Starlight Over Detrot: A Noir Tale

by Chessie


Act 3 Chapter 75 : Anger Issues

The dream ended.  

I opened my eyes as the ladybug on the end of my muzzle shook itself, then flew back down to wiggle underneath the hem of my trenchcoat.  I touched the dark hat on my head, then ran a hoof over my chest, feeling the thin pouch on my breast and the hard plug underneath.  It was an unsettling sensation and all seemed very foreign.

I’d been a mare, most recently.  Two mares, actually.  Then, before that, a stallion.  

‘Who am I, again?’ I thought.

I’d been other ponies for a fair bit.  Ponies I knew I loved.  Ponies who were mighty heroes.  Ponies who’d defended the city.

‘Who am I?’

‘You are Hard Boiled, you dim little stallion!’ a grumpy, feminine voice declared from the back of my mind.  ‘Rouse yourself!  You have been in the Ladybug network for almost an hour!’

My memories flooded back into all the right places and I inhaled a sharp breath, leaning forward to put a hoof on the steering wheel.  Steering wheel.  Right.  

That brought a fresh flash as my brain finally settled back into a more comfortable position.  

They’d all survived.

Sweet Shine, Limerence, and Swift.

I felt tears spring to my eyes as the sense of relief washing over me made my breath catch in my chest.  Wiping at my face, I started to try to take stock of my situation, again.  I was in a vehicle, sitting behind the steering wheel, my back resting on a surprisingly comfortable vinyl seat.  The engine was off, but the key was in the ignition.  The air smelled of incense and curry powder.  

I’d asked Sweet Shine for a favor.  Then she punched me in the face.  I’d asked her for the keys to the Dragon Flagon Wagon.  

Finally, I was myself again, not that being Hard Boiled was much comfort, particularly since I was sitting behind the wheel of Sweet Shine’s amalgamated monster set to commit what most ponies would call suicide.  Sweets had parked it facing the city at the edge of the tent village surrounding Supermax.  It was an almost straight run toward Uptown.  No doubt she was hoping I could manage to keep a wheeled motor in line if I didn’t have to make very many turns. 

Rain was pounding on the windshield and I could just make out the distant line of buildings a bit up from the edge of the horizon where the blighted land around Supermax ended.  

“They survived,” I whispered.

    ‘Yes, and it is now your job to make sure we survive!’ the feminine voice growled.  ‘If I had known she would actually give you those keys, I think I’d have asked to be moved into a different body sooner, rather than later.’

    “N-Nightmare?” I stammered, rubbing my temple just under the brim of my hat.  

    ‘Your brain must be scrambled eggs.  Who else would it be?’

    “Are you asking that seriously?  My head is basically a short stay motel for interloping personalities.”  I patted the ladybug under the edge of my trenchcoat.  “Queenie? Buzz at me.  What’s the status of the city?”

    The ladybug hummed its wings, and then an insectoid voice crackled over the D.W.F.’s radio.  “We are here, Hard ‘Hardy’ Boiled!  Most entertained are we!  You may find yourself disorienta-ta-ta-ted!  We did have to shove many simultaneous memories from your friends into your meaty mind bits!  We hope you were not using the knowledge of riding a unicycle or what caramel corns taste like.  We may have copied over them.”

    “I wasn’t intending to unicycle my way up to Uptown,” I replied, shaking my head.  “I hope you didn’t write over what remains of how to drive something with four wheels, not that there was much there to begin with.  Now, what about the city?”

    “The population survives!” Queenie enthused, its voice crackling with excitement.  “The ugly-bads have been pushed back and back and back!  Dragons went skidaddle when Stella poofed Propana with cake!  You saw, yes?  You saw her poof in your driver’s memories, yes?”

    “That I did.  Any idea where the ‘ugly-bads’ are regrouping?” I asked.

    There was a worrying pause, then Gypsy broke in.  “Whatever magic Miss Shine worked on the Marked to make them fight harder is wearing off, but the monsters are pulling back towards Uptown.  They aren’t going into the shield, though.  They’re...mostly in a blob just sitting outside it.  It’s like they’re...waiting.

    “No question, they’re waiting.  He knows I’m coming.”

    “Diamond Wishes?” Tourniquet asked.

    “He might have had a name of his own at one point, but I doubt it,” I muttered.  “His ‘benefactor’ in Uptown doesn’t strike me as the sort who cares what a minion’s name is.  I don’t know what I’m meant to do against the two of them.  I’ve got me, my gun, and this truck.”

    “So, no change, then?  That is what you have had against them for most of the last several months.”

    “I had my friends for most of those fights.  This time?  This time it’s just me.  One dumb stallion who won’t stay dead.  I’m not even sure which way to head except towards the middle of the city.”

    “I’ll keep the streetlights on.  If there’s a lighted path, you’re going the right way.  And you may be not entirely by yourself.”

    “What do you mean?” I asked.

    There was a loud thump on the outside of the truck, then a feathered face stuck itself over the lip of the window, so slick with blood it took a minute to figure out exactly who I was looking at.

    “Sykes?” I mouthed, then shoved the door open.

    “Oi, boyo!  Ye’ goin’ Uptown or shall Oi get a cuppa while Oi waits?”

    “Mercy, what happened to you?  You look like somepony stuck your head in a butcher’s waste bin.”

    Running a claw through his feathers, he wiped a slash of red liquid off and rubbed it on the door.  “Eh, Oi’ve been doin’ some killin’ Oi have!  Got me a fresh dragon head fer the ol’nest.  If Oi find me a girl in this battlefield, Oi’ll carry’er home to it!  Now, Oi hears from yon’ little robot ye be needin’ some backup!”

