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// Chapter 3 Tears, Horrors and Things Explode 
// Story: Boomer's Crisis 
// by WEKM 
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Chapter 3 Tears, Horrors and Things Explode
The darkness is still around him, but Boomer feels like he might possibly not be dead. No, dead wouldn’t hurt this much. Dang, what had they hit him with? His head hadn’t hurt this bad since he’d broken his horn. Okay, time to check in. He can hear breathing, some water dripping, and another odd sound. Have to figure that last one out in a bit, but at least it seems that he can hear. And the headache, and cold stone along his flank, he can feel. Something definitely smells foul. Forcing open his eyes. Darkness. Blink. Yeah, can feel the eyes open and close, but not seeing anything. Crap, he was blind.
Wait, not total darkness, he can make regularly spaced grid of not as dark as everything else little dots.
Struggling up to a low kneeling position. Yeah, he can feel it now. There’s some sort of rough cloth draped over his head. Boomer turns his head to the side, bites the cloth and whips his head to the side, flinging the cloth off.
PAIN!
Bad plan!
Headache!
Vertigo!
Nausea!
THUD!
Owwwww. Okay, let’s not do that again anytime soon. Let’s just lay here on our side and try not to throw up as the gods of angry pain shove lightning in our eyes and crush our heads in a ginormous vice.
On the plus side, the cold stone feels really good on what must be some massive bruising on the side of his head. And his eye is swelling shut. Oh yeah, he got smacked with something good. From the nausea, most likely a concussion as well. But he was alive. And his pain sharpened brain reached out and identified that last odd sound he’d heard. Somebody’s soft sobs.
Cracking open his better eye, he could see in the near total darkness around them, yes THEM. Somepony else was here with him, the source of the quiet sobs. Even in the near total dark he could make out the bright pink of her coat. She was facing half away from him, but he had never seen her in that posture before, broken, emotionally crushed, weeping from the depths of her soul. And it was entirely his fault.
She turned and looked at him, and he stared back at HIS ultimate horror. The tears he’d caused, those eyes totally devoid of joy. With words he’d crushed a heart, and now he was looking into the windows of that shattered soul. And he couldn’t look away.
As he fought to keep from screaming himself, he was frozen, by a small voiced question. He had to close his eyes so he could think. “Wha,” his voice cracked. He tried again, “What did you say?”
He could feel that condemning empty gaze turn from him, so he opened his eyes again. He could see her with her head bowed, but the sobs stopped for a moment. “Why, why do you hate me?”
That soft question, barely breathed, but it hit him harder than the shadow weapon had.
He reached out a hoof to her. “Pinkie Pie, I’m so sorry. I should have never said those things. I was mad, hurt and afraid. What I said was an unforgiveable lie. I don’t know why they said you had to come for us to win, but I took out my fears on you. You didn’t deserve that. I was wrong, and will never forgive myself for doing that to you.”
“But, why would you say I was here, as a sacrifice?”
Okay, some of the sobbing was gone from her voice, replaced by confusion. That was good, he could work with that. He doubted he could tell her the truth about his fears if she were still crying. “It, it has to do with the last time. How I was able to create a big enough blast to shatter the gate they were coming through. I had tried my best to blast it, but my explosions weren’t strong enough. Then my little sister Giggles came running up to where we had pulled back. She had volunteered to bring some messages from home out to us. She could run faster than most Pegasus ponies could fly. But she was so young, so full of life, so much ahead of her. 
“I never even found out what the messages were. She showed up, and I was yelling at her for risking herself coming out there. She just laughed that she was too fast to get caught, and that she would be back before anyone even knew she was out there. But she never finished her sentence, her eyes opened wide in horror. I went to turn, but was shoved aside by a giant shadow that grabbed her up. Before I could even get up, I heard a sickening wet crunch, and Giggles was dead.”
Boomer felt Pinkie Pie’s hoof on his shoulder. He couldn’t look at her, so he continued. “I just stared at the pile of broken that had been my baby sister. The shadow passed me by. I guess I was already experiencing my ultimate horror, it didn’t need to do anything more to me. But as I heard someone else scream, something inside me just snapped.
“Usually, when I make my blast magic, it builds with my temper. But that time, I felt the magic flash white hot in a fraction of a second. Hotter than I’d ever felt before, a hundred times stronger. I screamed Giggle’s name, and everything around me was blasted away. A circle nearly a half mile across, scorched down to bare rock, and that rock had been melted and pushed out in waves, like the ripples of a pond. The rift had been shattered, but I didn’t even care, my sister was gone.”
What did it matter that he was the one weeping now. Even the comforting hug wrapped around his neck did nothing to fill the void in his heart. "That is why I feared that you were sent with me as a sacrifice. You are so much like Giggles, I was worried that you were meant to be the sacrifice to push me over the edge again. "
Pinkie Pie looked at him with a cocked head. It was clear that her depression was evaporating, even the springy curls of her mane were back. "That doesn't seem right. The princesses wouldn't send you out to do something than would intentionally hurt you. "
Boomer laughed, "Of course, no thought whatsoever that they'd sent me out to do something that would get YOU killed. You never do see bad in others, do you? "
He saw her brighten to almost her normal levels of joy, and start to draw in a great breath. He knew what was about to come and quickly cut her off, "You break into song and I swear, I'll rethink the whole offering you up as a sacrifice."
