11: Anarchy / Running In The ‘90s / Bad Motherfucker / Trout Mask Replica
Light Despondent Remixed
Chapter 11
Anarchy / Running In The ‘90s / Bad Motherfucker
Shouts out to Jed and Vox for the edits. And, perhaps, Tb3, as his original writing does still exist somewhere in here.
Goodbye, it's been fine
Echoes through my mind
Soundwaves break my face
Everyone can be replacedI A M A L L R I O T
What else do you want me to be[Chorus]
Anarchy, won't you be
Won't you be my baby, oh
Anarchy, won't you be, woah
Biting Elbows, Anarchy
Tracey: When you can't run, you crawl. And when you can't crawl, when you can't do that...
Zoe: ...you find someone to carry you.
Firefly
Yael
August 8, 2022
“What is this bullshit?!” Bowie yelled.
“WHAT?!” Heliotrope roared.
“The fuck did you-” Summers started.
“Like hell we are,” Yael says. “We were on the Sorghum earlier. We stopped the guns, dammit!”
“We Nearly Lost Heliotrope There,” Quiette Shy added. “We. Had. Nothing. To Do. With That.”
The volume in her automatic voicebox steadily increased, even as QS managed the same tone. It was as close as she could get to yelling.
“And you’re herding us like cattle into the Bureau,” another National Guard said, their face hidden by a gas mask.
“We’re not,” Yael said. “The ten of us only just got onto the mainland. We were ordered by Colonel Gardner to help restore order in the city, so we came to–”
“Enough excuses,” the squad leader snapped. The men and women behind him were trembling. “Surrender to us now, and we shoot you.”
“Don’t you mean or?” Chinook asked.
“That’s your decision, not mine,” the squad leader said.
“Try it,” Heliotrope said, snarling. “I dare you. We’ll fucking destroy y–”
In that moment, Yael fired on the National Guard. Her squadmates died, she took a bullet, and after the firefight, there’d be an explosion on social media about how she had aided and abetted PER. About the overreach of the PER. About how they failed utterly, about letting them arm the Sorghum. More families dead, more of her friends dead, her in jail... Maybe even being left to die in the prison during Barrierfall.
And knowing full well she deserved it.
That didn’t happen.
Yael’s next option hurt to think about. Hurt to consider.
‘It’s this or another Nipville,’ she thought, her mind racing.
“There’s a way out of this,” Heliotrope said, the purplish-pink pegasus’ eyes darting back and forth. “We could…”
Yael looked down at her friend. In the instant she made that small movement, she thought of all the ways she had to say it, writing, discarding, and revising what felt like hundreds of ways she could talk to her friend without somehow saying the wrong thing.
“There’s not much we could do,” Yael said. “And I think you know that. This way, none of us get hurt.”
Heliotrope sighed, looking down. Looking… drained.
‘Whatever I said, I think it was right.’
“Heliotrope’s right,” Summers said. “All due respect, First Lieutenant, we could shred them here and now. QS shields us with her magic, we fill them with lead. There’s nobody who would kn-”
‘What,’ Yael thought.
“That’s Not The PHL Way, Though, Is It?” Quiette Shy asked. “And We Would Know.”
“QS” Yael said. “Let me handle this. But I need you to say that again.”
“I said, First L–” Summers started, sounding strangely satisfied with himself. Beside him, Smoky dug at the pavement with his foreleg, snorting slightly.
“Because,” Yael interrupted, “It sounded like you were saying to kill other military personnel we should be working with. Something that would in all likelihood be worse than what I’ve done in the last four days. I couldn’t have heard you saying that, could I? Because whatever the PHL has done, that would easily be one of the worst things on the list. I can’t have heard that.”
Summers stared at her, wide-eyed.
“I… must have…” he started. Then slumped. “No,” he said. “You didn’t hear it. That… would’ve been...”
“That’s what I thought,” Yael said.
‘Lord, do not make me regret thi–’
Yael’s earpiece crackled, so loudly it felt like she’d been punched in the ear. She winced.
“WE NEED HELP!” Major Haddon screeched into the piece. “First Lieutenant Ze’ev, I am ordering you to support us!”
‘What to do, what to do?!’ Yael thought. ‘Damn. Damn damn damn damn damn! That’s an order. They’re already breathing down my neck about Nipville. If I disobey a direct order, they’ll separate us. Me and Heliotrope, and…’
Hey eyes widened.
‘Oscar and Quiette Shy. Nobody else will know how to work with her. I’m what she knows, and I… I can’t sell out a friend. Oscar… No. Not Oscar. He’ll get repossessed. Legally, I have no right to employ him, and I could get in big trouble for it.’
And then came the voice of Gardner.
“I am ordering you to follow him, Ze’ev! Regroup with Haddon, now! Do whatever you have to. If our fellow PHL are in trouble, it’s our duty to help them!”
“Oh, what’s that?!” one National Guard yelled. “You getting orders to ponify us, here and now? Turn us into those little wind-up toys?!”
Haddon, screaming into the earpiece like a banshee. “He’s killing us! He got Barnes in the balls, and–”
A gunshot. A scream.
“OH GOD! RUNNING WIND GOT SHOT IN THE THROAT!” a woman shrieked from the other end of Yael’s earpiece. She didn’t recognize the voice.
[i]“The HLF are killing them,” Gardner spoke. “It is your duty to help.”
“He says there’s PER,” Yael replied. “He’s willing to hold us at gunpoint. I’m–”
“Have you not considered,” Gardner said, practically spitting out those last three syllables, “That they could be the PER? That they could be HLF?”
“Yael,” Heliotrope said, “He does make a good point, they–”
“Admittedly, yes,” Yael spoke to Gardner. Then, to him but clearly intended also for Heliotrope, and all the PHL and National Guard in the immediate area, she said, “But no. They were ready to shoot PHL. They were so psychotically angry that nothing else mattered. Either they’re right, or they’re all such good actors that I wouldn’t notice the slightest hint of a tell on any of them.”
“Are you saying that Haddon, someone I personally trust,” Gardner spoke, “A man that has been with the PHL as long as I can remember, is PER?”
“I’m saying these National Guard,” Yael said, “Are unlikely to be PER. Or HLF. I’m saying that I’m not going to shoot anyone until I know what’s going on.”
“We have to!” cried Heliotrope.
“But. We Are Screwed If We Do,” said Quiette Shy.
“If we do what?” demanded Bowie.
Quiette Shy and Heliotrope answered at the same time. Heliotrope dejected, Quiette Shy sounding much like she always did.
“Yes.”
Yael felt like a rookie all over again. Her commanding officer dead. Finding herself in charge of the squad. Surrounded by Newfoals, Imperial Guard, and other grunts of the Equestrian military, all bent on turning them into broken little half-people. No way out that didn’t make her stomach churn.
“Look,” said Bro. “I’m sure we can talk this out. We all need to put down the guns, and–”
The National Guard squad leader snapped back. “What? So you can ponify us?”
“Nobody’s ponifying anyone, dammit!” Wild Bill yelled. “You’d see that if you’d just listen to us!”
‘Whatever I have to.’
Meaning ‘I won’t question if you follow Summers’ suggestion.’
‘Actually, won’t it be worse if I shoot them? The optics. The way it’ll look if I, if the PHL shoot National Guard. The way every crazy from Yarrow to Lovikov will be right. Gardner. Summers. What, in the name of all that is good and pure, is wrong with you two?!’
“What’s it gonna be, First Lieutenant?” Bowie asked. “What’s it gonna be?!”
It wasn’t exactly disciplined, it was probably an unacceptable way to talk to the commanding officer...
But then, this wasn’t exactly a normal situation.
“Alright,” Yael said. “I surrender.”
Kraber
“YOU’RE FOKKED!” Kraber roared, pasting one of the fake PHL in the throat with his revolver. “BEND OVER AND TAKE IT, VARKNAAIERS!”
Okay. Pause. Let’s back up a second or two or three or four.
In the span of those few seconds, as Kraber had been holding the stretcher with one hand, he was trying to think of the most badass one-liner while also drawing the .44 revolver from his hip holster. Feeling the front sight blade brush against the bottom of the stretcher.
And then firing.
For all of Barnes’ body armor, it was still point-blank for a .44 magnum, loaded for hollowpoint ammo with a ball bearing in the hollow. The man fell to the ground, shrieking in pain, clutching the ruins of his genitals.
Exactly as Kraber had predicted, there was a bang from that rifle he’d noticed in that window. One of the ‘PHL’ fell to the ground, grasping a bloody hole in their chest.
‘Just as planned.’
Slightly before that moment – the presumably fake PHL unsure of who to shoot – Kraber and Nebula had made their move.
Kraber leapt to the right, his black Smith and Wesson Model 29 in his right hand. Nebula rocketed off to the left, dragging Rime Ice’s stretcher with one foreleg and somehow keeping it aloft.
As Kraber flew sideways towards the wrecked hulk of a car, practically parallel to the ground, he squeezed the trigger. Which is how we get to the following quote:
“YOU’RE FOKKED! BEND OVER AND TAKE IT, VARKNAAIERS!”
As Kraber flung himself to the side, he pulled the trigger.
This was a terrible place to shoot from, and the recoil was so high the gun practically jumped out of his hands, but Kraber was at close enough range that it didn’t matter. The .44 round tore through the neck of the one masked pony, all but beheading them.
Their head dropped to the ground, and by the light of the neon sign, the guns blazing, Kraber saw the pony’s face.
Glassy-eyed. Unfocused. A wide smile on its face.
‘That,’ Kraber thought, the world slowing around him, ‘is a fokdamn Newfoal. I was right. Fokdammit. I was right.’
He fired again. A .44 round from the Smith and Wesson smashed against Haddon’s chestplate. This being PHL body armor, the .44 wasn’t an instant kill. There was a massive dent in the vest, but it didn’t look like the bullet went very far.
It did, however, hit Haddon like a train. He staggered.
So did Kraber. He was dimly aware of something hitting his shoulder as he slid-fell into cover behind an old, battered van, breathing heavily. Dammit. He’d been shot. Wincing more in anticipation of what he’d feel on his armor, he placed a hand over his left shoulder to find a lump of…
A bullet or three…
… They had deformed against the shoulder of the PHL body armor!
Damn, PHL stuff was lekker! Maybe there was something to being a horsefucker. Sure, it stung like a woman with teeth in her beef portal, but he was alive and not bleeding everywhere.
Thankfully, Kraber had a pain threshold that could – and had – let him take a barstool to the face without even staggering, so he dragged himself back into a sitting position against the back of the truck.
Someone was playing a saxophone off in the distance, weirdly enough.
The rifle, probably bolt-action, judging by the delay in reports, kept firing, spitting hot lead towards the fake PHL. Before Kraber’s eyes, a round drilled through the skull of one fake PHL man. They collapsed backwards, head bouncing against the pavement.
All around them, people and ponies were coming out of the woodwork to fight against the fake PHL. A blue unicorn mare lifted a trash-can with her TK, and flung it at one of the fake PHL, this one an earthpony with a heavy minigun in their assault saddles.
“We’ve got ‘em now!” Kraber heard someone yelling. He looked across the street, seeing a man dressed like National Guard with a gas mask, wearing armor that looked like it’d been burnt. “Some crazy bastard just shot Alan Barnes in the leg, under a damn stretcher he was carrying!”
The man settled into cover at the edge of a brick building, firing off an M16.
“He’s starting a firefight!” the man in burned National Guard fatigues yelled.
With a noise that wasn’t quite a sigh, they crumpled like a leaf as the trash can hit them right in the face.
“BLISS!” Nebula yelled. “What in the blazes did you get us into?!”
“They’re faking!” Kraber yelled. “They’re not really PHL! Dayoung was right!”
“I know that!” Nebula yelled back. “But this some crazy horseapples!”
She tapped a pair of bracers on both forelegs, revealing a set of claws – like three long knives. Like… Wolverine?
Huh.
“Sure wish I brought a gun about now!” Nebula yelled, as a pickup truck rolled up behind the three of them. In the bed was a black man with a Kalashnikov, and armor that had almost certainly been HLF-owned before he’d smeared it with the PHL’s mint-green, rolled up in the back of a pickup truck.
He fanned the trigger of his rifle, laying short controlled bursts at the fake PHL in the street.
Kraber poked his head around the side of the wreck of the car, jerking it back when bullets pinged against the vehicle’s metal frame.
Up on the roof, Kraber saw a red-orange pegasus in a jumpsuit reading ‘STRANDED’ jump up from the roof like a rocket, soaring up into the air. What looked for all the world like fire streamed off from her mane and tail. She was carrying four bottles, one in the mouth, three between the arms.
She flung the bottles down towards the presumably fake PHL, then twisted into a curious maneuver like a corkscrew or a barrel roll, flames trailing behind her all the way.
“SUCK IT!” she yelled, as the contrails of flame behind her ignited the bottles… which burst into flame just above the fake PHL.
One bottle smashed against the head of another fake PHL. The flame splashed over her, and she stood in place, screaming in agony.
In the distance, Kraber heard the roar of an engine.
