Chapter 19
They stopped in an empty rest stop surrounded by forest. Jacob felt incredibly fortunate that there was nobody around to see how stupid he looked. Not that it matters. I won’t get better.
“Hey!” Harley poked her head in the door, gesturing at the sink. “I saw garbage bags under there. Get one and come with me.” Her eyes wandered to Eric and Danni. “You two, watch the pony. Jacob and I need a word alone.”
He followed her out into the rest stop, letting the familiar forest smells surround him. They headed towards a brick restroom.
“What’s this about? Dannie and Eric already explained the way you teleported us far away from the blast, but… I’m not sure I’m comfortable with stealing cars.”
“Are you comfortable surviving? There’s not a chance we could have made it far enough away on foot.”
“I guess,” he muttered.
They made it behind the bathrooms, in front of an old-looking vending machine, before Harley embraced him in a tight hug. So tight he struggled to breathe for a few seconds, feeling incredibly childish. “That was a damn fine thing you did.” She let go.
Jacob just shrugged. “I told her to come with us. Her getting hurt was my fault.” He reached up, feeling the strange growth on his forehead. “You sure I should be out here? If somebody else parks here…”
Harley just shrugged. “They’ll probably just think you’re a loser.” She searched around on the ground, hefting the largest stone she could find. “Cover your eyes.”
He did, and she smashed the rock into the glass face of the vending machine. “Hey! We can’t just…”
“Can’t steal?” Harley yanked the garbage-bag out of his hands, and started stuffing it with the junk food from inside. “We’ve got bigger problems than petty theft right now.” She lowered her voice to a mutter. “It’s not like it’s for me anyway.”
Jacob stepped backward, ringing his hands together. He had always felt uncomfortable to see rules broken, even silly ones. “I’m glad you stopped to explain things to me, but did we have to come out here alone? Eric and Danni already know everything, don’t they? They lived it.”
“They don’t know this.” Harley dropped the bag, and reached deep inside her pocket. She pulled something out, something that smelled dreadful and had little red-brown bits clinging to it.
Jacob couldn’t identify the object at a glance, save that it was made mostly from stainless steel and had a coil of wire attached not unlike an antenna. “Where’d you find that?”
Harley handed it to him. “The earth found it, actually. When that pony hit the ground, it must’ve fallen out of her guts. Your magic didn’t put it back in, since it wasn’t supposed to be there to begin with.”
“What is this?” He turned it over in his hand, and found a tiny barcode etched into the side. That was it, though, no other markings. “A pony pacemaker?”
Harley laughed bitterly. “Not damn likely. That wire that’s all bundled up was spread out when we found it. Think about it—for the first time ever we pick up a full pony from the outside. Unbeknownst to us, she’s got some kind of implant hidden in her insides, something ponies don’t know how to look for. A day later, they show up at Unity with an attacking force too big for Twilight’s shield spells to protect us from. From where I’m standing, it sure as hell doesn’t look like a coincidence.”
“When I was healing her…” Jacob muttered, his voice low. “She said that she deserved it. I didn’t know what that meant, thought maybe it was just delirium. You think she could’ve been a conscious spy?”
Harley shrugged. “No way she didn’t know she’d been operated on. She might not have known what they did. Or maybe she did, and we have a pony who might be responsible for the death of hundreds.”
He handed the implant back, wiping his hand on the strange pants. Probably stolen too. “We can worry about that when she wakes up. I have a few other things I’m worried about. Like, how’d we get here?”
Harley went back to stuffing the garbage bag with stolen snacks. “Stole the pickup-trailer from a farmer’s house about ten miles from where Unity went down. Some army assholes were on the ground, but their containment circle was too small. We got you out and we’ve been driving south ever since.”
“What about…” He reached up, feeling the horn with one of his hands. As before, he was careful not to touch too firmly. “What am I? I look like a squashed and melted freshman from those awful Equestria Girls movies.”
Harley almost dropped her bag. She grinned down at him, then reached out and ruffled his bright new hair. “The story goes Sunset wanted those to be a guide for humans when they first started manifesting, so they’d know what to expect.”
“She did a lousy job.”
“Yeah, it was pretty shit.” Harley hefted the bag again, and started back around the building. He followed along beside, wanting to offer to help but unsure he could actually lift that much weight anymore. “You already know what happened: blast out enough magic to bring back the dead and of course you’re going to melt yourself in the process.”
He hadn’t thought about it at the time. It wouldn’t have changed his mind about helping, though. “So why aren’t I pony? How much more of a freak will I get before I just…”
Harley shook her head sadly. “The transformation is never quite the same twice. Only the destination.” She slowed a little, since they were getting so close to the pickup. There didn’t seem to be anyone else parked, or anyone driving along the highway in either direction.
He got a good look at the pickup-trailer they were driving, a rusted ruin with Alberta plates and at least one tire that was almost flat.
“You know how big humans are compared to ponies, so there’s some serious adjustment there.”
He glared up at her. “That’s one word for it.”
