The day after leaving Stable 97 was filled with just as much walking as the day we left New Appleloosa, but the boredom was much easier to keep away by palling around with Stellar and Bishop, who I'd opened up to much more after our time in the lower floors of 97. When we weren't talking, I was catching up on the adventures of Harry Trotter, reading while walking just behind Chess's brahmin cart. I figured that as long as I kept the cart in my peripheral vision, I would be just fine... And I was until the cart stopped and I didn't. Nearly broke my freaking nose.

"This looks like a good enough place to stay the night," Chess said.

As we got close to it, my PipBuck notified me that the place was called “Golden Harvest Acres.” Calamity checked the area for any raiders that might be camped out here, but it seemed that the only building intact enough for raiders to use was the barn, and that was completely devoid of life. Everywhere else had had their roofs cave in after years of disuse, and that’s if they didn’t just collapse altogether.

We trotted into the barn and Chess untied the Brahmin from the cart before leading them into a couple old animal stalls. The rest of us started to set up camp.

“Hmph… Not the kind of place I would have chosen, but I suppose it’s better than nothing,” Chisel complained as we trotted into the barn.

"I take it you're not used to the real world are you?" I said. After the way Knight had gotten acquainted with Chess' hoof the night before, I was hesitant to mouth off to the aristocrat, but a pony can only put up with him for so long.

“Maybe it's 'the real world' for a commoner like you, but I was born to live in Tenpony. This is the last time I'm leaving the Tower, I promise you that."

“Why’d you leave this time?”

“What can I say? The job paid well. The crazies that hired Chess to deliver the statue even paid half of the price in advance. I almost didn’t think they were real caps, but I had someone back in Tenpony check them out. They’re real. Once I get back home, I won’t have to worry about money at all for a good longtime.”

"Well that's just wonderful, because Celestia knows that Tenpony Ponies have enough on their plates as it is," Oh snap! Did I just say that out loud!?

“Yes! Finally, someone else who understands as well as Chess does!"Oh, well that worked out well. "Most wasteland ponies are jealous of us and think we're all a bunch of 'stuck up softies,' but really they just don't understand how hard it is for us to live the way we do. We have to make a lot of money to keep up our lifestyles. Once, when there was a drastic drop in the demand for sculptures, I was actually forced to choose between buying food and taking my daily trip to the spa!"

"Wait...Choosing between eating and... fancy bathing?" The only reason I could afford to decently clean myself just once a month was because Mayor Railright sold the town's soul to Red Eye, and I was lucky to have even that!

"Yes! I eventually ended up having to alternate between them. Eating one day, grooming the next. It was awful! Still, even as much as Chess is paying me, this may not have been worth it. If you ask me, this whole expedition is cursed.”

“Cursed? Really, it's that bad?” I asked, unable to speak in any tone less sarcastic than a deadpan.

“Yes. The ponies that were originally escorting us from Tenpony all wound up leaving when they saw it all start happening. They all got scared and took off. Nothing outright harmful happened, but… it was just disturbing.”

“Like what?”

“Well the first thing I noticed happened on the very day that Chess came to me and asked me to make the statue. As I was following him from my shop out of the tower, I could have sworn that some of the ponies I saw on my way out tower passed by me more than once, as if there were duplicates of them or something. Then just two days before you joined us, we were mugged by a trio of old ladies. They weren’t exactly hard to fight off, Knight scared them all away without even killing them and they were only armed with rolling pins, but it was still just weird! There have been so many things happening that just seem strange and out of place like…Like that, over there!” he said, pointing behind me.

I turned around toward the corner of the barn and saw the skeleton of a pony lying beside what appeared to be an old Whac-a-Mole game. The top of the pony’s skull looked to be caved in with the game’s foam mallet wedged into the hole, giving the implication that the pony had been playing the game when one of the moles grabbed the mallet and hit back. As I looked at it, the derpy pony and ellipsis popped up for the umpteenth time that day. Every time something even slightly odd happened, I was seeing it. It was almost getting annoying.

“So… it’s a dead pony. It's sad, but in case you haven’t noticed it yet, there are lots of dead ponies in the wasteland. 97 was full of them, and there were even some skeletons lying down on the side of the road, if you were paying attention.”

“What? Do you not see the way the body is set up next to the machine like that? Like it was killed by the moles?”

I rolled my eyes. Granted, I had seen a couple of weird things on my adventure, especially whenever the ellipsis popped up, but a curse? No way. “Well yeah, that’s all a little weird, but it’s hardly a curse. My guess is that the ponies that originally owned this barn just happened to buy a Whac-a-Mole machine for their kids or something, and then 200 years later some traveler with a dark sense of humor found the machine and the body of one of the farm’s owners and decided to set up an ironic little scene for whoever came later. As for the duplicates and the old ladies, the duplicates were probably just you having déjà vu and the old ladies were just a couple of really, really, senile old ponies being crazy. It’s just a bunch of coincidences. If this statue were really cursed, it would make the sky rain snakes or make your mane fall out, something that will actually hurt you. Sure it’s odd, but what kind of curse is just ‘odd?’”

“That’s true… depending on who’s laying the curse.”

“Well, who would make a curse like that?”

Chisel seemed to hesitate a bit. “I… I think we may have invoked something rather bad when I made the statue. The last straw for the guards that left was when I told them what I made the statue of…” He paused again before finally spitting it out. “We were commissioned by a cult. The statue is an icon of Discord.”

My eyes widened slightly. That had caught me a bit off guard. My personal view on religion was that Celestia and Luna were either powerful ponies who had either ascended to divinity, or were just mortals whose names made really good placeholders for whatever gods or goddesses were actually out there. However, in my opinion, Discord wasn't some kind of demon-god the same way the Princesses were divine. Every source I'd heard of believed that, while powerful, Discord was just a historical figure, no different than countless similar threats to Equestria that had popped up over the years. Still, it seemed to me that a religion revolving around one of the most notorious enemies of ponykind was a bad idea.

Regardless, stranger things have happened in Equestria than gangs of old ladies and fake Whac-a-Mole murder scenes. For now, I could believe that it was all a coincidence, and even then, none of the supposed curses had really done any serious harm. Even on the incredibly unlikely chance that Discord was involved at all, he just seemed to be goofing around. “Well, I think you’re overreacting,” I said. “Until it starts raining chocolate milk, I’m just gonna file this under ‘not an issue.’”

Chisel and I weren’t the only ones to notice the Whac-a-Mole machine however. It wasn’t long before Tricky decided to investigate the machine more thoroughly.

“Hey, guys! Check this out, it’s a Whac-a-Mole game! We had one of these things back home and I would always get a perfect score when I played it!” he said as he trotted toward the machine.

He didn’t make it there though; as he stepped further towards the game, the ground began to give way underneath one of his hooves and he fell through the floor, screaming like a little filly as the rest of us looked on in horror. Calamity immediately flew to the hole and tried to follow him down, but the opening was too small for his wings to stay open. He would have fallen in himself if Bishop and I hadn’t telekinetically caught him by the tail. Meanwhile Tricky’s girly scream began to grow quieter and quieter until finally it was replaced with a dull ‘THUD.’

The rest of us cautiously approached the hole and looked down, wary of having the floor collapse beneath us too. It was so deep that we couldn’t see the bottom. “Well, he’s dead,” Chess said, shrugging.“Come on, let’s go find someplace else to sleep where the ground’s more stable.”

“HEY! GUYS?”Tricky’s voice came up from the hole. “Can you hear me? Don’t worry, I’m okay; I’ve got bones of stee- Ouch! Augh! It hurts too much to stand! I think I broke my fucking leg!”

“Huh? What was that?” an unfamiliar voice from the hole said, this one bizarrely squeaky.

“Hey, come here! I think it came from this guy! Boy, is he funny looking though…” came another similar voice.

“Who are you calling funny looking? It’s you two mole weirdoes that are funny looking! Um, I mean ‘I was sent as an
ambassador from the utopia of the Surface World. Bow before my glory!’ …and get me some Med-X or something, this leg hurts like a bitch!”

“Oh, of course, Mr. Ambassador! Shovel Shrooms, you stay here and bow for him; I’ll go get Dr. Mountainhill,” said the first of the two other voices before scurrying away.

“Tricky? What’s going on? Who are those other ponies down there?” Chess called.

“Huh? Mr. Ambassador, are those your friends up there?” Shovel Shrooms asked.

“Uh, yeah, they’re the other Surface Dwellers,” Tricky said, “and I’m coming to see if your race of freaky mole ponies is worth, um… trading with! Yeah, that’s it, because we are only willing to trade our magnificent wealth with good, hospitable ponies. So you guys better treat me right!” He then called back up to Chess, “I’ve got it from here Chess, you guys can just go away or something, I got it from here,” he said, although from his tone of voice he wanted to say something more along the lines of “I’m gonna milk this ‘Ambassador’ thing for all it’s worth, so get out of here and don’t get in my way.”

“So… what now?” Stellar asked.

“If he wants to stay, there’s not much we can really do about it,” Chess said. “Besides, being down by one guard isn't going to hurt us. There’s no reason for us to go down there.”

Suddenly, we heard a strange noise, like something was crumbling, and then a loud avalanche-like roar as the ground gave way under the cart carrying the statue.

Chess’s white face somehow turned whiter “…and now suddenly there is! Chisel, you did cast that unbreakability spell on that statue, right?”

“Of course, that’s what you paid me for. I even did the cart too, just to make sure I don’t have to spend an extra day in this vile, dusty place because of a broken wheel,” the artist said.

Chess calmed down instantly. “Then it should be fine, Calamity will just fly Bishop down there, and he’ll levitate it out, it’ll be that simple.”

As it turned out, it was not that simple. Instead of finding the cart at the bottom of the pit, they only found its tracks. The floor was slanted, leading into a dark cave. When Bishop cast a light spell to look further in, all he could see was that the path turned and probably continued to spiral down indefinitely. At Chess’s insistence, we decided to all go into the tunnels together on the off chance that not everything in the tunnels was as affable as the creatures Tricky met acted. Chisel was the only dissenter.

“It’s bad enough that I have to walk for days through dirt and grime, but now you want me in a cave? I’ll stay up here, thanks!”

“Good idea. Somepony needs to protect the brahmin from any raiders or bandits that come by here while we’re down in that tunnel,” Stellar said with a smirk.

“R-raiders?” Chisel stammered.

“What are you talking about?” Knight said, looking at Stellar incredulously, “Chisel couldn’t protect the brahmin from a one legged radroach. If any raiders came, he’d just get killed. Horribly. They’d probably peel his face off and make him eat it or something. I know that's what I wanna do to him. It’d be smarter to just have him come with us into the tunnel.”

Needless to say, Chisel couldn't get into the tunnel fast enough.

After Chisel, Calamity took the rest of us down one at a time, with me going down last.

As he lowered me down, I noticed that the walls of the hole had a few tunnels going through them with strange, tiny indentations peppering the spaces between them. That wasn’t the only odd thing though: judging by the chunks of hard, dry soil that had formerly made up the floor of the barn, the layer of dirt that the cart had fallen through must have been only about as thick as a pony’s hoof. How it had stayed up for any amount of time, let alone supported the cart for even a second, was beyond me.

“What do you think was keeping this tunnel covered?” I asked.

“I don’t know, what do I look like, an archgeologist?” Knight said roughly.

“Do you mean an ‘archeologist’ or a ‘geologist?’” Stellar asked.

“Fuck, I don’t know. Whichever one Daring Do is?” Knight said, looking confused.

