//------------------------------//
// The Cutie Re-Mark - part 2 
// Story: A Dream 
// by totallynotabrony 
//------------------------------//

	“He’s dead?  Truly?” asked Luna.  She and Celestia were holding a meeting with the others.  She had just been informed why Valiant was not present and leading the fight.
Soarin’ stood nearby, looking slightly relieved to hear the news but troubled that they still had to deal with the advancing army.
Shining Armor and Cadance were in the room, both wearing cloaks and looking pensive.  They, too, reacted to the news with relief.
Cordoba was glaring at them all.  Trixie, the wiser older sibling, put a hoof on her shoulder and gave her a subtle head shake.
“What resources do we have?” Celestia asked.  “All of us here can contribute to the battle, and Captain Soarin’ has his Guards.”
“There’s us,” said Applejack, gesturing to her friends.
“We have Tin Mare,” said Trixie.  “There are a few portable weapons, like my M60.”
None of the faces around the room looked pleased with the short list.
“That’s it, then,” said Celestia.  “Everypony do your best and we’ll see each other later.”
Luna went to surreptitiously check on Cheerilee.  She was doing good work nipping at the army’s heels, but she was only one pony.  None of Luna’s other agents were applicable or nearby.  It was going to be a straight-up battle at the gates of Canterlot and there wasn’t anything that could be done to prevent it.
The rest got ready.  The Royal Guard was already patrolling the walls, so they should recieve warning about when the battle was about to begin.
Soarin’ came to talk to the girls.  “I know a little bit about your respective abilities, but to effectively lead this battle, I’m going to need anything you can tell me.”
“You’re in charge now?” asked Applejack.
“It’s not a situation I want to be in, but I’m the only one available,” Soarin’ replied.  “Shining Armor is here, but he has no authority.  Plus, nopony looks at him the same since what happened to the Crystal Empire.  The Princesses haven’t been involved in war strategy in thousands of years.  If they want to command, I will submit, but otherwise the task falls to me.”
Applejack considered it, and nodded.  “All right, we’re here for you.”
They all ran through a brief list of their capabilities, Soarin’ looking alternately impressed and nervous.  He had one of the biggest reactions to Tin Mare.
“It’s a robot?”
“She,” Braeburn corrected.
Soarin’ raised a hoof.  “Not judging, just surprised.  As long as you can fight and defend the city, you’re equal in my book.”
He turned to Cordoba.  “And what about you?  Aren’t you a little young?”
She glared at him.  “I will have revenge for my father.”
“Your fa-oh.  Oh.”  Soarin’ quickly found an excuse to go somewhere else.
Applejack turned to Trixie.  “How’s your clan figure into this?”
Trixie caught the undertone.  They both glanced at where Sunset was staring into space, a hollow look on her face.
Trixie shrugged helplessly.  “I don’t know.  I…I want to help her, but I think she just needs time.”
“Aren’t you broken up about it?”
Trixie hesitated, and blinked hard a few times.  “If I don’t think about it, I can get through today.”
Applejack nodded in understanding.
Just then, a shout went up from the walls.  “They’re coming!”
Limestone Pie suddenly appeared, white powder on her nose and a wild look in her eyes.
“Hey, long time no see, sis!” said Pinkie.  “Where have you been?”
“Valiant died and so I left Ponyville to look for more crack.”
“Cool!  Well, since you’re here, would you like to participate in some extra-gratuitous violence?”
It was a rhetorical question.  The Pie sisters charged into the fray, Pinkie wheeling her cannon and Limestone borrowing Pinkie’s battleaxe.
Twilight grimaced, then closed her eyes and concentrated for a moment.  Her body went up in flames and she reluctantly headed for the fight.  Spike, being fireproof, went along for the ride.
Nobody had noticed Maud had been with Rarity this whole time.  Maud was that kind of pony.  When Rarity put on her hard salty shell, Maud picked up a load of rocks and the two of them went towards the battle.
Applejack organized her squad of meat puppets and leapt into action.  The group of them found positions on the wall.
Rainbow had shifted forms and was already spraying fire at the attacking army.
