Applejack had ended up chasing the upper torso. One of the upper torsos, anyway. Not that it mattered, the wretched Draconequus had all the sequential symmetry of a bag of cootie bug parts. This portion, at any rate, seemed to be composed of an enormous barrel chest with tiny fly wings and two powerful frog legs. It was all brute strength, spreading chaos by the expedient of thundering along like a bull in a china shop, smashing everything in its path, its ball tucked under its armpit.

It had chosen to elude the Bearers by diving further back into the castle and rampaging through the hundreds of rooms and twisting hallways. But Applejack was not so easily eluded. She'd quickly lassoed the creature around its middle and was now riding it, rodeo style, as it hopped and smashed its way through the castle.

"YeeeeHAW!" the farmpony hooted. "You ain't throwin' me that easy. I dun been to THIS rodeo before!" For all her boasting, though, she was in a fix. The bruiser wasn't getting away from her, but she wasn't making headway in bringing it down, either. Her plan had been to climb aboard, bear it down to the ground , and tie its legs together like a calf at the rodeo. But the jasper was too darn big and too darn strong to do that. In the back of her mind, her sensible self was starting to worry she'd lose her grip. And further back than that, her inner poor penny-counting farm girl was in danger of going into hysterics with a running tally of everything they were destroying, the longer it took to bring the brute down.

The upper torso thrashed and bucked, trying to scrape her off on first one wall there went another couple of them fancy vases and then another oh lord, a bunch of them gold-framed portraits, they had to be three, four hunnert bits apiece. She nearly lost her seating when it leapt up into the ceiling, smashing her bodily into the chandelier, Oh Maker, how many bits did great aunt Apple Brown Betty pay for that little chandelier in her home? And then crashed down on the enormous table set for twenty oh horseapples, not the china!

Battered, cut, bruised and not a little bloodied, Applejack gritted her teeth and held on. Stubborn as she was, though, if she didn't have a lucky break soon, she'd be thrown for sure. She just hoped that everyone, especially the younguns, was safe out of the way.

It was just her luck, and you can debate whether her luck was good or bad, that her family and friends didn't want to hide. They wanted to help.

"Cutie Mark Crusader Monster Wranglers, YAY!"

As she and the creature passed through yet another archway (trampling yet another collection of cupola bric a brac underfoot), an enormous rope net weighted down at the corners by three familiar fillies fell from the roof, covering them both. The beast bucked and thrashed; Applebloom, Scootaloo and Sweetiebelle hung on for dear life.

"Applebloom, whut're you and yore friends doin'?!" Applejack yelled.

"Helpin'!" Applebloom replied.

Any further argument between the two was interrupted by a sudden volley of apple fritters. Scalding hot apple fritters. They spattered against the partitioned draconequus, making its froggy skin sizzle. It jumped and shook, in obvious pain. Applejack caught a glimpse of Granny Smith on the far side of the room. She was manning a serving cart with a hot oil cooker on it, and was wearing an apron, oven mitts and a saucepot for a helmet. She was flinging apple fritters as fast as she could fish them out of the oil with a slotted spoon. "Hah, take that, ye durned vermint!" She shouted. "You mess with the Apples, you get the whole tree!"

"YEAH!" Scootaloo shouted. The monster hopped around the room in a scalded rage.

"Bu-u-t we-e-e're no-ot Ap-ples," Sweetiebelle said as she was jounced around.

"But Applebloom is, and you mess with one Cutie Mark Crusader, you get the, uh, the whole-- oh, I got nuthin. Whoa!" the Draconequus spun in a circle, trying to shake the CMC loose.

It was then that Big Macintosh got in on the act. The Apple family did, indeed, have a plan; Macintosh's part was to tie the brute's limbs together and bring him down. He galloped around and in between the monster's hopping legs, barely missing getting stepped on, dragging a stout braided gold rope he'd liberated from the royal draperies. After two or three passes he took off down the hall, closing the loop.

The Draconequi's frog legs came together. The huge torso teetered precariously, then fell, the red ball squirting out of its grip. Granny Smith pinned it to the floor with a pitchfork(1) on the second bounce; It collapsed with a bronx cheer. "We did it!" shouted Applebloom. The three fillies set up a cheer.

