A gentle breeze wafted through the city of Coltton, scattering a few discarded cups and napkins and sending them clattering along the cobblestone pathways like urban tumbleweeds. The sun had just started to rise, casting faint yet massive shadows all over the city, a thin blanket left from the night before. Eventually, the breeze shifted the twisted ruin of the banner from the day before, hanging on by one corner, the other having snapped sometime in the previous night while every human and pony was busy with drunken carousing and slurred renditions of nineties pop songs.

Uris picked his way through the wreckage left by the party: a hung-over pony in a lampshade here, an overturned water barrel there. He moved slowly, his gaze downcast, not quite as badly as it had been in that moment when he’d looked down at Ramirez and Webb’s rocks with a pair of scissors in his hand, but still with a taste of that same gait. Like a condemned man traipsing to the chair.

He reached the town’s square, easy to find thanks to the steady stream of ponies trotting towards it (those who were still sober enough to stand, that is). A lump rose in his throat at the sight of the Princesses, his father, and the six wonderful mares that were about to trot out of his life forever.

“Heh, trot,” he mused quietly. Less than a week in Equestria, and he was using horse puns. God forbid if he ever stayed here longer.

As if he’d ever have the chance…

Suddenly, a sob rose in his throat, tears rising in his eyes. Choking both back, the pilot threw himself into the closest alleyway and collapsed against a wall, sinking to his knees in the filth that seemed to gather in every alley in every city, no matter how clean or new the city supposedly was. He rammed a fist into his mouth, holding back the sob welling up from his gut. His crutch clattered onto the cobblestone next to him. His breath came in short, violent gasps, cut-off into little whistles by the ceremonial uniform glove on his hand. How in the hell could he possibly be expected to walk right out there, in front of all those civvies, and keep a big, shit-eating smile on his face all the way until…

“Airman? Are you alright?”

Uris swallowed another sob and looked up. The man in the leather jacket was standing there, gazing down at the pilot with his brows hunched in concern. The demigod stooped to his knees and offered a hand up. “I’m fine,” Uris insisted, brushing the hand aside and pushing himself to his feet.

The demigod sighed and stood up alongside him, just in time to receive a full-on salute. “Oh, goddammit, you are just like your dad, you know that!?” Michael groaned with a roll of his eyes.

“I’ll take that as a compliment, sir,” the pilot replied with a smart little smile: a thin mask for the pain that so obviously lay underneath. Michael didn’t need to be a demigod to see that.

“Hey kid, cheer on up,” the demigod clapped the pilot on the shoulder as his hand descended. “You don’t owe anybody that steak dinner anymore!”

The pilot paused at that, considering for a second. “Yeah, I guess I-“perhaps it was the way Michael grabbed his hand, or perhaps it was the little non-sequitur, but suddenly something clicked in the pilot’s mind. “Hold the damn phone, how did you know about that!?”

The demigod took a few steps back at the outburst, the soles of his sneakers scraping against the cobblestone. “I-uh…must have…”

“No,” the pilot shook his head as it swam, colors dancing in front of his eyes, morphing and condensing into shapes, like clouds on a clear summer’s day. Only these shapes actually had meaning, not just whatever popped into your head while you were looking up. “No, you were there! You were in the Chinook!”

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Uris wrestled with the safety harness, his stomach wrenching violently with each fresh turn of the chopper. Each little gust tossed the massive, American-made hunk of steel around like a child’s toy in a bathtub. Bannon had just been thrown out, and thank God for that. At least one of them was going to survive this. The pilot probably wouldn’t be joining the Marine, but hey, he wasn’t the “give-up and give-in” type. Vances rarely were. No, if death wanted him, it would have to drag him to the grave, kicking and screaming like a child in a full-on temper tantrum the entire way.

The rotors screamed and whined against the forces lashing at the chopper, signaling that it was minutes away from giving up the fight against gravity. The pilot felt a cold knot twist in his stomach, and not just from the constant, angry bucking of the machine. This was it, wasn’t it? He could rip and tear at the harness all he wanted, but he was going to die here, wasn’t he?

“Sorry, pop,” he muttered under his breath, giving the strap one last good yank. “Charlie, I’m comin’.”

