The musky old air was instantly lit ablaze with a flurry of gunfire and the shrieks and writhing screams of dying monsters. Bullets lashed out upon leathery flesh, puncturing arms, legs, hides and heads, giving rise to an uproar of siren-like wails. The walls flashed like a strobe light as the gunpowder behind each pointed piece of metal ignited, adding to the chorus of cacophonous barks resonating from the apparelled death machines, only to be replaced by another round, inanimately raring to put an end to another feral life.

The eight ponies were backing away, all the while shooting for all it seemed worth. The three equines less trained in the field of battle were the first to make it back through the door, declaring themselves out of service as the only clear shot they had with their weapons was of their pony comrades' flanks. Titter, Flitter and Cloud Nine could do nothing but watch their friends fight for their lives as wave after wave of relentless freaks came cascading from the new opening like deadly rats.

"Keep going back, guys!" Cantor yelled, his desperate orders barely audible over the fighting. "Don't stop 'till we're through that door!"

As the white alicorn extended his hoof towards one of the demons, the very same creature he was aiming at leapt up from the mass of bodies and took nearly all of his foreleg into it's gaping maw, clamping it's jaws down just under his torso.

Wincing in pain, but realising that the beast was not letting go, Cantor took his opportunity to make, in a sense, a mockery of this macabre situation. "Eyes bigger than your belly, hey, ugly?" He growled before firing off a shell down the monster's throat, practically decapitating it as its body split open, making everything that was on the inside burst outward, showering its brethren with blood and organs.

Cantor shook his foreleg, clumsily removing the severed head which landed on the ground with a sick crunch.

It hadn't occurred to Cantor at the time, but his team mates were moving a lot faster than he thought, and in the time it had taken him to deal with the animal and its messy demise, the four others had built up a considerable distance from him, allowing two of the monsters to flank Cantor and creep up behind him, ready to tear the young alicorn to pieces without so much as a warning.

Previously swept up in fending for herself, Faith just noticed the two black devils creeping up behind her unsuspecting friend. In as much time as it took her to cry out "Get down!", the creatures had pounced. But Cantor obliged, sinking to his knees and bowing his head as the duo soared above him.

Faith waited for the perfect moment, and the passage of time seemed to slow down as the dark beasts crossed each other in the air before firing off a high - velocity bolt from her rifle straight through both of their heads, cutting their hungry snarls dead.

The grey mare pulled the bolt back on the side of her rifle, loading another shell into the chamber and sending the spent metal clanging to the floor. Her eyes transformed to worry, however, when she noticed five or six more creatures behind the white stallion; far too many to handle on her own.

Cantor peered up from the floor, clocking the tight ring of shiny black eyes closing in all around. He scoured the wall of bodies for a way out, or for some way to create a diversion to escape, but hope as he might, the dreadful beings were far too thick to run through or fight his way out of and were closing in quickly. There was nothing he could do, and nothing anyone else could do to help him.

With all options taken away, Cantor reluctantly, but promptly gave up, sinking helplessly to the cold, wet floor and covering his head with his hooves. He screwed his eyes shut and prayed that the pain wouldn't last for too long, becoming deaf to everything but his own thundering heart with the sickening realisation that it would never beat again.

But then out of nowhere, like a terrifying angel, a low, distant, foghorn-like howl rang through everyone's ears, forcing a deathly silence down over the entire room. Even the feral hissing produced by the creatures ceased immediately.

The cowering alicorn peered up gingerly from his place on the floor in reaction to the hauntingly familiar sound.

Simultaneously, the encroaching beasts huddled around Cantor began scanning the room for the source of the howl, their psyche reflecting something almost like fear. Instead of harsh hissing, the swarm of monsters resorted to making low clicking sounds not unlike that of a dolphin, meeting each other with what appeared to be concerned eyes.

A second howl, a little closer, but still rather distant emanated from elsewhere, sending the black animals scurrying, flailing, tripping over one another to escape through vents in the walls, all the while emitting screeches of panic.

Of course, Cantor tried to move, but his body had ceased up from the peril, and he found himself all but paralyzed. The ground began to thump ever so slightly, to an extent that wouldn't have been noticed unless one were lying down.

"Cantor, come on!" Came Faith's insistent cry from just on the other side of the door, Red by her side, completely filling up the rest of the entrance. When Cantor failed to move however - not even to reply, she naturally assumed the worst. "No!" She shouted, beginning to hyperventilate. "No, please get up!"

"............"

"Cantor, please! You can't-" The horrified mare's sentence was cut short by a groundbreaking explosion that made her teeth shake. The booming crash was promptly followed by a well-pronounced female voice from somewhere within the roof.

"Hazardous anomaly detected in sector B-2. Initiating lockdown."

In the inky darkness above, blood red warning light flooded the room along with a sinister buzzing siren, projecting two opposing red disks chasing each other around in circles onto the walls, highlighting the distinctive maroon colour splattered all over the aged metal.

The hiss of hydraulics, accompanied by the sudden screams of his friends shook Cantor out of his trance, and supposedly on instinct, the alicorn rose from his helpless position and bolted towards the other ponies.

A cumbersome-looking metal blockade was lowering itself down from just above the exit, making haste on sealing Cantor into this murder scene of a room.

Everypony backed away from the door to allow him room, all the while calling out at the top of their lungs for him to hurry.

Cantor held his breath as he encroached on the rapidly decreacing opening, and in one swift move, he kicked his own legs from under him, sending him flying onto his back once he hit the pool of blood.

Only the stallion's shoulders skimmed the blood, infecting just the bottom of his mane with the rotten life fluid. Cantor's head barely made it under the door before it closed, and he foolishly allowed himself a second's worth of breath...

...Failing to take into consideration the length of the horn atop his head...

Panic flooded back into the alicorn's heart when he felt the swelling pain shoot through his head as the unstoppable steel door began to bend his unicorn anatomy into the shallow groove within the floor. His amber eyes flashed with vivid horror as his back hooves scrambled against the floor and he desperately tried to pull himself free from the hydraulic vice that was now causing his horn to split near the base.

The new pain was unlike anything Cantor had ever felt before; he'd rather break every bone in his body ten times over than endure one second of this ghastly torture. He screwed his eyes as tight as they would go and attempted to release some of the unbearable pain in the form of chilling, tormented screams of pure agony.

The giant Red earth pony, herculean as he may be, failed to pry the door back open, unable to force his enormous hooves into the inch of clearance Cantor's brittle horn was allowing.

And then, the unthinkable happened. The door suddenly slammed shut with an atrocious snap as it smashed the upper half of Cantor's horn into oblivion. Every unicorn present found it impossible not to wince in psychological pain when the sound occurred, having some idea, but not even scraping the surface of how much pain would emanate from such an injury.

Cantor's eyes shrunk, and his sordid screams halted abruptly as bright little sparks, as well as a weak trickle of blood were seen coming from the break halfway up the incredibly sensitive piece of bone. He merely rolled over onto his side and laid staring at the wall for several moments, his body trembling all over in what could only be described as something far more than pain.

Nopony was brave enough to speak, and none could take their eyes from the shivering alicorn or the magical sparks bursting from his horn and fizzling out in the small puddle of urine forming under his body. They could do nothing but hold their breaths and wait for whatever was happening to their friend to pass.

But when the flow of sparks stopped falling from Cantor's horn, he rejoined reality in the greatest agony a unicorn could ever dread to experience.

His bloodied hooves scrambled frantically at the snapped appendage, as if trying to quell the unbearable pain coursing through his whole body. Successively louder screams tore through his throat, only silencing whenever he attempted to gulp down air. Even breathing was a struggle in this demented situation. The tortured soul writhed around on the floor, his rear legs spasming with every heartbeat flaring excruciation into every neurone in his brain.

"Wh- What do we do?" Faith asked with a white face, turning to Cloud Nine, who already had a syringe grasped firmly in her hoof.

Without answering, the cream mare cautiously took aim at Cantor's neck, pausing for a moment when he was still enough to avoid the risk of stabbing him in the throat.

After five seconds of horrendous wails and screams, Cloud gave up, unable to get a proper shot at the stallion's vain.

She turned her frightened expression towards a sympathetic red pony towering above her. "Red! Can you hold him still whilst I give him a sedative?" She asked hurriedly.

Red gave a brisk nod and sunk to his knees beside Cantor. He was just about to touch him when the screaming began to subside. Cantor was still writhing about and clutching his horn, but, he was nearly silent. Red shot Cloud Nine a confused look, until blood began to surface in Cantor's mouth.

It was discovered that he had shredded his vocal chords.

The black maned earth pony placed one of his iron-like forelegs at the top of Cantor's neck, and the other just above his chest as the female physician readied her needle. The alicorn's squirming felt like nothing in the midst of Redgrave's immense strength.

The needle gently slipped through Cantor's neck, and with bated breath, Cloud pushed the plunger down gradually, slowly injecting the sleeping serum into the stallion's pain-wracked body.

After three seconds of struggling, the awful screams which once dominated the room now nothing more than choked gurgles faded away to nothing. Cantor's violent kicks became little more than half-hearted swipes at the ground as he passed out into merciful unconsciousness.

Red pulled away from Cantor's limp body, rising to his hooves whilst trying to step out of the stream of the alicorn's blood making a beeline for his hooves. He looked down upon the Cantor with a small dismal frown, a little disheartened to say the least about seeing such harm come to a pony so young. As time marched on, his thoughts tilted towards his family - his home town... His home planet... Right now, millions of miles away, in a small village in the middle of nowhere, his beloved wife, and irreplaceable daughter were either tucked up warm in their beds or working to harvest the annual crops alongside every pony he had ever known until five pegasi wearing shiny golden armour approached him and brought him into this. For a moment, Red became cynical, making the accusation that those ponies were to blame for his misfortune.

His anger quickly faded though, when he assured himself that this was not the case - and that no one could have predicted the catastrophe, and once again, he traced the faces of his family with his mind's eye, emotions so vivid within his memories that he could almost smell the crisp, dry air of the dusty Falabellian mountain range.

Cloud pulled the needle from Cantor's neck, replacing it in a special section in her saddlebag to keep everything else sanitised. She sighed with a heavy heart, shaking her head slightly with a sordid mindset that the white stallion had little time to live; only once had she ever had a unicorn patient who had lost his horn, and he died within hours of the incident with no symptoms detected by current Equestrian technology. The only other injuries of a similar degree she had seen were in books; very few of the unicorns in there had survived their treatment and the ones who had were never able to channel magic like they had before.

Everyone was speechless; what could be said at a time like this? Granted, Cantor's magic was severely weakened due to the fact that after a quick atmosphere analysis, it was discovered that the level of ambient magic, (the invisible soup-like energy dissolved into Equestria's air that allows unicorns to channel magic with a certain degree of instinct) here, was zero, yet the teenage alicorn was the only one with magic powerful enough to override this factor and successfully cast.

