Author's Notes:

Lero and his herd do not appear in this interlude.

This was originally a part of chapter 4, but I decided to excise it and post it separately. I didn't want that chapter to contain a huge block of text that has little to do with the main characters of Xenophilia.

Chapter four will star Lero and his herd.

The train rolled up to Beavertron station, the dried out and colorless pine slats of the platform greeting visitors with its apathy. The train visited only two days a week, and Berry Punch was the only passenger to exit that day. She picked up her saddlebags from the luggage car, and walked off the platform, glancing at the ticket master behind the broken glass. The ticket master shrugged in greeting, and Berry shrugged back.

She walked through Beavertron’s quiet and cramped streets, passing by the remains of houses as they had been stripped for materials needed for other towns. She passed by the ruined walls of the abandoned explode-o-dome, where unicorn scientists once hurled rocks around a track before smacking them into each other to study the explosions. Most of the innards had been moved to Zebratron, where a bigger, more advanced explode-o-dome had been built. They could actually use boulders instead of rocks, and the newly grown magic amplification crystals let them hurl the boulders at greater speeds.

Across the street from the explode-o-dome was the orphanage, state sponsored, and probably the only source of outside money Beavertron received. The kids were on the yard, playing below the dark clouds, chasing each other and squealing with delight as they tried to squeeze in one last inch of fun before the rain started. A griffon fledgling played with the ponies, and they were all watched by the smiling, though weary, pony staff.

Her dad’s home, at the end of a dead end street, jutted next to the Aether forest. She did not look into those dark and foggy woods. She could hear the antlers scrape against the branches, and could hear the cloven hooves press into the dirt. She would deal with it later, if at all. For now, she had to meet the civil servants in front of her father’s cottage.

“Hey!” the leader said, an earth pony mare with the yellow reflective jacket of a construction worker. “Ms. Punch, welcome back.”

“Don’t you threaten me,” Berry said, walking through the entirety of Beavertron’s civil servants. It looked like five today.

“Still a smart-donkey, I see,” Crocus said with a smirk. “Think you could tell your dad to knock it off when you go inside?”

“Sure, but he won’t listen,” Berry said. “His fear is greater than your… something-or-other.”

“His fear is stupid, pardon my saying,” Crocus said. “What’s his big deal with entropy, anyway? Without entropy, we’d be out of a job. What good is maintenance now, huh? There’s not a single hole for me to patch, and Hay Zoos here hasn’t been able to do lawn work in weeks.”

Hay Zoos, an earth pony stallion, nodded angrily. “The grass, it won’t grow. It’s always freshly cut, like new. I need to work the ground, Ms. Punch. It’s my cutie mark.” He thrust his rump toward Berry, showing off his pruning shears cutie mark.

“Mowing grass is a sick and depraved act,” Berry Punch said. “You should be ashamed of yourself, striking down grass as it reaches for sexual maturity, keeping it in an artificially retarded childhood, gelding those poor blades for the sake of appearances. How perverted.”

Hay Zoos snorted in offense, and a pegasus mare put a wing on him to calm him down. Drops began to fall, and Berry could hear a ponderous movement coming from the forest.

“Just ask him, okay?” Crocus said, as the little group split up to find cover.

“Yeah, sure,” Berry Punch said, entering the door.

Raindrops spattered against the windows of the dustless and still den. A chintzy couch was pushed against the stucco wall. In front of it sat an oval coffee table, and in the corners of the den edifices made out of books, stacked high, terrorized probability by leaning and not falling.

Berry walked through the silent room, pushing through the air that hadn’t moved in a month, which was the last time she visited. She felt it come to life as it flowed over her, and she wondered how a finely-tuned pegasus would take the static state of the atmosphere in this cottage. Air that barely moved would probably be a horrifying thing to a pegasus, so used to feeling it and reading it like it was a living being.

