The End of Ponies

by shortskirtsandexplosions

Chapter Thirty-Two: The Pinkest Storm

        “The Onyx Eclipse.”

        A puff of bright green flame erupted across the ceiling of a cavernous laboratory. A pair of green-clawed hands tightly shut the runed cap over the glass jar of billowing emerald. After a coughing spell, the fuming purple dragon squinted down at his little equine friend.

        “What, dear child, is an Onyx Eclipse?” Spike repeated awkwardly to the stone walls.

        Scootaloo leaned up into his grasp. “W'nyhhm,” she boldly hummed. The rune seal lit up in a purple glow and the green flame inside settled to a cool cloud of thick wisps. “Careful with those iron palms of yours, Spike.” She took the jar from him and rolled it into a saddlebag on her flank. “You've got a grip that could decapitate a baboon with one squeeze. I've gotta open the jar on my lonesome, y'know.”

        “I do believe you're ignoring the subject at hand.”

        “What's wrong? I happen to know a baboon or two who's a prime candidate for being beheaded.”

        “What—” Spike paused to cough, wheeze, cough again, and then finally breathe easily. He waved the green smoke from his nostrils and shuffled past a wall of clockfaces towards his bed of gemstones. “What is this Onyx Eclipse balderdash that you speak of?”

        “I wouldn't exactly call it balderdash,” Scootaloo muttered. Her brow furrowed under a tiny, fuzzy forest of pink mane hair. “I'm telling you, when Derpy Hooves' kid was possessed by that goatfish whatchamacallit, she started picking up things.”

        “Define 'things,' child.”

        “Trippy, spacey, constellationy things. Uhm...” Scootaloo rubbed a shaking hoof through a suddenly aching forehead and lisped forth, “Dinky rambled on and on in an out-of-this-world voice about a 'dead keyhole of heartless stars' through which the 'Onyx Eclipse' would 'suck out all light' and crud. And then this voice mentioned something about 'chaos flames.' Uhm... 'Hello, Cataclysm.' Am I right?”

        “If I recall correctly from your recollection of the events surrounding the delivery of the Capricorn foal...” Spike slumped his tired self down onto the gemstone pile and rested his limbs. “You were under quite a deal of duress, both mentally and physically. I am apt to emphasize the former above the latter.”

        “Yeah, sure, I had some magical resonance screwing with my projected soul self—”

        “Scootaloo, you were exposed for several hours to the direct aura of a celestial creature's energy essence. It is the sole reason for why you returned to the present as early as you did. Your Entropan body is anything but invulnerable, especially when it comes to severe trauma—both magical and physical. I truly thought that we had both gone over this—”

        “Okay, so it was a bucketload of magical resonance!” Scootaloo exclaimed. “But that's besides the point. Dinky was saying a heck of a lot of weird stuff, but for a brief spell it was like she was talking directly to me. She said that the skin I was wearing—“her skin”—wasn't mine, Spike. I'm pretty sure she knew all about Princess Entropa's avatar serving as my projection's shell and stuff!”

        “Ponies and dragons are both intelligent creatures,” Spike spoke through an educated smirk as he stroked his green chin crests with purple claws. “But we commonly make the fallacy of overexercising our mental tools of pattern recognition. It's quite likely that—out of the myriad of nonsensical things that Miss Hooves' child spat out—you simply chose to focus on a few key words, because they somehow constructed a structure of familiarity to your beleaguered mind.”

        “Ugh!” Scootaloo tossed her head back with a rolling of scarlet eyes. “For the love of Celestia, Spike! How come every time I've come back from these time jumps, you've been quick to commend me on performing the simple yet historically inconsequential acts for my past friends, but the one time I bring you a potential sign of progress towards unraveling the Cataclysm, you toss it out the window like a rusted pail of stale quartz?”

        “I'll have you know I happen to like quartz. It goes well as an entree with garnets.”

        “Don't make me hit you in places Gultophine was too drunk to bother armoring with scales.”

        Spike chuckled smokily. After another coughing breath, his violet pendant dangled with a manalit sparkle as he summoned the strength to wheezily say, “Assuming there is a truth to this 'Onyx Eclipse' that you're so vibrantly obsessed with, what exactly could it possibly mean?”

        “Well, it's too dang early to know that for sure. And—pfft!—I'm not stupid, Spike. If anything, Dinky was just picking up on a celestial vision. What she said and the way she said it was likely the best way she could process what she saw into words. If I scoured the caved-in libraries of the wasteland searching for 'Onyx Eclipse,' I wouldn't end up with crap. I'm sure what Dinky saw—or whatever the voice through her was trying to explain—can't adequately be summed up in words. What I'm looking for is... is a phenomenon that can likely be exposed for all its technical qualities.”

        “Like what, pray tell?”

        Scootaloo shrugged mightily. A brief floundering, and she finally sputtered forth, “A big, gigantic, scary, black thing falling down from space?”

        “Quite mesmerizing,” Spike murmured with wagging eyecrests and a sarcastic smirk that betrayed his age. “You have just put to shame my three hundred years of scientific methodology.”

        “Oh, shut your burnhole.” Scootaloo stuck her tongue out and hoisted herself up so that she sat on the edge of a lab table, her back legs dangling as she faced directly across her draconian companion. “Let me ask you something, oh learned hermit of the Canterlotlian Mountains.”

        “I'm all scales.”

        “Do you know when was the last time that the Royal Court of Canterlot issued the Astronomy Council to publish a star chart of the modern Equestrian Cosmos?”

        “Sadly, that knowledge escapes me, but I have full faith that my beloved 'Canterlotlian Clerk' can fill me in.”

        “Thirty-five years ago,” Scootaloo answered. She smirked and leaned her head playfully to the side. “That means the last astronomical almanac was produced ten years before the Cataclysm. In all of that time, there was no adequate mapping of the stars, at least as far as Royal Publication was concerned.”

        “Hmmm, that would explain why Twilight was always so enthusiastic to graduate swiftly from Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns.” Spike exhaled a few green fumes and rested his chin down on the edge of the gemstone bed beneath him. “She always said that the first thing she wanted to do once she had received her diploma from the Tertiary Magical Academy was produce an accurate and up-to-date map of the night's sky. Naturally”—he let loose a somber exhalation—“that never came about.”

        “I've had a long time to think about it.” Scootaloo raised a hoof as she thought aloud. “The space of time between the end of the Third Age and the beginning of the Fourth was a time of great anxiety and even superstition throughout Equestria. I've stumbled upon many discarded periodicals in my years of scavenging. The papers spoke of entire clans and even cities full of ponies who huddled together at various Alicorn Temples upon the thousandth year in deep prayer, for fear of what the Return of Nightmare Moon would bring to the face of Equestria.”

        “Many of them had a good reason to be afraid,” Spike said with a blinking of his emerald eyeslits. “My beloved mentor was among such righteously concerned ponies.”

        “And do you remember the nature of Twilight Sparkle's concerns, Spike?” Scootaloo leaned forward in her precarious seat. Her face grinned wickedly. “If I'm not mistaken, Princess Celestia's most gifted student came to Ponyville under a cloud of dread because she knew—Spike—she knew that on the longest day of the thousandth year since Nightmare Moon's banishment, the dreaded Alicorn would return.”

        “Twilight Sparkle had a knack for seeing things that other ponies didn't.”

        “She had prophecy, Spike. The old pony legend had been exposed to her—by word of mouth or tome of text—and it had prepared her for one of the most epic events in Equestria's history.” Scootaloo gazed aside at the now-dusty diagram which Spike had branded into the wall of the underground cavern several weeks prior. “I used to believe that prophecy was a bunch of crapola. But you've shown me otherwise, Spike.”

        “Oh have I, now?”

        “Your green flame,” Scootaloo murmured and gazed back at him with a soft smile. “It's thrown me past the seemingly impervious barriers of time. It's sent me in circles so dizzying that I've nearly lost cohesion trying to comprehend them. Thanks to you, this pony now fully believes that it is possible to see things beyond the limits of normal existence. Maybe the first equine souls who put pen to paper were able to see things that modern ponies aren't naturally inclined to. Maybe prophecies have always existed for a reason. And if prophecy could foretell the Four Stars—”

        “The Four Daughters in exodus...”

        “Right—If prophecy could foretell them aiding in Nightmare Moon's escape, then what's to say that there isn't a way to see or predict the stars' relation to the Cataclysm?”

        “And you believe the ambiguously named 'Onyx Eclipse' could be the center of such a pattern of prediction?”

        “Dinky could see things that were incomprehensible to most terrestrial creatures. You and I and our brains slammed together wouldn't be able to interpret what that poor foal must have seen, what galactic truths swam through her skull with such immensity that it nearly drove her to death and drove me insane.” After a deep breath, Scootaloo leaned her head down onto a pair of cradling forelimbs. “If only I knew where to look next...”

        “The sky?”

