The Coming Storm

by Jay911

All Hooves On Deck

MAY 28 2:15PM

“Swift!” I called out.

“Yes, Stormy?”

I hmph’ed but refrained from arguing the point again. (I’d asked her to not call me that, and she responded by telling me to come up with something better.)

“Come and give me some help with this. Please?”

I could hear her trotting over on the cement floor. I was near the front of the store, at the doors that led outside. I was exhausted and my jaw hurt from what I’d been doing.

We’d picked up the radio transmission again at 7:45, as the caller promised, but it was too staticky to hear anything meaningful. I figure either the caller was in a valley or there was a ridge between us.

8:45 came around and we finally made contact. ‘Jeff’ was the name he used. He’d picked up our signal on the day before, just before the power went out. He’d been trying hourly since then.

We kept it short to save his battery in case of emergency. He didn’t know precisely where he was, which was why we didn’t go out to get him in the SUV. He knew enough to keep walking south toward the lake, and then follow signs to get to Pickering.

The only other thing we talked about was that he too was changed; he didn’t elaborate, and we just confirmed we were too. He hadn’t seen another soul, except for random animal encounters like we had experienced.

So, near the stroke of 9, we set down the radio mic and sat back on our haunches to contemplate the enormity of the news.

Since then, Swift had been “cleaning up the place” - making our living space look presentable, i.e. not having our bedding, random books and magazines, drink glasses, etc. thrown all about.

I’d been busying myself with other things, and as Swift came to find me, she blinked and stared at my handiwork (or rather hoofwork, I suppose). “What. Are you doing??”

“I need your help please, to get this-” I gestured with my chin at the sheet of bite-marked plywood I’d pulled all the way from the far side of the store “-up there.” I nodded at two A-frame ladders, sideways against the front windows of the store.

“What for??”

“It’s a spotting stand,” I said. “It-”

“I know what a spotting stand is, my uncle was a deer hunter,” she shot back. “You are not going to aim a gun at him!”

“Of course not!” I retorted. “See? Binoculars.” I pointed at the largest, best pair I could find, which I’d set on a cash register counter nearby.

“Why are you being so suspicious of Jeff?”

“Because we have no idea what he’s like,” I countered. “He could sound just fine but be a complete psycho-”

“Storm!”

“Look,” I said, ignoring the stupid name again, “do you disagree that it’s wise to be wary?”

“I...” she began, then the wind came out of her sails. “No… I guess not.”

“That’s all I’m doing, Swift. I just want to see him coming.”

She thought about it for a minute. “I guess you’re right,” she sighed. “I just had this image of you looking at him through a scope, trying to figure out how to work a trigger with your hooves.”

“Please. Trust me, you know me better than that, right?”

“Of course,” she finally smiled. “After all, you’re my oldest friend in the world.”

I giggled, and stepped back from the wood as it slowly lifted off the ground to be placed atop the ladders. “Thanks,” I said. “By the way, just out of curiosity… do you have, like, a limit you can move with that skill? I mean, does that-” gesturing to the wood “-feel heavy?”

“I can sense weight,” she nodded. “But it’s not a burden. I don’t imagine I could move, say, a semi. But a hunk of wood? Or a fridge? Or… a pony?”

“Yipe!” I squeaked as I rose into the air. I was deposited on the ad-hoc platform just as my spotting glasses were brought to me. “Uh… thanks.”

“Good hunting,” Swift smirked, turning to go back to her chores.

I looked around for a second, then realized something. “Um…” I looked down to the hard floor twelve feet below - nearly four times my height. “Swift? He doesn’t show up ‘til tomorrow. I don’t need to be up here right now…?”

8:40 PM

“Given any more thought to a name yet?”

“No,” I said. We were sitting down to a late dinner after having moved around stuff inside the store all day, making it more our home and less a Wal-Mart we were sheltering in. I’d set up three more generators (after climbing down from my perch, helped down from halfway by a pitying unicorn), and sourced a bunch of windmills and solar equipment which I’d yet to figure out how to put together. They were going to be less plug-and-play than a couple of diesel generators, I figured, so I’d set their setup aside until after ‘Jeff’ was dealt with.