White light flooded the cockpit, consuming the windshield. “That must be it,” he figured, closing his eyes against the flash. It still shone through his eyelids, turning the inside of his eyes that bright red color you get when you stare up into the sun and shut your eyes against its light, as if the light itself were telling him there was no possible way to get away from it. He let out a frightened gasp. He’d heard of the light at the end of the tunnel before, though he’d expected more of a tunnel before he ran into it. But hey, maybe the angels would come floating on down from heaven to collect him soon.

“Airman!” A voice barked in front of him. Uris cracked his eyes open, expecting to see some blonde-haired beauty with white, feathery wings, basking in the light with a single, perfect hand outstretched for him to take. What he got was a dude in a beaten-up brown leather jacket and a greased-up hairdo that made him look like he’d be right at home on the set of Grease.

“Huh, you’re a funny-lookin’ angel.” He muttered.

“And you’re a funny-lookin’ guy to be saving Equestria, but we work with the cards we’re dealt.” The man replied dryly, his voice ringing out clearly despite the whipping rain and howling wind. Behind him, the light faded away into nothingness, leaving spots in the dazzled pilot’s eyes.

“Hold on…I heard you, and you heard me,” the pilot gasped. “How’s that possible!? Without that windshield, we should…”

“Pilot, you’re in a crippled whirlybird a few thousand feet above the surface of an alien world, dontcha think you have more important things to worry about right now?”

“Okay, point,” the pilot’s hands returned to his seatbelt, still fumbling with the straps. “Sir, I don’t know whatcha think you’re doin’ here…or, even how in the hell it’s possible…butcha gotta get out! This thing’s goin’ down, and it’s gonna take anyone inside with it!”

Despite the obvious desperation of the situation, the man in the leather jacket smiled easily, like a father looking down at the big red A+ on his son’s first math test. Same amount of pride, same amount of eagerness. “Gotta admit, I had my doubts about you, but that settled every single one of them.”

“What!?” The pilot shouted, even though it was obvious they could hear each other, maelstrom and howling alarms off the dash or not.

“Self-sacrifice! You’re so willing to throw everything away for the sake of others, though you do cherish your own life. That’s quite the rare trait, even amongst your fellow soldiers.” The man explained calmly, using a tone Uris recognized immediately from years of studying high school textbooks. A bit rougher around the edges, yeah, but that same professorial trait of great intelligence was there.

The pilot stared back at the man in the leather jacket. “What the fuck are you?” He asked. He’d meant to say who, of course, but apparently Dr. Freud’s old love-child just underneath the human consciousness had other ideas.

The man in the leather jacket just smiled even more deeply. “I dive into a whirlybird at five-thousand feet, and you’re only now asking that question? Man, you are gonna be tons of fun!”

Without warning, and with an almost childlike glee, the man gripped Uris by the front of his uniform and tore him out of his seat, the straps that had held him so securely before now falling away like a future beauty queen’s dress on prom night. Fat load of good that damn thing was, he mused as the man tossed him over his shoulder. There when I need it to be gone, and gone when I’m being dragged off by a maniac in the middle of the night!

The man in the leather jacket carried the pilot right over to the open hatch at the back of the chopper, stopping with the toes of his sneakers hanging just over the edge. Below them, the wind continued to whip the clouds up into a boiling soup right beneath their feet, that eerie, green lightning flashing almost constantly. “Okay, you ready!?” He shouted, though his voice was still as clear as ever.

“Wait, what!? How’re we supposed to jump without chutes!?” The pilot screamed right back, still debating with himself whether to try and knee the man in the face, praise God that the guy had shown up, or pray for deliverance from the oddly-powerful grip of an obvious maniac.

“Oh, right! Damn! You need one of those!” The man smacked his palm against his forehead, as if the basic principles of gravity had simply slipped his mind, before turning back into the chopper, grabbing the emergency chute from besides the pilot’s seat (stowed their courtesy of Boeing for when things went really tits-up) and turning back towards the gaping maw of the rear entryway. He crossed the floor of the chopper in a few, quick leaps, the rear hatch now looking more like some horrifying monster sent to gobble men up than ever before, and all the while Uris could only think how in the hell it was possible that a man could run across a metal floor, made slick by rain and perhaps just a bit of puke, with another full-grown man on his shoulder, all in a chopper bucking around hard enough to make a rodeo clown’s head spin, without so much as stumbling.

