The three friends had a new-found sense of confidence as the Sun rose on that Tuesday morning. Their quest was nearing an end, they were about to make things right again. "If the plan works, at least," said Pinkie Pie in response to Twilight echoing those same sentiments.
"Trust me, it'll work," said Twilight. "I didn't come this far and suffer this much just to fail."
"What if you do fail?" she asked with a small frown on her face.
"Well... then we fail our quest."
"And what will we do after that?"
"Then I guess we'll just find somepony to get us out of here."
"What if this whole plan is pointless and you never could alter what happens and erase this event?"
"Well... then I just told you. We'll just have to live with it and get out of here before the possessed can get to us."
Pinkie looked somberly in front of her. "I'm starting to think that's what we'll end up doing."
"I'm trying not to think of that. I don't want to live with the burden of knowing that this whole thing could've been prevented if I had just listened."
Rainbow Dash attempted to give a sense of optimism to the potential bitter-sweet ending of their story. "No use crying over spilled milk."
"But I told you, this isn't spilled milk. This can be prevented."
Pinkie spoke. "What if you're wrong?"
"... Then that kinda sucks."
Twilight hoped that wasn't the case as they neared the end of their adventure.
Correction: all three of them had a new-found sense of confidence, except Pinkie.
In the air above the three protagonists, a pegasus mare in full special ops combat uniform flew overhead. She looked about the street below her and spotted her two companions, waiting for the okay. She trained her sniper sight on the blue pegasus, wearing a black jumpsuit similar to the ones being worn by the other two, the only difference being wing holes to accommodate her two extra limbs.
She didn't have darkly glowing eyes. Neither did her traveling companions. They were survivors.
She immediately aborted her plan to kill them all. She pulled up and was about to call off her two co-conspirators when the blue mare she had previously been aiming at through a sniper rifle's foresight shouted from below, "Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird!"
The purple one, a unicorn, interjected, "It's a chariot!"
The pink one, neither a unicorn nor a pegasus, deadpanned, "You girls have really bad eye-sight. It's a pegasus in combat armor."
The blue one put two and two together. "It could be infec-- it could be possessed! It's way too dangerous to leave alive! Let me get a good shot at it!" She took to the air below the soldier. The special ops agent spoke frantically into her wristpiece to her companions, who were no doubt aiming at the three survivors now. "Abort! Abort! Do not shoot! I repeat, do not shoot!"
The soldier suddenly sped away from the scene. The misguided survivor gave chase as best as she could. "Nopony out-maneuvers Rainbow Dash and gets away with it! Get back here!"
The soldier banked down, into an alley, out of sight of her tail. Sidling up to her stallion partner in the alley, she ordered him to not shoot and to stay hidden for the time being. Rainbow Dash flew over the alley at break-neck speed, anticipating a surprise attack, as the soldier shot up into air and almost connected head-on with her. Rainbow Danger Dash barely avoided the collision, twisting around in the air and redirecting her momentum as she aimed at the dressed-up pegasus.
The soldier banked in a new direction, attempting to escape the great RD Dash, as she began thinking of herself as again. RD Dash, raptor of the skies, fox of the air, so cool that she went by her first two initials. A cheesy '70s-style trumpet tune began playing in her head as she locked onto the rapidly-moving grey bogey.
The soldier slowed down rapidly and attempted to punch her in mid-air. Dash narrowly avoided and twisted in the air again, this time stopping to hover in the air and smart off to her antagonist, even though the possessed couldn't speak. "You seriously think you can hit me in my own home turf? No way, dude. But if you want to see that proven," she said as she raised her hooves into a boxing stance and a high-pitched background riff was added to the cheesy trumpet tune in her head, "I'm more than willing to do a little hoofticuffs with ya!"
The special ops pony lunged at her in the air. She dodged with a graceful twist and trained her sights on the armored antagonist again, only to be greeted by a furious punch. She did an expertly-timed back-flip to avoid that one and coupled it with a double-hoofed buck that sent her impromptu sparring partner onto the roof of a building. A light dust was strewn about the roof as Rainbow dashed toward the enemy, connecting and sliding across the roof on top of her.
They both fell off into an alley and began tumbling toward the ground, both of them trying to righten themselves in order to fly off. As the soldier did that first, she threw a stun grenade at Rainbow Dash. The survivor unwittingly flew right into it as she tried to escape upward and was blasted out of the sky in a brilliant flash and a loud crack that resonated through the alley and into the street. She lost all control of her senses and plummeted toward the yellow brick that made up Canterlot’s streets, finally touching ground once again with a solid whump.
