Short Scraps and Explosions

by shortskirtsandexplosions

End of Ponies - Petra Arc - Kaizo Edition pt 4

The End of Ponies – by short skirts and explosions

Chapter Twenty-Eight – Something Worth Shining On

Haman was a dry, withered leaf of an imp. His yellow flesh was liverspotted and his bony limbs resembled scorched tree branches that had survived the Cataclysm. As if he wasn't unsightly enough, his gangly features were offset by a protruding belly that spoke volumes of his luxurious lifestyle and yet nothing of his tenacity. The latter was attributable only to the Rust-Bleeder's wealth, as was evident in the sparkling cane that he supported himself with. The handle-piece of the platinum stick was a small, crystalline dome, within which several perpendicular gears ticked and rotated against each other in a perpetual mimic of Petra. As the elder goblin rode a lone elevator monogrammed with his own name, he leaned against his cane and sighed. Off his skull hung two leathery spokes, a pair of ears that had lost almost all of their lobes through years of rot and decay.

“What's the matter, sir?” inquired a dark-haired goblin wearing black shades, one of four bodyguards that were flanking the wealthy clan leader. “Is something bothering you?”

The words that came out of Haman's dry mouth resembled crackling embers more than sentient speech, “What else, Fredden? Nnnngh... I only hope she knows what she's doing by talking personally to that sky-stealer.”

The dark haired goblin smiled placatingly. “She's not let you down before, boss. If I'd say so, she's worth every bit of the four hundred thousand strips.”

Haman of Rust Blood mumbled, shifting his weight on the golden cane, “I'd give four million just to be able to take a piss without it hurting.”

The other guards chuckled. Fredden gave them a glare, adjusted his shades, and uttered, “Keep your chin up. We're almost at the meeting. You're always good at moving a crowd. Pretty soon, you'll not have anything to stress about.”

“Boy,” Haman glared aside at Fredden through faded, amber eyes. “If I wanted you to ego-stroke me, I'd have paid you twice as much as Miss Ryst.” He gripped tighter to the ticking globe atop his cane as the elevator car shook and rattled in its descent. The elder goblin gazed down through the metal grates blurring by. “Truth is, I could use without the crowd whatsoever. There's no sense in a dead world having this many morons flocking over one giant hunk of metal like hungry ants.”

Fredden smiled nervously. “What else is Petra good for, sir?”

“I've long seen Petra as a fire, Fredden,” Haman slurred, his face suddenly sleepy, exhausted. “It excites us all, but it also consumes. Someday, boy, that fire will go out. What will it be like? A whimper? A puff of smoke? Who will be around to earn strips from something so pathetic?”

“I... I don't think I get you, sir.”

“Of course you don't.” Haman's lips curved slightly. “You're a good imp.” Suddenly, a olden aura of torchlight bathed across the elevator car, followed by the roar of dozens upon dozens of disgruntled goblins. The prime Rust-Bleeder's eyes lit up as he put on a shiny grin. “Well, the strips are clattering away! The show must go on.” He gripped the cane tight as the car came to a noisy stop. The doors rattled open, and Haman limped his patient way straight into the noise, flanked by his four yellow-banded guards.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Warden's green ears pricked upon hearing a rise of commotion. Gazing down the rows upon rows of ampitheatre seats, he saw a yellow, hunched figure shuffling towards the center of the meeting. All around the elder Rust-Bleeder, the families of Petra were murmuring, squabbling, and occasionally growling. The room was full of pale expressions, both shocked and angry, as the excitement burned itself loudly and then settled into a tittering hush.

Warden shuffled from afar, briefly wondering if the entire ampitheatre was going to pounce on Haman and rip him to shreds. The crazy scene briefly went dark as the Outbleeder bandanna fell over his eyes. Wincing, Warden pulled it back up over his emerald brow and re-tied the thing, all the while his aquamarine eyes were constantly and forlornly darting towards the image of a lone elevator door far to his side, leading down to the shadowed intestines of Petra, where a certain pegasus had descended.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

“Hmmm... We both want the same thing, four-legs. Yes yes yesssss...” Razzar, formerly Miss Ryst, said. She jerked her neck to the side and scratched at a loose sheet of dying skin flaking off her red scales. “Is it funny that there are just so many smelly boomers in the way? I don't remember the scent of my mother. Do you?”

“Some things are easier than others to forget,” Scootaloo murmured, suspiciously eyeing the naga as she strolled about the far side of the cramped chamber full of steam pipes. The goblin clan meeting roared directly overhead as she spoke to the shape-shifter, “Do forgive my one-track mind, but I think you said something earlier about a free trip to the inner pits.”

“One spit at a time, pony,” Razzar said, waving a hand that she proceeded to gnaw the knuckles of. “Hmmm... It's hard, isn't it? To be working so long for an imp under a cold shower of promises. It's like the reverse of hatching from an egg: thing gets darker and darker. Soon you can't remember why you ever began working for him in the first place.”

“If you're talking about my labors for Devo of Hex Blood, I'm not sure what you know... or what you think you know.” Scootaloo's nostrils flared. “But that imp is a creature of integrity. Such a thing is hard to come by in the Wasteland.”

“Integrity... yes yes yesss...” Her left eyeslit twitched a pale green the last pony's way. “You see this in him because he told you that it is there? Hmm?”

Scootaloo glared. “He's saved my life in the past... twice...”

“A goblin who saves a pony...” Razzar nodded, flexing her claws while a clump of dead skin hung off her wrist. “Hmmm... if I could see past my spit, I would write a book.” She jerked her neck and shuffled to the side, murmuring, “Sister four legs, a boomer only saves a peace of meat to carve his name into it later. Hmmm... Sometimes he carves an entire memoir until the meat has become stupid and tenderized. Yes yessss?”

“If you're such an expert on indentured servitude in the realm of imps,” Scootaloo said, narrowing her gaze on the naga, “Then what keeps you doing so much dirty work for Haman?”

“My life is dirty work, four legs,” the lizard woman briefly hissed. Her barbed tail flicked as she stared cockeyed at the pegasus. “Dirtier than yours? Hmmm... Truthfully, I cannot judge. But I can guess. A very fuzzy, tasty guess, like shooting steam bolts at feathers. Do you remember crows, four legs?”

“Uhm... What?”

“Crows, pony. Shrieking streaks in the sunlight, colored with the blood of trolls.”

“Sure...” Scootaloo shifted nervously, gawking at the twitching character. “I remember crows. What pegasus doesn't remember a bird, no matter the color?”

“I was old enough to remember them, four legs, before the lights of the world went out.” Razzar's green eyeslits briefly calmed just long enough to stare into a grand, steaming nothingness. She flexed one arm before a cluster of pipes. In the dim haze of filtered lanternlight, her red scales blended with the copper surface of the metal cylinders. “I was basking on the shores of the Bay of Nebula. The Sun was bright and wicked. It wove hot spit into my heart, and then it exploded.” Her razor sharp teeth chattered briefly. The skin on her bones briefly flashed a white platinum before dulling back to crimson. “So many dead brothers and sisters, four legs. So many wriggling tails... yes yes yesssss. No matter how hot the seas boiled and the sand turned to glass, the crows came. The crows came and ate the scales off my siblings. It was the last feast of a golden, desperate world. And then what happened? Hmmm?”

Razzar shuffled about and gazed at the last pony through a twitching, right eye.

“The crows all dropped dead. They ate of dead flesh and they became dead flesh. Then, when days rolled into weeks and there was no more sunrise or sunset, I ate that dead flesh, and I knew what I had been born for.” She jerked her neck and scratched at the skin peeling from her chin. “Hmmm... Do you not see? We are all dead crows on the inside. Haman and the other boomers? They are the deadest, blackest of crows, and there's a burnt beach waiting for them... waiting for all of them. It is all a matter of time.”

Scootaloo blinked at Razzar. She turned and glanced at Otto and the other goblins observing the conversation from a distance. Raising an eyebrow, she looked back at the naga. “Does Haman and his associates know of your... colorful opinions?”

“That's just it, four legs,” the shape-shifter hissed and tapped the handles of her holstered pistols with nervous claws. “Spit is spit, and silver is silver. Hmmm... They only know the truth that they allow themselves, and all of it is paved in strips. It may not be a noble truth, but it is a useful one. Useful truths are the only truths that matter, which is why I'm attempting to speak to the scavenger inside you.” She twitched and licked her teeth. “A pack mule, you are not, pony. These goblins are smelly boomers. You?” Her tongue darted out briefly. “The Wasteland hangs off you like a mother's breath. Yes yes yessss... You live to scavenge, not to beg. I came here to Petra to take, not to ask. Haman is but a vessel. He is not my master. Can you say the same about yourself and the prime Hex-Bleeder?”

“Are you telling me that you're not a servant to Haman of Rust-Blood after all?” Scootaloo remarked, squinting. “Just what kind of a deal are the two of you making?!”

“Stop... nnnngh... thinking like a boomer, four-legs!” Razzar briefly snarled. Panting, she rode down a wave of twitches and seethed, “This is not about servitude or deals or any of that spit! This is about the one thing that matters in the Wasteland, that which is thicker than blood, that which can get you what you want much faster than Devo's poetic integrity or any other boomer's meaty promises!”

“And just what is that?” the last pony asked.

Razzar stared at her evenly for once. “This is about business.”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

“There is a rift,” Haman said, “A fissure, a division, if you will, and it is threatening to tear this beloved imp city of ours to shreds.” The yellow-fleshed elder balanced the firmness of his hoarse voice before launching it boldly up and down the ranks of tense, mesmerized clan leaders. The many goblin elders hung on his every word like the floor of the chamber was made of acid. “There are many imps who desire power, many of them within my own flock of Rust-Bleeders, and I have endeavored as of late to keep them in check. However, even a goblin of my own polynumerous resources can’t stop the spread of vermin everywhere. It is because of this that I have been forced to spill the blood of imps in your streets. I assure each and every one of you good, righteous, hard-manifesting goblins of Petra that the only blood I have ever shed or plan to shed is that which has belonged to me.”

A hushed murmur fell through the crowd. The many colored clans hung in a cyclonic formation around the oldest and richest member of the city as the prime Rust-Bleeder cleared his throat and continued with his somber address, all the while slowly and methodically twirling the translucent cane handle of whirring gears in his claws.

“My dear brothers, I am a very old goblin. I have been manifesting Petra for a long time. I wish to die with my pride for this city’s accomplishments fully deserved. Most of all, however, I need to die with my senses intact. This wish of mine is threatened by rebellious, young, upstart imps as of late who do not have a respect for tradition. If I act as though there is no conspiracy transpiring beneath our very earlobes, then I am not acting as a responsible imp. For the sake of tradition and the sanctity of the families of the Thirty-Five platforms, I have chosen for the time being to halt Rust Blood production—not as an impediment to this city’s prosperity—but to make the task of Miss Ryst and my other faithful subordinates a lot more feasible as they endeavor to squash this pathetic uprising.”

The finality of his statement was made evident by the bevy of dead seconds that he allowed to follow the utterance of it. Slowly, the room bled into a cacophonous assortment of hushed murmurs and anxious squabbling. Warden fidgeted, uncertain what was going to be said next.

Then, out from the crowd, a lone voice loudly yet rather pleasantly rang forth, “Are we not goblins?”

The council chamber fell into a hush. A pale sheen of exasperation washed over Haman’s liver-spotted face. Sighing, he was already turning to glance halfway up the ring of seats when a large goblin to his side spoke.

“The Council Recognizes Devo of Hex Blood. Prime Hex-Bleeder, do you wish to expound upon your statement before Haman of Rust Blood?”

The aged blue goblin with white dreadlocks smirked from his seat. “Oh, how I do adore the chance to give a good speech. Evidently, that is Haman’s proficiency, so I shall not endeavor to emulate his greatness.” He cleared his throat, stood up, and spoke before the crowd, “What I mean to ask is simply this: is it or is it not within our calling to manifest Petra?”

The crowd muttered in a cloud of numbness to Devo’s blatant rhetoric. A few spaces away from Haman, Warden took note of a frazzled Franken of Glass Blood listening to the entire proceeding, nervously shivering as if the temperature of the place had become several degrees lower.

“I have long believed, my dear brothers,” Devo spoke, “That Petra is but a fraction of what it can be. We imps can be blossoming something great and beautiful across this Wasteland, whereas so far we have only managed to hammer forth a flimsy destiny at best amidst the desolation within which so many of us are born. We have it within ourselves to be more than clans, to be more than the disparate clusters of ideas and dreams. These many families who make up this city have it within themselves to become something fantastic, grand, and blissfully cohesive. As it is the nature of our blood to manifest Petra, I do sincerely believe it is the nature of our spirit to achieve a singularity that can maintain the product of our blood-bound talents.”

“Just what are you attempting to convey, old friend?” Haman finally tossed Devo’s way with a tired, amber gaze.

“Just this, Haman,” Devo calmly replied with a grin. “What you call a rebellion, I call the natural inclination of impkind to unify the families. Death and chaos surrounds us in this Wasteland, and there are so few goblins joined together to face outside threats, even fewer willing to work together in such a righteous cause.” The several clan-leaders were already murmuring in shock around him as he continued, “Instead of being a rational goblin and calmly asking your own flesh and blood why they’ve endeavored to leave your clan and branch out, you’ve taken it upon yourself to destroy any and all vaguely-labeled dissidents in a violent and unprecedented purge. You’ve stained the streets of your own platforms and those of your allies in the name of Rust-Blood’s supremacy, but have you for once thought about Petra’s supremacy?” The Hex-Bleeder’s copper brown eyes narrowed on the distant clan leader. “You’ve done more than freeze your own industry, Haman. You’ve stunted the growth of your own clan, and invariably those who would do business with you. Has it occurred to you that your inexplicable actions have damaged more than this city’s profit, but you’ve come to threaten the very fabric of Petra itself?” The audience broke into a loud roar, as the council chamber literally split down the center between those who accepted Haman’s placating words and those impassioned by Devo’s audacity. Whatever tranquility the prime Rust-Bleeder had hoped to quiet the crowd into accepting: he had lost it completely. Frustrated, he glared across the many seats at the prime Hex-Bleeder, staring daggers into the one goblin that utterly shot down his one chance to keep the other families of Petra quiet. Devo merely smirked back, as if evidently proud of the wrench he had thrown into the spokes of Haman’s further delay.

Warden was leaning forward on the edge of his seat at this point. The goblin teenager was mesmerized, so much so that he barely noticed the three impish shadows strolling up towards him until it was too late.

“Hey. No-Bleeder. What's with the bandanna?”

The green youth glanced up, blinking. “H-Huh?”

Three young goblins with matching brown vests glared down at the teen. “You're too young to be anyone's intercessor.” The tallest of the trio snickered. “What is this, a joke or something?”

“Look, I'm just sitting in on the meeting, acting as the ears of an Outbleeder,” Warden said, maintaining a brave frown for composure. “If you want to get anything out of this, you'd pay attention too.”

“Get anything out of what?!” The tall goblin frowned. “Haman's dragging his heels and Devo's being senile again. This city's never gonna unify! Especially not when we have branded bums like you trying to pass yourself off as an Intercessor!” His companions snickered.

Warden shifted nervously in his seat. For the millionth time in so many anguishing stormfronts, he tried pulling the edge of his vest down over his horseshoe mark. As always, he failed. “Look... I don't want any trouble...”

“Do you know the penalty of illegitimately passing yourself off as an Outbleeder?!” The imp sneered. “Do you know what all these bleeders will do to you?”

“I'm telling you...” Warden's eyes narrowed with a sudden anger. “I am working for Hex Blood's Intercessor! I'm practically an Outbleeder myself! I'm wearing the freaking bandanna, aren't I?”

The goblin's teeth glinted, as did a dagger that suddenly sang in his grasp. “Is that all you're wearing, half-pint?” His cohorts chuckled wickedly.

Warden gazed at the imp, at the dagger, then back at the goblin's face again.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

“Business gets us what we want,” Razzar murmured against the red scale of her knuckles as she shivered before an array of rusted valves. “Business gets us food for our bellies, and drinks to forget all the stormfronts with.” She gulped and darted her tongue out. “I have seen many, many stormfronts in the Wasteland, sister four legs.”

“Jee...” Scootaloo dryly muttered. “I had no clue.”

“You can get a lot done with business, pony,” the naga hissed. “You can buy airships, bottle flames, and move mountains.”

“Like Mount Ogreton?” The last pony remarked, leaning her head to glance at Razzar from an angle. “Just how many silver strips did the Mountain Ogres pay you for sabotaging their enemy, the Fire Ogres? It couldn't have been a lot, or why else would you be in contract with Haman?”

“Hmmm... All good questions.” Razzar's right eye twitched towards Scootaloo. “And when the Great Gilliam's battlecruiser went down in the Northern Heights, was it nearly as profitable?”

Otto and the goblins exchanged mute glances.

The last pony merely stared at the naga. “What does that have to do with anything?” she bluffed in a monotonous voice.

“Hmmm... Only that I am not the most wanted creature in the Wasteland, not like sister four legs thinks,” Razzar hissed. “Some of us are the targets of the Golden Gang, and some of us are the pets. Hmmm... Anything and everything is just a varying degree of luck. Yes yes yesss?” Her razor sharp teeth showed briefly as she shivered to say, “But do not think for a second that either vessel of fortune is any more righteous than the other. We have lived far too long to be as white as the snow that blankets us out there.”

Scootaloo took a deep breath. She gazed down at the metal bulkheads.

“Tell me, pony. Give me the spit,” Razzar lisped. “When was it that you lost all color?”

The pegasus glanced up sharply. “I beg your pardon?”

“I was twenty winters old and my husband had died,” Razzar said in a ghostly wheeze. “The moonrocks had finally stopped falling, and we were starving—myself and my children, such delightful, squirming broodlings.” Her twitching eye slowed to a pale strobe as she fed the lengths of frosty memories through chapped lips. “I went out beyond the petrified sands, hunting for something to eat, when a band of diamond dogs ambushed me. After four days of beating, they used my orifices for that which their paws were far too dry to perform themselves. Hmmmm... It was like parting a great black veil of feathers when they finally marched away, and when I crawled back to my nest, the world was gray and cold, like a blank slate. Everything finally made sense, yes yes yessss. I knew how to solve the hunger of my children: I ate all seven of them. I can still taste their tails when I swallow something down hard today. Do you want to know what it tastes like, four legs?”

Scootaloo was rubbing a hoof over her furrowed face by this point. “Nnngh... No, not really...”

Razzar leaned forward and hissed, “It tastes like weakness. Not for one spit, not for one belch have I let myself forget that. It has kept me alive all this time...” She shuddered and gazed into the pipes, gnawing on her knuckles. “Hmmm... for what it is worth.”

The last pony glanced up at those last words.

Razzar gulped and then said, “Any boomer who pretends to have integrity is either lying or stupid. Most of all, he is weak, and any pony who works for him is weak... or is allowing herself to become weak.” A twitching eye darted back towards the pegasus. “Do you want to be weak? Or do you want to get into the pits? One is achieved through spit, the other through business. If we keep our canter the same, four legs, we can both have what we want... which is a rare thing granted us in the Wasteland. Yes yessss...”

“What...?” Scootaloo winced, struggled against it, but eventually uttered, “What are you proposing, exactly?”

“Patience, four legs,” Razzar said. “I simply need you to wait it out. Work by not working. Stop being a servant and soon you can be a scavenger again, like you're used to, like the Wasteland has bred you to be.” She tore loose a thin sheet of dead skin from her knuckle, spat it to the floor beneath Otto's twitching feet, and stood up straight. “In a matter of days, the pits will be open to all creatures that wish to venture in, for the boomers will be out of the way for good.”

Scootaloo gulped hard. She felt the weight of the copper rifle in her armor. “Just what the heck are you and Haman planning, Razzar?”

“Do not spit so hard, four legs,” the naga calmly replied. “What the prime boomer-bleeder wants, the boomer-bleeder will get, no matter what we do. Business is business, and soon all the useless blood in the way will rot to black, like the crow feathers they are. Hmmm... The pony would do herself a lot of good to try not to do a lot of good. Honor is a noble word, but it hardly buys you zeppelin parts.”

“What makes you think I just won't go to Devo of Hex Blood about all of this?” Scootaloo inquired, turning to watch Razzar shuffle over to her yellow-banded lackeys. “You've just exposed me to a jackpot of conspiratorial insanity. If the clan leaders of Petra find out that Haman is in league with a mercenary naga shape shifter—”

“You really think they will believe a pony's spit over the prime Rust-Bleeder's?” Razzar calmly closed her eyes while her red scales fluttered up from her toes to her crown, painting her entire frame with the tan facade of Miss Ryst. A pair of pointed ears once more brimmed with golden ringlets on either side of a billowing ponytail of green hair. “Devo of Hex Blood is an important boomer, but an old one, known for his eccentricities. Yes yes yesssss... There is more gears shifting than what hisses with the damnable steam of this impcity, four-legs. The fall of Petra was envisioned long before either you or I had the bad fortune of walking these smelly streets.”

“The zeppelin crash at the Valley of Jewels...” Scootaloo thought aloud. “That must have been a cover for something!” She frowned across the chamber. “How many goblins died in that fiasco just to allow Haman a chance to make some infernal plans?! Do the ogres have anything to do with this mess?”

“Do not think that I've brought you here to confound you, pony,” Miss Ryst pointed with a clawed, goblin finger. “Even if you and Devo proceed to confound me, the whole spit will only give you a headache. Think not of the many foolish things that the boomers want, when there is only one thing that the scavenger wants. Sometimes the best business is the direct kind, the selfish kind. Honesty is a complicated web of pretense, a very dishonest machine if you think about it. Hmmm... I believe you've been entangled in integrity before. Perhaps that is how your colors died...”

Scootaloo was silent.

“I was afraid of that,” Razzar said with a lasting hiss. Her hands to her pistol holsters, she performed a jittery curtsey and was gone, along with all of Haman's lackeys.

Alone with her clopping hooves, the last pony trotted over towards the abandoned elevator. As she stepped in, the bulkheads rattled like exposed bones. She shuddered and closed her eyes. Her ears filled with steam, hissing like distant screams.

---

At the end of her blink, her vision filled with blood. When Scootaloo breathed, she inhaled the bubbling heat of an imp's insides. The author of those juices was a howling, quivering mess in front of her, because three trolls were presently writhing atop the goblin's back, digging a gaping red hole straight through to the half-ling's spinal column.

The last pony became aware of a cyclone of scraping noises, turning meatier and meatier as the leathery forms found their targets and dragged them—wailing—to the bosom of the freezing plateau. The air of the subterranean ruins became saturated with screams, then with jagged shadows. Half of the gathered goblins were already dead by the time the first slew of arrows flew.

The pegasus' twitching eyes caught the rattling sight of bow-strings. She saw Devo and two other imps in her peripheral, scampering backwards while taking potshots with their makeshift projectiles.

“Make for the cave, brothers and sisters!” The blue skinned clan-leader snarled through the erupting holocaust. Bodies fell on either side of him as he loaded another arrow from his quiver and took aim. “Hurry! I shall cover you—!” His last exclamation was cut short as a pair of leathery bodies plowed into him, dragging his flailing body beyond a mound of rubble.

Scootaloo gasped. She heard a hissing sound to her right. Spinning, she flung her shaved neck aside in time to see a pair of beady-eyes staring at her. Upon visual contact, a drooling troll swallowed the last of a severed goblin ear, shrieked, and bounded towards her on all fours.

The last pony whimpered. On numb legs, she shuffled backwards—tripping over a loose rock. “Unngh!” she yelped and fell on her spine. Her four limbs flailed in the air. The troll hollered a banshee scream and leaped high, aiming its serrated pounce straight towards the soft of her belly. Scootaloo gritted her teeth and shrugged her shoulders forward. The two Cloudsdalian spears fused to her canvas armor met the falling body of the creature. They merely snapped from his murderous weight. Suddenly she was being slammed to the ground under the girth of the leathery predator.

The violet bled away from her dilating pupils, reflecting a glistening maw slashing down to evenlope her neck. She shot her skull to the side as the troll's teeth scraped into the granite beneath her. Shoving against the creature, she brandished the sheathed dagger on her right forelimb and reached for it with her teeth. A trickle of warm drool bathed her cheek as the monster reared its head back and reopened its jaws to strike at her again. Hissing, she clamped onto the handle of the dagger with her molars and unsheathed it, swinging the length of the rusted thing across the troll's shoulder. Black blood sprayed, but the creature merely became angrier. Its snout furrowed like a canine's as it clamped both hands over Scootaloo's neck, choking her.

The last pony spat the dagger loose from her mouth as she hissed and sputtered for breath.

Just as the troll aimed its razor-sharp teeth at her temple, a pair of bodies slammed into its side. The troll was knocked loose by two of its siblings who were fighting over the severed leg of a goblin. Scootaloo, in the meantime, tumbled until she rolled into a fallen beam of sky marble.

Wincing, she stood up on wobbly limbs. Half of her canvas armor had been torn off. To her breathless horror, she couldn't see where she had dropped the dagger. She glanced every which way, desperately searching for it. Instead, she caught sight of an imp being pinned to an outcropping of rock two spaces ahead of her. The half-ling gurgled indecipherable wails as its face was being pulled off—layer by layer—in the jaws of a mutated troll. Two meters away, another goblin was fending off an entire circle of leathery monsters with a pair of Cloudsdalian spears. Sweating in desperation, the imp flung his weapons at the creatures, impaled one, and made a run for it. He was swiftly chased down by four pale predators who dragged him—kicking and shrieking—towards five more trolls, and a rampaging feast.

Scootaloo had seen enough. She had certainly heard enough. Her ears echoed with the deafening noise of carnage, of perpetual shrieks and bone-scrapes. Spinning about, she clambered and clawed her way up a steep embankment of Cloudsdalian rubble. She was only residually aware of several bipedal shadows surging past her. The last pony wasn't sure what were goblins or trolls anymore. Everything was chaos and screaming. Just as she made it up to the next tier of rubble, her heart skipped a beat... and then another, for she was being tugged from behind.

Fitfully, the last pony looked behind her. A troll with a hideously familiar dagger scar was grabbing her by the left rear leg. It hissed and roared at her before pulling with all its might. Scootaloo yelped as she slid back half-a-meter. Her front legs scraped and clawed at the powdery earth. Her hooves slipped and slipped. The troll tugged at her again, whooping forth a shrill cry. She gritted her teeth and slammed her other rear hoof into his brow once, twice. The monster snarled, unsheathed its claws, and mercilessly clutched a palm-ful of her blank flank. Five red rivers were ripped raw from her flesh as he tugged and tugged.

“Nnnnghh-Ahhhh-Aaaachkk!” The last pony clenched her eyes and wailed. Her flank was on fire. She could feel the blood running down to her shaved tail. Her upper limbs went numb and her hooves started to give way—

“Back! Back to the Dimming with you, hellions!” a random goblin shrieked.

Scootaloo smelled freshly lit powder. Her eyes flew open. Piercing the walls of pain, she stared down to see a limping goblin with a missing ear. The bleeding imp strolled backwards, lighting the grappling hook that they had been launching just a minute before. He aimed it like a weapon at an advancing wall of trolls.

“Stay back!” The shivering goblin stammered. “Stay back! Stay—” He wasn't watching where he was going. He stumbled straight into the imp that was clawing into Scootaloo. The two fell, sprawling, onto the edge of the plateau beneath the last pony. She didn't see what happened to them next, for the little pegasus was too busy watching the grappling hook as it slid clumsily into the collective pile of all the goblins' reserve explosives. She gasped and tried to gallop away. She was barely in mid-canter when the spark inside the grappling hook went off, burning into the gigantic bag full of flammable mix.

The last time the foal remembered being rocked so hard was the day when the fateful moonrock stranded her in the inner ruins of Cloudsdale. Her entire world spun. She saw the gray expanse of the bordering chasms twirling past her vision three whole times. Everything stopped so suddenly that she was certain every bone in her body had broken. Instead, upon the third blink, she found herself gliding loosely down a fresh pile of powdery sky marble. The air was filled with an evaporated steam, through which several chunks of ivory shrapnel fell like comets.

Scootaloo knew she was screaming. She felt it in her vibrating chest, but she couldn't hear herself. The last pony's existence had been bottled suddenly in an endless ringing sensation, numbing the pain receptors in her brain so that her system registered nothing more than pulsating terror. She spun around to see a goblin staring at her from the ground, his eyes wide. Her eyes traveled down to see his torso ending in a charred rag of smoking heat. She realized that half of the sunken landscape around her was freshly burning from the explosions. With an indiscernible growl, she somehow climbed up onto all fours. She slipped on something briefly. Glancing down, she realized that it was her own blood. The troll's claws had done their damage on her flank, but she couldn't tell how bad off she was. All she could see was red.

Then she heard the first sound since the powder had ignited, and it was full of desperation. Glancing down, she saw that a fresh, smoking crater had been formed in the plateau. The unmistakable figures of Braxx and Matthais were bumbling desperately over each other, struggling to climb their frantic way up the steep mound of shattered sky marble. Their half-ling bodies jumped and leaped in earnest, but between the two of them, they couldn't climb the sundered bank. A series of whooping and shrieking noises hungrily filled the air behind them. They turned to look with twitching eyes as a solid line of bounding trolls herded their way, slobbering like wolves.

Scootaloo looked at the trolls, then behind her shoulder at the open lengths of the ruins available to her galloping hooves. She seethed through clenched teeth. Her wings twitched... then twitched again.

Without a second thought, the young pegasus ran to the edge of the sundered sky marble. She flung her upper body down and stretched two hooves towards the goblins below. “Here! Up here!” she shrieked in a voice that was a lot more high-pitched than she expected. “Grab ahold!”

Braxx reached up for her, trembling. Matthais brazenly shoved him out of the way and grabbed ahold of the foal's two limbs. Not a single word or glare was passed between the goblins as the pony pulled with all her might. Matthais slowly rose up towards the edge of the ruins, but his weight took over halfway and he barely budged. Scootaloo quivered and strained with the effort. She glanced over his shoulder and saw the trolls bounding closer. Their jaws began glistening in the twilight bands from above.

Suddenly, Matthais' body shot dramatically upwards. Braxx was lending a hand, shoving the goblin's body up into the pony's helpful grasp. Equine and half-ling alike briefly cooperated upon the brink of annihilation.

“Almost... Almost...” Scootaloo grunted. She shifted her rear legs and swung her body back at the last second. With a slumping motion, Matthais finally rolled up onto even granite. He panted for breath while Scootaloo immediately flung her limbs back down towards the other imp.

“Hurry! Please!” Braxx seethed through his teeth, tears running down his adult face as he reached up for Scootaloo's hooves.

