Twilight awoke to nausea. Wherever she was, it was slimy and red and she was floating in it. "... Urghhh... M-Miss President...?" she uttered lowly, blinking a few times as she examined herself. She looked just fine, though her mane and tail were very obviously disheveled and her barrel was a little thinner. She didn't look or feel hurt, but when she tried to use her magic to light up her surroundings, nothing happened.
She noticed the thick, heavy, metallic collar around her neck, trying to pry it off with her hooves. She figured it must have been suppressing her magic somehow, and after being trapped in that damned... lie of a town for as long as she had been, she desperately wanted to begin tearing her prison and her jailors apart like the bastards they were!
... She stopped as soon as that thought hit her. "... Sweet Celestia... I..." she murmured, looking down (she assumed it was down) at the ground (again, assumed). Where had that thought come from? She wasn't a violent pony by any means, yet there she was, wishing a gruesome end on the ones whom had taken her from her home.
But they deserved it. They would deserve anything that they got... It would be sweet, sweet justice.
"... Stop it, Twilight... Stop it... that's... that's not you..." Twilight said to herself, doing her damnedest to deny those thoughts. As much as she wanted to see her newfound enemies crushed and destroyed for what they had done, she found herself picturing what would happen if Princess Celestia... the real Princess Celestia found out... what about her friends? Spike? Of course, she imagined the worst case scenario.
Her friends would fear her and/or hate her, Princess Celestia would disown her as a student, and the Elements of Harmony would no longer work, leaving Equestria vulnerable.
Equestria... What about Equestria, she found herself thinking next, her expression becoming one of despair. What about her friends and her mentor? How long had she been gone? Were they still looking for her?
Twilight inwardly scolded herself for thinking such. Of course they were still looking... no matter how long she was gone, her friends would never stop searching for her, trying to bring her back.
... Another terrible thought hit her at that instant, making her violet eyes widen. What if her friends had been foalnapped, too? She shook her head and grit her teeth, wishing desperately that she was wrong. She'd have to ask the President to help her save them, too. She couldn't just leave them here in this place.
A lump of bile threatened to evacuate itself, but she suppressed it like she suppressed the thought. She was working herself up over something that might not have even happened. She took many deep breaths - not once questioning how she was breathing while suspended in... whatever that red goop was - and did her best to calm down. She remembered the President's words.
She would be rescued. She just had to wait... and hope... But until then, she started fiddling with the collar fastened tightly around her neck, trying to remove it.
A little magic would go a long way, she darkly thought before she could chase that notion away.
---
After the escapes of The President, Matt Miller, and Johnny Gat, Zinyak's ship was much more heavily fortified. More troops, more "Murderbots", and more of those stupid giant ball tank things. Sure, the other Saints had gotten away, but the Boss was pretty sure that the Zin didn't care that much about the others. It was almost like they had just shown up on the ship.
One thing was crystal clear, however. As the Boss hit the deck in her robot/mech suit/in-no-way-power-armor, the Zin were ready for her. She barely had time to look like a robotic badass before she had to dash the suit behind a wall for cover.
As awesome as the mech suit was, the Boss had learned the hard way that it couldn't take all that much punishment. She had very nearly exploded many times while rescuing/picking up Johnny and having to smash the Zin during Matt's rescue - while fun - was also quite nervewracking.
Still, she knew the drill. Once she was certain that the guns worked (she had become paranoid about it since they broke down during Matt's rescue), she dashed into the fray, firing four rockets at three groups of foolishly bunched up aliens. Their corpses scattered all over the wide open room, while the survivors and tough Murderbots continued firing. The bots that were caught in the blasts began to crawl towards her, but she paid them no mind as she began unloading on the rest.
She focused down the remaining Murderbots first, not noticing the two ball tanks that had dropped down from the ceiling behind her for an ambush. Only after she had dispatched the last standing bot did she notice the telltale lasers of the ball tanks' weapon, and she took a beam right in the back for her ignorance.
"Agghhh! Fucker!" she cursed angrily, turning the mech around and dashing repeatedly to get in on her sizeable foes. She activated its jetpack and began to fly towards a platform where her first tanky target stood, all while firing backwards at a few alien footsoldiers.
Upon landing she cursed again when she saw that the tank had smartly kept looking at her, denying her the pleasure of putting rockets into its stupidly stupid green stupid weak spot of stupidity. She wouldn't claim to be as savvy as Kinzie when it came to mechanical shit like this, but even she had to wonder what would possess Zinyak to allow his ball tanks of death to have such an obvious weak spot. Sure, it followed its targets to not allow easy access, but still!