“DAMN IT!” Giddy Gallop yelled. “We’re dying out here, and they’re onto us! Haddon, PHASE THREE!”
At which point, Haddon reached behind his back and pulled out a small crossbow.
With a ‘thwip’, the dart hit the flaming PHL soldier in the knee, and they fell to the ground convulsing.
A moderately interesting fact to note here is that Kraber, whatever his mental state, is something of a savant. But, at this moment, he didn’t need that to know what a fake PHL using a crossbow in the company of a Newfoal could mean.
“EAT THIS!” Kraber yelled, and – remembering a tidbit from the Expanse novels – fired a .44 round at the screaming, flaming woman’s throat.
Everything between her sternum and chin exploded, her flaming helmet jumping up about a foot at falling to the ground facedown. Her headless corpse fell, chest-down.
“HOW’S THAT FOR A MERCY KILL, VARKNAAIER!”
‘Two left.’
A flash of movement. Another one of the fake PHL – this one human – was poking their head out of cover. Kraber fired the Smith and Wesson, the revolver’s thick wooden grip bucking backwards in his hands.
Whatever the PHL armor was made of, the transparent faceplates they had were not. The .44 round drilled through the forehead just above the eye, splashing the transparent faceplate red.
‘One.’
“We need reinforcements!” Haddon yelled. “We are under siege from HLF and PER at once! It’s a three-way!”
Giddy Gallop jumped out from cover, spiralling up through the air. Bullets and even a grenade or two or three whistled past him, but they almost seemed to veer away from him as he flew towards the ground like a meteor.
Kraber fired the last round in the cylinder. Giddy Gallop dodged like he knew where the bullet would hit before Kraber even fired it.
“She was my FRIEND!” Giddy Gallop yelled, assault yoke blazing towards Kraber. Bullets ripped through the air.
‘Okay,’ Kraber thought, suddenly very conscious of the emptiness of his revolver’s cylinder. ‘Hier kom Groot Kak!.’
Heliotrope
‘Where do they get off doing this to us?’ Heliotrope had thought just before Yael made the announcement. ‘We’re the PHL! We have th–’
And then Yael surrendered.
‘WHAT!’
She wasn’t sure what she thought of this whole situation. Held at gunpoint by National Guard? This was… this was definitely a new one.
“Yael,” Heliotrope hissed, “What, in the name of Faust, are you thinking?”
“If we’re surrendered, then we can talk things out.” Yael said, as she walked forward. “This way, nobody has to die. And there’s no reason for me to make things worse.”
Everyone in the street was silent for a few seconds.
Yael stared at the National Guard squad leader. “What?” she asked.
“I… didn’t think you would actually surrender,” the squad leader said. “I didn’t think it would get this far.”
“I was kind of hoping to kill PER,” another National Guard said.
“But,” Yael said, “We can help with that.”
“I saw your commanding officer ordering us to the edges of the city,” the squad leader said.
“Wait. Gardner? Him working with the PER?” Yael asked. “Something’s definitely screwed with him, but I can’t see him being PER.”
‘What?’ Heliotrope thought. ‘No. No no… well…’
And then she remembered how he’d treated Dancing Day. That was… well. That just wasn’t right.
‘She’s a pony,’ Heliotrope thought. ‘More importantly, a little filly. And he… Yeah. Something’s not right with him. Yael’s been right this whole time. I have to admit that. But… he’s directing us against HLF. He helped us take over the rig. He can’t be all bad.’
Then again, Heliotrope would have to wonder. Why had she thought ‘all bad’?
“Who’s Gardner?” another National Guard asked. “We were ordered to help them into the hospital by Major Haddon.”
“I work under Colonel Robert Gardner,” Yael said. “We were assigned to the rig. Whatever you were thinking of, we had nothing to do with it and didn’t receive any of those orders.”
She spoke with absolute certainty. All around her, Heliotrope could see the National Guard lowering their weapons, relaxing their posture.
‘That’s Yael for you,’ Heliotrope thought, nodding with a smile on her face. Beside her, Quiette Shy breathed a sigh of relief.
“And where do you even get the idea we’d be ponifying people?!” Heliotrope asked, fluttering over. “We’d… we’d never…”
“Because I saw it, alright?” the squad leader said. “We were ordered to the edge of the city. Haddon said that as this was a PHL-related emergency, he was taking command. And, and everything was so chaotic I…” He swallowed. “I just didn’t know how to react. He acted like he had authority, everything was exploding, I didn’t know what to do! So, I’m heading to the northern edge of the city, and see someone walking out of the Bureau ruins with crates. Then I look through a scope into one of the hospital rooms, and... And clear as day, I can see someone being ponified through one of the windows. There’s Newfoals walking all through what’s left of the hallways, and nobody’s coming out.”
Without warning, and quite uninvited, he gripped Heliotrope’s foreleg.
“Let go of me,” Heliotrope said, keeping the tremor out of her voice. Just like she imagined Yael would say it. “Now.”
“Nobody’s coming out,” he repeated, before letting go. “And all the PHL there, except for you, apparently, are letting it happen.”
“First Lieutenant Ze’ev, there’s something worse,” another National Guard said. A woman. Yael couldn’t make out much behind their potion armor’s visor. “They got a lot of other PHL, some of my friends to help them set up the Bureau they have going in there. Like, like Arthur Wright, Ladan, Rime Ice, or Tea Cozy, or Adaego - you know, that earthpony with the tea stand, that zebra huckster? And Sylvia Bray. Friend of mine who works at Maine Medical. I think that…”
The woman sounded like she’d vomit in her helmet. Heliotrope had done that before, back during the Crystal War – somehow, it was not as fun as it sounded.
“I think that they’re suckering PHL, ponies, PHL allies into helping them do it,” the woman said. “These people… Sylvia especially… they can’t know what they’re doing. The PER are forcing our PHL friends, others, to help them ponify.”
A shiver ran down Heliotrope’s back, through seemingly every last inch of her feathers. ‘That’s monstrous…’
“And by the time they realize where they are, they’re surrounded by potion, and they’re stuck in there.”
Everyone turned to the one who’d last spoken, John – well, he was Bowie to everyone but Heliotrope by then – curious looks on their faces.
“What?” Walker asked.
“I got stuck doing that in the Purple Winter when I was in Manchester,” Bowie said. “Some people I thought were my friends and some ponies were saying they were creating a shelter for all the violence, I got pressed into guarding it. By th–”
A blast of heat and sound resonated in the distance.
“What was that?” Zhang asked, her eyes wide behind the transparent faceplate of her armor.
In that moment, Quiette Shy spoke what was on everyone’s mind.
“Nothing Good.”
Kraber
Kraber shoved the revolver back into the holster on his right hip, and whipped out the .45 pistol.
‘I’m not going to be able to reload that thing. This is quicker. They’re usually armed with SMGs. The bullets probably won’t penetrate, but I don’t want to bet on that. I need cover.’
Kraber looked over towards a broken storefront with a hole in the window. He flung himself through, feeling broken glass bouncing off the kevlar and ceramic of the armor he’d taken. He rolled on the ground awkwardly, his left arm aching.
He staggered to his feet and slid into cover behind an aisle. The shape of Giddy Gallop fluttered down towards the window.
“You two!” he heard Nebula yell from someone. “Gonna need you to take care of Rhymey here!”
Giddy Gallop dodged again.
Kraber saw a spray of blood, but Giddy Gallop didn’t seem bothered.
A bag of potato chips exploded behind him, flecks of salt and fried potato floating to the ground. A bullet, probably 9mm, embedded itself in the cheap formica of a counter that probably hadn’t been changed since the 70s. Terrible fluorescent lights erupted into showering sparks of electricity as Giddy Gallop’s assault yoke’s SMGs ripped through the store.
Kraber tried to slow his breathing. Tried to stay quiet, back against the end segment of one aisle.
“We’re just trying to help, you horseapple-brained moron!” Giddy Gallop yelled. “But no! You DUMB! FU...”
It was hard to say what happened next, only that the last word segued into an ‘urrrrrrk…’
“Well,” Nebula said, “I did say I wanted a gun.”
Kraber looked over cover, past the exploded bag of potato chips. He saw Nebula standing over the corpse of Giddy Gallop, one of those weird wolverine claw things embedded in his neck.
‘That had to be paining,’ Kraber thought.
Giddy Glow coughed, blood burbling out of his mouth.
“Is… is he still alive?” he asked, taking the Model 29 out of his holster. He thumbed open the cylinder – which came with a Hogue cylinder release, a present from Lovikov – and jammed in a speedloader.
Giddy Gallop made an unpleasant noise that made Kraber’s eyes water.
“I mean, I shot and grazed him,” Kraber said, carefully moving the revolver cylinder back into the frame. He appreciated the feeling of a good, slow reload. Too many things that could go wrong rushing a reload. Dad, Paul Kraber, had made it very clear that snapping a revolver closed with your wrist was a terrible idea. “Heh. Grazed. And you just…”
He looked down at Giddy Glow.
“Nope, that’s pretty dead,” Nebula said. She shook her head. “He just…” she shook her head. “I knew him for years! I knew him before this war. And he…” She shook her head again. Her voice sounded like it was coming from faraway. “How long, dammit? If I can’t trust someone like him, who can I trust?”
Kraber briefly considered that he was an HLF defector, wearing stolen armor, lying about his identity.
‘This is very ironic.’
The two of them were about to walk out of the store, when–
“GET DOWN!” Kraber yelled, grabbing Nebula and dolphin diving to the linoleum floor.
A second after he said it, something – or rather, several somethings – went ‘thoom’ to the ground with a noise like a drum being dropped from a great height, and bouncing, shattering windows and shaking the floor beneath him. The other humans taking cover where Kraber and Nebula had been just seconds before, choking and clutching their throats. Just off in the distance, Kraber could see Haddon retreating. Motioning with his left hand with a Remington ACR in his right, a pony at his side.
PHL, who Kraber realized might not have been fake, were rushing to his aid.
‘Was that a grenade?! Kraber wondered. ‘A cannon? What?’
He peered through the window. Coppery metal cylinders slightly longer and slightly wider than one of his forearms peppered the street like thick black hairs on moles. They’d punched through windows, embedded themselves in walls, and nailed cars to the pavement.
‘Oh, this still can’t be good.’
“Any idea what these are?” he asked, looking straight at the strange coppery tubes.
“I’m the low mare on the totem pole,” Nebula said, “But admittedly, I’ve never seen that before.”
‘Fake PHL. Haddon’s crossbow,’ Kraber thought.
The strange devices began to hiss. In the flickering orange streetlights, he saw wisps of purple wafting off from them. Anyone standing nearby clutched their throats, making strangled choking noises.
“GAS MASKS!” Kraber screamed. “GET ON THE FOKKIN’ GAS MASKS!”
It’s the fokkin’ purple mist all over again!
Yael
In the months between August and December, Yael would watch many times as Heliotrope swore that the moment she heard it ‘thoom’ to the ground, she knew exactly what it was. At which point, Quiette Shy would invariably point out it couldn’t be true, that Heliotrope couldn’t have known.
“They’re potioning people,” Heliotrope said. “I know it.”
“Told you,” one National Guard said.
“We need to move,” Yael said. “I don’t know what that was, but we need to move. Now.”
She tapped her earpiece.
“Oscar?” Yael asked. “Oscar, Lorne? Eva? Are you okay? We’re downtown. Something strange is happening.”
“...Ael?” Oscar asked, his voice crackling over the radio.
“Yeah, Lorne, the freakshow and I are here,” Eva said over the radio.
There was the sound of a light slap on the other end of the earpiece.
“Don’t be a dick, Nilsdottir,” Lorne said in his thick Louisiana accent.
“Thank you,” Yael said, nodding even though Lorne couldn’t see it.
“Anyway. First Lieutenant,” Lorne said. “We’re holed up near a playground. Not seeing many HLF, but there’s some survivors with us. There’s PHL outside, we might–”
“No,” Yael interrupted. “We’ve received word that any PHL working with Garrett Haddon cannot be trusted. Assume any PHL other than us or Gardner are in league with the PER, and rendezvous with us on Congress Street, in front of the State Theater.”
Lorne coughed a little. “All due respect, First Lieutenant? What the fuck.”
“We’ve… been told that PER have infiltrated our ranks,” Heliotrope said. “They’ve taken control of the hospital, I think. We’re talking with National Guard right now, and they say they’re using it as some kind of Bureau.”
Despite the story they’d heard, Yael thought that Heliotrope didn’t sound like she believed it.
“That’s sick,” Oscar hissed.
“Couldn’t agree more,” Yael said. “We’re…”
Her voice trailed off. What, exactly, was she planning on? Walk up to Haddon himself and tell him to stop? Go up to the site of the bomb and…
And…
No matter. Improvising had worked so far, and it wasn’t like she had room for more planning. Not many other options.
“We’re going to move closer to the site of whatever that was,” Yael announced, forcing calm into her voice. If she sounded like she knew what she was doing, if she kept going, sooner or later it would all make sense. “We’ll need reinforcements.”
