of blood stings in my nose, and every hair on my body bristles against my skin like twine. Link stumbles back and heaves for breath, but a few seconds later once his pulse has slowed a bit, he shakes his head slightly and starts making his way back towards me.
“Ruby...”
The fur on the back of my neck stands up, and something solid and blazing hot twinges painfully inside my gut. “Wh...” I try to say.
“Ruby, you okay?”
“What...”
Link swallows, pauses, then swallows again with a little more effort. “Sorry about pushing you down like that, I...s-she was coming at you and I just...”
I look back at the mare again, whose eyes have gone glassy and dull beneath half-closed lids, and suddenly the haze is gone.
“What did you do?” I whisper. Link’s eyes widen and he keeps talking, but I can’t hear him anymore. The only part of my mind still functioning is the part that sees a pink-furred mare with her skull caved in, and a colt standing in front of me still coated with her blood.
“Link, what did you do?” I shout.
Now he just looks baffled. “What d’you mean, what did I do? She-”
No, not baffled. Offended. He’s offended that I’m not singing his praises for bashing another pony’s brains in. It’s all I can do to look away from him in time to keep from being sick, and when my eyes settle back on the mare my stomach just turns over again. “Stars above, she’s dead…” I whisper to myself.
“What the he-”
“Shut up, Link, she’s dead!” I scream over him, my gut roiling not with nausea now, but with fury. “You killed her!”
Link sputters for a moment or two, and I take the opportunity to let the coals in my chest simmer and heat up again. “Ruby, she was gonna kill you!” he argues back, his voice slipping into an incredulous whine that might as well have been an ice pick shoved into my ear.
“Don’t tell me what she was gonna do, how the hay do you know what she was gonna do?”
“I don’t know, maybe I jumped to conclusions when she charged at you with a monkey wrench!”
“So you charged at her with a crowbar? You broke her leg, Link, how in all creation was she gonna kill anybody with a broken leg?”
Link squeezes his eyes shut, and the expression on his face swings back around to a disbelieving grimace again. “I seriously can’t believe you’re arguing about this.”
“Well, I seriously can’t believe you just murdered somepony, so I’m pretty sure we’re even!” I yell back, although I’m sure the colt flinching a few feet away from me would call it a screech.
“You’re-”
“Yes, I am gonna call it that, Link, damn it,” I hiss at him. The curse leaves a bad taste in my mouth even after I spit it out, but with the circumstances being what they are, somehow it still feels justified. “Stars above, who the hay are you?” I go on after Link’s mouth snaps shut and the silence between us grows too heavy to bear. “What kind of pony does that, what kind of pony does something like that?”
For the first time since I’ve known him, Link is truly at a loss for words, but it only takes him a few seconds to find some again. “What kind of pony does that? What kind of…the kind of pony that just saved your life!” he spews. “You’re welcome, by the way!”
“Don’t patronize me, Link, not now,” I growl, my tone black as the bruises I’m one more self-righteous remark away from beating into every inch of him I can reach. I suck in a breath, say a quick prayer to Celestia—to forgive me for all the sins I’ve committed, and for those that I’m about to—and listen for the bell to start the round.
“Why not?” he sardonically replies. “Not like you’re gonna murder me for it, right?”
Ding.
By the time I get my tongue in working order again, I’m about two inches from Link’s nose, just like I’d been the last time he’d infuriated me right up to the edge of complete madness. I can’t remember whether the adjective my rational side wants to use is “coincidental” or “ironic”, so for the time being I go with the much more attractive alternative of “go buck yourself with a dictionary”.
“Listen to me, you gutless, insensitive, unbelievable-”
It’s a miracle I even hear the radio flicker back to life, and a bigger one still that my first instinct isn’t to smash it against Link’s forehead. “Ruby?” Applejack says, cutting me off just before I use my second swear word of the month.
“WHAT?” I answer through my teeth. To her credit, instead of shutting up, Applejack just answers in turn.
“Sweet mother’a mercy, keep it down!” she hisses. “What the hay’s wrong with you?”
And there it is: the moment I’ve been waiting for, the last straw on my back that snapped it clean in two. I’m trapped in an abandoned and terrifying city underwater, surrounded by piles of corpses and stuck with a colt who sees nothing wrong with adding to them, and the one guiding light I’ve seen the whole time has just asked what’s wrong with me. I’ve been this close to going straight off the deep end, and now—finally—I’ve reached the point where “this close” has become “right here, right now, and all over the place”. I. Am freaking. Done.
“What’s wrong with me?” I repeat, eyes closed and hoof pressed down on the talk button hard enough to crack it. “You know what, Applejack, I think there are a lot of things wrong with me right now. You see, where I come from, we have this wonderful thing called civility, which is what you use when you’re nice to your neighbors and you pay your taxes on time and you try not to make a practice of hitting ponies in the head with blunt objects. Maybe you’ve heard of it.”
“Ruby-”
“No, I get it, I really do. I have finally figured you ponies out. There’s some part of me—and it’s a crazy part, I know—that, I dunno, likes being civil. Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. But I’m in a different place now, and you guys have different traditions, and that’s okay. Really. It is. So yes, for a minute there I was just the slightest bit upset about the whole ‘witnessing a murder’ thing, but you know what? That’s normal down here, isn’t it? That’s just what you ponies do, and I can just zip my lil’ trap and deal with that. But, as you can probably tell, I’m not really the most emotionally balanced mare in the stable, so if you all could give me, like, ten minutes to just wrap my brain around this entirely foreign world I’ve been dropped into, that’d be just peachy freaking ke-”
“Ruby, listen to me! This ain’t your fight, they aren’t after you!”
Finally, the red haze lifts from over my eyes, though not thanks to anything Applejack said. Rather, it’s what she isn’t saying, what I can hear being whispered down the hall by harsh, raspy voices that aren’t coming from any radio.
