6: The Truth
Twilight found her apprehension growing again as they proceeded down stairwells and crumbling corridors that were occasionally blocked by debris or locked doors; their way lit only by the light of their horns.
They were able to proceed through a combination of levitation and lockpick spells, as well as at least one instance of Twilight teleporting herself across a small chasm; the sounds of dripping water and an occasional but very disconcerting creak beneath their hooves the only companions to Twilight’s increasingly dark and brooding thoughts.
This place is like something out of a zombie movie… was all she could think. She’d been warned off the human versions of those by Celestia, having once watched just ten minutes of Spike’s favorite Equestrian one ‘for science’ and ending up with nightmares for a week afterwards.
She detected no humans present, but couldn’t help but have the thought that, being undead, zombies wouldn’t show up to her aura awareness; with visions of them in her mind, she wasn’t altogether sure if she could restrain herself from firing a magical bolt if something unexpected appeared.
But nothing did as they went deeper into the complex; the light of their horns remaining their only source of illumination in the sealed structure.
We’ve got to be near or on the lowest level by now! Twilight was certain as she self-levitated down their fourth flight of stairs, not trusting her hooves against the steep and rusting steps that were designed for a human gait. But if the source of the contamination is THIS deep, then how did it ever get out…?
Finally, ten minutes after departing the control room, Celestia told Twilight to halt. “Please wait a moment, my student.” She did not wait for an answer before casting a new spell; one Twilight recognized as some form of sensory magic. “Right. This way.” She led her on again, and this time, as they got deeper, Twilight felt the buzz against her horn growing again, even despite Celestia’s magical field.
It’s close! the young mage realized, feeling her heart beginning to race.
It was then they turned a corner, and Twilight froze. In the light of Celestia’s horn, she saw a mass that was neither natural nor normal; a mottled and ugly grayish-black conglomeration. Its wrinkled surface showed that it had once flowed as a molten liquid out of the half-melted pipe above before being deposited there; it had even eaten halfway through the solid cement floor before its heat was spent.
Twilight could only stare at it in horror. She had to stifle a sudden urge to scream for the sheer level of corruptive energy she detected was coming from it. She tried to assign it a word, but each one she came up with seemed woefully inadequate to what she was sensing:
Toxin.
Contamination.
Destruction.
Poison.
Death.
“Wh… what is that?” She stared at its wrinkled surface, her tone aghast, recognizing that whatever its origin, it had once flowed like lava.
“Alchemy, my student,” Celestia replied solemnly, staring upon the substance sadly. “Alchemy of the very worst kind.”
“But humans don’t have alchemy!”
“Not as we define it, no. But it is alchemy nonetheless. What you are looking at is a substance that did not even exist before its formation here. It was named corium, and it is a dreadful substance indeed. It is a fused-together mixture of boron, sand, graphite, melted cement—“
“Wait—Melted?”
“—and a very rare element known to humans as Uranium.”
“Uranium?” Twilight repeated the unfamiliar word even as she couldn’t tear her eyes away from it, the prickling on her horn intense even within the shield Celestia was casting. “I’ve never heard of it!”
“Not surprising, as that is its human name. It is far more likely that you would know it by its alchemic term instead,” Celestia said, then paused and closed her eyes before speaking it:
“Arcanocite.”
Twilight’s eyes went wide and her ears splayed back. She took an involuntary step away, stifling a renewed urge to shriek and flee as both the source and enormity of the contamination they had encountered finally became clear. “One of the most deadly and dangerous alchemic agents known to exist?” she all but croaked out.
“The same,” Celestia confirmed, her voice subdued.
“But why?” a shaky Twilight begged to know. “Were they out of their minds? Arcanocite is incredibly powerful but it’s also very unstable! It’s hard to gather and refine as it’s not only very rare, but just being in its presence can poison you through the energy it emits! Even the Zebras don’t use that and certainly not in that amount! So why in the name of their sun and moon were humans?”
“Because they accomplished something we never could, my student—they tamed this exotic element and turned it to their purposes. They learned to use its instability and propensity to decay to their advantage,” she explained carefully.
“You call that taming?” Twilight stared at the globulous mass, aghast. “Princess, it poisoned this entire area!”
“And before that, it powered it,” Celestia answered patiently. “You were correct earlier when you suggested humans were trying to harvest a fuel both powerful and potentially dangerous. We are standing in the wreckage of what humans call a nuclear power plant. It is one of four identical units that once supplied electricity to this entire region, with the others located further down this structure.
