I can’t tell for how long the plasmid holds me in its grip, paralyzed and barely on the edge of consciousness. Here and there, moments of clarity break through the haze, but beyond those time crashes over me in waves, speeding up and slowing down at the whim of whatever breed of magic I poisoned myself with.
When the force of the plasmid recedes, pieces of the candy shop courtyard snap into focus: a sagging sculpture, a faded poster, the distant lights of the city shimmering in a puddle in front of my nose. Each one stays for a few seconds, and then the tide of diluted SUN swells forward again and fogs up my eyes with a milky gray mist.
And all the while, even as I try to cobble the scattered fragments of my mind together, my body launches an uncompromising revolt against the substance invading it. My coat tingles and buzzes like there’s lightning crawling through it, and every muscle I own aches all the way through to my bones. Each frantic beat of my heart threatens to crack a rib, and the drops of blood it sends flashing through me sizzle and burn on their way down to my hooves, where all I can feel is prickly pins and needles in the few patches of skin that aren’t completely numb.
In my brief brushes with sensibility, I don’t see anypony come into the room with me. If anypony did, I wouldn’t have the strength to even reach for my radio and call for Applejack, and my ears would be ringing too loud anyway to hear whatever she said. Any splicer that ambled in could do with me whatever their psychotic heart desired, and yet in all my waking moments I don’t see so much as a cockroach scurry into view. I’d call it luck, but I think I know better. And I’d call that paranoia, if it didn’t turn out to be right.
Just before I black out completely, the room shudders and creaks to life. Some ponies know better than to kick a mare while she’s down, and Onyx Ryder must despise every single one of them. When she speaks, her words echo in my stomach like gunshots, and the icy sting of her breath envelops me as if the city itself were exhaling it for her.
“So the little birdie thinks she’ll learn to fly…”
A twitch in my neck turns into a shudder down my spine, and for the first time since falling I find the will to move. My hoof drags along the ground and bounces off my radio. Silent. Freezing. It’s not the machine talking, but the walls. It’s the building. It’s Ryder. It’s Harmony.
“I dreamed once of a city without authority, a city where power could only be as strong as the pony who sought it. Have you found what you were looking for in that vial, little birdie? Has your perversion of the arcane bought you some spectral sense of security?”
I throw my chest forward and reach out again, an extra rush of heat flooding through me from the effort. Between grabbing the radio and drawing breath, I have nothing else left to fight off the blackness gathering in my eyes. The lights flicker, then flare up brighter than ever.
“Your vanity will be your undoing. Unlike you, I do not fear death, only those who would deny me the life I choose to precede it. If you’d rather wallow in your own egocentricity like the rest of the parasprites… you needed only ask.”
The world is black. My legs are filled with lead. Only my ears still work, still tether me to life.
“A mare is only as honorable as the company she keeps…”
In the distance, I hear a door slide open. I hear hoofsteps.
“I hope you enjoy yours.”
Blindly, numbly, I grit my teeth and stretch out as far as I can. An impact ripples through my hoof, and the radio slides out of reach. The floor presses up into me, and as if I’m as much a ghost as the apparitions I saw before, I fall right through it.
“... well, good golly, Miss Fally. How’d you get here?”
***
“... OW.”
I wake up with a start and a splitting headache--and not in that order. I feel like I've been asleep for years. And in a blimp crash. And sent down to a hellish underwater city filled with murderous magic-addled mutants where I was forced to work with a mechanically-altered farmpony and her tone-deaf little sister to find parts for a bathysphere that could get all of us back to the surface. And, briefly and very recently, on fire.
“Hi there, sleepyhead!"
I blink, blink again, then look up to find a shockingly pink earth pony staring back at me about three inches away from my nose. I would’ve jumped, but my head hurts too much for that. As do the parts of me that were just on fire. Seriously, is that what all plasmids do when you first inject them? How the hell did those things ever take off as consumer products down here?
“Hi,” I grunt after a moment’s pause. “Who are you, and am I dead? Answer those questions in whatever order you want. I’m not picky.”
“I’m Pinkie Pie, and you’re as alive as I am secretly full of SUN and lowkey bloodthirsty about it!”
I blink once more.
“Ugh, I rushed it, didn’t I?” Pinkie Pie says, backing off of me so she can rub her hoof sheepishly through her mane. “Sorry. I’ve been waiting so long to find another living pony to help me down here. Guess I kind of gave away the twist there… don’t suppose you’d still be up for helping with a fetch quest or two? I can throw in a boss fight afterward if you’d like.”
“Uh… no, thanks,” I tell her. “I should probably get back to Applejack and Apple Bloom and what’s-his-face… Link. Who names a pony Link? Anyway, yeah, I kind of wandered off and they’re probably looking for me, and I kiiiiind of told Link to literally go fuck himself a bit ago, sooooo…”
“Okay, okay, I get it,” Pinkie grumbles. “You don’t have to help if you don’t want to. Just figured I’d ask.”
