Short Scraps and Explosions

by shortskirtsandexplosions

End of Ponies - Petra Arc - HHH Edition pt 2

        Scootaloo was six years old, or perhaps she was seven.  She didn't know how many winters she had been alive; she didn't even know when her foalday was.  All she knew was that she was hungry and there wasn't a single thing she could do about it.

        She limped, one numb hoof trotting after another, into the shadowed alcove of a dilapidated barn.  The structure was surrounded by a forest west of the fringes of Ponyville.  The place was lonely, peaceful, and unassuming: everything that the young orphan had wanted... to hide the fact that she was an orphan.  Nopony strolled by that part of the wilderness.  Nopony came within hearing distance of her fitful attempts to sleep at night, nor her daily struggles with repairing her ramshackle living conditions.  She was happy for the seclusion, except for when she was assailed with pitiful moments like this when her hunger and desperation overwhelmed the enthusiasm that had brought her here to begin with.

        All on her lonesome—with only her wits and a bag full of random tools at the young foal's disposal—Scootaloo had done the impossible.  She ran away from her foster home in Manehattan and performed an insane, eastward trek across the great valley of Equestria.  The voyage was daunting, taking the greater part of four weeks to accomplish.  Scootaloo snuck rides on train cars, hid in the undercarriages of delivery wagons, and navigated forests along the fringes of small towns.  She had endured every hardship with tenacity that she imagined would have made her parents proud.  Her odyssey was an unstoppable thing, fueled by an enthusiastic high of manifest destiny that spoke of great promises once she returned to the village that she knew her parents had raised her in.

        When she arrived in Ponyville, all of those promises crashed and burned.  She had anticipated a lifestyle where hard work and enthusiasm could earn her bits to make a living off of, much like how her parents—through diligence and perserverence—had provided so wonderfully for her foalhood.  Scootaloo soon found that she lacked one thing her parents had possessed: an abundance of years under their wings.

        When Scootaloo heard her own voice—when she saw her reflection or witnessed the bright, pastel hues of her own coat—she did not see a child.  She merely saw a vessel, an equine shell that carried the same pride and strength that energized her parents.  She did not see the tiny, petite, underaged pegasus that so many store owners and laborers in Ponyville rightly turned away when she offered her talents as a workhoof.  For the life of her, she couldn't comprehend the turn of events that she was now being vexed with, a rather realistic series of circumstances that she never anticipated.

        She was in Ponyville, but she was still the same childish soul that urged so many child service ponies to pity her, to take her away from the one town she loved and her parents gave their lives for.  Manehattan ponies had shoved her into home after home in an audacious attempt to force her to accept an alien pair of pegasi as her new guardians.  For two years in the urbanity of western Equestria, Scootaloo had been bounced from house to house at least a dozen times, each occasion far more catastrophic than the previous.  She had been reprimanded several times, called a troublemaker, even a “demon child.”

        How could they understand?  She only had two parents, and as long as they were lying in the earth—the same earth whose infernal mine consumed them—she would never, ever deign to accepting a pair of banal, phantom replacements.  She couldn't convince the social workers of this truth that gnawed at her heart.  She didn't even try.  When the first opportunity presented itself, she burst her way out of her latest prison in Manehattan—like a falcon shattering its way boldly and righteously from an egg—and made a bee-line for Ponyville, where her hopes were lying—just like her parents.

        As her stomach growled, the pit inside growing ever deeper, she realized that she was on the verge of joining her parents, only not in the way that she had anticipated.  Scootaloo was more than accustomed to hardships in life.  However, one thing that she hadn't prepared herself for was failure.  With each rejection that the Ponyvillean residents gave her eager self, she felt more and more shameful, until the guilt practically overwhelmed the pain of her gnawing hunger.

        At that very moment, Scootaloo was crippled by the combination of both.  She ultimately collapsed in the center of the barn, just a meter short of a ladder she had planned on climbing to the second-story loft of the place, where she knew several blankets, a suitcase of personal things, and a photo of her parents waited to comfor her miserable, exhausted figure.

        She wondered how she could have been so foolish to have anticipated the world paying her the same respect she channeled into herself.  If only she was larger, older, disguised by the stretching skin of years, she could have made some progress in Ponyville.  A part of her wanted to curse time, her unwitting nemesis, for not allowing her the grace to do what her parents did: to become a pony who earned what she strove for, to get somewhere in life not by the gifts of other ponies’ pity but by the fruit of her own perserverance.

        Right now, she couldn't think of diligence.  She couldn't think of her Manehattan past or her Ponyvillean future.  In a breath of horror, she couldn't even think of her parents.  All Scootaloo knew was hunger, and it frightened the tiny, trembling animal inside her, so that she stared down at the dirty floor beneath the barn, saw a few blades of tattered glass, and drifted her lips mindlessly towards them.  As soon as her tongue flicked the edge of the banal vegetation, she immediately jerked away—reacquiring sickening sentience.

        She had crossed the great Equestrian Valley on her bare hooves, and yet she had sunken to a level lower than a common beast.  She didn't even realize she was so close to crying until her face scrunched up and blurred her vision.  Scootaloo burrowed her head into her hooves and shuddered.  The first of several whimpers was about to pierce their way up from her lungs, and she didn't know how to stop them.  It felt like a fate worse than death, and she lingered on the crest of her last conscious breath of pride.

        It was then, and no sooner, that out from the great bolting blue there came a rasping shriek, followed by a rush of billowing air.

        “H-Huh?”  The helpless pegasus glanced up through a hole in the roof, only to see a bright speck of random colors suddenly hurtling towards her like a missile.  Any urge to sob was instantly dashed by a violent need to shriek, “Holy crap!”  Scootaloo flung herself to the floor with violently twitching wings.

        “Yaaaaaaugh!”  The hulking body of a sapphire-blue pony bore a hole through the barn’s roof, ricocheted off the loft, and smashed through a rustic crossbeam in the center of the place.  “Augh!  Ooof!”  She landed in a thud, spilling hay and sawdust through the claustrophobic air of the Ponyvillean afternoon.  “Hoboy...”

        Panting, Scootaloo shot up from beneath a bed of straws.  Her eyes widened at the tumbling splinters and wreckage of her once pristine hovel.  “What... Wh-What...?”  She sputtered, stumbled up to her hooves, and barked, “My barn!  What the heck did you do to my—”  The orphan winced in mid-speech, her violet eyes twitching.  “Erm... What I mean was—Ahem—You just totally smashed up this stupid, ugly barn!  Are you insane?!”

        “Nnngh... Not insane... Just dizzy...” The offending pegasus sat up, wincing, rubbing her hoof through a tattered mane of red to green to violet.  “Whew... Eheheh... Guess I'm not exactly ready yet to pull off the buccaneer blitz solo...”

        “Look... L-L-Look at the hole you made!”  Scootaloo squeaked, staring bug-eyed at the offending chunk overhead, brimming with sunlight.  “You could have brought this whole place down, you crazy psycho!”

        “Pfft!  If you love this stupid barn so much, why don't you marry it?!”  The adult pony raspberried and shook the last of several haystalks loose from her skull.  “What were you doing here anyways?  Counting ticks in the hay?”

        “Nnngh-No!”  Scootaloo frowned.  After a blink, she realized that she was scratching her neck.  She flung her hoof down in a furious show of anger.  “Still, who are you to talk?!  I was minding my own business when you suddenly—”

        “Who am I?!”  The pony gasped in disbelief, flinging a pair of ruby eyes in the foal's direction.  “You mean you haven't heard of me?!”

        “Why?”  Scootaloo raised an eyebrow.  “Should I have?”

        “I'll say!”  The pony performed a devil-may-care smirk.  In a gust of wind, she twirled up from the pile of wooden debris and hovered high above the barn's loft, her mane and tail hairs whipping in the breeze like living spectral flame.  “The name's Rainbow Dash!  And I'm only the awesomest, coolest, most talented flier in all of Ponyville!”  She smiled wide, her teeth glinting.

        Scootaloo gazed up at her, silent, blank, and dumbstruck—at least until she stuck her tongue out.  “Pffft!  Yeah right!”  The filly smirked venomously, scoffing, “More like 'Rainbow Crash!'”

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

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

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

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

        “Jee, I dunno.  Maybe I just have a serious grudge against squirrels.  Besides, who died and made you expert on flight trajectories?—Whoah!”  Rainbow Dash did a double-take, giving Scootaloo the first solid glance since she arrived there.  “You're a filly!”

        The orphan pegasus blinked wide.  She stamped her hooves down and growled, “Of course I'm a girl!  What did you think?!”

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

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

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

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

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

        “I've been in fights before!”  Scootaloo boldly said.  It wasn't so much a lie as it was a guess.  Her memories were about as empty as her stomach at this point.  All she saw was blue, and all of it annoying and inside her barn.  “Don't talk to me like I'm a sissy!”

