Dream Interlude #1: Blue Swede
The vast, open field before her radiated a soft, beautiful light, courtesy of the sun that sat high above the world in the deep blue skies. Clusters of trees and small rolling hills broke up an otherwise flat landscape, and the crisp, clean air around her was like nothing else she’d ever experienced.
None of it could match the awesomeness of her thousands of legionaries charging forward to decimate the dark elven sorcerers for the glory of the Lunar Empress. These weren’t pony soldiers, but tall, strong pink-skinned bi-pedal creatures with no fur, no claws of any sort, and who wore indigo-colored plate armor adorned in dark blue tribal markings, as befitting those who served in the Empress’s legions. They had arms like monkeys, but stood upright and straight, and could talk like ponyfolk. Amongst their number, they fielded even larger-sized bi-ped creatures who looked like the pink-skins, but were made of stone and bore indigo chainmail armor, though she couldn’t imagine why stone colossi creatures with no boy parts would want to wear clothes. She was just thankful their magical lightning bolts were aimed at the dark elves and not her.
To the left and right of her pinkskins and their colossal constructs, mechanical marvels of war and destruction rolled forward, laying waste to the elvish beasts and monsters that served their dark masters. She absently remembered them as tanks and artillery vehicles, gliding forward on thick treads and glistening with brightly polish steel-gray armor two inches thick and enchanted to resist the elvish magic. The tanks’ cannons unleashed blast of destructive arcane beams that exploded on impact and wiped out hordes of the elvish creatures, while the artillery pieces hung back and launched their shells into the back ranks of the enemy. The rather mundane shells did their work in explosive fashion, but compared to the magic employed by the rest of her legion, the decidedly modern tech of the artillery left her a bit….wanting.
Not that it really mattered. The dark elves had no technology to aid them, only their shadow magics and their really incredible agility, and being mean and dark and mysterious and stuff. They were taller than the pinkskins, but had a dark grayish, almost smokey skin color and were more limber and lithe compared to the muscular, stocky pinkskins. Their long, black hair flowed like water off their heads, and their really long, pointed ears were almost comical in their appearance. Their beasts were…well, beasts. She couldn’t get a good look at them from where she was standing, but most of them were quada--…quare…oh, frick it, four-legged monsters that looked kind of like hogs, but with six eyes, black fur, four tusks, and a very long snout with row after row of jagged, needle-like teeth.
Against her tanks, they were mostly just roadkill. Larger sized beasts, dark, nightmarish monstrosities that looked like deer and bears mostly, fared little better.But there was this one elvish unit that had her worried, mostly because it was really big. Like, forever big, or maybe just a hundred feet tall, taller than even her colossi constructs. It was kinda like an elvish version of her colossi, modeled on the dark elves and apparently built to outdo the colossi in scale and power. It hung way in the back, for now, but every large step it took brought it a lot closer to the frontline. But it was taking its time for some reason she couldn’t fathom, so it would take a while to get in attack range.
And as she stared out at the field of battle from her perch atop a hill, at the rear of her forces, she could only marvel at the awesomeness of it all. The pinkskins and their magical stone constructs, the tanks and artillery, the glorious sight of the Lunar Empress’s colors adorning the armor and shields….
…and the sheer absurdity of defeated soldiers and elves flying up and away from battle as they were knocked away, with little cries of “aarrrgghh!!” and “waaaaaah!!” as their bodies turned bright blue and broke apart into millions of square-shaped bits of light. This was the most awesome life-sized board game she had ever played—
“Wait, board game?”
In the time it took her to blink, her world—and all the awesome stuff in it—was switched out with a much less enticing communal showering room and the harsh, prickly touch of a soapy brush running up and down her back. A small crowd of souls around her—griffons, ponies, and a couple of zebras—were likewise busy washing away the filth and dirt of the wastelands, though it looked like a couple of them were starting to take a little more interest in her. Whether that was a good thing or not, well….
“Yeah, like, a board game, but played in an open field, or somethin’,” she answered Rally’s question with a shake of her head to whip her slick, wet mane out of her eyes. Three weeks on the west side of the valley had already taught her how lucky she’d been to be able to wind up in places that had actual running water, let alone soap and working showers. "It was a dream, okay? Doesn’t always make sense.”
“This one sure don’t,” the teen responded from her left. She was pretty sure this communal bathing hall once had stall dividers, but it looked like most of them had fallen off over the decades and so now it was just a few rows of porcelain barriers that adults could still peek over, at least if you were lucky and got to use one of the center stalls. She and Rally had to settle for the wall mounted showers, but at least they could bathe (even though Rally had to take her metal leg off first and was kinda having trouble standing and turning around on three legs). “What the hell do these pinkskins even look like? Or how do you know they got pink skin if they’re all armored up?”
“They…well, they kinda look like monkeys, only they’re about six feet tall, and they stand and walk upright and not hunched over and stuff, and they talked like ponyfolk—”
“Now that’s weird,” a griffon female on her right butted in.
“When have any of your dreams made sense?”
“…continue, kid.”
“Cool,” she snickered. She’d only been in this Runner camp four days, but they were all pretty awesome and most of them were nice, at least to her and Rally. “So, anyways—”
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“That giant’s gonna be trouble,” she mumbled, watching the great and dark-shaded monster lumber ever closer with every turn her unseen opponent took. “Why can’t my artillery blast it from here?”
A stallion clad in a black military dress jacket adorned with all manner of medals and insignia she couldn’t make sense of had the answer almost immediately, and his crisp Trottingham accent added a touch of class to his imperial appearance. “Not in range, Legate Light Tail.”
“How is something that big not in range of artillery shells that arc for miles?”
“Give it another two turns, sir.”
“I’m a girl, dummy. Get it right.”
“I’ll try, sir.”
A nearly inaudible growl left her throat out of habit as she took a harder look at her battlefield.Her center legionaries had already taken their actions for her turn, mostly just hacking away at the elves before them. Two of her tanks on the left had to move back a bit to avoid getting blitzed, and she wound up having to use up a couple of artillery guns’ moves to cover the retreat instead of blasting the elves behind the front line like she wanted. But on the right, her tanks moved ever steadily forward—not as many heavy monsters on that side, so they could just blast away at the little ones and eventually clean that out, and then she could start moving them towards the center….
“….eeeehhhh, have all the artillery batteries on the right side shoot at all the elves waiting for their turn up front—”
“Flank, sir. The word is right flank, and it shall be done at once.”
Off in the distance, her ten artillery battery units on the right side of her end of the field turned their guns towards the center and starting sending their gifts to the dark elves in complete unison, leaving her ample time to school her “aide” on proper pony anatomy, at least as much as she knew about it. “No, no, this is a right flank,” she said, turning to face him and tapping her right side with her left forehoof.
“Are you certain, sir?” the aide asked, his face not disturbed in the least by the earth-rumbling roar of the artillery in the distance.
“Yes!” she shouted back, tapping her right side again.“This! Flank! This—”
—at that, she lifted her right leg up a bit temporarily and turned the back half of her body out to the right a bit—
“—this is my hindquarters!” she finished, flexing her leg a bit and tapping said hindquarter, since she was wearing a full set of clothes that obscured her lack of a cutie mark. “This is not my flank! Hindquarters! Blank flank is just an expression—”
The faint whistling of her artillery shells turned into a fantastic crescendo of explosions. “Sir, it is unprofessional to be flaunting one’s rear end in such a fashion.”