Trixie, too, had changed, sporting eight legs and her machine gun.  At her request, Cordoba and her cutlass stuck close.
Fluttershy, with her three slaves, had already decided to establish a triage center.  Guinness, taking a cue, held back from the front lines to organize logistics.  If the battle was going to be so large, the defenders would need more ammunition.
Tin Mare said, “Get in.”
Braeburn looked at her.  “Inside you?”
“I have door guns.”
“You’re going back into battle?  After what happened the last time?”
“Battle was why I was built.  And my contribution is even more important now that many more lives are in danger.”
“You’re taking a huge risk!  Stay here and maybe you can do something else.”
“It is in my programming.”
“Somepony made you think that!  You only want to put yourself in harm’s way because they made it so that you can’t do anything else.”
“Braeburn, I am a robot.  I have no desires other than what I am programmed.  It is what I want.  Would you deny me that?”
He fumbled with words.  “I care about you.  I don’t want to see you get hurt.”
“I don’t want to see you or anyone get hurt, either.  That is why I must do this.”
Her blades started to spin up.  Braeburn hesitated, but climbed aboard.  
When Tin Mare had gained enough altitude, she transitioned to forward flight and soared over the wall.  The resistance was heavy, with pegasi and spells flying everywhere.  Fortunately, Tin Mare had a response.
BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRT
The solid wall of high explosive armor piercing 30mm rounds from her improvised gun pulverized everything in their path.
That took some pressure off the defenders on the wall, but it was still no cakewalk, no matter what Pinkie might have actually been doing at the moment.
Spike had hopped off Twilight, as his own combat prowess was rather limited.  Instead, he was lighting flaming arrows for the archers.
Rainbow played close offense while Tin Mare handled the longer-ranged attacks.  Her fire breath was nicely complemented by the fire arrows and Twilight’s fire fire.
Applejack was doing the work of a small platoon and was rotating with Guards on the wall.  Guinness had seen to it that when they came down for supplies, they were getting them.  Fluttershy had seen to them when they came down for another reason.
Such as when an enemy pegasus dragged a cloud towards the wall and gave it a good buck.  Perhaps the intended effect had been lightning, but being cutie markless, they got rain instead.  Rain that fell on Rarity.
“I’m melting!” she shrieked, her salty body dissolving.
Around Rarity, Maud hammered a large chunk of the wall out, containing her slowly liquefying form.  She delivered the makeshift bathtub to Fluttershy.  “Will she be alright?”
“No problem,” said Fluttershy.  “This happens sometimes with our more ionized patients.  We’ll put her in a still and boil away the excess water.”  Fluttershy frowned, as if she’d pulled the solution to a very chaotic problem from thin air.
While Maud couldn’t be faulted for wanting to save Rarity, the hole in the wall proved a weak point for the invaders to break through.  The narrow entrance was a kill zone, but there were so many targets that they started to overwhelm the defenses.  They started to head for the castle.
Two hooded figures stepped into the street, blocking their way.
“Are you ready, Cadance?” Shining asked quietly.
“Somepony has to save our skins,” she replied.
They pulled back their hoods and lit their horns, beams of magic protruding a few feet from their foreheads.
Together, Cadance and Shining attacked the invaders.  The magic sabers cleanly cut the enemies apart, cauterizing the wounds.  Unicorns tried to shoot them, but they reflected the blasts and kept coming.  Fighting upstream against the oncoming tide of ponies breaking through the wall, they eventually reached the breach and went through it, taking the battle outside.
It wasn’t the end of the battle, but it was the beginning of the end.  The fighting gradually died down.  When there was a break, Fluttershy asked, “What are we going to do with the survivors?”
It was a possibility that none of them had considered.  When Valiant was around, survivors usually weren’t a factor.
“I guess we’ll give them their cutie marks back,” said Applejack.  “If we can find where Starlight Glimmer hid them.”
“In the meantime, we should replace them with something more benign,” said Twilight.
“Like multiplication signs,” suggested Pinkie.
“No, we don’t want them to breed.”
“Well, we can’t just wipe ‘em,” said Applejack.  “I can’t imagine what the CMC would do with so many new, adult recruits.”
