End of Ponies - Petra Arc - Kaizo Edition pt 1
This arc is death. It is cancer. I cannot emphasize this enough. I'd need a Jewish Ben Kingsley to be whispering this while waving a paper through the second-hand smoke produced by Qui Gonn Jim.
Where do I begin with the end of the end? I started this about a few weeks after the Dredgemane arc of End of Ponies was uploaded. In my head, I wanted this story to be a sort of "miniature" in-between arc that showed us more of the Wasteland. Also, since the Fluttershy arc was all about character analysis and the Dredgemane one was all about emotion, I wanted to have an arc that was all about balls-to-the-wall action and hollywoodesque explosions. A chance for Scootaloo in her apocalyptic element to really cut loose, y'know?
This eventually evolved into something else entirely as I saw a trip back to the Wasteland to be an opportunity for Scootaloo's character to be analyzed. The fact of the matter was, the next arc after Pinkie was to be Rainbow Dash's, and I simply couldn't see myself launching into that story and all of the important thematic elements contained therein without doing some super-duper preparations beforehand. So, I dreamed up a story plot that took place in three timelines: bouncing back and forth between (1) Scootaloo as a filly interacting with Rainbow Dash, (2) Scootaloo's first year after the Cataclysm, and (3) Scootaloo in the present trying to excavate Rainbow Dash's ashes.
Instead of the Everfree Forest or a huge chunk of moonrock, the obstacle in Scoots' path is so grand that it takes an entire arc to deal with it, but the story uses this to create numerous parallels between the present day mare and her struggles and her past idolization of Rainbow Dash as a filly. The biggest and most obvious device used for this was a young goblin named "Warden" (based on the selfless editor of the same title) who looks up to Scootaloo much in the same way that Scootaloo did to Rainbow Dash. And, yet, I didn't want the relationship to be identical, so I took liberties in creating a unique camaraderie between Scoots and this Warden imp.
Problems arose with just how intensely I was giving attention to the past segments over the present ones. For the most part, they came across as superfluous, gratuitous, and unnecessary. It was Vimbert himself who stated that the entire "past in Ponyville" segment could have been ditched completely. Sure enough, as the arc goes on, it's very hard to tell where the author wants the readers to be concentrated. If the truth is "all three segments," then I am simply not asking marsupials to digest a fanfic, but rather a bible of obese proportions.
Then there was the issue of Warden, the character I had invented to establish the parallel between Scoots and Rainbow Dash. He was simply... not a compelling character. All he did was act as an obligatory foil to Scootaloo in every imaginable way. He had very little substance, and was far too annoying for the audience to relate to. Also Razzar--as an antagonist--was a great deal too big for her britches. The arc shows how much I fell in love with her, to the point that I had her doing some supremely unrealistic things in the direct face of her opposition (Scootaloo).
But the biggest problem of this tumorously huge arc is the insane emphasis on action. End of Ponies--for better or for worse--is the most boring pile of filth in brony fanfiction history. However, this is ironically its strength. Scootaloo comes from a horrible world where she's done horrible things. Going back into the past has had its fair share of action scenes--yes--but the most powerful moments are when Scootaloo struggles to find peaceful solutions to stuff. It totally clashes with her violent, "scavenger" mentality.
In the initial draft of the Petra Arc (which I have decided to call the "Kaizo Edition" because it friggin' well speaks for itself), all of Scootaloo's learned lessons on peace and harmony fly out the window. While that may be forgiveable given the miserable setting that she's in, the fight scenes simply go on for too long.
Too...
Dayum...
Long...
For those of you who may have followed me in ancient days, this was a throw-back to the sort of shiet I wrote in my Teen Titans fanfics. It may have worked then, but I didn't have any sort of literary compass--or scale of decency--to aim my words by. I simply wrote what I felt like with no editing and no respect for the audience's digestion. Back in the day, I'd write fifty+ page fight scenes and not think anything of it.
The Kaizo Edition of the Petra arc has multiple scenes like this. And when they were dropped upon the laps of my editors... well... it was a veritable holocaust. You think Background Pony is a train wreck? You think Austraeoh is a story that resembles a car crash? Watching the editors limp through the Petra Arc was like watching people douse kittens in gasoline. And yet they kept slogging through with it, their jaws dropping lower and lower upon witnessing how little respect I paid to the perceivable audience's frail intelligence. It's like they couldn't believe that the same lemur who had produced the likes of Dredgemane could create such dense, unreadable, trifle garbage.
It was heart-breaking.
It certainly didn't help that I had thrown a month and a half and over two hundred and sixty thousand words into this "tiny in-between mini arc." What's worse is that I didn't perceive a single thing wrong about it at the time. Hell, in the original-ORIGINAL draft of Petra, I had even color-coded the entire text to indicate each of the different time periods that the story took place in (I think I used yellow, green, and red). Also, I didn't perceive a single thing wrong with the fight scenes--or with certain extended bits that drove an anonymous candle-stick-head to puppy stomping.
It was stuff like the Petra Arc that told me that I had to write differently--that, when working with editors--it simply wasn't natural to write 200,000+ words ahead of time and then slather it over their eyeballs. You gotta work with people gradually over time, chapter by chapter, much like how I ended up going about it with Background Pony (which did slightly better than Petra... f'naaaaaa?). In future attempts at the arc (I've made two since), I've gone about it far more intelligently, but it still hasn't yielded any positive results. The fact of the matter is, Petra Kaizo took the wind completely out from under my sails. I don't know if any of you have ever experienced it, but writing an entire novel's length of words only to have it go up in smoke will do that.
People think that I have given up on the End of Ponies, that I let it die or burn up in smoke. That couldn't be any further from the truth. I've tried hard... very, very hard. I've committed 300,000+ words of insanity, mistakes, self-doubt, and anguish to extending the life of the dayum story, and I keep collapsing in on myself.
Do I regret the whole experience? There's no point in lying. I'm familiar with failure; it's what forever blemishes the legacy of my Teen Titans foray. But things in our past--even the horribad stuff--have a way of shaping things out for the better. If it wasn't for my frustration with End of Ponies making me wanna try new things, I'd never have written the first chapter to a thing called Background Pony, and who knows where that would put me today.
I had a dream long, long ago of waiting until the next arc of End of Ponies was written before submitting these rough drafts. But, let's face it, so much time has come and gone. I mean... who really cares anymore? Besides, once I do finish EoP, the upcoming arc is going to be so incredibly different from the originals that it'll be like day and night. Would reading this present the marsupial alumni with spoilers? Maybe some--but I doubt it's gonna be that much of a detriment to the final version.
I just think it's time that I air out the deathly closet from which this zombified monster hails. The public needs to know what killed off End of Ponies. They need to know how hard I worked on creating something that I truly believed in at the time. Perhaps--just maybe--y'all marsupials can see that it's possible for someone to create an abomination like this and still continue to make stories that are worth giving two shits about.
Okay, okay. Maybe just one and a half.
The End of Ponies – by short skirts and explosions
Chapter Twenty-Five – All the Colors Died With Her
Scootaloo was six years old, or perhaps she was seven. She didn't know how many winters she had been alive; she didn't even know when her foalday was. What she did know was that tonight was the night: her one opportunity for freedom. She had planned for this moment, dreamed of this moment, lived this moment thoroughly—both inside and out—from every mental angle imaginable over the past several months.
She opened her eyes for the first time in hours. Every other pony in the room full of foals had long fallen asleep. She had faked her own slumber, and had since been lying fitfully in bed, trying not to disturb the dreaming bunkmate lying next to her. Now, the clock outside the bedroom door struck three o'clock in the morning. Beyond the window above her bed, there was a rattling sound, rising slowly, of wooden wheels against cobblestone outside. The garbage wagon was making its weekly round through the nearby streets below, and the tiny orange pegasus had mere seconds to act.
In a swift breath, Scootaloo soundlessly kicked out of bed, squatted to the tile floor, and reached two trembling hooves under her mattress. Hidden between the hay-filled mat and the wooden support beams were two things. The first was a canvas satchel filled to the brim with miscellaneous items scavenged illicitly over the past several weeks. The second was a metal sheet affixed with four wheels: none other than the bottom segment of a kitchen dish cart that had been wrenched loose from the rest of its rusted, metallic body.
Flinging the canvas bag over her flank, Scootaloo clamped the body of the metal platform in her mouth. The wheels of the tray dangled as she climbed back up to her bed, mounted the headboard, and planted her hooves against the windowpane above. She wiggled a brick loose from below the sheet of glass and exposed the handle to a screwdriver that she had hidden in the wall several days before. Grasping the utensil in the crook of her young hoof, she poked at a weak spot in the window's lock and popped the binding loose. A gust of cool, spring air blew into the bedroom as she slid the window wide open. With her pink mane billowing, the breathless pegasus gave one glance behind her shoulder.
The moment had become blissfully anticlimactic. There was no movement from beyond the bedroom hallway. Every sleeping foal in the room was oblivious to her daring escape. They knew nothing of her moment of glory. It was just as well, for she had barely paid attention to their names—much less their faces—in the flimsy two and a half years she had gotten to know them. A life that was friendless was a life that was worth leaving behind, Scootaloo figured. As the sound of rattling wheels intensified, she very gladly—very easily—turned her back to the room full of orphans and climbed out the window.
Outside, in the chilly night air, Scootaloo stood on the edge of the windowsill. With hooves scuffling along the third floor ledge of the foster home building, she made her way towards the nearest waterspout. Her flightless wings twitched against the bricklaid structure behind her. The child's teeth bit harder into the wheeled tray in her mouth upon visualizing the great height between her shuffling lower limbs and the hard street below. After a precarious eternity, the little pony finally reached the waterspout. She grasped the aluminum pipe with four limbs and bravely slid down the vertical structure, her tail hairs whipping in the wind.
Stealthily, she touched down onto the cobblestone street of Manehattan, just as the rickety wheels of the regularly scheduled garbage wagon rattled around the street corner. Scootaloo's violet eyes twitched in surprise to see the large brown shape of the heaping vehicle surging past her. She was going to miss it...
Gasping, she spat the tray out. The metal platform fell on four squeaking wheels before her. She ran, jumped, and planted all four hooves on it, sliding after the backpiece of the horse-drawn vehicle. With a rear hoof kicking against the street, she shoved herself harder and harder, faster and faster towards the body of the rattling wagon. The smell of city refuse filled her nostrils; the buzzing of flies deafened her. Freedom never before smelled so horrible, so real, so close. She kicked one last time and glided on the wheeled platform, reaching two limbs up in desperation.
Finally, Scootaloo made contact with the wagon. The tiny pegasus grasped the wooden support beams of the garbage cart's undercarriage. With a breath of relief, the little orange foal smiled proudly to herself. Fishing herself forward with her front limbs, she pulled and pulled until she was tactfully hidden under the very chassis of the vehicle, gliding along with it as it performed the last of its scheduled rounds. The pegasus' haunches were planted tightly on the wheeled metal tray beneath her, and the rattling of her platform was swallowed by the rickety sounds of the garbage wagon as she was carried to freedom through the streets of Manehattan.
The night was cold. The stench was horrible. The lanternlights of the sleeping city were dim and ominous, but Scootaloo was free. She couldn't remember a time when she smiled any more brilliantly.
Morning came slowly and foggily, and still Scootaloo was smiling. The little foal sat at the rear of a red caboose, her hooves dangling playfully over the edge of the metal platform as several rows of train tracks blurred below. Her excited violet eyes were locked on the westward horizon drawing away from her. The skyscrapers and pillars of Manehattan sunk into the mists of dawn. One by one, all of her troubles were being swallowed up by yesterday. As her last three years of helplessness and imprisonment melted into oblivion, she saw a new sun rising, and the little pegasus was burning a bright path towards it, one courageous train-hop after another.
She let loose a victorious giggle. Untying her canvas satchel, Scootaloo reached in and grabbed one of many biscuits that she had stolen from the same commissary where she had pilfered the tiny metal tray on wheels. She bit into the bread, enjoying the filling sensation in her stomach, daydreaming over the innumerable comical reactions that her former chaperones were likely displaying upon finding her bed empty in the third floor of the foster home. They would collapse all over themselves. They would have conniption fits. They would sweat straight through their ridiculously straight-laced dresses, realizing that Scootaloo had outsmarted each and every one of them. She had proverbially spat back into the same faces that had scowled, barked, and hissed at her for far too many boring and stuffy months in that goddess-forsaken hovel.
It served them right. They thought that they could control her. They thought that they could take Scootaloo's life from her. They thought that they could tell her what was a future worth living and what was a past worth forgetting. Now they had to bathe in the ashes of their own burned pride. Nevertheless, Scootaloo hadn't done this for them. She had done this for herself. Singeing a few egos was merely a fringe benefit to acquiring freedom, and the little pegasus couldn't be happier, prouder, stronger.
If only her parents could see her now...
Scootaloo swallowed a final bite of the biscuit and leaned against the metal railing of the caboose with a contented smile. As the train made a brief bend to the south, the rays of the morning sun bled through the mountainous Equestrian landscape and kissed the edges of her cheek, electrifying her smile even further, breathing life into a pair of twitching, petite wings. Scootaloo couldn't fly, but as she closed her eyes right then and breathed the warm morning breeze, she suddenly felt like she could make the impossible happen.
The impossible didn't happen quickly enough. Scootaloo found this out the hard way, two days later, when she collapsed from exhaustion in the middle of navigating a forest outside of Fillydelphia. She woke up, covered in mosquito bites, disgusted to have found a stream of ants infiltrating her canvas satchel. With the aid of a drinking fountain located in a nearby city park, under the shroud of morning mist, the foal washed her last remaining bits of food clean.
Scootaloo was ashamed of herself. Her journey was barely halfway over, and already she had consumed two-thirds of the biscuits she had alotted for the trip. She needed to learn to conserve her food much longer. She knew this. Such a lesson was important not just for her sojourn, but for the life that she was about to live upon reaching her destination.
The little pegasus figured that things wouldn't be easy. She realized that what she had to do—what she had to prove—would take more than just a spirit of enthusiasm. It would take every ounce of strength that she had to give, just like every bit of energy that her parents gave. Her mother and father's hard work was what helped support her when she was a newly foaled child. Now that she was older, now that she was stronger, that same ethic would keep her afloat. However, she needed to be more than just versatile. She needed to be smart.
Battling a gurgling stomach, the little pony fasted for the rest of the day. Hours that she could have easily spent munching, she instead spent exploring the lengths of Fillydelphia—street by street—gliding on the metal tray on wheels while hitching rides on the back of several horse-drawn carriages. In such a stealthy fashion, the filly made her long trek eastward...
Toward home...
Scootaloo's smile was the bravest part of her, even unto the bitter end. She almost met this bitter end on several occasions throughout the interminably long week it took her to cross the Equestrian Valley.
The little pegasus' memories immediately following her parents' deaths were a sour hodge-podge of tear-stained snapshots tossed blindly together in the rattling drawer of her mind. She only ever remembered fitful sobs, prayers, hiccups, and shudders—and they were all laced with the sound of her own lonely voice. There were so many dusty, putrid experiences, and they were mostly spent with the child's eyes clenched shut.
As a result, Scootaloo had no true recollection of just how vast and daunting a distance she had been taken—foster home after foster home—from the place of her foaling to the heart of Manehattan. Retracing those steps was like a blind marathon. Even with the aid of her wheeled tray, the eastward journey was a test of sheer endurance. She wasn't certain what she would faint from first: hunger or exhaustion. Either outcome would have been a blessed alternative to her one true fear: being inexplicably found and dragged back to her dismal, social prison, behind the iron bars of frowning faces.
Under the gun of such paralyzing trepidation, Scootaloo barely slept. She crept forward on sweat and adrenaline alone. When the Sun was too hot, she hid under a bridge or a cluster of trees to cool herself. When the night was freezing, she snuck her way into a nearby village, stole some firewood, and made herself a tiny camp in a bordering forest. She never stopped to sight see, she never paused for luxuries, and—most of all—she talked to nopony, nopony whatsoever.
This wasn't just a journey, this was a crusade. Scootaloo was on a mission. Insomnia became both an ally and an enemy all at once. When silence overwhelmed her, she heard the groaning sounds of her Manehattan chaperones' voices. When her eyelids closed, she saw two jaundice-stained bodies lying paralyzed in a bed before her. Between breaths, she smelled the crisp morning dew of home—the flavor of her forsaken foalhood—and the glorious aroma chased away all of the shadows of the darker memories, so that she once again saw the rising Sun that painted her path to freedom, and she remembered why her smile was there to begin with.
With renewed courage, Scootaloo kicked relentlessly at the earth, pushing it away from her as if she could fly at any second. Instead, she rolled forward on the wheels of her metal platform, carrying her canvas satchel over her shoulder. As the edible contents inside it became lighter and lighter, she dreamed harder and harder that each subsequent bend in the horizon would be the last, and soon that crisp morning dew would glisten before her, as real as her dreams, as cleansing as her future, a baptism waiting to happen.
Then there was the night of the full moon, and it brought with its pale glow a gale of cold air that chilled Scootaloo to the bone. The little pegasus sat between a cluster of trees along a hilltop, huddled under a patchwork blanket that she had stolen out of a dumpster behind a roadside inn two days previous. Her teeth chattered as she curled into herself, seeking a warmth that she knew was hidden somewhere inside but was somehow eluding her.
Scootaloo fought and fought. She tried her best not to think about it. She tried to forget her mother’s golden voice. Somewhere in the fitful tremors of the freezing night, it came to her, caressed her, milked the tears out of her twitching eyes.
This was too soon—too soon to be crumbling, too soon to be buckling, too soon to be failing. She would have none of it. Scootaloo had to be strong. She fought the sobs. She fought them with the same anger and ferocity that got her into so much trouble with her Manehattan chaperones, that stuck her for so many consecutive months in the same foster service with no family willing to accommodate her warrior's ferocity. She had only two parents and two alone. No group of ponies could ever replace them, and she would rather die than let such a horrible atrocity happen.
She had to be strong; she had committed herself. She had started this holy crusade. For her sake, for her parents' sake—to erase the pale grimaces that had frozen on their infernite-stricken faces—she had to see it to the end, even if it meant her own end. Some ponies were placed on this earth to trot in circles. Scootaloo had all the wind she needed to fly. There was no point in waiting; there was only glory in doing.
It was right there and then, in between shivering spasms beneath the ghostly pale moonlight, that Scootaloo decided that the golden voice would remain a phantom. From that point on, Scootaloo's ears were her own to use as she saw fit. Everything that anypony said to her would be a lie, so long as it was encouraging the filly outside of her and not recognizing the blossoming, audacious mare within. She was not about to let herself die—not from starvation or cold—not until she had a chance to test this new and burning determination, to see if it had the same permanence and tenacity as the impossibly bright smile that had dragged her emaciated body to this point.
Scootaloo was so engrossed in this manifest destiny that she was only remotely aware of the warmth when it started to wash over her features. Her ears twitched and her violet eyes fluttered open. The same morning sun that kissed her outside of Manehattan was bathing her once more, only this time it was a deluge of righteous heat, for with the death of night came a glorious revelation.
East, just beyond the band of trees in front of her, beneath the hill, encompassed in a forking riverbank, was her heavenly destination, her dream come true: Ponyville.
Scootaloo exhaled with trickling tears of joy. She had arrived home. As the rays of the morning sun danced between the tree branches, she crawled out from underneath the blanket, like a miraculous butterfly emerging from a partially-crushed cocoon. Her orange coat glistened in the burning dawn, and she was enraptured to discover that the same frost that had blistered her overnight had transformed into the crisp, twinkling dew of her dreams.
The little pegasus sat down on her haunches, basking in the sight of a promising horizon, of row after row of golden thatched rooftops burning like a glorious parade in her honor. She rediscovered her smile, for she had just been rejoined with her past. Only this time, all of the bitter shades of death and loneliness in between then and now had melted away, as if they had never happened to begin with. Scootaloo decided that this was all for the better, and she embraced this new life, this new identity, this new foalish pegasus being reflected across the dew-laden grass before her. She consumed it with an otherworldly vigor that not only dared to do the impossible, but had accomplished it so naturally within the span of two cross-country weeks.
Something twinkled in the corner of Scootaloo's violet eyes. She tilted her face up, and a smile blossomed in the morning mists The portrait had become complete; a rainbow had lit the edge of the horizon, framing the lengths of Ponyville before her like the gates of heaven. Scootaloo didn't need a more promising sign than that. She only had bright days to look forward to, lonely or not, and she anticipated them with every fiber of her being.
A quivering orange hoof hung a smudged shard of Cloudsdalian glass off a metal hook embedded into the rock wall of a claustrophobic cave. Shakily, the same hoof rose to the glossy surface and stroked several concentric circles, wiping the soot and grime away. The reflection of a nine-year-old foal came into focus. The violet-eyed pegasus looked at herself, trembling, her lips parting as she leaned in to examine her reflection, almost startled to find so many bruises and bloodstains across her young face.
There was a shrieking sound from beyond the dull walls of the place. The filly's reflection gasped, glancing over her twitching wings as several animalistic cries joined the great cacophony beyond the torchlit hovel that sheltered her. The world had become an echoing well of thunder, cataclysmic tremors, and monstrous banshee screams. The pegasus' nicked ears twitched, trying to make sense out of the many chaotic sounds of the apocalypse raging blindly outside.
She gulped hard, her shivers intensifying as the shrill shrieks multiplied, wafting closer to the camouflaged entrance of her improvised hovel. There was an undeniable hunger in the creatures' wayward cries; they thirsted for her. She knew this, and she shuddered at what she had to do next.
With a quivering lip, she glanced once more at her reflection in the scavenged shard. Gulping a lump down her throat, her eyelids moistening, she leaned in closer to the glass and raised a metal piece of shrapnel that she had pilfered from the world outside. Tilting her neck to the side, she exposed a long lock of pink mane hair, gave it one last forlorn look, and swiftly sliced the lengths of the pastel follicles away. Alone with her shivers in the dancing torchlight, Scootaloo dutifully scalped herself clean, removing the scent of ponydom from her body.
Two days later, the shrieking noises had died down outside. A gentle roar of distant thunder permeated the ashen landscape. Somewhere—in one tiny, frost-blighted ditch out of a million more just like it—a patch of white snow shook loose. A panel of metal shingles swung free in the naked air. A tiny, orange pegasus poked her freshly-shaved head out from a dark hovel dug out of a mound of ruptured, Equestrian earth. Biting her lip pensively, Scootaloo scanned the nearby landscape. She was quietly pleased to find the area devoid of any suspicious movement. She spent the better part of ten minutes observing her surroundings, until she was finally, finally satisfied that the coast was clear.
She dashed back into the hovel with a single breath. Less than a minute later, she re-emerged with a tattered satchel hanging off of each blank flank. With evident trepidation, she trotted one hoof after another until she was completely outside of her hidden habitat. Giving the landscape another look-see, she swung around and slid the metal door shut. After tossing a camouflaging blanket of snow over the secret hiding spot, she spun around and—panting frightfully—broke into a nervous canter across the shattered landscape of the Equestrian Wasteland.
Scootaloo's body was a tiny orange dot in the middle of snow-laden desolation. At a wide glance, the surrounding vista had been pockmarked with black, smoldering craters and several scattered chunks of ivory debris, forming the grand miasma that was the outer ruins of fallen Cloudsdale. Every dozen meters or so, a pillar of sky marble penetrated the earth, followed by a burning plume of flame enshrouding an otherworldly shard of fallen stone. A deep fog floated over the landscape, as the many bits of sky marble burst from within, filling the air with dense, compressed steam.
Above the hovering haze of pale mist, the gray sky was blemished with a perpetual orange hue. It had been two weeks since the Cataclysm, and all of Equestria was still burning. Endless flames to the southwest filled the air with a deep black soot, billowing plumes of obsidian above the lengths of the Everfree Forest. Blazes dotted the dark outlines of the distant Canterlotlian mountains to the east, adding to the holocaustal glow of the sundered planet.
All of this was pierced with a deep thunder, as several burning streaks of light surged into being overhead. Moonrocks were falling ceaselessly from the heavens, filling the sky with hot comet-trails that bled into a bloodsoaked crimson, almost drowning out the dreary twilight above. There was no sun to illuminate this nightmare. Hour by hour, the world shook as yet another shard of the exploded moon landed far too close for comfort, sending more tremors through the battered surface of the world.
