//------------------------------//
// The Day the Sky Changed 
// Story: The Day the Sky Changed 
// by Midnightshadow 
//------------------------------//

	Mikey swore as the rock came down on his thumb. He stood up quickly, holding his hand, waving it about. He snarled at the can and booted it. It flew through the air and shattered a window, rattling around inside the house. He heard what sounded like an old-style tube television burst.
“Who the hell has those any more? Probably a retro-collector...”

Mikey eyed the window, he could probably climb in, but he didn’t fancy adding another injury today. He would try the door. A makeshift crowbar and surprisingly enough non-shatterproof glass meant he could open the damn thing. The latch turned. He rummaged around inside their kitchen but failed to find a can-opener. He retrieved his can and took it outside again. It would be dark soon, well... darker. It never got dark any more, not since the sky had changed. He shivered, that nagging feeling of being watched played over him again, but he pushed it to the back of his mind and raised the brick before bringing it down on the can. He rained blows upon it before it finally split a seam. He was hungry enough that he just ripped it further open and upended the tin of beans into his mouth and started eating them cold.

“Ugh,” came a voice, “you feces-flinging primates are ever so disgusting.”
Mikey whirled, picked up the brick and threw it at the pony. It bounced off in a purple flash of light and shattered as it impacted the plascrete parkway. He snarled meaninglessly and took a cold metallic object from his waistband. Pulling the trigger, he emptied the entire clip at the beast before he threw the gun itself after the bullets. It was just as useful as the ammo it had carried, which was to say not at all. The pony had barely even flinched.
“Are you quite finished? I got this shield spell idea from watching your ridiculous excuses for entertainment. I based it off  the shield that surrounded our world itself. Impenetrable, almost. At least for anything you could do it is. I can leave you here, you know, to wallow in your filfth as your world is eaten away, or you can follow me.”
“Why would I follow you, you goddamn piece of shit!” Mikey spat.
“Because, monkey, I know the way out. I was sent, for my sins, to rescue the last of you two-legged hairless retards from an unknown fate and to deliver you to a slightly better-known fate. Or not, it’s up to you.”
“What if I like it here?”
“Then you may stay.” the pony turned around and flicked his tail, seemingly searching as his head wove backwards and forwards, “Come, the topology is highly unstable in this region, it will collapse soon. We have... I don’t know, somewhere between minutes, hours and days. Maybe a week, tops, before everything here succumbs.”
“Succumbs to what?”
“Universal manifold collapse, you simpleton. The weight of your reality is no longer self-sustaining, not in this local pocket of space-time. It’s been getting smaller, or hadn’t you noticed?”

The pony was right. The world was not what it once was. Mikey remembered - it wasn’t long ago but it seemed like forever. The world had been a lone, shining beautiful jewel hanging in space and it all belonged to god’s own, man. Then those damned ponies had come. Their... bubble, locking away riches to tempt the weak behind an impenetrable barrier, offering it freely... to those who turned away from their humanity. Equestria, foolsgold. Their world, merely an island at first, or so it seemed, had appeared from nowhere. Then it had started growing, and growing... Mikey remembered in the last days how space and time had become... jumbled. Parts of the world became sealed off behind miniature bubbles of their own, but these bubbles were seemingly... somehow they were complete and not at the same time. Eggheads had spun tales about ‘four dimensional geometry’ but he could smell bullshit when he heard it. He’d been told to evacuate. He had stayed... and then, then the sky had changed. He’d woken up one morning to a purple shining sky and impenetrable walls of energy surrounding what was left of this once great human metropolis, and he was the last one in it. No ponies, no humans, nothing. Rats didn’t count, neither did pigeons.  At first he could see beyond the barrier wall, but then it had become opaque. He’d sat at the wall for days, or it had felt like days. He’d laughed, cried, swore, promised, cajoled, threatened... but nothing had worked. He was now the most important man in the city, just like he’d promised himself he would be. He was the only man in the city, and every day the city got smaller, inch by implacable inch.

“If you’re going to come, come now, monkey. I am the greatest thaumatician Equestria has ever produced, but even I cannot prevent a universal matrix from collapsing.”
“You just want me to follow you?” Mikey asked, scratching his beard with one hand whilst picking at his armpit with the other.
“Yes, I’ll try to stay upwind so I don’t have to smell you. Grab on to my tail, without physical contact, as much as I loathe you hairless beasts, I cannot guarantee you will stay within the same locale as I.”
“I hate the idea just as much as you, you four-legged freak.” spat Mikey
“I doubt it. I had to work with you... you creatures every day. You’re looking at possibly the only non-human member of the HLF. Yeah, that’s right, the HLF. I don’t want your scum infecting my country any more than you want our kind mingling with yours. I’ve been to the dress clubs, I’ve met with your leaders, such as they are. Perverted pelt-freaks the lot of them. I had all the women I could want, you know. They threw your females at me in those places, said it was the perfect cover. I just think they liked watching. Don’t think they didn’t enjoy themselves too. It may have been the perfect cover, but there’s nothing in the rules against enjoying yourself.”
Mikey spluttered, “We humans would never...”
“Oh please,” the pony spat, “you were doing it long before we showed up. Dress clubs were neutral ground, idiot. HLF, PER, the various task-forces, both human and equestrian - they all frequented those clubs. Nopony talks about what goes on behind those doors, pony gotta have his vices. Makes discussing prisoner and information exchanges a lot easier, just slip the odd data-stick in with the credit sticks and paper notes, whisper the odd code-word as you pretend to kiss... all neat, all clean - mostly - and all secret. I’ve got the pictures to prove it. I’m one of the only ponies ever to have bionic implants. Double agent. Triple, really. First and foremost, I work for my goddess, Celestia, or more correctly her younger sister, Luna.”
Mikey hissed and the pony turned his head, “Easy, your ugliness. Don’t think I don’t know how often your royalty are referred to as looking like horses. I take it as a compliment. Anyway, first for equestria, now and always. Then I work for your human president, or I did whilst she was still human and there was still a president. Then I worked for the HLF.”

