//------------------------------// // Dope Fiend Massacre // Story: The Light Despondent // by Doctor Fluffy //------------------------------// Light Despondent, chapter 6: Dope Fiend Massacre Co - Authors / Editors TB3 Rush VoxAdam Kizuna-Tallis “It wasn't just the baby that died that day; something inside Sick Boy was lost and never returned.” Renton, Trainspotting I had a vision I saw Mr. Brown on the television He was talking crap as he always does I had to reign him in, why? Because I don't like who he is And I don't like who I am I don't like what he does And he makes me a man On the verge of his mind A spectacular view Mr. Brown, I've got an issue and its got to do with you Biting Elbows, Dope Fiend Massacre February 2023 The story of a life’s journey is a winding narrative, threaded through the rocks and shoals of time’s ocean, spanning ravines of thought and traversing deserts of memory... “I! FOKKING! WANTED! TO GO! SKIING! JOU FOKKIN BLIKSEM!” Kraber will yell, kicking one HLF man in the face. And sometimes it crashes off the rails and straight into the cornfields, into less poetic territory. In the life story of Viktor Marius Kraber, this is one of those moments… The HLF man will fall to the ground, clutching his face, and Kraber will whip out his heavy revolver, landing a shot on another Frontman down the street, one who had been aiming a rifle at them. It’s a sloppy shot at this kind of range, but enough arterial blood will spray up like a fountain from the remains of the man’s shoulder to guarantee he won’t stop falling for a long, long time… “Did you want to try skiing, Aegis?” Kraber will say, almost conversationally. Beside him, immense equine bulk and enchanted kevlar providing cover for Kraber, will be Aegis, Kraber’s best friend. A stallion to whom our unlikely protagonist will soon enough entrust his life. But all good things in time. “Ah… I’m terrible at it,” Aegis will reply, his loud rumbling voice conveying more than a little uncertainty. “Tried it once on the backside of the Canterhorn and ended up off the course and in a gully, wrapped ‘round a tree.” He will pause for a second, suddenly contemplative. “But maybe, hrm...I wonder if they could find human skis that’d work for me while I’m rearing up.” And on that runnel of introspection, Aegis will blaze away with the twin F3-Thunderlords on his back firing in percussive tempo, the MMG’s bullets stitching a line through the HLF forces poking themselves out of cover in this snow-choked mountain town. The earth pony titan’s long thick limbs and head (which is disproportionately small compared to his massive frame, almost as if another pony’s skull has been transposed onto some muscled golem) will be impassive as he bites down on the trigger, and the red-tinted goggles that cover his eyes will reflect nothing but death. Beside these two brudders-in-arms-and-forelegs, Johnny C and Fiddlesticks will stand their ground, Johnny firing his Leshiy and Fiddlesticks opening up with the two enchanted M249s on her battle saddle. A small layer of snow builds up on her ancient, battered, nicked stetson as she fires. “Don’t understand!” a cowering civilian shall wail from the back of a car from which she had been selling various hot foodstuffs for the winter. “The HLF! We thought we could trust them but they’ve just gone crazy! It’s all gone mad, trusting geldos and horsefuckers, but the HLF ARE CRAZY! They just went insane when that weird newfoal got here!” “Oh, they were crazy a loong time before this,” Johnny C will call over. “Hey, Kraber, remember that story you were telling Dancing Day? The one with the Sorghum Exile?” “IS THIS REALLY THE FOKKING TIME FOR A FLASHBACK?!” Kraber will yell, reloading his revolver in case he needs it later, holstering it, and bringing his new MG2019 up for a killing burst. “Fiiiine. Maybe later?” Johnny C will beg, almost pleading. Kraber and Aegis will shrug. “Okay. That’s doable,” Aegis will say. “How bout… near a fireplace, with hot chocolate?” “EMBRACE CELESTIA’S SUN!” a PER member will call down, opening up with what looked like a paintball gun. “Gotta be really fokkin good hot chocolate though,” Kraber will say, far too casually. “Maybe with mint…” “What about peppermint?” Aegis will suggest. “Even better!” Kraber will gasp. “And now these PER assholes are here too,” Fiddlesticks will curse, before ducking back into cover and wearily beckoning to Kraber. “Viktor, show them the light.” “Aww yeah, you want enlightenment, I’ll give your fokking enlightenment!” Kraber will yell, tossing a thermite grenade up at the PER man. “Here! HOLD THIS! YEHI ‘OR!” Yehi‘or. Fiat lux. Let there be light… “OH CELESTIA, THE BURNING!” the PER member will scream. And Victor will look upon the light, and yea verily, see that it was good. Fokking good. “YEAH, YOU BETTER RUN!” he will yell, firing in the general direction of the immolating men. “YOU WANT ME TO DO THE FOKKING BEER TRICK?!” “Oh shit! It’s them!” “NOT THE BEER!” “SPARE MY POSTERIOR!” “MY GENITALIA!” Music, sweet music. “...You’re going to do it to them anyway, aren’t you?” Aegis will sigh, firing off his Thunderlords again. “Why? Do you disapprove of the coors beer trick?” Kraber will ask. “No, no,” Aegis