Fluttershy tries to leave the Seattle of Tomorrow.
The Seattle of Tomorrow was birthed from hope. In its prime it held a billion souls, where the light of reason ensured that none suffered want. Now all that is left are ruins, tenuously held together by lunatic science and false memory, picked over by scavengers and madmen.
Why was Fluttershy brought here? Who can she trust to help her? How can she possibly find her way home?
Crossover with Genius: the Transgression. Takes place between seasons 2 and 3. No knowledge of Genius should be necessary.
There were three of them: Fluttershy, Twilight, and Rainbow Dash, walking through the deeper parts of Whitetail Wood. All of the rest of Fluttershy’s friends had been out of Ponyville. Fluttershy wished they had been around; she had woken up this morning to what had seemed like every animal in the Whitetail Wood lined up outside her house, all trying to tell her what they had seen, and from what they had said Fluttershy would have felt safer with more ponies with her.
“They were walking on two arms and two legs, like a really tall and thin Diamond Dog made of metal. They’re twice as tall as a pony. They didn’t have heads, just some kind of electrical stick that looked kind of like a spear. None of the animals knew what it was. They had these lamps in their hands, and they were shining them everywhere. They had this kind of metal screen on their chests, like armor.”
“Spears? Armor? That doesn’t sound good,” Twilight said. “Maybe we should get some more ponies before we go further.”
“Eh, how bad could it be?” Rainbow Dash asked. She was floating about above their heads, occasionally drifting in front of them. “If they want to fight us, we’ll figure something out. Like the changelings.”
“Rainbow, we weren’t the ones who defeated the changelings,” Twilight said. “Shining Armor and Cadence did.”
“We fought a bunch of them, right? Same difference.” Rainbow Dash waved a hoof dismissively as the ponies entered a small clear space in the middle of Whitetail Wood. The trees loomed overhead, growing in a thick circle around them.
A bird flittered down next to Fluttershy, and she bent down to hear what it had to say. Twilight and Rainbow stopped to wait.
Fluttershy listened carefully as the bird chirped. “You saw…” She gasped. “They’re almost here! That way,” she said, pointing with a hoof. She quickly bent back down towards the bird. “Thank you for telling us. You’re very brave.” Fluttershy made a mental note to get some extra birdseed when she got back to show her appreciation.
The bird chirped its thanks and flew off. Rainbow and Twilight had already turned to face the direction Fluttershy had pointed in. “Now remember, it’s possible that we can talk to them, but I want us all to be prepared just in case,” said Twilight. “Rainbow, stay up in the air and keep an eye out for any weather that you can control. Fluttershy, stay near the trees in case you need to take cover. If worst comes to worst, get back to Ponyville and tell Spike to write a letter to the Princesses.”
“Right!” said Rainbow, and she flew a few feet into the air and began looking upwards.
“Okay,” Fluttershy said. She took a few steps back, until her back was to one of the thicker trees nearby. She looked up into the sky in the same direction as Rainbow. The sky looked very clear today, bright blue with few clouds.
Fluttershy realized that she couldn’t hear any animals around her. Had they all fled? She stepped back, around the tree she had been up against.
There was something moving up ahead. It took Fluttershy a moment to realize that it was some sort of light, sweeping back and forth between the trees.
A tall metal creature, just like what the animals had said, stepped out from between the trees. The metal the creature was made from was a black iron. Fluttershy realized that impossibly, it didn’t seem to actually have a head; just some sort of stick with two metal prongs mounted on a swivel, with sparks dimly leaping back and forth between the prongs. Thick, dirty electrical cables led from the weapon to something on the back of the creature. The lamp in its hands was the size and shape of a head, connected to its torso by a black segmented cable. There was a click, and the lamp switched on, a harsh, industrial yellow light. It swept the light across the ponies in a slow, deliberate arc, like a spotlight searching for a target.
“H-hello?” Twilight said hesitantly. She was tilting her head back to try to look at the place where the creature’s head should have been. “Can you understand me?”
The creature said nothing. It only kept passing its light back and forth across them. Fluttershy didn’t like the way that it seemed to be scrutinizing them, searching for some sort of identifying mark or signal.
“Hello?” Twilight said again, sounding a more disquieted this time.
There was more rustling off to the sides. Two more of the creatures had just come through the trees, one of the left and one to the right. Both of them switched on their own lamps and began sweeping the light across the ponies, just like the one in front of them.
Twilight took a step backwards, glancing back and forth, trying to keep all of the creatures in view. Rainbow looked like she was wound up like a spring, trying to figure out what to do with these strange things that were just looking at them so silently and creepily. Fluttershy felt surrounded, under a microscope.
There was a crackling noise from one of the creatures. The three electrified prongs on top of the creatures began to glow, the sparks suddenly forming into a thick mass of energy.
There was suddenly a light shining behind Fluttershy. Something hard and cold grabbed her and pulled her away just as the creatures fired.
Twilight’s forcefield spell went up in a purple flash, covering herself, Rainbow, and the spot where Fluttershy had just been standing. The three lightning bolts smashed into the shield, leaving cracks all across the surface of it. Fluttershy screamed, and she saw Rainbow and Twilight starting to turn their heads towards her just as she was pulled behind a tree.
Fluttershy twisted about, trying to see what had her, but she couldn’t turn all the way. It took her a moment to realize that she was being held by a hand made of metal. A fourth one of the creatures was trying to carry her away! Fluttershy heard the electrical crackle of the lightning weapons firing again back in the clearing.
“Fluttershy!” Rainbow came whipping around the tree; Twilight must have lowered her shield long enough for Rainbow to get out. “Let go of her, you – ”
The creature that was holding Fluttershy spun about and fired point blank into Rainbow Dash.
The lightning bolt threw Rainbow back into the nearest tree. Lightning surged across her body and she convulsed, her eyes rolling back in her head, before she hit the ground like a stone.
Rainbow didn’t move.
“Rainbow!” Fluttershy screamed. “Rainbow!”
“Fluttershy!” Twilight was shouting from somewhere inside the clearing. The creature was starting to pull Fluttershy away, which made it harder for her to hear Twilight.
“Twilight! Rainbow’s hurt! Help, please!” Fluttershy flapped her wings and legs, trying to get free. She felt herself being lifted further into the air, and she realized that the creature that was holding her was straightening its arms to hold her further away from itself.
There was a pop, and Twilight appeared a few feet in front of Fluttershy. Twilight glanced around. “What is – ” Her horn flared.
The creature holding Fluttershy fired just as Twilight got her shield up over herself and Rainbow. The lightning bolt slammed into it, putting more cracks all across the front of it. Twilight’s horn glowed again, and the cracks gleamed and faded.
The three other creatures came around the trees. Their lamps swept over Twilight and Rainbow, and they focused on the fallen pegasus and the unicorn.
Twilight began pouring more power into the shield just as the first creature fired. The shot hit the shield, fracturing it again. Just as the new damage was about to fade the second one fired, hitting it from a different angle. They were firing in turn, not giving Twilight a chance to do anything but focus on her shield.
Fluttershy was being taken further away. Already Rainbow and Twilight seemed to be pulling away into the distance. She couldn’t twist out of the thing’s grip; its fingers were locked too strongly around her neck. Frantic, she reached up with her front hooves to its fingers, instinctively trying to pull them away.
The moment her hooves touched the fingers, the creature dropped her. Fluttershy hit the ground in a heap. She got her hooves under her, stood back up, and looked over her shoulder.
The creature looked absolutely huge from this close, as if she was standing at the base of a tower. It was shaking its hand as if trying to wring stiffness out of it, and Fluttershy saw that the movement of the fingers actually did look a bit stiffer than they had before. Its lamp gave another high-pitched burst of crackling. One of the other creatures that was around Twilight turned, shining its lamp over Fluttershy, and then rushed over, its long legs stiff out in front of it.
Fluttershy squeaked and turned to run, just as the creature behind her reached out and grabbed her by her tail. It dragged her back just as the second creature arrived and picked her up by her right front hoof. The two of them lifted Fluttershy between them and started to run, carrying her away deeper into the woods.
“No!” Fluttershy heard Twilight scream from somewhere behind her, and with a pop Twilight was suddenly standing directly in the path of the two creatures. Rainbow’s body was on Twilight’s back. “Stop!”
The creatures sped up, and Fluttershy saw Twilight’s eyes widen as she realized that they were going to run her down.
Twilight teleported to the side just as the creatures ran through the spot she had just been standing. She aimed her horn at one of the creatures carrying Fluttershy, but stopped and cast another forcefield when she heard rustling in the trees in the direction she’d just come from. Two lightning bolts came flying out of the trees to impact the forcefield, just as Fluttershy was taken away behind another clump of trees.
Fluttershy was in shock. She didn’t know what these creatures were or what was going on, and things were happening so fast that her brain felt as if it was spinning in her skull. But in the midst of the chaos she touched one idea that she clung to as soon as she realized what it was: she had to do something.
Fluttershy’s left front hoof was still free. The creatures were using one hand each to carry her; the other hand was holding the lamps. The one holding her right front hoof had its lamp aimed over her, pointing at the path it was taking. Fluttershy stretched out and grabbed the arm holding her, thinking desperately that maybe she could get the creature to drop her.
As soon as her hooves gripped the creature’s arm, she realized that something was wrong. The hard metal under her hooves was cold for only a moment before the spot she was touching was suddenly red hot, change temperature impossibly fast. Sparks of lightning leapt down its arm, and Fluttershy pulled her hoof away just as the creature’s whole upper arm began to glow and smoke.
The creature’s arm came off, leaving long strings of molten metal like wet taffy. The hand around her foreleg relaxed its grip on her and fell off. The creature in front of her staggered backwards as liquid copper dripped from its shoulder like blood. Its lamp was spitting off ear-splitting screeches of alarm. One of the creatures pinning down Twilight turned towards it just as the creature that had Fluttershy by the tail pulled hard. Fluttershy wailed as she was dragged roughly along the ground.
“Fluttershy!” Twilight shouted. “Try to fly!”
Fluttershy didn’t think that she’d be able to break free of the grip the creature had on her, but she flapped her wings anyway, lifting herself off the ground. The creature pulled, but she flapped as hard as she could, pulling back. The ground below her seemed to be moving more slowly, and Fluttershy realized that she was actually being pulled more slowly than she had been when she was being dragged. It was working!
There was a loud crack of thunder behind her; she winced, then she turned to look.
A circle lined with surges of electricity had suddenly opened in the air. She couldn’t see much of what was through it with the creature directly between her and it, but she could see orange and gray; definitely somewhere that wasn’t the Whitetail Wood. The creature was pulling her directly towards it. Fluttershy squeaked and flapped harder, fear driving her wings faster as she tried to get as much distance as possible between herself and the place the creature was trying to take her.
Then one of the creatures that had been attacking Twilight grabbed Fluttershy’s right wing.
Fluttershy’s balance spiraled away from her, and she dropped like so much dead weight between the two creatures. She flailed desperately, and the grip on her wings slipped. Fluttershy’s waving legs pushed directly into the creature’s chest.
The hard metal changed. Her hooves sank into the metal as if it was suddenly soft and yielding, like pudding.
The creature convulsed, and suddenly there was the smell of blood all around her, thick and coppery enough to taste on her tongue. It staggered backwards, pulling itself away from Fluttershy, and her hooves fell away from its chest. Her hooves had – impossibly – pushed through the wrought iron as if it was soft cheese, revealing metal gears and wires deep inside the creature’s chest.
As Fluttershy watched, blood began to seep out between the gears, from some spot deep in its body. The color and shape of the gears was beginning to change, and it took Fluttershy a moment to realize that its insides were turning into kidneys and lungs and hearts, all punctured and crushed as if something had opened the creature and taken a hammer to its insides. The creature took two unsteady steps forward, letting go of Fluttershy to bring its hands and its lamp back in front of it, pointed at her.
What was…what was this?
The creature took another stumbling step forward. Blood was now running freely down its front, turning its body red. Fluttershy could only stare in shock and horror as the creature started to bleed and die right in front of her.
She almost didn’t realize that she was at the portal until she was pulled through it, and Equestria fell away.
Steel and rust. Those were the first things she saw.
Fluttershy was in some sort of warehouse or foundry room, a green steel box with no windows. Rust crawled up the walls in long streaks. The floor she was on was hard stone, worn smooth with age. The area was lit by long lamps that hung from the ceiling; the lamps were white, but the light that came from them seemed to have an orange tone, as if they were reflecting rust that had gathered in the very air around her.
There were two more of the creatures in the room, standing at attention like guards marking the border of a path. Fluttershy was pulled between them, and she turned to look back in the direction she was coming from, towards the hole in reality.
There was a huge circle in front of her, and through it she saw the grass and trees and sunlight. The circle was made of some kind of clean white material, something that looked like metal but didn’t seem to have that same kind of sheen or rusting. Electricity ran back and forth along the inside of it, circling the portal that led back to Equestria. There was a loud electrical hum in the air as the lightning coiled back and forth.
The portal shimmered, and the metal creature that she had touched suddenly fell through, landing on its front on the ground directly in front of her. The entire top half of its body except for the head had been converted into pink, hairless flesh, and it writhed and twitched in front of her. One of the metal creatures reached down and pulled it out of the portal, dragging its feet over the lip of the portal and away from the gate. It dragged its already-still comrade towards the wall of the room, and that was when Fluttershy saw the corpse.
It had the same general shape of the creatures: two legs, two arms, a body, and a head. This one wasn’t made of metal, though; it had some kind of hairless skin, and its mane seemed to be just on the top of its head. It was wearing clothes, a simple shirt and pants. It had been propped up against the wall in a sitting position. There were black scorch marks all over its body and clothes; Fluttershy had been in Cloudsdale long enough to recognize electrical burns. The creature dropped its dead brethren face down next to the body, then turned back towards its fellows.
The portal shimmered again, and the other three metal creatures from the forest came leaping through it. The first two spun around, pointing their weapons through the portal. The third one turned around, opened up a panel in the side of the gate, and pressed something inside of it. The electrical hum died down and the portal faded away.
The creature that had been dragging her stopped pulling, letting her rest on her stomach on the cold stone floor. She looked up and around, trying to see if there was some way that she could somehow get away and out of here. All she saw was a door at the end of the room, behind the creatures. There was no way that she would ever be able to get there.
Unless…
Both times she had touched one of the creatures – not one of them touching her, her touching one of them – something bad had happened to them. There was enough length to her tail for her to easily fly up and touch the one who was holding her. If he let go, she could just push through them all and go out the door –
Wait. Wait. What was she thinking? This was terrible! She couldn’t deliberately hurt another being like that. Even just seeing the dead creature lying next to the wall made something deep in her chest cry out in guilt.
They had shot Rainbow Dash. They were trying to shoot Twilight. And they had kidnapped her. They couldn’t even be bothered to treat their own dead with respect. Did they deserve to not be harmed?
The creature’s corpse lay there. Blood was still slowly spreading out beneath its body. She had killed it. If she hurt them she would be just like them.
She couldn’t do it.
Could she?
She needed to think. She needed more time!
There was no time.
There was the sound of metal clanking against stone, and she looked over her shoulder. One of the creatures was bringing up a black metal cage large enough for a pony.
Fluttershy squeaked, leapt up onto her hooves, and was about to start running when two of the creatures reached out and grabbed her. The three creatures lifted her up between them and shoved her into the cage. The creature holding the cage swung it shut and locked it with a black key, which it placed on a key ring at its waist. Two of the creatures picked up the cage, and they began to march.
As they went out the door of the room they were in, it became clear to Fluttershy that they had been in the bottom of some kind of abandoned facility. The rooms were empty, and had the kind of wear and rust that only came about from having been standing for a long time without anyone coming back in. Fluttershy wondered what this place had been used for when it had been built. It all looked so…dead. Fluttershy knew that plants and animals might die; that was the way of things. But all this metal seemed to have died too, to have become just an empty shadow of what it had once been.
They traveled through the series of empty rooms for some time. At one point the stopped in front of a set of sliding doors with a button next to it. One of the metal creatures pressed the button, and the door opened into a steel box. They got into the box, and it rattled for a moment before moving upwards into another set of rooms. Some of the doors to the rooms were dented and broken down the middle; others had had blackened holes blasted in them, and were hanging half-off their hinges. There must have been fighting here earlier, but Fluttershy didn’t see any more dead bodies.
Finally they came to a plain steel door. The creature in front opened the door, and they went outside.
Everything was cast in an angry orange light, like a constant inferno. She was in a district surrounded by squat, three-story buildings made from what looked like steel and molded stone. The jagged fingers of broken towers from somewhere in the distance reached towards the sky, more than she had seen even in Canterlot. There was a strange glinting coming from them, and she realized that they had been built of some shimmering metal like silver that had been covered in soot and dust. Above her was something that might have once train tracks on a raised bridge, but they had crumbled and fallen away. Past the steel towers were the silhouettes of what might have been blocks of factories, long smokestacks leaking smog in a gray smear across the sky. The sky was a dirty stretch of orange and gray, as if heat and smoke had scorched away all the clouds and rain. There was no sun.
What was this place?
The metal creatures began to walk, carrying Fluttershy between them. The world around them was silent, without even wind. There was a thickness in the air, like the aftermath of smoke or soot from a long-ago fire.
The city was a ruin. All of the buildings seem to have been shaken and crumbled, as if from some great earthquake. Several of them had collapsed into piles of rubble. Every window frame Fluttershy saw was empty, with only shards of glass left. The streets were made of cracked black stone. Strange metal hulks lay scattered about the street, things with fins and open canopies with what looked like seats in them. A few were sitting in piles of rubble in the midst of still-standing walls, and Fluttershy realized that those ones must have fallen from the sky and landed on the buildings.
Fluttershy shrank back in her cage. What had happened here?
They walked through an empty city square that held nothing but patches of black dirt. One of the buildings seemed to be more important than the others; it was a bit taller, and there were small poles sticking up from the top of it. On the front of it was a large mural of one of the creatures whose dead body she had seen next to the gate. This one was wearing a red plaid shirt, blue jeans, and a yellow hardhat. He stood proudly, holding up a wrench in one hand and looking down at the citizens below him. The sun was behind him, making a halo around his head and casting rays around him.
They walked around a hill of bent steel and stone, stained with brown rust over the years. There was what looked like half a nightclub sign with electric blue neon underneath one piece of rubble, something Vinyl Scratch would have liked.
The creatures and Fluttershy turned the corner and almost walked right into another group of things.
There were five of them, and they looked just like the dead non-metal creature that she had seen in the room with the gate. These new creatures were dressed in sand-colored rags, layered and wrapped around themselves. Each of them wore a set of opaque goggles made of dark metal and black glass over their eyes. Their hands and faces were white as paper, and they clutched strange tubular weapons of stamped metal and square glass shields almost as large as they were in their hands.
Both groups stared at each other for a moment.
One of the non-metal creatures reacted first. Quick as a snake she swung her weapon up to point at the metal creatures.
CRACK!
The arm of the metal creature that was holding the front of her cage exploded. Fluttershy’s cage hit the ground with a loud crash, and she dug her hooves into the bars to keep from sliding downwards into the cage door.
The stillness snapped. The metal creatures dropped Fluttershy’s cage, letting it clatter onto the ground. The flesh creatures raised their weapons as the metal creatures lifted their lamps, highlighting their opponents. The flesh creatures scattered behind the mounds of debris and into the wreckage of the buildings as the metal creatures opened fire, filling the air with electricity and ozone. The metal creature in front of Fluttershy was hit, blasting away shards of metal that rained down on the cage. Fluttershy covered her head as iron clattered against the bars.
The metal creatures stood their ground, sweeping their lights across the buildings and aiming arcs of lightning through the broken windows and doorways the flesh creatures were leaning out of. There was a cry of pain and flash of red as one of the flesh creatures was hit. It dropped down behind the window it had been leaning out of, and Fluttershy saw smoke rising out of the window. One of the flesh creatures dashed out of the doorway it had been sheltering behind to sprint across to the window and hoist itself through. The flesh creatures fired back a few bursts of shots before pulling further into the ruins.
The metal creatures sprung forward after the flesh creatures. In a moment they had disappeared, leaving Fluttershy alone.
Fluttershy looked around and tried to think. The metal creatures hadn’t seen this coming. She had just gotten a one in a million chance, and she needed to get out of here, now. She pushed against the cage door; it was still locked. She looked around for some way out of here, and a glint caught her eye.
The cage key was on the ground in front of her. The metal creatures must have dropped it when they had run off.
Fluttershy pushed one hoof through the bars, pressing up against the bars to get her foreleg as far as she could towards the key. It was just an inch out of reach.
She pulled her leg back and looked around, trying to think of some way to get closer to the key. There was an iron shard nearby, and she picked it up with both hooves and reached back through the bars towards the key.
There! It was just long enough to hook the key and pull it towards her. She pulled the key all the way to the bars, then picked up the key in one hoof. She pushed it into the lock and turned it. There was a click, and she let go of the key and pushed the cage door open.
She was free! Fluttershy stepped out of the cage and onto the hard ground.
She needed to get away from here, but where could she go? Fluttershy tried to think.
The metal creatures already knew about the building with the gate; if they saw that she was missing they might check back there. If she flew directly ahead she would almost certainly run into them. If she went up too far in the sky they would see her, so she would have to stay near the ground.
Maybe she could hide somewhere? She flew up into the window of one of the ruined buildings. The room beyond it was dark, and she stood on the stone floor of the room as her eyes adjusted. The stone room was about the size of her living room. An old couch sat in the middle of the floor, while a closet leaned next to the window, and a table stood near a wall with a box on it. The table was made of green stamped steel, and it had an impersonal, sterile look to it. There was no paint on any of the walls, and the floor was cold stone. There was a small alcove with an open door; Fluttershy thought she could see the shape of an old toilet in it. The floor in one corner was made of white tile, as if it had once been a kitchen nook. There was a closed door in the far wall, on the opposite side of the room from the window. The light coming in through the window only showed the box on the table and dark water stains on the walls.
There was the sound of rubble shifting outside. Fluttershy dropped down to the floor of the room, hesitated, then peeked out the window.
The metal creatures were making their way back around the rubble. There were still five of them. None of the flesh creatures were around, and she wondered what had happened to them.
The first of the metal creatures swept its lamp across the empty cage. It stopped, then continued forward more slowly. The creatures surrounded the cage, all of them pointing their lamps at it. They stood there for a few moments as if they were thinking, before two of them stepped forward to pick up the cage again. They continued their march, and in a few moments they had turned the corner of the street and were out of sight.
Fluttershy dropped back down to the floor of the room. She was shaking. She took a few deep breaths to try to calm herself.
Fluttershy didn’t know what this place was. She didn’t know why she had been taken here. There were violent creatures everywhere. She hadn’t seen any trees or animals at all. And for all that the huge number of ponies in places like Canterlot and Ponyville made her anxious, it hadn’t been anything like the desolate emptiness of this city.
She wanted to go back to Rainbow and Twilight to make sure that they were all right. For all she knew, they had been left lying unconscious on the ground of the woods, easy prey for any carnivore that came along. Fluttershy remembered that the last soldiers to go through the gate had turned around towards it immediately, as if afraid that something might come through. That might mean that they had run from Twilight instead of subduing her. That had to be it, right?
