Fallout Equestria: Blue Destiny

by MagnetBolt

Chapter 109: Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah

I poked at the geode and tried to relax. I didn’t have to try hard. I was lying on my belly on a plush towel on a sunny shore far from home while a personal nurse and attendant rubbed suntan lotion on my back. The hooves doing it were cold and robotic, sure, but they were so skilled that I could have easily been fooled into thinking it was a real pony doing it instead of a gleaming steel and glass replicant.

“You should make sure to finish your drink, ma’am,” it said. “It contains several supplementary vitamins and minerals to help with your radiation sickness.”

“Thanks,” I said. It was babying me, but it also wasn’t wrong. I took another sip. The drink came in a foil pouch with friendly branding on it and very clear instructions. It was medical but it was as if it had been designed to please foals. The straw it had come with was even a swirly crazy straw shaped like one of the many cartoon alligators around the resort.

“Is there anything else I can get you ma’am?” the replicant asked.

“No thanks,” I said. “I’ll be okay for a while.”

“Of course, ma’am,” the robot said. It bowed and backed away to a respectful distance before turning around to go off on some other task. I watched it leave and, I’ll be honest, a part of me wondered if it was really a robot. I’d seen plenty of automatons and none of them moved like that.

And no I don’t mean she was shaking her plastic flank seductively, I mean that robots always have this stop-and-start motion to them, like an engine. You’d know it if you saw it, the pure repetition of it. These machines had a more lifelike quality to them, a fluidity to their motions that lacked the jerky pops of pneumatic pistons or rotary spinning from gears.

“Maybe I’m overthinking it,” I sighed, turning back to the geode. It was the thing I’d pulled out of Commander Lime’s chest, a chunk of rock that had taken the place of his heart. The robots hadn’t allowed it into the resort unless I kept it inside a thick plastic bag. Apparently, it was more than a little radioactive, which I could believe. It had a blacklight, ultraviolet glow to it that seemed to come right out of the rock itself.

It definitely wasn’t natural, but who would spend time and effort reanimating some pony in the middle of nowhere? And why? All he’d done was send some soldiers to bother a couple of poor farmers for being part zebra.

I thought about it and drifted off to a nice nap. For once, I had no nightmares. No terror in my mind while I slept. I must have passed out for an hour just basking in the sun before I jerked awake, sure somepony had been calling my name.

“What’s going on?” I asked, instantly disoriented and alert.

Nopony answered. I looked around the sunlit beach with bleary eyes and saw nopony around me. Maybe I was just being dumb.

I stretched and got up. The nap had been refreshing and filled me with the energy I needed to… well, I didn’t really have anything to do. That was a problem. I’d spent what felt like years getting in mortal danger on a near-daily basis and now I was just sitting on a beach. Was this what retirement was really like? Was I supposed to take up fishing?

Were the fish even safe to eat? Much to consider.

What would be nice would be a little bit of a treat. I made my way over to a stand at the back of the beach where a row of trees provided some shade and the sand was covered over with concrete and outdoor rugs. I’d spotted what looked like some kind of shaved ice thing and I was very interested.

“Aw…” My interest twisted into disappointment. The stand was perfectly clean and maintained and ready to go but the robot behind the counter was broken. There were a few offline robots like this around the park, all of them slumped over after something important inside them had worn out. The other servitors weren’t programmed to do the missing jobs, so a few things had just been left to rot.

It was a pity. The machines weren’t even built to be used by ponies. I’d watched the robots at the dispensers and they just seemed to touch them and then whatever a pony asked for would appear. It was like magic. Or like some kinda data transfer through their hooves, but it spoiled the fun if you tried to figure it out.

“...you’re going to get in trouble!” somepony hissed. I looked around. Surprisingly, nopony was yelling at me this time. There were two ponies walking along one of the marked driftwood-planked paths on the beach. A pale pink mare with a shock of orange for her mane was glaring at a stallion, a brighter pink stallion with a mane as green as grass.

“I have a pass!” the stallion hissed back. “Besides, it’s worth it so we can learn the truth!”

