Light Despondent Remixed

by Doctor Fluffy


14: This Is Not My Life / Don't Lose Your Way

Light Despondent Remixed 

Chapter 14

This Is Not my Life / Don’t Lose Your Way / Little Talks

Sometime I feel like the shit, sometime I feel like I'm shit
Sometime I wanna stand for somethin', then sometime wanna sit
Didn't really plan on cussin', but sometime it just slip…

..The way I feel tonight, I think I'll wear these shades
For the rest of my life
Gorillaz, Doyathing


Kraber was not floating.

He was not in the ocean. He was not about to do this again. He was not going to see everything fall apart around him again, and worse.

He was really in Britain this whole time.

He was in a line with a hundred other soldiers, each of them standing to attention. Their uniforms were jet black, with bulky body armor and full face masks. No two soldiers were identical, though – each of them had messages painted onto their armor in whites and reds, and all of them had at least one trophy. Some of them had small repurposed pieces of golden and silver armor attached to their body armor. Others had necklaces of teeth, and a handful – he felt almost sick proud – had skulls on spikes attached to their backs like grim banners.

He himself had seven tails that he had ripped from their former owners sewn onto the cloth of his black long uniform overcoat. Each one was a great commander of the Equestrian Royal Guard, and each had fought well. These trophies were testament to his skill.

They were, in a way, the reason he was here at all.

“Each and every one of you has served humanity to the fullest,” a voice was saying.

He could not see the speaker, but he felt a – strange and unnervingcombination of fear and pride at that voice. It was soft, almost whispered, and yet it echoed and filled the room where they all stood.

“You have sacrificed in the name of Earth. You have given your blood and your toil to her, and you have been rewarded with life at the close of this war. We stand victorious over the bodies of every Equestrian that has stood in our way. The Tyrant lies dead at our feet.”

Kraber swelled with pride. He had played his part in this victory. He had stood his ground against the horde. Though the final battle had been one man's victory, every soldier here had fought hard to win him the time to fight that victory.

“Those ponies who resisted are dead,” the voice continued. “Those who were amenable now serve to rebuild what their Mistress laid low. Their freedom is a small price to pay for their lives.”

Kraber thought about the many Equestrians who toiled outside in the work camps even as the voice spoke. He scowled at the thought of them. Many of the little varknaaiers had claimed to not support what the Tyrant had done – but if they didn't support it, where had they been when mankind had burned? Where had they been when less than three million of them finally broke the Tyrant's last assault? And when their champion had marched into Equestria and slain Sol Invictus and Commander Sparkle and thousands of others alone, a tornado, a hurricane... when the last chance to step forward and make their difference had come... where had they been?

One of the indentured, an overly-large stallion, nearly the size of a small Earth-born horse, with strong, hard eyes, had yelled at Kraber as they patrolled the occupied lands. He had screamed about having a family, about how this wasn’t fair or just.

“So did I,” Kraber had said, too quietly for him or the stallion to hear any emotion in his voice.

Not that it mattered. He had shot the stallion and crucified the corpse at the head of the work camp entrance as an example. There would be no dissent. No protest. No anything. These ponies had had their chance to make amends for their kind, had had their chance to stand by the human race in their hour of need, and they had never come. Mankind, alone and confined to one island, had stood against the tide and, though they had suffered more than anything had any right to, they had survived.

This was their retribution. And, much as some people over in London grumbled about it, they needed the work camps. The country’s industry was shot, they needed minerals and iron to rebuild anything like pre-war infrastructure.

‘How many of those people are using devices or vehicles built with metal from work camps?he wondered. ‘Fokkin’ hypocrites.’

“Some,” the voice continued, shaking Kraber from his reminiscences, “may say that we have won. That now we may rebuild our shattered world. And it is true, there is much work to accomplish.” There was a pause. “The Converted, our erstwhile kin, need to be tended to. We must salvage what we may of them that they might once more become as part of us, and that they might rule over the natural-born Equestrias and keep watch over them– in time, maybe even guide them to become more than they are, and if nothing else, keep them from ever again standing against us." Another pause. “But we are not done.”

Kraber frowned. Not done? Had they not fokking suffered enough? This was insane. What was this? What was that voice? What was he remembering...?

“I have stepped into the darkest chambers of Canterlot,” the voice continued, and Kraber's eyes narrowed in hatred at the very mention of that place. “Within those cursed halls I have seen a device. A thing that has shown me other worlds. Other Earths, other Equestrias.”

Kraber frowned in confusion. Other Equestrias? Other worlds? What was this kak?

“I have seen a thousand worlds where the Tyrant marches,” the voice pressed on. “She goes by many names and has many forms. Queen Celestia, Astra Solamina Maxima, Ra-Abaddon, Solaris, Corona, The Dark Star, Stella Imperatrix Supremus... but whatever the name, she is the enemy of humanity, our darkest foe.”

And now the owner of the voice stepped into view at the head of the line of men, and Kraber swelled with pride – and his heart almost stopped in his chest. The figure wore a full set of ornate, pitch black knightly armor. Slung over his shoulder was a sword as long as him. The blade was tempered steel and the hilt looked almost as though it were made of black marble. No face could be seen, but two burning, almost glowing eyes could be seen behind the slit in his helmet visor. Seven locks of mane hung from his belt, one for each of the Elements of Order and one for their foul Mistress.

This was the man who had slain the Tyrant, the man who had risen from nothing to lead the last armies of Mankind for four years alongside Constantine the Mad. The man who took them from the brink of hellish mindless purgatory to the hooves of Celestia herself. This was the Nameless, the Avatar.

And Kraber was terrified. Was this a vision of a world where everything that could have gone wrong, would go wrong?

Had already gone wrong?

It’s a shame, isn’t it? This was gone, once. This deserved better than it got.

who said that

And was this man he was... this... other him... and that was as crazy a concept as any... was he the man Kraber would become? No, no. That wasn’t right. He’d left, things had changed too much for this to happen. But still, it felt too close for comfort.

Kraber blinked as the Avatar approached him.

“You have all served with distinction and valour,” he said, and Kraber felt the urge to bow his head. He resisted and kept looking directly ahead. “There is not a warrior here who has not proved their mettle on the field.”

Again, Kraber swelled with pride. Yet this... person’s... praise was terrifying, if it was even a person under there anymore. The longer he looked at it, the more he felt like it was just something shaped like a person. And tried his best not to grin beneath his own mask...

“I have brought you here to offer you a special honor,” the Avatar continued. He paced along the line and Kraber stifled a sigh of relief at his passing. “Those other worlds are a threat. This Equestria came to our home and threatened it with war. This Equestria reached beyond the veil of the multiverse and nearly destroyed us. There is no way of knowing whether others will seek the same thing. Therefore... we shall go to them.”

What?

“We shall seek them out. We shall find every threat to mankind across creation, and we shall crush them. Every Celestia– every Solamina, every Solaris, every Corona, every Stella Imperatrix, every Ra-Abaddon. All of them will die beneath our blades."

Fok no. Fok that fokking shit right the fok now. You can stop, you know.

Then why don’t you?

Because I

“It will mean suffering and pain. It will mean hardship and the burden of responsibility, the likes of which you have not yet come to comprehend. It will be a life of unending war. You may never see this world again.”

