Calm Before The Storm

by Doctor Fluffy

Equestria

“Marcus, Cheerilee, Stephan and Trixie were truly larger than life. They were not merely cogs in a machine, four dogfaced soldiers among many, or the faceless masses that die in war. They were something leagues beyond that, they were... they were heroes, that’s as best I can put it. They fought at some of the most pivotal battles of the War, they were present alongside great heroes... their heroism will forever be engrained in the history of humanity. However, it’s easy to forget the trials and travails that happened on the way to their devastating victory in Canterlot. It was not easy to adjust to life in Equestria for six months; I know that my good friend, the infamous Viktor Kraber, wouldn’t have reacted well...”

Caught Between Hells, Verdant Tract. Published 2024

Two weeks after Marcus’ arrival

I’d passed the exams in the Royal Guard with flying colors. Shown great aptitude at shield spells. Fought off wild, barbaric and carnivorous beasts in the strangely abundant badlands, rumored to be caused by wild chaos magic or Nightmare Moon’s ascension.

I thought it would be like Shadowtrot when I went after whatever it was that tried to kill my sister and the Elements. I thought it would be a quick smash and grab, another monster of the week taken, commendation from Celestia, go home, drink tea with my wife, wonderful mare that she is.

I want to be perfectly clear on one thing. I’m not a coward. I’m not a weak-willed “prancy” as we call those cadets that wash out the first week of boot camp.

I was just... caught round-hoofed. Or flat-footed as a human might say. This being Equestria, where we can in all seriousness say “monster of the week,” I think everyone in the guard knew that something would go apocalyptically wrong someday. And thought we wanted to kick flank, we would all hope that the apocalyptic thing would not come tomorrow. Day after day after day, until one day two weeks ago we ran out of tomorrows.

“Canterlot Castle,” one of those humans said, whistling. “Never thought I’d see this and still walk on two legs.”

And that said it all, really. For the humans, it had been a symbol of oppression, the Fortress of Doom, an evil; a vile place where humanity’s downfall was being planned, where the Tyrant Sun sat on her throne. And yet they were walking (and in some cases, trotting) through the halls among nearly two hundred and fifty soldiers, fifty of them royal guard were there to escort them or prevent them from doing something stupid. Well, ten of them were my royal guardsponies - Marcus had insisted on using Luna’s bat-winged Night Guard for the other forty. We’d insisted to see these new warriors from this other world.

It had quite the effect on humans and ponies alike. Both of them stared in wonder at the Night Guard, who were something of a rare breed in their Equestria. Very few had fled to Earth to find themselves in high ranking military positions or becoming highly decorated soldiers that took to the Assault Yoke (the Pegasus’ equivalent of an Assault Saddle) like a fish to water. The majority had either been slaughtered by Celestia on the night of Luna’s escape, or disappeared into secretive Equestrian insurgencies and resistance cells. They were, to put it lightly, heroes.

While I was apparently one of the villains, having tried to drag my wife to Queen Celestia with a smile on my face thanks to a Geis. That sort of thing had been outlawed and declared to be the province of paranoid imbeciles centuries ago, and it did far more harm than good. The best soldier was one that could think straight, not a tin soldier.

“I hoped it’d be on fire, and that there’d be a lot more screaming,” said one soldier.

“You think that about everything!” complained one brown unicorn stallion.

“Very funny, Verdant.” The soldier sighed.

Verdant? As in Verdant Tract? Wasn’t he... let me see if I remember... “A forester from the Everfree, well-known for his papers and theories on uncontrolled ecosystems on mythical predators. Such as wolves, (No, not the timberwolves, actual flesh-and-blood wolves) the theorized ancestors of both the common canine and the Diamond Dogs. And can I have some of your ice cream, Shiny? Please!” Aha! I’m impressed that after being repeated that for about a thousand times by Twily years ago I still have that actually imprinted in my memory. Good times.

But in all seriousness, I never would have expected him to be in the military. Though him being allied with the humans made perfect sense, he would have jumped at the chance to visit a planet with weather unregulated by Pegasus magic even if he had to take a hoof for it. I could practically see him imitating my little sister, jumping around with a smile on his face: “Yes yes yes yes yes! Yes yes yes, yes yes, YESSSSS!” Ugh... being her BBBFF was hard. And huge pressure on the memory.

But now that I think about it, that was the odd thing about this fighting force Marcus had brought in, and the other human and pony workers who had appeared not too much earlier. I recognized some of them. A lot of them. Some were ponies you could walk past without noticing, but others were... Tartarus, some were celebrities! One of the ponies in the crowd of soldiers was actually rumored to be my distant cousin for years back in the day, or was it the rumor saying I was her... I forget the unimportant stuff. Her name was... Vinyl Scratch, yeah.

Don’t look at me like that, it’s not that unbelievable. We have similar mane colors. And I was skinny back then.

And she didn’t help either, didn’t carry herself like a DJ or fixture of Equestria’s party circuit or somepony who could keep pace with Pinkie Pie’s train of thought, though she still had that smile on her face. Now, she carried herself like a soldier. Impossible to confuse now, am I right? She marched like all of them did. On top of that, she had what was almost certainly a gun on her back. She could probably kill my entire squad with the thing-or, some part of me thought, maybe she has already in that other Equestria. She’d probably seen worse things in the last five years than I had in most of my time in the guard.

I’m one of the best in the guard. I can proudly say that without bragging. But when Vinyl Scratch, Equestria’s most hard-drinking, hard-partying DJ outclasses you, well… in the parlance of my friends back in high school, I forgot to level up with everyone.

But back to me. I groaned inwardly, still watching the group. Most of them hadn’t been to Canterlot, and the few that had were unlikely to know that this wing of the castle existed. The ponies here had likely been ordinary Equestrian citizens till Lyra Heartstrings had rallied them to the PHL.

If I was going to survive in the coming war, ponies like this would be training me, not the other way around. I’d have to unlearn so much, adjust to new tactics, learn new weapons... my first instinct when I’d been told that we had a lot to learn for the coming war was “Alright, I look forward to training new recruits.”

Right up until Marcus had said what we’d be up against, and how very effective spears were against an army with assault rifles would be. The average soldier, with enough well-aimed shots, could completely gut our favored tactic of charging at the enemy with spears. On top of that, humans had bigger machine guns, like the F3-Thunderlord or the MG2019, and they were the bane of many a charge even before the humans figured out enchantments and runic enhancement. It had been like the floor just fell out under me right then and there.

We were still stuck on whether or not to use Griffin flintlock infantry weapons, with military theorists claiming that they would never supercede our raw magical force…. that, and the bulk of our army was not composed of unicorns, so we had a large contingent of ponies who couldn’t reload. And the Griffins were slow to reload them, so we could easily deflect the bullets with a short-duration shield, then rush at them.

If we ever came to blows of course.

Apparently, the other Equestria tried that on the humans, thinking dismissively of guns thanks to how ineffective the Griffin Empire’s weapons were against them. They then found out just how inconceivably far ahead the humans were, letting loose on them with the other 29 rounds in the magazines of what the griffins called “repeaters.” Though apparently almost every human weapon was a repeater, enough that humans stopped caring about the term at least 140 earth years ago. They had a staggering advantage in ballistics over anything in Equestria-according to Marcus, 70 rounds in a minute, an unheard of speed with flintlocks, was a laughable speed compared to human rifles, which were typically measured with something well into the hundreds. Thats not including the heavier weapons that went into the thousands. There was another thing I wasn’t looking forward to, though. In all of Equestria’s somewhat limited military history, there were always those generals who resisted innovation.

It’s a good question why. Personally, I think it’s just different from what they’re used to, and they think that retraining ponies to use an innovation will be too much work or too expensive. The humans, however, were bringing centuries worth of ballistic advancement and other technologies to us. I’ll say it again, I had so much to unlearn. I’d probably lose a lot of my best stallions and mares to the march of technology, and maybe gain a few in the process.

Which wasn’t counting how many ponies would be unprepared for war on the scale that Marcus had described. He’d told me personally, and I still couldn’t believe it. They had things we could only dream of, and the Tyrant they fought had several million newfoals on her side, which she simply threw at the humans to overwhelm them. Granted, a lot of them were probably malnourished due to Equestria being highly unprepared to support that kind of population, but… several million?! I might be ashamed and sickened by the tactic, if you could call it that, but with numbers like that, it had to be effective.

The closest we had to wars rarely had more than three hundred on the opposing side, and they’d usually quit before things got worse.

It was not going to be fun. It was going to a bloody, brutal slog.

