In A Nutshell. Endless Space. Unstuck in Time.

Lyra hung in her restraints, forced into an unnatural upright position. The darkness of her solitary cell swirled, her light-starved eyes adding detail to a featureless void.

Things rose out of the darkness at her. Shapeless coils of deeper shadow. Hollow-eyed faces. Sometimes she was back at home or in Stable 93. She must have been dreaming at those times, though she had no memory of falling asleep.

Sometimes Littlepip would come and watch her, but she never spoke no matter how much Lyra called to her. She wouldn’t help. Useless hallucination.

“Who’s Littlepip?”

Light tore into Lyra’s eyes. She closed them; it did no good; the light shone right through her eyelids. She tried to turn her head away, but she couldn’t twist it far.

“Who’s Littlepip?” repeated Easy Money, his pallid face barely visible in the glaring light. “You keep talking about her.”

“She’s nopony,” said Lyra.

“Is she your commanding officer?”

Lyra groaned. Her mouth felt dry and gummy; her tongue stuck to the roof. “If I tell you she is, will you give me some water?”

The white blur that represented Easy Money shook his head. “Who is Littlepip?”

“How about a cigarette?” Lyra’s mind twisted with discontinuity. Since when did she smoke? It was a stupid habit; committing suicide in slow motion for a mediocre high.

“Who is Littlepip?”

Lyra huffed. “Okay. Fine. She’s my liaison at the Ministry of Awesome.”

Easy Money nodded. “And how do you contact her?”

“Via dead drop up your ass.”

Something impacted with her skull. The light broke into a swarm of fireflies. When it coalesced again, it was the sun, rising over the hills and forests of Sawhorse. It hung beneath the clouds, illuminating their undersides.

A little while later, a second sun rose beyond it. She rubbed at her eyes — had Easy Money beaten her so hard that she was seeing double?

“Do you like our little suns?” he said, marching ahead of her down the broken two-lane blacktop. “They’re just heat lamps, really, but they’re enough that we can grow crops year-round. We found the spell in the Buckstone Public Library before the alicorns drove us out.”

“What’s in there that you’re all so excited to get at?” said Lyra, her voice cracking. She was still a little hoarse from having her throat crushed earlier that... day? Was it still the same day? It had been dark a little while ago, but the little suns threw her off and made her feel like it was morning.

“A Ministry of Image Storage Hub,” he said. “With extremely strong automagical and technological security. Between that and the alicorns, I’m sad to say we haven’t been able to recover much from it.”

“You could work together with the alicorns. Friendship is magic, I hear.”

“A technical detail that shouldn’t be allowed to complicate strategic goals,” said Easy Money.

Lyra soon got a better look at the fields. Unicorns in ragged clothes worked amongst green — if twisted, spiny, and odd-looking — crops. Every mile or so, a group of unicorns sat in intense magical concentration beneath the sun lamps. These hovered far overhead, surface roiling with pseudo-plasma, throwing off luxurious warmth. She stopped near one, letting the fake sun soak through her damp clothes.

“Come on,” said Easy Money. “It’ll be warm inside, too.”

“Everypony is a Unicorn. So Ponysmith is a fascist,” she said as she followed him. The ‘Ironworks’ came into view as they crested the next hill. A steel mill, smoke pouring from its blast furnace, surrounded by a compound of several new multi-story buildings. As with most new construction in the wasteland, they were clearly recycled from older buildings in a mish-mash of styles, but they looked sturdy and imposing nonetheless.

“What do you mean?”

“He’s a tribalist who wants a better world for unicorns at the expense of every other creature.”

Easy Money shook his head. “If you want political theory or propaganda I’m not your pony. But I know he’s not a tribalist. He wants to uplift the other tribes, to give them the powers unicorns have always enjoyed.”

Lyra looked at Easy Money’s big handsome backside quizzically. “What, does he want to make everypony into alicorns?”

Easy snorted. “I think he’s going for a more balanced approach.”

They soon came to a chain-link fence with guard towers spaced along its perimeter. Automated turrets tracked to cover them as unislaves levitated the gate open. Lyra summoned the matrix of a memory spell into her mind, storing away as many visual images of this place as she could in case she was able to bring the Minutemares back here. He guided her to one of the smaller buildings and opened a gate.

Easy had promised light and warmth inside, but there was only darkness.

