“I’m alive. I’m alive!” Sunset screamed to the heavens.
It felt like days had passed since she had jumped through the exploding mirror.
As she stood, slowly blinking her eyes, her sense of time fluctuated. Seconds seemed like hours, then raced by like an express train. She focused on her own breathing, and slowly her reality stabilized. Her heart rate stopped resembling that of a hummingbird.
Her next realization, after the fact of her continued existence, was that she wasn’t in fact a messy pile of organs. The transition had been an exceptionally violent one, and she had definitely been transformed several times along the way. With the chaotic nature of her interaction with Limbo, there was no telling what shape she could have ended up in.
She looked down, to see thin fur-less forelegs ending in hands like those of a minotaur. She felt her mane hanging down on either side of what must be an equally hairless face and…
She had no horn. SHE HAD NO HORN!
Sunset sat down roughly on the pavement—she just noticed that she was standing on pavement—and raised her hands to her forehead. Yup...no horn.
This could be the most magical land in the multiverse, but without a horn, how could she…
No, wait. Zebra shamen didn’t need horns to access unicorn magic. She wasn’t giving up that easily! She’d figure out how magic worked here, and she’d figure out how to use it, and then she’d travel back to Equestria and fix everything! Speaking of which…
She spotted the only object that could possibly be a portal out of the corner of her eye. Turning around—a process that was rather rough on her bare legs—she spotted a square stone plinth, upon which was sitting a statue of a rearing… No, never mind that, she had more important things to worry about. Like the fact that the stone was stone. 100%, impenetrable stone.
“Where’s the portal?” she asked the universe. “Where’s the portal?!”
That’s when she heard somepony clear their throat beside her.
“High off her fucking ass, by the look of it. Darlin’, by chance do you remember where you put your clothes?”
He was a rough-hewn white-skinned creature with sharp angles making up his whole body, like his creator had foregone any attempt to round or shape him to be aesthetically pleasing. If it weren’t for his clothes offering some dark blue contrast, she might have compared him unfavorably to the statue behind her.
On his hip were several tools, and a flat-topped hat sat on his sandy yellow hair, but his gaze was solidly on Sunset Shimmer’s chest, of all places.
Next to him stood a much rounder, softer looking man, dressed much the same but looking Sunset in the eyes, and frowning instead of openly leering.
Sunset made a visual comparison between the pair of newcomers and her new body. “I knew I detected a Fitting In component in the interface!” she exclaimed in triumph. Then she made another comparison. “Hmm...yes, this form would be more comfortable with clothes. Do you happen to have a spare...something I could borrow?”
“Sir, maybe we should… Reach out to—”
“I’m not wasting my whole night looking for her parents. If a teen is dumb enough to get this high in public, that’s not my problem. Time to go, girlie.”
The angular rough man stepped forward with frightening speed, grabbing one wrist and hitting something against it, which spun and ratcheted shut around it, leaving an ache where it had originally hit, and a cold ring on her skin.
The rounder man sighed, as a wind gusted past them, bringing with it a few small drops of rain.
“At least you’ll be somewhere warm soon,” the softer one offered as he stepped closer, clearly intent on helping his comrade in restraining Sunset.
Sunset was puzzled by the tone associated with the word “teen”. (And she was on the ground, not “high”.) But that question could wait. “Hey, what are you doing? I wasn’t fighting you or anything.”
“Sure you weren’t, that’s why I’m not being rough with you,” the angular one said as he bodily lifted Sunset off the ground by her arm, and then connected her wrist to her other with that cold metal implement that sure seemed to resemble shackles, behind her.
Sunset was going to complain some more, but there was a glint of light off of one of the objects on the man’s belt. A rather large collection of objects, designed to inflict pain.
Sunset suddenly wished she had another chance to pick where she exited Limbo from. “Yes, sir,” she said meekly.
“Damn right,” he grunted as he turned her bodily and marched her towards a black and white vehicle of some sort, clearly made of metal, parked nearby.
The whole time, Sunset kept her eyes wide open, taking in everything she could about this world, anything she could use to help her.
What she saw was a city unlike any she had ever seen in Equestria, a city run wild and climbing towards the sky like the ground was poison. Pavement covered everything. It was late, and there was nobody else visible that she could possibly appeal to. A box was holding newspapers for sale. “Vietnam Protests Escalate,” the headline read. “Three Dead in University Protest.”
It wasn’t so much that she picked up walking quickly, as that she didn’t have a choice, and whenever she stumbled she was lifted bodily back onto her feet and the man would mutter something about her being “high” again, until finally she was in the much warmer car. She looked at the darkened glass, and was finally able to spot her reflection: flat faced, with mostly blonde hair streaked with red.
She was locked in, and then the two got into the front, and began talking as though she wasn’t there at all.
“Fucking teens,” Angles growled. “Swear to god they’d let the Commies kill us all while they smoked a peace pipe and whined about being oppressed.”