“Each of those plants, which they call ‘reactors’, once had a similar amount of the substance you see—though the others, thankfully, remained uncompromised by what happened here.”
“But… but… how could that produce power and not poison?” Twilight continued to point her shaking hoof at the dangerous mass on the ground in front of them.
“Through very clever use of chemistry,” Celestia answered easily. “Over the past seventy years, humans have learned how to regulate its decay rate and energy emissions, which they call ‘radioactivity’ or ‘radiation’, with various substances, some of which are now incorporated into that mass. They have in fact been doing it for well over half a century using reactors of various designs and source materials.”
“And they were using this to power the city?” an aghast Twilight had to ask again.
“And much of the province, yes. Indeed, they still do.”
Twilight reeled, having a sudden urge to flee not just the area, but the entire human world, never to return. “I look at it, and all I can think is—that is pure death.” She shivered, stepping forward fractionally out of her mentor’s protective shadow.
As she did, the once-lava’s powerful emissions now felt like not just prickling, but a slow burning sensation against her aura that made her skin crawl; for a moment, she thought she tasted something metallic like she’d just bitten the tip of her tongue. She tested her own protection spell against the evil energy, which produced only an odd sparking in the air before she conceded defeat and returned to her mentor’s protective umbrella. “I can’t block it. But you can?”
“Only through sheer strength of aura,” Celestia replied, her horn glow maintaining the spherical shield around them. “A dense enough substance or deep enough magical field can indeed block its emissions. I can teach you the spell I am using if you wish. But the strength required for a source this potent would quickly drain its caster—even you, my student. Doubly so on this magic-poor world.”
“But you can sustain it… because you’re an alicorn?” Twilight guessed.
Celestia smiled sadly. “No, my student, though the additional power of my alicorn form admittedly helps. It is because the energy this substance emits is similar if not identical to what the sun itself emits. I am bound to the sun and powered by all its emissions, not just the light you can perceive.
“And thus, in a rather ugly irony, being in the presence of this substance makes me not poisoned… but more powerful.” She bowed her head to show off her now-brightly glowing mane and tail, which caused Twilight to start, having not even noticed before that moment. “And thus, I alone can walk these halls without injury. As such, and as I’m sure you have surmised, this is not the first time I have visited this place. Far from it, in fact.”
“But why, Princess? Why would you have come here?”
“Because, my student, I sensed the accident when it happened,” she explained, deciding to leave out the fact that she’d also been able to detect nuclear detonations from across the globe when she’d been present on Earth for them in the past.
“I was in Equios during one of my twice-yearly visits at the time, and I sensed the burst of radiation from faraway. Alarmed at what I felt—such a thing never bodes well on the human world—I immediately investigated. I passed through the tunnel… and my worst fears were realized when I reached a bridge near the town and beheld this:” She projected an image from her memory into the air above them.
“It was a beam of ionized air over a burning power plant, and I knew it could mean only one thing, even without the intense energy emissions I sensed.” Celestia bowed her head mournfully. “For all my power, I knew there was little I could do as it was something no amount of magic could fix—a nuclear reactor meltdown.”
“M-Meltdown?” Twilight echoed, her voice barely a whisper.
“Once again, a human term. But the sequence of events that led to it—and to this—” she motioned to the ugly mass with a hoof “—I will not make you try to determine on your own, as you have not yet enough knowledge of human science to deduce it.” She sat down as she began her story, still staring mournfully at the mass.
“It was the early morning hours of April 26th, 1986 of the human calendar; just over thirty-three years ago. This plant—informally named Chernobyl for one of the nearby towns—had been in operation for some years without incident, but there was one lingering worry: what would happen if the cooling system should experience a sudden power loss, causing the water pumps that serviced the reactor and kept the Arcanocite heat in check to shut down.”
“And they didn’t have backups for that before?” Twilight recoiled. “That seems like a huge oversight! And a completely unacceptable risk for a substance like… that!” She pointed a shaking hoof at the melted mass once more.
“Unfortunately, my student, the state this plant served was willing to take such risks for the sake of their international image and own propaganda,” Celestia recalled with a sigh. “In due fairness, backups for the cooling system did exist, in the form of three diesel generators. They would activate within seconds upon loss of power, but it would take them nearly a minute to spin up, leaving a small gap of time—perhaps half a minute—where there might not be sufficient coolant flow to keep the reactor stable.
