To Serve Bronies

by Fuzzy Necromancer

Chapter 48

“So uh, what was it you wanted to talk to me about?” Rainbow Dash asked, as if she didn’t know.

“You’ve talked to Jamal, right?” Applejack said, raising an eyebrow.

Rainbow Dash fluttered to the ground. “Yeah, I know.”

Applejack subjected her to a long, silent stare. Big Mac opened his mouth, but she shushed him with a wave of her hoof.

“Well?” Applejack said.

“Well what?” Rainbow said, innocently, rubbing back beads of sweat.

“By golly you know damn well what I’m talkin about,” Applejack said, grinding her teeth. “We’ve got grown unicorns acting like teenage dragons in heat or wild timber wolves!”

“Yeah, about that,” Rainbow Dash said, scratching her head and trying to maintain her disintegrating grin. “You see, like, the Twilight and the other unicorns asked me over here to negotiate for them.”

Rainbow Dash could feel ice forming on her fur from the collective cold stares in this herd of well-armed earth ponies.

“Negotiate? What’s tah negotiate about?”

“Come on,” Rainbow Dash said, as a familiar tide of self-loathing rose up inside her. She’d been through so much with her friends. They’d split up sometimes, they’d been tested, but they’d always gotten back together, right? Nothing was stronger than the friendship between the six of them, not chaos gods or corrupted queens or dragons or demons or skeleton hoards. “We’re all friends here, right? There’s gotta be some sort of friendly compromise. I…” Her words trailed off.

One time, in a cloud factory, Rainbow Dash had accidentally broken a coolant rod in the snow machine. The resulting chill had splashed liquid nitrogen across the cloud’s floor and she barely got out of there with her hooves still on her legs. Compared to the look that Applejack was giving her fight now, that smoking white puddle had been black tarmac on a scorching summer day.

“No,” Applejack breathed.

The crowd stamped in unison.

“Okay, fine! You’re right. It’s like…I just…I don’t want any fallout from this. I don’t want…” Rainbow Dash sighed. Deep down, she must have known what the right choice was. She was just too chicken-shit to face up to the facts.

“I know you’ll do the proper thing,” Applejack said.

Rainbow Dash nodded, trying to hold back tears of shame.

She took off for her house and crashed into Fluttershy.

#

“There’s one thing I don’t understand about the human life cycle,” Lyra said, pushing back thick pricker-bushes and swatting at parasprites.

“I guess I could explain, but I’m way more interested in pony ‘life cycles’,” Max said with a deep chuckle.

Without being able to say precisely why, Lyra Heartstrings felt a pressing need to stop Max from exploring that topic further. It was hard to keep up with Max’s erratic conversation, ranging from adventures of the wielders of the Elements of Harmony, human “conventions”, complaints about his ex-girlfriend, and probing economic and ecological questions she was ill-equipped to answer. She stomped a few snap-dragon flowers that had been nipping at the human’s fingers.

“You said baby humans take years to even learn to walk, right? Does that mean you age at different speeds? I mean, you’re in your twenties and you live on your own, so it can’t be slower than ponies all the way through.”

Max yelped and ducked as a double-hawk swooped over him.

“Don’t worry. Those things are only interested in fish and small birds,” Lyra reassured him, clearing a path in the worst of the underbrush with a low-intensity force spell.

“Yikes. Well, yeah, we take a lot longer to figure out how to balance and walk as babies. Maybe it’s harder to learn balancing on two legs instead of four,” he said, looking thoughtful.

“But you said your girlfriend was annoyed that you skipped out on her sixteenth birthday, and you spent it at your own house. Do humans, I don’t know, stake out separate territory when they are juveniles?”

“Um, not really?” He laughed nervously and pulled a parasprite out of his hair.

“I’m getting confused,” Lyra said. She stopped in the sandy depression under a twisted maple-oak. “Why would you even have to worry about her mother if she was fully matured?”

Max shrugged. “Some parents aren’t very understanding, you know how it is.”

“I really don’t,” Lyra said, although a cold, crawling sensation that had nothing to do with centipede-scorpions or parasprites suggested that she really did know what he was talking about.

“So maybe she’s not, like, grown grown, but girls mature faster than boys, and you can tell she’s all woman,” he said, winking.

His eyes sparkled like shoals of fish nibbling at a drowned corpse. He used the phrase “act your age,” referring to younger people, twice, and talked about “age is just a number”, and anyway, she knew what she was getting into, he said. There was something about a time, in a car park, where she didn’t want to “put out”, but he knew she really was just being shy. He’d done it before, so she couldn’t leave him with “blue balls” (she sensed she really, really didn’t want to know what that meant.) Revelations came towards her, thick and dark and bubbling under the surface, full of poison and nightmares.

“Well, that’s, um, isn’t that…interesting,” Lyra said. She had to act fast. The numbness of shock would wear off very soon, and then he’d ask why she was crying, and she didn’t know how she’d answer with a straight face. All her hopes. All her dreams. Her wildest fantasies came crashing down, like a tower of blocks at a bully’s hooves.

“Why don’t you l-lead the way for a while?” Lyra said, managing not to choke, or vomit, or scream.

“Sure thing,” Max said. He seemed to relax a little more now that he wasn’t talking about his “girlfriend.” Friend. That didn’t seem friendly at all.

Lyra got down on all fours to decrease the chance of stumbling or collapsing.

She knew about human anatomy. She knew about the weak-points of the surprisingly fragile system. They were endurance predators, designed to chase, and track, and follow, until the exhausted victim was no longer able to escape.

“I’m so disappointed in you,” she said.

He turned around, and looked confused when she dropped the big, heavy rock on his head.

It wasn’t as clean as she’d hoped. He kept protesting his innocence and throwing out conflicting explanations. She stomped on his ribs, the reached down and, with the aid of telekinesis, snapped his neck. His leg shuddered twice.

She sat down, threw up, and broke down sobbing.

Comments

[bonberjean]

wow... that got dark real quick

[Alien Entity]

so I guess this whole Lyra subplot was just an excuse to (temporarily) turn this story into a revenge fic? uh, okay then...

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

9455483
On one hand, I can acknowledge that, but on the other hand, *waves at the tags and the preceding chapters*

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

9456271
I'm not sure I understand what you're saying.

[bonberjean]

9456940
still no death tag, so what Lyra did was basically murder

[Alien Entity]

9456941
All I meant was that it seems like the whole thing with lyra searching for a human in the forest was just an excuse to have a scene where some rapist gets brutally murdered. It's a bit anti-climactic if you ask me, not to mention overkill.

[JDunk1971]

Well, firstly, the first one down. Secondly, I'm delighted that you returned to this story. Thank you!

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

9457340
Oh sorry! I forgot there was a Death tag! I'll fix that right now.

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

9461101
Thank you. I may take a long time, but I'll get there in the end. :)

[Godiswithus3]

...I...Um...jeez...

...I'm gonna lay down.

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

9462793
Take all the time you need