Fallout Equestria: Old World Dreams

by KDarkwater

Chapter 3

3

Something was so terribly, horribly wrong. Chief Farsight wasn’t yelling at her. Well, not loudly, anyway.

“Only you would have the guts to try and slap me with the rules,” he said tersely, turning his face down to the intercom imbedded in his desk. “But today’s a bad time to be playing this game with me.”

He tapped the intercom on, which linked directly to the Overmare’s office, and was about to utter his wishes to the pony on the other end when the door whished open and filled the room with a brief waft of the slightly cooler air in the hallway before it snapped shut again. All eyes turned to face the crude interruption—

—and Cloud Wind’s face fell in on itself at the sight of the poor mare’s eyes. No, not now, you idiot—

The bright yellow earth pony’s voice was trembling, as if on the verge of breaking into a shrill wail. “C-chief, where’s my brother?”

Farsight’s brown-coated face did its best to maintain a calm façade even though he probably felt like trying to strangle a certain pegasus right then and there. “Calm down, Stick. I’d told you we’d find him.”

“Y-yes, you told me you’d find him in a couple of hours,” the earth pony cracked back through glistening eyes. “That was yesterday afternoon! You’ve never lost track of anypony before, what happened?!”

The awkward, tense silence that followed forced Sling Shot to answer the question when Farsight couldn't—or wouldn’t—bring himself to do it. “….if what Daffodil told me is right, then he never got back to quarters after his shift,” she sighed. “His PipBuck’s not transmitting his locator tag either. Either it’s damaged or he got somepony in maintenance to turn it off, but why he’d do that is beyond me. Since he does the night shift at the moment, that would mean he’s been gone since yesterday morning when Lavender relieved him.”

Farsight’s eyes narrowed into an icy glare when she’d mentioned the likely true length of his disappearance, and the teary mare’s shocked gasp further cemented the mistake her friend had just committed. “…you don’t think the bugs got him….do you….”

Farsight saw an opportunity to settle the issue of what to do with Sling Shot (and punish her for speaking out of turn at the same time). “I’m sure he’s fine. And since you seem to be up to speed on Butterscotch’s disappearance, Sling, you can spend your shift looking for him. When you find him, let me know right away and what his status is, and report back here for re-assignment…”

His eyes shifted over to bring their intimidating fire upon the pegasus before continuing. “One of my choosing, not yours.”

Cloud Wind did not like being challenged by a stallion in that tone. Or being challenged in general, for that matter. Unfortunately, he hadn’t said anything she could actually use to start an argument she could win. She hated it when he did that (which was often). “Shoving somepony in a room with only one way in or out is a death trap and you know it! The last time you did this we had to beat the damn things off the armory door ourselves ‘cause you locked out Sling’s access to the weapon racks right before you left her in there! Residents can at least seal themselves in other rooms in their quarters! The bugs could’ve easily found their way inside through the vents and left her kid an orphan, we are not risking this again! Put her somewhere else—“

“No,” he refuted her “order” immediately and with zero empathy. “The security of our weapons and munitions stores is more important in this situation. Under Stable-Tec regulations, chapter four, subsection E-point-one, the armory is specifically stated to be under my direct control in a potential security breach. Only the Overmare can give me orders regarding that. Surely you recall that part of the subsection you just quoted to me a minute ago.”

I’ll “quote” you something else in about three seconds!! she wanted to scream back and pound into the thick-headed stallion’s skull with the blunt, hard metal of his own desk. The fight that almost ensued was, to her disappointment, headed off by the one pony that had every right to expect better from them.

“Will you foals quit your pissing match and help me find my brother?!?” the earth mare screeched into their brains, no longer trying to hide her tears or her pain. “He’s just a stupid kid, I promised Daddy I’d take care of him before he died, don’t make me beg! Do better!”

Her indignant anger bled off into oblivion, a wash of red hot shame flowing into her bones. She’d often forgotten that Butterscotch was still technically a security pony-in-training; six months shy of becoming a full-blown stallion in legal status, if not by behavior. He’d put in the extra work to graduate from his class a year early and take his departed father’s place on the security force, put in the time to really learn the Stable’s layout in daily walks around the fourteen-level shelter, put in the effort to try and know the other ponies in the security force. He even put in the time to learn about the shooting range’s mechanical controls and the joys of their maintenance routines.

And here she was, trying to huff and puff and blown down the big, bad security chief because she felt her friend was still being slighted by a stable that saw her as little more than their resident “slut”, when Butterscotch’s big sister had a much more reasonable and compelling need to vent and ask them to what they’d promised to when they took on the security oath.

The uncomfortable silence that fell on her ears was thankfully brief, as Sling Shot seemed eager to see herself out the door before things could get any worse. The unicorn spun in place and walked away from the desk, not even bothering to acknowledge anything that their boss had said to them. “Walk with me,” she said, then added with a sharp edge, “You too, Windy.”

Cloud felt her ears go limp as she meekly fell in step behind Sling’s indigo tail, but said nothing. She’d earned the disrespect to be commanded about like a rebellious child. Stick didn’t even flinch. She just seemed grateful that the search could carry on as she’d thought it ought to. She didn’t even care that it was Sling Shot doing the searching.

How quickly ponies would forget the way they treated her when they actually needed her for something….

“The last time you saw Butterscotch, what did you two talk about?” the unicorn asked loudly once they’d escaped the confines of Farsight’s office. Interesting question to ask right off the bat…

“...I…I….ummm,” Stick stammered. Now that she’d gotten the search to continue, she was back to fretting and freaking out over a kid brother that might possibly have become a large snack for giant, mutated insects, and she wasn’t doing as good a job hiding it as she was earlier. “I…when Daddy died…Butters was just starting to ask about…um….mares. Why girls lack some…certain male qualities. At first I was still too broken up to tell him…and it was easier to just avoid it, so that’s what I did, and he stopped asking after a while. It wasn’t until last year when Amethyst cornered me and told me to explain it to him because he’d skipped everything but the core subjects in order to graduate early and start training for security—”

An unmistakable groan of despair filled the air from Sling’s lungs as she stopped herself mid-step and whipped around to stare down the earth pony. “Get to the point already!”

Butterstick wasn’t expecting such a harsh reprimand from the “immoral whore”, and she visibly shrank back from the unicorn’s fiery gaze. “A-aaah! D-don’t make this more embarrassing than it already is! I’m his sister, how was I supposed to tell him something like that?! It took me a whole freakin’ year to work up the nerve! He should’ve learned it in school—“

Sling’s eyes grew harder and angrier, trying to bore a new hole in the earth pony’s skull with her impatience, and Butterstick finally stopping stalling. “Wa…w-wait, don’t hurt me! I…I told him the other night and he just…he just took off! He just took off and he never came home and I’m trying not to think of him being eaten alive by mutant cockroaches with eggs the size of a dinner plate and oh gods Daddy I’m so sorry I tried—“

Butterstick’s body crumpled onto the floor in a curled heap, and it took all of Cloud’s willpower not to smack herself in the face, now that she knew why Butterscotch had just up and vanished on everypony. For such a bright guy, he was being incredibly stupid right now. She’d never have believed it if she hadn’t seen it with her own two eyes.

“Wow,” she muttered over the crying earth pony’s wails. “A singing robot and making a grown mare cry like a little filly. And all in less than an hour? You really bring out the best in us, Sling. Truly, where would we be without your constant guidance?”

“I hate you all,” the unicorn grumbled to nopony in particular as she stared down at the bubbling mass of yellow fur at her hooves. “Basket cases, every last one of you.”

“So where would you go if you were three months away from being declared a full-fledged stallion and just now found out how babies are made?”

Sling took a few moments to respond, still somewhat preoccupied with getting Butterstick’s attention by tapping the crying pony’s body with a forehoof with no success. After her fourth attempt she finally gave up and left the pathetic thing where she was, and started strolling away along with the pegasus. “In the deepest, darkest corner of the Stable that I knew of. And Butterscotch knows a lot of those. He could be anywhere!”

