Fallout Equestria: Blue Destiny

by MagnetBolt

Chapter 112: A Whale of a Tale

“This is so weird,” I mumbled, as we walked down what looked like the dusty streets of a desert town. The red rock walls of mesas rose up around us, obscuring the horizon. If not for time and the sun wearing down the corners to show the concrete underneath, the illusion would have been even more impressive. Lathe led me across a bridge that crossed a stream starting on one side of the street as a short waterfall and curving out of sight opposite.

“The park has a number of different sections,” she explained. “The Founder believed that theming and immersion were important. This part is called Frontierland.”

“It reminds me of a few places I’ve been,” I told her. We walked past buildings that had been designed to look a hundred years old when they were new. Wood siding was painted and detailed to look sun-faded. An old plaster skull. Faded paint. I smirked at a corral full of tumbleweeds labeled as a weed petting zoo.

“This place is one of the oldest parts of Gator World.” She stopped and looked around. “It has real experiences. The Dead Ringer Shooting Arcade. The Log Plume Adventure. The first Imaginseers built them and more with real machines. There’s even a railroad here with a steam locomotive!”

I nodded along. This all seemed very important to her.

“It’s places like this where you can feel the machine spirit strongest. Places where ponies had to invent new solutions to new problems.”

“So who was this Founder, anyway?” I asked.

“His name was Welsh Rarebit. He was a pony who was driven by his hobbies and vision. According to the sacred texts, he strove to turn his fantasies from his foalhood into reality. He would pretend to be a town sheriff or bandito, and so…”

“He built a place where anypony could do that,” I finished for her. I was starting to understand. “Neat.”

“Mister Rarebit hired the most clever ponies in the world, and we’re their descendants,” Lathe said proudly. She led me to a hidden door in one of the plaster rocks, and we walked out onto a wood-plank path.

“Do you live in the park?” I asked.

Lathe shook her head.

“One of the things he wanted to do was build a perfect, safe world,” she said. The planks gave way to a concrete path lined with decorative bricks as we made our way up a slight hill. “He saw some of the ways the world would change. Automatic appliances, prefabricated houses, new ways of building and organizing things.”

She stopped and waited for me to catch up. Going uphill was still a little bit difficult with the prosthetic. The springs were starting to feel as worn out as the rest of me.

“Welcome to ETROT,” Lathe welcomed. At the top of the hill, the road split into an eight-spoked hub centered on a circular park, with buildings in each direction. It was obviously planned in every detail, with identical prefabricated structures with clear labels for their purpose. It must have been pretty far ahead of its time. It wasn’t quite the same as the style that had developed just before the end of the war. That was all curves and swoops and chrome.

These looked more like they’d been built out of containers and boxes, slabs set at artful angles like concrete tents and lean-tos. Stained glass blocks filled the gaps. They reminded me of cloud houses with how they seemed to resist the pull of gravity.

I was seeing all this through a veil. A barrier around the town like a giant soap bubble, visible as a rainbow slick and shimmer in the air.

“Uh…” I stopped at the edge of it and looked at Lathe, hoping for an explanation, permission, or reassurance.

“Don’t worry!” she assured me. “It’s a barrier Elder Flysteel put up. It won’t hurt ponies, it only blocks out the influence of Dark Magic.”

“I sure hope that’s all it does.” I took a deep breath and held it before taking that last step. Would it tear me apart? If they’d made it to repel ‘Dark Magic’ but they meant it was keeping SIVA from infecting their town, it might splatter me like a bug, and I wasn’t sure I’d be able to come back from that again. I’d pushed my luck with near-death experiences way too many times.

It passed over and through me and I didn’t explode. Actually, I felt slightly cleaner. The low level of nausea I’d been cultivating ever since my misadventure at the naval base went away.

“Huh,” I said. “It stops radiation, too?”

Good thing I hadn’t brought Esme with me.

“We have many useful devices,” Lathe boasted. “That’s why you should never underestimate an engineer.”

“And a good engineer doesn’t take credit for something they didn’t do,” a voice responded. A pony in red robes like Lathe’s, but with more ornate designs along the edges, trotted up the road toward us. “Imaginseer Lathe, I assume the test was a failure, or…?”