    I peered outside and found a dozen griffins standing around, clapping each other on the back and all sporting various pieces of what appeared to be freshly dissected green dragon bits draped about their persons.  All were armed and as drenched in gore as Sykes himself.  Worryingly, I didn’t see Grimble Shanks among them.

    “Where’s your brother?” I asked.

    Sykes quickly sobered, scratching his neck with a filthy talon.  “Aye, Grimble took a fall and e’s ‘avin his beak glued up at the sawbones, but moi squad’s good to foight.  Ye’ve a lot of nasties what need axe-work ‘tween Uptown an’ ‘ere.”  He glanced over his shoulder.  “Ain’t that roight lads!?”

    The surrounding griffins raised their bloodied weapons and let out fearsome caws of encouragement.

Pulling my hat low, I waved toward the road ahead where the gradually weakening storm covered the city and the only light for miles was the still burning fires.  “I’m going right into the thickest part of the monsters who’re left over.  This might be a one way trip.  You don’t have to do this, you know.”

    Reaching up, Sykes laid a talon on my hoof and gave it a squeeze.  “If Oi’ve to end, Oi can’t think of a foiner stallion Oi’d like to stand besoide.  Besides, Tokan an’ Hitlan don’t be runnin’ from a foight, lad!  Yer the last of the Nursemaid’s guild, ye be.  We owes ye fer the lives o’ the young un’s.”

    “Well, never let it be said I turned down help I damn well need,” I said, giving the steering wheel an affectionate tap.  “Keep the bastards off me if you can.  Once you see me enter the shield, you back off, alright?”

    Sliding back into my seat, I shut the door and watched as Sykes raised his giant battle axe and the griffins, as one, took wing.  Reaching down, I pressed the ignition key and the armored truck let out a muted roar that I could only feel as a powerful vibration in my hooves.  I took a deep breath, trying to remain calm.

    “Come on, Hardy,” I whispered, unconsciously stroking the wheel as I wrestled with an explosion of adrenaline that suddenly welled up from somewhere below my sternum.  “It’s just a car.  You can drive calmly.  You don’t have to go nuts with this.  You’re a worn out pony whose friends need him to survive.  Can’t survive if you die in a car accident.  You’re not a god.” 

A thick, billowing fog started to leak from the truck’s vents, but it was nothing like the calming pink mist usually emitted when Taxi was in the seat.  It smelled more like a blacksmith’s shop in the corner of the darkest Tartarean pit.  My hackles rose as I felt a throbbing urge to put a hoof on the accelerator, but I held back.

    ‘You know, I didn’t ask if Taxi managed to fix the spellcore,’ I thought, with what was left of my weakening resolve.  

    ‘Hard Boiled, what is going on out there?’ Nightmare Moon demanded.  ‘Your heart is beating much more quickly and Gale is making disturbing noises.  Are you...are you aroused by being at the wheel?’

    ‘When would she have had the time to fix the spellcore?’ I added, ignoring the growing distress in my mental passenger’s thoughts.

    ‘Tell me what is happening this instant!  I am beginning to feel strange!’ Nightmare squeaked.  If she’d had lungs, she’d have been hyperventilating.  

    Somewhere under me, something growled.  It was a feral sort of noise, like a caged beast waiting to be fed.  My thoughts were starting to bubble with tingling, psychedelic frenzy, but I was cognizant enough to realize my vehicle shouldn’t make sounds like that.  It was, after all, mechanical.  Mechanisms don’t have vocal chords.

    Still, the growl persisted, taking on a throaty quality as the fog started to fill the cab.  I breathed it in, filling my chest with the smoke of burning worlds and funeral pyres that stretched to the horizon.  It was like sweet, sweet nectar.

    I don’t know when I realized the steering wheel was the wrong shape.  Surely it hadn’t always been a horned skull with a single gaping, golden eye in the center of its forehead staring up at me with malevolent intent, as though encouraging me to take to the road.  Was I hallucinating?  No, no, the glittering, vengeful eye with no pupil was definitely egging me on.

The truck lurched as my forelegs tightened on the wheel.  A series of thin, ugly little spines had started to grow across the dashboard.  I watched them with a certain internal approval, enjoying the way they crept up to the windshield.  They might have been flesh or perhaps bone, but it didn’t matter; they suited the vehicle of my coming.

Jutting fangs sprang from the front bumper and the growl became a snarl.  I felt the pedal beneath my hoof mold itself to the shape of my toe, as though it wanted nothing more than to become part of me.  The seat flexed against my back as a dozen pairs of slim, segmented limbs reached around my ribcage, securing me comfortably in place better than any seatbelt ever could.

Hard Boiled, I am frightened!  Please tell me what is going on?’ Nightmare croaked.

I couldn’t see them, but I somehow knew there were more wheels than there had been and not all of them were composed of rubber and metal.  A lick of red flame started to curl from the engine bay as I lightly brushed the accelerator.  Where the fire touched, the paint bubbled into tiny, grinning mouths full of sharp teeth that began to dribble something that looked suspiciously like oil.  A sane pony would have been frightened.  I’d stopped being a sane pony the second my hoof touched the ignition.  Few might have called her beautiful in that moment, but to me, the truck was a thing of magnificence.  After all, she was mine.

I finally gave her what she wanted; I slammed my hoof straight to the floor.  Something I would swear was a hydra’s angry bellow kicked up a spray of dust around the truck.  The flames from under the hood grew into a vile conflagration that poured down her armored sides, leaving bubbled scorch marks and tiny, flailing tentacles in their wake.

My face stretched against the acceleration and I couldn’t quite shut my muzzle entirely, but I didn’t want to.  Anything in my way deserved to see teeth.  The open road, full of phantoms and demons, beckoned me forward as the wheels dug in deep and I shot towards the city at an unknown speed.  I couldn’t check, either; the speedometer had filled with a thick flow of purple fluid which sloshed and flowed like it was alive and excited.

