//------------------------------//
// End of Ponies - Petra Arc - Kaizo Edition pt 7 
// Story: Short Scraps and Explosions 
// by shortskirtsandexplosions 
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The End of Ponies – by short skirts and explosions


Chapter Thirty-One – Know Her Name






        A reptilian pair of pale green slits quivered.  For the first time in years, Razzar was seeing color, a furious, diving comet of shades.  Her eyes swam with the rainbow as Scootaloo soared her way through the hole of the train engine's smoldering compartment.  The last pony's ruby goggles sparkled from the flames of her explosive entrance.  Her arcanium cloak billowed on each side of her, the edges of which were brimming with rusted daggers, still sharp with three decades of antiquity.  There was a dark grace to her violent flight, like the fluttering petals of over seven types of flowers combined, and all of them laced with poison.

        Then Razzar blinked, and the many colors drowned under a splashing curtain of red as Scootaloo landed.  The Royal Grand Biv's cloak-blades sliced the throats of two Rust-Bleeders.  Time resumed its rocketing pace.  The two gurgling imps fell meatedly to the floor while Otto and the other two rushed the invader with a combined, bestial roar.

        Scootaloo spun, blocked Otto's punch with the butt of her copper rifle, and shoved him across the claustrophobic train engine compartment.  The second goblin rushed her with a pair of knives.  The last pony blocked one knife with her arcanium weave and deflected the other out of the way with a horseshoe blade.  The third imp—a tiny yellow thing—ran and swung the full weight of his steel shovel.

        The last pony ducked, and the shovel went slamming into a panel of steam-valves.  Sparks rained down on the twitching naga.  “Watch it, boomer!”  Razzar shrieked, struggling to disentangle herself from a metal bulkhead that had fallen over her when the exploding scooter struck the front of the train.  “The steam controls—!”

        The yellow imp paid her little heed.  Hopping over his two dying companions, he swung the shovel down once more towards the pony's cowled forehead.  “Haaaugh!”

        Scootaloo back-trotted in time to duck the swing.  Ruby goggles reflected the dancing orange flames of the speeding train's boiler as she steadied her limbs and prepared herself for the next attack.  The imp shouted in bloodlust and jabbed towards Scootaloo's chest with the moon-stained shovel.  Scootaloo held the length of her copper rifle up in two hooves and met the thrusted shovel down the middle of the weapon.  She then retracted the rifle so that the end of the goblin's bludgeon was stuck between the gun's collapsing stock and hoof-brace.  Twisting her grip of the weapon, she wrenched the shovel out of his grasp before spinning her whole body and bucking him against a panel of steam-powered gauges.  Spiraling to a stop from the end of her three hundred and sixty degree twirl, she extended the rifle and aimed it one-hoofed into his skull.

        “H'rhnum!”

        Whatever shreds of the engine compartment's windows that were left were immediately bathed in brain matter.  Razzar's right eye twitched as half of her scaled face was splattered with the warm juices.  The menacing phantom of the Royal Grand Biv pivoted and aimed the copper rifle full of runestones at the naga's prone figure.

        “Hnnngh!”  Otto rushed in and uppercutted Scootaloo with a fierce set of brass knuckles.  Exhaling sharpling, the last pony flew back, smashing through the door to the engine so that she tumbled like a rainbow sack of potatoes into the first car beyond.  Three goblins were inside the narrow compartment, struggling to stand up under shaking lanternlight as the entire train still wobbled from the last pony's violent entrance.  At the sight of her, they immediately unholstered their steam pistols and took aim.

        Scootaloo looked up, her goggles reflecting their shiny gun barrels.  Biting her lip, she jumped straight up to her hooves and flung the full length of the old outfit's arcanium cloak over her figure.  The three Rust-Bleeders fired a wild volley of steambolts her way.  Her side of the train car sparked and danced with the red-hot ballistics.  She gritted her teeth and tensed her limbs as the ramcrafted cloak absorbed the brunt of the weaponry.

        From the engine, Otto and the other surviving goblin poked their heads out—only to duck and flinch as random steambolts littered the swaying doorframe around them.  “By the Blight!”  Otto shouted as Razzar finally disentangled herself from the mess of metal in the engine compartment behind him.  “Hit what you're frickin' aiming at!”

        The three goblins on the far end of the car were too busy reloading their smoking weapons to follow through with Otto's furious command.  Scootaloo took advantage of it.  Holding her breath, she unfurled her cloak, galloped towards them, then tossed the body of her rifle down with her teeth.  The copper rifle slid smoothly across the length of the compartment, gliding beneath the legs of the panicked Rust Blood trio.  In the meantime, Scootaloo jumped into the thick of the group just as they finished reloading.

        The three imps aimed at her, only to be assaulted with a cyclonic storm of flailing knives.  Scootaloo was leaping, rolling, and cartwheeling through the thick crowd, flinging the length of the Royal Grand Biv's serrated coattails through their numbers.  She effectively knocked the gun out of one thug, shredded the barrel off another's pistol, and deflected the bullet fired by a third.  Once she ended in the center of the group, she caught up with her rifle and slammed a cleated horseshoe over its stock.  The gun twirled up into her grasp.  She cocked it and aimed into one thug's neck.

        “H'rhnum!”

        The first goblin's head rolled off his slumping body as the second screamed and fired at Scootaloo.  The last pony ducked low, twirled the rifle over her cloaked wings, and slid the gun down her right rear leg until it came to a stop with its stock propped against her hoof and its barrel pressed to the second thug's pelvis.

        “H'rhnum!”

        The Rust-Bleeder's abdomen spilled over the floor of the train car.  Scootaloo stood back up, only to collapse from the weight of the third thug suddenly charging into her.  The last pony lost the grip of her rifle as she was slammed into a metal crate.  The angry goblin clutched her neck from behind, repeatedly slamming the barrel of his pistol into her cowled head.  The pegasus gasped and grunted, absorbing the blows through the ramcrafted material armoring her.  There was a brief pause in the violence as the brown-skinned thug spun his revolving barrel of steambolts and aimed the pistol point-blank at the base of her skull.

        “Nnnngh!” She grunted and flung a hoof up into his crotch.  The imp immediately stumbled off of her.  Spinning off the crate, the last pony flung a serrated cloak towards his skull.  Blood flew as deep ravine was sliced across his cheek.  Shouting in pain, the brown goblin clutched his leaking face and teetered off—only to receive the full brunt of the pegasus' bucking hooves.  As he fell into collapsing heap of metal junk on the far side of the train car, more bullets landed around Scootaloo.

        Spinning, she saw Otto and his goblin cohort firing at her now that she was the only thing standing inside the first car's compartment.  The two seething imps squinted and aimed for the few scant parts of Scootaloo's colorful outfit that was exposed beyond the arcanium weave.  She was about to make it a lot more difficult for them.

        Ducking another volley, Scootaloo squatted low and pulled at a release cord built into the neckline of the Royal Grand Biv outfit.  With a shout, she spun in a circle.  This time, the cloak lost a fan of knives.  The rusted, rainbow-colored blades flew—glistening—towards the door to the train engine.  Otto gasped and ducked.  His companion, however, wasn't so lucky.  He received two knives to the chest and one that stuck into the nape of his neck.  The goblin fell back—twitching and gurgling—just in time for a blinking naga to catch the full weight of his spasming body.  Razzar glared over the corpse's shoulder towards the last pony.

        Scootaloo sweated under her salvaged armor as she flinched her body and swung it the other way.  Another stream of blades flew through the train towards her opponents at the entrance to the engine.  Razzar merely held the dying body of the goblin in front of her and Otto.  Most of the pegasus' blades were absorbed into the meatshield.  The rest ricocheted off the doorframe with a shower of sparks.

        The last pony held her breath and grinded her hooves.  She knew that Razzar and Otto wouldn't go down like the rest of the thugs.  One way or another, she had to get into the engine compartment and stop the train from carrying the fire granite bombs into the body of Petra.  With a sinister growl, she galloped full-force towards the pair of Haman's lackeys.

        Razzar saw the pony's charge.  Calmly, she opened her mouth and bit hard into the neck of the knife-impaled goblin in front of her.  Ripping a chunk of red meat out from the imp's torso, she yanked her neck and flung a heap of guts towards the charging pegasus.

        “Aaugh!”  Scootaloo sputtered, her goggles soaked with blinding, crimson juices.  She skidded to a stop and stumbled over the body of a dead thug.  Hissing, she raised a hoof and desperately wiped the blood off her goggles just in time to see the dry skin of Razzar's clawed fist flying into her vision.  The pegasus toppled backwards, bouncing like a ragdoll off a pair of metal crates.  She stood up, and her goggles were cracked.  Sneering, she flung the article off her scarlet eyes—gasped—and raised her horseshoe blade just in time to block a clawed swing of Razzar's fingers.  The pony held her breath, flinched her lower body, and flung a razor-sharp length of her prismatic coattails at the naga.

        In a test of true nimbleness, the naga mercenary bent impossibly backwards, ducked the sharp swing, spun around, and flung a clawed foot straight towards Scootaloo's cowled skull.  The pony blocked with a horseshoe and jabbed forward with her other hoof's blade.  The reptilian woman merely performed a hand-stand on Scootaloo's lunging limb, flipped over her armored flank, and landed on the far end of the car in a slide.  She flung her sharp fingers down to her dual pistol holsters.

        Scootaloo saw it.  In a desperate lunge, she flung her coattails loosely at the naga, launching another fan of knives.  Razzar expertly dodged one, ducked another... then took the third straight to the face.  Her scaled head limply jerked back.  Scootaloo watched with momentary breathlessness, but then gawked as Razzar slowly turned to face her, having effortlessly caught the blade in her sharp teeth.  With emerald eyeslits narrowing at the pegasus from afar, she menacingly bit through the length of the colored knife.  Spitting the two shards out, she pulled both pistols loose, spun them, and aimed at Scootaloo's figure...

        The pony wasn't about to give the lizard the satisfaction.  A pair of pale objects rattled to a stop below the naga's feet.  Scootaloo had tossed two rune-capped flash grenades down the middle of the train compartment, and was already blocking her naked eyes as she shouted towards the swaying bulkheads of the swaying train.

        “Y'hnyrr!”

        Razzar barely had time to leap to a safe distance.  The far end of the car was bathed in hot white light.  The sheer force of the moonrock's magical outburst sent goblin tools clattering all over the floor.  Scootaloo looked once more and was about to rush the prone naga when a pair of strong arms suddenly gripped her from behind.

        “Nnnngh-Raugh!” A blood-stained Otto viciously suplexed Scootaloo in the opposite direction.

        The last pony grunted, bounded through the door-frame, rolled over three dead imps, and landed dizzily inside the engine compartment with her armored shoulders propped against an instrument panel.  Wincing, she glanced up in time to see the stocky-framed Rust-Bleeder marching into the room.  His dark threads billowed around a pale bald spot from the boiler's heat and Wasteland wind as he pulled a wire down from a battery built into his vest and attached it to his brass knuckles.  Slamming the two metal frames together, he produced a bright splash of sparks.  The metal knuckles brimmed with white-hot electricity as he sneered wickedly at the pony across the compartment.

        “This one's for Darper, you lousy sack of manure.”

        Scootaloo spat, stood up across him, and cracked her neck joints.  “Let's see how badly you insult him.”

        Otto hissed, growled, and came charging with a full-fist of electrical fury.  The pegasus held her breath and ducked.  The imp's punch slammed into an instrument panel.  Bright bolts of artificial lightning danced up and down the walls of the engine compartment.  Scootaloo headbutted him in the chest.  He stumbled back, joined both of his knuckles and swung them down hard at her.  She jumped back before the surging currents dancing across the floor could travel up into her horseshoes.  Otto came charging again, and she readied herself with a desperate spin, hooking her pink tail-hairs around his throat.  The burly Rust-Bleeder gasped and sputtered for breath as the follicles tightened around his throat.  Before Scootaloo could shove the length of her horseshoe blade into his shoulders, he shoved both brass knuckles into her chest from behind.  A wave of electricity coursed through the arcanium wing, shocking the last pony to the core.

        “Gghh-Hkkkt!”  Scootaloo spasmed and immediately let go of him.  She stumbled back, her rainbow armor trailing with smoke.  Otto spun with a full fist of dancing bolts.  The pegasus took it across the cheek.  Twirling from the heavy blow, she stumbled until her upper body was draped over a thick iron lever sticking out the side of the engine controls.  Wincing, Scootaloo shook her head and refocused her foggy vision.  She managed to see the shadow of Otto's thick body in the dancing light of the hot boiler; he was charging her rear.

        With a sharp breath, Scootaloo simply flung herself to the floor.  Otto's rush flung him—fists first—into the lever, snapping the device in two.  A rather explosive surge of electrical energy flew into the machine as the controls to the engine's steam distribution was ruptured from deep within.  A loud hissing sound filled the compartment, and the boiler billowed even brighter as the train was forcibly accelerated beyond sane tolerance.  Otto only had two or three seconds to gawk at the damage he had caused.  He was suddenly thrown forward as the body of the train lurched ahead.


~*~*~*~*~*~*~



        Warden gasped, his petite body jolting as the entire train shook.  He rattled nervously from the short length of chains anchoring him to the vertical array of steampipes in the middle of the second car.

        He was fully aware of the violent noises of battle in the two compartments ahead of him.  However, something far more dramatic had just transpired, and the air of the chamber filled with a dull roar of metal wheels scraping over monorail tracks.  Through the grated windows lining the second car, the golden aura of Petra shone brighter and brighter.  The train was now roaring ahead at a menacing velocity.  The teenager's eyes turned a timid turquoise, and he gulped while observing the many spherical bombs of fire granite rolling loosely against each other around him.


~*~*~*~*~*~*~


        Scootaloo winced, still weathering the electrified spasms coursing through her body.  Slowly, she stood up in the center of the engine compartment.  Her ears pricked under her arcanium cowl, alarmed to hear the high-pitched whine of the ruptured steam panels.  Before she could take a more proper survey of the damage, an imp's hulking weight pressed into her from behind, and she swiftly remembered that she was in a fight to the death.

        Otto held the pony's shoulder in a vice grip.  Wrestling with her, he inched his sparkling knuckles closer and closer to the nape of her neck.  The armored pegasus snarled and flung her body left and right—slamming the two of them into one instrument panel after another—desperate to shake the meaty Rust-Bleeder off her flank.  Their struggling breaths and angry grunts formed an undercurrent of hate beneath the perpetual hiss of the damaged engine panels.  The winds of the Wasteland blew the goblin's black threads into her face as his knuckles squeezed tighter towards her throat.  Hot white sparks danced against her skin, burning her coat.

        She gnashed her teeth while her muscles buckled  underneath his intense pressure.  Her twitching eyes scoured the metal walls framing the door to the first car.  She suddenly saw the dance of orange light from the hot boiler.  Summoning a deep growl from beneath her limbs, she stretched her wings out beneath the arcanium armor.  The gesture allowed her to shift her weight back against a gasping Otto.  With a bestial roar, she hobbled back, then fiercely back-trotted as fast as she could.

        “Rrrrrrr-Raaaugh!”  Scootaloo flung the two of them backwards into the mouth of the boiler.  Her armored body stopped right at the burning chamber's frame.  Otto's didn't.  The screaming imp was flung like a sack of coal into the blazes, his flesh and hair instantly roasting.  Before the smoking effluence of his melting skin could billow out of the oven, Scootaloo was fiercely slamming the boiler lid shut to his wailing voice.

        The last pony flung herself against the lid, panting.  Just as she heard the torturous sounds of a fist hammering against the seal from the inside, a bullet ricocheted off the panel above her.  She spun and looked towards the first car.

        Razzar stood at the entrance, her eyeslits still squinting from the effects of the runestone flash grenades.  “Sister?!”  She hissed and fired blindly into the engine compartment.  Bullets sparked off the metal bulkheads on either side of Scootaloo.  “Where are you, sister?!”  She blinked in the direction of Scootaloo's shadow and aimed truer this time.

        Scootaloo held her breath and jumped out of the way.  As soon as her weight moved, the boiler lid flew open.  The air of the compartment filled with screams as the charred frame of Otto lurched out, only to receive a bullet to the skull.  He fell in a smoking heap.

        Razzar's nostrils flared.  She made a face.  “Hmmm... Never did like his forehead—”

        “Yaaaugh!”  Scootaloo was suddenly diving into her, spearing Razzar straight in the chest.  The pony and lizard went tumbling into the middle of the first car.  Hooves tangled with claws.  A razor sharp mouth clashed with arcanium armor.  The two rolled for two or three more violent meters before ending with Razzar kicking the last pony off of her.

        Agilely, the last pony flipped and landed on sliding, sparkling horseshoes.  Breathless, she reached under her razor-sharp cloak for another cluster of grenades... when suddenly that very same cloak caught fire.  She gasped, lurching forward after taking the brunt of a burning-hot flare.

        Across the way, at the rear of the car, the brown-skinned imp held a smoking flaregun in one hand while his other limb palmed the bleeding knife wound Scootaloo had dealt his cheek earlier.  Sneering, he spat on the ground and fumbled to reload the projectile launcher in his grasp.

        Scootaloo was on fire.  More accurately, her Royal Grand Biv suit was on fire.  Shrieking, she desperately backed away from Razzar while fumbling with her hoves to wrench the red hot cloak of blades off her.  The arcanium weave heated up rapidly.  She could smell the ends of her mane burning.  Desperate to avoid a fate like Otto's, she flung the rainbow cloak onto the floor, only to realize she was still burning.  Twice as swiftly, she flung her limbs up to the problem—her cowl.  Yanking the article off, she tossed the smoking away before the flames could eat at her cranium.  The aching Scootaloo was now reduced to a tight, black layer of ramcraft body armor, devoid of the serrated colors.  Hearing the cocking sound of the flare gun, she spun a soot-stained frown towards the thug.

        The Rust-Bleeder finished reloading the flaregun.  With a bloody frown, he gripped the handle of the weapon with two gnarled hands and aimed at her.

        Scootaloo blinked.  She glanced down and saw her copper rifle lying on the blood-stained ground halfway between the two of them.  Before Razzar could get up and tackle the pony, Scootaloo was running in full-gallop towards the imp.  She stretched her wings out, jumped, and flapped her feathered appendages.  The Rust-Bleeder fired.  The flare burned a screaming path down the center of the car.  Soaring through the claustrophobic space, Scootaloo planted her hooves against the wall, scrunched her body, dodged the burning projectile, and leaped off the bulkhead with a twirl as the flare exploded violently behind her and a lunging Razzar.

        The imp backed up, trying foolishly to reload the flare gun a third time.  His fate was sealed; Scootaloo landed on her back, snatched the rifle up in two hooves, and slid icily forward from her momentum so that she came to a stop beneath the goblin's legs.  She aimed the barrel of the gun up his prone center.

        “H'rhnum!”

        The goblin's brown body jolted.  In a blink, the top of his head exploded as the manabullet flew out his skull and embedded into the ceiling.  With his spine reduced to butter, he fell in a quivering slump.  Stained with his blood, the darkly-garbed pony stumbled up to her feet.  Remembering Razzar, she slowly turned around—only to discover that the naga had remembered her first.

        “Hnnnckt!”  Scootaloo sputtered as a red, razor-clawed hand gripped viciously around her neck.  The mercenary's grip was so tight that the mare barely summoned the strength to lift her smoking rifle halfway.

        Covered in ash from the impacting flares, Razzar leaned her face of flaking skin into Scootaloo's scarlet eyes and sneered above the straining noises of the chugging engine behind her, “You have made a smelly, smelly mistake, four hooves.”  Her dry nostrils flared from the scent of Otto.  “Such a shame.  We could have been very pretty souls in this Wasteland together.”