“Your great-great-grandfather was paranoid and insane and it’s clear somepony inherited his worst traits!” the mare snapped back. Her expression softened after a moment when she saw she’d hurt him. “Please don’t do this. If we break the rules…”

“I know,” the stallion said quietly.

I sneezed, and both of them snapped to attention and looked at me where I was inadvertently hiding in the shadows of the treeline.

“Sorry,” I said. “I wasn’t spying. I was just, uh. I wanted a snowcone but the robot’s broken.”

The couple relaxed. “We haven’t had spare parts for them in ages,” the stallion said. “When they break too badly, they stay broken.”

“Chamomile,” I said, belatedly introducing myself and offering a hoof. “I’m sort of new here.”

“I’m Strawberry Daiquiri, this is my wife Hemingway Daiquiri.” We made the usual introductions, near silently saying hello to each other, just little polite sounds that weren’t exactly words but fit in the same space.

“You’ve got an outside perspective, maybe you can knock some sense into him,” the mare said. “Tell him it’s a bad idea to go down into those blasted utilidors chasing some old paranoid pony’s ravings!”

“Sure.” I shrugged. “Don’t do anything a crazy pony tells you to do, because it’s also crazy.”

The wife looked at Strawberry triumphantly. He rolled his eyes. “It’s not like that! I have actual evidence! Proof that there’s a conspiracy right under our hooves! Tell her I have proof!”

“He says he has proof,” I relayed, sighing. “Maybe you could get one of the robots to pass messages between you?”

“No, no,” Strawberry Daiquiri shook his head quickly. “They’re in on it.”

“In on it, as if robots can be in on anything,” Hemingway groaned.

“I’m not saying they came up with the plan, what I mean is, they’re still following their orders from two hundred years ago. There’s a reason park security let everypony into the tunnels when the first ashfall happened, and now we’re threatened with having our season passes revoked if we go near the access doors!”

“Even if they’re keeping some secret, what does it matter?” I asked. “We’re talking about two centuries ago.”

“That’s what I thought too, until that attack on the farm,” Strawberry said. “There are secrets on this island. What if something terrible’s about to happen and we don’t even try to stop it? Look, it’s perfectly safe. My ancestor was a staff member, and I have his spare access card! The robots will let me through. I even tested it out.”

“You what?!” his wife gasped.

“I walked right up to the door and presented the ID card and they opened it for me.” He looked sheepish. “I didn’t go inside, but that’s because I wasn’t ready. It was dark. It could be dangerous. I’m not a young pony, if there’s a radgator or feral ghouls down there…”

He shook his head. Then he seemed to get an idea and looked up at me.

“Say--”

“I’m not going in there without seeing whatever proof you have that it’s dangerous,” I told him.

He held up a holotape. “Here you go, take a look!”

He gave it to me and waited, grinning.

“Um…” I hesitated.

“Can’t you play it?” he asked. “I assumed you’d have some sort of slot--”

Hemingway smacked the back of his head. “Don’t ask mares about their slots!”

“I’m not a robot,” I said flatly.

“There are holotape players in the guest rooms,” the exasperated mare said. “Take it and the security card. At least if somepony else is hanging onto this junk he won’t be tempted to go and do something stupid!”

---

“If you’re listening to this, it means I’m probably dead,” the voice said. The tone was exhausted and desperate. I could almost picture the pony, sitting in a room just like the one I was in, two hundred years ago with the world burning around him. “My name is Peach Daiquiri. I’m a junior park employee. That might not mean anything to you but it means I’m responsible for all the ponies here.

“It’s been three days since… something happened. I don’t know what. The new park administrator had everypony take shelter inside the utilidors, and now everything’s covered in this bucking ash.” He coughed. “I came up early and got the robots to start cleaning up the resort area. They can’t keep the whole island clean but if we can keep this place safe for long enough for help to get here, that’s good enough.”

I shook my head. “Help wasn’t coming,” I said quietly. The recording couldn’t hear me. I wish I could have gone back in time and told him how stupid he was going out in that fallout.