        Scootaloo smirked bitterly. “Fat lot of good that will do us now, Spike.” Scootaloo ran a single hoof playfully through her short pink threads. “The answer is still in the past. If there's any stargazing to be done, it's then.”

        “I would have imagined that you were much more inclined towards princess-gazing.”

        “Say what?”

        “I'm anything but an impatient dragon, Scootaloo, especially when it comes to this conjoined venture of ours,” he said. After a fuming of dark green smoke, he coughed once or twice before uttering, “But I can't help but notice that you have had many occasions during these time trips to contact Princess Celestia directly, and yet you failed to directly pursue such avenues of opportunity.”

        “I-I have?”

        The purple dragon's eyeslits narrowed. “From the first moment you set hoof into the past, you've dealt with a murderous band of trolls, an apple farm in jeopardy, a dying celestial creature, and an unfortunate unicorn foal who was on the verge of perishing from a magical overload to her cranium. It's been three hundred years since I was a whelp, old friend, but if I remember my youth succinctly enough, our beloved Ponyville existed in a time and age when it was not uncouth for Princess Celestia—Goddess of the Sun—to come down from her exalted palace for something as trivial as a tea party at Sugarcube Corner. Now, you have dealt with crazy and unpredictable situations in your time travels which you have solved quite expertly on your own, but it stands to reason that they would all have been ample excuses for capturing the attention of Equestria's ruler and patron deity. Still, with all of these opportunistic moments literally being thrown upon your saddle, you refused each and every time to march or fly with your anchor to the royal throne room of Canterlot. Pray tell, why is that?”

        “Do I need to spell it out for you, Spike?” Scootaloo murmured, gazing down at her dangling lower limbs. “I'm not the same moronic pony who you sent to Cheerilee's schoolhouse.”

        “By no means. You have not only practiced the fine art of subtlety, dear child. I daresay you have mastered it.” His iron lips curved as he tiredly smiled. “But it's one thing to be subtle; it's another to be an absolute stonewall.”

        “You make it sound so easy, Spike.” She frowned at him. “You try going back in time. You try staring Applejack in the face and telling her that her entire farm has to be trudged to a pulp under the hooves of an entire Celestial Army because it was forced to go into a bloody melee with trolls! You try and explain to Derpy that Fluttershy's obvious solution to her kid's problem should be brushed aside for a risky, cross-country trip to Canterlot!”

        “I'm not condemning the decisions you've made, Scootaloo. Far from it. I'm just intrigued by them, is all.”

        “I know what we're both doing this 'experiment' for, Spike. I know what Equestria has lost, and I know what we're both wanting to light up the future with. But when I'm down there in the past—and it so totally does feel like taking a dive—it's no longer a matter of dealing with cause and effect and speculative variables. Right now, I feel like a doofus for not contacting a nearby pony militia about the trolls. Right now, I cringe to think of what an opportunity I almost had to get in contact with Canterlot when instead I threw my Entropan cohesion into jeopardy by exposing myself to Dinky's horn. But that's because, right now, I'm here in this cavern with you. When you're surrounded by other equine souls, when you're no longer the end of ponies, it isn't quite so simple to keep a straight head.”

        “But you've kept a straight heart, hmm?”

        Scootaloo sighed. “When I'm time traveling, it's a lot like scavenging. The best way to get anything done—I've discovered—is to focus on the moment. If I put too much thought into anything but the moment, I risk panicking and screwing up big time. The pathetic side effect of that is that I lose sight of the big picture.”

        “Do you?” Spike leaned his green-crested face to the side from where he reclined. “Our mission—above all, Scootaloo—is one of compassion and closure for the entire legacy of the Equestrian race. Would you be any greater a shining example of ponydom if you ignored the immediate concerns of Applejack and Fluttershy and Derpy?”

        “'Shining example'...” Scootaloo smirked bitterly. “The one closest thing Equestria has to a savior, and it's a friggin' blockhead.”

        “Your head resembles a fine pink brush far more than a block, old friend.”

        “Jee, thanks, Spike.”

        “Anytime.”

        “But—if I may add to this already depressing conversation...” She leaned forward and exasperatingly rubbed her hooves over the contours of her face. After a stifled groan she continued, “I think I'm going about this all the wrong way.”

        “Do tell.”

        “Yes, we both know that contacting Princess Celestia is potentially the best and quickest way to getting a firm perspective on the Cataclysm. But let's pretend I did get to acquire an audience with Her Majesty while visiting either Applejack or Fluttershy. What then? What would I have to show for myself? What case would I have to present her? I can just imagine it: 'Uhm, Hello, Your Majesty. It's awfully swell of you to have sent a legion of your finest soldiers to risk their lives against an army of trolls, and I'm really friggin' happy that you have Canterlot's most gifted doctors working around the clock on Derpy Hooves' tortured little girl. But, while we wait for all of that crud to sort itself out, let me tell you about how I've come from the future and I need to find a way to bring back magic to the Equestrian Wasteland long after you and your beloved sister friggin' bite the dust!'”

        “Ah, now there's the heretic of subtlety that I know and love.”

        “At your service.”

        “In all seriousness, I'm sure you would adequately stumble upon a tactful way of explaining your presence in the past to Her Majesty.”

        “Would I?” Scootaloo blinked. “Even if she would have been willing to hear me out, what would I have to go on?”

        “You know the time when the Cataclysm happened. You know what it did to Cloudsdale. You obviously know what it did to the Sun and Moon—”

        “But can I expect the Princess to fill in the rest all on her lonesome?”

        “I would imagine that you would help her, Scootaloo.”

        “Right. I would help her.” The last pony nodded. “But so far I haven't been doing a very good job of it.”

        “How do you mean, child?”

        She groaned and dropped back down to her hooves, pacing about the lengths of the cavern. “I need to know more, Spike! I need to get a solid grasp on what's coming to blast Equestria to ribbons. I need to narrow my gaze on just what's looming over the starry horizon. I need to gather my bearings on the what before I can so much as deliver it all wrapped-up-and-pretty to the Princess so that she can help me figure out the why.”

        Spike took a deep and tiresome breath. “And we are back to your ever-cryptic 'Onyx Eclipse' fixation, aren't we?”

        “I know that my Entropan ears were being graced with a truth, Spike. You can't believe it because you weren't there—not like I was. I have to start figuring out what was wrong with the heavens, what was killing Capricorns and Ursas and what was giving celestial voices the liberty to speak to me through Dinky.”

        “That's all good and fine, but how do you intend to create a starchart?”

        “I beg your pardon?”

        “That is the logical next step to take, yes?” Spike narrowed his eyeslits on her. “If this is the path you're wishing to take, old friend, then I'm all for it. But if you're so inclined to investigate the constellations' relationship to the Cataclysm, then I must say you'll likely wish to produce a map that all the ponies of modern Equestria failed to construct within a decade to disaster.”

        “I... uhm...” She bit her lip and sweated nervously. “I-I can't very well bring a pen and paper back and forth through time, can I?”

        “Sadly no, child,” Spike said with a shaking of his purple-scaled neck. With a fuming cough, he added, “You could, however, consider a way in which to permanently grant our present selves a solid piece of celestial evidence.”

        “Like how?”

        “You're resourceful, old friend. I'm sure that the solution will come to you when necessary. The first order of business—I perceive—is choosing your next anchor by merit of her providing you with the most accessible view of the Equestrian sky, twenty-five years ago.”

        Scootaloo instantly shuddered. Her body had turned into a glacier with the pathetic audacity to wear a brown coat of hair. She bit her lip and instantly avoided Spike's gaze. “I... I-I don't think I like where this is going...”

        “On the contrary, child.” Spike breathed in a low bass hum of understanding. There was a slight curve to his iron lips. “I think you quite well relish the thought of where this could be taking you.”

        An hour later, the last pony sat on one of three scant remaining planks that formed the dilapidated balcony of Twilight Sparkle's burnt treehouse. Spike had fallen into draconian slumber, his nostrils expelling a snoring flurry of green fumes that drove the coughing pegasus out into the bitter cold of Ponyville's ruins.

        It had been a long while since the cold snow and ash of the Wastes made the brown pony's limbs shiver. Right then and there, fumbling through a dangling forest of baby dragon teeth, there was no peace to be had in Scootaloo's squirming limbs.

        Wearing her goggles like a headband, the mare nervously gulped and fished her hoof from tooth to tooth until she once again braced the ivory bone structure hanging from a haunting blue string. She gazed long at it, devouring the sight of it like a separate sky against the gray expanse of her existence.

        Spike was a wise dragon, but with each passing visit that Scootaloo paid her elder friend, she became increasingly aware of his centenarian senility—or at least that was what she was so staunchly willing to label it. He had every optimistic bit of confidence in her, every grain of faith. There were times when she could swear he saw her not as the tortured soul that the Wasteland had tempered her to become, but rather he still believed her to be the rambunctious little foal that skirted the lengths of the town on a scooter, carrying a smirk and shrug of the shoulders wherever she went. Little did Spike know just how powerful Scootaloo's facade was, how strong it would forever be, how successfully and how effortlessly it had fooled the living world into leaving the self-sacrificial filly alone—until quite ironically that very same world died around her and granted the pony her every introverted wish.

