Fallout Equestria: Old World Dreams

by KDarkwater

Chapter 5

5

Hearth’s Warming Eve was a time forever reserved for exclusive consumption of hot chocolate. The cold winter chill, the ever-constant presence of falling snow, and the alluring approach of twilight as the last light of Celestia’s sun faded from the world, all of it combined made for an exemplary sight in the countryside horizon. She would plop herself onto the couch, a steaming mug in her magical grasp and the fleeting kiss of the winter chill slipping through the pane window, and sip at the sweet beverage as she watched the pink sky grow darker and darker as the sun moved about its merry way in the celestial skies above Equestria, losing herself in memories of years past.

A perfect example was last year. The holiday had been spent in Canterlot to attend a royal-sponsored play of the founding of Equestria, with the Princess’s own protégé and her entourage of friends playing the major roles to boot. It had been an excellent performance, one worthy of the harmony and unity of Equestria’s ponies and a testament to Celestia’s impeccable wisdom and guidance. She even got to talk to her for a few minutes! She’d been surprised to find the co-reagent of Equestria a far more laid back pony than her royal title would have suggested. She’d even found a moment to ply a short, amusing prank upon a mildly bickering couple nearby by subtly shifting a sprig of mistletoe onto an overhanging decorative curtain above them, and then loudly suggesting the two “kiss and make up” according to the ancient earth pony tradition of finding oneself and their lover beneath the plant amidst a winter snowfall.

Naturally, it worked to a brilliant T. None could bring themselves to challenge the advice of the Sun, and the two admitted afterwards it had been silly to bring up such a minor conflict at a royal play, of all times. The princess was amused, and perhaps even elated, to see that her teasing had brought about a more joyful ending to the argument than what might have otherwise transpired. And she’d even drawn a passing waitress to her with no less than eight freshly brewed mugs of hot chocolate. It had been among her most treasured moments of the year.

This year, no such extravagant or high class events were sought or wanted. This year, all she wanted was to stay home, enjoy the company of family and friends, and continue her yearly tradition of drinking habits.

A tradition often challenged, unfortunately, by the housecat’s antics.

"Quit it, Sparky," Sling growled at the fourteen-pound, orange-furred feline pouncing at her swishing tail. As cats were wont to do, however, the animal simply ignored her and continued to bat and claw at her tail whenever the mood struck him, which was fairly often.

Could be worse, I guess, she sighed in defeat, this being the third time she’d repeated the command to the same indifferent effect. Could have a hole in the roof, or a—

The mere act of imagining less desirable outcomes seemed to make them become reality rather than wild imaginings. A high-pitched squeal pierced its way through her eardrums from the kitchen, followed very quickly by the sound of a hoof smacking into flesh and bone—

"By Celestia’s mane, wait!" El-Tee’s voice commanded, but the girlish, laughing squeal of her words did not give her words much weight.

"What for?" Windy’s voice countered sweetly. "They’re already done, quit fussing over them and let’s chow down."

An evil thought quickly took hold in her mind, one she was willing to indulge in. "Sparky, go bug El-Tee!" Sling Shot shouted at the cat’s twitching ears, and the massive, bushy-tailed feline did listen to this particular command, darting away from the couch and into the kitchen to begin tormenting his second favorite pony to his heart’s desire. El-Tee’s admonishing cries soon turned into surprised and slightly terrified shouts as the cat’s claws began to find purchase in her mane and coat.

"Ow quit it ow ow ow stoppit—"

Sling Shot filled the living room, and likely the entire house, with an evil, demented cackle befitting an evil and demented sorceress and resumed sipping at her mug of hot cocoa, turning her eyes back to the dwindling pink horizon of the world outside the window and bemoaning its short existence. In a few minutes the pink shade would darken into a lavender underbelly in the dark blue sky, and soon after that the sky itself would become a dark cobalt blue canvas upon which the stars would begin to appear. Contrary to most ponies’ beliefs, Luna did not move and create the stars above, though she had little doubt that the younger alicorn princess often envisioned such abilities in her dreams.

A rapid series of hoofsteps scoffed across the carpeted floor in the living room in the middle of her misty-minded longings, drawing her attention away from the window at last—

—Light Tail’s body was zipping out of the kitchen in a fast-paced backwards run, constantly rising up on her rear legs to bat away the cat’s lunging pounces with her forelegs in a wild display of panic that drew her into a prolonged bout of laughter. Her own daughter, terrified of a cat (admittedly, a fairly big one) and play fighting with it as if her life depended on it? Too much. She had to set her mug down on the coffee table, her hold on her magic was faltering with every passing moment.

Sparky was not about to let his prey (playmate?) escape so quickly. With the speed that only a feline could make look easy, he dashed around her to cut her off from her intended point of escape, and for good measure leapt up and slashed at her hindquarters to make sure she knew it. With a yelp the filly spun around to face her tormentor, her forelegs constantly rising up briefly to ward off potential strikes as the cat lashed out at her in quick swipes. It was much like watching wild deer bicker and fight over a pile of crushed acorns.

Eventually El-Tee began to circle around to her left in short, quick hops, blocking two additional strikes to her chest with her right foreleg, and that was when Sparky decided to start fighting dirty. His next attack was not at her body, but the forelock of her mane, part of which was hung out off to the side of her left eye. The additional fourteen pounds of weight pulling down on her mane brought Light Tail to a halt almost instantly, and within two seconds she’d fallen to the floor, yelping and yelling in pain as the hair was nearly pulled from her crest—

—Sparky’s body quickly bounded around her head to the back of her neck, where he quickly grabbed hold of her with all four legs and began kicking the living daylights out of her with his hind legs, lightly gnawing and swiping at the back of her head at the same time. Light Tail’s resistance faltered quickly.

"Ow ow OW okay okay you win you win stoppit—"

His goal of the moment completed to his satisfaction, Sparky promptly halted his attacks and pattered away on four amused and haughty feet, purring loudly in satisfaction as he made his way towards his favored cushion in the corner of the living room. Light Tail dared to do little more than glare at the retreating cat as she rolled upright onto her belly, tucking three legs in beneath her while her right foreleg went to work dusting off her mane and neck (and probably checking for unintentional cuts or scrapes).

Sling could hardly breathe, she was laughing so hard. She wasn’t even aware of her left foreleg tapping the couch pillow in her aimless, uncontrollable joy. Oh, how she loved to see her night light overpowered by a simple housecat! Particularly given how much pain and effort she endured to birth her into the world! Tears slid across her cheeks as she howled and cackled in her daughter’s general direction, and soon she couldn’t even breathe correctly.

Even Cloud Wind had a chuckle at her expense as she sauntered into the living room with a plate of freshly baked walnut brownies and chocolate chip cookies. This many sweets weren’t the usual after-dinner dessert affair, but Hearth’s Warming Eve was a special night of the year. And the brownies in particular were so very scrumptious looking….

"Wow, he even scratched your butt this time," she snickered, taking more careful steps as she came near El-Tee in the event she decided to lash out at him in vengeance. "My kind of cat."

"Traitor," El-Tee growled back, shifting her body about so that her hindquarters were no longer touching the floor. "Why didn’t you help me out back there?!"

"Hey, I had other things on my mind," she said with a laugh, gingerly stepping past her with care and continuing on to the coffee table, and gently slid the plate off the top of her skull when she reached it three seconds later.

"I swear, you’re only here for the brownies every year," she sneered back, slowly scooting herself across the floor to join the two mares near the table.

"That is not true!" Windy rebuffed with a feigned veil of hurt. "Why, just the other day I was talking with your mom about how awesome it would be if the cat actually knocked you out this year—"

"And did you two even clean up in here?!" the child continued to ramble, as if purposefully ignoring the pegasus as her forelegs began to swipe at the scattered pieces of paper wrapping and empty cardboard boxes strewn about the living room. "And you whine to me about my room?!"

With her daughter’s attention more focused on chewing out her mother and friend rather than keeping an eye on her plate of baked goods, both Sling and Windy took the opportunity to lift a brownie off the top of the pile. The mere presence of Sling’s magic encompassing the snack drew Light Tail’s attention back to the table, but by then it was already too late to stop it—Sling merely floated it back into her eagerly-waiting maw and bit half the brownie off in a single gulp.

"Hey!" the filly protested loudly as the mares quickly scarfed down their first treat. "Just once, could you guys wait a minute, is that so hard!?"

"Oh dear Celestia, it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever been asked to do," Windy answered promptly, even going so far as to snap her jaws down on a cookie at the edge of the plate and slurping it up in a single movement. "Seriously, I struggled for all of like, twenty seconds just carrying the plate. You’re lucky it made it here at all."

"And you bake an absolutely sublime layer of fudge on these things," Sling added, just before she broke off another quarter-piece from her brownie and swallowed it. "I swear it’s almost like some thick chocolate milk you slathered on. The walnuts are rather crunchy this year too. I still think you should’ve gotten a cooking cutie mark by now."

Seeing the folly of further arguing on a day that was supposed to celebrate the unity and harmony of Equestria’s ponies, Light Tail finally gave up and allowed her head to slump onto the coffee table as she mindlessly levitated a brownie towards her. "I think you only get those for a talent you’re naturally good at. It took me a year just to stop burning stuff in the oven."

The last piece of Sling’s brownie popped into her mouth as she mulled over the squirt’s words of wisdom. It wasn’t exactly a secret, per se, but fillies and colts were not among the most patient of life forms in Equestria. Desperate to find a part of themselves unique from everypony else, they would often destroy entire swaths of ponies’ sanity and patience trying to find it. It took time for the message to sink in and calm them down, and by then many had already discovered their latent special talents.

"You’ll find your niche someday," she promised her offspring when she’d consumed the last of her brownie into her stomach. "But there’s nothing wrong with getting good at other pursuits in life. Some ponies have even gotten their cutie marks that way, by finding their special talent while they were trying out something completely different."

Light Tail’s answer was delayed considerably by the baked brownie she was chewing on, and whatever she’d intended to say in response was never uttered. By the time she’d swallowed her bite, Sparky had gotten bored with lying about on his cushion and began prowling about the living room. He first leapt up onto the back of the couch where he could then step onto the windowsill and block Sling’s view of the fading twilight’s glow upon the flat countryside, but he never intended to stay there. Instead he began to climb up the window drapes, which somehow managed to shrug off the weight of a fourteen-pound cat sinking its claws into the fabric. His ultimate goal was quickly determined to be a length of overhanging tinsel that stretched from above the window to the other end of the living room—

He reached the top of the drapes and leapt onto the length of tinsel, and despite the size and weight of the animal he never lost his footing, nor did the nails give way or the tinsel itself snap beneath him. For all intents and purposes, the housecat was now essentially tightrope walking across the living room.

