//------------------------------//
// Opening Fire 
// Story: The Legion of Bronze 
// by Sixes_And_Sevens 
//------------------------------//

The race had nearly run its course in both senses of the word. The greens were still leading, but only by a nose. The reds and whites, meanwhile, were throwing everything they had at one another. Every banana peel was countered with a graceful unified leap, and every attempt to swing over was beat back with sprays of champagne and custard pies. All three were on the last lap. Truly, it was anypony’s race. Ditzy found herself caught up in the wild abandon of the spectacle, cheering and calling as loudly as anypony in the crowd.
The remaining three carts rattled down the track, bumping and smashing up against one another. It was the final stretch, now, and the crowd’s noise was absolutely deafening. The whites formed into a beautiful, acrobatic crane shape, and swung about to smash into the reds. The red chariot tried to retaliate with a barrage of pies, but the pierrots pushed off against the tomato-colored chariot and forced the reds back, pushing themselves forward in the process. For a second, it looked like victory was certain for the graceful charioteers. But then the almost completely ignored greens crossed the finish line.
Silence reigned throughout the stadium. Even the other charioteers stood frozen, balanced in impossibly precarious positions.. Then, a few greens rose to the hooves, whooping and cheering. The noise echoed awkwardly, almost painfully, through the thick, all-consuming silence that suffocated the audience. Slowly, weakly, the cheering died away, replaced by angry mutters. The greens regarded one another sadly. Then, the two in front turned around and shoved their chariot back across the finish line, wings flapping quickly.
It was as if time had restarted. The red and white charioteers sprung back into life, warring for dominance in an acrobattle of skill and will. A spray of rose petals flew up dramatically as one of the white charioteers was knocked off kilter by a flying fish. The red rider that had thrown it cackled madly until the fish boomeranged back to smack her in the face. And then, driving up a roar from the crowd, the two competing chariots raced across the finish line as the greens sat sullenly on the sidelines. “A tie!” the grey general roared from her balcony, sweeping her hooves wide. “They have shown themselves equally worthy, and so shall receive equal glory.”
A mighty roar rang up at that. Ditzy sat silent, mouth hanging agape. “Did that…”
“Yeah,” Scootaloo said, grimacing. “You really don’t want to mess with that many angry sports fans. It’s about the most direct democracy there is.”
“That’s not even a little bit right.”
“No.”
Ditzy’s face was taut. “We should—”
“This is how history works, Dr. Doo,” Scootaloo said flatly. “Isn’t that what your husband alway says? We can’t change it, not one line. No matter how badly we want to…”




~I admired him from afar (said Holiday, wistful), and we never spoke. We could have spoken, undoubtedly. We were colleagues, after all, and our disciplines had more than a touch of overlap. But he was the Narcissus to my Echo. I could say nothing until I was spoken to. I was too afraid.
(Scootaloo remembered that story, too. There had been a nature spirit cursed by an angry alicorn to only be able to repeat what others said to her, and she’d fallen for a stallion so in love with himself he made Prince Blueblood seem almost normal. The spirit had wasted away (due, it was said, to a broken heart (Scootaloo wasn’t sure if it might not have something to do with not being able to ask for food if it wasn’t offered)) and Narcissus had fallen in love with his own reflection and turned into a flower.
(After the first time she’d read that story, Scootaloo had walked to Echo Peak with a picnic basket and spent all afternoon hoping that a thin, wasted spirit would turn up for lunch))
But then, one day, after a meeting of all the liberal arts departments, he came to me like Jupiter in the guise of a mortal. He wooed me softly, spoke sweet nothings in my ear. He promised me the world if I would only be his.
(Scootaloo never liked Jupiter, the King of the Sky. He was loud and brash and immortal, and he loved the ephemerals. But his love faded faster than even they did.(He had left Echo behind to the tender mercies of his jealous wife))
How could I refuse, Eurus? How could I ever refuse something so beautiful, so perfect? And so, we fell in love. I never doubted that fact, that he loved me as much as I loved him. Despite anything else that happened, he did once love me.~




“Scootaloo?”
The orange mare glanced up abstractedly. “Hrn?”
Ditzy had at some point risen to her hooves and begun to walk toward an exit. “I said, let’s go. I’d rather not watch another one, if it’s all the same to you.”
