CoCoBA Episode 8: Don't Turn Around

“Wait!”

Halted by the familiar voice, they turned around.

It was Diamond Tiara, toting saddlebags as she rushed up the desolation for them. Her namesake was still perched on her head, her mane still in order, but her eyes brimmed with nervous energy. Scootaloo regarded her with a mix of hesitation and annoyance, body half-turned away. Coco’s face, in contrast, was mellowly smiling.

When Diamond had caught up to them, a few seconds later, she caught her breath and said, “Let me come with you.”

Scootaloo’s fears were confirmed. “Why don’t you stick around and take care of Ponyville?”

Diamond all but scoffed. “Sweetie’s definitely got that in hoof.”

“How do you know?”

“Because she sent me!” Diamond said. “This town’s barely here any longer. There aren’t going to be lots of raids, and even if there are, it’s better for everypony if we can make it to this king’s house sooner.”

“Then don’t slow us down.” Scootaloo leered.

“What about your parents?” Coco asked, and the two jumped at the first words she’d spoken.

Diamond hesitated, coughed. “They... left. I don’t know where they went, just that they weren’t there to help when ponies needed them. I thought I could do that, but… ponies here already have help.”

Coco nodded to herself, then shared a look with Scootaloo, who sulked wordlessly. “I think she would be a good filly to rely on.”

“Yeah, whatever.” Scootaloo said, and started walking.

Shortly after, all three moved together across the green sloping landscape. Diamond tried not to dwell on the exercise, while Coco pondered the horizon. Two of them had already made this journey the other way around, roughly, although they’d only passed the mountain instead of directly climbing up.

Above, afternoon fell into evening.

***

Button Mash sat in the Castle kitchens, inspecting his Stand on impulse. The rhythm of it soothed him, and this place was mostly empty outside of mealtimes. He didn’t have any talents in that area, but it didn’t seem like many ponies did here. Already they were plotting out the logistics of running out to the Apple Family’s storehouses and orchards, grabbing everything they could carry back and ration safely.

It wouldn’t last them more than a month, he knew, even if they picked everything edible they could find. The town was naturally too large for one farm to feed them, and that was assuming something hadn’t already been done to the crops.

They were like a bud cut off from the rest of the plant, full of life and hope but not in the key ways that would sustain them. Unless someone was hiding a Stand that would make things grow faster, but he doubted that. Soon they’d have to wander somewhere else and leave Ponyville behind.

An unseen fetlock reached over his head and pulled him into a sidehug. He let out air through his nose and leaned into her.

“I feel bad that you get so cooped up like this,” the mare said.

“It’s fine, Mom, really.” Hours and sleep later, he still couldn’t say anything to her without almost crying.

Diamond hadn’t cried when her parents had left, she had been in control, in power from that moment forward. He hadn’t quite believed it when she was taken, and it was only when she’d been returned from the depths of an enemy Stand that he realized what it would’ve meant to spend the rest of his life as a gun-toting orphan.

The only thing that had kept him from seeing his own suffering was the way it was lost in the suffering of others. Now, with most of the missing parents returned, with the balance of power shifting back to the adults, he felt much weaker. As if, maybe, he’d been playing a much smaller and less important game than he’d originally believed.

“Am I supposed to be able to see this?” she asked, in the same calm-listening way she’d asked how to jump when he’d handed her a controller, as she extended a hoof out and brushed the sleek black plastic. In that moment, he almost broke down.

“Y-yeah. It’s not like the others, it’s just a… a thing. Solid.” He rubbed his eyes briefly, and hefted it a few inches up and down in demonstration.

Her hoof didn’t leave that polished surface, just lazily traced over its outline. After a long, pregnant moment, she said, “You did very good.”

When the volunteer cooks came in to improvise dinner, they found her hugging him, smiling, and him, tears staining her coat, with the gun on the kitchen floor.

***

If Mayor Mare thought that the current setup was ridiculous, she was incredibly good at hiding it.

She’d woken up in mid-sentence on one of the higher levels of Princess Twilight’s Castle, amid a crowd of strange voices. Her last memory had been of rehearsing a speech on a midnight stroll, a small luxury taken to avoid the faces in her dreams.

She’d been one of the first to go, she learned, and she understood why. Cut off the head to eat the chicken, or something ghastly like that. Privately, she believed that they already did most of the work when they incapacitated Twilight.