Right now, you are asking yourself: What is War? War is a legend to some of you.  War is a skirmish on the border. Some of you simply don’t know the word, or have simply forgotten it.

We have visitors who have not forgotten. One is here with me, sharing this typewriter with me, and his name is Photo Credit.

“But you are Photo Credit!” I can hear you saying. Exactly. We are both Photo Credits - one born and raised in this Equestria, one almost seven years older, an escapee of that vile other Equestria. In the parlance of a set of novels set in the human year of 1632, he has decided that he and all of his compatriots shall be called an “Uptimer,” which seems rather catchy. He has decided to collaborate with me out of nostalgia for his job in Canterlot.

And to help me explain something about our new visitors.

Many Canterlot residents are curious about the insular bipeds that have taken up residence in the castle, and have received numerous peculiar orders of food.

They are refugees of a world wholly unlike our own. Devoid of magic, where the sun orbits earth on its own like tightly wound clockwork, where they are the sole sentient species. A world at war, where they face extinction every day.

By no fault of their own, I must add.

One human says she remembers a quote: “We have met the enemy and he is us.“ She can’t remember what it’s from, but she said it would fit, for it is us that attack her species.

Not our Equestria. Not at the behest of Princess Celestia.

No, it is a different Equestria, a twisted nightmarish mockery of ours that has perverted the tenets our great nation was founded upon. A dystopic, oppressive mirror to ours ruled by Queen Celestia. A nation ruled by a terrible… 'perfect'... smiling goddess.

Look inside yourself. Celestia.

Look around. Celestia.

Go to sleep. Celestia.

This is how my future self described the omnipresence of Celestia in that world, though I suspect he cribbed that from somewhere else. Either way, he is right; from all I have heard, he may not be exaggerating.

The atrocities she has committed are numerous. She has taken their world, through a great magical working that sweeps across their planet, disintegrating everything made by human hands.

Whether created through the means of their advanced science or shaped nature to suit their needs, their works will be wiped away as if they were never there. The barrier leaves no mercy for the humans themselves, either. When they touch it, they simply become un. Molecule by molecule, atom by atom.

The only way to escape is to force them to become mockeries of ponies with no mind at all, no drive, no will, no souls, no desire but to further Equestria. Newfoals, the humans call them. They are abominations before sentience itself - even the simplest child ranks higher than them as a being, for they can at least talk. They can at least determine things for themselves. To be a newfoal is to give up all that makes you sentient, even that. To simply surrender and become one interchangeable with millions, with no soul between any of them. It’s a construct made from a human,  using all the mass to create a pony but none of the mind.

She must be stopped.

So, remember, Equestria. Remember. If you ask why we prepare for war, why we ready ourselves for what might seem to be senseless killing, this is why.

The future me would like to issue a warning about our guests though. They may be scary. They may be brutal. You may be horrified by what they have brought to our doorstep, for they are a race with tools that put much of our advancement to shame. Rifles that fire further than any of our cannons and make flintlocks of the griffon empire seem as useful as a thrown rock, devices roughly the size of a hoof that can hold hundreds of books and songs, magics that would make them nigh invulnerable on our battlefields.

But remember: they have been fighting us in a different universe for three years. They’ve grown to hate, and while they are eager for the help, they are unused to the good that our Equestria can do, an Equestria that stands for its values instead of claiming they apply only for ponies while stamping them out. Even the uptimers of the dark Equestria are scared; they shiver in the sun’s light, clinging to shadows, their eyes darting nervously when they are on the street.

To lose, by a traitor’s hoof or by military defeat is to lose everything. No reward will be given. Even if you go straight to the abomination that calls itself Queen Celestia, you will not be rewarded because it simply will not be you who comes back from her reward. It will not even be Equestria in which you receive your bits or estate, if you’re even given that. She may simply consider blasting the self out of you, turning you into a newfoal, to be a sufficient reward. You won’t complain, anyway, because there won’t be enough of you left to disagree with her.

It will be worse than death if the humans lose. Equestrians will all pretend to be alive, walking and talking, but we will all be dead through and through.

Remember, Equestria. Remember.

As you sleep, remember who we are. As you sleep, be grateful that you cannot remember who your double has become.

Be grateful that you have not become them yet, and that you have been spared the misfortune.

Photo Credit & Photo Credit (Uptime) Canterlot Times

You try to read headlines of today's newspaper, information about the bipeds living in the castle coming to light for the first time in weeks since their arrival. All for trying in vain to distract yourself from the fact that you are dead. It explains so much, and yet far too little. You look up from the paper, too confused not to do so, and examine your living room, where a tall biped in strangely familiar clothes sits on your couch, vaguely uncomfortably. Next to him is that little brown earth pony colt that Vinyl’s ex (and surprisingly enough, good friend) Neon Lights seems fond of, and on the couch is Vinyl Scratch, your best friend. Next to her is another Vinyl Scratch, leaner, with flat hard muscle. One of Vinyl is quite the task. Two? Sweet Celestia, there will be too much bass to get anything done in the house!

You are Octavia Philharmonica, and you are used to a Vinyl Scratch that has no indoor voice, who coasts through life with a huge smile on her face. No, she doesn’t quite coast. She rolls with life, so perhaps surfing is more apt. Your Vinyl Scratch, who was happy at meeting her doppelganger for whatever reason (you suppose that she’s just the kind of pony who would be happy about that, not too much unlike Pinkie Pie) is slowly easing away, inch by inch.

You are not used to the Vinyl Scratch that the biped and the small earth pony that accompanied her to Ponyville. While her muscles put your own to shame, and she’s in better shape than your Vinyl Scratch, she’s just so broken inside.

She’s happy to see you, but you have to agree with the sentiment of the biped, who has the rather odd name of Isaac Acevedo. Who, as it turns out, is a great fan of your compositions, so you may very well be friends with him at some point in the future. He had said, very clearly before this other Vinyl knocked on the door, “Is this for the best? What does it accomplish, and does it satisfy anyone?”

You think you will remember that moment clearly for quite some time. There was a knock on your door, and you were too tired, bleary-eyed, and hungover from all that scotch last night to really comprehend the fact that Vinyl Scratch (your Vinyl) is upstairs, still snoring in the guest room. It’s not a shared house, of course-Ponyville would be completely unsuited to her temperament. She’s more of a city mare, though she does love to visit her friends in the country like you and Pinkie Pie.

You’re used to her though. She’s loud, crude, uncultured, somewhat insensitive, but not to the point of being boorish.

Then, to your shock, Vinyl jumped out from behind the door, hugging you as she cried her eyes out. She was sadder than you’ve ever seen her, as if she’d had the worst day in her life.

What?

“Vinyl,” you’d sighed, “It’s only been nine hours since we were out drinking, you-”

You stopped cold. She’s in bed upstairs, so how did she-

Is she a changeling?! Someone in disguise?! WHAT?!

“This was a really bad idea,” someone said, and you stare up to see a tall biped in unfamiliar green and yellow armor, though it is made of strange materials that you have never seen. He smells like chemicals, rotting things, and some kind of sickly sweet burnt scent. Merciful Celestia, another human?! You staggered backwards. While you remember that the humans aren’t here to harm you, you can’t help but remember the rampage a couple weeks ago by that other human. You rear up, remembering the moves that had been so effective the day of the Canterlot Wedding, hooves out, ready to punch h-

“Whoa! Tavi, calm down!” said the other Vinyl. “This human’s name is Isaac Acevedo-he’s a friend. Or at least, a friend of a friend… specifically Button Mash here.” She points to a brown colt with an orange mane, well into being a teenager. He looks strangely familiar. That can’t be Button Mash, though-He’s only about eleven! Or was he nine? It was so difficult to tell with Ponyville colts and fillies...

“Are you changelings? Are you… who are you people?!”

“Well, I’m the guy sent here to keep her from doing something stupid,” Acevedo says, pointing on of his fingers at Vinyl. “And Button’s here to call us both off if one of us goes loco. Standard protocol.”

Sweet Celestia, he’s so tall!you think, still evaluating how dangerous he might be. You’ve heard that they’re friendly, and that they have good intentions, and yet… and yet, there’s so much regulation aimed just at them. He has the advantage in pure muscle mass, but you’re likely too small for him to hit...

“...Mrmm… Tavi?” Vinyl asked, having dragged herself out of the guest bed and managed to get down stairs. She rubbed her eyes as she gave a small yawn. “What’s going on?”

“I have no idea,” you said.

“Bitchin! Another me!” Vinyl blinked in surprise before she gave a loud belch and laughed, bumping hooves with her double in what will forever be called a high-five, in spite of the fact that Equestrians don’t actually have fingers.