“Yeah, well. Ponies age a little more gracefully than humans do. You probably noticed in that damn propaganda how most ponies were either adults or withering away, not a lot of gray area in-between. Most ponies look real good until they get to the end, then they don’t. That’s partly why you look like such a joke right now. Unicorns usually have that elfin, graceful build, and being a stallion won’t save you.”
“I get it.” They had made it to the door at the back of the trailer. Harley seemed to be waiting for him to open it for her, but he didn’t yet, not wanting the others to hear his last question. When he spoke, it was in a whisper, touching one hand to her arm. “Harley… what do we do?”
“I don’t know, kid.” She set the bag down and hugged him. Jacob hugged back, as tightly as she had held him earlier. “I won’t lie to you, things look like shit.” She was whispering too, right into his ear. It was easier now that his head was the perfect height. “The old radio frequencies are all dead, no code or anything. Haven’t been able to get onto the internet yet to see if maybe some of our web stuff survived.”
They slumped down together onto the ground, right behind the truck. If Eric and Danni noticed, they didn’t come out to comment. Harley went on. “Next town over I’ll steal us something new to drive, and we’ll make a break for Seattle. There’s a safehouse there, and last I checked some ponies I rescued real early on were still stationed there. I figure they’ll be more tapped into what happened. At the very least, it’ll be somewhere for us to crash while we get our flanks straightened out.”
“Okay.” It felt strangely comforting to be touched, something Jacob had very little experience with outside of his few girlfriends back in high school. While there was nothing romantic in being close to Harley, there was something intimate. If that made any sense. Probably a pony thing.
“Oh, and I kinda stole your wand.” She removed it from her pocket, showing it to him. “I figured you wouldn’t mind, since you don’t need it anymore…”
“So long as you take good care of it,” Jacob muttered, seriously. “I’m going to be human again as soon as humanly possible, and I’ll need it.”
“Sure,” she chuckled, then rose, helping him to his feet after her. She didn’t remind him that the mirror had probably been destroyed, and for that he was grateful. There was no need to remind themselves of such awful news.
* * *
Harley’s plan proved easier to implement than Jacob had feared. The National Guard, or the helicopter shooting rockets, or the tanks blocking the road, or the SWAT detachment to kill them while they slept, never came.
Another hundred miles and Harley parked them in the woods, then walked away. She came back a few hours later, with an old van and a satisfied expression.
The van sucked, but according to Harley it “wasn’t stolen,” though she refused to elaborate. No police pulled them over, and somehow she was able to keep putting gas into the van.
They listened to the radio all the way down, though nothing seemed relevant except for mentions of a “pipeline explosion” somewhere in Alberta which had killed a few of the locals. No mention of a war, or military action, or people becoming ponies.
The only one who really had trouble during the rest of their trip was Jacob himself, since his horn proved difficult to conceal. Harley found an extremely absurd straw hat in a thrift store, and that seemed to work, except that anyone who saw him seemed to think he was even more of an idiot than the horn probably would have led them to believe.
Jacob had never seen Seattle, but what he saw from the van’s tinted windows was about what he expected. Tall buildings, clean streets, and ceaseless traffic.
No sign that perhaps hundreds of innocent people might be dead.
Harley took them to one of the dirtier parts of town, far from the clean steel and hipster coffee shops. For the first time in his life, Jacob found that was exactly where he wanted to be. Far from the gentrification and the traffic of tourists was also less regular police patrol, fewer delivery drones, and less attention in general.
Harley drove them into an alley that looked like it didn’t have any cameras. “You’re gonna love my last group. Before they up and got themselves thrown out of Unity, they were putting lots of other rescue crews to shame.” She parked next to an unmarked steel door, so the side door was right up against it.
“I didn’t know that was possible,” Eric muttered from the passenger’s seat, glancing around to make sure nobody was watching them. “What happened?”
“I kindof have a habit for rescuing freaks and troublemakers.” Harley’s face darkened. “When we first started, smarter mares than I thought it was a good idea to keep the whole ‘transformation’ thing a secret. The rules were way stricter then, so that you’d never even catch a glance of a pony.”
“Well that’s stupid,” Danielle said. “Why the hell would they want to lie like that?”
Harley got up from her seat, then pulled a threadbare shade down over the front of the van, obscuring them. “Magic is… well, not really my specialty. All I can tell you is that ponies who know it’s going to happen—it happens way faster than ponies who don’t. Never tell a pony, and so long as they keep following the rules they might stay human forever.”
“So they… found out?” Jacob made his way to the door, climbing over the back row of seats. Not that he could be the first one out—he had a feeling he wouldn’t be out among the public for some time to come. Not until he could get an “illusion” from a mirror that might not even exist anymore. “And told everybody?”
“Yeah.” Harley’s expression got brighter, proud even. “Big ponies in charge forgot about human nature. Ponies might accept rules and know that they’ve got a good reason, but you all… you’re not so complacent. You always want to know why.” She opened the door, swinging it so it blocked their view from the street. Not that many people were watching.