“We’re moving the guests back into the resort buildings now. It’s safe enough as long as they stay indoors, and the administrator put all the robots in Extra Hospitality mode, so they’ll give everypony season passes and free drinks to keep them happy. Probably a good idea. All of us could use a few drinks, not that I’m allowed to drink while I’m on duty.”

He sighed.

“Duty. That’s why I’m making this recording. Or confession. We’re not supposed to talk about it ever, but the military, they’ve got that facility in the utilidors that the new park owner ordered added when we were putting in the NPE. It’s monstrous, especially now. If I’ve got a responsibility to the guests, I’ve got a responsibility to go down there and make things right, too. My staff card should let me inside even with the lockdown. I think all the navy guys went back to base, but they never came back. Maybe they evacuated and left us here.”

“You’re about to do something stupid,” I sighed, recognizing the signs.

“I should be fine,” Daiquiri said. “I’m leaving this somewhere the cleaning robots won’t find, along with my security pass. It’s not photo ID, it’s just a chip. The robots should think anyone carrying the card is staff. If you find this and I’m not back, just remember I tried to do what was right. It might already be too late by now, but I have to try. To my wife, Pina, I love you, and take care of our daughter.”

The recording trailed off into silence for a few moments and then shut off. I sighed and sat on the bed.

“No wonder Strawberry Daiquiri was acting like that,” I said. “Hearing your ancestor say a bunch of ominous horseapples like ‘Might already be too late, it’s monstrous, got to make things right.’” I shook my head. “But he couldn’t just say what the buck is down there that’s so bad. Naturally.”

I had a bad feeling. It could be literally anything if it was a military project. A hidden megaspell? Some kind of unstable reactor? An army of evil robots that looked just like the regular park servitors but with spikes and a darker color scheme? Anything was possible, and that made my imagination run wild.

For one brief moment, I felt terror run down my spine at the intrusive thought that it could be another one of those floating pyramids. Just the thought that one of those might be somewhere underhoof was…

“Somepony has to go check it out,” I groaned. “And I’m the only one dumb enough.”

I was selling myself short. There were plenty of dumb ponies around. I was just the only pony who had any experience with actual danger. Sending one of them or even asking them to come with me was like throwing a foal into a monster’s den.

If I wanted something stupid to be done correctly, I had to do it stupidly myself.

---

I walked right past the door twice before I realized it was where I needed to go. It wasn’t hidden or anything, it was just so mundane that a pony wouldn’t know it was anything special unless they were looking for it specifically. Even the janitor’s closet stood out more than the out-of-the-way door with a tiny sign next to it that informed guests there was an emergency shelter inside.

Once I stepped past the door, it was like I walked into a different world. All the comfort and theming of the resort vanished. It wasn’t even painted in the same warm colors - everything was various shades of grey, and the happy pictures of palm trees and tropical birds were replaced with exposed pipes and ducts. An extra-wide stairwell led down. I took my time on the steps. The prosthetic was still acting up a little from the amount of ash that had gotten into the joints.

I got to the bottom without falling on my face and looked back up. I must have gone down at least a story and a half and ended up somewhere similar to a subway station. There was no train here, no tracks for it to run on, but there was a wide corridor that stretched in both directions, curving just enough to go out of sight. Lights flickered overhead, about half of the ancient fluorescent lights hanging on to life.

“Left or right?” I asked. I couldn’t see anything useful either way, so I picked right. The navy base was sort of in that direction, so if the military had something to do with whatever was going on, it would logically be in that direction.

I trotted along the dim path and stopped, spotting something. Hoofprints in the dust.

“Somepony’s been through here,” I mumbled to nopony. I had no idea what that meant. Were these new? If the tunnels were really well-sealed maybe they could have lasted a century or two. Or they could have been from last week.

At least it was something to follow. I trailed the trail. It was hard to guess at distances down here, but unlike the door upstairs I didn’t walk past the next one without noticing. I couldn’t have if I wanted. It was painted red in defiance of the greys everywhere else, with signs warning about dire consequences for anypony who might enter.