"Shit..." Was all that was heard coming from a disgruntled grey mare after a very long and quiet pause. Everypony shifted their weight nervously, unsure of how to build on that remark as it already did a pretty good job of summing up the situation as a whole. "What do we do now?" She asked, staring blankly at Cantor's gently breathing form. "The captain can’t use magic, we've got no way of getting home; no way of... contacting them... It's only a matter of time before those things reach us..." She looked up at Red, her eyes void of all hope and optimism reflected in the huge stallion's contemplative, dark brown ones. “…We’re doomed.”

"Don't give up, kid." Replied the tall earth pony, giving Faith a reassuring nudge on the shoulder with his hoof. "If ya do that, we definitely ain't goin' home."

Faith sighed. "Yeah. I suppose you're right..." She complied, rubbing the upper proportion of her right foreleg, a forced expression of cheeriness upon her face.

Some very uncomfortable time later: a period of thirty tension-filled minutes, and Cantor was finally coming around from his sleep. Instantly, the magically incapacitated alicorn was met with a sharp, painful headache shooting right through his skull with every throbbing heartbeat.

With a laboured groan, Cantor dragged himself to his hooves, becoming aware of the sore spot on his back where he had slammed his shoulders into the ground. Despite this irritating injury, Cantor's main concern was his broken horn. It was an odd type of pain; comparable to the sensation of somepony constantly tugging on his mane with malicious force.

"Ogh..." The alicorn-turned-pegasus grunted as he straightened his legs out, stretching his wings out above him to limber up somewhat before he opened his eyes.

When his eyelids flickered open, he noticed that many of the ponies were seated, with only Faith and Cloud Nine standing for themselves near the corner of the relatively spacious corridor. Nevertheless, all eyes were upon him as he made his recovery.

A thin trickle of dried blood could be seen caressing the rims in the spiral of what was left of his horn from the initial break - jagged like a wine bottle beaten against the counter in a bar-brawl. The last few inches of his mane was glued together with dark congealed blood, sticking several crusty bangs to the fur around his neck. Scuffs and scrapes littered his body: his right foreleg was damn near matted entirely with blood from where the creatures had bitten him, though his shotgun seemed just fine, if a little battered.

"Ah! Decided to finally wake up, have we?" Faith jested, her remarks becoming somewhat trademark in perspective to her character. She stepped away from the medic and towards Cantor.

"I um..." Cantor started, rubbing his eye with the cleaner of his two hooves. "How long was I out?" He asked, shocked at how rough his voice came out. He had a rather gruff way of speaking to begin with, but now it sounded as if he had been eating glass.

Faith dipped her head to the side and rolled her eyes in a strangely placid manner. "About half an hour." She gestured towards the magnolia mare behind her. "Cloud here was convinced you weren't going to wake up."

Cantor turned his focus onto the purple-eyed pony, who met the disbelieving expression by turning away, ashamed.

"W- Well what happens now? I mean do we split up, or do we try and stick together?" Asked Cantor, looking about the group in search of ideas.

"Neither." The grey pegasus replied with a curt shrug. "All the doors are locked and won't respond." She cast a glance around the other explorers, who all shared the same clueless expression.

Cantor met eyes with everyone there, knowing only one of two impossible options would prevail, not wanting to suggest either. But seeing as how he was leader, such a decision was inevitable. "The way I see it, we only have two options..." He started in a light-hearted tone, trying his best to sound calm and in control even though his sore throat was beginning to grate with every breath. "One: we accept that there's no way out, no one coming to help us, no hope of repairing our ship, and we sit here and wait to starve to death, all the while losing our sanity and giving in to desperation: eating the ones who die first so that we may have another week or two to suffer..." He paused, taking in the worried faces of his shipmates before deciding to continue. "Alternatively..."

Cantor rose his right hoof to the wall beside him, and without looking, fired off a single powerful round into the metal surface, making everypony within range of the deafening blast shield their eyes as shavings of metal and tiny pellets peppered their coats. The alicorn failed to take into consideration the effect of firing a shotgun in such an enclosed space would include, and was confronted with a very unwelcome ringing in his ears.

"Not one of your best ideas..." Faith remarked harshly, her ears pinned to the back of her head in response to the unexpected explosion. She shot Cantor an unamused frown and shook her head disapprovingly.

"Alternatively..." Repeated the orange-maned stallion, ignoring the brash mare's comment partly due to the unending dialling tone in his head. He turned to the right, staring straight down an infinitely expansive ventilation shaft, only the first few panels visible before the eerily familiar darkness dominated the passage. "We can use the vents."

As Cantor spoke, everypony's jaws dropped. With an exasperated sense of disbelief, Faith met the alicorn's remark with an astonished disagreement. "Surely you're not serious, are you?" She asked, her shrunken pupils focused on the captain's calm amber eyes. Cantor merely pouted and nodded his head as if to say: "Of course."

"Are you mad?" Black Haze spoke up, taking an empowered step closer to Cantor with begrudging eyes. "You have no idea what's in there; what if there were more of those creatures, hm? To go blindly into the dark is suicide."

"Does... anypony else have any better ideas?" Cantor responded, raising his eyebrows openly and making eye-contact with the crew.

"Anyone?... No?..." He enforced after several seconds of silence, a rhytmatic dripping from afar being the only sound. When none of the ponies objected to his idea, Cantor gave a strong nod and made his way over to the small opening - it was plain to see that it would be a squeeze, but he reasoned with himself that he just might make it.

As he positioned himself with his forehooves upon the rugged metallic edge, Faith took it upon herself to make a protest. "No, Cantor. Don't: this is a really bad idea." She stopped walking less than a few feet from the stallion's form, burning her concern into his eyes with her uneasy stare.

Cantor just shrugged and gave a brief laugh. "Well stick around." He said, rolling his shoulders around in their sockets. "I'm full of bad ideas." He gave a short hop before hauling himself into the vent, his front legs and most of his upper body making it through with the initial movement. Cantor was instantly faced with a mild breeze hitting his face. All chaos aside, he admitted to himself that the sensation of the cold air against his tires eyes felt somewhat relaxing. He began to shuffle forward after taking a brief moment to enjoy the 'fresh air', stopping only when his broad rump struck the edge of the square hole.

The alicorn didn't panic: he could still feel the semi - evidential presence of the ponies behind him, and besides, it wasn't as if there was no way of getting out. He started dragging his hooves along the smooth metal in front of him whilst scrambling at the wall with his back hooves, knowing full well that there was no way in this world or his that would grant him access through the tiny opening. But this failed to stop him from persisting.

"You doin' okay, Cantor?" Came Red's voice, slightly muffled by Cantor's own body, yet still easily distinguishable towards the huge crimson horse.

Cantor was about to reply, when an ill, disembodied voice declared its presence within the alicorn's aching head.

"That's it..." The tormented introduction came; quiet, whispering, and almost seductive in nature. "Keep telling yourself it will all be fine... tell your friends you'll all survive..." The alicorn's brow furrowed as the voice continued. He attempted to pinpoint who it was that was doing the speaking. It sounded a little like himself, but in such a way that one would assume he was making a mockery of the tone an evil, demonic soul would use.

"Who are you?" Cantor asked, darting his eyes around in the blinding darkness, noticing his breathing becoming more rapid. "What's going on?"

The mysterious reply came back spiteful and in a word, venomous. "Oh, wouldn't you like to know?" It spat before Cantor was hastily dragged out of the ventilation shaft backwards by his hooves. He barely had time to point his forelegs downwards when his head popped back into the smooth red light. It was the first time it had occurred to Cantor, and at a time like this, it really shouldn't have, but the corridor held a similar hue to that of a darkroom, and was nearly dim enough to be classified as one.

When Cantor emerged, he was immediately met with an intrusive mare's grey face. "Who were you talking to?" Faith queried with raised eyebrows, getting so close to the alicorn that his head reeled back slightly.

Cantor was taken aback, and became somewhat protective over the abhorrent conscience. "Talk- No! I wasn't... talking to anyone..." He replied quickly with a nervous laugh, looking anywhere but Faith's persistent eyes. "A- after all... there's no one to talk to anyway... You... must be hearing things..." The stallion murmured under his breath.

The pegasus' wry frown transformed into a bright smile as she decided to taunt Cantor in a private attempt to bring nostalgia to this hellhole. "You really thought you could fit your fat ass through that gap?" She scorned with a provoking grin. "Maybe you shouldn't have made so many donuts on the way here, or at least hadn't eaten so many of them."

Cantor took the remark as more hostile than banter, as was intended, but when the trim pegasus added insult to injury by firing a cocky wink his way. "Hey, I'm not fat!" The snow-coated pony protested, reddening around the cheeks all the same. "I'm just... large."

"Exactly." Faith chortled.

"No..." Cantor replied dryly, rolling his eyes in an exaggerated manner. "I mean I'm a big pony - in the sense that calling me fat would belike calling Red fat. Obviously Red isn't overweight, but he couldn't even fit his head in there, let alone his flank!" Shouted Cantor, scuffing his hoof defensively against the floor.

"Okay, alright..." Faith exhaled, her uneven smile desisting to fade from her face as she paced behind Cantor to the side of her big red friend, who failed to react any more than a tired sigh. Normally, Faith would have persisted in arguing with the alicorn, but a discrete concentration of sympathy crossed her conscience when she realised that Cantor no longer held the power that set him aside from regular ponies - not that that was necessarily a good thing, but whether or not anypony liked it, Cantor's magic was elusive enough to save the world, and every single one of its inhabitants. And that was nothing to be ashamed of.

Cantor admitted to himself that it was a little odd that the grey mare dropped the conversation then and there: usually she would have ridiculed the stallion as much as she could before growing bored and storming off in lieu of Cantor's own harsh points toward her dignity, regardless of what she said first. Whatever the reason, Cantor thought, he wasn't complaining.

"So," Faith began, pacing circles around the broken alicorn until she came to a stop in front of him. Everypony else watched her adamantly as she walked. "Got any more 'brilliant ideas' tucked up in that head of yours?"

Cantor focused on the destroyed ventilation grate, then turned his attention to his hooves in hope of coming up with another solution. In the midst of his thinking, he became more aware of the siren buzzing quietly from the neighbouring room and the feint blood trails he was standing on.

"Damnit!" He finally spat, sinking to his haunches and glaring furiously at the floor, his hopelessness surfacing as anger and frustration within his tone. He sat there in silence for a few moments, wracking his brain for a spurt of inspiration, finding nothing but blockades of foreboding in its place.

Titter's voice cut through the dense air like a knife, the innocent, fair sound somewhat of a treat following previous events. "Um... I could try..." She proposed, drawing all attention to her.

"What?" Cantor asked, looking up from his hooves to forge eye contact with the fifteen year old unicorn.

"I could try going through the vent; I'm a lot smaller than you..." She reasoned, turning to stare down the dark metal shaft, swallowing gently before turning back to the alicorn. "Oop, no offense." She added, her rosy cheeks invisible against the powerful red bulbs.

Cantor turned hastily from Titter to her rouge scarfed sibling, who wore a face that reflected trepidation. "I... I suppose it's worth a shot..." He said after a weak shrug.

"Oh, no. You're not crawling into there, sis." Flitter scorned, casting a disconcerting look her sister's way.

"But what choice do we have, Flit?" The purple-maned pony argued, returning her equal's stare. "Cantor's right: if we don't find a way out of here, we'll all starve."

