Starlight and Sunset emerged from the forest, and made their way down the slope, across a narrow field of wild grass, and up a small embankment to reach the highway. This would lead into the town, so they followed it from the shoulder.
The highway was eerily devoid of the sounds of cars, but was almost as alive with the sounds of animals and insects as the forest was. The two walked side by side on the shoulder of the highway for a few minutes, saying nothing, before Sunset asked Starlight to stop for a second.
Starlight watched as Sunset sat down on the edge of the blacktop, removed first her shoes and then her socks, tied the laces of the two shoes together, and then stuffed the socks into the shoes. She then hung the tied shoes around her neck, leaving her barefoot. “I want to try something,” Sunset explained, climbing back down the embankment, ending up at the edge of the field of grass. After lifting and dropping her feet in the grass a few times, she smiled. “OK, let’s keep walking.”
Starlight watched her walking through the uneven field—which she knew from experience was littered with rocks as big as her hand—as if she was still on the paved road. She quickly scrambled down so she could walk beside Sunset, but found it impossible to maintain the other young woman’s pace. “Hold on!” she demanded, causing Sunset to turn around and walk back to her.
“Something’s going on here!” she said, pointing down at Sunset’s bare feet. “Those are the feet of a city slicker—I didn’t see a single callus when you took off your shoes. Is this another pony thing? Another...earth pony thing?”
“Yeah,” Sunset said in a serious voice. Starlight waited for nearly a minute, as Sunset gathered her thoughts. “When I first got here,” Sunset began, “the transition from hooves to squishy feet was pretty rough, so I always made sure to keep them covered. I couldn’t tell you for sure when it stopped. But I think it was during the Chicago Riots—the cops had poured gasoline across the street and ignited it to try and herd us towards the paddy wagons. I thought I saw a gap, so I led a group running right across it. I was in front, so I faced the brunt of the fire. My tennies melted, but I didn’t feel a thing.”
Starlight blinked in a sudden realization. “Wait a second. Wait...one...second. The Chicago Riots? Do you mean the Democratic National Convention protests from two years ago?”
“Yup!”
Starlight hopped in the air in her excitement. “No way! Every protester in the country wanted to be there! The only reason I stayed back was to protect my flock, but you better believe every single one of them wanted to go! So, were you one of the Yippies?”
Sunset shook her head. “No, I just wandered in with my fifteen-year old friend Cathy, to see what was going down with my own eyes. A vital bloodstream of mostly-female protestors, opposed by clots of male police and National Guard.”
“You haven’t become sexist now, have you?” Starlight asked.
Sunset shook her head. “There were plenty of men joining the protests later, and plenty of women at home rooting for the police on their televisions. But at that crucial moment, it was the women who stepped forward first, and the men who followed. Getting back to Chicago, Cathy and I managed to get right into the thick of it, right in front of the Conrad Hilton on the 28th, demanding that Candidate Humphrey listen to our complaints about the Draft and the War. The National Guard rushed us, armed with M1’s.” Sunset became incensed as she allowed the memories to come rushing back. “They looked like monsters with their gas masks on, turning day into night with all of the tear gas grenades they were lobbing at us. Cathy and I got separated, and when I finally found her again I saw her get deliberately shoved right through a plate glass window by a cop. She wasn’t the only one—lots of cops were pushing protestors through windows, breaking into shop after shop. They were breaking the windows, not us! And then that cop stormed through that window, and beat Cathy with his baton, deliberately battering her bare skin into the broken glass as she screamed for mercy.” There were tears in Sunset’s eyes as she remembered. “There were so many of them between me and her—there was nothing I could do. I looked away, unable to witness any more, and I saw the television cameras, recording everything! I pointed at the brutality being commited, and I cried, ‘The whole world is watching!’ The other kids took up the cry. It was only then that I saw a few of the cops looking guilty. But the beatings and arrests continued. Cathy was taken away to the police vans, bleeding, and I couldn’t save her. I stayed the night, trying to think of some way to break her out of jail.
