Fallout Equestria: Homelands

By Somber

Chapter 3: Up a Creek

The black creek snaked its way through the overarching trees, in no particular hurry to get anywhere. In the Wasteland, life was hardy and tough but sparse, grasses and thorny bushes and the occasional copse of trees that managed to find an area with no taint, radiation, or people after firewood to grow large enough to count as trees. What little lived in the Wasteland barely hung on to life.

In the zebra Homelands, everything lived. Scotch saw more green in one minute than she had in her entire life in the Hoof. Cypress trees with their knobby knee roots jutting out of the water in spiky ridges competed with blackgum trees thrusting up in spines and knots while the occasional oak thicket on higher ground created dense hummocks like hills of wood. Between, around, and hanging from the canopy was a shocking panoply of vines, shrubs, mosses, and water plants ranging from huge lily pads to tiny verdant specks moving along with the languid current. Thorns abounded everywhere she looked, along with glossy, oily green leaves.

These plants were at war. She saw lily pads clustered together, almost desperately, in spots where the overhanging branches failed to block out the sun. Trees were crushed and strangled by vines, which were in turn riddled with mosses and fungi. Here and there, large cypresses bent over from contact with the burly oaks. In fact, the number of living trees was illusionary; many were dead stands wrapped in so much other growth that at first glance, they seemed alive.

But there were more disturbing plants still. Strange, brightly colored plants like pots that smelled tantalizingly sweet, and then you looked inside to find the stew of half-digested bird and frog remains at the bottom. There were pads almost identical to the lily pads, with shiny, gummy patches that caught the birds that landed upon them. The four rowed silently past one exhausted green-plumed avian, watching them stoically as its legs and stuck feathers were dissolved even while it still lived.

“I’m not getting out of this boat,” Precious muttered as she eyed the legless bird.

“Well, at least we’re not going to starve,” Scotch said.

“What makes you think any of this is safe to eat?” Pythia asked immediately.

“Uh. Well, ponies and zebras can eat plants and stuff,” Scotch said lamely.

“You want to eat any of this, go right ahead. I’m not eating anything that I don’t see a native zebra eat,” Pythia said as she hid inside her cloak. She yipped and smacked herself. “Damned flies.”

There weren’t as many bugs in here as on the shore, but there were still plenty seeking to take a bite out any patch of hide not encrusted with mud. Dragonflies buzzed and flashed as they flitted here and there, their wings reminding Scotch of the unnatural flier she’d seen. Flies buzzed hither and yon, their flight terminated by a hungry fish or frog. There were some that seemed to dart along on the surface of the smooth river without the slightest problem.

Small birds nested all over the place, keeping their nests far from the water. Larger white birds stood on the edges, perfectly still as they passed by. Then their beaks would dart into the water, snapping up a frog or little fish to gulp down. Thankfully, they weren’t nearly big enough to eat a pony, but still, it was intimidating being watched by them, their beady red eyes staring.

Then the water erupted in a brown fountain, the river letting out a roar, and one of the white birds let out a scream of surprise as its wings spread wide. Then it disappeared under the water, which gave one last roil and went still, waves spreading in a ring as a few tattered feathers sank out of sight in the murky water.

Yep. Really missing the Hoof now!

“So, what kind of zebras live here?” Scotch asked, breaking the silence.

“The Orah,” Majina replied as she peered at the birds nesting in the trees.

Scotch waited a few seconds before prompting, “And? What are they like?”

Majina grinned sheepishly. “Um. I really don’t know. The Orah aren’t like the Roamani or Propoli. They don’t show up in a lot of stories. There’re plenty of Atoli sea captains, Roamani generals, and Carnilian seducers, but the Orah just… are. They’re the swamp tribe. That’s all.”

“You have to know more than that,” Scotch insisted.

“Not really. They just don’t show up. Even the Tappahani have Enkidee the Monkey King and the Twelve Bananas, but the Orah don’t have any stories,” she rubbed her chin. “The only times they’re mentioned are when some hero has to travel into a swamp. Then they’re… well… it’s not very nice,” Majina said as she squirmed.

“You told us all about Riptide and how not nice she was. Spill,” Scotch said with a smile.

“Well, if they are mentioned, they’re ignorant, inbred bigots who will do something to your tailhole called ‘corncobbing’, but I don’t know why you’d do that with corn! They play these weird tinny guitars called banjos, and are super lazy. And dumb. Really, really dumb, ‘cause they corncob all the smart ponies they meet. And did I mention inbred? I’m not sure what that means either, but the Orah are supposed to be that.” She rubbed her chin as she thought; Scotch wondered if she should inform her, but then Majina realized they were all staring at her. “I’m sorry! The only story I know with Orah is about some Propoli zebras who take a canoe trip into their swamps and get corncobbed! I’m not even sure how. How would they grow corn in a swamp in the first place?” She clutched her head, gritting her teeth and groaning, “But they corncob! And they’re bred in! And–”

Precious silenced her with claw to Majina’s lips. “We get it.”

“It’s… it’s fine,” Scotch said as she looked around the swamp. “This place just has me on edge, and I hoped they had some kind of tradition or something we could use to keep us safe.”

“Sorry. Like I said, they’re just not in many stories,” Majina sighed, drooping.

“Could be worse. They could be in all the stories as the villains. That’d suck,” Pythia commented dryly, smacking another bug.

Then Scotch spotted something stretched over the river. A bridge! “At last! Civilization! We can get off this river.”

But as they paddled closer, it became clear that the bridge was more a ruin than a route to escape. Once, it’d been a train trestle, elevated over the water on dozens and dozens of pilings. Now it was collapsed, tangled with rusty bits of flatbed cars and enormous logs. A locomotive poked out of the trees and growth like a drowning beast slowly sinking into the bog, while cars still chained with logs dangled precariously along the side of the trestle. The sides of the boiler had rusted away, giving the impression of a gaping, bloody maw. Even if they could get up on top of the bridge, she could spot collapses through the trees in both directions.

“So. The Wasteland’s here too,” she murmured.

“You doubted it?” Pythia asked.

“I just thought that, with how green this place is, maybe we’d find… I dunno. Civilization and stuff. Like maybe the zebras had it better than we did. You have to work to find somewhere that’s not poisoned in Equestria,” Scotch explained lamely.

“Newsflash, but I don’t think this place is as healthy as you seem to think.” Pythia pointed to the water, where an oily sheen gleamed on the surface. “Where’s that coming from?”

“I dunno, the train?” she asked as she peered at the oil. Then she extended her hoof and held her PipBuck as close to the water as she could without getting it wet. ‘Click’, went the radiation detector. A few seconds later, another ‘click’.

“It’s radioactive?” Majina asked. “How? Did the zebras balefire bomb themselves?” Pythia’s eyes went wide as she turned towards Scotch, extending a hoof.

“I don’t–” Scotch started to say, as something red flashed in her vision.

Then the water erupted in her face. Jaws clamped down on her outstretched hoof, locked onto her PipBuck, and pulled her into the creek.

The tea-brown water obscured everything beyond a foot. All she could tell was that her leg was locked in the jaws of something enormous and scaly. PipBucks were tough, though. Their casings were designed to last forever, resisting even small caliber bullets and the odd explosion.

The leg bones of a filly, in contrast, weren’t nearly as tough. The creature gave a great shake, and Scotch felt something snap in the limb, twice. She screamed into the disgusting, brown water, sending up a torrent of bubbles as the thing seemed to be trying to tear her leg completely off!

Somehow, maybe from working its jaw to get a better grip, or maybe because it wanted a tastier bite, it relaxed enough for her to pull her PipBuck free and kick away. Swimming with a crippled leg was rather like swimming with a couple of bits of red hot metal grinding together inside her limb, but it was a little better than drowning. Her head broke the surface just as she felt something big brush against her. “Blackjack! Help!” she screamed, barely keeping her head above water.

But she wouldn’t help. Couldn’t. Nopony could, because nopony was left.

“Get in there and help her!” Pythia shouted at Precious, who was perched on the edge of the boat.

“I can’t!” Precious snarled.

“The hell you can’t! What are all those scales and claws for then?” Pythia demanded.

“I can’t swim!” the dragonfilly roared back at her. “I don’t even float!”

The water swirled with a swish of a massive tail, nearly overturning the boat. Precious and Majina struggled with the oars to maneuver back to Scotch.

Scotch half saw and half felt the surge of water as the radigator charged again. Unable to reach the boat, she threw her legs around the moss and rot slick timbers of the bridge and pulled herself onto the nearest beam. The maw of the reptile erupted next to her, and all she could do was fall on the far side of the beam to get away. The gator’s jaws snapped down on the beam, shaking it savagely and pulling it away.

Scotch ponypaddled to where a flatbed loaded up with massive cypress logs rose at a steep angle from the river. With three legs, she scrambled and kicked up the slope, and the gator pursued her. The rusting chains holding the lumber creaked as she scrambled past them, and the whole structure groaned with the disruption. The gator, rad or not, was easily as long as their boat, and almost as wide. It lunged after Scotch, jaws snapping in the air at her hind legs. She managed one good, hard kick to the snout; it might not have made up for the insult to her left leg, which now felt as if its contents had been rearranged, but it felt good.

Till the gator turned back towards the longboat and its three tasty occupants.

“No!” Scotch shouted. “Look out!” But they were already looking out! If Precious couldn’t swim, there wasn’t much else they could do. Nothing anypony could do. Blackjack wasn’t here. Her father wasn’t here.

She was about to watch everypony die again.

“No!” she shouted, and looked at the flatbed and its chained up logs. Only three chains were restraining the load, all corroded. If she only had a hammer or prybar. Something hard!

But she did. It was just on a leg that didn’t work anymore.

She watched as the gator started to nose the boat, as if trying to work out how best to get the tasty morsels inside. Majina swung an oar at it, and Precious swiped at the end of its muzzle. She breathed plumes of emerald flame at the beast, but the fire was ineffective against the semi-submerged monster. For now, the gator was between them. If it moved around…

No, her foreleg might be crippled, but her hindlegs weren’t. She set herself and started to kick the brown links. The rust started to flake off, but the chains were thick. For all she knew, this wouldn’t even work at all, but doing anything was better than sitting up here on the side of the flatcar, watching them die. “Come on! Come on!”

Suddenly, there was a loud ‘ping’, and the chain exploded under her hooves. A second later, a second ping, and that chain snapped as well. The load of wood gave a great shudder as it shifted, and Scotch grabbed the side of the flatcar as tightly as she could as the enormous logs broke away and tumbled into the river.

And right on top of the gator.

For a few seconds, Scotch Tape feared she’d doomed her friends as well as the cypress logs, many thicker than Scotch herself, crashed down in a wooden cascade. The longboat bobbed and rocked on the waves, but it avoided getting hit as it was pushed away by the swell. Scotch lay there on top of the side of the flatcar, taking a moment to catch her breath.

Then it hit her. Her leg was ten thousand tiny suns all exploding at in rhythmic pulsations that felt as if the limb were ready to blast off from her body at any second. She grabbed the limb, sobbing, and then shrieked and released it. “Ow! Owwie. Ow! Owww!” she whined over and over as she lay there on the rusty car. “Give me another gator, please. Anything to stop the pain!” Or rather, she’d meant to say that. What emerged was more like, “Bwaharrghahow!”

“Just hold on!” Pythia called. “We’ll get to you. Just have to get around this logjam.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Scotch moaned, and then turned her head and barfed in the river. “Ugh, this day gets better and better.”

The gator had disappeared, either dead or not interested in a meal that involved falling trees. Precious used her claws to pull the boat past the logs to the base of the flatcar, and Scotch carefully flopped in. “It’s broken,” she whimpered.

“I’ve got agoloosh,” Majina said, opening the bag, but Pythia shook her head.

“Don’t,” the filly said grimly. “That seaweed might cure, but it’s not a magic healing potion that’ll put the injured bits back into place. You’ll be a cripple.”

“Then what do we do?” Precious demanded.

“Nothing. We splint her leg, she stays off it, and we find someone who knows how to set a limb, then heal it,” she said as she stared out into the jungle. Then she stabbed a hoof at Precious. “Look, if you want, we can try and set it tonight if we can’t find any zebras, but we’d just have to rebreak it when we found–” She blinked and rubbed her eyes. “Damn it. I’m still in the future, aren’t I?” She clenched her eyes shut, pressing her hooves to her temples. “No. No answer till you actually ask it.” Majina opened her mouth, but before she could speak, Pythia said, “The question that you actually want me to…”

Then she opened her eyes and looked at the others. “Crap. Now I’m in the wrong future,” she said with a haunted, exhausted gaze. She pulled the cloak over her face and curled up into a ball. “Just splint the leg till tonight. Now leave me alone till I’m back in the present. The right present.”

“She doesn’t make any sense,” Precious muttered. Majina carefully took some sticks that had broken off in the treevalanche and tied them to Scotch’s leg to immobilize it. Then Scotch sat in the bow while Majina and Precious took the oars and rowed past the fallen train.

I’m useless. At least on the ship I could fix things. Here, I can’t fix anything. Scotch thought as they left the ruined trestle behind. She fought them. She really did, but soon fat tears were running down her cheeks. She was an idiot for coming here. A useless idiot who nearly got a ship sunk and her friends eaten by a radigator. Now she had a busted leg that felt like it was on fire, blazing in its wraps any time she moved.

Her father had broken a leg. She’d watched him hobble along through the Wasteland. He hadn’t cried. He’d followed along silently in Blackjack’s wake.

I won’t cry. I won’t.

Well. I’ll try not to cry.

I’ll try harder not to cry…

“Good thing you baited that gator,” Precious said absently as she maneuvered the boat through some overhanging brush. A large black spider landed on her shoulder, fangs glistening with poison. Chomp! Precious chewed, wrinkled her nose, and spat the goo into the river. “Gross!” she muttered, scraping her tongue and spitting more.

