//------------------------------// // 16 - Full-On Convolvement // Story: Contraptionology! // by Skywriter //------------------------------// * * * Contraptionology! by Jeffrey C. Wells www.scrivnarium.net (with gratitude to the pre-reading powers of Akela Stronghoof and S.R. Foxley) * * * Part Sixteen: Full-On Convolvement All right, then! High time we had an actual science lesson in this here story. So listen up, y'all: before we start in on the tale of the single worst half hour of my life so far, we're gonna gab for a second about a little something called the Cloppler Effect. In your basic technical terms, this here thing describes the apparent variation in frequency of an emitted waveform as the emitter approaches or moves away from a fixed observer. When the object that's sending out a moving waveform is itself moving, it causes the waves in front of it to get all bunched up, a bit like driving cattle. As a result, your hypothetical stationary observer is gonna perceive them waves as coming more frequently, thus, at a higher "frequency" (see how that works?) Now, this becomes powerful important in the study of celestial motion, because a light-emitting heavenly body which is moving toward you will tend to shine out bluer than a heavenly body that's more relatavistically stationary, all 'cause blue light has a higher frequency, see? The Cloppler Effect applies equally well to an emitter giving off physical propagation waves (sound, e.g.), and the effect there is not blue-shifted light, but rather, a higher perceived pitch! Um. Y'all. Anyhow, long and short of it: say you're a pony, a normal, sensible earth pony with her hooves on the ground, just as Grower and Nature intended. And you look up in the sky, where – and I cannot stress this point too strongly – earth ponies ain't supposed to be, and you see a frazzled-looking orange-colored earth mare zooming across the sky on a cloud-scooter in your direction, clinging for dear life to the back of her blue barnstormer pegasus friend, and you happen to hear that orange pony screaming her fool head off in absolute spit-blind terror... ...well, just keep in mind that she ain't really screaming all high-pitched and sissybritches. She's actually bellowing in a real respectable and adult-like fashion. If she sounds like a panicked schoolfilly to you, well, that's just science messing with your ears. Blame Mr. Cloppler for that. "Seriously, A.J.," called out Dash, over her shoulder, the violent wind whipping her rainbow mane into a wild storm of color. "All the screaming back there is seriously harshing my buzz." "AAAAA," I noted, clamping my hooves even tighter around Dash's waist, my irises shrunken down to the size of pinheads. Dash scoffed at me. "C'mon!" she said. "This isn't even that fast! One of these days I'll take you to Mach One with me. Now that's a trip!" "AAAAA," I observed, making a keen logical counterpoint to Dash's words. Dash rolled her eyes and hunkered down over the cloud-scooter, giving 'er an extra burst of speed. With effort, I swallowed my stomach back down into my gut. "How... how long 'til we get to Ponyville, Rainbow?" "Not long now!" said Dash. "We'd practically be there now if we were going straight as the pegasus flies!" "Well, why in the hay ain't we, then?" I demanded. "We need to be there by first starlight, before things get more complicated than they already is!" Dash shook her head. "Yeah. Maybe you haven't been noticing on account of all your screaming, but there's one heckuva atmospheric disturbance on the beeline. It looks like there's some sort of air war going on. I can't tell if it's just Ponyvillians duking it out with attack balloons or if the Royal Guards have joined in, but either way, it's not good. We've gotta loop back around the Everfree Rim if we want to avoid it." "Right, right," I said, swallowing hard and hoping beyond hope that it was the first. Last thing we needed around here was a tussle with Canterlot's Finest on top of everything else. "You're the professional flyer. Let's just please get this here part over with as soon as possibAAAAA!" "Again with the screaming!" said Dash, her eyes fixed appraisingly on the sky-calamity above distant Ponyville. "You were doing pretty well for a second there. Go back to that." "AAAAA AAAAA AAAAA," I mentioned, prying one hoof away from the deadlock I had around Rainbow's waist and jabbing it into her back. "AAAAA," I concluded, pointing frantically in the direction of the forest. "For pony's sake, workhorse!" said Dash, turning back around "What?" "Ro-bot!" I cried. "Ro-bot ro-bot ro-bot!" Dash's head whipped around and her eyes went wide, 'cause she finally saw the same thing I did. "Oh, horseapples," she said, and rightly so. Angel Bunny