Airship Mauled

by Darkonshadows

Chapter Sixty, Separation Anxiety: Partition.

-Tartarus thirty minutes later, Marie-

…

Tail.

…

Hugs.

…

Protect.

…

-Mara-

We had moved to a corner and it took Maria a bit to learn how to walk with her new body, the only thing that bothered me about mine is that I didn’t have hooves for rear legs. Marie balanced my tail out nicely, if a bit painfully given how tightly she squeezed me at times.

After we moved to the corner, I proceeded to hold Maria and Marie, who was still wrapped around my tail and body, close to me.

Maria and I weren’t doing so hot and it would be nice if those ponies dealt with Cozy Glow in a swift and efficient manner.

Maria had a handle on her cognitive dissonance problem and wasn’t going all glassy eyed again, that sight had scared me more than anything. Slapping her several times had helped snap her out of it, but I didn’t relish hitting my sister or seeing the unnatural fear she felt around me shortly afterwards.

We were going to need therapy for this.

It made me wonder how many hospitals that relied on magic entirely for healing were doing, at least the hospital in Airship Mauled was run by someone who knows a thing or two about healing without needing a horn on their head.

Many medical places in Equestria didn’t have Dr. Zen Bones working for them and I tried not to consider the implications of magic being drained away from the medical professionals. Other species wouldn’t have it nearly as bad as ponies would, because ponies relied on magic far too much.

The implications still came to me even when I tried not to think them, they were staggeringly horrendous.

My racing thoughts went to thinking about how many ponies Tirek had harmed by stealing all the magic from just the ponies in Equestria previously. Just by draining medically proficient ponies that relied entirely on using magic for healing, Tirek’s probably...

My thoughts continued on that particular train for approximately thirty seconds, mostly because I couldn’t stop my agonizing headaches. My headaches were pretty bad and putting a task to my brain, as it currently was, hadn’t made it any better.

My eyes widened at the implications involved in Tirek’s rampage and I could now safely say without a doubt that Tirek definitely deserved to be imprisoned. Also, I think his jail needed to be put under greater security and scrutiny given he’s escaped from Tartarus before, to add onto that I think he seriously needed to be rendered incapable of using magic or teaching others how to do so.

Seriously, what were ponies thinking by putting him back in a place he’s escaped from before without increasing security on him after the devastation he’s wrought?! Oh right, ponies weren’t good at the whole punishment thing and tended to have the inability to deal with threats permanently or at least in a manner that wouldn’t come back to bite them later in some way.

Whoever Cozy Glow was, they were doing far worse than whatever Tirek had done. Cozy Glow was draining all of the magic from Equestria, Tirek had just drained magic from ponies.

For context of how bad that was for Equestria, a lot of the medical equipment, various appliances, weather factory machines and plenty of other stuff in Equestria tended to run almost entirely on magic.

Talk about having too many eggs in one basket and making the local weasel population very happy that the chicken coops were unattended. Only Fluttershy’s chicken coop could avoid problems like that and even then, she had to see and talk to the weasels to make sure they didn’t take any eggs under her nose.

“Mara…?” A whimpering Maria stated in my paws. My strong, big, careful paws, holding my sister against my chest. I was trying not to squish my sister, but it was so hard to not hold her tightly as I was both scared for many reasons and my head was constantly hurting.

We sat there in silence alone waiting for a sign for things to get better, it was several minutes later that I finally responded. I just wanted to protect my family, was that so wrong?

“My head is constant agony Maria, how’s yours?” I was just trying to make conversation, trying not to concentrate on my burning skull and the throbbing pain therein.

“I’m… still having some difficulties admittedly, but you sound to be suffering so much worse than I currently am.” Maria, what I was feeling was far from pleasant and I didn’t need to voice it considering you could hear me grimacing. Marie wasn’t helping things either with periodical squeezes.

“When we get out of here, things will be fine… Fluttershy and the others won’t forget about us, you'll see.” I placed my chin on top of Maria’s head, avoiding her horns, and she pressed into my body’s warmth while trying not to look at me. Marie hissed blankly and tightened around my hips slightly, but did little else. “We’ll be okay, we’ll get through this.”

“Say that however much you want, but we definitely aren’t okay now.” Maria was correct and I didn’t have a convincing argument otherwise. “Though it’s nice to say that we’ll eventually be okay and that much I can believe in.”