“What?” Scotch asked weakly though her tears.

“When you had your hoof over the edge of the boat. I was thinking about it. I think that gator was planning to wait till we were against the trestle, then slam our boat. Would have gotten me for sure,” the dragonfilly said as she resumed tugging against the hanging foliage to pull the boat forward. “When you stuck your hoof out like that, it couldn’t resist.”

“Really? I thought you’d be more than a match for any stupid gator!” Majina said with a broad smile.

“Hardly. Radigators float. I sink. It wouldn’t even have to chomp me,” Precious said simply. “I really want to get off boats. Forever. I’ve been about as useful as a doorstop,” Precious said.

“I’ve been worse,” Scotch said, staring off at the trees as they pulled past the drooping foliage. Something bubbled from down below, but at this point, she’d let it eat her. “I can’t do anything.”

Then she blinked as Precious crawled across the longboat towards her. Her deep blue eyes narrowed. “I will smack the stupid right out of you. Good thing I smack hard, because that was a lot of stupid you just said.”

Scotch gaped at the dragon filly. “She’s broken her foreleg,” Majina said, tugging on Precious’s tail.

“Didn’t know that was where she kept her brain,” Precious growled, and poked Scotch in the chest with a claw. “I’ve done precisely nothing except play anchor this whole trip. I sat in a pot. When that gator showed up, all I could do was growl at it. You dropped a forest on the Gator’s head, and you actually helped on the ship. So if you call yourself useless again, I will show you useless.”

“Sorry. I just… I left imagining a big adventure. I haven’t been in the zebra lands a day, and already I broke my leg,” Scotch muttered lamely. “I didn’t even think about what to bring. I thought… food… because Blackjack and Daddy always handled everything on the trip! I should have brought a gun or something. Healing potions. Tools. Something useful.”

“I only brought Momma’s stuff because I didn’t have any caps,” Majina said as she reached into her saddlebags and withdrew a blowgun. “I have Mr. Sleepytime here. Oooh! And Momma’s mask!” she said as she pulled out a wooden, painted mask that looked like some kind of crazy zebra monster. She popped it on her head and looked around. “How does anyzebra see out of this thing?” she muttered.

“And I brought exactly nothing,” Precious added. “So yeah, we’re all idiots.”

“I brought plenty of things,” Pythia muttered from her ball, not uncoiling.

“Well, I hope we get out of here soon,” Scotch said as she peered around at the swamp.

“We should,” Majina replied with a smile. “I mean, how big can this place be?”

“This swamp is stupid! It’s been a week! It should have ended by now!” Majina shouted at the host of thoroughly disinterested trees all around them. “You! Move out of our way so we can get somewhere!” she demanded imperiously.

“It’s official. Majina’s talking to trees,” Precious muttered.

To be fair, some of these islands did move. They were just great big rafts of peat so large that trees grew on top of them. They shook when walked upon, and if you weren’t careful, the whole thing could come apart. And occasionally the island turned out to be growing on the back of an enormous, irritable snapping turtle. Hadn’t that been fun. Every night they had to find something to tie up to and hope that it wouldn’t float off with them.

As bad as the swamp might have been in the day, at night, it became ten times worse. Sleeping on land was inviting a snake to share your blanket, but sleeping on the boat drew radigators in the middle of the night. Once, Majina had tried to rig a hammock, only to wake with spiders in her mane. The swamp wasn’t completely worthless though. There were bioluminescent green fungi growing on fallen logs; the four had scraped some into an old jar they’d found, and it provided enough light to drive back the darkness. More eerie were the occasional pools of water with dancing flames or smoldering peat, as if someone had set a campfire and then abandoned it. Three times they’d sought the sources of thin pillars of smoke only to find more swamp.

There were signs of civilization, but like everything else, they were long ago abandoned and left to sink into the mire. They came across a sawmill that had radigators sunning themselves on the metal roof. A trailer park reduced to metal frames draped in moss. A cinderblock building with an oak tree growing right up through the middle of it. Wood shacks built on trees, occasionally with skeletons curled up on rotting mattresses. No signs if they were Orah or even zebras. No signs of any living zebras at all.

Worse was the fog. It rolled in every evening and obscured the stars, and once it lingered for three days. Even east and west was lost to them as the sunrise and sunset disappeared in a gauzy haze. Even her PipBuck’s compass seemed glitched up; maybe the gator attack had knocked something loose? Pythia’s prediction of the weeds being inedible proved true. Scotch had sampled some oily green leaves, and within minutes her mouth was an inferno of pain as blisters and sores popped up inside it. That left the stores the Atoli had given them, and those were dwindling by the day.

And the final threat… “Do you hear a motor?” Pythia asked as she scanned across the water, through the thickening fingers of mist. For four days, the sound of a motor had stalked them. Once, Majina dared to climb high enough on a deadfall to spot a longboat from the Riptide prowling the water on the next river over. Three zebras with guns, two of those freaky dragonfly-winged fliers, and five red bars were all the proof Scotch needed that they should go any other direction.

“Yeah, I hear it,” Precious growled as she squinted. “I don’t think it’s growing louder, though.” It could have been, though. The swamp obscured noise just as well as it did navigation.

“Let’s go the other way,” Majina suggested, taking an oar and starting to row.

They rowed their way across a wide, brownish-black pool towards a large ridge that appeared to resemble something with some bedrock somewhere in all that peat. As always, Majina crept out into the foliage and picked her way towards the top. Since Scotch could barely walk, Precious couldn’t swim, and Pythia didn’t work, the storyteller got to make the trip. Normally she just brought back reports warning of an enormous turtle or a pack… herd… clump… whatever of radigators.

This time… “You three should some and see this.”

Transferring from boat to land was difficult. There was no shore to speak of. Just a ledge that dropped almost straight into the murky depths. At best, it was mud. At worst, a fragile layer of peat that would dump you into the tea-brown waters the instant all your weight was on it. With only three legs and a fourth that felt as if it was on fire with the slightest bump, swimming was the last thing Scotch needed to do right now. With Precious and Pythia’s help, she managed to climb onto an outstretched trunk and crawl her way forward till she stepped off on the spongy ‘ground’. When she reached Majina, the filly’s eyes were wide and round. “Look,” she said, pointing ahead of her.

This was the most open ground she’d seen in a while. It was a layer of peat and ugly black stone perforated by large, dead oak trees. Every step squished underhoof, the foamy peat gushing a torrent of water. Her PipBuck started to click slowly, like a petrified heart. Somewhere in the mist, a low, booming groan sounded that made them all freeze. “What was that?” Scotch murmured, but they just shook their heads.

“Better question: What’s that?” Precious asked, pointing above them.

A rummage sale hung from the dead branches overhead, suspended by thin tethers. Skulls were in wide abundance, but here and there whole skeletons were on display, posed in flight or combat with each other. That would have been creepy enough, but everything from plastic foal rattles to rotten books to rusty horseshoes also twisted slowly in the growing mist. Bullet casings gleamed dully as they hung like wind chimes overhead, and here and there, corroded weapons dangled.

Precious reached out towards one, and Pythia immediately hissed sharply, halting the filly. “Don’t touch anything!”

“Why? And why are we whispering?” Precious whispered back.

“Because this is very wrong,” she said as she stared at the junk hanging from the trees. “We shouldn’t be here.”

“Do you sense something or see something in the future?” Majina asked as she peered up at the water-soaked zebra dolls in their sun-faded dresses.

“I don’t need to see the future to see that this is bad,” Pythia muttered. “Don’t touch anything.”

“Is this the Orah?” Scotch whispered as she looked through the mist that curled all around them like hungry tentacles. Her E.F.S. kept glitching, and the navigational compass was turning slowly. Pythia’s face informed the pony that her question qualified as a stupid one, so she amended, “Are they nearby?”

“Don’t know, but I don’t think we should stay here,” Pythia muttered.

“I smell jerky,” Precious muttered. “Do you guys smell it?” Three stares ranging from baffled to flat to worried met her. “Just me?”

“Freaky as all this is,” Scotch whispered, “if we can’t take any of it, then what are we doing just standing around here?”

“‘Cause of those,” Majina said as she pointed past all the trees with their dangling decorations. Beyond the peaty marshland, a large lake lay. Nothing special about that; they’d seen a dozen lakes like it, basins of murky water ringed by cypress trees.

What was different were the enormous boxes sitting in the middle of it. The mist obscured them, but from what she could see, there were at least a half dozen out there. Maybe more.

“Now that’s something to check out,” Scotch said. A line cut across the lake. A bridge, maybe? “They might have some healing potions or things we can use.” If they were in the Wasteland, they were going to have to be a lot more active about getting stuff they needed to survive.

They made their way around the shore to the bridge, really just a bunch of oil drums with chained-together platforms on top. A chain-link fence, draped with moss, had once blocked access, but the razor wire was now rust. A glaze of oil shimmered on the surface of the water around the bridge. Every so often, Scotch’s PipBuck started to click; while the ambient radiation might be higher here, though, it wasn’t clicking at levels that would kill them right away.

Scotch carefully wiped away the moss covering a sign next to the rusty gate. The glyphs were spirals slashed through by thin, needlelike protrusions. “What does it say?”

“Keep out. Restricted area. Danger. Things like that,” Majina said thoughtfully.

“Things like that?”

“A glyph doesn’t always have a concrete meaning, like pony words. They convey an idea, not say things like words,” Majina said as she looked past. “This is a forbidden place.”

“Well, forbidden places have good loot,” Scotch said, her injured leg throbbing. Normally, she’d be a lot more cautious, but after a week, she just wanted a healing potion and fixed leg. How her daddy had endured this kind of pain without going crazy was beyond her.

The bridge had once had chain rails, but those that remained were so corroded that she didn’t dare put her weight on them. Each pontoon bobbed ominously, and once one almost dumped her right into the lake. She didn’t see any gators or turtles or whatever other monsters might live in lakes like this, but she didn’t want to risk a bath. At the rate her PipBuck was clicking, Scotch estimated they had at least a few hours before they risked sickness. Maybe there was some RadAway here?

The boxes were enormous metal-sided buildings on barges tied to pilings driven into the middle of the lake. A security checkpoint sat abandoned at the end of the bridge, with moss hanging from the ends of long, rusted machine gun barrels. Zebra skeletons slumped against the weapons, their armor corroded and rotted to uselessness. A bar with a bright red slashed glyph on it blocked the way, but they easily crawled under it. The metal buildings were the color of dried blood, but a large sign was bolted to the closest one: four stars above a circular glyph.

“Four stars,” Pythia murmured.

“What? Mean something to you?” Scotch asked.

The cloaked filly stared at the sign a moment. “Yeah, but I’m not sure what,” she answered.

“No wonder this thing is still floating,” Precious commented, scraping the barge with a hoof. “It’s made of concrete.”

“You can’t make a boat out of concrete,” Majina said with a roll of her eyes, then blinked and turned to Scotch. “Can you?”

“Find me a healing potion, and I’ll tell you,” Scotch answered, then looked at Pythia, who was regarding the sign with a distant stare. “Are you okay?”

“Sometimes I really wish I could see the past,” she replied, then shook her head. “We should go quick. I don’t know what this place is, but what little I can see is all shadows and mist.”

The door into the first building was rusted shut. No windows. No way onto the roof. Every now and then, the metal buildings groaned or shrieked as they shifted on their barges. The second was no more accessible, nor the third. The fourth barge set her PipBuck’s radiation counter through the roof, so they just avoided that one altogether. Moving along the grid, they passed by the next. Precious gave a few experimental tugs, but not only were the doors rusted, they were also locked.

Then they found one where the metal frame had shifted just enough that it had popped the corner seam, creating an oval space just big enough for four fillies to wiggle through. The pitch black interior didn’t offer more than pinpricks of light, so she turned on her PipBuck’s light.

“Oh, come on!” Precious said as a building inside the building appeared. Unlike the exterior, this one actually appeared more like a place zebras would work. It had doors and windows, though most of it was corrugated metal, albeit in far better condition than the exterior shell.

“No. It makes sense. The outside was just rusty boxes. If somepony flew over these, all they’d see were barges. The probably blend in well with the brown water of the lake, too.” Scotch gave the metal shell a kick, and though it rang like a bell and groaned a little, it was still perfectly sound.

Pythia gaped at her. “Are you trying to tell everything in a mile we’re here?”

“Sorry. Just… this is cool!” she said with a sheepish grin.

“Right. Cool. Like a corpse!” Pythia hissed. “Now, quiet!”

The interior building was just as locked as the shell. A few taps confirmed the windows were some sort of plastic that refused to shatter. Walking around it, she spotted condensers, radiators, and cooling units piped to vent through the wall of the shell. “There’s got to be a way in,” Scotch murmured. “There!” A grate under some pipes connected a radiator to the wall of the interior building. The grate was held on by four catches. There was no way an adult could make it through, but the four fillies were able to twist off the catches and squeeze through the hole into the interior of the building.

“Yay. We’ve scavenged lumps of plastic,” Precious muttered as Scotch’s PipBuck illuminated, well, exactly that.

“No,” Scotch said with a smile, knowing that sweet industrial smell. “Unwrap these!”

Precious and Majina tore off the plastic wrap, and Scotch’s eyes alighted on the most beautiful thing she’d seen in a long time: a lathe. Not an old, worn lathe like the one that had graced the Stable 99 workshop. This ruby-painted piece of art was a geared head engine lathe, with twelve speeds, twenty by sixty inch work space with fully automated arms. Rivets would have killed for this piece of equipment!

One by one, more treasures emerged from their plastic cocoons. Bandsaws! Belt grinders! Deburring and polishing vibrator bins! Drill presses! More precise lathes! Pipe, bar, and sheet metal presses! Even an industrial forge and hydraulic stamp press! “Okay. We can take all this home, and I’ll be happy!” she said with a croon as she rubbed her cheek against the polished metal, embracing the lathe with her good forehoof.