“Security area, no entry allowed,” I read. “Trespassers will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, and deadly force may be used.”

Very friendly and subtle.

I pushed the door open and looked inside. A chain-link fence divided the room in half, not quite going up to the ceiling. A desk sat next to it with paperwork scattered across it, and then something exciting caught my attention. A locker, a military footlocker with a padlock still attached and everything!

“Oh ho ho, maybe I’ll get a machine gun ~” I was practically giggling to myself. All I had to do was cut the lock off and… I raised my right hoof. The sprints and pistons whined softly. There wasn’t even a suggestion of a knife.

Right. That was gone.

It wasn’t a problem, though! I was inventive and creative. I rolled the chair out from behind the desk, went over to the locker, and lifted the seat up, bringing it down on the lock over and over again until the chair was a twisted wreck and my muscles ached and the footlocker had a small dent and was otherwise completely unharmed.

“They don’t build them like they used to,” I panted. I sat down in front of the padlock and glared at it. I was going to have to do this the hard way.

Rummaging around the desk, I found a few pens and some bobby pins. It wasn’t much in the way of tools, but it’d have to do if I wanted whatever prize was waiting for me. I carefully bent one of the bobby pins and tried to keep my grip on it and the ink chamber of a broken ballpoint pen while at the same time re-inventing lockpicking.

A minute later I was on my last bobby pin and swearing luridly. It snapped like it was made of brittle dry straw and I kicked the footlocker in frustration.

“Why won’t you open?!” I yelled.

I wanted to strangle the stupid lock. I grabbed the padlock and shook it in frustration. Then things got really weird. The thaumoframe scales on my foreleg started glowing, and the glow enveloped the lock like a unicorn holding something in her aura. For a moment I could feel every part of the mechanism from the inside out. I could sense how it fit together as if it was no stranger or more complicated than an extension of my body.

The lock popped open, and the aura snapped off. Probably from my own surprise.

“Woah, that was weird,” I mumbled, staring at my now not-glowing hoof. “I don’t know if that’s a good sign or a really bad sign.”

Then again, either way, I was about to get a new gun and that would make me feel better. I pushed the worries out of the way and opened the treasure chest because at that moment it felt like I was opening lost and buried treasure.

My disappointment was immense when I saw that it was a toolbox.

“What the heck is this?” I asked, lifting up the power tool inside. It could almost pass for a gun at first glance, but it was obviously some kind of power tool. It looked almost brand-new, gleaming with the high-visibility yellow-orange of a construction site. The business end was a big nozzle with a coil inside it, fed from a tank next to it. A few more tanks were in the box along with a pamphlet.

I put the tool down and looked at what proved to be a thin manual, showing cartoon ponies using the tool to fire balls of expanding foam and glue at leaky pipes and cracked walls as a temporary repair tool.

“The Geliform Leak Universal Utility Gun,” I read. “Or GLUU Gun, fires fire-retardant, waterproof nodules that expand on contact with any solid object. The nodules expand and harden within seconds and are suitable for patching leaking pipes and securing small loads. Aim away from face. Always use eye protection.”

I sighed and walked away from it. Totally useless.

The chain link fence taunted me. If I could fly I could have gone right over it. If I had my knife I could cut through it. If I didn’t feel awful I could have run head-first at it and used the power of total disregard for my own safety to smash through.

Maybe I’d dismissed those tools too quickly. I pushed the GLUU Gun out of the way and found a set of bolt cutters. They were shockingly light. They had to be made out of some advanced space metal, or maybe cheap aluminum. Either way, they’d probably be able to nibble on the fence enough for me to make a hole.

I walked over, touched the bolt cutters to the fence, and the electrical shock threw me across the room.

Things spun around me for a few minutes while my soul stuffed itself back into my body.

“That’s one bucking serious electric fence,” I groaned. “Why aren’t there any signs warning ponies about it?”

