Canterlot
Fifteen years ago
The flash was gone, now, Twilight's eyes slowly adjusting to the room where herself and the five elements stood, betrayed by the traitorous sixth. A madmare, a madmare. That was what she was. Too insane to even be called a traitory, whose head was stuck bucking and not understanding true duty, just as she had when she ran from Ponyville to work for money on a cherry farm. But she'd learn, now that the process was completed... Now that she was able to figure out what had happened to the princess.
Twilight Sparkle slowly focused on the shape in the center of the room, lying motionless without breath. A pink mare, her hair deflated, and body oddly still. She was silent. Twilight absently moved her hooves, slowly pushing past the fog over her senses and approaching, the exertion of the spell evident in her slowness of movement. Pinkie had still not moved.
Twilight's heart beat a little faster, and she reached out a hoof to the mare, slowly shaking it back and forth to make the party pony awaken, the one she'd been forced to substitute for Applejack. It wasn't her first choice, and certainly wouldn't be good, but she had no other option. She shook again, and still Pinkie Pie did not move.
Her heart was pounding, now.
A second hoof, and she pulled hard with both. Pinkie rolled, her legs stiff, and faced in Twilight's direction. Her forehooves were sprawled, and her face contorted in pain rather than a smile: Something Twilight had never seen in all her time with the other pony. But above all, the fact that her arms or legs or oddly glassy eyes hadn't moved told her everything. And she cried, then.
Her body was grayer, less colorful, and her eyes were glassy and sad, almost nothing like the Pinkie she'd known and love. And that smile, that lovely smile, was peeled even further back to show her dead gums, somewhat devoid of color. Her bod-corpse, she corrected herself with her scientist's mind. She had died because she wasn't strong.
Pinkie was dead. All because of the traitor.
The damn traitor.
Traitors. Every Earth Pony a traitor. There was no other option. Twilight's tears slowly dripped onto the floor, and she sat there a long time like that, oblivious to the rest. Her spell had failed, she of all ponies had failed. And it had costed two friends, at this point. Slowly, her eyes turned to observe the rest of them.
---
Long Beach
"Fire at will, dammit!" Commander Downey shouted to the rest of the crew, his loud voice masking his inner fears. The crew moved at lightning speed, the threat directly out the window obvious and confusing for all. One laughed hysterically, but the ringing of a pistol firing from outside a hatch told everyone that it was real - Or, to be specific, GMC Holland did. Only minutes ago, they were bouncing in rough seas and practically puking up half their bodily fluids. Now, the solid waste decided it was time to leave, as the face of a screaming beast met them as they awoke, four of them pressed close to the glass, the sound shaking the very floor. Or, it was, until BM1 Kovac pushed the throttle to flank, making the ship pitch backwards and bite the water, pushing both the beast and the ship to nearly thirty knots. It hollered in greater anger, and crew on the bridge covered their ears. The Commander included himself in this group, but his mind was still processing the situation.
Hostiles everywhere, weapons envelope breached, and only one weapon availiable. He looked to the Fire Controlman, who briefly removed his hands from his ears, and while wincing in horrific audio-related pain, pulled the trigger. It only got worse as a single 57mm round ripped into the thing's neck, sending one of its heads in two pieces. A cheer erupted as the noise died down, only for the other three to grow angry, their oddly human appearances only worse. One swung its head at the turret, making a loud clank, and the other two glared at the crew.
A loud crack against the hull told them all that needed to be said, the ringing reverberating all up the hull, and especially in the bridge which bore the attack's brunt. These creatures were obviously too weak to breach the hull, but the windows were another story. One of them shattered, and a tongue grabbed around inside, trying to nab someone. Holland leaned back inside, his pistol smoking in the cold air, and pulled the trigger again. The creature's loud roar was louder with it's mouth lip-locking the window, and the crew grabbed hard for their ears. Another two rounds, and the creature's blood repainted the puke and coffee-stained deck.
