//------------------------------// // Nopony Messes with a Mama Bear // Story: My Little Denarians // by Chengar Qordath //------------------------------// “Keep everyone moving, we need to get to the forest as fast as possible.”   As the last of the noncombatants filed out of Luna’s underground lair, I couldn’t help but think that there was going to be a huge gap between the speed I would like to have everyone going at and the speed we were likely to actually hit. Children and the elderly aren’t exactly known for walking long distances in a quick and organized manner.   That was going to be a problem, but one we just had to deal with. Considering the fact that everything indicated that Luna’s army was gone, we had to proceed on the assumption that someone had been captured and talked about the base. The longer we delayed, the worse our chances were of getting away in time.   Making a break for it came with its own set of risks, though. We should be able to cut through the apple orchards to avoid spending too much time out in the open, but if Celestia’s guards were out in force looking for us – and they almost certainly were – our odds of hiding this many ponies weren’t exactly great. The orchards of Sweet Apple Acres had trees placed to optimize apple yields and make harvesting easier, not to hide a large group of ponies from aerial patrols.   The return of 24/7 sunlight didn’t help anything; sneaking around in broad daylight was an extra complication we really didn’t need, not to mention that things were already getting uncomfortably warm even in the shade. The heat wasn’t going to do the older ponies any favors.   As Applejack’s grandmother slowly walked up the stairs, I turned to the pony we’d put in charge of managing the refugees. “Is that everyone, Cheerilee?”   The schoolteacher gave the couple dozen ponies under her care one last look-over, and nodded. “Yes, that’s everypony.” The schoolmarm trotted along with her charges, somehow managing to sound cheerful and upbeat despite everything. I guess when it came to keeping order among a group of scared and confused refugees, we could do worse than a having teacher used to dealing with a bunch of unruly children. Most of the refugees were kids anyway, and a lot of them had probably been her students back before the world went crazy.   Speaking of going crazy, we’d rigged up a basic litter that allowed Applejack to carry Pinkie around with less trouble than keeping the pink pony draped across her back. Pinkie was still in her magically-induced coma, and I didn’t plan on waking her up until we’d gotten to a reasonably secure base in the Everfree Forest. Just leaving her knocked out sat wrong with me, but the alternative was to have a mentally unstable mare in the middle of an extremely hazardous operation where stealth and secrecy were of the utmost importance. She’d already proven unwilling to keep moving with the group last time we had her awake, and there was no telling what might happen in a high-stress situation. Having her conscious introduced too much of an unstable element to the entire situation. It was safer for everyone this way.   The refugee column moved from the entrance of the cellar to the partial cover of Applejack’s orchard. Even getting everyone across that short distance took longer than I would have liked. Worse than that, the mood of the group had started getting dangerous the instant we moved out into the open.   The ponies were scared.   I didn’t blame them for being frightened. We hadn’t told anyone except for Cheerilee just how bad things had gotten, but it didn’t take a genius to put two and two together once they noticed that the sun was back up, Luna and her army had not returned, and we were running like hell from our secure base to a dangerous wilderness area. Our disorderly group of refugees was just one or two little setbacks removed from turning into a terrified mob.   I really wished Pinkie was in better shape; she would’ve been the perfect pony to lift everyone’s spirits after things went south. I think we might’ve been able to handle just losing Rainbow Dash if we still had Pinkie in good enough condition to carry on, but the one-two punch of Rainbow’s death and Pinkie’s breakdown had us all hurting. We weren’t giving up, we were never going to give up, but we sure could use something to give us a little bit of hope for the future.   “Hey, we wanna talk to you!” I turned, and saw that I’d somehow attracted the attention of the Cutie Mark Crusaders. “Applejack told me yer name is Harry Dresden, right?” I still wasn’t quite used to the way most of the ponies addressed me by first and last name. I guess it made sense; ponies don’t seem to have first and last names in the way that humans do, and a lot of them only have one name at all. The whole idea of personal name and family name didn’t seem to be there.   “Yeah, that’s me. So, what I can I do for you girls?”   “Where’s Rainbow Dash?” Scootaloo demanded.   “Why hasn’t mah big brother come back yet?” Apple Bloom added.   “Why’s Pinkie Pie still asleep?” Sweetie Belle chimed in.   “Applejack told us you’re really some sort of wizard that got himself turned into a pony. Why’d you get turned into a pony?”   “If you’re not really pony how come you’ve got a Cutie Mark? I thought only ponies had those.”   “Hey, can you help us get our Cutie Marks?”   “What’s your special talent?”   “If he’s not a pony then he probably doesn’t have a special talent.”   “That’s stupid Scootaloo! Everypony has a special talent!”   “But he ain’t a pony.”   Thankfully, Cheerilee came to rescue me from the trio of overly curious children. “Slow down there, girls.” I swear, managing to sound happy and light-hearted in even the direst of circumstances must be some sort of secret teacher skill. It was doing a lot to help keep the kids under control, though; a scared teacher would’ve made all the kids frightened too.  “Maybe you should actually give him a chance to answer the questions you’ve already asked before you bring up any more.”   “Yes, Miss Cheerilee.” The Cutie Mark Crusaders obediently silenced themselves, but judging by the expectant looks I was getting from all three of them, that silence was contingent upon me giving them some answers in the near future. Best to get started with the less hazardous questions. Hopefully, by the time I was done answering the easy questions the fillies would have forgotten about the ones where I’d have to lie. If that didn’t work, I would have either toss out a few little white lies or suck it up and find some way to tell them the truth in a way that wouldn’t traumatize the girls.   “Well, Applejack’s right that I’m not a pony, not originally. I’m actually a human.”   “Oh, I’ve heard of those!” Sweetie Belle enthusiastically cried out. “Lyra told me all about them one day. Do you really have hams instead of hooves? Because that sounds like it would be really weird.”   “Hands, not hams,” I gently corrected.   “Oh, that makes much more sense,” Sweetie Belle declared.   “Yes, it does.” Have to say, the mental image of me running around with a pair of live pigs on the ends of my arms made for an amusing picture. It gave an entirely new meaning to being ham-handed.  “Anyway, I came to Equestria because Applejack, Rarity, Rainbow Dash, and their friends needed some help to–”   Applejack trotted up and nudged me in the side, cutting off the rest of my explanation. “Harry,” the apple farmer whispered to me, “we got trouble.” Applejack twitched her head skyward, and I followed her gaze. With the sun blazing almost directly into my eyes, it took me a few seconds to spot what she wanted me to see, a trio of winged figures. They were far enough away that I couldn’t be sure if we were dealing with birds or pegasi, but with the way that my luck had been running lately, I wasn’t in the mood to take a chance.   Unfortunately for all of us, someone else spotted the possible incoming pegasi before I could start quietly passing word of the problem. Just to make things worse, it was a certain orange filly who’d been eagerly awaiting the return of her idol. “Hey, Rainbow Dash!” Scootaloo cried out at the distant pegasi. “We’re over here!”   Aw crap. I had a distant hope that Scootaloo’s voice hadn’t carried over to the pegasi on aerial patrol, but a few seconds later I saw the trio of flyers begin banking around to make a pass over us. Double crap.   “Hayseeds,” Applejack agreed with my unspoken sentiments. “Everypony! We got flyers comin’ in, and they don’t look friendly! Get yourselves hidden, now!”   For the record, telling a bunch of already scared kids and old folks that there are bad guys coming and they need to hide is not a good way to prevent a panic. Within moment, we had a pony stampede on our hooves as everyone tried to flee the approaching pegasi. If we’d had a better adult-kid ratio we might’ve been able to keep things under control, but what adults we did have were too old to keep up with a bunch of panicked kids scrambling all over the place. Cheerilee did the best she could, but no single mare can rein in that many younglings by herself.   I did the best I could to help, but I don’t have much in the way of experience with kids; the only ones I’ve spent any time around were Michael’s kids, and they were far more disciplined and well-behaved than this wild bunch of frightened fillies and colts. Me being a relative stranger probably didn’t help either. Applejack couldn’t do much while she was still loaded down with Pinkie Pie, and Rarity had her hands full just trying to keep the Crusaders in line. Fluttershy wasn’t in any condition to curtail the panic – if anything, she seemed to be only moments away from joining in on it herself.   