I sat up and glared at the fence and for the first time noticed the signs on it. In my defense they weren’t written out, they were those weird symbolic signs that are halfway abstract and only make sense if you’ve seen them before or can interpret what a pony and several lightning bolts are supposed to mean.

That pretty much meant I wasn’t going to be going through it. I was too vulnerable to electric shock. Even more so than the average pony. I was going to have to be clever. I hated having to be clever.

I looked at the gun that shot globs of non-conductive glue.

---

“First try!” I called out, as I landed on the far side of the fence. I’d used big globs of glue on the wall to make a kind of stairway up and over the barrier. It was easy once a figured out that the expanding glue-foam would support my weight. I definitely didn’t still have sticky hooves from my first thought of covering my hooves in glue. That attempt didn’t count because it had been a bad idea.

I followed the corridor around what had to be a deliberately blind corner and almost ran right into a jet of fire. A gas line on the wall was cracked, and a gout of nearly invisible flame crossed the corridor, blackening the concrete with heat. I hadn’t even felt it until I was up close, and the overpowered HVAC system was maintaining the room at a comfortable level despite everything.

I scrambled back. My life flashed before my eyes along with the frankly shocking amount of burns I’d suffered. I kept going back until my tail hit the wall, trying to catch my breath the whole time. My heart hurt. Blood thundered in my veins.

The GLUU Gun went off with a soft puffy splat. It hit next to the pipe, expanding into a ball a little bigger than my head and harder than concrete. I hadn’t expected it, and the shock brought me out of my panic attack.

I adjusted my aim. The next glueball hit the pipe and sealed it. The jet of fire stopped instantly. Whatever the glue was made out of, it was tough stuff. It didn’t melt or explode or react with whatever gas had fed the fire.

My steps were careful as I edged around it just waiting for it to explosively fail, but it didn’t. I got past the blackened patch of concrete and found myself looking at a body. It was just scorched bones now and the remnants of an aloha shirt with a cartoon alligator smiling up at me through the cinders.

I knelt down next to it and spotted something on the body. An employee ID tag, just like the one I’d used to get down here.

“I guess this is where you disappeared off to, Peach Daiquiri,” I sighed. “Maybe it’ll give you some peace to know that your descendants didn’t forget about you.”

I stuffed the tag in a pocket so I’d have proof I found him. Now it was time to find whatever was so important he’d come down here and risk his life to fix. Hopefully it wasn’t just that pipe.

The corridor ended at an ordinary-looking office door marked ‘holding area’. It wasn’t even locked. I pushed it open and emerged into what had to have been at some point a warehouse. The door put me on the upper catwalk, with sodium lamps buzzing overhead and a cheerful song faintly playing over ancient speakers.

Below me was a maze of high prefabricated walls, an office layout with no ceiling above it. I could look right down into the rooms. I didn’t like what I saw.

The floor and walls of every one of the rooms was covered in filth. The kind of filth you get when somepony gets locked in and forgotten and left to die. I could see the stripes, through the rot and dirt. Being buried like this had preserved them like jerky, just dry mummies lying under distant light.

“They built a prison camp,” I realized. “Right under a resort. No wonder they had a naval base here!”

In a way it made sense. The park had infrastructure, and facilities, and I’m sure the naval personnel fought to get the assignment. I would have. Maybe the temptation would be so great that ponies would be willing to overlook almost anything as long as they could stay.

Motion caught my eye. Just a little, but it stood out in the absolute stillness of the room.

One of the zebras in the open-topped cells was moving. Rocking back and forth on the ground in a fetal position.

“No way,” I whispered. I considered my options, then vaulted over the safety railing on the catwalk. Even with only one wing, a two-story drop wasn’t a big deal for a pegasus. The trick was to spin and bleed off the momentum that way. I landed next to the cell instead of directly inside it. Believe it or not, I did have the foresight to avoid trapping myself.

Making a pathway with glue wouldn’t have been difficult, but using the door was even easier. I worried I might have to pick a lock or find a military ID badge somewhere, but it was even simpler than that. They were steel security doors, and the lock was just a big red lever with clearly marked ‘locked’ and ‘open’ positions. A prison that wouldn’t hold a unicorn or pegasus for five minutes and that an earth pony could break down with some effort, but perfect for zebras.