Through all of this, Scootaloo nervously ran, scampered, stumbled and fled. She hid under every rock outcropping she could find, hyperventilating as her wide, pulsing eyes took in the burning desolation around her. Between the curtains of snow and soot, one or two conspicuously large flakes of ash would find her, landing on her coat. She gasped and brushed the offending slivers off of her, swallowing a lump down her throat, for she knew what it was made out of. She knew what it all was made out of. The only way to keep herself from breaking down was to keep moving.
Watching her flank, taking in the environment with frightful, darting eyes, the little pegasus did just that...
A huge crash of thunder boomed across the dead world. Scootaloo froze on top of a hill of doughy earth to glance over her shoulder. The shaven filly saw a distant cloud of flame and plasma erupting several kilometers away where a giant moonrock had evidently struck the Equestrian Valley far to the south. She gulped and performed a mental calculation, comparing the visual nature of the collision from how long ago she had heard its sound. She judged that the landing was no closer than any of the other recent impacts, despite the dramatic sight.
Gulping, she pushed the apocalyptic image away and turned around to face another one. Before her, at the base of the hill, the ruins of a Cloudsdalian rainbow factory stretched in open view. Many of the sky marble structures were intact, and they glistened in the red glow of the burning sky. Cinching the two satchels on her flanks, she scampered down the snow-pelted hill and eagerly galloped into the thick of the wreckage.
“Hello?! Somepony? Anypony?”
Her voice echoed against the precariously-leaning, ivory pillars of the place. Loud groaning sounds filled the hollowed expanse as the weight of the structure threatened to buckle in on itself at any moment. Undaunted, the shivering filly trotted lonesomely through the center of the crumpled factory, her breaths fogging in the air that was already dancing with soot and ash.
“Please! Just shout if you can hear me!” Scootaloo panted, glancing left and right, gulping hard as her trembling voice reached more and more desperate octaves. “Anypony?! Is anypony there? Hello?!”
She trotted past several golden basins lying on their sides, cracked and fissured in a dozen places. An endless stream of cold, dull-colored liquid trickled from every structure. Long black poles with stirring nets affixed to their ends lay in splintery bits across random spaces of open sky marble.
“Hello?!” Scootaloo's teeth were chattering at this point. She huddled herself next to an overturned rack of shattered glass jars, all of them empty. “If you can hear me, you're not alone! I survived and I found a safe place to stay—!”
There was an explosion of steam. The sky marble composing one of the ivory pillars had lost is structural integrity, and a billowing fountain of mist filled the entirety of the collapsed pegasus construction. Scootaloo shrieked, coughed and sputtered for a solid breath, then ran out of the factory on four stumbling hooves. Once outside, she slumped to her chest—clutching the burned earth with twitching hooves. As the thick of the steam cleared, she regained her breath, wincing. Through tearing eyes, she squinted to see a miraculous throng of charred grass wilting directly in front of her. Instantly, the pony's stomach churned, a violently loud thing. Biting her lip, she hesitantly lowered her mouth to the thin brown blades. She took one bite, and instantly spat out the brittle, burnt material.
Murmuring to herself, she stood up on wobbly legs, gave the steaming factory one last, helpless look, and trotted towards even more wreckage with a lonesome breath.
“Hello?!”
Scootaloo's voice was almost muted from the thunderous roar of burning Equestria and the dozens upon dozens of impacting moonrocks flashing across the crimson horizon beyond. Her tiny body strolled down an eerily preserved city square of Cloudsdale. Upon landing, the once-suspended block of urbanscape had folded in on itself at a thirty-degree angle, so that the courtyard resembled a bent, gray croissant in the middle of the Wasteland.
“H-Hello?!”
Scootaloo glanced left and right, spotting the many shattered storefronts, peering into the many hollow buildings with caved-in roofs of sky marble. With each passing minute, her violet eyes glossed over more and more. She bit her lip under a petrifying cloud of panic. Her freshly-shaved pink stubble stood on end as she ducked into a half-crumbled store, her tiny hooves stepping nervously over shards of broken glass and dilapidated plaster.
She shuffled to a stop, her body shivering in the bands of scattered orange light from the burning Wasteland outside. Her next breath was a muffled thing, bleeding defeatedly out her numb lips.
“Is anypony there...?”
After a deep sigh, Scootaloo let her violet eyes drift towards the length of the floor. Amongst the wreckage of the store, she saw... things, tiny, seemingly insignificant, utilitarian things. She saw nick-nacks, corkscrews, pocketknives, bottlecaps, loose springs, metal screws, and more. She saw sudden and inexplicable tools where—beforehand—there was nothing even remotely noteworthy.
In a firm breath, the little survivor knelt down, opened one of her satchels, and began pensively—but dutifully—collecting whatever she could get her hooves on.
Under the broken wings of a Princess Nebula statue, Scootaloo struggled, grunted, and finally overturned a pegasus chariot. Several broken bits of brass had fallen loose from the carriage. Many of these bore sharp, pointed edges that glinted in the orange hue of the apocalyptic deathscape.
Scootaloo ripped the upholstery out from the bottom of the chariot. Carefully, she bundled the sharp brass bits like a cluster of knives, wrapping the fabric around them five complete times before safely depositing them into her satchels. She then proceeded to yank the loosest of the chariot's wheels free from the vehicle. The bolts and fasteners fell free. She collected these along with a few wooden spokes from the structure. Once she had successfully skeletonized what she could of the chariot, she adjusted the weight of the bags along her flank, and trotted off for the next cluster of ruins.
Inside a snowflake factory that had landed sideways, Scootaloo climbed marble shelf after shelf, grunting with the effort, twitching her wings as she reached for one intact glass jar after another. These containers, she slid into her bags before hopping down, navigating a pile of smoldering debris, and investigating another rack of random tools.
Once done, she crawled through a tiny hole and slid her way into an upside down shop full of dangling, foalish marionette puppets. Unphased by the eerie sights, she climbed her way to the back of the collapsed Cloudsdalian toy store and snuck into the stockroom, where she found several measuring tools, three cutting knives, and—to her delight—a working compass.
The magnetic needle on the device guided her north towards where a wide swath in the wreckage had opened before her. Trotting up to the edge of a sudden cliff, she gasped and found out why. Gazing with wide, violet eyes, Scootaloo discovered an enormous crater—several kilometers wide—that had opened up in the middle of the Equestrian landscape. Clutching an ivory pillar, she bravely tilted forward and looked straight down. The world jutted open beneath her like a sudden esophagus, and the walls of the inexplicable pit were filled with chunks of sky marble and a cyclonic assortment of unnatural waterfalls spilling down into the black depths of it.
Scootaloo realized that the bulk of Cloudsdale had fallen into the landscape before her, and the collective weight of the once-hovering city had bored a gigantic hole in the flesh of Equestria. How deep this gigantic chasm was, the orange filly had no clue. From simply gazing at the casastrophic site, she had no doubt that the entirety of the pit was filled to the brim with the densest wreckage of Cloudsdale she had witnessed thus far. All she had explored prior to now was just the outer ruins of the pegasi's city. This crater before her was the inner ruins, and if there was anything—or anypony—to be found, they would undoubtedly be in there.
The orange filly bit her lip. Her tiny, flightless wings twitched fearfully, hesitantly. In a wise breath, she stepped backwards from the sudden, deathly dip in the landscape, turned about-face, and trotted back in the direction from which she came, all the while trusting the compass, her only friend.
Scootaloo's hooves splashed in a shallow current of liquid rippling downhill as she ascended a solid slope of fallen skymarble. She judged that the many chunks of vaporous ruins were still condensing, and the coalescing water from the whole mess was forming a collective stream that fell down into the gigantic pit that she had just discovered.
Unfazed, the pony walked up the slope of the fallen city district and glanced every which way. Random storefronts smoldered from endless flames burning within. Others were bathed in rising white mist as the sky marble dissipated underneath their crumbling foundation. The air was a mixture of black soot and ghostly white gas from this absurd contrast.
Navigating the outer ruins, the filly paused—gasping—to see a collapsed restaurant resting beyond a shattered water fountain. Her hooves plodded through the thin, wet river. She galloped desperately in through the bowed doorway and nearly collapsed inside the interior. Breathlessly, she glanced around, her eyes twitching in last-second surprise. She had caught sight of the kitchen beyond a charred serving counter. Hopping briskly over the structure, her satchels dangling at her side, she slid on her knees before a collapsed array of containers and feverishly flung them open, one clattering lid at a time.
Scootaloo practically shrieked with joy as she found a jar full of preserved daisies. The flower petals had fallen loose and the stalks were beginning to bend into brown strings, but none of that mattered as soon as she had crammed the vegetation deep into her equine mouth. The bites were soggy and pathetic sensations, but they were heavenly nonetheless. The stuff was edible. The stuff was food. Scootaloo was eating.
She scarfed as much as she could. Leaves were fluttering out of her chomping jaws, but she didn't care. She opened jar after jar, flinging half of the contents into her mouth and the other half into her satchel. How she stored this amazing bounty wasn't nearly as important as how much of it she could acquire. Scrambling on all fours, she slid across the kitchen floor, uncovering cans of soup, a bag of oats, a jar of flour, loaves of bread, a half-decayed pony skull—
“Aaaugh!” Scootaloo wailed and flew back, slamming herself up against a metal cabinet with a bang and covering her mouth with a pair of shivering hooves. A metal pot slowly rattled to a stop beside her. The filly's violet irises shrunk into pinpricks inside their twitching sockets as she sat—petrified and hyperventilating—staring at the deathly grimace glancing back at her.
It was the head of a pegasus stallion—half of its flesh hanging off the skeleton—the other half reduced to powdery dust that was blowing away from the air that the orange filly had suddenly exposed it to. A great black hollow formed in the center of the calcium frame, through which the twitching pegasus could very clearly make out meaty cartilage and spongy brain matter.
The quivering filly slid away from the corpse, her face wilting, until a freshly chewed daisy petal spilled from her lips, followed by another, followed by a thick dribble of bile, followed by an ocean of vomit as she keeled over in the corner of the kitchen—shrinking away from the odorous remains—spilling loose the first decent meal she had scavenged in days. Her retching was only punctuated by a random sob or two as she fought an uphill battle against giving the corpse another glance... ultimately losing, until her tears blinded her to the horror.
On wobbling limbs, Scootaloo trotted away from the restaurant, her satchels twice as heavy as her stomach was empty. There was no appetite that could satiate the aching pit in her stomach. She put the thought of it into the darkest recesses of her mind as she put the sight of another crumbling building in the forefront of her vision. Limping forward, she looked for a way to enter the building, when her ears suddenly pricked. She froze in place, for the distant thunder of the burning Wasteland was suddenly... not so distant.
In a frightful breath, she glanced over her shaved mane. She gasped to see a huge plume of burning orange light billowing straight towards her location. A chunk of moonrock was coming in fast. The air heated up. The river of trickling Cloudsdalian water started to form steam. Frantically, Scootaloo galloped straight towards the building ahead and leaped through the nearest windowframe she could find.
The world had become a deafening scream by the time she scurried inside and curled up against a wall. She braced for anything and everything, expecting her body to be crushed to a smoldering pile of meat at any instant. Instead, the sheer weight of the moonrock pulled it far ahead. It wasn't until ten seconds later that the impact transpired, and when it did it was no less thunderous than she had expected. The building rattled over her quivering body. Chunks of debris fell down in a rain of steam and ash. However, the ivory structure had remained intact. To Scootaloo's undeniable luck, it was another part of the outer ruins of Cloudsdale that got reduced to a crater, and not her location.
She glanced up, trembling, and realized that she was inside a lopsided library. Rows upon rows of shelves had collapsed in on each other like several sandwiches. Shreds of paper filled the extremities of the dusty place. For the first time in two lonesome weeks, Scootaloo thought of Twilight Sparkle.
Suddenly, something slapped against her shaved head. Scootaloo's impulse to shriek was only slightly overwhelmed by her impulse to curse. Grunting, she rubbed her head and glanced down at the offensive object. She saw a thick brown tome; it had evidently fallen off a shelf and bounced off her skull. On a curious whim, she opened the thing, only to find that every single page was blank. Unenthused, she contemplated tossing the thing away into a corner of the dilapidated place. For some reason, however, she stifled such an impulse, and instead stuck the thick, empty book into one of her satchels.
Getting up, rebalancing herself on numb limbs, the tiny pegasus marched out of the library and into a brave new world of soot and ash from the fresh moon crater. With the compass as her guide, she marched herself through the obscurity and trotted her way home.
Scootaloo sat in the middle of her torchlit hovel, laying out her many fresh tools before her, separating things in order of importance and necessity. As the world howled and thundered outside, she rummaged through her newly scavenged things with an invigorated spirit, engrossing herself in stockpiling the many nick-nacks into their appropriated corners.
All the while, the brown tome rested on the edge of a half-shattered arcane vault dredged from the wreckage of the Cloudsdalian airship. Scootaloo glanced at it briefly, but with disinterest, instead occupying herself with finding a spot to store her foodstuffs and setting upon a plan for rationing what little she had to consume for the next foreseeable... month? Year? Decade? Lifetime?
The last filly took a deep breath, briefly losing track of what she was doing... what she was thinking... what she was contemplating, until her hoof grasped ahold of one item she hadn't realized she had dropped into her satchel. It was a jar full of pens, and many of them full of ink.
Blinking, shifting nervously, she glanced back at the torchlit sliver of arcane metal atop which the blank book rested. She glanced once more at the many pens, took a brave breath, and pulled one of the many writing tools out.
Squatting on a bed of bundled, patchwork fabric in the corner of the cave, warmed by two glowing torches, the lonely pegasus spread the book in her lap. She bent over and fitted a pen between her teeth. The last time she ever remembered scribbling anything down was one chaotic week when she tried her hoof at songwriting. It was hardly a successful endeavor, and she couldn't pretend to expect anything to come of this.
But the need to produce something, anything, was there. She followed it, like a creature follows the instinct to live, in spite of the inherent absurdity of it all. Slowly, Scootaloo wrote:
Hello.
My name is Scootaloo. I am nine years old. At least I think I am. Something bad has happened. Many ponies have died. Cloudsdale fell and most of Equestria is on fire. I do not know why.
“Hello? Anypony?”
Scootaloo stood atop a hill. Moonrocks fell in bright orange streams on all sides of her. The world burned in indifference as she explored the latest wreckage she had discovered, this time armed with more than just a compass. She had bundled several bands of brown canvas around her upper and lower limbs, forming a very flexible armor that also insulated her from the pelting snow and ash. Sheathed into a pocket along her right forelimb was a sharp metal shiv that once belonged to a chariot.
“Is anypony there?! I'm all alone! Can you hear me?”
She panted and traversed crumbled block after block of collapsed Cloudsdalian sky marble, looking for signs of life, finding nothing but flame-dancing bands of her own lonesome shadow.
I am alive. I am alone. I am looking for ponies. I need help. There are scary things outside my hiding place. I think they want to eat me.
Scootaloo trembled. Scootaloo shivered. She flattened her flightless wings against a tiny alcove of rock and clutched the metal shiv to her chest. She had a canvas mask enshrouding her mouth, muffling her panting breath as her twitching eyes danced across the extremities of her sockets.
Above her, clawing across the top of the earthen outcropping, a body of pale leather sniffed and hissed at the air, detecting a faint scent of equine warmth. The creature's beady eyes darted across the burning, crimson horizon, and soon the monstrosity wasn't alone. Another abomination joined its side, then another, and another. Soon, an entire phalanx of trolls sauntered up to the top of the cliff-face just above where the frightened pegasus was hiding. The drooling creatures growled amongst themselves, until a frustrated series of blows were exchanged—splashing the air briefly with cold sweat and ink-dark blood. The monsters shrieked and whooped at each other like hyenas, before cackling devilishly and marching downhill... away from the lonesome filly.
Scootaloo gulped and clenched her eyes shut. Tears trickled down her cheek as she murmured breathlessly to Goddess Epona and ran a joyous hoof over her life-saving, shaved mane.
I have looked everywhere. Where Cloudsdale crashed into the ground, there are broken buildings and lots of junk, but there are no ponies. At least, there are no ponies who are alive.
Scootaloo's violet eyes were large, round saucers. Slowly, she pulled the canvas mask down from her mouth. A vaporous breath misted out of her as she sauntered forward—one trembling hoof after another—and entered an upside down temple that had fallen from the clouds.
In the scattered rays of snow-kissed twilight, dozens upon dozens of petrified pegasus bodies dangled, hanging from their wings off of shattered sky marble or skewered by the jagged teeth of broken pillars.
In a sickly halo of gray light, Scootaloo slumped numbly to her haunches, her body bathed in the drifting ashes of the dead equines. She gazed hopelessly up at them, murmuring a slew of unintelligible words as lonesome as her tears. Her only answer was a strobe of orange light as more moonrocks christened the dying world outside.
I saw a huge hole in the ground. It is a huge pit full of wreckage and falling water. Most of Cloudsdale is in that pit. Maybe there are surviving ponies there too.
Scootaloo stood on a mound of crumpled ivory. A cold, icy mist rose above her hooves as she wore a newly-woven assortment of canvas armor. She stared down a spyglass that she had scavenged from a fallen pegasus guard tower. The giant crater of Cloudsdale's inner ruins loomed far below her. The landscape roared from the collective waterfalls cascading inward from all edges of the gaping crater.
She studied a northwestern slope that descended gradually into the abyss. From her lofty perspective, it actually appeared climbable. Lowering the spyglass from her gaze, she took a deep breath, knelt down, and drew a map on a wide cloth sheet, plotting out a course for her to take. As what was once just an idea bled into an illustrated reality, her limbs started to shake from the sudden comprehension of what she was about to attempt.
I have to find other ponies. Something bad has happened to all of Equestria. I think even the whole world is in trouble. I can't survive on my own. I need help. I need to find somepony who can help me.
Scootaloo stood in the middle of her hovel, bundling up a thick coil of rope. She packaged this next to several woven satchels that she had combined to form an elaborate saddle, complete with metal shivs conjoined at just the right angles to resemble climbing gear. In the mdist of gathering her many things for the next day's brave sojourn, she paused, slumping against a spear she had carved out of rainbow factory nets.
She leaned her forehead against the dull weapon, clenching her eyes shut, stifling an urge to whimper that refused to go away. In the flickering dance of a dwindling torchlight, she sniffled, put the last of her things away, and crawled into the far corner for a nightless, moonless attempt at slumber.
Most of all, more than anything, I need to find Rainbow Dash. She will know what to do. She always knows what to do.
I need to find Rainbow Dash and I need to tell her “Thank you.” She saved my life.
If I should die soon, I need to write this so that somepony will know that I am here because of her.
Rainbow Dash, if it is you who finds this and I am dead, I want to thank you. Thank you for everything. I am doing my best to make you proud.
-End of entry
She tried. Scootaloo tried sleeping, but like so many things in her bitter decade of existence, what she asked for never came. She had to struggle for it.
So, into the thunderous ambiance of the apocalypse, Scootaloo struggled. Scootaloo searched for sleep, and in the midst of it—squeezing tears out of her eyes like so many a lonely night before—the filly fought, and lost. The shame of her defeat wasn't so painful, though, for in the climax of those sobs she squeaked forth a name that brought solace to the whole trembling debacle.
“Dashie...”
She whimpered and caved in on herself, curling up into a fetal position and hugging the last surviving colors of her dreams before they too faded away.
“Dashie... please c-come and find m-me...”
Scootaloo quivered and reached blindly for warmth...
...until the gentle rays of sunlight glistened across her copper coat. Reaching a hoof around a glass of ice water, Harmony raised the beverage to her lips, took a sweet sip, and exhaled blissfully into the salty breeze. Her wings flexed and unflexed as a pleasant smile graced her features, followed by a brief giggle. “Heehee... A girl could get used to this. Ahem.” She planted the glass back down onto the tabletop before her. “However, nothing lasts forever. Alas, my duties to the Canterlotlian Court are finished, and I must bid you both adieu.”
“You speak of your royal duties as if that's all you came here to do, Miss Harmony. And yet, you have accomplished so much more.” An earth pony with a creamy coat sat across from the pegasus. She spoke endearingly above the sound of crashing ocean waves, “Was it really stargazing that brought you here? Or was it fate?”
“Fate is only predictable to those who bind themselves to it.” Harmony smiled wide, her teeth showing. “I would think that the last few days have taught the two of you that, if nothing else.”
The mare blushed, hiding a shy face behind pink-and-blue bangs. “If the last few days have taught me anything, it's that truth is stranger than fiction.”
“I'd say!” A turquoise unicorn jutted into view, her face beaming under a fountain of gray-streaked hair. “We both elope on a cruise of the Eastern Shore, only to have some parasprite-sniffing jerk of a captain strand us on a desert island to fend for ourselves! Why, girl, if you hadn't dropped in to save our tails, I'd have sued that creep for every golden bit stuffed under his poop deck!”
“Yeah, well...” Harmony chuckled nervously, brushing a hoof in lazy circles across the tabletop where the three ponies sat on the rear patio of a hotel overlooking a sun-kissed beach resort. “I don't deserve all the thanks for getting the two of you off that island.” Seagulls cawed overhead while random ponies frolicked and jogged gleefully up and down the hot sand dunes behind her. “Most of the gratitude should be aimed Beachcomber's way. If it wasn't for her and her friends, the two of you would be sunburnt husks by now. I wouldn't be that much better off either.”
“Yeesh!” The unicorn rolled her orange eyes. “Yeah, so we owe Beachcomber's bosom buddies our thanks and all. But did they have to sing so freakin' much? I've got those dang musical notes stuck in my head!” She hissed and pointed at her golden lyre of a cutie mark for emphasis. “Music... stuck in my head! Do you realize how pitiful that is?”
“I'd say it was worth it.” The earth pony winked a blue eye. “If nothing else, we were treated to the most fantastic underwater dance number I've ever seen.”
“You mean the only underwater dance number you've ever seen,” her turquoise companion retorted. “It was slightly bearable for the first bubbling hour or so. But by the time that purple sea serpent joined in with his falsetto, I wanted nothing more than to take a baseball hat to my horn.”
Harmony winced. “Yes, well, there are some sights and sounds that few mortals are blessed—or cursed—to witness. I'll reserve the word 'lucky' for this right here.” She smiled and leaned forward against the table. “In spite of all the bizarre ups and downs, I am very... very happy to have spent the last week with the two of you. Joy just shines when you're both around. I still can't believe you helped me with my mapping of the stars. That was so very generous of you.”
“Generous?” The earth pony blinked. “Darling, if you hadn't dropped in on our lives, we'd have more than sunstroke and seaponies to contend with. That egostistical ship captain was prepared to spread a bunch of seditious lies about the two of us when you dropped in and threatened to turn his career inside out for what he did to us.”
“Yeah, how did you get under his skin so quickly anyways?” the unicorn inquired with a curious blinking of her golden eyes.
Harmony shrugged. “Eh... I made him an offer he couldn't refuse.”
“It's...” The earth pony fidgeted, bashfully. “It's not often that we have random strangers come to our rescue, and all from the kindness of their hearts.”
“Well, Ms. Bon Bon, you've been through a lot.” Harmony smiled sweetly. “The way you two were stranded out in the middle of nowhere just sickened me. It was like kicking a good pony when she's down.”
“There've been tough times lately, for sure.” The cream-colored mare nodded. “Ever since our biggest clients from Dredgemane stopped ordering supplies from the novelty store, I've been having to scrimp just to get by the past month. Still, Lyra and I have been looking forward to this vacation for as long as either of us can afford to remember.”
“Darn tootin'.”
“Shhh! Will you let me speak?”
“Er... Eheheh... By all means.”
Bon Bon stifled a giggle and glanced back Harmony's way. “I knew that, no matter what the future may bring, our time here was going to be special. You can live an entire life of hardship, of ponies misunderstanding you or even treating you like you don't exist, but what matters is that you have one moment, one happy place that defines you, that you can always return to when the stress of existence gets too great...” She turned towards her companion and softly smiled. “...where you know that you'll never be alone.”
“Awwww...” The unicorn smirked back. “Love you too, ya little fluff ball.”
“What comes next for you two?” Harmony inquired. “Any plans after your... vacation plans?”