With most of the ponies fleeing at the sight of the oncoming guards, we didn’t have any choice but to follow along with the herd. At least that was one advantage of dealing with panicking ponies instead of humans: all those herd instincts meant that everyone was still more or less sticking together instead of scattering. If every pony had run off in a different direction, keeping track of the group would’ve been impossible, and the guards could’ve started picking us off one by one.   Then again, staying in a single large group made it that much easier for the bad guys to keep track of us, so I guess all those herd instincts were a bit of a double-edged sword. Unless Celestia’s goons were a lot dumber than they’d been so far, they probably had some way of getting an ‘enemy spotted at location XYZ’ message out. Between the remaining Element-bearers, the rest of the refugees, and myself we could probably handle a trio of guards, but odds were there would be a lot more than three guards coming after us.   The stampede continued on for several minutes, until the frightened ponies were firmly in the depths of Applejack’s orchard. Once the pursuing pegasi were out of sight, our ragtag herd started to calm down a bit. We eventually went from a frightened gallop to a nervous canter, and after taking a couple deep breaths, I addressed the ponies. “Alright, we all had a pretty big scare there, but if we stay calm and–“   “Rebel forces!” A booming voice from the heavens cut me off. “In the name of Princess Celestia, we demand your surrender!”   Needless to say, that put an end to any hopes of the ponies staying calm and not panicking. Soon we were all running along in the midst of another frightened stampede. Whenever the ponies started to calm down or feel like we’d managed to shake our pursuers, another one of Celestia’s guards would start yelling for us surrender, or the ponies would spot a patrol somewhere along our line of retreat. From there it was straight back into panic mode all over again.   Applejack figured it out almost as quickly as I did. “Shoot! They’re leadin’ us around by the nose like we’re a buncha cows!” I guess a farmer and rancher would recognize herding tactics when she sees them. It was an old classic: spook your opponent into going exactly where you wanted them to go – in our case, likely into some sort of ambush.   The hell of it was, figuring out what the bad guys were up wasn’t going to do us any good. Pretty much all of the kids and old folks had already gone to the flight part of the old fight-or-flight instinct, and the guards were keeping the pressure on us hard enough that getting everyone to settle down and think for a minute wasn’t going to work. “No choice but to ride it out and wait for an opening,” I yelled over to Applejack.   Well, I guess I could’ve tried something like walls of fire to counter-herd the ponies, but slinging that much power around every time the guards tried to turn us around was likely to burn me out before we got to the Everfree Forest. That would leave us in just as bad of a situation as we were already in, but with me tapped out on top of it. Better to run into the bad guys while we were still in fighting condition. With any luck, we might be able to find an opening and bust through their lines.   The odds of smashing through the guards trying to catch us weren’t as bad as you might think. Well, unless Celestia herself was part of the chase, in which case we might as well stick our heads between our legs and kiss our asses goodbye right now. However, with the exception of Celestia there wasn’t anyone in Equestria who could stand up to me in a straight fight. Twilight was in my weight class and Luna was leagues above it, but they were both on the moon. From what I’d seen of the royal guards, they were potent but not in my weight class. That said, most of the ponies seemed to be pretty limited in what they could do magically. There certainly hadn’t been any unicorn guards blasting away with fire and lightning when we invaded the palace. Even with the magic they did have, the only time I’d ever seen a pony with anything like a killer instict was when I’d run into the demon-ponies. There are plenty of ways to be deadly with a fairly innocuous spell if you’re creative enough, but most cartoon ponies just wouldn’t even think about how to turn their talents lethal.   Not to mention that Equestria had never seen what happened when I cut loose. I still wasn’t exactly comfortable with the idea of going all-out against ponies that were mind-controlled or else being lied to, but after what happened to Rainbow Dash it was clear we couldn’t win this if we kept the kid gloves on. I’d already lost one of the girls, two if you count Twilight, and three if you add Pinkie to the list. It was past time I drew the line in the sand.   