Try as she might to find the scene before her physically impossible, all she could scrounge up in response was laughter as she watched the feline slowly inch his way across the room above them, his wide eyes taking in the ponies below them as though he were sizing them up for a potential attack. When he was directly above them he stopped, his attention drawn to a pile of shredded wrapping piled up inside a box near the couch—

"Watch out sports fans, this kitty’s all riled up!" Windy’s voice laughed heartily—

—the cat indulged in his curiosity and leapt off the length of tinsel, directly into the box beneath him, and the resounding WHUMP! of his landing sent the shredded contents flittering out in just about every direction. Their motions in the air also caught his attention, as within a split second of landing in the box he jumped right back out, pouncing upon the closest piece of paper he could find.

The comical sight was too much. Her lungs began to bellow with laughter so intense that tears were streaming from her eyes, and she slid them shut to stem the salty flow down her cheeks—

—the room temperature shifted southward in an instant, shocking her senses into full clarity and causing her eyes to snap open to a pitch-black room. The warmth of a running fireplace was replaced by the hugging touch of multiple sheets of thick comforters layered atop her, her forelegs hugging a small, warm package to her chest….

…and she was still laughing at the dream.

A dream. Just a dream….

The small package in her grasp shifted about for a moment, and a flood of dim light from her bed stand’s lamp flashed onto the bed—

Light Tail’s eyes shut her laughing down with one clear look of fear and worry. The squirt seemed almost…afraid….

"….Mom, are you okay?"

Sling Shot had to forcibly shift her focus onto the present rather than the dead dream world she’d just left, though she couldn’t help but marvel at how much more appropriate it would have been to have this little scene play out in Equestria proper and not the cold, sterile Stable they called home. Her short, tiny legs hugged the white fox plush to her even in her sleepy state of concern for her only known parent, and she had to pin the plush’s head down beneath her own just to be able to see past it.

A brief shower of sadness came over her, and she quickly tightened her sleepy hug on her offspring in the hope that the contact would lull both of them back to sleep. "….just a dream, honey."

El-Tee, however, refused to do anything but what she wanted. She began to push back against the hug, trying to free herself from her mother’s emotional reach. "No, seriously, Mom, what’s wrong? It’s almost eight-thirty in the morning, I’ve been awake for the last five minutes and you wake up laughing. That’s not normal."

Sling’s face hardened with worry as her eyes began to search about the dimly-lit bed for the clock mounted on the far wall, and sure enough the ticking hands of the device bore forth the time of the day at around 8:27, with the second hand quickly clicking towards the bold-faced 12 at the top. The rest of her body chose that moment to begin assailing her brain with intense feelings of laden weight and tension in her muscles, even down to her rump and underbelly. Her attempts to work the stressful aches out of her hind legs failed miserably as she was barely able to even move them, so tired and unresponsive that they simply laid still.

"I was serious," she sighed back into her pillows, closing her eyes. "Just a dream."

"And were you laughing in this dream too?"

"Actually, yes," she responded with pointed pride. "Yes, I was. And if you’ll let me go back to sleep I might get to go back…"

"Dreams don’t work that way, Mom.

"….you’re such a killjoy."

El-Tee’s body finally wriggled free from her mother’s forelegs, though the bed merely shifted a half inch away from her as the filly rolled herself onto her belly. "So what kind of dream was it? Must’ve been awesome if ya woke up laughin’. I wanna know what it was!"

Two days ago I was freaking out about brain damage, and today she’s back to her inquisitive and boisterous self, she mulled silently to herself in relief. Most mornings, she would’ve fought and protested every effort by her daughter to rouse her from bed.

Today was not one of those days.

"I was dreaming about Equestria That Was," she replied with a wistful sigh, rolling off of her side and pulling her head away from her cozy pillows. "Hearth’s Warming Eve."

"No way!" El-Tee balked with disbelief. "Nopony even knows what the old world looked like, except for all those ancient photos the First Ones brought to the Stable with them."

A brief shake of her head flung her mane back behind her ears, though she could feel the hairs standing out and curling about in some of the strangest ways. Gonna have to fix that. "Yes, but so many books in our library are so descriptive, so….so mesmerizing at times, at the way the authors describe the world they’re writing about. You can get lost in it, see it take shape in your mind, and you see that world instead of the pages that it exists on. You read those three Daring Do books so much I thought you might’ve known that by now."

"I do, actually, but Daring Do is different! She’s awesome, she’s brave, she’s smart and pretty, and she always finds a way to get things done even when it looks hopeless! How could anypony not imagine that in their head?!"

The hero worship is almost cute. "And if you’d bothered to read any of the old world adventurers’ memoirs we have in the library, you’d find one thing they all have in common between them. Something even Daring is drawn to."

"The adventure?!" the pipsqueak answered immediately, her body beginning to get caught up in her swirling emotions as she began to act out her very words. "The thrill of danger at every turn?! The priceless rush of discovering some ancient and lost artifact from the times before them?! The adrenaline rush as their wits and quick-thinking see them through things nopony thought they could handle—"

Sling couldn’t help but chuckle when Light Tail’s forelegs reached up in front of her as she spoke, as if to grab hold of an object in front of her, and then jumped forward, swinging the back half of her body outward to mimic the act of swinging from a rope or thick jungle vine, and plopped down on the other end of the bed with the flair and grace of a three legged pony. "All common traits of the classic adventurer stereotype, but no," the mother replied, quieting her laughter as she shifted her body about to face the filly and displacing the comforters over her body. "Sit still and close your eyes, I’ll demonstrate."

"….how can you demonstrate somethin’ if I can’t see it?" the little one asked, one eye curling up in confusion.

"Just close your eyes," she insisted gently. "Clear your head, blank slate. Shouldn’t be that hard considering all the notes Amethyst sends me about your daydreaming in class."

Light Tail’s throat grumbled darkly at the cheap shot to her attention span, but did as she was told without any further protests or stalling.

"Now then," she began, following suit and closing her own eyes to better focus her attention to the task at hand. "You’re in a wheat field—"

The filly’s snickering broke up her thoughts before she could get going. "Hehehe, Haystack’s really behind on his wheat crop this season—"

"Focus!" she barked back sharply, and the snickering halted. "You’re in a wheat field, stretching out across the land as far as you can see. It’s winter, and the chill in the air caresses your coat and bites into your skin. Princess Celestia’s sun is arcing down across the sky towards the horizon. A breeze of wind brushes against you, and it tickles, but Celestia’s sun warms you right back…."

And oh gods I’m good at this, she didn’t say out loud, as she found the pitch black of her closed eyes slowing morphing into life—row after endless row of wheat stalks began to take shape in front of her, swaying about slightly against that breeze she’d just mentioned, and a bright, blue sky littered with patches of white clouds spread out above her—

"The sky is like water, bright, blue and clear, and puffs of white clouds stick out like marshmallows. The air is so quiet around you that you can hear all the wheat stalks rattling in the wind—"

—her hearing was the next sense to be affected, as she began to hear those endless golden rows flitter and crinkle in the wind she’d made up—

"The harvest is close, you can smell it from the stalks shoving their way into your nose—"

—and though she’d never once in her life smelled what organically grown wheat smelled like, her sense of smell began to simulate something to that effect, but couldn’t for the life of her describe it. She didn’t even know what it was supposed to smell like to start with.

A tear began to creep through her closed left eyelid, but she ignored it and pushed onward. "You stand there and just soak it all in. The skies, the sun, the wind, the wheat, even the clouds. You just stand there and watch it all."

A soft, exhaled gasp briefly broke up the auditory half of her illusion, but despite the disruption, she smiled.

"Now you’re at home, on your couch and staring out the window. It’s the hour of twilight, and the sky is dark. At the horizon, Celestia’s sun has turned red as it sinks down below the horizon for the coming of the night. The sky around the orb is orange, but beyond that it grows pink, and further out than that it’s a dark blue, like Princess Luna’s coat. The night sky seems to be chasing the sun away to make room for the moon."

And as quickly as she was speaking it, the illusion before her shifted in appearance, returning her to that darkening sky and the fireplace-warmed living room she’d been dreaming about minutes earlier, that cup of hot coffee swirling up into her nose—

"You have a porcelain mug in the grasp of your magic," she added, ignoring the second tear to flow from her closed eyes. "It’s close, so close you could just lap your tongue out and lick it up, and the sweet, sugary smell of hot chocolate flows into your nose. A fresh flame in your fireplace envelopes the room, basking you in its heat—"

Another outside noise interrupted her hearing, this time one of a contented and bewildered moan—

"Celestia’s sun finally vanishes. The tip seems to burrow into the horizon, and that orange hue starts to fade, as if the warmth of the sun itself is leaving the sky. It grows to a cool pink, and the pink beyond dies down into a cold cobalt shade. Directly above you, the stars begin to emerge, dim specks peppering the dark with an entirely different kind of life. Before long, the horizon on the countryside fades away to the night, and the sky begins to lighten up with a thousand tiny sparks—"

In her vision, the sky followed her words, transforming into a blanket of star-studded cobalt blue, as if Luna herself was tucking in all of Equestria for a night of well-deserved rest—

This time, the tears were welcomed. "The wheat field outside your house begins to glow with a pale white, and your eyes are drawn up. Luna’s moon is settling into the sky to your right, and a halo of light flows around it, like a magnifying lens, shining down on the land and basking it in a dim glow that matches the moon—"

She was barely aware of her horn flaring to life, the flow of magic filtering through like a trickle of warm water as it felt the need to directly simulate the necessary light for the illusion to have its most dramatic and realistic effect. But the end result was breathtaking. Luna’s moon, in her vision, began to radiate with that pale, white light, the kind of light a pony could look at without hurting themselves, and soon enough the imaginary wheat field outside her imaginary window glowed with that same light—

"If you were outside, you could almost feel the moonlight’s cool, refreshing touch upon your coat. The moon seems intent to show beauty and majesty, of both itself and all the lands of Equestria and beyond. To shine a new light on ponies’ lives, a side of themselves they wouldn’t see in the sun. In the sunlight you can see every detail in all its physical beauty, but in the moonlight you can see past it, see the sweat and tears of your hard work that are dried up by the sun. In the moonlight, you can see yourself."

No outside sounds this time. No nothing, in fact. Both of them were lost in their own separate visions.

