Short Scraps and Explosions

by shortskirtsandexplosions

End of Ponies - Petra Arc - Kaizo Edition pt 2

        A puff of hot steam wafted towards the whalebone ceiling of the Harmony's cabin.  With expert precision, Scootaloo operated a steam-powered drill and unscrewed the fastener bolts of her cockpit seat.  It was an arduous process, but she eventually loosened the entire rig beneath the pilot's chair.  Shoving the structure aside, she turned the drill off and reached two hooves down towards a panel, lifting it open for the first time in over a decade and a half.

        She revealed a hollow within the bulkhead of the Harmony's upper gondola.  Inside of this immaculate crevice, there was a porcelain-white container built out of Cloudsdalian sky marble.  The box was fitted within a metal frame fashioned to perfectly encompass the fragile little object.

        Gently, as if cradling the preserved heart of Princess Celestia herself, Scootaloo lifted the white container in two brown hooves.  She raised the amber goggles off her scarlet eyes and gazed solemnly as she turned the box around, tapped its lid, and opened it before the flickering lanternlight.

        Inside the box, resting softly on a bed of velvety fabric, were three perfectly preserved feathers, and all of them were blue.  They shone with a brilliance that was not lost to the ages, and their sapphiric glory pierced the decrepit brown shadows of the cabin, as if the apocalypse was being stabbed by a preserved sliver of the once-blue sky.

        Scootaloo reached one hoof down and softly, lovingly petted the soft blue fibers, reveling in their touch, though her eyes watered progressively upon the hauntingly familiar sensation.  With each bend and flutter of the blue feathers in her grasp, she saw smiles, she felt warmth, she heard voices.

        She heard...

        “Pffft!  Yeah right!” a  seven year old Scootaloo scoffed, “More like 'Rainbow Crash!'”

        Hovering high in the rustic barn, Rainbow Dash's ruby-violet eyes twitched.  She frowned down at the little orange filly.  “Oh, hardy-har-har!  Didja think that brilliant crap up just now, or have you been talking to a few punks around Cloudsdale?”

        “I'm not from Cloudsdale,” Scootaloo uttered, “and even if I was, would I seriously hear ponies talking about a pegasus who's too blind to miss the broad side of a barn?”

        “Hey!  There's nothing wrong with my sight!”  Rainbow Dash fluttered down to the ground, brushing herself off with a blue hoof.  “It's not my fault the barn was in the way!  Who builds a barn in the middle of a forest anyways?”

        “I've got an even better question!  What were you doing flying like a comet into the middle of the forest to begin with?”

        “Jee, I dunno.  Maybe I just have a serious grudge against squirrels.  Besides, who died and made you expert on flight trajectories?—Whoah!”  Rainbow Dash did a double-take, giving Scootaloo the first solid glance since she arrived there.  “You're a filly!”        The orphan pegasus blinked wide.  She stamped her hooves down and growled, “Of course I'm a girl!  What did you think?!”

        “I guess it's just something about the tone in your voice.  It sounds like you were born to pitch overhoof.”

        “Grrrrr...”  Scootaloo's hunger disappeared in an angry flash as she ground her hooves in the floor of the barn and made to charge the rainbow-maned mare, only to have her limbs shuffling endlessly in place.

        This was because the young adult pegasus had planted a hoof on the foal's forehead and was holding her there.  “Heheheh.  Whoah there, Wonder Whinnie.  I'm just joshin' you.  How about we start over?  I don't like picking fights with ponies unless they're at least twice my size, otherwise it’s unfair.”

        “Well your... your...”  Scootaloo slumped to her haunches, folding her front limbs and blushing in furious frustration.  “Your face is certainly asking for a fight!”

        “Ha!”  Rainbow Dash hovered in place and thrust her grin in Scootaloo's blinking vision.  “That's the best compliment I heard all day!  Heheheheh.  Still, ya gotta be careful, kid.  You say that to just any pony in town and they're liable to give you a clean lickin'!  And I don't mean the type your momma gives you when you're freshly foaled!”

        “Uhhhm...”  Scootaloo bit her lip and gazed off to the far side of the barn, still feeling the fresh stings from Blackjack's hooves across her face.  “Yeah...”

        “You got a name, pipsqueak?”

        Scootaloo frowned again.  “Don't call me 'pipsqueak.’”

        “Tell me your name and maybe I won't!”

        “Mmmm...”  Scootaloo fidgeted.  She mumbled something in a low, low voice.

        “What are you, now, Fluttershy?  Speak up!”

        “'Scootaloo.'”  The filly frowned.  “There, you happy?”

        “Ehhhh... I think I like 'pipsqueak' better.”

        “Grrrr—Just what's the big deal about my name?”

        Rainbow Dash smiled and laid upside down in midair, hovering lazy circles around the filly.  “I'm always refreshing my list so I can keep track of who's on the 'Rainbow Dash Fanclub.'”

        “You have a fan club?”  Scootaloo raised an eyebrow, then frowned for the millionth time.  “And why the heck would I want to join it?”

        “Why the heck wouldn't you?”  Rainbow Dash smirked, spun, and performed a few blazing, close-quarter loops around the support beams of the barn's upper loft.  “I'm only the coolest thing to ever happen to this town, aside from the first Hearth's Warming Eve of course.  Heheheh.  I tell you, even wendigos have nothing on this supreme frostiness!”  She kicked off a wall, wrapped her tail-hairs around a horizontal crossbeam, spun around it twice, loosened her tail, and vertically dismounted to the floor, landing and rearing her front hooves in a heroic stance.  “Ha!  Y'know, when I get up in the morning, I plant one hoof onto the ground at a time so that I don't upset the Earth's rotation.”

        Scootaloo let loose a barking laugh.  “Okay, now you're just being stupid on purpose.”

        “Actually, I was trying to under-exaggerate.  AJ is always nagging me, saying I should learn to brag less around town.”

        “Who?”

        “But AJ's also a goody-goody-fourshoes who probably snorts appleseeds when nopony's looking.  You think she got those freckles on her face naturally?  Nosiree.”

        “The heck are you talking about?  Is this suddenly your world, now?”

        “Well you're living in it, aren't you?”  Rainbow Dash trotted past the filly, stood below a horizontal crossbeam, and leaped up.  Using her front limbs, she started spontaneously performing chin-ups, her blue wings coiled tightly behind her.  “Nnnngh... I'm telling you... nnnngh... twenty years from now... nnngh... fifty years from now... nnnngh... a hundred years from now...”  She grit her teeth through a snarling grin and only just then started breaking a sweat.  “... I'm gonna be a legend, known all across Equestria.  When historians put 'Ponyville' into textbooks, my name will be the first thing to come up, followed by 'smackdown.'  Heck, they should just rename this town 'Rainbow Dashville' in order to contain my awesomeness.  After all, someday I'm going to be more than a weather flier.  I'm going to be a celebrity, an athlete, a Wonderbolt—”

        “What's a Wonderbolt?”

        “Nnngh—Augh!”  Rainbow Dash fell off the beam and landed in the dust, her legs and wings sticking straight up like an arrowed albatross.  Scootaloo winced, then bounced back as the blue pegasus leered over her.  The mare's face was white as a sheet.  “You've never heard of the Wonderbolts?!”

        “I-I've heard of insane asylums...”  Young Scootaloo gulped, suddenly shrinking away from this blue stranger.  “And p-ponies that should pr-probably be sent there...”

        “But... You... It... They... How... Nnnght!”  Rainbow Dash twitched at the last exclamation, as if the wires in her brain were fusing.  The orange filly imagined smoke pouring out of the adult pegasus' ears as the blue pony took a deep breath, calmed herself, and eventually uttered, “The Wonderbolts are only the coolest, most spectacular, most radical bunch of fliers in all of Equestria!  They perform airshows in every major city and make thousands upon thousands of fans cheer like mad!  They can fly more loops around the continent than Princess Nebula ever could!”

        “If they're so 'cool' and 'radical'...”  Scootaloo glared with a smirk.  “Then how come you're not one of them?”

        “Hey.”  Rainbow Dash glared.  “Shut up.”

        “Heeheehee...”

        It was the blue pegasus' turn to turn red.  She paced across the barn, dragging her hooves.  “So what if I'm stuck being a boring weather flier for this dull flea-speck of an Equestrian town?  I'm a pegasus, and a pegasus has to do his or her part for the countryside.”

        “You mean like slamming full-speed into the countryside?”  Scootaloo exclaimed, her limbs buckling as her chuckles intensified.

        “Hey!  I was practicing!”  Rainbow Dash ground her hooves into the floor.  “The day I get to show myself off in front of the Wonderbolts, I gotta make sure I can make their jaws fall through the ground and travel all the way to Chyneigh!”

        “And just why would the most awesome pony in all of Ponyville need to practice anything, huh?”

        “Heh... Kid...”  Rainbow Dash finally managed a smirk of her own.  “You really think too much, y'know that?”  She narrowed her eyes and smugly uttered, “Unless you've ever been awesome, I don't think you should be second-guessing real coolness when it stands in front of you.”

        “Oh, I happen to be pretty awesome myself.”  Scootaloo stuck a tongue out and upturned her nose.  “Thank you very much.”

        “What are you awesome at?  Passing yourself off as a colt scout?”

        “No!”  Scootaloo growled into the echo of Rainbow's laughs.  She smirked devilishly and raised a hoof.  “Check it!”  She scampered over on tiny limbs to the far side of the barn and kicked a metal tray into her grasp.  She brandished the wheeled platform before the blue pegasus.  “You ever seen something like this before?”

        “Er... yeah, the last time I went to a buffet restaurant.”

        “Oh hush.  Take a look at what I can do.”  The little orphan fought a sudden bout of nervousness.  She was suddenly running off of a bizarre adrenaline she had never felt before, even in the midst of her hunger and desperation.  All she knew was that she had to get this braggart of a blue pegasus to shut up, to eat her own words.  For the first time in her life, she had the inexplicable need to impress somepony, at least somepony who was alive.

        In a bright orange blur, the filly ran, tossed the metal board in front of her, jumped, and landed on it with four hooves.  Gripping it tightly, she scrunched her body down against the metal platform and flexed her wings.  With a buzzing sound that echoed across the wooden walls of the hovel, she shifted her weight to the left and spun several blazing circles around the blue-feathered mare.

        Rainbow Dash produced something that surprised the girl in mid-“flight”.  The mare let loose a whistling sound.  “Hey, pretty nifty.  Though, I gotta say...”  She chuckled slightly.  “You kind of look like a runaway suitcase.”

        “I bet you couldn't do this when you were my age!”  Scootaloo murmured in mid-glide.

        “Nope.”  Rainbow Dash crossed her front limbs and smirked with pride.  “As a matter of fact, I was outflying griffons and earning my cutie mark.”

        Scootaloo gasped and glanced at Rainbow.  “You're lying!”  Blindly, she slammed face-first into a vertical crossbeam in the center of the barn.  “Oooof!”  Her tray went flying outside and she landed hard on her rump.  Her body rocked from mane to tail, irritating all of the bruises she had received over the past few days.  “Unnngh...”  The tiny filly couldn't help it.  Memories of hunger and streetside bullying bubbled to the surface, and she hung numbly on the precipice of a sob.

        “Whew!  Nice bump there, pipsqueak.  Heheheh—You're pretty tough.”

        Just like that, any hint of moisture lining Scootaloo's eyes immediately shrunk back into the core of her being.  She flashed a surprised look the adult pegasus' way.  “I... I am...?”

        “I'd say.  When I was your age, I knew many a foal at flight camp who'd trip on a cirrus cloud and go running home, crying for mommy.”

        “Eheheh...”  Scootaloo chuckled nervously, her tiny wing-stubs twitching.  “I guess it was... erm... their fault for having a mommy.”

        “Snkkkt—Haha!  Uhhh... Yeesh, I never heard that one before.”

        “Really?”  Scootaloo broke into a bizarre smile.  She was only vaguely aware of a loud groaning sound directly in front of her.  She glanced up and gasped with foalish fright, for the hulking body of the barn's support pillar—already knocked off-kilter by Rainbow Dash's entry—was falling down over her with deathly menace.  “Aaaaah!”  Scootaloo curled up into a pathetic orange ball, shivering.

        There was suddenly a gust of wind.  The blood rushed to Scootaloo's head, as if the entire globe had spun five times around her in the span of half a second.  She felt a sea of grass blades and feathers settling down across her mane, and then she heard the thunderous crash of the wooden beam, only it was several meters away.

        “H-Huh...?”  Scootaloo slowly, pensively blinked her eyes opened.  She was outside the barn, bathed in sunlight.  She glanced towards the structure in time to see a cloud of dust settling from the fallen beam's chaotic impact.  It wasn't until five seconds into registering the distance she had traveled from such a grim fate that she became aware of a strong pair of blue limbs clutching her from behind.  “Whoah...”  She glanced up breathlessly at the blue silhouette of her sudden savior, her wings still outstretched.  “Did you... D-Did you just...?”

        “Hmmm...”  Rainbow Dash rolled her eyes and smirked wickedly.  “Maaaaaaybe.”

        “You're... You're...”

        “Awesome?”

        Scootaloo gulped.  “F-Fast!”  She was dropped to the ground in a dusty heap.  “Oof!”

        “Heheheh...”  Rainbow Dash trotted away from the collapsed filly, brushing herself off.  “What'd you think?  I said my name was 'Rainbow Dash,' not 'Rainbow Drag.’”

        “Nnngh...”  Scootaloo sat up, shaking the cobwebs loose from her skull.  “I'm willing to settle for 'Rainbow Dunce.’  Still, for what it's worth, thanks for saving me... er... and stuff.”

        “Pffft!” Rainbow Dash raspberried.  “You call that gratitude, ya lil’ pip...”  She blinked, went cross-eyed, then grunted,  “—squeak?!  Feh!  Because of that, I just might not ask you to help me with doing something wickedly fun!”

        “Something wickedly fun?”  Scootaloo raised an eyebrow.

        “Oh, so now you're up for the challenge?”

        “What challenge?  What are you even talking about?”

        “Maybe it was fate that my screwing-up the buccaneer blitz had me almost crash land into the most stuck-up excuse for a fanfilly in all of Ponyville!”

        Scootaloo frowned.  “Who said I was your fanfilly—?”

        “‘Cuz I've been meaning to do business with this one farm filly, and I need somepony's helping hoof, or else the end result is going to be really lame.  You look cute and innocent enough to pull it off, at least when you're not frowning as if a porcupine's sliding down your esophagus.”

        “Pull what off?”

        “Hehehe... What’s with all the questions, kiddo?”  Rainbow Dash hovered in the air and spun lazy circles around random tree trunks.  “A foal your age shouldn’t have to know everything.  You don’t want to turn into an egghead, do you?”

        “Uhh...”  Scootaloo nervously gulped.  “No...?”

        “Anyways, you gotta learn to expect the unexpected!”  Rainbow Dash flipped in the air, hovered upside down, and smirked down at the blinking filly.  “Life's too friggin' short to plan to... plan everything!  Come with me!”  She motioned with her prismatic mane and spiraled towards the northwestern edge of the forest.  “I promise it'll be a blast!  Heheheh!”

        “I... Uh...”  Scootaloo shifted nervously in place.  “My parents—uh, yeah—my parents say that... uhm... I shouldn't encourage strangers!”

        “Pfft!  Did I or did I not say that I was Rainbow Dash?!  I'm hardly a stranger here in Ponyville!  If anything, I'm a recipe for fireworks and lightning bolts!”

        “You're a nutcase.”

        “And I think you're just chicken!”  Rainbow Dash scoffed from up high, like a taunting meteorite.

        Scootaloo twitched.  She remembered the words of Blackjack.  They were words that hurt her.  But now, in the mouth of this rainbow-colored braggart, the insult wasn't so much a dagger of venom as it was a dangling carrot.  More than angry, more than frightened, and more than desperate, Scootaloo was hungry.  She grit her teeth through a fresh and exciting breath of righteous fury, rushed over to her metal tray, and planted it underneath her with a buzzing of wings.

        “I'm no chicken; you're a turkey!”

        “Ooooh... Ouch...”  Rainbow Dash winced as if struck with a mortal wound.  “Yeah, we gotta work on that.  Follow me if you can, pipsqueak!”  And she bolted off towards the gradually-setting sun.

        Scootaloo glided swiftly beneath her, huffing and puffing, sweating up a storm.  All day, she had been starving and miserable.  Suddenly, for the first time since she made the arduous trip from Manehattan, she reacquainted herself with excitement.  Only, this time, it wasn't half as lonely.  She didn't understand it; she merely smirked.

        “I can get you a merchant's license,” Pitt said, smirking as he polished the bar counter of the M.O.D.D. under smoke and cold lanternlight.  “The price is two hundred and fifty thousand silver strips.”

        A battle-scarred ogre blinked confusedly at the balding baboon.  He flashed his overweight cohorts a weird look, then squinted suspiciously at the monkey bartender once more.  “Now, the price of a merchant's license is less than twenty thousand strips, is that correct?”

        “Yes,” Pitt said, stifling a yawn.

        The ogre took a deep, fuming breath, folding his fat arms.  “So why would I ever consider paying more than that?”

        The baboon grinned wide, yellow teeth glinting in the light of the bar.  “Because I intend to squeeze you.”

        The ogres exchanged lethargic glances.  The ringleader picked his beaten helmet up from the counter and droned, “I swear, life was easier when ponies were running the world.”

        “Then go dig some of them up and have an orgy!”  Pitt pointed a gnarled finger.  “If you lazy, A.W.O.L. melon fudges can't handle the Wasteland economy outside the protective wings of your bone-headed armies, then maybe you have no business trying to become zeppelin merchants to begin with!  It's a long crawl to the top of the food chain, fatties.”

        “We're never coming to this trading post again.”

        “Good!  Because this building has a hard enough time staying atop this mountain without the whole lot of you adding your godawful weight to it!”  Pitt waved a dishrag at them as they lumbered hulkingly through the double doors of the wooden place's exit.  “Go fly off and play exploding football or whatever it is you obese slobtards do in your spare time.  Like I need more flies gathering in this place than there already are.”  Once they were gone, the baboon wriggled his ugly red nose crests and resumed polishing the glossy counter as several nearby patrons slurred and belched between wandering shadows of monkey waiters.  “Frickin' humor of the gods—I swear.  We're living in the apocalypse, and the fatties just refuse to go quietly into that stinky night.”

        “You take things for granted, Pitt,” a voice droned.  “It's hard to smell anything in a life that forever stinks.”

        Pitt's nostrils flared.  Without looking up, he smirked.  “Harmony.  Long time no inhale.  If I do say so, you're a lot more fragrant than normal—”  He glanced up.  He stopped in mid-speech, blinking hard.  “...You're not the last pony.”

        A brown equine with long, flowing pink hair and a matching tail marched up towards the bar counter, carrying a saddlebag that bulged more than usual.  Several drinkers glanced over curiously from their wooden tables, giving the pony second glances until their eyes finally stumbled upon the familiar image of a copper rifle resting atop her spine.  They no longer pretended to be interested and resumed drowning themselves in alcohol.

        “I'm disappointed, Pitt,” Scootaloo spoke.  She did something strange within the confines of the M.O.D.D.  She smiled.  Pitt blinked awkwardly at her as she planted her saddlebag down on the counter and leaned casually against the bar with a positively cheerful posture.  “You're supposed to have the most gifted nose in all of the Wasteland, and yet you don't know a gift horse when you look her in the mouth?”

        “If you're a gift horse, Harmony, then I'm Ape Lincoln.”  He made a face at her.  A monkey waiter planted a tray down before him and he proceeded to grab a tall bottle from the shelves, pouring a fresh drink.  “Every time you come here, something explodes or someone is thrown through a table or some other ghastly destructive crap happens.”  He planted the fresh drink onto the tray and the waiter carried it off with a flicker of a brown tail.  “I suppose I should be thanking the monkey gods that you just missed those former war ogres by a few seconds.  Rumor is that the Battle over the Valley of Jewels has gone south for the Fire Ogres, ever since some naga mercenary infiltrated their lines and  performed some sabotage.  The Mountain Ogres have been kicking the Fire fatties' blubbery butts ever since, and we've had several deserters waltzing in on the bar here, asking for a job.  Yeesh, couldn't the Cataclysm have killed off all the bums in the world?”

        “I figured that it only made bums of us all, Pitt,” Scootaloo said with a sly smirk.  “Otherwise, a place like the Monkey O'Dozen Den wouldn't exist.”

        “'Monkey Ten Den.'”

        Scootaloo blinked.  “I beg your pardon?”

        “I'm changing the name,” Pitt muttered, shelving several drinking glasses.  “It's the 'Monkey Ten Den' from now on.”

        “What happened?”  Scootaloo squinted.  “Did two of your brothers...?”

        He nodded.  “Terry and Brad.  Three weeks ago, they fell into a vat.”

        Scootaloo glanced briefly across the eatery, then looked back at the baboon.  “A vat of what?”

        Pitt shuddered.  “You don't wanna know.”  He hung the dishrag over his shoulder while pouring another mug of ale for a half-conscious patron two stools away from the pony.  “So, Harmony, if you're not here to shatter my tables or chat it up about war ogres, just what are you here for?”

        “What am I ever here for?”  Scootaloo smirked.  “Business, Pitt.  I need strips.”

        “Nnngh!  Glue stick!”  A drunk, mangy raccoon with a metal prosthetic jumped up behind the pony, ready to slam his twitching claws into the back of her pink mane.  “To the horseshoe grave!  Nnngh!  With glue stick—OOF!”

        Scootaloo blindly back-hoofed the varmint so that he fell to the wooden floorboards with an ineffectual thud.  Her tranquil gaze remained locked on Pitt.  “Lots, and lots of strips.”

        “Heheheheh—Heyyyyy, kiddo, I want strips!”  Pitt grinned yellowly.  “My brothers want strips!  The whole crap-shoveling world wants strips!  There's not a single one of us here who wouldn't strip for strips, even those of us who don't wear clothes!  But you don't see me waltzing up to honorable business establishments begging for handouts—Or in your case, hoof-outs.  Heh.”

        “You should know me by now, Pitt.”  Scootaloo's brow furrowed ever so slightly.  “I don't beg.  I earn.”

        “That's a tough claim coming from a pony who almost entirely does her business with a vertically challenged flying squirrel from Godknowswhereistan.  I swear, it's a miracle you aren't spitting out peanuts every time you open them pretty molars of yours.”  Pitt slid a mug of ale to the nearest patron.  Reaching into a glass jar, he planted a toothpick into his mouth and smirked towards the pony.  “Seriously, Harmony.  Talk silver before you talk smack.  I've had it up to my ear hairs with cowardly ogres trying to scrape a bite to eat.”  He folded his arms in a smug posture.  “I can only toss so many fat lards into the canyon below before my shoulders get tired.  I do hope to retire someplace where there are trees for me to climb before these biceps of mine turn into string beans, y'know.”

        “Funny you should say that,” Scootaloo murmured, reaching a forelimb into her bulging saddlebag and rummaging through its contents.  “Tell me, Pitt.  How do you say 'banana daiquiri?'”

        Pitt huffed.  “'Banana daiquiri.'”  He smirked at her, but then the smirk fell—along with the toothpick from his mouth—as the last pony thumpingly placed a cluster of yellow fruit down onto the bar counter.  All the sound of mumbling, belching voices instantly drowned out throughout the entire room.  In the far corner of the M.O.D.D., a patron shouted in consternation as an entire tray full of dishes was dropped in his lap.  The guilty waiter—along with two simian siblings—immediately rushed over to the counter and gawked with bulging eyes.

        Scootaloo leaned her chin against a hoof, staring calmly at them, quietly waiting.

        “How...”  Pitt muttered in a suddenly dry breath.  His voice was dead and distant, as if reborn to a humble atmosphere.  He gulped and ran a gnarled, hairy palm across the pliable contours of six fresh and undeniably real bananas.  “Where in the wide world of crap did you get these?”

        “They were not gotten,” Scootaloo said.  “They were grown.”

        “You... You...”  Pitt's eyes fluttered, as if the bald primate was fighting off an inexplicable seizure.  One of the monkey waiters reached a shaky finger over to touch the holy fruit.  Pitt slapped his palm away and leaned possessively over the yellow objects on the counter.  “You mean to tell me that you've found a way to grow—to actually plant and breed edible bananas somewhere in the Wasteland?”

        “Actually, I mean to tell you that you can find a way to grow and breed edible bananas.  How you plan to do that here in the freezing heights of this Celestia-forsaken rathole is beyond me.”  She motioned a hoof towards the double-doors of the establishment, beyond which her airship was moored.  “I have three whole stalks potted and resting in the hangar bay of my ship.  The rhizomes are still ripe and there are plenty of suckers to graft off the things and regrow a new stem.  Why, with enough light and heat, you just might be able to—”'

        Pitt waved a hand in her face.  “D-D-Don't tell me how to grow bananas.  I'm a baboon.  My brothers and I knew how to grow bananas before we were even born.”  He took a shuddering breath, rubbing a soot-covered palm over his bald spot.  “It just begs the question... How and where did you find these, Harmony?”

        “There's an even better question.”  Scootaloo smiled icily, her scarlet eyes narrow.  “How much are you willing to pay to not bother having to know, because you'll have this stuff growing here?”

        Pitt blinked, biting his lip as the wheels turned in his balding head.

        Suddenly, the lights overhead flickered.  A door behind the counter flung open and a breathless, sweating chimpanzee stuck his head out.  “Brother!  Brother!  Do I smell what I think I smell?!”

        “Willis, ya worthless pile of showerdrain lint!”  Pitt hollered at the monkey while his other siblings cowered away from him.  “Get back on the bike!”

        “B-But brother—!”

        “You'd better resume pedaling before I paint the bathroom with your tooth enamel!”

        “Y-Yes, Brother!”  The door slammed shut and the generators resumed pumping electricity throughout the place.

        Pitt took a deep breath.  He rubbed his face and lips with a shivering hand, gazing at the bananas, at Scootaloo, then at the bananas again.  “Silver strips, huh?  You can bet my red butt this will get you silver strips.  I haven't seen you for ages—I imagine you're at the end of your last drop.”

        “I've been working on a project, Pitt.  It's something of a scientific endeavor.  For my latest experiment, a special business partner of mine needs me to acquire some ingredients.”  Scootaloo lingered halfway through her speech, staring at a random row of blue bottles on a distant shelf.  She briefly envisioned a trio of sapphire feathers fluttering in their place.  In a blink, she brought herself back to the here and now.  “Stronger ingredients, that is.  I need to get these things or else I can't perform the next leg of scientific... observation.”

        “Is this partner of yours someone who knows a thing or two about growing bananas in the Wasteland?”

        “Pitt.”  Scootaloo frowned at him.  “I need strips for where I'm going.  I need lots of them.”

        The baboon actually had to think for a few embarrassing seconds before finally uttering, “Five thousand strips.”

        “Don't insult me.”  Scootaloo grunted.  “Five thousand per friggin' banana plant, you volcano-nosed cheapskate.”

        “Now there's the pony I remember.”  He briefly smirked, cleared his throat, and said with a surly squint, “Eight thousand strips, and you give me two plants.”

        “You're such a kidder, Pitt.”  Scootaloo smirked.  “I know as well as you do that you want all three.  How about thirteen thousand silver strips for all three plants and you throw in a bushel of iron rivets just to show what a generous businessmonkey you are?”

        “Thirteen thousand strips...”  Pitt scratched the exposed skin of his head and whistled.  “Harmony, you do realize that I rarely ever give out ten thousand strips for a regular restock of ale.”

        “I bet you feel depressed for keeping track.”
        
        “Why would I ever consider bestowing a living soul more than that in a single transaction, much less a pony?”

        Scootaloo winked.  “Because I intend to squeeze you.”

        Pitt blinked, then smiled slyly.  “You've got the hooves of a pony, but the ears of a fox.”

        “I'm about to give the crap of an elephant if this conversation goes on any longer.”  Scootaloo stared at him.  “Is it a deal or isn't it?”

        “Hmmngh...”  Pitt folded his arms and sighed hard.  “There's an old monkey proverb: 'Money is impermanent; bananas last forever.'”

        “You just made that up, didn't you?”

        “So sue me.”  He cleared his throat.  “It's a deal, Harmony.  May the gods help me, it's a frickin' deal.  I don't know how you did it, but you just brought to this bar the last remaining good thing in this world.”

        “Yeah, well, to each his own.”  Scootaloo flung the saddlebag back over her spine.  “Oh, by the way, I want the twelve thousand strips packaged in brass bars.  I'm sure you have some sitting around somewhere in your stockroom, collecting dust.”

        “Brass bars?”  Pitt raised an eyebrow in her direction.  “Are you intending to do business in an impcity?”

        “The only impcity around these parts that matters.”  Scootaloo pulled a canteen out from her bag, unscrewed it, and raised it to her lips.  “Remember the ingredients I told you that I need for my partner's science experiment?”

        “Yeah...?”

        She took a swig of reclaimed water, swallowed, and exhaled.  “Well, my search is taking me to the Northern Plains.  It just so happens that the goblins there have built a huge frickin' factory on top of the location.”

        “Ahhh...”  Pitt nodded with a knowing smirk.  “So you're headed to Petra.  Good luck, Harmony.  I hear those halflings love ponies like they love a good scythe in the eye.”

        The last pony's brown nostrils flared as she screwed her canteen shut.  “Yeah,” she said with a stifled grunt.  “I know.”

        “Cheer up, though.”  Pitt winked.  “I heard the boiling steam clouds are pretty this time of year, assuming there haven't been any gremlin pilots falling into the smokestacks like what happened last month.  The resulting explosion took out about two hundred halflings along the city's upper strut below.”  Pitt snickered, laughed, and slapped his knee.  “Ahhhhhhh... gods, I am so broke right now.”

        “I'll have the plants delivered immediately.  You just have the silver strips ready in their brass casings, and I promise you won't be seeing me for a long time.”

        “I don't know whether to be sad or relieved.”

        “Try settling for indifferent.”  Scootaloo walked towards the swinging doors of the place.  “It's always been my favorite way to be treated in the Wasteland.”

        “Before you skedaddle, Harmony, I gotta say...”  Pitt pointed from afar, causing the pony to stop in her tracks.  “Whatever this scientific experiment you're working on had better be frickin' important.  To imagine you waltzing straight into the neighborhood of half-lings all alone...”  He shrugged with a pathetic smile.  “...All I can say is, I'm going to miss the prancing chaos you bring here from time to time.”  He winked.  “Just a little.”

        “Don't try to be sentimental, Pitt.  It gives off a bad smell.”

