They marched along side by side in the dismal drizzle, neither saying a word for some time. Fluttershy had Angel Bunny and Fluffyshy perched on her back  between her wings like little baby ducklings, and both mares were wearing identical brightly colored umbrella hats and stony expressions. Fluttershy just wasn't the sort who could maintain a grim and gritty mood for long, of course. After a while she finally spoke up.

"So. Um. Where have you been, Pinkamena?"

Pinkamena shrugged. "Eh. Here and there. A few other assignments. Moving into new digs out in the Dreamlands." A fleeting smile crossed her face. "Oh, and took a two week vacation."

"Really? Where did you go? What did you do?"

"Hunting expedition," Pinkamena said idly. "Gary Stu safari in the Chessgame of the Gods."

Fluttershy looked befuddled. "I'm.. wait. What?"

"Chessgame of the Gods," Pinkamena explained." Alternate continuum. It's sort of a hunting preserve set aside by a bunch of cosmic entities for keeping Mary Sues and Gary Stus."

"Um, Gary... Mary..."

"Gary Stus are the males, Mary Sues the females. Remember the trollfic?" Fluttershy nodded. "Sorta like a subspecies. They go out and try to make another universe revolve entirely around them. It never works, though; they suck so hard that it collapses in on them."

"Oh, my."

"So like I said, a bunch of Outsiders built an alternate Equestria to keep them fat, stupid, happy and out of the way where they can God Mode their way through life to their little heart's content." She snorted. "They get lured in with some sort of promise of cosmic ascendance for the 'winner'--" she snorted again-- "And once they're in, they're trapped inside. Not that they care that much. Too busy playing Mighty Whitey.  FakeQuestria is just chock full of social injustices to right, benighted ignorant savages to enlighten, victims of crime and murder to avenge, wars to fight, orphans to be idolized by, Diamond Dog slaves to liberate--"

"Oh, how terrible!"

"Nah nah nah, the place is uninhabited," Pinkamena said, waving a muddy hoof. "We populated it with manikins and cardboard cut-outs."

Fluttershy blinked. "Don't the, um, Sues and Stus notice?"

"Nah. Too busy narrating their own greatness." The corner of Pinkamena's mouth quirked. "Still, you'd think they'd notice that all the ponies they had sex with were inflatable...."

"Ewww!"

"Anyway, every now and then we gotta go in and thin the herd a bit," Pinkamena said cheerfully, oblivious to the shocked expression on Fluttershy's face. She stood on her back legs and swung her new frying pan, pantomiming knocking some unfortunate's head off his shoulders. "Great way to unwind. Not that it's much of a challenge: I bagged my limit on God Mode Stus and Villain Stus in the first three days."

"God Mode... Villain...?"

"Yeah, there are a ton of sub-breeds out there ," Pinkamena said. "All of 'em are enormous ego-sucking black holes, of course. But you got all kinds. Purity Sues which are all good and pure and sweet and sugary and incorruptible and well, you--" she gave Fluttershy a semi-apologetic glance-- " only, like, terrible.  You've got your Sun Tzu Sue who is a better military leader than Hannibal, MacArthur, Lee, Jackson, and Alexander the Great combined.  There's Copycat Sues, like-- picture a new pony coming to Ponyville, and she's a unicorn and her special talent is magic and she's Celestia's personal student and like, omigosh, no, she's not TWILIGHT, Twilight has a purple and violet mane, Dusklight has a violet and RED mane, and like original character DO NOT STEAL, K?" She bobbled her head from side to side like the vertebrae in her neck had turned to linguini.

"The most common kind in there are God Mode Sues and Villain Sues."

"Annnnd...?"

"God Mode Sues are for people who think alicorns are too underpowered. Villain Sues are just God Mode Sues for people who think Nightmare Moon was too subtle, Sombra was too benevolent and Discord wasn't a big enough dick." She shrugged. "Better just to cave their skulls in and put them out of everyone's misery."

Fluttershy made a sort of strangled sound of revulsion. "Is all that...really necessary?" She said faintly. "Cracking their skulls?"