Scootaloo stared down at the track. The red and white charioteers were mugging for the audience, their battle still subtly continuing as each gladiator vied for dominant positions. “You can’t really blame them,” she said flatly. “They can only move up in the ranks if they’re popular.”
“So where does that leave the greens and blues?”
Scootaloo let her gaze wander over the pitch. “Hitting the showers, by the look of it.”
Indeed, the last of the greens were slouching into a set of doors set into the wall of the Hippodrome. From the look of it, the blues had already gone in. The crowd didn’t even afford them a second look. Scootaloo averted her gaze, but a brief sparkle caught her eye.
She squinted down at the field. One of the greens had been held up by a violet mare before entering the locker room, and the two were talking animatedly. Or at least the charioteer was. The purple pegasus seemed as stoic and collected as a statue. Scootaloo leaned closer. The purple mare settled a wing around the charioteer. Then, she squeezed.
The orange mare gasped as the green driver went limp. In a moment, Ditzy was at her side. “What? What’s wrong?”
Scootaloo’s eyes were glazed and strangely calm. “I think I just watched somepony get foalnapped.”




Commander Hurricane was in rather a good mood. He didn’t show it, of course. That was not the way for an officer to behave, not in public and certainly not in front of lower-ranked officers. Somehow, he had managed to attract hangers-on, a small collection of new initiates and guards all fascinated with him. This was not something which had been covered in his official officer’s manual. The closest article that he could think of was dealing with a mob of panicked civilians, and the commander rather doubted that such a thing was applicable in this situation. He knew full well that he was unpopular with his fellow officers. The only reason that he held this post was thanks to his ability to redeem the disaster at Bapheus Valley as a victory for intelligence and because he hadn’t been the one directly responsible for the well-being of that little blue abomination. He had to uphold his good name even under the most dire of circumstances.
So, he tolerated his inferiors. No more, no less. That was his ideal. When in doubt, go with cool, distant, and impersonal, and that will see you through. The mob didn’t seem to much care. They simply wished to remain in the presence of Hurricane, the great hero who rose up through the ranks like an arrow shot into the air. Much to his surprise, he actually found himself warming up to the idea. If he could inspire these recruits to greater prowess in battle, then certainly it was his duty, if not his privilege, to do so.
Therefore, he allowed himself to be plied with wine and pizza in exchange for tales of his heroics. It was for the good of the empire, really. “So,” he continued, downing another goblet in front of his rapt audience, “There I was, down to my last arrow and my last unicorn, and my arrow was broken. Fletching fell out, couldn’t make sure of a clean shot. She was closing in fast, and I was only still alive because she hadn’t noticed me yet behind. And so, I did the only thing which I could do. I plucked three of my own primaries and fitted them into the end of the arrow. The last thing that would have gone through her mind was the color of my wings.”
A murmur of shock and awe rose from the audience, a great wave of hubbub. Hurricane smiled a little smile and set down his goblet on the table. The little park bench was swarmed by admiring soldiers, faces alight with admiration. The fuchsia pegasus rose to his hooves, perhaps a tad unsteadily. Presently he was more drunk than he’d been in years, before he’d even risen as far as the soldiers that surrounded him. “They say the horn-heads were acting illegally, of course,” he sneered. “Princess Platinum and her retinue condemned them completely, of course. Hardly going to take credit for such a blatant attack, are they?”
That unsettled them, that was certain. Feathers ruffled uncomfortably, and even the nearby vendors looked to be paying closer attention. One had accidentally shoved his own lunch into a kiln.
“...Sir?” one particularly brave mare asked hesitantly. “Are you suggesting that the Princess… knew of the attack aforehoof?”
Hurricane snorted phlegmatically. “I’m suggesting that it seems awfully convenient that those renegade unicorns managed to steal all of that guard armor in their own sizes.” He stomped a hoof, sending up a puff of cloud. “Damnable horn-heads. Constantly interfering outside their domain. At least the ground-pounders know enough to leave us alone more oft than not.”
If the crowd was attentive before, they were absolutely rapt now. The pottery maker took a big bite of the cloud-clay pot in his hooves, chewing slowly and apparently not even taking notice of the taste. Hurricane snorted again, his eyes distant with thought and drink. “Meddlesome hussy… somepony ought to do something about her. Her father was alright.King Bullion. Hmp. He respected the Accord. He went out to help raise the sun every day himself, and to help set it every night. He could be respected. But that Princess never did a day’s work in her life.”