“You are so lucky you’re a good fighter…” Chess muttered under his breath. “Anyway, we need to get going. Come on everypony, this way!”

As we trekked down, I presumed that we would find the statue relatively quickly. After all, how far could it have rolled?

As it turned out, the dumb thing rolled quite far. The tunnel continued on for a good couple of miles, turning and spiraling downward and branching out into different paths, a set of wheel tracks showing us which way the cart went. I noticed that the further we got in the tunnel, the more of those little indentations appeared on the floor, walls, and even the ceiling. There were also little patches of bioluminescent mushrooms growing along the edges of the floor.

As we walked, I could have sworn I heard something besides our own hoofsteps and breathing. Some weird, scratchy, shuffly noise, weirdly scratching and shuffling around us.

“Does anyone else hear that?” I asked.

“I hear it too. I’m going to check the EFS on my PipBuck. Click, do the same, just in case I miss something. You know how to do it, right?” Chess said.

“Oh, that’s right! Almost forgot about that,” I said, activating the spell. Instantly at the bottom of my vision, several blue lines appeared, one for all six of my allies… wait… six? One of the lines didn’t seem to correspond with anypony in our group, and it indicated something a few meters away in front of us.

“You see that odd line, Chess?” I asked.

“Yes...” He took a few steps to the right, then a few to the left. At first I was confused by it, but then I realized that he was triangulating the unknown creature’s position. “It’s right there in front of us. Maybe it’s underground.”

Suddenly, we were interrupted by something poking up out of the ground, about where the line indicated the strange target was. It looked almost like some kind of strange rock, then another identical rock came out beside it. Then, the ground cracked open and the large, furry, pink nosed head of some strange ponylike creature came through, followed by forelegs and a torso. The hind legs remained in the hole. The thing shook itself, flinging clumps of dirt out of its light grey fur, and looked over at us, its beady eyes widening in amazement.

“Oh, why hello there, strangers,” it said in a strange voice, just like the ones that were with Tricky.

“Ugh! What is that thing!?” Chisel whined, stepping back.

“He’s so cute!” squealed Stellar.

The creature cocked its head to the side and responded, “Um, I’m a mole pony, and thank you.” He crawled the rest of the way out of his hole, revealing that he had a short, ratlike tail and a cutie mark of a mushroom. His hooves, which were the rocklike things we’d seen earlier, were shaped like strange, flat claws to aid in digging. I noticed that the indentations they left where he walked were perfect matches to the ones lining the cave walls. His head was essentially pony shaped, but the end of his muzzle was pointier and his nose and ears were hairless and pink. He was much shorter than most ponies I’d met, probably because it let him crawl through narrow tunnels more easily. “My name is Boaris. What brings you ponies here? And why are you guys so bright?”

Bishop turned off his light spell, leaving the tunnel’s illumination to the mushrooms, then responded, “We’re looking for something; a cart carrying a really big crate. It fell into the tunnel a couple of minutes ago.”

“It fell? Wait, then that means… You ponies are Surface Dwellers! I don’t believe it! Just like that Ambassador Tricky guy I’ve been hearing about! You know, before him, I always thought that the surface world was destroyed, uninhabitable! Are you ponies radioactive? Is that why you glow in the dark?” Boaris approached and looked us over excitedly, although he backed away a bit at the thought of radioactivity.

“The radioactivity on the surface is negligible nowadays,” Chess said. “We’ll tell you whatever you need to know about us, but it’s very important that we get that cart. We’ve been following the tracks on the ground here, do you know where they lead?”

“Oh, of course,” Boaris said, finally seeing the tracks now that he looked closely. I assumed his sight wasn’t all that good. “This tunnel here goes to the Grand Antechamber. Most of the tunnels that lead to the surface have been plugged up ages ago to stop the radioactive rain, but if any of you broke through the plugs, which it seems that you have, you would probably wind up there. Come on, I’ll escort you and you can tell me about the Surface World!” It wasn’t so much of an offer as an insistence. Nothing against Boaris, but it seemed like the little mole pony was more interested in questioning us about life in the surface world than actually helping us. Essentially, we just followed the tracks like before, only now we had to answer his barrage of questions too, which many of us just didn’t mind.

Boaris practically danced around us, spouting inquiry after inquiry: “What is the sun like?” “What do we eat instead of roots and mushrooms and bugs?” “What are those horn thingies on your heads?” When we responded “We’ve never really seen the sun because of the clouds,” “We eat 200 year old snack food with insane amounts of preservatives,” and “they let us do magic,” it only opened up even more questions for him. Meanwhile, his own questions gave us insight on life below the ground. Not knowing about the Enclave's cloud cover meant the mole ponies had never seen the surface for whatever reason, Boaris’s question about our diet explicitly mentioned what his own meals consisted of, and mole ponies for some reason had no unicorns among them. But the little peeks of his life weren't enough for my curiosity, or Stellar's.

"Y'know, Boaris, with all the things we've been telling you, we kind want to know a bit more about what life is like down here," Stellar asked.

"Oh! I'm sorry, how rude of me!" Boaris said, blushing. "But don't worry, I'll make it up to you!"

Just then, a strange, upbeat rhythm began to play out of nowhere and the music note notification popped up in my EFS... I hoped that Boaris would at least be better than Tricky...

{{Underground Song, set to the tune of IKEA by Johnathan Coulton}}

Back two hundred years ago

The world blew up, except down below

And the mole ponies all knew that up was not the way to go

It is nice and dark here, it’s got lots of dirt

And it keeps us safe from all the horrors above

Assuming there are any horrors above

Underground: just some dirt and some rocks and the other mole ponies

Underground: A perfect home for me, nothing else I need to see

This is our happy home

And if there’s a better home I do not know where!

All we can eat bugs and mushrooms

Plus we got carrots and plenty of room

To explore and to dig and climb up on the ceilings and walls

There’s no other place I have been

But my friends say life here is an epic win

It must be, that’s what we have been told for our whole freakin’ lives

Underground: just some dirt and some rocks and the other mole ponies

Underground: A perfect home for me, nothing else I need to see

This is our happy home

And if there’s a better home I do not know where!

Underground: tunnels, caverns

Underground: carrots, mushrooms

Underground: Digging, dirt, rocks

We got everything!

That is why I sing!

I’ve seen everything this place can give

They say it’s the best, so where else can I live?

Although I cannot help

But feel curious from time to time

But whenever I feel that way

I just sing this song and remind myself

That it’s great here, since I’m down here, I have got it made.

Underground: just some dirt and some rocks and the other mole ponies

Underground: A perfect home for me, nothing else I need to see

This is our happy home

And if there’s a better home I do not know where!"

As the music finished and my PipBuck told me the song was saved, me and the rest of the group found ourselves stamping on the ground in applause. That was actually pretty good!

"Nice song! Did you just make that up?" asked Bishop.

"Nah, I wrote it when I was little. My mom made me write it to help me deal with my curiosity for the surface, but now that I know it's safe, I gotta see some of it when I get the chance!" Boaris said excitedly as he danced around our group some more.

“Have you ever seen something like him before?” I asked Bishop.

“I’ve never seen or heard of anything like this guy. They must have been living below that farm for years, but why haven’t they come out in all this time? Well, that’s Equestria for you, I guess. Always something weird hiding just out of sight…”

The cart’s tracks eventually ended, enveloped by countless mole pony hoofprints (were they even still considered hooves? Worked better than ‘shovelprints,’ I guess.)

“It looks like the other moles found our statue,” Chess muttered.

“Yes. They probably brought it to the King’s Tunnel. He would want to see anything that came down here. Come on, the Grand Antechamber is just around the corner, and the King’s Tunnel is just beyond that. I think I heard something about Ambassador Tricky being brought to the King’s Tunnel too,” Boris said gleefully, pointing us onward.

The Grand Antechamber was just that… Grand. It was like being in a hollow globe that was nearly the size of New Appleloosa in diameter, with dozens of mole ponies scurrying about between buildings made of dirt. Most of the mole ponies were actually walking on the walls and ceiling, their strange hooves holding them in place as they walked. “How do you guys go that?” I asked Boaris.

Boaris looked almost confused, “Oh, that? We mole ponies can make dirt as hard and solid or soft and crumbly as we want. That way we can hook our hooves into it, and we can plug up the entrances from the surface with thin layers of dirt to keep the rain out. However, since you guys fell down here it seems that some of the magic from some of those old plugs must have worn off, so somemole will have to reseal them.”

Just before we reached the King’s Tunnel, a couple mole ponies ran up to meet us.

“Excuse us, but you are Surface Dwellers like Ambassador Tricky, correct?” asked one of them, a dark grey male with seven small mushrooms for a cutie mark. I recognized his voice as one of the two mole ponies who found Tricky earlier.

“Yes. My name is Chess, and I’m the leader of this group,” Chess said. I supposed that since he was our boss, it stood to reason that he’d be our de facto spokespony too, even though the caravan guard jobs he hired us for didn’t exactly have ‘deal with a newly discovered race of mole ponies’ in the job description.

“Oh! Who knew we would be blessed with the company of even more Surface Dwellers so soon! Let me introduce myself, I am Deep Burrows and this is Shovel Shrooms,” the mole pony said, gesturing to his friend, another male who had pure black fur with grey highlights and a cutie mark that looked like the mouth of a cave.

“We hope you made it here safely,” said Shovel Shrooms, “I’m afraid Ambassador Tricky was injured falling into our tunnels, but don’t worry, he is in the capable hooves of Dr. Mountainhill, and being tended to by the King’s assistants.”

“We are all fine,” said Chess, “but something that belongs to us fell down here as well, something of the utmost importance. Boaris said it was probably taken to your king.”

“Oh, you mean the Strange Box? Yes, we all thought that would make a perfect addition to King Soilsifter’s collection. He’ll be happy to return it though; he is a hoarder, but selfishness is not in his nature,” said Deep Burrows.

“Excellent. And we would like to speak to ‘Ambassador’ Tricky while we’re down here too,” Chess uttered while trying conceal a scowl.

“As you wish, Your Surfaceness,” Shovel Shrooms said before he and Deep Burrows turned and led us down into the King’s Tunnel. It was very short compared to the tunnel that we went down to reach the Grand Antechamber, and we reached the end in under a minute. It led to a large room filled with all sorts of scrap metal and other garbage adorning the walls, ceiling, and floor, but most of it was in a pile in the middle of the room. There were steam gauge assemblies, motorcycle gas tanks, lawnmower blades, toasters, chessboards, ashtrays, even the arm of a robot.

In the far corner to the right, we saw a pony in a full body cast being tended on by a pair of mole ponies bucks dressed in very dirty tuxedos and a mole pony mare in an equally filthy yellow nurse’s outfit. Despite his clear signs of injury, Tricky seemed fairly relaxed, with the tuxedo moles feeding him strange, yet tasty looking mushrooms. Meanwhile, sitting on a large throne in the center of the room, was an older-looking mole pony with a mustache and a (clearly plastic) crown sitting up on a large throne. His cutie mark appeared to be nothing more than a pile of junk, which seemed odd, considering his role. The left side of the room had an open door leading to yet another tunnel. Notably, running along the ground toward this tunnel were a set of familiar cart tracks, but with mole hoofprints to the side, as if some of the Kings assistants had pushed it.

“Oh! Ambassador Tricky, look, it seems that some other Surface Dwellers have arrived!” announced the King as he hopped off of his throne.