He paused. “I will not ask any one of you to commit to this life. Only those who accept this burden will face it. Do you accept it?!”

Every warrior was silent for a moment, but Kraber needed no time to think. (‘...Don't do it, jou fokkin chopkont, don't you even fokking dare...’) He had lost everything already. There was nothing left but duty – and vengeance.

“I accept!” he yelled, stepping forward one pace.

The Avatar looked at him, but Kraber did not falter.

“I accept!” another man, Eric Smith, yelled a moment later, also stepping forward.

“I accept!” came the voice of Manfred Stein further up the line.

One by one, every warrior in the line stepped forward, each one accepting the hardship promised by their leader. Though none could see his face – though none of them even knew what he looked like under that armor – Kraber imagined him grinning.

And yet he felt so cold...

“Good,” he said. He stepped up to Kraber first and placed a hand on the man's chest.

‘For God’s sake! THINK!Kraber screamed wordlessly at the other him.Think about what the fok you’ve agreed to! About… Ask yourself! Please! I’ve done this– I might be younger than you, but… I swore to do this! I swore to exterminate all those fokking gluesticks, go in skop skiet and donner and fill them with lead, and it’s destroyed me! No family! No friends but fokking kontgesigs that just want to kill and kill and kill some more! It’s hell!

“You have all suffered, brothers and sisters,” the Avatar said. “But now we shall deliver that suffering tenfold. Each of you shall become like me. Each of you shall have magics and augmentations that make you the equal of the worst of the Tyrants. I promise you, Viktor– one day, with Excalibur as my witness, you will have as many manes on your belt as I do mine–  all of them."

That kind of power... the power to slay Elements... to slay Tyrants...yeah. To keep anyone from feeling like him, ever again. That sounded good. But something stirred...

‘One question,’ he thought, and he was surprised to hear the words coming from the one he saw below...

“Question.”

He, the self from Maine and the Sorghum, spoke through Kraber – the other one, thirty-six or thereabouts – and he was surprised to hear himself.

It was him talking, his own voice overlaid over his own. “What if we find a Celestia that has not done anything? One that knows nothing of us? One that is... dare I say it, innocent? Are you truly guilty if you haven’t done anything yet? Perhaps… we could teach her what she would do. And help in our crusade.”

The hand of the Avatar was retracted, and Kraber sensed he was pondering the question honestly.

“There is no such thing as innocence, Viktor,” he replied grimly.

oh no

“Only degrees of guilt. And you... all of you... shall be the iron fist that punishes it in the name of mankind.”

Kraber looked into those eyes. Those fiery eyes, eyes that had seen death and promised more... and he believed.

“NO YOU FOKKING DON’T!” Kraber screamed at the other him. “I fokking hate Celestia, I don’t like ponies any more than you… But think! He wants you to attack ponies that haven’t so much as heard of us!”

The other him –- this broken, terrible man with seven ponytails sewn into his coat – was impassive as he faded away.

“For God’s sake, was I always?! This! Much! Of! A! CHOPKONT?!” Kraber yelled. “YOU’LL REGRET THIS, JOU FOKKIN BLIKSEM!”

“Hrm?” the other him asked, and–

–The vision blurred, faded into blackness like smoke and fire, and Kraber thought he could hear a voice screaming in the darkness, the sound of battle behind him. And the voice, though deeper and colder and raspier than he hoped to ever be his own voice sound, was him.

“I am Viktor Kraber! I am the slayer of the twelfth Celestia, the fourteenth Pinkie Pie, the thirtieth Sparkle, the butcher of the Legion of Nightmare Corona and the doom of General Aegis the Giant! I wear the skulls of Kings, the manes of Gods! I am the iron fist of the Avatar! I am death! Now FACE ME AND BURN!”

The warrior, the him that was the iron fist of that dark knight, was changed beyond all recognition. He wore some kind of advanced plate armor that wouldn't have looked out of place in a gothic science-fantasy. It was massive, bulky and yet moved as fluidly as cloth. Runes glowed all over the armor, and the flayed skin of a pink horse was hung from one great pauldron, while a symbol that Kraber didn't recognise was hung from the other.

This... this was the darkest point. The very pits of evil. A man who had seen things Kraber couldn’t have dreamed, and never blinked. A man who had walked the spaces between worlds as the herald of doom. This was a man who looked at all the horrors Viktor had performed in his time with the HLF, every butchery, every murder, all of it... and he called it a slow Tuesday.

“Aegis is my china, you kontgesig!” he heard someone yell, a woman who was and was not him. “My china! SHUT YOUR FOKKING FACE!”

“You realize that you’ll die if you fight me,” he felt himself say. There was pity there, but no remorse – only a cold edge that promised quick death.

Okay, this one might’ve been nice to be if only for a bit

I’ll try anything at least once

“Ja,” said the woman who was and was not him. Victoria Kraber, he supposed. “But it’s me between you and him, or his children.” She looked up at the other him, defiant, light machinegun held out. “Come at me, jou fokkin kontgesig.”

There she was. Facing an unstoppable engine of destruction, just a machinegun and a scant few grenades, looking out at a burning landscape, and daring him to kill her.

Kraber wished, desperately, that he could be so brave.

And, as the other him, the monster that had strode between worlds, looked upon her, he wished he could be anything but that, and found himself screaming that


this had to stop


When Captain Grey got to the engineering deck, they’d pulled Twilight out of the column, gently as possible. Doctor Viktor Kraber, the chief medical officer (‘Why am I surprised thinking that? I’ve always been a doctor, haven’t I?’) was there too, his bushy beard bristling, his pale blue medical uniform decidedly unkempt.

“There you are!” he said when he saw Grey. “I can’t believe you let her do this! What the absolute fok, Captain?!”

“What happened?” Grey asked one of the engineers, deliberately ignoring Kraber.

‘Kontgesig doesn’t care,’ Kraber thought. ‘As long as he gets his results.’ 

“I don’t know, sir!” the engineer said, sounding nervous. No surprises there: Grey made everyone nervous. “During the jump she just… she just went stiff, stopped responding.”

“Sir,” Kraber said, scowling, “she’s fokkin’ catatonic.”

“Catatonic?” Grey repeated, frowning as he finally turned to address Kraber. “That’s never happened in the test jumps.”

“This was much further than the test jumps,” Kraber retorted, scowling. “I already told you, sir, that she’d strained her nervous system doing these things.”

“She knew the risks,” Grey said quietly.

Did she?!” Kraber asked scathingly.

“Better than you, Doctor Kraber,” Grey snapped, looking him in the eye. “Or are you seriously suggesting that Twilight Sparkle miscalculated the potential effects of her invention?”

“I’m suggesting that Twilight Sparkle has a history of self-destructive behaviours that prevent her from adequately taking her own health into consideration. Anyone that knows her would know that,” Kraber retorted hotly, “and instead of taking that into account, reeling her back before self-care made its way to the prestigious spot of last in her list  after some gentle prodding from yours truly while planning the design and use of your new favourite toy, you decided to enable her self destructive insanity!”

Grey scowled, before taking a breath to calm himself down. “Get her to sickbay, find out what her situation is. Get me a report as soon as you can.”

