“Sunset Shimmer?” Twilight asked, looking at her roommate unsurely. When the nurse left them, they sat on their beds and just stared at each other for some time before Twilight decided to break the silence.

“How do you know my name?” Sunset asked. “I’m here for years. They call it Capgras syndrome.”

“What?” Twilight raised her eyebrows. “I don’t know this one.”

“One day, another Sunset Shimmer came and took my place,” Sunset replied in monotone. “Like, she totally screwed me over. One day I was going to school, and then I woke up here. Of course the doctors give me pills and keep telling me that it’s something I imagined, but I know what I saw…”

Twilight’s face brightened. “Actually… I happen to know another girl called Sunset Shimmer. She looks just like you, and we were in school together. She’s actually a pony from another dimension, and she came here through the portal in the pedestal of a horse monument in front of the school. I was in Crystal Prep at that time, but later there were Friendship Games, and I was investigating magic around Canterlot High, and I turned into a demon and started to tear the holes in time and space…”

Sunset raised her hand. “Umm… What?”

“... and then it turned out that there’s another me who is also a pony. Pinkie said that she’s a princess. And she doesn’t wear glasses.”

The door opened and the nurse walked in, carrying a tray with food and some pills. “How are you doing, girls?” she asked.

“Awesome,” Sunset Shimmer replied. “She’s so fucked up that I feel normal in comparison.”

“Language!” the nurse exclaimed. “People are not ‘normal’ and ‘insane’. There are many ways to live, remember.”

“Mine is so alternative that I have to sit here,” Sunset muttered. “And I’m totally not up to date with political correctness. Or anything really.”

Twilight turned to Sunset. “Well, for starters, 2016–”

“Don’t.” The nurse stood between Twilight and Sunset. “She’s rather fragile emotionally. She may have a breakdown when you reach November.”

“Yeah, that wouldn’t be wise,” Twilight muttered, looking at Sunset’s expression.

Sunset sighed. “Okay. Will you tell me more about…” She looked at the nurse. “... your school friend?”

Sunset Shimmer groaned, staring at the baseball field in front of her. She could never understand it; while there was a similar game in Equestria, she was never much into it and didn’t bother with learning the rules. The only reason she was there was because she liked the idea behind the Charity Amateur Baseball League (often shortened to CABLE): the income for the tickets went for whatever noble cause the organisers were currently supporting.

Unfortunately for her, the teams weren’t very well balanced. After just three innings, Hipster Hurricanes were about sixty runs behind the Stream Team, consisting mostly of the nurses from the local hospital’s urology department.

“Are we gonna have to sit through ten innings of this?” Sunset asked, watching as Hipster Hurricanes’ shortstop somehow managed to knock himself out while darting to grab the ball.

“Nine,” Rainbow Dash replied. “Don’t worry, they have a mercy rule. If someone is ten runs behind after five innings, the game is stopped and the losing team is executed.”

“Sounds cool.” Sunset smirked.

Rainbow Dash chuckled. “I may have lied about the execution part.”

“Too bad,” Applejack muttered. “Ah don’t get why we’re still here. We coulda stayed for the beer, but it tastes like piss.”

“Having tasted both, I can tell that this is worse.” Sunset took a sip of her beer.

Applejack’s eyes widened when she thought of the implications. Luckily, a ball from the Stream Team’s another home run flew past her, snapping her out of shock.

“Do you think we should help them?” Fluttershy asked.

“Nope,” Rainbow Dash replied. “They’re losing pretty well even without our help.”

“I mean… The fish people are trying to eat their coach,” Fluttershy muttered. “That’s not a part of the game, right?”

“Indeed,” Sunset replied, eyeing a group of intruders that had just entered the pitch. “We’d better examine that.” She walked to the fence separating the bleachers and the pitch, and jumped over it.

“Hero syndrome and underwear fetish,” Rainbow Dash muttered, following her. “That’s Sunset Shimmer for you.”

“Wait!” Fluttershy shouted. “You can’t just attack them!”

“Okay, I’ll try,” Sunset replied, walked to the nearest fish person and patted his back. “Excuse me,” she said. “Do you have time to talk about our lord and saviour, Poseidon?”

The fish person roared, drooling something indescribable on Sunset, who didn’t even flinch, staring into a mouth with way more teeth than any fish should have. After a while, the fish person stopped yelling.

“He doesn’t seem to listen.” Sunset shrugged and kicked the fish person in the place where she thought their family jewels would be. The fish person fell back, but quickly got up, unfazed.

“Damn,” Sunset muttered. “Where are their nuts?”

“Who cares?” Rainbow Dash jumped into the air, spun, and kicked the attacker in the jaw.