“Right. We’ll just load all this up on the longboat. It’ll be easy,” Precious chuckled.

“You don’t understand!” Scotch gushed. “This is priceless! All of this!” she said as she waved her hoof around her.

“No. You don’t understand. All this stuff? It’s heavy,” Precious said, giving the lathe a kick. Scotch glowered at her as if she’d just smacked a newborn foal. “We’re not getting this stuff out the door, much less back home.”

“But… but… nngh!” She waved her hoof at all the wonderful equipment, much of it still wrapped up.

“Plus, without power, they’re not doing anything,” Precious continued relentlessly.

“But why is it here at all?” Majina wondered.

Scotch thought about it. “Well, none of us expected this to be here. Maybe this was some sort of hidden factory? You know, so that when cities were blown up, this stuff would be okay?” Celestia bless them, whoever they were!

Pythia trotted out of the gloom. “Or maybe someone was betting on the world blowing up and everyone dying,” the golden-eyed zebra murmured as she stared at the three of them in the wan illumination of Scotch’s PipBuck lamp. “Come on. I think I found an office that might have something we can use.”

The office was just as clean and sparse as the workshop. A terminal that looked as if it had been taken from a Stable-Tec store and had a zebra glyph slapped in place of the logo sat on a desk. Plastic folders with the four stars symbol rested on shelves. Against one wall were a number of electrical breakers next to monitoring equipment. A first aid kit was mounted on the wall just inside the door.

Inside, wrapped in plastic like everything else, were three syringes of purple healing potion.

“This is probably going to hurt,” Majina warned as she tugged off the wrapping and exposed the needle. She set it in her jaws.

“It’s hurt for a week. Fix it,” Scotch said as she clenched her eyes closed. A prick, and then…

Scotch wasn’t a unicorn. She had no idea how the healing magic stuff worked. What she did know was that they needed to invent a word past ‘hurt’ for what she felt right then. Her immobilized leg was rearranging itself, dragging the broken pieces together to fuse them, with nary a concern for what her nerves might feel. She fell to her side, leg outstretched, screaming and crying as Precious held her down. On her PipBuck, the little medical of a colt went from having his left foreleg in a sling to standing normally. The colt’s smile seemed particularly disingenuous to Scotch as her vision began to swim from the pain; still, the bar below the formerly crippled limb had filled a sliver. Majina used a second one on her, and the pain simmered down to a mere gnawing ache.

“Save that last one,” Pythia said blandly as she squinted at the contents of one of the plastic folders in the wan illumination.

“Thanks,” she told Majina and Precious, then frowned at Pythia. “Sorry you were so worried!”

Pythia glanced up at her. “Were those super deadly, toxic, acidic, radioactive healing potions they were sticking you with? No? Then you were fine.” She dropped her eyes back to the binder. “I’m just trying to find something on what this place was for.”

“Still hurts.” Scotch pouted, working her leg. It ached quite a bit, but at least she could put her full weight on it.

“Yeah, yeah. Cry me a river,” Pythia drawled, then twisted her lips and amended, “On second thought, don’t. It’s wet here enough already. Now bring that light over here so I can read this.”

“You know, I bet this will turn the lights on,” Majina said from the control panel. Then she reached out with a hoof and slammed a gate switch down.

“No!” Scotch and Pythia said in unison.

Nothing happened.

“Huh,” Majina blinked at it. “Guess it’s broken,” she said as she flipped a few more breakers.

“Stop playing with the controls, please,” Scotch begged. The batteries or generators they were connected to seemed to be either dry or offline, but still, playing with high voltage was just something you didn’t do.

“Relax,” Precious said as she joined Majina and flipped a few more switches with a smirk. “See? Nothing.” Then she flipped up a cover and pressed a button.

From somewhere in the darkness, a motor started to whirr. The lights on the breakers started to light up amber, red, and green. Scotch had no idea what they were for; all the labels were in glyphs. “Turn it off! Turn it off!” she said as she pressed the button that Precious had in the futile hope that whatever she started would stop. “Which one is the off button? What’s the glyph for ‘Deactivate’? ‘Off’? ‘Cut power’?”

Majina squinted at the panel. “It’s this one,” she said as she tapped a large button. More lights came on, these ones red. “Or… this one?” Another tap.

“Stop guessing!” Pythia hissed.

“Well, I’m sorry but the labels are tiny on these things! It’s hard to see!” the filly protested.

Scotch Tape gaped at the breakers on the panel. In a stable, down was a closed circuit and up was an open circuit. These went left and right; which was open? She flipped one. In the office and the workshop, overhead lights flickered to life. Okay! Right was closed!

“What’s the big deal?” Precious asked as she backed away. “I turned the power on. You’re welcome.”

“The big deal–” Scotch started to say, and then a round section of ceiling out in the workshop dropped down a foot. From a recess in the side of the circular drum extended a gun barrel, which swiveled and oriented on Precious in the doorway. A stream of gunfire spat out at the dragonfilly, and Scotch reached out and grabbed her, pulling her behind the frame. Her flank was bloody and battered, but not torn to pieces.

“Ow. Ow. Ow,” Precious growled, hissing in pain from where the turret had gotten her.

“That’s the big deal,” Scotch said. “Do you see a breaker for security system?” she asked as she gestured to the panel.

“Um. No. I don’t even know what half these glyphs mean!” Majina admitted. “We can just start pushing buttons and flipping breakers till they deactivate, right?”

“No! You might turn something worse on!” Pythia snapped.

Scotch carefully pulled herself to the terminal. If she leaned over, she could work the controls. “Tell me one of you knows how to hack a zebra terminal?”

“I’ve heard about how to do it,” Pythia said as she crawled on the floor next to Scotch. A few taps of the keyboard, and a collection of weird shapes appeared on a three by three grid. “Okay. Now you just have to rotate these to make a glyph that’ll access the system.”

“That’s insane. Zebras are crazy! Make a glyph! What glyph? I don’t even know which glyphs are what!” Scotch shouted.

“I don’t know!” Pythia shouted back. “Ask me some weird stuff about dark magic, and I’ll talk all day! This is weird Propoli technology stuff that nobody understands!”

Scotch stared at the screen. “Okay. Nine tiles. Four positions for each. That makes for… four times four times four times… oh… crap…” She groaned and buried her face in her hooves. “More than a quarter-million possible combinations!”

“They don’t all rotate,” Pythia pointed out. “Only five do, and some of those clearly don’t line up, so you can just count those out.”

“Okay… so…” She did the math in her head. “Just over a thousand,” she said as she moved the cursor, experimenting with rotating tiles. “I’ll need a piece of paper to keep track of this,” she said, hitting what she hoped was ‘enter’.

The image went bright red, and one of four little circles near the top of the screen vanished. “Let me guess, when all four are gone, I’m locked out?” she said, getting blank stares from the other three. “It’s okay. Daddy told me how to do this. You just try three times and then back out and start over.” She made a quick sketch of the screen and gave each tile a number, then rotated the first tile once and tried again. Failure. Another rotation and try. Failure. She hit ‘exit’, going back to a startup screen and then back to the puzzle.

With still only one dot remaining.

“It’s supposed to reset! Why isn’t it resetting?!” Scotch asked. She had a one in a ridiculously large number chance of getting the next one right just by guessing! “You’re breaking the rules!” she shouted at the impassive terminal.

“I don’t think it cares,” Precious said. “So, Plan B?”

“We have one?” Majina asked, giving a feeble grin. “Please tell me we have one. That would be so wonderful!”

“Sure. I run out and smash them,” Precious said as she eyed the door.

“But they’re in the ceiling,” Majina pointed out.

“And I breathe fire.”

“They’re way up in the ceiling.”

“I’m bulletproof.”

“You’re not that bulletproof,” she said with a gesture at the dragonfilly’s bloody flank.

“That’s a flesh wound.”

“And you’re made of flesh. So let’s bump that to Plan C,” Majina said with a smile.

“They can’t hit us in here,” Scotch broke in. “So think of something else. Meanwhile, I’ll hope to get lucky. Majina, tell me if I’m close to some zebra word.” Hopefully, this would be easy.

Unfortunately, after a dozen tile turns, she’d gotten the glyphs for ‘towel’, ‘inside’, and ‘hat’, none of which sounded promising. That wasn’t counting shapes that ‘kinda’ looked like glyphs. “Majina, how many glyphs are there in Zebra?”

“I dunno. A couple thousand?” the filly replied. “I don’t know them all.”

“How the heck do you learn them all?” Scotch demanded.

“Hey! You’re just biased against stripey things!” Majina countered.

“And you’re biased against letters!” Scotch shot back.

“I can tell them all apart easily,” Majina said huffily. “Besides, glyph meaning changes depending on what other glyphs are around it. If you put that hat glyph next to a glyph that meant filly, it would be a filly wearing a hat. If you swapped them, it would be a hat made by a filly! And if it was under the filly, it would mean covering the filly.”

Scotch signed and rubbed her face. “This would be so much easier if they just imbedded random passwords in the RAM, like Daddy taught me.”

“Just go through them and get a shorter list to guess from,” Precious suggested. “We’ve got time.”

“I’m not sure we do,” Scotch said as she help up her PipBuck. Oh how nice it was to not have that busted leg! “This thing lets me see threats. There’s three turrets out there.”

“So?”

“I’m getting six bars, and half of them are moving around,” Scotch informed them. “I think reinforcements are coming to find out why the lights are on.” She set the glyph for ‘hat’. “Here we go,” she said with a feeling of doom.

Pythia sighed.

Scotch Tape froze, her hoof touching the button but not pressing it. “What?”

“What do you mean, what? Now we’re locked out,” Pythia said, and then blinked in bafflement. The cloaked zebra groaned. “Damn it. I’m a few seconds ahead… wait… what…” Her eyes popped wide in shock.

Her hoof raised just in time to block Scotch’s kiss. Scotch didn’t care. She kissed her hoofpad anyway, making Pythia roll her eyes. “You’re a dream come true! I don’t have to guess. Just keep your vision in the future and tell me if it locks me out!”

“Okay! Just don’t kiss me!” she snapped, lowering her hoof, and wiping it off on the floor. “Pony cooties…” she muttered under her breath. Scotch started to work through the glyphs. “No. No. No,” Pythia repeated over and over for each one. Then Scotch had a circular shape on the screen, and the golden-eyed filly blinked. “That’s it!”

“Hee! Eat that, programmers!” Scotch said, feeling a little stab of victory at using cheating star magic to get around their stupid puzzle. “What’s that glyph mean, Majina?”

She stared at it. “Um. ‘World’. Or ‘Everything’. Like I said, the meaning of a glyph is really flexible.”

“Wasn’t that the one on the sign out front? Under the star thingies?” Precious commented, looking over Scotch’s shoulder.

Okay. Maybe that could have been faster. She hit enter, and the screen filled up with what looked like a crossword puzzle of glyphs. “Okay. I will never be able to read Zebra,” Scotch huffed.

“Ponies. If it’s not twenty-six glyphs arranged left to right with subglyphs thrown in, it’s just not language,” Majina said as she sat in front of the screen. “What am I looking for?”

“Whatever counts as security. Find the turrets and deactivate them,” Scotch said. The turret with the best angle for the door seemed to think that it should just keep firing, and began to spit a stream of bullets that began to chew through the fragile interior wall. Everyone who could hunkered down behind the metal desk.

Majina started working the terminal. “Security. Turrets. Where are you?” Majina asked as she pursed her lips, ignoring the wild ricochets. “Oh! That’s interesting!”

“You found the turret controls?” Scotch asked as a chunk of wall fell in.

“No! Apparently this was a message to a Propoli vendor telling them to take it up with the Caesar about unpaid bills, and–” Majina said.

“Turn off the turrets!” Pythia screamed.

“Oh. Right! Turrets. Security. Where is that?” she said as she kept typing away, so slow it made Scotch Tape want to scream. “Ah. Here it is,” she said as red glyphs flashed on the screen. “Alert.” She tapped a key. “Unalert.”

The turrets stopped firing, then retracted into the ceiling. Half the red bars disappeared. The other half continued to slide around. Majina tapped a few more keys and leaned forward, propping up her chin on her hooves. “Now here’s an interesting message. Apparently, there’s a zebra eating lunches that aren’t hers, so this zebra pooped in his sandwich. That’s funny!” she said with a laugh that cut short before she added, “And kinda gross.”

“Well, we can add discovering the identity of the phantom pooper to our to do list,” Scotch said as the bars moved towards the workshop’s front door. The knob rattled, and she looked over at the grate they’d squeezed through. “Copy what you can into my PipBuck!” she said as she extended a cable with the traditional round plug.

“Um,” Majina pointed at a square hole in the side of the terminal. “I think we need an adapter.”

“Nevermind!” Scotch said as the bars were moving to the other two entrances to the shop. “We need to get out of here.” Fortunately, the wall they’d entered had no doors in it. “If we’re quick, we can get away while they waste time looking for us in here.”

“Or we can just stomp them when they come in. I’m sick of running from fights!” Precious said with a grin.

“Fight when we need to,” Scotch said, prompting a frustrated snarl from the dragonfilly. Still, she followed as they got to the grate in the back wall and squeezed through the gap into the concealing darkness. Strange blue lights illuminated the far side of the building. Scotch pointed over at where the shell had split and started to creep forward.

Then she barked her head on the underside of the radiator and yet out a hiss of pain, sitting down hard and clutching her throbbing skull.

“Is someone there?” a strange, metallic voice asked. Then, far more quietly than Scotch herself had been, the red bar rushed around the corner.

And Scotch Tape knew she was going to die.

