The Exterminator

by HackamoreHalter

Invasive Species

"This is Don Cantare. If you are listening to this, you are the resistance. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves." -Series of pirate radio broadcasts after the Fall

*****

The club was rocking tonight. The DJ’s booth was on fire, literally for a few minutes when somepony got too tipsy and spilt a triple-digit proof glass onto the mood candles. Thankfully, the glass was nearly empty and the unicorn scratching the vinyl knew a thing or two about pyrotechnics gone wrong. The noise level was somewhere between blaringly loud and deafening. Ponies were packed on the dance floor like sardines, assuming the fish were placed in the tin still alive and thrashing. Strobe lights shot beams of rainbows out every direction, threatening seizures for any who stared too long. Laughter and cheer filled the air, and even the grumpiest of Gusses or most negative of Nancys were bobbing their heads to the beat.

The macho stallion who stopped in front of her booth could not have stuck out more if he’d tried. She’d seen griffons with less bulk than this behemoth, who was dressed in goth blacks studded with chrome spikes. And he was wearing shades. At night. Indoors. At least the DJ had an eye disorder for an excuse. He’d pushed his way through the throng like a snowplow, and now loomed over her like a skyscraper.

“Que Sera Cantare?” He spoke with a voice like an ancient, chain-smoking dragon that had gargled sand before gleefully lobotomizing itself.

“Just Sera, please.” As if anypony would go by her first name. She cursed her hippie parents while smiling brightly. “Can I help you?”

“Yes,” the stallion said, his eyes glowing blue from behind the glasses. The temperature dropped like a stone and a spear of frost formed over his head. Sera’s eyes grew wide as platters as a terror gripped her. Never had she felt a fear like this before, as if her life was but a candle about to be snuffed out. “You are to be terminat-”

An airborne table crashed into the hulking brute, knocking him to the side just as he released his grip on the frozen projectile. The icicle buried itself into the stuffing of the booth just next to her head and she screamed. The stallion who’d just tried to kill her, she struggled with even the concept of that for a moment, stood back up and turned towards her once again. Instead, he came face-to-face with an apple-sized object that beeped merrily.

A thrown table or two in a nightclub is just a party gone bad, but an explosion stopped the music for good. Screams erupted as the localized blast blew the murderous savage straight out of the brick wall, leaving a pony-shaped hole into the midnight air. The crowd began to flee in terror, streaming out the exits in a wave. Sera crouched beneath her table, hyperventilating as she peeked her head out to view the carnage.

Outside, the inequine thing sat up slowly amidst the ruined wall. It turned to face her, locking on with a cold gaze, and she muffled a scream before a new stallion blocked her vision. His eyes were so intense, so expressive, and he reached out with a chipped hoof, giving Sera the most important offer she will ever hear.

“Come with me if you want to live.”

Comments

[Sypher]

A nice story, but it follows the plot of its source material a little too closely for my tastes.

[HackamoreHalter]

5574745
I might have gotten a bit of tunnel vision with movie callbacks by the end, there. There were a few lines, such as that last bit of closing dialogue, that I'd wanted to add simply because I couldn't imagine a Terminator movie where someone didn't use that line in some way. It does toe the line of originality though, so I can see how that'd turn some folks away. I'd hoped to have a unique enough spin for that not to be an issue. My goal was to stay fairly close to the Terminator concept, but in an Equestria setting. Fallout: Equestria is my prompt and inspiration for this story/contest, with its ponified Wasteland, and I tried to follow the same path Kkat did. This story was limited by submission time and word count, but if this universe had a chance to extend into a sprawling epic I'd imagine there would be a clearer divergence between the story and source material.

[Sypher]

5574848
For what it's worth, I found the writing in the beginning of the story to be very enjoyable. You set up the post-apocalyptic setting very well.