Her giggles were so contagious, he couldn't help smiling as well. "Just keep it quite. First off, we don't want to attract any sorts of guards down here. And second, my headache can't handle any noise. "
He watched as she again drew in a great breath, then held it. He almost laughed as her face changed through several colors, and her eyes bulged. "Um, you don't have to hold your breath though."
She blew out explosively, and sank to the ground like a boneless deflating balloon. Which made him think of something. There were some things that she could do that no one really understood. And one of those just might be how they were going to get out. “Uh, Pinkie, how do you always know where to stand when something around me blows up?” From the look of confusion on her face, he knew that she had no idea what he was talking about. Perfect. If it was something that she did just because of who she was, he could finally use that to HIS advantage for a change.
Boomer got up and backed his rump against the bars of their cell. He looked around. There would be nowhere in the cell to hide from a blast that was right in front of him. Just to be sure, he kneeled down on his front knees so that even more of the cell would be exposed to the blast. There would be no place in it that was safe.
As he built a charge in his horn, and sent it into the cloth on the ground in front of him, a small part of his brain panicked at the fact that he was about to test a theory that, if he was wrong, could well kill the other pony in the cell with him. But he just knew that he wasn’t wrong.
At least he hoped so.
The main reason that Boomer used the crystals that he did to create blast charges was that their structure could hold his blast magic stably. Most anything else, when his blast magic was pumped into them, they reached a certain saturation point then, they exploded. Like blowing up a balloon, everything would be fine till that one too much puff of air and, kablooy! And the less structured and solid the item, the less energy it took, but also the smaller the blast.
Boomer figured that the cloth would hold enough energy to do some damage, but shouldn’t blow the walls out of their cell. It should be just enough, if he was right. Sure enough, it took very little effort to get the cloth to explode. But the blast was a bit stronger than he expected. As the blast hit him, the small shards of rock pelted his face, and the secondary shockwaves that bounced back from the walls of the cell, he knew that only one place would have been safe from all of that, if you weren’t immune to blast magic as he was.
Standing back up and looking over his shoulder, Pinkie Pie was standing on the outside of the bars, directly behind him, perfectly in his blast shadow once again. She cocked her head and looked at him, “If making noise would attract attention you don’t want, wasn’t blowing up our cell kind of counterproductive?”
Yep, she didn’t even question being on the other side of the bars that were too close together to even get a hoof through, let alone an entire pony body. “Don’t worry about that. Just find the keys to open this door and let me out of here. Quickly!”
She ran off and was back in less than a minute. The door was unlocked, and he stepped out. They didn’t have much time. She was right about one thing. That noise was going to draw someone there too quick. He charged down the corridor, and up the stairs at the end.
About half way up, and within sight of the door at the top of the stairs, he felt the nightmare presence descending down towards them. He held his resolve, still charging towards the door, till the presence was strong enough that he knew it must be just on the other side of the door. He planted all four hooves and thrust his blast magic towards the door hard and fast. His horn stub went instantly from black to white hot. The door, and whatever had been behind it just vanished in a shower of splinters and thunderous sound.
Boomer resumed running up the stairs and out.
They emerged into a courtyard, with a gate across the way, that was being swung closed, and several other shadow forms rushing into the open space between it and them. Boomer broke into a charge, praying that Pinkie Pie would stay in close behind him. He changed tactics with his blast magic, and used it in another way. He pushed out in front of him with a continuous blast as he charged.
He didn’t like doing it this way. For one thing, the ongoing blast wasn’t as forceful as a focused one. And for another, the blast pushed back against him almost as strong as it went ahead. It made running forward like pushing a house. If he were to lift all four of his hooves off the ground at the same time, he would be pushed backwards like he was on wheels. Crossing the courtyard at speed was going to be murder on him, and he wasn’t a young colt anymore.
But the force of the ongoing blast was enough to hurl away the shadow creatures between them and the gate. However, the resistance slowed him enough that the gate boomed closed just before they got there.
The strain was really wearing on him. His coat was completely lathered with sweat, and he was breathing so hard, it would have been impossible to speak. He turned around the see the shadow creatures that had been hurled away picking themselves up and advancing on them once again.
As they closed in, he could feel their terror energy washing over the two of them. Pinkie Pie fell to the ground shaking and covering her eyes. He almost did as well. He was so exhausted, he didn’t think he had it in him to blast the gate. But Pinkie Pie’s terrified moan at his feet snapped him out of the fear energy just for a second.
Boomer turned back to the gate, and stepped so he was standing directly over Pinkie Pie as she huddled. Instead of pumping his anger into his blast magic, as he most often did, he soaked in the terror and fear being hurled at them, and shove that through his magic and out into the gate. There was a LOT of it.
Boomer felt the claws of one of the shadow creatures swinging down towards his unprotected back just as the gate blew. 
That gate had absorbed an amazing amount of blast magic before it let go. So much so, that when it blew, most of the wall it was mounted in was blown away along with it. The claw never connected with his back. Along with every other shadow creature in the courtyard, the one that was attacking him was pulped by the blast wave from the gate.
With the immediate terror energy gone, they had a chance. “Come on Pinkie! We’ve got to go! Run, run, RUN!” They both charged through where the gate had been. Boomer could see the rift back to their world about two hundred meters away. And it wasn’t very big either. It had obviously been barely cracked open. So they HAD found it before the Nightmare realm had fully opened it into a gate as the first time.
Chancing a look over his shoulder, he saw that the walls to the side of where the gate he blew up had been, were crumbling even further, and it seemed that various forms of energy streamed away from the falling debris. But he also saw new shadow creatures coming after them.