“Something Feels… Wrong About It,” Quiette Shy said. “Yael. We Have To Be Careful.”
Yael nodded.
“...You outrank her by so much, First Lieutenant,” Bowie said, as they moved. “Why do you–”
“Because I trust her,” Yael said. “If Quiette Shy says that we have to jump to get out of the way of potion, I ask how high.”
With that, she set out towards Congress Street, which seemed to be where she’d heard the strange noise.
And then, screaming. From Congress street. High, piercing notes. The sound of revving motors.
“...What the hell is that?” ‘Bowie’ asked, his weapon ready.
With one foreleg, Heliotrope reached for a device just above her ear – something much like Yael’s own tactical earpieces, but re-adapted to ponies. Strangely, the controls were in a similar place on Heliotrope’s helmet.
Yael stared intently at Congress Street, the reticule of her Galil’s reflex sight pointed directly at the lettering on a broken storefront.
‘What is th–’
Before she could finish that thought, a horde of people rushed down the street either on foot or by car, screaming at the top of their lungs. They didn’t seem to notice Yael, or the soldiers behind her.
‘Oh no.’
A hissing noise. Behind the fleeing crowd, a steadily rolling cloud of purple.
‘POTION!’ Yael thought, and her mind went into overdrive. ‘We have to stop it, evacuate them. We have to - no, that won’t work. But how do we make them trust us? As far as they know, the people of this city have nobody to trust.
Then we make them trust u– Wait. No, they won’t trust me. They can’t. Okay, okay. I’ll have to use someone as a figurehead here. Someone that makes it absolutely sure we’re not HLF. Maybe I can pressgang Chinook into being my spokespony here. I’ll say he outranks me. I’ll make sure everyone knows that it wasn’t an official promotion.
This isn’t my worst plan, but it’s also not my dumbest.’
“If anyone somehow wasn’t thinking of it, gas masks,” she said. “On. Now.”
“First Lieutenant?” Zhang asked. “What’s going o–”
Heliotrope and Quiette Shy already had their respective masks on as Yael stared down the street at the mass of purplish gas. The twisted, frozen forms lying on the pavement. Some of which were caught mid-scream.
“Potion,” Yael said. “I don’t know how right they were about Haddon being a turntail, but they were right about the PER.”
Their bodies were warped in unearthly ways, limbs bending in directions that were simply wrong. Spines bent back like tree branches, feet stretched longer and longer past the hems of pants as the rest of the leg shrunk back into the hips.
‘They look dead,’ Yael thought, staring at the corpses lying on the pavement.
And, in the midst of all this, Yael saw a convenience store, with two humans, and three ponies – one wounded, lying on the floor – holed up inside.
“Do we shoot them?” Summers asked.
“No,” said the National Guard squad leader. Yael turned towards him, watching him give Summers a very dirty look that more than made up for the squad leader's hands being full of M4 and thus not being able to give him the finger. “In case you were thinking it–”
He looked at Yael.
“I wasn’t,” Yael said.
Kraber
Nebula scrambled to all four hooves, frantically pulling Giddy Gallop’s assault yoke over her barrel.
The black man with the Kalashnikov rushed towards the store now wearing a homemade gas mask – and a belt full of pipe bombs. He was followed by a blue unicorn mare. The doors to the store automatically slid open, much to Kraber’s surprise.
‘I threw myself through a broken window for nothing?!’ Kraber thought. ‘The fok is that kak?!’
The unicorn was carrying Rime Ice in their TK field.
“Glad ‘ou doo helped oud,” Rime Ice said, woozily. “Thanks for leavin’ me... in a safe place, Bebula.”
‘Did I give him more morphine than I thought?’ Kraber wondered.
“The hell, man!” the black man yelled. “Thought that was PHL!”
“I don’t think they’re PHL,” Kraber said, unholstering the Fostech autoshotgun as he stared at the purple cloud.
“Aren’t you the guy that shot Barnes under a stretcher?” the black man asked.
Kraber nodded. “Right in the fokkin’ eiers.”
“Badass,” the man said, apparently understanding that bit of slang. “I’m Jolu. This is Melody.”
“No relation,” said the mare. “No matter how awesome it’d be to pal around with Lieutenant Scratch.”
“We were joining in, but…” continued the man. “Well, then those jackasses did phase two. Whatever the shit that is.”
His name didn’t immediately sink in, distracted as Kraber was feeling by Melody’s comment about the notorious Vinyl Scratch. ‘Jolu’ had pronounced his own name like there was an H at the beginning. Kraber would later learn it was short for ‘Jose-Luis.’
“I think I know,” Kraber said. “You have people in PHL armor, loading people into a hospital building, then using the ponification potion. In plain view of several people and that security camera.”
He pointed up towards it.
“What do you think it means?” he asked.
“I’m scared to think,” Melody said, her huge pony eyes widening ever more.
It was at that moment that a radio crackled to life. The speakers vibrated, playing a tune that was–
“So fokkin’ upbeat I want to tear the fokkin’ teeth out whoever made it,” Kraber growled. “With fokkin’ pliers.”
“You’re not wrong,” Melody said, with Nebula nodding her agreement.
“How long have we had that?” Jolu asked.
“We installed an emergency warning system a while ago,” Melody said. “This being close to the sea, they were worried abou–”
“I get it,” Jolu said, shutting her down immediately.
“People of Portland,” Haddon said, his voice crackling. “This is an emergency! PER have decided to take advantage of the confusion and ponify survivors of this calamity. Please, meet us at the hospital! We have food, water, and treatment for any injuries received!”
Kraber stared out the window, seeing what looked like an army - like more PHL.
‘Oh, shit.’
“What do you think?” Kraber asked, looking over to his unlikely allies. “I say we shoot ‘em, too.”
“Just because you were right last time,” Nebula said testily, “Doesn’t mean you’ll be right this time.”
And then, from the group of soldiers, the man Kraber would come to know as Shawn Summers, and later simply ‘That Kontgesig’, opened his pie-hole.
“Do we shoot them?”
“You were saying?” Jolu asked, looking over to Nebula.
“They probably don’t know what’s going on any more than we do,” Nebula said. “I thought I knew Haddon, I don’t know… them.”
“Alright,” Melody sighed. “I’ll ask them then.”
“Are you sure that’ll w–” Jolu started.
“Hey!” Melody yelled, getting as close as she could to the window without putting her head outside.
Heliotrope
“If you’re one of those fuckmaggots working with Haddon, shoot us!” cried out a blue unicorn mare.
The humans looked like stallions, so it was probably a pony. Definitely a mare.
Just before that, one of the National Guard snorted as Haddon’s message crackled over the nearby speakers. “That lying son of a bitch.”
“We repeat. There are PER in the city. Report to Maine Medical if you need safety. It’s all taken care of, thanks to the PHL.”
Heliotrope stared around them. It was like she was… paralyzed? The dead, probably halfway-ponified bodies on the ground. The ghoulish broadcast. And now, this pony.
“So,” Heliotrope said, “That’s a ‘no’ to shooting them?”
Yael nodded.
“We’re not going to shoot any of you!” Yael called out to them. “We’re just here to-”
“We can provide anything you need! Just… find somewhere safe. We’re only here to help,” Haddon pleaded over the radio.
“We’re here to protect everyone in the city,” Heliotrope said, surprising herself with her own confidence. “PER excluded.”
“After all. We’re the PHL. We stand for the survival of all species outside Solar Empire authority,” Haddon said.
Maybe it was selfish of her, but she couldn’t make herself care for the HLF that’d kicked this parasprite nest. ‘Screw em. They deserve what they ge–’
A sharp, if contained ‘bang’ broke into her thoughts.
“The fok, Holu?!” someone yelled.
Not understanding Spanish all that well, Heliotrope heard it as an ‘H’ rather than a ‘J’.
“Sorry! I really want to take that pinche pendejo off the air for real.”
“Aaaaamen to that, brotha!” one of the National Guard yelled back.
Heliotrope’s earpiece crackled.
“Yael,” Oscar said. “We’re heading up towards Congress Street. A lot of people just fled past us. What’s happening here?”
“Some kind of gas weapon,” Yael said.
“Would it happen to be potion?” Lorne cut in.
“What makes you say that?”
“Because, we’re fighting Newfoals right now.”
“Copy that,” Yael said. “We’ll be over to help you as soon a–”
Heliotrope cast an eye towards the twisted Grotesqueries in the street. Had one just twitched?
“Move out, everyone,” Yael said. “We’re helping our squadmates.”
They had barely gotten twenty feet before Heliotrope saw it. One of the bodies picked itself up – the change apparently restarting – and walked up to the window.
All around it, the other Grotesqueries began to shake like leaves.
“YAEL!” Heliotrope yelled. “They’re not dead!”
“Wha–” Yael asked, turning to see an assortment of humans just behind them, steadily shrinking and ponifying, becoming enveloped in colorful fur.
“Show them how HAPPY we are!” something else – almost certainly a Newfoal – called out, and Heliotrope saw a massive crowd of blank-flanked ponies with hungry, thoroughly deranged smiles and dull eyes pouring out of nearby streets.
One pony – Heliotrope’s pegasus vision picked it out easily, a gray-blue pegasus Newfoal with a discolored eye – pointed over to their group. “Shieldwall said if we get them, we get a title in New Equestria!”
So there they were. Surrounded.
Before Yael could say anything, Heliotrope bit down on the mouth triggers for her SMGs, painting the crowd with blood and viscera.
“TEAR THEM UP!” Yael roared, switching her Galil to full-auto.
Kraber
“And so help me God,” Haddon said. “We’ll sa–”
Jolu whipped out a pistol – Kraber couldn’t make out what kind it was in the darkness – and drilled a round straight through the radio.
“The fok, Jolu?!”
“Sorry! I really want,” Jolu yelled, “to take that pinche pendejo off the air for real.”
“Aaaaamen to that, brotha!” someone yelled back from outside the store.
“You and me both,” Nebula said, tapping the claws worn just above her hooves. She looked over at Melody. “Wait. You PHL?”
“Yeah,” Kraber asked, narrowing his eyes. “What in the fok does tha–”
“I’m not PER!” Melody burst out. “I’m Indie, okay?”
Indie, short for “Independent.” One of many survivalists, refugees, and others that hadn’t joined themselves with the PHL, either side of the HLF Split, or PER.
“So you live in a city,” Jolu said, raising an eyebrow.
“Are any of us really that good at being ind–” Melody started.
There was a crash.
One person staggered like one leg was shorter, and fell against the window, a too-wide mouth squeegeeing against the glass. Bits of broken glass slid into their oversized bottom lip, but they didn’t seem to notice.
The light flickered, and Kraber saw the person. They looked wrong. Throat swollen, eyes too huge for their skull and practically going. A massive goose-egg of a bump or tumor on the head, something a bright unnatural lime-green poking out of it.
“No,” Jolu said. “Ohhhhhhhhh, shit, no.”
“Don’t have to tell me twice,” Melody said.
The light stopped flickering. It went dark again.
“Hlelkgrk,” they whispered through tortured vocal cords. “Slmrm… hlaa-” Someone staggered towards the unbroken window. “Hel… some’n hel-”
The person against the window fell to the ground, making a noise that was not quite wheezing, coughing, or screaming. Kraber could hear several cracking noises like a demented chiropractor was going about their work, then a sound like vomiting.
All across the street, they could see those same glowing eyes opening. The light flickered, and he could see a number of silhouettes, suspiciously pony-shaped, standing all about the street.
“YAEL!” a female voice yelled. “They’re not dead!”
“Show them how HAPPY we are!” yelled something else that was almost certainly a Newfoal.
“TEAR THEM UP!” a woman roared, and there was the sound of an assault rifle or LMG on full auto.
“Good news,” Melody said, over the hail of gunfire, “They’re definitely on our side. Bad news? Newfoals. Lots of Newfoals.”
“Great,” Kraber said, “As if tonight wasn’t fokked enough.”
‘Can you really trust them?’ part of Kraber whispered. ‘They’re ponies. And that was… How many PHL named Yael could there possibly be? It’s her. It’s almost certainly her. You know what she did in Nipville. You know that she and Heliotrope will flay you alive. You know she’ll never forgive you. Also, you shot Heliotrope once. Can you even trust Nebula? Or Melody?’
The answer to that last part was, obviously…
‘… Well, I don’t have a choice. Ze’ev, if that’s her, and these two mares lie between me and ponification. I have to.’
“Alright,” Nebula said. “We’re going to need to set up a barricade. We might–”
“Um,” Rime Ice said weakly, pointing with one foreleg towards the massive hole in the window that Kraber had thrown himself through.
Kraber, Nebula, Melody, Jolu – and yes, Rime Ice – all stared at the hole in the window. Almost in unison. At the Newfoals rushing towards what was almost certainly Yael.
“We probably should have thought of that,” Kraber admitted.
Yael
Blur.
That was how she’d describe the chaos all around her. Aiming, perceiving any details of the surroundings, describing the Newfoals or the color.