        Spike didn't know that the happy things of the foal's memories were like steaming cups of arsenic to the last pony now. Every time he breathed her into the past, it was in faith that she would find closure. Spike could hardly realize that the very wounds that required such attention took more than a simple chronotonic acceleration spell to seal up; it took pain, patience, and paranoia. It took battling with trolls, carrying possessed unicorns, and staring down a phalanx of frightened children's faces. It took every square centimeter of Scootaloo's brain that could go mad, and every deep vacuole inside both her natural and projected selves that could hold tears.

        Perhaps Spike was right in the long run; Scootaloo was overall benefiting from these trips. The excursions were far from simple—which was the only way a three hundred year old experimenter with time could envision it from where he sat on a bed full of multicolored gemstones. To Spike, the chains of time were iron-wrought and immutable reins that only the Alicorns could wield power over. To Scootaloo, the mad pony diver, those chains broke down into innumerably complex and unpredictable filaments that—when examined from the inside out—exposed the last pony to far more horrors and sorrows than any confident scientist in the grand history of existence could ever bother to postulate.

        So it was beyond Scootaloo to hate Spike—though she could very easily discount him—when she took into account his meager suggestion, his playful inference, his good-natured advice that she take the ever-fateful plunge, that she grasp ahold of the blue string, that she finally open the black barred door to the arcane vault and speak face to face with that haunting prismatic shade, something so joyfully pristine in the foal's path that it would crucify the thirty-three-year-old mare right then and there to her very screams.

        So much as looking at the tooth hurtled the last pony suddenly forward in a sputtering breath, so that she felt her lungs bunching up inside the hollow of her rattled brown torso. Her soul was plunging a million kilometers an hour past the wreckage of Cloudsdale and into the deep hollows of the earth where a wailing voice shielded her from the greatest and most awesome soul that had ever danced her colorful life under the yawning sky of living Equestria.

        “Nnngh—No!” Scootaloo jolted back, nearly teetering off the creaking wooden balcony of Twilight's treehouse. She panted and panted, her pink mane settling from a magical centripetal force that had ever so briefly empowered her, excited her, terrorized her. The next voice came in a whimper, echoing with phantom waterfalls of Cloudsdalian rain water. “N-no... Not now... Not y-yet...”

        The stars could wait, for all she was concerned. And yet, words that Spike had said—truly wise words—prodded the numbed edges of Scootaloo's soul. The time had long come for the equine survivor to stop running. In a firm breath, she briefly convinced herself that she wasn't running from that tooth; she was simply charging towards it in a curved fashion. There were plenty of yesterday's stars to be charted, and other separate truths to be told with other anchors, until the reality of the twenty-five-year old apocalypse would unveil itself. This, Scootaloo had no choice but to believe. She may not have been as old as Spike, but she could grant herself at least a measure of faith.

        Gulping her dread down her throat like so much mushroom broth, the last pony shuffled to the next tooth, and then the next, and then—her mouth sputtered. The girl cringed briefly, remembering in a vomitous fit of euphoria a saintly fruit that she had once bitten into under the shade of glistening apple orchards. But this sweetness was different, more potent, more forced.

        She realized that a fitful tooth had been dangling in front of her, lazily suspended from a pink string. As soon as her hoof so much as grazed it again, her insides bubbled with syrupy sarsaparilla. Her tongue lapped at an effluent cloud of cotton candy lodged in the hollow of her skull, and every breath she took was laced with cinnamon, licorice, vanilla, and all the many taste-bud-entrancing spices of joy, joy, joy...

        It made her positively sick to her stomach. “Heh...” She chuckled to herself with several inexplicable cavities across a crescent moon of teeth. “Do I really hate myself that much?”

        A ghostly stream of peppermint tugged her forward into a rosy heat that burned against the darkness of her imprisoning eyelids. With a scarlet flutter, Scootaloo opened her eyes to see where she had steered the Harmony in pursuit of the pink-stringed dragon tooth's directions. The gray world splashed evenly ahead of her through the broad windows of her airship. Glancing left and right beyond the haze, the last pony could hardly make out where the ground began and the horizon ended.

        A brief look at her altimeter did not help things. She judged that she was barely half a kilometer from the surface of the Wasteland, and yet the honey-lapping leylines of the dragon tooth were aiming her down, so that she felt a suicidal nose-dive into the depths of Equestria was in order.

        Scootaloo slowed the forward movement of the aircraft and tilted her seat so that she was perpetually gazing down through the windshield at a forty-five degree angle. Slipping her goggles over her eyes and adjusting them to compensate for the dimming fluctuations in the twilight, she scanned the snow-laden floor beneath the hovering zeppelin and felt for any “soul-centric” changes in the dragon tooth's invisible tug.

        Her tongue pulsed and her cheeks fluctuated. With every other league of forward drifting, she felt rivers of cinnamon-sweet euphoria spilling down through the bulkheads that held her body in place. Her heartbeat picked up at random occasions, as if she was being assaulted by random sugar highs that fought the very gravity seating her to the cockpit. Then—as the Harmony dipped dangerously close to the alabaster-white surface of the Wasteland—she felt as if she was going to suffer an inexplicable heart attack. Her veins filled with swarming lightning bugs, like gallons of bubbly soda gurgling through her. She licked her teeth instinctually, expecting to feel a sudden plethora of cavities at the perpetual sweetness assaulting her senses.

        This was nothing like the simple pull of Applejack's tooth or the gentle, silk-soft tugging of Fluttershy's. On both of those occasions, Scootaloo could easily tell exactly where she was going. Even though Fluttershy's remains were located in the hazardous depths of the Everfree Briar, Scootaloo at least knew that it was the Briar she was being tugged towards. Here—following the vanilla gasps that filled her body with a falling sensation—there was no real clue as to exactly where her next anchor was residing. The tooth was determined to aim the last pony straight into the bosom of the blasted world.

        Admittedly, Scootaloo had never flown this close to that particular splotch of Equestrian ground. She had spent an entire adulthood avoiding the site of Ponyville and the Wasteland immediately surrounding it. Here she was, barely five kilometers north of the spot where destiny reunited her with a purple dragon, and nothing about the barren fields looked remotely familiar to her. As a foal, she remembered a lonesome trip she had made, by hoof, to the grand valley beneath the shadow of Cloudsdale. Gently rolling fields and endless green hills composed the bulk of the Equestrian landscape that resided between Ponyville to the south and the hovering pegasus city in the north. All of that had been sundered by the Cataclysm, with many of the lush beds of grass replaced with jagged ravines and sinkholes and pale white exposed rock as far as her goggled eyes could see between there and Petra, the distant city of goblins.

        For the umpteenth time in her exhausted mind, Scootaloo was helpless to contemplate exactly what it was that compelled each of her and Spike's friends to have been located at such bizarre distances from one another the exact moment that the Cataclysm had happened. A part of her wondered if it was more than the physical landscape that the apocalypse had torn apart. Perhaps there had been a spiritual sundering, or an emotional catastrophe. From the confessions of the different anchors she had spoken to, it seemed as though Applejack was too busy working to be with friends. Fluttershy was too busy battling self-doubt to seek companionship. Rarity was an utter stranger and no-show to the rest of Ponyville. Twilight Sparkle was writing a book. As for Rainbow Dash—

        Scootaloo took a sharp breath, her hooves clasping harder to the levers of the airship as she momentarily floated in a dead hover. She closed her goggled eyes and exhaled long and hard. She knew very well what Rainbow Dash had been up to when the end came.

        As for this anchor, this soul that tugged at her with invisible straws channeling chocolate and licorice ghosts, Scootaloo could hardly figure out what was worth exploring about her. As the seconds ticked into tongue-tickling minutes, the cynic inside her overwhelmed any sweet-tooth left alive in her battered soul. A star-map could just as easily have been found through any other pony.

        “Celestia help me—I'd might as well just skip her,” the last pony droned.

        She was about to pull at the chains dangling over her pink mane and hoist herself far from the landscape—when a curvature in the nearby horizon caught her eye. Squinting through her goggles, she practically lunged out of her seat to gaze forward through the wide windshields. She could make out a sudden and bold contrast in the body of the Equestrian Wastes beneath her. The floor of the world was still the same exposed alabaster paleness as before, but there was a hauntingly unnatural contour to it. More specifically, the large and bulging hill looming directly beneath her somehow stood apart from the rest of the landscape.

        As she orbited the bone-white promontory, she realized that the substance of the rock was different from the rest of the singed earth. The matter appeared deader, colder, more porous, something that matched the ashen grayness of the snow settling down on top of it. If she didn't know better, her gut instinct would have surmised that the rock had fallen directly out of the—

        “Oh no.” Scootaloo grunted. She pulled sharply to starboard and banked back around so that she was spinning a steady, counter-clockwise circle around what was suddenly a bold half-sphere of deader-than-dead rock impaling the stone bosom of Equestria. “Oh no no no no no.” Her face was flung far between a dry retch and a bitter frown. “You've gotta be friggin' kidding me!”