"You stare out at your field, and the far away fields of your neighbors, and you can feel a sense of balance and harmony between all the fields of the prairie. You feel a unity of peace you can’t describe, and so you just sit on your couch, with that sweet cup of hot chocolate, and stare at the night sky until you’ve sipped the last of the cocoa, its warmth having faded into a watery coolness long ago.

"You let the cup settle down on a table, and cover yourself with a worn, thick blanket. The fleece enhances the heat from the fireplace, and you snuggle into the couch. Luna’s moon shines its light into the living room, lulling you into a well-deserved rest for a day’s hard work. The light is Luna’s promise that no harm will come to her little ponies as they sleep. Her moon is her vigil, its light her shield. You sleep soundly, secure in the thought that you will see the night again…."

The vision began to darken once more. The roaring fireplace, the couch, the empty cup on the coffee table all gave way to the oblivion of darkness….

"….and then you wake up."

With the illusion having run its course, Sling Shot opened her eyes once again, and had the fortune to be staring directly at her little girl as she too was roused from the grips of her imagination…

…and the bewildered stare of wonder in her eyes warmed her insides better than any cup of hot chocolate ever could. The thing was too lost for words right away, but managed enough thought to utter something after a few seconds of staring at her mom with her jaw hanging low.

"….wow….that was just…I never felt anythin’ like that before."

That warmth in her body spread out to her smile as she finally found the strength she needed to get out of bed. "And that, dear, is the thrill that every adventurer strives for."

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

“You can’t do this.”

The Overmare’s voice sighed, already exhausted from this short argument. “I can, and I have. And as I recall, she quit her assigned job on account of knowing you were never going to allow her out of the gun cage after how she handled Socket.”

Farsight’s face furrowed with silent rage—how he kept it from showing in his voice was beyond her, because she was certain he was absolutely seething at how things were playing out around him. “We do not reward insubordination and callous disregard for a pony’s state of being! She should be disciplined and punished according to our very laws and regulations! You’re the Overmare, for Celestia’s sake—

Mistake, Cloud Wind noted, quietly stepping away from the desk now that he’d made the error. She wanted some distance from what was about to follow.

“That’s right, I’m the Overmare, not you,” the mare’s voice on the other end of the intercom reminded him sharply, dropping all further attempts at politeness and courtesy. “I have decided that in light of her resignation, the manner in which she delivered it to you is conduct unfitting of a security pony and would be grounds for removal from the department regardless. I have also watched nearly everypony she ever knew and trusted turn on her when she was stupid enough to get knocked up at fifteen instead of helping and supporting her. I have kept tabs on how her talents and abilities were utilized within your department and found her time to be grossly wasted on tasks that several of your other subordinates could learn to carry out in-between their patrols. I have found records detailing no less than five submissions on the mainframe from her terminal in the armory requesting to be allowed to assume patrol and security duties of her own when her primary work was completed, and I have found no less than five refusals to such requests from your terminal in your office admonishing her to ‘learn some responsibility first’. Am I missing anything else?”

Farsight’s body trembled slightly behind his desk, his colossal efforts to contain his rage beginning to fail. But still he held his ground, and (perhaps wisely) kept any words he might’ve wanted to shout back in check.

“Between her estrangement from the Stable population and your squirreling her away behind a locked cage for most of her career, quite frankly I’m surprised she didn’t snap sooner. My decision stands. She is re-assigned to the library as Parchment’s assistant and subordinate, and I’ll chalk up her unusual behavior to the stress of over ten years of having everypony accuse her of spreading her legs for a living. Her security clearance was revoked yesterday afternoon, if that makes you feel any better. Compulsory counseling for her anger management issues may be forthcoming if these outbursts prove to be just the first of many, but for now I’m simply hoping that a change in occupation will give her the stress relief she needs. Now stop wasting my time and get back to work, we still have an infestation to clear out and I’m seriously considering a mandatory lockdown by fifteen hundred hours if you can’t give me a solid confirmation that we’re out of danger.”

The intercom crackled off with a sizzling hiss, and it took all of Farsight’s willpower to not transmit the entirety of his rage and embarrassment towards the lone pegasus in front of him. “You’d better have some damn good news for me.”

I am so kicking Sling’s ass the next time I see her. If she hadn’t up and quit on him like she had, these last two days would have gone so much smoother on the pegasus. Without being able to take out his frustration on the unicorn in question, however, he’d settled his rage on the next closest (and in his eyes, responsible) pony to pay for her transgressions.

Her only friend.

“Maintenance is still in shock over Hacket Wrench’s death,” she reported flatly, keeping as much of a neutral tone as possible. Today was not the time to be her usual “bite-back” self. “Particularly after Torque found what was left of him in the vents on level fifteen. I don’t think she’s up to the task of heading her department even if it’s just temporary, maybe Spanner or Sledge sho—“

“Torque’s gonna have to suck it up,” Farsight shot back, turning his attention to a small pile of papers scattered across his desk. “I want to know if they’re any closer to clearing the infestation.”

“They’re working on it—“

Bad thing to say to an impatient and ill-tempered stallion. “They’ve been ‘working on it’ since Monday, they need to work faster!” he roared across the room in fury. “They’re not being paid by the hour!”

“They only have six ponies small enough to fit into the vents and air ducts, and they won’t go in without a security escort,” she countered calmly. Oh ever so calmly. Must not shout, must not yell. “And only four ponies in security are small enough to go in with them. This isn’t a simple process either, it’s slow work and we’ve never had an infestation this bad in the Stable’s history.”

As she expected, her attempts to rationally and logically point out the problems they were encountering in their clean-up fell on mostly deaf ears. “Get back down there and tell the ten that can fit in the vents to start working by themselves. If they split off and put two each to the last five levels we need to search we can finish this up before noon.”

He can’t be serious! “Chief, that puts all of ten of them at incredible risk—“

Farsight had finally had enough of bottling his frustration at the way things had been going down around him, and began to channel it into his voice as he cut her off. “This entire Stable is at risk and I’m done with everypony’s BS! If I didn’t need you you’d have joined your whore of a lover out the door, and you still might if you don’t get to work and get a handle on these damn bugs right now!!”

It took every ounce of her remaining self-control to not leap at him from the other side of the room and do what Sling Shot should have done the other day, even though she knew she would end up regretting it later. But standing in front of the jackass as he slandered her sexual orientation and that of her friend’s in the middle of a security crisis, it was so very, very difficult to want to do anything but drill out the middle of his desk with his own skull.

So she simply turned and quickly saw herself out of his hateful gaze, into the hallway, where she was free to finally let a little bit of anger loose when she saw Lavender and Sunflower waiting for her right beside the door.

“….how’d it go?” Lavender asked meekly, recoiling slightly as the pegasus’s gaze fell upon her.

“How do you think?” Cloud Wind hissed back, stomping past the pastel purple mare as she fell into a quick jog for the elevator at the back end of the level. “He wants our ten tunnel rats to split up and work alone just to keep from being the first security chief in seventy years to have to oversee a Stable-wide lockdown. That idiot’s too pissed at Sling to see the danger he’s putting them in!”

“Some friend, hunh?” Sunflower’s mouth blurted without thinking, and Cloud Wind felt her legs go stiff as she turned her head back to face the pale gold-coated pony in a new, darker light.

“What the hell did you just say to me!?” she snapped at the blubber-mouthed mare, who only now realized the stupidity of what she’d just said.

“…w-wait, forget I said anything, I’m sorry—“

No. No more of this bullshit! “Like hell I’m going to forget!” she hissed quietly, trying her best despite her bubbling anger to keep from drawing a bigger scene through heightened shouting. “You just proved why she quit in the first place, you all treat her like shit to be scrapped off of your hooves!!”

“Well, can you blame anypony?! Whoring around and foaling before she turned sixteen, and then up and quitting on us in the middle of the largest radroach outbreak we’ve seen in a century when we need everypony at their posts the most?! How is that closet nympho still your friend after that?!”

Her anger was subsided—briefly—by Sunflower’s sharp, biting criticism, and even Lavender seemed taken aback by her barbs. “…Sunny, that’s cold, even for you…”

“That “closet nympho” is a better friend to me than you’ve ever been,” Cloud Wind fired back once her fury had returned to her. “And she wasn’t the only one getting some on the side. We all know it.”

“This isn’t about us!” Sunflower bit back sharply, her ears flattening backward in anger. “It’s about our responsibility to the Stable and our duty as security ponies to protect our own and she has never had the stones for this line of work! Why do you think she was stuck with gun cage duty all the time?! She choked and locked herself in her quarters for a month the last time we had an outbreak, or don’t you remember that?!”

“I remember Farsight taking her keys to the armory and locking her in before the rest of us went bug hunting! I remember running my rifle down to two rounds from the forty-nine I had left when we went back to check on her!”

“And do you remember what she did when we broke her out?! She bolted out like a terrified little filly—“

“And ran straight into what was left of Kickstart’s son in the northwest corner of L5!!” she finished for her, to try and drive into this thick, broadsided mare’s skull exactly what that little discovery had done to her friend. “You know, the corner you were supposed to sweep and clear for stray ponies before you joined us in the agri levels?! The corner Sling could have covered for us if she’d been allowed out of the damn armory to begin with?! You remember all the blood we had to scrub off the walls?! You remember how Kickstart cried herself hoarse and near-to-death when we had to break it to her?! You remember why she got she fired from security and is on constant suicide watch even today?!”

Sunflower’s ears stopped flaring back, and began to droop downward in despair. “….he wasn’t even supposed to be there…”

“That’s why we check our patrol coverage areas!” the pegasus continued to tear into her verbal sparring opponent. “To make sure ponies are not in places they aren’t supposed to be in! If you’re going to slam somepony about responsibility you ought to learn some of it yourself! Sling’s only thought after being locked up and stripped of weapons by her boss, nearly swarmed by flesh-eating mutant insects, and falling into an eviscerated colt was to make sure her own daughter hadn’t suffered the same way! She has raised that kid by herself for the squirt’s entire life without complaint! And the worst part of it all is that she tears herself up over Hoofprint and she wasn’t even the one who screwed up! You did!”

By the time she’d run out of breath with her quiet screaming, Sunflower had succumbed to her own shame and guilt, falling onto the floor and breaking out into quiet, gasping sobs. “H….he wasn’t supposed to be there….”