Heliotrope bouncing to and fro, wingblades flashing, SMGs blazing. The National Guard had found cover – it didn’t have that much of a point against Newfoals, but habits were habits – and were spraying down the attackers. Next to her, Chinook was doing the same. His guns were louder, and he only had one set of wolvers as opposed to Heliotrope’s two, but he ripped them apart all the same.
And, slightly south from them, the ponies and humans in the store sprayed hot lead at the writhing mass of Newfoals.
“That’s what they get for not having guns,” Carson panted. He hadn’t even slid into cover, just spraying downrange with his M4.
“Where did they even get this many Newfoals?!” Summers yelled. Unlike John, or even Yael, he wasn’t firing in short, controlled bursts – they were long. Saturating. He must’ve had an extended magazine on his M4.
“They just keep coming!” Smoky yelled, fluttering overhead and spraying them down with his assault yoke.
But his words were instantly belied...
“FALL BACK!” one Newfoal yelled. “FALL BA-”
Almost automatically, not even thinking of a one-liner, Yael snapped her Galil towards that Newfoal and pulled the trigger. The 7.62 round punched through its throat, dug a tunnel through the flank of another, and embedded itself at the bottom of a streetlamp.
“Didn’t think we’d be fighting Newfoals!” Carson yelled over to her. “We’re going to have a hell of a st–”
Carson wouldn’t.
Because at that moment, a car – glowing with the aura of a unicorn’s TK, tumbling bumper over bumper – smashed into him with all the force the Newfoal could muster.
“WILL!” Bowie screamed at the top of his lungs. “NO!”
The thrown vehicle didn’t stop at Carson. It tumbled down the street, window over window, crumpling like a wadded-up ball of paper. Somewhere, Carson’s body was still in there or on there, but the car was moving too fast for Yael to tell.
And before Yael’s eyes, Carson’s M4 began to glow.
“GRABBER!” John yelled, diving for the rifle. One combat boot ready to stamp down on it, keep the barrel on the ground.
In the space of a second, Yael scanned the mass of Newfoals behind the barricade for one with a color that matched the rifle’s aura. She decided against it almost the moment she considered it.
‘No. Too many colors,’ Yael thought, rushing for cover.
John wasn’t too late. He was, maybe, fashionably late.
A bullet ripped out through the barrel, kicking the red-glowing carbine back a centimeter or two with nothing to hold it. There was a slight spray of red-pink from John’s leg, but he didn’t seem to notice it.
With the same bloody leg, John held the gun down until it expended its ammo.
‘He’s probably fine,’ Yael thought.
“They’re not going to stop!” Heliotrope screamed, flying back towards Yael. “QS, I need an ammo drop. We’re going t–”
Just as a trashcan pelted the ground just behind her – then another car hit the ground right between her and Yael.
Yael didn’t have time to think about that as the two of them rushed into cover behind the wall of a brick building, bordered by a rock wall a foot or three taller than her head and a parking lot.
Quiette Shy galloped up, reaching into her saddlebag for a pair of 30-round 9x32mm mags.
“Can’t Believe You Survived That,” she said, taking ragged breaths. The camo bandanna she wore over her mouth contracted slightly with each breath.
“Barricades! NOW!” one Newfoal yelled. A team of Newfoal earthponies bucked against a car with their powerfulhind legs, pushing the car onto its side so the passenger side mirror pointed up towards the smoke-covered sky.
“You’re Okay,” Quiette Shy said. Yael thought she detected surprise, but that was…
Well, maybe it wasn’t so impossible.
“Retreat!” one Newfoal yelled from behind the improvised barricade. “Flame ‘em out!”
“This is Rasam… ah… Rasal…” Heliotrope started. “No, Sergeant Heliotrope. We’re responding to a strange occurrence near Congress Street.”
From the moment Yael heard those first syllables, she knew something was about to go pear-shaped. It was like a twisting serpent in her gut, an intense feeling of wrongness.
“First Lieutenant Ze’ev,” Gardner said, his voice tinged with a tone that sounded calm and was anything but. “What. Exactly. Do you think. You are. Doing.”
Every syllable sounded like it’d been torturously dragged up his throat, and then out of his mouth, grabbing at things and coming out inch by inch.
Snippets of what could happen to her if she went against Gardner here flashed through her mind’s eye, but Yael paid them no mind.
“I let them take me prisoner so I could reason with them,” Yael said. “It was that or shoot them.”
“And I. Ordered you,” Gardner said. “To rejoin with Haddon. You. Will. Rendezvous with him. And secure. The hospital.”
“And I’m not going to,” Yael said. “Not until I know what’s going on.”
“We heard what Haddon and the rest were doing,” Heliotrope said. “We heard they were working with–”
The sound of whooshing fire came in from nearby.
Yael looked to the store where the four of them had been hiding, seeing a flaming storefront and the bodies of dead Newfoals littered around the flames. One walked out, grinning stupidly…
...Before its survival instincts kicked in. Like a switch had been flipped, it began screaming at the top of its lungs, rolling on the pavement.
Yael shot it through the head.
“...They’re Dead,” Quiette Shy breathed.
Yes. Yael had definitely heard emphasis in the auto-voice-box there.
Dancing Day
December 24, 2022
“Course, I didn’t die,” Kraber says. “Just like all the other times Yael watched me seemingly explode or burn to death.”
“That is weird,” Aegis says. “That… that so many times that happened, it involved fire. This time, the boat, Berlin, M–”
“It is weird,” Kraber says. He will be nodding slightly. “Still. At least I was immune to Heliotrope at the time.”
“How in the buck does that work?!” Heliotrope will yell.
“Well, you’re sort of like a ninja, and being on fokkin’ fire makes you immune to–”
“You’re just fucking with me, aren’t you,” Heliotrope will ask.
“I could be, but you’ll never know!” Kraber will reply.
“He is,” Aegis interrupts.
“Aw,” Kraber says, almost but not quite whining. “Here’s what really happened to that building.”
Kraber
Kraber didn’t need to give commands. Everyone already knew. Kraber dropped the MG2021 on the counter, using it as a makeshift rest, and let loose. Bullets ripped through the remains of the glass window, punching through Newfoals after Newfoal.
“WE NEED TO GET IN!” another Newfoal yelled. “GET THEM!”
‘Oh, shit.’
In that instant, the five inside the store looked at each other. One thought was clear.
‘We can’t handle this many.’
“RUN!” Nebula yelled.
The five of them, with Melody still carrying Rime Ice with her TK, bolted for a door at the rear of the shop, followed by the Newfoals. They rushed through the back room of the store, passing shelves and shells full of boxes.
“GET THEM!” a Newfoal screamed from somewhere, their voice rasping.
Kraber could hear the Newfoal hooves pounding against the tile of the floor as they rushed through the building.
‘Shouldn’t we be hitting the other side of the–’
“DOOR!” Nebula yelled, fluttering ahead with a sudden burst of speed. “Melody, I need you to help me open it! Bliss, Jolu, cover u–!”
Unfortunately, Jolu was running too fast, and didn’t hear her…
… And body-slammed against the door like a hockey player or footballer. It practically flew off the hinges, slamming back around against the outside wall with a crack.
“Well,” Kraber panted, “that works too.”
Nebula shrugged with both forelegs, still holding the door open.
Kraber turned, his back to her, shotgun aimed towards the Newfoals. Melody was barreling towards him, Rime Ice held in her TK.
“Get them!” one Newfoal screamed. They were red-furred with a purple mane, their blue-green eyes glowing slightly.
‘Huh,’ Kraber thought, before pulling the shotgun’s trigger. ‘That’s new.’
The shotgun bucked, but the recoil was surprisingly manageable. Then again, he’d managed to one-hand it, so Kraber probably shouldn’t have been surprised.
The lead Newfoal practically exploded under the buckshot.
“Go!” Kraber yelled, firing the Fostech wildly. “GO GO FOKKIN’ HOL NOU NOU!”
Another shot. Without time to brace for recoil, the shot went wild, the gun bucking against Kraber’s shoulder. Whatever its effects on Kraber, the Newfoals took it far worse.
This time, he got two Newfoals. One pellet cut a runnel through a Newfoal’s barrel, ending just where the cutie mark would have been, another pellet hitting them in the leg. They collapsed to the ground in a bleeding spiral.
The rest punched into a white unicorn Newfoal with a look of hatred in its lightly glowing eyes.
“DOUBLE MOTHERFOKKIN’ KILL!” Kraber yelled, firing off another round. A Newfoal’s ribcage collapsed in on itself in a flower of red, its head spiralling off to the right.
Melody raced through, carrying Rime Ice in her TK, and Kraber flung himself out the door. Barely registering his surroundings, he turned around, just barely avoiding scraping against a brick wall. He panted, everything seeming blurry but for the door. Just like it had during surgery, where he had been able to hyperfocus on only the music in the background and the patient on the table.
‘GRENADES!’ Kraber thought frantically, reaching for a belt lined with the tiny explosives. Next to him, Jolu was doing the same, reaching onto the pipe bomb belt.
At the same time that Kraber’s thumb inched towards the pin of the grenade, there was a slight ripping sound and Jolu found the entire belt of pipe bombs in one hand.
For a second or two, Kraber, Jolu, Nebula, Melody, and even the heavily doped-up Rime Ice stared at each other. Nebula raised a skeptical eyebrow, and behind the homemade gas mask, Kraber could see Jolu mouthing the words ‘la mierda?’
Kraber shrugged, placing the un-triggered grenade back on his belt. It was a motion that practically screamed ‘whatever, just go with it.’
Evidently, Jolu thought the same, triggering one pipe bomb and throwing it through the still open door.
Melody, taking the initiative, grabbed the door in her horn TK, a rose-pink aura surrounding the door…
Which she slammed shut. The pink aura lightly glowed in the seams between frame and door, humming slightly. All the while, Newfoals pounded against it, screaming incoherently.
“Carry me!” Melody said, in what would have been a yell if not for the gritted teeth. “I can’t… concentrate… on…”
She was looking towards Nebula. But in that moment, it all clicked for Kraber.
‘She’d have been barely more than a foal when she left? Pony ages are hard to tell, but she’s young, she’s not so different from me. And I’d easily have killed her, the fok, the fok is fokkin’ wrong with m–’
Before he knew it, he’d grabbed Melody in one arm, scooped her onto his right shoulder, and dashed down the alleyway. Jolu followed.
Rime Ice yelped as, with this sudden motion, Kraber and Melody yanked him down the alleyway, though he didn’t look like he moved that much in the TK field.
‘That’s probably bad,’ Kraber thought as Nebula shot past him.
Heliotrope
Whatever the Newfoals had been planning on, a massive explosion definitely wasn’t it. Bodies flew out from the flaming storefront, shrapnel struck Newfoals, and bits of brick and rubble – and even the PHL themselves.
“What’s going on?” Zhang asked.
“Should I–” Heliotrope started.
“Hold it, Heliotrope,” Yael said. “They could r-”
Heliotrope would never know what Yael was about to say. Not because Yael died or anything, obviously, but because of the crash as another car hit the ground near them.
And, of course, the bullet that punched through the back of Zhang’s shoulder. It embedded itself in the wall behind her, smoking slightly.
Zhang howled in pain, clutching her left shoulder.
‘We barely know them,’ Heliotrope thought, almost dazed. How messed up is this?!’
She looked over to the street ahead. The Newfoals were creating a makeshift fortress of sorts, using cars as barricades and setting up nests with…
‘Guns?’
Yes. Guns. The Newfoals. Earthpony Newfoals stood behind barricades, hooves over pistol grips of rifles that glowed slightly. They looked to be held aloft by unicorn.
‘This can’t be right. They don’t use guns. They never use guns. How…’
Her mind raced.
‘Something’s wrong he–’
“MOVE!” she yelled, and rushed to her immediate left, heading south and towards the rock face.
“Can you walk?” Yael asked, looking down to Zhang.
“It’s the only part that doesn’t hurt,” Zhang said through gritted teeth. “I can probably still shoot.”
“I’ll make sure you get out of here safely,” Yael said, without hesitation. “Heliotrope, I need you to cover us. QS, do something to keep her okay.”
“On It,” Quiette Shy said, her horn glowing as she projected a red thaumic shield behind the two of them. Bullets sparked against it, but it still held.
Heliotrope was faster than Yael. As a pegasus, that came with the territory. A small wooden fence scraped against the bottom of her flightsuit, and–
“Enemy pegasi at one o’clock!” Yael shouted up to Heliotrope.
Heliotrope banked to the right, extending her left wing so she pivoted on her right side. What’s-
Behind Yael was a murder of (‘A murder? I’m making them sound like crows. Animals.’) pegasi, strips of metal fastened to their legs. Some looked like claws, some looked like knives. There was a faint sense of wetness that Heliotrope got as she stared at the improvised weapons.
‘Oh no.’
“Don’t follow me up here!” Heliotrope yelled. “You’ll just be a bigger target on the cliff, and Zhang can’t climb!”
Okay, it wasn’t much of a cliff, but Heliotrope was running a mile a minute.