        Scootaloo's eyes rolled back in her head.  She suddenly shivered, finding herself dangling from the reptile's surprising grasp as she was lifted in two hands towards the grated window lining the first car.

        “This is not your train to catch,” Razzar muttered, tensing the muscles in her upper body.  “After Petra falls, do us both a favor.  Scavenge somewhere else.”  With that said, she flung Scootaloo like a sack of bricks through the metallic window frame.


~*~*~*~*~*~*~


        Even as Scootaloo's body plowed through the curtain of metal bars, her mind was hard at work.  Time slowed as she contemplated the horrid fate being dealt her.  The train was roaring towards Petra now at a ridiculous speed, a momentum far too fast for the even the pegasus' wings to catch up with.  Not even the Harmony had a chance to match the train's velocity now.  Razzar knew how bleak the situation was as soon as she tossed the pony violently through the window.

        What the naga didn't know was just how crazy Scootaloo was.

        Time resumed, and the pony's flickering ears were bathed in a cacophony of shredding metal. The wide gray body of the Wasteland bowed upside down before Scootaloo.  Her entire body danced with pain, but that didn't stop her from doing what she needed to do next.

        “Nnnngh-Aaaaah!” She shrieked into the winds, clinging to her copper rifle while flinging her wings out so fast she swore they would have flown off their joints.  She lost a dozen feathers in the first gust of air she caught.  Her awkwardly angled body spun against the wind, uprighted, and was blown sideways in an ashen draft that carried her underneath the monorail track.  Panicking, Scootaloo wrenched her muscles in the effort it took to angle her body up.  The speeding train roared above her, threatening to surge out of reach at any second.

        Eyes tearing into the frigid winds, Scootaloo spiraled straight up, banked to the right, and met the blurring body of the train just in time to smash through a grated window on the far end of the second car before it passed her by.


~*~*~*~*~*~*~


        “Ooomf!”  Scootaloo and the window-frame flew into the claustrophobic compartment.  She pinballed off a wall, rolled over a pile of fire granite bombs, and landed in a dizzy heap before a twitching, green goblin.

        “Sc-Scootaloo!”  Warden's voice cracked in the ecstatic outbirst.

        “Ughhh...”  Scootaloo steadied her googly eyes and stared dizzily at him upside down.  “Oh hey.  You're still alive.  Cool.”

        “Did you just fly into this place all on your lonesome?”

        “No, I took a train.”

        “You...” Warden's aquamarine eyes glistened as she stood up in front of him and tossed a few loose brown feathers off her body.  “Y-You came back for me.”  He gulped.  “And after all I said—”

        “Yeah yeah, I love you too and all that crap.  One thing at a time, Wart.”  She sheathed her rifle, then swung her horseshoe blade across his chain bindings, freeing him from the vertical pipes.  “We're on a collision course with Petra and I've got a naga on my tail.”

        “So let's fly out of here!”  Warden exclaimed, rubbing his wrists and standing up on wobbly legs.  “Your wings still work, don't they?”

        “Not well enough to let me catch up with this train again.  The engine's smashed.  Haman's delivery of death is going faster than I can kick clouds.”

        “What are you getting at?”

        “We gotta get rid of this explosive junk before it collides with Devo's hometown!” Scootaloo said, waving a bruised hoof towards the many explosive spheres rattling across the compartment.  “You and I are the only thing standing between goblin civilization and kablooey!”

        “You... You mean you changed your mind?!”  Warden exhaled.  His cheeks reddened over a deep smile.  “You do care after all—”

        “Kid, there's a time for sap and a time for dying!  Now friggin' help me think.  My head's full of stars.”

        “Uhm...”  Warden fidgeted, gazing towards opposite ends of the car.  “I heard the lizard lady and her thugs talking about detaching the cars...”

        “Okay, so we'll separate this car from the first one and the engine,” Scootaloo said with a nod.  She blinked, then squinted down at the goblin.  “Wait, just how many thugs are on this train anyway?”

        Warden's eyes twitched.  “You mean you haven't killed them all?”

        With bitter irony, the door to the third car suddenly slid open.  Four yellow-banded Rust-Bleeders, the remainder of Razzar's dozen, burst into the compartment full of bombs, only to gasp at the sight of Scootaloo.

        “It's the Outbleeder!”

        “What happened to all the others?!”

        “Murderous glue stick!  Get her!”

        Warden turned pale as a sheet.  “You sure we can't j-just fly out of here—Ahh!”  He shrieked, for Scootaloo had just mercilessly bucked him hard.  He landed in a heap behind a stack of bombs.  Frowning, the last pony unsheathed her copper rifle and cocked it.

        For once, she was slow on the draw, and an imp was already aiming a steam pistol at her.  Just as he pulled the trigger, another Rust-Bleeder beside him gasped and yanked his arm up.  “No!”  The hot steambolt ricocheted off a metal bulkhead just a hair's sneeze from a rolling fire granite bomb.  “Idiot, you'll set them off!”  The speaking imp frowned, pulled out a machete, and sprinted forward.  His three angry companions unsheathed an assortment of metal weapons and joined his charge.

        Scootaloo blinked at the incoming imps, glanced at the many fragile explosives, then ultimately frowned as she had no choice but to use her rifle as a staff, blocking the attack of the first two imps before swinging the butt of her gun across a third's face.  When the fourth came in, it was with a jump kick.  Scootaloo's armored chest took the blow, and she teetered over two limbs before falling back on her spine.  Another imp leaped at her with a warcry.  She flung her gun to the floor and raised all four hooves in time to toss the flailing goblin over her pink mane.  The other thugs came in, swinging sharp blades.  She reverse-somersaulted from their serrated attacks and backtrotted, facing three thugs at once.

        Warden crouched behind a metal crate, watching with nervous shivers as Scootaloo unsheathed her second hoof's horseshoe blade and exchanged metallic blows with the quartet of murderous Rust-Bleeders.  The pony spun and twirled in the middle of the group, blocking a pair of attackers with one horseshoe while parrying two more with the other.  One goblin tackled Scootaloo's flank, and she swiftly bucked him off so that he fell into a pile of bombs.  One large sphere of compact fire granite rolled Scootaloo's way.  The last pony saw it at the last second, turned around, and grasped it with two hooves.  She saw two imps rushing towards her, so she swung the full weight of the explosive sphere in their path.  The pair of goblins skidded to a stop, their swinging machetes stopping mere centimeters from contacting the bulbous surface of the ogre contraption.  They gawked with wide eyes... until Scootaloo mercilessly slammed the body of the metal ball into their faces, forcing them to teeter back.  She turned one more time with the hulking thing against her hooves, and took a Rust-Bleeder's fist to her nose.

        “Ooomf!”  Scootaloo fell down hard onto the floor beside Warden.  The round bomb rolled away as a purple-skinned goblin marched menacingly over the armored mare, glared down at her and repositioned his machete to stab down into her exposed neck.

        Gulping, Warden glanced at the bracelet of unicorn horns just half-a-meter from his face.  He then saw where the copper rifle was lying, and where the purple goblin's foot was positioned in relation to the barrel.  “H'rhnum!” the teenager shouted.

        A manabullet skimmed the ground, severing the imp's ankle out from under him.  Screaming, the purple Rust-Bleeder fell to the floor of the train, clutching his bleeding stub.  In the meantime, the manabullet bounced off a bulkhead and haphazardly ricocheted off the edge of one of the many fire granite bombs.  As horrifically predicted, a spark from the bullet lit one of the many fuses on the rolling object.  The other three imps looked up and gasped in horror as the sphere started smoking.

        Warden bit his lip as his ears drooped.  In the meantime, Scootaloo—“Celestia on a bike!”—kipped up to her hooves, ran over, nudged the smoking thing into the air, spun, and bucked it fiercely out through the open window of the second car that she had crashed into previously.

        The green goblin was already bracing his tiny self.  No less than four seconds had passed when a bright orange flash illuminated the gray wasteland blurring by.  The entire car rocked, tossing two goblins to the ground and the third towards the doorframe leading into the first car.


~*~*~*~*~*~*~


        Standing in the doorway to the engine compartment, Razzar had to brace herself against the bulkheads.  She grunted as the train cars briefly tilted left, right, then evened themselves back onto the monorail track.  The golden body of Petra loomed closer and closer through the smashed front of the train as she glanced over her molting, red shoulder towards the rear compartments of the train and squinted.

        She had almost considered marching into the engine compartment in an attempt to salvage the instruments that had been smashed.  It would have been a lot easier detaching the fourth car with the rest of the train going much slower.  As the artificial thunder of an ogre bomb dissipated beyond the bulkheads, she turned around and marched icily towards the first and second cars.


~*~*~*~*~*~*~


        Scootaloo groaned, lying on the metal floor after having been thrown mercilessly from the force of the blast outside the train.  The dismembered, purple goblin's wails filled her ears as she climbed blindly forward, only to stumble upon the face-less corpse of Fredden.  She blinked, then glanced up at the sight of a looming shadow.

        One of the three imps—a tall and muscular goblin with gray skin—was steadying himself from the heavy jolt.  At the sight of Scootaloo's gaze, he picked up his machete and charged the grounded equine.

        Swiftly, the last pony reached into a pouch of her ramcrafted armor, pulled something out, and stuffed it into Fredden's cranium.  Just as the gray goblin charged in on her, she bucked the dead bodyguard up into him.  Gasping, the Rust-Bleeder bumped straight into Fredden's corpse.  He blinked, face to faceless-face with a skull stuffed full of runed moonrocks.

        “Y'hnyrr!” Scootaloo shouted, dashing over to the side.  The entire front half of the second car was bathed in imp guts as the gray goblin—thoroughly doused—flailed and fell back into the first compartment.  Scootaloo slid across the soggied bulkheads, stood up, and turned around—”

        “Scootaloo, watch out!”

        Upon hearing Warden's voice, Scootaloo instantly flung her horseshoes up.  Just in time, she parried the combined blades of the remaining two Rust-Bleeders.  The force of their attack was too much, and her trusty blades finally snapped clear off the hoof-braces.  She stumbled back from their attack, kicking off the ground to dodge their follow-up swings.  She slammed into a pile of rolling bombs while Warden gasped in the distance.  Collapsing onto her back, she winced as a bright green light flickered across her eyes.  With a gasp and a blink, she spotted the fragile cylinder full of Spike's green flame rolling across the floor.  She reached a hoof towards it.

        An imp's foot immediately stomped over her limb.  “Aaaugh!”  She screamed, only to have a second food kicking across her chin.  She fell back; an imp pounced on her chest and prepared to hack into her skull with his machete.  She jerked her head to the side, frowned, and leaned forward, biting her pony molars fiercely over the Rust-Bleeder's quivering ear.  The imp shrieked and howled as she pulled him off her by the weight of his snapping lobe.  Just as soon as he was off her, the second one dove in his place.  The goblin and the pony wrestled and tangled, rolling over the purple goblin's bleeding stub, filling the air with even louder wails.  The air danced in a green kaleidoscope as Scootaloo and her foe bumped into the rattling jar of green flame.  The capsule bounced off them and twirled in the center of several dangerously heavy bombs that were about to crush the vessel of reverse-time at any moment.

        “Nnngh...”  Scootaloo sweated and struggled with the imp entangled with her.  She tossed her mane and shouted across the rattling compartment.  “Wart!  Wart, could you please grab the—?!”  The imp wrestling with her clutched her neck suddenly with both wrists, having sacrificed his weapon entirely for the sake of strangling her.  “Snkkkt... Hckkkk...”  Scootaloo's eyes rolled back in her head.  The world briefly blacked out, fading into a shrouded hovel of whining steam and clamoring monorail tracks.  She wasn't aware of what her own tail was instinctually doing until the imp's body slid halfway off her.

        The goblin gasped, kicking his leg to shake the curling pink hairs free from his ankle.  He struggled one second too long, for two hooves suddely slammed into both his ears.  He shouted in pain before being bucked off by Scootaloo's lower legs.  The Rust-Bleeder flew into a bulkhead, littering the floor full of rolling bombs with a shower of metal tools.  Scootaloo, in the meantime, hopped up and almost tripped—only to have a green hand steady her.

        “It's okay,” Wart exclaimed, reaching out from behind a crate.  “I got you.”

        “Nnnngh—Never mind me!  Grab the frickin' bottle of—”

        “Scootaloo!” a hauntingly familiar voice echoed from across the car.

        The last pony glanced over.  Beyond the bodies of two imps stumbling back up to their feet, Warden could be seen standing next to a cluster of bombs.  The petite imp was clutching the glowing green cylinder obediently to his chest.  His wide aquamarine eyes stared past Scootaloo in horror.

        The armored pegasus turned to look at the teenage figure next to him, only to be uppercutted by a red fist.  “Oooof!”  She fell hard to the floor.  Meanwhile, a green imp stretched up from behind the crate, rematerializing as Razzar.

        “Hmmm... I think I should have tossed you harder, Four Hooves.”  She spun both of her pistols free from her holsters.  “Without your wings this time, might I spit.”

        Scootaloo rolled over onto her chest, frowning at the naga.  “You can try.”  She tried standing up, only to experience the two remaining imps running up and forming a dogpile across her black-garbed flank.  “Nnngh!”  She struggled and strained as the two Rust-Bleeders used their combined weight to hold her down to the floor.

        Razzar took a deep breath and aimed both pistols straight at Scootaloo's skull.  “Shhhh... There're plenty of black skies to fly in death.”

        The last pony spat, her scarlet eyes flaring.  “You want to see flight?!”  Her wings stretched ceiling-ward.  “Rrrr-Raaaugh!”  The pegasus shot straight up, carrying the bodies of the two gasping imps along with her.  Razzar jolted, watching.  Warden gasped from afar.  The combined weight of the pony and her two enemies slammed through a metal panel in the ceiling of the second car.


~*~*~*~*~*~*~


        The metal door gave way, snapping clear off its hinges and sailing off like a giant, rusted leaf into the gray Wasteland beyond.  Scootaloo flew up and came back down, grinding to a frictious halt across the top of the speeding train.  Stopping just at the edge of where the second car joined with the third, she spun in a complete circle.  Both goblins clung onto her for dear life in the heavily whipping winds.  Soon, however, they lost their grip.  One tumbled to a stop towards the front of the speeding train.  The other fell clear off the side, his agonized scream swiftly being swallowed up by the cacophony of the blistering winds as he fell to a splattering death beneath the towering monorail tracks.

        Scootaloo hissed into the freezing air and tossed her mane to get a good look ahead of her.  The one floundering imp eventually found his footing, glanced at her, and chose to unsheathe another machete.  The last pony merely glared at him, waiting.  At his wit's end, the goblin let loose a shrill scream and charged her.  She effortlessly dodged his blow, bucked him in the chest, flung her tail-hairs around his neck, and yanked him down hard.  The imp's forehead was slammed mercilessly into the metal roof of the train.  As he lay prone, he lost grip of his machete.  The weapon flew into the Wasteland—until it was snatched up in Scootaloo's teeth at the last second.  The pegasus jumped, used the momentum of the winds, and soared down onto his neck with a swift downward swing of the blade.  A rolling head bounced off the top of the speeding train's rooftop before twirling off into the blurring expanse, its pointed ears stalling the fall like the wings to a kite.

        Seething, Scootaloo turned and galloped towards the open compartment in the roof of the train to rejoin Warden.  A red figure suddenly leaped up from below and perched down in front of Scootaloo.  Bearing a wicked glare, Razzar icily stood, both steam pistols dangling by her sides.  The majestic heights of Petra formed a golden silhouette against her lithe, reptilian figure as she faced off against the last pony.  Scootaloo stared back, the machete in her teeth reflecting the mercenary's cold emerald eyeslits.  The pony's breath fogged against the serrated metal, her eyes worriedly observing the remaining length of the monorail track that was rapidly diminishing with each pulsating second.

        “I offered you fruits of business, darling sister,” Razzar's voice rang with a hissing melody above the roaring train.  Wasteland snow parted ways around her, as if refusing to christen her unholy frame.  “All our lives, boomers and bastards of the Dimming have only ever robbed from us.”  Her fingers tightened around her pistols' triggers.  The dry scales around her jaws tightened.  “I will not let you rob from me too.  My silver is my silver, and this city will fall.  You've shown your true colors, and I must bury them along with you.”

        Scootaloo turned her head to the side.  She spit the machete out.  The velocity of the air above the train's roof carried it back, so that she caught it in the curl of her flicking pink hairs.  “Yeah, yeah.”  The blade tangled from Scootaloo's tail as she grinded her hooves and hissed the mercenary's way.  “Come a little closer so I can skin you for good, ya stupid gecko.”

        Razzar glared.  Her nostrils flared one last time, and suddenly she was dashing forward in a red blur.  Both pistols stretched forward, their barrels flashing hot splashes of white steam.  The speeding winds doubled the speed of the steambolts sailing at the last pony.  Scootaloo ducked one flurry, side-dodged another, and deflected the last pair of bullets with the machete dangling from her hairs.  She then spun with a shout as her tail flung the blade at a curved angle towards the naga.

        The machete spun Razzar's way.  The mercenary leapt clear over the twirling, metal projectile.  She flipped forward, and landed upside-down.  With unearthly agility, Razzar “walked” rapidly towards the pony, using the pistols like stilettos, before firing both barrels.  Her body was propelled upwards into a twirling jump-kick that slammed across Scootaloo's chest.

        “Augh!”  The pegasus flew up, was carried by the winds of the Wasteland, and fell down towards the rear of the train, halfway down the third car.  She winced, a series of claw marks having miraculously shredded through her ramcraft armor.  She glanced up to see Razzar scurrying towards her on all fours, sliding, then firing both pistols while lying on her side.  The pony rolled towards ger flank to dodge, flailed briefly off the edge of the train's roof, and then hopped back onto the top of the car.

        Razzar pivoted and aimed her pistols at Scootaloo's chest.  She paused, seeing something reflected in the edge of Scootaloo's scarlet eyes.  Without a second thought, Razzar kicked up and somersaulted towards the very back of the train, just in time to avoid the return of the machete, flung back towards the train's roof like a boomerang in the high winds.  Sparks flew as the blade was embedded into the metal surface of the car.  Scootaloo dashed over, yanked it out by its handle, and spun in time to deflect two more bullets launched her way by Razzar.  With a muffled growl, she dove towards the naga in the hope of shoving her off the rear of the car.  The lizard met her charge, blocking with the barrels of her pistols before uppercutting the pegasus with a kick to the sternum.  Razzar next fired point blank at Scootaloo's hooves.

        The pony hopped and dodged, backtrotting towards the second car as Razzar advanced, swinging her pistols like billy clubs before firing more steambolts that sailed off into the Wasteland air beyond the agile pegasus' dodging body.  The scavengers' duel continued—creeping them towards the front of the train and the smoking exhaust of the engine beyond as the vehicle full of bombs took them on a collision course with the giant golden structure to the east.


~*~*~*~*~*~*~


        Below, in the second car, Warden stood directly beneath the open hatch in the ceiling.  His twitching ears were pricked to make sense out of the sea of chaos roaring loudly above.  Above both the pitch of the purple goblin's agonized sobs and the whining steam of the runaway engine, the teenager could barely make out the sound of clopping hooves.  He smiled ever so briefly—a bitterly hysterical thing—for he knew that Scootaloo was still alive.

        Just then, the last sane words she had spoken to him resounded in his lonesome mind.  Gulping, he glanced towards the doorframe connecting the second car to the first.  A pair of brass levers marked where the instruments controlled the coupling of the two train compartments together.  Warden realized that he was of no use standing in one place.

        Clutching the jar of burning green flame to his chest, the petite goblin scampered over towards the doorframe, desperate to play his part in the salvation of Petra.  As soon as he gripped four fingers to the handle of one lever, a blood-stained foot landed two meters away from him in the first car.  Gasping, he gazed up.  His ears drooped.