It wasn’t the guards’ fault they were on the wrong side of things, and it wasn’t right that some of them could end up severely injured or worse by the time this was over. However, life isn’t fair. I wasn’t going to go on a psycho killing spree or anything, but I wasn’t going to accomplish much if I kept going into every fight with one hand tied behind my back. It’s hard to win a fight when you have to worry about not hurting the other guy. There were innocents – kids especially – and the rest of the Element-bearers counting on me to keep them safe. I’d let them down once before, and Rainbow Dash had paid the price. It wasn’t happening again.   After being herded about for another minute or so, we broke out of the orchards and into an open field. The edge of the Everfree Forest was only a couple hundred yards away, and there wasn’t a single guard blocking our path to the relative safety of the dark, dangerous forest. Well, ‘safe’ wasn’t the right word to describe the Everfree, but vague and possible future danger was a lot better than clear and present current danger. For a moment, I thought we might actually get out of this without a fight, that the guards had messed up and given us an opening.   Sure, it wasn’t likely, but I’ve never quite gotten over my occasional bouts of optimism.   We were about halfway across the field when a barrier of pinkish-purple energy sprang up between the forest and us. The leading couple of ponies ran into it, and bounced off it as if they’d hit a brick wall. The crowd tried to find a way around but the barrier turned out to be near-perfect sphere surrounding all of us. The bottom edge of the sphere stopped at the ground, but I’m pretty sure that if we’d tried digging down we’d find the rest of the barrier soon enough.   So much for optimism.   A quick scan of the area revealed a bunch of pegasi closing in, and more ominously several pegasus-drawn aerial chariots. Judging by the all-too-familiar barriers that were popping up, I was willing to bet that one of those chariots was carrying our good old buddy Shining Armor. Guess it figures that the Captain of the Guard, who probably has a very intense personal grudge against all of us after we took his sweetheart hostage, would be in charge of chasing us down.   I stepped forward and took a crack at busting through the barrier, and barely made a dent in it. So much for my whole spiel about there not being a single pony aside from Celestia that could offer me a serious challenge.   I’d fallen into one those classic bits of wizard arrogance the White Council was infamous for among the supernatural community. See, the White Council is a pretty exclusive club: to be a full-fledged wizard, you have to have some serious magical muscle and enough raw talent to be at least basically proficient in most branches of magic. Wearing a bathrobe and having a long, flowing beard didn’t hurt either – image, and all that. Their versatility is one of the things that makes a proper member of the Council scary: they’ve got dozens of different ways they can completely ruin someone’s day, from the direct approach of tossing around fireballs to more esoteric stuff like thaumaturgy, pulling creatures out of the Nevernever, or even dropping an old Soviet satellite onto your house.   Thing is, there are plenty of folks with magical talent who don’t make the cut to be part of the White Council. A lot of them, much like a lot of the ponies, only seemed to have a very narrow bit of magical ability, like the Alphas’ being able to turn into wolves or Mortimer Lindquist’s ectomancy. As far as the Council was concerned, those kinds of minor talents didn’t qualify anyone as a wizard, or even a very significant threat.   A pretty big chunk of the Council has their heads permanently stuck up their own rectums. Sure, most of those minor talents couldn’t come close to matching a wizard’s mastery of magic in all its forms, but they tended to get really, really good at the one or two bits of magic they did know. Contrary to what the popular saying claimed, when all you have is a hammer, it usually means you start getting extremely skilled at using a hammer and find all sorts of creative ways to use it.   Sure, Shining Armor couldn’t manage a tracking spell or smack his enemies around with fire, lightning, ice, and force. He didn’t know a lick of thaumaturgy and probably didn’t have a clue about mind magic or the summoning and binding of creatures from other realms, let alone have the ability to travel to those realms himself. All he could do was throw up a couple variations on a single barrier spell. However, it was one hell of a barrier spell.   That’s not to say I couldn’t break it. Pretty much every type of magical barrier has some sort of weak point; it’s just a matter of finding out where and how to hit it. Too bad that right now I didn’t really have the time to study and experiment. There was always the brute force approach, but trying to bull through a problem with raw power is never a very effective solution. Against a focused spellcaster like Shining Armor, the last thing you want to do is get into a slugging match with him in his one area of specialization.   