//------------------------------// // War and Friendship (Part two) // Story: The Sun Never Sets // by Mr Fislewait //------------------------------// Waking up was a painful experience. My sleep had been remarkably peaceful all things considered and in retrospect that length of unconsciousness was probably one of the longest rests I had over the course of it all. My dreams weren't haunted by nightmarish alicorns and for that I can at least be thankful. Waking however was unpleasant. With a yelp of pain I lurched into wakefulness as a bucket of ice cold water was tossed over my body. My senses were still frazzled from before and it was almost impossible to focus on anything other than the biting cold. Judging from the snow in the surrounding area the air was probably below freezing, with the assistance of the water so was I. "Rise and shine, sunshine!" somepony barked at me. I couldn't make out a face but I was beginning to get a better sense for my surroundings. We were outside beneath a moonlit sky, a thick lay of snow covered everything as far as the eye could see and the land was a mix of mountainous ridges and sprawling tundra. Nearby I could hear the crackle of a campfire but I had been set up away from its warmth. I could feel the cold metallic grip of an inhibitor on my horn and a tightness about my neck and hooves. While I had been unconscious my captor had seen fit to manacle both sets of my legs and had crudely rooted me in place with a tether about my neck. The tether's post had been hammered into the ground within my reach but it appeared solid and would likely need either magic or earth pony strength to remove it. "I said get up!" there was a stinging sensation across my hide as something cold and metallic whipped into me, I could barely register what was happening but I made an effort to stand. The manacles made things tricky and twice I stumbled falling flat on my face to the amusement of my captor. She sniggered at my difficulties but rather than feel anger towards her it instead peaked my curiosity, there was something eerily familiar about her laugh. "Leave the prisoner alone, Dash. We're better than the Empire. Don't lower yourself to their level," Dash? The new voice was the most horrifically dull monotone I had ever heard, I had maybe heard one other voice that dull in all my time across either world. For that moment though my mind focused on what had been said, she had addressed my captor as 'Dash'. The voice fit, it was a fair bit colder and crueler than the Rainbow Dash I knew but it was unmistakably the same voice. Impossible, a lie, some trick from my injured mind, those were the thoughts that ran through my head as I tried to reconcile this pony with the person I knew. I hadn't actually ever met the Equestrian Rainbow Dash but from what you had told me about her I knew she was meant to be the Ponyville weather pony, not...whatever this was. Guard, criminal, bounty hunter, those were the possibilities that immediately ran through my head, Equestria had never really gone to war before after all so what possible need would they have for soldiers? "Shut it, Maud! If it wasn't for her then the Commander would still be alive and we'd be safe back at base camp instead of stuck the wrong side of enemy lines!" Dash dealt me another blow, this one across the face, flooring me and leaving a thin cut across my cheek. In the state I was in they probably didn't even need the inhibitor, Dash could have probably beaten me senseless and I'd have been too out of it to stop her. I tried to stand but a hoof slammed into my nose knocking me right back down. That time I opted to stay where I was, lying on the ground waiting for the next blow, it never came. I heard rather than saw Dash get bowled over as something leaped out of the darkness onto her sending both itself and Dash tumbling into the snow. "No, Dashie!" a third voice growled. "We don't torture ponies! We are better than that!" "But she-" "No! If you want to interrogate her go ahead, but just questions, no more beatings!" In the shadows I could make out the two forms disentangling from one another and could hear Dash muttering a few curses under her breath. Both ponies returned to where they had me tied up as the third brought over a torch, finally illuminating my captors. Seeing Rainbow Dash was not as great a surprise as it should have been, I'd already guessed as much that this would be the pony version of the girl I knew from CHS but she looked nothing like I imagined her to be. Her rainbow mane was cut in a jagged punk style, a blue military uniform much more practical than the standard Wonderbolt flight suit covered most of her body, one wing was replaced with some sort of metal prosthesis and a huge chunk was missing from her left ear. The other two ponies were more uncanny though, a pair of earth ponies in identical purple and grey military uniforms, different yet similarly styled to the one worn by Dash. One pony was pink the other grey and had it not been for Dash I doubt I would have recognized either. She had addressed one of them as Maud, the same name as Pinkie's creepy sister, the differences were more pronounced than they had been with Dash but it wasn't hard to imagine that these were the Equestrian equivalents of Pinkie Pie and Maud Pie. "Sorry for, Dash," Maud droned. "She's not normally this high strung but she's blaming you for the recent death of Commander Flash Freeze. We'll try to stop her from breaking military conduct again though if you answer some questions for us." I blinked a few times, in part because of how confused I was at the surreal situation but mostly as I was having trouble adjusting to the light on account of the throbbing headache I was stuck with. For all the strangeness of the situation though I managed to make one coherent thought, they were playing good cop bad cop. I nodded. "First things first, name, rank and outfit," Pinkie shrilled. Normally her high pitched voice would have been a comfort but here and now she was deadly serious, this Pinkie's mane was flat and plain, her eyes grim. "I'm Sunset Shimmer, I- I don't know what you even mean for the other two questions though. I'm not some soldier, I don't even know how I got here," it was the truth, the honest to goodness truth. Both Pie sisters raised a skeptical eyebrow though while Dash moved as though to strike me again. I flinched back on instinct, like a cowed dog and tumbled to the ground in pain. Feeling had begun to return to my body just in time for me to discover that one of my hind legs was in immense pain, as I tried moving back on it the leg buckled beneath