"Magic has nothing on the power of physics. We might alter our world, but in the end, the governing energies which determine how space and time are ordered will always reassert themselves. Those energies involve numbers that are impossible for the equine mind to fathom. They are numbers that should inspire humility.
The speed of light.
The power of stars.
The energy of pulsars.
If ever somepony wished to fancy themselves a god, they would first have to command an understanding of numbers and equations that should fill mortal minds with visions of our own smallness."
- The Scholar
The Overseer knew Purpose.
If the Overseer had any emotions that could be understood by equine minds, it might have spared a moment’s consideration of the poor, pathetic lifeforms that scuttled around its mighty claws. Many of the lower beings that inhabited the Office had base desires, which served their Purpose, but no others knew what that Purpose was. They ate, they bred, they defecated, and they died in pursuit of the Purpose, but it was only the Overseers unto whom Purpose was fully illuminated.
Purpose was the reason. Purpose was the order of things. Purpose gave motion to the little cogs, filling the grand mechanism with power to accomplish the Work.
Very full of Purpose though it might have been, the Overseer was having quite the strange day. It’d witnessed several of the smaller quadrupeds from the current employee realm rushing about, seemingly without Purpose. Most of the employees from the quadrupeds’ realm were caught in the employment field and sent successfully to Work. A very odd quadruped who appeared to have reached the end of his useful employment period—then exceeded it by many, many cycles—was not. The Overseer sent up to Administration for a directive on what it should do about the skeletal creature and received no reply. Taking that as a sign that all was well, it returned to watching the few remaining gainfully employed beasts.
Within moments, there was another interruption.
One of the creatures was fighting the employment field.
That should have been impossible. Nothing in the risk assessment had indicated the quadrupeds had anything like the neural fortitude to defy the employment field. It was true, however, that the risk assessment had also failed to indicate that Administration would place the Work on extended standby for so many cycles that the Overseers were required to go into stasis, but there were reasons. The Overseer was just not given to know what they were.
The Overseer made its way to where the resistant employee sat and began drilling into its mind. It was far more resilient than any life form this particular Overseer had ever encountered, but almost assuredly there had been some other who was moreso. Administration did not feel the need to inform it to kill the creature, so it was still influenceable. Of course, Administration hadn’t felt the need to tell the Overseer anything for many, many cycles, but that was irrelevant. The Work continued.
Some time later, another Overseer expressed discomfort over the link.
The other Overseer was missing half of their body.
If they could have, the Overseers might have been disconcerted. No Overseer had ever heard of another Overseer losing half their body before. It sounded like something that would warrant investigation.
Within seconds of leaving, the Overseer felt the resistant creature succumb to the employment field. It was reported that the skeletal creature had been responsible for violence, real, genuine violence which should have been impossible. Two Overseers had even taken damage warranting disassembly and reconstitution. The answer to such a thing was unequivocal: the skeletal quadruped needed to be destroyed.
A Search was begun.
Soon, Overseers all across the sphere were reporting unusual behavior from the new employees. Moving on their own. Doing things besides working. It would have all been very disturbing, if the Overseers were possible to disturb.
It short order, the sphere had been searched from end to end. The skeletal creature was nowhere to be found. Perhaps worst of all, they were also short two of the new employees as well.
Still, Administration knew the Purpose and Work continued. If they saw fit to allow these creatures to destroy Overseers, then those Overseers must have been deficient in some way. It was all perfectly reasonable.
The link quickly concluded that the creatures must have slipped passed the search perimeter and exited the nexus once more. It was the only logical conclusion and irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. If Administration felt there was a need to go after them, they would send a retrieval envoy to dissect the beasts, discover whence their partial immunity to the employment field might come, and adjust it accordingly.
Things had settled once more and the new employee was working peaceably while the few older ones that remained continued their efforts. In the grand design, there were always hiccups from time to time, but they were impermanent. Anything worth doing required effort, after all, and nothing could change the ultimate outcome: the world of the quadrupeds would be used for the Purpose.
Unfortunately, the peace did not last very long.