Fluttershy wanted her friends. Rarity would give her a hug and say just the thing to let her know that it would be all right, and Pinkie Pie would be bouncing up and down telling jokes a mile a minute to cheer her up. Applejack would be biting at the bit to charge in and buck whatever was causing all this. Twilight and Rainbow would be…
She could die here, without ever seeing her friends or family or her home again, completely lost and utterly alone.
Fluttershy lay down on the couch and began to cry.
Fluttershy didn’t know when she had fallen asleep. She was on the couch, facing the window. It wasn’t so bright outside as it had been when she had first come here; maybe there was still night in this place, even though there was no sun. She wondered if there was a moon here.
Clack, clack.
Fluttershy wondered what that clacking noise was. She sat up on the couch, rubbing her eyes.
There was some sort of clockwork ball about the size of an apple trying to climb the legs of the table. It had four legs that it balanced on like a spider, and a single wide glass eye on top of its body. As it moved about it turned a bit towards the light, and Fluttershy saw that some of the gears weren’t moving; they must be jammed.
The clockwork ball wrapped its legs around the table leg and began trying to pull itself up. It only made it a few inches before its legs slipped and it slid back down onto the floor. It rolled about for several seconds before righting itself. The ball clacked clacked to itself for a moment, moving its legs as if checking that nothing had broken, before skittering back to the table for another try.
Something about the way it moved reminded Fluttershy of an animal trying to climb kitchen cabinets to reach some food on a high shelf. What did it want? The only thing on the table was the box that was sitting on top of it.
Was this thing an animal? If it was, would her special talent work on it? If it did, then maybe her intuition was right and it really was after food.
Fluttershy flew off the couch and onto the table. The clockwork ball looked up and saw it, and it stopped in the middle of the floor to look at her.
The box on the table was a slightly water-damaged cardboard packing box, with black stains where the water had dried. Fluttershy couldn’t imagine how a clockwork thing could eat a cardboard box. She took a closer look at it to make sure, and realized that there was a faint bluish-white glow shining out from between the flaps. Fluttershy opened it.
There was a book inside with a hard brown cover, like the textbooks from back when she was in school. There was no title, only a picture of a lightning bolt arcing between two metal poles. The glow was coming from inside the book, casting electric blue light onto the sides of the box.
The light was really pretty, and Fluttershy wondered why the ball wanted this. Fluttershy opened it; maybe if she looked at it she would know why.
The letters on the page glowed with the same electric light. The book had no cover page and no introduction. It simply leapt straight into what appeared to be its subject matter.
P = VI where P is power in watts, V is voltage in volts, and I is current in amperes R = V / I where R is resistance in ohms (see previous equation for V and I) Apparent power squared is equal to real power squared plus reactive power squared The horsepower of an electric motor is equal to volts times amperes times efficiency in decimal form, divided by 746
As soon as her eyes fell on the words, there was a zap and a spark of lightning leapt from the book to her hoof, shocking her –
She blinked bright blue out of her eyes, and the page was blank.
What just happened?
The words had looked almost like some of the equations Fluttershy had seen in Twilight’s books on magic. Had that been some kind of magical knowledge? If it was, this was a really strange way to store it.
There was the sound of rapid tapping on the ground, and Fluttershy looked over the edge of the table. The clockwork ball was more agitated, taking quick steps to the right and left like a crab and looking up at her. It must have sensed that she had opened the box, and she was now sure that it had been looking for the book.
Fluttershy closed the book. Maybe if she didn’t look at the words it wouldn’t –
There was another zap, and her hooves almost slipped. Her mind cleared, and Fluttershy found herself gripping the book with both hooves. The book was noticeably dimmer than it was before; the energy within it was definitely going to disappear soon if she kept touching it. The clockwork ball was clicking and clacking at her, jumping up and down on its thin legs. She gently floated down, put the book on the ground in front of the clockwork ball, and took a few steps back.
The clockwork ball leapt onto the book, gripping it edges with its front legs. A pair of small fangs grew out of the front of it, and it pressed the fangs down into the cover of the book. The lightning was drawn upwards, through the pages and onto the surface of the book, before a short of arc of electricity formed outwards from the cover into the ball. In a few moments the book was no longer glowing, and the ball let go of it. Its little fangs retracted themselves; a few sparks passed over its body, and with a clack the jammed gears unlocked themselves and began ticking again.
The clockwork ball jumped off the top of the book, so that there was a clear line of sight between itself and Fluttershy. It started to click and wave its arms in the air, and Fluttershy realized that it was trying to talk to her.
The ball didn’t talk like the animals back home. In Equestria, she could talk about their homes, their families, what they remembered and what they wanted as if they were speaking clear Equestrian. All she was getting here was a much more vague sense of what it was trying to say.
She was reasonably certain that it was trying to say thank you.
“You’re welcome…uh…” she said. She didn’t know its name. “What’s your name?” she asked.
It paused, rubbing one leg against the front part of its body like someone deep in thought. Finally it shrugged.
“You don’t have a name? Oh, I…” Fluttershy had never encountered this kind of situation before. Back in Equestria, all the animals had called themselves something. An animal without a name seemed just…strange, somehow. “Do you want a name?”
It paused again, thinking, and Fluttershy got the impression that it had never thought about actually naming itself before.
Finally it responded with a rapid series of complex clicks. Almost all of them made no sense to Fluttershy; it sounded like a long string of technical terms. The only word she recognized was the last one: Orphan.
“Oh! I’m really sorry to hear that,” Fluttershy said. “But if you had parents, they had to have named you, right?”
The clockwork ball shook its head vigorously, and for a moment Fluttershy thought that the ball was telling her that its parents had not named it. Then it clicked out another sentence: it had never had any parents. Orphan wasn’t a family status, but a type. Rank one orphan.
“Uh…” Fluttershy turned the ball’s words over in her head, trying to understand what that meant. “What do you mean?”
It stopped and thought again. Finally, it just repeated the same list of technical terms it had given her last time. Fluttershy still didn’t understand any of it.
“I’m sorry,” Fluttershy said. “I really don’t know what you’re trying to tell me. Maybe later.” The ball nodded; it seemed it was all right with this.
As she talked, she took a closer look at the ball. There was a definite difference between the clockwork ball and the rest of this place. Everything else was solid stone or steel, and the two-legged metal creatures from before had been built from stamped iron and electricity. This strange thing was built a thousand polished gears of brass and copper, and it was clear that a great deal of craftsmanship had gone into its creation. Fluttershy was pretty sure that it must have come from somewhere outside the city. If it had come here from somewhere else, maybe it knew a way out?
“Excuse me,” she said. “Could you help me? Please? I need to go somewhere…” Fluttershy hesitated. Maybe it might know a way back to Equestria? There didn’t seem to be any harm in asking. “Have you heard of a place called Equestria?”
The clockwork ball thought for a moment, then shook its head.
“Oh," Fluttershy said, her head drooping from disappointment. "Well, maybe you can help me find someplace safe? Somewhere those big tall metal…” Fluttershy tried to think of a better word for the metal creatures from before besides ‘creatures.’ “…Where the metal soldiers won’t find me?”
The clockwork ball stood again in thought, tilting its body left and right like a dog trying to comprehend something. Finally it turned around and scurried back towards the door in the wall. It stopped in front of the door, turned around to face Fluttershy, and waited.
Fluttershy walked over to the door. There was some kind of doorknob that looked like a bar, and she reached up and pulled down on it. The door swung open, revealing complete darkness beyond. There was just enough ambient light from the window for her to see that it was probably a hallway beyond.
“Um…” Fluttershy took a step back. “I can’t see in the dark…”
The clockwork ball looked into the hallway, turned back to her, and clicked. It didn’t seem to have too much trouble with the darkness.
“Uh…” Fluttershy looked around, trying to think of some other way to do this, and her eyes settled on the window. “Can I just, um, wait for you outside?”
The ball considered it, and then nodded. It skittered out the door, and its clacking noises faded into the darkness.
Fluttershy flew out the window and landed on the ground next to the building. She looked up at the sky; she felt as if anyone could see her out here. She shrank back against the building, as if it could hide her.
A few minutes later, she heard a faint clicking noise from inside the building she was next to. A small grate on the bottom of the wall was pushed open, and the clockwork ball came clattering out. It looked left and right before seeing her, and it waved a leg to beckon her over. Fluttershy walked over to where it was, and it turned and began making its way down the street, staying near the buildings. Fluttershy followed it.
The buildings they were walking past were becoming different from the ones from before; they were getting taller, and instead of being made from stone they were built of metal and glass. Instead of the whole buildings having collapsed, it looked like just some of the upper floors had come down into the street or had collapsed in on themselves without destroying the lower floors. Fluttershy kept glancing around uneasily, trying to keep an eye out more of the soldiers. The clockwork ball seemed to be doing the same thing; every once in a while it would stop behind a wall or pile of rubble and carefully glance around before continuing. Neither of them saw anything.
They passed by a statue in the middle of an empty town square. It was of another bipedal creature; she was wearing a long lab coat and glasses, and her hair was tied into a stiff bun. The statue had once been crafted from what looked like steel, but it was now covered in a thick layer of old dust. There was an inscription on a plaque at the base of the statue.
ELSPETH ST. CROIX
MOTHER OF MEGIDDO
SCIENCE TRIUMPHANT
Fluttershy stood and looked at the statue. Part of her wondered how a place such as this would still make a statue written in Equestrian, but another part wondered who or what Elspeth St. Croix had been.
She didn’t think she would find an answer here. She turned and moved on.
The sky was starting to darken. Instead of being the inferno it had looked like when she first arrived, it was cooling down to a dirty navy blue. There still didn’t seem to be a moon, or even stars, just the sky changing color. Somehow there was still light coming from the sky, letting her see the world around her as if it was night back in Equestria. It was definitely getting colder; Fluttershy hoped that wherever the clockwork ball was taking her had a fireplace.
They were getting closer to one of the silvery towers Fluttershy had seen earlier; it was looming in the sky, and she had to crane her head back to see the top of it. It was surreal; she was used to seeing tall buildings such as the towers of Canterlot from a distance, but not even Canterlot had been this tall. Seeing one of these impossible towers so close was unsettling.
Finally, they were a block from the base of the tower. The clockwork ball stopped in front of what looked like it might have been a storefront a long time ago, but the glass was missing and the display cases empty. The ball turned around and waited for her.
Fluttershy reached the small ball. “What do we do now?” she asked.
The ball turned and walked through the broken windows, deeper into the shop. Fluttershy looked up at the darkening sky. It was dark in the store, and it was only going to get darker as the daylight faded. She wasn’t sure she wanted to be in there, in the dark. Who knew what kind of strange things she might wander into without being able to see? She might fall down a hole, or hurt herself by walking into a wall, or stumble into another soldier…
The clockwork ball had stopped at the back of the store; she could only tell where it was because the fading daylight faintly glinted off its body. Fluttershy looked nervously at the sky again before following it. She didn’t have any other ideas.
The floor was covered with scattered pieces of broken glass and small piles of dust. She stepped over a fallen machine that was a glass box filled with gearwork mechanisms. There was a white label on the front that she could still read in the fading light: “Penny Press Machine.” Fluttershy’s hoof nudged an unbroken piece of glass, and she looked down at it. It was a glass rectangle with a picture of a long skyline on it, prominently featuring a needle-like tower with a disc at the top as the tallest building. There were some words running along the bottom of the rectangle: “The Seattle of Tomorrow!” There were a few shopping baskets sitting on the ground next to the shelves. They were made from some kind of material she couldn’t recognize; it was hard, but not cold like metal was. Her hooves left small furrows in the dust as she walked. Her eyes were starting to adjust to the darkness a little, and she saw that the clockwork ball was standing next to a doorframe and doorknob. She flew up and opened the door.
The room beyond was completely dark. There was a faint blue strip on the ground where the light from outside fell into the room. As Fluttershy stood in the doorway, she saw that there seemed to be something on the floor just on the edge of the light.
The clockwork ball skittered between her legs and over to the thing on the floor. It turned and waved to her. Fluttershy glanced over her shoulder at the street outside; it was still illuminated in the night’s light. Then she looked back at the small clockwork ball.
Fluttershy swung the door all the way open, until it was against the wall. She took her hooves off of it and watched it for a moment. It stayed there. Good; at least there would be a little light in there. Fluttershy dropped back to the ground and walked into the room, towards the thing the clockwork ball was trying to show her.
Even this close Fluttershy couldn’t quite tell what it was. She reached out with a hoof to feel it. It felt like some kind of handle, something she could just hook the edge of her hoof under. A trapdoor.
Fluttershy could just squeeze one hoof into the handle. She reached down and pulled the trapdoor open.
It was so bright! Fluttershy instinctively flinched away, covering her night-eyes with a foreleg. After a moment she took her foreleg away and opened her eyes again, looking at the trapdoor.
There was a tunnel underneath the trapdoor, twice the height of a pony. The walls were made of steel, covered in vividly-colored stickers in yellow, red, and blue. Now that her eyes had adjusted, Fluttershy saw that the light wasn’t actually that bright; it had only looked like it compared to the night around her. There was a ladder leading down to it. The clockwork ball was already carefully picking its way down the ladder, spreading its legs between the rungs and the sides of the ladder. Fluttershy waited until it was all the way down before flying down the trapdoor. As she landed, the ball pointed upwards. “Oh, okay,” Fluttershy said, and she flew up and closed the trapdoor.
Now that she was actually inside the tunnel, she could get a better look around. It was lit with bulbs behind green steel shades that hung from the ceiling on short cables. The bulbs were covered in a thick layer of dust; everything illuminated by them seemed to be in a strange half-shadow. The walls looked as if nobody had cleaned them in a long time. Grime had worked its way around the edges of the stickers. Fluttershy walked slowly, looking at the stickers as they pointing down corridors that went off into the distance. “Dimensional Engine 10B, 500 meters.” “Fremont Rapid Transit Stop 3, 90 meters.” “Duwamps Hydro-Locks, 100 meters.” She wondered what they were.
“Where are we?” Fluttershy asked the ball.
The ball clicked and clacked, and pointed up and down the tunnel. It was saying that they were in the access corridors.
It started down the tunnel, turned around, and stood, waiting for her to follow. She walked after it.
The access corridors were quiet. The only sound was the tap, tap, tap of the clockwork ball’s feet, the sound of Fluttershy’s own hooves, and the occasional sparking noise from the overhead lights. She kept looking over her shoulder; the silence made her nervous.
“Where are we going?” she finally asked.
The clockwork ball kept walking, but made more mechanical noises as it moved. It was saying some words she didn’t understand. “Um…excuse me please, but I’m not sure what you’re saying…?”
The ball stopped and turned around. It began gesturing with its legs while making the same clacking noises over and over again. As far as Fluttershy could tell, it was trying to say a name, but she couldn’t tell what the name was.
“I’m sorry,” she finally said. “I just don’t understand…maybe we should just keep going and talk about this later.”
The ball tilted its body for a moment, but turned around and went on.
They walked through the corridors for several minutes, turning left and right at various intersections. Fluttershy walked slowly, looking at the signs pointing down corridors that went off into the distance. She couldn’t read them, but she wondered what they were and where they led.
The clockwork ball stopped in front of one section of wall and waited for her. Fluttershy walked up to it and looked around. “What’s here?” she asked.
The clockwork ball pointed at the wall next to it, and after a moment Fluttershy realized that it was standing in front of a single slab of metal with a handle and hinges: a door.
“Oh! Let me get that.” Fluttershy floated up, wrapped her hooves around the handle, and pulled.
There was a solid curtain of purple and white sparks on the other side. They stretched up and down like a set of bars, completely covering the doorway. She couldn’t see a thing on the other side of it. Fluttershy reached out to touch the sparks. They were oddly cool and solid beneath her touch, like a steel wall.
“Um…” Fluttershy said. She let go of the door, and it slowly swung back on its hinges and clanged shut.
The clockwork ball was staring at the door with what could only be an expression of wide-eyed surprise on its face.
“Was that supposed to be there?” she asked, even though she already knew the answer.
The ball shook its head, still staring. It seemed to think for a moment, and then turned and hurried away down the corridor. Fluttershy jogged after it.
The ball stopped in front of another door. Fluttershy flew up and pulled. It started to pull out, and for a brief moment Fluttershy thought it would work…only for the door to make a heavy clunk as it hit a lock. Fluttershy wrapped both hooves around the handle and flew harder, trying to put more force behind it. It wouldn’t budge, and finally she let go of it. “I don’t think it’s working.”
The ball stood for a moment, twitching one leg against the other anxiously. It tapped one leg against the ground before making a decision and going off again. They passed by a ladder, going up to another trapdoor. It stood at the bottom of it, tapping its legs in thought, before making a decision and zipping off around the corner. The little ball was clearly nervous; it kept looking up and down the corridor and bouncing up and down a little nervously.
“Are you all right?” Fluttershy asked. It nodded absent-mindedly even as it took another look down the corridor in front of them. “Are you sure?” she asked.
It stopped, considering the question. Then it started speaking again, holding its legs stiff like a clock’s hands and pantomiming opening a door. It was more complicated then the kind of things it had been saying before, but after the last few sentences the ball had managed to convey to her it was easier for Fluttershy to understand the ball.
The doors here were supposed to be open, and the two of them should have been out of here. Now they had been here too long for the ball’s liking; they were going to try one more exit and if that didn’t work, they would head back to the surface and look for somewhere to say the night.
“Why have we been here too long?” Fluttershy asked. “What’s down here?”
The ball was about to answer when it looked behind her and froze. Fluttershy looked over her shoulder at the corner they had just come around. She heard an echo of metal thumping on metal, in a regular pattern like footsteps. There was a circle of light shining on the wall, and she recognized the yellow lighting of one of the metal soldiers’ lamps.
The ball stared for a moment longer, then turned and skittered away down the corridor. Fluttershy followed it, staying close behind the ball.
After a minute, the ball stopped and held up a leg, telling her to wait. Fluttershy stood behind it as the ball as it stood with its head tilted. Fluttershy listened as well; she couldn’t hear the soldier anymore. The ball lowered its leg and started moving again.
The ball led Fluttershy through another short series of corridors before finally reaching a door at the end of the hallway. The ball pointed at it, and Fluttershy opened it.
The door lead out into a wide tunnel that stretched off to the left and the right. There were some flicking yellow-orange lights set into the wall, giving Fluttershy just enough light to see the shadows of pipes on the walls. The door was a foot above the ground, and Fluttershy hopped down to the ground. The ball jumped down after her, and pointed at the door again. Fluttershy flew up and pulled the door shut.
“Are we there yet?” she asked the ball.
It shook its head. They were still in the access corridors. The exit was nearby. The ball started down the tunnel, to her left, and Fluttershy followed it.
The tunnel opened up into what looked like an enclosed train station. Two tracks ran down the middle of the station, leading to two tunnels at each end of the station; Fluttershy remembered that the train stations back in Equestria had also had two sets of tracks, one for each direction. The walls had once been white, but age and dust had taken their toll. Everything was chipped and stained. In a few places piles of rubble from the ceiling had fallen down, scattering debris and dust over everything. There were green frames for what Fluttershy thought must have been train schedules once, but the signs inside of them were gone. Some blank signs hung from the ceiling, with black screens on them. Fluttershy saw a few small things that had been abandoned in the wreckage: a stained and shredded bag, a small black plastic rectangle, a wicker basket that had rolled next to the tracks. To her left and right were stairs leading to an upper floor, with another set of stairs at the other end of the station. The ball walked to the stairs, and Fluttershy followed it.
The stairs led out onto an upper mezzanine. The once-pristine dark tile floor was coated with dust, and the ceiling above had cracked, revealing gray stone threaded with black metal rods. There was another mezzanine on the other side of the station; Fluttershy could have taken off and flown there. There were two open entrances leading out, each with an empty sign hanging over it. “Which way?” Fluttershy said. The ball pointed at the entrance to her left and shook its head, and then pointed at the entrance to her right and nodded. The entrance to her left took them back to the ruins, but the entrance to her right took them to where they needed to go.
The ball started towards the entrance to the right, and Fluttershy was just starting to follow it when she heard the clanking sound of metal footsteps from the entrance head. A circle of yellow lamplight shone on the ground just inside the entrance to the left, coming down from above.
The ball immediately sped up into a run. Fluttershy followed it through the entrance. They were at the base of a set of stairs, heading up. The ball began clambering up the stairs, and Fluttershy came after it.
They reached the top, and Fluttershy looked around. They were in an entryway; the walls around them were metal bars covered in translucent glass. Fluttershy could only see some vague black outlines against a blue background through the glass. There was a glass doorway at the other end of the entryway. This one she could see through, and Fluttershy saw more crumbling ruins against the night sky.
“Are you sure this is the right place?” Fluttershy said. The ball nodded and motioned towards the door. Fluttershy flew up and opened it.
The first thing Fluttershy saw was the moon. It took her a moment to realize that she wasn’t actually looking directly at the moon; it was actually the reflection of the moon in…a glass tower in the sky? There were some weird metal poles at the edge of the…street? There were what had to be lamps on the top of the poles, casting a faintly orange light on everything. There was a faint rushing sound in the distance, as if there was a constant breeze somewhere. Cool air flowed through the door. Above ground the air had been hot and dry with dust, and in the corridors it had been stale, bottled for too long with no movement. This smelled…cleaner. Fresher. More real.
This wasn’t the ruins. What was this place?
Fluttershy looked back through the door. Through the glass door she saw the ruins, but through the doorway she saw the city.
Whatever it was, it looked a lot more hospitable than the ruins. She let go of the door handle so that she could fly through.
A familiar black silhouette stepped in front of the open doorway, shining the lamp it held in its hands into her face.
For a long moment, Fluttershy stared at the metal soldier in front of her. Time seemed to slow as it lifted one hand.
She dropped out of the air to the ground, and its hand flew over her head and through the air. Behind her, she heard the quick clack clack clack of the clockwork ball rushing back down the stairs, and she turned to follow it.
Both of them reached the bottom of the stairs just as the soldier that had been coming down the other entrance stepped into view. Fluttershy glanced over her shoulder; the soldier that had been outside the door was coming down the stairs. A constant stream of crackling hisses and growls burst from the two soldiers as they approached. Fluttershy and the ball ran down the next set of steps to the bottom floor of the station.
Fluttershy reached the ground and kept running. Behind them, the soldiers reached the bottom of the stairs and stood there, blocking them off. The ball ran towards the stairs at the other end of the station, and Fluttershy followed. There must be another exit at that end, maybe if they got there –
Yellow circles of light illuminated the foot of the two stairs at the other end of the station just before another pair of soldiers came down them. Fluttershy and the ball stumbled to a halt in the middle of the station floor.
The four soldiers stood at the foot of each staircase, shining their lamps at Fluttershy and the ball. None of them moved from their position blocking the stairs.
Fluttershy looked up. The mezzanine was maybe twenty feet above her, and she didn’t hear anything coming from up there. She could fly up with the ball and run. Fluttershy reached out her front hooves and picked up the ball.
It screamed.