Thankfully, Yael seemed to have understood that already. With a curt nod, she dashed along the side of the cliff, keeping low to the ground.
Meanwhile, more of the pegasi dove towards the street, smiles on their faces. Heliotrope watched in horror as the Newfoals manning the guns aimed away from the fleeing humans, subtly moving them into the path of the divebombing pegasai.
A National Guard screamed as one pegasus dove towards him, embedding six hoof blades in their shoulderblades.
“No…” the National Guard whispered, lying immobile on the pavement, knives in his back. Blood and something that definitely was not blood welled up. “No no no no no no, I… I can’t… not…”
His voice warbled slightly. Heliotrope watched the human make a strange noise partway between choking and screaming. The inside of the human’s visor turned a curious red-purple.
‘No.’
She watched the human shake, his spine bending at an angle that hurt Heliotrope’s head just to look at it.
“No, no, no…” the human said. It sounded almost like a chant from some human religion. And then: “YES!”
‘Oh buck. I was right.’
“YES YES YES YES!” the human said with manic glee. “I’m–”
‘Dead,’ Heliotrope thought, before biting down on the mouth trigger so hard she wondered if she heard something crack.
The charging handles made a slight, metallic clang noise as they whipsawed back and forth. The 9x32mm rounds stitched up through the ponifying human into the clawed Newfoal, red blossoming out from their skulls and necks.
‘They’re moving as one,’ Heliotrope thought.
“BETRAYER!” one Newfoal pegasus screeched, banking to its left and flying towards Heliotrope at a barely-controllable speed.
‘You Newfoals talk too damn much,’ Heliotrope thought, before hosing that Newfoal down with three more rounds. But even as she pulled the trigger, she could see something out the corner of her eye:
‘Bro’ took something to the ankles and tripped. The stolen gun that a Newfoal was using, inching towards his legs.
‘I have to do somethi–’
A red barrier appeared just behind Bro’s ankle. Heliotrope traced the glow from the shield back towards Quiette Shy, who stood in the middle of the street, unflinching.
The bullets pocked against it, but Bro, thankfully, was fine.
The Newfoal diving towards Bro was not. It skipped off the top of the shield, bouncing slightly, and fell on its back – on one of its wings – just in front of Quiette Shy. It tried to roll over. Tried to stand up on its forelegs.
It listed slightly. But it never truly got back on its hooves.
Quiette Shy bit down on her mouth triggers, and fired down at it. Pasted through the Newfoals’ face.
Bro nodded in thanks under his helmet, and scrambled down the street, rushing for a parking garage.
“You could be this harmonious,” the Newfoals said.
They didn’t say it in unison. Somehow, that was worse. They all said it at different speeds, in different tones – some angry, some almost sad, some saying it like it was the funniest thing in the world.
“You could be this unified,” the Newfoals said, pegasi diving down towards the humans below.
Heliotrope’s earpiece crackled.
“They’ve really got us by the balls,” Chinook said. Heliotrope saw him on the roof of one building, crouching against the brickwork.
“I’ve got an idea,” Heliotrope said. “You draw my fire on the Newfoals. Classic pincer movement.”
Chinook nodded.
“You’re clear for it,” Yael said over the radio. “Give them hell.”
‘That’s 33 shots left,’ Heliotrope thought, going invisible. ‘Have to make these count!’
She few downwards, then banked left, weaving between two buildings. Fire escapes blurred past her.
“YOU WANT ME?!” she heard Chinook yelling, both on the street and over the earpiece. Rounds buzzed from his assault yokes. “THERE’S MORE OF ME TO GO AROUND!”
A buzz of assault yoke fire. A scream of what could’ve been pain or anger.
“I GOT AN EARTH NAME BUT I’M STILL HUNDREDS MORE PONY THAN ANY OF YOU LITTLE TUMORS ON LEGS!”
As Heliotrope turned on to Congress Street, she saw Chinook punctuating this by punching a Newfoal pegasus stallion in the crotch. Heliotrope wasn’t sure, but she thought she heard bones breaking.
‘Ooohh…’ Heliotrope winced slightly. That had to hurt.
“GET HIM!” a Newfoal yelled.
“UNZIP HIM!”
“TEAR OPEN HIS HEAD AND SEE IF WE MAKE HIM MORE PONY THEN!”
‘Showtime,’ Heliotrope thought, and dove into the fray, leaning to her left and drawing into a corkscrewing roll, aiming herself directly at the Newfoals.
There would always be a blank spot in her memory when she remembered hitting the ranks of Newfoals. There was Heliotrope diving towards the Newfoals, cloaked and silent, the pavement spiralling towards her...
Then there was the moment after Heliotrope’s wing blade sliced along a Newfoal’s neck, only barely skipping over the bones… but spraying blood everywhere. Over other Newfoals. The pavement. Hopefully not her.
‘Suit power low. Recharging. ’
The notification flashed in the suit readout in her goggles. She flickered back into vision, in the middle of an army of Newfoals.
‘Let them see me coming! I don’t give a buck!’ Heliotrope thought.
But Heliotrope didn’t have time for that. She twirled back and forth, dodging knives and improvised bludgeons held in earthpony mouths.
“SEIZE HER!” another Newfoal yelled. “She’s beyond Celestia’s Light!”
Heliotrope responded by biting the trigger and spraying a short burst of two rounds into the Newfoal’s throat and skull. Blood bloomed from the remains of the skull across their light-turquoise fur.
‘Zombified little freaks!’ Heliotrope thought contemptuously…
Just as a unicorn Newfoal with a strip of metal in its horn TK clubbed her over the head.
“Got you~,” the unicorn said, singsong–
They fell to the ground, a bullet through their skull.
“Got ‘im!” Chinook called over Heliotrope’s earpiece.
Before Heliotrope’s dazed, woozy eyes, she could see the blue pegasus strafing over what had once been a Newfoal machinegun position, a dead Newfoal lying behind a rifle of some kind.
The Newfoals pounced on her, and Heliotrope knew what to do. She chomped down on the mouth trigger, spraying bullets through a red pegasus Newfoal diving towards her, and flew through the opening. Blood splashed against her, and Newfoals jumped at her, but she was flying too fast.
But then a yellow pegasus dove at her, ready to knock her to the pavement, and Heliotrope could see she sported what seemed to her a most sadistic grin.
“Now n–” she started.
“SH-YUT THE BUCK UP!” Heliotrope yelled, and drove a foreleg into the yellow pegasus’ face. Her opponent fell to the ground, blood streaming from a snout that seemed oddly caved-in.
Even with the foreleg punch to the face, the pegasus still hit Heliotrope. She wheezed, caught by the bleeding blue pegasus.
‘Just! BUCKING! GO! DOWN!’ Heliotrope thought, and jammed her wolvers into the Newfoal’s skull.
The Newfoal didn’t budge the first time.
So Heliotrope jammed the wolver into the Newfoal’s throat, up through the mouth.
“Hlerth!” the Newfoal coughed. “Gleh… Bl…”
Heliotrope twisted to the left, so she was on top, and flung the body at an earth pony. They both collapsed to the ground, definitely not dead.
Heliotrope bit the mouth trigger, spraying five rounds through the two Newfoals.
‘Now they’re dead,’ Heliotrope thought, before bucking a Newfoal in the face, launching herself up into the air, spraying bullets down into the waiting crowd of Newfoals. ‘Move like water,’ part of her thought.
She landed on the pavement on her rear hooves, then plunged both forelegs down on a Newfoal’s skull. The wolvers tore through the Newfoal’s face, blood pouring from the useless eyes the claws had punctured.
“YOU APE-LOVING COCKADOODIE BRAT!” the Newfoal screamed.
‘Was… is cockadoodie a swear? Was that a reference to something?’ Heliotrope thought, lifting the screaming Newfoal up with both forelegs as she pushed with her hinds.
Taking the Newfoal with her. She flipped forwards, ground blurring into sky, and back again...
...and slam-dunking the bleeding, eyeless Newfoal onto a unicorn’s horn.
KRANNNCCHH
“YEURGLK!” the Newfoal screamed.
As the scream drew the focus of the Newfoals - how could it not? - Heliotrope dashed forward, every blade extended, SMGs firing. Blood and casings littered the street all around her.
An adobe-colored Earth pony Newfoal stepped in front of her path.
‘I can take him,’ Heliotrope thought, and she flew faster.
The earthpony grinned, reared up… and stamped the ground with his forelegs. The ground rumbled and, suddenly, impossibly, there was a tree bursting out from under the pavement at ridiculous speed.
‘Newfoals can’t do that!’ Heliotrope thought, staring at the tree that was right. In. Front. Of. Her!
Fragments of thoughts of a concussion, of a broken back, of being useless just like she was after Kraber had nailed her through the barrel with a sniper rifle flitted through Heliotrope’s head. All she had time to think of, seeing the ground racing by under her head, knowing the tree was coming, was ‘Oh, shi–’
She spread her wings, and felt herself slowing. Felt herself getting closer and closer-
She stretched out her legs, and winced as she felt her rear hooves scraping against the. ‘Please work please work please w–’
Heliotrope sprang up into the ski, her barrel scraping against the leaves. But, thankfully, not hitting the tree.
She breathed a sigh of relief, before turning invisible again.
‘Nearly caught off guard again,’ she thought. ‘What is with me today?!’
She looked down to the adobe earth pony and plunged down towards him.
“Where’d she go?!” the adobe earthpony yelled, a look of confusion on his face.
Heliotrope shot down like a meteor, one wing outstretched, and banked to the right. Her wing blade dug through the Newfoal’s neck in a circle, blood spraying outward.
When she was done, the Newfoal’s head had rolled off his neck, blood pouring out onto the pavement.
“Heliotrope,” Oscar said over her earpiece. “I don’t know if that’s you, but I’m betting it is. Coming in hot.”
‘Oh buck.’
She could hear the sounds of music in the distance.
‘“Lorne says he’s about to fire,” Oscar said.
Heliotrope didn’t need to be told twice. She dashed upwards, leaving the Newfoals below clamoring to find her.
“NO YOU DON’T!” a Newfoal screamed.
Heliotrope’s suit wasn’t invisible, not at the moment.
“BETRAYING APE-L–”
The Newfoal would never finish. Because, at that moment, time seemed to slow down for Heliotrope. There was a moment where the Newfoal was flying up towards her, a mad grin on his face…
… And a moment where Heliotrope watched as a grenade smashed into the Newfoal’s crotch...
‘What.’
… and then the moment where the Newfoal fell to the ground, grenade not quite bouncing but not quite not-bouncing down to the pavement.
An explosion rocked the street behind her, the grenade’s fuse detonating in midair. Blood and limbs spiralled up through the air behind Heliotrope, and pavement and glass shattered.
“KABOOM, BABY!” Lorne yelled.
“Nice shot, trooper,” Oscar said.
“We’re friends, you can call me Lorne,” Lorne said.
“Affirmative, Trooper Lorne,” Oscar said.
Lorne chuckled. “...goddammit.”
Another grenade burst. Another Newfoal took it to the face, and vaporized near-instantly.
“Get clear of the explosives, Heliotrope, Chinook!” Yael yelled into the earpiece. “They’re tearing up the street!”
“Don’t need to tell me twice,” Chinook said, fluttering away from the remnants of the Newfoal position.
Heliotrope’s suit crackled as she phased back into visibility. She looked at him, not quite glaring, but–
“Don’t need to tell me twice, ma’am,” Chinook said.
There was a pause. The two pegasi looked below, watching as Lorne’s grenades bombarded the Newfoals.
“What?” Chinook asked. “In my defense, most of you know each other by your first na-”
He stopped cold.
“What’s that?!” he asked, pointing down at an indistinct blur on the street.
“That?” Heliotrope asked. “That’s Oscar.”
Oscar was bearing down on the Newfoals at inhuman speed, an autoshotgun held in both hands.
He fired the autoshotgun once, splattering two Newfoals against the pavement.
“SICK, EVIL NAKED A-” a Newfoal yelled, a dagger dipped in potion in its mouth as it leapt at Oscar from behind.
Oscar did something unexpected in that moment. He swept himself to the left, kicking a Newfoal in the face so hard they flew across the street like a pinkish furry soccer ball and hit a lamppost.
The lamppost dented as the Newfoal hit it. They didn’t get up.
But that wasn’t the end of it. Oscar’s left fist lanced out-
No it didn’t. There was his left fist leaving the autoshotgun, and then suddenly being in the face of the dagger-wielding Newfoal. Nothing in between. Everything about the Newfoal’s face caved in around his fist, and they slumped off his arm bonelessly, bleeding from a bloody, pulpy mass that had once been the eyes and part of the nose.
Another pegasus tried the same, one of the few surviving clawed pegasi. It had its talons outstretched, ready to ponify Oscar–
Oscar shotgunned them out of the air before they even noticed.
Evidently, that was too much for the Newfoals. They ran from the PHL and National Guard, filtering into alleyways, into doorways of the most intact buildings, scampering away from the human with the impossible reflexes, the invisible pegasus, and the humans and ponies that just. Wouldn’t. Give up.