Several quadrupeds wearing slightly worn out convoyers appeared through the nexus. The Overseer might not have made note, but that they all appeared to be heavily armed. Administration hadn’t mentioned anything about an alliance with the locals, though it wouldn’t have been the first time lower creatures were used to advance the Purpose. Moments later, one of the new employees burst from the elevator down from Control, shrieking at the top of its lungs. On its heels, the skeletal creature flew out, leaping nimbly across the tops of the employee containment cells while making almost no noise at all. Within seconds, it’d vanished into the nutrient fog, but the Overseer could still hear the two of them moving.
The Overseer watched impassively for a few seconds, then decided it’d had enough; it headed for the farthest corner of the sphere to let some other higher being deal with the situation.
----
Nightmare wanted to stop screaming, but it seemed to go hoof-in-hoof with the running.
Bones had said that if she wanted to live, she had to scream.
Her trench coat flagged behind her as her tail lashed at the air and her lungs ached like wildfire, but still she ran, heading between the aisles of cubicles towards the portal. She hoped, desperately, that she was still going in the right direction. The obscuring orange fog filled her lungs and despite the disgusting flavor, she could feel it filling her with strength.
The fear was like a living thing, nipping at her flanks as it kept her tortured muscles in motion.
It was something of a toss-up as to who was more surprised when Nightmare exploded out of the fog and ran muzzle first into one of the P.A.C.T. troopers. She only caught a flash of the trooper’s wide eyes through a pair of lightly tinted goggles before slamming headlong into the black-armored pony. The trooper let out a gasp as the air was knocked out of her and she was sent tumbling.
Nightmare stumbled, careered off one of the walls, but kept her hooves. Scrabbling for her trigger bit, she snatched it in her teeth and leveled her revolver at the trooper who was just then pulling herself up. The trooper paused, for a second, her machine gun barrel still pointed at the floor. Slowly, she took up slack on her own firing mechanism.
‘I...why can I not fire?’ Nightmare thought, her teeth clenched tight as she tried to will herself to pull back on her bit. ‘She is about to kill me! Why should killing somepony who is about to kill me be difficult? Oh, please don’t let me die—
A movement caught her eye and she took a step back as a flashing, skeletal shape suddenly leapt off the top of the cubicle, landing squarely on the trooper’s back and driving her face first into the carpet. Reaching down, Bones casually grabbed the trooper’s chin with one leg, then wrenched her head up while simultaneously shoving his free hoof into the back of her neck. There was a faint pop, then the trooper went limp.
“Get moving you silly git!” Bones barked inside her mind as he launched himself into the nearest cubicle, vaulting off the desk and up onto the wall. “Straight ahead, through the portal, and don’t stop to look back! You’ve got a clear run! Keep screaming!”
“Wh-what about Sweet Shine?” she stammered.
“She’s five rows over! I’ll get her! Now move!”
Swinging around, Nightmare bolted down the aisle, her fear giving her wings as she flew by a strange, towering tripod creature with an uncountable number of dripping mouths that only gave her the briefest of glances before returning to stacking piles of paper.
It was a full twenty seconds before she remembered to scream.
----
‘Mercy, I hope that dimwit doesn’t get my grandson killed,’ Bones thought as he watched Nightmare Moon flee into the fog. The bloody smears on the bottoms of his hooves were making it somewhat difficult to keep his balance on top of the cubicles, but it wasn’t more than a mild concern. By his count, he’d managed to bring down six troopers as they tried to close ranks to find the source of the screaming. Two had been heading toward the control room and four were chasing Nightmare. If they were following standard distribution, there would be four more chasing Nightmare, while two more headed for the elevator.
For a moment, he thought he’d miscounted the cubicles, but then he caught a flicker of yellow in the orange fog. Changing directions, Bones bounced off the wall of the tiny cell he’d been running along and hopped down amongst the aisles with a thump that wouldn’t have disturbed a sleeping dormouse. A curious P.A.C.T. trooper was standing in front of one of the cubes, peering inside at something unseen.
The stallion didn’t have time to be feel himself die as Bones drove a borrowed combat knife into the base of his skull, leaving it buried there as the skeleton quickly snatched the standard issue P.A.C.T. blade off the dead pony’s belt and slotted it between his teeth. It was as quick and efficient a kill as he might have wished for, but then, the fog was an almost ideal condition for silent wet work.
