The field outside City Hall was completely packed with bodies. Jackie herself had returned to looking like a pony, and wasn’t bothering to hide who she was.
They had been prepared to rescue a large number of ponies. Booths were set up around the base of the tree, with housing assignment packets and supplies and everything else their new population would need.
There was just one problem: the rescue had gone too well. Some part of Jackie had dreamed that they might, if they were very lucky, double their population. Any more than that would be dangerous, not just because they would be difficult to feed. Bringing in a large block of new citizens would mean tons of new voters, with interests radically different than those who were already established. Jackie was no nation-builder, but even she worried that her little country might not be able to cope.
From the look of the density of ponies here, she hadn’t just doubled her population, but increased it by as much as two orders of magnitude. She kept looking back, and the crowd just kept going.
This is exactly what we didn’t want, she thought, striding up onto the balcony with a little magic. She was beginning to feel weak and slow from all the spellcasting. Even with all her tricks, it would take some time to recover after today.
“Governor,” said Melanie the city planner, gesturing off the railing with a hoof. She stood far enough back that they wouldn’t be visible from below. “What in god’s name did you do? You weren’t supposed to bring every bat in Mundi! We don’t even have standing room for that many!”
“I know.”
“You love your magic trees, but we haven’t managed to get more than ten thousand per square kilometer. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you this, but we don’t have a hundred kilometers of city for those ponies to move into.”
“I know.”
Lavender Eclipse looked as worn from the mission as Jackie herself. Her coat was still splotched with blood, and she had wrapped one of her forelegs in bandage. But she had found her way up here to represent the militia anyway. “Those are civil protection uniforms,” she said, squinting off the balcony. “Maybe… Dreamknife, there are at least a thousand enemy soldiers out there. Maybe more… I’ve never had to count numbers like this before.”
“Not enemy soldiers,” she said, wilting a little more as the barrage continued. The rumble of distant voices from below had gotten louder. Keeping this many ponies in one place was rather like leaving bottles of nitroglycerin out on a desk. They might be okay for a few minutes, but soon they would start getting hungry, and thirsty, and then there would be a riot. “Ponies who wanted to be free. Not all of them were going to be bats.”
“We knew that,” said David, the deputy mayor. He stepped away from her, closer to the soldiers guarding the door. “Why didn’t you shut the door? We could’ve come back for them when we were ready.”
“I know!” Jackie turned away from her indignant council of advisors and petty officials. “I’m going to think of something, okay! Just don’t let the city burn down while I figure it out. Keep them happy.”
Jackie cut her way back out of the world, before they could scream at her anymore. There were already enough screams in her head from the ponies Athena had shot, they didn’t need company.
Unfortunately there was one thing she couldn’t do in the dream world, at least not in any meaningful way. Sleep in the unconscious world did not cause a traveler to dream, or restore their strength. That only worked for its denizens. But she fled there out of habit, into somewhere familiar and safe.
She hadn’t created some grand library for herself in the unconscious world, to protect incredible knowledge and attract visitors from miles around. Such places were vulnerable to attack, as the library had been several times. Not to mention the energy they took to maintain.
Jackie had somewhere else to hide, situated in the dullest dreams of city-dwellers who reenacted the drab activities of their lives when they slept. She arrived in the little fragment of dream, shaped like a cozy uptown apartment. She’d lived in a dozen like it over the course of her long life, and they were all fundamentally the same.
She wandered past little framed pictures on the wall. There was the same changeling in at least half of them. When the Last War ended, so did her records. Jackie had done nothing worth remembering after that.
“I never should’ve been in charge,” she muttered, staring at her tearstained reflection in a kitchen mirror. Outside was a sky of perpetual night, looking out on the Dreamlands in all its beauty. For all that Athena had selected her species for abuse, she could do nothing about this. Her machines could not stop them from dreaming.
“I should’ve just left the world as it was. Things always go to shit when I try to solve other ponies’ problems.”
“You’re not the only one who thinks so,” said a voice from behind her. Jackie didn’t even bother turning around.
So much for my secret hideout. Nopony had ever found their way here uninvited before. But she’d just cut a great big hole straight in from the council room. Hat Trick would’ve had to be dumb and blind to miss it.
“What do you want?”
“Same thing you do,” said the young mare, climbing up onto a too-tall barstool and leaning across the counter into the kitchen. “But the trouble with living is you never know how things are going to work out until after. Except Oracle, I guess. But you should see his dreams.”
“I have,” Jackie said, not turning around. She reached into the fridge, pulled out an ancient glass bottle of Coke, and cracked the lid open on a metal opener near the door.
“Then you know he’s paralyzed with indecision almost every moment. He wants to do good, but he never knows how. He has so many possibilities in front of him and he doesn’t know which is best. So more often than not he just doesn’t do anything.”
“You want one of these?”
