> The Last Flower
>  by TheMareWhoSaysNi
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

> Prologue: Where Are All The Flowers Gone?
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

Air. A cloud of oxygen back inside the heart. Blood supplied in the brain and the lungs hurting from aspiring too much emptiness.

Soarin’s eyes opened wide, his upper body sitting up in one single move, like pushed by a spring. Surrounding him, a crystal darkness, gloominess of the saddest days, those saddest days of routine. Silent was purring around him, an engine whispering in his ears, along with beats, like knocks at his body’s door.

His latest memories came back to his mind. As if he were still lying against the dusty red ground of the battlefield, as if he heard the astounding strike, that ground shaking under his feet, and the whistling air, bursting out his eardrums. And then, came nothingness.

Where were his fighting buddies? Where was she? How long had he been gone? Only for an hour, or maybe a whole lifetime…?

He had only one certainty now – he was alive. The rest was as hazy as the atmosphere of this cold and dark room.

Once the shock over, Soarin ran a hand over his face. His skin wasn’t cracked but dry and his lips were chapped. In theory, less than a decade separated him from this vision, only print left of a past that was impossible to situate.

Then, he touched his legs. Only by palpating the flesh and slipping his palm along the bones could he make sure they were still attached to his body.

That was when a new sound materialized. Regular yet piercing. The booster shot against oblivion. A small mechanical cry testifying life. One of the rare things he was able to affirm he knew.

The door of the room in which he was opened up. A narrowed ray of light came across the bed with immaculate sheets. A nurse appeared, wearing plain lab coat and pants, her pink hair into a bun. She stayed standing there for a few seconds, staring at him as if she were staring at some wandering ectoplasm. Then her face shut down, the spell already erased.

She came forward.

“Where am I?” asked Soarin in a reedy voice, feeling like his throat was on fire.

“Safe”, was all the nurse answered.

She took a small flashlight from inside her lab coat, and without any kind of explanations, opened wide the young man’s green pupils, and observed them one by one, her beam straight into his retina.

No other words went through the nurse’s white lips. Her back already was all Soarin’s stunned eyes could have a glimpse of. He needed clarifications. Something had happened and he had the right to know.

For a few minutes, paralyzed by the simple fact of breathing, in, out, in, out, he remained this way, his eyes lost in the bleached space. Too many and too little at the same time was all he was holding, invisible, between his fingers.

When the white outfit came back, he felt as if another whole lifetime had gone by.

She was pushing an old rusty wheelchair, which seat’s leather appeared to be worn at some spots, clear despite the strange darkness. Once at his level, she pulled off the patch stuck against Soarin’s chest, under the stiff-clothed shirt he was wearing. Her hand with long pale fingers patted the seat.

“I’d like to walk…”

“No. Four years of coma in a lying position made you weak.”

Was she always talking this way? As if she were talking to a child, or to an incompetent person.

The way she heled him to go from his bed to the wheelchair had nothing of the Healers’ usual benevolence. Just like in every caste, those who took this path didn’t always do it for desire or passion. It was an inheritance, as sure as the blood in their veins, like the eyes of a grandmother or the smile of a father.

Things might have changed a lot, if the basics of this inheritance were neglected, since it was the only law still presiding over the West Continent, and this country they called Equestria.

Not a word was uttered during all the time of his journey in the wheelchair. The sound of the rusty iron was the only thing resounding in the quiet of the night. If they were at night. There was no clock in the shady corridor. There was no window neither. The floor, the ceiling, the walls, it was nothing but plaster and dust. Military hospitals had never been renowned for being welcoming places, however, it seemed to Soarin he never had never seen such a place before.

At the end of the corridor, the nurse pushed his chair in a tiny room with a pale light she closed thanks to a metal gate. Once the box closed, it went down with a soft purr and finally stopped in front of another corridor, a little less dark than the previous one.

“Where are we going?” ventured Soarin.

“You’ll know it very soon.”

What seemed sure now was that they couldn’t be inside a military hospital, as he previously thought so. Between these walls there didn’t seem to exist anything restless. There were no staff, no other sick persons. He hadn’t even seen other rooms. Neither there was any kind of indications about where they were in the building or even whether this was indeed a building.

When the nurse pushed him through this new corridor, Soarin watched with eyes wide opened the first other inhabitants of this weird place. Behind doors made with wire fences, piled up on the ground or lying together on the same bunk, there were men, men by dozen and dozen. Those who weren’t asleep were looking at him passing by with a sad face like he already had seen many in the battlefield. Wearing grey and dirty pajamas, with beards shading their chins, their complexion waxy, some were coughing such as patients in a terminal phase.

In another corridor, more men, this time in great shape, were sleeping on bunk beds, in rooms which doors were wide opened. Yet, when passing them by, Soarin thought he had a glimpse at thin strips of red lights, crisscrossing, looking like loosen stitches of the same sweater.

His journey stopped at the end of this corridor, where a door similar to the other was waiting for someone brave to dare going through the infrared toing-and-froing. The nurse quickly drummed a code on the tactile keyboard blinking beside each knob, and a small click sound shut down the lights, lighting up the walls of the room at the same time.

While she was pushing him inside, he noticed another young man, sleeping and snoring on one of the bunks hanging at the wall thanks to metal chains.

In a few seconds, Soarin was transported from his wheelchair to a bed and the young woman dressed in red forced his legs to go into a strange iron machine, which immediately imprisoned his calves and thighs.

On the bunk under his, his new roommate didn’t seem to be equipped as well. He still could try and ask a question, but something told him he would find as many answers to that as he already had.

After this action, the nurse stuck against his neck some sort of small white cotton patch, that she had inside her lab coat.

“Sleep now.”

Soarin wanted to reply he had slept enough for years, however, he couldn’t even open his mouth that, already, his eyelids seemed to be as heavy as lead, and his mind was sliding to another country.

-----------------------------------------------

She used to smell like cinnamon. A spicy fragrance, which tickled your nostrils each time she was passing you by. One night, he had tasted one of her sweat drop, with the tip of his tongue. It tasted like cinnamon as well.

Or at least, it was the feeling he had then.

It felt as if she were still here in front of him. Her elbow leaning against the ergonomic pillow he always let her use, she watched him and when he opened his eyes, she smiled a little, softly, her lips stretching more at one side of her cheeks, forming a delicate small dimple. Her hair messy and her skin, soft as silk, against his own skin.

“Are you watching me in my sleep or am I dreaming?”

He took a strand of purple hair, make it slip between his fingers, banging into knots.

“You’re in my bed. It’s not as if I was some kind of lunatic lurking in the dark.”

He loved her. He loved her, oh how much he loved her. So not perfect. But perfect for him. Yes, he loved her more than he had ever loved anybody. The way people loved only in novels.

Where was she now?

------------------------------------------------------

But it wasn’t a fragrance of sweet cinnamon which woke Soarin up. If there was a hand trying to get under his shirt, it wasn’t the one, small and rough, of the girl he loved so much.

Bigger, more callused, these hands weren’t trying to caress him, they seemed to be more like grabbing his flesh as if it were examining a ripped fruit.

When Soarin opened up his eyes, his heart skipped a beat. His roommate, his face stroke out by a large scar coming from the top of his forehead until under his right ear, and which the stitch, reddish, were easy to distinguish even in the half-dark, was kneeling beside him on his bunk. Even seeing him woken up didn’t stop his exploration.

Once the shock registered, Soarin took the man’s wrist and removed the hand searching under his clothes.

The other man laughed in a whisper, his grey eyes almost completely shut down, as if nothing here was traumatizing or at least disturbing.

“Got to get used to untimely fingering here, dude”, hurled the man with his hoarse voice. “And seeing the merchandise, it’s going to happen, like, a lot. All day and all night long, I’d say.”

“What—What do you mean?”

Once again, the man laughed, though this time, his own voice finally strangled, and he turned his head in order to spit a few phlegm on the concrete floor.

“You must be the Military they kept up there for three years… The one in the coma, right? I knew they couldn’t have found a new one, so fresh, after so long not going back to the surface.”

Three years. Three years in coma. No. It was four. The nurse had said four years a bit earlier, he was sure. It meant he had spent three years in this place, whatever this place could be. But what about the other year?

It seemed to Soarin that the more he was told, the less he could understand what was going on. This period during which he had stayed unconscious was all he was sure of. The rest… It was fleeing shadows on the immaculate of anguish.

But maybe… Yes, maybe this accidental traveling companion had some of the keys which would open the doors of his understanding. So he could at least know what this was all about. If the Uncivilized War had ended, then who won it, if not what had become the survivors and of the Resistance Army?

“What is this place, anyway?” he asked with a hint of distrust.

“Here? That’s the Underworld, dude! No one up the surface knows it exists, not even the Chrysalis woman.”

“The Chrysalis woman?”

“The leader of the Hive, the floating Ghetto!”

Taken over by a sudden dizziness, Soarin lowered his head and buried his hands into his midnight blue hair. A lot of things had changed in four years. As if he had entered an alternate universe where he couldn’t comprehend neither the language nor the customs.

The name of Chrysalis, on the other hand, didn’t sound like out of nothingness. Among the swarming thickness of his blocked memories, these sounds reacted in a more striking manner. Hair like a curtain of spider’s threads with a strange hue of blue was moving in front of his eyes.

In the war which had led him in the place he was now, she wasn’t operating with the Resistance Army. No, she was affiliated to the enemy camp, Sombra’s troops, the Angel Stealers.

So, this woman led a Ghetto. So, this woman was still alive.

He had to learn more. He had to before the nurse would be back, because he was sure she would be back.

Taking a deep breath, Soarin rose his head again, and looking straight into his roommate’s eyes, which scary aspect now seemed to be a little less unpleasant, he asked:

“Is the Uncivilized war over?”

“It’s been four years now. The Resistants has released this virus, in order to speed things up. It killed the Angel Stealer. And a great deal of the male population with it. Now it’s worse than it ever been. Well, here it’s not so bad. If you’re not bothered to be turn into the ladies’ private genitor…”

This last detail remained one of the shadiest aspect of Soarin’s horizon, which was slowly starting to get clearer. He had seen all those men when he arrived. The ones piled up, sick, maybe even dying, and the others. The ones in great shape. The ones sleeping in bedrooms such as his, on bunk beds such as his.

The shrilling sound of an alarm cut their conversation short. Right after the chirring started, a blinding red light starting to blink in the corridor. It filled each corner, pervading everywhere, and Soarin saw his roommate turning pale.

Without an explanation, he left his bunk, tumbling down. As soon as he recovered from the fall, he went back to his bed, and took a refuge under his blanket flecked with brown stains. He was hiding, curled up, now a child terrorized by his surroundings.

Whatever this alarm meant, it couldn’t be a good sign. In all likelihood, someone who had his face cut in two, might have been through horrible things before, yet his dread, emphasized by jolts in his curled up long body, showed that whatever was going on felt even worse for him.

The wide opened door of their room got shut down in a slam. Though the light from the corridor no longer pervaded the room, the alarm’s, redder than ever, stronger than ever, never stopped gnawing at the air. Clearly, Soarin heard each of the other doors slamming the same way, above the alarm’s cries.

It lasted for minutes and minutes, minutes during which, pinned against his mattress, the young man was unable of the least move, his breath weak in his chest, now aching.

His roommate kept on shaking, the jolts of his body making the nearest wall vibrate.

Then, a distant sound, like an explosion, resounded in the middle of all the rest, followed by screams. Like a stampede. The metal gates separating the sick men from the other corridor probably were shaken, and the doors of the other bedrooms in his corridor probably were knocked into. Gunshots were exchanged. Other screams followed. Female and male voices were mixing up with the other sounds, forming an unbearable cacophony.

Just like the other man on the bunk under his, Soarin put his hands at each side of his head, shut his eyes. The racket was barely muffled. He even felt as if the more he tried to block the sounds, the more they were piercing his eardrums.

He jolted when he heard an explosion closer than the others. Sounds of boots against the concrete floor resounded, then something like sounds of a lock. So close. So close. As if they were right in front of his door.

When he took off his hands, in order to check, his heart compressed his chest, so much it turned out hurtful. It wasn’t as if it was happening right in front of his door. It was happening in front of his door.

Once again, an explosion. Small, concentrated, but an explosion all the same. The bedroom’s door opened wide again, and Soarin saw a young woman appeared on the threshold. The bottom of her face was devoured by a black scarf which prevented from seeing anything else than a pair of blue eyes. Her hair was covered by a scarf as well, but a few red strands escaped. In her hands there was a heavy gun, black and gleaming, almost too big for her frail arm.

Without the least hesitation, she walked to him, with fire in her eyes. His legs bundled up in the odd machine where the nurse had locked his bottom body, Soarin was unable to move and to defend himself when she grabbed his neck with her palm and stuck there, very indelicately, a cotton patch similar to the one the nurse had put on him a bit earlier.

Just like previously, he was unable to fight against sleep, immediately taking over him. Right before he fell back into unconsciousness, however, he was able to have a glimpse at the young woman’s face, when she removed her scarf for a short moment in order to adjust it.

She couldn’t be more than twenty-three. A little less than his own age. And almost the same age as she might have now, if she had survived to the Uncivilized War.
> Like Golden Petals Scattering
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

Through the mist of forced sleep, Soarin had a glimpse at a white wall, turning around itself like a merry-go-round. He closed his eyes again and let inertia rocking his body. It felt as if he were floating on a cotton-like cloud, which could have been pleasant, if it wasn’t for the sour smell of sweat mixing up with the rest, obliging him to wake up many times.

When he finally regained full consciousness, the white walls he had discovered earlier appeared again. Far from being perfectly immaculate, conversely they looked more like being of a bleached kind of grey. If he hadn’t the slightest idea of where he was, he knew one thing – it wasn’t the cell he’d been brought to after his first awakening.

He needed a few more minutes to take in every other element of this new room. In the back, on an old cast iron machine, a kettle was whistling, spitting out tiny puffs of smoke. Somewhere near one of the walls, a huge table was overcrowded with maps, pencils, papers and ammunitions. A loophole as large as a brick was the only visible gap.

The background noise which had accompanied his semblance of dreams, like creaking wood, suddenly stopped, and finally Soarin could see, close to the kettle, still whistling, a young woman. She had put on slippers decorated with an elegant satin bow. Her long thin legs were covered of black transparent pantyhose and she was wearing a quilted black dress with two pockets on each side which, despite how simple it was, seemed to have been sewn by the most skilled Crafters ever. Between her hands was a jacket with a hood that she was mending while humming.

The young woman put down her work on the rocking chair on which she had sat during all this time, and walked to the cast iron stove to get the kettle.

“I thought that, when you will wake up, you will appreciate a good cup of hot coffee. It is recreated coffee, of course… but it is almost as good as real coffee. Or so, I hope it is.”

Soarin could feel she was trying to sound cheerful but that, despite her efforts, something in her voice sounded odd. As if she didn’t believe her own words. Her voice with aristocratic hints and her refined manners clashed a bit with how austere the place he was in looked. At each of her step, her elegant hairstyle, a whirlwind of carefully controlled purple curls, was moving with the grace of a ballet dancer.

She walked through the room with the kettle in her hands, obviously looking for something, and for a very brief while, a sparkling light went through her marine blue eyes, before she went to the table from where she was able to unearth two cups, one of them with a broken handle.

“I suppose this will do the trick,” she whispered, shrugging.

Not that Soarin thought this young person to be an unpleasant company, no matter who she was, however, it was the third time in a short while he opened his eyes on a different place, and too many mysteries were still wrapped around his mind.

He had not forgotten what had happened before he arrived here. The alarm and the red light. The screams, the explosions. And this armed girl who had stepped into his room and sent him off to sleep, in all likelihood so she could bring him here. What was the point of all this?

When he tried to sit up and to put back into order the few pieces of this puzzle at his disposal, he found himself hindered again, his arms blocked by handcuffs around his wrists at each side of the mattress.

The young woman put down the cup she had prepared for him and ran to the bed, taking a tiny key out of her dress’s pocket.

“I am sorry. Sunset Shimmer was scared you would run away if you woke up in the middle of the night. I forgot to get you out of these.”

She hurried to get him out of the two bracelets, before going back to the table where she had left the cups, still steaming from hot coffee.

When Soarin sat up, he noticed he had been taken out of his other shackle, the strange machine in which the nurse had forced his legs before obliging him to sleep. Much to his surprise, he discovered he was able to move his legs again, though they hadn’t exactly regained their whole suppleness.

He welcomed the cup given by the young woman with pleasure. Whatever was the place he was now, the unbearable heat from outside couldn’t touch him, and though the air was far from cold, it was difficult not to shiver without the blanket over his shoulders.

While he was blowing about the ebony-colored liquid, Soarin couldn’t ignore the weight of this female gaze upon him, and when he looked up, he saw his new fellow staring at him with an open intensity.

“Please, forgive me,” she said, lowering her eyes. “I did not want to look impolite. It’s just that… it has been quite a while since I haven’t seen any man. My name’s Rarity, by the way.”

“Nice to meet you,” he answered automatically.

Quite a while without seeing any man. Then, came back to his mind the words of the scared man whom had shared his room for a couple of hours. There had been a virus which had exterminated a part of the male population. The war had been won thanks to this unconventional solution, and… And, he wasn’t sure what exactly.

It was his turn now to stare at the young woman. What was her name, already? Oh, yes. Rarity. Funny. If he believed everything he had been said, it was himself whom seemed to represent some kind of rarity. He had been told about “The ladies’ genitors”, if he remembered right. He didn’t have enough time to gather more information. Maybe Rarity would be able to light his path.

Yet, even before she had drunk her cup of coffee up, the latter put it back on the table and brushed an inexistent dust out of her dress. Compared to her former casualness, she now seemed to be taken over by a stiffness sucking natural out of her every move.

Without a glance at him, she walked through the room again, and went to a door Soarin noticed for the first time.

“I am going to get Sunset Shimmer to tell her you’re awake.”

Then she left, closing the door behind her so delicately he barely heard the sound of a click.

The silence of a wake suddenly weighed all over the room. With his eyes, he looked all around him, as if expecting to discover something else he would not have seen before. He didn’t know much than before he woke up, except maybe one thing. Rarity had said the same name twice – Sunset Shimmer.

The way she had spoken about her let Soarin think she was some kind of leader. It was her who gave the orders, anyway, since she had demanded to keep him handcuffed so he wouldn’t run away. As if he could have gone far… He didn’t even know where he was.

His legs shaky, he got up and made a few steps to the small loophole in the wall. All he could see through it was a dune of red sand, similar to any other dune.

New sounds of steps coming from the corridor drew his attention, and when the door got opened again, another young woman was standing behind it. Her blond hair tied with a red ribbon, she had worn a tunic equipped with a kangaroo pocket and a cowl neck that probably was put in front of the mouth once outside, a pair of worn-out jeans and black boots. She was carrying a tray with food in her hands.

Rarity was right behind her, and stepped into the room after the girl, visibly more relaxed than she was before she left.

Unceremoniously, the new young girl put the tray on Soarin’s bed, grabbing an apple as red as the sun on her way, in which she bit with delight. It had been ages since he hadn’t seen a fruit of this quality.

“What yar waitin’ fer, dude? It ain’t goin’ to eat ya! It’s the opposite, even.”

“Are you… Sunset Shimmer?”

“Nope! Ah am Applejack. Sunny’s goin’ to be here soon. She had to harness her horse.”

Apparently not impressed by his presence, nonchalantly leaning against the table, Applejack kept on eating her apple, her mouth half-opened. Her manners a bit uncouth were in a complete opposition with Rarity’s a bit affected behavior, offering a rather delightful visual contrast.

In all honesty, it was hard for him to envision what kind of connection there could be between two persons so different. The famous Sunset Shimmer, once she would finally deign to appear, would have to answer to many questions.

Soarin walked to his bed, passing by an Applejack who still was not disconcerted, and sat to admire the first meal he had since he opened his eyes – at all.

On the tray, inside a terra cotta bowl, was a soup smelling like mushrooms and, to accompany it, in a smaller bowl, a generous portion of grilled grasshoppers, smelling like lime.

Only once his spoon plunged into the bowl soup, Soarin did realized he was starving. In order to keep in alive in the same shape as he was during the war, he probably had been stuffed of liquid vitamins and proteins, but it would never replace a good meal. Sure, it lacked meat, but animals were already rare during the Community Power era.

He was in the middle of his meal when a fourth person entered in the room. From the moment Soarin looked up, he knew who she was. These turquoise eyes, he couldn’t forget, even if he forced himself. They might have the same color as ice, but they encapsulated a flame as blazing of an ardent fire. These eyes were all he had clearly seen from the girl who had sent him off to sleep last night. These eyes and a strand of red hair.

In reality, they were ribbed with a dazzling yellow, forming some kind of golden furrow into boiling lava. She was dressed with leather from head to toe.

It was her. Sunset Shimmer. The leader of that odd group.

“Ah checked last night followin’ the guidelines like ya said,” claimed Applejack to the young woman. “Ah don’t think he’s sick. Well, we’d know it better if we had a Healer, but…”

“OK. Thanks, AJ. Since Lyra’s on her break, we need someone at the control room.”

“Goin’. See ya, good-lookin’,” she said to Soarin, winking at him before she left.

If it remained the least of doubts, she had just swept it with her arm. She was the one telling the others what to do. Hence the first question Soarin asked her, as soon as she sat in front of him, her legs parted, her arms leaning against the back of the chair she had just grabbed.

“Where are we?”

“Canterlot. Well… What’s left of it.”

The Uncivilized War had left scars behind that had disfigured Equestria’s capital forever. Even he knew that. The Angel Stealer’s Army had invaded each of the Ghettoes of this part of the West Continent, but it truly was Canterlot that had been attacked the most, because it was the cradle of the Community Power, the place where decisions were taken. As arbitrary as they had been.

However, it was not exactly what he was expected when he had asked where they were. Which ghetto this was didn’t really matter to him, in reality. What he wanted to know was what was this place, the place he was right now, and whether or not he was a prisoner, like he had seemed to be where he had been taken off.

“It’s a bunker and a nuclear shelter located at the East of the Ghetto. And no, you’re not a prisoner here, conversely to what happens in the Underworld Ghetto. It’s to be said that there, the population is more than limited, so men are an even rarer thing than they are at the surface.”

“Because of the virus?”

“Yes, partly because of the Y virus. Also because the lack of sun creates other disease, diseases we can’t cure or we don’t remember how to cure. So, when they get men who are sturdy and in great shape, they don’t want to risk one of them to escape. Do you understand why?”

Soarin nodded. No need to be a genius to understand the problem this shortage of a male population was. The perpetuation of the human gender was now disrupted, like a mechanic with one piece which ceased to turn.

The words of his former roommate came up straight into his face. The ladies’ private genitor… This was why the doors were secured. This was why he had told him he would be requested all day long.

He took a glimpse at Sunset Shimmer, in the same position, who seemed to be lost in thoughts, her eyes in the direction of the loophole. She had come all the way down to this Underworld Ghetto to get him out and to bring him to this bunker. There was an explanation. And the only one able to find a way through his mind was this one: she also wanted to use him in order to perpetuate the human gender.

And yet… And yet, she had affirmed him he wasn’t a prisoner here. If she had handcuffed him, it was only so he wouldn’t run away.

“Is that why I’m here? To be a genitor?”

“No,” answered Sunset Shimmer, never taking her eyes off the loophole. “It has nothing to do with this.”

She left her chair, and started to walk up and down through the room. In the back, Rarity was still here, busy to mend her work again, humming and rocking on her chair.

Sunset Shimmer leaned against the wall, and deeply sighed. In her eyes, the fire wasn’t burning now, it was something else. An expression between melancholy and fear. That was how he knew there was even more to it all. So much more than a question of perpetuating the gender…

“I need… We need soldiers. Very, very good soldiers. A lot of them are dead, many others have decided not to fight again, because they’re traumatized and they’d rather sleep with women who don’t love them, or not the way they’d like. The female fighters almost all joined the Leader of the Underworld Ghetto, what’s left are still prisoners of Queen Chrysalis… Queen… Who the hell does she think she is?”

Just like last night, the name Chrysalis resounded in a familiar way into Soarin’s chest, as if an enormous bell was shaking between his bones. Conversely to a lot of things which remained wrapped in silky threads, this one was hitting his retina each time.

What he has suspected was clear now. Someone like Sunset Shimmer would never take a risk such as the one she had taken last night, seeping into a place where the best female soldiers of Equestria were, just for something like sex, although sex could be important in their case. Her goal was bigger than that.

“Did you see that dune?” she asked him by showing the loophole with her chin.

Then, without waiting for his answer, she went on.

“It was where Sweet Apple Acres was, where Applejack and her whole family used to live. Of course, it was a geoplant, but… Chrysalis had created some kind of army, an army that’s not made of human beings, though they look like humans, but of very sophisticated androids, like they created back to the postmodern era, and she calls them Butterflies. She had chosen Canterlot as the “guinea pig” of her “army”. And she had destroyed the whole Ghetto. If we can’t quickly gather an army as well, she’ll destroy every other Ghettoes the same way, will steal their Angels and will get done with the work Sombra had started with the Uncivilized War.”

A hundreds of years before, a solar storm of an inequivalent strength had destroyed every bit of the very advanced human technologies. The communication systems of yesteryears had been wiped out, and with them, monetary transactions, and everything which constituted the world back then. Shortly after this, several natural disasters, coupled with global warming, had finished the existence of these civilizations.

From then, the planet had turned into this heap of red sand, and humans of the now called Equestria country, one of the rare places of the West Continent to be still populated, owed their survival only to these entities fallen from the sky called Angels for this reason. They were a powerful magnetic strength imprisoned in spheres of tempered glass which could supply a whole ghetto of a hundreds of inhabitants with electricity and various sources of energy, allowing, among other things, to grow crops. Before the Uncivilized War, a Ghetto like Canterlot possessed around ten Angels, while smaller communities could have only one.

And so, anyone with a certain number of Angels in their possession would dispose of an immense power, able to get enough energy to render a part of the leading-edge technology of the postmodern era. And to run what was left of the world.

It had always been Sombra’s goal, a self-proclaimed king, and in all likelihood, it was now also the goal of his former right-hand person.

However, it remained details which, for Soarin, were still a mystery. Alright, he was a very good soldier, one of the best from his infantry unit, but how could he make a difference in front of a whole army of androids able to destroy a Ghetto as large as Canterlot? Even in the case her and her friends were excellent fighters, it would never be enough.

“I’ve been in a coma for four years. I’m not even sure I’ll be able to shot with a gun again. And… I’m only one man.”

“But not any man. One of the best gunner of the whole late Resistance Army. None of us here is from the Military Caste. Applejack is a Producer, Rarity’s a Crafter, and I’m only an Envoy. We had learned to shoot with a gun as you go along, just like everybody else here in New Canterlot. Back in the Army, didn’t they say that one person is enough to make a difference?”

Soarin opened his mouth, ready to contradict Sunset Shimmer, but he closed it back immediately. The image of his General, this legend called Bow Hothoof, came back to his mind. This litany was the one he used to repeat to his recruit each time they wanted to give up, thinking they were bumping into an obstacle impossible to overcome.

Without him to even nod, Sunset Shimmer knew he hadn’t had anything to add. And, anyway, if he didn’t fight by their side, where would he go? Everything he had known was gone. His army mates, his superiors, his family, they all had died or were missing. They were everything he had now.

Or in the least, almost everything he had.

“Fine. Let’s say I give you until I’m back from my trip to answer, would it be alright?”

“You’re going on a trip?”

“Let’s rather say I’m going on an expedition. And it’s not for pleasure. I told you, I need soldiers. There’s someone, someone hiding deep in Equestria, in the middle of the Everfree Forrest. Do you know about it?”

