The Dread Chitin

by Karazor

First published 27th of November, 2011

Dimension travelling with Twilight Sparkle and Rainbow Dash

Stranded on a hostile, alien world, Twilight Sparkle and Rainbow Dash must depend on one another and a fellow alien castaway if they want to return home to Equestria.(originally published on FFN)

Prologue & Chapter 1

Disclaimer: I own neither My Little Pony, Friendship is Magic, nor BattleTech (which makes a minor appearance) This was written without any profit in mind, and solely for my own enjoyment. I hope my readers like reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

*log begins*

(Voice 1, identified as Ctersius Albech, Division Head, Archaeological Engineering): *approaching* …And we'll need to move the second series up a day or two. Ah, here we are, now let's see what all this is about, eh? *pause* Door's sealed? Fedris, what is this? Analysis wasn't supposed to start in here for three…

(Voice 2, identified as Duran Thirk, Junior Project Leader): *interrupts* Yes, sir. I sent you that memo, sir. I hoped to demonstrate the efficacy of the new techniques I'd worked out.

(Albech): Thirk? The hell are you playing at? *pause* Thirk, why are you alone in there? Where's the rest of your team?

(Thirk): They're not here, sir. If you'll be so kind, sir, would you mind examining my procedure design? It's noted on the computer in the observation room.

(Albech): (unintelligible aside, presumably to someone else in the room) Very well, Thirk, I'll take a look. While I'm looking, why don't you tell me what you've done so far?

(Thirk): Of course, sir. I've finished the first three stages of artifact analysis, you'll see my findings on the secondary monitor there, and I'm just about to start final stage analysis. I'm pleased you arrived when you did, sir.

(Albech): How long have you been working on this?

(Thirk): About eight hours now, sir.

(Albech): Eight hours? How in the Fire… *pause* Thirk, are you mad? You're not using any of the proper safety protocols! You're going to… to… you, quick, get that door open. Now!

(voice 3(unidentified)): Yes, sir.

(Thirk): There's no need for that, sir. As you can see, I've got everything under…

(Albech): No you don't, you fool. You've been unbelievably lucky thus far, but the final stage is the most dangerous! Stop at once!

(Thirk): Sir, I'm trying to demonstrate that the safety protocols are utterly excessive. There are thousands of artifacts from the Arcane Wars awaiting analysis, and nearly every one that's been successfully studied has yielded major, vital advancements in arcanotechnological applications. It's criminal that we're withholding these things from the Imperium as a whole, sir, and I mean to ferret them out!

(mumbling can be heard in the background as Thirk speaks)

(Albech): *pause* Thirk, I've just been told what happened to your sister. There's no need…

(Thirk): *interrupts* This has nothing to do with Lys, sir.

(Albech): *quietly* Thirk, listen to me. I know it's hard, but there's no reason to get yourself killed.

(Thirk): That's not what I'm doing, sir. I know this won't bring her back, nothing will, but if her expedition had had a better lightning field, or a levingun that didn't jam, or if they'd been able to bring an armored vehicle or two, she might still be here. *voice cracks, continues after a pause* There's no guarantee that this specific artifact could lead to those, but one of the ones in storage might. The Imperium, all of its worlds, especially the survey expeditions, need those secrets, sir, and without the unnecessary precautions procedure insists upon, we can get those secrets, and then maybe someone else can avoid losing his big sister.

(Albech): *quietly, but speaking quickly* Thirk… Duran. Listen to me. Many of these artifacts are highly unstable, or have anti-tampering mechanisms. There's a reason for the safety precautions; every one represents a researcher or team we've lost. If you continue, you're going to be another one, son.

(Thirk): I've been very thorough, sir. This artifact is stable, and it lacks antitamper defenses, I'm quite certain. Now, if you'd like to observe, I'm starting the final procedure.

(Albech): No! NO! You two, GET THAT DOOR OPEN! NOW! Before…

*Albech's voice is drowned out by an alarm klaxon*

*recording unintelligible for several seconds, drowned out by roaring and banging sounds and alarms*

*brief silence as recording clears*

(Albech): Dammit. DAMMIT! Why the HELL wasn't his clearance suspended? Researchers who have received traumatic news are supposed to be sent in for psychological evaluation IMMEDIATELY! Emotional unbalance can be DEADLY in this line of work! You! Get down to the Rift department NOW! Have them send at least one theorist and an engineer, tell them to charge my department budget.

*running footsteps*

(Voice 4, identified as Albech's aide Fedris Thoryn) *quietly* Sir, that was a Wild Rift. The chances that we could track it and retrieve him are…

(Albech) *interrupting* …One in a million, at the very best. I know, Fedris, but we have to at least try. *quietly* We owe the poor bastard that, even though he's probably already dead. He had such potential. Such a waste. Such a damned waste. *louder* Oh, Fire and furies, I need to contact his family…

*log ends*

Twilight Sparkle was nearly giddy with excitement and enthusiasm. She'd discovered an ancient, incomplete magical treatise weeks ago, magically preserved and tucked away in a dusty corner of her library home's basement. It had taken her days to translate the archaic language into modern Equestrian, longer than similar projects had taken in the past.

She blamed the heavy amount of technical jargon.

The treatise had evidently been part of a project from more than a thousand years ago, trying to work out a new form of teleportation magic. Unsuccessfully, as it turned out; the volume had contained a number of hypotheses, all well-rooted in the magic of the day, as well as summaries of a series of fascinating experiments, but the unnamed author had never managed to get the spells to work quite properly. The author had concluded, with some evident frustration, that her predictions were impossible to properly test with the resources available to her.

Twilight, on the other hoof, was working with the benefits of more than a millennium of advancement in sorcerous theory. It had taken forever, but she thought she'd finally worked out the problems. She'd had to rework the original author's original equations, incorporating the theories of several more recent authors, including Moon Sky, an obscure theoretical magician who'd published his works a century and a half ago, as well as a series of postulates worked out by Dream Dancer, a modern arcane mathematician. Twilight was particularly pleased to have made use of the latter; she'd actually studied under Dream Dancer in Canterlot University, and had been deeply impressed by the old mare.

And today would be the day she tested it out. She'd been over the equations time and again, and was certain it would work. That was why she'd invited all her friends to see her amazing demonstration!

"Uh, Twilight? I know you already told us what you were gonna be doin', but, uh, would you mind remindin' me?" Applejack asked hesitantly.

"Sure! You know how I can teleport, and sometimes take somepony along with me?"

"Yeah."

"Well, this is going to be sort of like that." Twilight explained. "It's called a 'portal' spell. Instead of instantaneously moving me and maybe someone else, what it does is create a direct connection between two separate points in space, allowing several ponies to travel back and forth at will, at least as long as the spell lasts!" She grinned proudly.

"Uh, Okay." Applejack still had a slightly baffled look on her face. "And what's this thingamajig for?" She pointed a hoof at the large, circular structure occupying a significant part of Twilight's lab. It was studded with various gemstone resonators, as well as magically-conductive circuitry.

"Oh, that's the portal's matrix." Twilight explained proudly. The matrix units had been almost entirely her own design; the versions in the original series of experiments had been far more spartan, due in part to the more primitive state of magical conductor research a millennium ago. "The portal spell needs at least one to function properly. It anchors and amplifies the energies involved…" Twilight noticed Applejack's eyes glazing over as she tried to conceal her incomprehension, and decided to cut her explanation short, "and it involves a whole bunch of advanced theoretical sorcery that you're probably not interested in." Twilight smiled brightly as Applejack tried not to show how relieved she was not to hear a detailed explanation. "In a nutshell, the spell needs at least one of these to work. I've got two set up, one here and one at the edge of the forest, so I won't need quite as much energy to cast it."

"Why are you doing that, darling?" Rarity asked. "A regular teleport spell doesn't need any anchor points, does it?"

"Well, no," Twilight admitted, "but as I said, the portal will permit two-way travel, it isn't distance-limited, and I think there may be a way to make it permanent! Though, even if I can design a permanent version, I'm almost certain it'll need a matrix on each end. Imagine, though, being able to step from one side of Equestria to the other, without having to cross the intervening distance!"

"Hmpf." Rainbow Dash was distinctly unimpressed. "Takes all the fun out of it, if you ask me."

"Don't worry, Rainbow. Even if I manage to make a permanent version, it won't be easy, or cheap, to make these. I'd have to completely redesign the anchor point for one…"

"Yeah, yeah." Dash interrupted. "C'mon, Twilight, I kind of want to see what this looks like! I don't think I've ever seen you do a spell you designed yourself before!"

The sentiment was echoed by everypony in the room, including Fluttershy, though the yellow pegasus's affirmation was hard to actually hear.

"Okay, then!" Twilight's eagerness warred with a strong tingle of apprehension as she began mentally going through the steps of the spell in preparation. "I'm going to be connecting this portal with the one I built over close to Fluttershy's house, where Spike's waiting, and shut it down once we're all across. If I've still got the energy, I'll reconnect us, so we can just step over and then step back. But first!" she gestured to a series of heavy metal plates, each with a narrow window at about eye level, set up around the perimeter of the room, "I'd like everypony to get behind one of these shields, just in case. You can watch through the viewport, but I'd feel a lot better if you were each behind one. I'd never forgive myself if something went wrong and one of you got hurt!"

"How likely is that to happen, darling?" Rarity eyed Twilight with concern. As the only other unicorn in the room, she was uniquely aware of just how much energy Twilight was going to be dealing with, and she'd seen a couple of very nasty mishaps back in her school days when a unicorn lost control of a spell. And those spells had involved far less energy than what she suspected Twilight would be dealing with today.

"Oh, not very. I've worked this spell out precisely, and I really don't think there'll be any problems. But, better safe than sorry!" Rarity wasn't entirely convinced by her friend's breezy assurances, but Twilight Sparkle was one of the most capable spellcasters she'd ever even heard of, and she trusted the academic's word.

Twilight's friends obediently took station behind the barriers, as the lavender-coated unicorn finished her mental preparations. Taking a deep breath, she focused her mind, and began drawing upon the magic within herself. Her horn began to glow, softly at first, then with increasing intensity as she channeled more and more power through the lattice-like structure of the forming spell. Keeping a tight mental grasp on the necessary equations, forms, and components, she felt a thrill of excitement as the spell took form.

The others gasped behind the blast shields as the space inside the portal matrix began to distort, and the room filled with the sharp tang of ozone. At first, it resembled a mirage, the view of the back of the room wavering and swimming in an odd, twisting pattern. Then, the twist became tighter and more intense, and the light drew away from the center of the disc, the image bending as though seen through a lens, the view of the room compressing as it fled to the rim of the disc. What stood now in the center of the portal focus was a disc of darkness that almost tingled to look at, that seemed filled with colors that the eye somehow refused to see in favor of a black so intense it hurt, surrounded by an infinitesimally thin band of brilliant shimmering incandescence.

That was when things went wrong.

Twilight realized it first, before any of her friends had any inkling. As she held the spell in her mind, guiding the energy forming before her, she had a felt a sudden jolt, like she'd tried to climb a stair step that wasn't there. Something was missing. The spell suddenly began to twist and distort, tearing itself away from her control, forming itself into something not quite what she had intended. Horror lanced through her as a warped version of the portal spell she'd constructed crystallized with shocking rapidity. Soundless lightning shot through the previously pristine blackness of the disc and she saw strange, nebulous clouds boil into existence, instead of showing the edge of the Everfree Forest that should be occupying that space now. Worse, in the space of an eyeblink, the spell had turned on her. Twilight was now fighting against her own portal as it sank greedy claws into her, draining her energy voraciously.

"Something's wrong…" began Rarity, before Twilight cut her off sharply.

"Everypony out! Now!" Even as she spoke the words, the portal had begun draining other energy out of the room. The temperature was dropping, and a slight breeze had started blowing toward the roiling, lightning-shot gateway. "Get out of this room as fast as you can!"

Her warning spoken, Twilight was forced to trust her friends and turn her full attention to fighting the portal spell. At first, she tried clearing her mind, which should have caused the spell to dissipate. Any normal spell would have. It had no effect whatsoever on this one, however. Neither did the dispels she tried, frantically composing and hurling bolts of disruptive power into the cold, pitiless face of the raging spell. She used every dispelling technique she'd ever learned, but the portal swallowed the dispelling energy as effortlessly as the magic it had already drained from her. The light breeze had swiftly intensified to a gale, tearing pages out of stray books and driving small loose objects into the maw of the disc.

Then Twilight herself slid a few inches.

At the feel of her hooves sliding across the floor, an edge of panic began to creep into Twilight's thoughts. The wind was nowhere near strong enough to be doing that, it had to be some effect of the spell itself. The spell that was still somehow anchored to her, and continuing to drain her reserves of magic, despite her ongoing attempts to stop it. She dug her hooves in, and glanced back towards the door, hoping that her friends had at least made it out.

Rarity stood just outside the door to Twilight's lab, heedless of the mess the increasing gale was making of her elegant mane and tail, barring a concerned and abnormally serious-looking Pinkie Pie from re-entering. Her horn glowed as she, too, attempted to disrupt the out-of-control portal spell. Applejack, her hat blown away in the wind, had Fluttershy's tail clamped in her teeth as she dragged the yellow pegasus toward the door and relative safety. Fluttershy herself was trying to move, to say something, but the kindhearted mare was near-paralyzed with terror, trembling so violently it looked as though she was suffering a seizure.

Rainbow Dash stood about halfway between Twilight and the door, looking back over her shoulder and shouting something Twilight couldn't hear at Pinkie Pie. The rainbow-maned pegasus glanced back at Twilight, meeting her friend's eyes just as the unicorn slid forward another few inches, in spite of her braced hooves.

Dash's eyes widened for an instant, and then narrowed. Twilight could see the racer's determination crystallize. No! Twilight tried to yell, but between increasingly desperate attempts to disrupt the spell, holding on to her dwindling magic reserves, and trying to keep from sliding closer to the portal, she had no concentration left to spare on making her voice work.

"A.J.!" Dash bellowed at the farmpony, loud enough for Twilight to hear even over the ever-increasing wind, "Get Fluttershy out and go for help! It's pulling Twilight in!" Tucking her wings close to her body, Rainbow Dash bolted toward Twilight. As her friend approached, Twilight felt the pull increase to beyond what her hooves could resist, and she started sliding helplessly toward the nightmare her spell had become. Putting on an extra burst of speed, Rainbow Dash shot past Twilight, cutting in front of her and planting her hooves on the floor just in time to absorb the impact as her friend slid into her.
The two were barely a bodylength from the surface of the portal. They were stable for the moment, but Twilight could feel the spell's pull on her body increasing; even with Dash's shoulder braced against her chest, she knew they wouldn't be able to hold for long. She had seconds, at best, to convince her friend to let her go, or they'd both be pulled in.

She stopped flinging dispels at the gateway. They weren't working anyway, and she needed to be able to talk.

"Rainbow Dash!" Twilight could see her breath fogging before it was yanked away by the howling gale. This close to the portal, it was robbing the heat from the inrushing air, the same way it continued to greedily devour the unicorn's dwindling reserves. "Let me go and get out! I can't stop it!"

"Not. Gonna. Happen." Rainbow growled out between gritted teeth. Twilight could feel that the pegasus was straining, trying to keep them both from the portal's maw; Dash was prodigiously strong, especially for a pegasus, but she wasn't very heavy. And in this situation, weight mattered.

"Rainbow!" Twilight pleaded, desperately, but she didn't have time to finish. The spell's pull finally overwhelmed the slight extra weight Dash had lent and yanked Twilight toward itself, shoving the pegasus out of the way. Rather than abandon her friend, Dash wrapped her forelegs around Twilight's neck, her wings beating futilely against the wind as she tried to arrest the unicorn's momentum.

The roaring wind swallowed their screams as they disappeared into the unknown.

Chapter 2

Rainbow Dash awoke, feeling worse than she ever had before. Even worse than the day after that one party, the one that had made her quit drinking so much.

Urgh, was there another party? Her thoughts were sluggish. Man, I was limiting myself to two or three drinks, max. Did… did somepony spike 'em? Feelings began to register, it felt like she was lying sprawled half on her side on rocks, dirt, and spiky, scrubby plants. I passed out outside? And everypony just left me there? Groggily, she pried her eyes open.

Only to find that they were already open.

Uh, uh, this is bad. She fought back panic. She blinked several times, feeling the lids pass over her eyes. Okay, they weren't damaged, or they'd probably hurt, like the thorns poking her side that she should probably do something about. So why couldn't she see anyth…

Sight returned with shocking suddenness. Colors, light and shapes swirled around bewilderingly, sickeningly. Her stomach knotted, hard. Oh, microbursts, I'm gonna be sick! She managed to get her front legs underneath her before she vomited, so at least it didn't go all over her. Small favors… where the hay am I?

As she spat to clear her mouth of the remains of her breakfast (breakfast? When did I eat breakfast?) her eyesight settled down, showing her a barren, rocky scrubland. The plants were all small and dry-looking, with thick stalks, small leaves and plenty of thorns, and she was surrounded by smallish hills. The sky overhead was clear, cloudless, and a strange shade of light blue, and a dry, dusty wind moaned as it blew through the hills, ruffling Dash's mane. The sun was close to the horizon, and a crescent moon stood high in the sky. Um… okay. Well, this sure keeps getting worse. Even worse than after that party, really, when she'd woken up in another filly's bed with no idea what had happened or how she'd gotten there. She still hadn't managed to squash all the rumors that had started, but at least it hadn't been some dead wasteland! How the hay did I even get…

Memory returned with a rush. The lab. The fractured spell. Hurtling helplessly into tortured gray nothing, unnatural cold gnawing at her bones and pulling at her very heart, trying to hold on to…

"Oh Celestia! Twilight!" Dash looked around frantically, spotting a limp lavender form lying a few bodylengths behind her. She hauled herself unsteadily onto her feet, staggering badly and almost ending up falling back to the ground before she managed to find her balance. Argh, I'm still loopy from… whatever happened when we hit that thing. Gritting her teeth, Dash focused all of her concentration on the simple act of walking, and was able to hobble stiff-legged and without a trace of her usual grace over to where Twilight lay on her side, unmoving. "Twilight? Twilight, wake up! Oh, please, please, please be okay!" Leaning over unsteadily, Dash pressed one ear to Twilight's side, and let out an explosive, relieved sigh at the sound of her friend's breathing. Bracing herself on three legs, Rainbow used a forehoof to shake Twilight's shoulder. "Come on, Twilight, wake up! We need to figure out what the hay happened!" After a few moments of shaking, the unicorn's eyes flicked open. Dash's already-wobbly legs sagged with relief, and she wound up sitting down heavily, only to spring back up again with a yelp as she landed on one of the thorny scrub-plants.

Twilight blinked a few times, staring blankly, and then her eyes started to roll randomly, not focusing on anything. The unicorn's stomach heaved, and Rainbow realized her friend was going through the same disorientation she'd just gotten over. Rushing forward, (huh, it's getting easier to move, at least) she lifted the spellcaster's forequarters enough that Twilight didn't choke, though she wasn't able to keep her from getting a bit of vomit on herself.

"Yuck. Sorry about that, Twilight. Hey, don't worry, it starts off kinda like a really bad hangover, but it goes away pretty fast. Did for me, at least." Dash stood at Twilight's shoulder, waiting for the unicorn's senses to settle down. She only fidgeted a bit with impatience. Darn it, I have a feeling that we're in serious trouble, I should be doing something, but I don't know what to do! She decided to try yelling. She wouldn't have to leave Twilight alone half-recovered, and who knows? Maybe somepony would even hear her. Besides, she really felt like shouting right now.

"Hey! Heeeeeeeeey! Is anypony out there? Anyone at all?" Nothing. "HEY! If anyone's out there, my friend and I need help! Anypony hear me? Heeeeeeelp!" She listened as the echoes of her voice bounced off the hillsides, but no answer came.

"I don't think anyone's around, Rainbow." Twilight's voice was a little unsteady, but at least it sounded like she was finally tracking. Having caught the pegasus's attention, Twilight ducked her head, ears back in misery. "I am so, so sorry, Rainbow Dash. I… I must have missed something in the spell design, or cast it wrong, or, or something, and now we're both Celestia knows where and I dragged you into it too and I am so sorry…"

"Hey, Twilight, don't sweat it. I wasn't about to let you get hauled in there by yourself! It was my call to not let go of you when you got dragged in." Twilight was still refusing to meet her eyes, so Rainbow hooked a forehoof under the unicorn's chin and dragged her friend's gaze around to meet her own. Tears were welling in the spellcaster's violet eyes. She looks exhausted. Weird. I'm pretty tired too, and I just woke up! "Hey. Buck up, Twilight! Look at it this way; we've got Celestia's prize student, one of the best mages in Canterlot, plus the fastest flier in all Equestria and Ponyville's premier athlete!" Rainbow grinned confidently. Though I do kinda wish Applejack was here to argue that last point. "I couldn't pick a better pair to handle the unknown! We'll be back home in no time!" Rainbow maintained her confident grin as Twilight began to perk up a bit. Inside, though, the cyan pegasus was carefully hiding a set of serious concerns. In spite of her bragging words, she was scared. Really, honestly scared, like she hadn't been in a long time. Twilight was freaked out enough already, though, and Rainbow wasn't about to let her friend down when she needed a confidence boost, so she carefully bottled that fear away deep inside herself, where she would never let anyone see.

It worked. Rainbow could see the gears starting to turn in Twilight's head. "Well, I do need to figure out what went wrong with my portal spell and why. If I can do that, I can figure out where we wound up, and how we can get home, but that'll take me some time…" Twilight gradually shifted to the faraway look she generally assumed when she was thinking hard, while rubbing away the small spatters of vomit clinging to her coat.

Rainbow stifled another relieved sigh. Okay, awesome, I think she's back with me now. "Hey, Twilight, since you're awake and all, I'm gonna fly up and see if I spot any landmarks I recognize, 'kay?"

Twilight nodded absently. "That sounds like a really good idea, Rainbow. If you can figure out where we are, that will help me considerably in figuring out what went wrong. It also might give us a way to get home in case I get stumped!"

"Right! Back in a flash!" Rainbow launched herself off the ground with a powerful leap, wings fanning the air as she pointed herself skyward…

Only to land heavily right back on the ground.

At least I missed those buckin' thorn plants this time, a corner of her mind said, but the rest of her mind was thinking exactly what her mouth was saying. "What the hay?" She shook herself, then gathered her strength again and leapt as hard as she could, beating her wings for all they were worth.

Putting everything she had into the effort, she found herself hovering about two bodylengths up. The instant she stopped flapping her wings, she dropped right back to the ground like a stone, rather than gliding down as she should have.

What's wrong with me? I… I can't even fly? Dash felt the bottle she'd crammed her fear into start to crack as it overfilled. I can't fly, I don't know where we are, I don't know how we're gonna get home, there's nothing to eat out here… wherever here is! No. No, I've gotta fly! Desperately, she launched herself again, straining her wings so hard she was afraid she was going to tear something. Only to, again, find herself hovering a short distance off of the ground.

Surrendering to gravity's pull, Rainbow Dash landed on all four feet, then sat heavily. She was starting to hyperventilate, and she felt tears pricking at the corners of her eyes. I can't fly. I can't fly! If I can't fly, what the hell good am I? Even mentally, she didn't curse like that often; nopony did. But if this didn't call for it, she couldn't imagine what would.

She realized Twilight was talking to her. "Rainbow! Rainbow! Calm down, it's just magic drain!" Rainbow looked up, meeting her friend's concerned look. Twilight's horn was glowing, but so faintly it was hard to see with the sun overhead.

"What are you talking about, Twilight?" Rainbow asked miserably, "I'm a pegasus, not a unicorn. Pegasi don't get magic drain."

"Not normally. That portal spell was draining magic out of me the whole time, but I think it started draining your magic too, when we were close to it." Rainbow's ears started to lift from where they were lying flat to her skull. "It's hard for me to say for sure, I've got barely any magic left myself to look with, but it looks like it drained most of your inherent magic, too. You use it to make yourself lighter, to walk on clouds, to manipulate the weather…"

Blinking, Rainbow looked inside herself. She was feeling kind of like that time she'd nearly killed herself single-hoofedly breaking up that big tornado that had come roaring out of the Everfree Forest a couple of years ago. It had put up one heckuva fight, and had kept re-forming on her, and though she'd beaten it (of course!)she'd been a pretty lousy flier for a day or so afterward, she recalled, and the memory of the seconds before the spell pulled Twilight into itself resurfaced suddenly. It felt like it was pulling the warmth from my heart…

If that was really what was wrong, she'd be okay in a day or two. The bands fear had wrapped around her chest loosened, and her growing terror suddenly diminished, enough that she was able to shove it back in the bottle where it belonged. Drawing a deep, shuddering breath, she closed her eyes for a moment. "Thanks, Twilight." Her voice was a bit rougher than usual, but she was pleased that it was steady.

"Glad to help, Rainbow Dash." The two shared a slightly shaky smile, and Rainbow saw something out of the corner of her eye that caught her attention.

"Oh, hey, A.J.'s hat!" Grateful for the brief distraction from her problems, Rainbow trotted over to where Applejack's western-style hat had caught on the thorns of one of the scrub-plants. She carefully lifted it clear of the thorns, and plopped it on her head. Pasting a goofy grin on her face, she turned back to Twilight. "Applejack would kill us if we left this here. I'd better hold on to it!"

Instead of the giggle she'd expected, Twilight suddenly looked thoughtful. "Oh, now there's a useful piece of data! You were holding on to me when we came through, but if something came through without touching either of us and wound up in the same place, maybe the portal wasn't as chaotic as I'd initially assumed…" The academic trailed off, clearly thinking hard, and Rainbow started to feel a bit of hope creeping in. Twilight really was remarkable as a spell caster, and if she could figure out what had gone wrong, there was a good chance she could get them home.

Suddenly, both ponies whipped their heads to the side, as their ears caught an odd, skittering, slithering sound.

"What was that?" Twilight asked.

"I was just about to ask you!" Dash replied. She heard the sound again, closer this time. It sounded like something was coming toward them. "Um… Twilight? I'm thinking that maaaaaybe we should get outta here. Like, now."

The unicorn nodded wordlessly, her eyes huge, and started trotting away from the source of the noise. Dash watched her move for a moment, noting that the fatigue she'd seen earlier in Twilight's face was making her friend's movements a little slower and clumsier than normal. Uh oh. If we wind up having to run from something, that could be a major problem. Just as she was thinking that, the skittering sound intensified, and the something they were going to have to run from came around the hill.

Oh, Celestia. The thing looked like it had scuttled straight out of a foal's nightmare. Long and low, it looked like a combination of praying mantis and centipede. It moved forward on flashing legs, too fast and too many to count, as the front part of its body reared up and four long, mantislike claws extended around its head. An uneven collection of numerous eyes stared at her over a wide mouth that, though seemingly toothless, was flanked by at least three sets of hungrily-flexing barbed mandibles. The whole monster was covered in what looked like plates of bony armor, and it was a lot bigger than either pony.

"Twilight! Run!" Dash wanted to freeze in terror, but that was an instinct she'd long ago conquered. Instead, she bolted after her friend as the unicorn lurched into a slightly unsteady gallop, carefully keeping her pace down so she stayed between Twilight and the monster following them. If need be, Dash could fight, but Twilight was basically helpless without her magic. Man, I really don't want to fight that thing, though. Dash kept her attention divided; glancing forward to keep from stumbling over anything (which would probably be fatal) and back to monitor the creature's progress.

Oh, great. She thought, as she saw four more of the hideous creatures skittering along in a line behind the first. This day just keeps getting better and better. Worse yet, she knew they were catching up, and fast. She estimated that she'd be a bit faster than they were if she threw herself into a full-speed gallop, but Twilight couldn't run nearly that fast. Dash bit her lip as she realized she had a decision to make.

Well, not really. There was a less-than-zero chance that she'd leave one of her best friends behind to be torn apart by insectoid horrors, but it was nice to pretend for a moment that she'd get out of this unscathed. "Twilight! Don't stop! Get the heck out of here!"

"Wha- what?" the unicorn panted, then gasped as Dash skidded to a stop and turned around. "Rainbow!"

"Keep going! I'll slow 'em down and catch up to you when I can!" Dash spared a glance over her shoulder, locking gazes with Twilight for a moment. "GO!" The unicorn nodded and kept going, though Dash could hear her sobbing in terror and dismay.

Free of distractions, the blue pegasus focused all her attention on the scuttling horrors as she accelerated toward them. She watched them carefully as she approached, taking in the details of the way they moved, observing the patterns. Okay, long low bodies. They're obviously fast straight-line, but they'll be slow in a turn. Gotta watch those talons, too, they look like serious bad news. Dash had been in a few fights when she was younger, including one or two that had been pretty serious. She'd won every time, too, thanks to a combination of quick reflexes and the tremendous strength, far beyond that of most other pegasi, she'd found she possessed. But mostly, what had won those fights had been her sense of movement and pattern; it was something she'd always had, something that had fuelled her dreams of stunt flying. It was part of the reason that she'd excelled in her physics and applied aerodynamics classes (even when she was failing nearly everything else) and weather-work, and she really, really hoped it would be enough to keep her alive now, but deep down, she doubted that it would.

The distance closed in a flash. The lead horror's mantis-limbs flicked up and back, ready to strike at her. She wasn't able to use her wings for flight, but she was able to use them to generate the extra vector she needed, and flapping them hard, she was able to duck and shoot to her right as the striking limbs flickered forward, almost too fast for her to see. They missed her by a hair's width, and she could feel the wind from one strike sliding along her ribs. That's bad; they're really quick! She struck at the monster's flowing motive legs with a forehoof as she passed, and was rewarded with a series of sickening cracks as several of them broke under the impact. She used the reaction vector imparted by the hit to send herself rolling in a direction perpendicular to its line of travel, and saw with satisfaction that the thing indeed didn't turn well. Called that one. Okay, Rainbow, you need to stay away from the front end and hit 'em in the back. As it slowed and began to haul itself around to attack her again, she darted in on a curving path and hurled herself at the back of the thing. Focusing all her weight into her extended forehooves, she hit the rear left side of the creature's upraised body, hard. She'd never have used that move in a fight with another pony; the force involved was more than sufficient to shatter bone, and the spot she'd aimed it at would either crush a skull or smash a neck. The impact jarred her forelegs and shoulders, and as the creature twisted under the hit she used it as an improvised vaulting pad to hurl herself clear and out of the line of travel of the following creatures.

She landed lightly on all four hooves, and paused for an instant to see what effect her strike had on the creature. The impact had staggered it a bit, and when she leapt off its back she'd shoved it down and forward. Before she'd landed, its upraised forward section had planted in the rocks, and its momentum caused it to skid along the ground on its face. Emitting a low, keening hiss that made Dash shiver, the monster pushed itself back upright, turned and headed toward her again. The armor on the back of its body where she'd hit it was cracked a bit, three of its mandibles were twisted and broken where they'd been introduced to the rocks, and several of the legs on its left side were broken and spasming randomly, but it was a long way from dead. It hadn't even slowed down all that much, and there were still the four other uninjured monsters that were all now headed for Dash.

Oh horseapples, I'm in trouble. She glanced around, eyes flicking from one monster to another, measuring speeds and angles in her head. She saw the one she'd hit angle off to its left, and she thought for a moment it was favoring its injured side, before she realized that it was angling to cut off her retreat. The other four were fanning out from their previous near single-file approach, getting ready to come at her from multiple directions. Serious. Bucking. Trouble. Adrenaline was flushing out the fear, for the moment at least, but having seen how fast the lead monster could strike, and with five of them smart enough to work together to cut her movement options, she kept coming to the same, inescapable conclusion.

Dash was a dead mare.

She couldn't run yet; Twilight hadn't gained nearly enough distance to get away. Without flight, her options for escape once the monsters closed were zero. She could hit them, but not hard enough to do serious damage. Meanwhile, while she didn't know how sharp those mantis-limbs of theirs were, they were able to move the things fast enough that she suspected they'd be able to spear her clean through if they hit. She'd seen a heron do that to a fish once, and she felt a cold shot of terror as she pictured the same thing happening to her. It was going to happen, though; that was pretty much the inevitable conclusion of this fight. She would probably last less than a minute.

She wasn't gonna go down easy, though. I'll make you monsters work for your meal. At least you've forgotten about Twilight. She spared a glance in the direction her friend had gone. The lavender form, trailing her pink-streaked purple tail, was just about to vanish over the crest of one of the smaller hills. Don't look back, Twi. I really don't want you to see this.

Taking a deep breath, Dash hurled herself at the injured monster again, screaming "Bring it!" at the top of her lungs.

The instants blurred together. Dash lunged, struck, retreated, leaped, and spun. She sank into a near-trance, focusing on the way the creatures moved, using it to anticipate where they'd be at any given moment. She dodged strikes so fast she couldn't actually see them. Nothing she did seemed to hurt the creatures, so she stopped trying to hit them, and focused on keeping them busy and tying up their attention. She even got them to trip over each other a couple of times, which gave her a sense of vindictive pride.

She even saw the one she couldn't avoid.

The creature's talon blurred forward, and she knew she wouldn't be able to completely get out of the way. Despite her desperate, last-instant dodge, the claw sliced through her skin along her left shoulder and side, leaving a trail of burning agony behind it. Dash gasped, gritting her teeth in anguish.

Her concentration broken, the near-trance state that had kept her alive fell away. Everything slowed down.

She saw the talon arc away, trailing crimson droplets of her blood and a few fine, cyan hairs.

She saw the creature ready another limb, preparing the strike that would skewer her.

She heard chattering, staccato thunder from somewhere behind her, and heard several somethings too fast to see zip past her ear with a whining buzz like the fastest hornets in existence.

She saw the monster's head explode, splashing away in a spray of yellowish ichor and tissue as whatever had flown past her hammered into it, smashing craters through its armored exoskeleton.

Time snapped back to normal. The creature's decapitated body started to flail, which could have been just as lethal for Dash as its aborted final strike, but another blast of thunder and the whining hornets tore two of its striking limbs away and smashed its twitching corpse to the ground.

Dash gaped in horrified shock at the oozing, mangled ruin in front of her. That moment of shock almost killed her again; she nearly didn't see one of the other monsters striking at her in time. She managed to duck and roll out of the path of the strike, barely, darting out to the beast's side to take advantage of the space the first creature's demise afforded her. The instant she got clear, the thunder chattered again, though she didn't hear the high-pitched zzzzzips this time, and the attacking monster's carapace split and shattered like the last one. It, too, fell to the ground twitching.

Dash managed not to freeze this time, using the separation she'd gained to bolt away from the remaining creatures, and the uncanny concussive noises rang out several more times in short bursts, blasting the remaining three monsters into offal.

She stopped, panting slightly, and blinked.

The five monsters that she had known with absolute certainty were going to kill her were lying on the ground leaking ghastly yellow ichor, their bodies smashed and torn in an appalling display of violence. And she, Rainbow Dash, was still alive.

