Fallout Equestria: Blue Destiny

by MagnetBolt

Chapter 104: Spiridus

My wings beat at the air. I’d been flying for a long time - nopony was going to lend me a Vertibuck today and it wouldn’t have been a good idea anyway. The skywagon I was pulling along was heavy, but it was also silent. A Vertibuck’s engines were so loud a pony could hear them from miles away in the open air, and we couldn’t afford to be seen or heard right now.

“We’re getting close,” I warned.

It was just ahead of us, the place where all this had started. I mean, sort of. I guess it depended on how you counted ‘where it all started’ because arguably it had started with my mom and dad meeting a little over twenty years ago. Or when Princess Celestia had created the sun. Or something. Theology had never been part of my education back home.

The point was, my life had turned into a mess at the Smokestack, the volcano where the Exodus Blue had crashed down right after the war started. A lot had happened since then to both of us. I’d gotten shot in the head and infected with micromachines, the volcano had exploded. You’d think that meant I was doing better than the Smokestack, but since I’d been gone, it had gone through a real makeover.

Before we talk about that, let me give you a little explanation of how I got here. Again.

---

“It’s all over,” Klein Bottle said. The short, stocky, and drunk pegasus mare tossed back another gulp of cheap cloud potato vodka that tasted mostly like a medicine cabinet. I knew how it tasted because I was working on my own bottle. Both of us were watching ponies trying to salvage whatever they could from what was left of our improvised rocket program.

My own half-sister had burned it all to the ground. The fire had been so hot that even some of the metal had melted into slag.

“There have to be more parts somewhere,” I said.

“It doesn’t matter,” Klein groaned. “This was already a long shot, and with how many ponies are dead, they’ll never try again! It was crazy and it’s amazing you even got them to try it once!”

“There has to be something,” I mumbled. “No matter how bad things are, there’s always a way through as long as you don’t give up.”

“Maybe the way through is just suing for peace and minimizing the damage,” Klein Bottle said. “Chamomile, the last pony who wanted to fight to the bitter end and got me to do crazy rocket stuff was Unsung, and she… she was just using me to get revenge.”

I stopped with the bottle at my lips and looked at Klein. She wiped tears from her eyes.

“I don’t want you to be like her,” she whispered. “I don’t want to be the stupid pony that fell for it twice.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. I pulled her into a hug. “I didn’t even realize…”

“I know you were trying to help ponies,” Klein mumbled into my side.

“That’s what I told myself,” I said, looking up at the burned-out hulk of the hangar. The roof was just gone, turned into a localized storm to stop the fire within. It was wide open to the sky. The orbital weapons could have turned the place into a crater if Cozy Glow wanted. She was telling us that this was enough. She had more than warsats, she had friends, and they were strong enough that we couldn’t stop them.

“You’re not going to want to switch sides,” Klein said, sniffling and pulling away. “But we could still run away. I made pretty good money doing salvage and repairs! You could probably get a job as a caravan guard or mercenary or just go around punching raiders for fun. We’d never even see any of this again.”

“If it wasn’t for Destiny I’d find that awfully tempting,” I admitted. “She’s still stuck somewhere on the Exodus Red. I have to save her. I just have absolutely no idea how I’m gonna do that.”

“You could just fly up to it and punch it in the snout,” Klein joked.

“If I could do that, I’d be there. I don’t think I can get close enough without warsats seeing me and taking me out. As long as they’ve got that kind of artillery coverage, nothing can get close to the Exodus Red.”

“Maybe you can throw wave after wave of ponies at the enemy until they run out of shots,” Klein Bottle joked.

“That was my plan B, but nopony wanted to test it out. It’s sort of risky when we don’t know if she has a dozen warsat shots left or a thousand. There are basically no records left from the war.” I shrugged.

“It makes me wonder why she waited this long,” Klein said. “She’s from before the war. The warsats are from before the war. She could have tried taking over any time in the last century and a half and it wouldn’t have been any more difficult for her.”