        The moon rock was five hundred and fifty meters in diameter. Scootaloo measured it herself, flying nakedly over the alien dome of rock and spotting every curve of it from a low altitude. It was by far the largest single chunk of lunar material that the last pony had ever set her eyes upon. With a firmer understanding of the nature of what she was witnessing, she took greater pains to observe the landscape around her. She realized that the rising crests of mountains surrounding her at three-hundred-and-sixty degrees were actually the edges of a gigantic impact crater that had formed around this colossal mammoth of a meteorite.

        The fact that she had never heard of this structure—from any traveling merchant or from any random patron at the M.O.D.D.—surprised her to no end. It seemed absolutely absurd that she was the first and only scavenger to have realized this thing was no ordinary hill. It was simply impossible in life to be this lucky. The sheer possibilities of the innumerable raw materials that could be harvested from within the dome—rubies, runestones, flamestones, enchanted dust—completely boggled her mind. This was a gold mine of post-apocalyptic proportions. With the right amount of time and resources, one scavenger could salvage enough from this single find to make millionaires out of hundreds of silver-strip-starved souls.

        How ironic—then—that the first and only thought that graced the last pony's mind was not earning money, was not mining rocks, was not finding fortunes, but was determining where her anchor was inside that infernal thing and how to get to her. Had she changed so much that she could no longer look a dead gift horse in the mouth, simply for the sake of looking a living pony in the face?

        “And just how in the heck can anypony survive this dang thing falling on her fuzzy head?!”

        Scootaloo's voice was a thing of muffled insanity against the cold winds that kicked at her beneath the shadow of the moored Harmony. On stiff legs, she marched towards the edge of the big dumb object. She eyed where the jagged dome of moonrock met with the smooth blasted “skin” of the scorched earth. It looked like a bone-pale tumor had bubbled out from a plateau of dead flesh, and she was a tiny brown flea standing helplessly before the impervious girth of it.

        “Maybe her pink mane cushioned her.” She groaned inwardly. With bored scarlet eyes, she squinted at the uneven surface of the dome. She pressed a hoof to it; she lightly smacked it with a vibrating horseshoe. On a hare-brained whim, she knelt down low and tugged up at the edges of the thing with two forelimbs. Rightfully so, the lunar mountain didn't budge. “Well, so much for picking it up.” She stifled a dull chuckle while dusting her hooves off, then sighed. “Pffft... Dumb rock.”

        Falling down to her haunches, the girl sighed into the gentle curtain of snow littering the landscape around her. She slumped forward and leaned her snout within a crook of her foreleg, all the while rubbing the edge of her hoof into the fresh mane of pink hair and the brain matter roasting achingly underneath it. One eye squinted tighter than the other as she gazed deep into the ivory thickness of the rock and thought, thought, thought...

        The pink-stringed dragon's tooth had not let up. It tugged and it tugged at her, trying to convince the last pony that the giant stone structure in front of her was really just a sweet and spicy jaw-breaker waiting to be licked at. There was no telling how long it would take to pierce the surface of that lunar monstrosity. The pony could consume weeks, months, even years to find the remains of her anchor, assuming the bones survived the gargantuan impact at all. Those were not numbers that even the most daring of time travelers could afford.

        Still, as much as every centimeter of Scootaloo's soul was telling her to quit the task before she even started, a daring part of her—the part of her that was secretly proud to have survived all these gray desolate years—was telling her to go forward, to press forward, to dive forward as if it was a sea of cotton candy and not a wall of lunar rock resting a few meager meters from her pink forehead.

        “Hrmmfff...” She grunted to herself and gazed upwards at the soupy overcast sky lingering high above the drifting, copper shadow of the Harmony. Her soul bounced and her vision inside out, so that she envisioned that she was diving down like a meteor rock from the twilight and staring at the top of a thunderous wisp of clouds, spotting a lone pony walking over the strobing lengths of darkness and scaring the lightning into hiding with an angry smirk.

        The very thought forced her brown wings to stretch out. With a sudden brightening of scarlet eyes, Scootaloo flexed her limbs, stood up, and immediately flew up towards the bobbing ballast that was her airship.

        After several minutes of rummaging through the lower storage compartment of the Harmony—littering the black bulkheads with several clattering assortments of tools—she finally found what she was looking for. In a dry breath, she heaved a thick copper cylinder out from a pile of dusty metal scrap. A flurry of dust and rusted sediment kicked through the rune-lit air. She coughed, fanned the fumes away with a brown hoof, and stared nakedly at the mechanism that she had just reunited herself with.

        The thing was old—to be sure—and it sang from copper head to copper tail with the tell-tale signs of a lone pony's sophomoric engineering skills. A few conductive wires spilled loosely from the joints like tiny intestines, and several coils had decayed into brittle facsimiles of their former glory, but the device as a whole was remarkably intact for its age. The extent of its usefulness was yet to be tested—just as the last pony's resolve would be.

        With an inexplicably joyous humming sound, the mare hoisted the thing to her back, clambered up the spiral staircase to the pilot's cabin of the Harmony, and made a bee-line towards her workbench where a beautifully repaired scooter was presently dangling.

        This may surprise you, but I've long considered myself a lucky pony. Yes, I've suffered many misfortunes. Being the last living member of my species is rarely something to be proud of or thankful for—and rightfully so.

But when I look back at all of the chaotic circumstances of my life, I cannot help but feel that my existence has been bolstered over the years by freakishly amazing coincidences. I was lucky to have had so many Cloudsdalian tools deposited near me immediately following the Cataclysm. I was lucky to have had a rough childhood that prepared me for the scavenger's lifestyle that was to follow. I was lucky to have been born a pegasus so that I could fly far away from the many vicious residents of the Wasteland that would have ended an earth pony or a unicorn in a blink. And, yes, I was lucky that Rainbow Dash had chosen me—out of millions of other Cloudsdalian souls—to have been locked safely away in that one arcane vault when the end of Equestria came.

        On top of all that, I was born with a talent. As you well know, this talent has not been enough to earn me a cutie mark. I've long assumed that I shall forever remain a blank flank because of the magic that was drained from Equestria along with the ashes of the Alicorn sisters themselves. I've long learned to ignore any bitterness over that irony. My talent manifests itself in my survival, which is a far more meaningful thing than wearing a magical tattoo on my butt.

        I am an engineer. I am a dang good engineer. I can build a zeppelin out of scrap, a rifle out of shrapnel, and a runestone out of lunar rock. With months and months of preparation, I can create a vehicle that will fly me to far-off places for years. Within a panicked breath of adrenalized necessity, I can slap together something to burn, burrow, explode, or kill my way to safety. I cannot count all of the miraculous moments—in the present Wasteland as well as beneath the green-flaming depths of the past—when a split second firing of my synapses has helped me concoct something that has saved the day.

        I'm not writing this as a boast. After all, I should know better than to show off to you. I just mean to confess that oftentimes it is pure dumb luck that has been my salvation as opposed to true intelligence, grit, or tenacity. The Cataclysm has shaped the veritable coffin that has surrounded my life, and it was never my right to choose or comprehend what has landed me in this grave; it has all been mere fortune.

        But sometimes—yes, sometimes—there is something even greater than luck that makes or breaks the latest endeavor that I put my soul to...

        Above a stone plateau pockmarked with a ring of rusted metal barricades, the colors of the rainbow strobed brightly through the snowy air. The rainbow signal shimmered in a slight dimness; the flamestone within the body of the lattice was starting to lose its enchantment.

        The substance of the signal no longer mattered to the last pony. She sat leisurely in the nest of the watchtower beside the lightshow, using the bright intensity of the beams to light the task before her.

        With tools extended from a series of braces slid over her hooves, Scootaloo tweaked and tinkered with the filaments of the copper cylinder in her lap. Using expert precision, she bolted a long stalk of metal to the “neck” of the cylinder, successfully attaching the rusted antenna to a complex rig consisting of springs, levers, and the skeletal structure of a pulley system.

        Resting against the railings of the watchtower that the pony had hammered together over a decade ago, several more tools waited to be fused to this bizarre machine she was reconstructing. Through the prismatic aura of the signal behind her, she reached for what looked like a small leather kite fashioned in such a shape as to mimic bat-wings. She collapsed the flimsy fan of lightweight materials and notched it within the hollow of the “neck” she had attached to the cylinder. Then, with patience and careful precision, she spooled a long copper wire through the pulley system and fused it to the spine of the kite.

        From up above, a faint melody drifted through the flaking bits of snow. Scootaloo's record player was resting precariously at the aperture entrance of the Harmony, and Octavia's strings were gently piercing the air surrounding the once-sacred site of the rainbow signal. The rhythm lulled the last pony's aching mind as she obsessed harder and harder over the task at hoof, enraptured by the depths to which she descended into her reborn contraption.