Oscar, Lorne, Heliotrope, and Chinook shot at the fleeing Newfoals. A few went down under their combined fire, but most of them escaped into the back alleys of Portland.
“I Missed You, Oscar,” Quiette Shy said.
“Yes,” Oscar said. “I aimed away from you too.”
“Don’t know who that is,” someone from the National Guard said, “But they saved our asses for sure!”
“Should we–” Lorne started over the radio.
“No,” Yael said. “We regroup, we get our bearings.”
Yael
‘It’s going to be a long night.’
Yael felt drained beyond belief. Gardner. The Newfoals. Haddon. Nearly being shot by National Guard.
‘Dear Lord,’ Yael thought, ‘I don’t expect rest tonight, but I want to sleep all day tomorrow.’
She watched as Lorne’s grenades pelted down on the street. The Newfoals fleeing into alleyways.
Yael stared through her Galil’s reflex sight and drilled a round through the back of a Newfoal’s neck. They fell limp to the ground.
Part of her felt like she was doing something wrong for shooting retreating combatants. But… well, these were Newfoals. Half the time, people wouldn’t complain, the other they’d say it was a mercy anyway.
“Who’s that?” the National Guard squadleader asked, staring at a big, loud pickup truck – the kind the size of a small house that Americans just seemed to love – rolling down the street. Except it looked different - tubes extended from the gas tank into a device in the back, under the small roof attachment that covered the bed.
It was almost certainly PHL-modified.
And of course, there was Lorne poking up through a hole in the back that had almost certainly been intended for a turret, holding a revolving grenade launcher.
“That’s,” Yael said, “our reinforcements. Lorne Hebert, Private Eva Nilsdottir, and Mikkelsen.”
“Can you believe someone just left this perfectly good truck in the street?!” Lorne asked. “So–”
“You hotwired it?” Summers asked, looking at the massively built black man.
Lorne glared at Summers behind his helmet. “No, Eva did,” he said, voice dripping with tightly restrained contempt.
Yael knew that glare, and that tone of voice. She’d used it all the time, in the exact same setting. She knew from experience that what Lorne was really saying was ‘No, you jackass.’
“Full of medical supplies, too,” Eva said. “Seriously, who just leaves this in the street?”
“There was a pony in there too,” Oscar added.
“How can you tell?” Chinook asked, flitting over to the truck and landing just on the roof.
“Hoofprints on the seat,” Oscar said. “Brightly-colored pony fur, too.”
‘How strange,’ Yael thought. But she couldn’t dwell on that.
“Everyone,” she said. “I don’t know if that includes the National Guard, but… we’re going to find Haddon. And we’re going to make sure he regrets even thinking about turning tail.”
It wasn’t much of a speech, but she got cheers all the same.
Dancing Day
December 24, 2022
“...Wait,” Vinyl says. “So where was Kraber during all that?”
“I don’t know,” Yael says. “Kraber, why didn’t you bring it up by now?”
“...Honestly, I forgot about that,” Kraber says, almost sheepish. “I didn’t know what Yael did during all this, or how she found my truck–”
“They got yours?” Dancing Day asks, a quizzical look on her face.
“Well, there aren’t exactly a lot of trucks with medicine onboard, a turret, and PHL modifications in the city that someone just leaves in the street,” Aegis says. “I–”
“Oh, wow!” Verity interrupts. “Kraber forgetting how he’s really the hero in all this! I’d say it’s like seeing a unicorn, except we see those daily.”
Kraber glares at her, and it looks like he’s about to–
“Viktor,” Aegis says, reaching out to him with one foreleg. “Don’t.”
“Right,” Kraber says, before sitting back down.
He settles into his armchair for a second.
“Well then,” he says. “Either hou jou fokkin’ bek, or kindly fokkin’ tell me how you, the one who helped make this befok plan in the first place, the one who would have happily killed one of us, and gone along with Lovikov’s plan to take the entire-”
“Wait, the whole thing?” Soarin’ asks. “We never really knew what he was planning at the time, but… really? All of it?”
“It wasn’t hyperbole?” Lunar Phase asks.
“Surprisingly, no,” Kraber says, biting back anger in his voice. “It was fokkin’ worse.”
“And you are?!” Verity asks. “You were right there with me! The things you did in the Purple Winter–”
“Were fokkin’ awful,” Kraber said, face unreadable. He sounds like he is trying to keep emotion out of his voice, and only barely succeeding. “I cannot excuse them. I have done terrible things, Verity. I’ve done siek, horrible kak with a smile on my face. Things that make me genuinely wonder how Aegis’ foals can like me.”
Amber just stares at Kraber.
“Well, I thought it was a good question…” Kraber says, looking down. Sighing ever so slightly.
“It really is,” Verity says.
“It’s because of…” Rivet says, his voice trailing off. “I don’t know. It’s, you, it… you were always nice to us. I always felt like you were forcing it-”
“... Huh,” Kraber says. It’s impossible for Dancing Day to tell if that means he’s disappointed. Her first instinct is yes, but something isn’t right.
“But it was more like, uh… ” Rivet says. “You were forcing yourself to be nice to us because you wanted to be nice.”
“Which reminds me,” says Astral Nectar. “Why does Aegis?”
“Basically the same,” Aegis says, laconic. “There’s this moment in The Stormlight Archive where a character suspects Dalinar of pretending to be honorable. Then Dalinar does something so honorable that the main character says it’s-”
“At the point he’s not really pretending?” Amber asks.
Aegis nods. “The very same, Amber.”
Kraber strokes his scraggly beard. “You know, that sounds like a good time for a segue.”
“The part about you wanting to do the right thing?” Vinyl asks, cocking her head slightly.
“No, the part about The Stormlight Archive,” Kraber says.
Everyone stares at him. Rivet laughs a little.
“...You were serious?” Aegis asks.
Kraber nods. “It all started when I was being crushed against a wall, and I told Jolu and Melody that The Stormlight Archive was fokkin’ kwaai. Except not really, because you need to know how we got out of the building.”
Kraber
The alleyway erupted in fire and shrapnel. Heat licked at Kraber’s back, even through his stolen armor. There was a clang as the door flew off the building and smashed against the wall, the enraged screams of Newfoals, and the sound of something popping.
And still they ran. Jolu pulled ahead, outpacing Kraber but behind Nebula.
They crossed the nearby street, and settled behind a pair of parked cars next to some rubble. Panting like dogs. Sweating profusely. Breathing in great, ragged gasps. There was an alleyway next to them, a narrow street that would be lucky to fit even one car down its length.
Jolu wheezed something that might’ve been a swearword or a prayer.
“We have to stop it,” Kraber said, surprising himself with his own confidence.
“... How?” Rime Ice asked. “I’m… kinda…”
“Yeah, there’s that,” Nebula said, “We get Rhymey to a medical center I can trust. Maybe even back to Mackworth. I’m sure there’s PHL we can trust there. We’re going to need a truck, like…” her voice trailed off.
“Like the one we forgot,” Kraber finished. “Fokdammit.”
“Back the way we came,” Rime Ice added. “Hoo-buckin’-ray.”
‘I’m still not sure if I added too much or too little morphine,’ Kraber thought. “Right,” he said. “If it’s still there, anyway. Or we could hotwire one of these cars.”
“Don’t look at me,” Jolu sighed. “I don’t–”
“I was going to do it,” Kraber said.
Jolu looked at Kraber. “Oh.” He sighed in relief.
“Let’s get going then,” Kraber said, realizing that somehow he’d fallen into a leadership role. “You’ve done well for your kind,” he said, as he walked down the street.
It was at this moment, Kraber knew: He fokked up.
“The fuck, bro?!” Jolu yelled. “Look. We nearly die, together. Nearly get ponified. We save a pony, and you pull that shit on me.”
Kraber looked at Jolu, incredulous. “What?! No, I… I wouldn’t-”
“Don’t tell me,” Jolu said. “You have black friends.”
What Kraber wanted to say was, ‘You son of a bitch, how fokkin’ dare you pull that shit on me.’
What he actually said: “My wife was black, actually.”
Jolu looked at him, surprised. “... Huh.”
“Was,” Kraber said, insistent.
Jolu nodded, sadly. “Lost Abuela that way.”
“And it wasn’t aimed at you.” Kraber held up his hands. “Sorry.”
“Oh,” Jolu said, relaxing but not really. “Wait, fuck that. That ain’t better.”
“Wha–” Kraber started.
“...my kind?” Melody said, voice numb, before her horn flared. “MY KIND?!”
The whole of the less than fifteen minutes Kraber had known her, she hadn’t raised her voice. Had worn a scared expression.
And yet, as her horn glowed, Kraber felt something slap him, and he fell roughly against the wall.
He tried to push himself up. Couldn’t. Something was pressing down on him like an anvil. He reached for his gun, but-
His arm wrenched itself behind his back, to the absolute limit of its flexibility.
“Neb… Jolu...” Kraber said, speech suddenly very difficult. “I…. I hel…”
“You’re PHL, I thought you’d understand it!” Melody ranted. “Don’t tell me - you’re some conscript, an HLF asshole that just joined for a bigger gun?!”
Well, that was better than the truth –- that Kraber was one of said HLF assholes. And, at this point, he had to admit it - he was probably one of the biggest kontgesigs on the HLF. “Some’n… li...tha...” Kraber said, vague as he could make it.
“Well, let me give you a fucking reminder,” Melody hissed, practically growled, and Kraber never would have guessed a herbivore would be able to make such a predatory sound. “Here’s what my kind have been through. Our precious ‘Elements of Harmony’ failed, and because of that we had our first war in over a thousand years. I lost family there, dammit! There were crystal golems in the streets, and we had so many earthponies refugees crowding into Cloudsdale because everypony thought they’d be safe in the sky. But no, Sombra’s battlecasters… they disrupted the cloud-walking magic, leaving HUNDREDS of ponies to fall to their deaths. It rained ponies for awhile, y’know? And the Wonderbolts couldn’t catch everyone.”
No matter how many times he heard it, the concept of war between pastel-colored ponies in a land that seemed like it was the archetypical sugar bowl before the war was a downright weird image, but Kraber decided he would just go with it.
“And after that, it just got worse and worse,” Melody said. “The Great Equestrian.”
“The Crucible,” Nebula added. “The Disharmony Act, the Hand In Hoof Riots, the Battleship Strike, and…” she blinked, shaking her head sadly. “Tartarus, Bliss. I told you about this. You listened to me. You’re PHL, for Luna’s sake! And you still…”
She looked down, silent.
“I’d be treated as a monster back home,” Nebula said, more solemn than Melody. “Put in some camp for dissidents. Suspected disharmonious elements. Doing the same borderline-suicidal work as Newfoals, but for less pay, if I’m not in an internment center. All while Equestria acts like being a mindless little golem is the ideal. You can get disappeared by the Imperial Guard for damn near no reason, too. I didn’t want to be part of that, not that Luna would let me.”
It was the first time Kraber had heard a pony so disgusted or saddened about Equestria itself.
“I can’t believe somehow you didn’t learn this by now,” Nebula said, practically hissing it out. “That’s why we’re here. Because even when humans like you fire on a city, we can be free of the nightmare that used to be home.”
“It’s just…” Kraber started, as the pressure increased. “I was just…”
‘No,’ he could almost hear Kate saying. ‘It’s never ‘just’ that. It’s what the person really means.’
“You were just what?” Jolu asked. “You were just thinking what? In front of me?”
“It’s… different…” Kraber choked.
“How,” Jolu said, not making it a question. “How the shit is it different. Ya Goddamn hypocrite.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“Or are you gonna say you’re surprised I know that word?” Jolu asked.
‘It’s- t’s because… I… well, they’re…
It’s different. I’m different. I have to be, I was different to Kate, I was the kind of guy that glassed Nazis with a broken arm for…
...Wait. Did I do that for fun or for her brother? Or both? Was it both? Who the fok am I now? Would that person there, right now, be saying ‘it’s different’ and not knowing why?
I need to get out of this! Get the fok out of–’
So Kraber resorted to the only words he could say that would get him out of this.
“It’s really not,” Kraber said. “Fokkin’ hundreds. I admit it. I’m racist. I’m a horrible fokkin’ person. I’m Jewish, I’m bisexual, I married a black woman, and I joined a hate group. I’m…”
Either Kraber slumped against the wall again, in that horribly uncomfortable position.
“Fine,” Kraber said. “I’m. Sorry. I’m a terrible fokkin’ kontgesig. I only recently thought of how you’re outcasts, how your home all went to kak, and…. And on some level, I always had the ability to know. I just refused to. And what kind of fokkin’ kontgesig does that make me?! That’s literally what my religion is all about. What I learned about my grandparents and great-grandparents fighting, when they were young. That’s what Great-Grandpa Dragan teaching me how to build pipebombs was about. I could’ve learned this any fokkin’ time, and I didn’t care. I talked about fighting for the freedom to take yours. I. Am. A hypocrite. I’m all the fokkin’ vrot things you’re thinking and probably more. I… look.”
He sighed.