“He can only be in one place at a time,” she countered calmly. “We did a sweep of the residential and agricultural levels six hours ago, so we can rule those out. Levels two through seven don’t have very many places a pony can go if he doesn’t have any business being there, except for the commons areas and we’ve got those locked down until the alert passes. We haven’t done a thorough search of levels fourteen and fifteen yet but that’s only because maintenance gets pretty irate if us dumb security types come barging through during inspections. They tend to just block the halls and doors with their bodies so we can’t walk through.”

Sling’s excessively eager response was swift and tinged with lingering frustration from the week’s stresses and emotional abuses. “I don’t have the time or the patience for their bullshit today,” she howled angrily, her hastened pace overtaking the pegasus’s in a display of slightly unbottled rage. “If they can’t make a hole when I come through, I will.”

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They always laughed.

For some strange, inexplicable reason, whenever she allowed herself to get angry enough to show it, they always laughed. Like she’d uttered the punch line to a joke that everypony but her was a part of.

And today was a bad day for jokes.

“Hey guys!” Socket’s cream-colored body chuckled as he turned his hazel eyes away from her and motioned his head in her general direction, eliciting a similar roar of chuckles from the ten-strong crowd of earth ponies and mares behind him. “Check this out! She—hehehaha—she sounds serious! ‘Get out of the bucking way’ my tail—“

“Oh crap,” was all Windy would have time to whisper under her breath. In the next instant Sling Shot’s horn erupted into a brilliant indigo shimmer, and Socket’s body was flung straight up into the ceiling with enough force to bruise his skull on it, cutting his surprised shout short with a muted grunt of pain before he was dropped back to the floor by gravity.

Stars alive, that felt good.

“Let me make my position a little more clear to you,” she seethed in hot, heated breaths, her mind’s eye focusing her arcane energy flow into a second telekinesis spell in the event that she needed to do exactly what she’d threatened to. “Somepony’s been missing for over a day and I’ve already had all the BS I can stand today. I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. MOVE.”

Ten bodies immediately parted to the sides, their laughter dying in their throats at the sight of Socket writhing on the floor, his forelegs grasping at the pain in his skull. What were once stares of distaste and disdain now bore signs of confusion, fear, and even anger, as if they couldn’t understand why a security mare would resort to physical force to do their job when words weren’t enough. And maybe she had gone a tad overboard with Socket.

But they weren’t laughing at her anymore. At that point, that was all that mattered to her. That and the immense feeling of vindicated relief that flowed through her blood and invigorated her muscles. Whether it was rightfully deserved or not was another story. One Farsight would probably be hearing about later.

Since that time wasn’t here yet, she pushed it out of her mind and strode forward through the maintenance crew, Cloud Wind never more than four steps behind. She had no doubt that they were already planning to tell Farsight before she could even get back to his office, but that was a problem for later. Butterscotch was missing, Butterstick was probably still sprawled on the floor on the fifth level bawling her eyes dry, and she still had eleven and a half hours left to go in her shift. To Tartarus with what anypony else thought of her.

Even if that pony was a friend. “U-uhh, maybe you should call it quits this time, take a sick day or something,” Windy suggested softly as they strode through the corridor, bending around the wall as it bent to the right and funneled off into an intersection ahead. “You went over the line with Socket—“

“I told him he could move, or be moved,” she snapped back quickly, wanting to settle the issue and get the search over with so she could get back upstairs for whatever chewing session Farsight wanted to have. “He chose option B, so that’s what he got. You take the left side, I’ll search th—“

“Sling, I’m serious, you’re not thinking straight!” Windy protested still, ignoring her instructions entirely and instead focusing on whatever she’d decided for the unicorn. “Go practice your magic, take an hour in the gym and work it off, I don’t care, just stop—“

Just get to work, please, Windy! “Not now, ‘Scotch is sitting around somewhere and we need to find him. Now, take the left side—“

Her instructions were ignored a second time, the pegasus more concerned with whatever she’d decided was important rather than the task of finding somepony that could very likely be dead or dying right then and there. “Yes, now! What the hell’s wrong with you?! You’ve never lost your cool like that before, you could have seriously hurt him!! I know everypony treats you like scum to be scrapped off their hooves and it’s not fair or right, but you can’t just go slapping them around like that! You said it yourself, it’s just words to you! Why are you acting like this?!”

She tried. She tried so very hard to keep her mind on task, to just get on with the search and push it away, but the longer Windy yelled and berated her, the harder it became to not think of what Light Tail had screamed at her earlier. At how Comet Star’s colt had treated her, the things he supposedly said to her, about her own mother. And then….

And then she felt the dam holding back ten years of emotional abuse shatter.

“Alright, fine then, ‘MOM’, since you’re so gods-damned interested!” she screamed back, spinning around on her hooves to face the pegasus down. “I’ve been called a slut and a whore to my face for ten bucking years!! All because I had a kid when I was fifteen and still a year away from the G.O.A.T. exam and the three years of job skill classes afterward!! And why?! It’s not like I was the only one getting laid in her free time out of school, I was just the only one stupid enough to get caught at it!!”

Cloud Wind’s eyes shrank back into themselves, perhaps finally realizing that she might have been better off just leaving the matter alone, and she began to put some distance between them in the hopes that she might be able to avoid getting what she asked for. “Wh-whoa, wait a tic, stop—“

“NO!” she shouted into her face, her body stalking forward. “You wanted to know, and now you will!! It’s bad enough that I get treated like a used rag!! I’m yelled at, cussed out, or insulted to my face and I have taken every bit of it and said nothing!! I have not touched a stallion in a decade, and I’m called a dirty whore today regardless, but I take it—“

Cloud Wind’s shock did not last long—she soon squared her body and firmly planted herself onto the floor, her face staring back at the ranting unicorn with the stoic determination she was occasionally capable of showing. “And you shouldn’t have to, but this is not the time for a snit-fit—“

“My daughter should not have to take it!!” she went on, ignoring the tingling in her horn as she began to lose her hold on her anger. “I have let these stupid ponies drag my name and my reputation into the sewage lines for years, and it’s rubbing off on their children and hurting mine!! She should not have to walk these halls and hear other children call her mother the same things their parents do!! She should not have to catch everypony’s distaste and hate for me for one stupid evening I spent on my couch with a coltfriend!!! She has done nothing!!! She deserves better than what everypony’s giving us!!!”

Cloud Wind’s eyes began to lose their fire as she struggled to process what had just been bellowed into her ears. “….what are you talking about?”

A primal, almost animalistic growl vibrated through her throat and into the echo-friendly corridor as the unicorn’s mind fought off the urge to splatter her only friend across the floor. “You know what? Why don’t you go ask her, since you’re more interested in our business than in finding some poor lost kid?!”

If Cloud Wind had anything to say to that, she didn’t get to say it. The minute Sling’s voice stopped speaking, the world was plunged into blackness alongside the plunging, dying sound of hundreds of power conduits suddenly losing all of their energy at once. After that, any pretense of continuing their fight was long forgotten (if not the ill feelings that still lingered).

“…that’s twice this week,” Windy’s voice grumbled darkly, her head ducking down to pull the firing reins of her battle saddle up and locking it in place with a swift tap from her left forehoof. “The damn bugs are probably building a nest right over the exhaust pipes below us.”

The back-up generator began humming to life, and its associated back-up lights slowly began to energize and illuminate the hallways with just enough light for everypony to see where they were going. It would take them a half hour before they really lit up fully, but for now it was still better than shooting blindly in the dark.

And for once, she was actually looking forward to the coming violence. A good chance to work out her rage on something that deserved it. Her issued 10mm pistol cleared its holster in a flash, her magic already grasping onto the slide and pulling it back for a chamber check—

—the dull brass casing of the 10mm jacketed hollowpoint round nestled inside the firing chamber glinted slightly even amidst the dim lighting offered by the back-up lights, and she let the slide snap back forward with a slight tingle of satisfaction. “We’ll check it out while we search L15, then. If those things break the generator we’ll all be taking the Last Journey.”

