//------------------------------//
// Don't Panic 
// Story: The Olden World 
// by Czar_Yoshi 
//------------------------------//

Maple, Starlight and Valey stood at the bottom of a valley of shadow, the distant sky only marginally closer than it had been from the ground. Their second-floor alley and the wooden roofs that formed its surface was only a single step less dismal than the one below, doors more often in existence and slightly more light trickling down from on high. Bridges and entire platforms still crisscrossed above, and the amount of light filtering down was barely enough to watch their hooves for debris. Overhangs were rarer, at least, but the roads were narrower and frequently lead to visible dead ends, and there were still no lights working to counteract the gray gloom.

Valey's recent announcement made matters no better.

"So they're following us..." Maple gulped. "Really? The foals from before?"

"Eh, relax." Valey shrugged, slightly jostling the dazed Starlight on her back. "I said only one of them. Besides, you saw how harmless they were! Probably just wants to come get my autograph."

Maple frowned. "Last time, they tried to trap you and beat you up, and were willing to take hostages. I don't think they'd have turned into your fan club just by chasing you around a little..."

"Hey, a girl can hope, right?" Valey grinned stupidly, then glanced into a dark corner as if expecting a foal to leap out in want of a hug. "Besides, it's that or they want a rematch, and I'm down with both. Not to be passive-aggressive, but I did kinda get my time cut short, there..."

"It's the red one," Starlight dizzily muttered. When Maple looked questioningly at her, she added, "She's the leader. I saw her on the main road. She was following us that far, so why not now?"

As Maple bit her lip, contemplating, Starlight groaned and sank further into Valey's mane and coat, wishing fervently she had a proper, non-moving bed.

"Well..." Valey sighed, then looked to an opening in the wall. It led to a balcony overlooking a larger ground-floor plaza, and she paced through, beckoning for Maple to follow. "I guess if you're that worried about it, we can deal with it now. Hey, kid!"

No response.

Valey smugly smirked. "Come out and play with me, or I'll do that whole eeee-eeee-eeee bat-shriek thing that's really loud and annoying and will break any glass still intact in this place!"

"No!" Starlight hissed, yanking hard on one of Valey's ears. "My head hurts!"

"Ow, hey!" Valey flicked the affected ear heavily, knocking her hat askew and requiring it to be fixed by a wing. "Fine, then. Uhh... Hey, kid! Come on out, or I'll insult everything in this place until I find something that mortally offends you! Yeah!"

"You're rude and obnoxious," replied a voice from the shadows. "Everything my dad and friends said you would be. Everything the whole Sky District is, and the Stone District, too!"

After careful focusing, the filly-shaped outline of Redshift came into view, sitting on what might have been intended as a railing. She was balanced on her hind legs, forelimbs crossed in front of her chest, and her expression was given away by the tone of her voice.

"Eh, that's cool." Valey nodded. "I dig being rude. Ponies do funny things when they're mad. Kinda like you!" A smile slashed across her face.

"Laugh while you can," Redshift said darkly, immobile atop the railing. "The Spirit of Sosa is going to come and take back Ironridge, and make everything right again, and then you'll be gone!"

Valey raised an eyebrow. "You're having an entire revolution just to fire me? Wow. I'm actually flattered."

"You're just a symptom," Redshift sneered. "Ironridge is broken from the top! Everything was fine ten years ago, and they're going to put it back the way it was! All of it!"

"You know..." Valey took a step forward, leaning casually and slightly unbalancing Starlight. "You sound an awful lot like you're just repeating propaganda someone else shoved in your cute little brain. That's a shame. I had you pegged for an independent thinker, but parrots are way less fun."

"Hold on," Maple interrupted before Redshift could answer. "That was ten years ago. You don't look that old... How do you know for sure what it used to be like? Change makes everyone talk about the past more fondly, usually."

"I'm eleven, actually," Redshift responded in a slightly more civil tone, completely ignoring Valey. "But it doesn't matter when things are still changing and I can see them with my own eyes. Every time another family moves here, I see it. Every time me and my friends catch another robber and see they only stole because they needed to, I feel it. Every time the lights go off and the Sky District refuses to even hear about our problem, I know it!" By the end, she was shaking, having climbed down from her perch and walked far enough into the light that her face was visible. She had been crying.

"Oh my..." Maple whispered, holding out a hoof.

"Hold up," Valey belched, "you mean the light thing wasn't just a welcome party for me?"

"...No," Redshift spat with a glare. "The managenerator for the Blueleaf power grid has been failing for three months now. It goes on and off whenever it wants to, and it's getting worse. It's been off for a week solid right now, and none of us have any idea how to fix it or even get inside because the Sky District won't send any of their stupid technicians! It's making the bottom floors dangerous and completely unlivable since almost no one there can afford their own portable lights and we don't have room to move them up, and some ponies are staying there anyway in the dark and we can't find them and don't even know how many ponies are living like that!"

The tears on her face had resumed by the time she finished talking, though they did nothing to dull the burning intensity of her eyes that shone from behind scrunched lids. "I hate you," she hissed. "I hate you all! And some day, the Spirit of Sosa is going to win, and they're going to take back Ironridge, and they'll fix our city or let us move somewhere better! They'll make the Earth District as good as it once was, not some fruit place where nobody wants to go because it's hot and has no power! See how much your airships and your yaks do for you then, you jerk!"

"Hey, uhh..." Valey looked to Maple as the filly sobbed. "Anything about this not making sense to you, either? Because it's my job to know everything, and I legit didn't know about this generator thing. And I read my reports like comic books! You'd think if there was some issue that was causing part of the Earth District to become super radical and unstable, someone up in the Defense Force would consider it a major security threat, especially since this is the closest city in the district to the HQ."

