//------------------------------//
// My Self-Defense Catastrophe  
// Story: The Light Despondent 
// by Doctor Fluffy 
//------------------------------//



Chapter 9:  My Self-Defense Catastrophe / Real China

Co-authors:

TB3 (Thank you so much! ….especially cause this is the minor hiatus. Go have fun writing Last Train!)
Jed R

Editors:
Redskin122004
VoxAdam

Pre-readers:
Kizuna-Tallis



“We sure liberated the hell out of this place.”
Anonymous U.S serviceman in Vietnam

I fear this and it feeds on me
My self-defense catastrophe
The Light Despondent, Biting Elbows. This lyric comes after a bitchin good guitar solo.

New York City,
December 25, 2022

The Filly, Dancing Day

When the King's Speech concludes, you find yourself... More than a little uplifted. There’s a fairly happy mood all around, and you’re all more than ready to listen.

"Continue, though?" you ask.

"Sure," Kraber says.

"Do you have to do it in here?" Verity asks, rubbing her hooves together as if trying to return feeling to absent hands.

"Officially, yes," Kraber says. "I can walk out, though."

"No you can't!" Nurse Wildfire calls over.

"She didn't break anything major!" Kraber calls back.

"Look, I know you burnt out most of your pain receptors, but just stay put... Kraber."

"Right. So, guess I've got no choice till they decide I move," Kraber said. "Anyway, we’d taken the Sorghum, and Lovikov was giving that godawful speech..."

"Somebody shoot me," Verity groaned.

Kraber looked over at her and raised an eyebrow.

Verity looks over at Kraber, and notices you. And, regardless of the fact that many ponies are referring to her in the grown-up words that they keep saying you must never use, you find yourself… liking her? No. But finding her bearable. As ponifications go, this is bearable, and she’s not a zombie, so there’s that.

She won’t be your friend any time soon, though.

But she can see all of you, that many of the ponies, and even some of the humans that had come over to see Kraber are heavily armed. There’s also a big revolver (What is it with Kraber and revolvers?) with the barrel mounted upside down, beneath the frame, on the table next to Kraber’s bed.

“Why..." she moans.

"As I was saying..." Kraber continues. "So, Lovikov's stupid fokking speech…





...was fokking grating on his ears.

“Mariesa?” Kraber whispered, as Lovikov continued to badger and harangue the entire FM spectrum.

“Yes?”

“What the fok are we doing?”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“Just… all this. Where’s the liberation?” Kraber asked.

“Is something wrong, Viktor?” she asked, whispering, desperately trying not to be heard in the background of Lovikov’s speech (as it happened, the microphone was just sensitive enough to pick up their whispers).

“Fine, I’ll fokking do this. I’ll going to make another sweep of the rig,” Kraber said, desperate to be somewhere without Lovikov. And, oddly enough, the blood. The red stuff was becoming a little unnerving somehow, pretty impressive from how much it had splattered, but something - be it his hallucinations, his conscience, what little he had left of a soul - was screaming out at him, get out of this room!, “I get the feeling the enemy could be holed up in a lot of places in here.”

’Who’s the enemy?’

“Just... be careful,” Mariesa said. “Don’t... don’t get hurt, alright?” 

“I promise,” Kraber said, heading for the door and switching for a shotgun.

He half-hoped someone might get him as he searched. But… he had a duty. To the HLF. To humanity.

“Do you even believe that?” the newfoal asked.

“Of course I fokking do!” Kraber hissed, all pretense of sanity and normality gone as he argued with the… what was it? A ghost? A representation of his own guilt?

Ah, it didn’t matter. What it was, he decided, was annoying.

“No,” it said, “I’m right. And even so, I’m only annoying because you don’t fokking listen!” it mocked him, using his own voice.

“Tremble as your psyche unwinds, praise her in your madness. As your children so sublime, you will know but gladness!”

“Get… out… of… my… fokking. HEAD!” Kraber yelled.

“Ooh, that’s a bad habit you’re getting into,” the newfoal taunted him.

He strode down the corridors, shotgun held at the hip, ready to fire, searching for more ponies to kill. He kicked open doors, peered inside, prepped to throw grenades. He poked his head out from behind corners, scouring for anything that moved.

And he searched every door, every alcove in the rig’s accommodation block. He’d seen movies where children and others would hide, and soldiers would come to smoke them out. Speaking of soldiers, he’d passed Couldn’t remember the movie’s title-it was in black and white, so it must have been an old one.

He threw open cupboards, taking spare change and finding food. He threw open doors. He opened the doors to closets, kicked open crawlspaces, opened up whatever holes he could find.

The idea came to him to check some of the ancillary levels, or better yet, the honeycombed interiors of the other support columns. 

Of course! What a great idea! 

Of course! He didn’t have dogs he could use to sniff people out… He’d have to get a fluffy dog. Maybe a samoyed? Ooh, or maybe a wolf pup. He knew a few guys who knew some guys that had smuggled wolves out of Europe in a fit of pique, and were breeding them to eat newfoals...

’I know I saw this in a movie once, but which one was it? Ah, no matter…’

Flipping open a service hatch in the floor, he climbed down into a reeking, steaming vertical space, a series of descending catwalks threaded with creaking staircases, strung with hissing pipes and humming conduits. His MG2019 on his back, he slowly continued to descend down the length of the shaft, thankful he had a gas mask. He held out the LMG... 

And then he heard it - down, almost at the bottom, low, just above sea level.

He rushed down the stairs, quiet as he could, and found his shotgun’s barrel…





”Hold on a minute,” Scootaloo asks. “Were you really at Agua Caliente?”

“Is this all that important?” Kraber asks.

“Well, no, but… you were around Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean, blowing up bureaus, you got on TV once, you were at Defiance, and… how does all this happen to you?”

“My ass is everywhere,” Kraber says simply.

“His ass really is everywhere,” Aegis adds. “Well, except Okinawa.”

“My ass always wanted to go to Okinawa,” Kraber says, completely straight-faced. “It heard it was pretty there.” He paused. “Though really, I work for this kinda thing. Anyway, now I had my shotgun…





...pointed at the face of a redheaded child, her hair curly, smeared with unidentifiable muck. She pointed a cheap 9mm back at Kraber. Several other children were present as well, huddled together atop a rust-stained ballast tank: a girl that might have been the first kid’s sister, a youngish teenager in a jacket and ill-fitting kevlar, holding a 10mm.

They were guarding ponies. Mostly colts and fillies, sporting every color of the rainbow beyond the dull tones seen on Earth-born equines. 

‘Well Vicky, hear they are. Behold the Enemy...’

Except, these didn’t look like the destroyers of the world, nor they didn’t look like they were anyone’s salvation or what have you. They didn’t look like they were ready to ponify anyone. They didn’t look like they had no regard for human life-well, though little love for him burned in their eyes, and Kraber found he could understood that sentiment. They didn’t…

His finger closed around the trigger and abruptly stopped. His will failed him.

They just looked like scared children that had given up on everything.

Not fillies. Not colts. Not ponies.

Children. Their eyes were full of an innocence betrayed, one that transcended species. Even if… even if they were the same as those kontgesigs that had destroyed his home and murdered billions, he didn’t have it in him.

The little girl with the 9mm shook. Her gun trembled.

Viktor knew that he deserved the bullet. This was his fault.

“D-drop it,” the girl whispered, aiming at his gas mask.

“Go on, fucker,” one teal unicorn said, staring him down, her horn weakly glowing. “Do it... “

This was not what he’d expected at all.

“...I’m not,” Kraber whispered, looking down at the ponies and children hiding in the little alcove. Oh lord, of all the things he could have found, it had been the thing that could make him so broken...

“What’d you say?” the redheaded boy asked.

And it was at that moment that Viktor remembered the name of the movie this reminded him of, the movie where soldiers had been searching through all those alcoves, tracking down elusive human prey...

Schindler’s List

And here he was, cast in the role of… No, he couldn’t be, he was Jewish, he went to synagogue when he could.

Oh God no.

The world dropped out beneath his feet, and one leg simply gave out under him.

“I’m not here to hurt you,” he heard himself say, his voice shaky, betraying his uncertainty. His HLF emblem, cut into his chestplate with a soldering iron, seemed to swim as he looked down at it. Something about it seemed to say ‘filth’ backwards.

“But… you’re HLF,” one colt protested, staring up into the muzzle of his LMG, or at the grenade he held.

“You’re a-”

“I know, I know,” Kraber whispered. “But first things first. You’re not in here. I was never here, and you have to stay down here for the next few hours. Got that?”

He didn’t want to think on what fate he’d brought to their mothers up on deck. To their fathers…

The terrible feeling as countless fathers entered their homes and saw the slaughter, searching in terror through an eerily silent house, falling to their knees as they smelled the psychopathic purple liquid and cried, NO NO NO NO NO for hours as they realized how much they’d been destroyed, the glee on their faces, the utter hate overcoming them as they took the knife to their torturer, hour after hour until morning turned into night and had it been fifteen hours already, they’d ask as they looked down at their victim, disemboweled and painting the room with their own blood, viscera and fluids and oh FOK

oh fok

oh no

no

NO NO NO NO he couldn’t - be he was HLF he was a heroic partisan striking against a corrupt

he was destroying families

no no no he

-killed children and foals dammit

No

he could have just as easily been them he might have been broken but he’d broken so many more

He was the PER. Alright, no. He was just as hateful as them. Still, they were monsters-

But did that justify what he’d done?

It... it didn’t.

Kraber turned away, hoping they wouldn't see him shaking like a leaf, or the tears welling up in his eyes. 

He turned away, turned away, turned away. What was there to do?

He walked up the stairs, climbed the ladders, dragged himself out of this fetid hell, and slumped down, hunched over, all but gone in mind. When the PHL got here, they'd kill him. So would Lovikov. 

Ah, fok! FOK! FOK! F-

Shit. He’d really beaten any meaning out of that word, hadn’t he? 

He slumped down, sliding against the wall. He was idly aware that something had rubbed off on his back, maybe the blood.

What was he to do?!

“Hey? Annoying hallucinatory kontgesigs!” Kraber said. “Where the hell are you when I need you?”

There was no answer.

“We’re just figments of your imagination,” Anka - or rather, an earth pony with what Kraber was acutely aware to be  said. “It’s up to you.”

“But…” Kraber sighed, and slumped even further against the wall. “I’ve got kak. I have no idea what the fok I’m doing, I’ve got nowhere to run…”

“We don’t come up with ideas, Daddy. It’s only you.”

“The HLF will…”

“Daddy? What’ve you been asking yourself for the past few hours?”

That the HLF were….

‘The Enemy...’

There was a dead PHL man in the room with Kraber. About his size, a similar enough build to him, dead fingers clutching at a Fostech Origin shotgun. 

Suddenly Kraber was thrashing, ripping and clawing at himself as he struggled to tear off his own armour. It pulled away from his body with a clawing suction, as if trying to hold onto him. That emblem still blazed out: ‘Filth. FILTH’

“Filth? I’ll gie the fokking kont filth,” Kraber muttered, struggling to get it off. FOK! Why’d everything he wore get stuck to things? It was like the fokking vest couldn’t come off. It was dangling by one arm, and-

Whipping his arm to one side, the vest sailed down the hallway, bouncing and clanking against the walls.

His own shotgun was hurled into a corner.

Then, moving as if in a trance, Kraber, began to stripped the corpse of its armor and forced it onto himself when he noted the fancy case in the room. UN logo stamped on the side, the dead man’s name on it. Curiosity sparked in his mind as he unlatched the case and open it, staring at the item within.

New armor in digital urban gray camo, nearly pristine and filled with numerous of items for him to use. He stared at the armor in shock before he quickly slogged off the bloody armor he had on and began to fit the newer one onto his lanky frame. There was even a box of grenades nearby, with a note:

-Imbeault:

I don’t understand why you feel like you needed these. You’re guarding a rig, not PHL R&D or Cheerilee’s office, but apparently, the public responds well to us looking like hardy space marines. I was told to make some grenades to look futuristic and barely better than average, but I made a few with some Japanese research just for a laugh. They will work, but they probably aren’t meant to be used in close combat on the rig. Try the black one on a newfoal stampede after filling the air full of shrapnel, it’ll be hilarious.

Sincerely, 
Sebastian Irving.

“Fok, this thing is laanie,” Kraber murmured to himself as put on the armor, it felt like a well-tailored suit instead of armor. He just finished putting on the last of it on when he felt it literally warm up to keep out the cold sea air. Give him long enough, and he might not even notice wearing it. 

‘Perfect! A Space Marine is you!’