That was the…fifth, sixth time she’d been called a boy?! Enough! “Why do you keep calling me a sir?! Ponies don’t even normally wear clothes, you should be able to tell the difference—wait, no, don’t do that that’s creepy! Just…no more sir! That’s an or—”
“All your units have exhausted their allowed actions for this turn. Are there any other actions you wish to take?”
“…really?”
She heard a sharp blip to her right, and when she turned about to face it she found herself staring at a really cool blue overlay screen that floated about in the air, semi-transparent, and which displayed the field before her in a grid-like pattern. Every octagonal hex represented a fixed amount of space, like…she didn’t really know, but her thousands and thousands of legionaries and their colossi and her tanks and artillery weren’t all represented on the board as individual units, but as groups. Her legionaries were counted in groups of…two or three hundred apiece per unit, which still had them flooding her side of the middle of the board with like…twenty units? Thirty? She kept losing count of all the icons, there were so many clustered in the middle of the map. Her colossi were counted in groups of three, and she counted about fifty-two on the field itself so…a little over seventeen units of colossi? There was one that had only one colossal left in it, mainly because it was in the center of the frontline fighting and really getting the crap kicked out of it. Her tanks were numbered in singular units, but she had over two dozen merrily blasting away at the enemy. Her artillery batteries were arranged in groups of three per unit, with a total of twelve, six for each fla—errr, side? Eh, whatever. And behind her rows of infantry….
“Hey, wait a minute, I got archers back here! They haven’t done anything yet!” she shouted, her left hoof swiping at the ten units of archers to the rear of her infantry. She was surprised she hadn’t even noticed them out on the field before now, but now that she was looking at them she could see why. They moved slow, for some reason, probably because they were also hauling carts of arrows along with them, and they used monstrously huge ponies to pull them…
…well, she thought they were ponies. They were really big, like, six or seven feet tall from hoof to withers, and they had no cutie marks and really bland coat and mane colors, mostly brown and black with a few white ones, and with long snouts like the Princess Sisters. They didn’t talk either, they were like dumb beasts or something. But the archers were the really important part, ‘cause she wanted them flinging fire and destruction on the evil dark elves trying to reinforce their friends at the front so she could get her artillery in position to take out that giant before it got too close. And no matter how many times she tried to get them to do it, they wouldn’t budge. “Hey, I was gonna have them start shooting flame arrows! Why can’t I do that now?”
“Because you had to march them into position up until now,” her stallion aide remarked dryly. “Archer and artillery units cannot move and fire on the same turn. If you desire, you may order the archers to begin a fire arrow volley on the next turn.”
“Ugh. Whatever. Fine, I guess. Let’s see what the other player does.”
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By this point in the tale, she and Rally had finished their quick—but very refreshing and cleansing—shower and moved on to the mess hall, taking a seat at one of the center tables with a pack of stable rations since the Runners weren’t too keen to share their limited food supplies with visitors unless they did some work for them, which she was thought was kinda fair. She still felt a little guilty for getting to have some real food while everybody else around her made do with awful military rations, 200-year old preserved foodstuffs or whatever could be grown on the surface, but they didn’t seem to mind.
In fact, she noticed a good number of them were finding ways to bring their tables—or their breakfast—closer to the center of the mess hall, just as she’d finished talking about her stupid archers who couldn’t shoot flaming arrows until the next turn….
“….again?” she sighed when she’d taken a good look around her table. There must’ve been like….forty or fifty Runners gathering around her. Griffons, unicorns, earth ponies, four zebras and….two pegasi, whom she still hadn’t managed to get to talk to yet. She remembered enough of these faces from the other day, when she told Rally about this super-awesome dream she’d had about a fleet of spaceships traveling the stars, looking for a single planet to settle, and only had one last warship and its space fighters left to protect them. “This isn’t that dream about the last survivors of a space civilization.”
“We gathered,” that female, gold-furred and gray-feathered griffon from the showers spoke for the crowd, and who had plopped herself down on the other side of the table with what looked like a…spiral-bound notebook, or something, and a couple of pencils? That wa—no, wait, now she remembered, it was Raina. “Still sounds like an awesome mind trip. Keep goin’.”
“Okay, what’s the deal?” Rally shot back over the sound of their ration packs’ cooking enchantments blazing away. “All you guys got a real intense interest in the dreams of a little girl, what for?”
“We spend most of our time in the wastes hunting down raiders, slavers, thieves, murderers, and all manner of things that eat people alive,” another griffon answered back calmly, from somewhere in the crowd closest to the table on her left, and she could see him poking his white-black spotted feathered head up above the crowd to look Rally straight in the eye as he talked. “We see the worst of the worst, on a regular basis, and a good deal of us don’t sleep well at night for it. Then this little filly with the wildest imagination comes along, and the first dream we hear her sharing with you out loud the other day is like…well, shit, it’s like hearing a comic book come to life or something. And today looks like a crazy trip all on its own, by the sound of it. A board game played out before you in life-like detail with outlandish creatures, tanks, artillery, and something about dark shadow magic? Why the hell would we want to listen to anything else but this when it’s a thousand times better than the things we see and do all the time?”
She saw the defiance in Rally’s eyes wither away into nothingness, and her ears wilted a little bit out of shame. Of course a bunch of mercenaries who saw nothing but death and violence for a living would latch onto anything that took their minds off all the evil stuff they experienced. It wasn’t every day that a stable pony who was raised in a normal, peaceful environment came up out of the ground and told them stories of their crazy dreams.If they wanted to listen, she had no problem in telling them. By the looks of their faces, she was already getting their attention and she hadn’t gotten to the good stuff yet.
“Soooo, if yer done fightin’, I’d like to get back to it—”
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She wondered what this black and shadow magic stuff was for all of ten seconds before she decided she didn’t want it anymore.
The elvish player had some sorcerer units mixed in with their frontline infantry, and they went right to work casting their dark and evil spells. Some of it was downright destruction—big, black scary balls of magic that exploded and took out scores of her guys in a blast, and other spells defied gravity itself as they picked up guys from the ground and then dropped them back to said ground, with serious or even deadly results. They even cast a spell or two that completely covered a couple of elven infantry in black shadow smoke that made it real hard for her infantry to score a hit. She thought that last bit was cheating, but it was in the rulebook as allowable for units engaged in combat since it wasn’t a pure invisibility spell, just one that greatly enhanced their ability to dodge stuff.
And some of the beast creatures managed to make a mad dash past her tanks on the left side and join in the fighting in the center anyway, and these were the creatures that did the most damage. They had a poison effect that drained a unit’s health every turn until they all died or she had a light mage cast a cleansing spell, and while she did have reinforcements scheduled to show up on the next turn, they weren’t mages or spellcasters, just cavalry and one infantry unit. Her artillery couldn’t move positions and fire in the same turn, but they could re-target and fire in the same turn, so she’d have them re-focus on the flanks and try to kill more of the creatures before they could break free and ruin her legion’s day.
And that giant, hundred-foot-tall elf construct way in the back of her opponent’s side of the field/game board/whatever lumbered ever closer. Still not in range, but she’d be in a heap of trouble when it finally got close enough to start fighting. Thank the stars the game started with the thing all the way in the back.
“I knew I should have picked those pikemen over an extra four legionnaire units,” she grumbled, watching the beastly elven creatures wreak havoc on her pinkskins. In addition to poisoning some of them, the sight of the terrible monsters lowered their morale too, and if she didn’t do something about it soon, they wouldn’t fight as well. “Could’ve blocked those things.”
“Hindsight is 20/20, sir. Your opponent has ended their turn. Reinforcements have arrived on the eastern pass, two cavalry units, as well as one reinforcement unit on the western pass, a pandera unit.”
