Sparkweld finished wiring the translocator beacon from Krawah into the thaumimetric scanner recovered from Trottz, a sample of Harry Potter’s blood was used to set the scanner’s matrix, anyone related to the foal within three generations would create a ping on the scanner, which would be used to set up coordinates for the translocator, the power levels needed would be immense, the news that they would be sharing power with the Talons had made Sparkweld furious, but there was nothing that could be done about that without angering the griffons, they would need to recover several more arcane spark-generators to keep Project Elysium powered, however the opportunities in Harry’s homeworld were worth it.
The box recovered from Hippocampus Energy Unit Epsilon would go a long way in helping to deal with the predicted power problems, it drew magical energy from the environment and converted it into a form that was actually useful. Placing it into a barrel of magical radioactive waste would give them a sizable boost in power production. There was only one thing left to do before the system was ready to begin scanning the universe for Harry Potter’s homeworld, and that was wiring the translocator into a megaspell matrix, normal teleportation spells had a very limited range for what they were trying to do, but a teleportation megaspell had a range estimated to be near infinite, certainly larger than the observable universe. Only, they didn’t have a megaspell chamber on-hoof, and making one from scratch would take months, that was assuming they even had the blueprints for such a thing…
Sparkweld sighed, the Star Paladin would find a solution, they just needed a bit more time… Project Elysium could very well be the future of the wasteland, they just needed a bit more time...
Harry loved this gun… Harry had never known or cared much about weapons, but that changed when she found herself in the Equestrian Wasteland, now, she may not know the first thing about pistols or rifles or assault rifles or anything that used normal bullets, but she had spent a lot of time with Sparkweld, and she had used her beam pistol plenty, she had a very good understanding of magical energy weapons now, but that wasn’t anything like the Trottz Magical Plasma Rifle. This rifle was long, and while it still looked a little like the mess of coils and spikes and tubes that Rosemary’s magical plasma rifle was, it was far sleeker and more refined. It fired deep bluish-purple blasts of energy that turned anything it hit into glowing liquid, breaking apart a target at a molecular level. Rosemary had described atoms and molecules and all that to her, leagues above what her science teacher had tried to teach back on Earth. Harry would really need to give her new gun a name, she couldn’t keep calling it the Trottz Magical Plasma Rifle.
She had gotten separated from her teammates, she wasn’t quite sure how, but she had no idea where she was in this place… It was some kind of factory, and many robotic ponies were rolling around on the floor, brains encased in jars and placed into metal hulls with mechanical unicorn horns that fired blasts of lighting, they were annoying, but kinda weak, she had gotten hit by a blast from that alicorn, and while her shield broke, she still stopped the blast, these things were just pathetic compared to that. She had killed three of these damn things without firing a shot, that reflection spell was working wonders, they would fire their blasts of lighting, and then it would bounce right off her shield and right into their ugly brain-jars.
“I’ve killed five fucking brain-bots, not a single one of these dumbass thing has a scrap of bullets on it, I’m running out of bullets here Spiker”, a trio of ponies came into the factory floor from the door below, Harry was up on a catwalk, picking off robots with focused plasma blasts, the trio came in, and were at first confused by the sight before them… At first, Harry thought they were raiders, they seemed profane and ugly enough, but no, they were cleaner, and a little more sane than your average raider… Slavers most likely. “What the fuck… Something killed all these brain-bots.”
“Surrender to the Steel Rangers!” Harry shouted from her position above the catwalk.
“Fuck!” The trio ducked for cover, “Those fucking metal monsters are here!” The same dirty slaver pony began.
“Shut up,” Their leader, a pony with the cutie mark of a spike going through a skull, Spiker Harry guessed, peeked up from cover, but ducked back down, “Just one of those robed ponies, a filly, bring her to me alive, I want her ass!” Harry rolled her eyes, as if they would get the chance, Spiker thought he was safe behind that conveyor belt, but Harry knew something they didn’t, her magical plasma rifle could punch clean though all two-meters of a brain-bot’s hull before it lost its destructive power, it took a lot more than a thin conveyor belt to block a shot.
Spiker turned to glowing goo, and the two others fled, Harry shot one in the leg as they ran, she didn’t have much sympathy for ponies who threatened her, the Rangers, or any innocent stallion or mare. When she climbed down to move on and sweep the next room, she found the two slavers who had ran were both dead, their chests blasted open by a powerful blast of electricity, stronger than a brain-bot could manage, there was a faint shimmer in the air, then it was gone… Harry was on edge now, she wanted to rejoin the rest of her squad.
Soon, she did by luck, as she was carefully trotting through rooms, collecting ammo and medical supplies while keeping an eye out for blasts of lighting coming from invisible enemies, she ran into the two knights who had accompanied her on this mission, they had just cleared out a room, Harry watched them killing a huge robot-pony with a minigun and rocket launcher, moving on wheeled-hooves with a fierce red glow behind its faceplate. “Scribe Harry, reporting for duty…” She joked as she walked in.