...it included a mask. A Crowe Laboratories Eel-type to be exact, with seven micro-cameras in place of a visor. A good gas mask... uncomfortable as hell, but worth it. Plus, it’d look funny when he stared at people while wearing one. They’d be unnerved, they wouldn’t be sure where to look...


He knew what to do now. Most of all, he had to do it fast - before he could tell himself not to, or realize just how stupid it all was. If this could get him killed, second-guessing absolutely would.

“There’s no bad choices,” Kraber remembered his dad saying back on the beach. “Well, maybe there are. But it’s more important what you do with a choice.”

With the gas mask secured, he put on the helmet on over it, making sure to line up the seals and latches that mated the two together. Then, with the dead man’s Fostech twenty-round in hand, he made his way back down to the kids who had barricaded themselves in the foot of one of the platform’s legs. 

He hoped their parents were still alive. That he hadn't slaughtered them… no, there had to be something he could do to make that right, to undo it all!

But no, there wasn’t. All there was now, was the choice of leaving these kids to die, or to try and get them out.

“Come with me if you want to live…” he growled as he scrambled down into their little panic-room. He did not look at them though, could not bring himself to. They probably knew what he was.

Instead, he strode straight across the room and, by dint of sheer physical strength, smashed open the multiple locks on an escape hatch, stomping down on them with his HLF steel-toed boots. They were the one bit of HLF clothing he could bear to keep, with decent amounts of tread, a good ability to break things he turned his toes or soles to, and a nice ability to find a home in something’s skull…

Cool nighttime sea air poured in as he shouldered it open. They were not even six feet above the churning surface of the ocean, and high above, vaulted like an industrial cathedral, was the underside of the Sorghum’s superstructure. Not two hundred feet away bobbed the Arctic Warrior, still moored up where they had left it at the foot of the next column over. He could just make out the silhouettes of Verity Carter and Red Flammel, warding off other watercraft from attempting approach with a pair of mil-spec 40mm grenade launchers…





“Wait, when did Verity get back there?!” you ask. “You can’t just have characters teleport for no reason!”

“I walked back when we’d secured the rig,” Verity sighed, rolling her huge eyes. “The idiot over there just forgot to mention it.”

“Hey, fok you! I was having a fokking mental breakdown!” Kraber yells. “...And probably withdrawal symptoms too. Damn, Lovikov must’ve really been woedend at me. Anyway.”





There was an emergency boat stored in this hidey-hole, an inflatable ‘zodiac’ attached to a cylinder of pressurised gas. He tore it down from its mounting and spun the gas valve, before tossing the bundle of vulcanised fabric out through the hatch, holding onto a trailing line. Seconds later, a perfectly serviceable craft bobbed beneath their feet. It was dark and unobtrusive, the perfect escape...

‘This is desertion, disobedience. This is… this is….’

Ah, fok Lovikov and the rest, Viktor decided. Even if he survived this night, they’d declared him dead already. Probably planned to shove him off the deck of the platform and blame it on a pony or something: a martyr’s death.

What’d have have to lose? Nothing. 

But these children, they stood to lose everything. Had he joined the HLF to kill? To murder? To orphan kids? 

’Well, ja.’ 

Yeah, he’d jumped at the chance to do all those things, to leave a trail of dead gluesticks and horsefuckers behind him. Wait, no-

He… he hadn’t done it just to kill, had he?!

“Don’t lie to yourself!” said Victory the Pretty Private. “You’re a terrible person, but you can just let it all float away if you take the poti-”

No.

He wasn’t fokking giving up like that. He wasn’t going to stand in the streets and yell ‘CRUSADE ME!’ for some annoying fokking self-hating hipsters or misandric psychopaths to turn him into a pastel fokking zombie horse. He wasn’t going to go to the PER, so that only left…

The Ponies for Human Life...ah shit. 

The notion went against every action he had taken since that fateful birthday, but then, this wasn’t about him anymore, was it?

It was for these kids. For Kate, then. For Peter, for Anka… Even Dietrich and Cousin Richard. For anyone that had been caught in the way of fokking PER, for his chommies back in college, anyone out there.

“That’s the man I married,” the nameless newfoal said approvingly, in Kate’s voice. “Be careful though, the PHL are coming, and right now they’ve got no clue as to your little change of heart.”

Kraber had no fokking clue how the hallucination knew, but… there was no time left to consider. Lovikov was still broadcasting out, and the boats down below were visibly full of trembling men and women. Some were scared, but the others were angry. A lot of them were pointing their guns up at the rig, and Kraber could see their hands shaking in the weak, artificial light. A unicorn aboard one boat was levitating what looked like an HMG…

The larger ships notwithstanding, the gathered fleet didn’t have to fear the Sorghum’s own cannons, which couldn’t depress far enough to fire down into its own footprint. Likewise the HLF had little concern for the effect of small-arms against the shielded underside of the rig.

But it was still a standoff, one that would only devlove into further chaos once the PHL arrived in response to the hijacking.

Holding onto the inflatable’s mooring-line, poised in the open hatch, Kraber realised that as of yet, nopony and nobody had noticed them. Instead their attention was focused up at the platform’s  superstructure.

Except for a few who had turned their tails and fled towards the shore, towards the city. Hmmm...





Summer 2020

“I admire that in a man, Viktor,” Kagan had said. “I know you can get through this. We’ll meet up later, I promise. Right now… you have to get to one of the boats.”

“There’s guards everywhere!” Viktor hissed back, staring over the assortment of barrels.

“You can get in there, I know you can,” Kagan said. “You’re a slippery bastard, Viktor.”





Right. All he had to do was get these kids to shore. But no-way in hell was that going to be possible in the dinky inflatable, which lacked even an outboard engine.

And then he directed his attention back towards the inviting shape of the Arctic Warrior...

Oh God, no, he wasn’t going to…the HLF would kill him - they’d probably use him as a meatshield for potion-grenades, drown him, flay him to bits, hang him from trees if he d-

His conversation with Lovikov came back to mind. He’d been offered an ignominious death in the woods, shot by people that were more chommies of convenience than actual friends, or to go out ablaze with glory.

He’d chosen glory, but he’d never said for which side he’d go down fighting for…

“Stay here”, he murmured to the kids. “If anyone tries to capture you guys, put a bullet in their fokking faces… think you can do that?”

“Don’t think I have a choice,” said one filly.

“That’ll work in a pinch, kid,” Kraber said, ruffling her mane. Because even if she was a fokking gluestick, she was still a child. “If somebody has a gun to all of you, shoot the bliksem. The one that reacts first in a firefight wins, and they’ll be shocked to see children. That gives you an edge.”

They looked up at him, caught aback by his ruthless pragmatism.

“Sometimes, you have to do things before you have the chance to question yourself,” he explained.

After bestowing that good advice, he shimmered down into the zodiac inflatable, and lying prone with his hands as paddles, quietly made his way out towards the moored tugboat…





New York…

“What was it you called me, Verity?” Kraber asked lightly. “A treacherous cunt?”

“You still are,” the mare replied drily. “And if you hadn’t snuck up on me and knocked me out with the butt of your gun, I’d have taken you no trouble…”

Kraber snorted and waved her off. “Sure you would have.”

The half-sedated mare held up a challenging hoof. “Want to go another ten rounds in the ring with me, pony-pounder?”

Kraber laughed and settled back in his own bed, and Verity smirked.

“Yeah, I thought so. I was impressed with how you flipped Redd overboard though…”





Luckily, Verity had left the tug’s motor idling. Having incapacitated the two crew left behind (and none too gently tossed Verity onto the mooring platform), Victor had cast off all lines and clumsily brought the Arctic Warrior over to the hatch he had opened.

“Jump aboard! Quick!” he shouted, motioning for the kids to leap or climb down onto the deck. There wasn’t a moment to lose. From above he could hear shouting voices, and a set of navigation lights rapidly approaching in the western sky heralded the approach of several PHL helis.

Fok! They were coming!

“Get aboard, now!” he roared again from the wheelhouse, struggling to hold position as the current swirled about the foot of the column. As more and more passengers climbed aboard, he saw to his surprise that their numbers had swollen: now there was a number of oil workers escaping through the hatch as well.

‘One of the kids must have gone up to look for more survivors… whoever it is, he’s either crazy fokking brave or crazy fokking dumb. Kwaai!’

“That’s the last of us!” came a cry, and without waiting for further confirmation, Viktor spun the helm over and gunned the throttles, just as the approaching helicopters began to trade fire with the platform.

And so, leaving a firefight in its wake, the Arctic Warrior sped off in the direction of Portland, navigation lights dimmed and transponder silent, a cargo of children, foals, and wounded workers onboard…

...plus one half-crazed defector .Well, maybe ‘half’ would be doing him too much credit.

“Who the hell are you?” one man asked. “I haven’t seen you around.”

"Ah'm one of thae new guards," Kraber said, trying for that old Robert Carlyle voice he’d affected… Nine years back?! Had it really been that long since… Ah, fokking hell. It’d work for now. Best not to think about it too hard. He coaxed a modicum more knots out of the tug’s engine. “My name’s Ivan Bliss.”

It was another lie, another spur of the moment name. After all, he wasn’t sure how notorious his actual identity was among these people. Every place had its own boogeyman, after all.

“Viktor, you have to stop running away!” the newfoal pleaded with him. “Tell them-”

A series of flashes in the sky shattered the conversation as the PHL helicopters blossomed into flowers of explosive light and fury. The blazed wrecks ploughed into the black water astern…

...and then the Sorghum’s arsenal of cannons exploded into a fusilade of shots.

But then, that probably wouldn’t do me any favors either.

!!BOOM!!BOOM!!BOOM!”

...And neither would that.

Rounds and shells whistled overhead, tracer-fire painting their trajectory...

“They’re shelling Portland!” someone gasped. “My God, they’re firing on the city! Are they fucking insane?!”

Yeah, there’s no way I’m confessing to have been with the kontgesigs firing on innocents, Kraber ‘thought’ at the new foal angel sitting on his proverbial shouter. Do me a favor, and HOU JOU FOKKING BEK!

And blessedly, it did so.





“Verity,” Kraber sighs, “Why the fok did anyone think that was a good idea?”

“You seriously believe their propaganda?!” Verity yells, and for a moment, you’re glad she’s kept restrained. 

“I wouldn’t know,” Kraber says. “I left.”

“You damn traitor,” Verity sighs.

“Look, you’ve both been through this,” you say, trying to mediate it. “Verity… just tell him what happened.”

“Alright,” she says.





Verity

“I wish so much that I could have gotten everyone in the HLF to say that you ran away,” I say. Dammit, why can’t you say anything?! I ask, looking up at the faces of every pony and human that’s listening to Viktor Kraber’s bizarre, outright fucking crazy journey.

“...Fine. I guess there’s more important stuff here. But I swear, we never wanted to bomb Portland,” I say. “I just wanted my daddy back on the Front, fighting alongside us, to protect humanity from bastards like you-“

And everyone is stone-faced. Even Kraber.

“What?” I say, looking up at him and Aegis, that huge earth pony that he likes, is unimpressed.

“You don’t quite count,” Aegis says.

“I’m still me!” I protest. “I’m still-“

“Let’s not go there,” Kraber says. “We haven’t gotten to the part where I set that newfoal on fokkin’ fire, or the thing with the Fillydelphia-“

“No, I need to say this,” Aegis says. “It’s for her own safe-”

“My own-“ I say, and I am so disgusted that I want to beat him to a bloody pulp, never mind that Aegis is literally twice as big as me. “My own fucking safety? I’ve had enough of ponies telling me what’s the best for me, like I have no fucking rights!”

“I wasn’t saying that,” Aegis says. “I was saying that you can’t go back. You try and escape somehow-“ he points to me. “And you will not get a hero’s welcome in the HLF. You stay here, you’re safe. Well, not by much.”

“Oh, you son of a-“

“What?!” says that little unicorn filly with the ballet hoofshoes, looking up at Kraber. It’s the one that he failed to kill back in Defiance. Or so I’m told. I didn’t like Defiance, it was a goddamn shithole. My parents took me outdoors, and that place was just awful in comparison. With so many people displaced by the goddamn geldos, there were lots of places to hide, places better than there. “I remember the Fillydelphia,” that little unicorn filly says, and she shivers. Despite yourself, you can’t blame her. The Fillydelphia was crazy.

“For what it’s worth, I’m sorry for eating that man’s throat in front of you,” Kraber says. “I was under a lot of stress-“

“It’s okay, you did tell me to close my eyes-”

“Again?! Seriously?!” Bly yelled. “Why would you do this?!”

“We’ll go into that later. It wasn’t your fault,” Kraber says. “And I’m sorry. I lost control, and bad kak happens when I do.”