“Well, life won't be the same for us now, no matter how we look at it.” Bon Bon fiddled with a half-empty drink before her on the table, her blue eyes falling briefly. “When we get back to Ponyville, there will be no more hiding. Lyra and I decided on that long ago. We will have to deal bravely with an entire town full of ponies who have one typical, age-old opinion on...” She bit her lip nervously. “...on interracial matrimony.”
“And we all know what that opinion is.” Lyra rolled her eyes. “Yeesh! It's as if unicorns and earth ponies are doomed to explode upon contact.”
“Your courage is inspiring.” Harmony said. “If it wasn't, I wouldn't have been motivated to hang around as long as I have. If I may speak with some Canterlotlian wisdom...”
“You may try,” Lyra said, squinting at Harmony wryly.
The pegasus smiled. “Your Ponyvillean friends know you for the souls that you are. They know your gentleness, your kindness, and your generosity.” She lingered in mid-speech, her amber eyes pouring into the well of the past. She once again envisioned Ditzy holding her beloved child, a product of calamity and yet a bundle of joy all the same. “When you return home... when you return together, I have no doubt that they'll embrace you no differently. You'll be the same souls you've always been, only you'll be complete. That completeness is an inspiring thing, a spirit that can bridge so many intimidating abysses. You think that being accepted by your peers is impossible? Ms. Bon Bon, Ms. Lyra, you both have the power to move mountains. Everypony can make the impossible happen. All it takes is true commitment.”
Bon Bon bit her lip as a tear rolled down her cheek. “Oh, how I wish it was you who performed the ceremony and not that disgruntled captain...”
“Yeah, well...” Harmony chuckled and swirled her glass of water. “Her Majesty has invested me with many clerical duties, but none of them grant me the authority to do something so sweet and honorable. Still...” Her copper cheeks turned slightly rosy as she murmured in a girlish breath, “I never thought I would have been the maid-of-honor for anypony, even if it was last-second.” She gave a slightly embarassed giggle. “I'm not going to say that it was some friggin' dream come true...” She gazed at them with tender eyes. “But it was something close to it. I am honored, deeply honored.”
“Gah! Enough sap!” Lyra barked. “How about a toast? I hate to soggy up a beautiful, sunny day with misty eyes!” She reached her limb towards the cocktail in front of her. The unicorn's hoof hovered a bare centimeter before the glass, and yet she grunted and made strained expressions as if something was wrong. “Dang it... Come on... Why isn't this working?”
Bon Bon rolled her eyes. “Lyra, honey, we've talked about this.” She leaned over and pushed her companion's limb so that the crook of Lyra's hoof cradled the glass. “There, like that, darling.”
“Oh! But of course! Eheh...” Lyra let loose a drop of sweat. “Where I would be without you?”
“I shudder to think.”
“Ahem!” Lyra stood up and raised the cocktail drink high in the sunny beach air. “Here's to Harmony, pegasus extraordinaire! Never before was a deus ex machina so resplendently chivalrous and full of spunk!”
“Ugh, Lyra, honestly!” Bon Bon blushed for the umpteenth time before standing up and lifting her own glass. “Here's to a honeymoon that never ends, so long as our hearts are magical.” She smiled with a twinkle in her eye.
It was Harmony's turn. With a devilish smirk, she stood up and raised the glass in her copper grasp. “Here's to making the impossible happen.” She exhaled and gazed off into the salty air. “It is ever a labor of love.”
The three mares clinked their glasses together. After a mutual guzzle, they exhaled as one... until Lyra's belch punctuated the scene. A giggle was shared between the three, a pleasant chorus that pierced the roar of the sapphiric blue waves crashing behind them.
Harmony placed her glass down and performed a regal curtsey. “Well, ladies, goodbye, farewell, and amen.”
“And all that jazz,” Lyra droned. She leaned against Bon Bon with a smile aimed Harmony's way. “Try to relax, heroine. This was our vacation you dropped in on. Unless stargazing was your way of loosening up, I think you could stand to kick your horseshoes off and wiggle your toes in the wet surf.”
“'Toes'... Right...” Harmony gave the unicorn a cock-eyed glance. “Got it.” She cleared her throat and smirked at Bon Bon. “Try not to let her get too carried away.”
“Heeheehee...” Bon Bon nuzzled her companion and responded to the time traveler, “You know I'll fail.”
“Heh...” Harmony spread her wings, spun about, and soared skyward. The two ponies waved as the copper pegasus banked over the beach, twirled through the golden rays of the sun, and flew towards the far end of the six story hotel. Once she was out of sight of her anchor and the earth pony's loved one, she accelerated into a faster climb, barreling skyward as fast as her feathers could take her. The world twitched before the pegasus in a billowing curtain of emerald. Taking a deep breath, Harmony closed her eyes and calmly let the immutability of time take its course.
The world bled into a gigantic corridor of ghostly echoes as reverse-time pulled the mare back to the future. Her coat quivered from mane to tail as Harmony felt the layers of her soul-self peeling away one copper blanket at a time to expose her true flesh beneath.
Then something happened that broke the meditative tranquility of the moment. At first, it sounded like a low bass hum. Harmony briefly imagined that she had been bounced back to the shores of Dream Valley, for she was hearing the crashing of waves once more. However, the future scavenger never knew ocean waves for having a constant, thunderous vibration... something that shook her to the very core as if she was riding a wagon down an endless, bumpy slope of pebbles.
She couldn't help it. She fluttered her eyes open halfway between amber and scarlet. What she saw stole the breath from her incorporeal lungs. From beyond the refracting mirrors of numerous green hues, a dark copper shape was staring down at her. With heart-stopping pulses of awe, Harmony realized that this holy silhouette was moving towards her, crawling on gigantic, sinewy limbs that glistened with brass-horsehoes so immaculate that they could have been carved out of pure flame. The granite muscles of this being's frame flexed as it knelt down and tilted a dark, obscured face towards her. There was no discerning the shadow's facial features, for Harmony's startled mind had suddenly become reacquainted with her infinitesimal mortality.
She almost died the very moment the shadowy equine stretched a pair of copper wings out, majestically brimming with cogwheels, springs, and celestial spindles. The hum that filled the corridor morphed into a meticulous ticking sensation, as strong as a titanium heartbeat, perfect and immutable in its rhythmic precision. Before Harmony could even bother to comprehend the spaces between those beats, the green corridor bled away, and the noise softly coalesced into a flimsy fascimile of that radiant time-keeper. Rows upon rows of brass clocks were ticking across the lengths of the subterranean laboratory, and a thirty-three year old Scootaloo sat breathlessly in the midst of them like a long lost prophet to something that had come and gone, and still had yet to transpire.
“Ah, you're back, old friend. Fantastic timing.” Spike strolled nonchalantly past the alchemic circles the pegasus was sitting upon He shuffled a roll of parchment in his claws. “I've been working on my memoirs while waiting for you, and I must embarassingly admit that my literary expertise vastly pales in comparison to my scientific prowess. You're a well-read filly, Scootaloo. Tell me, is 'clamor' spelled with a 'b' or without it?”
“Uhm...” Scootaloo blinked numbly, the mechanically-winged shape still burned into her scarlets. She ran a hoof over her trembling face as a long mane of pink hair settled down from a magical wind, draping over her shoulders. The mare took a deep breath, then awoke to respond, “It... it depends on how you're using it. Are you describing a sound or a physical action?”
“I'm writing a humorous anecdote depicting this one time that I and my past self played a whelpish game of hide and seek with one another. There's a moment where I describe myself as having stumbled up a steep incline of Canterlotlian rocks.”
“Then you use a 'b' followed by 'e' and 'r'. 'Clamber'. But don't overuse the friggin' word, Spike. There are plenty of fish in the sea, and when I say 'fish' I mean 'verbs'.”
“Ah. Much thanks, old friend.”
“Seriously, Spike. You're three hundred years old. Couldn't you have scavenged a thesaurus during one of your many reverse-time expeditions?”
Her large, draconian companion smiled with iron jaws. “And relinquish myself of the ease of depending on such a gracious editor as yourself?”
“You're writing for a dead world, Spike. You could pick phrases out of a hat and slap them together into a tome that's large enough to fill the vault of Whinniepeg, and still—by sheer existence—it would become a masterpiece.”
“Your nihilism, as always, has a sprinkle of charm to it, dear child. I do not know about you, but I intend to leave more for this world than a restored sun and moon as a testimony to our existence.”
“Yeah...” Scootaloo exhaled and slicked her long, pink hair back with a shaking hoof. “More power to ya.”
Spike glanced narrowly at her sudden shivers. His emerald eyeslits glistened. “Scootaloo, did you have a... traumatizing experience?”
“Oh. H-Hardly, Spike.” She smiled softly at him, her scarlets sparkling. “Those were about the sweetest ponies I've ever had the grace of spending time with. Bon Bon is a complete angel, and Lyra is an absolute hoot... even if she says things from time to time that'd make Pinkie Pie's head spin.”
“And were you successful in hunting down the constellations?”
“Absolutely!” Scootaloo giggled and pointed towards a wide banner hanging across the far wall of the subterranean laboratory, obscuring the burnt diagram of the Cataclysmic time-line behind it. A gigantic map of the Equestrian night sky had been built in several pieces, consisting of conjoined sheets of journal papers taped together to form a grand mosaic illuminated by purple manalight. A large chunk was still missing along the lower right side of the rough diorama, but the overall design depicted a thick cluster of stars in the center, drowning out the rest of the specks. “It was just like with Braeburn at Appleloosa and Dr. Whooves in Stalliongrad. I touched down inconspicuously—well, more or less—and swiftly got acquainted. I lent a hoof as a good 'Canterlotlian Clerk' and, in return, I was granted a perfect view of the night sky. Appleloosa gave me a northeast glance at the constellations while Stalliongrad filled in the southwest cluster. Now, thanks to Lyra and Bon Bon, I've got another map to go pick up, and it should shed some light on the night sky as seen from Dream Valley, twenty-five years ago.”
“Astonishing!” Spike remarked, his green headcrests perking curiously. “Dream Valley! Did you chance upon any—”
“I do not want to talk about seaponies.” Scootaloo grunted. “Not now. Not ever.”
“Very well. My memoirs have enough tangents as it is.”
“Just how much of your writing involves me, Spike?” Scootaloo asked with a curious eyebrow raised.
He smirked at her, coughing up some green fumes. “Rest assured, old friend, there are quite a few chapters dedicated to the nature of your chronological exploits.”
“Considering you're over three centuries old, I don't know if that should make me feel flattered or awkward.”
“Let us venture to say a daring hybrid of both, for posterity's sake.”
“Yeah, sure, why not.” Scootaloo said. A pale sheen returned to her brown features as she trembled once more, gulped, and murmured, “Uhm... Spike?”
“Hmmm?” The dragon stood in the corner, scribbling along a scroll of parchment.
“What were Princess Entropa's wings made out of?”
“Ohhhh...” The dragon's nostrils flared in thought. “That is a question lost to the conjecture of ages, dear child. Not even Starswirl the Bearded lived long enough to write down that glorious bit of information. I suppose the only souls capable of regaling history on such a topic would have been Princess Celestia and Princess Luna, and you've had access to their journals, not me.”
“I...” Scootaloo bit her lip. “I think I may have j-just seen her...”
Spike glanced up from his parchment.
“Just now...” the last pony emphasized. “While coming back from my anchorage to Bon Bon. I believe she appeared before me.”
“Hmmm...” The draconian elder merely uttered, “I was wondering when this would happen.”
Scootaloo's jaw dropped. “Spike...” She trotted towards him, gazing up with bright scarlet eyes. “You anticipated that she would show up?”
“Scootaloo, Princess Entropa hasn't 'shown up' to anypony. Unlike her other Alicorn sisters, she is more than a purveyor of her element; she is the essence of it. Time is immutable because Princess Entropa is immutable, for Princess Entropa is the very fabric of time itself.”
“But... I saw her.” Scootaloo gulped and pointed ceilingward as if gesturing towards an invisible cloud of “time-ness” above the two experimenters. “I had never seen her before. I could have sworn that she was looking at me.”
“And perhaps she was looking at you, child.”
“But I thought you just said—?”
“Has it occurred to you that she's always been watching you? Observing you?” Spike relaxed on his haunches and lowered his purple-scaled snout so that it was level with the last pony. “Meanwhile, it's been you who have gotten more and more acclimated with the substance of time and reverse-time.”
“She's seen what I've been doing this whole time?” Scootaloo blinked. “These last four months that we've been performing this crazy crusade for the Sun and Moon?”
Spike let loose a deep, bass chuckle. Fumes of green smoke filtered up to the ceiling as he coughed, steadied the violet pendant hanging around his neck, and then gently stroked the pony's pink mane. “Dear friend, Princess Entropa sees all. That is how it's always been and how it always will be. You once asked me why it is that the Goddess of Time never interceded on behalf of the Cataclysm. The truth is asimple as much as it is somber. She knew it would happen the very moment she was foaled into this universe, even before the very Sundering of Consus. She was powerless to do anything about it, for to break the immutability of her essence would eliminate her very power over it. It is something that is hard for mortals like you or I to wrap our fragile minds around, but the easiest way to think of it is that Entropa is the eternal observer of the universe.”
“An observer...” Scootaloo murmured. Her nostrils flared as she stared defeatedly into a far corner of the underground laboratory. “...just like her avatar.”
The purple dragon smiled gently. “Yes. Just like her avatar.” He stood up straight on iron limbs. “And in speaking of her avatar, it can only be natural that she is curious of this blissful moment in a not-so-blissful history, when a mere mortal would happen to be donning her very skin—her very coat—to travel back and forth on the streams of her glorious essence.”
“Is she...” Scootaloo fidgeted. “Is she jealous of me, Spike?”
“That depends, child. How can one be jealous if one lacks the ability—or will—to possess an ego?” He chuckled fumedly. “I would say she's just curious. That's all.”
Scootaloo sighed. “You're right, as always, Spike.”
“I am neither right nor wrong, old friend. I am merely educated. And now you are too.” He leaned his head to the side with an iron smirk. “Does this in any way affect our ever-daunting mission at hand?”
“Heh heh heh... 'hand'...”
“What is so amusing, all of the sudden?”
Scootaloo waved a hoof. “Nothing. Just thinking about Lyra is all...”
“You sound like you've had a rather cheerful time jump for once. Nevertheless, it had to have been a tiresome experience. Perhaps some rest is in order.”
“Maybe there'll be a chance for that later, Spike. Not all of us have the entire fabric of time to sit back and relax.” Scootaloo hopped over to a laboratory table and briskly strapped a leather saddlebag over her body. “But right now, I must be going.”
“And where to, in such a hurry?”
“Dream Valley.” She glanced up and sassily tossed her pink mane behind her brown neck. “I've got the last bit of the sky to pick up.”
A brown hoof ran an invisible circle across a map before circling a tiny splotch of land that bordered an eastern seaboard. Scootaloo raised the pull-down map back to the roof of the Harmony, revealing a grotesque horizon of black sludge beyond the cockpit windows. A veritable ocean of obsidian sediment loomed immensely into view beyond the bow of the aircraft. Scootaloo grasped her hooves around the levers affixed beside her cockpit and steered her zeppelin down towards the last remaining length of gray desolation before the soupy blackness took over.
A cluster of shattered beachfront buildings came into focus as the Harmony lowerd to sea-level. Scootaloo slowed her descent, piloted the vehicle towards a stalk of sundered concrete support pillars, and anchored the craft to them through the use of two steam-powered claws.
Gathering her belongings, the last pony exited the aircraft and plodded her lonesome way towards the largest of the hotel structures... or at least what remained of them. Her target had collapsed in on itself, the upper five stories having caved-in on the bottom floor in a chaotic fashion.
“Whew.” Scootaloo whistled. “Good thing I put the crap in the hotel's foundation.” She smirked to herself, navigated a cluster of dilapidated, overturned carriages, and slid through the sundered front entrance of the crumbling structure.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
“Nnnngh!”
Scootaloo pried a large metal bar into the floor of the rubble-strewn hotel lobby behind a wooden desk. A gigantic concrete tile panel—one of several dozen more like it—peeled free with a groan. The last pony wheezed with the effort of removing the obstruction, cursing her Entropan double for not anticipating the degree to which her physical body would have to strain in uncovering the capsule left behind for her future self.
“Hnnnkkkt-Agh! There...”
She exhaled and slumped against the wall with relief as the panel finally slid free. She panted, panted, and giggled pathetically to herself. Dropping the metal bar to the lobby floor with a clang, she knelt down on her haunches and reached into the dusty crawlspace beneath the concrete paneling. Scootaloo licked her lips with the effort, blindly hoofing around for a spell. Finally, she felt what she had come there for.
With a victorious grin, she pulled her limb back up, cradling a long ivory seashell. The natural object was almost cylindrical, and its alabaster surface had been tainted with the mildew and soot of ages. Gnawing on her bottom lip, Scootaloo slid her hoof up along the stalk of the thing until she found a crease. She twisted at this spot, and the makeshift container snapped open. Pulling the “lid” off, Scootaloo turned the entire thing over and gave it a shake, her heartbeat briefly stopping.
Then, in immaculate grace, a rolled-up sheet of parchment effortlessly fell out of the elongated seashell. It had been perfectly perserved throughout the decades. Scootaloo exhaled with joy as she unrolled the scroll and held before her goggles an elaborate sketch of the Equestrian night sky as seen from the southeast continental seaboard.
“Harmony, you adorkable astronomer, you,” Scootaloo murmured to herself. With a soft grin, she rolled the parchment back up, sealed it inside the seashell, and stuck the whole thing inside her saddlebag. “Absolutely friggin' textbook.”
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Scootaloo layed the entire seashell on a shelf between two clusters of books. With gentle hooves, she closed the locker doors shut and spoke into the rune, “W'nyhhm.” The container of scavenged literature locked shut as the moonrock glowed in a purple haze.
Sliding her copper goggles up to her pink bangs, Scootaloo turned and walked across the cabin of the Harmony. She approached her workbench, above which many random objects of miscellany had been clustered together over the past several weeks. Humming to herself, she bore a soft smile as she reached into her bag and produced several new items, adding them to the assortment of mementos. She placed a cocktail glass atop a shelf, along with a hotel lobby bell, a pile of miraculously preserved sand dollars, and—last but not least—something she had pilfered from the novelty shop at Ponyville, but only now had a reason for putting up somewhere to be displayed. It was a golden instrument, a lyre with frayed strings, and she hung it daintily above the many tiny objects extracted from the beachfront ruins.
Taking a deep breath, the last pony stood back and stared across the wall of apocalyptic memorabilia. Suntrot's foalish sketch hung on the wall above a green beret and the folded arcanium weave of an entire Royal Grand Biv outfit, complete with ruby goggles and rusted cloak-blades. To the side of this was a cowboy hat, an apple bucket, a railroad track spike, and an elaborate buffalo headdress. Finally, next to this display was an array of military medals, a brick taken from the Great Wall of Stalliongrad, a golden pocketwatch, and a slender object that vaguely resembled a complicated screwdriver.
Scootaloo's smile was a placid yet bittersweet thing. She leaned her head to the side and ran a hoof through the pink lengths of her mane. Her eyes twitched upon a sheen of light in the amber glow of the ship's boiler. She glanced to the side. From a meter away, she saw her reflection staring back at her across a perfectly reflective shard of Cloudsdalian glass hanging above the workbench. The scarlet eyes that looked back at her suddenly seemed less jaded, as if a touch of violet had come back to refill them. She felt a sore pit in her throat, but for some reason she didn't detest this sensation.
Turning about, Scootaloo almost hopped back into her cockpit, when her gaze was once again stolen by the great, inky blackness lingering beyond the anchored vessel's windshield. Her eyes locked onto the spot where the gray desolation met the deathly sea of opaque sludge. The pegasus' wings twitched involuntarily, and her nostrils flared for the few lingering seconds it took to vainly fight her next impulse.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Petrified mounds of sand wafted up like so much ash and soot as the lone pony plodded towards the edge of the shore. Scootaloo walked past the beachfront shells of crumbling hotels, approaching the great, dead ocean. She glanced to her right and saw a collapsed pile of wood, the remains of a patio replete with wooden tables. She looked to her left and saw the remains of a sea vessel stranded in two sundered halves, its rusted contents spilling out onto barren rock and shoals.
Looking down, Scootaloo solemnly found her hooves navigating a sudden minefield of brittle bones. Several mammalian skeletons were lying on either side of her, their equine skulls attached to bulbous ribcages affixed with cartilaginous flippers. Curtains of white dust billowed over their rickety spines and hollow tails. The bones doubled, tripled, and quadrupled in thickness until Scootaloo could walk no further without practically tripping over the impenetrable carpet of corpses. Before her—bordering the edge of the ocean like a powdery layer of residue—was a solid line of calcified death that stretched north and south as far as the seaboard horizon could be seen.
Beyond the line of ash-white refuse, an even filthier sight stretched eastward into infinity. What was once a vast blue ocean of crashing waves had become a frozen soup of jet-black sludge. If there was any water left to the seas of Equestria, one could not tell from a distant glance. Something magically horrid in the Cataclysm had long ago dredged the dead matter of all the world's oceans up to the surface, so that a blanket of molasses-thick, necrotic ooze lingered in perpetual viscosity. The deathly black gunk was randomly dotted here and there with a throng of bones, a bloated corpse, or a jagged fossil, as hundreds upon thousands of sea creatures found their final resting places on the top of the blighted ocean.
The twilight bathed this deathscape in a gray funeral light, christening the lengths of it with white snow. Scootaloo had never said it out loud, nor had she the courage to write it in her journals, but she sometimes found a gentle beauty in the endless desolation that encompassed her life, or graced her vision like this. Just like Spike's memoirs, the Wasteland had little to no audience, so it all might as well have been a masterpiece. Perhaps, though, it was just that the thirty-three year old mare had come to a point when all that was horrible became all that was beautiful, in that it had taken her two and a half decades to realize that they were both the very same thing.
Taking a deep breath, Scootaloo glanced aside and found a rickety wooden beach chair that—for better or for worse—had survived the flames of the Cataclysm. Marching over several brittle skeletons, she lowered herself in the seat, sat in the middle of a sea of corpses, and gazed out onto the dead, black horizon of Dream Valley. A warm twinkle lit her scarlet eyes, and she helplessly hummed a bubbly tune that felt just as fresh as yesterday.
There was a sudden breeze, something that chilled the skeletons to the bone and the last pony as well. She hissed through clenched teeth as her pink mane billowed, reminding her of what she had lost and what she had reclaimed in such a long time... and yet in such a short time. She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply. Then, for a brief moment, she felt as though she heard the crashing of waves.
So she opened her violet orbs, trembling, as a grand white mist of all of sunken Cloudsdale's collective waterfalls wafted up towards her frail, orange figure. Nine year old Scootaloo stood upon the northwest edge of the pit. The inner ruins of the collapsed city looked far more intimidating than ever she could have bothered sketching in a map of the great, looming crater. Her stubby, flightless wings writhed nervously as she gawked at the great depths stretching beneath her, bathed with trickling water from so many surrounding clusters of crumbling sky marble structures.
“Okay...” She gulped and panted, her legs wobbling under the weight of her canvas saddlebags full of haphazard tools and scavenging equipment. A jar of half-decayed daisies rattled on either side of her slender, shaved neck. “I can do this. I can do this. Just think, what would Dashie do?”
A roar of thunder filled the crimson air of the wasteland horizon. Scootaloo shuddered, biting her lip and glancing over her shoulder as a distant explosion announced another landing moonrock beyond the mounds of desolation behind her. She suddenly winced and hissed angrily at herself.
“Idiot, Rainbow Dash would fly. I gotta keep it together, gotta do this like I planned.”
The foal craned her neck and looked directly below her. Her violet eyes followed the sloping path into the pit that she had mapped just days before. From far away, the sloping incline appeared navigable. Standing upon the precipice of the deathly slide, however, Scootaloo couldn't comprehend how any pony—no matter what age—would be able to trot down the thing and reach the bottom of the inner ruins in one piece.
“Yeah... Y-Yeah...” Scootaloo gulped and fiddled her hooves towards her rightmost saddlebag. “This totally calls for the rope.”
She wished she hadn't needed to rely on the climbing gear so soon, but the little filly saw no other way to safely descend this immedate bank of steepness. There could be pegasi down there that could help her—or, she suddenly realized—probably needed her help. Scootaloo didn't want to imagine how thoughtless and stupid an act it would have been to end herself in a pathetic tumble then and there. For two and a half weeks, she had been her only friend. It was only natural that she looked after herself with no less dedication.