“If you don’t, I’ll pick the rest for you eventually,” Swift said with a smile.

“You will do nothing of the sort,” I said. “I will figure it out on my own in good time. And I’m not accepting ‘Stormy’ for certain just yet.”

Swift continued to smile at me as she munched on dinner. “And how will you introduce yourself to Jeff tomorrow?”

“...I don’t know,” I frowned.

“You’re Stormy. That’s all there is to it.”

I had a sense of deja vu from that last statement, and it was clear from her grin that Swift did as well. I just shook my head and sighed.

“You gotta come up with something,” she prodded.

“I know! I know, I just need some time. Some of us didn’t get a silver spoon when we were ponified, with magic and butt pictures and names coming to us out of the blue and all.”

Swift laughed. “Well, if you need any help, I’m here, you know.”

“I know,” I nodded. I wasn’t really mad, I just didn’t want to be rushed into such an important decision.

Once supper was done, I rose to my hooves. “I’ll be up top for a while.”

“Up top?...”

“On the roof,” I clarified. “I wanna scout out locations for solar and wind installations.”

I suppose it would have been a less transparent fib if I’d actually took some solar or wind gear, or even some paper to take notes with, up there.

Instead, I stood on the edge of the roof, in the early evening overcast, trying to clear my thoughts and get ready for our meeting tomorrow with who would become either our first guest or our third team member (not counting Buddy, and the jury’s still out on him, to be honest - there’s something strange about him still).

I wasn’t thinking about my brush with disaster a few days back; surprisingly, that was far from my mind, despite all the revelations it’d brought. To imagine that a near-death experience would be low on the list of notable goings-on was incredible.

A breeze was coming off the lake, and I turned into it, letting it blow back my mane and tail and ripple through my coat. It felt oddly soothing. Shutting my eyes, I could almost imagine that I could picture the wind currents and their specific little eddies and vortices, like if it was a river and every little swirl against the rocks was visible.

After several minutes - maybe even half an hour - of standing there and relaxing in the calmness, the weird dream I had the other day came back to me. I opened my eyes to see that fog was coming in, and fairly swiftly, from the lakeshore. It would bank down to at least the roof of the building if not lower.

You’re insane, the rational part of my mind hollered at me. But the part that was controlling my limbs wasn’t listening.

As the fog bank arrived, I reached out and pawed at it with a hoof. It was bizarrely tangible, like I was pushing at something slightly less dense than cotton candy. It still parted around me while I stood on the roof, but I could make ‘dents’ and creases in the vapor at will.

I carved out a ledge in the fog and put my forehooves out, expecting to fall through it and land on the roof again. Instead, I found myself pushing against what felt like an ultra-soft bed.

Hesitatingly, I brought my hind legs up onto the ledge, and there I was, standing on water vapor, three feet above the roof of the building.

This is crazy.

With my mass on it (and I’m completely guessing, here - you have as much knowledge about this situation as I do - and probably more, considering you’re reading this after the fact), the little section of fog I’d carved out drifted slower than the rest of it. I slowly passed over the roof of the building, watching it go by as I stood there defying everything about physics that I knew.

Before I was carried over the edge of the roof and got too high off the ground for comfort, I hopped down to the safety of the tar and gravel, and turned back to watch the little shelf of cloud spring back up and merge back into the main… what do you call a big hunk of fog, other than a big hunk of fog, or a cloud?

For a few minutes I wondered what had been in supper that was causing me to trip out so badly. Shaking my head, I went back downstairs.

“Fog rolled in pretty good,” Swift said, peering out the doors beneath my spotter stand. “Didja see?”

“Uh, yeah,” I said, deciding to keep quiet until I knew more about what happened.

“Did you get your head cleared?”

“Huh?”

Swift came up and smiled at me. “You didn’t take any equipment up with you. So did you sort out what you needed to sort out?”

“Oh, um, yeah, pretty much,” I said. I added, “I guess I’m ready for whatever Jeff brings us.”

“What do you think he’ll turn out to be?” Swift asked as we headed towards the bedrooms.

“What do you mean?”

“Pegasus, unicorn…?”

“Oh. I have no idea. He didn’t say.” I cracked a smirk. “He didn’t sound smug, so we might be able to rule out unicorn.”