There were faint murmurs of agreement from the crowd. Hurricane continued to bluster, his face growing redder by the moment. “And now the griffons are at the gates in Roan! It seems that the pegasi are always under attack these days, from all corners. I should not be surprised if the earth ponies were to lead an army against us!”
There were aggravated murmurs from the crowd and Hurricane threw wide his wings. “They fought well at Bapheus, though we subdued them in time. Were they to take up arms against us again, it would prove greatly problematic.”
The mare from before let out a slight, nervous chuckle. “But they cannot even fly! What harm can they do us?”
The commander’s face darkened. “You ask that,” he said in a low growl. “You ask that now. You weren’t there. They have allies. Not many, but the few they have are powerful. I would sooner face an entire army of griffons than speak to that, that…” 
A flash of blue caught the corner of his eye. Hurricane’s expression suddenly stiffened even more, if such a thing were possible. Slowly, he turned around. A wooden box, painted blue, stood in a place that he was certain that it hadn’t been before. “That box.”
“Sir?”
“It wasn’t there a moment ago.”
“...Sir.”
Hurricane stared at the box for a long moment. “Take it to the gaol,” he said abruptly. “You and you. Carry it. You, you, you, and you, guard them. Nopony must be allowed to stop you.”
The soldiers looked at one another, uncertain, but a glare from the commander sent them scurrying. The mood of conviviality had broken, leaving behind only uncertainty and concern. The pottery vendor let out a cry of dismay as he realized what had just happened to his lunch, lumps of cloud-made clay coming sputtering out of his mouth as his sandwich burned to ash in the kiln.
The trouble with shooting an arrow into the air, Hurricane knew, was that it would eventually fall just as quickly as it rose.




Rumble rattled the castle doors, and cursed quietly. Locked tight. They were never locked. They didn’t need to be when not one, but two magical prodigies and a pyrotechnics enthusiast with a hair-trigger lived inside. He glanced up. The windows were hanging wide open. He glanced back. He could see Applejack racing up the street, a few more ponies behind her. Well. He could fly in the window, open the door, and let them all in, and the sooner he could do that, the better.
There was a blinding flash of magenta just behind the crystal door and Rumble flinched. Better hurry. He flapped up to the nearest window and dove in.
The corridor was empty, though no less quiet for it. He could make out individual voices now, but only in bits and snatches.
“—it so FAST? Rainb—”
“Metal! Reflects spells!”
“Aim for—”
“TEACUP TEACUP TEACUP TEACUP”
“Watch out! The crystal—”
“—know about the refracting matrix, Twil—”
Rumble carefully peered over the balcony. He recognized Twilight and Sunset, blazing as they were with purple and orange coronas. Trixie was a little harder to spot, but he managed to trace back to the point from which most of the fireworks were being shot. As for what they were attacking… that was a separate concern.
It was silver. Not grey, not shiny grey, silver. Bright and metallic, like a mirror. It was shaped like a pegasus, more or less, but larger, heavier, and with a wingspan like a griffon. He watched, half shocked, half awed, as a burst of magic struck it on the flank and was sent ricocheting away into the wall, bouncing across the room like some kind of demented pinball, steadily shrinking upon each contact with the wall. It seemed that Trixie was having the strongest effect in attacking; at least her explosives actually exploded where they were meant to, though judging by the copious number of teacups strewn about the foyer, she’d had no more luck getting spells to stick. But they left almost no mark on the metal pegasus.
It was at this point that Sunset glanced up and stopped dead in her tracks. “Another one!” she shouted, gesturing towards Rumble. “Up there!”
The grey colt put his hooves up in surrender just a moment too late. Twin surges of magic were hurtling right towards him.




The Doctor stared at the bank of dumbwaiters set into the wall. They were transcendental, but not in the way that the TARDIS was. They were smaller on the inside, the interior dimensions of a box mapped onto the exterior dimensions of a lengthy, twisting shaft that reached through the TARDIS. The upshot of which was that one could put food in at one end, close the door, and when the dumbwaiter was opened on the other end, the food would already be waiting, without having to travel through the kilometers of tight tubing and tighter turns. The other upshot, of course, was that one could do what the Doctor was about to do, provided that one was sufficiently small. Adric, the Doctor recalled, had once tried to crawl through the box and had wound up stuck halfway through. Tegan had teased him mercilessly. However, though Adric may have been small, the Doctor was, at least presently, smaller. 