“Something must have changed, but I don’t know what,” I admitted. “Maybe it has something to do with SIVA…”

“Hm?”

“Well, Polar Orbit was funding my mom’s dig at the crash site of the Exodus Blue, and she was there looking specifically for the SIVA core. She must have learned about it from their connections on the Exodus Red and…” I trailed off.

“What is it?” Klein asked.

“If Cozy Glow had working SIVA she wouldn’t have needed to fund the dig at the wreck of the Blue. That’s what changed. Something they found let them unlock the SIVA core! That must be how they got their ponies into space, too! They had SIVA grow the rockets from scratch - they already had designs for them since BrayTech made ICBMs!”

“One mystery solved, I guess,” Klein shrugged.

“Unless we can grow our own,” I mumbled.

“Don’t even think it,” she warned. “I am not going to work with untested crazy pre-war tech! Rockets are bad enough when you understand what every part does, if you start mixing in micromachines and mad science you end up with a worse disaster than… than all this!”

“You’re probably right,” I conceded. “It’s too bad we can’t borrow a rocket from the Exodus Red. They must have a hangar full of them.”

“They’re not launching them from the ship,” Klein said. I looked over at her. She shook her head. “You need a stable launch platform. Even the base here wouldn’t really be good enough, my plan was to move our rocket in parts to a mountain. You need solid ground to build the rocket stack and launch tower.”

“Why a mountain?” I asked. “Oh. Duh. Because it’s higher.”

“That barely matters. Orbital dynamics is about speed, not height. The real problem is the lightning shield. You don’t want to launch a rocket through something like that. Try it and boom! Nopony goes to space today. No, you’d have to use a mountain.”

“The Enclave controls pretty much every mountain that pokes up above the clouds,” I said. “And when I say the Enclave, I mean Neighvarro, not Thunderhead.”

“There has to be somewhere. Some forgotten spot way out, worthless for farming and without a Stable or anything from the pre-war days. Something Thunderhead knows about that it could try and keep secret.”

“The only place I can think of like that is the Smokestack,” I said.

---

“I can’t believe you were right,” Klein said. We’d put the skywagon down on the far side of the mountain and dragged a camouflage tarp over it, black and grey against the volcanic rock of the Smokestack.

“Hey, I’m not a total idiot,” I protested. “Just most of one.”

We could see the building from here. A spire of metal that gleamed in the red light of flowing magma. The stronghold was exquisitely tall and didn’t look like anything ponies could have built, like it had half-grown and half-crystallized out of the rocks at the command of an alien master, all strange angles and polygons, simple shapes jumbled together into a stronghold of metal and glass.

It was tall enough for us to see over the crater, and it was definitely some kind of launch tower.

“Those big domes,” Klein nodded to geodesic spheres half-buried in rock. “Those must be cryogenic storage for fuel. This place is massive!”

“They must have slapped it together really quickly,” I noted. “Last time I was here this mountain exploded. Even if it’s been a few years it’s hard to imagine ponies coming right back.”

“We could never have matched this with scavenged parts and a couple of amateur rocketmares,” Klein sighed. “Seeing all of this just… it makes me feel silly we even tried.”

“I think you could have made it work.”

“I probably would have gotten some ponies killed,” Klein Bottle corrected, shrugging modestly. “But part of me is sorry I didn’t even get to try.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll get to try out all sort of things today,” I promised. “So how’s our special package?”

“You mean your insane idea?” Klein asked. “You realize it was never designed for a pegasus, right?”

She pulled open the skywagon’s back hatch. Since she’d been the only pony inside it had meant plenty of room for the special equipment I’d requisitioned. That was probably the wrong term for it. Command had been happy to get rid of me. It was more like a bribe to go cause trouble for the enemy instead of them.