The lever was stiff and heavy from disuse, whatever grease was in the gears having long denatured into tar and wax. I put my weight into it and it freed up, the mechanism turning with a lot of resistance and unlocking the door.

I grunted and pulled it open and tried not to look at the marks on the other side. Prints from battering hooves that had turned bloody before stopping entirely.

“Hey,” I said quietly. “I’m not here to hurt you.” I approached the zebra quietly. They were humming to themselves. I wouldn’t say they were alive. That overpowered HVAC unit that had kept the corridor from turning boiling hot even with a jet of flame in it had also drawn in a lot of air from outside, and it must not have been built with radiation-scrubbing in mind.

She, or he, it was impossible to tell with the condition they were in, didn’t acknowledge me.

Slowly, I stepped up to them, circling around so I was in their line of sight. I didn’t want to surprise them if I could help it. I’d seen too many feral ghouls not to be wary, plus I was at least vaguely sure that being stuck in one room for two hundred years with the lights on constantly and the same music on a loop would drive even a normal pony completely insane.

I got within face-biting range without incident and put a hoof on hers.

She finally stopped rocking and looked up at me.

“I’m here to help,” I whispered.

Her eyes had long since turned to dark pits in her skull housing tiny lights. She met my gaze, and I sensed something there. Something aware and sane.

“Kill me,” she groaned, her tongue thick and voice as dry as a desert. “Please.”

---

There’s the right thing to do and the right thing to do. She blinked when she looked up at the sunlight after I led her out of the tunnels. The ocean breeze hit us, and she flinched at the sensation. She made a sound, and it took me a second to realize she was crying, with a voice as rough as a fault line and eyes that cried their last tears centuries ago.

“Thank you,” she mouthed silently.

I nodded and just let her take it in for a moment. The robots tending to the planters to either side of the door and definitely not guarding anything ignored us, thanks to the staff ID tokens we both had. Peach Daiquiri's had come in handy, and was hanging from a string around the zebra ghoul’s neck.

“You know, I don’t think I got your name,” I said. “I’m Chamomile.”

“My name is…” the zebra hesitated. “It’s been so long I can’t…” she looked down, clearly trying to focus. “...Embe. It was Embe.”

“Nice to meet you, Embe,” I said. I offered her a hoof to shake. She pulled me into a hug, still making choked, dry crying sounds. I realized this was probably the first physical contact she’d had with anypony in a very, very long time.

I hugged her back.

After a minute I coughed. “Are you biting me?” I asked.

“Sorry,” Embe mumbled. “There’s this urge and…”

“It’s okay, I don’t think you broke the skin,” I said. “No harm done.” I let go of her. She hadn’t done more than nibble a little bit. “I get weird urges too.”

Embe stood up and walked slowly down the path. I followed her. “I can almost remember this. It’s been so long. This creature is from my dreams. Or something like him. An empty place where a memory would fit.”

She put a hoof on a wooden carving of the resort’s mascot alligator.

“I knew somepony else who was missing her memories,” I said. “She spent a lot of time chasing after them.”

“What happened to her?” Embe asked.

“She regretted it,” I admitted. “She gave up on making new happy memories.”

Embe made a sound in the back of her throat. “I think… I want to see new things. New to me. Anything besides that room. And that song.” She shivered.

“We can manage that,” I promised. “Come on, I’ll show you around and buy you a drink.”

Comments

[Reese]

"The sprints and pistons whined softly"
"The springs and pistons whined softly"?

"It was easy once a figured out that the"
"It was easy once I figured out that the"?

"come down here and risk his life to fix"
"come down here and risked his life to fix"?

Well, more interesting developments. I'm low on time at present, but I've definitely been enjoying the story; thank you again for writing!

[Reese]

11503022
I don't have something for the second question, but here's something I found for the first, following the link from the description:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CaBWfNmNdR26A8gpwTKe81lktEo_n-Qb/view