Burn My Shadow

Light Despondent

Chapter 4

In the Summer Breeze / Burn My Shadow

edited by
TheIdiot
Jed R
Sledge115

I have burned my tomorrows
And I stand inside today
At the edge of the future
And my dreams all fade away

And burn my shadow away...
I faced my destroyer
I was ambushed by a lie
And you judged me once for falling
This wounded heart arise

And burn my shadow away...
UNKLE, 'Burn My Shadow'

Dancing Day
December 24, 2022

“I think,” Kraber said, “That I really started feeling fokked up the day after. I’d volunteered for Lake Patrol.”
“What’s that?” Dancing Day asks.

“Well, Defiance had a large rotation of guards. The ones who got Lake Patrol had the lekker spot,” Kraber says. “You know how in Rogue One, Scarif was a tropical paradise that Imperial officers used to retire while still getting paid?”

“Of all the star wars references I would expect,” Yael says, “That was not one of them.”

“What?” Kraber asks. “I like Rogue One. Besides, everyone knows the usual references. You have any idea how often I’ve seen a newfoal pull the ‘LUKE, I AM YOUR FATHER’ scene? It’s gotten to the point where I just shoot them in the fokkin’ throat before they finish.”

“...Yes? I do know,” Dancing Day says tentatively. She hadn’t seen that many Star Wars movies at the PHL base’s movie night, and for whatever reason, she didn’t remember Rogue One all that well.

“Huh, it was?” asks Aegis. The big pony looks contemplative, and - using a stylus he keeps in a bracelet around his right foreleg fetlock - opens up a tab on the iPad that is plugged into the PHL crystal projector, transmitting holograms of Yael and Heliotrope.

“You’d better not accidentally cancel this program,” Heliotrope says.

“I mean, I hope I don’t,” Aegis says. “But I can just reopen it if I make a mistake, right?”

“I guess that’s true,” Heliotrope admits. “But it’ll still be really annoying. Computers, am I right?”

“They’re so hard to use!” Dancing Day pipes up.

“Really?” asks Grayson, the bald human that’d come in to hear Kraber’s story. “I think they were easy.”

“We don’t have hands, and Equestrian computers were - till they put in totem-proles - about the size of a room. Meanwhile, you grew up with computers being the size of a briefcase,” Heliotrope says. “Trust me, they practically have a vertical learning curve for us.”

“Well, I guess that makes sense,” Aegis says, as he looks over the tab on Wookieepedia that he’s just opened. “Middle of nowhere, tropical, middle of an ocean…” he nods. “Specially cause I remember the lake. It was so pretty out there. Damn shame I couldn’t just go there to relax…”

“If we survive the War,” Kraber says, “I will take you, Amber, and Rivet out there and bring the roomys.”

Dancing Day blinks at Kraber.

“He means ice cream,” Aegis explains. “But, Viktor… Knowing what happened to Sutra Cross, I’m not sure I want to be… there. That makes it almost worse.”

“Aweh,” Kraber says, nodding. “I can understand that. But if it helps, I know a great swimming hole near Milan…”

You look up to the tall, skinny man, and implausibly heavyset pony. You cough slightly, saying ‘Ahem!’

‘Aaaaaaaaaanyway, Lake Patrol was like that,” Kraber said. “You’re guarding something, but it doesn’t really matter cause you’re out on the water, and you can just relax.”

August 7, 2022

Kraber had already narrowed it down to Lake Patrol or guard duty on the Farm with Da Costa and Joca the border collie, but that didn’t mean he was done thinking over his options.

I haven’t spent much time with Da Costa, Kraber thought, looking over the signup whiteboard hanging on the wall. But… I don’t think I want to be with people right now.

“Come on come on come on,” said Gage, the wheelchair-bound man sitting behind the desk. He hadn’t had much money or been part of any military before the War, and any money the HLF made from homebrew or protection had been so diverted by other causes that Gage had only been able to afford a wooden peg after Kraber amputated him. “Viktor. There’s a long line.”

Kraber had seen the leg, and knew - from experience and momentary checkups he conducted - that there was still some residue of the failed ponification there. Oddly colored grayish skin, and strangely colored red - not human red, but bright cherry red - hair. It was part of why Gage wore pants (even though they got caught on the pegleg) so often.

He’d been retired from active duty, and been reassigned to his ‘work placement office.’ Which was - and Kraber didn’t feel like kidding himself - an old farmhouse that had, before they built Defiance, been in almost a cartoon sort of nowhere. It’d been added to time and time again with prefabs and shipping containers, turning it into a massive, sprawling complex of wood and metal that housed apartments, offices, vaults, refrigerators, and other similar rooms.

Behind him, a woman in red with curly brown hair - Mariesa - sighed, momentarily blowing a mass of hair out of her face.

“Isit,” Kraber said.

“There’s someone you’re holding up,” Gage said, “and that’s enough. Go out and put down your name before I turn Bessie on you.”

‘Bessie’ could have been any number of things. It could’ve been Gage’s loyal giant dog, or it could’ve been the Serbu break-open .50 BMG rifle that Gage kept behind his wheelchair.

He’d not been this snippy before the amputation. Does… does that really do the kind of damage I’ve heard? Kraber thought. Could be either, really.

Then looked at the whiteboard.

Talk to a friend, or some alone time.

Talking to Dacosta was super tempting. Especially now that Emil was…

Kraber studiously tried not to think about that, and instead focused on how if he told anyone what he’d done, he suspected he’d get two reactions: If he told them about how wrong he felt killing a family of ponies, they’d laugh it off or shoot them. If he went so far as to say ‘Yes, I didn’t kill a ~~mother and daughter~~ gluestick and her spawn,’ they would probably exile him.

So, no question there.

“Lake patrol,” Kraber said. “No question.”

20 minutes later

Kraber liked Lake Umbagog. It was towards the south edge of Defiance, which was over near Wentworth Location, and it gave him time to be alone on a tiny little boat, barely more than a metal rowboat with an engine. Kraber didn’t know the exact term for it.

Normally, Kraber didn’t like being alone. He loved companionship from humans or animals, sought it out wherever possible. But he’d secluded himself because…

I’ll get exiled if I talk to them about it, he thought as he steered the boat over towards the west side of the lake.

But Kraber didn’t believe that. Couldn’t make himself believe that.

‘They’ll do much worse. I know I would. So, that leaves me with three options, Kraber thought, as he scanned the lake for - oh who was he kidding, there was nothing to see. Lake Patrol was just a placeholder duty that nobody cared abo-

December 2022
Dancing Day

“Ahem,” Yael says.

“Ja,” Kraber says. “Exactly.”

August 7, 2022
Kraber

So:

Option One: Get it off his chest, talk it over. Get shot or exiled.

I don’t like dying, and I don’t want to get exiled, Kraber thought. So, that’s out.

Option Two: Leave preemptively.

I mean, this is all I have left, so- Kraber thought.

Upon that realization, he shut down.

fok.

It wasn’t the first time he’d thought of that. But this time, it really seemed… to be driven home, somehow. So, that leaves me with…

Option Three: I’m with these people, I guess.

It should’ve made him happy to hear it. I’m with Mariesa, Gage, Dan, Dayoung and Megan, Dacosta, he thought. And… Lovikov.

Why am I thinking of that last part as a downside?

“This is too fokkin’ stressful,” Kraber said. Fok it. I’m going swimming.

So he’d decided to strip down to kaalgat and go swimming, all his clothes piled up in his little boat next to his guns. Lake Umbagog was shallow enough he could practically walk through most of it, but there were deep enough points he could immerse himself in the water.

‘Reminds me of home, almost,’ Kraber thought. He still thought of Cape Town as home, and had intended to go there after college. But, well, then Kate had gotten pregnant in sophomore year, and they’d both stuck it out in a Boston apartment, then in Germany.

Kraber let his mind wander as he swam through the lake, doing the breaststroke. There were a lot of things he was reminded of as he swept his arms through the lake - the fun times he’d had in pools, or over on Long Beach, for example.

He still didn’t feel right.

“Maybe I’ll just get back in the boat,” Kraber grumbled, swimming up to the rim of the boat, ready to pull himself in...

And then he stopped, gaping as he saw it. Something sat at the prow of the boat. A pony.

No…

“Viktor…. We’re still newfoals, Viktor,” said the equine in the other end of the canoe. It was a grotesque thing, covered in blood and eyes full of worms, one foreleg missing, a jagged stump where there should have been a horn.

Two smaller ponies were standing behind it. They could’ve been the foals he’d shot not long before, or they could’ve been…

“Who are you?” he heard himself ask.

“You know who we are,” the three of them said.

‘No,’ Kraber thought, closing his eyes and shaking his head. ‘You’re not real! NOT REAL!’

“Aren’t I?” the equine asked. ‘I’m as real as you need me to be, Viktor.’

Kraber opened his eyes…

Only to find the boat blessedly empty.

Kraber shook his head as he pulled his clothes back on, enjoying the silence.

‘Fokdammit. This was supposed to be relaxing.’

He hadn’t quite been the same for the last eighteen hours or so. He’d had a moment of weakness, of doubt as he fired into the gluesticks. Then…

Well.

Then he hadn’t been able to fire.

“I just feel… wrong. Soft,” he muttered, to nobody in particular. “Fok.”

Things had just been so easy before yesterday. He would wake up around 7 AM, throw on his guns, and maybe squeeze in some target practice, wasting as little of their precious ammunition ammunition as possible. Then, he’d do whatever duties Lovikov required around camp - some surgery, some basic medical checkups, some maintenance. Even carpentry or fishing. Even patrolling just as he was now. And, when they were called on a raid, he’d sign on and murder everything in sight. More often than not, any pony in range was fair game. It’d been simple, really.

But lately, things hadn’t been so black-and-white. That hadn’t been the first time that those (Stupid, ignorant, HORSEFUCKING) townies had defended the FOKKING GLUESTICKS. About a year earlier, it’d been so easy to understand: ponies and traitors were targets, humans who did not associate with them were heroes.

And heroes, as Kraber understood it, made things better.

But then… Emil had died. Crossley was dead. And that family of ponies had died. Some of his friends had been ponified, again, and he’d been forced to kill them, again. And the Barrier still came. People were still ponified.

‘Am I even doing anything right?’

“Why don’t I feel like we did that much?” he asked himself. “And all we fokkin’ have to show for it, ja, is a glowing yellow spike and some salvage.”

‘And I killed a family. Couldn’t kill another one,’ Kraber thought.

He couldn’t unthink that: I. Killed. A. Family.

‘But they were ponies, right? Doesn’t that make it okay?’ he thought. ‘So if that’s right, then how’s it okay I let those two live? How’s that work? It’s okay I killed a family cause they were ponies, but it’s okay I didn’t kill ponies cause they were a family?

He sighed.

‘Katie, and Peter, and Anka… they’re still dead. And I’ve made nobody happier. I’m fokkin’ useless.’

He reached into a cooler and downed a beer. It didn’t help.

Fokkin’ American beer, Kraber thought. Tastes like piss! he continued, as his mind drifted towards thoughts of-

That filly!

Staring down at that foal, finger on the revolver’s trigger, things suddenly didn’t seem as simple. He’d tried to fire. Tried to call out what he had discovered. He didn’t have it in him. He later swore that he’d seen Kate, Anka, and Peter looking back at him from behind the eyes of those ponies.

In that moment, the filly and her mother had transfixed him. The look of utter hate in the mother’s eyes had reminded Kraber of… Well, himself. And so had the look of fear and pity in the filly’s eyes.

They’re not so different, Kraber thought. And then, unbidden: They’d hate me for it. I know it.

Wouldn’t Kate, Peter, and Anka want him to avenge them? Still… at least he wasn’t-

-inflicting the same kak that he’d suffered through?

NO!

His stomach suddenly lurched at the memory, and he leaned over the side of the canoe, breathing heavily.

“Oh, Viktor”, sighed the dead newfoal. ”Where’d you go so wrong?”

This time, it had spoken in Kate’s voice.

Kraber had, of course, also spent some time fishing. And so he took his boat on a detour, away from the weed-choked road to the middle of Defiance. There was a cabin, just off the lake, that he needed to visit.

‘I hate doing this,’ he thought. Except, perfectly honest, he didn’t. It was something of a duty, and someone had to shoulder the burden.

He anchored the boat just a few feet from the beach, at the docks he’d helped to build years earlier. He jumped out, and headed into the woods with a cooler full of fish.

Which way is it, again? he wondered, before cursing himself mentally for his forgetfulness. He stepped to the right, heading for a gap between two pine trees, when the flashlight radio he kept in his backpack suddenly flicked on.

“ There's a cold black sun
Burnin' way down low
Where the bird don't sing
And the wind don't blow...”

That way, then. Guess I made the right decision ~~for fokkin’ once~~

It almost - but not quite - kept him from realizing that there were no sounds in the woods around him. The underbrush had even grown, to the point that soon it’d be too difficult for him to head this way without hacking a path through the saplings. No herbivores had been this way in quite some time.

‘Why in the fok do we keep this around, anyway?’ Kraber thought to himself, as he walked towards the cabin he could just barely see through the overgrowth. The incessant song from his flashlight radio was his only companion.

He tried not to look at the trees on either side of him. Something felt… wrong. Different. As if there were things behind the trees, behind him, even. All around him.

Still, he kept walking, cooler of fish firmly in hand.

