“For the record, I’m only doing this because I don’t want Warp to kill me,” Rainbow Dash said, hovering over her friends with her forelegs folded across her chest.
It was nearly midnight, and the rest of the Elements of Harmony were standing on a largish platform of clouds – real clouds, this time – as close to the impact site as Raindrops and Warp thought would be safe. If nothing else, it gave them a wonderful view of the ‘thunderstorm’ in the moonlight – a strange thing, fading from almost nothing at the top into a dark, dense, multi-layered affair that stretched all the way down to the valley, which the earth ponies and unicorns had dammed up with earthworks and sandbags. When the cloud was hit, the rain inside it would be squeezed out and form a lake for a final splash-down, at least in theory.
“Who now?” Applejack asked.
“Oh come on,” Dash said, swooping around to gesticulate wildly in front of Applejack. “How many mares want to kill me? Don’t answer that. I meant the night guard. Bat wings, cloven hooves, pretty good kisser, forget I said that. So, yeah. If you want me to help you blast the inanimate object, I’ll do it, but it’s totally stupid.”
“Well, we don’t have much choice, Rainbow Dash,” Rarity said. “While ideally we’d aim the Rainbow of Harmony at Twilight specifically, she happens to be attacking Equestria inside a metal-hulled air ship.”
“Not air,” Rainbow Dash said. “It’s meant for flying in empty space.”
“Well, if it can fly, then what’s the big idea with all this stormcloud nonsense?” Applejack asked, narrowing her eyes.
“Hello? It’s broken?” Rainbow Dash said.
“Regardless of whether it’s an air ship or a space air ship or a giant metal brick, I doubt we’ll find Twilight waiting for us on the sun deck.” Rarity paused. “Do space air ships have sun decks? It seems like it’d be a shame not to have somewhere to appreciate the sun, given how much closer to it you can get in one.”
“It doesn’t even have windows,” Rainbow Dash said.
“Does it have a force field?” Cherry Berry asked. “Because alien rocket ships in science fiction stories usually have magical force fields. Wouldn’t it be funny if we tried to get Twilight before she could hide by firing at the ship, and she ended up getting away because of a force field?”
“A mere force field will not stop the Elements of Harmony,” Trixie proclaimed. “Right?” she added, as everypony else shuffled around nervously.
“It doesn’t have a forcefield,” Rainbow Dash said. “Not one that works, anyway. It’s *broken*.”
===
On board the broken ship in question, Tess shook her head. “No. Heck no. Isn’t it traditionally the captain that goes down with the ship?”
“The goal is to have the ship not go down,” Chance said.
“I’ll do it!” Pinkie Pie offered. She was still floating in midair, rotating slowly, apparently guided by casual flicks of her poofy pink tail.
“No!” both moon ponies said in unison. “You’d die in the crash,” Tess said. “I would only be horrifically injured in the crash, and probably die later.”
“I’d only die if I crashed,” Pinkie Pie said. “It’s not like I haven’t flown airships before.”
“This is a spaceship,” Chance said.
“For the next one hundred and thirty seven seconds,” Tess added. “After that it’s a giant metal brick.”
“I’ve flown bricks, too!” Pinkie Pie said. “Well, thrown bricks. Okay, cakes. Still, it’s basically the same thing.”
“Tess has a machine in her head that will let her realize what’s happening as the atmosphere buffets the ship, and react in time,” Queen Meanie said, joining the conversation. “You don’t. Without implants, what you’re proposing is wildly improbable, Pinkie Pie. Still,” she said, thoughtfully, “you’ve always been surprisingly successful in making good on unreasonable promises before. Do you really think that you can successfully counteract the turbulent effects of atmospheric drag and keep the ship’s attitude perpendicular to the angle of attack?”
“I have no idea what you just said,” Pinkie Pie replied.
“Sixty seconds,” Tess said. “Nopony is staying behind. Teleport us down, and we’ll worry about the ship later. We’ve got the data core with us,” she indicated the duffle bag next to her, “and everything else important is either broken or redundant. Forty five seconds.”
“Wait. You want the bag, too?” Queen Meanie asked, looking at it askance.
Chance looked worried. “Is that a problem?”
“Distance is logarithmic, but mass is exponential,” the twilight clone said. She closed her eyes, and did a little math in her head. “I’ve got an idea, though. Pinkie -- unhook Sparkles and bring her over to Tess.”
“What?” Tess asked, looking over her shoulders as Pinkie Pie tugged on the other duct-taped unicorn.
“She’s stuck!” Pinkie said.