... Getting back on topic, it was preparing to fire again and the Boss was already firing her shoulder jets, dashing in to try and knock the ball tank off of the platform. As it turned out, she didn't need to. Her foe exploded a second before impact.
The Boss couldn't help but burst out laughing as she took off to try to strafe down the other. "Holy fuck, these robots!" she laughed. "They're so bad!"
"Duh," Kinzie replied, sounding preoccupied.
"You didn't see that?"
"What?"
"That... ball tank thing just got killed by another one!"
"Oh, that? I saw that."
"You're no fun, Kinzie."
Kinzie didn't respond, as the Boss figured she wouldn't. The second ball tank was destroyed after it foolishly tried to shoot a flying, moving target, landing behind it and rocketing it in the back of its infuriatingly stupid head before putting a few more rockets into the rest of the soldiers waiting for her.
The room was clear. As she landed back on the main platform and started trotting her way over to the door, she had a thought. "We've gotta think up a name for those things."
"Oh! Oh!" Matt Miller suddenly interjected before Kinzie could respond.
"No, Matt, we're not calling them Droidekas."
Matt didn't respond. Kinzie did. "Actually, the Zin call them Marauders."
The Boss reached the door and smashed it open with a dashing shoulder bash, beginning to unload on the lines of organized troops and Murderbots waiting for her beyond. "Eeeehhh... that's boring, though..." the leader of the Saints casually disagreed, as if she wasn't killing aliens with one robot arm and killing alien robots with the other.
"I like Marauder," commented one Asha Odekar, her British accent seeming vaguely familiar for some reason. "It seems fitting."
The Boss shook her head as she smashed a crawling Murderbot and bashed through another door, repeating the process of alien mass murder. "But they don't maraud! They're fucking tanks that roll around and constantly make me crash my cars."
"Sure, it's definitely the Marauders," Johnny Gat teased sarcastically, making the President grind her teeth a little as she rocketed another clump of Zin to hell.
"Oh, fuck you."
"They do maraud," came CID's monotone. "They are programmed to do just that."
"Fine, we'll call them fucking marauders," she finally conceded, smashing through another door and blowing up singular Zin soldier with a spectacular death scream. She dubbed him "Wilhelm."
The room she now found herself in was much like the other abductee storage rooms she had passed through while on Zinyak's ship. She briefly wondered if she should start searching the individual pods, but before she could start trying to do so, a marker popped up in the mech's HUD, along with a cluster of repair nodes that she quickly snatched up.
"So, is she deeper in?"
"Yep," Kinzie tersely replied.
"Fuck."
---
The first indication that anything was happening was an alarm that started blaring through the room, along with a repeated message in some language Twilight wasn't familiar with.
It had been at least an hour, possibly/probably more, since she had woken up in that tube of goo, and her attempts to remove the collar around her neck had proven fruitless. Even considering what she could do with her hooves without magic, she had long since come to the conclusion that the uncomfortable accessory was not made with ponies in mind. Well, actually it was, but it wasn't meant to be used by ponies, that was for sure. There were buttons on it that were hidden in deep recesses that she just couldn't touch with her hooves.
It must be an intentional design, she thought. Those evil things obviously didn't want their prisoner to take it off and run riot with magic. Which she would.
She cursed herself again for thinking that, though she then found herself justifying it to herself. Since she had been put in that terrible version of Ponyville, she had been bludgeoned, buried, choked, stabbed, beheaded, dismembered, de-horned, set on fire and burned, shot with crossbow bolts, crushed, eaten, poisoned, discected, and many other fatal, brutal things that she did not care to try and recall. She was well within her rights to feel wrathful.
"No... Violence isn't the answer..." she told herself aloud, shutting her eyes and shaking her head rapidly. "Violence isn't the answer... I am not a violent pony... No matter how much they deserve it..."
For better or worse, that train of thought was viciously derailed when she heard a loud series of yells, followed by a loud crash and sounds of fighting. She could vaguely hear what sounded like those smaller weapons the President had used during her fight with that... abomination from fake Ponyville, but it was difficult to tell. The goo she was suspended in made it hard to hear anything outside the tube.