The cabin was forty feet away from him.

Wasn’t it?

Twenty feet.

And, after a few more seconds, maybe even a minute… Still twenty feet.

“Fokkin’ cut this kak out,” Kraber spat, revolver in hand. “Fokkin’ do it! Before I decide to make an excu-”

The current song skipped with a burst of static, and then, for a few seconds, it appeared to be an entirely different song.

“...why didn’t you save us, daddy? Parasites got in my brain, and now I think I’ve gone insane...”

‘...What. Is it tuning me kak?!’

Okay. That didn’t make sense. A radio couldn’t be deliberately toying with him. He’d heard the song before, but that lyric was… well, off the top of his head, it was ‘Scary terry,’ not ‘Save us, daddy.’ But he couldn’t shake the feeling that it was what he heard.

Was that Anka’s voice? he thought. Nooit. Couldn’t be.

He reached into his backpack for his flashlight radio, and found that it’d been switched on, its light illuminating his backpack.

Fokkin’ magic kak, Kraber thought, turning it off again.

And before he knew it, he was at the front door of the cabin.

He knocked, and a rather gaunt (not that Kraber was anyone to judge) woman opened the door. She’d kept herself in excellent shape, but there was something about her that looked unhealthy. It was difficult to place - something about the pallor of the skin? The blemishes along her jawline? The fact that just out of the corner of his eye, Kraber could see her eyes were bloodshot?

She was Beatrice Hatch. A friend of Rebecca Benning who’d dropped out of her upper-class upbringing back in the 2000s for one of the militia movements would, in almost a decade’s time, become the HLF.

“Hello,” Beatrice said. There wasn’t a quaver in her voice, there was only perfect certainty. That worried Kraber, somehow. “It’s you, ah…”

“Viktor,” Kraber says. “With a k.”

“Makes it sound cooler, doesn’t it?” Beatrice asked.

It was so strange for Kraber to imagine that she wasn’t much older than him. Only 32 - and he was 29.

“Something like that,” Kraber said, holding the cooler out to her and silently praying that it could just be over with. “Here. I brought this, and-”

“Oh, please! Come in, come in,” Beatrice said. “I insist. I’ll need some help putting it all in my fridge.”

To be completely honest with himself, Kraber didn’t want to. But it was that or leaving someone like Beatrice alone (Well, not really alone, but pretty much alone) in here. So Kraber decided to walk in, taking Beatrice’s outstretched hand.

Two things hit him immediately. The stench of the room, and the volume of the music on his flashlight radio shooting up like a rocket.

‘'Cause there ain't no world left, baby, under your feet… came the song over the radio.

“FOKKIN’ KAKHUISKRIEK-” Kraber yelled.

“Richard!” Beatrice said, taking on a scolding tone. “Richard, turn that shit down! Can’t you see we have a guest?”

There was a sound like hooves on floorboards. Probably because it was indeed hooves on floorboards - there was a newfoal with bruise-red-or-purple fur, trotting towards them with a blank expression on his face. It was perpendicular to the two of them, trotting out from a room just parallel to the kitchen.

It took an act of staggering willpower for Kraber not to shoot the FOKKIN’ ABOMINATION’ in the face RIGHT FOKKIN’ THERE AND NOW, LIKE HE DID ALL THE OTHER FOKKIN’ NEWFOALS, SPLATTERING THEM INTO A PASTE AND PAINTING THE-

“Is that any way to greet visitors?” Beatrice asked. “Richard, what do you have to say for yourself?”

The newfoal jerked its head - not his, IT’S FOKKIN’ - head towards the two of them, revealing three things: Firstly, it was a unicorn. Secondly, something was drastically wrong with its movement. It was jerking its head towards Kraber too fast, then imperceptibly slow, then at what Kraber could only guess was a normal speed. As its head pointed towards Kraber (Not at his eyes, just generally in his direction) he noticed it make a slight correction. Like a machine repositioning itself.

And thirdly, it revealed the speaker in its body. Just where a pony’s trachea would be. Beatrice, in a fit of… nobody could quite nail down what… had sewn it into the newfoal that had been her son Richard.

She’d said she could hear thin, reedy weeping from it. Though Kraber had never heard it.

It stared at him, slack-jawed, with sightless eyes.

“I… aweh,” Kraber said.

“There!” Beatrice said. “That’s better. Apologize to our guest, Richard.”

The newfoal remained still, making absolutely no perceptible motion. Kraber couldn’t even see it breathing.

‘Is this thing even alive?’ Kraber asked himself. Which was silly, as he’d plainly seen it walk out of what he assumed was a bedroom. But something about its stillness, about its silence, just made it impossible for him not to think so.

The newfoal twitched so slightly that Kraber couldn’t even say what muscles it was using.

“That’s a good boy, Richard!” Beatrice said, smiling. “That’s a very good boy.”

Countless thoughts about how Beatrice sounded like she was talking to a dog rushed through Kraber’s head. He tried - and failed - not to focus too much on them.

“I… have to chuck,” Kraber said. “Excuse me.”

“Viktor, you know I don’t speak Dutch!” Beatrice said, scolding him lightly. “Do you mean you have to throw up or leave?”

“...Ja,” Kraber said. “Here’s the fish-” he pushed the cooler over to her, uneasily. Then, a bit faster than necessary, he headed for the door.

“Goodbye, then!” Beatrice said, waving to him. “Thanks for the food. So few people are this kind!”

It wasn’t that Kraber was a fearful man. Far from it. Kraber’s default reaction to most things that scared or threatened him had usually been “punch it, stab it, shoot it, or burn it.” But there were a number of reasons that wouldn’t have worked here. Newfoals simply unsettled something in him, drove him closer to cracking, made him think of Kate, and Peter, and Anka, and no no no FOKKIN’ STOP-

“Are you sure?” Beatrice asked. “Richard’s been telling me about his plans lately. He says he’s going to spend some time in Portland, and Burlington, then move up to Montreal for the grand finale!”

Fokkin’ bosbefok woman, Kraber thought.
‘Not that you can judge,’ he thought.

“Aweh,” Kraber said. “I’m sure he has. Enjoy the fish, ja?”

“We certainly will!” Beatrice said, waving to him.

Kraber tried and failed to keep an expression of disgust off his face as he walked towards the door. Anything to get away from that fokkin’ madwoman.

Someone had to be nice to Beatrice. Someone had to make food deliveries, because Benning and, grudgingly, Lovikov - the main reason the camp hadn’t shot either of them - were often too busy to do it personally. Lovikov would find most any excuse to get out of doing it, as would anyone else who was assigned the duty.

Nobody wanted this constant reminder of what could happen to them, what’d happened to their loved ones, and what the Solar Empire would happily do to all of them. More than a few wanted to kill the newfoal that’d been her son Richard, and some of them wanted to just shoot Beatrice and be done with it.

Surprisingly, Kraber didn’t quite count as part of that group. He’d known Beatrice, back during the early days when he came to America, and Solar Empire zeps and potioneers had tried bombing the East Coast. He’d known her son, too. Good kid, before he’d gotten hit with watered-down defective potion made by some Solar Empire commander with the characteristic quantity-over-quality mindset.

She wasn’t much different from him. She deserved more than exile, or shooting the one thing that kept her at least relatively tractable. And Benning had threatened to leave Lovikov or start her own unit if Beatrice didn’t get treated well. Surprising all three of them, Kraber had sided with Benning.

She was a lot like him, really.

Too much so.

Is this what I could’ve been? Kraber thought, trudging out the doorframe. Wait, is this what I a-

Kraber’s flashlight radio clicked on again.

Fokdammit!

‘Where is my me. It’s been taken,’ sounded the radio. It was so distorted that it was nigh on impossible for Kraber to guess what the gender of the speaker was. ‘Dajte mi ma späť! VRÁŤ TO! Rydyn ni i gyd yn sgrechian yma! Laat ons uit! Laat ons sterf, jou siek fokken kontgesigs! Jag kan inte sova HJALP MIG’

A pause. A sigh.

‘Ingen lyssnar, är de?’

The radio warbled, and another voice - or maybe the same voice, with different distortions? - sounded. Then:

‘No. No they're not. They're not, they're not, nobody's coming, NOBODY'S FUCKING COMING-’

Different distortions. The same voice, but not sounding the same:

‘Не будь таким завзятим. Nogen kommer. Nogen vil afslutte dette. Nogen har to.

‘The same fokkin’ broadcasts we heard on the radio yesterday morning,’ Kraber thought. He’d long since deduced that the broadcasts were made up of multiple languages, though he freely admitted he didn’t understand all of it. While he spoke at least thirteen languages - Hindi, Hebrew, Afrikaans, Dutch, Portuguese, German, English, Polish, Turkish, some some Swahili, Yiddish, some Russian, some Spanish, and some Japanese thanks to his knowledge of Turkish, there was still a lot of the broadcast that went over his head.

The one bit of Afrikaans he’d heard made him shiver, though:

‘Laat ons uit! Laat ons sterf, jou siek fokken kontgesigs!’

Or in his native language:

“Let us die! Let us die, you sick fokkin’ kontgesigs!”

Part of Kraber wanted to brush it off and head back through these FOKKIN’ WOODS back to Defiance. The other part of him had his suspicions about just what this was. So, a scowl fixed on his face, he reached into his backpack to turn the flashlight radio off.

As soon as the switch clicked to the off position, noise burst from the radio. Well fok.

“Budou tě bolet! Bude vám to všechno ublížit! Peggio di quanto tu sia mai stato ferito prima! Und du wirst hier mit uns stecken, im Loch, tief im Loch, für immer und immer, wie sie uns mit diesen zahlen und machen uns zum schreien! Yardım et, bizi öldür, lütfen, bir şey, sadece bu acıyı durdur … kuacha kabla ya kukufanya ujiunga na sisi hapa shimo, kabla ya kuchelewa!

“Fok fok fok PIECE OF KAK SHIT C-!” Kraber cursed, ripping the batteries out of the flashlight.

“ARRÊTE ÇA! ARRÊTE ÇA! ARRÊTE ÇA!”

Despite Kraber’s head for languages, he’d never had an easy time with French. Spanish was easier for him. Whoever was on the other end, they were screaming “MAKE IT STOP!”

Somewhere, distantly inside, he was thinking something along the lines of ‘Well that didn’t work’ as the broadcast simply kept going while he rushed for the road to Defiance.

The road was just ahead. Somewhere, Kraber was distantly aware that he was sprinting.

Just before he hit the road, he heard a voice:

“Daddy? Where are you g-?”

The radio cut out immediately by the time he was on the side of the road.

What the shit was THAT?! he thought. That was… that was Anka’s voice. His daughter’s voice.

Impossible. Fokkin’ impossible.

And yet, that sure sounded like her…

“Aweh,” Kraber said, trying not to shake. “I’m just going to head back to camp and pretend that never happened.”

He trudged north, along the neglected, weed-choked road.

“They better have a fokkin’ drink for me up there,” Kraber grumbled, looking at the forest all around him.

Once upon a time, just after the Europe Exodus, Gregor Helmetag, former commander of the Menschabwehrfraktion, had led his HLF here, to rural New Hampshire.

They’d been looking for a place away from ponies. A place they could call their own. And to their surprise, the people of Wentworth Location had opened their arms to Helmetag. In the wake of the catastrophic PER attacks of the Purple Winter of 2020, and the chaos of the year of First Expansion, the offer had been simple: A cut of the food they produced, along with some shelter, in return for protection from PER.

Helmetag had kept his promise, turning the area into a sanctuary for anyone who wanted to make a life away from the horsefuckers, turning the rural scattering of farms and outbuildings into a small town. While there was some permanent settlement, the bulk of it was made up of prefabs and shipping containers that could be easily disassembled and loaded onto vehicles in the event of Barrierfall.

Not that Kraber could see it with the security ahead. A large wall - made up of trees and other assorted junk - surrounded their farmland, cutting through the often-unused road. Walls surrounded the farmland and nearby town, and guard towers reached up above the tree canopy. Kraber himself had helped lay the traps and landmines in the surrounding forest.

He nodded to one of the women in a nearby guard tower - a dark-skinned woman by the name of Thompson. She nodded back, her M1 carbine resting on a sling over her shoulder.

“How was Lake Patrol?” she called down. Then, sympathetically: “I know you needed it!”

Kraber was silent for a moment. “It was alright!” he called back, responding almost robotically. Without a doubt, it was not fokkin’ alright - something had just tormented him over the radio. But she didn’t need to know that.

“Glad it helped!” Thompson yelled, as Kraber headed down into the place they called home.

At first he was greeted with pastures. Cows, goats, pigs, and other animals trotted over the fields on either side of the road, and he could see HLF with cattle dogs sitting in the fields almost contentedly. Some of them, he knew for a fact, had been from the hearts of the biggest cities in Europe - before the Barrier had atomized them, of course.

One dog - it looked like a border collie mix - ran up to Kraber. It laid its paws on the old wooden fence beside the road, barking at him. A farmhand in an almost hilariously cowboy-like getup ran along behind the dog.

Kraber ruffled the fur on its head. “Braver hund, Joca,” he said, scratching it. It panted contentedly, its tongue lolling out. “Who ist good hond, ja, ja…”

“Bon Dia,” said the man walking up to Kraber. And as always, the Portuguese coming out of the man’s mouth sounded incredibly incongruous.

