//------------------------------//
// Zomponies Ate My Neigh-bors! 
// Story: KoB's 2014 Nightmare Night Spooktacular 
// by King of Beggars 
//------------------------------//

Scootaloo rolled around on the floor of the clubhouse, clutching her stomach and wailing in agony.

“I’m dying!” she cried at the top of her lungs.

“You’re not dyin’,” Apple Bloom sighed from where she sat. She was backed into a corner, far removed from where Scootaloo was having her tantrum. She’d learned her lesson to stay away from the excitable little pegasus when she got herself whipped up into a froth like this – the shiner she’d been given courtesy of a carelessly flailing backhoof had seen to that.

“I am dying!” Scootaloo said with grim finality. “How would you know if I wasn’t dying? You’re not a doctor! If you were, you’d have a doctoring Cutie Mark!”

“You’re not dyin’ because nopony ever died from candy deficiency!” Apple Bloom barked angrily. “Except maybe diabetics… but you ain’t diabetic, so you quit that rollin’ around before I get a rope and truss you up like Mister Piggington when he gets into the grain silo! You’re gunna muss up your costume!”

Scootaloo sat up and glared at her friend. “You’re not the boss of me, Apple Lion,” she stated simply. She trotted over to where the hatchet had fallen off her belt and reholstered it, returning her Tin-Woodspony costume to proper order. She checked herself over for any tears in the aluminum foil, but the costume had held up surprisingly well despite her tantrum.

Apple Bloom scowled back and teased out the golden mane of her lion costume. She gave herself a onceover as well, making sure that the butt-flap on her costume was still buttoned. Granny had made it out of an old pair of brown hoofie-pajamas, and the holes for the buttons on the emergency-hatch were a little loose, so the flap kept coming down on her, much to the amusement of her friends.

“Sweetie, you almost finished?” Apple Bloom asked pleadingly of the curtain obscuring the far corner of the clubhouse. Sweetie Belle had set up the curtain as soon as she’d arrived, saying that she wanted her costume to be a surprise. Apple Bloom and Scootaloo hadn’t seen the point, since they were all dressed to a Wizard of Oz theme, and the enormous suitcase Sweetie had said was full of makeup had likewise seemed unnecessary, but they simply shrugged and let their friend have her way.

That had been before sunset, two hours ago.

“Perfection takes time,” Sweetie replied from behind the curtain in a singsong voice.

“It’s just a stupid scarecrow costume!” Scootaloo said with a stomp of her hoof. “We could’ve gone and gotten a real scarecrow from Apple Bloom’s fields, taken it to Twilight, had her bring it to life, gone Trick-or-Treating with it, and been back and half dead from candy poisoning by now!”

“Okay, now hold on a minute there, missy,” Apple Bloom said tersely, rounding about on Scootaloo and frowning. “First you say you’re dyin’ of lack of candy, now you’re sayin’ you can die from too much candy, which is it?”

“Both!” Scootaloo declared smugly. “My candy levels have to remain consistent, not too low and not too high, for me to maintain maximum awesomeness.”

“And you want to exceed that consistent level?”

“Yes! It’s Nightmare Night and I want candy! So much of it that it makes me sick and I die! Candy!” Scootaloo began stomping around the floor, trotting in a circle and shouting with every thudding hoof-fall. “Candy! Candy! Candy! Candy!”

The entire treehouse shook with the force of Scootaloo’s  final stomp, which was accompanied by a deep, resounding rumble that echoed off into the distance. Scootaloo stared at her hoof in awe.

“Whoa…” she whispered. “Did I do that?”

“I think it was an earthquake,” Sweetie Belle said from her hiding place.

Apple Bloom went to the clubhouse window and pulled a curtain aside, staring off in the direction of town. The orchard blocked most of her view, but she could still see Twilight’s new castle, the tip of town hall, and the flag on top of Carousel Boutique, over the tops of the trees. She could hear distant screaming coming from the direction of town – a sure sign that Nightmare Night was in full swing. They’d probably already missed Zecora’s retelling of the Nightmare Night legend, but hopefully the party that Twilight and Spike were letting Pinkie Pie throw at the castle would still be raging by the time they got there.

She looked upwards at the clear night sky. For a moment, she thought she saw some sort of flash across the darkness – something like a glimmer of light against glass – but shrugged it off as a reflection on the window.