“They travel in packs, Ruby! Get outta there now before-”
Before the whispers become murmurs, then growls, then roars. Before another pair of bedraggled stallions gallop in from the other end of the hallway, both of them unicorns and both of them as filthy and as furious as the mare who came before them. Before they look down and see the body on the floor, and the blood pooling beneath it, and the two dumbstruck refugees standing behind it. All of that is what Applejack was trying to warn me about, and now that I finally realize I should’ve listened, it’s already too late to try.
“It was you!” one of them shouts, his horn crackling to life as he reaches into his threadbare black blazer and pulls out a cannon just like the one Chestnut had. “You ruined it! You took her away!”
“That’s the last straw!” his partner adds, hefting a wrench over his shoulder to emphasize his point before lowering his head and galloping straight for us. “It’s time for your performance review!”
Link scrambles for his crowbar, but he won’t get there in time. Everything’s moving too fast: the stallion, the blood pool, the floor beneath my hooves. We have nowhere to run, no way of fighting back…nothing except a radio and what I sure as hay hope is a miracle on the other end waiting to be called upon.
“Applejack!” I scream into it. “Applejack, what do I-”
I never see it coming. I never finish asking for it. For a long moment, I can’t even comprehend what it is. Somepony howls, a deep, rumbling bellow shakes the entire hall, and then the next thing I know the stallion’s wrench is clattering to the ground and his savage red eyes are suddenly lifeless and dull. He stumbles blindly forward for a few steps before crumpling to the ground with a meaty splat, blood seeping from the jagged red craters left by whatever it was that just blasted through his skull.
“Holy shit!” the other stallion yells once it becomes clear that his partner isn’t getting up. I look up at him just in time to see him raise his weapon at me, but another bellow throws off his aim and draws both our attention towards the hallway the carriage rolled out from, the one that’s right across from where his friend just had his head blown off. The floor begins to shake, the stallion steps forward and looks around the bend, and I’m just about to turn tail and run when his eyes bug out and his jaw drops to his chest. He swears again, raises the cannon, and then at the last possible moment, he dives off to the side and throws his hooves over his head. A split second later, my miracle arrives.
Calling it big would almost be an insult; the thing that comes steaming into view like a runaway train is a behemoth, a hulking mass of steel-plated armor and coarse brown fabric with air tanks and hoses sticking out from its back and a rust-mottled diving helmet over its head. Its first charge misses the stallion by inches, and its inevitable impact with the wall a moment later leaves a two-foot deep crater in the waterlogged plaster. That doesn’t stop the monster, though. If anything, it just makes it even angrier.
The unicorn screams and squeezes off a couple rounds from his cannon, but the metal beast either shrugs them off or never feels them hit. A swing from its right foreleg—which looks like it’s made entirely of metal—sends the stallion scurrying for cover again, but this time he doesn’t make it far. Before his stomach can even hit the ground, the beast lifts its other foreleg and stomps down on his tail, throwing him off-balance and sending him sprawling face-first into the carpet. When the stallion tries to stand up again, the beast swipes his metal leg around again and bats him across the hall, like a giant robotic cat playing with a mouse.
The telltale snap of breaking bone rings out as the stallion hits the wall, and as the beast strides toward him, he can only twitch feebly and moan over what must be a broken spine. From there, the fight ends quickly and brutally: the beast stops over the colt, eyes him almost passively for a moment, and then, ignoring the babbling protests of his victim, raises his foreleg one last time and brings it hurdling down towards his head. I shut my eyes and try to turn my head away, but the sound of the stallion’s skull being crushed beneath the monster’s hoof is still something I know will feature into a lot of my nightmares over the next few decades.
Running is no longer an option, and now even drawing breath is still out on the table. When I open my eyes again, the hallway is silent, and the beast is looking down at what’s left of his foe, a sight that sends whatever’s left in my stomach rushing up into the back of my throat. I do all I can to hold back from spewing all over myself, and in the end I mostly succeed. But despite my best efforts, the smallest of whimpers still slips out of my throat, and that’s enough to make the beast jerk around and finally notice me. An impossibly long moment passes where my terrified reflection in its soulless black faceplate is all I can see, and then another ear-splitting roar blasts out of the beast’s chest. It holds its metal leg aloft and watches as it shudders and transforms into a bulbous, glowing cannon that’s almost as big as I am, then lowers its head and bears down on me with all the fury of a hundred-foot tidal wave.
The part of my brain not occupied with forcing air into my lungs is too small to handle sprinting for the elevator, so my mindless attempt only leads to me tripping over my own legs and falling flat on my back, just in time to see the beast smack Link out of the way and skid to a halt half a yard away, the barrel of his weapon an inch from my forehead. And of all times and places, it’s only now that a clear thought finally coagulates inside the fuzzy mess that was once my mind: This is it. I’m going to die.
And I would’ve died, were it not for another miracle that arrives at just the right time. The beast would’ve cut me down just like the two stallions before, were it not for a small, childlike voice crying out from somewhere out of sight:
“Wait, Mr. B! Waaaaaait!”
Were it not for the little filly who darts between the beast’s legs and scoots over to stand by me, her voice free of fear and her moth-eaten pink dress bouncing up and down with every step. With a small, almost playful grunt, she stands up on two legs and pushes into the cannon with tiny white forehooves, and my heart catches in my throat as I realize how close the foal is to being squashed like a bug. But the beast doesn’t even try to resist her. Even as it angrily rolls its shoulders and sucks in furious, metallic-sounding heaves of air, it allows the filly to gently guide his aim away from me, and the instant she points a pouty look of disapproval up towards its expressionless faceplate, it jerks the cannon back underneath its chest, where it quickly rearranges itself back into an ordinary-looking foreleg.