had been busy. Fluttershy's evil little rabbit pet, brain all full of science-punch as any of us ponies, had not taken R.D.'s cuffing him around at all well. And while their last fracas, "Rainbow Versus Large Rabbit-Shaped Battlesuit", had ended in a pretty solid win for the little critter, Angel was full-on convolved now, which meant that he would not, could not rest until his machines had been fine-tuned to meet contraptionology's absolutely impossible standard of success. In short, Angel was gonna keep on building more and more elaborate mechanical constructions until he finally achieved his goal. Unfortunately, his goal happened to be the eradication of Rainbow Dash. "Celestia's flaming dugs!" cussed Rainbow, wildly. "What the pony is that?" "It's a lagomorph colossus," I said, finally breaking all the way through my terror back to the calm rationality to be found on the other side. And so it was. Pulling itself out of the forest canopy was an absolutely brain-meltingly huge rabbit of raw black iron. Its blade-bright incisors were the length of an entire pony outstretched, fire spewed from its twitchy little ro-bot nose, and the painful metallic shrieks of its adorable ear-swivels were enough to reduce my innards to apple butter. And behind its huge, glinting, beady, smoked-glass eyes, the barest vision of a control cockpit could be glimpsed. At those controls: a tiny little white rabbit, yanking levers and pounding buttons like he was fixing to break 'em, and was in a hurry to do it. Angel waved at us, cheerily, and then threw his itty-bitty weight at what looked to be Equestria's largest lever. The mechanical rabbit hopped. The sound it made was that of a too-close thunderstrike, and dozens of acres of forest splintered and were flattened beneath its enormous rabbit feet. The colossus was slow and ponderous, but the sheer size of the thing meant that even a single hop had brought it into easy striking distance. Rainbow swerved the scooter reflexively, darting the cloud around like a hummingbird, and my already-liquefied guts threatened to spill themselves completely out of my mouth. One great iron-tipped paw passed in our wake, whipping through the space we had vacated just barely in time. I swallowed hard, willing the nausea down, and screamed over the noise of air and grinding metal. "Can you outrun that varmint?" "I don't know!" screamed Dash. "I'd be faster than it on wing, but I don't think I can push this scooter hard enough!" "Ditch me, then!" I shouted. "Angel only wants you anyway!" "Yeah, and let you get squished as collateral damage as you sit here dead in the air? Or on the ground? I don't think so, A.J.!" Dash raised her chin. "I never leave my friends hanging! After all, I am the Element of Awesomeness!" "I been meaning to say something about that!" I shouted back. "There ain't no such thing as the Element of Awesomeness! Your little necklace there is the Element of—" My attempt to square things up ended right there with another swipe from Angel's towering mechanical death bunny, accompanied by another vicious swerve of the cloud-scooter. I clamped my jaws shut to keep down the gorge, nearly biting the tip of my tongue clean off. Clearly, this weren't no time for me to get all pedantic. "Consarnit!" I screamed. "I hate rabbits! Ain't enough they gotta steal your vegetables and mess up your compost heaps, they gotta go build huge pony-crushing war machines on top of that!" "You said it!" agreed Dash, swooping the scooter into a confusing spiral pattern that she and I both hoped that Angel could not track. I clutched onto Rainbow like my life depended on it – on account of that basically being the case – as the fierce centrifugal force threatened to rip me right off the back of the cloud into the open evening air. The reward for my success was another solid minute of tearing around at positively ridiculous speeds with no control over the matter whatsoever. It was a little slice of Tartarus. "Get us out of here!" I yelled. "Make a run for the town!" "Not without slowing that thing down first!" replied Dash, narrowly ducking us under another definite-kill haymaker swing of one of the colossus's claws. I grimaced and gave my upper lip a good stiffening. "All right, all right, I'm on it!" Clambering to my hooves, I shot a glance down at the forest below, both my ponytail and my pony tail streaming out behind me like pennons in the wicked wind. I was familiar enough with this neck of the woods, and if my memory and my hasty calculations were correct, we should be real close by to... ...there. Peeking out of the greenery near the treetops was a sturdy-looking wooden platform, the highest end of a zip-line course set up by Spike the Dragon for his own personal amusement (and