“Thirty seconds,” Tess said, nervously. She gasped as she realized what was going on, but there was no time to argue, so she unhooked herself and kicked off to fly across the room to join Pinkie Pie and Sparkles. “Right,” she said. “Do it.”
Queen Meanie concentrated on a spell, and a pink glow enveloped Sparkles and Tess – and then the unconscious unicorn collapsed in a puff of glittering dust, sending Pinkie and Tess coughing and waving their arms. “There, that should cut down on our mass. Now get Twilight, and everyone come close!” she said urgently.
Pinkie and Tess darted over to the original Twilight Sparkle, and as Tess counted down, “Ten, nine, eight, seven, six…” they snapped loose the elastic bands and dragged her over to join Chance, now loose and holding the duffle bag, near the remaining duct-taped mirror image. “Five, four,” Tess continued, huddling close along with everypony else as Queen Meanie started to charge her teleport, her horn glowing brighter and brighter. “Three, two –“
The ship bucked two seconds ahead of schedule, and Queen Meanie yelped in surprise. Everything vanished in a pink flash.
===
“I see it!” Fluttershy said quietly. “Girls!” she repeated, at the same soft volume, but the other elements of harmony continued to bicker uselessly.
“We need to stop arguing and start watching the apple-loving skies,” Applejack said.
“I’m not arguing!” Rainbow Dash said. “I’m just complaining!”
“Nopony’s arguing,” Trixie said. “You all agreed to the plan, and every objection has been answered and countered. Was there ever any doubt?”
“Giiiiiiiirls!” Fluttershy screamed as loud as she could. Unfortunately, that was not actually loud enough to be heard.
“Well, now we’re arguing about semantics,” Cherry Berry said. “Does that count?”
“Eww! I didn’t know you worked blue, Cherry,” Rainbow Dash said, darting backwards a few feet in disgust.
Fluttershy pointed desperately at the falling star getting brighter by the second. “Look!”
“Blue Cherry is an abomination,” Cherry Berry said. “It’s mostly apple juice.”
Applejack narrowed her eyes. “And what in the cherry-picking depths of Tartarus is wrong with apple juice?”
Applejack’s words were punctuated by a flash of orange light, as a nearby mountain exploded in flames. A few seconds later, the sound hit, and only her quick reflexes saved her hat as they all hunkered down on the cloud, which was pushed across the sky by the sudden, warm wind. All around the mountains and valleys below, brightly-colored defensive domes lit up as the unicorns in the army acted to protect their squads from flying debris.
Rainbow Dash was left behind, staring at the faintly glowing mushroom cloud rising into the night sky at least a mile away from the thunderstorm they’d meticulously set up to catch Twilight and the others.
“What – what happened?” Rarity asked.
“I’m going to kill her!” Rainbow Dash screamed. “That featherbrain!”
"That was... her?" Trixie asked, staring at the explosion. She closed her eyes, removed her hat, and held it over her chest as she bowed her head.
Cherry Berry reached for Rainbow Dash, then pulled her hoof back, since it fell at least a dozen feet short. “I don’t think that’s really… um…” she trailed off.
Fluttershy flew over to Rainbow Dash, and held her as tears started to form in her eyes.
“Oh, don’t get all weepy,” Rainbow Dash said, waving Fluttershy away. “They’re not dead. The plan was always to teleport to the ground if it looked like the landing was screwed up. But I put my flank on the line to get that cloud built to catch their stupid ship and she missed! Buck you, Tess.”
“Tess?” Rarity asked.
“Oh, right,” Rainbow Dash said. “You don’t know about – Pinkie Pie. What the hay, Pinkie Pie. They never should have let you drive!”
Rarity glared at Rainbow Dash. “Tell us about this ‘Tess’.”
===
In a flash of pink light, Chance, Tess, and Queen Meanie appeared in a field of snow. The ground dropped off sharply, a few feet in every direction, and the wind was bitterly cold. A huge thunderstorm loomed over them from one side, lit by the grinning face of the moon, while other mountain peaks rose all around them, none quite as high as the one they were perched on.
Chance looked around, the cold not bothering him much as his metabolism adjusted. “Where’s Pinkie Pie? And Twilight?”
Queen Meanie was already starting to shiver, when a nearby mountain exploded. “I don’t know–“ she started to say, before the massive roar washed over them with a gust of hot air. A sizzling chunk of rock plunged into the snow, and she put up a shield to protect them from the rest of the incoming shrapnel. “I thought I had them!” she said, staring at the explosion in horror.
“Well,” Chance said. “That’s one way to get a promotion. I guess we can call you Twilight Sparkle now?”
