The commander stared fervently at the display screen, daring the blinking formations of red and green to give him something, anything. There was a hell of a lot of red and not a lot of green. No matter how he looked at it, it was there, pulsing and growing, nigh seething across the screen.
There was thunder as the nearest siege tank fired, and seconds later it was answered by a boom in the distance and the faint squeals of zerg, wafting on the wind.
“Boom, headshot!” crackled across the com lines, along with the blood pumping chords of power metal.
“Sarge, how the hell can you tell if that’s a headshot?” an SCV operator shot back across the radio waves.
“ ‘cuz with this baby, everything’s a headshot! Don’t even have to hit the suckers.”
An image flashed into life beside their commander, a holographic face made up of lines of light.
“Commander, a class twelve psionic waveform has been detec-”
He pounded on the comms table. “WHAT THE HELL, WHERE?” A chorus of curses echoed across the coms as the forward base exploded into frenzied activity. Anything involving psionics was bad news. Getting the class twelve was a death sentence.
“Commander, it is-”
“Damnit adjutant, where is she? Light her up!”
A vivid blip flashed into being on the display, a purple one edged near the centre of the thickest red cluster.
“Commander, it appears you have misun-”
He gave the console a hearty dose of percussive maintenance and the display shuddered out for a second. When it flashed back, the dreaded purple blip was still there.
“You better tell me, right now, that this is a sensor error! She can’t be here.” Marines and machines ran this way and that in a maddened state.
“We’re all gonna die!”
“Shut up, man, just shut up!”
“You are correct, Commander. There has been a mistake.” For a terrible second of stillness, not a single voice rang across the coms, listening with the intensity that those offered a light at the end of the tunnel are wont to do. The entire base listened as one.
“The waveform is being emanated by...”
For a second they let the name ring through them. Then the entire base sighed as one. Some laughed nervously.
The commander wiped the sweat from his brow and grinned. “Oh man, we thought... Adjutant. Don’t ever do that to us again."
“Yes, Commander.”
“Alright everybody, time to pack up and go home, we’re done here. She’s got this.”
“Sir, what about the cerebrate?”
“I said - she’s got this.”
“But, alone, sir? They decided to nuke that thing?” the rough accent of the SCV operator trembled. “Did they send...a ghost?”
“A ghost? You think a ghost could manage this? An entire hive cluster with cerebrate? Of all the dumb shit I’ve heard outta you, private... Listen up!” he roared into the comms. “I want everything and everyone in the air five minutes ago!” he grinned. “And somebody get me a bag of popcorn, I want to see this one from orbit.”
Warp in successful. Warp Prism disengaging.
Twilight Sparkle breathed in the heady stench of zerg. A few pot shots from the spore crawlers chased after her transport, but its shields held as it withdrew. Thank Celestia for the buff in that one patch. In a matter of seconds the entire hive would be a nest of activity.
The creep was sticky and squishy under her hooves. “Alright,” she said, as a small flare of magic warped in a neatly rolled up scroll.
She gulped. “Just like I planned. By the book. Well, by the scroll, it's definitely a scroll, not a book. It's important not to confuse to two. But the meaning is still valid.”
Twilight Sparkle undid the red ribbon binding the checklist and unfurled it, revealing the title.
The zerg swarm and you: an easy to follow checklist to dismantling defenses and disabling their different designs definitively.
1 - Warp into Zerg hive cluster and see to it that my Warp Prism gets away. Check.
2- Establish personal space and read through the checklist. Twilight gasped and quickly created a small force field around herself, though no zerg were forthcoming quite yet. But still! She’d done it in the reverse order! This was exactly the kind of thing that necessitated a checklist in the first place!
3 - Disable the primary defense structures utilizing the disruption web spell.
4 - Disable specialist units using feedback and EMP (Extremely Magical Pony) abilities as situationally fitting.
A pack of zerglings screamed and charged and surrounded her bubble, tearing and biting at it ferociously. With barely a flicker of her horn Twilight added a little spell to dampen the noise. She was reading.
5- Neutralize units utilizing blink, graviton lift, void prison, force fields, hallucinations, guardian shield, vortex, number 25, and judicious applications of psionic storm.
When her little shield was completely encased by writhing zerg biomass, she added a little magelight to read by in the darkness.
5* amendment - Maintaining the guardian shield - I think I might need to find a noise dampening spell as well to compound with it. I can’t believe zerg have never even heard of a library.
Twilight nodded sagely in agreement with herself. The complete lack of literature of any kind amongst the zerg was appalling to her sensibilities. The pressure of scrabbling claws and bodies pressing against her forcefield was exceeding several tonnes now. The first zerglings to have attacked it would be a sad smear of pasty chunks by now.