“Doesn’t look like anythin’ fell over in town,” she said.

“Good, that means that the candy is safe,” Scootaloo said. She turned back to the curtain and stomped a few more times for good measure. “Candy! Candy! Candy!”

“Alright, already!” Sweetie Belle shrieked from behind the curtain. “Geez, I can’t even get five flappin’ minutes to put on my costume!?”

“You’ve been putting on that costume for the last two hours,” Apple Bloom said.

“No, I’ve been getting ready for two hours, the costume only takes five to put on,” Sweetie said. A cloud of chemicals rose into the air above the curtain, accompanied by the sound of a spray can and the bitter chemical stink of hairspray. “I had to do my mane, put on my makeup, iron the costume, pluck my eyebrows...”

Scootaloo and Apple Bloom shared a stunned look at this revelation. They both ran towards the curtain and each took a corner in their mouths. The curtain was yanked away, revealing a stunned Sweetie Belle, who'd obviously just been trying to get a look at her own rear in the mirrored lid of her makeup case.

“What the hay are you wearin’!?” Apple Bloom asked.

“What?” Sweetie asked innocently as she looked down at her costume. She was wearing an elaborate dress in seafoam green, covered in sequins arranged to look like fish scales. The rear of the dress hung off her flanks and curled with some sort of underwire like a fish’s tail. Her mane had been done up with bits of fake seaweed and dyed blue. “Do you think it’s too much? Too little? Should I have used the seashells?”

“What happened to your scarecrow costume?” Scootaloo asked in disbelief.

“Oh, that old thing?” Sweetie asked with a laugh as she turned to gaze at her own reflection. “Rarity saw that ugly costume and insisted on helping me make a new one.”

“We’re supposed to be a team,” Scootaloo said indignantly. “Remember? Wizard of Oz? You picked the theme. I wanted us to be Wonderbolts.”

“Yeah,” Apple Bloom agreed, “and I wanted us to be the Three Stooges.”

“Then maybe you shouldn’t have made me be the stinky old scarecrow!” Sweetie Belle snapped.

“If you didn’t want to be the scarecrow you should’ve said something before Nightmare Night Night!” Apple Bloom growled through clenched teeth.

“Look, it’s too late for me to change,” Sweetie Belle said as she backed away, holding up her hooves like she was trying to placate a snarling dog. “Let’s just go like this. We’ll tell everypony that we’re characters from a fanfiction – an alternate-universe where the scarecrow was a totally sexy seapony.”

“Sexy?” Apple Bloom repeated with a raised eyebrow. “Is that what this is about? Are you tryin’ to impress Button Mash again?”

Sweetie’s cheeks flushed at the accusation. “No! Shut up! Shut up your stupid mouth!”

Scootaloo rose up on her hind legs and shook her hooves at the ceiling, unleashing a primal shout of frustrated anger. “What! Ever! I don’t care what you’re dressed as anymore, let’s just go!”

Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle shrugged at the outburst and walked to the door. Their little orange plastic, pumpkin-shaped candy buckets sat next to the entrance, grinning cheerfully as they awaited a night of candy collection.

The door flung open, slamming against the wall with a bang that surprised all three fillies. They backpedaled at once, crashing into one another and collapsing to the ground with a trio of grunts.

Spike ran into the clubhouse, wild-eyed and panting. He slammed the door shut and pulled the heavy wooden crate – which normally functioned as a table – in front of the entrance as a barricade before he rounded on the three groaning fillies.

“Are you like them!?” Spike screamed as his voice cracked in a mixture of fear of anger. He was pointing a claw at the three girls intimidatingly and baring his sharp fangs. “So help me Celestia, I will burn you alive if you’re like them!”

“What the hay are you talkin’ about, Spike!?” Apple Bloom shouted as she extricated herself from the pile. She rubbed tenderly at her shoulder, which was throbbing from the awkward spill she’d just taken. “What’s goin’ on!?”

Spike’s anger faded, giving way to relief. He fell to his hands and knees and huffed tiredly.

“Thank Celestia you three are okay…” he whispered.

The three girls watched in confusion as Spike kneeled on the ground, panting like an old dog.

“Okay, you’re spookin’ us, Spike,” Apple Bloom said impatiently.

“Yeah,” Sweetie agreed. “This is a little much for a Nightmare Night prank. You better cut it out or I’m telling Twilight and my sister.”