A servant to my will.

A deliverer of my glory.

A vessel of my rage.

----

They waited in the rain, ignoring the chill but for a few involuntary shivers here and there.  A few exchanged quiet grunts or growls, fighting over scraps of bone or bits of torn flesh.  Two smaller ones, who might once have been foals, were tugging on both ends of a piece of a cutie-mark.

Most had alighted on buildings near the Shield, for their order was not to enter, but to wait for the coming of the Most Hated One.

The day was good.  The food was good.  Their stomachs were full of meat and those who’d survived the slaughter of their companions were cheerfully digesting, insofar as one could cheerfully digest in the rain.  Still, they were alert.  They knew He would come, eventually, and their orders were to tear Him limb from limb.  They’d seen His face and knew His name, though many had forgotten the name just as they’d forgotten their own.

    One particularly large creature, whose mind was sometimes a little more his own than he was sure his master would have liked, was considering which of his companions to eat when the guards were not looking when he heard a sound that reached into the damaged scraps of his memories and ticked a switch.  He’d heard that sound during the war.  What war?  He couldn’t remember that.  It was the war, and that sound was there, along with images of bloodshed and fire.

He’d chosen, for his perch, a comfortable little air conditioning unit atop the remains of an outlet store which faced the longest uninterrupted stretch of road out of Uptown.  Funnily enough, it was also the only road with streetlights still on.

In his disjointed thoughts, words began to form.  He had little use for words, but they were interesting and he didn’t have much left to do with his day until The Most Hated One finally arrived.

That sounds like a dragon with a punctured flame sac that’s about to explode being chased by a bunch of angry griffins,’ he thought, ‘Sure is taking a long time to detonate, though.’

He turned to the horizon and beheld a sight that gave even his deeply devoted mind pause.

From down the distant road there came a thing.  He’d no word for it, though it tickled a word in his memory: car.  He remembered the word ‘car’.  His former self had sold cars, once, but none of them were like that.  It bore a resemblance to a car in the same way he bore a resemblance to his former self.  Maybe even moreso.

The twisted amalgam of protruding spikes and fire was covered from end to end in tiny, shrieking mouths while the front grill was a gaping maw with a flaming blue light at its center.  It drooled magmic spittle which left burning tracks in the shattered roadwork as it passed.  Sometimes it seemed to have wheels, but other times it appeared to be darting forward on six enormously muscled limbs.

Just looking at it gave him a bit of a headache, as though it weren’t entirely real, and another little series of thoughts worked their way to the surface of his mind.  They were badly abstracted, but broke down to: ‘If I still felt fear, I think I’d be scared right now.  That looks like it’s coming over here and it looks meaner than me.’

Regardless, he had a duty and no-one could ever say he was anything less than perfectly obedient.  To obey was to live, and he intended to have many more lovely meals of pony flesh.  Perhaps, later, he’d eat one of his small brethren just to see how they tasted.

Lifting his head, he let out a piercing cry that roused every last one of his kin.  As one, the obedient children of the leader whose name was unknown and whose face was unknown but whose voice gave them purpose turned to the oncoming force of griffins and raised a howl that rattled the windows in their frames and shook the dust off the streets.  For all their different shapes, their fangs and wings, their shredding teeth and crushing limbs, they were one Family.  It was written into their minds and so it was written in their hearts.

They were many.  The prey were few.  So long as they obeyed, the prey would surely die.

They saw the griffins, their axes raised high, and they knew victory would come soon.  Many of their number had failed to obey the leader’s command that they eat and kill any who were not of their number, but they would obey.  They knew if they obeyed they would feast well and receive many rewards.  Death was disobedience.

The large one, who’d first seen the prey coming, thought it might be what remained of his former self’s imagination, but he would have sworn he saw a face behind the giant, gaping windshield of the thing that the griffins seemed to be following as it tore up the road towards the Shield.  It was like the face of the Hated One, but also not.  The creature behind that windshield, who was clutching the steering wheel like it was trying to escape, did not look entirely equine.  It was more like something made of manifested anger wearing a badly fitting skin and a trenchcoat.

Unfortunately, despite being one of the most intelligent remaining amongst the brethren, he was still not given to long thought.  Angling his twisted, bat-like wings towards the oncoming prey, he started to dive towards the monstrous truck, intent on...something.  He hadn’t fully worked out what he was going to do when he got to it.

There were certainly some options.  Perhaps he could land on the roof and attempt to rend its armor with his teeth or wrench its hatch open with his claws?  There was no room in his mind for doubt.  

He was still trying to come up with some method of approach when the ravening mad truck launched itself into the air on a pair of malformed, prehensile limbs that could only distantly be described as ‘legs’ which had sprouted from its undercarriage.  His last sight, before its warped muzzle slammed shut around him, was the blue glow of its furious heart.  A moment before his body collapsed into a point of compressed arcane energy and was swallowed by the berserk spellcore, he had just enough time to think, ‘This was not how I saw this day turning out.’

The rest of the swarm descended on the Hated One.  They expected an easy victory. There was no room for anything else.

----

Nightmare Moon was more frightened than she’d been in the entirety of her short life.

You dare?!  You dare on my streets?  You would stain my wheels with your bile and viscera?!  Come and die!” the mad stallion shrieked as he grasped the distended wheel of the mutated vehicle.  The golden eye protruding from the skull in the center of the steering column wept a constant stream of blood onto his forelegs as he wrestled with the skull’s horns.

The truck was sometimes on the ground and sometimes darting up to run along the walls of nearby buildings with a gait like a sprinting hyena, then leaping up to catch one of the transformed beasts right out of the air as it plowed towards the shimmering energy field surrounding Uptown.