Thankfully, the noises were getting closer. Unfortunately for her nerves, the noises were getting closer. She immediately thought the worst. Her captors were coming to kill her again! She began to hope that this was still one of those "Simulations" that the President and her friends had been talking about. She didn't want to die. She wasn't ready to die. She couldn't bear the thought of dying while her friends, family, and idol missed her. Thinking of them looking and waiting in vain for a dead pony brought tears to her eyes.
It... felt good. It felt good to cry... She could barely remember any times in the "Simulation" that she wasn't crying or screaming. But this... this felt real. And it began to snowball into sobs, muffled by the red slime keeping her suspended in her tubular prison.
She probably would have had a more full breakdown if a door directly in front of her tube hadn't exploded. A huge, bipedal figure lumbered through it. Its body looked like it was wearing a full suit of metallic armor, though its helmet and bits of its two oddly shaped arms had a strange, light blue glow to them that made it seem... cool.
Whatever it was, it began to approach Twilight Sparkle's prison. The unicorn shut her eyes and braced herself for whatever it was about to do.
---
The Boss crashed through one more door to come out into another abductee room, and immediately saw her objective. "You'd think Zinyak would want to hide her better," she quietly commented as she walked her mech over towards the tube.
What she saw within gave her pause. Very little gave the leader of the Third Street Saints and the former free world pause, but this little unicorn did. She looked pathetic. Twilight was clearly scared of her, and she looked... well, she looked like she'd been stuck in that tube for many, many months. She frowned and stepped a little closer to the pod, stopping right in front of it. She brought her minigun arm back, then slammed it right through the bottom of the pod, shattering it and freeing its captive.
---
Twilight fell to the cold, metal floor with a loud cry as the slime that had kept her floating fell out around her, dispersing all over the ground and washing away the shards of glass or... whatever it was made of. Upon landing, she felt that bile coming back and couldn't hold it in this time. Her nonexistant lunch spilled onto the wet floor, a sickly violet-green color.
Once she had finished vomiting, she finally opened her eyes to look around. Then she looked back at the huge, lumbering beast that had freed her, eyeing it with both fear and hope.
Hope won out when she heard a familiar voice. "So, still wondering if I'll kill you?" came that confident feminine tone, making her smile just a little as she shakily tried to rise to her hooves.
"... T-Thank you... Thank you so... urp... so much..." she uttered in a raspy voice as more bile came up and out, managing not to do it on herself in spite of her weakness and disorientation. Instead, she collapsed rather embarassingly, her limbs splayed out.
The President, apparently inside that huge suit of armor, stepped closer to the unicorn until they were mere inches apart. The suit opened from the front to reveal the very same creature that had saved her life in that wretched place before. Twilight lifted her gaze as said creature hopped out of the armor and landed with a grunt on the ground beside her.
"Think you can stand?" she uttered, offering one of her... claws to the unicorn. Twilight examined it... it was that same fleshy pale color, but the backs of its individual... claws had what looked like short, blunt claws on the tips... Perhaps they weren't claws, but rather, hands. She must be some sort of furless ape, Twilight managed to ponder as she put a hoof in the President's hand.
A few seconds of uneasy effort and Twilight Sparkle was back on her hooves, albeit shakily. She looked the President over again. That black outfit was gone - as were her sunglasses - and in its place was some sort of grey jumpsuit with bits of black on her shoulders and parts of her legs. A zipper ran up its front and the zipper itself was not all the way zipped, exposing an even more pale portion of her torso. She idly noted that those lumps on the President's chest seemed to be a part of her body.
"What's with that collar?" the bipedal creature asked, producing those familiar looking hand held weapons again and looking around cautiously. "Is it yours?"
Twilight lit up a little, suddenly realizing the opportunity (and quietly berating herself a little for not thinking of it first). She lifted her head and sniffled, electing not to wipe her eyes because of how slimy she still was. "... N-No... It isn't... I don't know why it's there, but I can't take it off... Can you? ... Please...?" she replied, sounding raspier than before. She briefly wondered if her captors had even been feeding her. Her mouth felt like a desert and her stomach felt like a void.
The President of the United States eyed the collar and crouched down to examine it, noting a few buttons on its front that receeded into such. She seemed to think about it for a moment before pushing one of the buttons seemingly blindly.
Whatever it was, the collar made a few odd beeping noises before it suddenly came apart and fell off the unicorn in two halves. As soon as it did, it felt as though somepony had lifted a heavy layer of film off of her body and she could feel her magic beginning to slowly return to her. She managed a weak smile for her savior and started to try to nuzzle her, but stopped herself; she didn't think the President would appreciate being slimed.