Kraber knew from experience that the man’s cowboy costume was something of a running joke - when he’d picked up the revolver, his first weapon when he’d joined the HLF, people had joked that he was a cowboy. He’d wholeheartedly embraced it when he got to America, taking to farm work like he’d been born to it.

“Goeie middag, Da Costa,” Kraber responded, shaking the man’s hand. “How jou doing?”

“Not bad at all,” Joao Miguel - or Jomi, for short - Da Costa said in portuguese. “Any idea where Gunderson is?”

“Vreemd,” Kraber said, stroking his unruly beard. “I was about to ask you that same question.”

“He and his wife made the best tortiere,” Da Costa said, well on the verge of salivating. “Y’know, I heard from Gimp-leg Garrett that he was on some kinda secret mission.”

He whispered those last four - five, in Da Costa’s accent - syllables conspiratorially.

“Something so secret even I didn’t know about it?” Kraber asked. “Sounds unlikely. Lovikov’s-”

Something skipped in Kraber before he said the next two syllables:

“My friend. Why wouldn’t he tell me this?”

“Just telling you what I heard,” Da Costa said. “Besides, everyone knows you love a good story. Maybe…”

“Maybe I’m not the right person to talk about it,” Kraber said, and sighed. “Sure. Maybe I’ll ask Lovikov about it when I go in camp to-”

Though nobody would peg Kraber as a master of reading emotions, it was hard for him to miss the sudden start that Da Costa had when he mentioned meeting Lovikov in person.

“Might not be a good idea,” Da Costa said. “Word is, Lovikov’s not in a… mood.”

“Is he ever not in a mood?” Kraber asked, the words spilling out of his mouth before he could stop himself. He was still scratching the dog’s head, and it was still panting contentedly.

“Eu nao sei,” Da Costa said. “Talked to Benning awhile ago. Says sometimes he’s almost elated, then he flicks back to rage a few seconds later.”

‘That can’t be good,’ Kraber thought, before trying to bury that. ‘No. He is my china, he fights the good fight...’

“Benning also said he wants to see you,” Da Costa added. “Some big briefing planned.”

Whatever showed on Kraber’s face, Da Costa must not have liked what he saw. A look of concern and confusion flashed on the Portuguese man’s face.

“Isn’t he your friend?” Da Costa asked. “I thought you were practically joined at the hip. Don’t tell me you’re going like those Helmetag loyalists and those caralhos who want us to employ ponies in the fields.”

“I’m not,” Kraber said. “I just…” His mind raced, as he tried to encapsulate the vague feeling of discomfort he had towards Lovikov in a sentence. Kraber loved the work he did in the HLF, loved bringing the fight to the PER and those misanthropic bastards that’d thought all humanity deserved to die or be lobotomized to the point they were barely individuals. He loved the violence. He loved little moments like these when he could just talk to friends.

And yet, even with the things he’d done, even with all these beliefs, something didn’t quite feel right.

“Wait,” Kraber said, derailing that train of thought. “People here want us to employ…”

“Crazy, right?” Da Costa asked. “We’re the HLF! That sort of thing is exactly why we came here. But… well… There’s one thing - the farmers say that anywhere with ponies is outproducing them. They don't want pony crops near them, but there's people - Helmetag and Spader loyalists - who say the extra food might not be so bad.”

“Fok that!” Kraber roared, suddenly. “Fok those perdnaaiers, and fok selling ourselves out like that.”

Da Costa looked surprised for a second. Then: “that's what I keep saying. But… they have their points.”

“Like fokkin’ what?” Kraber asked.

Da Costa looked to Kraber uncomfortably. Shifting from foot to foot. “Kraber,” he said, “you'd better go see Lovikov.”

Kraber sighed. “Suppose I should pull through. Good talking to you, Da Costa.”

“Yeah,” Da Costa said. “Sure.”

Dayoung

Dayoung Tengku sat with Megan, just under a tarp that’d been unfurled off the side of an old green bus.

They leaned back in old, cracked plastic chairs, next to a bubbling, simmering pot of stew. The Ukrainian man named Lovikov who led this HLF unit - the Menschabwehrfraktion - stood nearby. He wasn’t alone - numerous others were camped out near this bus. A woman by the name of Blanchett with a burn on her face. A tall black man named Hakim Jones. A big, brown-bearded man by the name of Eugene Sullivan (though everyone called him ‘Sully’) with a trucker-hat and a passing resemblance to a bear, and a stocky build that didn’t seem to be entirely fat or muscle. All of which Megan remembered from the PER attack on her hometown, but there was someone new - a tall, smirking Irishman by the name of Andrew Murphy.

But Lovikov dominated the scene.

The first thought Dayoung had when she saw Lovikov was: “My God, he’s huge.”

He was well over six and a half feet tall, with broad shoulders, and bulging muscles kept under a drysuit - which, in turn, lay under a set of bulletproof armor that looked almost like it could stop an antivehicle round. If he was sweating in the summer heat, he didn’t show it. A gas mask hung lazily over one shoulder, and his face…

The first word that came to Dayoung’s mind was “pulled.” Lovikov had prominent cheekbones, short, trim gray-streaked beard that seemed to have retreated to the edges of his face, and a receding hairline far back enough to blur the line between “Well-defined widow’s peak” and “balding.” His eyes felt… sunken, somehow. She almost had a hard time telling what color they were.

A pot of stew bubbled and simmered nearby, and Dayoung sniffed it expectantly. “What is it?” she asked.

“Ah, you know. Bit of this, bit of that. How are you settling in?” Lovikov asked.

“...Decently?” Megan said, uneasy.

“Glad to hear it,” Lovikov said, serving up large bowls to Megan - then to Dayoung. “You know, I’m glad we have some new blood here.”

Megan flinched slightly.

“...I don’t know what you were thinking, but it’s not that,” Lovikov said. “Since Spader’s death, the HLF haven’t been doing too well. You remember that, right?” he asked.

Of course Dayoung remembered. Back in 2019 - in the 6-month outbreak of human-on-pony violence that’d become known as the Purple Winter - an ex-SAS soldier from Britain had come out of nowhere to unify bands of anti-pony militias into a cohesive fighting force. “For the good of humanity,” he’d said. He’d taken people divided by politics, culture, and language, and convinced them all to fight together in his new army - the HLF.

The ones who hadn’t joined up had either died, folded themselves into bigger groups, or become bandits - scum and scavengers who raided and stole to survive. During the Europe Exodus, Spader’s European “HLF” had helped evacuate people that the UN or PHL simply wouldn’t have been able to get to in time.

And then Spader died.

His body was found in a river, lodged between two rocks, burnt beyond recognition, the convoy he was with wiped out. It was in such poor condition that it wasn't even clear if he'd died human or was in the early stages of grotesquery.

“Yeah,” she said. “Damn shame, too. He… he was a good man.”

“Da,” Lovikov said, “So, with his death, well… we’ve been at war.”

“Well, obviousl-” Megan muttered.

Lovikov’s eyes stared at her.

For a moment, Dayoung could feel rage emanating from the Ukrainian man. Something that could almost be doubt wormed its way through her, for a fraction of a fraction of a second. But it passed.

“Not just with the PHL,” Lovikov said. “With ourselves. With elements in other units - Yarrow’s Reavers, his pet little tinkerer Romero from Ex Astris Victoria - and even this camp. Hidden little horsefuckers who think that because Spader’s gone, we can be buddy-buddy-”

(The American idiom sounded weird in Lovikov’s thick Ukrainian accent)

“-with the gluesticks. Make no mistake, the HLF is in dire straits.”

Megan looked to Dayoung uncertainly. “Then why did we…”

“Because the PHL didn’t care,” Dayoung cut in. “When we wanted help. Armed guards. They just sent us ponies and a few screw-ups with guns. The HLF, on the other hand does care.”

“You,” Lovikov said, gesticulating towards Dayoung with a ladle, “You get it. They left so many of us to die, too! And where were they during the Purple Winter?! Trying to talk nice when my friends, my family were dying or being ponified before my eyes?! Giving safehouses to any pony off the street? You remember that PHL loshadinoye der'mo Fiddlesticks? The one who was at the Alaska Incident, getting medals from Lyra just last year? She was PER! And the PHL treat it like that never happened!”

“That’s right!” Megan yelled, and Dayoung looked to her friend, surprised. Megan had never made outbursts like that. “I hear about that all the time - even went to one of her ‘benefit concerts’.”

“Exactly. That’s the kind of thing we’re up against - people who look at ponies, look at all the derr’mo they’ve done, and say it’s all fine,” Lovikov said.

“It damn well isn’t!” Dayoung said. “I lost so many friends during the Purple Winter. I watched ponies trample all over us with no consequence.”

“How refreshing it is to meet outsiders who finally understand. It’s a nice change of pace to have someone come up and join the real heroes of this war,” Lovikov said. “Welcome aboard.”

There was an odd silence as the three of them sat out on Lovikov’s improvised porch.

“So,” Dayoung said, somewhat confused as she kept sipping from Lovikov’s stew. It tasted somewhat fishy. “What are the plans?”

Lovikov sat down and considered that.

“I’ve a few ideas,” he said. “One - but it’s too unrealistic. We probably won’t be able to try it. But there’s another one-”

“You mean Operation DOG,” Murphy said, chortling slightly.

“Andrew,” Lovikov said, “I have told you repeatedly not to use that name.”

“What’s Operation DOG?” Megan asked, confused.

“You know. Operation Delusions Of Grandeur.”

And there was that rage in Lovikov again as Murphy said it. Dayoung could see it as clear as day. He looked like he was only an inch away from violent, screaming rage.

‘Maybe,’ Dayoung thought, ‘this wasn’t such a good idea.’

He glanced through the assortment of mobile homes, trailers, buses, and shipping containers that made up Defiance.

“Which I will explain when Kraber gets here for the briefing.”

Kraber

On the way to the bus that Lovikov called home, Kraber passed a gaggle of children, wearing rags and holding looted, near-destroyed toys, all of them armed, wearing kalashnikovs, bullpups, and SMGs.

Kraber idly wondered how many of those kids knew or could remember anything before the War. He understood the need for child soldiers, yes, but he always felt uneasy at the sight of it. None of them, he thought, desperately trying not to convince himself that Peter and Anka might still be alive-

dead they’re dead you killed them you kontgesig you horrible father you kiddie rapist

-would be able to live a normal life after all this. If any of them could go back. If there would be anything left at the end of it all. A kid… deserved a chance to be a kid. These children wouldn’t have that.

He overheard one talking in… Turkish? Thanks to Burakgazi, his lover from way back when, Kraber’s turkish was passable, so he could understand yet another rendition of the story of Old Skinner, some lone HLF man who’d allegedly accomplished feats that were downright impossible.

“They say he took potion to the face and lived - ordered someone to cut off half his cheek with a knife. They say he once took a PHL outpost by himself. They say he wears a coat of pony leather, the cutie marks all facing outwards… and I know a friend, right? Says he saw him...”

More mutterings.

“I heard he can command any HLF brigade he sees fit...”

“...blew those bastards away with his own power; turned them to mush.”

“Lit up the entire area like a flashbang.”

Oh right, apparently Old Skinner was not only real but had long since stepped up his game. Kraber himself still had memories of the first time back when he saw a site of unbridled carnage and someone claimed that it was Old Skinner’s work.

It was a small settlement in the Pacific Northwest that - based on who you asked - was either a joint settlement of independent humans and equines that just wanted to be left alone, or a PER/Imperial camp. Either way, when they got to it, everyone got to see the aftermath…

The area, according to their intel, was just some wilderness fashioned into a small town that used tents, camper vehicles, and RVs, rather like Defiance in its early days. The HLF had hoped to get some material out of it and possibly some prisoners and intel. Maybe even info on the EHS, God willing.

‘Not that time.’ Kraber thought silently in reflection.

When the HLF reached the area, they ground was twisted and warped like it’d been shattered, melted, burned, and then awkwardly put back together. Jagged spears stuck out of the ground, impaling some poor ponies and humans, but they’d probably gotten off lucky compared to the other inhabitants. Said inhabitants were…

Well. Here and there. Debris from the camp was everywhere, mixed in with massive red stains. Any vehicles that were there were practically useless - tires blown to pieces and the driver’s side of one was mangled into a mess. The only other thing that Kraber remembered were these spots of violet that were burnt into the ground - some of them were almost like footsteps.

The bodies that weren’t blown to pieces or ‘missing’ had been torn apart. Unicorns, ravaged and misshapen - their horns shattered or broken; Pegasi, wings either torn off or brutalized; Earth ponies, torn to pieces as if they were made of cheap paper or foam. It was after finding that one with welts for a face - couldn’t be determined it was a man or woman - that he heard someone say that this must have been the work of Old Skinner; only way that made sense, was the claim.

“I say we get rid of Kraber’s gun,” said one African man, a newcomer from one of the cities on the Gold Coast, before realizing, rather abruptly, that Kraber could understand him.

“It’s PHL. It’s magic,” he continued defensively, struggling to meet Kraber’s gaze. “We can’t trust it.”

“You fokking want it then?” Kraber asked, raising the LMG, pointing it in his direction, eyebrows narrowed. “Go ahead. Take it, kontgesig. Fokkin’ dare you.”

The man held up his hands, backing away slowly, and then running off into the distance.

