ooo000---000ooo
I couldn't do anything as I watched Dee get shoved out of the window, the monster grabbing onto him and causing them both to plummet down. Everything happened so fast that I couldn't react fast enough, there was nothing I could do! "Dee!"
I heard his yell and the window shattering, and the last thing I saw was his feet disappearing from sight. His voice kept going and I rushed over to the window, my wings spreading — or at least they tried too.
My injured wing was still wrapped up and I couldn't fly and pain spiked up causing me to slip and roll onto the floor, smacking into the wall.
"Agh!" I shook my head and tried to get up, to get to the window and find Dee.
Something smashed the door open behind me and when I turned around to face whatever it was, I saw several of those monsters stumbling into the room.
Dead eyes locked onto me, hungry mouths opening wide to try and chomp a piece off of me.
I wasn't going to let them get the chance!
Kicking off of the floor I galloped towards the monsters, my fears forgotten enough that I could slip by them.
I was smaller than they were and much faster even on hooves, and was able to knock a few out of the way, freeing up a path into the hall.
I rushed down the hall with my hooves slipping on the smooth flooring. I was able to regain my hoofing and make a mad dash away from the room.
No way in Tartarus was I going to end up as some snack for some stupid monsters!
The hallway kept leading down past more rooms, ones I didn't bother trying to open. I didn't know anything about this place, where to go, who to trust. I couldn't even fly and I had just lost the only help I had in this whole thing!
My chest tightened and my eyes burned. Why did this have to happen to me?! I just wanted to train myself to be a Wonderbolt, I wanted to get the fame and glory! Not be chased around by monsters!
"Yah!" I slipped and tumbled from something in the floor, rolling into a wall hard and hitting my bad wing causing the pain in it to flare up badly. I barely bit back tears before clambering back up onto my hooves and continuing to run away.
Stop running away, you coward! My mind screamed at me as I rushed down the hall, kicking off of the floor and keeping ahead of the horde of monsters trailing behind me.
No thanks, I don't plan on becoming some monster's dinner! I screamed and turned down another hall, managing to keep myself from sliding.
I spotted a door to an open room and took my chance, bursting through the door and looking around. When I didn't see any of the monsters inside, I slammed the door shut and hid near one of the beds, taking a minute to catch my breath.
J-jeez, this is too much. I swallowed hard, trying to get my thoughts back in order. Dee... damn it! That stupid monster! Now I'm alone! I thought back to Dee's scream, when he fell out of the window three stories down. No way he would have survived that, and even if he did... he probably wished he didn't.
I didn't even try to help him...
No.
I did try to help, I was just too slow to get to him in time, and it was all because of my stupid injury! I had noticed it every time I've had to run, I couldn't move nearly as fast as I used to. Maybe if I wasn't hurt...
I sighed and laid my head down in my hooves, covering my head. I hated this, I hated it so much!
I just wanted to be a Wonderbolt...
ooo000---000ooo
Ever since I was a filly, being a Wonderbolt was my life's dream. i wanted to take to the skies and show off my moves to crowds of starstruck fans, I wanted to dazzle them with wonder, just like my heroes did. I could see it now, I could see myself soaring through the air at high speeds, breaking the sound barrier with a powerful flap of my wings, sending an explosion of rainbows cascading across the skies like a flood of color. The crowds below would shout my name, throwing up their hooves in excitement and crying out as I did my tricks and moves.
I pulled myself up and grunted from the exertion, where my hind legs locked into place on a bar in my closet's door frame. I was doing this to help build up muscle in my core, I knew I was going to need it if I wanted to do the tryouts, maybe not today, or even next week, but I'm going to get into the Bolts no matter what!
I didn't care how long it took me! This was my dream!