Once upon a time, when she’d been fresh in the Wasteland and following along in Blackjack’s company, they’d gone into tunnels under that city. Something had happened down there. Something bad. Glory had lost a wing, and Blackjack’s legs had been crippled. She never knew what it was, because Blackjack had some medical ponies remove the memory. Whatever she’d seen, whatever had happened, was gone.

But the fear remained.

In her dreams, iron mouths occasionally opened wide with great grinding drill teeth inside. Every now and then, she’d look at a pile of rusty wreckage, and her heart rate would spike, to her great shame. It wasn’t just machinery. It had to have a certain appearance: a face. Most machines didn’t have those, or if they did, they were so abstract that she could suppress the urge to run.

This machine had a face. It was to Protectaponies what a bucket was to a twenty pony power, two hundred and thirty spark submersible sump pump. The white casing was some sort of ceramic, with black stripes at the joints. It didn’t just have cameras, but eyes that glowed with a cold, blue light. Its hooves ended in quiet, rubber soles. “Pony intruders detected. Terminating.”

And from its shoulders popped two smaller, drum-shaped turrets. All Scotch could do was sit there and wait for it to eat her. Her brain refused to do otherwise. She was dead.

“You first!” Precious roared as she leapt in front of Scotch Tape. The blue-white beams of energy hit the dragonfilly, but though she smoked, her cry of pain was caught behind her clenched jaws. Then she opened her mouth wide and let out a gout of flame that blackened the robot’s face and set its head on fire. The machine backed away several feet as Precious grimaced.

Then its head popped off.

The smoking, crackling extremity rolled at the dragonfilly’s feet. She pounced on it like a giant lavender fire-breathing cat, clutching it in her claws and chewing on its blackened face. “Yeah!” she growled around a mouthful of broken ceramics. “That’ll show you to zap my face, you robotic jerk!”

She was so occupied with her prize that she missed the movement of the machine. The decapitated robot charged straight ahead, smashing right into the dragonfilly and continuing till she rammed the shell. The entire structure rang like a gong. Precious struggled to get free from the robot that was crushing her against the wall. Yet Scotch could only stare at the decapitated robot’s head. Inside, it wasn’t exactly like a skull, but it seemed to be watching her with a still-glowing eye, its mouth torn wide in a silent scream.

“What is wrong with you?” Pythia shouted as she leapt next to Scotch Tape, then pulled her hoof aside just in time to avoid getting blasted by a beam. The other two robots had joined the first. Pythia moved away from Scotch in a strange, jerky dance that somehow had her body out of the way of each energy shot.

Scotch kept her eyes at chest level on the robots. If they didn’t have faces, they couldn’t eat her. “We… we have to go… just go…” she stammered as she rushed to the headless robot, which was trying to walk through a solid metal wall with Precious in the middle. “Come on,” she said as she tugged and hammered at the headless machine, “Get off her!” She turned to Pythia. “Where’s Majina?” she shouted.

“Over here!” the filly shouted. She was beside the third robot. When it turned left, she pivoted with it. The machine didn’t have the ability to kick out sideways, and when it tried to body slam her, she ducked and rolled beside it. In the nimble zebra’s hoof was the bamboo blowgun, and she was ineffectually whacking the robot in the head as it tried to blast her. The bamboo seemed tough enough to avoid splintering from the blows. “I can’t put it to sleep! Stupid thing just keeps trying to stomp and zap me!”

If Majina had been a pony, she would have been stomped or zapped, but she was quick enough to stay in a safe spot next to the robot. “I need…” Scotch began.

Blackjack.

She’s gone.

Daddy.

He’s dead.

Rampage.

On the moon.

Glory.

Dead too.

Blackjack… what if… the legs were similar. Not exactly the same as the cyberpony’s, but close enough. The headless robot didn’t seem aware of her as she examined one of its legs and its myriad servos and little pistons working through a gap in the casing at the back of the joint. If it didn’t give her the shivers, she’d love to study the design. “Let’s see. That’s the primary. That’s the tertiary. That’s the main support. So that…” And she reached in with a hoof to a lock behind the hind knee and gave it a twist. “…is the primary lock!”

The leg separated with a hiss, still connected by a dozen hoses and cables but now robbed of the leverage needed to move. When it attempted a step, the whole thing collapsed on its side, the legs kicking wildly in the air as it tried to march forward. Precious fell and sucked in grateful breaths of air.

“I did it…” Scotch Tape murmured, and then she grinned. “I did it!” she shouted as she hopped on her hooves in glee.

“Target priority reassessed,” the two remaining robots said as they turned on her. “Engaging pony saboteur specialist.”

“Oh horseapples,” Scotch whimpered as the need for flight fought with the urge to curl up in a ball and be eaten.

“Run!” Pythia screamed at her at the top of her lungs. It cut through the choking fear bubbling up inside her, and Scotch Tape turned and dove through the gap in the shell, then ran along the edge of the barge towards the bridge leading to the next. A glance behind her was all she dared take to verify she was still the ‘priority target’ for those two.

Only they weren’t the only ones.

From the other shells emerged more of the white robots, each repeating the phrase ‘priority target identified’ and giving chase. One stepped out right in front of her, and she had to leap onto its rump, jump on its head, and kick off its face to get past it. She landed in a tumble, took a roll, and managed to get back on her feet before it retargeted her. Blue beams sizzled through the air, but she saw a clear shot to the floating bridge back to shore. She just had to get out there and…

And then all these robots would go to lower priority targets. Her friends…

She saw the bridge stretching before her, inviting her to freedom and safety.

Then she gritted her teeth, clenched her eyes, and rounded the corner of the next shell instead of running across the bridge to safety. The robotic herd raced after her. She had no idea where she was going, just that she had to keep moving. She dashed across a bridge separating two barges and saw the trio rushing from the shell a good distance away.

“What are you doing!” Pythia screamed at her from the far barge.

“Running!” Scotch yelled, breathlessly. “Get out of here!”

Her freshly healed leg ached, her body burned, and every breath felt like fire in her lungs. All she knew was that if she followed the outside edge of the barges, she’d eventually make her way to the bridge. As she fled, she passed rusty tugboats and less durable metal barges with corroded cranes and equipment still poking up out of the murky water.

There! The bridge! She ran right for it and–

“Primary target acquired,” the robot said it stepped into her path. She stared up at those eyes, her already-hammering heart threatening to clench tight permanently. She could see its mouth opening up, and any second it’d send out cables to haul her into its maw forever.

Or it would, if it hadn’t been shot.

The metallic head exploded, and like before, the robot ejected the damaged part and rushed forward, stomping and blasting wildly. Scotch rolled out of the way, rising on trembling hooves when a second shot tore right through the torso in a spray of sparks and lubricant. The robot collapsed and ejected all four limbs before letting out a feeble burst of smoke. More robots came into sight around the corners, and she ran for the bridge before the terror took her. The robots were slowed by the mysterious shooter taking off legs and heads with sprays of shrapnel. The robots halted at the edge of the barge but continued to spray beams at her and out into the swamp. One of the beams connected with her rump, and Scotch bit back a cry as her hide sizzled. When she was across the bridge and behind the cover of some trees, the robots stopped their attack as quickly as they’d started it.

Scotch collapsed on the grass, sucking in great gulps of air, her sides burning as her body came down off the adrenaline. She scrubbed her rump with wet grass, trying to soothe the burn. She’d saved Precious and decoyed the robots and was alive! Plus, no crippled leg anymore! She had a hoof-sized scorch march on her bum, but that was a fair trade in her book. This was definitely a win.

“That was awesome, wasn’t it?!” she gushed as she sat up, scanning for her friends. “Girls?” she asked as she rose, looking at the oaks and gumwood rising around her, trinketless. A glance back at the barges confirmed her fears: there were two half-sunken tugs where there shouldn’t be.

This was the wrong side of the lake.

Okay. So she’d have to go around. How long could that take?

Ten minutes later, she’d made all of fifty feet.

She sat down in a huff on a hummock of dead grass next to a bleached gator skull. A few bones poked out amid the yellow strands. “Great. Now what do I do? Hopefully Pythia can find her way to me.”

Wait. What was that on her E.F.S.? A yellow bar? Her friends must have made the same… no. She stood on the hummock, but the bar kept on moving wildly around. As if the source were directly above her, but that was ridiculous! There was only sky up… her eyes slowly shifted down to the lump she stood on. “Is it just me, or is there something off about that skull?” she muttered as she reached down to flip it over.

Inside the skull, two green eyes snapped open, glaring at her. The hummock lifted, tossing her to the ground as the grass fell away, but the bones stayed behind. Bones which were tied to netting strapped to the zebra beneath.

Once, she’d met Majina’s brother Lancer, or Impalii as he was known to zebras. Lancer had been a sniper, fit and athletic, and had engaged in some kind of crazy rivalry or relationship with Blackjack. Something about curses and whatnot. He’d had a sweet rifle and generally kicked quite a bit of flank.

She thought of him now, because he’d be this stallion’s little brother. His entire body was powerful muscle, bigger than most zebras and ponies. His stripes were narrow, jagged lines, more resembling claw slashes than the simple curved lines she’d become used to. Green eyes blazed furiously at her as he loomed over her. The rifle he carried was a powerful, bolt action affair that was probably quite effective at killing huge radigators, or murderous machines. On a belt was a… not a sword so much as a thin, wide, sharpened piece of metal with a rounded tip. Had she been Blackjack, she would have probably offered her posterior immediately.

Since Scotch wasn’t Blackjack, though, she simply gave a sheepish little wave of her hoof. “Um… Hi?”

The frowning stallion stared down at her, then turned and started to walk.

Scotch watched him walk for several seconds. “Wait!” she blurted, and ran up to him, getting in his path. “You’ve got to help me! My friends are on the far side of the lake! If you could…”

He stepped right over her, continuing to walk while barely breaking stride. The thin stripes seemed to blend in ominously well with the grass and the trees as she hurried after him.

“If you could help me get over to them, I’d be really grateful!” Scotch said as she rushed to keep up, but the brush seemed to go out of its way to trip her up and slow her down. He almost disappeared from sight. Desperately, she blurted, “Tradition!”

He paused, turning to glance back at her with a long, hard stare.

“You’re Orah, right?” Scotch said as she struggled to catch up to him. “You must have traditions like… like helping people stranded in the swamp?” He leaned towards her. “Especially trapped young ponies?” she offered, grasping at any straw as he narrowed his eyes. “I’ll shut up now,” she whimpered. Majina had been right. This was a tribe of jerks. He turned and started back on his way.

“Follow,” he said, his voice low and deep.

What else could she do? Go back across the barges? The robots hadn’t gone back to their hiding places yet. She had no boat, and no idea where her friends were.

She followed.

Stinkbutt McHugegun wasn’t much of a travelling companion. He stayed near enough to follow but far enough that she couldn’t ask any of the millions of questions inside her or beg him to help her find the others. Any attempt was met with a glare, and more than once she’d nearly lost him when she’d refused to go unless he helped. The trail they travelled on was so narrow and twisting that she’d almost tumbled into a bog, mud, or stinging plants. Twice they reached rivers that were bridged by arching trees that met in the middle and vines woven together in a bridge all but indistinguishable from the rest of the foliage. The massive stallion had no problem navigating both, but Scotch felt one wrong step would dump her right into the water, with the hungry radigators and worse below.

At least Stinkbutt wasn’t trying to get her killed. If he’d wanted to do that, he could have simply let her walk into trees covered with huge nets of spiderwebs draped like gossamer over the entire hummock. Scotch stared as one of the great white birds became tangled in the filmy netting and was swarmed by spiders the size of the filly’s hoof. In less than a minute, the large avian was cocooned and dragged into the shadows of the grove by some unseen force.

Or into the mud pit occupied by a radigator even bigger than the one she’d killed with the logs. Scotch watched as the gator struggled up the sides, not to get out, but to get away from the triangular mouth slowly opening and closing with flat chisel teeth. Already the massive reptile had lost most of its tail and one hind leg, and it was slowly sliding back down towards those yellow teeth in that stinking maw.

By now, she doubted she’d ever see her friends again. Stinkbutt McHugegun had been walking almost for two hours now. It was already dark, and if it hadn’t been for her PipBuck lamp, she probably never would have been able to keep track of the stallion. Her friends were probably dead now, or thought her dead. If Pythia didn’t have some kind of star magic to help locate her…

Oh, why did she ever leave the Hoof?

Then she heard it: the tinny notes of an instrument being plucked somewhere in the swamp ahead. The notes moved tentatively, note by note through the brush, only to be matched a few seconds later by softer, more mellow melodies. Back and forth notes were exchanged, growing faster and more intricate till they merged into one melody. A whistling joined in, and someone stomping their hooves rhythmically. Then her massive guide brushed aside some grass.

The tree growing from the small hill had to be two or three times larger than any oak she’d seen in the swamp. Built among its huge branches were platforms and small shacks connected by bridges and netting. Three or four smaller oaks held more huts, connected by wooden walkways that snaked over the lily-filled pools snaking around the little hillocks. Colored bottles hung from string, the lit candles within creating a rainbow of colors hanging in the boughs. Flowers grew in hanging pots outside the huts strung through the trees.

At the base of the largest oak, a party of six or seven zebras played while a dozen more listened from the walkways above, stomping their hooves on the wooden planks in time with the music. Scotch had no idea how they strummed that guitar and, she assumed, a ‘banjo’, but then again, she didn’t have a clue how ponies played such instruments at all with their hooves. Still, in spite of her worry, Scotch found herself smiling a little.

Of course, it ended as Stinkbutt McHugegun stepped forward. Every face became a glower as the musicians set their instruments aside and started drawing knives and chopping swords like her guide’s. In the trees above, some zebras drew rifles; not as large as his, but plenty big enough to make Scotch want to turn tail and try her luck wandering boatless in a swamp.