“The next day Eugene McCarthy, the true candidate of the people, spoke to us, and invited us to his headquarters. But by then I had figured out that there was nothing more I could do, so I snuck out of the city to keep from getting arrested myself. You know the rest: The police cut the phone lines before storming the McCarthy HQ and beating everyone other than McCarthy himself unconscious. Humphrey won the nomination for blindly toeing the party line and refusing to have anything to do with us, and then of course Nixon tarred him as a traitor, along with the entire Democratic Party, riding a wave of generational fear into the White House.”
Sunset looked down at the ground. “At the time, I didn’t think I had done all that much. I didn’t hook up with Hayden, Hoffman, or any of the young women running the Yippies and MOPE, the ones the press called the Chicago Seven. I didn’t stay and let myself get arrested, so I could present my case to the American people like they did. I ran away, so I thought of myself as a coward.”
Starlight put an arm around her shoulder. “You weren’t,” she assured her. “Your alias would have fallen apart under federal scrutiny. You never would have made it to trial—they probably would have picked some random country to deport you to. It’s a favorite tactic of the Feds, when they find somebody the law can’t protect.”
“Yeah,” Sunset said softly, “I figured that out, eventually. There were plenty of people later in my travels who came up to me and said that I saved their lives. I wasn’t a major force of leadership in the riot, but I guess for a handful, I was in the right place at the right time.
“But I’m still curious how that changed your feet,” Starlight says, shifting back to the earlier topic.
“There is a process,” Sunset said, “not at all well understood, where one pony has been changed by Harmony to meet the needs of ponykind. There was a prophecy that said that that would happen to me one day, that I might one day stand beside Princess Celestia as an equal. When the Princess asked me about this prophecy I initially scoffed at it, because I knew in my heart that I was not worthy of her power.” She looked over at Starlight. “Inside, I was terrified—our nation had a long history of ponies, mostly unicorns, who sought that ultimate power, for good or for bad, and every one of them was corrupted by it. Every one of them had to be taken down by Princess Celestia and helpers throughout the centuries such as myself. Only Celestia, and later Cadance, proved themselves able to resist the temptation.”
Sunset sighed, shading her eyes with one hand as she looked up at the cloud that the sun was hiding behind. “But then one day our land was struck by the first great crisis not caused by a single bad pony. One that Celestia and Cadance were powerless to stop. That’s when I tried to become like them, to lend them the power to save our land from starvation and riot. And that quest...led me here.
“An alicorn...a princess...is earth pony, pegasus, and unicorn in one,” Sunset explained. “I think...it feels like such blasphemy to even say it out loud...I think I might have become an alicorn, during my time on Earth. I got what I was looking for.”
It seemed to Starlight like Sunset had somehow grown in stature during that last sentence, although she certainly didn’t change in height. Perhaps it was the air of genuine confidence which she had put on. “So that’s a good thing, right? Aren’t your princesses all-powerful? You ought to be able to take on Marcus easily!”
Sunset shook her head and sighed, sinking back down to normality. “It’s not that simple,” she explained. “A princess can do great things because she can hold so much more magic inside of her, and knows all of the new ways she can use it. My knowledge of pegasus and earth pony magic is woefully inadequate, and a good deal of it is almost certainly wrong, given that it was written by unicorn supremacists. And this world...you’d have to cover all of Colorado with peyote to give me enough magic to take on Marcus in a face-to-face battle. I’m sorry to disappoint you.”
Starlight put a hand on Sunset’s shoulder. “Don’t worry,” she assured her. “You have what you need to save your world now. Marcus is my problem. Even with your help, it has to be me that faces him.”
Sunset smiled, and put her hand over Starlight’s. “And I’ll give you all the help I can.” She bent down to pass her fingers through the grass. “And I think I might actually be getting a tiny bit of magic through direct contact with the earth. An ant’s worth every step.”
