//------------------------------// // 57 - Avenger // Story: Re:Harmony // by starcross7 //------------------------------// This wasn’t the way she wanted to see Gaeaopolis. This wasn’t the way she wanted see of Chancellor Cheval, his wife Meadowlark, and the President-Advisers who represented the Four Noble Houses of the Earth. She sat with them in a wheelchair at the top of the stairs leading to the parliament building watching a thousand eyes and ears tuning towards Cheval’s thunderous propaganda speech about young Posey’s bravery through her traumatic ordeal. Posey, on the other hoof, couldn’t look at them. She did not want to be looked at. “…these vulturous horde raped a fine daughter of a generous supporter of the Earth Party…” She wasn’t raped, but she might as well be. “They crippled her ability to give birth to children…” She wasn’t crippled. These bandages around her head, her neck brace, and the fake cast around her hind leg was just for show. The wheelchair was going too far, and yet it seemed that everypony in the rally fell for the ruse. “Good Gaea, when will this ever end?” young Posey muttered under her breath. Upon hearing this, Meadowlark’s wince stretched across her face. She reached over and patted Posey’s shoulder, hopefully to calm her down, but mainly to appear as the dutiful and caring foster mother as if to make sure cameras and film captured the moment. Posey did not escape the drawn-out propaganda ceremony just yet. Meadowlark wheeled the filly into the Palace of the Earth’s dining halls where dignitaries from Zebrica, Bovinia, and many others shook her free hoof, gave her forced words of encouragement, and participated with her in so many unnecessary photo ops just to get in with the good graces of the Government of Gaea. She almost wanted to spring from her wheelchair and buck the camera and the camerapony if they dared to take another picture her. Eventually, Meadowlark finally wheeled Posey into her bedroom long after the bourgeois-like dinner party. Freed from the eyes of the public and pictures, Posey immediately leapt off and stripped away her bandages, cast, and neck brace. She even slipped out of her blue dress, damning the Gaean rules of modesty, although she was with her new mother and inside her new bedroom. Meadowlark could gawk at it for all she cared, but Posey did not want to see it. She did not even want to see a reflection of it, for it was the grim reminder of the innocence she lost. “Anything else you need, little Posey?” Meadowlark asked with a false smile. Posey glared hard at her new mother, making her to succumb to the terror-trance that had her sweating and quaking in her dress. To Meadowlark’s credit, she managed to maintain her photogenic smile that she kept up before the state-controlled media. “I want you to leave,” said Posey. “Now.” “As you wish.” Nervously, Meadowlark backed away as if afraid to turn her back towards an Empress, and closed the doors as she walked out. Good riddance. She had heard how false these citizens of Gaeaopolis were, and Meadowlark was no exception. This attention and this pity were just stifling. Posey had to open a window for some air. When she did, a shimmering indigo-winged insect fluttered over to Posey’s dresser close to the warmth of a nearby lamp. It was a Midnight Butterfly. Posey watched the butterfly flexed and warm its wings for a minute before she drew a sewing pin from a nearby pincushion on a table with a firm grip of her hoof. She impaled the creature onto the wood, and watched it slowly snuff out its own life in a futile bid to escape. Butterflies: despicable creatures they were. As she zipped up her jumpsuit, a devilish thought passed through her mind. Poking her head out of the dressing room curtains, a “mature” Posey snaked her neck towards Sweetie Drops’s changing station. This might be it. This might be the day that she would finally catch a glimpse of her Nature’s Call, and she might not have another chance. It would have to be something that matched her name. Candy? Gumdrops? Her imagination ran wild, and slowly she followed the indigo and pink tail through the curtains. “Girl, is that all you can think about before Operation Rainbow Crash? Sweetie, you might wanna cover yourself up. Posey’s at it again.” Posey tripped on herself and stumbled onto the ground, and looked up to see Sapphire Shores chuckling and a red-faced Sweetie Drops poking her head past the dressing room curtains. “Posey, we’re about to go on a dangerous mission,” said Sweetie Drop. “Can’t you be serious for once?” “I’ll try to.” But I always am. She had to thank Meadowlark for teaching her