And now that she sat next to a filly who she’d previously only seen in indistinct crowds, who she’d only known because of her older sister’s importance to national security, she saw that there were further depths to sink.

Sweetie Belle was carrying a Stand, and had even let other ponies use it whenever it wasn’t necessary for her to check something. (She did that with a certain air of compulsion that worried the Mayor, the sensation of running out to the mailbox and then being vaguely disappointed a hundred times a day which she knew couldn’t be healthy.)

With anypony able to hold a Stand for themselves, flip through its images of the outside world, toss it back and forth without fear of damage, they all felt much better about the handful of superpowered ponies playing hero on their behalf.

“And if those three don’t make it to the end of their journey, what are we going to do?” she asked.

“Sombra’s not finished,” Sweetie said as she thought to herself, “This isn’t his endgame, or else we wouldn’t be sitting here talking.” Her eyes were focused on the Map, which had several hours ago returned to dormancy.

“Do you think we should try to find out what he wants?” the Mayor asked, internally listing the litany of ways in which that was a bad idea.

“No.” Sweetie said firmly. “Ponyville’s not an army. If he was attacking us in the first place, he wanted something from us. We should protect the three Elements we have, and keep whatever else he might want out of his hooves.”

“And should we think of relocation?”

“You can, if you want.” Her eyes were suddenly tired, but not angry. “I have to hope that things get sorted out before we need to. I can’t help ponies getting antsy, but I can help them getting invaded. This is really all we’ve been doing for the last few days.” ‘We’ being the children, growing up ahead of their time. The Mayor didn’t have another question to cart the conversation away from that thought.

Then, with a swift and graceful motion, she tilted her head back and let ｢Private Eyes｣ rest on her forehead, peering through it without the use of her hooves. Like magic, the lever on the side cranked without being touched, a trick only she could perform.

Four clicks in, she stopped.

***

In the encroaching dark, back from the new and jaggedly-defined outskirts of the town, a mare trotted. She could no longer pretend that she belonged here, which was even more annoying than the black eye or the constant resistance. Patches of her coat were ashy or missing, and beneath them were puckering scars and skin that almost matched the original color. Her mane and tail were almost completely disintegrated, and what remained had none of the bob or flow of the original.

Berryshine’s saving grace, in the end, was that she had access to a natural anesthetic. Stop, drop and roll was a difficult sequence in her current body, but it had done the trick. After a long dark sleep which she’d hazily worried about not waking up from, she’d trudged back into consciousness.

She still had a mission, a goal, a purpose. The wreckage around her gave her a feeling of accomplishment, that really there wasn’t more to be done. It was only the lack of ponies that stood in the way of that feeling, the way they weren’t settling down into their sleep under the stars, that they didn’t frolic peacefully among the dense trees of the distant forest. It was only when she saw the castle that she understood.

She’d seen the castle before, of course, but had assumed it was a landmark of some kind, or maybe a special kind of magical tree known only to inhabitants on this side of reality. To think that they just so happened to have a massive fortress in the middle of their town was hard to wrap her head around, when there were so many smaller and easier targets.

Berryshine knew now that she’d been lazy. It wasn’t about doing the most work, it was about doing the work that mattered! She’d let herself be grounded by small goals, and lost sight of her ideal.

Then again, maybe there wouldn’t be anyone around by now, castle or not. They couldn’t have bested the others, could they? Drops probably wouldn’t have been a match for Berryshine, but only because she wasn’t the type to loosen up ever, and she’d been briefed that no one else would have an ability like ｢Simply Red｣.

If that was the case, she was going to kill Drops. This was supposed to be a lively wilderness, not a ghost town. Even the wrecked buildigs needed more work before they would turn completely into ash and renourish the landscape. The road would need careful work, too, and the glass, and so many other small details that Drops would have been so useful for.

It would certainly have been easier with a fire extinguisher on hand for some of the larger projects. Berryshine had been saving the semicircle barricade of trash encircling the town for last - a final glorious noxious blaze and then, finally, the unfettered horizon from all directions - but that ambitious finale required some method of not burning down the forest it bordered.

There was already dew on the grass when she got there, which was more than enough. It had taken a few minutes scrounging in the wasteland to find a lantern, but it lit up with a little work. Lumber was easier to locate than at any moment before in her life, and her Stand drifted behind her with an orphaned table in its arms, the surface becoming stained a splotchy violet through the walk.