“Ordinarily, I think my mom would be happy to deal with them,” said Trixie.  They were all immediately suspicious about what that meant when the pony in question was Sunset Shimmer.  “But I still don’t know when she’s going to be functional again.”
They all looked to Sunset, who sat in the corner rocking back and forth.  “Only three more days, only three more days…”
“What’s she talking about?” asked Rainbow.
“That’s the average length of time for a messiah to be reborn,” replied Trixie.
“Is he coming back?” asked Twilight.
Trixie opened her mouth, but closed it again.  She looked away.  “Sir Win said he didn’t think so.”
“We’ll deal with that if we have to,” said Applejack.  She looked around.  “In the meantime, we should begin cleaning up.”
On that, they could agree.  Not everything was destroyed, but a city getting attacked tended to accumulate rubble.  Fortunately, most of it had been contained outside the walls.
The Princesses called them for a conference later that day.  The girls, minus Rarity who was still distilling, plus Spike, Trixie, and Cordoba entered the castle.  Trixie left her M60 with Tin Mare, intending to come back and clean it later.
“We’d like to talk about the future,” said Celestia when all of them were gathered.  “Walk with us.”
They started down the long castle hallways.  Luna said, “We still have our reverse-engineered equipment for piggybacking on the network Valiant created.”
Trixie nodded.  “We know.”
“And we know that you destroyed your main downlink in Ponyville to keep it out of the hands of Starlight Glimmer’s followers,” said Luna.
“We’ll talk about what to do with it later, in private,” said Trixie.  “Mom will want to be there.”
Moving on, Celestia said, “Such comprehensive surveillance has given us a great leap ahead of any competition.  With Valiant’s death broadcast around the world as part of the Countess Coloratura concert, it’s likely that many parties from all parts of the globe will take great interest in filling the void he left behind.”
“What are you saying, Princess?” Applejack asked.
“I sense that many enemies will attempt to probe our defenses in the time to come,” Celestia replied.  “Fortunately, we should be able to see many of them coming.”
However, as they entered the throne room, none of them were expecting to see Starlight Glimmer lounging around waiting for them.
The girls advanced.  Twilight demanded, “What are you doing, Starlight?”
Starlight laughed.  “I’d tell you, but I don’t want to ruin the surprise.”
That’s when most of them realized that she might be one of the most frighteningly competent villains Equestria had ever faced.
Starlight pulled out a scroll and lit up her horn.  An intricate, electromechanical magic dome formed over her and she zoomed upwards into it.  At the last moment, she wadded up the scroll and threw it, booping Twilight on the nose.
As if a great wind suddenly blew up, Twilight found herself being dragged towards the portal.  Her friends grabbed her, but got pulled along.  Rainbow made a desperate grab for the Princesses, snagged the removable mane Celestia had recently installed, and it came off.  The whole group, minus the two Princesses, were dragged into the portal and disappeared.
They reappeared on a paved area among the clouds.  Spike looked around.  “Cloudsdale?  Starlight doesn’t even have wings.  Why would she come here?”
“It looked like she could fly with just magic,” Twilight pointed out.  “Keep your eyes open.  We don't know what she has planned.”
Twilight cast the cloudwalking spell on the non-pegasi.  As she was finishing, Spike looked up.  He did a doubletake, looking at Rainbow and back at the small filly who looked exactly like her.  “Does that look like a really young Rainbow Dash?  Did we travel back in time?”
“Hey, it looks like it’s even before I got my cutie mark,” said Rainbow.  Her face lit up.  “It would be totally awesome to see a Sonic Rainboom from the outside!”
“Hang on!” Twilight protested.  “Interfering with yourself could change the future.  Besides, this shouldn’t even be possible.  Only Star Swirl the Bearded could do something like time travel magic, and even his spell just went back a week.  How could Starlight do more than the greatest wizard in Equestria?”
“Twilight, I think it’s time to stop denying that you aren’t the most powerful unicorn ever,” said Applejack.
“You’re an earth pony, what do you know about it?” Twilight snapped.
“Well, if Starlight came up with a better spell than Starswirl the Bearded – somethin’ you couldn’t do – I’d say that about settles it.”