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She was right on top of the beginning of chapter twenty-seven when the world went to sleep. Her vision was plunged into darkness, the environmental unit stopped humming cool air into the living room, and the air vents were noticeably quieter than they usually were. Thank the stars the oxygen ran on its own separate back-up system designed to kick in if power went out.

That didn’t, however, make up for the fact that she was stuck in the dark, right when the story was getting to this really great part where Starlight had finally found the Princess’s old royal castle after an agonizing three weeks in the Everfree Forest—and had an impending fight with yet another group of cultist ponies. And Mom had never gotten around to teaching her any other spells aside from levitation and telekinesis. A light spell would have been really nifty right now.

With a frustrated sigh, she looped the cloth bookmark back over the binder, sliding it inside the first page of chapter twenty-seven before clasping the book shut and setting it down on the coffee table. The back-up lights were starting to come on, but they weren’t going to give nearly enough light for her to pick up her reading again for a while. And she needed to go to the bathroom anyway.

When there was enough light in the room for her to avoid bumping into stuff, she hopped off the couch and walked over to the door, concentrating her magic on the door controls, aaaaaand—

Nope, not opening, she spat to the stars when the door remained in place after four button presses. Perfect. Now I’m stuck in here.

She refused to accept that. No stupid door was going to keep her penned up like an animal in her own home. She was going to find a way to get it open. It might have been smarter to let the door stay put in case those bugs started swarming through the halls, but if they got in here then she’d stuck. She’d rather have a way out than be sealed in with pony-eating roaches.

She crossed over into the kitchen as quickly as her four hooves would move her, retrieving a flashlight from a cabinet over the stove before dashing back to the door. Her magic flicked across the on switch as she approached, bathing it in white light and affording her a much clearer view of the doorway and the useless controls.

Control panel mounted next to doorway, door moved by big gears and pistons and Celestia knows what else, her brain surmised in quick bursts of thought as her eyes scrutinized the door and everything around it. Door supposed to take explosions and still work, power cables routed to door under the floor…Stable built to outlast pony-wrought Endtimes so Stable-Tec musta counted on power going out now and then….bet it’s got manual controls somewhere—

Her flashlight started poking about the wall surrounding the doorway, looking for any latches or wall panels that she would have otherwise ignored entirely in a typical day—

Presto! she squealed mentally when the light beam fell over a section of wall marked with a pale yellow triangle, with a black exclamation mark in the middle and accented with a red outline. Beneath the mark lay the words “EMERGENCY USE ONLY.” She was pretty sure a power outage and impending biological urges counted as emergencies.

She quickly unscrewed the rubber-coated lens cap of the flashlight until it popped off, allowing the bulb to throw its light out into a general area rather than being focused into a singular direction. She set the cap down on the floor, focusing lens down, and set the still-shining flashlight inside the cap where it could stand stable and give enough light to let her see what she was doing. She then planted her hooves onto the floor in a firm, steady position, and began to tear at the panel with her telekinesis spell.

And dear Luna it was tough! Her first try failed completely, and she smacked herself in the face for forgetting to take the screws out first, but even after that, the panel simply refused to be budged easily. Her next four attempts lasted all of three seconds before it snapped out of her spell field and back into its crevice in the wall. On her sixth attempt she thought she had it as she managed to get one corner out of the hole, but something on the right side kept catching onto something inside her spell’s grasp and keeping the panel from moving any further.

C’mon already, get out! she demanded of the slab of metal, giving it an extra hard tug out of frustration, which was apparently enough to coax it free of its restraints. The cover popped off with a loud crunch, startling her into sending it flying across the room, eventually clanging harmlessly into the kitchen floor.

“…oops,” she mumbled over a nervous laugh, turning back to the hole she’d revealed and enveloping the stick lever within with a telekinesis spell. It proved to be nearly as frustrating as the wall cover, with the added downside of roughly two centuries of age, minimal attention from maintenance staff, and the arduous task of having to engage an untold amount of weight and pressure by sheer force without the assistance of power and hydraulics. It took her roughly four minutes to lift the door up enough for her to consider crawling across underneath, and by then she felt like she’d been running a marathon up and down the stairs. She simply wanted to collapse to the floor and be allowed to die right there.

And yet that annoying detail of a full, pressured bladder begging to release its contents in an acceptable and dignified manner kept her strained, exhausted mind focused on at least finding her way to the washroom before it chose to disregard dignity. And though the space between door and floor was not quite ideal, she was able to squeeze through and enter the slightly brighter confines of the hallway. Now it was just a matter of—

Of telling Grape and Emmy to give me some privacy, she amended her unconscious checklist. Even with most of the hall lights giving off only dim glows, she could easily make out the distinctive outlines of Grape Jam and Emerald’s manes and tails as they gingerly trotted towards her. Grape Jam’s head cocked to one side, likely studying the unicorn filly in front of her as though she wasn’t sure who she was staring at, but Emmy was quicker to recognize her and broke into a light gallop.

“Whoa!” the earth filly squealed in delight as she reached the unicorn and finally got a good look at the door she’d spent the better part of ten minutes prying open. “Figures ya’d find a way to get a door open when ya want out! What’s th’ rush, you coulda made it easier on yerself if ya’d just waited for the power to come back!”

“Can’t wait,” she huffed through a heavy breath as she stumbled around her friends towards the washroom. Still winded out. “Gotta go. Gimme a minute.”

For once, her friends seemed content to give her the space she asked for and simply continued forward. “No biggie,” Grape assured her as she drew close to the door of her home. “We’ll just wait in your living room—“

Light Tail’s heart stopped inside her chest, cold tendrils growing out into her lungs as she imagined the worst possible outcome of the two of them finding Mom’s gun on the coffee table and inadvertently setting it off, and then she suddenly thought better of them trailing her all the way to the washroom entrance. “W-wait, I didn’t say nothin’ about stayin’ put, just…what’re you guys doin’ here? Didn’t anypony tell you we might end up in lockdown ‘fore long?”

“Yeah, we heard,” Emmy’s voice sputtered, dripping with scorn at being told to stay put in one place instead of hanging out with her friends. But her hoofsteps stopped growing distant and began to grow louder and closer, and Light Tail’s heart gradually warmed with relief as Grape’s hooves fell in step behind the earth pony filly. One potential disaster averted. “But we ain’t locked down yet, and ah’m tired of bein’ cooped up alone. Ah’d rather be bored with my friends. And Grape wanted to talk to ya anyways! Ain’t that right?!”

She could almost imagine Grape’s face flooding with embarrassment underneath her coat. “Emm-meeee!” the pegasus whined in a sharp hiss. “I told you not to say anything!”

“Oh, come off it, wouldja?! Ah’m just makin’ sure you don’t forget!”

Their hushed, angry argument carried on in the background, pushed out of her conscious hearing by her own wandering thoughts as she realized that she’d never known Grape to be shy about saying anything to either of them before. She couldn’t imagine that changing now, unless it concerned her on something really important or personal.

And the bathroom was the last place she wanted to be asked any kind of questions like that.

“Well, whatever you wanna ask me, can it wait a minute?” she pleaded again as they reached the washroom door at last, but she didn’t regret enticing them to follow along behind her. She’d rather be embarrassed than heartbroken over seeing them hurt, or worse. “This ain’t exactly the kinda place for important stuff.”

She turned her head towards them, just to see if they’d finally get the unspoken message, and their wide-eyed stares as they realized (belatedly) where the unicorn had led them caused them to shuffle away from the door in a mad dash of embarrassment. “Uhhh yeah!” Emmy agreed with a chipper voice, desperate to look anywhere but at her. She seemed especially interested in the floor right then. “Yeah! Important stuff’s for…important places! Like a couch! Go on, we’re not even here! Right, Jam?!”

“R-right!” Grape sounded off in unison. “Not here! Not here at all! Just…chillin’ out!”