The pony grasped onto him and lifted with all her might. She was already worn out, and Braxx's feet barely came off the ground below. “Nnnngh... Come on...” She seethed sideways. “Hey! Help me out here! Why aren't you—?” She suddenly gasped. The last pony's shaved neck spun as she looked.

Matthais was already more than ten meters away, hyperventilating, running away as fast as his pale legs could carry him.

“Hey! C-Come back! Come—”

“Oh no... Blessed Petra no!” Braxx hollered.

Scootaloo glanced down. Her eyes twitched.

The trolls were there. In one blurred motion, their pale forms overtook Braxx. Six sets of hands stabbed and ripped at his abdomen. Scootaloo felt their every stab and puncture from the imp's limbs tugging at her. With a gaping mouth of anguish, he slid down from her grasp, his four fingers clasping desperately at the last length of her hooves and then scraping at the wall as he was pulled into a sea of claws and fangs. His screams were as wet as the insides being pulled out of him, a mercilessly slow thing as the trolls dined on their wailing victim.

The last pony scooted away from the bloodbath. Even when Braxx was out of sight, his insufferable pleas echoed in her ears. She had to look twice to realize that a large specimen of the leathery cretins had suddenly pounced up to her tier of rubble. She shrieked and flinched as the monstrosity charged at her, its jaws dribbling with a length of Braxx's bowels.

When the troll finally pounced on Scootaloo, it was a limp thing. She shuddered under the dead weight, flinching fitfully until she realized that she could just shove the thing off of her. She did so effortlessly, discovering that an arrow had pierced the creature's quivering skull. With a gasp, the last pony looked behind her.

Half of his torso covered in blood, Devo stood on a hill of rubble and loaded one of three last arrows from his quiver. “Run, pony!” he shouted, spat crimson from his lips, and aimed at another pouncing group of monsters chasing after the last few goblins. “Save yourself! We are all dead here!”

Scootaloo panted and panted. She blinked, and she saw a streak of color flying over a long dead world of warmth. After another blink, Scootaloo realized that she must have obeyed the clan leader's command, for she was suddenly galloping as fast as her limping body could take her, barreling over mounds of sky marble, leaping over chunks of crushed moonrock, and ducking beneath leaning columns of ivory. Only halfway through the sprint was she aware of the stabbing pain in her flank. With each straightaway of the ruins that she navigated, the agony spread from her lower half up along her spine to her shoulders. Her throbbing world was peppered by the distant screams and desperate hollers of goblins on either side of her. She couldn't see where all the other imps were running. The whole subterranean hovel echoed with their disparate flights of terror. Some of those wailing voices were cut off, and as a rising cacophony of beastly howls took up the rear, Scootaloo began to understand why.

Glancing behind her wounded self, she saw a trail of splattered blood. Far beyond that—forming a pale sea of death—were the rampaging bodies of trolls. How many straggling imps they must have killed along the path towards pursuing her, she didn't know... nor did she care. The pain in her flank dissipated like a stormfront, and soon she was bounding her way forward on pins and needles. She shrugged her limbs every chance she got, flinging the weight of the canvas armor off her body in a desperate bid for weightlessness and flexibility.

Her agonized sprint tripled in severity the moment she broke past a cluster of dangling wreckage. A huge gaping space of twilight opened before her, and far away—at an impossibly long distance—was the murderously steep incline that led to her hovel. As she limped and trotted towards it, at the end of her breaths, she felt the scraping limbs of the many trolls getting closer and closer. Their hot breaths tickled the pink stubble on the back of her neck.

She had to run to the crest of the hill, climb a mountain of debris, and somehow make it past her tiny fort to crawl into the deathly thin crevice beyond. It was impossible; she knew it was impossible. Stifling a whimper, the pegasus leaped at the peak of each galloping bound and twitched her wings in desperation.

“Come on... Come on...” She shrieked, her voice cracking.

The wings twitched. The feathers caught air, ruffled, and did nothing.

“Work! You stupid, useless stubs! Work!” She choked back a sob and hyperventilated. “Why won't you—?!”

Her entire world flipped. A troll had slammed into her from behind. She screamed. The creature screamed. The two rolled like rattling dice into the thick wall of crushed marble. Dust and soot flew. Scootaloo shot up, and in a gasping breath she realized she had beat the troll to it. In a single bound, she hopped onto the hilltop and began climbing it.

With a snarling bark, the troll kipped up to its lower legs and scrambled at Scootaloo.

The clambering pony flailed for her life, barely outcrawling the troll. She navigated a small chunk of sky marble. Hissing in pain, she bucked her bleeding leg down against it so that the offensively large shard flew straight into the troll's gut. The creature exhaled all its breath through fanged teeth and fell back down the hillside, slamming into the bodies of all its comrades—all but one, which leaped after Scootaloo with a banshee cry, crawling twice as fast as she was.

Scootaloo took advantage of her distance. She clawed and floundered and hoofed her way up to the peak of the hilltop. Her twitching eyes caught the razor-sharp ends of the wooden line of pikes surrounding her hovel. The gaping cavern of Cloudsdale suddenly rang with a single troll's bloody scream, surging liquidly into her ears.

With a breathless grunt, Scootaloo rolled onto her back, lifted all of her limbs, and caught the monster's pounce in four hooves. For a split second, the whole weight of the drooling creature hovered over her. “Nnnngh—Aaaaugh!” She rolled backwards with all her might, flinging the monster so that it flew straight into the sea of pikes. Ink-black blood bathed her as the impaled monster flailed from its new binding. She scampered past it, limping the last few bone-chilling meters to her hole. She glanced up and saw the heavy slab of sky marble hanging from a lone rope...

The last pony tripped on her dried campfire. She fell hard to the ground. Her ears rang, and when the ringing stop she heard claws scraping against the rock directly behind her. With a single lunge, the young filly dove, fell, and slid into the hole. She spun and hunched herself against the wall just as a troll plunged in after her, shrieking.

Scootaloo screamed. Her niche had become a granite bottle and the troll was the cork, reaching in and clawing at her. Its leathery ribs were stuck in the mouth of the tiny cave as it struggled and fought to wrangle its way deeper. Its serrated fingers slashed at her chest and face, coming centimeters short. Frustrated, the cretin howled, filling the claustrophobic tomb with hellish noise and the stench of freshly-chewed goblin intestines.

The pegasus' eyes twitched as she shuffled her lower body and raised her legs, kicking and bucking mercilessly at the monster's face.

The troll took several vicious hooves to the skull. The angered beast snarled before clasping hard onto one of Scootaloo's limbs. Instantly, its teeth sunk into the last pony's lower leg.

Scootaloo tossed her head back and screamed, drowning in her own echoes. She flailed until her upper limp banged against the taut cable suspending the marble slab above the mouth of the cave. In the midst of her agony, the wheels in her head clicked true, and she pulled and tugged at the rope.

The marble slab refused to give way. The troll drooled crimson and bit harder. Scootaloo felt the icy sensation of its teeth scraping against bone.

Finally, snarling her way through a sob, the last pony lunged towards her mutilator with a war cry.

The troll's beady eyes twitched. It instantly released its grip of Scootaloo's leg and lunged for her skull instead.

Scootaloo instantly fell back, yanking forward the taut length of rope in her skull's place. The troll bit through it. The cord snapped. And the marble slab...

It fell with the booming volume of righteous thunder. The troll's body was instantly severed in two, its many snarling and clamoring siblings cut off outside as they howled in indignation. Scootaloo's world was bathed in blackness. She huddled there, shivering, baptized in her blood and the troll's, as she unwittingly prepared to spin several long, restless nights alone with the decaying torso of a demon.

She was alive and safe... for what it was worth...

---

With glittering, azure telekinesis, a bracelet of pearl-studded bands was slid over the earth pony's cream colored hoof. Wearing a garland of flowers in her mane, Bon Bon gazed up, smiling rosily against a gust of warm, sea air.

A turquoise unicorn stood across from her. Lyra's horn stopped glowing, and she exhaled the last breath of nervousness out from her lungs as she let herself fall adrift in her partner's ocean-blue eyes. She wore an identical bracelet over her right hoof, and the longer she stared at Bon Bon, the more her eyes glistened with the fragility of the moment.

Without delay, the ceremony proceeded, and both mares were engulfed in the words of a unicorn stallion standing beside them in full captain's regalia. As he spoke authoritatively before a crowd of gathered equines, the rolling waves of Dream Valley glittered in the golden sunset beyond the bow of the cruise ship sailing thereupon.

Standing just a few meters from the couple, the maid of honor gazed, her amber eyes curved in a desperate attempt to engrave this scene into her retinae. Harmony took a long breath, and her lungs tickled, as if the air had been sprinkled with an enchantment that all of her years hadn't prepared her for. She bit her lip—not to stifle a sob—but to hold back a giggle as her insides melted upon each passing heartbeat. Her eyes began to water, and she didn't understand why, nor did she question it, for it was a cleansing thing.

“...then by the power invested in me by the Celestial state, I bind these two ponies in eternal matrimony...”

Words were merely abstract brushstrokes to the beauty of this moment. Harmony felt her heart skip a beat as the last breaths were given, and soon both mares leaned towards each other. After the kiss, Lyra and Bon Bon nuzzled, their coats blending with a mutual warmth. The salty air filled with cheers, and soon the deck rang with clapping hooves.

Harmony joined the cadence, smiling painfully, as if she would never wear these heavenly liquid layers that she was discovering ever again.

---

It was so cold. It was always so cold. When the elevator came to a rattling stop, it was hardly as jarring as the last pony could have wanted. There was nothing to wake from anymore, just as there was nothing worth closing her eyes to.

Scootaloo sighed. She reached for the rusted door to the car, the one barrier between her and the rest of Petra. For a moment, she lingered. The last pony leaned her bare brow against the grated metal surface, feeling its cold texture kissing her, stinging her to the bone like so many painful stabs in her long life of gray loneliness.

Even now, as her jaded scarlets flicked over the lengths of the elevator car's bulkheads, she couldn't find the colors. She knew that they were there. She knew that they existed, but they shrunk away from her at every glance.

The colors in her life weren't all that had died. She realized that her dreams had perished too, along with her ability to dream. The only way to see colors anymore was to waltz back into the world where dreams were born, and it was no longer sleep that could take here there. It was something far rarer, and greener, the only color that held any merit whatsoever in the scavenger's life.

And she was a scavenger... to the bitter end...

With a deep breath, the last pony opened the door, yet another lifeless gate in her existence, and marched boldly through.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

The meeting had adjourned, or so Scootaloo assumed. Most of the amphitheater had been emptied. Only a few clan-leaders and family representatives straggled behind, talking with such desperate fervor that undoubtedly something dramatic had ensued during her absence. Dazedly, the last pony glanced across the lengths of the large chamber. Franken of Glass Blood was gone. Devo of Hex Blood was gone. As the empty seats rolled past Scootaloo's vision, the lone mare felt her heart skip a beat, for suddenly she could find no sign of—

“Hey! You're back!” Warden piped up, bouncing over towards the pegasus.

Scootaloo exhaled long and hard through her nostrils. “Hmmm... More or less.” She cleared her throat. “What'd I miss?”

“Pfft—Freaking loads, I'm telling you! Haman of Rust Blood showed up!”

“Oh yeah...?”

“At first, it looked like all the goblins wanted to strangle his throat. But then he turned the whole situation around, suggesting that the reason he slowed down all of his family's industry was to root out an uprising bunch of imp rebels attempting to take apart his clan! Then Devo spoke up out of nowhere—heehee—and ripped Haman a new one, suggesting that the whole impcity secretly wants to unify and Haman's the one dude throwing a wrench in the whole thing!”

“How delightful,” Scootaloo droned, running a hoof through her pink mane. She gazed indifferently towards the far corners of the amphitheater. “Sounds like a classical battle of rationalists versus pragmatists.”

“Gesundheit,” Warden blurted. He folded his arms proudly, though he winced for some painful reason. “Nnngh... Whatever the case, things are just about as crazy as they started. Some of the goblins are still ticked off at Haman, while some of them are curious about Devo's suggestion. If anything, I think Devo was just buying us some time. So long as there are less imps on the prime Rust-Bleeder's side, that means we can keep doing our little investigation thingy! We still gotta meet with Franken tomorrow, right?”

“Meet with Franken...” Scootaloo repeated Warden's words without thinking. Her scarlet eyes were distant. “Right...”

Warden squinted at her. He smirked curiously. “So... what did the Rust-Bleeders have to say?”

“Hmmm?”

“You freaked me out, y'know!” Warden frowned. “Please don't trot off like that again! Without the Outbleeder bandanna, you were just asking for a bunch of goblins to cut a glue stick up—!” He winced slightly, as if some of those choice words suddenly had a venomous edge to it. “Er... you know what I mean...”

“I... talked to... to...” Scootaloo gazed over, then saw something that made her blink. Squinting, she leaned towards the teenager. “Wart?”

“Hmm?”

“What... What the heck happened to your shoulder?”

“Oh... Uhm...” Warden blushed slightly. He pulled the upper half of his vest to conceal a fresh cut in his upper arm. “It's... It's nothing, really. I've had worse...”

“Wart, this is self-inflicted,” the equine scavenger said. She frowned with sudden ferocity. “What happened?”

“Look, I'm fine, okay?” Warden said, staring up at her and folding his arms. “I just... did what I had to do...” As he said this, he bit his lip, for he felt a warm trickle running down his brow. A fresh drop of blood was leaking loose from the bandanna tied three times around his head.

Scootaloo saw it, and a breath escaped her lips. In one swift motion, she yanked the article off his cranium and felt the fresh, moist blood staining it. “What the heck did you do?!”

“Yeesh! Calm your hooves! I was only trying to—”

“Did someone talk you into this?! Huh?” She exclaimed, waving the soggy article in her grasp.

He frowned back at her, his forehead anointed with red stains. “They were going to gut me! You think a Hex-Bleeder rag was gonna protect me with this stupid horseshoe burned into my butt?! Or have you forgotten that I'm a no-bleeder, pony?”

“Don't pretend that I'm a total idiot! No civilized imp in his right mind could ever get away with gutting another goblin in the middle of a friggin' council!” Scootaloo said in a shouting voice that turned many heads, including Warden's. “You shouldn't have given into a bunch of stupid bullies!”

“Bullies?! They all wore matching clan vests and—”

“Someone your age shouldn't have to freakin' mutilate himself for any reason whatsoever!” Scootaloo hissed, her voice cracking. “It's not right!”

Warden jerked away from her, wincing. His lips quivered. “Y-You didn't give me any choice, pony...” He gulped and added in a murmur. “You left me. You walked away...”

Scootaloo steamed and steamed. Defeatedly, she slumped to her haunches and held the stained bandanna to her forehead, sighing and closing her eyes.

Warden stepped up behind her and nervously spoke, “It's... It's not like you can protect me forever, y'know. I... uhm... I'm doing this for the strips, remember?” He gulped painfully, but bravely. “When this is all said and done, I'm going to have to deal with a bunch of crap worse than a little cut here or there. But that's okay. I know this. Besides, it's all—”

“Business,” Scootaloo grunted, opening her eyes and fumbling with the loose bandanna in her grasp. “It's all business.”

Warden blinked. Her nervously smiled. “Erm... Actually, I was gonna say 'it's all good'.” He gnawed on his lip before courageously uttering, “No matter how much life sucks tomorrow, I've had my fair share of frostbeams to carry with me for a while. I really should thank you for that, pony...”

The pegasus took a deep breath. Slowly, gracefully, she wrapped the ornamental bandanna around her forehead once more. The warm moisture christened her flesh, tearing her briefly from the cold Wasteland. She rode the sensation like invisible green flames, and murmured pitifully into the steamy air of Petra, “I'm not worth thanking for any of this. Not now, not ever...”

“Pony...?” Warden murmured in a breath of concerned.

Scootaloo took a deep breath. Her eyelids twitched, and she leaned her head back.

“Is...” The teenager's voice strolled around her, lisping, “Is there something wrong with your eyes?”

---

It was too late. Scootaloo was crying. Tears rolled down her cheeks as she counted her last breaths of freedom underneath the cramped, wooden belly of the sandbox above her. Just beyond a sloping ditch, the shadows of the two social workers gathered closer to that part of the schoolyard playground. She could hear the deep pitch in the stallions' voices, could smell what they had eaten for breakfast.

“What's so special about over here?”

“I... I dunno. I could have sworn that... that I heard...”

“What?”

“Right under here. Shhh! Listen... Do you hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“It sounds like somepony crying—”

Just then, thunder struck. Scootaloo was rattled to her very core. She gasped, but she couldn't hear herself, because the roar of inclement weather suddenly drowned out everything. Even the stallions' voices were a distant titter as their pounding hooves sounded off their shock and alarm.

“Gaaah!”

“Dear Epona! Where did that come from?!”

“Beats the heck out of me. Did you read up on Ponyville's weather schedule?”

“You asked me to interview the local sheriff's office, remember?”

“You could have at least told me it'd be raining cats and dogs all of the sudden!”

Scootaloo trembled. She felt the soil growing damp around her. Glancing aside, she saw a thin river of mud rolling down the sloping ditch so that it pooled across her cramped hiding place beneath the sandbox. There was not even the remote chance of drowning. On the contrary, her heart was racing a kilometer a minute. The mud doubled, tripled, and from the pelting noises all across the sandbox on top of her, the little pegasus could easily picture a freakish monsoon soaking everything around Cheerilee's schoolyard.

In the meantime...

“Dang it all, this is unbearable!”

“My saddlebag's not water-tight. The kid's pictures will be soaked.”

“Oh, for the love of Nebula—Unngh! Let's get the heck out of here and find some shelter. I'm dying for some oats anyway.”

“What about the—”

“Look, there's nothing here, alright?! We can't afford to screw around. We've got two more days before they want us to head east to Trottingham.”

“Could you explain it to me along the way? The saddlebag's getting heavier.”

“Yeah yeah. Follow me.”

Muddily, the two sets of hooves trotted off. The galloping stallions faded with a series of distant sloshing sounds. Soon, everything was blissfully quiet, save for the gentle roar of cleansing rain.

Scootaloo breathed calmer and calmer. Bravely, she gulped and crawled her way out from beneath the sandbox, one limb at a time, like a waterlogged spider taking a peak at sunlight.

As soon as she emerged, the world suddenly changed, as if a golden lamp was being raised across the midday gloom of Equestria, erasing everything that was briefly gray over Ponyville. The timing couldn't have been more unbelievably miraculous. Caked with mud and her mane soaked into a pink rag, the orange foal shivered briefly, but was soon basking in the toasty rays of sunlight. The speedy coming-and-going of the water was an impossible thing, and yet it had happened.

Tilting up, Scootaloo's violet eyes found a break in the dissipating thunderclouds. To her gasping joy, a rainbow appeared, but not just any rainbow...

A blue pegasus hummed a rock anthem to herself as she floated up high, bunching together a cluster of dark clouds in her sapphire hooves, wringing them dry with textbook, pegasus precision. Her mane and tail hairs were as dry as a desert, and her motions were calm, collected, and cool.

“R-Rainbow Dash...?” Scootaloo obligatorily mewled.

“Hmmm.... Hmmm?” Rainbow glanced down, her ruby eyes blinking. “Oh, hey there, squirt—” She performed a rather comical double-take, grimacing. “Yeesh! What the heck happened to you?”

“I... I...”

“Kiddo, I think you're supposed to play on top of the sandbox,” the pegasus said with a devilish smirk. “Not underneath it.”

“What are you doing?”

“What does it look like I'm doing, Einstallion?” The weather flier briefly grumbled, “I've got a rainstorm quota to meet by sundown.”

“You...” Scootaloo blinked, wrung the water out of her mane hair, and squinted harder at the flying equine. “You mean to say that you were scheduled to create a rainstorm above the schoolyard for a measely two minutes and then end it?”

“Pfft! Just who died and made you weather expert?” Rainbow Dash stuck a tongue out. She finished fluffing a cloud so that it dissipated into thin vapors and dissolved naturally into the blue sky. “If you must know, Cheerilee ordered this rain. She's been complaining about the dying grass for weeks!”

Scootaloo glanced down and gazed at the green, green lawn surrounding the schoolyard. She blinked back up at Rainbow Dash. “But the grass looks just fine!”

“Well, somepony needs to get her eyes examined and it's not me!” Rainbow Dash brushed her hooves off. “Whew. Well, that was fun. Off to the edge of Everfree...” She flapped her wings and began to take off.

Scootaloo gazed long and hard. Slowly, warmly, a smile graced her soaked features. To the undying pluck of her heartrstrings, Rainbow Dash briefly paused and glanced back.

“By the way, kid...” The hovering pegasus squinted. “What was up with those two stallions just now?”

“Wh-What?” Scootaloo remarked. “You mean you don't know?”

“They seemed to be having a hissy-fit over something. They weren't... bothering you, were they?”

The foal swallowed something down her throat. For a heavenly brief moment, she was thankful that her face was soaked with rainwater, through to her eyelashes. “No, Dashie,” she murmured in the warmest breath of her life. “Nopony's bothered. Everything is just fine...”

Rainbow Dash looked back. Scootaloo could hardly tell from a sudden glare of sunlight, but she could have sworn the pegasus had smiled. “Well, go dry off. You look like a wet, orange squirrel.” That uttered, the chief flier of Ponyville soared off in a prismatic streak.

The foal stayed there, staring after her, warmed by her own beating heart. There were no more shivers.

---

“Oh, it's just a delay, alright. It's always a matter of delaying things with meetings like that,” Devo said. The blue-skinned elder stood in the rusted, metal street before his warehouse on Strut Eighteen. He folded his arms as he and Warden watched a slab of sky marble being loaded through the side doors of the Hex Blood headquarters. “Rich goblins delay things in order for complicated financial arrangements to go through. Lower-bleeder clans delay things just to show that their opinions still matter in the grand scheme of impcity business. And I just delayed the proceedings so that you can finish your task as Intercessor.” His sapphiric ears twitched upward as he smiled the pony's way. “Besides, it is most exceedingly fantastic to see Haman sweating like a cornered rat.”

Scootaloo said nothing. She was staring into the grand haze of Strut Eighteen's oxidized colors. All of the many hues bled together to form a ruby sea in her vision, like somepony's eyes.

Devo squinted at her. “Have you lost sleep, pony?”

The pegasus snapped out of it. “Erhm... No. I was just... uh... thinking...” She swallowed and stared at Devo. “Wart here said that you delivered a rather obvious plea for unification while responding to Haman.”

“Your assistant has a good pair of ears,” Devo said while ruffling the green hair of the petite teenager. “I'm beginning to understand why it is that you hired him from the street.” He raised an eyebrow suddenly. “Though it still doesn't explain why you had to back out of the meeting yourself at the last second. I truly hoped you would have been there first-hand... er... or 'first-hoof.' Eh heh heh...”

“Never mind that,” Scootaloo dismissed with a grunt. “Explain to me why you had to emphasize the whole 'unification' angle in front of the whole council?” Scootaloo frowned. “Aren't we attracting enough attention as it is with me wearing this bloody rag on my head?”

“By 'we' I assume you mean to count yourself as one of the Hex-Bleeders now,” Devo said in a slightly amused tone. He paced across the front of the warehouse while the last of the sky marble slab was being hoisted into place behind him. “Yes, many goblins have been roused by the sight of an equine Intercessor galloping through the streets. It was one of the reasons why the meeting took place today to begin with. But the fact is, pony, I've been pushing for unification for a while. There's a reason why the other clans think of me as senile. When a goblin is persistent in anything beyond the superficial confines of steam-extraction or gear-making, then such an imp is labeled 'crazy.' I have lived a long, long, and undeniably 'crazy' life, child.” He finished this exclamation with a proud grin.

Scootaloo's nostrils flared. “If only every goblin in this place was as 'crazy' as you.” She lingered slightly, but ultimately said, “Maybe I'd have gotten into the pits sooner.”

Devo held a finger up. “All in good time, pony. I may have helped delay things with the ever-suspicious council, but Haman is still up to something and the only potential lead is the information Franken has offered to give you in Strut Eleven tomorrow.” He reached down and adjusted one of the spokes to his whirring leg braces. A puff of steam cascaded up across his blue features as he said, “I shudder to think of what exactly he has to tell you, but if it ultimately explains what Haman has been freezing assets and spilling blood for, then everything will likely pay off in the end.”

“Quite frankly, I don't care who gets silver and who gets a bullet to the head,” Scootaloo muttered. “I just want into the pits.”

Devo's responded to her calmly, “Always the business pony.” He smiled. “There's no need to hammer that lovely rivet into my skull once more, child. I can take a hint.” Devo squinted emphatically as he said, “But business—like hope—is something tempered by wisdom, don't you think? Not to mention a generous modicum of patience.”

Scootaloo blinked at that last word. He gazed up at him. “Right... 'patience.'”

“Now, if you'll excuse me,” Devo spoke, gesturing towards the warehouse behind him, “I have some extraction to oversee with my daughter.”

“Right. My hooves were just getting tired anyways.” Scootaloo motioned towards her assistant. “Come on, Wart—”

“One last thing, pony, if I may ask,” Devo exclaimed, holding a hand up. His smile was subtle and enticing as he looked at her. “Even though this whole investigation of yours appears to be hinging on what Franken says, I'm nevertheless curious about what Haman's lackeys had to tell you.”

“I'm sorry?”

“The goblins who took you aside,” Devo clarified. “The ones who interrupted you at the council for another meeting altogether? Surely they worked for Haman, judging by how your assistant here described their yellow armbands.” He leaned his brow forward. “Did they have anything useful to say? Or were the insufferable cretins just threatening you?”

Warden looked at Devo. At the end of the elder's inquisition, he glanced over at Scootaloo.

The last pony looked at Devo in the face. In a blink, she saw a younger imp with short white hair leaning over a little filly's bruised and battered body in the inner ruins of Cloudsdale. A second blink, and his pale blue skin took on a leathery quality, a nightmarish tone, just as bone-chilling and lifeless as the rest of the Wasteland's ash. There were no colors to be seen in that dead flesh, just as there was no spectrum to be dredged from silver.

“You know Haman's minions, prime Hex-Bleeder,” Scootaloo finally droned. “All bullets and no brains. It was a good thing I came out of that little pow-wow with my skull intact.”

Warden blinked, squinting in a sudden, quizzical fashion. It was with a nervous twitch that he turned to look at Devo again.

The elder goblin was nodding, digesting Scootaloo's words. Ultimately, he smiled. “Very well. Be careful who you follow down dark alleyways from here on out, pony.” He shuffled off with a whurring of his leg-braces. “Most want to extend a shiv rather than a hand.”

“That's the first thing I expected since I came here,” Scootaloo said. Only she and she alone winced at those words. With a shuffling sigh, she trotted off down the length of the district. Warden followed her at a distance, using the space between them to navigate a worrisome thought that was already forming hard creases in his green brow.

---

“Devo of Hex Blood is a punk,” Fredden exclaimed with a frown. The dark-haired bodyguard held two metal doors open for Haman.

The frail, prime Rust-Bleeder shuffled into his luxurious office in the center of a palatial structure built in Strut Twenty-One.

Fredden continued, “He may have a lot of years and a lot of strips, but that doesn't make him any less of a direspectful moron.” The bodyguard swiftly walked ahead of Haman and examined the desk, tables, chairs, and sofas, ritualistically checking for hidden goblin assassins or life-threatening traps. Once the coast was clear, he stood up and adjusted his shades with a smirk. “If you ask me, boss, I'd say he's only trying to maintain the council's current distrust of you so that he can climb the ladder of Petra!”

“I didn't ask you,” Haman grunted. Palming the translucent globe on his cane, he shuffled over and slumped down in a leather armchair situated below a pair of framed paintings on the wall. The canvas artpieces depicted goblin airships hovering over silver quarries. “If you really don't mind, Fredden, I want to be alone for a while.”

“Not too alone, I hope, sir,” Fredden remarked with a grin. “With the way the whole impcity's been acting up, lately, I really don't think it's a good idea to keep you far from sight.”

“I only pay you to think half of the time,” Haman said, running four fingers over his liver-spotted brow. “The other half can be better spent staying quiet.”

Fredden bowed. “As you wish, sir.” He backed out of the room, but paused briefly at the doorway. “One last thing—I'm sorry. Should I tell the crew that 'extraction is a go' for Strut Eleven tomorrow?”

“I'll get back to you on that, boy,” the elder said and waved a bony hand. “Leave.”

The bodyguard did as he was told. The double-doors shut to the lantern-lit room. Haman sat, spinning his cane slowly between two fingers, rubbing his temple with the other hand as he glared lethargically into the corner of the room.

“Devo, Devo... My old friend,” he muttered to himself. “Whatever am I going to do with you?”

A voice hissed from just behind him, “There's plenty of meat on the old boomer's bones to last through a Second Dimming. I can think of a lot of succulent things that you can do with him.”

Haman jumped in his seat. Coasting down a throbbing wave of heartbeats, he turned and glared up at the surrounding walls, his amber eyes trailing. “How many months have you been in my employ, Razzar? You should know by now, there really isn't any need for you to impress me anymore.”

“Impress you?” One of the paintings shifted. The front of a goblin airship crawled out of frame, distorted, and unraveled with a wave of scales. Suddenly, Razzar stood beside Haman's seat. “Rich boomer. Kindly, rich, silver-scented boomer.” Her teeth showed; it resembled a wince more than a smile. “I was merely relaxing.” She gulped and said in a deep voice, “Then you came in.”

“You must be needing to catch your breath. At the rate you've been scurrying all over the city, it's a wonder you haven't died of a heart attack faster than I have.” The elder goblin grunted, leaned back in his chair, and sighed. “So...” His eyes gazed into the gears clicking inside the globed handle of his cane. “Did you learn anything from the meeting you had with the Petra-forsaken horse that Devo was hare-brained enough to appoint as his Outbleeder?”

“Hmmm... There is nothing more to learn from that soul than what one gets from looking at her.” Razzar paced around Haman's office, her flakes of dead skin glistening in the lanternlight. “She is the last of her kind. Such specimens cling to desperation more than common sense. Yes yes yesssss... she will be easy to mold.”

Haman squinted at her. “If you knew that in the first place, why'd you have to go and have a meeting with her?” He frowned. “I could have used Miss Ryst's support while in front of the council!”

“Why do boomers hold so much worth in spit?” The lizard woman remarked with a twitch of her neck. “Each and everyone of you has claws and teeth just like naga. It would be best to save the tongue for licking up what's been spilled after a righteous impulse.”