Clamping a metal stake into the stony earth, Scootaloo tested the tightness of a rope tied to it. Satisfied, she fastened the other end of the cord to her petite waist and let loose some slack. Trotting backwards, the little filly nervously—but gradually—crept her way down the steep slope. Flakes of ash and tiny pebbles flew loose from her shuffling hooves, falling toward the gaping chasm below where so many jagged chunks of ivory sky marble lingered like a bed of spikes.
Scootaloo gulped, stifling a whimper as she gave the rope more slack and slid down the craggy path. Her violet eyes twitched to see an even platform of segmented rock lingering at least twenty meters below her clambering hooves, flanked by trickling streams of cascading water. The foal murmured, praying breathlessly that the rope's length would be enough to let her touch down on the brief splotch of even ground. If she could just make it to that outcropping below, Scootaloo figured, the rest of the descent would be smooth sailing, as she would follow the cyclonic ledge down towards the thick of the inner ruins where she could look for more tools and—more importantly—survivors.
Just then, there was an intense rumbling. The Wastelands above shook with a sudden tremor. The rope holding Scootaloo jostled, and she found herself dangling wildly. The foal let loose a shriek and clung onto the cord for dear life, her wings twitching instinctually as her body swung from side to side—dipping in and out of a bone-chilling curtain of water that stole the gasping breath out from her lungs. Finally, Scootaloo shot her hooves out and braced herself against a vertical stretch of sundered rock. Soaked and shivering, she glanced up through the falling blanket of snow to see a bright red hue bleeding through the gray circle of twilight overhead.
“Oh, Celestia, save me...”
A moonrock was sailing towards the edge of the pit. The air burned under a murderous cacophony of searing hot sparks. Tongues of flame erupted all along the edges of the rumbling crater of Cloudsdale above her. Soon, a bright orange blaze caught the rope and snaked down the length of it towards where the vulnerable pegasus dangled.
“Oh crap oh crap oh crap...!”
Scootaloo squeaked in desperation and fumbled with dull hooves to untie the rope from her waist. The rumbling intensified. The waterfalls around her started to boil. The flame crept its way down the rope towards her, filling her nostrils with smoke and ash.
Panting, Scootaloo kicked against the wall, spun like a dizzy spider, and freed her limbs to reach into her saddlebags. She produced a sharp metal shiv and swung it against the rope holding her above. A few threads snapped loose, but she still dangled under the falling curtain of flames. The world flashed in bright plasma, blinding her. She screamed and swung again. The last few filaments stretched thin, then snapped, and she fell like a dead stone towards the graveyard of Cloudsdale at the bottom of the abyss.
“Aaaaaah—Nnngh!” She jolted as her body ragdolled off a ledge of rock and then landed limply over the length of an ivory pillar embedded into the crater wall. Scootaloo winced, attempting to pull herself up as a gigantic wave of dust sailed down at her. She realized without looking that the moonrock had finally slammed into the edge of the crater's mouth. A gigantic shadow fell over her as several chunks of burning earth and moon sediment cascaded like a deluge of lava towards her figure.
In a breathless lunge, she dove from the pillar, fell, kicked off a wall of rock, pinballed off a water-soaked stretch of stone, and tumbled down a long slope of powdery ivory. Not taking the time to check for broken limbs, the filly squealed and broke into a heart-stopping canter, attempting to outrun the waves of falling, burning moonrock. She scampered towards a dark hovel beneath a platform of collapsed sky marble. Halfway through the sprint, her saddlebags got caught on the spoke of a crumpled chariot. She tugged and tugged and fought back the sobs before ultimately ripping the canvas material in half. Desperately, she abandoned a good chunk of her precious supplies in the effort it took to dive out of the way of the falling debris, sliding fitfully to a stop beneath the flimsy shelter of ivory marble.
Scootaloo almost lost all sense of hearing right then and there. Broken off chunks of lunar material showered the heart of the gaping pit. The world rolled with deep bass thunder, as if the Cataclysm was happening all over again. The filly shrieked into the madness, covering her bleeding ears and fighting for a single breath as a solid wall of smoke and dust encompassed her. She wasn't sure how she did, but she managed to climb out from beneath the claustrophobic space amidst all of the chaos, so that she found herself limping pathetically down a grand, subterranean expanse of gray rubble and slade beneath the vibrating roof of Cloudsdale's inner ruins.
The little pony lost track of time. The last few hours were just as mysterious as her unknowable foalday. At some point during her shuffling sojourn, she awoke to see her hooves reaching the edge of a vicious gap in the lower ruins. She blinked, glancing around herself, spotting a translucent haze of settling dust as the thunder from the impacting moonrock finally, finally settled. Scootaloo regained her hearing in time to bear witness to a great groaning ambiance as all of Cloudsdale settled and shifted weightedly above her. The foal's world had become a grand three-dimensional maze of labyrinthine rock croppings and steep, vertical wreckage. The inner ruins of Cloudsdale looked nothing like the relatively pristine buildings she had explored on the surface of the burning world. She was now submerged helplessly inside the heart of a grand intestinal mesh of broken ivory and watersoaked sky marble, and every direction looked just as claustrophobically intimidating as any other.
As the lucidity returned completely to the sweating pegasus, she spun with an impenetrable hyperventilation, her violet eyes widening as she looked all over for a sign of where she had numbly trotted from. Every gaping corridor that wasn't blanketed in flaming dust was just as gray and foreboding as the several dozens of identical passageways flanking it. Regardless, Scootaloo galloped down the closest tunnel she could find, emerging barely ten seconds later to find a giant gaping chamber of wreckage just as desolate as the one she had left. Her breaths reached a fever pitch as she ran down corridor after corridor, finding the inner ruins of Cloudsdale the same twilight-pierced landscape of crumbled nonsense that any other glance could possibly afford her.
“No...” She whimpered, spinning around, her lip quivering as she fought the urge to cry. “No no no... Oh Celestia, please...” Her eyes glistened as she searched in vain for the remains of her saddlebags, for all of the foodstuffs that she had spent a solid week collecting, for all of the many priceless tools that were now lost to her, as was her hope. “Nnnngh... Help me...” She murmured, then spat, then shrieked. “Somepony, help me!”
Scootaloo scrambled up to a nearby wall and clawed at it with her hooves. Dust and ash fell over her face and shaved mane, blanketing her. She shook it off, panting desperately, then bit her lip as she took several steps back and faced a wide stretch of even rock. She squatted her body down and flexed her stubby wings, all the while locking her eyes nonstop on the gray splotch of wreckage-filled “sky” above. After a deep breath, she broke into a running start, galloped, sped, and leaped as high as she could.
“Nnnngh!” She strained and strained, barely summoning the dexterity to flex her tiny appendages a few pitiful centimeters. After a weightless eternity, Scootaloo came back down twice as hard as she had lifted off. “Ooof!” She landed roughly against a stretch of rock. Her eyes welled with tears as she dragged herself back up, flexed her muscles, and jumped up and down repeatedly, beating her useless wings against the snow-laden air. “Come on! Come on!”
The wheels in her head were turning painfully. She knew that it was an impossible climb—gear or no gear—to get back up to the top of the crater. She also knew that when the moonrock landed, it obliterated the one single slope of navigable rock that her legs could ever have hoped to ascend. Now she was nothing more than a lonely, flightless pegasus with no resources at her disposal. She was a lonely, flightless pegasus with no resources at the bottom of an inescapable pit.
“Please! Somepony! Can anypony hear me?!” Scootaloo shrieked and sobbed, limping through puddles of Clousdalian water, rippling her reflection into a hundred quivering bands. “Help me! Please... Please... I need... I-I need...” She fell down to her haunches, surrounded in an abyss devoid of color, bathed in dust and tears. The water in the puddle settled, revealing to herself a sobbing face stained with fresh blood and bruises. The expression behind the layers of pain was helpless, weak, and pitifully stupid.
Her parents would have been ashamed of her.
“Please... I need you, Dashie...” She choked and dug her snout into the cold puddles in a desperate attempt to mask her tears as her whimpering voice echoed across the crumbling, groaning expanse entombing her. “Pl-Please... Dashie... help me... What should I do? Wh-What sh-should I do now?”
Born unto a bitter new helplessness, she hid her heaving face in a pair of water-soaked forelimbs, repeating her mournful words to the nothingness around her.
“I said, can you hear me?!”
Scootaloo raised an eyebrow above her blinking scarlets. She leaned her face towards the port-side spout that broadcasted her booming voice across the Wasteland clouds, all the while staring intently beyond the Harmony's windshield at the familiar sight of a dark-green airship hovering limply under an array of six bulbous balloons. What was odd about it was that the side door to the vessel had been yawning open long before the last pony had even approached it.
“Bruce, are you there? I've been calling you for—like—five minutes!”
There was no response. The airship drifted coldly, limply, like a giant unlit cigar in the frothing gray clouds of forever.
Scootaloo suddenly felt her heart beating at a faster rate. The veteran scavenger inside her let loose a retaliatory grunt.
“Friggin' furball. Like I should give a crap.”
Nevertheless, the next breath that came out of her was a shuddering thing. With a defeated groan, she cut the communicator off. The sparks died in the tesla coils crowning the device as she bounded across the interior of her cabin with a speed that even surprised herself. She hoisted a fresh satchel of scavenged items from the workbench, along with an armored saddlebag, and her copper rifle.
With gliding grace, the brown pegasus clamped her hooves onto the winding staircase and slid down the railings so that she descended briskly into the hangar bay of her airship below.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Scootaloo's four hooves landed in the doorway of Bruce's gondola. As soon as she touched the bulkhead, there was a rattling noise. Blinking, Scootaloo glanced down and groaned to see that her forward right horseshoe had fallen halfway loose.
“Ughh... Fourth frickin' time this week.” She grumbled to herself, slightly surprised that she could tell the difference in present time and past time anymore. She dashed the thought away as she knelt and fiddled with the horseshoe, tightening it against the edge of her weathered hoof while muttering, “I need some new nails or something. These aren't making the cut. Hey Brucie!” She shouted with a wry smirk as she marched firmly into the smoke-hazed interior of the rodent barterer's vessel. “What are the chances that you sell the ingredients for a dang good shoe that only an extinct race of equines could benefit from—?” She froze in her tracks, her pink mane hair settling like a tattered flag around her blinking face.
Bruce was staring back at her, his timid expression trembling under a pair of green goggles. His legs and furry tail dangled, for he was being held a good meter off the floor of the cabin, gripped in the sharp talons of two griffons who were each five times his size. The twin bounty hunters in high altitude flight gear gazed over their shoulders, their vicious interrogation having been cut short by the sudden appearance of the last pony. The avian mercenaries were not amused.
“What are you looking at, glue stick?!”
“This is Golden Gang business. So wipe that stupid look off your face and wait your turn.”
“My... turn...?” Scootaloo murmured, blinking numbly.
“Eheheheh...” The flying squirrel sputtered and coughed under the iron-tight talon encircling his neck. With tiny paws, he attempted to pull himself up so that his vocal cords could properly sound forth, “Do not be concerned over friend pony. She is merely business associate. Ve are both traders of scavenged goods in skies. Birds of feather, da?”
One griffon slammed him hard against a metal bulkhead. “Shut up unless spoken to first!”
“H-Hey!” Scootaloo growled. She made to trot forward, only to be distracted by a loud, sky-splitting roar emanating from beyond the open door to Bruce's cabin behind her.
“I'm gonna ask you one more time, peanut-brain!” The mercenary sneered through her beak into Bruce's face, fogging his goggles up. “Have you or have you not traded merchandise with any reptilian clients over the past five stormfronts?!”
“Snkkkt...” Bruce hissed and put on his bravest smile, sweating profusely in her vice grip. “Nyet! Brucie knows no reptiles! Is inborn squirrel instinct not to trust merchant vith scales! Perhaps griffons confuse Brucie vith furry creature of less intelligence, like raccoon or aardvark!”
“Intelligence?!” The griffon glared at him while her companion chuckled, her helmet rattling. “You fly around in a giant tobacco bong filled with worthless junk from the Equestrian ruins and you call yourself intelligent?!”
“Brucie never said he vas head of St. Petersbrittle Science Academy...”
“How do I know you're not a naga in disguise, trying to fool us?”
The roar outside the airship became deafening. A mute Scootaloo spun about to look. Emerging from the clouds, there rose a large, angular hovercraft of glinting platinum metal and serrated bulkheads. Two pivoting wings fitted with quad VTOL engines spat a deathly vapor that evaporated the surrounding mists. Several large missiles and incendiary mines glistened in the gray twilight as the Golden Gang's aircraft—a flying weapon nearly four times the size of the Harmony—hovered dangerously between Brucie's and Scootaloo's zeppelins.
Suddenly, a flurry of gray feathers occupied the last pony's view, followed by a loud clank of talons against metal. Scootaloo couldn't help it; she stumbled back with a stifled cry. In response, she received a hideous glare. With a rattling of fingerbone trophies about her neck, Stowe aimed her scarred left eye in the last pony's direction, snorted with indignance, and hissed.
“Out of my way, blank flank.” Stowe purposefully bumped into Scootaloo's shoulder, shoving her aside. She carried her icy grimace across the cluttered domain of Bruce's aircraft until she was staring down her two inferiors. “What in the tap-dancing crap is taking you two feather dusters so flippin' long?! We've got loads of sky to cover and you're wasting all the boss' time on this flea-bag!”
“I can't understand a single word this moron is saying!” One of the griffons shook a gasping Bruce in her grasp like he was an offensive rag doll. “It's like interrogating a shrunken Dirigible Dog with marbles in its mouth!”
“At least Brucie smells better—”
“Sh-Shut up!” The griffon squealed, then glanced pleadingly up at Stowe. “Can we just say that we found contraband, strip the ship, and eat the little rat for breakfast tomorrow?”
“You talk like any of this is up to me.” Stowe grunted. “The two of you should know better. Just find out what the stupid turd has to tell us before we get—”
At that moment, a radio fitted to Stowe's jacketed shoulder squawked forth in a familiar voice: “Scrkkk—Hey, Stowe. Have the girls gotten any info yet?”
“Nnngh!” Stowe rolled her one good eye and grumbled. “When it rains, it pisses.” She flung a talon to the radio on her shoulder and aimed her grimacing beak towards it. “Gilda, it's a friggin' squirrel. This is a godawful waste of our time. I told you that before we even—”
“Scrkk—You know, the time that you spend whining like a little brat, you could instead be earning your keep. Either get your tail feathers in gear or get a bullet to the head, because I'm sick of hearing excuses. You copy?”
Stowe weathered an angry shiver running up her spine. After a deep breath, she finally muttered, “I copy, Gilda. Stowe out.” She flicked the radio off and practically spat at the two lackeys. “Well?! Will you get a frickin' move on?!”
“He still hasn't told us if he's dealt with any naga!” the griffon clutching Bruce timidly remarked.
“Or if he's a naga himself!” the other added.
“You want to find out if he's a shape-shifter or not?!” Stowe shoved one griffon away and marched straight up to the squirrel. “Here! I'll show you how it's done, you brainless egg-huffers!” With that uttered, she flung a talon across Bruce's shoulder. With a slice of glinting claws, she made three shallow cuts across the twitching rodent's coat.
“Gaaah!” Bruce hissed.
Scootaloo winced.
Fuming, Stowe spun about and raised a talon in front of her two companion's gawking faces. Copper-red liquid dribbled down her gnarled wrist. “There! Ya see?! Squirrel blood! Now let's jet!”
The two griffons nodded shakily. They dropped Bruce to the floor like a grunting sack of flour and scurried swiftly past Scootaloo and out of the aircraft. The flying squirrel moaned and clutched his shoulder with a quivering paw while Stowe stepped dispassionately over him.
“I carry this whole friggin' team. I swear, Griffonese grit is all but dead.” Stowe gazed off into a far corner of the cluttered gondola. She absentmindedly raised the talons to her beak and licked each drop of blood up one at a time with a black tongue. She paused, one talon in her mouth, as her scarred face tilted the last pony's way. “And you.” An errant gray feather or two fell from her ruffled neck as she leered above the equine figure. “Have you seen any reptiles in the Wasteland lately? Like I should give a crap over what flimsy excuse for 'truth' a glue stick like you has to spit forth...”
“Can't say that I have.” Scootaloo glared back at her. “Though I'm seeing a real snake in the grass right now.”
“Heh. Cute.” Stowe's necklace of fingerbones rattled as she pointed a blood-stained talon in between the last pony's scarlet eyes. “I should gut you for your friggin' lip, ya walking sack of manure. If I had my way, I'd stab every single one of your clopping brothers and sisters, if only the Cataclysm didn't take the fun out of it by doing the job for me. After all, it's because of you frickin' prancing clopjobs that Griffon Mount today is an abandoned tomb full of rock spiders. Whatever crazy magic you destroyed the world with, it's reduced my species to a gaggle of feather-brained morons who can't even squeeze info out of a talking squirrel!”
“Is this the part where I'm supposed to feel intimidated?” Scootaloo droned, her scarlets burning back at the avian bounty hunter. “Because all I feel is pity.”
Stowe's beak grinded over her mouth. Her scarred eye quivered as she hissed, “You know what you are? You are Gilda's pet. Nothing more, nothing less. I'm surprised she doesn't just build a nest around you and regurgitate down your throat like the infant you are. When the day comes that some horrible bullet or blade whacks our captain off in the middle of a bounty hunt, I'll be given the reins of the Talon, and our first order of business will be to finish what the Cataclysm started.”
Scootaloo leaned back, her eyes thin. “Well, when that day comes, you'd better bring a bigger ship. Or did you forget that I once took down Gilliam's battlecruiser before breakfast?”
The gray griffon glanced at her sideways like a confused eagle. Her beak clicked on the edge of uttering a garbled sentence, as she mentally digested what was once an unfounded rumor into an impossible truth befitting the endangered specimen standing before her. All the menace had been drained from her figure, and she snarled in a frustration that mirrored her two inferior companions. Following their paths, she marched towards the entrance of Bruce's craft and spread her wings to take flight.
“Hey, Stowe!” Scootaloo called after her. She twirled around, her pink mane billowing from the Wasteland air wafting inside. “Aren't you forgetting something?”
Stowe spun a glance over her shoulder and grunted. “What?”
Scootaloo stared icily at her. She raised her left hoof, rotated the horseshoe against a nearby metal shelf, and produced a copper blade. Unflinching, she brought the sharp object to her right shoulder and sliced a shallow cut against her exposed brown coat. Blood dripped to the surface, glistening and crimson. She lowered her horseshoe and pivoted so that the bodily juices occupied the forefront of the disgruntled griffon's vision.
“Hmmph.” Stowe merely grunted at Scootaloo's show. “Please, blank flank, how could you possibly be a more despicable creature than you are right now?” With that, she took off and soared like an angry gray comet towards the Talon and its roaring VTOL engines.
Scootaloo exhaled long and hard. Hissing with a belated wince, she ignored the fresh wound in her shoulder and trotted over to Bruce's side. She helped him up with a gentle hoof. “It's okay. I think they're gone now.”
“Brucie vould be much more relieved if Golden Gang never came to begin vith.” The squirrel leaned back against his cockpit, clutching the three claw marks in his shoulder and wincing. “Everytime, dey rattle Brucie more and more. Is only matter of time before Brucie no longer has silver strips to pay dem off or pony friend to scare dem off.”
“Please, believe me, I only wish I could scare them off.” Scootaloo spoke. She glanced every which way, and finally noticed a white canister resting on the edge of Bruce's dashboard. She reached for it and opened the thing up. Sure enough, it was full of first aid tools. “Stowe's right about one thing. Gilda, for all of her annoyances, is a crutch. I'm both blessed and cursed to have ever made friends with her. As soon as she's gone, I'll have a whole bunch of nasty, slighted griffons to contend with.” With veteran precision, she unrolled some gauze and began bandaging up the flying squirrel's shoulder. The petite sky merchant didn't bother to protest. “Dirigible Dogs and Harpy Pirates are all fun and games, but having the Golden Gang chasing your tail?” She weathered a deep sigh. “No matter how many ways I try to shake the truth, time is ultimately not on my side.”
“Vell, dere is some good news.” Bruce winced under her administrations, but nevertheless managed a sheepish, incisor-fitted grin. “Neither Bruce nor friend pony is reptile, da?”
Scootaloo's lips curved. She broke into a grin, and that grin spilled forth a girlish giggle.
Bruce chuckled merrily as well. He next coughed and sputtered, which was evidently just the reminder he needed to reach into his jacket and pull out a cigar. While Scootaloo finished fitting the bandage to his talon-wound, he lit the cancer stick and exhaled a puff of smoke into the perpetually hazy gondola. “Hrmmm... Brucie is no liar, not to pony nor to griffon. Never have I seen dis 'naga'. Perhaps Golden Gang is foolish to pick up bounty over imaginary creature?”
“Nothing imaginary about nagas, Bruce.” Scootaloo stood back from her companion. She straightened her long mane and murmured towards the shadows of the zeppelin. “They're a race of bipedal lizards that hail from the south, beyond the Bay of Nebula—er—what once was the Bay of Nebula, that is. It's since dried up and become a gigantic salt flat. As a result, the race of reptiles who depended on the Bay spread out throughout the Wasteland, doing menial tasks in order to be paid with purified water. It so happens that they can shape-shift and mimic the skin, flesh, and voice of other sentient beings.”
“Vould make good party trick, da?”
“Only you would think that there's anything left in this world worth partying for, Bruce,” Scootaloo said with a soft sigh.
He puffed his cigar, exhaled, and smiled through buck teeth. “Is party whenever pony friend shows up, Brucie thinks.”
Scootaloo smirked, then suddenly brightened. “Oh! On that note.” She pulled a brown satchel loose from her saddlebags. “I've got something for you.”
“Horse brings gifts?” The squirrel raised an eyebrow above his green goggles. “Unless pony has big bucket of diamonds and rubies, it vould be better to trade elsewhere. Brucie has Diamond Dog clients barking up his tail for precious gemstones and market is dry!”
“Just shut up and be grateful.” She stuck a tongue out before opening the satchel and exposing several glistening white orbs before the gaping rodent. “Ta-daaaaaa. You've been searching for these forever, have you not?”
Bruce almost dropped the cigar from his lips. He reached a trembling paw out and grasped one of the immaculate spheres. “Dis... Dis is Oceanic Snow Pearl. But... But Brucie thought dey vere all lost vhen culture of seaponies kicked bucket!”
“Heh... Yeah, well...” Scootaloo rolled a few of the pearls in her grasp. “Let's just say that I've done quite a bit of research, and the result is that I got to know the seaponies... mmmnngh... inside and out. Besides, how I found the pearls is not nearly as important as how frickin’ pristine they are, wouldn’t you say?”
“Details, details, details,” Bruce spat, then eagerly looked up at her. “Enough, already! How much vill dey vound me?”
Scootaloo took a deep breath. “One hundred silver strips each.”
Bruce froze. He gazed up at her, his furry face pale. “Dis is some sort of scam.”
“Me, Bruce?” Scootaloo giggled. “Are you kidding?”
“Is most certainly joke, friend pony,” he slurred in a breath of suspicion. “Pearls like dese vould go for four hundred strips each at M.O.D.D. Vhat does Scootaloo think to accomplish vith such laughable bargaining?”
“Bruce...”
“Could dis squirrel merchant suddenly be charity case?! First you stare down griffons and now you toss pearls before swine—literally!”
“Brucie...” She placed a gentle hoof on his unbandanged shoulder. A soft smile reflected off his twin lenses. “Several stromfronts ago, you sold me a pearl, and it made all the difference in the world. You may not know how much your contributions have meant to me—to all that I've been struggling to do as of late—but I would like to show you. I would like to give you my thanks.”
“But... But...” He bit his incisor into his bottom lip and gazed forlornly at the wealth of pearls just beyond his reach. “Is not traders' tradition! Is not Vasteland tradition!”
“But what if it's pony tradition?” Scootaloo smiled. She dropped eight pearls gently into his grasp and grinned. “Eight hundred strips. Take it or leave it.”