Fluttershy dropped the ball in shock. Its body had caved in where her hooves had touched it. The legs curled back, bending in ways that would have snapped the joints of any organic creature who tried them. The ball rolled on the ground, clearly in pain. A few gears popped out of it, rolling away across the ground.
She hadn’t expected this! Why was the ball reacting the same way as when she touched a soldier?
Another wave of electricity passed over the ball. Its legs relaxed. Gears pushed out to the surface from somewhere inside the ball, filling in gaps. The ball righted itself and shook itself like a dog shaking itself dry.
“I’m so sorry! Are you all right?” It seemed a terribly inadequate thing to say, but she couldn’t think of anything else to say.
The ball nodded. It was all right, but it needed Fluttershy to never do that again.
The soldiers hadn’t moved from where they had been standing. All they were doing was making those same mechanical crackling noises. Fluttershy wondered what they were waiting for.
Alight went on inside the tunnel at the far end of the station, and Fluttershy turned to look.
There was a train coming towards them, traveling along the rails in the ground. There was a pair of lamps on the top of the train pointed right at them, and Fluttershy had no doubt it was full of more soldiers.
Fluttershy looked around frantically. Her eyes fell on the wicker basket that had been left with the other random junk next to the tracks. It wasn’t near any of the soldiers and she didn’t think that they would move from where they were, so that they could keep her trapped, so she could easily reach it.
Fluttershy grabbed the basket. “Come on, get in,” she said to the ball. It skittered over and jumped into the basket. Fluttershy gripped it in both forehooves. They could go up, over the soldiers and onto the –
Another lamp suddenly shone down from the mezzanine above her. They couldn’t go up there now.
What now? There had to be a way out, there had to be! It had to be somewhere the soldiers weren’t, and someplace they couldn’t be quickly. If she could only fly up!
The train car pulled completely into the station and out of the tunnel. It was starting to slow to a stop to let the soldiers out; in just a moment Fluttershy and the ball really would be in trouble.
Fluttershy flew up and over the top of the train, dashing past it into the tunnel just as the doors opened.
Fluttershy sped down the tunnel, banking downwards as the tunnel dipped, and she burst out into an empty station. The walls on her left were a simple white, but the walls on her right were green glass. The navy blue of the sky was visible through gaps in the roof. Was she near the surface?
“Can we get out here?” she asked the ball.
It shook its head; if there was an exit here, the ball didn’t know of it. But they couldn’t go back to the other station now.
“Okay, let’s hide somewhere for the night,” Fluttershy said. She flew up the nearest set of stairs and burst out into the ruins.
The skies above were still a dark navy blue. She was underneath a roof over an open space, next to the street. To her right were two more towers, and to the left across the street there was a wide open space that might have once held a fountain. In front of her, the road curved past the buildings and then curved back again, rising up above the ground in a wide-open area.
There was something coming down the road fast, and Fluttershy almost didn’t see it before the lamps on it landed on her. Some kind of wheeled carriage without any ponies pulling it, speeding towards her.
She squeaked, turned, and flew back in between the rest of the buildings, trying to put something between here and the soldiers who had just arrived. She banked hard to her right, throwing herself around a corner, out of sight from the new soldiers. There was a sudden buzzing noise of propellers and something whooshed past just over her head, and she looked over her shoulder to see what looked like two paper-thin metal wings flying away. There was something shifting between them, and Fluttershy realized that they were carrying a net between them.
Fluttershy turned her head back to see what was in front of her just before she slammed into the second net.
She tumbled downwards, spinning through the air before hitting the ground. The impact jarred the wicker basket out of her hooves, and she landed face down. She heard metal crashing into the hard ground just in front of her. Fluttershy looked up to see another metal wing crumbled on the ground before her. She must have flown into the net that this another wing was carrying and then dragged it down with her when she had fallen. Fluttershy began trying to disentangle herself from the net before anything found her.
A lamp shone on her, from very close.
There was a soldier standing right in front of her. It looked down upon her, then reached down.
Fluttershy squeaked and flailed, trying to get the net off. She threw the top part of it off just as the soldier’s cold hand closed around her neck. Fluttershy instinctively reached up to the hands around her, trying to pry them off. The hand tightened around her neck, and she coughed as she tried to get her hooves under it.
Fluttershy remembered what was supposed to happen whenever she touched one of the soldiers. They fell apart, or changed, or –
Nothing was happening.
The thought flashed through her head: the soldiers were protected here, in their home. Touching them wouldn’t work while she was in the ruins.
The soldier began pulling upwards, trying to lift her. Fluttershy dug in her back hooves and strained, trying to get away.
She looked down just as the ball reached the soldier. Its fangs grew out of its body, and it opened wide and bit down on the soldier’s ankle.
A ripple of wave of lightning surged over the soldier’s body, falling down towards the ball. The soldier let go of Fluttershy as power was drained from it. It kicked its leg, trying to shake the ball. The ball held on, and there was a crunch from somewhere inside the soldier’s leg. Small metal shards fell down to the ground. The ball let go of the soldier, dropping to the ground.
The soldier was limping on one broken foot; it was turning slowly to face them. Fluttershy snatched up the basket, and the ball clambered inside. She took off before the soldier could reach for them again, shooting around a corner and not stopping.
Fluttershy flew as fast as she could, cutting a straight line as far away from both stations as she could. She felt a shifting of the weight in the basket and looked down. The ball had hooked its front legs on the edge of the basket so it could keep an eye on the ground beneath it.
They flew for fifteen minutes, staying close to the walls and hiding in broken windows when groups of soldiers went by. Finally, they were out of the district of tall buildings and were back in another area with the same three-story apartment buildings. There hadn’t been any more soldiers or metal wings for the past several minutes, and Fluttershy let out a sigh of relief.
Her thoughts turned towards what to do next. They needed to find a place to stay for the night, away from where the soldiers were congregating. She decided to put just a bit more distance between herself and the stations, and then look for a room with a couch or bed. It felt a lot less cramped now that she could see more of the sky. They flew over the rooftops in silence.
The ball clicked, and Fluttershy looked down. It was jumping up and down a bit excitedly, making the basket sway, and it was pointing at something down in the street. Fluttershy could only see a darker shadow in the street. “What is it?” she asked.
The ball clicked again and kept pointing. Whatever it was, the ball wanted her to see it. Fluttershy flew down to the ground, setting the basket down before landing herself. The ball climbed out of the basket and clattered over to the thing it had seen.
It was another one of the two-legged non-metal creatures she had seen before. He was wearing a long, thick trench coat that went down to his ankles. His body was sprawled on its side in the street, and there was a faint smell of burning meat. He was curled up into a ball, and there was a dried dark stain smeared under his body. The ball had already reached the body and was trying to pull something off of it.
“What are you doing?” Fluttershy asked in alarm. “What is it?”
The ball stopped for a moment to speak to her. According to the ball, the creature was…something. It was trying to tell her some more words that she didn’t know, and again she could only understand the last one: Albino. The creature was an albino. Fluttershy let the information go; she had something more important to talk about.
“Those are his things you’re taking!” she said.
The ball shook its head. The albino was dead; he didn’t need his things anymore. The albinos often carried food or water or equipment with them, and they might need whatever he was carrying more than he did.
Fluttershy’s stomach growled at the mention of food. She was suddenly aware of an empty feeling in the bottom of her stomach, and that the back of her throat was becoming parched. “Well…”
Her first reaction was of shock and dismay. Her natural instinct was to treat the dead with respect, and going through a corpse’s pockets, even if it didn’t fall outright into disturbing the body, was definitely skirting the edge. On the other hand, if she didn’t eat or drink, what would happen to her? She imagined herself lying on the ground somewhere, too weak with hunger and thirst to move, until she died in a dusty corner or the soldiers found her and she couldn’t run.
She walked over to the corpse and took a closer look at it. It was wearing a backpack that was looped around its arms. The ball was trying to pull the loops down the arm, but the loop was trapped between the arm and the torso of the albino. Fluttershy reached out two hooves and grabbed the body’s forearm, where the sleeve covered the skin. She shivered as her hooves felt the cold flesh underneath. Rigor mortis was already starting to set in, but she was able to lift the arm enough to let the ball pull the backpack strap free of the arm. Together they rolled the body onto its stomach so that they could take off the other strap and pull the backpack free. The backpack was closed, and Fluttershy opened it.
Inside was a bounty. She recognized the canned food and water bottles at the top of the backpack immediately, six round cans and two bottles. In the dark night light she couldn’t see what was underneath the food, and she didn’t think she would be able to tell what it was in the dim light anyway.
“Let’s go inside to eat this,” she said. She lifted the backpack and put it in the wicker basket. Fortunately, enough of the backpack fit into the basket so that it wouldn’t fall out when she flew. The ball climbed onto the backpack.
Just before she lifted off, Fluttershy walked back over to the corpse. From this angle, she could see that it was wearing a pair of goggles like the other albinos she had seen. The night light glinted off the glass, and she saw that the lenses had been smashed into splinters. A strand of hair had fallen over his eyes, and she reached down to brush it away.
“I’m really sorry,” she said. She couldn’t think of anything else to say. She turned back to the basket and gripped it in her hooves.
Fluttershy flew up into one of the nearby apartment buildings, landing in a second story room. She could see just enough in here to tell that there was only a couch against one wall and a table in the middle of the floor in this room. The ball jumped to the ground when Fluttershy put the basket down, and it sat and watched as she opened the backpack and took a can out.
The cans had a pull tab on top, and she opened the first one easily. She smelled fresh kernel corn, and she realized just how hungry she was. She didn’t know where a spoon might be in the backpack, so she lifted the can to her mouth and carefully tilted it backwards, tipping the corn into her mouth. The corn was stored in water, and she drank that as well, making sure not to spill a drop.
When the can was empty she set it down. There weren’t any trashcans in the room, and she wasn’t sure what to do with the empty can. She put it down next to the backpack. She could figure out what to do with it in the morning. Right now she was tired. A blanket and a warm fire would have been wonderful, but she didn’t have those. Well, if she put the backpack on top of herself that would insulate her body heat; it would have to do.
Fluttershy curled up on the couch and drifted off to sleep.
Fluttershy awoke slowly. The light hitting her eyelids seemed different, somehow, and it took a few moments for her to think to open them.
Daybreak had come while she was asleep. The sky had gone back to the same fiery orange-red it had been when she had first arrived. The ball was asleep next to one of the couch legs, curled up with its legs underneath it like a small nest. Fluttershy gently lifted herself off the couch to avoid disturbing it and went over to the backpack.
Last night, she had put off looking through the backpack because of the lack of light and her exhaustion. Now that she was rested, she should see what was inside. She opened it up and began pulling things out, lining them up on the floor as she retrieved them.
Four cans of food. Three of them were for string beans, peaches, and diced vegetables. They were bigger than the cans back in Equestria were; Fluttershy thought that she might be able to stretch the food out a few days. The last one was shaped into a rectangle for some reason; it was something called “Spam.” She looked it over; there was an ingredients list on the back. It was made from…
Her eyes widened. Pork? Beef?
Maybe she didn’t want that one. She put it aside, away from the rest of the food, and went back to checking the backpack.
After that was a small glass box with a knife, fork, and spoon in them, a small orange cylinder, and then a small black box with a folding metal stick on top of it. There was a belt with a few pouches on it; each pouch had a strange metal rectangle in it with some round tapered cylinders in each one, almost like a rounded arrow tip. She touched one of the cylinders; the inside of the rectangle felt spring-loaded. She decided not to fiddle with it and put all the rectangles back in the belt. Close to the bottom of the backpack was a blue notebook with a pen in a holder on the cover. She opened it.
3/2/2012 I lost my last journal, so I’m starting a new one. The assassins found us again, and we had to move. Jean and Erwin disappeared somewhere in the tunnels, but we don’t know where and we can’t go out to look for them. We can’t go out until the assassins calm down, but we have enough food for a couple of days.
“Oh!” Fluttershy quickly closed the journal; she wouldn’t like it if someone read her private thoughts, so her first reaction was not to read this.
…But on the other hand she might need to know everything she could about this city if she wanted to survive.
Fluttershy hesitated, then opened up the notebook and quickly flipped through the rest of the pages. There were several more pages of entries, all a paragraph or so long.
She decided to compromise a little. She skimmed the journal, only letting her eyes settle on the entries that had what seemed like important information.
4/19/2012 Pike Place Market is the gift that keeps on giving. We’ve found more food there in weeks then we found at UW in a month. Not just the canned and pickled stuff, but real fresh meat, sitting pink and juicy in the freezers as if the refrigeration hadn’t failed decades ago. At least this place is living up to the “No More Hunger” part of its origin. Now if we could only fix hatred and death we could all live forever.
5/11/2012 I’m three years old today! Had a great day with Margaret. She’s sleeping next to me right now as I write this. I’m going to get the extra blankets so that she won’t get cold.
6/25/2012 We’re moving again. Rebecca says that she’s logging increased assassin movement around where we are and she thinks they’re closing in, so we’re leaving while we can. Still not allowed to say where we’re going in case someone finds this.
7/3/2012 Found a dead Klondike today. It looked like he’s been trying to scale a wall to get to the top of one of the old cathedrals, but his grappling hook failed when he was most of the way up. All his wonders had already gone orphan or self destructed, so all that was left was the clothes on his back, a capacitor that was hidden down his shirt, and a jar of peanut butter in his pocket. What was more interesting was the woman we found in the cathedral. Her name’s Gina, and she’s maybe two days old. We brought her back with us and gave her a dinner of ramen and spam. Biologically she’s around her early 30’s, so I guess we’ll put her to work soon.
8/20/2012 We’re going out early tomorrow instead of in three days. We’ve been seeing a lot of activity around the Industrial District, so we’re going to poke around and see what’s what.
That was the last entry. Fluttershy closed the journal and put it down.
Just underneath the journal was a heavily folded piece of paper. Fluttershy pulled it out. The front of it said “Map.” A rush of excitement went through her as she looked at it. Maybe there were some places marked on it that she could go to, like caches of food or where the albinos lived.
Fluttershy opened up the first few folds. The center of the map was an area labeled Downtown. To the north, near an area called Queen Anne, one larger building had been circled, with a logo of a snake next to it. To the south was a part of the city labeled the Industrial District; underneath it was a soldier’s lamp in a yellow circle. Thin blue lines were drawn on the map in a chaotic grid pattern. To the left side of the map, in an area that looked like it would have been only water, was a smaller inset of the surrounding areas. In the center was an area labeled Seattle, next to a bay. There were other regions marked around it with names like Redmond, Bellevue, and Tacoma. Most of the map was still folded, underneath the sections she had opened.
Fluttershy looked at the map and realized that she had no idea where she was in it.
Fluttershy looked at the small ball. It was still sleeping, and she decided to wait until later to ask it if it knew where they were.
At the very bottom of the backpack was a pouch made from a fabric Fluttershy didn’t recognize. She pulled it out and opened it.
There were three glass cylinders inside. There was a blue ball of lightning slowly floating up and down inside of each cylinder. Small tendrils of lightning reached up and down from the top and bottom of the cylinder, and the ball of lightning bobbed along it. It was actually kind of pretty. Fluttershy reached out to pick one up for a closer look –
zap
Fluttershy jerked her hoof back, shaking blinking lights out of her eyes. What was that? The blue ball of lightning had faded slightly, glowing less brightly and moving more slowly.
Whatever had happened reminded her of what had happened when she had touched the book she had given to the ball. She should save this for the ball to eat. She thought about why the albino would have something like this; the reminder of her friend’s dietary needs made her wonder if the albinos needed to eat the same energy in addition to their regular food.
Did everybody and everything in this city run on this knowledge-energy? If her body didn’t, would that explain what had happened to the soldiers when she had touched them back in Equestria? Her body might have disrupted the flow of energy in them, the same way lightning might be grounded by the earth. If that was the case, then there must be something else in this city that kept them from being destroyed when she touched them here.
With nothing else to do, Fluttershy sat and thought about what to do next.
Equestria already seemed like a lifetime ago. The animals of the forest…the bright blue skies…sunlight through the trees…she could feel that they were a world away, they were so divorced from the reality of the abandoned stone and burning sky that now surrounded her.
This place was cruel.
She wanted to go home.
There was a clicking noise to her side, and Fluttershy turned to look. The ball was starting to stir. It sat up and rubbed its eye with one leg, slowly blinking sleep away.
“Good morning,” she said. “I found breakfast for you.” She pushed the pouch with the cylinders towards the ball.
The ball climbed to its feet and scurried over to the pouch. It reached in, grasped the cylinder in its front legs and lifting it towards itself like a cup. The lightning collected at the top of the cylinder before a short of arc of electricity formed outwards from the cylinder into the ball. Instead of draining it like the ball had with the book, the clockwork ball let go of the cylinder after a few seconds and put it back into the pouch.
“You’re not hungry?” Fluttershy asked. The ball shook its head. It had been almost full after the book and soldier from yesterday, so it didn’t need much more to sustain itself today.
“Okay then,” Fluttershy said, deciding that maybe she should let the comment about draining the soldier go. She closed up the pouch and put it back next to the backpack. “Before we move on today, I just wanted to talk to you about something first,” she said.
The ball moved to a spot in front of her and nodded attentively.
“First of all…I think I’m going to need your help for a bit longer. Would you willing to do that? I don’t want to impose…”
The ball considered for a moment, then nodded. It hadn’t had any plans of its own, so it was perfectly fine traveling with her. Furthermore, when the ball was around Fluttershy, it felt…smarter, like its head was clearer. It thought that it could think more easily, like it could form words more clearly.
“Really?” Fluttershy said. None of the animals back in Equestria had ever said anything like that to her. She wondered if there was something else going on with the ball; maybe the magic of her cutie mark was helping it. There probably wasn’t any way she would be able to find out, though. “Thank you so much,” she said. “We should talk about what we’re going to do next, then.”
The ball nodded again, and waited for to speak.
“The first thing I wanted to do was talk to you again about a name,” she said. “When I asked you before, you gave me an answer I couldn’t understand. Could you try telling it to me again, please?”
The ball nodded, before giving her the same explanation that sounded full of technical terms as before. This time, she could pick out individual words in it.
Ball Robot Prototype #12 (Small) Automata 2, Apokalypsi 1 Limited Battery Life, Night Eyes, No Manipulators, Remote Control, Size 1
There were a few more sentences, but those still didn’t make sense, and Fluttershy didn’t know what any of the words she could hear meant.
“I’d like to figure out a name for you from that…” Fluttershy began. She didn’t know what Automata or Apokalypsi meant, and the third line didn’t have anything that could be used as a name. Small Ball didn’t sound right, either. “I’ll call you Little Ball, then,” Fluttershy said. “Is that all right?”
Little Ball nodded, taking a step to the left and then the right.
Fluttershy smiled. “I’m glad you like it,” she said. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to move on to the next question I had. I wanted ask a bit about the city. What is this place?”
Little Ball tapped its chin, then shrugged and waved its front legs apologetically. All it had was a pair of names. The city that the access corridors led to was called Seattle. This city was called the Seattle of Tomorrow.
“Why is this called the Seattle of Tomorrow?” she asked.
Little Ball shook its head; it didn’t know that either.
“Well…all right then,” she said. “Maybe we can find someone who can explain to both of us later. What do you know about the soldiers?”
Little Ball didn’t know a whole lot. They were being made from somewhere inside the city, maybe in the Industrial District. They moved in groups, and talked to each other through their lamps; you could tell when the lamps started making static noises. They were led by someone named Megiddo.
Megiddo. Fluttershy remembered that name from the statue they had walked past the day before. “Do you know why he told the soldiers to capture me?”
Little Ball thought, trying to pull up what it knew about Megiddo. Finally, it shook its head. It had always run whenever it had seen one of Megiddo’s robots, and had never tried to find out anything about them. It had heard that Megiddo come to the city before it had become ruined, but that was all.
“All right then. Do you know anything about the albinos?”
Little Ball nodded. The albinos came from somewhere inside the city. They had a camp somewhere, the but the ball didn’t know where. The albinos always traveled in well-armed groups. Little Ball stayed away from them; large armed groups reminded the ball too much of the humans.
“Humans?”
Little Ball kept talking. Humans looked like albinos, but they came from Seattle instead of the Seattle of Tomorrow. The only time humans were seen in the city was when they came through the access corridors. Sometimes the ball had seen them with orphans in cages and boxes, taking them away.
Fluttershy thought about what Little Ball had said about albinos and humans being alike. “Are the albinos and humans related?” Fluttershy asked.
The ball tapped out another explanation with lots of words she couldn’t understand. She thought she understood enough to get a general sense, though. The humans had come first. The albinos were somehow based on the humans.
Fluttershy considered this. Maybe she could find the albinos? Surely they knew about this place. If she could explain that they had the same enemy, they might help her.
“Do you know where I can find albinos?” Fluttershy asked the ball. It shook its head.
“Oh, ” Fluttershy said, hiding her disappointment. “One last question, I think. What do you know about that energy you eat?”
The ball tapped its chin, thinking. It remembered a word: Mania. It scratched the ground for a moment before nodding more enthusiastically. Yes, the energy was called Mania. It could be stored as information or energy. That was all it knew about that.
“All right,” Fluttershy said. “Thank you.” She sat for a minute, staring at the map and digesting everything that the ball had told her.
The access corridors were either sealed or watched, and they led to Seattle instead of Equestria. Even if there was help in Seattle, she couldn’t reach it now. They had been…well…locked in was probably the best way to describe it.
The humans might know a way back to Equestria, but on the other hoof they sounded unfriendly. She didn’t think she would be able to ask them for help.
She wondered if the albinos knew a way back to Equestria. The albinos were staying in the city for some reason; why hadn’t they left through the access corridors long ago? On the other hoof, they could fight back, Little Ball hadn’t directly seen them do harm, and they might still be willing to help somepony who wasn’t on Megiddo’s side either.
She had one more idea: Go back to the building with the gate and see if she could turn it on. This was a terrible idea; Fluttershy knew that if she were a military commander guarding something important, she would lock it up and put guards all around it, and she had no idea how she was going to deal with locks and guards.
Finding the albinos first seemed like a better idea. Fluttershy opened up the map and laid it on the ground. “Can you help me figure out where we are? And I’m not sure what the blue lines are, either…”
Little Ball stepped onto the map, looking at it carefully. After a few moments, it traced the blue lines and then placed a leg at one particular spot. The blue lines were the access corridors, and they were around here, in Downtown.
“Thank you.” Fluttershy put her hoof down on the map next to the ball’s leg. Now, the journal had mentioned Pike Place Market…there it was! Just a few blocks away. The albinos had said they were leaving the area around Pike Place Market, so they wouldn’t be in Downtown anymore. Fluttershy began to open the map further to see where else they may have gone.
Downtown was surrounded by Capitol Hill, Central Seattle, and the Industrial District. Fluttershy unfolded more pages, expanding the map. There were more areas: Queen Anne, White Center, the University District, Lynnwood, Redmond, Bellevue…the map spanned miles.
They could be anywhere in there. There was no way Fluttershy would be able to find them.
She looked around frantically on the map. Surely there was something else she could do besides go back to the gate…No…?
Fluttershy gulped. Finding the gate was the closest thing to a idea for what to do next that she had.
It was going okay. She told herself it was going to be okay. She should make sure that she knew where the gate was, anyway. Just in case she had to use it again.