“Holy shit, can we get you back on this?” I say, incredulously. He was never even remotely this calm in the HLF. “It’s like you’re on make-me-see-God-O-Contin.”

“Sorry, other people need it,” Kraber says. “Can’t be dipping into my own keg.”

“Ain’t we got more important things to talk about here?” Rivet asks. “I just want to know. What… did you do. I lost friends that day.” And it’s hard not to see that he’s grown up too fast. That he’s imitating his enormous dad, trying to be grown-up. I know that look too well.

“I promise, we never planned to attack Portland,” I say. “I swear, I just wanted him back, I’ve lost everything, home, friends, loves, my mother. Without him, the HLF could… could…”

“Don’t dig yourself deeper, kid” Aegis says. And I hate him. I hate Kraber, that sonovabitching turncoat that sold us all out twice and was still indispensable, the one that has so much work out for him while I’m expendable. I hate that he lived with ponies, the goddamn sellout. I hate…

I hate that he’s like me. So much like me, and so different. I hate that he made something of himself.

“So we were on the rig, and people from the boats all round had gotten it into their head that they could fight us,” I say. “And we hadn’t gotten all the people on the rig. Most of the actual military had holed up in its armory, and we could see people clambering on. Thankfully, we’d stationed people anywhere important - the drill, the guns.” I blink. “Speaking of, why the hell do you have guns on a rig?”

“In case something goes wrong,” says Vinyl Scratch, that DJ pony the PHL seem to like. I actually liked her music back before the War. “If it gets attacked by a zep, or something. They’re for firing while running away, more than anything.”

“Can’t blame us for being paranoid, can you?” Aegis’ other foal asks. She’s tall and slender, with white fur, green eyes, and a red and purple mane. If I’d gone horsefucker, I might think she’d end up being attractive.

“Fair enough,” I admit. Hard not to be in a world like this. “I heard this secondhand, alright? Kraber had knocked me out. But someone saw you steal the boat and they fired on it.”

“...Why?” Scootaloo asks.

“Well,” I say, “We were scared. Not by the boat - there were plenty of boats out there that helped take that rig back. See, we’d been hoping for an answer, and the one that Lovikov got was not it.”

Lovikov was already a paranoid bastard. He’d been jittering as he was holed up in the room. That AR-15 he liked, the one with the .50 Beowulf rounds and ridiculous drum mag that made it list to one side, was trembling.

He thought the HLF around him couldn’t see him shaking.  But there was a smile on his face whenever he looked at the corpses in the room, the ones that nobody dared remove. Even the human ones, or so I’ve been told.

Which… wasn’t right. I’ll admit, yes, we hire psychopaths, violent bastards that shouldn’t live anywhere outside a prison cell-

”Seriously?” Kraber asks.

And then the radio crackled. It wasn’t that other broadcast, the weird one with Gestalt. But… alright, we’ll get to that later. Anyway, Lovikov was a bit too happy admiring his handiwork, pony and human alike. We’re the human liberation front, 

And I sweep a glare across all of them, that treacherous cunt Kraber, his horsefucker college roommate, the stupid geldos they seem to love so much, that gluestick DJ

not the murder-everything-in-sight front. I’m telling you, he’d gotten further in the ranks than anyone that enjoyed bloodshed so much ever should. Not until you, Burakgazi, and that Scottish bastard Reid managed to rip out the guts of our ranks...

I honestly wouldn’t mind if he’d gotten killed on the mission, even if you lived through it as a result. He was expendable, a violent Russian thug with delusions of grandeur.

“Ah yes, someone to negotiate!” Lovikov laughed. “Now, PHL high command?” he was giddy with the power. His best action against the PHL, and one of the HLF on the rig told me right then and there that they doubted he’d be willing to let the rig go. “Excellent to have the pleasure of speaking to you,” he said, and he practically crooned it into the mic. Another HLF person, Lauren Estacado, said that he said it into the mic as if talking to a stupid child. “We have seized your mobile rig, the Sorghum, and we have hostages onboard. We will execute them if you do not comply with our demands.”

“I’m listening,” said whoever was on the other end of the line.

“Firstly,” Lovikov started. “We demand the return of Michael Carter to the HLF, and-”

"Enough," someone cut in. His voice was full of the rough tones of a man from deep Appalachia, with a baritone as deep as any valley in there. It was the tone someone uses when they’re angry as hell, too much to even raise their voice.

“Excuse me, but I am-”

“I don’t believe it!” the man interrupted. “You are as stupid as you sound. I said enough.”

"Who the hell is this?!” Lovikov yelled.

"You people just don't know when to quit,” the man said. “Fine. If I have to take care of you personally, then I will. You people," the man said, sneering, “If you can call yourselves that. You never knew what you were fucking with, and I can see that hasn’t changed.”

"Who the fuck do you think you are?!” Lovikov yelled. “Come here and you will be dead before you get a shot off!"

“You have no idea who I am, do you?”

“I couldn’t give a flying shit even if you held a fucking umbrella over my head to stop said shit to care who the fuck you are! I am in charge here, ME! NOT YOU!”


“I will tell you anyways. I am Colonel Marcus Renee of the UN/PHL Taskforce, and you have my attention.”

You could have heard a pin drop. Lovikov was silent, and tried to stammer something. 

“Do you think-” Marcus started.

“FUCK YOU, YOU HORSE FUCKER! FUCK YOU TELL HELL AND BACK! YOU GET CLOSE TO THIS RIG AND I BLOW UP ANY DUMBASS COMING! YOU HEAR ME! I WILL FUCKING END YOU AND YOUR STUPID GROUP WILL BURN UNDER OUR STRENGTH OF OUR TRUE HUMANITY!”

“I had you pegged for burning under some big gun from R&D,” Marcus remarked drily. “A laser, maybe. Or that thermite gun.”

“I like that thing!” someone called out in the background.

“THE FUCK YOU SAY! I WILL SKULL FUCK YOUR HEAD WHILE THAT PURPLE BITCH WATCHES ME! I WILL-”

“Lovikov!” a voice hissed over the personal HLF radio, a frantic whisper that could only be achieved by pure terror.

“I WILL RAPE HER OVER YOUR CORPSE! I WILL KEEP HER AS A LIVING FUCKING TROPHY WHILE WE RAM HER OVER AND OVER TO SHOW HER MY MIGHT AS A HUMAN! SHE LIKED THAT WOULDN’T SHE!”

“Lovikov!” The radio barked out again.

“I WILL MAKE YOU THIS PROMISE RIGHT HERE AND NOW! I WILL FUCKING KILL YOU THE MOMENT I SEE YOU!”

“So noted.”

“Lovikov! We have boarders on the rig, they being dropped by pegasus-*BLAM*!”

Lovikov and the entire HLF group in the room froze up as the gunshot blared over both radios, both the rigs and their personal radios.

“That wasn’t Lovikov, was it?” an unknown woman asked, the discarded radio picking up their heavily southern-accented voice. “One of you, promise me you’ll shoot that motherfucker. Just to shut him up.”

“I think its still transmitting.” Marcus’ voice came on next, causing everyone to slowly look at the paling look on Lovikov’s face. “Well then, this just got a lot harder. Lovikov, was it? Yeah, I am here. You have a promise to keep after all.”

“It would be a pleasure,” the same woman said.

Well, that clinched it. Marcus Renee. Marcus goddamn Renee. We’d tried to kill him near constantly, but none of it stuck. The best PHL medical treatments could cure him of any poison, he was always shielded when outside of a base, the man was goddamn indestructible.

And that was when WE were trying to kill him while he wasn’t geared up.

Outside, he was nearly impossible to get a bead on. He had the hardest and baddest of the UN at his fingertips. He had all the cool toys and armor, he had the backing of the entire world with him. He controlled the North America with words and backed up everything with progress. He wasn’t some Brass stuck at some desk in a bunker, he was a Marine who fought in the frontline with everyone else. Insisted on it, if the stories were right.

And he was here… on this rig… surrounded by the sea. A Marine and his group of trained killers were on this rig with only one boat out of here...

We might as well have served ourselves on a gold platter up to Kraber.

”Fok you, that only happened twice!”

“Why?’ Lovikov whispered, and his voice was wavering, as if coming from far away. “Why is he here? Why… Why in God’s name, no… Oh no…”

Wordlessly, one of the hostages, the one whose pony friend we’d killed, pointed up to a whiteboard and my jaw dropped at the words.

“COLONEL RENEE VISITING TODAY, CLEAN RIG UP, LOOK OUR BEST PEOPLE! :) ”

Yes, they actually had the smileyface emoticon.

It was around that time that I decided “Fuck this” and ran. Galt, Lovikov, neither one was paying me enough.

But on my way down, back to the waters (I didn’t have a plan, I just figured I didn’t want to be anywhere near the man that had said that shit to Colonel Renee) I saw Redd Flamel, still guarding the boat.  His grenade launcher, a real milspec thing, not a pipebomb launcher, was steadily aimed at the boats all around-

Then someone standing behind him punched him in the chin, kneed him in the balls, and flipped him into the ocean, somehow managing to keep the grenade launcher onboard.

I thought it was PHL, maybe someone thinking they could take the rig back themselves. So I snuck onto the boat, looking for the bastard that did it-

He elbowed me in the face and threw me onto the jetty.

I was unconscious long enough that someone fished me out of the water, and I pretended to be a survivor long enough that I managed to swim to shore. I’m glad I was unconscious, though, because I didn’t see the utter fucking travesty that got them firing those guns on Portland.

Lovikov, being half-crazy with rage, and seeing the boat you stole, Kraber, ordered the HLF to fire on Portland.

“If you’re trying to pin the bombardment all on me,” Kraber says, almost cheerfully, “I will wring your fokkin neck as you choke on the teeth I punched down your throat.”

There is an unpleasant silence.

“...Kay then,” I say.

Well, he said to aim up into the sky, for any pegasi, or any helicopters full of troops. Unfortunately, the HLF weren’t used to having artillery, so they weren’t exactly good shots. And he told them to keep firing.

And that’s how we fucked up. There. Are you happy, dammit?





Kraber again

As they drew closer to the harbor channel they saw the burning coastline, a conflagration consuming the vast shanty-towns that had been built right down to the tide-line and even on the offshore islands in the bay. Refugee housing, colonial mansions, and old tenements built of brick and wood nearly as thin as paper blazed in a sick harmony, as the guns from the immense rig continued to bombard the city, illuminating the sky with a million shimmering embers, ascending and dimming like dying souls.

“Mother of God!” cried out one man. “That last one came down just a block from Mercy Hospital...” 

“Fuck me!” added a mustard-yellow earth pony, practically galloping up to the tugboat’s bridge wing to get a better view, placing a pair of binoculars up to her eyes. “They hit my cousin’s house! And that’s… Huh. They hit the ruins of the Convie Bureau. Well, no loss there.”

“Portland had a Bureau?!” Kraber asked incredulously.

“They never finished it, though,” the earth pony explained. “It started construction early during the Three Weeks of Blood, and when the riots broke out, they started to convince PER doctors at Maine Medical to put patients in the Bureau, herd them in like cattle…”

“I remember that,” Kraber said, shivering. “Hope tae Goad I never see it again. Did… did most people make it oot?”

The earth pony turned his head back to Kraber. “Aye. Me and Patrick Saunders, this one hitter for the Portland Seadogs helped get them out. And the city burned the damn place to the ground.” The pony looked melancholy all of a sudden, his snout and ears angled downward. “Don’t know if there’ll be much left after th-”

The boat rocked as something impacted the ocean next to them.

“...They’re firing on us,” whispered one rose-colored unicorn mare. “FUCKING FUCK, THE HLF ARE FIRING ON US!”

It wasn’t intentional, Kraber guessed. Lovikov was just indiscriminately firing on the port facilities. But they could still die from a blind-fired shell as they could from one targeted specifically on them.

“Lovikov, you fokking kontgesig!” Kraber screamed to nobody in particular. “WHAT THE FOK DOES ANYONE HAVE TO GAIN FROM THIS?!”

“Hold on, everyone!” Kraber yelled, remembering everything he could about emergency boat-handling. He had to zigzag-

Another shell impacted the sea next to them, a spray of superheated steam splashing up into the air.

Right. Just. Keep. Fokking. Zigzagging.

I did this, Kraber thought watching the explosions and fire in Portland. Me.

Curiously, there wasn’t a follow-up barrage. It was just those shells, slamming right into Portland.

“We can’t get into the city proper!” he called out, seeing burning wrecks blocking the harbour channel. “We’re going to press on, up into the bay…”

There was an island ahead, a patch of serene dark amid the blazing inferno. It was one of the many small islets on the fringes of the city. Kraber couldn’t remember its name, but he recalled that there used to be a school of some kind on it, connected to the mainland by a causeway.