"Go on," Redshift gasped around a sob, "say you think I'm lying. That's what they all say! Or say you're going to take care of it, and then do nothing! Just t-to get us to like you and leave you alone, which isn't happening! Say you're going to run back to your wonderful council and tell them all about it, so they can brag about how little they care and do nothing just to taunt us!"

"...Okay," Valey growled, shifting and setting Starlight aside, breaking into a swift trot toward Redshift. "I'm actually legit curious here and there's a pretty good chance of me helping, or at least investigating until I know what's going on, because I'm an untrustworthy jerk but I do do my job. But first?" She stopped in front of the hyperventilating filly. Redshift looked up... and her head was abruptly seized by Valey with a single hoof. "You need to chill out."

Maple and Starlight both gasped, stretching to do something as Valey reared back, preparing to slam Redshift's head into the ground... but instead of a crack and a cry of pain, she fell through the floor, as if the ground was a projection covering the surface of a lake. Valey tipped forward and followed her, and in a blink there was empty blackness, the omnipresent shadow rippling like disturbed water.

A second passed, and then... Fwoooshh! "Gahhhhh!"

Redshift shrieked as she plunged back above the surface, still in Valey's grasp. The batpony hovered half in and half out of the ground, bobbing slightly, the shadows around her body distorting rapidly and unnaturally like waves. "All right," Valey announced, "we're going to do that as many times as it takes for you to stop freaking out, because that isn't productive for anyone."

The filly's mouth instantly snapped shut, eyes wide and pupils constricted, an obvious question hammering at her teeth and held in by fear. Maple asked it instead. "What was that!?"

"Oh, this?" Valey grinned, and pointed to her barrel, apparently bisected by the floor. "Batpony magic. It's called Shadow Swimming. The title is pretty self-explanatory. Very good for spying, too!" With a wink to Starlight, she added, "Feels a lot like being put in your crystals, by the way, except you have to hold your breath the old-fashioned way. Dunno if you've ever tried that on yourself, but it's gotta be the freakiest thing ever for newbies. Good at making them shut up, though!"

Maple gulped. "That's what you were talking about when you said you had a better way of escaping that room, wasn't it? You wanted to... take us through the shadows?"

"Wow, you're quick!" With a nod, Valey poked at Redshift. "Hey, uh, didn't mean to make you catatonic, little filly. I'd been saving that one for a while, and at this point I was like, 'meh, I really wanna show this off,' and might have gone a little overboard. Still spunky in there?"

The smallest bit of fire returned to Redshift's eyes. "I'm telling my father," she mouthed.

"...Right. You do that." Valey climbed all the way out of the shadows and set her on the ground, posing her in a comfortable sit. "So, I wanna do something," she announced to nobody in particular. "I feel like we should go check out that generator thing, but I actually have no idea where it is or where we are now. And unless miss sobs-a-lot repossesses her faculties, something tells me I'm about to be stuck carrying another comatose kid, because leaving her here like this would just be dumb. So, team, what do we do?" She winked at Maple. "And by team, I mean you, Ironflanks."

"Wow, thanks," Maple deadpanned, rubbing a still-sore leg. "You're never going to let that drop, are you...? Anyway. I think you know what I'm going to say, but we should find somewhere to rest. Just me is one thing, me and Starlight is another, and now you've managed to scare a local senseless yet for some reason are actually taking responsibility for it and not leaving them behind in a dark alley."

"Hey, I clean up my messes!" Valey held an indignant hoof to her chest. "...Sometimes. When it sounds like fun. Or is actually important to my job. Really, keeping these districts from fighting is a pretty easy catch for getting to do whatever I want. Besides, how was I supposed to know she'd be such a wuss about a little dunking? I do that all the time; it's easy!"

"...Really." Maple glared levelly at her. "Prove it. Give me a 'little dunking.' I want to know what you did to her, and if it's something you're considering having us use later, I want to be prepared."

"Suit yourself." Checking over the two fillies one last time, Valey shrugged and reached for Maple, grabbing her with both forehooves. "Take a breath beforehand, since you won't be able to breathe. I can swim anywhere there's shadow, but you can't and will just be dragged along. Prepare to feel helpless, drowning and really, really strange."

With a dark splash, Maple plunged toward the ground, thrust by Valey's hooves... and the impact never came. Instead, her perception shattered so completely that she had to close her eyes in order to remember that she had eyes to close, which in turn reminded her that she had lungs that needed to breathe and couldn't. Fortunately, she couldn't exhale either, and suppressed her panic well enough to think without losing any air.

She inched open her eyes. The arrangement of grayscale shapes and angles bent her mind, an impossible and confusing cloud of chaotic nonsense with no resemblance to anything in the real world. She squeezed her eyes shut again... and eventually reopened them.

This time, she completely gave up on trying to make sense of her vision, which strangely made it that much more bearable. Everything was fuzzy, with ill-defined detail and shapes that were as easy to identify as clouds. They reminded her of something a friend in Riverfall had once called 'cubist paintings,' which apparently worked the same way. There was motion, but less that of a sliding object and more that of a patterned screen being slid across her face. Her curiosity was just getting strong enough to overcome her fear and adrenaline when she surfaced.

"Ah...!" she panted, bringing a hoof to her heaving chest, drawing in and gulping down air furiously, slightly hesitant to open her eyes. "That was..." she eventually managed. "Bizarre."

Valey shrugged beside her. "Hey, I warned you. But anyway, were we going to find somewhere to rest up and wait for sobs-a-lot to wakey wakey? So we can, like... make this place a bit less of a fanatic haven and all around dump? There's misery and annoyance, and then there's despair, which I hate. Blueleaf is just begging to get someone hurt."

"Yeah," Maple agreed, finally getting her breathing under control. "Let's do that."