“I’ll take every little bit of help I can get,” Starlight said, matching Sunset’s smile. “Now do you mind if I do my walking over there next to the highway? This natural walking is murder on my feet.”
They both had a small laugh over that.
As they got closer to the town of Mukwonago, it became easier to hear the sounds it was making. Animal and insect sounds, like the forest and the highway, but also the sounds of fighting and screaming.
The sounds of Marcus’ “paradise”.
As the highway crossed a creek just prior to entering the city limits, Sunset beckoned Starlight to join her as she waded her way across the creek. “I don’t know how much Marcus enhanced their senses,” she explained. “And right now we stink pretty bad.”
Starlight made the mistake of testing that hypothesis, and wrinkled her nose in disgust.
After the pair had crossed the creek, they stripped down to their underwear and washed off the grime with the freshwater.
As they dried off in the early morning sun, Sunset turned to Starlight. “So, what was it like to grow up in a town named Santa Ana with a name like ‘Starlight Glimmer’?”
“Do you really want to know?” Starlight asked. “You haven’t asked that much about me before now.”
Sunset leaned back. “Well before I wanted to maintain your mystique, but now that you’re follower-less, I thought I’d satisfy my curiosity.”
Starlight laughed, and then bit her lip as she thought on how to explain her childhood.
“In pony towns, do you have those strange people… There’s always one or two, that don’t connect to anyone else? They just take up space, act like they’re better than everyone else, and make absolutely sure everyone knows they don’t belong?” she asked Sunset after a bit.
Sunset’s silence spoke volumes.
Starlight nodded. “My mom believed that she was a star that had fallen to earth. My dad took care of her, and believed she was… practically god on earth. Men can be pretty dim. I found out when I was fifteen that she’d taken so much LSD she had stolen from her psychiatrist when they first met that she almost died of malnutrition. She didn’t think she needed to eat, because she was a star. Well… I was her light. Her little Starlight,” she said softly, but slightly bitterly. “Thankfully for the duration of my… incubation, she remained sober. Or I may have been a very different person.”
Sunset nodded sympathetically. “That would explain where your particular powers come up. I always thought that this world would be very different if the various kinds of psychic and magical powers described in your fiction were real, even if they were extremely rare. LSD was only invented in 1938, so there hasn’t been much time for individuals affected by it to grow to adulthood.”
“Wait, so you’re saying I only have magic because my mother overdosed on LSD?” Starlight asked, grimacing.
“No, I’m saying that you humans as a race are broken, because you can’t use the magic that life naturally generates,” said Sunset. “Your mother is one of the rare individuals who managed to fix herself.”
Starlight gave her a look. “Didn’t you say earlier that only unicorns can use magic?”
Sunset’s eyes went wide. “Um...well, the long-term goal is obviously to teach every creature how to use magic.”
“So…. My mom…” Starlight stared at a nearby rock, processing a lot of potential information. “My mom fixed herself. And the way that fixing herself…. Manifested…. To the wider world… was believing she was a star.”
Sunset bit the inside of her cheek for a bit. “I really only wanted to impress you with the positive aspects of Equestria, but the fact of the matter is...like 80% of all powerful unicorns are clinically insane. The power just messes with your brain. That, uh, includes me. But I’m one of the lucky, functional crazy ponies.”
“That makes a frighteningly large amount of sense,” Starlight sighed, rubbing her forehead. “So… So I don’t need to respect her insanity, but she did find power, so I inherited some form of compatibility with magic without having to be driven insane, or at least no more insane than you are, because we both seem somewhat functional.”
“Yeah, there you go! You’ve even got a handle on your megalomania. That one took me years to get over.”
“I don’t think either of us are actually fully over our megalomania,” Starlight said flatly, giving Sunset a meaningful look.
Sunset looked shiftily around her. “Well….I haven’t got any megalo at the moment to mania over, so I’m fine! Perfectly fine.”
