//------------------------------//
// 3: Into the Dark Green: Chapter 1 
// Story: Conflict in Bloom 
// by aDerangedBrony 
//------------------------------//


Part Three: Into the Dark Green



Chapter 1




Fire was in the rebel captain’s eyes as she eagerly listened to her lieutenants’ reports. There had been some hiccups and far more casualties than she had hoped for, but the plan had worked. No ground had been won and they had gained no purely tactical advantage. Nevertheless, what they had won could turn the tide of any war. They had photographic proof that the expeditionary force had fired first.

“Thank you, Sapphire. That’ll be all,” she said once the lieutenant had recounted the attack on Checkpoint Charlie in full detail.

The captain was a pegasus mare with a violet coat and pinkish mane. Although she had a uniform, she preferred not to wear it. It alienated her from her soldiers, and she felt that forcing the rebels to recognise her as an authority figure would defeat the purpose of the rebellion. All she wore was a black beret on her head, a bandolier around her chest and a short assault rifle strapped to each foreleg. 

Her name was Wind Rider, a captain in the coalition that had come to call itself the Republican Alliance of Equestria, and commander of the rebel group known as the Everfree Fighters. Formerly, she had been the commander in chief of the faction which was independent, but she had jumped on the chance to throw in with a large group of like-minded ponies.

Wind Rider was from Los Pegasus originally, but once she graduated flight school she moved to Canterlot to study at the prestigious Equestrian National University. Although she excelled academically, her views were seen by most as either too extreme or incompatible with their own ideology. The monarchists thought she supported democracy too much, the democrats thought she was too right-wing, the rightists thought she was too socially liberal, and social liberals thought she was too anti-government, the anarchists thought she supported the monarchy too much.  She had few enemies, and even fewer friends. In the final year of her degree, she attracted the interest of some secretive ponies who took a liking to her. 

She completed her degree in 2002, and a week afterwards she simply disappeared. Two weeks after graduating, she showed up in Dodge City stirring up anti-government sentiment with a few of her formerly secretive friends. Military intelligence lost her trail somewhere in the Hayseed Swamp. A month later, she marched thirty ponies through a town near Baltimare. When the royal guard showed up the thirty ponies were gone, along with another forty who had joined up with them.  She pulled this sort of stunt all over Equestria, never resorting to violence. She would pop up in a town, recruit any interested pony, and then melt into a nearby wilderness before the guards showed up. They lived as a self sufficient nomadic community, willing to give up their old lives for freedom and enlightenment. It was Wind Rider’s stated and genuine intention to use violence only in self defence. Three years after graduating, however, something changed. 

Wind Rider saw the results of the military modernisation first hand in a colony of the San Palomino desert. She was lecturing a crowd on the inherent flaws of government, the evil of the aristocracy and ponies’ birthright to freedom. The colony was far from the nearest guard garrison, so she was confident that the lecture would be long and thorough. Her speech was interrupted by a group of three pegasi flying in formation overhead.

The pegasi were in drab gray spandex flight suits, similar in design to those of the Wonderbolts. Each carried something in their forelegs. They flew fast and low over the crowd, before banking around and flying back. It was at this point Wind Rider and the crowd got a good look at the ugly, black, metal objects they were carrying. None of the mares, stallions, colts and fillies who had gathered to see the fancy city pony talk had time to react. They stood stunned as the pegasi flew over once more, dropping their payload on the crowd. 

When the horror was over, the surviving ponies were split between those who blamed Wind Rider for the incident, and those who begged to join her to seek their vengeance. It was that day that she invested in armaments and converted her group of free thinking pacifists into an active rebel cell. She vowed to fight the monarchy, totally unaware that the massacre had been ordered by rogue captain who sympathised with the aristocracy. Within a year, the Everfree Fighters had developed notoriety as a vicious, relentless and tenacious fighting force.

In 2006 they built their first permanent bases, hidden in the Everfree.  Recruits now came to them, rather than the other way around. They offered asylum to any pony who felt they needed to escape persecution. In late 2007, they became part of the Republican Alliance of Equestria, giving them a massive surge in equipment and numbers. The Everfree Fighters went from a dangerous rag-tag group of rebels to an organised fighting force capable of achieving real change.

The attack on Checkpoint Charlie was the first direct order the Everfree Fighters received from their new commanders. The higher ups would want to know of the success as soon as possible. Wind Rider wrote a hasty report, placed it in an envelope with the photographs the lieutenant had given her, and put the envelope in a peculiar boxlike device by her desk. With the pull of a lever, a flash of green flame went up. In a matter of seconds, the package had arrived at the R.A.E. headquarters in the back room of a dank pub in Los Pegasus.



***



While the rebel lieutenant was delivering her report to the captain, some of the soldiers in Checkpoint Charlie were preparing their conspiracy against their own lieutenant.

“Well,” Apple Bloom said, “how’re we going to deal with that crazy commanding officer of ours?”

“Way I see it, him being away during the fight is cowardice. So, we tell the major, he gets a court marshal, we get a new CO,” suggested a private sitting next to Sweetie Belle in a thick southern drawl.

“It’s almost impossible for an enlisted pony to get a commissioned officer tried,” Avalon pointed out, “and he was less than 100 metres from the fight, so I don’t think the court would see it as cowardice anyway.”

“Can’t we get him transferred someplace else?” Apple Bloom asked.

Whistle replied this time, “He loves it here, for whatever reason. He’s from nobility. He’ll get his way. We’re not going to be able to get rid of him by following the book. We only really have one option, and let’s just say it’s less than conventional.” 

She paused to see how her fellow conspirators reacted. They were silent. Reading their faces, she knew they understood what she was hinting at. None of them were exactly jumping at the idea. With such little enthusiasm, it seemed to be a bad idea to press the issue much further.  

“Ok,” she continued finally, “maybe I need to let you all think on it. Get some sleep, soldiers.”

The chief sergeant remained seated, looking from pony to pony, challenging each of them with a hard glare. Every pony avoided eye contact, but none of them wanted to be the first to leave. After a while, Storm mumbled “Yes, chief,” and made his way back to the barracks. He was shortly followed by Avalon, who beckoned Sweetie Belle and Apple Bloom to follow. The four ponies made their way back to the barracks in silence, but it was long before any of them managed to finally get some sleep.



***



Celestia never did like the newspapers. This sentiment was built upon massively when she read the headline “Expeditionary Force Barbarously Attack Fillies and Colts in Forest”, complete with a gory photograph of a terrified looking colt being gunned down outside Checkpoint Charlie. Reading the article, she found it was exactly what she expected: a heavily biased recount which took great liberties with the truth, no doubt sponsored by the rebels to get popular opinion on their side. It appeared to have been rushed to release. News of the incident probably didn’t reach the writers until a few hours before printing. 

Both the princesses had been informed of the attack on Checkpoint Charlie almost immediately. They had hoped they could play it down to keep their citizens calm. Now they were being made out to look like the bad guys. There was no other choice. To counter this smear campaign, they would have to launch their own propaganda campaign prematurely. For full impact, this would have to coincide with the inevitable yet regrettable royal military campaign. Celestia brought forward some parchment, wrote a single word on it, stamped it, signed it, and performed all the other necessary measures to prove that the order was coming from the matriarch of the nation. Within five minutes of Celestia reading the article, orders were being issued to every branch of the military. The 6th of March on the 2008th year of the alicorns’ reign, less than 48 hours after the midnight attack on Checkpoint Charlie, would go down in history as the day the Everfree Forrest was declared a warzone.