"Uh, yeah. Universes collapsing in a singularity of suck, remember?" Pinkamena said. "Besides, it's a mercy killing. You don't want to know what the survivors from their canon realities want to do to them." She stopped to look around. It was hard to tell how far Sweet Apple Acres was, what with all the endless rain mingled with apocalyptic ash and the barren hills studded with tombstones.

"But... it's so... violent!" Fluttershy protested. "How can you be sure they're these, these Gary Mary Whatever thingies?"

The pink pony stopped in her muddy tracks and stared at her. "In the Chessgame of the Gods?" Pinkamena said in disbelief.

"Yes, they could just be... nice ponies who want to visit a pony world like ours and have fun and make friends--"

Pinkamena's eyebrows formed a flat line. "Here, let me list off some of the defining characteristics of these 'nice visitors' for you," she said. "And you tell me." She started tapping her points out in the muddy soil with her hoof.(1) "One: they pick what form they'll be in the chessgame. But they're NEVER ponies. Because ponies are too WUSSY. They're diamond dogs or gorillas or windigoes or cat people or timberwolves or talking trees or dragons or draconequi ... you get the idea.. But it's always big and bad with lots of claws and fangs and special powers and usually it's some kind of MONSTER."

"Oh my. Why would anypony want to--"

"Two: That's not enough. It doesn't matter that they give themselves super-pony abilities, from the moment they arrive they start stacking on extra powers and skills and magic artifacts like Pinkie Pie at a Sundae bar. Powers and weapons swiped from video games. Magic battleaxe guitars possessed by the spirit of Nightmare Moon. The power to cast spells using a magic system from another entire universe. Flaming swords. Guns that never run out of ammunition. Trinkets and toys and MacGuffins that even Princess Celestia couldn't make or afford."

"Well that is a little ridic--"

"Three:That's STILL not enough. They'll suddenly have more skills than any five ponies could learn in one lifetime. They'll be musicians and engineers and military geniuses. And they'll be better than anypony else in the world at them. Oh, throw in a hidden Dark Evil Side Deep Within. 'Cause that's like totally kewl."

"Now you've got to be jok--"

"FOUR:  they'll OF COURSE have some piece of technology from 'the human world' "--

"The what world?"

"Skip it. Anyway, they'll have a laptop or a cellphone or some junk which will naturally never ever need batteries, and all the little bone-in-the-nose backward ponies will 'ooh' and 'ahh' and then he'll go 'now let me play you the music of my people!' And no matter what cheesy crap noise comes out of his shiny techno toy, naturally everypony will love it and start dancing to it..."

"I'm starting to feel insult--"

"FIVE: despite being either scrawny bags of sticks or piles of gut pudding in their own Canon, they'll KICK. EVERYPONY'S. ASS." This was accompanied with a wide-eyed glare. "They'll know Pony-Fu and Krav Mare-ga and fifteen other fancy foreign fighting words and they'll be ultimate warriors and stomp a mudhole out of entire armies or monsters ten times their size. There'll be at least ONE trip to Tartarus or the Wastelands where they kick even MORE ass.

"SIX: They'll have an army of loyal followers-- and I mean literally, an army. Usually made of slaves they freed from the Diamond Dogs, and they're all totally loyal. Because EVERYpony who isn't a jerk is won over by Gary Stu's charm and wits and cool human music, even if he's a flesh eating monster or has fangs and sucks the lifeforce out of the living.

"SEVEN: And they'll have their own pirate airship within two weeks of their arrival, or some OTHER outrageously expensive form of transportation. And they'll be out 'liberating the slaves' or 'battling the pirates' or "digging out corruption in Equestria" or finding some other way to leave a trail of chaos and destruction right through the middle of Equestria by the end of the month."

"This is starting to sound like something Pipsqueak would come up with while playing pirates with Dinky," Fluttershy said, with a surprising amount of cynicism for the peaceful pegasus.

"The universe should be so lucky," Pinkamena said dryly. "An eight year old colt knows when he's getting ridiculous. A Gary Stu considers that a starting point."