“There you are, where were you?” One of the two knight-mares began.
“Down a few floors I think, no idea how I managed to get lost… Listen, I ran into some raiders, or slavers, they were also searching the building.”
“Understood, which direction?” Harry pointed with a hoof. “Alright, Drillbit,” She turned to her companion, “Keep watch… And as for you Harry,” Harry felt her ears perk up, “Found this in one of the safes, look for any mention of megaspells in it,” The knight handed Harry a strange glassy purplish-black orb, like a perfect sphere of deep opaque amethyst, or off-color obsidian.
“What… Is it?” Harry reached out with her magic… Then everything went dark, then there was a flash of light, she was scared and confused for a moment but then it started to make sense as time progressed.
She was standing in a hallway, somewhere in this very factory, she saw the room she had been in, where she killed Spiker, except it was working, the machines were pressing metal plates into cogs and rods and other simple components. Light was shining through the windows, not the dusy and dim light of the wasteland, but bright golden sunlight… It had been such a long time since Harry had seen the sun. She wanted to go outside and see it, but she didn’t have control over her own actions… Make that he… He was back in a male body now, that was for sure, and it was jarring, after a month of being female he didn’t like it.
Down below, it was chaos, the workers in the factory were clearly outraged, they were waving signs, smashing bottles against machinery, pointing guns, it was some kind of protest or workers strike. The stallion who Harry’s mind was in had huffed angrily, “Somepony! Round up those mules, don’t they know we have a war to win!” Another voice called out from somewhere in the office he was in, overseeing the riot.
The stallion Harry was in pulled up to the window and shouted down, “Cease immediately or we will activate the security system! Failure to comply will be viewed as treason against the Kingdom of Equestria!” The stallion didn’t wait for a reply but just clopped his hooves against a button and watched as brain-bots swarmed in, turrets activated, and turned the factory floor into a shooting range. “Inform the MOM that we had zebra sympathizers sabotaging the work effort and we had to purge the staff, we’ll replace the workers with zebra prisoners, fit them with explosive collars, just in case.”
“Yes sir!” A mare responded promptly
Harry woke back up in her real body. She had just seen the memory of another pony… It was short and simple, why someone would record that memory was beyond her, most likely as evidence in a trial against that stallion… But it was valuable to her in one way, it gave her an explanation as to how raiders and slavers could exist… If ponies were that cruel back in the past, why should they be any different now…
She got back to her hooves, “Status on the slavers?” She asked the knight who had been guarding her while she was observing the memory. Outside the window she could see them taking cover behind concrete barriers and overturned wagons.
“They tried to rush the back door after their missing trio failed to return, I fired a few bursts to keep them at bay while Pattern Weld went to search the last floor.”
Harry drew her energy rifle and started blasting the slavers out of cover, after that memory she was angry, she wouldn’t let a single one of those scum go free now. Something else seemed to have the same idea… There must have been eight or nine slavers out there, but for every one she shot, another two dropped dead… Some were suddenly sliced open by nothing, others simply exploded as if they had swallowed a grenade but there were no explosives in sight, and others still were hit with blasts of electricity from floating points around them…
“What’s gotten into you?” He said, too distracted by Harry’s sudden execution of the slavers to pay attention to what was going on below. The slavers tried to run, or return fire, those that tried to shoot back were hit by purple magical blasts, and those that ran were exploded or sliced apart by some invisible force.
The waggon flew through the sky lazily, Glory wasn’t as strong as Calamity, but the pegasus needed to rest his wings, It was a long flight to Canterlot. Littlepip watched her new companions closely… They had first met just outside Fillydelphia, she had first thought them raiders, the one in the lead certainly looked the part covered in barbed wire and spiked armor, but the other two didn’t… Thinking them to be the raider’s captives, she drew her zebra rifle, Velvet objected, of course, and so did Calamity to the mare’s surprise, she thought briefly back to how she was shot while wearing raider armor, and held her fire until they came a little too close… The mare had begun to say “You the Stable Dweller?” When Littlepip fired on reflex, putting a burning hole through the mare’s head… The raider-zebra’s companions looked shocked, Velvet scolded Littlepip something fierce, and then they were all, minus the zebra’s companions, when pink energy sparked around the holes in the raider’s flesh, and it reformed as if she had never been hit at all, “Fuck! Was gonna ask if you needed help… By Celestia’s tits…”
Littlepip was suspicious of the trio as they made their way into Fillydelphia and toward the Steel Rangers bunker, they said they were from Hoofington, they were here to help her do whatever she needed to do to help the wasteland… Littlepip didn’t buy it quite frankly. They wouldn’t say why they were here to help, other than that they wanted to help the wasteland too… Somehow Littlepip was the only one who seemed to think they shouldn’t be trusted, even Steelhooves seemed to buy their story… She was just waiting for them to try and shoot her in the back… But, they didn’t, they were just… Odd, the Stallion didn’t say a word the entire time, except to offer short comments or say a word to two to his companions, the Pegasus was downright terrified by Calamity, the brand on her flanks looked relatively new, both Velvet and Calamity just stared at the mare with a mixture of horror, sympathy, and rage. Steelhooves and the one who introduced herself as Rampage, who clarified that she wasn’t a zebra, were carrying on a whispered conversation, they didn’t seem to know one-another, but there was just something between the two, a form of mutual understanding that Littlepip couldn’t understand.