        The things that work best in life, the things that save me in a real disaster, the tools that keep me alive when everything else wants me dead—are all utterly ridiculous. I shudder to think what would happen if my entire life was somehow miraculously documented for all of living ponydom to read about. Equestrian civilization would think me to be a moron for the many crazy things I have done to accomplish my goals. They would be right.

        Sometimes in life, what works the most are the stupid things.

        “Three... Two... One... Liftoff!”

        After chanting into the lonesome winds, Scootaloo yanked at a lever along the neck of the contraption. A metallic ring sounded through the air from where she stood atop the floating Harmony's balloon. The leather kite shot out of the chamber of her contraption and flew straight up towards the twilight. The serrated sound of a copper wire sliced through the air as the flimsy craft soared its way up from the machine's spring-loaded launch. Finally—once the flung object had reached the end of the copper cord's length—the kite jolted and immediately spread its leather wings out.

        The lightweight craft danced in the high winds above the Harmony, staying aloft at the end of its metallic reins. A throng of conductive metal needles stuck out like barbs along the top and sides of the winged object. From where Scootaloo stood above the aircraft's balloon, she had her hooves tightly ensnared with black rubber goulashes. These likewise clutched non-conductive grip handles which could half-steer the soaring kite as well as the nose of the pointed copper antenna.

        Smirking at the effortless flight of the launched kite, Scootaloo's goggled eyes traced down the length of the copper wire attached to it and followed the cord as it ran into the neck of the launcher, then into a bundle of tesla coils that wormed their way through the body of the cylindrical antenna. Several stalks of copper filament swam around a circular assortment of empty chambers. Three of the chambers housed freshly carved runestones of the last pony's own hoofwork. But one last chamber was empty, missing one final and important ingredient...

        “Enchanted thunder pearl?” Bruce hacked, coughed, and spat out the fumes of his latest cigar as he teetered against the doorframe to his airship while adjusting incredulous green goggles. “Pony must think dat Brucie's bushy tail is made out of silver, da?”

        “Don't tell me you've never stumbled upon it, Bruce.” Scootaloo stood across from him. Beyond the bridges joining their two airships together, the Wasteland's grayness silhouetted her wind-kicked mane hair as she further murmured, “It's the most essential of ramcraft. You're always stumbling upon ramcraft.”

        “Only because ramcraft lacks good sense to not be stumbled upon. Vhy did dead civilization insist on living atop cold mountains and not bundle up anything? Is no vonder they didn't die earlier, da?” Bruce shrugged his shoulders with a sigh and proceeded to scamper over the rattling heaps of miscellaneous goods filling the lengths of his smoke-stained gondola. “Is only funny to Brucie dat not all living things bury precious valuables in dirt like nuts. Perhaps that's vhy Brucie is still alive and rams' skulls are dotting valls of M.O.D.D.?”

        “Do you or do you not have a thunder pearl?” Scootaloo asked as she trotted lightly after the flying squirrel. Her ungoggled eyes forlonly glanced at the darkening clouds far beyond the portholes. “I'm kind of in a hurry here, Bruce.”

        “Always paying last second visit before stormfront!” Bruce chuckled as he scurried over to a pile of metal crates and rummaged madly through them. “Brucie thinks pony must be infected with new kind of Vasteland madness! Surely pony does not intend to capture lightning in bottle like so much dazzling flame!”

        “And what if I was?” Scootaloo replied.

        Bruce glanced up in mid-rummaging. His green lenses flickered as he briefly took the cigar out from his incisors to say, “Last pony is amazing specimen. Vhy so insistent lately on suicidal adventures? Nyet, it doesn't make sense...”

        “Nothing suicidal about it, Bruce,” Scootaloo murmured as she strolled apathetically past a dangling array of artificially-lit seedlings and well-preserved leaves. “Let's just say that I've... uh... been working for a new client as of late.”

        “Bruce vould certainly hope client is well-paying. Thunder pearl is not cheap! If only Brucie could find vhere...” He fumbled briefly through the pockets along his leather belt, glanced left, glanced right, then glanced up at a metal compartment hanging above his cockpit. With a grunt, the smoking squirrel backflipped, clung to the ceiling, and gave it a good smack with his bushy tail. The compartment flew open and a glowing sphere of translucent rock fell into his paws. “Ha Ha! As beautiful as it is conductive! One strike of lightning and ramcraft jewel can light up airship's batteries for next twelve stormfronts. Volverines vould give princely fortune for dis!” He then leaned his upside-down head to the side and squinted curiously Scootaloo's way. “But Brucie thought friend pony's ship was steam-powered...”

        “It's not for my ship.” Scootaloo raised her goggles and exposed her scarlet eyes. “It's for a lightning gun.”

        Bruce whistled shrilly. With a flick of his tail, he flipped down onto all fours before Scootaloo and slowly stood up with the shimmering pearl in his grasp. “Brucie must confess, is awfully big bite to vallet for something dat takes less than two breaths to fire. BOOM!—Silver strips all gone in bright flash. Pony expects no less, da?”

        “I know what I came here for, Bruce. And I assure you I brought payment.”

        “Then either friend pony brought six hundred silver strips or trip vas for nothing. Brucie may be jovial fellow—heh heh heh—but certainly not stupid squirrel.”

        Scootaloo was already pulling the leather pouch out. With a briefly sluggish motion, she paused to contemplate the depths of the wound that she was about to make in herself. Ever since she met Spike, she had been functioning under a one-track mind. Everything she had done, everything she had set her heart to over the past few weeks—she had done for the sake of her time jumps. Aside from fetching brown flame for Pitt, she hadn't been acting as the typical scavenger she had trained over the many years to be. Bruce was right to warn her of the financial plummet she was about to take, and the last pony wasn't entirely certain if she could convince him anymore than she could convince herself that her life had changed, for a whole new horizon of priceless things had been thrown before her dashboard.

        “It's amazing how stupid things can be worth all the risk,” she murmured aloud. Scootaloo hoofed the pile of silver strips to him and attempted to ignore how pathetically lightweight the leather pouch felt immediately following the transaction. “Don't worry about me, Bruce. I'm not killing myself half as much as I'm discovering myself.”

        “Does pony friend think Brucie is blind?” He smirked. Bruce tossed her the pearl which the last pony effortlessly caught. The squirrel then pointed at her mane. “Is like blossoming bed of flowers, da? Not even grand gardens of St. Petersbrittle can outmatch dis beauty.”

        “Hmmm... Oh, r-right.” Scootaloo ran a hoof over her pink neck and smirked the squirrel's way. “Never figured you to be the charmer, Bruce.”

        “If it vasn't for ridiculously huge incisors, Brucie would be casanova of clouds, da? Mmmm... Brucie thinks so!”

        Scootaloo smiled impishly. “Don't give up, dude. I'm sure there's a winged sorority of sexy chipmunks floating around out there with your name on 'em.”

        “Now Brucie knows vhat happened to Sun and Moon. They became opposite ends of dis strange smile Brucie sees before him.” He smirked cheekishly, flicked the end of his cigar, and reclined back against a dirty bulkhead. “Perhaps after pony friend has captured lightning in bottle, she might share other ensnared secrets so dat rest of Wasteland can smile as well?”

        “That's kind of the whole point, Bruce,” Scootaloo said in a deflating exhale as she pocketed the incredibly small pearl of expensive quality. She trotted her way back towards the entrance of the dirigible. “But first thing's first; I gotta go take a wild stab at the moon.”

        “Hmmph! Pony is crazy! Beautiful, but crazy!”

        “You can bet your nuts.”

        Am I becoming a happier pony? I certainly don't feel like it. Perhaps it can be said that I'm livelier than I used to be. It's hard to not live my life with a greater degree of energy than what was once afforded me. Traveling back and forth across green flames has opened my eyes to so many hues and shades that I had long thought were dead to me. I suppose that makes me more sensitive, more aware, and to some extent more jittery than the spirit that once filled this frail brown frame. In a lot of ways, I'm a great deal more alive than I was a mere month or two ago. But does that make me happier?

        Spike would like to think that I'm pursuing joy. With the way I've changed, Bruce probably thinks that I'm sniffing something. I shudder to imagine what Pitt or Gilda might think I've been up to as soon as they witness me flying around with my head cut off, trying to dive into the Everbriar or carving my way into a giant mountain made of moonrock.

        Perhaps I have gone crazy. Only an insane soul would venture back to a haunted past full of dead spirits with the meager hope of capturing the seeds of what gave them life and attempt planting them into the dead soil of an eternal wasteland. To grasp this—to comprehend and understand the moronic audacity of this—is to whole-heartedly admit to tremendous insanity. The only happiness to be had in that is the flippant desperation of a mad pony.