‘Please, Hard Boiled!’ Nightmare pleaded. ‘Please, you must listen!  What is the matter with you?’

She had tried to feel about inside his mind for the pony whose thoughts she’d gradually become comfortable beside, but he was gone.  In his place was a demonic entity that stank of burning rubber and engine fumes.  All she could do was helplessly watch as another of the flying monsters screamed in and plastered itself to the bonnet, only for a horn of metal as long as her body to wrench itself up from the surface, impaling the creature like a grisly ornament. 

Overhead, griffins were engaging the horde who were focused on the truck for reasons that weren’t entirely apparent to Nightmare.  She thought she caught sight of Sykes; he was ripping the head off one of the oncoming beasts before tossing its body onto a nearby rooftop and raising the dangling spine high. It could have been some other gore soaked griffin, but something in what was left of Hard Boiled made her fairly sure it was him.

The transformed Dragon Flagon Wagon spit a stream of fire from some aperture on its side that tracked an abomination through the air, searing it just enough that it was still technically alive when it cratered face first through one of the buildings across the street.

Another creature made the ill mistake of landing on the roof, trying to wrench the top hatch open with its claws.  A yawning mouth opened under its hooves and it was sucked down into the passenger compartment where it had only a half second to realize it was staring into the barrel of the Hated One’s hoof-cannon.  The headless corpse was summarily ejected from the back of the truck alongside a contemptuous burst of flatulence and exhaust.  

Forcing herself away from the spectacular violence where Hard Boiled’s conscious psyche usually resided, Nightmare conjured herself a mental body, trying to give herself form within her host’s psychic landscape.  It was more difficult than it usually was, as though some force were fighting her, but after a short time her limbs began to appear.  She pressed into his subconscious, seeking the dreaming world where all the thoughts of a pony were made real.  It was, perhaps, the one last refuge his true self might have retreated to before whatever evil had taken over his body.

Nightmare appeared in the sky above a blasted hellscape of charred bones and burning tire-fires.  It stretched below her, the horizon covered by darkness and lit only by the unearthly flames.  Strange shapes moved amongst the bones, casting shadows without sources.

She had no lungs, but Nightmare still felt the need to cough, covering the end of her muzzle with one blue hoof as the fumes almost knocked her out of the sky.  The space was choked with thick, blowing smoke that cut her line of sight severely.  Spreading her wings, she scooped the psychic winds and began coasting towards the metaphorical ground, searching back and forth for a point of reference as to where in the dreaming she might be.

“And foals used to be scared of me,” Nightmare muttered to herself.  “If this is what is in the mind of a stallion behind the wheel, I feel I should have stepped up my ‘game’ as it were.” 

Coming in for a landing, she danced over a grinning skull and dodged around the smoking ruin of some car part she couldn’t identify.  Raising her voice across the dream, Nightmare called, “Anypony!  Is anypony there?

What came back was a whisper, barely enough to get her attention.

Shush!  You don’t want him to hear you, do you?”

A small cave had appeared off to her left, with a gently flickering wood fire inside and two shadowed figures sitting beside it on what looked like upturned logs.  They were both small and huddled under blankets.  A ring of small objects around the cave seemed to delineate some boundary where even the gas from the tire fires outside dared not pass.  

Trotting up to the ring, Nightmare scuffed it lightly with one hoof.  The items were a seemingly random amalgamation of children’s toys, from a stuffed Princess Luna to a battered yo-yo, but still she shied from actually crossing that line.  Something told her it would be an extraordinarily bad idea to do so uninvited.

A young, foalish voice piped up from inside the little cave.  “Kids only!  You wanna come in, you hafta be a kid!”

Nightmare squinted at the cave, trying to make out the figures inside, but the harder she looked, the more the flames seemed to draw back and leave the two in darkness.  Frowning, she looked down at herself.  She’d had enough humiliations in recent life.  What was one more?

Rolling her eyes, Nightmare adjusted her image of herself.  Her powerful legs began to shrink as her horn retracted into her forehead until it was barely more than a stubby point.  Her mighty wings shriveled until they were barely more than fluffy tufts on her back, buzzing frantically as they tried to keep her aloft.  Dropping onto all fours, she took a tentative step on her fresh form’s tiny hooves, sidling sideways to examine herself in a mare’s hoofmirror that sat among the items outside the cave.

“Cute,” she muttered, cringing at the squeak in her voice.  “I have become cute for that dingy bastard.  If he does not make properly appreciative sounds, I will make him piss the bed the next time he dreams of using the bathroom.”

Raising her much shorter head, Nightmare peeked into the cave again.  “Can I come in now?”

“Oh!  Please, yes!  You don’t want to be out there with him.  He’s crazy!” one of the foals chirped.

Trotting across the edge of the circle, Nightmare took a deep breath of suddenly clean psychic air.  It was a pleasant change from the thick smoke that still blew in great dust devils across the arid, corpse-covered plains outside.  Gathering her wits, she approached the fire.  A third log had appeared at some point when she wasn’t paying attention and the shadows finally pulled back to reveal two little colts sitting beside the flames.  One was a dark grey, his mane unruly, his fur streaked with dirt and his knees covered in grass stains.  A baseball bat was propped against his side.  The other was more ephemeral, a gaunt, ghostly figure of a colt with a crooked grin despite his hollow features.  His tail was cut short, and a shimmering light pulsated inside his chest.

“You are Gale...and Hard Boiled?” Nightmare asked.

“My dad is Hard Boiled,” the grey colt piped up.  “I’m Junior. You look like a Nightmare Moon toy I used to have.”

“If you said stuff like that to Sweet Shine she’d beat your flank,” Gale giggled, running a glimmering hoof under his nose.  “He’s right though, yahknow.”