“The test, therefore, was to determine if residual steam pressure and the rotational inertia of the turbines could cover the gap and keep the coolant pumps operating at sufficient speed.”
“But that’s still something they should have figured out even before they built this alchemic abomination! Any such gap is unacceptable, and you don’t try to test theoretical fixes like that on a live process!” Twilight reeled.
“Unfortunately again, meeting deadlines and other arbitrary goals were often prioritized over safety in the Soviet Union. So shortcuts were often taken, both in terms of materials and procedures.” Celestia bowed her head. “In this case, the test had already been performed repeatedly, but unsuccessfully at other plants, and thus the potential danger remained. Their management and government demanded a successful test so they could declare the issue fixed, so they simply tweaked the system as well as the terms of the test, and tried again.”
“But… that’s…” Twilight couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “Insane!”
“There was nothing sane about what happened here, my student.” Celestia sighed again. “And the oversights you have already spotted were but the start of a very long chain of events that led to this disaster. Another such event was that the reactor was to be partially powered down and reduced to a low output state for the terms of the test.”
Twilight blinked. “Lower power? But that doesn’t sound dangerous!”
“It would not have been, except there was a failure at another, non-nuclear power plant that meant this plant would have to remain in operation to cover the gap in electrical generation during peak evening demand. That, in turn, meant that the test would have to be postponed.”
Twilight blinked again. “So what’s wrong with postponing it a day or a week…?”
“Nothing, except that they were under intense pressure to perform the test as scheduled. The plant managers wanted to be able to report success when their superiors came to work the next day.
“So instead of postponing it as you suggest, or at least waiting until the day shift workers who had trained to do the test would return, the night shift was ordered to do it—after the reactor had been left in a lower-power state all day.”
“So they were under needless pressure and untrained in the test procedure?” Twilight couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
“Yes. Now, as you may recall from your alchemic studies, when Arcanocite decays, it does so into several other volatile elements. And one of them—what we call ‘Nightglow’ and what humans call Xenon-135—tended to ‘poison’ the reactor and lower its power level further.”
“Yes… yes, I remember that!” Twilight distantly recalled, a chain of events beginning to crystalize in her head; her thoughts starting to race ahead of her mentor’s explanation. “Nightglow is useful for some lighting applications once properly alchemically treated and stabilized. But too much Nightglow renders Arcanocite, if not inert, much less reactive. So they had to get rid of it first to run a proper test.”
“Precisely. At a high enough energy output from the Arcanocite, the Nightglow itself burns off, removing the restriction. But after being left in a lower power state all day, the Nightglow was present in large quantities, quenching the reaction further and preventing the test parameters—the minimum power level—from being reached.”
“So they tried to bring up the power via other means,” Twilight guessed, gulping again. “But how?”
“It goes back to that odd grid you saw in the control center.” Celestia smiled at her student’s deduction. “You were indeed correct as to its importance. Each light and button on that grid represented a single ‘control rod’ that covered a small sector of the nuclear ‘pile’, as humans call it, where the Arcanocite was present.
“In very simple terms, the Arcanocite was not a solid mass, but it had a series of slots through which these rods could be inserted and through which cooling water could circulate. Those rods were the primary methods of slowing or accelerating the reaction—fully lowered meant the former while fully raised meant the latter, and each rod could be raised or lowered independently of the others.
“So they began both deliberately reducing coolant water flow and raising the rods in an attempt to boost the reactor power to the point that nearly all the rods had been removed. They even disabled the automated control and cooling systems, violating many safety protocols in the process.”
Twilight wanted to bury her head in her hooves. “Had they no sense at all?”
“Some of it was carelessness. Some of it was governmental pressure. But some of it was simple ignorance. The plant workers believed that disaster was impossible—they had been assured, after all, that the reactor design was foolproof and catastrophic failure could not happen,” Celestia reminisced. “At first, it wasn’t working—the Xenon was simply too thick. But then, all at once, it changed.
“The Xenon began burning off quickly, and suddenly the core temperature spiked dangerously high. The exact sequence of events remains in dispute to this day, but what cannot be disputed is that through a series of very poor decisions that were brought about by unconscionable negligence and carelessness, the reactor went out of control as they attempted to conduct the test. Disaster was imminent… unless, perhaps, the crew used their last resort.”
“Last… resort?” Twilight’s head came up, half-hopefully.