She was still alive! Sure, she was bleeding some, (Um. Bleeding kind of a lot, actually) and that slice across her shoulder and under her wing hurt like fire, but it didn't look very deep. Her wing moved fine when she tried it, so it must not have hit much muscle. She felt a rush of elation, as strong as when she'd managed to flawlessly pull off some awesome aerial trick, and she let out a light, breathless laugh. She knew she should be horrified at the mangled remains of the monsters that had attacked her, and part of her was, but that was completely eclipsed by the fact that she was still alive!

Shaking off the sense of euphoric glee, she realized she could hear shouting. She didn't recognize the voice, and she looked around to try and find its source.

Dash spotted an odd-shaped moving silhouette at the crest of one of the highest hills she could see. It looked like it was waving, and training her ears toward it, she could make out some of what it was shouting.

"Hey! HEY! Over here, quick! There will be more coming, come on!"

Dash wondered for a second who or what the heck that was, and whether she should trust it or not, but realized that under the circumstances she didn't have a whole lot of options. Besides, she needed to find Twilight, and a tall hill would let her both look for her friend and get a better idea of the lay of the land. Clamping her wing over the laceration in her shoulder to slow the bleeding, she set off for the hill at a light gallop, glancing warily around in case more of those centipede-things were trying to sneak up.

When she reached the spot that she'd seen the silhouette waving from, she found Twilight there waiting for her. The spellcaster was sitting near the crest of the hill, head down and panting heavily, clearly out of breath. Rainbow herself was starting to get a bit winded after the intense activity of her short fight, but she was in way better shape than Twilight to start with, and she suspected the unicorn had been even more badly drained by the spell mishap than she would admit.

The surprise was the creature waiting next to Twilight. It was clearly bipedal, its general body structure similar to Twilight's assistant Spike, but it was a lot bigger than Spike was, with an oddly elongated body shape. Even with it crouched low on one knee, the top of Rainbow's head came about up to its shoulder. Long arms hung from wide-set shoulders, looking oddly threatening compared to the short stubby arms the little dragon sported. In its hands, it cradled a strange-looking long boxy object, with a grip and a protruding flat-ended projection on one end, a large rectangular box attached to the middle, and the end it pointed outward terminated in a slender tube. The whole creature was covered in what looked like non-reflective black metal, and she couldn't even see any eyes, just gogglelike structures on the front of the head panning restlessly about as it watched the horizon.

Rainbow squinted as she approached, trying to figure out if the creature was wearing all that metal, or was actually made out of the stuff. Try as she might, she couldn't see a hint of skin or hair anywhere; the joints were all articulated plates with odd pistons or something embedded in them, and the rest of the creature was just featureless, smooth black metal as far as she could tell. Her nose picked up an unpleasant, sharp smoky odor. As she got within convenient conversational distance, the creature stopped scanning the horizon and focused on her.

"Can you talk?" Rainbow was somewhat taken aback by the curtness of the question. Even the thing's voice sounded metallic, though underneath the weird, buzzing metallic tone it was pitched deep, like that of a male.

"Yeah, I can talk, what's it to you?" Rainbow found a bit of heat seeping into her voice, though she didn't really mean it. She'd just been taken off-guard by the sudden oddity of the question.

"Confirmation." Well, that was a weird answer. The metal figure glanced around the horizon again, and Rainbow took the opportunity to do the same. She saw nothing but low hills in every direction save one; behind the stranger she could see the beginnings of what looked like a small mountain range. Nothing was moving, save dust blown by the wind.

"Hey, were you up here the whole time? Did you see what killed those bug things?" Rainbow wasn't sure whether she wanted to know what had done that or not. On the one hoof, she very definitely owed her life to whatever had killed the monsters. Even half a second later, and she'd either be dead or dying. On the other hoof, the shocking, intense violence of the creatures' deaths had horrified her, and she wasn't at all sure she wanted to meet whatever was capable of that kind of brutality.

"I reached the top of this hill only a short time ago. I killed the murderpedes shortly thereafter." Well, she'd met something that brutal whether she wanted to or not. The flat, uninflected tone of the reply made it even scarier. "Nice hat, by the way." Rainbow was confused for a moment, before she realized belatedly that Applejack's hat was still somehow perched on top of her head. How the hay is that still there? She glanced sidelong at Twilight, hoping her friend would be in shape to take over their end of the conversation. Rainbow wasn't particularly diplomatic on the best of days, which today was definitely not. Unfortunately, while the unicorn was breathing a little easier, it was pretty clear that she wasn't up to taking charge.

"Oh. Well, um, thanks, and thanks for the help. I thought I was in some pretty serious trouble there for a second…" Rainbow trailed off with a nervous chuckle, but the metal thing didn't respond. The silence grew long enough to be uncomfortable. Her shoulder twinged, the feeling of blood still oozing from the long cut reminding her that she probably needed at least a bandage or something. "Hey, metalhead, I don't suppose you've got…"

"Shh!" Rainbow drew her head back in indignation.

"Hey! Don't shush me! I was just asking if you mmph mm mrph!" Metal fingers clamped over her muzzle, muffling her protests. They weren't gripping particularly hard, so it didn't hurt, but it certainly was embarrassing. Rainbow glared at the metal thing, rose-colored eyes furious, but then she heard something. A powerful, low-pitched, warbling cry echoed over the barren hills.

The metal creature grunted, and released Rainbow's mouth. She stepped back, rubbing her face with a forehoof, but before she could say anything, it cut her off. "Thought so. Okay, you two need to listen for a moment, don't interrupt, and don't ask questions." It glanced at both of them as Twilight finally got her breathing under control and lifted her head. Rainbow just glared. Neither pony spoke, and the other evidently took their momentary silence for assent. "There are going to be more predators coming, and much bigger ones. You both need to head that way," it twisted around and extended an arm, one finger pointing to the foothills of the mountains behind it. Rainbow squinted in the direction it indicated, searching the small mountain it was pointing at. "You'll find an open door set into the mountain, under…"

"Yeah, I see it." Rainbow took a perverse pleasure in interrupting the metal thing after it had asked her not to. She really did see the door it was talking about, too, which made it even better.

Annoyingly, though, it didn't even get flustered. "You both need to get to that door as fast as possible." The creature turned to Twilight. "Can you run?" The unicorn nodded, still panting. It then turned to Rainbow, who bit back a scornful reply and also nodded. "Okay. You should both go now. You with the wings, stay close to the ground." Dash bristled and growled a bit, but since she couldn't fly anyway she decided not to say anything. "Bad things happen to anything that flies too high in this place. I'll remain here for a bit and make sure nothing follows. If you find yourselves in danger once you get there, the large red button inside the room to the left of the door will close and lock it; please don't do so unless you're in imminent danger or you're reasonably certain I'm dead, though. I am not sure I'd be able to open it from the outside." Its tone was still kind of creepily flat, especially since it seemed to be suggesting that its life might be at risk.

Twilight turned to head in the indicated direction, but Rainbow hesitated. "Hey, why should we trust you, anyway?" She asked, glaring into its …goggles? Eyes? This thing was weird.

The creature tilted its head slightly. "An excellent question. I could point out that I haven't harmed either of you, or that you in particular owe me your life. I think." It paused for a beat, and Rainbow flushed a bit. She did owe the metal thing, but she didn't particularly like being reminded of it. Especially after it had rudely brushed aside her attempt at thanks. "I could further point out that the creatures you encountered were relatively small, and that some of the ones that are on their way are likely to be quite large, but then you've no reason to believe that, and it's not really a reason for trust anyway. I wouldn't do either of those though," Even though you totally just did both, jerk, she thought grumpily. "Instead, I'll just ask what other options you have?"

Rainbow just continued to glare for a moment, deeply aggravated for some reason that she couldn't come up with a decent counterargument. She suspected it was telling the truth, and that time really was of the essence, but it was seriously rubbing her the wrong way. Something about the metal figure's eerily uninflected tone and slightly disjointed sentences just made her feel weird.

"Are you gonna be behind us, then?"

"Yes. You should go now." With that statement, the creature's face turned away and went back to scanning the horizon. Rainbow waited a couple of seconds more, but that seemed to be all it was going to say. Oh, end of conversation, huh? Jerk.

"You think you can make it okay, Twilight? It's kind of a long way." Rainbow asked her friend in an undertone. It wasn't all that far, really, maybe twenty minutes at a trot, but the unicorn looked utterly exhausted at this point. Twilight nodded, wearily.

"I think so, Rainbow. I don't think I can manage a gallop, but if I pace myself, I think I can do it." She gave the pegasus a wan grin. "I beat you and Applejack that way, after all!" Rainbow returned the smile, but didn't respond.

The two ponies set off toward the mountain at a fast canter, Rainbow Dash taking the lead this time while Twilight trailed behind. Rainbow split her attention between watching warily for more monsters to spring at them and keeping an eye on Twilight. They quickly lost sight of the metal biped, and even when they crossed the occasional hill crest, Rainbow wasn't able to spot it when she looked back.

They did hear it, though. They'd only been moving for four or five minutes when the chattering thunder Rainbow had heard when the monsters died echoed from behind them. Biting her lip, the pegasus urged her friend into a slightly faster pace; she didn't really want to be around the results of that noise again.

They heard the same sound a few more times, at one point overlaid with a chorus of chilling shrieks, but it stopped before they'd gone more than halfway to their destination. Wonder if it's dead, Dash mused. The big metal thing had seemed fairly confident, but…

Dash was seriously worried about Twilight by the time they drew within sight of the door. The unicorn was panting heavily, barely able to keep cantering. Dash herself wasn't in great shape by that point, either. The long slash she'd sustained continued to ooze blood; it was actually seeping out from between the feathers of her left wing by now, dripping down her left foreleg. Her wing was starting to cramp with the effort of keeping it pressed over the wound, too. She really hoped the blood loss slowed soon.

The door, once they finally reached it, wasn't particularly remarkable except for its size. Just an ordinary, rectangular doorway, though if Rainbow had been able to fly, she could have easily hovered through without touching the frame or floor. Set between two large boulders, and under a really big triangular one that pointed to the opening like an arrow, the only reason Rainbow had spotted it from so far away had been the reflective gleam of the light gray walls inside.

Stumbling inside, the two ponies found themselves in a sparse, but clean anteroom with a really high ceiling. Everything inside was made of metal, glass, or an odd dark green fabric. Several chairs sat along one side of the room, with a square table surrounded by more chairs in the corner. The opposite wall contained a series of empty storage racks and a heavy bar running near the ceiling, and a second, closed door stood opposite the open one, with a red light gleaming in the wall above it. Rainbow looked at the open door and saw a green light glowing in the corresponding spot above it. The wall to the right of the open door was occupied by what looked like a window looking out over a panoramic view of the hilly badlands, (Ha! That's what this kind of place is called!) but that was impossible. All a window should have shown was the back of the boulder next to the door!

Not important right now, Rainbow decided. Twilight was so exhausted she was clearly having trouble staying on her hooves, and she was panting heavily. She examined the closed door, but could find nothing like a doorknob, and when she pushed on it, it didn't budge. They both needed water, but there wasn't any in… hey, wait, what's that? Rainbow spotted something that looked like a faucet next to the table in the corner, with a rack of what looked like handleless metal mugs next to it.

"Hey, hold on, Twilight. I think I can get us some water."

"Wa- Water… would… be nice…" Twilight gasped.

Rainbow dragged one of the chairs over next to the spigot so she could reach it; everything in the anteroom was just slightly too large or too high to be comfortable. A bit of experimentation revealed that the small button next to the spigot activated the flow of water, and that the flow stopped as soon as the button was released. She filled one of the mugs, and sniffed the water to see if it was clean. Smells okay. She took a sip to test it, and it surprised her. The water was some of the cleanest she'd ever tasted, and it was pretty cold besides.

Hopping down off of the chair, Rainbow held the mug out to Twilight. "Hey, Twilight, here. Found some water." Twilight's horn glowed dimly, and the mug shuddered, but the unicorn couldn't even muster enough telekinesis to lift it. Instead, she grabbed it with both forehooves and began gulping the water down. "Woah, there, if you drink it too fast you're just gonna make yourself sick again!" Rainbow gently pulled the mug away from her friend's lips. "Gotta drink it slow or it won't do you any good." Twilight didn't speak, but she nodded and followed Rainbow's advice, draining the mug with a series of small sips. Rainbow refilled Twilight's mug and got one herself, wondering as she carefully drained it how long they should wait for their metal acquaintance to show up, and what they were going to do if it didn't. She wanted to ask Twilight, but the unicorn was half-dead from fatigue, and Rainbow suspected she wouldn't be much help.

Rainbow found that some of the cushions could be removed from the oversized chairs, so she piled several in a corner as a makeshift bed for Twilight. The unicorn gave her a grateful look as she finished drinking, staggered over to the pile of cushions and collapsed. She was asleep and snoring faintly in seconds.

*Author's note: When I started this, I'd intended to swap back and forth between Rainbow and Twilight as viewpoint characters with each chapter. However, Rainbow's section kept getting longer and longer, and I realized most of what Twilight would be doing wouldn't actually be all that interesting. It totally wasn't because Dash borrowed Pinkie's Solar Exalt Fourth Wall Breaker Technique and beat me up to make me keep her as viewpoint character. Honest. So anyway, folks, get used to Dash being the viewpoint character from now on.

Chapter 3

After Twilight dropped off to sleep, Rainbow Dash spent a few moments trying to tear up one of the remaining chair cushions in an attempt to make a bandage, but whatever they were made out of was unbelievably tough and despite her efforts stubbornly refused to tear. Rainbow gnawed on her lip some more (I'm gonna chew my lip off at this rate!) but there wasn't much more she could do at this point. She wasn't bleeding as badly as she had been, but she thought she'd lost a lot of blood by now, and the way that it kept dripping off her forehoof was getting really distracting. Plus, it was making a heck of a mess on the floor. Not to mention it was going to be a nightmare to get out of her feathers.

Trying to ignore the leaking blood (at least it wasn't hurting as much anymore) and cramping wing, Rainbow refilled her mug and sat down in the doorway, watching the badlands to make sure nothing was creeping up on her and her sleeping friend. She made sure to locate the large red button that the metal thing had told her would shut the door, in case she needed it, and spent a couple of moments peering at the small collection of buttons underneath it, each embossed with a number. She had no idea what those were supposed to do, so she decided not to mess with them. Instead she sat sipping at the mug of water, (which was easier said than done; her hooves had a little trouble gripping the smooth, uniformly curved surface) her fatigue finally catching up to her now that she wasn't terrified or fighting for her life and making her a bit wobbly. She wanted to do something, to get out and find out where they were, or find something they could eat, but a combination of growing weariness and an awareness of her own… currently reduced abilities kept her in place.

She'd been sitting there for about ten minutes, as far as she could tell, watching the badlands and listening to Twilight snore softly, when she thought she saw something move at the base of the nearest hill. Her head spun a bit as she heaved herself to her feet. She nearly stepped out to look, but a moment of thought made her reconsider; she'd be leaving Twilight helpless, and if something charged the door, she could always close it. Instead, she stood just inside the doorframe, trying to spot the motion again, poised to rear up and hit the door button if she had to.

After only a few moments, a familiar bipedal figure stood up from where it had apparently frozen in place while coming around the hill, turned around and started loping toward the door. Looking closer, Rainbow realized why it had been so hard to spot until it had moved; it had changed color to perfectly match the badland rocks! Even as she watched, its reddish-brown mottled surface faded into the smooth, nonreflective black she'd seen before. She hurriedly backpedaled out of the doorway, but the metal thing stopped just before stepping in. Spinning around, it tucked the long, sticklike object it still carried into its shoulder, pointing the tube end at the horizon and slowly sweeping it around. Evidently satisfied that nothing was following it, the creature lowered its… whatever it was carrying, stepped inside, and quickly pressed a couple of buttons with embossed numbers that caused the heavy-looking door to swing soundlessly shut and the red light over the inner door to turn green.

"Hey, metalhead, this place safe?" Rainbow asked.

"Yes," the metal figure answered tersely, doing something complicated-looking with the implement in its hands. It pulled a couple of levers, flipped up the top of the object, and removed the large box attached to the middle, which Rainbow could now see was filled with short, thick, pointed sticks of polished brass. Setting both the mysterious tool and the box it had removed from it on one of the room's storage racks, it paced smoothly into a corner. This close, and with no wind to interfere with her hearing, Rainbow noticed that the creature made an odd, quiet, mechanical whining noise with each motion. Even though it stepped lightly, the deep, heavy thud she heard with each footstep sounded like it weighed a lot.

"Um, hey, listen, I got sliced pretty bad back there," Rainbow began, trying to be as diplomatic as possible as the metal creature stopped in the corner and turned smoothly to face away from the wall. "And I really do appreciate your help, but I could really, really use a bandage or something. Do you have…?" She was interrupted by a series of clicks coming from its arms and legs, and sharp hiss emanating from the neck and chest of the creature. Did you just interrupt me again, you gigantic jerk? As she was about to verbally tear a strip off of the biped, she was stunned to see its head fold up and back, and its chest fold open. Inside, she saw its actual face for the first time.

Woah. I was sure that it was made of metal! That's some kind of suit? That's… actually kind of awesome.

Underneath the metal mask, the creature had a flat, soft-skinned face, with a small nose that seemed like an absentminded addition. It didn't have a proper forelock or mane, instead it had short, light brown hair covering the top of its head and wrapping around its jaw, chin and mouth. The hair thinned around its cheeks and jaw line, and got thicker around its chin. Save for dark eyebrows, it had no hair on its forehead or nose at all, or around its eyes, and Rainbow wondered if the patchy hair meant that it was sick. Its small eyes were set below the bony ridge its eyebrows sat upon, and they were an odd color Rainbow hadn't seen before; a sort of greenish blue. It had what looked like a couple of really ugly scars, too, one across its forehead and one slicing through the hair on its face from just below its left eye down to its neck. Its face, framed by large, shell-like ears, was oddly immobile, and she couldn't read its expression.

The creature inside the suit wriggled slightly, and Rainbow realized it was struggling to get out.

"Hey, do you need help?" It didn't respond. Of course, Rainbow thought grumpily. Fine, if you don't want help, I'm not gonna help you. After a few moments of struggling, it managed to free an arm, and reached up to grab the heavy bar the pegasus had noticed earlier. Thus anchored, it was able to free its other arm and pull itself out of the suit, which continued to stand in place like a hollow statue. The actual creature swung forward on the bar, landing heavily in front of the empty metal suit.

Outside of its metal shell, the creature was much less imposing. It was much less bulky, for one thing, with an almost wiry build. Its arms were shorter than they had been in the suit, and Rainbow realized that its hands would actually rest in the suit's forearms. The hands drew her attention; its fingers were long and flexible, much more so than Spike's. The left one was encased in fabric, but the right one was bare and hairless, and she wondered if the thing had any hair at all below the neck. The creature was wearing a kind of one-piece dark green article of clothing over its entire body, so it was kind of hard to tell. Its clothing was slightly rumpled and covered with pockets, and though it looked clean she could smell a faint trace of sweat.

The biped stepped forward silently, kneeling next to Dash. Unnerved, she shied back a pace and turned to face it, but it when it leaned to the side, craning its neck, she realized it was trying to examine her injury. Up close, she noticed deep bags under its eyes, and wondered if that was the same indicator of fatigue in whatever its species was as it would have been on a pony. It reached a hand forward slowly, easing the wrist of her wing away from the wound. Blood poured out again, and she clamped her wing back down with a hiss of indrawn breath.

The creature had apparently seen what it needed to, as it nodded and straightened abruptly, turning toward the inner door. The door whisked aside as the creature approached, and it briskly walked out, the door shutting again soundlessly behind it.

"Hey… hey! Where are you going? Dang it, would you talk to me for just a second?" Dash yelled at the creature's back before the door shut. She hesitated for a moment, torn between following the biped to try and get… well, more than one word out of it, and staying with the slumbering Twilight. Glancing at the outside door, Rainbow saw that it now sported a red light where the green one had been before, and when she shoved at it, it didn't move at all. Hopefully, that meant it was locked, which would mean Twilight should be safe even without Dash watching her.

Trotting up to the inner door, Dash wondered what the biped had done to get it to open, but as it turned out she didn't need to do anything. At her approach, the door moved silently out of her way just as it had for the biped earlier, withdrawing into the wall. She found herself in a short hallway, with a series of signs in front of her pointing in various directions and several doors, and no sign of the biped. The hall bent at a right angle on each end, leading deeper into the mountain. The signs were clearly readable, pointing to locations like "Mess Hall," "Engineering," "Infirmary," "Armory," and a number of others.

"Hey! Where'd you go?" she shouted, but only echoes and silence answered.

Well, maybe the infirmary would have something she could use to patch herself up. Dash turned to follow the arrow on the sign, when the label on one of the nearby doors caught her attention. "Commander's Office."

Dash was torn. On the one hoof, she needed to get her bleeding stopped, and hopefully clean some of the caked blood from her coat and feathers. On the other, she kind of wanted to see if she could corner the stranger and strangle some words out of it or something, and someplace labeled "Commander's Office" seemed like a decent place to start looking.

Irritation won out over self-preservation this time, as happened to Dash occasionally, and she walked up to the door, which slid obediently out of the way just as the last one had. Inside, the room was dimly lit and almost as Spartan as the first room she'd entered. A small desk sat in the middle, with charts and maps hanging on the wall. An odd, flat glass screen, like an empty picture frame, sat on the desk, but that wasn't what caught the pegasus's attention. Sitting on the side of the desk, under a small electric lamp, was a badly battered, dusty notebook. She noticed it because it was out of place; this place seemed all gleaming metal and glass, and here sat a humble-looking, battered, thick little book.

Dash wasn't a particularly big reader. She always kept herself current on developments in weather alteration and planning, as well as devouring every volume she'd ever found on aerodynamics, but aside from her particular interests she didn't read much. The little notebook intrigued her, though, so she hopped up on the desk chair, blew a layer of dust off of the book, and flipped the cover open. And besides, if I can't find the thing, and it won't let me ask for a bucking bandage, then at least I can bleed all over its nice neat office and chair! The vindictive thought ran through her mind as she bent over to read the first page.

It was written in an astonishingly neat style, much more readable than Spike's typical attempts. The letters were small, blocky, and precise, and Rainbow found herself wondering if Twilight would try to recruit the thing as her scribe. Once she woke up, of course, and assuming their "host" was the one who had written it.

Expedition Journal of Duran Thirk, Entry One:

Well, it seems my colleagues were correct. The artifact did indeed have an anti-tampering mechanism built in. Should I see them again, I shall savor the taste of crow. Or perhaps it was just unstable and blew up when I tried to test it, which honestly seems more likely. I shall continue to maintain that the paranoid security precautions insisted upon by procedure are completely unnecessary, though I must ruefully admit that my current circumstance would probably shoot my own argument in the foot.

That's a weird phrase, Dash thought to herself, sprouting plants in your foot? She continued to read.

Regardless, the chaotic Rift generated by the artifact seems to have deposited me… elsewhere. Here, specifically, wherever "here" might be. The handful of pieces of monitoring equipment pulled through the vortex with me detects nothing; no thaumic signatures, no radio frequency emissions, no act

Expedition Journal of Duran Thirk, Entry Two:

My previous entry was rudely interrupted by the arrival of a veritable horde of nasty, furry, toothy little things. While I was able to improvise a club from part of a lab bench that followed me through the rift and thus drive them off, I find myself a bit gnawed, and I do hope they weren't carrying anything nasty. I realize that a proper scientist would jot down some kind of phylogenic notes or whatnot, but I am an arcane engineer, not a biologist! I've no idea what the cursed things were! Nor do I know what the much, much larger creature that showed up shortly thereafter was, save that it was also unpleasantly toothy and that it didn't run as fast as I do! My current resources are thus: One (1) slightly battered bench leg, now lightly stained with small-furry-toothy-thing blood. One (1) thaumic resonator. Now broken and thoroughly useless, thanks to Mr. Big And Toothy. One (1) radio receiver. Working, though likely never again to play the sweet, sweet songs of Deiranys. Two (2) halfcoins that I'd intended to use for my midday beverage. Also now useless. One (1) high-page-count lab notebook that you, hypothetical reader, doubtless already realize I have. Four (4) pencils, unbroken. Six (6) ink pens, two each of red, green, and black. All full. Assorted (several) pieces of metal debris I may be able to transmute into a knife. And one (1) high-quality engineer brain, flush with the eagerness of youth, somewhat underutilized and underappreciated! (If I cannot praise myself in my own journal, dear hypothetical reader, I despair for the fate of the world… whichever one I'm in!) As to where I am, I suspect that the wild Rift tossed me to a world somewhat beyond the normally-travelled boundaries of the Imperium. As I am an arcane engineer, not a Rift theorist nor a Rift manipulator, I shall be entirely unable to return the way I arrived. My best option appears to be simply surviving; if I am fortunate, an explorer vessel will happen upon this world sometime within my lifespan.

I… do hope I am fortunate. Hopefully, I shall be able to hold myself together whilst I wait. I shall further endeavor to keep a log of my adventure (Ha! Imagine! Me, on an adventure! How my colleagues will laugh!) Either I shall be recovered, in which case I can publish this and become fabulously wealthy, (and then I will assuredly be the one laughing!) or I shall die out here. In the latter case, perhaps someone, similarly marooned, will find this log, and perhaps it will help them survive and avoid whatever mistake proves to be my last.

Rainbow reached the end of the first page. Was this… this wordy, quirky fellow the same individual as the sullen, taciturn creature she'd encountered? Worse, she hadn't even considered the idea that she and Twilight might have been wound up in an entirely different world than Equestria. She'd have to ask her host if it'd seen anypony in the time he'd been here. The thought led her to wonder whether she preferred to think that the nameless biped was a later version of this Duran Thirk, or whether Duran had died somewhere, and the creature that had rescued her and Twilight had simply found the journal and decided to keep it.

Hesitantly, she flipped to the back of the book, but the last page was blank. She flipped back through the pages, finding the last entry. The small, blunt nub of a pencil fell out of the book where it had been tucked at the end of the text.

The contrast was unsettling. Where before the writing had been almost painfully neat and legible, here it scrawled and looped, with many letters overrunning one another and with the spaces between words proving hard to see. Rainbow scanned the page until she found the beginning of the final entry, hoping it would give her a clue as to whether Duran was still alive or not.

Journal of Duran Thirk. Entry whatever, ? days after previous entry

I don't think there's any point to my keeping this anymore. I don't know how long I've been here, now. Years, certainly, but how many? I've to date found no one living, only hordes of voracious predatory beasts, though this base proves that someone else was here before me. I can't praise them enough; finding this place has kept me alive. I also can't curse them enough; finding this place has kept me alive. What little of their personal records I've been able to access tells me they were stranded here, same as me, though I have no idea what happened to them. The stuff they left behind is amazing; weapons, armor, tools, even vehicles, though those don't work. And none of it magical! I can use it all without drawing the beasts! I was even able to replace my lost arm with an artificial one. Not that it helps much. I think I messed up when I installed it; it just doesn't seem to work right. This place is eating me piece by piece, my arm is just the largest one so far. In the quiet, in this empty base, I can feel my mind slipping away; it runs to happier places sometimes. Sometimes, I even see Lyssa alive again. With no one real to talk to, it's been harder and harder to bring it back. I'd hoped that writing this, addressing it to some hypothetical reader in the future, would help me keep myself sane, but I don't think it's working. I find myself talking to people that aren't there. Two days ago, I realized I'd made and set out five meals on the table in the mess, and I have no idea who I thought the other four were for. I'm running out of pages, anyway. No one's ever going to read this. I'm going to die here. Alone.

This is my final entry. I'm not dead yet, though. I'll keep living through sheer stubborn meanness. I'll be damned if this place will kill me without a fight. If someone is actually reading this, get yourself off of this hell-world any way you can.

Oh, merciful Celestia. Maybe it was the same individual. Rainbow shuddered at the thought of being stranded on a hostile world for long enough to start talking to ponies that weren't there. Years? She started flipping pages, glancing at the header for each entry. The more recent ones all had "?" as the time interval, but the older ones had numbers. Three days since previous entry… seven days since previous entry… five days since previous entry… some of them were only a line or two; there was a lot of time represented here, and she noticed then that the office had been dusted, save for a the journal itself. In fact, it looked like someone had carefully dusted around the journal, as if they didn't want to disturb it. As if they didn't want to remember, maybe? Dash wondered. She noticed she was having trouble thinking of the biped as an "it" now, having read its (his, maybe?) thoughts. The voice had sounded masculine, sure, but so had Fluttershy's that one time, and the yellow pegasus mare was pretty definitely not male.

Eh, heck with it. He's gonna be a 'he' as far as I'm concerned 'till I find out otherwise. If I'm wrong it'll be embarrassing, but I'll live.

Rainbow heard footsteps out in the hall. Somewhat guiltily, she got down off the now-bloodstained chair and went out the door. The door opened soundlessly as they seemed to always do, and she stepped out into the hall. She saw the biped walking briskly back to the anteroom where Twilight was still sleeping, a flat case held in one hand and a cylinder that looked vaguely like a hypodermic without the needle in the other. Rainbow didn't say anything, wondering what the stuff he was carrying was for, and just followed along quietly in his wake. The biped stepped into the anteroom and stopped short. Rainbow, following quietly behind him, saw him look at Twilight still sleeping on the pile of cushions, look around the room, then look at the things he was carrying with an air of confusion.

(Two days ago, I realized I'd made and set out five meals on the table in the mess, and I have no idea who I thought the other four were for.)

"Hey," Dash said, through a throat that was suddenly constricted.

Duran (she no longer doubted that was his name) turned around, catching sight of her. He looked at her, and then looked down at the things in his hands again. A slight smile marred the immobile mask of his face, and he gestured for her to go past him.

Chapter 4

Rainbow walked past the tall figure, into the anteroom. He was somewhat imposing that close up; with his bipedal stance, even outside of the suit he was nearly twice her height, and wiry though he was she estimated that he probably weighed half again what she did or more. But he had yet to make a single threatening move, even if she was now a bit worried about his mental state. She checked on Twilight, who was still snoring quietly, and turned to see Duran placing another cushion on the floor and seating himself next to it.

"Sit here, please." His voice sounded different outside the suit. It didn't have the metallic tone she'd heard before, and it was a bit higher pitched. A light baritone, rather than the harsh near-bass she'd heard before. It still had an odd tonelessness to it, though.

"Uh, why?" The biped looked confused, as though he'd never expected the question to arise.

"So I can treat your wound," he answered, and Dash finally realized what had been bothering her about the way he talked. He sounds like a bad actor reading memorized lines. Everything he's said has sounded that way. Why would he sound like that? She slowly walked over to the spot he'd indicated, watching him closely. He opened the case he'd brought in, which proved to be packed with gauze, medical tape, and various other first-aid items. Oh. I guess he was listening to what I asked earlier.

Rainbow seated herself gingerly on the proffered cushion, while Duran tore open a large, sealed packet and extracted what looked to be a damp sponge. It had a slight medicinal smell to it. Reaching forward, he gently pulled her wing away from the long laceration, causing blood to start flowing again with shocking suddenness. He carefully swabbed the wound with the sponge, cleaning it out, and before the blood could start to flow as freely again, he grabbed the cylinder lying next to the open case and sprayed something into the cut.

Rainbow twitched away from the sudden hiss of the spray, only to have the biped grab her gently but firmly, with one hand holding her body in place while the other grabbed her wing, preventing her from pressing it to the wound again.

"Hey! What was that stuff? What are you doing?" Rainbow yelped, starting to struggle.

"Neurotoxin antidote. Keeping you from re-poisoning yourself," came the calm, stilted reply. "Please hold still."

"Poisoning?"

"Yes. Murderpede claws are poisoned. That was the contact antidote, I still need to administer the bloodstream antidote so please hold still and don't try to touch the wound this will sting a bit." Rainbow blinked, that last sentence had come out in a monotone rush, with no pauses. It took her a moment to sort it out.

"Okay, but do it quick. I've lost a lot of blood already, and I seriously need to patch myself up."

"No need, I'll do it. I've patched myself up often enough that I should be able to do it fast." The answer wasn't terribly reassuring, but Rainbow held herself still anyway. Picking up the cylinder from where he'd dropped it to grab her wing, Duran reversed the implement, pressed it to her shoulder away from the wound, and pushed a small button. Rainbow felt a slight sting, nowhere near as bad as she had been bracing herself for. She relaxed a bit, careful to keep her wing elevated so as not to touch the cut and stretching it a bit to relieve the cramp she'd developed.

The biped dug into his first-aid kit again, this time coming out with a roll of gauze, a series of small, flat, butterfly-shaped things that reminded Rainbow of Fluttershy's cutie mark, and a small, sharp-looking blade. The blade worried her, particularly since he seemed to be using it first, but instead of doing anything violent he used it to quickly and carefully shave her cyan fur away from her wound. He was done faster than she'd have believed possible, and he moved on to close the cut. She'd expected him to just bandage over it, but instead he used the little butterfly things. He dexterously peeled some sort of backing off each one, swabbed the blood away from part of the wound with the length of gauze, pressed the edges of the wound together, and stretched the butterfly thing across it, and then moved an inch or so along the cut and repeated the action. Each of the "wings" had some kind of adhesive on it, and the center was elastic, so once placed they held the wound closed. It was kind of interesting to watch, actually, though about halfway through the laceration was starting to really hurt again.

I should probably mention that, she decided. "Hey, I don't know if it's got something to do with what you're doing there, but it's starting to hurt some more."

Duran didn't pause in his actions, only offhandedly remarking, "That's good. Means the nerves weren't dead yet." The casual statement actually didn't have the weird, dead, bad-actor tone to it, making it the first statement of his Dash had heard that sounded like it came from someone alive. She just wished the contents of the reply hadn't been quite so frightening.

"It kills nerves? But that's right over my primary flight muscles!" If those muscles were paralyzed, even partially, she might never fly right again!

"Yes, that's what a neurotoxin does. You'll be fine. It takes a couple of hours for nerves to start to die, and they always start from the outside in." Well, that was a relief. And he'd sounded alive again. Was it because he wasn't paying attention to what he was saying?

Finishing with the butterfly bandages, the biped reached back into the kit. Blood was still seeping slowly out of the slash, though it was a lot slower than it had been. His hand came out with a sealed tube of something. Popping the cap, he started applying the thin, sharp-smelling clear liquid that came out to her injury.

"Um, sorry to repeat myself, but what's that?" Rainbow asked. It didn't hurt, but it smelled kind of weird.

"Wound sealant. Waterproof, lasts about a day." Drat, he sounds dead again. He was doing a pretty good job of patching her up, though. The sealant stopped the bleeding completely. As the biped was replacing the cap on the sealant tube, his gloved left hand started twitching. Rainbow watched as Duran dropped the small tube and glared at his hand in irritation, but it kept twitching spastically, and he finally lowered it to his lap and left it to twitch.

(I was even able to replace my lost arm with an artificial one. I think I messed up when I installed it; it just doesn't seem to work right.)