Cloud Wind had not finished with her, but before she could go any further Lavender’s body had made its way between her and the emotionally-broken unicorn, settling a harsh (yet slightly pitied) glare on the raging pegasus. “That’s enough,” the pastel purple mare commanded of her superior. “Or did you forget that we still have a job to do?!”

For the second time this week, Cloud Wind felt a rush of warm blood flow into her cheeks at how quickly she had tossed aside her own duties at the drop of an insult towards her closest friend, and her large reservoir of anger faded back into obscurity.

Is there anypony in security that’s actually fit for the job anymore?

Part of her told her an apology was in order—right or not, she’d gone too far, and it wasn’t supposed to have gotten so out of hand in the first place. And yet she was too ashamed of herself to even contemplate it on a serious level right then.

So the job would become her escape. As usual.

“….get back to L11, see how the sweep is going,” she heard herself say calmly and coolly, as though the last two minutes of her life had not even occurred. “And whatever the chief tells you do not split anypony up to make things go faster. Losing Hacket was bad enough, I don’t wanna see anypony else go before their time. Got it?”

“We’ll get down there as soon as I can get your mess here cleaned up,” Lavender responded coldly, turning her back to the pegasus as she lay down in front of Sunflower. “Maybe you should get going before you say anything else you’ll regret later.”

Cloud Wind was too fed up with herself to bother snapping back at her. She just did exactly as suggested, and left via the quickest manner possible—back towards the elevator at the far back end of the floor, and she barely remembered tapping the button for the fourth floor. She was too distracted by her thoughts and self-pity to care. Five days of twelve-hour shifts with little rest, constant readiness drills and spot checks of air ventilation ducts, hundreds of ponyhours of work meticulously securing each duct, vent, and maintenance tunnel, and what did they have to show for all their efforts to secure the Stable? Hacket dead, Sling on the verge of a mental breakdown, a security chief that was already there, a hundred dead bugs, untold numbers more still in the dark waiting to swarm again and no guarantee they could even find all the nests in time to stop the next outbreak.

This week has been pure shit…

The elevator pinged to a stop the instant the thought came to mind, and Cloud Wind’s musings came to a halt as she galloped out onto the fourth floor. Having memorized the path so many years ago, it had come as something of a natural response anytime things with the chief started getting heavier than she could deal with.

Go straight to his boss. And everyone’s boss, in a sense. The Overmare’s office sat in a corner, at the back end of the floor, which allowed for a more defensible position in the event of an outside invasion or an internal insurrection. And at the moment, it also imparted an overwhelmingly comforting sense of isolation from the rest of the Stable proper, from all the stress and exhaustions of the day. In that office, the familiar hazy cloud of uncertainty and worry was washed away.

She could almost feel like herself again.

As she was wont to do when she was pressed for time, she simply tapped the door open with a push of her snout against the controls and strolled right on through without waiting to be invited in. Fortunately, the Overmare was not a particularly busy pony every day of the week, and had apparently been lounging about on her office couch on her back when Cloud Wind had chosen to pay her a visit.

And when Cloud Wind paid a visit, there was usually only one topic that was ever discussed.

“….oh, in the name of Celestia what’s your problem this time?” the Overmare muttered bitterly at having her R&R time interrupted. “I just talked to him, I know he’s angry—“

“He’s not thinking rationally,” Cloud Wind answered immediately, wanting to get this unpleasant business over with. She’d never quite brought up a complaint this serious before…and if it backfired she probably would end up fired and re-assigned to janitor detail for the rest of her natural days. “He just ordered me to split up the ten ponies on our sweep team clearing the Stable of radroach nests. Two per floor for the last five levels we’ve still got to search, and he specifically told me that if they worked by themselves they could finish the search before noon.”

This got the Overmare’s attention. She quickly rolled herself over in the couch until she was back upright with her legs back beneath her body, her disappointment replaced with worry and concern. “….that’s insane, that would leave them dangerously alone in extremely cramped conditions if they run into trouble in those vents. He made those safety protocols after the last outbreak, for Luna’s sake. He can’t be that upset at Sling Shot.”

“I doubt that she’s the sole stress factor, even if he won’t stop screaming about her and her “whoring” ways. He lost Hacket on his watch, we’re in the worst radroach outbreak we’ve seen in the Stable’s history, and now you’ve told him you may be implementing the first mandatory security lockdown in seven decades and he’ll have to oversee it if it comes to it. His efforts to try and keep from bullying ponies into their quarters may just end up getting some of them killed.”

“….that again,” the Overmare mumbled softly, mostly to herself.

“I know it’s not pleasant, but it’s better than speeding up our sweep and risking us missing a nest—“

“I meant Bookie,” the earth pony mare corrected quickly, raising her head up from the cushion it had been resting on moments earlier. “Gods alive, it was just one night with her coltfriend from school, and we all know she wasn’t the only one in class doing it! How did everypony end up thinking she’s some kind of…prostitute?! I don’t think she’s touched anypony ever since she got pregnant! And it’s not like the kid’s doing that much damage, if anything she could be the youngest filly to ever take the G.O.A.T. exam if Amethyst’s reports are even halfway true. What happened here? Who started it?!”

“I couldn’t tell you that,” Windy replied, slightly confused as to the sudden change of topic. And on the use of Sling’s old nickname, to boot. She didn’t think anypony else even remembered her real name anymore. “That’s something she won’t tell even to me. And her parents have been virtually silent anytime their own daughter’s name comes up. It’s like she’s dead to them.”

The Overmare’s face kept its collected calm, unwavering and unflinching even in the midst of such an emotive subject. “….I’m beginning to have my doubts about initiating Selection. If this Stable of ponies is the best we can do after two centuries, then maybe we need to decide if we deserve to re-join the surface at all.”

Before today, Cloud Wind would have been horrified sick to hear the Overmare say anything of the sort. Before today, she would have physically recoiled from her, desperate to escape the range of her poisonous voice and spread the word to the Stable at large that their futures were not quite as secure as they’d thought.

Before today, she’d never been called a whoring lesbian to her face, either.

So all she could think to ask, was….

“Why, then?” she dared to ponder aloud. “Why did you start a generational tradition twenty-odd years early? What do you know that the rest of us don’t?”

“I explained that Monday evening when I made the announcement,” the Overmare rebuffed quickly. “We have the supplies to last now, but thirty years in the future that could be a different story. The sooner we find out what happened to the world above, the sooner we can we start planning about our Stable’s future. But I’m wondering now if we’d just re-introduce the same poison that killed Equestria That Was if we left.”

“What, the arcane-powered technology that gave us the megaspells and the spark generators?”

“That would’ve come in time no matter what. I’m talking about us. We used to live in harmony with each other. Now we can’t even go a week without breaking down into heated arguments with each other. Living with others is not easy, but we never killed. We never sold ourselves for a price, we never intentionally hurt others out of rage and hate, or for our own sick and twisted pleasures. We were never this…this ugly, inside. What happened to us?”

….wow, that was actually a good question, Cloud Wind had to admit after she’d taken a few seconds to try and find a quick response, and found herself wanting. A good, deep question. What happened indeed…

“If we knew the answer, our ancestors wouldn’t have spent the last two centuries living in a fallout shelter, would they?”

Now the Overmare’s face finally began to crack apart, her eyes softening and furrowing into a wistful, sad stare. “….no, I suppose not….go on back to work, forget whatever the chief told you, just make sure we don’t lose anoth—“

The room was plunged into a darkness of endless oblivion before she could finish, the steady hum of the environmental unit dying down into silence alongside it. In its place, a dull red haze of light began to brighten up the room, but it did little to ease either of their fears.

If anything, they only felt worse.

“….oh shit, the emergency lighting this time, not the back-ups….”

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

They’d barely finished breakfast when darkness claimed the room for itself. The alluring touch of the light was extinguished, plunging both freshly-washed ponies into momentary blindness.

“…..oh, wonderful,” Light Tail’s voice quipped dryly. “Because once this week was just not enough to scare the hair off a pony’s tail.”

“Twice, actually,” Sling amended politely, tendrils of magic already coming alive within her horn and coalescing into the tip in a concentration of energy. “The second time was the morning you got hurt. The bugs came out not long after.”

“….oh….”

When the last of the needed mana had been compacted into the tip of her horn, she turned her mental focus into bringing the spell to life, packing it into a perfect sphere and allowing it to activate at about two-thirds of its normal power. The washroom interior soon lit up with the bright white glow of her illumination spell, spilling its reach outward until it touched upon the couch in the living room.

“Might as well settle in and find a book or something,” she sighed disappointedly. “We could be in here awhile.”

She needn’t have bothered with the suggestion—Light Tail had already hopped off of her chair and quickly trotted over to the bookcase in the living, stopping only long enough to rear up on her hind legs and pull her desired tome from the shelf with her teeth before continuing on to her favored nesting spot on the couch. “At least we got light. Hard to read in the dark—“

The filly’s words stopped mid-sentence as she flipped the book open to where the bookmark had been set, her eyes beginning to stare into the pages in relief rather than anticipation. “…..aaah, right where I left off Wednesday afternoon, I think. Guess I didn’t get through twenty-seven after all.”

That’s a rather odd reaction to a bookmark reminder. “And you’re relieved…why?”

“’Cause I was afraid I’d actually read through it and didn’t remember, just like everything else about Wednesday night and Thursday morning,” she sighed as her eyes began to flitter back and forth, dancing across the words in the pages. “Kinda comforting to find something right where I last remember leaving it. Is this memory loss gonna be permanent?”

“….probably,” Sling decided to reply after a brief pause, her eyes scouring the ceiling vents for signs of loose screws or slightly jostled gratings. Something that she neglected to do Thursday morning, thinking they were fine as they were. She wouldn’t make that mistake twice. “It’s possible you might start to recall some pieces here and there, but most of it is probably gone for good.”

“….great,” the little one huffed back, torn between her own lingering despair over her memory gap and her desire to escape it by diving into the book’s pages. “’Cause now I’m kinda hopin’ I might remember why Jam was in the washroom on our side instead of hers Wednesday night. I get this ugly feeling in my gut that it’s something important, but I can’t remember! I hate bugs!”

“Join the club, squirt,” Sling muttered back absently, that cold, creepy itch beginning to seep through her spine again. While the vent gratings were well and truly secured, she couldn’t help but notice that the back-up system for the lights still hadn’t kicked in, even after thirty seconds. They remained dark and lifeless, with no hint as to why they were refusing to even sparkle dimly as they normally did on back-up power.