        “Yeah, whatever.  You got a name, pipsqueak?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

        Scootaloo pretended not to be impressed, though she had to navigate a few stunned blinks before letting loose her next, barking laugh.  “Okay, now you're just being stupid on purpose.”

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

        “Who?”

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

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

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

        “What's a Wonderbolt?”

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

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

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

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

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

        “Heeheehee...”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

        “No!”  Scootaloo growled into the echo of Rainbow's laughs.  She smirked devilishly and raised a hoof.  “Check it!”  She scampered over on tiny limbs to the far side of the barn and kicked a metal tray into her grasp.  It was a rusted platform balanced on four squeaky wheels, something she had pilfered from the Ponyville landfill two days previous, when she had first arrived in town.  She brandished the hunk'o'junk before the blue pegasus, grinning.  “You ever seen something like this before?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

        “You're... You're...”

        “Awesome?”

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

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

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

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

        “Something wickedly fun?”  Scootaloo raised an eyebrow.

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

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

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

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

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

        “Pull what off?”

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

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

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

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

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

        “You're a nutcase.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

        “Snkkkt—Heheheheheheh...”

        The filly raised a perplexed eyebrow.

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

        “Er.... yeahhhhh?”

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

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

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

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

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

        “What's the difference?”

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

        “You mean 'bending them.'”

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

        “I still think you cheated.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

        “'Strawhead?'”

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

        “Exactly what do you need help with?”

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

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

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

        “You mean the barn, Einstallion?”

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

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

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

        “What did you do with the lunch money?”

        “Whozzitwhat?”

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

        “What's it matter?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

        “...not to mention that one blasted winter when our apples nearly froze to kingdom come and Carrot Top herself came to lend us a hoof with salvagin' the orchards.  Of course, she nearly left in a huff when I said that apple pies could beat carrot cake at any bakery competition.  She said that apples were as boring and old as the Third Age itself.  Can you imagine the nerve of that filly?!  Apples are as delicious and as important now to the Equestrian palette as they were in the Second Age!  Why, if it wasn't for last season's bounty...”

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

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

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

        “S-Sure.”  Scootaloo grinned plastically.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

        “Unngh!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

        “Nuts to you, Miss Obvious.  It's an awesome sunset.  It's like the sky saw us owning Applejack and decided to explode fireworks all across the horizon to celebrate!”

        Scootaloo merely blinked at her.  “You're high.”

        “What of it?”  Smirking, Rainbow Dash came to a stop on a hilltop and slumped to her haunches.  She basked ecstatically in the crimson glow, as if it was powering her bright, blue coat.  “Can't a pegasus dig a wicked sunset when she sees it?  I don't take much stake in pretty things, but when nature gives it to us, I'm in no mood to bat an eye.  You feel me?”

        “Jee, I dunno...”  Scootaloo winced, feeling yet another pang of hunger rocketing through her core.  She plopped down, weak and tired, beside the blue pegasus.  “The world's kind of full of ugly things.  It's hard to shake it, even when you are a pegasus.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

        “Scootaloo.”

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

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

        “Heck yeah!  We've got the Summer Sun Celebration coming up!”  She stared blankly at the foal, then rolled a pair of ruby eyes at herself.  “Oh—pffft—right, who can?  Ahem.”  She smiled.  “Once a year, Princess Celestia visits a lucky Equestrian city and raises the sun right there in front of everypony.  This year, she's chosen to do her magical goddess stuff right here in Ponyville!  Pretty wicked, huh?”

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

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

        “Er...”

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

        “I... guess...?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

        There was suddenly no shame to it at all.

        That night, upstairs in the loft of the dilapidated barn, a halo of glittering starlight fell down over a young pegasus inside the rustic structure.  Scootaloo clutched the blanket to herself.  She was cold; she was shivering.  For the first time in so many fitful nights, however, she was smiling.

        “Heh...”  She murmured to herself, navigated a wave of shivers, and managed a giggle.  “'Snakes on a Flank'... hehehehehehe... Hmmm...”

        Snuggling into the depths of her hovel, sprinkled with fresh memories, Scootaloo closed her eyes and greeted slumber with a smile.

        Twenty-five years later, in that same barn, the mare's smile was gone.  Scootaloo dangled a twirling dragon’s tooth before her deadpan face.  Her scarlet eyes remained frozen upon the string itself, as if she was far more engrossed in its color than in the enchanted, calcified shard that it held.

        The mare sat, perched atop the loft of the dilapidated structure.  Her legs hung loosely, just as brown and lifeless as the forest of dead trees that formed a desolate ocean around the lonesome building.  The roof to the orphan's shelter had long crumbled to bits, so that the drifting ash of the Wasteland fell undaunted upon her shoulders and the contents of the barn around her.  She didn't bother fighting the white flakes from settling on her shoulders.  She had learned long ago that the fight was useless.

        The last pony sat there, submerged in placid silence and isolation, until a great beating sound suddenly filled the air.  With a flash of aged, purple wings, a gigantic dragon touched down beside the barn.  Gazing with squinting eyeslits at the twilight-blanketed forest, Spike let loose a curious hum before pivoting to look inside the barn.  Shuffling up, he sat on his scaled haunches and gazed at his quiet, equine companion.

        “A place of significance, I imagine?”

        “Hmmm...”  She pivoted the string around in her grasp, deeply weathering the centripetal rush that it magically sent spiraling through her stone-still soul.  “Something like that.”  Her pink hair billowed under a brief flurry of snow.  With a shuddering breath, she tapped the dragontooth lightly and watched as it spun chaotic circles before her jaded eyes.  “There are so few places of significance left in this world, and even fewer that I've had the pleasure of sharing with others... with or without the aid of green flame, for that matter.”

        He gazed at her.  Swallowing, he pivoted his snout eastward towards the gray splotch of ruins that was Ponyville.  “After our last conversation, you left in such a hurry.  I didn't dispute your departure, though I doubt even someone of my stature could have made a difference in your case.”  He managed a smirk; it came out like an iron wince.  The dragon sighed.  “I suppose it goes without saying, dear friend, that you are always a subject of my concern.  This would be true even if you weren't the last of your kind.  I hope you know that...”

        “I do, Spike.  I do.” She nodded, craning her neck to stare at the tooth-and-string from another angle.  She exhaled softly, “There was a time when—if I had known how much you cared about me—I would have left your presence and never come back.  Long ago, before I had to survive in the wastes, before I was desperate, I saw affection to be a plague, and concern to be a dead weight.  But now...?”  She clutched the tooth around the crook in her hoof and finally tilted her blank, scarlet eyes towards the sea of snow flurrying above them both.  “What have I left to earn myself but pain and regret?”

        Spike nodded.  “You were always a rogue, I take it.”  He snorted green smoke, and his smile was truer this time.  “Just like her.”

        “Just like her?!”  Scootaloo flashed him a look.  Instead of a frown, her face ever so briefly—and bravely—bore a smirk.  “Spike, I was a rogue long before I met her.”  She cleared her throat and shifted her weight on the flimsy wooden floorboards of the loft beneath her.  “I was... I was homeless, Spike.  Not only didn't I have a family, but I didn't have an adequate roof over my head, nor a guaranteed meal every day.  Did I ever tell you that?”

        His emerald gaze fell to the cold, powdery floor below the barn.  “No.  But... But looking back after three hundred years of contemplating all of the ponies I've ever had the grace to know, I saw the signs, Scootaloo.  I realize now that you were... very brave.”

        “I was stupid,” Scootaloo retorted.  “I had so many friends, so many loved ones, so many opportunities at my beck and call, and I refused every single one of them.  And for what?  To prove that I was a strong and self-dependable equine being?  Spike, I slept in forests and ate out of dumpsters.  I performed menial tasks for gold bits to buy my friends gifts to make them think I actually had money to spare.  I skipped out on school, avoided social gatherings, and made unholy falsifications to paint a picture of a normal, healthy life to all who observed me.  And for what?  For some reason, I just had to prove myself to a pair of dead pegasi who had every right to lie in peace and not worry about how much their obstinate little daughter was suffering.”

        The air of the hollow barn briefly surged at the end of her exclamation.  The Wasteland had a dull roar to it, like a hushed audience that was always excitedly murmuring to hear what a lonely survivor had to say next, whether or not she made any sense.

        Scootaloo didn't bother to try.  “Here I am, two decades later, and guess what?  I'm still having to prove myself to dead ponies.”  She sighed long and hard, absent-mindedly wrapping and unwrapping the length of the tooth's string around the body of her forelimb.  “My foalhood, for all of its stupidity, was field practice for the life Entropa had destined me to live.  So don't think that I'm complaining, Spike.”

        “I never said that you were...”