Not that Bones was enjoying himself. He’d never much cared for killing ponies. Dragons were easy. He’d killed plenty of dragons. Ponies always involved a bit of guilt on some lonely night when the whiskey bottle was empty and the bartender was giving you nasty looks.
Stepping into the cubicle, Bones found Taxi sitting where they’d left her, bent forward over a stack of papers, her eyes darting down the page at a speed that should have made it impossible to actually read any of what was being laid down. The blood had stopped dripping from her nose, but she still looked physically exhausted. Her shoulders shook with each fresh sheet of paper she snatched up.
“Alright girly. I’d apologize for this, but I think you’ll thank me once we’re not in this wretched place any more.”
Reaching into his pocket, he retrieved the squirming convoyer, giving the vile little monstrosity a sidelong glance before carefully dumping it onto Taxi’s shoulder. It left a thin trail of slime in her fur as it wandered about for a few seconds with several tentacles raised as though testing the air. Suddenly, it spun in a quick circle, zipping underneath her mane like a frightened beetle and vanishing.
For a long moment, nothing happened.
It was the sort of moment where a pony has all the time in the world to start planning for how they’re going to explain to their grandson exactly how they managed to botch the rescue attempt and had to leave his best friend in another universe.
Bones had just finished rehearsing a long soliloquy about the inevitability of death and how Taxi was most likely in a better place, when she jerked in her seat. Her eyes unfocused and she drew in a loud, sharp breath. Bones just barely managed to slap his hoof over her mouth before she scream that’d been bubbling up could get loose.
Almost immediately, she began to struggle. Her toe smacked what would have been his carotid artery, followed by a jugular strike and a solid poke in the sternum over a pressure point that would have killed him deader than a doornail if he’d still had the anatomy to lose. Swinging the chair around, he shoved her against the wall of the cubicle.
Unfortunately, an animated skeleton inches from her face with a knife clenched between its teeth was not a recipe for calm. Taxi gasped for air as she fought against his iron grip. Grabbing his foreleg, she tried to wrench the joint.
“You’re free, girl! Knock it off!”
Taxi froze, the frothing fury she’d been working herself up to cooling faster than if she’d been hit in the face with a bucket of water.
“B-Bones?” she stammered, her shoulders going limp. “W-work?”
“Do you know anybody else this pretty? Are you back with me?”
Tears started to gather in the corners of her eyes as she sagged in his forelegs. “No more work? I...I don’t know. Oh Celestia, is this...is this real?”
“It’s real enough,” he replied, glancing back at where the office chair had fallen. The chair’s legs were writhing at the air as though trying to get purchase on the carpet to drag itself back beneath the desk. “We’re in danger. Can you fight?”
Taxi’s breathing hitched as she glanced around the cubicle, then waved at the orange fog.
“Where are we?” she asked, as her eyes centered on the living chair. She quickly stepped back against the wall, then squeaked and spun to put a hoof on the strangely spongy surface.
“This is the Office.”
“The...The Office? Why is that chair...um...why is that chair alive?” she asked dumbly.
A gunshot echoed somewhere far off and Bones jumped against the wall, peering out into the fog. There was a return shot a moment later, but the mist distorted the sound so it was impossible to get a heading.
“There are a lot of questions you will not want answers to,” he said, “All that matters is that Hard Boiled is drawing the enemy away from us. Now, can you fight?”
Taxi’s face filled with relief at the mention of her best friend’s name, then quickly hardened into an iron mask. “Somepony is trying to hurt Hardy?”
“When is somepony not? It’s P.A.C.T. troopers. I figure about six of them, plus however many are outside the portal.”
Raising her hoof, Taxi pushed her mane back, revealing the convoyer sitting on the side of her neck like an especially ugly tumor. “Should I ask what this is?”
“No, but it’s why you’re not still working, so don’t pick at it.”
Shrugging her shoulders a few times, Taxi began working the kinks out of her back with a sound like molten metal flexing. With a soft groan, she shook her tail out and glanced back at her scarred flanks. “My saddlebags...I had all our extra ammunition,” she said, a little mournfully.
“Don’t worry about it, sweetheart,” he said. “Considering what you did to those fools in the bunker, I don’t think you need a gun as it is.”
“I don’t remember that,” she muttered, wiping at the semi-dried blood that still soaked her forelegs. “How many did I kill?”