“Don't be so bone-headed.” Haman snorted and gazed beyond the walls of the office. “There's ample enough merit to be had in rhetoric. While you've been waltzing up and down the struts, tying up the clan's loose ends with your bloody crusade, I've used every trick in the book to keep the other families' heads in the clouds. Though it may not be nearly as barbaric as your tasks, it's the one thing keeping this juggling act from collapsing. Ever since Waven of South Blood died, the rate of production in Strut Eleven has slowed to a crawl. Franken's being pushed to the breaking point. I can see it in his eyes everytime I meet him.”

“He does have juicy, juicy eyes,” Razzar murmured with a brief lick of her teeth. She managed a brief sigh, then paced back in Haman's direction. “If Franken cannot pick up the pace, then he is the most worthless boomer I've had the misfortune of knowing, and that's a lot of spit.”

“I spoke with him before and after the meeting with the council. If he knows what's best for him, he will get his head back in the game.”

“Hmmm... It depends on where he's been leaning his head lately,” Razzar said, briefly gnawing on the back of her knuckles. “I've had several goblins and gremlins from the central pits say that he was seen talking quite closely with four-legs. Hmmm... yes yesssss...”

Haman's amber eyes flickered. “Franken?! Consorting with a sky-stealer?!” He sat forward and shook his cane while snarling. “If this is true, Razzar, then why didn't you shoot the horse's brains out when you had the chance?”

“Not that there isn't a boomer in this whole city that would adore the sight of a dead pony...” Razzar scratched at her flaking neck and blinked towards the ceiling. “But she is not the insufferable splinter here. Hmmm... Devo is. So long as that Hex-Bleeder has his red Outbleeder bandanna wrapped around her forehead, then killing her would mean setting off a chain-reaction of spit and explosions, and he knows it. Remarkably smart boomer... hmmm... to have set a trap using hooves and mane hair.”

“We're so close to the end, though.” Haman uttered, his eyes bright. “If we can just eliminate all obstacles immediately in our way, we'll have a clear shot at finishing the job! I want you to kill that pony, Razzar! If nothing else, it'll mean knocking Devo flat on his rear end! Repercussions be damned!”

“Hmmmm... I feel like I just got done lecturing another unsightly creature about patience,” Razzar hissed. She leaned over and “walked” a pair of claws down the liver-spotted flesh of Haman's twitching skull. “We must not hurry that which will fall down in a matter of seconds, dear boomer. The pony will die, someday. Perhaps by my guns, perhaps by her own. I'm much more interested in the death we've been planning since our paths and pockets crossed. Hmmm... yes yes yessssss, such a gorgeous sea of silver that we swim in. Must we pollute it with such childish, impatient spit?”

Haman took a deep breath. Calming himself, he nevertheless frowned as he said, “I've always relied on your judgment and experience, Razzar. Your wisdom is impeccable as always, but I almost feel like you're actually showing sympathy for a creature. That's not like you.”

“It's not sympathy,” Razzar said as she pulled a loose flake of skin off her shoulder. “It's science. Scavenger's science. Hmmmm... And I currently have an experiment underway. I told Devo's Outbleeder what she would need to do in order to get what she truly wants. If she's a wise scavenger, we will find out, for she won't be showing her face again. If she's a mindless idiot, and she spits into our plans, then I will take it upon myself to murder my sister before I had the chance to know her. Hmmmm... It's not so terrible of a sin, really. Sororicide makes for a hearty breakfast.”

Haman gave her a cockeyed glance. “'Sister?'”

Razzar looked beyond both him and his words. “Be a good boomer, Haman. Call Fredden back. Tell him that tomorrow's extraction in Strut Eleven is a go.” She ripped a sheet of dead skin from her arm a little harder than normal. The red scales bled. Sighing, she sucked on the wound for a few seconds and then murmured, “I really, really hope she is as bright as her mane...”

---

“So, just what did the Rust-Bleeders have to say to you? Huh?”

Scootaloo looked aside in mid-trot. “Hmm? What?”

“You were gone for almost the entire length of the council meeting!” Warden said, scrambling to catch up with the last pony's four striding limbs. The two walked briskly down a metal street clamboring with goblins as they made for a distant elevator. “Surely you and those yellow-banded yahoos weren't just playing hop-scotch! Spit it out!”

The last pony groaned and glared ahead of her. “I have no clue what you're going on about.”

“Sure you do!” Warden smirked wide, his sharp teeth showing. “I can see it in your tail! The way it flicks around like crazy means you're either happy or you got something on your mind, and knowing you it sure as heck couldn't be the former! Heeheehee!”

“I don't know what bothers me more: the fact that you think I'm hiding something or that you actually make a habit out of staring at my flank.”

Warden gasped, “So you are hiding something! I knew it!” He stopped beaming just long enough to strut forward with his back straight. “It's alright! You couldn't tell Devo, and I respect that.” His straight-lace expression craked into a childish grin. “But you can tell me! Are they plotting an assassination attempt? Is Haman in league with the harpies? Did his mines strike arcanium nodes? I really wanna know!”

“Kid, you don't know what you want.” Scootaloo droned emotionlessly, though for some reason she couldn't look the petite half-ling in the face as she said that. She gazed aside as the two passed by a saloon flooded with loitering goblins. “Whatever the Rust-Bleeders and I had to say to one another, it's of no consequence to you or anyone. It was all merely...” She sighed long and hard, but ultimately produced “...business.”

“Pfft! I know a thing or two about business.” Warden folded his arms, wincing slightly upon rediscovering the self-inflicted cut in his shoulder. “When a creature goes to a meeting with a frown on her face and comes back just as unhappy, then it wasn't worth the time spent chatting to begin with! I dunno what those Rust-Bleeders were thinking, but obviously they didn't have a clue who they were messing with. Any goblin who thinks they can intimidate such a frostbeaming scavenger—not to mention Devo's Outbleeder—is seriously barking up the wrong—” He paused in mid utterance, blinking, for Scootaloo was no longer by his side. “P-Pony?” He glanced back and finally found her.

Scootaloo was standing in the middle of the road, staring straight at a street corner. Her eyes were soft, a strange vulnerability that Warden wasn't used to. The young imp strolled over, and only when he was situated shoulder-to-shoulder with the pegasus did his pointed ears begin registering a bizarre sound from beyond the metal curbs.

“What's wrong?”

“This... This is wrong,” Scootaloo said, pointing straight ahead of them. In spite of her words, she was bearing the queerest and quirkiest of grins. “This is so delightfully wrong.”

Warden scratched his emerald head of hair. He glanced over to see a gathering of young half-lings, most a few years older than him. They hung in a corner around a band of imps brandishing a haphazardly-engineered assortment of lyres, flutes, and percussion instruments. What resulted from this ensemble was a lively, upbeat melody that echoed off the nearby walls and metal shingles of the shantytown district. Miners walked by, passing a smile at the tune. Goblin families leaned out the windows of nearby households to listen. Elders sat on rusted stoops and gazed silently from a distance, their withered ears subtly twitching with the beat. In the center of it all, as alive as the Sun was now dead, no less then three impish couples danced merrily to the streetside serenade.

“Okay, so it's a jamboree.” Warden shrugged. “Big whoop.” He looked up at the pony. “Can we get back to the airship now? I'm starving for some mushroom stew.”

“You don't get it...” Scootaloo gulped down something hard and hoarsely said, “This is music. This is music in the Wasteland...” She slowly shook her head, her lips pursed in blank thought. “I never... I never thought that—”

“That what?” Warden folded his arms and smirked. “That goblins could carry a tune? Ponies aren't the only creatures who can sing and prance around, y'know.”

“I guess it's just...” Scootaloo bit her lip, her mind flashing over the last twenty-five years of snow-drenched memories, and all of them lonesome. “I've never been in the position to stand in one place and notice it before.” Her smile was a bittersweet thing, pulling down at the edges of her moist eyes. “Bruce has sold me records. Some baboon at a trading post I frequent has been known to hum a song or two. But this...?” She inhaled deeply and squeaked forth, “This is life. Even in a goddess-forsaken place like this, there is life, Wart.”

“I... I don't understand,” Warden remarked, his voice suddenly weak as if he was truly ashamed at his own confusion. He glanced at the little merry band with distant eyes this time. “It's just music. What's so special about it?”

“Because it is a warm thing. A magical thing,” she said. “Maybe it doesn't mean much to you, but to me...” She smiled placidly, even with each upbeat jolt of the melody that contrasted with Octavia's eloquent strings. “...it speaks of hope. Even I can't do anything for this world... even a last steward can't restore beauty to Equestria, it's hopeful to think that something... something like this can survive.”

Warden gulped nervously. He gazed numbly back and forth between the pegasus and the scene that she was enraptured in. His voice was muted in the astronomical effort of attempting to bridge the gap of comprehension that she had just carved for him.

Ignoring him, ignoring her own anxiety, ignoring everything, Scootaloo shut her eyes, leaned back, and bathed herself in the tones of that ecstatic melody. The warmth that blossomed in her heart was a brief but healing sensation. It almost felt like... sounded like...

---

“You may not believe this, but I couldn't fly straight to save my life!” Rainbow Dash exclaimed, sitting atop a hilltop as she adjusted a pair of custom-made goggles in her hooves. “For nearly two days, I was crashing into stuff left and right, and all on account of this poison joke stuff that I had brushed up against.”

“Uh huh...” Scootaloo remarked. She sat across from Rainbow Dash. She listened to Rainbow Dash. She stared at Rainbow Dash, smiling, her eyes thin and her dimples showing.

“Then both Applejack and her little sister went missing, and we all figured they both must have gone off to see the witch doctor. So Twilight and the rest of us went to the Everfree Forest in search of them. I only slammed into—jee, I dunno, like—a dozen stupid trees along the way.”

“Uh huh...” Scootaloo hummed. Her eyes were warm. Her cheeks were rosy. Her chin was propped up on a pair of hooves as she stared, stared, and stared.

“But when we got there, the evil witch doctor simply turned out to be a zebra who likes to brew potions and talk in rhyme, even if it doesn't make sense all the time. Gaah! She's got me doing it now!”

“Uh huh...” Scootaloo smiled, inhaling and exhaling dreamily.

Rainbow Dash blinked, then glanced awkwardly aside at the little filly. “And... uhm... and then Rarity died.”

“Uh huh...”

“And Fluttershy got possessed by Timber-Wolves and started to shoot lasers out of her eyes.”

“Uh huh...”

“Eh heh heh... uhm...” Rainbow Dash raised an eyebrow and gave Scootaloo a nervous glance. “Are you okay, kid?”

“Hmm?” Scootaloo blinked briefly, but a warm grin melted across her fame once more. “Oh. I'm... perfect...” She exhaled gradually, still staring at Rainbow Dash, still smiling drunkenly.

Rainbow Dash winced ever so slightly. With a breathy chuckle, she waved a hoof right in front of the tiny pegasus' face. “Are you sure? Aren't you a little young to be hitting the joy juice?”

“Huh?” The filly briefly snapped out of her joyous stupor, long enough for her violets to blink with an innocent brightness. “What do you mean? I haven't hit anything!”

“Not even your head after waking up, this morning?” Rainbow Dash smiled. “I swear, you look dazed and confused, but in the good way. I've seen it in fillies before. It's as if you got trapped under an avalanche of chocolate cookies and had to eat your way out. I don't know whether to be happy or concerned for ya, kiddo.”

“Heeheehee... Oh, I'm fine, Rainbow Dash,” Scootaloo cooed, looking up at her, staring at her. “I couldn't be better...”

“Yeah. I can see that,” the blue pegasus said. She smiled awkwardly.

Scootaloo smiled back.

Rainbow Dash gulped and glanced off towards the horizon. “Yeah, so, there's still a lot of work that's gotta be done downtown,” she said, sliding the goggles up onto her brow so that the lenses rested below the prismatic bangs of her mane. “No village in Equestria can recover from a parasprite swarm overnight. Twilight's overseeing the restoration processes, but the silly bookworm can't get a bird's eye view. That's where I come in.” She smiled proudly. “I've volunteered to act as surveyor and report on the damage from the skies. It's a boring job, but somepony's gotta do it.”

“If there's any task, no matter how crazy, I have no doubt you can do it, Rainbow Dash.”

“Your confidence is always appreciated, ya little squirt,” Rainbow Dash said. “Just don't be creepy about it.”

“Oh? What do you mean?” Scootaloo's eyes were practically sparkling.

Rainbow Dash lost an errant sweatdrop from her brow. “Eh heh heh... Uhh...”

“Can I ask you something, Dashie?”

“Sure, why the heck not?”

“When the day comes that you finally get to impress the Wonderbolts...” Scootaloo spoke while kneading her orange hooves into the soft grass beneath them. “And they accept you and let you become their captain—”

“Snkkkt—Heeheeheehee!” Rainbow Dash let loose a gunshot of giggles. “Ahem... S-Sorry, kid. Don't get me wrong, I adore your confidence in me and stuff, but 'let me become their captain?'” Rainbow Dash smiled, amused. “What makes you think I'd be that lucky?”

Scootaloo blinked, as if the very question was preposterous. “You're the absolute best, Rainbow Dash. Why wouldn't they let you be anything but the leader of the Wonderbolts?” She pouted ever so slightly. “An awesome flier like you doesn't deserve to be a mere wingpony.”

“Erhm... heheh... Well put, kid,” Rainbow Dash uttered, her cheeks blushing slightly as she glanced off towards the sunny horizon over the green pastures. “Er... What were you gonna say again?”

“When you become the Wonderbolts' captain, and you go performing so many awesome airshows all throughout Equestria...” Scootaloo's eyes curved ever so slightly. “Will you ever come back here?”

“Huh...?”

“To visit, that is.” Scootaloo shifted nervously and let her gaze fall sadly aside. “Will you ever come back to Ponyville?”

“Kid, how could you possibly ask that? Heheh—I mean, for Nebula's sake! I wouldn't leave this place hanging! It's got weather to be kicked into shape and foals in trees to save!”

“But you're just...” Scootaloo breathed deeply. “...so awesome, Rainbow Dash. You deserve nothing less than to show off all your stuff throughout Equestria.”

“I'm also loyal, kid,” Rainbow Dash said, but twitched upon the end of that utterance. Her ruby eyes trailed off as the mare lost herself in the haze of the noonday spectacle. She swallowed a lump down her throat and bore a smile that was both bitter and blissful. A peace swam through her, almost as drunken a sensation as Scootaloo's rosy-cheeked gazing.

“Dashie...?”

“Ahem.” Rainbow Dash cleared her throat. Her eyes rediscovered the orange foal, and the connection was a warm, bubbly thing. “Of course I would visit, pipsqueak. Awesome ponies know a cool place that's worth returning to. Only friggin' lame-o's fly off forever and never come back.”

Scootaloo smiled wide. Her pink tail hairs flicked excitedly.

“I gotta go, squirt,” Rainbow Dash murmured as she stood up, dragged the goggles down over her blinking eyes, and flexed her blue wings. “Twilight and the others need me.” Her nostrils flared, and a calm smile alighted her sapphire features. “I'm not about to let them down.”

“Whatever you say, Rainbow Dash,” Scootaloo murmured, the intoxicated smile rediscovering its place across her lips.

Rainbow Dash bent her legs, about to spring up into the air. She hesitated slightly, gazing off towards an invisible thought soaring past her. Contemplating it, she turned and smirked down at the filly. “Tell you what... I should only take three hours to do what I have to do. What say, in four hours I meet you right here—on this hill—and we do a little something together this afternoon?”

“Oh?” Scootaloo's eyes fluttered. “Like what?”

“Oh, I dunno,” Rainbow Dash winked through the goggles Scootaloo had made for her and smirked. “Maybe see if those feathers of yours are good for more than filling pillows.”

Scootaloo stared up at the adult pegasus, a blank frozen expression across her face.

Rainbow Dash rolled her eyes. “I'll give you lessons on flying, ya friggin' numbskull!”

The filly gasped as if she had just been dunked in a basin of ice water. “Really?!” Her eyes were wide and her mouth hung agape. “You mean it, Dashie?!”

“If I didn't mean it, I wouldn't have said it, now would I?!”

“Oh! Yes! Yes! Yes!” Scootaloo bounced several times in place, her pink mane and tail twirling behind her in the breeze like twin comet-trails. “I would love to be taught by you!”

“Jee, why am I not surprised?” Rainbow Dash rubbed a hoof through Scootaloo's mane. Her glistening grin could light up the dark side of the moon. “I'll meet you in four hours, pipsqueak.”

“Promise?”

“Pinkie Pie Swear,” Rainbow Dash stuck a hoof to her eye, smirked, and flew skyward in a prismatic blur.

Scootaloo watched her soar off towards town, slicing the air in a ribbon of glorious color. She plopped down on her haunches, feeling her heart racing a kilometer-per-minute inside her tiny chest. Her whole day—her entire life had suddenly been funneled down a burning cyclone of excitement and anticipation, and it would all come to a rapturous head in four hours.

Four hours...

Scootaloo could hardly sit still. This was about to be the longest afternoon of her life.

---

The last pony held time in a bottle. Sitting on the stool beside her workbench, she gazed intently at the long cylinder of green flame that she was slowly rotating between her hooves. The compressed bands of emerald magic surged against the glass barriers and their runestone seals. No matter how Scootaloo positioned the container in her grasp, she couldn't feel a single drop of warmth from within. She could only imagine it, so that she wondered—as she often did from time to time—if the past was all just a dream, including the past that had given her scars.

“That's from snazzy stuff you've got there,” Warden uttered in between gulps of mushroom stew. He sat on the edge of the hammock across from her, his legs dangling over the metal floor of the Harmony. With a spoon, he slurped a few more creamy drops, gulped, and pointed with the utensil. “I've heard about scavengers finding magical flame in the Wasteland and selling it for gonzo strips. My Dad's a trader in the township that me and my siblings are from. He told me once that green flame is the rarest of all the magic.” He smiled, his aquamarine eyes twinkling. “It's only fitting that you of all Wastelanders have gotten ahold of it.”

“That's where you're mistaken, kid,” Scootaloo mumbled, turning the long bottle a few more times in her grasp before sliding it into a safe cubbyhole atop the workbench. “That isn't green flame.”

Warden made a strange face. “It isn't?”

“Nope,” the mare droned and reached for a copper magazine, proceeding to fill it with enchanted runestones. “We ponies liked to call it “Dark Flame,” the Seventy-Fifth Magical Element. It's what we once used to turn a malevolent entity of chaos named Discord into stone.”

The goblin teenager's jaw dropped. “No way! But how come you call it 'Dark Flame' if it's green?”

“Don't you know?” Scootaloo looked up, her face as straight as a slab of sky marble. “Ponies are color blind.”

“Are you serious?” Warden gawked.

Scootaloo stared at Warden.

Warden stared back.

Slowly, the last pony's lips cracked. The tiniest of breathy chuckles escaped her mouth.

The goblin fumed. He flailed on the edge of the hammock in a bold attempt to toss the spoon at her. “You suck! You know that?”

“Heheheheh...” She didn't even bother dodging the spoon. The tiny utensil clattered ineffectually against her chest and landed atop the magazine. She brushed it aside and resumed placing all of the runestones in place. “You really gotta work on that gullibility factor of yours, ya 'lil squirt.”

He folded his arms in protest, his cheeks red. “I'm usually not this gullible. I mean it.”

“If you say so.”

He glanced aside and squirmed awkwardly. “It's just that... everything you say, even if it is in jest, has meaning to it. I've never met someone with that sort of a gift before.”

Scootaloo briefly gazed beyond the focus of her task at hoof. After a brief pause, her nostrils fumed, and she resumed with her work. “Don't take too much stock in words, kiddo. Or, if you do, at least transform them into action.”

He leaned his head curiously to the side. “Is that a personal motto?”

“If it wasn't, I wouldn't be alive today,” she said. She filled the runestones and snapped them tightly in place with a whip of her limb. “For what it's worth,” she added in a ghostly tone.

Warden apparently let that pass. “You know, maybe we're going about all this the wrong way.”

“Going about all what the wrong way?”

“That green stuff you've got,” he said while pointing at the glowing container inside the work bench's cubby hole, “It's gotta be worth a lot! Even a lot more than my Dad used to say, considering you've got so much of it!”

“What are you getting at, kid?”

“Sell it to the gremlins who patrol the mining pits!” She smiled wide. “I bet there's someone in this whole impcity you could bribe into letting you get to your friends' remains alive if she means that much to you!”

Scootaloo paused in the middle of picking up her copper rifle. She blinked, then smirked across the Harmony at the teenager. “Not a bad idea, Wart. But I'm not getting rid of that green stuff for anyone or anything, at least not now. Besides...” She opened a slot in the top of the rifle and loaded the magazine of runes into place. “We're already in contract with Devo, are we not?”

“Well, you are.”

“What, are you done working for me now?”

“N-No! Hardly! I mean... erm...” Warden clutched the empty container to his chest and tapped it nervously with eight claws. “Unless we're finally d-done here.”

“Relax, kid. I'm sure I've got plenty of pathetically stupid exercises to put you through before all is said and done.”

Warden smiled bashfully at that. He scratched the back of his neck while murmuring, “For what it's worth, I think it's terrific.”

“What is?”

“That you would stay so committed to Devo even if you could possibly make more profit elsewhere.” His smile shone like the flickering snow outside the porthole behind him. “It's the mark of a good business pony. Heeheehee...”

Scootaloo cocked the rifle and blinked aside at Warden. Something twitched deeply in her scarlets. “Really? A good business pony would forsake profit for honor?”

“Well...” Warden shrugged and glanced down past his dangling feet. “Maybe it's not so much 'good business,' but it's something good. I'm beginning to think that while everyone around here lives for silver strips, you live for something else... something else with more frostbeams.” He smiled warmly. “Is that true, you think?”

“I'm not entirely sure half the time what I live for, kid,” Scootaloo murmured in a distant voice. “I just live.”

The silence following that statement was brief, for Warden was soon whistling like an extinct songbird. “Wow, you sure are packing a lot of heat.”

“Yes,” Scootaloo said, reaching for two more magazines of runestones and sliding them into a leather harness leaning against the workbench beside her stool. “Yes, I am.”

“May I ask what for?”

“In a matter of hours, we're going to go speak to Franken. With all the tension centered upon Haman and company, it doesn't hurt to be prepared.”

“Prepared for what?”

“For not having to ask myself that question.” Scootaloo briefly cast him a glare as she finished stocking up on ammo. “Strut Eleven doesn't exactly sound like a bed of roses. I'm not taking any chances.”

Warden made a face. “'Roses?'”

“Nnnngh... Forget I said anything.”

“Any chance you could make me a really wicked, thick, armor vest while you're at it?”

“You're small enough to dodge flying steambolts,” she said with a crooked grin. “You'll be fine, Wart.”

“Like the Blight, I will be!” He raspberried. “You think you've got goblins gunning after you? I'm a walking pincushion in these streets! Why not paint a bullseye on me while we're at it!”

“Why bother?” Scootaloo uttered without thinking, retracting her rifle and sliding it into her saddlebag. “You've already got one.”

“Oh... Oh yeah...” He briefly bit his lip, his branded leg twitching on cue. He gazed off towards the cockpit and the broad windshield of the upper gondola beyond. “Too bad goblins aren't colorblind... or just blind-blind. Life would be a heck of a lot easier if nobody had to look at me.”

Scootaloo gazed off in thought. Her ears twitched above her pink mane. On an impulse, she reached for her pen-brace and then grabbed a sheet of paper from a shelf above her work bench. The last pony then proceeded to sketch a couple of bold words on the sheet while she murmured across the cabin to the teenager. “Tell me, Wart. What are your plans?”

“Hmm? Plans?”

“When all of this is said and done, when all of the nasty business with Haman is sorted out, when Devo has found a way to get me to the inner pits, when I no longer have need of your assistance,” she murmured, her lips moving as swiftly as her pen strokes, “where do you intend to go? What do you intend to do?”

Warden bit his lip. “I... I try not to think about it too much. It's so much easier to think in the here and now without having to worry about the future.”

“But you can't risk ignoring the here and now,” Scootaloo thought out loud. “This is the present, not the past.”

“The heck are you talking about?” Warden made a silly face, stifling a loose chuckle. “Of course this isn't 'the past.' I know that!”

The orphan of time winced. Something green poked her peripheral vision from the work bench's cubby hole. “Sorry. Lack of sleep.”

“Ya think?!”

“Ahem.” Scootaloo glanced up from what she was writing. “You've got to come grips with tomorrow sooner than later, kid. I'm paying you right now because I need you, but with the life I live, I really can't afford to have a... sidekick.”

“Heeheehee!”

Scootaloo's brow furrowed. “What?”

“Ahem. Nothing.” Warden gulped and swung back and forth on the edge of the hammock, gazing into the whalebone bulkheads above him. “I guess I could... go back home.”

“You mean to your township? West, beyond the Briar?”

“He-e-ey... Good memory!” He smirked at her. “Heheh... I guess if anyone can accept me back in open arms, in spite of what's happened to me, it'd be my parents.”

“I thought your parents bugged you because they were so hardcore about manifesting Petra.”

“Yeah, well, what's a goblin to do?” He hugged himself and managed a warm breath. His aquamarine eyes glistened to a soft turquoise from the dangling lanternlight above. “Dad is a shrewd enough Stock-Bleeder to know how to solve my problem with silver. He'd pay all the neighbors to look away from my branding, or get a tattoo artist to cover it up—make the horsehoe look like a bunch of smokestacks or some crap.”

“That's a stretch,” Scootaloo pessimistically uttered. “But a good stretch,” she added, trying to smile.

“Then my Mom...” Warden tapped the lid of the empty soup container with his claws, gazing down into his knees. His breath morphed into something warm, like his cheeks suddenly. “She always knows how to make me feel useful around the house. As soon as I return, if I return, I'll immediately get to sweeping the chimney, cleaning the steam pipes, cultivating the mushrooms, polishing the roof shingles—you name it. Sure, it means that the only way to manifest Petra would be from inside the home... but at least it's something. If the whole world refuses to love me, I can still be glad for Mom.” He took a deep breath, his brow softening above curved eyes. “A goblin mother never shows her love by coddling her kids, she makes them into little engineers and housekeepers. In this world... in this life, there's nothing more special than being a part of some newly built structure. Mom understands that more than any other imp I've known. It's because of her that, to this day, I try so hard to be... to be a good helper.”

Scootaloo gazed at him intently. “If you love your mom and your home so much, why'd you leave town to be with your uncle here?”

Warden shrugged, tapped the can a few times, and let loose a hollow chuckle. His next breath was sadder than his face could express it with, “Sooner than later, you gotta grow up and earn stuff in this crazy world. Love is wonderful, but love... true love isn't earned.”

The last pony heard those words. She digested them. Still, she couldn't shake the sensation that the taste of Warden's statement was familiar, as if it had once fluttered through her own life, secretly and unspoken, lost between the bands of colors that had once defined her. Wrenching her thoughts away, she likewise tore her gaze from him and towards the cockpit. Nonchalantly, she returned to what she was scribbling and murmured aside, “We've been in the air around Petra long enough. The deadline with Franken is approaching. I need to park the Harmony somewhere along Strut Eleven.”

The goblin teenager nodded. “What's stopping you?”

“I think I could use some help.”

“Yeah, okay,” he said. He blinked. His ears pricked and his eyes narrowed as a jolt ran up his body. “Wait... Do you mean...?”

---

“Grip the lever on the right and pull it halfway,” Scootaloo instructed.

Warden sat in the cockpit seat, wide-eyed and trembling with excitement. He had two thick Fillydelphian tomes positioned between his branded hindquarters and the surface of the chair. While Scootaloo leaned over him, he grasped the lever sticking out from the floor of the cabin to his right, pulled a switch on the end of it, and tugged it a quarter of a meter towards the ship's stern.

The gondola swayed and rocked. Jerkily, but safely, it veered starboard under the goblin's manual command.

“Okay... Steady now...” Scootaloo eyed the shadowed edge of Strut Eleven looming before them. There was a wide, hollow notch formed in the edge of the golden platform, with just enough space for the airship to dock. “Okay, push the lever back to its original spot and release the switch.”

“L-Like this?” Warden murmured. He bit his lip and gently did as was commanded him. With a groaning of steam vents located deep within the dirigible above, the ship angled directly with the open docking station straight ahead.

“Very nice,” Scootaloo said, nodding with a smile. She calmly added, “But we're still coming in too fast... not to mention from up high.”

“Okay okay okay...” Warden glanced feverishly across the many dials, meters, and rotating nodes dotting the lengths of the dashboard console curved about the seat. “Wh-What does all of this mean and how do I know if I'm going to kill us all?”

“Heheheh...” Scootaloo snickered. Smiling, she leaned in and pointed with a hoof at one panel after another. “This is the altimeter. This is the pressure gauge. This measures forward momentum and this one keeps track of the integrity of the zeppelin's ballasts—”

“What's the purple button do?” Warden pointed at the bright sphere in question. “Is it the 'self-destruct' mechanism or something?”

“Jee, I dunno. Let's find out.” Scootaloo briskly slapped it.

“Nnngh!” Warden flinched dramatically in his seat.

A row of metal shutters extended outward from beyond the windshield and covered half of the airship's bow. Scootaloo very swiftly struck the purple button again, and the copper plates retracted from view.

“Gah!” Warden hissed through his teeth. “You lousy bag of oats!”

“Heeheeheehee...” Scootaloo smirked. “I've been waiting all my life to do that to someone.”

“Hmmf! I bet you were.”

“In all seriousness,” Scootaloo said, gesturing up towards one of four chain-link handles hanging above the cockpit. “Pull this to lower our descent.”

Warden reached, stretched, and ultimately resorted to standing on the edge of the chair with his heels. “Nnnngh... Got it! I swear, even with these books, this seat is so freakin' weird!”

“That's because it wasn't made for bipedal rumps,” Scootaloo said. “Especially when they belong to petite little shrimps. Now... pull gently and release when I tell you to.”

He lightly tugged at the handle. A puff of steam wafted outside of the vessel. The Harmony lowered gradually until it was level with the docking station.

“Now.”

Warden let go and slumped back into the chair. He giggled proudly as he saw the docking station looming into view, then proceeded to produce a nervous gulp at just how quickly it was looming into view. “Uhhh... You wanna take over now?”

“Are you going to earn all of your strips or not?” Scootaloo remarked, gazing down at him. “I'm going to need my assistant to know some basic piloting skills in case there's an emergency.”

“R-Really?”

“Sure. Who knows? A troll hitting me hard in the head when I was a little filly might make me suffer a spontaneous aneurysm one of these days.”

“That's nice, and all, but how can I stop us from dying before it's our time to die?”

Scootaloo smiled. “Think back to five friggin' minutes ago, ya little Wart.” She nudged his green shoulder. “Which of the levers controls forward acceleration? Do you remember?”

