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Chapter One: In Which Things are Sodded Up.

"Are you sure this is going to work, Ms. Sparkle? Only, this isn't exactly kids' stuff we're talking about here, and you're cutie mark ain't for this-" Soarin' was cut off by an icy-voiced Twilight.

"Mister Soarin'," she said, her ferocity causing the Wonderbolt to step back in alarm, "I resent the implication that I won't do my best or that I won't succeed. Princess Celestia places her trust in me as a student of the most complex magic a unicorn can handle, so I rather think this will go off without a hitch - and just why are your wings like that?"

"Oh, um, it's, um..." Soarin' scrabbled for command over both his tongue and his freshly-popped wings. Twilight raised an eyebrow and didn't wait for an answer, brushing past him and slapping his wings with a deftly-flicked tail. Soarin' keeled over in a dead faint.

Stupid flyboy... how dare he tell me I'm not any good at magic? How dare he? Time to show him what I can really do...

*******

The crowd stood in front of the stage, listening to the standard rolling drumbeat tape after Applebloom's pastries had nearly wiped out the entire Wonderbolt travelling backing band. The sound engineer clopped the announcer on the shoulder and told her it was her time to shine.

"Um... hello everypony... this is, um, the moment you've all been, um... waiting for... at least, I hope it is... um... here are the Wonderbolts, um, if that's OK with you..." There was a depressed-sounding squeak and Fluttershy bolted from the office like a thing possessed. With a huge fanfare (that only served to terrify the butter-yellow pegasus even further), the Wonderbolts took to the stage, blasting through the paper screen showing their graven icons. They'd originally planned to have statues but somepony'd run off with Spitfire's. The fact that there had been a Sonic Rainboom shortly thereafter left few people in doubt of what had gone on and how much licking of papier-mache was currently going on in a largish detached cloud house on the outskirts of Ponyville.

Twilight smirked, her hair long since devolved into a shaggy-looking wolfcut as her friends and their siblings did to her sanity what Applejack generally did to trees come harvest time. My time to shine. She spared a glance at Miss Smartypants - Spike had business in Canterlot with a donut supplier, so she'd brought along her ratbag stuffed pony instead - and shut her eyes.

Spectacle, she thought.

Poise.

Showmareship.

Oh Celestia, don't screw this up.

The Princess'd kill me if I screw this up.

Oh no! I've got to read that paper on dimensional consistency and get an essay done for that correspondence course with the Birmaneham Cold Matter Analysis Unit! No! Cannot think about that now-

The light show had indeed been going well, and the co-ordination was pulled off with perfect skill. All the pyro worked first time, which had made one backstage technician need to have a lie down in a very dark room for a while, and now the spotlights were converging on Captain Spitfire. Then, everything changed. The spotlights seemed to spin around each other, centring on Spitfire and tracing an intricate pattern of stage lasers through her personal space. The floor creaked ominously once, drowning out even the brassy power-ballad that they'd taken from Big Macintosh's record collection, then exploded around the preening pegasus in a spray of orange and blue light.

Then there was a sound as unto Hell itself, and Spitfire was sucked through an orange ring to end up Celestia knew where.

Oh, balls, thought Twilight Sparkle as the screaming started, and promptly said those thoughts out loud.

*******

The Blitz that smashed into England during the Forties was a terrible affair; a closer approximation to pure, unfettered, Hieronymus-Bosch-is-doing-something-brown-in-his-britches hell on Earth you'd be hard-pressed to find at any other point in human history. Americans are free to cite certain episodes of the Vietnam War if they so choose, for the right to be completely wrong is one inalienable to all mankind. It even spawned a new word; koventriert, a German word meaning utterly destroyed and named after the city of Coventry, razed by flame in the dead of night by howling steel reapers.

It was here, amidst the smoke and the screaming and the lazily-drifting loose barrage balloons, that a blue ring spat a confused little pony, yellow of coat and incandescent of mane. Immediately she shot away, trying desperately to find somewhere to hide from the dreadful fire of... of whatever was causing this. She made for a building only to see it disintegrate before her very eyes, the huge roof of it collapsing in on itself and sending razor-sharp stone splinters at her. She felt a few push through her pelt, and was too scared to even scream. As a city burned around her, she stood stock still, tears cutting trails of glowing firelight down her muzzle and cheeks.

She was still there the following morning, when a local baker's-boy saw her and dragged his older brother, a midshipman on leave after the attack at Mers-el-Kebir, to see her and take her home. They put her in the back room, their house being one of the few mercifully left undamaged by the raid, and sat around wondering what to do with her when a plaintive sob came from inside.

Spitfire had completely broken down, and her screams ripped through the house. The door burst open and the baker's-boy ran in.

"Hey, hey, it's alright... it's okay, you're safe now, nobody's gonna hurt you. I promise." He had the childlike innocence around him; so desperate was he to reassure her that he didn't realise quite who was answering.

"S-s-so much... hurts so much... why?" Spitfire's throat was raw as a plate of steak tartare and it showed in her voice. The boy stroked her mane, not letting her flinch away from him.

"Well, it's Jerry, innit? They hit us bad last night JESUS!" He shot back. "Alf! The horse is talking, Alf!"

"Stanley Arbuthnot, will you stop making that racket?" The boy, evidently one Stanley, gulped as his father walked in. Herbert Arbuthnot was a foreman at the local steelworks who looked like he should have been a prizefighter, largely because he had been. A powerful man who liked routine, a pint or several of mild in the Lady Godiva, and very little else, he erupted into the most eloquent sentence he'd ever uttered, largely because of its truly monumental obscenity. He'd then stormed off under the pretense of digging out Mrs. Trellis at number 83, but had headed in the direction of the pub.

Stanley and Spitfire had decided, simultaneously and utterly independent of each other, that their days were only going to get stranger.

Spitfire, however, followed up the thought with one saying that things were also going to get a lot worse.