“I lost count. Enough that I’m glad I wasn’t between you and whatever pissed you off so bad.”
Sighing, she stepped out of the cubicle, peering left, then right before looking down at the dead trooper sprawled against the wall, the knife still protruding from his skull.
“This is yours?”
“Yep. Terrible waste of talent. That medal on his shoulder means this poor schmuck took down an ice wyrm. I had a couple of those myself, back in the day.”
Pushing the trooper’s balaclava off of his face, Taxi looked down into his wide open eyes. They were bright blue. Carefully shutting his eyelids, one then the other, she braced braced a hoof on the back of his neck. Leaning down, she bit the handle of the blade and wrenched it out of his head.
Quickly wiping a chunk brain matter on his combat barding, she then rolled him onto his back. He had a couple of flashbangs in his front pockets along with a picture of a pretty filly in her middle teens and a granola bar. She took the granola and one of the spare explosives, then tucked the picture away.
“Alright. I’m ready. Where is Hardy?”
----
Nightmare’s hip ached as she limped toward the portal.
It hadn’t been an especially clean shot, but one lucky bullet had winged her before that strange tripod monster that looked uncomfortably like a tower made of mouths had laid itself down across the path between her and her pursuers, cutting off the chase for a moment. Hiding was no longer an option; the trail of blood was bright as a neon sign following her hoofsteps.
Close. It was close. She knew it was close.
Her head was swimming and she wanted nothing more than to lie down, to rest, to try to patch the bloody hole in her leg, but she knew if she fell the troopers would be upon her in seconds.
‘Ghost, are you there?’ she thought, weakly.
‘I’m here, Nightmare. I’m trying to stop the bleeding, but I don’t have enough magic to close the hole.’
‘Please...can you talk to me? I don’t want to be alone.’
Misjudging a step, Nightmare staggered, barely catching herself on the wall as she went down to one knee. The sharp pain made her hiss between clenched teeth. It hurt, but it was enough to keep her moving.
‘I...I can talk for a little while,’ Gale whispered. ‘If it will keep you walking.’
‘What will happen to me when Hard Boiled is back in control?’ she asked.
The reply took a few seconds longer than she’d have liked.
‘I don’t know…’
‘You don’t know?’
‘I didn’t really have time to figure out how you work. I just made all the...the everything...go through the part of Hardy’s brain where I knew you were. It was an emergency and I used most of my remaining magic just making it work. I still only have about a quarter charge.’
‘Oh.’ She hesitated for a minute, resting her forehead against the edge of a cubicle wall. Her back ached and her hip felt like an especially vengeful colony of wasps had taken up residence just above her cutie-mark. ‘Do...do you remember what it’s like to die?’
Gale’s inner voice sounded a little nervous, and a bit sad. ‘Keep moving. I...look, I just want to get out of here. I’ll tell you if you really want to know.’
Nightmare pulled her trench coat across her breast and began limping toward the unknown once more. ‘I think I am soon to die. I would like to know.’
She had the sense, for a moment, that something was gathering strength inside her before Gale spoke again.
‘That first time, back when I was little, I died in my sleep,’ he said.
‘You...you don’t remember it at all?’
Gale paused, then the trickle of sadness she’d felt became a flood, rushing up inside her. It was, just as quickly, tamped down but left a lingering melancholy.
‘I remember,’ he replied, his voice subdued. ‘It was a Thursday morning and my mom and dad were shouting downstairs. My brother, Jingle Jangle, was sitting on the end of my bed. I took his hoof and he smiled at me and said, “Cosmo, you have to get better. Get better, so we can climb that tree in the backyard.” I remember, I smiled back at him and thought I was going to have a nap. After that? A deeper darkness than any I’d ever felt before. Peaceful, empty...and very quiet.’
‘It ended, though, right?’
‘Sometimes I wonder. This all could just be a dream and in a couple seconds I’ll really be dead...and that’ll be it.’
‘If...if you don’t know, why do you keep going?!’
Nightmare felt her shoulders shrug.
‘Hard Boiled deserves to live, but if you offered him a death where he knew everypony else would live, he’d throw himself into fire again without hesitation. That’s his nature. If I keep going, he can keep going. Besides, how could a pony be bored with a friend like him?’
