The End of Ponies

by shortskirtsandexplosions


Chapter Forty-Two: The Eternal Piecurrence

The End of Ponies
by shortskirtsandexplosions

Chapter Forty-Two – The Eternal Piecurrence

Special thanks to Vimbert, theworstwriter, and Warden for editing

Extra Special Thanks to Valhalla-Studios for Cover Art

        “You mean to say that this will make me get better?” Ice Song nervously stammered.

        Nurse Angel Cake smiled and leaned over the young colt's hospital bed with a glass of herbal brew steaming in her hoofed grasp. “That is what we're hoping, darling. It's an exotic blend from the Zebraharan Deserts. According to Ms. Zecora, it's cured many children much like yourself of breathing problems brought upon by sandstorms. There are kids across the world who get sick just like you, and what helped them get better could very well help you and your friends get better. That's why Zecora is here! She's lending us a hoof, and you're the first on the list to receive this good medicine.”

        Another young colt of the Immolatia Ward leaned in with a moth-eaten mane. “Does... Does it taste icky?”

        Zecora trotted up, chuckling. “I assure you, my little ponies, I would not curse you with bitter remedies.”

        “Besides, with Zecora's permission, I added a dash of Auntie Pinkie Pie's happiness to the mix!” The aptly named mare smiled proudly. “A medicine full of sugar helps the spoon go down!” She grinned, blinked, then made a face. “No, wait...”

        A ring of chuckles lit the room. Angel Cake raised the broth once more to Ice Song's lips. The jittery young foal took a sip, weathered the taste in his mouth, and eventually braved a more liberal gulp. The other children watched with muted curiosity as he finished the last of the brew, leaned back into the folds of his bed, and trembled slightly less.

        “It m-makes me feel all t-tingly inside,” the young colt whispered.

        “That means it's working, Ice Song.” Inkessa leaned in beside her sister and stroked the tiny pony's pale forehead. “The medicine is searching around inside you for the infernite. It's trying to get the bad stuff out.”

        “Just like the other medicine I've taken?” he asked in a wilted murmur.

        Inkessa and Angel Cake exchanged glances, but calmly tossed a joined smile the foal's way. “In a different way, Ice Song. It's a new medicine, and that means new opportunities.”

        “I... I-I hope it works...” Ice Song painfully smiled under Inkessa's gentle touch. “Not just for me, but for everypony. I want us all to be able to walk again in time f-for my...” He let loose a hacking cough, then wheezed. “For my cute-ceañera.”

        Inkie Pie ushered herself past a somber breath and bravely smiled. “You won't just be able to walk, Ice Song. I'm willing to bet you'll be dancing...”

        “And Auntie Pinkie Pie will show up to give you lessons!” Pinkie randomly slipped on the glossy tile. “Whoah—!” She fell down to the floor in a slump. Several fillies and colts giggled and proceeded to tackle the ticklish earth pony.

        “Alright, everypony! We're going to hand out a cup of Zecora's brew to each soul in this place!” Angel Cake called out. “I want each and every one of you to drink the entire thing down! Pretend it's like your regular medicine! We promise it isn't going to taste bad...”

        “Are you really from the desert?” a random filly asked, blinking up at Zecora.

        The zebra smiled. “From a place most arid, I most certainly hail. My extensive travels make for an exciting tale!”

        “Oooh! Would you share it with us?”

        “Tell us, please!”

        “We wanna know more about the desert!”

        “Do the buffalo really wear tutus there?”

        Zecora chuckled. “I do not know what deserts you've heard about. A grand picture has been painted by Pinkie, no doubt.” The shaman motioned with her hoof as she leaned against the foot of Ice Song's bed. “Come close, little ones, and hear my words. I promise that, just like my brew, they are not for the birds!”

        As the zebra mare proceeded to marvel the young crowd with one mesmerizing Zebraharan account after another, Harmony observed quietly from the sidelines. A familiar haze of golden color trotted up to her peripheral vision. The last pegasus glanced down and murmured, “Aren't you going to take your medicine?”

        “I already did,” Suntrot murmured, wiping her cheek with a forelimb for emphasis. “I got it over with.”

        “Why, because the nurses lied and you knew it tasted like rust water?”

        “No, because I wanted to come and see you as quickly as possible.”

        Harmony raised a copper eyebrow. “Wouldn't you rather listen to Ms. Zulu and her stories of sandstorms and crap?”

        “'Zecora.'”

        “Whatever.”

        “And no, I'd rather see you.” Suntrot smiled.

        “You're cute, kid. Weird, but cute.”

        “Is it true that you really fought with the Royal Grand Biv?

        “Hmmm...” Harmony stared off beyond the many young shapes of the Immolatia ward. “Nope. That isn't true at all.”

        Suntrot's yellow ears drooped. “It isn't?”

        Harmony grinned wickedly down at the tiny filly with the solar cutie mark. “I fought the Royal Grand Biv twice!

        “Really?” Suntrot excitedly gasped, so much so that she fell under a quick cascade of coughs. She hissed, shook a tear loose, and braved a joyful smile. “That's s-so cool! I wish I was there to see you kick the Biv's rainbow butt.”

        “Yeah... Well... Uhm...”

        “Wait, if you fought the Biv twice...” Suntrot's face scrunched up in thought. “How come nopony's talked about the masked outlaw having been caught?

        “Maybe...” Harmony blinked, then smirked. “Maybe because I scared it away.”

        “Awwww... I was hoping you threw that no-gooder into jail.”

        Harmony spoke before she could make sense out of the words coming out of her mouth. “Now come on, where would be the... fun in that?”

        “Heeheehee! You're right!” Suntrot smiled, coughed, and smiled again. “If you get to chase the Biv again, will you tell me?”

        The last pony was momentarily distracted. She eventually snapped out of it and nodded. “Sure thing, kid. Chasing the Royal Grand Biv is... the one exciting thing that happens in this town. It'd be a crime for you to not hear about it.”


        “Heeee!” Pinkie Pie grinned as she bounced through the lone canyon lingering under the midday overcast. She smirked aside at the time traveler as the two strolled slowly away from Stonehaven and the brew-testing going on within. “Well, that was most certainly promising! How much do you wanna bet that all of those kids will start exchanging their bedpans for fresh new horseshoes within a week?”

        “I'm not one for gambling, Miss Pie,” Harmony murmured, staring down as the granite ground morphed into cobblestone blanketed with the names of dead ponies. She gazed up into the coalescing gray miasma of Dredgemane urbanity. “Let's let time decide who is or isn't healthy.”

        “I can't decide who's sillier.” Pinkie winked. “Dredgemaners for giving time too little credit, or you for taking time too seriously.”

        The last pony smiled bitterly. “Ever gave a thought to what time thinks of the measly little blinks that we call our 'lives?'”

        “Nah. I figure that time is smart enough to wear glasses.”

        “Ugh... Whatever. Let's talk about something else.”

        “Ooooh! I know!” The candy-colored earth pony grinned. “What are we going to do tonight, Har-Har?”

        “Same thing we try to do every night, Pinkie.” Harmony said—but in mid-breath she paused, blinked sideways at the walls, but shrugged those last few words off her shoulder. “Ahem. We chase down and stop the Royal Grand Biv.”