Her brain was halfway through plotting the cavalry units’ movements (without her even knowing how far or how fast they could move first, even) when her brain tripped up trying to remember what the…panta thing was? Never mind that he called her a boy again, these…p-something things sounded a little more important. “A…a what unit?”
“Pandera,” her aide repeated. “See for yourself, on the left fl--…left side.”
She brought up that blue semi-transparent overlay again, and had the viewpoint zoom in on the leftmost octagon, where this pandera unit was—
She squealed like the ten-year-old filly she was upon first sight of her new allies. They looked like giant pandas, but stood up on their legs and had arms and body structures like the pinkskins, and most of them wore simple, traditional-looking far eastern clothing—black pants and shirts, with those buttons in the middle of the shirt. About a third of them wore this strange martial arts uniform—kinda like a karate uniform, except that it was a lot looser and flowing. These panda people were totally weird, but they had katanas and wooden staves and looked really, really angry…and some of them were brave enough to be unarmed even. “Wow, what can these guys do?!”
“They are warriors of the far eastern Empire of the Dragon Emperor, sent to aid the Lunar Empress and her Legates as per the Crystal Accord, signed in the 112th year of the Solar and Lunar Diarchy over two hundred years ago,” the stallion aide answered. “They are extremely skilled in melee combat, and specialize in an ancient and honorable art of unarmed combat to the extent that it is said they can destroy entire hillsides or roll a drop of dew across their arm without splattering it—”
“Kung fu pandas!!” she squealed with a laugh, hopping about in delirious joy as she finally realized what they were. “Send ‘em in and wreck those elves!”
“They are pandera—”
“I said send in the kung fu pandas and wreck those elves!!” she repeated again.
With a dry, unamused glare in her direction, the stallion sighed and responded in a much less enthusiastic tone than the one he’d used to explain her new allies with. “….the kung fu pandas are marching forth and will engage the enemy in three turns. Also, their arrival came with a booster card that you may play immediately, if you wish.”
“What kinda card?” she asked. Everybody liked getting extra stuff, especially if it was helpful.
“It appears to be a morale boost card,” the stallion replied as she zoomed her overlay in on her new cavalry units, which turned out to be about a thousand centaurs armed with shields, spears, and short swords for back-ups. They had the head and torso of a pinkskin, and the body of a…big not-pony?She almost said ‘horse’ until she realized she had no idea what a horse was. “A perfect counter to the terrifying presence of the elvish beasts mingling amongst your legionnaires. Do you wish to use it?”
“Go for it!” she said, tapping the icons for her two centaur units and then dragging them into the right flank of the elven infantry (it turned out they had the movement speed and range to do it right off). Her tanks were rolling forward and clearing out the creatures ahead of them like grass, giving the centaurs a clear shot to charge right in and start having fun, and even now she could hear them roaring and cheering as they began dashing across the field to engage in mortal combat against a hated foe. Well, one they hated more than her pinkskins, anyway.
“Very well,” was the stallion’s answer, just as a bluish-white pulse of light washed over the entire field, much to the relief of her pinkskins and their colossi. “I should point out that this morale boost induces an urge to chant war cries alongside the music.”
She was in the middle of ordering her archers to start setting things on fire with their fire arrows, and stopped just short of issuing said order. “…the card plays music?”
Her answer came in the form of a neon-colored jukebox dropping out of the sky and into the throng of pinkskins with a mighty, thundering crash, and those in the back of the column not engaged with the enemy flocked to it like moths to a flame, jumping up and down and cheering wildly at the “gift” presented to them by their Legate—
“Praises to the Night Empress and her great lunar cheeks!” came one very enthusiastic shout, and she felt a rush of blood flow into her face. Even she knew what that meant.
Many more voices began shouting out as one of the pinkskins began fiddling with the jukebox, like he was trying to find a particular song. “Our Empress is with us! Our glory is her glory!”
“Her cause is our cause!”
“Our lives for the Equestrian Empire! Glory to the Night!!”
“Get three songs for two, today only, don’t wait, RUN!!”
A rolling roar of laughter washed over the pinkskins—those at the front even seemed to grow more energetic in their fighting, if the uptick in flying, screaming, and detonating elves was any clue. “Play that funky music!!”
“I have found it!!” the pinkskin fiddling with the jukebox cried out, leaping about in a short victory dance before picking up his weapon and shield and turning to face the dark elf horde with renewed purpose and vigor. “Come, foul creatures of shadow, and hear now the song and war cry of our people!! Hooah!!”
A sharp, crackling spark echoed across the battlefield, signifying that the jukebox was coming to life and preparing its song for her legion, in tune with a hearty, earth-shuddering “HOOAH” from the throats of her armies that overpowered every other sound for the second it lasted….
….at least, until they started chanting something completely different along with their chosen song.
“OOGA-CHAKA OOGA OOGA OOGA-CHAKA—”
Her eyes widened almost to the size of dinner plates. She kinda knew this song…and she knew her legionnaires wouldn’t shut up for a while now that the song of their soul was playing out loud for them. “No, wait! I take it back, no booster card—”
“It has already been expended,” her somewhat unhelpful aide reminded her, dashing her hopes for a quieter battle (at least for her, since she was in the rear and away from all the noise until they starting chanting along with the song). “I might add that rather than our usual western minotaur allies, the Empress was forced to plead for aid from the centaur tribes of the arctic north who are decidedly more…barbaric in their traditions and may actually take very kindly to the war cry of your legion, if only to spite us—”
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She had to stop at this point, mostly because the tan-coated, dark-brown maned earth pony stallion in front of her, next to Raina, wound up snorting his drink out of his nose, unable to contain his laughter like everybody else, and soon enough the whole room was laughing out loud.
Even Raina had to stop sketching or drawing whatever it was she was drawing, and set her stuff down before she ruined her work, and that was when she saw that the griffon was actually trying to sketch out all the different creatures of her dream as she described them and did a really neat job of it too.
…okay, scratch that, everybody was laughing, even Rally right next to her. And Rally was probably having the hardest time of it all, her forelegs kept banging on the table once in a while, tears streaming down her cheeks—
—Raina fell off of the bench chair, her laughing turning into a series of half-gasps, like she was struggling to laugh and breath at the same time. It took a full minute—and the consumption of a third of her ration pack—before a voice in the crowd could get the breath to say anything coherent. Sounded like a stallion, somewhere…
“O-oh my sweet Lunaaaaaahahahaaa, singing centaurs—”
“Weeeeeelll, they didn’t exactly sing—”
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“…barbaric?”
“Very.”
“Like…barbarian barbaric?”
“They revel in all manner of chanting and dance and superstitious traditions, yes. Your troops may very well be unintentionally announcing marriage proposals to the charging centaurs, sir.”
Her left eye twitched, but not at the words that one might have thought. “WHAT.”
“I said your troops may very well be unintentionally announcing marriage proposals to the charging centaurs, sir—”
She knew that last bit was kinda important, but the word ‘sir’ for what sounded like the seventh or eighth time finally struck the wrong nerve, and she began stripping off the officer’s uniform she’d been wearing since this whole crazy thing started. "Okay, that is IT ENOUGH with the sir! I! Am! A! Girl! I’m gonna take this stuff off so you can see for yourself—”
Her moronic aide continued to speak as though she wasn’t even the least bit upset with him over his overuse of “sir” in her general direction. “Dude” she could take, but not “sir”. “Fear not, sir, it is highly unlikely that the centaurs will actually accept such outlandish propositions—”
She’d gotten her uniform off and was just about to toss her hat at her aide for the ninth use of “sir” when she heard a great, thudding crash from the battlefield, and looked back behind her to see a thousand centaurs violently colliding with the elven infantry she’d selected for them—
—and the very last thing she’d expected to hear from the centaurs bellowed into her ears from a mile away as they plowed into their enemies, as though she were right next to them—
“OOGA BOOGA!!!”
