Fallout Equestria: Blue Destiny

by MagnetBolt

Chapter 118: Heffalumps and Woozles

If it wasn’t for the ghouls, I would have said it was a quiet walk in the theme park. Even they weren’t all that bad. They were almost all blind and wasted, stumbling through the ashfall and occasionally falling back into torpor. The ghouls reminded me of all the ponies that had been sleepwalking thanks to the dark magic being broadcast around the island. They had that same lack of awareness of the world around them.

I looked over my shoulder at the ponies that had come with me. I wasn’t an idiot. Going alone would be suicidal. I also wasn’t going to trust Lady to come with me and not betray me even if she hadn’t outright refused to come anywhere near our destination.

“For the record, I’m not sure the place she told you about actually exists,” Lathe said. She adjusted her rebreather and squinted at her tablet, wiping ash off the display. “There have been rumors for centuries about some secret vault, but they’re just rumors.”

“She called it a tomb, not a vault,” I corrected. “Embe, how are you holding up?”

The zebra ghoul stuck out her tongue, catching radioactive ash on it like a snowflake. She seemed brighter and happier out here with all the radiation around.

“Good!” she said. “I needed to get out of the resort.”

I nodded. All the ponies had gone inside to wait out the storm, and most of the staff robots had switched into an emergency radiological event mode and were going in circles cleaning up the ashes and dumping them somewhere safer. Unfortunately, Embe was also radioactive and had almost ended up in a lead-lined bag.

“Just stay close, okay?” I told her. “It’s not safe out here.”

With all the enchanted visitors gone, the main street of the old park felt like a ghost town. There were a few robots pushing brooms around, and more of those little squat self-propelled vacuum cleaners, but they were staying out of our way.

Lathe led us to the statue of Welsh Rarebit. It was cast in bronze, twice as large as life, and showed him holding hooves with the same cartoon alligator that was on all the park’s merchandise.

“I have a map of the utilidors here,” Lathe said. She held the tablet where I could see the screen. With the clouds covering the sun I could see the display clearly. “You can see none of them are anywhere near this area.”

There was a dead zone in the underground complex around the statue.

“That’s suspicious,” I said. “You understand that it’s suspicious, right?”

“Or, and this might sound crazy,” Lathe sighed. “Maybe there’s no weird secret vault and there aren’t any tunnels there because a big bronze statue is a lot of weight in one spot for flat ground and they had to build it a really robust foundation.”

“There’s only one way to find out!” I decided.

“There are several ways, but we don’t have ground-penetrating radar available,” Lathe said. “Unfortunately, the units we had were stripped for parts. Major construction projects and geological surveys aren’t on the list of priorities like food and water are.”

I gave her a look.

“The nearest utilidor entrance is this way,” Lathe sighed.

---

“Are you going to be okay down here?” I asked.

Embe nodded. “Yes. As long as I’m not alone. I don’t… want to be alone. That’s why I had to come.”

I gave her a quick hug, careful not to break the fragile zebra ghoul. Her squeeze back was stronger than I expected. All the radiation outside was giving her a big boost. Maybe I should have collected some of the ash in jars and had her carry it as a snack.

“I’m not going to leave you alone,” I promised.

“If she has to run off to do something unwise, I’ll keep you company,” Lathe offered. “You got to see the park at its height! I would love to hear stories about anything you remember.”

“Thank you,” Embe mumble-growled happily.

“How far are we from the statue?” I asked.

“We’re in the corridor around the dead zone right now,” Lathe said. “Before you ask, I am checking it against the map. So far, they’re matching one-to-one. If there are hidden spaces, I’m not seeing them.”

“There has to be something,” I said quietly. I stopped walking and looked at the wall to my right. Lathe coughed and pointed to the other side of the corridor. I turned. It didn’t help much, since both sides of the utilidor were more or less identical, but at least I was facing the right way.

“There could be a sub-level somewhere,” Lathe suggested, as we took a left turn to continue our route around what was increasingly looking like solid rock. “All of us are familiar with the rumors, but I always dismissed them as Breezy Stories, like the Fastener Breezy who helps you find the correct size screw if you leave out a bowl of milk, or the Hammer Goblin!”

“What does...?” I asked, morbidly curious. “What does the Hammer Goblin do?”

