//------------------------------//
// Anger 
// Story: Her Lips Tasted Like Cherry Cola 
// by MagnetBolt 
//------------------------------//



"Remember, you're here to make sure the Ursa doesn't run away," Tempest said. "Don't try and fight it. It's all mine, you understand?"
The ranks of guards looked confused.
Tempest was going to have to be more specific.
"When the big monster comes out, it might try and run away."
They nodded.
"If it runs away, the ones who let it get away are going to be in trouble." Tempest let sparks pour out of her horn slowly. That's what she intended, anyway.
The fact that one of the masked guards in the front row exploded was just the result of a momentary loss of control.
"Let that be an example of what I mean by trouble," she improvised.
She leaned over the platform she was using to address the crowd. The masked creature was groaning, smoke rising from its fur.
"Get him out of here," Tempest ordered, waving a hoof in the air like she just didn't care.
As he was being carried off, she leaned down to whisper to one of the creatures closest to her.
"He'll probably be fine with aloe vera and bed rest, right?" She hissed.
The thing grunted and shrugged.
"Whatever. Spread out and look for tracks!"







Twilight gripped her rifle, slowly pushing leaves out of the way. Black paint streaked across her cheeks like tiger stripes, sweat dripping from her brow. It was out there. She could feel eyes on her, a predator staring from some shadow. She had to hope she spotted it before it was too late.
“Do you hear that?” Tempest whispered.
“No,” Twilight hissed back, straining her ears.
“It’s quiet.”
It was quiet. Too quiet. Her aim moved from one patch of shade to another. The pressure was like being at the bottom of the ocean, water dripping from the leaves around her, the heat of the summer and the humidity making every breath a struggle.
A twig snapped.
Twilight’s heart skipped a beat, nearly dropping the rifle as she spun towards the sound.
Sunset gently pushed the barrel of the gun away.
“Twilight, we’re right outside the campsite,” Sunset said. “Calm down.”
She motioned towards the camp. Pinkie Pie waved.
“Do you girls want any smores?” Pinkie yelled. “We’re making smores!”
“Do you want a smore?” Sunset asked. “Twilight? Tempest?”
Tempest glared back at her. “These woods are dangerous! We have to stay alert at all times!”
“She doesn’t want a smore!” Sunset yelled back.
“Okay! Let me know if she changes her mind!”
“Let’s try going deeper into the woods,” Tempest suggested.





