May 24, 1:01 AM

Let’s call it “Temporary Princess” 76%

“I’m not from the other world,” she answered, and meant it. “But I would like to use their way of doing things to try and make up for our shortfalls. You said I’d be free to get help from anyone I wanted, right? If you’ve heard what I did with farming and lessons for unicorns, it would be like that, but… across other domains. I’d like the pegasi and the handful of hippogriffs and griffins we’ve got in the zone to be able to fly. Imagine how effective they could be at gathering resources, intelligence, regulating the weather to bring in moisture for our—”

The seapony whistled, a short musical sound that reverberated through the aquarium before it reached the speakers. She drifted sideways past the front of the glass, only a few inches from Wayfinder’s face now. “I’m sorry, what the hell did you just say? Denver doesn’t need some Ogone energy scam. We need food, water, order. We’ve got people shuffled into rickety metal tenements while whole sections of the city sit vacant. A significant portion of our resources goes into burning away the jungle that appears to be growing towards us at an increasing rate. The regional commander wanted permission to deploy Agent Orange. I didn’t think we still had a stockpile, but here we are. That’s the level of urgency I’m talking here.”

Wayfinder shuddered, considering the likely outcome of that particular action. So far as everyone guessed in Starhall, the Overgrowth was intelligent and responded to hostile actions against it. Trimming it back was already bad enough.

“I understand, sir. Though my methods may seem… strange at first, I think they’ll prove effective. I won’t… claim that I know what it takes to run a city on my own, let alone something bigger. But if we can get the right people together…”

The fish nodded towards the desk. “Open the top drawer. Roberts’ phone is in there. You can reach me or anyone else responsible for the operations of the Isolation Zone from there. You are not to mention me by name or refer to me in any way, Wayfinder. I am ‘Command’, that’s all. The Isolation Zone is yours to run. Whether into the ground, or somewhere better, that’s up to you. But one way or another, history will remember your name.”

What followed was more or less what she expected. Wayfinder settled into an empty office, with Roberts’ little knickknacks and trophies of long police service now missing. What did she have to take its place? A laptop from the CDC, which hadn’t sent her a message in a week. A few books that looked like old hardcovers and apparently came from somewhere called ‘Equestria’.

Lance let herself in that evening, while Way tugged in an old whiteboard to occupy one wall, and Hazel read a few issues of a light novel she’d borrowed from the base library, curled up in a bean-bag chair in a shadowy corner. “Well if it isn’t Wayfinder,” she said, shuffling through the open doorway. “Word was Captain Roberts was out. Wasn’t sure who I’d find in this office, but… it wasn’t gonna be you.”

“I’m as surprised as you are.” She kept her eyes on the whiteboard beside her, horn glowing as she wrote a basic set of priorities across the top. Nothing unexpected, nothing novel or that interesting. Anyone who had glanced in a FEMA handbook would’ve chosen the same things.

Water – Food – Shelter – Medicine – Electricity/Climate – Information – Safety – Maintenance

That morning Wayfinder had been one tiny part about solving a single issue from that list. How could one pony handle all of them?

Lance walked into the empty office without asking, trailing over to the board just behind her. She stared up at it along with Way, hoof finally tapping on the concrete floor. “Well? I assume you plan to solve those, right? That’s what you’re doing in this office.”

Wayfinder laughed, her voice betraying the weight of her exhaustion. She vanished from beside Lance, reappearing across the room next to the doors. She pulled them shut with her mouth, then crossed back in another little flash of light. She didn’t think about it, but Lance’s mouth fell open, staring in shock.

She talked right through it. “I was just trying to help with the farms, Lance! I was trying to do a little piece of one of these, not take over as Resource Officer—turns out Roberts was the damn king. He ran everything, not command! And now I’m supposed to do it! Without…” She slumped onto her haunches, and the marker began to move. She added a few little notes to some of them.

“Food: 4 months, ration, extract heirloom seeds, requisition fertilizer and equipment from elsewhere in the state, relocate emergency settlements from fertile areas. Ask help from earth ponies for share of harvest. Can or preserve excess for winter.”

That was the part she’d already been thinking over since seeing it done in Starhall. The odds of failure were low, assuming nothing else on the chart failed first. That left a lot of empty spaces.

“Water supply is good,” Lance said. “Roberts had a team at the municipal purification plant outside our boundaries. Worked security on it once. They were always making demands and he never gave in. If you can make them happy, we should have enough to drink.”

She added that little note to the board under water. “Stable, investigate maintenance needs.” She stared at the rest—mostly blank space. “The hell am I supposed to do, Lance? Captain Roberts barely held this place together, and he did it by running our reserves into the ground. Maybe that worked the first few months when the feds were still sending us everything, but… it’s not just food that runs out. What about medication? Toothpaste? Blankets? Clothes—”

Lance snorted, then twirled once in place, holding her tail vertically behind her. “You mean vests to play pretend human? We could use badges instead for those. Maybe silly hats.”