a couple doomed attempts by my sister and her friends to earn their Cutie Marks in so-called 'extreme sports'.) I gestured with one hoof toward the canopy. "Take us down there, and fast!" All credit to Rainbow Dash, she didn't hesitate for even a second to question me, and we fell quick enough to make gravity itself proud. Once we were in full dive, Dash glanced back at me. "How long do you need me to stop once we get there, cowgirl?" "We're doing this on the fly!" I said, raising my haunches and getting my tail into striking position. "Literally! Stop for, uh, zero long!" Another earthshaking rumble and Angel's colossus was nearly upon us again, blocking out the setting sun. "Good!" said Dash, anxiously kicking the cloud into high gear, her eyes tracking the path of the ro-bot monster. "Because that's about as long as we've got!" Our dive became near to full vertical, and the zip-line platform rushed up towards us. My athlete brain, not my scientist one, the part of me that instinctively knew a whole mess of stuff like speed and angles and force without one single silly calculation, took quick stock of the situation... ...and struck. There was no thought because there was no time for it. One second I was there with my tail high and ready, and the next I had a coil of spare zip-line dancing on the tip of it, without ever really experiencing the in-between time. Working the rope lightly, like one of my old lariats, I tail-tossed it in the direction of my mouth and yanked it out of the air with my teeth. One quick sliding noose-knot later, I had a serviceable lasso, the loop of which I then chucked smoothly back to my tail, which was already itself twirling and ready to receive it. Rainbow pulled the cloud-scooter into a steep climb as a single vicious overhand chop from the colossus smashed the platform to flinders behind us. I didn't care about the close shave. I couldn't. It didn't even exist. I was a rodeo pony again, and all there even was was my plumb glorious dance of teeth and hoof and tail and rope. Dash rocketed the cloud up and away from the canopy, steering us in a wide climbing curve away and then back around toward the lagomorph colossus. Angel made the thing to swat at us as we buzzed in close, but he was too slow to clip Rainbow; she was in a zone of her own, jumping us from altitude to altitude so fast you'd swear she'd grown a horn and was using unicorn teleportation on us. Meantime, I had the lasso spinning in a circle so perfect you could measure pie with it. Rainbow circled us in close on my say-so, and with an effortless little grunt, I sent the loop of the lasso spinning out, where it caught on one oversized mechanical rabbit-ear and cinched itself fast. "Yee-haw!" I shouted, wishing I still had a hat so I could swing it in the air a little. "It's a ringer! 'Spect you know what comes next, featherhead?" "Woopow!" bellowed Rainbow, stoked beyond the capacity for rational speech. I held on tight, my heart racing, as Rainbow tore us around the colossus in great counterclockwise loops, trailing that rope behind us like kite string. Angel turned the colossus to follow us, desperately trying to keep up with the pegasus-driven cloud-scooter, but each turn he made resulted in the colossus getting further and further ensnarled in the coil of zip-line, and in a matter of minutes Angel's ro-bot was more-or-less swaddled in it. With one final yawp, I ditched the line. "It's away!" I bellowed, and at that, we spun out away from the colossus, trying to achieve as much distance as possible as fast as possible just in case the dang fool thing went and keeled over. No such luck; the black iron ro-bot strained against its bonds, wiggling its steely-bright powderpuff tail and belching great clouds of flame at the sky, but it remained on its big forest-crushing bunny feet. Didn't really matter none, though. We had officially slowed up the colossus. "That's it, Rainbow!" I shouted. "We bought us our time! Ponyville, ho!" The cloud-scooter stuttered to a halt and hung still in the air. I caught my breath and shot a warning glance at my pilot. "Ponyville, uh, ho?" I tried again. Silence from the front end-of the cloud-scooter. "Rainbow," I said, a mite tetchy, "I ain't gonna start ordering you around to harsh-like or nothing, but that's sisal rope that critter's tied with, and while I'm generally real fond of sisal, it ain't powerful strong against giant fire-breathing monsters. You think we could get a move on?" She did not reply. I craned my neck around and followed the aim of Dash's fixed, slack-jawed stare, and as soon as I did, any speck o' irritation I had been feeling at the pegasus just plain dripped away. The sky was buzzing. Locusts, I thought at first, all kinds of unpleasant