"That's only the beginning. EIGHT:" Pinkamena continued. " In spite of Equestria being a peaceful, safe and happy country for thousands of years, all sorts of horrors and tragedies will sprout up like mushrooms around them. Corruption will surface like streaks of mold in a cheese wheel. Diamond Dog slavers will be under every rock, even right in the middle of Equestria. Bloody wars will pop up on every border. Children being abducted and eaten. Zombie outbreaks. Monsters escaping Tartarus en masse. Racist bigot ponies in uniform at every city gate. And every monster and villain gets a free level-up, just so the hero can look more badass when he finally shows up and curb-stomps them.

"And NINE: ponies will DIE LIKE FLIES around them. Why? Why, for TEH DRAMA." She actually pronounced the 'TEH.' "And oh yeah, you better hope you're not his or her boon companion because you'll be the first to bite it, just so he can mourn over your grave for a bit and then remember you with a tear in his eye while he tears through the rest of Equestria like a lawn mower stuck in high....

"All of this crap happens to US, so he can show how great he is and how he's the coolest and most awesome and most important thing in all Equestria." She hawked and spat. "The only thing that keeps the Chessverse from imploding is the fact that there are like a hundred of them at any one time, and they can't ALL be the center of the universe."

Fluttershy looked around. "This couldn't be caused by a Gary Stu or Mary Sue getting into our Equestria," She asked fearfully. "Could it?"

Pinkamena regarded the bleak landscape. "A Misery Stu? Could be, but it's really not likely." She paused to stare at a large scruffy black raven perched on a nearby fencepost. "If it was a Sue or a Stu, we would've already met them. They make the whole world revolve around them, remember? We would already know his immensely tragic backstory and all his current bad luck and hardships too. Heck, you probably would have already had sex with them." She started to trot on down the road, then realized Fluttershy wasn't with her.

Pinkamena looked back; the timid pegasus was standing stock still in the middle of the road, eyes round and jaw agape. "Whaaaaaat?" Fluttershy said.

"Oh yeah. Point number TEN..." Pinkamena trotted back to where Fluttershy stood stunned, and got up close. "They. Will Pork. Anything."

"Before you ask, it doesn't matter WHAT species they are or were. They'll be horny for the pony porny, and they'll get pony sex partners in no time flat. Sometimes several." She leaned in even closer. "And you and your friends are usually first on the list. You, Rarity, Twilight, Pinkie Pie, Luna, Celestia-- sometimes all of you. Though they'll grab a few background ponies for variety sometime--- maybe even throw in a few non-pony races for a lame attempt at originality...."

Fluttershy went "eee-hee-hee-heeeeeew." She danced on her hoof tips as if she'd stepped in something nasty.

"So no. Not a Gary Stu. This one is working from offstage, like the Trollfic was. It's probably something a lot worse."

"What could be worse than THAT?" Fluttershy said in horror. She darted fearful glances all around her, as if she expected a Gary Stu to jump out of the bushes and ravish her on the spot.

"My personal vote? A Toxic Nihilist," Pinkamena said. "Trollficcers? They just wanna pee in everyone's Hay Flakes to show how clever they are. Gary Stus and Mary Sues, they just wanna show how SPECIAL and BETTER they are. Even Misery Sues are just going "poor little me, pity me, wuv me." " Pinkamena shook her head. "But Toxic Nihilists? They just want to prove how terrible everything is... how horrible life is, and how pointless it is, and how hopeless... and they do it by ruining everything for everypony else."

"But they can't, not really," Fluttershy protested. "Can they? I mean, everything goes back to normal once they're gone."

"Usually, yeah." Pinkamena said. "But they still leave behind scars...Like me.  And they often traumatize other Outsiders in ways that never quite heal." She glowered. "And then there are the times when the fanboys ascend, the inmates start running the asylum, and Canon itself... the timeline, the source material for a continuum... gets torn to shreds." She pulled a comic book out of nowhere and showed it to Fluttershy. The cover featured a red-and-blue clad biped swinging from building to building on some sort of webbing. "See this guy? Used to be one of the most popular Canon superheros among the Outsiders. He was brave and tough and even though he had troubles he overcame them; he was a hero because it was the right thing to do-- he eventually got married to his greatest true love-- he was growing and developing as a character... and then..."