She could remember her youth when the cottage was cramped and lively, with her birth mother and herd mother and her father living in happy domesticity, while her younger sister stacked blocks to watch them tumble. Even though her parents were unicorns, and she was an earth pony, Berry never felt left out. It was a cozy little herd, up until her sister and herd mother, Double Mint, were killed.

(Years later, during her other life in Ponyville, Berry Punch had bribed a young filly to run with her in the Sisterhooves Social, using ice cream sundae as payment. It was another of what Amethyst Star would call ‘a trifling stunt’ (especially since Berry used her bilocation skill to heckle the participants while simultaneously competing in the event), but, for a split instant after she won, Berry felt like she was trying to relive something she never had the chance to have.)

Of course her birth mother, Fruit Loop, didn’t take Double Mint’s death well. Fruit and Double were made for each other, and Double Mint’s death, in Berry’s opinion, destroyed Fruit Loop’s ability to tolerate reality. Fruit Loop decided she had enough of the shrieking pain of her existence, and had walled herself off from reality, to pursue the strange pleasure of a stone; pleasure that comes from not having pain. She existed outside now, wherever outside was. Berry didn’t know. She figured no one would ever see her mother again. And, of course, that destroyed her father’s will to face up to reality. Berry wished her mother had fought against whatever dark forces were savaging her will, at least for her father’s sake.

Berry passed the dull and lifeless kitchen, and entered the hallway, its walls adorned with pictures of the herd’s past. She opened the door to her father’s bedroom. The blinds were closed, and the thick yellow curtain was drawn, and they dulled the sound of tapping raindrops. Notebooks were stacked in one corner, and a box of tissue next to it. None of those items had been touched in years. There was no dust in this room, and there probably never would be.

In the bed, lying under the sheets, was the unmoving body of her father, Star Struggle.

It wasn’t always like this. Sure, he’d spend most of his time in bed, sheets up to his chin, never leaving his house due to the foul terror, born of grief, that he lived with. He cooked and cleaned, and studied whatever it was he studied. He’d answer the door when Berry came to visit, or when the local grocer brought food. Then, he stopped answering the door. He wouldn’t leave the bed unless he was going to eat, bathe, or eliminate.

And now, after worrying about his collapsing mental state, after cajoling out-of-town doctors to visit, after tearful entreaties and furious begging, her father simply didn’t move at all.

“Hi,” Berry said. She sat down and let her saddlebag fall off, the bottles clinking together as it landed on the red carpet. “There was some angry folks with a petition outside. They asked me to ask you to knock it off. With the not moving thing. It’s kinda neat, you know, that you’re like a statue. When was the last time you had a meal? A year ago? I don’t get the mechanics of your despair. It’s weird. I’m guessing the explode-o-dome and the Aether forest probably allowed some of this to happen, that combination of magic weirdness.

“If you think about it, refusing to move to the point of ruining the, uh, local system’s tendency toward disorder, or whatever, what with your heart only beating once every other day, and your digestive system barely running, takes a monstrous act of will. Mom had that, ya know. When Double Mint died, mom used that monstrous will to remove herself from reality, to wherever she is now. I used to think it didn’t make much sense, you know. Why not just kill yourself? But it’s not just an act of grief, it’s an act of rebellion against a universe she considered meaningless and absurd.

“Yeah, I’m getting off track. Hmm. Anyway, your refusal to move, to not act, to add as little as possible to entropy, is in itself an entropic act, because of the will it takes to not act when it’s easier to act. Get it?”

Star Struggle didn’t move.

“Eh, I figured that wouldn’t work. I don’t know much about that stuff, anyway. Of course, the doctor couldn’t figure out how slowly your synapses fired, so as far as I know, maybe decades down the line, the words I just said will finally process in your brain. Who knows? I bet I’d be an old mare, coming to visit her father, who still looks as old, or as young, as he did when his heart decided it couldn’t deal with reality anymore.

