//------------------------------// // Trinity Pt. 3 // Story: The Arising Cartoon Pony // by Darkonshadows //------------------------------// After kicking the robot penguin through the recently recoded wall, mom came over and hugged me. Her warm wings tightly wrapping me before giving me sweet release and the ability to breathe as she backed off, she still kept one of her wings around me. “So Screwy, how much trouble was it to adventure this far into our realms to rescue me? You must have had a heck of a time surviving all the crap every one of us video game heroes normally does.” It was a sweet moment and Screwball was squirming a bit in the red and yellow feathers that encompassed her, Kazooie’s nickname for the pony was one that was not relished though generally accepted. Screwball gave a vibrant smile and then it quickly stopped. Screwball thought back to something important and she quickly told Kazooie that she had to watch out for a red crate. “Red crate, are you sure? Who told you tell me that? If it was Merluvlee I’ll scream and pull out a nuclear device, I really will.” Kazooie turned her gaze on Banjo and Honey who noticeably winced at the thought of her screaming, but it was more than likely the threat of a nuclear explosion going off near them. They would need to buy a lot of Rad-X and possibly detoxify Spiral Mountain again after last time. No, Screwball hadn’t met anyone named Merluvlee, so she decided to say it was Rosalina who was with a bunch of creatures called Luma. Kazooie’s reaction was nonplussed or even much of a reaction. “Well I now know who I will send a gift basket to… wonder if she likes sea salt ice cream.” The bird said after a moment after several strange looks crossed her face.”So who’s the new pony and how did she end up here? Better yet I want to know how the muffin lover got here.” “Well the way Screwball explains it she teleported right into her path a thousand or so feet in the air and knocked her off a missile she was clinging too that was launched by the now destroyed Cerberus Alpha.” Banjo sighed at the fact that this kind of stuff actually does happen in the video game realms and quite often at that. “Hah, I knew these ponies were at least part cat!” Suddenly this proclaimed loudly by Kazooie, as if that explained anything as she silently thought Screwball landed on her hooves after falling that far. “Can we please get a move on? We’re not exactly safe in the middle of enemy territory you know!” Honey was hovering near the door as the holes in the walls and floor had rebooted themselves already back to normalcy. “Sure sure yellow jacket, just give me a moment to set something up.” Honey gave an exasperated sigh as Kazooie reached into her backpack. Soon Kazooie pulled out a statue of herself in the form of sitting in a yoga position and the head was upraised on a pole somewhat with a black sphere sitting on top. She turned to Screwball and whispered something while motioning over to the two ponies and the crazy pony nodded. “Kazooie… please tell me that’s not what I think it is.” Banjo stated slowly backing away, prepared to run for the hills. “Okay I won’t tell you, once I set this thing off no hero or friendly left behind and ponies are a priority to get to safety. So please unlock and remove Lyra from the backpack. Only a Kazooie can survive this so don’t worry about me if I’m left behind and let’s get things started and make it fast!” Kazooie leapt up and stomped down on the head of the statue which immediately shot down and some clanging destroyed clock noises could be heard. A three dimensional digital number could be seen hovering above the statue giving them all fifty minutes to live as the black sphere lit up along with the statues eyes. They could all hear the ticking of a clock and the background music had suddenly become horribly distorted. Screwball attracted the attention of the other two ponies and a small black box appeared in front of them and something happened before it disappeared as Screwball silently explained what she did causing Derpy and Lyra to look at each other in surprise. They never heard of something so weird or that it was even possible. “Ohhhh….” Banjo really disliked it when Kazooie made situations worse before they got better, he immediately ran over to the door and shoulder checked it open, the fact that it was sealed and made of metal could not stop him. “We have to get moving right now!” They all exited the room with Screwball taking one look back to the statue and saw a black hole forming above it; she turned and started galloping down the hallways after the others with Kazooie in the lead. Kazooie simply pirouetted through a gaggle of the left over enemy defenses and they were torn to shreds, anything that got in her way was reduced to a pile of ash or destroyed then reduced to a pile of ash. She definitely knew her way around as it had taken them less than four minutes to reach the lobby, when Screwball suddenly stopped them all. “What is it Screwball? Once I’ve set off my special weapon I can’t stop it, the coding that goes into it makes it really unsafe to be stopping or even slowing down right now.” Kazooie then saw Screwball pointing to the destroyed shutters that lead towards the basement levels and saying that Chaos was to distract the main security forces of this building while she was sneaking in. She really didn’t want the chaos monster to be left behind as he was her friend. “Damn, Banjo, Wasp and Twink, we’re going after Chaos. You three stay here and out of trouble!” Kazooie turned back and ran through the destroyed shutters followed by the other three leaving the ponies in the lobby. “So who was that?” Lyra