"... Thank you... so much..." she panted, slowly rubbing her neck. Now that it was off, Twilight realized just how tight it had been. Her body had gotten used to its presence, so with it off, it felt great.
"Don't thank me yet..." the biped said in a distracted tone, looking back at the open armor suit.
Twilight suddenly found herself being pulled onto the President's shoulders, and being placed inside said armor before her savior climbed in herself. Once the armor closed in, she realized that it was quite cramped; the position she was sitting in had Twilight's head pressed right against the biped's stomach. It was dark, but only for a moment as the inside lit up with displays and a view of the outside. The unicorn, now thoroughly interested and distracted with the strange armor, decided not to ask about it and instead watched as the creature seemed to pilot the hulking contraption.
---
Ignoring the awkward position that the two were now crammed into, The Boss turned the mech suit around to begin leaving the same way they had come. Oddly enough, there was no opposition in the next room, only the corpses of the Zin and the scrap left behind by their Murderbots.
"Kinzie, same place?" she quipped, stopping the mech before she went any further.
"Yeah... where's Twilight?" came Kensington's response, seeming confused. "I don't see her around you."
The leader of the Saints raised an eyebrow. "She's... in the robot with me. I don't think she can walk, let alone run right now." She paused for a moment, chosing her words. "Kinzie, what are you doing?"
"Oh.. Uh... just poking through the Zin's security," she answered in a rather suspicious sounding manner.
"Dammit Kinzie, stop watching porn and pay attention... Never thought I'd say that..." the Boss scolded, hearing a sigh from her Press Secretary.
"Yeah, head back to the same platform. We'll be there in four, maybe five minutes, but the Zin are chasing us down. You'd better get moving because when we get there, we won't be able to wait for you for long."
"Got it," the President replied, getting the mech moving again and briefly looking down at Twilight. She could definitely feel the slime rubbing off on her suit, and it was uncomfortable at best, but she forgot about it the moment she looked at Twilight.
The way she was sitting and had her hands on the controls didn't allow for a lot of freedom of movement. Having a little purple unicorn sitting around her feet with her head meshed against her stomach - a few inches below her chest - didn't help either. She couldn't see past her own chest, so she could only see the top half of Twilight's head.
It was equal parts adorable and heartwrenching.
On one hand, she was tapping into the secret weapon of any dog anywhere ever: putting their head on something makes them infinitely more adorable. And Twilight was watching the mech suit's view with undisguised intrigue, her huge violet eyes glued to the screen.
And on the other, Twilight Sparkle looked like shit. Her eyes were heavily bloodshot and her purple and pink streaked mane was in great disarray. She'd probably been crying a lot, if her behavior back in the simulation was any indication.
She felt compelled to say something. She wasn't totally without a heart, after all.
"... Uhhh... You doing alright?" she awkwardly asked, almost immediately starting to regret that decision.
The unicorn looked at her now, blinking twice before quietly shaking her head.
"... Oh..."
The awkward silence that followed was terrible, but short lived as the mech stomped into another room. Zin were everywhere with full armaments. Shields, RPGs, specialists that she'd only seen inside the Simulation, CIDs, Murderbots, and... Marauders.
"Fuck that!" the Boss yelled, making the mech suit lurch forward in a dash while every single Zin in the room started firing. Many, many shots connected with the suit and rattled the cockpit. It was a wonder that they didn't immediately die, though given the fact that the RPGs and Marauders missed, perhaps it wasn't. "Hang on!" she yelled to the unicorn, taking off with the bot's jetpack and making a beeline for the door.
---
The sudden profanity startled the purple pony, following the biped's instructions and bracing herself while watching the screen. She could see all sorts of glowing projectiles hitting the giant armor suit. Judging by the way the small space rumbled with each strike, she figured it was a bad thing.
Twilight closed her eyes tightly, wracking her brain for ideas... one came fairly quickly. "Ummm... Kinzie?" she spoke up, hoping that she would be heard.
"Is that Twilight?" the voice replied.
"Y-Yes!" Twilight said loudly, wishing she knew more about the one called Kinzie. "Ummm... how tall is this armor?"
"It's a robot," she heard the President mutter under her breath.
"Ummm... about twelve feet. Why?" Kinzie answered curiously.
"Okay... thanks...!" Twilight let out a sigh and closed her eyes, trying to will more magic into her body (despite the lack of such an ability) as she opened them again and watched the screen as the armor suit brought them out of that death trap of a room.