He pulled open one of the doors on the wall at random and gave it an appraising eye. It would be a bit of a squish, certainly, but he ought to just about fit. He hauled himself up into the box, hooves scrabbling to find purchase on the wall. He was just about to haul his tail end in when a great, reverberating crash echoed down the aisle.
He froze. In the strange, ethereal light of stasis fields, the world seemed discolored, and the light they shed barely illuminated the corridors at all. Even the mildest of cheeses shone like ghosts in the night. There— movement in the darkness. His tongue flicked nervously over his lower lip. “Hello?”
The next moment, an explosion of laserfire opened on the wall. The Time Lord yelped, knocked off of his perch to the ground. Another blast singed his mane, and he was off like a rocket, dodging and leaping and jiving along the wall at random as blaster fire rained around him. Not blaster fire, he realized with a thrill of terror. Staser fire, a weapon of the Gallifreyan Chancellery Guard. One that was designed to do anything from stunning a Time Lord to outright killing them, sans regeneration. He hadn’t seen one used since— the memory was cut short when a lucky shot struck his flank. He let out a scream of pain, collapsing to the ground.
When he peeped an eye open, there it was. The Watcher. Watching. Watching him watching the watcher watch him. Watch no longer sounded like a proper word. In its hoof was a smoking staser. The Doctor let out a weak groan as the pale specter drew nearer. “No… no…” he moaned as its hoof reached for his chest.
And then, he sat up like a jack-in-the-box and walloped it upside the head. The figure stumbled backwards, as heavily dazed as a phantom could be, then crashed against a shelf. “Sorry, mate,” the tan stallion replied, breathing heavily. “But I’m not going anywhere.”
He hauled himself to his hooves slowly, wincing as he did so. The staserfire had got him right in the cutie mark. Fortunately, that particular area was mostly fat tissue, leaving his muscles relatively unharmed. Unfortunately, he wouldn’t be able to sit down for a week, at the least. All told, though, he’d gotten off lightly. The same couldn’t be said for the dumbwaiters. Several of them had been punctured by the staser blasts, disrupting the transcendental dimensions and turning them back into long, twisting chutes, impossible for virtually anypony to climb through. Even Rainbow Dash, small and athletic though she was, would be hard-pressed to wriggle through. With the level of destruction caused, it was almost as though…
“Almost as though it was trying to knock out the dumbwaiters,” the Doctor muttered. “Leaving me exactly one exit.”
Indeed, there was only one dumbwaiter still unharmed— the one second-to-farthest on the right, one marked with a little doodle of three brightly-colored flowers. “I don’t like this,” the Doctor said aloud, pausing expectantly. He glanced around. “Oh. Right. In it alone. ‘Course.”
He sighed deeply, then glanced at where the Watcher had once lain. The spot was devoid of anything but a staser pistol, now. He picked it up, examined it closely, set it to ‘stun’. Then, with a slight whimper of anticipatory pain, he turned to scale up the wall to the dumbwaiter.




Dash had taken to unconsciously preening, pulling her feathers through her teeth almost obsessively. “I… don’t get it,” she said. “I really don’t. So you were married to a jerk, why keep it from Scoots?”
"I dated him," Holiday said sharply. Then she sighed, leaning back on the sofa. “You saw the birth certificate,” she said quietly.
Dash froze for a second, then started preening with even more vigor than before. Lofty sighed. “Dash, it’s alright, really. We all know the truth, now.”
“Uh-huh, yeh, whi wnn’t t be light?” Dash muttered through her wing. She spat out the inconveniencing limb. “Sorry. Yeah, why wouldn’t it be alright? None of my business, right?” She stuffed the other wing into her mouth, picking and preening away
Lofty gazed at the blue mare. “We both know that’s not true,” she said quietly. “You care for her as much as either of us do, I can tell.” She hesitated. “Rainbow, why is it that you…”
“Half-adopted her?”
“...Yes, I suppose.”