“He punishes bad foals who think they can use any tool as a hammer and end up breaking calipers!”

I shook my head and followed Lathe around the corner. So far we hadn’t found anything. I was starting to think the ancient vampire queen who hated me might have been lying to me and wasting my time.

A drop of water hit my nose. I sneezed on reflex and shook my head, looking up at the pipes. The Utilidors were full of vents and pipes and wires, hanging overhead in the open for easy maintenance.

That’s when I spotted it, because nopony else had thought to look up.

“Lathe,” I said. “Why are there a ton of pipes and ducts going into the wall that looks like solid rock?”

“What?” Lathe stopped and looked around. I tapped her shoulder and pointed up.

A cluster of big square ducts and thick pipes in several colors went straight into the wall.

“That’s too much for a sprinkler system or regular ventilation,” she said to herself. She looked at her tablet and tapped a few buttons. “Hmm…”

While she tried thinking the problem out, I took drastic action. By that I mean I tapped the wall.

“Maybe there’s an illusion covering the doorway?” I suggested, feeling around and pressing myself against the concrete. It felt very convincingly real.

“I don’t think so,” Lathe said. “This would have been designed by the Founder, not the New Owners. He would have trusted himself to the machine spirit, not to pure sorcery and enchantments.”

“So some kind of hidden door?” I guessed. “It might not even be here. It could be around the next corner. Assuming they didn’t just seal it off entirely.”

“I don’t think so,” Lathe said. She lowered her tablet. “If this is what it’s rumored to be, there’s no way it would be totally sealed. Even discounting the notion that it would need to be accessible for maintenance, having to blast it open to access the vault would be too dangerous to the contents.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

“Besides, it’s probably here. They had to build an entrance for the ducts, right? So having the pony access here too means they only had to make one way in.”

Embe had been tapping the wall while we spoke. Now she had her ear pressed against it and was tapping more softly.

“It’s hollow here,” she said. “It’s painted the same as the concrete, but it’s metal.”

“It is?” Lathe checked her tablet, then pressed her head against the wall and tapped it herself. “You’re right! There has to be a way to open this. One moment.”

She stepped back and started whispering, reciting something between a prayer and a nursery rhyme. I only caught a few words while she worked.

“...Machine spirit, guide us by the rule of left hooves and the mystery of magnetism, which binds the world with invisible thread…”

She looked up from her tablet and pointed at a junction box. I popped it open to look inside.

“It’s an electrical panel,” I said. “Something’s weird, though.”

“Weird in what way?” Lathe asked. She stepped closer to look and saw what I’d spotted. A big red padlock was secured through the main breaker, locking it in place. “Ah, I see. This is part of the ritual of lock-out-tag-out. It’s an important safety ritual.”

I wasn’t sure what to think about that. “The lock is a ritual?”

“It’s too easy for a pony to be injured by a malfunctioning machine. It’s no different than approaching a wounded animal - a hoof in the wrong spot and it can bite down or sting. It’s important to make sure the machine is powered down and sleeping while you work on it to avoid accidents, but…”

“But?” Embe asked.

“Well-meaning ponies might try to restore power while this maintenance is ongoing. This can lead to disaster if the Imaginseer is working around or inside the machine when it restarts. So whenever doing work, it isn’t enough just to turn off the power, but to use one of the ritual Red Locks to make sure ponies know not to touch the power controls.”

“So what you’re really saying is that anypony who has the key for this lock will know not to touch it, and anyone who doesn’t have the key can’t,” I said.

“Right,” Lathe agreed. “Not without confirming exactly what they’re doing. Safety rituals are written in blood by our ancestors.”

“Great, let’s do something dangerous,” I said. I touched the lock, focusing on the mechanism. I could almost see it in my mind’s eye, a series of disks like gates that had to be aligned at the right heights for the mechanism to turn. I massaged it, sort of. One thing I’d never gotten from being educated by a recluse in a backwater town was how to describe using magic. It felt like a massage, that same kind of feeling around for knots where things are sticking and pushing and pulling until they click into place.

It popped open in my hooves.

“Got it,” I said, carefully pulling it out of the junction box.

“I’m surprised you were that gentle with it,” Lathe said. “You’re becoming a respectable citizen!”