        Perhaps that was why I didn't give up on the anchor that I had just spent six hundred silver strips and a prayer on salvaging. I think a big piece of me wanted to understand her, just as much as I shuddered to navigate the sickeningly sweet clouds of her. I wanted to understand what made a mad pony's heart and soul tick. I wanted to inject myself with her hysteria and see just what would vomit out the other end.

        You've known me long enough to tell that I don't do desperate things for no reason. It so happens that I was determined and soul-bound to carve my way into the heart of the moon and find her waiting for me beneath it. Sometimes, it's liberating to indulge in a little bit of looniness.

“A lightning gun, very impressive,” Spike said with a nodding of his scaled head. He adjusted a pair of crystal spectacles over his green eyes and glanced across the laboratory. “How noble it is that you so swiftly acquired the thunder pearl for it. But I daresay it is missing one major ingredient.” He cleared his fuming, draconian throat. “Chiefly, the lightning.”

        Scootaloo finished sliding the folded copper cylinder and neck into a bulky saddlebag before pointing a hoof towards the rocky ceiling. “Do you hear that?”

        Spike tilted his neck under a cascading roar of booming thunder that rumbled through the bowels of Twilight Sparkle's treehouse above. “I most certainly do hear it, regularly, every one hundred and twenty hours, as you should rightfully know, my little pony.”

        “Well, those are all the ingredients that I need.”

        “How poetic, though it leaves me wondering why you are with me here and not in the cabin of your most maneuverable airship.”

        “I parked her in the shell of Ponyville's Downtown warehouse,” Scootaloo said with a smirk. “You remember the one: Applejack used to rent it for storing her family's apples before being delivered all the way to Canterlot.”

        “It's enough of a feat for the Harmony to fit inside that, dear child. But do you think it can withstand the pressures of a passing stormfront?”

        “It has so far, hasn't it?” Scootaloo smirked. The world boomed above them as a few flakes of dust scattered down from the teeth of random stalactites. “Normally, I just wait out a storm with the Harmony hovering high above the thundering clouds. Still, there comes a time when I have to anchor it somewhere closer to earth, but don't worry your purple head about my airship, Spike. I've parked the dang thing in even riskier places and it came out just fine. Besides...” She pulled the leather straps tight around the bundled lightning gun and hoisted it with a grunting breath over her flank. “Nnnghh... where I intend to go—ugh, whew—there would be no chance of the Harmony coming out in one piece.”

        “I assume that you speak once more about this alarmingly huge moonrock that you just recently stumbled upon,” the elder dragon surmised, watching with calm emerald eyeslits as the pony gathered a few more necessities—hammer, chisel, bottle of green flame, bracelet of horns, and lanterns—before sliding them into their respective pouches along her heavily garbed figure. “Though I am quite certain that there is a method to your sudden madness, old friend, I think it would only be polite for you to explain it to this old dragon.”

        “I built this thing ages ago.” Scootaloo excitedly pointed towards the bulky contraption strapped to her back. “When scavenging the wasteland, I discovered that moonrock was exceptionally sensitive to high yield blasts of electrical energy. Do you have any idea how much time it takes to mine your way into a chunk of moonstone?”

        “I've only ever eaten a moonrock once. It's akin to swallowing chalk. I assure you, dragons do not enjoy chalk.”

        “Yeah, well, even if you fashioned a pickaxe out of dragon's teeth, it takes a heck of a long time!” Scootaloo smirked wryly. “One day, before I even built the Harmony, I watched as one of the many regular stormfronts of the Wasteland shattered a gigantic chunk of rock to bits from a single lightning strike. When the stormfront was over and the snow returned in its place, I trotted over to find that not only had the moonrock utterly exploded, but all sorts of precious multicolored gemstones had been exposed from the shattered core. I collected them, enchanted them, bartered and traded with them, and soon I had enough silver strips to buy myself the last few supplies I needed to start building my own airship.”

        “Sounds like it was a most fortunate break for you.”

        “Dang straight. But I realized that I couldn't just ask for lightning to strike any moonrock that I wanted it to. So, once I discovered thunder pearls and their amazing abilities to focus electrical conductivity, I set about constructing this sucker you see on my backside.” She shook her leather-clad shoulders with emphasis. “Using an airborne kite to draw in a lightning strike, I can lure natural surges of electrical energy into the heart of the antenna, funnel it through the thunder pearl, and then release the electricity forward in a single charge via a magical command to the runestone breakers built within. Cha-ching! Lightning gun!”

        “I assume you use such a beautifully-crafted machine of violence to perform autopsies on moon rocks?”

        “In that I make them explode horribly from the inside out and save myself a week-long job.” Scootaloo beamed. “Absolutely!”

        “I shudder to think what exploding a rock the size of two small towns might bring upon the Wasteland.”

        “Pffft!” Scootaloo foalishly raspberried. “Even one hundred lightning guns wouldn't be able to make something the size of this friggin' dome explode. But, if I seize the thunderous moment we have here and get enough lightning bolts to strike my machine, I just might be able to bore a hole deep enough inside the porous rock to give myself a better starting point for hammering my way towards the next anchor.”

        “You're convinced that there's anything left of the anchor to be found?”

        “I figure that if the ashes of my target were completely pulverized, what would this dragon tooth be guiding me towards?”

        “A decent assessment. I imagine the reason why you've waited until this stormfront to embark upon this endeavor is because—”

        “—I need a fresh lightning strike to power my gun.” Scootaloo nodded. “And even then, it will only be good for a few seconds of discharge. It may not be pretty, but the worst that the Wasteland has to throw at me is the best tool I have to work with at the moment. If I waste so much as a dozen hours, my opportunity will have come and gone. I'd have to wait several days before I can attempt zapping my way into the moonrock again.”

        “Dare I ask how you intend to traverse the five kilometers between here and there in the middle of a Wasteland stormfront with little to no protection?”

        “I figured that's where you come in.” She pointed at him with a wink.

        “Do I, now?”

        “Tell me, Spike,” she murmured beneath the rolling waves of thunderous noise cascading above them. The clockfaces and gemstones along the fringes of the room rattled from the vibrations of the storm. “All of the voluminous amount of green flame that you must summon to send me back in time...”

        “Yes...?”

        “....just what fraction of that is needed to send somepony somewhere through space?”

        “Mmmm... Not much breath at all—” Spike paused in mid speech. His aged pupils dilated as he gazed sickly down at her. “Oh, dear friend, surely you do not mean to insinuate that—?”

        “Heck, yeah, I mean to insinuate that!” Scootaloo smirked devilishly. “Surely somewhere deep inside that large, scaled beast of a dragon there still exists a whelp who can send mere parcels across half of Equestria with a flick of the tongue!”

        “Your optimistic opinion of my stamina is flattering, but hardly laudable, Scootaloo. It frightens me to think that you have suddenly hinged the entirety of your next venture on my ill-practiced ability to mimic the teleportations of the past.”

        “Pffft—As if!” She smirked and pulled a leather strap just wide enough to expose the glowing thunder pearl nestled in its socket within the antenna of the lightning gun. “The entirety of my next venture hinges on the likelihood of this dang thing to work as well as your ability to blow me across the Wasteland... erm... Y'know what I mean.”

        “Scootaloo, if I may express my concern...”

        “You may try.”

        “Since the beginning of our experiments in time travel, I have always made it my goal to hold your welfare and safety above all else. It burdens my three hundred-year-old heart that I cannot join you in your trips to the somber landscape of the past. I have been amazed several times over by the durable lengths of your tenacity and intelligence. It would be an utter shame if all of that was thrown to waste on a single gamble, on a single whim—”

        “Well, good thing it isn't your gamble to make, eh, Spike?”

        “I refuse to be an accessory to your self-destruction.”

        “Spike...”

        “You are the last pony. You are immeasurably priceless, and it would be a terrible tragedy if something so trite as a daredevilish scavenging mission sundered you to a million electrocuted pieces—”

        “Spike, I have breathed tragedy in and out of my nostrils all my friggin' life,” Scootaloo said firmly, gazing at him with stone scarlets. “Let me suck in some triumph for a change.”

        The elder dragon stared at her in a gray haze of helpless surrender. “Very well, old friend.” He briefly coughed a curtain of green fumes and managed a soft smirk. “Far be it from me to dictate what is or what is not the length to which you should excavate the past.”

        “Much appreciated, Spike,” she said with a smile.

        “As a matter of fact, I think it is noble—not to mention endearing—that you would take such risks to find Rainbow Dash's remains—”

        “Pinkie Pie.”

        Spike blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

        “Pinkie Pie's body is under the giant moonrock,” Scootaloo mumbled as she readjusted the bulging saddlebag on her back. “Not Rainbow Dash's. Now, are you gonna teleport me across the Wastelands or not?”

        “I... You... It...” The elder dragon briefly fumbled like an infant. He stood back on his haunches, pulled the spectacles off his snout, and rubbed a pair of painfully clenching eyecrests before gesturing with a blind wrist, all the while murmuring, “You're asking me to send you halfway across Equestria in the middle of a stormfront to summon a charge of lighting into a copper ray gun that will drill your way into a gigantic moonrock all for Pinkie's remains?”