“...B… b-but,” you stammered, looking from Vinyl to Vinyl. “Which of you is the real one?!”

“Does it have to matter?” the Vinyl with bedmane asked. “Whichever of us is real, I’m awesome the way I am!”

“Actually,” said the Vinyl hugging you, “We’re both real. I think.”

“Well,” said the brown earth pony (he looks strangely similar to Vinyl’s friend Neon’s friend Button Mash, but older). He lifted the newspaper in his mouth, and you have to admit he’s a good-looking colt. Far too young, but he’ll be very handsome when he grows up. “This might explain some things.”

And that’s how you got here. Trying to read the old yellowed newspaper, distracting yourself from the fact that in the other Equestria, you are dead.

"I’m… dead?" you ask, still not quite believing it.

"Yeah..." Uptime Vinyl whispers, looking away from you. "I..."

"What happened? This newspaper says that the Royal Guards attacked a birthday party?" you look to the other Vinyl, who flinches at your words.

“Are you sure you want to know?” Uptime Vinyl asks.

"Not really... but... it’s here in black and white." You point at the newspaper with your hoof, making sure that its edge is right on the headline that you mean. Uptime Vinyl sighs as she leans back on the couch, staring at the ceiling while your Vinyl looks at her counterpart with worry.

“There’s no way of avoiding it, is there?” uptime Vinyl asks as she closed her eyes. You shake your head no as you stare at her. "Right. Here's the thing. Before the war even started, things were rough as it is. We just got out of war with King Sombra, trust me, you'll find out in a couple days who that is once Celestia announces the return of the Crystal Kingdom."

"Things were... wrong," Vinyl mutters as she starts her tale, to which the brown earth pony you know to be an uptime Button Mash only snorts.

“I could never put my hoof on how wrong,” he says. “But it was like… you know how Celestia’s sun always makes everything feel warm and rejuvenated, even if it’s winter?”

“Like a hot summer day at the beach?” Acevedo suggests.

“Yeah. Like that. It was like no matter what time of day it was, no matter whether it was a snow day or a real scorcher in the summer that makes you curse the pegasus weather team, the light just felt cold. Same with everyone else… Ponies that I thought were my friends just became… off. Like a glitch in a videogame. They’d suddenly get angry and impassioned for no reason, then claim they didn’t remember it. We’d all get headaches, though I never seemed to get any. I had the worst dreams, though-” he and Acevedo shiver, remembering some incident of years past, “it was like the night air had gone bad. Gone rancid, even.”

"Then we contacted Earth and several months later, the freak shows began to show up," Uptime Vinyl growls, her horn glowing brightly. “And it just got so much worse!”

“...Does it strike you that they appeared way too early? Considering how there were some new foals during the grand opening of the Conversion Bureaus… some of them would have had to have been ponified before the Bureaus were instituted,” Button muses. “Never could figure out how that worked.”

“Now that you mention it, that always did bug me,” Vinyl says. “So many goddamn questions about the testing-potion just doesn’t come out of  nowhere! But, much as that always confused me, we’re getting off track. Those bug-eyed zombie bastards had the gall to say my music was corrupted by human taint! I’ll have you know that my music had nothing to do with humans! But they began to drive me out of business because there were so many of them, and soon, the most die-hard fans I had just started dropping off. Sometimes I could barely tell the difference between them and newfoals. So, I decided to check out human music, see why everyone could have possibly hated it. It was friggin hard, considering the Queen put an…” she struggles for a moment. “What’s the word?”

“Embargo?” Acevedo suggests.

“Yeah, that’s it. The music on Earth was blocked, nopony could bring anything back, even recordings, and we just kept getting the most godawful explanations of why that was for the best, even with the barrier! I had to leave Equus just to hear it, you... I mean, my Tavi came too. She wanted to hear the humans’ music. That, and she was getting rather peeved at the ‘suggestions’ she kept on getting. All just limp-hooved propaganda with no… no soul in it, you know? Something that most of her regulars hated, but the Newfoals ate up like free ice cream."

You couldn't help but smile a little when you saw Uptime Vinyl give a bright and warm smile as she thought back on fonder memories.

"Skrillex, Daft Punk, Deadmau5, Markus Schulz, Dirtyphonics, Seven Lions, Piano Guys, Lindsey Stirling, Trans-Siberian Orchestra and some 28-year old Czech guy we met online. The works!” Vinyl gives a bright smile. "We traveled the world for 3 months, seeing famous DJs, singers, bands, and orchestras. We got to see so much talent, we were blown away by what the humans were able to do with music. You got to listen to ancient musicals made by Beethoven and Bach, you loved how they still play their music, even the revamped versions didn’t bother you that much."

“Don’t forget rock n’ roll,” Acevedo points out. “What about Biting Elbows?”

“Heh, yeah, that’s pretty sick,” the uptime Vinyl agrees. “Loved that movie the frontman made awhile back.”

“It was like a movie made from a videogame,” Button says. “Man, Sharlto Copley was awesome in that… I wonder what his next role will be. He says he got a script from some ex-HLF guy that interested him…”

You and your Vinyl look at each other quizzically, not understanding a word of what the two ponies and the human mean.

"Anyways, my Tavi wanted to try her luck with her own music. You know, see if 'true' Equestrian music would take with the humans." The uptime Vinyl gives a beaming smile. "The humans ate it up. They wanted more!"

“I was that popular?" you ask. You never imagined you could be that beloved.

"Don’t put down orchestral music," Button Mash says with a smile. "Most movies and videogames have them in abundance and they win awards if given the chance." You can tell he’s trying hard not to make a reference to some video game that you won’t understand. After all, you have less than no context for anything he could say on the subject.

"It is also very soothing as well," Acevedo says quietly, causing a small blush to form on your face.

"Still... things were getting bad." Uptime Vinyl sighs as she looked around the room. "The Tyrant, the bitch, was throwing out more and more propaganda everyday. PER and HLF fights were spilling out into the streets, and we kept on seeing the weirdest graffiti about the potion. We began to receive letters from our home to return to Equestria immediately before the 'brutal and vicious' humans turned on us. Fuck her, they were throwing money at us to do what we love. I even got an invite from Bruno Mars to help him compose several songs, he even wanted you on board as well."

“I have no idea what any of you’re referencing means, but I assume it’s pretty impressive,” your Vinyl says.

"Dude’s famous, he makes good music and he’s an awesome dancer." Vinyl waves her hoof. "Then, on the day of my birthday, Tavi invited me to a private gathering in France. She managed to buy out an entire floor for us. And you invited every musician we knew personally and any ponies that were friends with us on Earth."

“No, I mean I don’t understand any of it at all,” your Vinyl says.

“It would take too long to explain, and I suspect that our Vinyl brought all of it on CD,” Acevedo says, and the uptime Vinyl gives a quick nod.

“Course I do,” the uptime Vinyl says. “You two… listen to it when we leave, awright?”

At this point, it’s almost impossible to say that you won’t.

“Anyway it was a lot of people,” Acevedo continues. “And I do mean a lot, it was the talk of the news that day. It was so good to hear some good news for once! I just remember thinking ‘You know, maybe if we can throw this party, maybe we can all get along!’” And here, his voice took a sharp turn into sarcasm, “Maybe all the tensions will just magically evaporate! God, I was a fucking idiot.”

"Then... came that conference with the Queen Bitch," Uptime Vinyl glares darkly at nothing. "Here we all were, laughing and smiling when Neon said that she was on the news. The next thing we know, she declares war on our friends and insults their whole race, and everything they’ve ever done! I was furious! I couldn't believe her! Then the Royal Guard shows up and tries to ponify MY guests at MY birthday party! They kept spewing shit about how they were there to ‘liberate the kidnapped ponies,’ or alternatively ‘thank us for gathering so many humans in one place to be ponified.’ They’re fucking sociopaths, it’s like they couldn’t comprehend why we wouldn’t like the Queen Bitch!”

“Or just aren’t allowed to,” Acevedo suggests, but he goes unheeded.

You and your Vinyl back away slightly as she jumps off your comfy couch and began to rant, her horn glowing as she seethed. "They were OUR friends! We liked them the way they were! How dare they do such a thing?! Tavi showed them though! She beat the closest guards down before they could even react. The rest of us ponies, all our friends, we were so enraged at her threatening our human friends that we just went nuts."

“I’m suddenly very glad they didn’t let her bring the minigun,” Acevedo whispers to your Vinyl.

“That doesn’t sound too threatening,” your Vinyl whispers.