        The gray Rust-Bleeder thug, covered from head to toe with Fredden's guts, stood above Warden.  He finished wiping the blood from his eyes, spat a chunk of brain matter out onto the floor, and glared down at the teen.  Instantly frowning, he pulled a dagger out from his vest pocket.  “Y-You!”  He charged the small teenager, growling.

        “Nnngh!”  Warden scrambled to run away from him.  He received a massive kick to the side.  “Ughh!”  He fell down hard.  The jar of green flame rolled away from him and disappeared into the sea of bombs beyond the purple goblin and his severed limb.  Struggling to get up, Warden crawled away just before the gray imp could kick him again.  His panting shouts echoed squeakily through the second car, wafting up to join the winds billowing through the square opening in the ceiling.


~*~*~*~*~*~*~




        “Nnngh!”  Scootaloo was shoved back towards the front of the second car's roof.  She clenched her teeth over the machete's handle, struggling to ward off the weight of the enraged naga pressing against her.  Suddenly, the last pony's ears pricked underneath her wind-tossed, pink threads.  Her eyes dilated as a gasp escaped her.  Caught of guard, she absorbed a fierce kick to the chest.  “Ooomf!” she fell on her flank, the machete almost rattling out of her teeth.

        Razzar cocked both pistols and aimed down at the prone pony.  Scootaloo desperately spat the blade towards the naga's feet.  The mercenary expertly jumped the spinning metal projectile, but then not-so-expertly absorbed the pair of lower hooves that Scootaloo next bucked into her airborne scales.  With a grunt, Razzar was propelled several meters down towards the third car.

        The pegasus spun over and stood up, scrambling towards the open door.  “H-Hang on, Wart!  I'm coming—”  A steambolt grazed her front left leg, spraying blood into the air.  “Auugh!”  She stumbled towards the roof, quivering in pain.

        Razzar was squatting and preparing to aim again.  The last pony flashed the mercenary a frown over her shoulder.  As a bullet whizzed over her shoulder, the pegasus inexplicably jumped up and spread both of her wings out.  Catching the wind, she flew like an armored missile straight towards the naga behind her.  Desperately, Naga fired two more rounds.  The bullets merely ricocheted off of Scootaloo's arcanium weave before the equine's limbs collided with hers.  The two went rolling towards the juncture between the second and third car, wrestling with each other's weight across the top of the speeding train as a hair-pin turn in the tracks lingered one hundred meters ahead.


~*~*~*~*~*~*~


        Below, in the second car, Warden was climbing the walls—literally.  Putting his tiny stature to good use, the green goblin reenacted a frightened no-bleeder waking in the cabin of the Harmony.  He jumped from shelf to shelf, kicking tools and metal nick-nacks down at his angry, blood-stained pursuer.  The gray goblin growled and batted away each random object.  He snarled, his upper body quivering in anger, as if he would toss an ogre bomb up at the teenager at any moment.

        Warden never stopped for one second.  The closer the gray Rust-Bleeder got to him, flinging the sharp dagger at the teenager's dangling legs, he climbed higher and higher, until his pointed ears dragged across the ceiling directly beneath where Razzar and Scootaloo's bodies were presently—and loudly—rolling.

        “I'm going to skin you into a new pair of gloves, you Petra-forsaken scrap of filth!” the gray thug hissed.

        Just then, a pained voice cried out from the sidelines, “H-Here!”

        The gray thug glanced over.  The purple, foot-less goblin on the floor of the second car had gathered his wits long enough to grab Fredden's discarded steam pistol.  He slid it across the sea of bombs and whimpered forth under his painful shivers, “Tr-Try not to bl-blow us up!”

        The gray goblin blinked, grinned, then picked up the pistol.  “Petra forbid.”  He cocked the thing and aimed it straight for Warden's skull above them both.  “Suck on steam, ya glue stick lover.”

        Warden bit his lip, freezing, his body plastered helplessly against the bulkhead of the car's upper wall.


~*~*~*~*~*~*~


        Razzar had the upper hand.  Fiercely, she slammed Scootaloo's shoulders against the roof of the train car and pressed the back of her flaking knuckles to her throat, forcing the pegasus' head further and further over the edge and into the biting winds of the Wasteland.  With just a little more weight, the naga would have flung the pony completely off the speeding train with no hope of getting back on.

        Scootaloo sputtered and hissed, her neck bending at an awkward angle as she slid further and further off the edge of the train.  Her eyes rolled back in her head.  She thought of Warden.  She thought of the green flame.  She thought of Rainbow Dash....

        She thought of the hair-pin curve they had just reached.

        Scootaloo did what Razzar couldn't.  She stretched her wings straight out and balanced herself in the whipping air currents as the train flew around the curve in the monorail tracks at ten times the speed normally allowed.  The engine up ahead stayed firmly on the rails, but the three cars attached to it were hardly as graceful.  The north edges of the cars tilted madly, and Razzar was flung over Scootaloo's body.  The naga shrieked, tossed one of her pistols into the gray Wasteland blurring below, and clung with one clawed hand to the edge of the roof.  Scootaloo was flailing next to her, holding on with mirrored desperation.  The pony backflipped, clasping the metal surface at the last second with her front limbs as she and her foe weathered the centripetal force that was currently attempting to fling them into oblivion.


~*~*~*~*~*~*~


        This same swerving motion rocked the gray thug in the second car's compartment off balance.  When he pulled the trigger, the bullet flew at an awkward angle, bouncing off the metal bulkhead just above Warden's twitching ears.  The train screamed as half its wheels lifted off the railing, then landed back down.  The resulting jolt threw the green goblin towards the floor with a horrible shriek.

        In the meantime, a couple of bulbous ogre bombs rolled past the gasping, purple goblin and slammed into the legs of his gray cohort.  The blood-stained thug yelped and tumbled across the compartment until he was slammed against the frame of the open window Scootaloo had first crashed through.

        Warden stood up in the sea of explosives, glanced at the teetering Rust-Bleeder, looked all around him, and found a hulking metal toolbox.  Lifting it up with scrawny limbs, he summoned a wave of adrenaline and flung it across the car with all his young might.

        The gray thug turned around.  He caught the toolbox, and then the wind outside the window caught him.  With a hellish shriek, he flew clear out of the second car...


~*~*~*~*~*~*~


        ...and plunged, screaming like a siren into the desolate plateau of rock and stone below.

        On the roof of the train above, Scootaloo was still dangling.  As the cars angled down a straightaway, she kicked at the side of the train and flipped back onto the roof.  From where she had gripped the edge of the car, a thick panel of metal had pulled halfway loose.

        Razzar too jumped up and squared off from Scootaloo.  She cocked her one pistol and aimed it at the last pony.  The pegasus ducked the blast, grasped the edge of the loose panel in her jaws, and wrenched it three with a gnashing of her teeth.  She flung the thing like a staff into Razzar's gut.  The naga bent over, exhaling hard, before receiving a vicious uppercut with the metal stalk across her chin.

        As the pegasus next made to fling the sharp staff like a spear into Razzar, she paused—her eyes widening.  Not only were they speeding dangerously close to the body of Petra at this point, but an elaborate tunnel of metal lattices loomed directly ahead, forming a tight bridge of aluminum crossbeams that hugged the tiny space allotted to the speeding train.  The bulky frame of a gremlin hovercraft station soared violently towards where the two of them had been battling.

        Razzar took advantage of Scootaloo's brief, horrified pause by pouncing on top of her.  The two went barreling towards the rear of the third car.  Scootaloo's improvised staff rattled of the roof and flew into the Wasteland.  Eyeing the body of the aluminum tunnel approaching the body of the speeding train, Scootaloo struggled to dash away, only to have Razzar hold her in a vice-like headlock.  Scootaloo hissed and wrestled with the naga.  The pony's pink mane flapped and billowed between them.  The train shook.  The air grew tight as the latticework loomed so close that it choked the snowy wind.

        The mercenary squeezed Scootaloo's neck tighter and tighter.  Finally, with an animalistic snarl, Scootaloo flung her left wing out and flapped it.  She managed to spin the two of them in a furious circle atop the roof of the car.  After five blurring revolutions, Scootaloo effectively tossed Razzar off of her.  The metal tunnel was so close that its rusty surface tickled the last pony's nostrils.  With a mad jolt, she kicked up off the roof of the car, briefly outstretched both wings, and performed a backflip.

        Razzar glanced up at her, kneeling and propping herself up by one pistol-arm.  Blinking, the confused naga looked towards the front of the train.  She received a face-full of metal latticework.

        That very second, Scootaloo was falling down.  She plummeted towards the very rear of the train, flung her hooves out, and caught the metalwork of the rearmost car's doorframe.  Gripping by the sheer crook of her forelimbs, Scootaloo dangled like a kite's tail from the back of the train—just as the tight webbing of aluminum crossbeams screamed past her, tightly consuming all sides of the train and its rooftop.  Panting for breath, the pegasus calmed herself and angled her wings just right, giving her a tiny bit of lift in the billowing air.  She landed her rear legs onto the bottom of the door's frame, exhaled long and hard, and twisted the lock so that the door panel slid open in front of her.

        The last pony practically collapsed inside the dimly-lit body of the third car.  Not bothering to shut the door behind her, she crawled her way inside, panted from the exhausting stretch of her battle, then ultimately pulled herself bravely onto four wobbling legs.  Warden needed her, and they had very little time left to detach the car full of bombs.

        Scootaloo galloped briskly forward... when a window to the side of the car burst open, its metal grate clattering across the middle of the floor.  The last pony skidded to a stop, gasping and wide-eyed.  Slithering in, a red reptile wormed into position, then expanded her shape-shifting muscles to once again adopt the shape of a normal biped.  Razzar stood directly in Scootaloo's way, as alive as ever.  After a firm glare, she raised her pistol and aimed it down the claustrophobic space of the car so that its sight was affixed between the eyes of the unguarded pony.

        Scootaloo's heart skipped a beat.  This was going to be a more pathetic death than the one she almost had at Sugarcube Corner months ago.

        The pistol clicked ineffectually.  Razzar pulled the trigger again and again.  Her weapon was empty.  She glanced at the gun like it was a naughty broodling.  “Awwwww spit.”

        The last pony blinked.  She rolled her eyes, growled, and charged straight into the naga.  The two slammed through rows of crates, splattering the wall of steam pipes with loose tools, mining equipment and other bits of Rust Blood merchandise.
        

~*~*~*~*~*~*~



        

        A car-and-a-half ahead, Warden was hunched in the doorframe between the first and second compartment.  He gripped onto one of two brass levers, pulling at it with all his might.  He grunted and hissed through sharp teeth as the lever jolted, jolted again, and finally gave way.  A loud noise emanated through the bulkheads below as the clasps adjoining the two cars began to loosen.

        Hyperventilating, the little goblin clasped the second lever.  This one, however, refused to budge.  He yanked and pulled at it desperately, his lithe muscles rippling with the effort.  Just then, a golden aura washed over his features.

        The goblin blinked.  He glanced up at the grated windows of the first car.  The golden glow of Petra was looming.  They were getting close.

        “Not good...”


~*~*~*~*~*~*~


        “See, boss?!” a breathless Rust-Bleeder bodyguard stood on the edge of a balcony atop Strut Twenty-One.  Sweating a storm, he motioned the limping Haman towards him and pointed down at the western stretch of the Wasteland beneath Petra.  “She couldn't possibly have listened to Fredden!  We haven't heard back from him, and now this!”

        The hobbling prime-bleeder of Rust Blood, half his face burnt and his aged body bruised, shuffled up to the edge of the platform, reunited with his eccentric cane.  He leaned on the metal staff and stared tiredly down at the distant image of a steam-billowing locomotive speeding suicidally towards the lower stalk of the grand impcity.

        “Has Miss Ryst lost her mind?!”  The lowly thug naively stammered, his whole body shaking.  Several other yellow-banded guards stood along the edge of the district, all of them staring at the runaway train heading straight towards the basement of their beloved homes.  “Surely she knows that the operation has been delayed!  What's happening?”

        Haman took a deep breath.  His fragile ear-stalks drooped.  “I'll tell you what's happening, my young brothers,” he murmured.  “Goblins are dying.  Petra has burned out, for today is the true Dimming.”

        The sea of panicked subordinates merely cast frightened looks Haman's way.  The elder said nothing.  He closed his eyes and meditatively breathed the cold breeze of the high atmosphere for as long as he could afford to.  In the meantime, the distant whine of the train engine...


~*~*~*~*~*~*~


        ...met the twitching ears of several goblins down below in Strut Four.  A group of Hex-Bleeders paused in the middle of loading several crates full of tools onto a gremlin hovercraft for transport back to Devo's headquarters.  The imps with red bandannas sauntered over to the edge of the platform, along with several other goblins of various families.  A murmur of confusion filled the air as Raimony herself stepped up to a metal walkway overlooking the train depot and narrowed her thin green eyes on the monorail tracks to the west.

        There was no mistaking it; a train with a smashed front engine was on a collision course with the body of Strut Four.  Several imps and hobs lining the depot saw the impending crash and fled for higher platforms.  The lower body of Petra rang with an air of panic and surprise.

        Ultimately, Raimony grimaced and shouted to her subordinates.  “Everyone!  Back off!  It's going to smash straight through the depot like it's tinfoil!”  She ran through the crowd, ushering them towards higher ground with a pumping fist.  “Go!  I mean it!  Move!”


~*~*~*~*~*~*~


        “Haaaugh!”  Scootaloo slammed Razzar's cheek up against a bulkhead of the third car.  She aimed a smashing hoof towards the base of the reptile's neck, only to receive a red-scaled elbow to the face.  “Unngh!”  The last pony stumbled back.  Razzar hissed, stuck her left leg down, and swept the pony's rear left hoof out from under her.

        Pratfalling, Scootaloo struck the floor chest-first.  There was a metallic ringing sound of Razzar picking up a link of chains.  Before the aching pegasus stand up, she was instead hoisted up.  Razzar had wrapped a thick web of chains around Scootaloo's throat and was choking her viciously from behind.

        “Snkkkt... Hckkk...!”  Scootaloo's face tightened around gnashing teeth.  Her hooves clambered over the metallic noose being wrapped around her neck.  Her limbs were helpless in their attempt to pry Razzar's grip loose.

        “What did I tell you about patience, four hooves?”  Razzar's tongue darted past Scootaloo's right ear.  “Shhhh... Relax.  You will be dead soon, yes yes yessss...”

        The last pony's scarlet eyes rolled back in their sockets.  The world was blacking out as a barely audible hiss dripped out between her bleeding lips.  With her last ounce of strength, she yanked her pupils back down and became aware of several steam pipes stretched across the wall in front of her and Razzar.  Breathless, she flung her hooves forward and knocked half-a-dozen valves loose.  A scalding hot gust of skin-biting steam immediately vented past her shoulder and into Razzar's quivering face.

        “Nnnngghh-Aaaugh!”  Razzar clenched her eyes shut, her dried skin peeling back and her nostrils flaring violently.  In a fit, she shook all over, dropping the strangling chains so as to grip her spasming face in a pair of clawed hands.  “Rrrrgghh—I friggin' hate steam!”

        Wheezing for breath, Scootaloo fell forward on her front hooves and immediately bucked her rear hooves.  The screaming naga was tossed back against the opposite wall of the third compartment.  Before she could get up, the pony glanced at the floor, saw a rattling goblin pickaxe, and immediately clutched the handle in her jaw.

        Wiping condensation off her face, Razzar stood.  A figure blurred towards her.  She looked over, but was too slow to avoid the swing of the pony's pickaxe.  Bloodily, the mining tool's blade impaled the naga's left wrist, pinning her tightly to the wall of the car.  “Aaaaaugh!” the mercenary screamed, falling to her knees and hanging from the bloody penetration.  Wincing, she tugged and tugged at her limb, but couldn't pull herself loose.  Crimson rivulets ran down her shoulder as he helplessly gawked up at the exiting pegasus.

        “Gotta hand it to you, Razzar,” the last pony limped towards the rear entrance of the second car.  She paused long enough to glare exhaustedly back at the shape-shifter.  “You always were good at sticking to your business.”  For a brief moment, there was color: Scootaloo bore a devilish smirk, and then was gone in a gallop.

        “Nnnngh—Come back, four legs!  Come back!”  Razzar snarled.  Fuming, practically hyperventilating, she flung her good hand over the handle of the pickaxe and tugged with all her strength.  The mining tool refused to budge.  She wrestled and struggled with her impalement, but was helplessly stuck to the wall of the rattling third car.  Enraged, she let forth a banshee shriek, filling the entire train with the thunder of her frustration.


~*~*~*~*~*~*~


        Bruised and bleeding, her breaths labored, Scootaloo loosely ran through the sea of rolling ogre bombs.  She caught a copper glint on the floor of the second car.  Reaching her jaws down, she clamped the body of her rifle up in her teeth and galloped the rest of the way, joining a green goblin who was struggling with the second lever to the compartment's clamps in the doorframe to the first car.

        “Scootaloo!” he exclaimed her name for the umpteenth time in so many bloody seconds.  “You made it!”

        Scootaloo spat the gun out of her mouth so that it rattled to the floor of the first car.  “Good to see you're doing something useful.”

        “Nnnngh...”  Warden grunted, yanking harder and harder on the lever.  “I... uh... I tossed a thug out the window.”

        “Sure you did, kid.”

        “W-We're almost at Petra!”  The petite imp sweated and strained under his vest as he threw his entire weight into the lever.  “And I can't for the life of me get this stupid thing to detach—”

        “Here, Wart.”  Scootaloo nudged him towards the engine with her head, spun around, and bucked the lever mightily with her rear hooves.  With a resounding clank, the metal spoke fell the length of its hinges.  “The key thing is to not be a wimp.”

        “Show off.”  The goblin briefly frowned, then gasped as a loud noise rang through the junctioning slabs of metal connecting the first car to the second.  He and the last pony gazed as the doorframe between the two compartments rattled, then slowly, slowly separated.  In a oozing motion, the second car started parting ways with the first.  The clamps rattled free, exposed to the gray twilight as a gust of wind billowed into the suddenly exposed interior of the train.  “Yes!  Frostbeams!” Warden pumped his fist.  “We did it—”

        Scootaloo, however, was suddenly gasping.  “Oh Luna Poop!” she cursed.

        “What?!” Warden hopped in place, his heart beating madly.  “What is it?!  Why is Luna pooping?!”

        “Be right back, kid!”  Scootaloo said... then jumped immediately into the detaching body of the second car.

        The green goblin gasped wide.  “Are you crazy?!”  He planted himself on all fours in the separating doorframes like a barking dog.  “Scootaloo, come back!” he shrieked after her, the Wasteland winds kicking at his emerald hair.  “What are you doing?!”

        Scootaloo was frantically digging through the sea of rolling ogre bombs.  Panting hysterically, sweating all the way through to her black arcanium armor, she swam her hooves through the piles of fallen tools and sensitive explosives.  Her scarlet eyes twitched in every conceivable direction as her limbs searched more and more desperately.

        The gap between the second and third cars was widening.  Warden cried again, “Scootaloo!  Hurry!”  His voice was gradually being drowned out by the howling winds between separately speeding halves of the train.  “You'll never catch up with me at this point—”

        The last pony had more pressing concerns.  “Where is it?!  Goddess Entropa, help me—where is it?!”  She sneered through her teeth.  “Dang it, Spike, next time let's put a friggin' bell on the thing—Ah HA!”  Just then, a green glow flickered across her drunken grin.  Parting a pair of large bombs, she exposed the cylinder of emerald flame to her sight.  She snatched the thing up in her teeth, spun around, and galloped towards the front doorframe of the second car.