Kraber struggled to keep himself from punching Grey in the face, but Grey didn’t even wait for him to decide. He turned and stalked off.

Before he could shout after him, punch something, swear, anything, the ground buckled, Kraber fell back again...


...And he felt tired. He felt old, more than anything. Fok’s sake, he was thirty-six! But… thirty-six was older than he had any right to be. Older than the age itself had any right to be. He’d seen over a decade of battle, of the world gone to shit, all but for one island.

"Angel, angel, what have I done?
I faced the quakes, the wind, the fire.
I've conquered country, crown and throne.
Why can't I cross this river?"

He’d seen everything. He’d seen Converted militia, he’d seen his pozzy destroyed, he’d seen Barrierfall in Britain… he’d seen the Avatar of Albion himself at the height of his glory, the battle in the sky between him and that hondenaaier Solamina… God, that battle...

He held his Bren gun at the ready, focusing himself. He was already dead, and the dead didn’t get distracted by anything. The dead had purpose, and they fulfilled it until some fokker was lucky enough to send their body the same way their soul had gone.

He steeled himself. He was ready. There was a Webley riding his hip, and a sword at his back he'd taken from a Knight who'd never need it again. Lucky he'd learned how to handle one–

This wasn’t right. He’d had sword lessons from Burakgazi, but he’d been shite at them!

...and now he was talking to the Undead, the tall man’s face obscured by the same death mask gas mask they all wore.

“Kraber, isn’t it?”

“Ja, sir. Joined when I heard South Africa was gone. People kept saying I was lucky. If I'm fokking lucky, my family burned in the Barrier and didn't get ponified by the PER."

No word. No anything except madness and thousands of homeless people struggling to live and all the while wondering what would happen when the Barrier finally reached them… except it never had, and instead there had been war, and a chance for even the Dead to seek revenge. Stuck in Britain, with only the khakis and a few million from other places, with nowhere to run.

‘This is what would happen, isn’t it? No ability to trust ponies till it’s too late and we’re down to millions instead of billions,’ Kraber realized. 

And yet, instinctively, he knows that’s not what happened here. But it could be. Not Britain, but somewhere... Whatever it is… it still left him without a family. Dear God, why couldn’t he see visions of happy things? It’s always got to be horrible fokking doom.

"Not knowing is the worst," said another man quietly, a Frenchman named Pierre Dupont that he had joined up with in the early days.

Yeah, that was true.

No,’ Kraber realized. ‘It’ll be worse. Not like there’ll be ponies willing to help… We’ll have made PER of all of them.

“This is why we have purpose, brothers,” the Undead assured him, and Kraber believed him. The Undead had always inspired that. "Kraber, I want you to lay down suppressing fire. When they're suppressed, we'll charge."

“Excellent,” Kraber said, smiling.

The Undead turned to look at the approaching group of militia ponies, as though waiting for the perfect moment. Kraber trusted the man – he was as nuts as the rest of them, but he was a good leader.

“Now!” the Undead called suddenly.

“Booyah motherfokkers!” Kraber yelled, and his Bren Gun barked out a deep staccato rhythm, the heavier bullets simply cutting the ponies apart. Three ponies from the head of the militia group dropped, spurts of blood exploding from the impacts. The rest of the ponies take cover, suppressed, though a bunch of spells flew in the direction of the Dead Men. One impacted on the rubble near Kraber, and then he cursed, grabbing at his gas mask. The fokking convies had broken it! Ah, fok, he needed a new one now!

“Right!” he said angrily, drawing the sword and looking at the Undead. “That’s it! Tell me it’s time, sir!”

“They’re suppressed, Kraber,” the Undead said, and Kraber figured the man was probably grinning. “Everyone, charge!”

And, right as Kraber stepped forward, opening fire…

...he was somewhere else.


Kraber scrambled awake in a bedroom.

It was kind of hard to say what part of that sentence surprised him more. That somehow he’d gotten to a bedroom. That it was clean. That he felt dry. That…

Shouldn’t I be kind of… dead right now?

The sheets were soft. The room was clean. And things suddenly felt like they’d fallen back into place. 

Maybe… maybe the small, dark-colored mare writing in crayon on the wall could answer that question. What was she writing? Couldn’t be that important.

We are… something.’ he read.

“Hello?” Kraber asked, looking down at the mare. “Could you–”

“Change the war, Viktor,” she said, and Kraber saw what she’d been writing.

‘We are in hell – HELP US!’

Her head snapped back in the direction of Kraber, and he saw it was Pinkie Pie, her eyes blank and pupil-less.

SAVE MY SOUL!

Kraber stepped back, staring wide-eyed at her. And then, to his surprise. “This? Again? Really?” he asked, taken aback by his own calm.

“Afraid so. We never got to meet like we were supposed to,” she said, sadly.

Kraber couldn’t convince himself to say anything else there. She looked like a little girl there, small and vulnerable. Like none of this could have happened.

That was the last thought he had before the floor tilted, and he felt himself falling back towards the bed and then through it, into–

not again
For the love of God, not again
Let us just be happy, let Pinkie be happy too, I don’t want thi


”The driver was fine. The driver’s always fine.”

This is something Kraber has heard from a friend back in Boston. Whenever Howard or Kate were doing anything with their friends, they ended up asking Kraber to be the designated driver.

Howard had been saying it to explain how Kraber was their rabbit’s foot in this case. How Kraber would always be the focal point of any police attention. How, in a truck full of drunk college students and maybe one underage girl, Kraber could have pounded back an amount of beers, confessed to the kerels, and inexplicably gotten off without a ticket or even a warning.

Of course. Howard’s little brother Shameik was wheelchair-bound ever since he got hit by a drunk driver, so Kraber was never really sure what to take from that one. The driver’s always fine, even when he shouldn’t be?

And now, here Kraber was, repeating that little Howard-ism over a kid who’d probably only just gotten his driver’s license. And the kid’s back was

as shattered as Kraber’s would be about 3 years from then, with broken scapulas as shattered as mine were on April 7th of 2017,which was funny because Kraber had broken one at the first moment of his existence, isn’t it, and wait what how are you doing this

bad, with a very likely concussion, broken ribs, a broken collarbone, and broken scapulas, 

Just like Doctor Fluffy Nny had suffered once

leaving him bedridden and in crippling pain. Kraber could sort of understand this. He'd been in the hospital for awhile after he'd jumped off a bridge that time back in college.

This was Dietrich Zoller.

The child of local celebrities. His father had been a big local skier, and then he’d done something truly terrible to his back.

The only cure, it seemed, was ponification. His wife had gone along with it, leaving Dietrich the lone human in the house.

Dietrich had some unsettling things to say about life as the Only Human In The House.

“Dn’ even r’member my name,” Dietrich slurred.

(Of course, this was not word for word what he’d said, he’d talked in German, not English, but Kraber would have to translate it to English later while storytelling.)

“Dn’ care, they barel’ feed me,” Dietrich was slurring. “Get me… t’ some oth’r hospital, get me ‘way from em… they’re gonna dose me while sleep...”

Viktor Kraber listens solemnly.