"Yeah, no." Button leans in close, his eyes trained on Uptime Vinyl. "Think of it like Pinkie’s party cannon, except it can fire 6000 times a minute and shoots supersonic metal slugs instead of confetti."

"O-oh."

"Urgh!" Vinyl stomps her hoof before laying down. "It was a massacre for them. They weren't even prepared for us to be able to disagree with them, let alone fight. But..."

You swallow nervously as she gives you a devastated look.

"During the fighting, one of our friends, Steven Nelson, he was pinned down and the bastard was going to change him. But Tavi tackled the guard off of him, but she ended up being thrown off and hit the window..." Vinyl gives a small shudder as she recounted the event. "I remember watching Tavi getting up... just in time to for the guard to throw the heavy recliner at her."

“And that’s…” your voice trails off, unsure on how to continue. Vinyl gave a choked sob as she buried her face in her hooves.

“She never had a chance, she couldn’t have gotten out of the way. She might very well have been crushed under the thing as she flew out the window… she landed on a car, too. Ten stories… d-down!” she cries, tears streaming from her eyes. “I... I lost it. I just watched my closest and oldest friend die before my eyes. I... killed them all. I shoved the vials of potion into that fucking guard’s eyes! I ripped wings off and threw those assholes out the windows, I did...I… I did terrible things. And they said I was as bad as the humans for it, even as I levitated a knife into one guard pony’s face. And that just made me angrier!"

You stare as the mare before you begins to cry, sobbing as she continues.

"Well... I didn't care anymore! They wanted to label me a human, they're welcome to it! If their definition of being Equestrian is to be a xenophobic wanktoaster that takes joy in turning other species into zombies, so be it! I’m proud to be human in that case!" Vinyl scowls as she wipes her eyes. "When I heard of Lyra's PHL group, I jumped at the chance to do something.  It took awhile but it was worth it. Now look at me! I'm in charge of a small company of hardened ponies willing to stick their hooves down the fat bitch's throat if they had the chance. I also make designs for sonic weapons, in fact they already made the Dub Grenade! And my Bass Cannon is already functioning and proven to work! I made it and used it in Boston!"

“I like that grenade,” Acevedo puts in. “It’s like a flashbang on steroids! I’d also like to get my hands on a bass cannon sometime..”

“Might not work; you need some kind of magic for that,” Uptime Vinyl says.

“Well…. with all the magically charged resources that we have to pay small fortunes for that are practically all over the ground here…” Acevedo suggests. “Let’s just say a whole lot of things suddenly became more practical. Can you make dubstep warheads for metal storm grenades? Or an underbarrel attachment or…”

“Ever played Saints Row 4?” Button suggests. “How about… explosive wubs.”

Uptime Vinyl gives him a quick kiss and he reels back, blushing like a firecracker, eyes wide. He hasn’t been kissed by anyone other than his mother in quite some time. “You’re a genius! Oh, Kraber will have so much fun with that...”

"I’m scared of me," your Vinyl whispers.

“Don’t be, she’s one badass mare,” Button says. “Just… we’ve had a rough couple years.”

“Why’d you come here anyway?” your Vinyl asks.

“To see both of you, obviously,” uptime Vinyl says. “And… just cherish what the two of you have, alright?”

“Well, we certainly will now,” you say. Oh, Celestia, that is an understatement. There is no way in Tartarus that you’ll let your best friend end up like uptime Vinyl. “There anything we can do to help the war effort, though?”

“Hmm,” Button Mash says. “Two musicians with an immense amount of pull in Equestrian society, who routinely play sold-out concerts. Gee,” he says, a smile on his face. “I wonder what that could possibly do…”

“But… I hated the Equestrian propaganda,” uptime Vinyl says.

“Nonsense! It’s for a good cause, and it’s not as brain-numbing as that shit!” Button says. “Hell, you could join in too!”
“I could?” uptime Vinyl asks.

“Duet between two Vinyl Scratches,” Acevedo says. “I’d definitely see that.”

“Merciful Luna, it’s brilliant!” uptime Vinyl says. “Come on guys…. we have work to do. And, uh… if you want to do another collaboration with Pinkie, you do it. I don’t think I’m ready to be in the same room as her for awhile.”

She, Acevedo, and Button walk out. As Button walks out, you can see one of the neighborhood children (Rarity’s sister, you think) looking at him, and saying “who’s that handsome stallion?”

“It’s… been nice to see you, Octavia,” Acevedo says. “I’m a big fan of your music. And your tea, now… way better than coffee.”

While your visit with the alternate Vinyl was tumultuous and subtly existentially terrifying, it’s nice to know that you’re well liked in another universe.

“So Button grows up to look like that?!” Rarity’s sister gasps.

You can’t help but let a smile cross your face. It’s going to be a hell of an experience during the war effort, but you know that you can make it work.

Acevedo pokes his head through the door. “Oh, and my friend Isaac - yes, I know, but I’m not responsible for his favorite alias or anything - has a surprise planned. You might want to come to Canterlot tomorrow.”

It has been only a few hours since the trio left, and Vinyl has been staring at the CD for the past hour.

"What's wrong Vinyl?" you ask, making tea while you prepare for a quiet lunch. "You have been staring at that disk for awhile now."

"I don't know... Scared? Confused?"

And you don’t need to ask why. A better question would be what wouldn’t have scared her.

"Its a simple disk. From the sound from your 'Uptime' counterpart, its just music."

"Yeah... a disk that has music we made. Together." Vinyl points out, and you realize the crux of her problem.

You really don’t know what to make of such music. Both of you possess a sense of music as different as night and day.

Your classical composure of refine musical instruments to the wild beats and deafening tones of her electronics.

'What in Celestia’s name did we create together?' You wonder before gently taking the disk and placing it in her player. "We won't find out by simply standing there, wouldn't we?"

"Yeah, lets start her up!" Vinyl pressed play, only to hear what sounded like a small discussion happening.

"Are you sure Steven? I don't want to impose-"

"Its fine, Octavia. Me and Jon here have been going through a rut lately. This... these songs here are perfect. Vinyl, you ready to get the beat going?"

"I was born ready!"

"Ms. Shores, you ready to sing?"

"Sugar, do you even need to ask? The girls are ready to sing too~."

"See?"

"Okay then. Now, this first song is called 'My Roommate is a 'Bassist'. Vinyl insisted on the silly name."

"Its not silly!"

"Why do you insist on using pieces of the Canterlot Wedding song?"

"Because it is the only song I know all the words to! You know I always forget lyrics... Besides, I want this version out and not the one sung by the Queen's pet nerd."

"Let it go, Vinyl."

"If you say so, Sharp."

*Cough*

"Sorry, Tavi."

" Alright, ladies! From the top"

“If you asked when my heart  would stop weeping, I would say never. Not in the foreseeable future, not today, perhaps even forever. I’ve seen humans at their best and worst-I did not know what to feel, at least at first. Though now I just feel anger-I know now that we must fight Equestria’s dark doppelganger. Under the pretense of giving unneeded aid, they take the world, leave it unmade. The world has become full of many hells, and to escape, the Empire says: “Become pony… or else!”  We must not rest as countless die or worse-to become newfoal is an unspeakably evil curse. It leaves them with no soul, leaving only an empty hole. It is not something I can say calmly, though hear me when I say that a newfoal is a damned zombie! I have seen the works of each and I despair, of a world stripped of humans and left bare. I want to leave not a single thing in doubt, for that is what this new war unifying our tribes is about. Not prosperity, and not quite an invasion of a foreign shore, it is instead a fight far above what has been seen before. We cannot sit by as humanity is annexed, for both here and in this other world, we are next. The exhibition is for all to see, as war is now a certainty. Only then will you truly understand why fighting this war is so urgent a demand.

Uptime Ambassador Zecora’s Letter to the Zebrican Tribes, urging its residents to view the Exhibition of Human Achievement and fight in the Conversion War.

Some pessimistic yet properly paranoid ponies had expected the humans and alternate ponies to react similarly to Marcus Renee upon contact with what everyone had quickly decided to call “True Equestria.” Nobody, least of all the PHL ponies, saw issue with the nickname.

Though they had something he didn’t have: Prior warning.

As a result, some fortunate few (such as the two men and the earth pony stallion from Brazil) had managed to adjust within a day. Others weren’t so adaptable, simply staying in the wing of Canterlot Castle that had been set aside for them until other residences could be found. Out of completely justified paranoia, Celestia, Luna, Marcus, Stephan, and anyone else of sufficiently high rank were trying their damnedest to make sure the taskforce and the Equestrians got along. All of them had ran over more scenarios in their minds than it would be practical to list, but they had to be careful.