“What you doing here?” the only zebra on the ground without a weapon in his mouth roared in a thick, slurring Zebra drawl that Scotch could only barely follow. “You git! Righ’ now!”

It took Scotch a second to realize he wasn’t yelling it at her.

The lead zebra walked right up to Stinkbutt, shoving his face into the skull-masked zebra’s. “Go on! What you thinkin’? Git!”

Stinkbutt reached up to the skull and pulled it off. The face behind it stared down at his persecutor, then he took a step to the side and gestured at Scotch. The zebra aggressor and his armed friends’ faces betrayed their surprise and bafflement as they gaped at her. She offered a sheepish little wave.

“Is that Orion?” a young mare called out as she rushed to the edge of the platform. Her pink eyes lit up as she smiled, and for an instant Scotch thought he returned the expression up at her.

“Never you mind, Diane!” snapped the leader of the group arrayed before Scotch and Orion. “Why’d ya bring that damned pony here? What you thinkin’?”

Orion stared down and rumbled deeply, “Tradition.”

“You got no tradition! Murderer! Sicarius! Git! Find some critter’s belly ta lie in!” bellowed the leader, rearing up and thumping his hooves into Orion’s chest. The enormous stallion didn’t budge from the impact, but he did turn from the village, walking slowly back towards the brush. “That’s righ’! Git on outta here!”

Orion gave one glance up at Diane, then turned and started back into the darkness again. The mare called out his name as she rushed along the walkways to reach the ground. “Orion!” Diane called out, rushing to him. The enormous stallion paused. “Thank you.” Diane reached the ground, but the leader intercepted her, and the others blocked her from reaching him. Orion walked into the darkness, and in a moment disappeared as if he’d never been.

“Damn you, Kyros!” she hissed, thumping his chest with a hoof. “You could have let me see if he was okay!”

“He’s sicarius. He be okay when he’s dead,” he said to her, then turned and regarded Scotch. He was older than most ponies and zebras Scotch knew. Like Orion, his stripes were narrow and ended in tapered points, but he was a little fattier around the edges, and wider around the middle. “Now to deal with what he left. Who you be, pony?” His friends, Scotch noted, hadn’t put away their weapons. “What you be doin’ with sicarius Orion?”

Scotch was too tired and frustrated to deceive. “My name is Scotch Tape. He found me after I escaped from some robots, but I got separated from my friends. I found him, and he led me here. And I have no idea what a ‘sicarithing’ is.” For some reason, her statement set the zebras muttering. Scotch really wished she knew what their weird names meant. At least the Atoli had been polite in that regard. Still, these were a little easier to keep track of.

Kyros grinned widely and laughed. “You found Orion? The mighty hunter can’t even hide from pony chile!” Few of the others seemed to find it as funny, though there were some chuckles.

“You escaped from the machines on the lake?” Diane asked, pushing through the crowd to regard Scotch Tape.

Kyros snorted. “No big deal, that. Run on a barge and run off. Done it plenty o’ times meself!” He tapped himself in the chest.

“Well, we didn’t do that. My friends and I went into one of the shells and explored a bit. Then we turned on the power and that’s when everything went nuts.” She hoped she was saying it all right. Their dialect sounded strange to Scotch, but at least they weren’t talking backwards! Her statement made more of those strange looks.

“We need to take her to Granny,” Diane said at once.

“We don’t need take her nowhere. Use her for gator bait,” Kyros said, no longer amused. “Pony get nothin’ from us. Jes like the Poli and Romi.” He spat at her hooves.

“Granny will want something from her. If she’s actually been on the lake.” Diane regarded her with those soft pink eyes. Her mane was long, appearing as if she’d just gotten out of a bath, and had swamp flowers coiled up in it.

“You just hope you bump into Orion,” Kyros said sourly. “He sicarius, Diane. Dead.”

“He didn’t want to kill Theron,” Diane said plaintively.

“But he did!” Kyros snapped. “You got no future with him. Stealin’ off hopin’ ta bump into him. Do a lot more bumpin’ and end up with his bump, huh?” He eyed Scotch flatly. “You want take pony ta Granny, tha’ your business. She no stayin’ here. No sirree.” And with that, he and his friends went back towards the tree.

Diane considered Scotch curiously. “What are you doing all the way here, pony?”

“How about this?” Scotch countered crossly. “Help me find my friends, and I’ll tell you the whole story and answer whatever questions you have, deal?”

“Your friends were on the lake as well?” she asked, and Scotch answered with a nod. “Then I’m sorry to say, but they’re probably–”

“They are not dead!” Scotch shouted at her. “Not till I see their bodies, they’re not!” But the very idea stabbed her to her core. Rampage. Glory. Blackjack. Daddy. How many more would she lose? “I know they might be, but I need to find them.”

Diane considered her a moment. “Well then, you’ll need Granny’s help anyway. Otherwise it could take days to track your friends, if ever.”

Scotch Tape sagged, wishing she had some way of doing this herself. “Is Granny a shaman?” Diane gave a nod. “Well then, I guess she’s my best chance. Maybe she knows what the Eye of the World is, where it is, and how it could be blinded.” Then, when her friends were safe, they could go home. Scotch had had enough of the zebra lands.

Diane fetched her rifle, saddlebags, and leather barding, and they started out while the rest of the zebras played, ate, and ignored the pony at the edge of their village. The trail they took was a little more obvious than the winding path Orion had led her down. “Can we talk?” Scotch asked the mare beside her.

“If you like,” Diane replied.

“You’re Orah, right?” Scotch Tape pointed at her stripes. They were much longer and wider than Orion’s or Kyros’s, and they seemed to meander along her body, defining her form. “You look different from Orion and that other jerk.”

“I’m Carnilian by birth, but I’ve been raised Orah my entire life,” she answered, which spawned a whole new slew of questions.

“You can switch tribes? I thought that being a part of a tribe was like… everything to a zebra? Like a horn is to a unicorn,” Scotch said as they walked along a wider path that allowed them to travel side by side.

“You are born into your tribe, but if a village is willing, you can be a part of it. Many Carnilians join other tribes. Our children take their stripes easily, and within two generations, it would hard to see any Carnilian in their stripes.” She looked ahead. “I only spent a few years among my own tribe before we left. Another famine. Another diaspora. Mother was lucky to be taken in, and while I am not Orah in my stripes, I am Orah in my heart.”

Scotch wasn’t precisely sure what ‘diaspora’ meant, but she guessed it was bad. “So… who are the Orah? My friend is that Zenwhatsit tribe and she doesn’t know. She says the Orah aren’t in any stories.”

“Not Zencori tales, no. You wouldn’t find them there,” she said as they reached a log bridge and walked carefully across. “The Orah… want to be left alone.”

“Well, they picked the right spot for that,” she said as she looked out at the swamp, lit by patches of glowing fungus and the distant flicker of swamp fire.

“You misunderstand. Many Orah live in swamps, that is true. But they also live in deep forests, dark caves, and other unwanted places because they wish to be left alone. The Orah never wished to be a part of the Empire. Never wished to be dragged into its problems and follies. If they could, Zebrinica would be eleven tribes plus one, and the Orah.” She paused and considered Scotch. “Do you hunt, Pony?”

“My name is Scotch Tape,” she said, and shuddered. “And no. I don’t kill things unless I have to.”

“Then you won’t understand the Orah,” she said as they walked past a bubbling pool of mud. “We are a tribe of hunters. In these swamps and wild places are beasts and monsters powerful and terrifying, and the Orah slay them. Not all of them, but we kill them as they would kill us. Every Orah hunts, even if all they hunt are marsh lilies. You have to find your prey. Study it. Stalk it. Know it. Only then can you kill it, and when you do, it must be with respect.”

“I’ve walked around the Waste– er, pony lands quite a bit, and I’m pretty sure plenty of people kill without all that.”

She smiled. “True, but anyone can kill. A foal can kill by accident. I’m talking about hunting. In this swamp, you don’t simply march out and find an enemy and shoot at them till they’re dead. You will drown or starve long before that happens. Even edible, nonpoisonous plants must be hunted because we do not have arable land for farms. So we hunt. We learn our homes better than any stranger possibly could. We know where the fish lie. We know there the cattails grow. We know where the radigators wallow. We could, if we wished, wipe out any of these, but then nothing would be left, and we would die fools.”

“So, instead of getting rid of the monsters and stuff, you just kill them sometimes? And they kill you sometimes?” Scotch gaped at her. “And you’re okay with this?”

“As much as they are. It’s hard to respect something if you wipe them out,” she said as they trotted past a lake with a massive, moss covered derrick in the middle. The rusted spire groaned softly as it listed in the mire. “After all, the other tribes have tried to wipe out the Orah too.”

“Wait? They have?” Scotch gaped at her.

“‘Orah’ means many things, depending on how the word is pronounced. ‘Unwanted’, ‘Disliked’, and ‘Worthless’. The Orah had no interest in wars and empires. Live and let live. Hunt. Have families. Die. But we tend to live in places other people want. Even this swamp had lumber, minerals, hides, and meat. If the other tribes could, they would drain this land, strip away the minerals, raze the forest, and make crops of it. Because a swamp is Orah. Worthless, as it is.” She dipped a hoof in the water, the ripples spreading out along the lake. As they travelled, the scum floating on the water suddenly glowed in lambency. The waves shifted from yellow, to green, to blue, and finally purple before fading away.

Scotch looked up at her, seeing her illuminated in the glow of the water. “Why are you so nice to me? Don’t you hate that I’m a pony?”

She smiled down at her. “Scotch Tape, there is nothing your people did to my tribe or me that was as bad as what other zebras did to us.” They continued walking along the shore. “During the war, my tribe was out of favor with the Empire. Every year, they demanded more. Every year, they took more and more of the swamp for logging. Every year, they stole away our hunters to snipe and kill your kind, threatening terrible punishments to their families if they refused. We were at war with the Maiden of the Stars, Nightmare Moon, who would kill us all. How dare we object?” Her smile faded as they approached the smell of cookfires.

“You didn’t want to beat Nightmare Moon?” Scotch asked, baffled.

Diane started to answer, paused, and then considered. “Personally, I suppose so, but I wasn’t there two centuries ago. If eleven tribes couldn’t beat her, how could we, with our few hunters, defeat her? No, we would have rather been left alone, or perhaps asked rather than being forced at gunpoint to do so.”

“I just… I sort of imagined the Empire as all the zebras working together to kill us. I didn’t think you fought your own people.” Scotch admitted. “Kywhatisname didn’t like ponies.”

“Kyros loves Kyros and those who love Kyros. He’s the best hunter now that Theron is dead and his brother exiled, and so he runs the village,” she said, her face hardening.

“Wait? Just like that?”

“No, but he is the best hunter after those two. None contested it.” She gave a thin smile. “It’s not absolute power or anything like that. The village elders and Granny would smack him if he did anything too stupid, but the young hunters listen to him.” Diane’s smile fell along with her ears. She stared out at the swamp, her pink eyes searching for something as her long mane fell around her shoulders.

“So… I probably won’t understand it, but what happened with Stin– er, Orion and that Theron person?” Scotch asked. “Kyros called him ‘sicarius’? What’s that?”

“It’s…” She faltered, coming to a stop. “It’s hard to explain. Murdering your own family, I suppose. It’s the greatest crime an Orah can commit.” She resumed walking as she went on, “Granny and the Elders arranged for Theron and I to wed. He was the elder brother and better hunter. Soon after it was announced, Orion killed him during a hunt. For that, he was named sicarius and exiled.”

“And you and Orion were in love?” Scotch asked.

“We were… friendly. If things had been different…” she sighed and smiled down at the filly. “Have you ever been in love, Scotch?”

Scotch considered. “No. I’ve done things, but… no.” She didn’t elaborate. After all, after the captain’s reaction, the last thing she wanted was to be punted into the swamp just because she wasn’t actually a child.

“Well, I hope when you are, you’ll be happy,” she said, and then stopped. “We’re here.”

Here? Here wasn’t anywhere. It was a huge, dense hummock of trees tangled together with thorny vines, utterly impermeable. Only a narrow path cut through the dense trees. As she stood there, a breeze rich with the smell of rotten leaves and the stink of putrefying flesh rolled out at her. “What is that?”

“Granny’s home,” she said as she walked to the opening of the path, really a tunnel through the wood. “Stay close.”

The trees seemed to suck every speck of light. Diane’s rear was barely in view as they walked forward. Scotch activated her PipBuck lamp, but things in the trees let out such a monstrous shriek that she staggered back in shock. The screaming shapes shook the branches around her, and she fell back, the ground giving way beneath her as she tumbled into a thorn-lined pit. The thorns scratched her hide and yanked her mane. In the wan green glow of her PipBuck, equine shapes snapped bony teeth at her, broken hooves thrusting through the interwoven trunks and vines, pawing at her.

All Scotch could do was curl up into the smallest ball she should and kill the lamp. She didn’t want to see the things about to eat her.

Instantly, all went silent again, but she could feel the branches bend and flex as things within moved about. She fell on her side, a tiny sliver of starry sky visible above her. Diane would either come find her, or the zebra mare had been eaten by the monsters.

Lying there, she heard the faint slosh of water. A tiny bubbling gurgle. The rasp of something rubbing against bark. The buzz of a mosquito in her ear.

And then she went mad.

“You’re a long way from home, Scotch,” rasped a voice she hadn’t heard in years.

He emerged from the gloom and starlight, barely visible at all, but she’d seen him briefly in the few hours she’d worn Blackjack’s PipBuck. The pony skull. The jacket. The cowpony hat. The cards.

The Dealer.

“No. You’re gone. You’re gone and you were Blackjack’s thing and you’re gone…” she whispered as she stared at him in the gloom.

“Maybe, but that does raise some fundamental questions about the conversation you’re having now, doesn’t it?” he rasped as his bony hooves worked his deck.