“I didn’t want to lock us out forever or get shocked with a billion gigavolts,” I said. Lathe took the lock from my hooves and nodded. She looked up at the junction box wordlessly. I shrugged and stepped aside, letting her have the honors.

Lathe reverently pulled the long lever, swinging the circuit breaker back into the live position. There was no dramatic shower or sparks or explosion of steam. A small green light glowed to life, and dust fell for a moment as the hidden door smoothly moved, sinking inward a hoof-length before dropping down into the ground.

“Wow!” Lathe whispered. “What a beautiful mechanism! One of the most difficult things for a machine is absorbing shocks when moving heavy weights, but even with centuries of being stuck in one position and powered down, there was no shudder or hesitation at all!”

“Built to last,” I agreed.

Embe squinted into the gloom beyond. Lights flickered to life, sulfur lamps humming to life and working their way up from deep cold sleep.

“It’s an elevator,” Embe said. Inside the revealed room were a few sealed crates of tools and random supplies, and at the far end was a big cargo elevator, the kind a pony might use to move heavy shipping containers and machine parts, with high walls made of metal fencing and obviously set to go down the deep shaft under it following the pipes and ducts heading into the depths of the earth.

“That explains why the area was small,” I said. “It’s just the way in.”

“Let me examine it quickly to make sure it’s safe,” Lathe said. “Elevators are known to have temperamental machine spirits at the best of times.” She pulled out a can of oil and a stick of incense, lighting it with her horn a she approached the elevator’s cage.

“Want to help me check these boxes?” I asked Embe. She nodded and we pulled them open while Lathe made sure the elevator wasn’t going to just drop us to our deaths.

“Oh, look!” Embe smiled and pulled a hat out of one of the crates. “It’s full of hats!”

“Neat!” I smiled. I pulled out a wide-brimmed sunhat and put it on my head. “What do you think?”

Embe tilted her head and nodded sagely. “It’s very elegant, but this one suits you better.” She produced a cap with a plastic frame around it that could hold two drinks, with long rubber straws to allow a pony wearing the cap to drink.

“You’re right,” I agreed, putting the sun hat on Embe and taking the novelty cap. “I’ll need to find some Sparkle Cola to give it a test run.”

“The elevator is ready!” Lathe called over. “All aboard!”

---

“I can’t believe you lubricated the brakes,” I said, when we got to the bottom. It had been a more exciting trip than I’d been prepared for.

“I might have been a bit too liberal with my anointment,” Lathe conceded. “I’m only a Junior Imaginseer, I’m allowed to make mistakes as long as I learn from them!”

“Will we still be able to get back up?” Embe asked.

Lathe looked up the long shaft. With the elevator’s open cage design it was obvious we’d gone down a few stories, well below sea level.

“Yes,” Lathe said. “The mechanisms aren’t damaged. It should be fine. I’ll pray to the machine spirit and clean the brakes before we go back up, and if it isn’t cooperating there’s also an emergency ladder in the back of the shaft.

“I really don’t want to have to climb back up,” I said, speaking as an expert with three legs and sore hips. “But at least we’re probably in the right place.”

The elevator had let us out into another small room, but this one felt more like an antechamber, more finished and obviously important. A path picked out in red laminated tiles led to copper doors emblazoned with the park logo. There was a sense of weight to everything, and even the lights in the room were carefully arranged for dramatic effect, focusing our attention on those doors.

“The most sacred place in the park!” Lathe whispered.

“What’s supposed to be here?” Embe asked.

“The only thing I’m worried about is my mother,” I said. “I’ll go first. You two get ready to run if this is bad. If Lady is right about the condition of her original body, we might only need to splash some bleach around and clean the place up.”

I doubted it was going to be that easy. I pushed the doors open. Cold air flowed past me, the chill enough to leave faint traces of fog on the tile floor. It was pitch black inside, and I carefully edged into the dark, staying in the light from the open doorway.

A ghost appeared in front of me with the clicking clatter of a film camera starting up. The phantom flickered and came to life, looking at me across time and space.