"And then?"

Pinkamena snarled. "And then... CHEESEHEAD."

Hearing their cue, lightning flashed and thunder rumbled in the distance. " A fat dorkboy who didn't LIKE the hero's wife... he got in charge of the Canon, stamped his widdle feet and tried to write her out of existence."

Fluttershy gasped. "Oh that poor mare! Did he succeed?"

"Pretty much," Pinkamena said. "She still exists in tons of continuum-- fanon, subcanon, alt canon, strip canon.... he couldn't erase them all. But the main Canon, he absolutely wrecked, trying to find ways to do it. He had her kidnapped. Blew her up in a plane. Tried to get them divorced. Turned her into a clone. Turned HIM into a clone. Rewrote the movies with a retcon. Gave her cancer from the hero's radioactive sperm...."

"....What." Fluttershy's eyebrows tabled.

"You heard me. You name it, didn't matter HOW stupid it was or HOW bad it screwed things up, he did it. The Hero's Wife Must Die. He finally managed to get her out of Canon completely... by having the hero sell his marriage to the Devil to save his ninety-year-old aunt who was dying of a bullet wound."

"....What." It seemed almost impossible, but Fluttershy's delivery was even flatter.

"They got rid of Cheesehead, finally, but by then it was too late. Twenty years of continuity and character growth WRECKED so one stubborn dorkboy could have his way. The whole Canon came unravelled like a cheap sweater. It'll probably take another decade for all his flunkies and his policies to be rinsed out of the system, at which point they'll have to do the mother of all Retcons to fix everything." She tucked the comic book away to whatever hammerspace it had come from. "I ain't saying this guy we got here could ever get put in charge of OUR Canon. But it does happen often enough that the Outsiders are worried."

"Why... why are they worried?" Fluttershy said. "You said they just watch us for entertainment. It can't be that important to them."

"Not important?" Pinkamena gave her a look. "Tell me, Fluts," she said. "Why do they watch us, do you think?"

"F-For entertainment...?" The answer finished as a question.

"For refuge," Pinkamena corrected. "Did you know that the suicide rate among young Outsiders has gone up four hundred percent in the past fifty of their years?

"They live in a hard, tough, difficult world, that can be incredibly bleak at times," she said. "Watching worlds like ours gives them hope-- some temporary comfort. A chance to rest, a chance to believe for a minute that things can get better.

"Toxic Nihilists hate that. They love to wallow in despair, and nothing makes them more spitting mad than seeing anypony or anything else that doesn't. If they see another person SMILING, they'll go out of their way to hunt down whatever makes them SMILE and DESTROY IT or as much of it as they can reach. If that means taking a cartoon world full of magic and rainbows and talking ponies and remaking it into a fricking morbid hellhole, one full of dead orphans, starving waifs, soulless shells of war veterans, burnt hills and graveyards, they'll do it. And they'll pat themselves on the back for 'enlightening' the rest of us to 'how the world really is,'...... and laugh at the notion that they're making other beings die just a little bit more inside.

"So yeah. Kinda important." She turned around and started trotting down the road, hooves splashing in the puddles. After a moment's lip-biting hesitation Fluttershy followed.

They soon found themselves passing the outer reaches of Sweet Apple Acres. Or at least the remains thereof; the trees were blighted and blasted, withered in leaf and barren of fruit. Their once cheery red barn house could be seen on the hilltop, decrepit and crumbling, the red paint gone gray and peeling.

Tromping down the road in their direction was Big MacIntosh. But he obviously... wasn't feeling like himself today. Fluttershy could tell. She'd watched the big brawny farmpony at work from a distance for too long, pining away for the nerve to speak to him, not to recognize his subtle little moods.