associations cropping up in my head at the mere notion of the hateful critters. But no, it weren't locusts. However horrible the sight of a great black cloud of them things was, you at least knew – even as you scurried to chuck shadecloth over any plantings you wanted to save – that they were basically natural. Not so with the black, sky-blotting cloud which was rising up to face us. These was twisted, wrong-looking things, not a one of them like any of the others, looking for all the world like you'd made a mess of conventional-looking critter-figures out of soft clay and then spent a while mashing a couple different ones of them together. They were absolute monsters, creatures of fangs and spines and membranes. Wings of various sorts stuck out from their chitinous black-and-yellow bodies at strange angles; it was a wonder any of them could stay airborne at all, 'less it was out of sheer angry maliciousness at the ground. And hovering at the head of the swarm, biggest and most terrible of all: a glistening black-plated critter with sharp fangs and gleaming red eyes, beating at the air with three whole pairs of wings, two butterfly-style, two wasp-style, and two that looked rather sickeningly like the pegasus-feathered kind. The last were yellow. It was the size of a pony, which actually made a bit of sense, since you could tell from the blackened Element of Kindness it was wearing that this was what remained of Fluttershy. "Oh!" said the creature, in a sweet, demure, hideously-layered voice. "Hello, girls!" "Fluttershy?" asked Rainbow Dash, weakly. "What happened to you?" The thing that used to be Fluttershy shook her head, causing one of her remaining patches of pink-hued mane to slough clean off. The wind and the forest below took it. "Oh, no no no," she said, earnestly. "No trace remains of the creature named Fluttershy. All that is left is the Flutter-Bee-Bat. Queen Flutter-Bee-Bat." The queen of the swarm looked a little sidelong and bashful at us. "Um. At least, I think so. That my former identity and personality have been totally obliterated, I mean. If that's all right with everypony." A thread of greenish saliva trickled out of the corner of her mouth. "No," said Dash, staring. "That's, uh, fine." "Ain't fine at all!" I said. "Flutters, this is wrong. More 'an that! They're gonna have to invent new words for 'wrong' after the word 'wrong' gets downright played-out with ponies trying to describe how wrong this is!" "I'm sorry, Applejack," said Flutter-Bee-Bat. "I just don't follow." In response, a grotesque little wasp-like critter buzzed up out of the swarm to her side and danced a few words at her in the secret language of bees. "Oh!" she said, watching the wiggling little critter. "I think I understand now." "So, Fluttershy," said Dash, rubbing the back of her neck with one hoof, completely failing to sound casual, "what's it, um, like being a totally horrible and gross mutant insect creature?" "It's so nice," gushed Queen Flutter-Bee-Bat, tiptapping her twisted, insect-like forehooves together. "Being snuggled up in the center of the Hive under a foot-deep layer of cuddly-wuddly vampire bees is like taking a nap under an entire scuttling blanket made of friends. Plus, they all want to regurgitate delicious half-digested blood and bodily humors for me to eat!" "A foot-thick blanket of puking insects," I said. "Sure sounds like heaven to me." "Oh, it is!" said Queen Flutter-Bee-Bat. Her face fell, then. "That is, um, when there's any blood or bodily fluids available. Which reminds me, I really need to have a word with Angel Bunny." She buzzed over to the smoked-glass cockpit of the bound-up lagomorph colossus and fixed the contraption's pilot with her fierce, critter-subduing Stare. "You!" she said, ruby eyes glinting. "You have been a very, very bad little bunny, Mister." The colossus hung its head in shame, chuffing a bellow of fire from its nostrils which managed to singe some of Fluttershy's few remaining hairs clean off. "Don't you take that tone with me, Angel Bunny. You were just about to flatten my friends into little pony flapjacks before I even got a chance to interrogate them about the whereabouts of my menagerie!" "Before you got a chance to, uh, what?" I asked. "Oh!" said Queen Flutter-Bee-Bat, bright and wide-eyed, buzzing back over to us. "Interrogate you! You see, the Swarm feeds on both my love and on vital fluids extracted from living creatures." "Not ponies, though?" "Not ponies," said Fluttershy, shaking her head firmly. "Oh, my, no. I couldn't. But I used to have plenty of animals that would work just fine for my purposes, and during my transmogrification, I promised my attendants that they could drink from my menagerie once I emerged from my chrysalis. But