Transistance

Easy

Gray thunderheads bloomed over the ashen skies of Manehattan. The clouds gathered around the tips of great metal spires that rose from sheet glass skyscrapers and steel pyramids below. A droning airship cast its shadow over an entire city block drifted in the space between the city’s buildings, announcing on its plasma screen: “HEAVY SHOWERS SCHEDULED BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 6PM AND 10PM.”

The message flashed several times, then was replaced by a picture of a raincloud with a rainbow thunderbolt below—the sigil of the Department of Weather Control—before cutting to commercials advertising a blue-eyed Neighponese mare drinking a brown bottle of soda. Heavy fans beneath the airship blew hot air down the sides of buildings that surrounded a busy Manehattan street.

Ponies pushed and shoved each other through open air markets that crowded against a road filled with both polysteel cars powered by miniature nuclear reactors and rickety wooden rickshaw carts that cut between the traffic and splashed grimy water into the stalls. The hot air blowing from above swept up hats and newspapers from the crowd, but the routine went unnoticed on the whole by the citizens of Manehattan.

One mare among the teeming thousands reached back and pulled her jacket’s violet hood over her head, and tucked her short, azure mane inside of it. Above her, the thunder clouds opened up at last and disgorged their cargo onto the city.

Fat, heavy raindrops pelted the top of the mare’s jacket and ran down her back, soaking the midnight-black splotches and white crescent moon of her cutie mark. She shoved her way through the crowd, and stopped under an overhang outside a secondhoof electronics shop. A neon sign cast a harsh green glow over her.

Luna looked back at her flank and ran a hoof over fiber-optic threads woven through her fur and skin that ran the length of her body—from her forehooves to her tail. When she felt damp patches around her cutie mark, she grimaced. “Great, my tech’s going to be on the fritz for hours,” she muttered.

She levitated a newspaper from a red stand outside the electronics shop and held it over her flank in a cloud of pale magic. Luna looked both ways on the sidewalk, then darted from beneath the overhang to a small stand across the pavement. She sat down on a stool underneath a cloth tarp that covered the wooden food stand. The smell of greasy food wafted out from ovens behind the front counter.

A lime green unicorn beside her stood from her stool and looked up toward the sky. Two hard-light wings extended from projectors embedded into her back and she took off, soaring off despite the rain. Luna smiled to herself and ruffled her own real, flesh-and-blood wings beneath her jacket.

A dour-faced stallion with a slim mustache at the end of a long, beige face approached her. He wiped his hooves on a stained apron and nodded to her. In a clipped accent from Trottingham, he asked: “Pie or pudding?”.

“The pudding,” Luna said, “and some of those fries too.”

“They’re called crisps,” he mumbled, then turned around to face the fryers. Luna drummed a hoof on the uneven surface of the counter. She watched a bright blue car extend turbojets outside of its chassis and shudder into the air, then take off toward the sky lanes above the city.

A plate was set in front of her with a mound of pudding in the center, surrounded by fries. To her right, a pony stared at her combination and grimaced, but Luna ignored her and dug at the hard, outer crust of the pudding for the gooey center inside.

She popped a fry into her mouth and licked her lips, but then felt a hoof tapping her shoulder. Luna looked up to see three gray stallions standing around her, clad in violet hard-light armor, and bearing her royal symbol.

“I’m eating,” she told them, and looked back down at her meal.

One of the guards grabbed her and pulled her up. “You’re going to have to come with us, Princess.”