"Flank check!" shouted Scootaloo. There was a brief pause. "....Nuts."

Applejack hopped down from the prone monster's shoulders. She'd give Applebloom a talking-to about going in harm's way later-- when she wasn't feeling so button-busting proud of her. "Give me a hoof here, y'all," she said, picking up the slack of the rope. "I want this half-a-draconequus tied up good and proper so they kin haul him... eh?"

There would be no need for rope. Even as she watched, the creature deflated like a depressed beach ball, shriveled up into a ball, and disappeared with a pop.

 

---

 

Rainbow Dash was enjoying this.

The funky chunk of draconequus she'd gone after was covered in feathers, had bird claws, and the wings of a peregrine falcon. The moment it had laid claws on one of the red ball thingies everyone was after, it had torn off into the sky and was hurtling for the stratosphere as fast as it could go. Even as it had flown it had gone from a roundish blob to a football-shaped form, sleek and streamlined, faster than any bird in Equestria.

It never stood a chance.

After nearly a minute of climbing almost straight up, Rainbow Dash blew past it, forcing it to jink madly to avoid her. She pulled an immelman and rocketed past it going the other direction, this time close enough for her contrail to catch it and send it tumbling. It righted itself after plummeting a few hundred feet and took to evasive maneuvers, weaving in and out and through the clouds as the impossibly agile and fast pegasus pursued it.

It wasn't a given, though. The disembodied body segment was half again the mass of a pony, which meant it wasn't just going to be bumped out of the sky easily. And it had one huge, pony-ripping talon free, to slash at anything that got too close to it. Rainbow Dash learned that when she tried for a third pass; the fleeing segment had flipped over on its back and lashed out at her, barely missing her leg by an inch.

"Fine. I don't need to lay a hoof on ya to kick your flank!"  Dash began circling her adversary, performing a barrel roll along its flight vector, orbiting it just out of its reach.  Then she started going faster.

A more experienced flier would have dived out of the vortex. A more clever Draconequus would have exploited the environment, turning the clouds to cotton candy or unleashing a storm of chocolate rain to clot her wings. Mayhem was neither of these things; in fact he was fairly simpleminded, and besides which his brain was quite literally elsewhere. He was a creature far too used to having everything his own way. Resistance was unthinkable, and so was getting tossed around like a sock in a clothes dryer by a pony-driven tornado.

Rainbow Dash simply twisted the funnel till the addled segment was spiraling straight down. The partial creature, panicking and completely disoriented, augured straight into the ground, smashing into the earth in the royal orchard. Rainbow Dash landed just as the dust cleared, revealing a neatly bored hole in the ground, a single, twitching eagle claw sticking up out of the hole. "Ouch," Dash muttered, wincing. "Total wipeout."

There was a sound like a cork coming out of a bottle, and the ball that the segment had been clutching popped out of the hole. Dash caught it before it hit the ground. "Ayep, yep yep yep," she said smugly, rolling the ball in her forehooves. "Mess with the best, fry like the rest." She lifted off and flew for the castle, not even looking back to see the turfed segment disappear in a puff of smoke.

 

---

 

"Zo, der universal laws in your universe are identical?"

I shrugged. "So far as I can tell," I replied. "I'm no scientist, but I know enough science from my school years to guess. Speed of light, gravitational constant-- those are the same. About ten meters per second per second, and just under 300 thousand kilometers a second... water freezes and boils at the same temperatures; a mole of carbon has the same mass, so on and so forth." I shrugged again. "Of course there are obviously other more exotic forces at play in your universe, ones we either don't have or haven't discovered yet--" I waved my hand around indicating our current circumstances, hiding in a ballroom from a rampaging Draconequus-- "but apparently all the vital constants are the same."

"Or else, your physiognomy vould not vork in our vorld," Cosmic Constant said, nodding. "Your body vould have... ceased to function der moment you arrived."

"The ultimate smoke test," I chuckled. At Cosmic's puzzled look I explained. "Old earth engineering joke. The 'smoke test' is where you take a device, plug it in, turn it on, and wait for the smoke to come out."