        “Well, you brought us bananas, kiddo.  That deserves some benchmark in history, if I may say so.  Heheheheh...”

        The last pony took a deep breath and marched beyond the double doors.  “I'm not the pony who deserves a memorial...”     

“And so this one time at flight camp, I got into a dare with a pegasus colt named Dumb-Bell.”

        Rainbow Dash smirked in mid-flight, her blue wings flapping majestically over the foal’s head.
        
        “No, seriously, that's his friggin' name, 'Dumb-Bell.’  I think his parents sniffed one too many bands of the aurora borealis at Whinniestock long before he was foaled.  Anywho, he said that I couldn't handle the cold temperatures of high-altitude flight.  I told him he was a pile of crap.  Guess which one of us was being honest?  Heheheh!  Anyways, one thing led to another, and eventually we decided—in front of all of the Young Fliers School's alumni—to fly together towards the edge of the stratosophere.  The first pony to lose their nerves, or bloodflow, would be the loser.  The winner would get the other's lunch money.”

        Scootaloo kicked at the ground, rolling forward on her metal tray.  She gazed up at the shadowy blue pegasus hovering high above, leading the two of them down a dirt path and into thicker and thicker orchards.

        “So,” the orange foal droned, “was this before or after you bare-hoofedly fought the invading band of harpy thugs and won back the recipe for sculpting sky marble that they stole from the Cloudsdalian Central Archives?”

        “Shhh!  This is different!  Something else that's awesome!”  A crescent moon of a grin glistened overhead.  “Anyways, Dumb-Bell had this thing for sarsaparilla, and I knew it.  So, the morning before our skyward soaring, I made a snide remark about how a high altitude climb can dehydrate a swift flier.  It was total horse hockey, of course.  But, living up to his name, Dumb-Bell bought it, and right before the match he supposedly drank four bottles of the crap.  Anywho, to make a long story even longer, we started the vertical climb.  The two of us soared straight up into the wild blue yonder with all of our friends cheering us on down below.  I was pacing myself, y'know, expecting to show off my sweet moves of acceleration at the last second, just to spite him.  Then, all of the sudden, he fell down past me like a heavy bag of cinderblocks.  Did I laugh at his dumb flank?  Well... snkkt—Yeah.  Hehehehe.  A little.  But I saved him too.  Yup.  I stopped what I was doing, rocketed down at blinding speeds—which was pretty incredible considering how heavily he was falling—and I grabbed him with strong hooves and swooped him up—WOOSH—just seconds before he could become a pegasus pancake against a platform of Cloudsdalian sky marble!”

        “What happened?”  Scootaloo blinked, gazing up at this pegasus stranger with bright violet eyes.  “Did he pass out or something?”

        “Snkkkt—Heheheheheheh...”

        The filly raised a perplexed eyebrow.

        “I told you that he drank four whole bottles of sarsparilla before the challenge, right?”

        “Er.... yeahhhhh?”

        “Well, about halfway through the climb, we reached freezing altitudes, and he got scared—I mean really scared.  And, well... Heheheheh...”  Rainbow Dash hugged herself and spun in mid-air.  After a chuckling spell, she exhaled and glided down to ground level.  “Ohhhhhh—Whew!  Well, by the time he thawed in the Flight Camp infirmary, the entire cloudbed smelled like a buffet table full of asparagus.  Hahahaha—Poor Dumb-Bell couldn't use the little colts' room for a week without it stinging.  Goes to show he could eat his words, but he sure as heck couldn't drink 'em.  Heheheh..”

        “So, wait...”  Scootaloo, unenthused, made a disgusted face.  “Wasn’t it you who talked him into downing all of those bottles of sars... sarass... saspaaaaa—”

        “Sounds stupid when you say it out loud, doesn't it?”

        “You cheated!”  Scootaloo squeaked.  “You knew that if you egged him on, he'd drink all of that stuff and do something stupid so that he'd lose and you would win!”

        “Hey!  I didn't cheat!”  Rainbow Dash touched down and trotted briskly beside her.  “I improvised!”

        “What's the difference?”

        “The difference is, cheating is breaking the rules.  Improvising is taking advantage of them.”

        “You mean 'bending them.'”

        “No, I mean to say that Dumb-Bell knew all about what we were going to do that day and still he decided to do a stupid thing.”  Rainbow smirked down at the orange filly.  “Whether or not I had a hoof in his stupid decision-making doesn't matter.  He should have had the gumption to know what was a bad idea when it was given to him, as well as the self-respect to not handicap himself when his own ego was on the line.”

        “I still think you cheated.”

        “Heheheheh—Look, kid.  It's all simple.  Can you fly yet?”

        Scootaloo frowned.  “What does that have to do with—?”

        “Can ya fly yet?  Yes, or no?”

        “What does it look like?”  The filly twitched her wings as she scooted along the road on the metal tray.

        “What it looks like to me...”  Rainbow Dash grinned wickedly, nodding with her prismatic head in mid-trot at the little foal's instrumentation.  “...is that nature is telling you that you can't move around quickly, and yet you've given nature the brush-off.  So maybe you’re too young to fly.  You’re smart enough to have found a way to move faster than you can, and that’s pretty cool.  Don’t you get it?  Just because the impossible seems impossible doesn't mean you gotta settle for less than half-awesome.  There are a million stinkin' Dumb-Bells in this world.  The earth is filled with boring ponies who make stupid decisions because they settle for lame and dull when they could really be radical.  Those are the kind of ponies who make themselves lose, whether they know it or not.  Ever since that day when he froze himself with his own... erm... lemonade—heheheh—Dumb-Bell got better scores and eventually graduated in the top percent of his class!”

        “Are you trying to say that you helped him?”

        “Nah, pipsqueak.  Dumb-Bell helped himself.  Sometimes you gotta do really stupid things to become really smart.  Those are the bumps and bruises of living and crap.  Still, I owe him one.”

        Scootaloo did a double-take.  “What do you mean you owe him one?”

        “Flying into the stratosphere is a huge no-no for pegasi at that age.”  Rainbow Dash smirked slyly.  “If Dumb-Bell hadn't had his embarrassing moment, the two of us could have flown so high we would have frozen to death.  You see, I've been known to do stupid things too.  As a matter of fact, I make a friggin' career out of it.”
        
        “But why?  Why do it and then admit to doing it?”

        “Because the impossible won't make itself happen on its own, now will it?”  Rainbow Dash hovered again, gasping with a wave of sudden excitement as her eyes locked onto something directly ahead.  “Hey!  Lookit!  We're here!”

        Scootaloo skidded to a stop on her metal tray and squinted at a sign that stood before a dazzling array of apple orchards stretching as far as her eyes could see.  “Uhhh... Just what kind of a fruity name is 'Sweet Apple Acres?'”

        “Only the most delicious kind.  And, hey, don't squawk at me.  I didn't name it.  That was all strawhead's doing.”

        “'Strawhead?'”

        “Shhh—You ready to be Rainbow's little helper?”

        “Exactly what do you need help with?”

        “What is this, preparation for a yearly physical?  Kid, stop acting like a scaredy-cat.  It's simple.  Look for a blonde, blonde, blonde mare in an ugly brown hat and ask her about her apples.  Be cute, be innocent, be curious—and I'll do all the rest.”

        “Why do I feel like this is some sort of trap?”

        “Don't even pretend like you're that smart yet.”  Rainbow Dash soared high up into the air, squinting towards a large structure in the distance.  “Ah!  There she is!  Hehehehe—Ahem.  Just walk up the road and head towards the big red thing—”

        “You mean the barn, Einstallion?”

        “Shut up!  Anyways, I won't be far behind.”

        “Hey, uhm...”  Scootaloo nervously fidgeted atop her metal platform.  “Rainbow Deutsch?”

        “'Dash', ya little pipsqueak!  'Dash!'  Do I sound like I'm from Fillydelphia?”

        “What did you do with the lunch money?”

        “Whozzitwhat?”

        “When you... er... improvised to win against Dumb-Bell in the stratosphere challenge.  You said that the winner got lunch money, right?”

        “What's it matter?”

        “I just...”  Scootaloo bit her lip.  “I'm just curious what other pegasi do with what they've earned...”

        “Pfft—I have cooler ways of grabbing bites to eat.”  Rainbow flung a bored hoof through the air as she hovered and smirked.  “I gave the money to some silly little filly who could barely fly and whose mom wasn't giving the light of day—she still doesn't, come to think of it.”

        “You... gave it away to some random filly?”

        “Ehhh, we got to know each other better since.  She's not so random anymore.  Plus, on the day that I earned my cutie mark, I nearly threw her to a horrible, screaming death!  It was cool!”  Rainbow soared off in a spectral blur.  “Okay, kiddo!  Just as we planned!”

        “Planned?!  But we've hardly planned anything—Ughh!”  Scootaloo tossed her pink mane and frowned, scooting ahead towards the distant farm engulfed in a sea of apple trees.  “Mom and Dad should have named me 'Dumb-Bell;' I'm doing gruntwork for a talking rainbow.”

        The orange mare was most definitely blonde.  Trotting with weighted hooves, she hoisted a basket brimming with fresh fruit over her flank and onto the back of a wooden wagon parked inside a red barn.  The farmfilly was humming a pleasant tune to herself, engulfed in an enthusiasm that made her ritualistic chore appear more like a jubilant hobby.  As soon as she spun about from her latest task, she stumbled upon a tiny orange filly standing in front of her.  Instead of showing shock, surprise, or anger like so many a Ponyvillean local that refused the child some work, she merely smiled with a brightening of her gorgeous green eyes.

        “Well, howdy there, lil’ missy!  What brings a foal yer age ‘round these here parts?”  The mare adjusted the brim of her hat.  An absurdly long ponytail dangled over her neck as she stepped over and squatted so that her face was even with the child's.  “Do yer parents know where you’re at?”

        “I... uhm...”  Scootaloo fidgeted.  She bit her lip as she gazed past the pony and locked her eyes on the mountains upon mountains of apples succulently stacked in the back of the wooden wagon.  She shivered, afraid that her growling stomach would announce itself to the fresh air above the aromatic orchards surrounding her.  “My parents... uhm... they... they're...”

        “Speak up.  I won't bite.”  The freckle-faced mare gave a sisterly smile.  “Ya reckon that yer lost, sugarcube?”

        “L-Lost?”  Scootaloo's violets finally jerked away from the apples, suddenly swimming in a fountain of golden mane hair instead.  “Strawhead...” she absent-mindedly murmured.

        “'Strawhead?'”  The mare spat out an invisible haystalk and chuckled helplessly.  “Just who've you been talkin' to around town?  I haven't heard that since I was about yer age!”

        “I... Uhm...”  Scootaloo gulped and smiled awkwardly.  “I was just... uhm... stopping by to... uh...”  She shook her snout, envisioned a blurred band of rainbow colors, and refocused her sight on the farm filly standing in front of her.  “My parents sent me to ask you about apples.”  Scootaloo bravely improvised.

        “Well, shucks...”  Applejack stood up straight, emerald eyes blinking.  “That's openin' a mighty huge well of discourse, if I do say so myself.  Just what are you hankerin' to know about 'em?”

        “Uhmm...”  Scootaloo winced her way around the edge of a glinting smile.  “E-Everything...?”

        “Heheheh... Well, it's one thang to be chattin' it up about apples in general.  I reckon yer folks must be new tradeponies in town if they're sendin' their young'n to ask about the local market.  It t'ain't all that underhoofed, come to think about it.  Why, I remember my pa sendin' me to get a gander of the Carrot family's crops when I was barely old enough to drink from a trough!  I guess the best way to take advantage of bein' a family of harvesters is to use the family for everythang.  Ha!  Why, I remember this one Hearth's Warmin' Eve dinner when Ol’ Granny Smith invited all of the local Ponyville farmers.  She was merely carryin' on the Apple family tradition of gettin' harvest counts from the local gossip.  The way I see it, you can't be connivin' so long as you're supportin' each other in the end.  Why, without the Carrot family's bounty these last few seasons, we'd be...”

        Scootaloo nodded and nodded, her head spinning from the explosive monologue that she had unwittingly sparked.  She was only vaguely aware of a blue shadow hovering overhead.

        “...not to mention that one blasted winter when our apples nearly froze to kingdom come and Carrot Top herself came to lend us a hoof with salvagin' the orchards.  Of course, she nearly left in a huff when I said that apple pies could beat carrot cake at any bakery competition.  She said that apples were as boring and old as the Third Age itself.  Can you imagine the nerve of that filly?!  Apples are as delicious and as important now to the Equestrian palette as they were in the Second Age!  Why, every Nightmare Night, I sell at least one hundred bushels of the things!  And don't get me started on the upcoming Summer Sun Celebration a week from now!  I swear, the only reason Princess Celestia is coming to this here town is because the apples will be the freshest in Ponyville!  And who does she have to thank for that?  It sure as oats ain't the Carrot Family!  Nuh-uh!  I'd love to see Carrot Top try to bake some carrot cake to top our golden delicious apple strudle, apple fritter, caramel apple delight...”

        Scootaloo was gnawing on her lip at this point.  Her hooves backtrotted slightly against the metal tray.  She struggled to find a moment in the mare's mountain of speech when she could swiftly and politely interject an excuse to glide away, when suddenly the blue shadow above morphed into a blue pegasus.  She twitched, her eyes widening.

        Rainbow Dash was hovering in a stealthy manner, her flapping wings slicing the air with such grace that she barely made a sound above the chattering blonde.  She cast a devilish glance towards Scootaloo and raised a hoof to her mouth, her lips producing a mute and emphatic “Shhhh!”  With expert hooves, she reached down and grasped onto the opposite brims of the farm filly's brown hat.

        “...Don't forget fried apple dumplings.  Now, I know that it's an acquired taste amongst most ponies, especially those from the city.  But it's a mouth-melting reward in the long run.  You ever been to Manehattan?”

        “S-Sure.”  Scootaloo grinned plastically.

        “I have an aunt and uncle who live in Manehattan.  One summer I invited them all the way over from the city and tried to get them to understand the rich stock that can be taken in apple farmin'.  You know what they did?!  They spent the whole dang week here complainin' about havin' to use an outhouse within range of hearin' the livestock.  Can you imagine the nerve of them folks?”

        Scootaloo watched with a nervous twitch as Rainbow Dash licked her lips and expertly lifted the hat off the clueless pony's mane.  Smiling victoriously, the blue pegasus stifled a giggle and soared off in a blue blur towards a muddy part of the orchards.

        “...As a matter of fact, keepin' pigs around is important to apple farmin'!  My Ma used to say that if the swine won't take a bite of the fruit harvest, then ya might as well be tossin' them apples into a trash barrel because somethin' is wrong with that year's bounty!  Heheheh—My Ma may have been raised to respect oranges, but Pa won her over to the apple buckin' business somethin' fierce!  Why, she learned to kick the fruit off of trees so quickly that ponies around here started callin' her 'Apple Blossom' instead of her real name 'Orange Blossom,’ which I suppose is what got my folks to namin' my baby sister the way they did and all...”

        The orange foal suddenly gasped as Rainbow Dash hovered back.  She covered her lips with a hoof, spasming frightfully upon the sight, for the prismatic pegasus had gathered fearlessly in her hoof no less than five living grass snakes.  The squirming reptiles hissed and twirled in ungainly, scaled ropes around the adult's limb as she breathily snickered, then dropped all five into a writhing pile inside the brown hat.  Biting her lip to contain her giggles, the blue pony hovered down and softly planted the bulging article back onto the farm filly's blonde mane.

        “...which is a funny thing because Apple Bloom's got Pa's hair.  It's her eyes that look so much like Ma's.”

        “Uhhh... Uhhh... Uhhh...” Scootaloo helplessly uttered, her hoof pointing shakily upwards.

        The blonde pony snapped out of it, grinning curiously.  “What's the matter, missy?  You look as though you've seen a snaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaake!”  The mare's green eyes bulged as she flung her hat off and hopped up and down in one place, shaking the leathery things off her with high-pitched shrieks that betrayed the normally strong twang in her voice.

        “Snkkkt-Hahahahahaha!”  Rainbow Dash finally exploded from overhead, lying on a jutting crossbeam of the barn while hugging herself.  “Ohhhhhh—What's the matter, Applejack?!  I thought you were good at spotting worms in your fruit!  Whew!  Look at them suckers wriggle!  Ah ha ha ha!”

        “Nnngh!”  Applejack flung the last of the writhing reptiles onto the ground and stomped her hooves in an impromptu square-dance, frightening the creatures away.  “Rrgghhh!”  She fumed, her freckled face turning red as she flung the empty article over her steaming skull.  “Rainbow.”  She launched a furious snarl towards the top of the barn.  “Of all the gul-dern, insensitive, outright wicked shenanigans—”

        “Whew!  Listen to you go!”  Rainbow Dash hiccuped a lasting chuckle or two, wiping a joyful tear from the edge of her eyes.  “I expected to scare the snot out of you!  Not a year's worth of Apple Family vocabulary lessons!”

        “Did you rope her into this?!”  Applejack pointed a vicious hoof at Scootaloo, before finally staring at Scootaloo herself.  “Did she rope you into this?!”

        “I... I... I...”  Scootaloo shivered all over.  This was not the first impression she was wanting to make in Ponyville, even if Ponyville had dealt her far less joyous cards thus far.

        “You're one to talk about rope, AJ!”  Rainbow Dash smiled wickedly.  “Especially since you're in the habit of tying up more than a hog or two!”

        Applejack did a double-take, her emerald eyes shrinking into twitching pinpricks.  “Is this whole thang about the chariot wrangle joke last week?!  That was Pinkie's idea!”

        “Yeah, but you helped!”  Rainbow Dash stuck out her tongue.  “Tying me up to a royal chariot in the middle of my sleep?  That wasn't nearly creative enough to be anything but lame!  Sure, I give credit to Pinkie!  She had to use a friggin' trampoline to get to my napping cloud.  But you?  You gotta learn to only write checks that your sorry flank can catch, strawhead!”

        “Why you cloud-sniffin' smartaleck!”  Applejack snarled, waving an angry hoof.  “If y'all think for just one second that this makes us even—”

        “Uhhh... I think you missed one, AJ.”  Rainbow Dash snickered and pointed.

        “Huh?”  Applejack turned around to see a wriggling reptile stuck in her tail hairs.  “Oh land's sakes!”  She spun in cyclonic circles, attempting to fling the thing loose.

        “Hey everypony!”  Rainbow Dash shouted towards the farm air.  “It's Snakes on a Flank!  Starring Ponyville's favorite cowfilly, in that she's Ponyville's only frickin' cowfilly!”

        “Nnngh!”  Applejack flung the offending reptile out of her tail, caught it in midair, and tossed it Rainbow Dash's way.  “Get outta here before I toss ya outta my orchards in pieces, you blue spitwad!”

        “Whoah!”  Rainbow Dash ducked the tossed reptile.  “Yeesh, what would Fluttershy think of you!”  She soared down and clutched Scootaloo by her shoulders.  “Time to skate, kiddo.  Applejack's about to plow the orchards with our skulls!”

        “I'm so sorry!”  The orphan pleaded in the blonde's direction.  “I didn't mean to—!”

        “Don't make this lamer than it already is!”  Rainbow Dash blazed skyward with the shrieking filly in her grasp, navigating a cloud of her own giggles.

        “Come back here, ya varmint!”  Applejack predictably squawked.  “I ain't done yellin' at y'all!”

        “Wooooohooo-Yeah!”  Rainbow Dash touched down immediately after flying over a wooden fence.  “Now that's how you spend an afternoon!”  She stood at an angle, blinking, realizing that she had a bizarre weight hanging off her side.  She glanced down to see a shivering orange foal clutching her right front limb, her eyes clenched shut.  “Ahem.  We're on the ground again, ya lil’ squirt.”

        Scootaloo gasped, her eyes twitching open.  She trembled with every centimeter she had to move in disentangling herself from Rainbow's limb.  “That was the first time... th-the first t-time that I was in the air...”  The tiny pegasus was beside herself with hyperventilation.

        “It's gonna be the first time you get skewered by a pitchfork if you don't stand behind me.”

        “I don't get it!”  Scootaloo took a hint and scurried on the far side of the pegasus' blue flank.  “Why'd we stop here?!”

        “Because this is outside of Applejack's property!  On this side of the fence, it's finder's keepers!”

        “What's that supposed to mean?  Shouldn't we get more distance from—?!”

        At that very moment, a galloping mare's voice angrily barked, “Hey!  I can see you!  Come back here, RD!  We've got a score to settle!”

        “You couldn't catch me if you tried, ya trotting farm plow!”  Rainbow Dash joyously raspberried and made a series of juvenile faces over the edge of the wooden fence.  “Say, nice singing voice you've got!  If I'd known snakes could make you shriek so high, I would have brought bottles of champagne for you to shatter open for me!”

        “Why you—!”  The distant orange splotch of Applejack bucked the nearest tree to her, grabbed a hoof-full of apples, and flung them murderously in the pegasi’s direction.

        “I don't get it!”  Scootaloo stammered.  “What's happening?”

        “Predictability, that's what.”  Rainbow Dash smirked and squatted down on her haunches.  “Aaaaaaaaaaand—”  She leapt up high above a gasping Scootaloo, flung her wings out, and grabbed four whole apples in her feathery appendages.  “—she makes the catch!  Ha ha!”  She landed in a reverse-slide through the dirt, juggling her victorious bounty.  “Finder's keepers!  Hehehe—See?  I told you that I have cool ways of grabbing bites to eat!”

        Scootaloo gazed up at her, and suddenly her trembles disappeared.  Just then, a smile started to form—

        Her world jolted as a tossed apple exploded across the side of her face.

        “Unngh!”

        “Whoops!  Go time!”  Rainbow Dash clasped the apples under her wings, grabbed Scootaloo by the hoof, and dragged her down the woods bordering the farm.  “Thanks for the snack, strawhead!  We're off to make several gallons of apple juice!  With friends like you, who needs enemas?!  HA!  Get it?!”

        “Y'all come back here!  This isn't over!”

        “You'll get me back!  I'll be waiting for you!  Snkkt-Hehehehe!”  Rainbow Dash broke into a gallop, forcing Scootaloo to glide after her on a rattling tray.

        The tiny filly shook the apple mush off her face.  She could hardly breathe, hardly protest, hardly speak.  She merely clung to Rainbow Dash for dear life, not wanting to let go.

        The bone-white spokes of a pair of pegasus wings glistened in a halo of twilight, but were quickly covered with ivory stone shards.  Laying the last few chunks of sky marble into place, a nine year old Scootaloo finished burying the remains of Rainbow Dash.  Exhaling several heavy breaths, she slumped down to her haunches before the mound of boulders she had spent the entire day hauling to that cliff-face within the inner ruins of Cloudsdale.

        The filly's violet eyes were thin, contemplative.  With each passing second that she spent gazing at the mound of stones, her irises jaded one tiny sliver at a time, spiraling outward from the deep abyss of her pupils, as if giving birth to a scarlet malaise that would become the new windows to a weathered soul.  She scraped a pair of hooves against the granite floor lit by the halo of twilight.  Scootaloo felt as if there was something wrong with her limbs, as if they weren't supposed to feel so empty.

        A shiver ran through her tiny body.  The little pegasus knew that it wasn't because of the cold.  Every time her violet orbs swam over the rocky edges of the grave, her heart sank deeper and deeper into a frigid abyss.  Somehow, the grave didn't seem anywhere near fitting.  It was hardly a memorial fit for Rainbow Dash.  The mare deserved something unearthly, something grand, a mausoleum built inside a comet or a burning castle in the sky.  If Scootaloo could live out a million lives just to carve an effigy out of the tallest mountain of the world using her bare hooves, she would, if only it'd mean that she had truly, lovingly, epically honored the soul whose shell was now decaying before her, piled underneath a mound of pathetic and unpolished stones.

        The last pony shuddered under the weight of her own breaths.  She needed to move on.  She needed to search for resources, for shelter, for supplies.  She needed to find a way out of that insufferable pit that she had fallen so foolishly into, only to discover the death of her dreams.  Every time she contemplated acting upon her necessities, her hooves felt heavier and heavier, gluing her to that spot, freezing her upon the threshold of Rainbow Dash's ashes.  All that was left of the prismatic pegasus was a brittle pile of bones and ashes, and yet Scootaloo would rather suffocate herself than wrench the grave that held it from her sight.  There was nothing left of Rainbow Dash's essence—of Rainbow's soul inside that crumpled mess—but it was the closest Scootaloo had to her, the closest she would ever have.

        Perhaps, then, it was fate that made her gaze down upon a lasting sigh, only to spot four bright blue shades against the twilight-glistening slab of granite.  Among the ashes that had shaken loose during Rainbow Dash's burial, a random flock of feathers had fluttered free.  While every other part of Dash's body had dissolved into the same powdery mess that the Cataclysm had reduced the whole of Ponydom to, the adult pegasus' feathers—those of which hadn't flown off into the gaping chasm beyond the cliff-face—had remained intact.  Their soft strands still sang with pristine, sapphiric color.  The stalks were strong and they could still catch air, as they had been grown to do.

        Scootaloo very slowly, very gently scooped these four feathers up in her hooves.  She clutched them to her chest, enthralled and embittered all the same to feel their softness, and—however impossibly—a magical state of warmth.  She shuddered, clenching her eyes tightly shut to hold the tears in.  No matter how deeply she flung herself into the darkness of her mind, she saw Rainbow Dash’s face, she saw Rainbow’s gaze, and she saw a coat that shone with the color of a blue sky, a sky that was now as mythological to the dead world as smiles and laughter.

        When her eyes reopened, all was desolation.  All was gray and lifeless.  All was real.  The last pony acquainted herself with it, one painful breath at a time.  Her eyes dried as did her resolve, pulling herself up on weak limbs as she stuck the feathers behind her ears—two on either side of her shaved mane—and marched off into the crumbling caverns beyond, wrenching her sight from Rainbow Dash's grave as she slowly embraced a life of broken and colorless dreams.

        
        The tiny equine figure shuffled up gigantic, subterranean mounds of crumbled sky marble.  Her hoofsteps made tiny, scraping sounds against the ambiance of distant waterfalls and the echoing groans of settling Cloudsdalian structures.  She was no longer shouting, no longer wailing, no longer calling out for other pegasi souls to answer her.  What was dead was dead; what was pointless was pointless.  Her breaths were solid and regimental things, merely pulling her over the next hill of rubble and the hill after that, diligently searching for salvageable buildings to scavenge from.

        Scootaloo found one such building, a lopsided post office that had fallen sideways into the grand abyss of the inner ruins, but had somehow remained intact.  A waterfall from melted sky marble above was relentlessly drenching the middle of the split structure, horribly soaking several mounds of parchment that now floated in a blighted pond of bobbing office tools.  Scootaloo waded over the surface of the liquid, keeping her head above water.  It wasn't so important that her shaved mane remain dry as it was to protect the four blue feathers tucked behind her ears.

        With patience and perseverance, the flightless pegasus paddled her way towards a dry platform of wood and ivory, atop which several splintery cabinets of post office materials were lying.  She rummaged through the drawers, pulling out every dry and tangible object she could find.  Upon discovering a mailpony's delivery bag, she let loose a victorious breath and fastened it to her flank.  It was made for an adult pony, and the canvas lengths of the material utterly dwarfed her.  Scootaloo reasoned that she could make adjustments later.  For the time being, she filled the pockets of the saddlebag with as many tiny nick-nacks and miscellaneous objects as she could find.

        Hours later, Scootaloo stumbled upon the imploded ruins of the Cloudsdalian Defense Ministry.  She knew what it was because the structure was filled to the brim with dead pegasi, and almost all of them were encapsulated with the heavy armor of royal guardponies.  The shells of golden armor were like giant eggshells, in the center of which were flimsy skeletons frozen in agonized death throes.  The bones had been seared to ash; the great fires of the Cataclysm had spared nopony.

        Scootaloo could care less.  There was only one corpse in all of Equestria that deserved exaltation, and she had turned her back to her several hours ago.  The last pony marched ahead, dragging her loose saddlebag from the post office, which was already filled to the brim with chunks of random tools and supplies.  The weight of what she carried was becoming unbearable. That didn't stop her from fishing through the armories of the Defense Ministry with desperation.  This place was a treasure trove of metal shields, polearms, helmets and several other samples of Cloudsdalian military craftwork.  Scootaloo eagerly snatched anything that she could.  The only resource she couldn't pretend to hold sway over was time.

        Marching up a steep mound of ivory debris, Scootaloo heard a haunting, shrill sound.  She dropped a trio of clattering spears from her gasping mouth.  They rolled uselessly down the steep incline she was ascending—at least until she stopped them with a firm rear hoof next to her dragging saddlebag.  Shivering, the lone pegasus glanced forlornly back past her flank.  The chilling wind of the Wasteland surged briefly down to flutter at her ear-tucked blue feathers.

        A wide, spacious vista opened up before her, exposing the grandiose inner ruins of Cloudsdale, stretching for hundreds of meters beneath the gaping mouth of the gigantic pit that had trapped her.  Rows upon rows of roaring waterfalls lined the cylindrical wound in the ashen earth.  The snowy sky above the mouth of the abyss had turned grayer than Scootaloo remembered.  The burning crimson of the horizon had died off, so that she speculated that the falling moonrocks had lessened in frequency at some point since she first fell into that subterranean nightmare.

        All of these visuals were the least of Scootaloo's interests.  She bit her lip and craned her neck aside, tilting a good ear towards the wide, cavernous expanse stretching before her.  All she heard was the gentle roar of perpetually trickling water and the occasional crunching noise of settling granite and marble.

        However, the pegasus knew that she had heard a whooping noise.  She knew it.  And with that noise there came a vision—cold and heartless before the twitching contemplation of her mind's eye—fitted with pale leathery skin that lurched after her, trampled after her, hungered after her with clawstreaks and growls.

        Her teeth began chattering as she rediscovered her fear.  She still couldn't remember what her foalday was, but she was suddenly sure she wouldn't live to see her next one, whenever it was.  Glancing towards the top of her climb, she clamped her mouth once more over the spears and scampered towards the crest of the hill of rubble, making straight for a black hovel of hollow debris that she had suddenly spotted at the top.

        The little niche of rock and ivory granite was pathetically small.  It felt more like a closet than a cave.  Nevertheless, Scootaloo scrunched her tiny, shivering body into the furthest corner of the craggy chamber.  She laid the Cloudsdalian spears before her—two against the walls and one on the floor—and all of them with their pointed edges aimed at the mouth of the crevice.  She had no room to produce a makeshift bed, even if she had the materials to do so.  Scootaloo settled for emptying the saddlebag of all its numerous, seemingly useless nick-nacks and stretched the canvas material along a slab of granite.  Against this, she rested her quivering body.