“What…?” Tricky said, half in a daze from his brief moment of relaxation. “Oh, it’s you guys. I should have known you’d come after the cart came down here. Seriously though, no need to worry about me, these guys have everything under control,” he said he chewed on another mushroom and proceeded go back to his relaxation.

“Your Highness, this is Chess, leader of the Surface Dwellers who came to contact us,” Boaris said gleefully, addressing the King.

The King approached Chess and extended a forehoof, “It is such a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Chess. I am King Soilsifter, leader of the mole ponies. Ambassador Tricky has told me so much about the Surface World.”

“Um, actually, I think we need to talk about that,” Chess said, glaring sternly toward Tricky.

“Aw crap…” Tricky said, knowing exactly what was coming.

“I hate to disappoint you, but Tricky is a compulsive liar,” Chess said. “He’s not an ambassador, merely a pony I employed as a guard while I was traveling. I wouldn’t put much stock in anything he says. I truly am sorry if he was any inconvenience to you.”

“LE GASP! A lair! For shame, Mr. Tricky!” said one of the tuxedo moles indignantly before walking off in a huff. The other one went so far as to turn and give a light buck to the cast on Tricky’s left leg before leaving as well, earning a yelp of pain from Tricky and a sharp glare from the nurse pony.

As the tuxedo ponies pony passed us and left the tunnel, Knight whispered to me “Wow, they took that well. I’d have broken the little prick’s spine.”

“Thank you for your honesty, Mr. Chess,” King Soilsifter said. “It is not often that we encounter a person with the nerve to lie so blatantly. Then again, I suppose a lot of bad things have been happening lately.”

“I find that misleading ponies about one's intentions seldom ends well for any parties involved. Unfortunately, Tricky seems to think the opposite. I hope you won’t let what he did reflect badly on us.”

“Yes, my King, these ones were really nice to me on the way here!” insisted Boaris.

“I cannot hold the actions of one of you against the entire group, but from one leader to another I must suggest that you keep better control of your followers, Mr. Chess. Not everymole out there would be so understanding. I do wish to know, however, why you are really down here, if not for a diplomatic mission, as Tricky said,” said the King.

“We’re looking for a cart that rolled down here just before we came. I believe it is the ‘Strange Box’ that this pony mentioned,” Chess said, gesturing to the mole pony, “and those tracks look like they came from it. We were hired to deliver it, so it is crucial that we get it back.”

“Ah, that thing? I might have known, “King Soilsifter said, nodding. “Yes, I have it. Some of my subjects thought I would like to add it to my collection. I rather like to collect treasure you see. Funny story: I used to just be ‘Patriarch’ Soilsifter before I found this old crown while digging about, then everymole started calling me ‘King’ instead. It’s a much funner title I think. But enough about that; I had an odd feeling about that box when they brought it in to me, almost a rather uncomfortable one. Perhaps it was a premonition about it already belonging to somemole else. I put it in my bedchamber. Follow me.

"Oh, one more thing though: when you leave, I’d like you to show Boaris, Shovel Shrooms, and Deep Burrows where the hole is that you came through. Any openings to the outside could potentially cause damaging floods, you see. Naturally, you must also take Tricky with you. Don’t worry about his condition. From what I understand it is a simple fracture that Dr. Mountainhill’s mushroom healing potions will have completely healed within the day. Most of the cast is simply due to the fact that Mountainhill is a notorious alarmist. Heh, you should have seen it when little Pink Paws got the pony pox last year. Everyone else just said to use some cold water, but the good doctor insisted on quarantining her for three weeks and then disinfecting everywhere Pink Paws had been that past month, hahaha!” As the King laughed jovially, I noticed that that strange ellipsis thing popped up again when he mentioned ‘cold water.’ I wonder what that was supposed to mean.

The King’s room was located just behind a pair of doors, more ornate than any other that I had seen down here. Just as Soilsifter was about to push them open, however, Chess shouted out for everyone to stop.

“Hostiles. My EFS is showing at least a dozen red bars behind that door!” Chess explained. I turned mine on again, having turned it off shortly after meeting Boaris, and saw that he was right.

“What? Those things dare invade again? In my own room no less!” Soilsifter shouted furiously, throwing the door open and charging in. Inside the room were several giant ants, each tearing away the scrap and garbage that the king was lining his room with and carrying it away through a massive hole in the wall. Chess had been woefully short on his estimation, however, as there were easily more than twenty, and more were coming in through the hole. It was forgivable though, as I couldn’t make out one bar from another they were so close together. Interestingly, among them was the occasional blue line as well.

Soilsifter grabbed a long lead pipe out of the various scrap in the room and clubbed one of them with it in the head repeatedly, crushing the monster to death, or so it seemed. The bug whirled around spraying fire from its backside, setting the King ablaze. As Soilsifter fell to the ground and rolled, trying to put the flames out, I noticed that the fire didn’t come from the ant’s backside at all, but from a second head where its abdomen should have been! The bug tried to grab the King in its pincers, only for Shovel Shrooms to leap on its second head and stomp it fatally. By then, the rest of us were rushing in as well.

Despite the sudden carnage, I couldn’t help but realize that this was my first real fight. The lizard and Nuts the robot had been fights, technically, but they were completely one sided. The lizard never even touched me, and Nuts had been too slow to catch me for the first half of our battle, and utterly helpless in the second. Instinctual fear for my own life nearly made me turn tail and run (Chisel had already taken that route) but as I saw one of the ants get a lucky shot on Calamity, clipping his wing with flame. As he fell to the ground yelling "Dammit, not again!", my fear was tempered by another instinct: protecting my friends.

I started by entering SATS. I knew beforehoof that the spell was supposed to slow the user’s perception of time so that they could aim better, but the sheer degree to which the spell did so caught me off guard. It was almost as if time wasn’t passing at all! It seemed Stable-Tec had found a spell to stop time!

I set up the first shot to hit the ant that attacked Calamity. Rather than take out the heads, which would only leave the other head to keep fighting, I aimed for the thorax. It was a smaller target, but seeing as every possible target was maxed out with a 95% chance to hit, I didn’t think it mattered. I did the same with two other ants, reloading between them, and let the spell go. The first one staggered, its chitin perforated with shot, though it was still standing. The other two suffered the same. Up until now I had thought of guns as essentially instant death dealers, at least after one or two shots, but now I realized just much a creature could take, depending on its size. It made sense now that I thought about it: I’d read somewhere that a pony body could live without a stomach or spleen, so I guess just putting a hole in one of those organs wouldn’t be instantly fatal either. It gave me a strange sense of comfort knowing that if I ever got shot I had a little while to get medical attention before bleeding out.

While I waited for SATS to recharge, I took out each of the ants that I’d wounded the first time using traditional targeting. Bishop meanwhile was making good use of his magic and Knight proved that she really did have the skills to back up her boasting, easily taking out twice as many as me with her assault rifle battle saddle. Chess and Stellar were holding their own while the mole ponies did much more than I would have expected from melee combat. I noticed through the fighting that some of the ants were non hostile, focusing on stealing the King’s treasures rather than fighting us, each one of their mouths holding some piece of garbage or another. One even held the corpse of a fallen ant!

I heard a shout of pain and terror from Stellar as an ant leapt up and clamped its jaws down on her head. Instantly I turned my gun on her attacker, careful not to accidentally hit her too. The ant let go after a couple shots to the head that had been holding her, but then the remaining head started to run toward me to avenge its other half, fire spewing from its maw. It would have been on me before I finished reloading, but it was quickly felled by a couple shots from Stellar’s pistol.

Soon enough most of the ants were gone, in no small part because many of them were more focused on stealing than fighting. We were just cleaning up the last few stragglers before we noticed that one of our number was missing.

“Help!” Deep Burrows cried as one of the ants dragged him into the hole, clenching him between its powerful jaws.

Those of us not occupied with fighting, myself included, immediately rushed to help, but it was too late. The ant’s escape went down a path that was far too steep for a non-mole pony, Calamity was grounded due to his burnt feathers, Bishop was busy fighting off some of the last few ants and the moles just weren’t speedy enough to outrun the creature.

Realizing that he was doomed, Deep Burrows woefully shouted “Tell my wife I love her!”

“But Deep Burrows, you’re single!” a teary eyed Shovel Shrooms called back.

“Oh yeah… Well tell that jerk Sandy that she should have gone out with me when she had the chance! She completely missed out on me and my glorious abs!” his voice trailed off as the ants dragged him away.

Shovel Shrooms fell to his knees and silently began to weep as Boaris finished off one of the ants and rushed up to comfort him. Soon enough, the last remaining ant fell and we were left to assess the damage. Deep Burrows had been the only casualty, aside from a few cuts and burns that would doubtlessly heal over time. On a less mortal note, the ants had taken who knows how many treasures from the King’s room, including, apparently, the statue.

“No… poor Deep Burrows…” The King sighed in frustration. “Boaris, Shovel Shrooms,” he said, addressing them in a more authoritative tone, “I’m sorry that we must put our mourning on hold, but we need to cover this ant hole. We can’t let them get through again.”

“Y-yes, of course,” Boaris said while Shovel Shrooms nodded silently. Soilsifter climbed the walls in that bizarre mole fashion, his hooves glowing as he did. Then he positioned himself over the ant hole, and started to collapse the tunnel, while the two lesser moles started covering the hole with dirt taken from other areas of the room. They worked surprisingly fast, and once it was done, they held their hooves up to the newly created dirt wall, light emanating from their hooves and casting some sort of magic over the barrier, turning it hard as stone. Even in the tragic circumstances, it was very interesting to see the mole pony magic at work, especially since the three of them did it so efficiently. The way they worked, it was as if they were just one pony. Even the way they all shared the work was awe inspiring: Soilsifter shared the work equally with his subjects, as if their tunnel construction was some great equalizer for them.

“That should do for now. It won’t hold them forever, but it’ll take at least a day of constant working for them to break through that, and from what I’ve seen of them, they aren’t that patient,” Soilsifter said, tapping his hoof against the barrier.

As they left, Soilsifter sighed morosely. “That’s the fifth loss this month... Shovel Shrooms and Deep Burrows used to be inseparable. Curse those ants! What kind of leader am I if I can’t protect my people against a bunch of worthless bugs?” he said, bucking the wall.

“Not to interrupt, King Soilsifter, but what were those things?” Chess asked.

"Yeah, Boaris didn't say anything about killer two headed ant things in that song of his," Knight said.

"It was from over a decade ago and they've only been here for a couple months... I guess maybe I should do some rewriting, hehheh... sorry..." Boaris blushed and let out a bit of nervous laughter.

“Yes, as Boaris said, they first appeared a couple months back. They steal everything that isn’t soil, from food, to metal, to mole ponies, and take it back to their lair in the Abandoned Caverns. After that, nomole knows what they do with it. Because they breathe fire and take whatever they want, my subjects have taken to calling them ‘Fiery Ant Reaver Things.’ They aren’t very hard to kill if you get your hooves on them but thanks to their two heads, mandibles, and fire breath, it’s too dangerous to get close, especially for peaceful ponies like us. Worst of all, they take so much that our food supply is draining very rapidly. At the rate things are going, we’ll have a major famine in just another month or so.” The more Soilsifter spoke, the more sadness began to show through his voice.

“It looks like they took the statue…” Chess mused, “I have to get that statue back, so I’ll need to know all I can about those Abandoned Caverns.”

“Wha-what!”Soilsifter’s tiny mole eyes nearly bugged out to pony size. “You want to face those monsters? After seeing what happened to Deep Burrows? No treasure is worth that, its suicide!”

