//------------------------------// // Chapter Two: Yup. Third Issue of the Origin Story. // Story: Fallout: Equestria - Records of Bone // by Philosophysics //------------------------------// I prefer living in color. David Hockney Being shot by an anti-air cannon was a hell of a way to discover that I was bulletproof. As my head came down from its suddenly renewed flight, I began reassembling my body. Since my head was in motion, it could not be recalled to the main body. Fortunately, my legs and torso were still relatively free and quickly reassembled without Gilda’s notice. I have no idea what Gilda was doing, but I took the brief respite from the gunfire to have my legs hop over to my body. Despite not being able to see my own limbs, I had firm sense of where they were in relation to one another and began moving them to one another. Proprioception at its best and then improved on with magical BSery. As soon as my head bounced to a stop, my reassembled body kicked it up to land on my neck. It landed backwards in way such that I could see the golden-white wings of Gilda expand to be double its original size. Obviously, Gilda’s wings did not grow. What she did was channel her magic into her wings,  giving her boosted flight. Most times when a pegasus and/or gryphon takes flight, the magic in the wings simply condenses. Skilled flyers will spread their magic out to better grasp the air in the sky and give themselves a short but devastating boost in speed. Either way, it terrified the shit out of me if I could shit, so I span my head to face forward. I began running towards the biggest thing that I could see, a large green scooter on top of a building. Bullets followed me all the way through, but I’ve always been fast on my hooves and deftly outran her bullets, tearing down the cracked and broken path. Quite a few times, I tripped over a ledge and took a few tumbles that scattered my bones everywhere. I immediately reformed running, but I always wondered what i looked like from the outside. A skeleton running, tripping and collapsing before turning into what I assume to be a rolling ball of bones, then reforming back into a skeleton. Idle wonderings, I guess. I eventually made it to the building, only to find that the door was locked. Not wasting time, I ran to the side and broke through the window to enter the building, taking the time to notice that both R’s had fallen off the large sign, leaving it to read ED ACER. Running past the tables of half assembled scooters and wagons, I  ran toward the office section of the Red Racer warehouse, trusting in that vague feeling that I would find something there, anything that would help me escape from the angry gryphoness. Past the cubicles, past the largest office, past the bathrooms, I ran before my gaze saw a square panel built into the wall. Skidding to a stop and for once, not falling apart, I slapped it and opened a panel in the wall, revealing a security panel. I instinctively entered the password, CMC3BFF, into the system. A door, built seamlessly into the wall, opened in response and I slipped through. As soon as I entered, it closed. Good thing too, as I heard the angry thrum of metal strings on the other side. I kept very still, careful to not make a sound and listened to Gilda’s search for me. Eventually, she roared in frustration and the building whines in discomfort as she lets loose with a burst of bullets. When the metal strings slowly faded, I knew the scary gryphon had left and I collapse against the wall and began shaking. It was physically impossible for me to cry. But I could shake in fear of what had just happened.. After I finished recovering from my breakdown. I got back up again and began exploring one of the many hidden research facilities of the Ministry of Awesome. It’s not a very interesting expedition compared to the others I would take in search of answers. I just wandered the complex aimlessly, at a loss of what to do.I had just found proof that life existed, but it had proven dangerous and scary. Like the child that I was, it was scary, so I stayed away from what I perceived to be dangerous and stayed inside my safe place. Which was a little forgotten laboratory. This particular laboratory was a lab in name only. Red Racer, a company owned by Scootaloo, was indeed a front for many black ops projects run by the Ministry of Awesome, but this particular one was merely an area to brainstorm ideas, commission experiments, and keep records of everything. Really boring stuff that I already knew. You know that bit in the beginning where I talk about Project TúshūGuǎn for a bit and then completely forgot it for a good while? There is no bigger story to that. I am it. It is me. As soon as I came out of Tav, I was me. I am still me. Me just happens to be the only connection to the largest repository of unbiased and unfiltered information of knowledge that would have been lost. My Project is one of the kindest that the Ministries have ever dealt in. My purpose was to preserve and spread the knowledge of Equestria in the event of a mass extinction event, such as the Last Day. I was to be a teacher, one of the noblest professions to ever be. I know exactly how I was made. I know my purpose. And I knew what I could do. One of my many blessings is that I was born into this world knowing exactly how and why I was put on this plane of existence. I just wish that I had lived up to it better… Bah. Enough depressing stuff. While I designed this thing to hold a crap ton of memory, it sure as hell doesn’t need to be filled with stupid crap that doesn’t matter. My journey through the laboratory was merely just idle wandering. At this point of time, the Library had not fully activated yet and the knowledge of Equestria flowed in and out as if they were idle thoughts. I was growing mentally quickly, but my maturity was little better than a foal who had discovered that monsters were indeed real and worse than they could have ever imagined. In my wanderings, I would find the main computer in my wanderings and while I could see it quite well, the control panels and monitors outlined in a very thin tinge of green, I realized that while my Thaumic Sight was great for getting a raw view of the world, it couldn’t really make out small details such as words and letters on a document or the defining features of a pony. I wanted to test out my knowledge on something that I knew would be fun. This would mark the first time I actively drew on my knowledge of Equestria. My first quest would be to set out to create an artificial eye for my own personal use. Thaumic Sight was all well and good for the small things, but for this, I needed an eye. And I was going to make one. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The art of enchanting was always my favorite of the old magical arts of ponykind. While earth ponies had their agriculture and subtle enhancements on their own bodies, pegasi could fly and manipulate the storms, and unicorns could change the fundamentals of the world, enchanting is unique in that anyone with the patience to learn the rules and runes of it can enchant. Ironically, the ones who were the best at it were the filthy zebras who started this whole mess… Oh come on! I thought I got rid of the pre-programmed racism years ago. My creators, while noble in their intent to preserve knowledge, had their fair share of flaws. Anyways, I was going to enchant myself a pair of eyes. Using the power of logical runes! They who master the runes, masters enchanting, and they who master enchanting, master the art of making really cool shit! Runes are a language unto themselves. Unlike the Equestrian alphabet, the written is not based on phonetic sounds, but on concepts. A single image represents a single concept. Fire has a symbol, water has a symbol, time has a symbol, death and life have their own, and so on and so forth. There are so many ways of combining them, from combining two or more to create a new symbol for a new conept, to changing sizes of symbol in proportion of one another to subtly change the meaning of the rune, to inverting them so that it was the opposite of what the original was and so many other ways,  that it takes literal lifetimes to truly master them. They’re so cool. They encompass the idea of heritage, the culmination of a study, where a master passes it down to their apprentice all their knowledge, the apprentice masters and creates new one, and passes it down more and more and the cycle continues for all eternity and I am so honored to have all this knowledge and I am getting distracted. Sorry. Teaching cool crap is literally what I was made for. Finding a suitable item to enchant was a bit of a problem. To create an eye, I would need something that could refract light such as a piece of glassware. While microscopes were plentiful in the lab, the glass lenses were too tiny. I did try them, but I broke quite a few trying to shove them into my skull. Eventually, I found the perfect item. Bottles. Specifically, Sparkle Cola bottles. Rip off the labeling and you get yourself a makeshift telescope if you had eyes from the get go. If you don’t, they make perfectly good makeshift eyes. Using a power tool inside one of the hidden workshops, I cut off the neck of the bottles, leaving only the body and base for my subject. I then used a small knife, held in my skeleton hooves with sticky magic, to carefully carved the runes for connection all around the rim of the very bottom, creating an intricate ring around the heel of the bottle. Once I was satisfied with that, I carved in a large symbol for light into the base of the bottle,enclosing it in the symbol for capture. The idea was that as light passed through the base, it would capture the image similar to the retina of an eyeball. I completed the final steps of the enchantment process by pouring magic as the activation catalyst. My jaws clattered as the ghostly white aura settled into the runes, dimming slightly. I had successfully created the Coke Eyes Mk. 1. Setting the completed objects to the side, I shoved my hooves into my sockets to begin creating the corresponding runes of connection. As the Coke Eyes Mk. 1 were then, the most they could do was simply collect images. If I really wanted to see, I would have to have a way for the enchanted bottles to transmit the images to my mind. Hence why I carved runes of connection into them and why I was about to do one of the most idiotic things possible. The Dummy’s Guide to Enchanting begins with the warning, DO NOT ATTEMPT TO ENCHANT YOUR BODY WITH RUNES. Back when Equestria had a functional government, it was highly illegal to even tattoo a rune onto the body. The first ten pages of Runic Magic: A Comprehensive Guide to Enchantment is one long warning of the dangers of carving a rune directly onto the body. The original list is quite graphic, explaining in precise and gory detail of all of the possible implications of this. It ends on the note that there are easier, quicker, and far less painful ways to kill yourself. To carve a rune into your body is to provide a conduit for pure unfiltered magic to run through. It is possible to survive it, but it is very, very painful and can leave lasting effects on your Thaumic system. You would be safer eating a uranium isotope to gain superpowers. It would do less damage to your magic too. I could not scream, but as I channeled my magic to activate the runes, I could feel pain. It was not all encompassing like the intense inferno I had suffered recently, but rataher focused directly where my eye sockets were and especially in the area where I carved the runes. It was intensely hot, intensely cold, and it was constant in its delivery. My jaw dropped quite literally in a silent scream as the pain suddenly swelled. I began shaking and I forget the next bit as the pain became too intense. When I came to my senses, I found that my bones laid strewn across the workshop. My standing theory is that I literally shook myself apart in pain. I shakily reassembled myself, gingerly touching my sockets. Nodding to myself, I acknowledged that that was painful and probably a bad idea, then grabbed the Coke Eyes Mk. 1 and shoved them into my sockets. I looked around and grinned. I mean as a skeleton, I always have to, but- Oh you know what I mean. I could see the real world and color, after not being able to see was amazing. I returned to the computer room and set out to reprogram the terminal to run Pac-Pony. ...Yeah. I became a shut in for a few months, living in the forgotten laboratory of Red Racer. I found President Scootaloo’’s secret stash of comic books and read every single issue of the Power Ponies, dug through her collection of Daring Do books, and basically treated the outside world as if it didn’t exist. Not my proudest moment. Also not my best choice since it meant that I was learning life lessons from literary characters that I became far, far, FAR too invested in. I still live with the consequences of my “cool” ideas. Like I said. Younger me was a fucking dipshit that I would happily kill to hide the evidence that I was ever that stupid. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Perk: Run And Hide: When your enemies tell you that you can run but never hide, you will prove that you can, in fact, run and hide quite successfully from them. Sneak skill is doubled whenever you flee from a hostile encounter.