“Not all of them are that bad. My cousin’s got two kids, about her age too, and I’ll be damned if they aren’t set up to be posterboys for the GOP. Might be a lot of dumb ones this generation, sir, but there’s some good ones too,” Roundy said almost plaintively in response.
Angles barked a rough laugh. “You’re getting as bad as they are. ‘Not all the Vietcong are bad,’' he bleated. “You know what I think: Kill them all and let God sort them out.”
“Amen,” Roundy said, with only a little reluctance. “Hey, you hear about the dumbass kids at the college? Serves them right.”
The car started moving, pulling out of the parking spot and off into a road clearly designed to accommodate them, humming along at a full gallop speed.
“Listen, if anyone comes up against us, trying to say we’re murderers, I’ll prove them right,” Angles said with a dark tone of amusement, or possibly glee.
That took the wind out of Roundy’s bluster, and he fell quiet while they drove, until the front surface of the inside of the vehicle crackled and spoke.
“Ten Twenty, cruiser five?”
Roundy sighed and picked up a device that was hanging from the surface, and brought it up to his mouth with a trailing coiled wire attached to it.
“Ten Nineteen with our Two Seventy in tow, requesting lockup.”
The device crackled to life again.
“Ten Forty Five?”
Roundy looked back at Sunset before smiling a little and speaking. “Naked.”
“Ten Nine?”
“Subject is naked, but seems alright.”
Sunset chose this moment to interject, hoping to appeal to the mysterious magical voice. “Actually, I—”
Angles turned suddenly and struck the grid separating the front and back seats with his baton at full force. If that barrier hadn’t held, there was a good chance that the blow would have broken her neck.
Sunset froze.
As for the speaker, there was a bit of silence, before the device spoke again.
“Ten Four.”
Somehow, that was amusing to the two as they both chuckled, Roundy putting the device back in its place.
Sunset curled up into a ball.
“It’s like teens these days don’t even know what the fuck cops are,” Angles said, as though their conversation had never been interrupted. “We aren’t your fucking friends, we aren’t fucking babysitters. We’re the guys with guns who keep society from falling apart,” he said proudly.
In her mind, Sunset was fairly certain that this particular society had already collapsed.
The vehicle pulled into an area that, if Sunset had to guess, was some sort of top security camp, with high barbed wire fence and a guard booth, everyone in sight wearing a belt heavy with torture implements, before they stopped and the two got out.
When Roundy opened the door to the back, he was wearing a pacifying hollow smile and holding out a hand.
“Lean this way, I can help you out, we’ve got a blanket just inside.”
“Inside” seemed to be an armor plated doorway that stood open, with a cold white light pouring out into the now drizzling rain.
Sunset looked desperately around her, but failed to find a single friendly face. She began to realize that she would probably die here. With a sigh, she surrendered herself to whatever was going to happen to her.
Surprisingly, the following minutes included very little pain; mostly what pain she did suffer was from the rough cold ground on her feet.
A woman who looked like she forever wore an expression of exhaustion wrapped her in a rough blanket, and even used a pin to keep it up like a cloak, since she couldn’t hold it up with her hands bound.
“Barbaric men,” she muttered as she secured it. “Don’t know the first thing about decency.”
But before she could even be thanked, Sunset was whisked off to sit at a desk across from a very old man with the largest mustache Sunset had ever seen.
“Name?” he asked in a low, gruff voice.
“Sunset Shimmer,” she replied confidently. At least she knew the answer to this one.
The man paused, and looked up at her with one raised eyebrow.
He looked down at the sheet of paper, then back up at her.
“Listen,” he said, attempting to be a little kind. “That may be what your… friends call ya. But… We need your real name. In case something happens to you, we can get you help. Alright? If you’ve run away from home or something like that, it’s best your parents at least know you’re alive.”
“Uh...let me see if I can remember it,” she bluffed, looking around her. The first thing she established was that she appeared to be a lot younger than everyone else in the room. Perhaps “teen” meant the same thing that “blank flank” did in Equestria. It would express the scornful tone that it was delivered in.
“Such a shame, the things drugs do to teens,” he sighed, seeming in abject misery.
The other thing she noticed was that everyone had name tags. She couldn’t see all of them, but she tried her best to come up with some sort of pattern. More data was provided by photographs on the walls, from their expressions, perhaps vanquished enemies of these “cops”? They too had names under them. “Alice…?” she ventured, after seeing one of the criminals that looked a bit like her. “Sh...iner?” she mumbled. Last names were harder, so she wasn’t sure she could get away with that one.
“That’s better,” the man said gently, in the best condescending “I’m speaking to a baby” tone he could manage. “Alice Shiner. Now, you’re being detained, since… well, homeless children without clothes aren’t a thing we just turn a blind eye to, but we’ll try to find your parents, get you home right quick.”
“OK,” she said. This could work. They wouldn’t find her parents, and they probably couldn’t hurt her while they were looking. That would give her time to find out more about this world. To see if there was anything, anything at all that a “teen” would be allowed to do without getting in trouble.