"All this training you're putting yourself through and you plan on using it to become a showpony? Bah." I heard the mare next to me speak up, and I could hear the tone of disapproval lacing every one of her words. "When I was a filly, the Wonderbolts were-"
"-Something to be feared and respected, not paraded around like toys." I mirrored my aunt's words and continued my inverted sit-ups, trying not to let it bother me. She did this whenever she visited our home in Cloudsdale, always checking up on me and questioning my dream, like it was a waste of time.
She even said it to my face plenty of times, telling me to do other stuff that wasn't so 'showy'.
"Why do you always do this?" I couldn't help but stare at the pink pegasus pony next to me, her eyes watching me as I curled my body and heaved myself up.
I could see how her gaze seemed to harden, and how her lips curling back as she brushed back her mane. "Because I don't want you wasting time trying to be a performer when the zebras-"
"This again?" I scoffed loudly and let myself drop down from the bar, twisting my body around and landing on the cloud floor beneath me. I turned to look at my aunt, mostly to give her a hard stare of my own. "Can you stop with the crazy conspiracy theories? The zebras have literally zero reason to attack us."
Her wings fidgeted by her sides as the pinions tightening against her barrel. "You didn't spend half your life in a bloody war." my aunt bit back, her eyes narrowed and lips pulled back into a firm frown. "You didn't watch your mates die all around you because of those filthy striped basta-."
"Hey now!" I heard my mom's voice in the doorway, cutting off my aunt before she could finish her slur. "Watch your language around little Dashie!" I blushed at the nickname, one both my parents used far more often then I'd like. "She doesn't need to be learning that, especially in this day and age!"
"You know it's true." My aunt turned to stare at my mom, eyes almost glowing from the anger. It was so potent you could almost taste it. "We may not be at war right now, but mark my words... they're not going to just give up because we won." Her voice was hard and venomous, and I swear I could see fire in her eyes as she stared.
After a moment she stood and pushed past my mom, leaving my mom and I alone to mull over her words.
Mom sighed heavily and walked over to me where she draped one of her wings over my back. "Don't mind your aunt that much, Dashie." She had told me. I just looked up at her, where I saw her eyes staring into my own. "She's a wonderful mare, she's just... suffering on the inside."
I didn't know how much I believed that, but I didn't care. My aunt was always like that when I was growing up, she was still like that. Even though she didn't want me to become a Wonderbolt, I had moved out of Cloudsdale a few years after that, moving to Ponyville to be closer to Fluttershy and keep up my training.
I was going to be a Wonderbolt, no matter what.
ooo000---000ooo
I shivered on the floor of the hospital room, and I could feel my body slowing down as the tiredness began to set in. When was the last time I even had some decent rest? I feel like I've been awake for days, unable to rest for even a second until just now. Things were starting to crash down around me. My mind zeroed in on the fact I was alone with no way to protect myself, and I had no one to turn to for help.
I always said I never needed help, I liked being able to get things done on my own, I wanted to prove to myself that I wouldn't ever need help.
But right now, I needed all of the help I could get.
It didn't take much longer until my body began to tremble as I pulled myself under the bed, and I could feel the drowsiness spreading over my body.
My limbs grew weak and my eyelids were getting heavier.
it was getting hard to keep them open the longer I tried staying up.
It wasn't until I collapsed on the floor completely that my body just decided to give out.
The darkness of dreamless sleep took me soon after, my last thought...
I'm alone in the dark...
I've been up 36 hours so you get a:
Big gay.
Great Work! Don't worry, Dash, you still have us. And i Guess her aunt is Firefly?
Dee is going to use the leech monster to cushion the call isn't he.
You got a immediate like and fav from me i love old school resident evil more and stuff add in poines and civilian pov and you got something more to the lore
And now I'm caught up, finally! This is getting very exciting so far; I already praised the writing style and the immersion is splendid, as well. You have descriptions that make you feel you're there.