“Uhhh... Uhhh...” He looked and searched and looked and—“Th-This one!” He pointed at a red handle on the undercarriage of dashboard.

“Ahem. That's the emergency release valve.”

“Yeah? What's it release?”

“Us.” Scootaloo said. “From the balloon.”

“Oh. Yeah, well, I'm not pulling that.” He bit his lip, glanced once more, and pointed at a second lever to his right.

Scootaloo gently nodded with a smile.

Warden grasped onto the switch. Licking his lips, he pulled back ever so slightly. Immediately, the Harmony slowed, its forward flight oozing into a liquid drift. Softly, with the grace of clouds, the dirigible hovered into place, surrounded by the clamps of the docking station.

Scootaloo reached in. She expertly performed ten times as many operations as Warden did in the span of five seconds. Soon, there was a gentle thump of the ship landing in place. The boiler at the rear of the cabin quieted slightly, and a long, lingering hiss emanated from the copper pipes filtering into the balloon above the gondola.

“Frostbeams...” Warden smiled, gazing up at her. “You make it look so simple.”

“If you live long enough in the Wasteland,” Scootaloo murmured as she shuffled over to the port side controls for the vessel's exterior claws. “You'll find that there's nothing in life that remains complex.” She twirled a set of valves, positioning the metal limbs outside so that they anchored the airship in place. “Sometimes, after a long day of pilfering resources from this dead world, when you sit and listen to the silence of it all, you wish things could be complex again.” Her nostrils softly flared as she gazed beyond the job she was doing. “Things are more frightening when they life is less understood, yes, but there's hope to be had in such ecstatic gaps of comprehension.”

“What is it about the Wasteland that makes living creatures so badass and philosophical at the same time?” Warden asked, propped up in the seat and gazing at her.

“I'd rather you not find out for yourself, kid.” Scootaloo wandered over to the starboard set of claw controls. “If you ask me, I kind of like the idea of you heading back to your Mom and Dad's township. Heck, I'm half-tempted to give you a ride myself when all is said and done.”

“Oh really?!” Warden exclaimed, beaming. Soon, that smile ended twice as awkwardly as it began. “Oh... really...?”

“One thing at a time though, Wart.” Scootaloo finished anchoring the Harmony in place. “We've got a Franken-Goblin to bump heads with.”

---

Strut Eleven was a dark and shadowy platform. Unlike most of the other Struts that the Outbleeder of Hex Blood had visited, this spot on Petra was comprised mostly of opaque bulkheads, shrouding the extremities of the soot-stained and grimy place from the rest of the impcity's golden glow. The structures on the Alpha Level were also uniquely different. They were built out of brick, concrete, and even a hint of wood paneling. Scootaloo's first and only assumption was that this Strut was once the topmost level of Petra—as Thirty-Five Strut was today—and in its past it had many luxurious apartments and palaces built to house only the richest of impish elite.

Now, the goblin extravagance of yesteryear had fallen into horrible decay, so that a veritable ghost-town occupied the majority of the upper level. Rooftops had caved in, steam pipes were bent at awkward anglels, windows were covered with tattered shingles, and all rooms or chambers of perpetual mechanization had long lost their purpose ages ago, but not their steam-powered momentum. Though this was a dead part of the city, it was anything but devoid of life. Scootaloo heard squawking, arguing voices bickering from within the shadowed living quarters. Lone, limping, drunken goblins dotted distant street corners. Homeless vagabonds clustered—half alive—in dank alleyways. Dangling lampposts illuminated shifty-looking half-lings with their hands dug in their vest pockets as they waited for the next of several shady transactions with representatives from the upper and lower struts.

Scootaloo took all of this in cautiously, her body armored thickly from mane to tail, her rifle feeling twice as heavy from the extra runestones that she had packed. It occurred to her that wherever Franken of Glass Blood was coerced into doing dirty work for Haman, it would likely be in a place of ill-repute. She didn't, however, expect to find herself crawling into a cesspool such as this. For once, the last pony wished she had delved deeper into Warden's hyperbolic description of the place.

The green teenager in question was currently occupied with staring at a sheet of paper that Scootaloo had hoofed him immediately after exiting the Harmony. The homeless no-bleeder seemingly ignored the unsightly environment around them as he struggled to keep up while looking over the pegasus' hoofwriting.

“Just what the heck do these words mean?!” Warden scratched his head and murmured while fast-walking. “You gotta have oats in your mouth to make these sounds!”

“That's not too far from the truth, actually,” Scootaloo muttered, spotting the rusted doors to a rickety elevator up ahead. A sparkling tesla-coil strobed the littered path between them and the moving passageway that led to the inner stalk of Petra, and the location she and Franken had agreed upon the day before. “Just try and pronounce the first one, kiddo.”

Warden's mouth contorted. “Hooh-jeehm!”

“Don't make the vowels long. Try it again.”

“Er...” He took a breath, wheezed, then practically spat, “H'jem.”

“There ya go. And the second one?”

“Uhm...” He grimaced as it came out of his mouth. “H'jnor?”

“Hmmm... Not bad for a first try. Those two go hoof-in-hoof. Now, try the third one. It's a doozy, I know. But you can do it.”

“This is the weirdest game I've ever played,” he muttered, scratching his head as they reached the elevator.

“Concentrate,” she said, turning to face him. “Stand still, plant your feet in the ground, take a deep breath, and give it your best shot.”

Warden did exactly as he was told. His eight toes wriggling in place, he put every effort into the pronunciation, ultimately producing, “W'nyhhm.”

“Hey, look at you. You're a regular cunning... Eh, never mind how young you are, that joke's just lame, even for me.”

“At least you know the difference between what's serious and what isn't.” He smirked, holding the sheet of paper up high, proud of himself. “So, what do you think? Did I pass this silly test with flying colors?”

“Definitely.”

There was a loud clanging sound immediately following that. Warden looked up and gasped, almost dropping the paper as he ran forward. “What the heck are you doing?!”

“What else?” Scootaloo calmly spoke, despite the fact that she had just erected a barrier between the two of them. She stood inside the elevator car, locking herself in. “I'm going to have a word with Franken. One way or another, I'm getting to the bottom of the Rust-Bleeders and their nonsense. Sorry, but, you're not coming with me.”

“Don't be a stupid glue—” He winced, seethed, and gripped the metal webbing of the elevator door as he peered up at her. “Don't be stupid! What if you need my help?! You have no clue what you may be dealing with down there!”

“Exactly, kid,” Scootaloo said. “Take a look around you. This is far from Devo's bright and shiny strut. If it looks this bad up here, imagine what it's like inside the adjacent stalk.”

“But... But...”

“You've helped me more times than those strips I gave you were worthy of,” Scootaloo said. “You saved my life twice and got me to witness new sights...” She briefly smiled. “...and sounds of your impish blood. I'm incredibly grateful, kid. But I'm not taking you down there. You're safer on the outside.”

“But I'll be alone on the outside!” Warden rattled the metal cage like he was the one inside of it instead of her. His eyes were bright and pleading. “What if something happens while I'm waiting for you?”

“That's the reason for our little test, kid. You still holdin' onto that paper?”

“Uh... Y-Yeah?”

“Good.” Scootaloo's eyes narrowed on him through the metal grate. “The first two words open and close the door to the Harmony respectively. But that third word is most important. It'll enchant and disenchant the runestone mana-shield that keeps any creeps from getting in and out.”

“But I'm not a pony! How the heck is it supposed to work with me?”

“With this.” Scootaloo reached down and plucked one brightly colored horn off from the bracelet over her right hoof. She passed it through one of the wider gapes in the porous metal. Warden cradled it awkwardly as she spoke, “Speak into it. It'll channel your command through a leyline into the runestones. I want you to go to the Harmony and seal yourself inside.”

“But... But...” He gazed up at her with a quivering mouth. “Why?”

“Because...” Scootaloo hesitated. The dark webbing of the elevator car divided his image like black bars across a bright, smirking face. As the tesla-coil outside flickered and briefly revealed his petite stature in a righteous strobe, she realized just how far the immutable pendulums of time had swung. “Because you're young, your vulnerable, and you still have so much unlocked potential. I want you to have only the best resources at your disposal in case... in case I don't come back from what I'm about to do right now.” She smiled, a pathetically predictable thing. It took every effort in her body not to add a wink to it. “Who knows, maybe my little flight lesson paid off, and you can find your way back to your parents. Worst case scenario: you can sell it all to Devo for some decent profit and get someone else to fly you there.”

“Please! Don't leave!” Warden pleaded, trying to steady the pitch in his voice. “This isn't the kind of payment I wanted—”

“I'm not going to argue with you.” She said and frowned briefly. “Now promise me you'll go to the Harmony and sit your butt down like a good little assistant.”

“But I can't just—”

“Promise me,” she said, sternly, like the billowing edge of a stormfront. There was no room for coddling, not in her life and subsequently not in his. “Promise me you will make use of what I've given you if I don't come back.”

Warden shivered, bit his lip, and nodded. “I-I promise.”

“There's a good little Wart.” She clasped her hoof around a lever and pulled it. With a groaning sound, the old rickety elevator car slid down the diagonal stalk, descending into the dark, dank recesses of the inner stalk of Petra beyond. “Don't worry. There's plenty of mushroom stew in the hangar's frozen hold.” She managed a last minute smirk between the last gap of illumination spared them. “Eat your heart out, kid.”

All she saw was a sad, grimacing face. It was gone in a flash.

Alone for the first time in hours, surrounded by the groaning belly of Petra's mechanisms, Scootaloo felt immensely naked, and twice as shameful. She let loose a heaving breath, her programmed smirk utterly obliterating itself as she pressed her head limply to the metal wall of the rattling car.

She hated her last words to Warden, assuming that they were her last words. It was always healthy for the last pony to assume such. The fact was, there were no good last words, for their very nature meant cold and heartless abandonment, no matter how Scootaloo tried to paint them otherwise, with or without the same colors that were so warmly given her with the best of intentions, only to haunt the recesses of her sobbing years for as long as she could care to remember.

Scootaloo couldn't think of Warden, even if thinking of him was another way of thinking of herself all of the sudden. With a strong breath, she stood up, turned around, and faced the depths of Petra. The diagonal shaft's dimness gave way to a flickering, crimson glow as a great heat wafted up to her armored body from the foundries beyond. She took a deep breath, her mane hair billowing briefly next to the blue feather strung around her ear.

---

Scootaloo hummed merrily in the brisk, autumn air. The little pegasus sat alone on a hilltop, staring off towards the emerald stretches of the Equestrian Valley beyond Ponyville. She played with her metal tray, bouncing it back and forth with rattling wheels between her outstretched limbs. All the while, she stared off into the distance and grinned unceasingly while random, cool breezes kicked at her pink mane.

Four hours. Rainbow Dash had said that she would come back and give Scootaloo flying lessons in four hours. Such a declaration had transpired no less than thirty minutes ago. Scootaloo had many things she could have been doing: rolling through town, exercising her fluttering wings, earning bits from random shopowners, visiting Applejack and Big Mac. However, she somehow couldn't remove herself from that spot. The hilltop felt peaceful, warm, and joyous in the effluent shades of the awesome pegasus who had briefly bestowed it with her amazing presence. A part of Scootaloo felt that the afternoon glory would fade the first moment she trotted away from that site, as if everything that had ever happened up until then had been a fanciful dream of fragile proportions.

Whatever the case, Scootaloo didn't leave that spot, not even as the thirty minutes bled into sixty and consumed the first of four hours' of interminable waiting. Scootaloo was unphased. She thought of Manehattan, she thought of all those grim foster homes and doubly grim chaperones, and then she thought of a miraculous rainstorm and how all of the grim fears of the past remained locked away there, forever severed from her and her new home, her true home, her only home: Ponyville.

Scootaloo was where she wanted to be, where she needed to be. There was no sense in budging. So, she didn't, instead choosing to lie back on the grass and playfully bounce her limbs atop the springy earth. She saw clouds, and every single one of them formed into blissful imaginings. Scootaloo giggled, gaily, as if she was several years younger than she really was. There was something enchanted about that afternoon, and she was not about to abandon it for a single blink.

---

Into the second hour, Scootaloo felt like stretching her legs. She abandoned her metal tray momentarily and proceeded to navigate a dirt path below the hilltop. Marching slowly in a casual trot, she took the time to observe just how luscious the landscape was. The fields of emerald grass danced like sea waves, as did her mane hair. She briefly anchored her hooves into the earth and leaned against a brisk gust of autumn wind, giggling at the weather's momentary ferocity.

Closing her eyes, she tiled her face into the brisk breeze and imagined that she was not standing on a dirt road. Instead, she was flying through rows of clouds, parting their vaporous lengths with her sharp orange wings. A prismatic blur was flanking her side, and together the two pegasi banked past a series of sharp cliffaces, skirting over their hard surfaces with wild abandon.

She reopened her eyes and once more absorbed the luscious sights of the landscape into her optics. She wonder what it would be like to see all of these familiar hilltops and trees from high up in the clouds. Then her heart skipped a beat and her wings twitched when she realized that—by that very afternoon—she may very well discover exactly what it felt like.

Riding a blissful spark bubbling up her body, the filly trotted cheerfully around the rest of the hilltop, counting down the last trailing minutes of the second hour.

---

One Hundred and eighty minutes after Rainbow Dash had taken off for downtown Ponyville, Scootaloo still hadn't left that spot. No matter how often she contemplated it, her legs still remained anchored to that hill. Her stomach growled with hunger, and her eyes hung heavily in want of a mid-afternoon nap. Scootaloo gave into neither temptation, instead choosing to plop her orange haunches down atop the grassy gnoll.

With a stick clasped between two hooves, the filly hummed to herself and drew random figures in the dirt. After several minutes of carving into the soil, she glanced at an angle. It was the worst looking 'werewolf' she had ever seen. With an embarassed giggled, she kicked a sea of sand over the offensive illustration and leaned back against a dead tree stump.

She absorbed her gaze into the sky, drowning in its pearlescent blueness. Only one hour remained. Scootaloo's nerves jolted happily and a rosy smile fell to her lips. Only one hour. The orphan closed her eyes and breathed peacefully, giving herself over to the nuzzling caress of time.

---

The fourth hour descended like a velvet blanket. Scootaloo gasped when she realized how much time had passed. The sun was halfway towards the horizon; the sky slowly took on an orange hue along the fringes of the crisp, autumnal sky. A young life lived predominantly outdoors had taught the versatile little filly to tell time by its natural signs, and she couldn't possibly be bursting at the seams any more ecstatically than she was right then and there, standing up and bouncing in place along the crest of the green hill.

Scootaloo aimed a grin up high, her glistening teeth shining like a beacon as her violet orbs darted left and right, searching for a bluer-than-blue symbol of joy against the oceanic sky. There was another gust of cool wind, and her wings twitched briefly as she imagined herself soaring off along those currents at any given moment, gliding under an older pegasus' guiding hooves, with nothing but the future to look forward to.

She was so focused on the intensity of her heartbeat that she didn't remotely measure its constant meter until a full ten minutes had gone by. The Sun continued sinking, the wind continued whipping, and the tall grass around her spun like a lazy cyclone before settling into a placid hush. Another twenty minutes had passed, and for the sake of resting her bouncy limbs, Scootaloo sat on her haunches. Thirty minutes dripped into forty, and slowly—confusedly—Scootaloo's smile was beginning to fade for the first time that day.

---

Five hours after Rainbow Dash had left, Scootaloo's heart was beating, but for a different reason. She gazed forlornly into the sky, her throat dry as she peered across the autumnal reaches of the globe with nervous eyes. She bit her lip and fidgeted where she sat, kneading the earth with petite orange hooves.

Every darting insect, every random songbird, every errant speck of movement against the sky shot a spark through her spine. She glanced and glanced, her neck craning to give her a look at every opportunity the atmosphere took to excite her. Hope clashed with anxiety, and soon each startling movement numbed Scootaloo's senses as her bubbling anticipation melted into a sullen frigidity.

At the top of the fifth hour, Scootaloo had been sitting upright. After another twenty minutes, her body hung in a slump. Forty minutes later, she reclined chest-first against the earth, toying pathetically with the tips of grass blades jutting up from the dulling hilltop. The Sun's golden brightness was being replaced with an orange haze, matching the lifeless hue that Scootaloo's coat had suddenly become.

---

Six hours had passed...

Scootaloo was pacing. Her hooves formed an elliptical ditch in the soft earth. Her deadpan face met a blurring horizon everytime she shifted and spun about, retracing her steps. A quiet hush had come over the land. The songs of birds were slowly being replaced with the chorus of crickets. Everything that was blue in the sky melted away in reverance to a burning, crimson sunset.

The day was dying, and it wasn't the only thing. Scootaloo sighed. Ultimately, she slumped against the wooden tree trunk and planted a front hoof atop her metal tray, sliding the pathetic little platform back and forth in a lethargic fashion. The filly bit her lip, refusing to look at the wheeled object under her grasp. Her eyes were dull specks. Her wings were coiled tightly against her side, useless as always.

---

The seventh hour came like a whisper. The sun burned into the scarlet horizon. The roof of Equestria was peeling away, and a cold black tarp lingered beyond, bespeckled with icy pinpricks of cosmic indifference.

Another speck lingered in the middle of Equestria, an orange speck. Scootaloo slowly exhaled through her nostrils, hugging her lower limbs with her upper hooves. There was a slump to her shoulders, as if an invisible weight had materialized on her backside. She winced with each breath, as if for the first time in days she was waking up to her senses and each of her lungs weighed several hundred kilograms each.

Swallowing a lump down her throat, the trembling filly gazed towards the horizon. Row up row of rolling Equestrian hills stretched to the north before her. Under the cold kiss of settling night, they appeared distant, unearthly, and heartless. They also were inviting.

Scootaloo's brow furrowed. Slowly, she stood up. She flexed her limbs. In a brazen gesture, she uncoiled her wings until the dinky stalks stretched her petite feathers on either side of her. After a brave gulp, the little filly frowned and trotted briskly up to the very top of the hill.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

The young pegasus felt the breeze. She felt the tendrils of wind billowing through her soft, downy feathers. The shivers that racketed her body were undeniable, and yet she bravely stood atop the hill, gazing at the lengths of the world beyond, like a shadowy, purple canvas rippling beneath her.

The last sliver of sunlight slid under the horizon, so that the final veil was flung over Equestria. There would be no witnesses, no sovereign observer to chronicle the sacred moment that was about to be Scootaloo's and Scootaloo's alone.

The pegasus bit her lip one last time and briskly cast away the last few remaining threads of apprehension. She broke into a trot, and that trot broke into a canter, and that canter broke into a gallop. Hissing into the breeze, her eyes blinded under the shroud of blossoming night, she sped towards the side of the hill, spread her tiny wings up, and soared high into the sky.

Scootaloo gasped. Her violet eyes moistened as she found herself gliding into a mesmerizing soup of twilight. Once again, she was an orphan. Once again, she was her own pegasus. She was nothing more than the sum of her own accomplishments. Blissfully airborne, she smiled, for it was a very breathtaking and proud realization.

However, it was also a very lonely one. Less than a second after wisely contemplating such, time resumed its normal motion, and Scootaloo found herself sailing stupidly into the ground with the grace of a collapsing boulder.

“Ooomf!” Scootaloo grunted, rolled, twirled, and plowed through a muddy embankment. “Augh—Ugh!” Dirt splattered on either side of her as she grinded to a painful stop, covered in scuffs and bruises. She tried getting up, but had to surrender to a throbbing wave of pain coursing through her petite body. “Nnnnngh...”

She gritted her teeth and shivered with the struggle it took to fight back the tears. When she reopened her eyes, they were dry. It was a meager victory, her only triumph of the pitiful afternoon.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

The wheels of the metal tray squeaked and squeaked under the funeral dirge of soulless crickets. A lone shadow—a slumped and shuffling thing—was gliding towards the heart of Ponyville like a gray ghost.

Scootaloo kicked lethargically along the metal tray as if it were a gurney. Her face was forever frozen in a painful grimace. “Nnngh, stupid. I can't believe you're so friggin' stupid.” For the life of her, she couldn't tell who she was murmuring to, and that was what broke the filly's heart the most.

---

The elevator doors opened with a rattling clang, and Scootaloo knew that she wasn't in Strut Eleven anymore. The walls of the interior before her were thick, curved obsidian, a polished metal that was nothing like the flimsy, porous lattice work that formed the foundation of the decrepit goblin ghost town above, where she had split ways with Warden. She was in the very stalk of Petra, and it was a dank, dark, grimy place. Dim red lights lined the floors, illuminating puffs of steam that billowed out of sporadic vents carved into the black metal plates underhoof.

Scootaloo trotted along, slowly and steadily, her armored self utterly dwarfed by the large, winding intestine of a corridor stretching before her. Every twenty meters or so, a juncture would slice through, forming thick crossroads of intersecting tunnels. They were all identical, and the only evidence that Scootaloo had to show she was making any progress was that the end of the passageway she was moving towards glowed brighter than the rest. It was a crimson color, artificial and foreboding, pumping waves of heat through the corridor to meet her, riding currents of hot, dancing vapors.

Halfway through her venture, Scootaloo's nose scrunched up. Something was smelling horrible. Just then, a series of shadows scuffled along the edge of one of the many crosswords. Upon hearing an array of high-pitched grunting noises, Scootaloo froze and spun about, swiftly reaching back for her copper rifle. Her scarlet eyes narrowed on a gaggle of stout, burly creatures that instantly waddled away from her gaze.

Their bodies were absurdly short, almost as if their spines had been squashed from the top down. They resembled walking tree stumps more than sentient creatures; it was ridiculous that they were even bipedal. Still, they strolled about, practically rolling in angry little circles as they formed a line of squabbling figures, facing off against the last pony from several paces away. They proceeded to wave their stubby little arms, shooting forth an offensive stream of short, guttural noises. Their brown torsos were almost indistinguishable from their heads, and the follicles stemmed in their skulls blended with veritable manes of backhair, so that their chubby bodies possessed what looked like black, flowing capes that covered the length of their spines. Around their waist and ankles, several tiny tools and bits of engineering equipment glittered in the crimson light, and permanent layers of soot stained their tanned leather skin from years of working within the stalk of Petra.

“Why, hello there, hobs.” The last pony relaxed in her stance. She stood like a giant before them, glancing down at the chattering phalanx of balking creatures. “How's the indentured servitude going?”

In response, they mutually performed as many lewd gestures as could be afforded by their sets of eight fingers. They chirped and hissed and spat at the pony's shadow.

“Yeah, yeah,” she muttered and walked off towards her hot, glowing destination. “An imp is an imp.”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Scootaloo threaded through the final length of the black corridor and emerged onto a thin, silver platform. She had to squint immediately, because she was instantly assaulted with a hideous glow of blood-red light, the brightest thing she had witnessed since before the Cataclysm. Shuffling up to a metal railing, the last pony peered into what turned out to be the largest single interior structure she had ever witnessed. The stalk of Petra, as it turned out, was hollow in its center. There she stood on a platform lining the great, vertical, cylindrical throat of the impcity, and she could stare either straight up or down and be equally helpless to find an end to the great space.

The stalk was loud, thunderous, almost deafening. Above and below her, the inside of Petra roared and hummed with the cacophony of all thirty-five struts' worth of steam, machinery, grinding gear, foundries, factories, and bustling goblins. Staring across the way, she could see many random platforms—much like her own—randomly dotting the grand vertical throat of the structure. If she squinted hard, she could barely make out the distant specks of imps on the opposite catwalks moving about from one engineering task to another. It was difficult to see beyond too great a distance, not so much because of the immensity of the place but due to the hot bursts of the impcity's combined steam that vented continuously through the central core of the stalk before being filtered upward into the various smokestacks looming above.

The last pony exhaled long and hard, contemplating the sight before her. She had seen the glory of Cloudsdale with her own foalish eyes. She had walked—however briefly—atop its luminescent, ivory cloudbanks. She had marveled at the pristine and immaculate shapes of sculpted sky marble. All of the Equestrian pegasi's legacy, Three Ages worth of perfection, all ended up here, as polluted steam being vomited up the neck of a giant metal tower in the middle of a desolate world. She'd later write a journal entry about it all if only she could resist the urge to throw up.

Gladly, Scootaloo wrenched her eyes away from the majestically horrible sight. Her gaze followed where the shiny metal steps of the platform led. She discovered a large factory door in the side of the stalk's interior. Flanking its side was a plaque for displaying the appropriate clan's colors. She saw an illustration, rather haphazardly plastered, that nonetheless matched the banner that Franken of Glass Blood had been carrying on his person.

Swiftly, Scootaloo trotted towards the door... only to find the massive thing hanging slightly ajar. Narrowing her eyes, Scootaloo strolled slowly through the opening, her muscles tense and ready to flinch at any given surprise.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

It was hotter here than anywhere else in Petra. Bulbs of sweat immediately formed on Scootaloo's neck and mane. She felt her body baking under the thick layers of leather armor. The blue feather around her right ear fluttered with the rising vapors of heat as she stood in the entrance to what turned out to be a grand metalworks facility. The large, spacious interior had a bright orange glow to it, mostly attributable to a pair of insanely enormous vats of molten hot metal resting in the center of the room. Above and to the side of these vats, a black metal platform stretched, flanking an assortment of metal chains and pulleys hanging from the rusted-iron ceiling. On the other side of the vats, opposite of the suspended platform, was a long and complex series of conveyor belts. Several copper-framed, steel-riveted mechanisms lined the currently unmoving platforms. A complex series of steam tubes swam serpentine paths into the many hydraulically-powered limbs, gyros, and servos.

Despite the remarkable intricacies of these engineering constructs, Scootaloo couldn't bother being impressed. She was too overcome by how eerily still, quiet, and dead the facility was. Nobody was there. Not a single imp could be seen amidst the bright, orange glow of the hot interior. She couldn't even spot Franken, no matter how hard she tried.

The curiosity over this place's utter stillness was overwhelmed by a completely different cloud of confusion currently vexing the pegasus. As she strolled forward and gazed closer at the conveyor belt, she spotted many tools and utensils and pieces of partially constructed mechanisms, and none of them even remotely looked like sky marble.

“This isn't a steam processing plant,” she murmured aloud to herself. She glanced back over her armored flank to make sure that the Glass-Bleeder colors were indeed marking the door. She was right, this was where Franken wanted them both to meet. “This...” She gazed once more at the conveyor belts. “...this is an assembly line.” She swallowed. “But for what?”

It suddenly occurred to her to look for moonrocks. Her scarlets bathed the length of the room, scouring the interior for something—anything—that was colored white. Soon enough, something caught her eyes. She trotted briskly over to one of the furthest conveyor belts, atop which was the half-shell to a large, spherical object. Upon closer inspection, she found the curved slice of metal to be anything but moonrock, but the powdery substance lining the inside of it most certainly was.

“Lunar powder...” She murmured aloud to herself. The last pony dipped the edge of her horsehoe into the fine soot, raised it to her mouth, and gave it a tiny lick. She tasted the substance in her mouth. The wheels in her head turned accordingly, and she immediately latched onto what it was. “Mixed with fire granite.” She spat onto the floor, then glanced once more at the spherical half-shell. “But you can't concoct that from the dust of Consus, not even alchemically. The only place in Equestria you can find fire granite is...” She blinked as she made the realization. “Mount Ogreton.”

Her eyes followed the path of the frozen conveyor belt. She saw several heaps of unfinished bomb-shells, each laced with the same mixture of lunar and ogre deposits, forming a terribly explosive combination that she had never witnessed before, but had certainly contemplated. She had bartered for bottles of fire granite before, but always in ridiculously small and expensive quantities. There was no way in her entire Wasteland existence that she ever came near to approaching Mount Ogreton to acquire fire granite personally, on account of the endless war over the Valley of Jewels. Such a huge supply of the substance had to have arrived at the goblins' impcity by means that were beyond them—or even beyond conventional commerce for that matter. Whatever the case, it was now in the hands of the half-lings, and just the residual traces of the mixture she was presently looking at would have been enough to blow up a quarter of the strut if properly harnessed.

“Hmmph...” She muttered once more to herself. “'Boomers' indeed.”

She frowned as she turned and gazed across the lengths of the hot, glowing room. All the time that she was in Petra, Scootaloo had heard every imp alive talking about how Haman and many other families were engaged in a weapons trade with the ogres up until weeks before she had arrived. However, this wasn't what she had envisioned. The goblins of this impcity were proficient at harnessing steam, and as she understood it, the steam exports were given to the ogres only for them to build into their weaponry, far away, at the Valley of Jewels. What she was seeing here, evidently, was an ogre weapons factory disguised as an extended branch of Haman's steam industry. The implications of what was actually being assembled here was explosive, both figuratively and literally. Scootaloo suddenly understood why Franken had been so hesitant to discuss the nature of his operations out in the open. She also began to understand the lengths to which Haman would be willing to suppress such a secret, even resorting to hiring the likes of an eccentric, naga mercenary.

What she couldn't understand, though, was the purpose of such an illicit manufacturing program. How would either the Rust-Bleeders or the Glass-Bleeders profit from so many explosives? Certainly, they could simply have been charged by the ogres to secretly construct them, as a publically announced shift in the manner of weapons production would have startled the rest of Petra. Still, that many explosives in the hands of conspiring goblins was a mortifying prospect. Scootaloo couldn't currently contemplate what in the nearby vicinity of Petra the goblins would benefit from blowing up... unless it wasn't about the goblins' profit at all.

It wasn't hard to grasp the fact that the plant had escaped the public eye of the other thirty-four struts. It could have been easy to disguise the vats of molten metal as a means to produce hovercraft parts. The assembly line could have been excused as the process for making steam extraction tools. However, the harvesting of moonrocks and the smuggling of fire granite—both amazing feats in their own right—couldn't have transpired long without the other clans of Petra knowing. Whatever was being done here could only have been an operation that necessitated swiftness, and Scootaloo had the distinct sense that she had arrived upon the tail-end of it. She wondered if even Franken knew that when he summoned her there.

All the time that Scootaloo pondered and thought over this situation, her eyes were gazing ceiling-ward. It was then that she registered movement for the first time. She spotted a body through the slits of the metal grated platform straight above. It was a stout and dark-gray body, replete with frazzled black hair and a somber stance as he leaned against railing of the metal floor.

“Franken!” Scootaloo called forth, her voice echoing hauntingly against the black shells of the twin molten vats. He didn't bother to answer her. Stifling a frustrated growl, she strolled briskly up the closest metal staircase she could find.

Ascending to the platform, Scootaloo found Franken standing next to a pair of steam tanks flanking a broad series of metal control stations. Several levers, valves, dials, and knobs blanketed the surface of the stations. As an array of tesla coils sparked with cold, blue electricity atop the devices, the last pony figured that the stations must have controlled the hydraulics of the conveyor belts and assembly line system below. None of that, of course, was her immediate concern. She galloped directly towards Franken.