by the time my metamorphosis was complete, all my animals were gone! Your animals too, Applejack." "Yeah, huh," I said. "Fancy that." "Not by chance, either!" said the Queen. "One of my soldier bees said that they saw your sister Apple Bloom and her friends rounding up all my animals and taking them away!" She glared at me, sharp and incisive. "I suspect you know where they are, Applejack!" Queen Flutter-Bee-Bat broke eye contact again. "I, um, might be wrong, though," she finished. "Yeah, uh," I said. "Fancy that. I guess I ain't got an exact idea where they all are." True enough, in its way. They could be out on the lawn up at the Peppers', in a barn up at the Peppers', out in one of the pastures up at the Peppers'... I didn't know exactly, savvy? "Oh, well," said Queen Flutter-Bee-Bat. "Maybe we can have a little chat over tea until you remember something." "Listen, Flutters," I said, "that sounds real nice, and it's been, uh, a pleasure talking with you, but we're on kind of a time-sensitive—" "A LITTLE CHAT OVER TEA MADE UP OF THOUSANDS OF STINGING INSECTS!" screamed the Queen. On cue, one of the pointier-looking butter-bee-bats out of the swarm jabbed my forearm but good with its stinger. There was a feeling of fire, then a feeling of ice, and then my whole left side basically turned into pins-and-needles. "A.J.!" shouted Dash. "Whu—", I tried, my tongue feeling thick in my mouth. My fierce earth pony constitution was on the scene in a flash, tearing away at the poison best as it could, but it wasn't fast enough to stop an entire half of me from going downright limp. "Paralytic toxin," said Queen Flutter-Bee-Bat, fluttering in close. "It won't kill you. It'll just keep you nice and safe until we can get you back to the Hive and tear the information out of your still-living skin, and then assimilate your biomass into our glorious collective." She shrugged a little and looked away. "If you, um, don't mind, that is." "Hngh," I said, clenching my teeth against the venom burning through me. "All right, that's it," said Dash. In an instant she hunkered back down over the cloud-scooter and took off, dragging me along on the back of it. It's a wonder I didn't fall, in that I was barely able to keep a grip on the dang-fool thing now. Queen Flutter-Bee-Bat screeched, a high inequine thing, and the buzzing of the swarm grew to a roar behind us! "No!" she cried. "Come back! Be one with the Hive!" "Nice try, Queen Fluttershy!" shouted Dash over her shoulder as she spurred the cloud-scooter to full speed. "The only thing I'm one with is myself!" "Really... need... to work on those," I groaned, pressing the side of my face firmly into cloud-stuff. "Bite my flank, A.J.," said Dash, gunning the scooter and finally cutting us back in the direction of Ponyville. "Would be in a real opportune place for that," I slurred, blearily eying Rainbow's sky-blue haunch which was currently filling the better part of my vision. "Need my mouth to work proper, first, mind." Behind us, Queen Flutter-Bee-Bat's screech rose to a full shriek. "MINIONS!" she screamed. "RETRIEVE MY FRIENDS! CUDDLE THEM WITH EXTREME PREJUDICE!" The buzzing rose and swelled, and from the angle I had fallen, I could just make out the black cloud of the swarm rising up like a wave, ready to crash down upon us. "Move it, Rainbow!" I said, struggling over every word. "What exactly do you think I'm doing?!" she shouted back, her wings beating into a blur. The sheer kinetic energy of our passage began shattering water vapor into prismatic radicals all around us, shrouding the scooter in billowing clouds of color and generating a bright rainbow wake behind us. It made us stand out like a signal-fire, but that didn't matter none, 'cause we were way past time for stealth. It was pret'near the fastest I have ever moved in my tender young life. It was, just barely, enough. We pulled free of the crashing wave of Butter-Bee-Bats right on the lip of it, into the open sky. Behind us, the swarm spun and undulated like a fish-school and began closing on us once again. Rainbow licked her lips, gritted her teeth, and shot us straight towards the distant hilly cleft which cradled our hometown. "You're enjoying this," I said. "You're actually enjoying this." "Yep!" said Dash, grinning fierce. I reckon there weren't much else to say. Lickety-split, the village of Ponyville was before us, and boy howdy, it was a mess. I tell you what, one solid day of contraptionology had really worked the place over. I had seen a little bit of the ruckus that had consumed our little town earlier today on my lunch-delivery mission, but seeing as I was hopped up pretty high on Large Hadron Cider at the time, and all-too-ready to declare absolutely everything as being