“But, like a book once said: Sometimes, a hypocrite is only a man in the process of changing.”
“Is that from The Stormlight Archive?” Jolu asked.
“You read those too?” Kraber asked back. “Oh, it is bitchin’ good!”
“Right?!” Jolu asked. “Dalinar’s the best character. No question.”
“Really?” Kraber asked. “I mean, my favorite is Kaladin. Or, well, Adolin. I can have both, ri-”
The glow of Melody’s horn softened, and Kraber fell to a more natural position, gasping profusely. “Oh, fok… oh… oh, that hurt.”
Nebula and Melody looked at Kraber.
“Personally, I liked Shallan more. And you’re not going to…” Melody started.
“I’m still going to slip,” Kraber said. “Like I said. I’m a hypocrite. But I promise I am fokkin’ trying.”
“You know what?” Nebula asked. “Close enough.”
“I’m sure this is a thrilling character moment, but can we get a move on?” Rime Ice asked.
That was as good as they were likely to get. And so, they walked down the street, Kraber inspecting cars.
He bent down next to one with a broken window, then shoved his hand through the hole, opening the door.
“I have questions,” Melody said. “About what you told us. With your great-grandfather.”
“Dragan is a fairly common name in Croatia,” Kraber said absent-mindedly. “Would’ve named my son Dragan, but Kate wouldn’t have it! Which is a shame, cause Dragan… wait, no, Dragan Strang? That would be stupid. Maybe Kate did have a point. But I got to call him my little dragon and have Dragan as his middle name. So I w–”
“No, the pipe-bomb thing!” Melody said. “Who teaches their foals to make pipe bombs?!”
“... Great-grandpa Dragan?” Kraber asked.
“There’s other odd things in his story, too,” Nebula said. “You knew the name of that woman that shot Rime Ice. Dayoung. And what you said when you were apologizing. You’re not–”
‘Oh, shi–’
“You!” someone yelled. “Stand up. Hands where we can see em!”
Kraber could see several more PHL standing at the edge of an intersection, not too far from where the five of them had jumped into the store for cover.
“Think they’re–” Melody asked.
“By order of Captain Haddon, all of you are to come with us. We are setting up a base in Maine Medical, and-”
“I have a counteroffer that sounds similarly appealing,” Kraber said sarcastically, looking them over. A few of them were absolutely not carrying standard PHL weaponry – crossbows, grenade launchers, and what looked like some kind of large squirt gun. The rest had the standard PHL Remington ACR. “How about you just choke on the sweat under my–”
“Oh, I don’t think they are,” a woman said. A woman with a very familiar voice, accented from somewhere in the Middle East...
Kraber turned, looking in the direction of the voice… only to feel his heart sink.
‘Well, fok me in the gat and call me a prison bitch.’
It was Yael Ze’ev. Flanked by Heliotrope, a heavyset masked soldier in all-concealing body armor carrying an HV Penetrator, a dirty-blond unicorn mare with a camo bandanna over her mouth, and a black man with a linebacker’s build and a grenade launcher, and another man with a pair of tonfas at his hips and an M4 in both hands.
“And from my perspective, things look awful!” Jolu said.
Kraber nodded. “Ja.”
“Goodbye, cruel world,” Rime Ice said.
“As the most senior PHL officer here other than Haddon, or Gardner,” Yael said, “And the one with a unicorn shielding me, I’m taking command. And you’re going to surrender and tell me what in God’s name you were thinking, right now, or we fire.”
“Y-you can’t do that,” an earthpony from the fake PHL stammered.
“One, you did and look where you are. Two, who’s stopping me? You?” Yael demanded, stepping forward. “Go on, traitor. Pull rank on me. Shoot us. Hit us. Summon up your demons. I dare you.”
The leader of this detachment of fake PHL snorted. “Oh, I think we can do all of that and more. Let me tell you how this is going to go down.”
Yael
“With your bleeding, mangled corpse in a dumpster?” spoke a thin man with a weird accent, wearing an Eel-type mask, staring at the wreckage. This was the man Yael would later know as Ivan Bliss, then Francis Strang, and then Viktor Kraber. Soon.
And Yael was certain she had seen him in the store.
“Or, better yet,” the masked man said. “You, lying on the sypaadjie there, clutching the bloody ruin of your ears.”
(”I didn’t say ears,” Kraber says. “I said eiers.”
“What’s the difference?” Heliotrope asks.
“It means, uh-” Aegis says, looking at his foals.
“Balls,” Kraber interrupts. “It means balls. That’ll be important later.”
“Yeah,” Vinyl says, making a motion that is part shrug, sigh, and shaking the head. “That sounds like you.”)
Yael looked at the man in command of the fake PHL. His nametag read ‘Whitten’. She admittedly didn’t know much about him.
‘This man was a hero, wasn’t he?’
She vaguely recalled that. He’d been a hero of the Europe Evacuation, helping to ward off Captain Cactus. He’d taken over a Reconstitution Camp despite the encroaching Barrier, his unit had fought in the battle of Puerto del Escudo...
“I just want to know,” Yael said, “Why?”
“Don’t encourage him,” Heliotrope said. “He’s a traitor to-”
Whitten looked at Yael, a weary grimace on his face.
“Tell me what you PHL fight for is worth it,” Whitten said. “We ruined the Earth, Yael. No matter what we all said about doing it for the greater good, we’ll be the same miserable bastards for all eternity. We’ll fight in wars, we’ll die for a meaningless god, all for nothing.”
“Are you saying,” Heliotrope said, “All human history is for nothing?! Art, culture, lives over millennia, walking on a Moon, the Internet, statues chiselled into mountains, stories beyond what I dreamt of in Equestria… For nothing?!”
“No!” Whitten protested. “I never said that. But we’re broken, you poor Fallen little pony.”
“I didn’t fall,” Heliotrope snarled, “I jumped.”
“For everything we create, there’s a downside,” Whitten said. “For every beautiful thing we make, there’s so many ugly little things. This is humanity’s chance to let what little beauty we’ve created survive. To break the cycle. This is all for the best. Even with all the-”
Whitten didn’t even finish saying the last words of that sentence before an ambulance slammed into him, flinging him and all his soldiers into the air. They flew in all directions, or were crushed under the wheels.
‘What,’ Yael thought. ‘Seriously, what.’
“Okay, what?!” John yelled.
Yael knew what to do before Whitten even hit the ground.
“QS! Paralysis, now!” she yelled.
Quiette Shy nodded. Just as Whitten hit the ground, a beam beam of red light lanced out QS’ horn, enveloping Whitten and freezing him in midair. Quiette Shy stared at the moaning fake PHL on the ground, lying broken and battered.
“Well,” she said. “That Happened.”
“... Was that a Jojo’s reference?” the man in the eel-type mask asked.
“Huh,” Heliotrope said, nodding. “I like him.”
‘Worrying.’
Yael looked over to Whitten, whose facial muscles strained. He couldn’t scream, and his eyes darted from side to side.
Somewhere in Yael, there was another her back at the ballet bar, wearing a red leotard and tights, moving with a grace she rarely felt outside of class, almost a foot taller than all the other girls in the class. Or maybe lying on a bed listening to Trout Mask Replica, possibly still in the leotard. This other her, whenever it was, was realizing how screwed up this all really was.
But, well, this was standard procedure. There were too many incidents of PER ponifying themselves – or becoming living bombs, and ponifying others – for Yael not to order this.
“Keep him restrained until we get transport,” Yael said to Quiette Shy.
“Need me to check for-” the man in the Eel-type mask asked.
“Oscar,” Yael continued, ignoring that. “Check his teeth. You-”
She looked at the masked man.
“You. I don’t know you, so I can’t order you. What’s your name?”
“Strang,” the man in the Eel-type mask said. “It’s Strang.”
“Wait,” a pale blue unicorn said, walking up to Yael. “I… you’re real PHL, right? I can tell. “I’m Melody, and…. And this stallion here needs help. He’s been shot, and he’s…. He’s taking it bad.”
Yael nodded. “Bro, Chinook? Keep guard on these two, I can call a medevac. You’re to guard the two of them with your lives, you understand?”
The human and pegasus saluted.
“If I can, Ma’am, I’d like to stay with them,” Jolu said. “They’re… they’re my friends. I need to know if they’re okay.”
Yael nodded.
“Very well,” Yael said, walking to the intersection, followed by her soldiers, a thestral pony, and the strange thin man in the Eel-type mask.
She tapped her earpiece.
“This is First Lieutenant Yael Ze’ev,” she said. “I am calling for–”
“WHY ARE YOU NOT FUCKING ATTACKING THE HLF?!” Gardner yelled. “THEY’RE SLIPPING THROUGH MY FUCKING FINGERS LIKE FUCKING SAND!”
‘Do it. Yell at him. Say that he’d have noticed the PER if he was actually good at his job.’
She didn’t.
“There was an emergency with PER in downtown,” Yael said. “I–”
And there came yet another explosion.
“What was that?!” Gardner yelled.
Here’s how Heliotrope would describe it when Yael asked her.
There was a... teenager, I think? She had a white gas mask, she was sitting in the driver’s seat of that ambulance that hit Whitten. screaming something unintelligible. Anyway, I saw her drop out of the ambulance…”
I remember her yelling that she was okay, even though I saw her rolling on the pavement. Bouncing a little.
Things weren’t okay.
The speeding ambulance, momentum barely sapped from where it tore through Whitten, reached the end of the street, jumped the curve, ploughed through the fake PHL, and smashed through a big plate-glass window.
“Get down!” Yael yelled, throwing herself to the pavement, just as a flash of light twinkled…
The hospital erupted into a massive glowing mushroom cloud lit from within by hundreds of shades of purple, and the sound of the conflagration sounded uncannily like a scream…
No, it was a scream. Dozens of screams, hundreds even.
And they were human. It was the death-cries of the unconverted within the bureau’s walls, burning alive as the potion stores cooked off.
Rainbow-colored lightning arced through the ascending mushroom-cloud. Yael, aghast, could not reconcile her relief at the structure’s destruction, and her horror at the casual eradication of innocent bystanders.
“Everything I touch turns to kak, doesn’t it?” the man in the eel-type mask sighed.
“I’m–” the teenager called out again, but as she stepped into the pool of light under a street lamp, the words died in her throat and Yael’s as well…
… As she brought up an arm to wipe her brow, and found a hoof attached to her wrist.
Now she screamed too. She was transforming – somehow, either from landing in a puddle of the potion, or having been struck by contaminated debris when her ambulance blew the Bureau up.
“No...NO! MUMMY! MUMMY!”
Purplish-pink fur sprouted out her skin in irregular clumps, and her face looked as pliable as clay, practically bubbling in the orange light. As it turned out, she was not, in fact, okay.
“Help me! Somepony help meeeeeheheeee!!!”
She screamed again, left eye forced closed by her cheek and brow swelling to the point that they were almost as big as a basketball, leaving her listing to one side. And, as suddenly as the massive potion-induced thaumic tumors had appeared, they receded, leaving the left eye to open, and-
“Help them! Haha! I’ll help all of them, Majesty!”
No. That was not a human’s eye! It was dull and glassy, like a doll’s eye. One side, the potion-imbued left half, moved forward, one arm with its fingers fusing into a hoof stretched out towards them. The right half, one with a desperate, pleading human eye, stubbornly stayed back.
“MAJESTY!”
Yael shot her in the face with her Jericho 941, realizing, too tired for even simple horror or revulsion, that she had never known the teenager’s name. She’d been brave enough to try and destroy the Bureau, but… the price she’d paid.
Nobody deserved that.
Somehow, it got worse when Yael saw inside the Bureau. She could see Newfoals in the bombed-out wreck of that building’s wall, some on fire, some jumping from heights that in all likelihood might kill them.
It wasn’t as bad as she remembered from the first time she’d been deployed during the Bad Old Times, the first terrible years of the war when any Bureau could’ve easily been turned into a forward operating base.
It was worse.
Even with the hole, even with the massive collateral damage, fake PHL and others crawled out of the woodwork armed with magic shields, rifles and smgs. They grabbed the wounded, those bleeding profusely from wounds, and shoved them towards the doors past the wreck of the van.
This was Sheol, and there were the damned, descending.
And inside, guarding them, were...
Yael paused.
“Newfoals.”
It was quite likely the first time a lot of these people had reason to be worried about Newfoal attacks here in America.
‘It’s up to us,’ Yael thought.
But down below, she could see what looked like other ponies being herded into the ruins. If anything, they looked to be treated harsher than the humans being herded in. Some of them looked to be near dead.
“What are you waiting for?!” one of the fake PHL yelled. “Get in here, you–”
Yael saw red.
“QS? You, the blue unicorn? Keep us shielded, and keep Whitten from moving. Everyone else, kill the PER,” she said flatly, and drilled him through the head with her Galil.
Kraber
The round from Yael’s Galil punched the man backwards an inch or two or three, and his bloody corpse fall to the ground.
“JOU FOKKIN KONTGESIGS!” Kraber screamed, letting loose a pipe-bomb from the MG2021’s underbarrel launcher, the pointy end embedding itself in a pegasus Newfoal’s head, making her look like some strange alicorn...