And it wasn’t like anypony else up here wanted what I’d requested. Filthy salvage taken out of the wreckage of a lab. Unsuitable and dangerous to be around. Also almost certainly cursed.

A suit of Steel Ranger armor stood in the back of the skywagon. It had been one of the monsters that attacked the lab where I’d picked up the Dimension Pliers during the whole mess at Winterhoof. Klein Bottle had repaired the most intact suit of armor from the undead knights and modified it. The back looked like it belonged to a changeling, with a beetle’s shell covering new holes made for wings.

“It should work fine,” I said. “You checked the mechanism, right?”

“I’m not worried about the hydraulics. If you want to go stomping around like a tin soldier you’ll do great! It also weighs close to a quarter of a ton. You can’t fly in this, Chamomile.”

“I’ll manage.” I didn’t want to admit I was putting on a lot of weight. I was getting pretty close to a quarter ton myself. There was one little thing I was actually worried about. I reached out and touched the armor and a chill ran down my spine.

It was absolutely one-hundred-percent chance cursed and probably tainted by ancient primordial darkness. The eyes lit up, glowing radon green, the same balefire shade as the necromatic magic the zebra shamans had used.

“The one thing I can’t figure out is why the operating system keeps throwing weird messages and errors,” Klein Bottle said. She picked up a wrench and smacked the helmet. The glow in the eyes faded.

“Suit’s haunted,” I said.

“Don’t be stupid, there’s…” she paused. “Yeah okay. It might be haunted.”

“Help me put it on.”

---

The Steel Ranger armor had a really weird heads-up display. I was used to having Destiny take care of the small stuff for me, so having a ton of range and status information crowding my vision made me feel oddly lonely.

Also there were a bunch of ominous runes flashing in the corners of my vision and the radio was talking to me.

“...swallow them in darkness…” a voice hissed in my ear. I tried to ignore it. I was walking up to what had been the front gate of the prison complex a few years ago. There were still remnants of the old place, shipping containers and supplies and cooled magma from the eruption.

The armor didn’t feel nearly as heavy as I’d expected. In fact, the second I saw one of the armored Thunderhead ponies, their power armor trimmed with fancy gold details, strength seemed to flow into me. I tamped it down as much as I could. I remembered what it had felt like to be possessed by the evil soul-eating sword. It had been… well it had felt really great actually, but then I’d tried to murder everyone around me.

“Halt! Who the buck are you?!” one of the two guards at the entrance said. I focused on him and the armor zoomed in, giving me a good look at his confused face. The voice in my ear whispered for me to rip him apart.

The funny thing was, that was already my plan anyway.

“Hi!” I said cheerfully, trotting closer. “I’m attacking your rocket base!”

They looked at each other.

“By yourself?” the first one asked.

“What, you think I need permission from my parents?” I asked. I hit the jury-rigged switch in the helmet and the back of the armor opened up, freeing my wings. I flapped hard and--

Got an inch off the ground before crashing back down.

“Huh,” I mumbled. I tried again, straining. If I tried as hard as possible, I was just able to get into the air, but it was like galloping at a dead sprint. I slammed back onto my hooves, already breathing heavily.

“Uh…” the two armored soldiers circled closer. “Are you okay?”

“Hold on a sec,” I said, holding up a hoof. “This thing is a lot heavier than it looks.”

“Yeah, how about you take it off and come with us and we’ll take you to a nice comfortable prison cell with a glass of water?” They both aimed their long beam rifles. It would have been a great time to have a grenade launcher or rockets. Unfortunately, the mounts had been removed so I wouldn’t have to cut off my wings to fit into the armor.

“...rip and tear…”

“Right, okay,” I agreed. I flicked my left hoof, and the power blade I’d stolen from Tetra unfolded on its brace. The two soldiers reacted right away, faster than I could. When I’d been taking slow steps I hadn’t really noticed it, but the armor was slow. There was a delay in the reaction time. I pushed, the armor felt me pushing, and then it moved with me. I stopped, and it tried to keep going. Every motion had to be big and deliberate.