Light Tail allowed herself a few moments of laughter at their expense as she strolled through the doorway, thankful that somepony had neglected to close it before the power went out. Sometimes those two could be as dense as the walls around them. She loved them so regardless. What were friends for, right?

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“Friends are not for use as battering rams,” Cloud Wind growled testily, refusing to come within twenty feet of the unicorn as she tried yet again to get the plate covering for the manual override lever off. And failed.

“We need this damn door open and your skull is the only one thick enough to take the abuse,” she snapped back, her fight with the protective covering giving her voice an added dose of hateful venom. “You won’t feel a thing, I promise.”

“No!” the pegasus bellowed, her voice amplified by the tight confines of the stairwell’s corridor. “Keep your fancy horn magic offa me! I like my skull the way it is!”

For the tenth time, she repeated the silent mind incantation for the telekinesis spell, willing the spell field into existence over the covering, and began to pull at it once more. “I’m not shooting this cover off! Or prying it off with the gun, for that matter, the barrel is worth more than these PipBucks on our front legs! It gets bent and the gun’s useless!”

“Better the barrel than my brain!” Windy shouted back, from what sounded like twenty-five feet away now. “Back! Back I say!”

At last she began to feel a smidgeon of success—the covering’s two left corners actually came away from the wall for about two seconds before the safety latch, long ago rusted into place, became too much for her hold on the spell, and the covering snapped back into place with an almost taunting flair. Her frustration began to boil over into physical actions as she slammed her right front hoof against the covering in despair.

“By Celestia, this is ridiculous!” she screamed to the uncaring Stable walls around her. “Has anypony in maintenance actually maintained any of these manual controls?!”

“Just rip it off, ya wuss!”

“I’m trying, dammit!!” she howled, grabbing at the covering with her front hooves in a fit of rage and beginning to physically pull on the thing in a bid to relief this overflow of anger. “This bucking thing—unnnggh!—is pissing me off!! I can….unnng—I can barely concentrate!!”

Cloud Wind had finally had enough of sitting and waiting for things to happen…that, or she simply didn’t believe that the latches for the covering had rusted over and frozen into place decades ago. She promptly stomped forward and bumped the unicorn aside with nary a care in the world, and began trying the exact same thing that Sling had just been doing. “Oh, by the unholy—step aside and let a real mare handle this, will ya? Wouldn’t want you chipping a hoof.”

Now Windy was beginning to frustrate her almost as much as that stupid plate of metal. She fought her way back into position, but wound up having to share the space with the sky-blue pony as she grabbed at one half of the covering’s edges with both front hooves and her magic, while the pegasus pulled on the upper and right sides. “A real mare?! You’ve been hanging around Steel Side too long, girl! Or do you even notice the lack of certain male body parts between your haunches, you thick-headed mule?!”

“Mule?!?!” Cloud Wind screeched, finally and truly enraged at her friend as she began to double the strength she was putting into her pulling efforts. “That’s it, when I tear this damn thing off I’m shoving it up between your legs!!”

“I’d like to see you try it, you flightless heavyweight!!!”

—SCREE—

“You just wait, hermit-girl!! When I’m done with you you’ll feel pain in places that never see light!!”

“Yeah, well, at least they’ve felt pleasure before in my lifetime—“

—SCREEEEEEEE—

Windy’s body began to drag across the floor as her pulling inevitably drew her closer to the panel. “Oh, now I’m honor-bound to hit you in low places!“

“You wouldn’t even know where to aim back there, feathers-for-brains!!”

—SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE—

“How could I miss what I’ve been trying to tap for three years!?!?”

Her mounting rage flashed away, overridden by a shock that not even a power overload could have produced into her. “WHAT—“

—SCREEEEEEECCHHH!!!!!!—

The cover plating popped off, and in her stunned stupor she’d been totally unprepared for it—her spell field didn’t even register that its target was no longer within its radius, and exerted its full force on the manual lever she’d been trying to reach for the last five minutes. The physical exertions of both mares sent them tumbling backward head over tail across the twelve feet of level flooring and into the first several steps of the stairs behind them as the door slammed open and sent its ear-screeching echoes into the halls around it. The metal plate flew free from their grasp and clanged its way up the stairs as their bodies collapsed onto each other—the pegasus fell on her back, wings spread wide, as the unicorn was plopped down on top of her by inertia and carelessness. Their faces were less than an inch apart, but could not have been more different. Where Sling Shot’s face bore a look of extreme horror and uncertainty, Cloud Wind’s face bared teeth and hate…

…for all of three seconds, before the anger in her eyes gave way to tear-filled glee and school-girl antics as she began to laugh hysterically to the point of having trouble breathing, her saddle-mounted rifle clicking across the floor in tune with her shaking body.

“Oh my stars this is the best prank I’ve ever pulled over your naïve little eyes!!!” she howled with joy, when she finally could speak for a few seconds. “Holy cow you really thought I had the hots for you all week hahAHAHAHAHAAAA—“

But Sling Shot could barely process this confession—her mind was still locked on ‘trying to tap for three years!?!?’, and with their haunches so close together she felt more than small. She felt….

….non-existent. “….y-you…wha…”

The pegasus continued to roar with laughter and shift beneath her, oblivious to the world in general and Sling Shot in particular. “Oh gods—hahahaha—oh gods wait ‘till I tell El-Tee hehehahHAHAHA!!! She’ll just DIE—“

She would later come to believe that some ambivalent, bored deity in the stars above had been watching them all through the morning, waiting for just the right moment to begin alleviating his boredom with a heavy dose of irony, because right at that moment both mares heard amidst Cloud Wind’s non-stop bellowing laughing a terrified, hair-curling scream from somewhere beyond the open doorway that made the hairs of their manes stand up on end. Quite a feat, since Sling kept hers in a braided ponytail.

Cloud Wind’s laughter died as promptly as the bone-chilling scream, and she shifted over onto her belly and scooted out from underneath the unicorn. “…oh gods, I think that was Hacket Wrench…”

Her mind still trying to get past her friend’s raunchy comment that had deflated her bubble of fury, Sling could only steady herself upright and bring her 10mm pistol and flashlight back into her telekinetic grasp as she followed the pegasus through the door and into the fifteenth and final level of the Stable. Windy turned down the right corridor almost immediately, bounding down through the passage as it curved off leftward a hundred feet later, before the gravity of the situation had seeped deeply into her psyche and gave her the incentive to focus on her assigned task once again. “....I’m not seeing any red marks on my EFS—“

“You won’t down here,” Cloud Wind explained quickly, her pace slowing to a quick but careful trot as her rifle locked into place and began following her head movements. It was limited to a thirty-degree field of aim, but at least she could actually aim it instead of having to settle for awkwardly positioning her body to get the bullet to hit in one particular spot. “This is where all the spark generator’s exhaust is funneled and recycled, as well as the water used to keep the arcane rods cool. The pipes have to be shielded with containment talismans pretty heavily to contain the radiation, which wreaks havoc on the PipBuck’s EFS matrix to the point of uselessness. There’s a reason we call the generator levels “The Dungeon”.”

A spark of intelligence finally came to life within her addled neurons. “…that would also block locator tags…and Butterscotch’s has been offline since…Tuesday night? Wednesday morning?”

Sling’s observation caused the pegasus to screech to a halt as the obviousness of it all finally became clear. “…and Spiner said he couldn’t find Hacket’s too…oh stars, how did we overlook this?! That idiot’s been down here the whole damn time!”

The unicorn’s mouth began to part, to utter a warning about keeping silent, and a sharp, rapid set of clicks began to scratch at her ears from the darkened depths of the corridors ahead…and then another set joined in after it, their off-beat crescendo promising grim and violent futures. She didn’t even remember thinking to cock the hammer on her pistol, or slinging the tall, orange crystal-insert iron sights up into her vision.

She would never, ever forget those sounds for as long as she lived.

And neither would Windy. Her belt-fed rifle began to strain against its mount as it sought to accommodate her frantic head movements. “Guess we know what Hacket was screaming about now….”