He looked at me. The pony had an incredibly thick pair of glasses on, with multiple telescoping lenses that automatically adjusted when he focused his gaze on me.

“She’s another pony looking into the dark magic issue,” Lathe explained. “Chamomile, this is Elder Flysteel. He’s one of our wisest elders.”

“I see you’re the recipient of that limb,” he said, stepping closer and looking at my prosthetic. “It’s repurposed from a spare animatronic from the Hall of Princesses. The Founder was always sure one of the ministry mares would become an Alicorn, but…” he shrugged and lifted my hoof with his magic to examine it from a different angle.

“Sorry if I’ve been a little rough on it,” I said.

“Mm,” the Elder nodded. “The machine spirit isn’t terribly happy, but Imaginseer Lathe did a good job of appeasing it for now. In a way, this is really our fault.”

I had no idea what he was talking about. “Huh?”

“Machines are built to serve a purpose. It’s clear we were wrong about the scope and deliverables needed. This was built to specifications for light duty. Like staying in a resort and resting from serious injuries. You need something more suited for combat, going by that old barding you’re wearing.”

“I don’t look too much like a raider, do I?” I asked.

“It could use some touch-ups,” the elder informed me. “At least a wash and a coat of paint. Come along. I need to check the rainbow void generator and I can do that while we talk.”

He motioned for us to follow him. As we approached the center of town I saw a pillar of that faint rainbow sheen reaching up into the sky. It was coming from a device that resembled an attempt to build a clock inside-out using the guts from several radios.

“What is that thing?” I asked.

“I just told you. The rainbow void generator. It makes this shield. Anti-radiation for when the storms come, but it’s also working fairly well against the dark magic. It took us a few days to modify it to cover those frequencies, but we haven’t lost anypony since we got it going.”

He started checking fuses and vacuum tubes, pulling dark ones free and replacing them with new tubes that warmed up and started humming with the rest.

“The one problem is that it wasn’t originally designed for this. The machine spirit in it is proud and protective and is doing its best to keep us safe, but it’s wearing itself out. If we don’t find a way to fix this problem at its source, it’ll burn itself out and we’ll have nothing when the next radiation storm rolls in.”

“Assuming we aren’t all enslaved by then,” Lathe added.

“Always looking on the bright side,” Flysteel sighed.

I looked over the mess of components. It reminded me of something, and it took a long moment before it clicked. It was a lot like the big cabinet the Greywings had built to replace tiny components they couldn’t replace or fabricate. A big, complex hoof-wired device to do the job of a little bit of silicon.

“Huh,” I mumbled.

“Don’t touch anything,” Elder Flysteel warned. “The machine spirit can only protect you so far and jamming metal hooves into its insides is a good way to annoy it and get a nasty shock.”

I nodded in agreement. “Good tip.”

“So why are you here? Aside from needing maintenance.”

“I used one of the big memory orbs and saw what was behind all this,” I said.

“It was horrible, Elder,” Lathe said. “It was like a living machine cancer in the utilidors!”

“Worse than that, it’s my mother. The infection is called SIVA. It’s a lot of microscopic robots that can make more of themselves and join together to do larger tasks. I don’t know how it got here.”

“It was probably the black beast that we were told about,” Lathe guessed. “The one that crashed near Futureland.”

Elder Flysteel rubbed his chin with a hoof, thinking. “Microscopic machines…”

“If I can find the core system controlling them, I can stop it,” I said. “Probably.”

“You’re infected by them yourself, aren’t you? That’s where those metal scales came from. It’s too fine work for hooves. Maybe too fine for magic.”

I nodded. He returned the nod.

“I suppose the only way to fight it is with the same technology. Like an immune system fighting off a virus?” he asked.

“It’s worked before,” I told him. “There was another place in the far north where the infection had spread for miles, but after the dragon controlling it was destroyed, the SIVA died off.”

“I’m not sure how I feel about tiny machines,” the elder admitted. “Machines shouldn’t build themselves like that. They should be made by ponies, for ponies. However, what you say makes sense. You need medicine to cure poison. Imaginseer Lathe, can you take her to the crash site? I know you just got back but I can’t spare anypony here.”

