Turning and standing up, Applejack looked at her friend. "Sorry, Rainbow, but Ah gotta do what Ah'm told." Walking—naked—toward Rainbow, she balled both hands into fists. "Nothin' personal."
"Yeah. Nothing personal either. We're gonna get you out of this, Applejack, no swea—" Rainbow dodged Applejack's first running punch. Twisting to the side to avoid the attack had been simplicity itself—Applejack moved slow, at least to Rainbow. "That all you got?"
"Well, Ah reckon you gotta dodge every single swing Ah make. Every one. If I get just one hit, I'mma pound your skull in, like my owner tol' me." This time Applejack took a pair of roundhouse swings at Rainbow, but her friend ducked one and jumped the other. "Been workin' out?"
"Thanks for noticing. Speed, endurance, some flying. What about you? Any actual training, or just hauling around hay bales?" From the corner of her eye, Rainbow noticed Aria standing up. "Whoa. What you doing?"
The shortened question barely had a chance to register in Aria's ears than a fist connected with her stomach. The blow knocked her back, and she barely had a chance to see a flicker of rainbow-colored hair before another sharp stroke connected, this time with her ribs.
Opening her mouth, Aria tried to shout an order to her pet, call Adagio, or just curse at Rainbow, but all she got for her trouble was a wheeze and another punch to the stomach. Winded by the repeated trauma to her diaphragm, she glared at Applejack.
Running over to protect her owner, Applejack tried to clothesline Rainbow, but the other girl ducked away too easily. "Dammit. Hold still so I can kill ya!"
"I'm gonna go with no on that." Dancing from hoof to hoof, Rainbow dodged another wild swing from Applejack that would have crushed a truck. "Pretty sure you're going to get tired of this before I do—Oh, she's open again."
Applejack fell for the faint, and didn't realize what was coming until the last second. She'd moved to block any punch at Aria, and was swinging in the direction she thought Rainbow was coming from, when a barbecue grill hit her in the face.
"Heh! Not so good at dodging, are ya, Applejack?" Watching her friend wipe soot and charcoal from her face, Rainbow only wished she'd gotten some in Applejack's eyes. A blind Applejack could easily beat down Aria with one stray punch.
Rainbow's reflexes—honed to a point—told her to move to the right quickly. A searing bolt of red-purple fire lanced through the spot she'd just stood in. "Fu—" She kept moving as another bolt tore up the ground in a line coming toward her.
"Aria!" Adagio Dazzle stretched her form out. It had been far too long since she'd been a siren. The binge of emotions she'd been feeding on was more than enough to not just give her the power to fully revert to a siren, but also to use her most potent offensive attacks. "Get on your feet and help me deal with this fly!"
"A—Adagio!" Aria moved to keep Applejack between her and Rainbow. "What'd you do?"
"Spent a few pointless lives to give me back something I needed." Rolling in a loop mid-air, Adagio bristled her head-fins. "Now it's time to deal with—Where did that annoying gnat go?"
Rainbow Dash was hiding. Applejack she could deal with. Aria—particularly Aria unable to speak—she could deal with. A thirty-foot tall siren breathing magic beams at her? She couldn't deal with that as well. Pulling her phone out of her pocket, she tapped autodial for Rarity. "Shit's too hot. Can't keep this up forever."
"We're almost set, darling. Do what you can, but don't get hurt." Rarity lifted her head from the mix desk she'd been helping carry, only to see Adagio Dazzle's full size. "R-Rainbow Dash? Is that a—"
"Yeah. Like I said, shit's too hot. Work fast. Is Flash there yet?" As soon as she asked, Rainbow Dash heard two engines approaching. She could identify one of them as Derpy's monster, but the other sounded too deep to be Flash's car. Moving carefully, she got a glimpse of the road and saw it was Flash's car. "New exhaust? Neat!"
"There you are! How about a song?" Adagio Dazzle was sick of spending her magic trying to blast such a fast target. Instead, she wrought her voice into a net of sound that should ensnare most creatures.