Taking a few more stumbling steps, Nightmare caught a distant flicker of light. It was just a glimmer through the fog, but after a moment she caught another flash and tried to pick up speed. Her hooves felt like lead weights on the bottoms of her legs.
‘Ghost?’ she thought.
‘I’m trying to make you stop bleeding. Just keep running.’
“I do not think I can,” she murmured.
Her front knees buckled as dizziness rolled in. Grey spots danced in front of her eyes as she slid onto her chest. Raising her head a little, she saw through the fog a glittering, golden wall of light hanging in the air between two cubicles.
‘I’m sorry, ghost…’
‘Me too.’
Just as her vision started to fade, something hard as iron suddenly shoved against her side, pushing underneath her. She yelped as she was hauled, bodily to her hooves. A sweaty, bloodsoaked mane of black and white hair was shoved into her face.
“Hardy? Hardy, can you hear me?” Taxi demanded.
“I...I hear,” Nightmare replied, coughing as she felt herself lifted off the carpet and shifted atop a pair of muscular shoulders.
“Oh thank Celestia! Just hang on. We’re getting you out of here.”
“M-my...my leg…”
“You sure you can carry him?” another voice asked which seemed to come from her own mind.
“I can carry him just fine! Don’t worry about me. What’s wrong with his leg?”
Nightmare felt a hoof on her wounded thigh and couldn’t repress a whimper as spikes of pain shot through her bleeding flank.
Bones shook his head and stepped back. “Somepony took a chunk out of him with...eh, looks like a shotgun. Must have caught the edge of the blast or he’d already be dead. He’s got brass in his thigh, though. I’m pretty sure it nicked an artery if that river of blood back the way we came is any indication. Might go any minute.”
“T-troopers?” Nightmare asked, softly.
The skeleton’s glowing eyes flicked back toward the control room. “Mister Tome has a couple heading toward him we weren’t able to bring down, but he told us to get out quick as we can. That colt has the stink of ‘mad scientist’ about him, so I’m real inclined to listen. Shall we make our escape?”
Taxi hefted Nightmare a little closer to her shoulders and trotted the last twenty meters to their exit. As she slowed to a stop in front of the glowing field, Nightmare unsteadily lifted her head. Her breathing stopped as she stared up at the mighty, magical nexus.
It seemed almost like a simple sheet of glass, though it only reflected Taxi, Nightmare, and Bones. Everything behind them was a flickering, golden nothingness. Through the portal, they could just see vague outlines of a darkened vault with the huge metal door.
“No time like the present. Hardy, you’ll be fine. We’ll get you to a power socket and you’ll be fine,” Taxi muttered, then reached up and pushed a hoof against the portal. For an instant, it seemed like it was solid, but then it began to give like a thick pudding. After a moment, her leg sank in up to the knee. She gasped, and was pulled through.
As Nightmare’s face touched the icy cold surface of the magical doorway, she felt herself grow faint.
Her eyelids slid shut and she exhaled one final breath.
----
“After all that crap you die of blood loss?”
Nightmare exhaled and sat up, blinking as she came face to bleary-eyed face with a distinctly irritated detective. She was an alicorn once more, but didn’t really feel it. Her magnificent black wings were rumpled and her fiery mane spilled out behind her in a flowing wave of darkness that looked like an overflowed sewer. Worst, perhaps, was that she felt like she’d just eaten several buckets of hay-fries too many.
“Hard...Hard Boiled?” she asked, then put a hoof to her throat. “I am...myself, again?”
“Yep. You somehow sneak through all those monsters and face Zefu Tome, and it’s a lucky bullet in the ass that puts you down,” I grumbled, pulling myself up off the empty space in front of her and gesturing at the now darkened hole in the air.
“I died? We are dead?”
“I’m guessing,” I replied. “Gale went walkabout just after you got me shot, so I’m guessing he’s working on fixing that.”
“Oh...I suppose when you awake, I will no longer...no longer be in control,” she murmured.
I shook my head. “I sure as Tartarus hope so. Otherwise, you’re going to have a real uncomfortable day explaining why you’re still in charge. Pretty sure my grandfather and driver will take turns torturing you. Limerence will probably have a spell or some-such that recreates the feeling of being turned inside out over and over again.”