fine and wonderful, the impact had been kind of lost. Not so now, when all I had coursing through my veins was blood and butter-bee-bat poison. My cheery little hometown had been reduced to a vast science wasteland of tar and iron and stone. Houses had become laboratories and laboratories had become towering bunkers, and each individual bunker was engaged in total scorched-earth warfare against every other one. The air was absolutely full of energy discharge, and basically anything nature had ever invented that could do harm was being used to do harm: ice, fire, lightning, classical cello music, and some other real wicked stuff I couldn't even recognize. The pavilion in the center of town was still pretty much intact; it seemed impossible until I realized that nopony actually lived there and so nopony had needed to use it as her headquarters. Same with Sugarcube Corner; the Cakes had remained sane throughout and, with Pinkie's help, were hopefully well clear of this mess by now. Carousel Boutique still stood, flashing deadly rays in all directions from the Wondrous Lanthorn, and even from our distance I could hear Rarity's mad cackle as she rained random accelerated death down from the heavens, or, alternately, sucked away enemy ordnance into the blazing gemstone furnace at the heart of her formerly froo-froo shop. And, there on the far edge, was the library tree, shielded from harm by a signature magenta-colored force field, which musta been running on some sort of automatic defense glamour considering that Twilight's spellcasting was out of consideration on account of her being a hornless brain-in-a-jar now. Defenses or not, we were gonna have to find a way through, because that library there was our goal. Somewhere in the basement of that hollowed-out tree was Iggy the Salamander, and if I figured right, he was our key to burning the horror out of this town. Not everypony was holed up in bunkers, neither. As Dash had noticed earlier, there was a fierce war going on in the airspace above the far end of town. Assault dirigibles and whatnot, all blades and cannons, tangled in death-locked struggles with one another, generating clouds of explosions and projectiles in the process. And on the horizon toward the celestial mountain, yes, the full power of Canterlot was massing, brigade after brigade of pegasus centurions hanging in the air as thick as the swarm of butter-bee-bats behind us, further supported by a massive capital airship, prolly the T.M.S. Resplendent, straight from Canterlot's military sky-docks. Praise Celestia, literally, that they were apparently hanging back to assess and not diving straight into the fray. The situation had escalated way too fast for anypony to gather proper intel about it, and as far as I knew they were looking to contain rather than engage. I couldn't blame 'em. It's like as not what I would have done. "Whoa," said Dash, taking in the entire nightmarish vista from our little perch in the sky. "What happened to this place?" "Science," I replied, glancing back at the swarm of butter-bee-bats, hot on our rainbow trail. "Science happened to this place." However horrible the state of the town, I figured it weren't gonna get noticeably better once we added a whole mess of angry mutant hornets to the mix, but we were sort of out of options. I hoisted myself back up into a sitting position on the back of the scooter and gestured flabbily toward the library, the paralytic poison barely giving way before my indomitable bull-headed stubbornness. "Get us over there, Dash, quick as you can! Sun's setting, and I reckon we got just a minute or two until first starlight!" Dash began to shout a "Roger that!" back at me, but was she was cut off by a harsh whine and a flicker of light from the Lanthorn atop Rarity's boutique. Only a stomach-lurching full-tilt folded-wing drop prevented us from getting a face full of mass-accelerated something-or-other. "What's that crazy mare shooting at us?" screamed Dash, kicking the scooter in a sharp right bank to avoid a second flicker of rarefaction beam. "At that speed, it don't even matter what it is!" I replied. "That durn-fool thing can drive cotton balls through concrete!" Two more rarefaction beams lanced out from the tiptop of the Boutique, missing us by a hairsbreadth. "We're sitting ducks up here, A.J.!" said Rainbow, darting back left to avoid a third shot. "I can't get past that turret! We gotta take it around to the other side of town and try to get past the air war!" "No time!" I shouted, my brain racing and shuffling through plans and coming up with jack squat. It ain't easy being an earth pony in a situation like this, on account of the fact that any problem with a more complicated solution than "run faster" or "jump