The wordless notes rang in Rainbow's ears, demanding her full attention. But she hadn't lost heart, and she hadn't given up on anyone. Her magic surged in power and the world slowed down a little more. Reaching out casually, she grabbed a potted plant that she judged should leave a dent, and started spinning around with it.
Adagio's expectations went unmet when, instead of a comatose Rainbow, she watched a ficus fly at her face faster than she could dodge. The roar Adagio let loose shook the ground, but apparently not enough that Rainbow couldn't leave her line of sight before she recovered enough to look for her. "Where did you go?"
"'Sif I'm going to tell you?" Rainbow waited for Adagio to look away from her each time before moving, and she moved fast, but what she wasn't doing was keeping Applejack and Aria in check. "You killed people?"
With a bark of laughter, Adagio turned to scan around for Rainbow. "No. I killed humans. There were no sirens harmed."
"So humans aren't people to you?" The leap of logic wasn't far for Rainbow to make, what with Aria's behavior in treating Applejack as a pet. "We're all just animals?"
"Goodness. And here I thought you were all universally stupid. How about this, clever little beast, you and your friends are free—even the one Aria has failed to housetrain properly. Leave Canterlot, leave America. Go wherever you want and call that place and its inhabitants your own. We will leave it as the only free land on the planet." Adagio rose slowly as she spoke, strengthening her voice as she did so to make her sound like she was still on the ground. "Live your lives to their full and do all the beastly little things you wish. Take it or leave it."
"And what about the rest of the world?" Rainbow Dash asked. "You get that, right?"
"Along with all the rats that inhabit it. A smart beast such as yourself should surely know when it's wise to take the offer of your betters." Each time Rainbow spoke, Adagio had pinpointed the girl a little closer. She knew exactly where her foe was now. "Just tell me you'll agree, and we all leave here in different directions."
"You'd backstab me."
"Too clever by half. You know what? I changed my MIND!" Adagio lashed out with another blast, this one at the ground under where she had pinpointed Rainbow to.
A beam of magic literally ripped the ground apart under Rainbow's feet, and she had to dance through the air on flying clods of soil to get any change in momentum. Spreading her wings, she used the exercise's she'd gone through with them to her advantage and jinked her direction suddenly—just in time to dodge another such blast. "Ha! Nice shooting, but I can keep this up all day!"
"Me too, sugarcube." Applejack brought her arm at Rainbow's neck, using Rainbow's own momentum to make the strike more potent.
The blow, thankfully, wasn't with Applejack's full strength, but it did knock the wind out of Rainbow for one heartbeat. Focusing everything she could on speeding up, she barely avoided a cross-punch that would have ripped her head from her shoulders—then a knee that threatened to smash every bone in her leg to smithereens.
For nearly three seconds Rainbow stood far too close to her mind-controlled friend for comfort, dodging blows as she tried to work out how to escape the proximity.
"Just relax. You don't need to fight." Aria wove her words into a soft hum she had in the back of her throat. Siren music was more than just singing, it was support too. "Just calm down, slow down, let me do what's right."
The words stung in Rainbow's ears. They felt like worms trying to burrow into her mind—poisonous. And they worked. She felt her mind slow and weaken. It seemed easier to just let Aria tell her more words—but something screamed.
Deep in Rainbow Dash's head, buried in a mass of tissue that was connected throughout the girl's head to every location of her brain, the remnant husk of the parasite demanded she not surrender. The bonding of it to her mind had rendered it part of her, and with this little kernel of free will she screamed at that soft song that poisoned her. "Awesome—as I wanna—be!"
Rainbow Dash lifted both legs, lined her hooves up at Aria's smiling face, and bucked her with both of them. The solid blow shoved Aria one way and Rainbow the other. Adagio's next shot ripped through the air where they'd both been moments ago.
Trixie didn't bother putting her key in the lock of the front door since she could see it was slightly ajar. "I don't like this. We always locked our doors." Inside, the normally pristine front hall was dirty with footprints leading from the door to the main living room.
Feeling like she was breaking in, Marble stuck close behind Trixie. She'd never been to a house quite like the one she was in, though she did know about such mini mansions. Everything looked fancy, but at the same time it looked wrong. These kinds of places shouldn't be dirty and they shouldn't have a room full of people sitting on the floor of their living room. "W-What's going on?"