        Her teeth had never stopped clattering.  Of all the random junk Scootaloo had acquired, none of it was flammable enough to make a fire with, even if she possessed the lunacy to attempt igniting something within such a claustrophobic space.

        She was cold, yes, but that wasn't nearly as awful as how hungry she was.  The pegasus was lucky to have found a few crumpled structures that could offer both weapons and tools.  Still, she would give away all of her scavenged things—saddlebag included—if she could somehow trade them for a single jar of wheat... or even a shattered wooden box of hay.

        There was always the next day; Scootaloo tried to convince herself that.  However, with each passing hour spent in that lonely hovel, struggling for sleep, suffering from the endless groans of the crumbling ruins around her, she realized that—sooner than later—she would no longer have the luxury of anticipating the “next day.”  Scootaloo wasn't sure what would give out on her first: her stomach, her muscles, or her nerves.  One way or another, the Wasteland was going to consume her.  It was only a matter of time.

        She had to keep trying.  She wasn't sure what the point anymore.  She wasn't sure if she had any logical reason to keep struggling.  Still, as she laid there, cradling the blue feathers in her grasp, stroking the fine sapphiric threads before her bloodshot eyes, she felt pulse after pulse of bizarre energy bolting through her, burning something deep inside of the last pony that no campfire or digested bit of food could illuminate with as much strength or heat.

        Scootaloo stared into the microscopic spaces between the dancing blue threads under her hoof.  She couldn't put a name on what she saw, nor did she need to.  She closed her eyes...

        ...and was serenaded by Octavia's strings.  The last pony's eyes reopened, gazing deeply upon the blue feather cradled in her brown hooves.  The tiny fibers bent and fluttered under her touch.  Flaring her nostrils, she tilted her gaze up across the wall of the Harmony stretching just above the workbench.  The Royal Grand Biv outfit, the golden lyre, the piece of Stalliongrad, and the many numerous novelty fossils of the scavenger's pilfering hung before her in a suddenly worthless array.  None of these miraculously preserved memories shone with the same glory as the tiny, downy strand in her gentle grasp.

        There was one exception:  Suntrot's golden illustration hung in the center of the memorable mosaic.  The filly's crayon streaks were jagged and juvenile, but they held more worth and sanctity than all of Princess Celestia's journal pages combined.  Scootaloo bit her lip as she gazed deeply at the humble masterpiece.  She wondered—in yet another round of somber breaths—if Rainbow Dash had ever kept a memento of hers before the Cataclysm took everything away.

        Just then, an alarm buzzed.  Raising an eyebrow, Scootaloo swiveled in her seat and stared over her shoulder.  A tiny light was sparkling across the leftmost side of the Harmony's dashboard before the cockpit.

        In swift order, Scootaloo placed the blue feather down into the tiny white container along with its two siblings.  She slapped the box shut and moved it to a safe part of the workbench next to an elongated jar of glowing green flame before she galloped across the lantern-lit gondola.  Sliding into the cockpit seat, the last pony slid her copper goggles down and switched the dashboard from autopilot to manual.  The alarm subsided, having fully warned the dirigible owner of rising levels of electromagnetic current in the vicinity.  That only meant one thing: Scootaloo was swiftly approaching a large structure that harnessed electrical energy.  From the rising temperature gauge measuring the outside of the aircraft, she judged that there was a huge buildup of steam as well.

        This became apparent as she descended through a natural cloudbank, only to be engulfed in a  wickedly synthetic cloud of black smog.  The windows were briefly covered in soot.  Cursing herself for her own carelessness, Scootaloo flicked her hoof across a switch.  Quadruple jets of hot, pressurized water sprayed over the sloping dashboard of the gondola's exterior, clearing the view for the pilot to see beyond the bow.

        What loomed before the scavenger's sight was a gigantic valley of watery lake beds and barren rock, pock-marked in innumerable places with deep pits and dipping valleys.  This were once the spacious and emerald green fields of the Equestrian Northern Plains.  She could still remember the bright, sunlit vistas that had stretched before her, full of rivers and ponds that had glittered in the afternoon glow.  Every grassy knoll had been flanked by luscious fruit trees and sporadic beds of clover.  Above all of that—casting a prismatic glow across the rolling landscape—had been the enormous and awe-inspiring sight of Cloudsdale, floating angelically high in the troposphere, a junction for all life and all purveyors of life.

        Now, the sky was filled with a black smog formed by dozens upon dozens of steam fountains jetting high into the air, coalescing with all of their combined pollutants to form an opaque ceiling that blocked out any hint of twilight, so that the once-sunny valley was now a sunken and saturated landscape shrouded in endless, pitch-black night.  This section of the Wasteland would have been utterly blinding, absolutely devoid of luminance, if it weren't for one enormous structure that was ironically responsible for the blackening to begin with.  In the middle of a jet black cloud of desolation, Petra stretched skyward like a great golden flower, and it lit up the dead world as though it was the last breath of fire to ever linger in a cold and infinite abyss.  At the same time, it was the author of its own foggy veil, for its spokes upon spokes of smoke stacks endlessly billowed steam and smog into the atmosphere above the golden super-structure, filling the air of the Wasteland—and even the cramped interior of the Harmony itself—with a constant, high-pitched whistle.

        Petra was only incidentally deserving of the right to be called a “city.”  Scootaloo had heard many Wastelanders speak of Petra.  She had read in Equestrian history books about ancient goblin cities that in some ways resembled Petra.  Nearly five years ago, entirely by accident, the last pony almost flew the Harmony straight into the heights of Petra.  Soaring towards it now, even at a slow speed, with the full intent of making a landing, the last pony realized that she had only ever underestimated its majesty.

        Even from several kilometers away, the body of Petra was enormous.  The goblin construct wasn't a metropolis made up of multiple buildings so much as it was one giant building divided into smaller, far more complicated parts.  What surprised her the most was just how organic and accidental the entire engineering marvel was.  There was a beautiful ugliness to it, an asymmetrical assortment of large, circular, horizontal platforms built along the body of a winding cylindrical stalk that jaggedly spiraled its way skyward.

        The central stem of Petra flickered from within, billowing red plumes of flame every few hundred meters up the gigantic trunk of iron and steel as it wove its haphazard way towards the veiled cosmos above.  Scootaloo judged that most of the factories and foundries of Goblin industry were housed up and down the vertical beam's infernal interior.  At the very base of the stem—where the immense cylinder strut met the lifeless and sterile rock of the earth—thousands upon thousands of perpetually self-consuming oil fires vomited smoke across the Wasteland’s surface, marking where the refuse of the goblin metropolis' population fell to the bosom of the world and continuously burned.

        Then, there were the platforms.  For their amazingly spacious grandeur, it was a time-consuming procedure to actually count them.  When she had flown by the sight of Petra five years ago, she could have sworn she had counted no more than twentyplatforms.  Now, if Scootaloo had to guess, there had to have been over thirty, and it boggled her mind t hat creatures of any size—much less goblins—could have erected even a fraction of that many structures in such a small span of time.

        The discs were huge, at least three hundred meters across and almost just as wide, and all of them brimmed with buildings, alleyways, balconies, courtyards, upper levels, lower levels, support struts, extensions, and electrical generators.  Scootaloo remembered the gigantic moonrock that housed Ponymonium, beneath which she had scavenged what remained of Pinkie Pie's skeleton.  It suddenly occurred to her to imagine each of these discs as an equivalent to a one hundred meter tall cut-out of such an epically large structure, and yet the goblins had built dozens of them—all out of iron and steel, reinforced with copper and brass—and they jutted out in a spiraling formation along the jagged stem of the city's central core, so that Petra resembled a giant, dead tree clustered from top to bottom with glowing leaves.

        This ridiculous feat of tumorous engineering stretched no less than two kilometers into the sky, making its peak higher than any other point in Equestra, save for the abandoned heights of Griffon Mount.  The only thing keeping Petra from piercing the clouds was the simple fact that the only clouds around that portion of the Wasteland consisted of the smoggy miasma that the city had produced with its numerous smoke stacks and steam jets billowing black soot forever into the sky.  The structure was ablaze—burning like a Hearth's Warming Tree in the center of a great, ghastly nothingness—with every single one of its horizontal platforms shimmering with white electricity and golden lanternlight across the blackened expanse.

        Swarming about the plethora of gigantic discs was a thin, luminescent swarm of dozens upon dozens of industrial and merchant airships hovering from one vertical destination to another between the city's “branches”.  Beneath the glowing stalk of a city—at ground level—the Wasteland was also alive with lights and stirring commotion.  As majestic as Petra was, it was merely an offshoot of an endless industrial project transpiring several kilometers to the west of it.  Immense concrete platforms stretched between the goblin city and a spacious mining operation.  Across these platforms, monorail trains ran on steam, delivering hundreds upon thousands of kilograms of white matter:  sky marble.

        Scootaloo tilted her gaze and glanced towards the west.  It was then that she saw what she had truly flown there for:  it wasn't Petra, it was Cloudsdale... or at least what was left of Cloudsdale.

        When the pegasus city in the sky collapsed from the wake of the Cataclysm, the resulting impact had smashed a gigantic hole into the face of the world.  Scootaloo, of course, knew this very well.  What she hadn't witnessed—but had only heard about in passing—was that for the twenty-five years that transpired after the Cataclysm, the goblins had been salvaging the sky marble of Cloudsdale from the ruins... and to this very day they hadn't stopped.

        It would appear that a quarter of a century was not enough time to pilfer the entire grave of Cloudsdale of all it had to offer the imps of the Wasteland.  Even from a distance, the pilot of the Harmony could make out droves upon droves of tiny half-ling shapes, clambering over the sunken wreckage like ants, hoisting what remained of the ivory buildings onto cranes and carts.  The salvaged materials were then loaded onto trains, equipped with steam engines that dragged the cargo all the way to the factories of Petra's inner stem.  There, Scootaloo imagined, the goblins had engineered a way to break down the structure of sky marble into its lesser components.  From this, they were able to extract compressed steam and sell it to the various, needy factions of the Wasteland.  The end result was the imps being paid ungodly amounts of silver strips which made the perpetual construction of Petra possible.

        Scootaloo felt a weight encompassing her heart.  It wasn't so much that the pegasus' soul was affected by the sight of Cloudsdale being reduced to a mere steam reserve.  Rather, Scootaloo realized that she was bound to be a complete and total alien to this place.  Petra was immense, grand, and rightfully intimidating.  The city was also young—about eight years younger than her—and Scootaloo knew a thing or two about being surrounded by hot-headed children of the Wasteland equipped with even a smidgen of power.  If the last pony had a hard enough time being accepted in places like the M.O.D.D., she was bound to be absolutely crucified here.

        Gently, she flew the body of the Harmony high above the grand pits of Cloudsdale.  The ruins burned in a dozen dark places with torchlight as thousands of goblin workers milled about, hammering and blasting away at the rock to uncover more and more pockets of pure sky marble.  A lump formed in the mare's throat as she adjusted her goggles and peered into the depths of the place for a sign—any familiar landmark—that her young and tortured memories could have pointed out to her aged self.

        With so many parts of Cloudsdale being penetrated, pilfered, and pulled apart before her goggled eyes, the last pony couldn't help but wonder—with a reborn spirit of helplessness—if there was still any chance of finding what she was looking for in one piece.  What if there was nothing left of Rainbow Dash?

        The last pony took a deep breath and quietly remembered a conversation still gnawing at her mind.

        “What do you mean they're not enough?”  Scootaloo balked, frowning.

        “I do not mean to discount their infinite value of sentimentality, old friend.”  One week before Scootaloo arrived at Petra, in the skating rink garden of Ponyville, Spike had walked across the magical glow of Princess Celestia's mirror and stood before the incredulous pegasus.  “I only mean to say that they are not sufficient for junctioning you to Rainbow Dash.”

        The pony stifled a frustrated growl, waving the white box full of three blue feathers in consternation.  “They are a part of her body, Spike.  They are imbued with Rainbow's essence, are they not?”

        “A valid argument, child.”  Spike wrapped a purple tail about the two of them and gently patted the pony's brown shoulder.  “But try convincing my green-flame of that.”  The elder dragon smiled, albeit awkwardly.  “Alas, just as with Bon-Bon, Dr. Whooves, Braeburn, Pinkie Pie, and all our other companions before them, I need a great deal of preciously preserved bone matter to anchor you to Rainbow's soul self in the past.  If I attempted using the feathers as an ingredient—no matter the good intention—they would not provide the desired result.  It would be just the same as exposing you, unguarded, to the raw heat of my green fire gland.”

        “And...”  Scootaloo blinked, then squinted at him.  “What would happen to me then, exactly?”

        “Why...” Spike chuckled, coughing up a cloud of green smoke.  “Without a spiritual anchor, child, you would hardly become the avatar of Princess Entropa!”  He waved the fumes off and sauntered over towards a bed of flowers which he promptly watered with a pair of pitchers hooked under one claw.  “You would simply fall victim to the throes of accelerated reverse-time!”

        “So, what?  I'd jump back in time to meet myself five days ago and play hop-scotch or something?”

        “Hardly, my friend.  You'd either get stuck in an eternal time loop, or—in a far less hellish fate—your body would de-age in a blink and you'd be reduced to a puddle of undeveloped amniotic fluid.  You would be unborn unto death, if you can properly interpret the metaphor.”

        “Well, the feathers are here.”  Scootaloo clutched the white container to her chest and sighed.  “Would it be so hard to at least try and see if it's possible to use these as an ingredient?”

        “Honestly, Scootaloo, must I lecture you even more on the hazards of impulsive actions than I already have?”  His iron jaw curved in a soft smile as he finished watering the plants and glanced back at her.  “I assure you, I have done enough proper experimentation in my time to know what is or isn't appropriate in these regards.  You need Rainbow Dash's bones.  I do believe you related to me two days ago that you know where her remains are, am I correct?  Or perhaps there is an impediment to your acquisition of her remains that you have yet to relate to me?”

        The last pony bit her lip and pocketed the white box in her saddlebag.  She shuffled across the green garden.  Bees and dragonflies buzzed past her flicking ears in the Celestial light.  “I haven't exactly had the most... pleasant of experiences in dealing with goblins, Spike.”

        “Is this supposed to surprise me?”  Spike raised an eyecrest towards her before leaning down to examine the fruit hanging off a cluster of nearby trees.  “From the stories you've had to tell, it seems as though you've butted heads with all sorts of creatures from harpies to ogres to monkeys to diamond dogs, and none of them are all too pleased to have experienced you either.”

        “With the goblins, it's a lot more complicated.”  Scootaloo trotted slowly around the giant hourglass dedicated to Rarity.  She watched with jaded, scarlet eyes as the two enclosed chambers exchanged growing and dying lavenders along the flaming tongues of reverse-time.  “They're cruel, and yet they're capable of reason.  They're pure industrialists, and yet they somehow afford a culture.  For all of their faults, they have a tiny speck of respectable mettle.”

        “I suppose there is one question that can utterly simplify this matter.”  Spike glanced down at her.  “Do you appreciate them?  As a race, that is?”

        Scootaloo exhaled long and hard.  “They're of this Wasteland, Spike.  What's to appreciate?”

        The dragon contemplated that silently.

        The last pony continued, “All that matters is that I need to get to Rainbow Dash now, and the goblins are in the way.  From what I understand, they built this big frickin' factory on the top of what remains of Cloudsdale.  To this day, they're constantly siphoning off what pegasi like her built out of engineering and nature.”  She shook briefly with a boiling rage, then slowly breathed the heated emotion out through her lips.  “Finding her won't be like finding all the others, Spike.  This isn't some lonely expedition into the Everfree Briar or a dip into the belly of a fallen moonrock.  I'm going to have to go deep into a place surrounded by creatures convinced that they own the landscape.  What's to stop them from ripping my wings off and feeding them to me on sight?”

        “My word, do half-lings detest equines that much?”

        “Spike, I love you to death, but you really don't get out that much.”  Scootaloo turned to gaze forlornly across the garden at him.  “I have hooves.  By nature, that means I'm lowlier than dirt in the Wasteland.  I think the only reason all sentient beings in Equestria know that one pony is still left alive is that they wake up each morning hating something unnameable for a reason they can't understand... at least until I cross their paths.”

        Spike leaned his head aside with a quizzical gaze.  “Why do you think that is, perchance?”

        Scootaloo snorted with a single, barking laugh.  “Ground Control to Major Obvious!  The dragon has landed!”

        “Seriously.  This intrigues me—this hatred for all things equine.”

        Scootaloo sighed.  “I've read many books salvaged from the libraries of dead cities, Spike.  The biggest lesson that history has taught me is that power is forever a precarious balance between the 'haves' and 'have-nots.'  For as long as there've been scholars to record the events of the First, Second, and Third Age, ponies made up the 'haves.'  Go figure: when the Cataclysm happened, it gave the 'have-nots' the leftovers of an apocalyptic dinner table.”

        “So you think that goblins—like so many other creatures of the Wasteland—will witness you and immediately be angered to be within the presence of a former oppressor?”

        Scootaloo gave him a double-take.  “Spike, the ponies of Equestria may have been fortunate.  I would hardly call them 'oppressors.'”

        “What finer oppression is there than an absolute monopoly?”

        The last pony blinked at him, her mouth agape in mixed shock and disgust.  “Spike... just what are you insinuating—?”

        “Please, dear friend, do not interpret my words as an insult to ponydom.”  He smiled gently as he lowered his snout to her level.  “I was raised by your kind, and I shall forever cherish them above all else.  It is with absolute zero bias that I declare ponies to be the essential substance of Equestrian magic, peace, tranquility, and beauty.  Regardless, the key thing here is to get into the mind of a sentient being without hooves.  When you imagine the history of the world from that lowly perspective, and you take into account the Alicorns' dominion over the Sun and Moon, and you realize that pegasi, unicorns, and earth ponies altogether maintained the functions of seasonal variation from equinoxes to solistices, how can you not perceive it all without a modicum of envy and—dare I say—malice?”

        “If you're trying to convince me that goblins have hated ponies for what they meant to this world, you can save your fuming breath.”  Scootaloo gazed emotionlessly into a far corner of the garden.  “I discovered that first-hoof a long time ago.”  She took a deep breath, running a forelimb over her brown coat, as if feeling for several ancient bruises and welts that she was suddenly reawakening to.  “It's not something that I wish to repeat.”

        “Then you should endeavor to approach this situation in a different manner,”  Spike said, pointing a clawed hand.  “This is not Pinkie Pie's city of Dredgemane you are paying a visit to, dear friend.  There are no pony souls to win over; there are none who will respect Goddess Gultophine or her teachings.  Perhaps you should put yourself in the mind of a goblin... when dealing with goblins?”

        “How do you mean?”

        “You yourself said that they were not without respectable qualities, however deeply buried in Wasteland malice and distrust.  Perhaps you should seek a path in accordance with the honor of their hearts, assuming it is indeed there.”  He smirked.  “And if that doesn't work, I'm sure there's another language all creatures of the Wasteland speak: the language of silver.”

        Scootaloo blinked at that.  She fidgeted where she stood.  “I'm kind of stripped of strips at the moment, Spike,” she murmured, then glanced off towards the far side of the garden.  Her scarlet eyes caught several hanging, yellow shapes pointing upwards towards the celestial mirror.  Her lips curved ever so slightly.  “But I may be able to procure some, with a little bit of persuasion.”

        “What are you thinking of, old friend?”

        “It depends.”  Scootaloo glanced his way.  “Think you might be willing to part with a plant... or two... or three?”

        “If it will help you get to your goal, absolutely, child.”  He raised a finger.  “Though, might I suggest that I part with a breath first...”

        Scootaloo was briefly confused.  Then she jumped in place.  “Y-You mean you're ready now?”

        He smiled with a brief wince, clutching a clawed hand over his burning chest.  “If I wait any longer, I do believe my fire gland will burst out of my sternum.”

        She was already fumbling through her saddlebag to procure the glass jar.  “And you promise me that this will give me anywhere between one hundred fifty to two hundred meters of anchorage?”

        “I would hesitate to put such a theory to an absolute test,” the dragon mumbled, clearing his throat as the temperature of the room heated up before his nostrils.  “It will be a good two to three weeks before I can produce another breath—regardless of its potency—considering how much enchantment and focus I've put into this flame.”

        “In other words...”  She smirked slyly while hoofing a long glass jar—two times larger than normal—into his palm.  “'Don't royally screw this one up, Scootaloo.'”

        “What I lack in your poetic gusto, let me compensate with my own endearing words.”  He paused with the open jar hanging before his jaws, his eyeslits glinting emphatically her way.  “Do not do this for me, Scootaloo.  Neither do it for the Sun and Moon.  Do this for Rainbow Dash.”

        She slowly, slowly nodded.  “Believe me, Spike,” she murmured in a low voice.  “I couldn’t possibly give more of a crap about this ugly world than I do this very moment.”

        The elder dragon gazed blankly at her, looking neither sad nor relieved.  Whatever reaction he had to give those bold words would come in time, as he tilted his body forward and exhaled the brightest and richest burst of emerald flame Scootaloo had yet witnessed into that small, glass jar.

        The container rattled loosely atop the last pony's workbench as the entire gondola of the Harmony shook.  The same buzzing alarm from earlier was now an ear-splitting scream.  Scootaloo gasped and flashed her dashboard a goggled look.  Every instrument panel was flickering madly, indicating a large burst of energy heading toward  her location.  Breathless, she gazed through a porthole along the side of the airship.

        A bright, glowing blob of electrical discharge was rocketing her way.  She barely had time to yank hard on her levers and steer the ship so that it protectively angled the least vulnerable part of its hull towards the unavoidable projectile.

        The resulting impact shook every square centimeter of the dirigible.  A pocket of thunder exploded all around the aircraft.  Scootaloo grit her teeth, struggling to keep the dirigible upright.  Bolts of static electricity danced from bulkhead to bulkhead.  Octavia's strings scratched and skipped as the record player rocked precariously on the edge of its shelf.  For ten seconds, Scootaloo felt that the entire cabin was going to fly apart, bolt by bolt, starting with the swaying hangar deck below.

        “Friggin' A!” she exclaimed, struggling against the pressure of the jolting levers.  She heard a rattling noise intensifying behind her.  She flashed a glance over her twitching wings.

        The elongated glass jar of pure emerald dragonflame was rolling straight off the workbench's edge.

        Scootaloo hissed through her teeth, shot her body up, and yanked hard on a chain-linked handle.  The ship ascended madly through the thundering air above the goblin mining operation.  In a single breath, she backflipped out of the cockpit, flapped her wings, and flew upside down towards the workbench.

        The glass jar of flame fell towards the bulkhead of the cabin floor below.

        “Nnngh!”  Scootaloo caught the container in two jittery hooves.  She landed on her spine with a grunt as the rapidly-ascending craft continued rocking and swaying from the electrical impact.  “H-Holy haystacks...”  She blinked under her goggles, then frowned viciously.  “Somebody shot me!”  Angrily, she kipped up to her hooves, shoved the glass container safely into the netting of her swaying hammock, and pulled the handle dangling above the cockpit once more.  As the Harmony evened out to a steady, elevated hover, she grabbed her rifle from underneath the fallen folds of the Royal Grand Biv outfit, and practically slid her way down the spiral staircase to the hangar level below.

        Marching across the flickering lanternlight, she hopped over several brass bars full of silver strips, nearly tripped over a loosely sliding metal scooter, and approached the copper aperture entrance at the ship's lower bow.

        “Friggin' pegasus target practice, I swear to Epona—'H'jem!'”

        A burst of smog funneled through the entrance as the catseye doorway opened wide.  Scootaloo coughed, wheezed, and bore the brunt of the unearthly fumes as she gripped the rifle in two front hooves, stretched her wings, and briskly flew out into the windy madness

        The gigantic, golden stalk of Petra shimmered in the distance as the last pony flew up to the very top of her dirigible.  Planting three hooves down onto the balloon of the craft, she hugged her rifle to her chest and peered down, down through the waves of smog and towards the port side of the inflated structure.  She groaned, for upon close examination she found several iron bulkheads charred and bent at horribly mutilated angles.  The tell-tale sign of an electrical impact burned across the side of her vessel.  Scootaloo had experienced lightning strikes from flying too low in a stormfront before, and this most definitely wasn't the same thing.  Guessing from the nature of the singed metal, the trajectory of the electrical discharge was about even with the last pony's aircraft.  This was the work of weaponized engineering.

        “Dang it dang it dang it dang it dang it!”  Scootaloo hissed into her flowing mane before tossing it aside with a jerk of the neck.  She frowned and spat towards the distant, torchlit ravines of Cloudsdale’s ruins, her voice shouting ineffectually into the beating winds and smog of the blackened world.  “Alright, which one of you wrench-huffing, bat-eared freakazoids wants to climb up here and take the hoof to the face that's coming to ya?!”

        Scootaloo's enraged voice was cut off by a pair of roaring engines that rose loudly from below.  She backtrotted and knelt on her haunches, aiming her rifle full of runestones at a pair of hovercraft levitating suddenly before her.  Both of the twin vessels were open platforms with copper railings and powered by bulbous, brass tanks full of compressed steam.  The hissing machines fed hot air to several thrusters rigged to the bottom of the rusted contraptions like hollow, jagged teeth.  Inside either of these vessels were five to six creatures, and each of them had a steam-powered, double-barreled, semi-automatic rifle fixed on the last pony.

        Scootaloo did not lower her firearm.  She continued aiming at the creatures, her goggles trained on them, her lips ready to spout out a runic command upon the next breath—even if it might be her last.  During the paralyzing seconds that consumed the high-altitude stare-off, she got a good look at the goblins... but realized they were not goblins at all.  Their frames were too tiny, and their heads were much larger in proportion to their torsos.  What was more, there was little to no visible portion of their craniums exposed.  All eyes were obscured with thick black visors, and all mouths were encompassed by brass breathing masks that gave their voices a metallic ring:

        “You have trespassed impcity airspace, sky traveler.  Identity yourself.”

        “I'm pissed off!”  Scootaloo barked.  “Who are you?”

        “On behalf of the Outer Aerial Gremlin Defense Initiative, you must remove yourself from impcity airspace.  If you have business in the city, make a landing in Fifteen Strut, Level Beta of Grand Petra.  For now, redirect your aircraft from these premises or you shall be fired upon.”

        “And just what was that earlier?!  Huh?!”  Scootaloo snarled.  “A sneeze?!”

        A blue glow shimmered along the front of one of the hovercrafts.  A gigantic tesla coil sparkled, affixed to a cannon fork that was twirling to aim once more at the Harmony as if in answer to the last pony's question.

        “You shall redirect your aircraft from these premises immediately—”

        “Yeah, Yeah—I friggin' heard you!”  Scootaloo snarled, finally lowering her rifle as a sign of trust.  “You know, for a welcome wagon, you could certainly do with more wagons.”  She blinked, then frowned harder.  “Or welcome.”

        The gremlins said nothing to that.  They muttered to each other with a series of metallic ringing noises channeled through their masks.  In a roar of steaming thrusters, the two crafts gave the Harmony a wide berth, but kept within firing range, patiently waiting for the equine pilot to comply with their orders.

        Grumbling to herself, Scootaloo took wing and flapped her way back to the dirigible’s aperture entrance.  “Why not fling a cannon through my dashboard as a gift basket while you're at it?!”

        Scootaloo piloted the damaged Harmony slowly—like a dissipating cloud—over the chasms upon chasms of mining goblins, past the tall, stretching monorail tracks, beyond the rows of smoke-strewn shanty towns until she finally reached a wide, golden platform positioned halfway up the breathtakingly high reaches of Petra.  She didn’t know to what degree her aircraft was damaged until she was coasting the swaying thing into the docking bay of a shadowy, metal hangar enclosed on all sides by rusted copper grates.  The last pony had to manually adjust for a last-second drift, or else she might have accidentally rammed her airship into one of the solid walls of metal that flanked the docking platforms.

        At that point, the gremlin hovercrafts escorting her finally soared off towards the wide, black expanse, but she paid them no mind.  She had her goggled eyes locked on the instrument panel ahead of her, fidgeting with greater and greater nervousness as she saw the pressure in her steam compartment dropping rapidly by the minute.  Once she was safely moored to the frame of the enclosed hangar, she dashed over to her lateral clamps and locked the metal claws in place.

        Rushing back to her instrument panel, Scootaloo turned three sets of knobs, unbolted an emergency lever, and pulled hard on it.  A loud clanking noise echoed through the bulbous body of the balloon above the Harmony's gondola as she redirected the gas into an auxiliary compartment opposite the damaged hull.

        In less than a minute, the last pony had once more exited the craft.  Her ears were assaulted by an endless chorus of hissing steam and venting gases pouring out from all metal walls and platforms of the imp-built hangar.  Flying up to a ceiling support beam, she hung off it, pulled her goggles to her forehead, and gave the balloon of the Harmony a naked glance.  She saw the structural damage from the electrical blast in far greater clarity, and it was obvious to her that the port-side chamber of the balloon had been leaking gas up until the point she redirected it.  Until she fixed that leak—which required far more resources than she had at her own disposal—she couldn't make any sort of long-distance flight across the Wasteland.  As far as she was concerned, she was grounded.

        Scootaloo sighed long and hard.  This should have diffused the rising temper in her being, but it didn't.  Her body shook and her teeth gritted and her hoof slammed offensively against the metal beam she was hanging off of.  “Nnngh—Celestia dang it!”  Her voice echoed across the hollow of the steaming hangar bay.  She suddenly became aware of multiple shapes turning and glancing up at her.  She looked back down, seeing an assortment of dogs, monkeys, raccoons, and other random sentient creatures tending to their parked vessels.  They all regarded her with a nervous curiosity.  The ugly distaste for equine souls hadn't registered yet in their eyes.  Perhaps, Scootaloo imagined, they had never seen a pony before.  The pegasus realized that the gremlins must have directed her to a hangar segregated off for non-imp species.  In a way, she owed them a tiny bit of gratitude.

        Then she remembered who launched the bolt of electrical discharge at her vessel to begin with.  She sighed, fluttering back down to her aperture entrance and peeling the goggles off her skull completely.  She fiddled with the copper articles, feeling random gusts of steam mixing with the Wasteland wind to kick at her long pink mane.  After several fuming breaths, she calmed herself enough to survey her cramped, metal surroundings.  The wheels in her head turned like so many gears and servos flanking the elevated garage.

        Slowly, Scootaloo marched back into the upper level of the Harmony.  She slumped down on her workbench stool, rubbing a hoof over her face and through her mane as she sighed hard.  The seconds ticked away like an invisible clock beyond the walls of her cabin's bulkheads.  With a dwindling thought, she turned her gaze towards her wall of souvenirs.  She saw colors, trinkets, and instruments—all of her souvenirs of dead Equestria.