The purple bolt of magic hit Chance right in the chest, throwing him into the air, where another bolt slammed into his crotch and lifted him higher. A third bolt to his chin. A fourth to his belly. They didn’t really *hurt*, but by the time the infuriated Twilight clone – who’d somehow managed to light her mane and tail on fire – stopped juggling him in midair, he’d been pushed back far enough that he didn’t land on the peak. He had time for a brief scream before something grabbed him roughly by the tail, whipped him around in midair, and slammed him face-first into the snow next to a terrified Tess.
-Little help here?- he sent to her, as the snow around him rose into the air and started forming itself into a ring of ice spears, while a purple field held him helplessly in place.
Tess threw a snowball, splatting across Queen Meanie’s face. The ice spears clattered to the ground, the field dissipated, and her flames extinguished, leaving her standing there blinking haplessly at the two moon ponies.
Chance leapt at her, claws outstretched, only to be pulled short by Tess’ hand around his ankle. Both of them fell into the snow awkwardly, followed quickly by the purple, sobbing unicorn.
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” she sniffled, looking at them with watery eyes. Which went wide and sparkly as a rainbow arced down from a small tuft of silvery cloud, briefly lighting up the mountain valley as bright as day, and plunged into the column of smoke rising from the impact site. There was an explosion of rainbow light, and a gentle tinkling noise that somehow they were able to hear from miles away, and when it faded, the smoke and fire were gone. They walked to the edge to get a better look, but somewhat to their disappointment there was still a crater in the side of the mountain, and no sign of the Here to Help.
“It didn’t fix the ship,” Queen Meanie said, “but maybe…”
She vanished in a flash of light, leaving the two Moon Ponies stranded on the mountaintop.
“So, Tess,” Chance said, glancing at his companion. “Or should I call you Sparkles?”
“Sparkles is sleeping,” Tess said. “Sparkles will continue sleeping until I decide to let my implants give her a time slice to execute her personality.”
Chance nodded. “So she played it straight. What are you planning on doing with your guest?”
Tess shrugged. “Virtual playmate?” She scowled, realizing how that sounded. “I mean, I’ve got a few game worlds loaded, and unless we somehow get back to civilization there aren’t many other places to put her that would resemble anything she’d know how to relate to.”
“No chance of her taking control of your body, then?” Chance asked.
Tess gave him a look. “One dead, one crazy, and one uploaded. You have officially struck out with Twilight Sparkle.”
===
“There, we made the rubble bounce, and apparently stop being on fire, which I guess is kind of useful,” Rainbow Dash said, as the draining effect of using the Elements of Harmony faded enough for her to catch her breath. “Can we go find Twilight now?”
“And Tess,” Rarity muttered, taking slow, measured breaths as she lay down on the cloud, gathering her strength for a graceful rise from where she’d collapsed. Having all the elements present at least seemed to have kept them from passing out.
“And Pinkie Pie,” Cherry Berry said, holding a hoof to the side of her head. “I think I’m ready to give her her element back.” Fluttershy looked at her, surprised but hopeful, and Cherry grinned. “By which I mean, blast her in the face!” Fluttershy looked as if she’d been blasted in the face, and Cherry looked away and started carefully studying the moonlit crater.
“I don’t know how you’re planning on finding her,” Applejack said, spreadeagle on the cloud with her eyes closed and a pained look on her face. “She could be halfway to Canterlot by now.”
“We should have been on the lookout for signs of teleportation,” Trixie said, “but somepony—“ she glared at Rainbow Dash “—neglected to tell us of that contingency before it was too late.”
“Found her!” Cherry Berry said, pointing. “Pink Flash at crater-o-clock.”
“Of course!” Trixie proclaimed. “The villain always returns to the scene of the crime! Elements, form up – RAINBOW DASH, GET BACK HERE!” Of course, by the time she’d finished her sentence Rainbow Dash was halfway to the crater.
“So now what?” Cherry Berry asked, then gripped the edge of the cloud tightly as it started to move towards the crater, as fast as Fluttershy could manage.
“Not sure it’d be such a hot idea to fire up the elements again just yet anyhow,” Applejack said, her eyes still closed. “I don’t know what in tarnation they’re taking from us, but I’d bet my barn something awful happens if we run out.”
===
“Where is she!” Rainbow Dash shouted, appearing suddenly in front of Queen Meanie’s face. The Twilight clone leaned to the side to see past the pegasus as she levitated several large chunks of twisted metal out of the crater and tossed them down the slope. “Where’s Tess? I’m going to buck her so hard – after all that work we did to make the storm, she missed!?”
“It’s not her fault,” the unicorn said, distractedly, as she continued to search. “It was the ramp. It didn’t work. Tumbling disks dropped into an atmosphere follow a rectilinear path, but it isn’t vertical.”