Trixie Lulamoon's mother, Sunflower Spectacle, wanted to jump up and hug her little girl and tell her everything was alright. She wanted to kiss her angel on the head and promise that her father was coming back soon. "Trixie…" But she couldn't. She'd been told to sit here.
"Mom I—" Trixie saw the tears leaking from the corners of her mother's eyes. "Where's dad?"
"I'm not allowed to think about it." Sunflower couldn't stop the tears streaming down her cheeks. "We were told not to worry."
"Trixie!" Lavender poked her head into the room. "There's a bunch of fighting going on in your backyard, that'll be Rainbow Dash's distraction. We need to move everyone." For the first time in quite a while, her parasite was quiet—letting her focus on a dangerous situation.
Fuchsia Blush lifted her head and stared at Lavender Lace. "We can't move. We were told not to go anywhere."
Sonata leaned over to Trixie and cupped a hand over her mouth. "If you can lie well enough, tell them Adagio told you to fetch them out the front."
"Trixie just had that thought herself." Confident again, despite the state her mother was in, Trixie straightened herself up. "Our wonderful goddess, Adagio, sent Trixie to get you to all help find cherries. Trixie did such a good job getting them the first time, that she has been instructed to teach you all how to best find them!"
When a few people stood up, Trixie looked down at her mother still sitting on the floor. "Come on, Mom, I—Trixie needs you to learn how to find cherries." She reached down and tried to pull her mother to her feet.
Marble, having grown a little worried about the crowd of people, decided the next room was a far better place to inspect. It was dark, and the curtains drawn. Fumbling around for a light-switch, she eventually found it—and screamed.
Moving the fastest by dint of predatorial reflexes, Sonata rushed into the next room and almost screamed as she covered Marble's mouth with one hand. "M-Marble. Close your eyes and come with me." She did everything she could to ignore the dead people on the floor. The monster inside her—that Sonata fiercely wished was never a part of her—saw only meat.
Lavender was just leaving the room Trixie was slowly gathering up people from when she saw Sonata pulling Marble out of a darkened room. "What's all the screaming about? We're supposed to be quiet, remember?"
Everything had seemed like a game in planning. Pinkie and her friends had always won the day before and no one had gotten hurt, so why were people dead? Marble's brain kept circling around and around the problem. Closing her eyes didn't help.
"Calm down. Relax." Sonata wished she could mean the words. "Your sister and her friends are going to stop this."
"B-B-But there's people in there that aren't—" Marble clamped her own hand over her mouth as she watched people leaving the room beside them. Following Trixie like a pied piper, they seemed to be smiling as if they didn't know there were dead people in the room right beside them.
The truth hit Marble even harder—they'd been told they couldn't think about it. "I'm going to be sick."
"You and me both." Sonata led Marble away from the others and held her hair back for her. The sound and smell of a sick human repulsed the predator in Sonata, for which she was actually thankful. She wasn't that monster, though she could think of two sirens she'd like to unleash her monster on. After a moment of hesitation, and with the memory of those people on the floor, she leaned over beside Marble and lost her lunch.
Having seen the effect the second room had had on the other two, Lavender decided quite firmly that she didn't need to see it. A little girl was still sitting in the room with her arms over her face. Lavender walked over to her and crouched down. "Hey. What's up?"
"I miss my mommy." Sniffing, Grace looked up at the big girl standing over her. "Do you know where she is?"
"I don't know much of what's going on. You want to come with me and let Trixie teach us how to pick cherries? She's not all that good at it, but I think someone important told everyone they need to."
"Really? I better go. We have to do everything they tell us." She was surprised when the big girl picked her up. For a moment she thought about squirming free, but when she was carried after the others, she calmed down.
When Sonata straightened up, the others had left her and Marble alone. She felt horrible at what had happened. But that's when she heard it—
A pure sound, a power chord, caused the ground under Sonata's feet to tremble and the windows and doors to rattle.
"Rainbow!" Fluttershy's voice boomed through the house. "We're ready!"