“Of course, elder,” she said, bowing politely.

“Good.” He nodded to my leg. “I’ll try to get something more suited for your needs. Try to take care of that until you get back. A good machine is worth more than the life of a pony these days.”

---

Lathe carried a map with her, a tablet about the same size and thickness as a hardcover book but with a glowing green screen built into it. I quickly noticed she had a bad habit of staring directly at it and not at what was around her.

“Thank you,” she said for the third or fourth time when I kept her from falling down a steep incline. “We’re almost at the crash site.”

I nodded and kept my eyes open. If she wasn’t watching her hooves, she definitely wasn’t watching out for wildlife or raiders. I expected once we left the path that we’d find plenty of both but the truth is the jungle was quiet. Too quiet. There was no birdsong, no insect noises, not even radroaches in the underbrush, and those little guys were everywhere.

The quiet was making me uneasy. My instincts were telling me there was danger around.

Lathe walked out into a clearing. It was a hole in the jungle. Trees and underbrush had been ripped apart in a long line.

“This is it,” she said, “The object landed there after that unusual celestial event.”

“The eclipse?”

She nodded. “An unscheduled one. Not that there’s really a schedule anymore but it didn’t fit into any of our mathematical models. We still can’t explain it.”

“Don’t try too hard. It was a magical ritual.”

I didn’t look at Lathe to see how she reacted to that. I followed the path of destruction to the impact point. I’d been in enough crash landings of my own to get a feel for how they went. All the trees would be broken away from the spot where it had slammed home into the earth. That put it about…

I stood in a shallow crater and dug at the loose earth. A black scale was buried just under the surface. As soon as the sunlight touched it, the scale burst into flames and crumbled.

“So it really is Lady of Dark Waters,” I sighed in relief. It wasn’t my fault! Directly. I had at least one other pony that I could blame for things, and that mattered a lot when I was already carrying a lot of guilt around. Also, it was good to know sunlight was deadly to her. Or… at least on parts of her. If she hadn’t crashed out in the open, the infection might have been much worse.

I looked around and saw Lathe about to do something stupid.

“Stop!” I yelled.

Lathe flinched back from the metal flower she’d been about to touch.

“What is it? What’s wrong?” she asked.

I walked over to her and moved a branch aside, letting sunlight shine on the wild SIVA. The black lotus burned like magnesium, flaring and sputtering. I didn’t let the branch go until it had burned down to the dirt.

“It’s dangerous,” I said. “Look over there.”

I pointed to a bird flopping on the ground. I could dimly sense the SIVA in it, unfocused and doing its best to be helpful and killing the bird slowly in the process.

“SIVA spreads quickly in a living animal,” I explained. “We’re constantly wearing down, you know? Just a little bit, and until we get old our bodies repair us. You exercise, wear yourself out, and sleep it off. SIVA sees that damage and tries to fix it, but it only knows how to build machines. It ends up hurting you worse, then it tries to fix that. Then it tries to fix those mistakes. Over and over again until…”

I held up my scaled hoof.

“That doesn’t seem too bad,” Lathe replied.

“I’m a special case. Most of the time it turns ponies into agonized monsters. Like that bird.”

We watched the bird together for a long few seconds. I could hear its joints whirring and bones cracking. It would have been kinder to kill it.

And now that I’d had that thought, I had to do it or I’d be a monster. I grabbed a stick and pushed the struggling animal out into the sunlight. There was a bright flare and a screech of pain, but it ended fast. It was still better that way.

“Watch the shadows,” I warned. “She isn’t here, so she must have gotten away somehow.”

Lathe nodded and looked down at her dataslate. “If we look at the damage from a birds-eye view it looks like there are drag marks that way,” she said. “Towards one of the defunct rides.”

“I didn’t think you’d let anything get defunct around here,” I said, following her lead and watching her steps so she wouldn’t stumble into anything deadly. I could see the signs she’d detected with her scanner. Even though I wasn’t an expert, it was pretty obvious that something had smashed through the underbrush.

“It was closed down before the war. It was one of the first rides they tested with the New Park.”

