Tactical Shorts By Request

by TacticalRainboom

>>97862: Phoenix Logo

Filler Wed, Apr 18, 2012 10:48 PM No. 97862
File 133481449088.jpg - (556.35KB , 1920x1200 , 131288984923.jpg )
http://dash.ponychan.net/chan/files/src/133481449088.jpg

Pic.

===========================================================

Look, I don't believe in ghosts. No good scientist should, if you ask me. A week before I left on this expedition, I would've told you to screw right off if you told me that I would be spending the first night after our arrival back to back with Professor Rainfall and Doc Scope, all three of us shivering like a foals who've lost their mommy. Yet there we were. None of us would've admitted it, but you could smell it. We were spooked. Even Rain, grouchy bastard, didn't manage more than a few half-hearted insults before deciding he wanted to cower along with the rest of us.

I know, I know it sounds stupid. I mean, we could practically see from one side of the sandbar to the other from where we were. Not only was there nothing out there that could hurt us, there was nothing out there. Just us and the wreckage. But that was more than enough.

The ruin was a strange enough sight by day. Curved metal plates like gigantic seashells scattered around where they were shed off the hulk of the main body. Fossilized rigging rotting in a haphazard mess on the sand. And the remains of the envelope, a tattered cloth stretched over an oxidized-black skeleton. Part of why we were here was to find out what the ship was built for. I had my suspicions as soon as I saw the pictures, but now I'm sure, and even Rain agrees: This ship was a war machine of an age long past.

So how would you feel, then, making camp out on a deserted island, surrounded by the bones of a dead machine, a thousand miles from real solid land in any direction? There was a kind of terrible beauty to the whole thing. The deep, jagged shadows that sunset threw across the water as it started to get dark. The harsh black and white of the floodlights. Then, finally, nothing but the blood red of the emergency lights as we turned off the big guns to save power.

I'll never forget that night. The wind whistling between the bits of wreckage, I could swear I heard whispering in it, the whispers of the ship's crew. But most of all I remember being surrounded by that red glow reflecting off metal scraps and decaying walls. Like firelight from Tartarus, offering no warmth, shining only on sorrow and suffering. We made camp right underneath the logo printed onto the hull's east side. The image of the rising phoenix was supposed to be inspirational. That night, it looked to me like death-- like the harbinger of doom, rising over the three of us and staring down with an uncaring, judgmental eye.

The past is not always glamorous, romantic, inspirational. The dark side of our history lurks just beneath the surface, testing us, making sure those of us who choose to live in the past really have the guts to tear back the veil and look the blemished, scarred face of ponykind right in the eye.