“Don’t forget about ‘Scotch,” Sling said quietly, her heart beginning to fight with her ribcage as it tried to beat its way out. “We’ll swing by the exhaust pipes, see if they’re jammed up with bug resin or whatever they use to build nests out of, but we’re not leaving until we know for sure if he’s here or not.”

For all the pranking and jesting Windy liked to get up to, she could set herself to dead-serious tasks with robotic precision and dedication when she had to. She trotted past the unicorn, firing rein less than an inch from her open mouth, and began to creep forward at a careful pace. “Taking point,” she whispered back. “Watch our six.”

Sling swung her body around to the other direction, her eyes and flashlight focused more on the vents along the floor and in the ceiling, and after a quick check of her weapon she flicked the pegasus’s rump with her tail to indicate that she was ready to move. Windy’s hooves began softly clomping against the metal beneath them, and Sling Shot was never more than a step behind as she followed along in an awkward walk backwards. All the while, that foreboding sound of chitinous legs skittering about in the darkness continued its song of doom, adding more sets to its step and from more distant places. She was starting to think they were emerging from every conceivable hole in the halls, and she was having a very difficult time getting her heart to do anything other than try to tear itself apart. Her legs began to grow hollow and cold, her fear becoming almost a physical ingredient in her blood as it zipped about within her blood vessels—

—her muscles slacked into pudding, collapsing her to the floor, her hooves pressuring against her ears as dozens of insect legs scratched and scorched against the door beyond the meshed-in security desk—

Stop, brain, she begged of her resurging memory as the darkness began to grow along the hall. Don’t need this right now stoppit—

—their ravenous, guttural chirping billowed through the overhead vent, filling the room with their cries of hunger as she began to cry at the prospect of being slaughtered with nothing more to fight back with than her own hooves and limited combat magics—

Sling felt her rear legs begin to tremble, unconsciously backing herself up against Windy’s backside as her lungs began to struggle for oxygen—

—the walls began to squeeze inward on her, promising her no escape from the razor-sharp mandibles stretching apart at the thought of her flesh beneath her teal-blue coat—

The walls at the corners of her vision began to bend and curve inward, at once stretching and constricting themselves around her into what she swore was a tunnel—

—her lungs stopped working entirely as the thought of her night light’s future without her began to take hold in her broken thoughts—

Her shaky hold on reality was snapped back into sure footing before her memories could overwhelm her entirely with the timely—and emotionally confusing—intervention of Cloud Wind and a strong, enveloping hug that trapped the unicorn within her front legs and pressed their bodies together—

“Bookie, listen to my voice!” Windy’s voice rumbled into her right ear.

Her brain stopped mis-firing its commands at the sound of her old pet name, and her lungs began to work in concert with each other rather than fight with her for what they needed. Her legs, while still buckling, no longer felt as though they would snap in two with a mere brush. And her heart, while still anxious, no longer sought a bloody and fatal escape through her ribs.

“Just breath,” Windy continued to plead, refusing to release her friend from her grasp. “Take a minute, just breath—“

Her lungs obeyed the worded urging, sucking in recycled oxygen from the air and filling her with its cool relief. Once rapidly, then twice in a quick gasp, and then a third time…

….and a fourth, calm, relaxing breath later, she was back in control of herself, if not her wildly running emotions and fear.

“You’ll be fine,” Windy’s voice soothed in as assuring a voice as she could manage. “You’re not in a one-door room, locked up like a misbehaving pet with no way out. You’ve got a gun this time, and I’m not going anywhere. We walked into this mess together, and that’s how we’re leaving. Just focus on my ass, if that helps.”

Windy’s lame attempt at humor broke at least some of the tension in her limbs, but she still couldn’t shake off the sheer terror afflicting her. “Thought we went over this already,” she chuckled back nervously. Her hold on her pistol was firm again, and by the stars if she saw even a hint of those damn things she was squeezing the trigger, subtlety be damned. She felt she needed to see one of them split in half from a 155-grain hollowpoint traveling fourteen hundred feet per second. Maybe then she’d feel safer.

“There you go,” she muttered softly, finally unwrapping her forelegs from the unicorn and returning to her point-mare position. “Back to your old celibate self, that’s better. Just stay calm and focused.”

How can such a carefree pony be so fearless when it counts…

“Easy to say for one whose name pops up in a dictionary when the word ‘courage’ needs an example,” she derided gently, her tail feeling Cloud Wind’s body stalking away from her. She followed along in a backwards walk again, this time keeping her mind from zeroing in on the constant patter of insectoid feet in the dark by thinking of just about everything else. Light Tail, The Mare of the Everfree book she read once a year, the ballistic table for the 10mm’s various loads—

“Everypony gets terrified shitless when the chips are down,” the pegasus muttered back, finally allowing what sounded like apprehension to creep into her voice. “Courage is being scared to death, and saddling up anyway.”

Windy stopped talking after that and simply slinked along through the halls, leaving Sling Shot to ponder the unusually thoughtful words her friend had just uttered…and how much better they made her feel when she began to count each step she took in spite of the fact that she was surrounded by carnivorous bugs and had seen first-hand what they were capable of doing to ponies like herself. Every hoof forward (or backward, in her case) was in direct defiance to what her fear and bladder-emptying urges were telling her to do, and the longer she did it, the more clearly she could concentrate on her task.

Even if she was scared to death to do it.

With her initial terror squared away, they strode through the hall, stopping at each room for a quick peek inside before moving on. Neither of them saw any sign of anypony being attacked, but they held no illusions that such luck would last. In time they came to the end of the corridor, which split off into two more in the left and right directions—

—Windy’s body turned down the right corridor, and Sling curved her body around to her left as she followed along, continuously lashing her tail outward to keep the pegasus within touching distance and to keep her oriented. They’d practiced this routine ever since the last radroach outbreak, and it was paying off already in terms of emotional relief as well as actual security—

—her light flashed across a vent in the corridor across from her, just in time to spot the antennae of a radroach emerging from its crevice, followed quickly by the rest of its chitinous and creepily oversized thorax and body—

—a warm, tingly stream began to flow within her horn as she silently discharged her hearing protection spell, and when that same feeling stretched out to her ears and Windy’s she settled her pistol’s sights on the disgusting bug’s body and squeezed down on the trigger—

—the muffled boom of the gunshot was overshadowed by the brilliant muzzle flash erupting from the barrel, and she immediately regretted not fetching a suppressor from her armory before coming down here as she noted several minute details of warning signs and lettering along the wall that she could no longer see in the dim lightning. Even hearing the bullet crack through its exoskeleton and tear meaty chunks out of the disgusting bug little to re-assure her over the loss of her low-light adjusted vision. Had she been aiming for its head and missed, she wouldn’t have been able to see it well enough to try a second shot. Fortunately, its terrified shrieks of pain were brief, and she didn’t hear it moving or chirping afterward. One down, hundreds more to go.

“Was going to ask about that fancy spell of yours,” Windy’s voice chimed in, swelled with relief. “That thing would have made us both deaf without it.”

“Should have grabbed a suppressor, my night vision just got shot to hell,” she berated herself darkly, taking a moment to study how well the orange-crystal inserts glowed against the dark background in front of her, though with a flashlight in her grasp as well they were likely overkill. “Thank the stars for flashlights and night sight inserts.”

“You’ll need them in a minute, that shot will probably bring the swarm right down on us,” the pegasus countered. “I got two hundred five-five-six rounds in my ammo belt, what have you got?”

“Sixty rounds across five mags, including the one in the gun,” she answered bitterly after a quick mental count of her ammunition. “Enough to sweep this level if we watch our shots, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Shoulda brought Grayhawk with you, that handcannon could kill three with one shot if you aimed it right.”

The thought of her family heirloom nestled in its holster on her traveling saddle, instead of at her side down here where she’d wished it was, brought her a pang of regret, but the logical part of her brain that still worked quickly assured her otherwise. “No, too much recoil and muzzle blast for what we’re shooting at. We oughta be working with what we have instead of wishing for something else.”