There was no subtlety now. His head hung low and his slow confident gait was now a listless shuffle. he was scruffy and dirty, his mane tangled. Rather than the stout horsecollar he wore a battered and scarred suit of armor. The breastplate looked to be as thick as the metal on a locomotive's boiler and the pauldrons were the size of potbellied stoves. They had been ornate, worked with symbols of the sun and moon and fine, ornate bas-relief figures, but the mud and battle-scarring all but obscured the detail.

As he drew closer Fluttershy gasped in shock. The stallion had dozens of scars on every visible part of him, even one that crossed over his left eye, which shone white with blindness. Filthy bandages wrapped him here and there. An enormous belt-fed weapon of some sort was strapped across his back, and a bladed weapon that looked like someone had mated a chainsaw with a ball of hate hung from his side.

He trudged up to them, only stopping and looking up when he realized someone stood in his way. "Make way," he grunted. "On a mission for the war effort in the name of the Solar Empress..."

Fluttershy lost all timidity and ran up, forehoof raised to examine his dirty bandages. "Oh Big MacIntosh, you poor thing, what happened to you??"

He looked at her with empty, listless eyes. "Been on the front for nine months, ma'am," he said. "The Great Equestrian War rages on with the heretics..."

"Heretics? Empress? War? What...?" Fluttershy didn't let her bewilderment stop her ministrations. She set Fluffyshy and Angel down on a nearby rock, gave Angel her umbrella hat to keep them dry, and  started digging through her saddlebags for clean bandages and antiseptic. "What war are you talking about?"

MacIntosh stared at her as if she'd gone simple. "THE war," he said. "With the heretics and infidels who have defied the rule of the Solar Empress, granting refuge to the corrupted and unclean..."

Fluttershy barely reacted. She was in the zone. "Uh huh," she said, daubing salves on cuts and bruises and winding bandages. "Take off this armor shoulder, um, thingy, please? It's in the way..."

Pinkamena facehoofed, spattering her face with mud. "Ah crap, they're cribbing notes off of WankHammer 40k," she said. " Five bits to nuthin' says we're up to our plots in Emo:the Tossers monsters next." She stepped closer to Big Mac and put her hooves on his cheeks, turning his head to look him in the eye. "Big MacIntosh," she said calmly. "I need you to listen to me very carefully, okay? I know the real you is down in there somewhere. This isn't real.  Okay? Equestria has been at peace for over a thousand years. There is no war with the heretics, you are not a space marine or whatever they told you, there's no battlefront, There is no War. Understand?"

Big MacIntosh blinked. He raised his head and looked over Pinkamena's head to the far horizon, his gaze bleak but his jaw steely. "Only the dead," he intoned, "shall know the end of War--"

Pinkamena sighed. "Oh well. Plan B." With an overhand swing she brought her skillet down on MacIntosh's head.

The skillet clanged. Big MacIntosh's eyes crossed. "Eeyup? EeNope? Eeyup? EeNope? Eeyup?" he said, then fell face down in the mud.

Fluttershy shrieked in shock. "Pinkamena! What are you doing?" With a desperate shove she rolled Big MacIntosh over onto his back, just barely managing. She examined the luckless stallion's head, her face inches from his. "You could have concussed him or given him brain damage or--"

"Quick, then, give him CPR!" Pinkamena said. C'mon, she thought. Don't think about it just---

Fluttershy's face bloomed red. Nuts, she's onto me, Pinkamena thought. "What? What are you trying to pull Pinkamena--"

Just then Big MacIntosh's eyes fluttered open. From where she stood Pinkamena could see that both his eyes were normal again. The window was narrow; she had to think fast. "KISS HER RIGHT NOW, SOLDIER-- THAT'S AN ORDER!" she barked in his ear.

Whatever deformed continuity had made MacIntosh a soldier, it had apparently instilled hup-two obedience. Without so much as a blink he lunged up, put his hooves on either side of Fluttershy's face, and planted his lips square on hers. The pegasus' squeal of surprise was muffled-- and brief. It quickly turned into something a lot more smoky sounding as the repressed filly suddenly began returning the kiss with enthusiasm.

