Steel and rust. Those were the first things she saw.
Fluttershy was in some sort of warehouse or foundry room, a green steel box with no windows. Rust crawled up the walls in long streaks. The floor she was on was hard stone, worn smooth with age. The area was lit by long lamps that hung from the ceiling; the lamps were white, but the light that came from them seemed to have an orange tone, as if they were reflecting rust that had gathered in the very air around her.
There were two more of the creatures in the room, standing at attention like guards marking the border of a path. Fluttershy was pulled between them, and she turned to look back in the direction she was coming from, towards the hole in reality.
There was a huge circle in front of her, and through it she saw the grass and trees and sunlight. The circle was made of some kind of clean white material, something that looked like metal but didn’t seem to have that same kind of sheen or rusting. Electricity ran back and forth along the inside of it, circling the portal that led back to Equestria. There was a loud electrical hum in the air as the lightning coiled back and forth.
The portal shimmered, and the metal creature that she had touched suddenly fell through, landing on its front on the ground directly in front of her. The entire top half of its body except for the head had been converted into pink, hairless flesh, and it writhed and twitched in front of her. One of the metal creatures reached down and pulled it out of the portal, dragging its feet over the lip of the portal and away from the gate. It dragged its already-still comrade towards the wall of the room, and that was when Fluttershy saw the corpse.
It had the same general shape of the creatures: two legs, two arms, a body, and a head. This one wasn’t made of metal, though; it had some kind of hairless skin, and its mane seemed to be just on the top of its head. It was wearing clothes, a simple shirt and pants. It had been propped up against the wall in a sitting position. There were black scorch marks all over its body and clothes; Fluttershy had been in Cloudsdale long enough to recognize electrical burns. The creature dropped its dead brethren face down next to the body, then turned back towards its fellows.
The portal shimmered again, and the other three metal creatures from the forest came leaping through it. The first two spun around, pointing their weapons through the portal. The third one turned around, opened up a panel in the side of the gate, and pressed something inside of it. The electrical hum died down and the portal faded away.
The creature that had been dragging her stopped pulling, letting her rest on her stomach on the cold stone floor. She looked up and around, trying to see if there was some way that she could somehow get away and out of here. All she saw was a door at the end of the room, behind the creatures. There was no way that she would ever be able to get there.
Unless…
Both times she had touched one of the creatures – not one of them touching her, her touching one of them – something bad had happened to them. There was enough length to her tail for her to easily fly up and touch the one who was holding her. If he let go, she could just push through them all and go out the door –
Wait. Wait. What was she thinking? This was terrible! She couldn’t deliberately hurt another being like that. Even just seeing the dead creature lying next to the wall made something deep in her chest cry out in guilt.
They had shot Rainbow Dash. They were trying to shoot Twilight. And they had kidnapped her. They couldn’t even be bothered to treat their own dead with respect. Did they deserve to not be harmed?
The creature’s corpse lay there. Blood was still slowly spreading out beneath its body. She had killed it. If she hurt them she would be just like them.
She couldn’t do it.
Could she?
She needed to think. She needed more time!
There was no time.
There was the sound of metal clanking against stone, and she looked over her shoulder. One of the creatures was bringing up a black metal cage large enough for a pony.
Fluttershy squeaked, leapt up onto her hooves, and was about to start running when two of the creatures reached out and grabbed her. The three creatures lifted her up between them and shoved her into the cage. The creature holding the cage swung it shut and locked it with a black key, which it placed on a key ring at its waist. Two of the creatures picked up the cage, and they began to march.
As they went out the door of the room they were in, it became clear to Fluttershy that they had been in the bottom of some kind of abandoned facility. The rooms were empty, and had the kind of wear and rust that only came about from having been standing for a long time without anyone coming back in. Fluttershy wondered what this place had been used for when it had been built. It all looked so…dead. Fluttershy knew that plants and animals might die; that was the way of things. But all this metal seemed to have died too, to have become just an empty shadow of what it had once been.
