Well, shit. I sat on the pew and considered the situation.
Pinkie was dead. Fluttershy and Rarity were incapacitated. Celestia was missing. Rainbow was too depressed and withdrawn to function. Zecora, our chief potion-maker and maybe the wisest person around, was now gone too.
The funeral was kind of awkward. Zecora had turned into a tree. We weren’t sure whether to get a coffin big enough to fit or just make the coffin out of her.
Bible stood at the podium and read the eulogy.
“There once was a zebra who rhymed
And yes, a good friend of mine
But now she is gone
And we’re all so alone
But maybe we’ll meet again in time”
At least it wasn’t Pinkie’s rap eulogy. However, good by comparison is still not good-good. Zecora just rhymed, she didn’t do full-on limericks. Either way, I thought it was kind of pandering and inappropriate. And I was entitled to my opinion, dammit, because I was the only one there.
I mean, I guess apathy was better than the outright racism Zecora had faced before. Well, that is, if it was racism. Most people around town didn’t even know she was a zebra before shunning her on the grounds of being an outsider. Hell, they didn’t shun me nearly as badly and I’d killed…
I was still counting it up when the funeral ended. Yeah, maybe I really should try to be a nicer guy.
I went back and changed out of my suit. Wachowski was still squatting at my place. I had the room, and at the moment wasn’t feeling too uncharitable, so I didn’t say anything to her.
Pinkie’s skull was humming and she appeared to be amusing herself despite being an inanimate object. I said hello.
“Oh hey, Valiant, I’ve got a plan,” she said. “You know, the one you asked me to make about throwing a boarding party for the Death Star.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“Okay, so, you’re going to need something with a lot higher maneuverability to get around the push of the tractor beams. I know you’re a good pilot, but you yourself aren’t as good as Tin Mare when she’s full-up.”
“I agree.”
“But maybe even Tin Mare herself isn’t that good. So you’re going to need help. We’ve got to get a bunch of pegasi to agree to this.”
“But I wanted to be the one to kill Gabby…”
“And you will,” she said soothingly. “But you know as well as I do that you need some cannon fodder. Trouble is, finding enough ponies who will do what you say and also can. Honestly, the Wonderbolts would be about it.”
“Most of them are dead now, from when Gabby took over their island.”
“Oh. Well, that changes things.”
“What if Tin Mare had help?” I asked.
“Well, nobody but me can ride my pedalcopter because muscle-powered heavier-than-air mechanical flight is nearly impossible.”
“I was talking about another AI aircraft. I was considering building more. A friend or two for Tin Mare, and also network-capable for swarm tactics.”
“Sounds cool. Can you build new airframes that quickly?”
Shit. “No. But...maybe I can improve Tin Mare.”
That would require a trip. I needed to talk to Rarity about a couple of things. With Tin Mare down for maintenance, I needed some other kind of transportation. The SNUT came to mind. I thought it was still at Sweet Apple Acres. So I went to see the CMC to see if they could lend me an ATV to go see the sea.
While the SNUT was primarily for snow use, it had tracks and I really like things with tracks. Man, I really missed tanks. If I wasn’t dealing with Gabby, a single soft target, I would have already built more.
I headed to the farm, carrying Trident along. Honestly, it was really more out of habit than anything at this point.
When I arrived, the CMC were nowhere to be found. Apparently they had started a cutie mark day camp.
That sounded kind of boring, but I headed for the camp. When I arrived, however, I instantly became the center of attention. Power armor does that. I had been wearing it so much lately that I had forgotten.
“Hey Valiant, can you take everypony on a field trip?” asked Sweetie. The rest of the kids swarmed me. I should have been scared. I’d seen these foals skeletonize a cake in thirty seconds. But I was in power armor, so that made it slightly less uncomfortable.
“What kind of field trip?” I said.
“Well, it’s a cutie mark camp, Scootaloo pointed out.
“That should have been my first clue,” I admitted. “Okay, a field trip. Where’s the SNUT?”
“Oh, um, we…” Applebloom scratched the back of her head and suddenly seemed very interested in something else.
I looked in the opposite direction and saw the vehicle. “What the hell did you do?”
“Makeup practice,” said a filly. “It didn’t get anypony a cutie mark, though.”
Probably because none of them understood the subtle art of blush and eyeliner. Holy shit, what did they do? I didn’t even know makeup on a tracked arctic vehicle could look that bad. And any makeup on a car looks bad.
That’s not to mention the bra and panties. I don’t even know where they got underwear that big. Well, okay, maybe it wasn’t big at all, just stretched really tight, because it didn’t cover very much.
Anyway, the point is, I’m pretty sure you can guess the rhyming word that they’d turned the SNUT into.
I covered the nuclear missile I was carrying. “Don’t look, Trident.”
I glanced at the rest of the kids. “Okay, we can still do the field trip, but I’ll have to take you another way.”
Conveniently, the farmers’ market train was just passing by and we hopped aboard. I showed the kids how to stomp grapes. I don’t think the farmers were very pleased. I think Trident intimidated them, though, and they didn’t say anything.
I don’t think simple farmers knew what a nuclear ballistic missile was. I could be wrong, but I’m making an assumption based on my knowledge of ponies. They don’t go outside their lane much, you see. Heck, the CMC were helping to ensure that with their cutie mark camp. Anyway, my point is that it was probably the sheer bulk of a Trident riding on their train rather than the actual threat of nuclear annihilation that they were most concerned about.
The train headed for Baltimare, but I hopped off a little ways short. The power armor was fantastic for just jumping off trains and digging furrows in the ground until sliding to a stop. I left my SLBM with the kids. Trident was a big missile and would be fine left alone.