The prismatic pegasus examined her left wing. It was cleaner and straighter than it had been in years. “Let’s just say I wasn’t always quite as awesome as I am today.”
Holiday and Lofty exchanged glances, then gazed at Rainbow in mute expectation. The orange pegasus was looking at the cyan mare with honest curiosity. Dash let out a sigh. “Fine. I watch out for the squirt because when she was a kid she reminded me of how I was at her age. Now that she’s all grown up… she can’t be. I don’t want her to turn out like me. Well, I mean, I do, but I…” She stopped, hanging her head low. 
“She got lucky,” Dash said after a moment. “I guess your guy skipped out on you before she could even remember him, right?”
Lofty nodded. “We’ve always been the only parents she’s known.”
“Yeah. With me, it was my whole damn town. Getting into my head, scratching at me, trying to change me. Like, I had a cool childhood. My parents were always chill, I had friends, but man, you step a hoof out of line and all the old farts in the city act like you slapped Celestia’s butt.”
Lofty’s eyebrows rose. “Where in the world did you think of that metaphor?”
Dash smirked. “Long story. But, uh…” her face fell. “Not a lot of room in Cloudsdale for anyone that doesn’t fit. I got by alright because I kicked butt at flying and I didn’t let on about… y’know…”
“Liking mares,” Holiday concluded.
“Yeah. Even with all that, I got picked on a lot by the other kids, the teachers, y’know.”
“So…” Lofty rubbed her chin. “You took Scootaloo under your wing to protect her from the bullies, so she could have a nicer childhood than you.”
“Uh, I guess. Not really. She’s tough, and she’s got you guys to protect her. Scoots isn’t my little sister ‘cause of that.”
“Then why…”
“Because she dreams big. She dreams bigger than she can be. She’s got a goal, and everything’s against her, but she just knows she’s gonna get there—” Dash broke off, voice raw. “She knew she was gonna get there,” she corrected quietly. 
“She will,” Holiday said, after a moment’s hesitation. “She won’t let this keep her down.”
Dash snorted. “Yeah? And how’s she gonna do that? This is it, Holiday. The dream is dead.”
“You could vouch for her,” the cream-coated mare pointed out, a note of desperation in her voice. “It’s all she’s ever dreamed of, Dash, you know that. You could get her a job on the Weather Patrol.”
Lofty looked at her wife with shocked indignation. “Holiday, you can’t possibly— you don’t know what—”
“I could,” Dash said flatly, cutting across Lofty, not meeting Holiday’s eye. “But I won’t. I can’t. I… I can see her wearing out up over the clouds, or over the Everfree. There aren’t any safety nets up there. You know how many pegasi die in weather work every year? You know how many weeks I spent in the hospital my first year in Ponyville? You study pegasus history, Holiday, but you don’t have wings. You don’t know the risks like I do!”
Holiday stared at the rainbow-maned mare. “You could keep her safe.”
“No. I couldn’t,” Dash said flatly.  “I’m head weather coordinator. That means I’m responsible for every member of the team. I can’t spend all my time watching her, no matter how much I want to.”
“So why did you encourage her?” Holiday asked, her voice growing cold. “All that time you spent, was it just building her up for a fall?”
Lofty discreetly removed the tea tray. If things were going to start being thrown, hot tea and fragile china would be removed from the list first.
“What?” Dash spun around. “No! Not in a billion years!”
“Why, then? Why would you do this?” Holiday shouted, drawing closer to the younger mare. “Why would you lie?”
Dash’s face fell like a hailstone, and turned just as hard and cold. “I didn’t lie,” she said. “I thought she could do it. I knew she could, if anypony could. But I guess… I guess nopony can.”
Silence descended on the little cottage. “Where do you think she’d try to go?” Dash asked.
“Carousel Boutique, perhaps,” Holiday said, not looking up from the ground. “Or Sweet Apple Acres. Sweetie and Apple Bloom are still in town, after all.”
“Alright, let’s go check at Rarity’s. Better than sticking around here any longer.” Without waiting for a reply, Dash turned and stormed out of the room, making sure to overturn several piles of papers in the process.
Holiday looked at her wife. “Lofty? Did I just…”
Lofty’s mouth was a line. “We’ll talk about all of this later. As a family,” she promised, before following Dash out the door.