And as far as crossovers go, the sort you're attempting to do--taking the setting, themes and ideas of the original and incorporating it into Equestria--is by far more interesting than simply mashing together the characters. The only issue in this case is preventing the story from becoming too derivative. Imagine if Littlepip was following her father out of Stable Two instead of Velvet Remedy. It would set an entirely different tone for what we could expect from the rest of the story.

While you did a lot of interesting things to keep it uniquely Equestrian, if I could make at least one suggestion, it'd be to change the names of the characters. Don and Que Sera Cantare, for example, don't really feel like pony names. Even Reese's Pieces, while clever, feels out of place in the MLP universe. That'd be one step in the right direction to making the story feel more unique.

[HackamoreHalter]

5576071
Much appreciated, it helps to know I've got at least a good landscape to build on.

Hmm, I see your point with the plot/character parallels. If I had a chance for a rewrite, I might try new reasons and targets for going back in time. Perhaps the main character goes back in time accidentally during a fight, realizes he could stop the war before it happens, and finds the bugs have sent an assassin back to stop him instead of the other way around. That would also solve the issue of the characters that are there simply for the sake of being there, pigeonholed by Terminator plot.

Names was an issue I definitely struggled with. John and Sarah Connor do not make the transition to pony names very easily. I felt like I had a suitable workaround with Don Cantare and Que Sera Cantare, as their names were inspired by Mi Amore Cadenza. Cantare is the Italian word for 'song', Don is an Italian title, and Que Sera is a saying springing from the song "Que Sera, Sera", meaning "Whatever will be, will be". I thought it had an ironic justice to it considering Sarah Connor's goal was to change fate. I can see how it's a stretch and taking another couple steps away from the source material would have kept me from being shackled.

As for the rest of the pony names, I tried to make a disconnect there with all younger ponies who had been born after the Fall only having very vaguely ponyish names. The older ponies still had names like Jiffy Pop or Marigold, while younger ponies had a new generation of names like Duskin or Lemma (Dusky Dawn or Lemonade if they'd been born in a happier time). I felt that pony names are part of the cheerful magical culture they've cultivated. When that comes crashing down, their names also lose a bit of that shine and take a step closer towards the mundane. Reese's Pieces was a one-line metahumor joke, a nickname the character earned for his habit of reducing the nearby landscape into so many splinters and piles of scrap, and had Reese been born before the war I'd think he would have had a proper pony name. Maybe something like Greaser, and his special talent would be fixing wagons or dancing like John Travolta.

[Sypher]

5576426
I had a somewhat vague understanding of Don and Que Sera - at least, I understood the connection to the title and the phrase, though I don't think I took the comparison as far as you did. Now that it's directly pointed out to me, I can definitely appreciate it more, though I still believe that it may be more effective to stand apart from John and Sarah. My main issue was actually that I couldn't figure out what "Cantare" meant. I must have typed it wrong into Google Translate or something, because I didn't find a good definition. I can't find anything to complain about that now!

I recognized that Marigold and Tough Cookie were members of the "Old Guard," which probably meant that they came from before the fall, but I didn't find the connection between age and the names of the ponies. Very subtle, and it actually comes across pretty clear when you look for it, such as the difference between Macaroon and Kora. Maybe it would have benefited from showing that Duskin and Lemma were of the newer generation, or maybe I'm just bad at reading.

I really like your idea on how pony names work. In this context, Reese having the name that he does makes far more sense. I understood that the "Pieces" part was a nickname, and I'm sure that given more time and a larger word count that you'd be able to better show "his habit of reducing the nearby landscape into so many splinters and piles of scrap," but it is what it is I suppose. I think the key issue for his (nick)name is that the logo happens to be the cover art for the story, which automatically makes it feel out of place in an MLP fanfic.

You've evidently thought a lot about this story and what direction it is/was focused towards. If you do ever decide to rewrite the story, or even expand it into a full self-contained novel, I think that I'd like to read it.

[PresentPerfect]

I wish you'd written something original.