        Ultimately, however, her gaze drifted to one object and one object alone.  The white box rested beneath her, pristine and immaculate in its ivory contours.  She gently opened it up, reintroducing the lantern-lit hollow of the cabin to three ocean-blue threads of immortal softness.  A deep breath cycled through her, and she briefly closed her eyes in meditation.

        Less than an hour later, Scootaloo had packed her things.  She wore enough armor and leather to battle an entire army of Phoenixes; not even her wings were exposed as she finished the ensemble with a leather cap and mask pulled over her brown snout.  Hiding every bright bit of her pastel mane, she even tucked her tail in as she marched firmly out of the mouth of the vessel's hangar bay.  She turned around and eyed the ring of ivory rocks lining the catseye entrance.  She had spent the last twenty-five minutes triply reinforcing her vessel with magical runestones.  The last pony would much rather have her airship explode in a burst of mana-flame than let it fall into the claws of half-ling hijackers.

        “W'nyhhm.”

        The purple aura of the runestones' magical shield was positively blinding.  It would take an arcanium cannon to blow a hole through it.  She hoped that the same goblins who built a two kilometer skyscraper in twenty-five years weren't capable of building such an improbable weapon overnight.  She worried very little about the other pilots inside the hangar.  They gazed at her with trembling trepidation as she marched past them on loud, rattling horseshoes.  Seemingly, the creatures regarded her with shock instead of hatred.  After all, she was about to march head-first into a city that they were obviously too frightened to venture into themselves.  Petra was the largest congregation of like-species that far from Mount Ogreton, and any entity that wasn't an imp in those streets had just as many rights as an insect.

        Ironically, then, Scootaloo stumbled upon a squirming sea of cockroaches feeding off a dead rat.  She paused briefly, blinking at the black little things and their twitching antennae.  Even they didn't bother giving the last pony any space as she drifted past them.  This city belonged to them far more than it would ever belong to her.

        “Heh... perfect...” she muttered and trotted over them like a good shepherd of scum.  “Now all I need to find are the cats.”

        As she navigated a sharp ramp of rusted copper plates, several vents spat bursts of white steam to either side of her.  The last pony breathed claustrophobically into her mask.  The goggles over her eyes fogged briefly as she marched into a grand, oceanic cacophony of thousands upon thousands of grinding cogwheels, gears, pistons, levers, and belts.  The mechanized womb of Petra swallowed the pegasus up, and as she was engulfed in the industrial miasma A flicker of color graced her figure.

        Hanging off the side of her mask, tied to her ear, was a soft, sapphire feather dangling from a matching blue string.

        The ground shimmered with a rust-red color as the sun burned its way past the western horizon.  Rainbow Dash and Scootaloo trotted side by side into the burning gaze of the dying afternoon.  All of Equestria around them hung in a gentle murmur as the bands of night settled over the world like a soothing blanket.

        “Whewwwww... Yeahhhh.”  Rainbow Dash grinned widely, her teeth glistening in the scarlet bands of the sunset.  She clutched four apples in her wings as if they were separate limbs.  “You feel that, ya squirt?”

        Scootaloo limply pushed against the metal tray beneath her, battling a pit in her stomach so large that she wasn't sure she had a stomach left at all.  “Feel what?  It's just a sunset.”

        “I know.  But it's our sunset.”

        The tiny foal's face scrunched.  She glanced up quizzically.  “What's that supposed to mean?”

        “Just think about it.”  Rainbow Dash came to a stop on a hilltop and slumped to her haunches, basking in the crimson glow.  “Without ponies, where would the sun and moon be?  Our very own Princess Celestia keeps them spinning around this crazy world with her awesome powers.  Then, when it comes time to change the seasons, legions of pegasi push the clouds away to make the snow melt.  It's amazing how simple it all works to make something so wickedly cool.  It also makes you wonder just how ugly this world would be if nopony was around to look after it.”

        “Jee, I dunno...”  Scootaloo winced, feeling yet another bruise beneath her flexing limbs.  She plopped down, weak and tired, beside the blue pegasus.  “There are enough ugly things in this world as it is.  It's kind of hard to shake it...”

        “Yeesh.  Ain't you kind of young to be that emo?”

        “Mmm...”  Scootaloo whimpered and hung her head.  Just then, something bright and red rolled into view atop the grass in front of her.  She blinked brightly and clasped the fresh apple between two shivering hooves.  “Wh-What... What...?”  She glanced aside at the young adult pony.

        “It's an apple, smarty pants.  Y'know, the round things that hang off of trees and occasionally get tossed around by angry strawheads with more freckles than boyfriends?”  Rainbow Dash winked across the rays of melting sunlight before taking a luscious bite out of one of the three remaining fruits in her possession.  “Mmmphh... Hmmph... And before you start spreading rumors, Applejack and I don't really hate each other.  Mmmph... We’ve had this lovely little game of 'tag' going on since the dawn of time and today was just her turn to be slapped upside the mane.”  She gulped down the bite and smirked.  “You just got a front-row seat to our little prank war, so enjoy your souvenir.  You've earned it.”

        Scootaloo's heart skipped a beat.  She blinked wide.  “I...”  Her lips quivered.  “I-I earned this?”

        “You were my bait, weren't you?”  Rainbow Dash managed a snicker, took another royal bite of the apple, and glanced off towards the burning west horizon.  The rows and rows of trees whispered with the fluttering advent of starlight.  “Nothing scarier than being the front meatwall before Ponvyille's resident cowfilly losing her cool.  Heh—AJ thinks she's such a straight-laced, dependable saint.  Still, I'm the only one in town who's figured her out.  There's an angry hothead boiling beneath the surface of her freckled shell; I can smell it.”

        Rainbow Dash took another bite, nearly choked on an explosive giggle, swallowed, and smirked.

        “I remember this one time that a guard pony from Canterlot tried hitting on her.  Applejack kept her cool until he licked her, right in the middle of downtown Ponyville!  I dunno how young you are, kiddo, but grown-up ponies only lick each other in public when they're engaged, married, or what-have-you.  Anyways, I never saw a filly buck a stallion so hard through a store window.  Hahahah—Bon Bon was at her wit's end.  Naturally, Applejack felt sorry and helped patch up the front of the novelty shop the very next day, with no help from the guard pony—that coward ran back to Her Majesty's Palace.  Heheh... Still, I don't know what embarrassed AJ more, the fact that it all started from a stallion hitting on her, or that a random temper tantrum made her show her true colors for once.  Heh... 'Honest Applejack' my left flank-cheek.  The way I see it: every pony has an angry warhorse spirit hiding deep inside.  I bet you've got a fury of your own to let loose every now and then, squirt.  Why, the way you mercilessly pound away on that metal slab of yours—I swear—it looks like you're ready to take on the whole world—”

        Rainbow Dash glanced down.  She stopped in mid-sentence, blinked wide, and nearly dropped her partially-eaten fruit .

        In less than a minute, Scootaloo had completely scarfed her way to the hard core of her apple.  Every edible part of the fruit had been shoved down her throat.  A splash of apple mush hung off her orange face in sloppy curds.  She was nibbling pitifully on the black husk left over, her teeth crunching at the seeds, when she froze under the gawking gaze of her older companion.  Still as a statue, she wilted with furiously blushing cheeks.

        “Erm... Uhm...”  The orphan raised a forelimb to her face and wiped half of the fruit bits off her nervous grin.  “It's... It's good stuff... Applejack's apples... eh heh heh...”

        Rainbow Dash raised an eyebrow, her colorful mane blowing in the last warm breeze of the day.  Such a beautiful snapshot melted under a snorting sound as the blue pegasus fell to the grassy hilltop, slapping the soft soil with a hard hoof and laughing her face off.  “Hahahahaha—Whew!  You're a trip, Skunkaloo.”

        “Scootaloo.”

        “Whatever.  Heheheh...”  Rainbow wiped a tear or two away and grinned, red-in-the face from hysterics.  “You'd darn well better work on those ladylike manners of yours.  Haven't you heard we've got a princess visiting in a week?”

        “We... Uhm...”  Scootaloo gulped and wiped her cheek again before sitting up straight beside the mare.  “We do?”

        “Heck yeah!  We've got the Summer Sun Celebration coming up!  Didn't you listen to Applejack?”  She stared blankly at the foal, then rolled a pair of ruby eyes at herself.  “Oh—pffft—right, who can?  Ahem.”  She smiled.  “Once a year, Princess Celestia visits a lucky Equestrian city and raises the sun right there in front of everypony.  This year, she's chosen to do her magical goddess stuff right here in Ponyville!  Pretty wicked, huh?”

        “I... uh... S-Sure!”  Scootaloo smiled crookedly.  “Pretty wicked...”

        “Yeesh.  Try not to get too excited, kid.  You might have to clean up after yourself.”

        “Er...”

        “Well, it's gonna be my job to clear away all the clouds for her arrival.  What's the point in having the Goddess of the Sun arrive if there's a whole bunch of overcast to put a damper on her job, right?”

        “I... guess...?”

        Rainbow Dash rolled her eyes.  She playfully nudged Scootaloo's soiled cheek with a hoof and stood up.  “You gotta work on your pony skills, pipsqueak.  I swear, it feels like I'm talking to a tiny, orange squirrel.”

        “I'm sorry.”  Scootaloo sighed.  “This... Uhm... This hasn't exactly been a nice week for me.”

        “Good thing I decided to show up, huh?”  Rainbow Dash smirked wide.  Twitching her wings, she juggled an apple and tossed it so that it landed next to the nibbled core in front of the foal.  “Knock yourself out, kid.”

        “I...”  Scootaloo bit her lip.  “Did I earn that too?”

        “Sure, whatever.  You listened to me gab on long enough, huh?  Anyways, I gotta make like an ogre's behind and split.  Like the Mayor of Ponyville keeps telling me, there's a crapload of cloud-clearing for me to plan between now and the Celebration.”

        “So you're off to work?”  Scootaloo asked, cradling the fresh new apple to herself.

        “Pfft!  Screw that!  I've got Wonderbolts to impress!  I'll get done what needs to get done.  There's nothing so important in life that it can't be finished at the last second.  That said, do you need somepony to hitch you a ride home?”

        “Ahem...”  Scootaloo stood up tall and strong.  “That won't be necessary.  My folks work all hours of the day and night. I can look after myself, y'know.”

        “Heh... I bet you can do just that.”  Rainbow Dash winked.  She hovered over and ruffled the twitching foal's pink mane.  “You're something else, ya lil’ squirt.  If only more pipsqueaks your age were as sassy as you, I might have hope for the future.”

        Scootaloo rediscovered her frown.  With a playful raspberry, she retorted, “You're still a barn-smashing psycho.”

        Rainbow smiled.  “And Celestia help Equestria when there're none like me left.”  She shot skyward with a multi-colored blur.

        Scootaloo was surprised to hear a young voice chirping skyward.  She was even more surprised to recognize the unfolding words as her own:  “Hey Rainbow Dash!  Are you gonna be at the Summer Sun Celebration?”

        “You can bet your stupid metal tray, pipsqueak!”  In a thunderous vapor of flight, the blue pegasus was gone.

        The orange foal's lungs deflated down a crest of excited breaths.  She hugged the red apple to her chest, feeling her heartbeat straight through the squeezable fruit.  Scootaloo suddenly couldn't remember the bruises, shivers, and tears of the past few days.  Taking advantage of her forgetfulness, she took a fierce bite of the apple, then another, and a dozen more.  She filled her enraptured stomach while the shadows filled the great Equestrian Valley, ushering in a new night... and a new life.

        There was suddenly no shame to it at all.

        That night, upstairs in the loft of the dilapidated barn, a halo of glittering starlight fell down over a young pegasus beneath a fresh hole formed in the ceiling of the rustic structure.  Scootaloo clutched the blanket to herself, her body still turned obstinately to the white box and the enticing cupcake hidden within.

        The filly was cold.  The filly was shivering.  For the first time in so many fitful nights, however, she was smiling.

        “Heh...”  She murmured to herself, navigated a wave of shivers, and managed a giggle.  “'Snakes on a Flank'... hehehehehehe... Hmmm...”  Snuggling into the depths of her hovel, sprinkled with fresh memories, Scootaloo closed her eyes and greeted slumber with a smile.

        The sundered world rumbled around her.  Crackling explosions and bright flashes of light ruptured the air beyond the tiny cranny within which she hid.  Scootaloo trembled, assaulted with the cold and the noise all the same.  Her eyes squinted open, tearing up as she sniffled and choked back the hundredth frightened sob of the evening.

        Over the past few days, the last pony had gathered enough supplies to turn her claustrophobic little niche into a sturdy enough hideout to rival the torchlit place she had built on the Wasteland surface.  However, this cramped excuse for a cave wasn't nearly sufficient at sheltering her from the regularly scheduled nightmare that haunted the sky.

        The latest stormfront was billowing across the deathscape, and cyclonic swirls of thunder and lightning were scooping their violent way down into the abyss of Cloudsdale's inner ruins.  Weathering a Wasteland storm was traumatizing enough at ground level.  Here, in the gaping wound of the world, the echoing bedlam created by the electrical event was positively deafening.  Scootaloo heard the shattering of rock and debris as an errant lightning bolt or two struck the rubble not too far from the mouth of her niche.  At any second, she figured, the brilliant phenomenon would soon reach into the cavern and strike her, lighting her up like a winged torch.  She awaited death like she anticipated her next breath, full of cold and relentless terror.

        A few hours ago, she had thrown up, which was the best evidence the last pony could have that she had finally discovered a way to properly nourish herself by that point.  Several scavenging trips had at last unearthed a Cloudsdalian supply depot, within which the filly discovered several jars of oats.  Instead of scarfing down the precious edibles, she had wisely decided to ration what she discovered, though it didn't help much that what little she had allowed herself to devour that day had come right back out her esophagus halfway through the nightmarish stormfront rampaging above.

        The smell of her own bile filled Scootaloo's nostrils as she shivered inside the tiny chamber of rock.  She knew that she was lucky to have food.  She knew that she was lucky to have spears, a modicum of supplies, and a saddlebag that she had managed to alter so that it could fit her petite size.  More than anything, however, Scootaloo needed to build a fire.  It was either find some flint or tinder, or die of cold during one of these pathetically futile attempts at sleep.  The stormfront was horrible and frightening, but at least it forced the adrenaline in her sobbing shell of a body to bring warmth to her twitching extremities.  Fear was healthy, so long as it kept her blood pumping.  Scootaloo dreaded the day when relaxation would be the end of her.  As the thunder and lightning roared on, she stopped fighting the tears, for they warmed her just the same.

         A blue feather fluttered in the cold breeze that wafted across the inner ruins.  Scootaloo wore this piece of Rainbow Dash—while the other three were safely bagged away in the hollow of her cave—as she climbed over a tall mountain of debris the day after the stormfront.  She poked a Cloudsdalian spear at a chunk of moonrock.

        Scootaloo's violet eyes narrowed as she sifted through the white powdery stone that had been charred black by lightning strikes overnight.  Curiously, she brushed a few flecks of white moonrock aside and uncovered—for the first time before her vision—a few shards of brightly colored gemstones.  It impressed her that such prismatically distinct rocks could somehow be hidden away beneath the ivory surface of the lunar material.  She briefly pondered if the lightning had somehow alchemically produced the crystalline substances, or if perhaps it was something else.

        There was a distant echoing sound from across the subterranean expanse.

        Scootaloo gasped and spun about, the weight of the saddlebag shifting along her flank.  She gripped her spear tightly and peered across the shadowy domain.  Beyond several bands of twilight, flanked by a curtain of waterfalls, four or five small specks could be seen climbing alongside a steep cliff-face of sky marble.  Their movement was freakishly fast, and even from a far glance, Scootaloo guessed that the figures were bipeds.

        They disappeared as swiftly as the last pony had spotted them, vanishing beyond a mound of crumpled ivory that rose in the foreground of the young equine's view.  Predictably, every coat hair on the back of Scootaloo's shaved mane rose.  Aside from diamond dogs and dragon whelps, she only knew one type of creature that marched upright.  Her ears pricked, as if hearing the shrill, phantom sounds of whooping and hollering voices beyond the twilight.

        She needed to get out of there.  She needed to ditch the moonrocks, scamper back up the hill, find a huge boulder to roll in front of her cave, and hide in the back of her niche until the shuffling figures went away or starved or both.

        However, Scootaloo knew that she also needed warmth if she was to survive, and all of her ingredients for torch-lighting had been left abandoned up in her surface-level hovel.  The little pegasus remembered seeing trolls carrying torches across the wasteland.  If she could somehow discover what secret it was that those pale leathery creatures knew—about how to spark fires in a world of lifeless desolation and chaos—then she might not only learn how to prosper like they did, but she might even be able to surpass them, even inside this pit of all places.

        The same ear that pricked to hear those creatures' haunting noises just then felt the soft blue follicles of Rainbow Dash's feather tucked against it.  Scootaloo gripped her spear tighter in the crook of her hooves.  As her jaw clenched, she marched downhill towards the abyss, instead of fleeing uphill towards safety.

        Hours later, the orange pegasus shuffled forward—chest-deep in dust and snow—as she rounded the crest of a pile of rubble.  Pointing her spear forward, she came to a stop, held her breath, and nervously peered over the edge of the ruins beneath her.  She squinted and saw a plateau of flat granite, atop which several pegasus chariots had fallen in a splintery heap, out of which spilled innumerable clumps of wooden and metal debris.

        Scootaloo was dead quiet, gazing cautiously at the scene.  She was not alone; several creatures bounded across the site, pilfering what they could from the fallen, smashed chariots.  They moved with a calculated intelligence and even tossed hushed, grunting words at one another.  What was more, they did not possess an identical paleness of leathery skin.  Their flesh was a hodgepodge of numerous, muted colors—of grays and browns and dark greens.  Additionally, many of them were half-clothed, wearing vests and jackets and leather bandoleers equipped with a grand assortment of intricately crafted tools.

        The last pony raised a curious eyebrow, her breath haloing a confused expression.  She was a great deal more perplexed than frightened.  Regardless, ponies these creatures were not.  Stealing the makings of a campfire was suddenly the last thing on Scootaloo's fitful mind.  Her heart skipped a beat when she realized that she was seeing only four creatures rummaging through the Cloudsdalian wreckage beneath her, when she could have sworn she had spotted five figures from afar at first glance.  With a nervous shuffle of limbs, Scootaloo turned around and made to trot back down the hillside.

        Instead, she ran right into a frowning face equipped with copper goggles.  “Hraaaugh!”  A short creature devilishly shrieked and swung a heavy wrench across the length of Scootaloo's spear, snapping it in two.

        Scootaloo fell back on her useless wings before she even had the breath to gasp.  This impulse was also cut short when a four-fingered hand viciously gripped the nape of her neck, shoving her convulsing body to the mound of rubble beneath her.  The creature leered over the pony, holding the wrench high in a threatening grip.

        “Were you spying on us?!”  The bipedal thing spat, its long, bat-like ears twitching over a fountain of thick, black hair.  “Was the infernal Dimming not enough that you had to come and finish the job, glue stick?!”

        “You...”  Scootaloo shivered as she sputtered for breath.  In the midst of her fright, she judged that the creature wasn't any taller than an adult pony.  To a helpless foal such as herself, it could just as well have been a towering giant.  “You c-can talk?!  I d-didn't think trolls could sp-speak!”

        “Troll?!”  The figure's goggles twitched and swirled in a mechanic fashion, reflecting a frightened pegasus doubly.  “I am no troll!  I am an imp!”  He raised a clawed foot behind him, his muscles coiling.  “And you just snuck up on the wrong clan of goblins, you filthy manure bath!”

        Scootaloo gasped, eying the creature's leg.  “Wait!  Please!  Let's j-just talk about—”

        “Nnnngh!”  He kicked her hard in the chest.

        Scootaloo lost all the oxygen in her lungs.  By the second twitch of her pained eyes, she realized that the world was spinning.  She slammed hard on her spine against the plateau of rock below, being rained on by a shower of pebbles launched from her awkward fall downhill.  Several gasping voices surrounded her as she struggled to climb back onto her wobbly legs.

        “Hey!  Hey Matthais!”  The voice of her assailant barked from somewhere above the dizzy scene.  “I found one of them!  Alive!”

        “Where?!  Where is the pathetic, prancing murderer?!”  A pale figure clambered up from Scootaloo's peripheral vision.  “Lemme at her!”

        “Mmmf...”  Scootaloo winced, teared, and looked up.  “H-Huh?”

        She saw the pointed teeth of a snarling goblin, followed by a metal gauntlet flying straight into her vision.

        The world spun again, this time laced with a spray of red liquid as the gasping foal fell in a quivering heap against a shattered chariot.  Her mouth was filling with a hot, pool of blood, choking her every attempt to breathe.  No less than two seconds into this vomitous sensation, the metallic fist was being slammed into her again, this time impacting her unguarded ribcage.

        “Aaaugh!”  Scootaloo whimpered.  She tried to run away but only collapsed painfully onto her chest, shuffling like a severed earthworm towards a bright splotch of twilight.  The air filled with the angry barks and grunts of strange voices as she heard a pitter-patter of toes, followed by several more kicks to her flank, thigh, spine, and finally her skull.  The last blow produced a sickly pop in her ear, and she felt half of her skull heating up, as if something fragile was leaking deep inside.  She coughed and sputtered, her eyes barely opening in time to see a blue feather fluttering free, landing on the granite floor, and then being torn to shreds as a pale foot stomped over it.  Her gasping vision was suddenly hoisted to look into a frowning goblin's face.

        “Speak, you filthy animal!  I asked you a question!”        Scootaloo's eyes were rolling back in her head.  Her nose twitched, faintly aware of blood trickling down from her shaved head.  “Nnngh-Snkkktk... What... Wh-What?” she mewled.

        “Hghh!”  The goblin answered with a savage metal fist slammed across the side of her splitting cheek.  He spat on her bruised, twitching body and hissed, “What did you do?!  What did you pathetic, magical pieces of crap do to the daylight?!”

        “The world's gone to crap and it's all your fault!” others shouted.

        “You and your Sun Goddess brought the Dimming upon us!”

        “Everything is dead now!”

        “We were close to manifesting Petra.  We were close to founding a home for impkind.  We built a frickin' city out of your garbage, because you refused us sky marble.  Now we've lost everything—everything, thanks to you!”  The pale one spat while his green, goggled companion slid down to his side, handing him the heavy wrench.  The frowning goblin palmed it in a threatening manner as he paced around the quivering, hiccuping equine.  “Now we're stuck down here trying to clean up the mess you've left behind!  Are you going to give us answers or do I have to beat it out of you?!”

        “Please... Pl-Please...”  Scootaloo sobbed, spat blood, and fought the bubbling bile rising up her throat as she pawed a desperate, orange hoof for the scattered blue threads of Rainbow Dash's crushed feather.  “I'll d-do anything...”  She caved, she begged.  She saw two comatose figures lying in a bed somewhere, covered in jaundice.  She wanted to join them so badly.  “J-Just stop hitting me...”  The filly pleaded.  “It h-hurts... It hurts s-so bad...”

        In answer to that, the goblin planted a heavy foot over her hoof before it could so much as touch the blue strands.  The filly let forth an agonized shriek as he leered over her, his companions crowding tightly around.

        “What caused this?!  Where did the Sun and Moon go?!  Was it enough that you played gods with the weather that you had to play gods with the earth as well?!”

        “You tell her, Matthais!”

        “Shut your dang trap, Braxx.  I've got this.”  The pale one gave her a swift kick in the chest, summoning another yelping cry as she trembled beneath him.  “Well, glue stick?!  We're waiting!”

        “I... I-I don't know...”  The last pony hyperventilated, curling into a fetal position as her tiny wing-stubs formed angelic silhouettes in a pool of her own blood.  “I-I'm all alone.  Everypony I've seen is d-dead.  Everypony is dead and I don't know... I j-just don't kn-know why...”  She spasmed uncontrollably as his shadow shifted above her.        Matthais was raising the blunt wrench up high while his frowning companions apathetically looked on.  “Oh, you know, you worthless glue stick.  And you're going to tell us.  Then maybe—just maybe—we'll give you the quick and happy death you ponies have refused all of impkind with your black magic!”  With that, he sneered and brought the full weight of the wrench down over her blackening sight.

        “Is something wrong with your ears, glue stick?!”

        Scootaloo stared silently, her goggled eyes cold and deadpan.

        “Huh?!”  A goblin frowned up at her in the middle of one of the many lofty, metallic alleyways of Petra.  “I said, did you hear me, glue stick?!”  He hung off a flickering, copper lamppost and pointed a blunt dagger at her armored flank.  “You'd better watch your step!  I am Blink of Sea Blood!  I'm the  head of local security around this strut!  Either you pay the toll or all my Sea-Bleeder brothers will come and rip your eyeballs out!”

        The last pony slowly nodded.  With a brown hoof, she reached up and pulled her leather mask free.  “I wasn't aware that I had to pay a toll to walk these streets.  This is certainly news to me, Mister... what was your name again?”

        The bat-eared half-ling sneered, hopped down from the lamppost, and marched towards her while juggling the blade threateningly.  “You friggin' deaf or something, oats-for-breath?  I said my name is Blink of Sea Blood and—”  The goblin's eyes bulged as an armored forelimb yanked him down by the neck and slammed him cheek-first against the perforated metal platform beneath them both.  “Ooof!”

        “How nice.”  Scootaloo said and clopped a hoof down in front of his twitching nose.  “Now allow me to tell you my name.”  She rotated her horseshoe.  A shiny, copper blade flashed in front of his gasping face.  “I am Scootaloo, the last pony, and I'm going to rip your tongue out and eat it for dinner if you don't put it to better use than lying.”

        “L-L-Lying...?!”  The imp stammered, pinned down by her merciless weight.

        “Mmmmhmmm...”  She leaned forward and whispered towards his twitching ears  “You see, I've read up on your kind to know enough about impcity custom.  If you really did belong to a clan of 'Sea Bleeders' or whatcrap, then you'd be wearing a banner around your person to indicate that.  I see nothing on your chest, arms, or shoulders, which lends me to think that you're just a cowardly, homeless beggar who thinks he can intimidate visiting merchants into coughing up a few dozen strips as soon as you flash your pathetic little butter knife in their faces.”  Her goggles glinted in the lanternlight as she tilted her gaze up, spotting several distant pedestrians who were staring indifferently at the altercation.  “Judging by the absolute droves of thugs rushing up to assist their 'doomed brother' as we speak, I'm guessing I've made a proper assessment of your worthlessness.”

        “Please... Please...”  The imp suddenly whimpered, shivering under her grasp as the pony's sharp blade danced near his reddened cheek.  “I-I'm sorry!  Please don't—”

        “Don't what?  Skin you alive and feed you to the trolls of the Wasteland?”  Scootloo droned.  “Because that's what all 'glue sticks' do, right?  Isn't that what you've been taught?”

        “I...”  He gulped and trembled.  “I-I don't know...”

        “The first honest thing you've said in your life, I'm willing to bet.”  She effortlessly hoisted the goblin straight up to his feet.

        He gasped as he was flung up against the metal lamppost.  The goblin's petite body flinched under the flat of the horseshoe being pressed against his chest as Scootaloo leaned towards him with a frowning face.

        “How about this?  I'll give you an opportunity to be of use to me.”  Her nostrils flared as her goggles reflected twin, panicked expressions.  “I need to get into the ruins of Cloudsdale.”

        “Cl-Cloudsdale?”  He gulped, shivering all over at this point.  “Wh-What's Cloudsdale?”

        She briefly sighed, but maintained her firm voice. “The mining operation.  I need to get inside the giant quarry where all of the goblins are harvesting sky marble.  Specifically, I need to get to a spot that's two kilometers from the western cliff-face and half-a-kilometer from the southern slopes.”

        “The...”  He bit his lip and nervously smiled.  “The central p-pits are under control of the Hex-Bleeders.  If you want to get into their area of operations, you have to t-take it up with their clan leader.”

        “Hmm... I see...”  She nodded slowly, then pressed her weight firmer against him.  “Just where can I find this leader of the Hex Blood clan?”

        “Strut Eighteen!” he exclaimed.  “Level Alpha!  Look for the goblins with crimson bandannas on their heads.  That's the m-mark of the Hex Blood clan!”  the imp said, then winced dramatically, expecting a vicious pummeling to punctuate the exchange.

        Instead, Scootaloo hummed thoughtfully.  “Hmmm.  Strut Eighteen.  That's only about three platforms above, if I'm not mistaken.  Not too terribly far.”  She released her pressure.

        “Nngh!”  The goblin fell on his backside, shaking a few mental cobwebs loose.  He was surprised to find a pair of metal objects falling into his lap.  Blinking, he cradled a pair of silver strips and gazed at them, his jaw dropping open.  “T-Two strips...?”  He glanced up, dumbstruck.  “Th-That's more than I've had in a week...”

        “You assisted me, didn’t you?”  Scootaloo slipped her mask back on and gave him a lasting glance over her armored shoulder.  “Maybe, from now on, you will consider helping visitors instead of pointing sharp things at them.  Perhaps you'll even win the respect of a clan and not be homeless anymore.”

        “What...”  The goblin gulped and gazed in awe after her.  “Who are you?”

        She trotted away, down an alleyway full of goblins who stared suspiciously at the filly.

        “Somepony who earns,” she muttered.

        Walls of golden light flashed down Scootaloo's armored figure.  Quietly, she rode a swaying elevator car up a towering spindle of aluminum towards the eighteenth strut built from the base of Petra.  The rising metal platform rattled around her like a cage as she gazed straight up.  The giant, golden discs of the imp city’s districts loomed above, piercing the black smog with a vibrant, platinum glow.  Taking a deep breath, she glanced down.  Beyond her hooves, she could see through the metallic spiderweb platform that formed the “floor” of the elevator car.  She was able to spot the smog-laden surface of the Wasteland over a thousand meters below.  The entire bottom half of Petra loomed between her and ground level.  Scootaloo knew that her armor was restraining her wings.  She imagined that if the elevator's platform was to suddenly snap apart, she would fall for a good minute and a half before finally and fatally hitting the earth.

        There was a snickering sound.  Scootaloo glanced aside.

        She was sharing the elevator car with three goblin workers.  They each wore green collars around their necks, like long emerald scarves.  The fellow clan members murmured among each other, secretively, casting the pegasus several smirking glances.