Well. Tries. Because he radiates an aura of “Fok-julle-naaiers” so intense that it’s impossible for Dietrich not to see it through a drugged out haze. He clearly Does Not Want To Be There. Understandable, really. What kind of fokkin’ kontgesig made someone work on their kids’ birthday when they’d scheduled it a month in advance?

See, this kid’s car crash coincides with Anka and Peter’s birthday party. Which is pony-themed. Peter didn’t want that, would’ve been happy with something involving the outdoors, but he’d gone along with it for his sister.

And here he is.

“Viktor,” Kate had said once, “You’re going to want to quit.”

“I love helping people,” Kraber had said, “I can’t just…”

“You burn yourself on both ends,” she said simply. “That’s what you’ve always done.”

Kraber understood that better than he ever had at this moment. He’d just finished time in the operating room, performing a spinal fusion on Dietrich’s back.

‘Well fok,’ Kraber thought, looking down at the two screws in the kid’s spine, ‘he’s not going to have a fun time taking planes any time soon.

Blood misted against his rubber gloves.

Finally, it was done.

Kraber walked towards the operating room’s exit, dropping his gloves in the box.

“It’s my kids birthday,” Kraber said, “I’m out.”

“But–” Dermail started, walking towards Kraber. “You–”

“I asked for today off,” Kraber said. “You force me to stay one more minute and I swear to God, you will end up on that fokking operating table.”

Nobody felt like contesting that. Kraber’s record from his four tumultuous years in the States spoke for itself.


As Kraber slipped into his Audi, there was one thing he couldn’t get out of his mind.

Dietrich’s parents were going to sell the car. His car. His parents were apparently more and more distant from him.

That was… worrying. There’s something he doesn’t like about Newfoals, something his mother has spent months researching. There is a shifting under the skin of the world.

Ladies and Gentlemen, we are not alone. There is life out there, and they’re friendly!

Even though the rate of Conversion has plateaued – though at a higher rate than he would have expected – Equestria is pushing for a mass expansion of their facilities, as if expecting an influx of willing converts… but he can’t rightly say why they are.

He will later suspect a cocktail of spells, suggestion, and pheromones inveigling their way into the general populace and the political establishment, for how else could humans have jumped on that bandwagon so fast? Kagan will support this theory.

He’s called upon his old chommies, the few that he's still in contact with – God only knows what Polo's up to now – and they're various shades of unnerved. Though there's funny news as well, specially about Helen’s sister Corinne, the one they bombarded with horse porn, but that’s cut off when Helen says she herself has now joined the Harriet Thomas Foundation, and she’s terrified.

And Heather, who ended up staying in Boston, nursing at the hospital there, passed along a really disturbing bit of information about a particular patient from last year, a graphic artist. It was one of the rare cases where the resulting Newfoal was so unequivocally different in temperament and attitude that it was impossible to deny something was seriously wrong. Heather is now convinced that whatever the serum did, whatever mental rewiring it entailed (“Of course it rewires them, you sure as Hell don’t have the muscle memory to walk on four legs like a quadruped!”) is far more extreme than anyone realizes, outright destroying identity at worst.

Heather felt very sorry for that poor artist’s daughter as well. She’d apparently reacted, well… saying she’d reacted ‘poorly’ would be like calling the ocean a body of water. The poor girl had gone nuts, that was how Heather put it. Her screams of “THAT’S NOT MY MOTHER!” had carried through the entire hospital, until the police had to be called in to secure the girl and arrest the father for attacking a representative assigned by the Equestrian consulate...

In the future, Kraber will make it inside the Innsbruck Bureau with a load of satchel charges and bathtub semtex, and the battle cries die in his throat. Even when he is telling a room of ponies and humans about this story, he will never say what he has seen inside Bureaus. He’ll soon have an impressive count of Bureau bombings to his name, but he shall never speak about it. All anyone will know about the Innsbruck Bureau is that he had just stepped inside, and simply decided to kill anything that moved and blown the place to hell.

...Peter and Anka do not like the Bureaus or the Newfoals, a fact upon which the man agrees. He also does not like Reitman’s–

Who the shit is Reitman?’ Kraber wonders.

insistence on ponification serum being the Grand Panacea, the Cure-All-Elixir. He has seen her and that odd unicorn Catseye together on TV, and it is as if they are fundamentally the same, two appendages of the same body.

There are colleagues of his who want to use the serum as well, though the hospital has heavy restrictions on its use. They claim that the serum has been too easily accepted, without sufficient long-term testing – oh, how wrong that will eventually prove to be, the serum was tested and refined for years!

But his mother has done her own extensive tests, and the preliminary results disturb him beyond belief. They indicated that, without exception, Newfoals eventually show an almost complete dissociation from previously-treasured passions, possessions, peoples and philosophies, becoming almost completely different people. And now there’s PER. People who don’t care if you want to be pony and have started making the choice for you.

One of them had tried to proselytize to Kraber while he was out on a family walk. Pointed out that Anka might’ve been happier if she was ponified, on account of her auti–

Kraber cold-cocked the PER member and stole their wallet.

Kraber’s home is close. Kate wants it to be temporary, it maybe it will be. Despite everything, she loves that her husband’s job brings in so much money. She also loves skiing, as it turned out back in college – which was kind of a surprise to everyone. She’s thinking it might be nice to move back to America someday once Kraber has finished this nepotism-fueled residency, find a ski area so Kraber can always have brisk business treating extreme sports injuries. Maybe somewhere on the East Coast, cause Boston will always be in driving distance. Or maybe Colorado or Utah, maybe they can be in Park City, and go to Sundance.

That, Kate thinks, would be amazing. She could learn so much about film, and maybe, just maybe, have an in one day. And maybe they could get a giant malamute. And he’d be the perfect pillow. The width of Kate’s ideas blows Kraber away whenever he hears her talk. While he misses Cape Town, the problem is that she’s not going back there. In part because Kraber keeps blikseming people enough, and there’s no reason to make the problem worse.

Kraber’s still thinking about that as he pelts out of the car. Finally. Dietrich is fine, and that asshole who made him come in on his children’s fokdamn birthday party. He’s going to talk to Kate about it too. He’s going to say it, finally – Dermail is a piece of kak, and he wants to take Kate home. He’s even looking forward to Kate telling him not to kick Dermail in the face.

Today is April 23rd 2019, his children’s birthday. Peter and Anka turn five today. The twins were an unexpected blessing (never an ‘accident’) that came during that production of Trainspotting that he was in, and he has been through hell for them and Kate.

And I’m about to go through more, aren’t I? He asks.

He’s looking forward to seeing what she’s baked as he steps up to the front door. Perhaps because of her preternatural skill in the kitchen, she tells Kraber that he must never refer to her skin as ‘chocolate-colored’. That’s a food, she says. You might get to eat me up, but nobody else does. Besides, it’s annoying when urban fantasy does that. He is looking forward to welcoming hugs, kisses, or Anka and Peter insulting Dermail. He knows the kids shouldn’t hear some of the stuff he’s said about Dermail in plain view of her, but he’s secretly proud of them.

‘My kids know  three languages!