The heads withdrew, and the creature screamed again. Another few puffs from the Mark 110 Mod 4 cannon reduced that, momentarily, as blood and bone spilled onto the deck, a severed neck and head collapsing in a pile, and another growing from the same point, screaming all the while. Downey stared momentarily, and looked over at Kovac. "Back water. Emergency." He said, and the crewman looked puzzled. A second later, in realization, he nodded. The entire ship lurched, the engines screeched, and the ship suddenly slowed, the monster losing its balance and disappearing over the front, as the ship slowed to a halt. Everyone breathed easy for a moment, and Julia Ranas voiced the entire crew's concerns:
"What the hell just happened?"
---
Her eyes turned as a blue shape shifted and fidgeted, slowly rising from the ground. Her rainbow mane was different, somehow, and her face seemed a bit different on the side laying on the ground. And then she faced toward Twilight. She looked with her one good eye at Pinkie's dead body, and then at Twilight. Her eyes narrowed, and eyebrows wrinkled, lost in a moment of clear thought before the inevitable next step came. Then those eyes widened in surprise and understanding, and quickly turned to a face of anger and hatred.
"You killed her." She said, with plain, even malice. Her eyes flicked between the body, though only one saw it. The other was an echo, a mirror shattered. Covered in red scarring the likes of which she'd never seen in her life. Not even on Guard combat veterans who had been wounded protecting Celestia had she ever seen much scarring. All her fault. All Twilight Sparkle's fault, and Rainbow Dash blamed her now.
"No, the traitor killed her." Said Twilight, crying once more. Rainbow just scoffed.
"At least she had dignity!" She said, her face contorting with anger before she cried out in pain, a hoof to her face. "What the buck have you done to me, Twilight?!" She screamed, her voice carrying across the royal chamber. Her head twisted, her face grimacing at the motion, and observed herself in the grand mirror intended to let the Alicorn see herself. Instead, all Rainbow Dash saw was a monster. A half-normal half-mess Pegasus, like some sort of demon-pony hybrid doomed to Tartarus.
"I've only failed because she failed us in loyalty, Rainbow Dash!" Twilight yelled back, trying to regain her composure. Dash only snorted and got angrier. "Fine! Come kill me then, traitor! Join her, if you want!" Said Twilight, her horn glowing once more.
"No, I don't think so!" Dash screamed back. "Maybe you've gone too far, Twi. Too much pressure trying to run the country. You've driven one of us out. When does it end?"
"We must have princesses! We MUST!" Twilight retorted, a hoof stuck to the air. "We must find the old ones, and the only way is with new blood!"
"You can't go testing spells on ponies! You've..." Rainbow suddenly turned sullen and approached the Pink mare. "...by Celestia, Twi. You've killed the only innocent mare in all of Equestria. How do you MURDER the Element of Laughter?"
"By betraying your friends by feeling lied to." The Element of Magic retorted. "She's a threat to the realm, Rainbow. What're you going to do about it?"
"Deal with you, first!" She said, flashing a mottled red hoof at Twilight, connecting hard. Blood seeped quickly from her nose. "We were never friends! Not ever!" Rainbow's wings flapped hard, and she was airborne. "I don't know who you think you were, but all I ever saw was somepony trying too hard to make magic fix all of her problems. All that seems to have done is created more, and go BUCK yourself. I'm going to Cloudsdale, and when I'm done the princesses will have an Equestria WORTHY of their ruling!" She screamed down at the purple pony, and disappeared in a motion blur of technicolor. Twilight's already ruffled personality broke once more, and she shuffled slowly to the mirror, a change to her appearance noted as well: a wavy tattoo of white arcane marks adorning most of her face.
Star-Swirl the Bearded had said that the greatest of mages developed such marks, a symbol of their unmatched spellcasting during an especially trying spell. She'd developed hers like a second Cutie Mark. And it had meant the spell portion wasn't the problem. Or so she thought, until her eyes drifted to an unconscious white mare.
---
It had been an hour. An hour of nervous waiting, of sonar searches, and of arming up. The 2030s Navy was very much a multiaspect force, supplementing its original role as ship crew with the additional olden-days role of combat infantry. Never to the extent of a standard infantryman, of course, but enough to get by. To put on the vest and the pads and load the rifle and shoot it, mostly, plus some basic tactics.