“Of course I do.”

The Everfree Forrest was one of the rare remains of the postmodern era. Back then, it was a protected natural park. No one really knew how it had survived the various disasters, but it had survived and now, it was the only natural space that had not been created by a geoplant nor cultivated despite a soil polluted by lead and mercury.

It also was the place where all the surviving animals had taken refuge, out of horses, that humans had been able to keep domesticated. Known to be dangerous, peopled with wild beasts and Transients, it wasn’t a place where it was good to go deep into, when alone and defenseless.

“This person is the only one able to operate guns which would allow us to measure up to Chrysalis’s androids, the Butterflies.”

“Is it a Master of Elements? I thought you were looking for soldiers.”

“No, she’s no Master of Elements. But she has known one very well, and she taught her everything she knew.”

“You mean… someone like a cousin?”

“For example, yeah…”

Unsure of why, from the moment she had said these words, Soarin had felt his heart beating faster, and the bells of his memory ringing again. Maybe it was coincidence. Yes, nothing but sheer coincidence. In fact, nothing could let him believe she was still alive. The last time he had seen her, she was running toward a mined shack in order to help fighting mates. Then, himself had suffered from the consequences of a deflagration, and his own mind had met with nothingness…

“You knew her very well, so what do you think? Would the Everfree Forrest be a place where would hide First Lieutenant Rainbow Dash?”
> Grown Through the Mud of Adversity
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

A light blast caressed the crown of trees, so furnished they met and formed a crisscross of leaves and branches. This whisper lasted for a few more seconds, before nature turned back to its quietness air. A couple of ring neck pheasants landed on one of the branches, nibbling at worms on the way.

From her spot, lying low against the greenery all over the ground, Rainbow Dash grabbed an arrow in her back, as slow as a setting sun. As soon as it was positioned inside her bow, her cautious transformed into precision and swiftness, and within the next second, the couple of pheasants fell from their perch at the sound of dead leaves.

With the quails she’d trapped a bit earlier, it would probably be enough for a few stews, soups and dishes cooked in sauce. Anyhow, whatever she brought back from her hunting expeditions, her mother always knew how to cook it.

Lately, she had to go deeper and deeper into the Everfree Forrest in order to find games with a consequent size. The birds and the rodents she found close to her home were a little too bony for her liking, and were less and less easy to catch, as if they understood she wasn’t here for a simple walk.

If she were conscious of it all, Fluttershy would probably be furious to see her this way, hunting and killing the few species that had survived the various human disasters. These innocent victims of her gender’s madness deserved a bit of a rest now.

Rainbow Dash got up and hurried to pick up her last catch of the day, her every senses on the lookout. In the most remote spots often were the biggest and most dangerous animals, such as stags and buffalos. If one of them caught her off-guard and decided to charge at her, she would have nowhere to hide and escape.

Another rustle from the foliage surrounding her surprised her, as she had just grabbed the pheasants, piled up at the feet of a tree, in a maelstrom of greenery and feathers. Her heart beating faster, she stood motionless for a few seconds, an arrow in her hand and her ear pricking, expecting to see an enormous enraged wild beast emerging, or maybe someone lost, at any moment.

Her relief was huge when she noticed it was nothing but a ferret, hurrying to bring back a harvest of nuts and acorns to his closest burrow, among the mess that was the ground.

A few moments after that, she was throwing the pheasants in a hessian bag in which were her other preys, as well as the result of today’s picking: berries and edible plants, as well as a few silkworms and other insects, which always constituted a good snack, and the leaves necessary for Pinkie Pie to cook her remedies.

The way back to her shack, in the company of singing birds and of the stream she had to follow not to get lost, happened to get longer and longer. Walking alone with no one to talk to hadn’t always been easy, but slowly, Rainbow Dash had got used to this forced loneliness.

No matter how much she wondered about it, and she had done it at least a thousand times, she couldn’t help thinking she had taken the right decision by choosing to settle here at the end of the Uncivilized War. Though sometimes she felt homesick, hidden in the middle of this island of wild quietness, she could protect the ones she loved, all that was left from her former life, from the torments of human greed.

The day she had woken up in Canterlot’s military hospital, surrounded by agonizing half-corpses, in the stench of blood and rotting limbs, her body marked forever, she had understood how absurd had been her life until then. Fighting couldn’t lead to peace, not like this. All that came out in the end was more pain and lives lost forever.

And it wasn’t only because of the death or disappearance of almost all these she cared about. It also was because of the state in which she had found the few surviving ones. Her own mother had lost her right eye, Pinkie Pie had been scalped, and had to stay hidden for months and months, waiting for a hair and skin graft. As for Fluttershy… Fluttershy was nothing but the shadow of who she used to be.

When she finally reached her destination, the sun was down at the West. At first, the wooden shack in which she lived with her recreated family was nothing but an old abandoned dump, with rotten planks and a floor covered with droppings. With time and hard work, by the sweat of their bows, they had fortified the walls, built a decent solid roof, then little by little they had improved it until it became that small cabin with a floor and a few rooms.

Alright, it was far from the comfort, which then seemed to be scanty, of the Canterlot’s military base, but everything from there and the memories linked to it were bygones, and Rainbow Dash had sworn to herself she would never look back. Nowadays, she wasn’t living with much, they had no running water and no electricity, but she was living far from insanity, far from conflicts of power and far from hate. And it was enough.

“It’s me,” she announced by crossing the wooden door, as if it could have been anyone else.

“Hello, Dashie… Was the hunt good? You forgot your water flask again, today.”

The small tin bottle still was on the long wooden table in the middle of the first floor’s single room.

Pinkie Pie was sitting here, leaning over a notebook with yellowing pages. Each time she found a new remedy, or another medicinal effects in a plant, the young Healer made a full account of it in some kind of grimoire in her possession since she was a child. She drew the flowers, leaves and various berries with a precision of a metronome, in the least of details.

Traditionally, this kind of grimoires were handed from generations to generations. The young woman could have ceased to gather material for it from the day she’d arrived in the Everfree Forrest, where there was less chances than anywhere else for her to meet a man, yet she hadn’t. Always, she said that, whatever happened, this precious document could be useful, one day or another.

Even the horrors she had seen during the war, even the most horrible deaths and the vilest of pains, had never been able to change Pinkamena Diane Pie’s dynamic and positive character. Her whole family had either died or gone missing, yet she never lost hope, nor her faith in the human kind.

It was what Rainbow Dash admired the most in the girl who happened to become her best friend. What used to irritate her back at the war had revealed itself to be a source of comfort more radiant than the sun’s light, and from it she regularly drew the strength to regrow. Without her by her side, she had no doubt she could never stand back up and decide to survive.

“Where’s mom?” asked Rainbow Dash, putting her bag on the table, sitting down as well.

“Oh, out to do the laundry. She’ll be here very soon.”

“Good… Won’t you check out what I got?”

“I have to finish this first. Did you know that forget-me-nots were really good sedatives?”

Her question didn’t require any answer. Although the Military Caste was the only one which mastered almost all the knowledge of the other castes, Envoys and Healers were an exception. Rainbow Dash had learned how to use the little technologies left from the postmodern era and the solar storm, she could harness and feed her horse without any extra help, recognize what was edible and what was not, dismantle and reassemble a gun in record time, shooting at a target with an extraordinary precision, but when it came to the medicinal virtues of plants or the best way to amputate a human being, her knowledge was more than limited.

While Pinkie Pie, focused on her work, was finishing the key of the drawing she had just sketched, Rainbow Dash took off her hunting gear, which she put on the table beside her bag.

She had gathered a horse, sleeping bags, flasks, utensils and a few tools as well as her personal guns, her bows and arrows from the deserted and half-destroyed Academy, but all the rest here had been built with their own hands.

Of their former life, her mother had brought only a family photo album and an old wood-burning stove she had saved from the ruins of their old house. With slight home improvements, she had been able to make it work again, and with it she cooked the dishes for her “daughters” – though Rainbow Dash was her only biological child.

The stove, in a corner of the room, purred like a plane engine each time it was burning. On a wooden shelf fixed above it, saucepans and cooking pots were piled up, and on the nearby shelf, there were phials with liquids of various colors. There was only one window for the whole room, and a rocking chair next to it, which was supposed to allow the person the chair was made for to enjoy the view.

But this person wasn’t here, and each time she saw this chair empty, Rainbow Dash could feel her chest tightening, as if her heart was pressed by fingers made of steel.

As if she could understand which thoughts were going through her mind, Pinkie Pie, while closing her grimoire, told her Fluttershy was upstairs taking a nap.

“I’m going to wake her up for dinner. And it’s time for her to have a shower, anyway.”

She left her chair and climbed the stairs, creaking at each of her steps. With her mother and her friend, they had built the second floor all by themselves, and a great deal of the furniture. In the same way, the well they used to drink and wash was their own creation. Without any Angel to help them, they had to resolved living by their own means. Now, she could barely remember the way her life was going before this return to nature.

If she closed her eyes and focused hard, the most striking images always were these of all the persons she had lost during the fights. They were her regrets, on the most nostalgic nights, when the light of the moon prevented her from falling asleep.

The young woman lying on a narrow bed, in one of the three rooms upstairs, only had the appearance of life. Her skin was still soft, her hair was still silky but her eyes were off, abandoned by the beams of existence. When she was asleep like this, she seemed to be more human, more real than when her eyes were opened. Except for her rigid position, closer to how a cold corpse was lying.

Softly, Rainbow Dash shook Fluttershy’s shoulders, whose pupils fluttered for a few seconds, before opening up completely. Out of her legs, this part of her body was the only one functioning correctly, and was how she communicated, blinking. Once meant no, twice meant yes.

To feed her, Pinkie Pie had created some kind of perfusion in which she injected a homeopathic liquid, gathering all the vitamins and necessary nutriments to keep the young woman alive.

The Canterlot’s Healers she’d seen before leaving the Ghetto forever had told her she would better finish her off than keeping her alive in such a state, but Rainbow Dash had refused. Fluttershy was all that remained from a passed period, back when she still believed the wheel of future could spin in the right direction. A period back when she still could dare that folly called dreaming.

It probably was selfish, yet she had never pretended to be flawless, quite the opposite, in fact. Taking this innocent life away, this only gleam of softness and purity was beyond her.

Every day, every night, always the same gestures, again and again. Making her sit up, then get up on her feet, taking her hand to force her to walk, taking the basin out of the closet, making her sit inside the basin, going downstairs to pick up two buckets of boiled water, coming back and finding Fluttershy still sitting in the same position in the basin, not moving an inch, taking her clothes off and starting the “work”.

In a complete passivity, the young woman let her friend taking off her clothes, rubbing her body with soapy water and scrubbing it with a brush made with pig’s hairs (Rainbow Dash sometimes was able to capture one inside of the nets she had settled at strategical points in the forest).

“This is the day when I wash your hair, alright?”

Two blinks. She understood.

The others’ body had never been arousing for Rainbow Dash. Back at the Military Academy, she had no trouble stripping in front of her mates, and the nudity of them were more likely to leave her indifferent. The carnal envelops never launched shameful thoughts inside her mind, nor particular urges. It had always been this way and the situation perfectly fit her.

Until then. Until that mine exploded a few inches away from her. Now she was envious of the others’ bodies. Their skin remained young, smooth, soft. Pale, yet able to tan under the sun. Now she regretted this body she had displayed in front of others without the least hint of embarrassment.

If he were here now, what would he say? He had been the only one with who she had shared a different kind of body intimacy, deep and complete. The only one with who she used to feel something warm taking over her chest when he stroked her hand, each time he pressed his stomach against her back.

Rainbow Dash shook her head, going back to the present. Fluttershy was shivering under her nose. By throwing a glance through the only window of the room, she realized it was night now.

When she went down to the main room, along with her friend, her mother was back from her laundry, and was busy cooking a soup of quails and red berries. Delicious smells spread out all over the small house.

One day, all Rainbow Dash had been able to bring back were a coypu and a few shoots of nettles, and yet, Windy Whistles had been able to enhance the taste of these indelicate treats. This gift came from her past in the Resistance Army, where she was admired for her common sense and resourcefulness. Many missions of this period consisted of keeping a secret post in the middle of the woods, back when Everfree was even bigger and shared with a nearby country – now even more isolated then Equestria could be.

She and her husband Bow Hothoof were very respected amongst the recruits. Together, they had gained more stars than all the senior officers of the Army, no matter the Ghetto. Real heroes in the hearts of the Community Power inhabitants. Without the bursting of it at the end of the Uncivilized War, Rainbow Dash would have probably followed their footsteps.


*****************


Pinkie Pie took off the last leaf of arnica of the poultice. Sitting in front of her on the bed they shared, Rainbow Dash was waiting, her fingers nervously playing with her old leather ball filled with small rocks, which was worn-out.

“So?” she asked, her voice always slightly shaky, like each time she asked this question.

“I’m sorry, Dashie… There’s no difference with last week. Nor with the week before, or the week before.”

“Oh. Alright.”

Without another word, she wore back the shirt she used as a pajama top. Why she persisted to ask Pinkie Pie for an arnica and chamomile poultice every week, Rainbow Dash didn’t know, just like the reason why she kept on hoping, although, deep inside herself, she knew the answer would still be the same.

Who would worry about such a thing, in a place like that? Certainly not her mother, even less her two friends, and yet, she couldn’t help it. Each week, she was waiting for this night and each week, always, she asked for her poultice, picking up the precious leaves every time she went out to hunt and harvest.

At first, Pinkie Pie used to smash them into a small bowl, extract the juice and mixed it with a secret ingredient in order to make an ointment out of it. She had warned her: there were very few chances for it to work. As planned, the result was none, again and again. Since Rainbow Dash kept on demanding her treatment, she had change the ointment for these poultices but the direct application of the flowers and leaves hadn’t changed anything at all neither.

It was painful to see her this way. And because Pinkie Pie suffered from seeing her this way, too empathic to decide not to care anymore, she couldn’t resolve herself to tell her friend once and for all that her state would never change.

Since she was back from the Uncivilized War, Rainbow Dash happened to be unable to fall asleep if no one was by her side. Her fighting traumas, along with those of her nights spent at the military hospital, left alone among the surviving and the dead, where agonizing screams tore the air each and every night, conquered one of her favorite leisure, sleeping.

Even with another body lying next to her, she had a lot of trouble letting sleep working its magic on her. The least suspicious creak could make her jump awake, her heart thumping, and keep her still awake for additional endless hours.

She had just fallen into the vapors of inertia when she thought she heard a branch creak on the house’s roof. Her eyes got opened immediately, as if all wound up. Her breathing abruptly sped up, she remained motionless for a few seconds, her head against her pillow while by her side, Pinkie Pie was sleeping while muttering incomprehensible onomatopoeias.

Gradually, the way she would do when she had to take an arrow behind her back when she had spotted a prey, Rainbow Dash slipped her hand under the pillow, and her fingers got in connection with the cold metal of her automatic crossbow.

Just because she had got away from her military life didn’t mean she’d been able to forget her former reflexes or that she’d given up on her weapons. The Everfree Forest wasn’t known for being a place particularly safe, and no one could tell what kind of persons this lonely shack in the woods would attract.

Her instinct couldn’t be wrong. Earlier, yes, maybe she had been trapped by the fears buried deep inside her memories, but not tonight.

Conversely to the way she had grabbed her weapon, she sat back up swiftly, her bow loaded and darted at the skull of the person standing in front of her, a pump-action shotgun darted at her own head.

It was a girl. A girl with hair like a sizzling fire and eyes of a particular blue, deep like an azure that would never be real again.
> Touching the Branches Underneath
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

“Who the hell are you? There’s nothing to steal here!”

By her side, Pinkie Pie sat up abruptly, and the sudden sound of a match resounded. Soon, the weak light of a candle illuminated the room. Far from being unnerved, the  curly pink-haired young woman stared at the scene under her nose, blinking. The face in front of her looked a bit familiar…

“I’m not here to steal anything. My rifle’s only loaded with tranquilizers.”

That confession contradicted her earlier statement a little. If the bullets of her rifle was only filled with sedative drugs, it meant she wanted to lull someone to sleep. And kidnappings already were a kind of theft.

“Then, why are you darting you gun at my forehead?”

“Because you’re darting yours at my forehead.”

“You broke into my house!”

“I only want to talk with you.”

“Lower your gun and we’ll see about that.”

Nothing could tell Rainbow Dash the person in front of her was the kind to be trusted. A stranger, breaking into her house in the middle of the night in order to abduct one of them, if not all of them, wasn’t exactly fitting her definition of a reliable person.

Distrust at its highest, she shifted her position of a few centimeters, getting her legs out of her blanket, to sat up, never lowering her crossbow. They were in her territory. She wasn’t the one who had to take the first step, but that girl, whoever she was.

And she probably guessed the situation wouldn’t change one bit if she stuck to this tactic, since she lowered her rifle, after her eyes had wandered around her, as if looking for something.

“Now, we can talk,” said Rainbow Dash, with her own weapon still directed straight at her forehead. “Who are you?”

“Sunset Shimmer…”

The sound of a door, soon followed by Windy Whistles’ worried voice, stopped their premise of a discussion, and immediately, Pinkie Pie left the room in order to dash to the other room, to reassure her friend’s mother. And something told her she would better let those two talking in private.

Rainbow Dash shifted her position a little more, sitting right in front of Sunset Shimmer whose stiffness showed a hint of suspicions which could hardly leave her body.

“There’s no use waking up Mrs. Windy…”

The young woman’s magenta eyes opened wide, and she tensed even more, raising her crossbow against her shoulders.

“How do you know my mother’s name?”

“Twilight often talked about her.”

“Twilight? Like… my cousin, Twilight Sparkle?”

Sunset Shimmer nodded. Now she was sure she had all the young woman’s intention. She never meant to say the name that early in the conversation, but her plans had changed by necessity.

She wasn’t expecting, however, that the mention would trigger such a reaction of animosity. An arrow was ejected of the bow before she could do a single move in order to avoid it, and the tip of it brushed her cheek, while whistling in the air. A thin trickle of blood appeared on her face.

“Liar! Twilight has been reported missing at the end of the Uncivilized War! She’s probably dead right now. How on Earth could you know her?”

“I know her because we’ve been writing to each other for years.”

“Twilight was just like my sister, she used to tell me everything. Absolutely everything. And she never told me about you.”

“Everyone got an inner sanctum… I have proofs of what I’m saying.”

Slowly, Sunset Shimmer moved her hand to the bag she wore over her shoulder and over her leather suit and sand-sheltering cloak. Just like expected, Rainbow Dash raised her crossbow again, promising she would receive another arrow between her eyes if she tried anything suspicious.

From inside her bag, she took out some of the few letters she had been able to save and keep with her, although this was one of her most precious belongings, and she threw them on the blanket.

Her opponent lowered her eyes, confusion clear on her pale face. For the first time, Sunset Shimmer noticed the scar along her left eye, a vertical line, of a tired pinkish, as large as a match.

Rainbow Dash’s hand groped around the blanket, while with her other hand she tried to keep the threat that was her weapon effective, until she caught one of the letters, that she had to get out of the envelope with an imprecise ability.

It took a few seconds only for her to determine this wasn’t sheer bluff, a gamble to buy time or to fool her watchfulness. She could recognize Twilight’s handwriting, round, neat. It was the sign of a balanced personality.

As soon as she had finished to read, however, she immediately regained absolute control over her weapon. The fact she was a friend of her cousin didn’t explain why she was in her house, in the middle of the night, with a rifle loaded with tranquilizers.

Windy Whistles, along with Pinkie Pie, appeared on the doorstep, and asked her daughter whether everything was alright. Her friend probably had done her best in order to reassure her, but she was her mother, she couldn’t just wait in another room while she was defending their safety against a stranger.

“Everything’s fine, Mommy. Sunset Shimmer was precisely about to tell us why the hell she was here. Let’s be crystal clear… You might have written as many letters with my cousin as you want, it doesn’t mean I’m going to trust you based on the faith of your face.”

Especially as her own plan seemed to have been to lull everyone to sleep, to abduct Rainbow Dash and not to let her having a choice about her intervention in her “business”.

But now Sunset Shimmer could see how limited was her plan. It had worked with Soarin, since Soarin had nowhere else to go, while Rainbow Dash benefitted from a house and the semblance of a family. Nowadays, it was luxurious conditions for a former Military.

“I have an offer to make you. Or let’s rather say a proposition. A proposition which could probably change Equestria’s fate forever.”

“Maybe your friend and you could have a more civilized way to talk about it,” Windy Whistles suggested, walking towards her daughter. “I’m going to make tea. Oh, and don’t worry. Fluttershy hasn’t woken up.”


----------------------------------


From the depth of the antinuclear shelter, no window could indicate how late it was. And the truth was that there weren’t exactly clocks here. Austerity argued with a sticky sensation. Like chocking.

Each time he woke up from a restless sleep, Soarin could hardly go back to sleep. Though he had been told he could come and go as he wished inside the bunker, as well as among Canterlot’s rubbles, he felt as if prisoner of invisible chains.

He had been taken out of a place to be brought somewhere else. Thrown from hands to hands by others deciding of his own destiny. Because he had nothing left, because he was fed by the hope of seeing her again, he had accepted this forced fate. But did fate really give a chance to make your own choices?

If he thought too hard, his brain would be obstructed by so many worries his head would spin. And if he stayed lying in the bed of narrow dark room, the turn of things would be what he dreaded the most.

His feet got in touch with the cold of the concrete floor. The heat was scorching during days but when the sun went down, temperatures went down with it, so low it felt like living on another planet, where everything would be layered with ice.

Soarin suppressed a chill, however, he didn’t go back. A few seconds later, he was leaving his room in order to wander along the barely illuminated corridors leading to the many other rooms. Except Sunset Shimmer and himself, most of the other persons were sleeping into collective bedrooms. Piled up on mattress as thin as rice paper, with nothing but an emergency blanket to warm them up, they were sleeping surrounded by gas masks and supplies. The rest of the bunker had a room for the Angel powering it, the command post, that Soarin had never seen. The kitchen was at the upper floor, which was also used at as a break room, which was the place where he had woken up.

Little by little, he had learned what the inhabitants’ routine was – no male seemed to have survived the Butterflies’ attack. Applejack had been able to provide a field where most of them were working. It wasn’t as wide and fruitful as had been her family’s former geoplant farm but it was enough to give what was necessary to live. Its one and only apple tree offered a disturbing contrast with the ruins covered by red sand.

A semblance of society had been built, bit by bit, but they all knew if Butterflies attacked them again, all that would remain of the little they had constructed would be nothing but new rubbles.

A sound like sobs drew his attention. It couldn’t come from many places since it was clear the place wasn’t wide.

To be honest, in his opinion, it was rather understandable that someone would hide in order to cry, concealed from eyes. Canterlot’s inhabitants had always been proud people, praising emotional and physical strength. Waking up every day to confront with the scars of a long-lost past was an ordeal.

He would never have tried to intervene nor to dare looking. But even before he realized what he had witnessed through the small glassy frame of the command post’s door, he knew it was too late.

Nobody was crying.

Applejack was sitting in front of the machines, her head against the seat’s back, her both arms above her head. Rarity had leaned over, and they seemed to be cheek to cheek. Just by the look on their faces and the voluptuous sound from out of their lips it was easy to guess what was going on here.

Frozen, no longer daring to go nor stay, scared he would be noticed, Soarin could feel his cheeks heating up. And suddenly, these sighs brought him back to other sighs, hoarser.

“You’re too serious, Soar’… Try to chill out a little sometimes…”

Her slightly thick laugh was like resounding in his ears again, and he opened his eyes wide, filled with the mirage of her figure materializing in front of him.

He shook his head, overwhelmed by the illusion, and took a step back. His shoulder blades got in touch with the wall behind, which immediately distracted the two girls of the command post.

“Shit! He saw us!”

His first reaction was a desire to escape, but Rarity had already opened the door and called him. Acting as if he hadn’t heard, running away, would have been the easiest solution. And, in his mind, the definition of impoliteness. The least he could do was to apologize for playing peeping toms, although it had never been his attention.

“I… I… Sorry, I didn’t mean to…”

“Let’s talk ‘bout it upstairs”, Applejack decided, while tucking the tips of her pajama shirt inside her shorts.

In the first floor’s kitchen, Rarity prepared cups of herbal tea while the young blond woman was busy clearing the table, still overloaded. This all was done in the most religious of silence.

Soarin was still feeling very embarrassed by the quick images he had seen. They quickly have been replaced by illusions that were true to life but it didn’t matter. In all likelihood, he had been at the outpost of a secret.

“Ya have to understand”, Applejack started. “Canterlot no longer has male inhabitants and we’re only human. There’s nothing wrong ‘bout natural desires.”

“For lack of another alternative, we make do with who we have in hand, as they say. It’s not really a choice. Because we don’t have any choice.”

“And… Maybe it’s stupid but emotions like these help ya to feel yar still alive, if ya know what Ah mean…”

He knew. Now that shame was starting to fade away, the logic of this all, irrefutable, was even truer. Human beings couldn’t change, neither could their own nature, just because the atmosphere was different. They were adapting themselves and that was all.

“No one would dare talking about it, but most of the girls here do it too. It’s some sort of open secret.”

“Eeyup. Once Ah caught Lyra and Bon Bon in a way more embarrasin’ situation than ours.”

“But…”

Rarity’s false lighthearted tone suddenly darkened, such as a ghostly shadow passing by a blinding light. Her head low, she was staring at the table, or maybe at the brown liquid in her hands, her fingers clenched around her cup.

“If things remain this way, Canterlot will soon be lost forever. A balance has been broken when we lost the last men of our small community. Getting comfort into each other’s arms won’t help us much. If we can’t procreate anymore, we’re going to die and the sand will wipe out our Ghetto forever.”

“Except if we have the chance to get new Angels, and so the migrating population would settle there to help us buildin’ everythin’ again. This is another one of Sunset Shimmer’s reason to try to fight the Hive’s Butterflies.”

In all honesty, his own opinion about Sunset Shimmer had never been really good until then. He saw her as a paradoxical person, a mix of benevolence and brutality, fighting for praiseworthy yet a bit blurry motivations. He always suspected she actually had something to hide and that she had another plan in mind, a plan she kept to herself.

With this new explanation, Soarin could see things from a different perspective. The future of the Ghetto once called Canterlot was her prime purpose. Saving the other Ghettoes and human gender from a great evil was nothing but a significant bonus, the short-term aim to make sure another goal would eventually be reached.


-----------------------------


The situation was dire. The other Ghettoes had no idea what the Hive’s Leader was up to, and had chosen not to care, anyway. Through her speech, Sunset Shimmer hoped she sounded desperate enough to get help from Rainbow Dash.

The latter had remained impassive through her whole summing up. Except hints of distrust, nothing had gone through her staring magenta eyes.

It appeared that her initial plan, breaking into her house in order to abduct her, hadn’t been her best idea, and now she realized it fully. However, she was confident that what she just had set forth was highly important, a hallmark of absolute necessity.

She had to be convincing when asking her to join their improvised army. She didn’t have the choice.

“No.”

Rainbow Dash had just hammered her answer without the least wavering and an unequivocal coldness. She was so definite it seemed like even her mother and her friend Pinkie Pie had been surprised.

Sunset Shimmer was feeling as knocked out as after a fall.

Without Rainbow Dash, they were lost. Each and every of them. She was the only one who knew how vehicles and guns created by Twilight were working. After the end of the war, and the destruction of the Ghetto’s fortifications, no Master of Elements had accepted to stay in Canterlot. Those who weren’t dead had either been abducted or had taken refuge in the Underworld. The others were living at a hundreds if not thousands of kilometers away, in other Ghettoes.