Flitter began to stutter, slurring her speech as she attempted to find a way to reason with her slightly younger sibling. "B- but you... it's... you can't-"

"Sis," Titter began, tightening her neck scarf with her hoof as she spoke. "It's not like we have a lot of options. And besides, what's the worst that could happen?" She gave her twin a trustworthy wink, bearing an empowered smile of confidence as she did so.

...

A minute or so later, a long coil of rope had been wrapped around the mighty foreleg of Red, the black-maned earth pony acting like some kind of anchor for the safety of the young mare. The other end of the faded beige twine was securely tied around Titter's waist, double knotted so as to not run the risk of losing her in the duct (which just so happened to be no larger than the interior of a coffin).

She stood before the entrance to the venting system, trying to assert herself despite the obvious beads of sweat running down her forehead, not aiding with the fear as they trickled slowly down her face and perched on her lips. To say she was worried would be a fabrication - but perhaps a more fitting word would be 'petrified'. She didn't want to do this; Celestia knew she didn't, but she had no choice. It was either face her fears,

or die.

With a steadying breath, the blue-scarfed mare mounted the edge of the vent, tensing her lungs as she felt the cool air dry her perspiration.

"If you get any problems, Titter:" Cantor said, placing a hoof over her small shoulders. "Anything at all - even if you start to feel scared, just give us a shout and tug hard on the rope three times and we'll pull you out, okay?"

Titter nodded, her emerald-hued eyes reflecting responsibility as well as unrivalled dread.

Just as she was about to plunge into the horizontal abyss, Flitter interrupted with one last protest. "Wait!" She cried, holding out a trembling hoof to stabilize her sister. "Why do you have to go? Can't I crawl down there instead?"

"You could..." Titter replied, falsely rapping the tip of her hoof against her bottom lip, making a show of her comedic style of thinking. "But I've already called it."

Her cute and untainted chuckle became a metallic reverberation as she leapt into the ventilation shaft - only her knees in contact with the wall as her butt sailed through no problem.

Red twirled his arm around, reliving one loop from the tight coil if twine which was about an inch thick. It fell to the hard metal floor with 'donk' - obviously a lot heavier than everypony initially anticipated.

"You okay, Tit?" Flitter asked, chewing the seam of her neck-bandanna nervously.

"I'm fine." Came her reply. "Just a little nervous is all..."

Cantor compromised with the older of the two twins in the form of considerate eyes. Despite being born mere seconds before Titter, Cantor could tell the elder of the two saw herself as such, and had taken it upon herself long ago to protect her little sister as best she could. Even though anypony small enough to fit through would have suited the job adequately, Flitter was still convinced that it should be her crawling along the cold metal on her knees, with nothing but an anaemic flashlight for sustenance.

"You can talk to us whenever you like, Sweetie." Faith called out, drawing odd looks from her one peer. "Just use your radio." The brash pegasus concluded her sentence with a strong nod, unseen to the only pony who should have seen it.

Titter replied with her own invisible nod of understanding. "Right. Got it." She answered, starting to make progress on crawling through the duct.

"What?" Faith whispered when catching a certain alicorn's questionable expression.

"'Sweetie'?" He asked, raising an eyebrow oddly towards the pegasus.

"Oh, it's a mare thing, Cantor." Faith answered as if it were obvious, rolling her eyes with a short smile.

Seconds into the expedition, and the dull crackle of shortwave radio static filled everypony's ears and made them jump. Titter's low-quality reply came shortly after.

"Guys, can you hear me?"

"Yep, we hear you, Tit." Cantor replied, watching Red uncoil another line of rope from his mighty leg.

"Oh, good." Came the hissing reply, the lilac pony's relieved smile audible in her tone. "Just checking, is all!"

"Thanks." Said the white alicorn, nodding protectively in Flitter's general direction, who was still chewing her necktie with anticipation. "Keep us updated, okay?"

"Okay."

"Cool. Over."

"Over and out."

During Titter's long decent, (or what seemed like a long time but could have theoretically been only about two or three minutes) the only audible sounds were the loud crack of the rope coils against the floor and an occasional bang or crash from inside the vent - which was usually followed by a comical "Ow." or "Oof.".

Suddenly, Titter's progress halted, and all indication of her existence disappeared; the hollow rumbling ceased, her intermittent grunts silenced, and the thick rope feeding into the darkness released some of its tightness and sagged against the floor.

The harsh burst of static made everypony tense a little as their ear pieces flared with white noise. The prone unicorn's stunted voice came through awkward and unclear, as if the signal were being jammed.

"Guy... I do... -f you... hear me... th... s... thing... -ocking th-... ent..." Titter's statement came, only fragments of her speech clear enough to understand - yet the ponies were fortunate to receive just enough to infer the mare's sentences.

"Titter?" Cantor asked hastily, trying to keep his voice calm before the fact that Titter was nearly isolated could attack his conscience train of thought. "I don't know if you can hear me, but you're braking up. Red's still got the rope, but if you go any further, you'll be on your own. Do you understand?"

Silence. Not even radio static graced the captain's fears.

"Can you hear me, Titter?" He continued, the bedevilling peace the only sound that reached him. "If you feel scared, you can come back..."

The rope remained slack.

"...Tit?"

A young mare's agonised screaming ravaged the air, reverberating and amplifying off the sheet metal walls, forcing unnatural noises through the vibrating metal. Horrendous banging and crashing cascaded from the darkness, as if Titter was thrashing violently within the claustrophobic place. And by the sounds of things, she was really going some.

The rope slipped momentarily from Red's leg, but the massive crimson anchor managed to hold strong. The bone-chilling wails continued for a number of seconds, petrifying Cantor until he found the breath to order Red to haul the girl from her endeavour.

“Get her out of there, get her OUT!” Cantor ordered, eyes wild with panic.

However, as soon as the cherry-coated pony began twirling the bonds back around his muscular leg, calamity struck hard, and another - far more cryptic absence of noise made everyone's blood run ice cold.

Not even the dull alarm next door could surpass the cataclysmic silence as everyone held their breath, staring more intently than ever a the small square abyss as the quivering rope shortened the distance between Titter and her mortified sister.

"Why isn't she saying anything?" Flitter demanded, her tone laced with dread. "She should be screaming like before!" The unicorn insisted with abandon.

Cantor found that he had to lie, but surprised himself with how well he convinced even himself that everything was alright. "She's probably just in shock." He confirmed, agreeing with his own acquired hypothesis in the form of a confident nod. "She might have had a scare and feinted; nothing to worry about." He continued to nod his head, hoping that in doing so, he could will the future to show a little more lenience.

Ten seconds passed, then twenty, and all anypony could do was watch and pray for a sign of the young purple mare.

When suddenly, out of the darkness, a pair of legs emerged, and Flitter's heart exploded with relief and joy. "Oh, Tit! You're okay!" She exclaimed, rushing over to the opening to welcome her sibling safely back.

Flitter grabbed hold of the rope with both hooves, placing one over the other to remove her sister from that hellhole.

About four seconds of critical hauling on Flitter’s account passed before Titter's back half - and only her back half limply fell from the bloodied vent, landing heavily on the metal ground with a sick slap.

Flitter froze in time as a little of her sister's viscous blood flicked up from the ravaged flaps of skin around her ripped torso and peppered her face with warm droplets. Titter's digestive tract splayed itself out on the floor, pink guts and olive orbs of matter finding their place amongst themselves within their suddenly more spacious enclosure.

None of the ponies - not even Cloud who had encountered all mannerisms of injuries could have continued observing the lilac unicorn's organs spill out in a vile puddle around her mutilated half of a body, and found that she had to avert her eyes from the grotesque scene.

Cantor couldn't breathe - he literally could not find it in himself to inhale. He merely stood there, his legs protesting to keep him upright as Flitter's morbid screams of terror came through muffled and distant.

The only one of the pair alive sank to her knees in what appeared to be slow-motion - a pinnacle example of grief stricken across her face. One could easily see that Flitter had not fallen voluntarily - but that she had lost the will to live following the nefarious demise of her one and only sister. She landed on her side and vomited onto the floor, partly from the gore, but mostly because she could confirm to herself that she was for once in her life... alone. That thought knocked Flitter out cold, and her wails of mortality ended abruptly as she sank into the floor with a depleted wail.

Nopony dared speak - none of them dared even to look at each other from the sordid scene that befell them. Red was still holding the rope tied tightly around Titter's hindquarters, but the blood merged everything into one colour and shape.

It was difficult to marvel at such a time, but several of the ponies were genuinely astounded that such a large length of intestines was inside just a single body. Of course, this observation quickly turned sour as one by one, all the ponies began to try and make headway as to what just happened, knowing all too well that it would not take half as long to theorise as it would to come to terms with it in relation to 'why'.

"She... She's dead." Cantor blatantly pointed out, tears of shock and pity brimming in his eyes.

"Damnit!" Grouched Faith, stamping her hooves and walking away from the heard. "This whole operation has gone from bad to total fucking shitstorm!"

Red just continued to stare soullessly at the shredded mare, his emotions forcing a boiling, deadly concoction up from the depths of his compassionate soul. "I was gonna protect her..." He breathed, barely able to comprehend his own adopted failure. He shook his head slowly as he continued his frail monologue, arousing pitiful faces from the ponies around him. "She looked... so scared. I told her I'd not let any harm come to her, and now she..." He sobbed, sending two glistening tears down his cheeks.

Cloud Nine attempted to place a hoof over his back, only reaching the lower proportion of his shoulder in the process as she rested her head on his arm and gently closed her eyes.

"Those... things..." Red seethed, his eyes becoming insane with anger. "They... They did this to you!" He bellowed, making Cloud skip away from his side and take refuge behind Cantor. The giant red equine snapped the rope from his foreleg and placed both hooves upon the heavy steel barricade. Standing bi-pedal, Red appeared the size of a polar bear, and his short cut mane and tail shone in the agitated light of the hall.

Suddenly, Red's fury exploded, and everypony found themselves scuttling backwards and into the rear wall as the beastly stallion began pounding at the great metal door. "I'll kill them! All of them! EVERY! LAST! ONE!" His hooves were like anvils; wrecking balls unleashing their ferocity into one single area with every hysterical word. Red backed away from the door, coming just short of Titter's mangled body and her unconscious sister before he galloped full charge into the blockade, burying his shoulder into the metalwork, making it bow around the middle and split around the edge.

"Holy shit!" Cantor exclaimed as Red backed away for another go, finally seeing the true power tucked away in that pony's immense muscles.

The brutal earth pony pumped himself up and gunned it for the door again, a ferocious battle cry escaping his lips as he neared his target.

Red sailed through this time, snapping the powerful hydraulics keeping the door in place and sending the six inch thick slab of metal soaring into the room, taking with it some of the aliens that had regrouped during the past half hour.

Faith scooped Flitter up and slung her over Cantor's back, taking care not to step in any of the dead unicorn's organs as she did so.

"Let's go!" She cried out, slapping Cantor on the shoulder before galloping after Red.