will say. “They’re PER – fuckers probably deserve it. I’m just…well some things are just you being you.” “What can I say? I’m a spirit of violence, and you can’t cage a free spirit…” Wanton violence against PER is endemic to him by now, if we’re going to be honest. Kraber will line up another shot and fires, nailing an HLF man in the knee, dropping him from a rooftop, sending him falling to an awning… only for him to bounce upwards off it, and awkwardly ram into the side of a van and bounce, landing on his stomach on the icy street. “MY SPLEEN!” the man will scream. Seeing the ragdoll slapstick comedy, Kraber will attempt a roguish smile and a punchline. “Besides. They’re resisting arrest, right?” More than anything, his attempts at Hollywood badassery are just disturbing. “...That is so fucked up,” Johnny C will sigh, half-jokingly, though he’s used to Kraber’s insanities and bloodlust at this point. “Stop trying to be cool and keep shooting, you batshit fuck.” “I don’t need to try. Besides, who cares that I kill them? They’re PER,” Kraber will ask. “A couple months ago, I counted as one of the sanest men in the HLF.” “...That’s even more fucked up!” Johnny C will yell back. “I know, right?” Kraber will agree, momentarily leaving Johnny C speechless at this singular moment of clarity. “And as I said, who’s gonna miss these kontgesigs?” “Friends, family…” will be Fiddlesticks’ dry response. “Ever wonder how many happy widows and orphans you’ve made?” “You’re such a buzzkill at times.” December 24, 2022 PHL base in New York For you, Dancing Day, the unicorn filly listening to this rambling account, it feels as if it has been a long time since you started this story. Right now you’re looking through some of Mr. Kraber’s books. They’re odd things, with weird titles like The Scar’, ‘Marabou Stork Nightmares, Perdido Street Station, or Veniss Underground. You remembered Venice from the pictures, from the short found-footage projects of lost cities and landmarks that are so common nowadays, but you had questioned why it was spelled with two ‘S’s. “Cause it’s the future,” Kraber had explained upon your question, awhile back. “It’s implied to be pretty degraded there.” Kraber and Aegis are telling the story, and this time, more foals and children, even a few adults have come to listen. Babs Seed and Scootaloo (that poor pegasus! What happened to her wings?) are listening intently, curious for this man’s stories. Some foals lie against human children, and vice versa, sitting on mattresses and chairs that somebody brought into this room. Even Vinyl Scratch is here! You love her music so much.... A brown earth pony mare lurks at the back of the room too, secured to a wheelchair and escorted by a smirking zebra shaman. She’s got a particular loathing for Kraber it seems, from the fire blazing in her curious, blue-rimmed eyes. “So you’ze sayin’ Sutra Cross’s murder didn’t start the Great HLF purge?” Babs Seed asks. “That was just the spark that lit the fire. There’d been people thinking the HLF could be trusted, that they were chommies to all refugees – so long as you didn’t count ponies.” To that, Kraber can’t restrain his disgust, and his self-loathing. “We said it was only bosbefok radicals that stole from people with nothing left to rop, but Sutra...well what happened to her destroyed that idea,” he glowers, like a banked-over fire. “And… Honestly? We were all kind of bosbefok radicals. And any that weren’t then, sure are now.” His gaze drifts over to the blank-flanked mare in the wheelchair, and spares her a momentary, mocking sneer. “You gotta feel sorry for those poor deluded bastards that think they can outdo the PHL…” “Even da reformists?” asks Babs. “Yeah, they’re just sorta low-wave varknaaiers – total dicks,” Kraber says. “Like, if the main body of the HLF is New York, then the reformists are New Jersey. Nobody gives them any heed, and most of the HLF like to point and laugh at them. Even if they have good ideas, they get ignored because the ideas of, say, John Birch mean that more ponies die. Aren’t even aware of how much harm they’ve done. At least I admit I’m a piece of shit.” “Don’t get us wrong,” Aegis says, struggling to get the conversation back on track, “Sutra was a wonderful mare, kind to everyone, good friend of mine… but there was a lot more going on. First, she was one of the most prominent PHL members - she was one of the first, and she joined medical organizations to help earth right out the gate. I think she even met Reitman before she went nuts. But, when push came to shove, she had to join the PHL. Let’s say she didn’t consider the potion to be ‘medicine’, so she was fired from the hospital she worked at and blacklisted by the Equestrian medical community for not accepting a position at a Bureau… and for protesting the Potion. Poor mare nearly lost an eye in those riots... But the HLF had been assholes long before that.” He’d looked over at Kraber. “No offense.” “Why would I take any?” Kraber asks. “They’re kontgesigs.” “Don’t ask what that means, my little ponies… and mares. Anyway, continuing on from that, the HLF managed to piss off Salem, Boston, and the entire state of Massachusetts by torturing her.” “I should point