“It’s okay, Mr. Bubbles,” the filly says, “she’s not a bad mare.” Her voice doesn’t sound nearly as innocent now. On the surface, it’s still the same bubbly little chirp I’d expect from a filly her age, but now that imminent death no longer has a monopoly on my mind, I can hear a thick, deeply distorted second layer to it, as if the beast behind her—or something even worse still lurking out of sight—is repeating every word she says in perfect sync. “She’s just like us,” the foal adds, and as she turns to face me I can’t help but jump back and gasp. Just like her voice, her face looks almost normal at first. A stubby unicorn horn pokes out from beneath pink and purple curls, and the dimples in her cheeks seem to glow when she smiles. But none of that is enough to distract from the part of her face that really is glowing: the twin orbs of otherworldly light that shine from her eye sockets and send a flickering yellow pallor splaying across my front.
The filly and I stare at each other, she with an angelic look of warm curiosity and I with something that’s steadily working its way up to horror, until without warning she hops back towards the beast and darts between his legs again, gesturing for it to follow as she slides back the sleeve of her dress to reveal a tiny bracer strapped to her ankle. “C’mon, Daddy!” she calls out, giggling to herself as she bounces away. “There’s stars in here!”
For the first time, the beast doesn’t immediately respond to the filly’s demands. I can see its legs tensing inside its suit, its mind straining to decide between staying with its ward and heeding its instinctual urge to not turn its back on me. I can’t see its eyes or any other part of its face through the porthole, so I can’t tell whether it’s leaning towards one decision or the other. I can’t even tell if it has a face under there at all. So I watch, and I wait, and I grit my teeth as my legs burn and my head begins to throb. If I run, could this thing catch me? If I pulled out one of those tubes, could I buy enough time to get out of sight? Could he hit me with that cannon from twenty feet away? From fifty feet? From the other end of the hall?
I can’t risk it. And yet I can’t just sit here either, wondering whether my lungs closing up will kill me before this machine pony does. Not even my workshop can save me now: every gear inside is too slippery to hold, every nail and screw too brittle to touch. I can’t decide. I can’t escape. I can’t…
“Ruby.”
Applejack’s voice is softer than usual, her tone calm and controlled in a way that makes it plainly obvious she’s forcing herself to stay that way. I try to answer her, but my lips are shaking too much to even form her name.
“You don’t have to talk, I can see you fine,” she intones. “Just keep quiet and don’t move.”
My brain catches her drift easily enough, but my tongue is still a step or two behind by the time she’s done. “M-m-maybe I could-”
“Don’t. Move.”
I swallow hard and obey, just as the filly turns around again. “Come on, Mr. B!” she shouts. “They’re dancing for us!”
“Look at the ground, Ruby,” Applejack tells me.
Now it’s my mouth that beats my mind to the punch. “What?”
“He’s watchin’ you because you aren’t lookin’ away. They’re only protectors, Ruby, wild dogs trained to bite only when one of those little ones hears somepony bark. Long as you keep starin’ at him, he’ll keep thinkin’ you’re a threat. So just look at the ground, and don’t so much as scratch an itch till he’s decided you ain’t worth his time.”
I take a shallow breath in through my nose and, and as slowly as I can, tilt my head to the side and turn my eyes down towards the floor, sliding my hoof off my chest in the same motion. The beast still doesn’t move. Sweat begins to bead at my maneline, but I don’t dare wipe them away, so soon my forehead is dripping from the heat flowing through my body and collecting in my face.
“Mr. B!”
It takes every ounce of self-control I have not to look up, and I guess that single action is what finally convinces the beast that I’m not going to attack. After one last parting groan, his shadow lifts from over me, and he retreats down the hall to join the filly he’s apparently supposed to be guarding. My eyes start to burn as soon as he’s gone, but I squeeze them shut tight and still don’t move. There’ll be plenty of time for emotional breakdowns later. In this moment right now, Applejack’s word is the only thing I need to hold on to.
“Stand up. Slow and steady,” she whispers. “Make sure Link’s all right.”
Link. Stars above, I’d completely forgotten he was even here. Wasn’t I mad at him about something? In the middle of rolling over onto my stomach, I throw a fleeting glance over to where I last remember seeing him, where the beast shoved him aside on his way towards me. He’s already on his hooves, a bit pale and shaky but otherwise unhurt. Our eyes meet long enough to confirm that both of us still generally in one piece, and then he looks back down the hall to keep an eye on the hall’s other two occupants while I occupy myself with remembering how to walk.
“You’re gonna have to pass by ‘em again to get to the elevators,” Applejack says once I’m up. “That big lug’ll preen for ya a bit once you get close, but so long as you don’t make any sudden moves and you keep movin’, he should let you by.”
He should let us by. I feel better already.
Without any more instruction to go on than that, all I can do is put one hoof in front of the other and keep my eyes on the prize as much as possible. Link falls in step behind me once I get going, pausing just long enough to grab his still-dripping crowbar and levitate it by his side where the beast won’t be able to see it. At least he’s being reasonable about that.
Oh, right, that’s what we were fighting about. The mare’s body was another thing I’d forgotten about over the past minute or two. I step around her as gingerly as I can, but keeping my eyes off that particular obstacle inevitably leads to my gaze drifting towards the much bigger one down the hall. The beast is now standing over the stallion with the hole in his head, his little partner crouched behind his torso with her hoof stuck inside his jacket pocket. Except that can’t be all she’s doing, because her hoof’s not moving like she’s digging around for something in there. Curiosity wins out over fear, and I give the pair a closer look just as the filly gives a little grunt and yanks her leg back away from the stallion.
A six-inch long needle comes with it.