Only two points of criticism are related to some of Rainbow Dash's characterization..... It is in-character for her that she has crippling fear of the zombies; already "Castle Mane-ia" showed that, while liking to tell ghost stories, she has problems with real ghosts and in "28 Pranks Later", we saw her completely stiff from fear when she thought that all of Ponyville has been turned into zombies and when they zeroed in on her in the barn.
But, why is she so pacifistic?
This demeanor of hers feels off. As one of Equestria's defenders who protected it from quite a large number of threats, you wouldn't usually think that the thought of killing to protect yourself and those dear to you is so alien to her. In fact, we've seen her being pretty rough with enemies. She is pretty eager to fight threats and all those changelings she beat up during the invasion of Canterlot, she surely wasn't holding herself back there to protect Equestria and if one of these changelings would have suffered a bit too much from a concussion she caused it to the point of dying from it, Rainbow Dash would have seen this as casualty that was necessary to defend Equestria.
Rainbow Dash of all ponies does not seem like the type of pony to be hesitant with killing if she has to do that.
At first, I thought it's just part of Dustin's characterization to assume that ponies are such innocent creatures that they would never take a life, not even of an enemy, and that the concept of killing to survive is completely alien to them (an opinion many bronies seem to have, however little sense it makes considering a lot of things we've seen in G4), but then Rainbow Dash herself said it.
It feels off, considering Rainbow Dash's personality, the things she did, as well as the things she saw or at least heard about (how her own friend, the Princess of Friendship, was quite willing to kill Tirek in her rage comes to mind), that Rainbow Dash has such hesitation towards killing in this story.
The other point is, that Rainbow Dash, even for being the Element of Loyalty, is a little too loyal here. At the beginning of the story, before she got shot and after she got all the infos she needed about the situation, she could have easily left Dustin and do a flight out of the town. Yet she stayed, even though Dustin was (technically still is, but she has grown some kind of liking to him in the hospital) a completely stranger to her, someone she has zero bonds with and to whom she has absolutely no connection whatsoever. It seems odd that she would feel loyal enough to such a stranger that she stays with him and risks to die or to become a zombie, instead of saving her own life by flying out.
However, I don't know what you have planned for future chapters..... If my theory is true, then there's something that can and will explain this seemingly OOC characterization of Rainbow Dash sooner or later. Something that will make it look right in hindsight.
I will closely follow this to see if I'm right.
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No character has had to kill in canon, at all. Beating up and fighting is one thing, being told you have to quite literally end their existence is another matter entirely. And for ponies, (in some headcanons I work with) they don't kill anyone or anything, hell, even in the show they didn't kill their greatest enemies, they either reformed them or imprisoned them in Tartarus. And while Rainbow is eager to protect her friends, she's not exactly at that point where she's willing to kill another living thing, be it alien or not.
The Mane Six are willing to fight off threats, yes, with every fiber of their being. Willing to end their lives? No, I wouldn't think so, at least in my opinion, it doesn't seem like they would from what I've seen in the show.
Second point. Rainbow can't fly right now, her wing is busted from a bullet so she couldn't escape the city even if she wanted to, least of all on her own. As for why she's staying with Dustin, there's a slew of reasons. One of which is he saved her life and is risking his ass to try and get her help, he bandaged her up when she was injured, and he could have left her the same as she could have left him, but he stuck by her cause he knows she won't be able to survive this alone. Thirdly, while she knows some things now, she doesn't know everything and that's bad. She's, again, injured and can't really do much and all they've faced right now have been stumbling undead and a leech man.
if you know Resident Evil, you know there's more then just zombies.
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Twilight shot a combat spell at a sentient plant and made it explode into pieces when it tried to eat Pinkie from behind, during the invasion of the Everfree Forest when the Tree of Harmony was weakened (seen in Season 4 Opener). In the same episode, we have also seen her weeping at Celestia's seemingly dead body after she thought that Nightmare Moon had returned and killed Celestia, and she wasn't more upset or distraught over this than you would expect it from seeing her mentor getting shot in the chest and seemingly murdered.