Instinctually, Cantor followed with the three other ponies in quick succession, racing out into the room to be confronted with gunfire from Faith. All the other ponies joined in too, the energy bursts from Cloud's laser rifle slicing a hole in the creatures' thick bodies and sealing it up with heat before they hit the ground. The brash succession of Haze and Deathwing's submachine guns dealt with large spans of the attacking aliens, making long lines of the creatures fall to their knees before they even got close.

Cantor, who was standing within a close circle of protection, couldn't do much, but whenever he had a clear shot past one of his pony comrades, he didn't let it slide, firing blindly into the darkness, killing two or maybe three of those things at a time, the muzzle flare from the guns giving him just enough light to see a couple of heads explode before somepony blocked his line of fire.

Red never stopped even once in his infuriated stampede through the hall, trampling aliens and sending them bouncing off of him like some kind of unstoppable freight train. He collided with the second locked door with unimaginable force, buckling this one as he had done the others. The barricade bent in half, but didn't quite break in lieu of the collision, but that didn't stop Red. He grasped the door at each end with his mighty hooves and tore hard, the sound of tortured metal only lasting for a brief time before it gave in and broke away.

Red used this newfound slack to whirl around and launch the destroyed barrier into the air, decimating a pair of demons mid-pounce.

Cantor heard the crashing, and just had enough time to scream "DUCK!" before he and his friends were decapitated by the flying hunk of steel. It screamed over the crew, skimming their ears until it came back into contact with the floor and cart wheeled into the opposing wall, embedding itself slightly into the metal when it struck.

The solo crimson juggernaut bellowed a second ferocious roar and stormed down the hallway, the lack of any and all light rendering his rage-fueled pursuit morbidly incessant. The red lights radiating from the beacon on the upper wall of the cavernous room was quickly consumed by the darkness, and pretty much instantly, Red was swinging his hooves blindly, through the air, striking numerous foes with bone-smashing force.

"HOLD YOUR FIRE!" Cantor screamed, the volume of his voice sending grating pain through his shredded throat.

The clangs of spent casings replaced the violent gunfire and the dying howls of the creatures as the action slowly descended from climax. The five conscious ponies in the room's breathing was noticeably heavy after the hefty confrontation, but they sought no rest as Faith had taken it upon herself to rush off and aid Red in his own fight.

The grey female reached into her saddlebag and drew out a clear plastic rod filled with liquid. She smashed it against the ground and the substance inside flared into bright orange life, casting a strong glow over the bloodstained flooring. She hurled the glowing orange stick down the hallway, bringing the image of the red leviathan fending off his attackers with unrelenting ferocity into view.

Red knocked one of the monsters onto its back, reared up and crushed its ribs with his tenacious hooves. Another replaced the fallen by leaping onto Redgrave's back and biting down hard on his withers. The stallion countered by rearing a second time, slamming his back into the wall behind him and shattering the freak's skeleton into shards. Red outstretched a blood soaked foreleg and launched himself from the wall, meeting with a third tormentor's face on the way across. Its black head burst open when the massive hoof slammed it into the solid corridor wall, and didn't stop until it struck metal.

The humungous pony scoured the ground for more 'victims', trampling the dead into pulp in the process, snorting and grunting like a wild animal, nostrils flared like tunnels and ears pinned to the back of his head. His eyes were frenzied with hatred like huge brown suns.

Then all of a sudden, like a malicious sugar rush, Red's fury dissipated from his mind, and he could finally see sense over sight, staring around in the warm orange light at the mess he had solely made, a little distressed, but in a strange sense, proud that he had destroyed the vile creatures that had stolen the life of one of his youngest, most innocent of friends. If he hadn't have looked at the unicorn twins in a similar fashion to that of his daughter, then maybe he wouldn't have reacted so... 'extravagantly'. He couldn't make heads or tails as to whether that would have been for the best. Regardless, here he was; there was no changing the past.

"Fuck, Red!" Faith exclaimed as she trotted to the stallion's company and spread her front legs, bowing her head low and panting as the adrenaline rush wore off. She looked up, a volume of blood making a path down her face from a gash above her eye as she finished. "Remind me not to piss you off!"

The door opened up to a far more pleasantly lit area - the contents of which... not so pleasant. Inside what appeared to be a laboratory at a first glance, the six ponies (given the fact that Flitter was still out cold) noticed four large circular operating tables one flight of stairs down from the grid work metal catwalk they were stood upon now. A large machine sprouting many a cruel - looking tools was positioned a few metres above each of these bloodstained workbenches. Cables and canisters supplying power to the instruments rose up into the high corrugated ceiling where bright white fluorescent beams shone down over the scenario, making a macabre mockery of the clinical nature of such a place.

Off to the left, there seemed to be some kind of observation booth, with large floor to ceiling windows overlooking the entire area, imposing a sense of control and order. Holographic monitor screens glowing a pale blue seen through the pure glass door were suspended just in front of a control terminal running the length of the square room, shining a little of the azure light onto the forest green carpet below.

The smell of blood was still just as pungent, but compared to what they had just been through, the ponies sought no time to acknowledge the odour. The air tasted like a cocktail of fumes given off by a chemical accident - as if someone deemed it a good idea to have a roaring tire fire in the middle of the scientific hangar.

Cantor poised to take a step downwards, but was stopped by a grey foreleg.

"We need a plan." Faith informed, frowning slightly through a subliminally caring expression.

The alicorn knocked her hoof away. "We had a plan." He retaliated with a heavy sigh. "But our ship's beyond repair."

"So what are you doing now?" The stone shaded pegasus asked, cocking an eyebrow inquisitively.

Cantor, beside himself for a moment, shot Faith a cocky wink. "Improvising." He returned. "My friends'll tell you I'm the best at that." He added with an off smile.

"Well just be careful: you and I both would hate to see another..." Her gaze drifted to the dozing unicorn draped over his back, an out of place picture of serenity etched onto her fair features. "...casualty."

The white pony's orange eyes grew sorrowful, and he turned to face the thin metal ground. "Yeah, I know..." He sighed darkly. "God... That poor girl..." He added, shaking his head disapprovingly.

"Hey," Faith called gently, bringing Cantor out of staring deeply at the floor. He slowly turned to face her with empty eyes. "It's not your fault; it's nopony's fault." She patted him on the neck softly, bearing a reassuring smile which seemed to restore a little of the stallion's spirits.

The sudden sound of shattering glass caught everypony off guard, and Cantor nearly threw Flitter off his back when he bucked instinctively in surprise. Every waking eye snapped towards the source of the sound, where they found Red standing atop a pile of glass where the transparent door to the observation room once stood, the only thing in his hoof, a petite plastic handle.

"Oops." Said the earth pony, the single word sounding far more like an apology than it should have done, and his innocent brown puppy-dog eyes weren't helping either.

Once inside the office-type structure, which happened to be by far the most unscathed of all the rooms so far, the ponies took note of how it seemed brand new - only looking about a couple of months old given the reassurance that it was kept in good condition while whatever this facility was had still been operational. Cantor crossed the room and cast an overseer's glance over the carnage. Numerous skeletal bodies lay broken and twisted throughout the scene, their blood staining everything within reach. Claw marks were seen across the walls and operating tables, and by the looks of things, whatever had been their cause had paid the dead their fair share too.

Did those monsters do this? Thought the alicorn quietly, frowning down over the massacre with a consultant, joyless expression.

Cantor felt as though he hadn't seen enough before Cloud's withheld voice pulled him away from the window.

"Cantor?" She asked timidly, keeping a keen eye on the white stallion.

"Yeah?" He answered back after a little pause, not averting his eyes from laboratory below.

The brown-maned pegasus turned towards her subject, considering her question before calling on the attention of the captain. "What do you suppose these dials mean?" Her voice was frail and brittle: not a huge contrast from her regular manner of speaking, but still, something was missing.

Cantor peered over his shoulder with pseudo-interested eyes, glancing at Flitter who had been 'positioned' against the wall shortly after entry. Cloud nosed in the direction of the illuminated panels, which were privately beeping away to themselves along the shoulder-high terminals.

"Not sure." The alicorn with the broken horn relayed, pacing over to the centre of the bank of consoles. "But by the looks of things, this appeared to be some kind of recording studio." His observations were met with a dumbfounded face worn by the magnolia mare.

"Recording studio?" She quizzed under her breath as Cantor began surveying the holographic screens.

"Hmmm..." The white pony mumbled, the sound hurting his ruined throat. He swallowed a sticky volume of saliva, which only made the grating sensation worse and made him realise that he was getting sick - something that had never happened to him since becoming equine.

All of the pale cyan boards were ablaze with odd symbols and letters - completely different to any Earth-language in that these monitors were scrolling through an alphabet of lines and different sized circles, completely incoherent to anything Cantor had ever seen before. Yet this did not deter him; he walked the length of the room once, silently surveying every square, symbol and sound being produced by the glowing blue monitors. Upon reaching the end wall, the white alicorn turned back around and found his way over to the only article of interest that had been discovered: a small box a little off from the centre of the computers flashing a vivid red, as if it were baying to had notice taken of it.

Cantor cast a second brief scan across the room, observing what everypony was doing, and it seemed as though he was not alone in his previous endeavour; almost everyone was staring down at the calamity below, aghast features fixated upon their faces, with the exception of Flitter - for obvious reasons. He returned to Cloud wearing an expression of earnest, hovering his hoof inches away from the control panel.

"Looks like someone left a message." He stated queerly, and in a tone a little too laid back for the current situation. Cantor pressed his hoof down onto the flashing red box - which was really more of a rich pink, resulting with a single, much larger display screen sparking into life just above the other holographic dials, nearly filling the entirety of the white wall above the bank of consoles.

The new presence came with two sharp, shrill beeps, attracting the attention of all the other crew members, stealing their gaze from outside to the number of symbols displayed over the fuzzy cyan screen.

"What's that?" Deathwing and Faith both asked in unison, meeting each other's eyes momentarily afterwards in an awkward tense of compromisation.

Cantor replied with nothing, but allowed the quaint display of dots chase each other around in a circle, as if it were the buffering screen for a video of sorts - and it was exactly that.

The pure blue screen crackled into a picture: some kind of humanoid creature with pale skin and large eyes wearing what appeared to be a lab coat. Behind him, one of the sinister black monsters which had plagued the ponies since their arrival seemed to be lying lifeless upon one of the operating tables seen in the other room, yet upon closer inspection, its chest was rising and falling very slowly, and the ribs were not even visible under the skin.

"Research log, number forty four." The pale creature spoke in a masculine voice, setting himself down on a white lab stool beside the operating table next to another of the white-skinned bipeds, who's chestnut hair was covered by a transparent shower cap. The creatures were nearly identical to that of humans - that was the second thing that made Cantor feel unsettled, but when they spoke the same language as him, he became very suspicious.

The only differentiation between the human race and these frail-looking aliens was that their eyes, though still possessing a distinct pupil and iris, were very large in a 'regular' sized head: they might have been about the size of tennis balls, or at least something similar when viewed up-close. They had three digits on either hand, each being about four or five inches long with stout claw-like fingernails at the ends. The male being who had introduced the video wore a large pair of half moon glasses over the tip of his miniature nose, the arms disappearing behind his bald, round head.