“You kidding? We kicked their asses!” said Knight. “Look at what we did! We only lost one pony and they lost…” she attempted to count out the ant corpses, “one… two… uh... a shitload of ants!”

Soilsifter paused, putting a hoof to his chin. “Hm… you do have a point, and you did manage to do quite a bit of damage with those loud things you were carrying,” he gestured to our guns.

“Knight, these are ants we’re talking about,” Bishop mentioned. “They may be weaker, but their strength is in their numbers. Eventually they’d overrun us.”

“Not necessarily,” said Soilsifter hesitantly, “We find their corpses lying about all the time by the dozens. I think their lifespans are too short for them to increase their numbers by much. There’s probably quite a bit of course, at least a hundred, but not quite as many as you’d expect from a typical ant army. We’ve studied them a little bit, and from what I’ve seen, it looks like they just reproduce very fast to maintain their numbers, but they die so quickly that they might just be at a manageable size."

“They won’t stand a chance in ranged combat. With enough ammo, we might be able to wear them down relatively safely, and then if we take out the queen, it’ll be the end of them,” said Stellar.

“But we could still lose ponies if we do that! Even you had a close call,” I objected. She still had a horrible set of cuts on her temples. They weren’t bleeding much, but still the wounds were enough to make me gag. It was a shame; she had a really pretty flank- FACE! SHE HAD A PRETTY FACE! I mean, not that her flanks weren't nice too, NOT THAT I WAS LOOKING! Although, to be honest, I wasn't not looking either...

Ugh... Ok, let's just get this straight here: I'm not the type of guy who likes to gawk at mares or anything. I'm actually pretty conservative compared to a lot of other ponies I've met. But all that aside, the fact remains that I am a stallion. If there's an attractive mare next to me, I'm gonna notice.

Anyway, what was I talking about? Oh yeah, I just mentioned Stellar's face. “Here, you should probably take this, it should clear up that injury” I said, levitating a healing potion out of my saddlebags.

Stellar lifted a hoof to the wounds, and felt the torn skin, “Ow... With all that action I barely even noticed!” She reached into her bags and brought out her own healing potion. “Save yours for yourself. Trust me, the longer you live out here, the more you’re going to need. Thanks for the offer though, it was really sweet,” she said endearingly, smiling at me. “Anyway, I know that it’ll be dangerous to fight the ants, but we can’t just leave the mole ponies to starve like that! Whether it’s raiders, or bandits, or even just insects, things that threaten the wellbeing of innocent ponies just pisses me off! They may be dangerous, but these bugs are just another pest that has to be exterminated,” she said, stomping a hoof for emphasis.

“Can’t argue with that,” said Calamity, “’sides, I gotta pay ‘em back fer what they did to mah wing.”

“If you really want to fight them… If you really really think you can win, we will be forever indebted to you,” Soilsifter spoke up. “But please, don’t even try unless you think you can do it safely. I could not bear to have it on my conscience if I let you go to your doom. Still, if you do decide to go in and fight, and you’re successful, you may take anything you want from my collection. I’m not sure if any of it will be of value to you, but I will gladly give it all to you if you end this threat, even my precious bottle cap collection.” He punctuated that last part by reaching into a pile of scrap and taking out a transparent plastic tube full of easily hundreds of Sparkle Cola and Sunrise Sarsaparilla caps.

When Chess saw that, I swear I saw his eyes turn into Sparkle Cola caps as the ellipsis popped up in my EFS.

“Oh, yeah… That’s mine…” Chess said almost lustfully before he turned to the rest of the group. “We need to get that statue back,” Chess said, “I know this goes beyond what I originally hired you for, but I can give you all a share of those caps if you help retrieve it.”

Calamity and Stellar were naturally in. Bishop agreed too, saying “These mole ponies need help. If you guys think we can do it, then it’d be selfish not to.”

“Yeah! Time to squash these fuckers! This is gonna be fun!” Knight said with way too much enthusiasm for a task involving killing and risking her own life.

So… it was just me left to give my answer. I wish I could say that everyone else was just quicker on the draw, but that just wasn’t true. Pulse’s warnings to be careful rang in my ears, and I knew that there was a genuine risk involved in this, even if the others all thought we could win. Besides, there was nothing stopping me from denying their call to action. I had no obligation to risk myself for any reason. But I also remembered other voices besides Pulse’s, albeit fresher ones. Stellar and Bishop were right; the mole ponies were really in danger because of these ants. Somepony needed to help them, and I wasn’t going to ignore them.

Pulse would throw a fit if she heard about this, but I shrugged and said “I’m in. I just hope I don’t die or my sister will kill me.”

The others laughed good naturedly as my joke broke some of the tension, except for Knight, who just said “She can’t kill you if you’re already dead, stupid.” This of course only made everyone laugh harder.

Before we all went to end the threat of the Fiery Ant Reaver Things, Chess insisted that we all get some sleep. After all, we had to be at the top of our game if we were gonna be risking our lives down there, and it was really late in the day. The next morning, we all gathered at the entrance to a sealed tunnel which Soilsifter claimed was the easiest route into the Abandoned Caverns. Chess naturally asked if Tricky and Chisel wanted to help us, but Chisel turned it down immediately in typical pampered aristocrat fashion. Tricky promptly underestimated the enemy and responded enthusiastically, even claiming that his armor was made from a rare fireproof material, but Dr. Mountainhill forbade him from leaving, or even taking off his cast, arguing that even if the bone was probably healed, she wanted to ensure that it was definitely healed. Soilsifter claimed that he could have ordered her to let him come, but Chess decided that on second thought Tricky would be about as useful as a campfire to a seapony, especially after hearing Calamity recount the part of our adventure in Stable 97 where Tricky's most effective act in combat was literally to pee himself in fear. Chisel, however, was instructed to return to the surface with a couple mole pony escorts in order to take care of the brahmin. Thankfully, Chisel remembered the way back up.

Just before Soilsifter prepared to remove the seal on the tunnel to the Abandoned Caverns, Shovel Shrooms and Boaris ran up to us, each wearing cobbled together barding and carrying long metal rods and some of the mushroom concoctions that were the mole ponies’ version of healing potions.

“Wait! Let us come with you!” Shovel said.

“Yeah! We can’t let you guys go down there alone! Not if you’re fighting for us!” added Boaris.

Soilsifter held a hoof out and stopped them, “Now I know you two only have the best intentions, but the Surface Dwellers are much better fighters than any mole pony. It’s best to let them handle this themselves.”

Shovel stomped a hoof, embedding it into the dirt. “No! Deep Burrows is my best friend, and if there’s any chance he’s still alive down there, I’m gonna take it and rescue him!”

“Yeah! And I used to explore the Abandoned Caverns all the time back when they were still just the Seldom Used Caverns. They’ll need a guide and I’m the best there is,” added Boaris.

“I will guide them and rescue Deep Burrows if he’s still alive. I cannot send my subjects to do a job I wouldn’t do myself!” insisted Soilsifter.

“But King Soilsifter, if something happens to you down there, what will happen to the rest of us? We mole ponies need a leader, and that’s you. I know you don’t want to think about lives this way, but you’re worth more than both of us combined,” Boaris said. I was taken aback by the profoundness of his cruelly selfless logic; it was beyond what I initially expected of the curious little mole pony. Behind me, I thought I heard Knight whisper something to Bishop about hoping Chess didn’t get any ideas.

“I… I suppose you’re right,” Soilsifter conceded. “I really don’t like it, but you’re right. Still, you two must know that this is very dangerous. There’s no guarantee that you will return, and even if you do, Deep Burrows has been gone for a whole night. It’s probably too late…”

“It’s like Dr. Mountainhill says: There’s a difference between probably and definitely,” said Shovel Shrooms.

“If the two of you insist then…” said Soilsifter, still visibly reluctant. He moved to the mound of hardened dirt sealing the tunnel and placed his hooves against it. The whole thing glowed, and became easy for the king and his two subjects to shovel away.“Just remember, if you all start to think you’re in danger, turn right back. Nobody needs to get hurt today.”

“Very well, your Highness. We’ll be back as soon as we retrieve the statue and deal with your little infestation,” Chess said. “Come on, everypony, let’s move out.”

We began hiking into the tunnel, Chess and Boaris taking point so Chess’s EFS could keep an eye out for ants and Boaris could guide him to the largest part of the caverns, the place most likely to house the queen. I brought up the rear, using my EFS to prevent any ants from sneaking up on us. Bishop was somewhere in the middle, using his light spell to make sure those of us who hadn’t grown up underground could all see where we were going. For the longest time, we didn’t see any actual Fiery Ant Reaver Things, at least not live ones. We did, however, find a few of their corpses, each one seeming to have died while right in the middle of a return trip from a raid. Mushrooms and scrap metal were clutched in both heads of each corpse. There were also a few bits of garbage strewn along the tunnel, too small for the ants to care much about.

“What do ya think killed ‘em?” asked Calamity, who was pocketing every little piece of trash that he could. I honestly wondered who other than Soilsifter could possibly think they were useful. Who knows? Maybe Calamity had a house that he liked to decorate with useless junk too.

“I don’t see any signs of physical trauma…” Bishop said, examining the bodies as the rest of us stopped to rest our hooves. “But I think I have an idea. Just look at them: they’re not whole ants, just two front halves stuck together. Brahmin are two headed cows, but the two brains are sharing an entire organ system between them, which is enough for them. These two headed ants on the other hand have two incomplete organ systems. If they eat anything, it has nowhere to go. They’ve probably been dying of starvation, although I’m not sure how they survive their larval stage if that’s the case… Hey, look at this!” We stepped closer and saw that Bishop was pointing to an odd grey patch on the creature’s body. Unlike the rest of the bug’s reddish brown carapace, this part wasn’t made of chitin but of metal.

“They’re cyborgs?” Knight asked, tilting her head in confusion.

“I don’t think so… those who know how to make cyborgs are very rare, at least in this part of the world. Who would waste that kind of talent on an ant and not do anything to prolong its lifespan? It just doesn’t make sense.”

“Guys, we got hostiles!” Chess called. A few seconds later, a red bar appeared on my EFS, a Fiery Ant Reaver Thing just crossing into its range of effectiveness.

“Mole guys, get behind us or be ant bait,” Knight said, turning her battle saddle toward where Chess was pointing. Boaris and Shovel Shrooms jumped behind us just as the first ant crawled into view.

Knight’s assault rifle easily destroyed the thing’s head, and clipped both of the second head’s antennae as well. Wisely, the ant scurried behind a corner for cover… or so we thought. Around the corner, we heard the sounds of ant combat, and the tunnel glowed with the light of their flames.

“Is somepony else back there?” asked Stellar.

“What if it’s Deep Burrows?” yelped Shovel Shrooms, who ran ahead to help his friend. Immediately after he turned the corner, however, he came right back screaming. “Help! Fiery Ant Reaver Things! Fiery Ant Reaver Things everywhere!”

They really needed to come up with a shorter name for these things.

Following behind him were at least six Fiery Ant Reaver Things, a couple of which showed signs of being burned, and the one in the lead looked like it had its face torn up somehow.

As soon as Shovel was out of our line of fire, we opened fire on the ants. The heads that faced us were all killed quickly, as were the second heads when some of them tried to turn around. Just behind them, five more ants came in, but rather than attacking, three of them picked up their fallen and went back the way they came.

“Wait…” Chess said. “Don’t shoot yet! Bishop, throw something in their path!”