We emerged from the jungle and found ourselves back in the park proper, stepping directly from the treeline and over rope fencing onto a dock. It was actually kind of incredible how the moment I got out on the main path, things were carefully laid out and shaped so that it didn’t feel like I was standing next to a wild jungle.

“Twenty Thousand Fathoms,” I read the old, faded sign.

“I’m told it was a water ride, but it was too expensive to operate and could only be used by a few ponies at a time,” Lathe said. “I always wished I could have seen it when it was open. There are pictures from those days showing that the guests could see all kinds of wildlife.”

“Wildlife like that?” I asked. I saw something big crawling out of the water. A thick segmented shell dripped water onto the path, a dozen scrabbling claws clutching for purchase as the monster rose up from the swampy water.

“Hm.” Lathe kept a cool head. She didn’t panic. She looked at her data slate and pressed a few buttons along its edge. “I detect traces of radiation. I think it’s a variety of mudcrab.”

I yanked her back by the tail just before the mirelurk could bring its heavy claw down on her head.

“I’ve fought these before,” I told her. “They’re tougher than they look. Shoot at the underside and joints, don’t bother attacking that big shell on the back.”

It was actually a little different from the ones I’d killed in Dark Harbor. These were more segmented, with a fringe of tiny fins along the edge of their entire shell ending in a plume of wiggling motion at their tail.

“Shoot… oh. I should have brought a gun!” Lathe looked surprised. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

I gave her a look. “What were you going to do if we got attacked by raiders?”

“I would have asked them politely, but firmly, to leave,” she said. “They’re not stupid. They don’t want to anger my tribe or the machine spirit.”

“Just… don’t get killed for a few minutes, okay?” I couldn’t criticize her too much, I didn’t have a real weapon either. I did have a lot of glue, though. I fired the GLUU Gun at the mirelurk’s bottom half. It had so many legs I barely even had to aim. It lurched to a stop with three of its dozen claws stuck to the boardwalk.

It screeched. I opened my mouth to make some kind of really cool one-liner, but the words died in my mouth when more of the mirelurks started crawling out of the water. It gave me a smug look, somehow, with its expressionless chitin face.

“Calling for help isn’t fair!” I complained. “Lathe, give me your biggest wrench!”

Her magic flickered along her toolbelt. She looked back at her bag of tools. “What kind? Torque? Ratcheting? Adjustable?”

“The type doesn’t matter!”

“You have to use the right tool for the right job!” she scolded me.

“I need one I can use as a club.”

“You’ll want the pipe wrench, then.” She floated one over to me. It was worn in the way that something got when it was used for a hundred years and lovingly maintained. When I grabbed it, it felt good and heavy. It was made out of metal that was designed to be abused.

I charged around the stuck mirelurk and to the ones trying to climb up out of the water, swinging the wrench down on their claws and cracking them, following it up with a shove back into the green-brown swamp water of the lagoon.

One of them grabbed the wrench with a claw and I instinctively slammed my head down into its face. It was a really good move in a barroom brawl, but less good against something with an armored skull. If my skull wasn’t also armored it would have gone much more poorly. The mirelurk’s face cracked open and it screeched and fell back in pain.

“The next one of you who tries anything will get the same, uh…” I watched a crab twice the size of the others pull itself out of the water. One of its claws was massive, almost as long as the rest of its body. It looked like it could cut a pony in half.

I fired glue at its legs, tangling them for all of three seconds before it smashed through the hardening epoxy. Tactically speaking, this was a bad thing.

The water surged. The giant enemy crab and I both turned to look. An alligator lunged out of the depths with the speed and force of a runaway train. The massive jaws snapped shut around the mirelurk and dragged it back under, the monster thrashing and fighting the whole time and utterly powerless to resist.

I hadn’t moved. I’d totally frozen up.

The mirelurk I’d glued down tore itself free, leaving one leg behind and flopping back into the water to swim the other direction.

“...Big,” I said quietly.

“T-the Founder imported over twenty different species of alligator, since the wildlife preserve was one of the first attractions here,” Lathe said, her throat dry. “I’m not sure what species that was exactly, since there was likely crossbreeding and some mutation from the radiation, but…”

“Big,” I repeated.