That didn’t matter though. All that was important was that, even though he knew the island to have been taken over by the PHL, the rig’s fire appeared to be ignoring it. The swarming mushroom-farms and prefab building stacks jammed in between the trees and permanent structures had yet to take a single shell, it seemed.

‘Where’s a jetty?’ he seethed internally, sweeping the tug around the island’s shore. ‘Where’s a fokking dock when you need one?’

There was none. Then, seeing the dark bar of the causeway ahead, he decided to ‘make port’ by another means.

“Hold tight!” he called out, and shoved the throttles to their stops. The tug’s stocky bow lifted itself skyward as they charged straight for the artificial shore, her stern trying to drown itself in the craft’s own wake…

And then they came ashore, ran aground, beached...or in layman’s terms, crashed into North America.

Kraber had expected a sickening smash or a sound like freight train running over a million marbles. Instead, there was just a slithering rush, an upward surge like an express elevator, and a sudden roar like a million beehives as propellers came up out of the water and accelerated to dangerous rpms.

He fisted the ‘emergency stop’ plunger, and the motors died…

Somebody took a breath, a child (or was it a foal?) cheered...

"IDENTIFY YOURSELF!" screamed a voice from ashore. Spotlights swept through the dark, blinding their vision.

What to do what to do what to do...

"We're workers from the Sorghum!" One of the evacuees yelled. “There’s a guard with us! He’s drove the boat aground, and-”

“INCOMING!” someone cried out, and everyone threw themselves to the deck as the whistle of a diving shell crashed down from above, ready to kill…

Nobody.

EISH?!

The projectile (A thaumic bolt? A huge artillery shell? A railgun slug?) had exploded in midair. It had not been shot down by a laser defense system or an autocannon, no. It had simply gone off prematurely, a slick of fire dancing against a shimmering lime-green patch of space that hung in midair.

“A fokking shield…” Kraber whispered, amazed. 

“What’s so surprising?” asked a pale unicorn mare, her cutie mark indistinguishable in the gloom. She looked confused. “It’s just an upscaled version of the same protection on your own armour.”

Was that… was that standard? Kraber asked himself, confused. Oh, fokking fokking fok me, so many HLF are going to die when we really piss the PHL o-

Another shell impacted the shield.

Next week. So many HLF are going to die when the PHL comes after us next week. Fok, but that was a sobering thought.

“Ah,” Kraber said, trying to put on an act of ‘silly-me-how’d-I-forget’ but mentally screaming. The average dreamweaver-





“There aren’t that many dreamweaver unicorns on earth,” says one unicorn stallion - Touchdown, that’s what Kraber thinks his name is - with a Hoofball for a cutie mark. He has just walked into the room. He’s the only stallion close to being as large as Aegis, but then, as pony size goes, Aegis is a class of his own.

“Really?” Aegis asks, interested, as Kraber pulls himself up, wincing a little, to look over at Touchdown. Touchdown seems like a solid stallion, anyway, and he’s good at playing Borderlands, Warframe, and Destiny, so in Kraber and Aegis’ respective books, that makes him a true bro. They haven’t seen him much, but Aegis and Kraber have both been impressed with his use of ‘remotes’ - small, mobile, TK-controlled platforms loaded with shield projectors, thaumic ennervators, bombs, and guns. The tactical applications are near-limitless.

“Really,” Touchdown says. “The college I went to had a school dedicated to those disciplines, but it got drafted into the war effort before they could turn flank for the PHL. Only dreamweavers I know are my sister, and this other Zebra named Mojisola…”

“Wait. Zebra dreamweavers?” Vinyl asks, confused.

“Yeah. The school accepted internationals,” Touchdown explains. “I’ll explain later, though. Very interested to hear your story.”

“Thanks for that,” Kraber says, genuinely intrigued. “I’ll ask about it later.”

“I’d like to hear about it too,” Aegis agrees. “Wonder how it works without a horn…”

“Anyway, the average dreamweaver





-mnemosurgeon, or other unicorn with psychomantic disciplines would likely find it to sound like a hardcore R-movie marathon with everything cut out except for the screams and profanities...

Which wouldn’t exactly be out of the ordinary for Kraber, but this time he was panicking.

“Ah…how do I turn that on?” Kraber asked. “Ah, eh…” and here, he tried to act embarrassed. “When the HLF attacked the rig I kinda traded in my older kit for one of the newer suits…”

The mare eyed the ill fit of the armor and shook her head. “You took this stuff off a dead guy, didn’t you?”

“Oh, no, no, no, no…” Kraber said.

“So, why does the namepatch say ‘Imbeault’...”

“Ah...okay, you got me. I flunked the training program for the new suits but decided I was better off in one of these when I had the chance…”

“What idiots are running the training school…” The mare rolled her head again and grabbed hold of his arm. “You’re just lucky you didn’t get caught with your pants down.”

“Ah eywis can get dressed and undressed real quickly,” Kraber said quickly, trying to channel a bit of the old suggestiveness he’d used back in med school in Boston. That was what… Ah, fok, he felt so gross doing this! Like he’d just proposed to have sex with a moose, or, well, a horse. Siff, even if it did talk! But that was what PHL did, right? Fok horses? Had to stay convincing.

“I’ll remember that,” the mare said, a contemplative edge to her voice.

Oh, fokking SIFF!

“Anyway, look here?”

She pointed.

“That’s your shield module. It’s your best friend. Repeat that for me…”

“Ah, the shield module is my best mate...”

“Congratulations, you just passed training…”

“Ah, okay,” Kraber said. “Can it… Can I shoot while it’s on?”

“Yeah, it’s calibrated to let nothing in, but stuff can go out just fine,” the mare explained. “Thankfully, you’ve already got a few PHL guns that’d work with it…”

Oh, thank God, the MG2019 and that Fostech he stole! And Lovikov thought the former would kill him… Showed what that asshole knew!

“Can you ID my pistols so they work with it too?” Kraber asked, holding out his .45 and .50. “I know how it fokking looks, but these are old friends of mine.”

“Another time,” the mare said, as the sound of boots and hooves scrambling onto the canted deck made themselves apparent. “For now just shut up and let me do the talking… and for what its worth, thanks for getting us out of that madhouse. Good job soldier…”

Two figures appeared on the bridge wing, shining in torches. Both wore MG42 assault rifles, though one carried it in his hands and the other had a pair mounted to a saddle.

“Identify yourselves.”

“Combat Engineer Socket Wrench,” said the mare who had helped Kraber. “I’m in charge here…”





Mackworth Island, as it turned out, was a strange place. The Ponies for Human Life had apparently converted the former school into an administrative centre. Now, with the centre of Portland merrily ablaze, it had also become responsible for overseeing all local operations.

Some of the various workers that Kraber had saved (was that the word?) from the rig had relatives here, and there had been a few ecstatic reunions, and most everybody who had come ashore on the tug with him had thanked and congratulated him. For a single, solitary micromoment, Kraber’s spirits rose, as people bumped bellies with him, raised him up (that man was strong!) and thanked him for getting off the rig. He’d even learned that the local name for Socket Wrench was ‘Socks’, had a good bit of rum, gotten hugged by more than a few ponies (which was nice, he had to admit, the gluesticks were like living plushies!) and yet something of their joy put him off. But why shouldn’t they be joyful?! They’d gotten away from those lunatic…

HLF.

And, with that word, with the remembrance that the rig was still firing on the city, Kraber’s spirits sunk.

Get away! He wanted to say. I’m not worth it. This is my fokking fault! I helped everyone out, I shot your friends, I killed… I killed your ponies.

He was grateful for the inscrutable mask he wore, so nobody could see his face. He was also glad that, in the madness, nobody had noticed the cracks in the story or demanded he identify himself by name, rank and serial number...

“Ah appreciate this, ah really dae,” Kraber said at last, breaking away from another grateful group and slumping onto a bench that overlooked the harbor, “But ah’m fokkin beat. Ah need tae sit doon.”

“You don’t seem happy,” said a strange batwinged mare fluttering towards him.

On a normal day, Kraber would have pulled out his revolver and exploded the fokking vampire gluestick coming up to him. But this wasn’t a normal day. Oh, he couldn’t look at her or damn near any pony, any of those foals, without seeing Pinkie Pie turning his family, Kate, Peter, Anka, Cousin Richard, into those fokking zombies. And yet, the ponies had been a hell of a lot more heroic than the HLF were today.

They’d been trying to protect their friends, they’d defended against hostiles… without resorting to shooting everything apart and then blowing up all the boats in the vicinity ‘just to be sure’.

While Kraber had shot foals. Which… sure, they were ponies, but they were still children. Wee yins, he heard himself think in that Robert Carlyle imitation he’d used during that production of Trainspotting in Boston.

He sincerely hoped that he wasn’t going to end up getting a hallucination of Begbie. That would be terrifying. Silly at first, but then, well, it’d just turn into pure torment. More than usual, anyway.

“Those who talk to themselves keep poor company,” Anka said, in that odd accent caught somewhere between Germany, Roxbury in Boston, and Cape Town.

Kraber paused and facepalmed. Fok, she was right, wasn’t she? He briefly debated telling this batwinged pony to go away, to just fokking take his pistol and shoot himself so he didn’t have to feel like this anymore...

But sometimes, a little bit of company does a man a body of good. And honestly, after ‘grand theft tugboat’, killing people on the rig, and waking up early, Kraber was too tired to act on that anger. It was on something of a low burn at the moment.

“I’m not,” he said, watching as another slug impacted the curiously benevolent barrier above the island. “Shield generators?” Kraber asked, intrigued.

“You didn’t know?” the batwinged mare asked, genuinely surprised. “When the zeps-”

Kraber abruptly realized that HLF ‘contingency plans’ for dealing with zeps were utter kak, as were their anti-air

“-and potioneer ships come during Barrierfall, they’ll try to bombard Portland. At the worst possible time, quite likely,” the batwinged pony said. “Because why the hell should we expect anything different?”

“Well, looks like it’s working a treat…” he laughed sardonically, watching the city across the bay go up like a roman candle...

Again, the fear. The knowledge of Barrierfall, millions dying or being ponified on the first day alone, desperate stragglers trying to outrun the barrier-

“Alright, what the hell is with you? I can hear you drawing in breath whenever I say something, and your heart racing,” the batwinged pony said.

“I’m a useless fokking paranoid psychopath,” Kraber said. “Those are just symptoms of the condition.”

The batwinged mare looked up at him, her eyes wide. “Uh… huh. Well, that explains a bit, but you didn’t answer my question…”

“I have a… a close friend in the HLF,” Kraber said. 

Lie. Not just a blatant untruth, no, but if the HLF found him, it’d be unlikely he’d have friends in there. 

“It’s noat… that abnormal. We all know someone. He just goes oan and oan, getting radger and radger, and Ah cannae take it, but Ah’m worried for him around Barrierfall. Fok, Ah’m worried for all of us…” he sighed. “Ah’m from Scotland. Fokking Leith, actually. Ah saw one barrierfall, and eish, that was a fokkin nightmare. I saw a woman with broken legs, halfway ponified, headboatin’ a knife, bringin’ oat brains an blood each stab, cause her arms were burnt to a crisp. I cannae blame her - naebody wants tae be potioned.”

Actually, Kraber had seen that over in Africa. Fokking terrifying, it was, and he’d shot her as a mercy, then killed a whole fokking lot of royal guard and newfoals as well. Not… quite… to avenge her. He would have done that anyway.

“It’ll be a fokking nightmare again when it touches down,” Kraber finished. “An’ soon eftir, we’re fokked. Ah’m scared, ah really am… Nae man nor pony should see a second Barrierfall in their life.”

Never mind that he wouldn’t - by the time Equestria’s Barrier had gotten somewhere that people could flee to, he’d probably be dead, or one of the enthusiastic little mindless zombie-dolls trying to potion everyone.

Victory…

“I can understand that,” the bizarre batwinged pegasus said. “I remember seeing the Barrier during the first days of the expansion… we were terrified when Geneva was swallowed.”

“Actually, that’s nae what Ah’m afraid of,” Kraber said.

“You’re not afraid of the Barrier?” the pegasus asked.

“Well, mostly… it’s what we’ll dae,” Kraber said. “We’ve hud years in America fae old hatreds tae come up and simmer. And the PER will jist come oot the woodwork, and fok us all up. My friend would say the HLF would help us, but…” he shrugged. “Ah didnae believe it then, ah dinnae believe it now.”

Which reminded him once more. About the elephant in the room. Except elephants, for whatever reason, weren’t sentient in Equestria.

“What do you think they’ll do?” the pegasus asked, curious.