What was the first thing she should do? She needed to retrace her steps to where she had first entered the city. Fluttershy looked back down at the map. “We were here…and here…” She began tracing one hoof along city streets and the access corridors, trying to remember the number of city blocks she’d walked along each way. Little Ball pointed with one leg and began counting off the city blocks with her. After several minutes, Little Ball and Fluttershy had narrowed down the location of the portal she had arrived in to several blocks just on the edge of the Industrial District. It would take maybe half an hour to walk there, assuming that nothing happened on the way. Fluttershy put the map down in the wicker basket and began repacking the backpack. She looked at the empty can from last night. She would just have to leave it here. She couldn’t think of anything she might need it for, and she might need the space in the backpack.
With a bit of work, she was able to loop the backpack straps around her front legs and wings, as if they were arms. She flew in a circle around the room to test it; the pack felt balanced on her back. Good, that would let her put more things in the wicker basket. She flew up a few feet and put her hooves on the basket’s handle. “All right, get inside.”
Little Ball climbed into the basket, and Fluttershy took them both out the window.
The albino’s body was gone. There wasn’t even a scrap of cloth or bit of blood to mark where his body had been.
Fluttershy hovered over the spot where the albino had been. The other albinos must have taken him away during the night. She remembered his journal in his backpack, and a feeling of guilt washed over her. Maybe when she had found the gate she might be able to return his things to the albinos some day.
There was nothing she could do. She flew away.
They moved slowly and cautiously along the roads. The two of them would hide in the shadows of a darkened window or door, make sure there wasn’t the silhouette of an soldier or anything else moving in the distance, and then dash across the exposed roads to the next hiding spot. She saw surprisingly few soldiers. Fluttershy had been expecting…well, she wasn’t quite sure what she had been expecting. Maybe she had been thinking of armies on the march like pictures from a history encyclopedia, or that as they went south towards the gate there would be more and more soldiers until she was facing a war camp.
What happened was that two patrols total went by. Both times, Fluttershy had heard them walking over the rubble and on the streets before they came in sight, and they easily hid until the patrol had walked away.
Finally, Fluttershy entered the back door of one of the abandoned apartment buildings that was in sight of the building that the gate had been in. Fluttershy crept around to a room that looked down on the building.
There were no guards.
Fluttershy blinked, then looked around at all the other buildings she could see, trying to find the distinctive outline of a soldier or a glint of light off of a lamp. Nothing.
This was too good to be true. Fluttershy was no soldier, but she knew enough about the Royal Guard to know that if there was something important in a building, you always had guards posted outside. “Come on,” she said to Little Ball. “Let’s – ”
There was a deep rumbling noise down below, as if a massive piece of machinery had been switched on momentarily. Fluttershy didn’t so much hear it as feel it, like as if the sound was a physical thing vibrating in the back of her ribcage. There was a moment of silence, and then Fluttershy felt it again.
Something was going on down there. “We need to go inside,” she said to Little Ball. It stared back at her for a moment with its eyes wide as if she was crazy, but when she turned to carry the basket down the stairs it didn’t jump out.
Fluttershy stopped in the doorway to the apartment building. There were still no soldiers in sight. She put the basket down on the ground just inside the doorway and landed. The ball hopped out to stand next to her. She looked both ways, and then dashed from the apartment building to the doorway to the building with the gate, the clockwork ball following close behind.
Nothing came out to stop them. Fluttershy stopped in front of the doorway to the gate building and looked around, suddenly conscious of how exposed she was out here. There was no movement anywhere; just stillness. She looked around one last time, gulped, and reached for the door handle.
The door opened.
The room beyond was well lit, and she could see everything in it. At least five soldiers, forming a protective line in front of flying wings like the ones with the nets last night. The floating wings were as big as she was, and hanging beneath them on steel cable were the parts of the disassembled white gate, two fliers for ever forth of the gate. They all looked up as the door opened, the soldiers shining their lamps at the yellow pegasus.
But what shocked Fluttershy the most was not the soldiers that had all seen her, or the fact that they were taking away the gate. It was the impossible figure that had just opened the door in front of her.
It wasn’t possible. Rainbow Dash looked alive and unharmed, just as she had been the morning of that first day. There were her wings, neatly folded against her sides. There was her hair, an uncombed mess going down one side of her face as always. There were her eyes, magenta and bright.
“Hello, Fluttershy,” Rainbow Dash said, and she smiled a cracked smile that wasn’t hers at all. “We’ve been waiting for you.”
Fluttershy turned and ran.
“Aerials, head back to Tacoma!” Fluttershy heard Rainbow Dash shout. “The rest of you, stay with me! I’m going after her!”
Fluttershy didn’t look back. She just ran as fast as she could for the shelter of the nearest building, with the rapid click click click sound of Little Ball’s legs on the ground close behind her. The building up ahead was one of the stone apartment buildings, three stories high, with wide windows for each apartment. There was a buzzing sound from behind her, and above Fluttershy’s head she saw the aerials lifting off into the sky, the rotors in their wings spinning into a blur. Behind her came the footsteps of the soldiers.
There was the sound of flapping wings above Fluttershy’s head, and Rainbow Dash came down to the ground right in Fluttershy’s path. “Stay there, you. Megiddo wants to – ”
Fluttershy dodged around Rainbow Dash. “Hey!” she heard behind her. “Don’t run when I’m talking to you!”
Fluttershy didn’t stop. She leapt through the doorway of the apartment building she had just come out of, reaching out a hoof to snatch up the wicker basket as she did so.
“Spread out,” Rainbow Dash said from outside, her voice echoing slightly in the halls of the building. “Make sure she doesn’t get out of there! If she runs, use the net guns!”
For once Fluttershy was grateful for the fact that the hallways of these buildings were almost completely unlit. She began flapping her wings, lifting her off the ground so that her hooves wouldn’t be making sounds against the hard floor, and flew deeper into the building, praying that the darkness would hide her. The sound of the clockwork ball’s footsteps stayed steadily with her; the ball could see her just fine in the dark.
Fluttershy felt a change in the air currents just ahead and slowed to a stop. She put a hoof out and felt a wall up ahead that she’d almost run into. She searched her memory for the layout of this particular building. Where were the stairs? She looked over her shoulder and saw the shadow of a pony standing in the open doorway.
“Fluttershy? Where arrrrrre you?” The scrape of a hoof against stone. “Come out, Fluttercry!”
Fluttershy couldn’t believe this was happening. She couldn’t believe it was Rainbow Dash saying these things. This couldn’t be real, this couldn’t be real! Her hooves fumbled over the walls almost on autopilot, trying to find the way up. Where were the stairs? She needed to be out of here, now!
“I know you’re in here, you flightless little coward. Just give up now.” More hoofsteps, a bit closer now. Fluttershy peeked over her shoulder; Rainbow Dash hadn’t gone too far into the building yet.
Fluttershy kept feeling along the wall. She had gone too far, she should have found – her back hoof bumped against one of the stairs; there they were. Fluttershy floated gently up the stairs. She could just hear the quiet tap tap of the clockwork ball following her up. It was moving slowly, trying to stay quiet.
“What is it, Fluttershy? Too shy to come say hello?” Rainbow’s voice was coming from somewhere below her; she must be near the foot of the stairs. Fluttershy reached the top of the stairs and began flying slowly along the second floor, looking for a doorway to one of the apartments. There was the sound of hoofsteps down below. It sounded like Rainbow was trying to find the stairs. That was fine with Fluttershy; she needed just a bit more time…
There! Her hooves found the open doorway. She darted inside, with Little Ball close behind her.
The room within was dimly lit with the orange sky outside. Fluttershy glanced around frantically. Empty filing cabinet lying on its side, three wooden dining chairs…closet by the window. Fluttershy flew up to the closet and opened the door. The clockwork ball scuttled inside, and she flew in after it and shut the door. Her breathing was much louder in the enclosed space, and her heart felt like it was trying to climb out of her chest with fear. Fluttershy knelt on the floor of the closet, trying to slow her breathing.
The only light inside the closet came from a razor-thin gap between the closet doors. Fluttershy peered through the gap, trying to see what was happening outside.
She could only see strips of light and dark; it might have been the open doorway leading into the dark hallway and the far wall of the room, but with only this narrow field of vision she couldn’t be entirely sure.
There was a flash of movement; she couldn’t be sure of what. Actually, with this little vision she couldn’t be sure it hadn’t been a trick of the light. Fluttershy held her breath and strained her ears.
There were hoofsteps from somewhere inside the room. Fluttershy stifled a gasp and curled up into a ball against the back wall of the closet, covering her head with her forelegs and trying to make herself as small and inconspicuous as possible.
The closet door opened. Rainbow Dash was there, wearing that same disturbed smile. “There you are. Megiddo wants to talk to you.” The smile faded, to be replaced by an expression of contempt. “Get up. Now.”
Fluttershy stayed on the ground, shivering. She didn’t get up.
“I said get up!” Rainbow Dash lifted a hoof as if she was going to slap Fluttershy.
There was a blur of motion just on the edge of Fluttershy’s field of vision.
Little Ball was suddenly on Rainbow Dash, clawing at her face. The pegasus screamed, stumbling backward as she pulled the ball off of her face.
Fluttershy leapt to her hooves and dove out of the closet. The window was right next to her, and she spun around and jumped onto the windowsill.
She was turning her head to face the sky when she saw movement at the bottom of her eyes. There was a soldier standing in the street below, swiveling upward to point a long weapon it held in one hand at her. She meeped and leapt back into the room just as there was a BLAM! A net shot through the window, hit the ceiling, and fell in a heap on the ground.
Rainbow Dash pulled the clockwork ball off of herself, tossing the ball aside with a shake of her hoof. Gray, strangely bloodless scratches ran up and down the side of her face. “Gah, stupid little pain in the flank!” Little Ball began climbing to its feet immediately, apparently not having been damaged at all, but Rainbow Dash was already turning her attention to Fluttershy. “Now…”
Fluttershy didn’t stay around to hear Rainbow finished her sentence. She flew past Rainbow Dash, snatching up one of the dining chairs on the ground and bolting out the door back into the hallway. Little Ball scrambled out the doorway just as Fluttershy slammed the apartment door shut and wedged the chair under the doorknob.
Something slammed into the apartment door. There was a moment’s pause before the doorknob rattled and the door was shaken back and forth in its frame. Instead of waiting for the pounding to stop, Fluttershy waved Little Ball towards her and flew down the hall, deeper into the apartment building. She pulled into another apartment, crouching down on the other side of the doorframe and putting the wicker basket down beside her. The clockwork ball scuttled in and set itself down on the ground in front of her. It looked at her, clearly waiting for her to say what to do next.
Now what?
Rainbow Dash would only be stopped by the blocked door for a minute at most. She could easily fly out the window, through the open front door, and back into the apartment building. Fluttershy had no doubt that reinforcements were on the way, and that the cyan pegasus would keep dashing back and forth within the building until she had found Fluttershy.
Fluttershy needed to get out of here. But for that to happen, she needed to get the soldiers away from their posts around the building somehow.
Maybe there was another way out? “When I first met you, you got out of a building like this one through some grates. How did you use them?” she asked Little Ball.
The ball gave her a quiet series of clicks. It had gone through the wider drainage pipes and some of the air vents. The pipes and vents went to every apartment in these kinds of buildings. Little Ball could squeeze into them, but Fluttershy was definitely too big.
Fluttershy tried to think. The vents would save Little Ball, but they wouldn’t save her.
There were hoofsteps outside.
The hoofsteps weren’t close by; they sounded a lot more like they were echoing from the far end of the hallway, next to the stairs. There was the thunk of wood falling onto stone; Rainbow Dash had reached the door Fluttershy had blocked earlier and had opened it again.
What could she do, what could she do, what could she do?
Maybe she could ask Little Ball to distract the soldiers and Rainbow Dash? It could get into places that she couldn’t, maybe go around to the front door and wave at them until they started firing and…
No, no! That was a terrible idea! She couldn’t ask it to go into danger for her like that. She racked her brains for something else.
The hoofsteps were getting closer.
She had one more idea. It was a stupid, desperate idea, but it was the only one she had.
“I need you to run,” she whispered to the ball. “We can meet up later in the store with the trapdoor to the access corridors you showed me before.”
Little Ball jumped, surprised, then quietly clicked out a question to her. Was Fluttershy sure?
“Yes, I’m sure!” The hoofsteps were getting closer.
The clockwork ball stood still for a moment, before lifting a front leg to salute Fluttershy and scurrying off into the bathroom. There was a rattling sound as it squeezed itself down the shower drain, and then it was gone.
Fluttershy could now hear brief pauses in between sets of hoofsteps now; Rainbow must be checking each apartment before moving on. Rainbow was maybe three-quarters of the way to Fluttershy’s apartment now.
Fluttershy swallowed. She realized that her hooves were trembling, and tried to calm them. Fluttershy took a deep breath, and darted up into the open window. There was another soldier in the street, spinning about and aiming its net weapon at her.
BLAM!
Fluttershy dropped down as another net flew into the room. She heard Rainbow shouting, and knew that the other pegasus knew where she was now. Fluttershy leapt onto the net, almost getting tangled in it herself before she could pick it up.
There was a loud crash as the door was slammed open against the wall. Rainbow stalked through the open door. “Now – ” Rainbow began, her voice low and dangerous.
“RainbowI’msosorry!”
Rainbow stepped back and started to go “Wha? – ” just as Fluttershy leapt on the other pegasus, wrapping her in the net. Fluttershy pulled the net together, tangling Rainbow inside, and then threw Rainbow out the window.
There was a thump and a shout of pain from outside. “Gah! What the hay! Stupid little pegasus! Hey, what are you all standing around for? Get me out of this thing!” There was the shuffling noise of soldiers moving outside.
Fluttershy bolted into the hallway and ran down it. The soldiers would be all clustered around the window she had thrown Rainbow out of, and she couldn’t go out there unless she wanted all of them shooting at her at once.
Instead, Fluttershy ran to the end of the hallway, darted into the last apartment, and looked out the window. Three soldiers were clustered around Rainbow, lifting the net off of her; none of them were near the window Fluttershy was in. She spread her wings and leapt out the window. Now she just needed to turn the corner to hide herself –
“Hey, she’s over there!” Fluttershy heard Rainbow shout, and Fluttershy turned her head to see Rainbow finish throwing off the net and rise into the air. Fluttershy turned and bolted.
“Come back here!” she heard Rainbow Dash shout. Fluttershy looked over her shoulder. Rainbow Dash was already off like a shot. Fluttershy squeaked and flew faster, trying to push more energy into her wings. The buildings flashed past in seconds.
“Don’t even try it!” Rainbow’s voice was closer this time. Fluttershy risked another look back. Rainbow was slowly gaining. Fluttershy’s wings were already starting to ache. She wasn’t used to flying like this, but she couldn’t slow down!
“Almost…almost…” Rainbow’s voice was right behind her. Fluttershy closed her eyes and flapped as hard as she could. The wind whistled past her, the hot air feeling like it was superheating her. She had to be going at least as fast as she had when she had been helping with getting the water to Cloudsdale…but it wouldn’t be enough. It had always been Rainbow who was the faster –
“Hey! What are you doing!”
Rainbow’s voice wasn’t as close this time.
Rainbow was…falling behind?
Fluttershy looked back. Rainbow was already half a building away and falling further. She was gritting her teeth in exertion and clearly pushing as hard as she could, but was still slowly dropping away.
This was her chance. Fluttershy turned hard, shooting down an alleyway and out into the next street. She banked hard to the right, soared through a window, and landed in a bathroom covered in light blue tile. She ducked through the open doorway into the gray hallway outside; it was covered in dust that she realized was old and disintegrated carpeting. She stayed there, crouched behind the door, listening.
There were wingbeats outside. Fluttershy held as still as a mouse.
“Horseapples,” she heard Rainbow say. The wingbeats continued for a few seconds longer before they started moving away. Fluttershy didn’t move a muscle until the wingbeats had faded completely away.
Time to go. Fluttershy followed the hallway until it met a set of stairs going down. She went down to the ground floor and jumped out an empty living room window. Fluttershy darted past a few more buildings, putting some cover between herself and where Rainbow Dash would have been, before flying back through the city to the first trapdoor to the access corridors.
She went cautiously, scanning the horizon for movement and hiding inside the storefronts and buildings, the same way she and the clockwork ball had first gotten to the gate facility. Three patrols of five soldiers each ran by in the first five minutes, all of them headed towards the apartment building she had just fled from. Fluttershy prayed that the clockwork ball had made it out.
Finally, she came to the storefront where the ball had shown her the entrance to the access corridors. She looked around; there were no soldiers in sight. Fluttershy flew into the store through one of the windows.
The door leading to the back room was still standing open. The closed trapdoor was clearly visible in the daylight. Fluttershy walked past the shelves full of metal knickknacks and abandoned shopping baskets to sit next to it, staying just out of the rectangle of light that was shining through the doorway.
She sat there, waiting for the clockwork ball. The minutes ticked by.
She swung a hoof back and forth. Where was it? Could anything have happened to it? What if –
There was a soft clattering sound outside, and Fluttershy turned to look.
Little Ball skittered in, clambering over the broken store window to head into the store. Fluttershy stepped out into the light, and it chirped and scuttled over to join her. “Oh, you made it! Are you all right?” she asked, and it nodded.
“I’m so glad to hear that,” she said, and almost gave it a hug before remembering that she shouldn’t touch it. “Do you need to rest for a bit before we go on? We need to go to Tacoma.”
Little Ball blinked in confusion, then clicked out a question. What was in Tacoma?
“Rainbow Dash…the blue one…said that they were taking the gate to Tacoma. She said there was a lab there.”
The ball jumped. It tapped out another question. One of Megiddo’s labs?
“Well…I guess…I mean, I can’t think of anyone else it might belong to.”
Little Ball frantically shook its head. This was a bad idea. There were sure to be guards there, and the ball had lived for this long by staying far away from anything and anywhere Megiddo had put his soldiers. They shouldn’t go there. It wasn’t safe!
Fluttershy thought Little Ball was right. This was going to be dangerous. But on the other hand, what alternative did she have? She couldn’t imagine herself living the rest of her natural life here, hiding in the shadows and living on scraps.
“I want to go home,” she said. “To do that, I need to find the gate. I have to go there. If it gets too dangerous, we’ll turn back. All right?”
Little Ball looked down at the ground, thinking. Finally, it looked back at her and nodded.
“Thank you,” she said. “We’re going to stop for a bit before we actually get there so we can eat and rest. We don’t want to be tired when we arrive.” Fluttershy took out her map and opened it. Tacoma was to the south, past the Industrial District. It looked like there was a route through the access corridors leading toward Tacoma. There was a thick line marked “Subway” heading south, bending just before it went off the bottom of the main map. After that she only had the inset of the surrounding area to rely upon, but it did show that the corridors went all the way to Tacoma.
She put the map down on the ground. “Can you get us to this part of the access corridors?” she asked, pointing at the subway line with her hoof.
The ball looked at it for a moment before nodding. It pointed at the trapdoor nearby.
“Okay,” she said. “Are you ready to go?”
It nodded again, and climbed into the wicker basket. Fluttershy picked up the basket, opened the trapdoor and stuck her head inside. There weren’t any soldiers in sight, and she didn’t hear any either. She closed the trapdoor behind her, and they started south.
According to the map, the fastest way there would have been to go southwest, moving through the Industrial District while hugging the waterfront. Fluttershy had been hoping that the corridors would have fewer soldiers in them, but they were only in the corridors for ten minutes before Fluttershy saw the lamps of a patrol up ahead. Fluttershy and Little Ball had gone up another trapdoor to the surface. Maybe she could keep moving south along the surface; she could hide behind the buildings as cover and use the open space to fly away if she was caught.
Then she turned a corner and saw a checkpoint.
They were right on the border of the Industrial District. A single cross street ran between the building Fluttershy was peeking around and a tall black wall. A group of soldiers had set up a guard booth in front of an open gate leading into another rubble-strewn neighborhood. In the distance behind the wall, Fluttershy saw the massive factory she had seen when she had first been brought outside here. Fluttershy was certain that beyond the wall would be even more soldiers.
There was no way they could get through there.
“Let’s go around,” she said to Little Ball.
It nodded, and they headed east, moving until they had reached what the map had said was Lake Washington.
After that they had gone south, sticking to the water. The water seemed to burn a rusty orange; Fluttershy couldn’t tell if it was just reflecting the sky or if it really was that color. There was a sharp acidic smell that got stronger the closer she got to the water. There were large two-story houses built along the edge of the water, many with docks jutting out into the water. The docks were in poor shape; they did not look so much like they had rotted like they had been dissolved.
On the way south, Fluttershy asked Little Ball what it knew of Tacoma. Not much, it turned out. The ball had never been there before. All it could tell her was that it had heard that Megiddo had placed his factories and generators there before the collapse of the city. Tacoma had been hit hard, and was covered in deadly malfunctioning machinery and power equipment.
As she got closer to Tacoma, the buildings she was flying over were steadily starting to crumble. In Downtown, the metal and stone shells of the buildings had still been standing, and had at least looked structurally steady enough to enter. As she flew south, more and more of the buildings had collapsed, looking as if they had been shaken or smashed apart. The sky before her was changing color, fading from fiery orange to a sooty black. A few green signs still stood on the roads she flew over, all with the same message:
TACOMA MANUFACTURING AREA
LETHAL FORCE WILL BE USED AGAINST UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNAL
ORDER OF MEGIDDO
The sky was darkening as they reached the first of the signs, so they ate in a room on the ground floor of a collapsed office building and slept until morning.
Finally, as she got close to what the map said was the geographical center of Tacoma, Fluttershy saw the extent of whatever had happened.
From the outskirts, it looked as if a meteor had landed right in the middle of the city. Many of the buildings close to her had been leveled, leaving empty factory floors and melted piles of slag behind. Some of the walls had survived as twisted skins of metal that stuck out of the ground. Cables led up and down the streets, attached to wooden poles that had been smashed into petrified splinters.
The smell of electricity was in the air, like a strong layer of ozone burning her nose. She remembered the smell from when she lived in Cloudsdale; she usually only smelled it there if there had been a mishap at the weather factory. Something, somewhere, was pouring a lot of electricity into the air. The air rippled with heat over a few sections of wreckage, and as her eyes followed it she saw a glow in the ground under the heated sections; lava, or molten metal.
As her eyes scanned the horizon before her, she saw a single building left. A large black factory, covered in smokestacks, billowing out what looked like a solid curtain of black smog into the sky.
The gate had to be in that building. Fluttershy looked at the ground and thought about how to get there. There was almost no cover around, just the remains of metal walls. If they flew, they would be spotted from far away. They would have to walk.
She dropped down to the ground. “Come on,” she said to Little Ball. It climbed out of the wicker basket, and both of them began walking towards the factory, going around the puddle of liquid metal and the places where the electricity smell was especially strong. Fluttershy did her best to keep the remnants of the walls between herself and the guards that were certain to be around the factory.
As she got closer, she noticed that the big central factory had been constructed right on top of the intact buildings; its outer wall stopped in the middle of the street or passed right through the neighboring foundries, as if it had been pre-built and then simply dropped from the sky.