She had to find a way to change her mind. If no one did anything, another war would take place and this one would be easily won.

It was out of question they would ask help from the Underworld's leader. The other Ghettoes didn’t know it existed and their main goal precisely was to live in secrecy.

Already, Rainbow Dash was standing up, ready to go back to bed, although her mother was trying to convince her to think things through.

But, as solid as a rock, she didn’t seem to want to reconsider her answer.

“When we came here, I promised to myself to stay away from this kind of madness, and that I shall never again fight for anyone else than my family or myself. I won’t go back on my words. There’s no Angel here, and nothing to claim ownership of. What you say has nothing to do with us. You can sleep here, if you want to, there are mats upstairs, but you’ll have to be gone in the morning.”

Though with the Uncivilized War, her exchange of letters with Twilight had turned more sporadic, Sunset Shimmer knew Rainbow Dash had been in the firing line on the front, witnessing the death of many of her friends and acquaintances. And if she didn’t know what had become of her once the battles were over, she realized she might have been through terrible things afterward.

It took her months and months of investigation before she was able to find where she had gone at the end of the conflict.

It was no accident if she had chosen to take refuge in this wild part of the continent, concealed from the rest of the world. In a way, Sunset Shimmer could understand why she was so stubborn. It might feel like plunging her hands into dark waters and fish out corpses.

And yet… Yet, she was aware of the fact that they all were doomed now. Chrysalis wouldn’t hesitate not to get rid of them if she ever was able to access to Equestria’s supreme power. They would all be treated like traitors and hung high.

Rainbow Dash was at the threshold of the door – though there actually was no door – which was leading to the stairs, when one of her sentence struck Sunset Shimmer’s mind. Something she had just said. Her family and herself. Her family. Like a cousin, for example.

She sat up immediately, determined, and slammed her hands against the wood of the table in order to be sure she would get the young woman’s full attention. The latter turned around, raising an eyebrow.

“What if I told you Twilight Sparkle was still alive?”
> Roots and Wings
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

Rainbow Dash wished she could have stayed cold to this new twist, and then laugh at her before sending her out. But she just couldn’t hide the peak of both cortisol and adrenalin that went through her body.

In her mind, came back memories of carefree days, like the perfume of a flower that no longer could exist. Sharing rolls, children’s games, hours of reading on the same swing, and more hours spent assembling and dismantling items from the postmodern era.

Because Twilight’s parents worked for the Community Power, they were often absent and they both spent most of their time together, dragging Fluttershy into their explorations.

When Rainbow Dash integrated the Military Academy, they had to space out their time together but kept on writing to each other… until the war started. On the front, it was difficult to get enough rest in order to write long letters, and the messages they sent to each other went shorter and shorter, longer and longer to come…

Then, all of a sudden, no more letters. Until the end, Rainbow Dash hoped, but she faced the fact in the end. If Twilight had stopped writing her, it meant she was dead. The fact she was part of the very long list of missing civilians by the end of the war only reinforced her intuition.

And here was this Sunset Shimmer girl, popping from out of nowhere, whom her cousin never even hinted about, though herself had never hidden anything to her, revealing her that not only did she also wrote to the young woman but that she also knew Twilight was still alive, when she wasn’t aware of the fact.

Who was she exactly?

She couldn’t help the yell that went through her lips.

“Liar! Why would I believe you? I don’t even know you!”

“Because I’ve witnessed her abduction, by Chrysalis’ minions. They also abducted my mother, who’s been able to hide me. I did nothing, though I could have helped. I’m mad at myself for that, trust me. Today it would be possible to free her but this isn’t something I can do alone. You’re the only one who can help me. The only one who can help Twilight.”

Rainbow Dash clenched her fists and swallowed. She felt like a mouse in a trap, in front of whom a piece of cheese was shaken. If she persisted in refusing, she would spend all her time wondering whether yes or no Sunset Shimmer had told the truth about her cousin, and with loneliness of the night, she would turn insane. But if she betrayed the promise she had made to herself, in the memory of all those dead because of human’s greed, she would turn insane anyway.

“How will I know you’re telling the truth?”

“You won’t. All you have are my words, and just like you said, you don’t know me…”

“Think it through, Dashie,” Pinkie Pie intervened, putting a hand on her shoulder. “It could be your only chance to see her again.”

The young woman threw a glance at her mother. Windy Whistles hadn’t said a word since Sunset Shimmer had started to explain the facts, and Rainbow Dash didn’t know what was her opinion about all this. Twilight was her sister’s daughter, her sister who also was among the missing civilians of the long list and who, in all likelihood, hadn’t survived.

If she chose to believe Sunset Shimmer, then she knew she couldn’t do otherwise than accepting her proposition, though it costed her to betray the words she had sworn on the sun and the moon, as the believer in forces of nature that she was.

“If that’s true, then we can’t let her down, Dashie. It would be like killing her again.”

Rainbow Dash let a sigh escape. Alright, so be it… Since there was a chance, even a small one, for her to find Twilight and to save her, then she would take it. Even reluctantly. Because there was another promise she had made, which was to do everything she could in order to protect her cousin, the way she was protecting her childhood friend, Fluttershy.

As soon as she would be done with it, she would go back here. Far from Ghettoes, far from these remains of a civilization in unceasing disintegration. It was a new promise she made, and this time, she would keep it.

“Alright. Let’s say I’m in. I have two conditions.”

“Which are?”

“I want Pinkie Pie to go with us. And I want to be the one in charge of liberating Twilight. It’s not negotiable.”

If the situation was as hopeless as Sunset Shimmer told them, she wouldn’t refuse these two little things. After all, as she said, she was the only one able to help them.

“Our shelter’s already overpopulated…”

“So what? If Pinkie Pie don’t go, I won’t go neither. She’s my personal Healer and she can fight. I won’t leave without her.”

Of course, the young woman’s good-naturedness wasn’t really revealing, yet her smiles and her high-pitched voice couldn’t be trusted a hundred percent. Pinkie Pie came from a remote corner of Equestria, a Ghetto now wiped away, but which in the past had been the cradle of peculiar traditions, where fighting was regarded as an art. And she knew better than anyone else the secrets of the New Medicine, since she could cook potions and remedies from almost everything.

Leaving her mother alone here was going to hurt her, for sure, but Rainbow Dash knew she would handle things perfectly on her own. She was an accomplished member of the Military Caste, used to the most difficult of living conditions. And she needed someone to watch over Fluttershy.

“Alright,” Sunset Shimmer conceded, releasing the pressure off of her shoulders. “We have to hit the road as soon as possible and…”

“We’ll leave tomorrow morning. I won’t go without bidding Fluttershy goodbye.”

She had just given up on some of the words which were the dearest to her heart, she had no intention of accepting everything without conditions. If something had to happen, she would react her own way. After all, she was the one who was an expert of strategies here. Sunset Shimmer might have certain skills for tactics, her vision remained a little too impulsive, a bit amateurish.


*******************


Sunset Shimmer had spent the night on a mat, on the floor of the main room of the first floor. From the moment the first rays of the sun had stroked her face, she had been unable to go back to sleep.

After so many nights spent sleeping under the ground, it was a bit difficult for her to adapt to a normal way of life. Like waking up with the sun.

Here, she had the feeling that time was going by in a different way. The heat was lesser, birds were singing, and the sound of the wind was humming. Though the place was far from any display of human life, she could understand the pleasures of living in such a house. Especially as, from what she could see, Rainbow Dash and her “family” had handled things rather well.

Undoubtedly, the various utensils as well as the books she had seen in the room upstairs had been brought from Canterlot, but they had built the rest with their own hands. The legend saying the Military caste was taught other specialties than the art of war might be a reality.

Sunset Shimmer had never had a doubt that Rainbow Dash was able to master some of the lost technologies of the postmodern era, since she had been well-trained by Twilight, yet she never suspected she could have other talents. Though what was her work and what was the work of this house’s other habitants was a mystery.

On one of the wooden shelves were pictures in frames without glasses. On one of them, Rainbow Dash was held by her two parents, a gold-plated cup in her hands, with Twilight and Fluttershy by their side. Squinting her eyes, the young woman was able to read the writings on the slab of the cup’s base: “Junior Contest of Bows and Arrows”.

Another picture showed Windy Whistles and her husband, Bow Hothoof, on their wedding day. Despite the white dress, it was easy to guess the bride’s belly was a bit round. From what she knew, Bow Hothoof had died during the Uncivilized War, but she didn’t know how it happened.

The third picture, Sunset Shimmer couldn’t really look at it. Windy Whistles had just gone down, greeting her with a hello that was too enthusiastic for the circumstances.

“We don’t have recreated coffee here, but you can find a very tasty chicory around here. I’m going to prepare a few thermos flasks of it for your trip. Rainbow Dash will be down in a minute.”

Indeed, the young woman arrived less than a minute after and the way she said hello to Sunset Shimmer was way less warm than her mother’s. She told her Pinkie Pie was taking care of Fluttershy and that they would leave as soon as they’d get washed, and their packs would be done.

Wordlessly, Sunset Shimmer, whom Windy Whistles had made a red berry tea to, looked closer at this odd recomposed family’s routine. To get washed, they had to draw water from a nearby well, and each their turn, Pinkie Pie and Rainbow Dash took shifts upstairs. Meanwhile, her mother had prepared chicory flasks and food supplies, still with an enthusiasm that made the young woman feel awkward.

By letting her daughter follow her, was she aware there were chances that she would never see her again? Probably, since she was an expert Military, used to the risks of fighting. The situation had to be serious, so why was she behaving as if all of them were getting prepared to go on summer camp?

Soon, the two young women announced they were almost ready to go. Before going to speak to Fluttershy, that Sunset Shimmer never met personally, Rainbow Dash wanted all the supplies to get loaded, figuring out that the young Envoy hadn’t come to the Everfree Forrest on foot.

Indeed, by walking West for a couple of minutes, they found her wain harnessed nearby. She only had one horse, and the transportation was just a wooden cart with a roof made of burlap spotted of yellow and brown stains.

They put their packs in it, principally made of guns, food supplies and a few clothes as well as a stock of indispensable homemade medicines. Then, Rainbow Dash and Pinkie Pie went back to the house in order to bid their goodbyes, while Sunset Shimmer stayed near the cart.

Not that she was a bother, but they weren’t close at all. These goodbyes had an aftertaste of farewells, she didn’t need to be their witness. It was an intimate scene, something which strangers weren’t granted access to.

Rainbow Dash first chose to go upstairs, where Fluttershy still was. Sitting on the edge of her bed, in the exact same position than before, the young woman, absent-like, seemed to be staring at a suspended speck of dust. Even when her childhood friend came closer, and crouched to look into her eyes, she didn’t move.

Rainbow Dash had to lift her chin a little so that, finally, she felt as if she were seeing her, or at least, was aware of her presence.

In their childhood, she had been this tall and skinny little girl the other children were joking about and who always cried, never defending herself. With Twilight, they both protected her the best they could, and had tried to teach her how to fight back.

Growing up, she turned out really pretty, though still very demure, which made the jokes stop and the boys more interested in her. Fluttershy had even been able to win a better recognition, even if her excessive politeness and her inclination to blush kept on making her pass as a weak person.

Her whole life had crumbled down during the Uncivilized War. The trauma of losing her whole family, the repercussions of the violent fights touching each Caste, with no exception of social rank, had created such a shock in her mind that it shut to the rest of the world.

Ever since, nothing had been the same anymore. Just like everything this damn war had touched.

Rainbow Dash stretched out her hand and stroked her childhood friend’s pink hair. She was as precious to her as a little sister. Her love for her was as strong as the one she had for her dearest cousin, though different. They shared a real blood connection with Twilight. Her connection with Fluttershy came exclusively from the heart. Yes, she was her soul sister. But a sister anyway.

“Listen, Fluttershy… I won’t be there for some time. Some people need me. But I promise you, as soon as everything would be settled down, I’ll be back. You’ll be with mom meanwhile, is that OK?”

The young woman blinked and Rainbow Dash thought she saw the semblance of a smile on her face. She sighed.

She would be safe here. Chrysalis and her minions had nothing interesting to steal in this forest. No Angel, nothing but natural resources which meant nothing to these so thirsty of power. And Windy Whistles would make sure she was fine, and would defend them if they were attacked, though that seemed much improbable.

Reluctantly, Rainbow Dash got up and not looking back, decided to leave the room. Her chest hurt, and fighting against her tears, swallowing them back inside was a constant struggle, much harder than all the rest.

If she accepted to leave this place, it wasn’t for this Sunset Shimmer and her fight against the Angel Stealers. It was for Twilight. It was because she’d been given this unexpected chance to save one of the persons she loved the most and thought she had lost forever.

What about Soarin? He also was part of this list of missing persons, and for him too, she had been waiting, her heart filled with hope, for him to appear in front of her, his arms opened to get her. But he had never appeared. And she never could have come to terms with his potential death.

Separating with her mother was as hard, if not harder, than what it had been with Fluttershy. She knew her friend was unable to move, to cry, to try to hold her back or to utter words that would make her feel overwhelmed. It was different with Windy Whistles.

The first thing her mother did was holding her close and to ask her to come back as fast as possible with both Pinkie Pie and Twilight. Because of this, it was difficult for Rainbow Dash not to let way to tears.

She didn’t want to appear like someone weak in front of her new fighting companion, who would surely notice her red and swollen eyes if she cried.

Her tears, she was saving them for later, when everyone would be asleep. Like she almost always did.

Windy Whistles, before she left, slipped a small item inside the palm of her hand, closing her fingers around it while making her promise to hang to this when she would have doubts.

If she ordered her to leave instantly, it was because herself couldn’t hold back her tears anymore and didn’t want to show them to her daughter. Not, conversely to her, so she would appear to be weak, but to make sure these tears wouldn’t make her change her mind. She had made a promise to her sister too, which was always taking care of Twilight the way she took care of her own child. She had failed and now, her greatest pride and joy, her daughter, hold the whole responsibility of honoring those words.

Before climbing on the back of her own horse by Sunset Shimmer’s side, Rainbow Dash took a glimpse at the house, half-concealed by the dense foliage of the trees and the bushy ferns on the ground. Her haven of peace, faraway from everything. The place where her whole person was already longing to go back to. The place where, from this day on, she swore she would visit every night in her dreams.


******************


Her cart’s wheel banged into a rock out of the ground, and shook the horses and carriage. This was common since they’ve left Rainbow Dash’s house. The forest’s design wasn’t made for civilization, even as primary as that. There was no real road and no indication and all Sunset Shimmer could rely on was her old compass.

By her side, Rainbow Dash seemed to be dozing, her head low. Yet she still sat straight on her horse back, her both hands firmly clasped around the reins. It probably was a military technique Sunset Shimmer had never heard of before.

She had learned everything she knew in books. Only then, going from theory to practice, had she been able to develop her skills in fight and strategies. If Canterlot’s attack by the Butterflies gave her doubt about her abilities and about those of the persons she had taught them to, she’d been reassured by her successful intrusion into the Underworld.

Though in reality, she had used a little trick…

Along with the necessary food supplies for the trip, a few personal belongings, the young Military girl had brought many weapons and ammunitions, the most sophisticated Sunset Shimmer ever had a chance to see.

If New Canterlot’s inhabitants could have some of this sort, she was sure they would all be able to win the fight they prepared for. Their fight. But how could they build such weapons? It was impossible to find resources to help to their construction because of the state of their Ghetto and how small their Angel was.

Sunset Shimmer jolted when she saw Rainbow Dash opening her eyes unexpectedly, a frown on her still sleepy face.

When she opened her mouth to ask her whether everything was alright, the young woman told her to shut up, clucking her tongue, before she grabbed her bow and one arrow in the quiver tied behind her back.

Swiftly, in the half-dark, she shot towards the big branch of a tree, and the muffle sound of a body falling from up high, along with a small shriek of pain, resounded into twilight’s silence, that was suddenly disturbed.

Other sounds, like quick steps against the ground covered by dead leaves, soon made Sunset Shimmer understand the reality of what was happening there. Unhesitatingly, she grabbed her weapon as well, and tried to shoot towards said sounds.

The horses, disturbed by the unexpected storming in of new human presences, bent and neighed, and started to get restless. Shooting while trying to master them wasn’t an easy task, but right before their lamp fell and broke, she could see Rainbow Dash getting off of hers, while she kept on shooting on sight.

In the chaos which ensued, the young woman with hair like blood and gold could do nothing more than taking back the reins of her fellow’s horse to redirect their cart in the right direction.

She felt an additional weight, as if someone had jumped into the small carriage, despite the flying arrows. If this person was able to steal their supplies, the rest of their trip before they could reach Canterlot would probably be a little more complicated.

It was a detail she could have planned… The edge of the Everfree Forest was known to be full of bandits, from the most insignificant to the most well-organized, stealing the Transients who dared venture around here, looking for a place that was a bit less unpredictable than the red desert.

Though Sunset Shimmer thought she would also have to deal with the person who penetrated inside their wain, she remembered Pinkie Pie was asleep there. She had been warned – behind her innocent face laid a redoubtable fighter.

All she could detect, yet, was a shriek from the culprit, who wasn’t long before jumping off the cart, running away from here. What happened, she didn’t know, but it surely wasn’t really pleasant if a man had screamed and fled like this – it clearly was a male’s voice.

As suddenly as it had started, the attack stopped. The horses turned calm again and inside the wain, Pinkie Pie illuminated another oil lamp, that she gave to Rainbow Dash.

The young woman, disheveled and apparently upset, had taken back all of her arrows, among which some were layered with red traces, dropping on the wet ground. She was rather ruthless for someone who didn’t want to fight anymore…

“They’ve stolen a great deal of our food supplies,” she said to her new fighting fellow. “Thanks for not letting go my horse…”

“What are we going to do without our food supplies?”

It didn’t seem to scare Rainbow Dash a lot, ready to get back on her saddle without even an answer… Maybe she was used to forced diet thanks to her Military way of life, but this way of life wasn’t hers. Since Sweet Apple Acres had been wiped away, Sunset Shimmer had promised herself she would never get hungry again.

Nothing was scarier and more painful than feeling hungry. This void, impossible to fill, the heart beating slow and the head spinning… Still today, though she was now able to eat enough, she had nightmares about being hungry.

This collaboration, she thought, wasn’t beginning under favorable auspices.

As she was about to insist, ready not to be pushed around, a noise against the dead leaves resounded again, and they all froze, now ready to react if they were attacked again.

But this sound came along a shriek… or rather a husky reedy voice calling for help.

Immediately, Rainbow Dash jumped off her stirrups, grabbed an arrow that she put against her bow, and walked in the direction of the sound, the arrow darted towards the ground, wisely. Behind her, Pinkie Pie illuminated the road thanks to the oil lamp, without a care about the fact that Sunset Shimmer would be left alone in the dark.

She didn’t have to go far to stumble into what seems to be a prisoner, tied to a tree, who was trying to get herself out of the rope, shaking her body with the energy of despair.

A nod from Rainbow Dash’s head was enough to let her friend know she had to check around them, in order to make sure no one would appear behind a bush to try to attack them, before she crouched to help the trapped girl, who had tangled blond hair.

When she rose her head, with a crooked and weak smile contrasting with the tears on her cheeks, Rainbow Dash immediately recognized the familiar face.

“Muffin… What the hell are you doing here?” she asked her before she started to get her off the ropes again.

“These guys… They captured me. Somewhere around Bogg… I’ve tried to run away many times…”

“They won’t bother you anymore. I took things in charge.”

Pinkie Pie came back from her quick watch, but with a small wooden crib. As soon as she saw it, Muffin leaped on her feet and, without a care about the fact she could hardly stand still, quickly looked inside.

“My Dinky! You saved her, Pinkie Pie. Thanks!”

And she threw her arms around her neck, crying against her shoulders.

inkie Pie took a few seconds to realize what she was thanking her for. Once her disarray was over, she patted her fellow’s back, the crib still in her hands.

As for Rainbow Dash, she tried her best to keep her distance… She only let them know they couldn’t stay around here for too long. Not that she didn’t like children, but that she didn’t know how she would react when she saw this one without a preliminary mental preparation.

However, as soon as she had recognized Muffin, in her mind it had been clear she couldn’t leave her to her own devices, at the edge of the Everfree Forest. When she wasn’t distracted, she was quick, she could go unnoticed and knew how to find of a route like nobody else… The Everfree Forest’s rules weren’t the same than those of the mainland. And Muffin wasn’t trained for the former…

Sooner or later, she would have to look at this baby. She knew it. Meanwhile, she would do her best to avoid it, though she wasn’t sure of how she could do such a thing.

For her part, alone in the middle of the thickening darkness, Sunset Shimmer was waiting, her heart thumping in her chest, for the two young women to appear again.

This situation made her feel like the interloper, like the parasite who was tolerated due to the circumstances. They weren’t an army, far from it… All she could hope now was that meeting the rest of Canterlot’s inhabitants and the account of their common goal would transform their relationship for the better. If she was lucky, the fact she had saved Soarin from the future of an assembly-line genitor in the Underworld would play in her favor.

When, finally, a beam of light outlined in front of her, she grabbed her weapon, before she relaxed when she saw Rainbow Dash and Pinkie Pie… accompanied by a girl who held a crib.

“Who is she?” she asked with a quaking voice.

“She’s Muffin and this is her daughter Dinky. She comes with us.”

While the small team went around the cart in order to settle the two newcomers inside, Sunset Shimmer got off her horse, fits and jaws clenched. Wasn’t it enough that they left her on her own, in the dark? Now they urged her to accept two additional mouths to feed, although the greatest part of their food supplies had been stolen.

“What if I don’t agree? We don’t have anything to give them to eat! We don’t even have enough food for ourselves!”

“You don’t agree? You would let a mother and her baby starving to death? If that’s your idea of solidarity, then maybe you should sort your problem out without us!”

She couldn’t be serious. It would mean giving up on the idea of rescuing Twilight out of The Hive, and Sunset Shimmer didn’t want to believe this Muffin was so important that Rainbow Dash would go back on her words.

Yet, in doubt, she softened her tone a bit.

“What I mean is that we’re a team and decisions have to be taken together as a team.”

“If we have to vote, then I vote to keep Muffin and Dinky,” Pinkie Pie intervened, lifting her hand a bit too enthusiastically.

Rainbow Dash turned to Sunset Shimmer, determined not to go without the young mother.

“Alright, let me explain you… This girl isn’t any girl and I’m not trying to be a philanthropist. She’s a Military Envoy. The best of all Equestria. She knows every Ghetto by heart, and every roads of the West Continent. That’s why she’s going to come with us.”

“What about food?”

“Well, I’ll hunt. It’s not the desert here, there’s no need to dig holes into the sand in order to get a satisfying amount of grasshoppers. There’s food everywhere around us.”

Sunset Shimmer tried hard not to give in, only because she wanted to pit herself against Rainbow Dash… Yet at the same time, it wasn’t in her character to leave someone in need to their own devices, especially when this someone had a baby to feed and protect.

And something told her this Muffin could be useful. She didn’t know how, and a Military Envoy was a high-profile pawn in fighting strategies and even her knew this.

“Alright, let’s bring them.”

“See? We can agree.”

“Dashie, can’t we stop here to rest a bit? Sunny and you might be really tired…”

Rainbow Dash glanced at Sunset Shimmer. The young woman was already upset, and something told her if she tried to force something else her patience could be pushed a bit too far. Though it could have been fun, she didn’t want to take that risk. If they had to work together, this kind of confrontation wouldn’t help much.

Only when she saw the young woman acquiesce did she answer it was a good idea. While they would settle their camp, she would go and hunt… Which meant she probably wouldn’t go to sleep.
> A Matter of Planting Seeds...
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

The trip had been long and perilous. After the relative dampness of the Everfree Forest, the group’s cart had to go through many various landscapes, from the dried prairie to the desert, passing by dry lands, all this under a temperature around fifty degrees Celsius during days, which always collapsed during nights.

Each time, Rainbow Dash volunteered the first to watch over their improvised camp, and Sunset Shimmer suspected her not to be asleep for real during most of her own watch as well as Pinkie Pie’s.

What never ceased to amaze the young woman, was her new fellow’s reactivity. At the least noise, at the least strange manifestation, all her senses seemed to be in a state of alert, and nothing could escape her hawk’s eyes.

She would be a precious addition to her “army”, this was a fact none could deny. However, Sunset Shimmer often wondered whether she would be able to do with her authoritarian character. She had charisma and displayed a resolution that commanded respect and it often was difficult for her to proclaim her ideas.

It wasn’t really what she had expected, if she had to be honest. In her letters, Twilight Sparkle was describing Rainbow Dash as a sharp personality, filled with determination but light-hearted, who liked pranks and naps as much as she liked physical efforts and rigor. If a part of this portrayal fit reality, cheerfulness was the missing portion of the picture she had a chance to have a glimpse of until now.

It was a war and the aftereffects of a war that had come in-between this picture and the image that was right under her nose. There laid the bloodcurdling reality.

It didn’t make things easier all the same, and very often, Sunset Shimmer tended to forget about this detail.

Finally, New Canterlot’s horizon was in front of them…

At first glance, nothing could help to ascertain that this was a Ghetto with inhabitants. The beginning of fortifications that was built after the end of the Uncivilized War crumbled down with the Butterflies’ attack and the stones had been covered by sand with time. The fate of the few wall faces still there seemed to be taking the same direction. All the buildings that used to be the pride of inhabitants and of the Community Power had disappeared and what was left, just like the rest, had been devoured by the desert which growth couldn’t be stopped by anything anymore.

In the past, this Ghetto was the greatest of them all. The most beautiful one and the most impressive one too, though it had never looked anything like the big cities of the postmodern era, with neon and giant screens. With the theft of their Angels, the bloody fights that happened there, it seemed like this past had never existed. As if the remaining inhabitants only fantasized it…

As far as Rainbow Dash was concerned, the vision rather felt like a nightmare. Even today, she could precisely tell where this boutique had been, where the big exchange market had happened, where the Ivory, Equestria’s black market, was hidden… She could picture all the streets in which Twilight, Fluttershy and herself used to run, the benches on which they sat to eat poppy-flavored candies, every of the places where they used to play, exchanging secrets and trying to fix old transistors found at the National garbage dump. Even this dump had been wiped away…

Her heart tightened inside her chest, and it felt like she was chocking. Her hands clasped around her father’s badge that her mother had given her before she left. She was trying to hold on to it with all her soul, afraid to sink into unconsciousness if she let it go for even a second.

But when they passed by what used to be her house, which postwar rubbles had also been eaten up by red sand, she understood that if she wasn’t able to take shape of this awful truth, she could never stay here and help saving anyone.

Right before they left the Ghetto, Pinkie Pie, her mother and herself, gathered what was necessary to survive in these rubbles that were now buried. Canterlot didn’t look like Canterlot at all anymore, like a woman once beautiful and now disfigured by old age. Now the Ghetto was nothing but an agonizing corpse, decaying inside its tomb.

Although the cart was still moving, she jumped out of it and ran straight in front of her, without a word or a glance back.

It didn’t escape Sunset Shimmer’s vigilance, nor any of the other travelers’, and she stopped the both horses of their carriage – now harnessed together at the wain to make sure none would flee if they were attacked again – frowning.

“Don’t try to catch her”, Pinkie Pie told her before she could even do the least gesture. “She needs to be alone. Please understand that she spent all of her life here…”

Sunset Shimmer understood. Canterlot also was her hometown. Just like Rainbow Dash, when she came back, and she saw what destruction’s stigmas had done to her favorite places, and to all of her landmarks, she had been in a state of shock.

If only the money the inhabitants had been able to gather before the Butterflies’ attack hadn’t been stolen to them, they could have started to rebuild their Ghetto, and even without giving it back its past splendor, at least, they could have restored a bit of its lost dignity.