With a quick flutter of her wings, the special ops agent landed softly on her hooves. She trotted up to the unconscious Rainbow Dash and inspected her for serious injuries.
She was then shot in the flank and fell to the ground. Her armor helped her tremendously, but the spot still stung as she got back up and saw Twilight Sparkle and Pinkie Pie trotting toward her. Pinkie was reloading a rifle strapped to her shoulder, the obligatory smoke still seeping from the barrel. The soldier quickly ordered her friends via wristpiece to come out of hiding and surround the subjects. Twilight and Pinkie were greeted by bullets implanting themselves into the ground next to them as the other two special ops agents deliberately misfired.
"Don't be afraid," said the armored pegasus mare. "We don't want to hurt you."
"So you tried to shoot us with a rifle and blasted her" - Twilight pointed quickly to Rainbow Dash's comatose form - "out of the sky with a grenade?!"
"We thought you were infected. We were trying to take you out of the picture so we could get to the Canterlot Archives. As soon as I found out you were survivors, I tried to call off our little assault that we had planned. But then your friend here apparently thought I was infected. She flew up to me and I tried to subdue her. That's why I attempted to tussle with her mid-air and used a stun grenade instead of something else."
Twilight enveloped Rainbow Dash in vaguely pink magical energy and began floating her to the two of them still conscious.
The soldier spoke up again. "You need to get to safety. Come with us and we'll take you outside the infected zone."
"No. We need to get some stuff in order first." She began tensing her muscles in preparation.
"You can take care of that after this is all over. Nothing's going anywhere, trust me. Now, come on. We can take you to safety, the nearest emergency shelter. Then we can collect our thoughts and get things in order there."
"I understand that you mean well, but..." She paused as she contemplated whether or not to tell them that they were aiming to get some items that they might want also. "This is urgent."
"Well, what is it?"
"It's... uh... I-I can't tell you that."
"Why not?"
"It's... umm... it's personal," Twilight bluffed, hoping they wouldn't see through her ruse.
"Where is it?"
"In... in the Royal Palace."
"I'm afraid you're denied access there at the moment," the agent said, trying to not reveal too many details of their operation outside of what the Princess had already told those inside the zone.
Twilight put Rainbow Dash's unconscious self on her back, helping lessen the burden as well as keep her firmly in place by cradling her in telekinetic energy. She began backing up and whispered through still lips to Pinkie Pie, "On 'three', I grab a smoke grenade and we bolt for the Archives."
She backstepped ever-so-slightly as she counted down. She didn't even bother to be inconspicuous on "three", shouting it to make sure her friend got the signal on time. She frantically whipped her head to the earth pony stallion to her left, grabbing a smoke grenade as fast as she could and slamming it to the ground as they were all shrouded in a non-toxic grey cover. In the resulting tumult, Twilight managed to nab a number of grenades from the stallion as well, frantically stuffing them in Rainbow Dash's saddle bags. She and Pinkie then commenced to make a mad dash toward the Canterlot Archives.
The three special ops agents turned on the heat vision feature of their goggles and gave chase.
The two conscious friends, the third one out like a light and in tow on Twilight's back, were sneaking through Canterlot's back alleys to avoid the special ops ponies. The two pegasi surveyed the sky while the earth pony tried to stay on their tails by ground. Occasionally the two's cover was blown by gun shots as they took out the possessed along the way in order to simply survive the trip to the Canterlot Archives.
Presently they were running down a desolate back street toward the image of the Royal Palace's towering spire poking above the roof tops, trying to not only outrun some possessed that were chasing them, as if their only purpose was to increase tension, but also avoid detection by the expertly-trained stealth specialists currently trying to stop them from interrupting their mission any further or get at any of the confidential items in the interest of the government that they were trying to take out of the infected zone.
The street was unpaven, almost a trench. Its grey dirt loosely shuffled as Twilight, Pinkie Pie, and the possessed galloped across it. Lone news papers crawled lightly about the ground and lethargically blew around when the ponies (and non-ponies) galloped by them. Vines snaked up the walls of the buildings that made up the walls of the alleyway. Pale, strewn bricks occasionally poked out of the dirt, increasingly as Twilight and Pinkie, with Rainbow Dash going along for the ride, neared the yellow streets proper of Equestria's once-populated capitol city. Now that the whole place was empty save for the eldritch freaks of nature that had become of it residents, it seemed vaguely creepy. Dank. Bleak. Something else that's synonymous with "crap sack".