Cantor took a step back with an abrupt gasp. "It's speaking English!" He yelled, catching a glimpse of Faith's disapproving expression.

"What are you talking about?" The grey mare asked intensely, frowning across the room at the alicorn. "They're speaking Equous." She informed, shaking her head whilst maintaining a disgruntled face.

"Day, 0-7, month, 0-9, year, 30-73." The bald creature continued, speaking directly into the camera. All the ponies could only watch in bewildered silence. "Exposing subject to sample of rubidium olympathane solution compound six." Despite being of a much different race of sentient creatures, the wash of wild excitement that crossed his face shortly after speaking was unmistakeable. "This is the one we've been waiting for;" He enthused with a goofy, flat-toothed smile. "After years of research, we've finally made a breakthrough: with the introduction of the orderly structure of the olympathane molecule, we should be able to control and manipulate the test subjects via infer-red radiation, whilst still maintaining their unnaturally large strength."

Unnerved, Faith turned to face Cantor, but his eyes were fixated upon the screen, so she begrudgingly decided to continue watching the video.

After a moment was spent staring with hope-fuelled eyes directly into the camera's lens, disturbing some of the ponies to the extent where they took a step back. The male humanoid creature turned and pointed one of his three fingers towards something off-screen. A second later, a soft humming noise filled the air, and another slender creature, also wearing a long white lab coat waltzed onto the scene, presenting the first with two needles, one containing an opaque orange liquid, the other housing a clear, water-like substance. The bald scientist gave a brief nod of thanks to his partner before they walked off screen once again. It was unclear, given the similarities between the two, but from the well-rounded section of the other scientist's upper chest, it was safe to assume that she was a female.

The first white-coated being swivelled slowly around in the cushioned stool, squirting a tiny amount of the clear liquid out of it's respective syringe before inserting it into the side of the black animal's leg. A few seconds of silence passed, in which time the male biped discarded the empty needle onto a metal tray beside him and turned to the motionless black body in front of him.

All of a sudden, the dark creature's head jolted up from the table, and it began to scream and writhe in protest, thrashing its hips around and smashing its head against the clean metal table surface, all the while struggling relentlessly against its bonds.

"Turn up that I.F output." Instructed the male calmly, never moving his huge eyes from the screeching demon even for a split second.

"More." He added, pointing upwards with his finger. The quiet humming turned into more of a loud buzzing. "More." The pale-skinned creature repeated, keeping his long, bony finger pointing straight up.

"It won't go any higher, doctor!" A voice off-camera cried out frantically.

"Make it go higher, then!" The 'doctor' barked through barred teeth.

The reply of the doctor's order came out even more distressed than previously. "Doctor Roskilde, I- I can't. It won't-"

"Use reserve power!" Roskilde shouted, gripping the edge of the table with great brutality.

The buzzing rose in pitch until it wasn't too dissimilar to that of a boiling kettle's whistle. It stayed like this for two or so seconds before the screen went black again and all sound except for the agonized screaming of the creature disappeared.

Within the next few seconds, the low, cumbersome tone of a generator whirring into life joined the monster's screeching howls and the lights came back on dimly, revealing a very flustered scientist.

"What happened?" The humanoid known as 'Roskilde' asked in a demanding tone, staring around at the other researchers who were gathered behind the camera.

The voice of a young male replied. "You tripped the power, doc. We can't cope with that level of output."

A sour grimace found a home on Roskilde’s face, and he pounded a fist onto the table before darting around the edge and staring the restrained creature in the eyes.

"Subject forty four, listen to my voice." He ordered clearly, obviously forcing himself to keep his cool. The black monster acted as though he wasn't there, and carried on thrashing about violently. All the while emitting its feral screams of anguish. Roskilde slapped the creature brutishly around the head, which still gave him the same disappointing result.

"Subject forty four! Can you hear me!?" He repeated loudly, and in a manner relatable to shouting. The black animal only continued to wail grievously.

When a brief moment had elapsed, the skinny pale life form plunged the syringe containing the viscous orange substance into the thrashing monster's chest and pressed down on the plunger. less than a second later, and the creature's desperate struggling ceased to exist. It just lay there, unmoving atop the chrome operating table, not even its respiration was visible amid the dim lighting and rich shadows.

Doctor Roskilde slowly paced around the corpse of his experiment, running his three fingered hand along the smooth metal surface as he neared the dead experiment's clawed feet. He met the clinical tray at the end of the table and sent it careering into the floor with a laboured grunt and a strong swipe of his hand. Several of the steel operation pans crashed onto the floor with shrill clangs, carrying with them the personification of the doctor's frustration.

Promptly, the female assistant scooted onto the scene whilst the medical dishes scuttled to a halt on the sturdy metal floor. She rushed to the infuriated doctor's side and ushered him back onto the white stool.

"Doctor, calm down." She said gently, placing her hand on his white collar with care, only to have it shoved away by the sulking man in the lab coat.

"Just... don't, Elisa." He replied with a deep sigh, slumping over himself upon the short stool, letting his arms fall limply by his side. "It just frustrates me to no end when things don't go as planned." He sighed a second time and rested his elbow on the shiny table behind him. "Ten years..." He muttered, nodding his head steadily as his forehead wrinkled in concentration. "It will be ten years tomorrow that we started with this whole damn endeavor. Ten years and we've hardly made any progress at all..."

The doctor jerked his head towards the camera, startled, as if he had just remembered that it was on. He exhaled laboriously for a third time and spoke. "End recording."

The video cut off there, and the projected screen collapsed into a single line of white light that soon faded away until there was nothing left but the previous illuminated controls.

Everypony stood perfectly still for a moment. No one even looked away from the screen after the video ended. They simply allowed the confirmation of sentient life to mature enough in their brains before any one of them could find the sense to speak. Naturally, it was Cantor who shifted the silence.

"So..." He began, still rather unaware about how to approach the topic. "We're not the only civilized life forms out there, huh?" He stated, the comment seeming to bring the others out of their post-revolutionary trance.

"What were those things doing with the monsters?" Cloud Nine asked, her hooves rooted to the ground.

"Don't know." Admitted Cantor, shaking his head cluelessly. "Maybe they were trying to invent some kind of drug." He proposed, feeling that was the most plausible approach.

Faith excused herself from the room without a word, with Red plodding along in tow, offering the alicorn an 'I hope you think of something' look as he passed.

Cantor dropped to his rump, then went one step further by lying down and resting his head on his forelegs, giving the wall a mile long stare.

The midnight purple eyed pegasus with the red and white saddlebags turned around on her spot on the floor, but daren't move any closer to the prone stallion. "Wh- what are you doing?" She asked, trying to establish whatever eye contact she could, but the battered alicorn gave her none.

"Thinking." He simply answered back, information racing back and forth in his mind.

A minute or so dragged on for what seemed like an hour before another soul disturbed the white pony's thoughts.

"Anything yet?" Black Haze enquired, sounding for a moment like he cared a lot more than his character provided evidence for.

Cantor shook his head, and everyone let slip a private sigh.

"Actually..." Cantor started, raising his head from his forelegs whilst still focusing upon the wall.

"Yes?" Haze encroached, taking the alicorn's thoughtful pause for more of a mental blockage.

"When we were coming in, I caught an areal glimpse of this whole place." Said the amber-eyed stallion, creating eye contact with the unicorn. "And it seemed to be the only thing for miles around. So you know what I think?"

"What?" All three ponies asked at once.

"I think those... things we saw injecting that creature aren't from this planet."

"What are you implying?" Deathwing enquired, his black feathered appendages stretched broadly outwards in front of his saddlebag straps.

Cantor rose to all fours, keeping an eerily accurate eye contact with the black pegasus' red eyes as he did so. "I'm guessing this planet was dead; didn't have any life, but was habitable." He explained, rolling his hoof over factually to asset his speech. "That's why we didn't wake up dead, EE1's life support was way more than fucked from the crash, so that's why we didn't die from suffocation. Now what I imagine happened was that those humanoid creatures built this whole facility as some kind of testing ground: a place to test chemical weapons or something. I mean... if their race was at war, what better place to hide your research than a deserted planet, right?"

"Interesting." Black Haze commented, stroking his chin and staring strongly at the floor. He turned his blood red eyes back up to Cantor's with a sombre look about himself. "What's your plan?"

"If the um... 'Inhabitants' set up a base here, then there'll probably be some kind of airport or landing site." Cantor relayed, growing used to the pain of talking. "There's bound to be some kind of spaceship or... emergency escape pod or something." He began nodding confidently, a self-assured smirk forming on his face. “If we can get hold of something like that..." He turned behind him, facing Cloud Nine, who was still standing perpendicular to the bank of holographic consoles.

"...We may just have a way out of here..."

As the team paced awkwardly down the brief flight of stairs, obviously built without consideration for four-legged creatures, the air grew colder, as if signifying the degree of death within this compound. Flitter was still asleep, her legs swaying limply either side of Cantor's body as he carried her. The five ponies cautiously navigated around the rotting corpses, but didn't shy away from examining them out of pure, sick curiosity. It seemed strange that a laboratory that, in its time, would have been maintained with the utmost care to make sure everything was pristine and uncontaminated had succumbed to such ghastly decay. But life, once again, had proved its imperative will to thrive, even if it had taken the form of flesh-consuming maggots and crazed killing machines.

The base of the expansive lab wore a plastic floor of white, painted red with blood. So much so, that little of the original laminated surface was actually visible beneath all the crimson liquid and piled up corpses. A second set of metal stairs rose up opposite the first, and backed out to an identical door in the same way the layout currently behind the ponies did, of course with the absence of a second observation booth.

Pre-occupied with an enticing poster of worker hygiene still remarkably in-tact and unscathed from the catastrophe, Cantor failed to notice the decaying corpse he was about to step on. The stallion's white, but ultimately blood-drenched hoof sunk straight through the body's cranium like it was a very mature pumpkin, making a soft 'pop' as some of the fermented blood bubbled to the surface around his limb. Cantor immediately ripped his hoof from the skull, shaking off the excess life juice and gelatinous pink flesh whilst holding his head as high as possible, trying his best to keep whatever food that was still in his stomach down.

"Eww..." He weakly said, blindly nudging the mutilated body out of sight before returning to look ahead, this time taking way more consideration in where he placed his legs.

"She doing okay, doc?" Faith enquired, the first thing she had said after she wordlessly exited the glass walled room in somewhat of a sulk.

Cantor stopped and allowed the medical pegasus to grasp the back of his pony cargo's right forehoof loosely, holding still for just a second before letting go with a satisfied nod.

"Heart rate's normal; she's fine." Cloud reported with empathy.

"Good." The other mare with the golden eyes replied with a stunted sigh of relief. "Then let's keep moving."

The ponies continued making progress until they had reached the metal steps within good time, the head of the party making a mountain out of climbing the flight of stairs with the added weight of a nearly full grown female pony upon his spine. Yet in the end, he reached the top and poised himself in front of the door leading out of the lab, a little apprehensive at first, but taking what little comfort was available in the knowledge that this part of the facility at least, had power. The other four equines converged around the vantage point, Red's great figure deeming the space on the shallow landing a little more than 'pokey'.

