Sunset and Starlight trudged their way into the city of Milwaukee to make their final stand.
[The scholars who have studied the manuscript over the past two centuries are split on the reasons why the pair chose to make their final stand here of all places. Some claim that there was no better reason than the fact that this was the closest city to the origin of the outbreak. Others, more cynical, claimed it was so they would have plenty of beer for their eventual victory celebration. As for me, I think they were there to sightsee the future filming locations for Laverne & Shirley.]
Sunset grabbed a newspaper from a smashed-in machine. It was dated May 1, 1970—three days ago. The lead story was so incredible that Sunset suspected that the editor may have already been succumbing to Marcus’ madness: the three-month long stand-off between the U.S. Army and several thousand mothers of soldiers serving in Vietnam to end the war immediately had ended, as President Nixon had ordered a squadron of bombers to “nuke that fucking school into the Stone Age.” Casualties were expected to reach one million, and included all of the soldiers that Nixon had refused to evacuate, just to ensure that there would be no survivors.
"Are we sure that Marcus knows we're here? No groaning hordes of zombified former friends wandering around to remind me of how much of a failure I am," Starlight said as she kicked a can out of the street with a clatter.
Sunset slapped her on the back. “Congratulations!” she said. “You managed to fill yourself with self-pity without us having to be confronted by a bunch of zombies. Now we can skip that plot point altogether!”
"It's not self pity, it's a general disillusionment with power structures, there's a difference," Starlight said as she tried to brush her long tangled hair out of her face to take another sip of her green bottle of absinthe, once used for magic and now used for the much more mundane art of obliterating a young woman's ability to feel.
Sunset snatched away the bottle. “I think you’ve had quite enough of that, young lady.” She took a sniff of the air. “Besides, the air is so saturated by alcohol that you might not need any other help in that department.” With a frown, she held the bottle up to the light and tapped it on the side a few times with a fingernail. “I keep expecting the fabled ‘green fairy’ to show up in there.”
Starlight pouted as she reached out one hand towards the bottle.
"It's hallucinogenic," Starlight sighs, wiggling her fingers towards the bottle but not causing it to zip into her hand like she'd hoped. "The green fairy's what some people see. I see octarine instead," she said proudly, putting her hands on her hips and sashaying down the deserted street.
Sunset put the bottle away in her knapsack, which let Starlight pull ahead of her. After a shrug, she followed at a small distance, improvising a little dance as a counterpoint to Starlight’s “sashay” as she went.
"So," the partly-inebriated woman declared, loud enough for it to echo. "We find a place, hole up, then when He and His army show up, we turn 'em all back, right?"
“Well yeah, but you’re not supposed to say it out loud!”
"Oh, right," Starlight giggled as she stopped walking. "So… pretend I didn't. Ooohhh, that's a nice skirt."
Without consulting the pony-turned-human who had kept her alive this far, Starlight dashed into a thrift store to examine the clothes on display, talking loudly about Communist Color Theory.
“I thought Communist Color Theory was ‘everything goes great with red, Comrade,’” Sunset quipped.
Starlight just grinned in response, holding up a very short skirt with a red stripe on its purple. She then started stripping off her more modest skirt to try it on.
Sunset blushed and turned away.
"I think we find a bank to set up at," Starlight declared as she hunted for a belt to hold up the too-loose skirt. "Big heavy walls. Lots of room for brainwashed minions."
“Again, I’ll pretend you didn’t say that out loud,” Sunset said, her head still turned away. “I should have taken the bottle away an hour ago.”
"Right," Starlight groaned.
She then fell very quiet, as clothes rustled and she clearly made 'getting dressed noises' until finally she put a hand on Sunset's shoulder and turned her around, revealing Starlight with a bit of duct tape over her mouth, a very short skirt held up by a black studded belt, and a trench coat that went down to her ankles, grinning behind her makeshift gag.
Sunset looked, then blanched—there were some very forbidden spells in Celestia’s private library that looked exactly like duct tape over a mouth, despite the absence of duct tape in Equestria. She grabbed Starlight by the shoulders, kissed her gently on the tape-covered lips, and then ripped the tape off while Starlight was still stunned. “Please don’t do that,” she said.
"You kissed me," Starlight observed in a daze. “It’s been awhile.”