Pinkie quickly spun around to pump some of the possessed impending upon them full of lead. She could see little pops in their chests as the bullets passed harmfully through.
Twilight and Pinkie panted and wheezed, their legs burning as they madly dashed across the street to avoid being seen by their second set of antagonists. To their surprise, one of the pegasi aimed her gun on some of the possessed that were chasing them. Almost as if she was in competition with them to see who could get to the three first.
The two of them galloping along the empty streets and broken back alleys of Canterlot were working their bodies overtime to accomplish their mission. Their sweat made spots on their black jumpsuits.
They burst into the doors of the Canterlot Archives, closing them as fast as possible.
Twilight galloped into the main hallway of the Archives that led to the many various wings of the information reservoir. "Star Swirl the Bearded," she repeated to herself as she deposited Rainbow Dash onto the floor. "Star Swirl the Bearded," she repeated to herself as she scoured the labels on the doors to all the wings of the Archives. "Star Swirl the Bearded," she repeated to herself as she found the door near the very back of the hallway.
"C'mon, c'mon!" she shouted as she found that the door was locked, as if doors could talk. She turned to her friend, still in the main room of the building. "Pinkie," she shouted, "how's it holding up over there?"
"Not so good!" she shouted back. She brushed some of her nearly-straight hair out of her eyes to get a good view of the scene out of the window she had walked up to. "The door could give soon, and I think those special ops guys are trying to regroup and plan their next move!"
"Horseapples, this week just keeps getting better and better," Twilight growled to nopony in particular (or possibly to the door). With a pissy screech, she grabbed her trusty pistol and crowbar and began hacking and firing away at the door. She felt no remorse for damaging property at this point. If her plan worked, there would be no reason to. It would all be irrelevant.
Pinkie began racking up kills through the window she had just broken. Twilight worked on her patient until it snapped vertically and she smashed it in two with a buck of her hind legs. One half stayed on its hinges and the other half fell to the ground at the entrance to the Star Swirl the Bearded wing of the Canterlot Archives.
Rainbow Dash slowly shifted about, just beginning to come to.
Twilight quickly worked out a crease in her jumpsuit as she trotted hastily up to the various files of spells and enchantments.
In the main room, the door finally gave and an influx of possessed rushed through the new opening. Pinkie began frantically shooting at the collective horde in wide-eyed panic as she galloped as fast as she could to the entrance of the hallway. A pegasus in full combat armor and wearing a scary-looking gas mask flew into the room above the growling mass of zombified horrors and opened fire on them. Her two companions joined from outside, one of them slowly working his way into the room from his position in the air above.
The possessed gradually ambled their way down the hall as Pinkie Pie backstepped toward the opened door at the end of it. Rainbow Dash slowly opened her eyes to see the scene unfolding in front of her. She put all her energy into an impulsive scream, still half-asleep. Pinkie multi-tasked as she tried to help her friend up while still attempting to lessen the number of enemies preying on her in a feral, inhumane survival impulse. In the main room, the two pegasi threw grenades of all different kinds into the crowd. Even after they had been rendered deaf, blind, seriously injured, or missing limbs, the monsters trudged on, determined to be complete pains in the plot until the very end.
Rainbow Dash made herself useful and shouted into the room Twilight was rooting through documents in. "Hey, Twi, do have any serious fire-power on you? Like, explosives or something?"
Twilight slid another fruitless tome into its shelf as she remembered taking some explosives from the military stallion when they began the gallop to the building they were in presently. "There are grenades in your saddle bags!"
"Convenient!" Rainbow shouted back. She turned to her earth pony friend. "There're some grenades in my saddle bags!"
"Great. Go get them out."
Rainbow Dash dug out a grenade Twilight had grabbed while she was unconscious, this one of the concussion variety. "Hold on to your flanks!" she shouted as she held the explosive in her wing.
"Not yet! Give it here!" Pinkie snatched the grenade from Rainbow Dash and stuffed it quickly into the neck of her jumpsuit. She grabbed her rifle from its shoulder holster and continued firing upon the army of possessed as she stepped closer to the open door of the Star Swirl the Bearded wing.
