//------------------------------// // Chapter 52 // Story: To Serve Bronies // by Fuzzy Necromancer //------------------------------// “Look, you two are on your own!” Rainbow Dash shouted. “Just deal with it yourselves!” “We…we didn’t say anything,” the human Reiko said. “Shut up!” Rainbow Dash said. She definitely didn’t have tears of panic and frustration in her eyes. “You’ve already made my best friends turn against each other!” “Dash?” The voice on the other side of her door was very, very soft, and very, very scared. It was a voice that was already on the verge of turning around and leaving, tossing this off as a bad move, and trying to forget any of this had ever happened. It was the kind of voice that forces itself to sound cool and calm between choking sobs in a bathroom stall. “Scootaloo?” “Y-yeah?” Rainbow Dash bit her lip. “I’ll be right there.” She blew her nose on a hanky, then splashed cold water on her eyes. She definitely hadn’t been crying, and she sure as heck wasn’t trying to make it look like she hadn’t been crying. Rainbow popped open the door and tucked Scootaloo under her wing, tossing the scooter into her umbrella stand. “Come on, kid. I’ll fix you a hayburger, and maybe a glass of small cider on the rocks.” Scootaloo’s eyes widened as if Princess Celestia had just offered to kiss her hooves. “Really? I might have sneaked some, I mean, I don’t drink of course, but nobody ever offered me some…is it like, real hard cider?” “Yeah, just enough kick for a cool kid like you to handle,” Rainbow Dash said. She gently preened Scootaloo’s feathers. “Just remember to hydrate.” She poured out a careful half-pint of 2.5% green apple brew for the kid, with a generous amount of ice. “Drink it slowly, okay?” Maybe a responsible adult wouldn’t do this for Scootaloo, but the kid was clearly going through something pretty brutal, and it was better to learn how to handle your drink in the sight of an elder instead of getting utterly shitfaced when you went off to Las Pegasus University. (Strict parents were a good recipe for ending up upside-down in a fountain wearing somepony else’s panties, a traffic cone, and smelling heavily of lemon, pine, and thrice-tasted regurgitation with just a hint of ozone. And that was only in the first half of her freshman biology course!) “Are you sure she’s old enough for that?” The human Jamal asked. “Don’t you start on me,” Rainbow snapped. “One more word out of your mouth and I’m pushing you off the cloud. Jamal opened his mouth to speak, closed it, and raised his hands in surrender. “Hey,” Reiko said to Scootaloo. “Aw horse-apples,” Scootaloo said. # “You two know each other?” Rainbow Dash said. Scootaloo hadn’t really realized how terrified she was until she saw Rainbow Dash shuddering at the look on Scootaloo’s own face. You knew things were bad when the adults freaked out. Rainbow Dash, being Rainbow Dash, covered it up very quickly, and played things cool by offering her a Drink! A real one, with alcohol, that she didn’t have to steal from the bottles that her mom thought she could disguise by writing the names backwards on them. (Aliuqet Dlog was her favorite, but the Maerc Hsiri was sweet too and it really impressed the heck out of Sweetie Belle and Applebloom.) Still, if Rainbow Dash was freaked out, then who could she possibly have left to turn to? Who would know what to do? “Well, sort of,” Scootaloo said, trying to distance herself from the whole clusterbuck that was rapidly escalating into an Equestrian Civil War. “It, I mean, she just stumbled out of the Everfree Forest. I thought she was one of the monsters at first.” Reiko laughed way too loud at this. She stopped when nobody else joined in. “Sorry. Um, mom used to call me The Monster. Little in-joke.” While Rainbow Dash fried up the hayburger, she took a generous slug from a bottle of Love Whinnies Smirnoff Vodka. “Yeah. Rarity, um, kinda tried to eat her?” Scootaloo said, feeling ashamed of herself. “It’s all cool,” the human said, waving a scaly third arm she hadn’t possessed the last time Scootaloo had talked to her. “What the f-, what are you talking about?” The other human asked. “She nearly got you killed!” “Hey, lay off Scootaloo!” Rainbow Dash and Reiko shouted at the same time. They stared at each other for a moment, and laughed. “Sorry,” Jamal said, lowering his head. “I know you’re just a kid.” They all went silent for a bit, while the hayburger sizzled. Jamal the human tilted his head. His beady little eyes looked…different. They were strange. “So, Twilight Sparkle, Applejack, all the other ponies are fighting each other?” Jamal asked. Rainbow Dash looked at him funny. “Yeah, that’s what we’ve been talking about this whole time.” “Do you think they’ll stop the show? If it gets too violent?” Jamal asked. “I still don’t understand what you’re talking about,” Rainbow Dash said. “This is something to do with the science box, right?” Jamal shook his head, not denying her words, but trying to clear it. “There’s a lot of kids that love this show,” Jamal said, his words hazy and distant, like mother after her seventh maretini of the afternoon, or father right before he tore apart the birdhouse he was working on. “Lots of adults too!” Reiko shouted, as if eager to prove something. “And teens.” “It’s important,” Jamal said. “It makes a lot of people happy, and we’ve messed it up by coming here.” “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Rainbow Dash said, fluttering off the floor and waving her hooves in the air. “Let’s not get hasty.” “It’s important,” Jamal said. “It doesn’t matter if an iceberg means no harm when it runs into a ship.” His eyes were glassy and cold. His fists were clenched. “Do you have a loudspeaker?” Jamal asked Rainbow Dash. Scootaloo didn’t understand what was happening, but she felt every hair on her back stand up straight. “What’s that?” Rainbow Dash asked. “A cone, or some paper or metal or something I could roll into a cone-shape. I need to say something to everyone. I mean, everypony.”