After the Nightmare

by CORACK

Chapter 4

Selene had just sat down to eat dinner. Rabbit again. What a lovely way to celebrate her 10th year on this frozen hellhole. Well, not really rabbit, she had no idea what the animal was actually called, but coming up for names of creatures on this godforsaken alien world was not near the top of her priorities. It was small, it hopped around, it was a rabbit.

Before she skinned and gutted the thing it was even sort of cute. 10 year old Selene would have been horrified to see what 24 year old Selene had just done. Not 14 year old Selene though, 14 year old Selene had been the only survivor of a crash on a mysterious alien planet, she learned quickly that survival depended on ignoring her inner desire to collect cute animals. Instead she had to overcome her sense of squeamishness, as what once would have made a fuzzy pet, now kept her fed.

She got up, and walked over to the water dispenser and filled up her glass. Most of the ships functionality had been destroyed in the crash. The hull, thankfully was still mostly intact. Unfortunately, the ships mess, the only room, that still had power was the one that was also open to the outside. The holes were large enough that she couldn't use any of the emergency hull plates as patches. The ones that would fit were way too heavy for her to move. Instead she had to settle for wood and smaller wall plates salvaged from some of the wrecked rooms. It certainly wasn't going to be space-worthy, but it kept out the local wildlife.

Power had been a problem for a while. The emergency batteries that were running the ship after the crash were good for 1 year. The ship had a small shuttle, which under ideal circumstances she could have used to escape, but the crash had wrecked it. While the shuttle was wrecked, the shuttle's power generator had survived remarkably intact.

Thankfully her dad was the ship's mechanic and had been teaching how ships worked for most of her life. Even so, it had taken the young girl almost a year, nearly the entire lifespan of the emergency batteries, to clean up debris from the crash, gain access to main engineering, run a fuel line from the ship's tank to the shuttle's generator, and then patch the generator into the ship's main power lines. The little generator couldn't power up the whole ship, but she did get full power restored to the mess and a number of surrounding rooms, plus minimal power throughout most of the ship.

With the limited power she had, she was able to restore heat, water and a few other ship components. Well, she sort of had water. The ship's food dispensers were damaged in the crash but using a heating element and a water tight container, she was able to melt ice and snow into drinkable water. And if it was one thing this planet didn't have in short supply, it was ice.

The winters here seemed to grow worse with each passing year. When she had landed, the ground was covered in snow half the year. No it seemed like at least two-thirds of the year was consumed by frozen winds and giant snow storms. Years ago, when she had managed to get the primary computer back online, trying to find out what caused the crash, she saw that the ship had landed quite close to the equator. If this was the weather near the equator, she was glad the ship hadn't landed near the poles, the planet must be in the middle of some sort of ice age or something.

Selene had to go out and get more ice at least once a day. It wasn't too hard, thankfully the ship had landed more or less upright. The lower levels of the ship were buried in the frozen dirt, but there was an emergency airlock just outside the mess that exited at ground level.

She had just sat down again, when she heard what sounded like a person screaming. She dropped her cup in surprise. It had been years since she thought she had heard other people on the ship. This was different though, this sound felt real, and it had gone on long enough that she was almost positive she wasn't hearing things. In fact, it had sounded like it was coming from outside. That would be a first.

In the 10 years she had been stuck here she had never once run into another person. As far as she could tell this world was completely devoid of intelligent life, discounting herself.

She heard another scream. This was too much. Could someone else have crashed here? Could someone have detected her ship and landed to rescue her, only to run into trouble? She had to investigate.

Selene ran over to the locker across the room, opened it up and grabbed her rifle, a magazine, and a box of cartridges. She loaded up five rounds as quickly as she could, then grabbed her heavy winter coat. Boots and gloves went on next and then lastly the security helmet. That was the most important piece for going out at night, the clear visor covering he face amplified low light, allowing her so see nearly as clearly as daytime.

As soon as she got outside, she could hear snarling and growling coming from the other side of the small hill to her left. It sounded like bone-wolves - okay she had named some of the wildlife - she almost turned around right on the spot. Going out at night up against bone wolves was not generally a safe thing to do. They tended to hunt in packs and were pretty good at surrounding their prey.