Pinkie clenched her eyes shut and recollected her thoughts. She prepared herself for what she was about to do. She put everything she had into shooting as many possessed as she could. The bodies littered the hallway as the ones yet to be shot down clambered over them and began advancing a bit faster now toward the three survivors. It was hard to manage, but she did the best she could. Eventually, the possessed began invading the Star Swirl the Bearded wing. They split up, becoming a harder lot to kill than they were in the hallway. Pinkie began resisting individual possessed with hoof-to-hoof skirmishes. She pushed them away to get good shots at them.
The possessed were roughly split into two groups: one that was shuffling down the hallway and flooding the open wing of the Archives, and one outside the building that was threatening to devour the earth pony soldier. His companions were focusing their attention on this group, making sure the earth stallion didn't become the first casualty of the group. The hallway pulsated with its collection of beasts.
Now the fire fight in the Archives was dying down, enemies becoming increasingly scarce, but more elusive as the protagonists let down their guard more and more often. There was still a mass of possessed collected near the entrance, spilling back into the hallway somewhat.
Pinkie's gun ran out of ammunition. Twilight had one magazine left. Rainbow Dash had ran out of ammo a while ago and couldn't possibly take on a small phalanx of the possessed with a crowbar.
It was now or never for Pinkie, though a part of her hoped it would be never. She glanced at the grenade tucked into her suit, trotted right up to the horde and prepared to inject herself into it. Rainbow Dash shouted at her, trying to snap her out of it. "What the hay are you doing, Pink? Go over to where Twi is!"
"No." Tears welled up in her eyes. Her hair was now completely straight. Just a few days ago it had been bouncy and poofy. Now it was pale and spaghetti-like. It was a sign of depression that her friends were familiar with. "If this plan doesn't work, then I don't want to live anymore."
"But what if it does work?!"
"Then everything will be okay again. I would have never done this and we live happily ever after."
Rainbow wanted to counter, but her friend was right.
Pinkie didn't wait for an answer. "Let's just hope that's the case." She galloped into the mass of possessed. They bit and tore at her flesh, making her scream in pain. She wasn't sure how much longer she had left, but at the same time she wanted to get as close to the center of the group as possible. After fifteen agonizing seconds of (almost literally) gut-wrenching pain, she gathered the will-power to pull at the pin of the grenade stuffed into her jumpsuit. She tore at the neck of it until she could get a good position to bite it and pull. Tears rushed down her cheeks and her throat clenched almost entirely shut as she did so, against everything her psyche was warning her. A couple seconds later, everything ended. The entire mass of possessed rippled and burst outward, away from the epicenter where Pinkie had once been. Where her bloodied body, strewn among those of her targets, now lay.
Rainbow had no time to register what had just happened as she whacked furiously at the few stragglers hanging on to their lives that were left. As she throttled the last demonic waste of oxygen to death in the hallway, she stood lurched over, sniffling and openly tearing up. She fought back her body's demands to collapse into a heap and sob, and went back into the Star Swirl the Bearded wing. There, she saw Twilight, sitting on her haunches, away from the horrid bloody mess that Rainbow clambered over, crying. She slowly ambled up to her, and joined her.
It was over. All of the possessed were dead. And so was Pinkie Pie.
Twilight glanced at her late friend's corpse and had unpleasant memories of seeing another one of her closest friends become a victim of the demonic plague that had overtaken Ponyville. The plague that had come about because she tried to play hero. Because she didn't listen.
Her reaction might have degenerated into outright sobbing if she didn't know how to fix all of it. But mentally repeating as much to herself helped her sniffle and blink the tears out of her eyes one last time. She slowly walked up to the aisle she had been looking in for the time travel spell. She continued looking for the spell that would take all of this away. Erase all of this. Make things right again.
She looked at her friend, who was openly crying into the carpet. Twilight abandoned her searching and walked to her, laid down next to her, held her as she cried into her shoulder.
"I... I know we can fix all of this, but... maybe we could just wait? Give me time to collect myself?'
"If that's what you want to do, I'll be happy to wait a little longer."
Rainbow Dash sniffled. "I know it's stupid to prolong this any more, but..."
"I understand." Twilight held her dear friend a little more firmly.
"Thanks."
"It's okay."