He wishes so much that he could have been around to see Pinkie Pie create the party. It just seems to fit. Pinkie seems to him like an adult with the partying capacity of a teenager, and the bubbly sugar-driven enthusiasm of a child, which Peter and Anka will love. The man muses on this, the noise in his head drowning out the terrible, deafening silence coming from his house.

No, I don’t want to do it again!

Don’t do it you kontgesig

YOU SON OF A

When he opens the door,  he expects a great, bonecrushing hug from his wife. He expects Anka to laugh and smile and for all the anger he has for being forced to work on his children’s birthday to just melt away. Perhaps Anka will be wearing a horse costume. A brown unitard with a tail. Silly, he admits it, but he helped make it for a ballet recital – who would have guessed that skill at stitching up wounds from industrial accidents also translates to sewing fake manes onto costumes? – and she loves the thing.

It is a struggle to get her not to wear it in day in and day out, but the man loves her even so. Even with his friends in attendance, judging by the girls and ponies Anka has invited, poor Peter will no doubt have already been forced into a matching costume, whether he likes it or not.

The man is also hoping Pinkie Pie hasn’t had to leave for her next appointment. He caught a lucky break in managing to secure her services today, but apparently she has a soft-spot for twins. To his amazement, she refused to accept any of his hard-won cash, saying over the phone she’s happy simple to help ponies ‘smile, Smile, SMILE!’

It’s odd that she limited her definition to ‘ponies’, but her presumes its force of habit for her. From what he’s seen and heard, she seems like a nice pony, and expects a good hug from her too…

...Perhaps he’ll get a quiet conversation with her, and some clarification over his concerns and fears over the serum and Equestria…

‘No! No, none of that pessimistic thinking now. I’ve worked my ass off, I get to be with my kids and my wife, scoop them up and hug them and ask how happy they are...

“Today is a Happy Day!” he says aloud.

And he’s really looking forward to giving himself his own birthday present, in the form of punching Dermail in the face. It’s probably not a good idea, and maybe he’ll get arrested, but he’s really looking forward to how this goes next. First, a party with Peter’s favorite chocolate cake, then punches, then going back to America with Kate.

He can almost see it as he’s throwing open the door and bracing himself for-

Something isn’t right. The wallpaper was a pale bluish color, not white. There was never a staircase so close to the door.

In the first hour after death, the silence is overpowering. The absence of any of the sounds of rowdy children and foals is deafening.

There is no one within the house. He is certain of it. The man calls out again and again, eyes wide. He wishes he had a gun. He feels as if he is walking into the gullet of some great leviathan beast, something ready to swallow him whole.

Wait a minute.

This is not my house, Kraber thinks, looking at a stairway.

It’s supposed to curve. There wasn’t a straight staircase leading upstairs last time–

Last fokking time?!

–and when he looked down at a long set of drawers, the photos didn’t make sense. He didn’t remember taking Peter to that beach. There was someone in a photo from Boston that he didn’t recognize, someone that he and Kate were holding close to with a profoundly unfamiliar face.

In some distant corner of his mind, the man knows what is about to happen. It urges him to get his gun from upstairs, a modest pump-action shotgun. Though he can’t rightly say why, it’s not like the house is full of something dangerous–

That’s not true. There is nothing in this house, and he’s afraid that the nothing is going to come up and swallow him. He knows what is about to happen, a panicked realization that he has been here before. And yet, even as his feet and mind scream against him, he is powerless. He can do nothing.

This isn’t my house.

So it’s not going to happen again.

A speaker crackles. It is playing some pony song that Anka likes, straight from Kate’s iPhone. And it’s on shuffle, so as soon as the track ends, it switches straight to something new.

‘C’mon everypony smile-smile-smile,
Fill my heart up with sunshine, sunshine...’

The man knows these lyrics. The man has heard this song countless times before, not just on Kate’s phone but on one of those radio stations that plays music from Equus. He steps into the living room, praying to not see blood on the floor or walls. Prays that his children are fine, that they are just trying to surprise him. Perhaps Pinkie Pie is trying to surprise him? She is a genius of partying, after all. Or so he’s been told.

Praying that the house he and his family have made together is not white with crimson inside, as that favorite song of his says. He looks into the dining room. My God, his mouth is dry. There are drops of something purple there. Something grotesque.

no don’t make me do it
Not again

This is not my beautiful house
This is not my beautiful wife
I AM NOT GOING TO FOKKING FIND

He knows the smell before he even sees it. Like lavender shampoo, or wildflowers, but sickly sweet and cloying. He knows that smell, has seen its source in hospitals, held out by dead-eyed doctors with clammy hands and gray-white-yellow skin. They always seem like addicts to his eyes, far too insistent on bringing it to patients attention, singlemindedly convinced on using it on everything more severe than the common cold. And even that’s a stretch.

He trembles. No. No, it cannot be.

But it is. It’s serum.

He sees the room. It is as if a cyclone has come through there. Cake is splattered all over the walls, the furniture is smashed, and there are tiny hoofprints leading out the door. There is more of that purple slimy shit everywhere he can see.

There’s a cord suspended from the ceiling, with a few scraps of papier-mache suspended from it.

A pinata. Pinkie Pie had promised a pinata on the phone…

SHE’D FILLED IT WITH SERUM!

... Serum which had splashed all over the children when the bat had been swung hard enough, by a pair of tiny hands…

“No… Oh God no, oh God… Oh God...” He thinks he is going to be sick.

don’t make me see this, not again, why do you keep doing this to me

Then hears a terrible laughter, and he is not sure whether or not it is his. At one end of the room, he sees a clown in makeup. A pony, though how makeup works with fur, he does not know.

Not Pinkie Pie… an accomplice...

The creature will not stop laughing. It laughs and laughs, hysterically, and the sound grates against the man’s ears. Kraber sees its flank after one bout of convulsive laughter, and realizes that it is blank.

That used to be a human.

And it was here.

“Made ‘em smile!” the clown laughs, a huge smile on its face. “Just like you should, what kind of horrible father–”

Usually, when someone said that to Kraber, they ended up lying on the floor immediately.

Kraber can’t tell if the horror hasn’t  set in or somehow he’s just gone full circle all the way back to calm. His thoughts can’t be articulated. All he knows is that someone is going to be screaming soon.

The man does not know what he is going to do. He walks upstairs, and finds his rifle and medical bag. All he knows is that he is going to stop that clown from laughing, from laughing that his children have disappeared.


Eighteen hours after death.

Kraber stands over a chair. He’s lined tools out on a table – hacksaws, needles, wrenches, kitchen utensils, scalpels, and went to work.

‘I don’t even remember how long I was here,’ Kraber thinks, looking at the figure of what used to be an equine.

It’s been flayed into strips, it sits on a tablecloth that used to be white and is now all the dried rusty brown of blood. He left a hole in its throat, there were red empty holes where the eyes used to be, and entrails lay on the kitchen floor. There’s a spare leg on one end of the table cloth, and a blowtorch.

He’d kept it alive as long as he could even as he was taking it apart.

Kraber picks up his pump-action shotgun.

Someone. Is going. To die. Fokking. Screaming. 

Kraber remembers–

why am I seeing this
I don’t remember meeting Helmetag for awhile

Something walks out of that house, with a pump-action shotgun, a lot of ammunition, and bombs made from household chemicals. It searches for someone, anyone willing to assist in its quest for revenge. Polo, over in Boston, says that he knows a guy who knows this German ex-military guy by the name of Gregor Helmetag.