6 - Remember to keep in mind that the zerg are not nice, and will not be forwarded memos as regards this checklist. Steps may have to be revisited as necessary or done out of sequence.
A muffled roar reached Twilight’s ears - it seemed an ultralisk had joined the attack on the shield. She shuddered. Having to do steps out of sequence? It almost made the checklist invalid, and then where would the sanity be? These things were important.
7 - When able, engage and destroy the zerg cerebrate. When that is done, mass recall to the warp prism.
8 - Remind Spike to pick up more quills this afternoon.
Nodding with satisfaction, Twilight Sparkle reread the checklist. It always paid to reread the checklist. She turned it over for the sake of checking to check the checklist and-
What was this?
A - Have fun!
B - Go crazy! xD
C - Like a BAWSS!!
...What? She certainly hadn’t put these here. “This can’t be right,” she said, her lower lip trembling.
But... but they were on the checklist. She couldn’t go disregarding the checklist now... But... but it made no sense.
Her half of the checklist was numerically ordered. This side was alphabetically ordered. Clearly the inferior system, as her lists often went beyond a mere twenty six things to check, but... but...
What took precedence? Did she go through the numbers first? But surely an ‘A’ came before a ‘2’? But then that broke the sequencing.
“This doesn’t make any sense,” she whimpered. She redoubled the muffling spell, and improvised a ‘Stay Still’ spell for the ground beneath her hooves - the zerg were causing a minor earthquake with their rowdiness.
Have fun. Go Crazy. Well, those were straightforward enough. What was ‘xD’ supposed to mean though?
And what in the hay was a bawss? Could it be an aberrant misspelling of bass? But how could she be like a fish? Or a low frequency sound?
For the sake of the rest of checklist, she’d have to disregard this. Her eye twitched.
She sighed, deciding she’d run the numeric list and the alphabetic list in tandem. It was the only way to be sure.
Carefully she rerolled the checklist, and tied the red ribbon around it. Tucking it away with her magic, she took a deep breath. She had a course of action to follow through.
So far she’d only completed steps one and two, and neutralizing units wasn’t until step five, but being entirely entombed in wriggling bodies was something that had to be addressed.
It wasn’t fair. She shed a single tear for all the checklists in the universe which could not be checked in their proper sequence.
A thousand squawks and roars collapsed in on her as Twilight dissolved her shield. Rather than crush her, the swirling energies of the vortex she’d cast at her hooves seemed to stretch and slow their bodies. They fell, fading into translucence, into a single black point of dimensional singularity. The ultralisk, a hundred times her size, stretched out like a rubber band and flowed through Twilight as the vortex sucked it in.
Twilight blinked to a likely patch of open ground and took stock of the zerg hive. Before her sprawled the creep, the thick living moss like material that all stationery zerg needed to be upon to survive. Upon it she spied several spine crawlers, their thick spear like protrusions ready to stab out at her if she stepped too close.
“Step three, neutralize the defensive structures,” she said aloud to herself, though the shrieking and general commotion of the place drowned out her words. No wonder the zerg didn’t read, they were so noisy.
Her horn flared with power and a glowing eminence settled around the nearest in a cloud like cotton candy made from electricity - anything inside would be ineffectual for as long as the effect lasted.
Zerglings flapped their little wings and bore down upon her with unnatural speed, but no matter how fast they could run, a blink was instantaneous. She kept one magical step ahead of them, casting more of the glowing disruption webs over the crawler structures.
All around her there were writhing, pulsating zerg structures and squirming larva. But with no more actual spine crawlers in sight, she stopped and pulled out her checklist.
A snarling zergling snapped at her flank, but before it could reach her it fell to the ground, rather harmlessly. It had just grown about three hundred pounds of facial hair, after all.
“Step three, Check. Augh!” she cried out as a green sludgy fungus started to grow on her side and weigh her down. It wasn’t growing as fast as the number twenty five had, but it was close.
Turning her neck wildly, she caught site of the cause. The infestor, like a giant caterpillar with thick tunneling claws and reticulated carapace, trundled towards her with some speed.
Twilight was rather happy with the situation. The infestor apparently had got the memo, because step four was neutralising the specialist zerg.
There was a flash of magic and a burst of catalytic energy that speared down into the infestor, causing its body to use up all its energy at once.
There wasn’t even an explosion, just a flash of light, a patch of scorched creep and little nibs of what, in another time and place, would have been smoking boots.
“Yay for checklist!” she called, rather giddy with herself for the success. Step four earned itself an extra loving tick.
Onto step five... wait a minute. Step five? She was already on step five?? What about Step A?