Bruce gulped something down his throat. Whether or not it was something bitter, all of the grime and dust of misery had nevertheless washed away from his furred features. Reaching into his jacket, he very swiftly dropped the relatively tiny payment into Scootaloo's grasp. The last pony gently pocketed it away into her saddlebag.
“There. Now that wasn't so bad, was it?” She smirked, performed a whimsical curtsey, and began trotting towards the entrance to the gondola. “You've been complaining for months that the ogres of the Southern Heights haven't been selling you any of their wares. Maybe those pearls can finally get you what you want from them, though I doubt it'll be rubies or diamonds. Still, I'm sure it'll be something just as awesome.”
“It is funny...”
Scootaloo paused and glanced back at him. “Hmmm?”
He leaned casually against his tail like a fluffy stool, folding his arms across his chest. “Brucie's day has been one ugly encounter after another. First, angry monkey merchants nearly run Brucie's airship into a mountain. Then, bunch of stingy goblins nearly leave Brucie high and dry. Then there is Golden Gang and angry business over naga. But pony friend?” He tilted his head to the side, the green lenses reflecting her pink-mane from afar. “Pony friend is always ray of sunshine. Brucie barely remembers sunshine, but Scootaloo is most definitely it. Da, she is. Vhat could bring dis to Vasteland so?”
The last pony grinned. “I may fly and scavenge in this world just like you do, Bruce.” She lingered on the next few words, until she defeatedly let them drip from her mouth. “But that doesn't mean that this is my world. I can't expect you to understand, or even appreciate what that means, until the day that... that I make this my world again, as it once was, as it should be.”
He ran a paw across the edges of his fresh bandage and shuddered. “Bruce vould very much like to live in dat world...”
“Someday you will,” she said softly. Turning to the clouds, she took wing, and soared towards the Harmony. “I promise.”
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
When Scootaloo landed at the aperture entrance to the Harmony's hangar level, she realized that the loud thunder VTOL engines hadn't drifted away. She glanced up with a frown to see that the platinum body of the Talon was still hovering above her and Bruce's zeppelins, looming like a giant metal dragon preparing to strike at any moment.
“What I wouldn't pay to get them to friggin' leave,” she muttered bitterly as she stepped into her craft.
“What you wouldn't pay indeed,” a chuckling voice said.
Scootaloo gasped. In an instant, she bucked, flung the rifle from her saddlebag, and swiftly clasped it in her teeth. Halfway through extending the copper weapon, she froze, for a feathery figure was already pointing a steam-powered revolver between her eyes.
“Easy, kiddo...” Gilda muttered over the hissing gun. She was aiming the weapon at Scootaloo's skull blindly, not even bothering to look over her shoulder. Instead, her other front talon was examining a half-carved chunk of moonrock in her grasp. “You'd think the last pony on earth would be a lot less skittish. I mean, you know what's comin' to you eventually. Why freak out at every scary thing that happens? You know me—I'm hardly life-threatening. Heheheh...”
Scootaloo sighed, slowly retracting the rifle and sliding it back into her saddlebag. “It's not my life that I'm worried about.”
“Of course it isn't. No soul in her right mind would experiment with a bunch of ancient lunar hocus pocus without expecting it to blow up in her face.” She whistled and raised her silver goggles with the barrel of her revolver, getting a better look at the pale rock in her grasp. “Just what is it that sets these little moon turds off again? Ahem—'Fuss. Roll. Darn!' Nope. Not even a spark.”
“You... Uh...” The last pony gulped in the shadow of her feathery “companion”. “You need a mana battery as a leyline bridge to so much as trigger a runic command.”
“Mana battery?! Like what, a wand or something?” Gilda glanced over with a smirk. She blinked, glancing at Scootaloo's wings, Scootaloo's hooves, and the utter lack of pointed alicornia in between. “Oh,” she grunted in a voice that was half as ironic as it was somber. “Oh, but of course. Heh.” She twirled the revolver and pocketed it away in a leather strap surrounding her left rear limb. “Heeeeeey... Check out the cotton candy flag waving off of your noggin!” She whistled. “Tell me, girl, does the rug match the drapes? Hahahaha—Oh, right. You're a pony. You're nothing but rug.”
“Gilda, is there...” Scootaloo shuddered, gritted her teeth, and calmed herself with an inward sigh. “Is there something I can help you with?”
“No doubt you ran into Stowe and her merry band of bumbling beak-nicks.” Gilda sauntered her way across the chemical lab, fumbling over the curious tools and runeforging materials like she owned the hangar bay of the Harmony. She might as well have. “I dunno if she pierced her angry equinist veil in time to tell you or not, but we're on the lookout for a naga chick named 'Razzar'. The Fire Ogres of Lower Mount Ogreton have a bounty on her head so high it'd make my nose bleed. Heheh... Considering I'm a griffon and I don't have a nose, that's pretty amazingly high.”
“What would the Fire Ogres want with a naga?” Scootaloo made a face. “Aren't they too busy fighting the Mountain Ogres over the ruins of Trottingham to bother giving out bounties?”
“Hahahahaha!” Gilda leaned against a random bulkhead, laughing so hard that her amber eyes teared. She raised a talon to her feathery face and smirked the pegasus' way. “Ohhhh do forgive me. Just... Just the cutesy-wootsy names you ponies gave to the places before the Cataclysm tickle me something fierce. Ahem.”
She clawed her way over to Scootaloo, slowly.
“Yes, I know there's a war going on between the Ogres over the Valley of Jewels,” Gilda said. “The reason behind the bounty is really none of my frickin' business, but if I had to guess, then I'd bet that this one naga mercenary has done something to help the Mountain Ogres' efforts. The Fire Ogres have lost tens of thousands of their fat-assed brothers-in-arms in the battle for that land, as well as supremacy over Ogreton, so I'm guessing that they took whatever Razzar did for their enemies as a major slap in the face. Catching that slithering reptile will mean gonzo strips for the Golden Gang, and a major morale boost for the Fire Ogres' soldiers, yadda yadda yadda. Whatever—The sooner we catch the stupid salamander, the better for us.”
“Aren't you afraid of incurring the Mountain Ogres' wrath?”
“You say that as if me and my girls can't protect ourselves,” Gilda smirked, suddenly leering over the pony in hulking menace. “And in speaking of protection...” Her lion's tail curled tightly through the air as her talons clicked against the bulkhead before Scootaloo's petite hooves. “It's been twenty-five storm fronts, kiddo.” Her amber eyes narrowed like tiny, golden fires. “Twenty... five... storm fronts. It doesn't take an Equestrian historian to know that counts as nearly a quarter of a year in your outdated horse calender, now does it?”
“What... Uhm...” Scootaloo glanced over her shoulder, hearing the lingering thunder of the Talon, imagining the weight of all its incendiary missiles. The fresh pile of silver strips rattled in her saddlebag, telling her that she was trembling. “What are you getting at, Gilda?”
“'What am I getting at'... Hmmm-Heheheh...”
Gilda marched slowly past Scootaloo. For a second there, it almost looked as if she was going to exit the Harmony, but then Scootaloo felt a prehensile tail wrapping about her waist. With a brief cry, she was hoisted into a razor-sharp side hug. Gilda held Scootaloo close to her, casually caressing the bottom of the pony's grimacing chin with a pair of pointed claws. “Do you know what Stowe's problem is?” Gilda murmured as she “walked” herself and Scootaloo leisurely towards the edge of the hangar bay's entrance. A rush of cold Wasteland air billowed in from beyond as they stood before the aperture. A sea of forlorn clouds surged and churned below them as Gilda stood them upon the precipice of the zeppelin's bulkheads. “She has daddy issues. Her father was a major member of the Military Academy in Griffon Mount. Before the Cataclysm happened, and the core of the earth opened and exposed our kingdom to all of the horrible arachnids living beneath our domain, Stowe's father had ascended to the rank of Grand Commander. He led battles against harpy uprisings along the Southwest Plains. It was thanks to him—and not to your beloved Celestia of old—that those nasty pirates were blocked from ever invading the pony city of Manehattan. Well, we all know what became of that, huh? The Sun and Moon blew up, rock spiders took over Griffon Mount, Stowe's dad got torn to shreds, and the entire Griffon Sovereignty crumbled like a deck of cards. I don't mean to say it was all a one-sided tragedy, of course. Manehattan today belongs to the harpies—the parts of it not under water, that is. And—of course—every other pony but you is dead...”
“Care to tell me something I don't know?” Scootaloo grunted.
Gilda smirked and walked her claws down Scootaloo's side as she held her. “Stowe thinks that all the crap that happened to her dad—and griffons in general—is the ponies' fault. Who knows, she may be right. All that you should be worried about, where Stowe is concerned, is that in spite of all her anger and threats and bloodlust, she doesn't know ponies. She doesn't know them like I do. She doesn't know that they're creatures of honor.” Her claws stopped at the base of Scootaloo's wings and tickled the soft spot beneath the first line of feathers with serrated menace, poking into the mare's flesh emphatically. “She doesn't know that ponies will become extinct the soonest they give up being creatures of honesty, comraderie, and respect.” She reached her tail around and tilted Scootaloo's wincing face up to stare uncomfortably close to her beak. “So tell me, kiddo. Are ponies extinct yet?”
Scootaloo sweated, her wings twitching under Gilda's tight hold. Her scarlet eyes darted away from the griffon's battle-scarred beak, searching the edges of her fitful mind, thinking about Spike, thinking about the green flame, thinking about the warm lands of Equestria and all the stars she had yet to chase down. The last pony didn't understand what was happening until she was in the thick of it; she realized that she had become a weak creature.
What had changed? This was the same miserable world. Was she still the same miserable pony?
She didn't think about the consequences for what happened next, for she realized that there was no preventing it. Swallowing a lump down her throat for courage, she reached into her saddlebag and produced the pile of silver bits. Gilda's tail swiped it out of her grasp in a flash. The pony was dropped—gasping—against the edge of the Harmony's copper aperture. She panted for breath as Gilda paced away, humming to herself and counting the strips with icy precision... until she froze.
Scootaloo gazed forlornly, wincing with each bleeding second that ticked towards the inevitable outburst. It came out of Gilda slowly at first, as a merry chuckle. The griffon spun about, grinning crookedly, waving the silver strips in her talon.
“Eight hundred strips. These are eight hundred strips, pipsqueak.” Her voice rang with a sharp, metallic edge, suddenly. “I do believe I mentioned that it has been twenty-five stormfronts.” Her amber eyes glinted as she took one talon-step towards Scootaloo, then another. “If I didn't know better, I'd say somepony has been flying around in the clouds too much. She's become an airhead. She's forgotten the value of true protection...”
“I haven't forgotten anything, Gilda,” the last pony firmly said. Nevertheless, she scooted back, back from the approaching avian figure, her mane hair billowing like an offensive banner in the cold wind. She knew that there weren’t even remotely enough strips in the entire zeppelin to appease her “friend.” She had been so engrossed in the experiment that she had barely scavenged enough things to trade her way towards refueling the Harmony itself. “I've just been very, very busy lately...”
“Busy doing what?” Gilda smirked. All the while, her talons scraped threateningly against the bulkheads as she towered above the cowering pegasus. The Golden Gang's thunderous ship hovered high above like a platinum vulture. The gray clouds seemed darker. “Chasing butterflies? Digging up daisies? Wrapping up winter? Wake up, sunshine. This isn't the same colorful world that you used to afford. There are worse things out there than ogres and nagas. There are creatures who want you dead more than even Stowe. Do I need to show you what they have in store for you...?”
“Gilda... You don't need to show me anything.”
“So you're a know-it-all suddenly?”
“I know this.” Scootaloo frowned, gulped, and spoke firmly, “I'm working on something, Gilda. It's... it's a project. A major project.”
“I'm listening...”
“I can't tell you what it entails, exactly...”
“Oh ho ho ho ho...” Gilda clinked the silver strips together and rolled her eyes. “Ohhhh that's rich.”
“I'm serious. It's taking a lot of my money, a lot of my resources and a lot of...” She winced slightly, but let loose, “And a lot of my time. But when it's all said and done, I assure you, it will change things—It will change everything. The very world as you know it won't be the same. When that moment comes, you and your Golden Gang won't have to chase shape-shifting lizards to get a bite to eat. You won't have to worry about trolls or harpies or so many other heartless monstrosities. What's more, I'll be able to pay you back a million times more than I could ever be capable of doing right now.”
Gilda stared at her long and hard. She pointed slowly with the silver strips in her hand, slowly and psychotically grinning. “You...” She chuckled and shook her head. “What in the name of all that's holy have you been sniffing, girl? Heheheh... Ahem.” She pocketed the strips, knelt down, and viciously gripped Scootaloo's throat with one talon while reaching back for her revolver with another. “What I think you need...” She hissed. “Is some intervention, courtesy of Doctor Gilda.”
Scootaloo bit her lip.
Gilda's muscles tightened...
Just then, a brilliant gust of wind rocked the Harmony slightly. The ship weaved in the air like it always did on random occasions, only this time something slid loose from beneath one of the hangar bay's runeforging tables. A metal scooter rolled across the bulkheads and slapped to a stop against the aperture's frame. Its slender body glinted in the gray twilight drifting down from above.
Gilda blinked at it, her feathered brow furrowing. Slowly, a smirk bled across her features. “Oh you gotta be frickin' kidding me...” She grinned stupidly at Scootaloo with a breath of disbelief. “Don't tell me you were that little pony?”
Scootaloo said nothing. Her scarlet eyes drifted towards the sea of clouds beneath them both.
Gilda digested the look, and slowly the smirk melted from beneath her beak as she saw a color in those eyes that she had seen before, but had tried her best to forget over the last two and a half decades. Slowly, gulping bitterly, she loosened her trembling grip of the pegasus and stood up like an aching fossil of yesteryear. With a deep sigh, she slid her silver goggles back down before her face could register any true emotion.
“You... You have her spunk, kiddo.” Gilda pivoted about and walked to the edge of the ledge. “Maybe not her spine, but definitely her spunk.”
Scootaloo rubbed her throat with a hoof and hoarsely replied, “Is that a compliment?”
“Call it what you want.” Gilda grunted. “But next time I see you, I expect more strips. Be a clever pony and learn to frickin' deliver.” She slapped a talon over a communicator on her shoulder. “Grif! Rev up the engines! We're taking off!”
“Scrkkk! Aye, Gilda.”
“Get your head back in the game, kid,” Gilda murmured. “The Wasteland takes no prisoners. So stop acting like you're in a friggin' cage and fly like you used to.” That said, she soared up towards the Talon and disappeared through a metal door that closed behind her. With a roar of the VTOL engines, the platinum mercenary vessel throttled off, leaving Scootaloo alone with the chilling winds.
The mare sighed, running a hoof through her long pink mane, something she didn't need to grow out... and yet she did, as if she was proudly displaying the whimsical highlight of a dream that was too fanciful to have been true. She glanced aside at a wheeled relic of the past, not one born unto green flames of reverse-time, but sweat and tears and victory in the face of perpetual heartache.
Her reflection glinted off the curved body of the metallic scooter, and in a squinting glance the pony's brown skin almost appeared orange.
Scootaloo was relishing the strong, afternoon scent of Equestrian pine when she first saw it. It unfolded before her like a brown cloud in the midst of a green sea of trees. To any other random pony, the barn would have looked like a dilapidated shack of gnarled wood and crumbling crossbeams. To the seven year old filly, it stood proud and tall like a fortress. It was antique. It was abandoned. It was strewn with cobwebs and dust, but it had a ceiling. That was all that mattered.
The little pony skidded to a stop atop the metal tray. She kicked the wheeled platform up and hugged it to herself like a rusted pillow as she tilted her head skyward and stared, awestruck, at the lengths of the old building. Around her, cicadas buzzed and dragonflies darted about. The heart of the forest was playing a brief and melodic fanfare for her, as if a princess was arriving at her palace of destiny.
“Yeah.” She giggled to herself. “That'll do.”
Hours later, Scootaloo had finished shoving the last of several clumped bales of hay out from the upper loft. Using her pink tail as a contrived broom, she swished mounds of strawdust into the corners of the creaking floorboards. She brushed spiderwebs free and pulled jutting nails out from their foundation.
The late afternoon sun melted in copper bands across her orange coat as she opened her satchel and unloaded her meager belongings. Scootaloo laid out the patchwork blanket, followed by a brush, a pocketknife, a ball of yarn, two metal drinking cups, an adult horseshoe, two candles, a box of matches, a large sock full of even more bundled-up socks that acted as a miniature pillow, and several more tiny nick-nacks. The last thing to exit her satchel was a tiny book titled The Werewolves Came On a Friday. The contents of the cheap, pulp fiction novel weren't nearly as important as what the pages safely framed within. Flipping the literature open to Chapter Thirty-One, the very middle of the book, Scootaloo exposed a tiny, faded photograph to the dusty air.
The filly took a deep breath, bearing a warm and bittersweet smile. She dragged a petite, orange hoof across the dated image taken at a Ponyville Hearth's Warming Dance. The banner in the background of the snapshot read “Everclear Holiday Dinner”, and two smiling pegasi in the foreground—a mare and a stallion dressed in festive attire—stood side by side in mid-nuzzle, gazing tranquilly back at the little girl. Scootaloo took a deep breath, kissed the end of her hoof, and planted it between the adult couple.
Night fell over the forest, and a tiny yellow glow twinkled like a phantom atop the loft of the barn. Scootaloo huddled beneath her blanket, her upper half sticking out as she cradled her last biscuit above a candle, warming the tiny morsel of bread. Her breath came out in vapors, and her extremities were shivering. She didn't seem to mind.
Munching and enjoying her last bit of food, she cast a hopeful glance upwards and found herself enraptured with the stars. Most of the barn's ceiling was intact, but a few holes permeated the structure and gave the filly a chance to stargaze while slumber slowly approached her.
Gulping the last bit of the food down, she briefly withheld the stress of plotting out how to fetch more bites to eat the next day. All things would happen in time. When morning came, her destiny would be made manifest. She told herself this. She clung to this, as she clung to herself, smiling with a serenity that she never dreamed she would enjoy, not in so many interminable months spent in Manehattan.
In the noonday sun, Ponyville was alive with color. Golden roofs covered brown and red wooden buildings, edged with green bushes and violet flowers. Ponies of all shades of the spectrum filled the dirt streets carrying satchels of bright fruit and pulling wagons full of shiny wares. There were smiles, chuckling voices, and melodic hums. Scootaloo's home wasn't as lovely as she remembered; it was even lovelier.
Perched atop her metal tray on wheels, the little pegasus kicked her way across the side alleys of the quaint little town. She gazed everywhere, gliding, as if floating through a cloud of dreams come true. At any corner or storefront, the girl figured, she could stop and offer her services, to lend a hoof for some bits. The ponies here were happy and approachable. In a matter of days, she would be making a living for herself. As homely as the barn was, she could make it even better. She could furnish it, she could afford herself luxuries. Then, when she got older, and when her wings worked, she could buy herself a real home. She could fly. She could start a business in Cloudsdale. Then maybe, just maybe, she could afford to buy her parents a proper grave—
“Ooof!” Scootaloo's chin violently met the ground. She didn't realize why she had collapsed until she saw the metal tray gliding to a stop behind her, and reflecting in its metal surface was some pony's hoof sticking out offensively across the path that she had been wheeling. A cackling shower of laughter fell upon her twitching ears. Wincing, she pushed herself up, blinked in shock, and raised an eyebrow towards a gaggle of young equines behind her. “You... You did that on purpose!”
“Heheh...” A tall colt with a black mane hanging across his muscular shoulders smirked at her. He lowered his hoof into the dusty sidewalk beside a candy store where four other young ponies huddled beside him. “It's the least I could do to help you!”
“H-Help me...?” Scootaloo brushed herself off, too dazed to be angry. “What...?”
“You look absolutely stupid gliding around on that thing. What are you, lame?”
“Hey!” The tiny pegasus finally found her frown. She rolled her metal tray over towards her, clutching it defensively. “So what if I get around a lot? These wheels keep me from getting tired over long distances!”
The ponies laughed around their burly ringleader. He tossed his mane out of his ruby eyes and scoffed at her. “That's the dumbest excuse I ever heard, blank flank.”
“Blank... H-Huh?” Scootaloo blinked innocently. “What did you just call me...?”
“Wow, not only does she have rocks for brains, but she lives under one!” The muscular colt marched icily around her, exposing his cutie mark of a jackhammer to the noonday sun. “Tell me, what's your name, lame-o?”
“Uhm...” She bit her lip, glancing forlornly back and forth between his cutie mark and her obvious lack of one. “Sc-Scootaloo.”
More laughs filled the street, engulfing her. She winced as the colt stared her down viciously. “The heck kind of name is that?! What are you supposed to be good at? Scooting around on dinner trays?! Hahaha—No wonder you're a blank flank! Anypony with 'scooting' as a talent is better off being served as Diamond Dog food!”
“So what if I haven't found my talent yet?” Scootaloo smirked proudly and upturned her nose. “I'm going to make it big here in Ponyville! I'll find out what I'm good at, work hard, and make some bits! Someday, I'm going to be rich! Maybe even richer than you! So... erm...” She tried her best to scowl. “So watch out!”
“Tell me, kid.” The colt pointed into her chest. “What pony is going to pay you bits when you've got your cutie mark in the wrong spot?”
“I do...?” She glanced down—
He instantly slapped her upside the nose with his hoof. His buddies laughed as he gave a mighty chuckle of his own and bumped into her so hard that she nearly fell down a second time. “Works every time, ya stupid blank flank! Do yourself a solid and go back to where you came from. Ponyville doesn't have room for lame pegasi who use wheels instead of wings. Yeesh! Have y'all seen something so stupid?”
The youthful crowd trotted away in a sea of laughter. Scootaloo wiggled her stinging nose and turned to frown after them. She saw a blurred image in the foreground, and upon closer focus she realized she was staring at her stubby little wings. The feathery appendages twitched uselessly, and she sighed, her head ringing with the young earth pony's words. Rolling her metal tray around with pitiful squeaks, she navigated a depressing cloud, cleared her throat, and summoned the previous night's enthusiasm. Boldly, she glided forward and headed straight for the first store she could see.
“Would I like some help?” A stallion lifted his hat and scratched a threadbare mane. He stood behind the sales counter of a thrift store in downtown Ponyville. “Well, of course good help is appreciated, but I'm not sure what you're getting at, kid.”
“I could fix the bell in your cash register for you!” Scootaloo hopped, straining to showcase her grin over the counter. “I'm good at fixing things! I noticed that the front door to your business is squeaking! I could oil it up for you! I once helped these two bunkmates of mine attach a wheel to this wagon in Manehattan and—”
“Wouldn't you, uh, rather be playing around with other fillies and colts your age? It's a beautiful sunny day. Seems like a shame for someone as young as you to be working on the weekend.”
“Hey! This is Ponyville!” Scootaloo grinned wide, her seven year old eyes blinking bright and violet. “This is the home of hard working earth ponies! I just arrived yesterday and I wanna play my part! So, do you need some help around here or what?”
“Well...” The thrift store owner rubbed his chin, then smiled awkwardly. “Uhh... I guess—uhm—that the display counters haven't been dusted in a good long time—”
“Perfect!” Scootaloo winked, her teeth showing through a cheekish grin. “I'll make them spotless in a jiffy!”
“That's... uh... sweet of you, kid. But I haven't had time to order a new duster since I threw the old one away.”
The little pegasus blinked. She glanced back above her blank flank and wiggled her wings. Grinning, she looked back up at the shop keeper. “Don't worry. I got it covered.”
Scootaloo licked her lips in the effort, but after a good hour and a half, her task was finished. She stood atop a stepping stool on wheels, aiming her hind quarters to one of several product shelves, using her very own wings as dusters to clear the shopping area of soot and sediment. Once the last visible surface was made spotless, she hopped down from the stool in one breath and sauntered over towards where the shopkeeper was opening several parcels of incoming product.
“There...” Scootaloo panted, but nevertheless smiled pleasantly. “All dusted! What do you think?”
“Hmmm...” The stallion squinted across the shopping area. He rubbed his chin, then slowly grinned. “Not bad! Not bad at all!”
“Cool! Then you like the job I did?”
“Absolutely... And for all of your hard work...”
Scootaloo practically wriggled with excitement. She bit a lower lip, her cheeks rosy.
