Twilight and Fluttershy, along with Spike, Sweetiebot, and the Fluttercube, rode the escape elevator up, up, all the way up to the surface. They came up into a little shack. Dark and damp as it was, through the cracks in the wood Twilight and Fluttershy could already taste the delicious fresh air and see the shining rays of dawn. Opening the door, once their eyes adjusted to the light, they found a beautiful field of golden wheat stretching out in all directions. After what seemed like an eternity trapped in that facility, the scene was too much for words, and the two ponies’ eyes watered, and they stayed that way, just staring at the field for a long time.
Spike stepped past Twilight and walked into the field. No longer a core, he was now in a robotic baby dragon body. On the way up in the escape elevator, he’d insisted in making a pit stop to a robot housing facility in order to transfer his memory and processing chips and other essential hardware components into the new robot body. “Thought it’d be more convenient on the surface. No management rails up there, you know.” And now that he was on the surface, he took a good look around. “Well, Twilight, we made it! And I’ll bet this fresh air will be good for that brain damage of yours. Some rest and relaxation is just what you need to recover some of your cognizance.” He looked to Twilight and winced when he saw her eye drooping. It looked even more disgusting now that he had two eyes to process it with. “And, uh… that lazy eye too… Maybe…”
“Wowee! This place is amazing! Where are all the walls?” Sweetiebot walked out of the elevator too. It turned out that her legs were fully functioning, and the only reason she hadn’t been able to move previously was because her cannons and aiming modules took up a lot of processing power. But now that she didn’t have the cannons, all she had to do was activate her walking routine. She poked around the wheat before calling out, “Scootaloo? Scootalooooo!”
“Wow,” Fluttershy said as she glanced around. “You could make a lot of cake with this wheat.”
“Caaaake!” Twilight happily clapped her hooves.
“Speaking of which, I’m starving… It feels like I haven’t eaten in days… How long were we down there, doing all those tests? It’s all so fuzzy now… I feel sort of disorientated…”
Twilight shrugged.
“According to my calculations…” Spike’s left eye began flashing red. “Uh… You don’t want to know. And I’m not just saying that because my memory is corrupted. Ha ha… Where’d you get that idea?”
Fluttershy’s stomach rumbled. “Well, putting aside cake for the moment, we should look around and find something we can eat right now. Right, Twilight?”
Twilight nodded.
With their Fluttercube in hoof and their two robot friends at their sides, the two stepped into the wheat field, but they hadn’t gone far before they heard a voice calling out.
“Sweet! Look at all this wheat!”
“Land’s sake! There’s a field out here in the middle of all this crazy? And it looks as though it’s hasn’t been touched by anypony or anything. Awful strange…”
Curious, Twilight followed the sound of the voices, and she dragged the timid Fluttershy along with her. When they came to the edge of the wheat field and poked their heads out, they saw two ponies gawking. One was an orange earth pony and the other a blue pegasus with a rainbow colored mane. They wore the uniforms of Black Maresa, a rival science company, and gauging by how beat up they were and by the dirt covering their hooves, they’d had a rough journey getting there.
With looks of confusion and shock all around, Twilight and Fluttershy stared at the two newcomers, and the newcomers stared at them. There was silence for a while, and then…
“Who the hay are you two?!” the rainbow-maned pegasus cried out.
The outburst caused Fluttershy to yelp and duck back into the wheat. With a blank look, Twilight watched her trembling with her hooves over her eyes.
“Now, hold on, Dash,” the orange pony said. “I reckon we owe them an explanation of who we are first.”
The two introduced themselves as Rainbow Dash and Applejack. As Twilight understood it, they’d survived some sort of hard-to-understand calamity that Black Maresa may or may not have caused, and had been fighting some interdimensional something-or-others to keep on surviving.
“Now, mind telling us how you got here?” Applejack asked.
Twilight smiled. “Testing!” She hopped up and down like a foal.
“Uhh… What?”
“Don’t mind her,” Spike said as he exited the wheat field. “She’s got a little brain damage is all. What she’s trying to tell you is that we just survived a test-crazy AI who wanted to keep us trapped in an underground facility, and possibly put us in permanent suspension, if you know what I mean.”
“Whoa! What is that thing?! An enemy robot?!”
“I got him!” Applejack grabbed her lasso with her mouth and spun it around.
“Whoa!” Spike ran back into the wheat and hid behind Fluttershy. “I’m not an enemy! Tell them, Fluttershy!”
Fluttershy waved her hooves. “Oh, yes, hold on! Spike is our friend!”
Fluttershy did the best she could to explain to Applejack and Rainbow Dash everything that had happened to her and Twilight. She rambled a little bit as she recounted the extensive amount of time she’d spent living in the underbelly of the facility, surviving off of nothing but a stockpile of canned food, but eventually she got the whole story told.
“Well, you girls may have survived down there, but it seems like ya don’t have the first clue what’s been going on up here. I reckon you should stick with us,” said Applejack.
“Just don’t slow us down, alright?” Rainbow Dash crossed her hooves. Then her gaze fell upon the Fluttercube. “Hey, what’s that thing?” She snatched it away from Fluttershy to get a look at it. “Hey, this thing is awesome! And it’s the perfect size and weight! I bet it would really do some damage if I used my gravity cannon to launch it!”
“Nooo!” Twilight wailed. She grabbed ahold of the Fluttercube and tried to tug it away from Rainbow Dash. “Mine!”
“Hey, let go!” Rainbow Dash yelled.
“Um, excuse me?” Fluttershy said in a meek voice. “Actually, it’s mine, and it contains the friendship data of all my animal friends, so if you could both give it back…”
“No!”
“Butt out!”
“Eeep!” Fluttershy shrunk. “Well, um, okay…”
As the other two continued fighting over the Fluttercube, Applejack put a hoof around Fluttershy. She shook her head and let out a long sigh. “Look at those two, already bickering like two little foals…” Feeling Fluttershy trembling against her and hearing her soft whimpering, Applejack gave the filly a sympathetic look. “Looks like it’s gonna be a long apocalypse, sugar cube…” Applejack grinned. “But don’t you worry about a thing! Y’all are safe with us!”
Fluttershy peeked out from behind her hooves. “Really? So all those terrible things that you were talking about earlier are all gone? And the world isn’t actually ending?”
“Oh, it’s definitely ending!” Rainbow Dash declared. As she spoke, she held the Fluttercube above her with one hoof and with the other pushed against Twilight’s head as the mare thrashed about trying to reach the prize. “Things are so bad that only totally awesome ponies like me can fight through the craziness going on!”
“Oh, it ain’t as bad as all that!” Applejack said, waving her hoof dismissively. “Just a couple thousand monsters here and there, and no safe place to head for on account of everywhere being overrun or destroyed! But shoot, hun! Me and Dash have managed so far, so ain’t nothing to be afraid of so long as we’re around!”
“Nooooo!” Fluttershy whimpered, hiding behind her hooves again. “I should have stayed in bed today! I never should have left my nice, safe den in the ventilation shafts!”
Twilight fell flat on her face after failing to get the Fluttercube back. She tilted her head and said in a whiny voice, “Testing!”
“I told you, there’s no testing up here!” Rainbow Dash retorted. “This is the real world, not some robot’s simulation!”
Twilight’s eyes filled up with tears. “Waaaahaaah!”
“Oh boy…” Applejack fixed her hat over her eyes. “It really is gonna be a long apocalypse…”
Seeing Fluttershy crying, Twilight quit her whining and moved to pat her friend’s back, and spoke some words that gave Fluttershy some comfort: “Everything will be just fine!”