        “Spike, tell me, have you ever once in your life more succinctly answered yourself with a single breath?”

        Spike's tired eyes blinked sickly. “Harumph...” He slid his spectacles back on and smirked in a lazy exhale. “Suit yourself, child. Perhaps a good injection of Miss Pie is the first step in building a vaccination for your daring mania.”

        “Exactly what I was thinking!” Scootaloo managed a crooked grin. “The way I see it, she's in Ponyville all the time. Our favorite village is as succinct a ground zero to the Cataclysm as any location. What better a place to spot the night's sky from?”

        “Oh, I have no doubt that you will be seeing stars, Scootaloo,” Spike said, failing to hide a wincing expression behind his scales. “Though, I doubt that you'll procure them in the manner which you seek.”

        “The heck is that supposed to mean?”

        “Applejack and Fluttershy were undoubtedly soothing souls for you to have been reunited with. But... hmmm... Oh bother...”

        “Speak up. Cat got your flame?”

        “Scootaloo, do you even remember Pinkie Pie?”

        “Pffft—Of course I do! 'Auntie Pinkie Pie:' always happy, always throwing a party, constantly giving out samples of the finest desserts from Sugarcube Corner...”

        “Do you not see the dilemma here, old friend?” Spike stifled an elderly chuckle under the rumbling of the stormfront above them both.

        Scootaloo squinted curiously at him. “Dilemma...?”

        “Your memories of Miss Pie were memories that belonged to a foal.”

        “Your point?”

        “Hmmm...” Spike scratched his green-crested chin and squinted towards the far reaches of the cave. “To somepony of adult age—as you will be when you are once more in her presence—you may find that 'Auntie Pinkie Pie' is... hmmm... a different shade of pink than you felicitously recall.”

        “Spike, my childhood was filled with enough stress to make any adult pony faint on sight,” Scootaloo said in a dry voice. “I think my memories are solid enough.”

        He shrugged with a helpless smirk. “Again, I cannot argue with you, old friend. Suffice to say, I am no longer worried about what the lightning may do to you.”

        Scootaloo blinked curiously at that.

        Spike marched his iron limbs over towards her. “Now, then—In what direction am I to teleport your brave body, Scootaloo?”

        “I measured the coordinates after I spotted the moonrock a couple of days ago.” Scootaloo unrolled a leather parchment from a forward pocket in her saddle bag and read off of it. “'107, 37, 8'. With the storm and all, you may wish to compensate for barometric pressure and—”

        “That won't do.”

        Scootaloo went cross-eyed. She glanced confusedly up at the dragon. “Spike...?”

        “I need a direction, old friend. If you... erm... wouldn't mind pointing.”

        The last pony twitched. She mentally measured her and her draconian friend's relation to the body of the treehouse above and the invisible compass arrows stretching beyond it. Finally, she pivoted, then pointed a hoof past the wall stretching above the bed of gemstones.

        “Uhm... That direction,” she murmured. “Northeast, about five kilometers out and eight hundred meters above sea level.”

        “Wonderful! Much better,” the dragon said with a smirk and proceeded to beat his fist against his chest as he summoned a flaming breath from deep within.

        “Wait wait wait wait wait!” Scootaloo sneered, waving two forelimbs in front of the hulking dragon elder. “Are you meaning to tell me that inside that brilliant three-hundred-year-old skull of yours, you can't teleport me based on simple coordinates?”

        “I may have mastered transporting an equine soul through time, Scootaloo,” he spoke to her with a bashful smile. Something rosy blossomed under his neck's purple scales. “But even in those situations, I still need a chronological allotment of years and reagents by which to tie your soul to a once-living anchor. Unless I am aiming at Canterlot—the place of my birth—in the present, then I am shooting blind, quite frankly.”

        “How come you never told me this kind of crap before?!”

        “Quite simple—You never had the audacity to ask me until now.”

        “And all of those times in your youth when you farted buttloads of Twilight's letters to Princess Celestia...?!”

        “I was much younger and much sharper then. Still, it was all mostly a matter of memorizing vaguely where to 'toss' the constant plethora of documents. You'd be surprised; for a few months there, much of the parchment ended in Her Majesty's fireplace, toasted to useless embers. Heh heh heh heh—” A sudden attack of hacking, fuming coughs. “Ahhhhhhh—Good times.” He gulped, licked his burning lips, and smiled placidly the filly's way. “So then, shall we do this?”

        “Just a second!” Scootaloo half-shrieked. With a shaking hoof, she reached down and hoisted a canteen that was attached to her saddlebag. She took a long and refreshing swig of reclaimed water, exhaled, slapped the cap back on, and replaced the canteen with a pink-stringed dragon's tooth that she tightly wrapped about her neck like a noose before a hanging. “Okay. Do me.”

        “You are prepared, then?”

        “No.” She grunted. “But send me off before I think twice about it.” The dragon's tooth shimmered invisibly about her neck like a fragrant slice of cinnamon toast. “The best bravery is random.”

        “That hardly sounds like your philosophy, dear friend.” Spike's neck reared back as his breathing tubes boiled hotly in the claustrophobic air of the place. “Though somehow I'm willing to predict that you may soon adapt it.”

        “The quicker you teleport me the better,” Scootaloo muttered, standing straight and tall as if before a firing squad. She lowered the goggles over her eyes symbolically. “I only need this stormfront for its lightning. As soon as its gone—and I've found Pinkie's remains—I'm coming back to you and the Harmony.”

        “Your confidence is reassuring.” He belched one last time before flinging his iron-thick maw towards the mare. “I'll try not to materialize you inside a mountain.”

        Scootaloo's scarlet eyes twitched. “H-huh?”

        Too late. The flames fountained over her. She briefly roasted in a shrieking gasp, for she was not being flung down the hauntingly familiar tunnel of cylindrical emerald mirrors that the time traveler had gotten used to. Instead, a queer sensation of a different sort wafted over the last pony—as if the world was really just a watercolor facsimile of something that the Goddesses' had once imagined, and it was changing before her, melting before her, surging and bulging and vomiting all over itself until it became a completely unique mosaic, a gray mosaic, a dark mosaic—and out from the canvas of its wind-howling depth there flickered an epileptic phalanx of impossibly bright flashes.

        The last pony blinked, breathing solid air again. “Well, that wasn't so bad—Gaaah!”

        She shrieked, for the hulking weight of the copper lightning gun strapped to her back was suddenly flinging her upwards, in that it was flinging her earthwards, in that she had materialized upside down in the dreaded thick of the air, and now a screaming storm boiled all around the last pony as she plunged, plunged, plunged down the length of an incalculable altitude through the swirling dark clouds of utter chaos.

        “Oh, friggin' A!”

        Her growling screams were muted under the blistering thunder that boomed all around her. The world was a spinning cyclone of madness, and she was hurtling towards the heart of it it—weighted by a stupidly expensive gun and lured via a dragon's tooth to one absurd kernel of candy-coated frivolity buried somewhere beyond the hellish miasma through which she helplessly flailed.

        No number of years spent in an airship could have prepared her for this, for this deafening nightmare. She fought to straighten her back against the weight of the lightning gun spinning her like a top. After an infinite struggle, Scootaloo finally freed her wings and shot them out. Immediately, she wished she hadn't; a strong gust of wind caught her brown feathers and hurled her like a missile straight into a giant anvil of dense, electrical clouds.

        With a hissing breath, the mare curved her wings and banked around the burning, misty monolith. Errant snow-bright branches of electricity shimmered out above and beneath her, blinding her blinking scarlets beneath their copper-lensed prison. A thick condensation formed on her goggles as she panted and panted and navigated her flimsy self in a spiraling descent through the violently shaking world.

        Another row of murderously huge stormclouds lingered before her. With bulging black wisps that would dwarf even The Dog's Bollocks, the giant frothing body boiled and surged in front of the tiny equine before hurtling a random spray of hell-hot lightning in her direction.

        “Nnngh!”

        Scootaloo bravely dove straight down, miraculously avoiding a burning river of charged electricity that blasted its way past her plummeting flank. Her heart stopped, pulsed, and stopped again as she dropped like a spiraling comet straight down a funnel cloud dancing from neck to neck with vertical screams of bright, sapphiric sparks. She gasped and struggled to hoist her suicidal plunge away from the nightmarish whirlpool, but the sheer mass of her re-engineered contraption was acting as a weighted ballast, leaning her into a perpetual spin. She fought and strained to even out the body of the device against her spine as she plummeted ever closer towards the cloudy esophagus of dancing stormbolts below.

        The hair on her neck stood on end. She gasped as a bright aura shimmered in her peripheral vision. The last pony realized that the thunder pearl inside the neck of the antenna was pulsating intensely. Even as she was plummeting, the enchanted stone was being excited by the cyclonic forest of electricity frothing around it. The bolts of lightning from the cacophonous swirl of nearby clouds danced closer and closer and closer—

        “Oh crud... Oh crud oh crud oh crud!”

