Fluttershy awoke slowly. The light hitting her eyelids seemed different, somehow, and it took a few moments for her to think to open them.
Daybreak had come while she was asleep. The sky had gone back to the same fiery orange-red it had been when she had first arrived. The ball was asleep next to one of the couch legs, curled up with its legs underneath it like a small nest. Fluttershy gently lifted herself off the couch to avoid disturbing it and went over to the backpack.
Last night, she had put off looking through the backpack because of the lack of light and her exhaustion. Now that she was rested, she should see what was inside. She opened it up and began pulling things out, lining them up on the floor as she retrieved them.
Four cans of food. Three of them were for string beans, peaches, and diced vegetables. They were bigger than the cans back in Equestria were; Fluttershy thought that she might be able to stretch the food out a few days. The last one was shaped into a rectangle for some reason; it was something called “Spam.” She looked it over; there was an ingredients list on the back. It was made from…
Her eyes widened. Pork? Beef?
Maybe she didn’t want that one. She put it aside, away from the rest of the food, and went back to checking the backpack.
After that was a small glass box with a knife, fork, and spoon in them, a small orange cylinder, and then a small black box with a folding metal stick on top of it. There was a belt with a few pouches on it; each pouch had a strange metal rectangle in it with some round tapered cylinders in each one, almost like a rounded arrow tip. She touched one of the cylinders; the inside of the rectangle felt spring-loaded. She decided not to fiddle with it and put all the rectangles back in the belt. Close to the bottom of the backpack was a blue notebook with a pen in a holder on the cover. She opened it.
3/2/2012
I lost my last journal, so I’m starting a new one. The assassins found us again, and we had to move. Jean and Erwin disappeared somewhere in the tunnels, but we don’t know where and we can’t go out to look for them. We can’t go out until the assassins calm down, but we have enough food for a couple of days.
“Oh!” Fluttershy quickly closed the journal; she wouldn’t like it if someone read her private thoughts, so her first reaction was not to read this.
…But on the other hand she might need to know everything she could about this city if she wanted to survive.
Fluttershy hesitated, then opened up the notebook and quickly flipped through the rest of the pages. There were several more pages of entries, all a paragraph or so long.
She decided to compromise a little. She skimmed the journal, only letting her eyes settle on the entries that had what seemed like important information.
4/19/2012
Pike Place Market is the gift that keeps on giving. We’ve found more food there in weeks then we found at UW in a month. Not just the canned and pickled stuff, but real fresh meat, sitting pink and juicy in the freezers as if the refrigeration hadn’t failed decades ago. At least this place is living up to the “No More Hunger” part of its origin. Now if we could only fix hatred and death we could all live forever.
5/11/2012
I’m three years old today! Had a great day with Margaret. She’s sleeping next to me right now as I write this. I’m going to get the extra blankets so that she won’t get cold.
6/25/2012
We’re moving again. Rebecca says that she’s logging increased assassin movement around where we are and she thinks they’re closing in, so we’re leaving while we can. Still not allowed to say where we’re going in case someone finds this.
7/3/2012
Found a dead Klondike today. It looked like he’s been trying to scale a wall to get to the top of one of the old cathedrals, but his grappling hook failed when he was most of the way up. All his wonders had already gone orphan or self destructed, so all that was left was the clothes on his back, a capacitor that was hidden down his shirt, and a jar of peanut butter in his pocket. What was more interesting was the woman we found in the cathedral. Her name’s Gina, and she’s maybe two days old. We brought her back with us and gave her a dinner of ramen and spam. Biologically she’s around her early 30’s, so I guess we’ll put her to work soon.
8/20/2012
We’re going out early tomorrow instead of in three days. We’ve been seeing a lot of activity around the Industrial District, so we’re going to poke around and see what’s what.
That was the last entry. Fluttershy closed the journal and put it down.
Just underneath the journal was a heavily folded piece of paper. Fluttershy pulled it out. The front of it said “Map.” A rush of excitement went through her as she looked at it. Maybe there were some places marked on it that she could go to, like caches of food or where the albinos lived.
Fluttershy opened up the first few folds. The center of the map was an area labeled Downtown. To the north, near an area called Queen Anne, one larger building had been circled, with a logo of a snake next to it. To the south was a part of the city labeled the Industrial District; underneath it was a soldier’s lamp in a yellow circle. Thin blue lines were drawn on the map in a chaotic grid pattern. To the left side of the map, in an area that looked like it would have been only water, was a smaller inset of the surrounding areas. In the center was an area labeled Seattle, next to a bay. There were other regions marked around it with names like Redmond, Bellevue, and Tacoma. Most of the map was still folded, underneath the sections she had opened.