Shortly before the changeling invasion in Canterlot, Twilight was attacking Chrysalis in her disguise as Cadance in the caves under Canterlot after Chrysalis banished her there with a combat spell strong enough that it made solid rocks blow apart, because Chrysalis implied she would do something to Shining Armor.
While Twilight didn't say she is going to kill Chrysalis, her aggressive demeanor and the kind of combat spell she chose made clear that she was willing to kill to protect her brother.
We've seen a similar reaction after Tirek destroyed her home. She shot Tirek with a combat spell in the face, threw him to the ground from a very high altitude with full force, once more used combat spells that were strong enough to blow solid (and much larger) rocks into pieces and finally, fired off a spell so powerful that, after it collided with Tirek's counter spell, created a massive, almost nuclear-like explosion, something that Tirek wouldn't have survived if he would have been hit by it.
In that moment, Twilight was furious and acted purely on emotions, not holding herself back with all the alicorn magic she possessed. It's hard to tell how her reaction would have been if she would have ended up killing Tirek, but in that moment, she was willing to end his life.
I sadly can't list any examples for Rainbow Dash herself, but we have seen Twilight quite prone to killing if it's necessary or if her emotions or protective instinct get the best of her, as well as dealing with death in combat rather naturally.
Rainbow Dash herself also didn't seem to be particularly shocked about it when King Sombra ended up getting blown to pieces and, from their perspective, killed in that moment when the Crystal Heart's magic hit him.
We don't see them killing enemies at a constant rate, but these examples show that they aren't above killing if there's no other way anymore. I'm not going to argue with a headcanon, but from what we actually see in the show, it doesn't appear like they're entirely unfamiliar with death in combat and with killing to survive. They use it as a last means of surviving when nothing else helps anymore, but they don't appear like they wouldn't be willing to do what's necessary.
I was talking about the time before that happened. She could have flown out immediately after they left the pawnshop.
But you're right, I forgot that Dustin saved her at the beginning, after she crashlanded. That indeed gave her motivation to stick around before she got wounded already.
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Shooting and blowing up a plant versus an actual pony is... pretty different, in all honesty. It's a plant, granted they're 'alive' in a sense but not in the same way ponies are, if you wanna argue that.
Also yes, Twilight used a lot of strong spells and I have no doubt she could easily kill just about anything. But she never properly killed anyone, she always kept her magic back until she downed them, she never actually went through with properly killing them even though she could have, they either held back or used their friendship beam. As for the battle with Tirek, she could have ended his life and that explosion when their beams collided, while similar to a nuclear explosion, it's not quite the same because we have no idea what the yield of that explosion was. It may look similar to a nuke going off, but is it the same tnt yield? Plus there's no residual radiation being let off from it, as far as we know from canon.
Her reaction was pure and simple rage, her friends were hurt and she was about to lose, so she went all out. Shame she didn't kill him, but she didn't, why? Well, for obvious reasons, it's a kid show and they're teaching reformation and forgiveness, in canon? Friendship reasons, among other things, if I had my way Twilight would have killed Tirek.
Sombra on the other hand, there's a big difference between blasting an enemy alongside your friends with a magical rainbow beam of friendship and actually using brute force to beat what looks like a corpse to death until it stops moving, all the while you're getting covered in blood, sinew, bits of flesh, and the smell of death and blood is filling your nose.
So having a theory your following the outbreak timeline and as such leon and Claire have not arrrived yet will the meet other survivors at somepoint or will they meet the main two and hehe haha chapter one I just realized your either described nemesis or a tyrant without it's power inhibitor
Though might add when he was grabbed in the newsman y didant he just knife the zombies head and why hasn't he told dash the truth about the world there in being fiction created by people of his world which leads to him explain how he really knew rainbows name or are you saving that for a later hit in the feels
very nice story, always in suspense, I am looking forward to continuing and more. good job👍👌
Wrong franchise