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1215 HOURS
30,000 FEET ABOVE SEA LEVEL
NORTH SEA, OFF THE COAST OF SCOTLAND
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The mushroom cloud bloomed like the fist of a vengeful god, terrible and foreboding even at this distance. Something inside it glowed with the heat of a thousand suns, a terrible energy being unleashed upon the unsuspecting world below. A deep rumble filled the air, humming with the explosion’s power. To David, it appeared as if the cloud was growing as slow as molasses, except he knew it had to be expanding at hundreds of miles an hour just for the motion he was seeing, punching into the sky at the speed of a rocket.

He wished he could tear his eyes away. He wished he could just turn around, close his eyes, and maybe even wake up from this nightmare. If only. As it stood, he couldn’t move a muscle, not even to crack that little kink developing in his upper back, he could only stand, transfixed by the incredible display of power before him. His eyelids seemed to be fused open as well, his pupils forever locked on the image blooming in his sight.

“God above…Christ alive…don’t tell me that’s her! Please, Jesus Christ almighty…” his radio garbled, clouding with static. David’s only response was to drop to his knees, a metallic clang coming from the ground as his legs hit. Somewhere nearby, someone started crying the Lord’s Prayer in between choked sobs, crying it out over and over again. Finally, as if a spell had been lifted, his eyes fell away from the massive, glowing column of smoke.

David fell to all fours, dry-heaving. The Dramamine in his bloodstream was the only thing keeping him from puking his guts out all over the flight deck. The water on the other side of the railing suddenly looked too glassy as it undulated beneath him, the world sliding in and out of focus as his mind reeled with each buck of the ship.

Just as something resembling coherent thought started to reappear in his mind, a deep whoosh sounded off to his right. He looked up, clutching his stomach as something burst out of the water and rocketed up into the sky, trailing smoke behind it. Then another whoosh and a splash, and another object punched up into the sky, and another, and another…

“This is it,” he gasped, and suddenly he wanted nothing more than to be sitting in his tiny living room again, a beer in one hand and a cheesy 90s action flick on his cheap television screen. That living room was so far away now, so very far away from the atomic detonations and the nuclear warheads sailing into the sky; but that’s where he wanted to be, as far as possible from this terror, from that mushroom cloud punching so high up that it might be destined to reach out and touch God, from the contrails of the missiles screaming into the air, and from the voices howling out his radio in panicked fright. This is how it all ends. Oh God, I’m sorry, this is it…this is it…this is…

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Dave jolted awake as the plane bumped in a spot of turbulence, a scream of terror lodged in his throat. His mind spun, but quickly settled when he remembered he was on an airplane in 2025, not…back there, back on that horrible day when the world changed forever, looking so much like it was going to end.

Something cold dribbled through his fingers, and he remembered the drink he’d made for himself before drifting off. “At least my arms didn’t spaz out or anything, thank God,” he mumbled, wiping the sweat from the glass off on his dress shirt.

Somewhere up ahead, the television screen glowed with flickering images, remote clenched firmly in the hands of David’s German counterpart. “A refugee crisis of unprecedented proportions,” a BBC newscaster announced, and on screen a massive column of people flowed into ferries waiting along the English Channel, just outside Dover, according to the caption along the bottom of the screen. Each of these people wore the worried, downtrodden look of the refugee as they packed themselves in tighter and tighter, trying to cram as many people on board each ship before they could set out. “Thousands of Britons fleeing the isles into France upon the emergence of a new Equestria! That’s right, you heard it here, a new-”

The screen flickered, Francis switching the channel to ABC, where a man with far too much hair gel picked right up where his British counterpart had left off from the safety of his broadcaster’s desk. “…and this with the reappearance of the asteroid Ceres V has some groups claiming this to be a sign of the end of…”

Another flicker, another channel, another announcer with fantastic cheekbones and enough botox in their face to kill an elephant. “…sources have confirmed that the anomaly is, in fact, yet another Equestria! The UN is already rushing a bill through to aid the beleaguered French and British as they prepare for what could be a repeat of the attack on-”

Another flicker. “…despite the panic gripping the British countryside, these men just south of Glasgow have decided to ride out the crisis in a local pub!”

For some reason, the screen dwelt on this one, the controller’s finger hovering over the power button. The view turned to a large man with a pint of Guinness in one hand and a Red Sox baseball cap perched high on his head. When he opened his mouth, it revealed his heavy Scottish accent, the massive gaps in his smile (a true testament to countryside dentistry, for sure) and his opinions on the apparent reemergence of one of the greatest threats mankind had ever faced: “I jus’ wanna git one thing straight, lads: this is oor home, and no pastel-colored freaks’re gonna fook it up! They wanna try, let ‘em! We’ll kill ‘em all!”