And he’s been joining the fledgling HTF alongside Mike Carter. Kraber is, sadly, not alone. They all want  to make Equestria pay, and they’re going to get vengeance soon enough.

It’s going to be fokking kwaai.

During the Three Weeks of Blood, Erika Kraber will receive a phone call. It’ll be something asking about the status of her children. The podcast she makes in response will be the final nail in the coffin for this man – that his children are drunk up, that there is nothing left to get back.

What is left of the man dies. It may never come back, and there is nothing left inside him tying him down. He’d love to be with his parents. He really would.

But he’s really looking forward to killing something.

He walks out of the house, following fresh hoofprints into the thick, dark forest beyond the street, where trees stretch tall enough that the stars themselves seem to be caught within their branches.

He doesn’t take long from him to find them. Or for them to find him.

Ponies, many of them Newfoals, slip out of the trees. They form themselves out from the cracks between bark, the shapes between branches.

The man smiles.

With each Equestrian he kills, with each newly invented act of brutality and sadistic glee justified as ‘saving mankind,’ every self-effacing reason he gives for his newfound murderous tendencies, he kills a little more of himself.

The seasons change all around the man as he walks through the forest. There are Equestrians swinging from the trees next to him, hanging by their necks, a thousand torments visited on him. They are bleeding, missing limbs, strips of flesh crammed into their mouths, cutie marks ripped off, de-horned and de-winged, too covered in their blood, spit, and shit for the thing that was once the man to tell what color they are. One of them, tied to a tree that the man remembers from out west near Agua Caliente, has an adorable little wolf pup gnawing on its insides, spilling from a wet bloody hole in its stomach.

Wait. Torments visited on him? Something wasn’t right.

And where was Agua Caliente? Who the shit was Reitman?! There’d been so many things he saw that were going over his head.

I’m not remembering the right version, Kraber realized. This is wrong, this is all wrong!

Yes. They all have his face. It is not an equine’s face and snout, it is his face, stretched grotesquely over the pony skulls, torn and bleeding, a ghastly smile on it. It is… No. They are turning to him. The man runs, backing away, trembling, finding he has no knife, no weapons. He has only his fists.

“No no no no,” he whispers.

They are looking at him… for approval. Hoping for his pride, like the young fresh-faced recruits that have never been in a battle.

Oh, God. The thing that was once the man runs, trying not to scream, as the corpses hanging from those trees turn to follow him, still looking at him expectantly.

He runs. The trees rush by, and he sees  so many people hanging from them. Sees skulls hidden between the roots, feels bones crunching under his boots.

“Well,” Pinkie Pie says, walking out from behind a tree. Looking up at Kraber with a strange sadness in her eyes. “Aren’t we a pair.”

“YOU!” Kraber yelled, pointing at her. “YOU FOKKING MADE ME THIS! YOU’RE THE REASON I–”

“I had a lot less choice than you did,” Pinkie Pie said. “It was you here, just like it was me not being able to stop.”

No,” Kraber whispers. “No! THIS IS NOT ME! I’m never going to become that!

“Oh, Viktor,” someone says.

Kraber turns and saw a faceless Newfoal stalking toward him, its eyes full of worms and maggots, covered in blood, its cheeks missing, its skin taut, hanging off it like a ripped and tattered too-big coat on a skeleton.

“You already are.”

“No,” Viktor pleads. “NO! I can change! I can–”

“You cannot,” the faceless Newfoal says, and its voice reverberates everywhere…

Except it is not one voice. It is a babble of several, out of sync with each other, coming from no discernible source.

Finally, Viktor realizes. It is his voice. It is Kate’s voice. It is the voice of Peter and Anka, of Dietrich, of Burakgazi, of Lyra, of someone who is not Marcus Renee, of those two Equestrians he had spared. Wait, that makes no sense, they never said a w–

“It is too late,” the Newfoal says.

And something begins to arise from underneath the mass of death and rot that was a face at one point. Eyes grow back from pea-sized to human-sized, bouncing around inside of enormous pony eye sockets, and muscle knits itself back together.

The pitch of the voice intensifies, sounding not unlike Pinkie Pie’s, until he realizes that he hears Victory’s voice.

“There is nothing you can do… But that’s not so bad, is it? Those PHL are idiots! They’re selling their souls to the devil!” she mimed. “Honestly, this world doesn’t have much longer. Maybe a few months. But you know that, right?”

“WHAT THE FOK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?!” Kraber yelled.

“There’s only so long before this world ends.” Victory says. “You remember how this was supposed to work last time. Remember being me?”

Montreal

“Poison tooth?” Shieldwall asked, walking up to the dead human. Victory had smelled the human’s breath, stared at the froth on their lips.

Shieldwall didn’t seem bothered by the bullet wound. He had a slight limp, sure, but nothing screamed that he’d been shot.

That was the first thing Kraber Victory noticed about him after the wound. He’d apparently been rewarded with the best modifications the Solar Empire could give for anyone save the elements. Reinforced skin, enhanced healing… 

You’d need a pretty big gun to even touch him.

And yet apparently the humans had one.

Victory nodded.

“If you would?” Shieldwall asked. 

Victory nodded again, and – grasping the rifle in her telekinesis – unloaded the magazine. Revealing a magazine full of rifle rounds that had once been hollowpoints, tipped with crystals.

“Huh,” Shieldwall said, “These aren’t for just anyone. These are meant to kill alicorns.”

“Could they?” asked a piebald unicorn mare with red-brown spots, this one a natural-born unlike Victory. Victory vaguely remembered that she liked them, but their name kept slipping her mind.

What am I missing?

“Let’s not deal in heresy, Cinnabar,” Shieldwall said. “It’s PHL-built, too. Didn’t know they still made those.”

“PHL or the ammo?” Victory asked, chuckling slightly.

A smile crept onto Shieldwall’s face.

“Figured these were obsolete,” Shieldwall said, “What with the new EHS models–”

EHS.

You remember them, don’t you, Kraber? They were never supposed to be. An unintended yet logical consequence.

Victory’s head felt like it was about to split open, and then… and THEN–

what’s this, this isn’t supposed to–

A unicorn mare by the name of Sandalwood, with a brown mane, purple eyes, and a tan-ish coat led them. That kind of surprised Kraber, but somehow it didn’t seem to matter.

“Your offspring,” Soldano said, “are a valuable wartime asset. Failure to comply will be considered a treasonous act under the Equus Patriotic Service Act, section–”

“I know damn well what you said,” the mare said,  “I’m not giving them to you.”

“Or what?” Kraber asked, fingers drumming over the surface of the revolver at his hip. “You’re going to go Indie? Join the PER?”

“No, the PHL,” the mare said. Her voice sounded curiously weak.

“Haven’t ya heard, pendejo?” Soldano asked. “We’re the PHL now. I mean, we’re led by a bona fide PHL hee-ro.”

Kraber looked over at their transport to confirm. Saw that it was emblazoned with...

Kraber's head felt like it was about to explode as he looked at it. That was very much not PHL. This was... well, whatever it was, it was something for which he had virtually no frame of reference. 