A prickling chill washes over my stomach, and I stop dead in my tracks. I have only a moment to pretend I’m not seeing what I think I’m seeing before the filly tilts her hoof to the side, examines a red vial inside the bracer the needle is protruding from, and then bites her lip and stabs back down. The syringe reenters the stallion’s body with a wet shick, and the floor pitches like a sailboat at high tide.
“Ain’t nothin’ you can do for him now,” Applejack calls out from beneath the waves. “Eyes down, hooves forward.”
Eyes down, hooves forward. I say it again under my breath, and each repetition gives me a little more strength to keep moving towards the hallway. Eyes down, hooves forward.
We’re about ten feet away from the filly before her protector notices us again. His angry groans and glinting faceplate follow us all the way past them. Eyes down, hooves forward.
We reach the second stallion’s body, and Link switches his crowbar out for the other pony’s more powerful cannon. When he leans back up, his forehead is shining with sweat. Eyes down, hooves forward.
We round the corner and walk a few more steps, until finally the corridor opens up into the balcony Applejack promised us we’d find there. Link nods forcefully and wipes his face with a forehoof, but I can’t even manage a relieved sigh. Even though we’re out of sight, nothing about this place feels safe anymore.
“Congratulations,” Applejack says wryly as I give a quick glance down towards the plaza. “You just survived your first meetin’ with a Big Daddy.”
“Is that something…I should be proud of?” I gasp back.
“Considering that rivet gun’a his can put six inches of steel through ya at seventy-five yards, it’s more than most ponies can say,” Applejack answers with a dark sigh. “Elevators are just off to the right there.”
The wonder of my first encounter with the automated machines has worn off a bit by now, so once Link and I are slowly sinking even deeper into Hades, I’m left with nothing to do but ask the question that’s been bouncing around in my mind since we got here. “What happened to this place?”
We’ve gone down almost a full floor before Applejack answers, and when she does, it’s in a soft voice tinged not with the motherly authority I’ve come to expect, but with a deep, almost physical sense of regret. “You might as well’ve asked what didn’t happen,” she murmurs. “Maybe the war we fought with each other did us in, or maybe the one we were fightin’ with nature all those years before whittled us down first. Could’ve been big business or big government, or big ponies pushing the smaller ones a step too far…most of us just didn’t care so long as the apples were fresh and the hypos kept rollin’ off the line.
“Me, though, I think we just got too smart for our own good. We made our bodies strong and our minds fast, and we kept buildin’ ourselves up higher and higher till it was too late to realize we were livin’ beyond our means, that those wings we were flyin’ on were just gossamer and mornin’ dew. Time was, this place was the busiest hive a bee could ever hope to find. Ponies came here from all over Equestria chasin’ after their dreams…now they’re ghosts, dead as the city they thought would save ‘em.”
The elevator creaks to a halt as it reaches the end of its descent, and once the doors slide open Link and I are treated to our first ground-level view of the desecrated plaza. The bodies littering the floor don’t move, and neither do we. “I don’t know what kind’a fate or providence got y’all in that bathysphere, Ruby,” Applejack says, with a new tone to her voice that almost resembles humility, “but if it’s kin with the kind that got me here…I reckon if I help you, maybe you can help me. Hope’s a right powerful thing to come by, and if believin’ in it makes me a fool…well, I can think’a worse things to be in a time like this.”
Applejack is silent for a moment, one that’s just long enough for her to gain her old personality back. “G’wan and head across the plaza,” she says. “I’ll send a bit’a help down once you’re a few jumps outta the fryin’ pan.”
I nod to myself and let the radio fall silent again, but I still can’t bring myself to step out of the elevator. It’s not even the bodies that bother me anymore; much more than that, I can’t shake the feeling that something else is in the plaza, watching and waiting for us to come just a bit farther out in the open. Normally, the point where I started thinking that would also be the point where the rational part of my brain told me I was being ridiculous, but in light of being rational getting me absolutely jacksquat so far in this place, paranoia just seems like an appropriate response right now.
But once I finally step out of the elevator and stop beside the stiffened legs of a long-dead unicorn, I begin to wonder whether those nerves are really justified after all. The plaza practically defines the term “deserted”; minus the sounds of my breath rasping out of my lungs, the whole place is silent as a proverbial grave. Not to mention it’s packed with enough bodies to make it a literal one. I let a shudder work its way through my back and then keep going, telling myself under my breath that the only way to get over fear is to face it head-on.
We make it all the way up to the fountain before I realize that’s also a great way to get yourself killed.
The lights, of course, are the first things to go. When I first walked into it, the plaza was lit by the same rounded lamps I saw in the bathysphere bay, but the instant I put a hoof past the far edge of the central fountain’s basin, each one fizzles out one by one until the place is nearly pitch-black. The effect, as I’m sure it’s meant to be, is terrifying, almost as much as the sudden screeching of metal that rings out from a dozen places high overhead, and the low whispers and growls that slither out after them like snakes closing in on a pair of half-crippled mice.
Before I can even so much as scream my last and hope whatever’s coming for me is kind enough to end my life quickly, the plaza is flooded with bright white light again, though this time it’s not coming from the walls. It’s coming from up above us, where something has unfolded from the rivets in the walls to form three giant glowing screens arranged in a circle around the domed glass ceiling. Struck half-blind by the sudden flash, the screens quickly take up what little vision I have left, which means I’m still looking up at them when the light shimmers and abruptly morphs into an image of the same mare I saw in the theater, and up in the tower, and in every shattered strut and rivet in this sunforsaken place. I blink up at the face and the face blinks back, and then Onyx Ryder’s lips curl into a sneer, and her booming voice fills the plaza with words that feel powerful enough to break me in half.