It took him a minute to get the joke, but he chortled merrily when he did. I noticed poor Violette was looking left out of the conversation, so I decided to shift topics a bit. "So tell me, what brought you here from your old homeland?"

"Oh, all der vunderbar discoveries vot happens here," Cosmic Constant said. "Equestria is much more open and villing to ponder ze imponderables, to try new tings, new ideas..." He cocked one shaggy eyebrow at me. "As your own presence here vould demonstrate, ya?"

"Ya," I chuckled. "And what of you, Violette?"

She started a bit. "Oui?"

"What brings you here to Canterlot, all the way from Prance?" the good professor translated for me.

She blushed a bit and ducked her head. Then to my surprise she hiked the hem of her maid's outfit to reveal her hip... I started to stammer in confusion and alarm when I realized she was just trying to show me her Cutie Mark.

Cosmic Constant got a good chuckle out of that. After some moment's embarrassment I decided to be clinical about it and took a look. It was an unusual one; a goldfish, leaping from a small bowl to a large one.

"Ma marque de cutie. C'est le symbole dans mon pays pour quitter votre zone de confort," she said. "Toute ma vie j'ai prospéré plus quand je me pousse d'où je suis confortable.  Ainsi, j'ai quitté ma maison pour venir ici, à Canterlot. Pour voir de nouvelles choses, nouveaux endroits, nouvelles personnes, pour prospérer, pour se développer." She looked up at me. "Je ne sais pas ce qui se produira après, mais c'est une aventure grande que je ne pourrais pas passer. Pouvez-vous comprendre?"

" She says dot it is der symbol for, ah, leafink one's comfort zone," Cosmic Constant said.  "Dot she has alvays done best ven she is leafink where she is comfortable. So she came to Canterlot, to see new tings, new places, new peoples. Dot she does not know vot comes next but her life is... a grand adventure, dot she could not pass up."

I leaned back against the wall. "A grand adventure she could not pass up. Interesting."

"Ah? How so?"

I looked at nothing in particular. "That's the reason I stayed."

Before the conversation could get any more philosophical, we heard the drumming of wings. Five of the six bearers came flying into the room through the shattered skylight, each triumphantly bearing a deflated rubber ball. "We did it!" Twilight crowed.

"And in ten minutes flat!" Rainbow Dash added. The ponies threw their deflated prizes in a pile in the middle of the floor.

I did a quick nose count. "Where's Rarity?"

"She's still downtown." Pinkie Pie said, throwing two rubber bladders on the pile. " She had a bad oopsie and needs to get cleaned up..."

 

---

 

It was certainly one of the more unusual customers at the carriage wash. The mare in question had no carriage, but was instead standing on the conveyor belt, riding it through the automatic hoses, scrubbers, sprayers and driers, getting out, walking around to the front, and going through again and again.

"We can't let her keep doing this!" the manager complained. His assistant shrugged.

"Hey, she paid," he said, pointing to the stack of bits she was feeding into the coin slot. "Nothin' says she's gotta actually have a carriage. Besides, she's a lot more entertaining to watch going through than some hoofball mom's four-seater."

"Can't... get.... cleeeeeaaaaan....!"

 

---

 

"Well, at least she'll have a few days to recuperate," Twilight said. "Now that Mayhem is taken care of, we have a month to prepare for the next--"

The next what, went unsaid. The room was suddenly filled with an explosion of light and noise, a storm of static and flares that flung the unsuspecting Bearers to the wall. Half blinded, I blinked away dozens of afterimages to see Mayhem hovering in the middle of the room. He was translucent, and his body segments were all disconnected, jagged blobs made of explosions and lightning. He looked like an animated cloud of angry.

His disembodied head spun around to look at me. "CHEATER!!" He screamed. "CHEATER CHEATER CHEATER!! You MADE them win! I'll fix you! I'll show you what I do to cheating cheaters who cheat!" He dove down on the pile of deflated balls and began to swirl around them like a raging storm, shrinking in on them as he spun faster and faster. They were sucked up into his vortex. There was an explosion of light, and he disappeared.