“You’re not real,” she whispered, clenching her eyes shut, as if that would make him go away.

“Whether I am or I’m not, I’m here,” he purred, his voice as dry as a bone stroked across leather. Something was moving in the darkness, the branches sounding like they were slowly pulling closed around her. “Just like Blackjack.”

“I’m not Blackjack,” she whimpered. “Go away.”

“You’re not? Not even a little bit?” he asked in her ear.

She whimpered and shook her head.

“Are you sure?” the Dealer whispered.

When she cracked an eye open, the apparition had disappeared. She could see a pair of yellow bars on her PipBuck, but no way out of the pit she’d tumbled into.

Blackjack wouldn’t have lain here until she died. Scotch slowly rose to her hooves and started to push her way through the dense trees. She kept her PipBuck light off, trying to make her way towards the yellow bars. As she moved, she could feel more than see the movement of things in the thicket. Could they see her? Her E.F.S. didn’t have bars beyond those two. Could it even detect those things lurking in the dark?

Her hoof pushed into something that gave way with a sickening pop and a reek that made her stomach threaten to disgorge its contents. Then, whatever was under her hoof started to stir, and it was all she could do not to scream. She wasn’t Blackjack. She couldn’t be Blackjack. Being Blackjack had killed Blackjack, and almost every pony Blackjack had known. But Blackjack wouldn’t have let a little wood and darkness and monsters stop her. Nothing stopped her.

But would it stop Scotch Tape?

Ignoring whatever was squirming underhoof, she scrambled forward, ignoring the sounds and the moans, the hisses and the threats. The briars scratched deep into her hide, and her newly healed leg ached as she forced it through the vines.

And then she tumbled out into warm firelight, and stood there, trembling, as she gaped at Diane standing by an old zebra crone wearing some sort of large, heavy skin, and a zebra colt who stared intently at a campfire. The ominous tunnel she’d entered was now a simple archway through the stand of trees. Fireflies drifted lazily about overhead. Ropes dangled around the glade were decorated with colored glass, like the village, only instead of candles, these were the homes of glow worms. A large hut rose in the corner, the surface decorated by masks that seemed to be sizing Scotch Tape up just like the old mare. From behind the hut rose an enormous tree, its limbs bare and gnarled, stretching out over the clearing.

“About time you got here. I was sure you’d be lost in the woods forever, chile,” the old zebra muttered, rocking in an old, rickety, rocking chair.

Scotch whirled, looking at the trees behind her. No thorns. No vines. “I buh… but it was…” She then turned and pointed a hoof at Diane. “What’s going on? What happened? There were… things… and…”

“Not too quick, is she?” the crone muttered.

Indignation pulled Scotch’s thoughts together. “Was that some kind of dream or spell or illusion? Was I hallucinating? Or something?”

“Yes,” the crone nodded once, and pointed a bony hoof at an open spot around the fire. “Come. Warm yourself. You must be hungry.” Scotch approached warily, and the crone gave another impatient wave. “In case the wrinkles and rusty voice didn’t give it away, I’m Granny.”

Scotch finally sat down next to the colt, who hadn’t looked away from the smoky campfire. “She says you can help me get back with my friends,” Scotch said to Granny as she regarded the colt. Cute. About my age. Nice butt. Hmm… She smiled.

He glanced up at her, flushed, and then looked back at the fire. “Granny! It’s gone!”

“Teach you to be distracted by a pretty girl, Arion,” Granny cackled. The colt frowned sourly at her and turned, trotting back to the hut.

“What did I do?” Scotch protested.

“Nothing, chile,” the old mare chuckled. “And everythin’. Usually something between.” Now that Scotch was closer, she could see the skin was some kind of large beast; a bear? Those were large, right? Mouse and snake skulls clattered on necklaces around her throat. She turned to Diane and pointed a hoof. “We’ll have to finish our talk later, Diane. Just remember what I told you. Questioning will only lead to trouble. Up to you to decide if the trouble be worth it.” Diane’s smile immediately transformed into a worried frown.

Then Granny turned her filmy eyes on Scotch. “So. Strange times come to the Orah. Strange times indeed. Ponies walking our lands. Sea invaders off the salt poking through our waters. The old relics getting woken up. Troubling times.” The stripes on Granny’s face looked like long, thin claw marks by the light of the crackling fire.

“I’m sorry. We didn’t mean to come into your swamp. We were chased here by an Atoli captain named Riptide. She’s after me for some reason. I don’t know why,” Scotch added, and then amended, “But I know she wants to kill me. Or get me. Or something.”

The old mare chuckled. “And what is you sorry for, little pony?” Scotch opened and closed her mouth a few times, and the mare reached down and seized the sides of her head before she could pull away. She stared deep into Scotch’s eyes. “Not much in there, is there?” she said as Scotch fought the surprisingly strong zebra, who turned her head this way and that, as if she could see straight into her skull.

“Could you please let go of my head?” Scotch asked, thinking that decking Granny wouldn’t be the smartest move to make.

Granny chuckled and let her go. “Lots of space to fill up,” she said as she settled back in her seat. “So, hile, Diane tells me you woke up the machines on the barges?”

“If you mean the robots, yeah. We were trying to turn on the lights, and turned on a lot more,” Scotch said.

“You seem to be stirring up all sorts of things, chile,” Granny muttered as she rubbed her chin.

Scotch gave a huff. “Well, I didn’t mean to! I mean, it wasn’t even my idea to come here. Pythia said we need to find out if the Eye of the World was blinded. She doesn’t even know what it is!” Scotch paused and considered Granny. “Do you?”

Granny wasn’t smiling. She stared at Scotch Tape for nearly a minute, and Scotch struggled to be patient, shifting uncomfortably on her hooves. “The Eye of the World… blind? Who would think of such a thing?” she muttered, failing to hide the look of horror on her face for several seconds.

“Then you know what the Eye of the World is?!” Scotch asked, rising to her hooves.

“‘Course. It’s the Eye of the World.” And she thumped her hind leg on the ground beneath her.

Scotch blinked at her and then slumped. “The world doesn’t have an eye. It’s an enormous spheroid of rock orbited by the sun and moon,” she muttered flatly.

Granny arched a brow. “Oh. Well then, if it’s as you say, I have no idea.”

Scotch groaned, pressing her face into the grass and clutching her head. “I should never have come here.”

“Can’t say that, chile, one way or the other. But if you are stirrin’ things up, I can’t say I disagree much,” Scotch peeked up at her and saw her staring off through a gap in the trees at starlit water.

“Granny, haven’t you always said we don’t need outside trouble?” Diane asked.

“Sure enough, I have. That doesn’t mean I haven’t been wrong from time to time,” she said as she gazed out. “The swamp isn’t much for changing. It is. You do something to it, and it’ll just take it and continue on as best it can. But these lands are sick. Always have been.”

“I detected radiation in the water,” Scotch Tape said, tapping her PipBuck. “Low levels, but anything strong enough to make this click is dangerous.”

Granny gave a dismissive wave of her hoof. “Propoli gibberish. The swamp is sick. Poisoned. The oldest trees know it. Some of them still remember a time it wasn’t so. When they drew up water clean and cold and stretched their branches high.”

“Kyros says it’s just monsters and outsiders causing trouble,” Diane mentioned.

“Kyros is an idiot who should stick his head up a radigator’s backside. It’d do wonders for his perspective, and for the gator too, I imagine,” Granny harrumphed. “Theron knew better. Orion, too.”

“I’m missing something,” Scotch said as she looked from one mare to the other.

“Kyros says those barges are full of weapons. Tools. Things we can use to take the swamps, kill the most dangerous beasts, and even steal things from Rice River,” Diane explained.

“He wants you to turn into raiders?” Scotch gaped.

“Who needs tradition, manners, or civility when you have guns?” Granny muttered, spitting off to the side.

“Well, I don’t know about guns, but there was one that was filled with a machine shop. Not just top of the line equipment, but preserved. You could build almost anything with it!”

“Except it’s all cursed,” Granny muttered.

Scotch felt something like a lead weight thump inside her head at the word ‘curse’. It was almost like a physical pain. “Seriously?”

“You don’t think so?” Granny asked, arching a brow.

“They’re machines! Tools. Even the robots. They’re not… whatever a curse is. They’re not magical, at least not in any serious way. You just use them to make things,” Scotch said with an annoyed frown.

“What sorts of things?” Granny asked, in that same annoying tone older ponies always had when they thought they knew better.

“Whatever you want! You could build a house instead of a hut! A new rocking chair. A boat. A gun. Anything you want. So long as you have the power and materials and know how to use it, you can do anything!” Scotch said, and thrust a hoof up at the tree. “You could cut down that ugly, dead tree and turn it into lumber for a dock.”

Just like that, she felt it. Nothing changed. Nothing moved, but as she sat there she could suddenly feel a multitude of eyes staring at her. It was like she’d just shat herself in the middle of the atrium of her stable. She curled up a little, and as insane as it might be, she looked up at the dead oak and blurted, “I’m sorry!”

“So you should be,” Granny said solemnly. “That ugly, old tree is old enough to remember when your pony princess spit her bit and hid away the sun. I’ll take that over a dock, or hut, rocking chair, or boat any day.” She rocked back and forth in the creaking chair. “And I’ve no doubt Kyros would do the same. Probably use him for firewood.”

Scotch Tape could feel the animosity all around. The fire didn’t seem quite so bright, and the shadows suddenly felt much darker all around her. “How do I say I’m sorry? I don’t speak tree,” she said as she shivered.

“Maybe tell him why you’re sorry,” Granny suggested lightly.

A part of Scotch Tape felt it was utterly insane. That the old zebra and the strange swamps were finally taking their toll. But she faced the tree looming over her and chewed her lip. Granny, Diane, and the colt Arion, who watched from the hut, all had their eyes on her as well.

Why was she sorry? She hadn’t said anything she hadn’t believed. “I’m sorry that I said we should cut you down. That we should kill you,” she started, but that sensation of disapproval didn’t diminish one bit. “And that I don’t… that I don’t understand.” Still nothing. That sense of disgust, contempt, if anything, increased.

She felt tears welling up as something caught in her throat and she gave a sniff. “And… I’m sorry that I said you were worthless. That you were only worth something as lumber. It was wrong of me to… to think that I knew what you were worth. I’m sorry.” She pressed her face to the grass before the old, dead tree. “I’m worthless too. I can’t find or help my friends. I need the help of others just to not get killed. I’m Orah too.”

The sensation lessened bit by bit. The fire seemed to brighten a little more, and the insects in the trees resumed chirping. The tree no longer loomed quite so much over her. It would remember her insult, but it would remember her apology too.

“Wrap me in moss and throw me in the river,” Granny murmured as she stared at Scotch, who blinked back and wiped her eyes. “Who are you, chile?”

“I’m Scotch Tape. Just a pony,” she said weakly.

“Mhmmm…” Granny hummed lightly. “Arion.”

The colt immediately scrambled over. He had a glyph that looked like an oak leaf on his flank. “Yes, Granny?”

“This chile is seeking her friends. Can you handle it, son?” she asked the colt. He worked his mouth silently. “You know how?”

“I… think so? Ol’ Cottonmouth?” the colt asked nervously.

“Best use the fat one,” Granny said with a disturbing grin, exposing a half dozen brown teeth lodged haphazardly in her gums. The colt nodded, gave a glance at Scotch, and ran back to the hut.

“Fat one?” Scotch repeated weakly. Granny gave a wink. Arion emerged with a box on his back and trotted down towards the water, and Granny shooed her away after him with a smile. Diane and Granny started to talk in low voices.

She followed him down to the edge. “Who’s Old Cottonmouth?” Scotch asked the colt, who set down the box. He stared at her for a moment, his thin striped face flushing before he looked away.

“Someone who can find your friends,” he replied. Then he stepped into the water, fished around in his pouches, and withdrew a harmonica. Scotch had seen them before back home, but she had no idea how to play one. Standing on his hind legs, he lifted it to his mouth and started to play a low, pensive tune. It sounded much older than the colt who breathed life into it. She took a seat nearby and listened. The melody made her think of the still pools and lakes they’d been travelling through all week.

Then she felt it. Like when she’d insulted the tree. It was as if the ground were shifting under her flanks as she straightened. A ripple beneath her hooves and a shiver up her spine. She immediately rose to her feet as he kept playing. “Something’s wrong,” she said, and got an annoyed look from the amber-eyed colt.

Then she saw it: a black wave that was more than just a ripple. It glided up, as silent as death, right to the hooves of the zebra. Then the wave broke the surface as a huge snake head lifted out of the water. Higher and higher it rose, the water sheeting along its scales. Arion stopped playing, looking up at the monstrous beast. Even more terrifying… somehow, her PipBuck couldn’t detect it. Its eyes glowed amber in the faint starlight. Scotch had no idea what she could do. She couldn’t even move with that terrible serpent inches from Arion.

“Hey, Ol’ Cottonmouth,” the colt said with a smile, bowing his head to the massive serpent. Scotch gaped as it seemed to consider eating the colt, or at least she thought it did, and then to her shock bowed its head in turn. Arion stepped out of the water, putting the harmonica away and dropping back to all fours. “This… pony… lost her friends. She’s a friend o’ the Orah. Think y’all can find them? Got a fat croaker for ya if ya do.” He tapped the box, and the contents let out a worried croak.

The snake’s eyes widened and turned to Scotch. She swallowed hard as the snake curled its body once around her, everything inside her telling her to run. The snake flicked its tongue against her face a few times, her body petrified, and then, as silently as it had appeared, it turned and slipped off into the water again. It paused, though, gazed back at her, and then bowed its head before disappearing into the swamp.