        “Wooohooo! Alright! Let's have some fun!”


        “Friggin' slime-sucking piece of dog crap waste of time, I swear to Celestia's reproductive organs!” Harmony angrily snarled, her eyes bloodshot in a violent rage as she hopped from rooftop to rooftop under the cloud-diffused starlight. “Miss Pie! Get your fluffy butt in gear before I rip you a new cupcake dispenser, Epona dang it!”

        “Whew!” Pinkie Pie breathlessly scrambled to keep up with her copper companion. “That last utterance deserves at least five 'Hail Gultophines' alone! You're on a roll, Har-Har!”

        “Will you just stuff it and pick up the pace, already?!” The time traveler spat as she scaled a row of metal-shingled warehouses, galloping angrily after a rainbow figure skimming the top of Dredgemane half-a-block ahead.

        In the meantime, down below, a blue-cloaked mule jumped past a gasping crowd of nervous onlookers, swung on the length of a torchpole, and hung off it while gesturing a wild hoof towards the figure after which the two ponies were furiously chasing. “Behold the mad pony! Behold he, who with so many colors and so little words stabs the herd into opening its eyes in wonderment of the great breathless cloud that is tomorrow, through which he sails like an impulsive comet with no regret!”

        Harmony grumbled, flicking the distant bum's crazy words off her ears as she angrily hopped over a wide gaping street and landed on a rooftop beyond. She almost caught up with the Biv when she heard a yelping voice from behind. Glancing back, she skidded to a stop with a muffled curse before running back to lend Pinkie Pie a helping hoof. Together, the two clambered back onto even shingles and resumed the pathetic pursuit.

        All the while, Brevis rambled from below. “What noble truth does this Royally Psychotic Biv know?! What balance gives his hooves their drunken grace and us our sober calamity as we witness him falling upwards, downwards, sidewards?! BraHa! For to truly see and feel is to fall, and what other way is there to shake oneself loose from the eternal circle of death and deathmongering?!”


        In the light of a quarter moon's dim glow, the Royal Grand Biv could be seen climbing the lengths of the Cathedral of Gultophine. With a rainbow-sleeved hoof, the miscreant finished spraying a cloud of multicolored paint across the structure's marble finish.

        Below, the grand wooden doors of the building opened wide. Bishop Breathstar stumbled numbly out, almost tripping over a velvet sleeping robe. He glared up at the front of his congregation's building, gasped at the sight of the Biv, and shook an angry hoof while spitting forth a barking chorus of threats. A frazzled Dawnhoof stumbled out and attempted to calm the elder cleric down.

        Above, the Biv continued its vandalism undaunted, at least until its masked ears pricked at the sound of a certain pegasus' copper wings slicing through the air. Swinging off the cathedral's marred face, the shrouded figure outstretched razor-sharp coattails and glided towards a stretch of rooftops across the way. Hot on the cretin's heels, Harmony touched down, let go of Pinkie, and joined her in a rapid pursuit while an aged unicorn with high blood pressure watched joylessly from the cold streets below.


        “Why is he mad?!” Brevis cackled and barked before crowds of confused Dredgemaners bathed in torchlight. “Because he knows that Consus is not only dead, but we have all killed him, and we have all killed him slowly! Even now, in the forever gray sepulcher of his fallen wings, we pass around his ashes like mementos! We have fashioned each and every one of our souls into the insufferable urns of a dead god! But we good Equestrians are not built with the unfathomable depths to house his incalculably huge and divine refuse! Not even the largest oceanic basin ever scaled could contain the decaying meat that once gave Consus his fabled glory and omnipotence! What could we—with such bright and blissfully short lives—ever hope to accomplish in this endless funeral of absurd proportions? For we will be nothing but shallow graves not even fit for ourselves, unless we fall further to find that there is something deeper within us than what gravity hides! After all, the Biv does not fear gravity! His madness is like a pair of wings and a looking glass all in one! And when we look into that glittering plumage, what will we find in the new depths of ourselves! Goodly Brevis tells you: it is far more space than the body of Consus could fill! Let us not make cemeteries out of the lengths of us left to discover! Let us—like the Biv, like the mad pony—bloom gardens! Yes!”

        


        “Nnnngh!” Harmony dove at the Biv once she had cornered it in a dead end of twisting canyon walls. Her shadow flew past a rainbow-defaced poster commemorating “Gultophine's Harvest” in the next few days.

        The Royal Grand Biv flipped over her body, fired a brightly colored grappling hook towards the edge of the cliff-face above, and soared up through the cold mists of Dredgemane.

        Sprawled out onto the cobblestone, the last pony spun around, snarled, and stretched her wings. She soared straight up into the air as a copper blur.

        The Biv was already turning around in mid-ascent, flinging a rainbow array of giant rubber bands down at the pegasus.

        With a vicious snap, the elastic binding ensnared the wings of the “Canterlotlian.” Harmony gasped and flailed as she fell like a dead weight towards the street below.

        Pinkie Pie caught up, and when she did she gasped and reared up on her hindquarters with her front limbs outstretched to gently catch Harmony. The last pony slammed into her like a missile and the two pratfalled directly through a wooden cart of loose pebbles while the Biv galloped away.


        Atop the Pie Family starlit rooftop at night, Harmony shuffled away her pile of illustrated constellations and busied herself with sketching forth the blueprint of a ridiculously complex wooden mechanism. Glancing aside and murmuring, she attempted to explain the finer intricacies of a giant, spring-loaded glaive tossing machine to Pinkie Pie.

        The candy-colored mare nodded numbly, tossing a random kernel of popcorn into her mouth as she listened to the pegasus rambling on. A few minutes into the dissertation, she tossed a kernel up towards her skull. On cue, a wall-eyed baby alligator stuck its head out from her fluffy mane and snapped the popcorn from midair.


        The next day, in the center of Dredgemane Town Square, several guards finished the sweaty gruntwork of snapping the last of several wooden crossbeams into place. Under Harmony's guidance, a giant ballista came into being. The hideously large wooden construction was topped off with a massive metal glaive that was lowered into the tightly coiled rope of the hulking, wheeled device.

        Pinkie Pie whistled in awe from where she sat on the edge of a wooden fence, her lower legs dangling. She smiled and observed as Harmony circled the device and checked every angle of it for imperfections. Finding none, she smiled and shook hooves with half-a-dozen guards before giving them a very detailed plan for unleashing the new atrocity upon the unsuspecting Royal Grand Biv.

        During this exchange, Pinkie Pie blinked to see a swift shadow leaping down from a line of gray-misted rooftops. She winced, hopped down from the fence, and shuffled over towards Harmony, tapping the pegasus nervously on the shoulder.

        The last pony merely brushed her off and continued her coaching of the guards. Pinkie gulped and tapped her shoulder through the turquoise vest once again. Finally, Harmony let loose a groaning sigh and turned around; her copper eyes bulged.