“Oh? Yeah?” Starlight grinned. “You mean like… how just because I’ve lost control for the moment over my mind-control hive-mind cult of people who see me as a living god I must be totally fine?”
“Exactly. Every addict is functional so long as it’s physically impossible for them to get their fix.” She said this with a completely straight face.
Starlight reached over and shoved Sunset off the rock she was sitting on.
“Ow,” Sunset muttered. “Turns out my newfound earth pony powers are not enough to make me immune to rock damage.”
“Sorry,” Starlight sighed, offering a hand. “That was mean of me. But you’re always so poised! Even when you’re messing with me!”
Sunset got up and dusted herself off. “For five years, I was the very public personal student of the ruler of the known universe, with no protection whatsoever from the press. I’ve learned to live my life as if my privacy was dead and buried.” She let a small fraction of a mountain of regret leak into that statement.
“I’m sorry,” Starlight said, frowning. “If I ever go to Equestria, I’m going to slap your princess lady for not protecting you from that. Though I don’t think I’m ever going to have the chance.”
Sunset chuckled. “Oh, I would have been so shocked if I had heard anybody suggesting that when I first came here. Now though...sure, I’ll let you do it. I know for a fact that she won’t be mad—and it won’t hurt her a bit, being a frickin’ alicorn and all—and even an all-knowing princess needs the occasional course correction.”
Starlight grinned a bit, putting her hands on her hips. “Would you kill me if I tried to make out with her? Once in a lifetime opportunity.”
Starlight could actually see Sunset’s brain short-circuit at having to consider the possibility that Princess Celestia might be a sexual being.
“Buh….”
Also, this was pretty clear proof that Sunset was at least bi, if not homosexual.
“Nonono,” Starlight said before Sunset could process it. “I’ll steal a kiss from her and then tell her I’m disappointed in her!” she crowed.
“Stop that…” Sunset said weakly.
“But it’s meaningless to me! For once there’s something that’s harmless, but gets you flustered, that doesn’t affect me!” Starlight said proudly.
Sunset suddenly recovered her composure. “Yeah, sure,” she said smoothly. “Mess with the pony who controls the sun for a living. What’s the worst that could happen?”
Starlight contemplated the question for a moment. “Banishment back to my world?”
Sunset paused for a bit before nodding. “Yeah. That is literally the worst thing she could do to you.”
“I win!” Starlight cheered. “Worst case, go home. Best case? I get to flirt with the biggest powerhouse in all of reality, and she’s amused by my ego before teaching me uhhhhhh….”
Starlight paused, looking at Sunset. “Friendship. She’d teach me something about friendship.”
Some lines of appropriateness even Starlight wouldn’t cross.
Sunset nodded, either ignoring or missing where Starlight was about to go.
“Anyway,” Starlight shook her clothes out. “You might be fine with being naked but I like clothes. I think mine are dry enough.”
Sunset sighed and started getting dressed as well. “In the abstract...yes. In rural Wisconsin at the end of winter—no thank you.”
“Yeah, nudists in general seem to bow to the demands of nature when it gets cold,” Starlight said, pulling on her clothes. “So are you considered attractive in your world, or did the portal give you a conventionally attractive body on top of language skills?”
Sunset stopped zipping up her pants to give Starlight a raised-eyebrow expression. “I think the rule is pretty universal: powerful people are attractive, regardless of how they look. I never had the chance to ask an unbiased individual how I looked, not since I was a filly.”
Starlight looked like suddenly she understood all of her prior relationships, and grimaced. “Wow, it’s really that simple, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. Sick as it sounds, I imagine there are loads of people who were into Marcus...before he took that decision away from them.”
“I briefly fantasized about trying to find a way to make him female,” Starlight confessed miserably.
Sunset finished her dressing maneuver, before looking up at Starlight and smiling sympathetically. “I think there’s a phrase...you can take the mud off of a warthog, but you can’t take away the stink?”