Spike rushed forward in the blink of an eye. He grasped desperately at Sweetie Belle’s costume, tears in his eyes, and shouted: “They’re dead, Sweetie! Everypony’s dead!”

The three girls stared at him with their jaws agape. The silence hung in the air, thick enough to cut with a knife.

“Shut up,” Scootaloo said sassily. “No frickin’ way. You’re yanking our chains.”

“They’re dead, Scootaloo!” Spike shouted back.

“Fluttershy?” she asked cautiously.

“Dead!”

“Pinkie Pie?”

“Dead!”

“Rainbow Dash?”

“Dead! Dead! Dead! Dead! They’re all dead!”

Sweetie pushed Spike away and smoothed out the wrinkles in her costume. “This seriously isn’t funny.”

“I agree,” Apple Bloom said with a nod as she walked to the front door. “Pinkie and Rainbow probably put you up to this and it sure as sugar ain’t funny. I’m gunna go tell my sister on you, and she’ll tell Twilight, and then you’re in for a world of hurt, mister.”

“Don’t go out there!” Spike pleaded.

“And why the hay not?” she asked, setting down on her rear and placing her hooves on her hips in challenge. “You give me one good reason why I shouldn’t go out this door.”

“Because…” he muttered as he cast his gaze downward sadly. “Because they’re not just dead… they’re… they’re zombies…”

Apple Bloom let out a sharp bark of sarcastic laughter. “I reckon that settles it then. The world is doomed, it’s all over and we’re goin’ to have to live in this treehouse until we die.”

She got back to her hooves and placed her shoulder against the crate blocking the door, moving it aside with a small grunt of effort. She may have been small, but being an earth pony and growing up on a farm made her plenty strong enough to move a wooden crate.

She threw open the door and came face to face with the rotten, shambling corpse of Ditzy Doo, the silly mailmare that everypony in town affectionately called Derpy. Her wonky eye was cloudy and bloodshot, the iris a dead, milky-white that spoke of the empty vessel her mind had become. Blood oozed from her coat in places where she had obvious bite wounds, and a clump of her mane hung from a dangling flap of scalp that appeared to have been half-torn away. She blinked lifelessly, out of some pointless reflex, before opening her mouth widely to moan with hunger pains that eerily mirrored the sounds Scootaloo had been making earlier over candy.

Apple Bloom slammed the door shut, quickly replaced the barricade, and turned back to the rest of the group. She stared at them in slack-jawed horror, her coat now white as a sheet, and shouted: “The world is doomed, it’s all over and we’re goin’ to have to live in this treehouse until we die!”

“It can’t be!” Sweetie said defiantly, shaking as she tried to ignore the moaning and the rhythmic beating of a rotting hoof against the door. “That can’t have been a zombie!”

“Are you sure!?” Scootaloo asked hotly as she ran around the room slamming the storm shutters closed and locking the windows. “That chick looked pretty zombie to me! That sure as hay wasn’t no costume!”

“Maybe she’s just sick…” Sweetie countered lamely. “We don’t know for sure that she was a zombie.”

“She was a zombie, alright,” Spike said confidently.

“How do you know?” Sweetie asked.

“Because a bunch of ponies that looked just like that tried to eat me back in town,” he explained calmly. “They’re zombies and I’ve got the bites to prove it.”

Sweetie and Apple Bloom watched in shock as Scootaloo drew the hatchet from her side and leapt forward, her wings fluttering violently as she brought the sharp blade down on the back of Spike’s head. The little dragon went down like a sack of hammers, screaming and clutching the back of his skull.

“What are you doin’!?” Apple Bloom shrieked in panic. “Is that a real hatchet!? I thought it was a prop!”

“I found this behind the barn!” Scootaloo said. “And you heard him! He got bit! I’m sorry, Spike, but you have to go down!”

She raised the hatchet and brought it down onto Spike’s head again, and again, and again.

“Stop that!” Spike cried with tears in his eyes. “That really hurts!”

“Stop resisting, damn you!” Scootaloo ordered. “Let me give you mercy!”

The hatchet flew from Scootaloo’s grip, surrounded in the pale jade aura of Sweetie Belle’s magic. Now disarmed, Scootaloo found herself tackled to the ground by Apple Bloom.

“Lemme go,” Scootaloo growled as she struggled with the much stronger filly. “He needs to be put out of his misery!”