“You got it! Calamity, give me something” said Bishop. Calamity tossed some of the bits of trash he’d collected to Bishop, who in turn tossed it at the ants. One of the ants suddenly turned blue on my EFS and picked up some of the trash with both heads, then turned back. The other ant ignored the trash and continued toward us though, and had to be shot before it got too close.

“It looks like they aren’t actively hostile… they’re just collecting stuff. If we give them something else, they might get distracted,” Bishop said.

“Oh! And remember when Knight shot the antennae on that first one?” said Stellar, "I think that made it go crazy and attack the others. If we hit their antennae, then maybe that makes it so they can’t tell friend from foe.”

“I could see that. Antennae are usually an insect’s most important sensory organ. Take those off and they’ll probably start panicking and attacking anything that gets close,” Bishop agreed.

On a whim, I walked over to the piece of trash that the ant had bypassed: a holotape. “Hey… Calamity, do you want this back now, or can I listen to it?”

“Ah don’t care, keep it if ya want. Ah was just gonna sell it to a merchant next chance I got,” he said.

I plugged the old recording into my PipBuck and popped in a pair of earbuds so I could listen to it quietly as we continued downward. When the recording started, all I could hear was somepony’s wet, nasty cough. Soon enough though, the pony, a stallion with a rough voice, regained enough control to start talking.

“Sorry about the coughing. Radiation sickness. I’m probably on death’s door right now, so I figure I may as well leave this message for… whoever the fuck’s left to hear it… My name’s Crystal Clear. I’m 29 years old, worked as a forepony at the Rock Steady Rock Farm. I had a wife, Ocean Breeze, and a daughter, Pearlshine, but by now they’re… I’ll see them soon enough, anyway... Damn zebras… they killed us all… Dammit, Pearlshine didn’t deserve to die… She was a six year old filly, not a fucking soldier! What did they gain from killing her? I hope our Megaspells sent every one of those striped bastards straight to Hell!

Crystal Clear began having another coughing fit again and it sounded like the recording device dropped to the floor. I heard another voice call out to him, although I couldn’t make out what they were saying. Soon enough, Crystal was able to talk again, although his voice was obviously strained by tears. “No, Clean Cut, I’m fine… just… I need to be left alone...”

He began speaking into the recorder again: “Sorry, it’s just so unfair…I just miss my little girl…” His voice cracked. “Fuck, we probably killed just as many foals as they did. Heh… the real murderers aren’t zebras or ponies… just the assholes in charge… hehheh… just… the assholes… in charge… heh…" There was no joy in the laughter. It was the laugh of someone who had just realized that life was a joke and loss was the punch line. "Hell, some ponies might say Stable-Tec’s as guilty as anyone for rejecting our application, the corrupt bastards. Now my family is gone… Me and the other ponies from Rock Steady have been using the special advanced mining equipment we just got to burrow down into the ground in a last ditch effort to escape the fallout. It’s helped, but it’s only delaying the inevitable. We’re all dying already. My best friend Diamond Day’s got it the worst. He says he feels fine, but just look at him, his fucking skin is falling off! I dunno what’s happening with the earth ponies, but they’re all starting to look really weird. We’re also on our last legs as far as Rad-X and RadAway goes…

“Anyway, if anypony finds this, I just wanna teach them this lesson: life isn’t fair. It sucks, but that’s the way things are, and if life in a nuclear wasteland is as bad as I’m assuming it is, you’ve probably already figured that much out. Even then, just take this little piece of advice. Even in the worst of situations, find something that makes you happy and cling to it… If I just had my Ocean Breeze or Pearlshine, maybe my life would still be worth living… It’s too late for me to find that kind of happiness again… but that’s okay… I don’t have long to wait…”

The recording stopped abruptly.

“Hey, Click, you comin’?” Bishop called to me. I realized then that I had been standing still for at least the last portion of the recording.

“Oh, yeah, sorry,” I said, running to catch up. I had picked up the recording expecting a… well, I don’t know what I was expecting, but it certainly wasn’t the dying words of some poor pony whose entire family was killed horribly in the apocalypse. And hearing his voice like that... It was even worse than the final typed words of the Stable 97 ponies. What must it have been like, losing everything and everyone you ever loved and having nothing left but a short, painful life in the burnt remnant of a land that had once been your home?

At first, I had thought that finding the ant queen was going to be a relatively quick job, just walk in, find it, kill it, and get back out the same way. By now we had been in the Abandoned Caverns for a good three hours, and we were still searching. Soilsifter’s guess that the ants’ numbers were limited appeared to be true, as we only met two more groups of ants (seven if you count the groups of corpses). Both times we allowed at least one ant to live and steal a bit of Calamity’s garbage in hopes that it would turn around and lead us to the queen, but the ants were always just a little too fast for us to keep up for long. For the times when we didn’t have an ant to follow though, Boaris still guided us, and, to his credit, I don’t believe we ever got stuck going in circles, even though the tunnels eventually became almost weblike with all their splitting pathways. The Abandoned Caverns were just that big!

“Hmm… that’s too bad. I guess the ants must have taken them, too,” Boaris muttered to himself.

“What was that?” asked Chess.

“Nothing, Mr. Chess. It’s just that this area used to have a whole bunch of gems in it. The Fiery Ant Reaver Things have been taking everything else, so I guess it’s sort of what you’d expect. It’s kinda sad though. They made these tunnels so pretty...”

“Yeah, they did, didn’t they?” said Shovel Shrooms gloomily. “That on top of everything else… Darn it! The next time I see one of those Fiery ant Reaver Things, I’m gonna really let him have it!” He yelled, releasing his pent up frustration. “I’m just gonna get right up in one of his faces and then WHAM!” He swiped at the air with a forehoof. “Then I’m gonna jump on him and stomp him into the dirt!” He pantomimed the action. “Then I’m gonna buck his head in!” He bucked the nearest wall. It was about this time that I started to hear a foreboding skittering sound from somewhere down the tunnels.

“That’s right! I feel really sorry for the next Fiery Ant Reaver Thing that runs into me!” Shovel Shrooms continued, “I don’t care how big and scary it is!” As he said this, the ant making the skittering sound began to come into view, but he was facing away from it. “I’m gonna beat it up, then when I get my hands on that queen, she’s as good as squished! Like the bug she is!” It was then that we realized how big the ant was. “Yeah, and I’m gonna do the same thing to any ant that gets in my way!” As he said that, Knight opened fire on the ant, her jaw hitting the ground as she realized that it had almost no effect on the monster bug. Where the other ants had occasionally had metal parts on their carapaces, this one looked to be almost solid metal, and was easily more than twice the size of anything else we’d seen. And it had razor sharp pincers for some reason, and what appeared to be miniguns attached to its antennae. Ha, just kidding. Well, about the miniguns; the razor pincers and metal body were very much real. “Then I’m gonna rescue Deep Burrows, and everything will be back to the way it should be!” By now, the rest of us had all turned tail and started running away screaming. “Hey guys? Where ya going?” He turned around and came face to face with one of the ant’s gargantuan heads. “Oh… Oh, no I wasn’t talking about you and your queen! I was talking about the ants in… that other place… and… Hey look, a thing that you'd find more interesting than me!” In an instant Shovel Shrooms was at our heels, his attempt at a distraction surprisingly effective at giving him a few seconds to catch up before the ant gave chase.

“What the fucking fuck is that thing?” screamed Knight.

“I don't know! I've never seen anything like it!” said Boaris. “It's some kind of Super Hard Ant Reaver Thing!"

Wow, they really needed shorter names for things…

With Super Hard Ant Reaver Thing rapidly gaining on us, we ran as fast as we could back the way we came. Calamity tried to distract it by opening his saddlebags and dumping out every bit of garbage he’d picked up on the way here, and Knight dropped a few land mines and grenades, hoping to blow a leg off, but the monster completely ignored the trash (I think it had enough scrap metal in its body already.) The explosions slowed it down a bit, even blasting off the tip of one leg, but it wasn’t enough to destroy it! When it became apparent that we could never outrun it, we made a sharp right turn into another tunnel as soon as we got the chance. When we noticed that ninety degree turns slowed the ant down considerably, we turned right again at the next opportunity. The ant was able to keep us in sight for a while, but soon enough we lost him! … That is, until we realized that by taking only right turns, we had ended up traveling in a circle and soon found ourselves skidding to a stop as we came face to face with the ant’s second head.

As we ran, I noticed that Boaris and Shovel Shrooms were beginning to fall behind, but they wisely managed to escape by using their mole magic to climb onto the walls and ceiling, and digging upward out of danger. I was glad they escaped, but I didn’t exactly have any time to celebrate, what with being chased by a giant ant and all.

Soon we came by a cluster of ant corpses, and my heart almost stopped when I heard Bishop shout. I looked back, and saw that he had tripped! I wanted to go back for him, I really did, but I was too scared and I knew it would have been futile anyway; the ant would have reached him long before I got there. As I looked back and saw Bishop’s panicked face, all I could do was pray that he had some kind of spell to get himself out of there. Just before the ant came upon him, I saw his horn glowed, and I was filled with hope... but rather than teleporting, or shielding himself or something, he picked up an ant corpse, tore off its head, and shoved his own head in its neck hole. When the Super Hard Ant Reaver Thing came to him, Bishop just waved it on, giving a somehow convincing ‘they went that-a way’ type gesture.

Well, that was confusing, but my friend was still alive, so I couldn’t complain. With Bishop left behind, I was forced to cast a light spell for us to make sure nopony else tripped again, being the only unicorn.

Soon, we wound up picking a bad route, one with no places turn into, so the ant was gaining on us rapidly, not seeming to tire out as we were. The only thing keeping us ahead was sheer adrenaline, which we got a huge boost of when the beast shot out a jet of flame at us, very nearly catching us. I was at the back of the pack and the heat was enough that I could feel my tail get singed.

Suddenly, we were able to see two parallel tunnels intersecting with the one we were currently in, so that there were five possible paths to take, two to the left, two to the right, and straight forward. “Everypony! Split up!” shouted Chess, realizing that there was no way that all of us could outrun the thing.

When we split up, I wound up going forward, and I realized a second too late how stupid that was since the ant wouldn’t have to turn and slow down to catch me. Even worse? It wasn’t really a pathway at all. I made it about twenty feet before running headlong into a dead end, getting a face full of a dirt wall.

Great, I was about to die and my last meal was dirt.

I turned around, expecting to see a giant metal death bug staring me in the face and eating me, but instead I saw the rear head of the ant disappearing into one of the other tunnels! For some reason, the ant was going down a different tunnel! I was safe!

I was about to go and try and go down one of the other paths to reunite with at least some of the others, but before I could take my first step out, Chess and Stellar came running out of one of the tunnels, the one adjacent to the one the ant came through, and ran into the one across from it. Then… I don’t know how I could possibly explain what happened then…

I saw the ellipsis appear in my EFS again, and suddenly the Super Hard Ant Reaver Thing came out of one of the other tunnels, not the one it had gone into, and went down another tunnel. Then Knight came out of the tunnel next to it and crossed to a tunnel on the other side. Then Calamity came from a different tunnel (wasn’t that the one the ant just went in?) and did the same. Then Stellar came out of a completely different tunnel with the ant close behind her, then a group of smaller Fiery Ant Reaver Things ran between a couple tunnels while being chased by Chess for some reason, then the Super Hard Ant Reaver Thing came back with Calamity riding it like a bull (fitting I guess because of his cowpony hat, but still, what the buck?), then Knight rode by on a unicycle, then Chess came out chasing Calamity, then Stellar ran between a couple of tunnels backwards, then Bishop ran out and then stopped and looked around with an expression that said "How on Earth did I get here?" and then the Super Hard Ant Reaver Thing came out and started coming right at me... Wait... It was coming right at me!