Ignoring his spasming hand, the biped replaced the container of sealant in the case, and removed another sponge packet. He tore it open using his working hand and his teeth, which gave Rainbow a good look at his tooth structure. Kinda wish I hadn't seen that. Those sure weren't herbivore teeth. It didn't bother her as much as it would have bothered most ponies though; her best friend in school had been an omnivore, after all. Even so, being this close to a strange omnivore, particularly a large and possibly crazy one, did make her a little jumpy. Removing the sponge from its packet, Duran began to carefully clean the clotted blood from Rainbow's shoulder and side.

"Hey, no need to do that." Feels kinda nice, though. "If there's a bath or something around here, I can clean myself up just fine."

"Need to check around the wound. Stuff gets left behind sometimes." What did that mean, left behind? She'd watched him clean and seal the cut, he hadn't put anything in there! Did he mean something left behind by the claw? He cleaned her shoulder and back within a few inches of the wound, dried it with a roll of gauze, and then, to her shock, started running his fingers lightly under her wing.

"Hey!" Dash yelped indignantly, leaping to her feet. "Getting awfully familiar there, buddy!" The areas right under and between a pegasus's wings were really sensitive, and a well-raised pegasus (which Dash would cheerfully admit that she wasn't most of the time, but in this case she did have the attitudes of one) would never let anyone but a really good friend anywhere near those areas.

The biped, however, seemed utterly clueless. He just looked at her with a vaguely baffled air, and repeated, word for word, "Need to check around the wound. Stuff gets left behind sometimes." In the exact same way he'd said it before.

Rainbow, feeling embarrassed and flustered, glared furiously at the biped. Is he messing with me, or could there actually be something dangerous? Her mind flashed back to the fact that the wound was right over her flight muscles. My wings are involved, and I gotta be careful, but… but!

She stared at his face, searching for any signs of a hidden motive. Angry rose-colored eyes locked with blue-green, but she saw nothing but confusion. Rainbow took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. "Okay, listen. I know you've probably been on your own here for… for a long time. But you are seriously not my type. You get me?"

He blinked once. "I… if that talon left something behind, and I don't get it out, it's going to hurt. A lot." He rubbed at his side, as if to ease an old ache, and she still couldn't see anything in his eyes but growing confusion.

Rainbow ground her teeth. Aw, man. If he's serious, then I've gotta let him check. This isn't gonna be fun, though. Bad enough that I'm having to depend on someone else for this stuff, without having to add something like this…

"Fine." She gritted out between clenched teeth. "If you have to. You could've at least bought me dinner first, though."

Some of the confusion eased. "Oh! There's some food in the mess hall if you're hungry." She was, she realized, really hungry. But that was so totally not what she'd meant.

Rainbow continued to watch the biped, hoping for a crack in his façade, while she wrestled with her internal dilemma. Letting this weird, crazy omnivore run its hand over her in what was, for a pegasus, a decidedly intimate manner was seriously creepifying. If she didn't, though, and her left wing wound up permanently damaged because of it, that would permanently kill the dream she'd been busting her flank trying to fulfill since fillyhood.

"Fine!" Rainbow snarled again, plopping herself down next to Duran. "Do what you gotta do. But if I find out this is some kind of messed-up prank, you and I are gonna have a conversation where you lose all your teeth, 'cause it's not funny." Her stomach rumbled loudly, and she added as an afterthought, "And you're still gonna owe me dinner."

Duran simply nodded and picked up where he'd left off. Rainbow found herself trying hard to ignore the feeling, which after only a couple of moments proved to be really difficult. She hadn't even been on a date in months, much less had a relationship go that far. Worse, the biped's fingers didn't feel even slightly like a hoof would have; they were weirdly soft and flexible, more like a collection of small tongues, and Rainbow, that line of thought is not helping. With that thought, she cut herself off, feeling her wings stir involuntarily, and cast about frantically for something to distract herself with. Unfortunately, her gaze lit upon the sleeping Twilight, and she found herself really, really hoping the unicorn didn't wake up anytime in the next few minutes. Aw, man, if anypony ever hears about this, the rumors I've got running around about me are gonna be so much worse. Even worse than the worst ones about Fluttershy! Rainbow remembered a conversation she'd run into a couple of years ago back in Ponyville, where she'd overheard a pair of snickering colts saying such horrible things about her shy, nature-loving friend that she'd confronted them over it. She'd actually wound up beating both of them up pretty badly, and gotten in fairly serious trouble for it afterwards. Well, maybe not worse than the worst ones… She stifled a gasp. ooooh, crosswinds, that spot's really sensitive!

Numbers. Maybe that'll help. Nice, sterile, abstract numbers. Let's see, not divisible by two or three; one, five, seven, eleven…

She'd only made it up to one hundred fifty-seven when Duran gasped and scooted backward, barking, "Blood and thunder!" Rainbow started guiltily, thinking that her distractions hadn't worked and she'd experienced the normal pegasus response to… that particular kind of stimulation. She glanced furtively over her shoulder, but her wings were relaxed, showing no hint of stiffness.

Instead, she glared daggers at Duran again, even more ticked off with him now for making her think she'd embarrassed herself. His eyes were wide, and a hint of a flush was creeping up his neck. "Gods of fire, I just now realized what you were saying a moment ago!" Rainbow was startled; there was more animation in his voice and manner than she'd seen before. "I didn't mean to… I'm not… I mean, I'm sure you're a perfectly… oh blast me, I had no intention of, of, I mean…" He was waving his hands vaguely as he continued to stammer incoherently, ignoring the fact that the left one was still twitching like a half-squashed bug, and the slight flush that had started at his neck slowly crept up his cheeks, intensifying as it went. In seconds, his whole face had flushed a bright beet-red. It was pretty funny, actually; she'd never seen a blush on something that had as little hair as he did. When a pony blushed, it was sometimes a little hard to see under the fur, especially if the pony in question had dark- or vibrant-colored fur. It was pretty noticeable on light-furred ponies like Rarity and Fluttershy, but she'd never imagined what it would look like on a bald creature. Well, now she knew, and in spite of the situation, she had to fight back a snicker.

Enjoying the biped's discomfort as a piece of well-deserved revenge, she let him stammer on for a bit before she cut him off. "Woah, woah, woah. You gotta finish your sentences. I got no idea what you're trying to say." Rainbow put as much irritation into her words as she could manage, hoping to get the biped to shut up.

It worked remarkably well. Duran's mouth closed with a snap, and he looked down at his hands, then back to Rainbow and over to Twilight. "I… I'm lucid." He met Rainbow's eyes again, and she realized his expressions weren't actually all that hard to read, he just hadn't had any before now. She saw an almost childlike wonder in his face as he looked back at her. "I'm lucid, and you're still here." He reached out with his ungloved right hand, and Rainbow grimaced slightly and braced herself, but he only touched his fingertips lightly to her cheek before withdrawing his hand and staring at his fingers. "You're real." He looked up again, and she saw tears glittering in his eyes. "You're real." His voice had dropped to a near-whisper.

Rainbow was more than a little surprised at the sudden change in attitude, but decided to try and roll with it as best she could. "Well, duh!" she laughed, masking uneasiness with bravado in a way that came easily to her. "Of course I'm real! I'm way too awesome to be imaginary."

He smiled at her, a little unsteadily, and paused for a moment before saying, "I'm dreadfully sorry, but I cannot seem to recall your name, and I don't know if I've told you mine. Have we introduced ourselves?"

"Um, no." She sobered. "You uh… haven't been real talkative." Rainbow said, shaking her head. She didn't want to tell him she thought she already knew his name, because then she'd need to admit she'd been reading his journal. Dash was still ticked at the biped, but the irritation was getting harder to hold on to with his change of attitude.

"In that case, please allow me to introduce myself, and apologize for my dreadful rudeness. I am Duran Thirk, a male human from the city of Narrowgard."

Rainbow frowned. "That's kind of an odd way to introduce yourself. Is that the way… uh… humans usually do it?"

Duran answered her frown with a wry smile. "No, actually. The truth is that I have no idea whether to address you as 'sir' or 'ma'am,' and I was trying to find a way to ask diplomatically, since I thought lifting up your metaphorical skirt would be an exceedingly rude thing to do, and I suspect I've been rude enough already today."

Dash was starting to feel a bit emotionally whiplashed. In the space of a few seconds, Duran had gone from taciturn and grim to intense and shocked to talkative and cheery. She didn't really have a good grasp on how to deal with him yet, though she found she did prefer his current behavior.

"Uh, okay then. I'm Rainbow Dash, a female pegasus pony from Ponyville. Also a star athlete, and the fastest flier in Equestria!" She finished with a cocky grin, then indicated the slumbering Twilight with a forehoof. "That's Twilight Sparkle over there, she's a female unicorn pony, and she's from Ponyville too. She's a mage, one of the best around."

The tears welled up in Duran's eyes again. "I…" He actually choked a bit, then cleared his throat and continued in a slightly husky voice. "I'm very pleased to meet you, Rainbow Dash." He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. "You have no idea how long I've wanted to say those words to someone."

"Oh, well, glad you're happy!" Rainbow replied. She was a little uncomfortable with the way the human's mood kept bouncing around the emotional spectrum, and tried to think of a way to change the subject. She had about a million questions she wanted to ask, but one floated to the surface. "Hey, a minute ago when you were, um, checking for… 'stuff?' What exactly were you looking for?"

"Oh, you mean when I realized that I'd actually met someone who could talk back after First-Emperor-knows-how-many years, and that one of the first things I'd done was to basically molest you?" He'd apparently realized that he was making her uncomfortable, and had dialed back some of the emotional intensity he clearly still felt in favor of a light joking tone. He was starting to blush again, though. "You mean I didn't tell you what I was doing? I could have sworn…"

He trailed off, and Rainbow cut in, waving a hoof in his face and hoping he wasn't going to disappear into his half-dream again. "Hey! Focus! No, all you said was 'stuff gets left behind sometimes'" she quoted in her best imitation of his previous lifeless tone, "which wasn't really an explanation! What 'stuff'?"

His brow furrowed a bit. "I really didn't tell you? Huh. Well, there's these little things that seem to live on murderpede talons. Don't know if they're parasites, some kind of larvae, or something else. Sometimes, when they slash you, some of the little things fall off the claw and land in the wound. They burrow under the skin, and just start eating and growing. You need to get rid of 'em pretty quick; if they get big enough, they're really hard to dig out without taking a big chunk of meat with them. Pretty horrible, but par for the course for this place."

Rainbow listened in horror, a knot of queasiness growing in her stomach. "You're kidding, right? Tell me you're kidding! Something like that can't be real!" She said frantically, looking at herself and trying to spot anything moving under her skin.

"I'm afraid they're very real." His hand went to his collar, and unzipped his one-piece jumpsuit to the belly. Pulling the left side open with his still-twitching left hand, he pointed with his right. Rainbow was momentarily taken aback; the human's torso was seamed with a patchwork of dozens of ugly, knotted scars of widely varying shape and size, and it took her a moment to realize that the horrific, ovoid patch he was indicating was all from a single wound. It looked like something had dug a divot out of his left side just below the rib cage, and Rainbow gagged as she involuntarily pictured what that wound would have looked like when it was fresh. She would have vomited, but her stomach was completely empty.

When she regained control of her stomach, she saw Duran looking at her sympathetically. He'd already sealed his garment back up. "Sorry, guess I wasn't thinking. Not a pretty sight, eh?" He paused a moment, then winced. "Oh, right. I hadn't finished checking you for the little hitchhikers." He rubbed at his forehead, momentarily hiding his eyes. "Gads, this is going to be so much more awkward, now. Still needs to be done, though."

Rainbow gave a nod that was heavy with resignation. "Yeah, I really don't want… that… happening to me." She had to close her eyes and fight her gorge back again at the mental image. "I do appreciate the help, but it is kind of creepy."

He nodded as he knelt next to her again. "Agreed. No offense meant, and I'm sure you're a quite attractive pegasus, but you… don't do anything for me." Duran replied, as he began carefully running the fingertips of his right hand along her shoulder.

"Uh, wouldn't you get it done faster if you used both hands?"

He froze for a moment, and then covered his face with his hands. "Oh, my. I have a feeling anything either of us says is going to sound like innuendo in this situation." The human's voice was slightly strained.

Rainbow blinked as she tried to figure out what he meant, and then facehoofed. "Gah. Sorry. Be easier if neither of us talked."

"It is a fair question," the human said, pulling the glove off his spasming left hand. What Rainbow saw was nothing like the right hand; this one was made of gleaming metal and some odd, dull gray substance. "As an answer, this one's made of metal and plastic, and it doesn't have the nerve sensitivity of the real one."

Rainbow had never seen anything like it before. "Oh my gosh, what happened? And what's plastic?"

"Long story that I'll tell you later. And plastic's this stuff." He pointed at the dull gray substance. Pulling the glove back on with some difficulty, he continued, "If there are any parasites, they're going to be really small right now, and the artificial hand won't feel them." He glanced at the now-gloved limb with a grimace. "Sorry, don't really like to look at the fake one."

The human went back to what he'd been doing, silently. Rainbow perversely found it even harder to ignore this time, knowing that both of them were now feeling tremendously awkward. It got a little easier as the examination moved down and away from the double shoulder where her wing attached, but her wings had still stiffened slightly by the time he was through. By the slight flush on his neck, she realized he'd probably figured out what that meant, and her cheeks were burning as she started to get up.

Duran quickly ushered her back down, as he pulled his left sleeve back to reveal more of the metal limb. "Hold on, Miss Dash. I finished checking, but there are two of the little bastards in there. I need to get 'em out before they get big enough to hurt." He quickly pulled a flat, glass-faced object from a flank pocket, extended a wire from it, and plugged it into his arm.

"T- there are?" She frantically craned her neck, looking at her shoulder. She imagined she could feel a crawling sensation under her skin. She shivered in revulsion.

"Yes." He nodded, poking at the glass thing. His left hand stopped twitching, and he detached the wire and put the object back in his pocket. Pulling his sleeve back down, he continued, "Don't worry, at this point, they're tiny; you won't be able to see or feel them." The human spoke reassuringly as he picked up the small blade he'd used to shave her fur earlier, splashing something that smelled like alcohol on it, and retrieved a pair of tweezers from the first-aid case. "Okay. Your interlopers are here and here," he indicated two spots low on her shoulder, "What I'm going to do is just make a small cut and pull 'em out. They're close to the surface, and this knife is really sharp, so it shouldn't hurt much. You ready?"

Rainbow nodded, but the human paused and added, "You're probably going to be better off if you don't watch. I wind up with nightmares for weeks every time I have to do this."

Nodding again and swallowing nervously, she averted her eyes. She felt a quick sting, followed by another, then a quiet crunch from the floor, then the human's voice. "All done."

Blinking, Rainbow looked back again. She saw two small cuts, more like scratches, really, already scabbing over. "Already?"

"Yep. I've had practice." He pushed himself to his feet, and Dash followed suit, though fatigue was starting to make her a little wobbly. On the floor next to where the human had sat, she saw two small, crushed, chitinous things that she didn't look at too hard.

"Let's never mention this again, okay?" Rainbow really didn't want anyone to ever hear this story. Ever.

The human nodded, flushing again. "Agreed. Okay, let me get you and your friend set up with a place to sleep tonight. Like I said, there's some food in the mess hall storage area, but most of it… probably won't appeal to you. There's a place nearby where I can restock, so I'm going to head that way as soon as I get you both settled." He paused a moment. "When you introduced your friend, you said she was a mage, yes? What specialty?"

"Oh, Twilight can do pretty much anything. Her talent is magic." Dash grinned up at the human, happy that he was so quick to change the subject, and for an opportunity to brag a bit on her friend's behalf. "She even designed the spell that wound up dumping us here! Which, you know, sounds kinda bad, but I'm pretty sure she can get us home again."

Duran looked at the slumbering unicorn with new respect. "She's an Omni? An Omni Rift Theorist? Great Emperor, you're lucky, I can see why you were so willing to risk your life to save hers! I'd have traded both arms to have been sent here with a Rift Theorist in tow. You might even be able to get home!" Rainbow thought she heard a tiny bit of envy in his tone, but she couldn't be sure. The human carefully lifted Twilight from her pile of cushions, ignoring her mumbled, sleepy protest, and carried her to the door. "Come on, there are plenty of empty bunkrooms. There's a shower back there, too, so you can get the blood off of yourself."

A shower sounded really nice. The feathers on her left wing were all gummed up, and felt nasty. Not to mention the smell. Rainbow followed the human as he carried Twilight down the hall. After a bit of walking, they came to a long row of identically-spaced, featureless doors.

"How big is this place?" Rainbow wondered out loud. She hadn't really been expecting an answer, but she got one anyway.

"Pretty big. Far as I can tell, they had over a thousand people here. I really wish I knew what happened to them, but most of the logs and personal files are encrypted. Can't get to 'em."

"Encrypted? What's that?"

"You need a password to access them."

That… didn't really help Rainbow's confusion, (A password? Who's here to ask for a password?) but before she could say anything more, Duran stopped and turned to the nearest door.

"Okay, this is the closest empty bunkroom. That one," he tossed his head to indicate the door behind him, "is the one I've been using. I'm going to put your friend in this one here, want to see what they're like?"

"Yeah, sure." She replied, and the human opened the door by pressing a button.

The room wasn't huge, though it had the enormously high ceilings every room in the place sported. There were a pair of beds arranged bunk-style, larger than a standard pony bed, but Rainbow figured it was just because they were made for humans; it looked like they'd be a little on the small side for someone Duran's size, and she had no idea if he was average size for his species or not. There was a pair of doors in the opposite wall, and a desk next to the entrance that had another of those weird empty-picture-frame things on it, and that was pretty much it.

"Fairly basic." Duran commented, setting Twilight carefully on the bed, and pulling a sheet over her as she mumbled in her sleep. "Beds, those doors are closets, desk terminal. Do you want me to show you how to lock the door, or would you rather I show you to the showers?"

"Hold on, what's a 'desk terminal'?"

The human pointed at the picture frame. "That is. It's tied into the central library computer; you get full access to all of the base's unencrypted data files. Pretty neat, there's an amazing amount of stuff in there, though it can be a serious time-sink at times." He flipped a panel in the desk, revealing a collection of buttons similar to the one Dash had seen next to the outside door, these including letters and punctuation marks as well as numbers. The glass lit up as he did so, displaying the words Welcome to the NAIS Hell's Reach Outpost Library Mainframe. "There's the keyboard, and the screen's touch-sensitive." Dash was still confused, but that sounded like something that was way more Twilight's style than hers, so she just shrugged.

"Okay, whatever. Hey, you said there was a shower around here?" She fanned her wings a bit, trying to keep the feathers from sticking together too badly.

"This way." He led the way back out into the hall. As she followed him, he remarked, "I suspect your friend may wake up before too much longer; I could hear her stomach rumbling while I was carrying her. She must be exhausted to sleep so deeply on an empty stomach."

"Yeah, whatever went wrong with that spell drained her pretty bad." Dash replied. "It got me, too; I can't even fly right now." Her head drooped as she made the admission. She hadn't been ground-bound like this since she was a little filly. Well, except for a couple of weeks after that time she'd tried an inverted split-S way too fast and too close to the ground and wound up clipping the top of a tree; she'd barely even been able to walk away from that one.

"Just as well. Flying around here is death if you go too high."

"Death? How?"

"Well, most places I've been in this world have huge numbers of aerial predators. Some of them are the size of small birds and swarm in the thousands, and the size ranges all the way up to ones the size of buildings. All of them will cheerfully eat each other, or anything else in the air from what I've seen. But here, nothing flies." He paused for a moment, collecting his thoughts, and Dash interrupted.

"That's not that big a problem. There's some nasty stuff flying around the Everfree Forest back home, but nothing can catch me!"

The human shook his head. "Well, maybe you'd be okay somewhere else on this planet, then. Not here, though. The people who built this place came here in a starship, and it's still up there. The stardrive's useless, evidently, a fused mass of junk, but the weapons are fine, and they programmed it to watch the area this base is sitting in and destroy anything that flies too high." He looked back over his shoulder at her. "I've seen it several times. One second a creature will be flying, the next it's touched by a line of light brighter than the sun and explodes. It doesn't even leave a body." He stopped for a moment to turn and face her, his face serious. "There's no time to evade. There's no warning. Just death from the sky, instant and violent. Please, once you recover, make sure you're nowhere near this place before you try to fly."

Rainbow reflected for a moment that she should be getting numb to shock by now, but this was still enough to shake her. The prospect of not being able to fly weighed down on her like chains of iron, and she had to blink several times to clear the tears from her eyes.

"This place sucks." She whispered to herself.

"You have no idea." Duran's eyes were pointed at Rainbow, but he wasn't looking at her. They were focused somewhere far in the distance.

"Oh, hey, don't zone out on me again!" Rainbow shoved at the human's leg with a hoof. He blinked a couple of times, before giving her a small smile.

"Sorry, I wasn't really zoning out. Just thinking back some." He turned and continued the way they'd been going.

"How long have you been here, anyway?" Rainbow asked, before realizing that it might be a dangerous question. When am I gonna learn to think before saying stuff?

There was a long pause as they continued down the hallway, past row after row of bunkrooms. Finally, the human answered, a thoughtful tone in his voice. "You know, I'm not even sure anymore. I think the last time I counted it up, it came out to seven years or so, but that was a long time ago. Ten years total, maybe? Fifteen?" He sighed. "Feels like forever, some days."

"Kinda like this hallway." Rainbow blurted.

The human barked a laugh. "Indeed! I don't know why they put the showers and sanitary facilities all the way at the end of the dormitory blocks. But here we are!" He gestured theatrically to a door that looked different from the seemingly endless rows they'd passed already, if only because there was a long stretch of doorless wall beyond it. The door slid aside as he approached, like the doors Rainbow had seen earlier. Inside was a huge room, with racks of lockers close to the door and rows of showerheads over tiled floors farther in. Like much of this place, apparently, it wasn't quite like anything Rainbow had ever seen before.

Duran preceded her into the room, pointing out the towel racks and demonstrating quickly how to turn the water flow on and off, and how to adjust the temperature. He then excused himself, saying he had some things he needed to do before he headed out to gather food, and left Rainbow alone in the shower room.

Rainbow found and used the sanitary facilities first, though she found them amazingly awkward, as they were very clearly designed for someone with a radically different body shape. The showers themselves were much better, though she had to stand on her hind legs in order to reach the controls. She realized just as she started the water that she was still wearing Applejack's hat. Ha ha, I've been wearing that the whole time! She removed it and laid it on one of the benches, making a mental note not to leave it behind when she and Twilight got ready to go home, and returned to the still-running shower. Rainbow was more used to getting clean by flying through clouds, or standing in the rain, but she found the shower soothing. Setting it to medium pressure and a bit above body temperature, she spread her wings out, closed her eyes, and let the heated spray wash over her. The warm water felt wonderful on the bruises she'd gotten in the fight with the bugs, and she could feel it sluicing away the clotted blood in her feathers. As it plastered her multicolored mane to her neck, she had a chance to think about the situation she'd found herself and Twilight in.

Okay, so we're obviously not in Equestria anymore. Duran said he'd been here for years without having anyone to talk to, so he hasn't seen anypony. I should ask him, just to make sure. I should probably ask what a 'starship' is, too. Sounds pretty dangerous, whatever it is; I should have asked earlier, but I was too upset about not being able to fly. Which sucks, yeah, but I'll live, as long as Twilight can get us home. I'm sure she'll be able to; she's not Celestia's star pupil for nothing. She was hit suddenly by a strong wave of homesickness. Oh, Celestia, I want to go home. I want to see Pinkie and Applejack and Fluttershy and Rarity, I want to set up some pranks, I want to go see the next Wonderbolts show. I even want to go plan the weather for the next few weeks. I want to fly again.

But brooding and feeling sorry for herself wasn't accomplishing anything.

Opening her eyes, Rainbow checked her wing. The clotted blood was almost all gone, and her cyan feathers were finally looking clean again. The same for her fur, and the slice on her shoulder looked much less severe after Duran's work. The two smaller cuts the human had made (and she shuddered again, despite the warmth of the water, at the thought of what could have happened if those things hadn't been removed) looked more like scratches. She had a bunch of smaller scratches and abrasions, too; she'd probably gotten them when she'd gotten those bruises, rolling over the sharp rocks and thorns to evade flashing talons and grasping mandibles. They'd heal, no problem; she'd had worse before.

Shutting off the water flow, Rainbow shook some of the water from her mane, tail, and wings, and snagged a towel from the rack. She rubbed herself down quickly, reasoning that damp wasn't all that far from dry, and tossed the towel on a bench, not seeing anything else to do with it at the moment. She paused, seeing the hat still sitting where she'd left it. Ah, why not, she thought, plopping it back on her head. Better keep it with me until I can give it back to A.J.

She decided to try and catch Duran before he left. He'd said he was going to go out to try and gather food for her and Twilight, and she wanted to see if there was anything she could do to help. Fanning her wings to air-dry them, Rainbow trotted out into the hall and retraced her path to the entrance.

The pegasus found the anteroom easily enough, and though it was empty, she noticed that Duran's metal suit was standing in a different spot. There was no further sign of the human, so Rainbow decided to take the opportunity to examine the suit without distraction. Prodding it experimentally with a hoof revealed that it really was as heavy as she'd thought it was; even leaning her entire weight on it didn't make it wobble. She could see a collection of odd pistons and fibrous cables at the joints, and there was a large, boxlike unit that rode behind the wearer's shoulders.

She dragged one of the chairs over next to the suit. Hopping up on the seat, she was able to get high enough to brace her forehooves on the suit's chest plate and peer down into it. There wasn't much to see, just a smooth, padded interior where the wearer rested. She had no idea how the human would be able to move in the heavy metal suit, unless he was a heck of a lot stronger than he looked, and she wondered if there was something special about it.

It did look kind of cool, after all. Rainbow wondered if there was some way she could get into it to see how it worked, but she didn't see a place her wings could fit, and she was a little worried about getting stuck inside it.

She was arguing with herself about whether she should try just jumping in to see if she'd fit when the door opened. Duran staggered through carrying a huge box, made of the same nonreflective metal as the suit and dangling a couple of wires.

"Woah! Let me help you with that!" Rainbow exclaimed, dropping off the chair.

"I got it." The human gasped, as he turned toward the suit and leaned the box against its back. It fit snugly, wrapping around the boxy rear of the suit to contact its shoulders. Rainbow spotted that he was trying to simultaneously hold the box against the suit and move around to the suit's front. She snorted in amusement.

"Sure you do. But I can still help." Rainbow stood under the box, rearing up and supporting its weight with her forehooves. It wasn't actually very heavy; she suspected he was having trouble with its clumsy size and shape more than the weight. It was way lighter than the statue of Celestia she'd managed to catch at the Gala, anyway!

"Thanks," he said, nodding to her as he stepped around to the front of the suit. She heard a couple of clicks. "Okay, you can let go."

Rainbow dropped back to all fours and stepped around to see what Duran was doing. He'd secured a couple of latches that looked like they'd been designed to connect to the metal suit, and was plugging the hanging wires into ports on the suit's back.

"Hey, how does this thing work?" Rainbow asked, peering at the machinery in the suit's joints.

"What, the battle armor, or the cargo unit?"

"This metal suit thing."

"Right, the battle armor." Rainbow found herself mentally comparing the human's suit to the only armor she'd ever seen, that of the Princess's Royal Guards. The Guards' armor was bright-colored, flashy and ornate. It was designed to stand out, to impress and awe, and remind other ponies that the wearer was a personal servant of the Princess and spoke with her authority behind him. The light construction allowed a pegasus to fly, and protected against minor or accidental injury.

This? This was different. She hadn't actually thought of it as armor before, and realized that it said something about its makers. This didn't have flashy colors. It wasn't designed to impress. It hid its wearer, allowing them to move about unnoticed, while the massive plates would provide serious protection if the concealment failed. And battle armor? What kind of monsters did humans have to deal with, that they built this stealthy, brutal armor to battle it?

Oblivious to her sudden thoughtfulness, Duran was answering the question she'd actually asked. "The armor has a lining of sensors on the inner surface. When I move, it detects that movement and mimics it." He pointed to the joints where she'd been looking. "Those pistons are shock absorbers, and those cable bundles are something called 'myomer.' They're kind of like artificial muscles, and they move the suit. The armor plates would be way too heavy for me to do much with without them; I've had the power fail in one of these things before, and I can barely move at all, even with the shock absorbers' help and residual charge in the myomers. The suit weighs close to a ton." He glanced at the window overlooking the badlands. "I need to get moving."

Dash looked too, and saw that the sun was beginning to go down. "Aw. Do you have to go now? I've got, like a million things I wanted to ask you!"

"I really do have to go now, unfortunately. It's a long way to the wrecked greenhouse I'm planning on raiding, and travelling by night is easier than trying it during the day. Most of the really nasty critters sleep at night." He swung himself up and into the armor using the ceiling bar. As he settled himself, Rainbow heard the clicking sounds from the armor's joints that she'd heard when he got out, and the human started an odd series of movements that the pegasus realized after a moment was intended to test all the joints. "I should be back in about a day and a half," he continued speaking as he did so, "and I'd be more than delighted to have a long conversation and answer any questions you ask then." Taking a step and turning to face her, Duran grinned. "Believe me when I say I'm looking forward to it. I've got all kinds of stories I'd love to tell. Not to mention that hearing someone else talk is something I've been craving for years now! Once I get back, you two will have to chase me away to get peace and quiet!" The chest piece and helmet closed, and Duran spent a few moments instructing Dash on how to use the door controls in the metallic bass voice she'd first heard him use before picking up the odd tool he'd been carrying when they met, reattaching the box of brass spike things, and loping out the door, closing it behind him. (He'd explained as he'd detailed the door controls that he'd been leaving it open as a minor convenience, and reassured her that so long as it wasn't locked he'd be able to open it from the outside with no problems.) From the window, she watched the suit change color to blend in with its surroundings as the human loped off, alone, into the badlands.

*Author's note: Oh, god, I know I'm gonna catch hell for this chapter. I borrowed this part of the plot from a first-contact story I'd been working on, where someone doing first aid on an alien winds up kind of... turning the alien on. It freaks out both parties, who think it's kinda gross. That's what happened here; I needed something to shock Duran out of his half-daydream, and wouldn't it shock you to find out that while you were treating that alien, you were basically feeling it up? This is not shipping. There is no physical attraction between these two characters, and they'd both be repulsed by any suggestion that there was. I've seen enough nasty stuff on the internet that I felt compelled to point that out.

Chapter 5

Dash was a little surprised to feel a pang of worry as Duran disappeared into the badlands hills. Though she'd disliked the biped rather intensely at first, she found herself warming a bit toward her new human acquaintance. Yeah, he was a jerk at first, and yeah, that whole thing with those… parasite things… (she wondered momentarily if she'd ever stop shuddering at the thought, carefully not looking at the crushed remnants on the floor) was about the second most embarrassing and uncomfortable thing I've ever had happen, but the explanation for the jerky attitude was a good one, and he sure seemed as creeped out as I was by the whole… um, situation, once he realized why it was bothering me. And he's been pretty nice since he realized I was real. He may have survived here by himself for a long time, but it must not have been easy, judging by all those scars. Not to mention whatever happened to his arm! Now he's out there, alone in the dark again, going to get food for two ponies he just met, and I'm actually worried about him. Ah, maybe it's just because I can't help. She castigated herself mentally, kicking at the floor in annoyance. I know I wouldn't do any good out there right now. I can't fly, I'm exhausted and beat up and hungry, and I don't know anything about this place, but dang it, I feel like I should be out there helping, instead of just sitting here waiting. Argh, I hate sitting and waiting!

Dash decided to go check on Twilight. The walk to the bedroom she'd left the unicorn in raised her spirits a bit, as she realized she'd probably only seen a fraction of this place. Even if she couldn't find anything else to do, she could explore.

She nearly walked straight into the door before remembering that the bunkroom doors didn't open automatically like the other doors in this place. She stepped carefully as she entered, trying to reduce the clicking of her hooves on the hard floor so as not to wake her friend, but she didn't need to bother. Twilight was looking around, blinking in sleepy confusion.

"Oh, good morning, Applej- Rainbow Dash." Twilight blinked. "Rainbow, why are you wearing Applejack's hat?"

"I was afraid I'd forget about it if I left it somewhere." Rainbow hesitated. "You okay, Twilight?"

"I've been better." Twilight shook her head and looked around at the room. "I was hoping I'd wake up and find that the whole thing was just a nightmare. No such luck, I guess?"

"Afraid not. Hungry?"

Twilight's stomach rumbled audibly, and she looked at Rainbow with a sheepish expression. "Um. Yes. Is there anything to eat around here?"

"Yeah, Duran said there was some, but not a lot. I was just about to go find it, want to come with?"

"Sure." Twilight rubbed at her eyes and jumped off the bed to follow her friend. "Who's Duran?"

As the pair walked, following the signs that pointed to the mess hall, Rainbow filled Twilight in on everything that had happened while the unicorn slept. (Well, almost everything) The pegasus could tell that Twilight's brain was still half asleep, but half of Twilight's brain was still better than some ponies could manage fully awake.

"A different world…" Twilight mused as they walked down the hallway. "I thought I'd been precise with my endpoint calculations. I mean, the portal wasn't distance-limited, so it could potentially take us to some distant planet, but the odds would make it far more likely that we'd end up in deep space somewhere…" she trailed off.

Rainbow flipped her wings in a pegasus shrug. "I'm just telling you what he told me. He's been here for a long time without seeing or talking to anypony, and if we were still in Equestria that doesn't seem likely to happen."

"And there's another thing that confuses me!" The unicorn exclaimed, "Here's a completely alien being from a completely different world that's never encountered pony civilization, and he speaks the same language we do? Do you know how unlikely that is?"

"No." Rainbow shrugged again. "And whoever built this place was from a third group, and we can read the writing here just fine."

"Aaaaah!" Twilight yelled in frustration. "This doesn't make any sense! The portal should have sent us to the edge of the forest, not to some… some alien planet full of creatures that all speak Modern Equestrian! I don't know how any of this could even be possible!"

"Maybe you'll think better with some food in your stomach," Rainbow suggested. "I know I'm planning on eating something and getting some sleep. You still look kind of tired too, Twilight."

Twilight's head drooped. "I am. I'm still feeling the aftereffects of the portal; it may be several days before I recover most of my magic." She heaved a sigh. "I've never been drained this badly before. I hope it doesn't have any permanent consequences."

The two were silent for a moment, before Rainbow remarked, "Ah, here we are!" The door marked "Mess Hall" was finally standing before them. Pointing at the sign with a forehoof, Rainbow grinned and said, "See, Twilight? Perfectly readable."

Twilight just facehoofed and groaned.

The room they entered was huge. Row upon row of gleaming metal tables and benches filled the space, and Rainbow spotted what she thought was the storage area at the far end.

"Wow, whoever they were, they sure liked their chrome." Twilight observed, as they wove through the rows of tables.