Finally, she was close to the edge of the central building, just around the corner of two walls enclosing what might have been a workshop once. The workshop sat on the edge of a larger road that was twice as wide as the ones she had seen in Downtown; it had to be for letting big things through. She crouched down low and poked her head around the corner.
The front gate was covered in guards. Two soldiers stood in the road in front of the gate, pointing their lamps and weapons down the road. Guard booths stood on each side of the gate, and a pair of guardtowers rose up out of the building behind it. A pair of aerials flew in a circular holding pattern overhead; from this distance Fluttershy could see the glow of charged lightning weapons on their underbellies.
Little Ball poked her in the leg and shook its head while pointing at the guards. She nodded to it; she would never be able to get in that way. Fluttershy turned and began walking, trying to stay close to the curve of the central building’s wall.
Fluttershy stopped in front of one of the half-smashed buildings. It had originally been made from polished steel that reflected the orange sky. Now the back of half of it was being swallowed by the factory, steel seeming to melt and corrode into black iron. The front wall of the building had bent over the street, as if something had exploded inside, blasting off the roof and blowing the walls outward. The building’s doors and windows hung open, unguarded.
Fluttershy looked around. She couldn’t sense any stray electricity inside, and she couldn’t hear any metal joints or see the glow of a soldier’s lamp. She slowly walked up the two steps in front of the building and opened the door.
The ground ended two paces in. The floor of the building had fallen away, revealing a mass of lava far below it, the red glow lighting up the blackened earth. Even from here she could feel the heat radiating from the lava.
The black wall of the factory was on the other side of the chasm. Part of it hung over the pit, reinforcing the notion that the factory had simply been dropped where it was without any consideration for where it would land. There was a blacker shadow in the wall; an open door.
Fluttershy looked over her shoulder. Little Ball was right behind her. It looked back at her, clearly waiting for her to say what they were going to do next.
“I’m going to go in there," Fluttershy said. “I need to find the gate I came in from, the one the aerials were taking away earlier. There's probably going to be lots of soldiers...and more soldiers...and all kinds of dangerous things...” She gulped, fighting back a sense of apprehension as she thought about the kind of things that were probably roaming around the big factory. “If you want to stay out here, that's okay.”
The ball looked apprehensively at the open door, before shaking its head. It was still anxious about what might be in there, but it didn't want to leave her behind. Maybe if they were lucky, the fact that this entrance had been unguarded meant that there might be few guards inside.
“Okay then,” Fluttershy said. “Let’s go.” She picked up the basket, waited for the ball to get inside, then flew across the chasm into the door.
The doorway led into a dark steel tunnel. Burnished pipes sprang from the walls and ran back and forth along the corridor. It was enclosed, and dimly lit by faint bulbs in the ceiling; somehow the combination cast shadows that seemed starker than average and making it look darker than anything reflective should have been. In several places, there were ragged holes in the wall and floor of the hallway, as if the metal there had melted away. The hallway went on for several feet before turning to the left.
Fluttershy’s hooves made clong clong noises as she landed. She took a few experimental steps, hearing the same clong noises reverberating in the metal walls around her. She winced; she couldn't walk here, something might hear them. Fluttershy gripped the wicker basket and flew two feet off the ground. Her wingbeats didn't echo like her hoofsteps had done; that was better. She flew slowly down the hallway, reaching and turning the corner.
The hallway lead towards a metal lattice catwalk that rose up above a large factory floor. Fluttershy flew above the catwalk and looked down.
It looked like a section of some kind of assembly line. The room was a long rectangle, with two lines of conveyor belts going down it. Metal arms were placed along each belt, scanning and sorting everything that went past them. Both belts were starkly illuminated with overhead lamps that hung down below where Fluttershy was. Most of the things on the belt looked like small metal pieces; it was hard to tell from this distance. The arms sometimes dropped the objects into large bins that stood behind them on the floor. Whenever one bin got full, it would sink into the floor and would immediately be replaced by an empty bin that rose up from the same spot the full bin had just been. Fluttershy looked at what was at the end of the conveyor belts and saw the red glow of fire. They must be checking metal scraps for reusable parts, and then melting down the rest. Four soldiers stood on the floor, slowly sweeping their lamps over the belts and the walls around them. None of them looked up.
Fluttershy kept moving along the catwalk and back into another corridor full of pipes.
The corridor reached a four-way intersection. The corridors were labeled with green stickers, and Fluttershy stopped to read each one. She had just come from Recycling Observation Walkway #9. To her left was Preta Storage Overflow #2. To her right was Transdimensional Viewing Laboratory Access Terminal #1. Directly in front of her was Knee Motive System Manufacturing Access #5.
“Do you know what any of these are?” she asked the ball.
Little Ball looked helplessly at the signs. The only sign it could understand was Knee Motive Systems, which were metal body parts for the robots. It didn't know what the Viewing Laboratory was, or what Pretas were.
Fluttershy looked at the signs again. She remembered seeing a sign for a Dimensional Engine the first time they had been in the access corridors, and vaguely remembered something about universes and dimensions from talking to Twilight one day. Twilight had been saying something about alternate dimension, or universes. If the strange portal had not just taken Fluttershy to somewhere else on the planet, but to another universe entirely, then maybe the viewing lab would help her find Equestria. She turned and walked towards the lab. The right hand hallway was maybe twenty feet long, ending with a plain metal door with a white light set in the wall above it. Fluttershy opened it and stepped inside.
She was standing on at one end of a large room. The end she was in was well lit, with bright lamps overhead illuminating the plain metal floor. In front of her were several rows of glass screens. Behind them, the rest of the room was lit with only an orange glow. Vast blocks of machinery behind the screens stood like buildings in the shadows. There was a humming noise almost below hearing range that made Fluttershy think of electricity.
All of the screens showed ponies.
On one screen, Twilight and Rarity were walking through Whitetail Wood. Twilight was clothed in glowing lavender spectral armor, and Rarity was wearing a white version of guard armor with her cutie mark on it. Twilight levitated a map in front of her, and she stopped every few moments to let Rarity mark off parts of it with a quill pen. On another screen, there was a contingent of royal guards building a guard post on the outskirts of Ponyville. Shining Armor was there with an escort of unicorn guards, holding up a shield spell. Another screen showed an empty room in the Ponyville hospital. A fourth screen showed Pinkie Pie and Applejack in Fluttershy’s cottage. Pinkie was making funny faces at some squirrels, while Applejack was dicing apples. All the other screens showed scenes from Ponyville, the Everfree Forest, Canterlot…the last screen showed the box that held the Elements of Harmony.
Fluttershy stared in amazement. What was all this? How was this place seeing Equestria? None of the screens showed Rainbow Dash; where was she? And Canterlot Tower was protected by Princess Celestia’s strongest magic, so that only Princess Celestia and the Element bearers could get inside! How had Megiddo built something that could see inside the tower?
She was interrupted from her thoughts by the sound of Little Ball tapping the ground next to her, trying to get her attention. She turned and saw it pointing at the screens. They looked like her! What were they?
Fluttershy walked up to the screen. The ball kept pace with her, its eye locked on the screens. “That's where I'm from,” she said to the ball. “It's called Equestria. It’s where ponies like me live.” She pointed at Twilight, Rarity, Applejack, and Pinkie. “Those ponies are my friends.”
Little Ball hopped and clicked. It wanted a closer look.
Fluttershy picked up the wicker basket and let the ball hop into it. She flew up, bringing the ball level with the screens. It climbed to the edge of the basket and leaned out, towards the screens. It pointed at the first screen. “Those are Twilight Sparkle and Rarity,” Fluttershy said. “Twilight was there when the soldiers...” Fluttershy gulped and pushed down the memory. “When they came for me. Rarity is my best friend...they must be looking for me.” The ball pointed at the inside of Fluttershy's cottage. “Those are Applejack and Pinkie Pie. They're trying to take care of my animals while I'm gone.”
Little Ball pointed again at the same screen. It wanted to know what the strange little creatures running around the cottage were.
Fluttershy realized that Little Ball didn't know what an animal was. In a place like this, there was every chance that it had never seen a live animal before.
“Those are...” Fluttershy began, but stopped when she heard faint footsteps coming from the hall.
Fluttershy spun around. The doorway to the lab was closed, but she could still hear that the footsteps were coming from the intersection.
They needed to hide! But where? The part of the room she was in was brightly lit; there was a big overhead lamp, and there was all the light coming from the screens. She needed someplace that wasn't well lit.
Fluttershy grabbed the basket and flew up, over the screens, to the dark machinery that was powering it. There were no lamps here, just the orange glowing strips on the stretches of empty floor that ran between the machines. Fluttershy landed on top of one bulky machine. It was warm under her hooves, and she felt a hum coming from it as it ran. She couldn't see the door or get a clear view of the back of the screens from here, but that was fine as long as she was hidden. "Shh," she said to Little Ball. It clicked softly, acknowledging her. Fluttershy crouched down, letting her backpack lie on top of her, obscuring her yellow coat. She put her hooves over her head, and waited.
She heard the door open. There was the sound of metal footsteps on the metal floor around the screens, and Fluttershy realized she was holding her breath. She tried to relax, to let the tension run out of her body, to remember to breathe.
The footsteps moved in circles in the area around the screens. They stopped for a few moments, then began to spread out. The footsteps moved to the sides of the room; there had to be at least two, and they were splitting up to cover the room. The footsteps followed the walls, and then began to come closer; they had to have walked around the screens, and were checking the dark machines now.
Fluttershy held still. Little Ball made no sound.
The footsteps came closer. There were two sets of footsteps now, one on each side of her. The set on her left was moving down towards the back of the room, while the footsteps on her right were moving towards the front of the room, where the screens were. A yellow circle of light moved slowly along the ceiling next to her, sweeping back and forth. Fluttershy followed it with her eyes. The light scanned the roof for a moment, then moved down, along the sides of the machines, where the edge of the machine she was on was blocking it. For a moment the light moved back up, brushing over the ceiling above her, before moving back down. Fluttershy listened as the footsteps moved away.
After what seemed like far too long a time, Fluttershy heard the footsteps make their way back to the front of the room. There was a subtle change in the way the sound echoed as both soldiers walked back into the hallway. The door closed behind them, and Fluttershy heard the heavily muffled sound of the soldiers walking away.
Fluttershy stayed where she was, not moving an inch, until she was sure that they were gone. She stood back up, picked up the basket, and carefully moved away from her hiding spot. She didn't see any soldiers anywhere. She breathed a sigh of relief.
She couldn't stay here. She didn't think there was a way to communicate with her friends from here, and if she stayed another patrol might find her. “Let's go see what’s in the Storage room,” she said to Little Ball. Little Ball nodded, and she opened the door, closed it behind her, and flew back down the hall to the Storage Overflow room.
Preta Storage Overflow was a small space, almost a janitor’s closet with a few bare metal shelves. The only light was a single long white lamp that was set into the ceiling. Dust flecks floated in the air. A few unmarked cardboard boxes sat on the shelves. At the far end of the room, there was a padlocked cage, big enough for a cat or a dog, sitting on the ground against the wall.
A thick glass disc the size of a large medallion on a lanyard sat on the floor of the cage, with a pair of strange glass spikes and small lights, red and orange and yellow, winking on and off inside of it. Lines of yellow metal were woven through the disc. The disc was slowly inching around to face the door to see what was going on.
As soon as Fluttershy looked at her disk, her intuition told her that it was another animal. The logical part of her mind caught up just a moment later: another orphan.
The disc stared for a moment before its lights began to blink rapidly on and off. It pulled itself forward in little hops, moving to the bars of the cage, clearly trying to get her attention. Fluttershy walked over to it, with the clockwork ball following her.
“Do you know each other?” she asked. Little Ball shook its head and turned back towards the clock. The disc also shook its head as well as it could, and then went back to pushing up against the bars. The lights on it blinked in an intricate pattern that reminded her of some of the displays she’d seen in Twilight basement. It took her a few moments before she could start to understand what it was saying. The disc was asking if someone had sent her and the ball.
“Nobody’s sent us,” she said. “Were you expecting someone?”
The disc blinked yes. Yes, it was expecting someone from the Angel.
“Who’s the Angel?” Fluttershy asked.
The savior, the disc said excitedly. The Angel was going to help them. She was finding orphans and bringing them together, she brought them friends when before they had been alone. She had food, weapons, defenses for them. She worked day and night, she fought the robots, she kept them safe. She had carved a safe place out of the ruins with her own two hands, hidden from the surveillance of Megiddo. They hadn’t heard of her?
“No,” Fluttershy said. She noticed Little Ball standing next to her, leaning forward, listening intently. “Little Ball, have you?” She asked. Little Ball shook its head.
They needed to meet her, the disc said. They had to talk to her, listen to her. She would explain everything. It would be astounding, amazing. It would all become clear. She was near the Lava Pits, near the Seattle Underground, around Pioneer Square. She was close to the access corridors to the Lava Pits in the real Seattle, but she kept her sanctuary in the Seattle of Tomorrow. If one of them could open this cage and get the disc out, it could –
There were footsteps outside, coming down the hall.
Fluttershy stifled a gasp of terror. She looked around frantically, but there were no hiding places in the small closet.
The disc hopped, pointing at something high up on the wall. Fluttershy looked where it was pointing and saw a black square in the wall, above the space that the lamp was illuminating. A ventilation grate.
Fluttershy flew up to the grate, holding the basket in one hoof and pulling at the grate with the other. It swung open like a door, and Fluttershy pulled it all the way open easily. The grate was large enough for both her and the wicker basket to fit. She put the basket in first and gestured for the ball to climb out. Little Ball did so, jumping to the floor of the shaft.
She was just about to pull the basket out so that she could try to get the cage inside too when she heard the footsteps right outside the door. Fluttershy flew into the vent and closed the grate just as the door opened.
Three soldiers came in. They stopped in the middle of the room, looking around. Fluttershy hung back from the edge of the vent as a soldier’s lamp passed over it. After a few moments the three soldiers had looked everywhere in the room.
They stood still for a moment. There was a brief burst of crackling, and one of the soldiers picked up the cage and left with it. The other two followed after a brief moment, shutting the door behind them.
Fluttershy waited a few moments as the sound of footsteps faded away, then opened the ventilation grate and flew out. She was just about to open the door to the hallway when she saw yellow light just under the door.
The lamps outside were white. The soldiers’ lamps were yellow. There was one of them still standing outside the door.
She pulled back from the door. She couldn’t go out that way. The only way out of the room was the ventilation shaft.
Fluttershy flew back into the ventilation shaft and closed the grate behind her. The ball looked at her questioningly. “They’re guarding the door,” she whispered. “We need to go out this way.” The ball nodded, and they started down the ventilation shaft.
There wasn’t enough room to spread her wings inside, so both she and Little Ball had to walk as she pushed the wicker basket in front of her. Their footsteps made thum, thum sounds on the metal. She winced with each step; they sounded far too loud for her.
They moved along the vents for a few minutes; Fluttershy stopped every several seconds to listen. The vent went in a straight line forward, and she wondered where it might come out. There were small square vent grates in the wall, and through them Fluttershy could see that they were moving along another empty section of hallway. The hallway’s lights filtered into the vent through the grates, letting Fluttershy see where she was going.
There was the sound of more footsteps nearby, and Fluttershy froze, one hoof off the ground.
The footsteps came again, and Fluttershy realized that these were different. The soldiers walked in an even pattern, with a clear sound of metal on metal. These steps were quick and light, and sounded like the one who was making them was wearing something with soft soles.
Something passed right in front of the grate Fluttershy was in next to; she couldn’t get a good look at it. She held still, waiting for whatever it was to leave.
The male voice had come from Fluttershy’s right, from outside the vent. Fluttershy froze.
“I say, hello! Are you alive? I hear a heart. Are you a friend?” There was movement outside in the hallway, and Fluttershy slowly turned her head to look. Was it an albino? Fluttershy couldn’t be sure; the creature outside had two arms and two legs and a torso and head like an albino, but his skin was a light pink instead of white. His black coat and pants were old and worn. He wore a bowler hat and carried a cane, and on his feet were shoes wrapped in dirty white rags.
Fluttershy felt something poking her foreleg, and she looked down to see Little Ball vigorously shaking its head. It waved a leg in the air, trying not to make a sound as it spoke. The creature outside was a human! It wasn’t safe to talk to him. They should wait for him to leave.
“You aren’t with Megiddo, are you? You don’t seem like one of his. Less metal, more life.” The human was leaning forward, towards the grate Fluttershy was looking out of. His head was tilted as if he wanted to turn it completely upside down like an owl, with one eyebrow raised in a inquisitive expression.
The human’s question sparked another in Fluttershy’s head. Was this human with the soldiers, with Megiddo?
Fluttershy didn’t think so. Just like with the clockwork ball, the human didn’t have the same look to him as the soldiers or this factory or any of the other places that had been claimed by Megiddo. And if the ball had been willing to help her…
Fluttershy felt the ball poking her leg again. It didn’t want to say anything. It was scared.
She leaned down towards it. “It’ll be okay,” she whispered. It looked up at her, then slowly nodded and then backed up against the wall. Fluttershy gave it a reassuring smile, then turned back towards the vent.
“I’m here,” Fluttershy said, speaking loudly enough to be heard out in the hallway. “I’m not with Megiddo. Who are you?”
“I – ” He grabbed his hat off his head and bowed “ – am Maxwell, gentlemen of the road – or at least the access corridors around Tacoma. I spend my hours with the Klondikes, fellow itinerants and transients.” Maxwell smoothly swung his arm up to put his hat back on his head. “And you would be?”
“I’m Fluttershy,” Fluttershy said. “I’m not with anyone. I’m just here.”
“Fluttershy,” he said, slowly, trying the word out. “What a strange name. It makes me think of pillows and marshmallows. Tell me, what is someone like you doing here? Megiddo has cameras everywhere, in the walls. His eye never closes, and his robots never sleep.”
“Well…it’s a long story…” Fluttershy began.
“Oh? Perhaps somewhere safer, then.” Maxwell straightened up and pointed to his right, down the corridor, in the direction the vent had been headed. “I just came from another room here. Server Room #11, near an assembly line. You’re in the vents?”
“Yes.”
“How far does it go?”
Fluttershy peered down the ventilation tunnel she was in. It stretched off into the distance, and she couldn’t tell where it might end. “I’m not sure.”
“Let’s find out, then.” He turned and pointed an arm down the hallway. “Onward!”
“Well…all right.” Fluttershy looked at Little Ball; it was still looking nervously in the direction of Maxwell’s voice. “It’ll be all right,” she whispered to it again. It took one last glance outside before looking back at her and then standing at attention. She smiled. “Thank you.”
Maxwell was already starting down the hallway, and Fluttershy followed him. He walked with his back straight and his cane just passing over the floor without touching it. His footsteps made a soft whooshing noise over the metal that would have been inaudible without her being almost next to him. Every few moments he would slow down and listen. Fluttershy walked along Maxwell in silence, with the ball walking behind her.
The grates looking out into the hallway were running out up ahead. Fluttershy hoped that that wouldn’t mean she would have to keep walking in the dark.
Then Fluttershy reached the last grate, looked around, and realized that the vent turned off to the left, away from the hallway.
Fluttershy turned towards the corridor. “Maxwell?”
Maxwell stopped and looked up at the grate Fluttershy’s voice was coming from. “Yes?”
“The vent turns left. Away from here.”
“Hmm. That’s unfortunate.” He swung his cane back and forth a few times, thinking. “Why don’t I go to the server room and wait for you there. Do you remember where it is?”
“Server Room #11, near an assembly line.”
“Excellent! Now, there’re a few hallways leading in and out of the production area. The server room is in the hallway that’s closest to an L-shaped bend in the assembly line with a light directly over it, and an arm with two arc welders. If you walk out of the hallway and you’re on that side of the room, you’ve gone too far and should look behind you.”
“Um, excuse me…what’s an arc welder?”
Maxwell tilted his head again, the same expression of inquisitiveness passing over his face. “You truly aren’t from around here, are you? An arc welder uses electricity to melt metal together. You’ll see lots of sparks coming from the weld area when it’s working.”
“Okay.” Fluttershy tried to imagine what Maxwell had just told her in her head.
“Very well. I’ll take my leave now, then. Be safe, my dear.” Maxwell reached behind himself, pulling out a garishly colored purple jacket. He pulled it on over his black coat, and for a moment there was a spot in the corridor that Fluttershy couldn’t make her eyes focus on. She blinked, and Maxwell was gone.
Fluttershy turned towards Little Ball. It was still standing right behind her, waiting for her to say what to do. “Let’s keep going,” she said, and began walking down the vent.
She followed it for what felt like at least fifteen minutes. At a few points she reached junctures in the vents; each time she took the one that felt like it was going to stay the closest to the path she had originally been taking to follow Maxwell. The vents always seemed to be right next to a corridor, with more grates to let in air and light; at one point she had even been underneath a floor when a patrol of three soldiers had gone by. She had stopped and hunkered down until they had passed out of sight before moving on.
Finally, she turned a corner and was at another grate large enough for her to fit through. Fluttershy looked out first; it opened up into another corridor. She pushed it open and gently flew out, carrying the ball out with her in the basket. The corridor opened up into a large room several feet to her right, and she looked out there first.
It was a long, L-shaped room, with walls and a floor with a reddish tint. Fluttershy was at the end of the longer part of the room, with the room bending to her right and the other end out of sight. Two assembly lines snaked their way around the corner side by side, ending in a pair of bins close to where Fluttershy was. The things on the conveyer belts caught the light as they moved, and Fluttershy saw that they were more of the soldier’s lightning weapons. Three soldiers were on the factory floor, walking a slow patrol pattern with their lamps scanning side to side. The room was filled with the clanking sound of heavy machinery.
Just on the other end of the room, where the assembly line curved to go around the bend of the room, Fluttershy saw an arm that split halfway down into two, smaller arms. It bent down towards a weapon that was coming down the line, and the ends of both flared into sparks and smoke. Just behind the arm was an open doorway leading into another corridor. It had to be the one leading to the room Maxwell was going to meet Fluttershy in.
But what leapt out at Fluttershy were the pale, gaunt figures standing at the various machines around the assembly line. More albinos.
Fluttershy looked at them. Their arms and legs were skeleton-thin, and their ribs were prominent on their chests; they weren’t eating well. Their hair had become nothing more than faint wisps on their heads. They had to be prisoners.
Maybe if she got close to them she could ask them for help. She’d need to hover just off the ground to stay quiet; the loud noise of the assembly line might be enough to hide the sound of her hoofsteps from the soldiers, but she didn’t want to take chances. “Get in the basket,” she said to Little Ball.
There was a flash of movement in front of her. The albino closest to her had turned her head in Fluttershy’s direction. There was a milky white film over her eyes; she was blind.
“Who’s there?”
The voice was just above a whisper. It trembled slightly. The albino’s hands slowed, but didn’t stop.
“Who’s there?” she said again.
Fluttershy tried to think what to do. Stay hidden, or greet the albino?
Maybe she could get help. “I’m Fluttershy,” she said. “Who are you?”