I fired a couple shots at it in desperation, but the tiny shot pellets were nothing against it.

Bishop's lightning, however, was very effective. The bolt coursed through the creature's body, its metal armor aiding the attack rather than blocking it. It seized up for a few moments, then fell, smoke coming out of its eyes and mouths.

"Click! Are you okay?" Bishop called to me, running out from behind the carcass.

"Yeah. Thank Celestia you were there," I said.

"Yup. I came following after you and I guess just took exactly the right turns. Once that thing had its sights on you, it ignored me long enough to get a shot."

It wasn't long before the others all came out of their tunnels, including the mole ponies who managed to track us down and come out of the walls.

"That was amazing, Mr. Bishop!" Boaris cheered when I recounted what happened. "I have so much to learn about you unicorns and your magic once we're done with this adventure!"

"We'd best get moving again then, if everypony's okay," Chess said. “Incidentally, Stellar, next time I say ‘split up,’ try to actually go a different route. I think the ant went after us because he wanted to catch two ponies instead of just one.”

“It was an accident, but really it’s probably a good thing that I did it. Otherwise, that ant probably would have just got Click,” Stellar said.

“That’s true, but it also could have made us lose two ponies instead of one. We’re very lucky we didn’t lose any.” I almost wanted to say something to Chess about the fact that he’d just said sacrificing me for the good of the team was the right thing to do, but I decided to just let it go, although from the glares that I saw Stellar and Calamity giving to Chess, I figured that I wasn’t the only one who felt that way.

Before we embarked again, we suddenly heard the sound of several dozen ant feet coming our way. We prepared for battle, but then I noticed that all the bars on my EFS were blue. Numerous Fiery Ant Reaver Things crawled out of the tunnels and converged around the Super Hard Ant Reaver Thing. It took all their combined strength, but they managed to lift the giant corpse and carry away. Because of the gargantuan metal ant’s extra weight, however, they had to move at a pace that was just slow enough for us to keep up with.

“Oh, well that’s convenient,” Chess said with a smile. “Come on, I think with these ants leading the way, our search is just about to be finished…”

The ants led us all the way back to the point where we originally met the Super Hard Ant Reaver Thing, and then just a mile or two further before we came to an enormous room that, unusually, was open to the sky, with cloud filtered sunlight pouring into whole room. The place was filled with Fiery Ant Reaver Things, all of which were blue on my EFS. The ants weren’t what first caught my attention though: instead, my eyes immediately went to the center of the room, where the Ant Queen lay. If the Super Hard Ant Reaver Thing was big, the Queen was outright gigantic! Unlike the other ants, which had a second head in place of their abdomen, the Queen looked more like two ants sharing a thorax, so their bodies made sort of an X shape. In front of the Queen was a mountainous pile filled with scrap, gems, mushrooms, dead ants, and notably our cart and the crate with the statue. Meanwhile, the two heads of the Queen were rapidly tearing into the pile, greedily downing organic and inorganic refuse alike. Each one of the Queen’s boxcar-sized abdomens was constantly popping out ants, all fully grown (which explained how they could survive the larval stage with an incomplete digestive system: they just skipped infancy entirely.) However, only the abdomen on the left produced the Fiery Ant Reaver Things we were familiar with, the other instead produced ants with two abdomens and no heads, which didn’t really do anything but lie there until a normal ant took the lifeless bodies and tossed them back into the pile in front of the Queen.

“Deep Burrows!” yelled Shovel Shrooms, running toward the pile. Sure enough, Deep Burrows was sitting amongst the rest of the Ant Queen’s food, dirty and a little scratched up, but alive. Three other mole ponies were alive in the pile too, victims of previous abductions. The ants didn’t seem to mind Shovel’s intrusion, but soon other ants began corralling the rest of us gently towards the pile as well, not biting us or shooting flames, but still making it very clear where they wanted us to be.

“Shovel Shrooms? You came all the way down here? Are you crazy?” said Deep Burrows.

“They’ll never let you leave here,” said a mole pony mare who was clutching a young colt tightly. “No matter how many times we try to run, we never make it out of this room. They won’t even let us leave the queen’s food pile for too long.”

“The only way to live here is to steal some of the Queen’s food when you’re hungry, and stay away from her mouths,” added an elderly mole stallion.

Chess thought for a moment and said “Knight, do you have any mines or grenades left? Maybe we can feed one to her.”

“Lost ‘em all when we tried to take out the metal thing,” she replied.

“I see… any of you moles tried attacking the Queen directly?” Chess asked.

“One poor fella tried it,” said the old stallion, “but she’s a lot tougher than any of the other ones, ‘cept maybe the big metal one you guys followed in. Say… speaking of him, he don’t look like he died o’ natural causes. Did you guys see what did that?”

"Bishop fried it with a lightning spell," I said.

"Yeah. Metal armor doesn't help much against electricity. In fact, it probably made it worse," said Bishop.

"Light...ning?" the old mole pony said, the whether phenomenon understandably foreign to someone who'd never seen so much as a cloud. "I can't say I know what that is, but do ya think it'll work on the Queen over there?"

"I don't know... Robots and metal armored foes, sure, but straight flesh tends to be more hit and miss, especially with big things like that. Besides, if I attacked her, her ants would probably attack us, and all the lightning in the world wouldn't save us then, especially if the Queen survived and attacked too."

That was too bad, but even if I'd have liked another quick battle, we weren't doomed yet. For the moment none of the ants were attacking us, and it seemed that at the very worst we could last for quite a while like the captive mole ponies had.

Suddenly, I had an epiphany. “Hey, Bishop,” I said, “Remember when Knight shot that one ant’s antennae, and he went ballistic and attacked the others?”

“Yeah…” he said, his tone carrying one of those ‘are you thinking what I’m thinking’ vibes.

“How many ants do you think we need to frenzy to wipe this whole place out?”

“Let’s just get all of ‘em!” Knight interjected, her eyes glittering in violent anticipation.

“Great idea, Click Click,” said Chess. “Calamity, you said you were a sniper, right?”

“Best in the Enclave,” Calamity said with a smirk.

“Good.” Chess nodded and began spouting out commands, an air of charisma assuring us that he knew exactly what he was talking about. “You and Knight start sniping their antennae once everyone else is ready. The further away your targets are, the better. Click, Stellar, you two need to take down any ants that gets too close to us, and I’ll do the same. Bishop, you create a shield around this pile just in case some ants get by us. Everypony else, just try to stay out of danger.” We all would have done it anyway, but something about Chess’ voice just seemed so persuasive that something told me there was no way this plan could possibly fail.

“Hey, betcha I can shoot more of ‘em,” Knight said to Calamity when they got into their positions further up the pile.

“You really wanna go up ‘gainst me? Bring it on,” Calamity replied.

I wasn’t sure which one got the first shot, but within seconds two Fiery Ant Reaver Things found themselves without antennae on either one of their heads, and were blindly attacking the first thing they laid eyes on as our two shooters smugly kept score.

“One.”

“One.”

The other ants in the area each turned a head toward our group, startled by the sound of the gunshots, as was the mole colt, who started crying. Still, even as every one of Calamity’s bullets and Knight’s bursts of gunfire relieved targets of their antennae, the ants’ dumb insect brains were unable to comprehend that we were the cause of their allies going mad around them. Any ants who decided to attack us anyway fell to me, Chess, and Stellar. Between us and the snipers driving some of the ants crazy, we were steadily carving into their numbers…

Then the horseapples hit the fan when one of the frenzied ants attacked the Queen.

The Fiery Ant Reaver Thing dug its pincers into her abdomen, eliciting a scream of rage from her as she leapt forward, smashing into the food pile and throwing us all asunder. The mole pony mare accidentally lost her grip on her foal and he was thrown toward a swarm of ants, only being saved by Bishop catching him in his levitation. Chess and I lost our grips on our guns, Stellar the only non-battle saddle user to remain armed. Knight was half buried under the trash, while Calamity was thrown into another group of ants. He was swarmed in seconds, but from the sound of his battle saddle, he wasn’t going down without a fight. The old mole pony stallion hit the ground head first, and was knocked unconscious or worse. The other moles were thankfully safe, if scattered. The other Fiery Ant Reaver Things then proceeded to try and gather the pile back together again, and as par the course they were giving us ponies no greater priority than the garbage. After her initial shock at being attacked by her own minion, the Ant Queen swiveled around with much more agility that I would have expected from her and immolated the offending Ant with double jets of white hot flame. In an instant I saw the ant shrivel into a black statue of itself, then crumble into ashes.

While Chess and I tried finding our guns again, Stellar, Shovel Shrooms, and Deep Burrows all went to help Calamity. Boaris busied himself with digging Knight free. Bishop rushed to the old stallion, levitating the foal behind him and calling for the mare to come to him. Once they all got together, he surrounded them all with a bubble shield.

Just as I saw my gun and gripped it in my magic, I felt the sting of ant flames against my back leg. My magic imploded and I turned to see three ants coming right at me. Apparently in all the chaos they didn’t have the patience to gently herd us into the pile anymore. I desperately tried making a shield, focusing all of my energy into a wall shape like Bishop had taught me… and I still came up short. It was no more than a small plate of magic… but what if that was all I needed? I had been able to make a little ball yesterday, maybe I could actually make something useful! I reshaped the plate into a thin bar and shoved it under the ants’ chins, then lifted it up with all the force I could bring forth, flipping them onto their backs. By the time they realized what had just happened and used their other heads to try breathing fire at me I had jumped backwards toward my gun, just out of their range. Then I snapped up the gun in my levitation and let them have it.

The second Boaris was able to free Knight, our combat expert began firing furiously at every ant that came too close, turning one of their heads to pulp then disabling the rear head’s antennae. I realized suddenly that she was always killing the head that was looking at her, but frenzying the one that was facing away: since the frenzied ants always attacked the first thing they saw, this meant that they would always target something facing away from her. I had to wonder what exactly made that mare so smart during combat but so stupid everywhere else, but I had neither the time nor the inclination to question it.

I started making my way toward Calamity, shooting ants on my way. Just as I got close enough to help, Calamity burst forth from the ant pile, burned and bleeding, but alive and apparently ready for more ant killing. “Hey,” he asked, “did any of you guys see which way my hat went?”

“Healing potions now, hat later,” chided Shovel Shrooms, offering one of his mushroom potions.

Suddenly, we heard a scream from the mole pony mare. Apparently after a life of luxury and pampering, just the chaos in her home and being attacked by one of her children was enough to drive the Ant Queen into a frenzy and she had started breathing her superheated fire at Bishop’s shield. I hoped that he was strong enough to hold her off, but for a moment I thought I saw it flicker.

“Knight! Calamity! Kill the Queen!” I screamed.

They were on it before I had even finished the first word. Let it never be said of Calamity that he was anything less than the best sharpshooter, as one of his bullets hit the further Queen’s head right through the eye, the other one embedding itself in her neck. Knight, while not nearly as accurate, was much more destructive, turning the other head into nothing but broken chitin and brain goo.

Seeing the destroyed heads like that made me shudder. It wasn't the gore and violence, the fact that her face was so messed up just kinda made me flashback to... well, let's just say it reminds me of something I saw ten years ago that I don't like to talk about.

I repressed the thought. But as disquieting as that thought was, I was at the same time elated as the Ant Queen ended her barrage of fire, her legs twitching erratically on the side that was now missing its head. But that elation turned to terror when the half blinded but alive head somehow regained control of the legs of its partner and then turned on us, its jet of fire missing us by inches.