Which was all that was applicable when facing huge monsters, really. The beauty of the LCS design, and especially the LCS2, is its capacity to carry large amounts of cargo for high distances. In this case, it happened to be a platoon of Navy Riverine personnel, who were currently buzzing around the ship, their heavily armed Small Unit Riverine Craft bristling with miniguns and heavy machine guns, everyone awaiting the great monster's return.
Chief Holland and his CO were sailing about, each leading three of the six craft to provide 360 degree coverage of Long Beach while she sailed to war. For the rest of the crew, snapping on the spare equipment and gear from the ship's locker took up most of their time, black and tan vests quickly snapping over their blue and grey camouflage, and helmets quickly joining them on their heads. Rifles and handguns quickly snapped into place and were slung, the bridge crew not needing the larger weapons and opting for a lighter sidearm.
But that was only a secondary backdrop to the conversation going on in the wardroom. The conversation that ultimately overshadowed all the other hushed rumors and not-so-hushed freaking out all across the small boat. 13 Officers sat in the wardroom, 7 from the Long Beach and 6 from the embarked Helo, which was deemed too critical to risk on the flight deck against the creature.
"...I'm just saying, Sir." Said one of the Co-Pilots from the Helo unit. "It's a little far fetched to go off of a dream you got when we went through a storm that knocked everybody else out. I had weird dreams too, does that make them real?"
"I understand you." Said Commander Holland. His rather youthful face for his ripe age of thirty seven, and his now-armored blue camouflage was strapped with a rifle and magazines. He'd be the first commander in perhaps a century to repel boarders. "But it seemed about as legitimate as flinging through a portal in an ungodly and nearly flash storm we ran into in the mid atlantic. Stuff like that just doesn't happen. Portals don't happen. Krakens, Lieutenant, do not happen."
"Fair enough, sir."
"So where are we, then?" Asked Lieutenant Ranas, her eyes drifting across the rest of the wardroom. That was, again, the question on all their minds. Where the hell were they?
"They weren't specific. Just that it was their world, that we needed to restore harmony, and that there were unjustly oppressed people here. And I believe we all recall the last line of the Sailor's Creed?" He said, looking about. Most of them nodded, except for a few who were just too shellshocked to pay attention.
"Look, I'm not saying let's just go ahead and charge in blindly. But we're not going to get back if a diety of some sort-"
"Hold on." Said the XO. "Are we really suggesting that gods are no-"
"We're suggesting alot of things that don't make any fucking sense, sir." Said the one enlisted man in the room, Senior Chief Will Costanza, the ship's highest ranking enlisted man.
"Damn straight, Chief." Said Ranas. "We just need a plan of action besides letting big monster stalk us."
"I agree. We're going to use the radar and start mapping for terrain." He said, looking to the sensors officer.
"It's doable, Sir." He said. "I'm not a fan of what it does to regular detection capabilities, but in a world with Hydras that may not necessarily be a concern."
"Make it fast." Said the Commander. "We need to lose this bastard in a nice harbor."
"What if the world is empty?" Asked one of the pilots, a shellshocked one. "What if we're alone?"
"Like the deities said, Ell-Tee," Said the Senior Chief, "We've got people to oppress. We don't just go through a magic megastorm portal for no damn reason. There's a purpose."
"Right." Said the Commander. "In the mean time, get your divisions ready, have the gun stocked, man the fifties, and keep the boat ready for emergency SURC recovery. Have one RHIB team ready to rescue anyone knocked overboard if it comes again. I miss anything?" The Skipper asked, turning to the Senior.
"Not that I see, sir." He retorted. The Skipper nodded and stood.
"Dismissed."
---
Sometime later, Chief Holland was on patrol still. His hydrogen-electric motor was negligibly auditory, and the calm seas were all that met his ears as the motorboat made another lazy 3km circle around the Long Beach, hunting for whatever it was that had attacked them earlier.
The sea began to pitch some, like a great mass was displacing it from below, and he looked from the minigun to the driver, and his fellow gunners. His head bobbed, and they bobbed theirs as well. Weapons were cocked, radios used, and sights aligned. And then an orange shape breached the waves. An orange flash echoed from his gun, and red filled the water and his vision.