“….they accept our troops’ proposals, sir.”
With a wordless cry of desperation, Light Tail slapped her head against her hovering overlay, barely acknowledging the fact that it had turned solid just to allow her to hit it and command her archers to fling flaming arrows upon her enemies.
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It took everybody a couple of minutes to stop laughing, which gave her plenty of time to finish off breakfast and toss the empty meal tray into a nearby trash can. She kept the ration packaging, having learned the other day that the wrapper was a pretty decent stopgap solution for “sucking chest wounds” (though when she made the comment that ‘all chest wounds suck’ the Runner was forced to agree with her on it even though he laughed when she said it). She almost gave up on anyone getting themselves back together until she looked around and saw a good many of them slowly getting back upright on their hooves, or paws, or…or whatever.
“….kid, you read way too many Daring Doo books,” Raina finally managed to say, when she’d clawed back up into the bench on the other side of the table and confirmed that her sketchpad was still there and that nothing was wrong with it or the things she’d doodled on it.
“’Specially since we found the third and fourth ones in that little library we found last week,” Rally added in-between some strange sounds that were halfway between a laugh and hard breathing.
“You mean the ones you won’t give back so I can read ‘em again?”
“Let the rest of us have a peek, ya little bookworm!”
“Funny that you say that….”
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“—igh on believing—”
Since she was doomed to suffer her troops’ strange and otherworldly tastes in music, she didn’t see any reason to try and pretend it didn’t exist. And in all honesty, it was actually kinda catchy. Just not the kind of thing she’d choose if she were faced with a horde of dark elves and had to destroy them. Or maybe it was? Who could say?
At least her fire arrow volleys were quick to sow chaos and panic within her enemies’ ranks. Even now, she could see the numbers next to their icons on her little floating display start ticking downward at a faster rate than they’d been when her re-energized troops had begun to lay into them like starving hyenas—
“—that you’re in love with meeeee,” her voice sang in tune with her legionnaires’ song, her forehooves re-directing her artillery strikes to once again focus on clearing out the last of the elvish beasts on the right side of the battlefield. One more volley should do it—
“Sir, I must insist th—”
Her head snapped to her left sharply, a very unfriendly and uncharacteristic snarling growl rolling out of her throat that reminded her of Max and Mona when they found something they didn’t like, and she was pretty sure her ears were doing that flattening-in-rage thing too. Her aide’s face, usually stiff and unwavering, began to look somewhat worried and afraid of the little filly glaring death his way, and he finally (FINALLY!) began calling her something else like she’d wanted all along.
“Mmmm….ma…maaadam Light Tail,” he forced himself to say after a couple of uncomfortable failed attempts. “…I must insist that you put your clothes back on. It is unprofessional for a Legate of the Lunar Empress’s legions to appear…naked.”
“Ponies don’t even normally wear clothes,” she whined, turning back to her floating display to begin planning her moves for the next turn while her opponent took his/her turn. “What’s the big deal?”
“It is an expectation of high society that one be clothed, and that one’s….nethers, be obscured from sight by said clothing. Particularly a lady’s.”
She felt her tail flick about irritably, though most of her attention was focused on her display, now that it was the enemy’s turn. It seemed that her legionnaires were really getting a kick out of that jukebox, because their elven foes were getting the crap beat out of them on the frontline to the point where the second line units were having to move up and take the place of a couple of battered, depleted columns that had turned and fled from the pinkskins in terror. On the right side of the field of battle, her artillery and tanks had finally wiped out the elvish beasts of nightmares and horrors and could turn left, start going af—
“Oh crap,” she muttered when her eyes ticked left and spotted the giant elf construct merrily lumbering towards those tanks through her semi-transparent display. The tanks couldn’t turn in place, they’d have to keep moving forward in order to make a turn, and that would take them right into the giant’s new path. And the tanks on the left side of the field were having more trouble with their foes than she’d have liked, mostly because that side had more of the beastly horrors to deal with. But at least her kung fu pandas were enjoying themselves in battle. She swore she could even see one of the girls among them squealing and laughing as she danced about and did her kung fu thing.
“I understand that your previous life as a commoner has had its shortcomings, but I can assure you that any unwarranted attention to yo—”
“Not that!” she shouted back. The last thing she wanted to talk about was her girl bits and now that she thought about it, it was kinda weird that her aide would even bother to call attention to them.It was one of those unspoken rules, where no matter how often you noticed, no one ever said anything about it because it was rude and everybody had the same problem and did their best not to stare if the tail happened to show a little too much. But that was later, and this giant elvish construct turning to crush her tanks was now, and that was probably more important! “That…that giant thing is gonna squish the tanks in about two turns! They can’t turn around that fast!”
“Are you aware that their turrets can rotate three hundred and sixty degrees? It will consume part of their movement range on the next turn, but they will still be able to fire.”
“I…oh, cool! We’ll do that, then w—”
The elvish construct formed a ball of black, smoking energy (how dark shadow magic energy could have smoke effects was never entirely clear) in its hands, came to a stop, and then thrust its arms and hands out to “shoot” it at her tanks, and she could only watch in abject horror as the black ball soared into her company of tanks and annihilated all but five of them in a single explosion. A roar of appreciation rolled across the grassy hills from the dark elvish forces, and the morale boost seemed to help them take their beating a little better, as they stopped losing guys and numbers so quickly.
That was beatable. This giant elf abomination was not. Not when it could just do….whatever it was that it just did—
“…aaaaat the crap?!” she shrieked as the last of the explosion’s concussive wave reached her position, though all it did was give her a nice, refreshing breeze and bat her mane around a little. “Since when could that thing do….that?!”
“It is indeed a powerful attack,” her aide agreed grimly. “It takes the construct three turns to gather the energy to perform it, and is quite devastating. Our foot troops will be utterly destroyed by it.”
Her voice was a garbled mess of words and panic-attack noises as she hastily re-planned her next turn’s movements and actions. Couldn’t do that thing with the tanks anymore now that most of them were gone and scattered all over the place, and though the giant elf thing’s slow, ponderous path would ultimately take it within range of her artillery, it wouldn’t get there until after her opponent’s next turn, and two artillery barrages wouldn’t do enough damage to kill it….
…hunh, most of her centaurs were still alive. Nine hundred and twenty-something out of…a thousand, was it? She supposed she could send them off to peck at the giant elf construct, now that their charge had done most of its damage and reduced the centaurs to being no more effective than her legionnaires. And her troops didn’t like the centaurs being close to them anyway, so using them for fodder would actually make them happier and fight better—
—a soft, misty emerald miasma began to waft its way through her pinkskins, and she immediately noted a marked improvement in their overall stamina, health, and morale. It even seemed to be washing away the poison of the elvish beasts that had until now been something of a problem she’d been having to get around with that booster card that played really strange music—
“What’s that cool-looking emerald mist and where’s it coming from?”
“Ah, yes, that,” her aide explained cheerfully. “The pandera are well versed in the use of an ancient and mystical inner power they call “chi”, and use it to empower themselves in battle. It also has healing properties, and the pandera unit sent to us includes several chi sorcerers which automatically release a healing miasma that heals nearby friendly units and removes poison effects from afflicted units as necessary. Now that the pandera are engaging the enemy, our troops should not suffer from the monstrous elvish sorcery any longer.”