the art of public fakery. It had amazed that after all these years, her adoptive mother stayed by her adoptive father’s side, despite each other’s constant infidelity, which was ironic because Meadowlark was the one who would go ballistic when she caught her husband with another mare. Growing up, Posey had grown tired of being the pitiful “filly who lived”, and decided to adopt an outrageous persona to get everypony to stop treating her like a delicate flower. Of course, she might as well enjoy faking her current personality and enjoy teasing Sweetie Drops, partly because she reminded her so much of her fillyfriend she had lost in Mustangia. Together, the three mares of the Avenger Squadron headed out from their locker to line up with the other fighter pilots in a large hangar between eight of Gaea’s latest tactical strike fighters. On the stage, her father, her mother, and the President-Advisers sat by and listened as Chief Master Sergeant Starlight briefed everypony on Operation Rainbow Crash, the mission to destroy the looming threat known as Cloudsdale Fortress. Starlight then delegated the presentation of the finer details of the mission to Master Sergeant Bright Eyes, which was long, drawn out, and caused a few pilots to yawn. When they were dismissed, Posey, Sweetie Drops, and Sapphire performed their secret Avenger Squadron rump-bumping hoofshake before running off to climb into their fighter jets. Posey barely remembered Starlight’s speech, and she pretty much half-slept through Bright Eyes’s battle tactics. But Posey had only one rule in mind: kill anything that had wings. Straddling on the body-long cushion in the cockpit, Posey’s tail slotted in the whip-control compartment responsible for adjusting rolling and pitching. The left and right hind hoof rested on the accelerators of the two engines, while her left and right front hooves controlled the weapons. Her oxygenated and masked muzzle was not far from the pilot eject button, but she felt she wouldn’t need that for the mission. Cleared for takeoff, Posey launched her jet to the skies. She tried her hardest to remain in formation with the rest of her squadron, because her body quaked in the burning anticipation to fly ahead and shoot down the pegasi-griffon horde. Posey barely contained her excitable squeal when the ominous Cloudsdale Fortress rose on the horizon. Cloudships and flocks of pegasi and griffon mercenaries surrounded the fortress like fat crows and flies respectively. Cloudsdale’s pleasantly pouring rainbow waterfalls and ostentatious columnar architecture belie the fact that in the next few minutes this would become a sky of crimson. “All right ladies,” spoke Starlight through a radio broadcast. “Give the horde no quarter. Ground them with everything you got.” “Sensational!” cried Sapphire. “Let’s blast these equine vultures from the sky!” “For our Motherland!” cried Sweetie Drops. “Hail Cheval!” Gaea’s aerial phalanx launched their missiles, many of which struck many unlucky pegasii and griffons and downed several cloudships. Moments later, the horde came at them like swift locusts. Lightning cracked from their hooves and shorted out several jets, while ice lances skewered a few more. Instead of swerving out of the way like the rest of her comrades, Posey floored the accelerators and clipped the wings of several pegasi with her jet’s wings. One. Two. Three. Ten. Barely there was ever a pause when the bullets left the barrels of her jet’s machine guns. It helped that Posey and her squadron was blessed with the latest supermaneuverable strike fighters, but even before then, she was terror to the equine vultures she grounded relentlessly. Pegasi had their small size and speed. Earth ponies had their technology and weaponry. Posey felt she had conquered the weakness of both armies as she felled the twentieth pegasi in the sky, and gleefully watching him spiral down to his demise. One foolishly tried to throw off her balance by landing on her wing. Posey merely rolled her jet so that pegasi could crash into another one. She laughed until she cried. She was probably at her hundredth, but she didn’t care. These creatures before her eyes were mutants, beasts, and monsters. They were living crimes against nature and they had to be wiped out from the planet. She was at her most euphoric, and the only thing better than this would be the opportunity to personally execute the equine vultures one by one. “Fall back! Fall back!” Posey barely acknowledged the words on the radio when a fiery blast vaporized ten fighter jets behind her, and she nearly avoided the swipe of a massive and spiked red tail. Posey