Chapter Nine: Same Stories, Different Ending
I still can’t believe how close we came to death. What was Grand Marshal Gallus thinking? Is he so determined that nobody else discover von Plume’s treasure before him that he was willing to destroy her manor, forever eliminating the chance of discovering any more clues? It must have been because of me. There’s no other explanation. If I was able to sneak in, then any griffin could. The Commonwealth government’s occupied the manor for years; surely they were able to see what I saw—the map in the main hall. Then again, maybe they hadn’t. It’s pretty nonsensical, and it was only sheer luck I was able to recognize it for what it was. It’s not going to point me directly to the treasure, of course. That would be too easy. No, there’s definitely more to this. If I follow the clues, I could find the long-lost fortune of Griselda von Plume and win Pleasure Coast all at the same time. But what would I do after that? What’s the purpose of owning a horde like a greedy dragon when you could never spend all of it? Could I spend all of it? Nobody really knows how rich von Plume actually was. Is this even worth pursuing? If I find the treasure, my life could become immeasurably more comfortable . . . but will that change who I am? Griffins know me as a traveler; how could I travel with such a huge amount of wealth weighing me down?
I tucked a crinkled 100,000-guilder bill into the Book of Rok as a bookmark and tucked it back into my saddlebags. This was the pristine, freshly (within the last half-century) printed copy that the griffins of Hope Springs had gifted me before I’d left; though I still kept the tattered, beat-up copy I’d found with me, wrapped up to keep it from getting even more damaged. Gretchen had claimed that all copies of the Book of Rok were identical in their content, but I found that hard to believe, considering large portions of it had to be copied over manually in order to preserve Rok’s illustrations and charts, rather than printed using a press. I hadn’t found any major discrepancies so far, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t something in my old copy that had missed making its way into the newer one and could prove useful.
I was skipping around through the book’s pages instead of reading them in order, so this was the first I’d read about Rok’s interest in the treasure of Griselda von Plume. I’d have to look back and see if he’d written any more about the heist into her manor and what he’d found there. Unfortunately, given what I’d just read, I wouldn’t be able to check out the manor myself. The idea of finding that treasure intrigued me, but if Rok had written down how to find it, surely some griffin had beaten me to it. Perhaps Grand Marshal Gallus had recorded it somewhere secret, but that was still a gamble; I had about as much luck of finding that as locating von Plume’s treasure.
Anyway, I had no idea what I’d do with the treasure if I did find it—something that hadn’t really occurred to me until I’d read Rok’s ponderings on the subject. Was chasing wealth just for wealth’s sake a worthwhile endeavor? Most griffins both during the War and up to the present day seemed to think so, but that still didn’t fully convince me. When I’d accumulated a fortune of bottlecaps back in Equestria, I’d used it to purchase shelter and protection for me and my friends, but a large part of that wealth had simply sat in Burnside until the Regulators had confiscated it upon learning I was Lord Lamplight. Here, in the Griffin Commonwealth, I had no friends, no home, and no cause. Well, no cause beyond bringing Radio Free Wasteland to the Commonwealth, but that dream couldn’t sustain me forever.
“We’re comin’ t’ the end o’ your journey,” the griffin behind me on the barge announced, and I acknowledged him with a nod.
I got up to stretch my legs and trotted to the edge of the barge, looking out over the river water that buffeted the vessel’s sides. After spending an unpleasant day in a Brinkfall cell, I’d been released and swiftly hightailed it out of the city before the weather captain could change his mind about merely detaining me. Apparently there’d been a foggy morning when some important griffin was assassinated recently . . . but I doubted anyone wanted to hear what I had to say about that. A cable car brought me down from the heights of the mountain, and I resupplied at the shops conveniently located in the foothills (and charging a premium for the convenience) before I headed back down into the valley. I’d reached the river a couple days later, right on time to meet a barge carrying food upriver. For a reasonable price, the captain had agreed to let me ride along until we reached the point where the river forked. He’d be heading northwest, deeper into the valley, whereas I’d be following the northeast branch of the river, to Distribution Station 5. The river I’d be following from here on swung past as the captain piloted the barge toward the bank, and he pulled up alongside a pier that looked like it hadn’t seen much upkeep in the last one hundred-fifty years. He didn’t bother to tie up since I was his only passenger, and I hopped off the barge as soon as it came to a halt.