They traveled through the series of empty rooms for some time. At one point the stopped in front of a set of sliding doors with a button next to it. One of the metal creatures pressed the button, and the door opened into a steel box. They got into the box, and it rattled for a moment before moving upwards into another set of rooms. Some of the doors to the rooms were dented and broken down the middle; others had had blackened holes blasted in them, and were hanging half-off their hinges. There must have been fighting here earlier, but Fluttershy didn’t see any more dead bodies.
Finally they came to a plain steel door. The creature in front opened the door, and they went outside.
Everything was cast in an angry orange light, like a constant inferno. She was in a district surrounded by squat, three-story buildings made from what looked like steel and molded stone. The jagged fingers of broken towers from somewhere in the distance reached towards the sky, more than she had seen even in Canterlot. There was a strange glinting coming from them, and she realized that they had been built of some shimmering metal like silver that had been covered in soot and dust. Above her was something that might have once train tracks on a raised bridge, but they had crumbled and fallen away. Past the steel towers were the silhouettes of what might have been blocks of factories, long smokestacks leaking smog in a gray smear across the sky. The sky was a dirty stretch of orange and gray, as if heat and smoke had scorched away all the clouds and rain. There was no sun.
What was this place?
The metal creatures began to walk, carrying Fluttershy between them. The world around them was silent, without even wind. There was a thickness in the air, like the aftermath of smoke or soot from a long-ago fire.
The city was a ruin. All of the buildings seem to have been shaken and crumbled, as if from some great earthquake. Several of them had collapsed into piles of rubble. Every window frame Fluttershy saw was empty, with only shards of glass left. The streets were made of cracked black stone. Strange metal hulks lay scattered about the street, things with fins and open canopies with what looked like seats in them. A few were sitting in piles of rubble in the midst of still-standing walls, and Fluttershy realized that those ones must have fallen from the sky and landed on the buildings.
Fluttershy shrank back in her cage. What had happened here?
They walked through an empty city square that held nothing but patches of black dirt. One of the buildings seemed to be more important than the others; it was a bit taller, and there were small poles sticking up from the top of it. On the front of it was a large mural of one of the creatures whose dead body she had seen next to the gate. This one was wearing a red plaid shirt, blue jeans, and a yellow hardhat. He stood proudly, holding up a wrench in one hand and looking down at the citizens below him. The sun was behind him, making a halo around his head and casting rays around him.
They walked around a hill of bent steel and stone, stained with brown rust over the years. There was what looked like half a nightclub sign with electric blue neon underneath one piece of rubble, something Vinyl Scratch would have liked.
The creatures and Fluttershy turned the corner and almost walked right into another group of things.
There were five of them, and they looked just like the dead non-metal creature that she had seen in the room with the gate. These new creatures were dressed in sand-colored rags, layered and wrapped around themselves. Each of them wore a set of opaque goggles made of dark metal and black glass over their eyes. Their hands and faces were white as paper, and they clutched strange tubular weapons of stamped metal and square glass shields almost as large as they were in their hands.
Both groups stared at each other for a moment.
One of the non-metal creatures reacted first. Quick as a snake she swung her weapon up to point at the metal creatures.
CRACK!
The arm of the metal creature that was holding the front of her cage exploded. Fluttershy’s cage hit the ground with a loud crash, and she dug her hooves into the bars to keep from sliding downwards into the cage door.
The stillness snapped. The metal creatures dropped Fluttershy’s cage, letting it clatter onto the ground. The flesh creatures raised their weapons as the metal creatures lifted their lamps, highlighting their opponents. The flesh creatures scattered behind the mounds of debris and into the wreckage of the buildings as the metal creatures opened fire, filling the air with electricity and ozone. The metal creature in front of Fluttershy was hit, blasting away shards of metal that rained down on the cage. Fluttershy covered her head as iron clattered against the bars.