The stallion reached onto a nearby counter where a paper box rested. “My wife went to Sugarcube Corner a few minutes ago. I told her to pick something up.” He handed the box to the little filly, smiling with a fatherly wink. “Here ya go. For all your hard work, little Missy.”
The tiny pegasus' face turned blank. Raising an eyebrow, she took the box in two sweaty hooves and opened it up. “Uhhm...” She glanced up, blinking. “A cupcake?”
“Not just any cupcake, but with royal frosting! The same type Ms. Cake bakes for when Princess Celestia visits from Canterlot!” He smiled with pride. “I figure a sweet little filly like you deserves a sweet little treat on a day like today!”
“Uhm... Eh heh heh...” Scootaloo shifted nervously, gulped, and clapped the white box shut. “It's nice and all, and I'm really thankful. But... erm... I-I don't suppose you could pay me in b-bits...?” She gazed up at him, fidgeting.
He let loose a chuckle and ruffled her pink mane. “Go home to your parents, darling. My wife and I included a letter in that box telling them how thankful we are that you decided to be such a good little helper. When you get old enough, and if you have the same work ethic, you'll immediately have our own recommendation if you want to be employed for real.” He winked. “In the meantime, maybe you can make some bits selling your own cupcakes! I hear they go good with lemonade!” He trotted off around the far end of the sales counter with several parcels balanced on his flank.
Scootaloo took a deep breath, fighting the urge to crush the box in two quivering hooves. She limply marched out of the thrift store and grabbed her wheeled tray along the way out.
“Could you use some work around the kitchen?” Scootaloo grinned pleasantly at the front entrance to a classy restaurant in the center of Ponyville. “I'm small! I can find hard-to-reach places and clean 'em!”
“I have no doubt that you could, little girl,” a unicorn waiter muttered from behind a podium. He telekinetically scribbled a quill across a reservation book in front of him. “But we don't hire children here. No good and well-to-do establishment in Ponyville does.”
“But all I want to do is lend a hoof!” Scootaloo murmured, her voice nearly taking on a whining pitch. “Don't you have some stuff that needs to get done around here?”
“What is this, Stalliongrad?” The waiter managed a slight snarl. “You want us to get in trouble with child labor laws? Now go run and play! I've got customers to attend to...”
“How about chopping firewood?” Scootaloo trotted alongside a well-dressed mare across the lobby of a two-story hotel. “It gets cold at night! I can fetch you the best lumber in town!”
“Maybe when you're older, young lady.”
“But I really need to earn bits!” Scootaloo's face was pleading. “I want to be a hard working earth pony like you!”
“I'm sure your parents can give you an allowance. Try some work around your house—whatever—but I can't help you out here!”
“But—”
“I mean it! Scram!”
“I...” Scootaloo shivered as the afternoon sun died under the fall of a cold, starlit evening. “I-I really need to buy some food, that's all. That's why I need the bits. So... uhm... c-could you give me some work around here to do?”
“Why, you poor, poor thing!” A unicorn mare stood in the doorway to an ivory boutique. Her purple mane glittered in the advent of night. “Your parents haven't cooked you dinner yet?”
“H-Huh?” Scootaloo blinked wide. “Erm—No! I-I mean, that's not what I meant. That is... erm...” She bit her lip, shivering in nervousness more than from the cold. “Of course they're making me dinner. I just... uhm... want to buy myself a different dinner!”
“I... see...” The adult pony raised a curious eyebrow and angled her pale face to examine the white box balanced atop Scootaloo's spine. “You have developed an affinity for gourmet cupcakes, I take it.”
“Oh... Eheheh—This? I'm just delivering this.” Scootaloo smiled under an embarassed blush. “Somepony... erm... at Sugarcube Corner is paying me and... uhm...”
“Then if you're already being paid, why must you encumber yourself with even more menial labor?”
“Uhhhh...”
“Hmmm... I have a splendid idea.” The white unicorn suddenly smiled. In a very warm, albeit coddling voice she cooed, “How about you step inside and I'll fix you up a nice, warm bowl of soup. And then afterwards you can let me escort you to your parents' place. I would very dearly like to converse with them about your... monetary needs.”
“I... Uhh... Uhhhh...” Scootaloo stammered, her legs weak, for she suddenly felt like this wasn't some strange Ponyvillean unicorn she was speaking with, but instead one of many foster care workers who had just magically teleported clear across Equestria to ensnare her.
“While we're at it, I could let you try on this new winter line of foals' scarves I've been weaving together. I have this darling little piece that matches your eyes. Hmm? It'll keep you warmmmmmm!”
“Yeah! No thanks! Okay, bye!” Scootaloo turned about-face and scampered off before the gasping unicorn could stop her. In an orange blur, the panting pegasus galloped over the nearby hill, banked westward when she was beyond sight of the boutique, and trotted briskly into the forest before night darkened the Equestrian landscape completely.
In a limp march, Scootaloo shuffled up the steps to the barn's upstairs loft. She slumped to a stop beside her bed of blanket and nick-nacks. A candle was lying before her, but she didn't bother to light it. Sighing, she planted the white box on the wooden floorboard. After gazing at it for a few seconds, she opened the tiny container. The blue frosting of the cupcake glistened in the hovering starlight as a chorus of crickets performed a pathetic laughtrack around her.
Her stomach growled, and she hated herself for it. Her mouth watered at the sight of the tasty dessert. Twenty-four hours had passed, and she hadn't had a bite to eat. For that matter, she hadn't earned a single gold bit for herself. The memories of the day spun around her in a blur, so that—either by choice or by nature—she became too nauseous to so much as take one bite out of the delicious treat, the infernal morsel she hadn't truly, truly earned.
“Nnngh... Stupid... Stupid blank flank.” Her whimper had a growling edge to it. The sound was sharp enough to scare the tears into hiding as she closed the box, shuffled it towards the far corner of the loft, and laid down to sleep with her back purposefully pointed towards the insulting object.
Several hours into the following dawn, Scootaloo dearly wished she had eaten that cupcake. Every kick she made against the ground vibrated a wave of pain through her empty stomach. She moaned to herself and clung to the metal tray on wheels with her other three limbs, holding on as if riding a ship in a sea of tempestuous waves. In the back of her mind, she heard the cruel laughter of a young colt, reminding her of how pathetically silly she must have looked: a flightless filly surfing across town on a squeaking platform.
Belatedly, she shook the shameful self-awareness out of her mind and summoned the same inner strength that brought her there from Manehattan. She visited door-to-door, asking every pony she could find if there was a job available, if there was a way to earn bits, if there was something—anything—that she could do to be paid in gold and not in guffaws. On every occasion, she was met with confused looks, shaking heads, pitiful excuses, and even a scowl or two.
When the afternoon came again, and Scootaloo was as empty-pocketed as she was empty-stomached, it occurred to her that she was trying too hard. She had covered a good half of Ponyville with her incessant pleading for employment. With each subsequent shop-owner she visited, they regarded her with increasing familiarity. She was horrified to think that she had developed an infamy overnight, so much so that she limply plodded “home” before the Sun even went down. She huddled under her blanket, closing her eyes and trying to chase off the increasing lunacy of her situation with the dark shroud of slumber. That night, she was too cold and hungry to cry.
That very next morning was a numb torture. She barely felt her legs as she glided down the lonesomely familiar path towards downtown Ponyville. The squeaking noises of her metal tray were like distant phantoms laughing at her. She had to open her eyes at random places to make sure she wasn't dreaming. This was very real: this hunger, this pain, and this restless lurch of the world spinning beneath her.
Her trip across Equestria had been a daunting accomplishment, but at least it was fueled by an intense vigor. At least Scootaloo had food to accompany her. At least she had the memory of her parents—and not this suddenly thick cloud of shame—to bring wind to her sails.
For the second morning in a row, she had ignored the cupcake. She hadn't even looked at it. For all she knew, it could have been covered in ants by now. Somehow, the concept hardly fazed her. The dessert didn't even register as food to her. It was like a knife in her side, an appeasement for a foalhood she didn't bother to acknowledge, a length in young years she was more than willing to skip, if only her wings could have grown fast enough to let her.
Everypony in Ponyville wanted Scootaloo to be older, to be an adult, to be much larger and much stronger and much more mature than she really was before they'd so much as allow her to earn her keep. If she had known that the complicated laws of Equestria maintained such, Scootaloo would have paid a unicorn sorceror or a Zebraharan shaman to put a growth spell on her. Her childhood, much like a frosted cupcake, was an obstacle, just a reminder of where she was—and where her parents weren't—at best. If she could, she would have tossed her foalish years to the ants of a growingly heartless universe with no less zeal—
“Ooof!” Scootaloo grunted, having collided with something. She teetered and fell on her haunches behind her rattling tray. For a brief moment, her heart jolted at the thought of running into a certain coltish bully again...
“Oh dear. I am so, so sorry,” a soft, golden voice cascaded towards her ears with haunting tonality. “I thought that you were going to move out of the way. I should have known better.”
“It's... It's alright...” Scootaloo hissed, dizzily trying to get up. She stumbled numbly, moaning in a woozy fashion.
“Are you ill?” A yellow blur with a pink mane towered above the tiny child. A pegasus mare came into focus, carrying a basket full of flowers on her flank. “Oh you poor thing, you are sick! Just look at you! Are you far from home?”
“H-Home...?” Scootaloo blinked with thin violets.
“My place is not far. How about I make you a warm bowl of soup?”
“S-Soup?” Scootaloo suddenly snarled, clamping her hoof down. “Why is everypony suddenly wanting to make me soup?”
“Erm...” The adult pegasus flinched away from her with bizarre pensiveness. “Well... I-I only meant to—”
“I'm fine!” The orange pegasus planted her hooves back onto the tray and kicked off at the dirt road, aiming herself towards the heart of town. “I don't need anypony to take care of me!”
“But—”
“Just leave me alone!” She snarled, kicking and kicking viciously.
She glided with furious ease down the path. It wasn't until the wind was billowing at the full length of her mane that she realized she was kicking pure air. With a startled gasp, she clung to the tray with all four limbs, sliding left and right in a haphazard fashion. Stifling a frightened shriek, she slammed both of her hooves down and braked hard. Her rear legs drove two paths through the dirt road until she came to a halt, panting.
In a breathless stupor, she gazed behind her blank flank, surprised at the distance she had made between herself and the yellow stranger in so little time. Confused beyond belief, she realized that her two tiny wings were beating incessantly. She stared intently at her feathery appendages, having successfully woken through the bitter veil of exhaustion and hunger to regard this curious sight.
“Did I... Did I just flutter myself all the way here?” Scootaloo gnawed on her lip, the wheels in her head turning as she wondered if such a new and remarkably natural trick could grant her such exceptional speed in other circumstances. In a solid breath, she gazed towards the heart of Ponyville, her eyes focusing on the distant image of a high-class restaurant.
Two ponies laughed merrily over several empty plates, all empty but one. A half-eaten daffodil sandwich rested in the middle of their table as they stood under the shelter of the restaurant's front patio, gossiping and chatting in merriment.
Scootaloo eyeballed them from behind the trunk of a nearby tree. She shuddered and quivered in nervous anticipation. The filly licked her lips as she glanced at them, the table, the sandwich, the ponies, and the sandwich again.
One mare leaned against the table, giggling as she gathered a satchel and hoisted it over her flank, preparing to leave. Her companion brushed an errant hoof awfully close to the plate with the uneaten morsel of food.
The orange pegasus gasped, feeling her heart skip a beat. Her hooves dug into the bark of the tree as her entire body froze.
The mare wasn't reaching for the sandwich after all. Gathering her own belongings, she shuffled away from the table and trotted alongside her companion as the two ponies exited the patio of the eatery. This was it; the heavens parted and shone a bright noonday glow across the scene as the dining table was finally abandoned.
Scootaloo took a sharp breath. She ran, she jumped, she planted the tray beneath her hooves and landed. As soon as the wheels of the rusted platform hit the dirt ground of Ponyville, the pegasus repeated history, filling her mind with the gliding flight from earlier. Sure enough, her wings started beating on cue. The air filled with a queer buzzing sound, and she was suddenly propelling herself at rocketing speed towards the restaurant, towards the table, towards the sandwich, towards the unicorn waiter waltzing up and gasping—
“My word!”
“Gaaah!” Scootaloo shrieked. Scootaloo ducked.
The unicorn spread his legs—wincing—as the wheeled filly soared directly underneath his body. He spun with a breathless gasp.
Scootaloo was no less panicked. She was sailing straight towards a metal support beam to the patio. Squealing, she pulled her back muscles tight. Her wings stopped beating. She coasted towards the side of the pole. At the last second, she stuck a front hoof out and caught the beam from the side. Her body twirled from her grip, spun, and flung her and the tray back towards the table.
The unicorn was snarling, shouting something in consternation—
Scootaloo paid him no mind. Gritting her teeth, she kicked up off the ground and beat her wings again. She sailed with the metal tray directly over the stallion, barely nicking the tip of his glowing horn. Gliding over him, she flung a front hoof down and briskly snatched the sandwich from the table. The filly landed with a clatter of wheels and kicked against the ground, steering herself down a tight alleyway and wingedly speeding off with the food in her grasp.
“Hey! Hey you! Where do you think you're going, you rapscallion?!”
Scootaloo grinned sweatily to herself, gliding further and further away from the scene with beating wings. “Heheheh... 'rapscallion.'” She delayed the next exclamation for the length of time it took for her to poison it. “Ya lame-o.”
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
The orange pegasus ground to a halt behind a Ponyville warehouse. She stood and kicked the board up so that it leaned against the bricklaid wall at her side. Panting and panting, she shook the dust out of her mane and gazed cheerfully down at her stolen prize.
As the seconds ticked by, however, that happiness faded—centimeter by centimeter—at her gradually frowning face. A sour pit formed in her throat, briefly numbing her to the growling of her stomach.
Everything she had done up until now was desperate, courageous, and maybe even foolish. However, she had maintained herself honorably the entire time, or so she felt. Ditching the chaperones back at Manehattan was hardly a sin, considering the spirit of vengeance that made her ambivalent to whatever worry she may have caused them.
All Scootaloo knew was that her parents had worked all of their adult lives in the mines of Everclear to earn their keep. Not once did they ever steal to get what they wanted. In spite of all of the little filly's bravery, finesse, and newfound dexterity, she had grabbed for herself something that was no more rewarding then the insulting cupcake festering away in the loft of the lonely barn.
The girl wasn't prepared for this new sensation. She never anticipated the immortally painful kiss of shame. It was something almost as bitter and venomous as what had made her scamper away from the unicorn at the boutique, or the flower-bearing pegasus in the middle of the road. In three whole days of trying to manifest her destiny in Ponyville, she hadn't earned generosity nor kindness. She had only earned another cupcake.
What was worse was that Scootaloo's body was weighing more than her heart, and she knew it. Every aching centimeter of her gurgling stomach was stabbing her, forcing her to foresake principals for pallet. She could despise herself the next day, so long as she could live another day. It was a good enough excuse... at least for that very fitful moment, at the end of which she closed her eyes for the necessary sin of taking the first bite out of that sandwich in her grasp.
When her jaws closed, there were no daffodils in her mouth. Scootaloo opened her violets to see that the sandwich was no longer in her hooves.
“Wh-What...?” She exhaustedly murmured.
“Bet you think you're a freakin' blur, huh?”
She glanced over and gasped.
A jackhammer cutie mark glistened in the sun. The pegasus' gaze traveled up the body to see a familiar colt waving the delicious morsel in his grasp. “I saw you steal from that restaurant. Pretty smooth moves, but still lame. Heh... a pegasus who can't fly shouldn't bother using her wings for anything else. From that point, it's just... pffft... sad.”
“That... Th-That...” Scootaloo pointed, her voice wilting through quivering lips. She grimaced as several more shadows waltzed in from the nearby alleyway. The colt's posse had joined his side, aiming their chortles at her as several local fillies curiously observed the awkward scene from afar.
“What did you expect?” The colt sniffed the sandwich up close and made a face. “Did you think you'd get a cutie mark in the shape of a burglar's mask? Puh-leeeeease.” He snickered and waved a boring hoof, marching off with the sandwich in tow. “Go home to your folks, blank flank. You're dorkin' up the whole town.”
Several of his friends laughed and blew raspberries at her. Her heart was beating faster and faster, but the cold panic was melting away under a fresh fire. She glared after him, grinding her hooves into the dirt road. “Nnnngh—Give that back!”
“Hah! That'd be rich!” He didn't bother to look at her as he took a lucious bite of the thing, consuming half of it in one chomp. “Mmmmfff... Seriously, kid. If you can't keep ahold of it, just give it up. Mmmff...”
Scootaloo frowned, her violet eyes glaring like daggers at him. As several murming kids watched on, she grabbed her tray, planted three hooves on it, and beat her wings with such ferocity that she soared into him like an orange comet. “I said, give it back—!” Her voice cut off as soon as she made contact, for the sheer size of his girth caused her to fall back on her hind quarters with a grunt. “Ooof!”
Nevertheless, the colt was pushed slightly off-balance. His buddies sharply held their breaths as he turned about and frowned down at the collapsed foal with towering menace. His cheeks bulged with his latest bite.
Scootaloo gulped. Shakily, she sat up and murmured this time, “Pl-Please. I'm just so hungry. Let me at least trade you for it—” A half-chewed chunk of sandwich was spat in her face. “Aaaugh—!” Before she had a chance to react to the disgusting mush, a hard hoof slammed across her cheek. She spat bloodily and spun into the dirt.
“Nnnngh!” The colt pivoted and bucked her hard in the ribs. The filly grunted as she rolled over three times and curled up against a lamppost, wheezing painfully for breath. “You little turd!” He stomped a hoof over one of her tiny wings and pressed his weight down onto the shrieking pony. Ruby eyes flaring, he growled through bread crumbs that tainted his glinting teeth. “No stupid blank flank comes to this town and pushes me around! Do you hear me?! I'll make sure you never fly, ever!”
Scootaloo trembled and winced. She clenched her eyes shut. She fought the tears. She fought them.
“Come on, chicken!” The snarling colt raised his hoof, this time to impale her once more in the ribs. “Get up and slam into me again! I dare you—!”
“Blackjack!” A squealing voice emanated from the sidelines of the violent event.
The colt glared aside, raising a perplexed eyebrow.
Three fillies rushed over and squatted bravely by Scootaloo's twitching body. They frowned mutually up at the sadistic adolescent. One of them, a peach-coated earth pony with fluffy red hair, adjusted her spectacles and lisped, “Haven't you done enough?! She's not from around here! She doesn't know what a big jerk you are!”
“Yeah!” another filly exclaimed. “Why don't you go pick on somepony your own size for once!”
“Hmmm... Hmmm-Heh... Heheheheheh...” The colt chuckled, gulped the last of the sandwich, and let loose a loud belch. “Will you look at that! A blank flank saved by a little army of blank flanks! Ooooh... I'm so scared.”
The redhead bit her lip, her pale cheeks blushing. Her spotless companions likewise shifted shamefully where they stood.
“Meh...” Blackjack tossed his tail hairs and marched off in a heavy trot. “Come on, fellas. I'm bored. Let's leave the lame militia to have a tea party with their new namby-pamby friend.” His chuckling band of colts joined him as they galloped off towards another end of Ponyville, bumping brutishly into each other and scoffing at the flightless pegasus from afar.
Scootaloo sniffed, struggling to get up under a cloud of fresh welts over her orange coat. She gasped at the touch of the ring of fillies helping her to her hooves.
“I'm so sorry that you had to run into that creep,” the redhead lisped. “His parents spoil him rotten. We've all learned to ignore his bullying, but it's not so easy to teach newcomers the same thing.” She smiled pleasantly. “My name's Twist. Are you hurt really bad? You can come to my place! My parents keep ice around—”
“I'm fine,” Scootaloo grumbled, reaching blindly for her metal tray.
“Heh! You're tough! But he hit you something fierce! Why don't you let us—?”
“Nnngh—I don't need your help!” Scootaloo snarled, summoning a gasp from the flinching fillies around her. “Just... Will you just buzz off?!” She stumbled briefly, hissed through bleeding lips, and clamped her hooves over the metal tray. “If I'm hurt, let me be hurt!”
“Why, that's the silliest thing I ever—”
“I don't care! I just want to be alone!” Scootaloo snarled and blurred away as the confused foals stared after her, their faces as blank as the rest of them.
Halfway back to her barn, Scootaloo could barely push herself any further. The pain had bled through her body from Blackjack's multiple blows. It was as if she had been wearing a cloak full of needles all day but didn't realize it until the weight of the afternoon fell on her shoulders. Fighting back a whimpering breath, she stumbled through the forest, hissing with each hooftrot she took as the pegasus resorted to carrying the rattling platform across her aching spine.
The shade of the barn was hardly a blessing when she finally stumbled under its dilapidated roof. She dropped the tray with a clattering noise and slumped to her haunches. With each straining breath, she re-awoke to the depths of her empty, gurgling stomach. She tried to sit up, but ultimately fell to her chest, as if desperate to suckle from the bosom of the naked earth.
She smelled a sharp fragrance amidst the settling dust of her collapse. With thin eyes, she gazed directly in front of her nose and saw several blades of natural wildgrass. Something between her teeth clicked, and her mind went briefly numb. She scooted forward on four shuffling limbs, and before she knew it, she had taken a bite out of the green strands in front of her.
Four bites into the desperate scarfing, and she stopped completely. Her tongue quivered in her mouth, and when she swallowed the blades down her throat, it was followed with a whimper as she brought two hooves up and shamefully covered her eyes.
Scootaloo couldn't earn bits. She couldn't even take a bite out of something she had stolen. Now she had eaten of the grass of the earth; she had reduced herself to the rank of a common animal. Still, as she tilted her blind eyes up towards the loft of the barn, where a white box resided, she couldn't motivate herself to climb up and eat that delicious treat that she knew was waiting for her, taunting her, insulting her with every blue shade of melted frosting.
The little orphan's manifest destiny had inverted. For the first time that the brash foal could remember, she hated herself, and it was for all of the same reasons that made her proud beforehand, that made her want to kiss the photo of the two Everclear pegasi instead of blanketing them with tears.
She had come to Ponyville to do the impossible, but what point was there in making the impossible happen if there was no reward to it other than the dream that conjured it up to begin with?
The barn had hidden her homeless life from the heart of Ponyville for three days. She curled into a corner and hugged the shadows. She couldn't bear to open her eyes, or else risk nausea from all the sick colors of her dying dreams.
The two moonrock gravestones were dull and dead: a pair of monochromatic memorials for a couple of colorful souls. With a lasting grunt, Scootaloo gripped her brown hooves over a hammer and pelted the rightmost obelisk into the earth. Stepping back in the center of Ponyville, she gazed at the twin graves planted before the collapsed shell of a crumbled novelty shop. The first flakes of snow fell onto both mounds of soft earth, glinting in the twilight like froth off of a warm beach surf that was forever lost to time.
The last pony raised her goggles, exposing a pair of soft, sleepy scarlets to the twin stones before her. In a somber breath, she dropped her tools and then reached into her saddlebag for a canteen. Unscrewing the flask, she raised it lonesomely before the graves.
"Here's to making the impossible happen,” Scootaloo slurred. “A honeymoon that never ends.”
Under a cold breeze, she took a mighty swig from the canteen of reclaimed water. She gulped, exhaled, and gazed softly beyond the ruins of the village around her.
“It is ever a labor of love...”
Her nostrils flared. Her eyes took in the ruined shells of houses like so many stars under a freezing, forested night. Then, with a shuffle of her hooves, she turned around and strolled liquidly towards the bony shape of a charred treehouse library...
“So?”
“So what, Spike?”
He leaned down under a rotating array of brass planetoids and smirked whelpishly at her. “Did you read what I gave you?”
“Oh, jee, Spike...” She hissed through wincing teeth as she stood precariously atop a wooden stool, pasting several large sheets of constellations onto the cavern's wall of stars, one at a time, slowly completing the illustration of the Equestrian night sky. “I barely had any time! What: with piloting the Harmony towards the Southeast Reaches and all. I had to spot from a high altitude the sight of post-Cataclysm Dream Valley before I could even think of finding the ruins of the hotel where Lyra, Bon Bon, and I stayed. Do you know how hard that is, even for a time traveler?”
“But...” His emerald eyeslits blinked quizzically. “You most certainly utilized your vessel's autopilot for a good part of that lengthy venture, did you not? I'm quite familiar with the Southeast Reaches of the Wasteland. Even in the midst of a stormfront, the skies there are rather tranquil, if I may say so myself.”