Her ears slowly laid back against her head as she worked her wobbly, overlong legs underneath herself and stood.
“I have decided I do not wish to cease to exist entirely!” she declared.
That took me aback for a second. “What makes you think you would?”
She squinted, then narrowed her slitted, blue eyes at me. “Is that not...your intent? You do not wish to stuff me back into the distant corners of your mind?”
“Oh, I am stuffing you back into the distant corners of my mind,” I said, trotting over and poking her in the sternum with one hoof. “Make no mistake, you’re not keeping my body. But—”
Her ears stood up and she glanced around at the dark pocket of space. “Am I to be your prisoner, then? A trapped consciousness, stuck in this...this monstrous emptiness?!”
“No,” I replied.
“What, then?!” she pleaded, putting her hooves on my shoulders, “Please, tell me! I do not like being frightened and I have been frightened since I awoke in that cubicle!”
I considered the question for a long moment. Gale, much as I might like him, was probably intent on sending her back to whatever dark pit she’d come from. He had a bit of his brother’s ruthlessness in him.
“You and I are going make a deal,” I said, stepping back and holding out my leg. “You get your old job back: keep me alive.”
“And...somehow this means I am not trapped here?” she asked, folding her immense wings against her hips.
“You want to get paid, that’s the job.”
“P-paid?”
I grinned and lifted her hoof with my own. “Like I said...we’re making a deal.”
----
Limerence craved a cup of tea and a biscuit. Simple green tea would have been plenty. A stale pastry with a bit of jam might have satisfied him.
That there was a universe where the evils that’d built its fundament never considered the possibility that a pony might want to sit back with a good book and a cuppa was feeding his already distemperate state of mind.
He stood over the Office’s control panel, feverishly working his horn over the pages of the translated manual. An errant sense of unusual loneliness was digging at the back of his mind, the awareness that if he were to die, nopony might ever recover his body. For some reason, that was a bother.
“What do you think, brother?” he murmured, pulling his sword open an inch so he could see the stricken face in its surface. “If I die here, mightn’t some other fool eventually pick you up? I suppose on a long enough time frame, that’s possible.”
Zefu, of course, had nothing to say on the topic.
Pulling a little more raw magic from the reserves inside his sword, Limerence returned his attention to the red binder. The lackadaisical organizational system the translators had used didn’t much help the process, but Limerence had assembled and pulled meaning from documents which existed before the birth of every modern writing system; it was a task he’d have relished were he not on a schedule.
“Dimensional throughput. Interesting,” he said to himself, then sheepishly realized he’d spoken aloud. Of course, with nopony there to hear him, he set the embarrassment aside and continued, “The portal can only transport in one direction at a time. An ordered gravitational lensing system that somehow keeps matter ordered in transit...would...require positive acceleration out of the portal’s event horizon! Excellent! That suggests two portals, then! Considering this parasitic dimension likes to move about...it would make sense to tether one within this world, while the other...hrm.”
Setting down the folder, he put his hooves up on the console and squinted at the golden switches.
“Two sets of identical controls,” he whispered. “That...hrm. Does that mean that both ends of the portal can move? Sensible, if you want to move forces about quickly on a foreign planet. Oh, would that we had time to master this technology!”
Tapping his chin, he leaned sideways to peer at an odd little dial labeled ‘Entry/exit translocation set motion weight in ‘m’ to ‘e’???’ then paged through the instructions to the appropriate page. There was a loose sheet of paper folded into the section. Limerence quickly opened it and read:
From Lollipop - Are we accepting this translation? It’s a little wonky.
From Waltz - Based on context, it seems to allow the nexus to move about after a certain amount of mass has passed through. Translator Moist said the panel has a queue, too, so they could set a series of instructions to execute one after another. Probably a good mechanism for snatching materials off dimensions they don’t intend to spend much time on. Don’t mess with it.
From Lollipop - Has anypony tried changing the locations of either of the portals? I’d love to visit my kids this weekend up in Cloudsdale. If it’s that easy to move back and forth, I could just set it to pop back after something my size hopped through. It might be a worthwhile experiment, you know?
From Waltz - The bosses will feed you to one of those garbage cans in a hot second if you do. You know the rules. We don’t touch what we’re not paid to touch. This place isn’t big on safety mechanisms and I know you, Lollipop. If I find out you screwed with anything, the higher ups will hear about it.