another thing out,” Kraber adds. “American HLF… mostly, they’re the paranoid kontgesigs you would’ve seen carrying kalashnikovs into a Panera before the War… The rest of the HLF from other countries are mostly refugees, Boston was almost three quarters refugees at this point, so they alienated the fok out of their target demographic.” To the outside observer, it’d seem bizarre to hear Kraber say business jargon like that, but then again, Kraber reads China Mieville books without a dictionary, and the works of Joseph Conrad in the original Polish. In the background, the mare in the wheelchair is being removed against her will. She might be too sedated to fight, and her voice hoarse from days of screaming and mad laughter, but at this rate she might just discover her newfound earth pony strength and rip a new ‘plothole’ in Kraber’s story. “I am gonna get so much kak for that when she can move again, but that was worth it,” Kraber says to himself. “Adieu Verity Carter, adieu…” As for yourself, Dancing Day, well you remember the day that the name Sutra Cross went national. Very, very well. Too well, even – you still wake up screaming from the memory of what was done to her. “Boston’s one of, if not the closest port to Europe,” continues Kraber. “So Massachusetts had a lot of refugees. A lot of which just didn’t have the money to leave, so they were practically stuck at the umkhuku – that’s Zulu for chicken coop, you can guess what it means back home – by the docks or on someone’s roof until one group or another took pity on them.” “It’s one of the reasons the PHL came there, and Sutra Cross had brought enough supplies to help everyone there. It was an enormous convoy,” Aegis takes over. “Hell, I’d helped make a lot of the supplies there. Even repaired some of the trucks! They were for people suffering from severe malnutrition, a hell of a lot of diseases, starvation…” “And what do the so-called fokking liberators of fokking humanity do?” Kraber asks sarcastically. “They rop all the supplies, fill two of the ponies with more lead than the plumbing in a high school dorm, gorge themselves on them and get chwee chweereekeys off the painkillers in the most fokking horrible bust-up in the history of man or equine, and decide to fok over the nurse administering it every way they can! Klein kakfokkers…” he muttered. “Even made me and Burakgazi think they’d gone too far. I just… It made me ask what the point was. I mean, what the fok were we accomplishing? We were flou, pure and simple. IF THERE WAS A FOKKING THING THEY COULDA DONE TO PISS EVERYONE OFF, IT WOULD BE–” “...And ‘flou’ means?” Scootaloo asks, ever the blunt-speaking roadblock in the path of a diatribe. Aegis mouths her a faint thank-you. “A weak, unfunny joke,” Kraber explains, calming down slightly. “I actually did try to help out in Boston. I felt responsible for it, kinda…” “But you weren’t there,” Vinyl says, confused. “Well, I... I wanted to help somehow,” Kraber says. “I felt like I owed them. Anyway, what I’m getting at is that there’d been plenty of incidents between HLF and PHL. ‘friendly fire’, defections, all kinds of things. It was at fever pitch, and the HLF’s raging inferiority complex towards the PHL just got worse and worse…” July 25, 2022 Off the coast of Maine Near the Sorghum It was amazing what industry a few horsefokkers – Perdnaaiers? – could manage. That wasn’t what Kraber would think in a couple month’s time, but that’s how it was back then. As the good tugboat Arctic Warrior eased its way through the night and sleeting rain, they saw the colossal bulk of the Sorghum Exile. The mobile platform truly was an immense rig, its light shining out even into the darkness outside. It was dusk now, almost true night, and everyone there was getting a little twitchy as the boat closed the final mile to the target.. “Stay on course,” cautioned Verity, checking repeatedly forward through a pair of binoculars. Everyone else stood alert, but Lovikov in particular had a huge smile on his face, staring up into the huge cannons mounted on the PHL rig. Or at least, what they presumed to be cannons. Kraber wasn’t sure how Lovikov thought, but something in him was ever-so-close to breaking. If it wasn’t gone already. “Oh, it will be!” chirped a forest-green newfoal mare, balanced on the gunwale like a sprite. Kraber whipped out his .45, ready to shoot it in the face, only to find that- “Oy va'avoy...” She was covered in blood, one eye a mashed and jellied mass, pulped against a bullethole in her skull. Kraber could see her mane visible through the hole in her skull. A little hair actually appeared to have gotten stuck in there, waving out the empty eye socket.... her smile appeared to be held open with rusty hooks, blood oozing out from where they pierced the skin, the fur and skin underneath discolored by both blood and rust. Maybe she had once been beautiful, or as much as a pony could be nowadays… but there looked to be lines through her face, around her eyes. She looked like a porcelain doll, a decayed piece of Victorian automata, steadily cracking and unwinding... “Isn’t that just wonderful?” she giggled. ‘Fok me, another hallucination?’ Kraber groaned inwardly. “Who are you?” He thought, doing his best to think at it. He was on a tug with the Thenardiers, after all. He had to… he couldn’t get shot too early into the mission. “I’m you, silly! I’m Victory, your Pretty Private!” FOK! It even sounded like Pinkie Pie. “Or at least, I’m what you will be…” “FOK JOU! I’ll never… EVER take the FOKKING POTION!” “Oh, don’t be so defeatist! Who knows what the future holds? I don’t, but it looks wonderful…” “Hou jou fokkin bek…” Kraber gritted his teeth. “Now, now. Don’t be that way! You’re so grumpy aaalll the time. I miss your smile, Viktor!” “Well, what the fok is there to smile about?!” “As a human, there’s nothing,” the newfoal said. “But if you become me, you’ll be happy all the time!” She jumps down off the gunwale onto the deck, trailing a string from her back that’d gotten stuck in a scupper… … A pullstring, like you’d see on a child’s toy. As she hits the deck it comes taught, and she moans lewdly. “You’ll be happeeeeeee, nice and happeeeeeee…beyond measure, purest pleasure. Sexy, sexy pleasure!” she giggled, sounding like she was on the verge of an orgasm. “Fokking turn into a hoer to the Queen Bitch,” Kraber said. “I’m not a mare.” He sighed, “Goddammit,” not knowing that in the future, foals would nitpick the story for how unbelievable his reaction seemed. The truth was, Kraber was just too tired to know whether to be disgusted or disturbed. “The queen can fix thaaaaaat….” the newfoal that called itself Victory said, fading away into the rain. “Seeya soon, Vicky…” It was at that moment that Kraber became acutely aware of just how much he hated his life. Under his breath, he muttered a quick prayer – “Shema yisrael, adonai eloheinu, adonai echad…” “Hey, Kraber.” Kraber stood bolt upright, hand on his .45 pistol, ready to shoo- “Whoa! Take it easy!” Mariesa yelled, hands up. “You’ve been jumpier than usual.” “Jammer,” Kraber apologized. “I’ve… I haven’t been sleeping that well lately.” “Wait, you actually sleep?” Mariesa asked, raising an eyebrow. “A lot of us hear you trying to sleep in that tent you have. You never sound good, always thrashing around… some of us are worried you might be going hatchers.” ”Even the HLF had standards awhile back. ‘Going Hatchers’ was their word for bosbefok,” Kraber explains, then, noticing that Aegis is the only other one in the room that understands Afrikaans, he explains: “Shell-shocked. The stress of battle getting to you. You know.” You do know, yes. Too many ponies and humans have had that happen… especially Mr. Kraber. It’s sad, really – sometimes, you can see glimpses of who you think he once was. But those are fleeting, and you’re not sure what to look for. “Anyway, we called it ‘going hatchers’ cause of this one woman, Beatrice Hatch. She was an old HLF, she’d known Mike Carter personally, and it seemed fokking nothing could shake her. She’d go in skop skiet and donner, come out unscathed,” Kraber continues, “But then… They were at a battle, somewhere. Probably the East Coast. And her son got ponified. But the newfoal, well, I don’t know what happened to the poor bliksem. Last I saw, her son had been running, going voetsek for a portal with a load of C4, trying to kill himself and take a bunch of ponies with him, but he fell in the portal and survived, right as the potion got to his skull…” He pauses, and shudders like a skyscraper in a quake. “The newfoal that came out, it was wrong. No, seriously. The regular newfoals already set the ‘wrongness’ bar pretty fokking high. But this... its eyes never focused on the same thing, and it kept babbling randomly. It didn’t want to kill anyone, it couldn’t talk without the words spilling into each other, but it wouldn’t leave Hatch alone, and it was always fokking crying.” Everyone in the room, even Aegis, stares up at Kraber, disgusted and horrified. You think you’re going to be sick, and you feel a lump in your throat as Kraber continues. “Was that… was that where the slang came from?” you ask. “No,” Kraber says. “It’s from what his mother did. Hatch, well, she couldn’t leave things well enough alone, and smuggled it back to Defiance. Somehow, she’d managed to get herself exiled to this kakhole cabin a bit west of Defiance, and she forsook the HLF. I don’t know how she got the idea, but she’d gotten too bosbefok to be left to her own devices, and one day I was heading off to Errol for… for graze or something, maybe to use the wireless, or maybe I just wanted to see a pub. Decided to stop by – even if I didn’t like her keeping a newfoal, I felt sorry for her. And… And I found her with the newfoal on her kitchen table, sewing a fokking speaker into its stomach. It wasn’t protesting, it just looked like it had gone limp, its tongue hanging out as the needle steeked him. She just… she turned herself into the thing’s nursemaid, talking to it as if it was alive and still her son. Still human.” There is an uncomfortable pause. “What was… what was the speaker for?” Scootaloo asks. “She claimed she could hear her son’s voice coming out of it,” Kraber says simply. You are all mesmerized, staring in rapt attention at this sudden ghost story. “Well, could she?” you ask after a brief silence. “That’s not important for awhile,” Kraber says, a bit too quickly. “I’m not sure I want to ova about it.” “Trust him, it’s pretty fucked up,” Aegis says. “Anyway, Mariesa had just asked how I was. And I’d said... “I… I don’t think I’m hundreds,” Kraber said. “What?” Mariesa asked. “Sorry… most of us don’t speak Afrikaans.” She paused. “Or, well, whatever other languages you speak.” “Means I don’t feel fine,” Kraber answered. “Just – I can’t shake this feeling. I keep on asking myself… the fok am I doing? I’m hallucinating my family calling me a bliksem–” “No we’re not.” ‘Hou jou bek, you.’ “And the worst thing is,” Kraber continued aloud, “they have a point.” “Are they telling you to join the Tyrant Sun?” Mariesa asked. “I’ve heard that the PHL have hypnosis spells they can use to lure you in…” “No we fucking don’t!” Vinyl yells. “Only the PER does that!” “Yeah, well the HLF are…” Kraber muses. “Well, here’s the thing. They do not fokking understand the PHL any more than I can understand vaporwave music or seapunk. Or normalcore.” “The hell is normalcore or seapunk?” Vinyl asks, head cocked to the side, one eyebrow raised over her huge purple sunglasses. “Fokked if I can explain. It’s too tumblr for me.” “You mean they don’t understand us?” Aegis corrects him. “Right – sorry. Even if I’d say you’re all my chommies, it’s just a bit hard to get used to,” Kraber says. “We exist in completely different stories, different levels of reality. I mean, it’s like… the Europe Front, and whatever the Dragons of the East are doing. Same world, but different kinds of stories,” He took a breath. “I’m not kidding. The PHL – you guys – are from a story where there’s always hope, where you just have to work together to save the world. Where you can solve problems with science and magic… then apply it to bullets for a big fokking gun right out of District 9. Maybe we’re in Warframe?” Aegis and Kraber share a Look at that. A look of ‘Ah, memories!’ that reminds them of testing massive grenade launchers, and that time Kraber used a thermite gun on newfoals. “The HLF, though…” Kraber continues. “They live in Mad Max. They’re in a world where we’ve lost everything, where everypony or everyzebra or whatever is the enemy, where you’re with them or against. In the PHL, you’re – no, we’re fighting to protect the spirit of freedom for all species. In the HLF, it’s already dead and nothing is sacred. They don’t understand the PHL, they don’t understand why I joined or anyone else did. So they made excuses.” “...That’s pretty bleak,” you say, visibly disturbed at just what that implies about the HLF. “It’s why the HLF you see that joined, like this one Scotsman I met in a pub with these Englishmen… Angus Reid, I think – he practically had fokking sensory overload!” Kraber says. “No, nothing like that,” Kraber said. “I’m just wondering what the fok I’m doing. I’m thinking, maybe I should have… I don’t know, helped build a railroad. Go work in a hospital, do something, anything that’ll help people out of Defiance.” “We have to be ideologically pure,” Mariesa said. “If one of us brings back something from ponies–” “Are you fokking saying that, or is Lovikov?” Kraber asked. "We're human. Let's live up to the name and do some fokking liberating." She looked open-mouthed for a second, and leaned against the tug’s gunwale, watching the waves below. Kraber did the same, right next to her. “I just… I look at Defiance. Then I look at the rig. I look at the gun I have, and the shit they have on the news, those… those damn rainmaker grenades." "I heard about 'em from one of the Canadian brigades that got away from Yael," Mariesa said. "They're a holy terror. Thank god they're in the prototype ph–" "And what happens when they're the standard? Or if the PHL have fokking AGLs of them… and I just realized this, but I’d really love to fire one. What the fok happens to us if they turn the rainmakers down on us and our chommies?” Kraber asked. “The PER, they have magic gear, and a couple billion newfoals on their side. What the fok do we have? And what do we do with it?” “That’s dangerous talk!” Mariesa hissed. “Lovikov will kill you!” “He wanted me dead anyway,” Kraber said bitterly. “Not like it’ll make a difference.” “Please, keep your voice down!” Mariesa insisted. “The HLF isn't a dictatorship,” Kraber said. “This… Our age is fokking ending. I don’t know how I know, but I know. One day, things will have gotten so much harder… and we won’t even wake up and realize it. It’ll be after a battle, or maybe just around midday, and I’ll just think: ‘My God, we’re fokking obsolete’.” “I was… I was working off old anxieties there,” Kraber explains. “I mean… The MG2019 I had was a prototype. It’d be standard soon, and when that happened we’d be fokked. Thing put the war into perspective…” "What're you talking about down there?!" a voice called down from the bridge. "Kapitan Kraber..." It was Verity, and the snide on the last two words was acidic enough to etch steel. “NOT YOUR FOKKIN’ BUSINESS!” Kraber replied, yelling over the roar of the tug’s bow-wave. “I don’t care what you call yourself, Kapitan, but right now this is my boat, and that makes your business, my business!” They glared at each other before Mariesa stepped in between, one hand placed on