“Ugh…” Yes, positive, we needed to be positive. I raised a paw to my head and growled.

“Don’t growl while holding me like this sis.” Maria was trying to stay absolutely calm, but the quavering in her voice told me that she wasn’t perfectly suppressing the fear she was feeling.

“Sorry, I’ll try to keep it down.” My sisters needed me and I was the most capable of us at the moment, didn’t feel like I could do much here in Tartarus aside form protect her physically. Comforting Maria didn’t seem to be helping much.

“Just keep holding me Mara…” Her voice was quiet, but the fact that she wasn’t begging me to let her go was heartwarming enough on its own. “You’re really warm.”

Tartarus was a cold place and we didn’t belong here.

Having my sister pressed into my fur like this and not actually a part of me was a weird, we’ve always been at each other’s sides. Now she was in front of me and Marie was squeezing me painfully every now and then, reminding me that our other sister is still alive despite her inability to talk or show signs of intelligence aside from the fact that she was still breathing.

This was a living nightmare scenario. The second I thought that this was a nightmare, was the second things got even worse when it seemed they should have gotten better.

Marie slithered off me looking at the colorful lights when they started flowing into Tartarus. It was all the magic returning.

Ours impacted with the three of us, however we only fused together for a few seconds before splitting apart again suddenly.

“I… think… BRRRAP!” Maria blasted a spout of fire from her mouth, in front of us. “My fire’s back... the magic is back on, but we aren’t together again."

“Yeah, this is… bad… really bad.” I stated as I looked at the other creatures becoming agitated and we weren’t fusing back together, we had separated again for some reason despite our magic being back in us.

Some of the animals looked to start getting aggressive, we stayed grouped up and hoped the wild creatures didn’t come near us as they started to get rowdy and attacked one another to start carving out territory in the limited space available to us near the entrance of Tartarus.

“Mara… I’m more scared than I have ever been in my life.” Maria said from beneath me.

“I said I’d protect you Maria!” I pushed her behind me and stalked forward and glared a warning at the suddenly aggressive creatures.

-School of Friendship, Fluttershy-

When the school of friendship was built near Twilight’s crystal castle, we had a good time teaching others about the magic of friendship. In fact, I really liked teaching all about animals and other things during my lessons too, even Silver Stream was learning a lot on the side and I hear that she might have found a familiar.

Though things were a bit rough at the start, what with our students being attacked by pukwudgies and the various world leaders threatening one another aggressively, we all made it work out in the end together. As such, Twilight’s school was a considerable success.

I liked teaching, even though it ate into a lot of my time to perform my caretaker duties. I wasn’t exactly surprised to hear that I was teacher of the month for the last several months.

Sandbar, Gallus, Yona, Ocellus, Silver Stream and Smolder were like us in so many ways. I personally liked Ocellus, she was such a sweet changeling that reminded me a lot of myself and sometimes she even reminded me of Twilight with how much she loved to learn.

It was so nice that the students saved the day and now everything would be… no, wait… good feelings gone.

Everything was not fine, not at all… Maries were still in Tartarus! We had caught Cozy Glow and avoided losing all the magic in Equestria, but we left a lot of animals and friends in danger!

“Celestia!” I called out loud to the princesses and the guards detaining Cozy Glow. I spooked a lot of people that knew me, considering that my voice never got that loud unless things were important. “We need to get to Tartarus immediately!”

“Fluttershy what has you so…?” Twilight started and I stared her in the eyes hard. Didn’t care if it only worked on animals, I was going to use ‘The Stare’ this instant and they were going to listen to me!

“Tartarus now!” I screamed much to the friendship princess’s sudden surprise as she reared up as I continued to glare her in the eyes. She lit her horn, but didn’t do anything more.

“I agree, there seems to be a bit of situation going on there and you should probably have that looked at. Quite a nasty bit of business, honestly couldn’t help if I wanted to.” Thank you for backing me up Discord, Maries needed help like yesterday! “Hmm… it seems someone has been playing with the cookie jar. I believe you should hurry like Fluttershy suggests, wouldn’t want something like that on my conscience if I didn’t bother to listen to her after all.”

“What’s he talking about?” Smolder the orange dragon asked as Discord disappeared.

“Twitch a twitch? Twitch a twitch, we need to go there as soon as possible to avoid something horrible!” When even Pinkie was calling for it, given her Pinkie Sense was never wrong, everyone was far more willing to comply.