“Sure, no problem, my bad. Good luck with, uh… finding more crazy-fying magic juice?”
“Thanks! Good luck apologizing to your boyfriend!”
“He’s not my boyfriend.”
“Uh-huh. Sure he’s not.”
***
“So you’re sure we’re cool?” I ask for probably the fifth time.
“Yeah, totally,” Link replies, punctuating his remark with a blast of his magic-held pistol. Once the SUN-crazed splicer in front of him falls with a bloody thump, he offers me a characteristically awkward grin. “I mean, you apologized, I apologized, we’re both better for this experience and way more comfortable with murder than we ever thought we’d be. Why wouldn’t we be cool?”
“I mean, lots of reasons, to be honest,” I say as I casually blow a splicer’s brains out with my own hoof-mounted gun, “but yeah, I guess that’s better left for our respective therapists to deal with.” In a brief lull between waves of faceless bad guys, I flick my radio on with my gun hoof. “Applejack, you guys ready down there?”
“Just about,” Applejack answers. “Bathysphere looks like it’s running fine, and I’ve already loaded Apple Bloom and Apple Cider in. We’ll have y’all back to the surface in two shakes of a sheep’s tail!”
Link looks at me, and I look back at him. “That’s not a thing real ponies say,” he says.
“Definitely not,” I agree. “But at least we’re done with all this. We’ve got the bathysphere fixed, and all the splicers are dead. How bad could things possibly go from here?”
***
“Okay, so… that went really bad.”
Link doesn't need to agree aloud, but I know he agrees silently. There isn't much else he could’ve done, considering that our escape attempt ended with the city’s respective psychotic leader and rebel icon, Onyx “Definitely Not Andrew “Definitely Not Ayn Rand” Ryan” Ryder and Daybreak “Definitely Not [Spoiler Redacted Just For a Hot Second]” Nevergotalastname, interfering by way of--respectively--filling the launch bay with toxic gas while Apple Bloom and Apple Cider were still inside, and then setting said gas explosively on fire. Can't really blame Applejack for swearing bloody revenge on both of them at that point. And also regular-swearing a bunch too.
“Well, I guess there’s nowhere to go but forward,” Link says. “Specifically, to the… what was it called again?”
“The Aerodome,” I clarify, “Y’know, so the pegasi can still fly around someplace while miles underwater.”
“That’s… really impressive,” Link muses. “Like, it’s a technological marvel that singlehoofedly proves the ridiculous nature of this entire endeavor. Kind of a perfect metaphor for the city of Harmony itself.”
“Huh,” I say. “You know, you’re sharper than you look.”
“Thanks. You’re pretty sharp too.”
“Are we flirting right now?”
“Stars above, I hope not.” Link lifts a hoof to point ahead. “Look, there’s the entrance. Let’s go talk to Applejack’s friend Rainbow Dash and figure out how she can help us defeat Onyx and Daybreak.”
“Did Applejack ever specify exactly how her friend could do that?”
“No. No, she did not.”
“Cool. Just checking. Was wondering if I’d missed something.”
***
“Okay, so that went really, really bad,” Link says.
“No kidding,” I agree. “Like, a seemingly peaceful society in a post-apocalyptic nightmare world that turns out to be violently cultish and fond of making splicers fight to the death for their amusement? That’s literally just the Governor plotline from The Trotting Dead! Talk about a narrative copout.”
“No, I more meant the part where we both got imprisoned for using plasmids and you had to fight a bunch of splicers in that arena, and then you almost had to fight and kill me too. But, y’know… you’re not wrong. And you did get that Telekinesis plasmid out of the bargain, so… silver lining, I guess?”
“Definitely,” I say, spinning my newly acquired/stolen shotgun around in my newly stolen/acquired magical aura. “Basic unicorn powers are OP as fuck, dude.”
“Can’t argue with that,” Link admits. “Are we flirting now, though?”
“Stars above, I hope not,” I snort. “Wanna go check out Arcadia?”
“Wait, that’s just… exactly the name the original game gave that area.”
“It certainly is. Wanna go find out which of Applejack’s old friends lives there?”
“... Yes. Yes I do.”
***
“Ah-ha-ha-ha!” Rarity cackles. “You’ve fallen right into my trap! Now that I’ve sealed all the exits to this area, you have no choice but to help me finish my masterpiece by… pause for effect… going on multiple fetch que-”
“Yeah, okay, no,” I calmly retort, while in the same motion gently slotting the end of my shotgun in between Rarity’s gnashing teeth. “In the past, mmm, 24 hours or so, I have been stung by mutant bees, technically tortured an Aerodrome pegasus into having Stockholm Syndrome, watched Applejack’s friend Fluttershy shoot Applejack’s other friend Rainbow Dash because it turns out Rainbow was using plasmids after all, and then almost drowned before finding out my definitely-not-boyfriend Link got ripped open like a Ziploc bag and I had to stab him with an ADAM syringe to keep him from dying. In other words, I have had a very, very long day. So if you’d be so kind, please let me out of this drawn-out crazy artist pastiche before I pump thirty pellets of 12-gauge buckshot straight down your fucking throat.”