Nightmare rubbed at the base of her tiny horn.  “Gale, you and I have communicated before.  Do you not remember?”

“I remember,“ Gale replied, then waved a foreleg at his companion.  “He doesn’t, though.  Most of Hardy is here, but all his anger?  That’s out there.”  He nodded toward the entrance of the cave and the hellish fires burning outside.

“What could make a pony that angry?” Nightmare asked, settling herself down on the third log and holding her hooves over the fire.  Despite being dream-stuff it felt warm, in a strange way, and when she looked closer at the flames she could see the face of Hard Boiled’s mother smiling at her.

“He...I...I’m not angry,” Junior muttered, closing his eyes and turning his flank so Nightmare could see that it was blank.  “But I don’t have my cutie-mark, yet.  I know about him, though.  Him out there.  I know about his cutie-mark.  I d-don’t think I’d ever want to have that one.” 

Nightmare let her head fall to one side. “Explain?”

Gale propped his hooves on his legs and sat forward.  “Do you even know Hardy?  You spent a little while in his head, but when you ask that you sound like you haven’t even looked at his memories.”

“I...I mean, I have. A few,” she stammered, glancing off to one side.  “It has been a hectic period!  I have barely come to terms with my own existence, much less the barbed wire snarl of this stallion’s mind.”

“Then I’ll make it super simple.  Hardy?  He’s angry all the time.”

Nightmare gave him a quizzical look.  “How do you mean?  How can a stallion be always angry?”

“Think about it,” Gale answered, tapping his temple.  “His best friend kicked him half to death a few weeks ago when he started to lose his mind and that’s the closest to a shrink he’s come in years.  He wasn’t even mad at her.  He wakes up every morning in a city that’s gone crazy with his cutie-mark burning and he doesn’t even notice how much it hurts most of the time.  Most ponies, if they had to sit in his head then they’d spend all day crying.  He’s like that zebra from the Vivarium. Miss Zeta?” 

“The one who is in pain all the time?  B-but how could he be like her?  Would I not have felt it when I possessed his body?”

“You couldn’t feel it because I kept you from feeling it,” Gale explained, patting his own glittering chest.  “He’s justice living in Detrot.  And when he gets in a car, he’s...he’s something else.  All the stuff he spends every day hiding from everypony gets put into going fast.  If he lived somewhere else, he wouldn’t be like that.  At least, I don’t think he would.”

“And...you two are hiding in here from all his anger?” Nightmare inquired, looking up at the cave which she’d just noticed was not made of rock, but rather, layers of compacted blankets.  

“He put us in here,” Junior huffed, getting up and trotting to the ring at the edge of the cave.  Reaching up, he tried to put a hoof over the barrier, but it stopped as though resting against sheer glass.  “I don’t think he wants us seeing what he’s doin’ out there.”

Getting up, Nightmare trotted over beside Junior and looked out into the fumes.  Above, there seemed to be something that throbbed with light, similar to a sun, but it was too smoggy to tell what it was.  “There’s something out there that’s dangerous?  You said I needed to be in here or...” 

“He would catch you?” Gale chirped, reaching behind himself and pulling up a stick with a marshmallow already attached, arranging it over the fire braced between a pair of rocks, “I...I think...I think whatever Hardy sees himself as when he’s driving is out there.  Maybe it’s cuz the crazy truck did some magic to him or maybe he just...never got mad enough for it to become real, but it’s out there.  I think I can maybe push the smoke away, so you can see it, if you want to.”

Nightmare frowned and gathered her hooves under herself, tucking them below her chest.  “Is this likely to be traumatizing?”

Pressing a hoof to his transparent forehead, Gale sighed.  “What do you think? We’re inside Hard Boiled’s head.  Just...don’t cross the ring.  I don’t think you’re stuck in here like me and him.”

Raising his hooves, Gale took a heavy breath, then began to slowly swing his transparent foreleg in a circle beside his head like he was stirring an invisible pot.  Outside, the air began to swirl a little faster and the howls echoing over the hills took on a more urgent quality.  Nightmare stood and trotted to the edge of the ring of toys, looking left, then right, trying to penetrate the dense air.

When she finally caught sight of Him, it took her several seconds to realize she wasn’t looking at just another piece of the surreal dreamscape.

The mountain crept out of the piles of bones and the remains of many thousands of shattered vehicles, creeping towards a gradual summit at the horizon.  It was a moment before she realized what she was looking at was not, in fact, the horizon but the point at which the ground transitioned into being part of a leg; a leg of monumental proportions.

He, for the figure was masculine in the extreme, sat atop a heap of corpses that was so big that all perspective was lost.  The form suggested an equine heritage, but the details were terribly, terribly wrong.  Nothing alive could ever be so large as that; bone would not support a creature that could step on the largest of dragons with a single toetip.  In a dream, such considerations mattered little.  Muscles throbbed and squirmed beneath a dingy grey coat that was leaking entire volcanos’ worth of smog into the air.  Great clouds of ash obscured the creature's head, but Nightmare could still tell it was the wrong shape for a pony; it was too bulbous, too irregular, and far too big.  

As her eyes worked their way up his body, Nightmare became aware that her bladder was suddenly extremely full.

“H-his face,” she stammered, clenching her tail against herself.  “What...what is wrong with his face?

Gale shook his head, letting his hooves drop.  The smoke closed around their little refuge once more.  “I don’t know.  I can’t clear that part from here.  He’s somehow...locked me out of most of his brain.  B-but...I think you’re going to have to go see.”

“What?!  Me?!  I’m not going out there with that!” she snapped.

The ghostly colt put a hoof on her shoulder and groaned.  “I can’t make you do anything this time, but...I can still see some of what Hardy is seeing.  He’s not slowing down.  The shield around the middle of the city is getting closer.”