“The vultures of Canterlot smell blood in the surf…and yet still they circle overhead, sending their chicks down to brave the unfathomable depths of equine dissimulation. Tell me, little birdies, what did you think you’d find down here? A worm from the Princess, a crumb of bread from the scientific nobility? Here’s the news: Harmony isn’t some piddling colony ready to be boxed up and shipped back home, and Onyx Ryder is not some modest mare of science begging to be snapped up and bid upon by the oligarchy of the elite. But of course, the barbarous mind of the vassal knows nothing of passion or initiative, and such a creature is less than despicable. You are merely…useless.”
Off to the right, something flits across a balcony before latching onto the wall and turning its head down towards me. As if she’s aware of my inattention, Ryder pauses in her speech for a moment, so I have plenty of time to watch in horror as more shadowy shapes pour out of doorways and air ducts and jagged holes in the walls, crawling and flying down towards the plaza like monstrous black flies. The growls are much closer now, and getting louder by the second. “We are all connected by the Great Chain of Progress,” Ryder goes on, “and if a link in the chain is inadequate…for the good of all, it must be removed.”
Link backs into me and pushes us into a slow, consistent spin, but no matter where we look, the picture is the same. Everything is living, everything is breathing, everything is oozing down closer and closer to the spot where we’ll make our first and final stand. “So I bid you adieu, little birdies,” Ryder finishes, already sounding bored by the formality. “Perhaps next time, your associates might know better than to wander so far from the ne-”
The picture overhead doesn’t change, but suddenly the voice coming out of it is lost amid the even louder interruption of a jovial-sounding stallion with a deep baritone voice and a country drawl thick as pea soup. “Ho’ up there, sweet cheeks, ain’t no sense in gettin’ bowed up on their account,” he declares. “Tain’t a crime to stroll out and see the sights, now, is it?”
For a breath of a second, Ryder’s face is blank with shock, but her expression rockets back to abject rage two heartbeats later. “Daybreak, this doesn’t concern you!” she shouts.
“Aw shucks, darlin’, don’t be such a square,” Daybreak teases back. “Can’t let you have all the fun in this Podunk town.”
“Just as I can’t let you keep endeavoring to destroy it,” Ryder seethes back. Even the shadows on the walls have stopped to listen by now. A sudden feeling of lightness fills out my chest: in the confusion of the moment, everypony else in the room has completely forgotten we exist.
“Well, I s’pose we’ll just have to agree to disagree on that particular philosophy,” Daybreak muses before raising his suddenly angry voice. “Soup’s on, everypony!” he hollers. “Time to get ‘em while the gettin’s good!”
“Daybreak!” Ryder roars, but it’s too late. Before his name’s even finished echoing off her lips, a whole new sea of bodies swarms out of every nook and cranny in sight, and this time it’s garnished with a dozen whirring, whistling hunks of flying metal, all of which start spraying the walls with impossibly rapid cannon fire the instant they get into open air. Ryder’s forces get their bearings on the situation just in time to catch sight of Daybreak’s leaping for their throats, and within seconds the entire room has dissolved into chaotic, incomprehensible carnage. Shrieks and smoke choke the air, bodies fight and fall and pepper the ground with frightening regularity, and all the while both Ryder and Daybreak are screaming themselves hoarse telling their respective fighters who to kill and how violently to do it, although how they can tell which pony belongs to who is a mystery to me. I can barely even hear myself think right now, even though all that’s going through my mind for some reason is my name repeated over and over again. Even though the voice that’s saying it doesn’t sound like my own.
Even though that voice isn’t even inside my head at all.
“Ruby!” Applejack screams for what must be the tenth time. Distracted as I am fumbling with the radio, I don’t see the body hurdling towards me until pure reactive instinct forces me down as I catch the tiniest glimpse of it in the corner of my eye. The scabby black pegasus misses me by less than a foot and lands in the fountain with a bone-jarring splash, air bubbles and blood seeping out of the freshly opened hole in his neck. “Applejack!” I yell back as I crouch below the lip of the basin, my teeth chattering as the filthy water inside lips over the edge and splashes over my back.
“Oh, thank the stars,” Applejack says in return. "I don’t know what’s got into either’a them, but we’ll worry about that later! Get to that door and don’t stop runnin’ till there’s dirt between your legs!”
She doesn’t have to tell me hardly even once. I barely even comprehend the end of Applejack’s order before I’m sprinting faster than I even thought possible, the thick metal door on the other side of the plaza the only thing visible in the tunnel my vision has become. When the door is fifty feet away, another body plummets to Earth, this one a lacerated earth pony whose neck snaps on contact with the floor. At thirty-five feet, a unicorn bleeding from his mouth stumbles into my path, and with a lopsided grimace raises a wicked-looking barbed harpoon over his head. I’m only twenty feet from the door before I realize I just barreled straight through him like he wasn’t even there.
From then on, everything is a blur. The battle rages around me, the uproar deafening enough to scramble my thoughts even further. Beside me, Link is matching every step I take, and in front of me, the wheel on the front of the door is spinning. I’m fifteen feet from the door when it begins to open, ten when I can see a pony standing in the space behind it, five when I realize I’m going too fast to keep from barging right into them. Steel crashes, cannons rumble, and as I dive over the threshold I hear Ryder screech, “Get them!” at the top of her lungs.
Then the door clangs shut, the noise disappears, and I smack face-first into a yellow-furred earth mare with bracers on each foreleg and a braid of red mane hair swinging behind her head. We go down hard, our hooves clanging against the metal platform beneath us, but the other pony barely hits the ground before she’s up on her hooves again, panting with exertion and frantically beckoning us forward.
“This way!” she calls out with an accent that sounds remarkably like Applejack’s. “We gotta get y’all outta here ‘fore they get that door open again!”
Link and I share a look, but I don’t even have time to identify the emotion we’re sharing before we’re hot on the other mare’s heels, each hoofbeat reverberating off the glass walls of the tunnel that’s carrying us straight over a chasm that looks a thousand feet deep. We’re about two-thirds of the way across when the grinding squeal of the door sliding open reaches my ears, and judging by the way the mare leading us grits her teeth and groans, I’m pretty sure she heard it too.