First impressions were everything, after all. Marcus didn’t expect one of his men in the taskforce to go mad as a HLF member and go on a rampage, but they had to be prepared nonetheless.

And the Princesses didn’t expect a sizable contingent of ponies and other races of Equestria to suddenly decide to follow Catseye’s contemptible crap theories, the ones based on the historical equivalent of what some ponies called fanclop, which stated that humans were evil. Again, they had to be prepared nonetheless.

And then, out of nowhere while Acevedo, Button and Vinyl were off in Ponyville with to see their counterparts (with Acevedo lazily playing guard with his .44 revolver), Grimnebulin had strode in with a proposal.

He had been very convincing.  

“I don’t think we should use this as a glorified training exercise,” Grimnebulin had laughed. He’d somehow pulled an immaculate suit out of nowhere.

“Glorified training exercise?” Marcus asked as he stared at his hand, small metal balls floating above it. Grimnebulin had been in regular contact with him ever since his adventure to the Crystal Empire with Stephan, Luna, and Celestia, doing tests, overseeing physical therapy and otherwise helping Marcus adjust to his new body. Physically, Marcus was healthier than he had any right to be, but Grimnebulin was a little concerned that he was throwing himself into his magical training a bit too much.

He was not ignoring his duties, but he hardly seemed as able to connect with the military personnel he’d brought to Equestria. Which left Grimnebulin worried, likely due to Marcus’ growing obsession with making sure their interaction with Equestria was ‘perfect’. He wasn’t exactly that kind of doctor, but that didn’t seem healthy.

Hence the plan he was pitching to two goddesses and the two most important men in this world.

“The exact words we were given were, and I quote, ‘ensure the safety of humanity by creating new devices and fostering cooperation with the true Equestria,’” Grimnebulin said. “Our plan, and Mr. Crowe’s, I might add, that fosters cooperation. That’s a loophole, sir.”

“I like the idea,” Princess Luna said. “I am very curious to see human art. That-” she gazed at her sister. “And I suspect that Marcus is not exactly a connoisseur of fine arts.” Marcus only snorted and flipped the finger at Luna, knowing the meaning behind it was lost to her.

“Believe me, the portal makes one hell of a strategic advantage for the greatest deep-strike in the history of mankind since the…” the irony abruptly washed over Grimnebulin, and he had to restrain himself from bursting into uncharacteristic giggles, “Trojan horse. But there’s another advantage. If we all die, then all the things we smuggled go to waste. So here’s what I suggest. Despite the fact that I don’t know how long it will be till we have wireless in Equestria, or even if we do, I know that a lot of humans and unicorns brought their computers.”

Non-unicorn ponies had not, as it was incredibly hard for them to use computers without hands. There were companies working on them, though, but the smallest interface involved either several large pedals or arcane things of questionable reliability that tapped into whatever force ponies used to allow things to simply stick to their hooves.

“Along with a lot of books,” Grimnebulin continued. “So here’s what I think we should do. You all say that first impressions are the most important thing here, right? Well… Art is damn good at influencing people. But propaganda? That’s like over-seasoning food and making it go rancid, or something. So I figured ‘Why go to propaganda?’ Why not just be honest? Why not show them what that fucking zombie apocalypse that calls itself the Solar Empire plans to stamp out underhoof?’ Once Equestria has seen this artwork, they’ll be jumping to support us. They’ll be appalled that anyone would think such things of a species which has created such wonders.”

“Why didn’t you suggest this earlier?” Princess Celestia asked. “This is… this is brilliant!”
Grimnebulin staggered back, ever so slightly. Though he had been in the same room as the Princess in the last two weeks, as she asked him a question about human ballistics, history, anatomy, or whatever other question came to mind, he still couldn’t get quite used to the fact that she was the same as the Queen in all but personality. As a result, the sight of her happy still unnerved him somewhat. “What?”

“A brilliant idea,” Princess Celestia said, beaming. “I… It’s alright. I know how I must still seem. Not just to you, but to all of you.”

“They’re getting better,” Grimnebulin said. “Slowly but surely.”

“I see. Are the assigned psychologists and psychiatrists helping?”

“Doing wonders,” Grimnebulin agreed. “Apparently I’ve been called in as a consultant, never mind that I’m not that kind of doctor. Still, I try.”

Rarity had never expected to be a soldier. The thought had literally never crossed her mind. She understood that as a Bearer of the Element of Generosity, she would have to face mind-blowing weirdness, perform tasks of great importance to the government (and according to Pinkie and Twilight on two separate occasions, all existence, and they really hated how right they were) and generally experience a level of importance far beyond that of a simple fashion designer.

Which was why she was enjoying her leave so much. She understood that she had to do this or there would be doom on a scale that no pony in Equestria could dream of, and yet… well, the armor she was expected to wear was so very drab and uncomfortable (she had spent some time negotiating with that large human doctor with the brownish hide to help design better, comfier armor), and she had never suffered quite as much as she had there.

So when she heard of the Exhibition coming soon, she had jumped at the chance.

“There’s still more to do!” Stephan had said. “So much that you don’t know!”

“Major Bauer,” she protested, “We know what we have to fight for. Marcus showed us what’s at stake, but this is the first time we could really get a sense of how big it is. That, and…”

“I think you still see us the same as the ponies that are committing… what’d Trixie call it?” Applejack asked. “Xenocide?” She struggled with the unfamiliar word. “She was right. There really are things in your world that we don’t have names for.”

“That, and I think that Twi is gonna joysplode at the prospect of going,” Pinkie Pie pointed out. She reached over to Twilight, opening her friend’s mouth with both hooves.

Almost immediately, Twilight let out a high-pitched squeal of, “Ohmygoshohmygoshohmygosh!” then looked around wildly, saw Pinkie, and just shrugged.

“Ya see?” she asked.

“Don’t question it,” Rainbow Dash sighed, having noticed Stephan’s raised eyebrow.

“We’ve been told what we’re fighting for,” Rarity said. “We just haven’t seen enough of it. Please, let us visit the exhibition. If anything, it’ll prove to you that we aren’t those poor imitations found in your Equestria.”

“And there’s a lot of things Marcus couldn’t explain about humanity,” Lyra added.

“Come to think of it… I think I need some R&R too,” Stephan agreed. “Been pushing myself pretty hard lately. In which case… we’re all taking a trip to the exhibition. There’s a lot of things there that I think we all need to see.”

And so he had let them go, leading to what would have been the happiest, most culture-filled day (for Rarity, the two were almost synonymous) of her life. She had happily trotted, almost skipped through the streets of Canterlot, finding her way to the Exhibition. But only with the condition that they could tell him what they learned from it upon their return, rather like the friendship letters that they used to send. The seven of them had paid little attention to that condition-they simply figured it would come effortlessly.

Beneath the noses of every authority figure, the Crowe personnel appeared to have commandeered a warehouse too high in Canterlot low-town to truly be considered “seedy” and too low in Canterlot to truly be considered higher-class, and packed it with artwork as far as the eye could see, art that most humans assumed had been disintegrated or atomized or whatever by the Barrier. It had overflowed into the streets within minutes. Ponies from all over Equestria marveled at the humans’ artwork, which (at Acevedo’s request) also included more modern things, and art composed in reaction to the barrier.

Pinkie Pie had simply disappeared when they weren’t looking, Rainbow Dash and Applejack had meandered off with Twilight while hoping for an explanation, Lyra had (in Pinkie Pie’s peculiar parlance) been about to “joysplode,” Fluttershy had looked for paintings of Earth’s landscapes and animals, and Rarity (predictably) had headed for the section that had to do with human fashion. It had been a long, twisty path that made her feel like she was going in circles, but the map assured her that she was going the right way.

Unsurprisingly, the section on human fashion was rather anemic compared to the rest of the exhibition. Much of the “exhibits” were life-size photos of humans in a wide variety of clothes - which, to Rarity’s shock, were surprisingly similar to Equestrian clothes. Why were ponies so similar to humans, anyway?

If she added more fabric to the front of one of her dresses, it would work surprisingly well as a human female’s dress. She assumed it was the females wearing dresses. Those were mammaries so far up on their barrels, weren’t they? Still, she’d have to rework the proportions quite a bit. And human suits and tuxedos were just breathtaking!

She stared at the suits, taking in every stitch, attempting to gain an impression of a human’s proportions.