Cantor reached for the left side button on the entrance's simple control panel and nudged it gently with the tip of his hoof, rapidly moving on to press the central button which illuminated as he did so before the steel door it was in charge of opened up to reveal the shivering form of a relatable blue unicorn, his body pretty much unscathed apart from a nasty-looking puncture wound above his left flank.

"Blue!" Was the first astonished word to pass Cantor's lips. He went to raise his gun as a result of a very quickly adopted instinct, but his aim was knocked aside as the royal blue pony's spouse rushed past and threw her forelegs around his freezing cold neck.

Cloud Nine buried her muzzle into her stallion's shoulder and began to sob. "Oh, darling!" She whimpered with excitement. "I thought I'd never see you again!"

"Really?" Blue Bolt asked casually, giving Cantor a cold, icy stare over the pegasus' shoulder.

Cloud pulled herself around in front of her husband and looked him in the eye as best she could. "Darling?..." She asked, but the unicorn ignored her and kept his rich turquoise eyes fixated on the alicorn's.

Blue Bolt opened his mouth to speak, but it seemed like a long stretch of time before any sound came out. "Did it hurt?" He asked vaguely with an unnerving lack of emotion on his face and in his tone.

The white stallion's brow furrowed over his spiced amber eyes, and he twisted his body slightly in an effort to dispatch some of that grim stare he was receiving.

"Did... what hurt?" Cantor asked, gazing inquisitively back at the sea blue pony.

"Your horn!" Blue cried out, pointing a hoof menacingly at Cantor's broken appendage. "I can tell from here that it has been snapped off rather than surgically removed." The doctor explained, failing to drop the uncomfortable look he held strong within his eyes.

"Oh, um... Yeah, I guess..." Replied the luck - deprived alicorn awkwardly, going to touch his injury, but promptly deciding that doing so would not be one of his best ideas.

Blue Bolt's eyes grew wildly excited. "Oh, I bet it did." He whispered, nodding his head maniacally.

There was an excruciating pause before Cantor spoke; a time that was spent staring into the unicorn's shrunken aqua irises. "...Uh, so..." He finally began, scratching the back of his right hind leg. "How have you been surviving? I mean we've just fought through a room full of deadly animals and barely made it out alive, but you- oh..." Cantor's sentence fell and his head dropped dejectedly. He stared soullessly at the floor for a moment before continuing. "We um... We lost Titter. She... She's dead..."

The mad-eyed paramedic seemed to sink into himself, and allowed his wife to help him to stand, keeping one foreleg around her shoulders. "Oh." He murmured, joining Cantor in facing the floor. Faith eyed the unicorn on the alicorn's back and let out a deep sigh of pity for her comrade's sake. "I'm... so sorry to hear that.." Said the blue stallion with pinnacle empathy, peering up at the beige mare beside him for a sense of communion.

"It's okay." Cantor stated after a second grave bout of hush. "There was nothing anyone could do. I can't even use my magic; can't protect anyone like I should." He closed his eyes as a pair of crystalline tears glistened and fell down his cheeks. He shook his head and uttered a quiet "Sorry."

"Hey-" A creditable grey pony spoke, knocking his neck gently with a friendly hoof. "Don't be so hard on yourself; like you said, there was nothing anyone could do: it's notyour fault."

"Yeah, but I'm in charge!" Cantor argued in retaliation, stepping away from the group. "I'm the one who took responsibility over all of you from the start, I'm the one who's duty it was to make sure you all were unharmed and happy. Look-" He felt his nose sting, and he turned to face the wall to spare him the humiliation of crying in front of these ponies. "Look where we are now... Oh, who am I kidding? We'll never get home! I'll never even see my foal..." The captain sunk to the cold, damp floor below and buried his face in his forelegs, sobbing pathetically with the knowledge that life as he knew it would never be the same again, which given the contrast between the previous scenario and this one was a fate worse than death.

The worst part about it was not the fact that he knew he was going to die. It wasn't even as bad as knowing he had failed his friends. What hurt Cantor most, was that no one would ever even know what happened here - namely, one Twilight Sparkle of Ponyville and her foal which she would have to raise on her own, dreading the day when he or she asked that agonizing question: "Mommy? Where's Daddy?"

Time marched on, yet kept steady in its stride as every pain stricken sob coming from the emotionally decrepit alicorn sent the crew into a whole new level of hopelessness. For the first time, Cantor was the one losing his head. He couldn't even think straight over the sound of his own hurt-laced hiccups. Everypony traded melancholy expressions for the few minutes their 'leader' was releasing his upset, challenging one another by eye to come up with another solution. But alas, there were none - and even if there were, no one would have stepped forward. Even with their own survival at the front of their minds, not one of the ponies present had the blistering indecency to question a father's unreachable love for his unborn child that he was convinced he was never going to ever get to hold - not even once.

After what seemed like a long while, Cantor's anguished sobs subsided, and he found it within himself to get back up - with a newfound fortitude to protect re-kindled within his heart. He felt a unique strain of courage lift his spirits and picked up both his physical and mental form with a determined and acute sensation of leadership. And with purpouse, walked back around to face his audience.

"Sorry." He started off with, bowing in a mildly bashful fashion. "I felt hopeless for a moment, but I'm alright now. I'm sorry you all had to see that..." As it were, Cantor got straight down to business. "First things first: we need to find our way to like a hangar or some kind of airport. Secondly, we'll need to locate a means of piloting a craft if we manage to get there. And lastly, we've got to keep up a high moral - not like how I've just demonstrated. Keep your hope up and your guns loaded: if you run into any of those creatures - and I'm sure you will - give 'em everything they deserve."

A quiet mumble of agreement broke out amongst the group, who felt it in no way necessary to cheer, yet similarly feeling rejuvenated by their captain's swift recovery.

"Maybe we should split up." Faith suggested, stepping forward. "You know: find whatever it is we're looking for faster."

Cantor bid the pegasus a firm nod. "Good idea." He replied, receiving a coy smile from the blonde-maned mare. "Red, Faith, Cloud and you, Haze: you're on one team. Blue Bolt, Deathw-"

"Wait!" Cloud called out before Cantor could continue, silencing the alicorn. "Blue, I... We've only just met up and... well he is my husband and I, uh... You can't expect me to just leave him again!" Her voice was thick with worry, and she too sounded to be on the verge of tears. Knowing how degrading breaking down in front of a group could be, Cantor quickly intervened.

"Okay, alright." The white stallion gently replied, holding out his left hoof defensively. "Okay: Blue Bolt can swap places with Haze. He and Deathwing can come with me and Flitter." The two teams he had declared slowly formed at either side of the corridor, yet held their interest in what Cantor still had to say. He turned about and proceeded to pace down the short corridor, which was lit relatively well - much less than the previous white washed laboratory, yet it was bright enough to see where you were going in its shaded yellow glow. If one were to put the word 'cosy' to this most extreme of situations, the term would not be immediately shunned despite following in the dense shadow of death.

After passing through the wide landscape door at the other end of the hallway, the eight ponies found themselves standing in an oval-shaped room, blue lights behind dials and displays cast an ultraviolet light over the crew, dying the lighter coated ponies a similarly cool shade. Five tall lockers with thin ventilation slots near the top were positioned against one of the walls in the corner, whilst the corner itself was separated by a single sheet of glass. The wall to the left of the group's entry point bore only one feature: a wide door similar to the one they had just came through, painted a mint green that appeared to glow a luminous pink in the oddly serine lighting. Directly ahead of the ponies was another door leading deeper into the compound, however this one was already open fully, giving everyone a masterful look into the steamy area beyond, dreary brown lights illuminating the fog as it poured from the door in thin, wispy plumes.

Pipes scarred the walls in tidy, colour co-ordinated rows and disappeared into the ceiling and shiny black floor. A gentle hum was audible over the clopping of hooves as everyone grouped around in the centre of the room. Four long white coats hung loosely from simple pegs bolted to the wall above a stunted wooden bench that ran along the wall to the left of the lockers, and a pair of black plimsoll-type shoes were placed under the varnished seat with care.

"Right." Cantor started, addressing the heard, slowly growing unaware of the pony upon his hide. Everyone stopped looking around the well-kept room; highlighting the gleaming polished floor and listened to what the alicorn had to say. "Faith," He said, addressing the pegasus directly. "You take your group and head through that door on the left, I'll take mine and go through this door that's already open." He wavered a hoof behind him to the dully-lit room, which took on an appearance not too dissimilar to a sauna. "Do you still have the frequency?"

Faith placed a hoof behind her ear and spoke. "Pretty sure I do, Cantor." She stated, her voice in stereo from the real thing and the slightly imperfect message coming through the speaker in everypony's ear-pieces.

Flitter was still wearing her ear-piece, and the sound of Faith's words coming loudly right beside her brain appeared to wake her from her slumber, and she began to stir atop her taxi's back.

The sensation of movement felt odd to Cantor, and he almost threw the young mare off of him when she grew restless. Regardless, the alicorn held still and waited for the unicorn to wake up on her own terms - as did everyone else; for no one was keen to remind her that her sister was dead.

The lavender pony, still fit with her red necktie, took about a minute to fully come round. And when she did, she sat up on Cantor's back and asked openly where she was.

"A little further into the compound, Flitter." Black Haze stated casually, not wanting to raise alarm to the girl just yet. "We were about to split up: Cantor thinks he might have a way out of here." He added with a cheery tone.

Flitter stayed silent in light of the remark and scanned the room, presumably unaware that she was riding the captain. But after all, who could argue that she wasn't looking for one pony in particular.

"Where's Titter?" The unicorn asked, her bright green eyes telling everyone that she already knew the truth.

Everypony's heads fell, but it wasn't too long before Faith looked back up with tender eyes. And unable to find any way of making the truth any less painful than it already was, she just adopted one of her primal features, and told it how it was. "Titter's dead, Flit."

The lonesome twin's emerald eyes shrunk a little, and she stared to all the ponies around her for reassurance. "N... No." She whimpered, tears brewing in her young, innocent eyes.

"I'm sorry, sweetheart, but... that's true." Cloud Nine backed up, holding her face up as straight as possible, though inside, she just wanted to say it wasn't so.

"B- b- but... she can't be- I... We promised we'd always be together, we’d always look out for each other." The heartbroken mare sobbed, loosing her balance on Cantor and falling off, not noticing the alicorn catch her and lay her gently on her side, where she lay perfectly still, yet desisting in crying and choking out anguished words. "She was my only sister, a- and I loved her. She can't be- No, please... don't leave. Don't leave me here, Tit!" The heartbroken unicorn cried out, coughing and spluttering out of an unbearable frustration, dry-heaving to the extent that she was nearly sick. "Please! I can't do this without you! Come back!... COME BACK!!!" Flitter screamed, lifting her head upwards and calling to the heavens, but when no reply came, she forced another tortured scream from her body.

A second bleating howl tore through the air as Flitter buried her face in her forelegs and bit down hard on her flesh, barely making a dent in the pain currently shredding her mentality. She sawed her teeth backwards and forwards, tearing chunks of meat from her foreleg as she continued to wail in torturous frustration, unable to mask the agony in her heart. A fourth scream came, and then a fifth before Cantor pulled her head away from her badly bitten limb, blood, sweat and tears ruining her youthful face with her resent.

