//------------------------------// // Forgone Conclusions // Story: Fallout Equestria: Dragon Her Heels // by Pokonic //------------------------------// Twilight Sparkles Home for Dispossessed Dragons is a nigh-legendary place in the wastelands, if only because it has anti-air defenses, as befits its former position at containing large aggressive fire-breathing magical reptiles, but also because of it’s position near the realm most ponies know as the “Very Sharp Glowing Place With The Sharp And Glowing Ghouls That’s Also Very Irradiated And Still On Fire, Oh Goddesses Why Is Everything On Fire, Do You Think Canterlot Is Nice This Time Of Year”, formerly known as the Crystal Empire. It is well known among treasure hunters, if only because it has all the hospitality of the Empire with the benefits of having a working electric fence that’s also invisible. There is said to be tunnels that go under it that are mostly free from irradiation, but few ponies have been in them and even fewer have managed to survive them. And of course, any pony that has reaped the treasures of such a facility would be unlikely to tell. ..........….. Two hundred years ago, in the middle of the war, Twilight Sparkle did not come up with the idea to “rescue” young dragons that either fought in the war or were found by Equestrians in zebra lands to “re-educate” them. It was actually a joint project funded by Moral, Peace, and Image. Goldenblood might have been involved, but this is pre-war Equestria. That’s a forgone conclusion. It was first brought up in a rather minor meeting conducted by two middle-managing Peace workers regarding the discovery that Bleakbane, a rather nasty piece of work that was apparently a cousin to the then-rampant Brimstone, was actualy female, and was found to have been tending to a clutch of more than forty eggs not ten miles away from the Equestrian border. Naturally, forty eggs were later found by an Equestrian ground support team, but urgent orders from Canterlot that came far too quickly for some ponies told them to destroy them. They were not, of course. Half the clutch was taken into Peace’s care. Out of those twenty, two were transported to varying places of study across the country, and two more were later “lost” in Hoofington. Again, Goldenblood. In general, the meeting between the two Ministry workers was never officially documented, as it was actualy more of a lukewarm conversation between a rather love-blind mare and a love-blinded stallion who was trying to send some hints of affection by striking up a conversation about how he helped, in his own words, “saved some baby dragons.” It was, however, documented as a meeting by the Moral agent who was watching the whole thing from a wandering Sprite-Bot. It was later sent for review to another Moral agent, where it was lost for six months and was promptly forgotten about by everyone involved, as the stallion later found himself in Hoofington, Hightower to be precise, while the mare quickly found herself in Maripony. Guess where she ended up in? After two home invasions and an incident involving an exploding pumpkin, the papers suddenly found themselves inside the personal files of a Image paper-pusher, who later presented it to a friend of hers who worked in Peace. It was eventually presented in a bi-monthly meeting between the local Ministry Hub reps in Manehatten, after which the basic idea presented within it, the creation of a “dragon orphanage” was refined to a more acceptable form as a “tax-deducible dragon orphanage”, and was eventually greenlighted by the council present. The area around the Crystal Empire was chosen for the site, not only because of it’s extreme distance away from Zebra lands, but also because of it having a plentiful supply of, well, tasty crystals. Image loved the general idea of having cutesy wootsy baby dragons making appearances in there posters and flyers, Peace loved it because it was Peace, and Moral loved it because baby dragons had the perfect head size to experiment with varying memory-altering magical items without requiring pony test subjects, which required messy forms. And, er, it was good for moral. Yes, that too. To sum it up, it was a public success right until the original batch of dragons housed in the facility hatched. Two workers outright vanished from the public record after the fact, while another dozen or so were permanently put of out work by virtue of having baby dragon sized bite marks taken out of them. As it turned out, Bleakbane was of a distinctly different dragonic breed than the ones ponykind was familiar with, as her entire brood, as it was later discovered, spewed acid and were born with wings, but were furthermore born with very sharp teeth. After much of the original funding was cut, the staff at the state of the art facility was halved, much like the number of dragons that was left after local forces subdued and slayed when nessisarly. The "patients" were mostly kept dazed and confused, with fitted there keepers fine. After all, they got most of there money by quietly letting ponies of presumably dark nature “examine” them during hours that were usually kept only by Luna’s Royal Guard. Most of those ponies worked for another pony who's name sounded like "Moldencrud". In the end, more than two-hundred dragons went into Twilight Sparkles Home for Dispossessed Dragons, and less than fifty survived there first six months of there stay. No more eggs were ever recovered by the Equestrians out in the field, and most of the teenagers subdued by them were either too eager to fight or simply tried to force themselves into a dragon-sleep to pass the time. Only one dragonling out of Bleakbanes brood survived, and she, a female known as Dragon #29, also known as Dursi The Slickscaled, managed to flee the by then descript building a few minutes after the end of the world. Out of those fifty, only twelve were alive by the end of the world. The staff by then was bedraggled and generally underpaid and overworked. Even Moral rarely bothered them by then, and the two-dozen ponies who were on regular payroll by then were embittered by there failed attempts in helping what they saw as young, down on there luck teenagers who were on the wrong, usually fatal path in life. This story is about a young thing who is just starting to know her place in the world, and falsely thinks that she has a bright future ahead. ....….. She is a lithe, shy looking speciman, with scales that could be reasonably be called grey-green and with a neat little row of brown spikes running down her spine, and gifted with long, slender limbs and a face that could be called attractive, even to a pony. Standing up, she would be a little taller than six feet, a decent size for a dragoness who just awoke from her first real dragon-nap. ........... In essance, this is the story of one of those teenagers. This is the story about her last day alive prior to the end of the world.