        The pale, blurring monorail tracks were visible, marking the length of a naked meter between her compartment's and Warden's.  The green teenager urged her on.  His image remained in place as the speed of Scootaloo's gallop matched the rate at which he was drifting away.

        “Come on!  Quick!  Jump over—”

        Scootaloo flexed her legs.  She was almost to the edge of the doorframe when—“Hrmmf!”—she jolted in place, stopping completely.  Eyes twitching above the green flame in her mouth, she flashed an angry look over her shoulder.

        The purple, foot-less goblin was clutching onto her left rear hoof with two gnarled hands.  Under a sheen of sweat, he produced a hideous snarl.  “You're not getting away, glue stick!  I'll drag you to the heart of Dimming's Blight if I have to!”

        Scootaloo hissed into the jar in her mouth.  She yanked and tugged and kicked at the goblin.  The lamed Rust-Bleeder clung to her with a death drip, employing the crook of his elbow.  The whipping wind intensified, blowing at Scootaloo's mane.  The last pony gazed helplessly ahead.

        The first car drifted further away.  The monorail track blurred across two meters... three.  “Scootaloo!  Hurry—”  Warden gestured.

        The pegasus shot her wings out.  “Hrmmmm—Ffffngh!” She flung herself forward in a desperate lunge, catching the air as she dragged a gasping goblin into the screaming madness with her.  For an eternal second, she plunged through the winds, sailing like a stray comet between the detached halves of the train. When she came down, she missed the front car.

        Warden's gasping face disappeared from her sight.

        “Hnngh!”  Scootaloo flung her forward hooves up.  Her body yanked as her upper limbs clasped onto the rear-most edge of the front car's door frame.  She nearly dropped the green jar from her teeth as she felt her lower half shaking violently.  Glancing over her shoulder, she saw that the goblin's body was being dragged bloodily atop the blurring monorail track behind her.  Petrified by the torturous friction grinding his lower half to a pulp, he clung to her leg—screaming—his arms stiff like frozen tree branches.  The last pony's teeth scraped against the surface of the glass cylinder as she raised her other leg and viciously bucked him in the face again and again.

        Finally, he let go.  His body fell like a wet sack, only to be reduced to red paste by the merciless  grinding of the metal wheels beneath the second car.  With his weight gone, Scootaloo's lower limbs fell all the way.  She met the blurring monorail track with the soles of her rear horsehoes.  Sparks flew on either side of her hooves.  Her tail flicked amidst the ashes as her upper body struggled to pull the rest of her up into the car.

        A pair of green hands clasped her upper torso.  Using his entire weight, Warden tugged and tugged, giving her just the boost she needed.  Timing her legs with his yanking motion, she kicked up and flapped her wings one time, flinging her body safely into the interior of the front half of the train.  Warden tumbled into a metal crate.  Scootaloo rolled and landed upside-down against the wall, her rear horseshoes heatedly steaming from her near-death.

        “Don't... ever do that again!” Warden exclaimed, clutching his breathless chest.

        Scootaloo spat the green jar of flame onto the floor.  “I'm sorry.”  She somersaulted onto her hooves and trotted towards him.  “It's my first runaway train.”

        “Whatever.  The job's done.”  Warden shivered as the golden glow of Petra wafted ominously across the two of them as they looked out onto the blurring monorail track.  “Can we please fly away now?”

        Scootaloo blinked, gazing numbly at the second car full of bombs.  They had succeeded in detaching it from the runaway engine of the train, but at this rate there was no chance of the speeding car full of explosives coming to a stop anytime soon.  The inertia was just too much.

        “The job's hardly done,” the last pony murmured.

        “Wh-What?!”

        “We're practically a foal's sneeze from Petra,” Scootaloo spoke while flinging herself down to her haunches.  She emptied all the remaining pockets of her ramcraft armor and fished for a special runestone.  “If we leave now, I swear, those bombs are gonna get flung into the impcity.  We would have done this grand dance all for nothing!”

        “Th-Then what do we do?!”

        “I got it covered!” Scootaloo smirked, dragging her copper rifle towards her.  She pulled a hollow dart out from her pile of haphazard ammo and stuck it into the barrel of the gun.  Next, she held a red runestone up before Warden's eyes.  “I've been saving this for a rainy day.”

        “What is it?”

        “Something that would evaporate all the rain.”  She slapped the runestone into the front of the gun's magazine, ahead of all the normal ammo.  “Hopefully, in this situation, it'll be enough to knock the car full of bombs clear off the tracks.”  She cocked the weapon, aimed it towards the doorframe of the second car, and growled, “H'rhnum!”

        Warden watched as a red plume of bright mana surged into the dart.  The capsule was subsequently fired out the barrel of the rifle.  It flew across the space between the cars and embedded—glowing a hot crimson—in the metal surface of the second compartment barely a meter above the blurring monorail tracks.

        “Why's it not exploding?” Warden exclaimed.

        “The rune's destructive mana is pressurized,” Scootaloo exclaimed, already raising the bracelet of hooves to her lips.  “I just gotta say the right word to collapse it—”

        The green goblin suddenly shrieked.  “Look out!”

        Scootaloo looked up.  Her eyes reflected a dashing, red figure.  Hissing murderously, Razzar was running the length of the second car.  She jumped like a crimson cannonball, her gnawed-off left arm glistening in the twilight as she flung herself madly across the space of the two train halves.  Her last good hand formed a fist as she plowed into Scootaloo, knocking her off her haunches and barreling the two of them across the floor of the first compartment.

        Warden spun, gasping.

        The last pony dropped her gun as she was slammed onto the floor of the car.  The bleeding, raving naga straddled her, slamming her one hand repeatedly over the last pony's skull.  Scootaloo spat blood, winced and pressed her hooves against the reptile's chest.  Abandoning any other recourse, she shouted towards her bracelet of hooves.

        “M'wyn—Mmmmfff!”

        Razzar's grimy hand was covering her face.  Bending her spine at grotesque angles, the naga roped the bulk of her body tightly around the last pony, intertwining her scaled legs with the pony's limbs and wrestling the muted equine to the ground.

        “No more spit, sister!”  The mercenary hissed into her ear.  Using her jaws, she wrenched the bracelet of hooves off the pony's leg and flung it to the far end of the car.  “No more magical spit!  Only your blood!  Your blood and mine!”  She raked the claws of her lower feet across Scootaloo's flank.

        “Nnnnngh!” Scootaloo hissed into Razzar's palm and slammed the joints of her upper limbs into the reptile's chest.  The naga merely absorbed the blows and wrapped her weight tighter around the pony's spine.  Warden charged in from behind, swinging both fists across the back of the naga's skull.  Unaffected, the reptile angrily hissed and uncoiled one leg to kick the teenager in the chest.  Warden gasped, his petite body flying into a wall on the far end of the car and slumping hard to the floor.

        Scootaloo bit desperately into Razzar's fingers, producing blood.  The one-handed shape-shifter didn't even budge.  She hissed pleasureably from the pain and opened her own razor sharp jaws wide.  In a flash, she bit down onto the stretch of arcanium weave armoring the last pony's shoulder.  The naga's teeth icily sliced through the ramcraft material, knifing painfully into the pegasus' skin.  Scootaloo let loose a muffled scream into Razzar's palm, her nostrils flaring as she cast a forlorn gaze across the lengths of the car.  The golden glow of Petra was blinding now.  She could smell the imp city's smoke and steam from beyond the naga's fingers.  The grinding sound of thousands upon thousands of machine parts rivaled the screaming weight of the runaway train engine.  In a matter of seconds, they would slam into a stalk of metal, and the bane of Petra would explode into the rear of them.

        “H'rhnum!”

        Razzar was first to gasp.  She released her jaws from the black arcanium weave of Scootaloo's shoulder.  However, it was not the last pony who had uttered that runic command.  The wide-eyed naga glanced behind her.

        Warden was wearing the bracelet of horns around his neck.  Standing at the doorframe of the compartment, he aimed out the back with the copper rifle, taking his second shot at the crimson dart embedded against the detached train car full of bombs.  “H'rhnum!”  The manabullet ricocheted closer towards the fragile capsule of explosive mana.  The small imp cocked the gun and aimed once more.

        “Hnnngh!” Razzar disentangled herself from the pony and dove towards him.

        Scootaloo twisted her blood-stained legs, fiercely tripping Razzar before the naga could finish her dive.  The lizard fell hard to the floor as Scootaloo tackled her from behind, holding her in place for Warden to take his third shot.

        “H'rhnum!”

        The bullet flew, struck the jar of compressed red magic, and ruptured it.  The resulting crimson flash was blinding.  Warden flinched and stumbled backwards as a rapidly expanding ball of fire erupted beneath the second car.  The monorail track crumbled beneath the rear half of the train.  Soon, with a groaning of metal parts, the two runaway cars plunged murderously towards the Wasteland surface below.

        All sound and chaos was briefly drowned out.  Then, once the tense five or six seconds consumed themselves, an even greater explosion rocked the world.  The car full of fire granite bombs ignited, and a gigantic plume of golden plasma billowed skyward, sending shards of rock and earth flying high enough to rival the spectacle of Petra.  The sundering of the earth didn't stop there; fiery waves billowed in all directions.  A pure wall of flame was threatening to outrace the runaway train.  The monorail track lifted up like a flung hose, and soon the tracks beneath the engine and the first car briefly lifted in a monumental lurch.

        “Aaagh!” Warden fell straight back as the rear of the compartment lifted straight up.  In the meantime, shards of burning debris flew through the doorframe, bathing the interior of the train with soot and ash.  The metal shell of the car bent and warped.  Scootaloo and Razzar were violently separated, their bodies flinging to the far ends of the collapsing vehicle under a shower of sparks.


~*~*~*~*~*~*~


        Raimony was halfway through scaling a steep flight of metal steps atop Strut Four when a sonic boom struck her blue, pointed ears.  Nearly thrown off balance, she leaned on the railings of her platform and flung a glance over her shoulder.  Several goblins nearby shrieked and cried in shock as a gigantic ball of fire lit up the west, barely two hundred meters from the edge of Petra.  The smog above was illuminated in a platinum wave, like a brief tribute to a dead sun.

        From afar, a broad stretch of the monorail track could be seen crumbling to dust.  Across the remaining length between the explosion and the depot, a runaway steam engine lifted off the tracks and tilted at an angle, grinding sideways over the platform with a flying sea of sparks.  The car directly behind it tilted in the opposite direction, so that both pieces of the suicidal train sped like crumpled, metal wings towards the helpless structure of the train depot.


~*~*~*~*~*~


        Scootaloo fell on her back, wincing.  Her ears stung from the grinding noise of burning metal on all sides of her.  The second car had flung to its side, but it was still speeding madly towards oblivion.  The golden aura of Petra strobed all around the crumpled interior.  There was no sign of Razzar, no sign of the green flame, and no sign of—

        “Wart!” she shouted into the bedlam, rolling over, crawling across the rumbling, careening madness.  “Dang it!  Say something—”

        “'Something!'”

        Scootaloo gasped.  She immediately dove towards the noise, her hooves sliding into the body of a quivering imp.  “Wart!  Hang on!”

        The imp was in the middle of fiddling with his vest.  He clung the article tightly to his chest and flung a pair of wide, aquamarine eyes Scootaloo's way.  “Hang onto what?!  We're dead meat!”

        “Story of my friggin' life!”  Scootaloo spun her body against the floor and kicked hard at a collapsed wall of metal.  “Nnngh!”  She bucked and bucked harder.

        “We gotta get out of here!” Warden squeaked, clinging to her and shivering as the golden light was blinding them both.  “We gotta fly!”

        “I'm working on it!” Scootaloo struggled and kicked a few more times at the wall.  It was no good; they were trapped inside the sliding car.  She tilted her head at an angle—then gasped at the sight in front of her.  The bright cloak of the Royal Grand Biv was dangling from a jutting bulkhead.  The flames had long been extinguished.  Clamping her teeth over the burnt fabric, she yanked the stretch of arcanium weave loose and flung the pliable material over her and Warden's bodies.  “Here!  Stay close!”  She hugged Warden close to her chest and folded the arcanium desperately around their every limb.  “Curl your hands and feet inward, towards me!”

        Warden buried his emerald head in her armored neck and squealed, “Is th-this stuff really tough enough to save our hides?!”

        “Guess we're about to find out!”  Scootaloo gulped and held him tight as the screeching noise of the train reached a breaking point.  “Wart, if worst comes to worst, I want you to know that I'm sorry for what I did earlier!”

        Warden nodded, trembling.  He murmured, “Sc-Scootaloo?!”

        “Yes, Wart?!”

        “Is now a bad time to tell you I feel like throwing up?!”

        “Yes.”

        The entire train jolted.  Both souls gasped and clung to each other as their world spun.


~*~*~*~*~*~*~  


        The engine's steaming front had struck a metal stalk lining the tracks.  It pivoted at an angle, snapping clean from the first car that was still fitfully dragging behind it.  The engine rolled over and purely slid sideways, its hulking weight smashing through several more stalks as it entered the body of the depot.

        The collapsing poles fell like meteorites through the body of the first car, smashing the vehicle in two halves that rolled violently across the platforms of the depot as the engine continued its murderous slide, eventually barreling through a collapsing overhang that upended the huge hunk of black metal so that it rolled—smoldering—into the depths of an aluminum warehouse.  From deep inside, the boilers finally burst.

        The warehouse exploded, sending chunks of debris flying so high that they ricocheted off the bottom of Strut Five.  Distant goblins shrieked and ran as a rain of burning shrapnel littered the distant lengths of the platform.  Soon, all parts of the depot that weren't smashed to bits were covered with steaming, hissing chunks of debris.

        At last, the two sundered halves of the first car rolled to a stop—their metal parts groaning as they lurched in on their own weight and settled in the middle of the crater of desolation.  All was quiet, blanketing the collapsed depot with a haunting silence.

        The violent crash had been dramatic, but it was barely one millionth of the carnage that would have been suffered if the fire granite had ignited within the platform, instead of the safe distance where it had exploded several dozens of meters to the west.


~*~*~*~*~*~*~





        High above, on Strut Twenty-One, several Rust-Bleeders gawked in amazement at the fires of the explosion that had decidedly not taken Petra with them.  Half of the clan members cheered in hysterical joy.  The other half—those who were in on Haman's plans—shuffled nervously, exchanging worried glances.

        As for the prime Rust-Bleeder himself, the liver-spotted imp opened his eyes from his brief meditation and timely drank in the fires burning in the middle of the sundered monorail track.  His ear-stalks pricked, taking notice of a sound that his brain could barely register at first.  Leaning curiously towards the edge of the platform, he heard a loud roar drowning out the machines of Petra.  He realized that he was listening to the collective victory shouts of every goblin in every platform of the city, having witnessed such a horrible catastrophe only to emerge with their lives intact.  For all Haman had done for the Mountain Ogres of the Valley of Jewels, he was being engulfed by one singular voice of imp-kind, a unification of joy and amazement.

        As the roar rose to deaffening new heights, the frail elder backstepped from the platform, hobbling away unnoticed through the crowd of his own mesmerized subordinates.  Gripping his cane, he made for the front steps of his metal-framed palace.


~*~*~*~*~*~*~


        Down in the shattered train depot of Strut Four, the roar of Petra was barely discernible above the hissing of hot metal.  One half of the surviving car sat in a crumpled heap.  Briefly, a few shadows darted down from the moutain of fresh debris.  A half-dozen hobs greedily grabbed whatever clumps of shattered metalwork they could get their puny little hands on.

        Just then, a ruptured panel in the side of the crumpled car was kicked loose.  Shrieking, the hobs rolled away on stumpy legs.  With an exhausted groan, the bruised and grease-stained body of Scootaloo slithered out from the wreckage.  She slumped to the debris-strewn ground, lying on her back and tossing her legs like an overgrown, brown cockroach.  Finally rolling over, the last pony flexed her wings under a mane of frazzled pink hair.

        “Unnngh...”  She gazed tiredly all across the steaming, crumpled urbanscape.  “Hmph... Some way or another, it always amounts to a frickin' train wreck.”

        Her ramcrafted armor hung in tatters off her body as she stood up and hobbled across the debris field, wincing with each lurching trot.

        “Nnngh... Wart?!”  She called out, her voice echoing throughout the steaming desolation.  “Wart, where the heck are you?!”  The pony was seething, flexing her muscles, keeping her bloodstream too adrenalized for her mind to contemplate the shivering horror that was slowly creeping up her spine.  “Wart?  Dang it, give a shout out, ya little grass stain!”

        She looked every which way across the depot.  The warehouse was flaming.  Shards of metal were still falling from the sky.  The golden haze of the fireball to the west challenged the glowing height of Petra.  There was no shade of green skin to be found.

        Scootaloo bit her lip.  She was about to whimper something, if only to expel a growing lump in her throat.

        Suddenly, a chunk of metal shifted to the side of her.

        Gasping, Scootaloo spun and looked.  The metal panel shook and shuffled from underneath.  “Wart!” she exclaimed, galloping over and furiously yanking the slab of debris skyward with a pair of gnashing teeth.  She dug into the sea of shrapnel with her hooves.  “Speak to me, kiddo!  Are you in one piece?”

        The last pony eventually unleashed a rainbow bundle of fabric.  Desperately, she unwrapped the last shred of the Royal Grand Biv's effluence.  Lying within the arcanium folds, curled up like a foal, was the bruised, soot-stained, but altogether living form of Warden.

        “Speak to me, kid!”

        Warden hissed through his teeth.  “Owie.”  His eyes bulged, for he was suddenly lifted by a pair of hooves.  A brown face was nuzzling him with a surprisingly warm breath of affection.  “Sc-Scootaloo?” the teenage goblin stammered.  “This is a little awkward...”

        “Shut up, ya scamp,” she muttered, smiling helplessly as she held him close to her.  Her upper body shuddered as she said, “I told you there was a time for sap, didn't I?  Celestia, I'm so envious of you, kiddo...”

        “Envious of me?”  Warden's aquamarine eyes blinked confusedly.  “What for?”

        She planted him down on the ground and sat on her haunches before him, smiling in spite of all her cuts and abrasions.  “It was your first frickin' time.”

        “First time for what?”

        The mare's eyes briefly watered as she ruffled his emerald bangs.  “For doing the impossible.  I wished things were nearly that epic when I experienced it myself.”

        Warden smiled crookedly, hugging his arms across his vested chest.  “Why do I get the feeling you're just being humble?”

        “Heheheh...” Scootaloo let loose a deep breath, her body's trembles calming down.  “For you, kid, I'd be a bucket of oats.”  She rested a hoof on his shoulder.  “I'm... I-I'm just so glad you're alive, Warden.”

        “I'm glad I am too,” he murmured, gulped, then leaned forward.  “But... uhm... aren't you forgetting something, Scootaloo?”

        She merely raised an eyebrow.

        The goblin bit his lip.  He stopped hugging himself, and in so doing he unfolded the inside of his vest.  A bright green glow wafted over the two souls as he exposed the safely smuggled jar of green flame.

        Scootaloo stared into the emerald tongues of reverse-time.  Her lips pursed.  “Frostbeams,” the last pony cooed.

        “I think this belongs to you,” he said.  After gulping, he added with a nervous smile, “Unless, of course, you're wanting to pay me with it.  I am earning my strips still, aren't I?”

        Scootaloo smirked wide.  “I'd say.”  She then blinked, for a warm drop of liquid had landed on her wings.  Warden glanced up; she did too.  Half of the wrecked train car loomed over them, but one patch of metal seemed strangely darker than the rest.  Suddenly, another trickle of blood fell from the patch.  Scootaloo gasped.  She made to move—

        “Haaugh!” the patch of metal leaped down, materializing into a battered naga with a drop-kick flung across Scootaloo's face.

