CoCoBA Episode 18: Different Strings (Omake)

Coco’s Bizarre Adventure, Episode 18: Different Strings (Omake)

Just a few bonus timelines while we wait for the vote to be decided.

	DRAGONFORCE

Spike stared up at the dragon as it burst from the roof of the Castle. Entire floors he'd spent his earliest days wandering came off with it as it roared, his own childhood speared by its neck.

It was larger than he'd imagined a dragon could get, even the ones he'd seen during their Migration, and yet he felt a kind of understanding for it. It was something raw and primal, as big and as thoughtless as the sky! He knew that this was the kind of creature he was descended from, the thing that he would turn into someday even if Sombra took over the whole of Equestria!

Moondancer muttered something to herself, and then her voice became audible. "Spike, I need you to hold still. Don't panic."

"What?" he said, not even turning to her.

As it turned its head back and forth, he realized he could tell that it was a female, not quite a catch but still slender with sleek joints and clean scales. He couldn't tell anything else from this distance - he would have needed to smell her to figure out anything else about her, and she was no Rarity.

"Rarity!" he shouted at the same time he thought it, when the realization struck him like a sledgehammer that she was still in there. He rushed towards it then, hoping to duck a path through the chaos and carnage of the battlefield - and then fell over.

Moondancer's magic tugged at his legs, and her voice was patronizing and annoyed. "No, stay still."

"B-but she's-" his words died at he saw the anger - no, the intensity on her face. He had learned from his earliest days of disrupting classes that an angry unicorn was nothing to mess around with.

"I need you for this, Spike," she said patiently. "I wasn't expecting this, but there's only one way we're going to stop it before Jupiter unleashes it on all of us!"

She didn't bother to explain what the way was, only to drop her head so that her horn was pointed at him, and then further down so that it was straight at the ground beneath him. It glowed and crackled with energy, bright and snappy, and he could feel it in the air around him.

He tried to see if she was doing something to him, making him into a cannonball or helping him fly or something, but he only felt distantly hungry. The brunt of the force was going into the earth below the two of them, and he could feel from experience the rough disc she was drawing under him.

"Let's just hope my geology's up to snuff..." she said to herself.

"What do-" he started, and then the world gave way underneath of him. He yelped, and the air whooshed upwards, carrying the echo beyond earshot as the light and the surface became a hole in a black landscape, and then a dot.

When he realized that he was falling, he scrabbled with his claws against the sheer surfaces of the hole. It was a cylinder, just large enough to fit him, and as he prodded the walls to slow himself, he felt something hard behind the soft earth and stone. On instinct he scratched for it, and a shimmering emerald greeted him dully behind the wall of soil.

He reached for it, a point of stability, and then it broke off from the wall. He went tumbling again, a few more feet, and he struck the wall again, looking down for some hint as to the length of the passage. The tunnel was slightly curved, and he couldn't make out the bottom, only a faint light entering it from one side.

The Canterhorn Mountain had existed for a long time, and many ponies had tried to map it in the early days of Equestria, but after the Princesses had established a home inside of it there had been surprisingly little effort put into its exploration. The natural caves had been left as they were, and it was only in rumor that they lived on for the ponies of the city above them.

Twilight had been down here, he remembered, when she'd had to save Cadance from the changeling hive. She'd mentioned that the place was full of magic, and gemstones, and then prodded him never to go sneaking off for it - as if he wanted to go running off into some abandoned mineshaft every time he wanted a snack!

But if nopony had been down here in ages without permission from the Princesses, why drop him? He looked up, but Moondancer hadn't followed him.

Then his movements tore too much at the soil in his claw, and he was falling again. He picked up speed this time as he saw other gems pass him by - blue, red, indigo - and then they started to dot the walls. His hunger grew as he saw them, something in the back of his mind blotting out whatever might have been going up on the surface.

If nopony ever visited this place, he might have half a chance if he just stayed down here. It wouldn't be much of a basecamp living in the dark, but if nopony bothered him and he had all the gems he could eat...

The hole suddenly got tighter, and he had to adjust himself to keep falling. Or no, that wasn't right - as he looked down he realized that he'd gotten taller, his legs long enough to reach the other wall without kicking them out and his snout now long enough to take up part of his vision. It bothered him a little bit, but there was something exciting in it.

He was starting to see the idea.

More gems passed as he slid down, hoping that the hole wouldn't get too tight for him to pass through. He grew again, and then a little more, and then he had to tear at the earth himself to open up the path - and then he was out.

He fell, but when he landed it was the ground that took the damage instead of him. A glance around and he could see it - an endless shimmering cavern tiled in sparkling gems and long glassy panels of black. On instinct, he could smell that this was the heart of it all, the center of Canterlot.

And it was his.

Above, Moondancer looked around for some kind of help. ｢Tragic But Magic｣ could've latched onto any of the ponies on either side and drawn something out of them if she held her attention for long enough, but that raised the problem of which one to look at. Thankfully not enough of the fights had been resolved for any of the Jovians to throw themselves at her yet, but that advantage would run out soon enough.