“Well, that went sweet as chitlins!” Arion said, beaming at her. “Ol’ Cottonmouth will find them. Just might take a bit.” Then he patted her shoulder. “I’m surprised you didn’t–”

“Yeaaggahaha!” Scotch screamed, leaping away from the water and scrubbing her hooves against her hide to rid herself of the creepy sensation running up and down her spine. She rolled in the grass at the base of the hill before finally sitting up and hugging herself. “Why didn’t you tell me you were calling a huge snake?!”

“Well, what else did you figger ‘Cottonmouth’ meant?” Arion asked, cocking his head. “Y’all don’t make no sense at all!” Scotch felt too indignant and disturbed to argue how ridiculous a name that was for a snake.

From the campfire, Granny and Diane watched stoically as the two youngsters returned arguing about the sense behind summoning huge snakes without warning. Granny frowned, staring at Scotch. “Never seen him do that before,” Granny muttered.

“Who? Ol’ Cottonmouth?” Diane asked.

“Mhmmm.” Granny nodded at the fire, calling to Scotch, “Come and warm your bones. He’ll find your friends.”

Diane cooked up some kind of tuber like a potato, only sweeter and mushier than the ones the Society grew. The three zebras also ate frogs and snails in butter, two things Scotch didn’t touch. All of them ate grass.

Then stories. While every now and then Scotch didn’t understand a word, she picked up a few here and there. Diane told about how she’d once hunted something called a hydra, baiting it for days with animal carcasses loaded with explosives, a rusty chain snare, and a fallen oak tree. Arion told about his first meeting with Cottonmouth, stalling the hungry serpent with prey ever more tantalizing than him, till the snake had released him to go get some of the delights. Granny told a fable of the sun getting lost in the swamp; too proud to ask for directions, he wandered aimlessly, getting angrier and angrier. Eventually he nearly sank into the middle, before he finally asked a cat for help. Of course, the cat extorted every favor she could before finally showing him the way back to the sky. That was why cats could sleep all day in the sun. Scotch, in her own stressed Zebra, told about her voyage across the sea. The Orah in particular seemed riveted by the megaspell.

“Bad trouble, those. None in our swamps, thank the sun, but bad trouble still,” Granny said, sharing a look with Diane before the mares focused on Scotch. “What is happening in your pony lands? We hear stories, but it’s hard to tell which are true, which are boasting, and which were pulled out of a mule’s backside.”

“Well, um… I don’t know everything that’s happened in the Wasteland. I mean, there’s the Lightbringer. She started it off going around and picking fights with the raiders and Enclave. She now controls the skies and stuff. Oh, and Blackjack blew up Hoofington and killed the Eater of Souls. But other than that…” Scotch rubbed her chin, thinking, then caught the stunned look on Granny’s face.

“What… what did you say?”

“Yeah. My friend Blackjack blew up the Eater of Souls with a piece of the moon.” Scotch rubbed the back of her head with a hoof. “The whole city is gone. She died doing it, but, yeah… boom.”

Granny rose from her rocker and staggered towards the enormous oak. Diane and Arion immediately sprang to her sides, moving to support her, but she shrugged them off and embraced the great tree, slumping to the ground. “Is it true? Can her words be true?” she said, tears running down her narrow cheek stripes as she gazed up at the bare branches. “What does it mean? What will happen now?”

Scotch stood there, stunned. “I guess… that was important?”

“Chile, you saying that is like… like saying winter’s gone for good. Like telling me our swamp is ours forever and not no one will ever bother us again,” the old zebra croaked as she wept. Scotch just stood there awkwardly with Diane and Arion, neither of them clearly knowing what to do either. “For this year, I knew something was different, but not what. Something had changed… but my whole life, that damnable city’s scream has echoed across this land, sometimes falling to a whisper, sometimes rising fit to make ears bleed. But I never imagined… never dreamed it could be gone.” She looked at Scotch Tape, but in her face was an expression of horror, not joy. “What have you done?”

“I’m sorry? Isn’t that Eater thing being gone a good thing?” Scotch asked while backing up a step.

She smiled, but it was a pained, dying smile. “Of course, Chile, but you don’t slay all the devils in the underworld without paying for it.” She slumped against the tree, closing her eyes as she leaned back against the wood. “For so long, that thing has been a thorn in the side of the world. But now that it’s been pulled out, I don’t know what will happen. To the world. To this land. To my home. I don’t know.”

Scotch really wished Pythia were here so she could talk spirit stuff and hopefully reassure the old zebra. “Sorry,” she said lamely, not sure what to say but needing to say something.

“Messenger’s got nothing to be sorry about. Just never thought I’d hear this,” Granny said as she closed her eyes.

Diane turned to Arion. “Why don’t you show Scotch where she can sleep? It’ll be a while before Ol’ Cottonmouth is back, and I reckon she’s tired.”

There wasn’t much argument there. After stomping all over the woods, she was more than ready to take a nap. Pythia, Majina, and Precious would be all right. They had to be…

Arion showed her inside the hut. It was surprisingly large, wrapping around half the trunk of the huge tree in a large crescent. An old four poster bed was inexplicably wedged in the far side, looking as if the structure had been built around it. A wall was covered in containers filled with an absolute menagerie of creatures ranging from cages of frogs and mice to bottles filled with worms, a snake-tailed chicken with a bag tied over its head and a hole for its beak, and other bugs she didn’t want to know more about. The ceiling glittered with jars filled with herbs, flowers, and pieces of bark, nailed to the roof by their metal lids.

“Granny said you could share the bed. It’s a big bed,” he pointed out, flushing a little.

“Thanks,” she answered climbing under the blanket. “Arion, can I ask a question? That whole Orion… Theron… thing? What happened?”

“Why do you care?” he asked back, not snidely but with a curious tilt of his head.

Scotch sighed. “Orion helped me. I thought he was just a jerk at first, but he took me to Diane, who helped me find Granny, and you helped me with Ol’ Cottonmouth.”

That made the zebra colt smile. “All right. You know how Diane was supposed to marry Theron? Well, Orion didn’t like it one bit. He and Diane were already a bit of a thing, so Theron and Orion had a challenge. Whoever could kill the Rougarou would win her. Kyros demanded to join the challenge, even though he’s not half the hunter of either of them. Diane went along too, saying if she killed it, she’d get her pick. So the four–”

“Wait. What’s a Rougarou?” Scotch asked with a frown.

“Oh! It’s a shapeshifting critter. Sometimes it’s a zebra. Sometimes it’s a huge wolf monster. It can turn into giant wolf-headed snake, monster radigators, and even scaly hawk beasts. It eats nothing but meat. In fact, feed it anything that’s not meat, and it’ll become ill. To hunt it, you have to stalk it and kill it in one shot to the head. Anything else, and it’ll just heal the wound and come eat the hunter.” Arion lowered his voice, glancing at the door as if afraid Granny or Diana would appear. “I heard from Chloe that if a Rougarou bumps into a boy he’ll never make a baby, and he it bumps into a girl, she’ll have a Rougarou baby,” he whispered. “Bumping is dangerous…”

Scotch just smiled and shook her head. “Yup.” And she tapped his shoulder with her hoof. “Bump.”

Arion gasped, going bright red as he stared at her and then at his shoulder and back again. “Um… is that how it works? Do we gotta get hitched now?”

She laughed. “Trust me. Real bumping is a lot better,” she said as she settled into bed. Arion was cute, but she was tired, and really not sure how zebras would take her ‘bumping’ with him. “So, something went wrong with the hunt?”

Arion nodded, the colt sitting on the edge of the bed. “Orion and Theron have these guns. Biggest guns you ever saw. Made for killin’ dragons! Well, Theron got killed by Orion. Orion said he shot the Rougarou. Kyros said he saw Orion shoot Theron in the back. Diane saw Theron get shot by a bullet that blew a hole clean through his chest. By the time he got fished out of the swamp, the Rougarou carcass couldn’t be found. That made Orion sict… sic… a murderer of family. Lowest of the low. No one wants to try and kill him cause he’s one hell of a hunter, except Kyros, and he’d only do it if he could get the whole village to wear Orion down first. So it’s a mess.”

“What happened to Theron’s gun?” Scotch asked.

“Lost to the swamp,” Arion said with a sigh. “I tried to bribe Raccoon and Muskrat into finding it. Raccoon likes shiny things and Muskrat’s good in the water, but neither of them could.”

“Why not ask Ol’ Cottonmouth?”

“‘Cause snakes couldn’t be fussed to find anything that doesn’t have a pulse,” he said, looking over at the wooden box. “When Ol’ Cottonmouth gets back, make sure you don’t feed him till he takes you to where you need to go. And don’t dare try and cheat him. Nothin’ worse than an angry snake.”

Scotch could think of a few. “I’ll try and remember that,” she said, then yawned and drifted off to sleep.

“For the hundredth, thousandth, millionth time, she is not dead,” Pythia muttered to Majina as the three clustered together in the back of an old fiberglass camper shell. The door was just a piece of wood forced into the gap, leaving tiny windows that not even Majina could squeeze through.

“She’s all alone in a swamp full of things trying to eat her,” Precious grumbled. “I could handle it, but she’s probably in some radigator’s belly right now.”

“Well, that’d be a silly way to die,” Majina said. “If you’re going to die, you should do it when you face your arch nemesis against incredible odds! That’s what I plan to do.”

“You have an arch nemesis? Who? The lame story fairy?” Precious demanded with a sneer.

Majina gasped. “Why’d you have to go and create a terrible monster like that!” She waved a hoof, glowering at the dragonfilly. “Quick! Think of some way to slay it before it’s too late!” she demanded.

“It’s not real! I just made it up!” Precious snarled.

“Exactly! You made it up! Now think of a way to unmake it, quick!” Majina said, then clasped her hooves to the sides of her head. “Oh, now. Now I’m imagining a lame story fairy going through the wastelands editing all the stories to make them lame and predictable! It’s horrible!”

“Will the three of you please shut up!” roared a stallion from outside the camper shell. At least Pythia thought it was a ‘stallion’.

She poked her head out through the gap between the warped door and the doorframe. “Hey! You guys captured us in the first place!” she snapped out. An enormous black hand reached out for her head, but she ducked back into the camper shell.

“How do they look?” Majina asked with a yawn.

“Tired. You’ve been at this all night,” Pythia replied. “Keep it up.”

“Any sign of Scotch yet?” Precious asked, her ears drooping as she scratched at her forehead in irritation.

“None, but I’m sure she’s alive. I don’t know why, but she’s important. If she were dead, there’d be some sign of it,” Pythia said, and slumped. “What I don’t know is if she’s close by or on the other side of the swamp by now.”

“Well, if we don’t see her, we’ll need to plan our own escape,” Precious said as she peeked out the door of the camper. “What are they? What do they want with us? If it was food, I think they’d have eaten one of us already,” she snarled.

“Third oldest profession,” Pythia replied. The two blinked at her blankly. “It’s not like slavers can only operate in Equestria.” Then she gestured to the pair. “Shouldn’t you two be arguing?”

“Hey! Don’t tell me what to do! You’re not the boss of me!” Precious snapped.

“Don’t you snap at her! She’s just trying to help!”

“I’ll snap at whoever I want to snap at! Just like the tiny flying snapdragon pony that eats your knees while you sleep!”

“You fiend! How can you just come up with such horrible things?” Majina shrieked.

“Oh for the first scales, shut up the fuck up and go to sleep!” screamed one of their captors.

“Cut out their tongues! Please, please cut out their tongues!” begged the third.

“Shut it! That lops a quarter off their value!” roared the second.

“My sleep is worth more than that!” whined the third.

“Hey! I’m worth at least a week of your napping!” Precious yelled out of the camper shell at their captors. “I’m worth more than the invisible imp that comes in the middle of the night to nibble your hooves down to stubs! Gnawed. Bloody. Stubs!”

Majina shrieked. “Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!”

Pythia wadded her cloak up in her ears and smiled as she drifted off to sleep.

Away from the camper, the campfire, and the captors, a shadow watched, then turned and slithered off back into the swamp.

There’re lots of ways to wake up. Having your face tickled was somewhere in that weird middle ground between ‘Might be okay’ and ‘Really annoying’. Opening her eyes, Scotch beheld the enormous black snake flicking its tongue against her face, and her wake-up plunged right down to ‘Bladder loosening’. Fortunately, before that had a chance to happen, the snake whispered, “I found them. Come.” Snakes that could talk without moving their lips? Add a little more to the creep factor.

The huge snake backed off. Diane slumbered next to her in the bed, opposite Arion. Granny was absent. Scotch slipped out of the sheets and shook herself off, then crept towards the door. The snake looked at the cowering animals in their cages. Scotch Tape lifted the wooden box that Arion had used, the contents letting out another worried croak, and balanced it on her back before moving out into the early predawn light.

Granny sat in her rocker by the embers of the fire. “Time for you to go,” the old mare said with a tired smile, her eyes distant.

“Yeah. He found them,” she said, rebalancing the crate. “Um, thank you. For your help, I mean.”

“Help,” the old zebra chuckled. “Your coming here is like pulling a branch out of a beaver dam. First it might just seem like a trickle, but when the dam gives way, everything changes. I just hope it’s for the better, chile.” She rose to her hooves with a groan. “I’ll send Theron with you,” she said as she walked towards the wooded bank around the clearing.

Scotch froze. “Say what now?” She stared at the zebra, wondering if this was senility talking. There’d been an old mare back in 99 who’d thought that Scotch Tape was her best friend. “Isn’t he… you know… dead?”

Granny thumped her hoof against the brush, and it shuddered. From the shadows under the trees rose an immense figure. The zebra’s flesh was shrunken in, but still powerful. His eyes, lips, and nostrils were all sewn shut. Through his chest, from left to right, was a puckered hole that still had bits of bone sticking out. Granny looked back at Scotch. “So?” She turned to the hulking corpse. “Go with this chile. See her safe out of our swamps.”

“Can’t… Can’t Diane come with me?” Scotch asked weakly.