She nodded. “Even bigger than the one in the utilidors.”

“Let’s stay away from the water,” I decided, keeping a close eye on any ripples or bubbles as we edged around the monster-infested pit. There was a building on the far side of the dock that looked like it was the old entrance for the ride. It had once been ornate with sculpted sweeping shapes, the way ponies thought the future would look before the war, all soft curves and attractive trim in now-rusting chrome.

I felt a little safer once we were inside. I was aware that the gator we’d seen could easily smash through the walls if it felt like it, but hopefully, it was enjoying enough of a meal that it didn’t need a snack.

“We ended up in the right place,” Lathe noted. We were standing in a winding line around mostly-collapsed brass and chain stanchions It formed a zig-zagging path from the entrance down a wide ramp towards the ride entrance. Lathe held out her tablet with her telekinesis, letting me have a look at the glowing screen. Something had smashed through them, leaving a straight path across the room of broken chains and bent poles.

I couldn’t interpret everything it was saying, but I could sure see the arrow was pointing in the direction we were going.

“I set it to pick up on the short-wave signals that were coming off the debris we found. Otherwise, I would have detected the life forms in the bay.” She took the tablet back and manipulated the knobs and keys. “There’s an active signal not far from here. And before you ask, yes, I did filter you out.”

“I wasn’t going to ask but I should have known to,” I admitted. “It’s nice working with a smart pony again.”

She blushed slightly, her ears twitching. She slipped her rebreather over her snout to cover up the pink tone in her cheeks and pulled her loupe back on. “Thank you. It’s nice being able to use my talents in something besides maintenance.”

We followed the path of destruction around the corner. I felt it crawling on and under my skin at the same time Lathe’s tablet beeped warnings.

There was something like a field of flowers, made of twisted metal. Sheets of dark, lead-like metal curled into shape and edged in a thin layer of frost that I knew had to be razor-sharp chips and splinters.

“Stay back,” I warned.

“It’s the same material as the crash site. The signal is too strong here, it’s washing out any other directionality.” She tapped her tablet a few more times.

In the center of the field, motion started. A darker blossom, as big as my head and carbon-black, curled open. The lotus spread wide, revealing something in the center of the flower.

I frowned. “That’s another one of those virtual ride orbs.”

“There were rumors they were going to re-open this area as one of the first virtual rides,” Lathe explained. She took a step towards it, then retreated when she realized how close she’d come to treading on the nanometal.

“She wants me to dive in,” I mumbled. “But why? Mom kicked me out last time.”

“It could be a trap of some kind,” Lathe said.

“Maybe,” I agreed. “You have any rope?”

She produced some thin but strong plastic rope, and I tied it around my hoof.

“I’m going to poke it,” I told her. “If it’s taking too long or I seem like I’m in trouble, yank my hoof off it.”

“Didn’t you say it was a bad idea to touch that material?” Lathe reminded me. The oversized memory orb was in the middle of a nanometal field.

I waggled my metal-covered hoof at her.

“I can’t get much more infected than I already am,” I told her, hoping I wasn’t wrong about that, but I’d done stupider things before. “It’s less dangerous for me.”

I took a few careful steps into the unearthly flower field, feeling metal debris crunching under me, and touched the orb in the middle of that black lotus.

---

I was standing in a place almost exactly like the one I’d left. The metal flowers were gone, and all the lights were working, shining brightly but not blinding. Music was playing, a faint adventurous tune.

In front of me, a stylized brass and crystal submarine that looked more like a rocket ship crossed with a dolphin than anything Equestria had ever really produced was stopped, with a happy looking attendant standing next to it and ushering me inside. I couldn’t quite get a grasp on their face, like it was a blur.

“Hello Chamomile,” Lady of Dark Waters said. “Why don’t you join me?”

The vampire queen was already inside the ride. Did I really want to be in a small space alone with her, even if it was just a pretend space in some kind of virtual ride?

“If you don’t play along with the ride, your mother will find us,” Lady warned. “As long as things seem to be going normally, her attention is directed elsewhere.”