        In a desperate gamble, Scootaloo hoisted her hooves down towards the leather straps fastening the hulking metal contraption to her vulnerable body. She fumbled and fumbled over the belt buckles. The lightning bolts drew closer. She could smell the roasting of air molecules sailing to greet her. Finally—with a jolt—she unhooked the bulky saddlebag from her body. Screaming into the deafening chaos, she tightened her muscles and kicked viciously against the free-falling body of the backpack, propelling the lightning gun and the rest of her equipment mercilessly down the vertical tunnel of electricity without her. The impact of her kicking hooves shoved her away from the mouth of the cloud just in the nick of time. With a grunting breath, she angled her wings and flew herself down along the outer crest of the cloud.

        She gnashed her teeth against the whipping winds, her ears practically bleeding from the apocalyptic booms of thunder all around her. Squinting through her shaking goggles, she watched as the black shadow of the equipment bag flew down the randomly strobing body of the lightning funnel beside her. With each bloodrushing second, she murmured and prayed that it would fly in one piece out the other end.

        After a final flash of lightning, the bag emerged. The leather straps had been singed to ribbons, but the bulk of the saddle remained intact, along with the copper contraption inside. Before Scootaloo could let forth a yell of victory, she took notice of a looming white body illuminated by the lightning strobes beneath her. She gasped; the moonrock dome was just below...

        Twirling her body past an insanely close lightning strike, she clasped onto the middle of the free-falling saddlebag with her forelimbs and dragged her wings skyward. Her bones tore at her skin and she lost several feathers as she forcibly dragged at the currents of the burning air. The strain was too much; at any moment her brown wings would tear clean off.

        “Nnnnghh—Gaah!”

        Scootaloo shrieked and finally gave slack, pulling her wings inward. She plummeted—hard as a rock—towards the white mountain of bone-breaking moonstone lingering beneath her in the strobing madness. A hulking breath, a torturous stretch of her naked muscles; she successfully flung her wings outwards at an angle, tilting her body up at the last second so as to skim the top of the lunar dome. Her back legs dangled and her copper horseshoes dragged against the white porous rock, spitting sparks and ashes on either side as she scraped her way over the summit and plunged down the far side of it like a bungie jumper.

        “Oh no no no no no—Jeez!”

        She yelped as she twirled, somersaulted, and flip-flopped down the height of the mountain of moonrock. With a final pathetic flapping of her wings, she managed to slow herself to the slightly less suicidal twenty-kilometers-per hour plunge that plowed her into the sputtering gravel of the earth. Bruised, wincing, but very stupidly alive, the last pony came to a grinding stop. She lay on the ground, clutching her huge saddlebag to her chest like an enormous doll, while the ashen world howled and burned with electrical devastation all around and above her.

        “Ughhhhhh—I think I would have settled for the friggin' mountain, Spike.”

        The ground exploded thirty thunderous meters from her.

        She sat up in a yelp, her goggled eyes twitching to see a scorch mark within spitting distance. The thunder pearl nestled deep inside her saddlebag flickered and pulsed. Once more, a crack—the world flashed white as another subsequent fang of lightning struck even closer than the last splotch of scorched stone. The last pony hissed through the pin-needling static electricity in the air and scuffled backwards on her flank, scooting and scooting and scooting away from a second, third, and fourth blast of ravenous lightning. Each strike burned closer towards her, filling the air with bloody chaos as she finally backed her shivering spine into the cold body of the moon dome.

        In a trembling breath, the last pony hopped up to her hooves and practically tore open the saddlebag. The lightning gun fell ineffectually to the stony earth in a dull clang. She cursed under her hyperventilation and proceeded to unhinge the joints of the half-rusted contraption. She stood the stalk of the launcher up on flimsy tripods and bolted its feet to the stony floor. Another flash of lightning: the pegasus flung the rubber goulashes over her front limbs and gripped the handles of the copper antenna tightly.

        Aiming the cylinder full of runestones and pearlescent light at the great white body of moonrock, the last pony raised a lower hoof over a lever attached to the launcher. “Okay! H-here goes! Three, two, one—Liftoff!” She kicked the lever down. There was no noise. The kite and its spool of copper wiring stayed put within the contraption. In a breathless lurch, Scootaloo helplessly looked at the machine. “I said—Liftoff!” She kicked the lever again. Once more, the kite refused to budge. More thunder. She snarled this time and peered down the neck of the thing. “What the heck is wrong with this—?”

        The kite spontaneously launched, slamming the bulk of its leathery body straight into Scootaloo's reeling face. The brain-rattled mare fell to the ground, encumbered with flailing leather wings, metal spikes, and an intestinal maze of copper string, all spooled on top of her. She growled and hissed into the cacophonous air as she fumbled to re-coil and re-spool the obnoxious equipment back into the chamber of the metal launcher.

        “Epona forsaken piece of—” Lightning. “—you back to your mother's—” Thunder. “—good for nothing son of a—” Exploding stone.

        Scootaloo shrieked. A veritable crater had been blown out of the ground a mere four meters away from her by the last lightning strike. The air was being sucked out from all around. Her pink mane had become a fluttering mohawk, stretching skyward as tiny bolts of sparkling energy danced between her lower limbs' horseshoes.

        With a grunt, she finished reloading the kite into the launcher. “I swear to all that breathes, her candy-flossed plot better be worth this!” She growled and practically hugged the body of the spring-loaded cannon as she slammed both lower hooves down onto the trigger. “Eat it, sky!”

        With the victorious sound of uncoiling springs, the kite soared into the churning maze of thunderclouds high above. The leather wings unflexed and the tiny craft was fluttering through the tormented wind within a second blink.

        Scootaloo practically dove into the copper lightning gun. With two rubber-enshrouded hooves, she cocked the cylinder and aimed it at the white face of the dome before her. Sweating profusely, she tossed worried looks back and forth between the flickering image of the kite and the thunder pearl dwindling inside the metal neck of the antenna.

        “Come on... Come on... Light up, you sadistic piece of junk! Get some juice—!”

        Lightning torched the air thunderously above her, barely missing the kite and screaming a blue string of energy past Scootaloo's mane and into the crumbling heights of the electrically sensitive moonrock. The last pony flinched and sputtered in a sudden spray of lunar dust and burning powder.

        “Yeah, that's fine! That's okay! Just keep doing that! Friggin' thunderstorm—Aim a little higher, or do I have to fly up there and crap out some lightning myself?!”

        Prophetically, a new fork of lightning shimmered down. This time, it struck the kite with full force. A charged beam of bright blue energy shot down the length of the dangling copper cord in a flash. The tiny pearl in the heart of the gun lit up and hummed with magical brilliance.

        “Woo! Happy New Year!” The goggled pony cackled psychotically into the chaotic thunder all around. She braced her lower limbs and gripped the sparkling antenna harder as she then shouted, “Almost there! Just a few more love pecks for Mommy! Come on—”

        Another surging bolt. And then another. Two new flickering streams of energy murderously throttled down the burning length of metal cable. The cylinder in Scootaloo's rubber grasp vibrated from pent-up electrical energy. A hissing sound filled the air as the oxygen around her ears began to roast.

        “Good enough for me!” She hissed and then firmly roared: “Y'hnyrr!”

        All three runestones dimmed instantly. The antenna nearly exploded as the thunder pearl inside unleashed a bursting dam of electrical madness down the throat of the lightning gun. A horizontal cyclone of shimmering bolts splashed outward and drilled into the side of the dome of moonrock at a bizarre angle, sending clouds of white dust screaming high into the air.

        “Whoops! CrapCrapCrapCrap—!” Scootaloo seethed as she pushed the full weight of her body into the violently throbbing gun. With great effort, she pulled the violent kiss of the lightning bolts down, down, down—until she was finally making a solid incision deep into the heart of the cosmic mountain. “Whew! Thattaboy! Keep drilling until you hit Neighjing!”

        The fresh tunnel carved into the body of the moonrock grew wider and deeper. Soon, a perfectly cylindrical passageway had been made, and as the shimmering bolts of blue began to fade, there was no telling how immensely deep inside the dome the hole ended.

        Soon, the thunder pearl burnt out. As soon as the lightning gun stopped vibrating, Scootaloo dropped the thing unceremoniously and made a dash for her saddlebag. Strapping it over herself, she galloped awkwardly on half-rubbered hooves and literally slid into the safety of the moonrock's fresh cave. No sooner was she inside the shadowed hollow of the rock—

        There was a violent explosion. Scootaloo spun about, blinking under amber goggles. The discarded metal lightning gun—the device of her own personal genius—had exploded into copper shrapnel.

        “Yeah. Whatever.” She eagerly turned her flank against the Wasteland stormfront and trotted slowly down the length of the endless tunnel, her clopping hooves accompanied with the infinite echo of surging thunder.