Starlight laughed and finished getting dressed, before grabbing her bag and bottle, unscrewing the cap and taking a sip.
Sunset said nothing.
“Let’s go find someone to save,” Starlight said confidently, before starting up the hill.
The urban landscape was mostly abandoned. Most of the windows were smashed in, but not all. And rarely were the goods inside those vandalized shops taken from their places. Sunset looked around her carefully as she walked. She stopped when a missing door revealed a flight of stairs. As Starlight watched, she slowly crept inside and looked around.
“Up here,” Sunset said with a beckoning motion. “We’ll be able to see more from a rooftop.”
The pair slowly made their way up, pausing at any strange sound, or when the wind would move around the curtains in an open room. The balustrade was broken in a few places, but otherwise it was an easy climb, up until they reached the door to the roof, which was secured with a padlock.
Sunset went through her things. “I’d ask you to show off right now, since I’ve been doing everything for the last few minutes,” she quipped. “But then you’d say something boring like ‘I’m saving my strength for when I need to use my magic to save us all from a horrible, horrible death,’ so I guess I can handle this difficult problem just this once.” By then she had already picked the lock with a couple of wires. She opened the door, peeked outside, and then gestured grandly for Starlight to precede her. “After you, Your Highness.”
Starlight, blushing faintly, took a deep bow, before taking another sip of the green bottle and stepping out onto the roof.
“Sufficient, my knight,” she declared with a giggle.
The wind was particularly loud at this elevation, pulled through the artificial canyons created by the buildings. Knowing that there was no way that her casual sounds could be heard below, Sunset walked confidently to the edge of the roof, and then looked down.
“Whoa!” she exclaimed, falling back and sitting down. “I hadn’t realized that we were so high!”
“Then don’t look over the side. Don’t worry, I’ll keep you safe,” Starlight said, walking over and mussing Sunset’s hair, looking out across the city. “Keep you from falling off… or… whatever.”
“Some alicorn I am,” Sunset muttered to herself. “I’ll have to spend all my time back home strafing everypony anytime I try to fly.” After a few moments of catching her breath, she sat down solidly on the top of the building with crossed legs, grabbing tightly onto the top of the railing. Only then did she feel confident enough to look over the side at the street below. “So...far…”
Starlight crossed her arms, leaning on the railing, and looked down at Sunset with a raised eyebrow.
“Not the weakness I thought you’d have.”
“Well...at least this means I can’t look down on the lesser mortals,” Sunset joked, still rather weak.
“Just make them kneel,” Starlight said with a smirk, offering the green bottle to Sunset.
Sunset held up a hand to forestall Starlight’s offer, then put her head in the other hand with her eyes closed, taking several deep breaths through her nose. “Let me just...I don’t want to just vomit it back up…” She took a few more breaths, then she got out a bottle of water and drank half of it. “All right,” she said at last, holding a hand out. She took the absinthe, opened the cap, and took a swig. “Whew!” she exclaimed breathily after a moment. “Still packs a kick!” She then handed the bottle back.
“Yeah. Worse without the sugar,” Starlight said numbly, looking at the bottle.
“You know, I just realized,” Sunset said. “Mary Poppins is Princess Celestia.”
Starlight frowned, and looked at Sunset, then back at the bottle. Then she sat down next to Sunset and narrowed her eyes, studying Sunset closely. “I don’t even want to hear the entire rationale behind that statement. Give me one line that supports your thesis.”
“‘I never explain anything.’” Sunset said confidently. “That is absolutely both of them.”
“Okay, fine, but on another note…. Why can’t I feel you, even a little? This stuff has my blood… I forgot, but… Nothin’.”