“Yeah, that’s what I fokking thought,” Kraber said. Fokking vultures.... couldn’t see a good thing if it cock-slapped them in the face.

(And Kraber does, in fact, later realize the hypocrisy, the absurdity of this sentence as he tells you this story, groaning.)

“Besides, Romero can trust magic,” said an HLF woman who had been standing next to the African man. She sounded Irish. “And if an HLF man ca-”

Kraber stared daggers at that woman. “Romero. Is. Fokkin’. Not. One of us. Not for what he does. That varknaaier works with ponies, he’s sold himself out to Yarrow...”

He glared at the woman.

“Unless,” Kraber continued, “You’re saying that’s admirable…”

Which made the second person that Kraber had intimidated into running away from him that day.

‘Heh, I love watching ‘em squirm like that,’ Kraber thought. ‘Always a fokkin’ treat.’

“So,” said one American who Kraber had seen working on the farms with Da Costa. He’d probably never seen the Barrier.

“I’ve been talking to Farnowitz. He’s out in the woods by Colebrook. Says he saw four ponies up there in Colebrook, sharing a room in some B&B, with two humans…” the American said.

‘Farnowitz… Farnowitz… who’s…’ Kraber struggled to jog his memory.

He remembered a twitching, nervous man with green eyes, a huge widows peak, and stringy blond hair. The two of them occasionally met whenever Kraber was at a drop-point near Colebrook, to trade supplies with individuals sympathetic to the Cause. Farnowitz was one of those sympathisers: he was nice enough, and he knew guns, but… being honest, he was something of a moegoe. Not enough of a believer to join them in Defiance, too set in his ways to leave his hometown, not good for espionage.

Die man is te flou, Kraber thought. Still, HLF life wasn’t for everyone.

“Disgusting, I bet they were fucking each other last night,” said another American.

“Wouldn’t surprise me,” the first guy said. “We probably just missed them at one of the checkpoints!”

For emphasis, he slapped himself on the forehead.

“Farnowitz remember the humans with them?” the second man asked.

“He said… a woman with hair dyed about five colors, and a short man with a pompadour, an assault rifle, and a revolver. The ponies, though… one of the mares had a telescope mark, another had a mark that looked like ballet shoes. ”

Kraber froze, ever so slightly, feeling conflicted.

’The filly and the mare from last night.’

Did he feel glad they were alright? Angry that they’d lived?

“So these guys were PHL?” the second man asked. “God DAMMIT! How’d we let something like that slip through their territory? We literally made a checkpoint just for that! One with Kraber and Lovikov, no less!”

‘PHL,’ Kraber thought. I… I let PHL survive.

The horsefuckers. Thousands of obscenities directed at them, for merely collaborating with the monsters that had killed his family, rushed through his head.

’At least nobody’s going to get ponified, anyway…’, he told himself. At least he could tell himself that.

Well. He couldn’t tell Lovikov that.

He was still thinking about that when he got to Lovikov’s bus.

The two girls they rescued sat outside, sipping from Lovikov’s fish chowder. Which, it had to be said, smelled extra nice today.

“Viktor!” Lovikov said, a smile on his face as he waved to Kraber. “Glad you could finally make it!”

Is that condescension I hear? Kraber wondered. “So,” he asked, “What…”

DAYOUNG

“...do you want me to do?” Kraber finished.

‘I can’t believe I’m standing in front of Viktor Kraber, Dayoung thought, awed.

The man was a legend. He’d lost his family to Pinkie Pie herself just before the Purple Winter and embarked on a campaign of destruction across Eastern Europe and eventually Turkey, destroying every Bureau in his path and murdering anything that even reminded him of ponies.

And some that probably hadn’t - there were stories of him fighting government forces, too. Even stories of fighting the PHL, before Spader put a stop to that.

“It’s easy,” Lovikov said. “I just need you… to show our new recruits. Who we are.”

“Am I a fokkin’ tour guide?” Kraber asked sarcastically.

Lovikov slapped Kraber on the back. “Nyet, nothing like that. I just figure that - with how you welcomed them in - you might appreciate showing them the ropes. Just after…”

Lovikov produced a sheet of papers from nowhere observable.

“This briefing.”

Lovikov walked to a tree, tugging on a cord. A strip of the material for projector screens spilled out, and Lovikov brought out an ancient, stolen projector. They’d looted it from a school during the Europe Exodus.

“Tomorrow,” Lovikov said, “We’re going to Portland.”

He clicked the slide. What looked like a stock photo of Portland flashed onscreen, and Kraber looked the city over. If you could call it that. It was very small compared to most cities he’d seen, built around a hill. No tall buildings to speak of, either.

“Tomorrow, a PHL mobile rig known as the Sorghum is going to be moving towards Portland for repairs,” Lovikov said. “We’re going to take it.”

The HLF all around Kraber erupted in shock.

“Are you crazy, Leonid?!” Helen Blanchett yelled. “Stealing from the PHL?!”

“We’re not going to steal it, obviously,” Lovikov said. “Not permanently. But: The PHL won’t take kindly to it being gone. We’re going to use that as leverage. They get the rig and all its personnel back, then in return… we get Carter back in the saddle again.”

Jones snickered slightly. “Heh. You said back in the saddle.”

“Okay, how the hell can you laugh at it like that, Hakim?” Helen asked. “This is… look, we’ve had some skirmishes with PHL before, but… nothing like what this’d be!”

“Well,” Jones said, “Excuse me for finding a way to cope with it! But.... this is just insane!”

“But it’d get us Carter back,” Sullivan added. “Not sure I like it, but… we need him.”

“This ou,” Kraber said, pointing to Sullivan, “Has the right idea.”

As Kraber said this, he thought over the plan. He thought of how obsessively fokkin’ superior the PHL acted. He thought of how they acted like the kindest, most oh-so-fokkin’ moral side of the war, despite the fact that they were as dirty as anyone else. He thought of how they’d left people to die, how the kontgesigs shamelessly worked with ponies, the fokkin’ gluesticks that’d been responsible for all this. The perdnaaiers who preached tolerance the same way the Solar Empire did and acted like nothing was ever the fault of their pony friends, when every day there was another house destroyed by the Barrier.

Kraber had never quite understood intolerance amongst other humans, but if according to the PHL it made him a bad person to hate ponies, then so fokkin’ be it. The common targets of human racism had never come close to destroying the world - ponies had.

‘What they’ve done,’ Kraber thought, They deserve to fokkin’ suffer.’

“I’m fokkin’ well in this,” Kraber said, a smile on his face. “Gives us an excuse to bliksem more of the hoenderpoes.”

“Great,” said Helen, “The goddamn madman thinks this is a good idea! I’m sure that’s a ringing goddamn endorsem-”

“Don’t. Fokkin’. INSULT ME!” Kraber yelled, and he saw red. Rage seethed in Kraber, and he reached to his hip for a knife, for a revolver...

Only for Benning to reach for a revolver of her own. Her .357 was a millimeter from the holster when Kraber stopped. Benning was incredible on the draw with that thing.

“I’ll admit,” Benning said, as if her hand wasn’t on her revolver, “It’s not the smartest plan, but we need Carter back. Without him, who’s going to keep real HLF fighting against the Solar Empire’s monsters?”

Lovikov continued on, unconcerned. “And there’s one more thing. One more reason why this plan is worth considering. We get Carter back, Galt finally isn’t the head bandersa for our side of the Split.”

“Aw, FOK YEAH!” Kraber crowed.

Everyone in the room looked at each other, relieved.

“I take back what I said,” Blanchett said. “I’m in.”

“Screw it, anything’s worth getting that asshole out of the picture,” Jones said.

“Oh, praise the Lord, we’ll finally be free,” Benning said.

Lovikov smiled, and the weight of years seemed to just slough off of him like mud in the shower. “Thought you’d all appreciate that.”

“Wait,” Megan said. The teenage girl had been quiet for awhile. “I mean, you’re all talking about… about what’s basically an act of war against the PHL. Can Galt really be that bad?”

“Yeah,” Dayoung said, “I mean, from what I heard about Galt, I’d think he was some big hero.”

“Well-” Lovikov started.

“Galt,” Kraber interrupted, “writes his own press releases with one hand.”

The floodgates opened, and Lovikov burst into laughter. At the same time, Dayoung snickered.

“Wait,” Megan said. “Writes them with…”

A bemused look crossed Helen’s burned face, just before she explained it to Megan.

Megan blushed, before breaking into a fit of laughter all her own. “Ha! Okay, I get it,” she said.

“...I’d be mad at you, Viktor,” Lovikov said. “If, one, that wasn’t hysterical, two, that wasn’t Galt in a nutshell. He’ as opposed to me as is possible. There are lines he’ll cross - depths he’ll sink to - that I won’t.”

December 22, 2022
Dancing Day

“And yet,” Astral Nectar says, “Lovikov said that.”

“To be honest, for all we say about him, that wasn’t wrong,” Aegis says. “There are lines Galt would cross that Lovikov wouldn’t. He was a loon, but a loon with… can I say principles?”

“Maybe ‘standards’?” Kraber suggests.

“Or ‘limits’?” Aegis ponders. “Doesn’t mean Lovikov wouldn’t take a piss over a line if need be.”

Kraber nods. “Aweh, Aegis. Exactly.”

He sighed.

“And, unfortunately, we’re going to be working with him for this,” Lovikov said.

“Oh, that is kak!” Kraber yelled. “BULLSHIT, LEONID! BULL FOKKIN’ SHIT!”

He wasn’t the only one who thought so. All around him, the other HLF - Sullivan, Jones, Murphy, Blanchett - were making similar exclamations, except they hadn’t been nearly as polite as Kraber.

As he heard them arguing, Kraber found himself puzzling over his HLF membership.

‘Is this really going to help anyone?’ he’d thought.

‘Of course it will, we’ll get Carter back!’

‘Is that for the best? I mean, considering what he did to those ponies when he got them out of that basement…’ Kraber thought.

‘Why in the fok do you care about ponies?! They’re the enemy! They’re monsters that’ll use you as raw material or lobotomized slave labor, all of them!’ Kraber argued back.

“I know how it sounds,” Lovikov said, “But at the very least, he agreed we needed Carter back. And with the men at his command, and the resources he can provide, it was just hard to pass up. Besides-”

Lovikov clicked a button. There was a whirring sound from the projector, and a scene of a street by a marina flashed onscreen.

The boats docked there looked... strange. Hammered together from scrap and wood, lined with tires. One was built on giant pontoons and a giant mass of gears jutting out from the back, another was an expanded houseboat with an array of what might have been solar panels but for their soft pink glow. There was even one that looked like it’d been a car at one point, a big heavy lorrie with a gas tank and a set of decks that’d been awkwardly welded or hammered onto it.

There were ponies trotting through the marina, too. A pegasus floating above a fishing boat, an earth pony in a tiny, pony-sized yellow raincoat.

“Is that a damn Coffin Ship?” Jones breathed, looking at the boat made from scrap.

“Da Costa and I came over on something like that,” said Murphy. “Not a day went by I thought it’d stay afloat.”

“He provided us with this tugboat,” Lovikov said, pointing to a large, forest-green tugboat sat by the dock, with multiple decks. The thing looked massive. “The Arctic Warrior. It has a hidden bottom so we can hold a damn sight more HLF and weaponry.”

Oddly enough, the relative normality of the Arctic Warrior almost made it stand out among the other strange craft.

“Wait,” Kraber said. “What’s… what’s with all the other boats? And…”

He looked to a lorrie, just driving through the middle of the photo. It had those same lightly glowing not-quite-solar-panels on the hood, a set of tubes feeding into the fuel port, and what looked like a boiler from a small steam engine in the lorrie’s bed.

“There’s a base of newtech, or magitech, or whatever you call it in Portland,” Lovikov said. “It’s filtering in from somewhere, and I don’t know where.”

“PHL?” Dayoung asked.

“Nooit,” Kraber said. “If it was there, they’d be selling it everywhere. Or at least somewhere more important.”

“I heard rumors that Romero could be there,” Jones said. “Think that could be it.”

“Seems likely enough,” Lovikov said. “But I don’t think he’ll stop us. For two reasons. One, that’d mean exposing himself - and he can’t afford that. Two, it’d mean him defending the horsefuckers. Can’t see why any HLF, even if they’re on the other side of the Split, would do that.”

“And we’re sure,” Murphy said, “That this’ll work?”

Dancing Day
Christmas 2022

You snort.

“I know, I know,” Kraber says, throwing up his hands.

“Positive,” Lovikov said. “In the event of Solar Empire attacks, the Sorghum comes equipped with a number of PHL weapons. Cannons, missiles, point defense - if we capture it, we’ve got a lot of big guns to point at Portland.”

“But… we won’t fire them, will we?” Megan asked.

Her voice sounded very small among the various grown men and women in front of Lovikov’s bus.

“Who let this rookie here?” Sullivan yelled.

“Lay off the stukkie, Sully,” Kraber said. “No need to talk like that to a kid.”

“Besides, she’s got a point,” Blanchett said. “The point of threatening someone with a big gun is making them think you’re going to use it. So what happens if push comes to shove and we-”

“So fokkin’ what?” Kraber interrupted. “Either we get our leader back, or we give all those fokkin’ perdnaaiers what they deserve. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a win either way.”

It sounded fokkin’ dof and he knew it, because he’d said it mostly to convince himself.