        The Royal Grand Biv was sitting, fearlessly perched in the center of the loaded glaive. The guards gasped. Harmony shouted something. With copper wings flapping, she dove forward to strike the Biv across the face with a heavy hoof. The ruby-goggled vandal effortlessly forward-flipped over the pegasus' dive, spun through the air, and flung a fan of serrated daggers earthward.

        The guards and Pinkie Pie winced while Harmony fearlessly charged through the cloud of slicing weapons. A tearing sound halted the last pony in her tracks. With drooping earlobes, Harmony turned around to see one of the blades having sliced halfway through one of the many tightly coiled ropes of the ballista's wooden rig. Seething, she dove towards the machine.

        She was too late. The rope snapped free. With hulking menace, the giant metal glaive flew free from the device. It soared over the street, slicing violently through the air and forcing many shrieking Dredgemaners to duck at the last second or else risk decapitation.

        Far across Town Square, a dust-covered Irontail was just putting the finishing touches on a brand new windowpane for his storefront. The blacksmith trotted backwards and shook the soot from his mane with a proud smile. Then, in one blink, a giant circular disc of metal violently smashed into the depths of his store, sending chunks of glass and wood flying all over the nearby cobblestone. The bushy-bearded stallion stared in deadpan silence, before swiveling to glare daggers across the courtyard.

        Harmony winced so hard, she felt her jaw would fall through her body and come out her flank. Beside her, Pinkie Pie mutely picked up one of the many multicolored knives and held the “souvenir” up with a proud smile. Harmony fought every ounce of Entropan strength inside her body not to slap the blade out of the mare's grasp.


        “Is it lonesome to be mad?! Terribly so! Who gives the Royal Grand Biv any more respect than a passing laugh or scoff can afford?! Oh dear herd, there is nothing more insane than to be an individual in this world! Not even a million Royal Grand Bivs stacked on top of each other and arrayed with Hearth's Warming lights can match the madness of the individual, of the pony who prances upon this dark abyss we call 'comprehension' and dares to be alone, as we are all so terribly alone, but are swift to blind ourselves to it with the warm yet superficial shades of each other's coats! To be an individual is to be mad and to be mad is to fall and to fall is to live dangerously! But do not abandon the idea, for it is glorious! When all the gods and goddesses have either died or departed from this world, what choice do we have but to live dangerously, to become gods and goddesses ourselves?! BraHa! I tell you this, what makes Celestia so glorious is not that she can raise the Sun, but that she's endeavored to do it, faithfully, by herself, for a thousand years! Could you yourselves live so lonesomely, so dangerously, so courageously, so madly? Cast off the shadows of Consus, Dredgemaners, and go forth and find your own suns to raise!”


        “Come on!” Harmony panted. “We almost got it this time!” She sweated her way up and over clotheslines, chimneys, ventilation units, and a dozen other obstructions littering the rooftops of a shanty town in the central Dredgemane ravines. “The Biv's bound to slow down! I know it!”

        “How can she be so awesome?!” Pinkie Pie breathlessly stammered from half a building behind the copper pegasus as the two chased the living rainbow. “It's like she's twenty Dashies all rolled into one!”

        Harmony grunted under her weathered breath. “The Biv certainly has the stamina of twenty ponies—” Before she could complete that thought, she fell through a loose panel of rusted shingles. “Whoah!” She fell through an abandoned apartment, rolled off a balcony, and plunged three stories down towards a dirty alleyway below.

        At street level, a snoring Vimbert sat reclined on a rickety lawn chair beside a tiny rusted shed surrounded by piles of urban nick-nacks and junk. The orange unicorn's rear hooves were propped up on a pink plastic flamingo while he sleepily cradled a silver flask in his lap. When Harmony's shrieking body missiled its way down into a crashing pile of metal bric-a-brac, Vimbert sat up with a snorting gasp before glaring angrily her way.

        “What in the wide world of vodka?!” He shook an angry hoof. “Get off my lawn!”

        “Nnngh!” Harmony's frowning face stuck out of a mountain of debris like a disgruntled groundhog. “Mr. Vimbert, you live in a friggin' landfill. How could anypony call this a 'lawn'?”

        “How can anypony say that your head is on your shoulders?”

        “But it is.”

        “Not when I'm through with it.”

        “AaaaaaaaaaaaiiieeeeOoof!” A pink meteor fell down beside Harmony and immediately hopped up, balancing a rusted cog wheel on her head. “Hey, candle-stick head! Love what you did with your lawn! Heeheehee!”

        The snarling unicorn sat up and flung the plastic flamingo at the two shrieking mares. “Get out of here!”

        They both scampered off, one giggling and the other hyperventilating. In the wake of their flight, the stallion with a broken horn grumbled and reclined back in his chair, only to have a falling sheet of rusted shingles slice through half of the seat and send him sprawling to the ground.

        “Dah! Luna dang it!”


        Much later, in the office of Mayor Haymane, the time traveler and her pink anchor stood side by side along with a phalanx of exhausted guards. The entire lot of them gazed nervously towards the wooden floorboards of the lofty structure while an elder blond stallion berated them with harsh words from across his desk.

        “Four days. It has been at least four days since I put you in charge of spearheading this crusade against the Biv!” Haymane frowned. His voice was several decibels lower than the sort of fury that either Breathstar or Sladeburn could manage, yet he subtly carried the force of several boiling thunderclouds in his throat. “I have a great degree of patience, but even that is starting to wear thin. It boggles my mind how a representative of Canterlot could actually cause more damage than the Biv has in the entire process!”

        “Well, if you ask me, I think she should have just stuck to stargazing,” Pinkie Pie brightly said. Harmony kicked her in the shin. “Errr—I meant being my probation officer!” Harmony kicked her again. “I-I mean being an unassuming and totally innocent Mary Sue!”

        Harmony sighed and facehoofed.

        “We've gotten very close on several occasions, Mister Haymane! Mayor, sir!” one of the guards—the youngest of the young—optimistically stammered. He put forth a brave smile beneath his rattling helmet. “We wouldn't have had a hope of even coming into contact with the Royal Grand Biv if it wasn't for the Canterlotlian agent here!”

        “Yeah!” Another guard joined in. “And to think we all once believed that the crazy vandal was untouchable!”

        “But he still is—Don't you see?” Haymane glared. “He's baiting you! Making a fool out of every single one of you! He wants you all to think that you're getting the upper hoof, because by drawing you out, he's raising even more of a ruckus than he ever did on his own with random tools of rainbow-colored paint!” Haymane shuffled his front hooves and rolled out from behind his desk. “Well, if there's anything I've committed to in guiding Gultophine's Refuge to glory, it's that I would never be made a fool of! Either you ponies rethink your strategy, or you call in some reinforcements from Canterlot who can do the job right.”

        Harmony's amber eyes flared upon sight of Haymane's rear tripod. She bit her lip nervously. Pinkie Pie, in the meantime, was hardly as tactful. She snorted back a chuckle and covered her rosy cheeks with a hoof while the many young guards behind her similarly struggled to hold their laughter in.

        Haymane narrowed his glare in a confused breath. “What is the meaning of this insolence? I am attempting to speak of a very serious topic here, and you find an occasion for pointless levity?!”

        “Uhm... M-Mayor, sir?” Harmony nervously pointed with a copper hoof.