“…good idea,” the gray-haired pony agreed as her body slung around a corner to Sling’s right, and then halted in place. “Speaking of which—“

—Cloud Wind’s rifle began barking in carefully aimed, semi-automatic shots, cutting off her own speech as its twenty-two caliber bullets soared across the hall and tore into the hard outer shells of her targets. Despite their small size, the rounds did an impressive amount of damage, often tumbling over inside the insect and shredding it apart from the inside out. From her rearguard position, Sling’s flashlight spotted a second radroach emerging from the vent, pushing its slain swarm mate out of its path as it turned towards the unicorn—

—a second shot from her pistol pinged off of the floor directly in front of it, but portions of the jacketed hollowpoint still managed to find and sever one of its antennae—

—a slight nudge of the sights brought the three glowing orange dots directly beneath its head before the gun roared again, and the bullet obliterated it and continued on directly through the body, her flashlight revealing an explosion of fluids from the rear end of its abdomen—

—a third radroach skittered out into the hall of death, apparently eager to join its brethren in the insect afterlife, and she obliged it with a single shot to its thorax as it somehow managed an awkward stand on four of its rear legs. Her flashlight revealed a ragged, gooey hole in its front as it collapsed to the floor—

—Windy’s rifle went click! after its tenth round, proving the ancient adage that such a sound would be the loudest one would hear in a gunfight.

“Frig, jammed!” the pegasus shrieked in a panic, and immediately backed herself into the corner, brushing Sling’s rump with the side of her body on the way. “Cover me!”

With no other insects immediately eager to leap out into certain death, Sling twisted her body around ninety degrees to her right—

—her flashlight revealed a sight that made her glad for the mere three bugs she’d had to dispatch, as she saw close to a dozen of the things a hundred feet down the hall, crawling over the seven corpses that Cloud Wind had created in roughly four seconds of firing.

Calm down, saddle up—

—her first shot rang true, completely separating the head from the thorax and creating another obstacle for the remaining eleven insects to clamber over. Her next round was less true, but found the backside of a radroach that had made it over the pile and split its hard-shell abdomen down the middle as it died in place. Her third shot missed its intended target but managed to smash into the underside of another one as it attempted to fly up and over its comrades, sending it into a spinning backflip and a soundless demise—

— Cloud Wind’s hooves smacked the side of her rifle out of frustration as the bolt slipped off and back into what sounded like a jammed chamber. “Godsdammit, I swear all these guns were built by unicorns, all these stupid small moving parts—“

--her fourth and fifth shots whacked into one bug each as they cleared over their dead and managed to make it three feet beyond the pile, splattering one’s head and leaving the other with its left side so badly mangled that it would likely die where it lay paralyzed in a minute or two anyway. Any other sentient beings might have taken the death of half their number as a sign that their plan wasn’t going too well and head for greener pastures, but radroaches were not terribly concerned with their own self-preservation. The remaining six—no, seven, she amended—simply continued with their goal of reaching the two ponies they’d found, intent on feasting on their lightly-coated flesh even if it killed them.

She indulged their fatalistic desires with the last four rounds in her weapon, taking out two with one shot each, blowing the head and part of the frontal thorax off of a third and completely missing her last target. The round ricocheted off of the floor, but thankfully sailed on down the hall and ultimately smashed itself apart against a storage crate that had been left out.

Still left with four threats rapidly approaching with renewed vigor (or anticipation at an impending meal), she shifted a small portion of the spell field holding the pistol and hit the magazine release with a solid tap—

—flicked the gun off on its side to help sling it out of the way, as this particular pistol had a rough magazine well and didn’t always like to release magazines properly—

—floated a fresh magazine of twelve rounds up and into the grip as it tilted back upright, and then shifted the top rear of the spell field over the slide and racked backwards on it, causing it to snap back into battery and strip a round into the chamber. One of the four radroaches chose that moment to unlock its wings from its backside and attempt to leap across the remaining forty feet of floor and sink its mandibles into whatever part of her it reached first—

—she snapped off a quickly-aimed shot, not even waiting for her grip to settle before squeezing the shot off, but was rewarded with a particularly gruesome effect as the bullet sailed right into the center of its head and blew it into dozens of nasty little bits. The bullet continued on, bouncing off the ceiling and then into the floor, even as the sights swung over to the next target—

—her shot was off-center, taking out a chunk of its rear abdomen rather than the back of the thorax, and the creature responded with an aggressive screech as it quickened its pace in a dash to attack her before it died—

—Windy’s rifle finally clacked shut into full battery, and the pegasus rushed forward to join her beleaguered friend in finishing off the stragglers, putting one round into each of the remaining three bugs in roughly two seconds with expert timing and aim, splattering their innards into starry patterns across the floor and ending the shooting gallery…for the moment.

With Windy back in action, Sling swung her attention back to the hallway on her left, and was only briefly relieved at the lack of additional living radroaches her flashlight found. If just the two of them had just run into almost twenty of the things already, how many where there in the rest of the Stable?

“Hell, even the last outbreak wasn’t this bad starting out,” Windy heaved in heavy breaths, lightly exhausted from her panic attack in having to clear her rifle malfunction with her bare hooves. “Surprised level 14 isn’t flooded with the damned things, that’s the warmest place in the entire stable. I really miss my EFS right now.”

“Let’s just find Butterscotch and get him upstairs to the infirmary,” she snapped back, not willing to trust that those three bugs were the only ones hiding in that particular little vent. “We can wipe these things out afterward—“

Their luck finally took a turn for the better for once today. As Windy began to canter down the corridor of bug carcasses they’d created, the earth pony they’d been searching for finally popped into the cone of light shining out of her saddle-mounted flashlight from a room in the far distance. Sling’s ears picked up his heavy, pained breathing and briefly took her eyes off of her fire zone to see what was ailing him.

His right rear leg was hastily bandaged, the result of having to work with hooves and teeth and without the benefit of a unicorn’s magic, and the bandage itself was heavily stained with crimson which streaked down all the way to his unshorn fetlock and even managed to cover a portion of his butterscotch sundae cutie mark. His hobbled walk, despite the fresh injury, was quick with fear and panic, desperate to escape the hell that his hiding place had become.

“I…I had this epiphany all of a sudden,” Butterscotch’s shaky voice huffed as he eyed the pile of mutilated insects in his path. “That maybe I might…I might be a trifle safer if I try not to piss you girls off anymore and apologize for you having to come grab me….”

A piece of his hide missing, bleeding, terrified, and afraid of his sister, and he still manages to crack jokes, she thought to herself, unable to keep from snickering at his words. “Worry more about what your sister will do to you in a few minutes. All this, because she finally got the guts to tell you how ponies make babies?”

That thought gave him pause, as his legs froze in place with one leg gingerly hovering over the first of the slain bugs…and then carefully cleared the remaining space and touched down onto the floor. “….nah, still safer than you two. Just…give me a gun before you leave me with her? So I can end my suffering on my own?”

Windy had little time for his jesting. Now that they knew he was alive and in relatively okay condition, there was still one other pony to account for. “Where’s Hacket Wrench? We thought we heard him a minute ago, did you see him down here?”

His face shifted into a veiled sadness at the mention of Hacket’s name, and his stumbling gait slowed considerably. “…y-yeah. He was walking me upstairs when the power went out. Those damn bugs started pouring out of the floor vents, took a bite out of my leg. He shoved me into a supply room, locked the door….even with all those things leaping on him like fleas, he managed to save my life by trading his, they…they were tearing him up bad. Took a minute to dress the leg, was working on the lock when you started shooting. There were a lot more of these things before he locked me in, they musta taken him off somewhere…”

“….shit,” the pegasus hissed through her clenched jaw, her eyes pressed shut to block out what Sling assumed to be tears of anger. “…let’s get out of here before they come back. Nothing we can do for him now…”

Another widow, none of them added, lest the air of dread grow thicker and harder to bear. Another kid without a father…

Sling almost didn’t hear herself speak, but her cracking voice made the pain clear regardless as her memories began to conjure up those distant images of a poor colt she’d found in four bloody pieces. “…by Celestia, not again, why….”