Kraber’s chest and the other held up towards Verity, palm out. “Please, we’re all on the same side here. We’re all HLF...and that’s what we were talking about, Captain Carter. The cause.” Verity tipped her head and made a half-shrug. “Fine.” She didn’t move away however, she and the tall, muscled man continuing to cross-examine each other in silence. The young woman staring down from the bridge wing, and the soldier gazing up from the main deck. “Alright, what’s the deal between the two of you. Why do you get along so badly?” Mariesa asked, projecting her voice ever so slightly. There was a pause, as Kraber stared up at the pilothouse, feeling Verity looking down on him. “I think kids should have a chance to be kids,” he said at last. “I mean… look at yourself, Verity. You’re twenty-something years old and you’ve spent your entire formative years as a soldier. Before the war, even. You never finished college, were never in lov–” “Don’t you dare make guesses about me, Viktor!” Verity yelled back. “The way I’ve lived my life is my decision, my choice!” They could see her bunching her fists on the rail, and her shoulders shaking, trickling with raindrops as the sky itself wept. “All of it, I chose all of it. Because neither of you saw… saw what they did to my mother.” “And you never saw what the potion did to my kids…” Kraber answered softly, and the two hardened warriors, divided by age and gender, but brought together by circumstances managed to share a smile. “I met your mother once, did you know,” he said, tone cautious. “It was at a convention, once. The Boston Comic-Con, 2015 – I slipped out of class for it. I needed a fokking break...” “Comic-Con 2015…” Verity mused, and both of the observers saw her visibly slip into nostalgia for back when people had big, flashy, decorated conventions like that, when there was money, clothes, and materials to spare for whatever costume you needed. When pop culture was a hell of a lot more important than living hand-to-mouth on what scraps you could find. “That...that was my first cosplay… I was in an Autobot exosuit. Wait, were you the guy with the pompadour, at the IDW panel!?” “I’m assuming you don’t mean the stocky fat guy in the Kill La Kill shirt, right?” Kraber asked. “He was a funny guy. Could stand to shave a bit more, though… I saw him dressed as one of the Galaxy Girls the next day...” “So close… and yet so far...” “At least he looked good in tights…” Verity waved a desperate hand. “No goddammit no! The guy in leathers, dressed like a greaser… kept asking my Mom all the questions about her work for DC and Dark Horse, who was he cosplaying…? Oh yeah, Sweet JP from Redline!” “Oh, that dipshit…” Kraber said. “Yeah, that was me.” “You looked kinda funny,” Verity admitted. “Hey, I smaak Redline! I even ghostwrote a paper on it for a friend in film school!” Kraber defended himself. “What the fok was I supposed to watch? Tailenders? Sies, man. Hated that so much.” “Yeah, I saw that,” Verity said. “It… wasn’t all that good.” “Say, did you know that JP’s real name is actually…” Kraber sniggered. “James Punkhead?!” “No way!” “I’m not tuning your kak, it really is!” Kraber protested. They chuckled softly, sharing a memory. Then Kraber’s expression darkened. “Your mother was a brave woman. What the ponies did to her, that… that wasn’t right. Look, Verity,” Kraber said. “We might not get along, we might be too similar to really… get each other, but I understand your–” A crack over the radio snapped the conversation’s tail off. “The hell is that?” Mariesa asked. “That’s the PHL’s local radio station,” Lovikov said. “It’s broadcast from the Sorghum by some horsefucker and her friend. I was hoping to take it over too. Add a little… personal touch.” “I like your style,” Verity said approvingly. “Go ahead!” “You… you can sympathize with Verity?” Amber Maple asks. “We all lost something in this war. Our pozzies, our chommies, our families, our lives… though that doesn’t mean it wasn’t hilarious what happened to her,” Kraber says. “Except the PER. They gave it away.” There is an uncomfortable pause after this sentence. “What about Kasparek?” you ask. “Kasparek damn near killed himself to get to the PHL,” Kraber says. “I can’t hate a man like that. And he gave us all big fokking guns.” “...I’m not sure what to say about your attitude towards forgiveness,” Aegis says. “Well, it’s not easy,” Kraber shrugs. “We’re not so different, really.” He pauses. "...now I feel pretty fokking terrible about what I said to Verity.” “Well, she’s HLF, cast adrift, left without…” Vinyl starts, her sentence stillborn. “So was I,” Kraber says. “If I didn’t have Aegis, I’d be fokking ponified, dead… or stretched out on a table somewhere with a toolbox next to me.” He looks up at Aegis appreciatively. “She’s got nobody, pony or human.” Aegis moves closer to Kraber, comforting him with his great pugnacious bulk, and Kraber leans against his barrel, gently sipping some hot chocolate that you suspect to be alcoholic. “Thanks,” Kraber says, a warm smile on his face as he moves slightly, Aegis inclining his great neck towards Kraber for a hug. “Just… don’t squeeze too hard, alright? I still think you cracked some ribs,” Aegis says. “Sorry,” Kraber