Button squinted through the curtains of sand that the storm raised on all sides. Rumble was good at keeping sand away, but that didn’t help his visibility any. He saw shapes vaguely illustrated in the swirling, blasting sand, but nothing concrete, and nothing that looked like the TARDIS. It all looked the same out here, and Button’s imagination— which his mother called ‘prodigious’ and his teachers called ‘overactive’— wasn’t helping in the slightest. Every movement was a zombie’s hoof, swinging out to grab him. Each change in the wind’s pitch was the victorious cry of a blue-eyed beast or the scream of Sweetie Belle as she was plucked out of line and spirited away. The fact that any of that was within the realm of possibility was unhelpful, to say the least.
Button shook his head, trying to clear it of distractions. “Hey!” Rumble said, turning to face him. “Leave my butt alone!”
“Srry.” Button replied.
“I’m saving that for my special somepony, and, no offence dude, but you are not my type.”
“Lss tlk, mre wlk!” Scootaloo grumbled.
“Shh!” Sweetie hissed.
“Yeh, shh,” Scootaloo agreed. “Lke I sed—”
“Nn! I fink I hrd smthng!”
The group stood quietly for a moment. There was nothing except the howling of the wind. “Mebee nt…” Sweetie Belle said cautiously. But then, Rumble, who had finally been able to clear enough sand from his eyes to open them, saw a menacing silhouette moving towards them. “RUN!” he shouted, taking off.
Nopony needed telling twice. A clear scream of anger rang out across the desert plains. “K, Buttn? Nd t’ fnd th’ TRDIS. NW.” Scootaloo said.
The colt scanned the curtains of sand, desperate for any sign of the big blue box. Through the howling wind, he heard the sound of a distant slapping sound, like something being buffeted in the wind. He glanced over to see if it was yet another terrifying blue-eyed zombie, but he saw no figures in the swirling sands. Wait. There was a faint, blinking light. It illuminated a silhouette of a box, and a sign being buffeted against its side in the wind. “Lft!” he shouted. “Trn lft!”
Rumble skittered for a moment, then changed directions. The sand was blowing differently now, and by tilting his head slightly, Button could clearly see three earth ponies stalking toward them. He looked forward once more, squinting against the sand. The box was plainly silhouetted now. They were nearly there— but wait a second. Three earth ponies. Four foals. Some strange sense tingled at the back of his brain, and he yanked hard on Rumble’s tail. The colt yelped, but at that moment, a fourth earth pony sprang out, landing right where the pegasus would have been. Button pulled around the stallion as he struggled to readjust, all but pulling Rumble along by his tail. The sand was blasting into his eyes, almost blinding him, but he could hear something banging in the wind against the wooden exterior of the TARDIS. He ran at it headlong, tears streaming from his eyes. The blue-eyed ponies were almost upon them, now, he could feel their cold presence at the back of his neck—
He slammed through the TARDIS doors, the others pulled along behind him. The doors slammed shut, and with eyes still streaming, Button pulled aside a nearby chair, knocking the stuffed panda off of it in the process, and braced it against the door. The others sat in various states of disarray around the room. Rumble was tenderly rubbing the base of his tail. Scootaloo was trying to fluff the sand out of her feathers. Sweetie was just sitting, dazed, in the center of the room, her normally near-pristine coat now more off-white than on. Button stared at the doors. There was a brief banging from outside, but it quickly wore down. The colt’s shoulders sagged and he let out a breath he hadn’t even realized he was holding.
“Good job,” Sweetie said, weakly smiling. “Well done, Button.”
“Yes, yes, good job everypony,” Rumble grumbled, “but now what do we do? We don’t know where the Doctor is, or where Ditzy, Dinky, and Bloom are. We can’t leave the TARDIS, or those things will get us. We also can’t just leave in the TARDIS because none of us know how it works!”
"We stay here," Button said. "We're safe here, right? The Doctor will come back eventually, and then we can tell him what happened--"
"Unless the Doctor's been taken, too," Sweetie worried.
"Oh," said Button.
“Actually,” Scootaloo said, “I was watching the Doctor fly it, and it looked… pretty easy. And he told us where all the flight controls are. I bet we could do it, too.”