asked wondering about the red and yellow bird. Screwball answered that that was her mother; she was a hero and a rather notably well known violent one at that. Famous for destroying a galaxy or something single wingedly. “Is there anything to eat here? Using so much magic works up an appetite.”Stated Lyra, she was trying to ignore the fact that Screwballs mother was a bird and able to slice through those moving metallic creatures with her flesh and blood wings. Walking over to the security station that was also the front desk and looking behind it, she was actively trying to ignore the other strange things about the pony. Like the fact that she didn’t move her lips to talk and her throat didn’t so much as twitch either. She looked to her erstwhile friend the grey pony holding a muffin up to her. “No I don’t want a muffin Derpy; I actually want something relatively green to eat.” Screwball turned to the saddened Derpy and accepted a muffin from her, causing the pony to smile as she ate it slowly to savor the flavor. While Lyra’s stomach grumbled, taking this as a cue to help Lyra out Screwball went over to one of the small amounts of leafy greens growing in small pots dotted around the room. She just picked one at random she pulled on it till out popped a humongous turnip with a smiley face. She was not one to question how it was bigger than the space it had just been occupying or the fact that the dirt smoothed out perfectly flat upon its removal. Video game physics were not to be explained, just acknowledged as long as it doesn’t cause trouble like knowing how boss fights work. Turning to Lyra, Screwball asked if this large thing was enough for her as she tried to drag it over and managed to move it with relative ease as it seemed to weigh nothing after being pulled out. “Yeah, that will do it.” Lyra took a hefty bite, tasted delicious too despite the odd facial feature on it. Around halfway to Lyra finishing it they all heard an explosion coming from outside through a section of the destroyed lobby Chaos made an entrance through. Being the usually curious ponies they were, they walked out, turned their head skyward and glanced at the shadow of an even larger fleet then that of the Reploids slowly descending towards the planet. Speaking of the Reploid fleet, it was largely sixty one point three percent down and continuing with the casualties the Star Fox team was delivering to it in all range mode ever since the heavy shields the energy field generator gave the larger spawn point battleships. “Oh what do we have here?” A posh voice said and the sound of flapping wings could be heard. Turning to the right the ponies saw a regal looking blue and yellow armored robot with the face of an eagle and large wings sticking from his humanoid back as he dropped to the ground. “Hoo, it seems that both kings are out at about the same time, looks like it’s a good time to take some hostages eh brother? As mavericks we must pride ourselves on coming away from this smelling a little better than biological excrement. It seems we have an opportune moment to take some hostages, which is if they are willing to come with us. If not I think we’ll have to blow them away.” This one had the face of an owl, red and green color scheme and was using his large shoulder pads to fly before he too landed to the left of the three and threw up a salute. He was a bit stockier and shorter, but was a lot more dangerous than his predecessor who was standing opposite of him. “I’m not a maverick…” The eagle one muttered sourly crossing his arms in front of his chest. “Of course not brother, you just lost a fight and honor demands that you followed Sigma’s orders like you’re going to follow orders of the one in charge now. I believe you were termed a maverick that was not a maverick? And to think anyone could actually look up to you at one time considering how you have fallen.” The owl one seemed to be a bit nastier in personality tapped something on its arm to speak into it, all throughout his tone remained neutral with a dark undertone. “Hoo, this is Storm Owl; fleet is to go into full retreat except for the Dauntless Peregrine. So much of my unit has perished and I’m quite frightfully mad. So allow me, Storm Owl, to take it out on you!” “I’m Storm Eagle; sorry about what we are going to do to you, well maybe not so much as it is regrettable that we must save face like this.” The eagle one seemed actually apologetic about attacking them and then a boss field erected around them and the three ponies. Boss Fight: Storm Brothers versus Screwball, Derpy and Lyra. (Insert Pokémon Red/Blue/Yellow gym leader battle music.) “Okay, just how screwed are we and what’s going on.” As she back towards the hole in the building the barrier popped up preventing Lyra from leaving the battlefield. She made her way back over to Screwball and Derpy; they were all stuck out in the open against two flying opponents both of which were already tough machines and they both had their own life bars filling up in the upper right corner of all their visions even Lyra and Derpy who didn’t have the advantage of a HUD could see their life bars. In the upper left corners of their own visions were their own life bars with their own heads as eight bit icons smiling at them. Lyra’s seemed to be the smallest and was already injured slightly from being tied into Banjo’s life system previously and the bear having been struck by several rockets and buster blasts, she had a green bar representing her current fatigue level. Derpy was at full health and there was a strange slowly depleting brown with blue dots bar next to her health. Screwball had three bars, her health bar, a