"I think they were called the 'nays' or something like that." Rainbow said.

"'Nays'?" Twilight asked, "What makes you say that?"

"Oh, when Duran turned on that terminal thing in your bedroom, it said 'nays outpost library mainframe.'"

"Woah, wait, what now? What terminal thing? What library?"

"It's that glass picture-frame-looking thing on the desk in your bedroom." Rainbow answered as the storeroom door slid open. "I'll show you what he did when we get back." They found themselves in another huge room, this one filled with shelving and with several doors of a different design than those they'd seen thus far. Dishearteningly, most of the shelves were empty, though there were several sealed containers close to the entrance. Twilight was able to float the bins on the upper shelves down to them, and Rainbow busied herself checking the contents.

The first bin turned out to contain strips of a dry, fibrous substance that smelled a bit smokey. Rainbow sniffed it carefully, then took a bite. "Meat of some kind, I think," she observed, chewing thoughtfully. She stuck the strip in her mouth so she could chew on it while she checked the other bins.

"Rainbow!" Twilight sounded shocked. "What are you doing?"

Rainbow Dash looked up from the bin she was examining. "Trying to figure out what all this stuff is! I think this one's dried fruit of some kind." She answered, past the strip of meat in her mouth. She lifted one of the small wrinkly orange things with a hoof and sniffed it. "Yeah, apricots. Too bad it's mostly empty"

"A- are you eating meat?"

"Yeah. Don't know what he did to it, but it tastes pretty good, actually." She pulled the half-chewed strip out of her mouth and held it out. "Want to try some?"

Twilight gagged. "What is wrong with you, Rainbow Dash?"

Rainbow returned the strip of dried meat to her mouth and continued chewing on it, to Twilight's evident horror. The pegasus grinned. "Nothing. I just had a griffon friend in school that would make me eat part of her lunch sometimes when I lost a bet." She swallowed. "Don't worry, Twilight, it's fine as long as I don't eat too much of it." She opened another bin. "Dried peas in this one, looks like. I looked it up after the first time Gilda made me eat some. I'd bet her I could do a triple backflip without flapping my wings, and I totally almost managed it. Almost doesn't count for bets, though, and her lunch wasn't like this stuff; it was pretty raw. That was pretty nasty; this is way better." She opened another bin. "Ew. No idea what this is, but it doesn't smell very good. Anyway, I managed to eat it without throwing it back up, and it was probably easier with a mouthful of my own blood since I'd landed on my nose. I kind of figured since Gilda saw it gross me out, she'd make that a normal thing for losing a bet." The next couple of bins were empty. Rainbow shoved the empty ones to the side, opening another. "More dried meat, different kind, I think. So on my way home, I went by the Cloudsdale library, just to make sure Gilda's lunch wouldn't hurt me or anything, 'cause if it did I figured I should tell her. Turns out ponies don't get too much from eating meat; can't digest most of it, but it doesn't really hurt us, either." She opened another bin, ignoring Twilight's look of shock. "Oh, hey, looks like some kind of bread." Popping a crumb in her mouth yielded a crunch. "Wow, it's kinda stale. At least there's nothing growing on it, should be fine if you spray some water on it. Where was I? Oh yeah. Like I said, it's pretty much harmless, so I wound up having to choke it down every once in a while. I tried not to lose bets when Gilda had chicken. She didn't like it much, so she didn't mind losing part of it if I lost the bet, and she'd always make that my forfeit if she had it." She looked around, deciding the rest of the bins were empty. "I got used to the taste after a while, and some of it wasn't that bad. I actually kinda liked snake. I think that's all for the bins, Twilight, I'm gonna check these doors and see if there's anything else."

Twilight gaped at the blue pegasus for a moment, at a loss for words. She searched for something to say, finally settling on, "Y- you looked it up? In the library?" Her tone held a fair amount of disbelief.

Dash frowned, then shot Twilight a dirty look, an edge of hurt underneath it. "Oh, I get it. Dumb old Dashie, always charging in where Celestia fears to tread. Who knew she could actually read?" Her voice started rising, and her wings flared aggressively as she rounded on the unicorn. "Yeah, she's so stupid! Hey, she even dropped out of flight school! Did you hear she failed fourth-year history three times? Yeah! And I don't think she ever passed Sociology! Never mind that she was always top of the class in physics, or that she can do multivariable vector equations in her head, what use does she have for a library? All she ever does is pick fights and screw up!" Rainbow was almost yelling now, and Twilight cringed back. "And who cares that she aced both parts of the weather exam first time through, something maybe one or two pegasi a year can manage, and got put in charge of a local weather patrol, even though she was barely old enough to be out of school, but that's just in some podunk hick town in the middle of nowhere! But that's just poor stupid Rainbow Crash. She never does anything right! Too dumb for classes, always trying stuff just past her reach and wiping out, isn't that right? Isn't it?" Old frustration and pain, laid bare by stress and fatigue and a sense of betrayal that her friend could sound like the other pegasi that used to pick on her, caused Rainbow to virtually scream the last question at the quailing unicorn. Rainbow stopped, panting and glaring, only to bring herself up short as Twilight's posture registered. Her friend was cringing away from her, ears laid back flat and violet eyes huge and filling with shocked tears. She looks like she's afraid I'm gonna hit her! Rainbow realized, and her anger and hurt drained away in an instant, leaving only hollow guilt behind. Dangit, Rainbow, she had no way of knowing what the kids that hassled you in school sounded like! Watch your temper!

"I- Twilight, I'm sorry. That was way, way out of line, and you totally didn't deserve it." Rainbow reached out to Twilight, but the unicorn drew away from the proffered contact. Rainbow hung her head and nodded. "Okay. I understand. I'm gonna go check these doors. F- for what it's worth, I'm really sorry I lost it at you like that. I- I didn't mean to…" She trailed off, her breath catching in her throat. Instead, she just shook her head and turned to look deeper in the storage room.

Why the heck did you flip your lid like that, Rainbow? She castigated herself as she made her way through the shelves. Twilight's never been mean to you! She was just joking, dummy! How could you do that to one of your best friends? Worse, she's all you've got right now! Stupid, stupid, stupid!

The door she came to was closer in design to the first door she'd seen, at the entrance to the base. It was thick and heavy, and clearly swung outward rather than sliding into the wall. It didn't open at her approach, and there was a small keypad next to it. Recalling the quick tutorial Duran had run her through before he left, Dash reared up so she could reach, and carefully pushed the keys in the sequence the human had said was the "open" command. It was harder than she'd expected; her hooves were broader than the narrow human fingers and tended to hit more than one button at once if she wasn't careful, and she kept having to blink away tears. She finally got the sequence right, and the door opened with a hiss as frigid air spilled out. She stepped inside, and found one of the biggest freezers she'd ever seen. It was mostly empty, though she did find a couple of sealed bins, one of which had frozen uncooked meat that wasn't at all appetizing, but the other was a jackpot; full of what looked like frozen strawberries. She was checking the rest of the shelves in the huge freezer, with a notable lack of success, when she heard Twilight clear her throat from the doorway.

"R- Rainbow Dash?" Her voice was hesitant, and Rainbow saw her peeking timidly in through the door. The pegasus made her way back to the entrance slowly, trying not to further startle her friend. At least, I hope she's still my friend…

"Yeah?" Rainbow stopped a fair distance from the door, not wanting to crowd the unicorn.

"Are you okay? I'm sorry I upset you."

"You're…? Twilight, you don't need to apologize to me!" Rainbow had been half-expecting Twilight to smack her for being such a jerk, and had been prepared to take it without complaint. She hadn't expected the bookish unicorn to apologize to her, and found that it actually stung worse than a smack in the face would have. "I'm the one that flew off the handle! If you want to hit me for being a jerk, that's fine, I won't hit back." The blue pegasus braced herself.

"Hit you? Rainbow, I'm not going to hit you! You're my friend!" Twilight was aghast. "You know, I think we both just need to calm down. It's been kind of a stressful day." The unicorn smiled, "Come on, I think we've found enough to eat for a little while."

"So… we're still friends?" Rainbow was starting to tear up again out of sheer relief. She swiped at her eyes with a hoof before the tears could freeze in the frigid room.

"Oh, Rainbow, of course we are!" Twilight closed the distance between them and hugged the pegasus. "Goodness, it's cold in here!"

"Yeah, I guess it kind of is," Dash replied, returning the hug tightly. "I really am sorry I yelled at you."

"It's… well, it's not really okay, but I'll forgive you. I shouldn't have insulted you."

"Pah, you didn't mean to insult me any more than I did when I was making fun of you for reading books about running." Dash shook her head, disgusted with herself. "I overreacted."

"Well, let's eat and get some sleep. Like I said earlier, I think we're both stressed, and we'll feel better in the morning."

Dash grinned wanly at her friend. "That sounds like a good plan to me. Oh, hey, I found some frozen strawberries in here. Let me get 'em and I'll bring 'em out."

She trotted out moments later, carrying the bin of strawberries on her back, frost flaking off her cyan coat. Twilight stared. "Rainbow, aren't you cold?"

"Nah, pegasi don't really get cold. We'd probably freeze to death if we flew too high, otherwise." Rainbow brushed ice off of Applejack's hat before returning it to her head. "Hey, let's eat! I'll take some of that dried meat, so there's more stuff you can eat."

Twilight hesitated. "Rainbow, I'm more than willing to split it evenly."

"Nah, no need to. That dried stuff tastes fine, and it'll give me something to fill me up. I don't mind eating it anyway, and I know it grosses you out."

There was actually more in the bins than they'd realized, and both wound up full, with more than half of what they'd found left over. Feeling much better with full stomachs, they carefully packed away the remainder and headed back towards the bedrooms. They walked in a semi-companionable silence, the stress brought on by Dash's verbal explosion draining away, though Rainbow could tell Twilight was still a little jumpy around her. My own fault, she thought glumly, as they approached the sleeping quarters. Then she remembered something that might help perk the unicorn up.

"I just remembered a couple of things I was gonna show you, Twi. How awake are you?"

Twilight responded by yawning hugely, and Rainbow had to struggle not to follow suit. "I can stay awake for a little longer, but I do need to get some more sleep soon."

"Okay, awesome. First off, let me show you the library terminal thing that Duran showed me." Rainbow opened Twilight's bedroom door and putting her own fatigue aside for the moment, hopped up on the desk chair, and flipped over the panel with the array of buttons on the other side. The picture frame obediently lit up, showing the same thing it had before. "See? 'nays outpost.' Hell's Reach must be what they called this place."

Squinting at the screen, Twilight replied, "I think it's an abbreviation for something, or maybe an acronym. N.A.I.S.? I wonder what that could stand for."

"He said the screen was touch-sensitive and that these buttons are a 'keyboard.' Maybe like a typewriter?" Rainbow looked for an ink ribbon or paper, finding neither. "I didn't really ask much about it, to be honest." She tapped the screen with a hoof, just to see if it would do anything. To her surprise, the screen changed, now showing a bewildering array of labeled icons. "Woah."

"Do you mind if I have a look, Rainbow?" Twilight asked, and Dash hopped down out of the chair. The unicorn heaved herself up to the spot the pegasus had vacated, and peered intently at the screen. "Wow, there's certainly a lot here." She shook her head. "I think I'm a little too tired to deal with this today, but I certainly intend to have a look first thing in the morning! Thanks for showing me this!"

"No problem! There's one more thing you should see before you hit the hay." Blinking sleepily, Twilight followed the pegasus down the long hallway to the shower facilities. Rainbow showed her how the showers worked and warned her about how awkward the sanitary facilities were to use, and left the unicorn to get cleaned up and ready for bed.

Walking back down the hall, Rainbow opened up another of the bunkrooms, finding it to be identical to the one Duran had left Twilight in. She took off the hat she'd been carrying around and left it on the desk, and turning her attention to the bed, piled the blankets and pillows into a fairly comfortable approximation of her cloud-bed back home and fell quickly asleep.

She only had the nightmare about things crawling under her skin once.

Chapter 6

Rainbow Dash awoke some time later, feeling almost normal again. Yawning, she stretched her legs and wings, and wondered what time it was. The unvarying brightness of the electric lights everywhere in the base combined with the lack of windows made it almost impossible to tell time, and if there were clocks, Rainbow hadn't seen them yet.

Without thinking, she flapped her wings and hovered out of the nest of bedding she'd made for herself. She was halfway to the door before it registered in her mind. Hey, I'm flying again! She hovered in place for a moment, testing the stress on her wings, then did a little loop in midair from sheer joy and let out a girlish giggle. I'm still feeling heavier than I should, but at least I'm not ground-bound anymore! Flapping her wings pulled a bit on the sealed cut on her shoulder, but it was more uncomfortable than painful, and the cut didn't reopen, so she decided to just live with it.

Rainbow had feared, deep down, that she'd been permanently damaged and would never fly again. Having that fear proved false was like having a huge weight lifted off of her shoulders. Literally. Buoyant with glee, she donned the hat she'd left on the desk and stuck her head in the room next door to see if Twilight was awake yet. Unfortunately, that proved not to be the case, as she saw the snoring lavender lump on the bed. Oh well. She'd get a chance to share her good fortune with her friend later.

The next place she checked was the base entrance. She found the hallway to be far shorter when she could fly, instead of plodding along on the ground, and she threw in a couple of barrel rolls on the way just for variety. She knew it wasn't a particularly good idea, given the relatively enclosed space, but it was rare for something like "common sense" to get in Rainbow Dash's way.

The entry room proved disappointingly empty, so Duran wasn't back yet. Looking at the window (which she was beginning to suspect was less a window and more like the terminal things) she could see that the sun was well into the sky, suggesting she'd slept through most of the morning. Nothing moved out in the badlands, and Dash had a sudden impulse to go outside and just soar for a while, maybe see if she could spot where he'd gone. She was just about to key in the code to open the door when she remembered the human's words.

"Flying around here is death if you go too high," he'd said. "There's no time to evade. There's no warning. Just death from the sky, instant and violent"

Rainbow twitched back from the exit door. A chill ran down her spine, ruffling her fur and making her feathers fluff out. She'd been that close to going outside for a flight. If she hadn't remembered…

Come on, Rainbow, get your head together. This place is dangerous, you can't afford to not pay attention. Rainbow took a deep breath and let it back out slowly. Well, I did dodge that lightning bolt, if only barely. There was still plenty of this place to explore, so she decided that was how she'd spend the rest of the morning. Before she headed back out to the base, she checked the table in the corner of the entry room, just out of curiosity. It was easy to reach with her wings working, and hovering had the added benefit of avoiding the dried blood she'd dripped all over the room yesterday. Ha, wow, I sure did make a mess. The picture frame proved to be identical to the terminals she'd seen in the bedrooms, and a moment's examination revealed a panel in the desk. She flipped it over to reveal a keyboard, just like in Twilight's room, and also just like Twilight's room the glass obligingly lit up to show the same message she'd seen before. Huh. Interesting. Those things are all over the place in here; I saw one in the commander's office, I remember seeing a few off in the corners in the mess hall, both of the bunkrooms had one, and if all those bunkrooms are the same, that's hundreds of the things. She'd be interested to see if Twilight could do anything with the terminals once she woke up.

Rainbow went back to the hallway, which was well on its way to being comfortably familiar, and thus boring. She stood looking at the signs by the entry door, trying to decide which would be the most interesting. "Hangars?" She mumbled to herself, rubbing her chin with a hoof. "Nah, that's probably some kind of closet or something. Rarity's thing, not mine! But why would they mark it?" An interesting mystery. Interesting enough to investigate? "Ooo! Could that be where they keep those cool armored suits? Or maybe that's what the 'armory' is. He called it 'battle armor,' so maybe that's what they keep in the 'armory'? I'll bet it is!" Pleased with her reasoning and hoping to be able to find one that fit her, Rainbow set off in the direction of the "Armory." The "Hangars" were in the same direction anyway, so she figured she'd just check out whichever one she reached first.

As it happened, that turned out to be the armory. After passing a seemingly endless number of small offices and storage rooms (she'd peeked inside a few doors, but they were uniformly empty and boring. The emptiness was getting kind of creepy; she was beginning to wonder if she was going to find a huge pile of skeletons somewhere. At least that would be interesting!) Rainbow finally spotted the door marked "Main Armory." The door led to one of the huge, spacious rooms that came as a shock in an underground building. Instead of the suits she'd been hoping for, this one was filled with racks and racks and racks of the long, narrow stick things like what Duran had been carrying when she met him, with metal lockers standing next to each rack. They were present in this room in a bewildering array of shapes and sizes, and there were thousands of them. Awesome, she thought, I wondered what that thing did, now maybe I can find out! She decided to be fairly careful; the human had had something that was the source of that thundering noise and the tiny zipping things that had torn apart the bugs, and it was a pretty good bet that the stick might be related. She lifted one of the sticks off of its rack for examination, finding it to be made of some dense, hard metal and much heavier than it looked. She tried holding it in her forelegs the way she'd seen the human hold it, with the flared projection at the end tucked into her right shoulder, her right forehoof hooked around the grip and her left forehoof supporting the far end, with its projecting hollow tube. It wasn't terribly comfortable to hold, though she figured that might be because she was just too small to hold it properly. She did notice that holding it that way caused it to line up naturally with her eye, and that looking down the stick drew her attention to a post with a white dot down near the far end and a metal 'v' up near the closer end. Huh. Wonder what those are for. They look too precise to be accidental.

Laying the metal stick on the ground, she continued her inspection. The grip she'd noticed at the end of the flared extension was the next piece to draw her attention. It seemed designed for one of the long-fingered human hands to wrap comfortably around, (more or less impossible to do anything with if you had hooves) except for the curving metal spur surrounded by a ring jutting from the point where the grip met the body of the stick. She prodded it experimentally with a hoof, finding that the ring was solid and fixed, but the spur moved a bit under pressure, though it took a surprising amount of effort to push. The ring was just wide enough that she could get enough of her hoof inside it to push the spur back, and it made a startling, snapping click when it she pushed it all the way back. Oops. Did I just break it?

The spur retained its springiness, and made the same click when she pushed it back again, so Rainbow decided that must be what it was supposed to do. Weird. What purpose could that have? I must be missing something…

She couldn't think of anything else to do with the stick for the moment, so she ambled down the rows of racked sticks, looking at all the different kinds. The one she'd taken down was near the entrance, and was one of the smaller ones. Further back, the sticks got bigger and bigger, some of them intricately precise, some huge, wide, and simple-looking; hollow tubes nearly as big around as her torso. The ones at the very back were massive and heavy, she could barely budge them in their racks. As she looked, she tried thinking back to the stick Duran had carried; surely it didn't just make a clicking noise! What could she be missing…?

Inspiration struck. Those brass spike things! Rainbow remembered. He stuck a box of brass spikes on it before he left! Maybe those make it do something?

Winging her way quickly back to where she'd left the stick on the floor, she looked around for anything like the brass spikes she remembered. Opening a large locker next to the rack proved fruitful; she found boxes of familiar-looking brass things. Admittedly, these boxes (and the spikes they contained) were smaller than the one she'd seen, but the stick was smaller too. Fiddling a bit with the stick and the box, she found that it attached behind the hand-grip. She seated it in place and heard a click.

Pushing the metal spur again yielded the same disappointing, snapping click as before, though. Dang it, I'm still missing something. Frustrated, she looked over the stick again. Rainbow was about to give it up and go find something else to look at when she noticed a little knob set in a track on the side. She pulled on it, using more force than she expected to need, and was rewarded by a satisfying ratcheting sound as it slid back into place.

Alright, let's give this one more try, she thought, poking at the spur again.

*BLAM*

The blast was enormously loud up close, as sudden and shocking as a nearby lightning bolt. The stick lurched backward forcefully, hurting Dash's hoof as the ring surrounding the metal spur caught it. Almost simultaneous with the discharge was the noise of an impact banging off of one of the metal walls, several sticks falling off of their racks with a loud clatter, a hot brass cylinder flying out of the stick and bouncing off of her face, and something else hitting the pegasus high in the flank hard enough to draw blood. Dash leapt back, spinning, her ears back as she tried to identify what had hit her. She heard something metallic hit the ceiling and fall to the floor behind her as she looked around frantically for her attacker, her wings flared defensively and her heart hammering in her ears. There was a sharp smell in the air that she'd last smelled on the hilltop, after Duran had killed the bugs.

Ow, ow, ow! What the heck just happened? Rainbow rubbed at her face where the cylinder had hit her, grateful that it had missed her eye. There was nothing in the room that hadn't been there before, so what was it that had hit her flank? She checked her hoof, but found no major damage where the ring had scraped it.

Her heart slowed a bit from its frantic pace as she searched. There was a dent in the wall that hadn't been there before, and a distorted piece of shiny metal lying on the floor behind her. Walking up to the wall, she peered at the dent, then glanced back at where the various items had been knocked off their racks, and where she'd been standing. She noticed that the stick was still pointed almost directly at this part of the wall, and the motion vectors suddenly coalesced in her head. It shot something out that hit the wall here and fragmented; some of the pieces hit stuff on the racks with enough force to knock them off. The biggest piece hit me, but it was going a lot slower by then, so it bounced off. Now that she knew to look, her keen vision spotted several small metallic fragments on the ground, most of them pretty far away. A few others were actually embedded in the metal ceiling and floor near the impact dent. It was small, but it was moving fast, so fast I couldn't even see it! If I'd been directly in the way instead of being hit by a piece that bounced… this place really is dangerous! She picked up the largest piece, the flattened metal smear that had struck her. It looked almost melted, like it had splashed with the force of the impact, and she dropped it back where it had fallen. She glanced back at where the piece of metal had hit her; she wasn't bleeding badly, (Argh, but I am bleeding again! I'm getting kind of tired of leaking all over this place!) but the spot ached, and she was going to have a heck of a bruise later.

Okay, these things may be a little too dangerous to play with. She gave the stick on the ground an apprehensive look. I'm not even sure what this thing is supposed to do! The only way I can think of this being used is to hurt somepony or something, and why would they have thousands of things that only do harm?

Rattled, Rainbow tried to pull the box of spikes back off of the stick, but it wouldn't budge. Carefully keeping the hollow tube end pointed away from her, she laid it back on the ground pointing away from the doors, and decided to leave it for now. As long as I don't mess with that spur, I think it's harmless. Kinda scary, though.

Leaving the thunder-stick behind, Rainbow decided to keep exploring. There were a couple of doors over on the far side of the armory, and despite the scare she'd had, she still wanted to see what kind of stuff she could find. It wasn't like she'd never been scared before! As she made her way to them, she found her thoughts wandering to the possible uses of the thunder-sticks. I've seen ponies get hurt pretty bad by monsters out of the Everfree. We had that group of colts get mauled a few years back by that Cerberus before Cloud Dancer and I drove it off, and the filly that almost lost her leg to a giant scorpion. Her dad chased it back into the forest, but he never came back out. And if Twilight hadn't been around when those two dunderheads brought an Ursa into town, who knows how many ponies could have been hurt or killed? If we had this stuff, could we keep ourselves safer? Would it be worth it if we hurt or killed something when we could have just driven it off? Dash mulled the problem over, and wondered if it was just something wrong with her, that she would rather hurt something than let it hurt one of her friends or neighbors. She knew she was a lot more aggressive by nature than most ponies; none of the thoughts she was pondering would even occur to, say, Fluttershy.

I need to talk to Twilight about this later. She's the smartest pony I know, she'll be able to help me work something out. Rainbow looked up as she approached the door, and hesitated. The sign read, "Morgue."

Her earlier morbid speculation about finding a pile of skeletons somewhere came rushing back. It had been just a moment of dark humor, but what if that was actually was what was behind this door? Only one way to find out. Steeling herself, Rainbow entered the code to open the door.

"Woah!"

Apparently, this was the place they kept the suits. Dozens, maybe hundreds of silent, looming metal sentinels stood in neat rows. Closer to the entrance were the sleeker, more human-shaped suits that she'd seen Duran wearing. Behind those stood hulking, distorted shapes, bulky with armor, and so different in shape that she wondered if they were intended for a different species. Their left arms ended in a long cylinder that reminded her of the biggest of the thunder-sticks in the armory, while the right sported a heavy, three-fingered, clawlike hand. Their shoulders sat above their heads, four big box structures making them look stooped and hunchbacked.

She flew up to examine the trollish suits and found one that was already open. The huge shoulders evidently weren't part of the wearer, but part of the suit. While examining the inside of the suit, Dash again had the impulse to see if she could fit in one. This time, no one interrupted.

Taking a deep breath (and knowing this was probably another bad idea) the cyan pegasus hovered up above the point where the armor's chest plate gaped open, and carefully lowered herself hindlegs first into the suit.

It sure was roomy. Too roomy, unfortunately. Dash managed to get her forelegs into the arms of the suit, but found that she just dangled from them, her shoulders too narrow to fit properly and her hindlegs not long enough to support her, as she realized that the suit was designed for creatures with one less joint in their forelimbs than she had anyway. Aw. Dumb humans. Everything's just too big and shaped wrong! Even when she pulled her forelegs out of the suit's arms and slid down, she wound up sitting at the bottom of the suit's torso, her hindlegs dangling in the suit's legs, and her hooves nowhere near the suit's feet. She peeked out of the open chest plate, annoyed because she knew she probably looked ridiculous. She felt a bit ridiculous, like a little filly lost inside her mother's formal gown. If her mother had been a hermit crab in a welding shop.

Hmph. Dash thought, climbing back out of the cavernous suit and readjusting Applejack's hat on her head. Well, there's a bunch of 'em in here. Maybe I'll find one that fits!

Sadly, this hope proved to be in vain. Rainbow went up and down the aisles, looking for smaller versions of the suits, but they all seemed to be the same size. Containing her disappointment, she decided to head back and see if Twilight was up yet.

Eh, it's not that big a disappointment. Rainbow thought to herself as she flew along the hallway. Walking around on two legs all the time would be really awkward, and those didn't look like they'd bend enough for me to walk normally. She giggled a bit at the thought of one of the huge, blocky, trollish suits trying to walk on all fours. The mental image that thought conjured was pretty funny.

Opening Twilight's door, Rainbow found that her friend was indeed awake, staring in rapt fascination at an active terminal screen. The pegasus waited for a moment to see if her friend would notice her, but Twilight was clearly totally absorbed in whatever she was reading, her eyes scanning across the screen, occasionally tapping it with a hoof.

Rainbow had a momentary urge to scare the unicorn, but an instant's thought made her change her mind. How would she feel if somepony scared her in this hostile place? Ha, maybe I'm finally learning to think before I do stuff! Yeah, right, and maybe Applejack will learn how to fly!

Instead of shouting, Rainbow just cleared her throat. The lavender-coated unicorn still jumped in surprise, though, so Rainbow got to have her little moment of humor while still feeling virtuous about avoiding temptation. Best of both worlds! She thought, smothering another giggle.

"Oh! Rainbow Dash, there you are! I looked for you when I woke up, but your room was empty. Are you feeling any better this morning?" Twilight saw the hat still adorning her sunset-colored forelock, but didn't mention it this time.

Rainbow grinned exuberantly. "Oh, yeah, tons!" She did a little midair double-flip, to show her friend she could fly again. "How about you?"

"I'm feeling much better, thank you. My magical reserves are still building back up, and it will be another day or two before I feel up to trying to get us home, but I've got enough back to do minor stuff."

"So, did you figure out how to use that?" Rainbow gestured at the terminal.

"Oh, yes, it's actually quite easy once you work out the basics." Twilight's smile was slightly smug. "It will even teach you how to use it, if you ask. And there's so much here! Far, far more than my library in Ponyville, maybe even more than in Celestia's royal library in Canterlot!"

"Huh?" Rainbow eyed the glowing glass face of the terminal suspiciously. "But it's so small! What do you mean there's more here than in your library?"

"It's… oh, it's hard to explain, and super complex! I'm not really sure how it works, but the information seems to be stored in a nonphysical form, and retrieved when…"

Rainbow listened as the torrent of words washed over her. After the way she'd lost it when she thought Twilight had called her stupid yesterday, she really didn't want to admit that while she understood every word Twilight was saying, the actual content was going way over her head. And, to be fair, she wasn't stupid, she just wasn't as good at abstract thought as Twilight was. So she just let the unicorn happily chatter on, nodding when she thought it was appropriate, and trying to understand as much as she could.

When the verbal flood died down some, Rainbow managed to get a word in without interrupting her friend. "Wow, Twilight, that sounds, uh, really interesting!" She put on her best fake smile. "But has it helped you figure out how we got here? Or where here is?"

"Well… no. Not really." Twilight looked a bit abashed. "I redid my equations first thing after I woke up, but I came up with the exact same results, even when I redid them from scratch twice. That means, given the way the spell reacted, that not only am I missing something from the spell design, but whatever I'm missing actually isn't present in our current model of arcane theory." Rainbow nodded, while thinking, oh boy, here we go again, but the unicorn declined to launch into a detailed explanation. Instead, she continued with, "I thought I'd check and see if I could find anything in this library terminal, and I was sure I would once I got through the basic tutorial and figured out how to browse the archives," Rainbow reflected that her friend's description sounded really cavalier about accomplishing something that seemed pretty complex. "But when I started looking, I made the most incredible discovery!" Twilight's eyes widened, and she stared straight at Rainbow, trying to emphasize the gravity of the information she was about to convey. "These humans use no magic! They don't even think magic is real! Every reference to it I've found has been under a 'Fiction' heading!"

Rainbow blinked a few times, unsure if she'd heard her friend correctly. "What? None at all?" She looked around, at the metal walls, at the doors that opened when you got close, at the electric lights that never dimmed or flickered, at the terminal that continued to glow cheerfully. "But, all this stuff…"

"Completely nonmagical. All of it." Twilight pointed at her horn, "I've checked. There's not even residual magic on anything. The only place I've found any thus far is in your human friend's room across the hall, but that's mostly just natural leakage from a magically talented individual, and you said he wasn't from the society that built this place anyway."

"But how does all this stuff work if there's no magic?"

"I'm… not entirely sure. As far as I can tell… well, you've seen steam engines, right?" Dash nodded. They weren't terribly common, but some earth ponies used them for a little extra push when they were moving things around. "Well, they work nonmagically, by using purely natural physical processes to generate and apply force; heat and pressure. You with me so far?" Dash nodded again. "Okay, as far as I can tell, this group of humans never encountered magic in any form, so they've gotten better and better at identifying and using different features of the way the universe works to do more and more sophisticated things. The ways they use electricity are absolutely amazing! Like I said, I don't understand most of it yet, and there's so much information there," she nodded at the glowing screen, "that I'm not even really sure where to start!" The unicorn shook her head. "I'm glad you came by, actually, I needed a break. Is your friend back yet?"

"Nah, he said it'd be about a day and a half, so I don't think he'll be back before tomorrow morning." Rainbow replied. She wasn't at all sure she'd consider the human a friend yet, but she decided not to mention that. She didn't think he was entirely sane, and she'd had some uncomfortable dreams about the way his hands had felt. Which probably wasn't entirely fair; he'd been extremely helpful, but that didn't make it any less creepy. She'd make up her mind when (and if, a little piece of her mind whispered) he got back.

Instead of actually saying all those things, Rainbow told Twilight about what she'd found in the armory and morgue, including some of her thoughts about the thunder-sticks and the only uses she could think of.

"Huh. Well, they could be some kind of mining tool, I guess…" Twilight's speculation trailed off as she pondered, then she brightened. "I know! I can just look up 'armory' here and see what's normally stored there!" The unicorn hopped back onto her chair, and her horn glowed as she used her telekinesis to press keys. "Ah, here we go! Armory… storage place for… weapons and explosives, including small arms and heavy weapons…" Twilight read in silence for a few moments, as Rainbow fidgeted with impatience. "Well, it… looks like you were pretty much right, Rainbow Dash. The things you described are called 'guns,' and they're used either for hunting or war."

"War?" Rainbow was confused. "But why would they need so many of them in the middle of nowhere like this? Who is there to go to war against? Besides, wars almost never happen!" She was frantically sorting through her poorly-remembered history classes, trying to remember when the last war in Equestria was, when Twilight answered for her.

"Wars almost never happen to us, Rainbow. The last one Equestria had was generations ago, against the predatory griffon clans." Twilight was using the keyboard again as she spoke, evidently looking something up. "These humans are an alien species; they almost certainly don't do things the way we do. What's more, they're predatory omnivores, from what I can tell, whereas we are cooperative social herbivores, so they're likely to be much more competitive and violent than we are, and oh my…" Twilight's jaw sagged as she trailed off, and she tapped a hoof to the screen. Then did so again. And again.

"What are you looking at?" Rainbow finally blurted, when it became clear that Twilight had lost the thread of the conversation. She hovered up to read over the unicorn's shoulder, but all that she could see on the screen was a list of names. Twilight tapped an icon on the bottom right corner of the screen, and the list scrolled down to reveal… more names. "What is this, Twilight?" Rainbow asked again. "It just looks like a list!"

"It's," the academic swallowed. "It's a list of wars." She tapped the icon again, and the screen scrolled obediently.

"Wow." the pegasus observed. "They really like to fight, huh?" Oh, that might explain why they've got something killing anything that flies nearby, since they can't fly themselves maybe they didn't want anyone having that advantage. Speaking of… "Have you read anything about a 'starship,' by the way? Duran said there was one that was watching this place, and killing anything that flew."

Twilight wrenched herself away from the screen. "Rainbow, I'm not sure we can trust him." Her eyes were troubled. "A species that fights this much…"

"Woah, woah." Rainbow interrupted. She had private doubts about the human, but there was no arguing that he'd been helpful and straightforward. "You trust Spike, don't you? What did you say about dragons when you left him at home while we went to deal with the one on that mountaintop?"

"Well… it's true that dragons tend to react to one another with hostility. Sometimes extreme hostility. But that's not what's going on here! This isn't an instinctive response, this is organized conflict!"

"Oh, more like griffons then." Twilight gave her an odd look, so Rainbow elaborated. "Griffon clan conflicts, though they're not really wars. They aren't all that organized, but they fight all the time. It's part of the reason there aren't very many of 'em."

Twilight still looked confused. "What? I've never heard of that! The books I've read on griffons say that their low population is a result of a low birth rate!"

Now it was Rainbow's turn to be surprised. "Low birthrate? Griffon families have more kids than ponies do! Gilda was one of five kids, and her family was one of the smaller ones! I met two of her brothers when her family visited once. They'd left her sister at home to help the clan out, and her oldest brother and father had died in a fight with another clan a couple of years before!"

"What? Rainbow, there have been several books published on griffons; I read most of them when Pinkie told me about the problems she was having with Gilda, and none of them mentioned any kind of interclan conflict. They all said that griffon families only have one or two kids, rarely three, and that doesn't allow them the kind of population growth pony towns get!"

"That's… weird." And this isn't really helping us get home. "Tell you what, when we get back, I'll go find Gilda, see if she's cooled off some, and you can talk to her about it yourself. But in the meantime, Duran's been really helpful to us, so let's give him the benefit of the doubt, okay?" Twilight looked like she wanted to ask something else, but just nodded. "You didn't answer the question I asked, either."