She tried to focus on the magical signatures instead of the Stands themselves, trying to gauge the magical power on the enemy's side, but it was pointless. Harmony was being flung in so many directions that it might as well have been seltzer or water balloons - the only point she could make out with clarity was the obvious one, the center of what was left of the Castle.

Then suddenly the dragon roared with feeling and lifted upwards, agitated enough to escape its perch. It dove in the air with its claws outstretched, heading for the ground with the force to send most of the combatants flying.

A few of the smarter ponies went running, losing alliances in the crowd, but Moondancer stood her ground. It would just be a matter of predicting the shockwave and trying to contain it. Her horn hadn't given out on her yet, she could do that if she had to...

But as the dragon fell, the ground itself roared in answer, and the shockwave came early. In fact, it came from the wrong direction!

Dark purple talons broke the shell of the topsoil like nothing, and within seconds the dragon had emerged from its burrow completely and taken to the air. Its wings and scales shed gemdust and rock-matter the size of pavingstones, and both dragons screeched in different keys as it drove its head into the white one's underbelly.

The two went rising back up into the air slowly, like a collective hot air balloon, but on the other two axes they were a violent storm of limbs, thrashing in a circle around each other. The dragon Jupiter had brought onto its side had been large enough to demolish the Castle, and large enough to threaten the city into submission if it came to that - but it hadn't been the right size for the whole of the mountain.

Spike, whatever was left of him in that screaming beast, was maybe one and a half the size of what he was fighting. His claws tore without piercing the skin, but sent a hail of alabaster hide glinting off into the courtyard - and then his jaw seized upon its neck.

There was a great thrashing of its tail, a crying out as all of its limbs went into some kind of fit, and then the dragon went limp completely. Moondancer had to cast a quick spell to check, but it hadn't stopped breathing. Was it playing possum? She wanted to warn Spike, but realized that he wouldn't hear her, and even if he could he probably wouldn't understand what she was trying to say.

But he didn't make any sudden moves, even to bite down. He flapped steadily, as they both were lowered to the ground, and when they both landed the ground merely coughed up a small rain of pebbles and dirt. Her mane clumped with grass, and she didn't care - the Jovians and ponies were staring from the outskirts and whatever cover they'd managed to improvise.

The white dragon stayed limp as Spike let it go, and then it lowered its head to the ground - and he grew, just another twenty or thirty hooves worth, but visibly. He looked almost disinterested, glancing around the courtroom as it drew itself back to its claws.

"A dominance contest." Moondancer said to herself, and wished that there had been some spare paper for her to note it down on. They'd never witnessed one of these in the wild, but it completely validated Haykamp's theories!

Which meant, hopefully, they just gained an ally.

In the night sky, Spike roared, and the other dragon joined in at a slightly lower pitch.

	SWEETIE BELLE RUN

Canterlot had grown more than dark under the eternal night sky, for the weeks that it had lasted. It was only through the Princess's magic that it was possible for food to grow, and by simply tracking the movement of rations any resistance upstarts could be found immediately. The restaurant district had been obliterated, every building turned to liquid in an instance and smelt into a black-metal briar patch nine blocks long.

Ponies drudged, keeping their abilities close to their chests and pretending not to see those that flew overhead. Their last hope had been the pegasi hidden within the last gift of Rainbow Dash, and yet those same pegasi slowly began to arrive in their workforces, with black-ringed eyes and unmoving tongues, unwilling to speak of what had happened to them.

The rail lines had been taken over at this point, and every holdout that somepony could get news from had gone with them. Even the Elements of Harmony had been lost, their whereabouts known only to the legion of maids and servants that now tended and repaired the Castle of the Night - they had been abducted along with most of Ponyville as the entire town had burned to the ground.

So when ponies came trudging up the mountain, none of the newly-minted perimeter guards could figure out why.

They moved in a rough line, not precisely a formation, and they weren’t armored like the guards of the Crystal Empire. In fact, not all of them were even full-grown ponies - at the front they eventually made out a white-coated filly, and towards the middle of the throng was, of all things, a zebra. By the time they could see enough to be concerned, the ponies were upon them.

Sunset appeared at the edge of the city, having been torn from some very important experimentation with the Amulet. Her sleep cycle hadn’t been affected as badly as most of the ponies under her, but even she was feeling crabby now.

“What’s your business here?” she asked the crowd from a good distance away.

They ignored her, trudging forward. They didn’t seem mindless, only driven by a single purpose, so she channeled some magic into her horn and blew a fireball twice her size a few feet into the air. It hung there like a beachball at the peak of its arc, and then fizzled out.

They were still moving forward, the filly at the very lead of the messy pool holding something in front of her eyes. “You’ll want to get out of the way.”

It took Sunset a moment to realize that the filly was speaking to her and not to her own people, and then she could hear buzzing in the air. She turned her head up a little, and then had to summon ｢Pepper｣ around herself.