‘It’s ALL their fault? Even a mother and child being held at gunpoint in a car trunk? The War may have come with them, but that doesn’t make every last one of them responsible! Does Lyra sound like she was responsible for Kiev getting nuked, the Barrier, for ponification, the Crucible, the Biomass Vats, Hell’s Point, the Tbilisi Massacre, the Thaum Rot, to you? he thought.

“That’s certainly true,” Lovikov said. “Still, Lord knows I’d prefer to put Carter back in power. Are… are you feeling alright, Kraber?”

“Aweh, sure. Fokkin’ kwaai,” Kraber said.

“Dismissed, all of you,” Lovikov said. “Get some rest, all of you. We’ve got a long day tomorrow.”

His gaze lingered on Kraber, and for a moment Kraber almost felt a spike of panic.

Does he know?!

The thought raced through Kraber’s mind.

But, as everyone filtered out from the space between the bus and projector, Kraber pushed it aside.

‘It’s not worth worrying about,’ Kraber thought. ‘If I act worried, if I act like I have something to hide… then they’ll find it. For now, just keep calm.

Dayoung

“What the hell have you gotten me into, Dayoung?” Megan yelled.

“What do you mean?” Dayoung asked, confused.

“I mean, you took us away from our home!” Megan said. “Sure, we didn’t have much back there, but… it was what we knew! And now, we… we’re with a bunch of crazies in the woods!”

“They’re not crazy,” Dayoung protested. “They saved us! Our town!”

"And nearly killed Caramel Swirl, and Grapevine!” Megan hissed.

“Can you blame them?” Dayoung asked. “Look, even if they’re a credit to their race… we both know what they’ve brought with them. Even if the ponies were helping, well… I can’t fault them for what they did.”

Megan didn’t answer.

As they walked by, they saw Kraber moving towards a shipping container.

“Something doesn’t look right about him,” Megan said.

“What do you mean?” Dayoung asked. From what she’d seen of Kraber - who she’d been lead to believe was a great hero of the HLF - she hadn’t really been able to form her own impression of him.

“I mean,” Megan said, “Look… when we saw him back home, he was just overflowing with energy. Enjoying every moment of the fight.”

Dayoung frowned slightly. Something about the way Megan said those last six words felt off to her somehow.

“But now… well, if you told me he was drunk, I’d believe it,” Megan continued. “Look at him walking there. He’s…”

Dayoung squinted. He did look almost drunk. He was takings hort, plodding steps, and looked hunched over. He was swaying slightly.

“He just looks drained,” Megan said.

“Should we do something?” Dayoung asked.

Kraber

Kraber’s shipping container was a mess.

Granted, it always looked that way, but somehow it looked worse to him when he staggered inside. Bottles were scattered all over, under the unmade, dissheveled bed, in corners, in a cardboard box.

He’d spent all of last night practically turning the container upside down, looking for some beer, or even some spare drugs. He’d barely found anything

He collapsed on the bed, looking over their container.

His and Emil’s spare guns - a couple homemade Kalashnikovs he hadn’t used since Africa, one an 8mm semiauto-only and another in 7.62x39mm, a scoped bolt-action, an SMG made of pipe, a home-built harpoon gun, a beaten-up Ithaca 37 shotgun, a break-open grenade launcher, a homemade crossbow, and a Darra Pass autoshotgun based on a Kalashnikov, equipped with an underbarrel grenade launcher - leaned against the wall, kept in place by a homemade rack. There was also a weird-looking homemade .45 pistol with a strange-looking trigger guard. Kraber knew from experience he could press down on the trigger guard to rack the slide one-handed, cutting down on the reload time. Emil had liked the thing, but complained about how heavy the pull was.

Kraber knew from experience that Emil kept a homemade glockalike pistol - A “Schlock 37,” he called it - with a faux-polymer frame made of epoxy and resin - under his pillow.

‘So, all the fok-ups, and this is where I end up,’ he thought. ‘A dirty little shipping container in the gat end of nowhere.’

He lay on the bed, feeling utterly gone.

‘Fokdammit,’ Kraber thought. ‘You were the one that got me willing to sleep in a bed again after that time in Tunisia, Emil. And now? I’m here, alone.’

Before the war, when he felt this destroyed, there were a few things he could do. He could’ve gone and played Warframe, The Amazing Eternals, Wolfenstein, Titanfall, or Overwatch. But there wasn’t a game console in the container, and they didn’t have the power supply for both. All the consoles and TVs had been brought to the ‘rec center’ - a big, easily-disassembled prefab building that served as Defiance’s community hub.

In college, he could’ve called up some of his old friends - like Becker, or Strychnine Jones, or Jimmy “Polo” Polmont, Gray, Howie, Stretcher Burt, Corinne, Frank, Eva, Heather, Zanna, Miranda, Terry, Johnny C, or Zo. They could’ve gone out into the city, found a bar, and bashed some heads. They could’ve found a club.

When he was married, he could’ve just asked Kate for help, or gone to play with Peter and Anka, or call those old friends up - and no matter what time it was in America, they would’ve answered in a heartbeat.

But no, none of that.

‘I miss home,’ Kraber thought. ‘I miss Germany, I miss Garmisch-Partenkirchen, I miss Kagan… Fok, it’s a shorter list what I don’t miss.’

He turned on the bed, head bumping up against Emil’s pistol under the pillow…. And then the stuffed animals he kept. His old threadbare stuffed African Wild Dog with comically large ears, Anka’s stuffed wolf, and Peter’s stuffed horse with proportions that curiously reminded a pony of Equestria.

Some people had threatened to take it on that basis. Kraber had threatened to take their legs off and beat them to death with their own severed limbs. Seeing as it wouldn’t have been the first time he’d done that to someone who pissed him off, that shut them up.

‘Years of HLF membership,’ Kraber thought. ‘And this is what I have left. All I have to show for it.’

He sighed, and reached for a book.

What surprised far too many HLF members was that Kraber was, in fact, an educated man. So many people built him up as the ultimate psychopath, but… he was happy enough sitting in his tent, reading China Mieville, Irvine Welsh, Jeff Vandermeer, or Joseph Conrad.

‘With luck, that’ll make a good read.’

He would get a lot of weird reactions for that. Of course he read. Why wouldn’t he? At the moment, he was reading Railsea. He had meant to reread Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, but something about the notoriously grim tale of a journey up the River Congo had alienated and terrified him as a boy, and still did.

And so he found himself engaged in Railsea. It was a silly plot, (some part of him inwardly giggled at his usage of the pony word for ‘flank’) about a world spanned with an ocean of rails, but he couldn’t help but read. Heh… That Apt Ohm. That had been really hard to get the first time he read the book.

Not for the first time, passing mentions of steam locomotives in Mieville’s fictional port of Manihiki, he found himself wondering about evacuation time. About winter. While he’d likely be overcome with rage soon enough, he did there weren’t that many routes around here. And the Barrier would likely force everyone into chokepoints through areas such as… say, Crawford Notch.

Which meant traffic. Congested roads, busy highways turned into parking lots, full of people trying to get and outrun the Barrier. He’d seen it before.

So, that left trains, then. Maybe steam locomotives? He knew they were rebuilding some of the old lines up here to assist in the evac. If the Barrier hadn’t stopped by-

“How are you going to stop the Barrier?”

Kraber could almost hear Kate saying it.

No. Not almost. His head snapped towards an old, threadbare armchair in the corner of the container.

Kraber stared at this apparition. She couldn’t be there. Wasn’t there.

She was there. The same mutilated newfoal with the missing eyes and legs. Sitting contentedly in their stolen armchair.

“How are you going to stop the Barrier?” the mangled newfoal repeated, sitting in the bed next to the stuffed horse. He tried to ignore it.

‘...& abruptly, Sham Yes ap Soorap was right in the middle of that moment. Quickly bloodstained. So started the longest hardest night he had ever worked. From butchery car to mess & back, again & again, running the length of the train. With drinks, with food to keep the strength up…’ Kraber read. Already, he was imagining steam engines, like the old Atlantic Rail engine he remembered from his childhood. The one that went through the winelands. The train that was probably responsible for why he was so bloutrein so much of the time, ever since his dad let a very[/] underaged Viktor Kraber (and his sister, and brother) have a taste of red wine.

“Viktor? Stop distracting everyone with flashbacks. What can this mob do to stop the Barrier?” the newfoal asked. Its voice sounded like Kate’s.

‘Why in the fok am I thinking like this? I haven’t done anything different from what I usually do! A few gluesticks dead, giving the kontgesigs what they deserve…’ Kraber thought.

He didn’t feel like he’d convinced himself.

“Maybe that’s the problem.It’s that you’ve kept doing this, Vic,” the newfoal said. “Year after year. But the problem is-”

And for a moment, Kraber saw a skull shining out from under her skin. Then heard a high-pitched scream, and saw her contort, her back at an impossible angle. He heard wet, meaty cracking noises, and before he knew, Kate was lounging there, the rich curly black hair he’d loved to play with cascading over her shoulders. The coffee she’d always loved in one hand. The gold earrings she wore that Kraber had never been able to find.

It lasted a split second, and then the newfoal was back.

“We’re still newfoals, Vktor,” the Kate-newfoal said.

“You’re not the real Kate,” Kraber said, surprised at how lucid he sounded. “The soul hasn’t left her body, as far as I know.”

“Even if it hasn’t,” Kate said, “I’d be here for a reason, wouldn’t I? And this reason is...”

“It should’ve been me instead of the three of you, Kate,” Kraber said.

“That reason is,” Kate said, as if that hadn’t just happened, “Yours. Why are you in the HLF? There’s too many things here that don’t make sense.”

“For you,” Kraber said, surprised. “It’s for you. It’s to make them all pay!”

“Yeah, but I’m not here,” Kate said. “What would I want, if I was here? What would Peter want? What would Anka want?”

Kraber felt tears welling up in his eyes. “That’s…. She was wrong! I fokkin’ trusted her, and she trusted ponies! She trusted Pinkie Pie! And that’s…”

“You had better not be blaming your own daughter,” Kate said. “I do hope that’s not the kind of irresponsible person you’ve become again, V-”

There was a knock on the door. Within seconds, Kraber had trained his eyes on it - and he was holding the Darra Pass autoshotgun.

When he glanced back at the chair, Kate was gone.

The dead newfoal had vanished, and with it the voice of his wife. Not entirely ready to accept that he was losing his mind, he walked up to the door.

Had… had Kate asked him that? Somehow spoken to him. No, impossible - she was hundreds of miles and an entire universe away. Practically braindead!

But that didn’t mean that the possibility didn’t have merit. This was, after all, a world that now had magic in it...and her question nagged at him. There were too many questions he could ask himself about the HLF as it was that didn’t make sense.

He opened the door, and there he could see Lovikov smiling.

Ooooooh balls.

“Viktor!” Lovikov said, holding out a hand outstretched, like he was expecting a handshake. “Talking to yourself, were you? You know that they say those who talk to themselves. They keep poor company.”

December 2022

“PFFFFFT…. BAAAAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAA!” Kraber guffaws. “Haha…. Ha… oh… oh, man.”

“It’s not that funny,” says Aegis’ son, Rivet. He’s a few years older than you - but not old enough he’s hit a major growth spurt yet. Except he’s built like his freakishly huge dad, which means he’s frequently mistaken for a grown stallion.

“I’m with Aegis’ brother,” says Gray. “It’s not funny, Vic.”

Rivet raises an eyebrow. “Gray, I’m his son. We’ve been over this.”

“What’s this abou-” Kraber started.

And then the world went white. In one fluid motion, Lovikov stamped down on Kraber’s foot, and then he was behind the Afrikaner, grabbing his hand and twisting it behind his back.

“Jou bliksem!” Kraber hissed at the stab of pain in his shoulder, and moved to elbow Lovikov…

“That,” Lovikov said, pressing something cold and hard against Kraber’s throat, “Would be extraordinarily ill-advised.”

“WHAT THE FOK, LEONID?!” Kraber yelled, ignoring the pain in his foot and arm.

“You give answers quick, calmly,” Lovikov said, his Ukrainian accent shifting. Sounding more Russian. “And tell me WHY THE FUCK YOU DID IT, PETUKH!”

He jabbed the barrel of his pistol against Kraber’s ear.

“If I don’t get answer soon,” Lovikov said, “Then the rest Defiance learns you planned potion-bomb us. Learns that they were right about stuffed horse.”

Kraber sighed. “Seriously? Jou so petty that you’d bring that u - OW!”

Lovikov jammed the butt of his pistol against Kraber’s temple.

“There’s some concerns circulating amongst Command. Concerns that you might have certain… sympathies,” Lovikov said, calm again.

“Whatever the fok’s given them that idea?” Kraber asked, spitting on the ground. “What in the fok are you talking about?!”

“There’s been…mutterings, in Colebrook,” Lovikov said.

“What. The fok. Are you talking about,” Kraber said, enunciating every syllable..

“There’s more sympathetic eyes in Colebrook than just Farnowitz…” Lovikov said slowly, with forced calm. “We have ears too, and they tell us that some very interesting stories were being told in the Dancing Bear last night...”

The pistol’s barrel was shaking against Kraber’s ear. Kraber was idly wondering if it’d leave a scar against his ear.

“That woman you let through last night was PHL…” Lovikov said at last. There was no hint of question about it. “She had two ponies with her, and now they’ve hooked up with two more kickstands and a horsefucker.”