Sunset tapped on her phone. “I can’t believe I still have three bars of signal out here,” she said, matching rows of colored gems and watching sexy anime girls vaguely based on supercars race around a track. “Are you two done yet?”
“If we were done we’d have a dead bear,” Tempest said. “Does it look like we have a dead bear?”
Sunset sighed and went back to her game.
“Now, the important thing is to know how to hunt a bear,” Tempest whispered. “In the Winter you have to find their den and break in while they’re sleeping. They don’t react well to being woken up.”
“It’s the middle of summer,” Twilight pointed out.
“Right,” Tempest agreed.
It was quiet for almost a full minute.
“How do you hunt a bear when it isn’t Winter?” Twilight asked, when she decided Tempest wasn’t going to volunteer the information.
“I kind of assumed it would come for you on its own,” Tempest admitted. “You know, because of the mystical bond between hunter and prey. The smell of unfinished business. A grudge that transcends time and space.”
“Is that a thing that happens?” Twilight asked.
Tempest considered. “Maybe.”
“I thought you did this before in your world!”
“Yes, but this is a little different. I don’t have an army. Or an airship. And I definitely can’t use any of you as bait to draw it out.”
“Glad you learned that friendship lesson,” Sunset muttered.
“How do we feel about setting the woods on fire?” Tempest asked.
“It’s frowned upon,” Sunset said.
“I think it’s a felony,” Twilight added.
“This is a lot more complicated than it used to be,” Tempest muttered.
“Hold on. Do you hear that?” Twilight asked, standing up and looking around.
“I can barely hear anything. My ears are tiny and can’t move.”
“Over there.” Twilight pointed. “It’s water!”
Twilight bolted, running through the brush.
“Hold up!” Sunset cried out, going after her.
Tempest yelled something that sounded like several curses at the same time. Sunset, having to choose between the two, kept after the girl who had once caused a cross-dimensional rift with a high school science project. She didn’t want to know what Twilight could do while unsupervised with a deadly weapon.
Sunset burst out of the woods and nearly ran right into Twilight’s back.
“This is it,” Twilight said. Her voice was quavering, on the edge of breaking. “This is the stream.”
It burbled past them, as crystal clear as her memory of that day.
“This is where we first saw the bear,” she said.
“Do you see it now?” Sunset asked, looking around, starting to feel a little naked without a firearm. She’d never felt like she’d needed a gun before. This was because Equestria didn’t have guns, and instead, some children were born with the ability to set fire to things with their minds, often without intending to do so.
“I thought we agreed that I was going to take point!” Tempest yelled, storming out of the woods. “We have a tactical plan, Twilight! We have to stick to the plan!”
Sunset turned to look at her and stared at Tempest’s right arm.
“Um--”
“You didn’t even do any tactical rolls,” Tempest said. “We talked about this. Tactical rolls are important. While you’re rolling, you can’t be hit by the enemy’s attacks!”
Sunset shook Twilight’s shoulder. The younger girl turned and paled. “Tempest, your arm…”
“Oh, this.” Tempest held up her right arm. There was a crossbow bolt clean through her elbow. “It’s just a minor crossbow discharge malfunction. I was tactically moving between trees while doing tactical rolls.”
She was still holding the weapon in her right hand.
“You keep saying tactical. I don’t think--”
“It was very tactical,” Tempest said, firmly. “Anyway, it’s just a scratch.”
“There’s literally a crossbow bolt through your arm!” Twilight sputtered. “How did you even shoot yourself there?”
“I’ll look up first aid tips,” Sunset said, grabbing her phone. “Oh, you’re kidding me! Now I lost reception?”
“Well, the first thing to do is cut it out,” Tempest said, pulling a long knife from her jacket.
“What? No!” Sunset started to grab for it, then thought better of trying to grab a knife from someone with her bare hands.
“Don’t worry, it’s sterile,” Tempest assured her. “It’d be easier if I was left-hooved, but I think I can manage as long as you tie it off to stop the bleeding.”
“How about instead, we go back to the camp and we get a real doctor to look at it?”
“I’ve had worse than this,” Tempest said.
“...Have you, though?” Sunset asked. “Because I think you’re just in shock and the pain hasn’t really kicked in yet.”
“Or I’m just extremely tough and this isn’t nearly as bad as it looks,” Tempest countered.
Sunset reached over and squeezed Tempest’s elbow.
The big girl shrieked in a note so shrill only some types of bats (and Fluttershy) could hear it before collapsing in a heap.
“Doctor time?” Sunset asked.
Tempest nodded quickly from where she was lying in the dirt.
“Okay. Twilight, give me a hand with her. I’ll take her right side, you take the left. We’ll get her back to camp and… Twilight?”
“It’s here,” Twilight whispered.
“What are you talking about?” Sunset turned back to her friend.
Twilight was staring into the woods.
Something was staring back at them.
“Oh.” Sunset didn’t say, because she’d totally frozen up.
“What do I do?!” Twilight looked at the girl who had shot herself with a crossbow for advice.
“Remember your training!” Tempest wheezed. “It came out because it smelled my blood! You have to kill it! Strike it down and take your place at my side!”
“Put the target in the center and pull the trigger,” Twilight said, repeating what she’d been told over and over again. For an hour. She was starting to realize that reading a gun’s operations manual and then practicing with it for an hour probably didn’t make her an expert. It would have taken at least twice as much practice.
The bear stepped out of the woods. It looked even bigger than it had when she was a child, the fur greyed with age.
“Take the shot!” Tempest hissed.
Twilight squeezed the trigger. The gun jumped in her hands, a tree trunk cracking, bark flying where the bullet hit it.
The bear startled at the sound, taking a step back.
Tempest laughed. “That’s it! You have the power now! Aim directly for his crooked brow! Right where he broke off my horn!”
“Twilight, I think she’s starting to hallucinate!” Sunset yelled.
“I have to do this,” Twilight whispered. “I have to save my friends!”
She lined the gun up on the bear and pulled the trigger.
She squeezed her eyes shut.
The gun barked, the bear roared in pain.
When she opened them again, the bear was running, crashing through the woods, trying to escape.
“I did it,” Twilight breathed.
“That’s it,” Tempest whispered. “You’re the hunter now, Twilight. You have to finish it.”
“Finish it?” Twilight asked.
“If you just leave it wounded, it’ll come after you for revenge,” Tempest explained.
“No, it won’t. It’s a bear.” Sunset groaned. “Twilight, just help me--”
Twilight had jumped the creek and looked back at Sunset from the far bank.
“Mind telling me what you’re doing?” Sunset asked.
“Finishing this fight,” she said, dramatically and unnecessarily cocking her gun again before running into the woods and leaving her best friend alone with a dangerous and wounded (but reformed) war criminal.
“All of my friends are idiots,” Sunset muttered.