“Impressive.” Sunset nodded. “Watch this!” She jumped, stopping in the air for an incredibly long moment, and kicked three fish people in the heads. She landed on the ground and rolled, avoiding another fish person, who stood there, until Rainbow Dash punched him.

“You don’t think your kung-fu is bigger than mine, huh?” Rainbow Dash chuckled, grabbing a baseball bat and hitting the fish person once more.

“It may as well be.” Sunset Shimmer raised another baseball bat and spun it in the air. The head of some hapless fish person flew into the bleachers, accompanied by an organ riff.

“Wanna check?” Rainbow Dash faced Sunset. Pony ears appeared in her hair.

“I don’t think that’s the best moment to–” Sunset’s voice drowned in a roar of an exceptionally large fish person who just emerged from under the ground, grabbed a bench, and threw it at the running audience. The creature roared again and rushed towards Sunset and Rainbow with another bench in its hands.

“Change of plans,” Sunset muttered. “Let’s see who can run faster.”

“I’m not sure if any of us can run faster than that,” Rainbow Dash replied.

“Well, for me it’s enough if I run faster than you…”

The giant fish person got closer. It was at least three metres tall and its arms resembled small cranes. It was about to grab them, when suddenly it collapsed on its knees, clutching to its stomach.

“Hello,” Trixie said, emerging from behind the screaming fish person and twisting a perfect voodoo doll of it in her hands. “Can Trixie give you a lift?” She pointed at her car standing in the middle of the pitch.

“W-what?” Sunset asked.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Trixie replied, nearly ripping the doll’s head off. “Took me seven hours to get this fucker right, so you’d better hurry!”

“Wait, where’s Fluttershy?” Rainbow Dash asked, looking around.

“She seems to be wiser than you,” Trixie replied. “I saw her running away.”

The sun shone bright over the town. A little mouse crawled out of the sewer and stood on the pavement. The first thing the creature saw was some big, green human, looking at it.

“Hello, dude,” Tree Hugger said, leaning towards the mouse and blowing the smoke out. “Wanna puff?”

It is often said that people are born with a limited amount of fucks to give. In case of Tree Hugger, the amount was precisely one. She gave it a long time, when she woke up in the middle of the night and discovered that her weed was gone. Now, she grabbed the mouse and put it in her hair. The mouse squeaked and disappeared in the jungle of dreadlocks, where it soon found several friends.

Tree Hugger inhaled the smoke from her joint and turned to face the sun. Unfortunately for her, it hid behind a tall building. Tree Hugger didn’t care; instead of the sun, she saw Fluttershy running towards her.

“Namaste,” Tree Hugger said, bowing. “What brings you here, my dear friend?”

“Fish people!” Fluttershy exclaimed. “They’re attacking the baseball team!”

“Worry not,” Tree Hugger replied. “Fish people are people too.” She gave Fluttershy her joint.

“Yes, but they’re eating other people!” Fluttershy put the joint in her mouth and inhaled. “Where did you get it?”

“From your brother, of course,” Tree Hugger replied. “And you shouldn’t judge them by their diet. Not everyone discovered the benefits of veganism yet.”

“I knew it smelled familiar,” Fluttershy muttered, smiling.

“Did someone mentioned weed?”

When Fluttershy raised her head, she saw three of Tree Hugger’s friend: a green-haired girl called Sweet Leaf, her friend Paisley, and a blue guy with thin moustache everyone called Captain Planet. Whether it was a nickname or his parents actually named him Captain was apparently his biggest secret. Fluttershy knew them well; they once set a lab on fire together because of all the animal testing. The mice also fried, but it was an acceptable loss.

“Sweet Leaf!” Fluttershy exclaimed. “How’s the banana diet?”

“Great,” Sweet Leaf replied. “I almost don’t have diarrhea anymore.”

“Can we not talk about that?” Captain Planet asked.

“We, like, agreed not to talk about your moustache,” Paisley said. “That’s, like, enough for one day.”

“Fluttershy just told me about fish people eating the baseball team,” Tree Hugger said. “Pretty groovy, huh?”

“I always thought we should be more open to different cultures.” Sweet Leaf nodded. “With the growing population and deteriorating quality of soil, we may have to resort to cannibalism ourselves in the nearest future.”

“Stop eating all those bananas,” Captain Planet muttered. “We’re vegans, remember.”

“Anyway, we were just, like, gonna visit Sandalwood,” Paisley said. “We, like, have to stop those lumberjacks from cutting down the rainforests, and he has a howitzer in his basement.”

“Not sure about the basement, but he does have one in his pants,” Sweet Leaf said. Everyone looked at her.

“Oh yeah…” Captain Planet smiled at his thoughts. He stopped when everyone’s gazes turned to him. “Umm… Let’s just go, okay?”