higher" or "buck harder" has to be prepared well in advance. Unicorns and such, well, they got a library full of tricks they can draw upon, 'cause they've got magic, which is more-or-less always at hoof. But earth pony magic is subtle and quiet, all based on things like the flowing of rivers and the growing of plants and the language of— Hold on. The language of bees. "Rainbow!" I shouted. "I'm a-gonna tell you to do something real stupid! You up for it?" "Oh, sure!" she shouted back. "Why the hay not, at this point?" "Good to hear!" I said. "I want you to turn this cloud around and head on back towards the swarm!" "A.J.," said Rainbow, "That's really, really stupid!" "I'm a mare of my word!" I said, nodding affirmatively. "Trust me on this one, R.D.!" Dash loop-de-looped us around two more Lanthorn shots, and then, grunting in frustration at my unbelievable idiocy, swung us back on an intercept course with the butter-bee-bat swarm that had been harrying us, which was just now hitting the town limits. I rose to my hooves again, the poison still prickling my muscles, and stared straight into the glistening face of grim insect fate. I sucked in a breath and began to dance. It was something I had mocked Pinkie about, yesterday. I had called her crazy for it. But even as I was doing so, there was something in it, something deep, that spoke to me. "You should know this stuff!" Pinkie had said. "You're an earth-triber, just like me!" Well, Pinkie was righter than I'd been willing to admit. Not for the last time, neither. There was something deeply, profoundly familiar about the bee-dance, a calm and sober earth pony goodness that defied every attempt I made to put words to it. Summoning every bit of recollection I could, and further calling upon the vast reserves of experiential memory that had come part-and-parcel with the science curse, I carefully moved my body in a direct mirror of the crazed, tail-waggling, haunch-swinging dance I had seen Pinkie Pie perform, thirty-six hours ago. Dash's eyes went wide. She raised her wings like she was about to take us out of there, seeing as I had apparently gone totally bat-bucking insane again, but the sight of the swarm pulling to a halt in mid-air before us gave her pause. Thousands of clusters of gleaming insect eyes watched my mad gyrations, utterly hypnotized by them. There was, glory be, just enough honeybee in those monsters for them to know and understand Pinkie's dance. I could hardly even feel satisfaction, so hard was I breathing at the exertion of the wild dance and the creeping lethargy of the poison in my muscles. It was all I could do to even get the dance right. But, Grower Beneath be praised, I was getting it right. I was getting it right, dangit. And then, the last few wiggles. Left Left Right to request more beeswax for your candles... ...Left Right Right for "sting the holy bejeezus out of the first pony you see wearing a hat." Left, Right, Right. The entire swarm of butter-bee-bats snapped to complete, galvanized attention, and just like that, I had won. "All right, you critters!" I shouted to the assembled mass of insect-bats. "I know you're good and primed to sting any hat-wearing ponies you see right about now. And thanks to that prissy white pony down there in the boutique, the one who's shooting at us, I ain't got a hat no more! But sure as night follows day, I can assure you..." A pause for second thoughts. I discarded them. "...that Rarity herself is wearing a hat right now. And lordy, what a fancy hat I expect it is." There was a noise like a fast-moving tornado as the butter-bee-bat swarm rushed us, rushed past and around us, leaving us spinning and dizzy but utterly un-stung, so set were they on their new target. With a mighty buzzing roar, the great wedge of the swarm converged on the partially-exposed firing cupola of the Wondrous Lanthorn, and the deadly assault of mass-acceleration rays came to a sudden halt. And then, the shrieking started. Rainbow shook her head at me. "Rarity is going to kill you," she said. "Rarity's always gonna kill me," I said, nodding thoughtfully at the telltale noise of Ponyville's resident high-class fashionista pony fending off an entire swarm of angry mutated non-lethal bees. "This ain't gonna be no different, really." Dash looked like she was about to say more, but just at that very instant, the sun finally touched the lip of the horizon, and I could see the light of the first stars glimmer out up above. Instantly, the library tree erupted into a cone of blue-white radiance, twinkling right in time with it. "No, no, no!" I said, despair clutching at my heart. "We're too late! Go, Rainbow!" And then, a lot of things happened, pretty much all at once. Rainbow gunned the cloud-scooter