Before Twilight could protest, Applejack went on.  “In the meantime, we’d better find Starlight and stop whatever plan she’s up to.  We know she’s here.”
They eventually encountered her at a familiar scene, but before any of them could intervene, Starlight had pulled young Rainbow Dash out of her race.
“What did you do?” Rainbow demanded.
“You’re about to find out,” Starlight snarked.
“If she didn’t tell us before, I don’t think she’d tell us now,” Fluttershy suggested as Starlight cast the spell again and sucked them back through the portal.
They landed on a patch of bare earth that somehow seemed familiar.  Looking around, Pinkie said, “Hey look, we’re back in Ponyville!”
“Are you sure?” said Rainbow.
There was some familiar architecture, but it was clearly not the place they had left, army occupation or not.
“I don’t like the look of this,” Applejack muttered.  “I think I’d rather see how Sweet Apple Acres is gettin’ along.”
They traveled to the farm, but found that it had been replaced by an industrial factory.  Applejack stared, openmouthed.  “What in tarnation…”
They spotted another her come out of a building.  Applejack quickly pulled her hat low.  Rainbow flew over.  “Hey, Applejack!”
The local version of AJ looked up.  The way she said “What can I do for you?” sounded less friendly and more a coded message for leave me alone, I have to get back to work.
“What happened to Ponyville?” Rainbow asked.
“Most everypony left to help out with the cause.”
“The cause?”
“You know, the war against King Sombra and the Crystal Empire?  They’ve taken half of Equestria, the last I heard.”  She turned around and left.
“This is bad,” said Twilight.
“No kidding,” agreed Pinkie.  “Wow, so if Starlight Glimmer stopped Dashie and she never did the Sonic Rainboom, none of us ever got appropriate cutie marks for becoming the Elements of Harmony and saving Equestria from meanies like King Sombra.”
“So this is the future that resulted from Starlight going back in time,” said Applejack.  “We have to go back and fix it.  Twilight, do you still have that paper?”
“Oh, so now I’m a useful unicorn?” Twilight retorted.
“Never said you weren’t useful, just said you weren’t as powerful as Starlight,” Applejack pointed out.  “If it makes you feel better, once we take out Starlight you can reclaim that title.”
Twilight grumbled under her breath, but unraveled the paper and activated the spell.
The group arrived back in Cloudsdale.  Twilight said, “Alright, now all we have to do now is find Starlight and-”
There was a blast of magic and all of them were suddenly frozen inside a huge crystal.  Starlight appeared.  “Well, finding her will be easy! But stopping her’s going to be harder than you think.  You’re all so predictable, you with your cutie marks that define who you are and make you so easy to read.”  She glared at them.  “My village was a sanctuary of equality, where nopony's cutie mark allowed them to feel superior!  It was a special place, and you and your friends took it away!  Now it's my turn to take something special from you.  Without the Rainboom, you and your friends will never form your special cutie mark bonds.  Cutie marks for cutie marks - sounds like a fair trade to me!”
The crystal shattered and they all found themselves somewhere else.
“Ugh.  Well, that didn’t work,” commented Spike as he picked himself up from the forest ground.
Cordoboa darkly muttered something that was mostly Spanish but also contained the word “Communists.”
“This is going to be harder than we thought,” said Twilight.  “We’ll have to try again.  I don’t want to live in that awful future we saw!”
“I don't think you’ll have to!” squeaked Fluttershy.
A crowd of ponies wearing tribal warpaint and carrying spears surrounded them.  A few looked familiar.
“Hey there, me!” Pinkie exclaimed.
“Silence, Changeling!” ordered her counterpart.
“All servants of Queen Chrysalis found in these woods must be destroyed!” added the alternate Fluttershy.
The group of them were dragged into a hidden village in the trees.  There, the menacing with spears only got worse until Zecora appeared.  “Stop!  If they are Changelings we’ll soon see, though I think they’re not what they appear to be.”
And so the magical minority was proved correct.  A special salve she had made revealed that the visitors were not Changelings at all.
“That’s because we’re from an alternate present that was effected by meddling with time travel,” Twilight explained.