✭☆✭☆✭☆✭

“You’ve done your best to ruin yourself,” said Easy Money, sitting on a stool at the edge of her cot. Lyra blinked in confusion. She didn’t have a cot any more — she’d been naughty — so this was probably something that had already happened. “You’re lucky for the research they’ve done in Ponysmith’s labs. A few more months living like this and you might’ve never cast a spell again.”

“What’d you do to me?” said Lyra, reaching for her head. Her upper skull had been shaved and swathed in bandages; the base of her horn ached.

“I don’t know. You’d have to ask Ponysmith and his surgeons. They put some things in; took some things out. But you don’t have to worry about magical burnout any more. And you don’t have to worry about mind control devices — if they could do that with surgery they wouldn’t need to pay my salary. And they wouldn’t need all those expensive Sombra helmets, either.”

She closed her eyes and lay back on her cot. “So you just fixed me up out of the kindness of your hearts.”

He brushed his mane out of his eyes and smiled absentmindedly at her. “Ponysmith is more kind than you know. But! There is a catch.” He held up his leg — he now wore a PipBuck — and tapped something on it with his magic. “I want you to use a spell on me.”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“Blast me. Right in the face. I know you want to.”

Lyra scooted away from him, pulling her sheet up over her chest. “This is a trap.”

Easy Money lit a cigarette. “Remember what happens when you disobey me.”

That was all the encouragement Lyra needed to give in to her rage. She visualized the spell matrix for a so-called self-defense bolt. Nothing happened. She tried again — she was groggy; she must have imagined it wrong. Still nothing. She scrambled across the cot as far as she could get from him. “What the fuck did you do to me?”

He tapped at his PipBuck again. Lyra’s horn flashed. He raised a shield to deflect her bolt without even a flicker of his eyes. “Internal magic limiter. I can turn you on and off like a switch.”

“You son of a whore.”

“Sex work is a perfectly respectable profession,” he said dryly.

Lyra leaned against the wall, trying to control her breathing, pulling it in, letting it out, as slowly and calmly as she could until the red cleared from the edges of her vision. “Can I have one of those please?”

He pulled out a cigarette, lit it off his own, and passed it to her. “I didn’t know you smoked, or I’d have offered it earlier.”

Lyra took a gentle drag and blew out the smoke. “I don’t. Not cigarettes. But now seems like a great time to start. What have I got to lose?”

“Yes, that was my reasoning,” he said. “I started very young. My mother didn’t approve. She said I’d get lung cancer. I thought that was funny.”

“Yeah. Cancer. That’s a good one,” said Lyra, looking at the glowing end of the cigarette. She could already feel the rush of the nicotine buzzing in her brain. It made this whole… thing a little easier to deal with. “What was she like?”

“She was a prostitute, for one thing.”

Lyra laughed. “Oh, shit. My bad.”

He tapped the ash off his cigarette. “There’s no way you could have known. I don’t know what she did before the war. It was a different economy, back then.

“She was kind to me, for as long as it lasted. And she taught me magic every day. She was good at it — she used it in her work, which meant she could charge more. Then, one day when I was nine years old, a group of raiders came to our shack. Which happened almost every night, of course. But this time there was a raider who didn’t like mares. He liked little colts. When my mother told him I wasn’t for sale, he killed her and took me with him.”

Lyra felt a chill of pity pass through her body. But she hardened her heart. “Why are you telling me this? Do you think your tragic backstory is an excuse for what you turned into?”

“This is the wasteland. Everycreature here has a tragic backstory. It’s the only kind they make any more.” He took a drag off his cigarette. “What I’m doing is making myself vulnerable to you. It’s an important part of the process that you come to trust me. You’re going to be our soldier. You need to see that we’re not monsters. We’re ponies, who’ve lost and who’ve suffered, just like you.”

“Good luck with that. Go on.” The nicotine was calming her — she didn’t want to kick Easy Money in the face half as much anymore. It must be that, and not that she felt sympathy for him.

“I could have gotten a worse rapist than Eye Gouger. He used me, every night, in the most humiliating and degrading ways, but he was gentle with me — he didn’t want to ruin my looks, you see. I even came to enjoy it, eventually. In the meanwhile, I made myself useful to the other raiders. I did chores around their camp, I listened to them, I asked them questions about themselves. And I practiced my magic. When I was sure they liked me enough, I sliced off Gouger’s balls between two force fields.