        “Good.  Because the point is...”  She gritted her teeth as the first wave of pain hit her.  Nervously, she whispered forth, as if slowly peeling the charred brown coat off her flesh to reveal the soft orange one underneath.  “The point is that I didn't need Rainbow Dash to bring direction to my life.”  She hesitated, her lips quivering.  “Only purpose,” she whimpered.

        Spike leaned forward so that his snout was at a parallel angle to her body inside the barn.  “I may have been a mere whelp at the time, old friend, but I bore witness to your adoration of her.  Even to this day...”  He smiled pleasantly.  “...I have always found it to be a sweet, endearing thing.”

        “'Sweet'... 'endearing'...”  She murmured, gulped, then said, “Spike, Rainbow Dash kept me alive.  Even when she wasn't around me, she breathed life into my lungs in ways that Gultophine never could.  I thought of her when I woke up and I dreamed of her when I went to sleep.  All of the daylight spent in between was all about finding new and exciting ways to emulate her.  I was surprised and elated to find my life was becoming happier and healthier in the process.  Rainbow Dash was my whole world, Spike.  I can't even pretend to tell you how much it meant to me just knowing that she could always be there—at any random moment—slicing the sky like the gorgeous spectrum that she was.  I may have been homeless, but so long as I knew there'd be her rainbow in the sky, the world had become safe, the whole of Equestria had become my home.  And I... I was happy, Spike.  For the first time in my crazy, broken childhood, meeting and knowing Rainbow Dash made me happy, and not because I was forcing myself to feel that way, but because everything was just... just awesome when she was around.”

        “If I may say so, child, Rainbow Dash had a fine taste for souls of like spirit: honest and brash, yet reserved in expressing affection.  You are in so many ways like her; I have no doubt she would be proud of you now.  I'm sure that she dearly adored you then, maybe even in a fraction of the manner that you so exalted her.”

        “She cared for me, Spike,” Scootaloo murmured with a nod.  “For better or for worse, I would not be alive today—I would not have survived the fall of Cloudsdale—if it wasn't for a sacred act of bravery that she saved for me and me alone.”  She gulped something hard down her throat.  “I have always known that my being alive, that my being the one to bear the brunt of this experiment, is a testament to the fact that... that I meant something to her.”

        “All the better reason for you to—”

        “To what?”  Scootaloo flashed him an angry look.  “To drop in on her little world and encumber her with the baggage of all of my broken hopes and dreams?  I've held my tongue before, Spike, each and every time I've made these delightful little sojourns into the past.  Cataclysm or not, what more am I doing than disturbing the peace of living, warm graves?  Because that's what they are, Spike.  Our friends' lives are animated graves, locked blissfully within the climactic throes of a lost, breathing world.  Perhaps I've summed up enough courage to disturb the Apple Family, or Fluttershy, or Pinkie Pie—but Rainbow Dash?”

        She shuddered suddenly.  Her hooves dropped towards her lap as she tilted up and aimed a pair of glossy eyes towards the roof of the dead world.

After a spell of heaving breaths, she finally spoke, “I feel as if the least I can do is let her rest.  She's done me a huge favor; why can't I do the same for her?  You say that I've been running from her, Spike.  You couldn't be any farther from the truth.  The soonest I found out about the amazing power of your green flame, about reverse-time, I instantly dreamed of hanging with Rainbow Dash again, of being able—for once—to fly in the clouds with her, of being able to finish so many unfulfilled promises that had been turned to ashes by horrific fire.”

        “But you won't let yourself... You can't,” Spike uttered, knowingly.  “Would it be any different if I could somehow allow you to meet your parents?”

        Scootaloo sniffed.  She gave Spike a bitter smile, her eyes watering.  She cradled the blue string in her grasp and murmured, “I had hope, Spike.  I had hope beyond the holocaust of the Cataclysm that there were survivors other than myself when Cloudsdale fell.  Can you believe that?  The first few days after the world friggin' blew up, I wandered the wreckage of the pegasus city like a moron, calling out for other ponies, looking for others who were alive.”

        “What happened, old friend?”

        “What do you think happened?”  She bit her lip.  Scootaloo leaned forward and clutched the string to her forehead.  “You have to understand, when I... when I found her... when I saw her body crumbled to bits like a d-discarded piece of broken pottery...”  She clenched her eyes shut.  Tears rolled down her brown cheeks as she shook her head blindly into the string and hiccuped forth, “I knew... I-I knew that there was nothing left of ponydom.  For years, with the rainbow s-signal and with flamestones I pretended otherwise, but right then and there... in the ruins of Cloudsdale, on the threshhold of her ashes, I knew, Spike.  I knew that I was the last pony.  Because if Rainbow D-Dash didn't make it...”  She quivered, choked on a sob, and murmured to the shell of her lost, orphan years.  “Then how c-could anypony?  Rainbow Dash was... is the best.  The best.  There was n-never and there will never be somepony as awesome... as amazing... and as... as...”  Her face scrunched up.  She navigated a heaving breath, sniffed, and opened her eyes.  Sitting up straight, she bravely dried her cheeks with a forelimb and murmured, “You must realize, Spike.  When Rainbow Dash died, all the colors died with her.  Everything that was once glorious and beautiful about this world went away when she did, and not with the Cataclysm.  How—Spike—how in all that is holy would you... could you expect me to somehow be able to go b-back to all of that?”  She sniffed and stammered, “How could I go back to her, after all that's happened, after all that I've b-become?”

        Spike stretched the iron scales of his neck in thought.  He pivoted on his haunches and leaned gently over the barn, his fingers toying with the dangling violet pendant about his neck, gently holding it still in the furious, random gusts of the merciless Wasteland.  “Have I ever told you, dear friend, about the Canterlotlian ritual of purple dragon whelping?”

        Scootaloo navigated a sniffling expression to raise a confused eyebrow at that.  Calming down slightly, she dried her cheek a final time, gulped, and muttered, “No.  Wh-What about it?”

        “Mmmm... I'm surprised you wouldn't know enough about it already, from all of your years of reading.  I do suppose you've had very few dragons to contend with in your travels, so perhaps it is just as well.”  He smirked slightly and twirled the pendant gently in his grasp.  “Long ago, in the early half of the Second Age, the Chaos Wars blanketed this entire continent in flame and mayhem.  It wasn't nearly as horrible as the Cataclysm, but it almost brought all of Equestrian life to a bloody end.  The campaign that the Alicorn Sisters fought against Discord was a long and arduous battle, spanning eons.  Many amazing, fanciful species that once populated this landscape met a terrible fate, forever to become extinct.  Among the afflicted creatures were none other than Cassius and Phalinore, the mother and father of green flame, the first purple dragons to exist on this planet.”

        Scootaloo brushed her pink mane aside and gazed intently up at her draconian companion as his voice filled the air in a deep hum, shaking the foundation of the barn with the somberness of his story.

        “Such is the consequence of war.  Life that has the chance to perpetuate itself was snuffed out for an eternity.  The Alicorn Sisters were not directly responsible for the pestilence that befell the first and only purple dragons, but Princess Celestia—who by then had become the chief Goddess in charge of restoring harmony to the landscape—felt a deep guilt for what the battle with Discord had done to end Cassius' and Phalinore's lives.  She discovered within their mountain lair no less than five hundred eggs, all unhatched.  You see, purple dragon whelps go through a metamorphic stage of development.  Even though the eggs are laid, they remain dormant for a long time, for they never have a chance of hatching until the parents decide it's time to provide a spark of magic to the outer shell in order to finish the last leg of the whelping process.  With Cassius and Phalinore gone, Celestia had the eggs taken into her care.  For the millennia to follow, the eggs would be stored in a special area of Canterlot, where only the wisest and most sagely of unicorns would be granted the honor of providing just the right magical spark to bring the draconian orphans into the world of the living.”

        Spike smiled down at Scootaloo, raising a scaled eyecrest as he spoke.

        “This unicorn Order of Purple Whelping persisted in Canterlot beyond the Chaos Wars, well beyond the Second and Third Age, as a matter of fact.  Fate would have it that Twilight Sparkle, a young and humble Canterlotlian native, would be bestowed the honor of bringing such an infant dragon into this world.  As a test of her commitment and character, she was told that it was a merely an 'entrance exam.'”

        Spike chuckled, filling the snowy air with green smoke.  He coughed briefly, sputtered, but ultimately refound his breath.

        “Her power was more than sufficient to bring me into this world.  She held within herself a phenomenal well of magical abilities, so much talent that—even until the end of days—it remained forever untapped.”  There was a somber breath.  He clutched the violent pendant tightly, but then continued, “You probably know what happened next.  She was taken under Princess Celestia's wing and made to be the Goddess of the Sun's special and most beloved pupil.  What you probably don't know is that, in being given charge over me, she was merely playing a chaperone—a foster parent, as you can probably relate—and one day she would see me sprout wings and fly off, rejoining the rest of my purple brood, destined to protect Equestrian sovereignty with all of my natural, magical talents, as a sign of gratitude for having been safely hatched into this world.  There was a place for that, you know:  Skybreak Point, where the pegasi held shop beneath Cloudsdale before sending weather fliers off to do their continental duties.  It was the same spot where purple dragons traditionally went to make their first flight.  I used to dream of that day.  I used to imagine myself becoming one with my own kind, and feeling the warm wind beneath a pair of majestic, flowing wings.”