At that moment, the three special ops agents walked into the room. The earth stallion walked up to the two survivors and took off his gas mask. He had a white coat with a straight, sky blue mane cut to have bangs that reached a little bit below his eye line. "You have to leave. There are things in here that we need. Let us take you to safety. The infected zone is no place to catch our breath."
"Just let us be!" Twilight shouted quite angrily. She turned to her lightly-crying blue friend and softly apologized as she let go of her and jogged to the aisle that should have held the time travel spell.
"Hey!" shouted the stallion. "Only those with special permission are even allowed in this wing, do you understand?!"
"I understand perfectly. I think if Princess Celestia knew what I was going to do here, she would give me special permission!"
"That doesn't mean anything! Get over here!" he said as he began trotting up to her.
"A-ha! Here it is!" She found the scroll that could fix everything. She galloped to the end of the aisle, away from the stallion keeping to his quota. "Look, I understand what you're doing here, but please just let me do this!" She telekinetically shoved him back.
She put the scroll on the ground and read the magic words. She followed the technically-written instructions accompanying it and vanished in a flash of vaguely pink light.
Twilight reappeared in another flash of light, gushing the words "... try to be a hero when Cerberus arrives!" as she found herself back in the post-possession Canterlot Archives.
She had been interrupted mid-sentence. She had failed.
Her conversation with her past self had been a carbon copy of the conversation she'd had when she was on the other side of it a few days ago.
This whole thing was spilled milk all along. Their whole quest to come here and make things right again, it was all in vain.
The stallion just stood there. "Are you ready to go now?"
"Yeah," Twilight said with a tremble in her voice. As she walked down the hall toward Rainbow Dash, everything sunk in.
Their whole mission was for nothing. Pinkie Pie died for nothing. Everything they had done in the past few days was for naught. Two of her friends had the same dying wish, and that wish would now never be realized. They had died in vain. All for nothing.
All because of her. Because she didn't listen.
She couldn't alter what she had already seen. Pinkie Pie had told her that. What she had seen was her future self being interrupted mid-sentence. Their whole journey was for nothing, and on top of that, already decided and etched into the sands of prophecy from the beginning. It was like some sort of sick joke from the Universe itself.
Everything had just come full circle. She stopped cold in her tracks and collapsed to the ground.
She had only teared up and sniveled before, after Pinkie died, because she thought she could fix it all in the end. Now she realized how wrong that assumption was. It couldn't be fixed, and everything she had done thinking it was possible, could never have amounted to anything in any case.
Everything was full circle.
She openly sobbed into the carpet.
"Are you ready now?"
Twilight had been sobbing into the carpet for ten solid minutes. She looked up at the stallion with the combat armor. She looked in front of her. Rainbow Dash and the other two special ops agents were nowhere to be seen. "Yeah."
They walked toward the entrance. "I'm really sorry about what happened. Whatever that was. All I know is that it was bad."
"Thanks. But..." she sighed, remembering Rainbow Dash's light of optimism in the darkness of cruel reality. "No use crying over spilled milk now." Even if her optimism was desperate, it helped just a little bit.
A piece of paper blew by Twilight's hooves in an unnoticed breeze. Twilight hoped it wasn't a news paper as she looked down at it.
It wasn't a news paper. It was a spell. From what Twilight could read of it, it seemed like it involved time travel. She flattened it with her hoof and skimmed through it.
"Come on," said the stallion.
Twilight's expression was a little brighter as she found that this spell at her hooves allowed the user to access any memory they wanted and relive it just as clearly and truly as when the event actually happened.
Twilight's left brain began racing to find a way to combine elements from the spell at her hooves and the spell she had used ten minutes ago, to create a spell that could do something along the lines of bringing its user back to the past with prior knowledge of certain events from that time period's relative future. It had a lot of room for error, but she figured it was worth a shot. This was how new spells were created. She went through the mental tribulations of using unicorn magic and tried as best she could to visualize a unique spell. Her horn began glowing.
"Hey!"
She abandoned her first attempt and used her telekinesis to shove the stallion into a bookshelf. She suddenly went into speed mode, racing to put together the various pieces of the jigsaw that came with attempting a magical concept without clear instructions. She tried to bury the nagging thought that she would simply be injecting herself into the past to relive this whole ordeal all over again.
The stallion began running toward her as she double-checked all the details of what she was about to do.
She disappeared in a flash of vaguely pink light.
Cue wormhole scene.