“I cannae quite guess,” Kraber said, half-lying to even himself.

“Well, they’re not exactly full of warm and fuzzy horseback riders,” the batwinged pegasus mare said.





“Ha! Nice!” Vinyl interrupts.

“Aye,” Kraber agrees, a smile on his face. “Ah think that was when-” he pauses, coughs, clears his throat, and switches from the affected Leith brogue back into the much less affected South African accent more familiar to all of you. “I think that’s when I thought Nebula - that’s the batpony - was alright. I mean, she had a sense of humor about humans… having…” he glances at you. “A kind and loving relationship with ponies,” he says quickly.

“Bit late for you to try and be responsible in front of colts and fillies,” says one PHL man. You’ve seen him around - he’s one of Kraber and Johnny C’s friends. Cept he’s an old roommate of Kraber’s from back in college, somebody named Bly Doyle. Though Bly’s quick to point out that Kraber never tried to eat him.

“Kraber tried to eat his old roommate?” Scootaloo asks.

“Well, yeah,” Kraber says.

“I thought you were joking!”

While Bly’s been trained with firearms, like pretty much everyone else (A short Kalashnikov hangs over one shoulder even now) he’s working at PHL medical, off the front lines. He’s been busy lately with some consultants over in Tribeca. Something about totem-proles, you think? You never liked those.

His family - who often let Kraber and Aegis stay over - are quite nice.

“Eh, a man’s gotta try,” Kraber says, shrugging. “Had to agree with Nebula on that because fok it,





yeah, that’s exactly it!” Kraber laughed, the epithet being far too silly for him not to laugh. It was like that time he’d been depressed back in college, and Erika had told him how to get shits and giggles - by making pot brownies with laxative. “Ah, fok, I gotta remember that one…”

Nebula looked at him a little insistently.

“Eish, well, Ah…” he paused, musing on the usual HLF M.O. “They’d kill all the ponies trying to escape,” he said with utter certainty. “And probably people trying to help them…” his voice trailed off into another tangent, seemingly independent of his brain. “So emergency workers, government soldiers… PHL relief workers… hospitals with pony doctors and nurses…”

Oh fok no

“And they’ll probably be desperate,” he realized, “So they’ll have to get medical supplies. And, if they do any evac, they’ll…” His face went white, though Nebula couldn’t see it. She could fokking well sense something about him, though.... “So many fokking people are going to die. Or… or get ponified, because some… some fokkin radges are going tae be more concerned with the HLF way than the safe way.”

And, at the end of that sentence, he hears a cacophony of voices, of his own, Victory’s the nameless newfoal, of Anka, Peter, Kate, Cousin Richard, Emil, countless others: “And it will be your fault.”

“The scary thing is how unsurprising that is,” the mare said. “I knew they’d be bad. But… I never heard it voiced so plainly. You know that feel?”

“I fokkin well know that feel,” Kraber agreed. “But… It just eats at me now,” he said, taking a drink. “I have HLF connections, even now. They don’t know I’m here. I could very well be like them-”

“Aren’t you already?” Victory asked.

“Yeah, and it scares me. The thought that in the future I could be - could have been - one of those bastards,” he said.

“Ah, there’s no reason to be guilty about what you might do,” Nebula said. “You gotta focus on now, and worry about that when you have time.”

They paused, Kraber thinking on that sentence.

“Mind if I ask a question? …What the fok are ye?” Kraber asked, looking over the batwinged, fanged (fanged?!) pony.

“Seriously?” the mare asked.

“Well, Ah’ve bare ever seen yuir like,” Kraber explained.

“We have a lot of names,” the strange indigo pony with the blue-black mane said. “Nightkin, the Nocturne, Thestrals… batponies…”

“Oh yeah, Ah haird o’ that,” Kraber said. “Thought it was just a story people told back at the refugee camp.”

The pony sighed. “Not surprised. There aren’t exactly many of us on Earth.”

In retrospect, Kraber shouldn’t have been surprised by her appearance. There’d been a lot of odd species of Equus that had come to earth in the chaos around the Three Weeks of Blood, even zebras (he’d never met one, though) and there were some HLF from down south that swore they’d seen a pony made of crystals, but he’d never been all that clear on it.

But the war hadn’t yet consumed America, so he hadn’t yet learned - he’d almost forgotten - to expect anything of the war, that making sense was a fool's dream. But 

“What happened?”

“Lots of things,” the bizarre-looking pony said simply. “They helped Princess Luna escape, a long while back…





“Here’s the bit of the story I remember,” Kraber says, and clears his throat. “Back from when I met her awhile later.”

“What happened to her?” you ask. “Nebula?”

“Oh, she’s fine. Still over in Portland, still watching for Imperials or some ship that manages to make its way across the ocean.” Aegis says. “Wonderful mare. Bit irritable nowadays, but who isn’t?”

“Good point,” Vinyl agrees. “It gets hard sometimes.”

“Which is why I’m happy for the friends I still have. Like all of you,” Kraber says. “She’s not…” And Kraber looks downcast here, his shoulders slumping. He looks wizened, tired. “…another friend I’ve lost.” He takes a drink of the bourbon hidden under his chair. “I’ve lost more fokkin’ chommies than some of you kids’ve yet made…” he sighs.

Aegis, putting himself up on a large chair, puts a hoof behind Kraber’s head, over his shoulder.

“Ah, thanks for that,” Kraber says, and he smiles over at Aegis. “You’re a real china, Aegis.”

“You too, Viktor,” Aegis agrees.

“Ah, fok it. All of you - except maybe Verity, because you’re not going to be a paragon of sanity till we find a cure-”

“Nope.”

“Are great friends. Fok what Equestria says, this is real friendship. Helping each other, visiting them in the hospital… and listening to punk rock.”

“Damn right it is!” Vinyl agrees.

“Anyway,” Kraber says, looking quite comfortable against Aegis’ foreleg, “Here’s what Nebula-





Nebula’s Tail

“Yes, her name’s Nebula. Just go with it. Here’s what she told me…”

We were revered by a lot of ponies back in the day. Feared too, for obvious reasons that we’re kinda intimidating to look at. There were some ponies that came up with stories as to where we came from; that we were created through magic as Nightmare Moon’s loyal soldiers, or were the victims of curses….

The truth is though that some of us are just created through enchantments by Princess Luna…though I guess all the stories have some truth in them. You can be born a thestral, yes, but Luna favors the use of enchantments to temporarily transform us to look the part, since her first permanent corps of guards were naturally-born Nightkin. We’re a rare breed, after all. For example, my brother - well, sister, oddly enough - wasn’t born a thestral like me, so she doesn’t have the omnivorous digestive structure. Huh? Well, bro asked Luna to make his thestral disguise look like a mare. Always seemed happier on duty that way… or when flying the Night Guard’s colors when on civilian leave, and I get to have a sister and a brother, which is pretty cool. You might like Princess Luna, Mr. Bliss.

Ah, okay. I understand, Mr. Bliss. The Princess is… was… well she loved her illusions and theatrics. She did things with pomp and splendor, loved making an entrance, and her voice could blow you back. Ponies quickly grew to adore her, but then, well… HLF bastards always act like all ponies threw their weight behind the sun bitch.

But we didn’t. For all her anger, Princess Luna was never all that intent on the orders to exterminate the Changelings. Yes, Mr. Bliss - genocide. Queen Celestia had us exterminate all Changeling hives in Equestria, and it had been scary how easy she’d whipped everypony into a frenzy. As I remember, that was when we first heard about the mare they call ‘Celestia’s Sword’... 

“Who’s she?” Kraber asked.

“We… don’t know. A mare that obeys the queen bitch without question, wears a flesh-colored mask like half a human face… and the nightmare of many a Changeling. And mine. I saw her in action, and she was surgical in the field. Like a scalpel to someone’s throat...

Luna, well, she’d wanted to capture Queen Chrysalis, punish her, impose sanctions, but not…. not kill her. Eventually, Celestia managed to convince her…. and we did so. I know we didn’t burn the majority of them, anyway, but the things we did during that campaign… We caught a lot of flak, so you humans say, for lagging behind on the campaign to protect the home and hearth of Equestria… once, it was more literal, though we could never prove that the fireworks launched by the Celestian Guards weren’t an accident.

From there, well, it went downhill. After the Great Equestrian exploded on Declaration Day - and that’s a long story, please ask somepony else, I’m trying to make a point - Luna begged her sister not to ‘spread harmony’, to do what she planned, based on what she’d witness on that ship. For a year or two, Luna sat by, afraid to act against Celestia again, desperately hoping that something could be salvaged from the war. Why? Well, she’d been Nightmare Moon - ancient enemy of the ponies, mad alicorn with great and terrible power, gone mad with jealousy for Celestia - earlier. Try and ask about it later, it’d take too long to explain. She’d only just recently been reintegrated into Equestria, and she was.... well, afraid. She would tell us she had confidence issues, and feared that even the slightest inkling of arguing with her sister meant that she could be on the way to becoming Nightmare Moon again. And I can’t prove anything, but I know in my heart of hearts, like up is up and bullets come from guns, that Celestia played on those fears-”





“She did what.” Kraber said, angered beyond inflecting even a question mark in his voice. 

“You heard me,” Nebula said.

“It’s just… Look. I have three siblings,” Kraber explained. “Maybe we hit each other a bit, but that shit is too fokking far!” he paused. “She disnae care. She disnae care, so I don’t know if she can be hurt. Not that it really compares to what Celestia’s done in the past three years, but… her sister, man.”





“Yeah. She played on it to keep Luna from acting.  Oh, she assuaged Luna’s fears by various reassurances, but there was always the veiled threat at the back of those words - “are you feeling quite yourself, Luna?” - “do you wish to speak to a doctor about these outbursts, ‘dear sister’?”...urgh! Heard them before. The words were like rancid honey. Before long, we had ponies saying Nightmare Moon had never really been ‘purified’ or what have you, that Luna was just biding her time… whispers and rumors among the Canterlot nobility, the practical dissolution of the Night Court for ‘reasons of national security’. Because Luna just… kept… asking…. questions.

There was only so long it could work, though. Luna was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, but she knew something was wrong. She knew it in her bones.  When her mane began losing its luster, fading back to the colour it had been at her birth, she became convinced something was rotten in Equestria. And do you know what the greatest, saddest honor was? It was she confided her fears in us, dammit. Not to her sister, nor her so-called friends, but in us...her guards, her forsworn defenders.

...most of those guys are dead now, I think. I’ve lost a lot of good friends. What? My bro? He... well, she’s over in New York right now. Spends as much time as possible a mare, until maintaining the transformation burns her out. If you’re ever there and you see her, tell her that Nebula says hello. And I think there are some of the old Nightguards back in the home country, leading resistance cells-

“Wait, resistance cells? In Equestria?” Kraber interrupted.

“Yeah,” Nebula said, surprised. “Course there’s an Equestrian resisty. Why wouldn’t there be? Even if you don’t like humans-”

“Gee, I wonder why…” the nameless newfoal muttered.

“Then you probably don’t like all the things Celestia’s done,” Nebula explained. “Ever hear of totem-proles?”

“Vaguely. Not until about last August, on the 17th,” Kraber said. What a great day that had been...

“That’s oddly specific. Anyway, they’re surveillance devices, and they’re up on every block. Say anything that Queen Celestia doesn’t like, and you get disappeared, or…. reintegrated.” The shivers that Nebula had when she said the word ‘reintegrated’ said more than any descriptor ever could. “And the war hasn’t done anything good for the economy, either.”

“Wait…” Kraber said. “Population boom… wartime economy… near medieval infrastructure, couple billion joining…” he winced. “Sounds downright fokking hellish.”

“Yeah,” Nebula sighed, “If anything, the war’s done more harm to Equestria than you ever could even with the Barrier up there.”

And, now, Kraber had to think. A resistance movement in Equestria… ponies that were truer to the partisan spirit that he once thought the HLF embodied… “Sorry,” he said. “Continue.”

“Anyway, all the other nightguards, I’m-”





”-not sure what happened to them. I can’t rightly say. I didn’t make many friends getting here, trying to save what they see as a doomed world. So many died just helping Princess Luna and Cadenza, the crystal princess, escape…”

“Wait?” asks Scootaloo. “Our Cadance? She’s a princess!?”

“Yeah...didn’t you know?” says Kraber. “She’s ‘rightful heir to the Crystal throne’ or something…”

“Awesome…” Scootaloo says, starry-eyed. “We have a princess on our side!”