        The last pony spun twice from the blow.  She landed hard in a mound of metal shingles.  Warden shrieked and angrily charged into Razzar's side.  The fuming, bleeding naga merely back-handed him.  With a cry, the green teenager tumbled off and landed under a collapsing heap of garbage.  The cylinder of emerald flame rattled ineffectually into a crook of fallen debris.

        “Hmmm...” Razzar squatted down on coiled muscles as she glared in the last pony's direction.  She brought her left arm up and nibbled briefly on the meaty stub.  “Trying to find an elaborate way to bury yourself, four hooves?”  Her twitching eyes darted all across the steaming wreckage.  “You could have simply asked, yes yessss...”

        Scootaloo snarled.  Hopping up to her legs, she clamped her teeth over a loose panel of metal and flung it in Razzar's direction.  The one-handed naga absorbed the blow and backflipped across the wrecked depot.  Enraged, the last pony broke into a full gallop, charging her.

        Suddenly, halfway through the trot, Scootaloo fell flat on her face.  Her front right horseshoe had flown clear off.  “Oh friggin' A!”  The battle-scarred article rolled, tumbled, and clattered to a stop two meters away.  Just as the wincing pegasus was about to get back up, a red-scaled figure charged into her with a heavy kick across the equine's chin.

        “Rrrrgh!”  Razzar kicked, then kicked again.  She shivered and leered above the painfully sprawled pony.  “Look at this Wasteland within a Wasteland!”  She pointed with her one good hand while her eyes flared like lanterns.  “You wrecked Haman's train and ruined all my chances at getting silver!  I like you!”  She hissed and kicked Scootaloo the hardest in the chest.

        Scootaloo wheezed, her eyes tearing.  She curled inward, her legs pressed against her bruised belly as her whole body stung from Razzar's merciless pummeling.  A ringing sound of scraping metal filled the air.  Razzar had picked up a long, rusted shiv in her right hand.  Marching over, she palmed the weight of the sharp spear and spat a dribble of blood onto the sundered platform.

        “Such a shame that we cannot live with the things that we like.  Such a bleaker shame that you have starved me of the one thing both you and I can afford.”  She aimed the sharp end of the shiv at Scootaloo's neck, but suddenly paused.

        A distant murmur was filling the air.  The naga glanced over her shoulder in time to witness several shuffling bodies of imps crawling down the walkways and stairs of Strut Four.  Goblins of all walks of life—bearing several different colors of countless clans—were descending upon the wrecked scene, hoping to get a good look at the train collision that had transpired.  The population of Petra wanted answers, and the shape-shifter was about to give them one.

        “This never had to get personal, sister,” Razzar lisped.  She relaxed as her battered and bleeding body slowly, liquidly unfurled from top to bottom.  The rough image of Miss Ryst once again stood in the golden glow of the imp city.  Her mutilated left arm proudly displayed the yellow band of Rust Blood.  “You could have held your distance, like I did.  Our hearts are not meant for such blemishing politics of boomers, only our bullets.  What more can be asked of the last two fossils who can still bleed?”

        Scootaloo weakly looked up, only to have the pointed edge of the shiv thrusted up against the nape of her neck.  She gulped, too beat up and exhausted to bother parrying the means of her untimely demise.  The crowd of imps gathered thicker and thicker.  They all stopped and gazed down from a ring of solid balconies overlooking the train wreck.  Among the many colored clans, the unmistakable red of Hex Blood shone in the light.  Scootaloo could spot Raimony from afar, and Raimony spotted her.  A frightened breath was shared between the distant souls.  It suddenly felt like Scootaloo's last.

        “Hear me, my fellow imps!” Razzar shouted boldly into the hiss of burning metal.  Her tan ears and green hair struggled to stay in the mode of Miss Ryst as she kept the shiv affixed to the pegasus' flesh.  “What has transpired here is a travesty of the most wicked sort!  This insufferable pony, a Wasteland vagabond hired by none other than Devo of Hex Blood, has delivered Petra a violent blow!  However, thanks to yours truly—and the divine intervention of Rust Blood—I have stopped this sky stealer's evil plan to tear Petra to the ground!”

        The overlooking crowd of imps murmured in shock and horror.  Several angry faces fell onto Scootaloo.  The Hex-Bleeders glanced at each other nervously.  Appalled, Raimony glared furiously at Miss Ryst and opened her mouth to shout in objection.

        Razzar's booming voice drowned everything out.  “Is it enough that the Hex-Bleeders sabotaged the steam foundries of Glass Blood and slaughtered Franken and his brothers?!  Is it enough that Devo insults the council with his subversive ideas of unification?!  Dear imps, Hex Blood has done nothing but bring the Dimming's Blight upon us.  Allow me, your loyal Rust-Bleeder, to end this pestilence once and for all... by ending this pony!”

        Scootaloo gasped sharply as the metal shiv clung sideways to her throat.  With just one yank, Razzar would slit her jugular.

        The shape-shifter's eyes briefly morphed into green slits.  “Boomers will be boomers, and corpses will be corpses, my dear sister.”  The voice that came out of her was quiet, truer to her reptilian self.  “Don't worry.  Where I'll be sending you, there won't be crows to eat the flesh.”  Her hands tightened to the metal weapon.

        The last pony calmly closed her eyes.  Just then, there was a metallic clatter.  Her eyes flew back open.

        Razzar spun and looked aside.

        Warden had broken free of the mound of garbage.  Sprawling out on all fours, he breathlessly looked at Scootaloo, at the metal shiv, then at the tan goblin shape wielding it.  His aquamarine eyes flared, and he immediately sprinted forward.

        “Bad boomer!”  Razzar spat, twirled, and flung the shiv at him like a javelin.

        “Wart!” Scootaloo cried.

        The teenager was already holding his breath, rolling forward.  The shiv sliced down his back, grazing his skin, slicing his vest in half.  At the end of his tumble, he reached down and grabbed the first thing he could find.  A jagged horsehoe glinted in his grasp as he crossed the rubble-strewn distance between himself and Razzar.  The angry “Miss Ryst” spat at him, flinging her left foot and her one fist.  Warden dodged both of these, for he had jumped high, bounded off her waist, and reached for her skull.  Hoisting himself by her right ear, he swung up so that he mounted her neck, screamed, and shoved the horseshoe down into the mercenary's face.  The air sang sickly with a pair of popping noises.

        “Nnnnngh-Giyaaaaaa!”  Razzar screamed loudly, for the razor-sharp ends of the horseshoe had punctured both of her eyes.  “Aaaaa-gaaaaaahh!”  She clutched her skull, teetering backwards from the weight of the teenage goblin on her shoulders.  Rivulets of blood dribbled down from where the horseshoe was viciously embedded in her sockets.  Before the sight of hundreds of goblins gazing above, the mercenary's tortured skin flickered and unfurled across several different facades, from Miss Ryst to Devo to Raimony to Haman to Franken to Warden and back to Miss Ryst.  “Aaaah!  J-Juices!  Juices!  Graa-haaaaugh!” the mindless reptile meatedly screamed, finally surrendering to the agony as her body slumped to a sheen of dried red scales.

        At the end of her color-changing sideshow, a growling Warden yanked the horsehoe viciously out of her skull.  Streams of ragged eye-muscle poured out of her.  She fell to the ground in a slump, clutching her face with one good hand while kicking the ground with her remaining limbs.  The hyperventilating green goblin stood above her.

        Scootaloo coughed, sputtered, and gazed weakly up at the scene.  “Nnngh... H-Holy crud, kid.”

        Seething, Warden looked at Scootaloo, looked at Razzar, then up... up at the crowd.  The entire ring of gawking goblins had their eyes locked on him, on his figure, on the shameless branding across his thigh.  Spitting into the air, Warden's eyes brightened with righteous fury as he raised the very same symbol in his grasp, stained with the guilty blood of the shape-shifter.

        “This!” he shouted with a sudden strength, his shivering body embolded by a monumental surge of goblin pride.  “This is the true color of Rust Blood!  Haman's family is tainted with the reptilian fluids of a naga saboteur!  You've seen with your very eyes how his most trusted associate tried to deceive you!  All of you!  It was not the pony or Hex Blood that tried to blow up Petra with this train!  Nor was it Hex Blood that caused all the mayhem against Glass Blood in Strut Eleven!  It was all Haman's doing!  Rust Blood is out to destroy Petra!”

        The many goblins listened in awe, their pointed ears twitching upon each and every booming word that the enraged teenager assertively tossed their way.  The entire time, their eyes were locked on the bleeding image of the horseshoe.  It burned into their eyes with the same fury that it once burned into the young goblin's skin.

        “My name,” Warden refilled his lungs and shouted, “is Warden of Stock Blood!  Some of you may call me a no-bleeder.  I call myself lucky!  Lucky to be alive, lucky to be bathed in the blood of Petra's enemies, and lucky to be sharing it with you all now!  We have it within ourselves to be more than a bunch of lame clans squabbling with each other!  We are all goblins, we are all brothers!  Let us bleed together from our hands blistered with the manifestation of Petra, not from beating each other to pieces!  The ogres and the harpies and the dogs of this world want to devour what we have made here, but must we let them?!  I am asking you—begging you: let us boot out the last kink in our armor!  Let us do away with Rust Blood, and make this City something that no nasty creature will ever again dare to attack!”

        At the end of his echoing cries, the many goblins above shared nervous glances.  His words were digested, but few of them were capable of matching the intensity of his beating heart.  Scootaloo glanced worriedly from face to face, until her gaze met Raimony's.  The daughter of Devo saw the pony's eyes.  The pegasus slowly, slowly nodded.  Raimony's jaw tensed, and after a knowing look, she cupped her hands over her face and shouted, “Hooooray!  Warden of Stock Blood!”

        Every goblin spun and glanced at the shouting goblinette, including Warden.  Raimony hopped down to the wreckage and swiftly ran over to the petite imp's side.  She gripped his wrist and almost lifted him off the ground as she raised his bleeding horseshoe higher into the air.

        “Let us hear it for Warden, slayer of nagas!  Our city's been saved, and we owe him our lives!”

        A roar of booming voices echoed from the crowd as the many imps smiled and shouted and pumped their fists in the excitement of the bloody moment.  Several goblins jumped down and rushed the scene.  For the first time in countless stormfronts, the colors and armbands and bandannas of the populace blended together, mixing the clans into a colorful sea of singularity, forming a rainbow circle around Warden as the young imp and his bloodstained weapon of pride were raised high atop the imps' shoulders.

        “Petra bless us all!”

        “Warden speaks truth!”

        “Praise Petra for the Stock-Bleeder!”

        Warden was hyperventilating.  His bruised and scuffed body couldn't have shone any brighter in the golden light.  Every square centimeter of his skin had been electrified, as if he had become an adult in one single shout.  If he had wings, this would have been his first flight.  Branded with the image of sky-stealers, he received the worship of every goblin within eyesight, a delightfully impossible thing.  He sliced his fist through it—and the bloody horseshoe matched his gnashing teeth.

        “To Strut Twenty-One!” he screamed.  “Let us rid Petra of the true traitors!  Who is with me?!”

        “For Petra's glory!”

        “Down with Rust Blood!”

        “Down with Haman!”

        “Every goblin, defend your city's sanctity!”

        “Listen to the Stock-Bleeder!  The Wasteland will not win!”

        The crowd surged thicker and thicker, all the while marching furiously towards the inner stalk of Petra and the multiple lifts that would take such a righteously enraged army towards the top of the golden megastructure.  Scootaloo could only watch from afar as the green shadow of her tiny cohort was carried away to a glorious new destiny.  She gasped at the feel of several hands lifting her up.  She glanced over her flank.

        Raimony and several smiling Hex-Bleeders were there.  The daughter of Devo helped Scootaloo to her legs and produced a gentle smirk.  “I'm sorry to steal your thunder, pony.  I'm sure even you would agree that this moment had to be his, not yours.”

        Scootaloo slowly nodded.  “I've already had my time in the spotlight, ages ago.”  She stared off as the crowd marched away with Warden on their shoulders.  “This was hardly my main event.”

        “Yeah.”  Raimony folded her blue arms and stared towards the stalk of Petra.  “So what do you think of our cute little riot?”

        Scootaloo sighed.  “I think that was a darn good shoe.”

        “They sure do grow up fast, don't they?”  The goblinette ran a hand through her brown threads and sighed.  “Children of the Dimming, that is.”

        “Too fast,” Scootaloo murmured.  She smiled, but it was a jaded thing.  The distant image of Warden finally vanished beyond sight, and the last pony's warm breath left with him.  “Still, it's nice to know that something can still grow in the Wasteland, and beautifully too.”  The pony's lips curved placidly at the thought of that.

        It suddenly didn't feel so lonesome to be the last steward.




        Scootaloo didn't see Warden for the next few days.  Strolling through the streets of the impcity's many golden platforms, Scootaloo could easily understand why.  Petra had become alive overnight.  Children and adults alike ran giddily through the streets, singing tales of a young goblin who had skewered the face of a traitoroous clan leader's secret weapon.  The wounding of the shape-shifting mercenary was the subject of dramatic gossip, and several imp tongues jubilantly shared the account, coloring it with greater and greater epic details upon each retelling.

        In the light of Petra's most recent salvation, Goblins had stopped bickering with each other.  They had stopped beating and bullying each other.  The only guns or machetes brandished in the streets were done so in the direction of frightened Rust-Bleeders who, under the glare of insurmountable numbers, surrendered their arms to a dramatically multiplying group of imps emboldened by a brand new cause.  The metallic districts vibrated under a brand new crusade of cleansing, a passionate campaign that sought to sweep Petra of all heinous goblins attached to the conspiracy that almost sent a train full of ogre bombs into the heart of the city.

        Marching through the streets, her limbs and flanks bandaged in several places, the last pony gawked at the transformation of the urban scenery around her.  Gone were the several clashing colors of the different imp clans.  In their place, a common banner was being hoisted atop every street corner, something that was as frighteningly colorful as it was swiftly illustrated.  In every platform, in every street, the image was slightly different, but generally depicted the same sight, that of a goblin hand gripping a jagged horseshoe... a horseshoe soaked in blood.

        The last pony blinked in shock.  A week ago when she walked these same streets, goblins were bumping into her, jeering at her, and even tossing their own filth at her.  Now, it was as though the pegasus was practically invisible.  The cheers that swam through the streets were deafening.  The goblins weren't celebrating so much as they were rallying.  In rapidly growing clusters, differently-banded goblins of diverse clans met and talked for the first time, sincerely approaching each other's faces when previously they had relied on the useless rhetoric of their family representatives at inane council meetings.  Among the various exchanges, smirks and laughter were also shared, followed swiftly by trade agreements and plans to defend the outer platforms from Wastelander incursion.

        The goblins' eyes were bright, as if they were alive for the first time since the Dimming, and not just pretending to be through their animation of perpetual machinery.  As the banners blanketed building after building in every strut, the colors on the imps' bodies were soon obscured by the same horseshoe image, joining every bleeding family with the commonality of Warden's symbolic gesture.

        Scootaloo gazed in numb disbelief as her frantic march slowed to a leisurely trot.  For the first time in her entire life spent in the Wasteland, she felt like she was somewhere safe.  A few passing goblins even smiled at her, gesturing towards her horseshoes and cheering as they ran off with fellow half-lings to make their gigantic city more glorious and secure.  Somehow, Scootaloo thought, if all the world's armies of ogres attacked Petra, not even a dent would be scratched into the structure's golden surface.  The imps' resolve had become iron-clad, stronger even than the arcanium weave that Scootaloo had donned to attack a steam train head-on.  With the death of the Royal Grand Biv, there came a rebirth—a goblin renaissance that the last pony never once contemplated ever being an accessory to.  This city full of rapture was not the past, it was not Dredgemane, but for the briefest blink in time it resembled the warmth and color of Equestria, and Scootaloo didn't even need to shine a single ray of sunlight to make it happen.

        Perhaps it always had been that easy, she pondered.  Hope was not nearly as impossible to spread as it was to forsake.

        The pegasus took a deep breath, smiling painfully—but proudly.  There had been some bumps in the road, some rocks and shoals across the shoreline of her existence, but she had recovered at the last second.  She knew that what she did to stop Haman's train was the right thing, for it was the sincere thing.  Clinging to hope, instead of to Razzar's words, she had exercised loyalty.  It wasn't that she was loyal to the goblins, but rather she was loyal to herself.  Like a certain prismatic idol had once told her, everything else just came naturally.

        Scootaloo paused briefly in the streets, shutting her eyes so capture the golden excitement under her moist lids.  She may have buried Rainbow Dash years ago, but nothing—not even the Cataclysm—could contain her awesomeness.  It shimmered brightly across the desolation, more intense than a golden fireball in the middle of a monorail track, and now Petra was blossoming in the glow of it.





        Several platforms above the wrecked train depot where one goblin would change the city's spirit forever, the palace of Haman loomed atop Strut Twenty-One.  Dozens upon dozens of yellow-banded imps laid down their arms and surrendered to a thick crowd of goblins who marched furiously into the interior.  Their colored armbands were covered with the unifying image of a horseshoe painted over with blood.  Bearing more frowns than steam rifles, the sea of imps marched into the center of Rust Blood's headquarters and burst the doors open to a certain elder's luxurious office.

        “Haman of Rust Blood!” a goblin at the front of the mob shouted, palming a metal club in his grasp as his brothers stood tall and threatening on either side of him.  “We represent the Stock-Bleeder, slayer of nagas.  Every imp in this city knows that you, Franken, and Waven were in league with the Mountain Ogres!  We've come to hold you responsible for plotting the death of Petra!”

        “Hmmm...”  A pair of yellow ear-stalks pricked up at the sound of the goblin's voice.  Slowly, a deadpan Haman spun around to face the unified crowd.  “The death of Petra...”  He held a steam pistol in his four wrinkly fingers.  “You don't say?”  With that said, the clan leader calmly raised the pistol to his own head... and pulled the trigger.






        “It was his choice, not ours,” Raimony spoke.  She and Scootaloo stood in the center of Devo's warehouse.  Outside, the districts of Strut Eighteen rang with hundreds upon hundreds of imps.  Crowds of goblins were clambering to get inside the heavily guarded building, desperate to have a word with a certain green teenager.  So many souls of Petra wanted to hear what the symbol of the imp city's inexplicable renaissance had to say.  “He asked for sanctuary within Hex Blood's property,” the goblinette continued, smiling awkwardly.  “It's funny.  In one week, the little guy has become five times as powerful an influence than this clan's prime bleeder could ever be, and still he trusts my father so much.”  She sighed long and hard, but it was a warm gesture.  “It's humbling, to say the least.  I'm not sure what Warden thinks he's accomplishing, but it's utterly saved my family from political annihilation.”

        “He's a loyal soul,” Scootaloo murmured, gazing off across the dimly-lit recesses of the metal warehouse interior.  The excitement of petra echoed against the bulkheads, vibrating the city to its core.  “He's worth more than your fellow imps could ever pretend to praise him for.  I hope someday they realize that.”

        “He's not the only one who's loyal,” Raimony said, smiling gently at the last pony, a gesture that she was getting gradually used to tossing the pegasus' way.  “You had every reason—not to mention every intention—to leave this city and let us suffer the fate Haman had in store for us.  What made you change your mind?”

        “I don't know how long you've been exposed to the Wasteland beyond these walls, girl,” Scootaloo muttered, staring tiredly at the daughter of Devo.  “The mind is something that's lost forever in such desolation.  It's the heart that stands to be scavenged from it all.  When it is, that's when magic happens.”  She smiled painfully, her cheeks suddenly warm.  “And then it's almost as if Equestria is alive again.”

