Once upon a time in the magical land of Equestria...

I guess it all started with that first time I lit the metaphorical match. Now I was always the one to be at the scene of the accident but the blame could never be put on my shoulders so I was left with a whole bunch of ponies knowing I was trouble but not being able to do anything about it. It was a normal day for the wasteland, the ever present cloud cover creating a slight overcast on the grey and brown rocky landscape that stretched for miles around our break site, broken only by the few spare hills and flat-topped mountains of Hoofington far off into the distance to the west.

The only person besides my mother in the trading caravan that we worked for that didn’t dislike me was my friend. My best and only friend looked exactly like me, mane tousled and falling in front of his right eye, hiding the crimson iris behind a lock of hair. The one difference between us was our color. Where parts of his mane and eyes were a bright crimson, I had an electric blue coloring. We both however have the same dark grey coat and black mane color.

After talking to my best friend for awhile, he eventually talked me into setting up a small package of this clay-like material on one of the uninhabited wagons in the train. It seemed pretty innocent at the time, with the package hooked up to a few wires and a remote signal to make it look like the bombs I read about while on particularly long walks. It was the perfect prank to pull on one of the guards as they made their routine inspections of the wagons before departure.

My friend and I laughed as we trotted back up the hill to where I usually sat while we stayed here in camp. The hill indented at the top, making a small bowl that we liked to lie in and talk without ponies giving me stares. Without really thinking I levitated the fake detonator that I had made using spare parts that I had stolen from a wagon just full of cool sciencey gadgets out of my saddlebags and clicked the button. To my utter surprise, and my friend's delight, a loud explosion split the air and I whirled around to see the wagon go up in a large fireball. And boy, the fireball was glorious. Orange and red flames expanded out in a billowing cloud of fiery destruction. My friend and I glanced at each other and grinned at the conflagration. I was so caught up in the fireball that I didn’t notice the other ponies from the caravan work their way up the hill and see me grinning like a maniac holding the incriminating detonator in my red magic. It didn’t take long for them to drag me to the caravan leader with their very true claims of me purposely blowing up the still unknown cargo.

Three things did not make sense in the story told to our caravan leader. First of all RED magic? It wasn’t possible because my magic was a bright blue like my eyes. That leads to the second thing wrong with their story, my eyes. They claimed when I glanced at them after the fireball disappeared, my eyes were a bright crimson like my friend, which is totally ridiculous seeing as you can’t just spontaneously change eye color unless you had a cosmetic spell which a young colt like me wouldn’t ever have access to. The third things that made this story fiction, and the only reason I was able to stay despite blowing up a covered wagon filled with very expensive, very explosive materials, was that I apparently had a cutie mark on my previously blank flank. The cutie mark they claimed they saw was a chasm etched into my flank with blue flames that matched my regular eyes erupting out of dark depths. But that was ridiculous because when they put me in front of Trader Joe ,the caravan leader, to get me thrown out; my eyes were normal, the magic around the detonator was blue and I was still a blank flank.

So when my mother died from an untimely raider bullet to the head, the caravan leader had to toss me into the wasteland as soon as he could and leave me to die with his final words being, “Sorry kid.” You know, instead of being heartbroken and sad my because my mother died, or angry at Trader Joe and his band, I just smiled with a red glint in my electric blue eyes and set off in a random direction away from the caravan with nothing to my name but the old detonator from way back when. Nice to meet you wasteland, my name is Cataclysm. And I am going to have some fun.

Footnote: Stats

S = 4

P = 8

E = 3

C = 4

I = 7

A = 8

L = 6