“Prime Glass-Bleeder, if this what you wanted to show me, then you could very easily have saved us both the time by shoving a grenade in my face!” She frowned. “How could you have kept this a secret from your own flesh and blood for so long? I don't know what Haman has against you, or why in Celestia's name you're bound to serve him, but this whole crap is beyond big. Either he's in league with the ogres, or he's got a serious fetish for things that go...” She stopped in mid-canter, blinking numbly. “...boom.”

Franken wasn't standing. He wasn't even leaning against anything. The elder goblin hung, twirling limply by a broken neck, with a series of metal chains wrapped tightly around his shredded throat. The chains were attached to a complicated pulley system dangling from a long, rusted track built into the ceiling above. The system was one of many dangling chain bits that suspended various objects to and from the bubbling, molten vats that suddenly loomed like twin, volcanic oceans below. Beyond them, the conveyor belts looked like thin strips of leather, about as ragged and lifeless as the goblin's dry, crimson voice-box that had been exposed to the vaporous air of the factory.

Scootaloo could briefly make out her twin reflections in the glossy surface of the dead imp's eyes. As his body pivoted and turned, she caught sight of a wide door of metal shingles stretching along the wall of the metal platform behind her, and it was starting to rise. She spun around just as the loud clamoring of the door met her ears. Halfway through unsheathing her copper rifle, she found herself staring down the barrels of twelve guns just as menacing. Emerging from a utility compartment, armed to the teeth with steam-powered weapons and grenade-studded bandoleers, a menacing line of goblins faced off against the last pony, and every single one of them was wearing a yellow armband.

More murderous half-lings came out of the nooks and crannies of the place, some armed with daggers, others armed with brass knuckles. She stared at them and the riflers alike, frozen in place as she found herself outnumbered nearly thirty-to-one. The effort she took to count each and every one of these Rust-Bleeder imps was clouded by the simultaneous brainwaves speculating nearly one hundred different tricks to get herself out of this situation, and none of them promised to be successful to her mind's eye. She was halfway through preparing to spit out a runic command to all of the explosive moonrocks in her saddlebag combined, when she realized that not a single goblin had pulled a trigger. Just after noticing this, she witnessed one goblin marching out from the center of the group. He was a dark-haired imp wearing even darker shades.

“Haman was right,” Fredden spoke into a sparkling communicator wired to a backpack that hugged his shoulders. “The stupid glue stick showed up just as scheduled. Flights One and Two, be ready to lift us out of here once we got the dang fabric.”

“Scrkkk—Copy that.”

“And tell Miss Ryst 'I'm sorry,'” the bodyguard added with a smirk, his shades glinting in the orange light. “'But we had to kill her beloved four hooves.'”

“Scrkkks—Hah hah. Toss her in the fire with the rest of the hobs.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Fredden switched off the communicator, pocketed it, and stood next to his many gun-toting companions. He stretched a hand out in the last pony's direction. “Alright, Outbleeder. Cough it up.”

“Excuse me?” Scootaloo murmured, her words coming out like molasses from her throbbing perspective. In between Fredden's shaded blinks, she stealthily darted her eyes across every ledge, vent, railing, precipice, and corner of the platform, looking for her escape route. She had to find an escape route. She ultimately settled her attention on the pair of thick metal steam tanks and the control stations situated next to them. They were within four trots from her right flank, and she estimated a breath-taking two seconds for crossing the distance. In the space of three heavy heartbeats, she had already made an impossible, daredevilish plan. She looked back in time to catch the Rust-Bleeder bodyguard's gaze on her figure. “Cough what up?”

“Your bandanna, brick-for-brains,” Fredden said, pointing at her cranium. “Peel it off that prissy, pink head of yours and toss it over. Now.”

“Why?” Scootaloo said, delaying the inevitable mayhem as she coiled her muscles underneath her armor. “What's it to you?”

“I don't talk to corpses,” Fredden sneered. “Give the bandanna to me, right now. It's of no use to me shot up and covered in horse guts.”

Scootaloo blinked. A sharp breath of epiphany escaped her. If it was the last thing her lungs would expel, she briefly didn't care. “You're going to try and incriminate Hex Blood,” she uttered. “Once you've done away with my body, you're going to expose this unsightly place to the light and somehow pin it on Devo.”

“Are your ears full of wax or something, sky-stealer?” Fredden hissed, trying his best to be even more menacing than the phalanx of angry-eyed goblins cocking their weapons on either side of him. “This is your last chance to do things simply. Don't make your death a long and complicated one.”

“Like you give a crap, you Rust-Sucker,” Scootaloo grunted with a frown. “I don't know what's worse: that Haman has the gall to use Devo as a scapegoat for whatever he's planning, or that he's actually stupid enough to think it would work.”

“Nnnngh...” Fredden ran a hand through his hair, chuckled, and sighed. “Yeah, enough of this crap.” He unholstered his own steam pistol, stepped back, and took aim alongside the thick wall of armed imps. “Well, we tried, boys. Just do your best to shoot her below the neck.”

This was it. Scootaloo's joints were already preparing to leap to her right. Only now, as she stared at the many rows of glistening steam rifles, she was suddenly petrified by the notion that her twenty-five years of luck had run out.

This momentary horror was suddenly interrupted by the glorious sight of a ventilation shaft's metal grate landing painfully across the top of Fredden's skull with a resonating clang. “Augh! Sonuva—”

The goblin thugs' eyes flashed up to the ceiling. Scootaloo's eyes darted up to the ceiling. Everybody was looking up toward the ceiling.

A little green body fell from an open shaft with the squealing facsimile of a battle-cry. Warden landed square on Fredden's shoulders and proceeded to bite into his scalp with razor sharp teeth. “Rghhhh!”

“Gaaa-aaaah!” Fredden yelped and flailed as rivulets of blood ran down, glossing over his shades. “For the love of Petra, get this little turd off of me!”

Warden shrieked with tearing eyes as over nine thugs immediately converged on him with an assortment of clubs, knives, and bayonets. Just milliseconds before any single Rust-Bleeder could bother to impale him—

“Nnngh—No!” Fredden shouted, his pale eyes briefly exposed from behind his sliding shades. “Pony—!” his lungs burst forth as he pointed a clawed finger directly forward.

Every imp gazed—Warden included—to see Scootaloo practically gliding across the row of levers, dials, and knobs along the control stations. She pushed, turned, twisted, and tugged on everything she could in a single, graceful swing of her upper limbs.

“Nnngh—Run!” Warden barely managed as he was held in the vice grip of a burly imp three times his size. In the meantime, the entire firing squad of riflers pulled the triggers to their weapons.

Just as the steambolts flew, Scootaloo was already squatting low to the floor of the platform and flinging a pocket-ful of bouncing runestones towards their clawed feet. One bullet bloodily gazed the back of her neck, shredding a pink hole through her mane. Two burning projectiles were absorbed into the thick leather armor just over her wings. Another three landed deep in the steam tanks to her side. The last six ricocheted mere centimeters between the spaces in her hooves. Before the line of trolls could fire another, far deadlier volley, she was already spouting out a deep-throated command. It bellowed out from her lungs in cadence with a huge burst of steam emanating directly from the compressed tanks that had been pierced behind her.

“Y'lynwyn!”

As soon as those words were uttered, Scootaloo's scarlet eyes clenched shut. Before the brains of the startled imps could speculate as to why, all four runestones exploded with magical brilliance, blinding them with a hot flash of white light that burned into their eye sockets.

Not even Warden was spared. He winced, hissing through his teeth, as he hung in the thick-arms of the goon who was holding him. He became aware of a large roar of noise suddenly filling the background of the room as the entire factory's worth of conveyor belts, hydraulic mechanisms, and assembly line devices came to life. In the foreground, the air was filled with another layer of bedlam as several voices coughed and hacked and wheezed endlessly. As soon as his vision finally returned to him, he figured out why.

The platform was awash with thick, choking steam from the punctured steam tanks. Any goblin who wasn't blinded by the runestones was helpless to see through this. The roar of the distant machines only added to the confusion, so that when the brown shadow of an equine figure suddenly galloped up through the smog, the thug holding Warden could hardly take notice until the last second.

“Nnnngh!” The last pony swiveled, spun her legs up high, and bucked the goblin upside the chin. The sheer force of her hooves impacting the imp's jaws popped Warden's eardrums. The thug fell back like a braindead sack of meat. Before Warden could fully collapse onto the ground, something was hoisting him up by his vest. He gasped until he realized it was Scootaloo's teeth. With the teenager dangling in her jaws, she galloped on all fours directly towards the edge of the platform, just as a floundering Fredden stumbled up, cocked his pistol, and aimed after her.

“Kill her! Dang it all, fill her full of holes already!” He shouted above the discharge of his own steam pistol. The thunderous roar of several other rifles lit the air. The full line of goblins were shooting madly at the escaping pony... madly but blindly.

It was just the margin of error Scootaloo needed. Warden shrieked from the steambolts whizzing past his pointed ears. The pony's body jolted once, twice as a pair of bolts once again embedded into her leather armor. Not once did the last pony slow her canter; she surged straight forward like lightning. Spinning around in her grasp, Warden discovered what they were speeding towards, and he childishly shrieked.

Scootaloo galloped, jumped, and clasped onto the dangling chain above Franken's dead corpse. Her forward momentum flung the entire pulley system forward along its track, so that she, Warden, and the remains of the prime Glass-Bleeder glided off the platform and over the twin vats of molten metal below. Bullets bounced off the bulkheads, lattices, and chains above and below them. Halfway through the dashing descent, the combined weight of all three bodies was too much, and soon they were dropping along the length of the chain as the metallic suspension gave slack.

“Uhhh... Uhhh...!” Warden shrieked, his dangling legs squirming as his eyes grew wider and wider. His and Scootaloo's bodies were bathed in an orange light as they slid lower towards the bubbling, lava-hat vat below. The edge of the basin was within sight, barely a hair's sneeze away as more bullets whizzed by them. A foul odor filled the air as Franken's body was the first to dip into the bubbling broth, his flesh and bones instantly melting away. Warden squeaked and clenched his eyes shut. Scootaloo gnashed her teeth around the edge of his vest and pulled her body up at the last second. They cleared the edge of the vat just as the very tip of her tail-hairs kissed the burning surface of the molten metal.

Swinging beyond, the chain pulley reached the end of its ceiling track. Scootaloo leaped, flipping in mid-fall and clasping the weight of Warden with her front hooves. The two landed hard on the moving conveyor belt below, rolling through discarded shells of ogre bombs, sliding to a rough stop as the momentum of Scootaloo's initial gallop on the catwalk finally gave out.

On the metal platform above, Fredden could barely be heard barking orders above the industrial noise of the suddenly electrified factory. Unable to get a clear shot from up high, he and his two-dozen cohorts scrambled down the metal stairs and proceeded to give chase from floor level, though they had a lot of ground to cover.

“Nnngh—Agh!” Warden scrambled onto all fours, crab-walking half-a-meter across the surface of the rolling conveyor belt as it rolled them briskly away from their pursuers. Gears and servos whurred on either side of the two as he spat, “Warn be next time you fling us over a big bucket of lava!”

“I didn't even expect there to be a first time!” Scootaloo sneered, stamping her hooves over the still-smoldering ends of her pink tail hair. “Luna poop on a stick, kid! What did I friggin' tell you up on the strut?!”

“And you're friggin' welcome!” He mimicked the angry pitch in her voice as he spat right back at her through the noise. “For the third time in a row too, you ungrateful bag of idiot!”

“How in all that is holy did you get down here so fast anyways?!”

“The steam shafts!” the soot-stained teenager smirked briefly. “I told you that I came to help my uncle chimney sweep, didn't I—?!” A mechanical arm swiftly swatted him upside the head. “Owie!”

He flew into Scootaloo's forward legs. The last pony clutched him to her chest. Her eyes twitched. She flung the two of them back in time to limbo-dance beneath the metal pole of a hydraulically powered assembly mechanism. Sitting back up, the last pony and her quivering sidekick witnessed several more menacing obstructions whurring claustrophobically over the thin conveyor belt ahead. At the speed at which they were rolling forward, it was difficult at best to leap off the contraption without slamming into some horribly brutal structure blurring by either side of them. As a few stray steambolts bulleted past the two from behind, backtracking was hardly an option either.

“Did you have to shove the levers to make the machines go this fast?!” Warden shrieked as Scootaloo swung the two side-to-side to avoid deathly collisions with the swaying arms.

Scootaloo panted and moved them both to dodge even more jutting mechanisms. “I was under the gun, literally, Wart. All that processed through my brain was 'speed!'” A steambolt ricocheted off a stretch of the conveyor belt beneath them. Seething through her teeth, she urged Warden forward and broke into a desperate trot. “Less complaining and more running! Let's make this quick hell a little bit quicker!”

Warden didn't argue. Hyperventilating, he ran alongside Scootaloo as fast as his branded limbs could carry him. Side by side, the goblin and last pony ran and hopped past metal bomb parts, ducking and dashing when it was appropriate to avoid the many swinging contraptions that sliced deadly paths towards them. The process became more and more difficult as the devices grew more and more complex, and soon several sparkling nodes, buzz saws, and soddering needles built for adding the finishing touches to ogre explosives were flying straight towards the pair's exposed flesh.

“Yeah, this is fun,” Scootaloo grunted, glancing about desperately for an exit-before-an-exit.

“Look!” Warden shouted, suddenly pointing upward in mid-stride.

High above, two lone goblins were navigating the lengths of a lone catwalk hanging from the ceiling. One of them spoke into a shoulder-mounted communicator, responded obediently to the crackling command of Fredden's voice, and unsheathed a rusted machete. His companion did the same. Together, the two timed the the momentum of the conveyor belt, flung themselves over the railing, and fell so that both landed on either side of the two runaway targets. Their blades sang in the orange-glowing air as they carefully navigated the waves of blurring machine-arms and closed in the distance between.

Warden fidgeted along with Scootaloo in the center. “Wh-What do we do?”

Frowning, Scootaloo was already reaching for her copper rifle. With a gasp, she had to duck a low-swinging arm and side-step another. Gritting her teeth, she fumed over the lack of open space to aim as the two assassins marched closer and closer.

“Oh jeez... Oh jeez... Oh jeez...” Warden winced. His aquamarine eyes suddenly reflected a pair of sharp objects. His vision darted down in time to spot the last pony's horseshoes having unsheathed their tiny blades. “Wh-What are you—?”

“Raaaaugh!” Scootaloo bloodily shouted, immediately bounding forward, leaping over a swinging arm, and pouncing on the goblin in front of them. The imp jerked back and held his machete out horizontally. Scootaloo's blades ricocheted off of his. After a shower of sparks, both ducked low to avoid a swinging buzz-saw. As soon as they stood up again, Scootaloo was spinning towards him with a high buck of her lower hooves. The imp deflected her kick and jabbed low with his machete. Scootaloo expected this and knocked the half-ling's weighted thrust down low. The goblin stumbled, his back exposed. She raised a blade to skewer him down the center—

“Aaah!” Warden's voice exclaimed from behind.

Scootaloo spun to look, her pink mane billowing.

The goblin to the rear was advancing on the teenager. The petite green youngster scooted and scooted away from him as he aimed his blade towards Warden's neck.

The last pony twitched. She looked down low. She saw a metal half-shell and immediately kicked it with a rear hoof.

The metal object flew off of the goblin's skull. He cried out in pain, stumbling back. Scootaloo abandoned the other imp and dashed towards his partner. By the time she hopped over Warden and reached him, the second goblin was already raising his sword to meet her horsehoe blades. The two clashed with a ringing of metal, shoving their weight against each other.

Warden panted. He glanced behind him and saw the first goblin advancing again. “Up front!”

Scootaloo flashed a glance over her shoulder. She spat. “Roll towards me—!”

Warden obeyed, just in the nick of time too. He avoided the first goblin's slashing machete just as it sliced into the conveyor belt where he once was. Another swinging arm whizzed by, low this time. All four figures awkwardly leaped over the sparkling metal limb simultaneously. When Scootaloo landed, she twisted the horsehoe on her rear left hoof. She protruded a blade and raised it just in time to block the next lunge of the first goblin while pressing her weight against the second. Sandwiched between the two assassins, she desperately parried and blocked their attacks with all her might. Warden watched helplessly as the second goblin overcame her, shoving the brunt of his weight into her body so that she flew murderously off the edge of the conveyor belt.

The green teenager shrieked and reached desperately for her. “Pony—!”

But Scootaloo didn't need any help. Her veteran eyes caught the vertical support spoke of a mechanism whizzing by. Reaching her front hooves out, she athletically caught the pole in the crook of her hooves. Her body spun completely around the circumference of the thing, flinging her back onto the conveyor belt in less than a blink's time.

The second goblin watched this spectacle for one dumb second too many. As a reward, he had his jugular vein slashed open as Scootaloo's rear horseshoe blade swung across his neck. He fell down bloodily, gasping and hissing while the last pony landed on top of him. As her pink mane settled, she stared with pulsating eyes and charged the first goblin ahead of her and Warden.

“Haaagh!” She flew into the imp, blades-first. He crossed his machete with her horsehoes as her weight flung the two of them onto the body of the conveyor belt. Together, the two wrestled and twirled over a clattering sea of metal debris as the platform carried them into a sea of pummeling gavels.

“Look out!” Warden shouted. “You're about to get hammered!”

Scootaloo flung herself from side to side, tossing her and the the weight of the goblin she was entangled with just in time to miss the brutal impacts of the slamming limbs. Try as she might, she couldn't get the body of her assailant to become any less lucky than she was. Soon he got the upper hand, straddling her and preparing to slam his machete down into her face.

Warden finished dodging the hammers, looked ahead, and widened his eyes. “Pony!” He pointed. “Saw! Up high—”

“Nnghh-Gaaah!” Scootaloo bucked the goblin directly upward. His head lifted just in time. With a buzzing snap, the machine arm swam through his neck, and his skull went flying off into the blurring madness beyond. The pony flung the lifeless torso off of her as Warden ran to the scavenger's side. Before any words could be exchanged, a pounding thunder filled their ears. They both gazed forlornly ahead.

The last ten meters of the throttling conveyor belt was a veritable sea of pounding, slicing, vertical blades. Beyond the serrated forest of death, the doorframe to an elevator car loomed like a rusted beacon of hope.

“Uh... Let's run back!” Warden gulped and clung desperately to Scootaloo. “Please, Pony! I really, really, really wanna run back—”

Scootaloo took a deep breath, clutched Warden tight to her chest, and galloped forward on three hooves the moment that she saw a sneeze of an opening. The teenager's prolonged squeal reverberated off of the many cascading blades on either side of them. They swam through the piercing thickness like a salmon hopping madly upstream, and came out miraculously unscathed on the other end.

What wasn't so miraculous was the embarassingly hard impact that their accelerated bodies made with the door of the elevator car beyond. “Unnngh!” Scootaloo let loose for the both of them. She winced and stirred on the cold floor of the factory, her every blood vessel surging from the liquids in her body coming to a stand-still. “Mmmmf... You sliced into ribbons, kid?”

“Uhm...” Warden hissed and rubbed his head as he sat up. “I-I don't think so.”

“Good, because I'm going to tear you to pieces later.”

The dented frame of the elevator rang as two, three, four steambolts ricocheted off of it. Warden gasped and Scootaloo looked up.

Running down the center of the conveyor belts' aisles, Fredden and his fellow thugs were struggling to catch up. Their bullets did a much better job than they did.

“Gotta keep moving.” Scootaloo slid the door open and practically flung a shrieking Warden inside. She dove in and slammed the elevator entrance shut just in time to shield them both from more steam bolts. “Up! Up! Ya little squirt, up!”

“Okay Okay!” Warden yelped as he desperately yanked on the lever. With a mechanical hiss, the elevator car sharply ascended, hoisting the two towards the body of Strut Eleven just as Fredden and company stumbled up to breathlessly gawk after them.

“Nnngh—By the Blight!” The shaded bodyguard growled. He motioned towards the distant metal stairs on either side of the factory. Immediately, his fellow thugs split up and climbed the lengths to Strut Eleven the hard way. In the meantime, an angrily pacing Fredden reached a clawed hand to his communicator and growled, “Flight One and Flight Two! The target is a runaway! Repeat! The target is a runaway!”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

“Scrkkk—The pony was last spotted taking a foundry elevator to Beta Level, North Side. Send in reinforcements to intercept!”

Hovering in mid-air alongside the rusted edge of Strut Eleven, the pilot of one of two hovercrafts full of imps palmed a communicator over his pointed ear. The yellow banded half-ling signaled a cluster of armed Rust-Bleeders standing parallel to the two flying machines upon the precipice of the strut. The many goblins nodded in accord, cocked their rifles, and ran towards the middle level of the strut to meet their target head-on.

“Copy that. Sending riflers inbound. Should Flight One and Two provide cover?”

“Scrkk! Standby.”

“What was that—?”

“Scrkk—I said hold on to your Petra-forsaken hind-quarters! Dang it all! We've got a prancing pony on the loose and I'm about to choke on this stupid microphone!”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

“Oh, this is not good.” Warden fiddled his clawed thumbs, gulping as he watched the bulkheads creakily slither by the grated walls of the tiny elevator car. “This is totally not frostbeams! Haman's goons likely know this place like the back of their hands! They'll have us cornered in no-time!”

Scootaloo hadn't stopped moving for a second. The breathless pony was in the middle of extending her copper rifle and examining its magazine of runes. “You sure your name isn't 'Warden of Obvious-Blood'?” She tightened her saddlebag while simultaneously loosening several pockets full of weaponized moonrocks with magical symbols etched into them. “When I die, I wanna go out with all of my whining left behind me.”

“How could you have gotten yourself into a trap like that?!” Warden shrieked.

“For the same reason you stalked me into the mouth of death,” Scootaloo uttered, eyeing the last lengths of the stalk's infrastructure blurring by. “I just don't know when to quit.”

“What the heck was all of that assembly line crap doing down there to begin with?! Were they building some sort of arsenal of newfangled weapons?” He gulped and added fitfully, “And did we just swing on Franken of Glass Blood's body?”

“Listen, Wart,” Scootaloo spoke above the rattling of the elevator car. Try as they might to calm themselves, a bright fate loomed at the top of the shaft above them, and their panting breaths deafened the lengths of the compartment. “When we get up there, we'll need to move, and we'll need to move fast.”

“You don't think I know that?”

“No. You don't.” Scootaloo motioned to her flank. “Hop on.”

Warden blinked. “Excuse me?”

“Do I have to spell it out to your dinky little bat-ears?!” She growled. “Get your sorry butt on my back. Now.”

“Uhm... Okay...” He gasped as he was forcibly hoisted up by a mouth to his vest's collar. He landed squarely on the pony's spine. The little imp blinked from on top of her. “Huh. This actually works... somehow—”

“Yeah, whatever. How's your eyesight?”

“Uhm... Kind of good?”

“Perfect.” She tossed the copper rifle up towards the ceiling. The imp nervously caught it on its way down. “Cuz I can't gallop us out of here and shoot at the same time. You're gonna have to help me.”

“But... But... I-I've rarely ever used a gun before—”

“Look, it's really simple!” Scootaloo finished pulling the bracelet of horns off her hoof and tossed it up into his grip as well. She sweated and spoke above the rattling of the ascending car. “You remember that one word I shout all the time to fire the thing?”

Warden blinked. He thought out loud, “'H'rhnum?'”

The necklace in the half-ling's grip shimmered. The copper rifle fired at an odd angle. Warden shrieked and Scootaloo danced in place as a manabullet madly bounced and ricocheted off the tiny, cramped space of the elevator.

“Don't say it now!” Scootaloo snarled over her shoulder at the petite imp. “Only friggin' say it when you've got a Rust-Bleeder down the sights!”

“M-My bad...” Warden wheezed into the fumes of the weapon's smoking magazine.

“Now cock the two levers on the side!”

The imp did so. The spent runestone was flung free from the clip.

“Do that every time in between shots!” Scootaloo exclaimed. “Or else it'll backfire and you'll lose a hoof—er—hand. Whatever... Just do it everytime!”

“But what if I'm not a good shot—?!”

“I just need you to provide cover fire while I get us the heck out of dodge!” Scootaloo said as the bright, white entrance to the top of the shaft loomed into view. “Rack that brilliant little brain of yours, Wart! Can you tell what side of Strut Eleven we'll be on once this ride ends?”

“Uhm... The... uh... the Northern edge, I think.”

“Nnnnngh... Celestia dang it.”

“What?! What?!” Warden nervously exclaimed, nervously clutching the rifle to his chest. “Celestia dang what this time?”

“We parked the Harmony on the Western edge of the strut, if I recall.” Scootaloo took a deep breath as the elevator slowed, squeaking to a stop at the edge of the brightness. “No matter, I just gotta find an edge of the platform—any edge.”

Warden flung the bracelet of severed hooves over his head and wore it like a necklace. “What for?”

“So I can strip of this armor, take wing, and fly us to safety,” Scootaloo said as she grasped ahold of a lever next to the door. “In between here and there, we're bound to run into many bullets. I don't want to be naked until I have to.”

“Like I'm any safer...” Warden whimpered from where he saddled her.

“Chillax, kiddo,” Scootaloo bravely uttered in spite of her own palpitating composure. “Haman's lackeys are as slow as diamond dogs, I bet. I'm sure it will be smooth sailing from here on—”

The elevator doors rattled open. No less than twenty, yellow-banded imps stood behind a freshly erected barrier of rusted junk, steam rifles aimed at the two.

“There's the glue stick!”

“Fire!”

“Take her out!”

Warden gasped, his face paling instantly.

“Oh, friggin A!” Scootaloo snarled and charged suicidally head-on.

The air filled with surging steambolts. Sparks flew off of bulkheads and support beams as the last pony darted left and right, clopping a desperate, serpentine pattern while a flailing imp clung loosely to her armored spine like a ragdolling rodeo clown. Throughout the entire maddening bronco-bust, he shrieked over and over and over again while habitually pulling at the levers of the rifle in his grasp.

“H'rhnum! H'rhnum! H'rhnum! H'rhnum!”

Manabullets pinballed against the walls of the dead-end district. Many Rust Blood imps who had never witnessed anything magical in their lives flinched from the purple-glowing projectiles whizzing by them. As a result, their aim was almost as terrible, so that the only thing being hit was the broad bulkheads of the street.

A rain of smoking runestones littered the ground as Scootaloo took two more steam-bolts to her armored flank, absorbed the blows, and leaped—snarling—into the thick of the impish crowd. Her horsehoes sharply slammed the brunt of her weight into a flailing goblin's body. As she squashed him to the ground, his two immediate cohorts took aim at her opposite flanks. She jumped away as quickly as she had landed, and the two Rust-Bleeders clumsily shot each other. They fell down, clutching their shoulders as the last pony galloped straight through the line of riflers, bolting towards a cluster of shanty buildings and lean-tos beyond. The crowd of yellow-banded thugs who were still on their feet spun around and fired at will, sailing a sea of burning bullets into the urbanscape through which the pegasus and her “rider” were fleeing.

Scootaloo gnashed her teeth and galloped faster, navigating the thick recesses of the Strut Eleven ghetto. Warden clung for dear life on top of her as she weaved in and around broken down shacks, homeless shelters, and abandoned wooden market stands. All of these things didn't last long, for the sea of bullets soon reduced them to pock-marked walls of garbage. Droves of emaciated, no-bleeder imps shrieked and ran every which way across the two's runaway path as Scootaloo endeavored to desperately out-race the carnage.

Just as they approached a crossroads in the run-down neighborhood, a pair of yellow-banded imps ran in front of them and simultaneously drew their pistols.

“Straight ahead!” Warden squeaked.

“I see them!” Scootaloo shouted and began weaving form side-to-side in mid gallop. “Do you?”

Taking that as a cue, Warden raised the copper rifle once more, struggled to keep the sight steady, and managed, “H'rhnum!”

The manabullet struck the metal street between the two Rust-Bleeders. Once flinched. The other fired.

Scootaloo skidded, squatting on her haunches and ducking low. The steambolt flew so close overhead that it ran a part through Warden's green hair. In a flash, Scootaloo uncoiled her bent legs and leaped violently towards the two imps. “Hnnnghh!”

She landed with her shoulder slamming hard into the one on the left. As he fell like a sack of meat to the ground, the imp on the right made a desperate lunge and grabbed onto the galloping pegasus' armored flank. The brave Rust-Bleeder strained with the effort, clinging for dear life while simultaneously reaching for a dagger from his vest.

“Get him off!” Scootaloo hissed, not stopping her gallop for one second as more bullets whizzed past them from behind. “Gethimoff! Gethimoff! Gethimoff!”

“I'm trying!” Warden grunted, repeatedly kicking the dangling thug in the face. The Rust-Bleeder took several smacks to the head before finally flinging his hand up to ensnare Warden by the throat. The teenage imp wheezed and sputtered for breath.

Scootaloo heard it. She saw a metal support beam stretching vertically ahead. “Hold on!” She darted to the right and skirted just past it.

The beam caught the full body of the dangling thug before he could stab Warden's chest with the dagger. Finally, he fell to the blurring street below. Clutching his own neck with one hand, Warden breathed with relief—only to have his lungs emptied as Scootaloo's armored body jolted below him.

“Sorry, Wart!” She panted, suddenly descending down a rickety flight of metal stairs into the dark recesses of Strut Eleven's Ceti Level. “We're taking a detour!”

“Down here?!” Warden exclaimed, his voice echoing against a hollow chamber full of Petra's perpetually grinding gears and steam-powered motors. “But why?” He was answered by a bullet sailing into a dim lantern that exploded above them. Shrieking, he glanced back in time to see seven Rust-Bleeders in mad pursuit, scurrying after the two on swift limbs as they took pot-shots in mid-stride.

Scootaloo hung a left just in time to avoid a sea of bullets ricocheting across a stretch of wall beyond them. Vents hissed hot vapor into their faces as Warden rode her down a claustrophobic chamber full of swinging pendulums and jutting pistons. The brass cylinders in question were jutting seemingly at random straight out of the floor, turning the hallway into a chaotic forest of steam-powered madness. Through the obscuring field of pistoning metal, angry imps scampered after them, aiming and firing as swiftly as they could.

Two bullets streamed straight at Scootaloo's tail-hairs, only for a piston to shoot up straight behind her and miraculously block the projectiles.

“Uhhh, Wart?!” Scootaloo panted through the hot, echoing room of metal. “A little cover fire would be nice...!”