This announcement was met with whoops and hollers from behind him as the camera zoomed out to reveal two more things: 1) The man was in a pub of sorts, the kind of place in the countryside where Guinness was always on tap and where the picture of the owner looked like it’d been hanging there since Thatcher was Prime Minister, and 2) The man wasn’t wearing a shirt, a fact made all the more obvious by the suds clinging to his sparse, blonde chest hair as he immediately set to chugging the ale clenched in his hand.

“It’s not going to be anything else, you know,” Andre mused, his legs crossed in his seat as he leafed through a copy of TIME magazine, not even bothering to look up.

“Ja, I know,” Franz sighed as he flicked the plasma screen off. “Still, it’s nice to remind myself that there are people out there with far less intelligence than me.”

“Careful, Franny,” Dave said, the scotch sloshing about in his hand. “That’s the same line of thinking that gave us Cops and Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo.”

“Plus, those guys are staying on land at least,” Lisa was quick to point out. “We’re the ones flying straight at the damn thing. How much smarter can we be?”

Dave snickered and brought the drink to his lips, starting to tilt it down, but then he lowered it back to the armrest. For some reason, the thought of this next drink joining the three beers and the rum and coke already sitting in his stomach sent a jet of acid oozing up his throat.

The plane bumped in yet another air current, sending another surge of acid up from his stomach. At least he was faring better than Akshat. The poor guy had locked himself in the bathroom a few minutes after takeoff and hadn’t emerged since, only replying with a ragged “Yes” whenever Lisa knocked on the door to see if he was still breathing.

It’s not like they’d had a choice in the matter, though. After less than an hour of being screamed at by politicians and bureaucrats alike through their big, red phones, a convoy of limousines and police cars had shown up in front of their building and a few dozen men in suits and sunglasses had filed into the office, bundling the group into the limos and rushing them to Heathrow, right up to a private jet waiting on the tarmac. Dave could remember the crowded terminal building as they shot past, the limo’s engine straining to pull them along at top speed. All those faces, filled with fear as they waited for a plane going somewhere, anywhere but England, anywhere but the place that might soon be a large crater on the surface of the Earth…

“Some guys just can’t handle their own stomachs, eh?” Liu mused, raising his fifth rum and coke in the air before downing it in a single gulp.

“Yeah,” Dave replied nervously, swallowing his bile and forcing a smile to his face, even as his stomach did backflips in his body. He managed to choke down another sip of scotch, mostly to keep anyone from wondering why the infamous David Preston suddenly couldn’t handle his liquor, because the most obvious answer to that question would be right on the money: because he was scared shitless. They all were, probably. The way Andre’s hands shook with every bump in the ride, a shake he unsuccessfully tried to disguise by turning to a new page in his magazine. The way Francis kept fondling the damned remote like a baby hunting for a special spot on its security blanket. The way Felipe kept typing away at his laptop, occasionally hammering the backspace down so hard the whole plane could hear it click. They all had their little idiosyncrasies, and not a single one of them had the guts to bring it up with anyone else, as if they were afraid that simply talking about their fears might make the bitch herself appear in the cabin, eyes blazing with xenophobic hatred and vials of that cursed serum in her magical grasp.

David took another swig of his drink, and this time he didn’t find it so hard to swallow.

“So, do you remember?” Liu asked suddenly.

Dave whipped his head around in surprise, as if he’d momentarily forgotten there were other people on the plane with him. Which, judging from the alcohol sloshing into his bloodstream, might not have been too far from the truth. “Re-remember what?” He stammered, immediately promising himself to ease up on the sauce until he at least had solid ground beneath his feet again.

“What do you think I mean?” The younger man replied, punctuating his sentence with a sip from his drink. “When Equestria first popped up, what were you doing?”

The American only needed a half-second to come up with the exact answer. Something like that was burnt into his mind, like the fact that he had been pulling his assignment book out of his backpack and trying to remember whether or not he’d done his math homework that one fateful Tuesday morning in September, or how his grandfather could recall weeding the small window garden they’d had in the old house, just starting to search through the tomato plants for any hidden trespassers when his brother had come running outside, bare feet smacking against the pavement, screaming over and over again that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor.

He had been seated in the library at the U of M, head in his hands, trying to commit Kepler’s Laws of Planetary Motion to memory. He could still see the picture on that specific page as clear as day, but for the life of him, the laws themselves still eluded him. Funny how that worked: everything else about that moment from the cheap, plastic wood grain of the table to the musty smell of the books lining the shelves around him still rang clear in his mind, but the laws which would have actually helped him pass the midterm he’d had coming up were still as murky and questionable as the water in the Detroit River.