“Ha! Missed, bi-atch! Now you won’t get a second chance!” Knight shouted as she bit down on the trigger of her battle
saddle… only to get a few empty clicks in response. “Oh shit…”

We scattered, each in a separate direction as the Queen continued her lethal fire blast.

I heard Calamity fire another couple of rounds into the remaining head, then I turned toward him just in time to see him flung across the ground with one furious swing of the Ant Queen’s leg. Chess hit her head once more with a (probably SATS assisted) shot, saving the unconscious pegasus from being finished off in a stream of fire. Once the Queen was distracted, Bishop, along with the mole pony mare and her colt, rushed to his side to cover him in their shield as well. I had a bad feeling when I noticed they hadn’t brought the old stallion too.

I couldn’t worry about that now though. If we let the Queen keep on attacking us, there was a very good chance he wouldn’t be the only one we lost. I wanted more than anything to bring her down, but as powerful as my gun was, the Queen’s remaining head had taken at least three shots already, two of which were from Calamity’s overpowered Battle Saddle. What good was a shotgun going to do, especially considering it’d be suicidal to get close enough for the Queen’s head to be in range.

Unless…

The Ant Queen had her back turned to me at the moment, having lost sight of Chess and now turning her fire on her own ants. I made a beeline for one of the Queen’s abdomens, not letting myself be distracted by a couple of Fiery Ant Reaver Things that still wanted to attack me, even as one of them sent searing flames at me which my light barding was only partially able to block.

The Queen’s abdomen was egg-shaped, with its tip tapering off to a small point near the end. I stood on my hind legs and tried to climb up it and onto the Queen’s back, but even when I jumped I couldn’t get enough of a grip to pull myself up.

“Click? What are you doing?” Stellar shouted, running up to me.

“I’m trying to get on her back where I can do some damage without her hitting me. Think you can give me a hoof?”

“I think so, just lemmie- wait, what the heck is that?” She pointed in between the Queen’s two abdomen. I dropped off the abdomen I was clinging to and went to look as well, and saw that somehow, each one of the abdomen had a door. That’s right, a door. A metal door, painted to blend in to the abdomen’s chitin. Well, I’d seen weirder today, although this was still gonna be in the top three.

“Well, it’ll be easier than climbing on …” I figured. Maybe with all that metal, Bishop's Lightning could have finished it after all, not that he was in any position to enter combat now that he was protecting the mole ponies.

I ran to the door on the right and grabbed the handle. It wasn’t even locked! I stepped inside, Stellar close behind me. It was very dark at first, but in a second or two the whole place was suddenly illuminated, as if the light sensed our need for it.

The inside of the Queen’s abdomen was, to be quite honest, not what I would expect the insides of a queen’s abdomen to be like. It looked more like I had stepped into a factory, rather than a living creature. By some magic, the ‘room’ (I can’t honestly think of it as anything that would be in an actual organism) was larger on the inside than on the outside, and running through the middle of it was a large conveyer belt leading from the Queen's thorax. The conveyer belt was filled with the front halves of giant ants, which would then be somehow glued together by metal arms that came down from the ceiling, then, toward the far end of the belt, they were given an electrical shock to bring them to life, then they emptied out of the Queen's, er... 'birth tube thingy,' and into the world as the Fiery Ant Reaver Things we all knew and hated.

"Well, that's an... unorthodox developmental system," Stellar said, scratching her head. "Come on, there's a door to the thorax. I bet we can do some real damage in there!"

If the Abdomen was weird, the thorax was outright insane. It was even more disproportionately huge in here, and it had another conveyer belt in it, which literally assembled giant ants, piece by piece. On the ceiling were tubes of goo, some for organic slurry and others for liquefied metal. The tubes for organic stuff emptied into vats of which poured into molds, where the goo would congeal into ant parts and then get deposited in the containers for the arms to use on the assembly line. A second assembly line stood near the other one, this one very similar except for the fact that it made larger parts out of metal. It seemed that the ant queen used that to create Super Hard Ant Reaver Things when she had the resources. I REALLY hoped that she very seldom had those resources. Fortunately, it looked like whatever system was supposed to take the metal from her food and sort it from the organic stuff wasn't working properly, as a lot of liquid metal was for some reason being mixed into the organic, which explained the ants with metal parts. At the rear end of the assembly line, each and was then sliced in half, and the assembly line forked in two, the front halves going into the abdomen we'd just come from, and the rears going into the other.

At the far side of the room, painted onto the wall, was a large insignia which looked like a Stable door, except the top part of it, just above the number (71), looked like a brain instead of a gear. Above the logo was the word STEIN, and below it, LABORATORIES.

“This is… Just wow… I can’t believe something like this actually exists!” Stellar said, awestruck.

“Me neither, but if we really want to check this thing out, we’d better do it as an autopsy,” I said, surveying the room for any internal structures we could damage. Unfortunately, I couldn't see any heart or anything in here, but there was a ladder the end of the room, which looked like it would take us right up to the Queen's head. "Over there! We should be able to set up a few easy headshots!"

The ladder led into a hatch on the top of the thorax, which opened easily with my telekinesis. The next step was to walk across the thorax to the heads, which was the hardest part… or it would have been if the Queen had stayed still.

The Queen was able to feel us stepping onto her back and began to thrash around to throw us off. Ironically, her first move was to try and throw us forward, which made me land right up on her neck, allowing me to grab on with my forehooves. Stellar was not so lucky, as she wound up sliding off, landing on the ground right under the Queen’s head.

The Queen reared her head back, and I just knew it was in preparation for a fire blast at Stellar.

Not while I’m here.

I didn’t have time to grab my gun, but unlike my gun my hoof was always accessible. Bracing myself as much as possible with one foreleg, I jammed my hoof directly into the eye socket that had been emptied by Calamity and began to twist it around. The Queen reared back in agony, fire bursting from her jaws. For a moment I was afraid that I might have been too late, but out of the corner of my eye I saw Stellar running away to safety. Good.

Now, it was shotgun time!

I ripped my hoof out of the Queen’s eye socket, my shotgun replacing it with one quick thrust.

“Hey Queenie… Bug off!”

BANG! BANG!

I can’t imagine why my shots killed the ant Queen when Calamity’s didn’t, but I couldn’t complain as the monster’s head burst.

Just like hers did that day...

... I got another flashback… I seriously hope that’s not gonna be a regular thing. As horrible as that memory was though, I quickly forgot it when I felt myself hit the ground. Nothing like a horrible childhood memory to make you zone out and lose your grip on the giant ant monster you're hanging onto for dear life!

“Mr. Click Click! Are you okay?” I heard Boaris calling out.

“Yeah… I’m fine,” I said, rolling back onto my hooves. It felt like I got hit by a train, but I was pretty sure I was going to be fine. I noticed, with quite a bit of relief, that the rest of the Fiery Ant Reaver Things had all either been killed or had left the tunnel, the chaos too much for even them to handle.

“I can’t believe you actually brought that thing down! Excellent work,” said Chess.

“Yeah, just one thing,” said Stellar, “did you actually say ‘bug off’ when you killed her?”

I blushed a bit, “Yeah… I kinda felt like I had to say something, you know what I mean? That was just the best I could come up with on the spur of the moment.”

She chuckled warmly, “Well, for a spur of the moment thing, it was pretty good.”

“Thanks,” I said, but then I remembered something. “Bishop! What happened to that old mole stallion?”

Bishop approached, Calamity, the mare, and her colt following close behind. “He broke his neck when the Queen threw him. There was nothing I could do…” he hung his head low.

“It truly is terrible,” said Deep Burrows, “but still, we moles are forever in your debt. Only one fatality was much more than anymole could have hoped for, and with the Queen gone, the rest of the Fiery Ant Reaver Things will disappear forever soon. You Surface Dwellers are true heroes!” The rest of the surviving moles were all in agreement with him.

“We were happy to help,” said Chess. “And our statue was down here too, so our employers will be happy about that.”

“Yes. But since we’re going to have to pull that thing back up, does anyone mind if we rest here for a moment?” asked Bishop.

He was right. When the adrenaline began to wear off, I began to feel a little tired. We decided to take a short break before setting off again. Calamity spent his time digging through the scattered remains of the Queen’s food pile in search of his hat and other random garbage while Knight and Bishop kept watch for any returning Fiery Ant Reaver Things and Stellar showed Chess the mysterious factory rooms in the Ant Queen’s abdomens. With nothing better to, I decided to help Calamity. It helped a bit to get my mind off the dead mole pony. I intended to make sure we brought his body back to receive a proper burial.

After a dozen minutes or so of searching, I came across a Calamity’s hat. “Hey, Calamity! I found your hat!” I called, lifting the hat up with my magic. Underneath it, I noticed a strange green glow: an old computer! I knew that these things could last a good long while, and there were a couple that were portable, but seriously, 200 years in an underground tunnel?

As Calamity came and grabbed his hat, I cracked open a bottle of Sparkle Cola and proceeded to test out the hacking tools that I had brought with me. Hey, I may as well get some use out of them, right?

Whoever set up the security on this terminal clearly wasn’t putting much effort into it. After two attempts I had narrowed down the options in the string of text to the words to ‘sorrow,’ ‘parrot,’ or…

I took a sip from some of my Sparkle Cola.

“Carrot.” Easy. Was that really supposed to keep somepony’s information safe? That was more like a game than anything. I actually found it a little fun! Regardless, now that I got in, all it had on it was some old business records and the journal of somepony named Golden Harvest (although some of the data referred to her as Carrot Top, a nickname I guess.) Anyway, I figured that since I had gone to the trouble of hacking this thing and I had a little while before we left to return to King Soilsifter, I might as well take the opportunity to invade the privacy of some long dead pony. It wasn’t what I expected, however: there were a few entries that were particularly interesting…

Entry 1: Well, I finally got one of these computers that Goldenrod’s been talking about. He says it’ll be really helpful for running the farm, although I think he’d be really better with it than I ever will be. It seems the younger you are, the better you are with new technology. Still, if nothing else, I’ve been meaning to start keeping a journal.

Entry 5: I can’t believe it! Poor Ditzy Doo’s application to Stable-Tec was rejected! If any pony deserves to be saved from the world being destroyed by Zebra bombs, it’s her! Not that that’ll ever happen anyway. Even the Zebras wouldn’t be crazy enough to do something like that. Still, just the fact that they would tell somepony “no, we’re not saving you” just seems… well, rude doesn’t quite cover it. Still, the poor girl took it well, and she seemed very happy that her daughters got into one. She actually has a theory about why she didn't get in. She says that Stable-Tec is probably trying to preserve the continuation of ponykind, so they're only accepting younger ponies and couples for breeding, not old, single, post-menopausal mares like her. It's not very fair, but I suppose it makes sense, in its own dark way.

Entry 6: Well so much for Ditzy's little "preserve ponykind" theory! Unless Stable-Tec thinks Bon Bon's gonna impregnate Lyra! Ugh... It's not that I have anything against those two, Lyra's pretty much my best friend, but the only thing more well known than Bon Bon's relationship to Lyra is her relationship to the MoM! Some might say it's just a coincidence, but we all know how much corruption happens in those big companies, especially when said company is supposedly selling something as valuable as survival. Just look at Stable 2 down there, or as I like to call it "the Stable that Stable-Tec's CEO shoved all her family members into rather than making it fair game for all of Ponyville." Ugh... I need a drink...