A single red ball dropped to the floor with an alarmingly metallic thud. Everyone was frozen in place with fear. In the silence, we could hear it ticking.

"Oh horseapples, it's a BOMB!" Applejack said. We all scrambled across the floor to where the ticking ball lay. There was a rather large, garish digital counter on the side, counting down from sixty. "Defuse it! Somepony defuse it!" Fluttershy was whimpering. I spun it around, looking for an access panel or something (Ha! More the fool I, for expecting a Draconequus to leave such a thing).

What I saw on the other side nearly threw me into heart failure. I must have looked like I actually was having a heart attack, because Twilight asked, "Arthur, what's wrong?"

"Interesting question with a BOMB in the room!" Rainbow Dash snarked.

I turned it around so they could see the symbol. Three triangles around a circle. The international symbol for radiation. "We got us a real sore loser," I croaked. "it's an atom bomb."

"Oh sweet Maker, one of those city killing bombs you told us about?" Twilight seemed to wilt. Pinkie Pie's mane and tail deflated like a balloon.

"Hang on, we just gotta get it out of here!" Rainbow Dash said.

"To where?" I said. "In fifty seconds? It'll destroy everything for MILES when it goes off. There's nothing in the world fast enough--"

I knew it the moment the words left my mouth. She was born for speed. She was the element of Loyalty. There was no way she could, or would, pass up a challenge like that. There was a rainbow-maned blur and the ball disappeared from between my hands.  "Rainbow, NO!" I shouted.

She actually paused at the skylight. "How far this thing gotta be from everything?"

I ballparked frantically. "I dunno, five, maybe ten miles? You'll never get it clear and get away in time---"

"Watch me," she said. She tore off into the sky.

We all stared in horror at the blank patch of sky where she'd vanished. Five second later a sonic rainboom split the sky.

Could she make it?

I realized what was coming and tore my gaze away. "Everyone, get out from under the skylight! Get under those stone archways, behind those marble pillars, they should provide some protection. We have--- call it forty seconds. And stop looking at the sky!"

Applejack looked angry. "She's my friend--"

"And when that bomb goes off anyone looking at it is going to have the eyes seared out of their heads! Do not. Look. At. the SKY! Understand?"

Twilight suddenly gasped. "The rainboom. Everyone in the city will be looking at the sky now!" She ran to the center of the room and began casting a spell. There was a flash of purple and a shockwave of almost-invisible purple light washed out from her and passed out through the walls.

"What was that?" I asked.

"A 'Look Down Now' spell," she said. "Anypony it touches will be absolutely fascinated with the ground between their hooves for the next two minutes." She ran back to her hiding place behind one of the pillars.and threw her hooves over her head.

I went and half-dragged, half carried Violette and Cosmic Constant behind a pillar of my own, Cosmic Constant translating what was going on as fast as he could. It was a tight fit, but none of us was willing to complain. I looked at my watch. "Thirty Seconds!" I shouted to the others. "Everyone cover your ears and close your eyes!"

I covered Violette's eyes with my hand and started counting down the last seconds. The fate of a whole city now rested on one question:

How fast could Rainbow Dash really fly?

 

---

 

Rainbow Dash may not have been an egghead, but she was smart enough to figure this equation out: There was no safe place in Equestria to take that bomb. Outside the city there were countless small towns and villages and lone farmsteads studding the hills. Even if she got the thing ten miles away, she would just be bringing other innocent ponies into the blast range.

So Rainbow Dash took that bomb in the only direction that would give her ten miles of empty space: up.

She rocketed into the sky at a steep climb, pouring on speed harder than she'd ever done before. Soon the castle was a mere white dot on a tiny hillock, far far below. And still she poured on the speed. She blew through the sonic rainboom and kept accelerating. The sky faded from blue to indigo; the stars appeared. Her last breath of air burned in her lungs, and frost began coating her wings. She kept going.

All of Equestria was counting on her. The ponies. The Princesses. Her family. Her friends. Scootaloo. She would go out burning up the sky before she'd let them down. She would die first, before that Draconequus got the last laugh.

Around her neck, the element of Loyalty began to glow a dull cherry red.