“Alright—Alright!” Scootaloo groaned. She stifled an exhausted giggle as she slapped up sheet after sheet of illustrated stars. “I read the snippet of your memoirs that you gave me. There, you happy?”
“Most deliciously felicitous!” The fuming dragon grinned wide. “Tell me, did you think my prose was too pretentious in addressing the nature of chronological immutability? Should I leave out the little anecdote about my futile attempt to hide the stash of gemstones from my past doppelganger in the hollow of the Canterlotlian Mountains? I feel that if I keep my writing indicative of neo-classical literary motifs, I could provide a reading experience that is as equally poetic as it is enlightening.”
“You... certainly... are... ermmm—poetic, and stuff.”
He squinted. “'Stuff?'”
“Exactly where in the memoirs did you... uh... write that anecdote again?”
“I do believe it clearly begins at the third paragraph of page one hundred and twenty-one.”
“Nnnnghhh... Yeah...” Scootaloo exhaled.
“Is there something amiss, old friend?” He ran a clawed hand of purple across his green scales, slicking them back in the twinkling manalight of the laboratory. “I thought you said that you read my memoirs.”
“And I did, Spike! I did!”
“And you do not remember the anecdote about the gemstones or—?”
“Okay, so... So I skimmed over a few parts, alright, Spike?” She gulped nervously and gazed over her pink mane at the towering dragon. “But—Can you really blame me? I mean, leaping Luna, do you ever hear yourself talk sometime?”
“What, pray speak, makes listening to my oration such a detrimental experience?”
“Exactly!” Scootaloo pointed a hoof, lost her balanced, and flailed with a girlish yelp. Spike tapped her ribcage with the thick of his tail. She regained her hooves, exhaled with relief, and gave him a thankful nod. “It's just that... well... you're so friggin' dense, Spike.” She bit her lip awkwardly as she slapped more stars across the wall. “Your words, that is. Not your head, of course.”
“So I gathered.”
“Reading so much as a paragraph of your stuff feels like running a gauntlet of harpies. Only, instead of trying to claw my eyes out, the pirates are smacking my skull with dictionaries, and not the marshmallowy kind.”
“Three hundred years of cyclical existence within a domain defined solely by my own introspection has produced a vernacular that is just as complicated as the draconian mind that has come to produce it.”
“And I get that, Spike! I've been known to get rather stuffy in my journal entries as well, but that's because I've only ever written for myself! If I had the ability to leave something for ponykind, I'd have arranged my words a lot differently, so that they were far more digestible. One thing I've learned from the tomes of Equestria is that history's best writers weaved their words with their audience in mind.”
“Hmmm... A very wise sentiment.” Spike nodded, his violet pendant dangling around his neck. “Though, I do regret that reality puts me in a rather pathetic bind. I'm sure you can relate, child.”
“Who knows, Spike?” Scootaloo briefly muttered as she plastered up the last of the white sheets. “Maybe someday, a thousand or a million years from now, a new race of sentient creatures will be blessed with Gultophine's spirit, and they'll have your written memoirs to inform them of what was done here to give them their Sun and Moon. But if you keep writing as thickly as you have, I fear such creatures will only take a brief look at your scrolls before belching 'Too long, didn't read' and resume slamming rocks against each other's heads.”
“I suppose it would only be redundant to proclaim,” the draconian elder said with an iron grin, “that the last dragon and the last pony are the best authors of their time, in that they're the only authors of their time.”
“That's the way to keep your purple chin up, Spike. Worship yourself, and eventually—by osmosis—the world will worship you too.”
“Do you sincerely believe that?”
“What does it matter?” She stepped down from the stool and let loose a sharp breath, smiling proudly at the elaborate constellation that brightly stretched before the two of them across the granite skin of the library basement. “Behold, Spike, I give you Epona's Exodus, in all of its glittering glory.”
“Two-dimensionally speaking, of course,” he murmured with a snort of green fumes.
“Pfft! What's that supposed to mean?” She smirked at him over her shoulder. Settling down on folded hooves, she gazed once more at the elaborate assortment of starry dots and nebulous strings in her own hoofwork. “This, right here, is a frozen snapshot in time, a look at a night sky that is forever lost to us. But you and me, Spike? We pulled it up to the surface from beyond the Cataclysm. We scavenged this beauty, and now it's close to giving us answers to what we seek.”
“About your elusive 'Onyx Eclipse', no doubt.” Spike nodded, then did a double-take. “Wait, what do you mean by 'close to giving us answers?'”
Scootaloo's nostrils flared slightly. She raised a forelimb out from underneath her brown body and pointed up at an off-center gap in the stars. “You see that spot right there? I first started sketching that part of the sky from atop Braeburn's stables—”
“Was that before or after Applejack's cousin summoned the courage to ask you out for dinner?”
“Yeah, shut up. Like I said—I sketched it in Appleloosa, because I couldn't see that part of the sky from Pinkie Pie's house in Dredgemane. However, there was the smoke from the Appleloosan bakeries constantly blocking the way. Those crazy tree buckers could never stop making pies for one measly second, even if Elektra herself was to come back to earth and slap them for their ridiculous obsession. Anyways, I always thought I would eventually get around to illustrating that part of the sky. I even had a chance in Stalliongrad when Dr. Whooves and I were held captive in the State Military Bunker. But—well, y'know—my Stalliongrad experience was almost nothing but galloping around like an idiot and trying to keep that silly professor alive.”
“Are you eventually getting to a point, old friend? I'm beginning to re-assess your opinion of the density of my memoirs.”
“The point is this, Spike.” She glared at him with a smirk. “I still have a piece of the sky left untouched. It's close enough to the center of the diagram, and that's where I think I'm finding the most evidence of the Onyx Eclipse. See how bunched up the constellations are there? It's so unnatural! The stars appear to be bending around a fixed location, as if something is exhibiting enough gravity to affect the rest of the celestial matter hanging above our planet. However, so long as that one piece of the sky isn't mapped, I can't pretend to know how the stars are operating around that part of the cosmos. There could be a huge slew of clustered specks that I haven't taken into account. If that was the case, then it might upend my entire theory altogether! Who's to know?! I need to find out what's missing there. I need to cover up for my stupid mistakes.”
“What, pray tell, is your plan to go about doing this, child?”
“Well...” Scootaloo shifted on her folded hooves, exhaling softly. “I did the smart thing by picking anchors who were traveling abroad just before the Cataclysm hit. When Pinkie Pie brought me to Dredgemane, I was incredibly miffed at first, but it turned out that dropping in on such a far-off corner of the Equestrian continent was the best thing that could have happened to me. Visiting Braeburn, Dr. Whooves, Lyra, and Bon Bon gave me an opportunity to map out the stars from completely different locations, so I wasn't just observing from one subjective spot. However, as awesome as all of that audacious starcharting has been, I think I should perform one last rudimentary check.”
“Oh?”
“In Ponyville,” Scootaloo said, gazing up at Spike with a soft smile. “I mean—Why not? It's what I wanted to do with Pinkie Pie to begin with, right? Besides, observing the stars from a spot so close to Canterlot seems like an appropriate way to finish this whole thing, then I can have a succinct map to trace the Onyx Eclipse with.”
“Dear friend, if I may interject—”
Scootaloo was too busy with her excitement to register his interruption. “So, I think anchoring myself to a far more homely companion of yours is in order. How about Mrs. Cake or Mr. Cake? You knew them well enough to have a dragon tooth enchanted with their soul selves, right? Or what about that one earth pony farmer who was always working gardens next to the Ponyville Produce Market? What was her name...? 'Brusselsprout?' 'Lil Pit?'”
“'Carrot Top,'” Spike answered. In a deep breath, he flexed his iron-thick muscles and murmured, “Scootaloo, as much as I respect the scientific diligence that honorably paints your current zeal, I do not think that you are making any true progress by retracing your chronological hoofsteps. I can very easily point you to Carrot Top's remains, or to Mrs. Cake's, or to any of several other Ponyvillean mainstays. But even if I could send you to their souls across reverse-time, I'm afraid that such a trip is going to have to wait for another two days... possibly three...”
“Huh?” Scootaloo blinked. With a crooked grin, she regarded her draconian companion incredulously. “For the love of oats, Spike! It's been a good friggin' two weeks in your time since you belched me to Bon Bon and Lyra's beachside honeymoon. I know you; you could have filled a good three runic jars with your fiery breath by now. What's the matter? Cat got your flame?”
“Hardly the case, my jocular little pony.” He suddenly stood up. On thundering limbs, Spike shuffled over to the far side of the lab and gestured towards a series of bubbling chemicals atop a granite table. “As soon as you left for Dream Valley, I started a little experiment I had always dreamt about, but never could have scientifically applied, seeing as I didn't have a flesh and blood pony like you over the centuries to utilize her equine essence.”
“I'm a little lost, but I'm listening.”
“The truth is, old friend, that not all of my baby's dragon teeth were enchanted with the souls of my companions. A few of them I kept as spares, in the possibility that I might be able to use them as ingredients in a different and far more audacious endeavor.” He picked up a large crystalline vial of bubbling liquid and swirled it between clasping claws. “As you can understand, I have very few teeth left to spare, so this is an exercise that I can only do once, possibly twice.”
“Just what is that stuff anyways?” Scootaloo asked, squinting from afar.
“An elixir that I made,” Spike explained. “It was concocted by grinding up the spare dragon teeth and incorporating the powder into a potion that I swiftly consumed. If my alchemic skills prove to be as expert as I spent the last several centuries training them to be, then the enchanted quaff will have filtered directly to my flame glands, where I regularly stoke the green plumes of magic that make reverse-time possible. As you can probably imagine, I have been spending the better part of two weeks incubating the next breath, only this time buffered by the experimental quaff that I have thoroughly ingested.”
“To what end...?” the last pony murmured with brief trepidation. “What's so different about your next breath of green flame that you've been saving up for?”
“Well, old friend, if my hypothesis is correct, the green flame will bind you far stronger to your anchor than ever before.” He placed the glass vial down and slowly marched towards her, his scaled features calm and collected as he stared at the pegasus. “Instead of having only forty meters of room to distance yourself from your anchor, this time and this time only you will have something along the lines of one hundred and forty.”
“Heh... Yowsers...” The pegasus smirked, her wings flexing at the sound of that. “Boy would that have come in handy around Pinkie Pie, or better yet in Stalliongrad when that infernal parade of tanks separated me and Dr. Whooves for a few frightening minutes.”
“As you can imagine, this next breath—which will be ready in two days' time, I imagine—shall be a concoction you will not want to use frivolously. I do not think your next venture should be wasted, however good-naturedly, on one of our Ponyvillean companions.”
“Well, I have to get this night sky finished completely one way or another!” Scootaloo exclaimed, pointing at the one lonesome splotch of barren white sheet. “How else am I going to get a firm hoof-hold on the Onyx Eclipse to present the matter to Princess Celestia?”
“Hmmm... Yes, about that, old friend...”
“Ah jeez, Spike,” Scootaloo moaned and facehoofed. “Not again with the lecture...”
“Do not be so quick to assume the worst, child. I have long learned to not only accept your theory concerning this cosmic phenomenon; I have learned to embrace it. However, I reiterate the fact that retracing your hooftrots should not be the next endeavor. You've spent four completely different time jumps essentially doing the same thing, and though they were noble in having used varied and distant spots of Equestria for observation, I cannot help but feel that you have only afforded yourself a safe refuge from the inevitable task that hangs over the two of us next.”
“Just what are you getting at, Spike? How can I map the stars any better than I already have been?”
“You've constructed for yourself a lovely starchart, Scootaloo. However, it is most definitely a two-dimensional facade of what we obviously seek to understand. Even with Entropan eyes, you can only map so much from the naked surface of this once-warm world. What you need is a sight that is beyond your own, that is beyond my own, that exceeds all of the devices of observation that have blessed the legacy of Equestria long before it was ever constructed.”
“Erm...” Scootaloo gulped and leaned her head curiously to the side. “What sight is it that you speak of?”
“Tell me, oh learned scavenger: in the many books that you have dredged and read, have you ever educated yourself on the Observatory of Nebula?”
“Well, the name is certainly familiar,” Scootaloo said with a chuckle. “If I'm not mistaken, it was the largest telescope ever built after the death of Starswirl the Bearded. You gotta understand, Spike, I'm an expert on history; astronomy is a new thing for me. Aside from that one 'magic camp' fiasco that Sweetie Belle once dragged me to before the Cataclysm, I barely had any chance to learn about the nature of Equestrian star charting. All of this map-making of mine has been a clumsy experiment of errors at best, but I'll do anything to narrow down all of this 'Onyx Eclipse' crap that I first heard from Dinky.”
“Truly, old friend?” Spike leaned his head to the side. “You would do anything?”
“I do believe I just said that, Spike.”
“Because if you were to go back in time and utilize the Observatory of Nebula, you would see far deeper into the starry cosmos of Epona's Exodus than ever you have before. Since you already know where to look, I might even venture to say that you would spot the Onyx Eclipse for your own mortal eyes, assuming there is anything to visualize whatsoever.”
“Yeah, alright.” The last pony nodded with a soft grin. “Sounds like a good idea, actually. A darn good idea! So... like... who would I anchor to in order to do that? Was this big, hunking telescope located in Canterlot or something?”
“No, dear friend,” Spike gravely shook his head, and in a soft breath uttered, “It was in Cloudsdale.”
Scootaloo was silent. Her brown ears wilted like a melting crown, and she let her deadpan gaze fall to the immaculate stone floor of the laboratory.
“It was constructed out of sky marble and positioned atop the highest reaches of the airborne pegasi maretropolis. The only thing that exceeded the observatory's altitude was the tall, windy, and unnavigable cliffs of Griffon Mount. From such a heavenly position, the Observatory of Nebula afforded Equestrian astronomers a lofty, pristine look at the cosmos, unblemished by the natural clouds of the troposphere. What they saw, they recorded and sent via winged messengers to the smartest and most gifted scientists in Canterlot, who took it upon themselves to make beautiful, detailed star charts in time for the next census every two decades. Obviously, they couldn't fill out such a chart in time for the coming Cataclysm, but you can, old friend. You know what it is that you are looking for, and if you go to the right time and place, you will have an opportunity to capture it, once and for all. Then and only then will you be able to construct a case to finally present to the appropriate souls of the past, and hopefully find answers to what leeched the magic from this great, glorious world.”
“Just what do you expect me to do?” The last pony mumbled. “Go back to Fluttershy, interrupt her in the middle of caring for that motherless Capricorn, and somehow convince her to take 'Harmony' on a tour through Cloudsdale?”
“My good friend...” Spike smiled gently and knelt down beside her. “You and I both know that we are not talking about Fluttershy.”
Scootaloo said nothing. She gazed down at a pair of brown hooves, the same limbs that once scratched at the black bars of an arcane vault, in a time when her coat was orange and her tears were fresh.
“After all, you could never get Fluttershy to leave her cottage, to part from her precious creatures, to abandon her post as Ponyville's chief animal tamer.” He managed a deep, bass chuckle. “And you most certainly wouldn't need one hundred meters—much less five—to maintain such a gentle-spirited pegasus as your anchor.” He shook his head. “No, my friend. In the grand history of the Third Age, Equestria only ever had one soul, one pony, one brash and agile lightning bolt of a spirit who could be in twenty places at once, who could fly from Manehattan to Dream Valley in a day, who could do so many courageous and dashing things that she never grasped how innately she outshone the very same royal fliers that she ever so faithfully idolized. You know her, Scootaloo, I daresay more than you've been allowed to know yourself. She was a hero and a villain all rolled up into one devilish smirk. She only ever awed me during the days I spent living in Ponyville, and I know that she can and will take you to the heights that you need to go, if not for the Onyx Eclipse, then for yourself.”
“I wish you'd friggin' stop talking about 'myself.'” She grunted sourly. “This whole dang experiment of ours is about Equestria, isn't it? Stop pretending like you know me, Spike, or that what I feel actually matters in the long run...”
“Doesn't it, though?” Spike gently reached a hand out and tilted the mare's face up to meet his gaze. “You are the last pony, Scootaloo. In a world full of monsters and suffering, you are the last living thing equipped to feel pain from it all. When history has run its course, and a new sun and moon hover over the scars of the past, this planet may forget that there ever was a Cataclysm. If that's the case, then we will have accomplished our task most righteously. But what an injustice it will be when you are forgotten, child. Make no mistake. Eternity is a long time, and both you and I will be forgotten. We have it within ourselves and ourselves alone to make amends with a legacy that dies with us.”
“I'm only doing all of this to fix what the Cataclysm has done to the landscape, Spike,” Scootaloo said, though it was in a disgruntled murmur.
“What about your own life, Scootaloo?” He gazed deeply into her with warm eyeslits. “Has it not been a cataclysm from the very beginning?”
The mare opened her lips to speak, but hesitated. She clenched her mouth shut and looked away from him, fighting a sudden bout of trembles.
Spike gently let his clawed fingers stroke down her mane before softly embracing her shoulders. “Do you remember what I told you months ago, when we reunited in Sugarcube Corner, dear friend?”
The last pony shuddered. “K-Kinda...” Her voice was struggling to keep its pitch.
“I told you that you needed to stop running. You were a brave spirit to have endured all of those years spent alone in the Wasteland, Scootaloo, but you were also a floundering spirit. You fled from so many horrors and monstrosities because you had to; it was your only strategy for survival. Then, when I presented to you the nature of this experiment, you very boldly agreed to become the avatar of Princess Entropa. Though I'm proud to have provided you a new opportunity to employ your amazing talents, I regret that I have only given you another avenue through which to continue running, only this time you have aimed your flight down tunnels of green flame instead of oceans of gray cloudbanks.”
“What are you g-getting at, Spike?”
“You are such a selfless and sacrificial spirit. So many other ponies I've had the pleasure of knowing wouldn't have been able to face the old phantoms of the past like you so fearlessly have. In spite of all of your bravery, you need to face the fact that there is something just as important as the Cataclysm that needs to be resolved. There will only be one end of ponies, Scootaloo. It would be a shame for that end to be a bitter one.”
“It is a bitter one, Spike.” The girl breathily shuddered. “Nothing can change that.”
“A life that begins bitterly only naturally believes so. Don't pretend that you can't afford to stay still for once and realize that you need this, Scootaloo. You need this, and you need to see to it now or else Epona help you ensnare the Onyx Eclipse with any fervor whatsoever, for all of the peace in your life will have been snuffed out long before you could ever postulate restoring that same tranquility to a world that has been fractured almost as much as your own, precious existence.”
Spike reached his one free hand over to a counter where the scavenger's saddlebag rested. He dipped his claws into it and pulled loose a dragon tooth hanging from a blue string. Gently, he held it directly before the last pony.
“You need to stop running from her, Scootaloo. As your friend, I implore you, for your sake... for the sake of the last decent soul of ponydom, find her. Find her and fill up the final gaps of the cosmos while you fill up the holes in your soul as well.”
Scootaloo's scarlet eyes glistened. She held the stringed bone matter in her grasp. She felt every centimeter of her soul being flung forward in invisible winds of speed and adrenaline, like she was falling into a great and deep pit. The mare nevertheless sat still like a stone mountain and muttered, “I do not need the tooth, Spike.”
The draconian elder tilted his head aside. “No?”
Scootaloo exhaled long and hard. She tilted her face up to stare past him. “I know where Rainbow Dash is.”
“Hello?! Anypony there?!”
A bruised and bleeding filly limped through the labyrinthine inner ruins of sunken Cloudsdale. A fine mist from several unseen waterfalls billowed through the already freezing depths of the place, chilling Scootaloo to the bone as she strolled through crumbled burroughs of sky marble and a forest of collapsed ivory pillars. Nothing was alive. Nothing had a single speck of color. Shattered granite and rock hovered above her, breaking the twilight of the moon-burning Wasteland so that the glowing bands scattered like harpstrings across the dusty, claustrophobic air.
“If anypony can hear me, I-I need help!” Scootaloo coughed, sputtered, and struggled her way forward through the three dimensional maze of carnage. “I'm stuck down here! I c-can't fly my way back up! Please, somepony! Just say something! I need to see you! I need to f-find you!”
Her echoing voice was drowned out by the roar of trickling water and the distant thunder of falling moon meteorites. After struggling to climb over a tall mound of black and white rubble, Scootaloo tripped over herself and slid—grunting—down a steep incline of pale pebbles. She slumped to a painful stop on a large white plateau, jutting over a huge gaping abyss in the center of the inner ruins. A black chasm lingered beyond the white dust and ashes of death falling from the distant surface of the Wasteland high above. Every pained breath Scootaloo let loose in this place was like a tiny clapping sound at the bottom of a steep sepulcher.
“Mmmmff... Ughh...” The filly winced as she rubbed a fresh bruise on her shoulder. Braving so much pain as she had done before, the lonely orphan took a deep breath and bellowed towards the shattered, monochromatic ceiling above. “Hello?!” For a brief second, it sounded as if a ring of pegasi was immediately replying, but they all carried the desperate pony's unmistakable pitch. “Will somepony please answer me?!” More noise, no solace. “I c-can help you as well! We can get through all of th-this together!”
Her panting breaths only grew more and more painful. Every time she closed her eyes, she envisioned her battered saddlebag of belongings, and it only pained her heart to realize that it was forever unobtainable. Grunting, the tiny pegasus hobbled back up to her hooves. She pivoted to face the black chasm beyond. Trotting forward, she began scanning the shattered scenery for a possible outcropping that might give her enough room to bravely leap to the other side of the expanse. In the middle of that thought, she froze.
Scootaloo's wings were twitching. They were twitching because something had flickered before her eyes. Breathless and wordless, Scootaloo had spotted color.
She had spotted color, and it broke the grayness of the crumpled ruins like a torch in the middle of a blackened sarcophagus. Craning her neck, Scootaloo saw it lying beside an overturned ivory pillar, resting in the center of a round halo of twilight that was shining down from the sundered world above. She saw it, and her heart skipped at the realization that it was not one color, but many. She counted four shades... five... then six, and all of them in a heavenly sequence that filled her lungs with a furious and felicitous fire.
“Rainbow Dash!” Scootaloo squealed. The only thing twitching more than her eyes were her hooves, scampering her tiny body desperately down an embankment of shattered sky marble, thrusting her forward by the sheer brilliance of a teeth-glinting smile. She slid once, she almost fell on her face. She didn't care. She ran. She fluttered towards the halo of light. “Rainbow! Omigoshomigoshomigosh! It's you! You have no idea how glad I am to have found...”
The scraping noise of her hooves was a violent thing as she came to a cold stop. She fell silent upon the precipice of a heaving breath, blinking hard as her smile reached a boiling point, but suddenly froze at the peak there.
“R-Rainbow Dash?”
It was in a slow, liquid fashion that her smile faded, like the binding to a brightly paged book being closed slowly, confusedly, as she furrowed her brow in a sudden and numbing perplexity.
“Rainbow Dash, why are you lying like...?”
Scootaloo gulped. Scootaloo gazed, her eyes darting left and right. The colors ended as soon as they began. Beyond them, there was too much dust, too much obscurity to make sense.
“D... D... D-Dashie...?” the filly murmured, her lips quivering, her eyes flitting sideways until they could barely stay open. She summoned an auxiliary strength by frowning, creasing her bloodstained brow angrily. “Th-This isn't funny, Rainbow Dash. It's me, Scootaloo. I need... I-I...”
Something fluttered in a gust of snowy air. Colors that shouldn't have been torn apart separated in a chilling gust, along with a flurry of blue feathers, and all of them taking separate paths into the black chasm below.
Scootaloo saw them, and yet she didn't. The world around her now was shaking, blurring, buckling as she knelt down and whimpered, “Come on, Dashie, g-get up.” She bravely nuzzled the colors, only to have them spread from her touch. She gasped desperately into the powdery mess, barely carrying her words on threadbare strings, “Get up. You're stronger than this. You can't... y-you can't... be...”
She lowered a trembling hoof in front her, and the last of the colors covered her limb, spreading almost as quickly as she was losing the parts of herself, sobbing, falling, clutching the spectrum before her and watching with increasing hyperventilation how she was being blanketed by the residue of the past, the sounds of her voice, and the shine in her eyes, like so much worthless dirt across an abandoned horseshoe.