--------------------------------------

The call of nature answered at last, she washed up as quickly as she could manage in the dark, and then made for the open door. She stopped just short of actually going through, though, when her ears picked up the familiar voices of her friends in the hall chattering away with each other. One wasn’t really supposed to eavesdrop on their friends, but she had a gut feeling that she’d get something useful out of it if she stayed put for a few seconds, so she simply lingered beside the door, careful to keep inside the shadows so that her own wouldn’t show up in what little light there was.

“—an’t do it, Em,” Grape Jam’s voice pleaded bashfully. “It’s a stupid question anyway.”

“It’s only stupid if ya keep it to yerself,” Emerald’s voice insisted in return. “It ain’t like we already know the answer anyway.”

“What if her mom never told her?” the lavender-coated pegasus continued to protest, and now Light Tail had a pretty good idea what they were talking about.

She’d asked that question before herself, once. She was still waiting for an answer three months later.

A pretty good sign that she wouldn’t get one.

With an exaggerated sigh to hide the stab of guilt that was inching into her heart, she casually strolled onward into the doorway where her friends could actually see her. “Hey, whatcha talkin’ about?”

“Eeehhh…nothin’, really,” Jam offered as a convenient lie after a couple of seconds’ thought.

But this time Emerald wasn’t letting their confrontation-shy friend off the hook. “…ahh, fine, then, I’ll ask, ya big baby,” she grumbled to herself. “You uh….you ever ask your mom about your dad?”

“Emmy—“

“Nope,” she lied swiftly, before Jam’s admonishment could even get started. “Get the feeling Mom doesn’t wanna talk about it, so I don’t ask. You shouldn’t either.”

Her sharp tongue caused Emmy to shrink away from her along the wall, her eyes betraying the hurtful sting she’d inadvertently delivered. “H-hey, ah didn’t mean it like that—“

“It’s Sun Star,” Jam interjected quickly in an effort to smooth things over. “And Lip Jam, too. We heard them sayin’….things, about your mom. Things we never heard them say before—“

“That’s she a slut and a dirty whore?” Light Tail heard a voice from her throat roar in a fit of quiet rage that made her wonder if it was her voice or somepony else’s. “That I’m a ‘mistake’? Those kinds of things?”

Now it was Grape Jam’s turn to be afraid of the unicorn filly. “…y-you know?”

“Sun Star couldn’t help but share it with me last week when he “bumped” into me,” that angry voice continued, unabated by her friend’s growing apprehension towards her. “When I was tryin’ to get to the bathroom, the little creep. Either of you know what those words mean?”

Neither of her friends could bring themselves to answer her right off, and for a moment she allowed herself the illusion that she might finally get an answer to a question that was burning her for over eight days.

And then the illusion was broken by the reality that she was actually quite a bit smarter than most every other filly and colt in her class, and that it was silly to think that her friends would know something that she didn’t. “…we was kinda hopin’ you would,” Emmy said with trepidation. “Yer a lot smarter than we are, we’d thought ya know…”

“’Cause if we’re gonna get back at ‘em for it, it might be good to know what it means first, right?!” Jam added next, trying to change her facial expression into something placating and failing. “…r-right?”

Her slight disappointment at having her question evade the answers she sought was short-lived—hearing how much that angry, low voice was scaring them was enough to make her will it away now that she realized that it was coming from her, and not some invisible dark spirit lingering in her shadow. She shoved the last of her rage back into the depths of her brain, her eyes no longer willing to look into theirs out of shame. “….sorry, guys,” she sighed heavily. “I just…it ain’t right. It makes me real mad just thinkin’ about it, and I don’t even know what it means. But I feel like I ought to. Nopony ever treats my mom right, ‘cept Aunt C. I’m startin’ to wonder if SS and LJ are just copyin’ whatever the adults are sayin’.”

She couldn’t see their faces, only the floor, so she couldn’t read their eyes and their expressions and tell if anything she said was making them feel even slightly better about how she’d just treated them. But when Emmy started talking again, the slight apologetic tone in her voice made her feel a little better. “…ya might be right ‘bout that. Ah remember when yer Mom still foalsat for some ponies, ‘fore she stopped last year. This one night she was foalsittin’ Softfeather for Missus Pillow, didn’t work out too well since Softie didn’t want to do a durn thing yer Mom told her to. Pillow came back, saw her livin’ room wrecked, and started callin’ yer Mom the same things we heard Sun Star and Lip Jam say. Said she’d had no clue ‘bout kids other than havin’ ‘em, and that can’t be right ‘cause you don’t get grounded near as much as the rest o’ us.”

“That’s only cuz I listen,” Light Tail muttered back, still not willing to face her friends in the eye. “Amazin’ how many problems that keeps you out of when you do it. You oughta try it sometime.”

It had been as a simple statement of fact and honest advice, but Emmy seemed to take it as an intentional—but light-hearted—insult, and her apprehensive voice vanished with the return of her boisterious, fearless self. “Hey, ah coulda fixed that enviro mental box!” she shouted back defiantly. “How wuz ah supposed ta know crossin’ two stupid wires could make it explode?!”

“You could’ve tried listenin’ to your dad when he said ‘stop’, silly,” Grape Jam laughed, the memory helping to soothe much of the fear and hurt that Light Tail had unintentionally inflicted. “He fixes the things for a living.”

“He coulda said somethin’ ‘bout it instead of just yellin’ at me!”

Now Light Tail was starting to laugh with Jam at the memory of how Emmy had shown up at school the very next morning with her singed mane cut almost down to the coat and her two forelegs wrapped in gauze bandages. “Yer both too darn stubborn to listen to anypony, I don’t know why he even tried!”

“That ain’t true!” Emmy challenged back, but she was far from insulted. If anything, she seemed to be getting a kick out of being the butt of their teasing this time around. Maybe to try to make up for making her mad earlier, which wasn’t even her fault in the first place. Kinda made her feel even guiltier, actually. “Ah listened to ya when ya said we ought not to plan our pranks and stuff in the diner no more, right?”

“That was three days ago, of course you’d say that after all the trouble we got into over those firecrackers!” Jam shot back with a gleeful chuckle as Light Tail began to walk back to her living quarters. “I learned more about boys’ anatomy than I ever wanted to! Just GROSS!”

“Hey, at least we know he ain’t gotta squat to pee anymore!” the red-coated earth filly squealed evilly. “Ah wuz startin’ to think he was a girl, the way he went on and on ‘bout us that one time last month! “You girls do nothin’ but giggle all the time and you get cooties on everything and you get your own bathrooms and everypony keeps tellin’ us to be nice to you fillies!” Or did ya forget that little talk of his already?!”

“I remember the creepy doofus following me all the way to the bathroom while he was saying it, uuuggggh!!” Jam shrieked with an audible shudder of her tiny wings. “I swear there’s something wrong with him, it’s like he’s obsessed with seeing what the filly’s washroom looks like!”

“Ya might be right, he followed you two clowns there and that takes all kinds of crazy ta start with!” Emmy laughed heartily, her hoofsteps close behind her. “He just avoids me like th’ plague, maybe he’s got your cooties!”

Her face burned with embarrassment for reasons she couldn’t even fathom, and she wanted to get off this creepy subject before it could get really weird. “Hey, if we’re gonna talk about Sun Star, why don’t we try and figure out what we’re gonna do to him this time?” she suggested as the trio finally reached the door to her living quarters, and she quickly squeezed herself back inside underneath the partially-raised door. “Oh, and watch yer wings, Jam, this door’s a tight fit. It was hard enough makin’ it move at all.”

“Bah, she’ll be fine,” Emmy dismissed her concerns, her voice shifting downward and under the door as she dropped to the floor and scooted herself through. “She’s like a cat, real limber and athletic and stuff. Ah bet she’s more earth pony than pegasus.”