        Raimony tilted her head to the side, her thin green eyes washing over the sight of the pony.  “I feel horrible.  After all these years, I scoffed at my father when he spoke kindly of your race.  For a moment there, I thought that I had every reason to hate you in all the ways my father didn't.  But you came through for us in the end, when creatures who you couldn't possibly give a crap about needed you.  That's a quality I've rarely been blessed to see, and I can only envy my father for having the tenacity to see it through all the steam and grime.”  She bit her lip, then reluctantly spat forth, “I'm sorry, pony.  I'm sorry for doubting you.”

        Scootaloo shifted where she stood and murmured, “Well, it's easy to doubt that which doubts itself.  You've lived a very gritty and regimental life, Raimony.  I can't blame you for only seeing things through silver and sweat, because I've worn such lenses myself.  But you see...”  She smirked devilishly.  “Hope is a business that requires patience, but it's totally worth it in the end, because when you profit it... those around you profit too.  I almost gave up on it all, but then I remembered what made me sign such a contract to begin with.  After that, I had no choice but to go after Warden and the train.  If I let him die, I don't think I could ever have profited from hope ever again.  Even if the warm land of Equestria was to miraculously come back, I'd be living within the shadow of myself, devoid of colors.”

        “What reminded you, if I may ask?”  The goblinette asked.  “What reacquainted you with hope?”

        “Oh...” Scootaloo breathed deeply, stroking a hoof over the blue feather strung to her ear.  “Small things.  Silly things.  For instance, can I tell you a secret?”

        Raimony blinked, shrugged, then uttered, “Shoot.”

        Scootaloo smiled.  “I really like your name.”

        The female Hex-Bleeder squinted her eyes.  Slowly, she smirked.  “Yeah, well, can I tell you another secret?”

        “By all means.”

        “I really like your mane.”  Raimony pointed.  “It's... It's pink.”

        The last pony stared at the imp.  The imp stared back.  Scootaloo was the first to make a sound—a snorting thing—and soon she was awash in a sea of her own giggles.  Raimony joined the mix, and soon both sisters of the Dimming were briefly reunited under an air of delightful absurdity.  They barely stopped in time to hear the rusted door to Devo's office creaking open above them.

        “Wowsers,” Warden murmured.  He wore a brand new vest sewn together by one of his suddenly countless waves of admirers.  A bleeding horseshoe illustration was patched to each sleeve, and his bare thigh brandished the original image as he slowly marched down the steps in a swaying, exhausted fashion.  “Did they pump some silly gas into the steam or what?  What's up with you two?”

        “I was about to ask the same thing,” Scootaloo murmured.  “You look dead on your feet, Wart.”

        “Nnnngh... I've talked to no less than fifty clan leaders in the last eight hours alone.”  He ran a green hand over his face, groaning tiredly.  “I keep telling them that I don't know a thing or two about building bulwarks of defense against harpy intruders or refinancing Strut Eleven.  All I did was stab a naga in the face and yell a lot.”

        “You did more than that, kid,” Raimony exclaimed with a proud smirk.  “What matters is that you've become a symbol for what my dad's been trying to get this city to do for years.  There's no stopping unification now.”

        “Good.  Then can I be that awesome symbol in my sleep?”  Warden's ears curled back as he yawned wide and leaned against the railing of the staircase with a drunken smile.  “I just wanted this city to avoid crumbling to bits.  That was Scootaloo's doing, not mine.”

        “A pony can't be what you are, Warden,” the pegasus gently said.  “Revel in it.  You're a legendary hero whether you like it or not.”

        He gazed down at her, his expression suddenly soft and vulnerable.  “How can I find time to be a hero?  I'm busy being a certain Wastelander's assistant, aren't I?”

        Scootaloo said nothing to that.  Her jaw tightened as a sullen breath left her.

        Raimony cleared her throat and suddenly walked towards the far end of the warehouse.  “If you'll excuse me, I've got to see how my guards are holding off the crowd outside.”

        As the goblinette marched away, Warden stepped down the last rows of steps to join the pegasus.  “Why do you look so glum all of the sudden?”

        Scootaloo avoided his gaze briefly.  Her response was also something elusive.  “I heard that Haman bit the dust.”

        Warden smiled awkwardly.  “Oh, he bit more than that, alright.  Still, you wouldn't believe all the junk that my new 'Stock Blood Brothers' found in his escape zeppelin.  The old fart had even more silver than he let on about.  The poor imps of Strut Twenty-One were discovered to be practically empty-pocketed.  Not only was Haman a traitor and a slaver, but he was robbing from his own family.  It's pathetic.”

        “Most things are in this world,” Scootaloo said with a nod.  “And what of everyone's favorite lizard?”

        The green goblin winced before saying, “There's been no sign of the mercenary since yesterday.  The cell that she was being held in was found empty.  Many think that the shape-shifter got away.”

        “Jee,” Scootaloo droned, “why does that not surprise me?  Still, I can't imagine she'd get very far with two eyes and a hand missing.”

        “There's no sign of the Mountain Ogre army that was supposedly going to attack us from the east,” Warden added.  “Devo's guessing that they learned of Razzar's and Haman's failure and retreated back to the Valley of Jewels.  That's the best possible sign; it means that Petra is now a force to be reckoned with, and in a matter of time this place will be a frostbeaming fortress.  Just you wait and see!”

        “Hehehehe... I can imagine it already,” Scootaloo said.

        “I... uhm...”  Warden fidgeted, fumbling with his brand new vest, however no longer attempting to hide the burn mark on his thigh.  “I finally met with my uncle in the lower struts.”

        “Oh yeah?” Scootaloo's ears flicked eagerly.  “What became of that?”

        “He was happy to see me, I guess.”  He clutched his other shoulder and gazed towards the floor while his green ears drooped.  “He suggested that I try and do something worthwhile now that so many goblins are willing to listen to me.  He said I could probably have enough influence to lead a team of armed imps to the townships west of the Briar and avenge my dead family.”

        “Really, now?”  Scootaloo leaned forward  “And what did you tell him?”

        “I told him... that I just wanted to protect Petra.  I t-told him that I was s-sick of violence, that my life has been so full of blood.”  He sniffled and finally gazed up at her with glossy eyes.  “But when you did violent things, it was to save stuff that otherwise would have been destroyed forever.  You saved me time and time again, Scootaloo.  I-I wouldn't be here if it wasn't f-for you...”

        “Oh Celestia dang it, Wart,” Scootaloo sighed and scooped him towards her with a pair of forelimbs.  She smiled and nuzzled his shivering neck.  “If you aren't just a friggin' bucket of warm fuzzies, I don't know what else is.”

        He clung to her, murmuring sadly into her coat.  “Everything is wonderful, b-but everything is finished.  Petra's safe, but there's n-no reason for you to be Devo's Outbleeder anymore.”  He parted the hug and stared tearfully in her face.  “My life's about to be surrounded by tons of revolutionary goblins who worship me, but I already feel so alone... because somehow I g-get the feeling that you're about to leave, and I-I'm not sure how I can be so awesome without you.”  He gulped and whimpered, “This is all because of you, Scootaloo.  I'm n-not the hero... you are...”

        The last pony opened her mouth to speak, but froze upon that numbing moment.  She raised a hoof up and wiped the tears off the goblin's face, like a blue limb had once smeared the stage makeup off of hers.  The fractured mirror of the cataclysmic world had spun around, and somehow the adult mare felt far stronger for it than she ever forlornly imagined she would be.

        “Being a hero is a crazy thing, accidental and brief at best.”  She gulped and smiled as she brushed his green bangs aside and stared into his eyes.  “Being awesome is something that lasts a lifetime.  I came to this city looking for one thing, Wart.  Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would run into you, but I'm glad that I did.  I'm envious of how awesome your life is, and what it's about to become.  Once again, I'm challenged to do the impossible, and I find it exhilarating.”  She cracked a devilish smirk.  “You see, lightning can strike twice... even way more than twice.  This may feel like the best day ever, but it can only get better.  I have faith that you and I only have a lifetime of best days ahead of us, because I've been there before, and even in a world of darkness... things have a way of becoming brighter.”

        Warden digested all she had to say.  Still, he teetered off the precipice of a lingering sob.  The teenage goblin murmured, “How can I live a bright life on my own?  How can I manage... without your colors?”

        She gripped tightly to his shoulders and pierced his eyes with hers.  “You make your own colors, Warden.  And you share those colors so that those younger and hungrier than you can bring beauty to Petra.  You're hardly the no-bleeder scamp that I swept of the streets a week ago, kid.  You're a brave steward, and so long as you're alive in this desolate world, you have my hope.”  Her eyes briefly watered as she found the words that she always wanted to hear, but tossed them his way before she could bother to indulge in them.  “And you have my pride.”

        Warden bit his lips.  The last tears sprang from his face as his body shot forward, wrapping his arms around her neck as he buried his face into her mane.  “Thank you so much, Scootaloo.  I-I think I can live off that... Heeheehee.... Yes... I-I really can...”

        The pony closed her eyes and murmured softly over his shoulder, “You and me both, kiddo.  You and me both.”





        Petra was alive with rebirth, excitement, and goblin renaissance.  None of these dazzling things could be sensed from two kilometers to the south, beyond the steaming pools of burning oil, where a shivering naga was busily crawling her way over the mounds of dry, scorched rock that blanketed the Wasteland.

        “Nnnngh... Hckkkt...”  Razzar heaved, pulling herself by one good arm.  Her red face was doubly crimson from the dry rivers of blood spilling out from her meaty eye sockets.  Her every muscle quivered in desperation as she made her awkward escape, clambering over the dead mounds of granite.  Her senses were blind and numb to the golden glow of the metastructure that lit up the deadscape behind her.  “Stupid, sm-smelly boomers... Stupid, horrid, soulless boomers.  Those w-were my juices, not yours.  Yes yes yesssss... Nnnnngh... M-My juices... Unnngh...”

        A loud roar suddenly emanated from the sky above her.  The twitching shape-shifter paused in her fruitless crawl, tilting her head of dried skin into the air.  Her nostrils flared, and she gasped immediately at the scent.

        “Not the feathers...”

        With a metallic clang, a set of razor-sharp talons gripped her skull and slammed her to the ground.  The naga lady let loose a long, muffled scream of anguish before tilting her face aside and hissing under the weight of the limb pressing down on her.

        “How... H-How did you find me, Gilda?!”

        “Razzar, Razzar...”  The leader of the Golden Gang paced towards where Stowe was pinning the mercenary to the ground.  The roaring VTOL engines of the Talon hovered distantly overhead in the snowy air.  “You know, you surprise me.”  She stood icily above the shivering, mutilated reptile.  “If anything in this life is certain, if history has taught us anything, it's that you can kill anybody.”

        Razzar gulped and trembled under Stowe's talon.  “Th-The Fire Ogres,” she murmured defeatedly.

        “No, actually, it was the Mountain Ogres, your former employers,” Gilda remarked, raising her silver goggles to expose a pair of cool, amber eyes.  “It seems that once you failed them, they set up a bounty worth three times as many strips as what their goblin insider was prepared to give you.  So don't pretend like you can haggle your way out of this, Razzar.  I know you haven't got a lick of silver on you.”

        Razzar hissed and sputtered.  “You... Y-You didn't do anything, you giant, spitting albatross.  Hckkk... It was... It was all four hooves... It was all the pony's dirty work...”

        “Hmm... Fancy that,” Gilda murmured with a nod.  “And to think that you couldn't possibly get any lamer.”

        The naga exhaled, shuddering into the hard stone she was pressed against.  Her meaty sockets brimmed with fresh blood.  “No... No, I suppose I couldn't end any muddier than I began.  She's spectacular, you know.  I tried to kill her so many times... and it hurts more than anything else right now to remember that...”

        Gilda exhaled long and hard, her eyes falling to the dead wastes beneath the three of them.  “I understand exactly, Razzar.”

        “Do me a f-favor...” The mercenary spat.  “Chop off my head when you're done.  I d-don't want the ogres playing games with my mouth.”

        “Sure thing.  Will do.”  Gilda nodded Stowe's way.  “If you would do the honors.”

        The scarred griffon smiled wickedly.  “I thought you'd never ask.”  With a rattling of her bone necklace, she stepped off of Razzar and reached for her steam pistol.

        By this time, the naga was hyperventilating.  “You... You have to understand...”  Bravely, she clutched the ashen rock, her body curling inward as if returning to the egg.  “I was only hungry,” Razzar whimpered, two crimson streams pouring down her dried face.  “I was hungry, and th-they tasted like crows...”

        “Shhh-Shhh,” Gilda uttered, one Wasteland ghost to another.  “I know, Razzar.  I know.”  She turned and gave Stowe a somber salute.

        Stowe not-so-somberly cocked her pistol with a grin and propped the barrel against the back of Razzar's skull.  A minute later, the two griffons carried a headless chunk of meat up into the hangar bay of the Talon.  The airship of the Golden Gang roared off towards Mount Ogreton, the griffons' bounty in tow, their business concluded.
        





        “It is a new day,” Devo said, smiling as he did so.  Bandages randomly covered stretches of blue skin as he leaned on a pair of metal crutches and stood across the desk from Scootaloo in his crimson-lit office.  “I, like you, remember the sunrise, pony.  If we still had the celestial bodies to bask in, I'd say that this would be a delightfully rosy morning indeed.  My clan's been absolved of any wrongdoing in Strut Eleven.  Rust Blood no longer has the power to conspire against Petra.  The entire council is seriously considering reunification in light of this revolutionary excitement filling the streets.  On top of all that... heh heh... we still have a majestic city standing straight and tall around us, and most definitely not in a smoldering ditch.”

        “Funny how things just happen to work out for themselves while you're lying half-dead on a cot,” Scootaloo murmured.

        “And what's more...” Devo spoke, undaunted.  He hobbled over towards her side of the desk and stared her dead-on.  A forest of white dreadlocks faced his gently smiling face.  “...a certain relic of her race decided to come back.  I could have sworn you gave up being Hex Blood's Intercessory Outbleeder, pony.  I could have sworn you had left us for dead.”

        “Let death render the dead,” Scootaloo said.  “I'm alive, and I make mistakes.”

        “As do we all, pony,” Devo replied with a nod.  “My first mistake was blindly shoving you in the thick of business that was hardly worth your getting shot at, if not worse.”

        “That's the thing about business,” Scootaloo said.  “It's all about taking risks.”  Her nostrils flared as she briefly tossed a guilty glance toward the floor.  “The hard part is knowing which risks are the ones worth taking.  For the longest time, I was uncertain whether I should have risked myself for Hex Blood or for myself alone.  But that wasn't the bad part.  My crime was not confessing such uncertainty to you.  I apologize for that.”

        “Honesty is the least dependable quality to lean on in the Wasteland, I imagine,” Devo said with a knowing glance.  He pointed a hand over one crutch.  “And yet, you have always and continue to be a creature of honor.  The world's not quite so dead as long as you're alive, I think.”

        She smiled bitterly at that.  “I believe that more and more with each passing day.”

        “So do I, pony.  So do I,” Devo remarked.  “You are a beacon of hope.  You were the very same beacon years ago, in the pits of the pegasus city, of course, but now... now that Petra has survived a second Dimming and my goblin brothers are on the verge of erecting a civilization that was too fractured to blossom until now, I know that I must give you what you deserve, what you've always deserved.”

        “Things are so crazy now,” Scootaloo muttered with a sigh.  “I'm glad you still want to help me, Devo, but even if you could—I imagine it's going to be a week before I can get into the pits.”

        “Not the reward I was thinking of, but also quite relevant,” Devo said.  He hobbled on his crutches towards the other end of the cramped office where a tall stretch of metal lockers resided.  “As a matter of fact, it may intrigue you to know that the pits have been utterly abandoned for the last three days.”

        Scootaloo raised an eyebrow at that.  “They have?  What for?  Because I totally smashed that one monorail track?”

        The blue-muscled elder chuckled.  “No, pony.  There are many other train tracks just like that one.  Mining operations haven't stopped for lack of transportation.”  His eight fingers fumbled with the combination lock hanging off the locker door's handles.  “Much rather, the passion of this entire impcity is being aimed at something other than profit for once.  Every goblin clan is attempting to get their act together, so to speak.  What you and Warden have done is phenomenal, and it's served as a wake-up call, alerting the thirty-five platforms of families that we can no longer afford to live so divided.  Haman's traitorous mechanization died with him, but there are still ogres and other horrible creatures to contend with.  The difference is, we now have a chance to prepare ourselves as a unified singularity of goblin force.”

        “Fantastic.  Kudos to you and all that jazz.”  Scootaloo cleared her throat and leaned forward.  “The pits...?” she hissed insistently through clenched teeth.

        “Funny thing about Warden taking up sanctuary with Hex Blood...”  Devo finished unlocking the handles.  The elder slid the creaking doors to the locker open before glancing over his blue shoulder.  “It's given me a remarkable bit of influence.  So, at the first opportunity, I suggested that the city establish a holiday to celebrate this monumental occasion transpiring all around us.  To my surprise, every clan agreed.  The pits are empty, pony.”

        Scootaloo gulped.  “Even of trigger-happy gremlin partols?”

        Devo chuckled.  “Yes, even of trigger happy gremlins.  I even went as far as to warn the families of your impending journey.  No imp will stand in the way of Hex Blood's Outbleeder.  After all, this is tantamount to your 'payment'.”

        “Well, that's certanily nice to know,” Scootaloo said with a dry smirk.  “Think you can toss in a bag of oats and a bottle of sarsaparilla while you're at it?”

        “Heheh.  No, but I will give you some advice.”  He leaned on his crutches and gestured with his hands.  “Take the platforms leading down into the pits from the third railroad junction along the south cliff-face.  Head north, descend about thirty meters, and you'll find the southern edge of Hex Blood mining property.  I assure you, the plateau where your companion is buried is quite untouched.”

        Scootaloo's eyes twitched at that.  Her lips parted ways as a cold breath left her.  “You... Y-You know about... about the grave?” she stammered.

        “Yes, pony.  I know.  For over two decades, I've known.”  His rich copper eyes stared across at her, weathering every shiver suddenly bolting through her stunned frame.  It was as though he anticipated this very moment, this very conversation, this very breath billowing through his lungs.  “When you discovered your gift of flight and gave us our tools, my surviving brothers and I made it out of the pits.  When we reunited with the pilgrims of several distant townships, we were swift to make a first claim to the basin of salvageable sky marble.  I took it upon myself to mark the nightmarish bowels of our two-year plight as Hex Blood property.  I didn't do that because I felt the gesture was poetic.  I knew that such a sunken depth of earth was more valuable to one soul than all of the world's silver combined.”

        “And... And all this time...”  Scootaloo murmured dryly.  She gulped, her lips quivering.  “You.. You guarded it?  You kept the grave untouched...?”

        He nodded to confirm her heart-pounding suspicion.

        She exclaimed, “But why?  We hardly knew each other.  I left you the very instant I could—I wanted nothing to do with you...”

        “You were a symbol of hope in the crumbled sepulcher of a dead world, pony.  Yes, you left us, and I felt as though I had sinned... because I did not give hope its just reward.  I kept the grave intact out of faith, and my faith was rewarded.  You came back, and your hope had transformed into something on fire, alive.  Perhaps it's hidden under all of that blighted skin you've grown throughout the years, but I know now—without a shadow of a doubt—that you are the one I was told to give this to.”

        “Give... G-Give what...?” Scootaloo nervously exclaimed.

        Upon that utterance, Devo turned around.  The elder leaned on his crutches—wincing—but managed to pull something down from a shelf inside the confines of the locker.  Scootaloo glanced at it, and in a single blink she was brought back to the anguished shell of a nine-year-old filly, battered and beaten on the marble plateau of Cloudsdale's ruins, staring into the backpack strapped to the back of a white-haired goblin.