        He took a deep breath as the color drained from his emerald eyeslits.  His webbed appendages coiled tighter against his massive sides.

        “In three hundred years of loneliness, all I've ever dreamt about... all I've ever thought about... has been her.  The very reason I started on this experiment and boldly launched the first breaths of reverse-time was in a fitful attempt to... to maybe reunite with her.  It wasn't until later, much later—when I awoke to the reality of time's immutable nature—that I settled for the more selfless goal of fixing that which the Cataclysm burned to a crisp.  Still, I can't help but wonder if perhaps my infant obsession with my foster parent had made me a bad dragon.  Perhaps I was different and more pitiable than the rest of the whelps who were hatched in Canterlot before me.  But that doesn't matter, Scootaloo.”

        He gazed at her, and a hint of moisture showed along the edges of his scaled eyecrests.

        “Twilight Sparkle was more than just my mentor or my magical guidance.  She was my mother, Scootaloo.  She was my mother and I loved her.  In the life that we have both lived, dear friend, a life full of flames and orphans and ash, we have every right to choose the ones who define us, and the ones we love.  The only difference between you and I is that... is that you—my dear friend—you have the ability to go where I cannot.  You have the chance to bask in that warmth that is forever lost to my spirit but not to my dreams.  You can experience that love again, first-hoof, and in such a glory that is unbecoming of all the lonesome shades you've painted yourself with throughout the years.  The colors were never dead, Scootaloo, so long as you've been alive to envision them, just as Rainbow Dash shared them with you.  Don't you see, old friend?  All of those centuries I spent trying to find a way to reunite with my mentor, I was actually—and quite fatefully—finding a way to reunite you with yours.”

        “I...”  Scootaloo shuddered.  She ran a hoof through her pink threads, gazing towards the desolate floor beneath the barn.  “I don't know... I-I just don't know, Spike...”

        “Oh child...”  He removed his hand from the pendant and lovingly cradled her chin between two claws.  “Do not bother so much with knowing.  Embrace your chance to feel while you still can, before you are encompassed by the very end that defines you.  All of history, both glorious and holocaustal, is brimming with knowledge.  Love, however, is a far more challenging, far more elusive treasure to scavenge from annihilation, in all of its multiplicitous shades.  This Onyx Eclipse that spites us may or may not be the key to uncovering a great and terrible secret.  But what fills you with joy and purpose isn't a secret, Scootaloo.  Go back in time and look for answers, look for stars, but most of all look for that joy.  Patch it together, piece by piece, and hug it one last time before the day comes when you—like me—will no longer have a second chance.”

        Scootaloo stared at him, her eyes wilting—but not tearing this time.  She was both weak and powerful at once, a queer and alien sensation that excited her as much as it frightened her.  She gave the dragon tooth one last look, strung it around her hoof, and clutched it to herself.

        “'Observatory of Nebula,' huh?”

        “Yes, my friend.  In the upper heights of Cloudsdale.”

        “Cloudsdale...”  Scootaloo murmured, holding the string to her chest as her nostrils flared.  “Epona help us if there's any of it left.”  She got up, and took wing.

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

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

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

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

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

        She saw...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

        The little niche of rock and ivory granite was pathetically small.  It felt more like a closet than a cave.  Nevertheless, Scootaloo scrunched her tiny, shivering body into the furthest corner of the craggy chamber.  She laid the Cloudsdalian spears before her—two against the walls and one on the floor—and all of them with their pointed edges aimed at the mouth of the crevice.  She had no room to produce a makeshift bed, even if she had the materials to do so.  Scootaloo settled for emptying the saddlebag of all its numerous, seemingly useless nick-nacks and stretched the canvas material along a slab of granite.  Against this, she rested her quivering body.        Her teeth had never stopped chattering.  She was cold, yes, but that wasn't nearly as awful as how hungry she was.  The pegasus was lucky to have found a few crumpled structures that could offer both weapons and tools.  Still, she would give away all of her scavenged things—saddlebag included—if she could somehow trade them for a single jar of wheat... or even a shattered crate of hay.

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

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

        Scootaloo stared into the microscopic spaces between the dancing blue threads under her hoof.  She couldn't put a name on what she saw, nor did she need to.  She closed her eyes, and absorbed herself in the silken touches of yesterday, and the last traces of joy they contained.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

        The last pony bit her lip and pocketed the white box in her saddlebag.  She shuffled across the green garden.  Bees and dragonflies buzzed past her flicking ears in the Celestial light.  “Goblins,” she finally blurted.

        “Goblins?”

        “Imps.  Half-lings.  Tiny, bat-eared freaks that like to smack stuff with wrenches and blow things up,” Scootaloo muttered, digging her hooves in the pliable island of soil beneath her.  “When I first left Cloudsdale, Spike, I didn't return for nearly ten years.  When I did, I almost flew the Harmony straight into a giant series of industrial platforms that popped up from seemingly nowhere.  In my absence, it turns out that a huge population of goblins built a city on top of what used to be the Goddess Nebula’s Refuge.  They own the center of the Equestrian Valley, Spike, and all manner of steam-production and silver trade in the Wasteland eventually gets cycled through their huge, abominable metropolis.”

        “I would be lying if I said I hadn't heard of such a marvelous, fabled city in my years,” Spike said.  “You mean to infer that such a place is a center of major Wasteland commerce?”

        “Sure.  I guess you could say that.”

        “I would venture to say it's an ideal setting to conduct business!  Perhaps more than you think.”  Spike smiled hopefully.  “Surely such a busy populace would diffuse anti-equine sentiment for favor of profitable exchange.”

        Scootaloo winced.  “It's not that simple, Spike.”

        “Why not, old friend?  Do tell.”

        “I haven't exactly had the most... pleasant of experiences in dealing with goblins in the past.”

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

        “With the goblins, it's a lot more complicated.”  Scootaloo trotted slowly around the giant hourglass dedicated to Rarity.  She watched with jaded, scarlet eyes as the two enclosed chambers exchanged growing and dying lavenders along the flaming tongues of reverse-time.  “I know the extent to which they can be cruel.  And yet, if it were harpies or diamond dogs that I first met after the Cataclysm, I probably wouldn't be alive today.”

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

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

        The dragon contemplated that silently.

        The last pony continued, “All that matters is that I need to get to Rainbow Dash now, and the goblins are in the way.”  She sighed and ran a hoof over her face before continuing.  “Finding her won't be like finding all the others, Spike.  This isn't some lonely expedition into the Everfree Briar or a dip into the belly of a fallen moonrock.  I'm going to have to go deep into a place surrounded by creatures convinced that they own the landscape.  What's to stop them from ripping my wings off and feeding them to me on sight?”

        “Surely half-lings can't be so animalistic that they would immediately destroy what they don't understand...”

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

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

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

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

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

        “So you think that goblins will want nothing better to do than to make you join the dust of all our extinct friends?”

        “Most goblins, if not all, would rather see me dead than imagine a world where sunlight has returned.”

        “Most?  Not all?”

        “I know what I know, Spike.  I discovered the truth first-hoof a long time ago.”  Scootaloo took a deep breath, running a forelimb over her brown coat, as if feeling for several ancient bruises and welts that she was suddenly reawakening to.  “It's not something that I wish to repeat.”

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

        “How do you mean?”

        “You've run into them in the past, and yet in spite of all your misgivings about the half-ling races, you are still alive.”  Spike smirked.  “That suggests to me that you stumbled upon honor as much if not more so than brutality.  Perhaps you should seek a path in accordance with the integrity of goblin hearts, assuming it is indeed there.”  He then winked.  “And if that doesn't work, I'm sure there's another language all creatures of the Wasteland speak: the language of silver.”

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

        “What are you thinking of, old friend?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

        Scootaloo stared into the curtains of green plasma as they filled the cylindrical container.  For a brief moment, the orphan of time wished that she could have been a wielder of Entropa's essence, instead of a hapless observer like the Goddess herself.  Once again, she would literally be carrying time in a bottle, and yet she knew to expect several days—if not weeks—before she could be close enough to acquiring Rainbow Dash's ashes for the trip that needed to be made.  For the first time since being anchored to Pinkie Pie, being the last pony felt as helpless and insignificant as it had always been without the green flame.

        The warm memories of Lyra and Bon Bon's vacation at Dream Valley were like mythological shadows now, melting away from the heat of Spike's prolonged exhale.  Scootaloo allowed her eyes to get absorbed into the bright, singular hue, and tried to imagine the colors of the past that were retreating away from her as she contemplated the journey ahead.  No matter how much she entreated the spectrum, all she could see—suddenly—was blue.