        Scootaloo's nostrils flared.  She leaned back against the side of the car and watched as the hulking shape of Eighteen Strut loomed within view above them.  A heterogeneous sea of lanternlights, steam boilers, oil fires, and sparkling tesla coils came into focus.

        “Ahem...”

        The filly glanced lethargically at her fellow passengers.

        “A long way from your stables, hmm?”  The tallest of the goblins smirked up at her under a glinting pair of work goggles.  “Does the pony come here to die?”

        The last pony stared blankly back at him.  “What?  And steal your life’s ambition?”

        The other two goblins poked at their talkative companion and laughed.  He fidgeted where he stood before smirking awkwardly.  There was a loud hissing noise of compressed hydraulics as the rattling elevator came to a stop.  The door flew open with a clatter, and the three goblins scurried out, snickering and chattering in a noisy cloud.  A slumped Scootaloo marched after them, making her lonely way through the middle streets of Strut Eighteen, Level Beta.

Here, the streets were crowded, positively drenched in imp life.  Scootaloo imagined the Hex-Bleeders to be a very important clan, in that their districts were filled to the brim with merchants, craftsmakers, traders, and even peddlers of food.  If fate could somehow take the open market of pre-Cataclysm Ponyville, replace every pony with a goblin, and bathe it with soot and grime, such could have poetically described Strut Eighteen.

        This stretch of an analogy ended the very moment Scootaloo found herself having to step over a bloodstained patch of metal sidewalk.  Her brow furrowed as she glanced around the streetcorners of the rusted district, spotting random bulkheads stained with the tell-tale signs of ancient scuffles, all of them having achieved a juicy end.  The distant sounds of angry shouts and steam pistol shots added to the foreboding ambiance of the crowded latticework as Scootaloo shuffled along.

        Level Beta was a claustrophobic thing, a thin sandwich of a horizontal space squished between two separate and identical floors.  Everything about the place was a hollow web of porous metal.  Glancing down, Scootaloo saw straight through the bulkheads to witness the paths and buildings of the district directly beneath her.  Looking up, the last pony spotted the topmost level of Strut Eighteen and the many soles of pedestrian feet shuffling immediately above.  She figured that every circular platform of Petra was built in this same, highly revealing way.  The goblins had very little to hide in their city of industry.  The only opaque things in the neighborhood were the iron factories and aluminum houses that randomly dotted the platforms, but even those buildings spared enough windows for wandering eyes to peer through.

        Still, Petra was a machine first and a dwelling place second.  Every shop, every saloon, every blacksmith, every foundry, and every office was really just an offshoot to a giant contraption that never stopped expanding for a second.  As Scootaloo trotted along, she gazed about and spotted random clusters of goblins huddled around welding tools, applying the finishing touches to new metallic structures that would never truly be finished.  There was no end to construction, so long as the imps lived and breathed; there was no end to Petra.

        Through the translucent walls of metal webbing, endless clusters of rotating gears and pumping pistons filled the rattling metropolis with a constant, mechanical heartbeat.  Millions upon millions of kilometers of pipe snaked around every nook and cranny, pumping steam relentlessly through the circulatory system of the two-kilometer high structure.  If Petra was alive, Scootaloo was navigating its lungs, and those rusted tubes were filled with a smoggy breath that didn't know when to quit.  Occasional vents of steam billowed through the platforms and walls of the place to bathe the last pony in a warm mist, constantly reminding her that she was just a trotting infectant in the middle of an alien organism of rust.

        Scootaloo hardly needed the city's mechanisms to remind her of this.  Every set of goblin eyes followed her for the full length of time it took the last pony to wander down a metal-plated street, only to experience the same hard-edged scrutiny upon the next rusted block of suspended urbanscape.  She gazed back at every single one of them, meeting their goggled gazes with that of her own.  If what she had read about impkind was correct, her best chance at avoiding the harassment of goblins was to bestow upon them the same distaste that was being tossed her way.  She only wished she had known that when she was much younger.  Books eventually taught her how to avoid pain; experience showed her how to deal with it.  Some way or another, she would always have to deal with it.

        Goblins were short, razor-clawed, thick-skinned creatures.  However, they were hardly monstrosities.  For the first time, Scootaloo saw imp children.  They gazed down at her innocently from the upper stories of rusted shanty houses, their bright eyes reflecting the gold lanternlight of Strut Eighteen around them.  Young goblin teenagers huddled around street corners, staring at the last pony with as much curiosity as disgust, too shocked to toss anything insulting her way.  For a brief moment, the pegasus wondered if perhaps she had very little to worry about in Petra after all.

        Then she found clusters of miners.  These goblins loitered around smoldering forges, murmuring amidst each other before their shifts came.  Then they would descend to the lower struts to take a train ride to the Cloudsdalian ruins and face the labor ahead of them.  In the meantime, however, they stopped whatever it was they were chatting about to stare fixedly at the last pony, their razor-sharp jaws locked into jeering smirks as they murmured and spoke hushed, offensive things behind her flank.  One danced out into the open street and charaded a “prancing” motion, all the while braying forth a melodramatic whinnie.  His fellow cohorts laughed loudly, their voices ringing against the metal walls full of gears and steam vents.

        Scootaloo sighed hard through her nostrils.  She glanced aside, briefly spotting a full line of workers—all wearing matching purple eyepatches as a clan sign.  These scarred, one-eyed goblins gave the last pony a lasting glare that could set snow on fire.  For a moment, she imagined that if there were no other goblin clans present, these half-lings in particular would have no hesitation gutting her right there and then, out in the open.

        She turned to look ahead when something harshly bumped into her side.  She teetered briefly on her hooves, expertly absorbing the brunt of the blow through her thick leather armor.  Scootaloo glanced over her shoulder in time to see a line of goblin miners marching the opposite way down the street.  One imp towards the back of the procession chuckled, rubbing a jutting elbow.

        “Whoops!  By Dimming’s Blight, did I just run into a side of meat?” he uttered.

        “Before the next stormfront, I think it will be!”  a companion chirped.  “Roasted at that!”

        “Hahahaha!”

        “Heheheh... Who the heck would eat broiled glue?  Heheheh...”

        Scootaloo didn't have time to frown at them when a splash of horrible, smelly liquid drenched her left flank.  She glanced aside in time to see a mother goblin standing upon the threshold of a household with an empty lavatory tray in her grasp.

        “Watch where you trot, pony.  You might not like what you step in,” she muttered, her glare betraying the fact that the drenching was hardly an accident.  She shuffled back into the house, closing the rusted aluminum door and blocking out the curious gaze of two tiny children within.

        The last pony blinked.  She glanced down at her two left hooves, watching as the offensive yellow liquid oozed down her limbs and dripped grotesquely through the porous grate to the streets below her.  Flaing her nostrils through the offending stench, she marched forward, undaunted... at least until her front right hoof nearly tripped on something.

        With a metal clank, Scootaloo realized that her forward horseshoe had slid loose again.  Cursing briefly to herself, she picked the curved metal object up in her teeth and glanced about for an empty spot to sit.  She decided on a lonely street corner ahead of her and shuffled over towards it, squatting down low so as to have full access to her right forelimb.  Muttering to herself, she worked on the laborious task of attaching the infernal article to her hoof.  Secretly she wished she had visited Bruce for a little bit longer and bought some new shoe pieces.  In a world full of dead ponies, finding a good farrier was next to impossible.

        She was interrupted in the middle of this thought by a chunk of dull sky marble ricocheting severely off her leather cap.  The last pony barely moved, though the impact caught her attention nonetheless.  Gazing across the street, she saw a gaggle of young adult goblins frowning at her, their reddened ears wobbling as they hurled insults along with their rocks.

        “Glue stick!  Go back to the Wasteland where you belong!”

        “Yeah!  Roll into a ditch somewhere and choke on hay, you dang sky-stealer!”

        “Sky-stealing glue stick!”  One youth twirled his whole body in the effort of flinging an ivory pebble her way.  “This isn't your steam anymore!”

        Scootaloo effortlessly dodged the thrown rock.  Without looking, she pulled a yellow-painted runestone out of her pocket and slid it halfway across the street with an errant hoof.  “H'rhnum,” she mumbled.

        In a purple haze of light, the rune etched across the moonrock faded, and a batch of chemicals inside mixed together.  Soon, a series of bright, golden sparks exploded at the twitching feet of the startled youths.  The goblins shrieked and scampered nervously away from the brilliant, frightening, but altogether harmless flare.  Watching from the upper balcony of a rusted metal saloon, a half-dozen gray-haired imps chuckled and raised drinks in a mock toast.  They scoffed at Scootaloo between sips, murmuring illicitly to one another while casting sly glances the pegasus’ way.

        The last pony fiddled and fiddled with her horseshoe, suddenly overwhelmed by the noises and sounds of that rusted cage of a city district.  Before her, a ramp rose towards Alpha Level above, but she suddenly didn't have the strength to get up from her lonely spot.  As the clanking and rattling of gears filled her ears, she closed her eyes, sighing long and hard.  The last pony tried taking herself to a happy place, but—as always in her life—she only found herself returning to far darker, danker hovels.

        When Scootaloo's eyes finally opened, she was more disappointed than shocked to still be alive.  Every square centimeter of her bruised skin throbbed as she witnessed the pock-marked ceiling of wreckage shuffling above her.  She realized that she was being dragged limply across the inner ruins of Cloudsdale.  Wincing, she glanced down to see a hand with four pale fingers gripped around her left rear limb.  Before she could summon an inquisitive voice, the little filly was flung towards the foreboding edge of a jutting cliff-face.

        “Ungh!”  she grunted, her front limbs hanging over the precipice.  Scootaloo gritted her teeth, tasting dried blood on her chapped lips as she gazed sickly into a broad, black chasm.  Across the empty expanse, she could spot a thin, granite sliver of rocky promontories littered with metallic debris, what looked to be a pile of discarded machinery that was hardly the product of Equestrian tinkering.

        “Alright, glue stick,” the voice of her chief tormentor, Matthais, grunted into the snow-laden air of the subterranean pit.  The pale goblin paced around her on shuffling, clawed feet.  Scootaloo became faintly aware of his four companions squatting by the wayside, rummaging through what remained of her saddlebag.  They had torn it off her catatonic body after she fell unconscious from the beating.  “This is your last chance to be of use to us.”

        There was a threatening sound of ringing metal.  Scootaloo squinted to see a flicker of twilight glinting off a rusted dagger.  The pale goblin marched towards her, hoisted her with a vicious grip of one wing, and aimed the knife straight at her throat.  She struggled not to whimper, or else her throat might accidentally poke itself on the sharp shiv tightly held against her orange coat.

        “For whatever your pathetic life is worth, we've got stuff to help it last longer.  Unfortunately for the both of us, most of that stuff was lost when the wagon we were pulling fell down this gigantic sinkhole that your stupid cloud city made when it collided with the earth.  Now we're all stuck here, and we can't get to the tools that can help us climb out of this festering pit of refuse.”  He pointed a gnarled finger across the grand, gaping chasm.  “What's more, there are these nasty creatures lurking about—no doubt some failed experiments that your Goddess forgot to seal up when she let the world go 'kaboom.'  No matter, if you want to make up for all of your race's pitiful mistakes, taking flight across the way and fetching us our tools would be a nice start.  Do you hear me, glue stick?!  This is the last time any creature is ever gonna be merciful with you ever.  Do this for us, and we'll pretend that we shouldn't just kill you right here and now.  We'll not bother you again.  Got it?”

        “I... I...”

        “Well?!”  Matthais elbowed her hard in the shoulder and tightened his grip on her tiny wing.  “Are you going to be a smart little horsie and take advantage of this opportunity?!  Or is your head about as dense as your hooves?”

        “I...”  Scootaloo murmured, her feathered appendages twitching pitifully in the goblin's clawed grasp.  “I'm too young to fly...”

        “What was that?!”

        “I-I can't fly, alright?!”  Scootaloo spat, gulping a lump down her haggard throat.  “I... I can't get your stuff for you... I'm sorry...”

        Matthais dropped her in a grunting slump.  He stood up, fuming, and stifled a rising growl long enough to bark over his shoulder toward his companions.  “She says she can't fly!  Petra forbid, we come across the only pegasus after the Dimming who's not a smoldering pile of dust and bones and she can't even freakin' take wing!”

        “Hahaha!”  Braxx laughed as he rifled through one of the saddlebags' pockets, stowing several of Scootaloo's belongings in the many pouches of his bandoleer.  He adjusted his goggles and smirked Matthais' way.  “What did you expect?!  All that those glue sticks were good for was singing and dancing!”

        “Not to mention flinging cyclones our way!”  another goblin remarked.  She opened a can of oats, sniffed it, and poured a little bit down her throat.  Immediately, she spat the stuff out and made a retching face.  “Gyaaah!  How could they have eaten this crap?!  It's a good thing most of them died!  Anything that eats garbage should become one with the worms.”

        “This puts us back to square one!”  Matthais grunted, shrugging wildly.  “Most of our weapons are on the far end of the ravine!  It's not like we can scavenge anything from those worthless fliers' buildings!  The most they ever crafted to defend themselves with was spears!”

        “It's friggin' cold down here, and that glue stick's got something that none of those brittle fossils have got!”  Another goblin muttered, nodding Matthais' way.  “Skin her while the flesh is still warm and pliable.”

        “Works for me.”  The pale goblin turned and knelt before Scootaloo.  Wasting no time, he brought the knife to her trachea.  “First let's get all the air out of you...”

        The orange filly trembled.  She closed her eyes.  Somepony's devilish grin greeted her across a crimson sunset.  She reached blindly towards it, calling out her name.  Only a whimpering sound came out.

        “I-I'm sorry!  Please!  Please stop hurting me!”

        Against the green goblin's plea, a taller and far more muscular imp snarled, slid across the street, and slammed a heavy foot into the waif's exposed chest.  “Nnngh!”

        The green teenager rolled over, curling into a fetal position as a crowd of pointy-eared bullies clustered over him, taking turns kicking him violently in the spine, neck, hips, and thighs.  He coughed and sputtered under a sea of blossoming bruises, coughing up blood and fighting back a gargling sob as the smell of his own juices filled the chilly, open air of Alpha Level.

        “You worthless no-bleeder!”  the largest bully hissed through crooked teeth, kicking the youth so that the quivering teenager rolled like a ragdoll over the metal patio of a three-story saloon.  A pair of bright, glistening tesla coils sparkled overhead, flickering bright flashes of white light across the violent melee.  “You come to my father's shop, branded like that, and even think about asking for work?!  You are nothing—do you hear me?!  You are lost unto Petra!  You have two hands for crapping and none for working!  Go throw yourself off the Strut and rid the world of your filth!”

        “Pl-Please...”  The green goblin squinted up at him through squinting, aquamarine eyes.  “No imp will help me.  I just want to eat.  I-I will do anything if y-you just give me food.  I will even clean up after your elders—”

        “Do not speak of my elders!”  The tall half-ling kicked him again while his companions spat down at the battered beggar.  “They were manifesting Petra under the ponies' skies long before the Dimming!  Long before some no-bleeder filth spawned you into the Wasteland!  If this wasn't Hex Blood territory, I would slit your throat myself!”  The surly goblin made to kick the teenager once more when a door to the adjacent saloon suddenly burst open, knocking him off-balance.

        Panting, a frenzy-eyed, brown goblin stumbled out of the crooked structure.  He was sweating bullets as he glanced every which way and ultimately scampered straight down the central metal street of the district.  “Somebody!  Anybody!  H-Help me!  They're going to kill me!”

        The goblin bully with crooked teeth rubbed his shoulder, glancing curiously at the fleeing figure.  Suddenly, a dozen imps marched out of the saloon, all following the lead of a remarkably tall female goblin wearing a yellow armband over her left shoulder.  A long, green ponytail hung off her skull between two sharp ears pierced with golden ringlets.  Her green left eye twitched at a larger, paler shade than her right as she glanced out into the street and watched the distant figure running off in a panicked gait.

        “Nnngh!”  Obstinately, the crooked toothed bully barked up at her.  “What gives?!”  He stepped over the aching teenager as his companions watched on.  “Go do your Rust-Bleeder business somewhere else—”  His voice croaked on a high pitch, his eyes bulging painfully.

        The green-haired female was clutching his crotch in a vice-hard grip of gnarled claws.  Without looking, she yanked him viciously down by her grasp so that his legs crossed.  She then flung her hand to a side holster, twirled a pistol loose, and whipped him viciously across the face so hard that his right ear tore straight down the middle.  The bleeding goblin fell to the floor beside the teenager he had been pummeling, joining him in a chorus of agonized wails.  The bully’s companions stepped back, abandoning him before the sight of these yellow-banded imps.

        A gust of hot air burst out of a ventilation pipe and blew at the girl's green hair.  Sighing, the goblinette brought her pistol hand up to her tan face and gnawed anxiously on her knuckles.  “Nnnngh...”  She murmured through tiny breaths, as if weathering a perpetual migraine.  “I frickin' hate steam.”  Her left eye twitched as she brought her hand down, sighed long and hard, and pointed towards the runaway goblin.  “Darper, if you wouldn't mind.  There's a good boomer.”

        “Right away, Miss Ryst.”  A black-haired goblin wearing a matching yellow armband pulled out a long-ranged rifle reinforced with serpentine coils of steam pipes running all across its stock and barrel.  Smiling wickedly, he squinted down the sight.  Several gasping pedestrians jumped out of the middle of the road, giving a clear shot to the running goblin.  With a high-powered blast, Darper pulled the trigger, and a red-hot bolt of iron sailed down the district of Alpha Level until it expertly skewered the leg of the fleeing target.

        “Augh!”  The brown goblin fell like a sack of wet meat in the middle of the metal street.  His left ankle had burst open, and several toes spilled loosely over the metal webbing as his blood dripped towards Level Beta below.  “Nnnngh—Aaaaaaahhhh...” He wailed and clutched his quivering stub as Ryst shuffled up along with her posse of yellow-banded thugs.

        “Mmmmmm... Oh my dear sweet Salvin.  How far such a boomer has fallen, yes yes yessss...”  Ryst murmured above the rattling noise of nearby gears and pistons.  Darper's gun exhaled a white plume of mist as he cocked the weapon, reloading a fresh new steambolt.  Ryst, meanwhile, squatted down above the bleeding brown goblin, dangling her pistol loosely between her legs as she glanced down at him with her left eye quivering.  “Haman gives and he takes away.  You do not take away from Haman, no matter how much you have given to him.  How could you forget such simple spit?  Hmm?  Be a good boomer and explain that to me.”

        “Nnngh... Hauchkkt...” Salvin rolled over in the middle of the street, clutching the knee above his ragged muscle mass as he bled all over the bulkheads beneath them.  “I... I-I was g-gonna pay back the Rust-Bleeders!  I was!  I-I-I started a loan with the Bread Blood clan of Strut Nine to g-get Haman more supplies!  Yeah!  That's it!  You g-gotta believe me, Miss Ryst—”

        “Shhhh!  Shh-Shh-Shh...”  Ryst rubbed a shaking hand over his blonde bangs before picking at the wax in his pointed ears with a bothersome expression.  “You have been working the pits too long, boomer.  There is soot in your head, or else you would have heard Haman's lecture on making unauthorized deals with the lower bleeders.  Yes yes yessss?  You remember how he chastises boomers who think for themselves and not for him.”

        “I only wanted to increase our pr-profit!”  Salvin exclaimed.  The brown goblin hyperventilated, struggling to stare up at her.  “Ever since Haman pulled out of the weapons market, our income has been nil!  With every other clan t-taking up more shares of the sky marble, Rust Blood will get swallowed up!  We will!”

        “Hmmmm.  It's Haman's job to decide if we're the appropriate pill or not, do you think?”  Ryst's eyes darted about as she ran a twitching hand through her green locks.  “So many goblins nowadays give heavy spit about Petra's unification.  I think it's a dumb idea, but I'm not Haman.  If Haman will let it happen, it'll happen on his terms, not yours or mine.  But the difference between you and me, little boomer, is that I carry his guns for him.  And you... just what do you carry?”

        “I... I-I have my fortune!”  Salvin hissed through clenched teeth, sweating profusely.  “I took it all out of the clan's hold when I went to make the loan payment with Bread Blood!  Here!  It's in my pocket!  I offer it to Haman as compensation for m-my wrongdoing!”

She gnawed on her knuckles as she glanced at him.  After a few jittery seconds, she slurred through the back of her hand, “In which pocket?”

        Salvin shook the left side of his torso.  A heavy lump shifted in his vest.  Ryst snuck her hand into the pouch and produced forty strips of silver.

        “Hmmm...”  Her left eye twitched as she glanced over the tiny bars.  She brought them to her mouth and flicked a tongue against them before pursing her lips.  “Hmm-hmmm... Twelve years post-dimming.  That was a tasty year for minting.”  She stood up, juggled the strips, then tossed them apathetically over her shoulder into the paws of one of her cohorts.  “Bad boomer.  Darper?”

        The black-haired goblin nodded.  He aimed the rifle point-blank into Salvin's neck.

        The brown imp gasped.  “No!  Wait!  Please, Miss Ryst!  Don't—”

        Salvin's voice was cut off by an explosion of steam.  A bloody hole formed in the metal street, meanwhile a round object with flapping ears rolled off into a nearby aluminum gutter.  As whiffs of hot air billowed from Darper's gun, Ryst cracked the cricks out of her neck, shook the blood off her bare feet, and shuffled over to the goblin who caught the strips.

        “Seriously, though.  The Bread-Bleeders?  Who would want to give up the yellow armband for those polka-dotted aprons?”

        “Beats the heck out of me, Miss Ryst.”  A stout, bald goblin with brass knuckles waved the strips in his grasp.  “You want I should drop these in Haman's box?”

        “Mmmph... Not quite yet, Otto,” she said, murmuring through the back of her wrist as she took turns gnawing on her knuckles and scratching behind her ear with the barrel of her pistol.  “There are still lots of foolish boomers who have turned their backs on Rust-Blood.  Haman wants them found out before they embarrass him even more than they already have.  Impatience these days is a poor, poor bloated animal that needs to be put out of its misery.  Yes yes yesssss...”  She glanced off, and suddenly her left eye stopped twitching.  “Speaking of which...”  Curious, Darper and Otto turned to follow her gaze.

        A lone pegasus wearing thick leather armor strolled boldly past the bloody scene.  She marched over the discarded skull of Salvan with indifference.  The gaze she threw in the direction of the beaten green beggar and wounded bully was just as emotionless.  Unhindered by the violence, she made her way straight towards the largest building of Alpha Level.  It was a a five-story warehouse that stretched broadly over nearly half of the upper portion of the Strut.

        “What business does a pony have with the Hex-Bleeders?”  Darper remarked, his rifle cocked at the hip.

        “I have no clue,” Otto exclaimed with wide eyes.  “I didn't even know ponies were still alive.”

        “Hmmm... Alive?”  Ryst's face twitched at an angle as she murmured, “Nothing that comes from the Wasteland is ever alive, my little boomers; I think I may have found my sister.”

        Darper snickered and smiled at the tall, green-haired goblin.  “Miss Ryst, is this another one of your riddles?”

        She frowned briefly, waving the hot steam of his rifle out from her face.  “I do not spit in riddles.  Hmmm... Only in bullets.”  She cracked a joint in her neck and shuffled off.  “Come.  Cowardly boomers await.  And try to stop smelling bad for once, Darper.”  Her posse followed her, leaving the carnage in the metal street like so much refuse before them.

        Scootaloo came to a shuffling stop before the front of the warehouse.  She raised a hoof to her goggles and adjusted the lenses, focusing on the image of a group of imps monitoring an elaborate operation taking place.  High above the metallic heights of Strut Eighteen, a trio of steam-powered, gremlin hovercraft were lowering a gigantic ivory slab of Cloudsdalian sky marble through a large pair of iron doors opened like a reverse hangar bay in the roof of the five-story building.  As the remarkably pale chunk of solidified steam slowly descended, one goblin standing on the edge of the rooftop barked angrily at the clamoring workers.

        “Easy!  Easy!  Will you friggin' watch where you're dropping that?!  If you crush the clan-leader, it would really, really suck!”  The goblin was a young adult, her short brown hair hoisted over a red bandanna that danced with crimson tails in the high winds of Petra.  Her slender ears curled back in a visible sign of frustration as she waved her well-toned arms and squawked at the masked gremlins piloting the hovercrafts.  “We're paying you handsomely by the minute!  It's okay to take your friggin' time!”

        Scootaloo leaned her head to the side, observing the situation from street level.  Suddenly, she shouted, “If the gremlins rotated each of their crafts counter-clockwise all at once, they should be able to compensate for the sway of the wind against the slab!”

        The brown-haired goblinette jolted.  Glancing down with thin green eyes, she frowned.  “Who the heck are you to tell a Prime Hex-Bleeder what to do?!”

        “What the heck does it matter?!”  Scootaloo squawked back up at her.  “Do you want to drop the slab gently or not?  Have them rotate counterclockwise to match the wind!”

        The goblin raised an eyebrow.  Adjusting her red headband with four shifty fingers, she shouted up at the pilots in gremlin tongue.  A series of masked, metallic voices ran through the air, and soon the hovercrafting imps complied, twirling about in such a fashion that the slab of sky marble remained relatively still while the cables hoisting it twirled instead.  Swiftly, then, the gremlins were able to lower the slab into the body of the warehouse under the goblins' directions.  After a few minutes, the cables were detached, and the hovercrafts rocketed off towards the monorail depot located at lower Petra.

        As the iron doors to the warehouse's rooftop closed with a steady, mechanized whirr, the goblinette glanced curiously down at the helpful visitor.  In an effortless twirl, she clasped a drainage pipe, slid down the five-story length of it, and landed agilely in front of the last pony.  She marched up towards her, planting a pair of meaty fists against her hips.

        “I'm guessing you wish to be paid for that,” she grumbled, her blue face locked in a stone-hard glare.  “Nobody offers anything for free in Petra.  Not even the smelly likes of hobs.”

        “Actually, I was thinking of paying you,” Scootaloo said.

        “Oh really?”  She folded her arms as her red bandanna billowed in the air.  “I hope you know that Hex-Bleeders do not freelance for Wastelanders.  Especially when they're... they're...”  She suddenly made a crooked expression.  “Just what in the Dimming's blight are you, anyways?”

        “Yeesh...”  Scootaloo blinked behind her goggles.  “How friggin' young are you anyways, girl?”

        “First order of business,” the goblinette spat, “is measuring substance before age.  If you wanna deal with goblins, you should learn that imps and imps alone manifest Petra, and no creature else.  That is the way of life.  If you want to benefit from our industry, you gotta respect our customs first.  So I ask again—What the heck are you?”

        “I'm a pony,”  Scootaloo uttered with a grunt.  “And if you want me to eat apples or hop over a stack of barrels to prove it, I'm trotting off to the next clan and offering them my strips instead.”

        “A pony?”  The goblin girl leaned her head to the side, her lips pursing in sudden reflection.  “You mean there are those of you who are still alive?  Pfft!  How sad is that?”

        Scootaloo took a deep breath.  “It's a regular Flankspearean Tragedy.  Now look, I don't want to complicate the matter by over-explaining things.  All I need is a trip to the inner pits of the mining operation that you Huxtable Bleeders are—”

        “Hex-Bleeders.”

        “Whatever—You goblins are overseeing the salvaging of sky marble from a particular part of the quarry that I seek access to.”  Scootaloo glanced briefly over her shoulder at several passing imps who were staring at her.  “I have no interest in the minerals there.  I don't seek any cut of the sky marble or the profit thereof.  I'm not after steam nor gemstones nor moonrocks.  I just want to find something special that was left there long ago, something that you goblins couldn't possibly find interest in.”

        “Hah—That's rich!”  The girl managed a scathing smirk.  “Why, was it you who left it there, pony?”

        Scootaloo turned and glanced back at her with dim goggles.  “Yes.  As a matter of fact, it was me.”

        The goblin appeared as though she was about to say something.  After several blinks of her green eyes, something in her expression melted.  Very slowly, she exhaled and murmured in a somber voice, “I think you should see our clan-leader now.”

        Scootaloo raised an eyebrow above her goggles.  She hadn't expected to be allowed a meeting with the top member of Hex Blood that quickly.  Nevertheless, she shuffled after the goblin girl, glancing as four guards with matching red bandannas parted ways to allow the two figures into the hollow of the warehouse.

        “No doubt you saw the Rust-Bleeders out and about,” the girl said with a grumbling voice.  She led Scootaloo down thin, metallic passageways brimming with steam pipes as they made their way into the heart of the warehouse.  “Personally, I think they should all be kicked out of Strut Eighteen for causing that much mayhem, but so long as they're only conducting business for Haman—however bloody that business may be—our clan leader lets them do what they want.  I swear though, it seems like every goblin these days is bending over backwards to let the Rust-Bleeders do whatever the heck they friggin' want.”

        “As far as I'm concerned, you're all bleeders,” Scootaloo muttered in mid-trot.  “Nothing but bleeders.”

        “'Nothing but bleeders...' Heh...”  She smirked bitterly over her shoulder at the last pony.  “Are you some sort of proponent of unification?”

        “I'd answer that if I understood the question.”

        “There's been a lot of talk over the last decade,” she said.  “Ever since the Mountain and Fire Ogres started their war over the Valley of Jewels to the east, many leaders in Petra think that all of the goblin clans should join as one, as a sign of strength and solidarity  For a while, our city benefited from an open weapons market with the ogres, selling pressurized steam to the armies in exchange for the resources to manifest more Petra, but just recently, everything changed.”

        “Yeah?  Like what?”

        “The chief trading clan—the wealthiest bunch of bleeders in this entire imp city—pulled out of the market.  Without their support, the rest of the clans had to back out.  This left both ogre factions high and dry, and the war has been swaying in favor of the Mountain Ogres ever since.”

        “Just who had the brass to do that?”

        The girl's nostrils flared.  “The Rust-Bleeders, who else?”

        “Ah, right.”  Scootaloo nodded, no less confused than when the conversation began.  “How does all of this crap end up with goblins being shot to death in the middle of your clan's streets and not the Rust-Bleeders'?”

        “So many clans have done business with Haman of Rust Blood.  We owe his wealthy family ten million times over.  If his little goon squad has to comb our streets to track down defecting Rust-Bleeders, the Hex-Bleeders will let them.  His bloodletting is honored by tradition, so long as it's only his own blood or former blood he sheds.”

        “Are you sure you goblins can easily tell the difference?”

        “Pffft...”  She glanced back at her with icy eyes.  “And ponies were nothing but bright manes and colorful tattoos.”

        “Works for me.”

        “Heheh... I imagine that a lot of things work for you.”