“Thanks for the ride,” I told him as I looked back.
“My pleasure,” he said as he tipped his hat to me. “You said you were headin’ up t’ the ol’ distribution station, right?”
“That’s right,” I replied.
“After that, were you plannin’ t’ head up t’ Moonraze?” the griffin asked.
“Most likely,” I replied, turning around completely since it felt like this wouldn’t be a brief conversation. Moonraze was a roost located in the peaks over DS-5, and it looked like a good place to stop for supplies before heading on west.
“I’d advise you against that, ‘specially since I saw you readin’ a Book of Rok,” the captain said. “Moonraze ain’t a friendly place, ‘specially for Rokkists. The place is run by a bunch o’ Mythologists.”
“Raiders?” I asked. I’d never heard anything about roosts being anything other than bastions of civilization, though my experience in Brinkfall had taught me how much that was worth.
“Not as such, but savages still,” the captain said. “‘Civilized savages,’ if there is such a thing. The one thing that matters is Grand Marshal Gideon recognizes them as the rightful government of Moonraze, so there’s no fightin’ them. They’re fervent in their beliefs an’ cruel t’ boot, so I’d stay away if I were a pony, ‘lest you want to be dropped from a great height.”
“Thanks for the advice,” I told him, mentally adjusting my plans.
“My pleasure,” the captain said again as he tipped his hat and began piloting the barge back out into the river. “You take care o’ yourself, y’hear? I want t’ hear the tale o’ the pony that made it all the way t’ Shearpoint!”
***
It was a slippery trek up to Distribution Station 5; not only was it was built at the top of a cliff next to a waterfall, but some griffin had had the bright idea to build the access stairs behind the waterfall. Decades upon decades of water had caused some parts of the stairs to rust away, but others remained intact, and I assumed they were protected by magic of some sort. The erosion of the cliff above by the waterfall had also caused it to creep inward, which meant I got considerably wetter ascending the stairs now than I would have when they’d first been built. Worried that my books would be damaged and my weapons would become too waterlogged, I stepped back several times and waited until I was moist instead of soaked before continuing up.
As I neared the top of the stairs, FITS informed me that the station was far from abandoned, and I cautiously took a peek before charging in. There were no flags to be seen, so while it was doubtful that this station was controlled by the Commonwealth government, it wasn’t a certainty. And given what I’d learned from the barge captain, the grotesque decorations created from maimed corpses hanging around also didn’t rule out that the government wasn’t somewhat involved; raiders, after all, were included in a civilization. The idea hadn’t seemed so strange to me years ago, when I had been Lamplight, but I’d rejected it since then. Be that as it may, if I was going to continue interacting with Commonwealth settlements—which was getting more common as I headed up into the valley—then I couldn’t go around killing Commonwealth citizens, no matter how much I abhorred their actions.
The contacts all appeared to be congregated in one place, out on the platform, so I stealthily made my way in that direction. They were undeniably raiders, decked out in spiky armor (which I’d only just realized was not purely for the aesthetic but could be helpful when wrestling with other griffins) and lots of guns. The crowd was gathered around a griffin who was not like them at all. He had snow-white fur on his hindquarters and black feathers, except around his frightened eyes, where the feathers matched his fur. Instead of raider armor, he was clad in simple protective garb which had clearly taken a recent beating. One raider held the griffin still while another held the victims wing extended, and a third wielded a ripper-axe, preparing to cut it off. I couldn’t stand by and let this happen, but I also couldn’t step in without knowing if these raiders were part of the Commonwealth and the griffin about to be rendered flightless was being punished for some crime.
“Hey!” I called as I stepped out from behind a stack of crates, drawing all the raiders’ attention to me. “Are you with Moonraze?”
In response, all their pips in FITS flipped to hostile. I took that as a negative confirmation.
“Kill him!” a griffin wearing armor with skulls impaled along the spine yelled, which solidified my guess.