It worked. The scars disappeared. The armor turned back into pot metal and hammered-together junk and fell off the stallion into a clanging pile around them. Somewhere a bird chirped. And darned if the dead grass for a few yards around hadn't turned green.

It took another second but Fluttershy finally realized what she was doing. She leapt away from MacIntosh, face flaming. "I'msorryI'msorryI'msorry--" she stammered, eyes tearing up. She started to turn and fly off.

"Wait--!" Big Mac said, holding out a hoof.

"Ohhhhh NO ya don't," Pinkamena said. She grabbed Fluttershy's tail in her teeth.(2) "You... shtay... HERE!" she said with her mouth full. She literally yanked Fluttershy out of the air and plunked her rump-first onto the muddy ground. "I am NOT going to put up with a few hundred chapters of that endless will they or won't they angst and poor communication CRAPOLA. You two are perfect for each other, anyone can see it. You like him, he likes you, you're both shy, GET OVER IT." She put her head down and pushed the pegasus over to Mac, sliding her on her rump through the mud.

Fluttershy was setting new records for blushing. "I-- I-- I---"

MacIntosh blinked at her. "You...?" he pointed at her, then at himself.

Fluttershy cringed for a second, then managed a quick nod. "....And...you?"

MacIntosh gave a lopsided grin. "EeYup."

Fluttersqueak. Suddenly, she jumped forward and kissed him again. The circle of color and life around them leapt outward another hundred yards. There were apple buds on the trees and dandelions in the grass now.

MacIntosh looked nervous. "So... Us...?" he asked.

Fluttershy giggled and nuzzled him. "...EeYup," she said.

The apple trees bloomed.

It was then that Pinkamena realized that Angel Bunny and Fluffyshy had jumped forward and pushed Fluttershy into MacIntosh's hooves. They sat there on the ground behind their mistress, smirking and looking rather pleased with themselves as the two ponies continued with their lip-lock. Pinkamena gave an amused snort and trotted over to the two conniving pets. They held up a hoof and a paw to her. "Bwo-hoof?" Fluffyshy said.

"Yeah, brohoof," Pinkamena said with a half-grin, giving them one each.

After the two finally came up for air, a great deal of plot exposition took place. "... and the last thing I remember is slippin' off the barn roof," Big Mac finished, poking at his bandages. "I landed in a junk pile. 'Swhere I got all these injuries."

"Probably where you got the armor too," Pinkamena noted, kicking at the scraps still lying in the road. "The T.N.'s getting lazy. Or doesn't want to try and write a whole war epic.... At least we know we're not going to come over the next ridge and find ourselves in a combat zone."

"So this thing is sorta like Discord," Mac said. "messin' up the whole world. And you're like... a Pinkie Pie from another dimension, sent to stop them?"

Pinkamena half-shrugged, half nodded. "Close enough for government work," she said.

Big MacIntosh frowned and nodded sternly. "Well, Ma'am, you got mah help," he said. "F'what it's worth." he looked at Fluttershy apologetically. "Ah guess we picked a right poor time to start us a romance..." Fluttershy just bit her lip and huddled closer into his side.

"Well yeah, I--" Pinkamena stopped. "No, I take that back, this is the exact right time to start a romance." She looked around; the fields were alive and blooming as far as the eye could see, and the clouds were beginning to break up, letting sunlight stream down. Every second Big MacIntosh and Fluttershy were together, the cleansing spread.

"I'm normally of the 'hit it with a spiked baseball bat till it's fixed' school," she said thoughtfully. "But maybe this time calls for different strategies."

There was a rattling caw. They all looked in the direction it came from. A huge black bird-- one that Pinkamena had mistaken earlier for a raven-- was sitting on a nearby fencepost, glaring at them with hate-filled yellow eyes. It shook out its ragged wings and leapt into the air, winging off into the sky.

Pinkamena followed it thoughtfully with her eyes. "Oh yeah, that's a good sign," she said cynically. "Come on, ponies, let's go get Applejack."

1)The pony equivalent of counting on one's fingers.

2) Being careful to get the whole tail, and not just the extensions.