"Flitter, listen to me." Cantor spoke, holding the fifteen year old firmly by the cheeks, forcing her to look into his eyes, burning brightly with passionate condolence. "Listen. Your sister is dead. There's no changing that, but sitting here and screaming isn't going to get us out of here, and if none of us survive to tell everyone back home about how she selflessly risked her life and lost it to try and get us out of safety, she would have died in vain. Now I'm sorry to sound like I don’t care; believe me I do, but one thing you must understand is that Titter would have wanted you to be strong for her. I can't imagine what it would feel like if I lost my Twilight, but I know for a fact that she would want me to be brave about facing life. So once again, I'm sorry for your loss, but we can all make it out of here, and Titter's story will live on through our memories." He shook the stunned mare gently, who had silenced herself ever since he had begun speaking. "Do you understand, Flitter?"

She nodded, and Cantor let go. It was unbelievable that the young unicorn hadn't laid into Cantor for seemingly telling her off for getting distraught over loosing her sister. But there was something about the way he spoke; some underlying meaning in his words that allowed her to hear everything she needed to to carry on. Something in Cantor's eyes let Flitter know he was right: she needed to be strong for her sister. There was no doubt that the deceased lilac unicorn meant the world to her, but to end her life's short story with distress and upset would be an insult to her spirit, and instead, the departed filly would be laid to rest as long as she was remembered, not in greif, but as the hero she was, and to many, still is.

"I understand, Cantor." Flitter said, her voice a broken whisper as her tears started to dry up. "I'm sorry about-"

"Oh, don't be sorry." Canter intervened, clasping Flitter's small hoof tightly. "You have every right to be upset, but please remember that crying and screaming will make everything worse."

Flitter bowed her head a second time. "Yes." She simply said, surprising even Cantor by letting a meek smile form on her lips. "I see that now... Thank you." She leaned forward and pecked Cantor on the cheek before wrapping her forelegs around his neck in a tight embrace.

Their hug soon ended, though, and it was inevitably time to split up. Cantor helped Flitter to her hooves and informed her on what had happened while she was asleep, going into great detail on what the video with the odd human-like beings had entailed, answering whatever questions may have been raised.

In good time, Flitter was up to date and raring to go, putting her sister's untimely demise on temporary hiatus for a spell whilst the success of her and her friend's survival was the greatest importance.

"So I'll call you if we see signs for an airport, then?" Faith relayed, looking across the room to Cantor as he and his four-pony group stood looking into their allocated route.

"Could do." The alicorn answered, dipping his head mockingly. "Can you read the signs?" He enquired, the sarcasm as thick as iron in his voice.

"Faith gave a similarly sarcastic laugh. "Oh, ha ha ha." She grumbled, narrowing her eyes at the white pony. "I'll call you if I see something that looks like a spaceship, then." She corrected herself, receiving a short giggle from Cantor.

"Yes, and I - you." He replied, turning to lead the way into the passage, stopping and calling out to Faith just before she went out of earshot.

"Yeah?" She asked, popping her head back around the edge of the wide opening and making eye contact with Cantor, frowning slightly out of confusion.

"Remember my 'official instructions'?" He asked with an irk grin.

The stone coloured mare returned his expression. "Sure do." She answered, cocking her gun intentionally loudly. "'Kill all sons a' bitches.'"

Faith and company had been walking for some twenty minutes now, and given the fact that the group of four hadn't encountered any of the black monsters for the last third of an hour, one would expect them to feel a lot more at ease as time progressed. Wrong. In fact, the lack of feral activity chilled their bones, and speculations of those things watching their every move; planning their attack was soon the forefront of everypony's minds.

Faith lead the way, edging her nose around every corner before proceeding to make sure all was clear. Despite the comfort of a pony five times her weight walking along beside her, the grey mare couldn't set her mind aside from her imagination: she saw shadows moving, and dark objects darting around the next corner as soon as she spotted them. She tried telling herself again and again that these apparitions weren't real, but that thought failed to make the experience any less unnerving.

Keeping a face like a concrete book, Red's fear was unreadable only to himself: there were no signs of his unrest apart from a thick band of sweat continuously dribbling down his forehead. He, like the captain, wore a shotgun around his humungous foreleg, but his own body could theoretically be classed as a weapon in its own right, but the idea never seemed to cross the broad stallion's mind. With haste, Red kept his thoughts to himself and kept up with Faith, barely paying attention to the more complex of orders; making turning a corner somewhat of a routine where he would pause and wait for the blonde pegasus to do her thing, then continue leading the way. It never occurred to him that the lack of contact with the enemy was odd, but then again, this particular pony regularly had trouble picking up on conspicuous vibes.

Cloud Nine and her husband were idly chatting away as they walked. Not to say they weren't paying due attention, but it was clear that they were trying to set themselves aside from the gradually climbing tension. Cloud explained all that had happened up until he had been found, avoiding going into detail about the youngest pony's demise, still feeling awful that it had happened in the first place, despite knowing full well that there was no changing the damage that had already been done. Everyone knew Cantor's words had helped, but there was nothing he, or anyone else in the world could say or do to make her fully get over her loss.

Rounding the corner for the umpteenth time, Faith's group of four stepped out into an identical hallway to the one before. But that was to be expected; the only time the scenery changed to an extent that was respectively noticeable was when they came across a door or two, but even then, the difference in the architectural integrity of the building was minute. Occasionally, the team would come to a room where two or sometimes three doors would lead off in other directions, but this wasn't much of a problem as Faith would always lead on through the left-most passageway, regardless of what her gut instinct was telling her to do. The last thing she wanted was to get lost in here; separated from Cantor. Even if one of the other routes did lead to a spaceship of sorts, she wanted to get lost as a whole, rather than have just four ponies (granted one could account for three on his own) wandering around this deserted facility, getting picked off one-by-one until there was no one left.

The pegasus shivered at the thought and continued on her way, checking every open room for 'nasties' before trudging on. Despite its complexity: signposts, wires and switches dominating the walls and ceiling, the corridors themselves didn't have much to look at, with only three or four moderately-sized rooms sprouting off from the main walkway. A thin rectangular glass window which allowed a visual into each of the office-like rooms stretched out beside each door. The rooms seemed to be weakly lit by some kind of white-blue lighting that cast strong shadows from the thin plastic chairs scattered incautiously around the horseshoe-shaped table onto the thin navy carpet below.

The leading mare retained a heightened sense of wariness as she constructed the path to follow, checking the darkness hiding inside crevices for any and all sorts of potential threats.

"So," Faith started, keeping her voice a little quieter than usual, but speaking loudly enough to be heard by all. "...Um..." Her mind went blank; conversation was bleak at best, but she felt silence had ruled for too long.

After a quiet while, Cloud Nine piped up, her walking becoming more restless before she began so as to eliminate any awkwardness that would come from simply pearcing the silence. "Blue was just explaining to me what kind of damage Cantor had done to his horn." She looked to her husband, who was trailing behind her slightly.

"Oh?" Was Faith's inquisitive reply. She raised an eyebrow and half-looked over her shoulder to the cream mare. "He seems to have quite an interest in Cantor, doesn't he?"

Cloud held back on her response, but instead looked toward her spouse's blue-green eyes, which held a barely noticeable slither of maniacal worry.

"I- I- I- I..." Blue stuttered, casting his eyes to his chest before looking back up. "I'm just enthralled by the fact that he is an alicorn - not many of those around, I'll tell you that!" The blue pony joked.

Faith turned her head more to meet eyes with the mint-green maned stallion. "You know he doesn't really like ponies pointing out that he's... different, 'special', maybe." She explained, watching the doctor's enthusiastic eyes fall a little dim. "He told me he sometimes gets excluded for being like he is, and that he just wants to be treated like any other pony." The grey pegasus turned back around and watched where she was walking more carefully, a bored sigh passing her lips before she continued. "Frankly, I don't see what the big deal is. Cantor has wings and a horn- well, he used to have a horn - big deal! So he has stronger magic; I don't see you unicorns discriminating against each other for being more magically abled than others!"

She felt herself beginning to get annoyed for her friend's sake, but quickly realised that she shouldn't really concern herself and decided to twist the subject. "So will Cantor ever be able to use magic again?" Enquired the gold-eyed mare with peaked interest, whatever the answer, she knew she couldn't do anything, and thus began to question her intuition - maybe she was just trying to create conversation.

Blue Bolt took a breath before answering. "Well our friend has severed his primary mana gland-"

"Equestrian please, doc." Faith intervened with a roll of her eyes.

"The part of a unicorn's horn that resides under the bony part." The green-maned stallion rephrased after a giggle.

"Primary gland?" The blonde pegasus asked, eyebrow raised in interest as she reached the next door and paused. "You mean there's more to using magic than just the horn?"

"Mmh..." Blue hummed with bemusement. "Unicorns have an extra organ that connects their heart to a part in their brain that intensifies neurone responses triggered by chemicals like serotonin, oxytocine and vasopressin: the chemicals associated with emotions like love and happiness." He turned to his wife and laughed, a small blush forming over his cheeks. "Call me sentimental but I think it's true what they say: friendship is magic, both spiritually and scientifically. As established, I know barely anything about how this cycle works for alicorns, but when a unicorn is in love, his or her magical ability can increase two, three, sometimes even ten times relative to what it would be if they were single."

Faith tilted her head and crossed her legs, using the sturdy metal wall to lean against. "But Cantor told me his marefriend's special talent was magic." She said with a frown. "Does that mean-"

"Oh, yes." The blue stallion answered before she could finish. "If she truly loves Cantor, she has the potential to become one of the most powerful unicorns in history."

"Huh..." Faith mused, her mind elsewhere, yet Blue snapped her from her idleness.

"Tell me: have they... mated?" He asked, throwing his head off-centre in a similar fashion to the pegasus'.

Faith turned her head back around, her golden eyes swimming in bewilderment. "Wh- I... Y- yeah." She answered with an ill frown. "Why would you ask that?"

"It is rather personal, dear." Cloud added with a disconcerting tone.

Blue Bolt's eyes seemed to light up under the shade of his pale green hair as he spoke. "I am assured you are aware that all ponies posses some kind of magical ability, but unicorns and especially alicorns even moreso." He cleared his throat into his hoof, glimpsing towards the bulky earth pony before carrying on. "When two ponies make love, uniquely unicorns, their secondary mana gland becomes... overwhelmingly powerful, and their magical potential is at its highest. You know..." The stallion began, gazing around his 'audience' with a lecturer's enthralled eyes. "I wouldn't be surprised if Cantor is more powerful than Celestia..."

Faith blew a raspberry and pawed dismissively at the air in front of her, rolling her eyes once again. "Yeah right!" She laughed, grinning widely. "That's ridiculous! Nopony's more powerful than Celestia! Hell, even her sister's probably twice as strong as Cantor!"

"I wouldn't be so certain." The unicorn stallion warned, making a point with his hoof in Faith's general direction. "You'd be astounded at the true power love can endow... 'Truly, there is no greater valliance than the secrets of the lover's behold.'..." He closed his eyes peacefully and nodded in private agreement to his statement, yet everypony else's reaction was more of a collection of misguided eye contact.