“Oh sweet!!” she squealed happily. “We should get more of these guys for next time, they’re much better than the centaurs that wanna marry ugly pinkskin guys! Speaking of which, they don’t seem to be following my orders anymore, I keep trying to make them move out and charge at that huge elf thing but they won’t do it.”
“They are not close allies of the Diarchy, so obeying your orders is not a high priority. They are also susceptible to bribes from the opposing side, now that their initial thirst for battle has been sated.”
“Wait, hold it, they can be bribed?”
“The dark elves are an honorless, unscrupulous lot who will use any advantage available. But this works both ways, for you can offer the centaurs a bounty to complete an objective. And should they perish in the attempt, you lose no coin.”
That was kind of an honorless thing to do too, when she got to thinking about it, and if this weren’t a game (no matter how lifelike and awesome it was), then she probably wouldn’t do it. But it was just a game, and the centaurs weren’t doing her much good anymore and she didn’t want them getting close to her awesome kung fu pandas and messing with their healing powers. So when her opponent ended their turn, she decided to put up a two-thousand bit reward for the destruction of the giant elf construct, and the moment she added the bounty to the giant’s head the centaurs’ willingness to follow her new command plot on the floating overlay took a very drastic one-eighty turn. They were suddenly all too willing to disengage from combat with their current enemy and go around the huge melee taking place in the center of the field, and charge right at the giant construct with the fervor they’d displayed in their initial charge into the frontline.
“…oh wow, look at ‘em go. They really like money.”
“Fear not, s--…m-maaaadam Light Tail, the centaurs are no match for such a foe and will be scattered into the wind like leaves within two turns, if they live that long. In fact, we truly have no counter on the field for such a foe.”
“Yaaaay,” she mused with far less enthusiasm than the word would normally convey. “Thanks for the reminder, killjoy.”
“Now, if the Diarchy were to grace you with a champion card soon, that could change entirely.”
The word “champion card” suddenly had her ears’ interest, though there was also this odd individual in the battlefield competing for equal amounts of her attention. It looked like one of the panda people, dancing in and out and about the fighting pinkskins with a pair of katanas in its hands, and it sounded like a girl from the happy, near maniacal laughing she was letting out as she sliced and diced dark elves into whatever oblivion it was they were sent to when they flew up and exploded into a million glowing blue dot-shaped bits. “Champion card? What’s that?”
“As a boon for fighting on behalf of the Diarchy, the Solar and Lunar Empresses may offer the assistance of their greatest champions to their Legates in dire need, and I believe the dark elf monstrosity qualifies. Such an asset will make short work of the construct, should it be granted to you.”
She didn’t really have much else she could do this turn, having elected to just let her units keep on doing what they were doing, but she held off on ending it and focused her overlay’s point of view onto the insane panda girl dancing about the frontline just to get a better look at her. Her slender, muscle-toned form and the litheness and water-like flow of her combat moves was somewhat mesmerizing to look at, and she made it look so easy. It was so cool and awesome to look at that she could forgive the game’s insistence on distorting her chest in strange ways. Why it would stretch into a pair of bouncing round bulges was a mystery she didn’t want explained. She supposed it kiiiinda made her a little more mesmerizing to look at, but it was really weird and it actually looked….“off”, was the best way she could describe—
“Ahhh, the pandera have seen fit to send one of their Masters to aid us,” her aide approved glowingly.
“You know this kung fu panda?”
“Rin Jun-Lee, the Tiger Master,” he answered proudly. “She is a prodigy among her people, and well versed in over forty styles of your…“kung fu”. She was granted the title of Tiger Master at the young age of sixteen. At just twenty years old she is the most accomplished of martial arts masters of her generation, and she is quite fond of us pony folk. It is rumored she seeks to serve as a Legate’s personal champion with the blessing of the Dragon Emperor and the Empress Sisters. Given the similarities in your backgrounds, she would make quite an honor guard for the youngest Legate to serve the Lunar Empress herself.”
“Flattery will not get a promotion,” she said with a light grin. “…but it’s a good start to one.”
“Such grandiose delusions are not intentional, I assure you. I should remind you that since you have no legal moves left this turn, you must end it within the next ninety seconds or suffer a penalty for delaying your opponent’s turn—”
Her right forehoof tapped the “END TURN” button on the lower right of her floating display, forcing it to zoom out from Miss Rin and return the viewpoint to the field overlay with all the icons and stuff. “Ugh, gonna hate this—”
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She kinda left out the part about the panda girl’s chest and how she found her mesmerizing to look at as she sliced and diced the dark elves into clouds of exploding, glowing blue dots, but even just a glance at Rally’s eyes told her that she’d probably just said a little too much about her Trottingham aide and that little chat about social norms regarding one’s nethers. But nobody else seemed to be paying it much mind, and Raina was hard at work sketching out all the different creatures and people she was describing from the dream. That kind of artistic talent seemed really rare or grossly unappreciated in a land of violence, death, and scarce food and water….
“Wow, you’re really into this today,” Light Tail said softly, so as not to jolt or disturb the griffon from her work. “…and yesterday, too, actually.”
Raina seemed to be waiting for her to say exactly that and produced a few sheets of paper from the sketchpad she’d had with her yesterday morning, and slid them across the table to her. “Oh, yeah, speaking of which, I think I finally got a decent rough sketch of that battered warship….what was it called again? Galaxia?”
“Galactus!” somebody in the crowd corrected her sternly, but that dude wasn’t right either—
“That’s not it either--oh, hey, you got it right here!” she said gleefully when her eyes fell upon the space vessel and its two long, pod-like pylons on the sides where it stored its space fighters, along with the correct name on the front of the visible pylon. “Right on the side of the pylon, and that’s actually a pretty cool looking typeface for that name! Where’d you come up with it?!”
“Eh, seemed to fit, didn’t really think much else of it,” Raina shrugged her off, and then stopped drawing on her current sketchpad and turned it around to show her a rough drawing of th—
….the panda girl, Miss Rin?
“Now, this little minx is something else, kid!” the griffon chuckled lightly. “The way you describe these kung fu pandas, makes them sound like a cross between those pinkskins and pandas, so I kinda just made a combo of the two, but there’s something missing here, I can feel it. Don’t ask me what, it just feels…incomplete.”
She wasn’t going to say anything about the flat chest in the drawing not matching what was in the dream, but the rest of Miss Rin was actually about spot-on, judging from what she could remember from the dream (and she hoped she’d get to go back to it soon, because it was the best dream she’d ever had). The two katanas, the dark kung-fu uniform and the belt sash with a yin-yang symbol, and the black/white fur and the long hair that flowed halfway down her back, with part of it tied into a tiny little ponytail at the back of her head with a couple of thin sticks stuck in it, for some reason….
“Coooool,” she cooed in giddy approval. “And that you drew that in like…what, ten minutes? You’re good.”
“Oh, that’s just a rough sketch, it’ll take me hours to actually clean it up, but it seems…off. Somethin’s missing, I can feel it, and I don’t know what.”
Say nothing, she resolved, though when she looked at the drawing of Miss Rin she was forced to privately agree. As odd as it was for Miss Rin’s chest to be distorted and bouncing like it had been, to see her drawn flat chested….even if she thought it made more sense and looked normal, it also looked incomplete. She just didn’t want to say it out loud and have everybody think she was some oddball or something. She liked these Runners, and they seemed to like her, and she didn’t want to ruin that.