After taking a moment to consider, Rarity accepts my proposal. She vanishes in a burst of teleportation magic, leaving the keys to the area’s exit in her wake.
(This is almost literally how this section was actually supposed to end.)
***
“Hey, Ruby?” Link asks as the elevator to Onyx Ryder’s office ascends. “Are we still flirting, or…”
I blink, then turn to face Link with a quizzical expression. “Link, we literally--and I do not use that term lightly--just had sex on a pile of Hearth’s Warming sweaters in an abandoned clothes emporium,” I say. “We have most assuredly advanced past the flirting stage.”
“Okay, just… just checking,” he replies. “Y’know, it’s good to make sure before you…”
“Fuck somepony in the remnants of a clearance rack, yeah, I’ve been slowly realizing that,” I say. “Well, what’s done is done. Literally, in this case. At least that Foxtail Meadow guy Ryder hates so much turned out to be pretty cool when we finally met him face-to-face.”
“Yeah, no kidding,” Link says. “He even helped us get this elevator running and insisted we wear these pointy hats that say “MARKS” on them. He must really want us to go meet with Onyx Ryder.”
“Yep,” I agree as the elevator jolts to a stop. “Pretty chill guy. Well, let’s go end this thing.”
***
“Well,” I say, after watching Link shoot Onyx in the face on orders from Daybreak, finding out that Daybreak was Foxtail Meadow all along, learning that Link was secretly Onyx and Foxtail’s son and brainwashed to follow any order preceded by the word “Sugarcube,” and then--again on Foxtail’s orders--being shot in the chest myself by Link, “fuck.”
***
“... OW.”
“Oh, stop complaining,” Twilight Sparkle says as I rise very literally from the dead, surrounded by all the SUN-gathering Little Sisters Twilight accidentally enabled to be made. “You’re not the only one you’re stressed.”
“Wait, wha… how am I alive?” I sputter. “I thought only direct blood relatives of Onyx Ryder could use the Vita-Chamber and resurrect after they… oh, shit.”
“It’s not incest,” Twilight quickly clarifies. “You’re just pregnant with Link’s child. It’s a technicality, but hey, you’re not dead, so count your blessings.”
“Oh, cool… wait, oh shit.”
“Yeah... also, Applejack’s dying,” Twilight continues. “Foxtail made Link shoot her too. And she didn't even know about the 'Sugarcube' thing, that was just a passive-aggressive dig at her from Foxtail. But if it’s any consolation, it turns Apple Bloom’s alive. And so is Apple Cider, even though she actually came from Foxtail raping Applejack and she’s a Little Sister now.”
“SHIT.”
“Yeah, fair enough,” Twilight says. “Apple Bloom being alive really isn’t that much of a consolation.”
***
“Well, isn’t this convenient?” Foxtail says, bleeding from his many bullet wounds atop a surfaced submarine filled with Twilight, Apple Bloom, Fluttershy, the Stockholm Syndrome pegasus, Vinyl Scratch (for some reason), and a bunch of Little Sisters. “You two just had to beat all the odds and do some video-game bullshit to defeat me, didn’t you?”
“No, we…” Link starts to say before I nudge him in the shoulder and offer him a conciliatory shrug. “Actually, yeah, you pretty much nailed us there. But come on, we reformed the Elements of Harmony with a bunch of background ponies and OCs! That’s gotta be worth some credit, right?”
“Yeah,” Foxtail coughs, “I guess Applejack would be proud of you after all.”
“Oh, fuck you, you overwrought political metaphor,” Link says before turning away to let Foxtail face justice on the mainland (because this is the good ending). Startled by his utter failure to corrupt Link in his own image, Foxtail tries to make one last desperate grab for him, but fails and slips off the sub to drown, because seriously, fuck him.
“Look, you tried,” I say, rubbing a hoof on Link’s back as he stares into the ocean’s depths at his sinking estranged father. “And that’s what counts. I think that’s what the moral of all this was. Aside from the fact that Ayn Rand was an idiot.”
“Does that even count as a moral?” Link asks. “I mean, everyone knows that.”
“You’d be surprised,” I say, and whatever Link was about to say to ruin the moment, I cut off with a deep romantic kiss. “By the way, I’m pregnant,” I say once I pull away.
“Oh,” Link replies. “Shit.”
(This is also almost literally how the ending scene was going to go.)
FIN