“Whatever,” Rainbow Dash said. “Get everypony together. We’ve got the elements, but there isn’t going to be enough juice for more than one more shot.”
Queen Meanie looked at her, confused. “What are we going to shoot?”
Rainbow shook her head. “We are going to shoot you. Then you’ll be ‘cured’ and everypony lives happily ever after.”
Meanie’s eyes went wide. “No! You can’t shoot me!”
“Don’t worry,” Rainbow Dash said. “I got zapped earlier, and it’s pretty awesome, actually. You’re not going to get turned to stone. It only does that to bad guys.”
“Right. It would not turn me to stone,” she replied nervously. “Mirror magic is a distortion of the natural order, so the Elements of Harmony would merely negate my existence!”
Rainbow gave her a look. “This was your plan, Twilight.”
“I’m not Twilight,” the mirror clone replied, tossing another large chunk of debris down the mountainside. “I’m an image she pulled out of a mirror.”
“Riiiight. Then where is Twilight?” Rainbow Dash asked, tail twitching impatiently.
Queen Meanie wrapped a large, flat plate of shiny white hull in her magical aura, and lifted it just enough to look underneath. “Not under this piece!” she said, flipping it end over end in a high arc behind her.
Rainbow Dash froze. With a voice like cracked ice, she asked, “Where’s Tess.”
===
Thanks to Trixie and Fluttershy working together, the Elements of Harmony had just managed to avoid being scattered across the sky by a giant spinning plate when they saw Rainbow dash from the crater towards a nearby mountain peak.
“Where’s she off to now?” Applejack asked, as an already exhausted Fluttershy turned the cloud around.
===
Rainbow Dash’s dramatic entrance was completely ruined when someone landed on her back with all four hooves, deflecting her just enough to slam face-first into a cliff. She hated slamming into cliffs. Especially when it started an avalanche. This time she managed to avoid getting her wing trapped under a giant rock, at least – it helped that this avalanche was mostly snow – but by the time she’d dug her way free her older injuries were teaming up with all her new bruises and scrapes to remind her that she wasn’t invincible, and it was a struggle to force her wings into gear when all she wanted to do was find a nice cloud and go back to sleep.
But sleep could come later. First, she had to kill Tess. But as she dragged herself up over the edge of the cliff to the mountain top, what did she see but Tess and Chance climbing onto the back of-- “Princess Luna?”
“Don’t act so surprised,” Warp said, standing protectively in front of the princess, along with another bat-winged night guard.
Luna tried to explain. “We cannot allow our sister to gain access to these sperrets--“
“Moon ponies,” Chance corrected.
“Silence!” Luna commanded, loud enough to start another avalanche.
“They killed Twilight!” Rainbow Dash shouted back at her, undeterred.
Tess tapped her head. “I’ve got a backup.”
“And Pinkie Pie? Did you kill her too?”
Tess shrugged. “If you want a backup of her, check any mirror in Ponyville.”
Rainbow Dash snarled, and there was a crack of thunder from the storm behind her, and the distant sound of rain. “I don’t want a backup, I want them back!”
“We didn’t kill them,” Chance said. “We don’t even know for sure they’re dead. All we know is that they didn’t teleport here. Now can we please leave before Celestia’s goon squad gets here and does who-knows-what with their rainbow cannon?”
Luna turned to blue, starry mist, absorbing the two moon ponies along with her night guards, and Rainbow Dash was alone again.
A few minutes later, the Elements of Harmony floated up on their cloud. Fluttershy, completely exhausted, collapsed into the snow, panting quietly. Applejack jumped off the cloud and walked over to stare Rainbow Dash in the eyes. “So what was the big idea, making us chase ya all the way up here?”
“They got away,” Rainbow Dash said, turning away from Applejack’s gaze.
Applejack frowned. “Well, shoot. And you couldn’t catch them?”
“There were no signs of teleportation,” Trixie said, suspiciously. “And Twilight is down below at any rate.”
“You said ‘Tess’ was a ‘moon pony’,” Rarity noted. “Do moon ponies have wings? You didn’t describe them in much detail.”
“Um… they got away with moon magic,” Rainbow Dash said, covering her eyes with one foreleg as she started to tear up. “I don’t know where they went.”
Applejack sighed, and stepped forwards to nuzzle her, and press her neck against Rainbow’s in a friendly hug. “Don’t worry, sugarcube. We’ll find them,” she said. “They’ve got Pinkie Pie with them, right? If there’s one thing Pinkie ain’t, it’s quiet.”