Then reality snapped back in like the cold, hard bitch that she was and smacked him across the face, alerting him to the fact that he was being carried by a madman towards the edge of a drop that had to be a good mile-long, probably more, through a storm that had just ripped an armor-coated piece of American military machinery to shreds. “Woah, wait! Waitwaitwaitwait…” he called, as if ‘wait’ was a magic word that could knock the sanity back into the other man’s head, or at least make him release his grip on the pilot. The man didn’t even slow down. Without so much as a pause, Mister Greased-Up-Hair took a flying leap right out the hatch, that childlike glee still frozen in his eyes.

For the first few moments, Uris’s brain couldn’t even process what had just happened. The thought of plummeting from thousands of feet in the air was just too much for his tiny, human mind to process all at once. He didn’t even notice as the man in the leather jacket tossed back his head and let loose with a good-hearted, boisterous laugh, rather than the kind you’d expect from some lunatic in an asylum. The laugh actually went a ways towards offering some comfort to the pilot, acting as an anchor for his mind to catch up to what was happening.

“Jesus H!” He screamed as they plunged towards the cloud, a flash of lightning highlighting the utter terror in his face. “Holy Jesus tittyfucking Christ!”

“No need to shout,” the man in the leather jacket said simply, that damned, childish grin latched onto his face like a face-hugger from that “Aliens” movie Uris had seen when he was younger and feeding a developing boyhood crush on Sigourney Weaver. “I am right here after all.”

“That’s part of the fucking problem!” Uris screamed in a sudden moment of lucidity just before the clouds rushed up to greet them. The pilot’s eyes wrenched shut, certain that the moment in the helicopter when he first saw that light must have been a trial run for this: the actual final moments of his life.

“You might wanna open your eyes, kid: you’re missin’ one helluva view,” the man reported.

Despite every instinct screaming at him to ignore whatever the maniac had to say, Uris did as he was told and opened his eyes up to the tiniest little slits, the kind of squint kids use when they’re at their first slasher flick and Horny Teenager #3 just walked into the dark basement. Finally, his eyes shot open at the sight of a massive forest stretching from one horizon to the next. Trees, every bit as wild and scraggly as the ones he knew back home (though quite a bit more colorful), covered every square inch of what he could see, with little space in between for much besides the occasional woodland clearing. None of that surprised him though: what got him was how damned clear and well-lit the whole thing was. He had just been in the middle of the storm of the century, his drenched clothes and the few water drops dribbling off the ends of his boots could attest to that. So where was it!?

He turned his gaze upwards to a clear, pristine night sky, the moon shining brightly through it all. The stars gazed back down at him, filling his vision as they always had, as if to say ‘Hey man, lost track of you for a moment there, where’d you go?’ Even the helicopter was nowhere to be found. “What in the fuck?” He gasped.

“What’s wrong now?” The man in the leather jacket asked with an exaggerated sigh, the kind you save for a child that just asked its seventeenth question in a row.

“Whuh-where…” Uris asked, unable to even finish the question.

“The storm? Oh, well, I didn’t need it anymore, so I figured why not send it on its way?” The man explained simply and plainly.

The pilot looked down at the man holding him. “You!?”

“Yeah, storms take a lot of energy to sustain! Why would I keep that shit up if I didn’t need to anymore?”

Head spinning wildly, Uris shook himself, trying to regain something resembling sanity, something to bring himself back down into a world where men didn’t fly around, conjuring storms from nothing in worlds populated by magic, cartoon ponies. “Wh-why?” He managed to ask despite the hurricane of madness threatening to reach Category Five in his head.

“I had to getcha alone somehow, didn’t I?” The man replied matter-of-factly.

The pilot pressed a hand to his helmet and tried to ignore the part of him that wanted to know why: why they were drifting steadily to the ground even though the parachute was still packed up nice and tight in the man’s hand, why said man had just conjured up a storm for the sake of grabbing some unwitting American from his bird, and most of all, why any of this was happening to him. He figured the answers would snap whatever sanity he had left like a twig.

“Okay, once we hit, you’re gonna have a job to do!” The man called to him, still drifting like a leaf on the wind. “Just keep that in mind, and everything should work out just fine!”