The Ukrainian licked his lips.

“You’re going to have to make up for that, Viktor...we all have our ‘wobbles’, but when one of our best and most celebrated players falls like you have…”

“What,” Kraber sneered. “Do you expect me to fokkin’ ‘do the honorable thing’ and shoot myself?”

“Never,” Lovikov said. “You’re a friend, right? So, in return for me not killing you... you owe me.”

“You can’t fokkin’ prove that I did it,” Kraber said.

“Oh, but I can,” Lovikov said. “I can prove that she was. I have photos, Viktor. And I can prove that she was driving that very. Same. Car.”

He drove the butt of his pistol into Kraber’s head, and Kraber’s skull throbbed.

‘He’s gonna give me a fokkin’ concussion,’ Kraber thought idly.

‘Oh, like a little brain injury would have any noticeable effect’ the Kate-newfoal said, standing nearby.

“And if I can prove that, well, it doesn’t matter what you have to say,” Lovikov said. “The rest of the camp will take my side no matter what.”

Lovikov spat on the ground.

“Consider most of your permissions revoked,” Lovikov said. “The guns you’ve hoarded? They’re mine, motherfucker. And maybe - just maybe - you go down, we don’t try to rescue you. We tell everyone you died heroically, so you give to the cause even after dead or ponified.“

Before Kraber’s eyes - as if to punctuate that sentence - two men walked out from the shipping container that Kraber and Emil had once shared, carrying the guns. Benning was standing nearby, a rather forlorn look on her face.

She looked regretful, strangely enough.

“THOSE ARE EMIL’S, JOU VARKNAAIERS!” Kraber yelled. “EMIL’S FOKKIN’ GU-”

Lovikov tapped his pistol’s grip against Kraber’s forehead. It wasn’t a hard hit - it was gentle, if anything. But Kraber flinched at the touch of the iron anyway.

Lovkov laughed like it was the funniest thing he’d ever seen. “Come on, where’s those balls you had? Flinching at that, you pussy?”

‘THEY’RE ALL I HAVE LEFT OF MY FRIEND, AND HE DOES THIS KAK TO ME?!’ Kraber thought. And, as Lovikov’s grip lessened, Kraber drove an elbow back into the Ukrainian man’s skull.

Lovikov stumbled back, and Kraber sprinted towards the two men carrying his and Emil’s guns.

One of them tried to load the 8mm Kalashnikov and fire at Kraber. He wasn’t fast enough. Kraber drove a boot into one man’s face.

The man staggered back and collapsed in an ungainly heap. Kraber twisted towards the other man, ready to throw a punch into his face-

“I really wouldn’t do that,” said the other man, pointing a sawed off double-barrel directly at Kraber’s groin.

Kraber backed away, slowly.

“Now,” Lovikov said, aiming his pistol towards Kraber’s head. “You can have these back. If you admit you’re a horsefucker, anyway.”

‘If you say that,’ the Kate-newfoal said, ‘He will kill you.’

‘Don’t need a hallucination to tell me that,’ Kraber thought. If he puts me through this, there’s no way to win. Admitting it, in front of all these people… I’m dead.

“Admit it! ADMIT IT, PETUKH!” Lovikov yelled.

“Like hell I will,” Kraber spat, looking Lovikov in the eyes. “I. Am. Not. A. Fokkin’. Perdnaaier.”

And all of a sudden, Lovikov laughed. He lowered the pistol, relaxed his pistol, and for a second nobody was truly sure how to react to this marvel of perfect what-the-actual-fok.

“What the fok are you trying to pull?!” Kraber yelled.

“I think,” Lovikov said, “that settles it. You wouldn’t go that far if you actually were one.”

‘He goes from 0 to shoot me in the face and back in seconds.’ Kraber thought, as he breathed a sigh of relief. ‘What the fok.

“Congratulations, Kraber,” Lovikov continued. “You’re not dead yet.”

“I thought jou were going to fokkin’ shoot me!” Kraber yelled.

“But,” Lovikov said, “I didn’t.”

Something told Kraber that it was best not to press Lovikov on that one. Because for a moment, Kraber was left thinking ‘He’s about to do it anyway, isn’t he? I just know it.’

“Right,” Lovikov said. “Benning, Williams, Gunderson? We’re done here.”

“But he-” Benning started.

One look from Lovikov silenced her - a terrifying, twisted, hate-filled visage that promised murder and destruction aplenty. Kraber was pretty familiar with that glare. Of course, ‘glare’ was like calling an avalanche a minor rockfall.

Gunderson and Williams stepped back, uncertain. And even Benning took a step back.

“Would you like me to-?!” Lovikov roared, his eyes bloodshot. He looked like he was about to kill someone, right then and there.

Benning stepped back, a look of fear on her face.but his tone changed midway through. She was glancing towards Lovikov’s pistol - and Kraber noticed that has trigger finger wasn’t on the guard.

‘Oh, shit.’

Kraber glanced at Lovikov, confused, and started backing towards his shipping container.

And then Lovikov’s face… shifted.

“Look,” Lovikov said. “Kraber’s a friend.”

Lovikov was still holding the pistol, with one finger above the trigger guard, and it was still lowered - but the barrel was still pointing towards Kraber.

“And friends deserve chances,” Lovikov said, as the four of them strolled off towards the main drag of Defiance, leaving the weaponry scattered in front of their h-

Wait a second.

Kraber walked over to the pile of guns, and pulled the 8mm Kalashnikov up. Emil had actually bought it for him when they were in Darra Pass. The mags were rare as hen’s teeth, to the point that most of them were made out of cheapshit metal that slipped out of his hand.

It’d been his favorite gun before he found the ‘2021.

Once he lifted it, he saw that some of Emil’s other belongings were there too. Photos he’d taken with Kraber. Old family photos of people Kraber remembered Emil discussing - a brother? A sister? An uncle? A stepfather? And his stuffed animals, including the Horse. His photos, too. Photos of Kate. Of Peter and Anka. Of his family. OF SOUTH FOKKIN’ AFRICA, OF HIS COLLEGE FRIENDS IN BOSTON, AND LOVIKOV JOU FOKKIN’ KONTGESIG-

“JOU SONOVABITCH!” Kraber screamed.

“Hmmm?” Lovikov asked.

“Leonid,” Benning said. “Don’t you think you might have-”

“WHAT THE FOK, LEONID?!” Kraber yelled. “You seriously fokkin’ took that, too?! The guns I can almost fokkin’ understand, but this?!”

Lovikov turned around, looking at Kraber. He had a odd, jaunty smile on his face - as if Kraber’s accusation hadn’t even registed.

“Remember, Viktor!” Lovikov added, “I’m only being this lenient cause I’m your friend.”

‘Yeah,’ Kraber thought. ‘A friend that humiliated me in front of people I liked. And steals our fokkin’ mementoes.’

Dejected, Kraber picked up his motley collection and slunk back to the shipping container. When he got in, he bonelessly collapsed onto the bed.

“Damn,” he said, looking over at the old stuffed animals he kept from back in Germany. He wasn’t sure if he was talking to them or not. “I have had a shitty day.”

2015
Somewhere in Boston

In his dreams, Viktor can smell the weed. He’s attending college in America, in Boston, before the war, before candy-colored equines from another universe proved to be the greatest threat to human existence. It's actually back in October.

Viktor had nearly lost a bet. One that would’ve had him dressing in a chicken costume. Which just would’ve been silly. But now, he’d ended up in an African Wild Dog costume. A fursuit in various shades of brown, tan, black, and white. The costume’s head obscured his face, but Becker - always the innovator - had made it so he could pull it up and down.

––You realize it’s still gonna look silly, Zanna had said. ––I mean, even if you win the bet, you still kinda lose.

––It’s a favorite animal, I’ll be fine, Kraber had said. ––Besides, Andy will love it.

Andy had not, in fact, loved it. In fact, so few things about Viktor turned out to be loved, that Viktor had shown up at a halloween party without his date.

“Didn’t work out with Andy?” asks an absolutely stunning black girl dressed as a zebra, in a white unitard decorated with black stripes. She has a mohawk, and neck rings made of some faux-gold material.

Viktor sighed. “Damn right it didn’t, Kate.”

He’s known Kate awhile. In his social circles, she’d been a bit of a fixture. She was there at Anime Boston, giggling at his cosplay of Sweet JP from Redline almost a year ago. He’d laughed at her jokes, she’d drawn him in to Milky Way and the Galaxy Girls, she... even showed him some of her comics. Spent time in the van heading across the States.

“What happened?” Kate asks. “You two just seemed so happy together! It’s just… it’s hard to imagine you breaking up.”

“Aweh,” Kraber says, and pushes the fursuit head up so Kate can see his face. “Well, Andy found out that Emma and I used to date.”

“...and?” Kate asks. “I mean, it’s not like anyone doesn’t know. Shit, even I know.”

“Well, it’s more like he didn’t like finding out that I still like women,” Viktor says.

Kate chokes. “Fu-kin what?!” And starts laughing. People are staring at her. At the way she moves when she laughs.

Then she stops abruptly. A look of what Viktor desperately hopes is not fear. But why shouldn’t it be? Everyone knows about his temper by now. And Viktor thinks: I think I like watching Kate laugh more than I like watching her terrified.

So, with what feels like half the room assuming he’s about to do something horrible, Viktor decides that the most rational thing to do is break into a fit of laughter of his own.

“Wha-” Kate starts.

“Gotta admit, it’s pretty funny,” Viktor says. “I mean, gay man brushes me off cause I still like women? What kinda crap is that?”

Kate looks at him, confused.

“Wait till he s-says what Andy did,” Becker says, stumbling over, his stutter made worse by the fact that he is very drunk. He’s dressed up in an old Mad Max cosplay from the last con they all went to back in the summer. “He says, he says that Kraber should be brave enough to admit he’s gay, and Vic says something about butts, and then Andy says Viktor’s sleeping with the enemy and probably cheating on him-”

“And Andy says I should pick a side,” Viktor adds. “So then I say…” he pauses. “PICK A SIDE?! WHAT THE FOK IS THIS SHIT, STAR WARS?!
Emma laughs hysterically, hanging upside down from a nearby staircase, dressed as Batgirl. Outside the costume, she couldn’t look any different from Kate - shorter, pale to the point that nobody can quite tell if she’s wearing white tights, with short dark hair that’s a different color every other week. “Oh, it was priceless.”

“How long have you been there?!” Kate yelps.

“Awhile,” Kraber adds. “...You were just sitting there so you could interrupt us upside down, weren’t you.”

“You know it!” Emma says, throwing Kraber a fistbump.

“But nobody got hurt this time, right?” Kate asks.

Viktor sighs. “Unfortunately, yes. So, that’s why I’m in Terry’s apartment for awhile. And why Andy ain’t here.”

“Sorry to hear that,” Kate says.

The two of them stand, a bit awkwardly, at the fringes of the party. Surrounded by friends.

“Sorry that happened,” Kate says.

“Eh, if he was willing to say that crap, there’s nothing to be sorry about,” Viktor says. “No great fokkin’ loss.”

They stand some more. Above them, Emma is thinking - and will tell Viktor as much, months later - ‘JUST SAY SOMETHING ALREADY! WHAT IS THIS, A FILLER EPISODE?!’

“I like your costume, by the way,” Viktor says.

‘Finally,’ Emma is thinking up above them.

“Really?” Kate asks. “Thanks! It was either that or one of those ‘sexy’ costumes and...” she looked down. “I hate those.”

“Yeah, me too,” Viktor agrees.

“You saying that just to agree?” Kate asks.

“Nah. They’re just… tasteless,” Viktor says, to Kate’s nodding. “I mean, ‘sexy baby?’ Who fokkin’ does that?!”

“That is so messed up,” Kate agrees. “Which is why I like yours! You’re owning that sparkledog costume.”

Part of Viktor wants to yell. But, to his surprise, he finds he still can’t be mad at her. He can’t be mad. It’s as if being next to this woman just makes him feel calmer. As if as long as he’s with her, everything can be alright. As much as any of his friends, maybe more.

“It’s an African Wild Dog, actually,” Viktor says. “Scary little buggers, but they just look too fokkin’ funny!”

He reaches into a backpack, pulls out a phone, and flips through a series of photos until Kate sees it.

“Wow, they do look silly,” Kate says. “Glad you went for this, looks so much better than my roomie’s selection of halloween costumes. ”

“...your roommate or the costume?” Viktor asks, barely hearing her over the music.

“...it depends on my mood,” Kate admits. “Andrea’s nice, but she’s just impossible sometimes.”

“My sympathies,” Viktor says, wincing. “Believe me, I know bad roommates. Which is why I don’t have one anymore!”

“Oh, she’s not-” Kate stops. “Wait. Didn’t you try to eat your last one?”

“He was high! You can’t prove it was my fault! My bed was full of his shit!” Viktor protests. “Like, actual feces! He stole my clothes! I was on PCP! There was temporary insanity! The illegal drugs weren’t mine! It was dark and we thought there was an intruder, especially after I lost my keys and had to climb in through the window! The American education culture is fundamentally broken to the point that he had a mental breakdown after getting a B minus, and I feared for my life! It wasn’t what it looked like! He had mescaline in his balls! It was self defense! There were, uh… The lawyer… fok! What did he...”

Kate looks at him, confused and alarmed. “What.”