me and sent waves of blinding agony across my body. A glance backwards and I could see why it had happened, the leg had been crudely bandaged and splinted from some recent injury but from the angle it was currently pointing I doubted that it had been properly set. This together with the manacles meant that I'd be lucky to make it across to the fire on my own, much less escape. "Bull! Nopony in Equestria could be that ignorant! We want your military rank and what job you had in Sombra's army!" Dash advanced once more but this time thankfully the Pies held her back. "Army? Sombra? What are you talking about? Why is Equestria at war?" "Can't you see she's lying, Pinkie?" Dash said shrugging the two ponies off but making no further attempts to approach me. "They know about the war all the way in Zebrica for Celestia's sake, she's clearly hiding something! I bet she's some bigwig in the army, somepony who actually volunteered instead of being enlisted! I mean she's a unicorn, far as I heard there's only one other pony in Sombra's whole Empire who isn't a crystal pony and we all know who that is." "This may not be easy to believe Rainbow Dash but I'm telling the truth. I came through the portal to check on some weird anomalies it was showing and next thing I knew everything had gone to Tartarus around me! Look, if you can just get me to Twilight then maybe she'll be able to explain what's going on," precisely what I had said wrong I didn't quite know but Dash was upon me as soon as I was done speaking. "Look, Sunny! You should just quit while you're ahead. I don't know anypony called Twilight, I don't remember telling you my full name and I don't remember you! So stopping acting all friendly and spill the beans, why are you with Sombra and how do you know who I am? You a spy or something?" this time the Pies let her be, standing ready to intervene if necessary but content to let Dash lay into me. This Dash didn't know Twilight, Sombra was supposedly very much alive and at war with Equestria and everypony I knew seemed to be some dark caricature of how I remembered them. At that moment I realized (though in retrospect I wasn't entirely right) what had happened. Whatever freaky anomaly had been influencing the portal had dumped me into the wrong Equestria. It wasn't too much of a stretch of the imagination, if there was an alternate world where everypony was a human it wasn't outside the world of possibility that there existed an alternate world where Equestria and The Crystal Empire were at war. I was in really deep water, my knowledge of my own Equestria was horribly out of date so what hope could I have of passing off as a native here? I had no friends to fall back on, no resources at my disposal and my actual ignorance was easily mistaken for intentional deceit. There was only one card left that I could play. "Princess Celestia! I'm the personal student of the princess, or at least I was. We had a falling out years ago and I ran away, far away. I only got back recently, I didn't even know there was a war on until I woke up in the middle of nowhere wearing-" I paused as that little detail from yesterday finally managed to sink in. "I was wearing armor. Why was I wearing armor? I don't... I don't remember. I was in the castle, there was some strange black crystal, it did something to me..." had I not already fallen on my bad leg I imagine I would have collapsed then and there. Something bad had happened and I had a good idea what. "When did you run away? Before or after The Crystal Empire first disappeared?" Maud asked. "After. I don't know much about it but from what I have heard it disappeared around a thousand years ago right?" Maud nodded in confirmation. "I don't know how I got here, I used a... a pretty sophisticated teleportation spell. It was meant to bring me to Ponyville but instead I wound up here. If I can speak to Celestia she can maybe straighten this all out. It's possible that she might not know me personally but she should know about the spell that brought me here." "Hate to break it to you, sunshine, but even if we were able to reach her I doubt she'd want to speak to some POW like you," Dash scoffed, kicking a small mound of snow onto me. "Flash Freeze seemed to think she was important, Dashie, besides she doesn't seem too dangerous to me. She's no soldier, Dash, just look at her. She probably got enlisted just like all the rest." The more things change the more they stay the same, even out here in the middle of a war Pinkie Pie was willing to give a complete stranger the benefit of the doubt. "I'm not a soldier but I learned some pretty powerful magic studying under Celestia, if you take the inhibitor off I imagine I could help you get back to your base, wherever that is. I'm not your enemy, I just want to go home," once more it appeared I had said something wrong. Dash shot me a glare as though she was about to strike me again. "Can't you see she's playing us? You both saw what she did down at Frostridge. She's probably a spy or an assassin. Maybe she attacks us as soon as the inhibitor comes off, maybe she waits till we get back to camp then tries to kill the princess, either way we can't take that chance!" "Then don't take the inhibitor off unless you need my magic! I just want to see my friends again." "I'll vouch for her, Dashie," Pinkie piped up, cutting off whatever rebuke the pegasus had been about to say. "I might not know who she is and I'm pretty sure the only student I've ever heard of Celestia taking was some mare called Moon Dancer, but she seems scared and hurt and I'm pretty sure anypony that willingly followed Sombra wouldn't even know what friends were," she offered out a hoof to help me stand though it did little to alleviate the pain in my hind leg. "If all this blows up in our faces then you can say 'I told you so', but I say we get her back to camp. Flash Freeze wanted us to grab her for a reason and I'm pretty sure it wasn't so that we could beat her bloody in our spare time," she shot Dash a glare so cold that the camp would have frozen over had it not already been logged with snow. "Fine, maybe you don't trust her, but are you really going to tell me that you didn't trust the Commander?" "Fine," Dash muttered turning away and walking towards the campfire, "but we leave at the break of dawn, make sure the prisoner is ready to move cause I ain't carrying her again." The Pies removed the tether about my leg but left the manacles and inhibitor on. Still it was a welcome relief that they allowed me the freedom to join them at the fire and what little warmth it supplied in the cold northern night.