“Over here!” she calls back, just before hanging a sharp right into another glass hallway about half the length of the first one, with a small fork in the middle where a support beam has been speared right through the center. In front of the beam lies another one of the flying cannons that Daybreak sent into the plaza, only this one’s been bolted to the floor and looks like it’s meant to stay there. My steps falter a bit as I remember how easily those things tore through the ponies clinging to the walls behind us, but the red-maned mare doesn’t slow down one bit. At least, not until we’re right on top of the thing.
“Stop!” she yells, sliding down into a crouch next to the machine without even checking to see if we’ve listened. Almost too fast for me to even see what she’s doing, the mare ejects a flathead screwdriver from inside one of her bracers and pries a panel off the side, and spends a few precious seconds rearranging the parts inside before slamming the panel back on and smacking the device to life.
“Go, go!”
The three of us turn tail and run again just as the mob behind us rounds the corner and catches sight of us. In the same instant, though, the mare’s bootlegged contraption catches sight of them as well, and soon the whole tunnel is ringing with concentrated bursts of cannon fire and the wails of the unfortunate ponies who took the full brunt of the assault. “That ain’t gonna slow ‘em down for long,” the mare grunts as we approach another crossroads. “Follow me. We’re takin’ a shortcut.”
Asking what exactly she means by “shortcut” would take far more energy than I have at the moment, so I just consign myself to enduring whatever fresh horror awaits me at the end of this tunnel, and mimic every step the mare in front of me takes. We turn left at the junction, run about fifty yards, then enter a building, turn right, then left, then left again, and then suddenly the air around me tastes fresh when I suck it down my throat. My sluggish brain registers the scent of flowers long before it tunes in to the fact that my hooves are thumping against the ground instead of clanging, and it even takes a second or two after that before I recognize the dark, crumbly stuff shifting between my legs is soil.
Soil. Dirt. Dirt between my legs. The scent of flowers invades my nose again, and now brings with it a soft, fruity smell. I look up and see green leaves and healthy brown tree trunks, and the crack my mind makes as it snaps in two is far too loud to just be something I just imagined. Green leaves. Brown trunks. Apple trees.
I’m in an apple orchard. I’m in an apple orchard under the sea.
“Come on,” the mare commands, though her voice is definitely more level now than it ever was before. “Ain’t too far now.”
She’s not kidding. Just a couple rows of trees and a corrugated storehouse later, we come to one last door big enough for half a dozen ponies to walk through side by side, bristling with rows of automated cannons and punctuated by a cylindrical camera hanging overhead that scans back and forth with a green spotlight along every inch of ground within ten feet of the door.
“Grand Galloping Gala. Apple Bloom,” the mare enunciates slowly, waiting for a telltale buzz from the door before continuing with her normal inflection. “Grounds are clear from where I’m standin’, Applejack.”
The same box that confirmed the mare’s voice now blossoms with the other one I’ve come to know so well in the past half-hour. “You hurt, AB?”
“Fit as a fiddle, and heavy two floaters,” AB replies. “Now open up ‘fore I break the lock again.”
The speaker in the door blips and cuts off, and then with a deep groaning noise and an even louder scraping one, a crack of light appears at the base of the door as it gradually begins to inch up off the ground. I see spotless gray tile, a braided blonde tail, a foreleg encased entire in gleaming gold metal, and then the door finishes its ascent and I’m staring past a pert, squarish nose, a ragged yellow cowlick, and a well-worn brown cowpony hat into wrinkled, weathered, weary green eyes that look like they’ve seen the whole world and everything in it. Exactly the kind of eyes I’d expect to see on a leader. Exactly the kind of eyes I’d expect to see on the pony who saved my life.
“Hey, Applejack,” I say a bit sheepishly.
“Howdy, Ruby. Howdy, Link,” she replies, giving me a once-over even as her freckles perk up with a smile. “You look rougher than a corn cob, sugarcube.”
“Tight schedule,” I answer with a weak grin of my own. “Didn’t have time to clean up.”
The chuckle that quip gets out of Applejack is small, but it warms me up so much to see a face so friendly that I couldn’t have cared less if she hadn’t even heard it. “Well, that’s fixed easily enough,” she remarks. “And if I’m not mistaken, I do believe I owe y’all an explanation or two.”
Link and I both remember his outburst at the same time, and to his credit, he has the decency to blush. “Don’t worry about it, sugarcube,” she tells him with another chuckle. “’F that’d been me in your place, I woulda hollered a lot longer than that. Louder, too.”
“Not to cut the meet-and-greet short,” the other mare butts in before any of us can continue shooting the breeze, “but the two-foot thick steel door and fifty-millimeter security turrets actually are here for a reason, so if we could all go ahead and hop on the other side’a those real quick, I’d be very much obliged.”
Applejack laughs for real this time, and when she looks over and flashes me a very poorly concealed eye roll, every nail and every screw that’s been twisted into my chest over the last few hours finally comes free. It’s not even the presence of security that makes me feel at ease; the feeling spreading through me goes much deeper than that. I don’t just feel safe, I feel comfortable, in a way that I haven’t felt in years. Maybe I’m at the bottom of the ocean, and maybe I have no way of getting back off it, and maybe I’m stuck here with a Canterlot socialite with dried oats for brains, but at least I’ve got one mare who I know will look out for me, who I know I can count on. Who I know I can trust.
That’s what this is, I realize as I step forward and enter Applejack’s home. That’s why I’m so happy. That’s why I’m so at ease. This is what it feels like.
This is what trust feels like.
“Come on down to the parlor and take a load off,” Applejack says as the door slams closed behind us. “I reckon we got some things to discuss.”