"I didn't?" Twilight's eyes went a little out of focus for a second. "Oh, about starships?" Rainbow nodded. "I haven't seen anything, but that's probably because I hadn't looked. Give me just a second…" Her horn glowed as she used the keyboard, and after just a moment she spoke up again. "Ah, here we go. Starships. Oookay. They're exclusively spacecraft…"

"What does that mean?" Dash asked, a peevish edge entering her voice.

"It means they're vehicles that stay in space all the time." Twilight replied distractedly.

"In space?" Dash was getting a little tired of being confused. "What, you mean up above the air? I tried to fly up there once when I was little, it got really hard to breathe and I lost all my lift. How could they build something up there?" She realized Twilight was ignoring her. "Hey! Helloooo! Equestria to Twilight Sparkle!"

The unicorn was muttering to herself as she read. "Jump drive? Kearny-Fuchida? What's a misjump? Sorry, Rainbow Dash, give me just a second…" She tapped something on the screen. "…theorized to send a ship almost anywhere in the universe or potentially to another one altogether…" Her brow furrowed. "Another… another universe? Multiple universes? Multiple universes! That's it! That's what was missing!" She spun in her chair to face where Rainbow was hovering, violet eyes shining. "Do you understand what this means, Rainbow?"

"Uh, not really…" Dash was interrupted when Twilight grabbed her in a hug and planted an enthusiastic kiss right on the cyan pegasus's lips.

They both froze. Dash's wings' flapping to hold her up was the only motion in the room. Man, what is it about me and this place? Are those bug things gonna try and hit on me next? Aw, man, ick, maybe they already have, Duran said he thought those little things might be larvae…. Eew eew Eeeeeeew! Dash thought, straightening the slightly-askew cowpony hat while trying to come up with something to say. Before she could sort herself out, Twilight released her, covered her mouth with her hooves with an "eep!", and started talking so fast Dash had trouble sorting out the words. "OhmygoshRainbowI'msosorry! IjustgotsoexcitedandIdon'tknowwhyIdidthat…"

"Woah, Twilight, sloooooow it down, there." Rainbow interjected, feeling her cheeks burn. Twilight was sporting a matching flush under her lavender coat.

The unicorn took a couple of breaths and started again. "Rainbow, I'm so sorry! I just got so excited, I got carried away, and…!" Twilight tried to say too many words at once, and evidently choked for a moment, so Dash tried to defuse the awkwardness a little bit.

"Um… Twi… you know I don't swing that way, right? I mean, I like you, and we're friends, but…" Oooh, yeah, Rainbow. Defuse that awkwardness. That's totally the way to do it…

"You don't?" Twilight interrupted, only to slam a hoof into her mouth and flush deeper. "Wait! No! Not what I meant! I mean, I don't either! I just, I mean, augh!" Twilight closed her eyes and took a couple of deep breaths, letting them out slowly. Rainbow had to bite down on a chuckle when she thought she realized where Twilight was going. Whew. I thought I was going to have to explain again that I'm not into other mares, rumors to the contrary. The unicorn, regaining some of her composure, started again. "Okay. Let me try again. Rainbow, I apologize for my… enthusiasm. It's just that, when I realized what I'd missed, I was just so happy and excited I just wanted to kiss somepony, and, well, you were right there, so…" Twilight tapped her forehooves together in an amusingly crude gesture, especially coming from the somewhat sheltered unicorn academic. "And then I got all flustered, because, well, most of Ponyville thinks you're, um, fond of other fillies, and I didn't want you to think I was hitting on you…"

Rainbow facehooved. More or less what I thought, but I guess I do have to trot out that explanation after all. "Okay, Twilight, a couple of things. One. I'm not upset, just a little embarrassed. Two. I'm not attracted to other mares. I know how that stupid rumor started, and it happened once back when I was in school and I was really, really drunk at the time. Okay?" Twilight nodded, her blush fading a bit. "And three, while you're not a bad kisser, I would be totally happy to forget it ever happened if you'd just tell me what the hay got you so excited in the first place!"

"Didn't I tell you?" Rainbow groaned and sank to the ground, covering her eyes with both hooves. Now I'm getting the 'didn't I tell you' routine from both of the other creatures capable of speech on this entire planet. Celestia help me, I may kill someone. Those 'guns' are looking awfully tempting.

"No, Twilight. You didn't tell me. You were going on about multiple universes, that's all I heard."

"Yes! Yes! Multiple universes!" The unicorn looked like she was getting excited again, and Rainbow took a cautious step back to take herself out of reach. "The portal spell was built under the assumption that there was only one universe! If there are actually more than one, then it was missing a set of coordinates, and must have used a random one to complete itself, and that's why it hesitated before completing the connection!" Twilight was smiling so widely Rainbow almost expected the top of the unicorn's head to fall off. "This is a huge discovery. I'll be able to publish at least six or seven major papers in The Arcane from just the basic math alone, once I get it worked out!"

Rainbow was starting to feel cautiously optimistic. "So… you know what went wrong with your spell? Does that mean you'll be able to get us home?"

Twilight beamed. "Yes!" Then her face fell. "Eventually. I think. I'll need to work out a way of describing multiversal coordinates that works with our current arcane mathematical language, so that I can properly construct the return portal. If I try again and fail the same way… we could potentially be lost forever."

"F- forever?"

"Only if things go really badly."

"Like they did last time?" Rainbow tried to picture what it would be like to never see Ponyville or her other friends again. Duran's blank expression and hinted description of half-dreaming life surfaced in her memory. Would I be that bad after years on my own? Would I be worse?

The unicorn winced. "I… kind of deserved that. I'm going to try really, really hard to make sure that what happened with the last portal doesn't happen again, but it is a risk, yes. Hopefully, I'll be able to use some of the information already worked out in there" she gestured to the terminal "as a shortcut, but I'll need to translate their physical-based mathematics into unicorn arcane-based systems, and at the very least it will take me a few days. Um… how sure are you that we can trust this Duran? He is an omnivore, and we know he eats meat, are you sure he won't decide to eat us?"

"Well, I'm not saying I trust him like I would another pony, but…" How to convince Twilight? She hadn't talked to the human, hadn't read… of course! "Hey, Twilight, come with me real quick. I've got something I want to show you."

"What? But I need to get started on…"

Rainbow cut her off midsentence. "You said you needed a break. We're taking a break. Besides, this is kinda important."

The unicorn protested a bit more, but Rainbow was able to herd her out of her bunkroom and down the hallway to the Commander's Office, where she'd found Duran's journal. She lifted the battered notebook off of the desk and handed it to Twilight. "Here. Read the first entry."

The unicorn was staring at the chair, however. "Rainbow… where did all this blood come from?"

"Oh, uh, heh heh, that was my fault." The pegasus felt sheepish. "I was kind of ticked at him at the time, so I figured if I couldn't find a way to patch myself up, I'd just bleed all over his nice clean office. Didn't know he'd gone to get a first aid kit. Anyway, read!" She pointed at the journal imperiously.

Pulling her gaze away from the dried blood, Twilight flipped open the cover and started reading. She reached the end of the page and started to turn to the next one, but Rainbow stopped her. "Hold on, Twilight, I want you to see this the way I did. Turn to the last page."

Eyeing the pegasus, Twilight did so, flipping back to the last entry just as Rainbow Dash had done earlier, and, blinking at the changed style, began reading again. She didn't take long to read the last entry, and when she laid the notebook down there were tears in her eyes, and she seemed at a loss for words.

"You should've seen him when he realized we were real; he was helping us even when he thought we were figments of his imagination. He's not gonna eat us, Twilight, at least I really don't think so. We're the first ones he's seen in years that he can talk to." Twilight nodded, and finally seemed to find her voice, though when she spoke it was a bit husky.

"I think I believe you, Rainbow Dash. Thank you for showing me this." Blinking, she used her telekinesis to ruffle through the pages. "Do you know… how many years?"

Rainbow shook her head. "I asked him, but he didn't know. More than seven, maybe as many as fifteen."

"Fifteen years…" Twilight repeated, quiet horror in her voice. "It's… amazing." She shook herself. "And I think we should take his advice. I'm going to get back to trying to work out the math for a return spell."

"'Kay. I'm gonna wander around this place some more; I'll come find you when I get ready to eat, so you won't forget and starve yourself."

Twilight laughed ruefully. "That might not be a bad idea, Rainbow." She lifted the notebook in a purple glow. "Do you mind if I borrow this? I'm not sure if I want to read it or not, but I'd like to have the option."

Rainbow shrugged. "It's not mine. Go ahead, I think he meant for someone to read it someday." The two left the small office and headed in opposite directions; Twilight back to her bunkroom, and Rainbow deeper into the base.

Rainbow Dash spent the rest of the day wandering around the human base. It was huge, but most of it wasn't all that interesting. There were exceptions, though. The main power area contained a huge, humming power plant that radiated warmth, the Engineering spaces had intricate, bizarre arrangements of tools and metal arms of all different sizes, with wires running everywhere like vines in the Everfree, along with what looked like several battered, half-disassembled armor suits. The hangars, far from being places clothes were kept, proved to house a collection of enormous vehicles. Rainbow spent hours crawling over and inside these metal behemoths, but after her experience with the guns in the armory she was exceptionally leery of messing with the vehicles, since she could see absolutely colossal versions of the guns she'd seen before sticking out of all of them. Some of them were so big she could almost fit her head in them. (She knew because she tried a couple of times. And succeeded with one, though she nearly got stuck.)

The most fascinating thing of all, however, proved to be the top layer of hangars that Rainbow almost missed. There were two huge elevators in the back of the main hangar, and when she'd taken one down to the engineering bay, she'd assumed that both elevators were identical. When she tried the second one on a whim, after growing bored with the vehicle bays, she found it actually went farther up than the first one. When she stepped out, she was confronted with six more vehicles, these clearly designed to fly.

Not just fly, but fly fast, and Rainbow felt something close to lust as she took in the streamlined shapes, crouched and massive in the bright hangar lights. She paced around one of them, trying to figure out exactly how they worked. The wings were thick and swept dramatically back, with an arrangement of mobile flaps on the leading and trailing edges, and there were huge nozzles at the back that were blackened with heat. She figured it must be propelled by something like a firework rocket, only huge. She found the place the operator was supposed to sit high on the nose of the craft; a transparent blister lying close to the sweep of the vehicle's body. Peeking inside, she could see several odd levers and buttons, and she thought the entire inside surface the operator could look at was covered in the glassy surface she'd come to associate with the terminals. She found the catch that she suspected opened the operator's compartment, but even after repeated efforts, she couldn't figure out how to open the darned thing.

Rainbow poked around the air vehicle for a while longer, trying to figure out the details of how it would fly, and resolved to ask Twilight how to use the terminals, because surely there was something on how these beautiful things worked in there. She wasn't able to do anything with the vehicles for now, and she was starting to get pretty hungry, so she left the hangars to go find her friend again.

To her total lack of surprise, she found the unicorn seated at her terminal, reading avidly. Duran's journal sat on the desk next to her. Ushering the protesting academic from her room, Rainbow told her about all the things she'd found in the base, especially the air vehicles, and extracted a promise that Twilight would give her a basic tutorial on how to use the terminals after they ate. Twilight, in turn, filled Rainbow in on the progress she'd made; the human multidimensional math was amazingly complex, and the unicorn was just beginning to understand it. Twilight used some of the arcane power she'd regained to duplicate some of the remaining food, just in case they wound up needing more. Duplication was a short-term solution, Twilight explained, and it could potentially be dangerous if done over and over, but a few times wouldn't hurt. Plus, it would help the food last longer, just in case Duran was delayed… or didn't return at all. After they ate, Twilight showed Rainbow the basics of how to operate and use the terminals, and then they both retired for the night.

*Author's note: Battle Armor and Aerospace Fighers and assault rifles, oh my! You get nerd cred if you can identify the base designs of the two Battle Armor suit types. They're both modified, but still legal, designs in BT. I should know; I went and designed them before I started describing them, just to make sure what I had in mind was still a legal design! Ha ha ha, I did so much world building that no one will ever know about, since it's all from Rainbow's perspective and she's pretty clueless most of the time. My extra detail is defeated by my viewpoint character!

Chapter 7

Rainbow started to get worried the next morning, when there was still no sign of the human's return. She even went outside the base and climbed a ways up the mountain, looking for any sign of him, but there was nothing. Mindful of his warning, she kept her wings tightly folded and shot the occasional nervous look at the sky. She heard eerie cries echoing across the badlands, overlapping with one another in an unsettling chorus, but none of the chattering thunder of Duran's gun. Dash was torn between going to look for him and staying put with Twilight, but the memory of her fight with the bugs (and the fact that she had no idea where the human was headed when he left) persuaded her to stay put for now. Besides, he said there were worse things out there, and I barely survived the ones we ran into as it was. As she was climbing back down to the door, an impossibly brilliant flash, far brighter than any lightning she'd ever seen lit the horizon, with a deep roll of thunder rumbling by several seconds later, and she shivered. Was that something trying to fly? She stopped in her descent and peered intently in the direction the flash had come from, and her keen vision picked out several moving creatures far in the distance, though none with the human's silhouette. As she watched, they fell on each other in a frenzy, ripping and tearing at one another in a horrifying display. Rainbow watched, appalled, as one group annihilated the other. She was about to resume her descent when she saw the last member of the losing group attempting to flee, only to stagger as the ground moved beneath it. Several immense, scythe-shaped claws emerged from underground, spearing the unfortunate creature and two of its pursuers and dragging them down under the dirt.

As the screeches and shrieks of the battle she'd just watched reached her, Dash bolted for the entrance, looking as she went for any sign of disturbed earth that might indicate the presence of another lurking horror nearby. She reached the door safely and sealed it behind her, but her fears weren't so easily shut away.

Oh, Celestia, what are we gonna do? If Duran doesn't come back, we're gonna need to go out and find supplies, but with things like that running around… how can I avoid them if I'm stuck on the ground? How is he planning on avoiding them? And where did they all come from, there was nothing when we got here two days ago!

She wanted to go see if Twilight could track Duran with her magic, so that Rainbow would at least know what direction to go to find him, but at the same time she didn't want to interrupt the unicorn academic's studies, since that was their best chance of ever getting home again. She shuddered at the thought of being trapped in this place forever.

Dangit, dangit, dangit! I won't do anypony any good if I go out there and get killed, but sitting here all nice and safe is driving me nuts! She considered going back to exploring the base; there were several hallways she hadn't been down yet, but she balked. If the human came back and got stuck outside, she'd never know it if she was off wandering deep in the mountain somewhere. He'd helped them, and set out to help them more, and her stubborn sense of loyalty demanded that she stay here in case she was needed.

The terminal on the table in the anteroom's corner caught her eye. I… well, judging by those flying vehicles I found yesterday, these humans evidently know something about flying. And if I'm gonna be stuck sitting and waiting, it might as well be somewhere that I might be useful… Making a quick decision, Rainbow activated the terminal and sat down where she could see the window out. If he gets in trouble out there, I hope it's at least close enough that I'll be able to see it. I owe him one.

Before she could start a search, she noticed an icon that hadn't been present on the terminal Twilight had used to run her through the tutorials. Activating it, she found a list of cameras. Each one she activated switched the view on the window beside the door; (Huh, cool. Guess it is a terminal of some sort after all.) at first it had displayed the mountain right outside, but she was able to see views from the very top of the mountain and from several points scattered around, as well.

The last camera listing was something different, however. It looked at first like she was looking at a very detailed relief map, but she noticed she could see clouds moving around the tiny mountains and could see the sun reflecting from the miniature lakes. The realization of what she was looking at hit her like a thunderbolt. This must be from the starship! She'd seen terrain in miniature before, when she went really, really high. This, though… it was astounding. And beautiful, in its way. It was higher, way, way higher, than Rainbow had ever flown. Oh, man, this is awesome! The image was centered on a small, craggy mountain range, and the pegasus's practiced eye realized she was actually looking straight down at where she actually was. The thought made her mind reel for a moment; how could she be looking down from far away at the space she was occupying?

She shook her head and returned the display to the view outside the door. She'd look at the other one some other time, when she wasn't worried about what was happening right outside. Instead, she brought up the archive search Twilight had showed her and, lacking any other ideas, carefully typed out 'aerodynamics.' They're sure to have something if they've got stuff that flies. Even if it's not as much as a pegasus library would have, maybe they'll have something I can use someday.

The search result was vastly more extensive than she had expected. Pages and pages and pages of titles, some just articles, others full-length books on the subject, were displayed on the screen. Picking one out at random, Rainbow started reading, trying to simultaneously keep an eye on the outside view.

She was still reading hours later. There was stuff here she'd never even heard of back in Cloudsdale, equations for modeling airflow and turbulence over an irregular surface, analyses of aerodynamic instabilities using chaotic math, and hundreds of other things. It was so fascinating that Rainbow had barely even fidgeted, sitting there immobile. She wasn't even sure how to properly work some of the more complex math she'd run across that morning; when she'd started trying, she realized it would take days, easily, just to model the airflow over a simple surface. Most interesting, though, was the effects of different wing forms on maneuverability and aerial performance. I'd never even thought about what I could do with different wings! She'd already come up with a bunch of different ideas for using that data, from artificial extensions she could attach to her own wings, to canard arrangements she could use. She had some really awesome ideas for entirely new maneuvers using artificial instability generated by canards attached to her forelegs, and she was sure more would occur once she started actually testing.

Rainbow found her attention drawn suddenly to the large screen showing the outside view, and she realized it was well past noon. The gnawing worry she'd suppressed suddenly came rushing back, and she studied the screen, trying to spot whatever had pulled her out of her reading.

She finally spotted the bipedal shape lumbering around the final hill in front of the doorway and gasped. The lupine lope he'd set out with was gone, as was the gun he'd been carrying. The armored suit no longer matched the color of its surroundings; instead it wavered and flared with odd bright colors, and much of its surface was spotted and sprayed with ichor, blood, and other less identifiable substances. She shot off of the desk chair as he approached the entrance and keyed in the entry sequence as fast as she could. The heavy door swung silently open just as Duran reached it, and he staggered inside, each footfall clanging heavily on the metal floor. The suit was making some unhealthy noises, too, grating and whining as it moved. Up close, Rainbow could see numerous dents and scratches along the surface of the armor, and it looked alarmingly like blood was leaking from several places in the joints. The pegasus had just entered the code to close the door and was moving to help, as the human twisted and reached over his shoulder, evidently to detach the heavy box he still carried on his back. The armor let out a sudden, sizzling pop, the wavering colors instantly faded to a dull black, and Duran dropped to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut, the heavy armor smashing into the floor with an incredible racket. It sounded like somepony dropping a box full of heavy frying pans out of a second-story window. Rainbow barely managed to get out of the way of the plummeting mass of metal in time.

"Ohmygosh!" She blurted, "Are you okay?" The metal-clad form lay flat on its face, frighteningly still. "Duran! Hey! Oh, please don't be dead…" She moved closer, trying to figure out some way to get him out of the suit. There was a sudden, quiet hiss, and she could suddenly hear his voice muttering an uninterrupted stream of weary-sounding curses from inside the helmet. Oh, thank Celestia, he's not dead. The curses continued, growing more colorful as one arm lifted, slowly. Um. Wow. Those are… really inventive. Rainbow blushed a bit as she listened to the imprecations, making a mental note to look some of them up later. "Hey! Can you hear me? How can I help?"

He evidently couldn't hear her. He lifted one arm wearily, trying to reach back over his shoulders. The motion was slow and labored, and she tried to figure out what he was trying to do. He clawed laboriously for something, and she finally realized he was trying to reach the release catch for the big cargo box. Dash quickly flipped both catches, finding just enough space to fit her hoof into, and pulled out the various connecting wires with her teeth. Duran's hand fell back to the floor with a muffled crash when the catches released, and he lay still.

Darting around beside him, Dash shoved at the cargo box. It was much heavier than it had been before, and it evidently sat in such a way that it couldn't just slide off, but she was able to lift and roll it off of Duran's prone form, resulting in another metallic racket as the box wound up lying connector-side-up next to the armored human. With the weight removed from his back, the human braced his arm and started trying to roll himself over. Seeing him struggling, Dash tried to help, only to find out just how heavy the armored suit was. It was enormously, impossibly dense, heavier than any metal or stone she'd ever encountered in her life. The pegasus was forced to hook both forehooves under the human's bicep, plant her back hooves on the ground, and heave with every muscle in her body in order to turn the armored form over, and a fair amount of the foul-smelling matter splashed about the armored plates wound up smeared in Dash's cyan fur. That accomplished, the human's cursing faded, and his mobile right arm (she noticed that the left hand was balled into a fist) flipped a couple of small switches hidden behind parts of the suit's chest plate, loosening the solid chest and helmet pieces. He pried the armor open and caught sight of Dash.

Blinking, he looked around the room and, seeing no one else, informed her, "Miss Dash, you are a lot stronger than you look."

"Hey, I told you before, I'm just that awesome. And you don't need the 'miss,' just 'Dash' is fine." Rainbow replied, trying not to show how appalled she was at his appearance. Where before he'd looked tired, now he looked half-dead. The bags under his eyes were larger and more pronounced, and much darker, almost like bruises. He had a couple of actual bruises, too; one on his forehead and a really big one on the right side of his face. Dash could smell a strong odor of sweat and blood wafting out of the open suit, and when he started trying to struggle out of the armor, his movements were slow and pained.

Rainbow hooked one hoof under Duran's arm to help him free himself, and received a grateful look in return. He had to fight to get his left hand free of the suit, and when he finally pulled it loose, the pegasus saw that it was clenched into a tight fist. Once he'd managed to pull himself out, she could see that he was bleeding from several deep cuts and puncture wounds that must have punched through the armor's joints. The human staggered to his feet, blood streaming from the inside of his right elbow, both legs, and left shoulder, and began lurching unsteadily for the door.

"Dude, what happened?" Rainbow asked, finally getting tired of waiting for the story.

"That Rift happened. A lot of the predators around here are acanovores; a big arcane event like that will draw them in from all over, and it makes them a lot harder to avoid."

"Arcanovores?"

"They eat magic. Or siphon it, or something." The human winced as he limped down the hallway in the direction of the infirmary, and Rainbow, with no idea of what else to do, hovered up next to him and looped his right arm over her shoulders. "Ran into a big pack of shriekers on the way out. Had to detour a pretty good ways to avoid them, so it was nearly daylight by the time I got to the greenhouse."

"Hey, you can lean on me, you know. I'm trying to help, here." Rainbow interrupted, annoyed. In spite of her efforts, the human seemed to be trying not to put much weight on her.

"I- right. Sorry." He leaned a bit into the arm hanging over the pegasus's shoulder and started walking a little more easily. It wasn't anywhere near the limit of what Rainbow could carry though, even hovering like she was. She noticed that he was carefully holding his hand out to the side, too. "With you being so much smaller than me, I was trying not to overburden you."

"Pah." Rainbow scoffed. "I could pick you up and fly you down this hall if I wanted to." The human stumbled, and she held him steady until he regained his balance. "See? So just let me help. And why are you holding your arm out like that? It's gotta hurt, with that gash in your elbow."

"Ah… I was trying to avoid the… discomfort I caused you before."

"Oh, for… look, the spots you need to worry about are right under and between my wings, okay? Just let your arm hang down, you'll be fine." Duran followed her instruction, though that meant she now had blood soaking into her fur again. Oh well. Bright red and light blue make a nice contrast. "I'll warn you if you do something you shouldn't, so don't worry about it." He nodded. "Oh, I kinda interrupted you, didn't I? You'd just gotten to a greenhouse."

"Right. I filled up the cargo container, but it was way too dangerous for me to start heading back while the sun was still up. I holed up in one of the maintenance buildings, but I was attacked by a couple of hopperlions." Rainbow wondered what the heck a 'hopperlion' was, but she let him continue instead of interrupting again. "I was able to kill them easily enough with a knife, but they made some noise, and that attracted six or seven of these big bear things I'd never even seen before." He paused. "Look, it was exciting enough to experience, but the retelling is going to be kind of dull. Short version okay?"

"The short version's fine, as long as you don't mind me asking questions! Like, what's a hopperlion?"

The human smiled. "It's… a little like a grasshopper crossed with a lion. Not really, I mean, it's got the big jumping legs a grasshopper has, and they sort of hunt like lions, but it's got this sort of thick leathery skin, and it's got mandibles more like a really big ant…" He trailed off for a moment before continuing. "Look, basically, I'm really terrible at naming things, okay?" Rainbow snorted a laugh. "Anyway, I wound up having to dodge all kinds of things for pretty much the entire day, so I was a lot further away than I'd planned to be when I started back here last night, and I didn't get a bit of sleep. I realized I was going to have to really hustle to have a chance of getting back here before daylight, so I spent pretty much the whole night running, and didn't pay enough attention to my backtrail."

"You haven't had any sleep in two days?" Rainbow was aghast. Running and fighting for two days straight, and he was still on his feet? Well, more or less on his feet, she thought as he stumbled again.

"Yeah, and it's no fun, let me tell you. Oh, here we are." The human cut himself off and pointed at a door marked 'infirmary.' "If you'll excuse me for a moment, I need to do some minor wound treatment. I'll finish my little story in a moment."

"No problem at all. If you'll wait here, I'll go get Twilight. I'm pretty sure she knows at least some minor medical spells; she should be able to fix you up pretty quick." Duran shook his head.

"Oh, there's no need. None of my wounds are particularly serious. In fact, I was prepared to have to spend a night on the floor recovering my strength; I didn't expect you to be in the entryway waiting. That was a pleasant surprise, by the way, and I sincerely thank you for helping me out of my suit."

Rainbow grinned. "I was just glad to be able to do something. I've been sitting around twiddling my hooves for two days now, and it's been driving me nuts!" She sobered, looking at his wounds. "You really should let Twilight help you out there. A couple of those look pretty deep."

"Oh, they're pretty deep alright," the human admitted cheerfully. "Particularly these two." He pointed to a puncture in his left armpit and the one behind his left knee. "But neither hit any major blood vessels this time, and I can't feel any nerve damage. Well, you don't exactly feel nerve damage, it's more like not feel, but you know what I mean. Just muscle, might have nicked a tendon. Ruined yet another set of fatigues, though." Rainbow was momentarily startled by his attitude, before remembering the impressive collection of scars she'd seen. If I'd been cut up as bad as he has been, it probably wouldn't bother me much either. Nonetheless, she was about to insist on getting Twilight when the human staggered into the infirmary and plopped himself down on a chair.

"Actually, Dash, if you still want to help, would you mind handing me that box over there? Or, ah, whatever you do without, you know, hands." He pulled out the glass-faced tablet thing she'd seen him use before to stop his metal hand from twitching, and again pulled back his sleeve and plugged a wire into his forearm.

Dash picked up the item he'd indicated, a small red box with a symbol that looked like a coiled spring and passed it to him with a hoof. He reached out absently and took it with his good hand, setting it down to tap at the tablet connected to his left arm. He stopped abruptly, looking from Rainbow to the box and back again.

"Er, how did you do that?"

"What?" The pegasus tried to think of something unusual she'd done, but drew a blank.

"That." He gestured vaguely from her to the box. "How did you just pick that up without fingers?"

"I just picked it up. See?" Rainbow took the box out of his hands, held it in front of the human's face, and put it back down again. Duran looked shocked.

"But… but how did you do that? How can you grip something with a hoof? You've got nothing to grip with!" He peered intently at her hoof, as if expecting her to suddenly manifest fingers or something.

Rainbow, annoyed by the scrutiny, waved the hoof in the human's face. "Hey, are you planning to just sit there and bleed?"

He blinked. "Oh, sorry, priorities." He tapped a few more times on the tablet, and his left fist relaxed. Flexing its fingers, he disconnected the wires from his left arm.

"Why do you keep doing that? Hooking that thing to your arm and messing with it?"

He gave a one-shouldered shrug as he opened the red case, pouring something that smelled of alcohol over his leg wound. "I did something wrong when I was attaching this fake arm. It screws up a lot, and when it does, I need to reboot it. That's what I'm doing with the pocket computer." As he spoke, he pulled a curved needle, some thread, and a pair of scissors from the case. Is he going to fix his clothes before he fixes himself? Rainbow wondered.

"Now, where was I?" Duran muttered to himself as he threaded the needle. "Ah, yes, the short version of my return trip. Well, the desert around here's swarming with arcanovores just now. Thank the Fire for that mimetic armor; I'd have been dead about thirty times over if it wasn't for that." He pulled up the leg of his jumpsuit, showing the pegasus even more scars. "Some of them got close enough to spot me anyway, and those I had to deal with." To Rainbow's horror, he braced his leg and started actually sewing the wound shut, poking the curved needle through his own flesh with barely a twitch. He just kept right on talking. "Used up more than three quarters of my ammo that first day, took some injuries, lost one of my knives, and had a pack of shriekers on my tail when night fell. Managed to lure them right past a sleeping dragon-tiger, and it woke up mad! Ha, ha." He finished stitching the wound in his leg, wrapped some gauze around it, and sealed it with tape. "Got through the rest of the night with no major problems, but I was still kind of a long way from here when the sun came up." Unzipping the front of his jumpsuit, the human pulled his arms free and left it hanging around his waist. This was the first time Rainbow had seen the artificial arm in its totality; it looked like it attached to a metal cap where his natural arm ended, slightly below the elbow. She wondered idly if he could remove it, or whether it was permanently grafted. Splashing more alcohol on the wound under his left arm, he threaded another needle and started sewing it up as well, while still chattering on cheerfully. Rainbow had to look away, unable to keep watching the needle and thread moving through flesh. "Well, it's generally a bad idea to travel during the day, especially when there are a lot of predators around, but I was worried about the two of you running out of food, so I decided to go ahead and risk it. Besides, there weren't any places to hunker down for the day! Didn't even see the three wolverine bugs that jumped me. Got the first one, but the second one got close and smashed my gun." He glanced up, nearly finished with his stitching. "Oh. Sorry, I guess this is kind of unpleasant to watch, isn't it? I can get behind a curtain, if you like."

"No, don't let me stop you! But doesn't that hurt?" Rainbow glanced at Duran to check his progress before averting her eyes again.

"A bit. Not as much as it used to." He chuckled. "Either I'm getting used to it, or I'm just getting tougher!" He went back to his needlework. "Anyway, those two wolverine bugs were nasty, that's when I took nearly all of these scratches and dents, and when my blasted arm locked up again. Good thing I was only a couple of hours away from here at that point; if it had been farther, I don't know that I would have made it." The human tied off his last stitch with a grunt of satisfaction. "Did you and your friend have any problems while I was gone?"

The pegasus decided not to mention her little incident in the armory. "Nope! Actually, we've got good news!" Rainbow told the human about Twilight's idea to get them home, while Duren closed the rest of his cuts with more of the little butterfly-shaped things that he'd used on her.

When she finished the explanation, Duran smiled, but Rainbow saw a moment of hesitation. She heard it when he spoke, too. "D- Dash, that's great! If she can get you home… nobody should be stuck here! Let me know if there's anything I can do to help." He paused, pulling his jumpsuit back over his shoulders and zipping it up. Rainbow started to say something, but he interrupted her. "The cargo unit's full; the storeroom should be pretty much empty now, but I managed to pack the box pretty tight, so it should be enough for at least a week. I'll sort it and unload it later, but right now I desperately need some rest. You and Twilight should feel free to take whatever you need." He turned and walked out of the infirmary without giving Rainbow a chance to get a word in.

Rainbow stood there for a moment, openmouthed. That was kinda rude. Why would he… oh. She felt a little dumb for taking so long to figure out why the human might be upset. She easily caught up to him in the corridor; he was still limping, and she'd bet that she was faster than he was even on his best day and her worst. "Hey! Duran!"

The human didn't respond, just kept walking, head down and apparently deep in thought. Rainbow flew past and stopped square in front of him, hovering so she could look him in the eye.

"Dude, we're not gonna leave you here. Twilight said the spell makes a portal that sticks around until she shuts it down; you can come back with us." He looked a little startled. "Come on, you helped us! We're not just gonna go, 'oh, gee, thanks for the help but we're going now, byeeeeee!'" She continued, rolling her eyes and putting a sarcastic sing-song tone into her spoiled-little-princess impression. She followed up by poking him in the chest and glaring. "We owe you, ya big bald sasquatch! The least we can do is get you outta here!"

The human ducked his head in the face of her glare. He was silent for a long moment. When he spoke up, eyes still cast downward, his voice was quiet. "Thank you, Dash, for the offer. I'll certainly consider it."

That certainly wasn't the response she'd expected. "Consider it? What's there to consider? Equestria's nicer than this place in, like, every possible way! You don't have to worry about getting attacked or eaten, there's no horrible monsters outside of the Everfree Forest, and nopony goes there anyway," She hovered forward so she could reach out and lay a hoof tentatively on his shoulder. "And there're other ponies like me and Twilight there. You don't have to be alone anymore; there'd be others around to talk to. You could have friends. Why would you ever want to stay here?"

He finally looked up and met her eyes. Underneath the exhaustion, he looked drawn. He looked old, she realized, and she wondered how old he actually was. "Why would I want to stay here? I know this place. Hideous as it is, terrible as it is, hard as it tries to kill me, I know it. I don't know your world, I don't know your people, and Dash, I don't really know you." She shied back a bit, startled and a little hurt. "You and I have only spoken a bit, and I haven't talked to your friend at all. I don't know you, and you don't know me. All you've found on this world is horrible monsters, how do you know I'm not another one?" She started to reply heatedly, but he interrupted her. "But all that aside, you say that your world is better. I have no reason to believe that you're wrong, from your own perspective." He started to reach out a hand, but seemed to change his mind, withdrawing it without touching her. "For you, yes, your world is undoubtedly the better one. But I have no way of knowing if that's true for me… and I stopped hoping for the best years ago. For example, I accept that you and your friend might regard me kindly. But would the rest of your people? Or would they see a giant monster with a metal hand?" He raised his left arm, flexing his fingers to punctuate his question. She could see despair in his eyes, so strong it made her want to cry. "I used to think things would get better. I used to hope that another Rift would open, one that would lead me home. Or that a ship would arrive, and the crew would find me, and…"

"…And take you back, so you could publish your book and get rich." Rainbow cut him off, prompting a surprised look. She had felt his despair reaching out to her, and she dealt with it the way she often dealt with such feelings.

She got mad.

She had just realized something, in a moment of blinding clarity. He's lying. Not to me, to himself. "I do know you, at least some. I read some of your journal. I know what you were thinking when you got here." She moved forward, getting in the human's face. "And you know what? I think you're wrong. You haven't stopped hoping for the best," She snarled. "You just gave up on getting yourself home, so now you're sitting here, whining about how there's no hope, but secretly hoping things will get better if you just stay here so home can find you. But you know what?" Rainbow shoved him in the chest with both forehooves, sending him stumbling back a pace. "It hasn't, and it won't. There's no ship coming. Twilight says those portal things can lead to different universes, so unless your ships do too, you're gonna be stuck here. Home's never gonna find you. Even Twilight can't get you home, but she can get you someplace better than this. You're either gonna have to try to make things better and get yourself home if you can, or you're gonna have to let it go and let us help you! Like you helped us!" She shoved him again, his eyes wide as he stared at her. "Listen to yourself!" the pegasus spat, "'Oh, Rainbow Dash, there's no hope'" she misquoted mockingly, in a whining imitation of his voice, "I'm offering you some, metalhead! So whatcha gonna do, huh? Are you gonna take it and run with it, or are you gonna throw it back in my face?"