Her half-hearted comment didn’t go unnoticed…and neither did her observation of the lights. Within a few moments, Light Tail had taken her attention away from The Mare of the Everfree to see what it was that had her mother’s attention, and it didn’t take her very long to reach the same conclusion. “….shouldn’t the back-up systems have kicked in by now?”

By Luna’s moon, why does she have to be so smart all the time?! “Power’s been a pain all week,” she tried to lie, knowing it was likely for naught but hoping it might work anyway. “The back-up system’s been turned on twice this week, it might just be taking longer to kick in this time.”

“….mom, the back-ups are charged by the generator,” the filly replied with a touch of nervousness. “Even I know that.”

Left with no other plausible excuses for why the back-up lighting had failed to work as designed, Sling could only watch on in growing horror as another sign of foreboding doom began to appear. The innocuous oval-shaped light bulbs imbedded along the top of the ceiling began to glow red, quickly bathing the room in a terrifying crimson and bleeding into the natural white light of her hovering illumination spell. Her legs began to feel like icicles, her brain no longer capable of assuring itself that everything would be all right in the end.

“….oh shi—“ she almost squeaked, catching her tongue at the last moment before the curse could be completed. “….the tertiary lights…”

The red lights began to pulse, growing brightest at the top of their rhythm before fading backwards into a dim glow and then repeating the cycle in a four-second cycle.

Very, very bad news. And her night light was observant enough of her mother’s reaction to realize just how bad it was.

“….m-mom, what are we supposed to do?” Light Tail stammered, shutting her book and sliding off the couch. “W-we never talked about this…”

What are we supposed to do? Sling repeated the question to herself, finding some small comfort and certainty of self in having to focus on the request. First off….

“…come with me,” she said with a calm she didn’t feel, quickly trotting back towards her room and now thanking herself for leaving the door open. Light Tail’s tiny hoofsteps were much easier to pick out behind her now that the environmental systems weren’t running, softly compressing the carpet beneath her with each hurried movement. She pulled her illumination spell along with them, tugging it with a mindlessly chanted telekinesis spell and throwing it out ahead of her until it illuminated the entirety of her room.

She spotted her set of saddlebags piled against the far right corner just after passing through the doorway and, uttering a silent rebuke at herself for praying she’d never need them in the first place, began to pull them towards her with a pull of her magic.

“Come on up here and stand still for a minute,” she said, taking extra careful note not to accidently swing the barrel of the holstered revolvers anywhere near herself or El-Tee. “This may be a little heavy.”

El-Tee’s body, which had been moving along at a consistent pace, stopped dead-still two feet in front of her when her eyes fell upon the massive frame of Grayhawk resting in its holster and began to back away from the saddlebags. “W-whoa whoa Mom wait a tic, what are you doing?!”

“Just stay still,” she pleaded in vain, separating her saddlebags from her child’s and slowly floating the smaller set out towards the filly.

“Not until you tell me what you’re doing!” El-Tee screeched back, quickening her retreat from the saddlebags and their holstered sidearms. “It looks like you’re planning on leaving the Stable!!”

Frag me, how does she do this?! “I just want us to be prepared if we have to!” she shouted back, fighting back her own fear to avoid scaring her child any more than she already had. “I didn’t say anything about that being my first choice!”

“But you’ve thought enough about it to have this stuff ready ahead of time!” Light Tail continued to protest. Having run out of room to retreat, she began to resort to physically pushing the saddlebags away from her with her forelegs each time they drew close to her. “I know you hate it down here sometimes but this is ridiculous—“

The unspoken accusation cut through her wavering calm and began to sting her in ways she’d never thought her daughter could inflict upon her. “I never planned on leaving!!” she screamed in a burst of anger. “I don’t hate it here, I hate all the stupid ponies around me that cut me off from them for something that happened eleven years ago!!”

Her brief snit fit made it hard for her to feel sorry for being so hateful towards her little girl, and she would count herself forever lucky that Light Tail didn’t seem to take much offense over it. “Does it have anything to do with what Sun Star said to me last week? When he followed me all the way to the filly’s room and roughed me up and called me a mistake? Said somethin’ about you being a slut and a dirty whore? ‘Cause I’m gettin’ this ugly feelin’ this is a conversation we’ve had before and I don’t remember it.”

Sling’s hate crashed in an instant, overwhelmed with flashbacks of the last conversation they’d had on the subject Thursday morning and her fervent belief that it would be something they wouldn’t go through ever again. She was growing torn between bawling her eyes out and trying to find some way out of this mess that didn’t involve transmitting over a decade’s worth of bottled emotions onto a filly that hadn’t done a damn thing to deserve any of it.

“….I….I’m sorry,” she gasped through a choked sob. “I’m sorry you had to hear that…..but this isn’t—“

“It is,” the stern-faced filly snapped back, taking an unusually combative approach. “It is the time, and it is my business. Sun Star didn’t come up with those things, he’s just repeatin’ whatever he’s heard grown-up ponies call you to your face or behind your back. And I bet it’s gotten so bad that you packed these things for us so that we could leave if the chance ever came up, even if you don’t know it yet.”

Why, Luna? she cried to herself, staring down at her daughter through slightly blurry eyes. Why is my daughter, the end result of my screwing around that’s gotten me so shunned, one of the only two ponies that care what happens to me?

“I don’t know what those words mean, and I don’t wanna know if they hurt that much,” El-Tee went on when her mother could only stare back in teary silence. “I do know that when this is over you’re gonna talk to somepony. Me, Aunt C, that scary shrink at the medical ward, whatever, but yer keepin’ all that hate inside and it ain’t healthy. I…I don’t want anypony taking you away ‘cause they think you’re not doin’ well….ya just blew yer top at me, that ain’t like you at all…”

Now she’d begun to realize what she’d done, and she couldn’t bear to relive it or remember it in any great detail. Her little girl…wasn’t quite as little as she’d seemed moments earlier. Was she growing up that fast? Or simply smart enough to see what her mother had been denying even to herself?

She could, at least, bear to look at her, at the saner voice of the two in the room at that moment, and declare to herself that for all the bad that had come out of that night of careless sex, it at least had given her her night light. She was a blessing—one she’d go back and have again if given a chance to go through that night again, just to have somepony in her life that cared this much.

She couldn’t decide if that was pathetic, sick, or heartwarming.

“….won’t be you,” she whispered in the silent, red-hued room. “Don’t think you’re ready for that talk yet…but I’ll talk to somepony, at least.”

El-Tee’s serious face finally began to disappear from her cheeks, and she pressed her small frame against her mother in a quick hug. “…I’ll take that. Now c’mon, what are we supposed to do now?”

Still broken up over how she’d blown up at her daughter half a minute ago, she no longer tried to whitewash or gloss over what she’d been preparing for. “In about a minute we’re going to hear a pre-recorded message over the PA system,” she answered softly, bringing the small set of saddlebags back towards them. “It’s tied into the tertiary emergency systems. We have fifteen minutes to get to one of four designated safe zones in the Stable—the agri rooms, the auditorium, the medical ward, or the library. After that, the environmental control systems will start to suck all the oxygen out of the Stable outside the safe zones. Anything outside a safe zone will be suffocated.”

She felt Light Tail’s body go stiff with fear at the information she’d just been given, and she began to eye the saddlebags with apprehension. “….s-so….if we don’t make it….does that mean you know a way out anyway?”

“….through the Overmare’s office,” she answered, bidding her offspring to let go of her with a gentle prod of her foreleg. “There’s an escape shaft underneath her desk that leads up to the surface level. It’s the only way we can reach it in time if we don’t make it into one of the safe zones on level seven. That’s why I kept these saddlebags ready when we first got news of the outbreak, in case something like this happened. If we have to take our chances on the surface I want us prepared.”

Light Tail eyed the filly-sized saddlebags and strappings with wide, wild eyes, her mane and tail shaking slightly as her body began to react to the possibility that her life could be a very short one if things didn’t go exactly as her mother had planned. “….fine. Just hurry up. I cost us enough time as it is.”

In truth, she had, but Sling wasn’t going to be so cruel as to say something like that now, not after how she’d just behaved towards her. She floated the saddlebags up and over the filly’s back, settling it down gently and then pulling the strappings down her sides and underneath her belly until she’d secured them in place. A quick nudge test with her forelegs budged the saddlebags only slightly, and after a second adjustment of the strappings the set refused to move at all.

With that task done, she set to work securing her own saddlebags to her person, grunting slightly as she found the additional weight dragging down along her back and sides to be greater than she remembered it being the last time she’d tried the things on. Either she was getting out of shape (very likely), or she was mistaken about how heavy the things were to start with. Her stable suit at least made for a good cushion between herself and the security straps encircling her body, and the weight of Grayhawk along her left side was unexpectedly comforting despite its overkill factor.

And she still had to force herself to take several steady breaths to calm her nerves enough to even speak.

“O-okay, let’s go,” she squeaked, willing her body to move out of her bedroom one leg at a time. “Library, just one level up—“

The PA speakers embedded into every room and hallway in the Stable crackled to garbled life with the subtlety of a drunken bear in a china shop, causing her to leap in place for about two feet before coming back down on her hooves—

“ATTENTION STABLE ONE-ONE-FIVE RESIDENTS,” a computer-generated female voice blared out, its ghostly voice echoing throughout the metal corridors as it slowly sounded off its pre-recorded warning of doom. “EMERGENCY PROTOCOL “LS” HAS BEEN INITIATED. ALL RESIDENTS HAVE FIFTEEN MINUTES TO REACH A DESIGNATED SAFE ZONE. PLEASE PROCEED TO A DESIGNATED SAFE ZONE IN AN ORDERLY FASHION. MESSAGE REPEATS—“

“Gah!” El-Tee screeched in surprise, her forelegs clamping over her ears to deafen the noise level. “So loud—“

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

She’d barely had time to complain before her stressed-out mom threw out her hearing protection spell, and that high-pitched robotic voice stopped scratching the inside of her ears out. Now everything was only slightly less bad. At least they could walk to the library without wishing for earplugs.

Not wanting to waste any more time than she already had, she quickly trotted out of Mom’s room and towards the door to the hallway, taking a moment to swing by the coffee table and pluck The Mare of the Everfree off the surface and stuff it inside the saddle….ba….