“I’m not infected,” Spike said as he sat up, clutching the newly formed lump on his head. “They bit me but nothing broke the skin.”

“Yeah, right,” Scootaloo said with a huff. “Like I’m going to believe something a zombie says.”

“A zombie wouldn’t say anything,” Sweetie said as she pried Spike’s claws away to inspect his injury. “These scales of his took like six hits from that hatchet, and you really think pony teeth are going to get through that?”

Scootaloo blinked. “Uh… point made. Sorry, Spike.”

“No, no, it’s okay,” Spike said as he stood dizzily. He wobbled drunkenly and gave Sweetie Belle a slight nod of thanks when she pressed against his side to steady him. “I know the rules. Just wish you would’ve asked me first.”

“Okay, so now that we’re all on the same page and we ain’t tryin’ to kill each other,” Apple Bloom said as released Scootaloo. “How’s about you tell us what’s happenin’ startin’ from the top?”

Spike sighed tiredly. “All I know is that Rarity and I are handing out candy at the boutique one minute, and the next the streets were crawling with zombies. We ran inside and tried to barricade ourselves in, but we must’ve left the back door open because… because…”

Spike’s voice hitched and tears filled his eyes at the memory. Sweetie stood and pulled him into a hug, tears of her own falling freely down her cheeks. Apple Bloom and Scootaloo turned away to give them a moment of privacy. The two fillies shared a look that communicated worry for their own loved ones, but they both nodded with fierce determination, resolving to stay strong in the face of this tragedy.

Spike recovered himself and wiped his nose with a kerchief Sweetie pulled from some unseen pocket of her costume. “I locked her in a closet and wrote a quick letter to Princess Celestia asking for help before I ran to find Twilight and the others,” he said. “But by the time I got to them they were already turned… I knew I had to get somewhere safe, and that the castle was going to be crawling with the things because of the party, so I headed for Sweet Apple Acres. On the way I heard you guys shouting in here so I just headed for the voices.”

The girls stared at him in stunned silence until the spell was broken by a change in the rhythm of the hoofbeats against the door. A half-dozen more thumps joined Ditzy’s, coming from all sides and accompanied by the eerie moans of tortured hunger. They all tensed up considerably but knew they were still safe for the moment.

“That’s… that’s crazy…” Sweetie whispered fearfully. “Didn’t you send a letter to Princess Celestia? Where is she? Why isn’t she here helping?”

“She did reply,” Spike said gravely. “Actually, it’s weird, the reply came from Luna. She said not to worry and that she’d take care of everything. A few seconds later Discord showed up.”

“Discord’s out there?” Apple Bloom asked. “Is he kickin’ zombie butt with that crazy chaos magic stuff?”

Spike shook his head sadly. “No, all he did was drop a giant glass dome over Ponyville, like that time Trixie showed up with that amulet. I saw him sitting up there eating popcorn and laughing at us.”

“Dangit,” Scootaloo cursed. “That means that they don’t intend to help us. This is a containment operation.”

“What do you mean they’re not helping us?” Sweetie Belle asked, her voice rising in pitch in relation to her panic.

“They’re going to leave us here to die!” Scootaloo explained as she pointed a hoof to the sky. “They’re just trying to keep the disease from spreading, but they don’t know that that never works! The zombie plague always gets out!”

“She’s right,” Spike said. “That’s how it works in the lore.”

“What lore?” Apple Bloom asked in a harsh whisper, mindful of the frantic attempts by the creatures outside to break their defenses.

“The zombie lore,” Scootaloo clarified. “Movies, comics, novels, graphic novels, movie adaptation novels, comic adaptations of the movie adaptation novels… it all agrees: once the zombie apocalypse starts, it’s unstoppable. It’ll spread and within a month the entire planet will be a charred, burning husk of what it once was.”

“I don’t want to live in a charred, burning husk!” Sweetie Belle cried.

“Calm down!” Scootaloo demanded with a point of her hoof. “You’re going to exacerbate the situation!”

“What the hay does that mean!?” Apple Bloom asked.

“I don’t know! They said it in a movie!”

“It means make things worse,” Spike supplied helpfully.

“See?” Scootaloo said. “Now quit being an exacerbator and calm down. We’re going to be okay.”

“How do you know that?” Sweetie Belle asked.

Scootaloo grinned smugly and crossed her arms over her chest. “Simple: I’ve seen every zombie movie ever made, and I know Spike is a fan, too.”