Sweetie gasped. “But we can’t just leave! What about everypony else? Not just our friends, but Timbucktoo! We have to find a way to stop the blue-eyes!”
“Not our problem,” Scootaloo returned. “I say we find Apple Bloom and everypony else, then get the Tartarus out of here.”
“No,” Rumble said. “Maybe it isn’t our problem, but we can’t just let those guys run free. We need to stop them. What if they decide to invade Equestria?”
Scootaloo looked as though she were about to object, but deflated. “Alright,” she agreed grudgingly. “But we still need to find everypony else, first.”
“Agreed,” said Button, walking over to the control panel. “But where are they?”
Rumble sighed. “Well, we won’t find an answer in here.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” said Sweetie, staring at a viewscreen on the far side of the console. It seemed to be tracking the storm front as it approached. “Button, what did you say earlier about the storm?”
“...Well, it’s probably connected to the blue-eyes,” the colt said, frowning. “I mean, I don’t know how, but it’s a bit of a coincidence if it just happened to be today that both the storm and the zombies came to town…”
Sweetie tapped at the monitor. “These clouds seem awfully important,” she said.
“And earlier, remember, Dash said that they were harder to control than usual,” Scootaloo agreed. Suddenly she froze, struck by a thought. “Oh, Celestia, that means they’re probably already in Equestria!”
Rumble frowned, thoughtful. “So… the clouds are behind all this?”
“Or there’s somepony behind both the clouds and the zombies,” Sweetie agreed. “Either way, we should probably investigate.”
Rumble nodded. “Okay,” he said slowly. “I guess that makes sense. But who’s going to get us up there?”
Scootaloo reached for the controls, grabbing ahold of an orange switch. “Rumble, unhook that wheel,” she said, nodding at the panel to her left.
When the grey pegasus had done so, Scootaloo flipped the switch upwards. The TARDIS flew up through the air at speeds well in excess of the reasonable. Four shrieks of absolute terror echoed around the console room as Scootaloo tried desperately to slow down. When the box stabilized, Sweetie Belle was twitching on the ground, Button had his forehooves tightly wrapped around a catwalk and his eyes closed as he rocked back and forth in the corner, and Rumble was hugging so tightly to a railing that his legs were white with the strain. Scootaloo, who was looking slightly green, gently settled the switch into standby position. “Right. Okee-dokee. I’m just gonna…” she stumbled over to a corner, and sat down in a heap, staring blankly into space.
Rumble uncurled himself first. “Okay,” he said, only the faintest of tremors in his voice. “So how do we fly this thing where we want to go?”
Silence reigned. He turned to Scootaloo. “Scoots? How do we control this thing?”
She blinked momentarily. “Joystick. Silver. Purple button on top.”
Rumble nodded, searching the console for the correct instrument. When he found it, he stopped and stared. “Wow. You really meant it when you said it was a joystick.”
It was the sort of thing found on the controls of an arcade game, a claw machine perhaps. More to the point, it was the sort of control that Button Mash would absolutely dominate. “Button?” Rumble asked gently.
“Hnn… Mummy?” Button asked, still staring into nothing.
Rumble sighed. “No. Not mummy. Rumble.”
Button looked blankly at his friend. “Rumble?”
“Yes?”
“I want my mom.”
Rumble groaned. “Button. Get up. I need you to fly the TARDIS.”
Button blinked. “Huh? Me? But I—”
“Sure you can. Look, it’s just a joystick,” Rumble said, nudging the other colt to his hooves. “I’m sure you’ll be great.”
Button looked at the joystick dubiously. “Well… No, no. You do it. I wouldn’t have any idea how to fly.”
“Button,” Rumble tried again, “Come on, dude. You’re great at video games, right? Well this is—”
“Real life,” Button said firmly. “Not a video game. Much as ponies might think otherwise, I know the difference, and I know which one I can actually do. You fly.”
With that, he pulled out his GameColt, and went over to sit by Sweetie Belle. The pegasus almost went after him, but instead just sighed, squaring his shoulders. “Right,” he grumbled. “Leave me on my own. Why not? Everypony else always does.” He pulled the monitor towards him and glared at it, flying the box back toward the city.