The Fluttershy of Tomorrow

by Amneiger

Smokestacks

It was slow going to Tacoma.

According to the map, the fastest way there would have been to go southwest, moving through the Industrial District while hugging the waterfront. Fluttershy had been hoping that the corridors would have fewer soldiers in them, but they were only in the corridors for ten minutes before Fluttershy saw the lamps of a patrol up ahead. Fluttershy and Little Ball had gone up another trapdoor to the surface. Maybe she could keep moving south along the surface; she could hide behind the buildings as cover and use the open space to fly away if she was caught.

Then she turned a corner and saw a checkpoint.

They were right on the border of the Industrial District. A single cross street ran between the building Fluttershy was peeking around and a tall black wall. A group of soldiers had set up a guard booth in front of an open gate leading into another rubble-strewn neighborhood. In the distance behind the wall, Fluttershy saw the massive factory she had seen when she had first been brought outside here. Fluttershy was certain that beyond the wall would be even more soldiers.

There was no way they could get through there.

“Let’s go around,” she said to Little Ball.

It nodded, and they headed east, moving until they had reached what the map had said was Lake Washington.

After that they had gone south, sticking to the water. The water seemed to burn a rusty orange; Fluttershy couldn’t tell if it was just reflecting the sky or if it really was that color. There was a sharp acidic smell that got stronger the closer she got to the water. There were large two-story houses built along the edge of the water, many with docks jutting out into the water. The docks were in poor shape; they did not look so much like they had rotted like they had been dissolved.

On the way south, Fluttershy asked Little Ball what it knew of Tacoma. Not much, it turned out. The ball had never been there before. All it could tell her was that it had heard that Megiddo had placed his factories and generators there before the collapse of the city. Tacoma had been hit hard, and was covered in deadly malfunctioning machinery and power equipment.

As she got closer to Tacoma, the buildings she was flying over were steadily starting to crumble. In Downtown, the metal and stone shells of the buildings had still been standing, and had at least looked structurally steady enough to enter. As she flew south, more and more of the buildings had collapsed, looking as if they had been shaken or smashed apart. The sky before her was changing color, fading from fiery orange to a sooty black. A few green signs still stood on the roads she flew over, all with the same message:

TACOMA MANUFACTURING AREA

LETHAL FORCE WILL BE USED AGAINST UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNAL

ORDER OF MEGIDDO

The sky was darkening as they reached the first of the signs, so they ate in a room on the ground floor of a collapsed office building and slept until morning.

Finally, as she got close to what the map said was the geographical center of Tacoma, Fluttershy saw the extent of whatever had happened.

From the outskirts, it looked as if a meteor had landed right in the middle of the city. Many of the buildings close to her had been leveled, leaving empty factory floors and melted piles of slag behind. Some of the walls had survived as twisted skins of metal that stuck out of the ground. Cables led up and down the streets, attached to wooden poles that had been smashed into petrified splinters.

The smell of electricity was in the air, like a strong layer of ozone burning her nose. She remembered the smell from when she lived in Cloudsdale; she usually only smelled it there if there had been a mishap at the weather factory. Something, somewhere, was pouring a lot of electricity into the air. The air rippled with heat over a few sections of wreckage, and as her eyes followed it she saw a glow in the ground under the heated sections; lava, or molten metal.

As her eyes scanned the horizon before her, she saw a single building left. A large black factory, covered in smokestacks, billowing out what looked like a solid curtain of black smog into the sky.

The gate had to be in that building. Fluttershy looked at the ground and thought about how to get there. There was almost no cover around, just the remains of metal walls. If they flew, they would be spotted from far away. They would have to walk.

She dropped down to the ground. “Come on,” she said to Little Ball. It climbed out of the wicker basket, and both of them began walking towards the factory, going around the puddle of liquid metal and the places where the electricity smell was especially strong. Fluttershy did her best to keep the remnants of the walls between herself and the guards that were certain to be around the factory.

As she got closer, she noticed that the big central factory had been constructed right on top of the intact buildings; its outer wall stopped in the middle of the street or passed right through the neighboring foundries, as if it had been pre-built and then simply dropped from the sky.