“They’re a guilty pleasure,” he said with a shrug.

“Well, now they were research,” Scootaloo said. "Our combined knowledge of zombies is going to be what gets us through this."

"What can I contribute?" Sweetie asked hopefully. "I don't know that much about zombies..."

"You're a unicorn," Scootaloo said simply. "Magic is useful."

“What about me?” Apple Bloom asked with a raised hoof.

“You’ve got a butt-flap.”

Apple Bloom lifted her flank off the ground and frowned at the flap on her costume. She reached back and tried to redo the buttons as she muttered expletives at Scootaloo.

“Right, so first things first: we’re all agreed that we’re probably the last four living things on the planet, right?” Scootaloo asked.

Sweetie blinked. “Wait, what?” 

“Keep up with the conversation!” Scootaloo admonished her friend. “The zombie virus will spread until it kills every living thing on the planet, if it hasn’t already, leaving only the four of us to repopulate the world.”

Spike blinked. “Re-what the what now?”

“Repopulate the world,” Scootaloo repeated matter-of-factly. “It’s a good thing you showed up. We’re going to need a male for this herd if we’re going to birth a new generation of ponies.”

Apple Bloom, Sweetie Belle, and Spike all blushed at the suggestion.

“Um… I hate to poop your party, but I don’t think it’ll work…” Apple Bloom said apologetically.

“Why not?”

“Because Spike’s not a pony,” she said simply. “I don’t think dragons can make babies with ponies.”

“Wait, they can!” Sweetie Belle exclaimed excitedly as the discussion triggered something from her memory. “I heard Spike talking to Rarity about it once! He said that dragons can make babies with ponies, but they’d be half-dragon!”

All three fillies turned to Spike expectantly. He shrunk away from their stares and backed against a wall nervously.

“What…?” he asked with a trembling voice. “Why are you staring at me?”

“Well?” Scootaloo asked eagerly. “Is it true?”

Spike’s eyes darted around the room, searching for some escape. “I… uh… I may have overheard Twilight mention something about it being possible…”

“Well…?” Scootaloo urged.

“Well, what?”

“Well, how do you do it?” Sweetie Belle asked bluntly. “How do you put babies in us?”

The world grew dark but Spike managed to fight off the urge to faint. “You three don’t know how to make babies…?”

They all shook their heads.

“We’re supposed to learn that next year,” Apple Bloom said. “I asked Applejack about it but she said to ask Miss Cheerilee, and Miss Cheerilee said to ask Granny, and Granny made me go upstairs and take a cold shower.”

The little filly shivered at the memory.

“I… I don’t know how to make babies either…” Spike lied.

“Oh,” all three girls said in unison, simultaneously hanging their heads sadly.

Spike whisked the sweat away from his forehead in relief.

“I guess we’ll figure that out later,” Scootaloo said with a disappointed sigh. She’d really been looking forward to finding out about babies. “Regardless, we need to organize ourselves. We’re going to need food and water, but we already know we’re the only survivors, so looting will be down to a minimum. Seeing as food’s not an issue, our first real concern should be defense. Spike? How’s your fire work against them?”

Spike grinned. “You mean my totally radical magical dragonfire that can burn anything? It lights them up like tinder. I had to burn a few on my way here.”

“Awesome,” Scootaloo said with a grin of her own. “I’ve got my hatchet, and we can find something for Bloom and Sweetie along the way. So that’s defenses. Next: our hit list.”

“Hit list?” the room’s other three occupants asked in unison.

“Yeah!” Scootaloo shouted. “We’re completely unsupervised! We can do anything we want! Get revenge on anypony we want!”

“I don’t think we should be in the market for revenge…” Spike suggested warily.

Sweetie Belle quieted him with a wave of her hoof. “Shhhhhh, let’s hear her out.”

“Think about it,” Scootaloo said through a wicked smile. “Everypony who has ever wronged us is out there as a shambling, brainless monster. Haven’t you ever wanted to smash Diamond Tiara’s face in with a chair?”

The rest of the group, including Spike, shifted nervously but didn’t immediately say no.

“I can’t say I’ve ever wanted to hurt anypony before, because I reckon that just ain’t nice,” Apple Bloom said cautiously. “But puttin’ down zombie Diamond Tiara does sound pretty fun.”