“The other raiders laughed at him. Said he had it coming. And from that day forward, I wasn’t a catamite. I was a raider. Of course, I knew I could do better. Later, I became a mercenary, and then I began to specialize in interrogation and psychological warfare. And now,” he spread his forelegs, “here I am.”

Lyra felt nauseated — by the cigarette, by his story, by the pity she felt for him, she didn’t know. “It didn’t work. Telling me this. You are a monster. Your past doesn’t free you from that — you were abused, so you became an abuser.”

Easy Money nodded thoughtfully. “You’re right, of course. But there’s another reason I’m telling you this story. I want you to know that, while I am going to hurt you very badly over the coming days, emotionally and physically, you will not be raped by me, or by anycreature else while you are here. There are some things even I can’t bring myself to do to another thinking creature.”

“I don’t believe you,” said Lyra.

Easy shrugged. “I am a monster. But you’re not my type.” He stood up. “I'm going to give you a few days to heal — even with stimpacks, you’re going to need some time to recover. Get your rest. You’re going to need it.”

He closed the door behind him and turned out the lights.

✭☆✭☆✭☆✭

Lyra had barely fallen asleep when the lights in her cell flicked back on.

“Good morning,” said Easy Money, stepping in through the cell door.

“It’s not morning,” said Lyra, pulling her one thin sheet up over her head. When was it? The last thing she remembered had happened right after her surgery. She touched her head. Her coat had almost grown back.

He ripped the sheets out of her grasp with his magic. She tried to resist, but he had turned off her magic while she slept.. “Nope. It’s been eight hours. Time to get to work again.”

Lyra sat up; he hadn’t laid a hoof or a spell on her since the parking lot, but she remembered almost choking to death too well to want to risk his wrath. “I just fell asleep!”

“It can feel like that, sometimes. Get off the cot, please.”

Lyra stood in front of him — sitting wasn’t allowed — naked and cold. Her coat was matted with sweat and grime. She hadn’t been allowed a bath in days. ‘Days’. They weren’t all the same length anymore. “I need to pee.”

He lit a cigarette. “You can pee after we’re done talking. Cooperate and it will go faster.”

“Can I at least have a cigarette, please?”

“No.”

Lyra clenched her teeth, trying not to yell and swear at him. “Okay. What do you want today?” Her legs trembled underneath her with barely restrained rage.

“Let’s continue our conversation from yesterday.”

“I don’t remember when yesterday was.”

“Just the last thing you remember, then.”

“About the Minutemares’ military capabilities? I might as well just piss the floor now.” That wasn’t right. She was talking out of order, too. And yet she remembered that conversation. When had it happened? When did it have time to have happened?

He tapped the ash off the end of his cigarette. “I never asked you about that.”

Lyra tilted her to head one side and narrowed her eyes. “Liar. You asked me over and over. I peed on the floor four times. You called me a stupid cunt.”

Easy Money raised one eyebrow half an inch. “That seems unlikely. I don’t use that kind of language. We were talking about magic.”

Lyra squinted at Easy. Was he telling the truth? She knew he was gaslighting her, to the point of literally adjusting light levels on the sly. The question was, how much of it was him lying to her, and how much of it was her being very, very tired? Had she dreamed about being verbally browbeaten for hours and hours? They did talk about magic sometimes. He had a lot of questions about magic and unlike the questions about Rarity and Triple Diamond City and the Minutemares she sometimes felt okay answering them. In intricate detail. It was just so nice to have someone to talk to.

This was exactly the kind of pathetic self-doubt Easy Money was probably trying to instill in her, and it made her hate herself. Which was also probably what he wanted. She looked up at him and realized he’d been talking all this time.

“…references to ‘amniomorphic spells’, but we don’t know what that is.”

Lyra’s mouth fell open. “Are you fucking shitting me?”

Easy Money’s brows knit together; the most extreme facial expression she’d ever seen him make. “Why would I be?”

Lyra swung a hoof out to one side in a furious gesture. “Because the amniomorphic spell is the fucking magical equivalent of the fucking wheel is why! It was the first form of metaspell, and I know you use them because you can cast force fields and smoke at the same time, so stop gaslighting me.”

He tapped the ash off the end of his cigarette. “I’m not gaslighting you.”

Lyra narrowed her eyes. “That’s exactly what a gaslighter would say.”

“Assume I’m sincerely ignorant. Would you like to speak about these spells?”

“To you?”

“To me and several others. As good as I am at magic, I’m not the technical type. I might not be the best audience.”