        Devo laid a black tin box atop the desk between them.  A white, painted stripe glinted from the red light above the container.  “Long ago, I was told something, something I would never forget.”  He cleared his voice and recited something that must have danced through his head a million times.  “'When Petra has blossomed under one blood, then you will know it's time to give a pony her colors.'”  The elder's face calmly smiled, his body momentarily framed against a fresh banner of a bloody horseshoe that had been hung across his office wall the day before.  “I thought that the phrase was mad, a load of gibberish.  After all, it was a pony who told me such a thing.  She was one of two equines who had made a difference in my young life, and thereby taught me a thing or two about the power of integrity in this doomed world.  Still, in hope that those words would bring as much prosperity as those ponies did, I kept this in my possession.  Through the Dimming and the birth of my daughter and the manifestation of Petra, I held tight to this, until I knew it was time to give it away.  That time is now, pony.  Neither you nor I can deny the fateful strings of hope.  I'm happy to have provided you a way to go see your buried companion, but I'm positively rapturous to be handing this to you now.  This is more than the culmination of our business.  This is the end of an era.  Hopefully, it will make as much sense to you as it has brought me solace throughout all these long years of waiting.”

        Devo generously slid the unassumingly simple tin box across the desk towards her.  The scraping sound was deafening, for the room had fallen silent, as if all movement had been sucked away under the currents of green flame.  Scootaloo stared numbly at the white-striped container.  When she reached a hoof towards it, it was a pensive gesture, as if the cryptic container would somehow somehow shatter her with the concealed breath of Princess Entropa.  Under the watch of Devo's enthusastic grin, Scootaloo finally lifted both hooves and grasped the box.  She slid the thing towards her, her heartrace increasing.  She briefly envisoned Spike buried deep beneath the mountains of Canterlot, playing hide-and-seek with his past self.  Everything was worth coming here to this city, and yet it briefly felt like none of it was.  Scootaloo couldn't tell; she could hardly think.  With a sudden shiver, she made to open the container...

        Then something slithered out, something small and fragile.  Scootaloo paused, her hooves lingering above the box's clasp.  She narrowed her eyes upon the very lid of the box, focusing on what had just fallen through the crease.  Her left ear twitched upon the examination.

        It was a blue feather.  From the lightest touch, Scootaloo could swear it was softer and brighter than the three pieces of Rainbow Dash she had carried with her all her years in the Wasteland.  The flimsy thing spoke volumes with a mute flutter of its sapphiric strands.  Scootaloo felt that with one of its threads alone, she could bathe the skies above Petra blue again, or even cleanse the sludge out of the depths of Dream Valley.  All it took was a single glance, and Scootaloo smiled; she got the message.  She remembered that she came all the way to Cloudsdale's depths for one thing alone... and yet for everything else at once.

        Before a blinking Devo, Scootaloo tucked the blue feather back into the box, and slid the striped container back over the desk towards the elder.  “Keep it for a little longer,” she murmured in the calmest of voices.  The orphan of time backtrotted a few steps away from the sight of the container; she was too loyal to do anything else.  “ I will be back for it.”

        The prime Hex-Bleeder's copper eyes twitched noticeably.  It was confusion that blemished his face more than shock.  “I... I don't get it, pony.  Don't you want to know what it is?  Don't you want to open the box?”

        Scootaloo smiled serenely as she looked Devo in the face.  “I have to close it first.”






        Warden was asleep.  He sat, slumped, in Raimony's lap as the young Hex-Bleeder cradled his slumbering form with a pair of soft, blue arms.  Several imps of like-blood stood along the fringes of the lower warehouse, smiling and sharing tales fresh from the streets of the changing imp city.  There was a series of clopping hoof-steps, and every single goblin—Raimony included—glanced over.

        Scootaloo descended the stairs from Devo's office.  A gust of steam vented beside her, kicking at her pink mane as she trotted over towards where Raimony and the unconscious little teenager were huddled.

        Raimony smiled sweetly, her ears twitching at the sight of the last pony.  “He's plum exhausted,” she murmured quietly in a gentle breath that betrayed her usual gruffness.  “The poor thing has barely gotten a wink of sleep these past few days.  So much has happened, and he's in the spotlight of it all, whether her likes it or not.”

        “We rarely ever ask for the spotlight,” Scootaloo said with a gentle nod.  She squatted down beside the two.  “But some of us are born to be natural show-stoppers.”  She paused to gaze deeply at the slumbering youth's green face.  Her eyes rounded moistly as a breath escaped her lips.

        Raimony saw the look in her face, but then saw something deeper.  She swallowed and braved a smile.  “I will look after him,” she said.  “He may be the symbol of a new and glorious Petra, but I'll make sure nothing bad comes to him.”

        “You'd have better luck looking after a minefield,” Scootaloo grunted.

        Raimony giggled breathily.  Warden stirred, his lips murmuring something... then turning still again.

        Scootaloo stared at him, filling her scarlets with his image.  The parts of her that had lived so long knew that it would be the last time.  She made to stand and trot away... but suddenly lingered.  After a blink, she performed her next act with a grace that even surprised herself.  Her hooves unlatched the blue feather from her ear.  Gently, so as not to wake him, she dragged the string over the length of his pointed ear.  The sapphiric threads dangled from the youth's cranium in the sway of his sleeping breath.  Swallowing a sore sensation down her throat, Scootaloo leaned in and ever so softly nuzzled the nape of his neck... before finally standing up and making for the exit.

        Halfway through her departure, Raimony craned her neck and whispered, “What should I tell him?  What should he hear when he wakes up?”

        Scootaloo paused in her tracks.  All of the goblins' eyes were upon her.  Eventually, she turned around and smiled under a glossy pair of eyes.

        “Tell him that I will never stop being proud of him.”  She shuddered, then smiled harder.  “And when I'm finally gone, even death won't take that pride away.”







        “Wave goodbye to the one and only Wonderbolts, ya little squirt!”

        A seven-year-old Scootaloo dangled in the forelimbs of Rainbow Dash as the two hovered in the glittering moonlight of Equestria.  “Goodbye, one and only Wonderbolts!” she flapped her hoof wildly and grinned through the high winds bordering Canterlot.  “You're totally going to let Dashie in on the team now, right—?”  As she said this, the golden wings of the Best Young Fliers' slid goofily over her face.  “Whoops!”

        Spitfire and the rest of the uniformed pegasi chuckled merrily.  “We'll see, kiddo!  Stay frosty!”

        “Good bye, Rainbow Dash!  I'll never forget what happened today!”

        “Seeing the Sonic Rainboom up close was like an out-of-body experience!”

        “Yeah.  Thanks for saving our teammates' lives and jazz!”

        “Hahaha!”

        “You're pretty awesome, Rainbow Dash.”

        “Thank you.  I know.”  The blue pegasus waved back with a wink, clutching Scootaloo to her hovering chest.  “Now go back to the castle and practice for the next time I whoop your tails in a race!”

        “Oh ho hooooo!  Come on, guys!  We totally gotta ditch the airshow in Fillydelphia for that!”

        “That's up to Spitfire, but I don't think she wants us getting banished to the moon.”

        “Hahaha!”

        “Take wing, Wonderbolts!”  Spitfire shouted as she rocketed towards the jagged horizons of the Canterlotlian Mountains and the majestic unicorn city resting thereupon.  “We've got a busy day ahead of us tomorrow!”

        Under a gleeful cadence of last goodbyes, the six legendary ponies soared eastward, disappearing in the glorious vista of Equestria's capital city.

        In the meantime, Scootaloo pushed the crown back up her forehead with one hoof while clutching the battered metal tray to her chest with the other.  “Uhm... Dashie?” she looked up at the pegasus holding her high above the clouds.  “I don't get it!  Weren't they going to—?”

        “Wow, I'm beat!”  Rainbow Dash yawned and fluttered the two of them down towards a wispy, cumulonimbus cluster hovering beneath them in the moon's pale glow.  “What say we grab ourselves a nightcap before I drag your sorry flank all the way back to Ponyville.”

        “Uhm... Okay,” Scootaloo murmured with a nervous smile.  Rainbow Dash lowered them onto the cloud.  The filly winced slightly the first moment her bandaged leg met the misty bed.  The older pony steadied her, and with Rainbow's help the foal folded her limbs comfortably underneath her.  “Still, Dashie, I'm confused.”

        “Ugh, can't you be exhausted instead?  I really need to get a crash nap if I can get us home by sunrise.”

        Scootaloo gazed up at the pony.  “All the times we've ever hung out together, I thought you said you were practicing your flight moves so that the Wonderbolts would induct you!”


        “You’re right; I was,” Rainbow Dash said, stifling a yawn as she sat down beside her.  The two ponies—young and old—cradled themselves atop the cloud overlooking the glittering expanse of Equestria.  The world stretched out like a crystalline pond beneath them, and the moon was gracefully showing them all the rich depths to which they could adventurously plunge.  “That was the plan.  I don’t remember anypony changing the plan.  What are you now, head organizer for ‘Wonderbolt Wrap-Up?’”



        “But the Wonderbolts are leaving!” Scootaloo exclaimed, breathing with a frantic shudder that was brought about by something other than the freezing altitudes.  “They haven’t even bothered to ask you!”





        “Yeah, so?”  Rainbow smirked.  “Maybe they’re off to secretly plan my induction party—”





        Scootaloo didn’t let her finish.  “Dashie!  Go after them!  Tell them how much you deserve to be on their team!”  She hopped and bounced in place, her eyes bright and earnest.  “I-I can stay here on this cloud just fine!  I’ll be safe until you come back!  Just go!”





        Rainbow Dash exhaled long and hard through a tiring smile as she gazed off into the dark layers of the nigh.  “It’s okay, kid.  I’ve pestered them enough.”





        “Dashie!  You can’t let them get away!  It’s not like you to settle for less—!”





        “Look, just cool it, will ya?!” Rainbow Dash exclaimed, her smile briefly breaking to reveal harder lines beneath her face.  “I... I had a great day today.”  She chuckled.  “The best day ever.  I want to keep it that way, until I have an even better day... heh.”  Her smile returned, but was an exhausted facsimile of her day’s worth of grins preceding it.  “You don’t run an awesome thing into the ground, kid.  You keep on beating your wings until you go higher.”





        Scootaloo gazed at her for the several seconds it took for the truth to sink in.  Her tiny wings drooped as she allowed the contemplation to manifest itself in a murmur.  “You knew, didn’t you?”  She paused, swallowed, and said in a shakier voice, “You knew that you weren’t going to be asked to join the Wonderbolts all this time...”





        “Hey—I knew that I would knock the goggles off them!”  Rainbow Dash said.  “And all things considered, that’s what I freakin’ did!  No doubt about it!”





        “But—”





        “But what?”  Rainbow Dash reached over and snatched the golden crown off the foal’s skull.  She planted the Best Young Fliers’ article on her own head and smirked, her eyes pointed towards the heavens beyond the trophy’s golden wings.  “You think I bought this thing at a souvenir store?  I won this by being the best at what I am.  All of that practice helped after all, kid.  Don’t think for once that I’m settling for less.”





        “But... You saved three ponies today and pulled off the Sonic Rainboom in front of Princess Celestia!”  Scootaloo’s face pouted.  “You deserve to be on the Wonderbolts.”





        “Nopony deserves stuff unless they can earn it, pipsqueak,” Rainbow Dash said.  She bore a briefly solemn face as she gazed down to where her hooves played with the fluffy edges of the cloud.  “I’ll have a chance to get into the Wonderbolts in the future.  I’m sure of it.  For right now... heh... I’ve got quite a bit to go on.”





        “Then...”  Scootaloo bit her lip, her violet eyes awash in a glossy sheen of guilt.  “Then today really was your one chance to spend with the Wonderbolts.”  She sighed and curled up on the quilt-like surface of the white mist beneath them.  “And I had to come and ruin it...”





        “Hey! None of that junk now, you hear me?”  Rainbow Dash frowned, nudging the foal in the flank.  “You’ll never get anywhere in life if you trash a good moment when you see it.  I had a blast today.  And you wanna know what?  It wouldn’t have been half as fun if you weren’t there to share it.”  She winked, hoping it would convey the message.





        It didn’t.  “I don’t get it...”  Scootaloo blinked innocently at the mare.  “I’m nothing special.  I no Wonderbolt.  You trained for months to get close to Spitfire’s team.  Why does it matter if I was there or not?”





        Rainbow Dash sighed long and hard.  Her blue wings curled tightly to her sides.  “Seriously, kid, do I have to spell it out for you?”







        Scootaloo exited the Hex Blood warehouse of Strut Eighteen, and when she did she saw something that made her pause.  Every single imp that formed the thick crowd in front of the building stopped chatting, stopped laughing, stopped moving and simply stared at her.  For once it was not a look of hatred or distaste.  Instead, pure wonder and reverance washed over the faces of the populace of Petra as they were blessed by the presence of the pony who had helped Warden stop a speeding locomotive.  Undaunted, Scootaloo wasted no time.  She trotted towards the nearest lift that would lead her down to her airship's hangar.  As she did so, the entire crowd parted ways, clearing a respectful path as they quietly watched the last pony march off into obscurity.

        “You marched clear across Equestria just to see me.  I kind of want to kill you for that, but still, it took guts.  And I like that.

        Scootaloo trotted up towards the wall of the Harmony's cabin above her workbench.  Every souvenir that she had collected from the ruins of the past had been improvised in providing her an explosive entrance into the the train full of bombs.  One souvenir, however, still remained.  Scootaloo smiled warmly at the colorful crayon-strokes of Suntrot's priceless masterpiece.  With a warm breath, the last pony produced a banner that she had scavenged from the streets of Petra.  The image of Warden's hand holding up a bloody horseshoe hung parallel to the illustration from Stonehaven's Immolatia Ward.  Scootaloo drank the both of them in with the same, sacred breath.  Quietly, she turned around and marched into the Harmony's cockpit.

        “You built some really wicked cool goggles for me to wear at the Competition.  As a matter of fact, they were so awesome, that I couldn’t be allowed to sport them or else the judges might think I was a friggin’ daughter of Nebula.  Heh.

        With a swinging of two levers, Scootaloo dipped her airship down towards the southern edge of the gaping ruins of Cloudsdale.  Several clusters of mining equipment rested under falling streams of Wasteland ash.  The site was utterly abandoned, just like Devo had said.  With a satisfied smirk, Scootaloo lowered the Harmony to the scorched bosom of the world, mooring her ship via metal claws to a towering platform.  She hopped out of her seat, collected a leather saddlebag, and reached across the workbench for a long cylinder of emerald flame.


        “You’ve sat down for afternoons at a time and graded me on my stunt moves in practice.  Sure, you may have been a teeny bit biased with your opinions, but at least you sat through and watched me do my stuff.  Nopony else in Ponyville has that kind of patience?



        Scootaloo flung a canvas mask over her jaws and marched firmly against a thick flurry of snow.  The great gray abyss of Cloudsdale loomed before her.  Passing by several crates of abandoned goblin tools, she trotted onto a metal platform and navigated a complex series of lattices, descending into the graveyard of the pegasi for the first time in decades.

        “What’s more, you’re not afraid to change.  I wish I was that smart and creative when I was a pipsqueak myself.  A pony who’s willing to become better than what she is takes the cake in my book.

        Scattered bands of twilight shone across the mare's weathered coat.  Inside the bowels of Cloudsdale, the last pony slowly marched over hills of powder and crushed gravel.  She passed underneath a branching archway of collapsed sky marble pillars and descended onto another plateau with a soft flutter of her adult wings.  To her far left, a tiny cave laced with wooden rubble lingered just beyond the ashen edge of visibility.  Scootaloo didn't bother looking at it; she marched forward into the cavernous depths.






        “You may not be a Wonderbolt, Scootaloo,” Rainbow Dash spoke conclusively from atop the cloud, “But I couldn’t have had somepony better to enjoy this day with.  I’ve told you that already.  What I haven’t told you was that things got all the more awesome when you showed up.  The Wonderbolts—I knew I’d be hanging out with.  You, kid?  Heh... you were some surprise, alright.”


        Scootaloo’s face was furiously rosy at this point.  She cleared her throat, smiled briefly, but ultimately murmured, “I-I’m glad you think that way, Dashie.  But I still think you should have enjoyed your one opportunity to be alone with the Wonderbolts.  It’s... It’s what you earned.  You’re a winner, after all.”





        “It wouldn’t have been the same, kid.  I...” Rainbow Dash sighed and ran a hoof through her mane.  Sitting frozen in the face of a cool breeze, she looked like a shadow of all the world’s colors, an oddly dim thing for Ponyville’s chief weather flier.  “You’re right, I knew the Wonderbolts probably weren’t going to do more than just hang out with me and head back to wherever.  I’m fine with that.  Really, I am.  But if that was all that happened today, I still wouldn’t have felt like I won anything.”





        “Why, Dashie?”





        Rainbow’s face momentarily grimaced.  The moonlight danced over her features like candlelight in a dark hospital ward.  The breath that came out of her was also as gently reminiscent.  “Because as much as I would have won the Wonderbolts’ respect, I knew that I wouldn’t have won their hearts.  That... That wouldn’t have bothered me before, but I’m kind of glad for it.  Yeah, I am.”  She gulped and smiled bravely, as if coming out of that statement was the equivalent to ten Sonic Rainbooms thrown into one.  When she gazed down at Scootaloo, her voice dripped forth another spectacular stunt, “Being around you is the one thing that makes me feel like a winner, kiddo.”

        Scootaloo smiled back at her.  She gnawed on her lip as her eyes watered.

        A brief gust of cold wind danced across their coats.  Scootaloo shivered, and immediately Rainbow Dash stretched her wing out, enfolding Scootaloo in a warm, feathery embrace.  Breathing evenly, Scootaloo leaned into the weight of the mare beside her, nuzzling Rainbow Dash's coat as she closed her eyes and absorbed the soothing whisper of night with a warm smile.





        “That was the moment I knew that I loved you,” Scootaloo quietly said.  She stood before the heap of stones, clustered in a winged shape to cover the soul lying silently underneath.  The same halo of twilight shone over that edge of the plateau, bathing Rainbow Dash's grave in a spotlight that refused to go away.  “It was a love that transcended definition, a love greater than the word itself, a love that made me realize that I was alive, because you gave me a reason to do it and to do it gladly everyday.”

        Scootaloo was already buckling.  Her brown, battered body was covered from mane to tail in leather armor, but nothing could have shielded her from this moment.  Her face tensed and her voice cracked as she summoned the strength to gaze up at the pale rocks glistening before her.

        “Rainbow Dash, I... I-I did not have a home.  I did not have parents.  For the longest time, I did not have food or friends or money.”  She shuddered and swallowed hard before continuing.  “But I had you—your devilish smirk, your jeering quirks, your fearless taunts.  In this deathly day and age, I've been granted the flames of reverse-time, the very gift of Princess Entropa herself.  None of it compares to the tr-treasure I had as a filly, the treasure of your attention and loyalty.  There is no greater hope in the world than the spirit of a pony who knows how fantastic she can be, because she chooses it.”  Her breath escaped her sharply.  She gnashed her teeth, forcing the words out.  “She wills it.  She breathes it with every laughter and shout and sob she challenges the world with, and you were my breath, Dashie, my entire sky, my golden dream at the end of the rainbow.”

        The mare hunched over.  Her breathes were the only semblance of life in the center of the ruins' cavernous hovel.  For a  numb second, she realized it resembled every other disquieting moment of her lonely existence, except for the few blissful days of warmth spent with her.

