Summer Shine watched as her friends walked around the farmland, looking for anything they could use to get out of here towards Norwich. From what they had gathered after walking around, they had landed somewhere in Launceton, along miles and miles of farmlands and fields. There hadn’t been any vehicles around, but they were feeling a little better about this current farmhouse, for no apparent reason.
“Sweet, two cars!” Prism ran back from a shed by a white house. “I knew this one was our pot of gold!”
“Neat! But which should we take?” Summer went around the corner to see a red and a blue car, as dusty as they could be, but definitely functional.
“Note down the address of this place,” Sweetie Belle instructed. “We want whoever lives here to be able to find their car again after we take it for a spin to Norwich.”
“Norwich is across the country.” Prism pointed to a map on her phone. “These farmers aren’t going to travel all the way there just to get their car back.”
“It’s still the courteous thing to do.” Sweetie Belle had her Stand appear and she pulled a piece of paper and a pen from it. “Here, I’ll do it, just give me the place.”
After writing a short note for the farmers, the group decided on the red car. Summer, Prism and Jojo piled into the back, while Fuchsia sat in the front with Sweetie Belle, who was the only one who could drive a car.
Once they were all set, she stepped down on the pedal and got them out of the shed, heading down a dusty old road towards civilization. It was a long drive before they even started seeing clusters of buildings, but eventually, they found themselves on a real road with lampposts and lines on the ground. They passed by rivers, bridges, city centrals, looking out the window to look at the English architecture around them. None of them had been to the UK before, and these were all new sights to them. Jojo began snapping pictures of buildings along the way on his phone.
After an hour of driving through the streets silently, the group decided to pass the time by swapping stories of myths or legends. Summer had told her friends of the legend of Gaia Everfree, a spooky campfire story her mother had told her once. It was about an evil spirit who haunted a summer camp’s grounds, taking away unsuspecting campers and of course, horny counselors.
“That doesn’t sound like the right story,” Prism said.
Summer shrugged. “Well, that’s what my mom told me.”
“I’ve got a good one.” Prism planted one foot on top of her other leg. “It’s the legend of the Maneating Mud.”
“I don’t know this one.” Jojo looked up from his homework. Even now, he was busy working on it.
Prism grinned. “Some kids went down to a swamp one night, long after their parents had gone to sleep. No one knew they were there and they decided they wanted to play in the mud. But all of a sudden, it seemed to come alive around them and one by one, it dragged the children under and they could do nothing as they suffocated. Their bones were then consumed by the mud, adding into the horrible, smelly mass. So don’t go playing in swamps at night.”
“That’s… bizarre. But then again, everything we’ve been doing the last few days has been quite bizarre.” Summer nodded. “Interesting story. Fuchsia, do you have one? A myth or legend.”
“Fuchs this…” Was all she said.
“Umm… okay. I guess I have one.” Cajole Joyride cleared his throat. “It might be kinda a real story. This was documented in the family’s sacred texts. One of my ancestors had the Stand ability to see into the future. In the texts, he actually claimed to have seen the end.”
“The end? Of what?” Summer asked.
“Well… The end of the universe,” Jojo continued. “He saw the very end, where everything had converged in on itself in some supermassive extinction event. There, only one sanctuary remained, and it was but an asteroid in a field of nothing, kept going by The Last Stand. The end of all things, and even then, there were still people trying to prevent the end, even though they lived in it.”
“Sounds a bit too far-fetched for me. The end of the whole universe?” Prism made a face. “I mean, yeah, I believe the world will end one day, but everything else? All the other planets? The stars? Don’t planets keep forming from time to time?”
“You know, I don’t actually know. Good thing I’m not being tested on it.” Jojo scribbled a note on his homework sheet. “I shall find out once this is all over. Maybe I can write my thesis on it.”
“What happened to this ancestor of yours? Surely he must’ve gone crazy from seeing so far into the future.”
“He did, actually. He gouged his eyes out. Then he danced on the roof naked and yelled down to people in the streets below to stop bullying little kids, for whatever reason. I don’t know. That’s all the texts say. And this was close to a hundred years ago.”
“Hundred years ago, huh?” Prism looked to Summer. “Sushi, I wonder if anyone else had come through before your mom did. I mean, after the time of the Nugget People at least, since they seem to be the first recorded Stand users or something.”
“I wouldn’t know, and I doubt my mom would know that too.” Summer gave her another shrug. “Hey, Sweetie Belle, you have any such myths? I mean, since you’re older and all, you’ve definitely heard more than we have.”
“You know, I actually do have some,” she chuckled as the changed lanes on the road. “My friends, Apple Bloom, Scootaloo and I used to be truth seekers at one point when we were trying to find out what we were good at. We would go explore old warehouses, hospitals, even caves. It was in one of these caves that we had gone spelunking that we had found symbols of an ancient cult or something. From what we could gather, they worshipped something monstrous from another plane and they believed one day, this monster would enter our world and destroy everything and bring it all into some kind of new age.”
“Wow… I think that’s actually worse than Jojo’s ancestor’s vision.” Summer looked at the others and they all nodded together.
“Hey, the end of the universe? I’d like that,” Fuchsia suddenly said from the front. “Then we’d all be done with this pitiful existence.”