“Would I get to leave this cell?” Lyra tried to disguise the eagerness in her voice.

“Yes. You’d get a shower, too.”

“When can we start?”

✭☆✭☆✭☆✭

Easy Money let her wash up and brought her to a meeting room with large windows overlooking an operating theater. Six of them sat around the conference table — her, Easy Money, three young ponies in lab coats (one of them an earth pony), and Ponysmith. He wore a partial suit of power armor; a red helmet decorated with curving bull’s horns, and a frame to support its weight. Under the frame his body was heavy; strong but rounded and saggy, the body of a mighty but aging stallion. He was the only pony here old enough to be a survivor of the war. She wondered what his story was.

“Can I borrow your ashtray?”

Easy Money slid it over to her, along with a cigarette. Part of her reviled the gesture — it was the first cigarette he’d given her in ‘days’. He was rewarding her for cooperating and she knew it, but she lit it with her magic and drew in a long drag before beginning. The nicotine rushed through the veins in her lungs to her brain, bringing calm and focus. Together with her clean body, it made her feel almost alive. Her stomach rumbled, but she ignored it. She’d rather talk about magic than eat at the best of times.

“Okay, how many spells am I casting right now?” she said, levitating the ashtray up alongside her floating cigarette.

“One spell,” said the earth pony.

“Not to sound tribalist, but why are you here?” snapped Lyra.

“Two,” said one of the unicorns in lab coats.

The other nodded. “Yes, two. One for each object.”

Lyra gestured violently with her cigarette, fantasizing about holding the burning end against their smug faces. “How are you even unicorns?”

“Three,” said Easy Money. “You need one spell to hold each object. But you can only cast one spell at a time, so you need a third spell to… I don’t know how to say this. You put both levitation spells in the third spell so that it can switch between them and keep both going. Only it’s not quite a spell, because it doesn’t interfere with casting the other two. It’s like a partial spell you keep in the back of your horn.”

Lyra took a deep drag and blew the smoke out towards him. “So you do know what an amniomorphic spell is, and you were gaslighting me.”

“A caul spell,” said Easy Money. “That’s what my mother used to call it. It holds the other spells like a mother holds her little lambs.”

“Right,” said Lyra. “And it can go the other way too — with more advanced amniomorphic spells several unicorns can combine their magic and cast a single spell together.”

“We do need specifics. Are you able to sketch the spell matrices?” said Ponysmith, his voice crackling through the speakers of his helmet.

Lyra took a deep drag and blew the smoke out through her nose like an angry dragon. “Let me see my son, and we’ll talk.”

“Agreed.”

Lyra blinked. She hadn’t expected it to be that easy.

“All right. Get me some scratch paper.”

✭☆✭☆✭☆✭

Lyra didn’t sleep for all of what she was pretty sure was a normal length night. She had no idea what to expect from Bean except for a couple of photographs on the Stable 93 computer and a figure in bronze power armor. She’d worked so hard, suffered too much to get here, and now she didn’t even know what she could hope to gain from the encounter.

Seeing him again. Seeing how he’d grown up without her. It would break her heart. But she needed to know.

She hoped she could reason with him. Persuade him to leave Ponysmith’s service. But she knew that would fail. Why would he leave? So he could be a sad and battered refugee like her?

It was a stupid hope.

She was stupid.

The door to her cell slid up, letting in a beam of yellow light blocked by two large figures. She resisted the urge to rush to him and embrace him.

“Mom.” Bean approached her cautiously, put his forelegs around her. His broad, hard, shaggy chest felt like her father’s.

She leaned into him and let out a choking noise. “Bean. Bean I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry, Mom.”

“You needed me, and I wasn’t there. It’s all my fault.”

He stroked the back of her neck. “You saved a lot of ponies, Mom. I was always proud of you. You did the right thing, no matter what it cost you.”

She felt gingerly down his back, tracing the edges of a bandaged spot. “Are you all right?”

“Those alicorns took a chunk out of me, but it was nothing our medics couldn’t grow back. I’m not ready for active duty again yet, but I can help out around the base.” He took a step back from her. “Are you all right?”

Lyra glared over Bean’s shoulder at Easy Money. “I’ve been better.”

“You could be better, mom. There’s a lot of evil out there in the wasteland.”

“Really son? You don’t see any evil here in the room with us?” She tossed her head meaningfully at Easy Money. He smiled blandly at her and tapped the ash off the end of his cigarette.