“Welcome to the Rarebit Vault,” Welsh Rarebit said. He sounded like he could be anypony’s friendly, outgoing uncle, the kind of pony that comes over to visit just to spoil his nieces and nephews and let them sneak off to play instead of doing chores. “I hope, before you start planning ways to plunder this place, you’ll indulge me with a moment to speak.”

“Uh, sure?” I said. "Go for it."

“It’s a recording,” Lathe said. “He can’t hear you.”

“I have no way of knowing if you’re seeing this five years in my future or five hundred. If it is closer to what was my lifetime, I can only hope that my grandson or perhaps one of his descendants is with you. Cheese, if you ever hear this, I’m sorry about what happened between us. I shouldn’t have said what you were doing was pointless.”

Welsh Rarebit sighed, and I saw exhaustion and pain crease his muzzle.

“I am, as I record this, gravely ill with a disease that has no cure in my time. It will be fatal within, oh, a few seasons at most. I didn’t know the end of my life would come so quickly, and I had a sudden worry about my legacy, as do most ponies in my position, I feel.”

He sat down, a chair materializing out of nothing behind him.

“I thought that my animated creations are all ponies would remember me for. I worried that I’d only be remembered for silly cartoons. I was worried I wouldn’t match up to the great ponies of history. Star Swirl the Bearded, Eddy Current, Zephyr Cockatiel. I created ETROT to try and make something more serious, but it wasn’t until after I drove my grandson away that I realized something.”

As if on cue, the cartoon alligator I’d seen so many times bounced out from behind the chair, somehow sharing space with the real pony sitting in it. The alligator waved and hopped up to sit on Welsh’s lap, where he gave her an affectionate pat on the head.

“Shiela brought joy to a generation of foals. Not just in Equestria, but all over the world. The ponies I brought together, most of whom were far more clever than I was, practically invented technologies from scratch that probably seem commonplace to you now. What legacy could be better than one where I made ponies happy?”

Shiela waved to us and hopped off his lap, disappearing in a cartoon splash of sparkles.

“What you’ll find here is what I’m leaving to the ponies of some far-off tomorrow. If you’re looking for gold or gems, you’ve come to the wrong place. If you came celebrating curiosity and the joy of discovery, I’ll see you ahead.”

He flickered and vanished, and more lights came on around us, revealing that we were standing in an underground chamber the size of a hoofball field, filled with fetlock-deep mist and with stairways branching off to the left and right. A vault door stood ahead of us, looking totally impenetrable.

“We weren’t the first ones to get in here,” Lathe said.

A hole had been bored through the rock, and it looked half drilled and half melted, the rock eaten away by something terrible that had dripped onto the tile floor and left holes in it. Another hole went through the wall next to the side of the vault door.

“Stop!” I warned. I saw something in the shadows. Black metal moved in the dark. Lathe took something from her toolbelt and threw it at the gloomy corner. The glowstick skittered across the ground, the chemical light showing what was lurking there.

“Is that… a talon?” Lathe asked.

It was as big as a pony’s whole body, all twisted and filthy and lead-black. Gears twitched and clicked uselessly at the ragged edge where it had been torn from the black dragon’s body. I could see burns around the broken joint. I made my way over carefully, not wanting to step in anything that might melt my hooves off.

“It must have broken during the fall then finally fell off here,” I said. “Stay away from it, just in case. SIVA is sometimes still dangerous even when it should be dead.”

“Understood,” Lathe said. “But it’s interesting work.” She leaned over my shoulder. “Look at those pistons! It’s practically more organic than machine! I think that might even be a fluidic processor there using--” she gasped. “Microvalves! I’d love to tear it down to look at some of those parts more closely!”

“Remember the bird in the forest?” I asked.

Lathe stopped what she was doing and backed off. “Point taken.”

“At least it’s not hard to tell which way she went,” I said. I took a careful look into the big holes she’d carved into the walls. The soil and rock were clearly disturbed, but slumped back together. Mud and sand had filled in even the tiniest gaps. “Looks like these tunnels collapsed.”

“The ground and soil here are soft,” Lathe reminded me. “The Utilidors are the only reason they could build the park, remember? It’s like trying to walk on snow. They spread out the weight and serve as a solid foundation, like a snowshoe.”