bar with her maximum amount of chaos energy in her system which seems to have improved with time and the last was strange bar as even Screwball didn’t know what it represented. Screwball explained in no uncertain terms that this was a boss fight and bosses of the video game realms can force you into an inescapable arena to fight you to the death. Video Game Heroes tend to always win the fights unless the odds are stacked or there is an underlying reason why they couldn’t win the fight. “She’s telling you the truth I ended up in one myself… though I had Mr. Bumble to help me at the time.” Before they could talk any further Derpy narrowed her eyes and dove in front of the two as a tornado was fired at them by Storm Eagle. Clapping her hooves together Derpy held them up to the tornado attack splitting it easily in two. Her two friends were perfectly safe from weather based attacks as long as she was around, except maybe for lightning as she tended to have problems with controlling that. “If you have time to talk then you have the time to die!” Stated Storm Owl, he fired a spread machine gun of metallic yellow feathers at the trio sending them scrambling to get out of the way of the makeshift bullets as they struck the ground shattering into small pieces of metallic shrapnel. They were completely exposed against the two flying opponents and they had little chance of surviving this. This was kind of unfair since only one of them could actually fly or at least that’s what Lyra thought. Screwball quickly pulled out her homerun bat from nowhere after reaching behind her back with her left hoof and held it in a swordsman style grip in both hooves as she stood on her two hind legs and took a few steps in front of Derpy gently pushing her back to Lyra’s side. Her spiraling pupils seemed to have slowly started to rotate. “You have got to teach me how to do that… the standing and walking thing, not the baseball bat thing. Where did you even pull that from?” She had been behind Screwball when the crazy pony did it and Lyra still didn’t even see where the bat had come from, she also didn't like the implications that Screwball could have just done an ass pull. “It seems like they have some fight in them after all.” Despite this Storm Owl noticed Storm Eagle didn’t say anything or react to the comment as he opened up his mouth and spat out an egg. All three of the ponies watched the egg strike the ground and Screwball was the only one that had inkling as to what was about to happen as she rushed forward and swung her bat horizontally to the right and then brought it inwards to vertical backswing upwards. Four explosions followed her defensive measures as the four small mechanical jet propelled birds that had popped out of the egg after hitting the ground; they exploded on impact with Screwball’s weapon. “Can’t we talk this out, I mean…?” Lyra was pushed out of the way by Derpy as Storm Owl fired a burst of machine feather rounds at her. Screwball was busy having to dodge out of the way of a dive kick from Storm Eagle as his foot claws nearly got a grip on her neck; she leapt out of the way and immediately positioned her body in front of the other two ponies again. There wasn’t much time for talking like the owl robot stated as he immediately was firing another barrage at the three of them. Screwball swung her bat in front of herself and held it there leaving sparkles to trail up her bat and when the bullets were going to strike she spun around twice rapidly knocking the shots straight back at Storm Owl. Storm Owl only took only a single bullet out of all of the ones he fired and was immediately bathed in a green glowing shield with razor sharp green energy blades circling it. Storm owl held up a hand and a green glowing orb matching his projectile shield coalesced in his hand and he tossed it straight at the gathered ponies getting them to scatter as it petered out upon contact with the ground. Screwball rolled to the right, Lyra Jumped back and Derpy took to the air to the left. Storm Eagle was immediately on the pony who screamed pray, flapping his wings twice he swooped down feet first at the mint green pony Lyra. She managed to duck his attack only to be grabbed by the tail by his feet and lifted into the air. Storm Eagle quickly dropped Lyra when Derpy rammed into him and Screwball dove into both of them knocking them out of the path of another one of Storm Owls barrier shots. As soon as they hit the ground Screwball was kicked clear of Storm Eagle as Derpy had already managed to get clear of him. Hitting the ground Screwball bounced and rolled into a standing position, but already had to move out of the way of a storm of yellow bullets immediately following that. She was seen as the most viable threat given she had a weapon and even if Derpy could fly she wasn’t going to be doing much damage as shown when she tackled Storm Eagle his health bar only dropped half a health point and that was with the increased strength the realm naturally grants her. Derpy had frowned as she couldn’t protect both Lyra and Screwball and they were really ganging up on the latter. “Lyra… you have to help fight too she can’t do it alone without the both of us.” Even as she said this to the lyre player they had to watch as Screwball was dodging another four jet birds coming from a hatched egg and another green sphere of violent energy even while being dive bombed by Storm Eagle. She was getting roughed up out there as she took a blow to the chest by one of the jet birds and was fending off the dive attack using her homerun bat to block Eagle’s attempt to eviscerate her, it wouldn’t stand up to the pressure of a full size robot master