She felt her wind come back. New strength flooded through her body and wings. How? She didn't care; she'd take whatever miracles she got. She poured on the speed, faster than ever before. Behind her, a second, then a third rainboom burst, thin and attenuated in the sparse atmosphere. She never even noticed. The cherry red glow crept over her, ever brighter.

The sky turned black. At the very edge of space, where her wings caught almost no air, she pulled an immelman and released the bomb. She didn't look back. Blazing like a crimson star, she dove for the ground.

She almost managed to outrace the blast wave.

 

---

 

"....Three... Two... One..." We all tensed, holding our breath. A few seconds later, the sky bloomed, briefly, with a second sun. I could see the light shining through my closed eyelids. I opened my eyes, blinking. The others started to creep from their hiding places. "Stop!" I said. They froze. "There's still the blast wave. If she didn't get... if she didn't get high enough..." I shook off the thought. "Take cover!"

We hid back behind our pillars. How long? Speed of sound, about a  mile in five seconds. If she was less than ten miles away-- I counted backwards from fifty, out loud. "....Two.... One...." Then there was a long pause. I started counting forward. I got to thirty before a deep, boneshaking boom echoed over the city.

Sixteen miles. Holy horseapples. The bomb must have been about the equivalent of Little Boy or Fat Man; fairly small, enough that sixteen miles dispersed the blast wave. "It's okay I think," I said... just as the wind hit. For several seconds manes were tossed and litter was blown high into the air. After it subsided I sat down hard, clutching my chest. "Okay, that's enough excitement for one lifetime," I said weakly.

Pinkie Pie looked up. "Wow, what's that?" Everyone's gaze followed her pointing hoof. High in the stratosphere was an expanding cloud of boiling rainbow colors. It was small, no bigger than the palm of my hand at the end of my outstretched arm. Even as I watched it faded away. Dash really had done it.

"Dash..." Twilight said. Fluttershy started to cry.

I noticed a small flock of birds, high in the sky. I squinted; no, they were pegasi. They slowly drew closer.  And what were they carrying--?

"It may be too early to mourn," I said. "Look!"

They were close enough to see clearly now; the Wonderbolts, or three of them at least. And borne in the air in between them was a familiar blue pegasus---

"Rainbow Dash!" Twilight and Fluttershy flew up to greet them. The others tried to follow, but fell back to earth with a thump as their ephemeral wings finally faded away. "Ah nuts," Applejack groused.

The Wonderbolts floated down through the skylight and lay Rainbow Dash gently on the floor. I staggered on over, awash with relief. She was was bruised, she was battered, she was unconscious... but she was alive. The leader of the flying trio was none other than Spitfire. She pushed back her goggles and grinned at us. "Hey, any of you lose a stunt flier?" she said. "We saw this one falling out of the sky and thought we'd catch her for you."

I leaned on my cane and laughed. "Nice work, captain," I said, giving her a sketchy salute. "We owe you one."

"Ah heck, we already owed her a couple, at least," she said.

I'll confess. I had no particular liking for the group. I'm not a big fan of sky shows, really. And I'd long had a distaste for anyone on two legs or four who used the drill sergeant nasty routine on their people as a default training method. But at that moment I could definitely find it in my heart to sincerely like the Wonderbolts and their captain.

I had some things to ponder too. Mayhem was beaten, but the pattern we thought we had figured out was broken. What had made Mayhem think that someone had cheated? Why had he accused me? I'd had less than nothing to do with the events today. What had changed?

I shifted my weight and grunted a little. And where could I find an ankle wrap? Apparently my burst of energetic running about had gotten me a twisted ankle....

I staggered over to get a look at the hero of the hour. She was just coming to. That crazy pegasus was luckier than a roomful of horseshoes; her feathers weren't even singed--

What I noticed next made me stumble to a halt in surprise. She was sitting up, and carefully poking her hoof at the spiral horn now sprouting from her forehead. "What--what the hay is this??" she yelped.

I looked at Twilight, who looked as astonished as I felt. "I'd call it a serious game-changer," I managed to say.

 

Author's Note:

1)She refused to leave Sweet Apple Acres without it. Nopony ever questioned that decision again.