“Yeah, I guess it is. But for Nebula, well, the night that Luna and Cadenza fled was a black one for the thestrals. Most of the few survivors had to part ways, smuggle themselves across the borders on their own initiative. But remember kids… if any ponies can be called heroes, the damn Thestrals are certain. Every single one of them had Luna’s back, foals and all - they were the only armed force not bound by that mindfok spell Celestia put on her own soldiers, thanks to Luna having her own charter, and they all used that freedom and made the choice to defy the Empire squatting without invite in their home. Loads still do. That’s why the Thestrals are heroes to the PHL, to any pony that looks up the sun and tells it to go fok itself.”

“Hey Kraber!” calls out a Night Guard mare walking by. “Heard you got beat up by our… what’s a word…”

“Not ‘new recruit’,” Kraber says thoughtfully. “Hmmm…”

“Go buck yourselves…” snarks Verity, before abruptly covering her mouth with her hooves and repeating the word ‘fuck’ repeatedly as if it was a warding spell.

You stifle a grin. It’s a weird and terrifying life you lead, but some things are just too funny not to laugh at.

“Unwilling charge?” Aegis suggests.

“Sounds good,” Kraber agrees. “Ah, don’t worry about it, Lunar Phase, I’m fine. Just telling these folks here a story.”

“Looks like all those writing classes you take on leave are paying off,” Aegis says.

“What’s the story about what?” ‘Lunar Phase’ asks, gracefully flicking a full mane of gunmetal-silver locks behind one ear. Despite the sleek muscle visible beneath her gleaming coat and the tempered steel in her eyes, she’s almost the perfect definition of pony femininity.

“Oh, just how I got into the PHL,” Kraber explains. “Just mentioned your sister.”

“Really!” Lunar Phase says. “I miss her so much…”





“So do you see?” Nebula asked. “See what the war means to me, and my clan? See what we’re fighting, and why?”

Kraber had never met Queen Celestia. Never had a sense of… of her, really. Absurd as it sounded. He’d just project some generic concept of her or Pinkie Pie upon every pony he met. True Quill, a PHL journalist, will later refer to HLF members as thinking of ponies as ‘one gestalt mass’. And hearing that, Kraber’ll agree. It won’t be far off the mark.

But from what he’d just heard, it was impossible not to hate her. What fokking kontgesig would… would do that to her sister? Whip the press into a frenzy, convince them an innocent mare was evil, consolidate power for herself… kill her guard… commit genocide… Though, granted, he’s seen the tapes of the two sisters final encounter at Reykjavik. They’re public to anyone, viewed billions of times on Youtube.

He can say it definitely though. This mare beside him now, Nebula, was a good pony. Irritable and blunt? Maybe a  little, judging by how many details she’d skipped over in her story, but then, she was trying to get to the point. She was refreshingly honest, easily able to listen to him, and, most importantly, not Celestia or Pinkie. It was a shock just after the thought crossed his mind, that there could be good ponies. But… their foals could suffer just like him, just like his own children. Just like him. And, most importantly, the war had cost her a prominent position too. She’d gone from a royal guard to a watchmare on an island in Portland, and she couldn’t go home again.

Yeah, for a gluestick, Nebula seemed alright. Not as if she’d be a friend of his, but more like they could be civil.

It was a welcome discovery, Kraber reflected, looking up into the stars. Nebula, a mare who looked quite graceful, came across as far more human than his comrades in the Front.

He could have relaxed, maybe, just maybe finding peace for a second, if not for that glaring problem that, oh ja, Portland was on fokking fire.

Kraber’s blood ran cold. “Nebula?” he asked. “Why the fok doesn’t the rest of Portland have a shield like this island?”

“We’d gotten a response from a radiowoman over in Portland, near the business district,” Nebula explained. “She said… somebody sabotaged the shield generator.”

“Who?” Kraber asked, his blood running cold.

“PER, she hopes,” Nebula said. “But… There’s another possibility. That the HLF did it. Wouldn’t surprise m-” 

Kraber ran, practically bolted for it.

“Where are you going?!” Nebula yelled.

“First, I’m getting these pistols encoded to work with my shield. Second, going out into the city!” Kraber yelled, dashing back to the boat. “I’m going to see what I can do to help!”

“You could die!”

“A hell of a lot more could if I don’t get out!” 





Mackworth Island did, it seemed, actually have a dock, but it was a tiny thing only suited for small launches and yachts. The motor-pool however was more than enough to make up for it, and in his stolen armour and MG2019 in hand, Kraber looked more than official enough to requisition a vehicle.

V8 snarling, the battered old Ford Explorer he’d taken off of Socket Wrench’s hooves fishtailed down the steep road from the island’s summit and then accelerated out across the causeway. As soon as he hit the mainland, two left-hand turns put him onto the highway into the city-center. So… this was it, just a city full of scared bastards, and himself, trying to fix his mistake.

...plus his crazy of course. The newfoal was currently watching him from the back seats, a shadowy and indistinct reflection in the rear-view mirror.

Ah, fok it. He had to do something. Fok the hallucinations, especially that kontgesig Victory. That ridiculous bitch with the pullstring. If there was anyone hurt by the Sorghum’s shells, anyone out there… he’d do what he could. 

Even if it killed hi-

A shell hit a stalled car right in front of him, sending a plume of smoke and shrapnel into the air, leaving him swerving to avoid it, the Ford squealing for one desperate moment as Kraber pleaded to God that his car didn’t flip over.

Well, that might not be very long.

“You could have stopped the shells!” the older new foal pleaded from the passenger seat, only visible in the flickering light cast by a passing streetlights, disappearing whenever their orange light segued into shadow. “This won’t-”

“If you’re my guilt, I expect you to make fokking sense,” Kraber said. “I’m not facing down that many people with guns. I’d get filled with more lead than Bly's plumbing.”

As he wondered what happened to people like his old roommate Bly, his college chommies - ‘Polo’ Polmont, Gray, Howie, Terry, Strychnine Jones, Helen, Zo, Stretcher Burt, Corinne, Frank, Eva, Heather, Zanna, Miranda (actually some friend of Bly's friend Johnny C in art school) all that crew that he’d trusted the year he spent in America as a lark-





“Who are they?” you ask.

“Ah, they’re old chinas from back in med school,” Kraber explains. “Specially Bly. He was the roommate I didn’t try to eat, by the way.”

“Why did you…” Scootaloo starts.

“It was in that flashback with Kraber meeting Kate,” Aegis says.

“Not sure you’ve got good judgment when it comes to friends,” Verity says.

Aegis glares at her.

“No, no, she’s got a point,” Kraber points out, “In that I considered the HLF to be chommies. Still though…. Crazy bastards, but these were good friends.  Helped me out a lot when Kate was bout to give birth. Even gave me money! Would’ve starved without that….”

“Think I’d like to hear about that sometime,” you say.

“Nah. It’s not all that important, and I feel like you have enough stories to keep track of,” Aegis says.

“Ja,” agrees Kraber. “Anyway, right when I was thinking about them,





“Look, I am doing this!” Kraber roared, pounding a fist on the steering wheel and pushing the rev-counter into the red. The 4X4 transmission snarled as he forced the car up and over an abandoned barricade, using other vehicles as berms and ramps. “And you’re not going to tell me to do something fokking stupid. I’m doing the right thing, FOR ONCE IN THE PAST FOUR FOKKING YEARS!”

There was no reply. The newfoal had vanished.

Okay, that was… that felt invigorating. Making a decision, for himself. With that thought - that suddenly, he was the master of his mind, and king of the road as he powered into Downtown. Not because he wanted to - a fleeting desire to come back to the HLF, to drive the Warrior back out to the rig and… okay, fok it, that wouldn’t work. No. Fok that noise. He knew what he was getting into when he did this stupid fokking thing.

So, armed with the knowledge that he was suddenly back in control, that he’d met a good mare, and now had a lot of gun that’d work with a shield, Kraber screeched the Explorer to a halt at the lip of a crater blasted in the roadway, kicked open the drivers-side door, and strode into a city gone mad.



 

Dancing Day, Dancing Day...

You’ve heard of it, of course. When the Sorghum started firing on Portland, everything went nuts. HLF and PER came out of the woodwork, seeing it as an opportunity to assert themselves, along with all the poor looters who had just wanted something to eat.

The PHL, National Guard and local authorities had been responding to the situation as best it could, but a lot of the best troops were being diverted to consolidate strongholds and eventually take back the rig, Luna only knows how HLF members like Verity escaped…





“You gonna enlighten us on that?” you ask Verity. “When they retook the rig, how did you escape?”

“Come to think of it, I was wondering how you did that,” Kraber says. “I knocked you out-”

“Barely.”

“-And threw you overboard while the boat was still going!”

“You threw me onto the jetty, not into the water. This is your storytime, not mine, at least keep the facts straight!”

“Fair enough…so that’s another story. The troops that were actually left were mostly green volunteers or fresh recruits outta training, panicky and nervous.

It was a recipe for hell.

“The city was a mess,” Kraber continues. “HLF graffiti was sprayed everywhere, fires and looting were going on all over the place. The newbie troops were trying to contain things, but they were not putting much effort into distinguishing insurgents from looters. Lotta blood was shed pointlessly that night, a lotta lives ruined.”

He pauses to describe one pony nailed to a wall with a railroad spike, a grotesque visual that brings and unnerving smile to Verity’s face, one that makes you feel more than a little dirty when you see it. You trot back from her, unnerved.

“Don’t worry, Little Day, it’s fine,” Aegis reassures you.

“Trust me,” Kraber says with a glare aimed at Verity, “It’s fine. Shoulda realized it’d be too much to ask Verity to like this… or any pony here. Or zebra. Or people here in general, actually.”

Verity glares back at him.

“Oh, don’t jou fokking deny it,” Kraber practically snarls.

She looks as if she is about to argue, then practically ‘deflates’. That’s how Vinyl put it, whispering in your ear that it seems like what Pinkie Pie’s mane used to do when she got depressed. Though Kraber reassures her that Vinyl’s fine - even if he’s pissed as fok when Pinkie Pie’s name comes up, he’s not gonna hurt his friends unless Pinkie Pie’s in the room. 

“The fokkin moer in? Ja!” Kraber says. “But not a threat to you. I’ve grown past that.”

And that, well, that puts a happy look in Aegis and Vinyl’s eyes, along with Amber Maple and Rivet, and they all smile… even Elena, that ex-HLF woman who’s been sitting around awkwardly, unsure of what to say, looks happy. So does Bly.

“I’m proud of you, old friend,” Bly says.

“You and me both,” Aegis agrees. “How about the three of us get a drink sometime?”

“Sure.”

“Ah, what the hell, why not, I’d like to go too,” Vinyl says. “It’s been another one of those days. Say, you should ask Lunar Phase about it.”

“She is a good friend,” Kraber says. “Sure. Why not?”

“I’d like it,” Lunar Phase says.

And so, their conversation trails off into people they’d like to invite, such as mommy, who’s doing a few last-minute touches on something important, Kraber’s few friends, including what few subordinates he has, Aegis’ various pony friends… It’s honestly a bit tiresome to listen to, and you find yourself lulling off a bit, using an ipad...

And once more, Verity breaks the ice.

“Look at you,” Verity says, and you’re not sure if she’s angry or just confused. “How the fuck did you… How the fuck are you so accepting?”

“Right, you weren’t in the room most of the story…” Kraber realizes. “…Eish. Well, I hit my limit.”

“No. No no no no. You do not  grow a conscience overnight-”

“I’d been killing, murdering, and otherwise making mayhem three years,” Kraber says. “I just… One day, I just couldn’t take it.”

“You practically lived for that!”

“No, I didn’t have any other fokking thing to live for!” Kraber yells. “It’s really hard to have faith in the HLF when they’ve promised to kill you, then you see HLF members take advantage of the chaos to rop a fokking shoe store!”

“What?” you ask.

“I never told anyone about this?” Kraber asks, genuinely surprised.

“Well, you told us…” Rivet points out. “Then again, you were in disguise at the time, so I’m not sure how true it was.”

“I was telling the truth, though,” Kraber explains.

“Rivet, Kraber had a German porn star’s mustache-” Aegis starts.

Kraber raises an eyebrow at that, reminding them all that officially, he is a German citizen, whatever that means nowadays, right before Bly interrupts and says: “Hey. Kraber and I needed money back then! Honestly, it felt more like a prank than anything.”

“Ah, memories,” Kraber says, smiling.

Everyone turns to look at them both.

“...Let’s not go into that,” Vinyl says.

“Agreed,” you say, more than a little disturbed.

“Bly, this has nothing to do with that! I was just saying how he used a mustache and a Robert Carlyle imitation,” Aegis continues. “That was not a disguise.”

“Sorry about lying, by the way,” Kraber says, downcast. “I… I thought you’d kill me if I told the truth.”

“That… is probably a good point,” Aegis admits. 