Finally, she was close to the edge of the central building, just around the corner of two walls enclosing what might have been a workshop once. The workshop sat on the edge of a larger road that was twice as wide as the ones she had seen in Downtown; it had to be for letting big things through. She crouched down low and poked her head around the corner.

The front gate was covered in guards. Two soldiers stood in the road in front of the gate, pointing their lamps and weapons down the road. Guard booths stood on each side of the gate, and a pair of guardtowers rose up out of the building behind it. A pair of aerials flew in a circular holding pattern overhead; from this distance Fluttershy could see the glow of charged lightning weapons on their underbellies.

Little Ball poked her in the leg and shook its head while pointing at the guards. She nodded to it; she would never be able to get in that way. Fluttershy turned and began walking, trying to stay close to the curve of the central building’s wall.

Fluttershy stopped in front of one of the half-smashed buildings. It had originally been made from polished steel that reflected the orange sky. Now the back of half of it was being swallowed by the factory, steel seeming to melt and corrode into black iron. The front wall of the building had bent over the street, as if something had exploded inside, blasting off the roof and blowing the walls outward. The building’s doors and windows hung open, unguarded.

Fluttershy looked around. She couldn’t sense any stray electricity inside, and she couldn’t hear any metal joints or see the glow of a soldier’s lamp. She slowly walked up the two steps in front of the building and opened the door.

The ground ended two paces in. The floor of the building had fallen away, revealing a mass of lava far below it, the red glow lighting up the blackened earth. Even from here she could feel the heat radiating from the lava.

The black wall of the factory was on the other side of the chasm. Part of it hung over the pit, reinforcing the notion that the factory had simply been dropped where it was without any consideration for where it would land. There was a blacker shadow in the wall; an open door.

Fluttershy looked over her shoulder. Little Ball was right behind her. It looked back at her, clearly waiting for her to say what they were going to do next.

“I’m going to go in there," Fluttershy said. “I need to find the gate I came in from, the one the aerials were taking away earlier. There's probably going to be lots of soldiers...and more soldiers...and all kinds of dangerous things...” She gulped, fighting back a sense of apprehension as she thought about the kind of things that were probably roaming around the big factory. “If you want to stay out here, that's okay.”

The ball looked apprehensively at the open door, before shaking its head. It was still anxious about what might be in there, but it didn't want to leave her behind. Maybe if they were lucky, the fact that this entrance had been unguarded meant that there might be few guards inside.

“Okay then,” Fluttershy said. “Let’s go.” She picked up the basket, waited for the ball to get inside, then flew across the chasm into the door.

The doorway led into a dark steel tunnel. Burnished pipes sprang from the walls and ran back and forth along the corridor. It was enclosed, and dimly lit by faint bulbs in the ceiling; somehow the combination cast shadows that seemed starker than average and making it look darker than anything reflective should have been. In several places, there were ragged holes in the wall and floor of the hallway, as if the metal there had melted away. The hallway went on for several feet before turning to the left.

Fluttershy’s hooves made clong clong noises as she landed. She took a few experimental steps, hearing the same clong noises reverberating in the metal walls around her. She winced; she couldn't walk here, something might hear them. Fluttershy gripped the wicker basket and flew two feet off the ground. Her wingbeats didn't echo like her hoofsteps had done; that was better. She flew slowly down the hallway, reaching and turning the corner.

The hallway lead towards a metal lattice catwalk that rose up above a large factory floor. Fluttershy flew above the catwalk and looked down.

It looked like a section of some kind of assembly line. The room was a long rectangle, with two lines of conveyor belts going down it. Metal arms were placed along each belt, scanning and sorting everything that went past them. Both belts were starkly illuminated with overhead lamps that hung down below where Fluttershy was. Most of the things on the belt looked like small metal pieces; it was hard to tell from this distance. The arms sometimes dropped the objects into large bins that stood behind them on the floor. Whenever one bin got full, it would sink into the floor and would immediately be replaced by an empty bin that rose up from the same spot the full bin had just been. Fluttershy looked at what was at the end of the conveyor belts and saw the red glow of fire. They must be checking metal scraps for reusable parts, and then melting down the rest. Four soldiers stood on the floor, slowly sweeping their lamps over the belts and the walls around them. None of them looked up.