        The sapphiric fibers of a feather tickled young Scootaloo's shaved scalp from where it was tucked behind her ear.  It was the tiniest of touches, and yet the last pony quietly relished in it as though it were an embrace.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

        “I can find you a zeppelin to pilot on your own,” Pitt said, smirking as he polished the bar counter of the M.O.D.D. under smoke and cold lanternlight.  “If you show me a pilot's license.”

        A battle-scarred ogre blinked confusedly at the balding baboon.  He flashed his overweight cohorts a weird look, then squinted suspiciously at the monkey bartender once more.  A pilot's license?”

        “Yes,” Pitt said, stifling a yawn.

        The ogre took a deep, fuming breath, clenching his fists.  “The world blew up decades ago.  Who in the blue fudge bothers with pilot's licenses, monkey?”

        “This monkey bothers, especially when the oafs requesting a license from him look like they just marched straight out of Tartarus.”  The baboon grinned wide, yellow teeth glinting in the light of the bar.  “Besides, I like seeing you sweat.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

        “'Monkey Ten Den.'”

        Scootaloo blinked.  “I beg your pardon?”

        “I'm changing the name,” Pitt muttered, shelving several drinking glasses.  “It's the 'Monkey Ten Den' from now on.  I don't care what the sign outside says; neon is expensive in a world without moonlight.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

        “Funny you should say that,” Scootaloo murmured, reaching a forelimb into her bulging saddlebag and rummaging through its contents.  “Tell me, Pitt.  What's curved, phallic, and delivered in its own yellow contraceptive?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

        “B-But brother—!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

        Scootaloo winked.  “Because I like seeing you sweat.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

        “Yeah...?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

        Heaving and sweating, two monkeys finished shoving a hulking crate full of brass-encased silver strips towards the edge of the high-altitude cliff.  Above them, the Harmony hovered, tethered by a series of dangling chains attached to one of the vertical wooden beams lining the outside of the M.O.D.D.'s wooden structure.  Scootaloo patiently watched them, a pair of copper goggles professionally obscuring her expression.

        “Now I know that Pitt is ga-ga for those bananas,” the last pony murmured.  “He had the payment delivered on time.”

        “Yeah, yeah, whatever,” a breathless orangutan grumbled and squinted suspiciously at her.  “There'd better not be anything rotten with those plants you gave us, pony!  The last time our brother was this generous, he lost all his head hair.”

        “Well, maybe I did him a favor then,” Scootaloo spoke into a flurry of snow.  “Maybe he'll lose his head next.”

        “Hardy har har,” the other monkey said, but stood in place.  His brother was also standing in place.  Neither of the two monkeys were moving a single centimeter.

        Scootaloo raised an eyebrow above her goggles.  “Is there something wrong?”

        One simian grunted, “Don't ponies believe in tipping?”

        “Not all species fling their poo.”

        “Meh.  Screw you, glue stick.”  The two bounded off on their feet and knuckles.

        Scootaloo managed a smirk to herself.  Flexing her wing muscles, she turned to the crate full of silver strips and prepared to lift the payment up to the platform outside the Harmony's entrance.  Just as she reached for the first brass casing, her ears pricked to hear the sound of a horrible scuffle beyond her flank.  Mildly curious, she turned around and adjusted her lens to get a good look.

        Three battle-scarred ogres were gathered in a circle about ten meters north of the edge of the M.O.D.D. building.  At first, they appeared to be arguing over something, but then Scootaloo noticed how all of them had their helmeted heads tilted down.  What was more, they were shouting several grunts, hisses, and insults—all timed with a series of kicks that they gave to a body that she suddenly noticed sprawled on the rocky ground beneath them.

        “Grrgh!  Pathetic slime ball!  Go find your own food!”

        “Heheh!  Typical half-ling!  You'll grab anything you can get your eight tiny fingers on!”

        “Back in the Valley, you would have made a good cannon cleaner, you puny, gutless piece of wimp!”

        “Pl-Please!” A tiny, impish figure was lying on the edge of the mountain, quivering from their repeated pummeling.  He spat blood and hyperventilated while struggling to shout up at the bullying ogres.  “I-I didn't think it belonged to anyone!  It was just lying here like someone left it!  Please—don't hurt me!  I'm just hungry!  I-I'm just so hungry!”

        “Hmmm!  A hollow half-ling!  He would make for a perfect game of ogre football!”

        “Hahah!”

        “Oh no!  Please!  Please—Don't!”

        “Alley oop!”  The biggest of the ogres reared his foot and struck the petite figure hard in the ribcage.

        Scootaloo observed from afar as the bipedal victim flew, landed, and rolled to a stop—barely missing the edge of the cliff by a meter.  In perfect view, the creature turned out to be a young green goblin.  A mat of shaggy, green hair framed a bruised face of emerald skin as he clutched his side and curled up into a fetal position.  A pair of aquamarine eyes glittered like distant stars while tears welled forth from deep within.

        The ogres laughed.  It was hard to tell what drew their guffaws out harder, the sight of the teenage goblin crying or the fact that he was lucky enough to have not flown off the mountain side.

        “Oh well!  Better practice your punting foot for next time!”

        “Yeah!  Hahah!  If you can't knock a dinky goblin into the canyon, what good are you outrunning the Military Police?”

        “Oh stuff your face!  Let's go find ourselves a ride off this god-forsaken monkey mountain!”

        The three ogres stomped away, but not without one of them pausing to observe the discarded, threadbare sandwich that they had spotted the goblin scrambling for earlier.  Making sure the pained imp was watching, the obese cretin stamped his heel over the rancid meal and ground it to useless paste.  He laughed, scratched the fatty folds of his own belly, and marched after his two companions.

        Sniffling, wincing in pain, the tiny goblin stretched his body out and crawled slowly towards the scant remains of sustenance.  It was an agonizing sight, highlighted by a limp and useless left leg that the imp was forced to drag behind him during the entire endeavor.  When he reached the residue of the sandwich, he clawed and scraped and licked at whatever flimsy morsels that he could pry off the rockface.  Halfway through the process, he broke down, clutching his green face in two hands and sobbing.

        This would have been a melancholy sight to behold, only no soul was looking.  Not even Scootaloo: she had hastily flown her silver strips up to the entrance of the Harmony and shoved them inside, shutting the aperture doorway behind her.

        The brass-cased strips were safely tucked away in a compartment of the hangar bay.  The boiler was fired up.  The steam pipes were hot once more.  With a solid breath, Scootaloo hopped into the cockpit of the Harmony and began flipping the many levers that switched on the airship's instrument panel.

        Scootaloo was refueled in more ways than one.  She had the money to negotiate with the impish creatures she was bound to meet in Petra, per Spike's suggestion.  What was more, thanks to Pitt's generous payment, she was certain she had enough extra silver to appease Gilda after the next batch of stormfronts.

        Scootaloo was ready to go.  She thought of the bottle of green flame lying on her workbench.  She thought of the Observatory of Nebula.  She thought of Rainbow Dash.  There was nothing to stop her now.

        Swiftly, Scootaloo pulled two levers on either side of the cockpit.  She raised her muzzle and clasped onto a dangling, chain-link handle with her teeth... and paused.  After a few seconds, she raised a hoof up and shoved her goggles up to her brow.

        Beyond the glass of the upper cabin's dashboard, Scootaloo had a good view of the polished, obsidian mountainside.  Across the tiny plateau of black rock, a green figure was slowly, painfully crawling towards a hollow in the side of the nearest promontory.  Scootaloo didn't realize how long she was staring at the starving goblin's plight until she blinked her eyes and saw—in inverse colors—a puny, orange shape scraping across a white expanse to enter a lonesome niche.

        Scootaloo reopened her eyes, instantly wincing.  With a frown, she aimed her eyes back down at the numbers and diodes of her instrument panel.  There was no reason to delay her somber trip to Petra.  Every second spent outside of Pitt's bar was wasted time.  Creatures of the Wasteland were doomed to suffer as soon as they were born.  Their life was desolation even before the Cataclysm hit.  Scootaloo could hardly care about goblins... or monkeys or ogres or Diamond Dogs, for that matter.  They all hated her anyways.  And she?

        She was indifferent.        She repeated the same words that she had thrown at Pitt:  “It's always been my favorite way to be treated in the Wasteland.”  She hadn’t understood what made her say them out loud until that very second, when she glanced up and saw the tiny figure of the goblin limping away towards the shadows of a distant cave.  “This is not my world, at least not until I shine the friggin' Sun on it again.”

        She punctuated her utterance by jerking hard on the chain-link handle.  The unmoored Harmony began its ascent.  However, it was a rapid climb, and the gondola was instantly assaulted with turbulence.  As a result, something rattled off her workbench in the center of the cabin and slid across the metal floor.