….oh, wow! That’s neat! she wanted to squeal in delight at the sight of the inside of the bag on her left side. She’d thought the bags had some sort of powerful magic enchantment to them, the way her horn was tingling through her head, but looking right in it was something else! She swore she could see a ton of stuff crammed in there! Dull-looking olive drab packages the size of granola bars labeled “MRE”, a map and compass, two or three small tool kits, a first aid kit, some water canteens and funny looking tablets, a flashlight, some healing potions, bars of soap…a pony could live off the land for a couple of months with this stuff! And the bedroll resting atop her loin was probably about her size, or bigger. The only thing this saddlebag set was missing was a saddle to go across her back so that the bedroll wouldn’t roll forward, but it was strapped down pretty tight and there was a good-sized stretch of hard leather to cover her back and sides anyway, so no biggie. She wished she’d actually had her stable suit on, though. She never liked it, but the cloth would have made all the straps more bearable.

And for all the stuff in the bag she could see, it didn’t feel as heavy as it probably should. She was willing to bet there was more of this stuff inside the right bag. She was so going to get Mom to explain how come she had all this stuff. It had to be enchanted to feel as light as it did. How much more could a pony stuff in these things—

Oops, getting sidetracked, she realized, and stuffed the book inside the bag and snapped it shut with a hoof before her thoughts got any further. Safe zone now, bug Mom later.

As quickly as she’d thought of her, Mom came strolling past her, her magic stuffing a book of her own to read inside her left bag and snapping the one on her right shut with a solid click of the button clasp. “When I open the door, stay as close to me as you can, and try to keep up,” Mom commanded…or tried to, anyway. She was still shook up from that harsh talk she’d had to give (to her MOM of all ponies), and she felt bad about having to talk to her like that, but she needed some sense slapped into her. She was gonna snap, and then they’d take her away and she’d never see her again….

No! No, Mom’s not gonna snap. You got Aunt C to promise to talk to her, and you got Mom to promise to talk to somepony, it’s gonna work out! Mom’s gonna get some help and she’ll feel better, and she’ll love her new job in the library and I’ll love her new job at the library holy Luna I wish I hadn’t messed the place up now—

Mom’s horn began to glow with the shade of her coat, quickly tearing off a section of the wall next to the doorway before enveloping a hand crank sitting in the recessed, hidden compartment, and began to tug at it with all the effort she could muster in her telekinesis. With each pull of the crank, the door would shift upwards about three inches or so, and then stop. Within a minute there was enough room for both of them to pass through comfortably—

—and Mom broke off into a sharp, quick trot, forcing the filly to gallop along behind just to stay within three feet of her like she wanted. Well, okay, maybe not three feet but Mom said ‘stay close’ and three feet was pretty close, so three feet it was. And if Mom hadn’t thought to keep pulling her light spell along with them she’d have lost her if she’d strayed any further than that. She’d never seen the halls like this before! She was so used to the white light that she could hardly see the walls in the pale red emergency lighting that now lined the ceiling. It glowed and paled in long, predictable pulses, the shadows receding in its reach and growing back in force when the red light retreated and dimmed into barely-noticeable dots inside the large, oval-shaped bulbs along the wall. She could count down to the quarter-second exactly how long each pulse lasted, and how long it would take to cycle back and forth between bright and nearly dead.

It was the only sane, calm thing she would ever see in the Stable that day.

The pair had barely made it past the western-side washroom when Mom’s body jerked to a halt, her head swiveling around and seemingly studying the walls around them, her ears twitching at the distant touch of scratchy clicking sounds bouncing down the halls….and then swiftly pulling a big revolver from its holster near her left saddlebag.

“M-mom, wait—“ she started to say, to try and calm her mother down before she could start shooting at things that weren’t really there—

“Stay close,” Mom snapped sharply, a slight rattle in her voice as she began moving forward again in slow, cautious steps, her head continuing to jerk from side to side. “They’re loose in here again.”

“….loose? What’s loose?”

“Radroaches,” Mom answered, taking her attention off the walls just long enough to fiddle with a dial on her PipBuck. “That sound….like hooves scratching at a chalkboard….”

El-Tee’s heart began to have trouble working properly—beat, beat, a pause, beat beat beat, pause. Her brain had to fight to string enough words together into a coherent question. “…w-where?”

“Not sure,” Mom heaved with a heavy sigh, slinging her body around ninety degrees to face down an adjacent hallway as they strode into an intersection. “I don’t wanna find out either, let’s just get to the library.”

Moving forward with shaky, hollow legs was beginning to make her feel like a foal learning to walk, but somehow she still managed to get one hoof out in front of another in a continuing drive forward, despite the chill touch of terror in her lungs. “No argument here—“

A sharp, chest-pounding bang rang out into the hallways, amplified by the metal walls, and if not for Mom’s spell she was almost certain her ears would have been ringing from it. An animalistic, shrill screech managed to follow along behind the sound of the loud bang for a moment before several more of the bangs cut it off in a rapid rat-tat-tat. She heard three more such bursts of bangs before she figured out what she was hearing.

Gunfire. And only then did she start to hear screams.

“Oh gods they’re here!” a mare’s shriek cried out from around a corner, or maybe even from a hall two hundred feet away. Voices could carry quite a ways through a Stable corridor. “We’re cut off—“

“No we’re not, we just need to keep moving forward!” a stallion’s voice boomed back, desperate to maintain calm in the presence of uncalm things. “The stairs are only fifty yards down the hall, we can make it—“

Another burst of gunfire, this time from somewhere off to her right and much closer, and when she looked down the hall she could see bright, blinding flashes of yellow lighting up the wall of an adjacent parallel hallway, and a broken silhouette of an earth pony inside each flash—

A third burst, from somewhere behind them, but in a much more uncontrolled fashion. It lasted at least two and a half seconds, and she wasn’t quite sure but she thought she could hear a stallion crying out in broken gasps of terror amidst the gunfire.

Another short burst echoed into the walls as Mom’s voice began to resemble that terrified mare’s. “H-honey….don’t….don’t freeze. Keep moving, quick as you can.”

El-Tee jerked her gaze back to her mother, to the mare she’d held up as a pedestal she could lean on if things got really bad….and saw a pony that offered a mirror image of her own fear. Her body seemed to tremble in short fits, her eyes kept darting back and forth inside their sockets in search of anything that wanted her as a meal, her tail swished and jerked in an erratic pattern, and her rapid breathing made her coat and muscles seem to ripple across her body.

Mom wasn’t taking this any better than she was.

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

Gunfire. Then muzzle flashes so large and bright that they lit up entire halls. Ponies beginning to stream out of their quarters and right into the crossfire of terrified security officers with full automatic weapons. That horrible, endless shrieking of radroaches and their disgusting array of legs digging into the floor as they swarmed out from whatever dark crevice they’d been nesting in. She knew what she looked like to her little girl against all that—scared senseless, hyperventilating, terrified of the dark and expecting the shadows to grow and latch into her coat. And it was all true.

It was also true that the fear of seeing Light Tail even slightly bitten by the nasty things was the only thing keeping her from shutting down completely like she nearly had the other morning. All she had to do to keep some sense of order to herself was to imagine the sight of her filly in the same shape she’d found Hoofprint, and the heartbreak that tugged at the inside of her chest would spur her into making sure she never, ever had to feel anything like that again.

She didn’t want to end up like Kickstart.

.44 Mag being far too loud and powerful for the bugs they were facing, she slid Grayhawk back into her holster and went for the .357 on Light Tail’s saddlebags instead, along with the speedloaders stuffed into a pouch right beside the small revolver. “Do you understand?” she called out to her child, instantly admonishing herself at how panicked she sounded in the process. Idiot don’t shriek like that—

A quick push of the cylinder release button unlocked it from the frame, and she counted off five .357 rounds in all five chambers before Light Tail could get her mouth to answer. “….do you?”

Buck me, she’s about to freeze—

“Courage is being scared to death and saddling up anyway,” she blurted, latching onto the only response she could think of in such short notice. “….’least that what Windy told me. I don’t care if you’re ready to pee all over the floor, but we have to get moving. I don’t wanna lose you…”

That seemed to get the little one moving again. She even went so far as to nuzzle her mother’s side as she drew close, as if hoping the contact would bring her enough courage and comfort to do what she was asked. “....just don’t get away from me.”

Better, she sighed in relief, finding a strange sense of security in her daughter’s touch that calmed her breathing a little. “…try to keep up, stairs are close. We’ll just shoot straight up to L7, we’ll be in the library in about three minutes if we don’t stop. Okay?”

“The sooner, the better.”

She expected her legs to procrastinate or lock up on her, keeping her pinned to the floor and fighting to get herself moving, but amazingly enough they actually began to move and speed up into a light jog without too much effort. She could have gone much faster, but she didn’t want to outrun El-Tee and moving slower would let her see danger and still have enough control to avoid it. And if she couldn’t, the .357 was more than enough for a radroach.

The stairs she sought were at the north end of the level, necessitating a trip down at least one of the leftward corridors in order to reach it, but with her EFS so flooded with red marks and locator tags it was impossible to sort them out and guess at which one had the fewest threats. She settled for the very next turn down the hallway, slipping around the corner and flinging her light spell out ahead of her to chase away the darkness.

Thankfully, no bugs. And at the end of the hall was a straight path to the stairway—

“ATTENTION, STABLE ONE-ONE-FIVE RESIDENTS,” the manufactured mare’s voice chimed soullessly. “YOU NOW HAVE TWELVE MINUTES TO REACH A DESIGNATED SAFE ZONE—“

A four-shot burst of rifle fire finished the PA’s countdown to doom, and a pair of high-pitched chirps curled the hair of her mane up on end—

—and the hair of her tail followed with it when she reached the end of the hall and ran smack into a throng of radroaches fearlessly advancing against a lone unicorn stallion and his 5.56mm rifle, his magic desperately trying to clear the ejection port of a stovepipe jam—

—Sling’s magic reached out to his web gear belt, unlatching the 10mm pistol from its holster and flicking the safety off before she began to squeeze off carefully aimed shots as quickly as she could manage. After four shots and two dead radroaches, he’d finally fixed his rifle and resumed his shooting, sweeping the weapon from side to side in hopes of catching at least one bug with each spray of bullets—

“Idiot, use the sights!!” she screeched at him over the gunshots as she let loose with two more shots, taking out one bug with a headshot and another with a shot that buried itself inside the bug’s body. “Misses are nothing but loud noises!!”

But he didn’t listen—or more likely, firing at least two magazines’ worth of high-velocity slugs in such a confined and amplifying environment had temporarily deafened him. He continued to spray his shots about with little concern for proper aiming, missing far more often than not. It took a firm hold of her own telekinesis spell to bring the rifle’s sights out in front of his eyes before he even knew there was another pony behind him, and his body jerked in place at the sudden intrusion to his personal space.