‘So many differences from humans… and yet so much alike!’ Rarity thought, levitating a small notepad from her saddlebags and taking notes. ‘There’s so much to do! Ah, this will be so much help when I design that new armor… I can’t add gems, that’d probably be too conspicuous. Hmm… never done any utilitarian fashion before, though I suppose there can be a certain beauty in that!’

Never mind the beauty in all the other dresses and suits that had come to Equus through the portal. Many examples of human clothing were nothing special, much of it clearly designed with comfort and utility in mind, in a clear case of quantity over quality. Humans obviously were not comfortable with going out without some cover-up; ponies didn’t really need clothes, which were more of a status symbol, decorative, or something to be used during special occasions. Some ponies in Ponyville didn’t even own one set of clothes.

But extravagant outfits, such as royal dresses, wedding outfits, and those costumes for a group of characters called “the Disney Princesses” were a sight to behold. And that didn’t even get to the traditional garb of other cultures - the Korean hanboks, Japanese kimonos (which reminded Rarity much of the fashions of Neighpon’s feudal era), and Indian saris and churidaars were so beautifully detailed and well made, that Rarity nearly felt herself hyperventilate. So many ideas for possible designs! She’d heard that kimonos might be coming into fashion again… and this exhibition wouldn’t merely breathe life into the fashion world of Equestria… it would feed it an entire medicine cabinet of drugs. Already, she was quite certain that somepony else had seen this and was busily sketching ideas as well.

‘Who could destroy a species that makes things like this?’ Rarity thought to herself, still half-trotting, half-bouncing through the exhibition. It was rather selfish of her, she had to admit, but she knew then and there that the other Equestria had to be evil. There was so much that the humans could create, particularly such fine clothes (she wished that she could have some that would fit her) and yet the other Equestria saw nothing in them?

How disgusting. Not aesthetically so, though she couldn’t help but think of that. No, it was morally disgusting that they would be so singlemindedly devoted to killing humanity.

She would prove to her Equestria that humans were worth as much as them - through fashion shows, through design, through whatever crossed her mind. And, when the war was won, she would give back to Earth as much as she could.

And then, towards the edge of the fashion exhibition, she saw the painting.

It was almost ten feet tall, simply entitled “Miasma.” It looked like a normal scene in Ponyville, but as she looked closer, it began to change. Not in the sense that it moved, that was a cheap gimmick for Equestrian painters, but in that she began to see it differently. The thatch roofs bore an uncanny resemblance to yellow bones, every window looked like eyes, and accusatory faces appeared to be everywhere around the small colt at the center of the painting.

“This painting is one of the few surviving examples of the Post-Barrier Surrealist movement, as most of the great masters inexplicably turned to propaganda, disappeared, or were forced to flee, their previous paintings either hidden or burned. This was made by the Ponyville artist Brush Nib, to, in his words, ‘Ask if anyone else could hear the voices in [his] head. It represents the inner turmoil and paranoia of prewar Equestrians…”  she read, looking at the small plaque. Huh. what an extraordinarily unnerving painting.

Meanwhile, where Rarity had felt subtle, visceral horror,  Lyra’s feelings were somewhat more… complex. She was elated and amazed, yes… but so shocked that while her current emotional state could only superficially be called happiness.

She had studied humans, trying desperately to refute Catseye, but there was only so much that had made its way into Equestria. Only so many things ponies knew about them, or could extrapolate from the limited evidence. She’d headed for the section on human history, which was predictably limited and threadbare (there was only so much that they could have brought to Equestria, after all) and sighed at the mention of wars. Already, she could hear that smug old nag Catseye crowing about her theories on humans and war, but she ignored those to focus on the exhibits.

Lyra knew that Catseye was an ignorant idiot, considering that Earth was a harsh, far more unforgiving world than their Equus, with all its; natural disasters, droughts and deadly diseases, such as bubonic plague, which killed millions. Unlike ponies, the humans had no direct control over their weather and vital resources, such as food and clean water, which were not always available. Which meant sometimes they almost had to have war in order to survive. Lyra thought if Catseye could somehow sympathize what Queen Celestia has planned for humanity, then she might as well help in not just wiping out humanity, but every other sapient race that committed the same crimes as humans. By that ‘morally righteous’ flawless ‘logic’, you would have to wipe out countless sapient species. Because they are all supposedly ‘inherently evil’ and not just trying to survive their inhospitable environment. Following this supposed ‘logic’ you’d become a hypocritical idiot, that can’t see they’ve become worse than the species they are destroying.

It would take her too long to explain what she’d learned, but in between their wars, they’d done so many wonderful things! Art, culture, exploration… they’d clawed out their place in an inhospitable world that was essentially a giant Everfree Forest. Oh, she couldn’t wait to read more on human history!

It really picked up around the 19th century, though, in which they began to advance to the same level of Equestria, but at a blinding rate that showed no signs of slowing. They were at once destructive, warring with each other… and creative, showing the most impressive kindness soon afterwards. If the human equipment was anything to go by, Lyra reflected, war seemed to stimulate humans in a way. For example, the human’s “second world war,” which even the current Conversion War utterly dwarfed. They had come up with rockets, jet engines, and even atomic power in that time… which had lead to the unique concept of the “Cold War,” a period of fierce, mostly non-military aggression between Marcus’ homeland and the Communist (sort of like Stalliongrad, she wondered) Soviet Union. And somehow, after sending a dog into space, and then a man, they’d accomplished a feat that most ponies thought to be impossible.

They visited the Moon.

Ponies had derided lunar landings as impossible, and yet, there the humans were, doing the equivalent of building a skyscraper with only bricks and mortar.

“Incredible,” Lyra whispered, staring at the picture of the human in the bulky white suit which the picture claimed protected him from radiation and lack of oxygen. “Just… incredible.” They’d solved one of the greatest engineering and thaumaturgical conundrums in the history of exploration, and they did it without magic. They’d done everything without magic, letting higher technology that  Equestria could only dream of into the lives of every human, and they seemed to be better off for it.

They’d built infrastructure up there, maintaining communications and leaving a belt of satellites and metal orbiting their planet.

It was a race that had survived without a nigh-omnipotent goddess guiding them, without any special powers to control their environment, and that twisted mockery of the other Equestria had simply written them off?

No.

Lyra could never live up to the uptime version of herself. She could never bring two worlds together single-hoofedly, but by Celestia she was going to try.

“Well, hello, Lyra!” Twilight said, trotting up to her, Applejack and Rarity close behind.

“Twilight! How nice to see you!” Lyra said. “I trust you were impressed with what you saw?”

Applejack nodded, a huge smile on her face. “Hoo-wee, the stuff that humans can make! Their farming tools are just… Wow! They could do so much for Sweet Apple Acres, when you consider the population that humans support...”

“Extremely!” Twilight cried, nodding her head frantically. “It’s… it’s just so wonderful! I’ve dreamed of a moment like this my whole life, getting to see the artifacts and history of a new species! I just…” she sighed, looking down at the ground, somehow limp with sadness. “I wish we’d seen it under better circumstances. And that it wasn’t… you know,” she sighed, pointing to a poster featuring Rainbow Dash diving for a child, a vial of the purple potion (presumably the ponification potion) in her mouth.

“Where’s Rainbow Dash?” Rarity asked, desperately trying to change the subject. “Wasn’t she with you?”

“She and Pinkie are watching something called anime with Spike,” Twilight explained. “Pinkie said she found something called… Kill La Kill? Whatever it is, she’s hooked on the first episode.”

“Don’t lose your waaaaaaay!” Pinkie Pie said, half-humming, half-singing as she bounced over to the two of them. “Human TV shows are amazing! I just saw this thing called Kill La Kill, and it has this girl who’s totally me, and there’s a giant scissor blade… And then she gets these weird clothes forced on her, and they talk! It’s so awesome!”

Lyra mentally facehoofed for not checking on human cartoons.  She still had so much to learn!

Spike however said, “Dude, I liked Avatar: The Last Airbender! It was just excellent in every way! Uncle Iroh was like a human dragon, breathing fire and shooting fire from his hands!" Spike proceeded to try and copy the moves he saw, only to lose his balance and fall over. “Ow… maybe it doesn’t work that way.”

“I don’t know, I think I like Gurren Lagann more!” Rainbow Dash replied.

“Yeah… that is pretty good! I wonder if we can use some of that in the speeches later?” Pinkie asked. “I just love that! Don’t believe in yourself… believe in the me that believes in you!”

“That doesn’t make much sense,” Twilight responded.

“Who cares?!” Pinkie laughed. “Nothing made sense in what we watched!”

“And that’s why it’s so fun!” Spike agreed. “I even found something you’d love, Twilight! It’s called Sailor Moon! The Sailor Senshi really remind me of you six!”

