//------------------------------// // Chapter 50 // Story: To Serve Bronies // by Fuzzy Necromancer //------------------------------// “I’m sure we can all reach a reasonable—fuck! My eye! Celestia-fucking daughter-of-a-gelding asswipe donkey clits! My bucking eye!” Twilight screamed, covering her face with a hoof and then yanking it back because even that contact was too painful. “Dear Celestia’s rose red asscheeks. Anypony have some ice?” Somepony pitched a snowball to Twilight. It smacked right into her other eye. “Celestia-dammit gosh fuck butts!” Twilight wailed, flailing around. “I meant give me some ice in a bag for my bucking eye!” Somepony laughed. She couldn’t see, and it was hard to focus on anything other than the semaphore of pain, but she thought it might be Lemon Hearts. “Are you okay?” a pinkish blur said to her. It sounded like Berry Shine. “I think I’ll be alright,” Twilight said, just managing to keep biting sarcasm out of her voice. “How did the rock get through?” the unicorn asked, pointing at a reddish-grey blur. “Usually your basic defense auras are pretty solid.” “There’s a break in the spell right around my horn and eyes, so the pink doesn’t cloud my vision and my own spells don’t shatter the barrier,” she grumbled. “It’s never struck me as a design flaw before.” Rock? It felt more like she’d been hit face-first by a charging buffalo with a steel helmet. “It was Applejack!” somepony, probably Lemon Hearts, shouted. “Horse apples!” Rarity said. “Our friend Applejack would never hurl an edged weapon at us. That rock could have been lethal!” “If it was Applejack, I’m pretty sure it would have hit harder, and with debilitating accuracy,” Twilight said, gingerly rubbing her face on the fallen snow. “Motherbucker this smarts, but it’s not like I’ve got head trauma or anything.” Did she have head trauma? She ran through the mental list of symptoms, raised her forelegs up to touch, balanced on her hind legs, and recited the alphabet backwards. Nope, nothing hurt except her pride and her eyeballs. At least one of her eyes stopped watering enough that she could make out Rarity standing right in front of her with a megaphone. “Fellow equines, friends and neighbors, there is no need for further acts of violence between us. Please remove all of your ranged weaponry and renounce all claim to the bipedal prey animals above. Once we secure the food, we can begin plans for a reunion party and get everything back to normal. We will allow,” she looked down at a scroll between her hooves, “two hours for a consensus response.” Rarity coughed, wiped her mouth on a lilac handkerchief and drank a glass of a sparkling water. “I think I handled that rather well, don’t you dear?” “It sounded reasonable,” Twilight said, hiding her uncertainty. She’d read a lot about the effects of onion gas in the border skirmishes between pre-equestrian pegasi and earth ponies. She was having a hard enough time seeing straight without wincing through a stream of agonized tears and coughing up spicy yellow phlegm. The other ponies, the earth ponies that had been their friends and neighbors for years, shuffled their hooves and talked among themselves. It didn’t take long for them to send over a representative. Big Mac and looked down at Rarity, squinted at his scroll, pulled out a pair of reading glasses, looked at it again, swallowed, and nodded. “Nope.” “You still have plenty of time to rethink—” Rarity began. Big Mac pressed a hoof against her mouth. “Y’all have one hour to stop trying to eat people and stop all those scary spells, otherwise, things are gunna get personal.” “But—” Twilight started. Big Mac glared her into silence. He was a nice pony, a gentle pony, and a polite pony, but every once in a while, he stopped to remind you that he could lift you up by one hoof, break your legs in seventeen places, and tie them into a fancy little bow without breaking a sweat. “We’ll think over it,” Rarity said hastily. “Right, Lemon Hearts?” “Sure thing. Don’t you agree Sea Swirl?” The chain of reassurances rippled through the unicorn ranks. Rarity and Twilight started conferring on a plan for a sneak attack. # Applejack shivered. She was glad she’d left Applebloom at home to watch over the livestock, and that she hadn’t talked about visiting her friend Sweetie Belle. Honestly, she was glad that Sweetie Belle was nowhere near. She had a hard time squaring that innocent little face with…with the things that had happened today, and the things that might happen sooner than she realized. She’d finally gotten Mayor Mare to escort Granny Smith home, on the pretense of “tending her wounds”. Then she and Caramel were able to calm down the crowd before violence broke out. It was clearly just the work of some hothead who panicked, or some similarly trigger-happy elder who thought they were under attack when Granny threw the rock across the town square. That Mayor Mare was one woman who always knew how to deal with Granny’s stubbornness, and she was old enough that Granny didn’t feel like she was “getting lip” from a “whippersnapper”. Those old birds spent a lot of time together whenever Mare went round for campaign contributions (even though the farm had precious little budget for political philanthropy) or when Granny brought her zap-apple jam to market. They both shared a lot of history, an appreciation of fine cider, and a love of old music. They were close friends. Very, very close. Maybe… “Naw, that’s a load of horse-hockey,” Applejack said out loud, shaking her head. She didn’t even want to think about that. At Granny’s age you probably didn’t even remember how it worked, much less have the energy to do it without pulling a muscle. The twang of splitting wire under tension jolted Applejack out of her thoughts. One of the catapults rocked on its base, its payload gone. “Who the Celestia-fucking hay did that?” Applejack snapped. “She did!” said the flower sisters, each one pointing at the other two. Applejack rubbed her hooves against her temples. “Ya’ll can mosey on back home, right now! This is hard enough without a buncha hotheads champing at the bit.” “Who made you the boss?” Daisy said, shuffling away from the other two. “I can stay here if I want.” “Yeah. Just because you broke the news and loaded up the beanbags and onion bombs, that doesn’t make you Grand Commander Applejack Von Clause!” Lucky Clover shouted. Hooves raised dust and angry neighs filled the air. “Aw shucks,” Applejack said. One time, she’d loaded up an entire cart of zap-apples, all by herself, to prove she could. She pulled as hard as she could, digging her hooves into the sod, cutting the grass, and then a moment of triumph. That moment was immediately followed by panic as her feet left the ground, the harness biting into her, as momentum carried the cart down the hill with all four of her legs waving in the air and a very large, very solid rock at the bottom. Right now, she felt something much, much worse. She tried to think of something that could break up the panic, a song to sing, a heroic speech, anything like that, but orb of purple fire smacked into her face and scattered her wits. She opened her mouth to speak, and instead chomped it down on the flank of the pony next to her. When he jerked free of her, screaming, she tried to explain, but produced only a shrill laughter as she ran around in circles. The next spell delivered the force of only a strong static electric shock, but it was dispersed over a very wide area, and was immediately followed by a conjuration of grease. Once Applejack regained the ability to think straight and stopped slipping on her own hooves, the flower trio were going at a small unicorn using brass horseshoes, and a thin steel wire, and a board with a nail in it. “Oh horse apples.”