He saw three letters underscoring it. ‘EHS’. It looked vaguely like a horse skull, and Kraber recognized it as the symbol he'd seen on the ship that had saved Lovikov in Portland, the one that had ████████████████████████████

“The hell you’re PHL, Sandalwood!” the mare spat. A small unicorn foal cringed behind her, looking thin, its eyes wide and staring. “These people would skin you alive if they thought it’d get you an extra ration.”

“If that goes even an inch in saving their world from us, so be it. I’m doing what I have to for humanity,” Sandalwood said coldly. “Anything else is tantamount to killing them.”

“So you’re going to take foals from their parents?!” the mare yelled. “We came here because we wanted to stop being used as spare parts! We’re here because we wanted better lives. Now–”

“Finish that sentence,” Sandalwood said. “I dare you.”

“Lyra would never allow this,” the mare hissed.

“I’m not Lyra,” Sandalwood said, “And for that matter–”

She jerked one foreleg towards Soldano–

“He very much isn’t, either,” she finished. “Kraber?”

Kraber’s Kalashnikov was pointed at the mare in a blink. “You wouldn’t leave a child motherless, would you? Don’t make us do anything you’d regret.”

It’s a bit too late for that,the foal said, speaking for the first time.

Something flashed around the two of them, and the world exploded. The mare and her foal vanished behind a curtain of fire and cascading brick and concrete.

“YOU SON OF A–” Kraber screamed.

And everything went dark.

When Kraber came to, he was under a ton of rubble. Maybe even a literal ton. He was in a coffin-sized space, barely able to move his arms, a little pinprick of

do you accept

light shining down on him.

Gunfire rang out around him. Soldano screamed in agony.

For some reason, it was Kraber’s first instinct that it was PER doing this. That only they would use a child this way. That only they would perform so brazen an attack on human soldiers only trying to protect Earth.

But he didn’t hear ponifications. He didn’t hear the mad laughter of Newfoals. He just heard screams and gunfi–

“GLORY TO LYRA HEARTSTRINGS!”

But we said we were PHL.

Then who? 

‘No, Romero or Yarrow would never do this,’ Kraber thought. ‘They’d never kidnap foals to make magicked weapons. They’d never kill the president and overthrow governments all over North America to–

wait what

None of this made any sense, no Goddamn sense...!

“GLORY TO THE PHL!”

“HELP ME!” Kraber yelled. “I CAN’T MOVE DOWN HERE!”

After an eternity of gunfire, of Viktor screaming for help, it died down.

“There’s a safehouse,” a woman or mare said. “We have some transport there. Go to the Copper Owl brewery and ask if Mr. Dallas can pick up your tab. The bartender will understand what you mean. Now move it, and don’t look back!”

There was a pause.

“Someone’s down there!” a man yelled.

Kraber heard the sound of hooves touching down on the rubble.

“It’s Viktor Kraber, isn’t it?” someone asked. Their voice was familiar. Very much so.

That’s Heliotrope, Kraber thought.

“Yes!” Kraber screamed, even as he knew she’d never do it. “PULL ME OUT, PULL ME OUT GODDAMMI–”

“I’ll ask Blackberry Preserve what he thinks,” Heliotrope said. “Or, alternatively. You can say ‘hi’ to all of them down there.”

Kraber’s blood ran cold.

“No, what did you…”

“Tell your baby-killer friends I said hey,” Heliotrope said, and Kraber heard the sound of her wings flapping, of hooves scraping off and then leaving the rubble.

“Sarge,” someone said, “That’s cold.”

“But that’s also Viktor Kraber,” Heliotrope said. “He’d do worse to any of us in a heartbeat.”

Kraber would never be able to

DO YOU ACCEPT

tell how long he’d been down there. Minutes or seconds or days or hours, he sat, barely mobile, mouth dry, screaming his lungs raw.

Nobody came.

And Kraber grew to understand that he wasn’t really buried. Somewhere, he was in a burning house falling into the Androscoggin River. Somewhere, he was being impaled, trying to pilot an airship away from Montreal and bleeding everywhere. Somewhere he was stuck in a car trunk. He heard people all around him, as this seemed far more extensive than just a coffin-sized,

DO YOU ACCEPT

but, well, he was still stuck.

Kraber had survived. Soldano and Sandalwood, in all likelihood, had not.

THERE IS A WAY OUT. ACCEPT THE BLESSING OF HE WHO SACRIFICED HIS OWN NAME TO THE DARKNESS, AND YOU WILL BE FREE. YOU WILL BE ABLE TO SAVE THOSE WHO DEFEND FROM

“Get me OUT!” Kraber howled through lacerated lungs and a dry mouth. “Help, fokkin’ HELP me goddamit–”

ACCEPT THE BLESSING.

And Kraber felt another hand, something cold and metallic grasping his…

AND WE WILL REMOVE YOU FROM HERE. WE ASK ONLY THAT. YOU. SAY. YES.

Kraber saw a face in the darkness, but that couldn’t have been it. This space was too small.

But then.

He’d never been in there, had he? Maybe he hadn’t for a long time.

He looked closer at the face, to see a tall, far-too-thin figure in black armor emblazoned with gruesome trophies. The face was thin. Angular. It had high cheekbones, prominent eyebrows, and stubble with a sense of permanence.

His face.

“How…” he breathed.

“You’ll find,” the other him said, and it was so strange hearing something that sounded so much like a recording of him but wasn’t one, talking to him, “That we’re a lot more interested in the why.”

The other Kraber looked down to him.

I would’ve done that?” Kraber asked. His mouth felt dry.

“Why are you so surprised?” Victory asked. “It’s nothing you haven’t done before. You’ve left plenty of people motherless. I’d almost think you enjoy it at this point. You just can’t bear anyone not hurting as much as you have, since the day you were born-–”

And Kraber is angry. Angry at this bitch that treats him so poorly each day, angry that he deserves it. Angry at himself. Angry at himself for the shit he’s done.

“FOK…. JOU!” Kraber yells. “NO! JY NIE DIE BEHEER MY NIE! EK BEHEER ME, JOU BLIKSEM! EK… BEHEER…ME!

“The HLF does!” Victory yells. “They want you to jump, you ask how high, they want you to kill foals, they ask you how many, you murderer, you kiddie ra–”

“VOETSEK, JOU BLIKSEM!” Kraber yelled, kicking the Newfoal in the face.

This was the worst damn dream he’d ever had. It was practically making his ears bleed, and his skull hurt like hell as he screamed.

“WON’T BE ME!” he screamed, and he was surprised to hear his own voice, his own heavily Cape Town-accented voice, the one he cultivated after hours and hours of watching District 9 and Elysium on his laptop and at movie night at Defiance’s bioscoop. The one that was, thankfully, not entirely an affectation.

“It already is,” Victory said. “None of you… save for a few… ever go pony. It would be so much better for them! Not like it’d be any different from what you already are… but at least you’ll be free! Untainted by morality or conscience!”

“Don’t jou FOKKIN’ quote TRAINSPOTTING at ME!” Kraber screamed. “Hou JOU FOKKIN’ BEK, jou fokkin’ KONTGESIG! Ek sal NOIT daardie! I’ll NEVER be THAT! I’LL–”

“But you already are!”