“And I was watching human dances and plays,” Fluttershy said, walking up to the five of them. “They were wonderful!”

Somewhere along the line, they’d questioned how they met each other there. Whether or not they’d somehow been guided to the beginning of this exhibit. But, somehow, they found themselves drawn to the stalls that followed the painting Rarity had looked at.

There was a sign hanging over the street that had the words “Dispatches from a Dying World” written on it.

“What’s that?” Fluttershy asked.

“I think it’s… an exhibition on art during the Barrier?” Rainbow Dash asked, flying upwards and staring down at the stalls that crowded the street. The ponies and others (human, griffon, minotaur, whatever race happened to be there at the time) were oddly subdued as they browsed its exhibits, moving slowly.

“Well… I see,” Fluttershy said. “We told Major Bauer that we’d try and get a sense of what we were fighting for. We might as well.”

Nopony could argue with her, so the seven of them walked under the sign, to see Earth during the Barrier. They’d only seen it before the Barrier had manifested, Earth in its heyday.

They were not prepared, and by the end of it all they’d be torn between being glad they got it out of the way and regretting it all.

There were photographs of famous, beautiful prewar cities from all around earth on the walls, with exotic names like Paris or Venice or Berlin or Moscow, with relatively short plaques on their histories. And there were also photographs of those same cities in ruin and on fire due to the war. Even worse there were photographs of the pink sphere of death known as the barrier approaching the cities, that were now little more than a memory. The series of photographs showed a time lapse of cities slowly being consumed by the barrier, until there was nothing left but featureless grass fields and forests behind the barrier. It was a good question how that had even gotten outside the Barrier, given that something told Twilight that the other Equestria’s Princess, no, Queen Celestia wouldn’t take kindly to possible criticism. Even if Twilight hadn’t known where all that nature had come from, she wouldn’t have thought it could ever be beautiful.

The cities were gone, of course, and the thought of a field full of wheat and toiling newfoals in the former location of Paris sickened her on a level that she hadn’t known existed. But the fields and forests that had replaced other cities and human habitation just looked wrong somehow. The branches were too regular, and they just seemed dead somehow. No sign that anything had ever been in those woods, animal or human, other than cellar holes and rampant flooding.

A miasma of crushing loneliness radiated from the photographs. It had grounded Rainbow Dash, who often seemed to forget to use her hooves, rendered Pinkie Pie unable to smile as her hair went dark and flat, and reduced all of them to silence.

All but Lyra.

She couldn’t help it at all as she stared at the pictures, at the forests and fields where there had allegedly once been a human city. The barrier didn’t even leave cellar holes, and that both infuriated her and saddened her. How… in the name of all that was holy… could the other Equestria do this with smiles on their faces?!

It was nothing short of horrifying and heartbreaking in equal measure. Many of those cities were beautiful (and it wasn’t lost on Twilight how odd it was some of them shared similar names as Equestrian cities), and were likely home to more people than the largest cities of Equestria had ever housed. Monuments and old structures that would’ve put even Canterlot Castle to shame were now gone forever. These places, steeped in centuries’ worth of history, were now lost and forgotten, destroyed so thoroughly that not even dust remained. Only in books and art would the history of those places be kept alive, and that strange thing called the Internet she had heard about… and even then, they’d be corrupted through years of hearsay and myth. Some tears fell down her cheeks as the thought of the horrible abuse of magic known as the ‘barrier’ and what it meant for even humanity’s dead. For it destroyed everything the human race ever created, even the bones and remains of humanity’s ancestors in their graves, both recent and long ago. The pain humans must feel of not being able to visit those that they loved at their graves, even if the barrier was to be shut down. Tens of thousands of years of history, and all of it gone…

And there were the pictures of the news, of humans as they coped with the war. Refugees being loaded into those odd vehicles called cars and busses, as well as trains far more advanced than any in Equestria; though, in very rare photos, steam engines without thaumaturgic enhancement had been taken, used by people desperate for any way to survive the advancing pink wall. Twilight wasn’t exactly an expert on the amount of space that a human needed, but Streets were littered with trash, discarded possessions like clothes, toys, books and family heirlooms lost in the frenzied evacuations.

Photographs of humans from all different walks of life walking about confused and wondering where to go what with their homes vaporized into nothing. People mourning those they lost; anyone that didn’t get out in time, and were now either dead or ponified. Their faces were wet from hours of crying; others looked like they had emotionally shut down. There was a collage of photos full of Equestrian fugitives and humans alike, showing their slums and poor living conditions. According to the plaque, the images used were located all across the Pacific, even to the east coast of North and South America.

One particular picture stuck out to Fluttershy - of a woman wearing some kind of scarf wrapped around her hair, carrying two small children and they were sitting at what appeared to be a tent in a refugee camp. The woman’s face appeared haunted almost, her eyes drifting off into what looked like a thousand yard stare, while her children were looking around, confused and crying. They had only the clothes on their backs and a few small bags of possessions, and little idea of where to go next. The photographer named it “The Migrant Mother of the 21st Century.”

There was was a photograph that Twilight just wanted to jump inside and stop it from happening. The photograph was of newfoals throwing books into a bonfire in the middle of a street, which looked set to consume the surrounding houses, and possibly the entire town. This deliberate destruction of history, knowledge and stories infuriated her.

Rainbow Dash glared angrily at a PHL propaganda photograph of her Uptime self in the middle of wartorn street, yet she smiled broadly while cradling a baby in her hooves and force feeding the child the potion, underneath it said in bright red ‘Baby Murderer!’. Despite her tomboyish nature, she could not hold back tears that fell down her cheeks as she stared in anger at the poster. ‘For that alone, humanity deserves its revenge,’ she simply thought.

One picture confused Twilight; it appeared to show masses of humans that were running toward the barrier. When she pondered why the humans would do that, a chill went down her spine. These humans appeared to be suicidal, she theorized they were left behind during a desperate, rushed evacuation from a heavily populated area. And now since there was no escape from either death or becoming a newfoal; they were trying to atomize themselves against its magic. She sighed, realizing it was still better than becoming one of those horrible abominations known as newfoals.

Her eyes widened in shock when she saw black and white CCTV photographs of what appeared to be a birthing ward in a hospital. What she saw made her nearly vomit her breakfast. She saw defenseless, newborn human children being forced fed the potion, by what she deemed to be the foulest of monsters in pony form. Yet, these ponies thought without any moral ambiguity whatsoever that they were doing ‘morally’ the ‘right thing’ to ‘save’ humanity. ‘Save’ as in murdering innocent babies… converting them into stupid pony newfoals and essentially enslaving their minds? In her mind there was no doubt that these ponies were either insane maniacs or brainwashed, by perhaps some sort of mind control spell.

“I think I’m gonna be sick,” Lyra said, in a weak, wavering voice that wasn’t so much a whisper as it was simply drained of emotion.

"What... what kind of pony would do that?" Applejack asked lowering her hat, as tears began falling down her cheeks. "They are monsters. How sick in the head…. how heartless does a pony have to be in order to murder children happily without thinking it’s wrong?"

"Applejack, I think they would have to be either insane or a mind controlled slave," Twilight answered her question in a low voice.

There was also a poem, next to two pictures - one of a blond adolescent human girl wearing what the humans called a “cheerleader uniform” and another of a newfoal with a magenta coat and blue mane and tail. Like all other newfoals, she lacked a cutie mark, and she was smiling far too wide for it to look natural. Her eyes were also open too large, looking more like glass orbs than actual eyes, and they looked strangely frozen.

Not A Smile
A poem by Reverend James Thomas

Here stands my daughter Harriet, on four hooves
Her new form? Oh, she approves.

Joy etched on her new pony face,
How happy she is to have left the human race!

Listen to her, it’s the best thing she could have done,
to become a pony, and praise the Tyrant Sun

I once knew a man who found himself to be a girl,
Few like that one proselytize, they’re rare in this world,

Yet here she is, urging, pleading me
I don’t want to, can’t she see?

Nothing’s right with her, since she changed she has always grinned,
But her eyes, like glass orbs, are dead with no glint.

She claims to be full of joy, all the while,
Look into her eyes, glassy and dead! No, that is not a smile!

Something has been made from the remains of my daughter,
It wonders if I am to join it, or be sent to the slaughter,

She stares unthinking, no emotions to call her own,
No drive but to bow before that tyrant’s throne!