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“Come on, everypony, smile smile smile,
fill my heart up with sunshine, sunshine...”
- Pinkamena Diane Pie
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I'm consistently impressed with the resourcefulness Aqua demonstrates when it comes to translating Rapture to Harmony. The baby carriage scene is completely different, yes -- but it's how he manages to make splicers sound like splicers and Ryder sound like Ryan without having to resort to paraphrase or copypasta. Oh, that and we're always so far buried in Ruby's head at all times that some may find it a very real temptation to soil themselves as they read.
It's been a long two months, sir. Make the next update more expedient, yes?
Today is a good day for me, a lot of my favorite stories have updated and i went to a tournament. Thanks for the wonderful chapter once more, as always im looking forward to the next piece.
>Unicorn
>White fur
>Pink and Purple curly hair
Did you make Sweetie Belle a little sister?
big daddy?
mylittlefacewhen.com/media/f/img/mlfw2337-DerpyWoohoo.gif
Yay, it's not dead! One thing, though:
"to push the button for the fifth floor."
Ought this to read "sixth"?
I see what you did there.
Can you say finally? Been waiting for this!
Thanks Aqua! You're a pretty cool person. I'll be reading this chapter in time...
In time...
And where is the emminent Twalight Sperkle? She must be around this underwater bloodbath somewhere...
990528
Actually, she was the first to die.
Browses favorites
See's Harmony updated
Choir sings
We meet again, Harmony.
I'm so happy
It is... glorious. And there's something appropriate about this update happening now, what with Jay Naylor trying to turn ponies into Objectivists. Seeing turret devastation of the Ran... RYDERoids was so cathartic and beautiful.
Wow, this has just even better. I daresay you may be able to surpass Fallout Equestria as the best MLP fanfic if you keep this up. I'm dead serious.
Ah! Yes! Finally!
.. Anyhoof! Great chapter. I managed to not get to the scared point of soiling myself, but I'll admit I was close.
Like how the splicer scene came out. I found it actually humorous how they kept getting into so much trouble. Though, as I said before... definitely nerve-wracking.
Keep up the gre-- no, PORTENTOUS work. C:
Who is this "Daybreak" fellow? Where is the rest of the mane six? did Apple Bloom ever get her cutie mark? Why in goods name did it take two months for an update? Find out these and more next time in Harmony..*
* Actual answers may vary, please consult a physician if you start feeling symptoms of fic withdrawal.
To quote another famous mare out of a fanfiction "Sweet Celestias solar flaring orgasms!" I'm was so happy to see this out, that I stayed up far later than I should have to read, and it's worth every second. Gotta say, AJ and Applebloom are far from my favorites, but darn it it stories like these that bring out the awesomeness behind them. Enfact I''d give this chapter four RD's
out five, it would be five but the time between the updates brought it down. But no matter, for now I will sit and wait, for the time that Harmony returns to us.
My body is ready
for the next chapter
990226
Or Caramel as a Big Daddy
This story doesn't have enough likes.
... It updated? _It updated!_ *dances*
*ahem*
I regret being unable to write a more worthwhile review, as unfortunately I have a somewhat negative technique - and you, dear ser, have included in this chapter nothing that I percieve to be of inferior quality.
In fact, the only suggestion I could possibly make, that would increase my enjoyment of this fic, would be to release chapters at a significantly increased rate. Of course, this comes with the caveat that you not decrease the standard to which you work in your attempts to do so.
I do have to say, however, that I am very interested in finding out what exactly happened to the Mane 6, whilst also being incredibly apprehensive about the same.
That said, I feel I can safely assume that, regardless of the direction you wish to take that particular road of enlightenment, it will be a literary experience of the highest order.
Nooooooooo, Sweetie Belle!
This is amazing, please keep this up.
How did the header image of FiMfiction change for viewing this story?
*Sees Update*
Ahem....FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
991818 WITCHCRAFT! BURN IT AT THE STAKE!
990738
Not sure why you're smiling about that fact.
990226 I was about to comment on that. I'm almost certain that's Sweetie Belle, and I wouldn't be the slightest bit shocked if Apple Bloom and Scootaloo are the only other Little Sisters we encounter.
Edit: Nevermind. I hadn't finished the chapter at the time.
992985
Because ... Insanity!
990226 Given Apple Bloom's current age, that may be Sweetie's daughter. Or Rarity's.
Another fantastic bit of blithering horror and narrowly averted psychotic breakdown, sprinkled with tantalizing bits of plot. Definitely looking forward to more.
Yes, a new chapter!
I love the way you translate the game into Equestria, especially Onyx Ryder/Andrew Ryan and Harmony/Rapture. Plus, the Big Daddy, one of the most awesome creatures in a Game! Oh, this story gets better by the chapter!
So Daybreak is an equivalent of atlas?
Awesome
.....
Also needs more Subject Delta
It's like playing Bioshock for the first time again, except with a second person.
All my praise.
990738
I- I- WHA?!?!?!?!?!?!
995989 I agree with you. Reading this story actualy makes me want to play bioshock all over again.
991818 Our author has connections.
993258 The Little Sister is most assuredly supposed to remind us of Sweetie Belle, but being made a Little Sister doesn't halt aging (or at least didn't in Bioshock,) and Sweetie herself is too old to be 'little' any longer. Not that I'm any kind of authority on that 'verse; my exposure has been limited to other Bioshock crossovers and some short wiki walks around the Bioshock wiki at Wikia.
And to our well-connected author:
Back in "Intro, part 2" Ruby says "...well, even my dad couldn’t be right about anything." Presumably, she means that she thinks her dad is usually right, and this was an exception, so it should read "...well, even my dad couldn’t be right about everything."
And last installment, Ruby's narration told us: "Some incontrollable part of me has to see." The second word is usually spelled "uncontrollable."