Uris nodded, trying to drive the man’s words right out of his head, force them away from himself. Everything about this man was poison to his sanity, and right now he needed something to focus on, anything! Something normal, something astoundingly banal, something to find his focus again. He found the man’s feet, one clad in a filthy-looking, off-white sock, the other in a tattered sneaker.

“What happened to your shoe?” He asked innocently.

“Wha-oh shit, thanks!” The man suddenly dropped the pilot, shrugging him right off with a roll of his shoulders before taking off across the sky, flying away with his fists punched out in front of his body, Superman style. Of course, this left Uris with nothing between him and the ground.

“Waitwait-WAAAIIIIITTT!” The pilot called as gravity took over once again, the man a rapidly-fading silhouette in the distance. It was as if gravity had forgotten about the pilot as long as the man was there, and now that he was gone, it had finally realized that someone was not obeying the normal laws of physics like a good little boy. The pilot looked on in horror as the man in the leather jacket faded away, tossing something over his shoulder as an afterthought. The something rocketed right at the pilot as he picked up speed, the tops of the trees looking alarmingly close. It smashed into his chest, and out of instinct, the pilot wrapped his arms around it, like a mother holding her newborn infant to her chest. He knew just by the feel of it what it was: the parachute. There was still the matter of getting it on, though, normally a simple procedure when done with two feet steady on the floor of a chopper, not so much when one was speeding towards death from a few thousand feet in the air.

Twisting this way and that, he fumbled with the shoulder straps and managed to wiggle the parachute onto his body, holding it to his back with one hand while the other frantically tangled itself in the straps. Barely managing to swallow a burst of puke bubbling up from his stomach, Uris calmed himself in a way that could only come with years of training and months of experience in the cockpit. The little strap clicked home, informing him he was scot-free. Practically wetting himself out of sheer glee, the pilot reached towards the pack behind him and gave the ripcord a good yank, preparing himself for the sudden pull of the straps that would undoubtedly follow the chute’s deployment.

Nothing happened.

“Fuck. My. Life.” He announced.

Frantically, he gave the cord another pull, and another. “Fuck everything!” He screamed. Just when he thought he was as good as safe and about to drift right into a nice, save world, it all went straight to hell. Welp, at least he didn’t have to worry about being buried if he died here: without that chute, he’d hit the ground so hard he would dig his own grave.

There was a sound like an F-18 hitting Mach 2, and suddenly the man in the leather jacket appeared right in front of the pilot’s face. “And that’s enough of that!” He announced, knocking the pilot’s hand out of the way and seizing the ripcord. This time, the chute finally deployed, blossoming over Uris’ head like the most beautiful flower he’d ever seen.

This was wonderful, just perfect, he just had to handle one thing though: “Where in the hell did you go!?” He screamed.

“Jesus, no need to scream,” the man said, hanging off one of the straps with one hand while the other ran a finger around the inside of his ear. “I’m right here!”

“Oh, I’m sorry, was I too loud?” The pilot said with faux sympathy. “I meant to say where in the motherfucking shit-piss Christ fuck did you go!?”

“Had to get my shoe,” the man shrugged, pointing at his foot with his free hand, now notably clad in both a dirty, off-white sock and a twin to the raggedy sneaker on his other foot. The pilot gaped at him in absolute shock. The man in the leather jacket flashed him a cocky little half-smile. “Looks like it clobbered one of your buddies on the way down, though. Nailed him pretty hard on the head: I don’t even think he was awake anymore.”

“Oh my God, you’re insane,” the pilot said plainly. “You’re insane, and super-powerful, and I don’t know whether to beg for mercy, thank you for saving my life, or kick you in the jaw.”

“The middle one should suffice for our current predicament.” The man in the leather jacket shrugged. “Might wanna hurry, though: this is where I get off.”

“Okay, uh…” Uris searched for something to send this strange, obviously-powerful, hopefully-benevolent being off with. Eventually, he realized he just had to go with what the guy had suggested and stick with it: “Thanks.”

“No prob,” the man said. “But before I go, I need to make sure all the pieces aren’t made aware of the players’ motions.”

“What?”

“I dunno: it sounded like something my brother would say and I wanted to give it a try. Whaddya think: too vague?”

Uris hunched his eyebrows and stared as the man clambered up to eye-level with him, arms hooked in the shoulder straps. “Eh, probably. Whatever. It’s just something I wanna give a try,” the man sighed, looking away absentmindedly.