It was going out on a limb, but odds were Shining Armor’s barrier worked both ways. A barrier that blocked us from getting out would also block Shining Armor’s people from getting in – or at least, that’s how barrier magic worked in my neck of the woods. Equestria being a different dimension and all, his barrier magic might not follow the rules of magic I took for granted. Still, if he had to open up a hole in his own barrier to fight us, that would pretty much be the perfect time to try a counter-attack. We weren’t any worse off than we were before if he didn’t give us an opening, so we might as well wait and see.   Shining Armor, accompanied by five other chariot-bound unicorns and about two dozen pegasi, gathered together outside the barrier, placing themselves between the Everfree Forest and us. Cheerilee shuffled her the ponies under her care to the opposite end of the barrier while I stepped up to edge facing the guards. Applejack joined me after leaving the unconscious Pinkie Pie behind with Cheerilee’s other charges; Rarity and a reluctant but determined Fluttershy stepped up next to me a moment later. I was a bit surprised when Trixie joined us, but right now I wasn’t going to turn down any help we could get. Even with Trixie, we were outnumbered six-to-one.   “Surrender, servants of Nightmare Moon,” Shining Armor demanded. “You cannot hope to prevail against such impossible odds.”   “I’ve tangled with a lot worse than you and lived to tell the tale, and you had a lot more guards than this back at the Palace,” I shot right back. “I think I’ll take my chances.” Sure, we hadn’t so much won that fight as gotten out of a battle we were in the process of losing by taking a princess hostage, but why quibble over the details?   I dropped my voice to a menacing snarl, spreading my attention across Shining Armor and the guardponies he had with him. “Think real hard, before you back me into a corner. I don’t want to see anybody get killed, but push me hard enough and you’re not going to like what happens next. Trust me, even if me and mine don’t end up winning, you’ll know you’ve been in one hell of a fight by the time we’re done.”   “Perhaps you’re right,” Shining Armor agreed, sounding amicable enough that alarm bells started going off in my head. In my experience, when the bad guys start sounding friendly, it’s almost always a sign that they’re about to hit you with something big and nasty. I got ready to smash my way through the barrier, in case he was about to try something like crunching the barrier around us like a big trash compactor.   I spotted Shining’s horn glowing, but I couldn’t see any sign of what he was about to hit us with. The barrier he’d tossed up around us wasn’t changing in any way I could see, and I couldn’t see any hint of a spell targeting me or the other four ponies who’d stepped up to the fight. Wait, if he wasn’t targeting any of the fighters, then that could only mean–   I figured it out just in time to spot a pink earth pony filly with a telekinetic gag over her mouth getting yanked out of a small hole in the barrier wall by Shining Armor’s magical grasp. I tried to pull her back, but my command of unicorn telekinesis was way too shaky to stand up to someone with Shining Armor’s experience. As soon as the filly was completely outside of the barrier, Shining Armor snapped it shut and what little I could do to stop him got cut off. The brief struggle with Shining Armor had gotten the attention of the rest of the ponies, but it was too late for them to do anything but shout in outrage.   “Why so surprised?” Shining Armor gave me a nasty little grin as he brought the filly up next to him and leveled the point of a dagger at her throat. “Turnabout is fair play, after all.”   The cold voice of pragmatism told me not to go along with his demands. The fate of the entire multiverse was potentially at stake here, after all. If we surrendered here, the bad guys would win and that little filly would end up dead anyway, and she’d have no shortage of company by the time everything was said and done. Better to sacrifice one life now than to let billions die later. Besides, that dark little corner of my own mind reminded me that his hostage was Diamond Tiara – it’s not as if the local schoolyard bully would be a huge loss.   Sometimes, the cold voice of pragmatism can be a real dick.  All it took was one look at the scared little girl being held hostage to hammer that point home. I don’t care if she was a perfect little angel or a total hellraiser, Diamond Tiara was still a kid. I’d had it up to here with adults dying; no way in hell I was going to start tossing kids on the fire.   