Fluttershy kept moving along the catwalk and back into another corridor full of pipes.

The corridor reached a four-way intersection. The corridors were labeled with green stickers, and Fluttershy stopped to read each one. She had just come from Recycling Observation Walkway #9. To her left was Preta Storage Overflow #2. To her right was Transdimensional Viewing Laboratory Access Terminal #1. Directly in front of her was Knee Motive System Manufacturing Access #5.

“Do you know what any of these are?” she asked the ball.

Little Ball looked helplessly at the signs. The only sign it could understand was Knee Motive Systems, which were metal body parts for the robots. It didn't know what the Viewing Laboratory was, or what Pretas were.

Fluttershy looked at the signs again. She remembered seeing a sign for a Dimensional Engine the first time they had been in the access corridors, and vaguely remembered something about universes and dimensions from talking to Twilight one day. Twilight had been saying something about alternate dimension, or universes. If the strange portal had not just taken Fluttershy to somewhere else on the planet, but to another universe entirely, then maybe the viewing lab would help her find Equestria. She turned and walked towards the lab. The right hand hallway was maybe twenty feet long, ending with a plain metal door with a white light set in the wall above it. Fluttershy opened it and stepped inside.

She was standing on at one end of a large room. The end she was in was well lit, with bright lamps overhead illuminating the plain metal floor. In front of her were several rows of glass screens. Behind them, the rest of the room was lit with only an orange glow. Vast blocks of machinery behind the screens stood like buildings in the shadows. There was a humming noise almost below hearing range that made Fluttershy think of electricity.

All of the screens showed ponies.

On one screen, Twilight and Rarity were walking through Whitetail Wood. Twilight was clothed in glowing lavender spectral armor, and Rarity was wearing a white version of guard armor with her cutie mark on it. Twilight levitated a map in front of her, and she stopped every few moments to let Rarity mark off parts of it with a quill pen. On another screen, there was a contingent of royal guards building a guard post on the outskirts of Ponyville. Shining Armor was there with an escort of unicorn guards, holding up a shield spell. Another screen showed an empty room in the Ponyville hospital. A fourth screen showed Pinkie Pie and Applejack in Fluttershy’s cottage. Pinkie was making funny faces at some squirrels, while Applejack was dicing apples. All the other screens showed scenes from Ponyville, the Everfree Forest, Canterlot…the last screen showed the box that held the Elements of Harmony.

Fluttershy stared in amazement. What was all this? How was this place seeing Equestria? None of the screens showed Rainbow Dash; where was she? And Canterlot Tower was protected by Princess Celestia’s strongest magic, so that only Princess Celestia and the Element bearers could get inside! How had Megiddo built something that could see inside the tower?

She was interrupted from her thoughts by the sound of Little Ball tapping the ground next to her, trying to get her attention. She turned and saw it pointing at the screens. They looked like her! What were they?

Fluttershy walked up to the screen. The ball kept pace with her, its eye locked on the screens. “That's where I'm from,” she said to the ball. “It's called Equestria. It’s where ponies like me live.” She pointed at Twilight, Rarity, Applejack, and Pinkie. “Those ponies are my friends.”

Little Ball hopped and clicked. It wanted a closer look.

Fluttershy picked up the wicker basket and let the ball hop into it. She flew up, bringing the ball level with the screens. It climbed to the edge of the basket and leaned out, towards the screens. It pointed at the first screen. “Those are Twilight Sparkle and Rarity,” Fluttershy said. “Twilight was there when the soldiers...” Fluttershy gulped and pushed down the memory. “When they came for me. Rarity is my best friend...they must be looking for me.” The ball pointed at the inside of Fluttershy's cottage. “Those are Applejack and Pinkie Pie. They're trying to take care of my animals while I'm gone.”

Little Ball pointed again at the same screen. It wanted to know what the strange little creatures running around the cottage were.

Fluttershy realized that Little Ball didn't know what an animal was. In a place like this, there was every chance that it had never seen a live animal before.