        Scootaloo turned around in time to see a white box sliding to a stop just at the edge of the revolving staircase leading down to the hangar bay of the craft.  It was the second time in so many minutes that something hadn't fallen into nothingness.  She stared at the ivory-white container, and her breath left her as she imagined the three blue strands tucked away safely within.

        And then she imagined—or rather remembered...

        “Hey!  Pipsqueak!”

        Scootaloo gasped, startled.  She leaned away from a garbage can in the center of sunny Ponyville and put every conceivable effort into pretending that she wasn't just foraging for discarded bites to eat.  Standing nonchalantly on a metal tray fitted with wheels, she tossed her pink mane behind her petite neck and glanced skyward towards where the voice called out for her.

        “Yeah, what?”  She blinked, then blinked harder as her eyes reflected seven colors at once.  “Oh... uh... uh...”

        “Yeah, I know.”  Rainbow Dash winked as she hovered down to just three meters above the little filly.  “I leave everypony speechless.  What are you up to, kid?”

        “I... Uhm...”  Scootaloo fidgeted, nervously imagining the thin, visual distance between herself and the garbage bin.  She cleared her throat and glided slowly towards her right on the tray.  “Nothing much.  H-hey, didn't we meet a week or two before Nightmare Moon showed up and made everything dark for three days?”

        “Don't pretend that a foal like you doesn't remember awesomeness when it crashes into the barn she's lying around in,” Rainbow Dash uttered, stifling a chuckle before casting a glaring eye in Scootaloo's direction.  “Aren't you supposed to be in school or something?”

        “Oh, well, uh, you see... m-my parents homeschool me and I'm out here... erm... doing volunteer work for a business lesson—”

        “Boriiiiiiiing!”  Rainbow Dash rolled her ruby eyes then smirked devilishly.  “Wanna do something fun?”

        “You... want to do something fun?”  Scootaloo's eyes were bright, glass marbles.  “With m-me?”

        “No, with your silly excuse for a skateboard.  What do you think?!”  Rainbow Dash pointed towards some indeterminant space in the heavens towards the north.  “I've gotta practice some wicked cool sky tricks, and I need somepony to be my judge for how awesome they are!  Right now, Fluttershy's too busy rocking her bunny to sleep and Twilight's doing some lousy experiment on mutant beanstalks or something...”

        “Oh...”  Scootaloo's ears briefly drooped as she stared down at her rusted platform.  “So, what you mean to say is: I'm your last choice.”

        “Pfft!  More like first!”

        “Huh?”

        Rainbow Dash flew down to her level.  She smiled.  “In the last month, I've learned how radical it can be to have these new friends I've made.  But it isn't without lameness from time to time.”

        “I... don't get it.”

        “Everypony's just so friggin' nice to each other all the time.  As if that wasn't sappy enough, it makes for poor flight spotting.”  Rainbow Dash merely rolled her eyes.  “Twilight and the gang are always so worried that they'll hurt my feelings that they never tell me when I'm bombing a stunt or not.  That's where you come in.  I figure a pony that once helped me drop snakes into AJ's hat will call a good or bad aerial trick when she sees one.”

        “You... would trust me like that?”

        “It's not a matter of trust, kid!  I'm the friggin' element of Loyalty—or at least Twilight says—so don't worry!  I've got the 'trust' part covered!”  She leaned in and winked.  “It's a boring, sunny day and I wanna have fun.  Don't you?  Anyways, I'll make it up to you afterwards and get us some more of those apples you seem to love scarfing down your gullet.”

        “I...”  Scootaloo stammered for breath.  She blinked her eyes to hide the moist sparkles in her pupils as she smiled warmer than she remembered smiling in months.  “I-I would love to do that, Rainbow Dash.”

        “Ugh, just don't get sappy.  I get enough of that from Twilight and that other unicorn who talks like a vampire.”  Rainbow Dash lifted up with a swish of her blue wings.  “Race ya to Haystack Hill!  It's the best place to watch fliers show off their stuff!”

        “R-Race?”  Scootaloo tightly gripped her metal tray.  “But you're way faster than me!”

        “Oh, of course I'll beat ya, pipsqueak!”  Rainbow Dash was already soaring ahead, casting a daring wink behind her.  “The trick of the game is to narrow the margin!  Now try to keep up!”

        Scootaloo grinned and kicked at the earth, pushing her and the tray northward out of town.  Like chasing a real rainbow, the pursuit was impossible.  Suddenly, Scootaloo saw impossible things as happy things.  It was just enough to erase the memory of hunger in the glistening afternoon.

        The thirty-three year old mare's nostrils flared.  She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and stared once more out at the cave.  The niche in the mountainside—along with the entire mountain itself—grew more and more distant as the Harmony ascended.  Suddenly, the ascent stopped.  Scootaloo discovered that she had pulled at another chain-link handle, forcing the aircraft into a sudden hover.

        The last pony groaned to herself.  She had to get to Petra.  She had the most precious jar of green flame yet, and it would be foolish to waste any opportunity to use it sooner than later.  She had an entire city full of goblins to worry about.  A single impish bum in the entirety of the Wasteland was the least of her concerns, the least of ponydom's concerns, the last thing that could possibly matter in the future of the desolate world—Sun or no Sun.

        Scootaloo cast the white container another look.  She frowned.  Rainbow Dash was the loyalest of ponies—but she was still a pony.  Aside from Spike—and perhaps Brucie—Scootaloo didn't have the luxury of choosing those who deserved her dedication.  Her mission in the past was too important to delay with meager distractions of the present.  Like Princess Entropa, Scootaloo had an essential duty to be impartial, to be neutral, to be nothing more than an observer.        Certain that would erase any doubt from her mind, she clutched the chain-link handle to the upper right.  With a single tug, the Harmony would continue ascending.  She would be gone.  She would be on her way.  She wouldn't be bothering with stupid, inane trivialities.  She wouldn't...

        A pegasus-shaped shadow appeared in the mouth of the dark cave.  A sheen of twilight shone off of Scootaloo's leather armor and goggled lenses from the Wasteland outside.  It had been a long time since she last trotted into such an alcove.  Her hooves made unnecessarily loud clopping noises within the entrance of the claustrophobic chamber.  She came to a stop, her horseshoes scraping against the obsidian earth.  Her front right article was rattling loose again.  She frowned, but kept staring ahead into the ink-black darkness, looking curiously for any movement or sign of life—healthy or otherwise—lying inside.  Frustrated, Scootaloo raised a hoof to her goggles, twisted a dial, and adjusted her lenses to take advantage of the grand lack of light.  She had no greater luck seeing the imp that she knew was hiding inside.

        “Hello?!”  She finally called forth.  “Is anypony—” She winced at her own words, doubly vexxed at having made that grammatical mistake for the first time in decades.  She was at a loss to understand why she said that, or at least she pretended to be so ignorant.  Clearing her throat, she resumed, “Is anybody there?”

        Silence returned with silence.  Scootaloo could hear the sound of her own heartbeat, but it wasn't fear.  She spoke again before she could realize what it was.

        “I saw you crawl in here.  Unless this thing leads all the way through the friggin' mountain—which I doubt—you can stop pretending like there's anywhere else to go.  Now are you gonna answer me or not?  ‘Cuz I'm just as confused as you are why I'm standing here.”

        Scootaloo would actually have been happy to have learned that she was talking to herself the entire time.  But then, a tiny voice squeaked breathily from the far end of the dark interior, and she was immediately let down.

        “St-Stay away!  I... I can hurt you!  There's nothing in here that you could possibly want, so... g-get lost!”

        Scootaloo fearlessly—but lethargically—spoke into the echoing blackness.  “Kid, a word of wisdom: insisting that there's nothing inside this cave that a scavenger would want only entices a scavenger all the more.”

        “L-Leave me alone!” the voice cracked with desperation.  “You can't have anything!  I won't let you!”

        “I suggested I was a scavenger—not a plunderer.”  Scootaloo sighed hard and shook her head.  “Look.”  She glared into the shadows, aiming her face towards the sudden, unmistakable sounds of panting breaths.  “I saw you earlier.  You got treated pretty rough.  On top of that, you're obviously very hungry and you have a bad leg.  Believe it or not, I only want to lend a hoof—or hand... whatever.  I very seriously doubt you could hurt me if you tried—”

        There was the explosive sound of compressed air being released.  Something sharp, gold, and pointed flew like a banshee and struck Scootaloo straight in the chest.  The last pony fell to the floor of the cave like a dry sack of meat and was deathly still.

        Second passed... then a full minute.  Shuffling, a petite figure emerged from the shadows.  A pair of aquamarine eyes reflected pale twilight, blinking wide.  A tiny goblin in a black vest stifled a whimper and crawled curiously—guiltily—towards the equine body he had just felled.  A rusted, steam-powered crossbow rattled in his tiny hands.  He slid towards Scootaloo's body on a scuffed, right knee while his left leg dragged behind him like a limp dragon's tail.

