As the neo humans got to work developing the land through atomic manipulation, Emily still lingered near the Patriarch and Matriarch, as if there was a question she needed to ask, but couldn’t bring herself to out of fear.
After rubbing the pointed earlobes of his double-pointed ears that set his kind apart from regular humans, Carson turned to Emily with a smile.
“You can speak, my dear child,” he told her. “What’s your question?”
“Father, you said I could join any family branch I wished, correct?” the newest neo human asked timidly.
“Of course,” Alissa assured her. “You can join any of them.”
“Does that include yours?” Emily asked hopefully.
The two leaders were shocked into silence. Alissa would have their first child in about eight months, so they had planned on starting their own personal branch, but to have someone ask to join that branch before they even had their first child was completely unexpected.
Emily lowered her head sadly after a few seconds of silence. “I’m sorry,” she sniffled. “I shouldn’t have—”
“Of course you can join, Emily!” Alissa cut her off as she embraced her. “You agree, right Carson?”
Carson blinked, then nodded before joining the hug. “Welcome to the Stevens’ branch, Emily.” he whispered. “Be a good big sister to the child we have on the way, okay?”
Emily looked shocked. “You were already going to have a personal family?”
“That’s right, dear,” Alissa replied, stroking Emily’s hair gently. “I’ll be having a child in about eight months. So, please set a good example, not just for the people, but for your sibling.”
“Prime Daughter Emily Stevens, welcome to our family,” Carson said as he released his personal daughter to hold her shoulders and look her in the eye. “May you be a shining example to the youth of our young race.”
“I will… Dad,” Emily replied with tears in her eyes. “I’ll make both of you proud, I promise.”
The touching moment was broken when a boy sporting a white t-shirt and blue denim shorts flew up to the trio with the aid of wings similar to the pair Carson had constructed back in the battle for Grand City.
“Esteemed Patriarch and Matriarch,” the boy began, “we’ve completed transmuting a segment of the wasteland into a riverbed stretching to the nearest source of water: a freshwater lake about fifty miles to the north. Water from it should reach here in a few hours.”
“Wonderful,” Carson said, clapping once. “Make sure it has an outlet at an ocean, no matter how far south you have to take it. Once we have a source of water, we’ll need to begin farming. And for that, we’ll need plants. Make sure a team is ready to search for vegetation, preferably ones we recognize, and preferably already growing. Only collect seeds if we have to.”
“But Esteemed Patriarch Carson!” the boy spluttered. “Can’t we just transmute some rocks into plants?”
Carson shook his head. “We could imitate plants, but they wouldn’t live. We can’t add the spark of life to things. And before you ask why those wings work, it’s because you fed your own genetic makeup into them when you fused them to yourself. You already possess the spark of life in yourself, so adding new limbs isn’t a problem.”
“I understand, sir,” the boy replied. “I’ll relay your commands to the others. ‘Bye!”
With a single beat of his generated wings, the boy took to the air again and flew in the direction of a large group of neo humans who were standing around a steadily advancing empty riverbed.
After several hours, the water reached the vicinity of the neo humans and continued to flow south towards another freshwater lake about fifty miles south that already had an ocean as an outlet. As Carson and the majority of the neo humans got to work on their new settlement, which they chose to call “Neuanfänge”, which was German for “new beginnings”, another group set out to fulfill the command to find vegetation.
Patrick Foreman, the leader of this group, grimaced as his stomach growled.
“Dang it, we need food!” Maria Foreman, his adopted younger sister complained. “Pat, where are we going to find plants in this endless desert?”
“I haven’t seen any cacti,” Louis Redmond, one of the youngest in the group remarked. “I haven’t seen any greenery since we got here.”
“Hey, isn’t that a town?” Sofie Hammond, the true youngest of the group remarked, pointing towards what looked like a settlement in the distance.
“You’re right, it is!” Pat gasped. “We don’t know how we’ll be received, so let’s lay low for now and just borrow whatever we can find that could help in getting us food fast.”
“Well, they’ve got some fully grown trees, for one,” Louis remarked. “Let’s start with those. We’ll each take one. Is that okay, Pat?”
“Not a problem at all,” Pat agreed as the group touched down and got rid of the huge wings that would make walking difficult. “Everyone, amp up your strength enough to uproot one of those trees, and we’ll fly them back to Neuanfänge. Grab some seeds from those barns, too. But remember: stealth is important here.”
“Roger,” the other three members of the group replied before they used their powers of atomic manipulation to change the color of their skin, hair and clothing to match the shadows perfectly by transmuting all the pigments to have something akin to coal in the chemical makeup. The only parts that remained unchanged were their eyes.
“Now, let’s get to work,” Pat whispered before the four of them split up to enact their small raid on this unsuspecting town.