“…yeah, well, anyways—”
--------------------------------------
“Hate” was a bit mild for what she felt. Was “raging” better? Livid? Furious? Incensed?
Whatever the right word was, it didn’t really change the fact that her hastily re-planned moves in her last turn were going to have to be re-re-planned in light of the carnage she had been dealt.
The centaurs didn’t last even one turn. It turned out that the giant elf construct gained an attack bonus against four-legged creatures, since they weren’t as nimble and couldn’t dodge as easily. It had this big sword on its hip and just cut all the centaurs in half in like, two swings, and then she was staring at a lot of bright glowing blue dots and lines where the nine hundred and twenty-something centaurs had been. The rest of the battlefield hadn’t changed much—her tanks were still struggling against the elven creatures on the left side of the field, and her artillery batteries were still aching for something to shoot at and her archers were re-lighting their arrows for another flaming volley. And Miss Rin was still dancing up and down the frontline, making every dark elf that dared fight her look like a clumsy foal as she tore them to bits with almost zero effort, or so it seemed. Some of the pinkskins seemed smitten with her, whistling sharply as she passed by them, but she only winked at them when they did it and went right on slaying dark evil elves. If anything, she swore she could see Miss Rin stealing a look back at her, like she could see little Light Tail from so far away even with all the fighting going on. Maybe she could…
“Strange, your opponent has ended their turn without moving the majority of their units,” her aide commented lightly.
She didn’t think it was that strange, really. “Why should they? That giant construct lumbering around is more than enough to wipe us out, as long as all our guys are tied up with fighting the elves. Otherwise I could just swarm it and take it out with sheer numbers. All those centaurs did was slow it from charging that super death ball attack for a turn.”
“Ah, yes, that does make more sense. This is why you are Legate and I am merely your humble assistant.”
“Humble my tail,” she muttered under her breath. Sadly, she didn’t really see all that much that she could do herself, beyond what she was already doing. Her tanks had to hold the left side, keep those monsters from getting to her pinkskins and colossi. Her archers were supporting the front line from a safe distance, the kung fu pandas were needed where they were to counteract the poison attacks from the few beasts still savaging her pinkskins, and her artillery was running out of targets they could safely attack without endangering her own units in the explosions…. “Can we draw a support card this turn?”
She had no idea why she said that, or what a support card was, really (that whole “dream world sense” that only made sense when she didn’t think about it), but it turned out to be a really big help. “Ah, yes, of course, it has been several turns since the beginning of the battle.I believe you may draw up to three, if you desire.”
“Three it is,” she ordered politely. If any of those three cards would be of any help, she needed them now—
The world flashed a brilliant gold, ever so briefly, three times before stopping, and a little icon of a deck of cards at the top right of her floating overlay lit up, with a little glowing number “3” on the bottom right of the icon.A simple tap of her forehoof replaced the battlefield view with a line-up of three cards, and her eyes scanned through them quickly. First one was a booster card, a +15% charge attack boost for cavalry units that she didn’t have anymore (not since the centaurs got wiped off the map). Second one was a….
“…an arms card? And with a goldish background? What—”
Her aide’s voice livened up considerably the moment she mentioned it, and she grew to share in his joy when he got to explaining it. “Ah, most excellent!” he exclaimed proudly. “This grants a hero unit a weapon befitting their status as exemplar warriors. Their attack power, morale, and attack speed will greatly benefit and allow them to decimate entire columns of infantry by themselves in some cases. Perhaps the Lunar Empress is sending a hint?”
“…I thought she was sending me cards.”
“No, I mean that she may be trying to signal to you, in less than subtle ways, that she would support your sponsorship of Miss Rin as your personal guard and second and has sent this arms card to empower her with a weapon that would augment her combat skills while also serving as a…”badge of office”, I believe is the term.”
“Miss Rin doesn’t need a badge, she needs a kick-butt weapon!” Light Tail proclaimed loudly, jabbing her forehoof on the glowing golden card twice to activate. It spun in place and vanished from the overlay in an explosion of light, and then the overlay’s viewpoint switched to a close-up of Miss Rin—
—the pandera girl froze mid-swing in combat, her traditional katana flashing away in a brilliant gold light, only to be replaced with a pair of katanas bearing a very sweet looking blade of some dual-colored metal of black and white. One half of the blade was devoted to either white or black, with the two colors coming together in the middle in a curved boundary, almost like a yin-yang. The white bottom half of the blade was further adorned with glowing red glyphs that she assumed was the language of the Dragon Empire. The grips of the swords were laced in black and red strappings, and even Miss Rin’s sword scabbards were replaced with a mismatched black and white scabbard, one on each hip. She looked at her new swords for a couple of seconds in complete and total confusion, during which she managed to avoid being sliced and diced by a couple of evil dark elves only because she happened to step forward in one of her confused moments of wandering and made the elves miss, but she didn’t think Miss Rin did it on purpose.
Then Miss Rin got to twirling the swords about and giving them a cute little swing to test their weight and balance, and her face lit up like a Hearth’s Warming Eve fire. She turned around and swiftly cut off an elf’s head in what looked like an effortless blow, causing him to explode into lots of little glowing blue dots, and then she went right back to work cutting elves to digital ribbons and bits with a maniacal laughter—
—and did so at more than twice the speed she’d been doing it previously, which was impressive to start with. Now it seemed like she was slaying scores of elves like they were paper dolls, while her pinkskins were locked in a brutal struggle for dominance in the battlefield.
“…oh my stars and sunlight,” her aide gasped in shock. “It appears the Twin Sisters have gifted Miss Rin with a special set of katana forged by their personal armorer. The Diarchy’s Light…such a fitting gift for a skilled champion. Yes, this settles it. Luna and Celestia would appear to favor Miss Rin as your personal guard and second. She should be summoned to the Royal Court in Canterlot at the battle’s end for a formal ceremony. What a delightful omen!”
“If you say so,” she croaked fearfully at the sight of the pandera girl happily slaying dark elves like they were standing still—and to her, they probably were. “…still won’t help with that giant elf monster thingy. It’s getting close enough to start wiping out my pinkskins—”
—her forehoof tapped the glowing card icon again, and the overlay went back to the support card screen and shoved the third and last card onto the center. A simple swipe across its surface flipped it over—
She shrieked a filly’s happy shriek at the sight of the prize unveiled to her. “Neeeeevermind! That thing’s a goner!!”
“What i—oh,” the aide said, stopping mid-sentence as he peered over her to stare at the third and final prize of the draw. “…oh my. The Empresses clearly adore you to be offering this level of support.”
She didn’t even hesitate, she just jabbed the card to activate it and summon the hero unit to the field—
—the field around her was blasted by a gust of wind that oddly had no direction or source, and she heard a solid thump! smack into the ground behind her—
—she turned about to greet Celestia’s champion and greatest student of the era—as well as the last three centuries—and felt her little body dip forward in a little cutesy bow out of habit. “Oh, heya, Princess!”
The light, high voice and warmth of Twilight Sparkle’s words filled her with hope, as did the sight of her lavender wings and alicorn-sized stature. “Hello! How goes the battle?”
“Iiiiiit’s…going,” Light Tail answered, turning to point at the lumbering elf construct drawing ever closer to the main battle line. “The direction it’s going seems to be a matter of debate...”
Twilight’s eyes betrayed only a brief moment of shock before a veil of seriousness set in, though her voice remained friendly and conversational. “Oh, wow. They must really hate you to be spending so many deployment points on that.”
“It’s not my fault I’m awesome…is it?”