I got a playful hoof to the back of the head for that. “Hush, you.”

“Ow. Here’s a thought, though. What if he has neither? Or what if he’s not a pony at all?”

“What makes you think he might not be a pony?”

“These other animals we’ve seen that show signs of intellect. Maybe Buddy used to be someone too.”

Swift psh’ed in a dismissive tone. “I already told you I think Buddy’s always been a dog. But you might be right, maybe there are elephants and tigers and gators-”

“I think that’s lions and tigers and bears,” I cut in.

“Ha ha. But who knows… with the incredibly small number of us survivors, maybe it’s just a big coincidence that two ponies happened across one another.”

“I guess we’ll see in the morning. Speaking of which, do we have a plan of action? Or are we just going to both of us stand out in the open and trust he isn’t going to do something bad?”

Swift rolled her eyes. “You are such a worrywart. Maybe that’s your second name. Stormy Worrywart. Or three names. Stormy Worry W-”

“Don’t get started on that, I don’t want to go to bed angry.”

“Fine, fine. You asked my opinion, here it is. Let’s greet him with open hooves. I’d rather think that he’s a pony needing a friend than a pony looking to harm the only two other ponies he’s made contact with in a week.”

“Okay, but at the first sign of hostility, I want you to run.”

Swift smiled as we stopped in between our two ‘bedrooms’. “Are you worried for my safety?”

I blushed and looked away. “For both our safety,” I hurried to say. “Look, I’ll be over the moon too if he turns out to be an ally. But there’s no harm in being cautious.”

“Well, you feel free to be cautious, but don’t be hostile.” Each word from ‘don’t’ on was punctuated by a hoof jabbed into my chest.

“Deal,” I agreed, holding up a hoof in concession.

“Good night… Stormy.”

“Gah!” I winced, and Swift’s giggle followed her to her side of the bedrooms.

MAY 29 11:21AM

“We need a copy of the Theme from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly to play.”

“Hush.”

“I mean it,” I said. “He’s gonna be here right about high noon, even.”

“If it’ll shut you up, I can go find you a poncho and a cowpony hat.”

“Cowpony hat.”

“Yes. Cowpony hat,” Swift said pointedly, as we still both stared in the direction we expected him to approach from.

I sighed. “Fine.”

“Fine, you want me to get it, or…”

“Fine, you win, your little wordplay isn’t going to faze me any more.”

“It makes sense!”

“Whatever.”

Buddy circled us a few times, and I pulled a water bottle from my impromptu saddlebag, first taking a pull for myself, then offering it to him, as he guzzled the remainder.

“At least the fog burned off,” Swift observed. “Nice and clear to see anypony coming from a long ways out.”

I smiled, opting to not tease her about seeming to be wary about the meet all of a sudden.

Buddy finished draining the water bottle and deposited it back in my open saddlebag, then looked between the nearby mall - the one we weren’t occupying - and the two of us.

“I think somebody wants to explore,” I pointed out.

Swift looked at Buddy, then the mall, then nodded. “Go on, but don’t stray too far. If you find something useful, let us know.”

“And if you hear us calling for you, come a-runnin’,” I added.

He barked once and took off for the building.

“See this?” I said, turning to show her the empty bottle in my bag. “Brings back his empties.”

“Just wait ‘til he develops language skills,” Swift grinned.

“Now that will be something to hear.”

For another few minutes we were silent, and then the handheld (...what do you want me to call it? Okay fine. Hoofheld) ham radio in my other saddlebag crackled.

“Hello? Are you there? This is Jeff. I think I see you.”

I sat down so I could use my binoculars, which were hung on the strap around my neck. I lifted them up, and held them to my eyes. The radio levitated itself out of my bag. “Hold on,” Swift said into it.

I peered through the glasses and finally saw what looked like a white T-shirt waving back and forth on the end of a long pole. “Got him,” I nodded.

“Okay. That’s you by the Greek restaurant with the blue sign? On your right.”

“Y-yeah,” he said.

“Come on up,” Swift responded. “Be aware we have a dog that’s roaming around in one of the nearby malls. He’s friendly, but if he confronts you, just stop moving and let us know.”

“You got it,” he responded, and the radio fell silent again.