Twilight, Celestia and Luna combined their magic to get us there. I never liked being teleported, it was disorienting, but it was the quickest way to get to Tartarus.

What we came upon was a complete mess.

“We need a medical help… please hurry…” I just stared at Maria in horror as she held Mara’s limp form, the animals that we separated to escape Tartarus were fused again and sporting various horrible injuries. A few of them had burns and snake bites.

Two of The Cerberus's heads were hurt too, but one of them was still awake and the body was standing defensively in front of Mara, Marie and Maria. They were good boys for protecting the separated chimera and the gates of Tartarus.

Mara and Marie were bleeding out on the floor. Maria had some wounds, but those were minor in comparison to the other two as she was surprisingly quite alert. Marie was awake, but she was hissing in distress, but her words were all garbled as if she didn’t know how to even talk snake.

Celestia carefully knocked Marie out with a soft spell to the head so that she would stop squeezing Mara so hard.

“Luna!” Celestia called and Princess Luna was immediately off to presumably get a doctor.

“Maria what happened here?” She was the only coherent being that had an idea as to what went on before we arrived.

“What happened here was cluster buck of situations all coming to a head and I’m not saying that as a pun from being a part of a chimera to be funny here!” She was spitting flames from her mouth angrily, but she let herself be gently levitated towards the entrance. She didn’t relinquish her hold on Mara though. “After the magic came back to them the animals got quite agitated, it didn’t help that we weren’t exactly in the right state of minds to keep things calm. Please… help my sisters…”

Celestia didn’t say anything. She looked horribly disappointed that one pony, a filly at that, could cause such phenomenal disaster like this one. She looked to be far more distressed than before about this.

“I am so sorry for what’s happened to you on my watch Maries…” Celestia muttered under her breath and a few tears dripped from her eyes, I don’t think she meant for me to hear her.

It didn’t take long for a medical team to be called in. I knew a thing or two about biology, both tiger and snake. Only Mara wasn’t a wild animal and Maria told me that Marie had been regressed to a point that she hardly counted as sapient, but I could at least help the medical crews make them stable.

After that I started helping The Cerberus with their several injures, their heads were all thankfully okay and their body would make a full recovery.

-Hours later, Ponyville Hospital-

Dr. Zen Bones was here overseeing things, she was called in as Maries’ personalized doctor and she assured me, and all our friends, that Mara would make it.

Marie was doing fairly well given my medical knowledge of how to treat snakes helped stabilize her much faster, I was glad that I could be at least of some help. Dr. Bones deputized me as a nurse based on my expertise and medical knowledge, we also called in Dr. Fauna for even more help given the tricky situation involving Mara and the other mystical animals.

Both Marie and Mara were stabilized, but Mara direly needed a blood transfusion and the blood type was far more exotic than a normal tigers should ever be. It definitely wasn’t normal, because Mara was still technically a chimera even without the other two parts of her.

Thankfully, Maria was healthy enough and surprisingly capable of being a blood donor. She was quite willing to give blood to both her sisters if they needed it, she didn’t care what happened to herself as long as her sisters were okay.

After giving a good amount of blood, all of which will be used up given the exotic nature of it, Maria was left sitting alone in a chair waiting for Mara to wake up. I sat down with her and pulled her into a hug and brought my wings around her.

“It’ll be okay Maria.” I said softly. “You’re not alone.”

“I’m sorry I haven’t exactly said anything about this, but I’m… suffering from… cognitive dissonance. I’m going to… need you… to… slap… me...” I looked into Maria’s eyes and saw that they were slowly glassing over. In a panic, I did as she asked and her eyes returned to normal. “Thank you.”

Author's Note:

More, Fizzle, Kuril and various interactions between characters. With Maries being in the spotlight.

The following scenes I'm not writing is Celestia throwing Cozy Glow into Tartarus with Tirek. Cozy Glow was far worse if you take everything she caused to their logical conclusions.

Comments

[Booster Spice]

At the very least, Cloudsdale wouldve hopefully been evacuated before it collapsed, and if the Tarterus chimeras had seperated early, what on completion, about all the free hybrids? Griffons, Hippogriffs, Kirins, Minotaurs, Sphinx, too many to remember.

I cant even look up the geneology tree of how the Sirens couldve lead to the whole Mythos races in the Girls universe.