“Line the sights!!” she screamed into his right ear, quickly trotting up next to him and demonstrating with careful use of the 10mm pistol’s sights to take out two more bugs eighteen yards away. “Squeeze, aim, squeeze, repeat!! You’re hitting nothing but air with that crap you’re pulling!!”

She felt his spell field attempt to overpower hers, and she dialed her spell back to its previous range and allowed him to resume his firing. To her relief, he began to take more careful deliberation with his shots, allowing only two or three rounds per aimed burst before tracking onto another target. Though the swarm of bugs drew closer with each step, their numbers were quickly dwindling, and the pair were able to finish them off just as the last two had gotten within lunging distance.

The 10mm now at slide lock, she punched the mag release and let the empty magazine clatter to the floor as she yanked a fresh one off the stallion and slapped it into the grip—

“H-holy sh….hoo man I need a minute,” the stallion began to blubber helplessly, his shaking body beginning to sink to the floor as he laid his rifle down in front of him. “Need a minute gotta breath—“

“Reload while you’re breathing,” she snapped back, flicking the safety back on and stuffing his pistol back in its holster as she eyed the three empty rifle magazines littered amongst the slain bug carcasses. “And don’t fire in full-automatic, you’re wasting ammo and putting ponies at risk with every shot you don’t hit with.”

“Y-y-yeah, sure thing,” he stammered with heavy breaths, now tasking himself with fighting the magazine out of the mag well and exchange it with a fresh one. “N-not a problem, breathe, dude, breathe, reload, breathe…”

Light Tail had been content to simply follow along behind her mother, but the sight of a grown stallion shaking like a leaf before her proved too tempting a prank target to pass up, even at a time like this. The little one inched to within three a few centimeters of his ears and eyed him with a critical, careful gaze for a few moments before launching her assault. “….you want to bake me a plate of homemade cookies for dinner.”

“S-sure thing, whatever you say….”

Light Tail’s dead-pan face broke into a fit of barely-contained laughter as she trotted away from the suggestion-prone security pony, and even Sling found herself choking back a snort at the sight. “Wow, you could tell him anything you wanted and he’ do it,” the filly laughed quietly. “Can we keep him?”

Her choked snort became a nose-bursting chuckle, eliciting a jolt out of the stallion as she turned back down the hall and made a run for the stairway door. “No. You don’t want Flashlight, you don’t know where he’s been.”

“We could clean him up,” El-Tee suggested with a squeal, gleefully hopping over a pile of dead radroaches as she went. “Get him straightened up and back on his hooves, maybe tie a bow in his tail!”

More gunfire erupted from the halls of level eight as they reached the stairwell and began the short flight up to level six, and the brief joy and elation over the jesting died as quickly as the sound faded. She wanted to feel ashamed for even making light of Flashlight’s turmoil to begin with. “….let’s just get to the library. We’ll worry about Flashlight later.”

She could barely hear the bolt of his rifle clacking shut in the hall as she ascended the first flight of stairs and bounded over to the next set with nary a lost step.

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

The way Mom just talked made her feel like she’d just done something she shouldn’t have, and she had a pretty good idea what it was. She hadn’t meant to put Flashlight down, but she wanted Mom thinking about something other than just having faced off with death and chaos without going mad, and making her laugh at something seemed like a good idea. Now she wished she hadn’t said anything.

Without another word she followed her mother up through the stairs, glancing back down behind them every fifth step to make sure the bugs weren’t following them, or that a throng of terrified ponies weren’t going to trample them in a mad dash for safety. It would have sucked to have come all the way up just to get squished from behind at the library door.

She amended her definition of “sucked” the second they reached the seventh floor and dashed out into the hallway. She’d thought things were bad when they came out of quarters, but it turned out she knew nothing of bad.

Things were even worse up here. The gunfire was constant now—short bursts like what she heard back on level eight, as well as single shots, and those bug chirps were like a choir, always shrieking and crying either at each other or as they died where ponies were shooting them.

And the ponies themselves….so many were shouting at each other, scared to death as they piled up into the corridors and tried to squeeze themselves through. Others were just screaming wordlessly, likely lost or cornered….or worse. The constant flashes of yellow and gunfire weren’t helping her night vision, nor were the strobing pulses of red light. In fact, it was starting to scare her. It was like the Stable itself was panicking.

She didn’t even hear Mom talking to her until one of her forelegs began to shake her loose from her stunned stupor. “—ey, I’m right here! Do you hear me, I’m right here!!”

“I…I’m here,” Light Tail heard herself gasp back, desperately trying to blink away the sights before her despite the knowledge that she wasn’t having a nightmare. “….in denial, but I’m here…”

“We’ll make it,” Mom assured her in the best, soothing voice she could muster, which was not really that soothing or collected, but at least she was trying. “Just—“

A pony’s screaming somewhere to their right began to grow louder, and closer, and Light Tail’s head naturally followed the screams. But that wasn’t what stopped her heart and lungs cold.

It was the four radroaches clinging to his body, chomping away at his neck and sides as he tripped on his own hooves and collapsed to the floor. And even as Mom raced past her and began flinging the nasty things off with telekinesis spells, a cold, ugly part of her gut told her that it was probably too late. And she couldn’t look away.

It happened so fast. Mom was tearing the bugs off and blasting them in mid-air with her pistol, but the pony was choking and gurgling, unable to talk through his neck wound, and the blood just started to pour out and bubble inside the ragged, bloody hole….

Mom was shouting at him as she wiped the last bug out of existence with a single blast from her gun, shouting and trying to plug that hole in his neck with a hoof, then with a torn piece of his stable suit, trying to stop the blood flow, trying something, while she just stood there frozen to the floor and staring at the blood—

Now Mom was jumping over him, hooked one leg over his neck wound and pulling at his stable suit with her teeth to tear more pieces of cloth for some kind of bandage. Her gun floated out past them, fired one more time, a huge tongue of flame spouting out of the barrel on the second shot—

She was saying something, to somepony. Maybe the stallion, maybe her, may—

Maybe I should just do something instead of standing here!

Without being bidden or commanded, the filly dashed forward, biting down on her tongue to choke back a gag as her forehooves came down on the stallion’s wound. A thin spurt of blood curled out from its depths and splattered her face, but also showed her where best to put on the pressure to cut down the blood flow—

—his body began to lift up off the floor, enveloped in Mom’s levitation spell, and it became a struggle to keep the pressure applied to his bleeding neck as she hopped backwards on her hind legs, pulling his floating body along with her. Her tail began to swish back and forth to help maintain her balance, but it would have been a lot easier if Mom would just help her out a little—

“Turn left!” Mom shouted, just as a metallic object clicked into place—

—she jerked her body around to her left without even looking behind her, thankfully running into little more than more open hallway—

—her hindquarters bumped right into a pony’s legs in the next moment, and despite everything that was happening all around her, she felt an immense rush of relief flow into her limbs at the sound of Aunt C’s voice. “Hey El-oooooh hell what happened to him?!”

That relief gave her back her voice, for the moment. “Hurt bad!” she shouted back as the pegasus began to shove her way through the filly’s front legs to see the injury for herself. “Real bad, bugs got all over him—“

Mom’s gun went off again, but with so many bugs chirping and shrieking and stuff, it was hard to tell if she’d killed one or not. She fired again as she came into view in the hallway, walking backwards and keeping the gun aimed out ahead of her—

“Sling, get Ballast to the medical ward!” Aunt C hollered out, brushing against the stallion’s body as she zipped out past her and took her mother’s place in the hall. “I got these ugly mothers—“

Whatever else Aunt C had to say was lost in a blaze of gunfire that erupted from a rifle mounted to the side of her saddle. She couldn’t tell how she was even shooting it, but she had this funny looking rein and bit stuck in her mouth that seemed to hook up to the mounting point that held her rifle—

—Mom’s spell field began to grow stronger, the telltale touch of her telekinesis spell pressing down on her hooves, and she drew her forelegs back onto the ground and let the spell take over the work of keeping pressure on the wound. Mom had no trouble keeping the stallion in tow as she took off down the hall as fast as she could safely manage, and the filly did her best to keep up. That little body chemical called adrenaline was a great boost, she didn’t know she could run this fast.

They had to weave their way through a smorgasbord of ponies crammed against each other a couple of times, and even leapt over another pair that had tripped over themselves in their mindless panic, but in short order they found themselves standing behind the crowd of ponies trying to force their way into the medical ward (as opposed to calmly filing inside in a dignified manner like the PA was asking them to), and Mom got the stallion past them by simply shoving them all apart from each other with a quick extension of her telekinesis spell before zipping inside—

“I got injured!” she screamed out on her way in, floating the stallion out in front of her, who by now was beginning to look less….alive. Still breathing, but barely, and the reception hall was stuffed full of hurt souls. None quite as bad as Mom’s haul, though. “Deep neck wound, pulse is dropping—“

Nurse Tender Mane happened to be the one trying to sort through all the injured when Mom burst in, and the white-coated unicorn mare wasted no time shifting her attention to the new patient being delivered to her. She rushed towards Mom and took a quick peek at the stallion, pressing one of her forehooves against his neck for a couple of seconds, and then reached out to a waiting stretcher shoved up against the reception desk and pulled it towards her. “Get him on the gurney and keep pressure on the wound. We’ll take him right to the ER.”

Mom’s resolve started to fade, probably at the thought of being pulled away from her, and she started to say as much. “Wa….wait, what about my da—“

“Go, Mom,” Light Tail squeaked back loudly before she could try to find somepony else to do what she was doing. “I-it’s fine, now, right? We made it here, we’ll be fine. Go on, I’m not goin’ anywhere.”

….well, actually, she was, but what Mom needed to hear was that yes, little Light Tail was going to be fine now and that it was okay to keep helping the poor soul she’d brought in to help in the first place. And even if Mom looked like she didn’t want to be more than five feet away from her right then, she wasn’t going to say no and take her attention off the hurt stallion right in front of her. Mom started to move along with the rolling stretcher when Nurse Tender Mane took the silence as her cue to take Ballast off to the ER, and soon both mares disappeared through the open hallway entrance and into the medical ward’s interior.

And then Light Tail booked it into the mare’s bathroom as quickly as her four short legs could carry her. She was safe now, even if the security ponies outside were still shooting and other residents were still trying to get inside a safe zone. She was safe, the bugs weren’t getting into the medical ward, there were at least two security ponies in reception if they did scuttle their way through the entry, Mom was safe….