As for Rainbow Dash, forgetting the reason why she was in Canterlot again, she kept on running among the skeletons of her teenage years. There was not the hint of a street, not a wall face mysteriously still there that didn’t remind her of someone, of a perfume, of a memory…

The tears blurring her vision formed some kind of nebula, and each time she wiped them away with the back of her sleeve, new ones appeared.

Even when a grain of sand came and land inside her eyes, or was crushed under her teeth, she couldn’t stop running. She couldn’t stop running until she would have reached it. This place that had been her last abode, this place where she met with her destiny. This place where, as strange as it seemed, though she had been learning the best ways to kill an enemy, she also knew an unprecedented bliss.

And when, finally, she stopped in front of what was left of the building, her knees gave in under the weight of her shock, and she fell in the sand.

The Military Academy, where also was the base of the Resistance Army, was one of the buildings that suffered the least of damages, probably because of its size… Yet, what was under her eyes was nothing but a heap of rubbles, spread as far as eyes could see.

Her legs still shaky, Rainbow Dash stood up, and decided to make a few steps among the stones and dust. It was impossible to tell where had been the offices, the dormitories, the practice rooms, the main events gymnasium… Everything had been annihilated, left for dead. What could have remained of the furniture or of the weapons seemed to have been plundered already, since all she could unearth under the rocks were more rocks and sand.

It felt like her heart would stop when she had a glimpse of what looked like a piano, half sunk inside the rubbles, with only one side of it unbroken.

Without a care about the wounds it could inflict her, Rainbow Dash walked at full throttle towards the instrument and her fingers brushed a few of the remaining white keys.

“Rainbow Dash… Is that you?”

She froze, the beating of her heart once again like about to burst. Was desert and dust giving in her hearing hallucinations now? She probably hadn’t drunk water for too long.

After she had seen Misty Fly stepped on a mine without the possibility to help her, and she herself had been injured by the deflagration, with the consequences that she knew, they told her he was on this endless list of men and women declared missing by the end of the Uncivilized War.

All along her convalescence, she had been waiting for him, filled with restless hope… and he never came back. It hadn’t always been easy, but she forced herself to think he was dead, not to keep on holding on to what her father used to call “the last flower standing when everything else has been destroyed”, since everything and more had been wiped out already.

It couldn’t be real. She might be in some kind of hallucinatory trance.

Yet, Rainbow Dash turned around, with the same fever in her heart that she held back then. But conversely to that period, her heart’s wish wasn’t disappointed.

It really was Soarin standing a few feet away among the ruins of their shared memories. If she was in the middle of a dream, then too bad. It always was best to lose your mind into a delightful fantasy than into the hell of battles.

Had she felt like herself completely, she would never have done something like that. Affection that was too effusive had always felt embarrassing to her, and she’d never felt attracted by the penny dreadful her other fellows liked to read before going to bed, fantasizing of love and romance.

But it was a fact, ever since she had penetrated into this ghost of a Ghetto, she wasn’t completely feeling like herself.

So, listening to her heart only and no longer to reason, she ran again, grazing her calves and knees on the way, and as soon as she was in front of him, she fell on his neck.

Sensations felt too real to be these of a dream or of an illusion. When she felt Soarin’s arms holding her and nestling her against his body, Rainbow Dash knew she was going through reality, as palpable as the visions of the end of the world that surrounded them.

He hadn’t died. She would have questions in a few moments, but for now, the fact that he hadn’t died was all she could think of. He hadn’t died. Everything couldn’t be lost forever if Soarin was still alive.

Their following kiss had a taste of salty tears as well as of sweet marshmallows.

Yet, she broke away from him, almost reluctantly, caught up by the harsh reality of things. The carefreeness of their love story was over. Times were different. And after she mourned him for so many years, it was impossible for everything to remain what they were back then, when they used to train, not knowing they would have to fight for real only one year later.

“You—You’re alive…”

“I am. I’ve been in a coma and only woke up two weeks ago. It’s… a long story.”

When circumstances would be more favorable, they would sit together and would talk about everything that needed to be discussed, but now, with twilight coming, it was more and more complicated to get your bearings in the Ghetto, and the temperatures were about to fall.

At first sight, she hadn’t changed much. Her body was as athletic as what it used to be, and she wasn’t any taller. Her skin had remained of a porcelain white, of a creamy texture, and she had the same big expressive almond-shaped eyes, her lovely cheeky face. But the mischievousness in her eyes seemed to have deserted her.

How he would have liked to keep on holding her in his arms, so they could forget about their surroundings, like they did back then, locked up in a bubble of bliss together. But he knew they were in a sort of hurry, and that she wasn’t here for him. In all likelihood, Sunset Shimmer didn't warn her of the fact she found him and saved him.

Why? Why hadn’t she played such a trick up in her sleeve? Although he thought he had a better understanding of her motivations now, Soarin kept on asking himself questions about her plans. Military strategy didn’t really seem to be her forte, yet she had been chosen as the leader by the inhabitants, such as the new customs wanted.

In fact, the first question the young woman asked him was about Sunset Shimmer.

“Have you also been recruited by Sunset Shimmer in order to plan an attack on the Hive?”

“Yes, in a way. It’s not like I really had the choice.”

In front of Rainbow Dash’s lack of understanding, he shrugged.

“Long story. Once again.”

“Do you trust her?”

“To be honest… I’m not sure. In a sense, I do. And in another… I’m wary. It’s a Military quirk, I suppose.”

“I suppose so. I missed you.”

Soarin didn't expect this. Especially so suddenly. Rainbow Dash never discussed much about her own feelings, especially not with words. She was a hardline Military, focused on action in every aspect of her personality.

Something might have changed, despite it all, if she could tell such a thing to him, looking straight into his eyes, without a blush of embarrassment.

Yet, he couldn’t help displaying a smile, and when she stretched her hand in his direction, he took it unwaveringly, following her through the ruins of what had been the setting of their blooming love story.

Even during the battles, they hadn’t been separated. Rainbow Dash had been under the direct orders of her father, with the same rank, though she had integrated the highest level of the Academy two years after him. They fought each time side by side, exchanging ammunitions, covering each other, and Soarin liked to think this was the reason why they’d been through the war relatively uninjured.

Until she ran after Misty Fly into what apparently had been a mere trap.

They had lost each other on that dreadful day, and the fact they were together again today, walking hand in hand in the middle of rubbles, almost felt like a miracle.

But miracles didn’t exist, and he knew what he was talking about. What was about to happen had nothing of a fairytale.


*****************


Only once getting closer of the bunker inside which lived all the survivors of the Butterflies’ attack was it possible to get the first glimpses at the apple tree hovering over the cultivable lands they all worked at. The tree wasn’t as impressive as those that used to constitute Sweet Apple Acres, but in the middle of the desolate scenery, it shone like a precious gem.

The vegetation outside the Ghettoes was rather limited. The desert offered a few cactuses it shared with some variety of bushes and trees with the dry lands. Only the withered prairies produced herbs and Echinacea flowers but they tended to become rare too, little by little. Without the Angels, Equestria would have probably been wiped out like the Northest part of the West Continent.

Since Equestria no longer was protected by high walls, its ecosystem was rather limited as well. It made of these few cultivable lands and of this apple tree some kind of oasis, an unexpected island of hope and life.

From the moment they approached the entrance of the bunker, where a few persons were waiting for them, Rainbow Dash let Soarin’s hand go, aware of how unjust it could seem.

He could have understood if she hadn’t put a certain distance between them. As if everything that happened before never occurred at all. His back got knotted and he felt as if an iron bar was planted between his shoulder blades.

“We were waiting for you,” Sunset Shimmer started. “We need you to vote for or against Muffin and Dinky’s acceptance.”

“I beg your pardon?” Rainbow Dash asked with bile in her voice.

“No decisions are taken unilaterally here. Everything’s submitted to the inhabitants’ vote.”

Perhaps. A display of democracy, no matter which shape it took, was always a good thing in those confused times where the temptation of totalitarianism was huge. However, Rainbow Dash didn’t really like the fact Sunset Shimmer wanted to discuss again of how legitimate it was to accept a mother and her baby in their community.

If every of the persons that were here hadn’t voted for, she would have willingly show her dissatisfaction about this decision.

“Good. Since everybody agrees, I’m going to show you your room and to explain you how our shelter is working.”

“Won’t ya make the introductions first, Sunset?” Applejack questioned, taking one step forward.

“Oh, yes… Well… Sorry. I’m disturbed because I’m tired.”

Applejack was the leading Producer. Out of all those who lived here, she was the one with the best experience of crops, agriculture and how to manage the gatherings. She produced the necessary seeds, watched the girls’ digging over, warned then if a sand storm was approaching, prepared schedules and decided of what tasks each had to do. She also was the one who gave the orders for cooking.

As far as Rarity was concerned, she spent most of her time mending or creating clothes for the workers. Life inside the bunker didn’t ask for a great luxury of items to use, but she also was in charge to make sure their well was working correctly, as well as all the electrical supplies, thought it wasn’t her specialty. Of course, she also was responsible for the maintenance of the cropping tools, and most importantly, of the guns.

Most of the other girls were Envoys, Entertainers, Traders or Diggers, and since they didn’t really need the abilities of these Castes, they had learned to farm, to cook, to use guns and weapons and to manage the command post, which main use was to check out whether strangers would be approaching and whether or not they were a threat.

Since the Butterflies’ attack, there wasn’t a soul anymore that came near Canterlot. In fact, a rumor was running inside the bunker, saying the other inhabitants of Equestria thought the Ghetto had been wiped away completely.

Just like the outside, looking like a big rock burning under the sun, the inside was very basic. The few ceiling lights which illuminated the corridors of a weak whitish glow were nothing but small bulbs hanging at iron wires. The armored doors of each rooms also were plain, and it was easy to get lost.

It wasn’t a surprise for Rainbow Dash that most of the inhabitants would rather spend long days cultivating crops on lands that were chemically fertilized. If she spent more than two days locked up in this gloomy place, she would turn insane.

Although the Everfree Forest was a hostile environment, that a threat could appear at any moment, and that life there was of an almost stern simplicity, at least she could see the sun, smelling the perfume of plants and trees, and feeling the wind on her skin.

She already missed her wooden house. By this time, her mother probably was busy washing Fluttershy. It was the moment where the nightingale and the pinch-marks were singing. The moment where the smell of the mushroom soup was floating between the walls, the moment where, finally, satisfied of her hunt, she could rest while sipping a red berry tea.

She took a glimpse at Pinkie Pie. For someone who liked joking and having fun so much, this gloomy atmosphere probably felt oppressive.

Her instinct didn’t trick her. The young woman’s cheeks were scarlet and small sweat drops were shining on her forehead. She never made any secret of her claustrophobia, which almost deprived her of her job as a Military Healer… A trauma which dated back to her preteen years, when she had to wait for days and days, on her own and in the dark, for a sand storm to stop, locked up in a shelter.

“Isn’t there a room with at least a small window? Pinkie Pie isn’t feeling well. She’ll never be able to sleep under the ground.”

Sunset Shimmer stopped walking and turned around to see Rainbow Dash. It was obvious that this was the one question too many. Things weren’t supposed to be this way. She shouldn’t have to beg her to join them, or to receive new mouths to feed, even less to give a special treatment to someone who wasn’t even supposed to be here in the first place!

Who did she think she was? A very important person? The Elite Caste no longer existed since the beginning of the Uncivilized War, it wasn’t for other persons to grant themselves rights that turned them into privileged ones.

And then, she realized. Rainbow Dash never needed them. They needed Rainbow Dash. Without her, it would be impossible to understand the gadgets Twilight had created, and even less the vehicles. Without her, there was no way they would prevent the Hive from doing anything. They didn’t have her abilities, not yet. And they lacked time to learn properly.

“There’s a bed in the kitchen…”

“I go with her”, Rarity volunteered. “I’ll explain her where to wash and everything else, this way.”

Taking a glimpse at Rainbow Dash, thus making sure everything was fine, Pinkie Pie followed the purple-haired girl. What a beauty she was! She never had the chance to see such a beautiful and elegant person since… since Maud’s death, maybe?

The complete visit of the bunker took nothing more than ten to fifteen minutes. There were only a hundreds of inhabitants, divided up on two “floors”, and outside of the command post, the whole was constituted of rooms, in which also were reserves of canned food, of water flasks and of gas masks.

The trip had been exhausting and Sunset Shimmer only wanted one thing now: washing up and going to bed. And so she considered Rainbow Dash probably was feeling the same way. Private rooms were rare. Soarin and her were the only ones who had theirs. Yet, she thought it would be a good idea if Rainbow Dash had her own as well. It wasn’t in order to bribe her; it was for a convenient reason. As a Military, she was well used to a morning routine that was quite different from the others’, and she could bother them.

“Here’s your chamber,” she said while opening another one of the doors which were many here.

Rainbow Dash took a glimpse inside. It was nothing but a small cube of reinforced concrete, with a couchette of the same material, on which there was a survival blanket. A few little recesses had been dug in order to put personal belongings, and a small lamp was hanging at the ceiling, on the same model than all the other ones.

She would never be able to sleep on her own in such a place… All the same, she didn’t point it to Sunset Shimmer. She had been demanding enough. But, once everyone would be asleep, she knew she would sneak out and join Pinkie Pie.

Rainbow Dash had good reasons not to join Soarin instead. Some things had to be said first. And it wasn’t fair for the other girls, deprived of a masculine warmth for so long. Plus he could see things that she didn’t want him to see…

If she thanked Sunset Shimmer now and decided to stay in her room immediately, she was sure the girls would let them together alone, considering the two lovers had things to catch up on, even if only talking. She wasn’t feeling ready for it. It hasn’t even been one hour since she had learned he was still alive, and the sensation remained a bit blurred, and this, even though she couldn’t ignore his presence – the way she never was able to ignore it.

Thankfully, something had her intrigued since she had stepped inside the bunker. Her mind whispered to her that now was the right moment to ask.

“Can I see it?”

“What?”

“Your Angel…”

Sunset Shimmer opened her eyes a bit wider. Military held a knowledge a bit more advanced than the rest of the population about the energizing entities which allowed them to survive in these complicated conditions, but it didn’t mean it was the only Caste which could understand the way they worked, conversely.

However, she decided to grant her request. It didn’t cost anything to let her see it. But she also had to show Muffin her chamber…

“Applejack, could you please bring Rainbow Dash to our Angel’s room?”

“Eeyup. No problem!”

Right before she followed Applejack, Rainbow Dash looked at Soarin, who she smiled to, hoping it would reassure him. He had to know she held no grudge against him, conversely, she was happy to know he was still alive and here by her side. If the circumstances had been different, she probably wouldn’t have hesitated to give him much more of her. But things were what they were.

He smiled back at her, right before he went the other way, following the bunch visiting with them.

After a small journey of a couple of minutes, on the same floor, Applejack opened another security door, and moved aside to let her step in.

The room wasn’t much bigger than what they called chambers. Neither was it more sophisticated than the rest, or even more than the command post which, energetically greedy, was situated nearby. The biggest difference was the light. Instead of the pale glow of the corridors, it was dazzling, like an aurora borealis, with touches of pink, blue and green.

And yet, the sphere in which the Angel was encapsulated wasn’t any bigger than a balloon. Nothing too impressive when compared with the enormous globes of the widest Ghettoes.

She took a few steps forward and, without the fear about the light, came closer in order to press her palm against the glassy ball. She immediately felt a sweet warmth stroking her skin. When she took off her hand before the warmth turned into a scald, Rainbow Dash noticed she was shaking.

Before she could see it, she hadn’t realized how moved she was to be in presence of such a hope, such a chance for the future, that the Angels represented. Even if, just like everything, ill-advisedly, it could turn into a weapon of mass destruction – although of a least power than what the humans of the postmodern era had been creating, of course.

“We lost all the others. It had wiped everythin’ away when they exploded. That’s all we been able to save.”

“It’s better than nothing at all.”

“Ah always wondered how such a thang could keep so many persons alive.”

“They come from the sun. Solar energy is very powerful. If we could create panels which would capture the light of the sun, the way they used to have, we wouldn’t need Angels anymore. Or it would multiply their energy.”

“So, they better not fall into the wrong hands.”

“Like you say.”

“Where would we find anythin’ to make panels, anyway?”

“I don’t know.”

Many times, she had wondered whether it would be that worth for humans to get back their lost splendor, despite heat, despite pollution that had never disappeared. They were able to destroy as much as they were to create. And there was no good without bad, life needed both to work.

Yet, each time, she came to the conclusion that it was best to keep on living this way, and to stop looking for constant progress. Life was tough, but now it was less likely to be worse…

Except if another war happened, a prospect she had never envisioned until now. And now that the threat seemed real, Rainbow Dash didn’t want to stay with her arms crossed, waiting for things to happen. Especially because without this, she could never return home, and enjoy life peacefully.

“It’s good, I’m ready to go back to my chamber. Thanks a lot, Applejack.”

“Yar welcome,” the young woman answered, shrugging. “If ya need anythin’ else, don’t hesitate. My chamber’s right beside yars.”

They both left the room, that the young Producer locked up behind her, before leading her to her room again. They didn’t utter a word before they were in front of the door, both in deep thoughts, meditating on all that had been said.

Before she let her to rest, yet, Applejack had one last thing to say to her new fellow.

“Since we don’t have Amazons, Am the one in charge of the horses. Well, Sunset, Lyra, me and ya are the only ones with a horse, but… Ah saw yars was blind. Does she need somethin’ in particular?”

She found this mare wandering alone in the deserted streets of Canterlot, right before she left with her mother, Pinkie Pie and Fluttershy for the Everfree Forest. They already had two additional stallions back then, miraculously survivors of the Uncivilized War, but these mounts were old and died as soon as their trip was over.

Yet Tough withstood, despite her sight that was already short, despite the difficulty of such a travel and the meteorological conditions. It was the reason why Rainbow Dash chose this name.

“No. She’s living like any sighted horse. She lets the other horses guiding her in the pen, that’s all.”

“Ah have to tell ya… Ah congratulate ya for the domestication of a blind animal. Ah heard that back in Fillydelphia, they shot ‘em if they have the least of flaws and then they eat the flesh. Ah can’t wait to work with ya.”

“So can’t I,” Rainbow Dash answered with a smile, before she stepped into her room.

She didn’t really know Applejack. All she knew about her was what Sunset Shimmer told her and the little conversation they had together. And yet, something inside of her had immediately made Rainbow Dash put all her trust in her. The way she stood. The way she smiled and spoke.

It showed that earning respect from peers sometimes could go either way.


*********************


Knowing what time it was each time he woke up in his chamber remained a bit complicated for Soarin. His stay at the Underworld hadn’t been long enough for him to get new habits there, and his whole body was still functioning the way it did during the war, when the first rays of the sun were so intense you couldn’t do otherwise than opening your eyes.

Losing his Military’s reactions was also a difficult task. The morning exercises, making his bed with hospital corners, his hairdo always perfect and his outfit flawless, shirt clean and shoes polished. Among all those inhabitants from various Castes, he always felt as if he was some kind of foreigner.

But this was about to change. First of all, because now he started to know the girls who peopled the place and especially because now, Rainbow Dash was with him.

They both had always been on the same wavelength. Everything was easier when they were together, supporting each other, shoving each other to go farther, stronger. Now she was by his side again, although they no longer shared the same bed, he had stopped worrying. About almost everything.

Not thinking much, he opened the door of her chamber while announcing “it’s me, Dashie” enthusiastically, not even knocking neither.

Much to his surprise, Rainbow Dash didn’t welcome him with the wide smile he was expecting. She pushed the door so strongly the thing closed up against his nose, her face red from embarrassment.

From what he had a glimpse of, she was busy putting her clothes on – a sweater with an integrated muffler, a hood and a kangaroo pocket, which were perfect for an outing in the desert, along with leather pants with buckles. And this detail let Soarin dumbfounded.

How many times had he seen her naked, or had he looked at naked parts of her skin? She never been the modest type, especially not with him. If he closed his eyes, he could still sketch every curve of her body. He knew exactly where were each of her birthmarks, each of her beauty spots and scars.

He wasn’t any common fellow. He was the one she held hands with so many times, the one against who she snuggled in the cold of the night, who she entrusted with each of her fears and of her hopes for the future…

When she finally opened her door again, he could see a sparkle of fear through her magenta eyes as she saw his wounded nose, tinged with a slight red.

“I’m so sorry, Soar’… You surprised me and I panicked. I’m no longer used to it; you know?”

Soarin nodded, though a part of him kept on thinking there was more to her attitude with him than she let him know, something she was hiding. But it probably wasn’t the best of time to start such a conversation as this. Sunset Shimmer and the others were waiting for them in the kitchen, in order to speak of their strategy to reach their goal.

“Is your nose alright? I don’t know whether there’s ice here. It’s such a strange place.”

“It’s true everything here feels different. Yet, the way we used to live during the war wasn’t perfect at all. But I don’t know… I can’t feel quite like myself since I’ve arrived.”

“Same here. To be honest, I already can’t wait to leave,” Rainbow Dash stated with an embarrassed laugh.

There it was again. This connection between them. This way they had to always be in consonance about feelings and intuitions. The reason why their couple was so perfect laid here as well. Though they had a completely different character, they complemented each other wonderfully, and when they were together, they felt invincible.

The ultimate proof of this statement was that, during the war, their worst misfortunes happened to them from the moment they parted.

They both exchanged a conniving smile, and for a very short while, Soarin felt as if he were years ago, back at the Military Academy.

But reality got him back quickly. Just one look at the corridor in which they stood was enough to remind them that the Canterlot of their memories was gone forever. Did this country called Equestria still deserved to be known as a nation? Each of the Ghetto were not separated and had cut all means of communication. The semblance of harmony they lived had been broken down for all time on the day Sombra killed the members of the disappeared Caste of the Elite, and stole its very first Angel.

“We’re expected to speak strategy. Are you ready?”

“I am.”

He stretched out his hand in order to grab hers, but Rainbow Dash was able to avoid it, and Soarin had to resolve and let things remain this way. What got them connected hadn’t disappeared completely, and yet, he could feel it had been transformed because of time, and this thing she seemed to be hiding.

What saddened him the most was that they could never have this conversation as long as they were here. To get privacy in this place was a bit complicated, as he witnessed on the day he saw Rarity and Applejack in the command post. A bit later, someone confirmed him this was the kind of accident which happened all the time. The easiest way to be alone and never bothered was to venture in the ruins of the Ghetto.

How could anyone want to talk about love in such a place?

When they stepped into the kitchen, everyone was already there. Out of Pinkie Pie and Muffin, Sunset Shimmer had apparently invited other members of the community, among those who weren’t getting ready to work in the fields, and that they met on their way.

“Sorry to be late,” Rainbow Dash said while getting closer, greeting the others with her head at the same time.

“There’s no problem,” Sunset Shimmer answered.

Funny. Her voice was saying something while her body was saying something else. Although she displayed a confident attitude, Rainbow Dash knew that each time she did something the young woman didn’t like, she tried not to show how upset she was, while not succeeding completely.

Yet, it wasn’t in an attempt of defiance that she did the things she did. It was because she listened to her consciousness and always tried to behave in the fairest way possible. If others didn’t like that side of her, well that was too bad for them.

Rarity stepped closer and gave the two newcomers a cup of coffee, and Rainbow Dash couldn’t miss the embarrassed reactions she had each time she interacted with Soarin. It wasn’t making her feel jealous, but rather curious. There were many things she still had to discover about this place and its inhabitants.

“Well, now everyone’s here, I think we’re going to start,” Sunset Shimmer began, leaning over the Equestria map laid on the table.

Obviously, she hadn’t summoned them here to have a discussion. She already had a very precise idea in mind about the way they would bring down on her knees the transgressor Chrysalis, who called herself Queen, in the same way that Sombra was a self-proclaimed King.

Rainbow Dash was curious as well to hear what it was.

“According to my sources, right now the Hive is floating in the area of the McIntosh Hills. Generally, it first goes around the Outside Lands before it comes back to the Inside Lands where their turn is faster. Despite its technological advancements and numerous Angels, it is impossible for the floating Ghetto to tour the complete country, Outside and Inside Lands included, in less than two months and a half. Which means before it’s going to be in Canterlot’s sky, we have this time in our hands in order to train and to fix our weapons and vehicles created by Twilight before we’ll attack.”

Every of the person around seemed to agree with the plan, nodding in a knowing way.

However, a palpable awkwardness was floating among three of them. By turns, Rainbow Dash glanced in Muffin’s direction, then towards Soarin, and the face they displayed was singing a different kind of lullaby.

There were good ideas in Sunset Shimmer’s plan, of course, but still, it lacked something. This maneuver laid too much on chance and speculations, saying that if they attacked an unprepared Hive – since Canterlot seemed to be a ghost Ghetto with the exclusion of the fields they were cultivated – although they were understaffed, maybe they could take it by surprise and win on the fact they weren’t expecting anything.

It was forgetting that what Chrysalis had at her disposal were more than mere soldiers, which most of them weren’t even, but an undefined number of cyborgs, cyborgs which had been able to put down a Ghetto such as Canterlot, even though it was already half-destroyed by the chaos the war caused.

In no way the Militaries they were could accept to get involved into a fighting strategy which laid so much on conditional. It was a solution which sounded too precarious and fragile.

“Is that your plan? Waiting nicely for the Hive to be above us and attack it with that little army of yours?”

“Yes, it is…”

“So you want us all dead?”

Immediately, almost all eyes conveyed towards Rainbow Dash, wide opened from surprise. No one here ever dared putting Sunset Shimmer’s plans into question. Out of them all, she was the one with the widest knowledge, though she had never been of the Military Caste, and had learned everything she knew in books and with experience.

Maybe, but now they had at their disposal real members of the Caste, so it was best to use them.

Wasn’t it the reason why Sunset Shimmer called Soarin and her? For their experience of war and of military strategies. Not to walk into the lion’s den, hoping they would escape from the potential swipe of the claws.

Once again, she didn’t mean to upset the young woman or to put into question her “authority”. All she did was voicing her opinion, maybe not in the most of diplomatic ways, for sure, but the result was the same. And, hadn’t Sunset Shimmer repeated many times there were no leaders here, unlike the other Ghettoes, that everybody had their say in the matters?

Without it, her New Canterlot would be no different than any other places in Equestria, where selfishness and corruption were the only masters.

“Do you have another plan in mind?” Rarity asked.

She was the first one who dared opening her mouth after the shock.

“Maybe I do…”

“In this case, I’m looking forward to hear it,” Sunset Shimmer claimed.

She stepped back and showed the map to the young woman, implying she let her take the lead. There was something a bit ironic in her gestures, as if she was already expecting to see her fail.

Unwaveringly, Rainbow Dash came forward to the empty space let by Sunset Shimmer, and saw both Soarin and Pinkie Pie coming closer too, and the others parting to let them in, as if it was where they naturally belonged.

“If the Hive tours all Equestria in two months and a half, it gives us this amount of time to gather a wider army. How many Butterflies were they when Canterlot had been attacked?”

“Somethin’ like fifty,” Applejack answered.

“So around fifty of them have been enough to destroy what was left of a Ghetto as large as Canterlot and to kill more than half of the remaining inhabitants, am I right?”

“You are,” Sunset Shimmer replied, her clenched jaw contrasting with the glow of curiosity shining in her eyes.

“Since last year, who knows how many of these Butterflies Chrysalis had been able to create? I have to remind you she got most of the most talented Masters of Elements still alive at her disposal. The cyborgs aren’t human beings easy to take by surprise, they’re machines. Us alone aren’t enough to defeat them, especially since we can’t know how many of the Butterflies the Hive now has in its possession. We have to gather a much wider army, if possible with a lot of Militaries…”

“And how on Earth could we do such a thing?”