The human gaped at her, stunned, and Rainbow held his gaze angrily. If he listens, he's either going to agree, or he's gonna take a swing at me. I just attacked a lie he's probably been telling himself for a decade or more; if he believes me, it's gonna hurt. And if he doesn't, I don't think there's anything else I can do.

He stayed silent for a long, long moment. Rainbow didn't blink until she saw the first tear. He finally dropped his gaze, tears running down his face as he wept soundlessly. "You're right," he finally said, in a whisper so quiet she would have expected it out of Fluttershy. "You're right. I've prayed for a chance to get out of here, and now that it's come, I'm almost too frightened to take it."

The sight of the tall, battered, scarred biped crying silently in the middle of the empty, sterile hall was heartbreaking. Rainbow, deciding to take a risk, hovered forward and threw her forelegs around his neck in a hug. Duran tensed for a split second before carefully returning the embrace.

"Hey, I know you don't know us, but it'll take time for Twilight to work out the return spell." Rainbow spoke to the human quietly, feeling the tears soaking into her fur and mane. "Take that time to talk to both of us. Get to know us some. Maybe that way it'll be easier to leave this place behind." She felt a little awkward. I sorta wish Fluttershy was here. This is more her thing than mine; I'm a little worried I'll screw up.

The hug didn't last long. Duran backed away after a couple of heartbeats, regaining control of himself. His voice was still a little choked up when he thanked her, promising that he'd speak to both ponies once he woke up. Rainbow helped him as he limped to his sleeping quarters. She hadn't been in the room, but there wasn't anything remarkable inside; only a pair of long, heavy-bladed knives and slightly untidy blankets made this room look any different from one of the uninhabited ones. He was already asleep when the door closed behind her.

A quick shower washed the blood and nasty-smelling ichor out of her coat and gave Rainbow a chance to think. Um. I don't think I've actually talked to Twilight about bringing Duran back to Equestria with us, she realized, standing under the spray. She had come to find the shower room oddly calming, with the echo of the falling water hissing throughout the huge tiled space, and the tiny drops drumming against her back and her mane. Surely she won't argue about it, though. And we can't leave him here. That would be seriously not right. Rainbow knew that the human was dangerous. She'd seen him kill five creatures right in front of her, and he'd casually mentioned killing several more creatures in his brief explanation for his tardiness only minutes ago. On the other hoof, though, he'd been decidedly non-hostile and even friendly towards her. Even when she'd gotten in his face and shoved him, he hadn't lashed out. Gilda, for example, probably would have reacted aggressively to that; heck, she'd known other ponies that might have lashed out with that kind of provocation. Like me, she thought ruefully.

The problem was that the human had been a friend to them, of sorts. Rainbow Dash was loyal to her friends, sticking by them even in bad situations, and sometimes even when she shouldn't. It had been hard to stand up to Gilda at the party Pinkie Pie had thrown for her, even after it had been clear that Gilda was being horrible to Pinkie. (And Fluttershy, as she'd later learned) Even after the griffon had shouted at and outright insulted her other friends. Rainbow squeezed her eyes shut at the memory, moving her head so the spray was washing over her face and forelock. That had been terrible, and she was still trying to figure out how to sort the situation out; she hadn't spoken to Gilda since then, though she desperately wanted to.

This isn't what I should be worrying about right now, she thought to herself. I need to go talk to Twilight.

Shaking water out of the polychromatic mane that gave her part of her name, Rainbow stepped out of the shower to dry off. Sticking Applejack's hat back on her head, (the pegasus had gotten used to the feeling of that hat. It was going to be kind of hard to give it back at this point!) she trotted briskly back down the hall to talk to Twilight.

Chapter 8

Rainbow found her friend right where she expected to; seated at the desk in her bedroom, right across the hall from where she'd just left Duran. Instead of staring at the terminal, though, the unicorn had the human's journal levitated in front of her, and was reading it with every sign of interest. She set it aside as the pegasus entered.

"I have to thank you again for showing me this, Rainbow," Twilight spoke before Rainbow could. "It's a very interesting read, if a bit disturbing, and it's been good for me to have when I'm taking a break from my equations."

"Glad you like it, Twilight. Hey, I've got something to run by you…" She quickly summarized the last few minutes, including the conversation she'd just had with the human, ending with, "…and I kinda told him we'd bring him along when we went home. We can do that, right?"

Twilight was silent for a long moment. Long enough that Rainbow started rubbing the back of her neck nervously. Finally, she said, "Rainbow, I really wish you'd talked to me before making an offer like that. I'm not entirely comfortable with bringing this human back to Ponyville with us."

"What?" Rainbow felt a little sick to her stomach. "But Twilight, he's been busting his flank trying to help us! He saved my hide from those bugs, let us stay here in his home, and nearly got killed trying to bring food back!" She shook her head in disbelief. "Are we just gonna leave him here?"

The unicorn sighed. "I'm uncomfortable with that option, too, Rainbow. I don't want to leave the poor soul here alone, but he may be just too dangerous to bring back with us! I've been reading that," she nodded at the journal, "and some parts of it seriously disturb me. He's clearly inclined towards violence, he fights and even kills other creatures fairly often, and with no sign of remorse that I've seen." She shook her head. "I'm not sure I'd want someone like that around Ponyville; he might hurt somepony."

"You don't, huh?" Rainbow asked quietly. "Well… if that's really what you think, maybe I shouldn't come back with you either."

Twilight clearly didn't understand. "What are you talking about, Rainbow Dash?"

"You remember when we got here, those bug things that were coming after us when I told you to run?" Twilight nodded. "Well, I don't think you saw, but I attacked them to try and keep them off of you. I even tried pretty hard to kill the first one." Twilight gasped, but Rainbow continued without pausing. "I hit it really hard, Twi. Right in the back of the head. The only reason I didn't kill it was because it was really tough, it wasn't because I was trying not to. I stopped trying with the other four, but that was just because they were too tough to hurt." Rainbow chewed her lip, tension making her ears lay flat. The next admission was harder. "And when I figured out what those gun things in the armory were, I started wondering if we could use them. Some of the monsters I've seen come out of the Everfree are dangerous, and I started thinking about whether I could use those guns to hurt or kill something rather than let that something hurt or kill one of my friends. And you know what, Twi?" The pegasus looked up and met her friend's eyes. "I think I could. I really do. So, do you want to leave me here, too?"

"O-of course not, Rainbow Dash! That's a totally different issue! I know you; you'd never hurt anypony! And besides, you're my friend, I could never leave you here."

Rainbow snorted bitterly. "Ha. 'Never hurt anypony.' I used to get in fights all the time in school. Plus, you weren't in Ponyville when I first got there. I got in big trouble and nearly lost my job the first couple of weeks I was there when I beat the hay out of these two colts; only reason I got to stay was because somepony else heard what they'd been saying, and I still got a serious black mark from the Mayor. Nopony talks about it anymore, though." Rainbow could tell that Twilight had never heard any of this. "All I'm saying is, give him a chance. I agree that he's probably kind of dangerous, but I don't think he's dangerous to us, or to anypony or anything that doesn't try to hurt him first. I don't think it's fair to judge him by the way he's acted in this place. It's worse than the Everfree, and there's nowhere to go to get away from it. And besides," she gave her friend a strained smile, "would you believe he's almost as nervous about us as you are about him? He was acting like he thought Ponyville was gonna attack him or something. I got him to promise to talk to us, get to know us, while you're working out the way to get us home. Could… could you at least make the same promise? Just talk to him, get to know him, and maybe he won't be quite as scary?"

Twilight hesitated again, but finally nodded. "All right, Rainbow. I won't make up my mind yet. But I can't promise what my final decision will be. I feel responsible for keeping Ponyville safe, and I don't think the Princess would want me to bring a dangerous alien into Equestria, but if I decide he's not dangerous to the Principality or the village then I'll let him come along."

Rainbow let out the breath she'd been holding. "That's all I'm asking for, Twilight. Thanks." It wasn't a lot, but it was a step in the right direction. Now if only Duran would cooperate.

Leaving the unicorn to her reading, Rainbow figured she'd go ahead and get the supplies Duran had retrieved and get them stored. That was really something Twilight would probably be better at, but Rainbow thought it would be better to leave the unicorn to her spell studies; she didn't really want to stay in this world any longer than she absolutely had to.

She even wound up getting a fair bit of exercise out of the deal. That cargo box thing was heavy, not as heavy as the battle armor suit, but still a long way from light. She wound up having to drag the thing all the way down the long hallway to the mess storage. The pegasus felt better once she got it there, though; she hadn't had a chance to really exert herself since she and Twilight had gotten here.

Opening the thing up was a nice surprise. Duran hadn't been kidding about how full it was; she didn't see any airspace inside. It was completely packed with fruits, vegetables, and other plant matter, and as she started sorting out the contents into the storage bins she realized he'd actually used things like grain stalks and large, succulent leaves as packing material. This was way more than two weeks' worth of supplies.

In fact, it actually proved to be more than three, as that was how long it took Twilight to finish modifying her portal spell. Rainbow occupied some of her time exploring the rest of the base, (she never did find that pile of skeletons, though she did find another entrance) exercising, or flipping idly through the library mainframe. She found all kinds of stuff in there, including stuff that Duran had never stumbled across. She was particularly proud of the entertainment database she'd found. She'd seen movies a few times on visits to Cloudsdale, but nothing like what she found in the human library. These not only had sound, but full color as well! Plus bizarre, fantastical visuals like nothing she'd ever imagined. After this discovery, the three made a point of watching one of the films after dinner each evening. Rainbow and Twilight took turns picking the movie, though Duran insisted they check with him, as resident 'human cultural expert,' before deciding on a particular film. Rainbow resented that a bit at first, but only briefly. Annoyed, she'd privately watched a film he'd vetoed and discovered that, rather than the adventure story she'd thought it was from the summary, it was instead filled with the most graphic, grotesque torture sequence she'd ever seen. Horrified and sickened, she'd gone to the human demanding an explanation for the depravity she'd seen. He'd reassured her that nothing on that film had actually been real, and that, while some of his people enjoyed watching that kind of thing, he most certainly wasn't among them. Indeed, when she'd pulled it up to show him what she'd been talking about, he'd looked away and shut it off after only a few minutes, a nauseated expression on his face like he'd worn when she'd asked if she and Twilight should worry about him eating them. (His verbal response had been a horrified, "Eat another sapient? Fires forsake me, I'm no monster!") Afterward, she'd listened when he'd said the ponies might not enjoy a particular film.

The second base entrance she found was interesting as well. The base evidently extended all the way through the mountain, and the second entrance opened into a valley nestled in the heart of the range. The really peculiar bit was that the valley had actually been leveled out and paved. The paved area was immense, and must have taken a truly immense amount of time to build, and the only clue to its function lay in the four deep hemispherical pits, each outlined with a bloom of black scorch marks, spaced around the perimeter of the huge field. She meant to ask Duran if he had any idea what the field was used for, but somehow never got around to it.

She also occupied some of her time in the minor prank war she'd started with the human. Rainbow had managed to find a command in the computer (as Duran had told her the terminals were called) that allowed her to broadcast sounds throughout the entire base, so she'd first used it in combination with a ghost movie she'd watched without either of the others present to make it sound like terrifying moaning phantoms were roaming up and down the bunkroom hallways in the middle of the night. Twilight and Duran had been utterly shocked, bolting out of their bedrooms to try and figure out what was going on, only to have the pegasus burst out in peals of delighted laugher at the success of her joke. Twilight had just sighed and let out an exasperated, "Rainbow…"

The human had quirked an eyebrow and remarked, "You realize, of course, that this means war."

The next morning, her bedroom door had been locked with a randomized password. It had taken her nearly an hour to figure out how to reset the passcode to get it open. He'd been leaning on a wall out in the hallway, smirking, and she'd jokingly shaken a hoof at him and vowed revenge.

She'd retaliated by learning the password trick, and sneaking into his room to set the most obscenely pornographic film she could find (and she'd found some pretty gross ones before she'd figured out how to filter them out) playing on his desk terminal looped at maximum volume, with a locked password so he couldn't disable it. He'd actually had to ask her for the password to turn it off, blushing furiously, which she'd counted as a major win. Then, the next time she went to take a shower, activating one shower head caused every other one in the room to come on at full pressure. The thundering roar echoing through the cavernous space had sounded like a huge waterfall for a moment, and made her worry for a heart-stopping moment that something had gone really badly wrong, until the various shower heads had started actually pulsing in rhythm, somehow playing an awesome rock-and-roll song Rainbow had recognized as one she'd enjoyed from the movie they'd all watched the previous evening. That time she'd had to ask him to turn it off, (after letting it run for a while) and she never did figure out how he'd done it.

They'd eventually started keeping score, with the target of the prank rating it on a scale of one to ten, and the score counting as a negative if it caught Twilight instead of its intended target.

Most of that time, though, Rainbow had spent swapping stories with Duran. She got Twilight to join in, too, as often as she could. The unicorn and the pegasus had very different tastes, but the human had plenty of tales for both of them. Rainbow preferred adventure stories, especially scary ones, and was constantly asking about how Duran had survived, and about kinds of creatures he'd encountered and how he'd dealt with them. Twilight, on the other hoof, was fascinated by the world he'd come from. The human's stories of the huge, shining cities of the Tethinar Imperium's central worlds, the strange savage landscapes of the frontier worlds, and the vast space ships that traveled between them often held the unicorn academic enraptured for hours. His knowledge of the history of his world was extensive, and Twilight enjoyed that just as much, even his recounting of its many wars. Rainbow had to admit the war stories were kind of cool, too, and she'd found the great Arcane Wars that had ripped his home world apart more than a thousand years ago to be fascinating in a horrible way. Once she'd realized how interesting the subject was, the pegasus had started pestering him for more of those stories, too, and by the time they were ready to go, she knew more about the Arcane Wars than Twilight did.

Rainbow had been secretly overjoyed (though she pretended to be tremendously bored) when Duran went through some of the N.A.I.S.'s history archives with Twilight, offering possible explanations of some of the events that had confused or disturbed the lavender unicorn and giving her insight about the way humans in general thought. That had been the first major breakthrough between the human and the unicorn, and marked the point where Rainbow no longer had to push her friend into spending time talking to their 'host.'

For his part, Duran listened to even the dullest, most boring story either pony told as though it was the most thrilling adventure tale. Simple things, like when Twilight talked about her time in the Canterlot Academy or when Rainbow couldn't come up with anything else one day and wound up telling him about how she'd helped Pinkie set up a surprise party, was more than enough for him. Rainbow thought it was both sad and embarrassing; she didn't know anywhere near as many cool adventure stories as he did (probably because she hadn't spent years fighting hostile predators) but he barely cared about the difference between a cool story and a lame one when she told it. It seemed just listening to someone else talk was enough to make the human happy.

One particular story stuck with Rainbow, partially because it was exciting and disturbing, where most of his survival stories were exciting and scary. It had been during the first week they'd spent in the base, and she'd just finished telling the human about the time she'd won the Best Young Fliers' Competition, pulling off a trick everypony else had thought was just an old pony's tale in the process. (She'd sort of… glossed over her minor breakdown right before the competition.) He'd thoroughly enjoyed the story, even sharing a celebratory hoofbump with her. (He did it oddly, lacking hooves. He'd just balled his hand into a fist and thumped the knuckles against her outstretched hoof.)

"Thanks, Dash," He'd said. "Any preferences on what you'd like to hear in return?"

"Yeah," She'd answered, "How about what happened to your arm?" She'd been trying to get that story for days, but he'd been really reluctant to tell it. Rainbow had hoped that telling one of her best stories would get him to loosen up enough to share it.

He'd hesitated long enough that she thought she'd blown it, but had finally nodded. "Ok, I guess I do need to tell someone that story sooner or later, and I never did write it down." He'd smiled wanly, "But I warn you, it's not as interesting as you might think." The human had paused, gathering his thoughts.

"Have I told you what a Tank Bug is?" He'd started, and Rainbow had shaken her head. "Well, each one looks pretty different, but they've all got a few things in common. They've got this thick, heavy armored shell, a pair of gigantic pincers out front, and six legs. Oh, and they're huge, the size of small buildings back home. They've got to weigh seventy, eighty tons at least." Rainbow had formed a mental image of a water tank with legs and claws, and figured that's where he'd gotten the name from. "That's about where the physical similarities end; I've seen some with a smooth carapace, others with a forest of tentacles coming off of their backs, some with multiple heads, some with horns, and some without, and a whole bunch of other things. Their behavior is all similar, though; they like to dig underground in soft soil and sit there, waiting for something to come by. When it does, if they're awake, they lunge up out of the ground and start chasing it. If they're drowsy, they usually wait until it's really close, then grab it with a claw and drag it underground to eat." Rainbow had realized suddenly that she'd seen a similar creature when she'd been up on the mountain looking for Duran, and interrupted briefly to describe what she'd seen.

"Yeah, that sounds like a Tank Bug," the human had mused. "The big scythe claws are new, but it wouldn't surprise me a bit, and the behavior fits. Anyway. A few years ago, I was living in a cave a really long way from here. It was a really nice one; the entrance was just big enough to let me in, so most of the bigger predators couldn't fit, the inside was really roomy, and there were some cracks in the ceiling that would let smoke out. Plus, there was this little freshwater spring in the back. Honestly, until I found this place, that cave was the nicest living spot I'd seen since I got here." Duren had drifted off into the past for a moment, and Rainbow had felt the same mixture of horror and pity she sometimes felt when listening to the other's survival stories. "I really liked that place. Lived there for about three months before the Tank moved in." His mouth had twisted in recollection. "Those things are impossible to live near. They're really good at hiding for something so big, and they don't have any predators. If one moves in close to you, it's safest to just move out, but I liked that cave, so I decided to see if I could kill the damn thing." Rainbow had twitched a bit at the curse; she and Twilight had both asked the human not to do it, but he forgot sometimes. "So I set up a deadfall. I was going to lure it through a canyon and drop the heaviest rocks I could find on it; I figured that would kill it pretty dead, and I'd have food for months. I spent about a week undermining this huge stone outcrop and bracing it, then rigging the bracings so I could pull 'em out from the ground, then I went to find the Tank. I got lucky, it was awake enough to chase me, and I swear the things have a sadistic streak; he stayed just far enough back that he couldn't reach me, and just let me run." He'd grinned at the memory. "Backfired on him that time. I got him right where I wanted him, and dropped half the damn cliffside right on his head. I was pretty sure he was dead, but I decided to let him sit under that pile of rocks for a few days just to make sure. Came back on the fourth day, and the pile of rocks hadn't even shifted, so I figured it was safe to dig it up."

"Dig it up? Why would you want to do that?" Rainbow had asked.

"Because I was hungry, and that was a heck of a lot of meat to let go to waste!" He'd answered with a wry grin. The pegasus occasionally forgot about Duren's predatory tendencies. Most of his stories didn't emphasize that much, but this one did. "I'd started moving rocks, trying to figure out how I was going to crack that huge shell, when the claw came out of the pile. Just shot out," He'd lunged forward suddenly, right hand extended in a grasping claw. Rainbow had shied back, startled, before he could grab her. "Like that. Heh, you're quicker than I was. That claw grabbed me, I'm sure you can guess where," he'd gestured to his artificial left arm, "and started dragging me into the rock pile. I was terrified, of course. I'd seen Tank Bugs swallow other creatures whole, not exactly a prospect to relish! I fought, but Tanks are so big that it was pretty much a lost cause from the start. All it accomplished was to make him tighten down with that claw and, sharp as it was, that meant it sliced clean through down to the bone and dug in. Pretty memorable feeling, let me tell you." Rainbow had shuddered, but it got worse. "So there I am, being dragged into a pile of rocks, with this huge Bug claw basically holding on to the bones in my arm. It hurt more than I thought anything could ever hurt, and I suddenly had this absolutely crazy idea. I mean, it had me; I was going to die unless I did something, and I'd basically lost my arm already, right? So I grabbed my left hand with my right one," He'd suited words to actions, gripping his left wrist with his right hand, "set my feet, and pulled. There was this snap, and this horrible tearing feeling, and all of a sudden I was holding my own hand, only it wasn't mine because it wasn't attached any more. I stood there for a second, I think I was kind of in shock, and then I took off running for my cave. The Tank comes up out of the rocks, just shrugs and the whole pile falls apart. Not only was he not dead, the big bastard wasn't even hurt; I'd just given him a burrow he hadn't had to dig himself. I knew he was about to take off after me again, so I threw it at him."

The way he said it had confused the pegasus. "Threw what?"

"What else? My arm!" He'd let out a snort of bitter laughter. "I was still carrying the silly thing! Not sure what I thought I was going to do with it! So I chucked it at him. I don't know, maybe I figured he might slow down some to munch. I think he did, but not by a whole lot; I squeezed into my cave and he was right behind me. He couldn't fit into the entry, but his claws could. He reached in, one claw snapping," The human had waved his hand right in front of Rainbow's face, making a claw with it and grabbing repeatedly an inch or so in front of her forelock, "like that, but I was able to scoot back far enough that he couldn't reach. I was bleeding like a fountain, too, but that I could fix with my fire right there. Stuck my stump in the coals, and whoooo, I only thought it had hurt before! Worse, I hadn't eaten in a while, and I'm ashamed to admit… I smell pretty good when I'm cooked." The pegasus's stomach had turned a few times, hearing that. "Stopped the bleeding, but I passed out. Guess I was far enough back, and the rock was strong enough, that the Tank gave up while I was unconscious. When I woke up, I grabbed what I could with one hand and took off as soon as night fell, and didn't stop moving for about a week. Never saw that particular Bug again, but I never saw my cave again, either." He'd looked despondent. "I liked that cave."

Rainbow hadn't been quite sure how to respond, but one statement had stood out. "You… smelled good cooked? But I thought you said you didn't eat, uh, creatures that could talk?" She'd glanced around nervously.

The human had looked horrified. "Oh, flames and furies, I don't think I could actually eat another sapient, or even bits of myself, even if I was starving! That was just a joke; a bad one, I'll admit. It did smell good, but blech," he'd mimed retching, "Haven't your folk ever encountered anything that smelled good, but really wasn't?" The conversation had drifted off to discussions of their respective diets, which was way less disturbing.

About two weeks after that particular conversation, Rainbow and Duran were sitting in the mess hall, playing a game of horseshoes, though Duran thought it was funny to give the pegasus human boots he'd pulled out of storage to throw while he used steel horseshoes he'd made in the machine shop. They were idly discussing something of no particular importance, and Rainbow was ahead a comfortable five games to two, when Twilight burst excitedly into the room.

"I've got it!" the unicorn exclaimed, skidding to a stop, "I'm finally finished! Woo hoo!"

"What, you've got the portal spell fixed?" Rainbow asked, and the academic nodded ecstatically. "Dude, that's awesome! Can you cast it now?"

Twilight lost a bit of her enthusiasm. "Actually… it won't work here. I need to cast it as close to where we landed as possible, and the sooner the better."

"Wait." Duran interjected. "You have to cast it out there? How soon?"

"As soon as possible." Twilight replied seriously. "There's a congruency between that particular point and Equestria, but it decays with time. I'm reasonably certain I can still get us home, but after a few more days my calculations get a lot more uncertain. Oh, and it needs to be during the daytime; the congruency has already decayed to the point that I need an extra sympathetic element, and with Princess Celestia being both my teacher and Equestria's leader, sunlight is the best one I'm going to find."

The human's jaw sagged in disbelief. "You need to go out there, where there was a major magical event only three weeks ago, find the center of said event, and cast a spell, and you need to do it during the day?"

Twilight blinked at the vehemence in Duran's tone. "Um, yes. And I need to do it sometime in the next two or three days."

Duran stared at the unicorn speechlessly. Rainbow, who'd heard more stories about the local wildlife and was more familiar with the way this world worked than the unicorn, chipped in. "Uh, what I think he means is; that's gonna be crazy dangerous. There're still all kinds of monsters out there, and they can smell magic, remember? As soon as you start casting that spell…"

The human's mouth closed with a snap, and he spoke up again, cutting the cyan pegasus off. "If that's the way it has to be, then so be it. You'll need someone to keep the predators off your back, Milady. Give me the rest of today to get one of the heavy battle suits fitted, and we'll go." Now it was Rainbow's turn to look shocked. Duran shook his head at her. "They're not going away any time soon, Dash. If this is the only way to get the two of you home, then all I can do is to carry the heaviest firepower I can manage and try like mad to keep you both safe." He sighed. "I only wish I could get one of the blasted tanks working."

"Hold it." Twilight interjected, putting as much authority as she could into her tone. "It's not going to be just the two of us, Duran. You're coming, too, especially if you're going to be right there guarding us anyway!"

Rainbow, who'd been about to say pretty much the same thing, nodded so enthusiastically her hat nearly fell off, "Darn right you are! Come on, dude, you can't still be scared of Equestria, I thought you were getting along with the two of us pretty well!"

"I didn't want to assume…"

"That's enough, you two." Twilight interrupted whatever the human was going to say. "Duran, we both sincerely appreciate the generosity you've shown us over the last few weeks. I'm going to quote Rainbow Dash, and say that it wouldn't be at all right for us to leave you here while we went home. So, on behalf of Princess Celestia, I'd like to extend you an invitation to return with us."

"I-" Duran ducked his head and gave one of his people's odd, flourishing bows. Rainbow always expected him to fall on his face, but somehow the biped always stayed upright. "Thank you, milady. I appreciate the offer, and I'll take you up on it."

Twilight frowned slightly. "Would you please stop calling me that? I've told you about a million times now, my name is Twilight Sparkle!"

"Of course, milady Twilight. Please excuse me." He said, bowing again. Rainbow snickered.

"It's Twilight! Just Twilight! You don't need the honorific!" Rainbow's snickers got louder, despite her attempts to keep them quiet. The human and the unicorn went through this exchange periodically, and it never stopped being funny; he'd explained once that mages that were capable in every field were a very high social class in his home world, and he tended to refer to Twilight as though she outranked him socially. That annoyed the unicorn (who most definitely did not see herself as part of the nobility) no end, while amusing Rainbow. She's so funny when she's mad!

"Right. Sorry, mil- Twilight. I'll try and remember next time." Twilight gave the human a suspicious sidelong look, clearly expecting him not to remember next time, (much like the last few times he'd said that, as her expression eloquently said) and Rainbow nearly choked trying to suppress her giggles.

"I'm sure you'll try." Twilight sighed. "I'll be glad to get home, but there are things I wish we didn't have to leave here. I'm going to miss that library computer, that's for sure."

"Actually, that we might be able to take along with us," Duren said, "the memory core is designed to be easily copied, and it's not very big. I can save a copy of the blueprints for a simple terminal station on my pocket computer, and once we've got that built, we can find plans for more elaborate setups in the library core itself. I checked that when I first found this place, hoping I could bring some of this tech home with me."

The unicorn smiled delightedly. "Really? Oh, that's wonderful! All that information could be amazingly useful back home, not to mention how interesting the history and fiction sections are! How much time would it take to make a copy?"

"None. I've got one already made; I can just pull it out of stores tomorrow morning when we're ready to leave." He blinked. "Speaking of leaving, I need to go get my armor ready. Don't look for me at dinner; I'm going to need several hours, and I'll probably go straight to bed when I'm done." He smiled, and bowed again. "So if you'll excuse me, ladies, I'll go get started. Make sure to get a good night's sleep; we'll need to be sharp tomorrow if we want to live to see you home." Waving, the human left the mess hall.

"We're really gonna get to go home?" Rainbow asked, wings flaring excitedly. "Great job, Twilight, I knew you could do it!"

"I'm just glad I managed to work it out when I did," the unicorn admitted, "If it had taken me just another two days, it could have been bad." She gave Rainbow a wry look. "Though it does mean you're going to have to give Applejack her hat back."

The pegasus sheepishly adjusted her headwear where it sat on her rainbow-striped mane. "Heh heh, yeah, I'm gonna miss it after wearing it around for this long. I've kinda gotten used to it, you know? But it'll be great to see A.J. again."

The two ponies grabbed a few bites to eat and left the mess hall. Twilight went back to her bedroom to rest, so she'd be ready the next morning. Rainbow wasn't tired, and she'd never really stopped being curious about the armor suits, so she headed to the armory to pester Duran while he got his suit ready.

He had the left arm of one of the big troll-suits open when she got there and was messing around inside it. She stood and watched for a minute, not wanting to break his concentration. It looked like he was disconnecting the big gun mounted in the suit's forearm, a suspicion that was borne out when he lifted out the big, heavy barrel. He caught sight of the cyan pegasus when he turned to set it down. "Hey, Dash. Need something?"

"Just wanted to see what you were doing." She watched him carefully set the heavy barrel assembly down, noting the odd rings spaced along its length.

"Well, right now I'm swapping out the weapon mount on this suit. The Magshot here," he tapped the gun he'd just removed, "is great for single, hard targets at long range, but I'll have the missile launchers if I need to hit something hard, and I won't need really long range out in the hills. I'm putting in a heavy machine gun instead; it'll help me deal with multiple targets, and its range should be more than enough out in the badlands." He lifted out another component from the suit's forearm, though Rainbow had no idea what the big boxy thing was supposed to do.

"Do you need any help with that? What you said in the mess hall made it sound like it was going to take a long time." She wandered over to look at the heavy box thing he'd just set down.

"No, but thanks for the offer. It's mostly a single person job, and most of it needs these." He wiggled his fingers at her. "Feel free to hang around and talk to me, though."

Rainbow did just that, chatting with the human idly while he fiddled with the big suit. She did learn that when the human talked about wanting a 'tank,' he wasn't actually talking about a water tank; (which didn't make much sense anyway) he was actually referring to the huge armored vehicles sitting in the hangar. The pegasus couldn't help but agree; one of those things would make surviving the next day a lot easier.

Twilight's announcement had been so sudden that Rainbow hadn't really had time to think, but as she talked to Duran she was getting more and more tense. She knew she was doing a terrible job of hiding it; she caught herself laying her ears back quite a bit, and she was having major difficulty standing still. She flew restlessly around the hunchbacked suit the human was working on, and even when she was on the ground she kept fidgeting, nervously spreading and folding her wings. She hoped the rustle of her feathers wasn't bothering Duran, but he seemed way calmer than she was. Rainbow gradually realized how scared she was about facing this world's monsters again tomorrow.

Worried that trying to keep it in might lead to another breakdown like she'd had at the Best Young Fliers' Competition, she decided to speak up about it. "So, Duran… I gotta admit, I'm, ah, a liiitle nervous about what's going to happen tomorrow." She laughed uneasily.

He finished connecting the wires he was messing with and turned to face her, eyebrow quirked. "A little nervous, eh? You're a good bit braver than I am, then. I'm utterly terrified." She started to laugh, before she realized he was dead serious. "I mean it, Dash. We're going to be going out there, where there's already a high concentration of predators, and sending out a flare to get as much attention as we can. This is what the army back home would call a nightmare scenario." He shook his head bemusedly. "I am going to do my damnedest to shoot the things down before they get to Twilight, 'cause they're going to be making a beeline for her. Before she starts casting, though, they're going to be going for you." He stared into her eyes unblinkingly.

"What, me? Why?" Her fear started to crystallize into a hard knot of panic. Maybe speaking up wasn't the best idea…

"Because Twilight and I have conscious control over our magic use. You don't, or at least I don't think you do; you use your magic instinctively, and you do it almost all the time. I can sense some right now, and all you're doing is sitting still. Before Twilight starts her spell, you're going to look tastier to them than either of us will. They are going to be trying really hard to get you." Rainbow started shivering, lowering her head and closing her eyes. She could feel her ears laying tight to her neck, and her wings were clamped against her sides.

Suddenly, she felt the human's hand on her chin. She was a little surprised; he'd been really shy about touching her. She opened her eyes and realized he was kneeling right in front of her as he gently pulled her head up so he could look her in the eye. "But you know what? They won't get you. First, because if I remember right, you're not exactly easy to get." His mouth quirked in a crooked smile. "The first time I saw you, you were out-dancing no less than five murderpedes, right?"

"That didn't last long…" she began dejectedly, but he held up a finger to stop her.

"Of course it didn't. Murderpedes are probably the fastest, nastiest creature I've ever seen. And there were five of them. I've only ever fought those things when I was wearing armor, I've never gone against that many at once, and even then they've tagged me six or seven times. Through the armor. That you lasted as long as you did was downright astonishing. If I hadn't been a half-asleep fool and shot the things when I should have, you would have gotten out of that without a scratch, Dash. And if there had only been one or two, I think you could have danced around them all day long. That's amazing." Rainbow felt a flush of pride warring with her fear, and her ears lifted while her wings relaxed a bit. That was kinda awesome, actually. "And if you can do that, you can stay clear of nearly anything we might run in to. And that brings me to the second reason; I'll be there too." His blue-green eyes were hard as steel. "All you'll need to do is stay clear long enough for me to deal with anything trying to get you. I've handled nearly anything we could run in to, back when the best I had to work with was a spear, Dash." He thumped the leg of the battle suit beside him. "This thing is far, far better than any spear. So, like I said, if anything comes after you, just dance with it until I deal with it. Once Twilight starts her spell, they're going to ignore you and me both and go straight for her; that's going to be the tricky part. I'll deal with them as fast as I can, but you may need to try and distract some of them until she gets that spell up, and we can get you home. It's not going to be easy. It's not going to be fun. But we can do it. The three of us are going to beat this place, hear? We're gonna win. You with me?" He held out a fist.

Rainbow's confidence came flooding back in a heady rush. "Duh, of course I am!" She thumped his knuckles with a hoof. We can totally do this. I never should have doubted!

Another thought occured to her in that moment. "Hey, Duran... do you think there's anything in the armory I could use?"

"What, you mean the guns?" Rainbow nodded firmly. The human gave her a searching look. "Are you sure you want to use that stuff? I was given to understand that your people were... less inclined toward the kind of actions those tools facilitate, shall we say."

"We are." Rainbow had been mulling over the issue since her converation with Twilight after discovering the armory. She'd asked Duran several times to tell her exactly what the various weapons did, and he'd been very thourough. The human weapons were powerful tools in a fight, giving their wielders tremendous advantages over anyone who didn't have them. "And if we were in Equestria, that would matter. We're not, though, are we?"

Duran shook his head slowly. "Not yet, anyway."