        Under the rising cadence of Pinkie's giggles, Haymane glanced back to see that his wheels—from the spokes to the rubber reinforcements—had been painted with every shade of the rainbow, so that a bizarre color lit up the otherwise gray and emotionless room. The guards were soon coughing up a storm of chuckles, punctuated by Pinkie's undammed guffaws.

        “Oh, for Gultophine's sake...” The Mayor slumped back on his legless haunches, only to roll back offensively into his own desk with a thud. “Augh!”

        The guards couldn't contain it anymore. The laughter almost shook the building from its anchor to the cliffside. Pinkie Pie lurched into view, wiping tears from her eyes. “Oh please, lighten up, Haymane! Why wouldn't you want to look fabulous the next time you attend one of your beloved Breathstar's sermons?”

        “Begone from here!” Haymane snarled and hissed as the guards, Pinkie, and the copper pegasus scrambled out of the double-doors to his office. He reached for the closest random thing and tossed a stapler at their hooves. “Go! Catch that infernal Biv!”


        “Raaaugh!” Harmony soared madly over the wooden platform flanking the edge of the Dredgemane Quarry.

        Overseer Sladeburn glanced up lethargically—then gasped wide. His eyes bulged as he ducked low, dropping his clipboard with a snowy blizzard of falling mining reports. All the while, a furious pegasus in a turquoise Winter-Wrap Up vest sliced over his mane and the necks of fellow workers flinching alongside him. The breathless stallion glanced up to see the time traveler spearing the body of a rainbow-garbed stranger in mid-air.

        Harmony and the Biv flew to the earth and tumbled through clumps of loose gravel. Several ponies gasped and jumped out of the way as Harmony confiscated numerous cans of multi-colored spray paint from the masked figure and proceeded to wrap her forelimbs around the figure's cloaked neck.

        “Seriously...” Harmony hissed, her beret sliding awkwardly over her amber eyes as she struggled and wrestled with the Biv. “You're making me thirst for your blood here!”

        The Biv bucked the copper pegasus off of itself. With a cry, Harmony tumbled backwards and slid through a splitting sea of loose stones. Coughing into a cloud of dust, she winced to see the Biv rising up to its rainbow-striped legs. Glancing down, the last pony saw a thick rock of carved granite. With Entropan strength, she soccer-kicked the thing so that it flew like a meteor into the Biv's ribcage.

        The Biv tumbled sideways before it had a chance to break into a gallop. Harmony was once more pouncing the cretin in one diving swoop of her wings. Face to goggled-face with the vandal, the last pony exchanged a dozen swinging hooves and close blows as the two continued their scuffle on the edge of the deep looming gash in the bitterly mined earth.

        “Woohoo!” Pinkie Pie ran up and skidded to a stop on loose rock, pumping her pink hoof into the air. “Give her what-for, Har-Har! Make the rainbow see stars!”

        “What on earth is the meaning of this escapade?!” Sladeburn snarled, standing up from his lofty wooden platform. “Did Haymane arrange this—?!” He stopped in mid utterance, blinking, for Pinkie Pie was not alone in her cheering.

        Several of the workhorses and laborers of Dredgemane had completely and utterly stopped what they were doing, shuffling up to the scene with a fresh breath of enthusiasm as they watched the latest in epic fights unfold. Soon many of the dully-clad ponies were brightly chanting, whooping, harmonizing along with Pinkie's ecstatic shrieks.

        “Elektra alive! This is amazing!”

        “She's going to capture the Biv!”

        “I never thought I'd see this...”

        “Go get him, Canterlotlian!”

        “Yeah! Get that vandal!”

        “What are you all doing?!” Sladeburn hissed disbelievingly from the wooden railing of his pedestal. “Get back to work! You're delaying our progress! We have a quota to meet!”

        The fight continued. The cheering continued. The rock farming... not quite so much...

        “Did you hear me?! If you want to keep your jobs, you'll resume your tasks this very instant!”

        “Pffft! Hahaha!” Pinkie Pie spun and grinned. “Are you loco in the coco?! This is the main event here!”

        “Somepony?! Anypony?!” Harmony snarled in the middle of blocking several punches and returning with some vicious hooves of her own. “It would be really friggin' fantastic if one of you actually lent me a hoof for once!”

        Right on cue, a dozen guards ran up with net guns. “We're here, Miss Harmony!” One of two up front breathlessly panted as he squatted down and aimed the black cannon with help from his partner. “We caught up! Just get the Biv to hold tight for one second—”

        “Remember what we planned!” Harmony glanced over her shoulder for a brief moment to bark, “Don't fire until I say—” The Biv caught her blind punch at an awkward angle and twisted her forelimb into a vicious legbar. “—Ow!”

        “There! She said 'now!'” One guard spat. “Fire!”

        “No! Wait! I said—” Harmony barely got her words out when the Biv reached over her wincing face and flung down a smoke grenade. A cloud of rainbow haze billowed up, covering them from head to hoof in prismatic obscurity.

        The guards fired the flailing net directly into the puff of smoke. They grinned with victory on their faces, but even Pinkie Pie was already wincing, because—

        With a glinting of dagger-sharp coattails, the Royal Grand Biv shot out of the cloud, dove high, landed, and galloped effortlessly east into the dipping chasms of Dredgemane, and far away from any living souls' reach.

        The cloud of smoke dissipated, and there remained Harmony—lying in a slump under a web of tight netting—glaring through the webbed material towards the blanching guards. The crowd of gathered onlookers let loose a collective groan of disappointment. Regardless, a loose cloud of joy and enthusiasm trailed off their lips as they slowly returned to their lethargic tasks, much to the belated joy of a grumbling Sladeburn.

        Pinkie Pie slowly shuffled up to the copper pegasus, grinning limply. “Well, here's the good news. We know she tosses smoke grenades. That could possibly give us an edge in the future, right?”

        Harmony mumbled, “That's a blissfully sharp edge that I would like to take across the street, not down the block.”

        “Uhhhhhh...” Pinkie blinked. “...Huh?”

        “Drink twenty bottles of Sarsaparilla one night. Then maybe you'll understand.”

        “Silly filly!” Pinkie squatted and slowly began to untangle Harmony from the netting. “I first did that over ten years ago!”

        “So much for my hope that you could ever be capable of even an ounce of subtlety, Miss Pie.”

        She grinned. “Could I possibly be more proud of anything else?”

        “I'm sure I could dredge up a list of ideas, if you pardon the pun.”

        “A pun! See, Har-Har, there's hope for you yet!”

        “Oh please, Miss Pie...” Harmony stood up, finally freed from the netting. She slapped the beret back onto her head while flexing a pair of stiff wings. “We've been through this! What's the point in trying to give me a comedic edge if there's nothing that this... town has... to laugh... about...” Her voice petered off. She craned her twitching ears towards a bizarre sound behind her.

        The guards were laughing, along with a close gaggle of smirking workers wandering right past them. It was a spirit that tasted of the same hilarity that alighted Mayor Haymane's office, though it was far more appropriately thick here.

        “Dang... Foiled again...” One of the guards said to the others as they retracted their net-gun cannon. “Y'know, if we just aimed that darn thing a little higher.”