The metal creatures stood their ground, sweeping their lights across the buildings and aiming arcs of lightning through the broken windows and doorways the flesh creatures were leaning out of. There was a cry of pain and flash of red as one of the flesh creatures was hit. It dropped down behind the window it had been leaning out of, and Fluttershy saw smoke rising out of the window. One of the flesh creatures dashed out of the doorway it had been sheltering behind to sprint across to the window and hoist itself through. The flesh creatures fired back a few bursts of shots before pulling further into the ruins.
The metal creatures sprung forward after the flesh creatures. In a moment they had disappeared, leaving Fluttershy alone.
Fluttershy looked around and tried to think. The metal creatures hadn’t seen this coming. She had just gotten a one in a million chance, and she needed to get out of here, now. She pushed against the cage door; it was still locked. She looked around for some way out of here, and a glint caught her eye.
The cage key was on the ground in front of her. The metal creatures must have dropped it when they had run off.
Fluttershy pushed one hoof through the bars, pressing up against the bars to get her foreleg as far as she could towards the key. It was just an inch out of reach.
She pulled her leg back and looked around, trying to think of some way to get closer to the key. There was an iron shard nearby, and she picked it up with both hooves and reached back through the bars towards the key.
There! It was just long enough to hook the key and pull it towards her. She pulled the key all the way to the bars, then picked up the key in one hoof. She pushed it into the lock and turned it. There was a click, and she let go of the key and pushed the cage door open.
She was free! Fluttershy stepped out of the cage and onto the hard ground.
She needed to get away from here, but where could she go? Fluttershy tried to think.
The metal creatures already knew about the building with the gate; if they saw that she was missing they might check back there. If she flew directly ahead she would almost certainly run into them. If she went up too far in the sky they would see her, so she would have to stay near the ground.
Maybe she could hide somewhere? She flew up into the window of one of the ruined buildings. The room beyond it was dark, and she stood on the stone floor of the room as her eyes adjusted. The stone room was about the size of her living room. An old couch sat in the middle of the floor, while a closet leaned next to the window, and a table stood near a wall with a box on it. The table was made of green stamped steel, and it had an impersonal, sterile look to it. There was no paint on any of the walls, and the floor was cold stone. There was a small alcove with an open door; Fluttershy thought she could see the shape of an old toilet in it. The floor in one corner was made of white tile, as if it had once been a kitchen nook. There was a closed door in the far wall, on the opposite side of the room from the window. The light coming in through the window only showed the box on the table and dark water stains on the walls.
There was the sound of rubble shifting outside. Fluttershy dropped down to the floor of the room, hesitated, then peeked out the window.
The metal creatures were making their way back around the rubble. There were still five of them. None of the flesh creatures were around, and she wondered what had happened to them.
The first of the metal creatures swept its lamp across the empty cage. It stopped, then continued forward more slowly. The creatures surrounded the cage, all of them pointing their lamps at it. They stood there for a few moments as if they were thinking, before two of them stepped forward to pick up the cage again. They continued their march, and in a few moments they had turned the corner of the street and were out of sight.
Fluttershy dropped back down to the floor of the room. She was shaking. She took a few deep breaths to try to calm herself.
Fluttershy didn’t know what this place was. She didn’t know why she had been taken here. There were violent creatures everywhere. She hadn’t seen any trees or animals at all. And for all that the huge number of ponies in places like Canterlot and Ponyville made her anxious, it hadn’t been anything like the desolate emptiness of this city.
She wanted to go back to Rainbow and Twilight to make sure that they were all right. For all she knew, they had been left lying unconscious on the ground of the woods, easy prey for any carnivore that came along. Fluttershy remembered that the last soldiers to go through the gate had turned around towards it immediately, as if afraid that something might come through. That might mean that they had run from Twilight instead of subduing her. That had to be it, right?
Fluttershy wanted her friends. Rarity would give her a hug and say just the thing to let her know that it would be all right, and Pinkie Pie would be bouncing up and down telling jokes a mile a minute to cheer her up. Applejack would be biting at the bit to charge in and buck whatever was causing all this. Twilight and Rainbow would be…
She could die here, without ever seeing her friends or family or her home again, completely lost and utterly alone.
Fluttershy lay down on the couch and began to cry.