“R-Right!” Warden uttered, nervously spinning so that he rode Scootaloo backwards. He braced his backside as best as he could against her neck as he squinted down the barrel of the copper rifle and hissed: “H'rhnum!”

The pursuing goblins flinched, moreso from the sea of randomly thrusting pistons than from the purple manabullet that utterly missed them. One gray-skinned imp took his position atop a metal circle, knelt, and aimed, only to that same disc rise up as the piston impaled him against the ceiling with a sickening, wet snap. A fellow cohort emotionlessly scooped the weapon from the twitching corpse and dual-wielded both rifles in the runaways' direction.

Warden flinched, ducking the projectiles while Scootaloo dodged and weaved around the sea of pistons. He took aim again. “H'rhnum!”

This time, the bullet flew but struck the stalk of a rising piston. It bounced madly off two metal cylinders five times before finally sailing off and slicing through a random imp's ankle. The goblin fell down, bleeding and screaming, as his partners continued their pursuit.

Warden cocked the pony's weapon and was about to fire again when he noticed in his twitching peripheral that the magazine was empty. “Crap! I'm out—Aaack!” He shrieked as he felt Scootaloo's body galloping uphill.

Scootaloo ascended a series of metal steps and came out on the other side of the piston chamber. She ran straight for a two-story, run-down apartment building just as a flock of gun-toting imps came up along the flank.

“I've got more ammo in my saddlebags! Right beneath you!” She shouted before briefly swiveling to bucking open an aluminum door. A cloud of bullets sparked off the buildingside around them. She ducked inside the dimly-lit interior, galloping down a long, wooden hallway lined with age old, wealthy antiques. “Just slap the new magazine into the clip and—”

“I've seen you do it!” Warden exclaimed as he popped a fresh sliver of moonrocks into place. “Just try not to shake around so much!”

The world screamed with crumbling madness once again as a layer of fresh steambolts swam through the walls of the hallway as if they were made of tissue paper. Warden flattened himself against Scootaloo's mane while splinters and clumps of debris rained down all over them.

“Tell them that!” Scootaloo finally retorted. One streaming-hot bullet sailed low through the wall and grazed one of her front legs. “Augh!” She shouted as a splash of red littered the hallway.

“Omigosh! Omigosh!” Warden panted, almost dismounting her as Scootaloo briefly lurched before the aluminum exit door to the apartment. “Are you okay?”

“Nnngh... As good as I'll ever be.” She hissed through her teeth and strongly stood back up. “Did you reload the gun—?”

Just then, the exit door burst open and a tall goblin with a yellow armband was aiming a steam-powered pistol in their faces. His other hand reached threateningly towards a belt of grenades around his waist. “Halt! That's as far as you go, glue stick—”

“H'rhnum!”

The goblin's head jolted, for he suddenly grew a third-eye, in that it wasn't a third eye but both Scootaloo and Warden could see straight through it to the other side of his skull nonetheless. His muscular, meaty body began its slow slump towards the dusty floor of the apartment.

“Guess that answers that,” Scootaloo murmured, then smirked up at her rider. “Nice shot, kid.”

Warden bit his lip with an awkward smile.

Just then, the goblin's body hit the floor, and out from his limp hand their rattled three loose, un-pinned grenades.

The two runaways gazed at the ticking sight with wide-eyes. “Then again.” The pony glanced immediately to her left. She saw a door, and swiftly rammed her shoulder into it once... twice. She broke through and dove into an apartment suite layered with cobwebs just as the explosives went off.

The room collapsed all around Scootaloo. She coughed and sputtered, navigating a hauntingly familiar ringing noise that she hadn't experienced in decades. A trickle of crimson rivered down from her Outbleeder bandanna as she stumbled up onto four limbs, calling for a two-syllable name, helpless to hear a response as she was wanting to hear her own voice. Her scarlet eyes dazedly navigated a rocking, dizzy world, just as three figures blurred into focus. One figure was Warden, his body being-yanked back and forth. The other two figures were brawny Rust-Bleeders who had burst in from the opposite end of the room from the where the grenades had gone off.

Scootaloo's eyes flared. Without thinking, she shouted at them.

The ringing noise was still drowning everything out as one of the two goblins glanced over, saw the pony, and immediately took aim. Warden screamed something faint and indistinct.

Scootaloo's eyes found a round, wooden table in front of her. She slammed her front hooves down over the edge of it. The thing flipped on its side just in time to absorb the steambolt sailing from the firing goblin's weapon. Within a single breath, Scootaloo spun and slammed her rear legs into the thick piece of furniture. Mercilessly, she bucked the table across the room so that it flew into the goblin. The imp fell hard under a sea of splinters while his partner blinked dazedly with Warden in his grasp. The narrow-sighted imp looked up in time to catch Scootaloo charging into him with a vicious head-butt.

Stumbling across the ringing world, the imp slammed into a wall, growled, and shouted an indiscernible curse the last pony's way. He fired at mid-range. A flash of steam filled the air, but Scootaloo ducked it, spun, and flung her tail-hairs up so that they ensnared the imp's neck, wrapping around it three times. Scootaloo roughly yanked down and slammed the thug to the floor of the suite. She saw something reflected in a dusty picture frame in the corner of the room and realized that the other imp was getting up again. Breathlessly, she rolled over onto the back of the grounded goblin, pressed her body weight into him, and bit fircely into the forearm of the wrist that was still gripping the rifle. The imp's fingers painfully spasmed, and Scootaloo made sure he was aiming at his companion when the shot went off.

A spray of blood filled the air, but Scootaloo could hardly notice, for the angry goblin had punched the small of her neck with the back of his other fist. She stumbled off of him, her tail-hairs unlatching as her desperate fight for breath further adrenalized the blood flowing through her skull. In short order, the ringing finally subsided in time for her to hear the low-pitched scream of her opponent now sailing straight into her sternum.

“Raaaaugh!” The goblin speared Scootaloo viciously. The two slammed into the apartment wall. The wooden barrier had become fragile with age, for the pair of combatants flew with a spray of wooden debris down into a rectangular factory room built directly below. Their bodies sailed towards a floor swarming with giant, grinding, horizontal cogwheels.

Scootaloo struck the ground first, her armored body bouncing brutally against the revolving cogs. She barely had a chance to hop back up to her hooves when the versatile goblin was slamming her back down with a clawed foot to her chest.

The enraged goblin spat bloodily at her and pulled out a switch-blade. Before he could bend over and make mince-meat out of the pony's exposed flesh, a green figure hopped down straight after them, wielding the copper rifle like a club. “Yaaaaugh!”

The metal barrel of the gun slammed off of the goblin's skull. He stumbled away from Scootaloo, wincing, but not down for the count. Angrily, he spun and back-handed Warden across the cheek before the teenager could get a close-ranged shot off.

“Oooof!” Warden ragdolled over onto a rusted platform, away from the giant spinning cogs that filled the room with a monstrous, rhythmic ticking.

The goblin aimed to throw the switchblade into the teenager's chest from across the way. Scootaloo swiftly tackled the imp from behind. The two struggled and wrestled for dominance over the flimsy dagger, all the while a bruised and trembling Warden sat and aimed as best as he could.

“I... I...” the green youngster stammered. “I-I can't get a clear shot! I might hit you!”

“Then... nnngh...” Scootaloo hissed and sputtered against her enemy's clambering claws. “Don't bother! Shoot at them!”

“Who?” Warden exclaimed, blinking. In answer, a bullet bounced just between his knees. He scooted back with a shriek and gazed directly up.

A row of goblins had rushed up to the edge of the fresh-hole in the side of the apartment above the machine room. From up high, they took aim with their pistols, training the sights on Scootaloo and the goblin she was entangled with.

Without a second thought, Warden pivoted and aimed up at the assailants. “H'rhnum!”

The manabullet sailed hotly into the space of the apartment. The goblins ducked before firing blindly around the corner. Bullets and steambolts ricocheted across the cogwheels as the imp suplexed himself and Scootaloo onto the giant gears, their struggling bodies slowly rotating along with them. In the meantime, Warden swung, pivoted, and fired straight up at the room as often and as desperately as he could, keeping the other Rust-Bleeders occupied as he cast fitful, breathless glances over his shoulder.

The seething goblin pressed his weight down on the pegasus, fiercely grinding her face cheek-first against the metal surface of the rotating cog they were on. She winced and gazed aside with twitching eyes. As her ears filled with the grinding of the steam-powered machines beneath her, she caught sight of the nearest cog and its adjoining teeth to the wheel they were lying on. A glinting dagger once again flickered in her peripheral. The imp on top of her licked his lips and victoriously stabbed the blade down.

Scootaloo flung her neck aside at the last second. The goblin's dagger struck pure rust. While the imp's weight was shifted awkwardly forward, she reached in and clamped her teeth over his yellow armband, forcefully flipping his body over her by the sheer strength of her muzzle. Bullets randomly bounced around from above as the thug of Haman found himself sprawling head-first towards a slowly-closing gap of adjoining cogs' teeth. Gasping, he shot back up—only to be forced back down by Scootaloo shoving her armored weight into his back. Mercilessly, the sweating, bleeding equine pushed the imp's skull deeper and deeper into the shrinking space. He struggled and shoved back against her, slashing wildly and blindly with the dagger. She took two shallow grazes to the chest, but nothing more. The imp let loose a blood-curdling cry that was soon muffled by the sickening crunch of his skull caving in from the pressure of two gigantic gears coming together.

Warden, wincing, did his best not to look, instead busying himself with two more shots aimed high up at the apartment complex. “H'rhnum! H'rhnum!”

“Nnngh... W-Wart!” Scootaloo wheezed, struggling to get up on wobbly limbs above the headless corpse beneath her. “B-Back in the saddle! We gotta g-get out of here...” She coughed briefly, her joints aching all over.

“R-Right!” With a rattle of the horn necklace, he scurried over to join her. The youngster had briefly turned a blind shoulder to the apartment complex above. One goblin saw it. He aimed a pistol towards the square of the teenager's back.

Scootaloo gasped. In a flash, she wrenched the dagger from the dead imp's grasp, stuck the blade into the thick of her tail-hairs, and spun a full three-sixty. Warden watched as the glinting blade soared straight up over his head. He heard a meaty impact from above, followed by a blood-curdling cry. Hopping onto Scootaloo's spine, he glanced over his shoulder to see an imp falling limply out of the hole in the apartment, desperately clutching a knife that had landed through his left eye. Soon, everything was once again a blurring madness as Scootaloo galloped the two of them back out into the blistering streets of Strut Eleven.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

A pair of elevator doors flung open. In the middle of Alpha Level, Fredden and five other imps ran out into the golden lanternlight, finally catching up with the pursuit, or so they thought. Everywhere they turned, no-bleeder goblins were running panicked through the ghetto streets. The air was full of random shouts, screams, and echoing gunshots.

Adding to the noise, Fredden's shoulder communicator crackled to life. “Scrkkk! This is Flight One. It sounds like utter havoc down there! Should we engage?”

The shaded goblin sneered into the microphone. “Where're the ponies last known whereabouts?”

“Scrkkkk! Reports are still coming in. So far, we believe she's in the middle of Alpha Level!”

“Alpha Level?” Fredden exclaimed, blinking. “Wait a second! Aren't we in—?!”

A galloping, equine figure barreled through them. The goblins splashed every which way, sprawling onto the ground as the figure of the last pony and her impish rider soared due north, straight towards the faint glow of twilight beyond the webbed latticework.

While the Rust-Bleeder bodyguard's companions stood and fired desperate shots at the distant pegasus, he sat up and roared into his communicator: “Dang it all, that is an affirmative, Flight One and Flight Two! Engage the target!”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

“Scrkkk! Do you copy?! Engage the target now! She is almost reaching the edge of Strut Eleven, north facing!”

Fredden's voice echoed across the hulls of the two hovercraft floating outside the edge of the strut. Each vehicle housed at least six imps apiece, and they glanced curiously at one another upon hearing the chief bodyguard's words.

“Loud and clear! Engaging!” A tall, yellow-banded goblin shouted back in the high winds of Petra. He holstered the communicator, pulled a semi-automatic steam rifle out, and tapped a gremlin pilot on the back. “Time to weed out the galloping trash! No time to waste!”

The gremlin replied with a metallic ringing sound emanating through his cold-black mouthpiece. Visors glinting, he cast a glance over his shoulder towards a gremlin at the rear of the tiny vessel. Indiscernible ringing sounds flitted between the two, and soon the rear gremlin was swinging loose the sparkling double barrels of a tesla-coiled powered lightning cannon.

The hovercraft banked sharply through the air, circling around to the north edge of Strut Eleven. The tall imp motioned to the other craft, and it swiftly followed suit, its steam thrusters hissing loudly through the high-altitude winds.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Scootaloo's lungs were ragged at this point. Between the weight of the leather armor and Warden on her back, she was finding it progressively more difficult to keep up her desperate pace. Bravely, she embraced the sudden numbness overcoming her, running through it like she was swimming to the surface of a steep lake. Freedom lingered beyond, laced in gray twilight and smelling of the Harmony's cabin interior.

“We're almost out in the open!” Warden exclaimed excitedly from where she rode her, his face beaming as it was progressively illuminated by the blinding edge of the strut in front of them. “Oh, blessed Petra! I never thought I'd be so happy to see the miserable ash again!”

“You can make snow imps in it later if you want. I don't friggin' care!” Scootaloo gulped and gasped as she trudged the last few meters towards the edge. “Just help me get the armor off quickly so that I can—”

A loud, hissing hovercraft rose a column of steam and appeared directly in view. Four goblins aimed their rifles while a gremlin pivoted about a sparkling lightning cannon.

“—swiiiiiiiiftly turn about-flank and ohhhhh dear Epona screw THAT!” Scootaloo wheezed, her hooves scuffling as she dashed immediately to her left and galloped towards a gray, abandoned warehouse while a shrieking Warden clung to her careening flank for dear life.

“There she is!”

“She's on the move!”

“Let her have it!”

A solid wall of steambolts flew madly at the scampering body of the last pony. Scootaloo darted swiftly up a steep, rusted incline of steps and onto the second level of the warehouse interior, bursting through aluminum barriers and wooden panels as she navigated what turned out to be a sudden hobo-hotel full of lifeless, no-bleeder goblins. The many drowsy goblins shifted and sat up, blinking curiously before having their bodies rained on by metal shrapnel and glass shards from the rows upon rows of exploding window panes.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

“Keep up with her!” The goblin in the foremost hovercraft exclaimed. The other vehicle hovered at a distance, ready to provide backup as the first airship flew parallel to the galloping pony inside the warehouse. The imp turned and shouted through the whipping winds. “Give it all you've got!”

The rearmost gremlin nodded, ringing forth a sharp reply through his breathing mask. He pulled a silver lever on the instrument panel of the lightning gun. The hulking turret hummed loudly from within, then filled the earth with bright light and nose-bleeding static as twin rivulets of electricity swam monstrously through the broad side of the warehouse, smashing the windows to sandy dust.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

The interior of the building filled with a horrendous thunder. The bulkheads and support columns of the structure alternated between melting and exploding at the rear hooves of the scampering pony. Teeth gritting, the last pony outraced the artificial lightning as it weaved violently behind her. Several shrieking, homeless goblins shot up and dashed away too late, only to have their bodies burned to a smoking crisp in the pegasus' wake.

A metal bridge of webbed plates bridged that warehouse with another across the edge of the strut. Knocking aside fleeing goblins to make room, Scootaloo dashed swiftly across the precarious platform. The metal plates wobbled and shook underneath as she made her way over. Then the lightning beam caught up with the edge of the bridge behind her. The structure melted on its hinges, and half of it fell behind Scootaloo in a sudden lurch.

“Aaack!” Warden shrieked, clinging to both her neck and the copper rifle. The two jolted, sliding down the suddenly slumping bridge.

Scootaloo struggled, her muscles tightening as her horseshoes scraped and grinded against the bridge's metal plates like nails against chalkboard. Putting her weight into it, she managed to drag the two of them up just as the last lengths of the bridge fell. Grunting, she leaped through thin air and landed in the second-floor doorway of the warehouse as the platform crashed loudly behind them under a sea of artificial sparks.

The air roared immediately outside the grime-covered windows of this second structure. Scootaloo slowed down as she realized that the two hovercrafts were soaring ahead to gain some distance before she and Warden could. They would undoubtedly be waiting for the two of them on the other side of the structure.

“What are we standing in place for?!” The teenager panted, clinging to her hard and shivering. “They'll shoot us at any second—”

“Something tells me they can't maintain that sort of electrical discharge nonstop,” Scootaloo muttered under a panting breath. She gulped and gazed towards the far end of the warehouse. “They're likely recharging as we speak.”

Warden bit his lip, his pointed ears drooping as he heard the throttling steam engines of the hovercraft just beyond the walls of the dark, two-story interior. “B-But we can't just stay here! If we remain here, we're toast. If we try and outrun them, we're as good as dead! They can just fly past us! Nnngh... Wh-What's left to do?!”

Scootaloo breathed in and out. She gazed at the thick, mildew-stained windows stretching before the two of them. She gulped and muttered, “W-Wart?”

“Yes, pony?”

“Hold on tight.”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

“Is that thing ready again or not?!” the goblin in the foremost hovercraft shouted towards the rear of the vehicle.

The gremlin recharged the tesla-coils, chirped something through his mask, and gave a clawed thumb's up.

“Good. On my mark...”

“Scrkkk! Flight One! This is Fredden! Is it the friggin' Dimming all over again or what?! What’s your progress?”

The tall goblin raised the communicator to his ear. “We've got them cornered in a warehouse. There's nowhere left for the glue stick to—”

There was an explosion of glass shards. The last pony sailed straight through a window and out into the open air of Petra. With Warden in tow, her armored weight flew unabashedly towards the hovercraft.

The goblin blanched, along with his gasping companions. “H-Holy—!”

The pony landed straight on the bow of the ship, upending the vehicle so that it lurched forward from her four-limbed impact. An unstrapped goblin was flung—screaming—clear overboard so that he plummeted towards the desolate Wasteland below.

“W-Warden!” Scootaloo managed to shriek, her brown face knicked all over with cuts and bruises.

“R-Right!” The goblin on her shoulders shot up and aimed the copper rifle straight at the pilot. “H'rhnum!”

The gremlin looked up, and half of his visor shattered in an instant as the manabullet sailed through his cranium. His body slumped against the controls, inadvertently jerking a row of the front thrusters to emit a burst of steam.

“Augh!” Scootaloo exclaimed as she and Warden were bucked through the air. They and the remaining five imps collapsed, sprawling across the flimsy space of the loosely hovering craft. Warden fell clear off the last pony's spine and collapsed into a leathery seat on the side of the vehicle. Scootaloo stood in the center, surrounded by the floundering limbs of Rust-Bleeders. With only a blink to spare, she fiddled with the straps of her bullet-riddled armor, desperate to get her wings free.

Just then a goblin shot up and charged her, swinging the full weight of a studded club. “Nnnngh!”

Scootaloo briskly dodged the blow and rammed him in the side with her flank. Another goblin leaped onto her neck and attempted a choke hold as the two wrestled and struggled across the middle of the craft. On the other side of the teetering vessel, another imp stood up and aimed a pistol her way.

Warden saw it from where he was lying on his back. Using his legs like braces, he propped the length of the barrel between his thighs and swiftly shouted, “H'rhnum!”

The imp's pistol flew off into the high winds, along with his entire arm. The bleeding imp screamed and clutched his side as suddenly the other hovercraft hovered into view, its occupants not wasting any time. A stream of hot bullets soared at the careening vehicle being fought over.

Warden gasped and dodged the projectiles. He returned fired, sending manabullets sailing desperately towards the other vessel's occupants. “H'rhnum! H'rhnum!”

The imps on board the other hovercraft effortlessly dodged and fired volley after volley, pock-marking the hull of their allies' vehicle with holes.

“Nnngh—Wart!” Scootaloo managed a hiss while struggling to get the upper hoof of her assailant. “The tanks! Aim for the steam tanks!”

Warden's eyes twitched. He saw a pair of pressurized, brass containers at the rear of the rival aircraft. He rolled sideways, dodged another flurry of steambolts, and laid on his chest as he performed the most expert shot of his young life. “H'rhnum!”

The manabullet flew straight into the attacking vessel's power source. The vehicle's thrusters lost half of their strength. The ship lurched violently to the side—briefly bumping into Scootaloo's and Warden's vessel. The two hovercraft collided with a splash of sparks. The rival ship sailed limply towards a fatal drop below while the remaining vehicle spun and spun over the great, golden lengths of Petra.

“Nnnngh—Haugh!” Scootaloo finally flung the weight of the goblin off her. She clasped with numb hooves for an even grip of the floor, but found herself flailing helplessly as the winds tore into her mane.

“Mmmmf—Aaah!” Warden screamed, slipped, and fell into ashen nothingness—

Scootaloo gripped tight onto him with two hooves. She yanked him back onto the hovercraft, their surging weight evening the balance of the vessel, but not without another imp suddenly pouncing on her backside. She struggled and strained as the imp held her in place for...

Near the abandoned pilot's seat, another imp was aiming a shotgun straight at the last pony's chest. “Keep the glue stick still, for Petra's sake—”

The pegasus seethed and rear-bucked her leg into the wrestling goblin's crotch. The imp flinched while his partner fired. Scootaloo ducked, and the blood that flew across the shuddering gremlin at the rear of the vessel wasn't hers.

The imp with the shotgun did a double-take. Snarling, he grabbed a new steam cartridge from his vest pocket. Scootaloo flashed him a look. Angrily, she rotated her metal horsehoe and protruded a tiny carving knife. The Rust-Bleeder slid the cartridge in, his hair billowing in the windy air as he cocked the weapon with a hiss of vapors. Scootaloo bolted clear across the floor of the tiny vessel, charging into him.

He aimed at her skull—only to have her plow into his body and slam him against the vehicle's dashboard. The goblin was too dizzy to register the barrel of his own shotgun being placed underneath his chin until the last pony was already weaving the length of the butter-knife into the trigger. After his brain matter joined the snow of the Wasteland, Scootaloo wrenched the gun from his grasp in time to slam the butt of the weapon across the face of another imp charging her.

In the meantime, a panicked and shivering Warden watched the entire fight unfold with trepidation. Unbeknownst to him, the blood-stained gremlin at the lightning turret was standing up, aiming a steam-powered crossbow at the offending teenager's spine. The green youth spun at the last second, gasping in surprise before he could reach for the copper rifle.

Scootaloo saw from afar. She hoisted the shotgun over her head and flung the weapon desperately at the skull of the petite assailant. The weighted rifle ricocheted off the gremlin's helmet, cracking it down the center. Groaning, the gremlin's body fell inadvertently over the silver lever powering the lightning cannon. The air stung with a blistering static as the sparkling weapon hummed louder and louder, its bright barrels aimed directly into the hull of the very ship it was mounted on.

“Great Celestia—” Scootaloo bounded over her stumbling foes and literally plowed into Warden's body. The startled teenager shrieked as the last pony sent the two of them plummeting—naked—clear over the edge of the hovercraft. As the pair fell, the three remaining imps on board the craft stood up, glanced at the throbbing cannon, and shrieked in one collective outburst of horror before the electrical explosion overtook them.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

The resulting explosion lit up Scootaloo's body even from so far away as she fell and fell, flailing like a lifeless rock as she surged towards the great black expanse of the Wasteland below. She gazed up—in that she gazed down—in time to see a second explosion. The other hovercraft had violently struck the earth, and as it lit up the bosom of the desolate world, she spotted the tiny shadow of Warden's helpless body in the midst of it.

Keeping her eyes locked on the sight of him, the pegasus blindly fumbled with her armor's leather straps in free-fall. She twirled and she spun and she spiraled along her path earth-ward, but not once did she wrench the image of him from her sight. The stalks of Petra soared past her like golden streaks in her peripheral vision. The air grew thicker and more rancid as the oil fires blanketing the ground beneath the impcity's stalk collected densely beneath the two sailing bodies. The last pony's scarlet eyes teared into the freezing winds. She fought and fought to loosen the bullet-studded leather enshrouding her. Finally, as she could begin making out their tiny reflections in the slick, oily surface of the rock-hard plateau below, she flung the straps free.

The leather armor ripped off of her and twirled into the ether. Instantly her wings stretched outward, blossoming like a mahogany flower in the shadow of Petra. Majestic feathers caught the wind and angled her body true as she flew directly after the sound of Warden's screams.

“Hold on, Wart! I'm coming!”

She screamed, she roared, she throttled down into gravity and yet against it all at once. She could hear the hissing of the oil fires by the time she swooped up for the sake of swooping up, and was enraptured to victoriously feel the light weight of a trembling young goblin in her grasp. Her heart throbbed with each dozen of meters she safely flew the two of them higher and higher, scaling the distance that they had lost in half as many blinks. She exhaled sharply and held his tiny body tightly to her chest during their ascent. The last pony was only residually aware of the youngster endlessly screaming the entire time.

“Wart....”

“Aaaaa-aaaaa-aaah!”

“Wart.”

“Aaaa-aaaah!”

“Wart!” She finally resorted to a growling hiss straight in his twitching, green ear. “Knock it off! Or so help me, I'll just friggin' drop you!”

“Aaaa-aaa-aaaaaah frostbeams!” He ultimately exclaimed, clinging to her neck and giggling hysterically into her ear. “That was freakin' amazing! Can you do that again?!” He blinked, then blushed. “Erm... th-the last part, I mean?”

“Hmmm...” She took a deep breath, weathering a numb smile as she flew the two of them towards the copper shape of the Harmony along the West end of Strut Eleven above. “For you, ya little Wart, anytime. But for now, let's take off before we run into any more bloodlusting sons of Haman.”

“Okay...” He said, clinging to her and gulping. “Uhm... Pony?”

“Goblin?”

“I... uhm...” He bit his lip. “I-I dropped your gun.”

She took a deep breath as she brought the two of them swiftly to the aperture entrance of her dirigible. “That's why I have spares, kiddo. Some things in this world can't be duplicated. Take you for instance.”

“That's... That's nice of you to say...” His green body flushed slightly as he set his trembling feet down onto the Harmony's door platform. “Does this mean you're no longer mad at me for following you into the factory?”

“No.” She said in a guttural voice before speaking to the glowing mana-runes. “W'nyhhm!”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

The bulbous brown shape of the Harmony soared off into the collective smog of the polluted air above Petra. Shuffling breathlessly over towards a metal railing alongside Strut Eleven, a sweating Fredden gawked. Condensation dripped down his black shades as he flung a pistol down into a metal bulkhead with frustration and shook a fist at the image of the pony's escaping aircraft.

“Dang it! This is... She is...” He snarled and spat. “Impossible! Absolutely flippin' impossible!”

His yellow-banded associates caught up with him, gazing with no less shock and awe.

The Rust-Bleeder bodyguard spun and frowned their way. “How does one single pony learn to do all of that?!”

---

Moths flittered gray-streaking orbits around the golden lampposts of downtown Ponyville as Scootaloo shuffled through the night-drenched streets. The squeaking wheels of her metal tray echoed against the fenches, mailboxes, and building faces passing slowly past her. She serenaded her lurching gait with an ensemble of moody sighs. She wasn't looking where she was going. She hardly even cared.

Thus it was with a belated reaction that Scootaloo's ears twitched to hear the commotion. Pony voices doubled, tripled, and quadrupled. An equine figure surged past her, then another, more and more—until Scootaloo realized she was no longer alone in the streets of Ponyville, for the filly was suddenly navigating a funnel of excited, murmuring ponies moving with one coordinated shuffle towards the north side of town.

Scootaloo finally looked up, blinking curiously. She saw a huge crowd of hoofed figures clustering around a white, two-story building. Squinting, Scootaloo made out the structure in lanternlight. It was Ponyville's Central Hospital, and no less than four dozen ponies were rushing up towards the front gate where Officer Silvertrot and many other uniformed stallions were forming a barricade at the front gates. Above the bouncing, craning, and gazing heads, Scootaloo could even make out the image of Ponyville's Mayor herself.

The voices around her stammered and gasped:

“I can't believe it! I could see the blazes from my front door!”

“Did you hear?! It took two teams of firefighters to put the flames out!”

“What started it? A box of matches?”

“Who cares—We're lucky that the whole town didn't go up in smoke!”

“Not as lucky as June Bug and her brother! Or the Old Mister Barley, for that matter!”

“I still can't believe she got them out all on her own!”

“I know! Isn't she amazing? I swear, there's nothing that pegasus can't do!”

“I only hope she isn't hurt that bad...”

“I know, isn't it a shame? And after all she did...”

Scootaloo gawked at the passing bodies. Her nostrils flared, and she sniffed at a frightening odor in the air. Turning about, she gazed skyward and saw a plume of thin smoke rising through the starry night sky. From afar, she spotted a crowd of firefighters forming a circle around an ashen heap of rubble—what used to be a three-story condominium in the center of town just the day before. A few amber sparks crackled menacingly as a weighted building-face toppled over and fell into the center of the burnt rubble being sprayed upon with pumped water.

The little pegasus blinked. The puzzle pieces came coldly together in her head. A sharp gasp escaped Scootaloo's lips as her violet pupils violently dilated. She kicked fiercely against the dirt street and blazed a trail towards the hospital on her metal tray, surging through the crowd and forcing many ponies to jump aside, gasping defiantly.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

“Nurse Red Heart has assured me that all the ponies admitted this afternoon are in stable condition and should recover from their injuries in a matter of days,” the Mayor of Ponyville spoke towards the gathered crowd of murmuring, concerned equines. She stood behind a line of police officers and smiled placatingly while waving a gray hoof. “Please, go back to your homes and enjoy your evening's rest. Come tomorrow morning, the City Council will arrange a proper ceremony to honor today's heroics.” Her breath took on a somber tone, “As well as an honorable way to memorialize those who have—”

“Rainbow Dash!” A filly's voice squeaked shrilly. The crowd gasped, bumped into each other, and broke apart as the tiny orange pegasus on her metal tray broke through a sea of limbs and emerged at the front of the gathering. Panting, Scootaloo darted straight for the double-door entrance of the hospital on the glinting tray. “Out of the way! I gotta see Rainbow Dash—!” Her breath was cut short by the burly forelimb of a police stallion lifting her clear off her tray and holding her in place.

The Mayor adjusted her spectacles and glared at the filly. “Young lady, this is most uncouth! Isn't it past your bedtime?”

“Nnnghh—Please!” Scootaloo hissed and flailed in the officer's grip, her eyes moist. “I gotta see her! I gotta find out if she's okay...”

“I'm sorry, my little pony. But Nurse Red Heart has expressively forebidden any visitors at this hour, aside from family and close friends—”

“But... But...!” Scootaloo choked back a sob.