“Umm…” Jojo had no reply for that. “So Sweetie, what did you do with this discovery? How come we haven’t heard about it, you know, on the news or something. Surely you’re famous after discovering something like that.”
“I guess we were for a while,” she laughed as they entered another highway. “But we were just kids when we found it, and we didn’t know nuts about all this, nor did we go on to research it. We just left it to the smarter people to continue on for us, you know, scientists and the government and all that. Oh, yeah so, uh, I’m not supposed to have told you anything about that. So don’t go spreading it, alright?”
Everyone in the back shared a laugh.
Then the car sputtered and everyone looked to the front as it began to slow down.
“Oh, uh…” Sweetie Belle twisted around in her seat to face her passengers. “We’re out of gas.”
--—----JO-JO—------
“At least we still had your Stand.” Prism lounged back in a purple sofa. “This is more comfortable anyway.”
“Just kill me now…” Fuchsia Blush groaned and buried her face in a pillow.
The car died somewhere along the way to London and they had to leave it where it was, though Sweetie Belle had left another note on it, seeing as its owner would most likely head to Norwich instead of wherever the car was.
With no other mode of transport and not wanting to steal a car in broad daylight on the city streets, the group opted to travel using REO Speedwagon, at least till they found somewhere more secluded to steal another car. According to Sweetie, her Stand was invisible unless it started sucking up non-Stand users, so that was why they could see it on the plane, and how no one else was reacting to a walking backpack right now.
Its speed was roughly that of a rather fit walking person. It was a lot slower than a car, but at least it was getting them where they needed to go, though everyone was starting to get bored.
“I’m bored…” Fuchsia groused and began twirling the handle of a fishing rod. “This day couldn’t get any worse.”
“Pretty sure it could,” Prism said.
“I doubt it.”
The sun was already setting by now and they were no closer to getting to the other side of London, but at least they were safe. Since the airplane, there had been no other signs of Weather Alternate. Summer hoped that meant that the enemy had no idea where they were and Blueblood had just been a fluke. She wouldn’t mind going on with the rest of the journey to Germany without an enemy Stand in their way.
When night finally fell, the group went around the outskirts of the city, searching for unattended cars away from cameras. They had recently learned that London had tons of cameras and not wanting to become international criminals, they opted to keep looking, and they eventually found a row of vehicles away from the cameras just outside the city along a grimey and dark road.
There were a bunch of cars Prism liked, but in the end, they had to take a silver car that had enough comfortable room for all of them; the last car was a rather tight one.
Once they obtained their ride, the group continued making their way to Norwich, using the cover of night to get through the streets quicker.
Summer had shut her eyes for a minute to rest them, but when she opened them again, she realized it was already morning and they were now parked outside a low one-storey building made of bricks and the rest of her group were also in the midst of stirring.
“Where are we?” Summer asked as she stretched her arms to remove her soreness. Sleeping in a car wasn’t the best of ideas.
“We’re here. This is Norwich.” Sweetie Belle yawned. “Took us about three hours to get here, then we spent the rest of the night sleeping.”
“Wow.” Summer popped open the car door to stretch her legs. “Great work, Sweetie Belle.”
“What can I say, someone had to drive.” She smiled and raised her arms, then she pointed to a small off-white building ahead. “Anyway, that’s where we can find a ride to get us across the ocean.”
“Not long now. We’ll be at Rotterdam soon enough.” Jojo stuffed his books into his bag and climbed out. “That’ll be one step closer to putting an end to Weather Alternate’s plans.”
Tenacious D appeared beside him and he high-fived his Stand.
“Yeah.” Summer thought back to her friends’ stories of the end of everything and she shuddered to think what Weather Alternate’s release of the Nugget People could spell for them. She hoped it wouldn’t be anything like Jojo’s and Sweetie Belle’s stories.
--——JO-JO——--
As Summer Shine and her group marched their way onto a fairly decent-sized yacht, a figure joined in with the crowd, pulling her hat low as she walked past the captain ushering his passengers on. Frizzy purple hair jutted out from under her cap and she had on a grey jacket to stave off the cold air, along with striped gloves that went all the way up her arm under her sleeves. A silver piercing hung off the edge of her bottom lip and she smiled to herself as she found a seat by the port side, giving her a good view of everyone else coming on board, including her targets.
After the whole airplane fiasco with Blueblood, they had lost track of the daughter of Sushi and her friends, but by a stroke of luck, they had decided to ring their folks back home in Canterlot, giving Weather Alternate their location. Now that they knew Sushi’s plan to stop them, there would be no pause, no reprieve. She and anyone else after her would come down hard on this Sushi’s group and they would do everything in their power to ensure they never get to Germany.
Gloriosa Daisy was in charge of the task force to end their lives for the deaths of her brother, her brother’s girlfriend, her brother’s girlfriend’s brother, and of course, that cute little purple dog that everyone was so sour about.
But Gobble Gab wasn’t part of this task force. Born and raised in Germany, she was part of the inner circle of Weather Alternate and she answered only to her master, Dolfy Horner. It was just too bad for Gloriosa that she nor her team would get the satisfaction of ending Sushi’s group. By the time their ship got to the other side of the water, every single person on the ship would already be dead.