“I’m Lisa.” She turned the rest of her body slightly, towards Fluttershy. “Please, come closer…”
Fluttershy hesitated, then flew and landed next to the albino. Lisa put a hand on Fluttershy’s head for just a moment and then snapped her hand back up to her work. Fluttershy looked at what was on the assembly line.
It was Fluttershy-themed dentures. Lisa’s machine was putting labels onto the dentures, which were in a clamshell package. Lisa was pulling down on a lever as each denture rolled in front of her. A chime would go off, and Lisa would pull down on the lever, placing a Fluttershy sticker on the dentures and moving the line along.
“You don’t feel like one of them,” Lisa said. “Where did you come from? Are you from outside?”
Fluttershy wasn’t sure if Lisa meant outside the factory or outside the city, but both were true in any case. “Yes, I am.”
“Please, help us.” Lisa’s voice shook. “They keep us prisoner here. They only give us one meal a day and a few hours of sleep, and if one of us drops they take them away and we never see them again…” Lisa stopped to cough. “There’s a central reactor near the prison. It powers the security systems…if you shut it off, we can all get out.”
“Where’s the prison?”
“I…” Lisa coughed again. “I’m not sure…they bring us here in boxes, and we can’t see outside. Please, can you help us?”
“I can try…” Fluttershy wondered if Maxwell knew where the prison was. “But I need to get to the other side of the room, to the door near the two arc welders. I need to ask someone where the prison is.”
“That door? Yes…” Lisa paused, thinking. “There’s a panel behind me, with some wires. You can turn off the lights. They’ll bring in more security once the lights are back on, but you should have a minute.”
“All right.” Fluttershy looked back at the assembly line again. “Can I take one of the dentures?”
“Dentures? Is that what we’ve been doing? You shouldn’t. Megiddo might be counting them.”
“All right. Thank you.” Fluttershy flew back towards the doorway, where she had left Little Ball. Fluttershy wondered how she was going to navigate in the dark. Hopefully if she left the machinery on it would cover the noise of her flying into the walls. If only she had some sort of night vision.
Fluttershy remembered something from when she had first met Little Ball. “You can see in the dark, right?”
Little Ball nodded.
Fluttershy looked up at the ceiling of the factory room. It was high enough for her to fly comfortably with the wicker basket over the heads of the albinos and the soldiers.
“I’m going to turn off the lights in there,” Fluttershy said. “Can you help me fly through to the door over there?” Fluttershy pointed.
Little Ball squinted, looking out at the far door, and then nodded.
“Okay. Stay in the basket.” Fluttershy picked up the basket and carefully entered the room until she could see the handle of the panel set into the welded steel of the wall. She opened it.
The inside of the panel was a tangle of red and green wires. She had no idea which was which.
Fluttershy looked around. The soldiers were at the far end of the room, going around the assembly line and starting to head in her direction. She needed to do something, fast.
Fluttershy took a deep breath, reached a hoof into the tangle, and pulled.
There was a loud crack as all the lights went out. The machinery screeched. The soldier’s lamps suddenly seemed much brighter in the darkness. Fluttershy closed the panel, reached to her side where she had left the basket; her hooves closed on it, and she lifted off. “Am I facing the right way?” she whispered.
Little Ball clicked yes.
“Good. Tell me when to stop.” Fluttershy flew forward. Beneath here, there was shouting and footsteps. The soldiers’ lamps were getting closer to the panel.
Little Ball clicked again; they needed to stop and turn left.
Fluttershy hovered in mid air, slowly turning until the ball clicked that she needed to head down. Fluttershy risked a quick glance around; the soldiers were gathered near the panel, one of their lamps shining clearly into the open panel.
Fluttershy dropped down into the doorway just as the lights clicked back on.
When she was safely in the corridor, Fluttershy put the basket down and dropped to the floor. Her hooves were shaking a bit, and she took deep breaths. After a few moments she felt her pulse decreasing and her heart calming down, and she got back up.
Fluttershy didn’t stay to see what would happen next. She needed to find Maxwell, before the extra security Lisa had said was coming could get here.
Within a minute Fluttershy reached another intersection. The corridor in front of her was unlabeled, to her left was Radio Transponder Storage #6, and to her right was Server Room #11. Fluttershy opened the door to Server Room #11 and went through it.
The inside of the room was mostly dark, with a few overhead lamps that produced as much shadow as light. The room was filled with rows of large black metal boxes, which were making a low, insistent humming noise. Heat was radiating from the boxes, making the inside of the room very warm.
“Very good! You’re here.”
Fluttershy looked to her right. Maxwell was leaning against the wall in a corner of the room, just behind one of the boxes. He gestured her over, and Fluttershy and the ball followed him behind the box. Little Ball followed along behind Fluttershy, moving slowly and reluctantly.
As soon as both of them were behind the boxes, Maxwell sat down next to the wall and tapped a silvery coin that was on the wall next to him. “What do you think? I’ve been practicing coin engraving quite a bit recently. That one there bears a perfect resemblance to an empty server room. How does it look?”
Fluttershy looked at the coin, which as far as she could tell had an engraving of a building with pillars on it. “Uh…”
“Oh, yes, of course, you can’t see the side I carved. Oh well! Megiddo can’t see us in here, so we have some time.” He gestured at the ground in front of him. “Sit down, relax for a moment.”
“Um, all right.” Fluttershy sat down. Little Ball sat down behind Fluttershy, partially hiding itself behind her.
“Good, good. Do you mind if I took a look at you? I’ve not had a chance to examine anything quite like you before.”
“Um…I guess not?”
“Wonderful!” Maxwell crouched down in front of her. “Hmm…You’re short. And yellow. You look equine, long mane, bright colors, wings…You know, I saw something else that looked a lot like you, except blue and with rainbow hair. Any relation?”
“You did?” Fluttershy looked up. “Where was – what was she – ”
“You know her?”
“Yes…I think. She was one of my friends…I knew here before I came here.”
Maxwell shook his head. “Well, I imagine she’s no friend to you now. I saw her earlier, near the prison cells. I’m afraid that she was talking to the assassins instead of being captured by them.”
Fluttershy jumped to her hooves. “I-I need to find the prison. Oh, and I need to ask you if you’ve seen a white circular gate – ”
“Whoa, whoa, slow down my dear.” Maxwell held up his hands. “What’s all this about?”
“They have albinos here as slaves. They wanted me to let them out…and I got pulled into the city through a white gate and I want to go home.”
Maxwell frowned. “Get them out? How? I’m not sure…Tell you what. Would you answer one more question for me first? After that maybe I can help you.”
“Well…” It made sense. Fluttershy didn’t think she could argue with the idea of helping someone who was going to help her. “All right then.”
“Thank you. Now: I need to know if you’ve seen anyone matching these descriptions.” Maxwell’s tone changed as he began reading out what was clearly a mental list. “Human, male, bald, white skin, 1.9 meters tall, white lab coat, backpack ray gun. Paper goblin, four feet tall, newspaper, corrugated metal armor and crossbow, gold cross on a chain around his neck. Small flying pixie, ten centimeters diameter, glows green, high-pitched voice, deathly afraid of spiders.”
Fluttershy shook her head. “No, no one like that. Who are they?”
“Some friends of mine whom I entered the city with. We got separated a day ago, just after we got into here through a third-story window. I was hoping that you’d seen them.” He sighed. “Oh well. Would you remind me again what you needed?”
“Yes.” Fluttershy sat up. “There were soldiers in the factory room you were telling me about, and the albinos there helped me get past. I’m from Equestria, and I’d really rather be home in my cottage with my animals instead of here.”
“What was that about soldiers? I’ve seen only assassin units and a few aerials here, not too many other models.”
“They’ve got the lamps in their hands, and the lightning weapons on their heads.” Fluttershy held up her hooves in front of her chest and then in front of her head to show where she was talking about.
“Oh! Yes, the official name for them is electric assassins, although most people just call them assassins. They talk to each other through the radios in their lamps, and if you see one there’s always more nearby. The weapons on their heads are called arc blasters. If you must face one, shoot out their lamps or use electricity. As for your real questions …Equestria, was it?”
Fluttershy nodded.
Maxwell shook his head. “I don’t think that name sounds familiar, and I’m afraid I’ve seen nothing that was white at all in the first place, let alone a white circle or white gate.”
Fluttershy’s ears drooped. She hadn’t realized how much she had been hoping that the more-experienced seeming Maxwell could help her with this, and the disappointment hurt.
“But I do remember where the prison is,” he continued. “There’s a crawlspace through the room across from ours. I hid it with a wheeled shelf just in case. Take the first left and go out the third vent in the floor. You’ll be on a catwalk above some big vats of something green. Go along the unmarked corridor all the way to the end, then turn right towards a place where they make the helicopter blades for the aerials. On the way you’ll go over another catwalk where you can look down and see the cells. They bring in prisoners through the door underneath the catwalk, and take the cells away through the door in the opposite wall. Got all that?”
“Um…just a minute…” Fluttershy opened the backpack and pulled out the journal and pen. She hoped that the journal’s previous owner wouldn’t mind her writing down some directions. She wrote hurriedly on the first empty page. “Yes…I think so.”
“Good.” He held up a finger. “I would, however, bring up a logistical question about the prison. How exactly are you going to go about getting everyone else out of the prison? There’s quite a few of them, and unless you have something really amazing in your pack the assassins will catch you and kill you. And don’t think you can cut a deal with them; Megiddo prefers his own creations to outside manes.”
Manes? “Um…I’m a pony, not a mane? I have a mane…” Fluttershy lifted a hoof to her hair.
He frowned. “I’m sorry? An orphan, then?”
“No, I’m not an orphan either.” Where had that come from? The conversation seemed to have suddenly twisted away from her, missing some context that she instinctively felt was important. “What are you talking about?”
“Manes? Orphans?” Maxwell looked at the puzzled expression on Fluttershy’s face. “Those don’t mean anything to you? All right then, just give me a moment.” He reached into a jacket pocket and pulled out a pair of old, battered glasses that appeared to have been made by melting metal scrap and soda bottles into something that resembled the shape of a human face. There was a thick metal grille that had been soldered on over the lenses. He put them on and they began humming, a high-pitched noise that was just on the edge of Fluttershy’s hearing. It made her feel like her eardrums were suddenly about to float right through her skull and up to the ceiling, and Fluttershy winced.
“Sorry, sorry, I’ve never figured out how to make a resonating array that doesn’t make that noise. This shouldn’t take more than…than...”
“What is it?” Fluttershy asked as Maxwell trailed off. She lifted a hoof to cover her left ear.
“Hold on.” Maxwell took the glasses off and peered at them. “No visible damage…just a moment, I need to look at your friend there.” He put the glasses back on.
Little Ball moved around behind Fluttershy, keeping Fluttershy between itself and Maxwell. Fluttershy looked over her shoulder at it. “Let him see you,” she said. “Nothing bad will happen, I promise.”
The ball hesitated, then came out from behind Fluttershy. It stood looking up at Maxwell as he looked it. He took the glasses off, then put them back on again. “Impossible,” Maxwell mumbled.
“What?” Fluttershy said, as she lifted her right hoof to cover her right ear.
Maxwell tore off the glasses. “I get it now!” His eyes opened wide, bright and jubilant. “You’re an alien! A genuine alien!”
“Um…I guess?” Fluttershy knew what aliens were from the science fiction adventures Rainbow sometimes read if she got bored of waiting for the latest Daring Do. This was clearly another planet, so of course she was an alien here. Why was this such a surprise?
“No, you don’t understand! A real alien! Imagine the possibilities! I just need to get you out of here…I can get the backing of Those Fools at the Institute…” For a moment Maxwell was staring at some point in space, brow furrowed in deep thought, and then he focused back on Fluttershy. “Come on, we need to get back to Seattle. Once I’ve announced I’ve found a non-human mortal I should be able to get enough support to come back here and find the rest of my collaborative.” Maxwell climbed to his feet.
“But the access corridors are sealed,” Fluttershy said. “How do we get out?”
Maxwell stopped halfway off the floor. “I’m sorry?”
“We were there yesterday. All the doors were locked or had an energy field over them. We couldn’t get out.”
“Truly? How strange. They were open a few days ago.” Maxwell tapped his chin. “Perhaps together we can brainstorm a solution. We should make sure we’re all on the same page first. What do you know about this city, or what it’s made of? Do you know where you are?”
“The Seattle of Tomorrow.”
“Good! And do you know what kind of place it is?”
“Um…a city?”
“Not quite, I’m afraid. Perhaps…do you know what a bardo is?”
Fluttershy shook her head.
“No? How about Mania?”
“Um…it's about ponies who act really active, and it's because they're...um...not quite all there,” Fluttershy guessed.
"Wrong! Well, right, but in this context it's wrong. This may be difficult to explain…” Maxwell frowned for a moment before looking back at Fluttershy. “Ah! I know. Let’s talk about science.”
“Science? Um…” Fluttershy had taken some science courses in school when she had been a filly, but that had been a while back. The only things Fluttershy could remember about science were some of Twilight’s lectures about it.
“Yes?” Maxwell said.
“Well…it’s about studying the natural world and learning how it works.” Fluttershy thought back to school, trying to remember more. “You, uh, run experiments and make hypotheses about what’s going to happen in them…”
“Absolutely correct! Now, a long shot: do you have magic where you come from?”
“Yes.”
“Excellent. Can you get pure magic? An essence of magic, pure mana? Is it something you use to power spells? Can you detect it as something separate from other things?”
Fluttershy nodded. “Good,” Maxwell said. “Can you do the same with science?”
Fluttershy frowned. “Um…no? I don’t think so…it’s a way of thinking about the world. Science isn’t physical like magic is.”
“Correct again! Now, imagine that you could make science act like magic, kind of.”
Fluttershy blinked. “Um…”
“Pure science. Essence of science. Distilled knowledge and mathematics and philosophy, bottled and boiled and drinking, used to power impossible machine. That is Mania.”
Fluttershy stared. “Wait…but that…” She thought hard. “Is that how science works here?”
“Not in the slightest! Science on this planet is like science everywhere else. Therefore, Mania technically can’t exist. And that, my dear, is what makes it so versatile.”
“I’m…” Fluttershy could feel her head starting to hurt. “I’m not sure what that would look like…” Something occurred to her. “Wait.” She opened up her backpack and pulled out the pouch with the electricity-filled glass cylinders. “Do you mean something like this?”
“Let me see…yes, these are capacitors. It’s good you have these, your friend won’t survive without them. You should hold on to these.” Fluttershy put the pouch back in her backpack as Maxwell kept talking. “Now, let me explain to you what a bardo is.”
There was the sudden sound of footsteps behind them, and Fluttershy turned to look.
There was another Maxwell there, bowler hat and shoes on feet and all, leveling an arc blaster at them.
Fluttershy gasped and dropped to the ground, covering her head. Somewhere next to her Little Ball skittered against one of the big boxes as it spun back and forth between the two Maxwells, trying to comprehend the existence of both of them.
CRACK!
Something small and thin whizzed over Fluttershy’s head; she didn’t see it, but felt it splitting the air with its passage. It smacked into the wall right next to the second Maxwell, punching a divot the size of her head into the metal.
The second Maxwell fired back, with an arc blaster’s lightning bolt. Something exploded with a deep BOOM right behind Fluttershy, and smithereens of something rained down on her back. There was the smell of something instantly flaring into ash, and behind her Maxwell screamed.
CRACK!
The shot hit the second Maxwell in the upper left shoulder, just under the neck, blasting away a large chunk of his upper body and disintegrating his head. Metal shards flew everywhere, and smoke rose from disconnected and burning wires and circuits inside of his body before he slumped back against the wall and slid down to the floor. A wave of electricity rippled across his body, erasing the color on him; what was left was a metal frame in the same shape as a human. It didn’t move.
There was a moan of pain from behind Fluttershy, and she turned around.
Maxwell was on the ground, his arms wrapped around his body. His stomach and chest had been scorched black, and they smelled of charred meat. His cane had fallen to the ground next to him; there was a sewing needle protruding from the bottom of it that hadn’t been there before, held in place with an odd arrangement of clamps.
Maxwell groaned again, and shifted slightly. A thin layer of black cinders moved on his body, and under it Fluttershy saw a red and pink flash of –
She couldn’t fix this. Even if she had been in her cottage back in Equestria, with all her medical supplies at her disposal, she couldn’t have healed something like this.
Maxwell coughed and looked down at the ruin of his body. For a moment, Fluttershy saw the cheer fall away from him. The lines in his face etched themselves deeper, his skin seemed more rough, and his eyes lost their energy. He looked old.
Then he looked back up at her, gamely pulling the cheerfulness back up over his face. But they both knew what the other had seen, and try as he might he couldn’t have covered all of it.
“I…I think the road ends for me here, my dear.” Maxwell coughed again, and blood trickled from the corner of his mouth.
Fluttershy was trotting towards him almost before the intention of doing so had formed in her mind. “Don’t move. It’ll just make the pain worse.”
Maxwell’s breathing was getting heavier; he was straining to suck in air. He shifted again. “No…it doesn’t hurt much now…it just feels cold.” He shivered. “The train yard at night…I remember…” For a moment his eyes were far away.
Fluttershy didn’t have a blanket. Instead, she carefully spread her wings over the human. She kept her feathers out of the wound; even though it wouldn’t have made a difference, she still instinctively didn’t want to contaminate a wound.
Maxwell shivered. His eyes refocused on Fluttershy. “What are you doing? You should…you should run. Megiddo knows we’re here…”
Fluttershy shook her head. “I didn’t want to leave you to die alone.”
He blinked, slowly. “Thank…thank you.” He sighed and let his head rest on the cold ground.
Fluttershy looked up at Little Ball. “Watch the door, please,” she said. The ball nodded and went to the corner of the boxes. It peeked out from around the boxes towards the door to the room.
“What was that?” Fluttershy asked, looking over her shoulder at the metal human against the wall.
“Infiltrator agents…I’ve heard that sometimes, when you look into their eyes, you see Megiddo looking back. He must have built it right in this factory…there’s no way it could have gotten here in time.”
There was a minute of silence. Fluttershy reached into her backpack and pulled out a bottle of water. She opened it and held it out to Maxwell.
Maxwell didn’t take it. His breathing was getting more ragged. “Megiddo…” he mumbled.
Fluttershy looked at her. “What?”
Maxwell strained to speak. “The Lemurians brought him here decades ago…when they found this place…it wasn’t like this then… I don’t know what you were looking for, but it isn’t worth it. To resist him is death.” His eyes were starting to dim, and his voice was getting quieter and quieter. “You need to leave…run…Megiddo is…Il...Illu…” He took one long, last breath. “Megiddo is Illuminated…”
Maxwell went silent. His eyes closed. His bowler hat and cane creaked for a moment and then crumbled to dust. The coin on the wall fell to the floor and cracked in half.
Fluttershy folded her wings and stepped away from the body. “I’m so sorry,” she said to Maxwell. “I wish you could have found your way home, or at least found your friends.”
There was nothing else she could do. There was no place to bury the body, either here or outside. Fluttershy turned and walked away.
Little Ball looked up as Fluttershy approached. “Come on,” she said to it. “We should go.”
The corridor was still empty outside, but Fluttershy knew that it wouldn’t stay that way for long. If the infiltrator didn’t come back, there would be more assassins coming to see what was wrong. She darted across the corridor and entered Radio Transponder Storage #6.
It was another poorly lit storage closet, with the same lighting and cardboard boxes and metal shelves as Preta Overflow Storage. Just as Maxwell had said, there was a metal shelf standing by itself against the far wall, with a cardboard box on the bottom shelf. Fluttershy pushed it aside.
There was an open vent at ground level, big enough for her to walk inside. “You go first,” she said to the ball, and it skittered into the vent. Fluttershy went in after it, then turned and pulled the shelf back in front of the crawlspace, hiding it.
Fluttershy turned and started going down the crawlspace. Just as she reached the first corner, she heard the door in the storage closet opening and the sound of more assassins stepping in. She looked over her shoulder at the blocked opening, and then hurried along, away from them.
It didn’t take her long to reach the catwalk that Maxwell had said would be over the prison cells. It was near the top of a tall room. There weren’t any lights at the top of the room where she was; the only lights there seemed to be were about midway down the walls, shining down on the cells. The upper half of the room was only dimly lit with light that reflected from the walls and floor towards the ceiling. Fluttershy put two hooves on the railing and looked down.
The cells were dull red metal boxes in short rows on the floor below. There were maybe six cells in two rows, one row against each wall. There was a black frame on wheels, with a pair of long prongs in front of it, moving around on the floor. A single lamp shone a stark cone of yellow light in front of the frame. Fluttershy could just make out the outline of something that looked like an assassin sitting in it. As Fluttershy watched, the frame moved towards one of the cells, slid its prongs under it, and lifted it up. It spun to her right, and then drove out of an open doorway into a hallway that was opposite of where she was.
Fluttershy looked around the room. There didn’t seem to be any more assassins. She took another moment to make sure, and then turned to Little Ball. “We’re going down there,” she said. It looked down nervously for a moment, then nodded and climbed into the basket. Fluttershy picked up the basket and gently flew down.
Instead of bars, the front doors of the cells were transparent energy fields. A number of the cells were empty. A few of them had strange objects sitting inside of them: a bucket of glowing green sludge, a glove made of shining chrome, a pair of boots carved from bones. One cell had the disc from earlier, still in its cage. The last cell had a handful of albinos, dressed in rags, sitting on the floor of the cell.
Fluttershy landed in front of the albinos. The one in front was Lisa, sitting on the ground facing the floor. She didn’t look up.
Fluttershy put a hoof on the energy field. It felt like warm glass. “Lisa!”
Lisa jumped and turned in the direction in Fluttershy’s voice. “Fluttershy? Is that you?”
“Lisa! What happened?” Fluttershy thought that Lisa would still be working on the assembly line, not back in a cell already.
“The assassins just took us away. I think they didn’t want to take any chances. Now they’re moving the cells. The forklift will be back in a few minutes. Can you open these cells?”
“I’m not sure…” Fluttershy walked up to the cell. There was a black keypad in the side of the cell. She had no idea what the code would be. Fluttershy looked around for some clue that might show what the code was. She turned towards the disc; it was still in its cell across from the albinos, flashing green. “Excuse me,” she said to it. “Did you see anyone typing in the code for the cell here?”
The disc blinked yellow and green. It had seen some of it. The disc began blinking in a complex pattern of lights, and it took Fluttershy a moment to understand it. The code had four numbers, and the disc had seen the first three: 791. It didn’t know what the last one was.
“Thank you.” Fluttershy turned back to the albinos’ cell and lifted a hoof to the keypad. She hesitated for a moment before guessing: 7911.
There was an angry beep, and a small light on the keypad blinked red.
Fluttershy looked around. Nothing seemed to have happened in response to the wrong code. She turned back to the keypad: 7912. There was another angry beep, and this time the red light blinked twice.
The keypad was tracking the number of incorrect attempts, and she was sure that if she kept going she would trip an alarm. Fluttershy put her hoof down. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m sorry. Um…if you don’t mind, I’m going to look around for a bit and see if I can find something that can help.”
Lisa nodded. “All right. Please don’t leave us.”
“I won’t.” Fluttershy began to walk around the cells, with Little Ball followed behind her.