Twilight knelt down, touching the fern she’d seen. Something bright red was splattered on the fronds and, now that she’d touched it, on her fingers.
She gingerly brought it to her lips, tasting it.
Immediately she started sputtering and coughing.
“I shouldn’t have done that,” she said, between gags. “I don’t know what I was expecting.”
She stood up and wiped her lips.
“I must have wounded it. It’s bleeding all over, and if it bleeds…” She paused. “If it bleeds it’s probably wounded and angry and even more dangerous than before.”
That wasn’t a good thought, so she tried to force herself to stop thinking it and just follow the trail of blood. Among Twilight’s many skills - like math, science, mad science, and sexy mad science - not thinking about something was listed so far down that even the world champion at Limbo dancing couldn’t sneak in under the bar.
A branch snapped.
Twilight dove behind a tree, taking up a tactical position like she’d been taught. She considered doing a tactical roll, just in case.
Up ahead, the woods thinned out into a clearing, sunlight pouring through the gap in the tree canopy like a spotlight. At center stage was the bear, slumped and breathing heavily. It was helpless, exhausted.
Twilight raised her gun.
A smaller bear stumbled out of the canopy, only a little larger than Spike. Well, much larger than Spike, really, but still quite small compared to the adult grizzly. It called out in obvious distress.
“It has a family?” Twilight whispered.
The bear heard her, ears turning. The cub moved between her and its mother, roaring and trying to scare her. Even to Twilight, who occasionally had night terrors with a distinct bear theme, this was more pathetic than actually intimidating.
“Tempest said I should end this, make sure you can never come back for revenge,” Twilight said, aiming at the cub.
All it would take was one pull of the trigger.
It looked terrified, just like she’d been.
And despite how scared it was, it was trying to protect something it loved.
“I can’t do it,” Twilight whispered.
The huge grizzly, urged into motion by the danger despite the pain, stood, backing away from Twilight.
She wavered and lowered the gun, watching it go.
It vanished into the woods.
Twilight, overcome with nameless emotion, pointed her gun in the air and fired, screaming.





“So the good thing is, Fluttershy’s first aid kit had surgical glue and ketamine, so Tempest is fine,” Sunset said, hours later, once Twilight had found her way back. 
Twilight frowned. “Isn’t ketamine for horses?”
“Technically speaking, Tempest is a horse. So am I. Besides, she decided not to go to the real doctor.”
“Because she’s worried she’ll be locked up by the government since she’s an alien from another world?” Twilight asked.
“No, because she thinks not having healing potions and sterilization spells makes medicine on this side of the portal barbaric and primitive. She says she’ll get the rest fixed up by a witch doctor later.”
“Oh.” Twilight frowned. “A witch doctor, though? Really?”
“Look, the healing energy of crystals is a thing that actually works in Equestria. If she says she has a referral to a good witch doctor, I’m inclined to take her word for it.”
“I guess.”
“So how’d the thing with the bear go?”
“I ended up letting it go,” Twilight sighed.
“You realized revenge wasn’t the most important way to get closure,” Sunset said, smiling and putting an arm around Twilight’s shoulders. “That’s a good friendship lesson.”
“No, I just couldn’t shoot it in front of its kid,” Twilight said. “If it had been alone…” She shrugged.
“While I think it’s still good not to shoot someone in front of their child, I’m not sure that’s actually a friendship lesson.”
“Yeah,” Twilight agreed. “Honestly, I have a lot of complicated emotions about this whole thing and I’m gonna need to unpack them over time.”
“Did you do that thing where you fire your gun in the air and yell ‘Aaaaah?’”
Twilight nodded.
“You’ll be fine,” Sunset said. “Feel like a smore? Pinkie’s been saving one for you.”
“I’d like that,” Twilight smiled. “I think I’m ready to try having fun again.”







Tempest panted, her whole body dripping with sweat. It was finished.
The body of the Ursa lay still in front of its lair. The same place where her horn had been shattered so long ago. It was never going to hurt another pony again. It was never going to do much of anything ever again, really.
Something mewled in the deeper darkness within the cave.
The guards, forming a perimeter - really, forming a ring that Tempest had used to fight the beast to the death - started to close in.
“Stop,” She ordered. She hadn’t spoken loudly, but in the aftermath of what had just happened, the masked creatures were all ears. None of them wanted to share the same fate as the Ursa.
Tempest walked into the cave, letting sparks flow from her horn, a flickering blue light that didn’t reach far.
It was enough for her to see the cowering cub at the far end of the cave.
“So, it had a cub,” she muttered.
The tiny Ursa, not even large enough to be an Ursa Minor, really, just an Ursa Minus, backed away.
“A long time ago, your parent hurt me,” Tempest said. “First I was afraid. I spent years thinking about all the things I’d done wrong. Then I spent more time thinking of what I’d do if I just had a chance. The revenge I’d have someday.”
She took a deep breath, breathing in the musty air of the cave, the sharp ozone smell from the magical battle and the repeated explosions outside.
“Maybe someday you’ll stop being afraid of the pony who came here today, and you’ll decide you want to seek me out and have your own revenge.”
Tempest smiled.
“I’ll be waiting. Don’t disappoint me.”