But no, if she turned around now, she would never know what that scream was. As quietly as she could she ran up the hill, slowing down to a creep as she approached the top. Looking down through the trees, she caught a flash of a bone-wolf in the distance, confirming her suspicions. They were hunting something... or someone.

She made her way partially down the hill, the trees near the top were fairly thick here, so she couldn't get a good picture of what was going on. As the trees started to thin out, she heard a yelp and saw a bone-wolf flying through the air. It impacted on the side of a tree, the branch it hit shattered and it dropped to the ground with a thud. Its head was twisted at an unnatural angle, it wasn't getting back up again.

She looked in the direction that the bone-wolf had come from and saw another one laying on the ground. The snow in front of it was a dark red, covered in a massive amount of blood. There was a massive puncture in its throat that looked like it went all the way out to the other side.

A loud snarl caught her attention, turning towards the noise, she saw what she hoped was the rest of the pack in a clearing. They were advancing on a... a... a...

For a moment, her brain fizzled and sputtered as it tried to process the image she was seeing. Multiple thoughts fired off simultaneously, each struggling to grab her full attention.

"Is that a pony?"

"Are those wings?"

"Is that a horn?"

"Oh my god, it's really cute."

"It's hurt!"

"I heard someone scream, did someone ride it here? Where are they?"

"Oh shit, it's gonna die!"

The last one she said out loud as Selene's brain finally kicked back into gear. She raised her rifle, took aim at the bone-wolf closest to the pony and fired.

BANG! The bone-wolf closest to the pony dropped to the ground as a small spray of red mist exploded out of its chest.

She pulled the bolt back, ejecting the brass and then pushed it forward, feeding in another round. She quickly counted the remaining wolves. There were four, she had four rounds left in the magazine. No room for error.

Aim, squeeze the trigger, BANG!

A hit, the bone-wolf dropped.

Another shot and another hit, but then the last bone-wolf turned towards her and charged.

She fired and missed.

Reaching into her coat pocket, she grabbed the box of cartridges and tried to fumble it open with one hand. The bone-wolf was already half way to her when she finally got a cartridge out of the box. She nearly dropped it in the snow when she reached to the bolt to eject the last piece of brass. With no time to load the magazine, she quickly pushed the cartridge into the chamber and closed the bolt.

Just as she was bringing the rifle up, the creature jumped forward, she squeezed the trigger while it was in mid-air, not taking time to aim. The bone-wolf landed on top of her, pinning her to the ground and knocking the rifle out of her grasp. She had one arm free and she started punching the creature as hard as she could. When it didn't fight back, she realized she must have scored a hit.

Selene struggled to push the creature off, she didn't know for sure there wasn't more of them and she had to be ready. She managed to roll a bit and the dead bone-wolf started to slide off, most of its weight was no on the ground instead of her, and she slowly pulled herself out from under the rest of it.

She heard a noise while she was working on freeing her leg, and saw the pony-creature walk slowly over to her. It stood above her and started to raise its hoof. For a brief moment she thought it was going to step on her.

"10 years of survival and I'm about to die, stepped on by a pony," flashed through her brain.

The pony lowered its hoof and pushed the bone-wolf off of her leg. This act in and of itself would have been fairly surprising to Selene, but before she had time to register what the pony had just done, it reached its hoof back down and picked Selene up off the ground.

Selene had no idea what was going on, she clearly felt a the pony pull her up. She looked down at the pony's legs.

"Yep, that's a hoof," she thought.

Then, in what must have been an effort to confuse her further, the pony picked up the rifle and handed it... hoofed it? to Selene.

Her brain seized up trying to process what was going on, and she felt a little wobbly. She decide that, perhaps, sitting back down would be best. Selene dropped back down into the snow covered ground, and looked at the pony again.

The pony looked down at Selene with what was clearly a look of concern, and then, because she wasn't confused enough already, the pony opened its mouth and said something.

Selene's ears kept telling her brain something more important was going on than hooves but the brain was having none of that. Instead it ignored the auditory input and went back to thinking about hooves.

"Magnets? It must be magnets," she thought. "But wait, the rifle barrel is magnetic, but I'm not."

The pony repeated its statement.