Suddenly, a strong voice called from the double-doors. “It's alright, Mayor. Let 'er in. I reckon the little darlin' won't get a wink of sleep until she gets to see her face-to-face.”

Voices murmured curiously from the crowd. The Mayor glanced over her shoulder. “Are you sure about that, Miss Applejack?”

“Heheh...” The orange mare trotted up to the edge of the gathered crowd, adjusting the brim of her hat. “Trust me. I can speak for RD in this particular matter. Let the lil filly through. If Nurse Red Heart makes a fuss about it, I'll give her a talkin' to myself.”

“Very well.” The Mayor simply looked at the officer.

The stallion nodded, and with an amused smirk he effortlessly let the orange pegasus go. Plopping down onto her petite hooves, Scootaloo rushed over and immediately nuzzled one of Applejack's legs.

“Oh, thank you, AJ! Thank you, thank you, thank you!” She nevertheless shivered and stared up at the farm-filly with quivering eyes. “Where is she?! I gotta see her! Please!”

“Relax, sugarcube,” Applejack smiled softly and patted the small of Scootaloo's back. “Rainbow's doin' just fine. Let's go see her together, shall we?”

“Oh Applejack, I feel so horrible!” Scootaloo squeaked, biting her lip, not caring how pathetic her own words sounded as she trotted in a shivering gait through the doors of the hospital. “I waited forever for her because she promised to meet me and then she didn't meet me and I almost felt angry and it's just so horrible—”

“Shhhh... We're in a hospital, Scootaloo. Try usin' yer inside voice. You've got an inside voice, don'tcha?”

Scootaloo gulped a lump down her throat and muted herself as she followed the farm filly into the chilly hallways of the Ponyville infirmary. Her and Applejack's hooves clopped hauntingly against the tile floor, chilling the pegasus to the bone as she looked at each doorway and wondered anxiously which one would reveal a blue pegasus to her pulsating eyes...

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

When Nurse Red Heart greeted them both, she didn't protest. She led the two ponies into a long room lined with several rows of sheeted cubicles. Scootaloo glanced left at the sound of groaning voices. She saw three or four ponies being bandaged by orderlies. The Ponyvillean citizens winced, their muscles twitching under singed coats. The little pegasus looked to her right and saw a few ponies who weren't as badly burnt. Some didn't even need to be reclining on the hospital beds; they stood and leaned against the wall as a nurse or two finished applying white wrappings to their bruised limbs.

In one spot, a family clustered around an injured stallion. He was obviously recovering, and yet his children clung to him, sobbing tenderly. He leaned over and nuzzled his wife's face as the group of ponies shared a quiet moment. A few spaces over, a stallion stood beside a bed and held an injured mare's limbs in his hooves. The two smiled and murmured sweet nothings to one another, delighted to be alive.

Scootaloo took all of these sights in skittishly, her eyes darting past them in search for a sapphiric hue. With each lurching second, her heart pounded harder and harder against her chest. Everything about the hospital ward was dull, gray, and dismal. The place was a sterilized tomb of tension, and she could barely stand straight for want of color. Suddenly, Applejack's body stopped trotting. Scootaloo came to a stop with her and gazed ahead, gasping immediately.

Four young ponies hovered around a velvet bed at the far end of the hospital ward. A lavender unicorn was donating a pile of books with a smile. A yellow pegasus was drying her eyes and smiling while a pink earth pony practically bounced jubilant circles around the bed. Finally, a white fashionista was murmuring something while tying up the last length of a scarf around a reclined mare's neck, and that was when Scootaloo finally saw the colors after so many hours.

“Rainbow Dash!” Scootaloo loudly barked; she didn't care. On scampering hooves, she darted straight over to the bed.

“H-Hey there, ya little squirt,” a hoarse voice managed.

The four adult ponies parted ways. Scootaloo rushed up, beaming. As soon as she propped herself against the bedside, she took a good look... and her smile faded under a pale curtain of concern. “D-Dashie...?”

Lying on her left side, Rainbow Dash gazed back through thin, tired rubies. Her front right hoof was in a cast, and her wings were bandaged so thickly that hardly a single blue feather poked free. Nevertheless, she gave the dumbstruck little pegasus a soft, tranquil smile.

“I bet I look pretty messed up, huh?” She hissed briefly through her teeth and navigated the crest of a passing wince. “I certainly feel it... Heh heh heh...”

“You... You're...” Scootaloo bit her lip and her eyes began to water.

“Don't ya fret, sugarcube,” Applejack said as she caught up to the filly on slowly trotting hooves. “She's makin' a full recovery. RD only looks worse off cuz she likes to do things all dramatic-like.”

“Unlike some of us,” Rainbow Dash grumbled, casting a brief glare in the farm-filly's direction, “who would end up like this after taking their frustrations out on a tree.”

“Heheh...” Applejack shifted the hat atop her blonde mane. “I reckon some of us are brave, and some of us are just plain stupid.” She shook her head with a soft, but proud smirk. “Yer somethin' else, RD. If Equestria had a couple more dozen of you, we'd live much safer lives... but with ten times as many headaches.”

“Yeah, well...” Rainbow Dash stirred from where she was lying perpetually on her side. “Too bad there's not enough of my awesomeness to go around...”

“Well, at least she knows when she's deserving of such laudable praise for once,” Rarity uttered with a blue-shadowed wink.

“Are you kiddin'?” Applejack smirked. “Today she was just lucky! After all, she has her braggin' tongue switched on all the dang time!”

The circle of mares giggled pleasantly, forming a ring of felicity around the recuperating pegasus. Scootaloo glanced at them all curiously, attempting to make sense out of their discourse.

“I'm just so glad that you're okay, Rainbow Dash,” Fluttershy murmured and leaned in to nuzzle the pony's shoulder. “When I first heard what happened, I was so shocked, I nearly dropped Angel in the pond outside my cottage.”

“You mean you got the little furball soaked?” Rainbow Dash tiredly smirked. “Well, chalk up another good deed of the day.”

“Hee-hee-hee...” Twilight Sparkle smiled. “In all seriousness, Rainbow Dash, what you did was spectacular. I'm thinking of writing a letter to the Princess all about today, because you never cease to amaze me.”

“Heh... While you're at it...” Rainbow winced and shifted her weight. “Nnngh... Put in a plug for the Wonderbolts, will ya? If flying through burning windows doesn't impress them, then I'm scared of what I'll do next.”

“Oh, heaven forbid!” Rarity dramatically rolled her eyes.

Scootaloo blinked up at everypony. “I-I don't get it. What happened? Why's the whole town going nuts?”

Rarity bit her lip all of the sudden. “Well, darling, erhm... you see...”

“You mean you don't know?!” Pinkie Pie chirped, her blue eyes staring Scootaloo straight in the face. She bounced joyously about that side of the infirmary. “Rainbow Dash was only being the most super-terrific hero ever! The condo was burning to a crisp, and did she bat an eye?! Nuh-uh! Nosireeboberooni!”

“Pinkie Pie...” Twilight Sparkle muttered in a low voice, her gaze as sharp as nails. “We talked about this. Keep mum about the—”

“Ponies were shrieking for help! Flames were everywhere! And ziiip! Zoom!” The mare from Sugarcube Corner all but pounced on the end of the bed, flailing her forelimbs dramatically. “Ponyville's most loyal weather flier wasn't about to take any beef from fire! Uh uh! She shot like a bullet into the collapsing apartment and before you could say 'Luna Lumps', she—”

“Shhh!” Nurse Red Heart was suddenly hissing from the sidelines. Beyond her, several rows of patients lingered, still jittery and shaken.

Pinkie Pie blinked their way. She winced sweatily, then shrunk out of sight with a nervous smile once her companions had finished glaring at her.

“You...” Scootaloo turned to look at Rainbow Dash, gazing at her in awe. “You flew into the burning condo?”

“Hmmm... Yeah, kind of...” Rainbow smiled weakly. She gulped, “Look, kiddo, I'm sorry about—”

“Oh, Dashie! It's alright! It's more than okay!” Scootaloo smiled sweetly, her violet eyes soft and warm. “I don't care anymore! I know you promised you would come hang out with me and stuff, but I understand now—”

“Erm... Actually...” Rainbow Dash bit her lip. “I-I was gonna tell you that... uhm... I-I accidentally smashed those goggles you made for me a while back.”

“Huh?”

“They're in a lot worse condition than I am... Heh heh...” She breathed slowly, shuddering from a brief wave of pain as her bandaged wings twitched. “Guess you should have made them 'radical-proof', huh?” She winked.

Scootaloo grinned wide. “I'll be sure to test goggles for 'radical-ness' the next time I make them.” She gulped and leaned forward, “You will let me make you some replacements, won't you, Rainbow Dash?”

“Absolutely, ya little squirt. Where... nnngh... Where would I be without your awesome hoofwork?”

“Besides... Hee hee...” Scootaloo giggled, her wings fluttering happily behind her. “If it helps you save so many ponies, then I'm happy to help!”

Rainbow Dash suddenly blinked. She shifted uncomfortably. “Yeah, Uhm...”

“You're... You're just so cool, Dashie...” Scootaloo gazed warmly at her. “Who else can save everypony from a burning building and call it a day?”

Rainbow stared straight back at her, and as the seconds oozed away, any trace of a smile melted from her face. Her lips grew taut, and her ruby eyes fell by the wayside. After a flaring of nostrils, she murmured, “Look... Uhm... You guys? I'm... I'm pretty tired, and... and as much as I wanna hang out n'stuff, I really think it's best I try to get some shuteye before Red Heart embarasses me by kicking all my friends out.”

Scootaloo blinked confusedly at her. Her heart was beating hard, though she couldn't tell why this time. Curiously, she glanced up and saw that all the other adult mares were avoiding her gaze with just the same dispassionate malaise as was suddenly haunting the blue pegasus.

“I... I don't understand...” the orange filly murmured. “Can't we just hang out a little bit longer? I wanna hear all about the heroic stuff Dashie did—”

“You heard the pegasus of the hour, darling,” Rarity murmured in a coddling voice. She braved a graceful smile and nudged Scootaloo towards the far end of the ward as the other ponies took turns nuzzling Rainbow Dash before trotting for the exit. “It's been a long day, and she's endured enough bumps and bruises. Let us not tarry here any longer.”

“But... But...”

“Visit time's over, sugarcube,” Applejack added. As always, her voice hammered finality into the moment. Under the proximity of the orange mare's shuffling movement, Scootaloo was ushered clumsily out of the sterile interior. “Go on home to yer folks, now. If you wanna come by Sweet Apple Acres at sunrise, I'll fix us a way to visit Rainbow together later on in the week. Does that sound good?”

“L-Later this week...?” was all Scootaloo could manage. Over a twitching shoulder, she managed one last glance. From afar, she saw Twilight sharing a few words with Rainbow Dash. The blue pegasus' face was scrunched up, her eyes tightly shut as if she was weathering a sudden wave of pain. Her limbs curled up to her chest as she absorbed the whispering words of the lavender unicorn before Twilight nuzzled her dearly.

And then Scootaloo could see no more.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Scootaloo lingered outside the hospital, numb to her senses, for what had to have been the better part of an hour. She poured through the recent images in her mind, contemplating what they all meant. One second, Rainbow Dash and all of her friends were happy. The next, the weather flier wanted nothing to do with any of them. The little filly couldn't help but feel as if it was somehow her fault, and she traced the beats of her heart for an explanation as she likewise dragged a hoof through the dirt, making mindless little circles.

At some point, two mares shuffled past her, gazing briefly at the hospital with somber expressions as they made their way home under the glow of lamplights.

“It's so terrible... It's just so terrible,” one uttered.

“I know,” the other remarked in a breathy voice. “It's freaky, ain't it? One morning you're here, the next you're gone.”

“If our weather flier wasn't around, I shudder to think how worse it could have been...”

“Did you personally know Miss Garden? Forgive me for asking, but I'm still getting used to this town...”

“No, it's okay, Lyra. I didn't know her personally, but my mother used to go to school with her. I... I just don't know how to break the news to Mom, or even if I have the right to.”

“You care about your mother, don't you? There's nothing to hold you back.”

“You're right, I guess. It's just that... Um...”

“Yes, Bon Bon?”

“I don't know... I just don't know what to say. It's like this town is a little less colorful now and... and...”

“Shhh... It's okay, Bon Bon...”

The other mare leaned into her companion, weathering a wave of quiet sobs. “I-I just don't kn-know what I would do if something happened to you, Lyra. I don't want t-to think about it...”

“I'm here, sweetie. We're both okay. Let's just be thankful for that, huh?”

“And I am, Lyra. Oh d-dear Celestia, I'm s-so thankful...”

Scootaloo gazed long at the embracing couple under a glowing lamppost. Slowly, her jaw fell agape. She spun around and looked at the sight of the hospital building behind her. A sour lump had formed in her throat. Shifting about on petite hooves, she approached the doors to the place. The pegasus stopped in mid-gait, biting her lip, for she remembered that Nurse Red Heart and the rest of her staff had locked the entrance off over an hour ago.

Undeterred, the little filly glanced all around—until her eyes settled upon a tall oak tree flanking the western wall of the two-story hospital. Glancing over her shoulder to make sure the coast was clear, she broke into a gallop and jumped for the lowest branch she could find.

---

Scootaloo bit her lip, wincing slightly as she stretched the length of a final bandage over her bullet-grazed leg. She could take dagger stabs to the chest or goblin fists to the face and bounce right back. The little things in life somehow were the most painful. The brown pegasus exhaled long and hard as she felt the enchanted moondust soothing her wound from beneath the tight fabric. She leaned back against the workbench from where she sat on her stool in the center of the Harmony. Across from her, a teenage goblin was clasping shut a metal container full of the scavenger's first aid tools.

“There really isn't anything you're not prepared for, huh?” Warden remarked with a proud smirk. Pure twilight glistened gray and lifeless outside. The last pony had piloted the airship high, so that they hovered above the smog that acted as the ceiling to Petra. No single imp could see them from up here; it was what the pegasus had intended. “I sometimes wonder if you're ever surprised by anything, ever.”

“Jee, I dunno.” She flexed her limbs, feeling the many tiny wounds and scrapes across her body. Her wings flexed over a coat that was bruised in nearly a dozen places. Her thick leather armor had saved her from many bullets during the entire chase, but her skin still ached from the general locations of their impacts. “I'm sitting here and talking to a little shrimp with bat-ears.” She momentarily rested her eyelids and exhaled long and hard through her nostrils. “That's a bigger shocker than finding an assembly line full of ogre explosives.”

“Yeah...” Warden placed the first-aid container onto a shelf above the hammock and glanced over at the airship's owner. “What's up with that? Did Franken of Glass Blood say anything to you, or was he dead when you got there?”

“One thing at a time, kiddo,” Scootaloo muttered, her eyes still closed. “See the wooden contraption next to the hammock on the table? The thing with the conical speaker and a black disc slapped onto a spindle?”

“Uh... Yeah. Sure.”

“Give the lever a few cranks and place the needle on the edge of the disc once it starts spinning. Would you mind?”

Warden did as he was told. With tiny fingers he spun the record player to life. Soon, under his gentle ministrations, a melody of cello strings filled the copper bulkheads of the upper gondola.

“Hmmmmm...” Scootaloo managed a drunken smile as she exhaled long and hard. Her ears filled with Octavia and her wings fluttered slightly in the claustrophobic air. “Yeah, that hits the spot. Thanks, kiddo.”

“Uhm... You're welcome?” He stifled a short giggle and hopped down from the hammock, pacing slowly about the cabin. “I can't say I'm familiar with the stuff we're listening to.”

“I wouldn't expect you to be,” she murmured, breathing evenly, meditating after an afternoon's worth of carnage. “Unless your goblin ancestors ever once stumbled into the Canterlot Concert Hall during a royal symphony.”

“Uhhh... I can't say that they ever did.” Warden smiled awkwardly, his pointed ears twitching. “Mom and Dad were barely old enough to manifest Petra before the Dimming.”

“Just what is a goblin's life span anyways?”

“Let's just say that Devo and Haman are lucky to have seen as many years as they have,” Warden said under the rhythmic tones of cello strings. He sighed and leaned against the workbench beside her. “The Rust-Bleeders are wanting to blow something up, aren't they?”

“You certainly don't make a ton of explosions out of moon dust and fire granite to plant a rose garden.” Scootaloo's head tilted his way as she blindly murmured, “The thing I wanna know is who exactly wants to blow something up? Haman or the ogres?”

“Does it matter?”

“Heh.” Scootaloo's teeth showed in her smile. “Good point, Wart.”

“We gotta go tell Devo!” He exclaimed in sudden earnest. “If Haman had Franken's imps build a bunch of ogre bombs, then who knows what could go happen?! There's no telling where they could have taken the crap to!”

“You're right on both counts, kiddo,” Scootaloo muttered. “There's just no knowing or telling.”

He blinked at her awkwardly. “Huh...?”

The last pony sighed. Finally, her scarlet eyes opened, and she gazed tiredly down at the little imp. “I have everything and yet nothing to tell Devo. Even with what little I've learned, relating it to him is not going to make all of those illicitly manufactured explosives show themselves to the rest of Petra. It certainly doesn't help that Haman's lackeys have done a pretty decent job of covering up for themselves down on Strut Eleven. What evidence do I have?”

“You found the fire granite, right?” Warden exclaimed. “And what about all that craziness we just survived?! An entire strut of Petra turned into a warzone. Surely, some goblins are gonna—”

“What? Ignore the gunshots, gang fights, and blood-letting that happen daily in their own districts to pay attention to what transpired on a completely different platform?”

Warden winced at that, but nontheless said, “Still, it's all gotta amount to something! We can't just toss it all out the window!”

“And I'm not about to, Wart,” Scootaloo said in a low voice. “We obviously know that all of Rust Blood wants us dead... er... or just me, the Hex Blood Outbleeder. Whatever. I think we should let things quiet down a bit. I really don't want to bring the Harmony within sight of Petra at the moment if there's still a squadron of hovercraft looking to gun me down on sight.”

“How screwed are we, really?” Warden murmured as he walked over and ran a finger across the aged surface of the Royal Grand Biv outfit. His bright, aquamarine eyes were briefly a pair of jaded hues. “It's our word against all of the impcity's, huh?”

“I have no doubt Devo can pull some strings to get goblins to conduct some sort of an investigation on Haman,” Scootaloo said. “But I'm still not sure that's going to get us anywhere. It seems that when all of the clan members put their heads together, all that gets done is a bunch of heel-dragging. It's almost as if the one thing all of the families of this city can agree on is to not agree on anything. I'm willing to bet Haman knows that, and that's what makes him think he can pull such a stunt like making ogre bombs beneath everyone's noses.”

“It kind of makes sense why Devo wants the families to unify,” Warden murmured, turning the ruby-framed goggles in his grasp. “If they could just work together faster, with one goal in mind, then crazy attacks from both the inside and the outside could be prevented...”

“Yeah... without having to rely on 'glue stick intercessors' to uproot a splinter in the whole works.”

Warden briefly smirked at her, then held up a cape of rainbow-colored daggers. “I bet the thugs wouldn't have chased us if they saw you wearing this freaky stuff.” He marveled at the firm density of the aged fabric in his grasp. “Just what is this made of, anyways?”

“Hmmm... Arcanium weave. Ramcraft design. Strong stuff, even after twenty-five years.”

Warden whistled. “Arcanium. Frostbeams—I never knew it could be turned into a flexible material.” He squinted over his shoulder at the pony. “You go through so much effort making yourself flanks of armor out of what you find in the Wasteland, and yet you've got this amazing piece of work right here. Ever thought of wearing this in a dangerous situation instead?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because...” Scootaloo bit her lip, fidgeted, and ultimately sighed. “Because some things mean too much to me. Some things deserve to stay as the relics that they are. I... I like having reminders that there's more to the past than just this frazzled pile of meat that you see in front of you.”

“Yeah... I guess I can believe that...” Warden's ears twitched to Octavia's strings as he gazed at the wall of souvenirs hanging over the workbench. His eyes wandered from the golden lyre to the seashells to the buffalo headdress to the oddly-shaped screwdriver and more. “Maybe I was wrong to assume that you could ever manifest Petra like a goblin.” He dryly gulped, but his next smile was a genuine thing. “The stuff that is most precious to you are things you couldn't possibly rebuild.”

Scootaloo took a deep breath. “Some things you just can't recreate, Wart, no matter how much you try. I can't let myself forget that...” Her eyes twitched, catching the gray haze of twilight beyond the zeppelin's cockpit. The grayness had a pale hue to it, like sheets of dead skin flaking off a lizard's scales somewhere. “...that no matter what I do for this world, it won't ever resemble what it once was.” She weathered a shuddering sigh. “But, I'm willing to settle for what I can dredge from this Wasteland, for wh-what it's worth. I only wished there was more color, that's all.”

“I'd say you have enough color inside this airship alone to last a lifetime,” Warden said as he gazed at the little trinkets of the past.

“Heh, don't I know it, kid.” She stood up from the stool she was seated on. “But that doesn't mean I've gotta stop looking for—” She tripped suddenly. “Gahh—Dang it!”

Warden spun, blinking. “What?”

“Nnngh... What else?” She snarled in frustration, bending over to pick up the horseshoe that had once again fallen off her front right leg. “If I had a silver-strip for everytime I—”

“Here,” Warden suddenly shuffled over. “Allow me.”

“Allow you to what?” she grunted.

Warden knelt in front of her, grasping both her bandaged leg and her horseshoe in opposite hands. “It sucks everytime watching you try and fix this with only your hooves to help you.”

“Kid, don't worry! I've got it—”

“Please,” Warden said, gazing up at her with a soft expression. “I... I-I want to help you...”

Scootaloo's tongue lingered in the middle of a word. Ultimately, the last pony gave in. She closed her lips and slowly sat back down on the stool as the little imp gently examined the intricate parts of the horseshoe before using his tiny fingers to reattach the thing to the pegasus' limb. His work was gentle and careful, employing a sincere delicateness that neither of the two souls anticipated him of having.

“By the Blight,” he exclaimed in a low breath. “Just look at this thing.” Warden couldn't help but grimace as his fingers ran over the gnarled edges of the hoof during his task. “It shows from all the times you've fiercely jammed these metal shoes onto the ends of your legs. Don't you ever worry about hurting yourself?”

“Hooves are tough, Wart. They can take a beating and still work just fine,” Scootaloo murmured, absent-mindedly glancing at the branding on his thigh that bitterly matched the metal object he was affixing to her. She suddenly felt the need to keep her voice at a soft and respectful tone. “I've never been one to try and look pretty. So long as my body's fit to get the job done in the Wasteland, ugliness is bearable.”

“Did you start believing in that before or after you grew that ridiculously pink hair out?”

Scootaloo blinked at that. She smiled helplessly under a rosy complexion. “Eheheh... Yeah, well... Uhm... Let's just say my philosophy has been under review the past few...” She blinked off into the far corners of her cabin. “Dear Entropa, just how long has it been now...?”

“How long has it been since what?”

Scootaloo briefly saw the image of a bleeding pony in the middle of Ponyville’s ruined town square, clinging to a statue of Princess Celestia while trolls closed in from all sides. It felt like a hundred life-times ago; she had certainly come close to dying on more occasions than she could measure. Here she was, letting a goblin treat her hoof, and that moment could very well have been the afterlife to a dozen deaths that she had earned herself within the depths of Strut Eleven. The orphan of time briefly pondered if she would be lucky enough to be looking back from several months from then, twice as scarred and confused, wondering how the many ridiculous effects of life were ever caused to begin with.

“I really can't think right now,” she uttered. It was a cop-out, and she knew that it showed in her voice. “My ears are still ringing from all the bullets,” she nevertheless added.

“Want me to start that music contraption over again?” Warden smiled eagerly up to her, finishing his job on the horseshoe. “I think it stopped.”

Scootaloo had barely noticed. “Oh. Huh. I guess it did.”

“Is that seriously all you listen to?” The goblin sat back on his haunches in the middle of the floor. “It all sounds so... so...”

“Beautiful?”

“Sad!” he exclaimed. “Why would you of all ponies want to hear stuff so sappy-sounding?”

“Sorrow is but a shade of precious things, Warden. I'm sure even you could understand, in your own way.”

“I still think it's silly that you would listen to it all the time.”

Scootaloo smirked down at him. “You got a better idea, DJ?”

“The heck should I care about what ponies listen to?!” He briefly giggled and hugged his knees to his chest, gazing up at her. “I can't even imagine how you were able to hold string instruments in those stubs you call 'hooves', much less record them!”

“Equestrian civilization lasted long enough to do a bunch of amazing things. I'm sure goblins have a remarkable library of their own. I saw the band performing up in Devo's district. I know you imps aren’t devoid of all culture.”

“Pffft—That was just a sideshow act.” Warden took a deep, warm breath, smiling at a distant thought. “Where my family's from, goblins really know how to jam it up. The imps I grew up with could lay a beat down on anything that could ring from a wrench-strike. The Western Townships have long had access to aluminum and copper, even before the Dimming. It all makes for good junk-drumming.”

Scootaloo blinked at him. “'Junk-drumming?'”

“Heh, that's what we all call it as kids. When the tools of mining and constructing Petra get too old, we never just throw it all away! Even the most useless of spare metals can be bent and curved to make percussion instruments. There are generations of imps who know how to curve the metals just right to make these fantastic ringing tones. When you've got another goblin to clatter brass casings in the background, it makes for an ensemble that would put all of your pony strings to shame!”

“Did you say a clatter of brass casings?” Scootaloo asked, standing straight up all of the sudden. “That's funny,” she murmured to herself, shuffling over towards a metal locker.

“Pffft! What's funny about it?” Warden folded his arms and smirked proudly. “So maybe I can't describe it to a pony like you so well. So what? As much as I try, I couldn't do it justice. Goblin percussion is like sugar in the Wasteland! Is that so hard to believe? We manifested Petra to cast a gorgeous heartbeat of steam and gears, so why can't we make even greater sounds more deliberately?”

“Uh huh...” Scootaloo merely muttered, carrying something from the locker over to the record player.

Warden stood up and paced over to the hammock, sighing and gazing out the porthole above it. He stared into the twilight beyond his tired reflection. “I wish I could have a collection of pretty and frostbeaming things like you. It's nice enough to have one hundred silver strips, but I don't think I'm ever gonna afford myself nearly as much cool stuff as you've collected. Wherever I go, goblins would only want to rob me blind, because the only thing I can allow myself to own is this stupid mark on my butt—”

The cabin of the Harmony was suddenly ringing. At first, it felt as if hailstones were pelting the outside of the vessel's hull. Slowly—like a rising wave of pebbles—the various noises melted into a soothing cadence, and was soon punctuated by a melodic assortment of percussion sounds. A pair of green ears instantly twitched in timing with the rhythmic tempo. His mouth hanging ape, Warden turned from the sad reflection and gazed wide-eyed at the other end of the gondola.

Scootaloo stood before the record player, removing a hoof from the needle. She gazed with an alien indifference as the speaker dripped forth music that was strange to one soul but hauntingly familiar to another. Seeing the spark glimmering in the imp's eyes, Scootaloo turned to gaze at him. She spoke softly under the ringing tones.

“I stumbled upon this one day while scavenging through the Royal Anthropological Archives of Canterlot. The disc was unlabeled, and for the life of me I couldn't get a frickin' clue as to what I was listening to, but it sounded a little bit like what you described. Tell me, Wart, is this the stuff of the Western... Townships...?” She stopped and blinked fixedly at him.

He had answered her with a glossy look in his eyes. Warden drifted over and reached four-fingers up towards the distant record player, as if desperate to clasp onto a substance of the music that drifted through the naked air. “This... This is it...” His voice was shaking, as if recovering from a strong blow to his heart. “How... H-How in Petra did you find this?”

“I... I just told you,” she uttered. “I found it while scavenging and... and...” Once again, she didn't bother finishing her sentence. She squinted at him.

Warden was trembling. His ears drooped with each progressive meter that the melodic percussions progressed. He hugged himself and looked ready to collapse at any moment. “This... This is 'The March of Manifestation.' This is what my mother used to play for me when I was too small to hold a wrench. She used to put me to sleep to this. I remember, because her ears had this funny way of waving to the beat. I always wanted to mimic her. But... But when I got older and my ears grew long enough, she... she wasn't...”

Scootaloo stared long and hard down at him. Warden suddenly looked so far away, as if she was staring down at the youth from atop a cloud. For some cosmic reason, she knew exactly what was about to happen next...

The teenager hissed through clenched teeth and turned away from the record player. “C-Could you turn that off now, pl-please...?”

“Wart...”

“I-I'm done listening to it. I'm done—”

“Wart,” she trotted over and knelt in front of him, clasping his shoulders with two hooves. “Wart, look at me.”

He bit his lip and gazed up at her.

The pony's face reflected in twin pools of turquoise as she spoke, “I know that you've been trying to be strong. I know that you feel like it makes you a better goblin to not dwell on it. But you need to say it, Wart. While you still have it within you to pick up the pieces that are falling apart, you need to stop... to stop running from what is the very foundation of your life.”

“I'm... I-I'm not running.” Warden briefly frowned, the last defense before a great fountain bursting inside of his green shell. “I-I came to this city to help my uncle b-because he needs me more than my parents do.”

“And why don't your parents need you, Wart?” Scootaloo inquired, her scarlet eyes mercilessly piercing the last flimsy veil of his young soul. “Where have they gone?”

“My... My parents are... are...” He shivered and trembled in his grasp.

“Say it.” Her frown was swift, a timely dagger. “Say it before the truth comes out of you when it's too late to put yourself back together again, when there'll be nobody left around to give you the support that you so desperately need. Warden, you need to say it.”

He lowered his head, his lungs suddenly assaulted by a hiccuping tremor as he leaned his green skull against her chest. What squeaked out of him was fragile, like the reverse of a foal's breath being sucked in at a parents' bedside on a bitterly golden morning.

“It was a rival clan that wanted our copper deposits. They came d-during the night. When all the screams were over, they dragged me out into the middle of the street, covered in th-their blood. They shouted to the rest of the township, saying that they spared me as an example of their victory, that I-I was too useless to have been a threat to them, that I was a m-mistake too stupid to bother killing. So they left me alive to be a symbol, and that's all I am. I'm a useless, horrible piece of filth, the only thing left of my parents, and then I get doubly branded on my way towards finding a new life.”

Scootaloo was as little prepared for that as she was for the sharp breath that escaped her grimacing face. Bravely, she encircled her front legs around his petite form and held him close. “Now you listen to me and you listen close. You are a precious and beautiful thing, Wart.”