“It’s called ‘working out’, Emmy,” Grape Jam snarled back, unknowingly aiding her friend’s argument by scooting down underneath the door, and emerging into a standing position on the other side in a single stride within the glow of Light Tail’s upturned flashlight, whereas her friends had to scoot over completely before standing up in a separate movement. “You—unngf—you earth ponies might be naturals at this stuff, but the rest of us gotta work at it.”

“….ummm…yeah, sure,” Light Tail’s dumbfounded voice spoke a moment later. “…whatever you say…cat.”

The pegasus blinked in confusion as she began to scrutinize herself in search of whatever it was that her friends were staring at. “…what, is there somethin’ wrong?”

“Yeah,” Emmy answered calmly, but then started to snicker in short fits as she continued. “Where’s that can of crazy ya drank this mornin’?! Ah want some!”

“What?!” Grape Jam asked again, still confused at their reaction to her graceful entry through the door, and Light Tail decided on a whim to start searching Mom’s bookcase for a couple of books for her friends to read while they waited for the power to come back on. Their reading level wasn’t quite on par with hers, but she was pretty certain there was still something on those shelves they could dig into and stay out of trouble.

And away from Mom’s gun on the coffee table…

…and I bet I could find out what those ugly words mean in that thick dictionary! she realized in the next moment when her eyes fell upon the faded leather tome stuffed away at the top of the bookcase, near a section of the top shelf marked “References”. Crud, why didn’t I think of that sooner!?

She reached up with her telekinesis spell and plucked the heavy book out as a short test of whether Mom was truly right about how weight could affect a spell, and was rewarded with what felt like a hoof or a griffon’s claw tugging softly at her horn as she flitted it about above her. But it wasn’t that bad, and it wasn’t that much heavier than Mom’s gun. Maybe I oughta start using telekinesis more often…

Her delighted skip towards the couch didn’t go unnoticed. As Emmy’s mouth bit down on the lens cap holding the flashlight upright, Grape Jam’s hoofsteps began to follow along behind the unicorn. “….uhhh, El-Tee, that’s a dictionary, not Daring Do. It might actually make this blackout more boring, if that’s even possible.”

“A dictionary defines words, dodo,” she huffed as she leapt up onto the couch and dropped the dictionary down in front of her. “Words like the ones everypony keeps calling my mom, and I’m gonna find out what they mean so I can have a reason to be mad at them.”

Jam followed her up onto the couch without hesitation, ignoring Emmy’s epic struggle to keep the flashlight from slipping out of its lens cap as it teetered between her teeth. “….that really bugs you, doesn’t it? Can’t you let it go for a bit?”

“You’re the one that said we oughta know what they mean if we wanna get properly mad,” she reminded her tersely, flipping the dictionary open—

—and silently cursed herself as she found the words on the paper difficult to make out. It was still too dark to read much of anything without that flashlight! Stupid stupid stupid! “Hey Emmy, bring that flashlight over wouldja?”

“Ohm rhyin’!” Emerald’s occupied mouth tried to complain, but the badly garbled words only made them laugh instead. “Annn—“

Emerald’s voice was drowned out by a sharp, guttural screeching from the hallway outside, and Light Tail’s ears flinched as it tore at her brain. She slapped the dictionary shut and rose up from the couch, intending to hit the floor running and give that ‘bot a piece of her mind and a swift kick to his chassis. “Spiner, quit draggin’ your arms on the floor, Hacket Wrench hates buffin’ those scratches out—“

—her shouting voice promptly died in her throat as her eyes fell across the slab of dim light protruding in front of the door, and on the hideously massive (and hideous looking) bug that effortlessly skirted through the door she’d left open in an ironic attempt to escape the disgusting things if they’d gotten in—

—Emmy was the second pony to see it come through…and the first pony that the bug fixated its attention on. Its pincer-ringed maw screeched again as it began to close in on the red earth pony, almost as if the sight of her had enlivened its tiny brain.

Emmy’s proper and dignified response was to shriek at the top of her lungs like the little filly that she was, dropping the flashlight in her terror and allowing the light beam to roll about the room as she began to backpedal away from it as quickly as her four little legs could take her—

—but the bug was quicker. Even as Emmy had almost reached the kitchen behind her, the bug had managed to close the distance, chirping and screeching the whole way, and Light Tail’s lungs began to shut down as she leapt across the gap onto the coffee table, furiously tearing at the bag Mom had left in her care—

“Emmy!!!” Jam screamed, bounding off of the couch and rushing towards her imperiled friend—

—the bug’s chirping reached a crescendo as its wings snapped up in anticipation of its kill—

—Light Tail’s breaths came in short, terrified gasps as she unceremoniously dumped the bag’s contents onto the table and tossed it aside, her magic grappling with the gun an—

—Mom’s marking spell surged through the spell field and through her horn, leaving a lingering chill on the left side of her face as she swung the gun’s cylinder open and started jerking spilled bullets into its holes—

“Holy crap it’s hideous!!!” Emmy finally managed to scream once she’d gotten over her wordless shrieking, and she could hear the filly smashing her way over the dinner table to get at something from the cabinet. “An’ it’s bigger than Teakettle’s cat—“

“Emmy, RUN—“

Light Tail’s control over her magic was beginning to falter as the bug screeched again, and its feet continued to scratch its way across the carpet in its mindless trek to ki—

—Emmy’s red coat, stained in a darker shade of crimson as the bug’s pincers tore at her throat and cut her shrieks short into a bubbling, dying gasp—

“No,” she cried softly amidst her frustrated attempts to get her own spell under her control. The darn spell wouldn’t grab the stupid bullets like she wanted and she could only get one in the cylinder and she needed more or her friends were going to di—

“No no no no c’mon C’MON—“

—her spell faltered further, no longer able to concentrate on multiple objects, and the bullet fell back onto the table with an almost taunting flair. A horrified howl escaped her throat as her mouth shot forward and bit down on the back of the bullet—

“Too slow sucke—oh Luna it can JUMP—“

“Shut up Em just RUN—“

“Screw that, GJ, ah’m gonna KILL IT—“

Her eyes began to grow slightly blurry, her mouth struggling to find an empty hole in the cylinder as her friends tried to get away from the bug—

—something from the kitchen banged off of the stove and smacked against a cabinet on its way down—

—the bullet in her mouth dropped into the cylinder at last, and she nudged it shut with her snout and lifted her head up towards the kitchen, the gun’s green sights sliding up into place almost without thought—

—the vent over the coffee table tore loose from the ceiling, crashing down onto the table and startling her into losing control of her spell completely—

—a second bug dropped into her tiny world through the new opening, coming down on her back, its legs slipping and sliding down her flanks as its pincers began to pinch down on her neck—

—her body took control of itself after that, jumping and bucking about like a wild animal, her throat turning itself hoarse as it shrieked and screamed in wordless, bloodcurdling terror, her mind losing all focus on higher thinking functions and desiring only to put as much distance between her and large, hideous bugs as she could, as quickly as she could manage—

—the bug’s sickening carapace vanished after her fourth buck, though she could still feel its squirming, tendril-like legs along her sides as she attempted to jump down to the floor—

—and ended up tripping herself before she could even get airborne, tumbling over the edge instead and hitting her head against a table leg on her way down. An incredible and deep-reaching ache began to pound at her skull, turned into a sharp, hot pressure that forced her eyes shut as she stumbled away from the table in clumsy rolls and half-steps before giving up entirely and sinking onto her back.

When she dared open her eyes again, the bug had managed to find its way on top of the coffee table, and its head cocked off to one side for a moment as it studied her writhing, heaving form—

—it leapt forward, its chirping searing through her ears and into her pounding brain, and her eyes snapped shut and plunged her back into a willing darkness as her screams became the only sound in her world.

Comments

[Deathpony]

good chapter

[KDarkwater]

1217081 It appears that I have surprised you after all. :) I hope I can continue to do so.

[DreadTheDarkness]