“Still. I’m gonna do my damnedest to make up for th-”

“Don’t,” Aegis says. “You already have. So - that thing about the shoe store was true?”

“It was,” Kraber says. “But, for those who didn’t hear this before, well, it’s really hard to have faith in the HLF when two-





-women, youngish bakvissies in ragged clothes and kevlar, along with HLF jackets covered in patches - are smashing open a window of a shoe store.

Practically giggling, one of them grabbed what few shoes she could, even holding a pair of high heels in her teeth. A dazed, fearful sky-blue unicorn pony with a slicked-back gray mane and blue aviator sunglasses ran by, and pulling out a cheap nine-mil, one of the bakvissies shot it in the legs. Twice, crippling it on one side.

Before Kraber’s eyes, they rushed at the pony, stopping only briefly to pick up their loot, and kicked him in the gut. Cheering.

Some part of him wanted to say the damn gluestick was in the wrong here. That he and his kind had brought nothing but suffering to earth. But that was kak and Kraber knew it. Who was the one that had helped fire on a city? Who had taken advantage of a crisis, something that should have been the defense of earth itself (oh, what a filthy fokking lie that was) to loot a goddamn shoe-store?! Who was beating the defenseless?!

HLF were.

So, tempting as it was to let that pony die - Kraber had no ability to guess if he was one of the good merry-go-round-toys like Nebula - Kraber couldn’t do it.

“This isn’t being a fokking partisan. Fok. This!” he roared, and punched the first girl across the face. The second got a wild shot off, and it splashed harmlessly across his armor before he landed another blow on her too, the sole of his boot in her face. The crunch of impact might have been her nose breaking, or her neck snapping.

He didn’t care.

Maybe they were good people, maybe not.

He didn’t care.

They were acting the same way he had until today…

He didn’t… he didn’t give a fok, but he knew what he had to do for the gluestick. He didn’t like it, but it was what had to be done.

“Hold on!” Kraber said as he knelt beside the wounded stallion, momentarily deepening his voice. People looked for a person, not a persona. Kagan had always said that. “I’m gonna help you out, boykie.”

“Please… no…” the pony whispered.

“Don’t worry! I’m a doctor. Vasbyt china, this kak will be over soon.”

“What?” the pony asked.

“Never mind that!” Kraber said. “Anyway… Where’s somewhere I can-”

He heard the sound of sporadic fire in the distance, and then-

There was the sound of something shattering. An unmistakable smell. A-

“It’s the fucking PER!” someone screamed off in the distance.

Well. Shit just got a whole lot more complicated. He could go for the PER. He could.

“Go to them, Viktor! They’ll welcome a new convert!” Victory suggested. “They’ll-”

“Save this pony!” the newfoal yelled. “Find him help-

Wait, Kraber thought. Won’t I save more lives if I kill those PER?

“EK BEHEER ME!” Kraber yelled.

“...Oh Luna, I’m being rescued by a madhuman,” the unicorn gasped fearfully.

“...No, no. That’s ah, that’s me psyching myself up. Means ‘I control me’ back where I’m from,” Kraber said. “Don’t worry,” he said, surprised to find that he meant it, “I’ll get you somewhere quiet that we can treat you.”

A quick check established no spinal or lumbar damage, so at least he could safely move the pony, so long as he didn’t handle or move the area around the gunshot wounds.

‘I need… I need antiseptic, and a pair of tweezers, bandages, thread… I need my fokking head examined!’

He didn’t like it. He… he couldn’t stand ponies, he admitted it. But this was a patient in pain, shot and kicked by two greedy bitches.  Even if he was from a race of imperialistic, mass-murdering and mass-zombifying xenophobes, it was hard to say humanity was in the right here.

“Don’t worry, I can heal myself,” the unicorn said, his horn flickering. “It’ll… It’ll sting like a bitch in the morning but…” he wheezed. “Ah, sonova... it hurts!”

Suddenly, as if out of nowhere, a group of ragged men and women… appeared. That was the only word for it. 

“PHL!” one man yelled, pointing at Kraber. “And one of the damn gluesticks… let’s show that geldo and the newfoal-in-training what we do to people that come into our city!”

Oh, fok. At this point, he’d probably worn out any possible meaning, but…  if the HLF found him, and he’d shot them, he’d be screwed.

He couldn’t run away either. He’d get filled with bullets and… the unicorn would die? Hm. He supposed that’d be bad.

Think, damn you, Viktor! Kagan always called you a slippery bastard! I managed to survive the HLF this long, keep my gun from getting stolen! I can think my fokking way out of this! Okay. I could sell this pony out, and join the H-

A shell from the Sorghum impacted a building about a mile down, a plume of fire shooting up into the air.

-ell no.

That would… that’d be betraying humanity. Betraying himself. Today, he’d had the first inklings of a conscience towards ponies, the first in close to three years. Now, he had in his custody a helpless pony that had been wounded by two HLF bakvissie bitches. Unless something was done, that pony would die, and so would a lot of other people in this city.

And Kraber realized, to his horror, this wasn’t a situation he could shoot his way out of.

There are some characters that have a tongue smooth as velvet, and voices like warm chocolate. People that could convince armed men to put their guns down through sheer intimidation. Kraber could manage the latter on a good day, even though his tongue was essentially covered in enough barbs that it came as a shock to others - especially Galt when he was deep into a discussion on the meaning of objectivism, and Kraber had refuted several of his points - that he could read the average China Mieville novel without a dictionary and knew the meaning of the word ‘Inveigle’.

This was not one of those good days. Especially as Kraber would realize within twelve hours that he’d essentially hit rock bottom...





“And that’s the first time I hit rock bottom,” Kraber says.

“Wait, are you considering what happened the day after this as rock bottom?” Aegis asks.

“Well, yes,” Kraber says. “I didn’t have friends, family, or money. All I had was my word and my balls.” He pauses. “And my guns… and a stuffed animal or three-“

“Which reminds me,” Verity says. “I actually talked to Lovikov. How did you manage to get away with carrying a stuffed horse around while in the HLF?”

“Wait,” Lunar Phase asks, looking over at Kraber. “You have a stuffed horse?!”

“Her name is Joanna,” Kraber says, holding up a stuffed mare proportioned like an earth horse with a strangely long face, because it would be weird if it looked like a pony native to Equus. It has been lying next to his heavily bandaged head. You can see that there’s a little bit of blood on it as well…

“It was my daughter’s,” Kraber explains, and Lunar Phase draws in a little gasp, a little ‘oh’.

“Whose blood is that?” you ask.

“Mine,” Kraber says. “Mostly. Anyway, I threatened to shoot off their balls and rearrange their organs when doing surgery. I… I don’t fokking know, I was gesuip when I told them what I’d do. And none of them bothered me afterwards, though even women kept putting their hands over their crotches when I came by...”

There’s an uncomfortable pause.

“Look, sometimes, violence really is the answer,” Kraber explains.

Aegis looks up at Kraber, then to his foals, to you, to Scootaloo, then to Babs Seed and Featherweight.

“I’m not sure to be conflicted about the fact that you’re right, or wonder whether or not that’s a good thing to say in front of foals,” Aegis says. 

“Ah, don’t worry, I have some restraint,” Kraber says. “Who the fok do you think I am, Francis Begbie? It’s not like my idea of kind paternal advice is to say ‘beat the fok out of your brother with a baseball… bat…’”

His voice trails off as he remembers that he has, in fact, told foals how to beat up Newfoals with baseball bats. And, of course, that he had once played Begbie in a production of Trainspotting.

“I’m a terrible fokking person,” he groans, and his shoulders slump.

“Wow, he finally gets it…” murmurs Verity.

“The fok’s that make you?!” Kraber asks.

“Consistent.”

“Hey, fok you, haven’t you ever heard of character development?!”

“Look,” Amber Maple says, ignoring her. “It’s fine. It’s not like Imperial forces are in a talking mood.” 

“Good point,” Kraber says.





Dodge, Viktor, the newfoal whispered in Kate’s voice. They’ll fire anyway. You can’t convince th-

And a split second before even one person’s finger could tighten on their trigger, Kraber was halfway across the street, half-dragging, half-carrying the unicorn pony behind a car.

He was dimly aware of something hitting his shoulder as he slid-fell into cover behind an old, battered van, breathing heavily.  Dammit. He’d been shot. Wincing more in anticipation of what he’d feel on his armor, he placed a hand over his left shoulder to find a lump of…

A bullet or three…

….they had deformed against the shoulder of the PHL tac-vest. It stung like a woman with teeth in her beef portal, but he was alive and not bleeding everywhere! Damn, PHL stuff was awesome! Maybe there was something to being a horsefucker...

So. Good news! Behind a van with a unicorn, not dead.

Bad news: Yeah, that wouldn’t last long.

Kraber bent down, one ear to the ground, and caught a glimpse of the HLF mob between the undercarriage and the asphalt. Yep. Definitely advancing.

Maybe he could parlay or something. Maybe he could-

They’re not going to let me live, Kraber realized. The only thing they hate more than ponies is people that like them… they’ll go for me, fill me with bullets, and rip me apart.

Maybe they were his HLF ‘brothers and sisters’... maybe not. But right now, he wasn’t their china. They would torture him slow enough, use him as a banner and thrust him up on a pike… then go after the pony.

He poked his head out the other side, activating the shield like Socket Wrench had shown him, and squeezed off a quick burst.

Most of the HLF hadn’t been wearing body armor, so the .338 rounds punched through them, sometimes up to 7 at once. But… 

And then Kraber realized. Proper soldiers - not HLF -wouldn’t be grouped that close together. Wasn’t like these people actually wanted to help during Barrierfall. They were just angry kontgesigs. 

“Any suggestions for where I can take you?!” Kraber yelled over the roar of the bullets.

“Maine Medical might work!” the pony said. “But you’ll have to go by the Bureau!”

“What’s wrong with that?” Kraber asked. “Isn’t it unfinished?”

“I don’t know how, but… some sonovabitch managed to access one of the basement-level storerooms and located some potion stocks,” the pony said. “The PER have been dragging people in since. I was trying to warn everyone, but then those two assholes shot me…” He sucked in a breath between clenched teeth. “If I die, tell Sylvia Bray at Maine Medical that I love her.”

“Sure,” Kraber said. 

“Get them before they ponify us!” one HLF woman screamed.

Well, that settled it...

“Oh. FOK!” Kraber yelled. “Excuse me.” Sliding out from cover, almost smoothly, he line up the sights his LMG, shield activated, and let loose on full auto. A rare pleasure for him.

Several quick spreads were enough to break the crowd, and that was enough of an opening for him to make a quick break down a side-street, the unicorn carried in his arms. He switched to the shotgun, the MG2019’s drum mag nearly dry.

And around him, Portland burned. Shells from the Sorghum were still shredding structures and streets, their screams overhead and the streaks of tracer lending everything a blitz aesthetic. People were panicking, civilians and combatants alike caught up in the hellstrom of carnage, violence and desperation.

Then, amidst the fire and fume, he saw the bureau, a blasted shell of a building, windows smashed and dimmed. 

It wasn’t as bad as he remembered from Innsbruck. 

It was worse.

There were people, armed PER guards armed with magic shields, rifles and smgs, the motley weapons of the average insurgent nowadays, herding people into the ruins of the Bureau. They grabbed random passers-by and shoved them towards the doors, forcing them down an access ramp into the basement loading bay.

This was Sheol, and there were the damned, descending.

And emerging, coming out the other way, faces full of smiles...

He paused.

“Newfoals.”

It was quite likely the first time a lot of these people had reason to be worried about newfoal attacks here in America. And if there were newfoals, and the HLF was fucking around, going for the PHL, then… Up to him, then. Fok. 

But down below, he could see what looked like other ponies being herded into the ruins. If anything, they looked to be treated harsher than the humans being herded in, beaten by the new foals for no reason at all, if any. Some of them looked to be near fokking dead. Bleeding, even.

Half dead. One newfoal - a reddish-yellow one, was slamming a gray mare that looked like a mother into the pavement, something dark and wet crusted around his hoof. And at the same time, he was cooing to her colt. Kraber couldn’t hear the words, but the colt was covered in his mother’s blood, and he looked like he was too dry to burst into tears.

Ah, fok it. He had to do something.

So, sighting in the MG2019, finding just the right window that he could hit as many of the goddamn gluesticks as possible, Kraber sighted it in and fired the MG2019, punching through the legs of one new foal pegasus and splattering that bastard new foal’s face all over the colt.

Well, there’s a colt that’ll grow up with severe mental trauma… Kraber thought, before breaking from cover, his unicorn charge slung over one shoulder. ’But at least he will grow up’.