I watched the pole and flag start moving side to side, not as if it was being waved, but like it was tucked into a pack and the pack carrier was underway once more.

“How old do you think he sounds?”

“I dunno?” I shrugged. “Same as us? Maybe all of us who ‘survived’ and got transformed ended up the same ‘age’.”

“Hmm,” Swift said noncommittally.

I continued to watch in the glasses, and soon, my eyebrows surely rose up above the eyepieces. “Huh.”

“Huh what?”

“Looks like ponies are three for three so far.”

“Really? Let me see.”

Like a slapstick routine, I found my neck being jerked to the side as the glasses were telekinetically wrenched from in front of my face.

“Ow! Let me-” I half-choked out.

I became disentangled and rubbed my neck where the strap had dug in, while Swift took in the sight I’d seen in the binoculars. Coming at us was a male pony - a stallion, I guess? - with a light reddish-tan coat and blond mane and tail. The pole and its makeshift flag were indeed tucked into a saddlebag of some kind, stuffed to the gills with supplies. Behind him he towed one of those balloon-tired gardening wagons piled high with belongings.

Speaking of tired, or at least one of its homonyms, he indeed looked like he was spent.

“You got any more water?” Swift asked with mild urgency.

“Of course,” I told her. “Saved some for this reason.”

“Let’s go.”

Now that I’d seen Jeff and his situation, I had to agree - the poor guy needed our help. We broke into a gallop and met him near the disused intersection on the road.

“Sit down,” Swift said, magically rooting around in my bag for the extra water, and offering it to our newcomer. “Drink this.”

“Th-aank…” he began, but trailed off, not so much out of dehydration or ailment, but reacting to Swift’s telekinesis as she unscrewed the bottle cap and pushed the bottle towards his hooves. His green eyes focused on the plastic bottle hovering in front of his face.

“Drink,” I urged him. Like I said, he wasn’t too bad off, but he needed hydration, and he wasn’t getting any by staring at Swift’s magic.

He reached out and squeezed the bottle gingerly between his forehooves, blinking a couple of times as the magic faded. He started chugging the water before either of us could urge him to take it slow, and we just stood in silence watching him drink.

I took the moment to take a closer look at him. He had no horn, explaining why he was so surprised by Swift’s ability. He also had no wings - functional or otherwise - on his sides. So that meant, I guess, he was just a regular pony.

Well, a regular, sentient, talking pony currently taking down a one-and-a-quarter-liter bottle of water.

“Thanks,” he gasped, lowering the empty bottle. He looked at Swift. “How did you?”

“I’m a unicorn,” she smiled, taking the bottle from his grasp and recapping it, then tucking it back in my saddlebag. “I can do magic.”

“Wow,” he responded, duly impressed. “I’m not… well, I’m, I guess, just normal? If you can call this normal.”

Swift giggled, and I smiled and nodded knowingly. “We get what you mean,” she said to him. “By the way, I presume you’re Jeff. I’m Swift Quill, and this is Stormy.”

I winced.

“Swift Quill?” he echoed. “Were you a Native before this happened?”

She laughed politely. “No, I had a human name, but I think this fits me better.” She turned her side to him to show off her butt picture. “It kind of fits, when you look at it all.”

“Oh,” he said, eyes widening as he stood. “I was thinking I was the only one who got that weirdness.” He shrugged off the rope he was using as a harness for the wagon, and turned his rump to show us his own butt picture: a hammer, with three bricks surrounding it.

“Wow,” Swift said, while I silently fumed. Was I going to be the only one without my own rump icon? “Congratulations! Do you know what it means?”

“I’m - I guess I was - a third-year in building engineering at Carleton,” he explained. “I-”

“Holy shit!” interrupted Swift. Was that the first time she’d cursed in my presence? “You walked here from Ottawa?”

“Around abouts, yeah,” he shrugged. “Wasn’t too bad. I figured it was wise to head toward the biggest population center, once I found Ottawa was empty.”

“Wasn’t too bad?” Swift echoed. She turned to me. “I’ve found I have some increased stamina, but nothing like that, to walk, what, 350 kilometers? How about you, Stormy?”