There was only the one front door, although a pile of furniture made up for the second one. It would have been easy to attack there, but she wanted to force ponies out of it instead of entrenching them. Once she’d started some panic, she could start dropping them like flies, and then get to work on disassembling whatever this monolithic thing was made of.

For a moment, staring, she wondered exactly how ponies in a small town had carved and built it, and then decided that it wasn’t worth the trouble asking.

What she hadn’t seen from a distance were the windows, and one was nearby enough and far enough down to be exactly what she was looking for. With a droplet of her ability, she turned a patch of dew into wine, lit it on fire and touched the table to it.

It caught, and then the blaze ate away some of the grass and receded into itself, its legacy hoisted by her Stand on hands she dearly missed.

“Stop!” The word was an elongated shout that pierced through the sound of the remaining door swinging open. One of the young ones, in fact the first one Berryshine had knocked out when she first infiltrated the wall of trash.

She’d been exactly this unhelpful the first time, too.

The filly stood in range, looked Berryshine in the eye and said, “All of your friends are gone! They’ve been driven out, because they don’t belong here, and neither do you! This is your one chance to leave before we send you out like the rest of them!”

Berryshine stared back at her, then snerked, and then finally started a fit of raucous, pealing laughter, throwing her head back towards the sky in pure enjoyment. In that moment, her voice cracked from lack of use.

“Even defeated, the only thing that’s harmed me is my own power! With my understanding of that defeat, I’ve taken yet another step toward invincibility! I could drown this world and none of you ponies could stop me!”

With that, her Stand hurled the burning table through the nearest window.

“No!” the filly shouted, and Berryshine only laughed as the filly collapsed to the ground. Patiently, she waited for the others to come flooding out in fear, or aid, but none did.

Then a puff of smoke flew with purpose out of the window, and above her head, the burning wood reappeared, bearing down on her. Shocked, she tried to sidestep, but the wood caught her back legs, and she collapsed. Her Stand knelt beside her to lift it, and a stack of books appeared over her head, breaking her concentration as they drummed on her skull.

When she stopped reflexively holding her eyes closed, she saw that there was something other than a pony over her. Standing next to the unconscious form of the filly, a short lizard-looking creature, purple. Under one arm, he held a large white viewfinder, the sort of thing she’d seen in toystores all throughout her childhood.

Still trapped, she willed ｢Simply Red｣ to fling the table off of her and at him. He put the device to his eyes and sucked in air as the projectile arced. Then, with a green flame that danced through the regular fire and meshed the two together, the table became a puff of smoke, and started traveling back towards her.

Realizing what was going on, although only in terms of immediate survival, she feinted and ran past it, closing in on him.

Only for the table to crash into her Stand.

She stumbled, tripped and fell with the force of the impact, somersaulting to a stop next to him. He smiled, and waved the device in the air above her.

“With this, I can see what she sees. Even Stands.”

Whatever that meant, it didn’t matter. Berryshine let a sour look overtake her, and raised her voice to shout “｢Simply Red｣!” Her control slipping slightly, she let out a lethal dosage, enough to transform twenty percent of his blood into wine.

Then, as she glared up at her enemy, he stared down at her with smug amusement.

“Tell Sombra dragons can’t get drunk. ｢Private Eyes｣!” he said, and then brought the viewfinder down on her head until she blacked out.

***

Although night was useful cover for traveling, and it suited Coco best, it took a lot out of the younger two and made it harder to navigate the terrain. They made it less than halfway in that first jaunt, and Scootaloo fumed to herself over it, debating whether or not to actually plot out the time it would take to walk to the Crystal Empire.

Coco had made them all sleeping bags, but warned them that they wouldn’t last the whole night unless she was touching them. As a result they slept in a tight formation, one on each side of her. She was the last to drift off, staring from her hillside vantage point at the next chunk of their walk.

Diamond was the first to wake up, much sooner than she’d have liked. Scootaloo jumped out of bed soon after, when the noise was swiftly approaching them. Music, playing loudly, like a party a block away.

Coco heard it too, and sat up, rubbing her eyes to prepare for the dawn. When she’d stretched her fetlocks out slightly, she looked from one filly to another, and then followed both of their gazes downwards.

Down the slope, in the flat green land, there was a pink and purple house, walking on a multitude of thin black legs that had no good excuse to exist, bobbing up and down in tune with its own distant music.

Almost aimlessly, it began treading in their direction.

｢To Be Continued｣

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78yioWJhUJA [Rush - Something for Nothing]