“It was a while coming,” Sunset said after a pause. She then paused again, as the words she said shocked her a bit. “And you really needed it right now.”
"Okay," Starlight said with a slight smile, nodding. "Lead the way, my Femme Fatale."
Sunset looked out the window of the store. Above was gray sky, from which snowflakes were steadily falling in a gentle stream onto black asphalt piled with white snow. It was a black and white world, perfect for a film noir. “I can live with that title,” she declared. She then picked up and donned a fedora and walked out of the door of the store. The image was marred a bit by the price tag dangling from the back of the hat.
Perhaps utterly shattered by the young drunk woman following after her in a riot of bright colors, grinning in a way that noone ever grinned in a film noir.
A few hours later, a couple dozen zombies pushed their way into the bank that the pair had picked out. Sunset, hiding behind some curtains at the front of the bank, stepped out to close the door behind them, while Starlight appeared in front of them from out of the vault.
Quickly, Starlight poured some absinthe into her hand while reciting the verse.
The zombies slowed down to look at each other for a bit, before advancing slowly towards her with menacing expressions and animalistic groans.
“Quick, Sunset, I need a magnifier!” Starlight declared.
Sunset looked around her, and the zombies who separated her from Starlight. “We can’t touch,” she said.
“You’ve got something else, you’ve got to! Chant a spell!”
“Bricka bracka, firecracker, sis boom bah! Bugs—”
Starlight stamped her foot in frustration—sometimes Sunset just didn’t know when to be serious. “...How about a chant that didn’t come from a Warners Brothers cartoon?”
Sunset pouted. “But I really liked that one,” she said. “Seriously though, Equestrian chants are more of a zebra thing. I don’t know any.”
Starlight thought for a bit, walking backwards so the zombies couldn’t reach her. The warmth of the bank seemed to be slowing them down. “Why don’t you sing? Ooh, can you do magic through singing?”
“Yes,” said Sunset, with a bit of a pout that Starlight didn’t notice.
“Then sing! Something Equestrian.”
“No,” said Sunset. “A human song for humans.” She took in a rapid breath through her nose, creating a sort of reverse snort...in the key of F.
“When the night...has come,” she started to sing as she closed her eyes. “And the land is dark. And the moon...is the only...light we see.”
Starlight’s jaw dropped open in awe. Sunset’s speaking voice was raspy, and really it sounded best when she was using it to yell in anger. But her singing voice...her singing voice was the voice of a genderless angel.
And more than that, the voice was somehow accompanied by the strumming of an ethereal bass. Starlight noticed that Sunset had one hand upraised, and its fingers were moving as if to hold down the frets of each note.
The zombies froze in place, utterly silent. And then, when Sunset hit the chorus and began to gently sway, they began to sway as well. There was a bright glow all around Sunset, making it hard for Starlight to see clearly. Through the aura, Starlight was not entirely sure that Sunset was still completely human, ears peeking up from her hair, and was that a tail?
“If the sky...that we look upon,” Sunset said, beginning the second verse of Ben E. King’s “Stand By Me”. She opened her glowing eyes and started pointedly at Starlight.
“Oh!” she exclaimed, and went back into her own chant. This time, she had to work to hold back the magic, to free instead of to re-enslave.
By the second verse the zombies, now human again, were singing the chorus along with both Sunset and Starlight.
When Sunset reached the orchestral interlude she gestured to Starlight like she was throwing something. A semi-transparent violin and bow appeared before Starlight, so she “grabbed” them and started playing. She was both in control of the instrument and at the same time not as the melody pulled her along. The violin disappeared when its part was finished.
The entire group sang and danced through the rest of the song in celebration. When it ended, the freed humans sank down to the ground to rest. Sunset’s aura faded, and she was human again.
Starlight nodded. “Their time as animalistic zombies must have taken a lot out of them.” She walked through the group to confront Sunset. “Now how come I never saw you sing before?”
Sunset visibly shuddered. “I…” she sang. She coughed, and then resumed in her speaking voice. “I don’t really like singing. It’s kind of a drug for ponies.”