“This, like all nuclear reactors, had a failsafe—an emergency shutdown measure the Soviets called AZ-5 that could be used if a meltdown or explosion was deemed imminent. A button that, if pushed, would result in all control rods being lowered at once, thus quenching the Arcanocite reaction from within, making it cool down and retreat from the brink of disaster,” she explained.
“It was the correct decision. And it might even have worked. But unfortunately… this particular type of reactor had an additional design flaw that was in fact known, but never addressed.”
“Wh-what?”
“The control rods I speak of consisted of two parts—graphite, which accelerated the Arcanocite reaction and thus increased its power output, and boron, which conversely reduced it. The ratio of those two elements plus a steady supply of water was required to regulate the pace of the reaction, and the ratio was in turn set by how many rods were raised or lowered into the pile.
“But the design flaw was that in order for the dampening boron parts of the control rods to be reinserted, the graphite would have to enter first,” she explained, as Twilight listened to the damning description of events, completely stunned and unable to understand how anyone could be so incredibly stupid.
“Under normal circumstances, this would not have caused anything more than a fleeting spike in power before the boron took effect, but unfortunately… you may recall that they had withdrawn nearly all the control rods in an effort to boost sluggish power in time for their test, which was both unnecessary and in violation of all safety protocols for the unstable state that the reactor was in.
“As a result, their failsafe turned into a detonator. The graphite took effect first and super-accelerated the reaction; the heat it generated flashing the remaining cooling water to steam and pressurizing the system far past what it was designed to withstand. The result… was not one, but two explosions. The first was a steam explosion that ruptured the pile’s containment vessel, blocking the rods from being lowered any further. At that point, air rushed in, igniting the pile.
“It was shortly thereafter that the second explosion occurred, perhaps resulting from the cooling water devolving into a highly volatile mix of hydrogen and oxygen from the unimaginable heat. It blew the roof off and vented both Arcanocite dust and highly contaminated pieces of the control rods onto the roof and immediate area. And then...” She bowed her head.
Twilight could only too vividly fill in the blanks from there. “And then, with nothing left to check it, the remaining part of the ‘pile’ began burning at temperatures too high to fathom and shortly melted; the rapidly rising smoke and gasses it produced releasing even more contamination high into the air! It then settled all throughout this area, poisoning everything—and everyone—within!” Tears began to well in her eyes as the terrible truth was finally made clear.
“And as long as the fire raged unchecked, still more contamination was released! And worse, this wasn’t a fire you could put out with water!” She remembered that much from her alchemic lessons, including time she had spent with Zecora.
“Correct again, my student,” Celestia acknowledged. “When the meltdown occurred, the Arcanocite turned molten and flowed, breaking free of its housing and spilling downwards through these pipes that originally served to cool it and collect its heat to turn into electricity—this is but the most prominent deposit of it; there are several others throughout this facility.
“I need not tell you that the hotter it is, the more dangerous it becomes, and when it was first deposited, to be in its presence for mere seconds would have been sufficient to kill even a fully-shielded unicorn,” she noted idly, causing Twilight to instinctively burrow deeper into her mentor’s protective aura.
“Over time it has cooled and lost much of its potency, but even now, were you to stay here for but half a day outside of my shield, exposure could still be fatal. And thus, we will not linger here. For I fear there are limits to what even my protective spell can restrain.”
“But the Arcanocite fire... how did they put it out?” Twilight’s desire to know warred with her urge to flee.
“A good question,” Celestia granted. “They were forced to risk the lives of pilots to airdrop a mixture of sand and boron on the pile in an attempt to gradually smother the fire and slow the reaction. Those flying vehicles you saw were used in the effort, and thus, too contaminated to be used afterwards.
“Whether by those efforts or simply by its own cooling, it was two weeks before the fire was out and further radioactive release finally ceased. But by that point... the damage was done. Surrounding forests turned red and died beneath the plume the plant emitted; animals and humans alike likewise fell ill… or worse.”
“How… how many died?” Twilight sat down heavily, her mind reeling, having to ask even as she was terrified of the answer.
“Not known,” Celestia answered honestly, her voice solemn again. “At least one plant worker was slain in the initial explosion of the pile, which blew apart its containment vessel and then allowed the second explosion to destroy the building and scatter its deadly debris. The Soviet government then covered up the accident and its costs, later admitting only to several dozen deaths, mostly among the plant workers and the firefighters who initially responded to the explosions.