Twilight allowed herself a short laugh as she gently squeezed in beside her and started studying the overlay, after switching it to the overhead battlefield view. “Well, you probably could have used four units of pikemen instead of extra legionaries beyond what’s already assigned to you, but you did bring in two companies of tanks and artillereeeewhere’s the second tank battalion?”
“Blown to bits. That giant thing just shot this big ball of…something, and most of the tanks on the right side went BOOOSH!”
“Oooooh, it’s one of those,” Twilight mused, mostly to herself, but she stopped looking at the overlay and focused her attention on the giant construct that stuck out like a pillar of death in the far distance. “Fourth one today.”
“…wait, fourth?”
“Yes, fourth. I just came off the battlefront to the south, outside Baltimare. Legate June Bug was having a rougher time with it and actually engaged it with her entire division.Barely stopped it. This one here looks to have been constructed in the likeness of Avaskir, God of the Black Magicks. He’s a very prominent icon in the dark elves’ mythological pantheon, and the source of much of their magical power. I’m not sure what the effect of destroying this construct could be.”
“I’m thinking more of the immediate benefit of not having all my guys squashed like ripe grapes in three turns. I kinda like those kung fu pandas.”
“Yes, but I—oh, is that the Tiger Master herself!?” Twilight squealed when she caught Miss Rin’s body leaping up above the fray briefly, her spiffy new swords drawn back behind her in preparation for a deep swing—
—Twilight’s voice grew into a thundering, earth-shaking beast, the telltale of the Royal Canterlot Voice spell as she reared up on her hind legs and tried to get Miss Rin’s attention with a wave of her left foreleg. “HI RIN! LOVED YOUR DEMONSTRATION IN CANTERLOT LAST WEEK!!”
As Light Tail batted away the grasshoppers that had been terrified into leaping in her general direction to escape the Royal Canterlot Voice, she was surprised to see Miss Rin stop fighting long enough to acknowledge the presence of the Fourth Princess of Equestria with a wave back—
“LOVED YOUR DEMO OF THAT MAGIC FIREWORKS SHOW THE WEEK BEFORE THAT!!” Miss Rin shouted back, somehow, even over the sound of war, artillery guns, the Royal Canterlot Voice, the pinkskins’ jukebox, and what looked like a mile’s worth of distance.
Even with all of that going on, Twilight Sparkle found it impossible to not break into a wordless, oscillating squee at the counter-praise she had received. She even hopped a little in place. Light Tail might have found it funny had a grasshopper not decided that her face was the best place to retreat to and landed on her nose right then.
“Ackpth!” she cried out, shaking her head furiously to dislodge the gross bug and send it back to the earth. “Hey! Equestria to Twilight! Big elf construct of death and stuff!”
“Oh! Right,” the Princess of Friendship muttered, her body shrinking slightly out of embarrassment. “Umm, yes, I can remove it from the battle, but as I was saying, I have no idea what effect it will have. The dark elves may flee in abject terror at the sight of their God of Dark Magick being destroyed, or they may fly into a blind, psychotic bloodlust and utterly devastate your army in a matter of seconds. It’s a fifty-fifty deal.”
“A fifty percent chance of defeat is still better than certain death as long as that thing’s up and stomping around,” Light Tail decided immediately. She wasn’t lying, either, that thing could wipe out her legionaries as quickly as it slaughtered the centaurs, and her tanks and artillery would be too exposed without the infantry to tie up the dark elvish forces. Either the construct went away, or she’d be better off just yielding the fight altogether if she wanted to save the majority of her army. “Take it out.”
“Okay,” Twilight said, though the strangeness of an Equestrian princess taking orders from a ten-year-old filly never registered to either of them. “I’ll take care of this construct and it’s all yours from there while I head to the far northern front! Good luck!”
Twilight’s wings flared out, and the Fourth Princess of the Equestrian Empire leapt forward, beginning a slow climb up into the skies above the battle and veered straight for the huge, dark elvish construct that was turning its attention to the main battle line. A few seconds after she passed over the line of pinkskins on the front line, a massive glowing purple beam of pure arcane energy shot out from the alicorn’s horn and struck the construct in the face. As the construct stumbled and halted its forward stride, Twilight unleashed another spell, a massive purple and blue ball of swirling energy that appeared to contain a night sky of stars within it, and the star ball turned the construct into an exploding shower of rubble and black stones the moment it collided into the monster’s chest.
Just as she said she would, Twilight immediately took off in a northerly direction, leaving the battlefield to ponder her effortless destruction of the dark elf construct in complete and utter silence. All sounds of battle had come to a sudden halt as the combatants—pinkskins, pandera, and dark elves alike—gazed upon the rubble that had once been the most powerful entity on the field until the Fourth Princess’s appearance. It was a very drastic and eerie changed from the chaotic orchestra of war that had been their world only moments earlier. Her colossi just stopped moving, like the big statues they were supposed to be.
The silence was broken by the loudest, most hearty “HOAH!” from her pinkskins she’d heard yet, thundering into her chest cavity as all of her legionaries and pandera and colossi renewed their assault on the dark elves and their monstrous pets (and without fair warning, to boot). The dark elves, visibly stunned and devastated by the loss of their dark god avatar, quickly succumbed to terror and panic as their secondary line flew into a hard retreat to the back of the field, while the primary line struggled to maintain their composure and at least hold her very happy and energetic troops back.
Light Tail couldn’t help but begin to cackle maniacally, ordering her artillery to begin bombarding the retreating dark elves while simultaneously ordering all of her infantry and pandera to converge on the front line and utterly destroy it. Her remaining tank battalion was ordered to circle the infantry line and come at the retreating elves from the left side, though it would take a turn for them to do so. With her moves conducted and carried out, she promptly ended her turn and allowed her cackling laugh to reach a crescendo high enough to carry across the field, likely filling the dark elves with even more terror at the sound of a little girl laughing evilly in their general direction.
“Mwaahahahahahahaa!!” the little filly’s demented, amused cackling roared above the sound of battle. “Go! Destroy all before you! Send these sunless heathens back to their dark shadowy lairs or whatever they live in!! Nyahahahahahahaa—”
“Sir, they’re going for their guns,” her aide interrupted rudely and flatly.
It took a moment too long for her brain to register the words, and when she finally digested his warning her evil and demented laughter screeched to a halt. “--hahahahahaaa…wait, they have guns?”
A dark, foreboding roar of doom and death rolled back across the field at her, and she turned her gaze up to find that the dark elves had not been retreating from the field, but merely rushing to their supply wagons that she’d willfully ignored for the entire battle because she didn’t think anything of them. But as she watched the last of the dark elven infantry rip their prizes from the wagons and cargo crates and begin rushing back to the front line, she saw a very different, very…angry look to them. They were really mad, and had all sorts of guns ranging from the normal and mundane to some really outlandish sci-fi stuff, like rapid-firing energy weapons that fired these big blue comet-style bolts of…of something that quickly proved capable of tearing her tanks apart like a sharp knife stabbing at paper dolls. Some of the elves had something of a cross between a conventional weapon and a sci-fi one…it seemed to fire bullets, but they didn’t spit shell casings, had these really big muzzle flashes and had the absolute coolest firing sound in existence and…even had a small pump-action grenade launcher? Then there were the energy guns that just seemed to shoot lasers really fast, or at least they looked like lasers. They were strange, purple-blue beams that fired like machine guns and had a weird (but cool) zippy-zap sound to it. Of the conventional arms, she saw rifles, machine guns, pistols, and these blocky-looking awesome pistols with big magazines that fired like machine guns—
—a garbled, furious roar echoed out across the field, accompanied by a flash of red that engulfed the dark elves, and they all got bigger and much, much faster, and the dark elves on the front line even seemed to be hitting and swinging their swords much harder and with more power than before. It was like some crazed bloodlust effect had been cast on them to augment their anger and make them impossible to stop….