        “Keep imagining, lady.  Business is business; that’s all I’m here for.”  Scootaloo glanced up as the two of them suddenly marched out into the central warehouse interior.  A wide, five-story tall chamber opened up before the last pony.  Several clusters of sky marble were affixed to metal lattices as dozens of goblin workers in red bandannas crawled over them, using various power tools to break the solidified steam composites into smaller shards fit for trips to the foundries of Petra's inner stalk.  She murmured in a distant tone, “I'm curious.  If I was just any other goblin, and not a pony, would you have taken me on this grand tour?”

        “Probably not.”

        “Why, if I may ask?”

        “Tchh... You're asking me?”  She glared back at Scootaloo as she stood before the giant ivory slab that had just been lowered through the doors of the warehouse roof.  “Miss, I don't pretend to understand the world.  All I ever handle is steam.”  She shuffled up towards a trio of goblins standing next to the slab and examining its bright white surface.  “Hex-Bleeder Prime, I bring you a visitor.”

        “Hrmmm... So grimy.  So very grimy.” A male figure with wrinkled blue skin paced before the leaning slab.  His muscles were still well-toned for his age, but the goblin's legs were encased in shiny copper braces that spouted steam as the tiny servos and joints moved to match his shuffling gait.  “How many blasted times have I told Matthais to inspect the samples before they're committed to the Gremlins for extraction?”

        The brown-haired goblinette cleared her throat.  “Sir?”  She frowned, and her thin green eyes glared.  “Father... We have a visitor.”

        “Bah!  A visitor—A visitor!  We always have visitors!  If it's one of Haman's or Miss Ryst's murderous thugs, I haven't the time!  This month's quota has barely been met, and I'm this close to forcing Matthais into retirement from the mines!”

        “Father...”  The girl leaned in and whispered into his wilted ears.  “It's a pony.”

        The figure froze.  A cold ripple melted through his limbs, as if he had just been injected with pure ice.  Slowly, with a hissing of leg-brace hydraulics, he turned around.  He was a pale-blue goblin with white hair pulled back into ivory dreadlocks that fell from a spreading bald spot.  A pair of black goggles adorned his face just beneath a tattered, red bandanna.  Raising the goggles, he revealed a pair of copper brown eyes that inexplicably haunted the last pony upon sight.

        “So it is...”  He muttered, his voice a deep and contemplative calm amidst a world of noise, death, and industry.  “A pony, in this place of all places.”  He exhaled long and hard, as if expelling a ghostly spirit from his old, old lungs.  “After all of these years...”

        Scootaloo wasn't immediately sure why, but her heart was beating rapidly.

        “She seeks entry into the inner pits,” the goblinette explained, leaning into her father's ear while gazing cautiously the equine figure's way.  “She is willing to pay, she says...”

        “Into the pits...”  The figure slowly nodded.  “Yes, I would imagine she would want to go there.”  With a deep breath, he stepped forward.  “Greetings, Pony.  My name is—”

        “'Devo.'”  Scootaloo uttered.  She raised her goggles, revealing a pair of soft scarlets that took in his pale blue figure.  “You are Devo of Hex Blood.”

        His copper brown optics narrowed on her.  “Have...”  He cleared his throat.  “Have we met, child...?”

        The last pony felt the impulse to shiver.  Briefly, meditatively, she closed her eyes.
        

        Scootaloo's throat twitched against the biting edge of the dagger about to slice into her bruised flesh.  All of a sudden...
        
        “Matthais!”  A growling voice echoed from across the subterranean expanse of Cloudsdale's Inner Ruins.  “What in the name of Petra are you doing?!”

        “What does it look like?!  Braxx caught this useless glue stick sneaking up on us and I'm putting it out of its misery—”

        “Let that pony go this instant!”

        Scootaloo opened her eyes to find herself slumping to the granite edge of the cliff as Matthais paced angrily past her.  “Oh come off it, Devo!”  His voice grumbled.  “Don't be a bleeding heart now of all times!  You know what their kind did to the world—”

        “Which, may I remind you, remains to be proven!  Besides, even if they caused the Dimming, where's the intelligence in snuffing out the one living specimen we've found since we came down here?!”

        Scootaloo winced, whimpered, and fought the waves of pain to simply roll herself over.  When she did, she saw an older goblin marching down a steep incline of ivory rubble.  The blue figure had short white hair and carried a heavy canvas backpack over his muscular shoulders.  Seven more imps marched alongside him, and they were all casting the last pony a nervous glance, as if she was leaking pestilence simply by being there.

        “Devo, she's useless!”  Matthais pointed at her with his rusted dagger as he stood in Devo's way.  “She's a cowardly, crapping mess!  She's got wings and she can't even friggin' fly!”

        “She's also just a child!”  Devo frowned back at him.  “How many young and unlucky souls have been snuffed out and robbed of Petra since the Dimming began?!  Matthais, when I put you in charge of Beta Team, I was hoping you would have scavenged for pegasi supplies, not their blood.”

        “Well excuse me for showing a little backbone!  I swear, Devo, ever since we survived the cyclone that the ponies tossed at us, you've been humping their legs like there's no tomorrow.  A fat lot of good that’ll do us now that they're going extinct.  Where will your edge be then, huh?”

        The white-haired goblin suddenly whipped out a wrench that expanded mechanically into a clawed device.  This, he stretched threateningly around Matthais' gulping neck.  “My edge—you insufferable half-ling—is in the authority granted me by my forefathers.  I am chief Hex-Bleeder.  If it weren't for me, you'd be a pile of mush under a moonrock that my clan pulled you away from.  Do you respect my blood, or should I toss you into the chasm along with the rest of your dead, Teeth-Bleeder siblings?!”

        Matthais shuddered, then slowly bowed his head.  “No... D-Devo...”

        “Swear it.”

        Matthais cleared his throat.  He bowed his head even lower.  “I am Matthais of Teeth Blood, and I owe my life to you and all of your Hex-Bleeders.”

        “Very well.”  The elder goblin's nostrils flared as he retracted his wrench and holstered it into his backpack.  “Continue to pilfer what you can from the dead.  Now that Team Alpha and I are back from our expedition, I shall deal with the living.”  He shuffled slowly towards Scootaloo's side.

        The twitching orange filly slid away from him, rolling her bruised body over and covering a frightened face with her front hooves.

        “Do not be afraid, pony.”  His voice was deeper than Scootaloo's, remarkably deep for a creature of his small stature.  He knelt down beside her and laid a gentle hand across the one spot on her shoulder that wasn't bruised.  His face took on a pitiable shade as he summoned a deep breath from within, murmuring, “My name is Devo of Hex Blood, and I am deeply sorry for what has happened to you.  I cannot take back the wounds that my inferiors have dealt you.  In many ways, I cannot blame them for their anger.  The Sun and Moon were under your race's magical control when the Dimming happened...”

        “I... I-I don't know why everything is the w-way it is...”  Scootaloo shivered and trembled, her teeth chattering as she avoided his gaze.  Her violet eyes fell into the black abyss of the chasm, just a sneeze's length from where her body rested precariously along the cliff-face.  “Cloudsdale fell.  The world b-burned.  The sky and everything in it exploded and I-I don't know where everypony is.  I c-can't tell you anything.  I can't...”  She struggled and struggled not to sob.  “I just can't...”

        “And you don't have to,”  he breathed.  The elder goblin's lips lingered, as if he was desperate to say something else, but wasn't sure if this was the correct time or place.  His eyes curved, holding back deep copper pools of an emotion that was just as strange to him as this sudden equine figure was.  Clearing his throat, he ran a hand across the violet stubble of her shaved mane and muttered.  “'When Petra has blossomed under one blood, then you will know it's time to give a pony her colors....'”

        Scootaloo's face contorted in confusion as she shivered and shivered.

        Devo's eyes narrowed.  “Do these words make any sense to you?”

        “No,” she sputtered, wincing under another wave of pain.  “Do they make sense to you?  Please... Just tell me what you need f-from me.  I'll do anything if you j-just don't hurt me...”

        “Hmmm... Humility.  I'd be lying if I said that this was the first time I witnessed such a quality among your kind.”  He took a deep breath and leaned back on his haunches.  “I heard that you cannot fly.  Is that true?”

        Scootaloo gazed toward the hard granite floor of the plateau beneath them.  Her gaze was full of instant and undeniable shame.

        The aged imp immediately recognized it.  “A pity,” he said.  “My violent companion, Matthais, may be a goblin, but he thinks like a diamond dog.  He would rather spill blood and plunder than tinker.  The Dimming is already bound to be the most horrible event in history, but somehow I feel that his kind was born for it.”  Devo tilted his white head of hair towards the high ceiling of the Cloudsdalian ruins.  “Still, he was right about our tools.  We need them desperately if we're to climb out of this trap we've fallen into.  We were within sight of your... 'Cloud's Dale' when it fell, young pony.  We figured that now was our one opportunity to learn the secrets of pegasi sky marble.  A burning comet of moonrocks overtook us during our descent.  Many of my blood brothers and sisters died.  Even now, I can still hear their screams, days past their burial...”

        Scootaloo squinted at him, her shivers constant, but manageable.  She visually navigated the contours of this creature's face and was rather surprised to see sincere emotion for the first time since a prismatic savior smiled at her from across a forest of black, arcane bars.  Something suddenly glinted in the twilight.  Her violet eyes glanced up past his shoulder.  She spotted a small black box of tin with a white stripe painted across it.

        Devo saw her darting eyes.  He made a point of dragging the edge of his canvas backpack down, hiding the striped box from her sight.  After a meditative breath, the clan leader spoke, “Indeed, Petra has far from blossomed.  May the bleeder ancestors help us; I can't see for the life of me how we can manifest Petra in all of this mess.”  He ran four clawed fingers through his white hair and looked back at his many shuffling companions.  “You may see nothing but pony-hating, simple-minded monstrosities.  Equestrian subjects had the habit of employing a glorified tunnel vision as well.  I cannot fault you for the failings of your race, and I hope you cannot fault me for protecting these brothers and sisters of mine with every fiber of my being, even in spite of their own blemishes.  If the Dimming is to produce more than twilight, it will be up to imps to take up what the hoofed kind have failed to maintain.  Still...”  He turned and gave her a gentle look.  “It doesn't mean that we cannot help each other.  After all... it does appears as if you are trapped in this grave as helplessly as the rest of us.”

        “How... H-How...”  Scootaloo coughed up a spit of blood, winced, and barely managed to keep her eyes open.  “How can I p-possibly help you...?”

        “You are the only living pegasus we've seen in all the time our two teams have been stuck down here.  For better or for worse, that means that a piece of what kept this wondrous city afloat is still with us.  The longer you remain alive, the longer a shred of hope remains for us to find an answer to what's happened to this world.”

        “I... I d-don't know if th-there's any real hope in that...”

        “Hmm... Perhaps not.  But hope is still hope, so long as it isn't killed.”  Devo gulped.  “That has always been the first rule of manifesting Petra.”  He paused briefly.  “Are you cold?”

        Scootaloo said nothing.  She merely shivered.

        “Here...”  Devo reached into a satchel hanging off his belt and produced a black stone and several scraps of metal.  “I can give you flint and tinder.  No goblin clan exists that doesn't possess loads of it.  With this, you can build yourself a fire and keep yourself alive, wherever you happen to be camped.”

        Scootaloo's violet eyes suddenly hardened.  The same fire that empowered a homeless foal to survive so many lonely nights in the forest outside of Ponyville burned brightly within her now.  Navigating a reborn well of anger, she hissed through bruised lips to say, “First you imps b-beat the snot out of me, call m-me names, and nearly kill me.  Now you want to g-give me a gift?”  She hissed.  “You... Y-You can—Snkkkt—Keep your friggin' pity!”

        He slowly, solemnly nodded.  “Yes, I imagine I should.”  He scratched his neck, glanced over his shoulder once more, and stared at several goblins fingering through Scootaloo's stuff.  He raised an eyebrow and looked back at Scootaloo.  “Perhaps some bartering is in order, then?”

        “Go jump of a cliff...”  Scootaloo bitterly grunted.  “They stole all of that from me.”

        “Indeed, but—you see—I am this clan's leader, the prime bleeder, and what I say is law, until we join up with another family at least.”  He gestured to himself.  “Allow me, if I can, to make the whole exchange fair.”

        “Fair...?”  Scootaloo gulped.  The frown left her as she breathed desperately, glancing over at the stuff.  “Okay... Okay th-then...”  She got up, shaking, and stood on four numb limbs.  Devo instinctively attempted to help her, but she merely shrugged him off with a deep-throated snarl.  “Have them give me my friggin' stuff back... and the flint and tinder.”

        “Very well,” Devo said firmly, forcing many incredulous goblins to stare at him with drooping ears.  “Is there anything else?”

        Scootaloo flashed him a surprised glance at that last question.  Blinking, she produced her first grin in days—albeit a blood-stained one.  “Yes.  I want one more thing...”

        Matthais stood at the back of the caravan of goblins, folding his pale arms and frowning.  Several quiet and vexxed imps stood alongside him, hoisting large packs of scavenged items over their shoulders.  They all turned to look at their clan leader and the exchange that was coming to a conclusion.

        Scootaloo examined Matthais' rusty dagger up close.  With a nod of approval, she sheathed the blade and slid it into an easy-to-reach pocket of her saddlebag.  Breathing past her bruises, standing tall and proud in spite of her aching limbs, she turned to face Devo.  “So... What happens now?”

        “That is a question befitting all of us, pony,” the gray-haired leader of the impish expedition said.  He gripped the straps of his backpack as he shuffled over to his companions' side beyond a mound of rubble.  “We shall proceed to search for an exit from this place.  Our travels will likely take us to the far ends of this abyss.”

        Scootaloo nodded.  “I get it.  I stay on my side of the huge gaping hole, and you all stay on yours.  We don't have to meet with each other, talk to each other, or even know that each other exists.”

        Devo's eyes narrowed.  “Is that how you wish it to be?”

        “Is it really up to me?”  She frowned, casting a bitter glance at the many goblins shuffling beside their leader.

        Braxx smirked under glinting goggles.  Matthais merely huffed and rolled his eyes.

        “So be it.” Devo nodded.  “Though there may come a time when you'll want the assistance of our tinkering hands.  I'm sure it beats having hooves on any occasion.”

        “Yeah.  You keep thinking that.”

        Devo managed a slight smirk.  “You have a tenacious spirit, pony.  If your race lived a little while longer, I almost think you could have been capable of manifesting Petra yourselves.  For the time being, however...”  He nodded towards the junk-ridden layer of granite across the black chasm.  “So long as neither of our kinds can reach that promontory, it will be a difficult prospect at best to find a way out of here.  In the meantime, we could all perish from a falling moonrock, a cave-in, or something far more nefarious...”

        “Like what?”  Scootaloo raised an eyebrow.

        “Don't pretend that you haven't seen them, pony,” Devo murmured in an icy tone.  “Don't pretend that you haven't spotted them crawling out from the fissures in the earth, basking in the twilight, eating from the flesh and bones of your dead relatives—as they've raked the flesh from my brothers and sisters.”

        The last pony shuddered.  “I can't pretend anything anymore.  What's the point?”

        “Pretending is a lot like manifesting Petra, young one,” Devo said.  “It keeps us alive.”  He turned about and shouted towards his clan members.  “We move north!  Even pacing!  Stay clear of the edges or else you might fall into shadow!  Let us scour the walls for an exit from this infernal place!”  That uttered, the grand cluster of half-lings marched away, leaving the pegasus blissfully alone once more.

        She exhaled slowly, reveling in the weight of her belongings.  Still, she felt empty, for what was once tucked away behind her ear had been dissolved into a thousand blue strands blown away by the Wasteland winds.  The last pony turned around and marched directly home to her tiny niche, knowing that there were still three more feathers just like it.

        “Don't you tell me what friggin' keeps me alive...”

        The rusted door to a cramped office opened with a creaking noise.  Four walls of spiderwebbed metal fixtures surrounded a flat slab of iron that served as a foundation for a desk, two workbenches, and several aluminum lockers.  A red lantern flickered above, casting a dim, crimson glow over the claustrophobic space.  Almost all corners of the Hex-Bleeders' warehouse could be seen from the porous walls of the lofty place.  Scootaloo, however, couldn't keep her eyes off the elder goblin with white dreadlocks as he limped into the room on whirring leg-braces, balancing a thick notebook of mining schedules in his four-fingered grasp.

        “You never did answer my question, child,” Devo muttered hoarsely to the vaporous air of the place.  Wafts of steam and hydraulic exhaust billowed through the vents in the wall as he waved off a pair of armed guards.  They gave Scootaloo a shifty glance before reluctantly shuffling out of the room to wait beside the brown-haired daughter of the clan leader just beyond the closed door.  “Could it be possible that our paths have crossed before?”

        Scootaloo breathed uneasily.  She had seen bloody horrors and cruel atrocities throughout her entire visit thus far, and only now—before the grace of this soft-spoken elder—was she suddenly overwhelmed with an vague sense of trepidation.

        “Many things are possible in the Wasteland,” she said.  “And most of them are best forgotten.”

        He stood briefly behind his desk and stared at her with thin, copper eyes.  “I never forget, child, not even for a second.  One cannot live for as long as I have and afford to lose track of his mind and still expect to be anywhere but in the grave.  That is the least I can say about the many younger clan-leaders committing murders in the streets outside like a harlequin would perform juggling acts.  A poor memory is a crutch that so many lower bleeders of Petra lean on as they pave for us all a future of bedlam and chaos.  There was once a day and age when my own streets were clean of spilled blood.  Alas, I no longer have the same authority and control that afforded me this lofty strut of the imp city to begin with.”  Devo sighed, fumbling through the many throngs of scribbled notebook pages before him.  “You're right, though.  Many things are possible in the Wasteland.  Here, though, the balance of life is squeezed through a pathetic meat grinder of politics, and all of it paved in silver.”

        “I come bearing brass-cased strips to pay for safe passage,” Scootaloo bluntly said.  “I do not wish to add to the mayhem that is rampaging across your streets.”

        “One cannot add to that which is limitless, child.”  Devo slapped the book shut and glanced up.  “Still, I am intrigued by your approach.  Being here—being surrounded by these foreboding walls and bodies of half-ling strangers—you are undoubtedly a helpless witness to a newfound barbarism.  Wastelander or not, the fact that you come here with the intent to negotiate instead of shedding blood is remarkable.”  He kept an eye trained on her as he dialed a combination on one of his lockers, opened it, and slid the notebook inside.  “Are you certain that we haven't met before?”

        Scootaloo sighed heavily.  “Look, does it friggin' matter?  I just want to pay you to get safe passage to the pits—”

        “I believe it does matter, child.  It matters to me.” Devo leaned briefly against the open locker.  “Unlike many of my associates, I have come to know a thing or two about ponies.  Your kind embodied an honor and decency unbecoming of the grossly inaccurate tales told about them that have been handed down through time.”

        “Sir, I respect your years and your honorable opinion of my species,” Scootaloo spoke gently.  “Both are hard to come by in this world, more than you could ever imagine.  But you must understand who I am and what I do.  I'm the last of my kind, and I have a very important task to complete.  I cannot afford to conduct anything more than business in this world.  May we please keep the conversation centered upon the transaction at hoof?”

        His eyes narrowed coldly on her, though they were still laced with a thoughtful curiosity.  “So it is true, then?  You are the last of your kind?”

        Scootaloo closed her eyes, slowly inhaled through flaring nostrils, and uttered, “Yes.  Yes I am, sir.”

        “You are the last of your kind... and all you wish to do is conduct business?  For strips?”

        She stifled a snarl and reopened her eyes in a piercing frown.  “Do you interrogate everybody you meet before coming to an arrangement?  Where's the profit in that?”

        His face tightened in sudden consternation.  Something above him glinted within the locker.  Scootaloo glanced to the side.  She briefly made out what looked to be a rusted, tin box with a faded, white stripe.  This was swiftly hidden from view as he shut the locker with a metallic clang.

        “Profit...”  Deveo grunted, as if the very word was spiced with poison.  “It figures that you would presume all goblinkind to be fetishists of monetary gain and nothing else.”  He shuffled over towards the side of the desk facing her and leaned against it, folding his arms.  “As it is the inbred instinct of ponies to pick flowers and sing songs from their lofty cities in the clouds, I imagine.”

        “I beg your pardon?”

        “Grating isn't it?”  The prime Hex-Bleeder raised an eyebrow beneath his red bandanna.  “Prejudices and stigmas separate souls of this Wasteland far wider than ash and lifeless rock.  If the Fire and Mountain Ogres simply forgave each other for their undesirable qualities, the war over the Valley of Jewels would have ended over a decade ago.  Unfortunately, nobody expects that war to end without the utter desolation of one ogre clan or the other.  In that same vein, nobody could have expected an equine soul like yourself trotting up to my warehouse and asking for help in reaching a place that is off limits.  To have lived so many years in the Wasteland, child, you undoubtedly had to rely on amazing resourcefulness.  What stopped you from using your various tools and talents to simply infiltrate the mining pits on your lonesome and stealing whatever it is you seek out from underneath our noses?”

        Scootaloo shifted nervously, glancing aside at the walls.  There was no opaqueness to the barriers to give her solace.  “I'm starting to wonder that myself.”

        Devo chuckled suddenly, his sharp teeth showing.  “Indeed.  And yet you are here, offering me strips.”

        “I... I guess...”  She fidgeted, then met his expression again with soft, foalish eyes.  “I've come to know a thing or two about goblins, as you did about ponies, and it left me with room for... hope.”

        “Hope...” He nodded slowly, gazing thoughtfully at her.  “Tell me, is that any more important than business?”

        “Excuse me?”

        He murmured, “'When Petra has blossomed under one blood, then you will know it's time to give a pony her colors.'”

        Scootaloo made a face.  “The heck are you going on about?”

        “What indeed.”  His blue nostrils flared as he stood up straight and paced towards a goblin map of the local Wasteland along the rusted wall.  “As much as I would love to let you into the pits, child, I'm afraid that will be impossible.”

        “How so?”  Scootaloo's brow furrowed as she turned to follow his movements.  “They're your part of the mining operations, aren't they?”

        “The clans of Petra may not all be unified, but we are all sure of one thing.  We are all imps.”  He circled a clawed finger around a highlighted portion of the map alongside a junction of monorail lines.  “As we speak, all goblins working in the mines have been given a grand issue to shoot any non-imps on sight.  This is something I cannot currently remedy, even with all the power that is invested in my blood.”

        “But I thought you were a clan-leader...”

        “There is far more at stake than I can properly explain, pony.”  He turned and gazed at her.  “Ever since Haman of Rust Blood and his entire faction pulled out of the weapons market, the ogres have been choked of goblin steam exports.  This has led to many mercenaries infiltrating our borders to rob from our resources.  Whether or not the Mountain or Fire factions are paying these ruffians, the goblins of this impcity can only speculate.  Over the last ten stormfronts alone, we've had over a hundred incursions of harpy pirates, dirigible dogs, and other sniveling creatures attempting to siphon off of our supply line.  Gremlins patrolling the mines' airspace have been paid to shoot trespassers on sight.”

        “Of that, I'm quite familiar,” Scootaloo said with a grumbling voice.  “My airship took an electrical discharge to its hull as soon as I arrived here.  After I find a way to visit the inner pits, I'm going to have to scrounge around for repairs.”

        “You will find few goblins wishing to do deals with outsiders, presently,” Devo exclaimed.  “The clans are having a hard enough time as it is trusting each other.  As soon as legitimate trade ended with the ogres, a series of heated disputes began between the many prime bleeders of Petra.  Half of the clans feel that unification is necessary.  The other half want to resume trade with the ogres at all costs.  Sitting in the middle of this fiery debate is the Rust Blood clan, the wealthiest organization in this whole imp city, and Haman's subordirnates are too busy bloodily cleansing his own ranks of turncoat separatists to bother with making any steps to improve the situation.”

        “Why did Haman and his clan back out of the weapons trade to begin with?”

        “No goblin knows, but it hardly matters.  The longer this situation persists, the greater the need for unification.  If Petra can't combine in body like it has been manifested in spirit, then all impkind will be too divided and defenseless to fend off the ogres if or when they finally decide to raid the city and take the highly desirable steam for themselves.”

        Scootaloo sighed, running a hoof over her brown features.  “Boy, do I know when to pick a bad time for visiting a goblin neighborhood.”

        “Petra is a majestic and awe-inspiring manifestation,” Devo said.  His lips lingered, but he finally murmured, “But has it blossomed?  No.  Not even remotely.”  With a deep breath, he glanced fixedly at the pony.

        The pegasus sighed, her eyes shut as she drifted alone with her thoughts, and all of them were bathed with the colors of the spectrum.  Every hue died twice over, and she couldn't begin to contemplate a way to unbury them anymore.

        Devo cleared his throat.  “No, pony, you cannot gain access to the inner ruins, at least not with your life intact during these trying times within Petra.  Now, most goblins would be right to question exactly why you would wish to do so to begin with.”  He strolled over and squinted up towards her eyes.  “But as for myself... I learned a long time ago to not look a gift horse in the mouth.”

        Scootaloo grumbled, “Sometimes I think that once I'm dead and gone, the only thing that will survive from my culture is that damnable expression.”

        “Ah, but it is a good expression,” he said, pointing with a smirk.  “For you could very well be of use to me.”

        “I'm sorry, sir, but if I can't get to where I need to go, I don't see what use I am for—”

        “You said yourself that goblins once left you with a shred of 'hope,’ am I right? I implore you not to despair, pony.  There may still be a way to get to your destination, but you will have to do something for me first.”  He paused, then stared at her with a subtle, knowing glance.  “You would like to earn your opportunity in this regard, would you not?”

        She stared at him with full attention at this point.  Thoughtfully, she asked, “How much?”

        “This is not something that can paid for in strips, child,” he said while waving a finger and pacing across the office atop whirring leg-braces.  “However, actions are a far better payment in their own respect.  I need you to do something for me—something that is a balance of trust, both yours and mine.  In this time of goblin adversity, you may be the best chance I have to figure out what the other clans are up to.  There is something amiss in this city, and it'll take something beyond impkind to uproot it.”

        “I... I don't get it...”  Scootaloo shook her head with a sigh.  “You want me to be a spy?”

        “Not a spy.  More like a messenger.  It would take a great deal of words to explain, but I am currently needed to oversee my clan's latest sky marble extractions over the next several hours.  I suggest you come back and see me tomorrow.  In the meantime...”  He folded his hands together and gazed pleasantly at her.  “What do you need for repairing your ship?”

        She gave him a sideways glance.  “I need at least eight planks of iron, ten sheets of copper alloy, and at least a hundred brass bolts.”

        Devo nodded.  “Sounds like a fairly sturdy zeppelin that you've built for yourself.”  He scratched his chin and muttered, “Five thousand strips, and the materials are yours.”

        “Five thousand?!”  Scootaloo was more shocked at her impulsive, vocal repetition of that figure than she was at the price itself.  “Why, sir, any self-respecting business goblin would charge twice that much!”

        “Then why complain?  What did we just speak about gift horses?”

        She frowned.  “Gifts are one thing; mockeries are another.  Do not coddle me, Devo of Hex Blood, if that's your way of buying my respect.”

        “Respect is a matter of sincerity that no amount of strips can buy—big or small.  And as for coddling...”  He stared at her rigidly with his copper optics.  “Once you learn of what tasks I have for you to perform for me tomorrow, you'll see that more than enough labor is required for whatever assistance I can lend.  I assure you, though, that it shall be a worthy endeavor, for if you help me learn more about the doings of my fellow clans, it may very well lead to the inner ruins becoming accessible once more.”

        Scootaloo gave him a sideways glance.  “You are obviously a goblin of great intelligence and sincerity.  Still, why do I get the feeling that I'm about to be used?”

        “A heart tempered darkly by the Wasteland has no choice but to feel that way.”  He waved a clawed finger.  “The key is to hang onto hope, as one hangs onto self-respect.  That is something that was taught to me long ago, and ever since then I've waited for a time to teach it to someone else.”  He leaned his arm back and knocked his fist against a metal bulkhead.

        In answer, the door to his office squeaked open and his daughter poked her head in.  “Yes, father?”

        “This pony will need eight iron planks, ten copper alloy sheets, and two buckets of rivets.  We've agreed on five thousand strips.  I'm certain she will pay you upon delivery where her airship is moored.”

        The brown-haired goblinette's eyes widened.  “Five thousand?  But father—!”

        He snapped his fingers at her.  “And... you shall perform this shipment promptly.  The pony will wish to repair her vessel swiftly if she is to return here tomorrow to offer her assistance.”

        “Her... assisstance...?”  The female gave Scootaloo a frowning look.

        “I trust our days of living in the dark of the Upper and Lower Struts shall come to a close.”  Devo uttered, then pivoted to face Scootaloo once more.  “My daughter, Raimony, will escort you from the premises.  I suggest you tell her where your vessel is so that she can appropriately instruct the gremlin delivery craft.  Now, if you would excuse me...”

        He shuffled away, along with his two bandanna-wearing guards.  Scootaloo could barely register his last few words, though, for she was suddenly stuck on a glaring, colorful name.  Slowly, she blinked over and squinted at the goblin girl.  “I'm sorry.  But... what did your father say your name was...?”

        “'Raimony,'” the green-eyed goblin said, still fuming from Devo's crazy instructions.  As she found Scootaloo blankly staring at her, Raimony frowned and spat in the pegasus' direction.  “Why, do you have a problem with that, pony?!”

        “N-No...”  The scavenger dryly gulped, shaking her head in a numb breath.  “No problem at all.”

        “Good.”  Raimony huffed, then marched out of the room on stomping, blue feet.  “Then let's give you all of that crap for a measely five thousand strips.  Ughh!  By the Dimming's Blight, I swear my father's losing his mind!”

        “I don't know...”  The pegasus shuffled slowly after her, still digesting the name like a freshly preserved chunk of fruit.  “He seems rather... inspired to me.”

        Scootaloo was still distracted.  She stood in the streets outside the warehouse several minutes later, staring off into the distant spaces between the metal slits of Strut Eighteen.  Just then, Raimony shuffled up to her from having chatted with a hovercraft full of gremlins.

        “You can expect your supplies within the next two hours,” the goblinette murmured.  The hovercraft behind her lifted up with a thunderous thrust of steam vents.  The girl glanced, blinking, at Scootaloo's expressionless face.  “Hey!” she snarled.  “Earth to pony!  Are you there or do I have to shove spurs into you and see if you're still breathing?”

        “Sorry, I...”  Scootaloo glanced up.  “Uhh... The gremlins are making the delivery?”