        “We would have caught the sucker! Grrrrrr! We were so close!”

        One helped another to his hooves, patting him on the back. “Did you see what the Biv did before she or he came here? She somehow painted an entire warehouse full of stored gravel! That shipment is due to Trottingham in six days! Can you imagine some rich posh pony having his entire driveway paved in rainbow colors?”

        “Hahaha! Oh boy, I'd pay bits to see that. I wonder—once we catch the Biv, will somepony make a scrapbook of all the pathetically stupid stuff we finally put an end to?”

        One of the passing laborers shouted from his wagon with a grin. “Hey, give me a copy of that! I swear: all of my money! I need something to send with my letters to my girlfriend!”

        “Hah! You work the midnight shift down there, dude! Like you even have a girlfriend!”

        “Buck you!”

        “Hahahaha!”

        “Heh heh heh...”

        “Uhm...” Harmony blinked, her wings twitching nervously. She glanced Pinkie's way. “I give up. Is there something suddenly in the drinking water of Dredgemane that I haven't known about?”

        “What, in my town?” Pinkie Pie winked and finished a new paper airplane. She launched the thing gloriously towards the yawning chasm of the quarry beyond. “Nawwwwww.” She stifled a giggle and trotted off.

        Harmony slowly followed her, all the while gazing with forlorn curiosity over her shoulder and towards the gaggle of chuckling, murmuring, and decidedly happy guards.


        What was it that bled forth from the alleys and trenches of Dredgemane? Did it bloom out of nothing? Was it there from the beginning, but I was just too frenzied and angry to notice it until then? I can accept the fact that I've been blind to things before, but—come on—I'm the last pony, the Scavenger of Ages. Not all souls can be as tunnel-visioned as Haymane. The Royal Grand Biv may have been able to sneak up and paint the mayor's “other hooves,” but I would have stomped such an errant gnat at the first beating of gossamer wings.

        I'd be lying if I said I wasn't also captured by the thrill of the hunt for the prismatic vagrant beyond the blood-pumping frustration of it all. But I've dealt with crap like that my whole life, while chasing down pirates for stealing my bottled flame or while going to blows with bounty hunters who decided to switch to a life of crime in open view of the Harmony's portholes.

        The most excitement the citizens of Dredgemane ever got was weathering the air-throttling octaves of Bishop Breathstar's voice. What to me was an exercise in persistence had to have been—to them—a dramatic spectacle that put Celestia's divine display at the Summer Sun Celebration to shame.

        I didn't want to admit it, but the Royal Grand Biv's strategy was becoming all too apparent. I could see through it, and I realized that it had been seeing through me all the while, much like Pinkie Pie could somehow see through me. I was not used to time traveling into a situation where I was as hollow and useless as a wisp of clouds, and suddenly I was being molded into a brand new vandalism that the rainbow-colored cretin wielded liked so many blobs of paint. All that time, I had been dancing to its tune, and to what end? By attempting to do everything that Haymane demanded of me, I was inexplicably undoing the frowns he had forged with his legacy, one street at a time, one band of militia at a time, one gasping crowd at a time.

        Perhaps this was what Dredgemane needed. This was what Brevis rambled about. Everypony in that town needed an opportunity to glance up from whatever it was that they were doing and watch this frazzled moron in the middle of chasing a rainbow across their desolate dome of an existence.

        But even you knew that I had to ask myself—at some point or another—when I was going to stop? And when I did stop, who would be the victor? The last pony? Or the rainbow?


        “You mean you drew all the stars?” Pinkie Pie made a face. “Pffft—Har-Har, I'm trying to get you to tell a joke, not tell a lie!”

        “You know what I mean,” Harmony grunted. She and her anchor shuffled slowly down the thin winding canyon towards Stonehaven to catch up on Zecora's progress. “I mapped all I can get out of the constellations from your rooftops... or at least all that I care to map out.”

        “So then, you're done?” Pinkie Pie bounced as she glanced at the copper pegasus curiously. “You've dotted all of your i's, crossed all your t's, licked all your o's, and it's back off to Canter-Town?”

        “I...” Harmony squinted Pinkie's way and mouthed “Licked all your o's?” She shook her head. “Ahem. I can't leave... That is, I won't leave until I find a better way to preserve the starchart I've made.”

        “What's wrong with Blinkie's drawing paper?” Harmony grinned. “Just keep them away from Gummy's jaws and I'm sure they'll survive the trip back to Canterlot!”

        “I need something more permanent than paper. An engraving, perhaps. A metal stencil-work... I dunno...” Harmony sighed. “Her Majesty doesn't want just any normal sketch, she needs something that can be recreated! Something that can... stand the test of time...”

        “Like how long? Months? Years?”

        Harmony gulped. “A... very long time.”

        “Then I'm sure you've got printing presses in Canterlot! That city's gotta somehow pump out all of the books that Twilight is in love with! Heeheehee! Head on back home, girl! You've done your duty—in my book, at least. Maybe not in Haymane's. I'm sure we can chat again another time—”

        “No!” Harmony hissed, then winced at her own utterance. She was suddenly at a loss to compose herself before this simple pink fuzzhead of a pony. “I can't leave,” she gave with a grumble. “Not... N-not yet...”

        “Hmmmm? And why would that be?” Pinkie Pie's grin was a crescent moon, a nonexistent kiss of joy in the Wasteland future. “Face it! You saw the look on those guards' faces! And the workers too! The Royal Grand Biv is addicting! I bet her awesomeness has hooked you in too! Heeheehee!”

        Harmony squinted at her. “You do remember that the goal here is to capture and try the Biv for her many transgressions committed against Dredgemane. Why are you so willing to help me turn in your idol?”

        “Because I get to be close to her, silly!” Pinkie Pie was halfway through making a fresh new paper airplane. “But, to be perfectly honest, I wouldn't enjoy chasing her with any other pony...” She winked at Harmony as she tossed the plane through the air above the tall canyon. “...more than I am enjoying it right now with you.”

        “Hmmph...” Harmony smirked slightly. “Littering is vandalism in its own right, Miss Pie. You aren't trying to get closer to your idol by landing yourself in prison along with her?”

        “Heeheehee! Oh, Har Har.” Pinkie paused to lean back against the canyon wall with a wink. “You say that as if 'littering' is as horrible a crime as 'stalking!'” Just then, she bumped directly into a disheveled pair of ponies dressed in black. “Eeeep!” Pinkie jumped back and clutched, trembling, to Harmony.

        The last pony winced, struggled, and finally disentangled herself from her petrified anchor. “Ahem.” She tossed a bored stare in the two strangers' direction. “Can we help you?”

        One of the cloaked figures murmured in a low voice. “Are you trying to capture the Biv?”

        Harmony squinted. “Excuse me?”

        “Are you attempting to capture the Royal Grand Biv?”

        The scavenger from the future glanced from one shadowed figure to another. She half-expected one of them to spontaneously pull out a dagger or a boomstick from beneath their robes. “Maybe... What's it to you?”

        The two figures exchanged solemn looks before once more looking the last pony's way. “Come with us. There's someone who would like to have a word with you.”