Fluttershy looked at the map and realized that she had no idea where she was in it.
Fluttershy looked at the small ball. It was still sleeping, and she decided to wait until later to ask it if it knew where they were.
At the very bottom of the backpack was a pouch made from a fabric Fluttershy didn’t recognize. She pulled it out and opened it.
There were three glass cylinders inside. There was a blue ball of lightning slowly floating up and down inside of each cylinder. Small tendrils of lightning reached up and down from the top and bottom of the cylinder, and the ball of lightning bobbed along it. It was actually kind of pretty. Fluttershy reached out to pick one up for a closer look –
zap
Fluttershy jerked her hoof back, shaking blinking lights out of her eyes. What was that? The blue ball of lightning had faded slightly, glowing less brightly and moving more slowly.
Whatever had happened reminded her of what had happened when she had touched the book she had given to the ball. She should save this for the ball to eat. She thought about why the albino would have something like this; the reminder of her friend’s dietary needs made her wonder if the albinos needed to eat the same energy in addition to their regular food.
Did everybody and everything in this city run on this knowledge-energy? If her body didn’t, would that explain what had happened to the soldiers when she had touched them back in Equestria? Her body might have disrupted the flow of energy in them, the same way lightning might be grounded by the earth. If that was the case, then there must be something else in this city that kept them from being destroyed when she touched them here.
With nothing else to do, Fluttershy sat and thought about what to do next.
Equestria already seemed like a lifetime ago. The animals of the forest…the bright blue skies…sunlight through the trees…she could feel that they were a world away, they were so divorced from the reality of the abandoned stone and burning sky that now surrounded her.
This place was cruel.
She wanted to go home.
There was a clicking noise to her side, and Fluttershy turned to look. The ball was starting to stir. It sat up and rubbed its eye with one leg, slowly blinking sleep away.
“Good morning,” she said. “I found breakfast for you.” She pushed the pouch with the cylinders towards the ball.
The ball climbed to its feet and scurried over to the pouch. It reached in, grasped the cylinder in its front legs and lifting it towards itself like a cup. The lightning collected at the top of the cylinder before a short of arc of electricity formed outwards from the cylinder into the ball. Instead of draining it like the ball had with the book, the clockwork ball let go of the cylinder after a few seconds and put it back into the pouch.
“You’re not hungry?” Fluttershy asked. The ball shook its head. It had been almost full after the book and soldier from yesterday, so it didn’t need much more to sustain itself today.
“Okay then,” Fluttershy said, deciding that maybe she should let the comment about draining the soldier go. She closed up the pouch and put it back next to the backpack. “Before we move on today, I just wanted to talk to you about something first,” she said.
The ball moved to a spot in front of her and nodded attentively.
“First of all…I think I’m going to need your help for a bit longer. Would you willing to do that? I don’t want to impose…”
The ball considered for a moment, then nodded. It hadn’t had any plans of its own, so it was perfectly fine traveling with her. Furthermore, when the ball was around Fluttershy, it felt…smarter, like its head was clearer. It thought that it could think more easily, like it could form words more clearly.
“Really?” Fluttershy said. None of the animals back in Equestria had ever said anything like that to her. She wondered if there was something else going on with the ball; maybe the magic of her cutie mark was helping it. There probably wasn’t any way she would be able to find out, though. “Thank you so much,” she said. “We should talk about what we’re going to do next, then.”
The ball nodded again, and waited for to speak.
“The first thing I wanted to do was talk to you again about a name,” she said. “When I asked you before, you gave me an answer I couldn’t understand. Could you try telling it to me again, please?”
The ball nodded, before giving her the same explanation that sounded full of technical terms as before. This time, she could pick out individual words in it.
Ball Robot Prototype #12 (Small)
Automata 2, Apokalypsi 1
Limited Battery Life, Night Eyes, No Manipulators, Remote Control, Size 1
There were a few more sentences, but those still didn’t make sense, and Fluttershy didn’t know what any of the words she could hear meant.
“I’d like to figure out a name for you from that…” Fluttershy began. She didn’t know what Automata or Apokalypsi meant, and the third line didn’t have anything that could be used as a name. Small Ball didn’t sound right, either. “I’ll call you Little Ball, then,” Fluttershy said. “Is that all right?”