Finally deciding to give up on hooves, Selene's brain shifted attention back to the pony. She looked up as it repeated its statement a third time. By now her brain was done wasting time trying to figure things out, so instead it gave her mouth permission to respond, which it did in a clear and articulate manner.

"Wha?"

The pony rolled its eyes and repeated itself a fourth time. Selene didn't recognize the language, but it was clearly words, not whinny or neighs or any other sounds a pony was supposed to make.

"I don't... understand you?" she said, questioning her own grip on reality.

The pony shrugged but didn't say anything else.

Selene decided she had enough of sitting in the snow, so she picked herself up off the ground. She took her rifle, checked to make sure the safety was on and slung it over her shoulder. She still wasn't sure that the pony thing was alone, so she started walking around, she saw bone-wolf tracks and hoof tracks, there was nothing else that indicated a rider had run off into the woods. Also the pony wasn't wearing any sort of saddle combined with the lack of tracks Selene guessed that there was nobody else around.

Selene wasn't quite ready to deal with a talking pony, so she took a quick walk around the small clearing, checking to make sure all of the bone-wolves were actually dead. Most of them were sickly and thin, but two of them appeared to have a good amount of meat on them. She's have to go back to the ship and retrieve a sled.

Bone-wolves were tough and stringy, but food was far too scarce in this place for Selene to be picky.

She turned around and started to head back to the ship. She motioned for the pony to follow her.

It seemed to understand what Selene wanted and it trotted over to her.

The pair walked back up the hill in silence, when they reached the top, Selene pointed out the ship.

"We're going there," she said.

She continued down the hill with pony following close behind her. There was a small log shed built next to the ship. Selene used it to store animals that she caught in her traps or from hunting before she was able to process them. One good thing about the constant cold was she could store way more meat and not worry about it spoiling. Space in the ship's kitchen was limited as she only had partial power running to the food storage systems.

She grabbed a hand-built sled hanging off the wall of the shed. She used the sled to drag animals that were too heavy for her to carry back to be processed. She turned around and headed back to the clearing. Picking the two largest bone-wolves she dragged their corpses onto the sled. It was tough work and took her a while, the pony stood by and watched, looked really confused and slightly disgusted.

The bone-wolves loaded up she grabbed the rope slung it around her shoulder and tried to pull. Even with all her body weight leaning into it, the sled was barely moving, there was no way she was going to be able to get it back up the hill. The pony saw her struggling and walked over.

It grabbed the rope in its mouth and pulled. The sled jolted forward. Selene was impressed, it wasn't even leaning into the pull and already the sled was moving more than she could get it to.

Working together the pair pulled the sled back to the shed. Selene did her best to get the two carcasses stuffed into the shed. Processing could wait till tomorrow, she was exhausted.

She walked over to the ship's airlock and keyed in the code to open the airlock door.

"Follow me," she said to the pony, pointing into the ship.

The pony hesitated, took a moment to look back and forth at the snowy landscape and then followed Selene in.

Selene made her way to the mess, the pony trailing behind her. She took off her coat and winter gear and dumped it in a pile on the floor. Then she removed her helmet and walked over to the storage locker. She put her rifle in the locker and locked it.

Getting shot by a curious alien pony thing playing with her rifle was not how she wanted to go.

She figured now was as good a time as any for introductions.

She looked at the pony and pointed at herself.

"I'm Selene"

The pony cocked its head to the side.

"Seh-lean?"

Well, that confirmed it, either this pony-thing could really talk or she had finally lost it.

The pony lifted a hoof and indicated at itself. It then said something that sounded like a combination of words and musical notes. Selene had no hope of imitating it, so she just nodded. It was then when she saw a deep gash on the pony's leg. That was not a good sign. Blood-wolves had a venom in their saliva that caused the area around the wound to necrotize. She had a spray in her medkit that could neutralize the poison, but she had no idea if it would work on the pony, or if it would make things worse.

She pointed at the gash and slowly walked towards the pony.

"I need to look at that."

Upon close inspection, it didn't look as bad as it originally had. The chunk of flesh that had been ripped away was fairly large, but surprisingly, it had already stopped bleeding, unusual in a wound of this size. If it wasn't for the fresh blood, Selene would have assumed it was a few days old. She took a few minutes to inspect the rest of the pony. It had a few scrapes, probably from branches as it ran away from the bone-wolves, but no other bite marks.