“Don’t be silly, chile. She’s got things to do. Theron’s just dead. Got all the time in the world,” Granny said matter-of-factly.

“Follow me or feed me,” Ol’ Cottonmouth hissed in her ear.

“Gah!” Scotch tried to rub the creepies out of having snake tongue in her ear. “Don’t do that!” she said, then looked up at the dead zebra. “Can you… can you carry me?” Theron dropped to his knees, and Scotch climbed on, bracing the box between her and his bony spine. “Goodbye, Granny.”

“Goodbye, chile. Bring your friends next time,” she said with a wave.

Scotch gulped as she stared at the undead zebra, watching her with a sewn-over eye. “Um… let’s go?” The snake slithered off into the swamp, fast as lightning.

And he followed. It was all Scotch Tape could do to hold on with her legs, biting down on his rancid mane as he ripped through the swamp. Thornbushes parted like the sea before his chest. Small trees were knocked aside. Streams were cleared in single, powerful leaps or shallows ploughed through with great sprays of foamy brown water. Once, the zebra cadaver used two enormous radigators as springboards to cross a lake, crushing one under his hooves before leaping to the next and then off to shore.

Ol’ Cottonmouth kept pace with them, somehow. The black snake was always ahead, or to the side, as they raced along. Scotch couldn’t image how it kept up, but it did, as quick and slick as a murderous thought. All Scotch could do was hold on tight till both the serpent and her ride slowed to a walk.

This section of the swamp was far more wooded and less marshy. The ground was sloping upwards to the south and east. “There,” the snake hissed, pointing with its tail at a cluster of faded green fiberglass camper shells. “I have completed the bargain.”

“Wait a minute,” Scotch said as she crept closer. There were voices yelling wearily in the early morning nearby. Scotch crept up to a tree and peeked around at the campers. A firepit in the middle smoked and obscured the three alien forms before her.

One had the lower body of a brown pony, but the body from the pony’s shoulders up reminded her more of a hellhound, with arms and a strong muscular torso. The face was flat with a protruding ridge of a nose, and two horns curling up from its brow. A strange pistol was clutched in one hand as the other reached into the camper.

The second looked like some sort of squat dragon thing, with two small bat wings and a fangy, toothy sort of snout. Its chin had a scruffy, tangled beard of all things, and mismatched horns curled like bent corkscrews from its brow.

The last was most like the sand dogs back home… if those dogs lacked cybernetics and were the size of hellhounds. It had a muscular frame, but also an enormous protruding gut and thick brow. Scotch could see the thing was surrounded by buzzing flies. It had Majina and Pythia in nets dangling along its mangy back.

The pony thing was fishing around in the shell with his free hand. “Come on! I don’t want to damage the goods, but you are working my last nerve! Get in the sack!”

“Piss off!” roared Precious, blasting green flame at him.

Okay. So her friends were alive but in trouble! She turned around, pressing her back to the tree as she tried to think, hugging the box to her chest.

For the third time, she had a snake inches from her face, only now his mouth was wide as he hissed, “I have completed my service!” Pale venom dripped from his fangs.

Scotch looked at the box, then the snake, then over her shoulder at the three monsters. “I… could you help me free my friends? Please?”

“That was not the bargain,” the snake hissed, eyes narrowed. “Do you mean to cheat me?”

Scotch sighed and set the box down, undid the clasps holding it closed, and uncovered the frog. It gave one look at the snake, let out a croak of despair, and launched itself towards the bog. Ol’ Cottonmouth was faster. It swooshed by, and the frog let out one last cry… and then… something. It was too fast for Scotch to see, but the frog flipped over and landed on its back in the water, still, while Ol’ Cottonmouth slithered past, swallowing. Scotch stared from the snake to the frog and back again. The snake bowed its head to her and turned away.

“Wait!” she said, moving towards it. “Can you help me free my friends?”

It regarded her coolly. “What will you pay me with?” it hissed.

“I… you…” She didn’t have anything! “I’ll get you another frog. Or a rat! A bigger one!” She said desperately.

Then the snake wrapped itself around her faster than she could blink. Its coils tightened as it stared into her eyes. “And if you don’t? If you can’t?” it hissed as it gazed into her eyes. “Promises are coins traded by fools, and fools are not long for this world.”

Scotch swallowed and dropped her eyes from the serpent’s blazing yellow pupils. “Nevermind,” she muttered.

And like that, she was released. Her last glimpse of the serpent was its black tail disappearing through the reeds, heading back into the swamp.

“Okay. So, I have one zombie zebra and… me,” Scotch said. Theron stood impassively next to her. While he was strong, he was also dead. Against three monsters, how long could he last? Long enough to get her friends free? That pony monster had a gun, and the other two claws and fangs. If Theron could occupy two of them, the third would still be able to hold her friends and catch her.

She needed some way to even the fight.

Then she heard it. From the bog behind her.

An outboard motor…

“What do you think? Thirty-five shells each? Forty?” the gargoyle cackled as he hopped on his spindly legs, clapping his hands together. The camper was ripped in two like a cracked egg, and the scorched and scratched centaur worked to tie up Precious.

“You’ll be lucky to see twenty! I’m the one that did all the hard work!” the stallion growled, equal to the dragonfilly.

“No fair! No fair! Who spotted them lost in the mire? Who? Who?” the gargoyle wailed as he hopped from foot to foot. “Split equally we should.” He thrust a claw at the huge canine. “Take his share! Stinky not need more. Fat enough already! I is only skin and scale!”

“I like food,” the canine rumbled as he held the nets.

“Shut up!” the centaur roared, kicking out at the gargoyle, who was knocked into the canine, who barely budged an inch. “All night I’ve listened to all of you! Enough! When we sell these three off, I’m going to look for a crew that aren’t morons.”

“He’s the moron here! Him! Not I!” the gargoyle shrieked.

“Yup,” Stinky agreed with a slow nod.

Suddenly from the bog raced a green form. It charged straight towards the trio and leapt into the centaur’s scorched arms. “Take me!” the pony cried.

“Whoa. That was easy,” the centaur said, blinking down at her.

Suddenly, the air filled with the buzzing of wings and the stomping of hooves as a half dozen zebras in leather barding charged the campground. A trio of diaphanous-winged fliers landed on the trunks of the surrounding trees, their hooves sticking inexplicably to the bark, green eyes glowing brightly. Lamprey, from behind the row of other zebras, balked for an instant, then pointed a hoof at Scotch Tape. “She’s ours!”

The centaur’s brown eyes narrowed as his grip tightened alarmingly on Scotch. One hoof pawed the ground. “You want her? Fifty tens.”

“Sold!” Lamprey replied, triumphantly.

“Easiest payday ever,” the centaur chuckled.

“Uhh…” Scotch blinked as the centaur peeled her off and held her out towards the zebra. “Okay. That’s not what I thought was going to happen.” Then she screamed, “Theron!”

The arrival of the zombie stallion had predictable results. He barreled into the crowd, smashing through the fire and scattering ashes and embers everywhere, and rammed into the centaur, knocking Precious and Scotch Tape to the ground.

“Get them!” shouted Lamprey, pointing a hoof, and a trio of zebras raced at them.

“No you don’t!” shrieked the gargoyle, leaping into their path, claws wide. “You don’t get nothin’ till you pay for it!”

“Why are you always getting tied up?” Scotch asked as she yanked the muzzle off the dragonfilly.

“I have no idea,” Precious snarled, “but I am sick of it!” She began to rip at the ropes with her fangs, and they proved far less stout than chain. The zebras tried to get around the slashing claws of the gargoyle as the centaur wrestled with Theron.

Two of the fliers pounced on Scotch Tape and Precious, and the unmuzzled dragon let out a blast of flame that caught the wings on one, crumpling them up. The creature let out a shriek of pain, staggering back. The other let out a blast of green, garlicky-reeking gas that made Scotch Tape lightheaded when she inhaled it.

“Nope,” rumbled a deep voice, and the huge, smelly canine grabbed the flier gassing Scotch Tape with one paw. It easily held it by the back of its neck. The flier sprayed more of the gas at the muzzle of the scabrous hound, its diaphanous wings buzzing indignantly. “Nope,” the canine repeated, and then smashed the flier into the ground. Green ichor exploded out its goggled eyes as it was ground into the grass. The hound then stomped on the twitching remains, crushing it flat. As the dewinged flier tried to scramble away, the hound took two steps and stomped down again. “Nope!”

Taking the opportunity, Scotch helped Precious free herself. “Finally!” Precious roared as she crouched. “Time to kick some… wait… okay… tail! They all got tails!”

“We got to get the other two free!” Scotch said, pointing at the pair still carried by the canine. “Use your claws to cut the nets.” The canine was curiously examining the green goo stuck to his feet, seeing how it tasted.

“Ugh! I finally get a stand up fight, and I can’t fight?! This place sucks!” Precious whined, then added, “Oh, glad you’re back and not dead.” Then she ran to the hound, circling around behind him to get at the nets.

Scotch began to join her when she was tackled from behind. “At last!” Lamprey hissed in her ear. He scooped her up as a second zebra rushed to him, pulling a net from his saddlebags.

The centaur shoved Theron back, the cadaver sporting a half dozen extra holes that seemed to have had little effect. “You cheating–” the centaur said, then pointed his pistol at the pair of zebras and opened fire, not taking all that much care to aim. Lamprey grabbed the other zebra and held the baffled equine as a shield, giving Scotch a chance to scramble away. Precious had sliced holes in the nets and was now turning this way and that, scratching and snapping at the canine’s flank. It contorted its body trying to spot her as Majina and Pythia wiggled out of the nets.

Scotch was moving to join them when the last flier landed and sprayed her with more of the gas. Her limbs felt like lead, and she struggled to stay away as it approached. The bottom of the gas mask opened, and… that was not a zebra mouth. Zebra mouths didn’t have fingers in them.

The gargoyle leapt at the flier, pulling in his arms and legs. Midflight, his body turned gray, and he crashed like a boulder into the ground where the flier’d been. The nimble zebra-thing had only just lifted to the skies in time to not be squished. Rolling to a stop, the gargoyle de-petrified and shook a fist at the hovering creature. “Get down here so I can squash you proper.”

“Just shoot them!” Lamprey roared in desperation. The remaining zebras pulled out guns and opened fire. The centaur used Theron to block some shots, and the scaly hide of the gargoyle resisted the bullets as well as Precious could. The canine, however, took several rounds in his fleshy gut and shoulder. He dropped the nets entirely, facing the zebras and letting out a bladder-loosening roar as he dropped to all fours and charged the shooters, heedless of the bullets. Lamprey turned and ran immediately, and the canine smashed into them like an avalanche.

Scotch returned to her friends, her head still swimming from the garlic gas. “Come on. We’ve got to get out of here,” she muttered weakly.

Then the gargoyle sprang on her. He seized her in his claws and cackled. “You’re not going anywhere! All mine!” And then the gargoyle transformed into stone, his grinning leer frozen on its face. Majina and Pythia immediately started to hammer at the hard stone, but even Precious couldn’t do more than scratch it.

So she did the next best thing and bit its nose. The stone cracked, then popped off. The gargoyle de-petrified with a scream, clutching the bleeding stump of his nose. “Ba nos! Doo but off ba nos!” he cried. Precious smirked and gave one deliberate chew.

“We got to run! Hurry!” Scotch Tape cried out. “Theron!”

The cadaver, now with further new holes in his hide, shoved the centaur away and raced to the four, dropping down. The centaur seemed to struggle between shooting back at the zebras and going after the four fillies. Fortunately, the four of them were barely small enough to all fit on Theron’s back, though all of them were holding tight when the cadaver ran off away from the fight.

Half an hour later, the cadaver stopped. They’d reached the edge of the swamp. Ahead of them were flat plains and an old road cutting east; there was a sign that read ‘Rice River, forty-eight kilometers.’ Theron, for all his running and damage, didn’t seem any the worse for the wear, but Granny had told him to take them only as far as the swamp’s edge. “Thank you, Theron.”

He only turned and headed back into the marshy swamp.

“What happened to you?” Pythia demanded. “Where did you come across an Orah revenant? How the heck was it listening to you?”

“Met some Orah. One named Granny loaned him to me,” Scotch Tape said.

Majina glowered at Scotch. “Oh, come on! You totally could have told that better!”

Scotch just smiled and shook her head. “I’m just glad that you’re okay and we’re all together again.”

“Exactly like I predicted,” Pythia said with a smug smile at Precious.

“At least we’re out of that dumb swamp,” Precious growled as she looked over her shoulder.

Scotch Tape considered it. From here, they could see the great green bowl of the swamp. The radigators and fens and great white birds now pinpricks in the distance. Somewhere in all that were the Orah. “I dunno. It wasn’t that bad.”

Then Majina flopped across Scotch Tape and yawned loudly in her ear. “Well, we were up all night arguing, so you’ll have to carry me and tell me what happened. And don’t leave out any de…tail… zzzz…”

Scotch smiled, and, with her carrying Majina on her back, they started east towards Rice River.

Behind them, there was a buzzing of wings and a flash of green-goggled eyes watching them travel. Then it zipped back into the depths of the marsh as the four friends walks into the sunrise.

Author's Notes:

So... another chapter. Hope the Orah were interesting. Next chapter is Rice River.

So the Thanks. Thanks to Kkat for creating Fallout Equestria. Thanks to Hinds, Bro, and Swicked for helping me edit. I'd also like to give special thanks to Icy Shake for coming along and fixing all our errors and mistakes in the chapter. Hopefully this one will be of better quality than the last two. I'd like to thank every for reading, and everyone that leaves comments. I do love reading them. I know I don't respond to them like I should, but I do appreciate everyone that leaves them. Lastly, huge thanks to everyone on my patreon and other people that support my writing. You can't believe how much it helps.

So that's it. Hopefully the next chapter will be up around the end of the month.