Right up until it exploded, anyway, shrapnel shredding through the Newfoals right next to her. But… he paused. Wait. They weren’t getting new numbers. THERE WOULDN’T BE ANY MORE Newfoals IF HE SLAUGHTERED THIS FOKKIN BATCH OF VARKNAAIERS!
“Alright,” Yael said, ducking behind an ambulance. Something – maybe spells, maybe bullets – pocked it. “Kill the PER. Heliotrope, Chinook, you’re guiding them out. Quiette Shy, I need you to…”
“On it,” Quiette Shy said.
A purplish pink – well, a heliotrope-colored overlay surrounded Heliotrope through Kraber’s helmet’s visor.
‘Huh. They can just… do that?’ Kraber wondered. ‘I don’t know what to think about that.’
Behind them, the National Guard stood around the traitor PHL man that’d hassled them , moving him into position in the storefront of a nearby building. Taking position behind cars.
‘This is going to be a bloodbath,’ Kraber thought, watching Newfoals spill out of every ground-level opening in the hospital. Crossbow bolts, explosives, and even conventional bullets rained against the pavement between them and the hospital.
Kraber slid into cover behind a blue car, next to a blue pegasus with a yellow mane. A red energy shield formed in front of the car, and Kraber looked back, tracing it to an off-white unicorn with a dirty blond mane, and a camo bandanna over her mouth.
‘Quiette Shy.’
An explosive of some kind rammed against Quiette Shy’s shield. There was a vibration of sorts, like ripples on the surface of a pool – as the shield took the brunt of the explosion…
… and, much to Kraber’s surprise, held.
He nodded thanks to the white unicorn. ‘There’s something to this. Shields, not being threatened, and not shooting kids. This feels right.’
She nodded back, as Kraber shoved a new pipebomb down the underbarrel launcher. “BLIKSEMS!” he screamed, the MG2021 ripping them apart like a buzzsaw.
“GONNA FOKKIN’ KILL YOU!” Kraber roared, letting loose a buzz of full-auto fire and cutting through some charging Newfoals. “I'm gonna kill your chommies and your family, I'm gonna track down your grandparents and turn them inside-out, nobody can stop the blood train that will turn your loved ones into a red splatter across the tracks of humanity!”
So far, he was making good on that promise.
“What is wrong with you?” breathed a massively built black man with a grenade launcher. (This was Lorne.)
“Ye think Ah’d pass up the chance tae chib PER?” Kraber asked, as if the mere idea of leaving a PER member alive, with anything intact - be it arms, legs, brains, genitals, or dignity - was completely foreign to him.
Dancing Day
“It really is, you know,” Aegis says.
Dancing Day has to admit, it’s really not all that much of a surprise.
“Why thank you!” Kraber says, a smile on his face.
...Aaaaaaand neither is that.
“You’re welcome,” Aegis agrees, without missing a beat.
Kraber
“That’s befok talk!” Kraber continues. “You can do any fokked-up shit you want to Newfoals and PER, and nobody bats an eye! I killed one by farting on its balls, once.”
“What?!” yelled a blue and yellow pegasus.
“It’s true!” Kraber called back. “It was taco night, and I used a lighter.”
“...While we’re glad for the assist, that’s…” said the blue-and-yellow pegasus stallion. Kraber would later know them as Chinook.
“...you a sick fuck, you know that?” Lorne asked.
“The kontgesigs killed my family,” Kraber explained. “It’s just a little–” his LMG jamming, right at the moment a pegasus Newfoal landed on the back of the car he used as cover, Kraber shoved a pipe-bomb into the Newfoal’s throat. With a grunt, he rammed his fist into the Newfoal, knocking them back into the mob of Newfoals… where the Newfoal exploded.
“Okay, a LOT AY FOKKING INTEREST!” Kraber called back.
Beside him, a heavily-built man (Oscar Mikkelsen) jumped over the barricade, HV Penetrator in hand. Before Kraber knew it, the heavily built man was behind a group of fake PHL, the Penetrator nailing them to the floor, to each other, to cars.
‘Holy shit,’ Kraber thought.
Through the smoke, he could see some people rushing out the door, holding onto each other like crutches. All human. He stared through the reflex sight, ready to–
“They’re humans!” yelled the blue-and-yellow pegasus – okay, this is going to be too much of a headache to say every time, it was Chinook. “They don’t look like PER! Hold your fire, whoever you are!”
Kraber looked them over. Still staring through the red dot sight. A woman – probably a teenager – in a ratty T-shirt with a band logo, a small child that only came up to her hips, and a man with orange sunglasses and a blue shirt.
‘I could’ve killed people running from the PER,’ Kraber thought. ‘After fokkin’ up the city. After killing countless people. I’m just no good to anyone here, am I?’
Kraber carefully aimed away from the running humans, tracking up towards a window…
And seeing a PER pegasus aiming a crossbow. A ballista of some kind.
‘That can’t be good.’
Kraber drilled two rounds through the pegasus’ face. They shot back against the wall, blood spraying everywhere...
He watched in horror as another crossbow – one he hadn’t noticed – fired. He fired two more rounds through the human aiming the ballista, but in the wind, in the confusion of the battlefield, they pocked harmlessly in the brick above the window.
Next to him, the massively-built black man (Lorne) with the grenade launcher fired a grenade up towards that same crossbow. Like thread through a needle, the explosive flew through the open window, splattering the PER man in a red haze.
Kraber would’ve been crowing ‘FOKKIN’ LEKKER SHOT!’...
...if not for the fact that at the very moment the grenade had blown up the PER man, Kraber was watching the child taking a crossbow bolt through the knee, falling to the ground screaming. Kraber knew what was happening almost before the bolt hit them.
‘Oh God, no.’
The child began to shake on the ground – no, shaking somehow didn’t cover that. It was like their entire body was sloshing, bouncing, spasming all at once. Purple fur began to grow around the hole the bolt had made in their knee, spreading out through the hole.
The other two humans didn’t notice. Or weren’t letting themselves notice.
‘It’s Dachau in here,’ Kraber thought.
Kraber shot the kid in the head. Twice. Then aimed for another PER soldier, at a ground floor window…
… Except he didn’t. Whatever it was that had been shut off within Viktor Marius Kraber all this time was back on, shining or blaring at full blast. All the while, he watched humans rush out in groups of two or three, desperately trying to dodge PER weapons. Purplish sparks and clouds sprayed up from the pavement, and crossbow bolts pocked everything nearby.
‘I killed a kid,’ he thought. He slumped down, back against the cover. ‘God dammit. I killed a kid. Why now?! Why?! I’ve killed plenty of–’
There was a giant blank space in Kraber’s thoughts for a few seconds there. He found himself making heavy, ragged breaths, trying to force himself back against the car he was using as cover.
‘Wait a fokdamn minute! That’s worse! All these kids, and… how many. I don’t know how many.’
“Hey!” Chinook yelled, ducking down...
… as a crossbow bolt flew over his head. The human and pegasus stared at that absurdity, seeing it shatter against the brick wall behind them.
“You alright?! Have you been shot?!” Chinook yelled.
“No,” Kraber said. “I just… I…”
He shook his head.
“I just shot that kid,” he said. “I… shot a kid.”
Chinook stared down at him. “I… I know,” he nodded. “But… we can talk through it later. We’ve got a job to do.”
‘I’ve shot more kids than this,’ Kraber thought. ‘A lot of this is my fault. What in the fok is fokkin’ wrong with me?!’
“Having a job to do,” Kraber said, “Is how I got to the point where, after doing this more often than I’d like to admit, I’m trying not to cry while under heavy fokkin’ fire.”
‘I’m no fokkin’ good here.’
“I’ve been there too,” Chinook said. “But, no matter what, there’s still people that need our help. And I’d rather know someone’s not going to die a Newfoal than let myself stop.”
“You’re a correct ou,” Kraber said, nodding slightly. “Ah…”
“Chinook,” Chinook said. “It’s Chinook.”
There was a pregnant pause as the two looked at each other.
“Besides, these are PER we’re fighting,” Chinook said. “God’s perfect cannon fodder. You just told me you can do any fokked-up shit,” he made air-quotes with his forelegs “that you want to them, and nobody cares. Well, I need you to put that spirit to good use. Yael needs you to. Heliotrope needs it. The city needs it.”
Kraber felt himself smile.
“That’s doable,” Kraber said. “And I’ve got just the idea. Draw the PER fire over there.”
He pointed to the left of the hospital entrance. To a broken window, leading into a lower level.
“I can see some PER down in that basement. I’m going to flank them,” he said. “I’m going to flank them RIGHT UP THE FOKKIN’ GAT!”
‘Time to fok voort.’
Heliotrope
The humans in the hospital weren’t exactly rushing out in droves.
“They… they must’ve been using it as a Bureau,” one National Guard man said. “Raided supplies from the old one, came here.”
“How many more are in there?” Yael asked.
“A lot,” said a woman in a ratty T-shirt that was more holes than fabric, shivering. “They… they’re herding them all into a portal of some kind. But the hospital’s so big, that, that there’s people still in there. We have no idea how to get to them!”
Yael nodded. “We see to the people out here first, until backup arrives. I am not leaving you unguarded.”
She looked over at Heliotrope. “Heliotrope, I need you to observe the building. Everyone else? You’re with me. Even you–”
She looked for the PHL man with the eel-type mask. Strang.
“Where’d Strang go, anyway?” she asked, a sinking feeling in her gut.
She knew the answer almost as soon as she asked, watching someone hose down a broken window with a pump-action shotgun, as Chinook flitted from side to side, spraying down PER with his assault yoke.
And then, the man jumped in. There was a slight squelch as he did. A yelp.
“He said he was flanking them!” Chinook yelled.
“I’ll go after him,” Nebula said. “If I can’t bring him back, I can at least be backup.”
A singular moment of clarity hit Heliotrope.
‘This is going to get so ugly.’
Kraber
The hallway was littered with rubble, cheap broken art, shattered chairs, and dead Newfoals.
Fine, then. Ponies weren’t all bad. The HLF wasn’t a force for good and the protection of humanity. And if tonight was any judge, maybe the ponies had to be protected. Tomorrow, he could decide on all this shit and what it meant about him.
But he didn’t need to make any decisions when killing PER. That was a public fokkin service.
He looked up a set of stairs, and - certain he couldn’t hear anything from their direction - made his way up as silently as possible. He’d seen a walkway miraculously untouched by bombing, one that looked impossibly stable, that led into the main building.
He hefted the MG2021, peering around a corner. It was almost a straight shot to the walkway – almost – save for a few ponies and humans, definitely PER, retreating down it.
“What the hell are you doing?!” Nebula hissed, fluttering up to him. Kraber had no idea how she’d found him, but that wasn’t important.
“... Ah’m going to go practice medicine,” Kraber said, slipping back into his usual accent, smiling. “Someone’s oan a burst mooth…”
With that, he stepped into the hallway, Nebula following.
One of the retreating ponies – this one an earthpony, a natural-born stallion with a cutie mark of a firepit – turned and stared at the two of them, mouth open.
“Oh, bu–”
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9394050
I hope it's not going to overtake the whole story though.
Anyway, new chapter, woo! I'll admit, I was sharing Yael's confusion until things slowly started to fall into place. But the best part of the chapter was undoubtedly when Viktor slipped up with his compliments. It's not easy for a racist to change overnight, but damn if he isn't trying.
9403722
It won't. Don't even trip, dawg!
Cross my heart and hope to fly, stick a cupcake in my eye.
i.pinimg.com/originals/13/30/0a/13300a8c50422bd8590d7f3e85f124a6.png
The fact that you were confused at first should probably worry me.... but, well, since it all worked out in the end and the pieces fell into place, I count that as a win. And what a pleasant surprise! I was worried anything I wrote that went straight from allegory to real-world politics like that would be too much of a reach and be seen as too tone-deaf and preachy.
Also this is the weirdest goddamn chapter title I've ever made. I blame Captain Beefheart though.
It kills me every time I reach the end of a chapter on this, because theres really nothing quite like it or any of the Spectrumverse stories on the site.
The rewrites have done these a hell of a good turn.
They're significantly more understandable, better structured, more well-paced, and the characters are much more relatable.
In the interest of fairness, you could argue there's too many pop culture references, or that there's no need for reference to other fictional universes (like F.E.A.R.), but I consider these stylistic choices, not necessarily flaws, especially as long as they aren't employed ham-fistedly.
The last time I read something like the Spectrumverse was when I went on the Fallout Equestria kick that brought me into ponies in the first place. It's honestly that engrossing.
I look forward to seeing where Kraber's story goes. I'm a sucker for a good redemption arc.
9417443
Thanks so much, dood! I'm glad the rewrites have brought you as much joy as they have brought me. I'm especially glad that this applies to Light - much effort has been expended making it that much more me.
We have no plans of doing anymore super hamfisted referencing. We left that behind us with the GTA characters.
ugh
Wait, really? Well, damn. That's high praise.
You and me both.