"Right." The pegasus gave another decisive nod, hat bouncing atop her flame-colored forelock. "And we'll have a lot better chance of getting there if I help you defend us. If I can use one of those guns, there's less chance I'll get hurt, and there'll be more things I can stop, right?" The human nodded. "Then every one I stop is one less for you to have to deal with, and one less that might slip by to hurt one of us."

"Dash," Duran said quietly, "you know what those guns are designed to do. They're killing tools. Are you sure you'd be alright with using them?"

Dash took a deep breath, letting it out slowly. "Yeah, I think so." Then she added, in a moment of rare frankness, "Yeah, there's a chance I'll freak out the first time I have to use it. But I don't think I will. You and Twilight are gonna be depending on me, just like Twilight and I'll be depending on you, and we'll be depending on Twilight. I don't let my friends down. Ever." She gave him a level look.

The human nodded, a slow grin spreading across his face. It had a predatory edge to it. "I knew there was a reason I liked you." He stood. Turning back to his armor, he remarked over his shoulder. "Alright, I'll see what I can do, once I get this finished. I can't promise anything, you understand; those weapons are built for humans, and it'll be a job finding one you could use. You remember our fun with the battle armor." Rainbow winced, and nodded. At her urging, he'd tried a few times to modify one of the battle suits so the pegasus could wear it, but Duran hadn't been able to manage it. He himself was just barely large enough to use the suits, and after a few attempts, he remarked that he'd probably need to custom-build a suit from scratch to get it to fit her. Such a project would probably take months.

Rainbow sighed. "Okay, if you'll try, that's all I can ask, huh?"

"I will definitely try." Duran promised. "You should probably go get some rest, if you can. Tomorrow's going to be interesting."

"Ah, I don't think I can sleep right now. Maybe later." The pegasus brightened, the heavy subject out of the way. "Besides, I'll get all the sleep I want back in my own house. I've totally got to show you my place, it's awesome!" She was looking forward to introducing the human to the rest of her friends, too. That thought reminded her… "Hey, just so we're clear, you are coming back to Ponyville with us, right?"

He hesitated. Just for a split second, but it was long enough for Rainbow to notice. "Yeah. Yeah, I think I am."

She returned his earlier searching look. That hesitation worried her, but there wasn't really anything she could say that she hadn't said already. I'll drag your butt through that portal if I have to, metalhead. No way am I leaving a friend in this place. She didn't vocalize the thought, though, and just changed the subject. The two stayed up talking about other things for hours while Duran finished working on the armor, finally turning in around midnight to get what sleep they could. To Rainbow's disappointment, the armor modifications took longer than the human had planned, and he hadn't had time to find her a weapon. Oh, well, she thought, I'll just have to work with what I've got.

Chapter 9

Duran woke Rainbow and Twilight early the next morning. Rainbow wasn't actually asleep when he came to get her; she'd been restless all night, only managing to sleep for a few minutes at a time. So, when her door had opened and the human had quietly said, "Dash, we need to get ready to go," she'd been on her feet and fully awake within moments.

The pegasus was almost fizzing with nervous energy. She barely paused long enough to grab Applejack's hat off of her desk and plop it on her head one last time before winging her way out of her bedroom and finding that he'd already woken Twilight, who was standing behind the human sleepily rubbing her eyes. Duran asked the two ponies to wait in the entry room while he retrieved his suit, advising them to take the time to wake up.

Rainbow Dash didn't need it, virtually dancing around the room while she waited and chattering at Twilight without even listening to herself. She felt like she was never going to be tired.

Twilight Sparkle, on the other hand, very definitely needed the extra time to wake up. By the time the two friends heard the human's footsteps coming back up the hallway, she'd managed to rub the sleep out of her eyes, and was responding to about a third of what Dash was saying. It would have been difficult to respond to more than that, actually, since the pegasus was talking so quickly she sounded almost like Pinkie Pie.

Rainbow forced herself to calm down as the heavy, thumping footfalls came closer to the door. Twilight was still watching her bemusedly, wondering if she was going to stay that hyper, when the door finally opened.

It was the first time either of them had seen one of the heavy battle suits in motion. The big, wide doors the entry room sported were just barely enough to admit the massive suit, and Duran had to maneuver carefully so that its boxy, swollen shoulders didn't hit the sides of the frame. Dash could feel the floor tremble slightly with each footfall, and even with the helmet open the suit looked incredibly alien and threatening, far more so than the lighter suit they'd first seen him in.

He parked the suit, opened the chest plate, and swung himself out. "Okay, ladies, a few things we need to go over before we head out. First up; Dash." The pegasus saluted. "I know you're going to be tempted to fly. Don't do it. I'm not sure how far up you could get before the ship does something about it, and I'd rather not find out, okay?" She nodded. "Second; Milady Twilight." The unicorn rolled her eyes and made an inarticulate sound of frustration. "Right, right, just Twilight. Sorry." Dash pressed a hoof to her mouth to muffle her snickers. "You are probably going to be tempted to use your magic if we get attacked on the way. Like I told Dash, don't do it. I've already warned her," He glanced at the pegasus, who sobered and nodded again, "that anything we run across on the way is probably going to go after her first. They'll do that as long as you don't use your magic; let them. Dash can take care of herself long enough for me to handle the problem." Twilight started to protest, but Duran knelt and laid his hand lightly on her muzzle to forestall her. "Listen; if you get hurt and can't cast your spell, we are all screwed. Your job on the walk there is to keep a low profile and let me and Dash handle anything that comes up. Okay?"

Twilight nodded slowly. "I don't really like it. I can take care of myself if I have to, but I'll hold back if you're sure that's what's best."

"I am absolutely sure." Turning, he removed a black box about half the size of a pony's torso from where it was hanging on his suit, and lifted what looked like a collection of straps off of a small hook on the suit's back. "Of the three of us, you're the least expendable. Neither Dash nor me will be going anywhere without you, and I mean to make certain you're kept safe. I'm not suggesting that I'm going to neglect Dash's safety, or mine, but without your magic I get the impression that you're a lot more vulnerable than she is, is that right?" At Twilight's reluctant nod (and Rainbow's far more enthusiastic one) he held out the box. "That's why I want you to carry this."

The unicorn looked at the box suspiciously. Rainbow didn't think it looked all that heavy, and she hoped it wouldn't slow her friend down. "Uh, what is that?" The academic asked.

"This is a copy of the library core." Twilight's violet eyes widened in surprise.

"That little thing?"

Duran nodded. "This little thing holds more than six thousand years of written history. Plus information on all the science and technology of an interstellar civilization. With this, you could take your people to the stars."

Twilight was speechless. Dash chipped in with an awestruck, "Woah."

"This could be utterly invaluable to your civilization. That's why I want you to carry it, Twilight. If any of us are going to make it through that portal, it's going to be you." He raised the collection of straps in his hand. "This is a piece of what we call load-bearing equipment that I modified last night. It should fit you, and make the core easy to carry. Do you want my help putting it on?" Twilight nodded, and the human knelt down again to help her don the vest.

Dash wondered when he'd made that. She'd been with him the whole time he'd been working on the armor, and had thought he'd gone to bed when she had. Guess he couldn't sleep either, she mused. Once the human had the load-bearing harness securely fastened to the unicorn's body he attached the library core so that it rode comfortably above her shoulders, well out of the way of her legs so as not to impair her movement. He tugged on it a few times, making sure it fit snugly and wasn't inclined to shift.

Dash laughed. "Hey, Twilight, I didn't know you were into that kind of stuff!" She teased. The collection of straps and pockets looked a little kinky. Duran looked at her uncomprehendingly, but the unicorn flushed a bright red under her lavender coat.

"Rainbow!" The unicorn scolded, "This isn't the time…"

"Relax, Twilight. I won't tell anypony." Rainbow snickered some more and Twilight glared, while Duran blinked at the two of them.

"Um, okay. Anyway," the human pulled his pocket computer out of his fatigues and slid it into an appropriately-sized pocket on Twilight's new harness. "The schematics for a basic terminal and power station are saved on that. Even if I don't make it, you should be able to build an interface station, and once you have that, you'll be able to pull up plans for more advanced units from the library itself."

Rainbow suddenly sobered. Looking suspiciously at the human, she asked, "Why is Twilight carrying all the important stuff? Why don't you carry some of it, behind all that armor?"

"Because, Dash, I am frankly the one least likely to survive today. I am going to be making a concerted effort to put myself between the two of you and any threat that arises, and if I get unlucky I don't want either of you to suffer for it." He shrugged. "I certainly intend to survive, but just in case I don't, I want this stuff to get home with you. And I didn't want you carrying it, because you're going to need every bit of agility you can muster."

Rainbow's rose eyes were still narrowed. "You sure you're not planning to flake out at the last second and stay here?" She asked, "'Cause if you do, I'm totally coming back through that portal and dragging you along. Armor or no."

Duran laughed, though Dash thought she could hear a nervous undertone to it that she didn't like one bit. "No, Dash, I'm planning on coming along. If I survive, of course." Dash resolved to keep an eye on the human. She was still worried about him. "I do, however, have something for you."

Walking over to the other side of the parked suit, the human retrieved another set of straps, this one hung with odd levers, cables, and what seemed to be the slender barrel of a gun. Rainbow cocked her head, peering at the odd device intently. "What's that?"

"It's what you asked me for last night, of course!" Rainbow's eyes got big. "I'm pretty pleased with it; let's see how it fits."

"Ohmygosh, you found one I could use?" Delight warred with apprehension on the pegasus's face as Duran knelt beside her like he had with Twilight, carefully settling the long barrel along her right side and a slender box on her left. Cables connected the two components, and a lever with a small button on it stuck out in front of her.

"What, exactly, did you ask for, Rainbow?" Twilight asked, a slight edge to her tone.

"Oh, last night I asked Duran to find a gun I could use." Rainbow flashed a grin at the unicorn before going back to watching how Duran was attaching the weird setup and keeping her wings out of the way.

"What?" Both human and pegasus froze at the outburst, looking up in shock. "Rainbow, you're going to use a gun? Are you crazy? That's... that's not the kind of thing ponies should be doing!" Twilight shook her head, aghast. Next to her, Rainbow could sense the human's tension as he looked back and forth between the two ponies. "Ponies don't fight! We certainly don't kill if we can avoid it!"

"Yeah? And what makes you think we can avoid it here?" Rainbow snapped. "This isn't Equestria, Twilight, and we've already had this conversation, anyway! If it's a choice between hurting something and letting it hurt my friends, I'm totally fine with using this thing." She jerked her head to indicate the weapon.

"Rainbow... you don't really mean that." Twilight's voice had lost its edge. She sounded concerned and a little confused. "I know you said you'd gotten in fights in the past, but this is different! If you use that, you'll be killing living things! I know we'd talked about it, but I didn't think you'd actually go through with it! You can't do this, Rainbow!"

"Wha- You're not my mom, Twilight! You don't get to tell me what I can and can't do!"

"I can if you're acting childish!" Heat started to seep back into Twilight's tone. "I think you've been listening to too many of Duran's war stories. It's fine for him to act like that, but you're a pony, Rainbow Dash, you should act like one!"

"What the hay, Twilight! That is not fair! This is my call, not his!" Rainbow glanced at Duran, seeing the stricken expression on the human's face. "And I don't think you've listened enough! We're going to get attacked out there, and Duran can't look in every direction at once! I'm just trying to help, make it so he's got less to deal with! What is your problem, anyway?"

"I'm...!" The unicorn began angrily, but the anger left her in a sudden rush, leaving her looking downcast. "I'm worried, Rainbow. I'm worried about you and the way you're acting, I'm worried about what's going to happen to us, and I'm worried I'll mess up the spell to get us home." Twilight closed her eyes in silent misery. "And I'm scared."

"Aw." Rainbow stepped away from where Duran was still kneeling, stock-still, and gave the unicorn a quick hug. "I'm worried too, Twilight. But I think we'll be okay. And I think I'll be able to do a better job of making sure we're okay if I use this." She nodded at the gun half-hanging off her side. "Tell you what. If you'll promise to trust me, then I'll promise to listen if you tell me I'm going too far. Deal?"

Twilight sighed heavily, but nodded. "Okay, Rainbow Dash. I'm still not happy about this, but I do trust you. Deal."

Rainbow stepped back over to Duran, who was watching the two with raised eyebrows. "Something wrong?" She asked him.

"Uh- no, no, nothing's wrong." He wasn't a very good liar.

Twilight picked up on it too. "If something's bothering you, Duran, you should really tell us. We're going to be depending on one another out there; If there's a problem, we should work it out before we go."

He blinked. "Oh, it's just... really? You two were sounding like you were winding up for a pretty serious fight, and you can just drop it that quick?"

"Well, yeah." Rainbow shared a confused glance with Twilight. "We both figured out why the other was upset, so there's no real need to keep going."

"Wow, you folks really are alien." He shook his head. "You don't hold grudges? Get into... well not fistfights, you don't have fists, but, ah, physical altercations?"

"Oh, heavens, no!" Twilight started, but trailed off, seeing Rainbow sheepishly rubbing the back of her neck.

"Weeeeell... I do, sometimes. I'm kind of a freak that way; I've been in a few real fights." Rainbow admitted. "There's a few ponies like that, but not many. And I'd never hurt Twilight! She's my friend!" She finished indignantly.

"Oh. Well, in that case, I'm sorry if I started that fight." Rainbow glanced at Twilight, who laid her ears back in chagrin.

"No, you didn't. And Rainbow was right, it wasn't fair of me to drag you into it. I'm sorry."

"No harm done. I am a bit concerned, though, about whether you think I'm a bad influence..." He trailed off, sounding uncertain.

Rainbow wanted to speak up, but she figured anything she said was more likely to make the situation worse than it was to make it better. Instead, she waited for Twilight to speak.

"Well, Rainbow was right in saying we'd had this discussion before, and at the time she'd barely talked to you. I don't consider you a bad influence, but I'm not entirely sure it's a good thing for you to be the only influence to have around her." Twilight wasn't looking directly at Duran as she spoke. Rainbow ground her teeth in annoyance, thinking way to talk about me like I'm a foal who isn't standing right here, Twilight! But she held her silence, waiting to see how the human reacted.

He nodded slowly, expression unreadable. "Fair enough. I appreciate your honesty." He smiled, "And I understand that you're scared. I think we all are; we'd have to be crazy not to be. But like I told Dash last night, I'm confident that we'll be able to get everyone back." Twilight perked up, her confidence somewhat bolstered, but Rainbow remained a little uneasy. Something in Duran's manner rang slightly false, and after hanging around him so much she knew that humans were less trusting than ponies were. She really wished she could look in his head to see what was actually going on in there. She wondered for a moment if he was just acting the way he thought they expected him to act, but she shrugged the thought aside; that kind of twisty doublethink didn't really fit right in her head.

She couldn't read his thoughts, so she just let him finish fastening the weapon harness to her, marvelling at the design. When he finished, tugging at it to make sure it was secured firmly just as he had with Twilight's, and her excitement overrode her concern. "Oh, cool! How does it work? Where did you find this thing?"

He held up a finger in what she'd come to recognize as a wait a moment gesture, pulling some kind of tinted visor out of his pocket. He pulled off her hat and settled the visor over her eyes, adjusting the elastic band at the back so it fit snugly but not too tightly, and settled the hat back on her head. "Got this one piece left to connect, then I'll explain." He took a small wire that ran from the top of the visor, ran it behind her ear, and plugged it into the weapon. The visor instantly turned transparent, so clear she had only the feel of it on her face to tell her it was there at all.

"There we go," Duran said, satisfaction in his voice. He pressed something on the rifle "Okay, see that thing in front of you? Grip it in your mouth, but be careful of that button. Don't press it." Rainbow reached forward and took the lever in her teeth, gingerly. The instant she did, she saw a dot appear on the floor, almost exactly where her eyes naturally fell. She moved her head, noticing that the gun barrel moved as she did so, and the dot seemed to follow along wherever she pointed. She dropped the lever to speak, and the dot disappeared.

"Oh, that is so cool! What was that little glowing dot?" Twilight blinked, but Duran chuckled.

"The dot is the aim point; the rifle produces a low-power beam when you hold the control yoke. It's an infrared light, so Twilight and I can't see it, but that visor shows where it falls. Basically, that dot is where the rifle is pointed, so make sure you don't point it at anything you don't want to shoot, understand?" His voice was stern in the last sentence, and Rainbow nodded. "As long as you have the control yoke gripped in your teeth, the rifle will point basically where you look. It has kind of a limited traverse, so you won't be able to point it very far to the left or right, but it's the best I could manage, and I'm pretty sure you're agile enough to compensate. Once you have it aimed at your target, you should be able to press that button with your tongue to fire. It does fire in bursts, so be careful or you'll drain the battery fast. How's the fit? Feel okay?"

Rainbow shifted in place, testing the harness. It wasn't restrictive, the barrel on the right side was low enough that it didn't interfere with her wings, and the weight was even on both sides, so she didn't feel unbalanced. She jumped a few times, twisting in midair to see if anything would come loose, but nothing shifted. It fit closely, but nothing pinched, and she didn't feel anything digging into her sides. "Wow, this fits really well. How the heck did you find something that fit a pegasus in a base full of human stuff?"

"Oh, I built it." Duran's voice was dismissive, but Rainbow and Twilight shared an impressed look.

"You built it? When? I only asked for this last night!"

Duran shrugged, a gesture that Rainbow always found amusingly exaggerated with the human's long arms. "Last night, after you'd gone to bed. I couldn't sleep, and I remembered you asking about something to defend yourself with, so I went down to the machine shop and threw that together." He frowned a bit. "I'd wanted to use an assault rifle or something, but I couldn't figure out a good way to deal with the recoil, and it would need an ammo hopper or something that would have made it drag to one side, since you'd have major problems reloading magazines or clips."

Twilight was amazed. "You built all of that in one night?"

Rainbow cut in before Duran could speak. "Less than a night! I was up talking to him until like, midnight!"

Duran shifted uncomfortably. "You're talking like it was hard. I just took a pulse laser rifle out of the armory, took the stock off, modified the trigger, and built a stabilized gimbal system for the controls. The harness took pretty much no time, and the visor's a stock unit. I had a full machine shop; it's not like I built it out of scraps!"

Rainbow flipped her wings in a shrug. For whatever reason, Duran thought it was no big deal, so she was willing to let it slide. "Well, I think it's really cool. I guess we just didn't realize you were this good at that kind of thing."

The human smiled, a slightly distant look on his face. "Well, I was an engineer, you know. I didn't just do analyses; I used to love building mechanisms, machines, even little robots and things like that. Haven't had a chance in a long time; I should be thanking you for giving me that opportunity." His smile faded, replaced by a slight frown. "I just wish I'd been able to give you a slugthrower instead."

"Why? Is there something wrong with this one?" Rainbow cocked her head, examining the harness.

"Well, no, I went over it really carefully both before and after I put it on that mount, and I wouldn't have given it to you if I thought there was something wrong with it, it's just..." He trailed off.

Rainbow waited a moment for him to finish, before prompting, "What? It's just what?"

"I- don't fully trust energy weapons. Not since my sister..." He cut himself off mid-sentence, a shocked look in his face.

Twilight looked similarly surprised. "Sister? I didn't know you had a sister!" She looked at Rainbow, who shook her head. "I've read most of your journal, and we've spent three weeks here with you! Why have you never mentioned that?"

The human swallowed heavily, looking away. "It's... because she died. Two days before I got stranded here."

"Oh, Duran, I'm so sorry! What happened?"

"Lys was... a member of a Survey unit. Teams out on the edge of the Imperium that looked for habitable worlds, mineral resources, other species, that kind of thing. Her flotilla had pulled up in this system that had a lifebearing world, and most of the science teams were planetside. Live worlds are really, really rare, and Lys was a xenobotanist, so she was just thrilled to have a new ecosystem to look at. I'd gotten a message from her about four days before..." He choked up and had to stop, wiping at his eyes. The two ponies were quiet, letting the human regain his composure. Clearing his throat, he continued, "She was doing a random sampling, just a preliminary thing. The guard force wasn't huge, and she was kind of a long way from the nearest one, but they were all armed, and survival-trained to boot. When the predator came out of the trees, she had time to get her weapon out; it was a shortbarrel levin rifle, arcane energy weapon that fired this sort of concussive-disruption blast. Short range, but it would have torn the critter in half... only it failed on her. No one had any idea why, and when they checked the gun... afterward... it was in perfect condition. She always kept it well-maintained, but it just... failed. By the time the expedition's guards got to her it was way too late. They killed the predator, but not before it killed my big sister." He sniffed, wiping his eyes again. "Why the hell am I talking about this? I've barely even thought about Lyssa in years..."

"Thank you for sharing that, Duran." Twilight said quietly. "I think it was good for you to talk about it, and I feel that I know you a little better than I did before."

The human looked at the unicorn for a moment, then coughed and shook his head. "Kind of you to say, Twilight, but I've wasted enough time moaning about the past." Swiping at his eyes again, he pulled out a visor similar to the one Rainbow was wearing. "Here, let me put this on you real quick." He settled it quickly over Twilight's eyes, pressing a small button that turned it as clear as Rainbow's. "Okay, these visors are important, since Rainbow here is using a visible-light laser. Make sure to keep these on, or you could get blinded. Dash," Rainbow, brought out of a momentary reverie, blinked for a moment before looking attentive. "Your visor is tied to your weapon. If you see a yellow flame symbol, it means it's overheating, and you should stop firing to let it cool off. If you see a yellow lightning bolt, it means the battery's getting low. If you see a red lightning bolt, that means you're out of power, and you should ditch the gun since it's just dead weight. Here's the quick release..." He showed her briefly how the harness could be detached with two quick motions, falling clear so she would regain all her agility, not that the harness slowed her down much.

Rainbow interrupted briefly to say, "Hey, dude, if you need to talk..." but Duran merely nodded curtly.

"If I need to talk, it can wait for later. I've wasted enough time already. Okay, two final things. If either of you see something you don't think I've noticed, make sure to say something. And finally, there are some creatures that go around on the ground, but take off and attack from the air if they get into a fight. I'll try to warn you if I see any, but if you see something taking off, look away from it. The ship will fry them, but if you're looking at them when it does, it may blind you, even with those visors." He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, reaching out to lay a hand on each pony's shoulder. "Okay. It will be better if we can get into position before dawn. Are you both ready to go?"

Both ponies nodded. The human climbed back into his armor suit and sealed it up. As the door opened, he turned and said, "I'll take lead. Twilight, you're behind me. Dash, watch the rear. Keep your eyes open, be as quiet as you can manage, and if you need to slow down, tell me." With that, the human led the way out into the badlands, footsteps thumping heavily on the rocks.

*Author's Note: Okay, here we go. Thanks for your patience with all the talky bits, readers who are still with me. The next chapter's action-oriented, which I like to think I do far better than I do character dialogue! And yes, the design for Dash's laser rifle harness is partially based on Kkat's Fallout Equestria battle saddles, because I honestly couldn't come up with a better way for a four-footed, fingerless being to use a human weapon.

Chapter 10

The three moved as quietly as they could through the rocky badlands terrain. They couldn't move very fast; the two ponies kept tripping on rocks in the dark, though a glow on the horizon heralded the coming sunrise. They quickly adopted a method of movement where the human would forge ahead and take station, waiting while Rainbow and Twilight caught up to him.

They'd only been walking for about ten minutes when the first problem arose. Rainbow heard an eerie wailing echoing across the hillsides, and Duran cursed quietly, dropping to one knee.

"Okay, ladies. You're hearing a pack of shriekers, and they're getting closer. We're going to try and avoid them; they're stupid, they're not all that dangerous, and their senses aren't very good, but as you can tell," he gestured in the direction the sound was coming from, "they make a lot of noise, especially when they're in a fight, and that can draw worse things. Dash, you need to stand close behind me, and keep me in between you and the shriekers. The armor will help block your arcane signature."

Dry-mouthed, Dash nodded and moved closer, taking comfort in the presence of Twilight beside her and the solid armored bulk of Duran in front. She whispered, "S- should I be ready to do something?" Twilight shot her a look, but she ignored it.

Duran answered quietly, "No. No gunfire unless we absolutely can't avoid it. The noise will draw attention that we can't afford at this point." Dash nodded and fell silent, waiting.

The wailing rose and fell in volume, but it was clearly drawing closer. Finally, the shriekers came running around a large boulder, and Dash, peeking out from behind Duran, got a look at them.

They weren't pretty. A bit larger than a pony, they ran unsteadily on four clawed legs, and it looked like they could stand on their back legs to attack with the long, clawed toes on their front feet. Their skin was knobbly and glistened in the dim light, looking like it was coated in mucus. Their heads were the most disturbing part, though; it looked like the creatures' necks simply ended in a six-part radially symmetrical mouth full of backward-pointing teeth that dripped a nasty drool. There was a large nostril-like structure in the creatures' chest area that was emitting the wailing shriek they'd heard approaching. The pack wasn't headed directly for them, and Dash breathed a quiet sigh of relief as she realized the creatures would pass a fair distance away.

The pack of monsters ran past them, not even glancing in their direction, as Dash and Twilight looked around nervously for anything that might be coming from another direction and Duran knelt, still as a stone. Just as the last of the creatures was about to move out of sight, it paused. Dash felt the tension ratchet up as it sniffed the air with the nostril in its chest, halting its howl, then turned and slowly began walking in their direction. Its howl resumed as it stopped sniffing, and Dash realized it was headed straight for them.

"Blast," Duren spat quietly. "Okay, here's how we're going to do this. You two back up as slowly as you can, and get behind the boulder over there." He didn't move, but Dash turned her head and spotted the rock he was talking about. She estimated that it was just big enough for the two ponies to hide behind. The human continued, "Stay behind it while I deal with this shrieker. The instant it stops making noise, you two run as fast as you can to the hill ahead and to my right. Get over the crest and wait for me," he stayed rock still, not pointing, and Dash guessed he was talking about the closest hill. She hoped so, anyway. "Go, but stay quiet, and keep me between you and it until you get to the rock so it doesn't see you." The two ponies eased away, moving with what Dash thought was agonizing slowness so as not to make noise. They reached the rock and huddled behind it as the shrieker's howling got louder.

The howl stopped abruptly with a wet crunch, and the shrieking of the pack over the hill redoubled. Twilight bolted out from behind the boulder, with Dash close at her shoulder carefully matching her pace. Dash's head swiveled around as they ran, watching for any other threats, but she didn't see anything moving other than Twilight and Duran, who was lumbering with surprising speed in the same direction the two ponies were headed. Dash was impressed anew by the harness Duran had put together; nothing thumped, nothing rattled, and the control yoke didn't bounce into her face as she ran.

They got over the hill before the returning shrieker pack spotted them, but it was a near thing. Pausing to wipe thin, pinkish fluid off of the heavy three-fingered claw at the end of his suit's right arm, Duran spoke up quietly. "Blast. The pack's roused. We're going to have to pick up the pace for a few minutes to get clear." Beckoning for Dash and Twilight to follow, he set off down the hill at a slow lope. Twilight stood for a moment to catch her breath after the sprint and had to hurry for a few paces to catch up. Dash followed her, having barely noticed the extra exertion.

What she did notice was a sudden movement on a hill to her right. She caught it out of the corner of her eye, and it was gone when she turned her head to focus on it. Worried, she kept glancing in that direction, and saw motion again a few moments later, closer this time, but she still couldn't spot what was moving.

She picked up her pace a little bit, moving past Twilight to draw abreast of Duran and tell him what little she'd seen. He looked off in the direction she'd indicated. "You didn't get a good look at it?"

Dash shook her head. "Nope. But I've seen it twice now, and it was closer the second time."

He grunted. "Sounds like something's shadowing us. Okay, thanks for telling me, but all I can tell you right now is to keep your eyes open." The human looked around briefly; the sound of the shrieker pack was getting fainter. "We're going to need to slow down again in a minute to keep quiet; if something's after us, it'll probably hit us then." Rainbow paused, allowing Twilight to pass her again, and resumed her position trotting along behind the unicorn.

Dash was doubly cautious when they slowed moments later, Duran telling them quietly that they were about an hour from their destination. Nothing leapt out at them immediately, though, and she couldn't see anything moving. Remembering his warning, she was being extra-wary, careful to hold her rifle's controls in her teeth, even though adrenaline was making her jumpy and she was a little worried about shooting by accident.

Even with her caution, the attack was a total surprise when it came. The creature had evidently gotten ahead of them and hidden next to a rock. It was amazingly well-camouflaged, as Duran and Twilight passed by within two bodylengths of it without seeing it. When Dash got close, it lunged out with shocking speed, taking her completely by surprise. She had just enough time to register a low, wide, lizardlike body as it jumped. She ducked low and to one side, trying to avoid accidentally triggering her weapon, evading the thing's initial rush and turning to face it as it landed. It whipped around, giving her the chance to see the big triangular head and long, whipping tail before it leaped at her again, before she could line up her rifle. She saw it spread its forelimbs, which suddenly unfolded an array of long, barbed hooks, and realized she wouldn't be able to dodge the same way again, and she was having trouble bringing the laser to bear in such close quarters. Instead, she spat out the control yoke to avoid possibly damaging her teeth, ducked low, and rolled, using the creature's powerful jump against it by going underneath its reach. The battery pack dug slightly into her side, but it wasn't painful, and it didn't impair her movment. Dash's roll allowed her to bring her back hooves into play, and she did so; giving the creature a powerful kick to the belly that boosted the height of its jump and sent the thing sailing through the air out of control. Bet you wish you had wings, chump!

Twilight had frozen in surprise, but Duran had already started to move before the creature launched its second pounce. He'd wheeled around and taken a step in Dash's direction, but when she launched the creature he reversed himself, moving past Twilight to intercept the thing before it landed. His right arm shot out, the heavy claw grabbing the creature where its forelimb met its body with a crunch of breaking bone. The human turned, swinging the creature around and slamming it to the ground on its back, then smashing his left elbow into its ribs in a fast, savage motion. More bones snapped, and the creature writhed in agony as the human released it and stood, only to send his heavy armored foot stomping into its skull with a sound like a melon being crushed. The creature spasmed and went limp.

Duran pulled his foot from the ruin of the ambush predator's head and turned to Dash, who was standing and adjusting her hat shakily while checking to see if she'd damaged the battery pack. "Very well done," he murmured, "You handled that as smoothly as anyone could have asked. Either of you hurt?" Dash shook her head, and Twilight made a small, shocked sound. "Twilight? Are you all right?" His voice stayed quiet, but it sounded concerned.

"Y- you killed it!" The unicorn's voice quavered. Uh oh, Dash thought, and spoke up before Duran could.

"It was gonna kill me, Twilight. I tried to shoot it, but it was too close and too fast." The pegasus looked around nervously, trying to see if any more creatures were around. "Duran stopped it. And we kinda need to keep moving, I think."

"But… but couldn't you have just driven it away or something?" Twilight was sincerely upset. Dash was, too; the sudden explosion of violence had been shocking.

"I'm afraid not, Twilight. It saw Dash, and was going to try to grab her and drag her off so it could eat her. It probably would have kept her alive for a while too, so it could get more magic out of her." Dash shuddered, but Duran ignored her, "Even if I'd been able to somehow chase it off, it would have just followed us and waited for another chance. The two of you have become my friends; I'm not letting these things hurt you if I can stop it." He paused to let her speak, but she just stared at him, breathing hard, and he finally continued. "I'm sorry if the way I do that upsets you, and you can hate me all you want, as long as you do it from the safety of your home." His voice was sad. "Come on, I'd like to get where we're going before the sun comes up. It'll be safer that way."

Twilight lowered her head, "I- I'm sorry, I don't hate you. It's just…"

"Twilight, we need to move." The human interrupted, an urgent tone in his voice, "I'm really sorry, but we can talk about this later."

The unicorn looked angry, but she nodded curtly and the three set off again.

Dash's stomach was tying itself in knots as she followed the other two. The sudden violence had shocked her, but so had the attack when they'd first arrived. She got over that shock pretty fast. What was really upsetting her was the potential rift she was seeing between her two friends. Guys, please, don't fight now!

Unable to stay silent any longer, she moved up alongside Twilight so she could speak in a whisper. The words tumbled out, her tension making her a bit incoherent. "Twi, please, don't be mad at Duran. The things around here… h-he won't be dangerous back home. Please, you're still gonna let him come with us, right?"

Twilight sighed, her ears back, and whispered back to Dash, "I'm… upset but not really mad. I know I said you'd listened to too many, but I've heard some of his stories, too, Rainbow, and I know he had to do what he did. I was just upset. It doesn't change the invitation I extended him yesterday."

"Does he know that?" Dash hissed. "You said earlier that he was a bad influence, and you just spazzed out at him again! He's not a pony, Twilight! They remember stuff like that!" Twilight looked confused for a moment before her eyes went huge, and she looked frantically from the pegasus to the human's back. She drew her breath to speak, but before she could Duran's metallic tones interrupted.

"Ladies." His voice was so quiet they barely heard it, but the flat tone of command was strong. "I know you're not used to this place, but when I say we need to be quiet, I mean we need to be quiet. Please don't speak unless something urgently needs to be said."

Twilight shot an agonized glance at Dash. "Duran, I-"

"I'm serious. Noise could get us all killed. Please, whatever you two are talking about can wait for later."

Twilight bit her lip and looked at Dash helplessly. The pegasus shook her head and fell back behind her friends. This is bad. I'm really, really worried he's going to refuse to come through the portal with us. She knew it was his call if he wanted to stay in this world, but at the same time she didn't think she could just leave him to go crazy with loneliness again. She decided she'd talk to him when they stopped, to make sure he knew he would still be welcome.

Unfortunately, as it turned out, she didn't get the time. The sun was starting to peek over the horizon when the human crested yet another nearly-featureless hill and announced, "Here we are."

Dash and Twilight moved up on either side of him. The small valley before them looked exactly like a dozen others they'd passed. "You sure about that?" the pegasus asked.

"I am." He replied with certainty. "And we've got a problem."

The two ponies studied the landscape in front of them. Seeing nothing threatening, they glanced at one another, then up at the armored human. "Um… what's the problem?" Twilight asked.

The human pointed at one of the hills near the end of the valley, a good bit smaller than most of the others. "That."

Dash had no idea what he was talking about; all she could see was a hill. "The hill?" she asked quizzically.

"That's not a hill." His voice was grim. "There was no hill there when we were here before. That's a Tank Bug."

Twilight clearly had no idea what the human was talking about, but Dash knew. The pegasus gasped in horror, asking, "Are you sure? Is there anything we can do? Do we need to go back?"

The human's sigh sounded odd with the metallic overlay. "Yeah, I'm sure. And at this point, going back would be a bad idea. Everything's starting to wake up." He paused, thinking. "I think I might be able to deal with it, with this suit. The short-range missiles should mess it up pretty bad; they're designed to destroy armored vehicles. Problem is, I'll need for it to come out from under all that dirt and rock…" He trailed off.

Twilight spoke up. "If this is the place we arrived, I think we'll need to be on the opposite side of the valley from that hill. If there's something hiding there, you should have time to do something if it comes out. Rainbow can keep an eye on it, and tell you if it changes."