        Pinkie Pie let loose a tiny whimper. Harmony stood protectively in front of her. “Is this a demand or a request?”

        “Everypony in Dredgemane knows how strong you are,” one of the figures said. “You have it within yourself to refuse this simple invitation. If it helps, we promise that no harm will come to you, but you must follow us quietly and swiftly.”

        “I dunno about this, Har-Har.” Pinkie Pie clutched the pegasus by her vest and leaned towards her ear, whispering. “Rarity says this sort of stuff happens a lot in Trottingham, which is why she used to carry a can of mace with her everywhere.”

        “Don't fret your fluffy mane, Miss Pie,” Harmony winked over her shoulder. “If need be, I'll be your can of mace.”

        “Could you really fit on a keychain?”

        Harmony sighed and smiled in the two ponies' direction. “Are you gonna lead the way or not?”

        The two figures made like shadows and galloped quietly eastward through the dimly-lit trenches of Dredgemane. Harmony followed closely, pursued by Pinkie Pie in a decidedly pensive bounce.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        Harmony almost had second doubts as soon as she saw the entrance to the tunnels. After a brief canter through town, the two cloaked figures had opened a circular, metal lid to a sewer passage. One jumped in while the other motioned for the time traveler and her anchor to follow. Harmony reluctantly complied, making sure that Pinkie Pie was at her side the entire time. She suddenly remembered that her Entropan invulnerability didn't extend to the candy-colored soul to which she was bound. What would she have to say to Spike if she lost cohesion because something violent and fatal had happened to her anchor? What would she have to say to herself for the rest of her life, for that matter?

        To state that Harmony's actions in the well of the past were impulsive would have been an understatement. Harmony knew this, and she also knew that this fearlessness strengthened her, helped her to accomplish her goals far more swiftly and daringly. At the same time, she had to remind herself that she wasn't in the past solely for herself. Each chronological endeavor, no matter how convoluted, had the safety, honor, and sanctity of deceased ponydom at its heart. If she forgot about Pinkie's well-being, even for a second, then all would be for naught.

        With each passing minute that Harmony and her earth pony companion traversed the subterranean tunnels of Dredgemane, she grew less and less apprehensive. Harmony had seen many a shady figure in her days as a Wasteland scavenger, and nothing about the motions of these two messengers conveyed the same malice or ill-will of the bounty hunters, pirates, or predators of the future. There was almost a discernible tremble to the way in which the pair of cloaked figures moved, as if they were four hundred times more afraid of the “Canterlotlian Clerk” than she or Pinkie could ever be of them.

        The sewer corridors twisted and turned in a manner that mimicked Dredgemane's serpentine array of streets above. The bricklaid walls of the tunnels glistened from randomly-placed torches that lit the way for the four spelunking equines. Soon, there was a rise in steps, which Harmony noticed were carved rather haphazardly into the ancient framework of the sewers. Sometime in the last few decades, an underground group of Dredgemaners had obviously fashioned a secret passageway that connected one leg of the brick corridors to some obscure location. The time traveler figured that she and her anchor were about to figure out exactly what that location was.

        “Here we are,” one of the cloaked figures uttered, the first word that had echoed beneath street level since that clandestine sojourn began. “He should be expecting you.”

        “Who?” Pinkie Pie asked, blinking. “I thought the Marquis de Saddle was dead!”

        Harmony rolled her eyes and stared at the two figures. “Can we just get this over with?”

        The ponies opened a tight wooden door to a dusty, lantern-lit basement. Harmony and Pinkie sauntered through, blinking about them. The room was filled with several vertical support beams, interspersed with large wooden barrels and supply crates. What was more, several equine figures—at least a dozen or more—stood in the shadows of the place, all watching the two visitors and waiting for what would happen next. Pinkie Pie trotted alongside Harmony as the two mares were guided over towards an enormous wooden trunk and encouraged to take a seat. They did so, fidgeting.

        “Alright, I give.” Harmony ultimately groaned. “Unless this is some sort of whacky initiation, I would very much like to know what this is all about.”

        “We wouldn't know a thing about initiation, darling,” a sultry voice rang from the shadows. “The only one starting a cult is you with that rainbow-thirsty militia of yours.”

        Harmony squinted through the dusty air of that place. As a series of darkly-clad Dredgemaners parted ways, she saw a scarlet shade standing in the midst of the group.

        “You?”

        “Try to keep your pants on, sugah,” Pepper Plots said, clad as ritualistically as ever in frilly dancing attire. She stood, leaning saucily against a half-empty wine stand as the broad cellar stretched beside and beyond her. “This whole 'meeting' is for your own good. Let's not get all in a hissy fit while we still got our senses together.”

        “You call this a 'meeting?'” Harmony looked half as perturbed as she was unenthused. “I've read up on military summits during the Celestial Civil War that were more cheerful than this!”

        “Pepper! Heehee! Of course!!” Pinkie Pie giggled from where she sat on the edge of the big wooden trunk. She beamed at the sight of Miss Plots. “Only you would make a game of hide-and-seek this kaizo!”

        “Let me do the talking, Miss Pie—” Harmony jolted and blinked oddly Pinkie's way. “Wait, where did you hear that from?”

        “This may feel as silly as a game, P.D.P, my dear,” Pepper cooed Pinkie's way and sashayed across the dusty cellar. “But I assure you, it's pretty dang serious. And you should know me by now, sugah. I don't normally do 'serious.'”

        “Nope, normally you just do 'Nick.' Heeheeheehee!” Pinkie's hooves clomped the trunk as she flitted her way through another sea of giggles.

        Harmony sighed long and hard and gazed limply up at the showpony. “Just who are all of these friends of yours? Do they get a discount for fetching us?”

        “They're neither her friends nor yours,” a voice guffawed from the shadows of the place. A rank, homeless stench filled the lengths of the cellar. Harmony watched with very little surprise as a blue-coated mule swung his way into view from where he gripped to a wooden support beam. Brevis' smile was an icy thing that rolled to a stop like a deathly grinning cadaver on a gurney. “They're my friends, friends in the rancid delight of the mad tomorrow!”

        “Really?” Harmony raised an eyebrow from where the pegasus sat in boredom. “I mean really?” She blinked rapidly. “Mister Brevis, I—like so many other hapless pairs of ears in Dredgemane—couldn't help but hear some of your raving words in the streets over the past few days. You lambast Bishop Breathstar's congregation for being a 'herd,' and yet you've got this little clique here to do your bidding? Pffft... I may be painted stupid, but at least I'm no bitless, smelly hypocrite.”

        “BraHa!” Brevis leaped and stood on his head, pointing at her with a rear limb. “See! See how polluted she already is with the same gray dust that Haymane exhales like so many a smokestack over the quarry?!” The mule spun and flipped back up to his hindlegs, freezing into a ridiculously poised ballet stance. “My darling Canterlotlian, hypocrites only exist within the terrarium that bloomed them for the simple fact that they weren't allowed to be bloomed! But myself? Goodly Brevis is no hypocrite! Alas, he is a hyper cricket, and these good Equestrians—” He stood shoulder to shoulder, limb and limb with Pepper Plots and another random pony. “—are the sinners and saints of tomorrow, my fellow grasshoppers of discovery! And you are our guest here in—Ahem...” The mule dramatically raised his grinning maw towards the roof of the cellar. “The Inferno of Madness!

