"What sort of contingency do you imagine this kit might prepare you for, young man? "

"One of my classmates gets bitten by a horrible monster, and as I scrabble frantically in my mokeskin pouch for something that could help her, she looks at me sadly and with her last breath says, 'Why weren't you prepared?' And then she dies, and I know as her eyes close that she won't ever forgive me -"

"Why would you say such a thing, Mr. Potter? Why would you even think it?"

"I, I, I," Harry swallowed. "It's just that I always try to imagine the worst thing that could happen," and maybe he'd also been joking around a little but he would rather have bitten off his own tongue than say that now.

"What?" said Professor McGonagall. "But why?"

"So I can stop it from happening!"

______________________________________________________________________________

"I used to think that good was something that was defined by actions. Don't lie, don't steal, don't murder ... I thought that if you worked at it hard enough, you could make up a set of rules to follow, and that would make you a good person. I think that's what my father thought. But eventually I moved away from thinking like he did, and tried to live my life by his values instead. Maybe it was okay to lie, if it was for the greater good. Maybe it was okay to break the law, if breaking the law resulted in the greatest good for the greatest number of people. The change was so slow I barely even noticed it, and I don't think I was fully aware that I was thinking any differently until a few days ago. But it didnt' really matter, because for the most part I was living my life the same way. Even if I no longer believed in an absolute prohibition against killing - and how could I when I was sending men to their death at the hands of the state - I still wouldn't kill because of what it would say to people. I wanted to be a symbol for them.

"But as I was sitting in the pitch black of slowed down time, I kept thinking about truth and justice. I'd ensured that Calhoun would have a fair trial, because I'd promised him he would. What would it say though, to have him walk free? Not just from that trial, but from the botched trial in December? He couldn't simply be immune to consequences. He had to pay for his crimes. That was justice. I kept weighing these things until I came to my decision, and it was only when my fist was halfway through his skull that I realized my emotions had their thumb on the scale."

______________________________________________________________________________

I reached out, tried to find others, and I failed.

It would- would have to do.

This was it. Finally, everyone was working together.

I turned my attention to Scion.

_______________________________________________________________________________

“Universal love,” said the cactus person.

“Transcendent joy,” said the big green bat.

_______________________________________________________________________________


“If you want to help,” he started, but started coughing. “You can get me a doctor!” he wheezed.
She shook her head. “I told you, there are no more doctors. You’re the last person living in a human body. I can still help you emigrate to Equestria. It’s not too late.”

He didn’t respond. He knew her kinds' lies. He had heard stories of how the little ponies would say anything to trick their targets into agreeing to go with them. They would promise you harems, or threaten you, as long as they made you agree to follow them back to their homeland. He closed his eyes and ignored her. Anything he would say would just be used to convince him to agree to whatever the pony wanted him to do.

The simulacrum of Pinkie Pie waited thirty-seven minutes and five seconds and looked at the corpse of Hassan Sarbani. She waited another fifty-eight minutes to make sure all electrical activity in his brain had stopped.

Then, for the first time since Princess Celestia had been created, there were no humans on Earth. An observer orbiting the Earth may have noticed the silvery spots growing on the surface of the Earth; consuming it. Every plant and animal died in the incoming waves of silver. They were made of atoms, after all. Twenty minutes later, an observer might have noticed that there were no clouds in the sky as Princess Celestia re-purposed the atoms that made up the atmosphere. If they could see the moon set against space, they would have seen tendrils of silver reach out to Earth’s former satellite.

_______________________________________________________________________________

There is FTL now. There are pan-stellar civilisations. There are pan-universal civilisations. There are uplifted humanities crawling up the pillars of the Structure towards Upsilon layer, for whom Multiverse One was just the cradle. There are timelike loops and solar sails and bifurcations and antigravity and honest-to-God laser blasters. For the bewildered or homesick the lost Earth is rebuilt in virtuality in perfect detail. There are worldtrees, space elevators, Dyson swarms, replicators, space stations, terracompatible planets and cities on the Moon. There are halos, AIs, brains in jars, Jacob's Ladders, Singularities, infolectricity and superlight. There are people from the future and people who can fly and people who can't die--