Properly Paranoid collapsed his telescope after the strange creatures entered Appaloosa. He had a feeling that anything from the wasteland couldn’t be trusted, and he was going to prove it. The four that had entered town looked like they were trying to be stealthy, and that wasn’t a good sign.
The dark green coated and red maned unicorn stallion left his house and surveyed the town, not seeing any of the four creatures.
A barn door opened, and he bolted towards it, but found nothing inside except for bags of seeds that were all open.
Another barn door opened, but once again, he found no creature inside. Just more open bags.
By the eighth time this occurred, Properly was getting very irritated, both eyes twitching in frustration. After a few seconds of his silent fuming, he heard a sound so surprising that he couldn’t believe his ears: the sound of trees being ripped out of the ground!
“Emergency!” Properly yelled. “Something’s attacking the trees!”
Ponies scrambled to the defense of the town’s apple trees to find four figures the color of shadow, each one holding up an uprooted tree with one limb. Even the smallest of the four seemed to be showing no strain at all from the effort.
“Our cover’s been compromised!” the largest one, a male exclaimed. “Pat, what do we do?”
“Everyone, we need wings, and now,” another male answered. “Hurry up and transmute the air! Use the trees as clubs if you have to, but we have to get out of here!”
“Roger!” the other three shadows replied in unison before taking up fighting stances.
The townsponies tried to attack the group of four, but all of them, even the smallest, seemed to be experts in close-quarters combat. Hoof punches would be intercepted, and with a twist of the ankle, an attacking pony would suddenly be in a single-limbed submission hold. Any attempt to buck one of the thieves in the face would be countered by a chop to the hind legs and followed up with a punch to the stomach. As the fight dragged on, the ponies kept dropping like flies from exhaustion, and the shapes of the four shadows started to change as enormous bat-like wings sprouted from their backs.
Properly wasn’t about to let them get away, however. With a burst of red magic that matched his mane, the four figures were encased in his magic, holding them down.
“So, you guys have magic too, huh?” the smallest, a young-sounding female said cheekily. “Well, we’ve got attack magic out the wazoo! Watch!”
The four figures each raised their free forelimb and opened a paw in the same way a minotaur would with a hand. And that’s when he realized that these creatures also had hands, not paws. The free hands glowed white, and Properly suddenly found himself being assailed by streams of four different forms of pure magic attacks.
Properly tried to dodge, but he wasn’t very athletic, so he soon found himself hiding behind a bubble shield as white wave-motion bursts, concussion blasts, scattershots and immense magic cannonballs pummeled it.
The shield started to fracture, and Properly started to sweat profusely from trying to maintain both it and the spell keeping the four bipeds in place. When the shield finally shattered, one of the magic scattershot pellets struck him square in the horn, cancelling out his magic and freeing the four thieves from his grip.
“No! We need those!” he cried out as the bipeds took flight.
“You’ve got plenty more trees where these came from!” the final member, another female shouted back as they flew away. “Our people need food now, and we have nothing to eat! I’m sure you won’t starve from losing four trees, some seeds and a few crates of vegetables! We’ve got over four thousand people to feed!”
It was then that Properly saw the aforementioned crates shoved into the branches of the stolen trees. Some creatures had tried to destroy the trees before, but they’d never had anything steal them right out of the ground before! Not only that, but they’d stolen some of the food stocks, as well!
“You’ll pay for this, whatever you are!” he cried out in fury as the creatures flew even farther away, barely even specks in the sky.
By the time the four scavengers had returned and reverted to their normal appearances, Neuanfänge already had a few buildings constructed out of transmuted matter. The sturdy glass and metal buildings varied in shape and size: some were skyscrapers that could dwarf the tallest buildings on Earth, others were stores, still others were factories, some farmland had already been set aside, and in the center of it all rose a building of white marble with stained glass windows depicting the struggles the race had gone through during their short existence.
In this building, Carson sat down on his new bed, lost in thought about the state of his children. It was then that a knock came to his door and a servant poked his head in.
“Esteemed Patriarch,” the man said with a bow, “the scavenging group has returned with vegetation and food.”
“Excellent,” Carson replied, rising from his bed. “I’d like to oversee the beginnings of the reintroduction of agriculture to our society.”
“Yes sir,” the man replied. “They’re actually at the gates to the palace as we speak. They were hoping to meet with you.”
“Of course I’ll meet with them,” Carson chuckled as he allowed the servant to lead him to the gates. “I’ll congratulate them for such heroics. It’s the least I can do to say thank you, but there isn’t much more that I can do but offer my congratulations for now.”
“Of course, sir,” the servant said with an understanding nod. “In such trying times as these, we have little more than words to offer each other.”
Upon reaching the large gleaming doors that lead out of the palace, Carson motioned for the servant to go about his business, and the man walked away.
Taking a deep breath, Carson readied himself for his first address to his people in this new world they found themselves in.