        “Yes.  They'll ask for a fifteen percent interest as a commission for the shipment.”  Raimony kicked at a few rusted flakes on the street's bulkheads and muttered against her better nature, “But that's a load of bunk.  The agreement with Hex-Bleeders is that our gremlin partners accept no more than ten percent.  If you pay them any more than five hundred strips, it'll be highway robbery.”

        “Well, thanks for the heads-up.”

        “I figured it's something my father would want to tell someone like you.”

        “Your father... has a unique respect for ponies.”

        “Pfft—You think?  I have no friggin' clue why,” Raimony said, then briefly winced.  “Erm... No offense and whatcrap.”

        Scootaloo blinked, and in that blink she saw the waterfalls of Cloudsdalian ruins, as well as a white-haired goblin carrying a thick backpack over his blue shoulders.  “He's lived a long time, I imagine.  Creatures as old as he is... as old as we are remember a world before the Cataclysm.”  She produced a long sigh.  “Perhaps that makes us strangely similar.”

        “What the heck is the 'Cataclysm?'”

        Scootaloo smirked bitterly at her.  “Look up the 'Dimming', kid.”

        “Don't call me 'kid!’”  Raimony frowned.  “I'm over twelve hundred stormfronts in age!”  She folded her arms as her rigid expression melted into an exhausted slump.  “All my life, my dad told me things that no other goblin father in his right mind would say to his kids.  He taught me that there was more to this world than imps, that there was once a culture that took care of things and would never have let something as awful as the Dimming happen.  I can't imagine that he'd be talking about ponies.  Every goblin knows that they controlled the seasons and weather once.  When they died out, the world changed into something darker, and so we took our rightful place upon the threshold of manifesting Petra.”

        “Well, I'm still around,” Scootaloo muttered, staring off into the far corners of the street as several goblins stole her glances from afar.  “The world can only get darker.”

        “You're nothing like the pretty picture my dad painted of ponies,” Raimony said, squinting her already thin green eyes.  “You're rough, gruff, and you obviously take crap from no one.”  Her sharp teeth showed briefly as she smirked.  “If I didn't know better, I'd say you were just a goblin in disguise.”

        “Years of living in the Wasteland will make goblins out of all of us.”

        “Heh.  I'll try and take that as a compliment.”

        “Whatever.”  Scootaloo waved a hoof and lowered her copper goggles.  “I need to get back to my ship and make sure it's in one piece.  Apparently, I'm coming back tomorrow to perform some mysterious errands for your father.”

        “Yeah, I know.  What's up with that?”

        “You tell me.  Does your dad often make bizarre requests of strangers?”

        “Only when they're four-legged, red-eyed, and armored to the teeth with reinforced leather.”

        “Well, I'll try not to be a one-time-wonder,”  Scootaloo muttered as she shuffled off. “But as soon as I find out he's simply using me for some political agenda against his neighboring clans, I'm so out of here.  You can tell him that yourself.  I don't care how much of a bargain he's given me on airship parts.”

        “There are many things that goblins have said about my father!”  Raimony barked after her, frowning.  “Know this, pony!  He may be crazy at times, but he never indulges in charity cases!  And if so, then not without a good reason!”

        Scootaloo briefly paused in her stride, gnawing at her bottom lip.  She heard the pained, whimpering breaths of a tiny orange foal in the back of her mind.  Shaking the haunting sounds loose, she strolled off past a metal street corner, flanked by curious onlookers.

        The last pony attempted to digest the nature of her situation.  She was stranded in the heart of a giant city populated by goblins bound in blood to support each other, or else slay each other in open public.  She had just been given the opportunity to fix the Harmony and—if need be—make a swift and speedy exit.  However, the benefactor of such resources had given her an insanely generous discount.  At the same time, he was about to request her services in a vague and shadowy manner, so that she would ultimately be delving into politics that she had no true place dipping her hooves in.  Still, humoring his wishes was the closest and perhaps only chance she had at getting the goblins to open up the part of the Cloudsdalian ruins where Rainbow Dash's remains were lying.

        “If they're still there,” she muttered, feeling a cold shudder rise up her spine as she shuffled slowly towards the descending ramp that led towards Level Beta and the elevator beyond.  Gossiping goblins and like-colored clan members strolled past her, giving her looks of mixed suspicion and curiosity.

        So much had happened over the last twenty-five years in that place.  Barely a quarter of a century ago, there was no gigantic, two-kilometer tall spike of glowing metal in the middle of the Equestrian Wasteland.  In such a freshly wounded time, the ruins of Cloudsdale were pockmarked with moonrocks and not monorail tracks.  The deep abyss was filled with waterfalls instead of mineshafts.  There were no clans, no squabbling groups of multiplicitous imps attempting to shovel sky marble and silver strips around, no ogre war looming over the horizon and threatening to crush everything into a mindless oblivion.  The odds of Rainbow Dash's grave surviving the onslaught of all these innumerable factors were impossible, to say the least.

        “Why am I still frickin' here?”  Scootaloo grumbled.  “I'll be doing all of Devo's dirty work for nothing.”

        Just as she heartlessly uttered those last few words, she felt her heart skip a beat.  For the life of her, she could barely comprehend the insane coincidence of having met the leader of the Hex-Bleeders, only to discover it was none other than a bizarrely placed goblin who had shown the last pony mercy in a merciless situation.  She had no doubt that he knew exactly who she was—or else had a strong inkling.  Scootaloo wasn't sure why she wished to hang a veil of uncertainty before Devo's eyes, in hope that the weight of time would obscure his pristine memory of her.  Decades of wandering the Wasteland had given her a strange solace, as if her lonely anonymity was a safety blanket she could hide in and escape all of the dark shades of yesteryear.  Only with Spike did she finally ever open up, and that was because the dragon's heart covered her with far greater warmth than even green flame could conjure up.

        Devo, however, was something different.  He was salt in the wound of her heart, and yet his very voice produced a spark in her inner being that made her look forward to repairing the Harmony instead of immediately fleeing from that infernally bright city.  There was something in his mannerisms, something in his eyes, something in his speech that gave her a strange vigor.  Still, it felt like something far warmer and richer than confidence, and as Scootaloo rolled the name of his daughter over and over again in her mouth, it tasted like something she had never thought non-equine creatures of the Wasteland were capable of bestowing.

        “Raimony... Raimony... Raimony...”

        It tasted like hope.

        Just then, Scootaloo heard a panting, shivering breath.  She sniffed the air, as if suddenly expecting to smell the damp wood of an abandoned barn.  Instead, she glanced over to see an emerald shape curled up into a little ball in the dankest shadow of a cold, metal alleyway to her left.  The chaos of the imp city's streets blossomed across the fields of her cluttered memories, and she instantly recognized the young, green goblin as the pleading soul who had been violently beaten to a bruised pile of meat just an hour before.

        Scootaloo paused in her gait, staring fixedly at the homeless little teenager, for there was something far more striking about him, something haunting.  As the green goblin curled into himself, struggling for warmth, a thin stream of tears rolled down his welted cheek.  His black vest was frayed in the corners; several tassels hung loose along the back.  His ribcage was bruised severely, and his upper thighs bore several savage scrapes and cuts.  However, above all of these grim details, it was something located on his left hip—his flank—that caught her attention.

        It was a burn mark, a branding, in the unmistakable shape of a horseshoe.

        Scootaloo's eyes twitched beneath her copper goggles.  Her vision poured all over the searing tattoo.  She looked.  She saw...

        Several months ago, in front of the M.O.D.D., a little goblin struggled under the arms of several sneering monkeys holding him down.  “No!  No!  Pl-Please!  Don't do this to me!  I'll never last a night in the wastelands if anyone sees me with—”

        “Shut up and take what's coming to ya, cheapskate!”  One of Pitt's brothers brought the horseshoe-shaped branding iron down so that it kissed the goblin's thigh and filled the mountain air with the steam of burning flesh.

        Under the hooting laughter of sadistic primates, the imp's tortured screams rang endlessly into the Wasteland snow.

        Scootaloo winced, her ears humming with the memory of the sound.  Blinking, she refocused her gaze once more upon the homeless, branded goblin as he fell into a fitful, shivering slumber.

        The last pony was unnerved to be bearing witness to two cosmic coincidences in one soot-stained night.  It was enough that she ran into Devo here after so many years.  Did she truly cross paths with another soul for a second time as well?  The Wasteland wasn't something that could afford miracles.  Pre-Cataclysm Equestria was a time when one could make the impossible happen.  That was the day and age when Rainbow Dash lived.

        Scootaloo took a deep breath and slid the goggles back down.  She was there for Rainbow Dash.  She had to remember that.  Anything and everything else was merely business.

        The last pony walked away from the pitiful sight of the freezing goblin.  It wasn't her fault that he was in such a dire strait.  It wasn't her fault that creatures of the Wasteland hated ponies so much that they used a symbolic image of their legacy to designate who was lesser-than-dirt in their goddess-forsaken culture.  It wasn't her fault that the little imp was shivering, forsaken, hungry, and likely to freeze to death by the next stormfront.  It just... wasn't her concern.  She marched on, frowning, not looking back, not looking...

        The goblin's lips murmured under flickering lanternlight.  His ears twitched, then twitched again.  There was a strange melody wafting into his little, pointed lobes.  It was the sound of melancholic strings dancing around a series of bass chords.  Confused, he stirred, until his body rose a groaning breath up to the level of flinching consciousness.

        “Hrmm... Wh... What...?”

        The teenager’s eyelids fluttered open.  A pair of aquamarine optics glistened in the shadow of his mysterious surroundings.  He glanced at his fingers as he found himself lying in a dangling hammock.  He saw several bandages plastered soothingly across his upper arms, legs, and thighs.  Every major bruise was covered, and he could smell the combined scent of medicinal herbs and ointments.  With another twitching of his ears, he tilted his head up towards the cello music.  He saw a black disc rotating on an antique record player.  Blinking, he followed the whalebone shape of iron bulkheads forming together to produce a tight gondola, inside of which were a glistening boiler, several metal lockers with glowing purple locks, a workbench full of miscellaneous tools and colorful souvenirs, and finally an equine face with a pair of copper goggles shoving a jar of soup towards his mouth.

        “Mushroom stew?”

        “Gaaaah!”  The young goblin leaped up out of the hammock and clung sideways to the bulkheads with surprising athleticism.  His clawed fingers scraped into the metal surface of the gondola walls.  “Aaaah!  Filthy glue stick!  Don't eat me, pony!”

        Scootaloo sighed, “Yes, yes.  I'm a walking repository of liquid adhesive.  Story of my friggin' life.”  She waved the jar of steaming broth up towards him again.  “Shut up and shove something in your belly already!”

        “Nnngh!—No!  I want none of your stuffing, glue stick!”  He panted and scrambled over to the top of one of the metal lockers like a green feline.  “I won't let you eat me!”

        “Oh, for the love of oats—I'm not going to eat you!” Scootaloo exclaimed.  “Look, you were cold, you were hurt, and you were hungry.”  She trotted sideways, following him as he scampered from locker to workbench to locker, his limbs clambering loosely and knocking things over.  “I've already taken care of the first two of those things but right now you're making it really hard to do the third—Yeesh!”  She winced.  “Will you friggin' watch where you're climbing?!  If I wanted to capture a monkey, I'd—”

        “Monkeys!”  The little goblin shrieked, his bright eyes turning a frightened, turquoise

        “This has nothing to do with monkeys or Petra or—Hey!  Watch it!”

        “Lemme out!  Lemme out!”  He gasped and clawed his way over the communication system.  His leg tripped on a lever, sparking the tesla coils to life and magnifying his voice with monstrous feedback as he spat and stammered before the microphone.  “I'd rather burn in a billion steam pits than become a lifeless turd in your guts!  Why not skewer and nibble on a gremlin or hob?!  I've got no meat on me!”

        “Dang it, kid—”

        “I've got no meat on me!  Look at me!  I’m a bag of straws!  Please, lemme out of here!”

        “Alright... Alright!”  Scootaloo planted the broth down onto the workbench and waved her hooves.  “Fine.  You want to get out of here?”  She pointed at the revolving staircase.  “The exit's down there.  Be my guest.”

        “Nngh!”  The goblin breathlessly leaped onto the brass railings of the descending platform and all but tripped his tumbling way down into the hangar level of the airship.  A bandage or two flutterred loose as he limped, hyperventilating, towards the catseye aperture and banged against it with desperate fists.  “Come on... Come onnnnn!  By Dimming's Blight, I don't want to become pony food!”

        “Here, allow me,” Scootaloo calmly said, eliciting a shock from the youngster, for she was suddenly standing behind him and speaking towards the runes in the aperture:  “H'jem!”

        The iris-shaped panel slid open in a flash.  Without a second thought, the goblin scrambled out—only to come to a shrieking stop, his limbs flailing as he stood precariously on the edge of the airship's bow.  Looming nightmarishly far beneath him was the grand, gray expanse of the Wasteland.  The gaping chasms of the steam pits glittered with swarming goblin mining operations.  Monorail cars darted to and fro, trailing white puffs of smoke.  Finally, the grand golden stalk of Petra loomed in open view below a perpetual ceiling of horrific black fog.

        “Uhh—Uhh—Aaaugh!”  The goblin teetered, flailed, and fell—

        “Y'know...”  A brown hoof was suddenly gripping his waist from behind.  Scootaloo droned behind his pointed ears.  “Eating mushroom brew is at least three times a more pleasant experience than falling to a wet, nasty, pulverising death from fifteen hundred meters above sea level.”  She shrugged.  “Of course, that isn't exactly speaking from experience, but one can make an educated guess.”

        Hissing, the goblin wrenched himself from her grasp and clutched a side of the precarious platform, his claws gripping tight to the bulkhead as he cast frightful glances back and forth from between the horrifying drop and the horrifying equine.  He bit his lip and fidgeted visibly.

        “If it's really that hard of a decision to make, it doesn't matter.  I'll have this thing landed eventually.”  She gestured towards the body of her airborne craft as her pink mane hair billowed in the wind.  “The last twelve hours you spent sleeping like a bruised doll, I was fixing up the damage that a bunch of gremlins did to this thing.  I still have some finishing touches to do, and then I've got an appointment with some dude named Devo of Hex-Blood tomorrow.”  She glanced back at the goblin and leaned casually against the bulkhead opposite of him as her wings tightened against her flanks.  “I didn't want to stay in the hangar of Fifteen Strut all this time because—well, quite frankly—there aren’t a lot of creatures there who can stand the sight of me.  The sky's a lot safer where I'm concerned.  But don't worry.  Fed or not, I'll get you back on solid footing within a dozen hours or less.  Hopefully by then, most of the enchanted rune powder will have done its job and sealed your wounds.”

        He shivered, glancing at his many bandaged limbs, then at the distant specks of goblin miners far below.

        Scootaloo grunted, “Now you say 'Thank you, glue stick.'”

        “Mmmm...”  He shook, nearly threw up from the sheer height of their location, and ran frightfully back into the interior of the Harmony.

        The last pony rolled her scarlet eyes.  She slowly trotted after him, leaving the whipping winds of the outside air with a swish of her pink tail.  “H'jem.”

        Marching slowly back up the spiral staircase and entering the main cabin, Scootaloo paused.  She glanced around, blinking, finding no sign of the little biped creature.  On a whim, she clopped her two front hooves against the bulkheads, ricocheting a dull echo across the place.  A distant whimper sounded from the port side, halfway down the gondola.  Scootaloo shuffled over to the workbench and raised the coattails of the Royal Grand Biv outfit with a brown hoof.  Underneath, the goblin teenager was hiding, hugging his knees to his chest.  At the first sight of her peering face, he jolted, his aquamarine eyes pulsing.

        “You know, I haven't dusted down there in ages.  I sure hope you're not allergic to pony hair.”  She suppressed a chuckle, smiling slyly.  “Boy, wouldn't that be a friggin' burn.”

        He said nothing.  His eyes fell to the floor.

        Scootaloo glanced up, seeing where she had placed the metal cup.  She clasped the steaming broth and held it out one more time before the imp.  “Don't pretend you're not hungry.  I know a thing or two about starving.  There's nothing poetic about it.  Do yourself a favor and ditch the ego for a sip or two.  A healthy body leads to a healthy mind, even if you are a bipedal little shrimp with bat-ears.”

        He nervously shook.  Slowly, like a butterfly sprouting its first wings, the goblin stretched a nervous hand towards the container.  As soon as his clawed fingers made contact, he yanked the thing from her gasp and cradled it to his sternum, simply reveling in the heat wafting up to his chin.  He stared into the thing after a few seconds, still navigating a minefield of suspicion in his head.

        “It... uhm...” Scootaloo ran a hoof through her pink mane and sat down on her haunches in the middle of the floor, so that she was at an even gaze with the “guest” hiding under her workbench.  “It isn't all mushrooms.  I put in a few morsels of cougar meat.  I kind of figured that goblins are carnivorous by nature.  I seriously doubt you have such razor sharp chompers for opening bottlecaps.”

        He took a tiny, meager sip of the broth—as if testing it.  He didn't keel over dead from the first swallow, so his next few gulps were infinitely more liberal.  Within the span of a minute, he had emptied the entire thing down his throat.        Scootaloo slowly watched him, rubbing her chin in thought.  “What... Uhm...”  She sighed, shrugged, and settled for a relatively unmelodic voice.  “What's your name, kid?”

        He fidgeted, turning the metal case around in his clawed fingers.  “Mmm... W... Warden.  Warden of Stock Blood.”  He gulped hard.  “B-But all of my friends call me 'Wart.'”  He bit his green lips and gazed towards the bulkheads with a wilted expression, his pointed ears deflating.  “Well... they used to.”

        “‘Used to?’”  Scootaloo rather stupidly muttered out loud, “What happened to your friends?”

        The goblin's nostrils flared.  He brought a four-fingered hand aside and attempted pulling the edge of his black vest down over his seared left thigh.  It was a fruitless endeavor.

        “Oh... Uhm...”  The last pony glanced at the horseshoe brand and gulped hard.  “Yeah, well...”  She fidgeted with the goggles strapped to her head while fumbling for words.  “What... uh... what were you doing in Petra, Warden... er... Wart?”

        “I was... I-I was looking for a job,” Warden said, shuddering with each sentence that bled from his lips.  “My uncle works in Strut Seven of this imp city.  Months ago, I heard that he was looking to expand his soot-sweeping business.  That's always a good job for young, small goblins who can fit in tight spaces.  So... uhm—I left my parents’ place in a township far west of the Briar.  I hitched a ride with some Dirigible Dogs.  They... uh... They screwed me over big time: took my strips and slipped something into one of my drinks.  The next thing I know...”  He weathered a sharp, painful breath.  “... I'm branded.  Somehow, I made it onto an ogre supply ship, but they weren't running cargo to Petra anymore.  I had to piggyback onto two more zeppelins until I landed about twenty kilometers south of here.  Then... uhm... I walked.”

        “You walked?”  Scootaloo's eyes narrowed on the kid with disbelief.  “Kid, you've been starving for days at least.  You shouldn't be so full of crap.”

        He merely whimpered and looked aside.

        Scootaloo winced at her own words.  Rolling her eyes, she cleared her throat and tried speaking again.  “Anyways, that's a heck of a lot of... uh... heck for someone your age to have gone through.”  She blinked.  “Just how old are you anyways, kid?”

        “I...”  Warden's expression was painfully embarassed.  “I have no clue.  Who the heck remembers their birthday anyways?”

        Scootaloo leaned her head aside as a wilted part of her comprehended that.  After a breath, she uttered, “Well, you look about no more than eleven hundred stormfronts to me.  Though, I'm not much of a judge of goblin aging or whatnot.”  She glanced at the empty can in his grasp and reached towards it—

        He instantly flinched from her brown hoof.

        She paused.  Slowly, she summoned the most genuine smile she could muster.  It came across like a deflating tire.  “I'm just gonna give you seconds.  Doesn't that sound good?”

        Warden calmed down.  He gently handed the container back to her.  Scootaloo swifly refilled it from a large pot of the bubbling broth.  The goblin crawled out from under the bench and stood up by the time she handed him his refill.

        “There you go.  At least half a dozen majestic cougars gave their lives so that this touching, magical moment could be made possible,” she droned, smirking at her own sarcasm.  She was ever so briefly let down that he didn't let loose a single snicker.

        The goblin merely sipped from the broth, glancing curiously about the lengths of the hovering aircraft's gondola as his pointed ears slowly raised back up above his skull, relaxing.

        “I uh...”  Scootaloo backtrotted and leaned against the rear of her cockpit seat, standing across from the little imp.  “I didn't say anything at the time, but I saw those other goblins beating the snot out of you.  The only thing worse than having no money or food is having no money or food and being the punching bag for a bunch of bullies.  You might not think that I can relate to that... but believe me, I can.”

        To that, Warden merely gulped down his last drink, swallowed, and glanced at her with suddenly round eyes.  “Whoah... Are you a girl?”

        Scootaloo's scarlets flared.  “Yes.  I am female.”  She flung a lock of pink hair over her shoulder.  “What, did you think this mane was just a friggin' accessory?”

        “Are all ponies as bright as you?”

        “Define 'bright.’  Are you talking about my hair color or the brain matter that it's all stemmed in?”

        “Saaaaay...”  Warden blinked wide, bearing a sudden smile as he shuffled over towards the glowing locks across the panels of a metal locker.  “Are these moonstones?”

        “Yes.  Yes, as a matter of fact, they are.”

        “Why are they all purple and glowy and stuff?”

        “Uhhh... It's all on account of magical runic commands that are channeled along the leylines of fossilized alicornia.”

        “Frostbeams...” the teenage goblin cooed, his eyes lighting up as some innate engineering gene inside his nervous system clicked into high gear.  He ran a clawed finger across a magazine of dim runestones lying on the edge of the workbench.  He then examined several tiny metal nick-nacks, tools, tinkering equipment, and other miscellaneous objects of Scootaloo's quarter-century of invention.  “I've never seen such fancy schmancy engineering.  Tell me, what goblin merchant did you buy it off of?”

        “I didn't buy it off of anybody,” Scootaloo said.  “I built it.”

        Warden spun around so fast, it looked like his ears would fly off.  “You built this?”  He gestured towards the whole of the gondola.  “This whole ship as well?!”

        “Uhhh... Yeah?”

        “But... But...”  He fidgeted and glanced awkwardly down at her four limbs.  “You've only got hooves!”

        “And somewhere on that green body of yours, you've got a rectum.  What's your point?”

        “It's just... yeesh.”  He made a face.  “Wouldn't that have been—y'know—really hard to do and stuff?”

        “The hard things in life are what teach us the most about... stuff.”  Scootaloo blinked, her head turning as she followed the little imp.  The goblin was shuffling back towards the work bench, fumbling over the many rattling things.  “Just what are you looking at now?”

        “Everything...”  Warden murmured, grasping a hoof's pen brace and slipping his tiny wrist through the cylindrical hollow of it.  “The last time I got a chance to look at some real decent tools was on an ogre zeppelin.”  He picked up a pair of wide-lensed goggles and squinted at the space inside them for holding enchanted moon dust.  “Ever since, I've been either stumbling across the Wasteland or sleeping in gutters.  It's like I'm going through mechanical withdrawal...”  He tilted up half of a lantern yoke, gazing intently at the lever-operated flints inside the glass jars of the device.  “Every goblin has to kindle the fire of Petra in his heart...”  He briefly fingered the worn edges of a paperback pulp fiction novel.  “...or else he'll go mad like a hob with rabies.”

        Scootaloo made a face.  “I thought Petra was just a city.”

        “You would think that, wouldn't you, glue stick?” he chuckled, mesmerized with a series of lightning gun blueprints.  “Ooooh... Frostbeams!  A focused electrical blaster...”

        “Yeah, uh huh...”  Scootaloo glanced at the goblin, at the hammock, then at the goblin again.  She pointed at the netting while smirking plastically.  “Wow, I bet you're spent after all of that mushroom soup.  Wouldn't you like to... er... get some sleep and mend those bruises of yours... or something?”

        “Yeah, yeah—Whoah... You built a light rig out of multicolored gemstones?”

        “Hey kid—er, Wart, I need to work on finishing the last of my repairs and I really can't afford to just leave you with—”

        “Yeesh—Do you ever actually build all of these things or do you just randomly sketch the crap?”  Warden picked up a journal full of scribbled notes in his green hands.  He squinted at it, making a face.  “Just what the heck is a 'nyx eclipse?'”  After a blink, he slid his left fingers to the side.  “Oh!  Heheheh...”  He chuckled.  “I read that wrong.”

        Scootaloo sighed, hanging her head and running a hoof through her pink mane.  “Okay, I'm glad you're getting your machine fix or what-not, but do you have to do that with your bare hands?  Just use your eyes if you don't mind—”

        “Hah!”  Warden's voice chirped merrily from above the workbench.  “Did you draw this too?!  You must have been drunk that day!”

        Scootaloo glanced up.  Suddenly, her eyes flared like scarlet lightning bolts as she howled, “Do not touch that!”

        The goblin instantly rediscovered his shivers.  Gazing frightfully at her, he slid down from where he had stood atop the workbench to clutch a white sheet with foalish yellow drawings on it.  Scootaloo swiftly shuffled over in his place and smoothed Suntrot's illustration out, sighing long and hard upon making contact.  After a calming breath, she murmured with closed eyes.

        “Okay.  I was wrong when I inferred that I built everything that you see here.  The truth is: some of the stuff in here is salvaged from the Wasteland.  And though I can't expect you to understand it one bit, the scavenged things mean a heck of a lot more to me than all the crap I've built with my hooves over the years.  So I would really, really appreciate it if you didn't touch things unless you were given permission.  You got that?”

        Warden said nothing.  He shuffled away from her in a newfound uneasiness.

        She cleared her throat, turned away from the drawing, and trotted towards him with a soft attempt at smiling.  “Please forgive me for shouting.  I've lived a great deal of my life in the Wasteland, and I'm not used to exercising anger without performing a total, violent freak-out.  Does that make any sense?”

        “I guess...”  He fidgeted, pressing his eight fingers together at various angles, avoiding her gaze.  He navigated the rough edge of a frown before finally murmuring, “Though, what did you expect?”

        Scootaloo raised an eyebrow.  “I beg your pardon?”

        “If you knew that the Wasteland was gonna make you into such an angry pony, then why'd you go about Dimming the world in the first place?”

        The last pony's lips pursed.  She was briefly more confused than insulted.  “You mean the Cataclysm?”

        “Whatever you glue sticks call it!”  Warden frowned, his eyes taking on a hard-edged sea color.  “Was it because you knew that we were about to manifest Petra?  Did you freakin'' Dim the planet to blind us before we could get that far?!”

        “Kid... I...”  Scootaloo rolled her eyes and groaned into a facehoof.  “I have no clue what caused the Cataclysm—”

        “Then if ponies didn't do it, who did?!”

        “Has it occurred to you that some souls are trying to figure it all out?!”  She snapped at him, her scarlet eyes burning once more.  “Some of us are putting our time to better use than wasting it all on beating sky marble to a pulp or murdering our own flesh and blood in the middle of the friggin' street!”

        Warden flinched.

        The lantern-lit air of the cabin dwindled mutely between them.  The boiler projected a deep, low hum against the opposite walls of the gondola.  Both souls stood equally apart from each other, once more separated by invisible yet impermeable barriers as old as the Wasteland was young.

        “What...”  Warden shifted uncomfortably where he stood.  “What happens next?  What are you planning on doing with me?”

        “I'm not tossing you out the nearest porthole, if that's what you're asking, Wart,” Scootaloo muttered.  “It's not that I have anything to prove; I just don't think that way.  Quite frankly, I don't care how you feel about me or ponies in general.  If you wanna hate me, that's fine.  I won't blame you; I rightfully couldn't.  I just need to get a few things done, and then when it's time for my appointment with the prime Hex-Bleeder, I'll drop you off... somewhere.  We'll be out of each other's hair, so to speak.  Sound good?”

        “Sure, whatever.”

        “Hopefully your bruises will have mostly healed by then—”

        “Why the heck do you care?”

        Scootaloo blinked.  “Pardon?”

        “If you're so indifferent about me and the way I feel about you sky-stealing glue sticks...”  He frowned suspiciously at her with his arms folded.  “...then why did you do this?  Why did you patch me up and feed me?  What's in it for you?”

        “Kid, do you really have to press the issue?”

        “I gotta know,” he said, his aquamarine eyes narrow.  “I could have died last night.  From cold and starvation and blood loss, I could have died, and then all of my troubles would have been over.  Then you had to prance in and try to make things all flowers and giggles or whatever it is ponies do.”

        “Cute.”

        “Why?”  His green brow furrowed under dark emerald tufts of hair.  “Why didn't you just—?”

        “What?  Let you roll over and croak?  Isn't that what your own flesh and blood would have done to you?”

        He merely bit his lip at that.

        Scootaloo sighed long and hard.  “Once upon a time, when I could very easily have had all my troubles stripped away by the cold touch of death, I was instead dealt a hand of mercy.  At my lowest of lows, I was given a new lease on life, along with all of the many, painful, and horrible realities of that life.  In spite of all my fears, regrets, and wounds... I am a much better soul for it today than I ever was, for I have earned everything that defines my existence today.”  Her lips hung open as she hesitated briefly, then added, “I have a goblin to thank for that.  And... uhm... tomorrow, I... I think I’ll have that same goblin to thank for it all over again.”  She gulped, then avoided the teenager's gaze as she shuffled a hoof across a stretch of lonely bulkhead.  “I guess a part of me felt... inspired by him, and I wanted... needed to grant the same gift to you.  After all... whether I claim responsibility for it or not...”  She finally gazed up, glancing forlornly at the horseshoe blemish on his left thigh.  “I've only ever dealt a curse to you...”

        He leaned his head to the side, as if surveying new and unseen angles of her figure.  “I always thought ponies only ever wanted to fill their mouths with the bones of goblin children.  Instead, you've got your mouth full of words.”

        “You think that's bad?  Read my friggin' journal.”

        “You can write too?”

        Scootaloo pointed a hoof towards the bench.  “Who the heck did you think scribbled down the 'Onyx Eclipse?!'”

        “I dunno—one of your hob slaves?”

        “Nnnngh...”  Scootaloo face-hoofed.

        “Doesn't every single pony at least own five imp slaves to do their bidding?”

        “You wanna do my bidding, kid?  Lie down in the hammock and try to get some sleep.”

        “Will you eat me if I don't?”

        “Don't friggin' tempt me,” Scootaloo muttered, marching past him and towards the stairs leading down into the hangar bay.  “By the way, don't try touching any of the instrument panels of the airship.  I've got a high-voltage charge running through it that can only be diffused by vocally activating a runic circuit breaker.”