There were no fish people to be seen anywhere, so they just walked to Sandalwood’s house. He used to live with his parents in a big house with a garden the size of a small country. It all ended on one fateful day when his mother accidentally left her credit card at home and found out later that she donated a million dollars to saving polar bears in Afghanistan.

Since then, Sandalwood lived in a squat with Sweet Leaf, Tree Hugger and some other people, spending days on curling each other’s dreadlocks, looking for cheap weed, getting beaten by the members of Diamond Dogs motorcycle gang, and painting graffiti on the walls.

“Don’t you think this is gonna fall apart?” Fluttershy asked, poking the wall of the abandoned building, right below the squatters’ symbol painted on bare concrete.

“The idea will prevail,” Tree Hugger replied, going up the flight of decrepit stairs. Fluttershy and the rest of the Eco Kids followed her through the staircase adorned with graffiti such as “Arise, ye prisoners of starvation!”, “War against Earth”, “After eating at McDonald’s, you’ll shit all the crap of the world”, or “Love people, even though they’d rather see our corpses”.

As they walked up, they slowly realised that something was wrong. The whole place smelled. It was actually a normal thing in a building that no running water and electricity was generated by homemade windmills and shoddy solar cells, but this time the smell was different. Fluttershy sniffed the air and slowly recognised the scent.

“Remember that time when we blew up a slaughterhouse?” Captain Planet asked. “Smells like this.”

Fluttershy nodded. The smell of burned pork caused her body to revolt and made her eat a pound of bacon after coming home. Later, she spent two weeks in her bed, crying over what she’d done.

However, it wasn’t this smell. Tree Hugger rushed to the floor, where she saw the youngest Eco Kid, a short, green-skinned girl called Starlight. She kept being confused with another girl called Starlight and she really hated being asked for Che Guevara t-shirts because of that.

Currently, however, she was just standing in front of the door of Sandalwood’s flat, staring at what was inside. She didn’t seem to be in a mood for loving people. Maybe because she was seeing a corpse.

The whole flat was littered with pieces of pig’s bodies, cut in halves with chainsaws. Blood was smeared on the walls, forming pentacles and other occult symbols. There were also some puddles on the floor, adorned with a large goat’s head drawn in blood. On the opposite side of the room, naked Sandalwood was duct-taped to the wall, his limbs spread in the middle of another bloody pentacle.

“Holy shit, dude…” Tree Hugger muttered. “It’ll take me days to get rid of evil spirits in here…”

“I’d start with calling the ambulance,” Captain Planet replied, swiftly avoiding Sweet Leaf, who just threw up something that looked like a banana cocktail.

“I’d start with untying him.” Paisley walked across the room, carefully avoiding stepping in the puddles, and ripped the tape holding Sandalwood’s arms. When he fell face-first on the floor, she thought that she should’ve started with the legs.

“Is he alive?” Fluttershy asked.

“I think so,” Paisley said. “Dude, you, like, alright?”

Sandalwood muttered something incomprehensible.

“Okay, he’ll be, like, fine.” Paisley smiled, trying to help Sandalwood up. “Who did that to you?”

“I think that’s pretty clear,” Captain Planet said, pointing around the room. “Some satanists!”

“Dude, we, like, have no satanists in town,” Tree Hugger said. “Except maybe that Flash Sentry guy and his band. They seem like sick dudes, man…”

“Could be them.” Captain Planet nodded. “And they defeated us during the Battle of the Bands. I guess I’ll get the van. We need to talk with them.”

“I’ll take that stuff we stashed in my basement for that nuclear power plant we want to destroy,” Sweet Leaf said. “That should make them listen.”

“Are you sure they did that?” Fluttershy asked. Unfortunately for her, the Eco Kids had more THC in their veins than she did.

“Like, totally,” Starlight replied. "Let's get 'em..."

On the roof of the nearby building, Sugarcoat put down her binoculars and bumped fists with Indigo Zap. “Perfect,” she muttered, watching the Eco Kids leave.

“Shouldn’t we kill them all?” Indigo asked.

“One for one, that’s my rule,” Sugarcoat replied. “Also, it wasn’t them.”

“How so?” Indigo asked.

“He didn’t tell where they hid the body.”

Indigo shrugged. “He could’ve lied.”

Sugarcoat looked at her friend and sighed. “Have you ever seen anyone with a car battery on their balls lying?”

“True.” Indigo nodded. “By the way, where did you learn all that? Like, crucifying people and shit?”

Sugarcoat smirked. “From my uncle.”

“Who was he?” Indigo asked. “A fucking Rambo?”

“A librarian,” Sugarcoat replied. “Great at finding rare books and collecting the overdue ones…”

Author's Notes:

This chapter was at first supposed to be titled "Rehab", but Army of Lovers eventually won over Amy Winehouse.