And suddenly, a hallway opened up behind her, lined with doors, the spaces between them splattered with bloody splashes. Kraber looked back. All he could see was a blank space.

“These are your choices, Viktor,” Victory taunted him. “No matter which door you do, it’ll probably end the same way! Dead! Ponified! A monster!”

Newfoals, unicorn, earthpony, and pegasus alike formed themselves from the stains in the wall, stretching their way out, dripping blood onto the floor from massive wounds.

“Dead! Ponified! A monster! Dead! Ponified! A monster! Dead! Ponified! A m–”

Kraber looked down at Victory and sighed, bending down on one knee, arms outstretched, as if he was about to hug.

There’s only one thing I can choose, I think.

“I’m glad you-–” Victory started, right as Kraber picked her up, suplexed her, and threw her at that bare patch of wall.

There was an audible crack.

“NEVER! FOKKING! BE! YOOOOOOOUUUUUU!” he screamed, and punched her in the face. Cracks spread out from where her snout had rammed into a tree. “This isn’t either world! Maybe I’m a monster, but I’ve still got time to change, I hope… But I’m not a fokking monster! I’m ME!” 

Victory weakly punched out at him, and Kraber kicked her hoof out of the way.

“ORE WA VIKTOR KRABER DA!”

A punch, even as the Newfoals tried to grab at him with that peculiar hoof TK, or with their horns.

“ORE WO DARE DA TO OMOTTE YAGARUUUUU KIIIICK?!” he yelled, and curled his toes, like he was playing football again, and drove his foot up into Victory’s face.“I’M NOT GOING TO BE SOME FOKKING MONSTER!”

A punch to Victory’s face.

“EK! GAAN! TE! WEES! ME!”

Water spread out from one crack in the forest floor when grabbed her by the neck and rammed her down into the concrete. He could see a sink on the wall – why was it there? – and he ripped it off the wall, bringing it down on Victory’s head.

“VIKTOR MARIUS FOKKING KRABER! IVAN BLISS! ME! ME! ME!”

He punched her in the throat, and the floor exploded into a geyser of saltwater, and they were all washed away, blasted down the hallway.

“WHOEVER THE FOK I AM!”

he held Victory’s head under the water, watching the bubbles as she drowned below him.

“Ek sal iemand anders wat!”


Kraber

Seawater rushed into his mouth, and Kraber gagged. 

Kraber coughed, flapping his arms, struggling to stay above water. And it was at that moment he realized he was freezing.

A wave crested down on his head. He felt himself plunging down into the freezing depths before breast-stroking his head above water. He made a gasping noise, struggling to stay afloat, to get his bearings, to keep himself from panicking.

The waves swamped him.

Can’t die!’ he thought, and tried to paddle. He didn’t care what direction, but he had to move, he had to be somewhere, anywhere, he couldn’t be buried agai-!

Another wave, and so much seawater in his mouth! He gasped, choking, and for a second he thought he could see a strip of land just on the horizon. The island had to be close, he felt like he’d been swimming for hours!

It was a long shot, but he had to try. He folded his arms above his ribcage, fingertips up to his throat, and pushed forward in a breaststroke.

His muscles burned. The effort to keep himself afloat was excruciating! But he pressed on, moving towards the island. Stroke by stroke.

He couldn’t say how long he swam. But no matter how hard he tried, the island didn’t seem to get closer. 

That’s it,’ Kraber thought. ‘I refuse to die.

An eternity later, he heard it. The roaring of an outboard motor.

“Hey!” someone yelled. “There’s someone in the water!”

Oh, thank the Lord!

“Here!” someone yelled. “Take it!”

Kraber turned towards the thing that’d been poking him - an oar - and grabbed it. A dark-haired, well-built woman in a vaguely naval uniform was holding on to it, a look of surprise and disgust on her face.

“Buggery-fuck, it’s Viktor Kraber!” she yelled. Next to them, Kraber could see a middle-aged fisherman in oilskins, carrying a big pump-action shotgun.

“Well,” Kraber said, making brief but passionate eye contact with the muzzle of the fisherman’s Mossberg, “fokdammit.”

“Calm down, both of you,” said a white-furred pegasus with a blue mane, the mark of a butterfly, and a tight black cap. “We’re not going to shoot him.”

“Lucky,” said the shotgunner. “It’s. Viktor. Kraber. Tell me why we shouldn’t.”

“Yeah, and I’m not leaving a man to drown in the ocean,” Lucky said. “It’s the principle of the thing. Either he dies in agony, unable to breathe-”

“Yeah,” Kraber said, “Drowning is not a good way to go.”

“He makes his way to that island and we don’t know where he is,” Lucky said.

“He might die on that island,” the shotgunner said, stubbornly. 

“And he probably won’t,” Lucky said. “The news said he was dead. But here he is. So, option two – we display basic kindness, and we have him in sight. What’s it gonna be.”

“She’s right, Rogan,” another woman said, looking at the fisherman with the shotgun. “Unfortunately. I’m not leaving a man to drown.”

“Fine,” ‘Rogan,’ the shotgunner sighed. “But we’re disarming him when he gets aboard.”

“So,” the woman said, “We’ve given you two choices. You can either come aboard, disarm yours–”

“Oh for the love of God, I don’t have any guns!” Kraber yelled. “Get me out of the ocean before I die of fokking hypothermia!”

“We have–”

“And I don’t give a fok,” Kraber said. “In the past forty-two hours, I’ve been insulted by a friend, left to die twice, pistol whipped, had my limbs broken and rehealed, shot several times, stabbed, told my children were better off ponified, mutilated a PHL man, and was blown the fok up by Yael Ze’ev and Heliotrope. If you give me a hot meal and a bed right now, I will be in the palm of your fokkin’ hands. I will even do a Rusty Venture for you if you ask nicely.”

“Really?” the woman asked, seeming genuinely intrigued.

“I mean, I think it’s a bit too late to go back on that offer, so fokking yes!” Kraber yelled. “Now, would jou kindly PULL ME ONTO THE FOKKIN’ BOAT?! The water is fokkin’ freezing my dick off!”

They pulled him in, and dragged him over the railing. He coughed, spitting up what felt like a gallon of saltwater.

[url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghb6eDopW8I]Someone turned on a radio.

Rogan still kept the shotgun trained on Kraber. “Well?” he asked.

“Told you,” Kraber said, weakly, his body feeling faint and somehow overstretched by the change in temperature. “Naw in the fokkin mood.”

“That’s as close as we’re likely to hear from someone like Kraber,” the dark-haired woman said, reaching for Kraber’s backpack. He didn’t object. “You know, Yael exploded the boat you were on, right? How did you survive?”

“It…” Kraber coughed. “Jou know, fok weet.”

He took a look around the boat. It looked like a fairly standard Maine lobster boat - large cabin, a wide deck with lobster traps, and fishing equipment. 

“Wow,” ‘Lucky’ said, whistling. “You’re going to have an interesting story to tell on the way to the Captain.”

“Wait,” Kraber said. “Who… who’s that? Isn’t one of you the Captain of–”

Rogan smirked. “It’s much bigger than that.”