Beams of arcane energy hit me, a half dozen times before I was able to catch myself and finish my swing through empty air.

The lasers just bounced off me. I didn’t feel the impacts at all. Not that they had much stopping power to begin with, but there was no heat, no transfer of force. Nothing. They might as well have been using water guns.

I almost forgot how strong the undead Steel Rangers had been. I leaned into the armor and lunged at the soldiers, building up speed and running through the gunfire, turning my gallop into a jump at the last moment. A swing that would have gone low caught the first soldier in the chest.

The power sword bit into him and didn’t let go. The armor blasted apart, the edges forced aside like jaws opening up, blood spraying into the air and sizzling, already boiling. The pony screamed. The energy field around it flickered between blue and unhealthy, evil green. For a second I felt it, that sickening, sweet feeling of a soul being cut apart. I ripped the sword back, too late. I’d meant to kill him, sure, but there were worse things than just being dead.

“Oh buck, oh--” I swore, then landed badly and stumbled, my hooves hitting fragile volcanic rock and crunching through.

“You monster!” The other guard slammed into my back and fired at point-blank range, riding my blind spot. The worst thing was I was pretty sure I’d done this to one of the undead knights too, and it had worked really well!

I heard the rifle going off right into the back of my head. I tried to throw him off, but he was able to get into the air and land again right where I couldn’t see them. I was going to have to be extremely clever and think of a way to--

I hit the armor release button in my helmet and it popped the panels on my back. I hadn’t meant to do that but Klein had put the button in a weird spot. The pony on my back fell to the side, and I stumbled at the same time, feeling like i was being pulled by an unseen force, the armor twisting with some glitch or unseen--

“...kill maim burn…”

Oh right. It was haunted. My left hoof moved, I tried to keep my balance, and the sword came down through the belly and spine of the pony, the power field shorting and sparking and tearing at the pegasus. I tried to get the sword free and it was like a chainsaw, cutting the poor stallion in half.

He looked down at himself, then back up at me, then gasped for a few more moments, each one of them way too long.

“Sorry,” I whispered.

He gurgled and didn’t say much after that. I felt a chill run down my spine. The blade in my hoof rumbled, purring like a pleased kitten.

“Maybe I shouldn’t be wearing the ancient cursed armor,” I conceded. It was way too late for me to actually take it off and try something else. Probably. Alarms were going off across the base. The ponies must have radioed in.

“...death…”

“That’s getting real old,” I sighed. “I miss Destiny. She was a nice ghost.” I toggled the radio, trying to get somepony else on the line. “Klein? Can you hear me? Where are you? I thought you were gonna follow me in?”

She didn’t answer, but that was okay because while I was walking inside I got distracted. Something big and square and glowing rose up in a glow of magic that tingled through my chest and across my nerves.

The Grandus glared down at me.

“Oh no,” my brain said to me. “We’re in trouble.”

“Got any ideas?” I asked it.

My brain shrugged. “You’ve never listened to me before.”

“Good point,” I admitted.

“Skulls?” the evil dark spirit inside my armor suggested. It was surprisingly clear, and also sounded concerned.

The Grandus fired. A spray of anti-armor lasers exploded out of the chest armor, magical beams raking across stone and ash. A cloud of debris blasted into the air around me, and I felt the ancient cursed barding around me flash as hot as a kettle where I took glancing blows.

Before the dark dust had even fallen out of the air, I’d taken to the sky, avoiding a second shot. Every second I was flying while wearing the armor felt like trying to lift an impossible burden. The Steel Ranger armor hadn’t been built for a pegasus and it felt like it resented me having the gall to wear it. If I didn’t know better I’d think it was getting heavier by the moment on purpose.

My graceful ascent was more like a ballistic arc, and it was a good thing I didn’t have to go far to enact my plan.

