The last thing Rainbow Dash remembered was punching out, the canopy flying past her, and then nothing, so that waking up draped over Mike's shoulders as he stagger-ran down the remains of what looked like a road made of half-buried stone blocks was pretty weird.

Even weirder, Mike was singing loudly while clouds of smoke and ash swirled around them both. Coughing from the unexpected smoke, she started kicking while pounding on his back yelling, "Put me down!" until he abruptly stopped, swaying as she slid backwards, dropping to the half-buried stone road so that she faced him as he sang, staring past her, "...He came down through fields of green...on the summer side of life..."

Feeling like she'd fallen off of a cliff and bounced the entire way down, Rainbow grabbed Mike's shoulders and shook him, noticing that his blankly staring eyes were no longer blue but purple. "Oh crap… Twilight, what's going on?"

"...he prayed all night."

Mike's voice shifted higher, becoming softer, feminine as Twilght Sparkle's familiar voice came out of his mouth, singing, "Not much further, we're almost there!" Mike's head lolled, eyes briefly rolling back in their sockets, flashing blue and then purple again as they settled, focusing on Rainbow Dash, "I'm losing him fast, just follow!" He sang in both his and Twilight Sparkle's voice, taking a step forward, shouldering Rainbow Dash aside, one cool, clammy hand pawing at her bare upper arm, fumbling blindly down it to take her's as he resumed his stagger-run down the road, which Rainbow now noticed was paralleled by broken pillars randomly sticking up out of the now burning brush on either side like crooked teeth.

"Then he walked into a house, where love had been misplaced, his chance to waste…"

Rainbow found her feet unwilling to move, jerking Mike to an abrupt halt so that he reeled drunkenly around to face her once more, still singing.

"...He prayed all night..."

He shook his head as a bush burst into flame beside them, saying in Twilght's voice, "Follow, before I lose him completely!" Mike started running again, Rainbow hitching up and zipping up her flight suit with her free hand she as broke into a run beside the now singing Mike, letting him take the lead, his breath now coming in loud sobbing gulps, eyes staring blankly ahead, still singing, "...and if you saw him now...you'd wonder why he would cry..."

One after the other, they leapt a ruined pillar laying in rounded sections across the road, the wind shifting directions so that through the smoke Rainbow caught a glimpse of the remains of a stone building where water trickled from between fallen walls and toppled pillars, an unexpected patch of green in the barren landscape.

"—the whole day long..."*

(*An old Gordon Lightfoot soldier's song adrift in these days of mass-produced rap, electronica and highly groomed boy bands. Mike's uncle was really his great-uncle, a Viet Nam vet who came home and disappeared into his lawn mower engines, his roofing jobs, and his scrap yard, and who would have been quite familiar with this song, maybe even introducing it to him.)