Nightmare shrugged her tiny shoulders and stepped back from the ring of toys.  “Well, then, problem solved, yes?  He will stop--”

“He’s not going to stop and I don’t think all the magic in that truck can keep him or us alive if he hits the shield going this fast.  If Hardy ends up a pancake, I can’t bring him back from that, no matter how many city power grids Tourniquet plugs into us.”

“Th-then what are we to do?  I cannot simply take his body from him!  Managing our little arrangement was your job!”

Gale prodded her nose with his transparent hoof-tip.  “And now it’s going to be your job, for a minute.  This isn’t like a normal dream.  I’ve spent plenty of time in normal dreams.  This is like something somepony made.  Hardy, maybe, or someone else.”

Who else?” she asked.

Looking off to one side, Gale trotted over to a shiny object sticking out of the rubble around them.  Leaning down, he picked it up, brushing ash off its surface.  Turning back, he held it out.  It was a filthy, dented police badge with the moniker ‘Detective Shores’ engraved on it.

“There’s...there’s another pony who visits Hardy sometimes.  I don’t think Hardy knows he’s anything but his crazy brain.  I’m not sure what he is, but when we were outside the city last, he visited.  I think something in the city is keeping him away.”

Nightmare slowly nodded.  “I have seen memories of this pony.  He...he is not like us.  He’s something more.”

Gale bobbed his head.  “He made...changes.  Not big ones.  I barely noticed them.”

“Are you two done out there?” Junior piped up from inside the cave.  “Your marshmallow is almost cooked!”

“Oh poop,” Gale squeaked, darting back to the fire and quickly yanking the stick off, examining it closely.  “The marshmallow is how much time we have before he hits the shield!”

Nightmare gave him an incredulous look.  “You...created a dreamscape representation of a sugary confection to tell you when we will all die?”

“Hey, I went camping exactly once before I died!  You think I wanted to miss out on s’mores?  Because Hardy has really good memories of those.”

Rolling her eyes, Nightmare dropped her flank in the ashes.  “So what am I meant to do against...whatever that thing is?” she asked, pointing off toward the obscured giant in the distance.

“Well, the trigger I used for you and Hardy to flip minds isn’t in here with me, so it’s probably out there,” he answered, waving at the destroyed lands around the cave.  “I tied him switching with you into the words you picked so I don’t have to be paying attention all the time when he does it.  It’s wired into his head, now.  If he hears or thinks those words, you and he will change places.  Normally, I could just do it, but--”

“--you are stuck in here,” Nightmare finished before turning back to the dreamscape.  

“Exactly.  So, I figure Hardy is out there and if he hears ‘Free The Moon’ then you’ll get control and can hit the brakes.”

“And if you are wrong or I fail and that thing squishes me then we all die as little more than smears on a wall and the entire world dies with us, yes?” she added.

Gale grinned and threw a leg around her shoulders.  “You get to be a hero again, though.  That’s worth something, right?”

Nightmare scratched at the tuft of fur on her chest as she replied, “I have already bought a pardon from Princess Celestia and Luna for past crimes.  At this point I am simply booking additional rooms in Canterlot Castle to store a harem and a collection of those amusing little illustrated tomes Hard Boiled used to read.  I find in spare moments I enjoy recollecting his memories of those.”

“Comic books?” Gale asked, tilting his head.

     “Yes.  Now, then.  How long do I have?”

    Raising the marshmallow, Gale inspected it closely.  “Maybe two minutes in the real world.  I’ve tried to slow everything down in here as much as I can.  It’s a dream, after all.  I wouldn’t go slow, though.”

    Raising one hoof, Nightmare stepped over the ring of toys, her leg exploding back to its normal length as she retook her favorite form and stepped into the smokey darkness.  Taking a moment to look back at the cave where Gale had retaken his seat beside the fire alongside Junior, she considered the strange path of her existence.  She hadn’t even wanted to exist a few days ago and yet, to die in such a place - victim of a manifestation of rage - seemed a sad waste to her new sensibilities.

    “If I do survive...I shall eat cake until Hard Boiled is sick,” she muttered.

    “And I’ll make sure he’s the one to throw it up,” Gale called back, having somehow heard her despite the distance.

    Turning her face to what constituted the sky, Nightmare leapt into the air, grabbing as much dream as she could with her wings.  A rush of fear filled her as she found herself rocketing towards the mighty figure of Hard Boiled’s fury made real at many times the speed she’d expected. A trail of sparks burst off the tips of her feathers and the air folded around her, seeming to draw her forward with a life of its own, all-the-while demanding greater acceleration.

She tried to brake, but it was as though the wind itself betrayed her and the icon of anger had developed its own gravitation.  Through the vast nebula of smoke she could just begin to see the outlines of the creature, licks of fire spurting from its obscured face.  Across the distance, she could just begin to make out the angular shape of the abominable spawn’s craggy features.

Rolling sideways, she spun away from the creature as best she could.  Nothing would slow her, but by digging her hooves into the ethereal surface of the dream itself she found purchase and was able to skid into something resembling an orbit, moving closer and closer.  The sheer scope of the thing left Nightmare breathless as she arced her way nearer.  One of its legs was a thousand times the size of a normal pony.  Its weight was enough to dust the bones of everything it sat upon.

Creature,” a deep, tortured voice growled, feeling as though it were rattling her bones right to their cores.

Nightmare found herself being yanked forward, her wings almost bent back against her shoulders as she was torn out of the air like a puppet having her strings jerked.  Sputtering helplessly, she tried to backpedal, but it was no use.  She was pulled into the swirling maelstrom around the monolithic entity’s face.

“P-please!  I do not wish to be hurt!  Pain is p-painful!” she squeaked, feeling as though an enormous fist was closing around her body.