“And there again, is why you saw fire engines in that vehicle graveyard. They were summoned to put out the outside fires the explosion ignited, and fought it without any protection or knowledge of what they were facing, pouring water on the flames even as large pieces of red-hot and highly contaminated graphite from the destroyed control rods lay all around them.
“Within hours to days, many had fallen gravely ill from acute radiation poisoning, as humans call it,” Celestia explained as tears now openly rolled down Twilight’s cheeks.
“The effects of Arcanocite emissions are cumulative with exposure, resulting in progressively worse cellular damage over time. And even if the emission level is not strong enough to kill you directly, a constant low-level dose dramatically raises the odds of various maladies in the future. The true death toll remains in deep dispute, and all but impossible to research given the secrecy of the Soviet Union. But it is possible that thousands of early deaths were the result of the contamination here, due in large part to a delayed evacuation.”
“D-Delayed…?” Twilight choked out, having thought there was no way this story could horrify her any worse.
This time, it was Celestia who hesitated, sensing her student had heard about as much as she could stomach. “Yes. Delayed,” she confirmed, deciding there was no point in sugar-coating it. “The authorities were slow to realize what had happened here, both because their underlings were afraid to report failure, and because they simply did not believe that this type of reactor could suffer such a catastrophe.
“Even the surviving reactor crew was in denial for a time, as their radiation-measuring instruments—called dosimeters—either did not function or gave readings that were so high they simply could not fathom they were accurate.
“As a result… false reports were sent up the chain and an unconscionable amount of time—36 hours—elapsed before the order to evacuate was given,” the Princess explained in some visible disgust, causing Twilight to give a choked sob. “The results… you can well imagine.
“The residents of Pripyat and other nearby towns began taking ill when the nuclear ‘fallout’ bathed them for an extended period, slowly poisoning them. When the magnitude of the disaster was finally understood, it was too late. And the residents—everyone within roughly twenty miles, in fact—were indeed forced to drop everything and flee as you surmised.”
Twilight openly wept as Celestia offered her a comforting wing, at which point her student buried her face in her mentor’s glowing mane. Another half-minute passed before Twilight finally found the ability to speak once more. “No government should ever fail their people so miserably! And no system of governance should ever prioritize their bucking image over the safety and security of their citizens!” Her emotions roiled, she couldn’t bite off the curse, even in the presence of her mentor.
“On that, we agree, my student.” Celestia nuzzled her, unperturbed by the outburst. “But they did. And the radiation was not confined to the evacuation zone. In fact, the accident was only exposed to the outside world when radiation alarms were triggered at nuclear power plants in adjacent nations, where small but measurable amounts of the contamination had been blown by the prevailing winds.”
Twilight’s head came up sharply from where it had been pressed against her mentor’s foreleg. “Wait—then there are more of these abominable power plants?”
“Nearly four hundred worldwide,” Celestia admitted, causing Twilight to cringe. “But though there have been a few accidents over the years, their failsafes have proven almost uniformly sufficient to prevent such catastrophes. This is the only plant to have suffered a disaster of this magnitude, with such a wide release of radiation. There was another meltdown at a coastal plant eight years ago caused by a severe earthquake and tsunami, but the radioactive release there was but a tenth of this.”
“I’ve heard enough.” Twilight’s shoulders slumped in defeat, feeling sick to her stomach as her legs threatened to buckle. “No more, Princess. Please take me away from here,” she begged, suddenly entertaining thoughts of heading back to Equestria as soon as she could, never to return to Earth again regardless of the friends—and more—she had made there, fearing her image of humanity was now forever tainted just as badly as their surroundings.
“Very well,” Celestia draped a wing over her student. “I understand it is a great deal to absorb at once. So let us leave the way we came. And you will be relieved to know that we do not have to completely retrace our steps. Once we are far enough away, I will teleport us out. We will leave the area soon, but before we depart this land, there is one last place I wish us to visit. And this time, it is a place that I feel you will appreciate seeing.”
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Correction for Twilight not Firesight.
9761965
Correction accepted!
Tsunami, tidal waves are different things with different causes, tend to be less destructive then a tsunami.
9779276
Corrected, thanks.
"So to answer a scroll Spike sent me shortly after one of your lessons, yes. It is possible for something to explode twice. And I truly wish it weren't."
9854181
I went to laugh at this... but then the reality hit me and I felt sadness instead.
9923987
It's not a happy tale, but at least some of the eventual outcomes were, as Celestia later explains to Twilight.