“Easy, could we talk in private?” said Bean.

“I’m due for my lunch break anyway. Take your time,” said Easy. The door slid shut behind him.

Bean turned back to his mother. “Nopony likes Easy. He’s a creep. I can get you out of this cell. You just have to play along.”

“What? No! I’m not ‘playing along’,” she made scare quotes with her hooves, “with that unicorn kidnapping tribalist psychopath! I… I…” She wanted to say she’d raised him better than that, but she hadn’t. She hadn’t at all.

“He’s not a tribalist. He wants all ponies to be equal, but he has to start with the unicorns because they have the most powerful magic. And… okay, he does kidnap them, but he makes life better for most of them.”

Lyra crossed her legs over her chest. “He’s a fucking imperialistic fascist, and you can do better. What about the Minutemares?”

“Mom, you’re just throwing the word ‘fascist’ around without thinking about what it means. If you want to resort to name-calling, then the Minutemares are a bunch of irresponsible anarchists. They have no rules, no principals. They’re a gang. Raiders with better discipline.”

“Rarity?”

“Isolationist. She’s afraid of her power. She’s locked herself away behind her walls and she’s not going to do anything to help the wasteland as a whole. She’s already almost been wiped out by the alicorns once.”

“And she survived because of the Minutemares. And you can’t beat the alicorns either. I’ve seen how well you do.”

Bean shook his head. “You were helping them, Mom. Why were you helping them?”

Lyra banged her hooves on her cot. “Because I thought Ponysmith had you captive. I didn’t imagine for a second that you’d be working for him.”

Bean bared his teeth and sucked in a deep breath before replying. “Ponysmith is the only creature who has a real chance of bringing order to the wasteland. I know he’s not perfect, but he’s the best there is. We have to be realistic about this — we can’t have the kind of leader who’d be considered ‘good’ by the standards you grew up with and still succeed. We use ponies like Easy because they’re effective. We use unicorns in Sombra helmets because it makes it possible to train large infantry forces quickly. Our civilians live under a lot of restrictions, but they need to, to be safe. Our medical ponies are the best in the world — better than anything before the war. They can do things you wouldn’t believe.”

Lyra lay down on her cot and rolled to face the wall. “So you won’t leave here with me.”

“I don’t see that as an option, Mom.”

She pressed her snout against the steel wall of her cell. It felt so very cold. “And I’m not leaving this cell until I agree to join you.”

“Please join us, Mom. We could do so much together. If you don’t like the way things are, you could work inside the system to change things.”

Lyra blew out through her nostrils. “It wouldn’t be a family reunion without an awful conversation about politics. Please go away. I don’t want to talk to you right now.”

✭☆✭☆✭☆✭

Lyra stood in the eerie, multi-shadowed light of the mini-suns, staring at the cheap PipBuck knockoff on her foreleg. It smelled like new plastic. It had no ungual controls; she needed to use magic to operate it. “I changed my mind. I can’t do this.” She could only hold out against Bean’s offer for so long. She would have liked to think she was the kind of pony who’d rather be a prisoner forever than become a quisling.

She wasn’t. She sucked.

“Then you can go back in your cell until you're ready to co-operate,” said Easy Money. His absent-minded smile was especially punchable this morning. If it was morning? She didn’t know how bright the mini-suns would be at night. Maybe it was always daytime in Sawhorse. She felt so confused all the time.

Lyra flipped through the command screen on her SmithBuck, and entered a waypoint for the maniple of unislaves she’d been assigned on its mini-map. They fell out of the line they’d been standing in, formed a column, marched the five-minute walk to the waypoint, and formed a line again. The SmithBuck had no EFS; she had to check the map on the device itself. “How do I keep them in formation when they march?”

“The ‘hold formation’ button. Right here.” Easy Money had a real PipBuck. Well. He was Ponysmith’s enforcer, and she was still technically a captive, so she should expect that he’d have better equipment.

Lyra marched her maniple of unislaves around for a bit. They moved in perfect time, executing her commands with only the slightest delay. The SmithBuck’s poor interface made issuing complex commands difficult, however. That probably explained why the Ponysmith’s forces used such crude ‘pony wave’ tactics in battle. Every one of these unislaves would be a living, thinking, independent pony if you took their helmets off. She felt sickened by that. But this was the side Bean had chosen. Who was she to question that?

His Harmony damn mom was who.