Hazel broke into nervous giggling. “Can I have a silly hat, Way? Now that you’re in charge…”

“Yes.” She glanced around the room, and found none. “Soon, promise.”

The bug shuffled out of her seat, then plopped down near the side of the board. With a feeble green glow, she took the pink marker and wrote “hats” in tiny print near the bottom.

“Look, I didn’t come in here to join your cabinet. I’m internal security now. Before that, I was Intelligence for the ones trying to stop an outbreak like this. The stuff I knew would’ve got me shot for hinting that I’d even dreamed of learning about it once to someone without the right clearance. Now you and every other survivor in this place knows more just by getting up to take a piss in the morning. I can gather information, and move undercover through a population without being detected.”

She lowered her tail again. “Whether being this little pink horse makes me better or worse at staying hidden depends on your perspective. I have managed not to get pregnant in the last three months, which is a surprising accomplishment in this barracks, let me tell you…”

Way cut her off with her hoof. Something just struck her, sharp enough to occupy one tiny spot in her very overwhelmed thoughts. “Among my many responsibilities right now are dealing with the overflowing prisoner population,” she said. “I’m not trying to shake up the administration in there too… I’m already drowning. But if I gave you authority, could you go in and do something for me?”

“What you need are a few eggheads, not me. Someone who can go through each of the basics for supporting an isolated population and give you concrete recommendations. Then you… work your magic, and make a hopeless situation work even though Roberts had a lifetime more experience than you and he couldn’t.” Lance looked up, raising an eyebrow. “I could go into the prison. If you order me…”

“I don’t want to order you,” she said. “Even if I am an ‘honorary’ captain. I’ll give the orders because otherwise the prison might not cooperate, but…” she added the word ‘Prison’ to the whiteboard. “I know from personal experience that there are a large number of people in there who aren’t guilty of violent crime. They didn’t hurt anyone, yet we’re wasting resources keeping them locked up for trials that might never happen.”

Lance nodded. Her playful grin was gone, tail limp and ears folded backward. She whistled under her breath. “Oh no. You realize what you’re asking, Way? That’s… that’s our unofficial, official revenue source you’re talking about there. Your brother gets arrested for stealing a stick of gum or going into a restricted area, and you get to bribe him out. The ones risking their lives to keep the town from tearing itself apart without federal support get a little extra they can trade for goods or weapons or whatever we need.”

Her face fell. Wayfinder had realized some of that—at least in the abstract. She knew that the bribes were funding what they did. Obviously, with as easy as it was for her to be part of the system herself, management must know. Such a nakedly corrupt system would never have been possible before! But with the world ended, their little city might as well be the whole world.

“Let’s table that one for this second,” she said, frustrated. No, Wayfinder was not going to leave the innocent people like Sam stuck in that stupid prison. But she also couldn’t completely undermine her authority by fighting such a difficult battle on the first day.

She took a slow, deep breath. “There’s an underlying problem here. The corruption isn’t the cause of that problem, it’s a symptom. The police force operating this isolation zone doesn’t have the resources to operate effectively. I’ve lived in the barracks: no one is turning into a warlord with a mountain of gold to sleep on every night.” She gestured around the office. “Captain Roberts might’ve been overly conservative, but I’ve seen no evidence he was squirreling resources away, and he could have.”

“Sure, yeah. We can’t tax anyone, which means we can’t raise money… and what is money anyway? No banks, nothing digital, so… we’ve got ration chips and precious metals. You see how well that’s going.”

Where it went was so far over her head that it all blurred into sludge. Wayfinder didn’t belong in an office like this. She wanted to learn magic, thought other ponies should get to learn it too. She wasn’t a government official; she’d never belong in a world of making tax policies!

But she did know someone who did. “Egghead, you said?” She stood up straight. “I’d like your help after all, Lance. Not this second, but… I do think I’ll need to make some changes around here. I don’t feel much like starving to death, do you?”

She grinned toothily back. “Can’t say it was on my agenda, Blue—” She stopped abruptly. “Sorry, Captain. Listening to Peter a little too much.”

She shrugged, then levitated her little protection charm out of her satchel. “Alright, Hazel. Your big sister has to visit with an old friend. I wonder how he’d feel about helping to administrate a city.”

The answer, as it turned out, was “overwhelmed.”

“You can’t just…” The unicorn paced up and down in his office, which was far better-equipped than hers. Shelves of books, charts pinned to every open space in the wall, maps of the Overgrowth and spell diagrams so complex she couldn’t even guess what they were supposed to do. “You can’t come in here and tell me you got yourself made princess of the Pony kingdom! Then you’re looking at me like I’m supposed to… supposed to…”

“I don’t know what you’re doing here,” she said, as gently as she could. “But it sounded like you came to our world to try and help us. Here was a whole planet full of people who didn’t know how their bodies worked, had no idea how to survive or how their powers worked. You weren’t sure our civilization was going to be stable enough to survive the stress. Well, neither am I! You’re doing good things for the people out here. A few hundred ponies, looks like you’ve solved most of the supply problems. Everyone here seems happy. My ex decided to stay with you, and I can’t blame her. But there are at least two million people in the zone, not just a few hundred. Those people need us.”