It had been almost a little under a week since then, Rampage lived up to her name when she cut her way through Red Eye’s army, getting Littlepip, and their new Zebra companion, Xenith, out of that horrible city. Glory avoided Calamity like the plague but warmed up to Velvet quickly, who got her to open up a bit… The stallion stayed as quiet and mysterious as ever, not even mentioning his name, nor why his cutie mark was so… Weird… They didn’t reveal much, but their friend had died, and her last wish to help the wasteland… When the Steel Rangers attacked Stable 2, the stallion had adamantly refused to go in and help, he stayed outside, and made sure that no one tried to attack them from behind, but he adamantly refused to go past the stable door.
Now, it seemed like Littlepip was the only one who still didn’t trust them… Calamity sighed as he flew into the cabin, they had figured out a clever system for switching pullers while in-flight. “I don’t get her, she’s so… Uhhh, naive… How can she still think the Enclave are trustworthy after all she’s been through.”
“Give her time,” Velvet replied, “She’s hurt, not just physically, she’s deeply mentally hurting…”
Over in a corner the stallion, still yet to give his name, took a quick dose of med-x while discussing the plan with Steelhooves and Rampage, “It’s fine,” Rampage began, “Even if the cloud gets my armor stuck to me it’s not like I take it off all that often anyway, if I really want it gone you can just cut me out of it…”
“Wouldn’t that, you know… Hurt…” The stallion muttered.
“Wouldn’t be the worst thing I’ve dealt with.”
Steelhooves suddenly looked thoughtful… No doubt he was wondering if he could survive being cut free from his armor, it would certainly be a worthwhile experiment, ghouls could survive just about anything.
Littlepip sighed and looked out the window… Canterlot was coming up, but first, she spotted a small settlement on the side of the hill… What the hell was a town doing this close to one of the deadliest places in the wasteland, “Glory!” She shouted, “Bring us down, now.”
It had been a month and a week since Harry had come to this world, it was weird to think. How long she had been here, it was weird to think she was a she… As brutal and terrifying as this world was sometimes, she liked it, in a weird way… It was different, exciting, she was never allowed to do anything back on Earth, here though, now she was getting experience as an engineer, a scribe for the Steel Rangers, and a soldier, she had already taken plenty of lives, something she wouldn’t have thought possible just over a month ago.
Harry needed some fresh air, even if the air outside was a little more radioactive than normal, it was cooler and smelled better than the recycled air of the Stable. She thought she saw a quick glimpse of the moon from between the clouds, but it was only for the tiniest of seconds. The clouds… The one thing she did miss was the sun and moon, they were always so pretty…
A noise from behind her made the filly jump, and she drew her beam pistol, “Little mare…” She recognized that voice.
“H-Hello?”
The air shimmered and a deep blue pony with wings and a horn materialized before her eyes… Her face was still scared, but the flesh looked healthier, and bits of new blue fur were starting to crop up around her eye, her horn was still a stump, but it wasn’t as broken as before, it looked like someone had moulded a horn from clay and then flattened the end with a hammer, it would probably never grow back fully. “Little mare, I wanted to thank you… I still cannot hear the Goddess’ voice but I can hear distant whispers of my sisters. I do not know what they are saying, but even this much I am grateful for…”
“Umm… You’re welcome…” Harry didn’t know what to say.
“Some of the voices, they sound a little worried, I do not know the meaning but I still hear fear, something is wrong… I-” And then she stopped. Harry looked confused for a second, then the alicorn shouted, “Something is wrong, something is wrong, my Goddess, she is telling us to flee, where is she, what is wrong!”
A speck of light caught the edge of Harry’s vision, a tiny pearl of pale lavender light at the edge of the horizon, a little to the west of Canterlot, the ghastly mountain still visible as a slight pink glow on the edge of the world. Then there was a flash of green light from that dome, bigger, horribly bright even from this distance, like someone had lit a copper flare at the edge of the world… Harry could only wonder what it looked like up close, the alicorn stared in horror, moments passed, then he felt a slight shake and a breeze of warm air, even at this distance. “My… My Goddess… She’s gone…”