Sunset shrugged. “I’ve got human blood in me—I’ve seen it on multiple occasions. I’m going to say that it’s the unicorn magic I’ve managed to accumulate. Unicorn magic and black magic are diametrically opposed according to Classical theory. And we’ve already established that Earth blood magic is the same as Equestrian black magic.” She paused for a bit. “Of course, if that was absolutely true then Equestrian history would have been a lot smoother than it has been. So how about this: ‘I am rubber and you are glue. Whatever you say bounces off of me and sticks to you!’” And then she stuck out her tongue like a little girl.
Starlight leaned back against the railing and swirled her bottle of Absinthe, grinning.
“I should get you drunk sometime,” Starlight said happily.
Sunset frowned. “Not unless you drain me first. I’m an angry drunk.”
“Sounds good. Twofer,” she replied before standing again and stretching, putting the lid on the bottle. “So… how do we lure one up here?”
Sunset took another look over the ledge and then crawled on hands and knees over to another side of the building. “I don’t know,” she admitted along the way. “I never took anthropology. Didn’t think knowing how to herd chimpanzees would come in handy. Shows what I know. I figured we’d try to find one of them separate from the rest and work on her. Or him.” She crawled over to another ledge and looked over. “Somebody like that.”
Starlight looked in the direction that Sunset was pointing. There was a narrow alley, not wide enough for two people to walk shoulder-to-shoulder. A lump of flesh with a puke green shirt was huddled in the back, behind the dumpster.
“Ooooh it’s Mr. Rogers,” Starlight whispered sadly. She remembered that he had never gotten around to telling her his first name. “Should I…. throw something at him? Or should we go down there?”
Sunset carefully scanned the surroundings. She didn’t seem to see anybody roaming the street outside the alleyway, and nobody was leaning their heads out of any of the broken windows that looked into it. “We have to go down there,” she said. “He’ll surely run if we do anything from up here. And I really don’t think this is a safe environment for a high speed foot chase.”
“That’s true, alright, we can do this,” Starlight told herself before setting down her backpack and slipping down the stairway slowly, anticipating something jumping out of the shadows and pouncing on her.
It turned out that there were two figures standing in the doorway separating them from the first floor exit. Both of them looked extremely emaciated, and they were swaying back and forth.
Sunset sighed in sympathy. “There were probably like this before Marcus,” she said to Starlight.
“I… We can’t just leave them though,” Starlight whispered. “Just… a second.”
Starlight went back up to the roof, and a moment later she came back down with a can of soup, already open, holding it out to Sunset, then gesturing to the two figures.
Sunset had looked in the store on the first floor while Starlight had been gone, and had found both a skateboard with a bent wheel, as well as the water dish that had been meant for the store’s canine mascot. Soup went into dish, dish went onto skateboard, and the skateboard was pushed towards the two figures, who fell upon it with a vengeance. At first to kill it, but then to drink the nourishment inside.
Sunset then led Starlight into the shop, and out of the busted window, in an area where it was possible to do so without cutting yourself.
If there had been any noise outside whatsoever, Sunset wouldn’t have been able to hear Starlight’s whispered self affirmation as she followed behind her.
“I’d be a good pony,” Starlight whispered to herself, weakly.
The two walked around the building, their eyes alert to any movement. At one point they saw it, as a lone human dashed from one distant building into another one, crashing right through the window. The sound attracted more ferals, leading to a fight.
Starlight was frozen in place.
“Come on!” Sunset urged her, pulling at her arm. “This might be our only chance!”
“But… they…”
Starlight was looking at the human who was fleeing, and she didn’t know what to do, until she gave into Sunset’s urging and stumbled after her to the alleyway.
Unfortunately when they got there, Rogers was no longer alone. A feral boy, maybe 15 or 16 years of age, was smashing a trash can lid into Rogers’ head. Rogers bellowed a cry that was meant to be intimidating, but it failed to have any effect.
Sunset was about to advance into the alley. This was a fight that she felt confident she could win, even with the enhanced strength that Marcus’ changes gave to its victims. But at the last moment she was yanked out of the way by Starlight.