The raiders began to fire at me, and I instinctively cast ERSaTS. I had the opportunity to get out of the way, but my attention was drawn to the captured griffin as one of the raiders raised their ripper-axe and the one holding him pulled out a pistol to end him quickly. I targeted the three raiders nearest the captive with my battle rifle and fired. The axe-wielding griffin dropped his weapon, and the blade’s safety shutoff didn’t kick in before it had gnawed through his face. The one holding the captive dropped her pistol and fell to the ground, clutching at her shoulder wound with one claw and reaching for her pistol with the other. The raider holding the griffin’s wing was thrown back as my rounds blew through his face, blasting a mess out the back. The captive, as soon as he realized he was free, grabbed a set of saddlebags from the ground nearby and ran.
As the captive flew off, never to be seen again, the other raiders’ shots struck me. I flopped backwards and crawled behind a stack of crates as I frantically searched around in my saddlebags for a healing potion. As my wounds closed up, I looked down at my chest, and all the holes in my Stable jumpsuit and doctor’s coat. The apparel has already been patched and mended and modified so many times even before I’d left the Equestrian Wasteland, and now it was on its last leg. I didn’t know how much longer I could maintain my iconic look and still consider myself adequately protected from the dangers of the Commonwealth.
While I was musing over the state of my wardrobe, likely delirious due to the multiple wounds I’d taken and my forced magical healing, the raiders had wasted no time in their advance. Rising from my hiding spot, I ran toward the door to the main building of the station; the raiders were flying, so any of the low cover outside wasn’t going to protect me for long. Once I was through the doorway, I grabbed a nearby rifle and wedge the door shut. The raiders outside banged and tugged on the door, but it wasn’t budging. I kept an eye on FITS, and when enough raiders had clustered up outside the entrance, I pulled the pin on a grenade and teleported it among them. The door shook as the grenade went off, wiping out most of the raiders.
Already running down the hall away from the main room, I ducked to the floor as the remaining raiders began firing at the door directly, some of their shots passing through and whizzing overhead. I crawled along until I was able to get out of the line of fire and prepared my shotgun for close quarters fighting. The raiders soon managed to burst through the door and charged down the hallway, so I threw another grenade their way, which FITS let me know killed all but one of them.
The last raider came around the corner—the leader with the skulls on his spine, holding the ripper-axe from his dead companion. My arm went up to block the swing, but I wasn’t prepared for the chain-blade, and it ground against the prosthetic, throwing off sparks. I dropped my shotgun and focused my magic entirely on holding onto the ripper-axe and pushing it away from me. The raider leader fought back, even as I pushed the weapon away from my arm; eventually, I couldn’t push it back any farther. He began to buffet me with his wings, trying to distract me. My mind desperately searched for a plan, and suddenly one came to me … but it was risky. If I moved my arm too slowly and the axe came down, its blade would be buried in my face, but I was out of other options. Before I could hesitate any longer, my prosthetic claw let go and my magic alone grabbed the ripper-axe and jerked it around into the griffin’s wing. He screeched in pain as the spinning blade tore through muscle and bone, letting up on his grip enough for me to grab my shotgun with my magic and fire it at him. The blast tore the top of his head off and he fell to the ground, axe grinding to a halt a second or two after he dropped it.
I fell back and rested a bit before moving on to activate yet another distribution station. It was only spreading static for now, but soon it would broadcast the sounds of Radio Free Wasteland and Radio PC.
***
Heeding the barge captain’s advice, I ignored Moonraze, headed back down to the valley, and followed the river road north. None of the few barges I saw on the river responded to attempts to wave them down, so it looked like a long walk the rest of the way was in order. A few days after leaving DS-5, on the day I realized I’d spent as much time outside of the Pleasure Coast as within it since arriving in the Commonwealth, I came upon a factory near the road. The sign over the building said Stalwart Steelworks; judging by the lights and sounds coming from it, it was still in operation. There was no fence surrounding the factory, but that didn’t surprise me much anymore; fences were useless against trespasser when they could fly. Most of the griffin ruins I’d come across had relied solely on signs warning against trespassing, and presumably a private security force back when they’d been in operation. The factory’s security force seemed to be composed entirely of robots, which patrolled the grounds. I avoided them as I approached, in case they were authorized to use deadly force—or at least thought they were after decades of degradation.