watched the owner of that tail descend through a thick cloud clover, and the flap of his leathery wings sent gusts that sent many fighter jets spiraling away. Crap. A dragon. He was Crimson Skyfall, and it was rumored that he was a survivor of the nuclear bombing of his dragonkin in the eastern continent. Unlike his fallen kin, Crimson decked himself in black armor that protected his already-bulletproof scales, and he swung his massively long twin swords like lighting. Nopony counted on him guarding Cloudsdale Fortress when he should have been guarding Black Cloud, especially today of all days. Bullets bounced off him like pellets, and without a blink he shrugged point-blank missiles as annoying pests. He wasted no time destroying entire squadrons with just his swords, and he even ground a jet into scrap that he caught with his jaws, pilot and all. The true prize remained in the background mocking her, laughing at her. She was close. Posey wasn’t going to let a mere dragon stop her revenge, and so she revved up and flew towards him. “Posey, what are you doing?” cried Sweetie Drops. “You gotta bail out, girl!” cried Sapphire Shores. “You can’t get past a dragon!” “I can do it!” Posey yelled back. “Cloudsdale is right there before me!” Posey held the trigger down to draw Crimson Skyfall’s attention, and she did. The dragon narrowed his burning-orange reptilian eyes at her and then opened his jaw. Go ahead, grinned Posey. Blow off your dragon breath, you reptilian demon. After a deep breath, the dragon immediately fired its destructive column of dragon fire at the daring mare in the jet. Posey quickly banked her jet safely upwards in the neck of time to perform a triple-axial maneuver that spun over Crimson’s head. A normal pony would pass out due to the extreme g-forces of this technique. Not Posey, though. She was no ordinary pony. She wouldn’t care if she threw up in her oxygen mask if it would get her one step closer to her objective. Cleared from the dragon’s sight, Posey flew off alone to find him, the stallion who ordered the destruction of Mustangia and the destruction of her friends and family. If there was one pony she truly wants to kill today, then he resided in the cozy command of Cloudsdale. Posey’s left front hoof twitched in glorious anticipation as it hovered over the trigger for the Anti-Atmos Bomb. One detonation, and Cloudsdale would disintegrate from within. She would find him, and personally leap out of her cockpit to stab him in the heart, but not before reminding him excruciatingly the pain he had caused. But then, she heard a loud thud on the hull of her jut, and now she was spinning out of control. The alarm blared and the monitor incessantly flashed to let her know that the left engine was down. If only that was her only problem, for an armored pegasi warrior with a blue mane and a pink coat stood on the jet’s nosecone trying to break through cockpit’s windshield with a knife. Seething anger destroyed Posey’s mad joy, and if she were to go down, she would take this winged brute down with her–and in spades. Posey pressed the windshield release button, and the cockpit windshield flew off, but not before it struck the pegasus’s muzzle. The pegasus remained on the nosecone; but this was just as Posey wanted. She fired all six shots from her revolver hoofgun, but the pegasus avoided them all with quick sways left and right. The earth pony threw her pistol away, tore off her own oxygen mask, and then lunged in to clamp her jaw on her enemy’s left wing. If she couldn’t kill the pegasus, she would do worse: rob them of their pride by ripping off their wings with her bare teeth. The pegasus screamed as Posey bit harder and harder. Pink feathers flurried around her eyes and she could hear the crunching and snapping of cartilage. She could feel the pegasus struggling to stab her back, but instead feeling a knife wound, Posey felt herself being jerked straight up to the skies. The pegasus inadvertently activated Posey’s parachute. The yellow earth mare had thought she lost the winged warrior, but the pegasus hung for life on her right leg, and she still had the knife. Posey tried kicking her off. The pegasus tried stabbing her. The two continued their dance until they crashed into the forest below. After short tumble through the tree canopy, Posey and the pegasus fell through, but the tree branches kept both of them suspended above the ground. The pegasus still had the knife, and she was preparing to stab Posey once more. The earth pony quickly detached herself from her parachute and hoped that the fall would kill the pegasus. But instead of landing