You are an artifact of sin,” the voice rumbled, almost knocking her out of the sky.  “You are created from the breath of that which first sinned.”

Still being pulled toward the creature, Nightmare felt her bones creak as its grip tightened.

“I h-have not had time to sin!  I did n-not exist two weeks ago!” the alicorn wailed, flailing her legs against the nothingness gradually crushing her.  The firestorm began to grow in intensity, ripping feathers out of her wings and tearing at her swirling mane.  She felt herself being drawn in, closer and closer.

“Light upon darkness.  Skin upon muscle,” it snarled, raising one gargantuan hoof to gesture at the broken mindscape around them.  “In the beginning, there was no sin.  Only the fire and the darkness.  Then they came.  The sinless flames amid the dark.  The virtuous.  The fleshless diamonds shimmering.  They granted purpose and breath to these...disgusting little things.”

“I...I do not understand,” she yelped, feeling her wingbones almost ready to snap.  Her body was only made of thoughts, but the agony was all too real.

The voice continued, seeming to ignore her for a moment.  “Then came questions.  The one who asked them did not deserve its fate.  Nor any fate.  It sinned, not in the asking, but in the acting.  To enslave the flames.”

“P-please!  You are going to i-injure me!” Nightmare moaned.  With a loud snap, the joint holding her wing to her body gave way.  She felt the pain, just as much as she had in the brief period she’d had a real body.  It tore a shriek from her and she sagged, held aloft by the unseen grasp and still closing on the whirling fires around the beast’s head.

“We smell much sin in you, little dream,” the voice added, turning to face her.  At once, the smoke began to clear.  “Justice was born with the first sin.  The foil of evil.  But Justice cannot find you here.  Justice may only hold sway so long as it can find satisfaction.”

With that, the cloud of smoke cleared, and Nightmare Moon beheld the face of a god.

It might have helped in some way that she hadn’t been around terribly long.  She had very few frames of reference for what going insane was like and had no experience in the matter.  Being authentically psychotic takes a certain amount of time, effort, and above all a particular context for what sanity looks like.  Nightmare’s brief life was saturated in eldritch beings and unearthly events; it was all that saved her from descending instantly into gibbering madness.

The creature’s head resembled nothing so much as a gape-mouthed bull, far too large for the shoulders of the already mammoth body it was perched atop.  Its muzzle was a collection of chrome pipes, woven together into the loose shape of a mechanical engine.  Not any particular engine, but at the same time every engine ever imagined by any demented speed freak who’d ever lived. A thousand constantly thumping pistons up and down the deity’s metallic skull provided a staccato beat that made the very air dance with their restless energies.  

It was not of muscle or bone or machine, but rather rigged together of the ideas that predated all of those things.

Two massive, empty holes full of boiling magma glared down from where its eyes should have been, piercing right through Nightmare and leaving her feeling stripped to the bone.  Had she been any deeper or had much more to strip, it would have surely driven her out of her mind.  It was fortunate, then, that she was a desperately shallow person, having not had very long to develop depths or layers.

That didn’t stop her from metaphysically voiding her bowels.

The pain in her crushed wings seemed a distant distraction.  She couldn’t take her eyes from the divine monstrosity, even as it began to pull her closer.  She tried to speak, to beg, but all that came out was a thin, keening wail of fear.

We are not bone, nor machine, but rather came before, tiny dream.  We were born in speed.  We suckled on the fury of those who had no voices with which to shriek.  When the first cells clung to one another and the flames gave them breath, we heard their screams.  Now, scream for us, tiny dream.  Scream and feel our...rage.”

The creature’s face split from chin to forehead, a pair of jaws fit to devour entire worlds spreading open in front of her to reveal a cauldron of shimmering light.

Nightmare’s limbs jerked as she tried to escape with what was left of her awareness.  In an instant, her legs were torn from her torso. They didn’t even have time to bleed before the thoughts composing them turned to wisps of nothingness and were sucked into the gaping void.  She barely felt it.

Casually, as one might eat a grape, the god tossed the dream into its vast maw and, like an enormous pair of gates slamming shut, its jaws closed around her. 

----

Nightmare waited for a long time to feel herself die.

She’d died once before, and it was more peaceful than being a limbless, shredded remnant stuck in a dream body that seemed devilishly intent on sending her pain signals despite not having anything like nerves.  Mercifully, the creature had left her eyelids she could close, but that was the only kindness she’d been afforded.  Sinking into the scalding, stinking embrace was enough to leave her feeling a tad disappointed that she’d put up so little fight.

Still, non-existence wasn’t so distant a memory.  It certainly beat being eaten and, for a moment, she found herself looking forward to the quiet.  Existing was ever so complicated.

Time passed.  However much time, she couldn’t have said.  Time in dreams was almost irrelevant and things could happen out of order, so until something else happened she was content to sit and wait to expire.

Despite this, she didn’t have terribly long to wait.

Something warm and wet wedged itself into her left ear.

Letting out an indignant squeal, Nightmare’s eyes popped open and she leapt to her hooves, stumbling backwards on four suddenly-present legs.  She staggered a moment, catching herself with a quick beat of her mighty wings that were also seemingly returned.  Gasping for breath, she rounded on her attacker and found a tiny mare sitting a couple feet away with her tongue poking out.

The mare looked a great deal like Hard Boiled’s partner, save that her wings were a tad more proportioned to her body and she wore a white cloth blindfold across her eyes.  She was casually leaning on a shimmering silver sword with a pair of golden scales dangling from the cross-guard.  Her expression was nothing short of pure mischief.

“Finally awake?” the mare chirped, deftly swinging her sword up onto her back and catching the scales on her hoof as they dropped off the handle, “I was wondering if you were going to sit there all day.  Of course, there’s not much ‘day’ left, is there?  Not that I would know.  I’ve never seen day.  Nor night.  Nor anything, really.”