“Checklist, I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean to! Its alright, its alright its alright I can still manage it!” A couple hairs snapped out of place and her ear twitched, though she didn’t notice it.
More zerglings came at her from the side, only to crash at full sprint into a force field. “It’s fine. I mean, they’re the shortest two steps, of all. Just four words.”
Have fun. Go Crazy xD
“What does xD mean?!” A roach that unborrowed behind her for an ambush suddenly found itself being lifted into the air inside a sphere of shimmering light. Twilight didn’t seem to notice she’d done it.
Oh, yes. Being efficient was fun! The vortex spell must nearly be up by now, and all those hundreds would pop back into this dimension. A single well placed psi storm would be efficient.
But was it crazy? The checklist said crazy. and... that xD thing. Twilight twitched. Effient was fun, but it wasn’t crazy.
“All the psi storms!!” she shrieked, and cast the spell over everything. Arcs of electricity ripped through the air in every direction, and every zerg that reappeared found itself in an environment normally only occurring in the corona of a star.
What happened to the squishier and smaller zerg was indescribable.
The pretty lights crashing against her guardian spell were fun, and this was crazy, and though she didn’t know it Twilight was slipping into a fair approximation of the ‘xD’ expression too.
She cast two dozen hallucinations of herself, what should be perfect illusory copies that, for whatever reason had terribly frayed manes, with ears and eyelids that twitched nigh constantly. Some appeared outside the shield, and these exploded instantly in a burst of smoke from the supernatural storm that seemed to make the entire world lightning.
“Come on, girls!” she screamed to herselves.
“Void prison! Void Prison! VOID PRISON!!” The crowd of Twilights shouted at the singed ultralisks as she cast the spell on them, sealing them in a expanse of nulled out space-time.
The storm died away, but she hadn’t really noticed. A couple of hallucinations were playing with one another’s hair. It was, after all, fun. And crazy. CRazY FuN!
“Alright me! You do what you're doing, and I’ll get the cerebrate! Just like on Checklist!”
“Hurray for Checklist!” the hallucinations cheered back to her ecstatically.
The cerebrate was, after all, essentially a big brain. And about as capable of defending itself. With no minions to control, it was essentially harmless.
“Judicious application of psi storm, GO!” The air exploded into lightning over the cerebrate, and Twilight indulged in a minor cackle as she stacked the spell four more times.
“Mwuhahaha!!”
The air over the helpless expanse of zerg tissue seethed with raw power. Power... Overwhelming.
“Mwuhahahahah! MWUHAHAHAHA!!”
...
The cerebrate was entirely unchanged. To some extent, it deflated the thrill a bit.
“Huh.” With a little flash of magic Twilight conjured a small instruction manual headed with Protips: Stars, crafts, and you.
Protip - Psionic storm is entirely ineffectual against buildings.
“Ooooh.” The twenty or so Twilights chorused. “Umm... Graviton lift!”
Protip - Graviton lift can only be used on non massive units.
Several Twilights were squinting with concenentration, a few others looked bewildered. One was laying on the ground, spinning in circles and speaking gibberish, but she looked so happy doing it none of the others had the heart to stop her.
“Uhhh... Number Twenty five? Forcefield??”
She now had what was ostensibly a mound of living tissue that sported a rather neatly trimmed handlebar mustache and what looked to be a hat made from shimmering translucent energies.
A tumbleweed rolled by.
Twilight Sparkle, the one that was fairly sure she was the real one, fell to her haunches.
“Do I have any spells that can blow up a building?”
One of the others rifled through the booklet, and because it was the only booklet on the entire planet, the rest crowded around it reverently. Somewhere along the way a bulkier guide book was conjured, and they rifled through its pages.
A probably fake Twilight shook her head. “No. I do have an attack though.”
“Oh! Let’s see.”
Disruption Beam - six damage. Rate of fire - one.
“Wait, I’m a tickle cannon? I’m a tickle cannon??”
Zerg Cerebrate - 1500 health. One armor. Passive regeneration.
Twilight looked upon the the now desolate zerg base. Herselves were alone with the cerebrate and looked to be for quite some time.
“I’ll never get back in time to remind Spike to get those quills! I won’t be able to complete Checklist!!”
Then hallucinations all vanished with a poof, and the lone remainder’s cry of “Noooooooooo!” rang out.
From the bridge of the command deck of his flagship, the commander’s jaw hung open. A bag of popcorn had fallen to the ground beside him, its kernels scattered forgotten across the floor.
They hadn’t even needed viewer magnification for that display.
“Adjutant?” he said carefully in the silence.
“Yes, Commander?”
“The next time you detect a class twelve... you damn well better tell me it’s fucking Kerrigan.”
“Yes, Commander.”