//------------------------------// // Survival Instincts // Story: The Outsiders // by Arania //------------------------------// “Rainbow!” Twilight yelled, pulling the beam’s focus tighter and pushing forward. “Move!” Rainboom didn’t respond, already moving. With an almighty bellow, she flared her wings to their maximum extent, kicking off against a nearby crate and accelerating towards the black-clad assailant with as much acceleration as her wings of capable of providing. “RAINBOW!” Twilight cried, her attack beam abruptly shutting down. “NO!” Her ears popped. G-force slammed into her brain, the black-clad assailant twisting only barely out of the path of her attack before her vision smeared and went purple, the assailant’s magic field swinging her around in a tight circle. Her brain reacted sluggishly, only barely registering the wall of black that was rapidly rushing towards her. Confused and groggy, she twisted her wings perpendicular to the airflow, desperately trying to slow down. An instant later, the darkness swallowed her whole. Gravity, light, and sound abruptly vanished. Her brain, operating largely on instinctual autopilot, flared her wings out as far as her physiology would permit, trying desperately to catch any sort of airflow to arrest her motion, or even discern which direction she was travelling in. Her stomach heaved from the combination of no gravity and her tumbling motion imparted from her final moments before being catapulted into nothingness, acceleration-sensitive bones and highly sophisticated absolute pressure sensors in her inner ear screaming absolute nonsense to the centres of her brain responsible for orienting her in 3-d space. She extended her legs, trying to at least slow her tumble before realising that she wouldn’t be able to reliably tell the difference without gravity or visual reference. Determined, she gulped back on the nausea, and racked her brain for something, anything that she could do to prevent her imminent death from hypercapnia and asphyxia. Nothing came. Every piece of training Rainboom has received was centred around the assumption that she would be operating in an environment under the purview of normal physical laws, not a sealed pony-shaped bubble of spacetime drifting through nothingness. The only thing that came remotely close was her high-altitude endurance training, but that was concerned with oxygen deprivation and problems with pressure at high altitudes, not dealing with carbon dioxide buildup in a closed system. Already, her skin had begun to prickle unpleasantly from the trapped heat, the air in her lungs rapidly going stale as her lungs dumped the carbon dioxide she had built up from her earlier exertion. The contents of her stomach re-attempted their escape of their confines, only barely held back through sheer power of will. “So this is how I die…” Rainboom muttered to herself, her words echoing through the confined bubble. “This sucks.” Out of nowhere, the breath was driven from her lungs as something hard and unyielding was driven into her belly at speed. She flailed, partly out of confusion and partly to try and grab whatever had hit her, a task made all the more difficult by the complete lack of external sensory input. Another something whacked into the back of her head, sending stars swimming throughout her already-reddening vision. She yelped, groggily, as something sharp raked her outstretched wings and caught on her saddlebag strap, swinging her around as the bags tore away. Mercifully, her hooves grasped something solid. After a few panic-filled moments of scrabbling, she finds purchase, drawing herself close, almost hugging it in relief as her accumulated body heat rapidly bled off into the shard of what felt like metal. She pulled, momentarily hindered as the few meagre remaining scraps of fabric that held her saddlebags to her sides finally tore away completely, moving herself along the spike of metal. Her brain, only barely functional thanks to the knock to her head and steadily increasing CO2 levels, latched onto a single, desperate thought: There has to be something at the end of this shard. She kept pulling, holding herself as close to the metal as possible in an attempt to keep her rising body heat at a tolerable level, though it did precious little to abate the steadily-worsening headache that was spreading through her awareness, threatening to wrest consciousness from her and strand her in her own personal tomb of spacetime. Redness filled her vision. Tingling spread along her limbs up from her hooves, progressing into full-blown numbness as she suffocated. Piece by piece, her mind slipped away, whole sections of her brain bluntly refusing to continue operating until all that was left was a periodic throbbing, and the fragmenting remains of her consciousness desperately pulling her along. Her hoof breached something, something cold. Pushing against the reflex to yank her hoof back from the icy something, she braced her hind legs against whatever purchase she gould gain on the metal, gathering the last vestiges of energy available to her, and with her final thought, pushed off. Her entire world went white. White and cold. Her brain, finally overwhelmed from the sudden stimulus and CO2 poisoning, shut down, ferrying her into blissful oblivion. ------ “Are you okay?” The question cut into her like a knife, stabbing directly into the part of her brain responsible for interpreting pain and amplifying it by a factor with enough digits to give an accountant nightmares. Through the intolerable, throbbing headache, the realisation that she might not be dead was presented to her faculties, since she shouldn’t have been feeling pain. A realisation that was almost summarily dismissed, since, of course, she could be in Tartarus, which