Starlight leaned against a desk. “Tell me more…”
“Well,” Sunset explained uneasily, “ponies are herd animals, like you’d expect ponies to be. And that means they like being told what to do, what to think...what to feel. And songs are basically how they brainwash each other. If a pony fell in love, they’d celebrate the fact by pulling the whole village into a happy song...whether they like it or not. Way too many ponies get off on being in song trances. I consider Princess Celestia’s most-noble trait to be the fact that I have never heard her singing. Since of course if she did she could make any pony in Equestria do whatever she wanted.”
Starlight held up a hand for Sunset to stop as she tried to fully absorb this information.
"If she wished, through no fault of her own, your leader could bond together your entire species into a singleminded purpose and drive their actions to accomplish it," Starlight interpreted. "Right?"
“Until she stopped singing,” Sunset answered.
"The sheer self control…" Starlight whispered. "I… you know that singing is enjoyable on it's own, right? Singing and dancing make humans feel good. That's just a fact."
“Yeah, well ponies are fueled by cookies and pastries, and we turn musical numbers into reality-altering miracles. We’re basically a Rankin-Bass special come to life,” Sunset quipped. Starlight could see though, how much this troubled her. How it might not have even occurred to her back when she herself was using her voice to get whatever she wanted.
Starlight nodded, setting aside the thoughts for now to take Sunset's hand.
"Okay. I'll try not to ask you to sing again. I can tell it bothers you a lot."
Sunset put on a wan smile. “But I saw how much you enjoyed it,” she said, squeezing Starlight’s hand back. “Maybe when we’re alone—it’s less overpowering that way.”
"Yeah," Starlight nods, smiling. "Yeah that'd be good. Then maybe when you take me to ponyland, I'll ask Celestia how she keeps herself from singing occasionally."
Sunset nodded, looking away so Starlight could not see her dismayed reaction—she had just realized that Starlight was probably going to have to stay.
“Well, the good news is that Step 2 of our plan went off without a hitch. Easy peasy.” Then Sunset looked over at the group of humans, their joy during the song now turned to sorrow, who were now their responsibility. “Oh,” she said in realization. “New problem. What do we do with these guys?”
"Listen up!" Starlight barked, getting all of their attention easily. "After bringing about the end of the world, I'm rethinking my positive stance on cult behavior and mind control. I know, shocking. But I'm basically out of magic now! And Sunset has been teaching me uh…"
She paused as she tried to figure out how to sum it all up.
"The magic of being unified, but not so unified that you all literally hear me in your head," she spread out her arms apologetically. "So! If anyone wants to chill here or go rough it on their own out there, I get it. I'll still love you, you can still come back to the compound once it's safe, and I'm not doing the whole brainwashy thing. But! If any of you actually genuinely want to help…"
Starlight took a slow breath, and clasped her hands in front of her, wondering if her former friends would just hang her.
"I'm completely powerless, and linking up with me would help me save more people again…"
A big burly man still wearing the work jumpsuit belonging to the Pabst Blue Ribbon brewery stepped forward. “Hey, I don’t know exactly what you’re talking about, but you just saved us all from slavery. I wouldn’t mind helping you out in trying to save the rest of humanity.” A number of other men and women nodded in agreement.
"It's somewhat more morally complicated than that but I see your point," Starlight nodded. “We’re looking for the headquarters of a man named Marcus, who—”
“Hey, is that the guy responsible for this?!” the man I’m now calling “Pabst” asked. (Hey, let’s be grateful the guy didn’t work for Schlitz.) “Let’s get that guy and smash his face in!”
The rest of the crowd quickly and enthusiastically agreed with this plan, picking up pens and random desk planners for use as weapons.
Starlight was stunned, and couldn’t come up with something to say to diffuse the situation.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Sunset cried, stepping in front of her friend. “We’ve got a way to go before we can just ‘storm the castle’.”
“Let’s storm the castle!”
“I just said…” Sunset calmed herself. “We can’t jump to extreme measures, Sunset. A crisis like this needs to be…” She stopped herself on realizing who she was quoting, word-for-word, then turned to look back at her friend. “Mark this moment, Starlight,” she said ruefully. “For it was the moment I realized that I had turned into Celestia.”
The mood of the angry mob had been broken, more by confusion than by good logic.
“Alright in that case, how can we help?” asked a woman holding Pabst’s arm. Pabst’s woman, I guess we can call her.
Starlight sighed, gently pushing Sunset aside. "Okay, so first off magic is real, as you've seen, and I have the ability to borrow magic from other people."