        Harmony blinked boredly at him. She tilted her neck up, caught a whiff of alcohol fumes and drunken laughter, and tilted her face back down. “We're in the saloon's cellar, aren't we?”

        “You maniacal trollop!” Brevis suddenly barked at Pepper. “I told you we should have gone to your grandmother's!”

        “That's all the way in Fillyelphia.” Pepper rolled her eyes and shrugged Brevis' shoulder off her with a wry smirk. “Besides, she probably has customers at the moment.”

        “A pox upon the Alicorn who invented the libido!” Brevis muttered and sauntered towards the witless duo. “Where was I... Oh yes! My fellow maniacs and I have noticed a disturbance in the spectrum, as if thousands of colors cried out at once and were then silenced.”

        “Wait...” Harmony pointed with an inquisitive grimace. “You mean to say that this is all about the Biv?!”

        “The Biv!” Brevis leaned forward at an impossible sixty-degree angle and leered in the pegasus' wincing face. “My dear wind-flailing dealer of death, it is always about the Biv! Do you not see that?”

        “I see that you need an individual bath for every tooth that's rotting in your jaws,” Harmony hissed. She then squinted. “Wait, did you just call me—?”

        “—a dealer of death?! Naturally, my unnatural equine! For that is what you've traveled all this great distance to deliver unto this shriveled nautilus shell of a town: death!”

        A frightened and trembling Scootaloo shuddered forth a breath through Harmony's lungs. “What... wh-what do you know about me?”

        “Simply this!” Brevis hopped up and balanced himself atop a large wine barrel, planting a hoof over his chest in a mock pledge of allegiance. “You are a patriotic, honorable, law-abiding member of Equestrian Society.” A pause, and he flickered his eyes brightly before craning his neck at a bizarre angle to realign his vision with Harmony's again. “You are just what Haymane needs to kill Dredgemane's last remaining chance to fall! You are death incarnate, my dear!”

        Regardless of the last few words spoken, the time traveler let loose a breath of relief. “Oh... Well that's great.”

        “Great?!” Brevis frog-leaped over another pony's shoulder, tripped, spun, and slid on his knees before stopping dead center in front of the bound pegasus. His eyes sparkled like a mind-blown foal looking at a rainbow for the first time. “Don't you see?! In a town full of misery, mayhem, and miscarriages... that mad living kaleidoscope is the last thing to possibly give the soot-born organisms of this town a chance to breathe something other than theirs and their ancestor's sobs! I, goodly Brevis, am but a happy, gay scientist, Miss Canterlot! I study the science of the heart, of the many horizons that our pulsing strings have yet to carry us to, until the lines are cut before a great gasping brightness! I do not ask for a coup d'état or a revolution, for such things are only incited by narrow-minded hotheads—zealots and murderers alike—who worship the fallacious concept that the future is as permanent as the ever-bleeding-now. All I ask is that the Royal Grand Biv... that this marvelous and mad rainbow be allowed to shine on the whole of Dredgemane a little bit longer, and then—maybe then—we will all fall from this inane and heartless Ponymonium that the terrible triad of Haymane, Breathstar, and Sladeburn have fashioned out of the bones of dead divinity!”

        Harmony's lips parted in a cold breath. The future caught up to her on green flames, and she was once more a brown waif of an equine arguing with an aged dragon over the absurdity of making a second trip to her pink anchor, only everything was suddenly and pathetically clear, like the empty hollows of Princess Luna's upside-down purgatorial kingdom, where countless generations of Lunar Imperialists had flung themselves into dust and oblivion for a Goddess that was too far gone to reward them for an eternity of their foolish servitude.

        “What... did you just call this town?” the last pony asked of the mad mule.

        “Hmmmph...” Brevis scratched a hoof to his scraggly mane. “I figured you were heartless, not tone-deaf.”

        “Actually, she's titter-deaf!” Pinkie Pie beamed.

        “Pinkamena! Child of the bright shinies!” Brevis grinned her way. “A pleasure as always!”

        “Heehee! Hey, Brevis! How's it hanging?”

        “Mmmm—Ever since I was run over by that infernal plow a decade ago, slightly to the left!”

        “Heeheehee!”

        “BraHahaHaha!”

        “Hah hah hah!” Pepper Plots and the entire cellar full of tipsy ponies laughed madly.

        Harmony snarled with a renewed frustration and kicked Brevis in the chest. “Listen, my little ass!” She maintained just enough patience and charm not to rip a new hole to the sewers then and there. “I'm only doing what I've been told because this town's been abandoned for so long! If this was Fillydelphia or Whinniepeg or some other glistening jewel on the navel of Equestria, then letting some prankster like the Royal Grand Biv run amok wouldn't be that big of a deal! But have you stopped your incessant street preaching just long enough to look at the streets?! Ponies are miserable here! This city is... is... the Wastelands itself!” She took a deep, heaving breath and attempted belatedly to amend that last utterance. “It's like a wasteland of pained and overworked souls! What would it hurt to bring a little structure back into the chaotic mess that the Biv's caused?! All... All I want...” The last pony gulped, then whimpered, “All I want is to bring back light to this place...”

        “Through structure?!” Brevis stood up and balked alongside his chuckling companions. “Oh sweet gentle filly! It was the structure of the council and the unholy trinity above them that built the bars around these Dredgemaners' hearts to begin with! So long as you support Haymane and his will, you hide the string to the grand curtain! You maintain both death and darkness!”

        Harmony frowned, fuming slightly. “So what, then? You're going to threaten me until I give in to your anarchist agenda?”

        “BraHa!” Brevis glanced at his compatriots and pointed a shaking hoof the pegasus' way. “She thinks that this is a threat! BraHahaHaha!”

        As the mule doubled over, laughing, Pepper Plots sashayed up to take his place. “Sugah, with severe work schedules, Overseer Sladeburn makes threats. With Gultophine's Spirit as his excuse, Bishop Breathstar makes demands. Caught between his fellow living crutches, the good Mayor makes impositions.”

        “But we—oh turquoise ping pong ball—are simply making a request, which you can just as easily refuse as a good Equestrian soul refuses the shadows imposed upon it while on a quest to divine madness.”

        “Then—Snkkt—What was the point of all this melodrama and cloak and shadows?!” Harmony barked. “Did you really need all of this pretense to get my attention, you incomprehensible bum?!”

        Brevis shrugged. “What? Would you have preferred a song and dance number?” He whistled at somepony behind Harmony's shoulder. The pegasus turned to see an equine figure opening a pair of wooden doors to the misty streets of Dredgemane above. She glanced back, only to see that Brevis and Pepper Plots were gone, along with the bulk of the cloaked group. Getting the message, the last pony stood up, motioned Pinkie to follow along, and trotted unethusiastically out the not-so-subtle exit.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

        The cellar doors to the saloon slammed shut, echoing a brief thunder across the far side of Dredgemane's Town Square before fading into oblivion. Soon, Harmony and Pinkie Pie stood in the vast sea of etched cobblestones, alone with their shadows in the torchlight of leering lampposts above.