Honestly, it probably would have been better if I had a submarine to go along with the missile. I had a submarine once but I couldn’t remember what happened to it. The CMC, deepwater salvage experts that they were, could probably find it and tell me. I think it had something to do with dolphins.
I stepped out of the deep gouges in the ground the power armor had made and trotted for the Rarity. She was there, right where I left her.
“Hello,” she said as I approached. Her color patterns in her water from the industrial dye seemed to be even more vibrant than before.
“Hey,” I said. “I just need to pick up one thing real quick.”
I waded out into the water, the heavy armor keeping me securely on the bottom even as the waves washed. The onboard air supply was handy, too. I’d gone a fair distance off the shore when I came to a spot I remembered. I’d never told a soul about it before, never recorded it in my journal, never made a single reference to it.
But now was the time to bring it out. I dug down in the soft bottom of the Rarity, sticking my hoof in deep. I touched something solid and began clearing away ocean silt to reveal a small watertight box.
“What is that?” Rarity asked. “Why did I never know it was there?” I never knew it before, but I guess it made sense that she could speak underwater.
I carried it up out of the surf. “I buried this a long time ago, back before you dissolved in the ocean. Not only that, but it was in the sand under the water, so you didn’t know it was there.”
“But what is it?” she asked.
“My most prized possession.”
Rarity paused, as if she wasn’t sure she wanted to ask. Clever girl.
I stowed the box in my bag of toys and walked back up to the train tracks. From there, it wasn’t too difficult to catch the mobile farmers’ market train as it came back from Baltimare. Yeah, I figured a CMC-led field trip would probably be rejected from the city limits.
Back in Ponyville, I got off at the train station. I headed for my place, but ran into Rainbow Dash on the way. Well, not all of me, just my hoof.
She looked dazed, lying on the ground. “Is it just me or am I so numb lately that I didn’t even feel that?”
“No, it’s my super fast-acting topical numbing formula,” I said. “You can punch someone and it works so fast they don’t even feel it. In retrospect, though, I’m not sure why anyone would want a product that nullifies the whole point of punching someone.”
She got up and went back to what she was doing, which seemed to be playing with little wisps of cloud. She wove them into her mane and tail, using a puddle of water on the ground as a mirror.
Other than her initial comment, she hadn’t reacted to the physical assault. Also, I’d never seen her do any crafting project or mane-related projects before. A dull Rainbow doing stereotypical introvert things like crafting? What the hell?
That surprised me so much I decided to go talk to Twilight about it. I found her in the library. I mean, I guess where else would I have found her?
She listened to my story. “Wait, why did you punch her?”
“She deserves it, right?”
“Valiant, I could argue you deserve it.”
“Never said I wasn’t a hypocrite.”
“You’re right about that,” Twilight muttered. “Okay, so what can we do about Rainbow?”
“You know me, normally I don’t care about Rainbow, but she’s...different today. Not that I mind, any day she isn’t herself is a good one, but it’s such a sudden and drastic change that I’m worried it signals something. What, I don’t know, but I can read warning signs even if I don’t know what they’re warning.”
“Those are some surprisingly astute hypotheses about philosophies.”
“Wow, that’s high praise coming from you,” I said. “Normally I bomb atomically Socrates' philosophies and hypotheses.”
“Wow, and if I thought Rainbow had suddenly changed,” said Twilight. “I didn’t didn’t know you were a poet.”
“I’m not. I was quoting the Wu-Tang Clan.”
“What’s that?”
“A rap group.”
“Oh,” said Twilight, suddenly dismissive.
“Hey now,” I said, “The Wu-Tang Clan ain’t nothing to fuck with.”
I frowned. “Shit, forget the Beatles, I should have sold my soul to them.”
“Speaking of selling your soul to someone, Guinness told me you killed Santa Claus,” said Twilight, using a very accusing tone of voice.
“Yeah, but now I am Santa Claus so the total number of Clausi stayed the same.”
“That isn’t the point!”
“So?”
Twilight let out an extended sigh. I smiled. “Hey. What do you want for Christmas?”
“Is it too much to say world peace?”
“Yes. Also, what about the space aliens on war-torn planets around the solar system you selfish bitch?”
I think she knew I was only kidding. I don’t think she cared, though.
I went back over to my place. Tin Mare was where I left her. I mean, as a computer bolted to an airplane, yeah, that was to be expected.
She was a pretty good piece of AI, though. Between Windows 98, a sophisticated electromechanical interface to run her aircraft systems, radio connections, an emulator for Doom, and a cup holder, it was a pretty decent setup. Lord knows she had saved my ass more times than I could count. All in all, it was a great replacement for Merry May’s brain. This one didn’t even need glucose and protein, though I had the connections in there anyway. Meat cooling is the way of the future, tell your friends.
While it was an incredibly advanced system if I did say so myself, it could be better. And it would need to be better if Tin Mare was to fight Gabby’s technology. Fortunately, I had just the upgrade in mind.
I pulled out the box I had picked up at the Rarity and carefully set it down on my work bench.
“What is that?” Tin Mare asked.
I had kept it so secret that not even she knew. This was something special to me and I had never shared it with ponies because I can be a selfish bitch myself.
“You’re going to love it,” I said.
I opened the box. A gleaming light met my eyes as a heavenly chorus began to play.
It was a Windows XP install disc.
I reverently picked it up, closing the top of the box. The light and the chorus cut off. I turned and placed the disk in Tin Mare’s CD tray. She closed the tray and began the install.
I sat back in a comfortable chair and opened a bottle of tequila. And now we played the waiting game.