There was a black box on the back of each cell, with cables leading from the black box into the back of the cell. The black box was marked with a lightning bolt symbol. “What’s that?” she asked Little Ball.
The ball skittered around in front of her and peered at the box. After a moment it made several clicks. The box was a power source. It was entirely possible that it was what was powering the cell doors.
Fluttershy looked at it. It was worth a try. She reached up towards where the cable was plugged into the cell.
There was the faint, steady clanking noise of assassins in the distance, coming closer.
Fluttershy squeaked. For a moment she thought about pulling the cable anyway, but realized that if the assassins saw the albinos were out they would recapture them at best and kill them at worst. It would be better to wait for them to go away first. Fluttershy flew over to another cell and got down behind it.
A moment later, three assassins came in from the door leading out, followed by the forklift from earlier. Their lamps swept past her hiding spot, but didn’t highlight her.
The forklift went around to the front of the cell with the albinos under it. With a mechanical groaning noise it picked up the cell, turned around, and went out with it, the three assassins marching behind it.
Oh no. She couldn’t just let them be taken away like this. Fluttershy dashed out from behind the cells. She stopped in front of the cell with the disc. “I’ll come back later,” she said to it. It flashed green in response, and with that acknowledgement Fluttershy picked up her basket, let Little Ball climb into it, and flew down the corridor after the forklift.
Fluttershy carefully followed the forklift as it moved the cell along the corridors. She always stayed one corner behind, peering carefully around the corner to make sure that the assassins didn’t see her. She couldn’t see into the cell with the wheeled machine in the way, so she had no idea if the albinos were still all right. Fluttershy looked at the signs on the wall as they passed them, and it looked like they were heading towards something called the Dimensional Engine.
None of the assassins slowed or looked back. They moved for several long minutes, until Fluttershy realized that there was an electric blue glow being cast on the walls ahead. They were heading towards something that was generating a lot of light. Somewhere in the distance, Fluttershy heard electricity crackling.
The forklift and the assassins turned one last corridor, and Fluttershy heard the sound of the wheels and metal feet that had been echoing down the corridor suddenly echo outwards. They must have stepped out of the corridor into a wide room. The blue glow was much stronger here; whatever was causing it was just ahead. Fluttershy carefully poked her head around the last bend.
She was looking into a vast cylindrical room, hundreds of feet across, bigger than Ponyville’s town hall. The whole cylinder was lit up in a strong blue-white glow, brightly illuminating everything inside. The room went up through where the ceiling was and down far past where the ground floor of the factory should have been; Fluttershy couldn’t see how far either end stretched.
In the center of it was a huge turbine that spun rapidly as lightning danced from the walls to meet it. There was a constant loud hum in the room from the energy bolting through the air. Walkways and loading platforms and scaffolds led in circles around the cylinder. Steel boxes and tables littered the platforms; she wasn’t sure what they were for. A steel frame had been built around the turbine, and many of the scaffolds and platforms were attached to it. Lightning streamed like a river between the frame and the turbine, and there were more of the red prison cells in the frame, facing inwards. There was a booth big enough for two people at the base of the cylinder, with what looked like the lights of some kind of control panel inside of it.
Fluttershy stared. What was that?
The forklift with its escort stopped underneath one of the prison cells in the frame, on a platform with what looked like several other cells. One of the assassins jogged towards one of the nearby platforms with tools, put its hand on a scissor lift, and pulled it up to the central turbine, under on of the prison cells in the turbine frame. The assassin pressed a button, and the lift went under the cell. There was a deep thunk, and the cell dropped out of the frame onto the lift. The lift lowered back down, and the assassins dragged the cell to the other side of the platform with the rest of the cells. As they did so the front of the cell was turned to face Fluttershy, and she thought she saw a fine layer of ash on the bottom.
This looked very, very bad.
The assassins began pulling the scissor lift towards the full cells. She had to do something –
The assassins froze. From this distance Fluttershy faintly heard crackling noises coming from their lamps. A moment later, all of them turned and ran out one of the other doors.
The big room was unguarded. Now what?
Fluttershy flew quietly into the room, landing in front of the albinos’ cell. “Lisa!”
“You’re back!” Lisa whispered back, sitting up. “I can hear the machines outside. This is the reactor! How did you get past the guards?”
“There aren’t any,” Fluttershy said. “They just left.”
“That’s strange,” Lisa said. “We should leave before they return. Can you get this cell open?”
“I think so. Let me try.” Fluttershy flew around to the back of the albinos’ cell and pulled on the power cord.
The cable came free in a short shower of orange sparks, and Fluttershy instinctively threw up a foreleg to cover her face. She let go of the cable, letting it fall to the ground. From the front of the cell was the sound of something powering down.
“Stay here a moment,” Fluttershy heard Lisa say to the other albinos. “I’m stepping out.”
Fluttershy flew back to the front of the cell to see Lisa stepping forward cautiously, holding her hands out. Fluttershy hovered in front of Lisa and held a hoof out to Lisa’s hand. Lisa felt the hoof against her palm and brought both hands up. Fluttershy let Lisa touch her on the head again.
“Thank god,” Lisa said. “Are there any more cells here? We had some equipment with us, it might be there.”
“Let me look,” Fluttershy said. Lisa nodded and sat down.
Fluttershy looked at the other cells on the platform. All of them held orphans, in their own separate cells. There was a bracelet that seemed to be held rigid in the middle of a translucent orange sphere like a hamster ball. A short L-shaped device flopped up and down on the floor of another cell. One cell held a flat white box, which seemed to have grown wheels and was now rolling rapidly back and forth on the floor of its cell. A fourth cell had a series of tall metal tubes as tall as an albino, that hung in the air and gently swung back and forth like wind chimes. Three of the cells held one human zombie each; all three seemed to have very tiny, doll-like arms sprouting from them. The cell next to the albinos had several black goggles and metal tubes in it, and she recognized the equipment that the first group of albinos she had ever seen had been wearing.
“There’s some goggles and tubes in the next cell,” Fluttershy said. “Are those yours?”
“Yes, they are! Please, open it.”
Fluttershy pulled out the power cord for the next cell and flew back to where Lisa was. “Hold your hand out.”
Lisa held her hands out, and Fluttershy pulled her towards goggles. “Here,” Fluttershy said.
Lisa reached down and grabbed one of the goggles. She ran her fingers over them for a moment, making sure of what they were, and then put them on. She stood up, and Fluttershy saw a pair of red eyes behind the goggles. “Good work,” Lisa said. She turned, taking in the rest of the room. She picked up another set of goggles, handed them to another one of the albinos in her cell, and turned back to grab one of the tubes. “Get everyone equipped,” she said to the albino she’d given the goggles too, and then turned her attention to the tube. She looked it over, pulling back on parts of it and opening other parts of it. “Still in good condition. I’ll shut down the reactor. Once the robots are stopped we can make a run for it.”
“All right.” Fluttershy could look for the gate more easily if the guards weren’t there.
Fluttershy watched as Lisa went into the control booth. Lisa looked over the rows of blinking buttons before finding and pressing down on a large red button the size of a hoof.
Nothing happened. Lisa scanned back over the control panel. “Damn!”
“What is it?” Fluttershy said. She trotted into the control booth.
“It’s locked.” Lisa pointed at a keyhole that was set into the controls. “We’ll need the key if we want to do anything. Come on.” Both of them went back out into the platform with the cells. At this point all the albinos were wearing goggles and carrying their tubes. “We’ll head out now to look for it.”
“Wait,” Fluttershy said. “What about the orphans?” She pointed at the orphans, which were still in their cells.
“What about them?” Lisa kept walking towards one of the doors leading out.
Fluttershy hurried to keep up with her. “We should let them out. They must be miserable in there.”
“I’d rather not. Wild orphans are always hungry for anything with Mania, like us.”
“Like you?” Fluttershy thought that Mania was just used for making and powering the impossible inventions Maxwell had tried to tell her about.
“Yes, us. We come from the Seattle of Tomorrow. Not Megiddo, the city. Can’t have a city without people in it, can you?”
“Well…I don’t…” Fluttershy remembered what the journal had said about finding other albinos. There had been no mention of albinos being born. “You mean, you just…appear fully grown in the city using Mania?”
“Yes, like I said. A city needs people, and a place like this will do things to make that work. We’ve wasted enough time. Let’s get moving.”
“No, wait. I still want to let the orphans out.”
“And what will you do next? How are you going to control them? And even if you could, how are you going to keep such a huge group from being found? Fluttershy, this isn’t practical.”
“Don’t worry,” said a familiar voice. “I got that all taken care of for you.”
With a loud CLANG, metal shutters came down on all the doors leading out.
Something landed on the ground behind Fluttershy. She spun around, coming face to face with who was now standing between her and the control booth.
“Looking for this?” Rainbow Dash said, pointing at a key around her neck.
The door they had been heading towards opened, showing a squad of assassins on the other side.
“All of you, back in your cages,” Rainbow Dash continued. “As soon as we’ve got you all inside, I’m going to use this key to open the controls and recycle all of you.”
There was a flash of movement out of the corner of Fluttershy’s eye as Lisa swung her tube up to aim at Rainbow Dash. Rainbow Dash dodged just as Lisa pulled the trigger, filling the air with a cacophony of sharp cracks.
Fluttershy screamed and bolted, instinctively leaping off the platform and up towards the ceiling. She landed on a section of another platform and ducked just as she felt Rainbow Dash shooting past just above her. Below them, the albinos were scattering, ducking behind boxes and machine as the assassins opened fire, filling the air with lightning.
Rainbow Dash came to a stop close to the ceiling and turned towards Fluttershy. “Like it?” she asked. “We built this place just to draw in the Klondikes and the orphans, and then we render them down to Mania to power the generator. We get something useful out of them, and they don’t bother us anymore. Megiddo says that for a while we tried using mortals as a renewable generator, but they kept breaking out so now we just shoot them.”
Below them, the albinos were returning fire. Without cover, half of the assassin squad dropped, but the remainder stood and kept firing, forcing the albinos to focus on staying down instead of exposing themselves to fight back.
Fluttershy flew out and dashed underneath another section of scaffolding, behind a cart full of metal plates. She hunkered down under it, hoping that there was enough shadow to hide her. Rainbow looked right at her. “I know you’re there, you know. It’s not like there’s any places to hide in here.”
There was a rattling noise as another of the room’s doors opened, revealing more assassins. The albinos frantically swung around, trying to get cover between both groups as lightning bolts rained down on them.
Rainbow bolted down towards the engine, and Fluttershy threw herself off the scaffolding. She landed on the ground just as Rainbow Dash landed on the spot where Fluttershy had just been. “Oh, and by the way? The gate’s not here. I just said that so you’d dig yourself so deep in this place that you’d never get out. You’re locked in here with me. Just give up now!” Rainbow said, as she stood above Fluttershy. Fluttershy darted away, zipping directly under where Rainbow was and then dodging to the side, out of sight.
Fluttershy heard Rainbow land on one of the walkways. There was a moment of silence as Rainbow looked around. “Stupid pegasus,” Fluttershy heard Rainbow mutter. “How’d she get that sneaky?”
Fluttershy slowly tiptoed away from Rainbow’s voice. There was another pocket of shadows, nestled in between two sheets of metal at the base of the engine. Maybe if she holed up there, Rainbow wouldn’t be able to find her –
There was a scream, and Fluttershy turned just in time to see one of the albinos fall, a massive chunk of his upper body scorched black.
She needed to do something, or they would all be overwhelmed. What could she do?
Fluttershy realized that the cells were unguarded.
Maybe the orphans could do something to help. At the very least, they could try to get away.
Fluttershy looked around. The assassins were preoccupied by the albinos, and Rainbow Dash was still somewhere above her, muttering to herself.
Fluttershy took a deep breath and made a flying leap towards the cover of one of the larger machines. As soon as she landed, she looked around. Nobody seemed to have spotted her, although she could see Rainbow Dash now as she prowled near the top of the turbine.
Fluttershy ran for the next set of boxes, crouching down behind it just as another door in the ceiling slid open. Three aerials flew out, angling down towards the albinos. They were met by a spray of fire, and all of the aerials plunged down as their wings were shot out. Fluttershy flung a wing up to shield herself as one of the aerials slammed into the ground right in front of her, spraying her with sharp pieces of metal. Up above, another aerial dropped out of the open door, its arc blaster already charging up.
She needed to hurry before even more robots arrived. Fluttershy dodged behind another box before popping up to look around.
The next platform was the one with the cells on it. The orphans were inside, all of them pressed up against the doors, banging against them. There was no cover between the box she was behind and the cells.
Fluttershy looked around one more time. Two aerials were circling overhead, weaving between the albinos' shots. A few more of them were down, and the rest were trying to fire back at two open doorways. The dead assassins were starting to pile up at the front of the doorways, enough to partially shield the fresh assassins from the albinos' attacks. None of them seemed to care about their dead comrades lying at their feet. Megiddo was going to keep sending robots at them until they choked.
"Okay," she said to herself. "This is it. You've got to make it Fluttershy." She took another breath. "One...two..." On three she threw herself forward, spreading her wings and pushing herself as hard as she could.
There was a sudden change in the aerials' fans above her, and she knew they had spotted her. The two aerials buzzed over her head, and for a moment she thought they would stop near the cells. But they passed over the cells and began banking around to face her. She kept flying.
The first aerial finished its turn. It pointed at her for a moment before suddenly angling forward and speeding down. Fluttershy jumped to one side just as the aerial dive bombed into the ground right in the path she had been going before. The second one slammed into the platform, sticking up out of the metal like a wall, and she ran around it. She heard more aerials behind her. They must have been trying to slow her down.
Fluttershy looked ahead. She was almost there.
Something grabbed her tail, and she hit the ground just in front of the cells. "Ah ha!" Rainbow Dash cried. "Got you - "
Suddenly something dropped down from overhead, and Rainbow Dash screamed as Little Ball landed on her head, clawing her face. "GAAAH! GET OFF!" She let go of Fluttershy's tail, trying to pry Little Ball off.
Fluttershy flew up and over the cells, landing next to the power cables. She was near one of the walkways leading to another closed exit. It opened just as she landed, letting in another squad of assassins.
Fluttershy didn't wait to see if the assassins had noticed what she was doing. She flew down the line of cells, pulling out cables. There were metal footsteps echoing through the room, enough so that she couldn't tell which direction they were coming from, and Rainbow shouting. She ignored them, focusing on what she'd come here to do.
A circle of lamp light fell on her just as she pulled out the last cable, and footsteps sounded right behind her. She turned, staring up into the face of an assassin just a few feet away. She backed up against the cell, holding her hooves up in front of her as it stepped forward. "No...please, don't!"
Something came whistling from the side and smashed into the assassin, slamming it into a wall. It was the floating giant metal pipes, now wrapped around the assassin and squeezing it hard. Fluttershy took advantage of the distraction to fly up on top of a cell and take a look around.
The orphans were bursting from their cells, jumping and crawling and running away. One assassin was shooting at one of the zombies; the zombie lurched with each shot, but stayed on its feet and slowly kept advancing. As Fluttershy watched, two more assassins entered from a door on the other side of the room and were met with a hail of red beams of light. A pair of boots tied together by their shoelaces leapt straight up, springs popping out of their heels as they disappeared into one of the ceiling doors the aerials had been using to enter; at least one of them was trying to escape, Fluttershy thought. The remaining albinos had turned to face the orphans, but had held their fire when they realized that the orphans were more concerned with the assassins then them.
Rainbow Dash was still wrestling with Little Ball on the ground near the cells. On floor nearby was the key that had been around Rainbow Dash's neck.
Fluttershy dropped down from the cell, snatching up the key in her mouth. Something small and round skidded past her, and Fluttershy spun her head to focus on it just as Little Ball hit the side of a conveyor belt with a bang. It rocked back on forth on its back for a moment before dizzily righting itself. Several of its gears were dented and were ticking erratically, and a small trickle of smoke rose from somewhere inside of it.
“Ha! Take that, you loser!” Rainbow was floating in the air near the cells, several gray lines on her face where the ball had scratched her. “Now – ” Rainbow ducked an energy beam. “Hey! Stop shooting at me!” Rainbow flew around another energy beam, going behind a crate and out of sight.
Little Ball was swaying dizzily, and it seemed to be having trouble focusing its eye. It needed energy, but Fluttershy didn’t think that sitting down and opening her backpack in the middle of this battle was a good idea. Fluttershy picked up the wicker basket and brought it over to Little Ball. “Come on, get inside,” she said. After a moment it was looking in the right direction, and took a few unsteady steps and made it into the basket.
The albinos had fallen back to a cluster of boxes closer to the engine; only half of them were still standing. A few bodies were still sprawled on the ground where the albinos had first taken cover. Their weapons were missing, and a moment latter Fluttershy realized that the surviving albinos had taken them and were still using them.
Fluttershy flew over to the albinos. Lisa was still with them, staying crouched down behind a crate and taking careful aimed shots. "Lisa!" Fluttershy said. "I have the key!"
Lisa nodded. "Good! Get to the control booth. Put the key in, then press the large red emergency shutdown button. Can you do that?"
Fluttershy looked towards the control booth. Two aerials were flying in ovals over it, and two more assassins were moving in slow circles in front of it. "I don't know," she said.
Lisa looked in the direction Fluttershy was. "All right. Give me the key, then find somewhere safe." She held out her hand, and Fluttershy gave her the key. Lisa turned back towards the other albinos. "John, Sarah, come with me. Everyone else, hold them off."
Fluttershy looked around for somewhere she could hide. There was a shadowed spot under what looked like a maintenance bench, and she ran under it. She put the basket down and pulled out the pouch with the glass cylinders. "Here, eat something."
Little Ball lifted one leg, pulled one of the cylinders towards itself, and bit into it. The energy flowed into it, and Little Ball stood back up, all its gears restored.
Fluttershy put the pouch back in her backpack and turned to see what was happening at the control booth. The three albinos were down behind different crates, firing up at the aerials above them. A shot sheared across one aerial's wings, and there was a metal screech as a fan jammed, spinning the aerial around in the air. The aerial began to drift, but its remaining fan began spinning twice as hard, and it flung itself around and slammed itself into the floor right in front of one albino, punching a hole in the ground and sending both of them falling through it. His scream echoed up out of the ground as both of them were sent spinning down the darkness.
The second aerial suddenly whirled about, and like a shot it rammed into the albino Lisa had said was named Sarah. Both of them were crushed into the ground, the twisted metal of the aerial partially covering her unmoving body.
Two assassins and Lisa were left. Lisa stood up and fired a long burst across both of them, blasting both of them off their feet. The weapon clicked and stopped firing, and Lisa dropped it and ran for the control booth.
Another assassin stepped out from around the control booth and shot Lisa at point blank range.
Lisa fell just at the front of the control booth. The key clattered to the floor an inch from her outstretched hand.
The assassin stepped forward over Lisa's body, ignoring the key as it took up a guarding position in front of the control booth.
They had been so close...
There was no time to stop. They needed to do something, fast.
There were only a few albinos left, fighting as hard as they could to keep the increasing numbers of assassins and aerials from overwhelming them. Fluttershy could hear fighting going on in other parts of the room, but she couldn't see the orphans anywhere. There was no one else around to help.
If anyone was going to get the key, it would have to be her.
"We need to go now," she said to Little Ball. It nodded and set itself, preparing to run.
If she waited any longer, then more guards would arrive. Fluttershy ran out from under the table towards the booth, Little Ball running behind her.
There was a buzzing behind her, and Fluttershy rolled to the side as a lightning bolt came down from an aerial that had flown up behind her. It shot past, narrowly turning to miss the central turbine. Fluttershy kept running.
Another assassin stepped out from behind a crate, stretching its arm out to grab her. She jumped up, spreading her wings, and she glided over its outstretched hand.
The assassin that was standing over Lisa's body turned to face her. Its lamp swung up, shining directly into her face, and just above it was the glow of its arc blaster charging.
Little Ball rushed past her, sinking its fangs into the assassin's feet. Its leg crumpled, dropping it to the ground as Fluttershy flew overhead. She landed next to the key, grabbed it, and ran into the control booth.
The numerous lights and buttons on the control panel were all blinking rapidly, small green and yellow and red bulbs flashing back and forth like an alarm, all with obscure, heavily abbreviated labels she had no hope of reading. Under the light, Fluttershy easily found the keyhole and the red button Lisa had been trying to use before. She put the key in the hole and turned it. The emergency shutdown button lit up, glowing a bright, angry red.
There was the sound of footsteps behind her, and she heard hooves landing on the hard metal floor outside. She had only moments.
She pressed the button.
For a brief moment, everything turned bright blue as the entire engine filled with lightning at once.
A moment later, Fluttershy’s vision cleared.
The turbine was slowing. In almost imperceptible increments, the turbine was starting to wind down.
The tumult outside had dropped into a sudden silence.
The turbine turned one last revolution and came to a stop. Sporadic lightning leapt from the turbine to the engine’s walls, but it looked drained, exhausted; there was none of the same energy it had had when the engine had been running.
There was a resounding thump as all the assassins in the room collapsed.
Outside, Rainbow Dash howled in frustration and rage.
Something flew into the booth and slammed her right into the control panel, hard.
Her head rang. All she saw was something blue in front of her, something that swam in her vision before it resolved into Rainbow Dash raising a hoof.
The blow came down hard, right under her eye, and Fluttershy cried out in pain. She felt blood trickling down her cheek where Rainbow’s hoof had cut the skin.
“What do you think you’re doing? He told me not to let you touch those controls!” Rainbow’s rage was a palpable thing, twisting her face like Fluttershy had never seen before. “Just give up! You can’t fly. You can’t fight. Why do you keep causing trouble for me!” Rainbow Dash lifted a hoof to hit her again.
The hoof sparked.
Rainbow froze in horror.
“Oh no. No. Oh no…” Rainbow took a step back, holding her hoof up and staring at it.
The hoof began to twitch. Small bursts of lightning were gathering around it, small at first but rapidly gathering power.
“No, no! It’s not my fault, it’s not my fault, blame her, blame – ”
The spark exploded all around her.
Rainbow Dash screamed. She threw herself away from Fluttershy, skidding out of the booth and into the open space around the engine. Lightning was surging out of her and encasing her body, and the blue pegasus writhed under it until it burst, blasting away the color of her coat and mane. Underneath it was an articulated metal shell of a pegasus, lying on its side. The only thing unchanged were her magenta eyes.
The Rainbow infiltrator stared at something past Fluttershy, her eyes wide with confusion and terror. “No,” she said. “No! Don’t leave me alone!”
“What?” Fluttershy said.
The Rainbow infiltrator’s eyes snapped back to focus on Fluttershy. “Get back! Get back!” She backed away in a panic, almost tripping over her hooves.
The world flickered.
Rainbow turned and ran. She bolted past the crates between herself and the nearest door. The door disappeared just before Rainbow shot through it, falling into a crack in the ground leading to non-existence.
Fluttershy blinked. Wait, what?
The world shook under her hooves. The building groaned. A nearby platform twisted and fell, and was swallowed up by a shard of black unreality that had formed in the air between the wall and the turbine. As Fluttershy watched, another piece of existence splintered away. Another platform popped loose from the engine, hanging from the bolts attaching it to the walls.