“Those ponies need…” he stopped in his pacing, but his hooves kept swaying sharply to either side, his eyes huge. “Those ponies need…” He stopped. “Fine. I’ll do it, princess. I’ll be your advisor. But you will have to promise me to take my advice even when it seems confusing or strange. And you will have to… cast a lot of the spells yourself.”

That last part came out in a rush, as though he were trying to stop her from hearing it. He scurried over to one of the sets of spell diagrams. “This one here, in particular. I believe we’ve found a way to halt the growth of this forest before it turns into a thaumic nexus drawing power in from all over this continent until there’s nothing left for ponies to use.”

She vanished, reappeared next to him. His eyes went briefly huge, and she almost caught him mouthing something. But then it was gone, and her attention turned to the spell. “I have… no idea what this is. Except—wait.”

There was almost nothing familiar here, except for a single frightening shape. The scale of that spell wasn’t ‘self’ or ‘surroundings’. That figure extended to… thousands of square miles. “Holy shit.”

The words felt like sandpaper on her tongue, far worse than forcing ordinary English out of her lips. She managed anyway. “What the hell is this, Sunburst?”

He winced and looked away from her. “Something that will form anyway, somewhere on this continent. If it happens wild, many ponies will die. I told you… that this disease releases magic, correct?”

She nodded slowly, retreating from the diagram on the wall like something that might attack her. “It goes into the new pony, makes their magic. Or…”

“Or they die, and it takes some echo of the person it used to be—captures all their pain and heartbreak and suffering from their death, and goes loose into the environment. Our best guess is a 2–3% fatality rate, Wayfinder. I’m told estimates suggest there are… about 350 million humans living in this one country. We don’t know how many people are still uninfected. Let’s say… 25%. Probably less than that, if I’m being honest with you.”

“Probably less,” she agreed. “There are a few militarized zones on the eastern seaboard now. And there’s Alaska; they managed to stay clean. I think one of the Hawaiian islands. But Toronto got the infection, so there might be more—”

He waited for her to finish. “At the worst case, Wayfinder. There is enough magic for… somewhere between two and three million ponies. With nowhere to go, it’s going to be dangerous. Because none of you know how to be ponies, it will probably kill you. This Overgrowth has momentum; it’s already attracted lots of that magic. We can expand it, dramatically. Make it like a… pressure differential, and it will pull in most of what’s wild. Patches already settled in their own spots, I’m sure. Can’t get rid of what’s there. But we can make ours so much more attractive that the rest finds its way here.

“If we make it happen, we can… guide it. Turns out there are these huge mountains nearby, mostly inhospitable, few residents. Fewer now, I’d guess. Hiking trails and camping and winter sports. Until you learn to travel safely through wild magic, it will be inhospitable. But think of that as a small price to pay for how many lives it will save.”

Outside his office windows, Starhall was quiet. A few ponies and other creatures moved about in the food court. A group in sleeping bags looked up at the stars. Way caught a familiar face down there in one corner—then her eyes went wide. There was a bird down there, with a bright yellow plume that caught the faint red lights even from this distance. Sam’s here?

She couldn’t ask that second, though. But maybe someone else was doing it for her; a set of four little feet made her way between the shelters and benches, crystal wings reflecting starlight back towards the office from its third-floor vantage.

“Let me try and… connect this,” she eventually said. “You’re willing to help me. You’ll be my advisor. You’ll help me stop the city from tearing itself apart and feeding thousands more souls to the forest.”

“Technically, no,” he said flatly. “Ponies don’t release wild magic when we die. There’s this whole Harmony with the…” he trailed off. “Yes. I’ll help you. I’ve held a position like it before, in the… Crystal Empire. But you will have to agree to help me in exchange. I have no students here with the talent. You will have to help, knowing that there will be consequences. Everything I know might still not be enough. The ponies who came to Starhall left the human way of doing things. Do you think you can convince a whole city to do the same? You aren’t really a princess yet.” He glanced back at her, eyeing her sides. “No wings that I can see.”

She shrugged. “I have to try. Because no one else knows how. We need an alternative and we do not have much time to change.”

He settled in front of the magical diagram, dropping onto his haunches. “Well, Wayfinder. Will we help each other?”

1. Yes, so long as he doesn’t wait until she’s able to cast that spell to help. They need to start now, and Way will need practice and study first.
2. No, she can’t make that decision. Why should all that dangerous magical energy come to them? The danger is too great.