“By asking help to the other Ghettoes. I believe this is about them as well, because without us warning them, they’ll be attacked unprepared. We have to target the biggest ones which are reachable in less than two months and a half… Muffin?”

The young mother stepped closer, shyly. Just like Pinkie Pie, her simple-minded appearance and her crossed eyes couldn’t be trusted. She wasn’t a warrior, conversely, but she knew the West Continent like the back of her hand, better than anyone in this room. Her knowledge about roads, but also about the habits and peculiarities of the other Ghettoes was unmatched.

In a few seconds, she was able to mentally draw a simple and meaningful itinerary.

“The closest ones would be Las Pegasus, which has something like ten Angels, then Cloudsdale with seven Angels, then Appaloosa and finally Fillydelphia with both five Angels. The Ghettoes with the greatest numbers of Angels are those the most likely to be attacked and plunder by the Hive. Plus, there are the places where life’s the most comfortable and so where a lot of Military settled. Two of them even are led by Militaries.”

“It’s perfect. Once gathered a bigger army, then we’ll be able to attack The Hive in two times. First, we’ll free the imprisoned Militaries and Masters of Elements who are participating against their wills to the elaboration of the Butterflies, then we’ll gauge how many Butterflies there is and try to destroy them. After that, a few days later, we’ll attack the weakened Hive again.”

“Without her Butterflies, she’d still have fighters, that’s for sure, but human fighters. And human fighters are something we can take care of,” Soarin finished.

“Exactly.”

Once again, they both exchanged a conniving look… but they quickly were slowed down by the sudden weighing silent hovering over the room. It felt as if they all had fought a boxing game and were knocked over, lost, no longer sure of where they stood.

It was really different from Sunset Shimmer’s plan. Of course, chance still was a part of everything, but it was always the case in battles and wars. No one could tell in advance the ins and outs of a strategy, but if this one sounded rather elaborated and thought through, there always were more chances for it to succeed than the opposite.

This time, it was Applejack’s turn to break the strange silent with her legendary frankness.

“Gee, this is a strategy, apple heavens!”

No one missed Sunset Shimmer’s furious glare at her but just like the pretty blond farmer always did, she received it with a simple shrug.

“Ya know am always honest, sorry. But this is somethin’ I’m OK with bein’ enrolled in.”

“Think about it, Sunset Shimmer,” Rarity said, putting a hand on the young woman’s shoulder. “It will lead us to the same result that is getting rid of both the Butterflies and The Hive.”

If there was something the Envoy remembered from the teachings she had learned in History books, it was that conflicts of ego were always responsible of the worst disasters on the battlefield.

What hurt her the most wasn’t that Rainbow Dash submitted a plan which seemed to won public support more than hers… It was the fact she hadn’t been able to come with the same scheme; with the experience she’d gained over the years. Once again, she was brought back to her lack of knowledge in the matter.

Because if she took a closer look, it seemed obvious that what the Military girl proposed was of a better content. And it was rather logic since she had been raised for the defense of civilians and that she had always swum in this universe.

After all, Sunset Shimmer was nothing but an Envoy who had turned into a fighter by necessity. She still had a lot to learn, and the most obvious of evidences had just been thrown at her face.

“Fine. Let’s adopt this plan, then… When do you think we’ll be able to leave?”

“I’d say in three days, maybe five days at the max. I think it’s going to be enough time for us to prepare our weapons, food supplies and packs, for Muffin to draw our itinerary and for me to fix Twilight’s Flying Vehicles…”

“I can draw your itinerary in two days,” Muffin replied.

“It’s perfect. Are the vehicles that broken?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Four days sound like a good concession.”

“Very well. We’ll leave in four days, then.”
> The Heat That Reflects The Light
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

Here, there was no electricity. The Angel was too far away and this second nuclear shelter was too small to be equipped with a complete infrastructure.

In reality, this place was a secret pantry, only know by Militaries, that Sunset Shimmer had discovered a bit after she arrived in Canterlot, by the end of the Uncivilized War. The place had been emptied of the resources it was supposed to offer, yet she knew this would be a perfect hideout to conceal the rest of Twilight’s technological creations, that she had been able to save and to preserve.

It had been a long and hard work, especially as some of the items were of an important size, heavy and complicated to carry. She would never have made it without the help of some deceased persons or others who were now hidden in another Ghetto.

She had been lucky this place never was discovered by one of Chrysalis’ Butterflies. If one of them would have seized the fabulous treasure it presented, then Canterlot would probably had been lost forever. And so would she.

Sunset Shimmer put the oil lamp she had brought on a concrete shelf built next to the door, in order to light up the place for today’s guest. She willingly remained in the background while Rainbow Dash was walking towards the infamous Flying Vehicles, covered by a huge dusty tarpaulin.

It felt as if the young woman was stepping into a sacred place. Her steps were slow, her hands were stroking each of the uncovered items and her eyes were shining of the glow of tears kept inside. When she took off the hessian suddenly, the sigh which escaped her lips sounded so much like a strangled sob that Sunset Shimmer even thought she had to leave her alone.

Then five hybrid vehicles appeared under their eyes, looking like a fusion of the two parts of a sidecar. Roomier and more powerful than a motorcycle, but still not close to a car, even a small one and able to run on any kind of surfaces, they were equipped with a peculiar mechanism which allowed them to take off and fly on a short distance, up to something like five thousand meters of altitude, thanks to a system of retractable wings on each sides. The height definitely was enough to allow them to reach the bottom of the Hive. Provided that the whole initial equipment had been saved, which Sunset Shimmer was sure about.

“I’ve always wondered how Twilight have been able to create something that sophisticated…”

“Thanks to very complicated calculations, and because back at the Academy, I had a lot of advanced materials at my disposal. She told me what she needed and I brought it to her if I found it. It’s the result of many years of hard work. Our brightest success until now.”

About this, Sunset Shimmer had no doubt. There were many things haphazardly made here, but nothing as forward-thinking as this. She could be wrong, but it seemed to her that even in the wealthiest Ghettoes, the ones with the greatest number of Angels out of the Hive, didn’t have such an advanced technology in their possession. Like a survivor of a time they haven’t even known.

“What’s their problem?” she asked after she admired them like a child rediscovering the sweetness of her lost infancy.

“There’s no way I can make them start. I never could understand how to fuel them… I used to put them into many sheltered wains.”

Before the Uncivilized War, the Resistance Army and the members of the Community Power had technological vehicles at their disposal. The rest of the population, like Envoys, were using horses, or going on foot. It was nothing truly cutting-edge but really old remains of the postmodern era, which already were old back then, and which were working badly. And only the most erudite of Masters of Elements knew how to fix them.

The only other persons who could have explained her how Twilight’s creations such as the Flying Vehicles were functioning had been abducted at the same time than the young woman, letting Sunset Shimmer ignorant.

She always wondered why no one ever tried to steal these creations. Probably because Chrysalis’ minions thought nothing of this would help them in their cause, or maybe they had very precise orders. Though, she knew it very well, it was much more difficult to go on exposed with such a heavy load than with bunches of drugged and tied together human beings…

“If that’s the only problem then it’s nothing complicated. They’re functioning half with electricity and half with solar energy. All it takes is to recharge them by connecting them to a plug long enough so they’re full, and then, it’s easy as pie.”

“Alright. I’ll ask Applejack to help us bringing them closer to the main shelter. She’s really strong, it probably will be just a breeze for her. Are you sure they’re going to work? It’s been ages since no one rode them at all.”

“I’ll take a look and if that’s needed, I’ll fix any problem. But from what I see, they’re in excellent state, so there’s no reason why they wouldn’t run. I’m going to need tools: a cross-head screw, a torque wrench… Wasn’t there a small complete box with the vehicles when you found them?”

There was one, indeed. Sunset Shimmer has always known the items inside weren’t mere gadgets but very important tools and always made her best not to lose it or to misplace one article. The only problem was that now she wasn’t sure of where exactly it was, among all the things that were gathered here.

That’s what she confessed to Rainbow Dash who, immediately, started to search. The fact there was none of the weapons they had built wasn’t a surprise, since she knew Sunset Shimmer had already amassed them all.

There were a lot of transistors and quirky radios they used to have fun assembling made from various pieces, back when they were nothing but kids. They never been able to receive any waves, the way they hoped so much, which would have been the evidence that the East Continent had been able to re-establish means of communications from the postmodern era.

But in the middle of all this not much, Rainbow Dash was able to unearth a few very interesting items. Among them, radiophones able to keep a clear connection on a few thousands of meters of distance, two cameras connected together – on the same system than the radiophones – which could be hidden in a helmet, and most importantly, a solar energy computer.

They were quite rare already back when they found this one, and she remembered with a sense of nostalgia the sleepless nights its fixing had costed them, and as many emotional outbursts to understand the way binary language and code were functioning. But they had been able to get it, and before they started the creation of the Flying Vehicles, for a long time this had been their greatest pride.

They were lucky the famous Master of Elements called Celestia was Twilight’s mentor! Without her huge knowledge, they could never find the keys which allowed them to understand this technology which used to be the center of the world, and which now was almost an urban legend.

Like many others, she was part of the list of missing Masters of Elements. Now and thanks to Sunset Shimmer, Rainbow Dash knew a lot of those had actually been abducted by minions in order to transform The Hive into the most advanced Ghetto of the whole West Continent.


*********************


At the break of dawn, Rainbow Dash had woken up before anybody else, like most of the time, and went to check out whether the Flying Vehicles were recharged enough to go to Las Pegasus, the first Ghetto on their way.

Since she was back in Canterlot, she had started a morning ritual, always the same. She got up, did some exercises to wake up her muscles, then went running for half an hour, watching her heartbeat from time to time. Then she fed her mare, Tough. At this moment, the rest of the inhabitants had woken up as well and the girls chosen for the day were going to work in the fields, while the other handled the domestic tasks.

After a breakfast with Soarin and Pinkie Pie, Rainbow Dash took her Healer as her assistant, and took care of the vehicles fixing. Although, in reality, there wasn’t much to do, it allowed her to keep her distances with the others.

To be honest, she wasn’t feeling she truly belonged here. The Canterlot of her memories was gone, and this idea could hardly get a way through her mind. And, she hoped she would postpone her face to face with Soarin as much as possible… There were certain things that demanded time, and she needed to think them through before speaking of it with him.

Because he was the only male of the whole Ghetto, the young man had to wait for each of the girls to have washed before he could bathe. Because of this, he was always late on the schedule decided by Sunset Shimmer. This morning might be the morning of their departure, it wasn’t an exception.

When he arrived, almost everything was ready. Most of the food supplies were loaded, as well as their packs and weapons.

Muffin created an itinerary for them on a map she had copied herself, and the day before, everybody agreed the leaders and scouts of the expedition would be Soarin, Rainbow Dash and Sunset Shimmer, since they were the most experimented ones when it came to trips through the desert.

By security, packs, food supplies and weapons would be at the back, in case they were attacked and the scouts were seriously harmed. Everything was divided up in two carts tied behind the vehicles, and Pinkie Pie, Rarity and Applejack would take shifts carrying them.

They were at the back of the convoy, with Sunset Shimmer, deciding of the last details, when Soarin met Rainbow Dash, busy arranging a few things with Muffin, thanks to the freshly unearthed radiophones.

“If there’s a problem but the frequency is unclear or unavailable, don’t be afraid to grab Tough and meet us. I’m sure the remaining girls would take good care of Dinky while you’re absent.”

The young mother’s soft voice resounded into the radiophone in a way that was a bit rough yet understandable.

“Received loud and clear.”

Soarin stepped closer prudently, as if he was scared he would break something precious by his presence. He was a bit reassured when Rainbow Dash greeted him with a smile, while hanging her radiophone on the dashboard of her vehicle.

“With all that, I haven’t been able to see how these machines were working,” he said with an embarrassed face, which made the young woman rolling up her lips in an amused rictus.

Since the dawn of time, he had often behaved as if his whole presence was troublesome. It costed him a lot of mockeries back at the Academy, yet he had kept on reacting like he should apologize to be alive, thinking it was in his genes and it couldn’t be helped…

Because of this, Rainbow Dash didn’t point out his manners and simply showed him the basic functioning of the machines, walking the walk as well as the talk.

“All you have to do is turning the grip of the right handlebar, pushing the green button under it, and at the same time, you press the left pedal… See?”

Indeed, the vehicle had started to purr, only waiting to be guided to go forward.

“If you want to go left, you turn the handlebar to the left, same kind of maneuvering if you want to turn right. Its only disadvantage is that there’s no way to go backward, so if there’s a problem, you’ll have to stop the bike by pressing the right pedal, which allows you to slow down, then the red button on the switchboard. It’s so simple even Dinky could drive it!”

Right after this, she burst out laughing… It was a strange vision, in theory, but it immediately injected a soft warmth into Soarin’s chest. It was the first time she laughed since their reunion. It felt as if the teenage girl she was back then had risen back to life.

He wanted to take her in his arms and to hold her close, but it surely wasn’t perfect timing for such displays of affection. So he only smiled and told her he understood everything and that, indeed, it was a piece of cake.

“Of course, I just told you so!” Rainbow Dash added, stopping the machine.

He almost jolted when she walked his way and arranged his anti-dust collar, which was upside down, with a softness he hadn’t witnessed from her since he was back in Canterlot.

This short moment of complicity could have been longer had not Soarin caught a glimpse at her left upper wrist, slightly sticking out under her sleeve. He thought he saw reddened flesh but couldn’t watch more closely since Rainbow Dash, realizing the problem, immediately lowered her arm with an embarrassed look.

His intuition telling him she was hiding things to him sharpened again, but before he was able to open his mouth and ask the question, they were disturbed by Rarity’s voice, a bit farther behind them, obviously very angry.

They both looked questioningly at each other, then went together, as one, in the direction of the three girls, seemingly disagreeing.

“What’s going on?” Rainbow Dash asked once she was in front of them.

“She doesn’t want me to carry a weapon,” Rarity answered, outraged, showing Sunset Shimmer with her chin.

“Why?”

“Because she can’t shoot”, Sunset Shimmer replied tis for tat.

“Maybe she doesn’t strike the heart or the head but she strikes the target anyway. It’s all that should count.”

“And I’m no damsel in distress who needs to be protected. If I’m going to be a part of this expedition, I want to be treated with equality.”

“I told you, Appelajck, that it was a bad idea to let Rarity come with us but you insisted…”

“Because Ah think she’s gonna be very helpful. And Ah still thinks so. Do Ah need to remind you we’ll never find our shelter if she hadn’t been there?”

Obviously, negotiations were in a dead-end. Each one was more stubborn than the next, and stuck to their guns. Pinkie Pie  tried her best to reason them at the beginning of the conversation but quickly gave up on the idea once she understood no one wanted to listen to her point of view.

It probably wouldn’t make her already tensed relationship with Sunset Shimmer go any better, but Rainbow Dash decided that if there was going to be a referee to unscramble the situation, then she would gladly take this role. Each minute spent in a dispute was a minute lost for their cause.

In a real army, such an event would never take place, since the least of details and assignations already were decided a long time before the official departure. Their group failed a bit when it came to organization. If only Twilight had been there… She would have found a way to fix things in the most of diplomatic ways.

But Twilight still was a prisoner of The Hive, so they were going to have to be satisfied with her, Rainbow Dash.

“Enough! She’s not going to be empty-handed and unable to defend herself. We’re not here to be bodyguards but to try to save this dirty country from a potential disaster. Give her a gun.”

"No, I won’t. What are we going to do if she gets hurt? She’s too important.”

“Another reason. If anything happens to you, you’ll be glad if she’s here to save your ass. FYI, you can kill someone even if she only shoot in their legs or shoulders. All it takes is striking the right artery.”

This last line, interjected with a casualness and a composure that sent chills down the spine, generated a deadly silence which stopped the discussion. If both Soarin and Pinkie Pie knew the darker part of the young woman’s personality, the others, actually not really used to it yet, stiffened up a little.

It felt as if she had just spat a reality into their faces, a cruel reality they had tried hard to ignore but that, from now on, none of them could sweep away with the back of their hands.

There were risks that things would turn out bad, and that people would die. Risks that themselves, who, until then, only shot on targets and Butterflies, which meant cyborgs, were going to be those who would take away lives.

In front of this sudden switch of atmosphere, Rainbow Dash, more and more annoyed by these mishaps she regarded as nonsensical, searched through her own pack and took out her automatic crossbow, along with the set of arrows matching it, and put it into Rarity’s hands.

She exchanged a look with Sunset Shimmer, who shrugged and turned around, walking in the direction of her vehicle, silently. Once the shock registered, her resentment had taken over again, and it was obvious to anyone that she didn’t like the fact another of her orders was transgressed by Rainbow Dash.

Each of the protagonists, Pinkie Pie and Soarin included, withdrew as well, ready to leave. Before going to her own vehicle, Applejack patted Rarity’s shoulder, while the girl was looking at the crossbow with a puzzled face.

“I won’t be able to use this.”

“It’s easy.”

Rainbow Dash slid one of the arrows into the crack provided, and guided Rarity’s arms so they would be in the right position and at the right level, all while explaining the maneuvering to her.

“You just aim at your target, and once you have it in sight, press the button right here…”

Rarity obeyed and an arrow lodged itself into the leather of the seat of her own saddle.

“See? Easy as pie! Most importantly… Never forget to take back your arrows. Because I don’t have another set. And good luck,” she concluded with a smile and a wink.

Upon these words, Rainbow Dash turned around to join the front of their delegation. Yet, after she took back the arrow lodged into the saddle, like advised, Rarity stopped Rainbow Dash anyway, holding her back by the bottom of her sweater’s sleeve.

“Thanks for pronouncing a judgement in my favor. I’m very grateful you did.”

“You’ll thank me when this will be over. If you’re still alive.”


*******************


As soon as the sun took its leave, the heat of the desert decreased at the rate of knots, and even the leather clothes no longer were able to warm up the travelers. By common consent, it was decided that the group would stop near a rocky mountain in the shape of a creek, sheltered from prying eyes.

Each hurried to prepare their encampment. Rarity had sewed their tents, in a material solid enough to resist a surprise sand storm. It was nothing like her creations of yesteryears, when she was working at the service of the Elite Caste, just like everything she had created with her hands since the beginning of the war, which never stopped her from feeling proud of it all.

Out of all Canterlot’s inhabitants, she was the one whose life had changed the most. For eighteen years, she lived surrounded by luxury, beautiful things and refined persons. And everything crumbled down on the doomed day when the Elite members were shot, women and children included, on a November night.

Militaries burst in into her house, in order to settle them somewhere safe, along with a dozens of other families from any type of Caste working for the Community Power. On their way to the shelter where they stayed for the greatest part of the war, before Rarity decided to enroll at the fabrication of bullets and bladed weapons, a lot of them died in an ambush. Among them, her own parents.

She would always congratulate herself for sending her little sister Sweetie Belle in a boarding school for young girls escaped from the Community Power’s massacre, which was in the small Ghetto of Hoofington – only those escaped from this massacre knew it existed. She had no doubt that she would have died during the Butterflies’ attack if she hadn’t done this.

Still today, Rarity remembered who was the person who told her about this place. A man, top brass Military with rainbow hair which reminded her something. He told her his name was Bow Hothoof and she was sure his hair wasn’t the only thing the man shared with the Military girl in front of her.

Rainbow Dash was sharing her tent with Pinkie Pie, though they both had their own. It surprised Rarity that the young woman didn't choose instead to share a bed with Soarin, since she knew he was her boyfriend.

All the girls she knew, except maybe Applejack, were longing to have a man in their lives. It wasn’t about sex. It was about love and affection, and sharing something different with someone dear. And the one who had the chance to live such a joy seemed to be fleeing it with a great deal of energy, colored with despair.

So, when Rarity saw Soarin stepping inside Rainbow Dash’s tent, as Pinkie Pie had volunteered to take the first shift, she concluded that the young man had noticed with strange distance between them, and wanted to fix the problem. How she wished she were a butterfly so she could be able to spin above the couple, and see and hear everything that was going to happen.

Her lack of romance was really starting to be embarrassing!

“Do I bother you?” Soarin asked on the threshold of the door made of fabric.

Rainbow Dash was busy preparing the sleeping bags. She was lit only by the weak yellow glow of an oil lamp and shadows were playing against her back. It was impossible to see the looks on her face, nor to see through her precise gestures whether she felt shaken by his intrusion or if it didn’t matter.

“No, you don’t,” she simply answered.

Her voice was neutral.

And yet, she kept on busying herself, as if she was expecting him to get weary and leave her alone. But he wouldn’t let her alone. Since they left Canterlot, she had barely told him a word, even during their breaks, even during meals, and she refused his help each time he proposed.

Back when they still were in the Ghetto, Soarin had a few rays of hope, glows that were weak and flickering, but which made him believe things would soon be a bit more lenient between them.

Of course, nothing would never be the same. Too many things had happened in-between, and they weren’t exactly who they used to be. However, the feelings they had for each other still were here and it was thanks to them he kept on having faith about them being back together. Together for good, not sporadically, when a sparkle ignited between them.

He didn’t like it but if things needed to be forced a bit, he would force them. Knowing she was so close and he couldn’t touch her, he couldn’t even hold her hand, it had turned out almost unbearable to him.

So, he took one step forward and wrapped his arms around her shoulders. Immediately, Soarin could feel Rainbow Dash stiffening, and suspend her actions. An odd embarrassment beribboned around them, before vanishing away like smoke rings when he felt her body relaxing against him and she pressed a hand against his arm.

Relieved by the fact she didn’t reject him, Soarin let it go and put his cheek against her rainbow hair. She was still smelling like cinnamon and ginger, faithful to his memories in each of her corners.

“Sorry. I couldn’t help myself… Are you mad at me?”

“No.”

She answered with a sigh, a bit breathless, and for the first time, he noticed her heart beating against his chest, the restlessness of her shoulders… Her anxiety hadn’t completely left her, and Soarin didn’t know why. She had never been nervous around him, not even when she was a teenager, back when they first met.

Something was wrong, it was palpable, yet he didn’t dare asking questions, scared to see her slipping through his fingers forever. He could lose her again. Not now they had the chance to be together.

When she turned around, her face confused, somewhere between desire and fears, he knew that, somehow, these questions couldn’t be postponed forever. He needed to know, if he wanted things to get any better. Although it also meant the situation could worsen, or set them in a dead-end.

He cupped a hand around her cheek. Her skin was soft, fine and almost translucent, once again, just like in his memories. The way she pressed her face against his palm gave him hope. No one could react this way to a caress if they were feeling nothing for the other one. It didn’t exist.

However, when he tried to take her in his arms again, this time by wrapping them around her waist, she took a step back, and slipped out once again.

It made no sense.

“What’s wrong, Dashie? Why are you always rejecting me? Is it because… you don’t love me anymore?”

Said like this, the question could seem to be a bit stupid. But he needed to know. Though a part of him kept on whispering this couldn’t be, that her reactions proved him otherwise, another part convinced him not to trust appearances. Never trusting appearances. Military quirk.

She looked up, as if she was trying to show him how sincere she was by sinking her eyes into his.

“Can we really stop loving someone who’s dead?”

“I’m not dead.”

“I know. But you’ve been dead to me for so long. I have mourned you during all these years. So… It’s always complicated for me to tell myself you’re here by my side and that we both made it through. Can you understand?”

He could. Yet, something told her what she just confessed was only a half-truth and that she was hiding other secrets.

It couldn’t be the explanation of why each time he touched her, or even he just brushed a part of her body, she had a reflex of rejection, as if his fingers against her skin were scalding, though she had been on the verge of melting down because of a mere stroke on the cheek.

Grey areas hadn’t completely disappeared, and when she sat on her sleeping bag, in order to take off her boots, he sat by her side, willing to know more. The fact she didn’t ask him to leave was a sign of encouragement… He had better stake it all.

“Do you remember, during the war, there was this two days-long ambush? We took refuge in a mountain, a bit like this one… And in the tent, you told me you didn’t care if we were living in such conditions, or even if we died on this night, because, as long as we were together, you could accept everything?”

Of course, she remembered. She could never forget this night. In the middle of fires and screams, protected by their shelter of rocks, they thought they would die before sunrise, she confessed it to him and he nodded… what followed then was of an unprecedented passion.

After they survived this night, they thought they could survive anything, until the day which separated them and each of the petals of hope fell.

“Something else happened, Dashie… You sound like you no longer have faith in anything.”

“Stop talking nonsense!”

The pain he read in her eyes made him understand how wrong he was. It wasn’t that she didn’t have faith anymore. It was that she was scared to have faith.

And, right after, she sighed resignedly. Her shaking hands were fingering her boots, and many times she opened her mouth to explain before shutting it again without a word.

She was struggling. Something was on her lips, something she wanted to get out of herself, but which she wasn’t able to grasp without taking the risk to burn.

It would be counterproductive to force her to tell, so Soarin let her enough time to say what she wanted to say. To be patient was always the best thing to do with Rainbow Dash, especially when it came to intimate details.

“When I woke up at the Military Hospital, with my mother and Pinkie Pie by my side… I’ve been told I was pregnant.”

Soarin expected anything but this. Rainbow Dash… pregnant? And he was the father, obviously. And obviously, if she learned this after the explosions – at different spots – which both knocked them over, it meant the child was made during this infamous night of ambush.

So, it meant that…

“I have child?”

“You don’t.”

“But you just said that…”

“She was still-born.”

Suddenly, Soarin regreted with a throat-scalding bitterness that he spoke about this night. If he was aware of how he would hurt her, he would never talked about it. Of course, it also was a crushing blow for him, but it had nothing common with what Rainbow Dash probably was feeling. She carried this child during nine months, and probably thought it represented her ultimate bond with him, this bond she thought she lost forever.

And today, in place of a child who reminded her of her greatest love, what was under her eyes was her greatest love who reminded her of her lost baby.

“From the moment I’ve learned, I knew there was no way I could stay in Canterlot, even if the war was over. Everything was destroyed, men were dying from the Y virus in awful ways, in the streets… I couldn’t raise my daughter in such conditions. So, with Mom and Pinkie, we took the decision of leaving for the Everfree Forest. But…”

“Dashie, you’re not the blame. You did what was best.”

“I know,” she claimed, wiping her tears away with the back of her hand. “I know, but you have to understand how difficult it is for me to be standing in front of you while knowing this.”

“I understand. I also understand that I have no doubts – nothing has changed in my heart. If you’re by my side, I know I can accept anything.”

Soarin jolted when, without notice, he felt Rainbow Dash’s lips pressed against him, for a long kiss. Flabbergasted at first, he then let himself go to the unprecedented feeling of bliss which swept away his inner body. His hands buried into the young woman’s rainbow hair and he parted from her only once they both were breathless.

“I only need a bit of time, Soarin,” she claimed.

“Take all the time you need. I’ll wait for you. I promise.”

A few minutes later, he was leaving Rainbow Dash’s tent, his heart lighter than when he entered into it. Of course, not everything was settled, and deep inside of him he knew she was still hiding something… Yet, hope was allowed again, he could feel it. It had started to grow in his chest like flowers in the spring, and was only waiting on another beam of sun to bloom completely.

On his lips, remained the salted sensation of their kisses bathed in tears.
> Light-Heartedly
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

And in the middle of the desert, after days of a tiring trip under her scorching sun, appeared the huge walls of the Ghetto called Las Pegasus. Despite the oversize of its fortifications, it was impossible to miss the bolts of lights spat through the sky. Like a calling signal encouraging to come and get lost.