“Eh, he was a dick anyway,” Emma says. Still upside down.

How is she doing that, anyway? Kraber thinks.

“...yes,” Viktor says, looking off to the side. “Man, Sheja Rutabiyiro. What a hoerkind. Ek hoop hy breek sy spier van plesier af in 'n goedkoop hoer en sterf van bloed verlies.”

“Oh, the fuckin’ worst!” Becker adds. “You heard the stories about him right?”

“Damn right I have,” Kate says. “I mean, he was an asshole, but… I just thought they couldn’t all be true.”

“Oh, they were,” Emma says.

“Daaaaamn,” Kate says, then she’s silent for a few seconds. “What did Viktor just say, anyway?”

“You don’t want to know what I just said,” Viktor says.

“You’ll have to teach me some Afrikaans sometime,” she says lightly. “It sounds like a beautiful language.”

“You’re right. It is beautiful,” Viktor admits.

It is at this moment that Emma starts stifling a laugh.

“Not as beautiful as you though.”

It just slips out, the cheesiest come-on possible, and Kate dissolves into laughter. His self-esteem crumbles with every second, until, through her breathless peals, she manages to speak the four most wonderful words possible.

“Did you mean that?”

And Viktor finds out that he does, and tells her so, a smile on his face. They get to talking, talking moves on to walking together, and suddenly the costume doesn’t feel so bad.

Suddenly the two of them are dancing, the woman dressed as the zebra and the man dressed in the… ugh, he can’t say this with a straight face…. chicken costume, which suddenly feels like his best outfit ever.

“Aha!” Kate says at one point, a smile on her face, “Got you liking it! Yellow is a good fit for a coward who murders ponies and can’t even realize whAt… he... Is...”

Wait, what the fok?!

“Kate… what did that have to do with…” his voice trails off.

And Viktor comes to the worst realisation possible.

‘Wait, shit, I’m dreaming. Ain’t I?’

And everything crumbles apart and falls to nothing.

Having sex in the back of Kate’s old car, the horrible realization afterwards that Viktor is 21… while Kate has only just turned 17. Nearly six months later, near Viktor’s birthday and premature, their children are born. Kind of sickly, both born with autism, but as parents, the two of them love their children. What decent parent wouldn’t? No potion from PER members, no ‘miracle treatments,’ no therapists for autism that just end up treating his kids like they’re retarded (Those kontgesigs! Kraber kicked one of them in the face, which made Peter giggle a little, and then he’d treated him to ice cream) can change that, and Kate and Viktor love them so much.

Kraber selfishly wishes that maybe he hadn’t talked to her, maybe he hadn’t lost the bet, maybe he hadn’t gone to Germany or that he’d stayed with Kate’s family. But he’d needed to go to Germany! His mother had gone full nepotism, earning him a residency in Garmisch Partenkirchen where he can ski, (He’s really grown to love the sport) where he has no shortage of patients during the winter, and things are good. That he’d been anywhere, anywhere at all except…

May 10
2019

Here.

It was the last days of the world as anyone knew it, and it was Innsbruck again, in Austria. The Purple Winter. The days and weeks where it turned hot.

The HLF had been fighting for anywhere from days to weeks to a month. Nobody could say when the first attack had been, the first outbreak of hostilities or whatever passed as the turning point. Most of them agreed that it’d “Gone hot” during the Whitechapel Massacre nearly three weeks ago, when a mass of disgrunted HLF and religious let’s-not-call-them-zealots called PKS, or Ponification Kills Souls, protested outside a Conversion Bureau in London. Nobody knew what’d happened next, only that the PER counterprotesters had started throwing Potion…

When the PKS and HTF rioters had been ponified and made the expected immediate about-face, the rioting had overtaken the entire neighborhood. Bureau security had opened fire into the massed crowd, completely uncaring about collateral damages. Cars had been flipped. Businesses had turned into fortresses or massive conflagrations.

But it hadn’t been the first attack. Far from it. Relations between humans, other Equestrians, and ponies had been steadily worsening. The FOKKIN’ MASS MURDER that’d happened to Kraber’s family and all his children had been but one incident in a cresting wave of ponifications and abuses.

And the HLF - newly formed from a hundred anti-ponification protest groups, the newly bereaved friends and family of the recently ponified, anarchists, and anyone with an axe to grind - had responded in kind.

In Innsbruck, cars are overturned and wrecked, storefronts are shattered, and the fires are raging. Kraber saw to that.

And yet, even as he thumbs the detonator, he and Kate are still in Becker’s old car, still making love, only for Viktor to suddenly realize Kate is a newfoal unicorn the color of maple leaves in fall. And as she continues to manically bounce on his thrusting crotch, she levitates a bottle of potion to him, her zebra costume discarded like a snake's skin. It is dripping blood, as if someone has meticulously skinned it from her.

He reaches for a knife and stabs her, ramming the blade down into her neck and barrel, into her eyes, anything to keep her from ponifying him. But on the tenth or eighteenth or thirtieth stab of the knife into her neck, she is suddenly human again. Blood is gushing from her neck. Viktor tries to stop the bleeding, applying pressure to the wound, but there's far too many cuts to stem, she's losing too much blood...

She looks up at him, pleading even as she looks betrayed.

“You killed me, Viktor,” Kate says, her voice clear and uninflected despite her wounds. “Why did you kill me?”

He pulls away from her in fear, and topples out of the bloodstained car, weighed down by his clanking HLF military kit.

More newfoals are coming. They wear bandoliers of potion, and leading them from the rear is that mank genaaide bergbok Pinkie Pie. He grabs a baseball bat, Kate's baseball bat, and runs out the door. The stolen revolver at his belt is heavy, the Kalashnikov on his back so cumbersome. Newfoals are everywhere. He empties his assault rifle into them, screaming madly. He’s trying to make his way to cover and reload. If they get a drop of potion on him, or open up his mask, he’s fokked.

But when he gets a perfect shot in, a 7.62x39mm round cutting through up to two unshielded newfoals at once, dozens of maimed humans flash into this place, expressions of agony on their faces. They glare at him, gurgling, hands over the wounds, blood pouring between their fingers.

FOK!

One pegasus with a cutie mark of a snowflake divebombs Kraber, and he pulls out Kate’s baseball bat and cracks its head, splattering brains and blood all over the wood. And, to his horror, there is a human woman on the ground, everything above the bridge of her nose simply pulped into a mass of red.

“Eh-haaaah,” she gurgles, trying to look up at him. “Eh-haaaaauuurhhhhh…” she points a finger.

He takes the 9mm semiauto pistol at his hip and fires into her skull, maybe as a mercy, maybe just to finish her off, and he sees one of the newfoals practically pounce on her and baste her in potion, watching her scream and scream, thrashing, her eyes growing so wide it looks like they will pop, her smile so wide it looks like it’ll split her face in half-

Kraber takes his eyes off her and runs. In the windows facing the street, he sees Pinkie Pie in place of his own reflection, the pink mare weighed down with all his equipment, burdened with his sins…

He throws open the door to a shop, finding a storekeeper with a homemade double-barreled shotgun standing next to a mare. The storekeeper is ready to fire at him. Acting on reflex, Kraber swings the bat at the threat, caving in the storekeeper’s head from the side, teeth and spittle flying to one side, a spray of blood from the mouth and nose, one eye about to pop out. As she stagger-flies backwards the storekeeper changes to a pony. There is a look of utter agony on her face.

The mare, this one a violet pegasus with gray eyes and a black mane in a bobcut, screams, jumping at Kraber, but he’s faster. He rams his knife into her throat, and puts pressure down on the knife like a pry bar, a quick wet sound as he pulls it out….

Of a rather cute human woman’s throat. Her gray eyes are so sad, her bobcut covered in blood.

“No,” Kraber wants to whisper. “NO!”
She falls to the floor wordlessly. Kraber, noticing this, takes a shelf and throws it in front of the door to form a barrica-

FOK! There’s windows, that won’t work!

He rushes out the front door and exits into an hotel corridor. Now he’s running up a flight of stairs, knocking the empty banana-mag out with a full mag and shoving it home. A human armed with potion-grenades jumps out, and Kraber switches to his shotgun.

The buckshot hits the PER suicider like a freight train, blood exploding out from his mouth as he staggers back and tumbles down a set of stairs. At which point an explosion rings out from down in the stairwell.

Right.

Have to keep moving.

I have burned my tomorrows
And I stand inside today
At the edge of the future
And my dreams all fade away…

He runs, careful not to touch the corpse.

Kraber runs.

He rushes down the fire excape then, through streets that blend architecture, styles and nationalities flowing like water. Austria to Turkey, all down the Mediterranean to Africa, then over to America, off in the distance....

Desperate to escape, he clambers down a fire escape, into a ship’s hold, finding himself before a burning storefront. A dull purple stallion rushes out, half on fire, and runs up to Kraber. His hooves rap on the riveted metal deck.

“Oh thank Celestia! You have to get me out of here! The newfoals, the ponies at the Conversion Bureau, they’ve gone crazy!” he stallion babbles. “They’re trying to ponify everyone, and the HLF are going nuts and-”

He looks up into Kraber’s eyes. “Oh Tartarus no.”

Kraber smashes Kate’s baseball bat against his head, knocking his snout to the pavement. Then he grabs the stallion by the neck, and throws him into the flames. For a moment, he sees a human face, burning, screaming in agony.

Two newfoals, a filly and a foal, dissolve out of from the hull walls and rush at him. Kraber fires his Kalashnikov in short controlled bursts. But, when the killing rounds hit them...

They are Peter and Anka. Light, brownish skin, with Kraber’s not-quite-curly-but-full-bodied dark brown but not quite black hair, Peter with his one eye and Anka in that same costume - a horse costume, what are the fokking odds - she had insisted on wearing for her birthday, giant bulletholes through her.

“Kill them,” says a voice, and he turns to see a furious young woman. She’s armoured like him, and has a shotgun holstered on her back and an assault rifle in her eyes.

“Kill them,” Verity Carter repeats. “They murdered the people we loved…that’s our creed, our mission, you fucking coward. YOU KILL ALL OF THEM!”

“I CAN’T!” Kraber yells back. “They’re my family, my children, they’re… I can’t kill… I’m not...”

And suddenly Verity is a pony. Dark brown coat, her hazel eyes ringed in blue.

“Kill them all! Kill me too!” she roars, vocal cords raw and pained. “Murder everything that ever hurt you, because we’re all just fucking animals. Laugh while you do it, laugh at them like you did for me, you bliksem! Your whole life is one poisoned JOKE!”

Anka coughs up blood, and stares up at Kraber. “...Why?” she whispers. “Why?”

“...Daddy?” Peter asks, looking up at him. “Why’d you do that? What’s happening?”

‘No,’ Kraber whispers/says/thinks, though he can hear no sound. ‘No… this… I didn’t do this! This hasn’t happened!’

But it will, he realizes. I’ll kill them. I’ll have to kill all of them, and there’s no way I can stop it.

He turns to scream at Verity, and finds her tight black ponytail of a mane has exploded into orgasmically pink coils. The warlike mare moans lewdly, and like an elastic band, springs into another new shape, one Viktor knows all too well.

“You might as well have killed them,” Pinkie Pie says, a manic gleam in her eyes, like that of a child pulling off the wings of a fly or roasting ants with a magnifying glass just because, like Kraber had always told Peter and Anka not to. “You invited me, didn’t you?”

Four newfoals grab Kraber, holding him down.

“You wanted me to plan the party, and I did!” Pinkie Pie says, all happy and bubbly, bouncing over to him, that gleam still in her eyes. “Yupperoony, I gave them the best present of all!”

“FOKKING KONTGESIG!” Kraber spits, struggling against the newfoals. “LET ME GO, YOU GODDAMNED FOKKING TWO-BIT HARIME NUI RIPOFF! I’LL RIP YOUR EYES OUT AND FEED THEM TO YOU!”

“Don’t be like that! Parties are supposed to make you happy, and they’re going to be happy, perfect, pretty little ponies forever!” Pinkie Pie laughs. “Why didn’t you take it?!”

“He was helping meeee!” chirps the one newfoal holding down Kraber’s right arm. Kraber recognizes him, somehow, a flicker of self-awareness, something screaming behind those wide glassy orbs fixated on something only newfoals could see. Echoing behind its words is a tortured and distorted howl of misery.

“Dietrich,” Kraber whispers. The boy. The boy he’d been helping. The one that had gotten drunk and made him work overtime. Oh God, he’d even failed at that…

“Yeah, I’ve talked to your foals, and they’re right, you are a failure!” Pinkie Pie says, so sickly-sweet, like someone that thinks they’re being nice by being cruel, but is just being condescending, made even worse by their obliviousness. “But if you’re a pony, well, you might just be better!”

“NO! FOK JOU, MAG DIE DUIWEL JOU HAAL, JOU BLIKSEM! GOTTVERDAMNT… FOK! JY NAAI JOU MA VIR SAKGELD, JOU NAAI!” Kraber screams, and suddenly, impossibly, he throws off the newfoals. He rushes at Pinkie Pie. “SLAAN JOU BINNE JOU MA SE POES, JOU FOKKIN TEEF!”

And suddenly, he realizes he’s naked. No clothes, no nothing, no knife.

Ah, what the hell.

He punches Pinkie Pie right in the face, enjoying the satisfying crack, ready to…

To…

And then he sees that his arm ends in a hoof.