        “Well, that was fun!”

        Harmony slowly turned and glared at the candy-colored filly.

        “What?” Pinkie blinked.

        “I don't even know where to begin with you.”

        “Perhaps right where you end with me?” Pinkie grinned.

        “Meh... Whatever.” Harmony trotted off towards the southwest, having memorized the way to Pinkie's house after so many days.

        Pinkie shuffled behind her in a sudden lethargy, digging the edge of her hooves into the cobblestone names of ponies, ponies, ponies with a childish pout. “I'm guessing, after all of that, you're gonna gallop up to Mayor Haymane and turn in Pepper and Brevis and all those other ponies of the saloon to the Council, huh?”

        “I should. They're obviously Biv sympathizers.” Harmony grunted, then gave a long, cascading sigh. “But... I just don't know...”

        “Don't know about what? Huh? About the Royal Grand Biv? About what Brevis asked for? About how bad his cavities are?”

        “I don't know—I just don't know, alright?!” The last pony briefly stopped in place to bark, “Just... just let me friggin' think for a minute!”

        “Heeheehee—Maybe that's your problem right there, Har-Har!” Pinkie leaned in and playfully tapped the middle of Harmony's amber-streaked forehead. “You use your noodle too much when you should be using other organs. Erm... Not like Pepper, of course. More like candle-stick head—wait, not like him either... Huh...”

        The pegasus brushed the mare's bright hoof away and stuck her nose up. “Believe it or not, Miss Pie, there are some sane ponies in this world. And despite what Brevis may have just told us or how much you may admire him, this great civilization of ours was built on intelligent and structured thinking.” She sighed and gazed off into the cold, misty streets of the abandoned Dredgemane night. “The day that civilization ends, madness will be a disease, not a remedy.”

        “Hmmm... Sounds sad,” Pinkie uttered with a moping expression. She meditated on that for a full two seconds before bouncing with a bursting chirp. “But I sure would love to have stayed down in that cellar long enough to have seen a song and dance number!”

        “Pffft...” The orange foal inside of Harmony raspberried out into the cold air. She resumed slowly trotting down the foggy lengths of the torchlit square. “The most we would have gotten out of that was a middle-aged mare stripteasing in front of a top-heavy, homeless mule. I can think of much more charming ways for me to lose my lunch, thank you very much.”

        “But you saw how Brevis moved about! He's such a natural dancer!” Pinkie Pie spun and twirled around the time traveler. “Ziiip! Zoooom! Hehehe! He'd be a natural on the stage of Canterlot.”

        “Yeah, if he didn't smell like the love child of a landfill and a sweaty hippopotamus.”

        “Don't tell me you hate dancing as much as you hate laughing!”

        “Miss Pie, I never said—!”

        “Surely you're no stranger to the foxtrot? The hoof shuffle? I can buy that you've never laughed, Har-Har, but never danced?! Were you ever once a foal?”

        “Of course I was once a kid!” Harmony snarled. She blinked as if gazing through clearing fogs from beyond an airship's dashboard. “And... mmmm...” She shrugged, shrugged again. “I was... kind of a natural at it.”

        “You were?!” Pinkie paused in mid-twirl to lean towards Harmony with an ecstatic gasp. “I knew it! Of course a pegasus would be gifted at getting her groove on!”

        “Oh please. That's stupid and equinist and you know it—”

        “Watch me! Watch me!” Pinkie cartwheeled and performed a series of circular acrobatic tricks with more or less success around the pegasus. “Wooooo! I'm you as a little kid! I like looking at stars from my treehouse! I adore colts with bowl-cut manes! I am totally not the same, stiff stick-in-the-mud that I'll someday grow up to be!”

        “Oh please. Don't even pretend to impersonate—”

        “Ohhh-Weeee-Ohhhh, I look just like Harmonyyyy...”

        “Oh Celestia dang it...”

        “Uhhhh Ohhh and you're Marey Tyler M—”

        The last pony caught Pinkie's mouth with her hoof, stopping the filly in mid-cartwheel. She leaned in with a bored expression. “First off, don't ever do that again. Secondly...” Her brow furrowed. “You call that dancing? That's just flailing around like a friggin' lunatic.”

        “Mmmm-Meff!” Pinkie dislodged her lips from Harmony's hoof. “But I am a friggin' lunatic! Why not show me some awesome dance moves of your own?”

        “Not on your nelliest of nellies, girl.”

        “Whatsamatter?” Pinkie leaned over with a wicked grin, accompanied by an emphatic wag of her eyebrows. “Are ya chicken?”

        Harmony's amber eyes became burning pinpricks. She shoved Pinkie aside with one effortless tap.

        “Check it.”

        That cooly uttered, the adult pegasus bent her whole body forward—balancing her entire weight onto her front right limb. With grace that could melt tongues of volcanic flame, she twirled and twirled and twirled. Soon she was spinning like a copper top, gradually sliding her rotating self backwards on one hoof until she ended beneath a lamppost, frozen in a lazy repose with all of her three other limbs outstretched.

        Harmony smirked. “You jelly?”

        “Ooooooooooh!” Pinkie practically drooled. She clapped her hooves and hopped in place. “Do it again! Do it again!”

        “Nope.” Harmony proudly backflipped, twirled her wings once, and gently fluttered down to the ground. “First time's free. Second time, you gotta pay with the blood of a virgin.”

        “Then I guess the show's over.”

        “Well, that answers a question I never knew I had it within me to ask.”

        “But lemme try what you did!” Pinkie Pie twirled, but as soon as her limbs moved, she got tangled with herself. “Whoah-Whoah-Whoah—”

        Harmony caught the mare's balance with an outstretched wing. She raised a hoof to the blinking earth pony's lip, then gestured to herself. With mute speed, she performed a very simple hoof-tapping number on the cobblestone. She stood still and stared at Pinkie.

        The fluffy-maned pony grinned and repeated the movement.

        Harmony did a deadpan shuffle, side-strut, twirl, and stopped.

        Pinkie hummed to herself, mimicking the cadence with more or less grace. Once finished, she smiled brightly—as much with herself as with Harmony.

        Harmony pretended to trot normally down the length of the town square, but when Pinkie Pie bounced to keep up, gazing at the pegasus with pleading blue eyes, the last pony smirked and did another smooth dance move. The pink anchor followed suit, this time trying to one-up the time traveler with an added shuffle or two. Harmony exhaled in mock shock and proceeded to let loose a flurry of hoof-tapping that put Pinkie to shame. The candy-colored filly nevertheless attempted to copy the movement, only to stumble into the nearby curb with a brief yelp. Harmony smirked and showed off again, but Pinkie was not far behind.

        Into the empty streets of Dredgemane, flanked by dim flickering torchlamps the two proceeded, half-dancing, half-smiling, entirely living... in a way that was alien to the gray shadows of that town, shadows that briefly and felicitously parted ways before the two bright souls. Then the mists swallowed them up, and all was once more cobblestone desolation, a precursor—if not a tribute—to the Wastelands.