would handily explain the pain, and probably still mean that she was dead. She cracked open an eyelid, only to yelp and slam it closed a moment later as pure, unfiltered white pain seared her optic nerve. “Could someone turn that bucking light off?” she swore, holding her hooved up to her eyes. “That’s the sun.” “What?” she responded, confused, as she squinted through the glare, focusing, or trying to, on the blurry shadow standing over her. “Are you the only one? Is there anyone else down there?” “What in Celestia’s name are you talking about ‘down there’?” “In the Void, in the hole. Is there anypony else?” “No. Wait, where am I?” “You’re on Harmony’s Shard, where did you think you were?” “Honestly? Dead.” It took a few moments for the implications of what the pony standing over her had just said, and a few more for her to react to them. “Harmony’s Shard?” she exclaimed, sitting up and squinting behind the slowly-resolving form of the pony that was attending to her. While she could only barely make it out, the giant vertical occlusion was unmistakable as the Shard. “How did I get back here?” “We spotted you jumping off the edge of the bridge and into the Void, you and your friends. Are they down there too? Are they okay?” “They’re… fine?” The memories of her rather abortive fight against the hostile Outsider came flooding back. For an instant, she considered diving straight back over the edge of the bridge and getting back to them as soon as she could, before realising that, by now, the fight would have been over, with either the hostile or her friends dead on the floor. “I hope.” “What in Tartarus is that supposed to mean? Are they down there or not?” “Yes! No,” she sputtered. “Augh! Shut up for a moment! I need to think!” “There’s no time for that! You were barely alive when we pulled you out of there. If they’re in there as well…” “I was barely alive because I got thrown into the Void by a crazy pony who was trying to kill me.” “I’m sorry, what?” Rainboom looked up, only to groan in mild annoyance as the face of the pony above her came into focus. Her own face. While it certainly made sense that a Dash would be part of whatever SAR team they had in the Shard, ad-hoc though it likely was, it didn’t in any way mitigate the inevitable irritation that came when she had to deal with one of her alternates. Barring the rare exception, Dashes are stubborn, proud, determined, and unfailingly loyal to their allies. Putting two of them together, especially when their objectives are at a crossroads to each other, and you were guaranteed a confrontation. “Trust me when I say that there’s exactly nothing you can do for them right now. It pains me to say it, but I can’t do anything for them right now.” “You realise how crazy that sounds, right? I saw you jump off a bridge, willingly, into the Void, and now you’re asking me to trust you?” “The irony is not lost on me.” Rainboom sat up, rubbing her hooves as the feeling slowly returned to them, almost gulping down the blissfully oxygenated air to clear out her lungs. As her vision returned to its normally-sharp levels, she noticed the dozens of heads poking out of the bolted-on superstructure of the Shard, all staring at her. “I see I’ve become quite the attraction,” she quipped, stretching herself out and smirking. “Would have thought you lot would see interesting stuff fairly often out here.” “‘Freak jumps from entryway bridge into Void’ is interesting above and beyond what we usually get.” “‘Freak?’” Rainboom repeated, slowly, feeling a twinge of anger ignite inside her. “Yeah. Freak,” the Dash replied, a distinct lack of malice in her voice. “As opposed to Normies. You’re all weird and freaky, and have weird, freaky gear, thus freak.” “It’s not all that nice to call a pony a freak,” Rainboom said, holding her anger in check, for the moment. As much as her hot-headedness was begging her to lay out the belligerent pony in front of her, weight of experience held her back. Getting into a fight with one of her alternates never ended well. “Uh… sorry?” Dash replied, seemingly genuinely confused. “That’s… just the word that gets used around here. What’s wrong with it?” “It makes it sound like you think there’s something wrong with me, like I’m a monster or something.” “Monster? Nah, we get plenty of monsters, you’re no monster.” “Still…” “Well, what word do you use?” “‘Outsider’ is the only one I know, really…” “Too clunky. ‘Freak’ rolls off the tongue better.” “Fine,” Rainboom acquiesced, rising to her hooves, unsteadily. “Are we done here?” Dash supported her, wrapping a leg around Rainboom’s shoulders. “You’re going to be a bit shaky on those hooves for a bit. You should come inside, sit down.” “No, I…” “I insist,” Dash said, forcefully, pulling Rainboom along towards the Shard’s entryway. “You’re not going to be any help to anypony for at least another half hour.” “They probably think I’m dead, anyway,” Rainboom remarked. “Good thing we were there to scoop you up, then, eh? Should be a happy surprise when you meet again!” “If we meet again…” No sooner had the both of them stepped inside the entryway of the Shard, the entire structure tilted precariously off-axis, the screams of startled ponies and shattering of unsecured glassware echoing through the corridors. “Is that normal?” Rainboom asked, struggling to hold her footing. “No, it’s not,” Dash replied, visibly concerned. “What’s going…” The words were plucked from her throat as the floor fell away from under them, pinning Rainboom and Dash to the ceiling as the entire structure plummeted. Rainboom got the barest glimpse of the walls of the pit rushing upwards and the entire bridge disintegrating before the entire Shard fell into the Void, and nothing could be seen beyond the doorway but inky nothingness.