for too long or the abuse it was being put through destroying explosives and protecting her from the claws of the robots feet. “But what can I do?” Lyra suddenly regretted asking that as she found herself face to face with someone she considered a blonde ditz that was an acquaintance of hers, this mail delivering pony with the weird but now obviously known true stories was serious about them getting into the scrap that was nearly killing one of the three of them at the moment. “I’m scared Derpy...” “I’m scared too, I’m far away from home dimensionally my daughter is in the care of a lazy bones, a mental pony raised by timber wolves and a pony that’s a living doormat except when her friends are danger. How do you think I feel that I’ve been threatened at every turn since I got here, but I’ve also made friends and they’ve gotten me this far as I have them. So you don’t know how to fight, well think of something because I’m not going to let Screwball take on both of those two alone. We’re ponies and we fight together, make friends and use our talents to better the world wherever we are!” As she yelled this Derpy heard the sound of another egg cracking and pulled Lyra out of the way of a swarm of jet birds launched from another egg Storm Eagle spat at them. All the while Storm Owl fires another spray of feather rounds at Screwball who was desperately tap dancing out of the way of the shots. “They aren’t going to focus entirely on her forever no matter how much we don’t want to be in the thick of it.” Derpy immediately took to the air and Storm Eagle fired his tornado buster at her and she easily split the tornado in twain with her hooves and was performing an aileron roll straight through the center of the weapons blowing wind, her Winter Wrap Up tornado techniques really helped with that. When Derpy got close enough she curled into a ball and tightened up as she slammed into him rotating at a high velocity to actually do three bars worth of damage to him. Derpy managed to recover from the blow and had to immediately fly backwards as an Eagle kicked upwards at her with his left set of talons. The previous blow did as much damage to Derpy as it did to Eagle throwing off his aim by a few centimeters that could have caught the bubble flanked one harshly in the jaw; his kick missed whiffing past her shell-shocked head and now dizzied walled eyes as she darted away from him. “I’ve had enough of this!” Storm Owl glowed and four tornadoes formed around the battlefield and start to move inwards on Screwball who ran towards Lyra who was at the center of where all the tornadoes were converging. Derpy flew down and started kicking up air around all three of them and then the tornadoes slammed home created a solid wall of ripping wind that took up half the battlefield. It almost hit Storm Eagle as well leading him to think Storm Owl didn’t care about his existence given the previous near miss when Screwball shoved him and Derpy out of the way. Inside that wall of dangerous wind Derpy was sweating as she continued to flap her wings as hard as she could to focus on creating a bubble of air around her two friends. It was relative to her special talents that had to do with all forms of spherical objects, she liked golfing and could hold her breathe underwater for ten minutes. What she was doing right now was protecting them from a veritable maelstrom of ripping wind and it stressing everything she had to keeping bubble in place around her friends. After it was over Derpy collapsed to the ground and so too did Storm Owl having used up a large amount of weapon energy just to summon that desperation attack on command, they were both vulnerable. Storm Eagle immediately aided Storm Owl though he was loathing doing so. He fired an egg out of his mouth and then proceeded to launch a tornado from his buster. Derpy, even tired, intercepted the tornado, but while she was diverting the tornado she couldn’t block the jet propelled bird grenades screaming at her. Screwball did that for her when she shoved her out of the way and swung her bat rapidly three times with one hoof, after taking a look at her bat it was cracked and in a sorry state. Lyra just watched as both of them protected her with all they had; Derpy was already troubled having to divert so many focused tornado attacks and Screwball was taking more than a beating for the both of them. Eagle launched another drop kick at them or to be more specific at Lyra and both the ponies in front of her pushed him off. They did this with a flying buck to the chest and a bat strike to the head causing him to back off only for the green glow of several large orbs to come flying at them. Screwball roughly shoved Derpy into Lyra as she took the first large green orb with her bat and it shattered sending splinters of wood into her body. Then next one struck her hooves as she brought them up, covering her limbs in deep gashes. With both her defending limbs going limp the third one struck home and yet she stayed standing on her hind hooves, because the fourth one would have made it past her if she fell and she was stubborn enough to take all these damaging hits herself. When the fourth large green sphere of energy finally struck, Screwball didn’t even scream once… she just fell backwards dead. Lyra’s eyes started misting up and Derpy cried out, they ran over to her lifeless body. Her corpse was a macabre thing in the video game realms, the flesh of her limbs worn down to the bone, her belly blasted open and her innards shredded. This was not to mention all the blood splattered about the ground or that chunks of her mane and tail were as well. Storm Owl was super effective, in killing her.