He fired again and again, MG2019 blazing, shredding through newfoals, through anyone that  he’d decided he didn’t like.

Seemingly following his lead, or him following their lead, sporadic fire broke out all around, people and ponies with guns surrounding the PER.

It was essentially point-blank range, and the PER didn’t stand a chance.

“Get to Maine Medical!” he yelled, providing cover with long, sustained saturating bursts from his MG2019, as men, women, and unicorns with stolen guns also fired into the PER and newfoals chasing them.

Where the fok did this sudden counter-strike come from?! he thought for a second, before seeing the other attackers break their stand and pull back, creating an open channel down the center of the street…

A pathway to the main entrance of the Bureau.

And, barreling down that corridor was a delivery-truck that had been remade in the end of the world with a sharp bumper made for ramming, pushing on with manic determination, regardless of anything that got in its way, human or pony. 

He hadn’t inspired a stand at all: he had blundered into somebody else’s attack.

To Kraber’s horror, he could see a youngish teenager with a white gas mask behind the truck’s wheel, screaming something unintelligible.

And then - not even a hundred feet from the mass of newfoals, she dropped and rolled out of the door, landing in a tumbling roll.

“I’m okay!” he heard her call out.

The Bureau - or rather its ruins - were not. The speeding van, momentum barely sapped from where it tore through the newfoals, reached the end of the street, jumped the curve, ploughed through the human wall of PER and captive civilians, and then threw itself down the Bureau’s loading ramp, colliding with the doorframe of the basement dock.

“Get down!” Kraber roared, throwing himself to the floor, just as a flash of light twinkled…

!!SS-CHOOM!”

The unfinished, ruined Bureau erupted into a massive glowing mushroom cloud lit from within by hundreds of shades of purple, and the sound of the conflagration sounded uncannily like a scream…

No, it was a scream. Dozens of screams, hundreds even. 

And they were human. It was the death-cries of the unconverted within the bureau’s walls, burning alive as the potion stores cooked off.

Rainbow-colored lightning arced through the ascending mushroom-cloud. Viktor, aghast, could not reconcile his relief at the structure’s destruction, and his horror at the casual eradication of innocent bystanders.

“Everything I touch turns to kak, doesn’t it?” he sighed.

“I’m-” the teenager called out again, but as she stepped into the pool of light under a street lamp, the words died in her throat and Kraber’s as well…

...as she brought up an arm to wipe her brow, and found a hoof attached to her wrist.

Now she screamed too. She was transforming - somehow, either from landing in a puddle of the potion, or having been struck by contaminated debris when her truck-bomb blew the Bureau up.

“No...NO! MUMMY! MUMMY!”

Purplish-pink fur sprouted out her skin in irregular clumps, and her face looked as pliable as clay, practically bubbling in the orange light. 

”Help me! Somepony help meeeeeheheeee!!!

She screamed again, left eye forced closed by her cheek and brow swelling to the point that they were almost as big as a basketball, leaving her listing to one side. And, as suddenly as the massive potion-induced thaumic tumors had appeared, they receded, leaving the left eye to open, and-

”Help them! Haha! I’ll help all of them, Majesty!”

No. That was not a human’s eye! It was dull and glassy, like a doll’s eye. One side, the potion-imbued left half, moved forward, one arm with its fingers fusing into a hoof stretched out towards Kraber. The right half, one with a desperate, pleading human eye, stubbornly stayed back.

“MAJESTY!”

Kraber shot her in the face with his revolver, realizing, too tired for even simple horror or revulsion, that he had never known her name. She’d been brave enough to try and destroy the Bureau, but… the price she’d paid.

Nobody deserved that. 

“Here! I hotwired a truck!” cried a man with a baseball cap. “JUMP IN AND SHOOT THE FUCKING ZOMBIES!”

In the space of a second, Kraber rushed over to the truck and placed his unicorn charge into the bed, then following them, finding himself behind a heavy red-orange pegasus mare with two LMGs reminiscent of shorter MG42s (Vaguely reminiscent of a PPsH) mounted on her sides, with something that looked like a chewable cylinder with buttons hanging below her chin, wired up to the triggers of the LMGs.

“Look after this unicorn,” Kraber said, sighting in the MMG and opening up full-auto, slicing through the newfoals ahead like a buzzsaw.

“Shit, it’s Rime Ice!” the mare gasped.

So that was the unicorn’s name. There were a lot of things Kraber might have wanted to say to this earth pony - okay, maybe not - but it was lost in the roar of their rifles as they emptied them into the charging newfoal horde behind them.

“JOU FOKKIN KONTGESIGS!” Kraber screamed, letting loose a pipe-bomb, the pointy end embedding itself in a pegasus newfoal’s head, making her look like some strange alicorn...

Right up until it exploded, anyway, shrapnel shredding through the newfoals right next to her. But… he paused. Wait. They weren’t getting new numbers. THERE WOULDN’T BE ANY MORE NEWFOALS IF HE SLAUGHTERED THIS FOKKIN BATCH OF VARKNAAIERS!

That happy thought in  mind, that for once he was overwhelming the newfoals, rather than the other way around, he forced a grim smile onto his face under the Eel-type mask, reloaded the MG2019, pipe-bomb and all, and let loose. “BLIKSEMS!” he screamed, the MG2019 ripping them apart like a buzzsaw. “I'm gonna kill you all, I'm gonna kill your chommies and your family, I'm gonna track down your grandparents and turn them inside-out, nobody can stop the blood train that will turn your loved ones into a red splatter across the tracks of humanity!”

So far, he was making good on that promise.

“Who the hell are you?!” the mare asked.

“Ivan Bliss, PHL,” Kraber said, quicker than the mare could react. “Ah’m a doaktir. Ah’m tryin tae git tae Maine Medical. That unicorn - Rime Ice - was hurt bad. But unfortunately, Ah went intae PER territory…”

“Glad we rescued you then,” the mare said.

“That wasnae a rescue, that wis backup,” Kraber said.

The mare paused, even as she kept firing. “What?!”

“Ye think Ah’d pass up the chance tae chib PER?” Kraber asked, as if the mere idea of leaving a PER member alive, with anything intact - be it arms, legs, brains, genitals, or dignity - was completely foreign to him.





“It really is, you know,” Aegis says.

You have to admit, it’s really not all that much of a surprise.

“Why thank you!” Kraber says, a smile on his face. “Not as much as 

...Aaaaaaand neither is that.

“You’re welcome,” Aegis agrees, without missing a beat.





“...While we’re glad for the assist, that’s… that’s kinda fucked up,” the mare said.

“The kontgesigs killed my family,” Kraber explained. “It’s just a little-” his LMG jamming, right at the moment a pegasus newfoal landed on the back of the car, Kraber shoved a pipe-bomb into the newfoal’s throat. With a grunt, he rammed his fist into the newfoal, knocking them back into the mob of newfoals… where the newfoal exploded.

“Okay, a LOT AY FOKKING INTEREST!” Kraber called back.

The mare might have remained silent for the rest of the trip up to Maine Medical, if Kraber, of course, had not managed to characteristically fok everything over in less than five minutes, thanks to a very ill-worded expression of gratitude...

“...my kind?” she repeated back to him, voice numb, before her wings flared and she screamed. “MY FUCKING KIND?!”

Kraber simply stared at the red-orange pegasus for a moment. “I-”

“You’re PHL, I thought you’d understand it!” the pegasus said. “Don’t tell me - you’re some conscript, an HLF asshole that just joined for a bigger gun?!”

Well, that was better than the truth - that Kraber was one of said HLF assholes. And, at this point, he had to admit it - he was probably one of the biggest kontgesigs on the HLF.  “Something like that, yes,” Kraber said, vague as he could make it. 

“Well, let me give you a fucking reminder,” the pegasus hissed - practically growled, and Kraber never would have guessed a herbivore would be able to make such a predatory sound. “Here’s what my fucking kind have been through. Our precious ‘Elements of Harmony’ fucking failed, and because of that we had our first war in over a thousand years. I lost family there, dammit! There were goddamned crystal golems in the streets, and we had so many earth ponies refugees crowding into Cloudsdale because everypony thought they’d be safe in the sky. But no, Sombra’s battlecasters… they disrupted the cloudwalking magic, leaving HUNDREDS of ponies to fall to their deaths.”

The concept of war between pastel-colored ponies in a land that seemed like it was the archetypical sugar bowl before the war was a downright weird image, but Kraber decided he would just go with it.

“And after that, it just got worse and worse,” the mare said. “I don’t mean the war - that was bad enough! But when it was over, it was like… it was like we’d gotten drunk on national fervor or something! There were parades everywhere, it was turning into a fascist hellhole wherever we went, and then I lost two friends from Baltimare when the Great Equestrian, exploded thanks to that bitch-Queen Celestia.”

“...Ah heard ay that earlier from a china,” Kraber said.

“Oh, let me tell you about it,” the pegasus mare sneered. “Queen Celestia decided she didn’t like a statue about ‘harmony’-” (you could hear the air quotes in her voice) “-so she blew it the fuck up and killed some good friends of mine. She left the ship about to fall to the ground, and fucking ignored us for the victory celebrations of finding this world to spread more of that fucking desolation she called harmony, and we weren’t rescued for a day. She doesn’t want harmony, she just wants control. You think having fucking newfoals in Equestria benefits us? No! IT DOESN’T! Equestria has homeless bastards everywhere, workers killing themselves because they can’t think enough to take breaks, we are watched by fucking spy-systems just about everywhere we go, can be reported to the royal guard for damn near no reason, and are damn lucky to come back after arrest! You know what’s the worst?! IT’S THE NEWFOALS that report us in! Like they’re better ponies than us because they have no free will and work themselves to death if asked! Like they’re trying to replace us, or Celestia’s trying to replace us with them cause she’s decided she doesn’t like having free thinkers! Those fucking zombie abominations…”

It was the first time Kraber had heard a pony so disgusted with newfoals, with Equestria itself. Nebula’s rage had been reserved for Celestia, for the System. But this mare’s vitriol was pouring out across the entire nation.

And then, without warning, the mare punched Kraber in the knee. “That’s why we’re here, in spite of assholes like YOU! Or the HLF! Because even being around you apes is better than even a second in the sty my home’s turned into!” 

“My… fokking leg…” Kraber hissed. “I’ll fokking ki-”

No. He wouldn’t. 

“llllisssten. Just listen, okay? Ah’m sorry,” Kraber said. 

“I…what?” the mare said, surprised, her eyes (Why were pony eyes so huge?) wide.

“What do you mean ‘what’? Never seen a human apologize before?” Kraber asked.

“Well, course I have. It just… you don’t seem like the type who ever admits they’re wrong,” the mare said. “HLF, ex or whatever…”

“Yeah, well, Ah’ve bin having one ay those days,” Kraber said quickly. “What’s the situation between here a Maine Medical?”

“We’ve got ponies that need treatment,” the mare said. “But… there’s PER in the middle of the hospital, screwing up any evac in the helicopters. Or so I’ve been told over the radio.”

“Wait. PER? People Ah can kill withoot concern fir thae nature ay the morality of man and nietzschean inner conflict?” Kraber asked, a smile on his face.

“...you’re a sick fucker, you know that?” the pegasus mare asked, smiling as the truck came to rest in front of the hospital. Patients - pony and human alike, even a few zebras and a pony that looked made of glass or crystal - were being shepherded out, into huge trucks, ambulances, whatever vehicle would take them. A lot of them looked to have been modified like the vehicles out of Mad Max - metal shielding over the windshields, spikes on the wheels, rams, gun turrets.

“What, you need me to turn you off your leash?” she asked.

Kraber vaulted out of the truck, and headed into the hospital.

“Ah understand ya have PER and newfoals infesting this building?” Kraber asked one PHL man guarding the entrance, holding a huge shotgun with a drum magazine.

“Well, yes, but-”

“Excuse me. Ah have some anger tae work oof,” Kraber said, pushing away anyone trying to stop him, a huge smile on his face under his mask as he headed for the hospital. “When the screaming stops, you’ll ken I’m done.”

Finally, some clarity!

Fine, then. Maybe ponies weren’t all bad. Maybe - okay, definitely - the HLF wasn’t a force for good and the protection of humanity. And if tonight was any judge, maybe the ponies had to be protected. Tomorrow, he could decide on all this shit.

But he didn’t need to make any decisions when killing PER. That was a public fokkin service.

“Done with what?” the red-orange pegasus called over.

“...Ah’m going tae go practice medicine,” Kraber said, sure that he had a ghoulish smile on his face. “Someone’s oan a burst mooth…”

Kraber knew they were looking at him in fear.

That was it. Finally - a good kind of fear for Kraber to enjoy. Let the PER fokking come, he’d paint the walls with them!