        The imp propped his body upright with the crossbow so that he could get a better lock.  He stared at Scootaloo like a young colt regarding a songbird he had just unwittingly killed with a slingshot.  The goblin's eyes moistened and his lips began to quiver.  Gulping, he knelt on his good knee and reached a free hand slowly—cautiously—towards the goggles on the figure's head.

        Suddenly, the limp pony's lips moved.  “You know, you really should aim higher if you want to mortally wound me.”  The voice was calm, serene, and very much full of life.

        “Aaaack!”  The goblin dropped his crossbow and fell back on his rear end.  He scooted desperately away from the undead horse, his eyes wide and pulsating.

        Scootaloo swiftly sat up.  With a single hoof, she effortlessly popped the barbed arrow out of her chest armor.  “Not that it would have done you much good.  You're wielding a late Third-Century Diamond Dog crossbow, undoubtedly something you found dropped off by one of their dirigible grandsons.  The thing was built for skewering rats in tight, underground locations.  They're not meant for long-range.”  She stood up straight and tossed the arrow behind her, all the while icily approaching the goblin and stepping over the ineffectual weapon in question.  “If you really wanted to kill me, you shouldn't have fired from such a long distance.  Even still, the weapon's unkempt and rusted.  You would have had much better luck trying to spear me with a severed stalactite from this cave you've made a home in.”

        “You... Y-you...”  The goblin shrunk away from her and flattened his emaciated form against a wall of the cavern, trembling all over.  “Please... Please don't kill me...”

        “What would it profit me if I did?”  Scootaloo's goggles glistened with the furthest reach of the outer world's twilight, giving her a ghostly presence as she loomed above the imp.  “Did I or did I not say that I was only wanting to help you?”

        “Help... H-help... I...”  The goblin murmured.  The goblin exhaled.  His bright eyes rolled back in his head, and the green half-ling fell down in a slump, fainting instantly from exhaustion and hunger.

        Scootaloo's nostrils flared.  “Heh.  Way to go, Spookaloo.”  She sighed and gave his figure a once-over, studying the hollowness of his cheeks, the gangliness of his limbs, the threadbare state of his black vest, and finally the infection that had consumed the majority of his left leg.  From the way he was numbly dragging his lower limb around, she figured that the bipedal waif had suffered a horrible wound in the past that had never received treatment.  Looking for a scar, she discovered such a mark... only it was in the shape of a horseshoe.

        Then the last pony's brow furrowed, for she realized... it was a “horseshoe.”  Her lips pursed, and in an instant, her heart began beating behind the spot in her leather armor where the arrow had intended to kill her.  Her eyes twitched, and she once again saw...

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

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

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

        Scootaloo winced, her ears humming with the memory of the sound.  She swiftly tore her goggles off her scalp and rubbed her eyes under a confusing fit of shock.  Blinking, calming down, she refocused her gaze once more upon the homeless, branded goblin that was lying beneath her in an unconscious, fetal position.

        The nameless goblin had been alone, all this time, abandoned and destitute on the edge of a mountain populated with countless drunken creatures, and most likely none of them had ever bothered giving him so much as a taste of compassion.  How any living thing—much less one branded with the image of “Equestrian glue sticks”—could possibly have survived that entire time was a mystery to Scootaloo.  It was simply impossible, and yet this tiny scamp of a half-ling had accomplished just such.

        “For what it’s worth,” Scootaloo found herself murmuring once more out loud.  She suddenly realized that the goblin was alive enough to afford murmuring such a thing too.

        The last pony sighed.  She spun around and gazed—squinting—into the pale glow of the outside world, full of bone-chilling snow and desolation.  There was an ivory sheen to the sight, as if it was being reflected off of walls of crumpled sky marble.  With sudden shivers, Scootaloo wanted nothing more than to leave that place immediately.  However, she suddenly remembered something that she had once wanted on another occasion, more than her lonesome words could ever have conveyed to herself, much less anypony.

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

        “Hrmm... Wh... What...?”

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

        “Mushroom stew?”

        “Gaaaah!”  The young goblin attempted leaping out of the hammock.  In his limp condition, he merely toppled over and slammed head-first into the metal floor like a fallen log.

        Scootaloo instantly winced.  She balanced the jar in one hoof and waved at the goblin with another.  “Hey!  Kid!  Calm down—!”

        “Nnghh—No!” The dizzy goblin shrieked, hyperventilated, and spun onto his hindquarters.  “Filthy glue stick!”  On three legs, he desperately crab-walked away from the pony.  “Don't eat me, pony!  Sky-stealing glue stick pony!  Stay back!”

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

        “Nnngh!—No!  D-Don't poison me!” He frantically flung his good leg up and knocked the can out of Scootaloo's hoof.

        The last pony gasped, wincing as her chest and front limbs were doused with steaming soup.  “Nnnnngh—Yeowch.  Sweet Nebula, that sure as heck stinks...”

        “You won't eat me!”  The goblin panted heavily and scooted backwards across the cabin.  His pointed ears drooped as he jerked his head briskly from side-to-side, his frightened eyes reflecting a million alien details all at once.  “I won't let you!  I-I won't!”

        “Oh, for the love of oats—I'm not going to eat you!” Scootaloo exclaimed, shaking the last of the soup off her limbs while making a face.  “Look, you were cold, you were hurt, and you were hungry.  I've already taken care of the first two of those things but right now you're making it really hard to do the third—Staircase!  Behind you!”

        The shuffling goblin shook his head.  “I-I'm not taking my eyes off you for a second!”

        “No, I mean it, kid!”  Scootaloo fiercely pointed a hoof.  “There's a revolving staircase right—”

        “Aaaieee!” The goblin shrieked as he toppled like a weighted domino down the twirling structure of metal steps.  His body ended with a loud thud in the hangar bay down below.

        Scootaloo winced visibly, her teeth showing.  “—behind you.”  She bit her lip and trotted slowly towards the stairs.  “If I'm lucky, maybe he friggin' died from that,” she muttered.  Halfway down the steps, she peered into the dark of the gondola's lower level and sighed to see he was still scrambling about.  “Ugh.  Entropa help me...”

        “Lemme out!”  The young goblin panted from where he sat—bruised and haggard—in the center of the cabin.  He gazed, horrified, at the walls as if they were phalanxes of metal soldiers aiming spears at his tiny body.  “Lemme out, please!  I don't want to die as a morsel in a pony's belly!”

        “Dang it, kid—”

        “I've got no meat on me!” He stifled a sob and waved his thin arms in front of her vision.  “Look at me!  I’m a bag of straws!  Please, lemme out of here!”

        “Alright... Fine!”  Scootaloo silenced him by stamping her hoof down.  With a frown, she marched past the imp and made straightway for the aperture doorway at the gondola's bow.  “H'jem!” she shouted into the runes surrounding the frame.  The iris-shaped panel slid open in a flash..  “You want to get out of here?”  She pointed out the copper hole.  “There's your exit.  Be my guest.”

        Without a second thought, the goblin crawled desperately out on three limbs—only to come to a shrieking stop, his hair windblown as he squatted precariously on the edge of the airship's bow.  Looming nightmarishly far beneath him was nothing but gray clouds and swirling ash; the Harmony was airborne.  Heavy steel propellers sliced against the beating wind as the zeppelin churned its way southwest, piercing the soup of endless overcast.  The entire world was a heaving sea of monochromatic obscurity, ready to devour him at the merest slip of his toes.

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

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

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

        “In case you're wondering, I'm not carrying you off to the goblin slaughterhouses that 'evil ponies,'” she said while doing her best to replicate quotation marks with a pair of hooves, “possess in abundance.  It so happens I'm on a mission to Petra, the local capital of all things goblin.  Now, if I'm not mistaken, you're a goblin.  You certainly have the ears of one.  So if there's a safe place in the Wasteland that's worth taking you, I bet Petra's it.  Now I know life is tough in our day and age, but if you're patient enough to wait out the company of a 'sky stealer' like me for just a few more hours, I'll reward you by getting you someplace where—hopefully—you won't have to worry about big, rotund ogres kicking your teeth in.  By then, most of the enchanted rune powder will have done its job and sealed most of your wounds, though I can't say much about your leg.  That's something you'll need to... uh... have an 'imp doctor' look at, or whatever.”

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

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

        “Mmmm...”  He shook, nearly threw up from the sheer height of their location, and scrambled frightfully back into the inside of the Harmony on three legs.

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

        Turning from the closed aperture, Scootaloo raised her goggles and blinked.  The imp was nowhere to be seen.  Scootaloo's scarlets scanned left and right.  She trotted forward a few steps.  Then, on a whim, she clopped her two front hooves against the bulkheads, ricocheting a dull echo across the length of the hangar bay.  A distant whimper sounded from the port side, halfway down the gondola.  Scootaloo shuffled over to a bench built for runecrafting and squatted down towards the floor.  Underneath, the goblin teenager was hiding, hugging his knees to his chest.  At the first sight of her peering face, he jolted, his aquamarine eyes pulsing.