No one in the expedition had been expecting this, despite the fact they all knew this place possessed something like ten Angels.

According to Muffin, Las Pegasus was especially centered around pleasures and fun, the kind of place Pinkie Pie couldn’t just wait to visit. She planned the other Ghettoes not to be as entertaining as this one, although the reasons why they were here weren’t the entertaining kind at all.

By following the itinerary that the young Envoy had drawn, they were supposed to arrive in front of the huge gates which gave access to the Ghetto. Because of the past attacks, Canterlot was the only place all over Equestria not to have any walls or admission controls.

Or at least, that was what they all thought. Once again, what a surprise when they stopped their vehicles in front of a huge opening, towered by a neon panel twinkling with red and yellow, saying: “Welcome to Fabulous Las Pegasus”.

“Are you sure Muffin haven’t mistaken?” Rarity asked, staring at the panel just like the others.

“It seems like she hasn’t,” Sunset Shimmer answered. “This is Las Pegasus. As written there.”

Flabbergasted anyway, the whole team got off of their vehicles, that they started to push in the direction of what seemed to be the appropriate doorway. Their suspicions were confirmed as soon as they crossed the inexistent gate; there wasn’t even someone devoted to control who came in and went out, like in any other Ghetto, and this, even back when the Community Power was in charge.

Their fear to be headed towards a trap was easy to smell. This all was too good to be true, almost utopic, even…

Yet, by going farther into the Ghetto, they quickly understand that, as strange as it appeared, things were what they seemed to be in Las Pegasus. If they were looked out by the passersby swarming about in the streets, it only was because of their vehicles. As far as the rest was concerned, everyone kept on attending to their business without a care, and the eccentricity of their outfits were competing with the very psychedelic fairytale-like décor surrounding them.

For sure, the ten Angels were working at full capacity. Everywhere, there was lights, tackiness, attractions, music and laughter. The buildings, quirky, were painted with shimmering colors and the roads were sparkling with sequins.

It was hard to believe, going even farther into the Ghetto, that they were still in Equestria. For sure, when compared to the absolute despair that Canterlot represented, or the severity of the Underworld, the differences were noteworthy.

“I wonder what type of person could be the Leader of such a Ghetto?” Rainbow Dash whispered almost to herself.

She gasped and jumped when suddenly, appeared in front of her a girl, with violet and white hair full of wild curls, a funny propeller hat on her head. She looked like a mauve and completely insane clone of Pinkie Pie.

In fact, whoever that girl might be, she immediately got the sympathy of Rainbow Dash’s best friend, as if she could see herself through her.

“The Leader of our Ghetto’s Mr. Discord. You’re going to love him! My name’s Screw Ball and I’ve followed you all this time because these are funny machines you got here! By the by, have you ever ate mud pies? I mean, pies with real mud! It’s good but then, your tummy hurts a little… Don’t you think so?”

Alright. After further thinking and after she recovered from her scare, Rainbow Dash had to face the facts… This girl wasn’t just a Pinkie Pie clone. She was way worse than Pinkie Pie! Her speech made no sense whatsoever.

Actually, she kept on following them without asking for permission, watering them with questions they couldn’t even answer to, before she went on with anecdotes which were in nothing related to what she had asked before.

If there was a trap in this colorful Ghetto, maybe it was this one. By dint of staying among all those lights and sparkles, people were getting crazy.

However, the girl seemed to be very acquainted of the place and its Leader, and if she could finally let someone speak, she could be very useful to the group. It probably was the reason why no one had tried to get rid of her yet, though Applejack was showing advanced signs of irritation.

Their salvation could only come from Pinkie Pie, who was able to pick up by cutting her clone short, in the course of a silly anecdote about the man she told to be the Leader, Discord.

“Where can we find him? We have to talk to him. It’s very important…”

“Very important? Mr. Discord doesn’t like important things! Tell him you want to have fun and he’ll understand. He lives at the Chaos Hotel, where I’m going to lead you to and after that, we’ll have a mushroom shampoo!”

“A mushroom shampoo, so funny! It’s an assonance!”

“Hem, Pinkie,” Rarity intervened. “I think she speaks seriously…”

This last detail made the young woman laugh harder, while they all walked behind Screw Ball, rushing at full throttle through the crowded and still colorful streets of Las Pegasus.

If, in the beginning, it had been a bit difficult to get adapted to Pinkie Pie’s dynamic and cheerful nature, contrasting with the seriousness Rainbow Dash seemed to be displaying all the time, after a few days’ trip, those who didn’t know her well finally got used to it all.

She brought a dash of freshness and casualness to a mission which was in no way cheerful. Their mission was too important, and, most of the time, being aware of that prevented them from envisioning anything under a positive angle. Yet, they all knew it – it wasn’t by feeling defeated in advance that they would win the struggle they had to fight, conversely.

Maybe all they really needed was to have a little break in this absurd place. It could be a small bubble of oxygen where to breath in completely before they had to hold their breath for a very long time.

Rarity, walking behind without the possibility to see where Screw Ball was, leading from afar, even farther than where were Sunset Shimmer, Rainbow Dash and Soarin. She leaned next to Applejack.

She could have thought this place to be fantastic if it hadn’t been so tawdry.

“Seeing the rest of the décor, I admit I’m a bit scared to discover what could a hotel called Chaos look like.”

“Well… Maybe like this,” the young woman replied, showing something with her chin.

Rarity looked up and her eyes opened wide under the shock. The Builders who had built this place might have been extremely plastered on the day they drew the plans and started the construction site! She couldn’t find no other explanation to such a muddle of walls and glasses.

Two towers like one of a castle were surrounded blocks of multicolored bricks on which had been added hexagons of iron painted in canary-yellow. All this with windows of various shapes and sizes. There even was flight of stairs leading straight into a wall… A metaphor of the Ghetto, in some kind of way.

In the front of the group, although none between Sunset Shimmer, Rainbow Dash or Soarin regarded themselves as judges of the good taste, the amazement wasn’t different. The Hotel Chaos seemed to be the icing on the cake of the strangeness of the place… And most importantly, it scared them because of what they were supposed to do next.

Obviously, if the Ghetto and the Hotel were similar to the Leader, their task wasn’t going to be the easy kind. Although anyone could penetrate into Las Pegasus they were sure that nobody there, their Leader included, seemed to be worried about a potential cybernetic attack.


************************


The most complicated detail was to find a place where to park the Flying Vehicles, without taking the risk of a wreckage or worse, a theft. The eccentric Screw Ball girl proposed the stables and if the suggestion could theoretically sound really stupid, in fact it happened to be the safest places of all. In the boxes kept for the master of the house who, yet, didn’t own a horse, locked up thanks to a secret code, their only means of transportation were sheltered.

The whole team agreed that, since they were here for the night, they might as well sleep at the hotel.

The place, just like the rest of the Ghetto, was discordant with the idea they all had in mind about the other fortresses. After the War, Equestria’s inhabitants all turned very distrustful, and everything apparently foreign was regarded with a strong suspicion, if not a rejection in due form.

Nothing like this went on in Las Pegasus. Here, it was as if everything what was going on anywhere else didn’t exist. An alternate universe, in which all troubles about pollution, hunger and violence were imaginary, where everything was only extravaganzas and luxury.

If this atmosphere fit some of them, for Rainbow Dash these happy faces and smiles were hiding a truth that was gloomier. Who could feel happy to be obliged to get by with the rest of a depressed civilization? Where did the money they all spent with these smiles come from? What were the sacrifices these people had made in order to spend a few hours of good time in this palace of debauchery?

Whole families were torn apart because of the War, thousands of persons were still missing, supposedly dead. An insidious threat was weight on the Continent’s fate, and there they were using four Angels to operate this strange palace, pretending none of that ever happened.

She just couldn’t help it. She had to keep her guard on. She had to observe everything with distrust and uncertainties. She wasn’t that different from other Equestrian inhabitants, in the end.

Or was it because she meddled with people again? They were influencing her unconsciously, making go up to the surface memories she took so much time to bury deep inside.

They all settled in some of the cheapest rooms. They all were scattered all over the hotel, which never bothered to follow any level of social ranks. In fact, the numbers on the doors were mixed up as well, and the room twelve was just beside room thirty-eight and room forty-two.

Spacious yet very humble, they were everything they needed. One bed, one closet, one desk. No embellishments, no luxury. It would have been inappropriate, to make the most of the highest comfort when their fellows stayed in Canterlot had to be satisfied with the bunker’s collective bedrooms. And it would be especially inappropriate when compared to the reason of their visit.

Tourism wasn’t on the order. They had a mission to fulfill. And as soon as they were settled, Sunset Shimmer and Rainbow Dash hurried to go and meet with Las Pegasus’ Leader, this famous Mr. Discord, whom Screw Ball couldn’t stop talking about.

What they knew about him was that he was a former Crafter who denied his Caste, and now introduced himself as a pleasure-seeker. He had been chosen by Las Pegasus’ inhabitants – the Ghetto was completely destroyed at the end of the Uncivilized War – a little while after the battles stopped, and helped by the important capital at his disposal, he had entirely recreated a Ghetto in a short time, a Ghetto that was among the most advances ones.

His office was at the last floor of one of the towers, and to get there, people had to… climb a wall. In fact, it was one of the favorite attraction of those who came in the Ghetto of pleasures, and they were very few to be able to climb all the way up. Of course, the current owner got there thanks to his private elevator system, but it seemed like he had thought it funnier to welcome his visitors in an absurd manner.

Unless it was actually to make sure they would never be courageous enough to climb up in order to complain.

Rainbow Dash and Sunset Shimmer were two athletic young women, in perfect health.It would have been easy for them to climb the wall completely. However, they didn’t want to become another attraction for the hotel’s costumers, and instead, they gave a few coins to the lady who was surveying the boss’ private elevator.

Since there was no other room at this floor, there neither was a door to get to the office. At the threshold, the two young women introduced themselves and could only notice the place seemed to be as empty as Screw Ball’s messy brain. And, taking a few steps forward, they discovered a man lying on the floor, passed out.

Or at least that was what they thought…

“Boo!” He shouted, opening his eyes.

Sunset Shimmer, who was the closest, yelped with a high-pitched voice and jumped back, her heart thumping. Her reaction started a laugh that was almost hysterical to the man on the floor. The latter, now sitting, held his sides, obviously unable to stop his hilarity. The young woman was red of embarrassment and didn’t dare looking in Rainbow Dash’s direction, afraid to see she was laughing at her as well.

And she would gladly have, a few years ago. She always liked pranks and jokes, whether it was making them or when others did them to her. Even back at the Military Academy, she was really enjoyed putting glue on the instructors’ chair, fake spiders in her fellows’ sheets and pepper into Soarin’s orange juice glasses. Her sense of humor, yet, seemed to have desert her at the same time than life deserted from her father’s body.

It probably was her inability to laugh of the prank – which she regretted bitterly – that convinced the man to stop laughing himself. He got up and went to sit behind his desk, on which he lied his two legs. One of them probably was an artificial limb… Rainbow Dash recognized it by the way it dragged a little compared to the other one.

“I suppose you’re Mr. Discord,” she questioned.

By her side, Sunset Shimmer did her best to stop feeling embarrassed, despite the fact her fellow had not even giggled.

“Depends what you need him for,” was the man’s answer.

And they immediately understood it was him. Who else could it be, anyway? He had to be able to climb up here and they figured out everyone wasn’t lucky enough to meet the chatterbox named Screw Ball to give them as much information could be.

His lanky attitude clashed with his very classical suit, composed of a shirt, a jacket and pants, not the type of clothes that fit with life in a Ghetto planted in the middle of a desert. His forehead was going bald and his hair was brushed back as if constantly loaded with static electricity.

But what was the most striking to Rainbow Dash and Sunset Shimmer was that he had another artificial limb, an arm this time. These transplants were expensive, since it was a very advanced technology, dating back to the end of the postmodern era. Only excellent Masters of Elements could conceive them and there were only a few left. Which means either the Ghetto held these Masters of Elements neither these surgeries had been made before the Uncivilized War, thus explaining why he wasn’t able to fight when civilians were called to enroll in the Resistance Army.

“We need your help, Sir,” Rainbow Dash started.

“What’s happening? You don’t like your room? Are the buffet’s grasshoppers still hopping? No, you wouldn’t have such a look on your faces if it had been the case…”

“Indeed, Sir.”

“I can already feel boredom taking over me…”

As weird as she was, Screw Ball had told them so. Discord wasn’t the type of persons to feel inspired by serious matters and it was more than very likely that their problem wouldn’t give him a burst of strong emotions.

And yet, they had to tell him. His Ghetto had many Angels, which meant they were among the most probable targets of Chrysalis. If her Butterflies took over Las Pegasus, they weren’t sure that even with the help of other Ghettoes, they would be able to get rid of the threat that would represent.

Sunset Shimmer was the one with the clearest vision of what the danger was like. So it was her who took the initiative to explain it all to Las Pegasus’ Leader, who seemed to be more interested by the various gadgets on his desk than by her speech.

Once the situation’s explanation was over, Discord looked up with questioning eyes, as if he were expecting to see them burst out laughing, telling him this was nothing but an enormous joke. Of course, they didn’t and this time, the deception that followed was much anticipated.

“Let me guess… Military and Envoy?”

“Well… It has nothing to do with our problem, but yes, that’s what we are,” Sunset Shimmer answered. “How did you guess?”

“How? Just look at her… She’s as stiff as a bayonet! And you’re bowlegged, which means you’re riding a lot and only Envoy do such stupid stuff nowadays! Fall out, Sergeant!”

After this, he burst out laughing again.

This time, it was Rainbow Dash who blushed from embarrassment. She hadn’t even realized that, instinctively, her body had taken the mandatory position Militaries were taking when they were in front of a superior.

Yet, this Discord was anything but a warrior. If she was an open book, so was he as well. Everything in his behavior shouted indifference. The whole world could explode around him, as long as he wasn’t harmed or injured, it didn’t matter to him at all. And she would bet her bottom coin that their alarming speech had no more impact on his feelings than a small breeze brushing the branches of a millennial tree.

“I’m sorry. This is all so very sad but it has nothing to do with me. I haven’t taken part to the Uncivilized War so it’s not now that I’ll get involved in a guerilla with the Floating Ghetto, whether it’s a Hive or I don’t know what else. Chrysalis could send as many cyborgs as she wants, we won’t deceive her expectations. Las Pegasus won’t need anyone to defend her.”

“Do you mean you have a great deal of weapons and fighters at your disposal?”

“Who knows?”

It had to be the case. If not, it was pure madness. The right amount of Butterflies would make short work of Las Pegasus. Especially if they attacked by surprise. With their incredible human appearances, they could easily blend in with the crowd and the lack of surveillance at the Ghetto’s doorway wouldn’t help.

“Is there any way we could make you change your mind?” Sunset Shimmer asked.

“Absolutely none. I’m not interested. It’s better when handled by professionals.”

She glanced at Rainbow Dash. Equestria needed Las Pegasus, if Las Pegasus really held the strike force its Leader boasted about. However, nothing could let them know it was the truth. Also, if he refused to help, it undoubtedly was a knock and threatened their mission, but they couldn’t force him to accept.

With Rainbow Dash, Sunset Shimmer had been able to notice that, sometimes, strong-arm tactics weren’t the best of solutions. What worked with Soarin couldn’t work with everyone else. He had much more to gain than to lose in all this. Which wasn’t the case for the rest of the population. And obviously, Discord considered it wasn’t the case for him, neither.

When she saw her fellow nodding, she knew that for once they both were on the same wavelength.

They would have to do without Las Pegasus’ precious help.

“Thanks for your time, Sir”, Rainbow Dash said, mentally swearing at herself for the Military way she had to talk to him.

“I should be the one thanking you. It was quite funny in the end… You know what you should be doing, Sergeant? Release some tension! Make the most of the Hotel, get yourself a pin-up boy and have a good time! It can’t hurt you.”

“Well… Thanks for your suggestion.”

“It was more than a mere suggestion.”

He searched through the jumble on his desk, a mix of toys, golf balls, food packs, and unearthed tickets he put into their hands, after he got up and skirted the furniture.

“These are tickets for the Hotel’s cabaret. Invite some friends if you have friends and get yourself drinks. Dance a little, and forget about Chrysalis only for tonight.”

“Thank you, but it’s not going to be necessary,” Sunset Shimmer claimed, giving her own tickets back.

“She’s joking,” Rainbow Dash stopped her, taking the tickets back. “Thank you. We’re going to use them astutely, trust me.”

“Well, this is unexpected! Maybe the Sergeant isn’t the most uptight of the two.”

Indeed, the young woman’s decision had surprised Sunset Shimmer a lot. Discord’s offer was tempting but she had regarded it as inappropriate and that they had more important things to do than “having a good time”… And here was Rainbow Dash, who until now never displayed any particular sunny mood, deciding it was exactly what every of them needed…

Actually, Discord’s comments and the offensive nickname he gave her, had deeply affected her. He was right. She was “as stiff as a bayonet”. And that wasn’t the way she had always been. Before the War, she used to be a pleasure-loving, who liked parties, laughing and having fun with her friends.

Deep inside, Rainbow Dash could feel it. She needed to take up again with the person she used to be. The real Rainbow Dash. Even for just one night… To breath. To put the pains of the past behind her and to stop worrying about the future. To live the moment.


********************


The Chaos Hotel’s music hall was situated underground and was as wide as the hotel itself. No place like these were to be found anymore in Equestria, since most of the Entertainment Houses closed their doors when the War began, and never opened again. The people’s leisure had changed, and were now more thinking about getting intoxicated in order to forget their condition than about having fun for pleasure.

But just like the rest, what went around elsewhere wasn’t a rule in Las Pegasus, where the landmarks were mixed up.

One large bar went all around the huge room illuminated by lights of various colors; pink, red, green or blue. The only gap was actually left for a mysterious door by which women came and went, often accompanied by men. At the back, there were tables for those who were hungry and wanted to savor many kind of dishes with vegetables and insects that were more sophisticated than the average. There was a stage on which musicians, dancers and singers, always the same, were taking shifts. What was left of the room was a giant dancefloor where everybody dashed willingly.

Sunset Shimmer finally understood… People who came in here also wanted to forget about the past and about a part of what was their present. It felt as if jumping back in the delights of forgotten times, made of carefreeness and enjoyments.

Yes, there was a threat hovering over all these persons, but they ignored it, and if they did their job well, it probably would go on like this. However, sometimes, living the moment without a care about the weight on one’s shoulders, even for a couple of hours, it felt good, she couldn’t deny it.

And she wasn’t the only one. Much to her surprise, none of the members from their expedition refused Discord’s present. It even was with some sense of cheerfulness that they all got prepared for this party that would probably be their only entertainment for the two months to come.

Especially for Rarity, it was a chance to attire herself with her most beautiful clothes and to make the most of a luxury she hadn’t enjoyed for years. She was the daughter of Crafters working for the Community Power, so the beginning of her life was more than comfortable and she spent many years without a care about any financial problems.

Like many others, she lost everything she had because of the Uncivilized War, which included her parents, and she had to adapt to a way of life that was much different from what she was used to. It was hard, in the beginning. But she finally had been able to make the best of this new existence, and got on with it.

This made her very enthusiastic about the night to come. She intended to make the most of it wholeheartedly and also, to have some good time with a man, if possible. It also seemed to be Applejack’s plans.

Both dressed to kill, they didn’t wait too long before going on the dancefloor, with a cocktail in one hand, partners in crime with a common ambition.

In theory, it seemed to be a bit strange but they were really close. Yet, Applejack came from a humbler though very powerful environment, since the Producers were respected by all the other Castes. If she lost everything she had as well during the War, her way of life used to be very different from Rarity’s.

The young man was raised with the intention to make her and her now deceased big brother the future managers of Sweet Apple Acres, the huge geoplant domain which used to feed all of Canterlot. The comfort which was her life was much simpler and unassuming than her friend’s, however it meant as much to her and had disappeared too.

Applejack and Rarity should have hated each other. If there truly were fights sometimes, especially when they first met, most of the time they were on the same wavelength and spent most of their free time together.

What happened at nights when everybody else was asleep was natural like a river going to the sea. Most of the girls in the shelter did the same, coupling by sympathy. It didn’t mean they felt attracted by the same gender. It only was the only option available.

Sunset Shimmer never gave in to this secret habit. There were no girls back at the shelter she was feeling close with. Of course, she got on well with everyone but she had found no friends there as precious to her as Twilight.

Though in reality, she had met face to face with Twilight only twice in her life. The first one when they were introduced by Sunset Shimmer’s mother and the second time on the day of her abduction. Yet, it was their letters, getting more and more intimate, which created the bond between them.

Why the young woman never told her cousin, who she yet was so close with, about this bond connecting them together, Sunset Shimmer didn’t know. What she knew, however, was that if Twilight hadn’t tried to keep an inner sanctum, maybe it would have been less complicated to convince her cousin to join them, and their relationship would probably be rather different now.

The waitress dressed in pink put a translucent cocktail decorated with a slice of lime in front of Sunset Shimmer, who thanked her with a smile.

She felt the presence beside her before she could even see it, which probably prevented her from being trapped again and from jumping from scare. Once was enough.

“What are you drinking?” Pinkie Pie yelled in her ear.

When she turned around, Sunset Shimmer discovered the young woman dressed in red, with sequins on top and frills at her skirt, accompanied of Soarin, who wore a suit which seemed to be fresh out of Rarity’s suitcases. Where could she find such an outfit? It couldn’t be from their shack in the woods, where it was useless to keep trinkets for any occasion.

As if she had guessed what was on her mind, Pinkie Pie replied, while sitting at the bar.

“Dashie and I kept our ball gowns… We like to wear them for special occasions, like birthdays. I was right to bring them along. I want a pink cocktail!”

Immediately, they saw Soarin, which hadn’t uttered a word since he arrived, scanning the bar’s doorway with anticipation… There was no need to think hard to discover what he was expecting with such a feverish hope.

Since they first met, Sunset Shimmer understood there was only one person who would be able to get their way to his heart. And it wasn’t herself. Just by the way he was looking at her, his eyes illuminated by a glow like some precious gem, to guess how much he loved her.

She didn’t want to play that trump to convince Rainbow Dash to join them, since Twilight’s rescue had always been part of her plans, while Soarin’s hadn’t always been obvious. There were chances for him never to wake up from his coma. In fact, it probably was the reason why The Hive never tried to get him back, since it also was the case with every of those who fled and founded The Underworld.

To be honest, he was some sort of “backup trump”. If Rainbow Dash had kept on refusing, she would have get everything done with only one top brass Military. Although he surely would never be able to understand Twilight’s creations.

Rainbow Dash finally appeared as well. Her dress, of the same color than her hair, cracked at the thigh, aerial, seemed to be floating like a cloud around her athletic body. White sleeves made of three layers of muslin which hid the skin apparently had been added a long time ago, but perfectly matched the rest.

With her one-side braid, plaited from the top of her skull and falling on her shoulders, she almost looked like a different person. Usually, she only let her barely brushed hair linger against her shoulders or to arrange it in a high ponytail, and she dressed practical with dark colors, of the camouflage type.

When he saw her walking in their direction, Soarin’s eyes lit up with delight and Sunset Shimmer understood that, once again, she wouldn’t matter in the equation.

Rainbow Dash sat at the bar, beside them all, with a relaxed something on her face that Sunset Shimmer had never seen before and that the others had almost forgotten about.

“Where are Rarity and Applejack?” she asked.

“On the dancefloor. They decided to have fun.”

“And they’re right! I’ll do the same in a few moments… But first, I want a drink. Have you ordered already, Soarin?”

“No, not yet…”

“Do you think they have this something made of violets they used to serve at the Academy’s balls? I haven’t drunk one of those since ages!”

“Let’s see that,” he said while calling a waitress. “Would you like to try, girls?”

“Why not?” Sunset Shimmer answered. “Once I’ll be done with my current cocktail…”

“Thanks, but not for me,” Pinkie Pie said. “I’m way too intrigued by the door that’s over there. I’m going to see what it is.”

“Have fun!”

“You can count on me.”

And she leaped off her seat, after she completely gulped the tiny glass of pink alcohol she had ordered before.

If she had the least of common sense, she thought, Sunset Shimmer should follow her in order to let the two lovers take their romance up again. These two needed to be left alone, for a bit of intimacy. A lot had happened between them and they had to learn to get acquainted again, to put some things behind them, and focus on each other.

They were out for a commando mission, after all, and it was impossible to predict how much time they had left.

It wasn’t the only reason why Pinkie Pie decided to leave the bar. What was to be found behind this door really intrigued her. Of a curious nature, she liked opening lost boxes, she liked exploring forbidden places and what was hiding behind closed doors, of course… In fact, curiosity was an important Healer’s quality. The best remedies were found thanks to experimentations.

As soon as she went through the door, she was feeling aggressed by the thick smoke reigning there. It wasn’t easy to be able to see clearly where she put her feet, and all along the corridor she bumped into laughing couples.

Opium. Equestria’s citizens favorite drug, a true counterculture with its disciples in each and every Ghettoes, even the smallest ones. If Entertainment Houses had disappeared by the beginning of the War, Opium Smokehouses, on the other hand, had multiplied. It also often was the place where Courtesans could be found, both the parallel branches of a same tree, since the dawn of times.

Opium’s properties never interested Pinkie Pie out of their benefits as sleeping pills and painkillers. It wasn’t her type of enjoyments. She preferred things which were more down to earth and most importantly, pleasures she could remember about and which weren’t only mere illusions…

The infamous opium smoking rooms were at the end of the corridor – small rooms into which people were lying down to smoke a long pipe, most of the time in company. Actually, men and women were intim The Chaos Hotel’s music hall was situated underground and was as wide as the hotel itself. No place like these were to be found anymore in Equestria, since most of the Entertainment Houses closed their doors when the War began, and never opened again. The people’s leisure had changed, and were now more thinking about getting intoxicated in order to forget their condition than about having fun for pleasure.

Pinkie Pie was a bit disappointed. Because of the Hotel’s atmosphere and various extravaganzas, she expected something more mysterious, much funnier or freakish-like. What lied under her eyes was nothing but a common place of debauchery.

And so, her first reaction when a young curly brown-haired man called out to her was to display how not interested she was… Until she saw his ridiculous get-up which immediately set her in better moods.

“This place is weird, isn’t it? I thought this was the backstage but I obviously was wrong. My name’s Cheese Sandwich,” he claimed, kissing her hand.

“I’m Pinkie Pie.”

“Nice to meet you, Pinkie Pie. Would you like a bit of company? There aren’t only smoking rooms here. There also is another bar that’s smaller and cozier.”

If he mistook this place for the backstage, how did he knew there was another bar here? Although he talked and behaved like someone from the Caste of the Entertainers, there was something about him which made her think he wasn’t what he pretended to be. She knew no Entertainer looking for backstage who would stop everything else just to keep company to a girl.

But after all… Why would she refuse the offer? She never came in here with that kind of intentions and only wanted to have a little fun between two exhausting travels through the red sand desert. It didn’t mean she couldn’t improvise a little. Actually, improvisation had its own charms.

And, it had to be said, she hadn’t been intimate with a man since ages and this Cheese Sandwich boy seemed to be the perfect person to have a good time and to relax in a different way, which she hoped would be both playful and delightful.


**************


Since the artists on the stage let way to an orchestra of brass and chords instruments, the whole space that was the dancefloor never got empty. Neither Rarity nor Applejack had reappeared, except to drink a glass of sparkling water. Though they didn’t seem they had found a male partner to dance with them, the two young women made the most of the night as much as they could, and were partying as if the world would end on the next day.

Maybe it was the case. But only a few of the persons around here were aware of that fact.