“And it doesn’t stop at revenge!” Scootaloo declared triumphantly. “There’s nopony left to tell us what to do! Nopony to make us do our homework, make us go to bed, or keep us from eating ice cream until we puke ourselves inside out!”

The other two crusaders let Scootaloo’s honeyed words wash over them and whip them into a frenzy. Sure the world was over, the undead roamed freely, and they’d never see their loved ones again, but for just a moment, they were ready to believe that anything was possible.

Spike just raised an eyebrow. “I’d like to point out my discomfort at the readiness of this little group to so quickly devolve into barbarism.”

“Your concern is noted,” Scootaloo said. “Does that mean you’re not going to help us?”

“Oh, no, no, no, of course I’m in,” Spike assured the three fillies with a toothy grin. “I just wanted to point it out.”

Scootaloo smirked nodded towards the entrance. “Alright then, Cutie Mark Crusader Zombie Apocalypse Survivors, let’s get out there and crack some skulls!”

The group gave a warcry and converged on the door. Sweetie Belle stood at the back as Apple Bloom ran forward to remove the barricade. Scootaloo drew her hatchet and Spike let loose a few warm-up puffs of emerald fire.

Apple Bloom threw the door open and they strode forward towards their ultimate destinies.


* * *


Apple Bloom sighed around the stick she held in her teeth. She speared a wadded up paper bag with the nail at the end of the stick and deposited the piece of refuse in a large burlap sack slung across her shoulders. The sack was clearly meant for much larger ponies, so it dragged behind her on the ground.

Nearby, Sweetie Belle and Scootaloo were carrying similar implements.

“I hate this stupid thing,” Sweetie Belle growled as she tried to readjust the oversized orange work vest she was wearing.

“Well, you better get used to it, because it was the smallest size they had and we still have two-thousand nine-hundred and ninety-six more hours of community service,” Scootaloo sighed as she leaned against her trash collecting pole.

Apple Bloom spat out the stick and groaned. “I still can’t believe the whole thing was a Nightmare Night prank set up by Discord and Luna.”

“Well, we’re lucky we got off with just community service for all those buildings we set on fire,” Sweetie pointed out. “It would’ve been way worse if we’d actually killed anypony.”

“Speakin’ of – think they’ll ever let Spike out of prison?” Apple Bloom asked.

“I hope so,” Sweetie Belle said. “It’s not his fault that his magical dragonfire broke all the safeguard spells they put in place to keep anypony from actually dying. That’s Discord’s fault if anything.”

“That’s why they only gave him thirty-two counts of ponyslaughter, instead of straight up murder,” Scootaloo reminded them. “I’m sure he’ll get paroled eventually. He’ll probably even get a royal pardon once Twilight gets tired of cooking for herself. I bet he’ll be back on the streets before we’re even halfway finished with our community service.”

“Either way, it is nice that things are going good for him and Rarity,” Sweetie added. “I always knew she secretly had a thing for bad boys.”

Scootaloo admired her new Cutie Mark – a bloody hatchet – and frowned at the irony of having a talent she’d never get to use again. “At least they’re getting conjugal visits.”

“What’s a conjugal visit?” Apple Bloom asked.

“Dunno,” Scootaloo said with a shrug. “I heard Dash talking about it. I guess it’s something where she can go tutor him in Equish. You know, conjugating verbs and stuff.”

“But ain’t he like a librarian or somethin’? I reckon a librarian would be good at readin’ and such.”

“I don’t know!” Scootaloo replied tersely. “Maybe she’s the one that needs a tutor!”

An aluminum can struck Scootaloo on the side of the head and fell to the grass with a hollow thud. She turned and glared at the filly that threw it at her.

“You convicts quit all that chit-chat,” Diamond Tiara said from under the umbrella where she and Silver Spoon were having a picnic. She tilted her mirrored sunglasses down and smirked wickedly at the trio as she opened another can of soda. “I’d hate to have to tell the judge that you’ve been shirking your duties.”

“How the hay did you two even get to be our probation officers!?” Scootaloo demanded.

“Daddy pulled some strings with the mayor,” Diamond Tiara said haughtily. She made a show of enjoying the refreshing can of soda and smacked her lips in satisfaction. “Now get back to work. Another hour and you get a scheduled fifteen minute break.”

The three felonious fillies picked their tools back up and went back to work.

“I hate Nightmare Night…” Scootaloo muttered sourly.


* * *