Little Ball nodded, taking a step to the left and then the right.
Fluttershy smiled. “I’m glad you like it,” she said. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to move on to the next question I had. I wanted ask a bit about the city. What is this place?”
Little Ball tapped its chin, then shrugged and waved its front legs apologetically. All it had was a pair of names. The city that the access corridors led to was called Seattle. This city was called the Seattle of Tomorrow.
“Why is this called the Seattle of Tomorrow?” she asked.
Little Ball shook its head; it didn’t know that either.
“Well…all right then,” she said. “Maybe we can find someone who can explain to both of us later. What do you know about the soldiers?”
Little Ball didn’t know a whole lot. They were being made from somewhere inside the city, maybe in the Industrial District. They moved in groups, and talked to each other through their lamps; you could tell when the lamps started making static noises. They were led by someone named Megiddo.
Megiddo. Fluttershy remembered that name from the statue they had walked past the day before. “Do you know why he told the soldiers to capture me?”
Little Ball thought, trying to pull up what it knew about Megiddo. Finally, it shook its head. It had always run whenever it had seen one of Megiddo’s robots, and had never tried to find out anything about them. It had heard that Megiddo come to the city before it had become ruined, but that was all.
“All right then. Do you know anything about the albinos?”
Little Ball nodded. The albinos came from somewhere inside the city. They had a camp somewhere, the but the ball didn’t know where. The albinos always traveled in well-armed groups. Little Ball stayed away from them; large armed groups reminded the ball too much of the humans.
“Humans?”
Little Ball kept talking. Humans looked like albinos, but they came from Seattle instead of the Seattle of Tomorrow. The only time humans were seen in the city was when they came through the access corridors. Sometimes the ball had seen them with orphans in cages and boxes, taking them away.
Fluttershy thought about what Little Ball had said about albinos and humans being alike. “Are the albinos and humans related?” Fluttershy asked.
The ball tapped out another explanation with lots of words she couldn’t understand. She thought she understood enough to get a general sense, though. The humans had come first. The albinos were somehow based on the humans.
Fluttershy considered this. Maybe she could find the albinos? Surely they knew about this place. If she could explain that they had the same enemy, they might help her.
“Do you know where I can find albinos?” Fluttershy asked the ball. It shook its head.
“Oh, ” Fluttershy said, hiding her disappointment. “One last question, I think. What do you know about that energy you eat?”
The ball tapped its chin, thinking. It remembered a word: Mania. It scratched the ground for a moment before nodding more enthusiastically. Yes, the energy was called Mania. It could be stored as information or energy. That was all it knew about that.
“All right,” Fluttershy said. “Thank you.” She sat for a minute, staring at the map and digesting everything that the ball had told her.
The access corridors were either sealed or watched, and they led to Seattle instead of Equestria. Even if there was help in Seattle, she couldn’t reach it now. They had been…well…locked in was probably the best way to describe it.
The humans might know a way back to Equestria, but on the other hoof they sounded unfriendly. She didn’t think she would be able to ask them for help.
She wondered if the albinos knew a way back to Equestria. The albinos were staying in the city for some reason; why hadn’t they left through the access corridors long ago? On the other hoof, they could fight back, Little Ball hadn’t directly seen them do harm, and they might still be willing to help somepony who wasn’t on Megiddo’s side either.
She had one more idea: Go back to the building with the gate and see if she could turn it on. This was a terrible idea; Fluttershy knew that if she were a military commander guarding something important, she would lock it up and put guards all around it, and she had no idea how she was going to deal with locks and guards.
Finding the albinos first seemed like a better idea. Fluttershy opened up the map and laid it on the ground. “Can you help me figure out where we are? And I’m not sure what the blue lines are, either…”
Little Ball stepped onto the map, looking at it carefully. After a few moments, it traced the blue lines and then placed a leg at one particular spot. The blue lines were the access corridors, and they were around here, in Downtown.
“Thank you.” Fluttershy put her hoof down on the map next to the ball’s leg. Now, the journal had mentioned Pike Place Market…there it was! Just a few blocks away. The albinos had said they were leaving the area around Pike Place Market, so they wouldn’t be in Downtown anymore. Fluttershy began to open the map further to see where else they may have gone.
Downtown was surrounded by Capitol Hill, Central Seattle, and the Industrial District. Fluttershy unfolded more pages, expanding the map. There were more areas: Queen Anne, White Center, the University District, Lynnwood, Redmond, Bellevue…the map spanned miles.