The pony led the way through the abandoned city, seemingly turning at random. He would tap open doors and walk through buildings, go up and down stairways and stop in blind alleys, counting to himself.
“What the hell are you doing, meetwurst?” yelled Mikey.
“Shut up, monkey. I’m reading the flux... look, you want to amuse yourself? Pick up something and throw it down the alley. Try not to hit the walls.”
“You what? It’s fifteen feet across!”
“Yeah, do it. I know you monkeys can fling shit at each other, so I’m pretty sure you can manage a rock down the alley.”

Mikey hefted a rock, he considered bashing the pony’s brains in with it, but at this point was honestly intrigued. He drew back his arm and let fly. The rock sailed through the air, curved, and slammed into the wall. Mikey blinked, and threw another rock. It did it again.
“What did you do?”
“I told you, topology is shifting. You might think we’re walking in circles, but I’m plotting for us the only way out of this city.”
“You can’t get out of this city! It’s... it closed up! The sky changed!”
“Then how, shit-for-brains, did I get in?”
Mikey fish-mouthed for a few minutes, then asked, “Assuming you’re not lying and I haven’t just not seen you... how did you get in?”
The pony smiled, “I am the greatest thaumatician in all of equestria. Many years ago, monkey, I found a spell. Our world, you see, suffers from an influx of meta-stable energy fields that results in our reality being a relatively tenuous one, and it had a tendency to shrink. During one of these shrinkages, I measured the flux in the energy fields. I perfected a spell to push outwards, to steal energy from a universe that was, in theory, infinite and expanding. I’d do both universes a favour, that way. The hypothetically infinite universe would gain billions of years of extra life before heat-death claimed it, and our universe would expand immeasurably, at the cost of a small slice of local space-time being seized and converted.”
“You mean,” said Mikey, as he picked at an ear, “Equestria appearing, and devouring our world, was your plan all along?”
“Beautiful, isn’t it? I remove the blemish on your reality called ‘mankind’ and in return, our universe gets an influx of cheap labour and eager workers so that ponies like myself can have a more comfortable retirement. Your assimilation was complete, human. The serum was simple, relatively easy to manipulate. I gave our newfoals the greatest of gifts - happiness.”
“You monster!” yelled Mikey, and let go of the tail.
“Oh hardly, not from where I’m standing. I gave billions of you humans a new, comfortable happy and productive life. I gave them families, freedom from disease, freedom from poverty, a purpose in life. I gave you undeserving shit-flingers heaven, and all at the cost of one teeny tiny little thing. No more fingers. Your children are now our children, your ways are now our ways. Humanity is reduced to a cosmic joke and the punchline is that every conspiracy theory you window-licking short-bus riding disgusting little savages could dream up is outshone by the real deal. I worked the greatest crime in the history of ponykind, and I walked away scott-free. I gave you heaven and wiped you out, and I didn’t harm a hair on your flea-ridden heads. You thanked me for it! And one other thing...”
Mikey looked at his hands, balled into fists. He looked up at the pony, horn glowing, “What?”
“I told you not to let go of my tail.” the pony fled. He galloped off around the corner. Mike screamed and shouted, picking up rubble and throwing it after the four-legged abomination, but when he rounded the corner, the pony was gone. Instead he met with a group of several hundred dirty, disgusting, muddy, dishevelled humans. They were crowding around a streak of brilliant purple light. Mikey could see something squirming inside the bulging column. He dropped the makeshift weapons and ran closer. The crowd parted and he came face to face with horror.

The energy wall was brightly charged and flexing. It bulged out like a pus-filled blister. Inside the blister... was a girl, a woman. She was writing in pain.
“The wall it just... burst, and then it swallowed her! I can’t get her out!” said a man, he slammed his fists on the wall but it barely registered the contact. The woman inside was wide-eyed and screaming. Her eyes went even wider as the bubble contracted... and contracted. She opened her mouth even wider but no sound came out. Instead a red frothing liquid boiled out as the cavity shrank ever smaller, too small to hold a human. Her silent, agonized screams stopped as her body went limp, compressed into a bundle of snapped bones and crushed organs that liquefied as Mikey watched. He turned away. He retched when the strange bubble burst and a fetid lump of what used to be human fell into the street.
He wept. Humans were almost extinct, and the universe had chosen to take another one. The mocking laughter of the pony rang in his ears as the crowd shuffled away from the barrier.

The hours passed, and the barrier shrank. It had sped up, now. The end would be coming very, very soon. Mikey almost welcomed it. He walked calmly to the boiling, frothing wall and put forth a hand to touch it. The barrier felt like warm glue as it enveloped his hand. He stared dumbly at it for a few seconds before registering what had happened. Then he ran back and fetched the others.

They argued, they fought, they came to blows, but Mikey was determined, “I am a man,” he said, “there is no fate but what I make. I’m not going to sit here and piss myself in fear. I’ll go out the way I came in, kicking and screaming, on my own two feet. Whoever is with me, take my hand, form a chain, and follow.”

Mikey felt a hand in his; pink and mostly hairless, skin-covered, five fingers. He gripped it. This was the day, he thought to himself, that he had been waiting for. He grit his teeth and walked into the pink mist, and kept on walking.

It was the day. The day the sky changed.