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

        He said nothing.  His eyes fell to the floor.

        Scootaloo stared at him for a time.  She waved a hoof.  “Stay right where you are.”  She trotted away, paused, and pointed—this time with a glare.  “I mean it.”

        The goblin winced, clutching his shivering limbs to himself beneath the bench.  The sound of Scootaloo's hooves grew distant as she ascended the revolving staircase.  There was a pause, and then her hoofsteps grew closer once more.  The imp bit his lip and flinched the instant she reappeared before him.  Blinking, he saw that she had the soup jar in her grasp once more.  Not only that, but it had been refilled with the steaming, delicious-looking broth.

        “Don't pretend you're not hungry,” Scootaloo said in a droning voice.  “I know a thing or two about starving.  There's nothing poetic about it.  Do yourself a favor and ditch the ego for a sip or two.  A healthy body leads to a healthy mind, even if you are a bipedal little shrimp with bat ears.”

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

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

        He took a tiny, meager sip of the broth—as if testing it.  He didn't keel over dead from the first swallow, so his next few gulps were much more liberal.  Within the span of a minute, he had emptied the entire thing down his throat.

        Scootaloo watched him, rubbing her chin in thought.  “What... Uhm...”  She sighed, shrugged, and settled for a relatively unmelodic voice.  “What's your name, kid?”

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

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

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

        “Oh... Uhm...”  The last pony glanced at the horseshoe brand and gulped hard.  “Yeah, well...”  She fidgeted with the goggles strapped to her forehead while fumbling for words.  “At least you've still got the leg.  With as bad as the infection got, it's an impossible miracle that it's... still on you.”  She was already wincing at her own words halfway through saying them.

        “I'd much rather lose if it it could mean losing that stupid branding,” Warden said, briefly frowning.  He paused in scarfing the soup, casting the pony a guilty, frightened glance, as if expecting the equine to lash out at him for thinking such a thing out loud.

        Scootaloo tactfully smiled.  “Well, with one leg, how could you possibly manage to kick my flank for scaring you so badly?”

        He said nothing.  He merely clutched the soup can tighter in his grasp, his claws scraping at the lid.

        Scootaloo gulped.  “Refill?  Here...”  She reached her two hooves forward.  “Allow me.”

        He stared at her forelimbs as if they were gun barrels about to go off in his chest.  Gently, he held the soup can out and simply dropped it in her grasp.

        She wasted no time.  “I'll be right back.”  Scootaloo ascended the stairs, refilled the can, came back, and handed it to him.  “Sorry if it's not quite so warm anymore—”

        He daringly yanked it from her grasp this time and took the soup in no less than three gulps.

        She blinked, then smirked.  “Well, you certainly know when to stop being shy, don't ya?”

        At that, the goblin said nothing.  He stifled a tiny belch—perhaps the only one he could afford in months—and avoided her gaze as he clutched the empty can to his vested chest.

        Scootaloo tried her best not to stare at the horseshoe on his thigh.  She was only residually successful.  “So... if you don't mind me asking,” she murmured.  “How... uhm... did you end up living in a cave on a mountain full of monkeys and drunken morons?”

        Warden bit his lip.  Fidgeting, he ultimately murmured, “I was... interrupted while doing... mmm.... a b-business trip.”

        “A business trip?!”  Scootaloo almost went cross-eyed.  She reacquainted herself with professional deadpan in time to inquire, “Just how old are you anyway, kid?”

        “I...”  Warden's expression was painfully embarassed.  “I don't really know.”  He gulped and shuddered, his aquamarine eyes sadly cast to the floor.  “Who the remembers their birthday in this world anyways?”

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

        He instantly flinched from her brown hoof.

        She paused, then slowly leaned back.  “Okay.  That's fine.  We can wait on you having thirds.”  She cleared her throat, then uttered, “So what kind of business could a goblin as young as you be doing in the Wasteland?”

        “Mmmm....nnmmffamily...”

        “What's that?”

        “F-Family business,” Warden muttered, hugging the can tightly as if it was his own heart.  “My Mom and Dad—prime Stock Bleeders—had entrusted me with overseeing a delivery to the Eastern Township, along the Black Shore.  My zeppelin was attacked by harpies along the way.”

        “Harpy pirates?”  Scootaloo raised an eyebrow.  “This far east from Manehat—erm... this far east?”

        “All I know is that they attacked and I couldn't get back home to Petra,” Warden said in a quivering breath.  “I was so desperate to get back to my parents, even if I had to explain what happened to the shipment.  So, I flagged down the first aircraft I could see.  These dirigible dogs—they gave me a lift.”  He shuddered visibly.  “Boy was that a bad idea.”

        Scootaloo glanced once more at his branding, then back at his green face.  “Do tell.”

        “Those horrible creatures drugged me and left me to face the monkeys at that run-down pub in the sky,” Warden said.  He bit his lip and his left thigh squirmed at the recollection.  “All I wanted to do was get back to my parents in Petra.  Was that too much to ask of anyone?”

        “Well, lucky thing... uhm... that I stumbled upon you, huh?”  Scootaloo tried to smile.  It came out paper-thin.  “And it's even luckier that your parents are in the same place I'm heading for.  So... luck, luck, luck all around!  R-Right?  Eh heh heh...”

        While she chuckled nervously, Warden's head started bobbing.  His eyes were thin, but a sudden moisture clung to their edges.  “I don't know what's the use.  H-How will Mom and Dad accept their Stock-Bleeder now that he's... now that he's Equestrian filth...”

        “Hey, there's nothing filthy about—”

        The metal can rattled to the floor.  Warden was out like a light.  The exhausted imp, his teenage belly full for the first time in ages, sat—slumped—against the wall beneath the runescaping table.  His body rose and fell in gentle movements of his lungs.

        Scootaloo gazed at him.  Her own nostrils flared in time with his.  “Nothing filthy about us at all,” she finally murmured to her own ears.  After an uncomfortable silence, she reached forward and gently slid him out from underneath the bench.

        A minute later, Scootaloo ascended the top of the revolving staircase with the unconscious half-ling sprawled on her back.  She moved slowly—not because he was heavy.  Quite the opposite: he was as light as a feather, and she was frightened that any sudden movement might break him in two.  Gently, she laid him out atop the hammock.  She then paused, as if stunned to think up what would come next.  Then, taking a golden page out of Fluttershy's book, she yanked a stretch of woolen blanket out from a nearby cabinet and draped it over his slumbering figure.

        She unwittingly got a close-up view of his face during this process and saw tears forming along the edges of the unconscious imp's lids.  It wasn't the first time that she had seen a goblin crying.  However, it was the first time in ages that she had remembered that was the case.  Much different, far hotter memories had been boiling at the surface of her experience with half-lings, and she felt wounded to realize it... far bloodier than all the world's crossbow projectiles combined.

        Scootaloo raised a hoof to her chin, nibbling the edge of her horseshoe in thought.  A deep breath formed from deep within, revealing to her the degree to which her throat had suddenly become sore.  Before moisture could form in her eyes that mimicked his, she chased the melancholy away with the best weapon the last pony had at her disposal: a frown.

        Marching off towards the cockpit, she paused and leaned lethargically against the back of the pilot's seat, as if  she was just as lame as the young, branded passenger she had suddenly decided to bless.  Clenching her eyes shut, she fought the serrated claws of the past.  But, like the good avatar of Entropa, she gazed straight forward and bore witness, observing the pale snow beyond the windshield of the Harmony, and how it matched the ivory tones of a grave that belonged to Rainbow Dash... and almost to her as well.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

        “Speak, you filthy animal!  I asked you a question!”

        Scootaloo's eyes were rolling back in her head.  Her nose twitched, faintly aware of blood trickling down from her shaved head.  “Nnngh-Snkkktk... What... Wh-What?” she mewled.

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

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

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

        “Everything is dead now!”

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

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

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

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

        “You tell her, Matthais!”

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

        “I... I-I don't know...”  The last pony hyperventilated, curling into a fetal position as her tiny wing-stubs formed angelic silhouettes in a pool of her own blood.  “I-I'm all alone.  Everypony I've seen is d-dead.  Everypony is dead and I don't know... I j-just don't kn-know why...”  She spasmed uncontrollably as his shadow shifted above her.

        Matthais was raising the blunt wrench up high while his frowning companions apathetically looked on.  “Oh, you know, you worthless glue stick.  And you're going to tell us.  Then maybe—just maybe—we'll give you the quick and happy death you ponies have refused all of impkind with your black magic!”  With that, he sneered and brought the full weight of the wrench down over her fading vision.