“I talked to a physicist about why you aren’t freezing cold, like near absolute zero, what with you slowing down your system and stuff. Anyway, the physicist couldn’t come up with a good explanation outside of some stuff like reality bubbles, so I decided it’s because you’re a dilettante. The immediate outside world should be near freezing too, up to however far the radius is that your mad quest affects, but you aren’t doing that right because you’re a dilettante.”

Berry Punch frowned, and sighed.

“Actually, now that I think about it, it’s the Runner in the Woods keeping that from happening. I’m sure of it.

“Listen, when Double Mint died, mom decided her life had no meaning, and she thought it was terrible. I think it would be a wonderful thing. It means ultimate freedom. We’re ponies, and our life’s meaning is given to us by our cutie mark. That means I live my life toward a goal or a destiny, and that’s a terrible thing. Take my word for it. Having to live my life around whatever goal the universe had planned for me? I might as well just burn everything to the ground.

“There’s this Still Way grandmaster in Ponyville – oh, I’m a Drunken Hoof grandmaster now – and we sometimes get in philosophical arguments, the few times we’ve spoken to each other. She’s definitely a quality over quantity pony. I guess aiming for quality makes sense if you’re an alicorn, and have untold thousands of years to live for, but with our measly little lives of seventy or eighty years, it’s just a waste. Maybe if you believed in Elysian Fields after this, sure, but that’s so beyond my experience that it’s just another absurd thing. I can’t believe or disbelieve. There’s so much to do in this life that you’d never be able to do them all. Aiming for quality over quantity really cuts out a huge swath of what’s good in life, wanting to do one or two things really well. I told her I want to do everything I can, as much as I can. Quantity has a quality of its own.

“That’s what I told her, but, deep down, I really don’t care. You and mom deal with this universe through grief and despair, you two even shaped it into a weapon of sorts, but what I have is scorn and indifference. I just don’t care either way. I mean, I’m a Drunken Hoof grandmaster, and that took a total qualitative act. Then I spend most of my time drinking and ruining things and occasionally getting into fights. So much for quantity.”

Her cutie mark throbbed. She looked up, looked through the wall, hazing away, looked across the field and through the forest, through the trees, to the clearing where the ponies danced in drunken frenzy, and in the middle was the Runner in the Woods, pointing a cloven hoof at Berry Punch, beckoning her.

Berry popped open her saddlebag and pulled out a glass jar of moonshine. She gulped it down in seconds, closed the lid, and put it back in her saddle bag. Her cutie mark was burning hot.

“I get called the town drunk, but if they actually paid attention, they would notice that I never, ever, get drunk. I’ve been pushing my tolerance limit for decades. I want to know what’s happening…” she pawed at the ground.

“I get all the lovely feelings of harmony and belonging when I do what my cutie mark tells me, and I hate it. I do everything I can to fight and rebel against it. I don’t want to be told what to do. It’s like I’m being manipulated by outside forces, and those forces are me.”

She bent down and kissed his cheek.

“Gosh, you’re cold. I guess you were listening, huh? You’re not cold enough, though. Heh, you’re being a dilettante again.”

She put on her saddle bag and headed toward the door. She turned back.

“I love you dad. I love mom too, no matter what. But, if either one of you ever make it back, I am going to beat total hay out of you. Both of you. A complete and utter smack-down. Get it? Because both of you deserve it.”

Berry Punch frowned, squinting in thought. “Actually, deserve has nothing to do with it. I’ll beat hay out of both of you because it’s funny. A daughter reunited with her long lost parents, running up to them, tears in her eyes, and right before they hug, she gives them a major beat-down. That’s hilarious. Anyway, good luck with achieving that personal zero-point energy state. Bye dad.”