Duran snorted a bitter laugh. "If it moves, we'll know it, no real need to keep an eye on it." He paused again before speaking up decisively. "Okay, let's do this. Twilight, let me know when you start casting your spell. Dash, help me keep an eye on the surroundings, and sing out if you see anything, even if you think I already know about it. If anything gets close to Twilight while I'm dealing with something else, see if you can distract it. Are you ladies ready?"

Both ponies nodded.

"Then let's get you home."

The three made their way down the hillside, Twilight leading as she searched for the spot where the portal had originally formed. She found it quickly, but there was a problem.

"The congruency's decayed more quickly than I expected."

"Can you still form the portal?" Duren asked, facing towards the suspicious hill while Dash bit nervously at her control yoke.

"Yes… but it's going to take me time."

"Time, time, anything but time…" The human turned to Dash. "Are you ready? This could get ugly."

The pegasus nodded. She was nervous, terribly so, but she trusted her friends. "I'm always ready!"

He turned back toward the suspicious hill. "Alright, Twilight. Cast your spell; we'll keep you safe." The unicorn nodded. Her horn glowed as she began weaving the energy she needed.

Dash heard horrible cries echoing from every direction. Faintly, under the savage sounds, she heard the human speak in a quiet voice, barely above a whisper. "…And thus the gates of Hell opened, and forth poured the dark, icy Hosts to snuff out the Flame." The hill he watched remained still.

Dash's head whipped back and forth, trying to train her weapon on every side of the valley at once. The first predators to come bounding over the hills were a group of six big bearlike creatures sporting six limbs and grotesquely oversized mouths. "Duran! Behind you and left!" she called, voice slightly muffled as she spoke past the grip in her teeth. She trained the weapon on the nearest bear-thing quickly, waiting until the dot was relatively centered before pushing the trigger button with her tongue.

The weapon spat lines of brilliant light through the air with a rapid crackcrackcrack and a smell of ozone. The beams snapped into the bear creature, blasting seared craters into its hide and dropping it to the ground, bellowing. Startled by the noise and flash, Dash jerked her head back, sending bolts flashing into the sky before she remembered to take her tongue off the trigger.

The human wheeled about, bringing his left arm into line and firing a thunderous blast from his machine gun. These projectiles were much larger and heavier than the ones he'd used the day they'd met, and the bear things were nearly torn apart in an explosion of blood. The rolling blast of the gun was so loud Dash actually felt it as an impact in her chest and wings. "Nice shooting, Dash!" The pegasus heard Duran shout through the ringing in her ears, "Try and leave the bigger ones for me! You take the little ones!"

He turned again as a trio of monstrous armored beetle forms came thundering over another hillside, unleashing more thunderous fury into them. Dash, trying to keep watch, saw a tide of chitinous beasts, smaller than a pony and armed with long, flashing talons, come pouring through a valley near her. "Little ones, my side!" She shouted, "I've got 'em!" Settling the dot on the center of the mass, she fired again. This time, she was ready for the sudden light and noise, holding the weapon steady as a storm of light burned into the middle of the pack. She fired for several seconds, before feeling heat on her left side, and a small yellow flame icon began flashing in her visor. Dash released the trigger, but there were still a few of the creatures left from the pack. They were clearly intimidated by the blinding assault, checking their charge and milling momentarily, but they rallied and drove on. Fortunately, their hesitation gave Dash's weapon time to cool, and when she resumed her attack she tried to mimic the firing pattern she could hear from Duran, firing a short burst, letting up, then firing again. She burned down the last of the chitinous pack this way, and felt a flood of elation as she looked at her work. These creatures had wanted to hurt her friend, to kill her, but Rainbow had stopped them short. She felt powerful. Woah, Rainbow, back it down. That's not a good way to feel right now.

Those were the first creatures, but far from the last. As Twilight fought to keep her concentration on her spell, monster after monster poured into the valley, sometimes one at a time, sometimes in shrieking hordes, while Duran tore at them with his machine gun and Dash burned them down with pure light. The human and the pegasus fell into a rhythm of motion, almost a dance, moving around Twilight's position to keep the monsters clear. The two worked together well, Dash lending extra fire against the larger monsters when she had no smaller targets to strike, and Duran wading in to hordes of smaller beasts with his claw and mass to help Dash scatter and destroy them. Eventually, the yellow lightning bolt the human had warned Dash about began to flash, and she glanced nervously back at Twilight, to see the disc beginning to form. There was nothing more she could do, so she fought on, though the red lightning bolt followed quickly on its heels, and the torrent of light finally ceased. Anxiety rose in the pegasus's throat as she realized the weapon was now useless. She heard Duran shout over the thunder of his gun, "Good work, Dash! I've still got plenty of ammo; drop the gun and concentrate on distracting them!"

Regretfully, Dash hit the quick release the human had shown her, and the beautifully engineered weapon fell away to land in the bloody dirt. The cord pulled away from her visor, but the visor itself stayed in place and clear, and she didn't have time to remove it as she dove into a pack of snarling, octopedal dog beasts with mandibles. She danced among the pack, enticing it to follow her with kicks and bites as Duran tore at the creatures with his gun. The two continued, falling into a new rhythm as they defended the purple unicorn and her slowly-forming portal. At one point, Dash found herself darting around a group of shriekers, maybe even the same pack they'd seen earlier, trying to tie them up while Duran hammered at a pair of huge mantis-things. She actually found the shriekers to be quite fragile, (unlike the horrifically tough 'murderpedes' she'd encountered on her first day) killing several with kicks that sent them flying into their packmates. She flew amongst them, striking, kicking, even biting, (they tasted foul) but there were so many that she couldn't handle all of them. Her fight was interrupted when a huge dragon-like beast reared up on a hill, spreading its wings and taking off, nearly blowing Dash and the shriekers out of the valley with its downdraft. She heard Duran shout, "Look away!" and managed to avert her eyes from the creature just in time.

An impossibly brilliant light, brighter than the sun could ever be cast incredibly sharp shadows on the ground beneath her. She thought for a heart-stopping second that the dragon had blown her up the side of the hill and into the air, where the fire would take her, but though there was an intense crack of thunder and searing heat scorched her fur and feathers, she found herself uninjured about halfway up a hillside, while bits of roasted flesh rained down. The dragon was just gone, blown to pieces smaller than her hoof by the fury of the sky.

Regaining her feet, Dash launched herself back into the disoriented pack, killing several more before Duran finished his opponents and turned his weapons, both the heavy machine gun on his left arm and a smaller version mounted on his right forearm that Dash had somehow not noticed before, on the surviving shriekers.

There was a short lull after the last shrieker fell. Dash checked on Twilight, but the unicorn's face was scrunched in concentration, and the pegasus could see the disc-shape of the portal forming in the air. It was taking way longer than it had the first time, and Dash hoped somewhat desperately that it wouldn't take Twilight much longer.

The thought heralded the arrival of six more creatures. Dash glanced at them, but saw them unfurling wings and launching themselves into the air to attack. Warned, she looked away without getting a decent look at the creatures, and there was a deafening rapidfire crackcrackcrack as the impossibly intense light flickered and burning heat washed over her again.

Blinking, Dash looked up just in time to see the hurtling piece of scorched meat and bone flying towards her at frightening speed. She dodged, but wasn't quite quick enough to get completely out of the way. The smoking piece of flesh slammed into her side, hard, and the pegasus felt an intense spike of pain in her right wing as she was thrown spinning off her feet and sent rolling.

"Dash!" She could hear fear in Duran's metallic voice. "Dash! Get up!" There was another blast of thunder, from the human's gun this time, as she heaved herself shakily to her feet. Her right wing sagged, and as she tried to fold it she felt the sharp pain of a bad sprain. The ground shook.

Dash looked at the hill Duran had warned them about to see dust billowing away from it. The dirt and rocks slid aside as the colossal bulk of the Tank Bug heaved itself clear. Duran hadn't been exaggerating about the size of the things in the slightest. Its six legs were thicker than any tree she'd ever seen, and its carapace looked harder than rocks. It shook itself, wiping at its face with a pair of vast crab claws, and the dozens of chitinous limbs on its back rattled. It focused several of its window-sized eyes on Twilight, opened its incongruously mammalian-looking jaw with a deep rumble, and started running ponderously.

The pegasus didn't even think Twilight realized what was bearing down on her. The unicorn was utterly focused on her spell, and Dash could see the interior of the disc starting to rotate, but it was clear that the spell wouldn't be completed before the juggernaut reached her. Dash, wincing at the pain in her sprained wing and goggling at the immense monster, planted herself between her friend and the beast and froze. She had no idea what she could do, but it would have to go through her to get to Twilight.

Fortunately, Duran was swift to act. Pivoting with surprising lightness, considering the heavy suit he wore, he planted his feet solidly in the ground facing the Tank Bug. Fire blossomed in the boxy, swollen shoulders of his suit, and four flame-ended darts shot out and flashed down the valley. They struck the Tank and detonated in thunderous fireballs. One of the monster's claws went flying, and it crashed to the ground as another severed its right front leg. The remaining two punched deep craters in its thick, hard carapace.

Dash's breath caught in her throat, but the monster wasn't dead. It let out a basso scream, lifting dust from the valley floor. Its scrabbling legs kicked boulders larger than some of Ponyville's homes out of the ground and sent them tumbling as it heaved itself to its remaining feet, multiple eyes rolling as it sought to locate whatever had harmed it so grievously. Duran took a few paces backward towards Twilight as the monster stumbled forward, then planted his feet again.

This time, the darts shot out one at a time. The first hit at the base of the monster's other claw, blasting it away to join its partner. The second impacted the titan's left front leg, severing it and sending the monster thundering into the dirt with another incredibly deep howl. The third went wild, corkscrewing harmlessly off into the air.

The fourth augured into the Tank Bug's head, blowing nearly a third of it away.

The Bug went limp. Its forward momentum caused it to slide along the ground, building up a dam of earth in front of it. It came to a stop maybe fifteen bodylengths from where Duran was standing.

Dash's jaw nearly dropped off of her head. He killed it! I didn't even think it could be killed! After a moment of shocked silence, she let out a banshee cheer of triumph. "Whoooooo! Duran, you did it!"

Even with the bulky armor masking his body language, Dash could see Duran's shoulders sag with relief. She looked around, but there weren't any creatures in sight at the moment, so she cheered again, pumping a hoof in the air. "Dude, that was AWESOME!"

Before he could say anything, Twilight's voice rang out. "The portal! The portal's up! Come on!" Dash whipped her head around, seeing a perfectly clear disc in front of the spellcaster, except instead of the dry, dusty badlands around them, there was a rain-soaked forest on the other side. Were we scheduled to have rain today in Ponyville? The utterly irrelevant thought skittered through her mind as Twilight hopped through the portal. "Come on! I can't keep it up forever!"

At Twilight's shout, Dash let out a giddy laugh, and turned to beckon at Duran. "Come on, let's blow this joint!" He started lumbering across the short distance to the gateway, and Dash, settling her hat firmly, ran to join the unicorn. "Way to go, Twilight! Celestia's gonna be proud!" She didn't thump the academic on the shoulder, though she badly wanted to, as she could see her friend was still concentrating hard, and she didn't want to disrupt the spell by accident. Instead, she turned to welcome the human.

Her grin fell off her face and her heart plummeted as he halted a few paces short of the gate. Oh no, no, NO! "Duran! Come on, dude, it's just a few more steps! Come on, you can do it!" He stood still for a moment, then raised his foot and took a step, shaking so badly she could see a tremor through the armor. Merciful Celestia, he really is terrified. She shouted encouragement, running back toward the portal.

With a screech, something small cannoned into the armored human from the side. He spun, teetering, as something small and heavy with incredibly long claws raked at his back. His arms flailed, but he couldn't reach the thing sitting on his suit's backpack and trying to find a chink to ram its talons into.

Dash felt a sudden rush of pure hate for the world on the other side. "Twilight! Hold the gate!" She yelled. It's trying to keep him there! Screw. That. She was accelerating before she could even think about it. Her wings, even the sprained one, beat strongly as she hurtled back through the portal, forehooves extended. She smashed into the small creature on Duran's back hard enough to shatter its exoskeleton, driving her hooves deep into its flesh. She felt something snap in her right wing. Duran spun around and they both fell, the human barely missing the cyan body that landed next to him. Dash feared for a moment that she'd broken both legs. She hurt, all over, but that was a secondary concern. She dragged herself on top of the supine human, putting her face inches from his eyepiece.

"Get your metal butt OVER there!" She screamed at the human's helmet. "If you stay here, I'm staying here, too, and I hate this place! I'll never forgive you if you get us both stuck here!"

"You're going through first." The metallic voice shook a bit. "I give you my word, I'll be right behind you." He rose and helped her gently to her feet, and she limped heavily back through the gate, watching suspiciously over her shoulder.

The human was following her, though, watching her carefully to make sure she didn't stumble.

It was because she was looking back that she saw the immense shell move again.

NO! "Duran! Watch the Tank!" Her warning came an instant too late. The human spun, backpedaling, as the ravaged hulk thrust itself forward on its four remaining legs. It didn't even bother to stand, just propelled itself along the ground. Duran fell backward through the portal, but the Tank Bug's immense jaws closed around his foot, holding it fast on the other side.

Lying on his back, Duran extended both arms toward the titanic head holding his right foot in its jaws. Both guns roared, hammering the Tank Bug's broken head, but the gunfire stopped suddenly with a series of dry, ratcheting clicks, and the Bug's injuries seemed no worse than they had been. Its remaining eyes blinked blankly; it looked to be stunned, but it wasn't letting go of the human.

Screaming in denial and heedless of her injuries, Dash wrapped her forelegs around the human's metal-encased upper arm as he struggled to push himself backwards. She dug her rear hooves into the damp earth and heaved with all her might, desperate to wrench her friend out of the jaws of the titan. She even beat her left wing in an attempt to exert additional force, though her right wing hung limp and unresponsive. Rainbow Dash strained with every muscle in her battered body, sobbing as she realized it wasn't enough.

"Dash! Dash, let go!" The human was yelling, "There's no reason for you to die, too!"

"Not. Gonna. Happen." Rainbow growled out between gritted teeth, and pulled with renewed fury.

The Tank on the other side of the portal blinked, and one of its vast eyes focused on Dash. The limbs on its back stirred, unfolding into the immense scythe-claws she'd seen from the mountain. Dash ground her teeth harder and closed her eyes. Oh, please, let it be quick. But she didn't let go.

"Twilight!" Duran's voice boomed out, "Close the portal! NOW!"

The unicorn let out an explosive breath as the glow engulfing her horn died. The portal shrunk swiftly, lifting the human whose lower leg was still partway inside off of the ground as it did. It closed around his armored shin, and then vanished along with the Tank, the badlands, and Duran's lower leg with a hideous cracking, rending sound as it sheared through armor, flesh, and bone. Duran let out a high-pitched, agonized shriek, made horrific by the metallic distortion imposed by his helmet, as he dropped to the muddy grass. Blood poured from the severed stump of his leg, and the shriek cut off with an anguished sob as his remaining heel drummed against the ground. Even then, he used his arms to prop himself up until Rainbow released him, refusing to drop the armor's weight on the injured pegasus, and only then did he fall full-length into the grass.

"Ohmygoshohmygoshohmygosh," Rainbow babbled in horror, trying to shove herself back up on all fours, "Twilight, you gotta stop the bleeding! Where are we, I'll go get the doctor!"

Twilight's horn glowed softly as she walked up next to Duran. "It's okay, Rainbow." The blood pouring out of Duran's stump slowed and stopped, and his harsh breathing eased. His armored body relaxed as he lost consciousness, but the two ponies could hear him still breathing. "We're at the edge of the Everfree Forest, close to Fluttershy's house." Twilight's horn glowed again, and a brilliant star shot up into the sky, exploding like a firework in a brilliant purple burst. "There, I've called for help. Just relax. You two have taken such good care of me over the last few weeks, it's time for me to return the favor." Rainbow's pains started to recede as Twilight started healing her. "It's okay now, Rainbow Dash. We're safe."

Dear Princess Celestia.

Today I learned that friendship is sometimes about sacrifice. Sometimes, to keep a friend safe, you have to be willing to get hurt, or give up something important to you. Rainbow Dash was willing to batter herself until she could barely move to help her friends, and our new human friend Duran Thirk was even willing to sacrifice his friends' good opinion of him, something I know was of truly tremendous importance to him, in order to get us home safely. I am sincerely looking forward to seeing you again in person, so that I can tell you the whole story. It's a long one!

Your Faithful Student (Newly Returned From the Dead!)

Twilight Sparkle.

*Author's note: Ok, folks, this is pretty much the end of the story. You can end it here if you want, but I've got a bit more in the epilogue, so if you don't want more, you can stop reading here and make up your own end, or just leave it as-is, and thanks for reading!

If, on the other hand. you want to find out how *I* ended the story, just click on the next chapter.

As a side note, Dash tore a tendon in her wing at the end there. It hurt, and it took her a bit to recover, but it's not a permanent injury; she recovered fully. I'm sick to death of stories where Dash dies or is permanently crippled.

Epilogue

Fluttershy, Rarity, Applejack and Pinkie Pie were thrilled by the return of their absent friends. They'd been frantic after the incident in Twilight's library, and had found Spike and insisted that he send an emergency message to the Princess. Celestia responded quickly, coming to Ponyville in person to try and determine what had happened to her beloved student. After a quick investigation, she'd summoned her sister, Princess Luna, who'd written the theoretical treatise Twilight had based her spell upon.

The second Princess arrived as quickly as the first had, and immediately set to poring over Twilight's modifications to her research, which the Night Princess deemed "Absolutely brilliant!" Her careful analysis could find no reason for the horrible malfunction of the spell, however, and she suspected, given the quality of Twilight's work, that anypony who attempted the spell would suffer the same result. Shaking her head sadly, Luna had stated that she thought the only pony who could get Twilight and Rainbow back was Twilight herself; the spell was far too dangerous to meddle with.

The Sun Princess, however, was leading search parties all over Equestria, searching for her missing student. To her despair, every search came up dry, and the Princess of the Day was eventually forced to call off the search. It was said amongst the guards that Celestia was heartbroken to have to abandon her student.

Those left in Ponyville were grieving for friends they thought lost forever when the purple star burst over the Everfree. Fluttershy was the first to find them, and the quiet, gentle yellow pegasus was overcome with joy, hugging her friends so fiercely they had to remind her that they needed to breathe.

Rainbow figured out how to remove the human from his armor, and Fluttershy had insisted the wounded creature be taken to the hospital at once. She was seriously concerned about his leg injury getting infected, and was willing to defer her friends' story to help a creature in need.

They'd run into a group of ponies headed to investigate the flare on the way back to Ponyville. Applejack was in charge, and she'd been shocked speechless to see her missing friends. She hadn't even been able to move while Rainbow Dash sauntered up and stole her brand new hat right off her head, replacing it with the rather battered one the cyan pegasus had been carrying for the last three weeks. "Y'all are back. Yer okay! We were so worried!" She'd finally choked out, grabbing her friends in a fierce hug much like Fluttershy had done. After being given a brief summary of their story, she'd unhesitatingly leant her strength to carry the unconscious wounded human, taking some of the strain off the still-injured Rainbow Dash.

Upon entering the town, they'd encountered Pinkie Pie and Rarity. Pinkie was thrown into paroxysms of glee, bouncing around and chattering a mile a minute, and vowing to throw the "Bestest-best of all welcome parties, ever!" while Rarity gave a more reserved, though no less heartfelt, "Welcome back, darlings." They'd met Spike in town as well, and the little dragon had latched on to Twilight and refused to let go. He was happier than anypony had ever seen him.

Duran Thirk regained consciousness in the Ponyville hospital, only a few hours after he, Twilight Sparkle, and Rainbow Dash returned to Equestria. Finding that his stump was already sealed, he insisted on leaving his hospital bed immediately so he could fashion a crutch for himself. When the nurse insisted that the hospital would give him one when he was ready to leave, the human proclaimed he was ready now, dragged himself out of bed, and started crawling down the hallway. Rainbow Dash, being treated in an adjoining room, heard the commotion and went out to calm her bipedal friend, though she only managed to convince him to sit in the hallway while the nurses brought out a crutch.

When Twilight and Rainbow introduced the human to their other friends, they were somewhat surprised at how well he got along with Fluttershy. He stayed in a corner during the party Pinkie threw to welcome them back, though he apologized to the party pony early on for seeming antisocial. The pink mare just smiled and said, "That's okay. What's important is that everyone enjoys themselves, not how they do it!" Duran thanked her, and the cheerful earth pony made sure to bring him fresh punch every once in a while. Fluttershy, on the other hoof, stayed next to the human for most of the party, talking to him quietly while everypony celebrated the return of Twilight Sparkle and Rainbow Dash.

Twilight asked the yellow mare the next day if she knew the human was a predator. Fluttershy answered that, yes, she knew a predator when she saw one, but predators were living things too, and this one was hurt in more ways than one. She would help him if she could.

The two princesses arrived the next day, together. They both spoke to Twilight at length, both about her experiences and about the magic she'd employed. Luna, especially, was thrilled at how far the lavender unicorn had developed her theories, and Twilight promised to share a copy of her findings with the Night Princess before she published it.

Sadly, things went badly for a time after that. Three days after returning to Equestria, Rainbow Dash and Applejack were having a friendly argument while visiting Twilight's home about the condition of the cowpony's hat when the pegasus had returned it. Duran was listening and chuckling from the sidelines, when he suddenly mentioned he was a bit dizzy and laid his head down on a table to recover.

Ten minutes later, Rainbow noticed he still had his head on the table. She poked him playfully with a hoof, thinking he'd fallen asleep, but he fell over heavily onto his side, and she saw his eyes were wide open and staring. Unnerved, she and Applejack tried to coax a response from him. When that failed, they rushed him back to the hospital.

Everypony had been baffled. The doctors could find nothing wrong with him, he just wouldn't wake up. Twilight had written to the Princess again, emphasizing that the human's knowledge could potentially benefit all of Equestria. Celestia had sent several of the best doctors in the Principality, paid for by the Crown. They finally realized that the human was undergoing severe neural degeneration. None of them knew why. The truth was, it was caused by the antidote to murderpede venom Duran had used back on Hell's Reach. Unknown to anyone but the NAIS expedition commander, who'd kept the information in a password-locked file, there was a limit to the number of doses that could be safely taken, and Duran had exceeded that number. He'd been dying slowly when Twilight and Rainbow had first encountered him; the shock and trauma of having his leg amputated had accelerated his condition.

The six unicorn doctors Celestia had found, however, were very, very good at what they did. Even without knowing what had caused the human's condition, they were able to stop the degeneration before it reached his brainstem. Calling in a small army of colleagues they each knew and respected, the six worked in shifts around the clock; two worked, supported by friends and fellow doctors while the other four rested. Twilight Sparkle, Rainbow Dash, and their four friends were present in similar shifts, two at a time, talking and telling stories and jokes so that their friend was never left in silence. Twilight and Rarity even leant their own magical strength to the hardworking doctors, funneling extra strength to them so they didn't depete their reserves so quickly. Rarity even wound up exerting herself so heavily she passed out on two occasions, but she didn't stop.

After nearly a week of constant, heroic effort, the doctors had restored enough of Duran's nervous system for him to finally wake up. Blinking, he asked thickly, "Uh... what happened, 'n' where 'm I?"

Twilight and Applejack were on watch at the time, and the unicorn was too overcome with emotion to speak, so it fell to the orange earth pony to explain. She adjusted her hat (she'd gone back to wearing the rather battered one Rainbow Dash had returned) and told him, "Well, I don't rightly know all the specifics, but you had some kinda 'gen'ral nerve collapse,' or some-such. Yer back in the Ponyville hospital, been here fer 'bout a week."

The human asked for more specifics, but Applejack didn't know much else. One of the supporting doctors took pity on the farmpony and came over to explain. Duran listened intently to the doctor's description of the progressive neural collapse that had nearly killed him. When the medical pony was finished, the human looked down at his immobile metal arm, a strange smile spreading over his face. Twilight, Applejack, and the doctor looked at him with concern.

"Uh... you okay there?" Applejack asked.

He pointed at the prosthetic. "I kn- knew it wasn't a hardware problem! Blasted wetware." Duran managed to say. The ponies stared at him incredulously, before Twilight choked out a laugh.

The doctors kept Duran in the hospital for another week, working on further neural reconstruction, before he was released. Pinkie threw another party, holding it in the town square and inviting everypony. She planned it to combine a "thank you" party for the doctors' tireless work with a chance for everypony in town to meet the odd-looking alien in non-threatening circumstances. Duran was able to get out of the hospital on his own power, though his progress was painful to watch as he hobbled along, holding his crutch with his one working arm. Rainbow offered to carry him more than once, but he steadfastly refused. She hovered along beside him just in case, ready to catch him if he fell.

The party went well. It was the first time Duran had been able to talk to the six doctors who had saved his life, and he thanked all of them effusively. He swore to repay their generosity one day, though they all thanked him politely for the offer, privately thinking that nothing would come of it. The rest of the town had a chance to meet him too, though most simply congratulated him on his recovery, moving on after exchaging a few polite words. There were exceptions, of course. One mint-green unicorn with a harp cutie mark seemed oddly fascinated by the human's mannerisms, hanging around talking to him for most of the party. Rainbow Dash and Twilight Sparkle's friends stayed close by as well, especially Fluttershy, who was concerned about the human's still-fragile health. Rarity, who'd been told by Twilight about the human's seeming aversion to going about unclothed, (and being horrified by the state of his only article of clothing) presented him with several varieties of clothing she'd put together, trying to blend together the pony styles she was familiar with and what she'd seen of the human's fatigues.

Duran was touched, doubly so when the unicorn brushed aside the thought of payment. "It's a gift, dear." She explained, "Besides, it was a wonderful challenge! I'd never considered making anything in this shape before, I quite enjoyed seeing how the styles worked together!"

Afterward, Twilight offered to let the human stay at her library for as long as he wanted. Rainbow sheepishly confessed that she'd make the same offer, "Only, you know, my place is made of clouds. Kinda awkward for anyone who can't walk on 'em!"

Duran didn't wait long before finding his own place. Celestia offered him a royal stipend in exchange for finding a way to make the contents of the recovered library core available to the Royal Library, and Duran agreed quickly, having intended to do so anyway. Twilight was relieved, having looked at the plans he'd given her for an access point and realizing she couldn't make heads or tails of them. He set to with a will, demonstrating his own magical ability for the first time as he molded components out of base materials when he couldn't find all the stuff he needed. It took him a fair amount of effort to do so, however, and Fluttershy (who looked after the human when she got the chance) wouldn't let him do very much at one time. She made him promise her that he'd only do a small amount at once, and she got Twilight to promise to monitor him. Even with the restrictions, he was able to build a small power unit, screen, slightly oversized keyboard, and even a small adjustable device that would fit over a pony's hoof to help them type more effectively. Promising that he'd be able to build a large networked system for the Royal Library (and explaining what that actually was when nopony understood it) he bought a small home in Ponyville and converted a large portion of it into a workshop. His friends visited often, including the green unicorn named Lyra who'd gotten along with the large alien so well at Pinkie's big party, and a mysterious brown earth pony with an hourglass cutie mark, who always talked to Duran when nopony else was around. He was often working on machines or mechanisms when anypony came to visit, usually powered by odd arcane energy sources rather than the electricity used by the salvaged library core. Before long, the small robots he built were a ubiquitous sight, running off on one errand or another on behalf of their maker, some crawling along the ground while others flitted through the air.

It was shortly after Duran began building and using his little robots that Rainbow Dash had a minor mishap. She'd been hanging around the human as much as she could, though she had a lot of weather scheduling to catch up on when they got back. Still, she was pleased at how much he'd recovered; he'd given her a bad scare, and she was still checking in on him at odd times to make sure he was okay. This particular morning, she was planning on meeting a couple of new weatherworkers that had moved into town before going over to Duran's place. He'd been talking about going along to a Wonderbolts show in a nearby town, and she'd gotten her hooves on a list of times and places she was planning on sharing. First, though, she was showering up so she'd be presentable when she met the new members of her crew. She didn't realize something was wrong until she'd been standing under the spray for a moment, and caught the odd colors out of the corner of her eye. When she noticed what was going on, she leapt out of her shower, aghast, as she realized that somehow, the rainbow fountain outside her house was pouring through her showerhead. She toweled off quickly, but it was too late; her light blue coat was faintly stained in multicolored stripes to match her mane and tail. I look like a piece of candy, she thought, examining herself in the mirror. She facehooved, aw, man, this stuff's really hard to wash out! I'm gonna have to meet my new weatherworkers looking like this! She sighed. Better get it over with.

The meeting went pretty much as she'd expected. She'd been extra-serious and businesslike to try and make up for her slightly silly appearance, but though the two new pegasi (a pair of siblings, brother and sister, who'd just moved to Ponyville from Cloudsdale) were perfectly polite and serious, Rainbow could tell they were trying really hard not to snicker. She'd been headed to Rarity's boutique after her meeting, hoping the unicorn would have something to wash the concentrated rainbows out of her fur, when she walked by Duran and Twilight playing a board game on an outside table while Fluttershy watched. The human called out, "Hey, Dash? Scale of one to ten?"

She stopped, not understanding right away. "Uh, what?"

Twilight and Fluttershy were gaping at the (formerly) cyan pegasus, but Duran was trying to stifle a grin. "You know, the whole..." he mimed stripes with his fingers, "How would you rate it?"

She stared at him like he'd lost his mind, but then understanding dawned. "Wh- it was you?" she spluttered, "Bu- wha- ... how?"

He pursed his lips and let out an odd, twittering whistle. A pair of small machines swooped down to hover behind his shoulders. Another modulated whistle, and the machines each unfolded a jointed arm and waved at her. The human gave a beatific smile, but didn't say anything.

Rainbow glared for a second, but she couldn't manage to stay angry. It is kinda funny, she thought, as the first chuckle slipped out. Soon she was laughing, along with Duran, Twilight and Fluttershy. When she caught her breath, she shook a hoof at the human. "Oh, dude, it is so on now! And I give it an eight; I thought it was just an accident until just now, and for a nine or ten you really should know you've been pranked!"

That marked the resumption of Rainbow and Duran's prank war. Prank War Two had a lower tempo than the original had boasted, since both belligerants were busy with other projects, but it stretched out for far longer. Both sides eventually brought in allies; Rainbow enlisting Pinkie Pie, and Duran, oddly enough, gaining Rarity's support. The Pinkie/Rainbow Alliance found the Human/Unicorn League to be a formidable foe; both members combined creativity and attention to detail, and while the League set up far fewer pranks than the Alliance, those they did engage in tended to be the stuff of legends.

Rainbow actually found it difficult to make Duran look silly, as by that point he'd started to repay Rarity's generosity, in his own odd way. He'd begun distributing his arcane and mechanical technology, forming several corporations to better distribute the fruits of his labor, and he had a significant surplus of funds. He would periodically visit Rarity's boutique, and place an order for something absolutely rediculous. He always proclaimed total satisfaction with whatever bizzarre garb resulted, insisting on dramatically overpaying. This, on occasion, led to tension in the Human/Unicorn League (despite the name, Twilight remained a declared neutral party, as did Lyra) when Rarity felt that he was paying too much. He always snuck the surplus in somehow, though, and after Rarity woke up one night and went downstairs to find a horde of tiny robots making an artful mural out of newly-mined gemstones on the floor of one of her downstairs dressing stalls, she stopped arguing. It was easier that way.

His odd garments paid for, he would then wear the outlandish getups anytime he left Ponyville. The alien inventor had become quite well-known in Equestrian high society, and on the rare occasions he attended an out-of-town party, Rarity was often flooded with orders from high-class ponies for clothing similar to the human's frankly insane taste in high fashion. She wasn't sure whether to be flattered or infuriated; she knew he was making her famous, almost a household name amongst the upper-crust, but at the same time he was playing a gigantic joke on the Equestrian aristocracy. The fashion-conscious unicorn eventually persuaded the engineer to transition to more... conventional fashions, but it took her months to talk him into it. Twilight later told Rarity that Celestia had found the whole affair howlingly funny, and that the Princess had often found herself hard-pressed to keep from laughing at the clothing her courtiers wore after Duran had attended a society party. She'd even had Twilight warn her what days the engineer left Ponyville, so she could mark it on her calendar and prepare herself to not laugh at the things she'd see the next day or so.

The human paid back the doctors who had saved his life, as well. Any time his work, or his research into the library core, yielded a potential medical application, he funded its production out of his own resources, donating the results to every hospital in the Principality.

The advancements that resulted soon permeated every level of Equestrian society. Telecommunications networks, household appliances, mechanical conveyances, all this and more came flooding out of the workshop of the one-legged human.

Not every influence he had was positive, however. Rainbow Dash, following up on her thoughts during the fight around the portal, soon started to patrol the edge of the Everfree Forest, aided by a pair of armed flying robots she'd gotten Duran to build. Fluttershy was horrified, and the two pegasi had a serious fight over the matter. Relations between the two remained cool, especially when Rainbow began recruiting other, like-minded ponies to patrol similar wild areas in other areas of Equestria. Duran provided these teams with robots, and eventually also with armor and weapons of their own. When it was noticed, the human and the ponies he supported recieved serious negative press from the newly-established news outlets. His reputation was damaged, but far from destroyed. Academies sprung up across the Principality of Equestria, devoted to teaching young colts and fillies the ins and outs of the new technologies.

Yet, even as Duran's influence grew, his health weakened. The human never fully recovered from his collapse, and though periodic therapy slowed his deterioration, it was unable to halt it. He was as active as he could manage, but he stopped leaving Ponyville entirely after about six years. He lasted a further three, producing marvel after marvel from a workshop that seemed far too small, before dying quietly in his sleep.

His friends discovered his Will while clearing out his home. The first part detailed the distribution of his assets, and they discovered that he had been vastly more wealthy than anypony had known. He left each of his friends huge fortunes, dispersing the remainder to support the academies and a fund that would help provide newly developed medical technology to Equestrian hospitals at sharply reduced costs.

The second component was intended for his friends' eyes only. It read, "check the basement." and had an access code appended. They were all confused, until Pinkie Pie stumbled across a door hidden behind a bookcase. It led downward, to a sealed door with a keypad. A note stuck to the door read, "This is where I left the dangerous stuff. I trust you all to handle it, but be careful."

Inside was his real workshop. Hundreds of incomplete machines lay scattered about, with finished projects interspersed. They found weapons designs, potentially dangerous vehicles, a small army of armed robots that gave Twilight chills, a functional space drive, and finally, in a sealed vault, a complete working copy of the Tethinar Imperium's faster than light drive. They found a third note beside it. All it said was, "This will give you the stars, if you want them. Reach out, and marvel at what you may find."

As for what they did with all these things? Well, that's another story.

*Author's note: that's it, folks. Thanks for reading, and making it all the way to the end.

Special thanks to firefossil, GBscientist, Harry Leferts, and Sixpack. Your input was greatly appreciated, folks!