….and everything that had happened in the last two minutes was finally starting to catch up with her.

She barely made it through the door and into a stall before she lost it, but thankfully hit the toilet bowl instead of the floor. It was a fight to get her lungs to breathe all of a sudden, and she couldn’t bear to look at her forehooves anymore. They were absolutely soaked with that stallion’s blood. From his neck, and he was choking on it and hardly breathing and…and….

…..and oh stars had she just witnessed a pony’s last moments of life?! Was he dying right in front of her while she plugged his torn-up neck in some sick vain effort to keep him alive and suffering a few seconds longer?! Oh stars what if there were other ponies out there that were dead, what if—

—her forelegs came down on top of her snout, choking back an upsurge of bile, at least until her bladder had finished relieving itself of its own accord, and one of her hind legs kicked at the flush lever as she turned around and hurled into the swirling rush of tainted water. Her entire body was starting to shake now, probably because she had a moment to process what had just happened, and—

—a second gag reflex tossed up the last of her breakfast, and a second flush of the toilet washed it away alongside a hoof full of used dry towelettes . How the plumbing systems were still working with the power out, she didn’t know, so she was just thankful that they were working. Her shivering form began to stumble out of the stall, bumping the door open with her head, and walked the six steps to the row of sinks mounted into the wall. With some considerable effort she was able to get a hoof up and over a basin sink mounted low to the wall, for little fillies like herself to make use of, and shoved her forehooves underneath the faucet as it began to spill warm water. Despite how sick it made her to see all that blood on her, she forced herself to look at it and make sure she got it all off of her, as quick as she could.

It became yet another fight for her struggling body, barely able to muster any kind of finite control over itself. Either her limbs wanted to smash their way about, or barely flinch at her mental commands. Either she wanted to shake like a leaf, or freeze where she stood. Either she wanted to breathe in loud, sharp gasps and hyperventilate, or struggle to even suck in a tenth of the oxygen that she normally did. And all she could think of was that bloody, pulsing wound she’d tried to keep from spraying blood all over he—

—she didn’t know why it took so long for her to remember that she got some of his blood on her face, but now that she remembered that little squirt she was in a near panic, sticking her head under the faucet and swiping her left foreleg over her face to scrub it off. Her eyes kept trailing it as it slimed its way through the running water and swirled about in a circular pattern in the sink, stretching out in a thin, red line as it ran into the drain, hoping she’d see it end in the next instant and panicking when it didn’t. The ten seconds it took for the water to start running clean and clear instead of crimson felt like a lifetime.

With a gasp she drew her head back, shook off the excess water and not caring how much of it splattered up against the mirror as she stared back into the foreign face it showed her. She knew deep down that it was her, but she could hardly recognize herself. She never looked so…

….so ragged looking, she wondered fearfully as her body shakes began to grow stronger. Stars, my mane, my body….it’s all a mess, oh Luna I hope he makes it I hope he makes it—

The chant, the silent plea to a departed alicorn, became something of a stab at her sanity. What if he didn’t make it? What if she’d just watched him live his last moments in pain, unable to even say good-bye or thank-you to the ponies that had tried to help him? What was his kid gonna do, or the mom? How many more were suffering like that? Had anypony actually died already and she just didn’t know it yet?

She’d never wished so hard for school to come back. Wished for everything to just go back to normal like it was supposed to, so she could sit at her desk and be bored to death by Miss Amethyst teaching stuff she already knew. Wait for school to let out so she could rush to the library and try to find those Daring Do books she’d misplaced by accident, play with her friends and hang out, and bug Mom when she got home and just sit on the couch and read something with her. And wish that things could stay that way, forever.

She wished so hard she didn’t even hear Aunt C barge into the washroom, calling her name, until the pegasus had to resort to shaking her out of her panic attack—

“—y El-Tee, you okay?!” Aunt C’s voice cried softly through her ears, her forelegs encircling the filly until she’d become trapped in the mare’s grasp.

Her voice became an anchor in the sea of intense emotions, and she practically willed her body up against the pegasus in some instinctive effort to find a source of physical comfort alongside the emotional one. “Aunt...Aunt C, I…oh Luna the blood is he gonna—“

“Don’t think about it!” she snapped back, her forelegs now encompassing the filly into a tight hug against her chest. “Don’t think about it, just listen to my voice, you’re gonna be fine now—“

“I can’t…I don’t….oh stars what did—“

“Light Tail, listen to me!” Aunt C’s voice blared, stunning her with the use of her actual name instead of just the letters. “You’re gonna be fine, you’re safe in here. Don’t think about it, just listen to my voice. Think about your mom, or that book you’ve been reading all week, anything but what you just saw. Don’t think about it, just calm down and breath slowly, and think of something else.”

She gasped in another three breaths before the touch of the pegasus’s hug and coat began to calm her shaking nerves, and her tail stopped twitching and zipping about in random directions and patterns. Her lungs began to work towards a normal, soft breathing rhythm, and like Aunt C suggested, she started to think about—

—Starlight’s horn blazed with her magic, shaping the water of the river into a sparkling visage of the Princess of Equestria, and willed it into motion with a breathtaking charge towards the surprised cultists of Discord that had sought to end her journey at the creek—

Light Tail’s gasp was now one of awe and wonder rather than desperation, and her mind’s eye sought to further the daydream a tad longer as her heartbeat began to wind down—

—her spell shattered into a brilliant shower of crystal blue sparks, the cultist’s shield shimmering from the impact even as she began to draw out a flow of red mana into her next attack spell—

“There, you see?” Aunt C soothed into her ears, her whisper clearly audible now that her lungs were no longer trying to suck in half the stable’s oxygen every time she inhaled. “You’re gonna be fine, breathe slow, keep thinking of that awesome thing you’re thinking—“

—Starlight’s eyes drew up towards her namesake, mesmerized by the otherworldly glow of the celestial night sky as it illuminated the ruins of the alicorn sisters’ castle—

“All better now,” the pegasus whispered with relief, and Light Tail felt a drab of wetness trickle down the mare’s face as she spoke. “Breathe, girl, just breathe easy. You’re fine now…”

Snippets of The Mare of the Everfree continued to play out in her head as she began to recollect herself. “….ahhh….Aunt C, I….I think….I know what I won’t be when I grow up.”

Somehow, even though she didn’t clearly explain what she meant, Aunt C seemed to get it right away. “’S okay, not everypony’s cut out to be security,” she assured her gently. “But don’t sell yourself short, you did great back there. Not many ponies rush to help without thinking about it, and even if you had to tell yourself to do something instead of standing there frozen, you still did something. Don’t let anypony tell you different.”

Her calm, slightly more collected mind began to freak out slightly at the mention of what had caused her to lose her nerve in the first place, and the sickening pulse of the stallion’s torn flesh began to creep back into her forehooves. “….is he gonna—“

“He would have if you two had done nothing,” she answered the question, tightening her hug and even nuzzling her head a little. “He at least has a chance now, and that’s more than he would’ve had otherwise. You did everything you could for him. Everything, you hear?”

That wasn’t quite true. She could have done something sooner, faster, better. “I-I shouldn’t have been standing there like a foal—“

“You didn’t,” Aunt C’s voice continued to coo into her ear. “You did everything you could. You’ve never seen anything like this before, and I’m sorry that you had to, but you can’t second-guess yourself like this. You did something, the right thing, when somepony needed you even if you had to fight with your own fear before you did it. Very, very few ponies can do that.”

“I about peed myself just now!” she howled back, growing both angry and ashamed with herself. All the days she’d spent so confident and sure of herself, and the one moment she should have been that confident she’d just stood there and gawked as her mother tried to fight off a swarm of bugs and keep him from bleeding out at the same time! “I couldn’t stop it, and I just puked up my breakfast and my body won’t stop shaking I’m so freaking terrified—“

“And that’s okay,” the pegasus kept on going in that soft, caressing voice that almost made her a second mother. “It’s like what I told your mom the other day, courage is being scared to death and saddling up anyway. Your body is just trying to deal with it all now that it’s over. And…and sometimes that means a pony will lose control over things and mess themselves, or throw up. And your shakes are nothing to be worried about, it’s just your adrenaline being bled off now that your body doesn’t need it. That’s nothing to be ashamed of, okay? You did everything you could for Ballast. You’re a good, brave pony. You’re fine, just breathe and don’t think about it. Just breathe.”

She wanted to believe it, badly….and as her shakes began to fade and break up into short pulses instead of a constant running thing, Aunt C’s body warmth began to spread through her coat and envelope her as tightly as her physical hug. Oddly enough, the warmth was even more comforting than the physical contact. Like she could just close her eyes, and be protected in both body and mind if she just sat there and basked in it, and did like Aunt C asked.

So that’s what she did. She just closed her eyes, and let it all be.

And breathed.

Comments

[Mr Pones]

Prologue and an intro? Well then.

[KDarkwater]

1941553 Yes, cats can be awesome in their own strange way. :D That particular part was based on a rather lucid dream I had the day before I started working on the chapter (I work graveyard shift and sleep during the day). It involved very similar circumstances on Christmas morning with this fifteen-pound beast of a Maine Coon cat we called Sparks when we first got him as a kitten on July 4th, 1996. He was doing the same thing in my dream--dashing around, annoying my family, pouncing on the shredded wrapping, but when he leapt off the couch and right into a box, all this wrapping paper just came poofing out and I wound up laughing....and that's when I woke up. Laughing. I burned the dream into my mind and typed down as many details as I could recall later to make use of it, and it turned into the scene that starts off Chapter 5.

Sadly, Sparks developed a terrible chest tumor, but cats are very skilled at hiding potential symptoms of diseases and medical problems--my guess is that it's an ingrained ability that allows them to continue hunting and moving about without giving away their position to either prey or other animals. We didn't even know anything was wrong with him until he started having trouble breathing and moving more than a few feet at a time. Before that, we chalked up his increasing sleep periods and lack of spunk to old age as his breed is known to live an average of twelve years. By the time the tumor developed to the point where he could no longer hide it, it was too late, and we were forced to put him down a week later on July 29th, 2008. It was a little difficult writing that scene, but at the same time it also reminded me of all the laughs and joy he brought us, and was somewhat therapeutic even after all this time. I'd long since dealt with it, but this still helped in some ways.

I miss that big, furry bastard.

[The Amateur]

I am surprised how well you presented Light Tail's perspective on the chaos!
It was utterly horrifying to see this stuff through the eyes of a child. It properly represented the psychological effect of violence that so many authors of these fictions seem to miss.