“Right, yeah,” I sighed. “Okay, we’re going to have to get through these doors.” I squared up with the vault door, trying to figure out how it opened up. I doubted my little lockpicking trick would work on something like this. The thing was imposing, solid, and steel. It was also painted with a stylized castle wrapped in black thorny vines.

“This was… in one of the movies,” Embe said.

Lathe and I turned to look at her.

“It was a story about a sleeping prince and a princess had to come and rescue him,” she said. “There was a witch that put a spell on him. He got locked away in a secret castle and the witch ruled the land with darkness.”

“And this was in it?” I asked.

Embe nodded. “The princess had to find two keys to open up the way to the castle.”

“There are two paths here,” Lathe suggested. “Let’s pick one.”

---

“Be ready to jump,” Lathe said.

I nodded and carefully pushed on the pressure plate. There was a soft click. I flinched. Nothing happened.

“This one seems safe,” I said. “I’ll try the next one.”

I put my hoof on it, there was a slightly sharper click, and a buzzer sounded. I got out half a swear before a spring-loaded floor tile tossed me back to the start of the room, smacking into padded cushioning clearly placed there just to catch flung ponies.

“That one was safe last time!” I groaned.

“It must be some kind of code,” Lathe said. “The way the floor tiles are arranged, the extra-wide areas with two panels side-by-side implies a numerical pattern. It’s probably related to prime numbers somehow. Everything is.”

Embe snickered dryly.

“Do you really not know what this is?” the ghoul asked.

“A trap?” I guessed.

“It’s not a trap, it’s a puzzle,” Lathe corrected. “If it was a trap there would be spikes or flamethrowers or flaming spikes. Or a boulder. Boulder traps can have fascinating designs!”

“Wrong, and wrong,” Embe said. She stood up carefully on her rear hooves and hopped carefully onto the first panel. That one had never flung us so far, but I still winced. I watched as she hopped forward and back, one panel at a time, only keeping one hoof on the tiles at a time and alternating with each hop as she made her way across in a looping dance. “It’s hopscotch. You hop on one hoof and go on the first tile, then back, then the first two, then back, then three…”

She got all the way to the end and looked back at us.

“Didn’t either of you play games as foals?” Embe asked.

“I played with plastic building bricks until my father took them away because I was gluing them together,” Lathe said.

I shrugged. “I don’t think I should discuss my foalhood except with a therapist, and where am I gonna find one of those around here?”

Next to Embe, the panel on the wall opened up, revealing a huge key, practically as big as the pipe wrench I was carrying in my saddlebags. She picked it up like a sword.

“We probably need two keys, right?” I asked.

“That’s how it worked in the story,” Embe said. “The princess had to use the two keys together to open the way to the Kingdom of Hearts.”

“Let’s get the other one so I can really disappoint my mom,” I said.

---

“But why use a foal’s game?” I asked. “It doesn’t make sense. Anypony could get it.”

“Anypony except us, apparently,” Lathe sighed. “The Founder built this park because he wanted other ponies to experience the pure joy that goes from foalhood, remember? Maybe he wants to ensure that anypony who opens the tomb has the same cultural background.”

“I think he designed it for his grandfoal,” Embe said, her growling voice low and sad.

“Maybe you’re right,” Lathe agreed.

“Wait,” I said. We’d walked back into the main room and something was wrong. I couldn’t put my hoof on it. “I have a bad feeling.”

Lathe checked her tablet. “It’s possible opening that passage could have triggered some mechanism… wait.” She frowned and looked at the dark corner of the room. “Where’s the dragon talon?”

A tingle of warning ran down my spine. I grabbed Lathe and Embe and rolled to the side. A razor-edge whip came down across the walkway where we’d been standing, sending up sparks and tearing the tile.

We came to a stop and I was backing up even before I was fully on my hooves again, scooting back on my butt. A horror dropped from the ceiling where it had been clinging, landing on the ragged, melted edge of what had been a knee joint. Pistons and belt drives were forced into service as countless small, spiderlike, twitching legs pushed out of that broken stump. The talons stood on top like a crown, twisting into a shape almost like a fanged mouth.

“I knew this was too easy!” I shouted. “Get through the other door!”

Embe was literally dead on her hooves and still got to the second door before Lathe. The Imaginseer was busy trying to scan the mechanical monstrosity with her equipment.

“This is fascinating,” she said. “It’s drawing power from the background magical field and rebuilding itself using its own parts as raw materials!”

It started making a sound like a pony who just found out the hard way that they’d just eaten something extremely expired. I picked up Lathe in my prosthetic hoof and ran for it, whacking her in the snout with my wing when she tried to protest the rough treatment.

Behind us, the thing belched out a horrible mix of oil, smoke, and poison in a wet cloud. I felt it corroding my tail before we got through the door and Embe shut it firmly behind us.

“That was some serious bad breath,” I panted. My whole body felt sore. I was not in good shape. The last few days of running around had undone almost all of the healing I’d managed at the resort’s spa. My muscles weren’t healing right and I knew it. My body was an engine being run with no oil in the tank.

“We’re trapped in here…” Embe whispered. She started shaking. I pulled her into a hug and squeezed.

“We’re not trapped. I’ve got a plan to get us out of here when we’re done.” It was only half a lie. I had part of a plan and I’d figure out the rest soon. Probably. “Lathe, can you watch the door? You’ve got that scanner so you can tell if it’s going to break through.”

“Oh yes, of course,” Lathe agreed. I think she understood that I needed to get Embe focused on something else before she started to panic and worked herself up until she started to go feral.

“Let’s see what we need to do for the next key,” I suggested. “Got any ideas what this might be about?”

There was a wall in front of us, with a series of windows through it in a grid, seven across and six up. It had to mean something, but I wasn’t sure what.

“Is the answer forty-two?” I mumbled.

“Hmmm…” Embe stepped closer, and one of the bottom row of windows lit up with blue light. A moment later, the window next to it turned red. Embe looked down at her hooves. “There are buttons here.”

“It must be some kind of code we have to enter,” I said. “Maybe we have to press them in the right order?”

We tried a few panels at random to see what they’d do. Every time we pressed one, a window would turn blue on the bottom-most empty layer. Then a red one would appear. Nothing seemed to be happening until almost two dozen turns in.

Four red panels in a line blinked and a buzzer went off. The entire wall flashed red and then all the lights disappeared.

“We must have done it wrong somehow,” I groaned.

“This is familiar,” Embe said. “Should we try again?”

“It can’t hurt.” We tried a few more times, and I quickly realized the pattern. As soon as four of the red panels lined up, the little game ended. The last time I didn’t even see it coming until a diagonal group of the red windows blinked and signaled our defeat. “Pretty sneaky.”

“Why are you so bad at games?” Lathe groaned.

“Like you could do better,” I scoffed. “It’s harder than it looks!”

The red-robed pony rolled her eyes and pushed me aside. “Watch.”

She tapped on the buttons, not even taking time to think between her moves. Less than a minute later, four blue circles were lined up. A happy chime played instead of the harsh buzzer from before. The wall split in half, allowing us into the chamber beyond. A second oversized key was embedded in the floor, in a block of concrete shaped to look like a boulder.

“You take this one,” I told Lathe, pulling it free and tossing it to her. “I’ll be busy keeping that monster busy, so you two are going to have to get the vault open.”

Lathe took the key and examined it, turning it over in her hooves.

“I think this is more than just metal,” she said. “There are seam lines, but the machining is so tight you need a loupe just to spot them. No gaps at all.”

“How are you going to keep that monster away?” Embe asked. “It looked really…”

“I know,” I said. “But I’ve got a secret weapon.”

I did actually have one. I pulled a wooden box out of my saddlebag and opened it. Sunlight flooded the small room.

“Ah!” Lathe nodded. “Sunlight destroys the SIVA, right?”

I nodded back to her. “Exactly. It won’t be able to get anywhere near me. As long as I stay between it and you, you’ll be perfectly safe. It might even outright kill that thing.”

“Thank goodness,” Lathe sighed. “I was worried something would go wrong.”

A few minutes later, something went wrong.

Comments

[Thought Prism]

LOL, it's Kingdom Hearts. Thankfully the plot of this story makes far more sense.

[Reese]

And this one, I didn't spot any errors in.

I continue to quite enjoy this story; thank you for writing!

I'm also wondering if Welsh Rarebit is going to end up resurrected by SIVA by the end of this part.
Pity about Presumably Cheese Sandwich, though.