“Four!” I shouted, slamming into the Grandus’ face. The armored head-slash-cockpit was as big as I was, and I knew who’d be inside. I just had to feel her out with that same magical connection we’d shared before. She didn’t recognize me because of the armor, but once she felt my presence, she’d stop shooting!

Nothing happened for a long moment. Then a longer moment. There was a magical aura around the machine, blue-violet on the edge of visibility, like a flame fueled by alcohol. It felt empty. There was power, but no person.

“Uh…” I hesitated. “Four? Are you in there?”

The machine rumbled and there was an ethereal roar in the air. It was like whalesong.

“She’s not in there,” my brain told me. “We’re gonna die.”

I let go and slid down the face of the machine, dropping off the edge and hitting the ground running. I went straight under the Grandus. Whoever was in the thing wasn’t nearly as good at piloting it as Four had been - she would have used the Thaumobooster and her telekinesis to fling me aside or tear me apart or something. If nothing else, she would have slammed straight down into me to flatten me like a pancake instead of trying to turn in the air to follow me when I ran behind the giant machine.

I scurried over the ridge, taking another big blast from behind that sent me sprawling, the beams cutting into the old, cursed metal. I swore, feeling splatters of molten steel hit my flank where the beams burned right through.

A pool of dirty water was right ahead of me. I rolled down the hill and splashed into it, the magical beams hitting the volcanic lake and creating plumes of steam. I let myself go down deep, falling into the water and sinking immediately, my armor instantly cooling with the sound of popping and cracking metal.

It wasn’t deep, only a little above my head. I took a cautious breath. The armor was still sealed, but the moment it switched over to the internal air it smelled like burned hair and rot. I gagged but I was also grateful it worked at all. The undead horrors who’d used it before I had didn’t have any need for fresh air, and it was a crapshoot that it worked at all.

I stayed down there for a few minutes, just waiting and watching the surface above my head. The shadow of the Grandus passed over me and… kept going. I waited a little more.

“Do you hear me?” a voice came over the radio. “Chamomile?”

“I’m here,” I whispered, as if I really needed to whisper. Nopony was going to hear me unless seaponies had invaded the Enclave looking to take me back for a second war crimes trial.

“It’s Klein,” she said. “I saw you splash into the water. I’m pretty close to you. I found another way into the base.”

“Good,” I said. “I think the front door is out. Where do I meet you?”

---

“Trust me, leave the armor there,” Klein said. “The batteries are low and it needs time to self-repair.”

Now that I’d gotten it off, I could see what the Grandus had done to the old Steel Ranger suit. It looked halfway between a shot from a scattergun and a burn from lava. It had felt like it, too.

“We might regret not having it,” I said. I gave the armor one last look before following Klein up the ladder of what was clearly a very new drainage system leading to the lake I’d been in before. Or more accurately, the pool of wastewater from the base.

“You’d be amazed at how much you can get done without being shot at,” Klein said, rolling her eyes. She helped me through a hatch sized more for a pony like her than a pony like me. I squeezed through and took a look around where it had led us.

It was a utility room, with pumps and pipes and a lot of dials. It all looked brand new. More than that, it didn’t look like something built by ponies. For ponies, maybe, but not by them. It resembled the constructions in Limbo by the Exodus White, all strangely organic. The pipes looked like veins, subtly curving and free of any seams or joins.

“This is really weird,” Klein Bottle said. She put a hoof on the wall, looking at it closely. “It sort of looks like wood. There’s a grain structure…”

“It was made by SIVA micromachines,” I said. I was sure of it. It was distant, but I could feel a trace of the signal. There was no beating, living heart to it. When she’d said it was like wood she’d been right about that. It was a fossil in the same way the core of a tree was, the hardened, dead center.

“What does that mean for us?” she asked.