I tried not to grimace at the accursed name again. “I can last longer than I could as a human, but I doubt I could make that kind of trip that fast.”

“I don’t know what to tell you,” he said. “I don’t tire easily in this form.” He stood up. “Speaking of which, I’m good enough to move on to wherever we’re ending up. Thanks.”

We parted and let him fall in between us, as we headed back towards home. He noticed my wings and said, “Wow. A pegasus? How high can you fly?”

I scrunched up my face in a frown as I heard a snigger from the other side of Jeff. “I can’t, yet,” I said. “I’m still trying to figure out how to use them.”

“Oh,” he said, blushing a little. “Sorry.”

“She’ll figure it out eventually,” Swift said. “It took me a long time to learn magic.”

“Two days,” I scoffed.

“Well, you have to admit I was motivated,” she countered. “I could have just let you fall.”

“Fall??” Jeff said with alarm.

“I almost fell off the roof of our place putting up an antenna,” I mumbled.

“In a lightning storm!” Swift added happily.

“What?!” Jeff blurted out. “Don’t you know how dangerous that is?”

“Got an inkling of it, yeah,” I responded.

“You should really have had some fall protection.”

“My ladder belt doesn’t fit any more,” I quipped.

“I’m sorry,” he said after a moment, blushing again. “I shouldn’t be criticizing you. I’m sure you were doing what you could with what you had.”

“Exactly,” I said, brightening a little.

“So anyway,” Swift said, changing the subject, “you said you were in engineering school?”

“Yeah,” Jeff nodded. “I’m from Moncton, but I’ve been taking building engineering for a couple of years in Ottawa. That’s infrastructure and systems design, pretty much.”

“That’s actually pretty handy,” Swift said, and I agreed. “That’d help us immensely.”

“Happy to throw in, however I can,” he nodded. “I presume you’re on alternative power now?”

“Sort of,” I contributed. “I put together a few generators, but haven’t had time to work out solar or wind - though I did collect as many kits from the hardware stores as I could find.”

“Child’s play,” he said, waving a hoof before us as we walked along. “We’ll be up and running in no t-”

“What is that?” Swift demanded, magically seizing the poor guy’s hoof and drawing it towards her.

“Yipe! That’s attached, you know,” he protested, hopping to keep up with his limb’s arrested direction of travel. “Oh, you mean my boot?”

Enclosing Jeff’s hoof, and the other three now that I bothered to notice, was a leather-and-fabric bootie of some kind. It was far from a professionally sewn item, but it evidently did the trick, and was held on by extra-long hiking boot laces wrapped a couple of times around his foreleg, above the fetlock. (See, I can learn!)

“Haven’t you ladies noticed your hooves wearing down from the hard surfaces? Tch. I guess I know what I’m fabbing up first,” he smiled.

I shook my head. How could we have missed such an obvious solution? Then again, we were busy learning magic, and getting radios to work, and finding dogs…

“Oh, should I call Buddy back?” I asked Swift as we continued on.

“Nah, let him explore,” she said. “Maybe we’ll luck out and he’ll find something.”

“Buddy? Oh, the dog?” Jeff asked, and I nodded.

“Hey, have you encountered any animals on your travels?” Swift asked.

“Have I!” Jeff responded. “One night I spent in a tree because a pack of wolves were on the prowl.”

“Wolves,” I shivered. I carried on what Swift was surely going to ask. “Did they seem unusually smart to you?”

“Definitely,” Jeff nodded. “They seemed to be openly communicating, though they weren’t talking. Because, you know, that’s reserved for us pony folk.” The last bit was of course sarcasm.

“Of course,” Swift said, beating me to the line.

“And not just them. I was followed by a herd of cows for a bit of time.”

“Followed?”

“Indeed. As if they figured I must know where to go for sustenance. I.... Well, I’m not very proud about this, but I gave them the slip by ducking through some concrete culverts. Because I didn’t want to be responsible for them… I mean, until I heard your message, I didn’t know if there was a chance for survival, so I didn’t want to give them any false hope…”

“We get you,” I said. We were at the mall, at the door I’d kicked in an eternity ago. Or was that just last Sunday? “Here we go.”

“A shopping mall, that’s a good idea. Lots of, shall we say, raw material.”