and put us on a low, swooping arc toward the Library, trying to beat whatever horror it was that Twilight was fixing to bring about. The sympathetic radiance from the library tree grew blinding, almost sun-like. Twilight's voice, echoing and amplified through the little squawk-box on the front of her brain-tank, thundered out of the library and across the ruined town: "It's alive! ALIIIVE!" A scream from Carousel Boutique – Rarity's – and a sudden spasmodic flash from the great contraption atop it as the fashion pony's hoof struck a control in her attempt to ward off the swarm I had brought down upon her head. Rainbow Dash flickered and vanished, in a burst of Lanthorn-light. Lacking both control and power, the cloud-scooter that had carried us all the way from Sweet Apple Acres dipped wildly, sending me tumbling to the hard dirt road at speed. There was a sickening crack as one of the micro-fractures that Poblano Pepper had warned me about finally gave way on my impact with the ground, and the long bone of my right front leg shattered to bits. I crashed, half-paralyzed and thoroughly crippled, into a brick embankment in what used to be the Ponyville public square, now a great no-pony's-land of waste and torn debris. It was a hard fall. It did not seem likely I would be moving again soon. The library's front door flew open with a crash, the magenta globe of its force field flickering out. Twilight's brain, still wearing its little blackened crown and resting comfortably in a wheely stand pushed by the tiny hunchbacked form of Spike the Dragon, appeared in the opening. "Attention, Ponyville!" Twilight screamed, electronically. "Gaze now upon the culmination and realization of the full potency of contraptionological thought, and also, the one-hundred-percent sure-fire winner of tonight's Science Fair for Grown-Ups!" A third form appeared at the door. It was a sleek mare made entirely of quicksilver or molten metal or some such thing, large and imposing and unnaturally beautiful, powered by magic and starlight and, according to Twilight, my own betrayal. A curl of shining silver mane hung jauntily along one side of her snooty little face, and her horn was cloaked in a pointy, brushed-metal wizard's hat of deepest purple, decorated with shining gold and silver stars. The dreadful ro-bot reared up and whinnied, and the noise was not unlike the end of the world. "BEHOLD, PONYVILLE!" cried the contraptionoid monster, flinging away her cape. "BEHOLD THE GREAT AND POWERFUL RRROBO-TRIXIE!" Even splayed out as it was over the rubble of the town square, my twisted and broken body managed to cough up one last tiny groan. "Oh, I hate that mare," I said. So this is how it ends, I thought. It was a good ride, but: I'm lying here basically dead in Town Square, and the fact that I'm still thinking ain't much more than a technicality. Any plan to burn the demon grove with Iggy the Salamander like as not dies with me. Dash is gone – probably incinerated – by Rarity, and I'm probably gonna kick the bucket before my brain can even get past my shock to grieve for her. Ponyville's a loss. Canterlot's on the brink of military action, of civil war, against us, and ain't no telling how many souls that'll claim, neither. The Elements of Harmony, Equestria's most powerful tools for goodness, are out of commission, mine busted clean in two. And Twilight, bless her little brain, has just unleashed the most obnoxious face of Armageddon imaginable. Discord, in short, wins everything. All because of one stupid little lie I ain't even told you folks about yet. The quicksilver mare stood up high and cocked her head in my direction. "The superlative robotic ears of the Great and Powerful Robo-Trixie have picked up the noise of a neighsayer in the audience! Show yourself, heckler! Present yourself to the Great and Powerful Robo-Trixie!" "Applejack?" came Twilight's disbelieving voice. With the absolute final drippings of my strength, I managed to raise myself up on my left elbow. "I hate her," I said, to the universe at large. "I hate the ro-bot version of her." "Hmph!" said the Great and Powerful Robo-Trixie, doffing her hat. "It seems as though an object lesson is in order! Prepare to witness the awesome magical power of the Great and Powerful Robo-Trixie!" "Yep," I said, sinking back down. "This's gonna hurt." "Prepare to witness it RIGHT IN THE FACE!" shrieked the Great and Powerful Robo-Trixie. With a noise like a vibrating wineglass, the Great and Powerful Robo-Trixie's shining metal horn summoned a sparkling cloud of steel-pink energy and then loosed it in a deadly streak straight at where I lay. I closed my eyes and commended myself to the Grower and the Forever Harvest. It was all there was left to do. G'night.