The Finality of Things
Speech Increased To 2.5
The Mayor hit the ground hard. All around him the world turned and twisted, and spun out of control. Shapes and shadows danced around him, constantly they came in and out of focus, and disappeared before he could recognize them. Mudcrabs? Ponies? For a moment he was sure he’d seen a Royal Guard! But it was all he could do to keep awake. He shook his head to clear it, but all he managed was to make the bells inside his brain ring louder and angrier.
“What...” he mumbled, and slowly the glade came into view. “No...”
The battle was lost. The last of the mudcrab battlelines was broken, the horkers were reduced to a handful, and yes... the Royal Guard had come. They stormed out the treeline and blasted magic bolts into what remained of his forces, and the Mayor knew as he saw that golden barding and crested helmets that everything was hopeless.
“Midflight!” he groaned, as he dug his hooves into the dirt. “Get the chariot... we have to get out of here... we gotta-” But his henchpony was nowhere to be seen. None of them were. A great, dark pit formed in the Mayor’s stomach as he realized how empty the sky was. Empty, except for one terrible shadow that loomed overhead, with stars in her mane...
“No. This can’t be happening!” But it was. Pierre grit his teeth as tears formed in his eyes. It was over.
A heavy hand grasped him by the collar of his coat and the invisible pony was lifted up high by the strong arm of our mighty Guard. He dangled limply in his grasp and slowly turned until he was face to helmet with the impassive, steely gaze of his greatest foe.
“You have committed crimes against Skyrim and her people. What say you in your defense?”
The Mayor stared hard into the dark void of the Guard’s eyes as his own mind slowly began to unravel. He’d been so close... everything had been going so well until he showed up... everything...
“...would have worked out just fine without you,” he spat. “I would have gotten away with it all, if it weren’t for you and your stupid toad!”
The Guard drew back his arm to deliver one final punch to knock the Mayor out cold and deliver him to justice. One hit, a short walk over to the Royal Guardsponies, and all would be over. Pierre would go to prison, Hollow Shades would be free of his influence, and no one else would suffer the terrible wrath of the Machine. Equestria would know peace from its horrors.
Alas, it was not meant to be.
In one swift motion fueled by hateful madness, the Mayor lifted up his hooves and slid out of his trenchcoat. He hit the ground with a soft squee! and shook his shades away from his face. Fully and completely naked, the brave Guard had no way to see where he had gone.
And no way to defend himself from the kick that knocked the wind from his lungs.
The Mayor struck him once in the stomach, and the exhausted Guard hit the ground on his knees with a pained grunt. A second buck rammed hard into his shoulder, where the Machine had so terribly wounded him, and tore a muted cry from our battered hero. But it was the third and final kick that allowed the terror that would follow to happen... Pierre reared back on his front legs and bucked hard against the Guard’s helmet, and knocked him flat on his back.
Dazed and hanging on to consciousness by sheer willpower, our stout Guard lifted himself on his elbows and tried to find the Mayor before he could escape. But he did not intend to flee... not anymore.
Cackling madly, Pierre dashed for the control panel of the Machine and began to reconfigure it for one final, terrible task... to wreak havoc and make everypony who had wronged him pay the ultimate price for his defeat. If Mayor Pierre du Montblanc couldn’t rule Hollow Shades, then nopony would. If he couldn’t be the richest pony in Equestria, then he would make sure there wouldn’t be an Equestria at all!
He worked silently and quickly, with deft and practiced ease as he pressed the runes and entered his vile commands into the Machine. Dozens of lines of that incomprehensible language went in, one after the other, until a great block of that alien language had accumulated in the darkness of the panel’s screen. But he had not yet sent the commands. No, for the Mayor had no desire to win the battle any longer, nor to summon more vile creatures into the world...
Above the battlefield the Machine’s glow dimmed and intensified in pulses of ominous crimson light. To the unwitting spectator these would bear no greater meaning... just the beeping lights of a construct, like flickering candles on a chandelier... but the truth was dark and alien, and in these flashes of tenebrous light the Machine hid a horrid and unnatural secret. The glow of these lights cast its glare over the panel where Pierre quietly worked his evil, and in silence it pondered the rhythmic pattern of the Mayor’s inputs...
Desperate, the Guard rose to his feet and searched for the Mayor... but it was hopeless! How could he ever hope to find the invisible pony?
“FRIEND!”
A blur of white and yellow slammed! into the Guard and sent him tumbling down to the ground for a second time. But this was no foe!
“I can’t believe I found you!” Juniper cried as she squeezed the Guard between her hooves. “I th-thought I’d l-lost you FOREVER!” The vampire mare wept and smeared pony snot into the Guard’s cuirass as she buried her face into his back.
Sprawled on the ground, with his face pressed into the ash and his injured shoulder sandwiched between the soil and about 200 kilos of pony, the Guard muttered something between a sigh and a groan.
“...these vampires are becoming a real menace...”
“Oopsie!” Juniper rolled off of him and offered her best apologetic smile. “Sorry! I’m just so glad you’re alright!”
But there was no time!
“You there,” the Guard said once he had regained his breath. “What do you know about this?”
He took the discarded trench coat and shades and showed them to Juniper. The vampire mare squinted hard as the gears in her pony brain cranked and turned...
“It’s the Mayor!” she gasped! “Oh no, we’ll never find him!”
Indeed, the odds seemed to have finally turned impossibly stacked against our brave heroes. But it was then, at their darkest and most impossible moment of need, that Juniper realized the true nature of a most powerfully powerful power she’d had within herself all along!