From Lollipop - Loud and clear.
As he finished reading the note, Limerence felt a feral grin spreading across his face.
Through the window overlooking the cubicle farm, he could just make out a pair of troopers headed in his direction.
Even better.
----
Taxi felt like she was shoving her way through a wall made of overcooked spaghetti. Every inch gained was against a slippery, greasy surface that tore at her hooves and licked at her pelt. She’d have gagged, if the thought of filling her muzzle with the vile substance wasn’t so awful. Her nose was burned, though there seemed to be no scent associated with the golden field of energy.
Then, like a child out of the womb, she felt herself suddenly break free and was all but tossed out of the portal with a wet squelch. Stumbling, she caught herself and swung her head around to grab the edge of Hardy’s coat so he didn’t slide off her back. Her body felt like she’d just bathed in a puddle of slightly warm snail slime.
“Don’t m-move!”
The sound of a gun-bolt ratcheting back brought Taxi to attention.
Standing in front of the vault door was a group of three P.A.C.T. troopers, their guns leveled and their goggles pulled up onto their foreheads. From their heights and builds, two seemed to be mares, while the center one was a slightly short stallion, all rendered almost completely anonymous by their black armor.
“Put him down and put your hooves in the a-air!” the stallion demanded, though with a strange quiver in his voice.
‘He needs orders,’ Taxi’s talent whispered.
A second later, there was another loud splash and Bones slid out of the portal, deftly catching himself. Yanking his coat straight, the skeleton gave his ribcage a shake.
“That’s still disgusting as ever,” he muttered.
“Freeze, creature! I swear, we will gun you down!” the trooper shouted, his shotgun barrel jumping back and forth between Taxi and Bones as he took a nervous step back.
“What’s the call?” Bones asked, tilting his head toward his companion.
Taxi shook her head. “Can you cover ten meters fast enough to kill three ponies before one of them shoots both of us?”
“Don’t think so. I’ve done seven meters, but that was one pony and he didn’t have a shotgun.”
The trooper’s eyes were round with fear as he pulled his trigger bit warningly. “Shut up! Drop that stallion and get down on your knees!”
Cautiously, Taxi let her back legs relax and slowly slid Hardy onto the ever-growing carpet that blanketed the area around the portal.
“You smell something wrong, here?” Bones whispered, settling on his rump and raising his forelegs.
Taxi gave an almost imperceptible nod.
“Get down on your stomach!” the trooper snarled.
One of the mares beside him leaned over and whispered, “Goldenrod, where’s the rest of the team? Don’t tell me these three killed—”
“Shut up, Harp! Orders were to capture Hard Boiled! That’s him, there! Get downstairs and r-radio for backup!”
As the trooper named Harp turned toward the vault door, there was another unpleasant squishy noise from the glowing, yellow portal. Taxi held her breath for a moment, wondering what might be coming through. If it was more troopers, they were well and truly screwed.
After a moment, the portal began to bow outward and a bloody, baby blue muzzle poked through, followed an instant later by a disgruntled librarian. Limerence leapt onto the carpet and braced himself. He quickly surveyed the situation, then looked back over his shoulder at the magical doorway.
The slick, golden surface flickered, then a flash of light lit the room like a lightning strike. The temperature suddenly jumped fifteen degrees and a powerful scent of burning fur leaked into the air.
“Move! Everypony out! We’ve got to shut that door! Anyone in here is going to cook in less than a minute!” Limerence shouted, then started toward the troopers.
The troopers all raised their guns.
“Stop! Don’t move!” Goldenrod demanded
“Fifty seconds!” Limerence growled.
“Maybe we should listen—” Harp started to say, but the male trooper cut her off.
“No, d-dammit! We’ve got them! Now—”
“We do not have time for this!” the Archivist barked. He swept his staff off his back, pulling the scabbard free. The serrated blade let off a flicker of distorted energy as he turned it to face the troopers.
“My name is Limerence Tome!” he declared, his horn blazing like a raging inferno. “I am the last scholar of the Archive! My friends and I are all that stands between equinity and omnicide! I have a necromancer in my sword and I have just destroyed a dark dimension with science! Get out of our way, or no one will ever find your bodies!”