The rain stopped, and the fog rolled over the grassy meadow, green in sunlight but now a pale blue as the dark clouds glowered overhead, and Berry Punch trudged through the mud toward the Aether forest. A combination of unwanted emotions struggled with each other, sadness and anger toward her parents, and love, and grief, and anger toward herself and fear for what was going to happen. She pushed them back and tried to manufacture self-control. Her cutie mark throbbed warm-hot-warm and pushed her forward. Tinglings of expectation shot through her, and Berry tried to fight it by following the example of her mother; the pleasure of a stone. Her cutie mark mocked her.

She entered the now darkening woods, walking under the beech trees that towered straight up before creating a leafy canopy. The darkness graduated to black, but light came from the center of the forest and guided her. Rushing wind carried faint music, and the fiery tingling increased, telling her she wanted to experience the pleasure and ecstasy now, and Berry ignored it. I refuse, she thought. Her bottles clinked in the saddlebag.

(In Canterlot, weeks prior, Berry Punch woke Minuette up and told her, “I want to eat an ice cream cone.” Not able to go back to sleep, Minuette followed her to Freezy Pop’s for some ice cream.

Minuette, levitating her hot fudge sundae, took a seat and waited for Berry to join her. Berry, as if staggering in a dream, made her way to the garbage can and threw away her one-scoop alfalfa-flavored ice cream cone.

“W-why did you do that?” Minuette asked.

“Nopony tells me what to do,” Berry said. “Not even myself.”

“That doesn’t even make any sense!”

Berry Punch only laughed in response, scaring Minuette.)

Trying to ignore the call of her cutie mark never worked. It was if it pulled her toward the forest, and that was never pleasant. Even when she tried to leave town, taking the turn toward the train station, she’d somehow be on the street again, looking at the corner of her dad’s house, as if the street looped on itself. If she was summoned by the Runner in the Woods, then she could not leave until she saw her.

She pushed through the forest, the trilling of flutes and whirring of bullroarers getting louder. Screams that lingered between ecstasy and pain filled the air and added to the mad symphony. Berry’s lip curled up in scorn.

She made it to the clearing. The noise of the debauched revelry stopped, and the shadows of ponies projected through the trees, waiting for her to join the revelry.

In the middle of the clearing, in a field of daises, stood The Runner in the Woods. She stood bipedal on her cloven hooves, her antlers reaching out like webs, her phalluses hanging low. She saw Berry and smiled her fanged smile.

“You aren’t fulfilling the duties of your sign,” the Runner said, pointing to Berry’s cutie mark.

“I ain’t beholden to that mess,” Berry said.

“Berry Punch, I am trying to give ponies the gift of ecstasy and revelry that destroys all inequities. I would prefer that all of my chosen ones fulfill their duty.”

“I didn’t vote for you,” Berry said. “I don’t remember signing a ballot that said you could tell me what to do.”

The Runner’s mouth closed, though her lips formed a smile that could be called pitying. “Poor, deluded, Berry Punch.”

I should never have been born a pony, Berry Punch though. I’m a bad fit for it. A cutie mark telling me what to do. I refuse on principle.

The Runner didn’t move toward Berry, but simply folded the space between them. A hoof traced Berry’s jawline, and Berry tried to manufacture disdain at the lust that shot through her, a synthetic response to a true emotion. She panted instead.

“Look at you fighting it,” the Runner whispered, her words like a silk brush tickling Berry’s ears. “You’re the only pony I know that tries to make a virtue out of unhappiness.” One of the Runner’s phalluses sprang erect. Berry’s vagina became instantly wet. She forced her tail between her legs, not to hide her reaction – the Runner knew what was happening – but as a defiant act against the dictates of her body. Her cutie mark flared, and whispered unwanted commands to her soul. Berry Punch curled back her lips in rage.

The Runner trailed a hoof across her back, this simple gesture causing a moan of pleasure to escape from Berry, though it trailed into a growl.

“You always try to fight, and you always give yourself to me. Please, dear Berry, please stop hurting yourself. Follow your destiny. You want this pleasure.”

“I don’t want to want it.”