“Obviously things are different now. Once they told everyone, the rules got changed. These days we don’t volunteer it, but anyone who wants to know gets the truth. It seemed to be working all right.”
Jacob didn’t think so, and not just because Unity was now a mountainous pile of rubble. There was still something about this whole “magic” thing he hadn’t figured out. If only his whole world hadn’t ended again, he might’ve had the chance.
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How do you write these things so fast, and almost perfectly???
7472185, the fact it is put under a spoiler scares me.
Harley knows him pretty damn well, I'd say. I'm looking forward to this new group!
"She said that she deserved it."
7472335
Good catch, fixed!
Possible to put other rescue crews to shame, or be kicked out of Unity?
Since it's been established that ponies are terrible at special operations, I'm pretty sure it's the latter.
Aw, c'mon, wasn't Rainbow Rocks good?
Now I'm wondering what happened to Twilight (and Sunset). It would be one thing to just have to write off Unity and the rescues as a loss (at least until they can plan out a better operation and/or diplomacy), but if one of Equestria's sovereigns was harmed on top of all the other casualties, the others aren't going to take that lying down. And either way we're just going to have to hear about it from the the sidelines....
7472223
He could be just messing with your mind.
But you did make some good points in your last reply to me. To be honest, what makes me nervous is that Starscribe listed Nightmare Moon as one of the character tags.
7472335
7472397
I read that as saying she didn't deserve to be saved, but whichever.
This story definitely reminds me of Mage The Ascension, so much so that when Agent Avery first showed up my first thought was "oh **** it's the NWO, dude RUN!" this impression has only grown as the fic went on with the pony's and containment standing in for the traditions and technocracy respectively, especially since both sides think their in the right and are doing "What Needs To Be Done".
Nice work Starscribe and I so want to voice my guess about Harley and the big bad but I don't want to spoil anyone's enjoyment.
7472692
From the previous chapter:
7472397 In the same sentence you've got 'conscious spy', which is an odd bit of phrasing at best. If by conscious you mean that they're aware that they're spying, that's usually implied by spy. If you typo'd and meant something like 'a spy with a conscience', that should probably be fixed.
If you meant something else, I'm at a loss.
Aside from that, keep it up. You've certainly got my attention.
This big bad is starting to remind me of the SCP Foundation, except more assholish, and less about containment. Actually they're more like the Global Occult Coalition, see something off and BOOM, they destroy it without question. GOC can be good guys, but this big bad feels like a nasty cult under the guise of an Evil GOC pretending to be good.
7472811, don't forget that in this story Government, or Agency, does pretty logical things.
Precise strike on the base of operations wold give a huge advantage to the Government:
First is desorganization of rescue groups. Their communications are either damaged or destroyed, require recalibering in best case. Add here injuring of the command or the crews and Unity's rescuers stop being a threat for the containment operations. At least for a while.
Second is damaging the Unity itself. We don't know what exactly was damaged, but any significant damage will give an advantage for the Agency: teachers hit? No more people knowing how to deal with their abilities. Command damaged? Complete desorganization of Equesrrian corps on Earth. Mirror damaged? Not more reinforcements from other side then.
While it may seem like the agency is acting like Destroy.Destroy.Destroy., this presise attack will give them an advantage in containment in the cuture.
7472811, also, I would use different Comprasion. The Agnecy is pretty much S.C.P. Foundation/G.O.C. hybrid: while most of the time they try to contain anomalous entities, their origins are somewhat similar to the origins of the Global Occult Coalition and if they cannot contain something, they destroy it then.
But Equestrians aren't holy too. We can find an analog in the SCPverse for them as well. The most suiting organization we can find — The Serpent's Hand. This is a covert organization that is hostile to both SCP Foundation and GOC. They dislike the way this two organizations treat treat anomalous objects and are responsible for several Containment Breaches. Their base of operations also does exist outside of our universe (while Unity might be still on our planet, the Agnecy cannot track it or breach it, as well as with the Serpen't Hand's base of operations, but, as we can see, they have already tracked Unity down and Foundation done this too. But Agency dealt damage to the Unity, while SCP Foundaton couldn't).
Well, the cat's out of the bag now -or should I say, the transmitter's out of the spy?
Dammit, I don't care what you say, I'll ship Jacob and Harley as much as I want. Because my God do they make an awesome duo. I mean, shit, just kiss already or something. We all know she needs that love to survive anyway.
Do it.
And she probably got a meal out of the bargain too.
7472811
You mean the
"Destroy Destroy Destroy Foundation"
7472811
7472905
I know im responding too older comments but i want to get my piece in on this
If the SCP foundation was involved with this there would at most have been 2 outbreaks, they would have captured or neutralized the affected, and would likely eventually have negotiated a deal with the equestrians to contain magic in general. If relationships with the equestrians stays positive i could see them developing an mtf squad that utilizes magic. Magic and the equestrians would probably be considered thaumiel scp's. The lightenders would probably simply be a Group of Interest.
The GoC would totally get tricked into doing the lightenders bidding though. Would make for an interesting crossover story.