(story extract)
 
“…So, you’re like a half-robot pony or something? Or is it a half-pony robot?” I snickered lightly, trotting beside the plasma-happy unicorn who called himself Minty Candy. We seemed to hit it off rather well, for having been shooting haphazardly at each other just an hour or so ago - he apparently was on the run from his home Stable, for what he described as a disagreement between himself and his Overmare. Sheesh, myself and Mayflower never completely saw eye-to-eye, but that never made me an outright criminal of Stable 34…
 
“Ha-ha, very funny you half-bird. I thought all pegasi were outright traitors… not as made of pure evil as Zebras, but still an enemy of Equestria. Shouldn’t you have been born up above those things?” He waved a hoof to the sky, the rolling overcast making it hard to tell if the sun was up or not. I made a point to keep my gaze as low as I could looking up, or at the very least not let Minty notice the light shaking in my legs. A pegasi afraid of heights, what a laughing stock… in my defense, the highest drop in 34 was just from the top of the atrium, only two stories up. Goddesses, the sky was scary.
 
“Shouldn’t your horn not be made of metal? The hell kind of freaky stuff went on down in your Stable?” With a roll of the eyes, I let off another loose chuckle as the freezing snow crunched underhoof. Passing by the sign on the main road leading away from the small town, it appeared that we were headed out of Emerald Ridge and were en route to a place called Mooscow. Wasn’t expecting to find much; stories and reports that were transmitted out on that fateful day that were recorded in the Stable maneframe said that the entirety of Equestria was consumed in balefire and radiation, every major city center struck by hundreds of bombs and missiles from Zebra lands, nothing could have survived the initial onslaught. Didn’t really state who pushed the buttons first - I suppose it was for the best. Then again, Emerald Ridge really didn’t seem as touched by bombs so much as just deteriorated by about two centuries from natural forces. There weren’t any stark negatives burned into the facades of buildings, most of the skeletons and bodies around were just laying in the street, flat out, some curled in balls, all most certainly dead. Wasn’t there a secondary phenomenon from Balefire blasts that could be the cause? Radioactive fallout, I think it’s called…
 
“What? Everypony had some sort of implant down there, unicorns got magic enhanced by power cells and spark batteries, and Earth Ponies had special skeleton servos that made them stronger. Just mandatory things, I thought every Stable did that. Besides, it does have it’s own little perks~” The unicorn looked at myself smugly for a moment, before I suddenly felt my tails tugging upwards, slowly but surely, at my hind end. I skidded along the snow as my rear hooves left the ground, soon followed by my front ones as the coy bastard kept me aloft with his magic. We exchanged looks, his a wide grin behind his frosting-over glasses, and mine being of the type one might give a young colt caught with a hoof in the cookie jar. He kept me lifted, trotting along and levitating me over the shoulder of the motorway as I crossed my hooves over my chest, glaring at him.
 
“Put. Me. Down.” He seemed to contemplate this for a moment, a cool breeze tossing wisps of snow into both of our manes, still casually trotting along. I had to admit, things were starting to get a bit blurry from this new change in perspective - let alone the fact that clouds were the new ground, which was dizzying enough as is. Minty rolled his eyes, humming softly as we continued onwards, the icy frost on the ground catching in my shaggy mane and making it damp. I could almost feel the heat radiating off of my head as he passed me over a rather large snow bank… a place he finally decided on being soft enough to let me drop into. Did I mention how cold snow is? And how hard the permafrost is? Well, apparently it’s also very, VERY sharp, too, a fact that my forehead deemed hell-bent to prove to me. With a bit of flailing around, my head finally worked itself free of the snowbank, a hoof moving to rub at the nice gash that was leaving a trail of crimson straight down my face. Minty looked back in surprise, trotting up to greet myself.