The idea that Celestia can withstand radiation because of her connection to the sun was also used by AlexWarlorn in the TCB Not Just Ponies series. And in the story the 2 sides of Daring Do which I believe was commissioned by AlexWarlorn.
10035665
I was told by prereaders it wasn't an original idea, and I got shared a couple of those stories. I wasn't aware of them at the time. I actually got the idea myself from the FoE series, where Alicorn drones seem to thrive on magical radiation. I just decided that wasn't far removed from nuclear radiation, and it made sense for Celly to be powered by it. The only thing I made sure of was that nuclear Fusion like happens in the sun also releases neutrons. It does. At that point, I decided that was good enough for me.
10035831
As I'm responsible for this info bit being attached to Firesight's assumptions about Fallout Equestria (Firesight has not read it), I feel it's worth expanding on alicorns and how they relate to Kkat's fictional masterpiece as well as correct some errata that's sprung up from my misunderstanding of the work.
The first and most important thing to say here is alicorns are *not* specifically powered by or charged up by radiation. The alicorn drones are based on the super mutants from the popular Fallout series of games which forms the dominant part of Fallout Equestria's universe — the subservient part of the crossover AU which serves as the story's vehicle, being formed by the established lore of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic season 1.
I'm going to spoiler the next part because anyone who hasn't read Fallout Equestria already really should, if they can handle the dark stuff, and I don't want to spoil anything.
Super Mutants were created by the government in both Fallout and FoE in a series of experiments that frankly don't make a whole lot of sense when you think about it logically. I blame Fallout 3 for utterly ruining the lore. But the basic idea is these guys can survive the harsh realities of a world gripped by nuclear fallout, ruined infrastructure and poisoned earth. Their leader, The Master — called The Trixie Goddess in FoE — sees mutants as the master race who are destined to become the new rulers of Earth as humans are now on the bottom of the food chain in a world of twisted abominations and cannibal anarchists. Their bodies were augmented with mad science gene therapy giving them superhuman abilities and in many cases, uncontrollable aggression.
While the alicorns are a bit more girl fantasy horse in their magical ability, the idea is the same. Their extraordinary abilities come from the mad science which created them as opposed to external radiation.
The reason each thrives in radiation is because humans (and ponies) suffer under the effects of radiation, making radioactive places safe for mutants (and alicorns) to occupy with minimal concern for their safety.
Now, there is a race that thrives on radiation in Fallout and Fallout Equestria called 'ghouls' that were granted virtual immortality under radiation's effects for unknown reasons after The Nuclear Apocolypse, living hundreds of years after the great disaster at the cost of their skin and the odd body part here and there. While their bodies retain their form despite their long age, many have succumbed to madness and a drive to hunt and kill humans.
Now we get to my part in this confusion.
I read Fallout Equestria back in 2014. It was what made me a brony. Thing is, I hadn't played the games at all and so I walked into the story completely blindsided by the death and horror that awaited me. This initial impression of the story was thus that of an OC work and I formed a number of inaccurate impressions in this time about... well, everything to do with Fallout Equestria!
In hindsight, it probably made me over-appraise the quality of both its author and the work itself since Kkat was basing much of the plot and storyline on two already existing intellectual properties instead of just My Little Pony but I digress.
Fast-forward to 2016 and I've started doing long-form commentary on the story itself. About half of the way through, I stop and buy Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas. The comments are taking forever to get through and it isn't until 2019 (!) when I finally complete my second readthrough, now complete with commentary posts.
An aside but no less a woman that Kkat herself PM'd me and personally thanked me for the 100+ hours of effort this commentary entailed. I was honored to be thanked by one I have so much respect for and still do to this day.
Before I've even completed this readthrough, I wrote my own story based on my own fragmented knowledge and experience with this over 600,000-word epic and get the concept behind ghouls (powered by radiation) and alicorns (thrive in radiation absent meddlesome humans with guns) and this weird fusion between the two concepts is formed. The real issue is there's a chapter in FoE with a giant alicorn that takes residence inside of a crater filled with radioactivity. I guess I connected the two when in reality it's just a Fallout 3 reference to really huge mutants that run around doing things like whacking people with utility poles and such. Yeah...
So that's my story and I'm sticking to it. Sorry for the misunderstanding, sensei!
Fallout Equestria rules!
It is. There was nothing sane about Chernobyl.
11382527
As both the show itself and Celly stated, yep. And now that Twilight fully understands, it’s time for Celly to wrap up this history lesson with a message of hope that balances the bad with the good.