The bullets came down heavy, scattering into the field of energy her Stand put out, but the rest of the guards weren’t so lucky. A whole legion of planes swept downwards out of the sky, and the good-for-nothing guards behind her drew themselves back behind the city walls.

Sunset gritted her teeth as her Stand tried to make do with what it was being given. The bullets weren’t preferable when it came to filling her reserves, but they counted for something! They had to!

She aimed a burst of magic through her Stand, and shot it straight for the headset-looking thing that the filly was holding, hoping that it was the center of the Stand attack. Another filly swept her out of the way, and the bolt of fire slowed in mid-air in front of her, illuminating the battered orange of her face.

Sunset watched as the second filly came charging for her, taking faster strides than should’ve been possible and only giving her a few seconds to respond. She stood up in the crowd of her Stand and prepared them to sap the energy of this new Stand user, while at the same time trying to think of who else could be called in to deal with these ponies the most efficiently.

The filly was a pegasus, and wtih a couple beats of her wings the two were only inches apart. ｢Pepper｣ started drawing energy out of her as soon as it was able, as forcefully as possible, and she didn’t make it close enough to land a hit. Sunset stared down at her as she slumped, tired like she’d been running around too much and needed a nap.

Then she looked up at the rest of the crowd, which was now drawing itself away from her and towards the city, almost marching. There was a look of determination on their faces after all; they were haunted, but unwilling to waver from their path even a little, even in the face of death! She didn’t recognize any of them, but surely if there’d been a crack team of mercernaries they would’ve shown themselves before now?!

One of them stood out to her as not moving - another foal, this one laying low to the ground and aiming a sniper rifle! She panicked as he lined up the shot, and on instinct tried to throw herself out of the way - except she couldn’t move! Her hooves were stuck to the ground at four different points!

She felt a sudden pressure on her back, and turned her head to see an orange-and-black Stand floating above her. ｢Pepper｣ fired at it, but it didn’t move!

And then the foal fired, with a distinctive plastic click - and she fell to the ground, unconscious.

Sweetie piped up again with a voice much louder than her frame suggested, walking alongside the line of Ponyvillians as the guards shrunk back from them. “The workshops are changing shift in fifteen minutes. We can spread out to each of the major ones and then perform a pincer attack on the Castle, but it’s going to be tricky.”

Scootaloo appeared next to her in a flash, and they walked silently. Ahead of them, the city stretched, quiet for only a few minutes more. All ears were perked, even as they edged forward with determination born from pain!

“Alright, if there’s no questions,” Sweetie shouted, “Here’s how we’re splitting up!”

	HAPPINESS IS A WARM GUN

Jewel Joy rode on her ｢The Holograms｣, feeling the wind rush in her mane as the mock-train moved by underneath of her. The orange filly sped in front of her, much faster than she’d expected at first blush, and already the chase had been going on for a good half hour. If not for how much she enjoyed the landscape speeding past, she would’ve gotten bored and ended it sooner.

Ah, but now she tripped up. The filly saw something, and it distracted her just enough! Jewel Joy let her Stand pick up speed and close in.

And then she heard something, loud and persistent even over the air, and her own eyes were drawn away.

Coco cackled into the night air as ｢Megadeth｣ impregnated the countryside with its hollowpoints. It rattled in her hooves until it finally sputtered and died, its sleek black design steaming and disfigured from the sheer heat of the rounds forced through it. She frowned, and then tossed it over her shoulder.

The train had disappeared, which was a result. The filly was cowering, well out of the line of fire, staring at her with wide eyes.

Coco winked, and then looked for whoever had been hunting her. She’d run into half a dozen Stand users up to now, to the point that they seemed magnetically drawn to her, and she could tell by now when somepony had killing intent.

She stepped over the tracks, grinning lopsidedly as she approached the mare. This one sparkled in the light, and she scooched away on her butt, sunglasses hanging loosely from her wide eyes.

Jewel Joy threw up her hooves; this was the mare Sombra had sent a warning about. “｢The Holograms｣!”

A wall appeared between them, sixty feet tall and five thick, and a shade away from transparency. The mare’s grin died, and then she fished around behind herself for something, eyes cast off into the sky in concentration.

This time, when she produced ｢Megadeth｣ it was as large as she was, a slender mess of rotating gear-teeth and interlocking black clamps that hummed and whined its way to life. The magazine stretched out somewhere behind her hooves and curled cutely on one end, like a lock of Rarity’s hair.

That reminded her.

She turned to the filly and put on a calm voice so’s not to spook her. “Do you know where Rarity is?!”

Scootaloo had made her way back to her scooter, and now shook her head violently as she righted it and kicked off, speeding for the horizon. Coco watched her go, and shrugged.

Then she turned back to the mare ｢Megadeth｣ was trained on. “What about you?”

Jewel Joy sweated.

https://www.fimfiction.net/chapter/1200767