The woman seemed even more confused, and seemed to tune out the conversation, her mood turning a bit blue. Pabst's blue woman, if you will.
As she spoke, Starlight walked around the group, having each one sip from the green bottle she'd stolen back from her friend, the word "friend" here standing in several times for the much longer phrase "potential love interest who you care for so deeply you would deny your own feelings to retain their friendship" as is well known throughout the historical and archeological community.
But as she had them drink, she paused, realizing two of them had no need to do so. Claire and Sam, two of her cult members. Claire was still wearing her robes, but Sam was dressed in jeans and a hoodie, half-hidden under the hood, but he didn’t look away from Starlight. She almost stopped right then to talk to them, but she wanted to get the group on board first, so she just clasped their hands and smiled instead of having them drink, when it came their turns.
"So as long as you all stick with me, and…" Starlight hesitated a moment. "And believe in how much I care about all of you, it'll help me be more powerful, able to free more people. But it means we have to stick together… Like herd animals! Like p—"
“Like a herd of big powerful Clydesdales,” Sunset added.
“Oh, like those ones on the Budweiser commercials?” one of the other men asked. “I love those commercials.”
“Budweiser isn’t made in Milwaukee,” Pabst grumbled. “But yeah, OK, I get what you’re saying.”
"Great! Let's get going and find—"
Sunset was cut off by Starlight putting her hand over her mouth, grinning.
"I thought we weren't supposed to say the plan out loud?" Starlight asked cheekily.
Sunset giggled, but then stopped. Starlight wished she hadn’t stopped.
Slowly she let her fingers fall away, and she turned back to the group.
“Alright,” Starlight said, clearing her throat. “Let’s go to the town hall, see if he’s there, then we’ll figure out where to head next.”
The group flowed out of the bank, but Starlight stopped Sam and Claire before they could pass her by.
“You… You could leave if you wanted to,” she told them, Sunset pausing at the door.
“I never wanted to leave you,” Claire said angrily. “I never wanted… anything but to be part of your group, to help people, to be part of something.”
“We could feel it when you gave up,” Sam added softly. “It… hurt, like you didn’t really think we could be saved.”
Starlight nodded and took their hands again, holding them firmly.
“I was wrong,” Starlight said, with as much confidence as she could manage. “I was wrong to give up, I was wrong to think we couldn’t do this, but at the same time… I was in your minds, I had too much control, and if you are with me again, it’s never going to be quite like it was. It’ll be more… a circle of friends caring for each other.”
Sam smiled and squeezed her hand. “I like that.”
“I would have kept with you even if you were going to go right back to what it was before,” Claire shrugged. “I knew what I was getting into. But this sounds fine. I’ll be by your side, Starlight.”
With a smile and a nod, Starlight, Sunset, Claire, and Sam brought up the rear of the team as they walked down the center of the street towards City Hall.
“I know it’s a little cold out here,” Sunset called forward. “Maybe you can sing to keep your spirits up? It’s a little late for Christmas carols, but…”
“Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way…” the youngest of the men started singing. The others soon joined in.
Sunset quite deliberately did not join them.
"Christmas carols," Starlight muttered quietly. "The closest thing to song-brainwashing you'll get here. Christmas is bourgeois propaganda and I hate it."
Of course, the word "bourgeois" here stood in for "all the people who Starlight didn't like" in addition to signaling the ownership of the means of production.
Behind them, the crowd started to grow, surrounding the core group of four. Zombies, attracted by the noise, would come running towards them, but would gradually slow down, straighten up, shake their heads, and in the end join the others as free human beings.
Sunset took Starlight’s hand. “Life is an act of interpretation,” she told her. “Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer might be used to sell wrapping paper and empty proofs of one’s love, but you can choose to ignore all that and focus on a little runt who decided to step forward and do the right thing, despite the fact that the reindeer he had to work with were the same ones who bullied him his entire life.”
"So what you're saying is that if the chance ever presents itself, I shouldn't enact Plan Number Sixty Six, and cast a spell wiping Christmas from the public consciousness?" She sighs in response.
“Could you shift it to just eliminating Black Friday?”
"Sadly no, Capitalist greed is more baked into human culture than even religion," Starlight explained as they finally walked up to the stairs of town hall.
Sunset shrugged as she followed her—Equestrian wisdom could only go so far.