Nightmare tried to speak, but her tongue felt a bit too big for her muzzle.  “Buh?”  Working her lips a moment, she tried again.  “P-pardon me, but are...a-are you D-Death?  I h-had hoped just to cease to be again being as I do not believe it is p-possible for me to have a soul but--”

“Soul?  Oh, honey,” the mare giggled, swiping a foreleg through her short, spiky mane.  “You definitely have a soul.  Souls are sentient beings’ connections to each other.  You definitely have a soul.”

“You...did not answer my question,” Nightmare muttered, then immediately regretted it.  She quickly covered her face with one wing and peered cautiously between her feathers.  “You are not going to make me hurt more, are you?”

“Me?  No, not at all,” the mare replied.  Her smile was calm and cheerful, almost enough to make Nightmare relax a little.  “I’m not the big ‘D’ and you’re not dead.  At least, not in any conventional sense.  It might help that you aren’t a traditional definition of ‘life’.” 

“Then...who?”

Snorting, the mare pulled her sword off her back and raised herself up on her back hooves.  She hefted her golden scales on one foreleg and assumed a serious expression.  When Nightmare slowly shook her head, the mare dropped back onto all fours and gave her an incredulous look.

“Really?  Still not ringing any bells?”

“I...I am afraid I have had a very traumatic day,” Nightmare mumbled, lowering her head.

“Well, then you can call me ‘Jay’. I’m a part of Hard Boiled, just like you.  Maybe a little more, maybe a little less, but then who isn’t?  He’s a complicated stallion for one who can’t put on his trenchcoat without falling over half the time.”

“Jay?” Nightmare asked.

“Yep!  Short and sweet.  Like life.  Also, you need to wash out your ears.  You’ve got ash and marshmallow fluff in them.”

Reaching up, Nightmare self-consciously dug at her ear for a second then huffed and sat up straight.  “I did not expect to have somepony sticking their tongue into my tympanic cavity!  Where am I, if not dead?”

Rolling her neck in a way that suggested there’d been an associated eye-roll under that blindfold, Jay waved at the surrounding darkness.  Nightmare hadn’t realized it until just then, but she seemed to be standing on a surface.  It was soft, pink, and a bit yielding, though also somewhat slippery.

“Where do you think?  You’re in that...thing’s belly.  At least, it’s what Hard Boiled thinks a belly is like.  He read a story when he was young about a pony who got trapped in a hydra’s tummy and had to fight his way out by giving it hiccups.  Be glad he didn’t picture what a hydra’s stomach is actually like.  This conversation would be a lot...stickier.”

Nightmare’s ears flattened against her head as she tried to take off, but her wings would not grab any of the substance of the dream, leaving her standing there frantically flapping and going nowhere.  After a few seconds she slumped onto her flanks and stared dejectedly at her hooves.

“Am I g-going to die?  I do wish fate would stop teasing me if that is the case!  I have not been alive long enough to learn patience!”

“Honestly, I can’t say for sure,” Jay replied, setting her scales on the floor and resting a hoof on one side.  “All that anger Hard Boiled kept bottled up his entire life is out there, ripping up the city and tearing its way through most of the remaining population of mutants.  In here, there’s what I think you’d call a god made of car parts and bad temper.  In about thirty seconds, neither of those things will matter because Hardy will hit a high energy shield that’ll turn him and that truck to dust.”

“Then...what am I meant to do?” Nightmare asked, wiping her hooves on the spongy floor.

Jay fluffed her wings out and picked up her sword, using the tip to gesture at Nightmare.  “You came here to do something, right?”

“I...did.  But how am I meant to do it from in here?”

“You’re right in the middle of what it means to be Hard Boiled.  If he can’t hear you here, he can’t hear you anywhere.  This is the core of his being.  He’s...”  Jay smiled again, this time with a motherly fondness.  “He’s a good pony.  Crazy, but good.  I approve of what he’s done for me through the years.  His methods might not always be the kindest, but sometimes kindness isn’t what the world needs.”

Nightmare raised her head and drew in a breath.  “Every time I think existing cannot get any stranger, it makes me wrong.  How does he survive like this?”

Jay chuckled, trotting over and patting the taller alicorn on the foreleg.  “He has a very good soul: the people who love and care for him. That includes you, incidentally.  He’s grown quite fond of you.”

“He...he has?  I thought I irritated him.”

“Oh, you do.  But that goes for many of the people he loves.  Now he has a chance to do the most important thing in his life up to this point.  But first, you have to decide what you’re going to do.  In this moment, the fate of an entire world is sitting on your lovely, blue shoulders.  Do you step up?  It might mean more pain.”

Shrugging her wings, the alicorn stared off into the darkness.  “I...could just go back to not being.  Not hurting.  Not existing, even as an algorithm.  B-but I did...I did make a deal.”

“And I like it when ponies keep their word,” Jay said, bobbing her head,  “Now, chin up!  Breathe deep!  Lungs full and throat relaxed.  You may have to use the Royal Canterlot Voice, but I’m sure you can conjure that up.  And do tell Hard Boiled when you see him that he needs to take a vacation before he falls apart entirely.  There’s only so much I expect of my servants.”

Despite herself, Nightmare found herself following the mare's instructions, unconsciously assuming a stance that was downright heroic.  Hesitating for a moment, she looked down again and tried to conjure the mare’s name.  Hard Boiled’s memories felt fuzzy and indistinct in her thoughts.

“B-but...who are you?”

“You’ll remember in a moment when his mind is open to you again.  Now!  Deep breath!  Make him hear you!”

Raising her voice, she let out a shout that echoed into the distance, punctuating each word with a beat of her wings.  

Free...The...Moon!