“Intriguing, but let’s not talk here,” said Zecora.  “Chrysalis and her army will soon draw near.  The Changelings took over not long ago, though I’ll wager in your world that isn’t so.”
Interrupting the conversation, versions of Rarity, Rainbow, and Applejack suddenly burst into the camp.  “Please, you have to help us!  The Changelings attacked Ponyville!”
“The only Changeling attack I see is the one that comes here looking for me!” Zecora retorted.
Queen Chrysalis decloaked from her Applejack disguise and laughed.  As the resistance members rushed into battle, the others GTFO’d.
On the run, Applejack said, “This is why Valiant put so much effort into brutal, permanent murder – Sombra, Chrysalis, all of ‘em – to prevent this kind of thing!  He knew!”
“But then why didn’t Valiant stop them in these alternate timelines?” Rainbow asked.
“Maybe if we never became friends he never became whatever he was,” Applejack speculated.
“Are you suggesting that we made Valiant the way he ended up?” Twilight demanded.
That was an uncomfortable topic.  Fluttershy implored, “Just cast the spell!”
The group of them popped back into the Cloudsdale of the past.  Trixie just barely managed to get a spell up in time to block the crystallization spell Starlight fired.
Starlight said, “Not bad, but it’s going to take a lot more than-”
Trixie interrupted.  “I’m gonna let you finish, but Sombra had the best crystals of all time.”
“I said, it’s going to take a lot more than that to stop me!”  Starlight promptly started firing spells.
“Lucky for you, there’s more where that came from!” Trixie retorted.  She started shooting back.  Twilight also joined the fray.  Fluttershy opened the small pouch around her neck and took a sniff of pepper.  She immediately sneezed herself into a unicorn and promptly dropped through the clouds.  Rainbow caught her and the two of them also went after Starlight.
However, despite being attacked from multiple angles, Starlight was holding her own.  “You’ve really got to work on your aim, Twilight!” she taunted.
It didn’t help that Twilight had gotten distracted, making sure young Rainbow was still racing.  Starlight took the opportunity to crystalize Twilight again.  Now with only Trixie and the Rainbow/Fluttershy combo to deal with, she started to push harder.
The others watched with growing alarm.  “What are we going to do?” Spike said, biting his claws.  
“Starlight’s too far away from the clouds for me to reach her,” Applejack growled.
“I got this!” said Pinkie, pulling out her party cannon.  Starlight easily blocked the shot, however.  Pinkie shrugged sheepishly.  “Maybe not.”
“You’re so predictable!” Starlight shouted.  “The gaiety, all right, I’ll admit I didn’t expect that, but everything else is so tied to your cutie mark that you’re all so unbelievably easy to read!  Nopony in Equestria can stop me!”
Applejack frowned and turned to Cordoba.  “What’s your cutie mark for, again?”
“It’s a hood ornament, a decoration on some cars, which are these mechanical transportation devices that move on wheels,” Cordoba replied.  “Something that doesn’t exist in Equestria.”
Applejack touched her shoulder.  “You’re up, kid.”
Cordoba nodded and unsheathed her cutlass.  She flexed her wings and then shot forward into battle.
Pinned down by Trixie’s and Fluttershy’s magic, Starlight wasn’t able to devote her full attention to the filly coming at her, managing a spell that Cordoba blocked with her blade.
Up close, Starlight tried a shield, which stopped Cordoba temporarily.  She hacked at it, and combined with incoming spells eventually got through it.
Starlight charged her next spell and let it go, point blank.  Cordoba had seen the telltale glow of magic a fraction of a second beforehand and was already getting out of the way, but feathers from one wing were vaporized in the blast.  She tumbled out of the air, catching one forehoof on the small cloud on which Starlight stood.
Starlight leaned forward, preparing the final strike on her dangling opponent.  She lowered her head and glared directly into Cordoba’s eyes.  Cordoba took the opportunity to thrust her blade up from under Starlight’s jaw, through her skin, tongue, mouth, brain, and out the top of her skull like a second horn.
Starlight’s body fell forward and Cordoba shook it off her cutlass.  She climbed up onto the cloud and watched the limp corpse fall until it hit the ground.
Cordoba spat.  “Better dead than red.”