        “I wonder,” she murmured in a wavering voice.  “I wonder what it would have been like if things were different, if that dark day in Cloudsdale hadn't lost all of its colors, if instead of leaving me alone and safe in the arcane vault...”  She bit her lip, and the next thing came out in a whimper.  “...you would have joined me inside.”  Her breath jolted with an explosive chuckle as the first tears ran down her bitterly smiling face.  “Ohhhh... Heheh... What beauty you and I would have brought to this dead world, Dashie.”  She sniffled.  “Maybe the Wasteland would have been less wasted, to have been blessed for a few dying decades by the Queen and Princess of stewards.”  She paused, lingering on the next utterance, her lips spelling out the name of Princess Entropa's avatar as her throat almost collapsed beneath her.  “However...”  She swallowed hard, and in a low voice muttered, “I am what I am, and this fate is mine and mine alone.”

        She cleared her throat, trying to steady herself, trying to be brave.  The blue pegasus always brought out the best in Scootaloo, which is what made the next few words tear her to pieces.

        “Rainbow Dash, I have tried so hard to keep things beautiful.  I have fought for ages to carry even an ounce of your spectacular awesomeness.  But all I've managed to do is ugly...” She winced, feeling the length of her wounds and bruises aching across her limbs.  It had been over four days since she fought goblins on a train, and still she could smell their blood staining her.  “...and it's made this decrepit world even uglier, to the point that I actually gave into those endless gray horizons of twilight and let it devour my soul.  I can only hope that you can... th-that you can forgive me, because for so long I had forgotten.  I had lost track of your colors, of your hope.  I gave up believing in this world, and I gave up believing in myself.”

        The last pony clenched her eyes shut as more tears squeezed out.  She felt the weight of the glass cylinder in her saddlebag, and it made her whimper like the foal she was once more in the ruins of Cloudsdale.

        “Now, I have a chance to speak with you again, and I haven't a clue as to what I should say.  What could I possibly say?”  She shuddered, her lips quivering.  “I am... not worthy, Rainbow Dash.  I never was.  I may be the last pony, but when I am gone, I will be just a shadow while you will be every dazzling piece of the light.  It's because you are legendary, Dashie, an endless spirit of awesomeness and hope.  I can bring sunlight back to all the corners of this blighted globe...”  She gulped hard and squeaked forth, “But I can never recreate you.”

        That was it.  She stopped fighting.  Scootaloo lowered down onto folded limbs as she gave into the weight that had been pulling at her wings since Spike gave her both his breath of time and his breath of wisdom weeks ago.

        “I love you, Dashie,” she murmured, trembling.  The plateau below darkened from her tears.  “I always have.  I wish you were my mother, my sister, my goddess—anything but what you are now, and what I had to bury.”  She gritted her teeth and blurted forth, “But I can't change that.  I can't change anything except for how much I adore you, and wish—as I have always wished—to make your pr-proud of me.”

        She sat there, breathing deeply, as if weathering a fall from an enormous height too tall for the twilight to contain.  Sniffling away the last of her tears, the scavenger reached into her saddlebag and produced the glass container.  A warmth of green light briefly bathed the two reunited pegasi as she held it before the grave and spoke.

        “I don't know what is in store for me, for you, for either of us as soon as I bathe in this flame to haunt you, but whatever it is—I promise...”  She frowned with the effort it took to produce these words.  “I promise with every iota of my being that I will make it worth your while, that I will shine back the light that you have anointed upon me, that I will give wind to your wings as you have lifted mine, that I will give you the full spotlight to fly your colors—in every hopeful shade—even if it is your last time...”  She added with a bittersweet smile, full of adoration and warmth.  “For I know it will be our last time.”

        Scootaloo briefly hugged the cylinder to her chest.  Eyes shut, the pony calmly murmured into the lonely air.

        “Equestria ended decades ago, and this is the end of something too.  I think you would like the feeling, Dashie.  After all, impossible things have happened colorfully before.”

        After a few meditative breaths, she planted the jar down and practically dove into the somber task ahead of her next.  With swift grace, she removed the stones of the grave one by one, so that she could have access to the bones of Rainbow Dash, and provide the green flames with the reagent it needed for anchorage.




        Twenty-three years ago, a young Scootaloo stood in that exact same spot, adjusting the stones so that they stayed firmly in place over the sacred grave.  The last pony stepped backwards, wearing a leather cowl with goggles over her shaved mane.  Her scarlet eyes took in the pale sight of the rocks, and she brandished a smile, a devilish smirk.  Sliding the goggles down, she flung her brown wings out and shot skyward, effortlessly exiting the pits of Cloudsdale to become one with the gray clouds of the Wasteland once more.


~*~*~*~*~*~*~


        Journal Entry # 2.

        Two years have passed since I first started this thing, and I have learned and lost so much.  I'm sure that it will show in my words.  I have nopony to write to, so there's really no point to this.  But I am not going to abandon this journal.  Giving up is the very essence of defeat.

        


~*~*~*~*~*~*~




        Years later, Scootaloo sat—hunched over—beneath an overhang of rocks several kilometers west of the Cloudsdalian abyss.  She finished charging the energy core of a welding tool she had engineered with her own two hooves.  Sliding a thick sheet of dark glass over her face, she proceeded to fuse together the sundered pieces of a royal airship.  Slowly, bulkhead by bulkhead, the last pony worked on the brazen task of building a zeppelin for herself.


~*~*~*~*~*~*~





        I have learned to fly, but that is not enough.  I must live as I do, and do as I live.  This Wasteland is a stupid fossil of what Equestria once was.  I have every right to not live in the garbage that the Cataclysm has left behind.  If nothing else, a high altitude will give me a better perspective, and I can then find the things that are worth preserving.







~*~*~*~*~*~*~



        More years had passed.  Scootaloo sat in a cockpit seat, piloting the Harmony through the snowy mists flurrying beneath the height of Griffon Mount.  She leaned back, calmly gazing at a map balanced on her lower legs while one hoof casually gripped a lever, drifting her aircraft forward into the southwestern heights of former Equestria.


~*~*~*~*~*~*~


        Like my life—that is also something worth preserving, for I am the last pony.  I know this.  I cannot deny this.  Even if some other equines were to exist in some far corner of the globe, I cannot pretend to depend upon them.  I am alone, I am alive, and I can do this.



~*~*~*~*~*~*~


        With a rattling of leather armor, the last pony finally broke down the grand white door to Princess Celestia's royal chambers.  Marching over the bodies of dead guards, she marched into the luxurious interior, shining her lantern-yoke across the heart of Canterlot's Royal Palace.  She blinked beneath her goggles, noticing that the Goddess' personal mirror was gone.  As she shone her light across the room, something else reflected with ten times as much brilliance.  The mare's lips parted and she breathed in awe as she trotted up towards a pedestal, atop of which was positioned none other than Celestia's sacred journal.


~*~*~*~*~*~*~




        I owe it to more than myself to live on.  What I take from this land, I give back to the legacy of those who came before me.  What I pilfer and steal, I do so because I am attempting to rebuild, not to rob.  If any creature tries to stop me, curse them.  If any monster hates and berates me, I don’t care.  I am all that matters in this world, and I am awesome.  What's more, I know this.




~*~*~*~*~*~*~



        Atop the mountains overlooking the Everfree Briar, Scootaloo briefly paused in scavenging.  She marched onto the shattered promontory of what remained of Nightmare Moon's Castle, the former holding place for the Elements of Harmony.  Dropping her canvas bag of gathered material, she stood upon the very edge of the ancient structure.  Before her, the Wasteland was covered in a shiny, silken overcast of clouds.  The pale gray twilight conveyed a subtle brilliance as it glittered off the rolling mists of ash below.  The last pony took a moment to drink in the essence of her life.  She closed her eyes as her brown feathers billowed in the wind.


~*~*~*~*~*~*~





        I will find beauty, or else beauty will find me.  What I can't get by asking, I will take by force.  This world was built by the spirit of Alicorn Goddesses, and it shall be a pony—the very essence of their glory—that has the last say about what is remembered and what is forgotten.







~*~*~*~*~*~*~



        Several years had melted by.  Older and more sullen, an armored Scootaloo marched through the dark, rusted hallways of a floating battleship.  Flanked by canine guards, she emerged onto a bridge laced with iron-riveted bulkheads.  Several dirigible dogs turned to glance at her and the pony's shiny rifle.  Through the center of the mangy group, Gilliam hobbled.  He smiled eagerly, his teeth brimming with rubies, as he produced a leather sheet from his belt pocket and handed the pony a complex contract detailing the types of flames he and his brothers desired.


~*~*~*~*~*~*~


        And at the very top of that list is the legacy of a pony who is mightier than I.  Her name is Rainbow Dash, the chief weather flier of Ponyville.  She is the legend that will last longer than the dying lengths of this world, for she is what I have to bestow this land, and nothing else.







~*~*~*~*~*~*~



        Scootaloo tugged at the metal lever once, twice, and finally the lattice full of flamestones lit up.  A bright rainbow arched through the gray ash of the Wasteland.  Drinking the sight in, Scootaloo leaned briefly on her copper rifle and ran a hoof over her neck, almost surprised that her pink mane from childhood was gone.  Two decades had burned away in a blink, and yet seeing this signal brought her ever so gently back, everytime, so that she was sitting once more on the cloud, protected under Rainbow Dash's soft blue feathers.  The last pony smiled gently, clutching hard to her rifle, smiling into the sea of colors.


~*~*~*~*~*~*~




        For it was Rainbow Dash who won my heart.  And I carry her with me, in my heart.  I am but a vessel, a means of transferring her colors into the gray desolation that is bold enough to think it can drown all that's good in the world.  And when my heart stops beating, and when there is no pony left to wander this sacred land, her spirit will leap out from me.  It will whisper into the ears of every creature left to linger in darkness that there is a reason for their tears.  It will tell them, “Something magnificent has passed on, and the world will only be as spectacular as it can summon the gall to remember it.”  I shall be that reminder, even if it takes every bone in my body to carve it.  This I pledge, before anything else I write in this journal, before any other piece of me fades into the shadows.

        Rainbow Dash was here.  Know her name, and then know what it means to be nothing.

                -End of Entry





        Harmony's black mane billowed in the wind.  She plummeted, her eyes shut and her lips pursed, as several clouds blurred past her.  She murmured something, perhaps a name, perhaps a prayer, and then the golden streaks in her hair showed, glistening in bright sunlight.  Her copper coat was instantly toasted.  The warmth opened her amber eyes, as if waking her from an immortal slumber.  Blinking, she glanced fitfully across the lengths of her fall.  She was surrounded with sky, an eternal sphere of pearlescent blue.

        A thunderous burst of air rippled past her.  Harmony turned her neck to see.  Her eyes rolled back, and something bluer than blue burned across the ether above.

        With a rocketing streak, a living rainbow broke the sky.

        A tear rolled down the pony's Entropan cheek.  Her breath left her as her wings found her, flapping, tilting her copper body up so that she was barreling towards the colors, surging skyward.  She suddenly clenched her teeth and flung her body straight ahead, blurring her wings behind her in desperation as her legs went through the foalish motion of kicking at an invisible earth.  She panted and strained with the effort, her lungs bursting under her soul-self as she desperately broke through the clouds.

        On the other side, the air was rupturing, bursting at the seams with explodings mists.  A bright blue pegasus was kicking the clouds, exploding them one by one, shouting brazenly with a raspy voice, her voice.

        Harmony bolted towards it, hyperventilating, desperate to close the fragile lengths between her and her anchor, no matter how buffered by the power of Spike's breath.  When she came close enough to count the shades in the pegasus' mane, an errant cloud was thrown her way.  Amber eyes flaring, she tightened her face and broke through it like the bow of her airship, emerging victoriously on the other side with a showing kick of her four legs.

        She had to hover to a stop, because Rainbow Dash was right there.  Rainbow Dash was alive.  She flung a pair of ruby eyes towards the shell containing Scootaloo's soul, and the devilish smirk crossed the cold veil of time to grace the last pony once again.

        “Heheh... Not bad!  But can you kick clouds with the best there is?!”  She gave a wink, and the mare darted towards the stratosphere like a prismatic comet.

        Harmony gazed up at her.  Her teeth showed through a wheezing breath.  “Y-Yes,” she pathetically squeaked.  “I can.”  Another tear fell, only to be washed away by a smirk of her own as Harmony soared on copper wings toward the ceiling of the world.

        Above her, Rainbow Dash was spiraling in a wild arc, shredding banks of cumulonimbus into aromatic chunks of madness.  Life was a contest, a breathtaking race towards the shores of oblivion, and Rainbow Dash was reminding her then and there.  Harmony smiled, tilted aside, and found her own column of clouds.  She dipped her wing into the bank to her left and spiraled along the entire height of it, carving the pillar of mist hollow, so that at the top of her climb she bucked the top of it and exploded it straight down the center like a gaseous string of firecrackers.

        “You ever seen a pegasus do that?!” the orphan of time barked, grinning.

        “Pfft—In kindergarten!”  Rainbow Dash grinned wide and spun about.  “Watch and learn, girl!”  She stretched her bue wings out as far as they could go, then spun her body like a sapphric drill.  Soaring briskly ahead of Harmony, the twirling pegasus burrowed her way into a dark thundercloud.  The black mist shrunk in on her as she carved it from the inside out.  Condensing, the electricified vapors ruptured, and suddenly the entire cloud exploded from around the shape of Rainbow Dash with her every limb outstretched.  A veritable ring of lightning bolts briefly flickered around her grinning figure, and dissipated.

        Harmony smiled.  “Okay, so you're flashy!”  Her amber eyes glistened as she breathed forth a challenged she had only ever dreamed of.  “Let's see if you're just as quick as you like to show off!”

        “Ooooh!  Is this a challenge?”

        “It's my dust!”  Harmony hissed, flapped her wings, and barreled earthward.  “Eat it!”

        “Hahaha—Oh it's on!”  Rainbow Dash rocketed after her.

        The blue sky was soon sundered by both pegasi as they spun and darted their way down the mountains of bursting clouds.  Vaporous mists parted on either side of them as they skirted down the side of a rippling bank and emerged through a dark patch of thunder with their mane-hair's sparkling with static.  There was laughter echoing between them; Harmony recognized only one of the voices, but it was the only sound that mattered.  She was panting the entire time, her senses doubly numb under the Entropan shroud as she struggled to sample the unbelievable reality of the moment.  When she looked aside in the middle of her flight, all she could see was Rainbow Dash's smirk in return.  It took everything in the future scavenger's arsenal not to break down in sobs.

        Rainbow was her own immaculate self the entire time.  She laughed and let loose a howling whoop as she rolled ahead of Harmony, spinning her way through an ivory archway of clouds and tossing errant puffs of white into the time traveler's face with her hooves.  The last pony effortlessly batted the projectiles away and flew faster, guided by a smile.  Together, the two pegasi spun loopty-loops and orbiting twists, shredding the grayness into a pearlescent blue that brought out the shine in Rainbow Dash's coat.

        “Heheheh—Say, you're not half bad!”  Rainbow Dash saluted back with a grin.  “But you can't beat the best!  Time to bring out the big guns!”  With that said, she beat her wings harder and accelerated at a maddening rate.

        Harmony blinked, and suddenly the smile drained from her face.  She panted, realizing two things: first, what she was there for, and second, what little chance she had to truly, truly outrace Rainbow Dash.  In a matter of seconds, Rainbow's speed could separate the two by an impossible gap, even beyond Spike's two hundred meters that Harmony wasn't yet sure was a safe distance or not.  In a fit of desperation, she gulped hard and shouted into the whipping winds.

        “Rainbow Dash!  Slow down!”

        “Ha!  Not on your life!”  Rainbow Dash shouted.  “You're never gonna win any rounds if you resort to begging!”

        Harmony gritted her teeth, beating her wings as quickly as she could, attempting to keep up.  “I mean it!  I need you to slow down!”

        “Pffft!  Hahaha—You really can't take a hint, can you?  Your loss!”  Rainbow's wings stretched fiercely and her entire body coiled up to burst forward in a lightning-fast lunge.  “Prepare to be smoked!”

        “No!  You don't get it!  I'm here on behalf of Canterlot and, I—Nnnngh!”  Harmony flashed a look to the side.  She was just passing a tall column of clouds.  The copper pegasus angled her wings, hoisted her body sideways, caught the cylinder of vapors, and used it like a springboard to launch her forward.  In a breath of desperation, the last pony caught up with Rainbow Dash... and tackled her full-on.

        “Daah!” Rainbow shrieked, her ruby eyes exploding with surprise.

        Harmony held on tight.  The two fell like a dead weight together, spiraling and spiraling, until they landed smack dab in the middle of a cloudbank with the last pony on top.

        “Ooof!”  Rainbow Dash winced, then snarled up at the other mare.  “Hey!” her voice cracked.  “What the heck gives?!  This is totally not part of the rules, you jerk!”

        “Rules?!”  Harmony blinked awkwardly.  She shook the confusion off and refocused, trying not to be overwhelmed by the living, breathing relic that was in her grasp.  “I'm not here to play games!  I'm a representative of the Royal Court of Canterlot and...”  She panted, trying to seize her words as she struggled to seize this moment.  She had never had Rainbow Dash angry at her ever, and she wasn't about to let such a horrid thing continue.  “And the Princess has ordered m-me to... to do a report on your performance as Ponyville's Chief Weather Flier,” she ultimately said.  Nervously, she produced a copper smile.  “You see... uh... she never got a chance to thoroughly congratulate you for winning the Best Young Fliers Competition, and she's commanded that I interview you thoroughly—”

        “Wait!”  Rainbow Dash sat up, her ghostly-pale face staring down Harmony's.  “Y-You mean to tell me that you're not competing?”

        “Uhhh... H-Huh?”  Harmony blinked confusedly.  “Competing in what?”

        “Horseapples!”  Rainbow Dash viciously shoved Harmony off of her and ran to the edge of the cloudbank, trembling.  “Omigoshomigoshomigosh!  How could I be so stupid!”

        “I don't get it!” Harmony exclaimed.  “What's going on?!  Why are you... uh... stupid?”

        “Do you realize what you've done?!”  Rainbow Dash pulled at her face muscles, moaning fitfully.  With her flank facing Harmony, the last pony realized for the first time that the blue pony's left cutie mark had been covered with a square sheet of paper emblazoned with the number “64.”

        Curious, Harmony trotted to the pegasus' side.  She watched as a broad cloudbank drifted by in front of them, revealing behind it another bed of clouds over two hundred meters away.  The very same field of mist was filled to the brim with pegasi of all shapes and colors, their eyes locked on the patch of air where Harmony and Rainbow Dash had been flying.  What was more, a series of Cloudsdalian tables and equipment had been set up on a floating platform suspended by hot-air balloons.  Seated there was a group of old, graying ponies, and above them was a grand banner that unmistakably read:  “Wonderbolts Intermediary Tryouts”

        Just as Harmony saw this, she heard a roar of thunder.  She glanced aside in time to see a pegasus with the number “40” coming down from a cloud-kicking stunt.  She flew under the banner and landed gracefully on the floating platform, just as a giant hourglass beside her emptied its upper half, followed by a loud bell that rang through the high winds of the air.  The sweating pegasus tossed a confused, worried glance Rainbow Dash's way, then trotted into a cheering crowd just as one of the elder judges shuffled up to a megaphone and shouted forth:  “That was quite the commendable job, Miss Dash, albeit you know the official Cloudsdalian Rules.  Regardless of outside interference, you failed to return to the stage within the allotted time limit.  I'm afraid that you've earned a score of zero for this particular round.  The victory goes to Manehattan's very own Miss Zenith Star!”

        A series of cheering shouts echoed from the many pegasi contenders in the audience.  The air rang with celebration, and none of it was lauding Rainbow Dash.  The blue pegasus in question blinked.  Then her brow furrowed as she slowly pivoted and gave her strange, copper visitor the deadliest of glares.

        Harmony blinked, fell numbly down to her haunches, and then gulped.

        “Hoboy.”