“Maybe that’s the real reason they came here. These rocks were lousy with SIVA. It was starting to grow out of the ground like a fungus. They must have found a way to program it.” I shook my head. “This is exactly the kind of thing Destiny always wanted to do with it.”

“Is that why they kidnapped her like you said?”

“No, they built this way before they took her. They had enough time to get ponies into orbit. You said if you had the time you would have spent a lot longer with a rocket program, right?”

“Years at least,” Klein confirmed.

“They’ve had almost three since this place cooled down after the eruption,” I said. “And I bet that volcano is great for a geothermal power source.” I shook my head. “Okay. Let me think.”

I walked over to the hatch and pressed my head against it, listening. It was a single piece of thin metal and conducted sound well. Even if it didn’t, I could feel ponies coming. I waited until they got a little closer and knocked on the hatch.

I felt and heard confusion. I knocked again. They got closer. I took a step back. The hatch opened. Two confused ponies looked in at me.

“Hey,” I said, before grabbing each of them by the collar and pulling them inside, slamming their heads together to daze them for long enough to finish the job. Walls and the floor are an excellent bludgeoning tool, but I had to be somewhat careful.

I didn’t want to get blood on my new uniform.

---

“It’s a little big,” Klein mumbled.

“And mine is tight in all the wrong places,” I mumbled back. “Just try to act like you belong.”

We trotted through the base. Somepony had been thoughtful enough to hang up signs, which was good because every hallway and room looked the same. Whoever had designed the stupid place had just copied the same area over and over again. It gave the base an almost dream-like feeling, with the shining silver chrome everywhere, tinged with blue and only a few details from ponies.

It was like a machine, something meant for industry, and the small touches like the signs and banners and furniture were all out of place. A bunch of ponies squatting in an alien engine’s piston chambers.

I was starting to think this was a mistake when I felt it. A spark.

I stopped in my tracks and walked back the way we came, taking a different path.

“Where are you going?” Klein hissed. “The sign says--”

“This way,” I said. I turned the next corner, and a door opened, sliding into the wall. A thin unicorn mare stepped out into the hallway, looking confused. My heart jumped in my chest. “Four.”

“Chamomile?” she asked weakly. She looked exhausted. I looked both ways, then ran over to her. She smiled and hugged me.

“You’re okay?” I asked.

“I’m a little out of it,” she admitted. “You look great! How have you been? I can’t remember the last time I saw you!”

“...Stormreach,” I said.

“Stormreach?” she asked, looking confused. “I don’t remember that. Are you confused? Come on, let me get you a drink.”

Klein Bottle ran over, joining us as we ducked into the room. Four’s quarters looked like the contents of a hotel room dumped out of a shipping container and mostly left where they landed. Cardboard boxes and cheap cloud furniture were in a rough circle that took up half the room, clustered together against the cold, empty expanse of metal and trying to make it seem at least a little cosy right there.

Four walked over, humming to herself tunelessly, like she was switching from one song to another with every step. She pulled open a fridge and produced some ice-cold cans.

“Do you like guava?” she asked. She frowned, her brow furrowing. “Why can’t I remember if you like guava? I should know this!”

“It’s never come up before,” I said quickly, trying to keep her from getting upset. She seemed so exhausted that she was only one bad moment from having a screaming fit or passing out. “I don’t know if I ever had it.”

“Really?” she asked, relieved. “Try it! It’s good. I like it. It tastes pink.”

“That sounds good,” I agreed. I took the can and had a sip. It tasted generically tart and tropical in that sort of weird unidentifiable way. Maybe the trick to making something taste tropical and exotic was just a lot of sugar substitutes and flavors that didn’t match anything in nature.

“Can I have one?” Klein asked gingerly.

Four scowled at her for a moment, then smiled. “Sure! Here you go.” She gave Klein Bottle a can, and we all sat down on the cheap, thin carpet.

“So, uh,” I coughed. “I’m really glad you’re okay, Four,” I started. “I guess we have a lot we should talk about.”