Leaning his elbows on the bar, by Rainbow Dash and Sunset Shimmer’s side, who weren’t talking to each other at all, Soarin was envious of all those who had the chance to dance their night away. He really wished he could do the same…

And nothing prevented him from doing so, yet he couldn’t make up his mind about going on the dancefloor on his own. Especially as most of the dances were to be done in couple and he would probably get assaulted by the many female costumers if he dared going there unaccompanied.

Besides, he still hoped for Rainbow Dash to invite him. She said when she arrived she would only have one drink before having fun as well but she was there for at least one hour now and hadn’t changed her position.

Soarin couldn’t help thinking about their ultimate ball at the Academy, barely a few days before the Uncivilized War began. Rainbow Dash wore the exact same dress, except the fact that it was sure the outfit had no sleeves back then. In his eyes, she was the prettiest girl of the ball and they didn’t waste much time talking or drinking punch. They danced, and danced until the break of dawn, never exhausted.

He could never forget the way she used to tell him he was too serious, that he needed to relax and to stop taking everything at face value. Now the roles seemed to have reversed.

So, what was he waiting for? He was the man of the relationship, after all, and too bad if this was a very old-fashioned point of view.It was another one of his flaws, this tendency to let the others do the first steps. Yet, he was the first to come to her, in the beginning, and after some time, he got too much used to her daring and forward character.

A lot of things had changed since then, and maybe he had to see this as their new beginning. Which meant he had to take steps in her direction again, though it wasn’t the first one.

“I thought I was the one who was too serious… What the hell are you still doing at the bar?”

Rainbow Dash looked up curiously, before a mischievous smirk appeared on her face, the type of smile he thought he would never see again. She put down the glass in her hand, and without a look back, grabbed his own hand strengthfully, in order to drag him to the dancefloor.

He wished he could have made sure before they left the bar that Sunset Shimmer wouldn’t feel too lonely but as he had a glimpse at a young man approaching her, he stopped thinking about that immediately and only focused on the moment.

All the question he asked himself and which still were pending vanished away like dust in the air. All that matter now was Rainbow Dash and himself, back together like in the old good times. Nothing in the young woman’s attitude was there to remind him of the truth of things. She was the one he had always known once again – audacious, self-confident, playful and sensual, although it wasn’t on purpose. Or better, especially because it wasn’t on purpose.

It probably wouldn’t last, and once the sun would be back, truth would catch them, but as long as it was, Soarin intended to make the most of it. Finally, he could wrap his arms around her waist, knowing she was so close, without her stepping back or their complicity to be interfered with other factors.

It didn’t take long before the past reflexes came back, and quickly, they were behaving as if these seven years had never been real.

Which, much naturally, soon led them to leave the cabaret in order to get a bit of intimacy. To be honest, when Soarin leaned over, he never would have thought she would be the first one to kiss him but he was happy to notice she still had her personal way to make the first move.

All along the journey which led them to Soarin’s room, between two burst of laughter and kisses, they had to grope around in order to find their way back without bumping into a wall or worse, into costumers who always stared at them embarrassingly.

It didn’t matter neither. As long as Soarin was concerned, anyway, the only thing that mattered was that she was with him, not rejecting him and that pains of the past didn’t keep her at a distance anymore.

He was convinced that from now on, everything would be easier. Together, they had proved more than once they were able to achieve great things and that their complementarity worked on every level, and especially when it came to military strategies.

Though the negotiations with Las Pegasus’ Leader gave no result, though the negotiations to come would probably be even harder, though the mission was very dangerous and no one could tell what would be the finale conclusion of it all, he knew, deep inside, that he would have no regrets.

She was his sky, his nights, his sunny mornings. For her, he could give the little he still had and the rest of the world, even if it didn’t belong to him.

When they finally arrived in his room, not even trying to turn on the lights, and never leaving each other’s lips, they fell down on the floor, still laughing out loud the way they hadn’t laughed in ages and decided it wasn’t worth it to go to the bed which stood a bit farther.

Everything was a matter of course. Although the room was pitch black, it felt as if the sun was up in the sky, bathing them in its soft warmth…

Yet, Soarin could suddenly feel Rainbow Dash getting tensed under him, as one of his hand was trying to get its way on her stomach. As abruptly as a thunderbolt, she pushed him back, and in a flash, he saw that her magenta eyes had lost their sparks of happiness.

“I’m sorry. I… I can’t do that. Please, don’t be mad at me! But… I have to leave.”

“Wait, Dashie…”

But he couldn’t even try to know some more that she had already left the room and he could hear her running steps through the empty corridors.

Was it because of her lost baby? Maybe he shouldn’t have ventured around this part of her body. Yet… Yet, something told him there was another reason. An unaccountable reason, that he couldn’t understand, and that probably no one could understand, except Rainbow Dash herself.

As soon as she was back in her own room, the young woman, out of breath, locked herself up. Only once sure no one would hear her she let everything go and burst into tears.

She got carried away by her desire to get in touch with the person she used to be before the War. To be with Soarin without condition, the way they were back then, had been so pleasant, so comfortable she forgot about all the rest.

And because of this, she probably had broken his heart. But was there another way? The truth, the sad truth, was that she could never be the girl he had always known. She had turned into a monstrosity… A living nightmare. And it was irreversible.

As if the material was now scalding, she took off her dress, and threw it on the floor, as if it were some vulgar piece of rag.

Rainbow Dash looked up to the mirror which was in front of her bed. She couldn’t stand the image it reflected. Not because of her tangled hair, not because of her red eyes and her cheeks wet with tears.

Her back, and her whole left arm down to the base of her wrist was nothing but an awful reddish and whitish sketch, peppered with black, made of wrinkles, craters and burst blisters…. She had tried everything, but all the poultices and all the ointments of the world would never change that. Whatever she would do, the past would always go after her and the sweetness of yesterday would keep on haunting her in order to show her what she lost, in addition of her family, her friends, her baby girl, her personality…

Completely exhausted, she crept to her bed, on which she climbed the best she could, and still half-naked, without the courage to wait for Pinkie Pie’s return, she closed her eyes to sleep, in the fool hope that the past wouldn’t catch her even in her dreams.

But it caught her. As if she was going through it all again. As if it was trying to torture her soul a little more…
> Flowers As Far As Eyes Can See
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

About every three months, newcomers arrived at Canterlot’s Military Academy. Called Cadets, they would never all progress the same way after their admission. According to how they performed at training sessions and in civilian interventions, they could get promoted and incorporate specialties in various fields.

It was now already four years since Soarin had enrolled in the Academy and his rank was now this of Chief Warrant Officer, and he intended to move up to Second Lieutenant before his seventeenth birthday.

To be honest, the competition was ruthless and his main rival was no one else than his best friend, Fire Streak, though the latter dreamed more of becoming instructor than of being a soldier for his whole life.

During each of the welcoming ceremony for Cadets, the top brasses weren’t meddled among the audience with the others, but they were sitting on chairs on the main platform, behind General and Chief General, always repeating the same old speech.

All the students agreed to say these ceremonies were deeply boring, yet Military rigor oblige, no one displayed annoyance of hearing the same sentences over and over each trimester, tirelessly. They had not to let the Cadets think everything would be easy and at the same time, they neither had to show them how demanding the system was.

Such a subtle art with which Soarin got along effortlessly … But it wasn’t the same for Fire Streak.

This true stud and official female newbie’s heartbreaker, had some little game, always the same as well, helping him to go through the welcome ceremony with a light heart.

There obviously were girls among the Cadets. Back then, becoming a Military or not wasn’t really a choice and Caste were respected with a scrupulous fastidiousness, almost martial. No matter which gender you were, you had to stay in the Caste which you were born in, unless you got married or had a member of your family married to someone from another Caste.

And so, every three months, he would scrutinize them from head to toes and attribute them a note, while explaining his choice to Soarin who only listened silently.

According to Fire Streak, this year was especially good and he would be delighted to choose among this pool of freshness and innocence. One of the young girls, in particular, titillated his curiosity for a very precise reason, connected with her filial bonds.

With his chin, discreetly, the orange and white haired officer showed her to his friend.

“Do you know the General’s daughter is with us this year? Name’s Rainbow Dash. You can’t miss her, she’s basically Bow Hothoof but much sexier, and with boobs.”

Usually, Soarin only rolled his eyes, as he always refused to surrender to his best friend’s childish and chauvinistic games. But this time, curiosity got the best of him. It was their superior’s daughter, after all, the one and only man who ran the Academy but who also would probably become the Head of the Resistance Army once the General in Chief would have retire – which seemed to be rather soon.

It was impossible not to spot her among the other Cadets sitting at the first rank, with her rainbow hair dressed in the mandatory bun for female recruits, her very special way of wearing the kaki-colored uniform, looking at the platform where her father was talking. Her admiration for the man gave her something dignified and faithful which attracted the eye no matter what.

“Cute”, he couldn’t help but whispering.

“Isn’t she? I definitely give her an A! But she’s the General’s daughter… I think he’d break your neck if you touch her.”

Even for an ingrained romancer such as Fire Streak, the young woman seemed to be out of reach. Bow Hothoof was known for being a decent man, uncompromising but always fair but also a father who was really proud of his only child. During the training sessions of the officers under his orders, which Soarin was a part of, he often boasted about the way even his daughter, who wasn’t even an official soldier yet, could do way better than they did.

And when he looked at her, he was sure of one thing: it wasn’t just mere talk. Surely, if one of the boys tried anything inappropriate, she would be the one to break their necks!

It undoubtedly was impolite to stare at her the way he did, but Soarin couldn’t help it, as if his eyes were unable to look anywhere else.

Once again despite himself, his heart skipped a beat, when he saw the young woman’s magenta eyes going in his direction. she only started at him for a couple of seconds yet it was enough to create unexplained sensations inside his body.

Ever since, he knew he would never be able not to watch her secretly each time they would be together in the same room…


************************


He didn’t have to wait very long for that. On the next day, Cadets had to start their training sessions. The first test always was the same, every three months, no matter how many newcomers there were.

It was about loading an assault weapon quickly enough to be able to shoot on moving cardboard targets, that the superior officers activated with a system of ropes and pulleys, and go the other way, avoiding obstacles. Plastic bullets filled with paint were thrown on the Cadets in order to simulate firings from enemies and those who were the most colored were today’s bad pupils and didn’t start under the most favorable of auspices.

Most of the times, higher ranks, while in the middle of an assault course training, were allowed to watch this very first session, in order to choose who they would like to have as their assistants.

Each newcomer went by a group of ten, and Rainbow Dash was part of the first group.

As soon as he knew about it, Soarin stepped closer in order to watch the young woman in action, curious to see whether he was right about her or if, like many of his fellows thought, General Bow Hothoof’s speech were nothing but boasting.

The signal of the exercise beginning was heard, and the other Cadets still were busy loading their guns that, already, Rainbow Dash was on the run to attack the moving targets. The swiftness of her actions were enough to let anyone stunned, as well as her agility to move between the cardboard dummies and the bullets full of paint, all while shooting with a meticulous precision.

All the seniors around were glancing at each other, unable to believe it… Their General hadn’t lied. Her skills were not those of a Cadet. She even was better than some Caporals or Sergeants. And she was so small, the smallest girl of her trimester group.

In barely one minute, Rainbow Dash reached the other side of the virtual field, and pressed the red button showing she was done with this exercise. There only was one stain of paint on her camouflage outfit, and it represented nothing but a small brush at her right thigh.

Yet, when her father met her on the training field, Soarin thought he heard scraps of their conversation, where it was said she should not have been stained at all, but that overall it was “not so bad.”

Far from taking it personally, she seemed to agree with the top brass officer, and greeted him with the mandatory military salute, as if he were any type of hierarchical superior.

It was enough to make Soarin understand he absolutely had to be the one who would train with her. Not only because he thought her to be cuter and cuter each time, but especially because she was the best recruits he had ever seen since he arrived at the Academy and he knew that gathering their skills would give extraordinary results.


********************


When someone entered in this room, they were overwhelmed by the damp heat and soapy smell. The laundry room was the Cadets’ responsibilities. They were the ones cleaning and folding the other students’ sheets as well as the rest of their linen, which also meant they took care their superior’s and of the one used at the canteen.

On the other hand, bedrooms were the responsibility of everyone, individually taking care of the bunks and everything around. Girls were separated from boys, of course.

Soarin’s only way to meet Rainbow Dash was to come to the laundry room while she was the one on duty. Elsewhere, he would obviously be exposed to prying eyes and he absolutely wanted to meet her in intimate circumstances, in a place he would be sure no one would stare at them.

He found her, clad in a tank top and khaki pants, her mandatory bun messy because of steam, obviously tired of the task she had to accomplish. She kept on sighing while folding the white towels, and as soon as she saw him stepping into the room, she got stiff with the appropriate military salute, which made the young man smile.

“You don’t need to do that for me…”

“You have a higher rank, there’s no other way. If my father comes around and sees I’m not sticking to procedures, he’s going to drag me over the coals.”

“Instructors and Generals are in the middle of a meeting.”

“Really? I guess it’s alright, then.”

She immediately gave up on her strenuous posture, and went back to work after sweeping her forehead with the back of her hand.

Everybody hated working at the laundry room. The steam spat out by the big industrial machines was thick and sticky, and although it smelled good, its smell could sometimes make you feel dizzy. Besides, folding the linen asked for a constant attention because, if the instructor who checked out the final result was unsatisfied, he could give a punishment or even ask the Cadet in charge to start it all over again.

Him too had been through it and hated each part of the process. A bit daydreaming and absent-minded, he often left ugly pleats over the linen which broke the harmony of the whole. When he wasn’t forgetting about putting washing powder in the machines…

He was lucky to be very skilled for everything else, and had been able to climb the ladder quickly. To be honest, he possessed the undefeated record of ascension quickness that each new Cadet dreamed of breaking.

While still working, Rainbow Dash looked up, feeling uneasy to be stared at so closely during this task which, obviously, she wasn’t really good at.

“Are you here to survey how good I’m doing my work?”

“Me? Not at all! I was really bad at the laundry room. I’m here for another reason…”

She only nodded and Soarin understood that, since she wasn’t about to pick up on the conversation, he was going to be obliged to get into the matter without further ado.

Being straightforward and unfiltered was okay for Fire Streak. He wasn’t really feeling comfortable with girls, although he was aware of his attractive physical characteristics. They each were different, and each liked many various types of personalities, there was no recipe, despite what his best friend kept on telling him. In his own opinion, being able to address a topic was as delicate as explaining facts to a superior.

The best was to go slowly slide to the main subject by starting somewhere else.

“I’ve watched you a lot during training sessions… You’re good!”

“Yeah, I know. I’m the best.”

Coming from another girl, the way she liked to boast would have sounded unbearable but coming from her mouth, it all was said with such a nature he couldn’t help thinking it was part of her charms. There was something about her, about this extreme self-confidence she displayed proudly, which kept on attracting him to her.

The worse was that she was right. Out of all the new recruits, she truly was the best. And it was rather obvious that she would quickly get even better than most of them. She was born for this.

“Is that you who climbed the ladder the quickest, right? Prepare yourself to lose the title. I’m ambitious and I want to come up through the ranks fast.”

At least, it was clear.

Soarin cracked a smile and stepped closer. She was done with folding the towels and had now to start the most difficult task – folding the sheets. Usually, this demanded two persons, but here at the Military Academy, people weren’t Helpers and didn’t care about domesticity. It had to be done by the Cadet in charge, it was all, and it had to be perfect.

With an exchange of a few words, he now understood that there was no need to go sparingly with Cadet Rainbow Dash.

“You haven’t chosen a Senior officer to train with yet, have you?”

“Yes, I haven’t. Why?”

“Well, I think I’m not too bad in my kind and so I was thinking maybe we could train together.”

“Like, you and me?”

“I guess that’s the definition of ‘together’, yes…”

Maybe he was mistaking, but Soarin thought he saw her briefly blushing.

Ordinarily, Senior officers offering to train Cadets were of an inferior rank, most of the time Caporals or Sergeants. To be choose by a rank 5 Chief Warrant Officer was an honor, an honor which couldn’t be refused. It was boon for someone so ambitious, Soarin knew it and she probably knew it as well.

Yet, deep inside he hoped she wouldn’t accept for this mere reason but rather because she liked his personality, though they hadn’t talked that much, and talked to each other for the first time.

Suddenly, he saw Rainbow Dash displaying a panicked face and jumping back. This unexpected reaction from her made him jump as well… What was happening?

“There’s a spider in the sheets! An enormous spider!”

“What?! Where? Where?!” he screamed, as panicked as she was.

If it had been any other type of insect, Soarin wouldn’t have reacted and only killed it in the second. But it was a spider and though he was a tall manly boy, he hated spiders. It had to be said that they rarely were small and harmless in this part of Equestria.

And then, Rainbow Dash burst out laughing, which immediately embarrassed him. It took a few additional seconds before he understood he just had been pranked.

“If only you could see your face when I said the word “spider”! It was hilarious!”

Hilarious… Yes, it probably had been rather funny. Immediately relaxed, Soarin started to laugh as well, half because he still felt a bit embarrassed he had been such a coward in front of the pretty young recruit.

“You know what? I do want us to train together! At least, I know it won’t be boring with you.”

It was difficult for the young man to hide his triumphant smile. When he had stepped into the laundry room, he had a goal in mind and this goal had been reached. In the end, it had been much easier than he thought it would be. The most interesting detail was that his secret desires had also come true, thanks to his gullibility. Rainbow Dash hadn’t accepted his offer because of mere ambition, but also because she liked his personality.

“So… Are you going to help me folding these, or what? The thing is that I intend to go sleeping one of these days.”

Without a word, Soarin nodded and went to the other side of the table where the linen was put, in order to assist his new right arm.

Until the young woman would reach at least the rank of Specialist, they were going to spend many hours together, each day, leaves included. Which was going to help them to know each other better…


********************


The room was empty. Out of the official hours, supervised by instructors, the Academy students could also train on their own, or with their appointed Senior. That went without saying that idleness wasn’t really valued and that it was of the better taste to be busy all the time, if possible busy with a martial activity.

Since they were aware that they somehow where some kind of center of attention for the others, Rainbow Dash and Soarin always trained together when everyone else was busy doing anything else.

In a short amount of time, the young woman had been able to went from the lowest rank of Cadet to the one of Private First Class and was on her way of reaching the superior rank, and this all while those who had integrated the Academy at the same time than her were still entitled to clean the refectory after meals.

She owed this progression to her dedication during the simulations but also, she knew it, to what Soarin had taught her. Of course, being the braggart everybody knew, she wasn’t ready to admit it but these were the facts. Soarin taught him not to rush into action without further thinking and to envision every possible scenario before starting anything.

However, although they mutually respected each other, their relationship wasn’t anything like what they were supposed to be as Senior and Junior. Rainbow Dash always teased and pranked the young man, never saluted him as protocol demanded, and would speak to him as if speaking to any Cadet.

At first, his fellows made fun of him, mocking the way he let her be this way without scolding her or displaying discontentment. To be honest, he thought her attitude with him to be fun and he even liked it. Actually, it was because Fire Streak and the others noticed the situation fit him that they stopped laughing at him. And they understood those two really liked each other…

They were training to hand-to-hand combat. In the task entitled to the Militaries to be like the safety valve of people, the ultimate shield allowing things not to go completely awry, it seemed logical that weapons were a bit too much and some had to be handled in a different way. It also was useful if they were disarmed.

Conversely to what happened in the field, training sessions of hand-to-hand combats were very choreographed, since it was various type of moves to use according to circumstances.

The move they tried to execute entailed throwing the adversary on the floor without straining a muscle and being able to block them and to prevent them from moving again.

Putting an arm behind Soarin’s back, Rainbow Dash easily was able to find a spot to grab which allowed her to realize the first part of the exercise, which was throwing her opponent on the floor. She was small but she wasn’t some frail creature unable to defend herself when confronted to someone taller and bigger.

Which didn’t stop Soarin from being able to make her stumble as well, just because, proud of herself, she hadn’t been swift enough to stop him from moving again after her first action had been such a success.

In a few gestures, he was able to pin herself against the floor and to curtail her reactions.

“In the field, you don’t have time to play peacock so never relax in your efforts…”

Wise advice. Yet, the fact he said those words gave Rainbow Dash a small action window and she took advantage of it to do a leg-lock, and thus, reverse the roles again. This time, she was on top of him, his two arms blocked behind his back.

“In the field, you don’t have time to play peacock, so never relax in your efforts…”

Logically, he had to thank her and tell her the exercise was over. But Soarin remained speechless, more than stirred by the intimacy of their both positions. He just couldn’t do otherwise than feeling his cheeks heating up and his heart racing inside his chest.

They were alone here, and the night had started to fall. Soon, the temperatures would decrease as well… It was the moment of the day when everyone was taking a shower or getting ready for dinner. No one would come into this room before the first patrol of the night watch would begin.

Rainbow Dash could also feel the sudden tension between them, blooming from the moment she had decided it would be fun to trap him. Now she was the one who was trapped. She had only two choices – stopping everything or rushing headlong. And despite wise pieces of advice, she wasn’t the type to give up on something from cowardice.

After all, this was what they both wanted, this she knew since the very first minute of their very first training.

This was why she didn’t listen to reason and instead swooped down on the young man without further thinking, planting her lips against his lips.

Soarin immediately kissed her back and a few seconds later, they were rolling over the mats, their position switched once again but this time without any will of domination. Their both bodies were intertwined, legs wrapped over, hands in the hair or sliding against a back.

All the tension amassed during training sessions were finally released out and they only let their bodies speak. It felt good, not to think or to hold back anymore. To finally be connected with what they were feeling inside that they tried to shut down because protocol didn’t really enjoy love affairs.

Things no longer were completely the same from this day on. Though they still were unchanged. Everything simply had another taste, sweeter and spicier at the same time.


***********************


He had never stepped into this music room before. To be honest, before passing it by and hearing piano notes, Soarin didn’t even know there was a music room inside the Academy.

Yet, a brass band played at every event and balls organized by the Resistance Army in order to connect Militaries with the other Castes and remind them they were especially here for their protection, as well as being the link between them and the Community Power, led by the Elite.

Though it wasn’t the reason of his passage around here, titillated by curiosity, the young man pushed the room’s door so he could see who was playing this marvelous melody.

What a surprise it was when he realized it was no one else than the person he was looking for, Rainbow Dash. She was leaning over the instrument, focused on the keys, a deep peace of mind echoing on her face.

Slowly, as if he were scared to break an item made of crystal, Soarin walked into the room, almost on the tip of his toes. There really were instruments played by the brass band all around him as well as some others, more difficult to bring around. Most of the Militaries who could play music had someone in their family from the Entertainers Caste. Was it the same for Rainbow Dash? He didn’t know…

That was how he realized that, though they were dating since a few months already, there still were things about her that were a mystery. The blame probably was on a lack of intimacy which could have allowed them to talk about deeper things.

As soon as he reached the piano, Rainbow Dash stopped playing and looked up. He was a bit reassured by the fact she greeted him with a wide smile. He had been so scared to break her concentration, thus making her mad.

“It’s a very nice melody…”

“It’s a play for piano in la minor.”

“I didn’t know you could play piano.”

“My childhood’s Helper taught me the basics and then, I learned the rest on my own. Don’t you think that’s so relaxing?”

Soarin nodded and sat by her side.

He had not been looking for her everywhere in the Academy for no reason. He really wanted to spend some time alone with her, outside of training sessions or meals, and so learn things about her he still ignored but was more than eager to know about.

In his mind, it had always been clear: dating someone didn’t mean they only had to be together. He wanted them to share more than food and stolen kisses behind closed doors. He wanted to hold her hand, to talk with her until the break of dawn, to confess things she would be the only one to know, and that she would do the same.

He wanted them to be an ordinary couple, without the weight of Military protocol on their shoulders. A lot of top brass officers were married, after all, and had met at the Academy, why couldn’t they show their feelings to the world just because Rainbow Dash hadn’t reached a certain rank yet?

“I’m going to have a few days leave next week. I thought, maybe, you could ask your father to give yours at the same time. I’d like us to go out without any rules to follow.”

“It feels like a Military’s life is only made of rules… Don’t you think that’s a bit sad to always be serious? Life’s too short not to have a little fun!”

He had noticed many times: Rainbow Dash liked fun. Although she was among the best of the Academy, although she was of an unmatched discipline during training sessions in group, giving everything she had, without a care about exhaustion or difficulty. When protocol wasn’t expecting this harsh discipline from her, the young woman let her cheerful nature out.

Gladly sarcastic, she liked quips, laughing with her friends, balls where there were no procedures, pranking and tasty food. She was lively teenage girl, behind her bragging attitude and her reputation of inexhaustible machine – if they only knew that napping was her favorite hobby.

“What about breaking the rules? This is what they’re made for!”

She leaned over and put her lips against his. Soarin knew he had let the room’s door ajar, which meant they could get caught by anyone. Usually, he would have tempered her by telling her if they get caught, the consequences could be unpleasant.

However, this time he thought Rainbow Dash was right. What were all these rules made for, if they couldn’t be broken from time to time? Before he met her, he wouldn’t have had thought of such thoughts, but now he didn’t really care about this strenuous behavior which had been his for so long. Because, once again, his girlfriend was right. Life was too short. Especially for him, since as Militaries they were always confronted to danger.

So, he kissed her back, and the way he liked to do so much, slipped his fingers in the young woman’s hair. It lasted for barely a few seconds but it was enough for him to feel happy about the violation they had just made.

“And to say that you’re the General’s daughter…”

“This is why it’s so much fun!”


***************************


It was a Sunday afternoon and streets of Canterlot was full of strollers who were going to the market which took place each week on the wide square in front of the City Hall. Because they hadn’t gone there for a very long time, obviously Soarin and Rainbow Dash had decided to go there as well.

Walking hand in hand among the crowd without anything to point it felt different, warm yet refreshing. They had turned into couples among others… At least, it was their illusion.

They had no real intentions of buying anything and the outing’s purpose was more like strolling among the stalls while chatting. Of course, it was nothing extraordinary but they both liked simple things and weren’t fond of luxury.

Yet, back then, the Caste of Elite made fantasize a lot of teenagers. They all knew the name of their members and a lot of young girls dreamed about meeting one of the boys of their age and thus being able to reach the supreme status.

They weren’t like that. Both had been raised with the main goal of becoming the best soldier and to reach higher ranks, not because they wanted to get some privileges, like having Helpers, but rather because it would mean their efforts and hard work would be recognized among their community.

And now, they couldn’t envision their future without being together, and climbing the highest steps of the ladder at the same time. A bit like Rainbow Dash’s parents, who were the teenage girl’s role models.

A bit isolated from the market’s restlessness, a vendor of syrup-flavored crushed ice was settled. This treat, somewhere between an ice cream and a cold beverage, which was very popular among the youngest, came from the West Continent, and had invaded Equestria centuries ago, when they country’s name was different.

That was where Rainbow Dash and Soarin decided to stop after they walked for a few hours.

The afternoon sun was blazing. No one was out without a small fan, and even while using of this artefact, people were still ready to go to any length in order to get some fresh air.

“Two plum-flavored please…” Rainbow Dash ordered to the vendor, before she paid him.

The young couple sat on a bench nearby from where they were free to watch the boiling market.

“Have you already gone to the Ivory?” Soarin asked, still starting at the passersby.

“You mean… Equestria’s black market? Never. But we used to go to the National Dumper all the time with my cousin.”

“Really? What for?”

“Well, to find stuff! You have no idea of the treasures you can find there. We dismantle them, we learn how the circuits work and how we could improve them with spare parts we took elsewhere. Twilight’s Celestia’s pupil. She’s the best Master of Element of all Canterlot.”