"What are you doing, Twilight?" the President queried, peering down at the unicorn.
"I think... I think I can make us a shield..." she uttered softly, swallowing dryly. The biped seemed incredulous as she continued. "I don't... I don't know how long I'd be able to keep it up, but... it's something... I want to help..."
"Ooookay, great," the President uttered in reply, continuing through Zinyak's ship.
---
The next three minutes were intense. The Zin seemed to be very much opposed to letting the Boss leave with their precious captive. The Boss didn't stop for much, though, opting to run and gun through the Zin ship. She was getting awfully sick of mowing down Murderbots.
"Boss!" Shaundi's voice rang out through the cockpit, startling Twilight as they approached the door to the landing platform. "We're gonna be there in just a few seconds! Johnny and Ben are trying to hold them off, but you need to hurry! Where are you?"
"Almost there! J-" The Boss started, though as she walked through the last door. She was, however, cut off when a massive barrage of lasers and rockets struck the mech suit, filling the cockpit with smoke. "SHIT!"
"Boss! What happened?!" Shaundi yelled. "Bo-"
"I'm okay!" the President yelled back as she dashed out of the killzone, stamping towards the edge of the platform while turning to return fire on the bastards that had nearly blown her up. "Fly faster, Shaundi!"
"Got it!"
Another dash sent the mech sliding across the platform and into incoming fire, making the robot's HUD light up with many, many warnings as it worked to vent smoke from the cockpit and recommended that its pilot eject immediately. The Boss quickly stomped behind a nearby wall and began firing on Zin troops behind her, looking down at the unicorn sitting at her feet.
"Twilight, whatever that shield is, we need it now or we're dead!"
---
No pressure, then. "... Alright... Here goes..." she managed with a following cough, closing her eyes and focusing as hard as she could. She dug for every single tiny shred of magic she had left in her, channeling it all into her horn.
---
The Boss didn't know what she was expecting when she asked for a shield, but she wasn't expecting her purple charge to begin lighting up the cockpit. She chanced a glance downwards to see Twilight's horn glowing an appropriate violet, raising an eyebrow and a hand to wave away some smoke. Upon looking at the view screen, she saw that a thin layer of purple... stuff was forming a bubble around the mech suit.
"... Alright... Alright, just keep it up!" she declared as she made the bot lurch into action, immediately seeing the ship at the other end of the docking platform.
"Boss! We're here!" Shaundi yelled as they stomped their way over, now ignoring any and all Zin on their way there.
The Boss fired the robot's jetpack and took off towards the ship, flying it as hard as she could towards the open cargo bay door. Alien fire sailed into and past them nonstop, but the shield held (from what the Boss could tell, anyway). A few seconds later, they were in, and the door slammed shut behind them.
"We're in! Go!" the Boss yelled, feeling the ship lurching back up to top speed. She lowered her gaze to the tired unicorn and tapped her head a few times. "Twilight, you can stop now."
---
Twilight gasped as she was told to stop, breaking her concentration and opening her eyes to look up at the President. She swallowed once and nodded at her savior. "... We're safe?"
The biped shook her head and Twilight's expression fell slightly. "No. We have to get away first," came her answer, tapping a few things on the side of the armor to make its front open. Smoke filtered out of it as the President hopped out of the suit, grunting with the landing. "Come on... oh, uh.. right."
Twilight slowly tried to climb out of the armor, but her hooves failed her and she collapsed. She passed out a few seconds later.
---
The Boss cursed under her breath as she saw Twilight collapse, climbing up to the cockpit and awkwardly picking up the little unicorn. Then she hopped back down from the heavily damaged mech, grunting harder with the effort.
Matt Miller and Pierce were waiting for her. "What's wrong with her?" Pierce quipped, pointing at the unconscious equine with his hat and scratching his head with his other hand. Miller beckoned the Boss over and pointed to his couch in the corner, upon which the leader of the Saints placed their quadruped prize.
"I dunno. She's probably hungry, though. See to her when she wakes up, I'm gonna go take the controls. Matt, fix the mech. Pierce... do whatever..." the Boss uttered, getting a nod from the former and a shrug from the latter as he elected to stay put.
"Nah, I'll stay. Meeting an alien that doesn't want to kill me's better than being Kinzie's middleman," the face of the Saints replied, sitting on a nearby crate as a door above them opened. CID floated through it and down to observe the unicorn. It didn't say a word.
The Boss left the cargo bay and made a dash for the bridge, leaving Twilight alone with the two males and the AI.