“Okay, what’s these rebels’ grievance?” she asked Easy Money.

“That’s not your concern. Go in there, force their surrender. If they resist, kill them all. Do not attempt to negotiate. That’s not your job.”

Lyra gritted her teeth. “It’s your job, right?”

“I might’ve mentioned I don’t negotiate. You’re being tested. Any independent action will be interpreted as failure. Just do what you’re told.”

“You don’t believe in individual initiative?”

“From your son, it’s not a problem. You’re not cleared to think for yourself yet.”

✭☆✭☆✭☆✭

She led her unislaves in column, an hour’s march north and then east. Creeping things watched them from the undergrowth. The wasteland wildlife seemed afraid to risk preying on the unislaves, and Lyra was grateful for that — she wasn’t familiar enough with the SmithBuck’s controls to feel confident about handling an ambush.

This didn’t feel right. But it was what she had to do to see Bean again. She could work within the system, couldn’t she? She could earn a position of respect under Ponysmith with her magical knowledge, and use that to persuade him to be better. It could work, right?

It’s not like the Minutemares were saints. They did war crimes too. War crimes were all the rage these days. They were the new fashion. She’d be willing to bet even Rarity did one every now and again, just to keep up with the style.

She paused on a wooded hill a mile or so from the settlement of New Peapoddy. The inhabitants had begun building defenses — some walls made of scrap that didn’t cover much, and several turrets that careful examination revealed were crude imitations made out of wood. She set complicated instructions for the Unislaves to go down into the valley between the hill and the settlement — far more cover than the Ponysmith’s Centurions usually bothered with. While her troops milled around trying to get to her waypoints, she galloped directly over to the settlement ‘walls’.

“Freeze! And keep your horn dim!” The guard leaned on top of the wall in a posture that suggested he had his hind hooves on a ladder back there. His rifle wobbled in his telekinetic grasp as he struggled to keep the sights trained on her.

“I’m from the Ponysmith. I’m here to ask you to surrender. Before something bad happens.”

“Fuck surrender,” said the pony on the wall. “We’re not giving him any more of our daughters as soldiers. He won’t even send anypony to teach us the sun spell.”

Lyra sighed. “Fuck. I hate this. You know you’re going to die if you don’t surrender, right? I’m not good at war stuff, but I’ve got a pretty good sense that you’re not ready for it.” Her SmithBuck told her most of her unislaves were in position. She brought half her maniple out of the woods. She didn’t even fear for their lives anymore — the way the pony on the wall was holding his rifle, hitting anything further than a few hooves away would be a freak accident.

“Better to die free,” said the pony on the wall.

Lyra stared up at him. He had a point. What was she trying to stay alive for? Her husband was impossible to reach. Her son was impossible to reach in a different way. The pony she’d been before the Bad Day was gone forever, now. She hadn’t liked that pony very much, but at least that pony had always stuck to her principles.

And anyway. These ponies wouldn’t surrender. That meant she had to kill them. And she just couldn’t. “So, if you had a hundred or so extra ponies, do you think you’d be better able to defend yourselves?”

“You tell me, miss ‘war expert’.”

“I said I wasn’t a war expert.” Lyra bit the edge of her SmithBuck and pulled it off her leg. “Come down here and help me take these ponies’ helmets off.”

✭☆✭☆✭☆✭

Easy Money’s magic held Lyra kneeling in the snow, forcing her to keep her head up and her eyes open. Two Centurions moved down the rows of kneeling unicorns in front of her, finishing each one with a single bullet shot in the back of the head. Their limp bodies fell into the shallow graves they’d dug themselves.

The settlers, and her maniple too. Every last one of them, even the settlement’s foals. Lyra keened with grief, and Easy Money kicked her in the back, hard. “Shut up and watch, you stupid cunt. This is your fault. This is what happens when you think for yourself.”

Her revolt had lasted half an hour. Two maniples had trailed her to New Peapoddy, following just out of her view to ensure her compliance. They’d fallen on the settlement before they’d even begun getting organized. The battle had lasted fifteen minutes. The executions lasted all afternoon. When they were done, Easy Money put her in a halter and dragged her all the way back to Sawhorse.

✭☆✭☆✭☆✭

Back in her manacles, back hanging from the ceiling balanced on her hind hooves, Lyra slumped in despair. Every part of her body hurt. Especially her forelimbs and back. Why couldn’t she just die? Why was her body so much stronger than her will and her mind? Her will had broken when they’d brought her Bean the first time. Her mind? Maybe that had broken when she’d come to the wasteland, if Littlepip was any indication.