He had been maybe a couple hours into his study session, and was seriously considering just tossing the book off the table, bolting for the door, hopping on the 5:15 to Cincinnati, and becoming a hobo for the rest of his life when he’d heard a few hushed whispers from the librarian’s desk. The librarian, a stereotypically mousy woman in her early forties who only needed a little chain to hang her glasses on to complete her ensemble, was loudly chatting with a student about something nearly-indecipherable, something about “cartoons” and “make-believe” and “can’t fucking believe it.”

Considering this was the first time in his life David had heard the small mouse of a woman utter a phrase worse than “Oh, shoot,” his curiosity piqued instantly. Not wanting to alert her to his eavesdropping, he had simply whipped out his smartphone and hopped on the local WXYZ station’s website, hoping whatever had made the bashful librarian swear for the first time in his memory had been newsworthy enough for the 5:00 local report.

The screen on the little phone had loaded up the site. David had blinked, then his jaw had dropped. “No fucking way,” he had reported, voicing his agreement with the librarian’s assessment.

There, splashed across the main page, just below the red bar announcing “BREAKING NEWS: More on the situation developing in East China Sea,” was a picture of six characters from a certain TV show for little girls, all in the same pose they showed on their entry in Netflix, with the six gathered together for an apparent photograph. Six ponies, all waving and winking for the camera, in a stock photo almost certainly downloaded right off the Internet in a rush. That, of course, wasn’t the incredible part. Rather it was the headline along the side of the page, in big, black, all-capital text: “LAND OF PONIES REAL!” with the subhead “Mysterious anomaly appearing in the Pacific Ocean, apparently populated by characters from the popular children’s TV show ‘My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic’.”

Slipping out of the memory, he tried to condense everything about that moment into words, tried to capture all the emotion and disbelief and impossibility of seeing a talking cartoon horse princess on the six-o-clock news, standing next to Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, both with massive smiles on their faces in an apparent show of friendship and understanding, as was expected of the Equestrians. Of course, those days would soon end, settling into general fear and disbelief as things went south and culminated in a few more “flashbulb” moments in David’s life, moments he would probably remember until the day he died.

Eventually, he realized there was no conveying that emotion. Not in a conversation being held over scotch at 30,000 feet over the North Sea. So he sighed, crossed his legs, and turned to his companion. “I was studying for a physics exam when I overheard the librarian cuss like a sailor.”

Liu nodded, copying David’s motion with his legs and peering into his drink with a little sigh of his own. “I was just getting ready for bed when the tsunami warning sirens started up. A lot of people don’t remember that of those first few days: the tidal waves you’d get from just plopping an island in the middle of the ocean, but I remember just fine. Of course, there was plenty of horror afterwards for everybody else to remember, so I guess it balanced out.”

David sat up. “Liu, my man, that was surprisingly deep,” he said, honestly surprised.

“Not bad for a drunk Chinaman, eh?” Liu grinned and tilted his head back, downing a few more sips of his drink. The grin didn’t last long, though, fading with another soft sigh and a sad glance to David. “I had a great aunt in Shanghai. When the Barrier hit, I mean.”

“Really?”

“Really. She was just too stubborn to leave when the evacuation orders came down,” he sat up in his seat and twisted the corners of his mouth downwards in an imitation of an old lady’s scowl, then he faced Dave and said in a high-pitched, aged, warbling voice: “’There has been a member of the family in Shanghai since this city was built, and there will be a member of the family here when this city is destroyed.’ That’s what she said to my mom when she tried to get her to join the rest of us in Xian.

“And you know what?” The grin returned, though much weaker and more resigned than it had been before. “She was right. She was absolutely right. Thanks to her, there was a member of the family in Shanghai, right until the last moment.”

David nodded, his brows hunched in thought. Unsure of what else to do, he raised his glass and smiled to his companion. “To great-auntie Liu,” he announced.

The Chinese man smiled, raising his drink alongside David’s. “To great-aunt-”

He never got to finish the toast as the entire plane shuddered and wrenched violently to the right in a sharp turn, the floor tilting at an insane 30-degree angle.

“Jesus!” David gasped, his drink clattering to the floor as he gripped his armrest. The rest of the group threw in their own swears and exclamations in their native languages, the cabin filling with the clatter of foreign words and discarded objects being turned into missiles, each member of the team throwing their nation’s own special blend of vulgarity into the mix. Except for Akshat, who simply let loose with another wretch from the bathroom. When it was over, everyone who hadn’t gripped their seat for dear life was on the floor, desperately scrambling for a handhold.