“Oh yeah!” She realized. “There was something I wanted to tell you!” She stood up, opened her mouth to speak, then stopped. She looked concerned. “It’s on the tip of my tongue,” she mumbled.

“When’s the last time you got a decent night’s sleep?” Klein asked. Even she could tell Four was close to passing out where she stood.

“Sleeping is tough,” Four groaned. She started pacing. “I start seeing things and sometimes things happen and I can’t remember them but ponies keep dying and--” she froze up and looked into the middle distance. “I feel like I’m inside it but it’s inside me.”

I gave Klein a look.

“Maybe we should get out of here,” I said. “What always helps me when I feel down and out is to go for a walk outside.”

“What about the rocket?” Klein hissed.

“There won’t be a launch until tomorrow, they haven’t even started clearing the storm away,” Four said. “Going for a walk sounds good. I can’t remember the last time I went for a walk outside…”

“Great!” I said. I put the drink down and offered Four my hoof. I felt like if I wasn’t holding onto her, she’d wander off or vanish or something. She felt like a ghost. She took my hoof and I led her outside, motioning for Klein to follow.

It wasn’t stupid and emotional. If we could keep her out of Cozy Glow’s hooves, we’d be depriving them of the Grandus, and that thing was an army-killing weapon on its own. I wasn’t going to let ponies on our side use her the same way, but I wouldn’t mind it if nopony had access to a giant deadly assault armor.

“Do you know the way out?” Klein asked.

“Of course I do!” Four snapped. She blinked and shook her head, overcome for a moment. “Sorry. I have a headache.”

“It’s okay,” I promised her.

“Go left and then follow that hallway,” she said quietly. I started leading her. She gave my hoof a squeeze and we smiled at each other. She wasn’t in great shape. I could tell that at a glance. I knew she’d be a hundred times better once we were out of there.

I felt it the second it started. Four’s grip on my hoof tightened like a vice. Her eyes rolled back in her head, and she collapsed, shaking and shivering.

“Damn!” I swore, kneeling down next to her.

“A seizure?” Klein asked.

“I guess they’re still a problem,” I mumbled.

“We had anti-seizure medicine back in Dark Harbor, but…”

“I know,” I said. “But there has to be some here. We need to find the medbay!"

Comments

[Starlight Nova]

How many chapters long will this story be?

[Just a tree]

Heh, now she's worn unicorn power armor, an Enclave suit, and earth pony Steel Ranger armor. She's not picky about her gear ...

[Innman7]

Thanks for the chapter!

I'm liking new companion Klein (and I'm 90% sure Quattro is going to turn up somewhere in the base, so I'm not missing her too much). She's got the right level of care and scientific know-how to be endearing.

And we get more information about Four. Something's going on with the Grandus armor---I guess it's being controlled by remote? That doesn't exactly bode well for Four's longevity in the organization, especially since she's pretty compromised by her relation to Chamomile. It was very cute to see her worrying about Chamomile and guava and seeing the literal attraction they had to each other. Also a little worrying about Four's mental health (not to mention her physical health). I don't get why she didn't recognize/acknowledge Klein Bottle as one of the members of their resistance group ages ago, though.

I have to guess the haunted power armor is going to come back into play later in the arc (possessing Rain Shadow, perhaps). Otherwise, it seemed like a pretty pointless ruse.

I'm looking forward to seeing what's next!

[Reese]

"Don’t worry, we’ll get to try out all sort of things today"
"Don’t worry, we’ll get to try out all sorts of things today"?

"shade as the necromatic magic the zebra shamans"
"shade as the necromantic magic the zebra shamans"?

"I tried to throw him off, but he was able to get into the air and land again right where I couldn’t see them."
"I tried to throw him off, but he was able to get into the air and land again right where I couldn’t see him."?

"slamming into the Grandus’ face. The armored"
"slamming into the Grandus’s face. The armored"?