“Does this mean not everyone of your family is Military?”

“My mother’s sister has married a Master of Elements and so she became one herself. And my father’s sister was my mother’s best friend. She married a Builder and she taught a lot of things to Mom, just like Twilight taught me everything she knew. And one of my best friend’s an Amazon. As you already know, my family’s Helper taught me to play piano. This is why I’m so awesome!”

Soarin was impressed. He had only known life as a Military, and this since he was a little child. Discipline, strategy, manipulation of various weapons and combat techniques were all he knew. Of course, he had been taught how to play chess, to understand the way of functioning of Angels, and to ride a horse. He liked to read as well, but ahead of this small horizon, what his universe was made of was a bit narrow.

In some kind of way, he envied her. Learning how to do so many different things certainly was very stimulating! Knowing persons from other Castes, talking with those who allowed the country to have a certain harmony, thanks to who these well-oiled mechanics worked…

Thankfully, he had Rainbow Dash. If he asked her, Soarin knew she wouldn’t refuse to teach him new things, to widen his window to the world. They still had so many things to give each other, so much to share and learn.

Maybe it was being a bit naïve, probably even, yet he felt as if their future could be nothing but blissful.

They were almost done with their ice cream when a man appeared in front of them, so suddenly that they both jumped at the same time.

His face, with a greyish complexion, was barely shaved, his clothes haphazardly tailored had holes all over them, he had tangled tow hair and he smelled a strong odor which reminded of litter.

“Would you have a bit for me, please?”

In front of them was stretched out his hand with too long black nails, and whose knuckles were injured. His dirty appearance could be scary but he didn’t seem to be aggressive. Only completely desperate.

“Here”, Rainbow Dash said, putting a grey coin in his palm.

“Thanks, Miss.”

The man got away. When observed with a bit of attention, it was easy to see he wasn’t walking normally… Maybe it was because of a badly treated polio, unless it was because of a fight.

It was the kind of encounter that were impossible inside of the sheltered Military Academy, even during balls or errands downtown. One of the ugliest sides of living in a huge Ghetto such as Canterlot.

“Do you think he was a Transient?”

“No,” Rainbow Dash affirmed. “I think he’s from Rock Farm.”

“Is that the Ghetto of the Outside Lands that had been wiped away by a level 6 sand storm?”

Rainbow Dash nodded. These really rare sand storms were the deadliest ever. One of them had touched this particular Ghetto called Rock Farm a few years before. There were so many dead bodies in the streets that it was impossible to bury all the corpses and thus the Ghetto had been completely set on fire.

Among the survivors, who had lost everything they had, a lot hadn’t been able to get integrated to life in the Inside Lands’ Ghettoes, which worked in very different ways, and were now wandering among the streets, panhandling or going through the trash, searching for a little something to eat.

A few months later, they were going to meet another one of these survivors, though it was in very different circumstances.


******************************


The Uncivilized War had started. All the available soldiers as well as volunteers among civilians had been requested to fight, all over Equestria. Their group was to be sent around Fillydelphia, where the huge amount of Angels put the population in great danger.

Gathered at the back of a vehicle in which they were going to go through the desert, they were about to leave when the last member of their expedition arrived. The fact her impressive curly pink hair hadn’t been shaved in the back made it easy to understand that she wasn’t a Military.

As if they were going to a summer camp, the newcomer introduced herself, while wearing the mandatory bonnet of her position.

“Hi, I’m Pinkie Pie, your team Healer! It’s great to meet you all. I’m sure we’re going to get along very well.”

Her civilian statute was obvious in the way she had not the slightest idea about protocol. Actually, she quickly got scolded by the Colonel who accompanied them – as General, Rainbow Dash’s father was already in the field.

“We’re not going to have some fun, young girl. You’d better watch your tongue.”

“Alright, Sir. Received loud and clear,” Pinkie Pie declared with a clumsy military salute.

Rainbow Dash immediately liked her light-hearted behavior. Finally, someone who wasn’t tough and who was trying to bring a bit of sunshine to their highly important mission. True, they were going to war and it was really serious, but it didn’t mean they couldn’t relax a little before they got killed. It could be their last moments of glibness, after all…

With her warmest smile, she stretched out her hand to the newcomer.

“I’m Rainbow Dash and this is Soarin. Nice to meet you.”

“Nice to meet you too, Rainbow Dash,” Pinkie Pie answered, taking her hand and shaking it vivaciously. “Let’s do a great job together!”

She sat next to the couple and lowered her voice.

“Thanks for such a warm welcome. It’s nicer than you know who,” she said discreetly pointing her finger at the Colonel.

From memory, this was the last moment when Rainbow Dash felt like laughing earnestly. The last moment of her existence the way she had always known.

Because, after this day, from the moment they arrived in the field of Fillydelphia, everything crumbled down. Of course, she kept going because she had her father, Soarin and Pinkie Pie, but the more she lost friends and fellows, even losing General Bow Hothoof, the more her heart got filled with a black smock which finally penetrated each part of her and annihilated everything else.

Of course, she thought hope was still possible on the day her mother told her she was expecting a child from Soarin, missing as well, but even this last petal had withered. From now on, all the rest had been buried…
> Carnivorous Plant
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

As she could no longer ignore the hubbub in front of her door, Rainbow Dash sat straight on her bed and got her hand under her pillow… which met with emptiness!

Yesterday, when they arrived in Las Pegasus, she didn’t have time to unpack her stuff in the right way, and once back from the cabaret, she was so overwhelmed she hadn’t thought about getting a weapon within her reach, unlike she always did.

Now, someone was trying to force her room’s door open and she had nothing to defend herself against the intrusion. Something she hated was to be feeling vulnerable in front of an assailant.

And so, she was utterly surprised once she discovered who was the person trying to get into her room. It was none than the Ghetto’s Leader himself, Discord. As soon as he locked up the door again, he turned around, briefly got a closer look at her back and stated:

“Holy stars and moon, you’re hideous, girl!”

On the defensive, Rainbow Dash grabbed a jacket that was within her reach and hurried to cover her shoulders and her back. At least, he hadn’t ogled at her breasts. That was a start.

“Yeah, I know that, thank you… What the fuck are you doing in my room?”

She left her bed and followed him around, as he was obviously looking for something precise. Alright, this was his hotel, so this wasn’t an official violation, especially as he was the one saying what the law around here was. It didn’t mean she would let him push her around.

“There’s an on-going burglary in the hotel and all your dear friends are trapped. I’m your last hope. You think we’re off to a bad start, don’t you?”

She did. But right now, it wasn’t at all what mattered the most to her. The whole expedition was entrapped in the middle of a burglary and it was a problem. There was no way that, especially as none of them seemed to have a weapon with them, under pressure, they had to give up on the Twilight’s creations they had brought for the trip. Without those precious weapons and items, it would be almost impossible for them to fulfill the mission that was theirs.

“When you say all of my friends, do you also mean Soarin?”

“Yes, even your blue-haired big fellow. He probably was too overwhelmed because you broke his heart again.”

How could he know such a thing? What happened between them wasn’t that surprising in this place. Most importantly, they were lost among a crowd of dancers and the rest of their journey was too torturous to be understood. Especially the last part of the night.

Unless… there were cameras in each room! No. Impossible. This was a very advanced kind of technology, even for a Ghetto such as Las Pegasus. They needed a very skilled Master of Elements close to hand.

Discord’s red eye twinkled when he finally got his hand on what he was looking for since he arrived in the room, palpating the walls in a strange way.

Under Rainbow Dash’s flabbergasted eyes, a touch screen appeared which, when a code was tapped on it, granted access to a secret safe.

No doubt. If Discord had settled such a technology in his hotel, it meant there was a very talented Master of Elements in this Ghetto, who was his accomplice. Which makes her theory about cameras in the rooms even more probable.

She would certainly have rebelled if the situation didn’t seem that urgent. There was still this on-going burglary and the whole expedition, including the boy she loved and her best friend, were captured.

In the safe, Discord took two guns that really looked like plain plastic toys. White and blue, it had three buttons to switch up and a plastic trigger. Yet, it wasn’t likely these were toys indeed, especially by the satisfied look on the face of the one who seemed to be their owner.

“Dress up, Sergeant, and take one of these! We’re going to kick some Burglar ass and show them this kind of stupid shit never happens in Las Pegasus. We prefer real stupid shits, the one which are fun!”

“Burglars isn’t an official caste,” Rainbow Dash said while wearing pants and a sweater instead of her jacket.

“Technically, there are no official castes anymore…”

He waited for her to be fully dressed, before putting one of the weapons in her hands, explaining her how it worked, which was even simpler than counting to three.

The gun had three different modes: one that was an alarm, one for the long-distance shots and another to shoot at point-blank range. To set off a mode, or the three at the same time, the right button had to be switch up and after that, all was left to do was to look in the sights and fire.

Indeed, it was even easier than the weapons Rainbow Dash possessed. She could have chosen to use one of them, if she hadn’t been won over by the curiosity of seeing what these weapons Discord called the “Rainboom Guns” could do.

She had no doubts Twilight would have been excited to break them open and to analyze the circuits. Except Twilight wasn’t there, and that in order to save her, she first had to save her team, thus completing their mission.

She followed Discord who, instead of going back to the corridor where he came from, led her to a secret passage, reachable by a trapdoor hidden under a rug by her bed.

Actually, if that hotel apparently was assembled randomly, it was to make sure no one would suspect the structure was built around these hidden passages, but also traps, and a whole network of galleries allowing to go from one floor to another without being noticed.

However, the Leader didn’t lead her straight towards the first floor. Thanks to holes equipped with what seemed to be spyglasses, he was able to watch what was going on in the corridor in a panoramic way.

So, this was his secret, and not cameras. Of course, it didn’t change the fact it was necessary to have an excellent Master of Element to create such an architecture and the weapons she had in her hands.

“There are two guards at each floor… What a bunch of morons! So few in such a big hotel… Come on, Sergeant, let’s get rid of them! And try not to kill them. We’re lacking ammunitions.”

“Who do you think I am?”

Rainbow Dash waited for a sign from her improvised battlefield friend, and taking one of those hidden trapdoors, they both sneaked into the corridor, with the back of the “guards” visible in front of them.

Though he wasn’t a Military and hadn’t fought at the war, she was impressed to see how Discord was able of a martial discretion in the way he moved.

Unwaveringly, as soon as she was behind the guards, Rainbow Dash used the back of her weapon to knock them out, hitting their napes, before they could even notice anything. The men fell on the floor and she saw Discord staring at her circumspectly.

“What?”

“Nothing… I was just thinking about taking aim at them and tie them together, but oh well… This isn’t a bad method neither.”

“Feel free to tie them anyway if that’s your idea of fun.”

“What a charming idea!”

And then, it was the way they proceeded for each floor. Rainbow Dash knocked down the guards, and Discord came after her to tie them together thanks to a rope he seemed to be bringing around everywhere with him. As soon as it was done, they would sneak away by another trapdoor and another secret gallery in order to reach the lower floor and do this whole routine again.

The burglars leading this assault had gathered all the guests in the cabaret, and had tied their hands, which never stopped them from stealing everything they possessed, that they threw into a huge hessian bag.

They were hooded and gloved but all they had to attack were shotguns, like the one Sunset Shimmer tried to use on Rainbow Dash – except they probably weren’t filled with horse tranquilizers.

It was an advantage to her and Discord, concealed behind another of the hotel’s secret hideout. Indeed, this kind of rifles didn’t use many bullets, and though it could create heavy losses, they certainly would need to load them again if they ever chose to actually shoot with them.

Her eye in the sights, Rainbow Dash visually scanned the huge room. She was looking for the best angle to get this new party started.

To be honest, the other clients didn’t really matter to her. The most important was to come and help her fellows in order to get away from Las Pegasus as soon as possible and find the help they in some other places.

Once she felt ready, her hands clasped around the weapon and she stuck her tongue against her upper lip. It was a habit she always had when she had to make long distance shots and she could easily hear how it made Discord smile with sarcasm but she chose not to care, focused as she was on her main goal.

When she pressed the trigger, she didn’t expect to be pushed back by the violence of recoil. In her life, she had used all kinds of weapons, some that even were three times heavier than this one and never again had she been so knocked over by the power of the shot.

“Militaries,” she heard Discord whisper before he pulled the trigger at his turn.

Immediately, Rainbow Dash positioned herself back for shooting. The clients, panic-stricken, were screaming, while the rest of the burglars were wondering where did the shots which touched two of their fellows come from.

Only when it came to the small expedition faces were rather at peace. Seeing Soarin’s expression through her sights, as she was targeting the man who was the closest to him, she understood the young man knew she was the one behind this. Without a doubt, to him her shooting’s precision was easily identifiable.

Better prepared for the recoil this time, she pulled the trigger again, and hit another of the burglars, who fell on the floor, shrieking in pain, holding his bloody leg. Of course, the rest of their small team replied and shot back.

But their bullets only hit the walls and never went through it.

“Bulletproof steel,” Discord underlined before shooting again.

Quickly, the burglars were lacking ammunition. They needed to reload their guns. Discord then pulled on a rope which opened a trapdoor under their feet, and Rainbow Dash got the message, preparing herself for a landing that wouldn’t hurt her.

And she wasn’t the only one who, by sheer Military instinct, had understand what they were supposed to do next. Soarin, his hands still tied together, was able to reach one of the culprits, and to lift his two arms above his head in order to grab his neck with the chain of his handcuffs.

It was like the expected signal, and the rest of the team quickly moved as well, each attacking like they could, while Rainbow Dash and Discord, weapons in their hands, walked in the room with confidence.

“Now just be nice and surrender. You’ve seen what these bullets can do when shot into legs or arms and you don’t want to know what it looks like when it hits your silly little heads, now do you?”

A few minutes later, Discord had freed his security staff, who took charge of bringing the burglars in what was Las Pegasus’ jail… Donjons which were inside the hotel Chaos, and where, as a punishment, they would have to go through three torture sessions a day. And what a torture! Here, thief meant feet were licked for hours by a bunch of goats.

Where Discord had found goats around here was a question for another debate.

The clients who had been prisoners thanked Discord and the whole team with warmth, before being able to get back their dearest possessions. It made no doubt they now understood the peril of a little fun time in this place of debauch… But at least, they would have something to tell their fellow citizens once back in the fortress that were their own Ghettoes.

“As a thank you for this very refreshing adventure, my dear Sergeant, I declare you got yourself the right of asking me for any kind of reward,” Discord claimed while giving them each a glass filled with a baby blue liquid.

“If I’m asked that, Ah’d say these lil’ free cocktails already are a very good reward.”

“Can’t we have a few measures of this ravishing fabric the curtains of my room were made with?”

“Fabric, got it. What else?”

Soarin had nothing special to ask. Or something Discord just couldn’t guarantee, something very personal. Pinkie Pie asked whether he hadn’t a few rare medicinal plants to give her.

As far as Sunset Shimmer was concerned, if she had it her way, she would ask him to join their mission, but she felt as if, in reality, the reward had only been proposed to Rainbow Dash… After all, she had been the one with Discord all this time. They only reacted and helped at the last moment.

“I want a Rainboom Gun.”

This answer, said in an unedifying self-confidence, didn’t really satisfy Sunset Shimmer. Actually, her jaw clenched like each time something wasn’t going her way but she forbade herself to say it out loud. It was so… So selfish.

“There are only two copies in the world and if I’ll only have one left…”

“I want a Rainboom Gun, or nothing at all.”

If she wanted to get one of these weapons so bad, it wasn’t out of sheer whim. Its long-distance power was mind-blowing, and if it went the same way when at point-blank range, the possibilities seemed to be endless. And there was the alarm signal mode. Something told her it wasn’t only a simple gadget, and that this option could be more than useful along their journey.

In front of such a determination, who was he to object, thought Discord, very amused by this small young woman who was surprising on many levels. And, it wasn’t as if his Master of Elements couldn’t create a second Rainboom Gun if he decided to let someone else have one of the preexisting ones.

Since he had refused to help them in this war against The Hive they were engaged in, it was the least he could do to accept a request from the one person who helped him to get rid of a bunch of rascals.

Discord gave her the gun in person, along with a pack of ammunitions, as if giving a plain slice of cake to someone celebrating their birthday. No formality, no solemnity. It wasn’t that bad, actually.

They probably would never be friends. To be honest, they didn’t have much in common. Yet, the fact they fought side by side, even through a rather short amount of time, had been able to create some kind of mutual and tacit respect between those two.

Even so, though she knew his answer in advance, Rainbow Dash told herself it wouldn’t cost a thing to ask again. This way, she couldn’t be blamed of doing no effort…

“Are you sure you don’t want to fight Chrysalis with us? That’s quite a surprise but you’re not that bad with a gun.”

“A hundred percent sure, Sergeant. And anyway, you need an army and these things are no fun to me. If I started recruiting soldiers, my clients would fly away without further ado! They don’t come around here to bother with what they already have outside…”

“It’s true,” she answered, smiling to herself.

Of course, Las Pegasus was a place like nowhere else, a surprise with an aftertaste of a ridiculous prank. Just like the others, she hadn’t believed her eyes when she first stepping into the Ghetto, she even worried and felt disgusted. And in the end…

In the end, it wasn’t such a bad place. Outlandish and weird, for sure, one could never know what kind of eccentricities would pop up at the corner of a street or of a corridor, but in a way, it felt like a bubble of oxygen – or a bubble of laughing gas – for Equestria’s inhabitants, somewhere almost out of the world, where anyone could stop for a short while when everything else was a burden.

“Well… Farewells are boring so let’s part here,” Discord claimed, his back already on her. “Good luck for the rest, Sergeant, and try to cheer up a little sometimes.”

“I’ll do my best,” Rainbow Dash answered, putting her brand new Rainboom Gun at her belt.

She saw Discord climbing into his elevator, still controlled by the same young woman, the only person of all Las Pegasus who probably was bored to death. Soon, he would disappear out of her field of vision and no one could tell whether they would see each other again.

Not that Rainbow Dash felt sad. But she had a question on her lips for a while now, and if she didn’t ask right now, she might never get the answer…

She took one step and shouted to the Leader, while the machine had started to ascend.

“Hey! I want to know! Who’s your Master of Elements?!”

“Who,” Discord shouted in return, very loud. “Well, it’s Screw Ball, obviously!”

“What?! The girl eating pies with real mud?!”

Discord shouted an answer at her but it got lost in the meanders of heights and of the horrible sound of the elevator.

Shaken, Rainbow Dash didn’t want to believe it. It was another one of his joke, some kind of ultimate nose-thumbing at her martial stiffness… This Screw Ball was out of her mind. She always speechified and her discourses had no logic. And she really looked like she was straight out of a refuge for mental patients!

But, once things thought through… Often, there only was one thread, thin and half-devoured, between genius and insanity. To feel at ease day and night in a place such as Las Pegasus and to accept to put your skills at the service of such eccentricities, there could only be someone who was doing a high-wire walker performance on this thread.

She put her ammunitions inside the bag hanging on her shoulder and walked towards the hotel main door. The others certainly were waiting for her near the stables, ready to get back on the road for the next Ghetto on the way, the Ghetto of Cloudsdale.

It would probably be easier to convince the two chosen Leaders once there. Indeed, the couple ruling the place were well-known by Rainbow Dash and Soarin, since they had been together at the Military Academy.


**************************


Rainbow Dash was surprised when Sunset Shimmer appeared in front of her and pressed her forearm under her neck in order to pin her against the wall. Usually, she would have defended herself but the shock woke up a few pains in her back, preventing her from getting out of the grip the way she would have to.

“Who the hell do you think you are?” the other young woman spit with anger. “You’re not our General and you’re not the only one who’s taking decisions!”

Rainbow Dash needed a few additional seconds to understand what Sunset Shimmer was accusing her of. Since the beginning, she did nothing else but think in the way she thought was the most logical and appropriate to the situation, and if the others didn’t like that, it had nothing to do with her.

And the obvious just popped up in her face. In all likelihood, her fellow hadn’t appreciated the fact she asked Discord for a weapon, instead of acting according to the group’s interest and begging him to come with them, insisting again and again, even though he wouldn’t have agreed anyway.

“Excuse me but who saved up your asses? I did! And he would never have said yes to help us, and you do know it. Now let go off me!”

“What? You should have seen worse in your life, Miss Top Brass Rainbow Dash. I thought you were the girl who did everything perfectly.”

“And I thought there were no leaders in that group. Was I wrong? Someone’s got to be in charge… Oh, but I got it, this person has to be you or things aren’t alright, are they?”

“I’m the one who started the mission. Without me, you’d still be haunting for critters in that rotten log shack of yours!”

“And without me, you’d still be wondering how you could start a machine which works by pushing a button. Who needs who, here?”

Many times, when she saw Rainbow Dash taking on responsibilities she thought should be hers, Sunset Shimmer thought that, after all, she had called her for her expertise and that the young woman was the one who could have lived good without them, though it wasn’t obviously the case the other way around.

And yet… And yet, she didn’t like truth to be shaken under her nose with so much vehemence. To be honest, it upset her even more. Because she knew it was reality.

So, since this obviously was time for big revelations, she decided to strike where it hurt the most, and too bad for the general atmosphere if it got worse after that.

“I still would have Soarin!”

The mention of this name ignited a spark in Rainbow Dash’s eyes and Sunset Shimmer knew she had the effect she was looking for. Although she would probably kick herself for that.

“Oh yeah, it’s true, you’d still have my boyfriend! Is that why you kept to yourself the fact that he was alive?”

“Your boyfriend? Stop kidding me! You barely even look at him, you don’t give shit about his presence.”

She saw anger reaching the higher level on Rainbow Dash’s face, who immediately replied that she didn’t know anything about their common story.

She didn’t, indeed. All she knew was that they were in love and fought side by side during the War, and yet, in her letters, Twilight reported this detail out of a logical personal conclusion. The young woman didn’t write much to Sunset Shimmer about their love story, undoubtedly because it was none of her business and because she didn’t know much about it neither.

As for the rest, she had no idea how they met back at the Military Academy, of all the things they had been through there and shared during the war.

Rainbow Dash long thought he was dead, that was for sure. She didn’t know he had been abducted by The Hive and that when a group of kidnapped persons fled to create the Underworld, they took him with them, in order to make him a Courtesan… or something else, in fact, nothing was clear.

If she didn’t have the slightest idea of all this, it was because Sunset Shimmer had told her nothing at all. She wanted to keep this incredible advantage for her, just in case… And then, some kind of jealousy had piled up on top of all the rest. Not because she was in love with Soarin but because she longed to be looking this way by someone, one day. By anyone.

“You know what?” Rainbow Dash went on. “You don’t want my help. You’d like me to be your good little soldier, hanging on your every word. Is that respect you’re yearning for? Respect the others first, instead of expecting them to be at your beck and call. Or else, you’ll never be worthier than Chrysalis!”

For Sunset Shimmer, this reply was a bit the same than everything concerning Soarin for Rainbow Dash. She hated this so-called Queen Chrysalis and everything she represented, for reasons she kept to herself, once again. To put them on the same line, although it was a warning, it was the worst insult of the world.

Without further thinking, guided by the red anger of this arrow planted in the core of her ego, Sunset Shimmer lifted her hand and slapped Rainbow Dash, after she released the pressure of her forearm against her neck.

The young woman stood it with some kind of martial dignity, and her jaw clenched, didn’t waver much before she replied the same way. The difference was that she aimed at the temples instead of the cheeks, and her slap sent Sunset Shimmer down, in a literal sense.

“Don’t you ever slap me again, or I swear next time, you’ll receive my fist in the middle of your face.”

After these words, Rainbow Dash took back the bag of ammunition which had fallen on the floor when the other young woman grabbed her neck, and took a few steps towards the main door, which she tried to execute with her proudest air on.

It was excluding the pains caused by the shock against her burned skin… She couldn’t help touching her shoulder, whistling a brief suffering whimper. Behind her, she felt Sunset Shimmer got up and closer, and even reaching out a hand in her direction.

“Are you alright?”

“Mind your own business,” she answered spitefully, rejecting her helping hand before walking to the main door without a look behind her.

Here. She let herself go to negative feelings, and had been guided by her jealousy, envy and anger, and now, the mood between the three pathfinders was going to be more obnoxious than it was before.

She was the one who had called Rainbow Dash, going as far as using her friend’s Twilight survival in order to convince her. And all this, what for in the end? To intensify the disagreements to the extent of quarreling so hard she thought things were irreversible.

Even if she wanted to fix everything between them, Sunset Shimmer didn’t know how she would do that. It wouldn’t help them much to fight side by side against the real threat hovering over the fate of the whole nation…


********************


Somewhere on the mountains, which peaks were swept by a permanent windy storm, she had been sucked up by The Hive, then led to the Queen’s GHQ.

Peachy Sweet was a scout in Las Pegasus since the Ghetto had been built and for the first time, she finally felt like her mission wasn’t in vain. It was necessary to be able to adapt to the place’s folly and it had been difficult for the young woman to blend in this background between a psychedelic dream and a nightmare.

In her opinion, the place was interesting only thanks to its many Angels and the creative madness of its main Master of Elements, whom no one could guess how talented she was by the look of her pathetic general attitude.

Many times, she had begged the Queen to let her abduct the scientist, and never understood why the orders she got back always told her this was the silliest idea. Alright, The Hive still had what was necessary in this field, but ever since the escape of a hundredth of prisoners – the most rebellious faction of their various kidnappings – the amount of quality Masters of Elements who were still alive had decreased considerably.

It didn’t matter anymore now since Peachy Sweet finally possessed pieces of information which would allow her to make her contribution to the dream of their Dearest Leader, their living goddess, Queen Chrysalis.

Like usually, when she received her spy, she didn’t even bother to turn around and greet her. To be honest, although she had premium pieces of information to disclose, Peachy Sweet didn’t think she deserved the honor of their Dearest Leader’s attention.

“If all you have is begging me to abduct the crazy one with her propeller hat, once again, you might as well go back to the lunatics of Las Pegasus…”

“No, not this time, O My Almighty Queen. This time, what I have to tell you is really worth something.”

“Fine, since it makes you so happy, speak. Nothing guarantees I’m going to listen, though…”

Sitting in her throne, Chrysalis was busy playing chess against herself, with pieces representing members of the Lost Caste of the Elite, her long turquoise hair hiding a part of her face, with a casualness close to boredom.

Life in The Hive had nothing very stimulating since years now, and her satisfaction to have annihilated the Ghetto of Canterlot didn’t have her excited since as much time. She longed to finally be able to walk off with the rest of the West Continent, but unceasingly, she was told it wasn’t the right time yet and she still had to wait, because her army wasn’t completely ready to function.

In her own opinion, they were ready enough, and she knew that one very close day, she would grow tired of waiting and would order that everything would be raze to the ground right away.

“Well, you’ll never guess who came to Las Pegasus in order to beg their Leader, Discord, to help them form an army… Dissident Sunset Shimmer in person. Along with no one else than General Bow Hothoof’s daughter! They’re heading to Cloudsdale, now, my Majesty.”

The sovereign’s green eyes suddenly sparkled and she sat straight. This was very interesting indeed… So, Sunset Shimmer wanted to form an army and she went as far as exhuming of her rotten shack this little bitch who slaughtered one of her favorite bees? Very interesting indeed. Highly interesting, even.

“I want you to go back to Las Pegasus immediately and keep on working near Discord’s elevator. Don’t worry, you’ll get rewarded all in good time. Delilah!”

Immediately, a frail young woman, whose pink hair glittered as if it was covered with sequins, appeared in font of her. She was so discreet it seemed like she never had been in the same room in the first place…

“Yes, My Almighty Queen,” she said, bowing.

“Get the A-Team prepared. We’re going to make a surprise to an old friend…”