“What the…” Lisa gasped in surprise, picking herself off the floor as the surprise quickly morphed into rage. “Who the bloody hell’s piloting us!? Lemmy fuckin’ Killmeister!?”

The intercom blinked on, and the cabin fell silent, as if it were the word of God speaking to them. “Folks, we apologize for that rough patch we hit back there,” the pilot announced as one of the men in a pressed suit and sunglasses strode out of the cockpit and stood at the front of the cabin, hands folded in front of his body in that way every government man seemed to have practiced to an art. “We just got orders for a rapid diversion to an airstrip on Shetland, the gentleman in the suit will explain.”

“He damn well better,” Lisa muttered, sinking back into her seat with her arms folded across her chest as she glared at the man.

The man in the suit nodded towards her in a rare act of acknowledgement, then raised his head to address the entire cabin. “We will be catching a helicopter from the airstrip on Shetland, which will take us to the HMS Illustrious, bound for Norway.”

“Wait, what!?” Dave stood up, his shoes squishing in the scotch-soaked carpeting beneath him. “Why aren’t we going to the Emergence Zone!?”

“I’m afraid I can’t divulge that information at this time, sir,” the man replied, also in that tone G-men practiced as much as the businesslike hand-fold.

“No, of course you can’t,” he sighed, sinking back into his seat.

“You will be briefed after the helicopter lands aboard the Illustrious,” the man in the suit said, stepping back into the cockpit. “That is all.”

“Typical,” Liu muttered, rising from his seat and heading towards the bar, stepping past the bathrooms where Akshat gave another violent wretch while he passed by. “Ta ma de typical.”

“You said it,” David grumbled as the cabin settled right back into business as usual. He was just starting to consider grabbing a fresh glass from the bar (Merlot this time, perhaps) when he noticed Anton’s flask lying on the carpet. An eyebrow cocked, he picked the tiny container up and held it out to the Russian.

Anton, for his part, had been oddly quiet since their rapid takeoff from Heathrow, nursing a pearl flask from his jacket pocket. David knew better than to interrupt a man when they were thinking through things this big, especially things that could mean the end of human civilization as they all knew it. So they had sat in their large, padded seats, David occasionally joining in with the others’ attempts at staying in good humor and Anton lost in his own little world. Still, a part of him wished he could see just what the cogs and wheels behind the Russian’s eyes were really turning around. Anton might not have been any more than a decade older than any of them, but he was still the most experienced, the de facto leader when shit hit the fan.

Even with the flask practically in front of his face, Anton kept staring straight ahead, eyebrows furrowed, both hands gripping the armrests as if they were still in the middle of that violent turn, his knuckles turning white with effort and blending in with the pleather. David had to clear his throat for attention.

“Hm? Oh,” Anton whipped the flask out of David’s hand and stored it in his pocket in a single, fluid motion. “Thanks.”

Figuring this was his best time to ask, the American prodded his Russian counterpart. “What’re you thinking about so hard, anyway?”

There was a brief moment when he thought Anton must not have heard him, but then the Russian turned and tilted his head up into David’s face, smiling tiredly. He looked so old right then, as if just the effort of looking up into the younger (but not that much younger) man’s eyes had added a couple decades to his life. “Just things, my little Amerikanets, just things.”

“Ah,” David said, nodding as if that answered anything. “What kind of things?”

The tired smile faded. “Just…how badly this complicates things, and not just for us,” he replied, his hand starting towards his jacket for the flask, pausing, and falling back to the armrest.

Guess I’m not the only one who could use a drink on dry land, David thought with a small twinge of relief. Knowing that the aging Russian couldn’t swallow a drop either didn’t make him feel better, per se, but the twinge of sympathy he felt did distract him from his own fear. “I know it’s not just for us. I mean, you saw those people heading south! For all they know, their homes won’t be there tomorrow!”

“No, no, not just us,” he motioned to himself and to the rest of the plane. “I mean…not just…people…”

David’s eyes widened. “The ponies,” he realized.

“Da,” finally, Anton whipped out the flask, flicked the cap off, and upended a single swallow down his throat, grimacing as the alcohol slid to his stomach. “Damned heights…messing with my tolerance for this stuff…”

“Right, right,” David sighed, collapsing into the seat next to him. “Shit, I forgot about the Equestrians…God…how do you suppose the Prince will react to this?”

Anton grimaced, whipping out the flask again and swallowing another gulp with a wince. “After everything that evil bitch took from him, how do you think he’s going to react?”

Author's Notes:

Sorry this one took a little longer than planned. A few days, I know, hope y'all ain't upset