Entry 11: Darn it, has all of Equestria gone mad!? Carrot Slices, my ingenious father-in-law decided to hop on the “end of the world” bandwagon, and did it in a way that makes Stable-Tec seem reasonable: he bought a tunneling machine from the Rock Steady Rock Farm up north. I can’t even think of what to say about that, there’s just no words for it, we’re strapped for bits as it is, and my daughter Sweet Treat is going to have her baby in less than a month! This is worse than when he bought that stupid Whac-A-Mole machine that just sits there while nopony uses it! The swindler he bought the dang thing from won’t take it back! I went to the police and they said that technically selling Carrot Slices the digging machine wasn’t illegal, and he has no obligation to give us our money back. I figured as much, but darn it, sometimes I think there’s just no justice in the world!

Entry 20: It’s over. For whoever reads this, I admit I was wrong.

Entry 21: I can’t believe I’ve gotten to write another entry. Carrot Slices actually tried that digging machine. I doubt it’s going to save us, but the whole family, as well as a couple of neighbors, have gone underground. We brought as much supplies as we could carry, and I grabbed the computer too. In retrospect the computer shouldn’t have taken such priority, but I was panicking at the time. Besides, it's not as bad as those neighbors who brought tuxes, ha ha. Gotta find humor in even the darkest times, you know? I figure I may as well continue my journal. To be honest, I doubt we’re going to last very long. I don’t think we can survive the fallout, especially since one of those bombs landed really close. I’m surprised we aren’t already dead.

Entry 24: It’s been horrible. The children are all terrified, and a lot of ponies are already starting to die. We’ve convinced most of the children that we’ll get through. Now if only we could convince ourselves. I’m so scared.

Entry 26: Our neighbor Lemon Hearts died today. Radiation poisoning. It’s only a matter of time for the rest of us. Minuette and Comet Tail are probably next; nopony’s skin should look like that. The Earth ponies though… we’re… changing, or something. It’s not what I thought would happen from radiation. Some kind of mutation, I guess.

Entry 29: The mother of all flukes just happened. Our digger actually ran into another tunnel! Some of the ponies from Rock Steady apparently had the same idea that Carrot Slices had, dug underground with one of their digging machines. Apparently their boss was trying to get every gem in that place to make as much money as possible and buy his way into a stable. It was foolish from a long term perspective, as it completely destroyed his land, but I guess that’s irrelevant because he was right about the bombs anyway. I’m still so shocked that the Zebras would go through with all that… Regardless, money’s also why he sold Carrot Slices our machine: Rock Steady had more machines than they could have used, and Carrot Slices didn’t know how much one of those machines was worth and was willing to overpay. From what the Rock Steady ponies told me though, that jerk got what he had coming: Even though he apparently got into Stable 97, he was asleep in his office at the time and completely slept through the warning his little PipBuck thingy gave him! By the time the megaspell hit in this area, it was too late. He took off toward the Stable, but there's no way he got there in time. We’ve started traveling with the rock farmers, for moral support if nothing else. Their Earth ponies are changing just like us, too. No such luck with the unicorns…

Entry 34: Sweet Treat had her baby. I’m honestly surprised it survived, and it doesn’t look like any pony I’ve ever seen, but it’s healthy! At least it looks that way, it’s laughing and playing just like there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it! It looks almost like a mole or something. She even named it Merry Mole! Kinda twisted if you ask me, naming a kid after his deformity, but at least the baby doesn’t seem to mind. It is a fitting name, anyway: he certainly is merry! I just hope we can keep the poor thing fed, we’ve almost run out of food and some of us have been having to eat bugs and underground fungus. Thankfully, we seem to be finding quite a lot down here. Maybe it has something to do with how fertile the soil is around here, it always did make good farmland. One pony suggested eating any ponies that die… ugh, I really hope it doesn’t come to that.

Entry 40: We lost another five unicorns today. Weirdly, the ones that started losing their skin have been just fine, even the ones who it happend to early on. They don’t even complain about their condition, except for their appearance. The earth ponies are still changing: we’re all starting to look just like Merry Mole. The kids seem to be changing faster than the adults, too. I wonder if the age slows the mutation somehow…

Entry 48: I can’t believe it! Comet Tail went mad and actually killed one of the Rock Steady ponies! He would have gotten Carrot Slices too, but some of us were able to restrain him… he was like an animal! One of the other rock Steady ponies actually had to kill him, it was so horrible! Minuette and the other skinless unicorns all decided that they should leave, go back up to the surface. They think Comet’s madness had something to do with whatever the radiation did to them. They said that they didn’t feel bad with the radiation but I’m still worried for them up there. I guess it’s just us earth ponies down here now, or whatever it is we’ve been turning into. None of us seem to be getting sick anymore, I wonder if we’re not going to die at all… maybe all that bomb did was change us somehow. I guess only time will tell.

Entry 49: Carrot Slices died today from the wounds Comet Tail gave him. Since he was right about the bombs falling, he’s kind of been a leader to us. On his deathbed, he left leadership to me. He said that I’m a realist, and that’s what we need right now. Even he admits he was being paranoid when he bought that drill, and he just got lucky. I don’t know if I deserve to be a leader, or even if we even need a leader. Still, if the others decide to follow me, I’ll do the best that I can!

The rest of the entries were about Carrot Top’s family and the Rock Steady ponies continuing their descent, and eventual discovery of their strange digging abilities. One day, they just ended up settling down in what was now the Grand Antechamber.

“Hey, Click’ whatcha reading?” Bishop asked. Apparently they’d finished examining the dead Ant Queen.

“Apparently the entire history of the mole ponies. This thing says they descended from mutated earth ponies. Instead of giving them Rad poisoning, the radiation just changed them somehow. But what I don’t get is that if that happened here, then why isn’t the wasteland full of mole ponies?”

“Not all bombs were the same. Both the Ponies and the Zebras were experimenting with different kinds of megaspells, and there were a lot of weird prototypes that weren’t mass produced. When the bombs got launched though, both sides launched everything. I guess one of the Zebras’ prototypes went down near here and had a bizarre effect on earth ponies. Now, since you’ve solved that little mystery, wanna try explaining the factories in the Ant Queen’s butts?”

“No. I really wish I could, but a pony can only tolerate so much weird.” All I had learned about that… thing was that it had something to do with a place called Stein Laboratories, and if that was all I ever learned about it, then that was good enough for me. Life was hard enough without all these mysteries. “Let’s just say a wizard did it and move on.”

On our way back, we met a couple more ants, even another Super Hard Ant Reaver Thing. Fortunately, they were all preoccupied with carrying collected food for the Queen, and didn’t pay us any mind. It made sense, since we were catching them on their return trips. When we returned to the Grand Antechamber we were immediately greeted with thundering applause, with mole ponies showering us with flowers… well, mushrooms, but I could tell the sentiment was the same.

The first thing we did was go to Soilsifter to report that the Ant Queen had been killed. There were still a few ants left in the tunnels, but we predicted that their short lifespans would take care of that within a week or two. The body of the dead mole pony was taken to be prepared for a funeral and his family was notified, as well as the families of the few other mole ponies that the Queen had eaten before. Their loss brought many tears, but overall, most ponies were just happy that the ants were all but gone, and even the families of the dead were grateful for the closure. I also gave Carrot Top’s computer to Soilsifter, figuring that it would have great historical significance. It had apparently been taken by the ants that attacked his room when we first came, but he had only been using it as a lamp until then; he had never figured out the password.

While we were gone, Soilsifter had sent a small group of scouts to the surface with Chisel, both to take care of Chess’ bramins as per his instructions and to get some perspective on the Surface World. Apparently, Soilsifter was interested in trade, but after being told of the dangers by Chisel, he decided that exposure to the Surface World ought to be limited, especially considering the mole ponies were actually a lot better off than the average wastelander.

Soilsifter insisted that we stay and celebrate the defeat of the Ant Queen, and offered us a place for the night. At first I thought that Chess would say no, and that we’d been delayed enough already, but I was pleasantly surprised to hear him say “Our employers didn’t specify a day that they needed the statue by. I think they can wait a little longer.”

We left early the next day, hoping to return again someday. The mole ponies had sent us off with more than enough rewards for us, namely a bunch of junk for Calamity, the bottlecap collection Soilsifter promised us, and a bunch of carrots for me. The moles introduced me to the little orange things at the celebration feast they threw for us, and it was love at first bite. The things almost tasted just like Sparkle Cola!

However, the next day of travel was really pretty boring. Even the place we decided to spend the night in was completely devoid of odd surprises! Sure, as we walked we had the occasional encounter with a gecko destroying a small city of dollhouses or a skeleton in a treasure chest wearing a sash that said ‘Hide and Seek Champion,’ and other various ellipsis causing phenomena, but after the Ant Queen, these were nothing. I’d actually stopped noticing the ellipsis after a while, and quite frankly, I'm sick of mentioning it every time one pops up.

That night, we slept in another abandoned building, this one thankfully free of sink holes. I was so tired that I fell asleep with my earbud in, listening to DJ Pon3.

“Hey, Wastelanders! This is DJ Pon3 with another report on the goings on in the wasteland! Another report of activity from the Legion, those yellow-armored raiders on station 66.6. Again, I’m sorry that those new stations didn’t go over too well with all of you, but hey, that Fizzypop girl wasn’t too bad, am I right? She certainly has good taste in stallions, hehheh. Anyway, those Legion bastards have reportedly taken over an entire town! And I'm not talking some small place like Gutterville or Arbu. I mean one of those cities up north, one of the big civilization-truly-coming-back sized places. Apparently, just two Legionnaires teamed up with a nearby gang, and together managed to completely overrun the place. Now everypony that gets too close winds up robbed, or worse. Therefore, all travelers are advised to stay the hell away from the town of-”

ZZZ... ZZZ...

Footnote: Level up! Level two.

Perk Added: Magic Construct- What you lack in your shield’s size, you make up for in versatility! You can now cast a spell to create a magical melee weapon. It doesn’t do much in the way of damage, but it is great for parrying and can take any shape you wish.

Next time on Fallout Equestria: Wild Wasteland, the Checkmate Company is on the last leg of their journey, but they've got one last hurdle before they reach the end, and this one's a real doozy! Watch your plot, Click Click, because things are about to get serious!

Author's Notes:

What's that Lone Wanderer? You just beat up a giant ant queen to help a girl drug her boyfriend? Well guess what? My little pony just killed a two headed cyborg ant queen and saved a whole civilization! And he was even able to avoid having to deal with a twisted double-standard karma system! In yo face!

The song in this chapter was set to the tune of Ikea by Johnathan Coulton. I know that song has been ponified before, but I'm pretty sure that the Ikea pony hasn't done anything involving secret races of underground mole ponies. Anyway, go ahead and check Johnathan Coulton out. You can download or listen to all of his music on his website. I recommend Creepy Doll.

While we're on the subject of songs, I'm sure you all have heard the song that I got the title from, Beyond Her Garden by Woodentoaster. Or at least you've probably heard one of the kajillions of remixes.

In other news, we have a new arrival to the pre-reader team, Beep Beep! There are still spots open though, if anypony is interested. So that makes Me, Tutis, Trivial, and Beep on the team so far. I'd like to thank, them, you readers, Hasbro, Lauren Faust, the various Fallout teams, and especially God for delaying Armageddon so I could post this. Remember that 2012 crap that was disproven as of the morning this chapter was posted? Yeah, that was so this fic could get finished, so you'd better be dang grateful for me. BOW TO ME, PEONS!

Anyways, that's it for now, bye!