Rainbow Dash wailed, shoved her away, and flew off into the night.
===
“Twilight Sparkle, you’ve got a lot of explaining to do,” Princess Celestia intoned, as she approached her wayward student, surrounded by a ring of guards. Shining Armor, standing at the princess’s side, had already put up a barrier against teleportation, and there were enough guard and militia ponies in the area to make escape unlikely. Somehow, they’d taken the fugitive unicorn completely by surprise, and it was only when Celestia spoke that she turned from her fixation on the crash site.
“Princess Celestia!” she exclaimed, eyes wide, and took an eager step towards the princess before noticing the army surrounding her. Her ears flattened, and she took a shaky step back. “Please don’t dispel me!”
The princess looked more closely at the unicorn before her, and said in grim tones, “Oh, Twilight Sparkle. You may have more explaining to do than I thought.” Her horn flashed, and a golden beam engulfed the cowering unicorn, turning her instantly to stone.
“Twilie!” Shining Armor said. He looked to the princess, confused.
“That is not Twilight Sparkle,” Celestia said, lifting the statue effortlessly with her magic and turning away from the crater. “It’s a decoy, an image taken from a mirror and briefly given life – another crime to add to my student’s ledger. I’ve arrested the spell’s duration so that it will not end until we’ve questioned her.”
“Then where’s the real Twilight?” he asked.
“She may have eluded us,” Celestia admitted, then smiled. “Then again, perhaps not. She would not risk teleportation with this many eyes watching, so she may still be nearby. Have everypony spread out and search. We will find your sister, Shining Armor, and put an end to this.”
===
The shock of being tossed into near vacuum woke Twilight, to darkness, silence, cold, and pain. And falling. Lots and lots of falling. Also, pink. Pinkie Pie!
Almost as if she had some control over what she was doing, the pink pony flew towards her and collided, and they wrapped their hooves around each other and let out silent screams. There was a faint sensation of wind whipping past her fur now, as the air thickened the lower they fell, but it was far too slow – she still couldn’t breathe, or hear what Pinkie Pie was trying to tell her. Pinkie seemed to realize this, and tapped out a pattern on Twilight’s back. Light-hard-hard-light… “Cloud?” Twilight asked, although of course nopony could hear her.
Cloud-walking! She cast the cloud-walking spell on herself and Pinkie, and then went back to screaming and falling until she passed out from lack of air.
The thunder woke Twilight next, from a ring of lightning spreading from the impact site where she and Pinkie had plunged into the overcharged thunderstorm. They were surrounded on all sides by thick gray clouds, the lightning visible through the translucent mist as it crackled its way towards the edge of the storm. The hole they’d punched as they fell through the cloud filled in behind them like mist. The sensation of motion faded so gradually that it took a few minutes before she was confident enough that they’d stopped falling to stop screaming in terror.
Pinkie Pie took a deep breath, and Twilight put a hoof to her mouth before she could scream again. “I think we’re safe,” Twilight said, in a voice that came out as more of a croak. Pinkie Pie nodded, and she removed her hoof.
“I can’t believe you tried to kill us like that Twilight! I mean your evil twin! She left us behind and oh! Oh oh oh! Did she leave the others too? Did you see anypony else?” Pinkie Pie asked, shaking Twilight, who winced as the hooves touched her skin, which was bruised all over like Pinkie’s had been after that first, aborted flight.
“I think it was just us,” Twilight said, trying to gather her thoughts. “The last thing I remember is hitting something on the ramp.” Twilight gingerly put a hoof to the back of her head, and winced – it was still sore. “You’ll have to fill me in,” she said, then interrupted the pink pony’s oncoming exposition with, “later, when we’re back on the ground.” Twilight tried to stand up, but the clouds pressed back against her from all sides. “If we get back to the ground,” she said, worried.
Pinkie Pie watched, confused, and then tried to move around herself, finding it similarly difficult. She managed to dig a little hole, but it snapped back closed as soon as she stopped working at it.
Twilight sighed. “A real Pegasus could just walk through this like it was mist, but the cloud-walking spell doesn’t come with an off switch.”
“So we’re trapped here?” Pinkie Pie asked, looking around at the clouds on all sides. She didn’t sound scared.
“Well… at least until I feel rested enough to teleport,” Twilight said, relaxing. “Or I could probably blast a hole in the clouds or something. So, right. Safe.”
“Trapped, and safe,” Pinkie said, grinning. “Which means it’s time for...”
“A story?” Twilight said, warily.
Pinkie Pie giggled. “I was going to go with ‘tickle fight’, but that works too! Okay, after you and Sparkles got knocked out, the ship was spinning…”