Oh FOK! Oh God, oh fok, oh no! FOK! There’s… potion. It got on his back there’s no way to get it off-

“Just wait, you’ll be happy soon enough-”

He screams wordlessly, something that might have made sense in any one of the many languages he knows, and pounds his fists against her face. Over and over, until the fingers meld together and become hooves, even as something keeps on telling him he shouldn’t be doing this, she’s his rightful better, he’d be happier as a pony, no matter what happens, and even as his life flashes by he keeps pounding and pounding with both hooves, roaring and shrieking till his throat bleeds and runs dry, and he wishes that this could all end that he could just-wake…

“Hi there!” he squeaks, in a bright, feminine voice. “I’m the Pretty Private, Victory!”

He, no, she...what, no! What’s happening to herself?

“I’m your toy soldier…” he/she chirps again. “I’m a cutesy killer!”

Oh yes...being a ‘pretty private’, whatever that is, enthuses her even more, and intensifies the drive she has to keep punching the face of the disgusting, bearded human male beneath her! This is her creed, so simple and right! Kill and destroy them all!

They’re gonna scream, just like she did; open mouth, open heart, blood and noise forever piercing her skull, poisoning her with psychopathic purple liquid. She watched it all, and felt the knife edge split down the middle…

She can feel her nethers moistening in glee as she fulfils her purpose. Everything’s clear now, no more doubts, no more pain. She was forged to fight and fuck, to slay and suck! An animal without desires beyond primal rage and lust...

And she’s gonna serve her Queen, she’s gonna keep hitting him till she can squish his brains between her hooves-

fingers

LIKE A FOKKING SAUSAGE!

And his identity floods back in…He can’t stop the killing...

AND HE DOESN’T FOKKING WANT TO! HE’S GOING TO KEEP PUNCHING THE KAK OUT OF THIS PONY, RIP HER FOKKING THROAT OUT WITH HIS FOKKING TEETH, AND SPLATTER HER ACROSS THE TRACKS OF EXISTENCE! RIP THE PAIN OUT HER THROAT AND SHOVE IT IN HER EYES, BITE OFF HER EARS AND SHOVE THEM UP HER FLANK, RIP OFF HER FOKKING LEGS AND BEAT HER WITH THEM AND STAB HER WITH THE JAGGED SPIKES OF THE RADIUS AND ULNA, THUMBS IN HER EYES AS THEY SCREAM AND AS HE DRIVES THEM UP INTO HER BRAIN! HE’LL LOOK INTO THE HEART OF DARKNESS, AND HE’LL EAT IT ALL! FOK THIS FOKKING KONTGESIG FOR ALL THE CRAP SHE’S PULLED, HE’S GONNA RIP OFF HER FOKKING HEAD AND PISS IN HER FOKKING SKULL! HE’S GOING TO MAKE HER REGRET EVERYTHING SHE’S EVER DONE, HE’S GOING TO-

-wake

up.

Wake Up.

Kraber gagged, coughing, rolling over in the bed. He was drenched in sweat, trembling - and cold. Oh, so cold. He found himself clutching the stuffed animals so tightly to his body that his arms ached. His .45 automatic was in one hand, rattling. The safety was still engaged, but there was probably a round still in the chamber. He was breathing heavily.

“Emil?!” he asked, looking around the room. “Emil, where are y-”

“I’m dead,” Emil said, looking up at Kraber. Bloody hole in the middle of his head. “Don’t you remember, you piece of shit?”

The revolver was in Kraber’s hands before he knew it. He only looked away for a fraction of a second before Emil was gone.

Oh. Right.

Emil was dead. It’d been barely even 48 hours since Kraber had watched the man he love be ponified, and then die.

Kraber tried to move. Tried to make himself do something, anything other than lie in bed. Actually, no he didn’t. What he really did was think ‘I should probably move’ and then he didn’t.

The most he could do was sort of flop to the side.

‘A man who tries to kill me, humiliates me, all for not killing a chi..’ Kraber thought. ‘..for not killing a mother and child, you son of a bitch, you monster’

‘Why do I feel like this?’ Kraber thought. ‘I’ve done the same thing to so many other gluesticks! I’ve punished them hundreds of other times!’

There’d been the Innsbruck and Graz Bureaus, and so many more. There’d been the gluesticks and horsefuckers he killed in Turkey. The Shieldwall and Pinkie Pie troops he’d slaughtered in Algeria. The mass grave he’d helped dig in Egypt. The camp full of kickstands that’d been getting food and water that could’ve gone to human refugees that actually fokkin’ well deserved it. The time he killed every member of the the Congregation Of Celestia, a nigh-religious group of PER potioners.

The refugees the PHL and Spader-Loyalists had wanted to guard that he’d slaughtered. The ponies he’d thrown overboard to drown. The skirmishes with PHL. The two ponies he’d killed in that basement just yesterday.

And yet… he just didn’t feel right.

‘She must’ve done something to my mind,’ Kraber thought. ‘It’s the only thing that could’ve happened. They’re just ponies, I’d never…

There was a knock on the door. Kraber made some kind of noncommittal grumbling noise, and rolled over on his face.

“Hey,” Lovikov said, sounding friendly. Enough that Kraber almost couldn’t connect the happy man he heard today with his behavior yesterday. “What are you, a college student? We have to leave for Portland today. Pack up what you’re taking, now.”

With that, Lovikov walked away.

Kraber pulled himself out of bed and pulled on his usual suit - a drysuit that’d protect him from potion, a gas mask, some old and obsolete kevlar the HLF had looted, patched over with some metal. Some spare filters.

Then he looked over the array of weaponry. He picked up the MG2021, and his revolver.

Then paused. Looked at the old Darra Pass autoshotgun and the weird .45.

‘Ah, fok it,’ he thought, and slid on their respective holsters.

“That’s a good idea,” Kate said, and then there she was, lying on top of his bed. “You know… Lovikov really isn’t good for you.”

“He’s my friend,” Kraber muttered. “I mean, he brought me this far, I… I owe him.”

“Viktor,” Kate said, “Stop. I’ve been turned into part of an alien race that values friendship over…”

“Over our right to exist as a species?” Kraber asked. “Over our culture? Over everything that makes us us?! Over the right to be a fokkin’ individual with an intact fokkin’ mind?!”

“I can’t really argue with that,” Kate sighed. “I’m probably a figment of your imagination-”

(Wait. FOKKIN’ PROBABLY?!)

“But all the lessons I’m supposed to know, all the ones I’m also supposed to fucking ignore for the sake of Equestria, and ‘disharmony…’” She reared up on her hind legs, making air quotes with her forelegs.

‘That’s definitely Kate,’ Kraber thought.

“A lot of them have something to say about being manipulated by someone,” Kate said. Then she put a hoof to her chin. “At least, I think they do. I don’t know if they did an episode about that…”

“Kate,” Kraber sighed, “We’re not in a TV show.”

Kate raised a hoof to object, then resumed thinking. “Well, you’re probably right… technically, I guess…”

Kraber just sighed again. That didn’t seem like an avenue worth pursuing.

Then he placed the rest of his supplies into the backpack. Some spare HEIAP 7.62 rounds for the LMG, a set of clothes, and his last 3 stuffed animals. The stuffed African Wild Dog he’d gotten in South Africa… and of course, Peter and Anka’s stuffed horse and dog, respectively. A wallet full of spare cash.

‘You’re probably not going to need all that,’ Kate said.

“Of course I’m not,” Kraber said. “It’s just… habit.”

He walked out the door, staggering slightly. Every step felt like a struggle. And he had this strange feeling - an awkward, almost crawling feeling, as if something was terribly wrong, as if ~~he was terribly wrong, no no stop~~

‘Whatever I’ve got,’ Kraber thought, ‘It hasn’t gone away. Do I have the flu? Why the fok do I keep feeling so out of it?’ He started feeling almost normal by the time he was near Lovikov’s bus.

He knew it was big when he saw the old SWAT van with the painted Thenardier Guards symbol next to the bus.

‘This is gonna be big, Kraber thought.

In front of SWAT van, Kraber saw Lovikov, Benning, Jones, Sully, Dayoung, and Megan having an animated conversation with some HLF he almost recognized.

Was that…

It was!

The Thenardier Guards. And some of their most high-profile members, too. Verity Carter was there, for one thing. Even Atlas Galt, their commander!

He was a hazel-eyed man of average height, with a prematurely graying beard. It could’ve looked silly. Instead, it somehow looked distinguished. He made for quite the presence in Defiance, standing as equals with Lovikov.

“This will work,” Lovikov said.

“Absolutely,” Galt replied. “We’ll have the PHL over a barrel with this. We won’t even have to consider your Plan!”

“A man can dream, Atlas,” Lovikov said, looking… well, it was hard to say. Maybe he was hurt. But then, more likely, he was just laughing it off with a friend.. “Perhaps, if it works, it can be tried. For now…”

“Understood,” Galt said. “For what it’s worth, Leonid, I like it. It’s just a bit… out of reach.”

“I keep telling you, I know,” Lovikov said. “It’s the main reason I agreed to help. It’s my plan, or Carter’s vision, or we all die.”

“Are things really that dire?” Hakim asked.

Galt and Lovikov looked to Hakim.

“Absolutely,” they both said. Or, well, both of them said something to that effect. Lovikov said ‘da,’ actually.

Kraber walked up towards them, and everyone stared. Apparently, he looked about as bad as he felt, going by the disgusted look on Verity’s face. Then again, she had that virtually every time she saw him.

“So,” he said. “What did I miss?”

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McNess

McNess #1 · Apr 24th, 2018 · 1 · ·

Before I mention anything else, was the use of May 10th as the day all hell broke loose intentional? Hard to imagine that being a coincidence.

Nice, I liked the Wookieepedia reference. I'd be fine with more references to the internet in general cause the only times websites have really been mentioned is some HTF/HLF support forums, and the occasional mention of social media.

I don't believe we ever actually saw Rebecca and Richard Hatch in the ClassicVerse, so that encounter was a nice touch. Honestly the worldbuilding of Defiance in general here is much better, in the ClassicVerse it felt like the place may has well have been a few houses and trailers out in the woods occupied by a bunch of idiots with guns. I know the HLF have delusions of grandeur, but still.

Wait, Kate is black? Huh, if she was in the original story I must've missed that, cause I always saw her as white. Also, out of curiosity, where does the Sorghum get it's name from?

I've always been curious about Private Victory. I get that she's one of Kraber's "hallucinations," but the fact that it predicts the creation of the Pretty Privates is quite intriguing. Is she possibly Kraber's fate in another universe? Knowing Kraber it's probably all three.

I'm drunk and incredibly tired so sorry if this comment is me just rambling and not providing anything constructive.

McNess

McNess #2 · Apr 24th, 2018 · 1 · ·

Also, error. There were more errors but I can't find them now:

“ [url= https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ukXbjTr8NU ] There's a cold black sun Burnin' way down low Where the bird don't sing And the wind don't blow... ”

Yeah, I don't know what happened here.

Mr cold ghost

Mr cold ghost #3 · Apr 24th, 2018 · 3 · ·

It’s always interesting when Kraber starts hallucinating! Thanks for the update!

Doctor Fluffy

Doctor Fluffy #4 · Apr 24th, 2018 · 2 · ·

8884209
That was super weird. Thankfully, it's fixed by now, but that was.... just weird.

Before I mention anything else, was the use of May 10th as the day all hell broke loose intentional? Hard to imagine that being a coincidence.

Surprisingly, it actually was a coincidence.

I don't believe we ever actually saw Rebecca and Richard Hatch in the ClassicVerse, so that encounter was a nice touch. Honestly the worldbuilding of Defiance in general here is much better, in the ClassicVerse it felt like the place may has well have been a few houses and trailers out in the woods occupied by a bunch of idiots with guns. I know the HLF have delusions of grandeur, but still.

I'm going for the Stephen King's IT approach to worldbuilding. In the book (not so much the movies) Derry itself gets so much focus it's practically its own character, and by the end of the book you know it and its characters and have such a strong image of this Maine mill town that you might as well have been there, cause you know its history, its landmarks, its buildings, the people who live there. And then it gets destroyed, so it's hard not to feel something.

As for why you don't see the Hatches in the previous story, that's because... well, I was making that shit up as I went along. And I'm sorry for that.

Wait, Kate is black? Huh, if she was in the original story I must've missed that, cause I always saw her as white. Also, out of curiosity, where does the Sorghum get it's name from?

Yep, she's black! I don't actually remember where I said that in the original. Also, the Sorghum gets its name from the, uh, Sorghum mobile rig from The Scar by China Mieville.

I've always been curious about Private Victory. I get that she's one of Kraber's "hallucinations," but the fact that it predicts the creation of the Pretty Privates is quite intriguing. Is she possibly Kraber's fate in another universe? Knowing Kraber it's probably all three

Yes, she is a possible alternate fate of Kraber. TB3 added that in, and I've... well, I couldn't bear to get rid of her. Part of me wants to edit everything so it feels more me, but in a lot of ways, Light wouldn't be what it is without those touches. So she stays!

I'm drunk and incredibly tired so sorry if this comment is me just rambling and not providing anything constructive.

Don't even trip, dawg! It's plenty constructive.

Doctor Fluffy

Doctor Fluffy #5 · Apr 24th, 2018 · 3 · ·

8884480
YOU ARE WELCOME

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