“I-I'm not!” He suddenly wailed, pushing against her. “I'm so pathetic—”

“You are precious and you are beautiful.” She held him tighter and murmured into his ear. “You are strong, courageous, smart, and delightful. Your heart and body are full of all the gorgeous things that this world has always meant for you to have. The Wasteland has stripped you of joy, innocence, and peace of mind—as it has also stripped from me all these years. But we can't let the Wasteland win, do you hear me? I'm telling you right now, don't bottle it all inside of you and become the same lifeless ghoul as those who took your life from you!”

“I-I'm just so s-sick of it...” He suddenly clutched her, burrying his sobbing face in her brown chest. “I'm so sick and tired of running from everything in th-this world!” He shuddered and curled his fingers against her coat as he struggled to make sense of the words exploding out from his own mouth. “Why d-does it have to hurt so m-much to just breathe?! Why does anything and everything have to hurt so much...?”

She smiled painfully and nuzzled his neck. “It hurts because you're still a creature who has hope, Warden. And the reason you have hope is that there's still beauty inside of you that hasn't given into the desolation. It's okay to cry about it.” She shuddered and rocked him there in the center of the Harmony. “It's okay to mourn the loss of all the good things we were once anchored to. The past may be a dead thing, but it's how we learn to harness the best of what's left of us.”

Warden sniffed and sobbed, his breaths barely registering all the sentient patterns beneath his pent up, agonized wails. “I miss them. I m-miss Mommy and Daddy so m-much...”

Scootaloo said nothing. This was not her symphony. Regardless, it brought tears to her face with as much grace as Octavia's strings once did. She simply sat there, embracing Warden as he collapsed within himself, peeling loose the first of several layers that the ash of the Wasteland had long tricked him into believing was permanent. There, in the middle of a pony's airship, another orphan had finally stopped running, and it eventually lulled him to silence under the ringing tones of the record's broadcast, like a mother's parting gift.

---

Quietly, like an unfolding flower, a window lattice swung open along the top floor hallway of Ponyville Central Hospital. An orange shadow crept into the dark-lit chamber, shaking off the last scant traces of leaves and twigs from the tree Scootaloo had ascended outside.

Gazing down the far lengths of the hall, Scootaloo held her breath and crept stealthily across the tile floor. She immediately descended the winding steps of a granite stairwell and made her quiet way towards the bottom floor of the building, in search of Rainbow Dash's ward.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Nurse Red Heart strolled down the line of hospital beds, gazing at the clipboard charts hanging off the posts. Several ponies slumbered under their covers, clad in various arrays of bandages and casts. The utter tranquility of the moment sharply contrasted whatever horrors may have transpired in the daytime. After closely observing the multiple patients, Red Heart grasped a tray empty of supplies and pushed it through a pair of swinging doors on the far end of the ward. She exited, and the chamber was momentarily devoid of all movement.

Rainbow Dash was wide awake. With glazed, ruby eyes she stared off into the dim glow of a candle sitting atop a table several meters away. Her limbs liquidly moled into the velvety contours of the hospital bed she was lying in, but no matter how hard she tried, she couldn't catch a wink of sleep. Her face was long, pale, and somberly contemplative. After a deep breath, her blue ears started twitching. She wasn't sure what she was hearing at first, but then a sharp shuffling noise emanated from beneath her bed.

“Hmm...?” The pegasus squinted across the darklit ward. “Red Heart?” She tilted her head.

Just then, an orange shadow nervously popped up into view.

Rainbow Dash's lips pursed. “P-Pipsqueak...?”

Scootaloo smiled bashfully. “Seriously,” she whispered. “...do you call me that sometimes because you forget my name?”

Rainbow Dash gawked at her. A few numb seconds passed, and Scootaloo wasn't sure if maybe something would randomly exploded. What followed was a blissful relief. Rainbow Dash laughed.

“Hahahahah... Yowsers, kiddo,” the pegasus hoarsely said, keeping her voice to a low murmur beyond earshot of the sleeping patients. “Even the Army of the Celestial Union couldn't put a friggin' leesh on you.” She glanced up at the ceiling with a wry smirk. “What'd you use to get in here? The air vents?”

“I... uhm...” Scootaloo bit her lip. “I climbed a tree.”

“Heh, look at you. Your wings don't work, and still you can't stop yourself from getting your head in the air.” Rainbow Dash winced briefly from a random shot of pain. Her ruby eyes darted towards the distant doors of the place. “You do realize that Nurse Red Heart is gonna kill you the soonest she sees that you're here.”

“R-Really?”

“Never underestimate a pony who knows the worst spots of the body to get hurt,” Rainbow uttered with a dry chuckle. Her bandaged wings twitched slightly. “Might as well state your business while you've still got a head on your neck.”

“I... uhm...” Scootaloo fidgeted. “I wanted to see you...”

“Wow, what a surprise.”

“I mean it, Dashie!”

“And didn't I say that I needed to get some shuteye?”

Scootaloo squinted suspiciously at the pegasus. “You don't even look tired!”

Rainbow Dash's eyes narrowed. “You try sleeping when you're only allowed to lay on one side with your wings bound behind your back.”

“Oooh, ouch,” Scootaloo said with a wince.

“'Ouch' is right, kiddo. I admire your guts, but I think this was totally a crazy-bad idea.”

“But... But...”

“Of course, I would have used a lot more style and finesse—Like a zip-line or something.”

Scootaloo beamed suddenly. “You enjoy zip-lining? Me too!”

“Scootaloo,” Rainbow Dash said, her voice suddenly pitched lower and graver. “Really, now. You're nose-deep into trouble. If I were you, I'd jet. I wouldn't want your mom and dad getting on my flank for luring you into a hospital after-hours—”

“You're not luring me anywhere!” Scootaloo exclaimed, shuddered, then leaned in to whisper, “Rainbow Dash, could you... could you tell me what happened today?”

The pegasus was silent. Her ruby eyes were jaded, ruby shards. Her voice came out in a drone, “I can yap on about all of my awesomeness later, kiddo. This really is a lousy time...”

“You... You saved ponies today, Dashie.” Scootaloo gazed earnestly into the pegasus' face. She swallowed hard. “But... That's not all there is to it, is there?”

Rainbow Dash's nostrils flared. She glared off, avoiding Scootaloo's gaze. “Look, if you're that nosy, I'm sure that there're other ponies around town who can tell you all you need to know.”

“I don't want to hear it from them!” Scootaloo's eyes squinted. “I want to hear it from you—”

“Who are you now?!” Rainbow Dash suddenly snapped, her eyes burning into the young foal's. “Twilight?!”

Scootaloo jerked back, her violets wide and hurt. “R-Rainbow...?”

“Take a friggin' clue, kid! Lay off!” The pegasus frowned, a gnarled and ugly thing. Scootaloo suddenly felt like she was talking to a completely different pony. “You're not deaf or dumb. You heard me earlier and I'm sure you can hear me now! I don't want to talk about anything that happened today! Not to you, not to Twilight, not to the whole world!”

“But... But...”

“Scram!” Rainbow's voice echoed against the walls. A few distant patients stirred and shifted, but fell back asleep. “I mean it! I still have three good limbs that can kick your flank out the door if I have to, so don't make me!”

“Dashie, this...” Scootaloo fought to stay afloat above a rising, foalish sob. Her heart was plummeting into a deep abyss within herself at a hundred kilometers per hour. She was falling, and for the first time she wasn't sure if even Rainbow Dash would catch her. “This isn't like you...”

“Kid, you don't know me!” Rainbow snarled. As if shocked at her own menacing tone, she rolled her eyes, sighed, and said, “Look, I'm sorry, okay? I'm sorry I ditched you on the hilltop when I made a Pinkie Pie swear to come back and see you. But that's life, and someday you'll find out that life isn't always a bed of roses.”

To this, Scootaloo frowned. “I know things about life...”

“Sure you do,” Rainbow scoffed. “Nnngh—Nebula!” She suddenly rolled her eyes ceiling-ward, seething with an inward growl. “I don't even know what I was thinking. You're too friggin' young to fly.”

Scootaloo glanced aside, her face sullen as her wings drooped...

“Don't make that face! I mean it!” Rainbow bitterly hissed. “A kid your age has no sense trying to fly around! You'll just bang yourself up or worse! It ain't worth it, squirt.” She sighed long and hard, gazing off towards the distant shadows of the room. “It's stupid, and it isn't awesome.”

“But... But all the things you said—”

“Yeah, about all the things I said—Do you remember me telling you to scram?” The pegasus grunted. “I just want to be alone, okay? Please...”

Scootaloo sighed and hung her head. She turned around. She walked off.

Halfway through the trot, however, the little foal stopped in her tracks. She gazed down at the tile floor, at her tiny hooves. A warm wave broke through her veins, melting the shivers away. Frowning for courage, she spun about and marched straight back to the bed.

Rainbow Dash's angry complexion was briefly betrayed by a shocked blinking of her eyes. “Scootaloo...?”

“I want you to tell somepony what happened today,” Scootaloo said, planting her hooves firmly into the floor. “And that pony should be me.”

“Dang it, kid—Don't make me do something lame like calling for the nurse! Ugh—I hate it when ponies call for the nurse.”

“Rainbow Dash...”

“You need to make like a banana and split! I mean it!”

“No.” Scootaloo leaned up against the bed with two petite hooves. She stared into Rainbow Dash's face. “No, Rainbow Dash. I'm not going to leave.”

“What the heck is this?!” Rainbow's voice cracked in disbelief. “Seriously, if you wanted to do some intervention, Berry Punch is in the ward two doors down—”

“Dashie... Can... erm... Can I tell you something?”

Rainbow Dash shut her eyes. She ultimately surrendered with a sigh.

Scootaloo gazed down at her hooves. She kneaded the side of the velvety bed cushion and muttered, “I... I don't know many ponies in town, Dashie.”

Rainbow Dash gazed at her quietly, emotionlessly.

Scootaloo went on, “I mean it. I... I don't have any friends. There're no ponies my age that I talk to, no ponies that I hang around with. I only see Applejack and Pinkie Pie and Fluttershy when you're around. I... uhm...” She gulped a lump down her throat. “I don't even... t-talk much with my parents...”

“Where are you going with this, pipsqueak?”

“What I'm trying to say is...” Scootaloo's lip quivered as she gazed bravely up into Rainbow's eyes. “There's no way... no possible way that anything I see or hear could turn into town gossip.” She gulped and put on a fragile, tender smile. “So... you can say anything to me, if you just need to say it, Dashie, and nopony will ever know, not even Twilight or Applejack. I swear it.”

Rainbow Dash opened her mouth to argue that, but her lips merely hung open. She saw something sincere in Scootaloo's twitching violets, and a part of her suddenly latched onto it. Her angry blue face melted into a pale sheen one slow breath at a time. Her lips closed, and she swallowed a dry lump down her throat before dryly murmuring, “I saved ten ponies today. I saw the fire burning. I heard their screams. I dove in as fast as I could. I pulled them out, two by two. And... And then the building collapsed... And I...”

Scootaloo stared intently, her bright eyes curved as they took in as much as her ears did.

Rainbow Dash exhaled sharply, and when she tried once more to breathe in, it was a shuddering thing. It shook something out of her eyes that Scootaloo could never have imagined seeing: a tear, then two, then three—trickling down her cheeks and magnifying the sapphiric lengths of her grimacing face. “I wasn't fast enough, Scootaloo. The building fell down... and there were two ponies left inside. I tried to g-get to them.... but...” Her eyes curved and she hiccuped through a jaw-wrenching sob. “I shouldn't be that slow! What's wrong with me?! What is all of my practicing worth if I can't outrace a stupid, friggin' fire?!”

The orange filly weathered a painful breath. Her eyes moistened to take in the sight of Rainbow's crying, but for the life of her the little pegasus couldn't do anything but smile. The same rosiness that filled her cheeks earlier that afternoon returned, only it was twice as burning now.

In the meantime, Rainbow Dash had clenched her eyes shut. She shook her head as her limbs curled inward to her chest like a little foal. “I've always hated losing,” she stammered. “Today, I lost. I lost and it cost the lives of a mother and her child. Nebula help me, I'm such a friggin' loser...” She hissed and squeaked as more tears spilled out her eyes.

The tears dried instantly, for Scootaloo was reaching up and nuzzling her close. Smiling gracefully, the pegasus murmured into the mare's ears, “Dashie, you are the best pony. The best. You're not a loser. You've won the hearts of everypony in town...” She sniffled and added in a warm breath, “Including mine.”

If Scootaloo had any words to add, Rainbow Dash didn't give her the opportunity. The blue pegasus encircled the child in her limbs and clutched to her dearly, hiding her sobbing face into the filly's tiny chest, releasing more than a week's worth of Ponyvillean stormclouds. Rainbow's cries were a stuttering, quiet ensemble. Regardless, Scootaloo weathered every single sob as if they were cannonfire, smiling and letting the adult pegasus hold her, quietly conspiring to bury the unsightly tears beyond the shadows of the room, so that when morning came and light returned to the sterile world, Rainbow Dash was found sleeping, alone and unblemished, as if the heroine hadn't let a single crack form across the azure shores of her spirit to begin with.

---

Princess Celestia's golden text glistened in the Harmony's lanternlight. Scootaloo sat in the hammock, her legs folded beneath her as she stared into the Royal Journal that had been propped onto a pillow. As the ship briefly weaved in a gust of high Wasteland air, she turned a page with her brown hoof and read over an entry that she had poured over hundreds of times before, relishing each paragraph as if this was her first opportunity to digest it all.

As the minutes ticked away, and the last pony's breaths rose and fell with the gentle sway of the ship, a scuffling pair of clawed feet rustled behind her. The pegasus glanced back over her pink mane.

Warden was frozen in place at the top of the revolving staircase, wincing—as if caught guiltily in the middle of some atrocious act. “I'm... I-I'm sorry, am I bothering you?”

“Hmmm... Not yet,” she said with the slightest curve of her lips. “Everything okay?”

“Uhm..” He finished walking up from the hangar level below. He wrung his eight fingers together while gazing at the bulkheads. “I... I-I couldn't get to sleep.”

“I can't blame you, considering we've still got Haman's crap hanging above our heads,” Scootaloo muttered. She motioned with her head towards a nearby locker. “Do you need another canvas sheet? I know the blankets don’t make up much of a 'bed', but for what it's worth it was the best thing I could come up with.”

“Actually, I-I was curious to see what you were up to,” he remarked with a shy smile, shuffling a few more steps towards the hammock. “You're always so quiet with everything you do. Sometimes... Sometimes it's as if you're not really here.”

She smiled gently. “I haven't left the airship. I wouldn't abandon you alone in this thing.”

“Yeah...” He chuckled nervously. “You just abandon me at elevators.”

Scootaloo winced at that.

So did Warden. He cleared his throat and attempted to salvage the sanctity of the moment. “So... Uhm... What are you reading?”

“It's a journal,” Scootaloo merely said at first. She then paused, blinked, and ultimately explained, “It was written by an alicorn goddess named Princess Celestia.”

“'Princess Celestia'.” Warden smiled softly. It was a concentrated effort. “I've heard that name before. I'm guessing she was a special pony.”

“Yes, Wart,” she murmured, turning another page while speaking aside, “She was a very special pony.”

Warden clasped his hands behind his back. He leaned forward on his clawed toes and squinted towards the pages full of golden lettering. “Would you... Would you like to share a little bit of it?”

“Mmm... I doubt an imp like you would be interested.”

“Well, it's important to you, right?”

“So?”

He smiled softly. “So I'm interested.”

Scootaloo glanced at him. Her wings twitched slightly. She shifted a bit where she was lying on the hammock and murmured, “Well, it's an entry that the Princess wrote during a moment in the past that the ponies liked to call the 'Second Age.' The land of Equestria was being torn about by the most devastating event before the Cataclysm. It was called the 'Chaos Wars,' and right now I'm reading Celestia's account of the Grand Burial of Paleo-Canterlot, where she mourned over the lives of nearly ten thousand of her subjects who all tragically perished under the sneak attack of Discord's...” Her breath jolted as the hammock suddenly shook. “...trolls and harpies.” She glanced aside, blinking. “Uhm...”

“Sounds really depressing!” Warden made a face, suddenly perched on the side of the swaying hammock right next to her. The petite imp craned his neck over her mane to get a better look at the entry she was referring to. His face scrunched up with disgust. “Do all ponies dwell on really sad stuff? Even pony princesses?”

“Well... Not exactly...” Scootaloo managed to say while gazing back at the pages. She dragged a hoof out from underneath her to point at the journal. “I just find that Celestia's most eloquent words are contained in the pieces where she contemplates her immortal existence within a realm defined by mortal tragedy...”

“So it's just you who likes the depressing stuff?” Warden asked with a wry smirk. “Didn't this Celestia-pony ever write happy entries?”

“Well, sure...”

“Don't you ever read them?”

“On occasion. I just think the somber pieces serve up prettier examples of Equestrian language...”

“Isn't happy stuff pretty enough on its own?” Warden asked her with suddenly soft eyes. He gulped long and hard before adding, “I-I think the pony who hugged me earlier would think so...”

Scootaloo glanced back at him. After a breath, she finally droned, “You want me to find a happy entry? Fine. I'll read you a happy entry.”

Warden smiled victoriously. He swung his legs up and folded them underneath in a bipedal facsimile of the equine figure beside him.

In the meantime, Scootaloo was flipping furiously towards the very end of the journal. Golden bands of reflected light shimmered off the two survivors' faces like the aura of a dead sun. She finally reached an entry that was dated a few years before utterly blank pages consumed the rest of the tome. “Okay, this was written not too long ago, well, as an alicorn lifespan is concerned. As a matter of fact, it was only a few winters before I was foaled.”

“Wow...” Warden leaned in, pricking his pointed ears upwards. “It's hard to believe that anything's older than you.”

“Hardy-har-har,” Scootaloo grunted with a slight smirk. She leaned in, cleared her throat, and ran down the preserved, sacred text. “'There were no clouds in the sky this morning, and I couldn't have asked for a better dawn to anoint with the Sun. This is the day that the most gifted unicorn born in centuries entered my palace to dwell within these walls, and to blossom under my tutelage. Twilight Sparkle is unlike any filly I've ever seen. Her talent for magic is a brilliant gift, and the only thing that outshines her talent is the gentle sincerity and righteousness that I sense in her heart—'”

“Pony?”

Scootaloo paused in the middle of reading. She glanced over at the imp. “Yeah, Wart?”

He gnawed pensively at his lip before finally inquiring, “What's your name? I-I mean your real name.”

The last pony squinted at him.

He smiled nervously. “I... I would really like to know. I would hate to die an old imp without... without knowing what to label someone with so much frostbeams that got me there.”

At hearing that, Scootaloo's face softened. With a gentle breath, she let loose, “'Scootaloo.'”

Warden stared at her. Warden twitched. Warden fell into a deep, snorting fit of giggles.

The last pony rolled her scarlet eyes. Nevertheless, she patiently smirked as his laughter ran its course.

“Whewwwww,” he exhaled, rubbing a tear from his eye and smirking. “Do forgive me. There's nothing wrong with it. Just... 'Scootaloo' sounds so... so cute. It totally isn't you.”

“I assure you it once was.”

“Uh huh.” He clutched his knees to his chest and squirmed in place, playfully rocking the hammock slightly beneath them. “If you ask me, I much rather like the name of your ship, 'Harmony.'”

Scootaloo's nostrils flared briefly. “I... I like that name better too.” She gulped and gazed back towards the journal. “But it's hardly befitting me either.”

The goblin took a deep breath, but he had no response to that. Instead, he cleared his throat and uttered, “I'm sorry for interrupting. Go ahead...”

So she did. “'Blossoming inside my new student is a love for life and all that preserves life. I know that she is as aware of her magical gifts as I am, but I believe the precious unicorn has unwittingly blinded herself to the opportunity she has to be a good, healthy, and friendly pony. She has surrounded herself with study when she could have been surrounding herself with companions. The degree to which she aspires to excel in the magical arts is a diligence that befits an immortal alicorn, and in her innocent naivete I know that Twilight Sparkle cannot yet perceive the futility beyond the noble courage of her mortal efforts. It is something that I haven't seen since the days that I mentored Starswirl, and though this should be opening painful wounds within myself, I can only feel happiness, hope, and joy. There is something in Twilight Sparkle—something in her eagerness to learn all that this universe has to give her, something in her smile that shines with more brilliance than even I have to raise—and it makes me remember the Dawning of the First Age, when I too was young and jubilant and so blissfully naive. All I want to do is help her to live out this glorious and adventurous life that she has before her, an existence that can only encapsulate that immeasurably pristine excitement, whereas mine has diluted it beyond tangibility... until now, now that Twilight Sparkle has humbly graced my life.'”

Scootaloo turned the page and was about to read more, when he suddenly felt a light weight against her flank. Blinking, she glanced over to her side.

Warden was leaning up against her, a smile plastered against his face. With eyes shut, the blissful goblin's body rose and fell in peaceful slumber, his unconscious ears still twitching with every word she had to give.

She gazed at him, and her next smile was a silken thing. If it could have lasted forever, it would have dredged the brightness back from beneath her blighted coat. She stared at Warden and continued quoting the entry of Princess Celestia, spilling forth the sacred words of joy that the last pony hadn't realized she had memorized until now.

“'Once again, this world is precious and beautiful. I know that any affection, any indulgence of companionship will only hurt me in the end, but I cannot help myself. This moment is too golden, and Twilight's felicity is too sweet. In nearly a thousand years since Luna's plight, a single child has shown me that there is something worth shining the sunlight on once more. I shall not tarry in my duties, not for a single day—for days are the very strings with which I weave my tapestry in honor of all I hold dear, from here until eternity, by Epona's grace.'”

Warden stirred slightly, ultimately curling against Scootaloo's side. A soft crown of feathers suddenly engulfed him in a warm embrace.

Scootaloo wasn't aware of the gesture until she saw her right wing doing it. The warm breath that had entered her lungs came out in a sudden cold gust of contemplation, and she was briefly shocked to see that the feathers were brown. Bringing a hoof up to her ear, she felt the soft blue piece of the past fluttering in the air of the cabin. Her next smile was something solid, built to contain her memories deep inside as she turned once more to the journal. Celestia's texts were too sacred, too sacred for even the last pony's tears.

As the Harmony swayed gently in the high winds, rocking the body of the imp further into slumber, she kept her wing wrapped around Warden, anchoring herself to him, for she had discovered that there were more sacred things left to scavenge from the desolate world, and unlike her souvenirs of the past these precious things could absorb tears.

---

“Dang it! This is... She is... Impossible! Absolutly friggin' impossible!”

Hours ago, along the edge of Strut Eleven, a disgruntled Fredden and his minions were watching as the body of the Harmony soared away from the destruction and chaos left in the wake of the last pony's scuffle with the Rust-Bleeders.

“How does one single pony learn to do all of that?!”

A voice behind the dark-shaded bodyguard hissed, “Exactly where a lousy boomer doesn't learn to be nearly as impressive.”

Fredden and his fellow thugs winced. Slowly, they turned around to see Miss Ryst, Otto, and several more elite Rust-Bleeder goblins walking up with steam rifles in tow. The air still rang with the sound of screaming no-bleeder imps who were shaken in the wake of the disastrous chase.

“This is no pathetic imp or harpy being paid a modicum of silver to do petty vandalism,” Ryst murmured, her right eye twitching after the distant sight of the fleeing Harmony. “Sister four legs is a survivor, a relic of the bright past and all that spit. She fights because she is all that she will ever be, and that means something.” Twirling a steam-pistol free, she used it to point accusingly at Fredden. “It has been a good long vomit of stormfronts since you’ve meant something, Fredden boomer, yes yessss?”

“Please...” Fredden pleaded, clasping his clawed hands together as his thugs parted ways so that he and he alone was under the shape-shifter's deadly aim. “You d-don't really know how crazy psycho that glue stick is! She outran an entire company of imps! She t-took out two hovercrafts with her bare hooves!”

“Don’t spit so fearfully. I cannot waste a boomer simply for being a boomer. Haman assures me when he sent us that you still have use beyond being meat,” Miss Ryst uttered hoarsely. She stopped aiming the pistol long enough to nibble anxiously on her flaking knuckles. “Hmmm... But it does put us in a tight bind, all of these explosions that have owned the air It was good that Franken did the extraction before he was no longer useful. Though we cannot expect the rest of the families to believe the spit of four hooves, Devo will, and Devo has much disastrous spit of his own to spread. Such an itchy, itchy boomer...”

“B-But I couldn't get the Outbleeder bandanna off of her!” Fredden exclaimed, pointing towards the smoggy skies above Petra. “She dashed our plans to bits right there in the factory! How are we going to distract the families long enough for Franken's stuff to get moved into place?!”

“Hmm... A tough neck to snap, all this is.” The shape-shifter scratched at her neck, staring up at a distant squadron of gremlin security hovercraft that were presently speeding towards the sight of chaos and mayhem to investigate. “If we cannot fabricate evidence that the Hex-Bleeders were responsible for this meat-mess...” Razzar took a deep breath, and in front of all her impish minions her body morphed from tan to red to blue. Several snow-white dreadlocks poured down from the back of her skull as her body stretched into a muscular, old goblin with copper brown eyes. The naga's voice took on a deep, masculine tone. “...all the better for the prime boomer himself to be here at the scene of the crime, yes yes yessssss?”

Comments

[The Great Turnip]

Equal parts beautiful, sad, cute and intense. Reads a little more like a hella extended chapter of Austraeoh with an EoP twist, but still feels really great to read.

Say what you like about your lengthy action scenes - I can't get enough of them. You managed to maintain the tempo so that I don't find it dragging at all.

Ryst is certainly an odd character, really like the implications that her referring of Scoots as her 'sister' have; raises interesting comparisons between the two survivors. And Warden's so darn cute! He may be the Short-Round of the EoP Universe, but he has his moments.

[RoboRed]

Wow...halfway point already.

Okay, I definitely admit that Razzar is really, really bold in giving out all that information to Scootaloo. In front of the goblins in her security team, no less. Reading into her story, she gives off the air of self-confidence in her ability, given her explanation of her backstory and the hardships she faced from the Cataclysm. She believes that she is a scavenger, living only to survive off of others and that she can fool everyone and snake her way out of anything. Indeed, she seems to have Haman and Rust-Blood wrapped around her claws, and he gives her free-reign to blast anything in her path. And were it not for “business”, she would leave Petra in a heartbeat, possibly turning the information of Haman's doings in to the highest bidder, or letting the imps deal with it and scavenge what she can from the resulting chaos.

Given all this, her attitude is only the tiniest bit believable. She has a lot playing in her favor, as long as she has actually has the ability to back it up with action, but she is still really damn bold with what she's doing.

Haman makes his first appearance in the flesh in this chapter. He's alright. Kind of like Devo. Not all-knowing, but he's calm and has an air of power around him. He isn't outright evil like Razzar, but he's still the one pulling the strings. But I can't help but feel he lacks presence. I mean sure, he's the leader of Rust Blood, and is running a massive scheme to manufacture weapons using moonrock and fire granite, but in comparison to Razzar, she steals more of the show. Even to the end, from what I remember, it's a lot more about Razzar. I'll focus a little more attention on him, though.

Speaking of all these underhanded dealings, conspiracies, and whatnot...I'm a fan of videogames. Often, I thing of stories in video game form, sometimes putting myself in the role of the character, going through quests, solving mysteries, gathering important items, meeting different people. In particular, I enjoy the adventure genre (Grim Fandango, anyone?). I once mentioned elsewhere when discussing End of Ponies that I could easily picture myself playing it as an adventure game or an RPG. You have an overarching story, several subplots, one in this case being a conspiracy underneath imp society mixed with elements of subterfuge, and the covert acts the main character needs to do to investigate what's behind it all, ultimately leading up to a goal. Oh, and of course, there's the action scenes. Really, let me gush here and say that despite the navel gazing, the wordiness, and the long intro, this fic has it all. This is just part of why I love it so much.

I forgot about the occasional flashbacks to Harmony-Scoots in this arc. Can't for the life of me figure its place in this chapter, though. Then again, my reading comprehension isn't the greatest at times...
Ponyville Scoots flashbacks still seem to be just getting in the way, though.

Music in the Wasteland is a beautiful thing. This is one thing I really like about Petra. The one thing that can be called a city in the wastes. Despite all the strange dealings, goings-on and industry, the city of Petra has life. The music is just one part of this. The activity and goblin society, with the merchants and the goblin children and teenagers, and the elder imps at the bars...so much non-gloomy wasteland stuff that just shows that life can move on. I loved the bits where Warden explains goblin society and family life to Scootaloo. Cultural information is damn interesting. Speaking of the little guy...

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.

Alright, you know what? I firmly refuse to believe any of this now. (Maybe a little bit about the relating part – thank god I've never lost my parents or been the world's whipping boy) Okay, fuck that bit too – it feels like I've been shat on my the world now and again. Warden is far more than a foil to Scootaloo and just a sidekick. It's obvious she cares for the little wart, no matter how rough she is with him. They bond in the Harmony, she teaches him how to fly it, comforts him as he tells the truth of his story, and they have each other's backs in battle. Warden is a character who bonds and interacts well with Scootaloo, has his own quirks and faults, is an awkward teenager that is wowed by technology and Scoots's antics, and his awkwardness is used occasionally for comic relief. He does all this in addition to being a sort of mirro of younger Scootaloo. Plus, he is bound for greater things later on at the end of the story. He is a solid character through and through. And if I could draw worth a damn, I'd dedicate some art to the little green booger.

She hated her last words to Warden, assuming that they were her last words.  It was always healthy for the last pony to assume such.  The fact was, there were no good last words, for their very nature meant cold and heartless abandonment, no matter how Scootaloo tried to paint them otherwise, with or without the same colors that were so warmly given her with the best of intentions, only to haunt the recesses of her sobbing years for as long as she could care to remember.

God, I love this paragraph.

Okay, the action scene. Lessee here...according to OpenOffice, starting from Scoot's runecalled explosion, and ending at the exasperation of “How does one single pony learn to do all of that !?”...The whole fight scene was 9778 words long. Well...that definitely equals the size of an average story chapter seen on FiMFic...I suppose it could be trimmed down a little, but it would still fit in line with a 18-23k chapter size mark. I'll be damned if it wasn't entertaining, though. Like I said earlier, detail brings immersion, and immersion leads to a better reading experience. It's damn cool when you read a chapter and you can visualize every shard of shrapnel that flies off – every splinter from an exploding wooden shack – the flying droplets of blood from a goblin's slit throat...that's immersion. Not that you actually need to describe every last dust mote off a dead corpse flopping to the ground, you just need enough to paint it in the minds of the readers that it exists. I think you've accomplished that.

And we leave on a note where things start to heat up...