THE SUSPENSE IS KILLING ME! MOAR!
1000848 Well, judging by the time elapsed and Apple Bloom's size, I guess you're right. By the way, Little Sisters that grow up become Big Sisters, which you encounter in Bioshock 2. They're still possessed by the same force, but they inhabit diving suits much like the Big Daddies (except much more light and agile) and they even carry some Little Sisters around themselves. So there's good reason to believe that, whatever the case, that isn't Sweetie.
Though maybe there's some relation... because, come on, an author doesn't imply that sort of connection for absolutely no reason.
Didn't think we would see a big daddy this soon into the fic, and i also got to wonder will we see any big sisters as well or will this just stick with stuff from the first bioshock game? Also on the note of big daddies I was kinda expecting them to be griffins or diamond dogs, mostly for the fact that in the game big daddies kinda gave off the feeling of I'm big, I'm bad, don't f*** with me and in the mlp universe i would have thought that taking something that already has some of that feel to them and making them badder would brought the message through nicely.
I really liked this chapter by the way, you give off the feel of the game had nicely without copying it step by step but replacing all the characters with ponies, good job.
1001521
Agreed. My working assumption is, as someone upthread that I'm too lazy to check on said, that the Little Sister in question is Rarity's daughter, assuming we're going with the more-or-less default assumption that ponies age at the same rate people do. A decade means if she's Sweetie's the Crusader got a very early start on the whole motherhood thing; maybe she was going for a mommy cutie-mark.
Hey, would you look at that, I actually read a chapter when it came out.
I can't say I have the same complaint I had with the previous chapter. This one was marvelously well done character wise. I also have an inkling suspicion about Link that I'll keep to myself for now.
If I do have a gripe with this, and to be honest, I could probably find fault in any and all of Picasso's work, it would be the lack of description of Ruby's environment in some places. Yes, most of the time you did that, but other spots, like the hallway we spend half the chapter in, were void of a lot of details. I mean, all I remember you saying about the hallway was it had moldy, shag carpeting. :/
Or, you may have described it, and I read over it like a twat. *shrug*
Anyway, you improved form the last chapter, which is all I could have asked for. Looking to that next one.
(P.S. I now have Smile stuck in my head. >_> )
Faved, watched.
You know, it's kind of odd. I usually get into other works of fiction by reading crossover fanfic with canons I actually know and like. I got into MLP, for instance, by finding a few good pieces of crossover fic for it that made me interested in the show. And now I'm feeling a great desire to go buy Bioshock for PC.
Also, I must ask- how did you get the Fimfiction banner to change specially for your fic? Did you just pester the site owner, or is there some little snippet of code you can paste into your fic to make that work?
Whoo hoo! A new chapter!
Ah, yes, I was wondering when we would finally get to meet a Big Daddy. And the Little Sister does sound like it may be Sweetie Belle's daughter or something along those lines. Anyway, can't wait till the next update! 
“Come on, everypony, smile smile smile,
fill my heart up with sunshine, sunshine...”
- Pinkamena Diane Pie
This is the first time these words have ever filled me with dread. Please, please please don't tell me that Pinkie Pie is now a splicer! I don't know if my heart could survive that!
Hooray, it updated! And now some words from your friendly neighborhood copyeditor.
>if the stakes get high enough and a mare get desperate enough
gets desperate
>he steps into the elevator and reaches in front of my chest to push the button for the fifth floor.
sixth
>raises his foreleg one last time and brings it hurdling down towards his head.
hurtling
>“Tain’t a crime to stroll out and see the sights, now, is it?”
T'ain't
>I don’t see the body hurdling towards me
hurtling
>a foreleg encased entire in gleaming gold metal
entirely
Please OH PLEASE have Photo Finish take the place of Sander Cohen later on!
The story is long but very good. I don't find myself drifting off into other thoughts like I do with something that is written like this. Good job, and I will be waiting for more.
I feel like such an amateur everytime I read this story.
I'm guessing Daybreak is either a pony version of Atlas (Although Applejack seems to be taking that role) or Sinclair.
That Big Daddy encounter was amazing, and I'd love to see that visualized or even animated. Fuck, I'd like this whole fic animated. Imagine a fan-made Harmony movie? Well, we can dream.
Also, Ruby needs to pull her shit together.
1268223
My personal pipe dream is a full reimagining of the whole story in graphic novel form. In all honesty, if I had the time and the artistic wherewithal to do so, I probably would've made the story that way from the get-go.
1268223 Dude, if you saw something like that after growing up in a world like equestria, how the f
k would you react?
> The pony-to-corpse ratio’s a lot closer to my comfort zone, at least. // You’ve got a lot of great lines in here, but this may be my favorite this chapter so far
>Peter Pan’s back from Neverland. // Well that’s outta left field.
Haha, man, Ruby’s starting to really crack. It’s hilarious.
>I’m fifteen feet away when the carriage explodes. // Whoa dude. Da fuq.
and then link flattens a mare’s skull in with a crowbar and I have no idea what’s going on just that it’s probably now official policy that if anything moves it probably needs to die.
what the hell are all these bedraggled ponies blathering about stage performances and reviews and —HOLY shit wtf is that monstrosity that just barreled through and turned everything to red paste and dawn is that sweetie belle?! wait… is it? No idea, onward.
Damn tho, that was an intense scene.
> “G’wan // Heh. AJ’s accent can be such a bitch sometimes.
> jacksquat // I’d hyphenate this.
>country drawl thick as pea soup // Lol.
Suddenly war zone? Wut.
>don’t stop runnin’ till there’s dirt between your legs! // wut
dawwwww apple bloom!
>I see spotless gray tile… // Holy run-on sentence Akwa.
Oh shit some answers are inbound. oh god what happened to best blue pone?! Onward.