Little Ball was on the ground next to the overturned basket, where Fluttershy had dropped it after being tackled by Rainbow Dash. It was staring around, trying to see what was happening. Fluttershy grabbed the basket. “Little Ball, get in. We need to go!”
Little Ball shook itself out of the astonishment it was in, and climbed into the basket. Fluttershy grabbed it and flew as fast as she could.
Everyone in the engine room was long gone. The building groaned again; the structure of the factory was collapsing as walls and supports suddenly ceased to be. Fluttershy bolted down the corridor she had come in through as she tried to mentally retrace all the steps she had taken to come in.
The ceiling in front of her buckled and caved, falling down into the corridor with an ear-splitting CLANG. Fluttershy coughed, holding a hoof up to her face to block the dust. As the dust settled she saw that a large piece of machinery had fallen through the ceiling, blocking the hallway ahead of her. She looked up to see if she could fly into the story the machine had fallen from. Up above, several stories above her, she saw the orange glow of the sky.
Fluttershy flew upwards, keeping her eyes focused on the patch of sky above her. The contents of the stories she was flying past flashed by her; half an assembly line dropping half-finished components into nothingness, a floor cracking and shattering like a struck mirror, vats spewing green and gray smoke.
She burst out into the open, the wide expanse of the outside feeling liberating after so long. Underneath her, the factory had already half-sunken into the ground. Parts of the building were shot through with nothingness, and the ground was cracked as if an earthquake had broken it. Chasms dropped into nothingness, and parts of the sky were missing, leading towards a swirling nothingness that held no color.
In the distance Fluttershy saw three black dots approaching, and she flew down into the walls and buildings that surrounded the factory. She ran, trying to put as much distance between herself and the factory as she could.
As she drew close to the outskirts of Tacoma, three huge aerials, each as big as two airships, flew overhead. Each of them was carrying a wagon-like metal box beneath them.
As the aerials flew into Tacoma, beams of lightning shot from them, surging into the factory. Fluttershy felt the ground right itself underneath her, and she suddenly breathed deeper, as if the air and her chest had been freed from a tension she hadn’t been aware of. She looked at the sky and saw that the shards of nothingness were beginning to shutter closed. Megiddo was repairing the reality here. Fluttershy guessed that after that he would move out to find who had done this.
Fluttershy kept her head down and hurried north, away from Tacoma, back towards Downtown and the Industrial District.
They stopped for the night in the basement of an old, crumbling house. It was a larger house, sitting by itself on its own block, and it was made from wood and carpet instead of the uniform stone that the apartments had been made out of. Fluttershy wondered how the house had come to be in this world.
She didn’t know if anyone else had made it out of Tacoma. Almost none of the others she had met there, the albinos or the orphans, had shown any ability to fly.
Fluttershy found a box of matches and some birthday candles inside a kitchen cabinet. She lit three of them: one for Maxwell, one for the disc, and one for Lisa. It wasn’t much of a memorial, but it was all she could do.
She thought about what Maxwell had said to her. He had been trying to tell her what the city was, then had mentioned something called a bardo, and then had told her about Mania. He wouldn’t have talked about them in that order unless they were connected. Rainbow Dash had said that the dimensional engine that had kept the fabric of Tacoma’s reality from falling apart ran on Mania. Was a bardo a place that needed Mania?
She ate a can of vegetables with the help of the last light of the day, while Little Ball worried at one of their two remaining glass cylinders. After that, she sat and watched the candles burn down until she and Little Ball had fallen asleep.
Fluttershy awoke when the dawn’s light shone into the basement through a small, narrow window that was just above ground level. She yawned and sat up. Little Ball was still asleep in the wicker basket. Fluttershy quietly opened her map and sat in front of it, thinking about what to do next.
The house they were in was a mile outside of Tacoma, and she wasn’t sure Megiddo wouldn’t send assassins to search around Tacoma once they had cleaned up the factory. They needed to put distance between themselves and Tacoma. But which way could they go?
Her eyes caught on the marked building with the snake that was near Downtown. It had to have been marked for a reason. Hopefully it wouldn’t be the same reason the Industrial Distract had been marked.
Fluttershy sat down on the ground and looked at the sky as she waited. The orange light didn’t quite reach all of the basement, and one of the far corners was still dark. She didn’t hear any footsteps outside, which was good.
There was a series of quick ticking noises, and Fluttershy looked up. Little Ball was waking up and stretching.
“Good morning,” Fluttershy said. “Did you sleep well?”
Little Ball nodded.
“I’m glad to hear it,” she said. “We’re going back up north, to here.” She put a hoof on snake building. “Do you know anything about there?”
Little Ball shook its head. It usually stayed near the center of Downtown instead of wandering north. It did seem to recall that there seemed to be more humans around there than in other places it had been, but it wasn’t sure.
“Thank you,” she said to it. Maybe the humans knew a way past whatever Megiddo had done to lock up the city, if they came from regular Seattle all the time. “We’ll go there, then.”
They headed north, flowing low to stay in cover behind the buildings. It was clear flying until they came close to the edge of the Industrial District again.
The guard had increased. Patrols of three now walked the streets around the Industrial District.
Flocks of aerials flew in circles over the black walls. Behind them a giant aerial that looked as big as a train car hovered, with metal arrows attached to the wings. They must have come out in force after what had happened in Tacoma. Fluttershy was giving them a wide berth when she saw the aerials forming up near one of the walls around the Industrial District.
Something was flying in rapid circles just before them, winging back and forth, trying to gain distance. Bolts of lightning cut through the air past the thing that the aerials were chasing. It spun, and Fluttershy saw the profile of spread pegasus wings.
Fluttershy gasped. “We have to help!” she said to Little Ball. She turned and flew towards the pegasus, flying low to stay behind the buildings.
Above her, the pegasus was slowly but steadily pulling away from the aerials, spinning left and right to dodge the bolts. Fluttershy changed course, trying to get ahead of them so she could try to signal the pegasus once they had gotten away.
The other pegasus was almost out of reach of the aerial’s weapons when a bolt whizzed right past her. There was a shower of sparks and a familiar-sounding scream, and the pegasus spiraled down behind a building nearby. The aerials zoomed over the spot where the pegasus had gone done; their speed had caused them to overshoot it.
Fluttershy put on an extra burst of speed and flew down the street, taking a turn around the last building that was between her and the pegasus.
The pegasus was sprawled out in the street. Her coat was an odd orange-black color, and something about her form rang a bell. She was still, and Fluttershy trotted towards her. As she got closer, Fluttershy realized that the coat wasn’t actually orange; it was a dark metal that was partially reflecting the sky above.
It was the infiltrator Rainbow Dash.
Fluttershy skidded to a stop next to the body. The other pegasus was still lying there, on her side, wings limp around her. Her eyes were closed. A large section of her left side had been destroyed, as if something inside the pegasus’s body had exploded outwards. Through the wound, Fluttershy could see something steadily beating inside of the pegasus: a dark chrome heart.
Fluttershy looked at the pegasus.
She…wasn’t sure what she should do.
It didn’t seem like the infiltrator was on the same side as Megiddo anymore. But she had attacked Fluttershy, had hurt her, had ordered others to attack her and lured her into a trap.
On the other hoof, seeing anybody like this…
In the distance the aerials were banking, coming back around. Fluttershy needed to do something fast.
Fluttershy remembered that when they had been attacked in the underground train station, she had grabbed the arms of one of the assassins, but they hadn’t been hurt. At the time she had realized that they had been protected from her touch because they had been built in the city, by Megiddo.
If fake Rainbow Dash was built here by Megiddo, would she be protected too?
There was an open doorway nearby, leading into what Fluttershy guessed might have been the back of a restaurant. Fluttershy flew inside and put the basket with Little Ball down. “Stay here,” she said, and then flew back out.
Fluttershy wrapped her forelegs around the infiltrator’s body. The metal was warm to the touch, like a tin can that had been left in the sun, and she smelled like oil. Fluttershy dragged her into the restaurant just before the aerials flew back overhead, the buzzing noise they made rising to a high pitch before rapidly dropping down as they faded away.
They needed to get some distance from here, before reinforcements arrived to search the area. “I can’t carry the basket and her at the same time,” Fluttershy said to Little Ball. “Let me put the basket in my backpack.”
Little Ball nodded and climbed out of the basket, although its eye was on the body in Fluttershy’s arms. It ticked out a quick question. What was Fluttershy doing?
“I’m…not sure,” she said. “The right thing, I hope.” She picked up the basket, put it into her backpack, and poked her head out the door.
The sky was clear, for the moment. Fluttershy put her legs around the infiltrator again and pulled her out into the street. The body made an uncomfortable scraping noise whenever Fluttershy pulled on it, and she winced in sympathy. Hopefully that didn’t hurt too much.
Fluttershy couldn’t move quickly at all with the body. They only made it two buildings down before she heard the buzz of approaching aerials again.
They were in front of what looked like another apartment building, this one taller and narrower than the ones in Downtown. The door was ajar, and Fluttershy pulled the body through and closed the door. The ground floor of the building was a big empty space with an overturned couch and some fallen shelves in it, with the stairs at the back of the room.
Fluttershy made it to the stairwell before she heard metal footsteps stomping in the street. She put the body down at the foot of the stair and looked around for something to make it safer. A bookcase had fallen at an angle against the wall, and she pushed it upright and pulled it in front of the stairs before dropping behind them.
The footsteps outside continued. Fluttershy could faintly hear the buzzing of the aerials through the ceiling.
There were footsteps out front, and the front door creaked open. She didn’t dare look.
An assassin’s lamp danced across the walls above them. Fluttershy held her breath. Little Ball crouched as low as it could.
The footsteps turned and kept going down the street.
After several long minutes, the footsteps and buzzing faded away.
Fluttershy sighed in relief. She looked down at the body at her feet. She would have to take her somewhere else, further away from the Industrial District. It was going to take a long time, though; it would be nice if the infiltrator could move a bit by herself to help out.
The body groaned.
Fluttershy jumped. Little Ball leapt up and skittered around behind Fluttershy, and she heard a faint tick as it leaned over to look around her.
After a second, when the initial shock had worn off, she bent down towards the infiltrator to look at her. The infiltrator moved slightly, one wing twitching and rolling the body slightly further onto her side. Her magenta eyes blinked open.
“Wha...?” she said, her eyes moving slowly over the ceiling above her. Then her vision passed over Fluttershy, and her eyes snapped towards the yellow pegasus.
“Oh no, not you, not you again, oh no oh no get me out of here!”
The infiltrator jumped to her feet, spun, and ran right into the metal shelves that were blocking the stairwell. She was knocked back with an “oof!”, and she sat down heavily on her flank, dazed.
“It's okay,” Fluttershy said. “I'm not going to hurt you. Are you all right?”
“What? No, no I'm not all right! How could you...” The infiltrator made a sobbing sound, and brought a hoof up to her eyes.
Fluttershy hesitated, then stepped forward and put her forelegs around the infiltrator in a hug.
The metal pegagus stiffened as if expecting a blow, but slowly relaxed. Fluttershy held her for a minute before letting go. “Are you feeling better?”
“I...I guess...a bit,” the infiltrator said.
“That's good,” Fluttershy said. “Could you tell me what you were doing? I saw the aerials chasing you.”
The infiltrator glared at her. “Why did you help me?”
Fluttershy blinked at the question. “I’m sorry?”
“The last thing I remember was falling down. Now I’m here.” The infiltrator stood up, snapping her wings out. “You pulled me out of there. I wanna know why you helped me.”
“I…” Fluttershy began. “I saw you lying there. I knew that if I left you there they’d find you, and probably hurt you. I didn’t want that to happen.”
The metal pegagus stared at her for a long moment, judging her. Fluttershy leaned back slightly, away from her.
“Fine,” the other pegagus finally said. She sat down, letting her wings fold back down again. “I believe you. Because that is the kind of thing you’d do.” She sighed. “What were you asking again?”
“I wanted to know why you were trying to get into the Industrial District.”
“Well…” The infiltrator fidgeted. “I thought that he'd understand, it was just a mistake back in Tacoma, it wasn't my fault...” The infiltrator sniffled. “But he didn't! He didn't care! I couldn't even get close to where he was before they started shooting at me, I just...” She lowered her head.
“It's okay,” Fluttershy said. “You're safe now.”
The infiltrator humphed and looked away.
Fluttershy wondered what to do with her. Now that she'd rescued the infiltrator, she felt she had an obligation to at least not hurt her. If they parted ways here, it wouldn't be that bad. The infiltrator could take care of herself, probably, and maybe if she could prove to herself that she wasn't helpless and lost that would be helpful.
On the other hand, leaving her alone, even after she had been an enemy in the past, felt...wrong.
“Why don't you come with us?” Fluttershy said.
The infiltrator's head snapped back up. “What? No! Why would I want to travel with you lame jerks? I can do fine on my own.”
“I don’t think there’ll be too many people who are going to be friendly to you,” Fluttershy said. “Megiddo isn’t going to help you, and I think if any albinos saw you they would just attack you. I won’t, though.”
“I'll be fine,” the infiltrator said. But she was mumbling, and looked back down at the ground as she said it.
“Do you really want to be by yourself?” Fluttershy asked. Her intuition told her that the infiltrator wasn’t used to being alone; she had always had the assassins or Megiddo to help her. If she had been built specifically to deal with Fluttershy, the infiltrator might never have had to be alone before in her short life.
“Well, I…” The infiltrator scuffed a line in the dust with a front hoof. Fluttershy waited.
“Fine,” she finally said. “Just for now, though.”
“Oh, thank you so much!” Fluttershy threw her forelegs around the infiltrator’s neck in a hug. The other pegasus leaned back, but otherwise didn’t try to pull Fluttershy off of her herself. “I’ll be really nice, I promise.” Fluttershy pulled back and sat back down. As she did so, another question occurred to her. “What should I call you? I mean, you’re not the Rainbow Dash I knew in Equestria…I hope you don’t mind my saying that.”
“Really? Everyone else called me Rainbow Dash in the past. And I feel like Rainbow Dash.” The infiltrator crossed her forelegs.
Fluttershy considered that. She did sound kind of like Rainbow Dash, and the body language was the same, but at the same time she simply wasn’t Rainbow Dash.
“Infiltrator Dash?” she finally said.
“What? What kind of lame name is that? ‘Infiltrator Dash?’”
“Well, I don’t have any other ideas…” Fluttershy looked away, embarrassed. “Do you have any?”
“Yeah, I should totally be called Rainbow Dash! Because I’m totally her.”
Fluttershy looked at the other pegasus’s metal body and exposed beating heart. “Um…”
“What?” said the other pegasus. She bent her head around to see where Fluttershy was looking. “Okay, I guess that’s different. But I’m still Dash!”
“Um…” Fluttershy tried to think of another name. “Dash 2?”
“Dash 2? Hmm…” the other pegagus said, trying out the name. “Dash 2…” She thought for a moment. “Dash version 2. Dash v2. Like Dash, but better. I like it.” She smiled. “Dash, but better!”
“All right. I’ll call you Dash v2 then.”
“All right! That sounds awesome.” Dash v2 jumped to her hooves. “So, now what?”
“We should probably go somewhere further away from the Industrial District,” Fluttershy said, looking around and listening for more footsteps. “And then I was hoping I could ask you what to knew about a few things.”
* * *
Fifteen minutes later, they were in the kitchen of what had apparently been a small restaurant. Much of the equipment were rusting hulks and the door to what could only have been the cold room was missing, but the window in the back door was still clear enough for them to see out of.
When the three of them had sat down (with Little Ball still keeping a cautious eye on Dash v2), Fluttershy pulled out the pouch with the glass cylinders. “You must be hungry. Did you want one?”
Dash v2 shook her head. “No, I don’t need that. I mean, I could eat it if it I wanted, but I don’t have to because I’m ide…idio…idiosomething-compatible. Whatever. It means that as long as I stay in the city, I don’t have to eat.”
Fluttershy wasn’t sure how that worked, but it didn’t sound like Dash v2 would know. “All right then.” Fluttershy put the pouch away.
Dash v2 shifted where she was sitting. “So what’d you want to know?”
Fluttershy went over her mental list of things she still didn’t have answers to. “That white circular gate, the one I was looking for. You said it wasn’t in Tacoma. Do you know where it is now?”
“Yeah, it’s in the Industrial District. In his central laboratory, like right next to him or something.”
“What?!” She couldn’t get past that huge blockade! There were so many of them, she’d never sneak past them all! She should have guessed it would be in the most heavily fortified place in the city.
Dash v2 shrugged. “What? Did you think it was going to be somewhere else? That’s where I’d put it.”
Fluttershy’s ears drooped. She couldn’t believe it. How could she get back to Equestria now?
There had to be a way in. There had to be. She had to think of a way in.
Fluttershy thought over what she knew about Megiddo’s military, trying to remember if there was some weakness she could use. Assassins, walls, aerials, infiltrators…
“I have a few questions. Is it okay if I ask them?”
“Sure, go ahead.”
“I think he locked the access corridors so nobody could go to regular Seattle with them. Is that right?”
Dash v2 nodded. “Yeah.”
“How did he do that? Is there a way to open the doors?”
“The lock generator’s also in the Industrial District. I’m not sure where it is, but it’s probably pretty well guarded.”
Oh, not that too. She had been hoping she could turn off the lock, get to the other Seattle, and see if the humans would help her. She needed another approach.
“Why didn’t he put the gate in his lab and have the assassins take me right there?” she asked. “I wouldn’t have been able to get out if he had.”
Dash v2 shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe it wouldn’t work if it was right next to him? He didn’t tell me much about the gate.”
“Oh.” Maybe another question would get something helpful. “Tacoma seemed like a strange place to put a trap like that. There was such a big and important machine right there. What if someone else before me had tried what I did?”
“I’m not sure. He had a plan, I guess. Maybe.” She scratched her head.
“Well…all right then.” Um. What next? “If Megiddo could make infiltrators, why did he send soldiers to get me? He could have sent infiltrators instead and done it much more quietly.”
Dash v2 shrugged again. “I dunno. I just followed orders. I didn’t know the whole deal.”
“Hmm…” She was asking all the wrong questions. Fluttershy decided to try another angle.
“Who is Megiddo?” Fluttershy thought about what she'd seen so far in this place, and decided to amend the question a little. “And what is Megiddo? If you don't mind my putting it that way.”
“I dunno. I never actually saw him.”
“But…” Fluttershy had no idea how that could possibly work. “But if you never saw him, how could he give you orders?”
“We didn’t need to see him. He would just…kind of be in our heads, and you would just know what he wanted you to know. I don't know if he actually talks like that or if he could just do that because he built us.”
“What did having him in your head feel like?”
“It’s really hard to describe.” Dash v2 rubbed her chin. “He didn’t talk. He was just there.. I guess the best way to put it was that he was bright. Really bright, like the sun.”
Fluttershy remembered something Maxwell had said. “Do you know what Illumination is, then?”
“Know what’s what now?” Dash v2 looked at Fluttershy in confusion.
“Um, never mind.” That hadn’t been so bad. Maybe she was getting the hang of what kind of questions would get useful answers. “Can you tell me what he did tell you about me, then?”
“Yeah, sure. He wants the Elements of Harmony. He’s got a plan to get them, and you’re part of it.”
“But…!” How could that work? “The Elements are protected by Princess Celestia’s magic! He can’t get to them!”
Dash v2 shook her head. “Don’t you remember what happened during Shining Armor’s and Princess Cadence’s wedding? Princess Celestia told the six of you to go to Canterlot Tower by yourselves to get the Elements. So you can get inside.”
“But…but…” Fluttershy groped for something to argue with.
“You saw them, right?” Dash v2 said. “In the dimensional viewing room? I know we set it up for you to find, and the last screen had the Elements of Harmony in Canterlot Tower.”
“Well…yes…”
“So there’s your proof. We can still look inside even with the spells Princess Celestia put on the tower, so we can get inside too.”
Oh no. Oh no. “I…But why does he want them?”
“I don’t know.”
Fluttershy closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She needed to figure out what to do next. She needed to focus.
Something touched her shoulder, and Fluttershy opened her eyes. Dash v2 had just poked her in the shoulder.
“Look, you’re not going to get the gate back from right under his nose like that, so you’re going to have to work something out. I’ve got an idea for that: the Lemurians.”
“The Lemurians?” Fluttershy said.
“Yeah, them. You know about them?”
“I heard that they were the ones who brought Megiddo here.”
“Yeah. He was supposed to be working for them, but when things went all kablooey in 1962 he stopped listening to them. They’ve been trying to get him back under their control since then.”
“1962?”
“Huh? Oh, right, you’re not from here, you wouldn’t know. It’s the year 2012 in Seattle right now. This city wasn’t all wrecked before 1962 come along. The Lemurians were doing something to this place, something that was supposed to make it better, but they messed it up. After that all they had left was one base in here, connected to their main base in Seattle.”
Fluttershy did her best to process this. “If they didn’t do so well, then why are we going to talk to them?”
“Because they’re always looking for more of Megiddo’s technology. He started making his own stuff instead of using their designs when he split, and they think that if they understand enough of it they can take the city back. I’m Megiddo’s technology, so they’d ooh and ahh all over me and we can ask them for anything we want. If I knew where the Lemurian base was, I could take us there. I think Megiddo knew where they were, but he never told me.”
Fluttershy remembered what Little Ball had said about humans who came and took things away. “Are the Lemurians humans?”
“Yeah, they are. Why?”
“Well, I heard that humans sometimes come to this city to take things…”
“Yeah, that’s probably them looking for more stuff to study. Why?”
Fluttershy fidgeted instead of answering. “Um, do you mind if I just talk to Little Ball about this for just a minute?”
Dash v2 shrugged. “Yeah, all right I guess.”
Little Ball had been sitting off to the side, watching the two pegasi talk. Fluttershy took a few steps back into a corner, and Little Ball followed her.
Fluttershy leaned down towards Little Ball. “I’m not sure this is a good idea,” Fluttershy whispered. “What do you think?”
Little Book shook its head. It didn’t like this, and it still wasn’t sure having Dash v2 with them was a good idea. They should play it safe and get rid of her.
“But where? And how?” Fluttershy said. “We need another idea. Let me check something.”
Fluttershy got back up and turned towards Dash v2. “I was going here,” Fluttershy said. She pulled out the map and pointed at the snake building.
Rainbow Dash leaned forward to look at where Fluttershy was pointing. “Oh, hey, that’s the Lemurian symbol! Awesome! Where’d you get this?”
“I…I found it. Um. I need another moment please.” Fluttershy trotted back to where Little Ball was. “Do you have any more ideas?” she whispered.
Little Ball looked at the map, tracing a leg helplessly along the street lines before looking back up at her and shaking its head.
Fluttershy couldn’t think of anything else. “We’ll just have to be careful when we get there,” she whispered. She looked back up at Dash v2. “All right,” she said. “We’ll follow you to the Lemurians.”
“Awesome!” Dash v2 jumped into the air. “This’ll be great! Come on, I don’t want to be wandering at night when we’ve got a place we can crash at. Let’s go.” She pushed the back door open and was out.
Fluttershy and Little Ball looked at each other, before Fluttershy folded up the map and they followed Dash v2 out.