Something has taken all that made my daughter Harriet,
Given her hooves and reduced her to some grotesque marionette

In future’s time, she’ll trot at our machine guns, one in death-bound waves,
Just one among thousands of brainwashed slaves

She’s not the only one who’ll do it, there’s too many more,
It is for certain she isn’t, never will be, the daughter I cared for.”

Twilight tried, but failed to suppress a shiver as she read the poem. It didn’t matter how many times she heard the descriptions, the very concept of the newfoals chilled her right to the bones. There were already soldiers telling the Royal Guards the horror stories about them; how sometimes you could kill them with one hit to the center of mass, but they would completely ignore limb shots and incineration. Electrocution had proven promising, though.

And they never stopped smiling. Never stopped looking at you with their too wide-open eyes, and no matter what they were doing, they were always happy. It was as if they could not feel any other emotions whatsoever, other than rage at the audacity of humans to simply exist in the same universe as them or that ponies went against the wishes of their mad leader. No matter what native Equestrians did to them, they wouldn’t mind… because they barely had anything that could be called a mind. According to a poster nailed to the wall of one building, there’d be a documentary on an interrogation of a captured newfoal.

There was little information on it, but Pinkie Pie had steadfastly refused to even look at the poster. “They’re not smiling!” she’d cried. “Whatever that face they’re making is, it’s not a smile!”

“It… sure looks like one,” Applejack had said.

“You have to be happy for it to be a smile!” Pinkie Pie disagreed. “They’re not happy! They just have the happiness lodged inside them, and they can’t get it out!”

Twilight sighed and parroted Marcus’ words from days ago. “The potion rewrites a person into a pony... changes their body, their mind, binds their soul in chains... takes them away from you.”

“Screw it,” Pinkie Pie said, a most un-Pinkie Pie turn of phrase. “I don’t care how hard it is. I don’t care if I collapse, I’m going to do something to save humanity from turning into those…. things. They’re not happy - the other versions of us are taking away everything from the humans, including all this awesomely amazing stuff here! They’re ironing out the wrinkles so everyone thinks it’s smooth! And without all those… can you really be happy?”

The other mares and young dragon were quiet for a moment, letting it sink in.

Spike replied, “No. That isn’t real happiness. They’re just…”

He really couldn’t find the words to describe it.

“Dead?” Applejack suggested. “If you can’t feel anything, really, that’s kind of like being dead. Maybe worse.”

“No, no,” Twilight said. “He was very insistent that they were still alive, so…”

“How about zombies?” Rainbow Dash suggested. “I keep hearing PHL soldiers calling them that.”

“Like hollow shells; mindless pony-shaped drones that just worship their queen and carry her will out…” Fluttershy elaborated, half-whispering.

Everyone stared at her. Like Pinkie Pie’s proclamation of ‘screw it,’ it was also a rather out-of-character moment for the butter-yellow pegasus. Though it was rather impressive she’d gotten this far in the exhibit of art at the time of the Barrier. She steadfastly ignored the music and protest songs, though. Not that anyone could blame her; that music was terrifying on a level beyond what any of them had ever felt.

“I think Fluttershy put it best,” Rarity said, shivering. “Now… please. Let’s go somewhere else, this is just…” the descriptor eluded the white fashionista mare, though she realized that was excusable, because Equestria had never had need of anything to describe this. With luck, they wouldn’t have to ever again.

“I… don’t think that’s a… um… good idea,” Fluttershy said.

“What?” Rarity asked.

“We’re going to try and understand what we’re fighting for,” Fluttershy said with a determined tone. It was so rare to see her like this, but at the same time, it wasn’t shocking. Fluttershy was nicknamed “the friend to all living creatures” and to see such an affront against all life like the barrier and the newfoals would no doubt bring out that angry side of her. “If we have to suffer bad dreams, so be it! We need to know! How can we fight for them if we don’t know enough?”

“I… I can’t believe I’m saying it,” Lyra said. “I can barely take any more of this. But she’s right; we need to know.”

She was right, of course. Nopony (or dragon) could find a reason not to listen to Fluttershy’s argument. Even ponies who weren’t actually in the Elements, and curiously found themselves listening to the adorable butter-yellow pegasus with the pink mane.

They’d decided she had a point. She was right - they couldn’t understand. But if they saw the photos, if they listened to the music (no matter how painful it was emotionally), they would come close to understanding the true suffering of the human race thanks to the other Equestria.

By the end of it, nopony would have considered isolationism. No matter their occupation, they resolved that they would Do Something Important. Whether it was manufacturing, support, maintenance of communication networks, or fighting on the frontlines with the new modular assault yokes and saddles that they saw at Isaac Dan Der Grimnebulin’s stall, (“Is that really the scruffy little Earth Pony that liked Sweetie Belle there, the one wearing the assault saddle?” Rarity had asked herself. He’d grown up to be a very handsome stallion!) they would not quietly sit in their homes as war raged on.

They would make absolutely sure that Earth won its fight.

In the coming weeks, as griffons, minotaurs, buffalo, and all the other races of Equus flocked to see the exhibition, the newspapers went wild. Not a day went by without a mention of the Exhibition, even in far-off places like Saddle Arabia and Zebrica, though one thing seemed to capture everyone’s minds. It overshadowed even the live music talent, featuring Octavia, Vinyl Scratches from both Equestrias, and even the non-PHL Vinyl’s good friend Pinkie Pie.

“Dispatches from a Dying World.” Nobody yet knew the place that the particular section of the exhibition would occupy in history, though Grimnebulin would frequently be cited as the one that had truly brought Earth and Equestria together. “Marcus Renee and Stephan Bauer might have built the armies up,” one book by a distant descendant of Twilight Sparkle’s would claim, “But it was the exhibition funded by Crowe Labs, and organized by Isaac Dan Der Grimnebulin, Isaac Acevedo, and Uptime Button Mash that truly unified the two worlds. While Marcus and Stephan were phenomenal in the field of battle, it was those three that allowed Equus to truly understand their new visitors.”

“So… I hope you enjoyed that one day’s leave I gave you,” Stephan said. “Did it give you perspective? Helped you learn anything?”

The seven mares standing in front of him didn’t interrupt, even Pinkie Pie. That was… unexpected.

“Yes sir,” Twilight answered firmly. “We know what we have to do. For all of Earth, for our Equestria… for all of existence. We might complain, but we know you can make us into the soldiers Equestria needs.”

“We’ve been lucky,” Rarity added. “Lucky enough that we’ve fought enemies that were, to put it lightly… easy. But that won’t work here.”

“She’s right. This isn’t something we can deus ex machina our way out of,” Pinkie said. “I know you can mold us into better soldiers to fight those… things… pretending to be us.”

“They deserve to suffer,” Rainbow Dash said, staring at the ground. “They deserve the greatest smackdown in the history of Equestria for what they’ve done to you!”

“They’re both right - I can’t stand by and let them suffer, while expecting everything to work out. We’d just get trampled under the stampede or worse,” Applejack declared.

“We have to,” Fluttershy agreed simply. “You won’t even have to say please, this is what we have to do.”

“I’m not an Element,” Lyra admitted. “I don’t even know what I’d be if I had one. But there is no way I can sit by while billions of humans are suffering a fate worse than death every day!”

A smile crept over Stephan’s face. ’Well well well,’ he thought. ’How about that?’ “So!” he called out. “You mares ready for round two?!”

They nodded, all of them replying in unison, “YES, SIR!”

“Whatever it takes!” Pinkie Pie yelled.

’There might just be some hope here after all,’ Stephan thought. He got back into drill instructor mode and said, “Alright, everyone - today we’ll be reviewing speed and agility. Dodging attacks and quick thinking are vital skills to use on the battlefield. One second can be the difference between life and death. Are you ready?”

“Sir yes sir!” they all yelled.

“Well then, training begins now! I expect nothing less than the best from all of you!” Stephan smirked as he and Trixie held up several rocks in their grasp. "If you can dodge these rocks, you can dodge lethal spells."

"What?!" Twilight shouted.

Stephan paused for a moment before he and Trixie laughed. “No, no, of course we won’t throw stones at you.” Trixie gave a sad sigh let the stones fall to the ground, rather reluctantly at that, and the six sighed in relief.

“Get your Simulation Battlegear and be back in five minutes. We are going to do a little walk.”

Twilight looked at him confused. “A walk?”

Stephan gave them the smile that made their blood freez. “From Canterlot, to Ponyville and back with some exercises in between.”

Their jaws dropped on the ground. “B-but that is almost two days travel…and we have to go through the Everfree Forest, too…” whispered Rarity.

“Oh, then you should get your tents as well for a little Biwak.” The mares still didn’t move. “What are you waiting for? MOVE IT!”