“Wait a second...” she muttered. The sound of machinery and pistons working overtime in her head could be heard all the way to Fillydelphia. Steam and smoke churned out her ears as her eyes crossed and her muzzle scrunched. Such was the level of thought going on in her brain!
She gasped! like nopony had ever gasped! before once she finally realized...
The Mayor was naked!
All around her Juniper saw ponies... clothed ponies. The Royal Guard had their armor, Princess Luna had her royal regalia, the bat ponies were covered in rope, and Juniper had a moist towelette over her shoulders that the kind nurses had given her... and the nurses had their hats! But that was it! Everypony was wearing something except for her... and the Mayor!
“I can find him!” she said then, and looked into the eyes of our hero with a determination unlike any she had ever felt before. Our brave Guard looked into her eyes in turn, and knew without doubt that he could trust her. He nodded, and the vampire mare scrunched like she had never scrunched before, as she set her eyes to scan the battlefield...
Juniper focused hard. She looked into every gap between mudcrabs, toads, ponies... everywhere she thought the Mayor might hide. She did a full 180 sweep of the battlefield, and then turned around to face the dreaded Machine...
Juniper gulped. It was a terrifying sight, but the feeling of dread wasn’t what she was focusing on. She cast her gaze over and beyond the Machine, looking for something... special... The vampire mare squinted hard as sweat pooled on her pony forehead, and she started to lose hope as the seconds mounted and nothing turned up... But then it happened! As she cast her gaze over the command panel, a feeling washed over her... She tensed. Her eyes widened and her heartbeat quickened to a very familiar rhythm.
‘N-naked...’ she thought. Then a smug grin spread across her face.
She pointed a triumphant hoof over at the panel. She’d found him!
Pierre’s maniacal grin threatened to split his head in two as his hoof hovered over the final rune. His vengeance was at hoof! If he could not win, then nopony would! Before him the control panel showed the complete list of all the runic combinations and their effects. He had finally found the one he needed... the one that would show them all not to mess with Pierre du Montblanc!
He entered the dreaded incantation with glee...
‘qqq’’
With wide, bulging eyes, Pierre savored the moment before his vengeance would be complete... and his hoof slowly moved to press the input button.
But something made him hesitate... Above him, alien and inscrutable, eternal and malignant, the Machine seemed to loom and glare over the invisible pony like an all-seeing monolith. For the first time in his life, Pierre felt eyes on him. Eyes that could see him. A cold dread washed over the Mayor.
But he had come this far. He was not about to stop, especially not because of some stupid alien hunk of metal! Even as the weight of the Machine’s presence weighed down on his mind, he entered his command into the console...
...and nothing happened.
He pressed the rune again, harder this time. Still nothing. Then a third time, and a fourth, and with a cold feeling of fright in his innards, Pierre slammed his hoof hard against the panel.
Nothing.
Slowly he turned to face the Machine. Unknowable, it hovered in silence over the glade, and without eyes it glared at him, and without ears it listened to his racing heartbeat... and without a mouth it spoke to him.
‘Betrayer,’ it said, and Pierre felt his blood run cold.
The Mayor had no words. His mind went blank, and in his very soul there was nothing but horror. He did not see as the display on the panel cleared and new runes flared to life on their own, nor did he notice their dark meaning...
The first set of runes was entered.
‘tim’
...and the Mayor felt a strange sensation wash over him. If he had not been so utterly terrified, he might have realized that his body felt oddly reinvigorated... then the second set of runes flared to life.
‘coc <CrabRave01>’
...and a dark, terrible portal opened up before the Mayor’s eyes, invisible to all others but him. What happened next took place within the span of a millisecond—so fast that not even a single speck of dust had time to cross from Equestria to the other, dark dimension—and only the Mayor saw in detail what horrors awaited him beyond his world.
First the very air split, and a window roughly the size of a grown pony flared to life. Dark and outlined in the very void of the night sky, the window showed a glimpse of another world... a world far beyond Equestria, alien even to Skyrim, if only in location. Second, the Mayor noticed something terribly familiar about this new world. Hundreds of thousands of shapes moved in a deep, terrible darkness within a vast, empty space. There wasn’t a single feature within this alien landscape, except for the writhing, crawling shapes that completely blotted out the floor.
Mudcrabs. Hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of mudcrabs. Far beyond the scope of what little light managed to seep through the portal, they extended like an endless blanket into the endless void of this strange dimension. Their pincers clicked! and clacked! with malicious glee, all too familiar to the Mayor’s ears. He’d lost count of how many adversaries and foes he had fed to the foul beasts... how many times he had heard those pincers in the darkness beneath his town hall.
Now they snapped! for him.
Third, in the time it took a snowflake to melt, the Mayor was sucked into the portal to fall amid the ravenous mudcrabs, never to be heard from again...
***
Juniper pouted as she kicked at the dirt in front of the Mayorless control panel.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I could swear I’d sensed him right here...”
The Guard shrugged and patted her head.
“Everything’s in order,” he said, and the vampire pony smiled up at him.
Behind them the Machine rumbled! and rattled! as its insides twisted and turned with power unknown to ponykind. Within seconds, the binds that held the nord and thief came undone and they fell to the ground. Then, with a glare of crimson light and a flash of blinding darkness, the Machine disappeared...
The Guard watched it in silence during the few final moments it lingered in Equestria. Its twisted metal, its insidious cogs and gears as they worked their unknowable designs behind rusted plating... he watched it and for a moment he could swear it watched him in turn.
Then it was gone.