        “What are you, a dictionary?”

        Scootaloo froze, blinking awkwardly at that.  She glanced up at him.  “In simpler words, ya little Wart, as soon as you so much as touch a finger to the dashboard, you'll be too burned for me to bother with eating.”

        He slumped down in the hammock, hugging his knees to his chest and frowning.  “I think I was better off in the gutter.”

        “You're welcome.”  Scootaloo shuffled down the steps.  Once alone in the hangar bay, she sighed heavily to herself and paused beside a table of chemical rune-making tools.  She glanced down to witness a shiny metal scooter.  Gently, she planted a hoof down onto the edge of it and absent-mindedly slid the thing back and forth a few centimeters.

        Hopping over a bump in the sidewalk, Scootaloo planted all four hooves on the metal tray, glided for half-a-minute, and resumed kicking at the ground with a rear hoof, accelerating herself towards the center of the warm, bustling town.

        It was the eve of the Summer Sun Celebration.  Ponyville glistened in the waning afternoon.  Banners and Celestial crests were being hung off of every downtown buildingfront.  Ponies filled the streets with reflective decorations meant to capture the glory of Princess Celestia's sun-rising that very next morning.  Through this festive, busy atmosphere, Scootaloo glided atop her metal tray, lost in the grand scuffle of excited equine souls.

        The orange filly was hungry; she was always hungry.  However, after a solid week of struggle and lonely persistence, her hunger had become a manageable pain.  Scootaloo had established a pattern, had found a random assortment of pony shopkeepers willing to give a “treat” or two for a volunteer job done well.  Unlike her first experience, the orphan pegasus didn't refuse these hoof-outs with the same vehemence that she denied herself the cupcake.  Perhaps it was because she expected the treats as payment this time.  Perhaps it was because her need to satiate her appetite was more important than her desire for golden bits.

        In the end, Scootaloo decided that her refusal of the cupcake during her first day in Ponyville was a noble, albeit stupid act.  The special thing about doing something stupid was her ability to learn from it, she concluded.  Every time she thought about it, she didn't hear her voice; she instead heard the raspy, snickering voice of an older pony.  Scootaloo saw colors, and felt the ridiculous impulse to smile.

        Scootaloo hardly understood it, but whatever this persistent well of energy was, it had helped her survive over the course of the last harrowing week.  It had given her reasons to look towards the sky in search of something that would dart across her eyesight and give her a whimsical reason to gasp.  It still wasn't enough enthusiasm to make her eat that infernal cupcake, though.  She was saving that for a special occasion.  What that occasion was, Scootaloo barely had an idea, but she had faith that she would understand it when the time came.

        Now she was here—riding up to the threshold of Ponyville's Town Hall—as night began to fall, ushering the many chatting, excited ponies into the same domain where Princess Celestia would magically raise the sun the following morning.  Most of the citizens of the town were there—but not all of them.  Scootaloo was briefly aware of a wild party taking place inside Ponyville's library across the central courtyard.  She cast the giant, hollow tree a bizarre look and wheeled her way inside the Town Hall.  She didn’t care about partying.  She didn’t care about the Celestial banners and the decorations and the singing songbirds filling the magically-lit hovel.  She didn’t even care about the elaborate buffet table of apple treats stretched before her growling stomach.

        Gazing towards the upper rafters of the tall, cylindrical town hall, Scootaloo gazed from loitering pegasus to pegasus, and in spite of all of their bright and varied coats, she didn't see the colors that had secretly, delicately ushered her there.  So, she grabbed an apple fritter from the table and sat atop her metal tray in a far corner of the crowded place, refilling her dry mouth with the delicious memories from seven days ago, her heart skipping several beats as she quietly searched for a rainbow that had promised to be there.

        “This is where I gotta let you go, kid.”

        In the hangar of Strut Fifteen, Scootaloo stood before a little green goblin alongside the moored and magically sealed body of the Harmony.  Several non-imps lingered around them, tending to their various aircraft and dirigibles.  A few of them gave the horse and half-ling several shifty glances, intrigued by the bizarre pairing.  It wasn't a scene that would last for long.

        Scootaloo was in the process of dumping a stack of silver bars into the flinching goblin's paws.

        “Here.  One hundred strips.  Merry Hearth's Warming and all that jazz.”

        “What...”  To the last pony's muted surprise, she was given a frown instead of a smile.  The goblin looked at the clattering bits of metal as if they were hideously radioactive.  “What is this supposed to be?”

        “Uhm... Jee, I dunno.  A warm meal?  A place to stay?  A big bright machete that will let you murder those bullies from yesterday in their sleep?”

        “How in Dimming's Blight do you expect me to buy anything in this city?!”  Warden balked at her generous donation.  He wriggled his left thigh so that the crimson hangar light caught the charred edges of his horseshoe mark.  “I've been branded with the image of sky-stealers!  Anywhere I go to ask for a job, I'll only be mocked for the no-bleeder that I am!  This money will be yanked out of my fingers!”

        “Then use them to hop aboard the next freight dirigible out of here,” Scootaloo said, adjusting the leather armor clinging to her frame.  A lone blue feather fluttered in a gust of steam, strung to her ear  “Fly somewhere far away from goblins carrying steam rifles and crap.  You want my advice?  Find an aircraft that'll take you through the Central Heights.  Look for a flying squirrel merchant named Bruce.  He should be flying a giant green cigar of a zeppelin suspended on six bulbous balloons.  Tell him ‘Harmony sent you.’  He may know of a squirrel who knows a squirrel who knows of another squirrel who might be able to smuggle you safely to a far less dismal place, like St. Petersbrittle.  It's been my experience that the Wasteland's a little less nasty the more talking rodents you have around, but Celestia help your lungs be any healthier from it.”

        “But who help my lungs?”

        “So long, Wart.”  Scootaloo waved a hoof, spun about, and trotted towards the upper levels of Strut Fifteen.  “I've got an appointment to meet.”

        “What makes you so dang sure that I'll be any better off than you would be in any part of the Wasteland?!”  He barked at her from the widening gap between them.  “Don't you realize that you just nursed me back to health so that this crazy world can beat the crap out of me all over again?!  I'm just as bad off as you, glue stick—”

        “Kid, when I was your age and all on my lonesome, I would have tortured puppies to be holding as many silver strips as you've got in your claws right now.”  She briefly glanced over her armored mane and squinted at him through copper goggles.  “You think you're as screwed as any other 'glue stick?'  Then suck it up and make like a 'glue stick!’  Gallop off to greener pastures!  I don't care—Just do something useful with your life!”

        “Y'know, one of these days, somebody's gonna gut you for that mouth of yours, sky-stealer.”

        “Get in line,” she grunted and marched out of the hangar.

        Warden stood alone beside the Harmony, frowning.  His expression wilted as a deep shiver returned to his figure.  He clutched the silver strips to his chest, gazed at them, then at all of the foreboding shadows of the place.

        The last pony trotted quietly towards the distant elevator shaft.  On either side of her, crowds of suspicious goblins stared and gawked, murmuring innumerable words of distaste that formed a grand, somber hum around the filly's shuffling gait.  The lurching, icy crowd was occasionally pierced by a random laugh or scoffing snort as numerous imps made mumbled jokes at her expense.

        The pegasus sighed, shuffling to feel the weight of the copper rifle in her saddlebag.  Somehow, the solid body of the weapon did very little to comfort her in the midst of this sea of malice.  At any second, at any drop of the mining hat, these soot-stained goblins could very easily pounce on her and rip her to shreds in hysterical numbers.  The last pony briefly imagined that the only thing separating these creatures from trolls was a modicum of decency and the ability to pronounce curse words.

        It was with a paranoid jolt, then, that she realized one shadowy half-ling was suddenly walking at an even pace with her.  She shifted her body in such a way as to slide the rifle half out, but when she glanced aside she realized who it was.

        “Wart?!”  She blinked, cockeyed.  “What the heck gives?”

        “You the heck gives, apparently,” he said with a snarling frown.  His vest pockets bulged with the strips she had freshly donated to him.  “Did you really think I was going to let you get away?”

        “What do you think you're doing?”

        “I'm helping you.”

        “If you want more strips or something, kid, you can give up right now—”

        “I may have slept in streets and alleyways like a filthy beggar, but that doesn't mean I am one!”  He showed his razor sharp teeth as he glanced at her, exclaiming, “I've only ever offered my hands in labor, to help other goblins manifest Petra.  It was their hatred for glue sticks like you that refused me.”

        “And 'glue sticks' don't own imps as slaves,” Scootaloo muttered, trying to out-trot the teenager.  “We've covered this—”

        “Don't insult me!”  The green goblin suddenly ran in her path, forcing her to a stop.  “I have no intention to become anybody's slave!  You've healed my wounds, fed me, and given me strips.  Now it's time that I paid my dues.”

        “Kid, I don't need you—”

        “I don't care what you need, sky-stealer!”  He hissed venomously.  “I'm a goblin.  Stock-Bleeder or no-bleeder, I am bound to earn that which has been paid to me!  I can't expect a pink-haired horse like you to understand it, but perhaps there's something inside all of that leather armor that can respect it.”

        Scootaloo opened her mouth to protest, when she suddenly saw herself reflected in those aquamarine eyes, and perhaps even absorbed within.  She closed her mouth with a sour taste, like a dry tongue that ached for a sinful cupcake with blue frosting.  She dreamed of apples, waterfalls, and tears all in one moment, until she realized that she had never been so wrong about something before in her life.

        So, she amended her mistake right there and then.  “Alright, ya little Wart.  You wanna help me?”  She glanced at the thick line of goblins surrounding the conversation that the two of them were having in the middle of the rusted street.  “You can start by helping me find a quick and safe way to Eighteen Strut.  Currently I'm walking the path I took yesterday, but I don't like how long it takes.”

        “Well...”  Warden smirked, his arms folded.  “First off, you're headed towards an old, worn-down elevator shaft.  I swear, whoever built that thing was eating the wrong kind of mushrooms.  It's bound to collapse at any time, which is why so few goblins take it to the upper struts.”

        “You know of a faster elevator, kid?”  Scootaloo asked, glancing nervously over her shoulder.  “I don't care much if something kills me, so long as it's a quicker alternative to being constantly stared at by Petra's patron saints of gloom and doom.”

        “I think I just might know a route,” he said rather brightly, his ears twitching upwards like an adrenalized cat.  “Follow me!”  He scampered away with a flicker of his black vest and matching horseshoe mark.

        Scootaloo smirked tiredly to herself and trotted briskly after him.  “Now if only I can get him to fetch me drinkable water in this friggin' dump, then I'm sold.”

        A half-hour later, the two had made very good time.  They exited out of an elevator onto Ceti Level of Strut Eighteen.  The large, rusted warehouse of the Hex-Bleeders lingered two translucent floors of metal grating directly above.  Side by side, the brown pegasus and green goblin marched down the aluminum streets under golden lanternlight.  They made straightaway for a ramp that ascended towards the large, jutting platform's Beta Level.

        “There are sometimes two to three clans living on each platform,” Warden explained to the last pony, hurrying his little feet so that he could keep up with the steady trot of her four hooves.  “They struggle for control of the streets and—more importantly—the population of mining families who live there.  In the end, though, it usually comes down to just one clan getting the upper hand, so to speak.  For example, my uncle may be a Stock-Bleeder, but he answers to the Horn Blood clan of Strut Seven, cuz they run the seventh platform of Petra from the Wasteland floor.  Then, of course, you've got a lot of other famous clans who each own a strut, like Wood Blood of Twelve Strut, Lake Blood of Twenty Strut, and of course Rust Blood of Twenty-One Strut.”

        “Lemme guess...”  Scootaloo gazed up at the multiple metal lattices looming above them both.  “This platform, Eighteen Strut, belongs to Hex Blood.”

        “Yup.”

        “I don't suppose... erm... that you would happen to know anything about their clan leader, Devo?”

        “Ooooh... Devo...”  Warden paced quickly alongside her as they came upon a shuffling line of taller goblins wearing yellow armbands.  “Yeah, the prime Hex-Bleeder is the talk of the town around here.  Even a no-bleeder like me has heard gossip about him.  Goblins, gremlins, and hobs alike say he's really freakin' old, almost as old as Haman of Rust Blood.  He’s certainly better-looking than that liver-spotted silver-grabber.  Heeheehee.  Ahem...  there aren't many imps who have seen the world before the Dimming.  Devo and Haman are among them.”

        “Do goblins... respect Devo in his own part of town?”

        “Pretty well, I guess,” Warden said with a shrug.  “Lately, though, it's been tough for Devo to keep the confidence of all his lower Hex-Bleeders.  But he's not alone.  Recently, the clans have started bumping elbows with each other, and in a bad way.”

“Is there a good way?” Scootaloo flippantly asked.

The green teenager went on, “Haman of Rust Blood suddenly pulled out of some really rich trade agreement with a bunch of battling ogres somewhere in the Wasteland, and ever since then Petra has had the thugs of wealthy clans wandering all over platforms that don't belong to them, hunting down former brothers and sisters who've abandoned the business.”

        One of the imps wearing a yellow armband bumped rudely into Warden as they walked past the chatting pair of outcasts.

        The green-skinned goblin stumbled, almost falling flat on his face.  Regaining his balance, he frowned and pointed over his shoulder.  “Like those punks right there!  Why, if I wasn't a no-bleeder, I'd show them a thing or two.  But, you see, that would just get me in trouble with the likes of the Hex Blood clan, ‘cuz it's on account of their agreement with Rust Blood that those creeps are allowed to—”

        Without warning, Scootaloo spun about with a scraping of horseshoes.  “Hey!” she frowned at the line of yellow-banded goblins.  “Hey you, shrimp!”

        A dark-haired goblin chuckled in mid-conversation with another Rust-Bleeder.  He only briefly gave Scootaloo a passing glance.

        “Yeah, that's right, you.” The last pony glared through her glinting goggles.  “Give them back.”

        “Snkkt—Hahaha—Ahem.  Excuse me, Otto, Miss Ryst,” Darper saluted his superiors and shuffled towards the pegasus while palming the metal stock of his steam-powered rifle.  “Give what back, you oats-crapping pile of filth?”

        “Wax poeticson your own friggin' time,” she sneered right back at him as his companions turned to stare at the conversation.  Several impish bystanders craned their necks to look from nearby foundries and shop fronts.  “You're not half as smooth as you think you are, punk.  Give the bars back now.  I won't ask you again.”

        Warden gasped.  Eyes flashing a bright turquoise, he patted his black vest with shivering palms.  All of the silver strips were gone.

        Darper squinted at the lone pegasus, his gaze full of more amusement than malice.  He licked a row of sharp teeth and snickered.  “What died and made you police pony over goblin matters?”  He pointed a sharp claw towards the goblin teenager.  “Unless you're gonna auction off that side of meat you've so capably branded, I’d skip town in a heartbeat.  Heheheheh...”

        A few voices chuckled along the sidelines.  Warden hugged himself, blushing shamefully.

        Scootaloo stood directly between the wilting goblin and the sneering rifler across the way.  “Those strips are payment for a guiding tour of this City.  I've recently been employed by none other than Devo of Hex Blood.  Until my task for the local clan leader is complete, I'll need the boy's assistance, and his strips still belong to me.”

        Otto shuffled up, brandishing brass knuckles and a snarl.  He was held back by a twitching hand as a tall goblinette with long green hair stepped before him.  “Hmmm... Dear boomer Darper, Darper Boomer...”  The leader's left eye quivered as she hissed into his ear, “Do we have a problem with four legs here?  I do not think she is on the menu for Haman today—”

        “Don't worry, Miss Ryst,” he gently pushed her aside.  “I'll take care of this.”  He pumped a lever on his steam rifle.  An intimidating cloud of mist wafted up from the heated weapon, summoning an uncomfortable murmur from the many goblins in the background.  “You're long overdue for a tranquilizer shot, glue stick—Straight through your flippin' brain stem!”  He held the rifle high in the glistening lanternlight.  “Stay out of goblin business or else—”

        “I don't care about goblins,” Scootaloo said, icily.  “I don't care about hobs.  I don't care about gremlins, and I don't care about you.  I only want that which was taken from me to be returned, and I want it returned now.”

        Warden bit his lip.  His eyes quivered fearfully as he backed away from the sight of the gun and the angry imp wielding it.

        Darper's frown had become a searing thing at that point.  “Pony, you picked the wrong day to flash your flank around.”  He wrapped a clawed finger around the trigger, and aimed it at the pegasus' snout...

        Warden flinched, covering his head.  He took a peek, and was surprised to see that Scootaloo hadn't moved a single centimeter...

        Hours passed, hours that Scootaloo could have spent finding slumber in her barn loft—no matter how difficult.  No matter the number of apple treats that she stole from the town hall's buffet table—enough morsels to fill her lonely stomach for days—she couldn't fill this sudden pit inside herself.  Hunger, for all of its horrible vices, was something that could feasibly be measured.  Presently, the orphan was at a loss to explain to herself this inexplicable appetite burning away within.  She sauntered around the many excited, murmuring ponies.  They were all waiting for Princess Celestia to appear at the crack of dawn.  Scootaloo was waiting for something just as bright, but a million times more colorful.

        Exhaling her umpteenth sigh of the evening, the wilting young foal gave into a new desperation that hearkened back to her first day of rambling around Ponyville.  She wandered up to the nearest pony that she could find, tugged on her violet-streaked mane, and murmured once she had acquired her attention, “I-I'm sorry to bother you, Miss.  But... uhm... Has a pegasus named Rainbow shown up?”

        “Rainbow... Dash?”  The lavender unicorn blinked, her mind obviously distracted.  Navigating a thick cloud of thought, she glanced numbly down at the orange foal.  “You mean Ponyville's chief weather flier?”

        “Uhhh... Yeah, sure...”  Scootaloo smiled nervously.

        “She was in the library earlier, but then she must have left for some place.  I'm not exactly sure where.  Please forgive me.  I... uh... I'm not from around here.”  The unicorn shifted nervously, her purple eyes darting left and right across the lengths of the crowded Town Hall, as if a cluster of firecrackers was about to go off at any second.  “You might have better luck asking somepony else.”

        Scootaloo let loose a defeated sigh.  “Well, uhm, did she at least say if she'd be here—?”  She froze in mid-speech, jumping back with a girlish gasp upon seeing what was seated atop the unicorn's spine.        “What?”  A stubby excuse for a whelp blinked a pair of eyeslits back at the orange pegasus.  He ran a young, clawed hand over his green headcrests.  “Is there something wrong with my spines?”

        “You... You...”  Scootaloo squinted her violets.  “What the heck are you—?!”  She was suddenly knocked aside by a bright pink mare bumping into her.  “Yaaah!”

        “Isn't this exciting?!”  the fluffy-maned earth pony chirped in the unicorn's face.  “Are you excited?  Cuz I'm excited!  I've never been so excited—well—except for that time I saw you walking into town and I went—Wuhhhh—but I mean really, who can top that?”

        Scootaloo's nostrils flared with an indignant snort.  “Pffft... Friggin' earth ponies: they think they own the planet.”  She picked herself up, collected her metal tray, and glided off through the crowd.  The Mayor of Ponyville proceeded to orate a boring speech over the heads of everypony as the orphan  plotted a dismal course towards the far edge of the interior, flanked in purple curtains.  “No wonder she's not here,” she grumbled.  “This place is snoozefest.  I swear, being a wallflower here would be a crime.” Nevertheless, she gave the upper rafters another glance, spotting the moon through the tall, stretching windows.  “Oh well, maybe seeing the Princess will be... awesome...”  Her words trailed off as her eyes narrowed on the oddity that the lunar sight had suddenly become.  “Wait... where'd the Mare in the Moon go?”

        The fabric of this very thought was split in half when a sudden cloud of gasps and shrieks filled the air of the room.  Scootaloo glanced at everypony and saw their many heads collectively tilted upwards.  Following the path of their petrified gazes, the little foal suddenly shared their fitful fright.  A froth of sparkling blue effluence had collected atop a grand balcony overlooking the interior of the grand hall.  A bone-chilling air of cold filled the place as the dark magic solidified in the form of a black equine figure.  Every vessel inside Scootaloo's being pulsed upon witnessing this obsidian alicorn, as if the core of her very soul had been naturally sculpted to shiver upon the sight of her majestic wings.  All the ponies around her buckled and quivered under a weighted paranoia that was older than time itself.

        Every ounce of courage that had ushered Scootaloo all the way from Manehattan to Ponyville dissipated in a single breath.  Whimpering in childish fright, she abandoned her metal tray and unashamedly scampered towards the sheltering folds of the purple, hanging curtains.  Her sundered, mortal mind begged for a veil, an obstruction, any opaque structure that could block the nightmarish sight of that alicorn and her glinting helm of lunar blight from sight.  Scootaloo was only vaguely aware of a pair of foalish bodies joining her beneath the curtain's velvety folds.  Collectively, the three figures huddled under an unrelenting cascade of shivers, barely glancing up to witness the last flickering ounce of light from the town hall being absorbed magically into the onyx equine's blacker-than-black coat.  The entire place rattled from the echoes of her unearthly voice:

        “Oh, my beloved subjects, it's been so long since I've seen your precious little sun-loving faces.”

        Something from deep within Scootaloo squeaked, as if a part of her soul was about to bleed out through her tearing eyes.  As the two foals sniffled on either side of her, she scrunched down to the floor, hiding her face in a pair of shivering forelimbs.  She whimpered a strange name, a name she hardly knew, a name that was more like an idea than a pony to her...

        And just like that—from across the icy air of the hall—she heard her rasping voice breaking through, the only brave breath in the entire universe, and it resonated like a colorful knife cutting across the black nightmare.

        “What did you do with our princess?!”

        Scootaloo gasped.  Scootaloo glanced up.  Scootaloo saw...

        “Pony, you picked the wrong day to flash your flank around.”

        Warden stared with disbelief as Scootaloo fearlessly stood her ground, staring down the barrel of the steam rifle being aimed towards her snout.  As Darper's finger lingered on the trigger, there was only the slighest hint of movement under the pegasus' armored flank.  The goblin teenager squinted, realizing that this entire time Scootaloo had coiled her limbs to unspring at a moment's notice.  His engineering mind went into overdrive, and he suddenly saw the trajectory that Scootaloo's rifle would fly upon a single thrust of her shoulders.  No other soul but he and the pony knew it, but Darper's days were numbered.

        Then a twitching hand suddenly clamped onto the rifler's shoulder.  “My little boomer, give four legs back her money.”

        The dark-haired thug blinked wide.  He glanced over a yellow-banded shoulder to gawk at his leader.  “M-Miss Ryst?”

        “Doesn't Haman pay us enough?  Hmmm?”  Ryst jerked her head in the direction of her quivering eye and compensated by straightening a pair of thin arms down past her dual pistol holsters.  “Yes yes yessss... Finding dissidents should come first.  Robbing from idiots always comes second.  Sometimes they come together, but hey—it's a small Wasteland.  Better to let no-bleeders no-bleed-out on their lonesome.  Hmmm... A pity to be such lowly boomers; an even bigger pity to pickpocket from them, don't you think?”

        “But... But this filthy glue stick thinks she can throw her weight around and—!”

        “Darper Darper Darper...”  Ryst shut her green eyes and gnawed with frustration on the back of her knuckles.  She hissed, and bestowed him one glaring pupil, steady as a gun barrel.  “Don't make me sick Otto up your butt.  I highly doubt that he could very easily come back out.”

        Darper frowned, fumed, but ultimately thrust a hand into his pocket with a grumble.  He viciously flung the silver strips onto the aluminum floor of the street with a shower of metallic ringing noises.  “There!  I just made Haman bend over for a show horse and her bum jockey!  Are you happy, Miss Ryst?”

        “Hmmmm—Ecstatic, boomer.  Ecstatic.”  She gnawed one last time on a knuckle or two before murmuring, “I only hope you keep better track of the dissidents' money than the bars you just tossed around like yesterday's eggshells.”

        Warden was already picking up the numerous strips of silver.  “The least you guys could have done was freakin' put it in our hands...”

        “Shut up, you worthless ooze of sky-stealers!”  Darper spat at the kneeling teenager, forcing Warden to fall back on his hindquarters with a gasp.  “Devo of Hex Blood should do you a favor and paint a bullseye on your other buttcheek, cuz that's what I'm aiming for next time, ya little turd!”

        “I highly doubt that,” Scootaloo spoke, once again summoning the dark-haired goblin's frown.  “So long as he is in my employ, he will be in Devo's.  It's one thing to bring upon you the wrath of one measly 'glue stick.' It's another to piss off all of Eighteen Strut.  I'd watch that trigger finger if I were you.”  She calmly turned her flank to him and murmured towards her sudden companion.  “As soon as you've got it all picked up, Wart, let's get the heck out of here.”

        “Let it go, boomer—”  Ryst said, planting her hand atop Darper's shoulder.

        However, the imp was already snarling.  In one motion, he shrugged his leader's claws off of him and aimed the long barrel of the steam rifle straight at Scootaloo's leather-clad spine.  “I'll teach you to be a smart aleck, you oats-huffing piece of filth—!”

        Warden gasped.  His pointed ears twirled in the lanternlight.  “Look out, pony—!”

        Scootaloo's joints jolted.  Without a second thought, the pegasus dashed to her right.

        Darper fired.  A gust of steam flew towards the metal ceiling above as a red hot bolt soared out from the long barrel of his gun.

        The searing projectile missed Scootaloo by a virtual kilometer.  In the molasses motion of a single lurching second, she had bucked her body sideways and flung her copper rifle free.  A dumbstruck Warden watched as the metal device spun like a top in the air, only to be clutched in the hooking fibres of an expert, pink tail sliding out from underneath the pony's armor.  At the end of that breathless second, time resumed in a maddening gust of hot air.  Scootaloo's tail twirled the rifle in a blur, extending it.  With a magazine full of glowing runestones, the last pony flung the stretched weapon into her front hooves as she spun about in a sideways lurch, shouting:  “H'rhnum!”

        The manabullet from her rifle flew true.  It burned a clean path through the street.  Every goblin watched with muted awe as the magical projectile soared violently down the barrel of Darper's very own rifle, exploding from inside the metal stock with a burst of purple fury.

        The resulting pop knocked Darper back, so that he rocked briefly on his own heels.  Blinking, the dazed goblin glanced down to see his weapon scattered about his toes in a sea of smoldering shrapnel.  Also, his hands were gone.

        “Ah... Ahhhh!”  He shrieked, his eyes as wide as saucers.  He fell to his knees and stared in horror at the two bloody stubs his arms had become.  “Aaaaah-Aughhhhh!”

        Scootaloo watched with a deadpan expression.  She calmly cocked her rifle, spitting the worn, smoking rune out from her magazine.  The murmuring goblins alongside the street struggled to hold their lunch as Darper's wails filled the rusted lengths of the platform,

        Warden gazed at the last pony.  He almost dropped the silver strips from his trembling fingers as his teenage mouth hung in a perpetual gape.

        “Nnngh—Haughh!”  Darper shuffled pathetically on his knees, shoving a wincing Otto aside to plead up at the green-haired goblinette.  He sobbed and waved his bloody stumps in front of her.  “Miss Ryst!  Miss Ryst!  Nnnngh—In the name of Petra, call one of Haman's medics!  Help me, pl-please!”

        Ryst rolled her eyes.  With a groaning sigh, she unholstered a pistol, twirled it to a stop against Darper's forehead, and pulled the trigger.

        Warden winced, gritting his razor sharp teeth.

        At the end of the resulting thunder, Darper's wails were no more.  Ryst stood above him, wiping a splatter of red off her knee.  “Well, at least he doesn't smell so bad anymore.”  She glanced over at Scootaloo through a twitching eye and pointed with her pistol.  “I like you, four legs.  Well, that is, I like you more than the the pathetic, spitting boomer whose brains I just spilled all over my toes.  Is it true that you're doing dirty work for Devo of Hex Blood these days?”

        “That depends.”  Scootaloo leaned on her rifle and gazed calmly at the tall goblinette with green hair.  “Dirty work appears to be a relative concept around Petra.”

        “Hmmm... Yes yes yessss.  Just try not to weigh yourself down with the sack of hormones you've got to assist you, Wastelander.”  Ryst licked her chapped lips.  “He would make good bait for harpy pirates, but a poor tourist guide.”  She bent over and salvaged what remained of the steam rifle's metal stock from a fresh pool of blood before tossing it into a dazed Otto's arms.  “Come along, Otto.  You're the new Darper now.  Try not to smell as bad as the poor boomer did, yes yesss?”  With a nervous gaggle of yellow-banded Rust-Bleeders in tow, Miss Ryst marched off towards the next order of business.

        The goblin crowd nervously dissipated, their eyes lingering on the last pony as she quietly retracted the copper rifle and slid it back into its leathery holster across her spine.  A numb Warden slowly shuffled up to her.

        “You... You... You totally wasted him!”

        “Hmm?”  Scootaloo glanced over.  “Oh, right.  I forgot.  You're a young little thing, aren't you?  Sorry you had to see that...”

        “I... I have seen death...”  Warden gulped.  “Every imp does by his three hundredth stormfront.  But never before have I seen so many frostbeams...”

        “There's nothing cool about killing, kid,” Scootaloo said with a sigh.  “Still...”

        “Still what?”

        “He did try to shoot me in the back,” the last pony grumbled in an off-key voice before resuming her steady trot towards the ramp beyond.

        Warden stood behind her, watching, gazing.  His face was suddenly in competition with itself, with a grin attempting to outrace the rosiness to his cheeks.

        “What did you do with our princess?!”

        Young Scootaloo watched, mesmerized, all of the fear draining from her foalish face.

        Rainbow Dash frowned.  Rainbow Dash snarled.  Rainbow Dash flew.  She would have soared her fearless body like a missile through the demonic Alicorn of Night, if not for a quick-moving farm filly snatching the enraged pegasus by her prismatic tail at the last second.

        “Whoah there, nelly!”

        Scootaloo's breath left her.  She had stopped trembling.  She had stopped whimpering.  Her beating heart melted into a tranquil, serene hum as she stared into a breathtaking scene, a living canvas of courage and...

        “Awesomeness...”  the orphan murmured.  The orphan smiled.  The orphan understood.  The unholy Alicorn of Nightmares was cackling from atop the Town Hall balcony, bathing the petrified crowd of Ponyvillean souls with a booming speech befitting a demon goddess, but the little foal could hardly care less.  All Scootaloo could see was a rainbow.

        Just then, one of the two foals shivering next to her sputtered, “What the hay is that pegasus doing?!  She's crazy!”        Scootaloo grunted without even looking at the snow-white unicorn.  “Shut up ya friggin' marshmallow.”