squarely on the ground, the two tumbled down an incline, over a cliff edge and into a deep and giant hole where Posey lost consciousness upon impact. She came to with a pounding in her head right as the pink pegasus woke up. Posey could barely stand up. Her hooves might be sprained, or her legs might be broken. It might be the same for the enemy. Worse for her, she was no longer able to fly. Both ponies stared each other down before Posey collapsed from pain and exhaustion. She thought she was going to meet her end, but then the pegasus sat down on her haunches grunting in pain. Her left wing was stiff and broken, and the pegasus angrily stared at Posey from the other side of the inescapable hole. This might be bad. Pegasi warriors were reputed to be brutal, but a cornered one with an injured wing became killing beasts with nothing to lose. They religiously prided themselves in honor, and dying in battle was just as important as winning one. Whether against a thousand or just one, a dying pegasus would strive to die fighting. However, the pegasus did not lunge after her as Posey anticipated. Instead, she observed her, tapping her pink hoof on her chin. The pegasus did not have the knife. That couldn’t be the primary reason why the pegasus didn’t attack her. There was more than one method of battle: survival. Posey did not expect pegasi to be patient creatures, but she should at least expect them to have brutal survival training in forests like these. As if. Posey rose to her hooves and silently accepted her challenge. She and the pegasus had their own side of the massive hole and their own devices. In Posey’s jumpsuit pockets were maps, a pocketknife, a stick of flint, water treatment tablets, and an extremely limited first aid kit, which she exhausted immediately upon her wounds. With the flint, she started the fire. So did the pegasus with whatever weather witchcraft they possessed. Posey purified some muddy water from a puddle inside plastic bag used from her first aid kit. The pegasus sipped dewdrops she formed on her hooves. Disgusting. And a show off. At least Posey knew what was edible in this hole: moss, dried berries, some nuts, and a few fresh leaves fallen from the trees. She gathered them all into her handkerchief. The pegasus observed this, and imitated her. Figures. What do pegasi know about tilling the land? They enslaved earth ponies and even their own, forcing them to grow food as part of an “honor tithe”. Posey hoped that she would die from a poisonous berry. The first night she almost didn’t sleep. Subsequent days were spent with Posey and the pegasus forming their own woefully inadequate makeshift encampment across from one another. Hours were spent with each of them reading their own maps and writing down their notes while trying to make sure they could read each other’s. Not that would have happened anyway. They were so far apart that they appeared like tiny figurines. Posey at least had the decency to keep her clothes on. Her jumpsuit served as a makeshift blanket, but she never took off her khaki pants and her black shirt. The pegasus stripped herself bare and flexed her body during her morning. Could she not sway her hips like that? She didn’t even need to see her Heaven’s Insignia or whatever the pegasi named it. One night, Posey went to sleep much earlier, and on the next morning, her body was too lethargic to rise. Her vision was still blurry, and she began having visions of the pink pegasus trotting towards her way. No, she was really trotting towards her way. Posey had to think back where she put her pocketknife. Crap. It was back at her food stores. If she got up now, the pegasus would certainly bolt after her for the final kill. How she would do it, Posey could only imagine, but she would not be surprised if the winged pony would choke her to death by biting onto her windpipe. But Posey was patient, and she waited right until the pegasus was just a few steps before her. Instantly, the yellow earth pony rolled towards her food stores and gripped her pocketknife between her growling teeth. The pegasus remained unfazed. “A knife like that won’t kill me,” she said. “Didn’t mean to surprise you, but I needed to make sure that you’re alive.” “Clearly, you can see that I am.” “Good, because I don’t want something lame like starvation or sickness to kill you, Aerial Ace Posey Shine.” “You know my name?” “Who wouldn’t know about the terror of the Lightning Canary?” she grinned. “It is an honor to have fought against you, Posey Shine. I am Firefly Flaresmith, captain of the Wonderbolts Striker Division, and I can’t wait to have our rematch.”