Selene walked over to a locker and opened it up, she pulled out a medkit and dug around a bit getting everything she needed.

"I need to clean that wound," she said, showing the pony the supplies she had pulled out of the kit.

Very carefully, she reached toward the bite. The pony fidgeted slightly, but otherwise did not interfere as Selene gently rinsed away the dried blood and cleaned the wound as best as she could. It was too large to stitch closed, so she bandaged it up as best as she could. A wild animal would never let her do this, not that she had any more doubts about the pony being a mindless beast.

Her inspection was the first good look she had gotten to take at the creature. She, and Selene knew it was a she now, the lack of clothing hid nothing, only superficially resembled a pony, in fact she looked more like a pony toy Selene had played with as a little girl than an actual horse. The pony's eyes were huge, with a teal ring surrounding a large pupil. She had a purplish-blue coat and a light blue mane and tail. It must have taken a huge amount of die, because there was no way those colors were natural.

There were a few small dark splotches running up the pony's rear legs, and there was a large dark splotch on both sides of her... butt? flank? Selene wasn't sure of the technical terms. Both of the darker areas had a white crescent moon inside them. Selene had no idea how that had been done, the die job was absolutely perfect. The boundary between the dark splotch and the moon was extremely crisp, not a single hair was out of place and as far as she could tell, both moons were identical and exactly the same size.

The pony did indeed have both wings and a horn. The horn ended in a very nasty looking point and there were spots of blood on it. She had a feeling she knew what had happened to the second bone-wolf. The wings were closed but even without seeing them fully extended, Selene knew that there was no way they were large enough to support a being of the pony's size. Maybe they were fake. She reached a hand forward slowly and touched one of the feathers. It was incredibly soft, and clearly real.

The pony's wing extended slowly. It was much larger than Selene had originally thought but there was still no way this thing could fly. The pony must weigh at least 200 lbs. Maybe more, it had to be heavily muscled to help her pull the sled with such ease.

Selene let out a yawn, the last couple of hours had been extremely tiring.

The pony followed suit, yawns apparently being contagious across species.

It may be some strange alien creature but Selene wasn't about to turn away the only other intelligent being on the planet just because she couldn't communicate with her. Besides, how could something that adorable be dangerous?

"I need to sleep, you can stay here I guess," she said.

She ran out of the mess to one of the rooms she used for storage and grabbed some blankets and a few pillows. She went back into the mess and dragged some tables out of the way clearing a large space for the pony. She set the blankets down and tossed the pillows onto the makeshift bed.

Actually she wasn't sure if ponies slept standing up or not.

"OK, I'm going to be in my room, it's the third door in the hallway on the right," she said pointing to the hall outside of the mess.

She walked out of the mess and started walking down the hallway. A clopping sound on the metal floor followed her. She turned around and the pony right behind her.

"No pony, I need to sleep."

She kept walking to her room, and the pony continued to follow. When she got to her room she opened the door and pointed at the bed.

"See? Sleep," she said.

Apparently taking this as an invitation, the pony hopped up on her bed and curled up right in the middle. Even though the pony was shorter than Selene while standing up she was quite a bit longer. The pony was way too large for Selene's small bed. There wasn't any room left for Selene at all.

"Damn it."

Comments

[Canary In The Coal Mine]

Finally, we get to the heart of the story. I'm actually fairly interested now to see how this will develop, and if Luna will be rescued (and by extension, Selene). What is Luna and Selene's ultimate fate? How will Luna do surrounding by this very advanced equipment, far beyond what Modern Equestria has, let alone the world she left.

[Confused Horse Noises]

I bet they are on the other side of the planet equestria is on. Also i bet its Luna/Nightmare Moon's fault the human ship crashed.

[ynfiltra]

ok the sci-fi bit was a tad confusing for me in the least.
i guess i was hoping for a more in depth perspective of the sci-fi bit oh well...
woot!

[Lancerlot]

My guess, having read chapter 4? Luna is now in the FUTURE of sunless Equestria, or something like it.