—and they were turning her guys into a sea of exploding blue dots so fast that the frontline quickly became engulfed in it. Her number of companies were starting to drop like rocks. Twenty, then nineteen, eighteen, sixteen what the—
—her pandera, probably seeing the futility of the fight now that the dark elves had been filled with an insatiable bloodlust, promptly turned and fled from the frontline before the elves could finish destroying the pinkskins and turning her colossi into piles of de-powered rubble. Even Miss Rin seemed to have had enough of it, as the bloodlusted elves were proving to be too much for even her new swords and heightened combat prowess. She flipped over the eroding line of pinkskins and started running straight for Light Tail’s position in the rear like her butt was on fire.
She knew a Really Bad Sign when she saw it. “…I have good news for you, dude!” Light Tail proclaimed, swiftly punching the big “FORFEIT” button on the bottom left of her overlay screen and picking up her hat from the pile of clothes nearby. “I hereby promote you to the position of Field Marshal of the 5th Night Legion, effective like, right now!”
“…si….maaaaadam Light Tail?”
She set her hat upon his head and adjusted it a tad when it sagged to the left to straighten it out. “Congrats, Marshal! Wear the title with pride!”
Her aide took his eyes off her long enough to look at the collapsing front line in confusion, and she took the opportunity for all it was worth. “Madam Light Ta—”
But when he turned back to his Legate, Light Tail was nowhere to be found. She promptly bolted away like a terrified rabbit, down the back of the hill with Miss Rin catching up to her as she made it halfway down. “Flee!”
The Field Marshal of the 5th Legion looked back upon the battlefield—in the time it took him to look down at where his Legate had been, and then back up, the dark elves had overwhelmed the pinkskins, destroyed the tank battalion, and were in the process of engaging the artillery with the large comet-bolt energy weapons even as the enraged sword infantry rapidly closed in on the hilltop with an earth-shattering roar of utter, barbaric savagery, their bodies becoming reddish, whirlwind blurs of rapidly-swishing blades and death.
“….oh, bollocks, I should have been a tailor like mother wanted.”
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That was as far as the dream went, because Rally woke her right before the dark elves reached the top of the hill and was probably the reason why she remembered so much of it. Everybody seemed to be getting a kick out of how it ended regardless, though, as they were back to laughing and struggling to stand/breath/live and all that.It gave her a minute to check on her stuff she’d set down behind her, and to make sure that Max and Mona hadn’t up and wandered off to explore like they’d done the other morning. Both pups had managed to stay put this time, despite all the noise in the cafeteria and the lack of attention they’d been getting, and even surprised her by not once begging for a second helping of food like they sometimes did when they thought she’d surrender to their pitiful whimpering and puppy-dog eye look.
As much fun as the Runners seemed to have whenever she had a crazy dream to share (which she was getting a lot of lately), their boss wasn’t quite as enthused with the time she sucked up in telling them the tales. She could almost feel his hopeless presence intruding into the cafeteria, no doubt drawn to the sound of laughter and happy crying, and sure enough when she looked back at the door to the cafeteria he was standing in the doorway. His dark tan fur and eggshell-colored feathers were missing a few patches here and there, and he always had this red beret on his head and his green eyes were looking at all of his Runners like a parent trying to scold their children with a mere glare, like Mom sometimes did.
Then he turned that glare on her, but since he wasn’t her dad, it didn’t really work on her. “What was your little fairy tale this time? Snowy plains and a castle of crystal?”
Some of the laughing Runners closest to her somehow heard him speaking to her, and they didn’t usually like the tone he used on her and were quick to shoot right back at him. “Hell no!” one of the laughing griffons on the floor shouted back. “A battlefield full of pinkskins!”
El-Tee spotted BJ struggling his way into the cafeteria, breaking into a yawn and stopping mid-way when he realized he was walking into the middle of a verbal fight between the boss of the Runners and about forty of his subordinates—
“And dark elves!” another voice added in-between laughs, sounded like a girl….pony?
“And kung-fu pandas!” said a third Runner…male, sounded like one of the stallions at the next table over…
“And a funky jukebox of tunes falling from the sky!” Raina said last—
Oh gods are they gonna—
They did. She just knew they would the moment Raina opened her beak about that jukebox and she was not disappointed in the least when they broke into song in complete unison despite never having even heard more than what she’d managed to tell them—
“OOGA-CHAKA OOGA OOGA OOGA-CHAKA—"
The Chief—at least that’s what everybody here called their boss—knew when he wasting his time trying to talk sense into his underlings and just make them pay for it later, and with a frustrated huff he just turned around and showed himself back out. BJ just stood there in a frozen mid-yawn, staring out at the room of singing goofballs with that perpetually bored look in his eyes—
“OOGA OOGA HOOOOAAAH!!!” came the finale of the funky chanting when the juvenile-like Runners saw their boss departing in defeat—
—BJ’s eyes finally blinked, slowly, and his jaws gradually closed before he turned about and sauntered back out the way he came, and his voice sounded about as tired as he looked. “Way too early in the morning for this shit.”
Somehow, that little snarky sentence had the Runners laughing almost as hard as when she’d told them about the centaurs and how they answered her pinkskins’ singing. She could hear Raina’s body falling onto the floor for the…third time so far (she thought), and she thought it better to just let them laugh until they stopped themselves. For all the death and violence they saw (and dealt), they still knew when to have fun, and they never once laughed at her, but at her dreams and what she saw and did in them. If it did the least bit of good in making them forget the horrors of the wastes, even if only for a little bit, then she’d tell them every last crazy dream she had for as long as they were willing to hear it.
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8750266
The dream I based this chapter on was certainly one of the strangest I'd ever had. There's a few differences of note--in my dream, I didn't have a contingent of kung-fu pandas or artillery, and my infantry consisted of a whole horde of what looked like the Footman unit from Warcraft III, but I did have these fantasy-sci-fi tanks that blasted the dark elven army with blasts of holy light, and there was this really big colossal dark elf statue in the back that kept getting closer and closer. I remember blasting a few elves with a Beretta 92FS (incidentally, almost identical to my personal model), turned around and saw this space samurai in a white exo-suit patiently awaiting my command. I had him take out the colossal elf with his laser sword, and as my army surged forward to take advantage of the new opening I heard this British voice call out from out of nowhere, "Sir, they're going for their guns!". The dark elves get this power-up that I can only describe as a Warcraft III Bloodlust spell, because they went red and I even heard that "WAARRG!" cry that accompanies Bloodlust in that game, and the few at the front line still wielding swords started going crazy, and the rest were coming back to the front line after breaking out all sorts of guns from wherever they'd been keeping them. I saw GLOCK 18s, those pulse rifles from Aliens, lots of different plasma and laser guns that just tore my tanks to shreds like they were even there, and I look down at my Beretta and think "I'm in the wrong place with the wrong damn gun!"
And then I woke up, because my alarm clock went off and I cursed Fate that I had to have this awesome dream on a work day. But it gave me a very entertaining idea for a story chapter that could not be ignored. I added quite a lot of embellishment's to Light Tail's dream, simply because I could and wanted to make it stranger than the one I'd had. It also almost makes me wonder how much further I could take the concept, if I put a little more time and thought to it.
Like this story, waiting for more.