The Runner lifted Berry’s tail, and Berry’s flanks quivered.

“Don’t,” Berry said.

“Then walk away, Berry. Simply leave. I am the one that summons you here, but only you can make you stay.” The Runner bent down, and breathed her hot breath over Berry’s vulva.

I’m going to come, Berry thought, and she stuttered out, “Our n-nada who art in nada, nada be thy name.”

“What are you doing?” The Runner said.

Berry’s mind, despite the pleasure invading her body, trying to stoke the fires of voracious lust, settled into the stillness of a grandmaster meditating. “Your kingdom nada, thy will be nada,” and Berry burst into laughter.

The Runner stood up and away from Berry as her purple body shook with laughter. Berry spat out parts of her mantra as she laughed, and she fell to the forest floor, folding her front legs under her to hold her chest as it heaved with laughter. Berry’s laughing died down, and she noticed a parade of expressions marching across the Runner in the Woods’s face; anger, confusion… and sadness? Hurt?

“I give you untold ecstasy, Berry Punch, and you reject it.”

Berry Punch rolled her eyes. “Sex is boring,” she said. “All day trancelike orgies with you and a bunch of easily manipulated ponies? Snore. I got better things to do, like setting things on fire. Like these trees. They’re stupid, by the way. This whole forest is stupid.”

“Your childish insults mean nothing to me,” the Runner said, and Berry startled when she felt the coldness in her cutie marks.

“You released me?”

“You released yourself,” The Runner said. Tears filled her eyes and fell down her cheeks. “You have rejected me.”

I’m free, Berry thought. Her cutie mark was a dead thing now, a mere scribbling empty of purpose and destiny, and it felt wonderful.

Stunned, the bottles in her bag forgotten, Berry whispered, “I won.”

“I loved you, Berry,” the Runner said through her sobs. “I watched you since you were a child. I admired your will-“

“I don’t care,” Berry said, turning to leave. “I’m out.” She walked out of the clearing, ignoring the Runner’s sobs. An uneasiness settled over her as she tried to define the long years of her servitude to this demigoddess and her orgies. A giant red neon sign, flashing RAPE flared in her head, and Berry felt confused.

I was raped, Berry thought. She had never felt that before, or even realized it. It was a rape I was complicit in by virtue of my cutie mark. No, I’m making excuses.

“Am I?” she said, as she walked through the meadow next to her father’s house. This should be a victory she was celebrating, a victory over her internal destiny and an ancient demigoddess whose rites should have been obsolete long ago. There was no anger, no sadness, no guilt. Maybe I’m in shock… or am I indifferent to even that? She slowly made her way to the train station, walking through the empty streets.

The train station had a self-serve post office next to the ticket office, and Berry selected a form that was a petition to the Office of Princess Celestia.

She sat at the visitor’s desk, set out the form, and thought about how she could describe what happened to her. At the very least, someone needed to know about The Runner in the Woods. Maybe there were other victims like her, ponies that wanted to stop, but couldn’t. There was a chill fear that the diarchs did know about Her, and weren’t going to do anything about it. She gripped the quill with her mouth, dipped it in ink, and began to write. She only paused to get a second sheet of paper. When finished, she stuffed it in an envelope and dropped it in the mailbox in the train station.

Eventually, as the sun set, the train came to pick her up. I’m free, she thought. Whatever that means. I’m going to change. No more groping against destiny. I can do what I want. I can change myself to whatever I want!

In Ponyville, the next day, after finishing a bottle of Pinot noir, Berry laughed as ponies tried to sample jelly donuts she had secretly filled with mayonnaise.

“You’re such a troublemaker, Berry!” Minuette said, spitting out bits of fried dough and mayo.

Berry frowned. “Welp, I guess I’m not going to change after all. Oh well.”

The wind carried the sound of Pinkie’s sad trombone.

"'Know thyself?' If I knew myself, I'd run away."
- Goethe