"Starswirl said that." Blue Bolt continued, still staring at his eyelids. "And he knew magic better than pretty much anypony; has a whole wing at Canterlot library dedicated to his work, you know..."

After a few seconds of silence, which could have been deemed compulsory, Faith turned her mind and everyone else's back to the subject very much at hoof with the only word appropriate. "Anyway!" She began with a huff, limbering up her shoulders and rolling her wings in their sockets. "It's all very well and good discussing lovey-dovey matters with you, Brainbox, but I don't think that feelin' all sentimental is gonna help when I'm gettin' my ass chewed off by one of those creatures." Returning quickly to her usual state of mind, the brash pegasus turned around to face the control panel at the side of the door they all stood beside. "Let's just find a spaceship and get the hell out of here. I may not be Cantor's marefriend, but I trust him with my life - if there's anypony who can get us out of this, it's him." She smiled with confidence and opened up the door, which led on to a lengthy walkway, glass walls and ceilings giving a vast view of an impermeably massive room.

A great expanse of tarnished metal stretched out in front of the ponies as they stepped into the glass-walled room, pausing to take in the scenery. Shattered shells of what appeared to be spacecraft littered the gigantic floor below, the metal below each singed black with soot and stained a repulsive brown from oil. A second glass-walled catwalk was seen opposite the group of four's. Unsurprisingly, it was empty, and doubtless it had been that way since the monsters took over.

The roof above may as have not been there: only about two meters above the catwalk, the illumination coming from the intense floodlights poised against the rusted moss-green walls became overwhelmed by darkness.

All the ponies took in the trashed space vehicles, their hope of escape feeling threatened as each and every means of freedom lie as destroyed husks in untidy heaps before the mare in charge decided to re-evaluate the situation to some context.

"I'm calling Cantor." Faith relayed, drawing her hoof slowly to her ear, capturing everypony's attention although they stayed staring at the carnage with all but eager eyes.

In a similar respect to Faith, Cantor had been leading his group for getting on twenty minutes now, yet the alicorn - led squadron had experienced a much less peaceful time. Not to say they were threatened beyond a few scars and bites, but nevertheless, the creatures which roamed these darkened halls had tried their luck against the four armed equines and did not fail on leaving the four several reminders of their scrap - despite being ultimately annihilated.

Black Haze and Deathwing walked side by side behind Cantor and Flitter, who were also traversing the corridors at each other's side. Opposed to Faith, Cantor had somehow wound up in a sort of maintenance deck: pipes, wires and huge whirring generators were the only items of scenery he had down here, aside from the odd door or two separating different types of the same machinery and boilers.

An ambient steam-type substance was meandering around aimlessly just above the ponies heads, the odd reminder of its presence occurring when it obscured one of the harsh ceiling lights casting a dull yellow tinge over the bodies of the crew.

Cantor had barely spoken to the lilac mare to his left, but the two mercenaries behind him seemed to be chattering away quietly between themselves just fine. Every now and again, the alicorn thought he heard his name whispered. He wouldn't have cared so much, however the source of the voices did not always rise from the black ponies to the rear, but came from all around - almost as if there was something inside his own head trying to get his attention. Cantor merely shrugged the ill feelings off as anxiety: being in such a place would do that to even the most sound of minds was the thought he assured himself with.

"Uh- s- so um, Flitter..." Cantor started, avoiding looking towards the young girl, but diverting his attention from the path ahead.

Flitter looked up at the stallion, but quickly drew her eyes back to the dim, musky corridor stretching out in front of her just as Cantor spoke again.

The white pony batted his ears uncomfortably before continuing. "You have any hobbies?" He asked, his tone verging on awkward.

The green-eyed pony turned back to him, quizzical. "Why would you ask me that?" She enquired, bewildered, if indeed sounding a little annoyed.

"Oh... no reason." Cantor quickly replied after catching the miniscule hint of hostility in her voice.

Flitter closed her eyes momentarily and took a long, deep inhale through her nose, remembering... home. "I like sailing." She simply answered, recapturing the white stallion's interest. "I used to live by the sea before I moved to Canterlot for this exploration thing..." A smile formed and proceded to grow on her face as she carried on. She remained looking forward, but it was clear her eyes were elsewhere. "Once or maybe twice a month, my mom, my dad, my sis and I would hire a yacht and sail around the islands close to our village..."

Cantor peered down at Flitter, but she had her eyes closed in remembrance. Yet this didn't stop him from looking away again.

"The village itself wasn't particularly big - it had all the essentials: a post office, harbour, corner shop. You know, just a typical seaside town... Fresh air... the smell of fried chips down by the seafront and the squawk of the seagulls..." Flitter sighed again, opening her eyes and looking back up into Cantor's. The alicorn expected to see tears in the mare's pair of emerald peepers, but was surprised to see reformed peace.

"Sounds like a nice place." He responded with a demure smile.

Flitter nodded briskly. "It is. I hope I get to go back there." She said, her voice drifting a little into the realms of despair.

"Hey," Cantor called softly, giving the purple-maned girl a trustworthy wink. "You will. You've just got to have hope." He shot Flitter a warm smile, and she returned with a hearty grin of her own.

"You can't do it..." A disembodied voice spoke out within Cantor's head, its tone devilish and tempting. The alicorn snapped his head around behind him, eyeing the two black stallions suspiciously, but they were seen conversing quietly as they had been, and were proven innocent when Cantor heard that off voice once again. "You can't get her home. You're a failure. Because of you, the children of loving parents are going to die."

"Can you hear that?" Cantor asked worriedly to Flitter, stopping dead in the passageway, causing Deathwing to crash into his rump.

"Hear what?" Flitter asked in a similar state of suspicion. "Are there more of those aliens?" She began to scour her surroundings, dashing her eyes between dark vents and particularly cloudy corners.

The voice continued to drill into Cantor's head, making him wince and clutch at his skull in pain. "How pathetic; you can't even keep your head in this place... and they call you leader? You're not a leader - you're a joke."

"Who are you?" Cantor shrieked, burning his eyes into every inch of darkness. "What do you want?"

"Exactly what you want..." The sinister narration replied, its tone flooded with a suppressed hatred. "Look at her." It ordered.

"Who?" Asked Cantor, still looking around, expecting to get at least a hint as to who was speaking; at the moment, it just sounded as if there were twenty ponies in a circle all around him speaking in perfect unison, completely disorientating the young stallion.

"The girl!" The voice seethed in response. Cantor snapped his focus to Flitter's concerned, and slightly frightened face. "Look at her smooth body, her firm flanks. Oh how easy it would be to overpower her." Cantor said nothing, just waited for whoever was playing this cruel mind trick to come clean. "You three stallions, and... her." The voice whispered sensually, making Cantor feel uneasy. Another wave of cringe worthy pain washed through the white pony's mind, making him clench his teeth together. However, the cruel voiceover continued on relentlessly. "And she's a virgin... What a treat." It let out a callous chuckle before returning to taunt Cantor. "Imagine how she'll scream. It would be bliss."

"Shut up!" Cantor finally cried out after hearing more than enough, shaking the voice violently from his head. "I don't know who you are, but I don't like your attitude. So just piss off and leave me alone!" He stamped his hooves violently on the damp floor, the hard white cuffs making clinking sounds against the rusted metal.

Everypony exchanged confused and cautious looks while the white alicorn waited for a response, not knowing how to feel when no such reply came.

"Uhh, Cantor?" Flitter asked tentatively, stepping closer to the stallion despite feeling rather nervous in light of his outburst. "A- are you okay? You don't look so good..."

Cantor shook his head and scratched his shoulder roughly, bearing an unsettled laugh as he replied. "I'm fine!" He answered happily, turning slightly away from his group.

"Are you sure?" Black Haze asked apprehensively, eyeing Cantor coyly. "You were just talking to yourself. You're not losing it, are you?" He asked, discretely limbering up his right foreleg.

"I'm fine, Haze." Cantor answered brashly, turning about and following his head towards the rapidly approaching door, the iron surface of which had been attacked by rust. "But one thing's for sure: the sooner we get out of this place, the better... For all of us..."

Cantor opened the door and froze upon discovery of the next room's contents. A repercussion of the first few minutes of his expedition came back into mind as he stared down the hallway of black creatures, their spiny bodies clustered all over the walls like spiders. For a second or two, Cantor was petrified. However when none of the monsters seemed to react to the new presence stood at the entrance to their lair, he became a little more lenient.

For a brief time, Cantor stood there in breathless silence, waiting for something to happen - waiting for the dark animals to pounce. But they didn't. In fact, one would be right to assume that they were sleeping. However to this theory, another dilemma arose: If any sound were to be made, they could all awaken and unleash their fury. Cantor found it odd that the iron door hadn't woken them up in the first place. But then again, the doors throughout this facility made less noise than a sheet of paper being withdrawn from an envelope upon opening and closing, so no legitimate surprises there.

The captain gave a silent hoof signal to fall back, beginning to walk backwards himself, taking impeccable care with every millimeter he moved.

Now, despite Equestrian engineering’s advances in making highly technical in-ear walkie-talkies, their knowledge of masking the catastrophic volume of which one pony's voice came from the another’s speaker was extremely limited. And the next thing Cantor knew was the strident crackle of radio static followed promptly by a certain brash pegasus' full-mouthed voice.

"Cantor!" Came Faith's speech, giving rise to a flurry of angered hissing and snarls from within the corridor of deadly animals. "I think we've found something! Go back to where we split up and go through our door. Take every door leading off to the left and you'll get to us."

Cantor continued to back up with mortified eyes as the first few monsters emerged from their nest. All the while, Faith's suddenly irritating voice was filling his ears and the air around him.

When the grey mare had finally finished talking, Cantor instantly retaliated with a stern hoof upon his own earpiece. "Nice fucking timing, Faith!" He shouted, to which the closest creature leaped out with its many ferocious teeth presented in its gaping pink mouth.

Cantor reeled back and flared his wings, which seemed to make the sadistic monsters back away out of intimidation. But they soon found themselves and begun charging at the ponies. The alicorn raised his right foreleg and caught the first alien along the side of its torso with his shot. He just had enough time to scream "RUN!" before another two assaulted him, one biting onto his left wing near the tip and the other sinking its teeth into his shoulder.

He cried out in anguish, but the pair of assailants were quickly disposed of by several rounds from the two mercenaries’ machine guns.

"Thanks." Cantor quickly said, shooting a creature point-blank in the head and scoring a collateral kill on one beside it as the buckshot peppered its ribs with hundreds of tiny meta pellets. "I owe you one."

Though the three ponies who were willing to end the heinous beasts and their fourth, rather timid companion had eradicated a smidgen of the threat, their siege was far from over, and from the looks of things, if they couldn't haul ass out of there before they needed to reload, they may never get out at all...

Author's Notes:

... :(

(Also, L4D2 reference! ^3^)

But seriously, Titter is dead. I just wrote about a young teenager getting ripped in half... :(

H-hope you're enj-joying this s-story... D: