Fallout Equestria: Blue Destiny

by MagnetBolt

Chapter 117: Circle of Life

“I wanted to thank you again for saving me,” Chuck said. He’d met me at the rainbow-shaded border of the bubble around the Imaginseer’s town. Outside, the ash was coming down heavier and heavier, and it was starting to leak in here. It was just flurries, nothing compared to the shower elsewhere, but I could tell ponies were concerned.

“I think Lathe would have figured something out on her own if she had more time,” I said. “She’s pretty smart.”

“She’s special,” Chuck agreed. He slowed to a stop just before we entered the plaza in the middle of the planned down. The young stallion turned to face me. His cheeks were still sunken from dehydration and malnutrition. “My sister means a lot to me, Miss Chamomile. I don’t want her to get hurt.”

Describing myself as an idiot was easy, but I was an idiot who could read between the lines. “You want me to stay away,” I guessed.

“Sorry,” he apologized quietly.

I put my prosthetic hoof on his shoulder in support. “If it makes you feel better, I’m not here to put the moves on your sister. I stopped by to see Collet about getting some armor and beg Flysteel for filled spark batteries.” I lifted the robotic hoof up and waggled it. “This thing’s great but using the built-in weapons drains the battery like crazy!”

Chuck nodded. “Okay. I’m--”

“You’re not sorry. You just don’t like having to tell a dangerous madpony that she shouldn’t stick around town.”

“That too,” he admitted. “I’ll go and get--”

“Chamomile!” Lathe yelled. Chuck groaned. The young Imaginseer waved to us from the middle of the plaza. She was surrounded by tools and poking at the chugging, sizzling pile of machines and electronics in the center of town.

"--Maybe I'll just go find where the ends of my sentences end up when I get interrupted."

“This one’s not my fault,” I said.

“I know,” Chuck sighed. “I’ll go get Collet. Please make sure my sister doesn’t go with you on some adventure.”

“No problem,” I assured him.

He shook his head and trotted off. I walked over to Lathe to see what she was doing. I stared at the machine for a moment, trying to decipher it. She caught me looking and waited patiently while I examined her work and the old rainbow void generator.

“You’re reconfiguring it to work for the ash again instead of blocking dark magic,” I said.

Lathe blinked in surprise, raising her loupe to look at me more clearly. “How did you know that? This is a complicated machine, and restoring it to the original specs is a big task. Most ponies wouldn’t even know what it was!”

“I don’t know much about machines, but I do know dark magic isn’t an issue right now and the ashfall is,” I said. “Plus you already have the filter working partway.”

“Ah. Logical reasoning.” Lathe nodded. “I need to filter out the rest. The power curve is logarithmic, with diminishing returns. Every bit of performance we can get is critical.”

“Radiation isn’t something you want to mess with,” I agreed.

“What were you and my brother talking about?” she asked, turning back to the guts of the machine and unscrewing vacuum tubes one by one to examine them closely. She swapped two that both seemed to be working just fine, but seemed pleased by the swap when the hum of the generator shifted in pitch ever-so-slightly.

“He’s absolutely sure I’ll get you killed if you hang around me,” I told her frankly. It wasn’t my job to keep family secrets. Besides, there was a good chance she’d caught some of the conversation.

“He’s probably right,” Lathe agreed. “Do you know about chaos theory?”

“Uh…” I tried to remember the term. I’d heard it somewhere before, read it in passing in a book somewhere. “I think it was something about how disharmony spreads on its own in unpredictable ways.”

She nodded. “Chaos is a universal force. It works in the opposite way as Harmony. Harmony tends towards a convergent result over time, like how adding one and a half and a quarter and so on will get closer and closer to two. Chaos is divergent, with wildly unpredictable results depending on the initial conditions.”

“Right, right. I heard about that,” I said. I tried to recall parts of my education that… I hadn’t actually gotten. I could feel it in there, but the memories weren’t quite mine. I abruptly realized I was quoting form somepony else’s life but the words were already coming out of my mouth. “Like rolling a ball down a hill. Even if you start in as close to the same place as possible, the place where the ball comes to a stop and the path it takes to get there will vary because of small imperfections in the ball’s surface, the hill’s topography, the wind, and so forth.”

“That’s… correct,” Lathe said, sounding surprised. She glanced up at me. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, it’s just that sometimes I remember half my brain is a computer with another pony’s memories imprinted on it and I once spent a long time stuck in a hive mind thing.”

“Really? A computer? That sounds very convenient. Can you make spreadsheets?”

“I… what? What kind of question is that?”

“A practical one. They’re very good for maintaining an inventory and doing accounting.”

I rolled my eyes.

“So what insane venture are you off to next?” Lathe asked. She went back to the generator, tugging lightly at several wires.

“I’m going to the nature preserve,” I said. “Pretty sure it’s going to be a death match against an evil undead monster. Or several of them.”

“I see.” Lathe shrugged. “The Imaginseers stay away from that place.”

“Probably not a lot of machines to worry about,” I agreed.

“Mostly we stay away because it’s full of hungry alligators,” she corrected. “The Founder loved them, but they’re exceptionally dangerous when they’re hungry and wild. In the old days, they were tame, but that was with regular feedings and handlers who knew what they were doing.”

“I don’t suppose you have any alligator-fighting advice?” I joked.

“Don’t let them get you into the water,” she said promptly. “They can lunge but don’t have much stamina. If they get a grip on you, it’s probably all over.”

“That advice sounds a lot like ‘don’t fight alligators’.”

“Solving a problem means solving the right problem.”

---

Getting to the nature preserve turned out to be simple enough. It was one of the oldest parts of the park, predating a lot of the infrastructure and development. There were also directions on every signpost I saw pointing me in the right direction.

I knew I was in the right place when I was walking through a building shaped like an open alligator’s mouth. There wasn’t even a robot in the ticket booth, and I was about to jump the turnstile when it beeped and reacted to my bracelet, letting me inside with no hassle.

“Thank you very much,” I mumbled to no one in particular. There were obvious signs that raiders had been living out of here - cardboard boxes flattened out into dirty beds, the remains of old food, empty booze bottles. I checked those twice just in case they’d left anything to drink.

I tossed an empty vodka bottle to the side and sighed.

“The drinks at the resort are better anyway,” I assured myself. It wasn’t sour grapes at all, really it was fermented and distilled if anything! Straight vodka wasn’t all that appealing compared to drinks that were about two hundred percent sugar by volume.

I hefted my borrowed pipe wrench and adjusted the armor Collet had given me. It was made of overlapping bands of a silvery alloy that showed a rainbow sheen everywhere it had been welded or heat-treated, giving it an iridescent look.

It also felt a little small, even though Collet swore he made it to size. I think he was trying to convince me to lose weight.

“Here we go,” I mumbled. “Let’s see how bad this is gonna be…”

I ducked out into the open expecting to immediately get shot at or find myself in the middle of some atrocity. Most of the raiders I’d had to deal with had been relatively civilized, by drug-addled madpony standards. I was just about due for some real horror.

It was waiting for me, but not like I was expecting.

The crystal monolith was pulsing with terrible, ominous intent. I could see it, and feel it in every part of my body. About half of the raiders were circling around it. The rest were stacked off to the side in a rotting pile that was half-covered by falling ash. From the looks of the living ones, they’d be on the pile pretty soon if I didn’t do anything.

The whole place was built like a boardwalk, or at least this part of it was, Wide wooden platforms and walkways over and around drops into landscaped pits full of water and hungry maws full of teeth. The gators barely moved, ignoring my presence.

I pushed my way through the crowd and put a hoof on the stone. It reacted to me, the dark veins of SIVA inside the crystal flickering and pulsing with light. It flashed with baleful red light before going dark. The oppressive aura in the air faded. The raiders took one more step, then almost everypony there collapsed to the ground.

Only one shape remained standing, a pink pony with a mane of magenta curls. I almost thought she was real for a second before I realized I could see right through her.

“Hi there!” the ghostly ministry mare said brightly. “I’m Pinkie Pie, and I wanted to welcome you personally to my favorite part of Gator World! My pet Gummy is one of my bestest friends and he’s an Equestrian Alligator, a species you can find here along with Zebrican Alligators, Garvals, Desert Crocodiles, Saltwater Crocodiles, Rockod--”

The recording glitched and Pinkie was suddenly in a different spot, looking down into one of the swamps below.

“I didn’t think my Pinkie Sense would be going off here,” Pinkie Pie said. “It’s why I came here on vacation. Just to get away from it all.” She was quiet for a moment, which seemed wrong on a pony whose whole body looked ready to spring into animated movement at any moment.

She sighed and rubbed her eyes.

“You’re not even supposed to be here,” she whispered. She sounded like she was admonishing herself, but when she turned, she looked directly at me. Not just in my direction. Right at me, like she was really there. She blinked and squeezed her eyes shut, shaking her head. “I can’t focus. I didn’t want to--”

Pinkie pulled a small tin from her mane and shook a few candies into her hoof, crunching down on them. A tremor in her hoof that I hadn’t noticed until that moment calmed, and when she looked back at me, her pupils were huge and black and deep.

“Wow, that’s a lot better! I wish I could help and tell you what to do. Or at least what not to do!” She giggled. “You’ve come a long way.” Her expression turned sad, even while she smiled. “I hope whoever you are, you have some good friends. Don’t forget about them. None of us get to be the same pony we were at the start of our stories, but if we have friends, we can make sure the ponies we turn into are better than we were.”

She took one careful step towards me, squinting a little.

“It’s so weird that this isn’t working with you! It’s like you shouldn’t be in this--”

The illusion glitched and blurred, stretching out before snapping back into focus.

“--I know we can’t use that take for the park,” Pinkie sighed, talking to somepony who didn’t appear in the hologram. “Just leave it in the junk folder, but don’t delete it. Trust me, it’ll matter later--”

Pinkie fuzzed out one more time before reappearing.

“--and remember, everypony! No flash photography. A lot of animals have sensitive eyes and bright light is bad for them! But most of all, have a good time!”

Pinkie exploded into confetti. I waited for a long moment, trying to figure out if that was a special effect or part of the live recording. It didn’t start up again, so whatever that whole unnerving show had been, it was over now.

“It’s rude to invite yourself into a lady’s home without permission,” somepony called down from above. I stepped around the crystal monolith and looked up at the second floor of a long structure that mostly had snack restaurants and merchandise on the bottom story. A mare was standing on the balcony there, glaring down at me. Her eyes looked black except for glowing orange embers where the pupils should have been, along with a pale lavender coat and a seaweed-green mane.

She looked over at the crystal, the exhausted half-dead raiders, and then back to me.

“I take it that witch Acadia sent you,” she said. “I have no idea who you are, so I suppose that means you’re a mercenary of some sort?” The way she said witch felt like she wanted to use a slightly different, harsher word.

“That’s a rude way to put it.”

“There’s nothing wrong with being a mercenary. I’ve hired some of my own, but they went and got themselves killed in some kind of explosion. Breezeberry was supposed to be smarter than that, or I wouldn’t have changed plans from that delusional ghoul to his little group of raiders.” The mare sighed. “Tell you what, how about I pay you double whatever she is? I plan on killing her anyway, so you can take what you want from her corpse.”

“That’s really nice of you miss, uh…?” I hesitated.

“Briar Heart,” she said.

“Cool, I’m Chamomile. Look, I’m sort of on a time limit, can we do this without the monologue?” I asked. “Usually I’d use this time to come up with a clever plan but I’d prefer to speed this along with brute force today, thank you.”

“Oh, my apologies,” she said sarcastically. “I didn’t know we were on the clock! I’ll just kill you right away, then.”

Something inside her chest glowed with purple light bright enough that I saw her ribs right through her coat. A surge of magic spilled out. It was already quiet, with most of the island’s birds and insects hiding from the ashfall. Everything went totally silent. Even the gators went totally still.

The boardwalk under me started to rumble.

“They had all kinds of creatures here,” Briar Heart said. “Did you know some crocodilians can live practically forever, and they just keep getting bigger?”

I was thrown to my knees by a sudden lurch in the wooden boards. One of the raiders, who looked a little more aware and stronger than the others, got to his hooves in alarm and tried to run. The sound must have alerted whatever was underneath us.

Huge jaws tore through the deck. The scales were like roughly hewn granite, with teeth as long as my forehoof and made of crooked obsidian. The monster snapped up the fleeing pony in two bites. The first one was accompanied by a scream. The second one ended in silence.

Briar Heart laughed. “He should have been more careful! Cragadiles hunt by listening for the sound of their prey!”

I never thought it would happen but I was getting tired of wrestling giant monsters. I really must have been getting old. With the greatest of care, I got up to my hooves without making any more noise than my knees cracking. If I was very quiet and careful, I could probably make it to the building where Briar Heart was standing.

Her aura flared around her whole body. “That doesn’t mean I can’t control him directly, little mercenary!”

The wood behind me splintered and I bolted, barely avoiding a lashing tail tipped with a stalagmite thagomizer. The dock under me collapsed, I spread my wing, and fell like the dullest sack of hammers in Equestria, landing directly on top of a scaly beast twice as big as I was.

Our gazes met.

“Saltwater crocodile?” I guessed.

A shadow fell over us, and the reptile decided I was not worth fighting over. It rolled on the swampy ground, throwing me off and sprinting into the water, splashing down and away. I looked up at the cragadile. It really did resemble masonry more than flesh. Spikes and plates of stone covered its body in thick armor. I don’t know what weapon would have worked against it even if I’d had one.

“Stop!” I ordered, holding up my hooves. Maybe I just had to be firm and confident. It worked on a lot of creatures, at least long enough to confuse them. “Bad monster! Go back to your room!”

It roared with enough force to literally push me back just with the force of its voice. I got the sense it wasn’t intimidated. I ran for it, going directly over the water and using the gators as stepping stones. Neither of us was happy about the arrangement but they weren’t as scary as what was coming after me and they knew it.

I got to the far side of the pit and found a fence between enclosures. The cragadile stomped closer, knocking out more of the supports for the boardwalk as it closed in on me, beady little eyes glaring. A flash of color caught my eye, and holographic confetti drifted down from nowhere. I was suddenly reminded of something Pinkie had mentioned.

The monster roared. I went for my saddlebags and grabbed a wooden box, opening it and revealing bright, piercing sunlight. It poured out of the crystal bottle Acadia had made, and the cragadile screeched, blinded. It backed away from the pure illumination, retreating to the shadows.

“Stupid thing!” Briar Heart yelled. “It’s not going to hurt you! Get up!”

I spotted an employee access door in the fence and kicked it open, holding the light between me and the monster until I was through. The room was a basement level, fitted out to be an examination room for the local veterinarian. Diagrams of crocodile biology were up on the walls, along with cabinets filled with alligator-grade antibiotics and food supplements. It would probably have been a really great find in other circumstances, like if I had been a sick garval.

A big box next to the door was labeled was a medical warning about dosage by body weight. I blinked at it, read the label again, then picked up the whole box and walked back out with it, putting the liquid sunlight back in its protective case. I had a plan now.

“Hey!” I called out.

The cragadile blinked, turning its head. It was obviously still blinded. I remembered what its master had said and stomped the ground.

“Over here!” I shouted again. “Come and get me!”

It roared and charged, attracted by the sound. I held up the crate in one hoof. It opened its jaws to snap me up. I threw the crate full of drugs into the cragadile’s maw, and it snapped down on instinct, the crate and the glass vials inside shattering, opening shallow cuts and drenching the wounds in alligator tranquilizer.

I rolled out of the way and let it smash into the fence behind me, its head getting stuck in the wooden planks.

“You think that’s going to stop it?” Briar Heart cackled. It sounded practiced like she’d heard Acadia cackle too much and was trying to copy her old master. I watched the cragadile’s struggles to free itself slow down. It slumped and started snoring.

“Yes,” I decided. “I think it’s going to stop it.”

Briar Heart swore and stomped her hooves. I gave her a few moments to collect herself. Eventually, she managed to pull her mane back and appear calm again. “Apparently so!”

“So are we going to--?”

“Since you have defeated my creation, I will give you permission to leave!” Briar Heart declared. “You have proven yourself, and so you may leave with your life!”

I sighed and looked around for a way out. The place had been designed for ponies, and the smart ponies who followed standard safety conventions had put a brightly colored ladder in the corner. I mumbled to myself in annoyance and climbed up, finding that I had stopped being nearly as depressed about my missing wing and that I was now more frustrated and angry about having to walk everywhere.

“You fool!” Briar Heart cackled, once I got myself up on the deck. “You’ve fallen into my second, even more deadly trap! Ancient spirits of evil, transform these decayed forms into my unliving servants!”

Briar Heart raised her hooves, black and purple lightning cracking through the air and into the pile of raider corpses. They started to get up.

“No. Bad!” I smacked the ones on top with my wrench. “Stay down or else!”

“Fool! With the necromatic power from the ashfall, they’ll be twice as strong!” Briar Heart laughed. “Tear her apart, my minions!”

I fired a few globs of glue into the mass, and they quickly tangled themselves up. The zombies moaned, stuck to each other in a reaching, hungry mass.

The glue took a moment to dry, and then I rolled the whole ball of zombies over to one of the pits and pushed it through the broken railing. They fell to the bottom of the gator pen and landed in the water with a splash. I wiped my hooves clean on the deck and glared up at Briar Heart.

“You’ve… passed my second, secret test!” she declared. “I concede defeat. I will leave this place forever, conqueror. You are the victor this day.”

Briar Heart bowed and then took one dignified step back before turning and bolting in terror, ducking inside the building and out of sight.

“Hey! Get back here!” I yelled at her. I charged into the nearest broken-down old food stand, vaulting the counter and smashing through the back door, letting me into the guts of the building. The facade of old wood and rough safari style vanished, replaced with the same tile and neutral colors as the vet’s office I’d found in the basement.

I stopped, breathing heavily, and listened. Hooves pounding on hard floors. I glanced around, then went in the right general direction. I broke through another door and found a stairwell and a retreating pony going for the back doors.

Briar Heart looked back at me with terror in her glowing eyes. “Leave me alone, I told you you’re the winner! Be gracious about it and let me go!”

“I want your body!” I yelled.

“You’re a pervert?!” she gasped.

“No, I mean-- I need it for a ritual!”

“You’re a pervert in a cult?!”

“Lady, you’re an evil necromancer! You don’t get to claim any moral high ground!” She shoved the doors open and fled, slamming them shut behind her. Sparks flashed at the lock, and when I hit it, I felt the heat. She’d welded it shut.

I kicked it harder, felt the hot metal creak, and gave it a third shove. The doors burst open, and a black bolt of death magic slammed into my chest. My metallic scales flared to life, and I felt the necromancy curl around my heart, fighting against the push of my body’s natural defenses.

The sorcery dragged claws through my chest. It found my center and… I felt it pass through like it didn’t recognize anything.

“What the buck?” Briar Heart swore. “What’s wrong with your body?!”

“You just tried to kill me,” I said. “Again!”

“Attempted murder doesn’t count!” Briar Heart screamed, turning tail and running again. “Nopony should be prosecuted for things they didn’t do!”

“You are the second or third most annoying pony I’ve ever met!” I chased her onto a nature trail, firing glue at her hooves and missing. The mare had a talent for escape. Another blast hit the ground in front of me, throwing up a cloud of dirt. I jumped through it, not giving her the extra few seconds to escape.

She screamed in alarm when I landed on her.

“I don’t want to hurt you--” I started, then I realized what I was saying. “No, I do want to hurt you. You tried to kill me a whole bunch of times!”

“What if I apologized?” Briar Heart asked.

---

I threw the body onto the floor in the middle of Acadia’s lair. It flopped, ragdolling onto its back and showing the open wound in the chest where I’d torn out the crystal orb that had been buried where her heart was supposed to be.

“That sucked,” I stated firmly.

“Dat didn’t take as long as I thought it would,” Acadia said. She kicked her apprentice’s corpse. “Not bad. You didn’ tear her apart. I thought you would bring back pieces an’ I’d have to stitch them together.”

“It wasn’t easy.”

“Of course not,” Acadia agreed. She motioned to a circle she’d drawn on the floor in chalk. “Put her over dere. I’m almost ready wit de ritual. I tink dis is going to work. De soul you want to drag into dis body is already tainted an’ undead. It makes it more fitting, you see? Like fitting de square peg in de square hole.”

“I have no idea what that means but okay,” I said.

Acadia sighed. “When you try an’ put a square peg in a circular hole, de corners get caught an’ it won’t go in--”

“That’s not what I meant!”

“Well don’ blame me for it when you are de one who don’ understand tings.”

“Please just do the evil undead ritual,” I sighed. “I am exhausted and I need a drink.”

“I’ll have de maid get you one.” Acadia cleared her throat. “MAID!”

There was a long pause. Acadia sighed and clapped her hooves. Bird of Paradise appeared a few moments later in the Fastpass teleport pad on the floor, a ring of ribbon around her neck glowing. She made a strangled sound, and Acadia clapped her hooves again. Bird of Paradise gasped for breath.

“Get our guest a cup of tea,” Acadia said. “No. Make it rum. She has had de hard day. Get me one, too.”

Bird of Paradise grumbled and said something under her breath before storming off into the kitchenette. I heard bottles klinking around.

“She’s going to poison us,” I warned Acadia.

“I started making her taste all my drinks,” Acadia said. She pulled a covered steel box from under one of her tables, setting it next to her old apprentice’s body. “I am waiting for her to be clever enough to take de antidote before serving me tea.”

“Or crazy enough to poison herself.”

“Either way it would be interesting.”

Bird of Paradise came back with the rum. I took my cup and sipped it. Acadia took hers and held it in her magic, taking off her hat and reaching inside to retrieve a crystal spher, putting it into the empty spot in the corpse’s chest.

“What’s in the box?” I asked, nodding to the metal lockbox. Acadia shrugged.

“Someting I had to get myself. It was too dangerous to send my maid out for it.”

That was worrying. She didn’t seem afraid of sending Bird of Paradise into obvious danger, so whatever was in there had to be extraordinarily deadly. She uncovered the box and popped the locks. I felt something flow out, just for a moment, like she’d trapped a storm front in the little container.

Acadia retrieved a black metal flower and placed it delicately on the open wound in the corpse’s chest.

“That’s nanometal,” I said quietly. “It’s--”

“Sleeping, but not dead. If I had sent de maid for it, she would have killed herself plucking it from de ground,” Acadia said. It sounded like she was agreeing with me. The flower’s petals seemed to glitter in the light with frost. I knew it was a fractal edge, all splinters and little hungry micromachines.

The witch’s horn started glowing, and she poured a measure of rum over it. The rose dissolved as if it was made of sugar instead of black steel, melting down into the apprentice’s body.

The crystal started glowing, and the shadows in the room grew darker and longer, the lights fading and something else replacing the illumination.

Soft whispers and wailing came from the corners, as if a choir of mournful souls and the unrestful dead were being tormented just beyond the confines of the room. Acadia’s horn flared brighter and brighter as she mumbled, strands of energy coming out of the very air like she was collecting cobwebs in her magic and balling them up. There was something alive about them, or unalive. It was cold and dirty and old and smelled like blood.

Acadia stomped her hoof and the ball of energy shot down into the heart of the corpse, collecting around the crystal and sinking inside, sucked in and seeping into the rock as if it was a sponge collecting water.

The eyes of the corpse shot open. It sucked in a breath. The crystal heart inside its ribs throbbed and pulsed, the undead flesh over it drawing closed. The eyes were red now, blood red. She sat up. The echoing whispers stopped. The lights grew stronger.

“I live… again,” she said. Her voice was different now. Not the same accent as the mare I’d chased down. It was older, with a tinge of something from a country and time that didn’t exist now and hadn’t for thousands of years.

“Not bad,” Acadia said. “Looks like de ritual worked.” She drank the other half of the rum in the glass. “Never say dat I am not de best.”

Lady of Dark Waters looked at me.

“Chamomile, you actually came through for me,” she said. “Despite all the damage you cause, you must be the most resourceful pony I’ve ever met!”

“I’m flattered,” I said.

“Don’t look so glum, at least your body count is lower than mine,” Lady joked. She got up and stretched. “This body is interesting. No wings, but a horn? I suppose I’ll spend a few centuries learning to use it. A wonderful pastime since I can’t return home now that you’ve put my daughter in power…”

“If you even try to make me feel guilty about that, I’ll slap you silly.”

Lady chuckled. “No. She deserves a chance to be in charge for a while. I’ll be curious to see what she does with our little clan. You’ve upheld your end of the bargain. I’m out of that disaster of a body your mother hijacked. Now both of us have a vested interest in you putting it down.”

“Great,” I sighed. “So how about your half of this deal? Where’s the rest of the Black Dragon?”

“In the very safest place on the island,” Lady said. She spun on one hoof, pirouetting as if she was a ballet dancer. “The Black Dragon is in the bowels of the earth, in one of the deepest sub-levels of the utilidors.”

She grinned at me, and oddly enough had no fangs.

“It is in the cryogenic vault directly beneath the main park’s statue of Welsh Rarebit, snuggling up next to his tomb.”

Comments

[Thought Prism]

Briar Heart was very fun while she lasted. Too bad she died again, but alas, the plot had to move forward.

[Reese]

"of the planned down. The young"
"of the planned town. The young"?

"I was quoting form somepony else’s life"
"I was quoting from somepony else’s life"?

"using the gators as stepping stones. Neither of us was happy about the arrangement"
"using the gators as stepping stones. None of us were happy about the arrangement"?

"door was labeled was a medical warning"
"door was labeled with a medical warning"?

"to retrieve a crystal spher, putting"
"to retrieve a crystal sphere, putting"?

[FridayPie]

“I live… again,”

Well, howdy, Zoltun Kulle.