I swallowed and stepped in. She was looking pretty much the same as the last time I’d seen her. Before she’d infected herself with SIVA deliberately and become even more of a monster.

I sat down in the plush seat across from her. There was room for a dozen ponies in the submarine. Once I sat down, the door slid closed and the ride slid into motion. She lounged across three seats in a pose that seemed seductive but was probably just her unconscious charm.

“This is the part where we talk about the enemy of my enemy,” Lady said. Around us, the submarine exited the building and into crystal clear ocean waters completely different from anything like the swamp outside. Colorful fish flashed past the crystal windows. Sunlight streamed down but didn’t bother her, because it was only as real as the rest of the illusion.

“Does that mean you’re helping my mother because I’m your enemy, or that you want to work with me to stop her?” I asked. “Because at this point it could go either way.”

“Both, of course,” Lady said dismissively. “But if you help me enough to make up for all the things you’ve done to me, I might upgrade you from enemy to minion. Then things would be much simpler for both of us, wouldn’t they?”

“Maybe,” I conceded. A shadow fell over us. I looked up at a whale swimming by, singing to us as it passed.

“Good. I’m glad you agree.” Lady smiled with her mouth full of fangs. “I can’t fight her on my own. It’s humiliating, but my body is a wreck. The SIVA needs a control core to function correctly, and after your attack, a fall, and direct sunlight…” she shrugged. “There’s not much left of me to fight.”

“You’re still here right now,” I pointed out.

She nodded. “After your mother took control of me, she connected us to the park systems. She’s trying to hack the main system, but it’s a better computer than she is even with most of my body turned into transistors.”

I nodded slowly. “Which leaves you free to go into these simulated rides?”

“They’re all connected to the main system, but I can jump in the middle like this and ride along. It’s something to do while my body is in torpor.”

“What do you want from me?” I asked. The submarine rumbled around us subtly. It was a wash of sensation like a sonar pulse.

“We don’t have much time,” Lady said. She stood up. “I’m going to give you my command codes. Lemon has already changed them in most places, but they might be useful in some way. You can keep her from using my SIVA to infect you.”

“Okay, so do we just hold hooves, or--”

She laughed. “Chamomile. I’m a vampire.”

She lunged for my neck faster than I could react, latching on with long fangs. I felt something like warm poison seep into my blood. Over her shoulder, while I gasped in shock and pain and some other complicated feelings about predatory mares who were nibbling on my neck, I saw three huge draconic heads rise out of the depths of the ocean. Their maws opened, and the windows exploded just before the illusion collapsed.

---

I gasped and stumbled back. Lathe yanked on my hoof, too late for any help inside the memory orb but it did keep me from falling on my flank in a field of caltrops, so overall it was an excellent job.

“I detected an unusual data surge,” Lathe said, instead of asking me if I was okay. “I knew those ride orbs weren’t safe! What did you see?”

“I had a talk with an old enemy. She wanted something from me.”

“Inside the simulation space?” Lathe frowned. “I suppose it’s possible. They were designed to allow ponies to interact so families and friends could ‘ride’ together. What did she want?”

“She wants to be my friend,” I said. I looked at my left forehoof, thinking. “I think she gave me a gift.”

“What was it? Some kind of information? Was it one of the old park templates? We’ve been trying to find the spec sheet for some of the pneumatics for a century!” She looked excited.

I put my hoof on the frost of metal shards covering part of the floor. I could feel the SIVA signal coming from it. I focused and pushed, and it melted away, steel flowers wilting and frost softening, everything deactivating. The black lotus fell away petal by petal until the orb was left on a plain brass pedestal.

“Something that might help even more than pneumatics,” I said. “Let’s go see if we can do anything for those hypnotized ponies.”

Comments

[Thought Prism]

Something tells me she's still going to be less amenable than her daughter.

[Reese]

Ahh, so it looks like Lady of Dark Waters crashed here directly; I'd been thinking that that she'd been sent here for some reason, after being "rescued".

In any case, I continue to enjoy the story; thank you for writing!

[FridayPie]

Cham is half-machine. Those ponies are revering machines. It's just the freak of personal opinion about nanite wrongness stops her from founding an Equestrian branch of Adeptus Mechanicus