Was this even the present moment? More shapes moved in the darkness. She could still be remembering. Hallucinating. Even seeing the future if her earth pony blood came to the fore in a new way, as earth pony magic sometimes did.

The small of her back twinged sharply.

Sudden light flared, blinding her. She closed her eyes, looked away. When she turned back, it was dark again, except for a red after-image of Bean’s face. “Fuck, if I’m going to hallucinate, why not just Littlepip?”

“Who’s Littlepip?” said Fake Bean.

“I don’t know,” said Lyra. “Are you here to interrogate me?”

“It’s not right. What they’re doing to you,” said Fake Bean.

“Thanks for noticing. You’re better than my usual hallucinations.”

“Let me get you down from there.” His magic tugged at her bonds; the pressure on her fetlocks released. He wrapped his forelegs around her and guided her gently to all fours. “Mom, I’m so sorry.”

“Why, Bean? Why these ponies?” She felt like he was manhandling her, fiddling around her legs with some kind of fabric restraints. No. Wait. He was dressing her. She felt the familiar soft stretchy fabric of a stable suit against her coat. Then she felt the weight of her saddlebags on her back.

“I got your things,” he said, helping her slide her left hoof through a PipBuck. “ I can get you to the exit; you’re on your own from there.” He helped her into her jacket and fastened her helmet strap under her chin.

“No,” she said, gripping his foreleg. “You come too. I didn’t come all this way looking for you just to leave you behind.”

“I can’t. Easy Money is leading a special operation. He’ll be gone for a week, at least. I’ve assigned your feeding schedule to a dead pony. It’ll be hours, maybe days before you’re missed. But I have to hand over my shift at oh-three-hundred.” The door slid open, and he guided her into a corridor lined with similar doors. “Can you walk okay?”

Lyra stepped away from him on her own. As much as she hurt, walking on her own made her feel better about herself. “Why, Bean?”

“I was mad at you, Mom. I know I said I wasn’t, but I was. Mad enough I wanted to spend my life making things violently explode. So I found the ponies who were best at it.” He unlocked a door, hurried her along a wide concrete corridor. A second door led to a stairwell.

“So all that stuff about him being the best choice for the wasteland was bullshit?”

“No, I believe that too. It’s complicated.” The door at the top of the stairs was labeled ‘Emergency Exit Only.’

Lyra squawked as icy wind ripped through her clothes. Snowflakes spattered her nose. She looked at the Stable 114 Pipbuck on her wrist. Long time no see! said Littlepip. It’s...

Rainpril 3rd, EOH 47!

The weather is snowy! Checking for updates now. This may take a few minutes!

“A blizzard in Rainpril,” muttered Lyra.

“It’ll help cover your escape. Did it not snow in Rainpril before the war?”

Lyra stepped out. Snowflakes swam through the yellow cones of spotlights — all searching away, outside the compound. Suns light dotted the horizon, brightening the dim sky. “Probably not as often.” She turned around to face her son, backlit in the light from the stairwell. “Please come with me. They’ll kill you when they find out I’ve gone.”

“I’ll be fine. Go down to the river; there’s a gap in the fence there. Follow it north and stay close to the bank until you can’t see the light of the suns anymore. Then you’re probably safe to swing west. We don’t patrol much past Awakefield.”

She put her hooves on his shoulders. “They’ll. Kill. You.”

Bean shook his head. “They’ll kill us both if I don’t cover for you. Go on, mom. It’s my turn to do the right thing, and your turn to go on without me.”

“Bean! No! Please!”

“They’ll hear you, Mom! Let go!”

She clung to his neck. He pushed her away. A moment of wrestling, and she found herself on her butt in the snow, staring at a closed steel door with an ‘Exit Only’ sign on it.

There was nothing she could do. Turning herself in so she could stay near Bean would just get him in trouble. If she wanted his sacrifice to mean anything, she’d have to escape.

“I’ll be back for you,” she whispered. Sniffling from the cold, she stumbled to her feet and headed into the night.

Level Up
New perk: Mod It ‘til It Crashes II. You have disabled the magic burnout mechanic. You are now OP. Have fun.

New status: Addicted (Nicotine)

Next Chapter: Chapter 21: How Lyra Got Her Towel Back Estimated time remaining: 2 Hours, 39 Minutes