A large shape rushed into the alley from the street, flying through the air and landing on the boy. Sunset eventually realized that it was a dog, Rogers’ dog, still the biggest dog she had ever seen in two separate worlds. Against that, the boy didn’t have a chance—the lid was ripped from his fingers in seconds, and the dog’s fangs briefly bit into his arm. It was released a second later, and the dog positioned itself between Rogers and the attacker, growling furiously. The boy twitched in place for a few seconds in indecision, before dashing back out of the alley.
He stopped on seeing the two young women. Judging Sunset to be the weaker, he ran forward, his teeth on display.
Sunset back-handed him to the ground and gave him a look.
The boy whimpered and scurried away.
The pair then advanced cautiously into the alley. The dog was pushing Rogers, trying to get him on his feet. The human in contrast was completely confused, and kept trying to push the dog away.
Sunset tried to get further into the alley, to get the two separated so that Starlight could cast her spell successfully. But the dog immediately positioned itself between her and Rogers just like before, growling in warning.
Sunset retreated slowly, hands in the air. “So...what’s the worst thing that would happen if you zapped both of them?” she asked.
“Um, complete brain death in both; I’ve never ever brought an animal into my fold,” Starlight said. “But… I bet I could cleanse the dog first, it used to be friendly.”
Sunset looked at Starlight in disbelief. “I keep forgetting that you were never a dog owner. This is friendly, just the extreme version. If he were infected he wouldn’t protect anybody, same as the humans. Also, he absolutely would have killed that boy and torn his intestines out.”
Starlight stared at Sunset in horror for a bit before nodding.
“Alright, so… zapping both of them and hoping that it doesn’t kill them,” Starlight said before pouring a bit of absinthe into the palm of her hand and giving the bottle to Sunset. “Beast of mind and feral of heart, I command you to rise, to meet my mind on equal terms,” she said as her eyes shimmered purple and her voice reverberated through the alleyway.
Then, a surge of purple-white magic flowed out from her and washed over the two figures in the alleyway.
Rogers swayed, and then fell hard against the wall. The dog just collapsed.
Sunset rushed over, stepping over the dog for now to take the human’s pulse. Then on second thought she turned around and put her fingers against the dog’s neck. “They’re both alive,” she reported. “Always a good sign.”
Starlight was leaning against the wall, flexing her right hand, the palm stained purple.
“Now we just have to hope… that their minds are in just as good shape,” Starlight said with a nervous smile.
Sunset bent over, picking up the trash can lid. Part of one edge had been torn off, leaving it sharp. She hefted it a bit, then nodded, walking past Starlight. “I’ll stand guard,” she said, positioning herself in the alley’s shadow, where she could look out without herself being seen.
Starlight walked over to kneel next to Rogers.
“Hey,” she said as she lifted his head off the ground and brushed his hair out of his eyes. “Hey, um… Mr. Rogers, are you okay? Can you hear me?”
Rogers groaned. “Cousin Betty Lou? Is that you? And could you get me the number of the bus that just ran me over?”
“Nah, it’s…. It’s me, Starlight. The… crazy lady that took you out in the woods for a couple days?” Starlight said, trying to smile. “Someone else messed with you, and… I’m trying to help.”
Rogers sat down on an open trash can. “Oh...that’s OK,” he said distantly, a hand to his head. “At least you were nice about it…” His eyes settled on the dog. “Scooby!” he exclaimed. “Scooby-Doo! How are you!”
The dog itself shook its head slowly, looking up at Rogers. It made a sound. It sounded an awful lot like “shaggy.”
“Oh no,” Sunset muttered to herself.
“Yeah, that’s me! Shaggy!” the human exclaimed. “This is great!”
Starlight’s eyes went wide and she backed away. “Time to go! It worked! Not dealing with that!” she insisted to Sunset.
The two made their way out of the alley and down the street, hands in pockets, whistling.
“So,” Sunset said after they had turned the corner. “What’s the worst case scenario with a talking dog on this planet?”