Scootaloo sobbed into it, sobbed into her, bathed in her, kept afloat by foalish sobs, sobs that morphed fitfully into bellicose wails that baptized the basement of the dead world. Each time she closed her eyes, she saw her soaring through the air. Each time she opened her eyes, she saw her coating her limbs. There were many tears, and yet not enough tears to wash it all away. She never wanted to wash all of her away. She howled names that belonged to her, but now belonged to nothing, as the last remaining colors that covered a brittle and lifeless core flew above the halo of twilight, casting a curtain over the sanctity of the moment, the birth of the last pony unto the ashes of the rainbow.
Twenty-five years later, the mare's ears never stopped ringing with those cries. She listened to them as if she was being serenaded by a lonesome record player. Scootaloo dangled a twirling dragon’s tooth before her deadpan face. Her scarlet eyes remained frozen upon the string itself, as if she was far more engrossed in its color than in the enchanted, calcified shard that it held.
The filly sat, perched atop the loft of a scorched and dilapidated barn. Her legs dangled loosely, just as brown and lifeless as the forest of dead trees that formed a desolate ocean around the lonesome structure. The roof to the orphan's shelter had long crumbled to bits, so that the drifting ash of the world fell undaunted upon her shoulders and the contents of the barn around her. She didn't bother fighting the white flakes from settling on her shoulders. She had learned long, long ago that the fight was useless.
The last pony sat there, uninterrupted, submerged in placid silence and isolation, until a great beating sound suddenly filled the air. With a flash of aged, purple wings, a gigantic dragon touched down beside the barn. Gazing with squinting eyeslits at the twilight blanketed forest, Spike let loose a curious hum before pivoting to look inside the barn. Shuffling up, he sat on his scaled haunches and gazed at his quiet, equine companion.
“A place of significance, I imagine?”
“Hmmm...” She pivoted the string around in her grasp, deeply weathering the centripetal rush that it sent spiraling through her stone-still soul. “Something like that.” Her pink hair billowed under a brief flurry of snow. With a shuddering breath, she tapped the dragontooth lightly and watched as it spun chaotic circles before her jaded eyes. “There are so few places of significance left in this world, and even fewer that I've had the pleasure of sharing with others... with or without the aid of green flame, for that matter.”
He gazed at her. Swallowing, he pivoted his snout eastward towards the gray splotch of ruins that was Ponyville. “After our last conversation, you left in such a hurry. I didn't dispute your departure, though I doubt even someone of my stature could have made a difference in your case.” He managed a smirk; it came out like an iron wince. The dragon sighed. “I suppose it goes without saying, dear friend, that you are always a subject of my concern. This would be true even if you weren't the last of your kind. I hope you know that...” “I do, Spike. I do.” She nodded, craning her neck to stare at the tooth-and-string from another angle. She exhaled softly, “There was a time when—if I had known how much you cared about me—I would have left your presence and never come back. Long ago, before I had to survive in the wastes, before I was desperate, I saw affection to be a plague, and concern to be a dead weight. But now...?” She clutched the tooth around the crook in her hoof and finally tilted her blank, scarlet eyes towards the sea of snow flurrying above them both. “What have I left to earn myself but pain and regret?”
Spike gently nodded. “You were always a rogue, I take it.” He snorted green smoke, and his smile was truer this time. “Just like her.”
“Just like her?!” Scootaloo flashed him a look. Instead of a frown, it ever so briefly—and bravely—bore a smirk. “Spike, I was a rogue long before I met her.” She cleared her throat and shifted her weight on the flimsy wooden floorboards of the loft beneath her. “I was... I was homeless, Spike. Not only didn't I have a family, but I didn't have an adequate roof over my head, nor a guaranteed meal every day. Did I ever tell you that?”
His emerald gaze fell to the cold, powdery floor below the barn. “No. But... But looking back after three hundred years of contemplating all of the ponies I've ever had the grace to know, I saw the signs, Scootaloo. I realize now that you were... very brave.”
“I was stupid,” Scootaloo said. “I had so many friends, so many loved ones, so many opportunities at my beck and call, and I refused every single one of them. And for what? To prove that I was a strong and self-dependable equine being? Spike, I slept in forests and ate out of dumpsters. I performed menial tasks for gold bits to buy my friends gifts to make them think I actually had money to spare. I skipped out on school, avoided social gatherings, and made unholy falsifications to paint a picture of a normal, healthy life to all who observed me. And for what? For some reason, I just had to prove myself to a pair of dead pegasi who had every right to lie in peace and not worry about how much their obstinate little daughter was suffering.”
The air of the hollow barn briefly surged at the end of her exclamation. The Wasteland had a dull roar to it, like a hushed audience that was always excitedly murmuring to hear what a lonely survivor had to say next, whether or not she made any sense.
Scootaloo didn't bother to try. “Here I am, two decades later, and guess what? I'm still having to prove myself to dead ponies.” She sighed long and hard, absent-mindedly wrapping and unwrapping the length of the tooth's string around the body of her forelimb. “My foalhood, for all of its stupidity, was field practice for the life Entropa had destined me to live. So don't think that I'm complaining, Spike.”
“I never said that you were...”
“Good. Because the point is...” She gritted her teeth as the first wave of pain hit her. Nervously, she whispered forth, as if slowly peeling the charred brown coat off her flesh to reveal the soft orange one underneath. “The point is that I didn't need Rainbow Dash to bring direction to my life.” She hesitated, her lips quivering. “Only purpose,” she whimpered.
Spike leaned forward so that his snout was at a parallel angle to her body inside the barn. “I may have been a mere whelp at the time, old friend, but I bore witness to your adoration of her. Even to this day...” He smiled pleasantly. “...I have always found it to be a sweet, endearing thing.”
“'Sweet'... 'endearing'...” She murmured, gulped, then said, “Spike, Rainbow Dash kept me alive. Even when she wasn't around me, she breathed life into my lungs in ways that Gultophine never could. I thought of her when I woke up and I dreamed of her when I went to sleep. All of the daylight spent in between was all about finding new and exciting ways to emulate her. I was as surprised as I was elated to find out that my life was becoming happier and healthier in the process. Rainbow Dash was my whole world, Spike. I can't even pretend to tell you how much it meant to me just knowing that she could always be there—at any random moment—slicing the sky like the gorgeous spectrum that she was. I may have been homeless, but so long as I knew there'd be her rainbow in the sky, the world had become safe, the whole of Equestria had become my home. And I... I was happy, Spike. For the first time in my crazy, broken childhood, meeting and knowing Rainbow Dash made me happy, and not because I was forcing myself to feel that way, but because everything was just... just awesome when she was around.”
“If I may say so, child, Rainbow Dash had a fine taste for souls of like spirit: honest and brash, yet reserved in expressing affection. You are in so many ways like her; I have no doubt she would be proud of you now. I'm sure that she dearly adored you then, maybe even in a fraction of the manner that you so exalted her.”
“She cared for me, Spike,” Scootaloo murmured with a nod. “For better or for worse, I would not be alive today—I would not have survived the fall of Cloudsdale—if it wasn't for a sacred act of bravery that she saved for me and me alone.” She gulped something hard down her throat. “I have always known that my being alive, that my being the one to bear the brunt of this experiment, is a testament to the fact that... that I meant something to her.”
“All the better reason for you to—”
“To what?” Scootaloo flashed him a look, a briefly angry one at that. “To drop in on her little world and encumber her with the baggage of all of my broken hopes and dreams? I've held my tongue before you as much as before myself, Spike, each and every time I've made these delightful little sojourns into the past. Cataclysm or not, what more am I doing than disturbing the peace of living, warm graves? Because that's what they are, Spike. Our friends' lives are animated graves, locked blissfully within the climactic throes of a lost, breathing world. Perhaps I've summed up enough courage to disturb the Apple Family, or Fluttershy, or Pinkie Pie—but Rainbow Dash?” She shuddered suddenly. Her hooves dropped towards her lap as she tilted up and aimed a pair of glossy eyes towards the roof of the dead world.
After a spell of heaving breaths, she finally spoke, “I feel as if the least I can do is let her rest. She's done me a huge favor; why can't I do the same for her? You say that I've been running from her, Spike. You couldn't be any farther from the truth. The soonest I found out about the amazing power of your green flame, about reverse-time, I instantly dreamed of hanging with Rainbow Dash again, of being able—for once—to fly in the clouds with her, of being able to finish so many unfulfilled promises that had been turned to ashes by horrific fire.”
“But you won't let yourself... You can't,” Spike uttered, knowingly. “Would it be any different if I could somehow allow you to meet your parents?”
Scootaloo sniffed. She gave Spike a bitter smile, her eyes watering. She cradled the blue string in her grasp and murmured, “I had hope, Spike. I had hope beyond the holocaust of the Cataclysm that there were survivors other than myself when Cloudsdale fell. Can you believe that? The first few days after the world friggin' blew up, I wandered the wreckage of the pegasus city like a moron, calling out for other ponies, looking for others who were alive.”
“What happened, old friend?”
“What do you think happened?” She bit her lip. Scootaloo leaned forward and clutched the string to her forehead. “You have to understand, when I... when I found her... when I saw her body crumbled to bits like a d-discarded piece of broken pottery...” She clenched her eyes shut. Tears rolled down her brown cheeks as she shook her head blindly into the string and hiccuped forth, “I knew... I-I knew that there was nothing left of ponydom. For years, with the rainbow s-signal and with flamestones I pretended otherwise, but right then and there... in the ruins of Cloudsdale, upon the threshhold of her ashes, I knew, Spike. I knew that I was the last pony. Because if Rainbow D-Dash didn't make it...” She quivered, choked on a sob, and murmured to the shell of her lost, orphan years. “Then how c-could anypony? Rainbow Dash was... is the best. The best. There was n-never and there will never be somepony as awesome... as amazing... and as... as...” Her face scrunched up. She navigated a heaving breath, sniffed, and opened her eyes. Sitting up straight, she bravely dried her cheeks with a forelimb and murmured, “You must realize, Spike. When Rainbow Dash died, all the colors died with her. Everything that was once glorious and beautiful about this world went away when she did, and not with the Cataclysm. How—Spike—how in all that is holy would you... could you expect me to somehow be able to go b-back to all of that?” She sniffed and stammered, “How could I go back to her, after all that's happened, after all that I've b-become?”
Spike stretched the iron scales of his neck in thought. He pivoted on his haunches and leaned gently over the barn, his fingers toying with the dangling violet pendant about his neck, gently holding it still in the furious, random gusts of the merciless Wasteland. “Have I ever told you, dear friend, about the Canterlotlian ritual of purple dragon whelping?”
Scootaloo navigated a sniffling expression to raise a confused eyebrow at that. Calming down slightly, she dried her cheek a final time, gulped, and muttered, “No. Wh-What about it?”
“Mmmm... I'm surprised you wouldn't know enough about it already, from all of your years of reading. I do suppose you've had very few dragons to contend with in your travels, so perhaps it is just as well.” He smirked slightly and twirled the pendant gently in his grasp. “Long ago, in the early half of the Second Age, the Chaos Wars blanketed this entire continent in flame and mayhem. It wasn't nearly as horrible as the Cataclysm, but it almost brought all of Equestrian life to a bloody end. The campaign that the Alicorn Sisters fought against Discord was a long and arduous battle, spanning eons. Many amazing, fanciful species that once populated this landscape met a terrible fate, forever to become extinct. Among the afflicted creatures were none other than Cassius and Phalinore, the mother and father of green flame, the first purple dragons to exist on this planet.”
Scootaloo brushed her pink mane aside and gazed intently up at her draconian companion as his voice filled the air in a deep hum, shaking the foundation of the barn with the somberness of his story.
“Such is the consequence of war. Life that has the chance to perpetuate itself was snuffed out for an eternity. The Alicorn Sisters were not directly responsible for the pestilence that befell the first and only purple dragons, but Princess Celestia—who by then had become the chief Goddess in charge of restoring harmony to the landscape—felt a deep guilt for what the battle with Discord had done to end Cassius' and Phalinore's lives. She discovered within their mountain lair no less than five hundred eggs, all unhatched. You see, purple dragon whelps go through a metamorphic stage of development. Even though the eggs are laid, they remain dormant for a long time, for they never have a chance of hatching until the parents decide it's time to provide a spark of magic to the outer shell in order to finish the last leg of the whelping process. With Cassius and Phalinore gone, Celestia had the eggs taken into her care. For the millennia to follow, the eggs would be stored in a special area of Canterlot, where only the wisest and most sagely of unicorns would be granted the honor of providing just the right magical spark to bring the draconian orphans into the world of the living.”
Spike smiled down at Scootaloo, raising a scaled eyecrest as he spoke.
“This unicorn Order of Purple Whelping persisted in Canterlot beyond the Chaos Wars, well beyond the Second and Third Age, as a matter of fact. Fate would have it that Twilight Sparkle, a young and humble Canterlotlian native, would be bestowed the honor of bringing such an infant dragon into this world. As a test of her commitment and character, she was told that it was a merely an 'entrance exam.'”
Spike chuckled, filling the snowy air with green smoke. He coughed briefly, sputtered, but ultimately refound his breath.
“Her power was more than sufficient to bring me into this world. She held within herself a phenomenal well of magical abilities, so much talent that—even until the end of days—they remained forever untapped.” There was a somber breath. He clutched the violent pendant tightly, but then continued, “You probably know what happened next. She was taken under Princess Celestia's wing and made to be the Goddess of the Sun's special and most beloved pupil. What you probably don't know is that, in being given charge over me, she was merely playing a chaperone—a foster parent, as you can probably relate—and one day she would see me sprout wings and fly off, rejoining the rest of my purple brood, destined to protect Equestrian sovereignty with all of my natural, magical talents, as a sign of gratitude for having been safely hatched into this world. There was a place for that, you know: Skybreak Point, where the pegasi held shop beneath Cloudsdale before sending weather fliers off to do their continental duties. It was the same spot where purple dragons traditionally went to make their first flight. I used to dream of that day. I used to imagine myself becoming one with my own kind, and feeling the warm wind beneath a pair of majestic, flowing wings.”
He took a deep breath as the color drained from his emerald eyeslits. His webbed appendages coiled tighter against his massive size.
“In three hundred years of loneliness, all I've ever dreamt about... all I've ever thought about... has been her. The very reason I started on this experiment and boldly launched the first breaths of reverse-time was in a fitful attempt to... to maybe reunite with her. It wasn't until later, much later—when I awoke to the reality of time's immutable nature—that I settled for the more selfless goal of fixing that which the Cataclysm burned to a crisp. Still, I can't help but wonder if perhaps my infant obsession with my foster parent had made me a bad dragon. Perhaps I was different and more pitiable than the rest of the whelps who were hatched in Canterlot before me. But that doesn't matter, Scootaloo.”
He gazed at her, and a hint of moisture showed along the edges of his scaled eyecrests.
“Twilight Sparkle was more than just my mentor or my magical guidance. She was my mother, Scootaloo. She was my mother and I loved her. In the life that we have both lived, dear friend, a life full of flames and orphans and ash, we have every right to choose the ones who define us, and the ones we love. The only difference between you and I is that... is that you—my dear friend—you have the ability to go where I can't. You have the chance to bask in that warmth that is forever lost to my spirit but not to my dreams. You can experience that love again, first-hoof, and in such a glory that is unbecoming of all the lonesome shades you've painted yourself with throughout the years. The colors were never dead, Scootaloo, so long as you've been alive to envision them, just as Rainbow Dash shared them with you. Don't you see, old friend? All of those centuries I spent trying to find a way to reunite with my mentor, I was actually—and quite fatefully—finding a way to reunite you with yours.”
“I...” Scootaloo shuddered. She ran a hoof through her pink threads, gazing towards the desolate floor beneath the barn. “I don't know... I-I just don't know, Spike...”
“Oh child...” He removed his hand from the pendant and lovingly cradled her chin in between two claws. “Do not bother so much with knowing. Embrace your chance to feel while you still can, before you are encompassed by the very end that defines you. All of history, both glorious and holocaustal, is brimming with knowledge. Love, however, is a far more challenging, far more elusive treasure to scavenge from annihilation, in all of its multiplicitous shades. This Onyx Eclipse that spites us may or may not be the key to uncovering a great and terrible secret. But what fills you with joy and purpose isn't a secret, Scootaloo. Go back in time and look for answers, look for stars, but most of all look for that joy. Patch it together, piece by piece, and hug it one last time before the day comes when you—like me—will no longer have a second chance.”
Scootaloo stared at him, her eyes wilting—but not tearing this time. She was both weak and powerful at once, a queer and alien sensation that excited her as much as it frightened her. She gave the dragon tooth one last look, pulled hard, and broke it free from the string. She dropped the bone matter to the wooden floorboard like a flimsy white box and clutched the blue string to herself.
“'Observatory of Nebula,' huh?”
“Yes, my friend. In the upper heights of Cloudsdale.”
She took a deep breath. “This will be... a long, long trip.”
“I'm sure you're more than equipped to overcome whatever lies in the path which leads back to where you started from.”
“It's not a matter of what I'll encounter on the voyage to sunken Cloudsdale,” Scootaloo said, then glared firmly at him. “It's who.”
Scootaloo huddled, alone with her bruises, at the bottom of the dilapidated barn. Sniffling, the seven year old glanced up towards the loft. Something inside her was beginning to crumble away. Defeatedly, she stood up on all four limbs, and made to climb the ladder towards the upper floor, towards a white box, towards the blue, frosted dessert inside that was about to fill her and shatter her with the shameful consumption that was to follow...
Then, out from the great bolting blue, there came a rasping shriek, followed by a rush of billowing air.
“H-Huh?” The hungry pegasus hung halfway up the ladder, glancing up through a hole in the roof to see a bright speck of random colors suddenly hurtling towards her like a missile. “Holy crap!” She flung herself to the floor with violently twitching wings.
“Yaaaaaaugh!” The hulking body of a sapphire blue pony bore a new hole in the barn, ricocheted off the loft, and shattered through a rustic crossbeam in the center of the place. “Augh! Ooof!” She landed in a thud, spilling hay and sawdust through the claustrophobic air of the Ponyvillean afternoon. “Hoboy...”
Panting, Scootaloo shot up from beneath a bed of straws. Her eyes widened at the tumbling splinters and wreckage of her once pristine hovel. “What... Wh-What...?” She sputtered, stumbled up to her hooves, and barked, “My barn! What the heck did you do to my—” The orphan winced in mid-speech, her violet eyes twitching. “Erm... What I mean was—Ahem—You just totally smashed up this stupid, ugly barn! Are you insane?!”
“Nnngh... Not insane... Just dizzy...” A pegasus sat up, wincing, rubbing her hoof through a tattered mane of red to green to violet. “Whew... Eheheh... Guess I'm not exactly ready yet to pull off the buccaneer blitz...”
“Look... L-L-Look at the hole you made!” Scootaloo squeaked, staring bug-eyed at the offending chunk overhead, brimming with blinding sunlight. “You could have brought this whole place down, you crazy psycho!”
“Pfft! If you love this stupid barn so much, why don't you marry it?!” The adult pony raspberried and shook the last of several haystalks loose from her skull. “What were you doing here anyways? Counting ticks in the hay?”
“Nnngh-No!” Scootaloo frowned. After a blink, she realized that she was scratching her neck. She flung her hoof down in a furious show of anger. “Still, who are you to talk?! I was minding my own business when you suddenly—”
“Who am I?!” The pony gasped in violent disbelief, flinging a pair of ruby eyes in the foal's direction. “You mean you haven't heard of me?!”
“Why?” Scootaloo raised an eyebrow. “Should I have?”
“I'll say!” The pony performed a devil-may-care smirk. In a gust of wind, she twirled up from the pile of wooden debris and hovered high above the barn's loft, her mane and tail hairs whipping in the breeze like living spectral flame. “The name's Rainbow Dash! And I'm only the awesomest, coolest, most talented flier in all of Ponyville!” She smiled wide, her teeth glinting.
Scootaloo gazed up at her, silent, blank, and dumbstruck—at least until she stuck her tongue out. “Pffft! Yeah right!” The filly smirked venomously, scoffing, “More like 'Rainbow Crash!'”
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Two heroes whom I've never met have openly stated that they don't like this fic. For one, the fic is too dark and simply not to his tastes. The other considers it a pile of absolute detritus. How it's possible my two heroes don't love this fic to cataclysmic pieces is beyond me. But my opinion is my own, so neither my King of Wonderfolk nor even Lord of Goats will change my mind.
I enjoy this.
Whilst I kind of understand why you dislike this draft so much... I still get all weirdly giddy whilst I'm reading this.
It may not be close to the quality of the Dredgemane Arc (which I absolutely adore), but it still reads and feels like End of Ponies - and any foray into this universe is wonderful news for me.
Wow, I think you just set a record speed for breaking me.
Well, I'm going to be reading all these Petra scraps over the next couple weeks 'till New Year's (starting yesterday, posting today, thanks Obama). Rereading in the case of the Kaizo edition. So I'll be offering opinions and thoughts, now that I have an actual medium to do it through.
From what I remember, I was thoroughly entertained by this arc. While it wasn't quite the same caliber of the Dredgemane Arc, it was still very entertaining in its own right. Apart from some definite tweaking, I really would have liked to see this posted. (You, of course, having an entirely different opinion.)
This is one of my first gripes. I absolutely love the concept. Character analysis is cool, backstory is entertaining, and I can see its importance before running through the Rainbow Dash arc. However, it still feels like it doesn't have a place in the story. At least not the way it's currently done. Perhaps as a side-story? I mean, the closest you've done to one of those for EoP is Saros. But this I can easily picture as something like a side story, with bits of Wastelander Scoots scene dispersed around every so often in a way to show the reader how they are linked to the main story. The different eras of Scootaloo are quite fascinating to read, but they way they are done is really jarring at some points (especially when jumping between several points in one era, like Wastelander Scoots), and I sometimes lost track of what was currently going on.
Ohchristwhat...that would've made my head/retinas explode...
I dunno, I kinda liked Wart. Then again, I already had some idea of what his role in the story would be soon after he was first introduced. I'll keep this in mind as I'm reading, though. Same with Razzar, I'll keep this in mind. Didn't necessarily like her, mind you. She pissed me the hell off over the course of the story.
I will definitely agree on part of this. The fight scenes were definitely lengthy. Though moreover, I think it's the chapters that are too "Nietzsche-dayum" long. 20K is solid. 30K is a bit of a chore. When you're pushing 50k words for a single chapter, you're really starting to get people to have to schedule their time and the health of their eyeballs around a story, and that becomes a bit of a pain. I'm really grateful that you went and refurbished EoP for that 2013 edition because dear christ...looking back on it, I have no idea how in the hell I burned though that entire story in pdf form in a week on my tiny-ass smartphone apart from being completely bored at/having nothing to do at work, by chance being on break from school, and oddly being left alone and not bugged enough so I could sit down and fucking read. Massive chapters that span over half the length of the first Harry Potter book are daunting.
So yeah...fight scenes...length doesn't hurt too much, but trim it down a bit. Detail brings immersion. Immersion keeps with the readings and the interest. Entirely massive chapters, however, do hurt, and drive people away. The entire Austraoh saga is longer than EoP at this point, but it's easy for a new reader to pick up a fic that comes in smaller bites. Mind, they don't have to be that small. Just small enough. The 18-23k range works great, imo.
I'm really curious about the specific comments and reactions from the individual authors on the arc. At least this draft anyways. And yeah, dropping 200k words all at once in front of someone to sift though would definitely be ill-advised as it leads to the brain-melty. But you've obviously already figured this out.
Let it be on the record that I give several truckloads, good sir. I really want to see this story finished someday. When? Who knows? Just don't let it die.
Besides, with the traffic from the 2013 edition, and the upcoming crossover from the Sweetie Belle Chronicles, there just may be renewed interest in this after all.
Now if only this could be cannon Scootaloo.
Reading this again a year later. I stand by what I said earlier. Splitting chapters apart into ~20-25k sizes like with EoP2013 so it's an easier read and easier to pick up where one left off, cutting out some extra bits with past Scoots. At least it's you that gets to decide what to cut out. I'm a goddamn hoarder that needs to hang onto every last bit of lore.
On a side note, I completely forgot you reused Razzar's name for Austraeoh until now.
I mean... who really cares anymore?
I still care