I’m no expert at this kind of thing, but I figured the smart thing to do was try to go along with Shining Armor until we had a good chance to get the hostage away from him. We might even be able to talk him down. I didn’t know the guy, but I had to think that anyone who could make up to Captain of the Royal Guard in Equestria was probably a pretty decent, honorable fellow when he didn’t have Discord messing around with his brain. Going so far as to threaten a kid was probably way out of character for him; if we played it smart, we might be able to get him to think about what he was doing, and snap out of it.   Before I could put that particular plan of action into motion, Fluttershy exploded.   “JUST WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING?” The not-so-timid-anymore pegasus fluttered up to the edge of the barrier and unleashed her signature death glare on Shining Armor. “The Princess’ royal guards are supposed to be the noble protectors of ponykind! How dare you threaten to hurt a little filly! HOW DARE YOU!”   “Back off!” Shining Armor snarled, placing the tip of his dagger right on Diamond Tiara’s throat.   “Sir!” One of soldiers cut in. “Maybe we should–“   “Stand down, soldier!” Shining Armor snapped. The guard captain cast a quick look back at his men, most of whom weren’t even trying to hide the fact that they were not alright with him taking a filly hostage. Shining Armor started breaking out into a nervous sweat, and a hint of feat entered his eyes. “All of you! Stand down and fall in line!” His gaze snapped back to Fluttershy. “And you! I said back off!”   “You back off!” Fluttershy answered, propelling herself forward until her nose was touching Shining Armor’s barrier. Despite the close-to-impenetrable wall separating him from the mare, he still took a nervous step away from her. “You let that filly go right now, or you are going to be in BIG TROUBLE mister! You should be ashamed of yourself! WHAT WOULD YOUR MOTHER THINK IF SHE COULD SEE YOU RIGHT NOW?”   “I–“ Shining Armor looked back to his men for support, and found that almost none of them were willing to meet his gaze, and most of them were slowly backing away from him. “I was–“ He looked to the refugees huddled on the other side of his sphere, and saw a bunch of ponies cringing from him in fear or glaring at him in defiance. “I was just–” He met the Fluttershy’s uncompromising death glare. “I–” He looked down at the terrified little filly that was his hostage.   His grip on the girl and the dagger he’d been holding her slackened.   Three of his pegasi soldiers, or perhaps I should say his former soldiers, sprang into action the instant they saw an opening. One smacked away the dagger with a sweep of a foreleg, another snatched the girl away from him, and the final one gave him smack across the head and horn for good measure. The blow did a fine job of disrupting his concentration, and the barrier spell that had been holding us all in collapsed around us.   I immediately started trotting up to Shining Armor. If his reaction was anything to go by Fluttershy had already put in a pretty good start at snapping him out of Discord’s mind control, but I wanted to make sure he was completely clear. I’d only managed to take about two steps forward when a pink-and-burgundy ball of fury zoomed past me and charged Shining Armor. “NOPONY HURTS MY KIDS!” Cheerilee shrieked.   Shining Armor had size, muscles, military training, magic, and the armor he was named for. All Cheerilee had was the righteous wrath of a mother bear who’d just seen one of her cubs threatened.   Poor guy didn’t stand a chance.   “Reckon maybe we oughta pull her offa him?” Applejack asked. “Ain’t like he’s a bad pony; he was just doin’ all that bad stuff ‘cause Discord made him.”   I looked at the enraged schoolteacher, then back to Applejack. “You want to tell her that she can’t hit him anymore, you go right ahead.” Personally, I wasn’t dumb enough to put myself between a mama bear and her target. I haven’t managed to stay alive for this long by being suicidal (granted, sometimes I’d survived despite my best efforts).   Applejack eyed the schoolmarm and gave a slight wince. “Reckon he’s a tough enough fella to handle takin’ a few hits,” she agreed. Nobody else, not even the guards that had been under his command up until a minute or two ago, seemed all that eager to rush to his defense.   I turned my attention to the three guards who’d helped handle Shining Armor just in time to see them tossing aside the armor and helmets they’d been wearing. Soon as the armor was gone, I was pretty sure they weren’t guards at all. One downside of uniforms; they make it a lot easier to pull off any sort of infiltration   Two of the pegasi I’d never seen before in my life, a lavender mare with a blond mane and a white mare with a pink-and-green one. The remaining pegasus – who was in the process of comforting a quite traumatized Diamond Tiara – was unmistakable. “Good to see you again, Derpy.”