“What in the hell are you…”

Then the man smashed his forehead against the pilot’s own, and everything went dark, simple as that.

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Uris’s mouth gaped open. His arm levelled out in front of him, jabbing into Michael’s chest, right into the metal teeth of the zipper holding the leather jacket to his body. The pilot’s throat made a high-pitched, raspy sort of squeak, like a broken valve on a scuba tank.

“Airman?” Swarm shifted uncomfortably around the finger. “Seriously, couldja stop? You’re goin’ all Invasion of the Body Snatchers on me.”

“YOU!” The pilot announced.

“ME!” Michael replied, arms spreading out as if he were taking his final bows in a play.

“You did it! You downed my fucking chopper! You’re the one who did all of this!” The pilot screamed frantically, like a madman trying to convince the world that the lizard-people were, in fact, taking over.

“Yep!” Michael replied cheerily, taking a few steps back to clear the finger away from his chest. With a deft little twirl, he pulled his cigarette lighter and the never-ending box of smokes out of his pocket, nonchalantly lighting up as the pilot’s jaw wavered up and down, the high-pitched, squeaky sound still emitting from his throat.

“Hu-wha-ah…” he started, his brain misfiring in an attempt to simultaneously process the newly-reformed memory, decide whether to strangle the cocky little shit in front of him, or just admit sanity and logic no longer applied and head for the hills, stripping off his uniform and screaming about the mole-people stealing his cottage cheese the entire way.

“Ooh, nice try! Let’s shoot for a fully-formed word this time, eh?” Michael said, repeatedly flicking the lighter in an attempt to light it.

Uris swallowed, his hands clenching and unclenching every few seconds. He took a few, shaky breaths and levelled an icy glare on the man in the leather jacket. “Wh-why?” He finally managed.

“Well, how else was I going to make sure the Element Bearers were safe and sound? I couldn’t just leave them alone with a bunch of nutjobs, after all.” He replied, taking a break from lighting the cigarette to pat the pilot on the head. “And you did quite well, my friend. You performed quite spectacularly indeed.”

“All…all of it…” the past forty-eight hours flashed through the pilot’s mind: waking up in Fluttershy’s cottage, running through the forest with a squad of SS on his tail and the ponies by his side, teleporting to Coltton and beating up that one officer, the ensuing hunt for the Elements, the battle, Ramirez, his father, Miller, Bannon, the dome…all of it…all of it…impossible! It couldn’t be! Nobody could…nobody could…”

“All of it was meant to happen?” He gasped.

Michael smiled warmly as he gave the lighter one last flick, and the flame burst out of its top, glowing warmly and casting little, orange shadows over his face in the morning light. “You can look at it that way, if you choose. Personally, I think that would be wise. Might keep your sanity longer.”

“Y-you’re…” Uris leaned against the wall, still stunned. He shook his head, cradling it in his hands. There was only one thing he could do now, one thing he could possibly do to make it all right: he leaned back against the wall and smiled, letting loose with a few snickers as he looked up at the demigod. “You’re good.” He managed to say.

“Not just good, son,” Michael smiled as he held the cigarette up to the flame, taking a few, quick puffs and blowing a tiny smoke ring. Then, as Uris watched, the demigod took another puff and blew one little jet of smoke, which passed right through the center of the ring in a perfect bullseye. He grinned down at the pilot with a confident little half-smile. “The best.”

“I’m-uh,” the pilot shakily pressed himself to his feet. “I’m gonna go now. Should probably say goodbye to the ponies and everything.”

The cocky little smile faded off Michael’s face, a few wisps of smoke still curling around his features. “Yeah, that would be a good idea,” he said, his voice losing a few centuries of its old youth, becoming the rasp of an old man with the weight of all creation on his shoulders.

“You coming?”

“Naww, I need a few minutes to tie up a few loose ends. You go on ahead: I’ll catch up.” The man waved him off, and the pilot, still trembling with existential terror, nodded and stumbled out of the alleyway, disappearing into the large crowd gathering in the streets. Just one white-colored face in a sea of pastel.

The demigod watched for a while, then closed his eyes. “Alright, gang, daddy’s coming to check up on all of you,” he muttered, tilting his head back. He dropped the cigarette and crushed it underfoot, sighing once as he…