“Those are...” Fluttershy began, but stopped when she heard faint footsteps coming from the hall.

Fluttershy spun around. The doorway to the lab was closed, but she could still hear that the footsteps were coming from the intersection.

They needed to hide! But where? The part of the room she was in was brightly lit; there was a big overhead lamp, and there was all the light coming from the screens. She needed someplace that wasn't well lit.

Fluttershy grabbed the basket and flew up, over the screens, to the dark machinery that was powering it. There were no lamps here, just the orange glowing strips on the stretches of empty floor that ran between the machines. Fluttershy landed on top of one bulky machine. It was warm under her hooves, and she felt a hum coming from it as it ran. She couldn't see the door or get a clear view of the back of the screens from here, but that was fine as long as she was hidden. "Shh," she said to Little Ball. It clicked softly, acknowledging her. Fluttershy crouched down, letting her backpack lie on top of her, obscuring her yellow coat. She put her hooves over her head, and waited.

She heard the door open. There was the sound of metal footsteps on the metal floor around the screens, and Fluttershy realized she was holding her breath. She tried to relax, to let the tension run out of her body, to remember to breathe.

The footsteps moved in circles in the area around the screens. They stopped for a few moments, then began to spread out. The footsteps moved to the sides of the room; there had to be at least two, and they were splitting up to cover the room. The footsteps followed the walls, and then began to come closer; they had to have walked around the screens, and were checking the dark machines now.

Fluttershy held still. Little Ball made no sound.

The footsteps came closer. There were two sets of footsteps now, one on each side of her. The set on her left was moving down towards the back of the room, while the footsteps on her right were moving towards the front of the room, where the screens were. A yellow circle of light moved slowly along the ceiling next to her, sweeping back and forth. Fluttershy followed it with her eyes. The light scanned the roof for a moment, then moved down, along the sides of the machines, where the edge of the machine she was on was blocking it. For a moment the light moved back up, brushing over the ceiling above her, before moving back down. Fluttershy listened as the footsteps moved away.

After what seemed like far too long a time, Fluttershy heard the footsteps make their way back to the front of the room. There was a subtle change in the way the sound echoed as both soldiers walked back into the hallway. The door closed behind them, and Fluttershy heard the heavily muffled sound of the soldiers walking away.

Fluttershy stayed where she was, not moving an inch, until she was sure that they were gone. She stood back up, picked up the basket, and carefully moved away from her hiding spot. She didn't see any soldiers anywhere. She breathed a sigh of relief.

She couldn't stay here. She didn't think there was a way to communicate with her friends from here, and if she stayed another patrol might find her. “Let's go see what’s in the Storage room,” she said to Little Ball. Little Ball nodded, and she opened the door, closed it behind her, and flew back down the hall to the Storage Overflow room.

Preta Storage Overflow was a small space, almost a janitor’s closet with a few bare metal shelves. The only light was a single long white lamp that was set into the ceiling. Dust flecks floated in the air. A few unmarked cardboard boxes sat on the shelves. At the far end of the room, there was a padlocked cage, big enough for a cat or a dog, sitting on the ground against the wall.

A thick glass disc the size of a large medallion on a lanyard sat on the floor of the cage, with a pair of strange glass spikes and small lights, red and orange and yellow, winking on and off inside of it. Lines of yellow metal were woven through the disc. The disc was slowly inching around to face the door to see what was going on.

As soon as Fluttershy looked at her disk, her intuition told her that it was another animal. The logical part of her mind caught up just a moment later: another orphan.

The disc stared for a moment before its lights began to blink rapidly on and off. It pulled itself forward in little hops, moving to the bars of the cage, clearly trying to get her attention. Fluttershy walked over to it, with the clockwork ball following her.

“Do you know each other?” she asked. Little Ball shook its head and turned back towards the clock. The disc also shook its head as well as it could, and then went back to pushing up against the bars. The lights on it blinked in an intricate pattern that reminded her of some of the displays she’d seen in Twilight basement. It took her a few moments before she could start to understand what it was saying. The disc was asking if someone had sent her and the ball.

“Nobody’s sent us,” she said. “Were you expecting someone?”

The disc blinked yes. Yes, it was expecting someone from the Angel.