They could be anywhere in there. There was no way Fluttershy would be able to find them.
She looked around frantically on the map. Surely there was something else she could do besides go back to the gate…No…?
Fluttershy gulped. Finding the gate was the closest thing to a idea for what to do next that she had.
It was going okay. She told herself it was going to be okay. She should make sure that she knew where the gate was, anyway. Just in case she had to use it again.
What was the first thing she should do? She needed to retrace her steps to where she had first entered the city. Fluttershy looked back down at the map. “We were here…and here…” She began tracing one hoof along city streets and the access corridors, trying to remember the number of city blocks she’d walked along each way. Little Ball pointed with one leg and began counting off the city blocks with her. After several minutes, Little Ball and Fluttershy had narrowed down the location of the portal she had arrived in to several blocks just on the edge of the Industrial District. It would take maybe half an hour to walk there, assuming that nothing happened on the way. Fluttershy put the map down in the wicker basket and began repacking the backpack. She looked at the empty can from last night. She would just have to leave it here. She couldn’t think of anything she might need it for, and she might need the space in the backpack.
With a bit of work, she was able to loop the backpack straps around her front legs and wings, as if they were arms. She flew in a circle around the room to test it; the pack felt balanced on her back. Good, that would let her put more things in the wicker basket. She flew up a few feet and put her hooves on the basket’s handle. “All right, get inside.”
Little Ball climbed into the basket, and Fluttershy took them both out the window.
The albino’s body was gone. There wasn’t even a scrap of cloth or bit of blood to mark where his body had been.
Fluttershy hovered over the spot where the albino had been. The other albinos must have taken him away during the night. She remembered his journal in his backpack, and a feeling of guilt washed over her. Maybe when she had found the gate she might be able to return his things to the albinos some day.
There was nothing she could do. She flew away.
They moved slowly and cautiously along the roads. The two of them would hide in the shadows of a darkened window or door, make sure there wasn’t the silhouette of an soldier or anything else moving in the distance, and then dash across the exposed roads to the next hiding spot. She saw surprisingly few soldiers. Fluttershy had been expecting…well, she wasn’t quite sure what she had been expecting. Maybe she had been thinking of armies on the march like pictures from a history encyclopedia, or that as they went south towards the gate there would be more and more soldiers until she was facing a war camp.
What happened was that two patrols total went by. Both times, Fluttershy had heard them walking over the rubble and on the streets before they came in sight, and they easily hid until the patrol had walked away.
Finally, Fluttershy entered the back door of one of the abandoned apartment buildings that was in sight of the building that the gate had been in. Fluttershy crept around to a room that looked down on the building.
There were no guards.
Fluttershy blinked, then looked around at all the other buildings she could see, trying to find the distinctive outline of a soldier or a glint of light off of a lamp. Nothing.
This was too good to be true. Fluttershy was no soldier, but she knew enough about the Royal Guard to know that if there was something important in a building, you always had guards posted outside. “Come on,” she said to Little Ball. “Let’s – ”
There was a deep rumbling noise down below, as if a massive piece of machinery had been switched on momentarily. Fluttershy didn’t so much hear it as feel it, like as if the sound was a physical thing vibrating in the back of her ribcage. There was a moment of silence, and then Fluttershy felt it again.
Something was going on down there. “We need to go inside,” she said to Little Ball. It stared back at her for a moment with its eyes wide as if she was crazy, but when she turned to carry the basket down the stairs it didn’t jump out.
Fluttershy stopped in the doorway to the apartment building. There were still no soldiers in sight. She put the basket down on the ground just inside the doorway and landed. The ball hopped out to stand next to her. She looked both ways, and then dashed from the apartment building to the doorway to the building with the gate, the clockwork ball following close behind.
Nothing came out to stop them. Fluttershy stopped in front of the doorway to the gate building and looked around, suddenly conscious of how exposed she was out here. There was no movement anywhere; just stillness. She looked around one last time, gulped, and reached for the door handle.
The door opened.
The room beyond was well lit, and she could see everything in it. At least five soldiers, forming a protective line in front of flying wings like the ones with the nets last night. The floating wings were as big as she was, and hanging beneath them on steel cable were the parts of the disassembled white gate, two fliers for ever forth of the gate. They all looked up as the door opened, the soldiers shining their lamps at the yellow pegasus.
But what shocked Fluttershy the most was not the soldiers that had all seen her, or the fact that they were taking away the gate. It was the impossible figure that had just opened the door in front of her.
It was Rainbow Dash.