“Exactly,” Swift said, telekinetically holding the fold of broken laminated glass open so Jeff could duck through. I followed him, and then Swift brought up the rear, after closing up the hole again.

“What’ve you been surviving on?” I asked, partly out of curiosity and partly to fill the time it’d take to walk to the Wal-Mart.

“Berries, fruits on and off the vine so to speak, and the occasional garden raid,” he answered. “I found out early on that red meat is off the menu for the foreseeable future. I tell you, that was almost the last straw, knowing I’ve had my last strip of bacon ever.”

“Buh,” I said, coming to the stunning realization at the same time. “Now I’m sad.”

“Oh my god,” Swift said, “What I wouldn’t give for a Baconator, if I wouldn’t bring it right back up again.”

“A girl after my own heart,” Jeff smiled.

“You’re both making me drool,” I complained.

“Relax, Stormy, we have plenty of celery and carrots yet,” Swift quipped.

“‘Stormy’,” Jeff said, as we rounded the corner to the Wal-Mart entrance. “How’d you come across that moniker?”

“It’s a placeholder,” I mumbled.

“She’s in denial,” Swift said brightly. “She gave up her human name too, but refuses to come up with a pony name. So I gave her one to match her disposition.”

“Aw, that’s not fair,” Jeff said sympathetically. “She doesn’t seem that surly to me.”

“Thank you!” I exclaimed.

“Stay with us a couple days,” Swift said, cracking a grin.

We gave Jeff the nickel tour of our home base. I don’t know if we could even call it a nickel tour any more, because, of course, money was just an obsolete word now.

“And these are our useless TVs,” I said as we walked through Electronics. “Had them going while the power was on, but nobody was broadcasting anything meaningful.”

“Too bad,” he nodded as we walked on. “You’d think getting to a satellite-equipped TV station would have been the ideal way to find survivors.”

“I know,” I nodded. “We didn’t get to a TV station, but we did get this.” I stopped at the ham radio cart, resting a hoof on it.

“Jerry-rigged pretty well,” he said, assessing the cart and its contents, and the cable snaking off towards the ceiling. “I’m very thankful for it.”

“You a ham?” I asked.

He shook his head. “No, but my roommate at the university had a couple of radios. So since he, erm, vanished, along with everyone else, I figured it would do me better in my pack than sitting on his desk.”

“I think that’s fair,” I agreed.

“Do you know what happened?” he finally asked.

“No,” I admitted. I gestured to Swift, who was shifting items around in her magic field to make a third ‘bedroom’. “Neither of us do. We both woke up to find we were alone and… ‘ponified’.”

“Ponified,” he chuckled. “I was up late working on a paper, when suddenly my touch-typing skills got… much less accurate.” He held up his forehooves. “I fell out of my chair and can only assume that I passed out from the shock. When I awoke, it was early morning, and campus was deserted. I tell you, that was frightening, but the scary part was hearing the carillon on the Peace Tower at Parliament Hill slowly fall out of sync and stop playing the hourly chime on time. Or, eventually, at all.”

“Wow,” I responded, nodding. “Yeah, that would be kinda creepy.”

“So, may I ask what you did? Before?”

“Oh, I was a computer g… uru,” I said, almost tripping myself up. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Swift pop up from behind a divider she was moving, smirk, and tuck back out of sight.

“Oh?”

“I programmed databases,” I said. “Near as I can figure, that’s why I don’t have an assigram like you two do. I don’t have any useful skill in the new world.”

“Nonsense,” he scoffed. “You rescued me. I’d say that was a pretty important skill.”

“Well, it didn’t give me an icon,” I groused. “You know what? I don’t even know why it bothers me that much. It’s not like I’m jealous or anything. I could get along just fine having a plain, unadorned butt.”

“Who can tell what the reason behind all this is,” Jeff shrugged. “Maybe we’re all in some omnipotent alien’s science fair project.”

“Well, we’d better get an ‘A’,” I quipped. “For all the effort we’ve put into things.”

We’d continued walking around and were at the front of the store now. “What’s this? A blind?” Jeff asked, sizing up the ladders and plywood.

“Of sorts,” I said. “Just to make sure we can see who’s coming.”