“Who’s the Angel?” Fluttershy asked.

The savior, the disc said excitedly. The Angel was going to help them. She was finding orphans and bringing them together, she brought them friends when before they had been alone. She had food, weapons, defenses for them. She worked day and night, she fought the robots, she kept them safe. She had carved a safe place out of the ruins with her own two hands, hidden from the surveillance of Megiddo. They hadn’t heard of her?

“No,” Fluttershy said. She noticed Little Ball standing next to her, leaning forward, listening intently. “Little Ball, have you?” She asked. Little Ball shook its head.

They needed to meet her, the disc said. They had to talk to her, listen to her. She would explain everything. It would be astounding, amazing. It would all become clear. She was near the Lava Pits, near the Seattle Underground, around Pioneer Square. She was close to the access corridors to the Lava Pits in the real Seattle, but she kept her sanctuary in the Seattle of Tomorrow. If one of them could open this cage and get the disc out, it could –

There were footsteps outside, coming down the hall.

Fluttershy stifled a gasp of terror. She looked around frantically, but there were no hiding places in the small closet.

The disc hopped, pointing at something high up on the wall. Fluttershy looked where it was pointing and saw a black square in the wall, above the space that the lamp was illuminating. A ventilation grate.

Fluttershy flew up to the grate, holding the basket in one hoof and pulling at the grate with the other. It swung open like a door, and Fluttershy pulled it all the way open easily. The grate was large enough for both her and the wicker basket to fit. She put the basket in first and gestured for the ball to climb out. Little Ball did so, jumping to the floor of the shaft.

She was just about to pull the basket out so that she could try to get the cage inside too when she heard the footsteps right outside the door. Fluttershy flew into the vent and closed the grate just as the door opened.

Three soldiers came in. They stopped in the middle of the room, looking around. Fluttershy hung back from the edge of the vent as a soldier’s lamp passed over it. After a few moments the three soldiers had looked everywhere in the room.

They stood still for a moment. There was a brief burst of crackling, and one of the soldiers picked up the cage and left with it. The other two followed after a brief moment, shutting the door behind them.

Fluttershy waited a few moments as the sound of footsteps faded away, then opened the ventilation grate and flew out. She was just about to open the door to the hallway when she saw yellow light just under the door.

The lamps outside were white. The soldiers’ lamps were yellow. There was one of them still standing outside the door.

She pulled back from the door. She couldn’t go out that way. The only way out of the room was the ventilation shaft.

Fluttershy flew back into the ventilation shaft and closed the grate behind her. The ball looked at her questioningly. “They’re guarding the door,” she whispered. “We need to go out this way.” The ball nodded, and they started down the ventilation shaft.

There wasn’t enough room to spread her wings inside, so both she and Little Ball had to walk as she pushed the wicker basket in front of her. Their footsteps made thum, thum sounds on the metal. She winced with each step; they sounded far too loud for her.

They moved along the vents for a few minutes; Fluttershy stopped every several seconds to listen. The vent went in a straight line forward, and she wondered where it might come out. There were small square vent grates in the wall, and through them Fluttershy could see that they were moving along another empty section of hallway. The hallway’s lights filtered into the vent through the grates, letting Fluttershy see where she was going.

There was the sound of more footsteps nearby, and Fluttershy froze, one hoof off the ground.

The footsteps came again, and Fluttershy realized that these were different. The soldiers walked in an even pattern, with a clear sound of metal on metal. These steps were quick and light, and sounded like the one who was making them was wearing something with soft soles.

Something passed right in front of the grate Fluttershy was in next to; she couldn’t get a good look at it. She held still, waiting for whatever it was to leave.

“Hello, friend!” someone said to her.

Author's Note:

So I've never actually been to Tacoma. Google Images gives me too many pictures with not enough context. I don't know anyone who lives there, so I can't ask them for interesting things that I can use. I haven't been able to visit. All I know about the area is the description in the Genius sample setting and what Google Maps (without Street View) tells me.

So I blew it all up. Blew it all up and built whatever I felt like. Which I guess makes me a bit of a hack, but hopefully one who can at least entertain you with explosions.