The bat shook her head. Jackie knocked it back, feeling the familiar sugary substance glide down her throat. Pony tastes were subtly different than human, but this wasn’t a real Coke. This memory tasted exactly the way she remembered it.
“Maybe he has the right idea,” Jackie said, settling the empty bottle on the counter a second later. “At least if you don’t do anything you can’t royally fuck everything up.”
“Maybe. Can’t really fix anything though, can you?” The young bat leaned close to her. “Running away is exactly the reason the world is this bad. The Alicorns hold themselves responsible for what Charybdis did—and where are they now? Either gone, or not helping. Our lives only get worse when good people do nothing.”
“But I did fuck it up!” Jackie smacked her bottle down, letting it shatter on the tile at her hooves. “I could’ve sent those ponies home. I could’ve lived with the fact that they might get punished for trying to run away. I could’ve taken exactly as many as we could handle and no more. Then we wouldn’t be in this position.”
“Maybe.” Hat Trick shrugged. “Maybe is a bitch of a word though, isn’t it? Maybe Athena will grow a conscience tomorrow and all these problems will go away. Maybe the real Alicorns will come back and wrangle her in. Maybe a passing black hole gobbles up the sun and we all freeze.”
Jackie only stared, stupefied. “This is almost as bad. I knew how much of a problem for our new country it would be if we got a bunch of ponies who weren’t prepared. I made sure Lavender spread around exactly what we really had, so they’d know what they were getting into. No propaganda, nothing.”
“Then what’s the problem? Sounds like we recruited an awful lot of prepared refugees.”
“Prepared for what we had,” Jackie said, grumbling under her breath. “We were aiming at twenty thousand. That’s… a million? It feels like a million, anyway. We don’t have anywhere for them to live. When winter comes, there won’t be anything for them to eat. And they’re gonna get pissed off a long time before that if we tell them to spread off into the jungle and just eat bugs and fruit for a few years while we get our shit sorted out. We’ll have bats begging to go back into the fucking datamines after that.”
“I think you’re forgetting our best resource, Dream-knife.” She gestured in the air, and a photograph of the crowd of evacuated ponies appeared. She pushed it across the counter towards Jackie.
“Uh…” Jackie squinted down at it. Lots of dark wings, lots of evacuated ponies who had the wrong idea of what was valuable. They’d brought portable computers they couldn’t power instead of blankets and food. “What?”
“I don’t know about counting them all, but it looks like eight hundred thousand bats. Not quite half the ones living in Mundi, so congrats on that too by the way.”
“I didn’t miss that,” Jackie argued. “That was the whole point. We were getting them out from under Athena’s awful hell-city. It was the bats we were trying to help escape.
“Exactly. So we have more bats together in one place than there’s ever been. More magic than there’s ever been. Of one specific kind, anyway.”
She thought for a moment she might be able to see what Hat Trick was suggesting. But she couldn’t quite put it together. She was a wrung-out sponge, only moments from total collapse. “Untrained bats,” Jackie said. “Most of our first wave had never even gone dreamwalking in their lives. And I’m good, but I’m not ‘feed a million people with dream food’ good. You’re not. Not even that ancient Equestrian Alicorn could’ve done that.”
“You don’t know much about Thestralia,” Hat Trick said, back in her smug voice. “This won’t even be the first time we’ve tried something like this. Maybe the situation wasn’t as desperate in the past, but…” She gestured behind her, at Jackie’s kitchen table. Something was growing there, the same sort of model Jackie herself had used while planning their response in Axis Mundi. Only this one depicted a city made out of trees, bigger and grander than anything they’d built so far. Trunks seemed to tower right up into the stratosphere, with terraced ledges for food and little waterfalls pouring down from where water was brought in by pegasus teams and collected in canopy pools.
Jackie stared at the model, indignation on her face. “We couldn’t build this,” she said. “Certainly not before those ponies realize we lied to them and riot our city to the ground. We could bring in every bat trained to make tree-buildings, hell, we could train every citizen we had, and it still wouldn’t make a dent in a city this large.”
“Well, obviously.” Hat Trick waved a wing dismissively. “Maybe it would be cool to really build, maybe not. That isn’t what I’m saying. I’m saying we already have ourselves a stable Spirit Road in and out of the dream world. City Hall.” She waved one hoof through the model, and most of it blew away like smoke. In the center only the single, tallest tree remained. With its opening near the heartwood.
“You’re… you’re saying we should build a city in the Dreamlands?” Jackie shook her head. “That’s… the most batshit insane thing I’ve ever heard.”
“It isn’t, really.” Hat Trick didn’t sound even the slightest bit dissuaded. “Like I said, we’ve done it before. City Hall already exists on both sides. How much harder would it be to expand, with the best dreamcrafters in the world to build it?” She flexed her wings, beaming proudly. “And we’ll have enough bat pony glamour to keep the dream stable indefinitely. That’s part of what the Arcane Network was for.”