The factory’s doors were unsurprisingly locked, but that was nothing a screwdriver and bobby pin couldn’t fix. (I did happen to notice that my supply of bobby pins was getting rather low. Without manes, the griffins of the Commonwealth had little need for them, so I’d either have to find a substitute or return to the Pleasure Coast to restock. FITS was illuminated with contacts, all neutral, and I passed by quite a few robots going about their business keeping the foundry running. Machines clanged as the factory worked on, but I saw no sign of griffins in the place. After crossing through the steelworks twice, I concluded it was just the robots here, running this place in absence of living beings telling them what to do. How they could possibly still be producing anything after a century and a half was a mystery, but one I managed to solve after observing the factory some more. The steelworks were producing steel beams and girders from molten metal. Once they were done, the products were piled up on trucks outside. Other robots then retrieved these beams and returned to them to the foundry, melting them down to repeat the process. It was a pointless cycle, but none of the machines seemed to realize that.
There was an overseer’s office in the back of the factory, and I broke into it, looking for something to make my trip here worth the time and effort. I managed to jimmy some desk drawers open and retrieve a snow globe from Jubilee Park and a few cartons of cigarettes, which I knew some griffin vendors would pay top price for. However, the real treasures were in a safe behind the desk: a revolver inlaid with gold in a fancy pattern, and a two small gold bars. Like Equestria, the Griffin Commonwealth had accepted bottlecaps as the new currency, but griffins still had an insatiable lust for gold. This could buy me almost anything I wanted, so long as I didn’t get mugged before I could spend it.
As I was rearranging my saddlebags to hold my new possessions, I heard a thumping from outside the office distinct from the regular noise of the presses and machinery. Looking up, I spotted a Dog of War stalking by the office window, and it turned its gaze toward me. Its mark on FITS lit up hostile at the same time its eyes changed color, and it began to transform into combat mode. I stuffed my possessions into my saddlebags and ran to the only exit from the office that wouldn’t take me past the Dog of War: the executive elevator. The doors slid open as I pressed the button and the deadly robot crashed through the office’s doorway, tearing the door from its hinges. I jumped in and frantically pressed the “Close Doors” button, watching as the Dog charged toward me.
Its claws tore into the door and I looked for another way out, spotting the emergency exit above me. It was a leap without wings, but I managed to push the panel open and pull myself through into the elevator shaft. As the Dog gleefully ripped into the elevator car, I crawled into a ventilation duct and pulled myself along. The duct groaned under the stress after going so long without maintenance and deposited me onto a crossbeam just under the ceiling high above the foundry, giving me a good view of the entire complex. After realizing I was no longer in the elevator, the Dog of War charged out of the office and began searching the foundry. I stayed as motionless as I could, hoping it would leave me be.
After several minutes of tearing through the factory, the Dog of War ended its pursuit and returned to patrolling, just as I’d hoped it would. Watching it, though, I doubted I could get back through the factory without running into it again. I’d need to find another way out of the steelworks, so I made my way along the beams until I found a vent that led up to the roof.
From the roof, I could see all around Stalwart Steelworks, and I discovered the Dog of War hadn’t completely given up on me yet. The security robots that had been patrolling the grounds around the foundry rather loosely now tightly patrolled the perimeter of the factory itself, keeping a close eye on it and all its exits. There was no way I could escape through the factory and no way I could climb down the outside. The only way would be to take down the security robots, which would first require confronting the Dog of War, since I had no idea where the foundry’s maneframes were located and couldn’t afford to search for them while the Dog was still active.
I headed back into the foundry through the roof and began to formulate a plan. It would require using a couple tricks I’d learned or roughly remembered from reading books on magic in the Pleasure Coast’s Library of Arcana; but if successful, it could allow me to overcome the Dog of War. It would be the first time I came even close to pulling this strategy off, but at the moment, what other choice did I have?