says, looking a little embarrassed as his best friend – his bru, his chommie – hugs him, and Kraber hugs back. “I love you so much, Aegis.” “Me too,” Aegis admits, blushing slightly, the expression out of place on such a huge stallion. “Hold on,” Kraber says, something dawning. “...I’ve got an idea. For Verity’s christmas present… Verksoon my a mo, I’ve got to talk to the Major! I’ve got a Hanukkah idea!” And with that, he and Aegis have dashed out the room to requisition, leaving you looking confused. When they return, Kraber talks about the rig, and how it was... In a word, enormous. Saying it was a city unto itself would have been trite and cliche, though it was one of the only descriptors that Kraber could think to use. It was massive, colossal towers, drilling platforms and pumphouses and inscrutable rugged-yet-kitbashed PHL machinery balanced by improvised buildings that made it look like nothing so much as a mass of paint, girders, and rust. Shipping containers and deceptively hardy driftwood dwellings had been hammered and welded into place where possible. A few didn’t look to have ladders down, and were perched high up on the rig. Probably pegasus houses? But beneath all that, Kraber could see those huge PHL weapons, bristling like hairs from the upper echelons of the four pillars that bore the Sorghum’s weight. The cannons had been modified in some odd, exotic manner, with additional machinery added on, strung and bound with cords that steamed softly in the drizzle, glowing lightly in the cloudy night. The light cast by the platform reached down and illuminated the darkening ocean below, which was populated by a multitude of boats, swaying gently in the sluggish, frigid current. Most were tugs, running the gamut of the four types America could manage – 1. New at the time of the war... 2. Fairly modern, which usually became... 3. Long overdue for scrap... Or finally... 4. The rare homebrewed one made from said scrap and odds and ends lying around, or old boats frankensteined together from spare parts. The latter types were smaller, rarely built on any large scale, weaving in between the boats guarding the rig, its various tugboats, and the other semi-permanent boats docked and anchored near the rig. To Kraber’s amazement, there looked to be small stores on the boats weaving in and out of the mass of vessels. Most of those were taking turns at the docking ports around the feet of the rig’s support columns. Squinting, he saw that on one moored-up boat a large earth pony in a lifejacket was passing baskets of fish up to a longshoreman on the rig. Supplies, this was how the floating community kept itself found. And there were many more boats clustering around - tugs not-so-different to the Arctic Warrior (bar of course, the submerged compartment full of ruthless soldiery) along with a smattering of gunboats, both purpose-built and improvised, and patched, half-scuttled ships that clung to the Sorghum’s bulk like pilot-fish to a whale. Kraber doubted that a lot of them had more than one voyage left in them, save for the last desperate trip down south as the Barrier made its way to America… Down below, hovering just above the waves, he saw a pink pegasus hammering in a large metal patch to a boat that looked like it should have been scrapped… in the nineties. It listed to one side, on account of the various houses bolted onboard like odd growths or barnacles. The label ‘Winterstraw Market’ was emblazoned on the side of it. Yeah, Kraber reflected, Someone out there definitely has a sense of humor about this. Tethered to the market and other boats, he could see aerostats made from a reclaimed and incredibly large potioneer ships, the PHL logo sprayed over eight-layer-thick graffiti on the gasbag. If the rig was a city upon the sea, then here was the umkhuku suburbia, exiled from who-knew-where or making their way down from the wilderness of northern canada. Some of them looked to have beaten to high hell. Lots of the boats bore the scars of some kind of offensive magic, such as strangely transmuted wood with grain that appeared to be interspersed with metal wire, or shoots of plants growing up from the wood. The largest of the support ships bore the name Genesis, and appeared to have began life as a bulk grain carrier. Now, its lengthy foredeck was a colossal hydroponic greenhouse, glassed and tented in to grow crops, likely the closest that most ponies on the rig would have to an orchard or vegetable patch. Kraber had heard that most of the PHL’s ‘oceangoing’ ponies were pegasi – their ability to fly made staff changes easy, and a life on the ocean wave satisfied their avian desire to roam, but a ship like Genesis would probably have at least some earth ponies at hoof to staff the greenhouses and artificial orchards. ‘Pegasi are simple, they usually have SMGs or bombs or molotovs, but earthlings favor those ridiculous little assault saddles with the light machineguns...there’ll definitely be some unicorns, if only because the PHL is addicted to with their magic...’ Still, even with those considerations in mind, the majority of the ponies present would be ‘peggies’, who tended to be overconfident and had lightweight, easily broken bones. So this should probably be an easy job. “Shit,” Mariesa said. “I didn’t think there’d be this many people...” “Huh?” Viktor grunted, and then realised that he had been so focused on the ponies that he’d neglected the veritable army of human security personnel patrolling both the rig and the large ships. So many guns were out there… and of course, he doubted the people on the boats were unarmed. That was a luxury few could afford nowadays. “That makes things interesting,” admitted Verity, who had come out onto the bridge wing to join them. “...Are we changing plans? Doing something else?” Lovikov asked, clearing balking at the thought of taking orders from someone so much younger than him. “No. If we wait, the actual tow will arrive, and then the rig will leave. And once it’s under way, getting aboard is going to be near to impossible,” Verity said. “And since they swallowed our cover, they’re expecting us, so we have to do it now. There’s no other option.” Hundreds, Kraber thought, making a mental shrug of acceptance. Not like he had a way out of this sort of thing. With Verity keeping up a string of repeated commands from the rig over the radio, the Arctic Warrior muscled itself through the teeming vessels towards the nearest of the pillars. Wider across than the tugboat was long, the vertical pillar was coated in umber-red anti-fouling paint, and featured collapsible jetties around the base that unfolded for vessels to tie up to. “Redd, be ready on the aft lines,” she instructed. “Viktor, go forward, and don’t try be a pirate. Just take the coil of rope and sling it to the guy on the jetty…” “...and then shoot him in the gesig while his hands are full?” “...And the gesig is…” “Face.” “Wait, so you keep saying ‘kontgesig’, so… DAMMIT! No, you hick. You want his buddies to return fire? Are you trying to get killed?” she snorted. “Once we’re made fast I’m going to use the tug’s engines to whip the whole jetty sideways and knock em’ to their knees. Then you can go Johnny Depp batshit. But no guns. Keep it silent.” It was a beautiful, elegant plan… ...and unlike most, it survived first contact with the enemy. The enemy however, did not. “Alright, you’re tied up. You can shut off your engines n-hey! Hey! What are you doing! Go ASTERN, TUGBOAT WARRIOR, GO ASTE-ARGH!” “This part isn’t easy,” Kraber said. “...Not the outright worst fokking thing I did in the war, probably. But it’s the one that hits the most.” Perhaps, in years past, this would have been a dream come true for Kraber. He would have strode straight into a building, smile on his face and a huge gun in his hands. The crew on the mooring platform had gone down as free and readily as good whiskey. While they were still dazed, Kraber and his crew had jumped aboard and ‘helped them to their feet’. It was partly common sense, but also important that the cluster of boats not realise what they were seeing and report it up the chain of command. So yeah, jump onto the jetty, grab each of the defenders (two per man, keep it simple), and then hustle them through the door into the support columns inner shell. The rest was just the free application of violence. And now the Arctic Warrior was secured tight to the column, the boarding-party were disembarking from their secret compartment onto the platform… … and nobody or nopony knew that it had happened. “Beautiful!” enthused Lovikov as they climbed the stairs to the upper works. “A perfect insertion, just perfect. Almost fun.” ‘He’s getting worse… Fun, yeah’, mused Kraber. It had to be fun, didn’t it? It had to be fun killing the damn invaders and their toadies, those fokking mank genaaide bergboks! He made a promise to himself. He had to give himself over to this, body and soul. If he was going to die here, as Lovikov had promised, he was going to be damn good at this. The top of the column’s spiraling staircase opened up into a courtyard in one corner of the platform’s main working deck. Pipes as great and huge as felled redwoods rumbled, spat and hissed, forming a lattice roof over their heads. It was like walking through an industrial jungle. “Hey. You’re… you’re the new tug crew, aren’t you?” asked a viridian-colored pegasus trotting up to them. He wore a light, inconspicuous assault yoke with two PDWs that vaguely resembled a P90, though Kraber could still pistol grips for humans protruding from the bottom of the things. Good touch. “Don’t think you’re supposed to be here.” Now, there could have been a bloodless, easy way to do this. The HLF could have appealed to the reasonability of the PHL. They could have held the pony hostage. They could have been convincing. There could have been minimal bloodshed. That would have made too much sense. “Don’t think you do either,” Kraber said, and before he knew it, his revolver was in hand. The pegasus’ head exploded all over the hot pipework, congealing and cooking immediately upon contact. The smell of burnt flesh and blood filled the cold air as more of the sanguine red liquid poured from the pony’s twitching corpse. In perfect time, the assault team poured up the stairwell and spilled around Viktor and Lovikov, and like parasites introduced into a body, began to divide, and spread, and slaughter.