He nodded. “Good sound defensive tactic,” he said, then turned to carry on.

I instead turned toward the middle of the store. “HAH! Ya hear that?!”

“Stormy Stormy Stormy Stormy Stormy!” came the response.

Jeff didn’t know what to think. After a moment, he gestured at me with a hoof. “Do you know you’re doing that?” he asked.

I looked at what he was indicating and found my wings poofed out again. “Dangit,” I cursed, “that’s all they ever do.” I grunted and forced them back in.

“It almost seems like an instinctive response,” Jeff observed. “You’re trying to make yourself look bigger against a predator or foe.”

“I… wha?” I said, never having thought of it that way. “...You know, that almost makes half-assed sense.”

“I know it’s an odd combination, but I was minoring in veterinary biology,” he said, adding sheepishly, “Just so I’d have some transferable skills to help my sister tend her horses back home. Ironic, huh?”

“Uh, yeah,” I said. Wanting to get off the subject, I led him towards the automotive bays. “Here’s where I’m keeping the gennies…”

We surveyed my haphazard attempt at keeping us powered. The three or four machines I’d gotten to run were chugging away, less one that had apparently run out of fuel while we were out. Jeff and I together managed to refuel them from jerry cans relatively safely, without smelling too much like we’d bathed in a refinery, and got them all running again.

Then I showed him the stash of renewable resource parts I’d, ehem, ‘acquired’.

“Yes, indeed,” he said, stroking his chin with a hoof. “We can make this work. Tomorrow is going to be a good day, I think.”

We all had supper not much later, and continued to catch each other up during and after the meal, each learning what the other(s) had encountered. What Jeff had seen and experienced on his way to us would fill several journals alone, I’m sure, and we certainly had a lot to add to our own story’s pages once Swift found some time to get down to her so-called prophetic task.

Buddy finally returned from the other mall with a canvas shopping bag containing three Coke bottles, two tins of wet dog food, a can opener, and the labels off a couple other cans. See, scary smart. I think the extra labels were to hint that there was more where this came from.

As I gulped down the beautiful yet warm carbonated beverage, Swift showed Jeff to his new quarters. I set aside the empty bottle, failed at concealing a burp, and stomped around in my bedding a few times, turning around until I found a comfortable spot to hunker down in.

Yes, today had been a pretty good day. And tomorrow seemed like it’d be decent as well.

Comments

[Seeking Dusk]

Ottawa to the GTA? Damn, man. Which route did he take?

[Jay911]

6161184 I didn't particularly specify, but generally southwest.

[ThePrinceOfTheNorth]

Mares of GTA, we have a Stallion.

"In other news, it seems that the ponies of the GTA have acquired a new member! An Earth Pony by the name of Jeff, and the group's first stallion. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm sure that repopulation is now certainly an option, because, though it does have a catchy phrase, adoption isn't."

[CanadianPony]

Damnit, I was tempted to make one of these side stories myself until you used Ottawa and Carelton. My guy was going to wake up and eventually drive a tank outta the war museum in Ottawa. But now that can't happen oh well... Fantastic story either way!

[Dances With Unicorns]

6698064

Dear CanadianPony:

There are other Canadian military museums to set your future adventure within.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organization_of_Military_Museums_of_Canada

If your protagonist is a knowledgeable train spotter, they could use as their ride anything from a high-rail truck to a train Via Rail passenger cars, with sleeping cars.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road-rail_vehicle

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Via_Rail

Someone should write a train-themed crossover story. South of the Ontario 401 Express highway, there is a passenger station, passenger tracks, and freight tracks. The station Pickering GO Station is about 250 meters from the mall. I would love to read about ponies that are operating trains, especially a military freight train with a boxed, field camp or a diesel tanker freight train.

Sincerely,

Dances With Unicorns

[bluemoon1996]

“I mean it,” I said. “He’s gonna be here right about high noon, even.”

I was gonna make a McCree reference but that wouldn't exist

[Helium]

Yes, today had been a pretty good day. And tomorrow seemed like it’d be decent as well.

i.pinimg.com/236x/0d/75/ce/0d75ce5e1632750e001c2924886966fb--quill-sisters.jpg
_{(It was the only image i could find with his doom sign)}