It was a long way to the highest catwalks in the factory, let alone the other levels, so I used a spell to slow my descent. The journey down was wobbly, but I arrived safely and timed it so that the sound of my impact with the floor coincided with the slamming of the machinery. I snuck through the foundry and set up my trap, careful not to interfere with any of the robots’ duties. They didn’t seem overly perturbed that I was here, but I didn’t know what capacities they had to communicate with the Dog of War, given that it obviously had some way to communicate with the security bots outside.
Somehow it eventually cottoned on to my presence, and I heard its lumbering patrol gait switch to combat as it charged toward me. I watched its pip on FITS as it slid around a corner and started to pursue me. The Dog of War opened up with the weapons in its mouth and wrists as I galloped away and up a staircase. Looping around, I ran down a catwalk between robots and machinery. The Dog of War forewent stairs altogether and leapt up onto the catwalk to continue its hunt.
I zigged and zagged my way through the foundry, leading it on a merry chase and trying to keep it from having a clear shot or keeping up with me. Yet, I knew it was impossible to outrun the Dog, and my body would give out long before it did. The air grew hot as I galloped along the catwalks over the vats of molten metal and I concentrated my magic. I’d teleported grenades before but never a living creature, much less myself. I was going to make the attempt, though, and hope that the pressure would give me the extra bit of power I needed to pull it off.
With the Dog of War nipping at my tail, I cast the spell and vanished from one location to reappear in another, farther along the catwalk and out of reach of the cyberhound. I didn’t pull it off perfectly, materializing with my hooves off the ground, and I stumbled forward and faceplanted. Crawling away, I looked back as the Dog of War continued to pursue me and plummeted through the illusory catwalk I’d just teleported over. The illusion vanished as it passed through and fell into the molten metal below. It tried to thrash its way out but soon succumbed to the immense heat and sank below the surface to melt away.
Sweating from exertion and heat, I waited to make sure it wouldn’t find some way to resurrect itself before doing a thorough search of the foundry to locate the maneframes. I found them beneath the factory (only accessible through a hatchway in the floor), connected my PipBeak to them, and turned the security robots off. Even though I was now free to leave, I stayed a little longer to poke around. Greenbush Agriculturium, Brittle Pass, and now Stalwart Steelworks: wherever there were Dogs of War, there seemed to be something peculiar going on with the robots in the area. How had they managed to keep up their work for so long, and how had the Dog of War controlled the robots outside? I started digging through the maneframes.
There were logs on the foundry’s activity, and for the first fifty years, it was what I had expected. The robots had kept up their work without griffin supervision until they had run out of raw materials to forge, and then errors had begun to appear. The machines left without a job to do had begun to malfunction. However, roughly a century ago, the errors had trailed off and vanished the same time that production had resumed and, after a bumpy patch at the start, reached a steady level. That level had remained consistent for the last century, with a minor drop-off due to less than 100% efficient conservation of materials. If I asked around, I’d bet that the Dog of War had arrived around the time work had resumed.
There were other peculiarities as well, with the code that ran the foundry and controlled the robots. Most of it was standard stuff I would expect for a foundry and had seen before in the Griffin Commonwealth . . . but there was also a foreign code that had clearly been injected into the system. It didn’t match the style of code written for systems designed by GroverCorp, like my PipBeak; instead, it was more closely related to the RoBronco systems I’d become familiar with in Equestria. There was no way to check the Dog of War now that it was melted, but I wondered if the cyberhound had some kind of marking on it that would indicate it as coming from RoBronco. But what was a RoBronco war robot doing in the Griffin Commonwealth? It seemed that somehow the Dogs of War were taking over robotics networks throughout the Commonwealth—but for what purpose?
Level Up
New Perk: And Now, For My Next Trick – You’re a natural at creating illusions. +15 to Illusion Magic.
New Quest: The Final Stretch – Only 3 more distribution stations to reach the broadcast area of Radio Free Wasteland. Keep pressing on and finish the job.
Athletics +2 (31)
Barter +1 (101)
Explosives +2 (110)
Illusion Magic +17 (33)
Lockpick +1 (106)
Manipulation Magic +3 (32)
Medicine +1 (119)
Science +1 (103)
Small Guns +2 (119)
Sneak +2 (110)
Survival +3 (50)